produced you with more favourable dispositions to virtue than the simple people; a heart more noble, and more exalted; happier inclinations; sentiments more worthy of the grandeur of faith; more understanding, elevation of mind, knowledge, instruction, and relish for good. You have received from nature, milder passions, more cultivated manners, and all the other incidental advantages of high birth; that politeness which softens the temper; that dignity which restrains the sallies of the disposition; that humanity which renders you more open to the impressions of grace. How many benefits do you then abuse, when you live not according to God! What a monster is a man of high rank, loaded with honours and prosperity, who never lifts his eyes to heaven to worship the hand which bestows them!
And whence, think you, come the public calamities, the scourges with which the cities and provinces are afflicted? It is solely in punishment of your iniquitous abuse of abundance, that God sometimes striketh the land with barrenness. His justice irritated that you turned his own benefits against himself, withdraws them from your passions, curses the land, permits wars and dissensions, crumbles your fortunes into dust, extinguishes your families, withers the root of your posterity, makes your titles and possessions to pass into the hands of strangers, and holds you out as striking examples of the inconstancy of human affairs and the anticipated monuments of his wrath against hearts equally ungrateful and insensible to the paternal cares of his providence.
Such, my brethren, are the two characters inseparable from your sins, — the scandal and the ingratitude. Behold what you are when you depart from God; and this is what you have never perhaps paid attention to. From the moment that you are guilty, you cannot be indifferently so. The passions are the same in the people and among the powerful; but very different is the guilt; and a single one of your crimes often leads to more miseries, and hath, before God, more extended and more terrible consequences, than a whole life of iniquity in an obscure and vulgar soul. But your virtues have also the same advantage and the same lot: and this is what remains for me to prove in the last part of this Discourse.
Part II. — If scandal and ingratitude be the inseparable, consequences of the vices and passions of persons of high rank, their virtues have also two particular characters, which render them far more acceptable to God than those of common believers: firstly, the example; secondly, the authority. And this, my brethren, is a truth highly consoling to you, who are placed by Providence in an exalted station, and well calculated to animate you to serve God, and to render virtue lovely to you. For it is an illusion to consider the rank to which you are born as an obstacle to salvation, and to the duties imposed upon us by religion. The rocks are more dangerous there, I confess, than in an obscure lot, — the temptation stronger and more frequent; and, while pointing out the advantages, with regard to salvation, of high rank, I pretend not to conceal
