selves in following your steps! Fifthly, how many souls, still too attached to worldly interests, would dread lest piety should be an obstacle to their advancement, and perhaps find, in this temptation, an effectual bar to all their penitential desires, if they were not taught, in seeing you, that piety is useful to all, and that, while attracting the favours of heaven, they do not prevent those of the earth! Sixthly, your inferiors, your creatures, and all who depend upon you, view virtue in a much more amiable light, since it is become a certain way of pleasing you, and that their progress in your confidence and esteem depends upon their advancement in piety.
Lastly. What an honour to religion, when, in your persons, she proves that she is still capable of forming righteous men, who despise honours, dignities, and riches; who live amidst prosperity without being dazzled with it; who enjoy the first places without losing sight of eternal riches; who possess all, as though possessing nothing; who are greater than the whole world, and consider as dirt all the advantages of the earth, whenever they become an obstacle to promises held out by faith in heaven! What confusion for the wicked to feel, in seeing you treading the paths of salvation amidst every human prosperity, that virtue is not an adoption of despair! that they vainly endeavour to persuade themselves, that recourse is had to God only when forsaken by the world, since you fail not, though loaded with all the favours of the world, to love the shame of Jesus Christ! What consolation, even for our ministry, to be enabled to employ your examples in these Christian pulpits, in overthrowing the sinners of a more obscure lot; to cite your virtues to make them blush at their vices; to cover with shame all their vain excuses, by proving your fidelity to the law of God; that their dangers are not greater than yours; that the objects of their passions are less seductive; that more charms and more illusions are not held out by the world to them than to you; that if grace can raise up faithful hearts even in the palaces of kings, it must be equally able to form them under the roof of the citizen and of the magistrate, and, consequently, that salvation is open to all, and that our station becomes a favourable pretext to our passions, only when the corruption of our hearts is the true reason which authorizes them.
Yes, my brethren, I repeat, that, in serving God, you give a new force to our ministry; more weight to the truths announced by us to the people; more confidence to our zeal; more dignity to the word of Jesus Christ; more credit to our censures; more consolation to our toils; and, in viewing you, the world is convinced of truths which it hath disputed with us. What benefits, then, accrue from your examples! You accredit piety, and honour religion in the mind of the people; you animate the righteous of every station; you console the servants of God; you spread throughout a whole kingdom a savour of life that overthrows vice and countenances virtue; you support the rules of the gospel against the maxims of the world; you are cited in the cities and in the most distant provinces to encourage the weak, and to aggrandize the
