And surely say, — while that cities and provinces are struck with every calamity; that men, created after the image of God, and redeemed with his whole blood, browse like the animal, and through their necessity go to search in the fields a food which nature has not intended for man, and which to them becomes a food of death; would you have the resolution to be the only one exempted from the general evil? While the face of the whole kingdom is changed, and that cries and lamentations alone are heard around your superb dwelling; would you preserve, within, the same appearance of happiness, pomp, tranquillity, and opulence? And where, then, would be humanity, reason, religion? In a pagan republic, you would be held as a bad citizen; in a society of sages and worldly, as a soul, vile, sordid, without nobility, without generosity, and without elevation; and in the church of Jesus Christ, in what light, think you, can you be held? Oh! as a monster, unworthy of the name of Christian which you bear, of that faith in which you glorify yourself, of the sacrament which you approach, and even of entry into our temples where you come, — seeing all these are the sacred symbols of that union which ought to exist among believers.
Nevertheless, the hand of the Lord is extended over our people in the cities and in the provinces; you know it, and you lament it: Heaven is deaf to the cries of this afflicted kingdom; wretchedness, poverty, desolation, and death, walk every where before us. Now, do any of those excesses of charity, become at present a law of prudence and justice, escape you? Do you take upon yourselves any part of the calamities of your brethren? What shall I say? Do you not perhaps take advantage of the public misery? Do you not perhaps turn the general poverty into a barbarous profit? Do you not perhaps complete the stripping of the unfortunate in affecting to hold out to them an assisting hand? And are you acquainted with the inhuman art of deriving individual profit even from the tears and the necessities of your brethren? Bowels of iron! when you shall be filled, you shall burst asunder; your felicity itself will constitute your punishment, and the Lord will shower down upon you his war and his wrath.
My brethren, how dreadful shall be the presence of the poor before the tribunal of Jesus Christ to the greatest part of the rich in this world! How powerful shall be these accusers! And how little shall remain for you to say, when they shall reproach to you the scantiness of the succour which was required to soften and to relieve their wants; that a single day cut off from your profusions, would have sufficed to remedy the indigence of one of their years; that it was their own property which you withheld, since whatever you had beyond a sufficiency belonged to them; that consequently you have not only been cruel, but also unjust in refusing it to them; but that, after all, your hard-heartedness has served only to exercise their patience and to render them more worthy of immortality, while you, for ever deprived of those riches which you were unwilling to lodge in safety in the bosom of the poor, shall receive
