pleasures, your pains and time should be lost: your uncertainties are efforts which you make to defend yourself against a remnant of faith, which still inwardly enlightens you, rather than a proof that you have already lost it. Seek no longer, then, to convince yourself; rather endeavour to oppose no more that internal conviction which enlightens and condemns you. Follow the dictates of your own heart; be reconciled to yourself; allow a conscience to speak, which never fails to plead within you for faith, against your own excesses; in a word, hearken to yourself, and you will be a believer.
But it is admitted, you will say, that if nothing more were to be required than to believe, that would easily be subscribed to. This is the second pretext of the sinners who delay; it is the want of grace, and they await it: conversion is not the work of man, and it belongs to God alone to change the heart.
Now, I say, that this pretext, so vulgar, so often repeated in the world, and so continually in the mouth of almost all those who live in guilt; if we consider the sinner who alleges it, it is unjust; if we view it on the part of God, on whom he lays the blame, it is rash and ungrateful; if we examine it in itself, it is foolish and unwarrantable.
In the first place, if we consider the sinner who alleges it, it is unjust; for you complain that God hath not yet touched you, that you feel no relish for devotion, and that you must wait the coming of that relish before you can think of changing your life. But, full of passions as you are, can you reasonably expect or exact of God that he shall ever make you to feel a decided inclination for piety? Would you that your heart, still plunged in debauchery, feel the pure delights and the chaste attractions of virtue? You are similar to a man who, nourishing himself with gall and wormwood, should afterward complain that every thing feels bitter to his palate. You say, that if God wish you to serve him, in his power alone it is to give you a relish for his service; you, who every day defile your heart by the meanest excesses; you who every moment place a fresh chaos between God and you; you, in a word, who, by new debaucheries, finally extinguish in your soul even those sentiments of natural virtue, those happy impressions of innocence and of regularity born with you, which might have been the means of recalling you to virtue and to righteousness. O man! art thou then unjust only when there is question of accusing the wisdom and the justice of thy God?
But I say farther, that were God even to operate in your heart that relish for, and those feelings of, salvation, which you await, dissolute and corrupted as you are, would you even feel the operation of his grace? Were he to call upon you, plunged as you now are in the pleasures of a life altogether worldly, would you even hear his voice? Were he to touch your heart, would that feeling of grace have any consequence for your conversion, extinguished as it would immediately be by the ardour and the frenzy of profane passions? And, after all, this God of longanimity and of patience
