the eyes of men, than touched with the endless fatigues and dangers which he had surmounted, in order to announce to them the Gospel, and to convert them to truth; were it permitted, we might say to you, my brethren, we sustain, solely on your account, the whole weight of a painful and laborious ministry; our cares, our watchings, our prayers, the endless toilings which qualify us for, and accompany us in, these Christian pulpits, have no other object but that of your salvation. O! do not our pains entitle us at least to your respect and gratitude? Is it possible that that zeal which suffers all, in order to secure your salvation, can ever become the melancholy subject of your derisions and censures? Demand of God, good and well, that, for the glory of the church and for the honour of his Gospel, he raise up to his people labourers powerful in speech, of those men whom the sole unction of the Spirit of God renders nervous and eloquent, and who announce the Gospel in a manner worthy of its elevation and sanctity. But likewise demand, that, when we happen therein to fail, your faith may supply the deficiencies of our discourses; that your piety may render the truth, in your own hearts, that which it loses in our mouths; and that, through your unrighteous distastes, you force not the ministers of the Gospel to have recourse, in order to please you, to the vain artifices and colouring of a human eloquence, to shine rather than to instruct, and like the Israelites formerly, to go down to the Philistines to sharpen their instruments, destined solely to cultivate the earth: — I mean to say, to seek in profane learning, or in the language of a hostile world, foreign ornaments to embellish the simplicity of the Gospel; and to give to instruments, and to talents destined to increase, to multiply, and to strengthen the holy seed, a vain brilliancy and a subtlety which blunt its energy and its virtue, and which substitute a false splendour in the place of truth and zeal.
And now, my brethren, behold the last fault inimical to that spirit of faith; it is a spirit of curiosity. You do not sufficiently distinguish the holy gravity of our ministry from that vain and frivolous art which has nothing in view but the arrangement of the Discourse and the glory of eloquence; you assist at our discourses with the same view as Augustine, still a sinner, did in former times at those of Ambrose. It was not, says that illustrious penitent, in order to learn from the mouth of the man of God the secrets of eternal life, which I had so long sought, nor the desire of finding in them remedies for the shameful and inveterate wounds of my soul, and which thou, O my God! alone art acquainted with; it was in order to examine whether his eloquence corresponded with his great reputation, and if his discourses warranted the unbounded applauses which his hearers bestowed upon him. The truths which he announced interested me not; I was moved only by the beauty and the charms of the Discourse.
And such is still, at present, the deplorable situation of far too many believers who listen to us; who, like Augustine, loaded with crimes, and fettered with the most shameful passions, far from
