necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you; but, seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo! we turn to the Gentiles." We shall therefore turn toward the nations hitherto abandoned, toward those humble and poor people buried in ignorance, who cultivate your lands, and who will, with faith and gratitude, receive that grace which you reject. Ah! our labours there would be much more availing, our yoke more easy, our ministry more consoling: we should not then, it is true, reckon among our hearers, names celebrated in history; but we would reckon the names of those who are written in heaven: we should not see there assembled all those titles and splendid dignities, which form the whole glory of the world which passeth away; but we would there see faith, piety, and innocence, which compose the whole glory of the Christian who eternally endureth: we should not hear there vain applauses given to the language of the man, and not to that of faith; but we would behold those tears flowing which are the immortal praise of grace: our pulpits might not, indeed, be surrounded with so much pomp; but our hearers would be a spectacle worthy of angels, and of God.
Such are the dispositions which ought to prepare you for our instructions. It is necessary now to instruct you on the mind in which you ought to listen to us.
Part II. — In order toward instructing you on the mind in which you ought to listen to the holy word, it is required only to establish at first what are its authority and its end. Its authority, which is divine, demands a respectful and docile mind; its end, which is the conversion of hearts, demands a spirit of faith, which searches in it only such lights as may enable it to quit its errors, and such remedies as may cure its evils.
First. I say that its authority is divine. Yes, my brethren, the word which we announce to you is not our word, but the word of him who sendeth us. From the moment that we are established by him in the holy ministry, through the way of a legitimate call, he willeth that you consider us as sent by him, as speaking to you here on his part, and as only lending our weak voice to his divine words. We bear, it is true, that treasure in vessels of earth; but it thereby loses nothing of its majesty. Like those pitchers which Gideon formerly employed against the enemies of the Lord, the sound may be mean and contemptible; but truth, that divine light which God hath placed within us, is not from thence, less descended from heaven, or destined, like the lamps of Gideon, still to strike with terror unfaithful souls.
Now, you owe, in the first place, to the authority of this divine word, a pious docility and an attention to it, rather in the light of disciples than of judges. In effect, we expose to you the rules of worship and of piety, the decisions of the Gospel, the laws of the church, and the maxims of the holy. We come not here to give you our own opinions, our prejudices, our thoughts; this is not a
