that law which you violate; every where a fund of weariness and of sorrow, inseparable from guilt, makes you to feel that regularity and innocence are the only happiness which was intended for you on the earth; you vainly display an affected intrepidity: the guilty conscience always betrays itself. Cruel terrors march every where before you: solitude disquiets, darkness alarms you; you fancy to see phantoms coming from every quarter to reproach you with the secret errors of your soul; unlucky dreams fill you with black and gloomy fancies; and guilt, after which you run with so much relish, pursues you afterward like a cruel vulture, and fixes itself upon you, to tear your heart, and to punish you for the pleasure it had formerly given you. — O my God! what resources hast thou not left in our heart to recall us to thee! and how powerful is the protection which the goodness and the righteousness of thy law finds in the bottom of our being! — First testimony which the conscience renders to the law of God, a testimony of truth to the sanctity of its maxims.
But it also renders a testimony of severity to the exactitude of its rules. For a second illusion of the greatest part of wTorldly souls, who live exempted from great irregularities, but who otherwise live amidst all the pleasures, all the abuses, all the sensualities, and all the dissipations authorized by the world, is, that of wishing to persuade themselves that the gospel requires no more, and to persuade us that their conscience reproaches them with nothing, and that they believe themselves safe in that state. Now, I say, that here the worldly conscience is again not candid, and is deceived; and that, in spite of all those mollifications which they endeavour to justify to themselves, it renders, in the bottom of our hearts, a testimony of severity to the law of God.
In effect, order requires that all our passions be regulated by the bridle of the law. All our inclinations, corrupted in their source, have occasion for a rule to rectify and correct them: we confess this ourselves; we feel that our corruption pervades the smallest as well as the greatest things; that self-love infects all our proceedings; and that we every where find ourselves wTeak, and in continual opposition to order and duty; we feel, then, that the rule ought, in no instance, to be favourable to our inclinations; that we ought every where to find it severe, because it ought every where to be in opposition to us; that the law cannot be in unity with us; that whatever favours our inclinations, can never be the remedy intended to cure them; that whatever flatters our desires, can never be the bridle which is to restrain them: in a word, that whatever nourishes self-love, is not the law which is established for the sole purpose of destroying and annihilating it. Thus, by an inward feeling, inseparable from our being, we always discriminate ourselves from the law, our inclinations from its rules, our pleasures from its duties; and, in all dubious actions where we decide in favour of our inclinations, we perfectly feel that we are deviating from the law of God, always more rigid than ourselves.
And allow me here, my brethren, to appeal to your conscience
