pity upon you, you no doubt promise yourself that he will change your heart; now, why do you depend upon this change, so necessary to your salvation, more in future than at present? In the first place, shall your disposition for penitence be then more favourable? Shall your heart find it easier to break asunder its chains? What! inclinations deeply rooted through time and years shall be more easily torn out? A torrent which has already hollowed out its bed, shall be more easy to turn aside? Are you in your senses when you say so? Ah! even now, it appears so difficult to repress your inordinate passions, though yet in your infancy, and consequently more tractable and easy to regulate! You delay your conversion only because it would cost you too much to conquer yourself on certain points: how! you are persuaded that it will cost you less in the end; that this fatal plant, then become a tree, shall be more pliable; that this wound, inveterate and of longer standing, shall be more easy to cure, and shall require less grievous remedies? You expect resources and facilities toward penitence from time; it is time, my brethren, which will deprive you of all those yet remaining.
Secondly. Shall grace be either more frequent in future, or more victorious? But, granting it even to be so, your cupidity, then more powerful, opposing greater impediments, the grace which would now triumph over your heart, and change you into a thorough penitent, will no longer then but slightly agitate you, and excite within you only weak and unavailing desires of repentance. But you have little reason to flatter yourself even with this hope: the more you irritate the goodness of God by delaying your conversion, the more will he withdraw himself from you: every moment diminishes m some measure his favours and his kindness. Recollect, that when you first began to deviate from his ways, not a day passed without his operating within you some movement of salvation, troubles, remorses, and desires of penitence. At present if you attend to it, these inspirations are more rare: it is only on certain occasions that your conscience is aroused; you are partly familiarized with your disorders. Ah! my dear hearer, you easily see that your insensibility will be only increased in the sequel: God will more and more retire from you, and will deliver you up to a reprobate feeling, and to that fatal tranquillity which is the consummation and the most dreadful punishment of iniquity. Now I ask, are you not absurd in thus marking out, for your conversion, a time in which you shall never have had fewer aids on the part of grace, and less facility on the part of your heart?
I might still add, that the more you delay, the more you accumulate debts; the more you enrich the treasure of iniquity, the more crimes you shall have to expiate, the more rigorous shall your reparation have to be, and consequently the more shall your penitence be difficult. Slight austerities, some retrenchments, some Christian charities, would perhaps suffice at present to acquit you before your Judge, and to appease his justice. But, in the sequel, when the abundance of your crimes shall have risen above your head, and time and years shall have blunted, if not totally destroyed,
