favour, and of fortune; and it well becomes you, after that, to accuse the just of the same tricks, and so loudly to ring their dissimulation and pretended hypocrisy: when you shall have nothing in the same way with which to reproach yourselves, then will we listen to the temerity of your censures; or rather, you shall have reason to be jealous for the glory of artifice and meanness, and to be dissatisfied, that the pious should dare to interfere with a science which so justly belongs, and is so especially adapted to you.
Besides, you so nervously clamour out against the world, when, too attentive to your actions, it maliciously interprets certain suspicious assiduities, certain animated looks; you so loudly proclaim then, that, if things go on thus, no person will in future be innocent; that no woman in the world will be considered as a person of regular conduct; that nothing is more easy than to give an air of guilt to the most innocent things; that it will be necessary totally to banish one's self from society, and to deny one's self every intercourse with mankind; you then so feelingly declaim against the malignity of men, who, on the most trivial grounds, accuse you of criminal intentions. But do the pious give juster foundation for the suspicions which you form against them? And, if it be permitted to you to hunt for guilt in them, though hidden under the appearances of virtue, why are you so enraged that the world should dare to suppose it in you, and should believe you criminal under the appearances of guilt?
Lastly. O worldly women! when we reproach you with your assiduity at theatres, and other places where innocence encounters so many dangers, or the indecency and immodesty of your dress, you reply that you have no bad intentions; that you wish injury to none; you would wish indecent and criminal manners to be passed over, for the sake of a pretended innocency of intention, which your whole exterior belies; and you cannot pass over to the pious, virtuous, and laudable manners, for the sake of an integrity of heart, to which every thing external bears ample testimony. You exact that they shall suppose your intentions pure, when your works are not so; and you think yourselves entitled to believe that the intentions of the pious are not innocent, when all their actions are visibly so. Cease, then, either to justify your own vices, or to censure their virtues.
It is thus, my brethren, that every thing poisons in our keeping, and that every thing removes us farther from God: the spectacle even of virtue becomes to us a pretext for vice; and the examples themselves of piety are rocks to our innocence. It would seem, O my God! that the world doth not sufficiently furnish us with opportunities for our ruin: that the examples of sinners are not sufficient to authorize our errors; for we seek a support for them even in the virtues of the just.
But you will tell us, that the world is not so far wrong in censuring those who profess themselves people of piety; that such are every day seen, who, if possible, are more animated than other men in the pursuit of a worldly fortune, more eager after pleasures,
