“That is religion not the priest.”
“I speak for the instrument, I confess; but a clergyman is to religion what an army is to a war—and you might as well think of conducting a national contest without officer and soldier, as a moral, religious contest without a clergy. And I doubt whether you have any idea of religion, unless it be a sort of restraint upon certain actions and passions. You mean morals when you say religion, and as you have seen morals exist where there was no profession of religion or observance of prescribed devotion, you think that such a morality is an independent system. Let me correct that idea. I agree that we find morals without religion, but I do not agree that morals would exist without it, and thousands of our young officers (I heard some of them last evening,) assert with philosophic gravity, that they are moral (they mean good) without religion. How vain—how short-sighted. They overlook the great fact that their morals are good habits founded on the religious teachings and practice of their mothers or priests, and that all the credit which they claim for their philosophy is due to Christianity, and that less settled in habits, or less reflective than they now are, they would fall with the first temptation that presented. What do you say to that Adolph?”
“I say nothing now—proceed.”
“I will proceed to make a personal application. To whom was the virtue of your childhood and youth due? Certainly to your virtuous, religious mother.”
“Did you know my mother?”
“What a question!”
“If not, how did you know that she was religious?”
“Because you said that in your childhood you were religious and had a mother. You gave me a knowledge of the cause when you stated the effect.”
“But my mother was neither a priest nor a religeuse.”
“No, but she frequented the sacrament of the church, and attended to the instruction of a priest, and thus became religious. But you admit that falling into bad company your morals became, if not depraved, at least vitiated, and that you began to despise religion when you neglected morals.”