your mind from that thought? Do you lessen the danger? On the contrary you augment it, and render a surprisal inevitable. By averting your eyes, do you soften the horror of that spectacle? Alas! you only multiply its terrors. Were you to familiarize yourselves more with the thoughts of death, your mind, weak and timid, would insensibly accustom itself to it. You would gradually acquire courage to view it without anguish, or at least with resignation on the bed of death; it would no longer be an unusual and strange sight. A long anticipated danger astonishes not: death is only formidable the first time that the imagination dwells upon it; and it is only when not expected, and no provision made against it, that it is to be dreaded.
But, when that thought should even disquiet, and fill you with impressions of dread and sorrow, where would be the disappointment? Are you, upon the earth, to live only in an indolent ease, and solely engrossed by agreeable and smiling objects? We should lose our reason, say you, were we to devote our attention to this dismal spectacle, without the relaxation of pleasures. We should lose our reason! But so many faithful souls, who, in all their actions, mingle that thought; who make the remembrance of that last hour the check to curb their passions, and the most powerful inducement to fidelity; so many illustrious penitents, who have buried themselves alive in their tombs, that they might never lose sight of that object; the holy who every day suffered death, like the apostle, that they might live for ever, have they in consequence of it, lost their reason? You should lose your reason! that is to say, you would regard the world as an exilement, pleasures as an intoxication, sin as the greatest of evils; places, honours, favour, and fortune, as dreams; and salvation as the grand and only object worthy of attention. Is that to lose your reason? Blessed folly! And would that you, from this moment, were amongst the number of these foolish sages. You would lose your reason! Yes, that false, worldly, proud, carnal, and mistaken reason, which seduces you; that corrupted reason, which obscures faith, authorizes the passions, makes us prefer the present moment to eternity, takes the shadow for the substance, and leads all men astray. Yes, that deplorable reason, that vain philosophy, which looks upon as a weakness the dread of a future state, and, because it dreads it too much, seems, in appearance, or endeavours to force itself, not to believe it at all. But that prudent, enlightened, moderate, and Christian reason, that wisdom of the serpent, so recommended in the gospel, it is in that remembrance that you would find it: that wisdom, says the Holy Spirit, preferable to all the treasures and honours of the earth; that wisdom so honourable to man, and which exalts him so much above himself; that wisdom which has formed so many Christian heroes; it is the image always present of your last hour, which will embellish your soul with it. But that thought, you add, should we take it into our head to enter deeply into, and to dwell continually upon it, would be fit to make us renounce all, and to form the most violent and overstrained resolu-
