sought to lull its grief, and to prevent the total loss of reason, in giving way to all the horrors of a profound melancholy. It is thus, O my God! that by our eternal contradictions we justify the adorable ways of thy wisdom upon the lots of men, and that we provide for thy justice powerful reasons to overthrow one day the illusion, and the falsity of our pretexts.
For, besides, be our sufferings what they may, the history of religion holds out righteous characters to our example, who, in the same situation as we are, have held their soul in patience, and turned their afflictions into a resource of salvation. Do you weep the loss of a person dear to your heart? Judith in a similar affliction found the increase of her piety and faith, and changed the tears of her widowhood into those of retirement and penitence. If a pining health render life more gloomy and bitter than even death itself, Job found in the wrecks of an ulcerated body, motives of compunction, longings for eternity, and the hopes of an immortal resurrection. If your character in the world be stained by calumnies, Susanna held out an unshaken soul under the blackest aspersions; and knowing that she had the Lord in testimony of her innocence, she left to him the care of avenging her upon the injustice of. men. If your fortune be the victim of treachery, David, dethroned, considered the humiliation of his new state as the just punishment of the abuse he had made of his past prosperity. If an unfortunate union become your daily cross, Esther found, in the caprices and frenzies of a faithless husband, the proof of her virtue, and the merit of her meekness and patience. In a word, place yourself in the most dismal situations, and you will find righteous men, who have wrought out their salvation, in the same; and, without applying to former ages for examples, look around, (the hand of the Lord is not yet shortened,) and you will see souls, who, loaded with the same crosses as you, make a very different use of them, and find means of salvation in the very same events where you find only a rock to your innocence or a pretext for your murmurs. What do I say? — you will see souls whom the mercy of God hath recalled from their errors, by pouring out salutary sorrows upon their life; by overturning an established fortune; by chilling an envied favour; by sapping a health apparently unalterable; by terminating a profane connexion through a glaring inconstancy. You yourself, then, a witness of their change and of their conversion, have lessened the merit of it, from the facilities provided by chagrin and afflictions; you have placed little confidence in a virtue which misfortunes had rendered as if necessary; you have said that it required little exertion to forsake a world which has become tired of us; that at the first gleam of good fortune, pleasures would soon be seen to succeed to all this great show of devotion, and that they had devoted themselves to God only because they had nothing better to do. Unjust that you are! and at present, when there is question of returning to him in your affliction, you say that it is not possible; that a heart pressed and bowed down with sorrow is incapable of paying attention to any thing but its grief, and that we are more hardened than touched in this state of
