appetites, that a retired and mortified life becomes indispensable. It is because you are weak, that with more caution you ought to shun every danger; take a greater command over yourself; pray, watch, refuse yourself every improper gratification, and attain even to holy excesses of zeal and fervour, in order to accomplish a barrier against your weakness. You are weak? And, because you are weak, you think you are entitled to expose yourself more than another; to dread danger less; with more tranquillity and indifference to neglect the necessary remedies; to allow more to your appetites; to preserve a stronger attachment to the world, and every thing which can corrupt the heart? What illusion! You make your weakness, then, the title of your security? In the necessities you have to watch and pray, you find, then, the privilege of dispensing with them! And since, whence is it that the sick are authorized to allow themselves greater excesses, and make use of less precaution, than those who enjoy a perfect health? Privation has always been the way of the weak and the infirm; and to allege your weakness as a right of dispensation from a more fervent and Christian life, is like enumerating your complaints, in order to persuade us that you have no occasion for medicine. — Second reason, drawn from the passions, which are strengthened in a state of lukewarmness, and which proves that this state always ends in a departure from virtue and the loss of righteousness.
To all these reasons I should add a third, drawn from the external succours of religion necessary to the support of piety; and which become useless to the lukewarm and infidel soul.
The holy sacrament not only becomes of no utility, but even dangerous to him; either by the coldness with which he approaches it, or by the vain confidence with which it inspires him: it is no longer a resource for him; it has lost its effect: like medicines too frequently made use of, it amuses his languor, but cannot cure him: it is like the food of the strong and healthy, which, so far from reestablishing, completes the ruin of the weak stomach: it is the breath of the Holy Spirit, which, unable to re-illuminate the still smoking spark, entirely extinguishes it; that is to say, that the grace of the holy sacrament, received in a lukewarm and infidel heart, no longer operating there an increase of life and strength, never fails, sooner or later, to operate the death and condemnation attached to the abuse of these divine remedies.
Prayer, that channel of grace; that nourishment to a faithful heart; that sweetener of piety; that refuge against all attacks of the enemy; that cry of an affected soul, which renders the Lord so attentive to his necessities: — prayer, without which the Almighty no longer makes himself felt within us; without which we no longer know our Father; we no longer render thanks to our benefactor, nor appease our judge; we expose no longer our wounds to our physician; we live without God in the world: — prayer, in a word, so necessary to the most established virtue, to the lukewarm soul is no longer but the wearisome occupation of a distracted mind; of a heart dry and shared between a thousand foreign af-
