perience, have happened in all ages; the calamities we behold are not unexampled; our forefathers have witnessed them, and even much more melancholy and dreadful: civil dissensions, the father armed against the child, the brother against brother, countries ravaged and laid waste by their own inhabitants, the kingdom a prey to foreign enemies, no person in safety under his own roof: we see not these miseries; but have they seen what we witness — so many public and concealed miseries, so many families worn out, so many citizens, formerly distinguished, now low in the dust, and confounded with the meanest of the people? Arts become almost useless? The image of hunger and death spread over the cities and over the fields? What shall I say? — so many hidden iniquities brought every day to light, the dreadful consequences of despair and horrible necessity? Whence comes this, my brethren? Is it not from a luxury unknown to our fathers, and which engluts every thing? From your expenses which know no bounds and which necessarily drag along with them the extinction of charity?
Ah! was the primitive church not persecuted, desolated, and afflicted? Do the calamities of our age bear any comparison with the horrors of those times? Proscription of property, exilement and imprisonment were then daily; the most burdensome charges of the state fell upon those who were suspected of Christianity: in a word, so many calamities were never beheld; and, nevertheless, there was no poor among them, says St. Luke, nor any that lacked. Ah! it is, because riches of simplicity sprung up, even from their poverty itself, according to the expression of the apostle; it is, because they gave according to their means, and even beyond them; it is, because the most distant provinces, through the care of the apostolic ministers, flowed streams of charity, for the consolation of their afflicted brethren in Jerusalem, more exposed than the rest to the rage and hatred of the synagogue.
But more than all that; it is, because the most powerful of the primitive believers were adorned with modesty; and that our great riches are now scarcely sufficient to support that monstrous luxury, of which custom has made a law to us; it is, that their festivals were repasts of sobriety and charity; and that the holy abstinence itself, which we celebrated, cannot moderate among us the profusions and the excesses of the table, and of feasts; it is, that, having no fixed city here below, they did not exhaust themselves in forming brilliant establishments, in order to render their names illustrious, to exalt their posterity, and to ennoble their own obscurity and meanness; they thought only of securing to themselves a better establishment in the celestial country; and that at present no one is contented with his station; every one wishes to mount higher than his ancestors: and that their patrimony is only employed in buying titles and dignities, which may obliterate their name and the meanness of their origin: in a word, it is because the frugality of these first believers constituted the whole wealth of their afflicted brethren, and that at present our profusions occasion all their poverty and want. It is our excesses, then, my brethren, and our
