to overcome its antipathies, to repress its likings, to lower its pride, and to fix its inconstancy? Is it so easy a matter to restrain the sallies of the mind, to moderate its judgments, to disavow its suspicions, to soften its keenness, and to smother its malignity? Is it so easy to be the eternal enemy of one's own body, to conquer its indolence, to mortify its tastes and to crucify its desires? Is it so natural to pardon injuries, to bear with contempt, to love, and even to load with benefits those who do evil to us, to sacrifice one's fortune in order not to fail to his conscience, to deny one's self pleasures to which all our inclinations lead us, to resist example, and singly to maintain the cause of virtue against the multitude which condemns it? Do all these appear, in fact, so easy to you, that you deem those, who for an instant depart from them, unworthy of the least indulgence? How feelingly do you expatiate every day on the difficulties of a Christian life, when we propose to you these holy rules! Is it so very astonishing, that, in a long march through rough and dangerous ways, a man should sometimes stumble, or even fall, through fatigue and weakness?
Inhuman that we are! And nevertheless, the slightest imperfection in the pious destroys, in our mind, all their most estimable qualities: far from excusing their weaknesses, in consideration of their virtue, it is their virtue itself which renders us doubly cruel and inexorable to their weaknesses. To be just is sufficient, it would appear, to forfeit every claim to indulgence: to their vices we are clear-sighted; to their virtues we are blind; a moment of weakness effaces from our remembrance a whole life of fidelity and innocence.
But what renders your injustice toward the pious still more cruel, is, that it is your own examples, your irregularities, and even your censures, which stagger, weaken, and force them sometimes to imitate you; it is the corruption of your manners which becomes the continual and the most dangerous snare to their innocence; it is those foolish derisions with which you continually assault virtue, that force them reluctantly to shelter themselves under the appearances of guilt. And how can you suppose it possible that the piety of the most righteous should always preserve itself pure, in the midst of the present manners, in a perverse world, whose customs are abuses, and its communications crimes; where the passions are the only bond of society, and where the wisest and most virtuous are those who retrenched from guilt only its scandal and publicity? How can you suppose it possible, that, amidst these eternal derisions which ridicule the pious, which make them almost ashamed of virtue, and often oblige them to counterfeit vice; that, in the midst of so many disorders, authorized by the public manners, by senseless applauses, by examples rendered respectable by rank and dignity, by the ridicule cast on those who dare to hesitate at them, and lastly, by the weakness even of their own heart; how do you think it possible that the pious should be always enabled to stem such a torrent, and that, obliged continually to fortify themselves against so rapid and so impetuous a course,
