"No doubt we have bad articles in theology and metaphysics, but with theologians for censors, and a privilege, I defy you to make them any better.

There are other articles that are less exposed to the daylight, and in them all is repaired.

Time will enable people to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said."[122] This last is a bitter and humiliating word, but before any man hastens to cast a stone, let him first make sure that his own life is free from every trace of hypocritical conformity and mendacious compliance.
Condorcet seems to make the only remark that is worth making, when he says that the true shame and disgrace of these dissemblings lay not with the writers, whose only other alternative was to leave the stagnation of opinion undisturbed, but with the ecclesiastics and ministers whose tyranny made dissimulation necessary.

And the veil imposed by authority did not really serve any purpose of concealment.

Every reader was let into the secret of the writer's true opinion of the old mysteries, by means of a piquant phrase, an adroit parallel, a significant reference, an equivocal word of dubious panegyric.