respects virtue; but it always despises those who make a profession of it: it acknowledges that nothing is more estimable than a solid and sincere piety; but it complains that such is no where to be found: and, by always separating virtue from those who practise it, it only makes a show of respecting the phantom of sanctity and righteousness, that it may be the better entitled to contemn and to censure the just.
Now the first object, on which the ordinary discourses of the world fall against virtue, is the probity of the intentions of the just. As what is apparent in their actions gives little hold, in general, to malignity and censure, they confine themselves to the intentions: they pretend, and above all at present, when, under a prince equally great as religious, virtue, formerly a stranger, and dreaded at court, is now become the surest path to favour and reward, — they pretend that it is there to which all who make a public profession of it, point their aim; that their only wish is to accomplish their ends; and that those who appear the most sanctified and disinterested, are superior to the rest only in art and cunning. If they excuse them from the meanness of such a motive, they give them others equally unworthy of the elevation of virtue and of Christian sincerity. Thus when a soul, touched for its errors, becomes contrite, it is not God, but the world, whom it seeks through a more cunning and concealed path; it is not grace which hath changed the heart, it is age which begins to efface its attractions, and to withdraw it from pleasures, only because pleasures begin to fly from it. If zeal attaches itself to works of piety, it is not that they are charitable, it is because they wish to become consequential. If they shut themselves up in solitude and in prayer, it is not their piety which dreads the dangers of the world, it is their singularity and ostentation which wish to attract its suffrages. Lastly, the merit of the most holy and the most virtuous actions is always disparaged in the mouth of the worldly, by the suspicions with which they endeavour to blacken the intentions.
Now, in this temerity, I find three hateful characters, which expose the absurdity and the injustice of it: it is a temerity of indiscretion, seeing you judge, you decide upon what you know not: it is a temerity of corruption, seeing we generally suppose in others only what we feel in ourselves: lastly, it is a temerity of contradiction, seeing you find unjust and foolish when directed against yourself, the very same suspicions which to you appear so well-founded against your brother. Lose not, I entreat of you, the consequence of these truths.
I say, first, a temerity of indiscretion. For, my brethren, to God alone is reserved the judgment of intentions and thoughts: He alone who sees the secrecy of hearts can judge them; nor will they be manifested till that terrible day when his light shall shine through and dispel every darkness. An impenetrable veil is spread here below, over the depth of the human heart; we must then wait till that veil shall be rent, before the shameful passion which it conceals, as the apostle says, can become manifest, and before the
