with that strength and faith which even the most tender and watchful piety sometimes cannot give? You would wish passions flattered, nourished, and strengthened, to remain tractable, quiet, and cold, in the presence of objects most capable of lighting them up? Those which, after years of austerities, and a life devoted to prayer and watching, awake sometimes in a moment, far even from danger, and, by melancholy examples, make the most upright feel that we never should be off our guard, and that the highest point of virtue is sometimes the instant which precedes a departure from and total loss of it. Such is our lot, my brethren, to be quick-sighted only toward the dangers which regard our fortune or our life, and not even to know those which threaten our salvation. But let us undeceive ourselves. To shun guilt, something more is required than the lukewarmness and indolence of virtue; and vigilance is the only mean left us by our Saviour to preserve our innocence.— First reflection.
A second reflection to be made on this truth is, that the passions, daily strengthening in a lukewarm and infidel life, not only duty finds in us insurmountable repugnances, but guilt likewise, as I may say, polishes itself; and at last we feel no more repugnance to it than to the simplest fault. Indeed, by these daily infidelities inseparable from lukewarmness, the heart, as if by insensible steps, at last arrives at those dangerous limits, which, by a single line, separate life from death, guilt from innocence, and makes the final step almost without perceiving it; only a little way remaining for him to go, and having no occasion for any new exertion to accomplish it, he does not believe he has exceeded his former bounds. He had replenished himself with dispositions so nearly bordering on guilt, that he has brought forth iniquity without pain, repugnance, visible movement, or even perceiving it himself. Similar to a dying person, whom the languors of a long and painful malady have so attenuated, and so nearly approached to his end, that the departing sigh resembles those which have preceded it, costs him no greater effort than the others, and even leaves the spectators uncertain whether his last moment is come, or if%he still breathes. And this is what renders the state of a lukewarm and infidel soul still more dangerous, that they are commonly dead to grace, without knowing it themselves; they become enemies to God, while they still live with him as with a friend; they are still in the commerce of holy things, when they have lost the grace which entitles us to approach them.
Thus, let those souls whom this Discourse regards, no longer deceive themselves, because they believe to have hitherto avoided a gross departure from virtue: their state before God is undoubtedly only more dangerous. Perhaps the most formidable danger of lukewarmness is, that already dead in the sight of God, they live, in their opinion, without any visible or marked guilt; that they compose themselves tranquilly in death, depending on an appearance of life which comforts them; that to the danger of their situation they add a false peace, which confirms them in this path of
