appears clear to those who would wish that nothing were so; that every thing appears doubtful to those who have an interest in its being so. I say, with St. Augustine, that it is a willing spirit alone which gives understanding of the precepts; that unless the rules and duties are loved, they can never be thoroughly known; that we enter into the truth only through charity; and that the sincere desire of salvation is the grand solver of all difficulties: I say, that faithful and fervent souls have almost never any thing to oppose to the law of God; and that their doubts are rather pious alarms upon holy actions, than pretexts and difficulties to authorize profane ones.
Men have learned to doubt upon the rules of the manners, only since they have wished to connect them with their iniquitous passions. Alas! all was almost decided for the first believers. In those happy ages, we see not that the first pastors of the church had many difficulties to resolve upon the detail of the duties. Those immense volumes, which decide their doubts by endless resolutions, have appeared only with the corruption of manners: in proportion as believers have had more passions to satisfy, they have had more doubts to propose; it hath been necessary to multiply volumes upon volumes, in order to resolve difficulties which cupidity alone formed, — difficulties already all resolved in the Gospel, and upon which the first ages of faith would have been scandalized that they had dared to form even a doubt. Our ages, still more dissolute than those which preceded us, have still beheld these enormous collections of cases and resolutions increasing and multiplying to infinity: all the most incontestable rules of the morality of Jesus Christ are there become almost problems; there is no duty upon which corruption hath not had difficulties to propose, and to which a false learning hath not found mollifications: every thing has there been agitated, contested, and put in doubt: the mind of man hath there been seen quibbling with the spirit of God, and substituting human doctrines in place of that doctrine which Jesus Christ hath brought to us from heaven; and although we pretend not universally to blame all those pious and able men, who have left to us these laborious masses of decisions, it had been to be wished that the church had never called in such aids; and we cannot help looking upon them as remedies which are themselves become diseases, and as the sad fruits of the necessity of the times, of the depravity of manners, and of the decay of truth among men.
Doubts upon the duties arise, therefore, from the corruption of our hearts, much more than from the obscurities of the rules.
The light of the law, says St. Augustine, resembles that of the sun; but vainly doth it shine, glitter, enlighten, the blind are unaffected by it: now every sinner is that blind person; the light is near to him, surrounds him, penetrates him, enters from every quarter into his soul; but he is always himself far from the light. Purify your heart, continues that holy father; remove from it the fatal bandage of the passions; then shall you clearly see all your
