for ever united with him be the sweetest consolation of your life, if it appear so desirable to live in separation from him, and if you find even his presence a punishment? Renounce, then, the promises and all the hopes of faith; separate yourself as an accursed from the communion of believers; interdict to yourself the altar and the awful mysteries; banish yourself from the assembly of the holy; no longer come there to offer up your gifts and your prayers, since all these religious duties, supposing you in union with your brother, become derisions if you be not so; depose against you in the face of the altars; and command you to quit the holy assembly as a publican and a sinner.
Perhaps, alarmed at these holy truths, you will finally tell us, that you will so far conquer yourself as to see your brother and to live on good terms with him; that you will not be wanting in civilities; but that, for the rest, you know where to stop, and that he need not reckon much upon your friendship.
You will not be wanting in civilities! And that, my dear hearer, you believe, is to pardon and to be reconciled with your brother, and to love him as yourself? But that charity which the gospel commands is in the heart; it is not a simple decorum, a vain outside, a useless ceremony; it is real feeling, and an active love; it is a sincere tenderness, ever ready to manifest itself in actions. You love as a Jew and as a Pharisee, but you love not as a Christian and as a disciple of Jesus Christ. The law of charity is the law of the heart; it regulates the feelings, changes the inclinations, and pours the oil of peace and of lenity over the wounds of an angry and wounded will; and you turn it into a law wholly external, a Pharisaical and superficial law, which regulates only the outside, which settles only the manners, and is fulfilled by vain appearances.
But you are not commanded that you shall merely refrain from wounding the rules of courtesy, and that you shall pay to your brother all those duties which society naturally imposes; it is the world which prescribes this law; these are its rules and customs: but Jesus Christ commands you to love him; and, while your heart is estranged from him, it is of little importance that you keep up the vain externals of courtesy. You refuse to religion the essential part; and the only difference between you and those sinners who persist in not seeing their brethren, is, that you know how to constrain yourself for the world, and you know not how to thwart yourself for salvation.
And surely, my brethren, if men were united together by the sole ties of society, they no doubt would discharge their duty, by keeping up all the externals of politeness, and by maintaining that mutual commerce of cares, attentions, and courtesies, which constitute, as it were, the whole harmony of the body politic. But we are united together by the sacred and close ties of faith, of hope, of charity, and of religion. In the midst of the world we form a society wholly internal and holy, of which charity is the invisible bond, and altogether distinct from that civil society which legislators have established. Consequently, by fulfilling, with regard to
