Nevertheless, without your express orders, I should never have dared to point out to you a mode of thinking widely different from your own, nor to combat the dangerous opinions to which you have been persuaded your happiness is attached. But for your request I should have continued to enclose in my own breast opinions odious to the most part of men accustomed to see nothing except by the eyes of judges visibly interested in deceiving them. Now, however, a sacred duty obliges me to speak. Eugenia, unquiet and alarmed, wishes me to explore her heart; she needs assistance; she wishes to fix her ideas upon an object which interests her repose and her felicity. I owe her the truth. It would be a crime longer to preserve silence. Although my attachment for her did not impose the necessity of responding to her confidence, the love of truth would oblige me to make efforts to dissipate the chimeras which render her unhappy.
I shall proceed then, Madam, to address you with the most complete frankness. Perhaps at the first glance my ideas may appear strange; but on examining them with still further care and attention, they will cease to shock you. Reason, good faith, and truth cannot do otherwise than exert great influence over such an intellect as yours. I appeal, therefore, from your alarmed imagination to your more tranquil judgment; I appeal from custom and prejudice to reflection and reason. Nature has given you a gentle and sensible soul, and has imparted an exquisitely lively imagination, and a certain admixture of melancholy which disposes to despondent revery. It is from this peculiar mental constitution that arise the woes that now afflict you. Your goodness, candor, and sincerity preclude your suspecting in others either fraud or malignity. The gentleness of your character prevents your contradicting notions that would appear revolting if you deigned to examine them. You have chosen rather to defer to the judgment of others, and to subscribe to their ideas, than to consult your own reason and rely upon your own understanding. The vivacity of your imagination causes you to embrace with avidity the dismal delineations which are presented to you; certain men, interested in agitating your mind, abuse your sensibility in order to produce alarm; they cause you to shudder at the terrible words, _death_, _judgment_, _hell_, _punishment_, and _eternity_; they lead you to turn pale at the very name of an inflexible _judge_, whose absolute decrees nothing can change; you fancy that you see around you those demons whom he has made the ministers of his vengeance upon his weak creatures; thus is your heart filled with affright; you fear that at every instant you may offend, without being aware of it, a capricious God, always threatening and always enraged. In consequence of such a state of mind, all those moments of your life which should only be productive of contentment and peace, are constantly poisoned by inquietudes, scruples, and panic terrors, from which a soul as pure as yours ought to be forever exempt. The agitation into which you are thrown by these fatal ideas suspends the exercise of your faculties; your reason is misled by a bewildered imagination, and you are afflicted with perplexities, with despondency, and with suspicion of yourself. In this manner you become the dupe of those men who, addressing the imagination and stifling reason, long since subjugated the universe, and have actually persuaded reasonable beings that their reason is either useless or dangerous.