worlds which is nothing, and from which I have consequently nothing to expect."
Yes, my brethren, it is in that last moment that your whole life will present itself to your view; but in very different colours from those in which it appears to you to-day. At present you count upon services performed for the state; places which you have filled; actions in which you have distinguished yourselves; wounds, which still bear testimony to your valour; the number of your campaigns; the splendour of your orders; all these appear objects of importance and reality to you. The public applauses which accompany them; the rewards with which they are followed; the fame which publishes them; the distinctions attached to them; all these only recall your past days to you, as days full, occupied, marked each by some memorable action, and by events worthy of being for ever preserved to posterity. You even distinguished yourselves, in your own minds, from those indolent characters of your own rank, who have led an obscure, idle, and useless life, and dishonoured their names by that slothful effeminacy which has kept them always groveling in the dust. But, on the bed of death, in that last moment when the world flies off and eternity approaches, your eyes will be opened; the scene will be changed; the illusion, which at present magnifies these objects, will be dissipated. You will see things as they really are; and that which formerly appeared so grand, so illustrious, as it was done only for the sake of the world, of glory, of fortune, will no longer appear of the least importance to you.
You will no longer find any thing real in your life but what you shall have done for God; nothing praiseworthy but works of faith and of piety; nothing great but what will merit eternity; and a single drop of cold water in the name of Jesus Christ, a single tear shed in his presence, and the slightest mortification suffered for his sake, will all appear more precious, more estimable to you, than all the wonders which the world admires, and which shall perish with it.
Not that the dying sinner finds only cares and anxieties thrown away in his past life, he finds the remembrance likewise of his pleasures; but this very remembrance depresses and overwhelms him: pleasures, which have existed only for a moment: he now perceives that he has sacrificed his soul, and his eternal welfare, to a fugitive moment of passion and voluptuousness. Alas! life had appeared too long to him to be entirely consecrated to God. He was afraid to adopt too early the side of virtue, lest he should be unable to support its duration, its weariness, and its consequences. He looked forward to the years he had still to run as to an immense space, through which he must travel under the weight of the cross, and separated from the world in the practice of Christian works. This idea alone had always suspended his good intentions; and, in order to return to God, he waited the last stage of life as the one in which perseverance is most certain. What a surprise in this last hour, to find that what had to him appeared so long has in reality been but an instant; that his infancy and old age so nearly
