To be insensible to the extent of despising interesting things, and to become insensible to the point which interests us most.
198
The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.
199
Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.
200
A man in a dungeon, ignorant whether his sentence be pronounced, and having only one hour to learn it, but this hour enough, if he know that it is pronounced, to obtain its repeal, would act unnaturally in spending that hour, not in ascertaining his sentence, but in playing piquet. So it is against nature that man, etc. It is making heavy the hand of God.
Thus not only the zeal of those who seek Him proves God, but also the blindness of those who seek Him not.
201
All the objections of this one and that one only go against themselves, and not against religion. All that infidels say ...