the souls whom we daily see returning to their God, are not led by other lights: the righteous, who bear his yoke, are not sustained or animated by other truths;. we ourselves, who serve him, know nothing more of it.
Cease, then, to deceive yourself, and to await what you already have. Ah! it is not faith that is wanting to you, it is the inclination to fulfil the duties it imposes on you: it is not your doubts, but your passions which stop you. You know not yourself; you willingly persuade yourself that you want faith, because that pretext which you oppose to grace is less humiliating to self-love than that of the shameful vices which retain you. But mount to the source; your doubts have sprung solely from your irregular mode of living: regulate, then, your manners, and you will see nothing in faith but what is certain and consoling: be chaste, modest, and temperate, and I answer for that faith which you believe to have lost: live uprightly, and you will find little difficulty in believing.
And a proof of the truth of what I tell you is, that if, in order to be converted, nothing more were to be required than to bend your reason to mysteries which exceed our comprehension; if a Christian life were accompanied with no other difficulties than certain apparent contradictions which it is necessary to believe without being able to comprehend them; if faith proposed the fulfilment of no irksome duties; if, in order to change your life, it were not necessary to renounce passions the most lively, and attachments the most dear to your heart; if the matter in question were merely a point of opinion and of belief, without either the heart or the passions being interested in it, you would no longer have the smallest difficulty in yielding to it; you would view in the light of madmen those, who, for a moment, could hesitate between difficulties of pure speculation, of which the belief can be followed by no injury and an eternity of misery, which, after all, may be the lot of unbelievers. Faith appears difficult to you, therefore, not because it holds out mysteries, but because it regulates the passions: it is the sanctity of its maxims which shocks, and not the incomprehensibility of its secrets: you are therefore corrupted, but not an unbeliever.
And, in effect, notwithstanding all your pretended doubts upon faith, you feel that avowed unbelief is a horrible course to adopt; you dare not determine upon it. It is a quicksand, under which you have a glimpse of a thousand gulfs which fill you with horror, in which you find no consistency, and on which you could not venture to tread with a firm and confident foot. You continually say to yourself, that there is no risk in devoting one's self to God, that, after all, and even admitting the uncertainty of any thing after this life, the alternative is too horrible not to require precautions, and that, even in an actual uncertainty of the truths of faith, the party of the godly would always be the wisest and the safest. Your state, therefore, is rather the vague determination of an agitated heart, which dreads to break its chains, than a real and actual suspicion of faith, and a fear lest, in sacrificing to it all your iniquitous
