stagger in their road, like the ark of Israel, while conducting in triumph to Jerusalem, for the purest and most shining virtue has its spots and eclipses, and even the most solid cannot always equally support itself; but the Lord is incensed, when rash and impure hands, like those of Uzziah, shall venture to put them right; and scarcely have they touched them, when they are smote by his wrath. He takes to himself the slightest insults with which they dishonour his servants, and he cannot endure that virtue, which has found admirers, even amongst tyrants and the most barbarous nations, should frequently, among believers, find only censures and derisions. Thus the little children of Israel were devoured on the spot, for having mocked the small number of hairs of the man of God; nevertheless, these were only the puerile indiscretions so pardonable at their age. Fire from heaven fell upon the officer of the impious Ahaziah, and in a moment consumed him for having in derision called Elijah the man of God; nevertheless, it was a courtier, from whom little regard might be expected for the austerity and simplicity of a prophet, or for the virtue of a man, rustic in his appearance, and hateful to his master. Michal was struck with barrenness, for having too harshly censured the holy excesses of joy and piety of David before the altar; nevertheless, it proceeded merely from female delicacy. But to meddle with those who serve the Lord, is, according to the Scripture, to meddle with the apple of your eye. He invisibly curses those rash censures on piety; and though he may not strike them, as formerly, with instant death, yet he marks on their forehead, from this life forward, the stamp of reprobation, and denies to themselves that precious gift of sanctity and grace which they had despised in others. Nevertheless, it is the upright who are now become the general butt of the malignity of public discourses; and we may safely say, that virtue gives birth to more censurers in the world than vice.
I do not add, that if these slanders, which you term light, be highly criminal in their motives and circumstances, they are still more so in their consequences; I say their consequences, my brethren, which are always irreparable. You may expiate the crime of voluptuousness by mortification and penitence; the crime of hatred by love for your enemy; the crime of ambition by a renunciation of the honours and grandeurs of the age; the crime of injustice by a restoration of what you had unjustly ravished from your brother; even the crime of impiety and free-thinking, by a religious and public respect for the worship of your fathers; but what remedy, what virtue, can repair the crime of detraction? You revealed to only one person the vices of your brother: it may be so; but that unlucky confidant will soon, in his turn, have communicated it to others, who, on their part, no longer regarding as a secret what they have just heard, will relate it to the first comers; in the relation of it, every one will add new circumstances; each, in his way, will empoison it with some new trait; in proportion as they publish, they will increase, they will magnify it: similar to a spark of fire, says St. James, which, wafted by an impetuous wind to different
