people! If you, with all your resources, feel so much the misery of the times, what must they not suffer, those who are destitute of every comfort! If the plagues of Egypt obtrude even into the palaces of the great, and of Pharaoh, what must be the desolation in the hut of the poor and of the labourer! If the princes of Israel, afflicted in Samaria, no longer find consolation in their palaces, to what dreadful extremities must the common people not be reduced! Reduced, alas! perhaps like that unfortunate mother, not to nourish herself with the blood of her child, but to make her innocence and her soul the melancholy price of her necessity.
But, besides, these evils with which we are afflicted, and of which you so loudly complain, are the punishment of your hardness toward the poor: God avengeth upon your possessions the iniquitous use to which you apply them: it is the cries and the groanings of the unfortunate, whom you abandon, which draw down the vengeance of Heaven upon your lands and territories. It is in these times, then, of public calamity, that you ought to hasten to appease the anger of God by the abundance of your charities: it is then that, more than ever, you should interest the poor in your behalf. Alas! you bethink yourselves of addressing your general supplications to the Almighty, through these to obtain more favourable seasons, the cessation of public calamities, and the return of peace and abundance; but it is not there alone that your vows and your prayers ought to be carried. You can never expect that the Almighty will attend to your distresses while you remain callous to those of your fellow-creatures. You have here on the earth the masters of the winds and of the seasons: address yourselves to the poor and the afflicted; it is they who have, as I may say, the keys of heaven; it is their prayers which regulate the times and the seasons, — which bring back to us days of peace or of misery, — which arrest or attract the blessings of heaven: for abundance is given to the earth only for their consolation, and it is only on their account that the Almighty punisheth or is bountiful to you.
But, completely to confute you, my brethren, you who so strongly allege to us the evil of the times, does the pretended rigour of these times retrench any thing from your pleasures? What do your passions suffer from the public calamities? If the misfortune of the times oblige you to retrench from your expenses, begin with those of which religion condemns the use; regulate your tables, your apparel, your amusements, your followers, and your edifices, according to the gospel; let your retrenchings in charity at least only follow the others. Lessen your crimes before you begin to diminish from your duties. When the Almighty strikes with sterility the kingdoms of the earth, it is his intention to deprive the great and the powerful of all occasions of debauchery and excess: enter, then, into the order of his justice and his wisdom: consider yourselves as public criminals, whom the Lord chastiseth by public punishments. Say to him, like David, when he beheld the hand of the Lord weighing down his people, " Lo, I have sinned, and
