descendants one day receive them; lastly, such shall the blessed in heaven eternally love and adore them. The fervour or the licentiousness of ages adds or diminishes nothing to their indulgence, or from their severity; the zeal or the complaisance of men renders them neither more austere nor more accommodating; the intolerant rigour, or the excessive relaxation of opinions and tenets leaves them all the wise sobriety of their rules; and they form that eternal gospel which the angel, in the Revelation, announces from on high in heaven, from the beginning, to every tongue and to every nation.
Nevertheless, my brethren, when in the manners of the primitive believers, we sometimes represent to you all the duties of the Gospel exactly fulfilled, — their freedom from the world, their absence from theatres and public pleasures, their assiduity in the temples, the modesty and the decency of their dress, their charity for their brethren, their indifference for all perishable things, their continual desire of going to be reunited to Jesus Christ; in a word, that simple, retired, and mortified life, sustained by fervent prayer, and by the consolation of the holy books, and such, in effect, as the gospel prescribes to all the disciples of faith; — when we bring forward to you, I say, these ancient models, in order to make you feel, by the difference between the primitive manners and yours, how distant you are from the kingdom of God: far from being alarmed at finding yourselves dissimilar to such a degree, that hardly could it be believed that you were disciples of the same Master and followers of the same law; you reproach us with continual recalling, even to weariness, these primitive times, of never speaking but of the primitive church, as if it were possible to regulate our manners, upon manners of which every trace hath long been done away, impracticable at present among us, and which the times and customs have universally abolished. You say, that men must be taken as they are; that it were to be wished that the primitive fervour had been kept up in the church; but that every thing becomes relaxed and weakened through time, and that, to pretend to bring us back to the life of the primitive ages, is not holding out means of salvation, but is merely preaching up that nobody can now pretend to it.
But I demand of you, in the first place, my brethren, if the times and the years, which have so much adulterated the purity of Christianity, have adulterated that of the gospel? Are the rules become more pliable and more favourable to the passions, because men are become more sensual and more voluptuous? And hath the relaxation of manners softened the maxims of Jesus Christ? When he hath foretold in the gospel that, in the latter times, that is to say, in the ages in which we have the misfortune to live, faith should almost no longer be found upon the earth; that his name should hardly be known there, that his maxims should be destroyed, that the duties should be incompatible with the customs, and that the just themselves should allow themselves to be almost infected by the universal contagion, and to be dragged
