and of human expectancies. But, in order to save your soul, the Lord, in his great mercy, hath raised up obstacles which have stopped your course. He hath employed an envious person, a rival to supplant you, to keep you at a distance from favours, and to place himself between you and the precipice, into which you were running headlong, for ever to perish: he hath seconded, as I may say, his ambition; he hath favoured his designs; and, through an incomprehensible excess of goodness toward you, he hath crossed your worldly schemes: he hath raised up your enemy in time, in order to save you in eternity. You ought, therefore, to adore the eternal designs of his justice and of his mercy upon men; to consider your brother as the blessed cause of your salvation; to entreat of God, that seeing his ambition or his bad intentions have been employed to save you, he may inspire him with sincere repentance, and that the person who hath been the instrument of your salvation be not permitted to perish himself.
Yes, my brethren, our hatreds proceed entirely from our want of faith. Alas! if we regarded every thing which passes, as a vapour without substance; if we were thoroughly convinced that all this is nothing, that salvation is the great and important affair, and that our treasure and our true riches are only in eternity, where, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall be; if we were convinced of it, alas! we would consider men, who passionately quarrel and dispute with each other for the dignities of the earth, as children who fall out among themselves for the playthings which amuse their eye, whose childish hatreds and animosities turn upon nothings, which infancy alone, and the feeble state of reason, magnify in their eyes. Tranquil on the greatest and most important events, on the loss of the patrimony of their fathers, and the fall of their family, and keen even to excess when deprived of any of the little trifling objects which delight their infancy, — thus, O my God, foolish and puerile men feel not the loss of their heavenly inheritance, of that immortal patrimony bequeathed to them by Jesus Christ, and which their brethren are already enjoying in heaven. They unconcernedly see the kingdom of God, and the only true riches, pass away from them; and, like children, they are inflamed with rage, and mutually arm against each other, from the instant that their frivolous possessions are encroached upon, or that any attempt is made to deprive them of those childish playthings, the only value or importance of which is that of serving to deceive their feeble reason, and to amuse their childhood.
For a Christian, interest is therefore an unworthy and criminal pretext for his hatred toward his brethren; but vanity, which is their last resource, is still less excusable.
For, my brethren, we wish to be approved, and to have our faults as well as our virtues applauded; and, although we feel our own weaknesses, yet we are so unreasonable as to exact that others see them not, and that they even give credit to us for certain qualities which we inwardly reproach to ourselves as vices. We would wish that all mouths were filled solely with our praises; and that the
