pulpit of controversy, it is the place of truth: nothing which can afford room for disputation ought ever to find place in the pulpit of peace and of unity; we speak here in the name of the church, and are only the interpreters of her faith and of her doctrine.
Nevertheless, how many of those men, so wise in their own conceit, and who pique themselves upon sagacity and reason, come here with a mind set against, and, as it were, watchfully upon guard against all the terrors of the holy word! They make not a boast, like the sinners we have lately mentioned, of being callous to all truth; but they look upon our ministry as an art of exaggeration and hyperbole; the most holy emotions of zeal are only, in their opinion, studied tricks of human artifice; the most awful threatenings, only the sallies of a vain eloquence; the most incontrovertible maxims, only discourses adapted rather to custom than to truth. Such, my brethren, is the deplorable situation in which the greatest part of you find yourselves here. You always inwardly oppose, to that truth which we announce, the maxims and the prejudices of the world, which contradict it; you are ingenious in weakening in your own breast, by specious reasons, the pretended excess of our maxims; you come here to combat, and not to yield to the force, or to the light of truth; you come here, it would seem, only in order to enter into contestation with God, to invalidate the eternal immutability of his word, to undertake the interests of error against the glory of truth, and to be the inward apologists of the world and of the passions, even in that holy place destined to condemn and to combat them. Ah! suffer that truth, at least, to triumph in its own temple; dispute not with it that feeble victory, which has formerly triumphed over the whole universe; oppress it, and welcome, amidst the world, and in those assemblies of vanity which error collects, and where error is enthroned. Is it not enough that you have banished it from the world, and that it dare no longer show itself without being exposed to derisions and censures? Leave to us, at least, the melancholy consolation of daring still to publish it in the face of those altars which it hath raised up, and which ought surely to serve it, at least, as a place of refuge.
You accuse us of exaggeration. Great God! And thou wilt one day perhaps judge us for weakening the force and the influence of thy word, in consequence of not giving sufficient consideration to it at the feet of the altars! And thou wilt one day perhaps reproach us for having accommodated the holy severities of thy Gospel to the indulgences and the softenings of our age! And thou wilt perhaps range us one day among the workers of iniquity, because the lukewarmness and negligence of our manners have taken from the word, which we announce, that terror and that divine vehemence which can only be found in a mouth consecrated by piety and by penitence!
How, my brethren! The truths of salvation, such as Jesus Christ hath set forth to us, would be incapable of alarming consciences, were the mind of man not to add extraneous terrors to
