internal be full of infection and putrefaction; and that God is truly worshipped only by loving him.
But, alas! my brethren, is this mistake, so wretched, and so often reproached to the synagogue by Jesus Christ, not still the error of the majority of us? To what, in fact, is the whole of our worship reduced? To some external ceremonies; to fulfilling certain public duties prescribed by the law; and even this is the religion of the most respectable. They come to assist in the holy mysteries; they do not, without scruple, depart from the laws of the church; they repeat some prayers which custom has consecrated; they go through the solemnities, and increase the crowd which runs to our temples: — behold the whole. But are they, in consequence, more detached from the world and from its criminal pleasures; — less occupied with the cares of a vain dress, or of fortune; — more inclined to break off a criminal engagement, or to fly opportunities which have so often been a rock to their innocence? Do they bring to these external practices of religion, a pure heart, a lively faith, a guileless charity? All their passions submit amid all these religious works, which are given to custom rather than to religion.
And remark, I pray you, my brethren, that they would not dare to dispense themselves altogether from them; to live, like the impious, without any profession of worship, and without fulfilling at least some of its public duties. They would consider themselves as anathematized, and worthy of the thunder of heaven. And yet they dare to sully these holy duties by the most criminal manners! and yet they do not view themselves with horror, while rendering useless these superficial remains of religion, by a life which religion condemns and abhors! and they dread not the wrath of God, in continuing crimes which attract it on our heads, and in limiting all that is his due to vain homages which insult him!
Nevertheless, as I have already said, of all the worldly, these are the most prudent, and, in the eyes of the world, the most regular. They have not yet thrown off the yoke, like so many others; they do not arrogate to themselves a shocking glory in not believing in God; they blaspheme not what they do not know; they do not consider religion as a mockery and a human invention; they still wish to hold to it by some externals; but they hold not to it by the heart; but they dishonour it by their irregularities; but they are not Christians but in name. Thus, even in a greater degree than formerly under the synagogue, the magnificent externals of religion subsist among us, along with a more profound and more general depravity of manners than ever the prophets reproached to the obstinacy and hypocrisy of the Jews: thus, that religion, in which we glory, is no longer, to the greatest number of believers, but a superficial worship: thus, that new covenant, which ought to be written only in the heart; that law of spirit and life, which ought to render men wholly spiritual; that inward worship, which ought to have given to God worshippers in spirit and in truth, — has given him only phantoms, only fictitious adorers; the mere appear-
