which have formerly disgraced the name and life of some one of your ancestors? Would you not wish for ever to efface these hateful vestiges of disgrace from the histories which hand them down to posterity? Do you not consider as enemies to your name those who ransack the past ages, in order to lay open these hateful particulars, and to revive them in the memory of men? Do you not in opposition to their malignity, loudly proclaim that maxim of equity, that faults are personal; and that it is unjust to attach the idea of dishonour to all who bear your name, merely because it has once been disgraced through the bad conduct of an individual?
Apply the rule to yourself: the church is your house: the just alone are your relations, your brethren, your predecessors, your ancestors: they alone compose that family of first-born, to whom you ought to be eternally united. The wicked shall one day be as though they had never been: the ties of nature, of blood, and of society, which now unite you to them, shall perish; an immeasurable and an eternal chaos shall separate them from the children of God; they shall no longer be your brethren, your forefathers, or your relatives; they shall be cast out, forgotten, effaced from the land of the living, unnecessary to the designs of God, cut off for ever from his kingdom, and no longer, by any tie, holding to the society of the just, who shall then be your only brethren, your ancestors, your people, your tribe. What do you then, when you uncover with such pleasure, the ignominy of some false just, who dishonour their history? It is your house, your name, your relations, your ancestors, whom you dishonour: you come to stain the splendour of so many glorious actions, which, in all ages, have rendered their memory immortal by the infidelity of an individual, who, bearing the name they bear, stain it by manners and a conduct totally dissimilar: upon yourselves then it is that you make the dishonour fall; unless you have already renounced the society of the holy, and prefer to associate your eternal lot with that of the wicked and the unfaithful.
But what is more particularly absurd in that temerity which is always so ready to judge and to blacken the intentions of the pious, is, that you thereby fall into the most ridiculous contradiction with yourselves: — last character of that temerity.
Yes, my brethren, you accuse them of cunningly working toward their own point, of having their own views in the most holy actions, and of only acting the personage of virtue. But doth it become you, the inhabitants of a court, to make this reproach? Your whole life is one continued disguise; you every where act a part which is not your own; you flatter those whom you love not; you crouch to others whom you despise; you act the assiduous servant to those from whom you have emolument to expect, though, in your heart, you look up with envy to their rank, and think them unworthy of their elevation; in a word, your whole life is an assumed character. Your heart, on every occasion, belies your conduct; every where your countenance is in contradiction to your sentiments; you are the hypocrites of the world, of ambition, of
