but you come to give new subject of offence; on the very spot where you have so often appeared penitent, you proclaim yourselves still worldly and profane. Ah! far from coming to these holy tribunals to recapitulate the disorders of your life; far from coming to renew those promises of penitence, those sentiments of compunction, those emotions of shame and of confusion, of which they have so often been the depositories; you boldly appear before them with an unblushing countenance, your eyes wandering here and there, full, perhaps, of guilt and adultery, as the apostle says, to renew in their presence the same infidelities that your tears had once expiated, and to render them ocular witnesses of the same prevarications of which they had been the secret confidants and the blessed purgers!
What more shall I say, my brethren? — In the third place, the temple is the house of doctrine and of truth; and it is here that, through the mouth of the pastors, the church announces to you the maxims of salvation, and the mysteries of the heavenly kingdom, concealed from so many infidel nations: — fresh motive of gratitude on your part. But, alas! it is rather a fresh subject of condemnation; and even here, where, from these Christian pulpits, we are continually telling you from Jesus Christ that the unclean shall never enjoy the kingdom of heaven, you come to form profane desires; even here where you are warned that you shall one day have to render account of an idle word, you permit yourselves criminal ones: lastly, even here, where you so often hear repeated that evil to him that scandalizeth, you become yourself a stumbling block and a subject of scandal. Thus, my brethren, why do you believe that the word of the gospel, which we preach to princes and to grandees of the earth, is no longer but a tinkling brass, and that our ministry is now become almost unnecessary? It may be that our private weaknesses place a bar to the fruit and to the progress of the gospel, and that God bless not a ministry, the ministers of which are not pleasing in his sight: but besides this reason, so humiliating for us, and which we cannot, however, either dissemble from you, or even conceal from ourselves, it is doubtless, the profanation of the temples, and the indecent and disrespectful manner in which you listen to us, that deprive the word, of which we are the ministers, of all its energy and virtue. The Lord, estranged from this holy place through your profanations, no longer giveth increase to our toils, nor sheddeth his grace, which alone causeth his doctrine and his word to fructify: he no longer looketh upon these assemblies, formerly so holy, but as an assembly of worldly-minded, of voluptuous, of ambitious, and of profane. — And how would you, that he turn not his countenance from them, and that the word of his gospel fructify there? Reconcile, in the first place, with him, by your homages, by your collected behaviour, and by your piety, these houses of the doctrine and of truth: then will he compensate for your deficiencies; he will open your hearts to our instructions, and his word shall no longer return empty to him.
