by imitating you; your inferiors, your creatures, your dependents, consider a resemblance to you as the high road to your favour: they copy your vices, because you hold them out to them as virtues; they enter into your fancies, in order to enter into your confidence; they outrival each other in copying, or in surpassing you, because, in your eyes, their greatest merit is in resembling you. Alas! how many weak souls, born with the principles of virtue, and who, far from you, would have nursed only those dispositions favourable to salvation, have had their innocence wrecked through the unfortunate necessity in which their fortune placed them of imitating you?
Thirdly. A scandal of impunity. You could never reprehend, in your dependents, those abuses and those excesses which you allow to yourself: you are under a necessity of suffering in them what you have no inclination to refuse to yourself: your eyes must be shut upon disorders which are authorized by your own manners; and you are forced to pardon those who resemble you, lest you condemn yourself. A woman of the world, wholly devoted to the art of pleasing, spreads through all her household an air of licentiousness and of worldliness; her house becomes a rock from whence innocence never departs uninjured; every one imitates at home what she displays abroad; and she must pass over these irregularities, because her own manners do not permit her to censure them. What excesses, in those houses kept open and appropriated to everlasting gaming, among that people, as I may say, of domestics, whom vanity has multiplied beyond all number! You know the truth of this, my brethren, and the dignity of the Christian pulpit does not forbid me from repeating it here. How dearly do these unfortunate wretches pay for your pleasures, who, out of your sight, and no check to restrain them, fill up the idle time which your pleasures leave to them, in every excess adapted to the meanness of their education and their abject nature, and which they think themselves authorized in doing by your examples! O my God, if he who neglects his people be worse in thy sight than an infidel, what then is the guilt of him who scandalizes them, and is the cause of their finding death and condemnation where they ought to have found the succours of salvation and the asylum of their innocence?
Fourthly. A scandal of employment and of necessity. How many unfortunate wretches perish in order to feed your pleasures and your iniquitous passions! For you alone the dangerous arts subsist: the theatres are erected solely for your criminal recreations; profane harmonies every where resound, and corrupt so many hearts only to flatter the corruption of yours; the works, fatal to innocence, are transmitted to posterity solely through the favour of your names and protection. It is you alone, my brethren, who give to the world lascivious poets, pernicious authors, and profane writers: it is to please you that these corrupters of the public manners perfect their talents, and seek their exaltation and fortune in a success, the only end of which is the destruction of souls: it is you alone who protect, reward, and produce them; who
