they had to shun, nor the derisions of the world which they had only to dread in declaring for Jesus Christ; it was the most cruel punishments to which they must expose themselves; it was the power of the Caesars, and the rage of tyrants, which they must despise; it was superstitions, become respectable through their antiquity, countenanced by the laws of the empire, and by the consent of almost all the people, which they had to shake off; it was, in a word, the whole universe which they had to arm against themselves. But the faith of these pious men was stronger than punishments, than the tyrants, than the Caesars, than the whole world: and our faith cannot hold out against the absurdity of customs or the puerility of derision; and the Gospel, which could formerly make martyrs, scarcely at present can it form a believer. The law of God is then immutable in its duration; always the same in all times and in all places; but it is likewise immutable in its extent, and the same for all stations and conditions. — This is my second reflection.
Part II. — The most essential character of the law of Jesus Christ, is that of uniting, under the same rules, the Jew and the Gentile, the Greek and the Barbarian, the great and the people, the prince and the subject; in it there is no longer exception of persons. The law of Moses, at least in its customs and in its ceremonies, was given only to a single people: but Jesus Christ is a universal legislator; his law, as his death, is for all men. He came, of all people to make only one people: of all stations and of all conditions to form only one body: it is the same spirit which animates it, the same laws which govern it; different functions may there be exercised, different places, more or less honourable, be occupied; but it is the same spring which rules all the members of it. All these hateful distinctions, which formerly divided men, are destroyed by the church; that holy law knows neither poor nor rich, neither noble nor base-born, neither master nor slave; it sees in men only the title of believer, which equals them all; it distinguishes them not by their names or by their offices, but by their virtues; and the greatest in its sight are those who are the most holy.
Nevertheless, a second illusion, pretty common against the immutability of the law of God, is the persuasion that it changes and becomes mollified in favour of rank and of birth; that its obligations are less rigid for persons born to elevation; and that the obstacles, which high places and the manners attached to grandeur throw in the way of the observance of the strict duties of the Gospel, and which render the practice of them almost impossible to the great, likewise render their transgressions more innocent. They figure to themselves that the abuses, permitted, in all times, by custom to the great, are likewise accorded to them by the law of God, and that there is another path of salvation for them than for the people. Thence, all the laws of the church violated; the times and the days consecrated to abstinence, confounded with the rest
