tributed a patience which should be a gift of God. Thus, the weaker you are, the fitter instrument you become for the designs and for the glory of God. When his hand hath been heavy, he hath chosen only the weak, that man might attribute nothing to himself, and to overthrow, by the example of their constancy, the vain fortitude of sages and of philosophers. His disciples were only weak lambs, when he dispersed them through the universe, and exposed them amidst the wolves. They rendered glory in their weakness to the power of grace, and to the truth of his doctrine. They are those earthen vessels which the Lord taketh delight in breaking, like those of Gideon, to make the light and the power of faith shine forth in them with greater magnificence; and if you entered into the designs of his wisdom and of his mercy, your weakness, which in your opinion justifies your murmurs, would constitute the sweetest consolation of your sufferings.
Lord, would you say to him, I ask not that proud reason which seeks in the glory of suffering with constancy the whole consolation of its pains: I ask not from thee that insensibility of heart, which either feels not, or contemns its misfortunes. Leave me>
0 Lord, that weak and timid reason, that tender and feeling heart, which seems so little fitted to sustain its tribulations and sufferings: only increase thy consolations and favours. The more
1 shall appear weak in the sight of men, the greater wilt thou appear in my weakness: the more shall the children of the age admire the power of faith, which alone can exalt the weakest and most timid souls to that point of constancy and firmness, to which all philosophy hath never been able to attain. First pretext, taken in the weakness of man, confuted, we have now to expose the illusion of the second, which is founded on the excess or the nature of the afflictions themselves.
Part II. — Nothing is more usual with persons afflicted by God, than to justify their complaints and their murmurs by the excess or the nature of their afflictions. We always wish our crosses to have no resemblance to those of others; and, lest the example of their fortitude and of their faith condemn us, we seek out differences in our grievances, in order to justify that of our dispositions and of our conduct. We persuade ourselves that we could bear with resignation crosses of any other description; but that those with which we are overwhelmed by the Lord, are of such a nature as to preclude consolation: that the more we examine the lot of others, the more we do find our own misfortunes singular, and our situation unexampled: and that it is impossible to preserve patience and serenity in a state where chance seems to have collected, solely for us, a thousand afflicting circumstances which never before had happened to others.
But, to take from self-love a defence so weak and so unworthy of faith, I would only have forthwith to answer you, that the more extraordinary our afflictions appear, the less ought we to believe them the effects of chance; the more evidently ought we to see in
