familiar maxims of the Gospel go infinitely farther than all our discourses.— Third reflection.
I also say to you, in the fourth place, that if almost all be contested in the world upon the most incontestable duties of Christian piety, it is because the Gospel is a book unknown to the greatest part of believers; it is that, through a deplorable abuse, a whole life is passed in acquiring vain learning, equally useless to man, to his happiness, and to his eternity; and the book of the law is never read, in which is contained the knowledge of salvation, the truth which is to deliver us, the light which is to conduct us, the titles of our hopes, the testimony of our immortality, the consolations of our exilement, and the aids of our pilgrimage: it is that, on entering into the world, care is taken to present to us those books in which are explained the rules of that profession to which we are allotted, and, that the book of the law, in which the rules of the profession of the Christian are contained, that profession which shall survive all others, alone necessary, and the only one which shall accompany us into eternity; that book, I say is left in neglect, and enters not into the plan of studies which ought to occupy our earlier years: lastly, it is that fabulous and lascivious histories childishly amuse our leisure; and that the history of God^s wonders and mercies upon men, filled with events so grand, so weighty, so interesting, which ought to be the sole occupation, and the whole consolation of our life, does not appear to us worthy even of our curiosity.
I am not surprised, after this, if we have continual occasion to maintain the Gospel against the abuses and the prejudices of the world; if we are listened to with the same surprise, when we announce the commonest truths of the Christian morality, as though we announced the belief and the mysteries of those savage and far distant nations, whose countries and manners are hardly known. And if the doctrine of Jesus Christ find the same opposition at present in minds, that it experienced at the birth of faith, it is, that there are Christians to whom the book of the Gospel is almost equally unknown as it then was to the heathens; who scarcely know whether Jesus Christ be come to bring laws to men, and who cannot, for a single moment, support without weariness, the reading of that divine book, the rules of which are so sublime, the promises so consoling, and of which the pagans themselves, who embraced faith, so much admired the beauty and the divine philosophy. Thus, my brethren, read the holy books, and read them with that spirit of faith, of submission, of trust, which the church exacts, and you will soon be as well acquainted with your duties, and with the rules of the manners, as the doctors themselves who teach you.
And, indeed, my brethren, whence comes it, I beg of you, that the first believers carried so far the purity of manners and the holiness of Christianity? Were other maxims announced to them than those which we announce to you? Was another gospel preached to them, more clear and more explicit than that which we preach to you? Nevertheless, they were idolatrous and dissolute
