gular consequences; you will be unable to produce, before the Lord, a single instance of these in your favour, without the enemy having it at the same time in his power to reckon a thousand against you: salvation occupies your intervals alone; the world has, as I may say, the foundation and the principal: the moments are for God, our entire life is for ourselves.
I know, my brethren, that, with regard to this, you feel sensibly the injustice and the danger of your own conduct. You confess, that the agitations of the world, of business, and of pleasures, almost entirely occupy you, and that a very little time, indeed, remains for you to reflect upon salvation: but, in order to tranquillize yourselves, you say, that some future day, when you shall be more at ease; when affairs of a certain nature shall be terminated; when particular embarrassments shall be at an end; and, in a word, when certain circumstances shall no longer exist, you will then think seriously upon your salvation, and the business of eternity shall then become your principal occupation. But, alas! your deception is this, that you regard salvation as incompatible with the occupations attached to the station in which Providence has placed you. For cannot you employ that station as the means of your sanctification? Can you not exercise in it all the Christian virtues? Penitence, should these occupations be painful and distressing; clemency, pity, justice, if they establish you in authority over your fellow-creatures? Submission to the will of Heaven, if the success does not correspond sometimes with your expectations? A generous forgiveness of injuries, if you suffer oppression or calumny in that station? Confidence in God alone, if in it you experience the injustice or the inconstancy of your masters? Do not many individuals of your rank and station, in the same predicament as you find yourselves, lead a pure and Christian life? You know well, that God is to be found every where; for, in those happy moments when you have sometimes been touched with grace, is it not true, that every thing recalled you to God? That even the dangers of your station became the vehicles of instruction, and means of cure for you; that the world disgusted you even with the world; that you found, continually and every where, the secret of offering up a thousand invisible sacrifices to the Almighty, and of making your most hurried and tumultuous occupations the sources of holy reflections, or of praiseworthy and salutary examples? Why do you not -cultivate these impressions of grace and salvation? It is not your situation in life, it is your infidelity and weakness, which have extinguished them in your heart.
Joseph was charged with the management of a great kingdom; he alone supported the whole weight of the government; nevertheless, did he forget the Lord, who had broken asunder his chains and justified his innocence? Or, in order to serve the God of his fathers, did he delay till a successor should come and restore that tranquillity to him which his new dignities had necessarily deprived him of? On the contrary, he knew how to render serviceable,
