for others; but I ask of you who maintain their innocency, whether you have never made a bad use of them? Have you never made these cares of the body, these amusements, and these artifices, instrumental toward iniquitous passions? Have you never employed them in corrupting hearts, or in nourishing the corruption of your own? What! your entire life has perhaps been one continued and deplorable chain of passions and evils; you have abused every thing around you, and have made them instrumental to your irregular appetites; you have called them all in aid to that unfortunate tendency of your heart; your intentions have even exceeded your evil; your eye hath never been single, and you would willingly never have had that of others to have been so with regard to you; all your cares for your person have been crimes; and when there is question of returning to your God, and of making reparation for a whole life of corruption and debauchery, you pretend to dispute with him for vanities, of which you have always made so infamous a use? You pretend to maintain the innocency of a thousand abuses, which, though permitted to the rest of men, would be forbidden to you? You enter into contestation, when it is intended to restrict you from the criminal pomps of the world; you, to whom the most innocent, if such there be, are forbidden in future, and whose only dress ought henceforth to be sackcloth and ashes? Can you still pretend to justify cares which are your inward shame, and which have so often covered you with confusion at the feet of the sacred tribunal? And should so much contestation and so many explanations be required, where your own shame alone should amply suffice.
Besides, the holy sadness of piety no longer looks upon, but with horror, that which has once been a stumbling-block to us. The contrite soul examines not whether he may innocently indulge in it; it suffices for him to know, that it has a thousand times been the rock upon which he has seen his innocence split. Whatever has been instrumental in leading him to his evils, becomes equally odious in his sight as the evils themselves; whatever has been assisting to his passions, he equally detests as the passions themselves; whatever, in a word, has been favourable to his crimes, becomes criminal in his eyes. Should it even happen that he might be disposed to accord it to his weakness, ah! his zeal, his compunction, would reject the indulgence, and would adopt the interests of God's righteousness against men; he could not prevail upon himself *to permit abuses, which would be the means of recalling to him his past disorders; he would always entertain a dread that the same manner of acting might recall the same dispositions, and that, engrossed by the same cares, his heart would find itself the same; the sole image of his past infidelities disturbs and alarms him; and, far from bearing about with him their sad remains, he would wish to have it in his power to remove even from the spots, and to tear himself from the occupations which renew their remembrance. And, surely, what kind of a penitence must that be which still permits us to love all those things which have been the occasion
