in your memory, the multitude and the flagrancy of your iniquities; ah! no reparation on your part shall then be sufficiently rigorous, no mortification sufficiently austere, no humiliation sufficiently profound, no pleasure, however innocent, which you must not deny yourself, no indulgence which will not be criminal: holy excesses of penitence will be necessary to compensate the duration and the enormity of your crimes; it will require you to quit all, to tear yourself from every thing, to sacrifice your fortune, interests, and conveniency, perhaps to condemn yourself to a perpetual retreat, for it is only through these means that the great sinners are recalled. Now, if slight rigours, which would at present be sufficient amends, appear so insupportable, and disgust you at the idea of a change, shall penitence be more alluring, when more toils, and steps a thousand times more bitter, present themselves in its train? My God! upon the affair of salvation alone it is that men are capable of such wilful mistakes. Ah! my brethren, of what avail are great lights, extent of genius, deep penetration, and solid judgment in the management of earthly matters, and of vain undertakings which shall perish with us, if we are children in the grand work of eternity?
And allow me to conclude this part of my Discourse with a final reason, which, I trust will serve to convince you. You consider the vain hope of a conversion as a feeling of grace and salvation, and as a proof that the Lord visiteth you, and that he hath not yet delivered you up to all the inveteracy of sin. But, my dear hearer, the Lord cannot visit you in his mercy without inspiring you with salutary troubles and fears on the state of your conscience: all the operations of grace begin with these; consequently, while you continue tranquil, it is evident that God treateth you according to all the rigour of his justice, and that he exerciseth upon you the most terrible of his chastisements; I mean to say, his neglect and the denial of his grace. Peace in sin, the security in which you live, is therefore the most infallible mark that God is no longer with you, and that this grace, which in the criminal soul always works trouble and anxiety, dread and distrust, is totally extinguished in yours. Thus you comfort yourself on what ought to excite your justest fears: the most deplorable signs of your reprobation form in your mind the most solid foundation of your hope: trust in sin is the most terrible chastisement with which God can punish the sinner, and you draw from it a prejudication of salvation and of penitence. Tremble, if any remains of faith be yet left you: this calm is the forerunner of a shipwreck: you are stamped with the mark of the reprobate; reckon not upon a mercy which treats you so much the more rigorously, as it permits you to hope and to depend upon it.
The error of the majority of sinners is that of imagining that the grace of conversion is one of those sudden miracles by which the whole face of things is changed in the twinkling of an eye; which plants, tears up, destroys, rears up at the first stoke, and in an instant creates the new man, as the earthly man was formerly drawn
