To appease them, man offered up the sacrifice of all his enjoyments.

He environed himself in privations, and reversed the order of nature.
Conceiving his pleasures to be crimes, his sufferings expiations, he endeavored to love pain, and to abjure the love of self.

He persecuted his senses, hated his life; and a self-denying and anti-social morality plunged nations into the apathy of death.
But provident nature having endowed the heart of man with hope inexhaustible, when his desires of happiness were baffled on this earth, he pursued it into another world.

By a sweet illusion he created for himself another country--an asylum where, far from tyrants, he should recover the rights of nature, and thence resulted new disorders.

Smitten with an imaginary world, man despised that of nature.