You are surely sensible, my brethren, of all the injustice of your conduct with regard to what I have been mentioning; but what would it be, if, in completing what I had at first intended, I were to show you, that not only you give corrupted motives to the good works of the pious, which is a temerity; not only you exaggerate their slightest weaknesses, which is an inhumanity; but, likewise, when you have nothing to say against the probity of their intentions, and when their imperfections give no handle to your censures, that you fly to your last hold, that of casting an air of ridicule over their virtue itself; which is an impiety.
Yes, my brethren, an impiety. You make a sport, a comic scene of religion; you still introduce it, like the Pagans formerly, on an infamous theatre; and there you expose its holy mysteries, and all that is most sacred and most respectable on the earth, to the laughter of the spectators. You may apologize for your passions, through the weakness of temperament and human frailty; but your derisions of virtue can find no excuse but in the impious contempt of virtue itself; nevertheless, this irreligious and blasphemous mode of speaking is now regarded as a pleasantry, as a sally of wit, and as a language from which vanity appropriates to itself peculiar honour.
But, my brethren, you thereby persecute virtue, and render it useless to yourselves; you dishonour virtue, and render it useless to others; you try virtue, and render it insupportable to itself.
You persecute virtue, and render it useless to yourselves. Yes, my dear hearer, the example of the pious was a mean of salvation provided for you by the goodness of God; now, his justice, incensed at your derisions on his mercies to his servants, for ever withdraws them from you, and punishes your contempt of piety, by denying to you the gift of piety itself. The kings of the earth take signal vengeance on those who dare to injure their statues, for these are to be considered as public and sacred monuments representing themselves. But the just, here below, are the living statues of the great King, the real images of a holy God; in them he hath expressed the majesty of his purest and most resplendent features; and he for ever curseth those sacrilegious and corrupted hearts who dare to make them a subject of derision and insult.
Besides, even granting that the Lord should not deny to you the gift of piety in punishment of your derisions, they still form an invincible human barrier which will for ever exclude you from its cause. For I demand, if, when tired of the world, of your disorders, of yourself, you wish to return to God, and to save that soul which you now labour to destroy, how shall you dare to declare for piety, you who have so often made it the butt of your public and profane pleasantries? How shall you ever boast of the duties of religion, you who are every day heard to say, that, to become devout, is, in other words, to say that the senses are lost; that such an individual had a thousand good qualities which rendered his society agreeable to all, but that devotion has now altered him to such a degree, that he is fully as insupportable as he was formerly pleasing; that he affects to make himself ridiculous; that we must renounce common
