fied with an inaccessible tower; I mean to say, that your soul hath been as if defended from its birth by the succours of the sacrament, by the lights of the doctrine, by the force of examples, by continual inspirations of grace, and perhaps by the special aids likewise of a holy and a Christian education provided for you b,y the Lord, and which so many others have wanted. Ingrate! wherein could you be able to justify your weakness before the Lord, and to interest his justice itself to use indulgence toward you? Ah! what do your transgressions present to him but the abuses of his grace, and means of salvation perverted, through the licentiousness of your will, into occasions of sin?
But let us leave all these reasons, and tell me, that weakness of which you complain, and for which you pretend that God will have consideration, is it not your own handwork, and the fruit of your own special irregularities? Recollect here, those happy days when your innocence had not been wrecked; were your passions then so difficult to be overcome? Did modesty, temperance, fidelity, piety, then appear to you as impracticable virtues? Did you find it impossible to resist occasions? Were your tendencies to pleasure so violent that you were not then their master? Ah! whence comes it then that they now tyrannize with such dominion over your heart? Is it not, that having, through a fatal negligence, allowed them to usurp the command, they have ever since been too powerful to be conquered? Have you not forged, with your own hands, these chains? Look around you, and see if so many just, who bear (and from their earliest youth) the yoke, are even tempted in situations in which you are always certain to perish. Ah! why then should you complain of a weakness which you have brought upon yourself? Why should you count, that what must irritate the Lord against you shall serve to appease him? What doth he see, when he sees the weakness of your inclinations? He sees the fruit of your crimes, the consequences of a licentious and sensual life. Is it here that you dare to appeal to justice itself, to that justice before which the righteous themselves entreat not to be judged? My God! upon what shall the sinner not flatter himself, since, in the most terrible of thy perfections, he finds reasons of confidence?
The only rational and legitimate conclusion which it is permitted to you to draw from your own weakness, and from these inclinations for the world, and for pleasures, which, in spite of your resolutions, hurry you away, is, that you have more occasion to watch, to lament, and to pray, than others; that, with more studious care, you ought to shun the dangers and the attractions of the senses and of the flesh. But then it is that you believe yourself invincible, when we exhort you to fly all profane conversations, suspicious intercourses, doubtful pleasures, lascivious spectacles, and assemblies of sin. Ah! you then defend yourself upon the ground that your innocence is in no degree injured there: you resign to weak souls all the precautions of flight and of circumspection: you tell us that every one must feel and know himself, and that those who are weak enough to be injured there, should in prudence keep away from
