mystery of iniquity, which worketh in secret, can be revealed; till then, whatever passes in the heart of men, buried from our knowledge, is interdicted to the temerity of our judgments: even when what is visible in the conduct of our brethren appears unfavourable to them, charity obliges us to suppose that what we see not makes amends for and rectifies it; and it requires us to excuse the faults of the actions which offend us by the innocency of the intentions which are concealed from our knowledge. Now, if religion ought to render us indulgent, and even favourable to their vices, will it suffer us to be cruel and inexorable to their virtues?
Indeed, my brethren, what renders your temerity here more unjust, more black, and more cruel, is the nature of your suspicions. For, were your suspicions of the pious to be directed only toward some of those weaknesses inseparable from human nature, — for instance, too much sensibility of injury, too much attention to their interests, too much inflexibility in their opinions, — we would be entitled to reply to you, as we shall afterwards tell you, that you exact from the virtuous an exemption from error, and a degree of perfection which exist not in life. But you rest not there: you attack their probity and integrity of heart; you suspect them of atrocity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy; of making the most holy things subservient to their own views and passions; of being public impostors; of sporting with God and man; and all these through the ostensible appearances of virtue. What, my brethren! you would not dare, after the most notorious guilt, to pronounce such a sentence on a convicted criminal; you would rather consider his fault as one of those misfortunes which may happen to all men, and of which an evil moment may render us capable; and you decidedly give judgment against the virtuous; and you suspect in a pious character, from a holy and praiseworthy life, what you would not dare to suspect from the most scandalous and criminal conduct of a sinner? And you consider as a witticism, when directed against the servants of God, what would appear to you as a barbarity when against a man stained with a thousand crimes. Is virtue, then, the only crime unworthy of indulgence; or is it sufficient, to serve Jesus Christ, to become unworthy of all respect? Do the holy practices of piety, which surely ought rather to attract respect and estimation to your brother, become the only titles which confound him, in your mind, with the infamous and the wicked?
I allow that the hypocrite deserves the execration of both God and man; that the abuse which he makes of religion is the greatest of crimes; that derisions and satires are too mild to decry a vice which deserves detestation and horror from the human race; and that a profane theatre errs in throwing only ridicule upon a character so abominable, so shameful, and so afflicting to the church; for it ought to excite the tears and indignation rather than the laughter of believers.
But I say, that this eternal inveteracy against virtue; that the rash suspicions which always confound the pious man with the hypocrite; that that malignity which, in making the most pompous
