brethren, ah! our wish would be to have it in our power to render your path more easy, far from throwing fresh obstacles in the way. Wherefore should we dishearten you in the enterprise of salvation, by starting chimerical difficulties? It is our duty to smooth such as may actually be found in it, and to tender you an assisting hand, in order to sustain your weakness.
Meditate, my brethren, upon the law of Jesus Christ. What do I say? Only open the Gospel, and read; then shall you find that we draw' a veil of discretion over the severity of its maxims; then, far from complaining of our excesses, you will yourselves supply the deficiencies of our silence and of our softenings, and will say to yourselves what we dread to say, because ye could never bear it. Great God! To bear his cross every day, to despise the world and all it contains, to live as a stranger upon the earth, to attach himself to thee alone, to renounce all which flatters the senses, incessantly to renounce himself, to consider as happy those who weep or who are afflicted, — behold the substance of thy holy law, and which every Christian undertakes. O! what can the human mind add to the rigour of this doctrine? What could we announce to you more melancholy or more formidable to self-love? Consequently, your reproaches are merely a vain language of the world, and one of those fashions of speaking which no one examines, and each adopts; your conscience inwardly belies it; and when you speak candidly, you confess that we are in the right, and that the Gospel is a preacher much more severe and more fearful for the world, and for those who love it, than it could be possible for us ever to be.
First duty which the authority of the holy word exacts of you, namely, a docile spirit.
Secondly. You owe to the authority of this holy word, a spirit of sincerity, and inward application of it to yourself; that is to say, to be a rigorous examinator here of your own conscience; to have incessantly before your eyes, on one side, the state of your soul, and, on the other, the truths which we announce; to measure yourself according to that rule; to search into yourself by that light; to judge yourself by that law; to listen to, as if addressed to you alone, the holy maxims announced to the multitude; to consider yourself as alone here before Jesus Christ, who speaks to you alone through our mouth, and who sends us here perhaps for you alone. For, my brethren, no one here takes to himself that truth which attacks and condemns him; no one thinks himself an interested personage: it would seem that we form at pleasure to ourselves phantoms of the brain, for the purpose of combating them, and that the reality of that sinner whom we attack is no where in existence. The lewd and dissolute person recognizes not himself in the most animated and most striking traits of his passion. The man, loaded with ill-acquired wealth, and perhaps with the blood and spoils of the people, joins with us in deprecating that very iniquity in others, and sees not that he judges himself. The courtier, consumed with ambition, and who sacrifices conscience and integrity every day to that idol, frankly admits of the meanness of that passion in his equals, and looks upon it as a virtue, and as a deep experience of
