other resorts? What shall it be to make instrumental to guilt, what in religion is most holy; to choose thy presence, great God! to conceal the secret of an impure passion, and to make thy holy temple a rendezvous of iniquity, a place more dangerous than even those assemblies of sin, which religion interdicts to believers? What guilt, to come to crucify afresh Jesus Christ, in the very place where he offers himself up for us every day to his Father! What guilt, to employ, in order to forward our own ruin, the very hour in which the mysteries of salvation, and the redemption of all men, are operated! What madness, to come to choose the eyes of our Judge to render him the witness of our crimes, and of his presence to make the most horrible cause of our condemnation! What a neglect of God, and what a mark of reprobation, to change the sacred asylums of our reconciliation into opportunities of debauchery and licentiousness!
Great God! when insulted on Mount Calvary, where thou wert still a suffering God, the tombs opened around Jerusalem; the dead arose, as if to reproach to their descendants the horror of their sacrilege. Ah! reanimate, then, the ashes of our fathers who await, in this holy temple, the blessed immortality; let their bodies rise out of these pompous tombs which our vanity hath erected to them; and, inflamed with a holy indignation against irreverences which crucify thee afresh, and which profane the sacred asylum of the remains of their mortality, let them appear upon these monuments; and, since our instructions and our threatenings are unavailing, let them come themselves to reproach to their successors their irreligion and their sacrileges. But if the terror of thy presence, O my God! be insufficient to retain them in respect, were the dead even to rise up, as thou hast formerly said, they would, in consequence of it, be neither more religious nor more believing.
But if the presence of a holy God require here, as of the blessed in heaven, a disposition of purity and innocence, the presence of a God, terrible, and full of majesty, requires one of dread and of internal collection. — Second disposition, marked by the profound humiliation of the blessed in the heavenly temple; " And they fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God."
Part II. — God is spirit and truth, and it is in spirit and in truth that he requireth principally to be honoured. That disposition of profound humiliation which we owe to him in our temples, consists not, therefore, solely in the external posture of our bodies; it also comprises, like that of the blessed in heaven, a spirit of adoration, of praise, of prayer, and of thanksgiving; and such is that spirit of religion and humiliation which God demandeth of us in the holy temple, similar to that of the blessed in the heavenly temple.
I say a spirit of adoration; for as it is here that God manifesteth his wonders and his supreme greatness, and descendeth from heaven to receive our homages, the first sentiment which should be formed within us, on entering into this holy place, is a sentiment
