ances of worship: in a word, but a people still Jewish, which honours him from the lips, but whose corrupted heart, stained with a thousand crimes, chained by a thousand iniquitous passions, is always far distant from him.
Behold the second blessing of the birth of Jesus Christ, in which we have no part. He comes to abolish a worship wholly external, which was confined to sacrifices of animals and lawful ceremonies, and which, in not rendering »to God the homage of our love, alone capable of glorifying him, rendered not to him that glory which is his due: in place of these appearances of religion, he comes to substitute a law which ought to be fulfilled wholly in the heart: a worship, of which the love of his Father ought to be the first and principal homage. Nevertheless, this holy worship, this new precept, this sacred trust, which he hath confided to us, has miserably degenerated in our hands; we have turned it into a worship wholly pharisaical, in which the heart has no part; which has no influence in changing our irregular propensities; which has no effect upon our manners, and which only renders us so much the more criminal, as we abuse the blessing which ought to wash out and purify all our crimes.
Lastly, men had likewise wished to ravish from God the glory of his providence and of his eternal wisdom. Philosophers, struck with the absurdity of a worship which multiplied gods to infinity, and forced, by the sole lights of reason, to acknowledge one sole Supreme Being, disfigured the nature of that Being by a thousand absurd opinions. Some figured to themselves an indolent god; retired within himself, in full possession of his own happiness, disdaining to abase himself by paying attention to what passes on the earth, reckoning as nothing men whom he had created, equally insensible to their virtues as to their vices, and leaving wholly to chance the course of ages and seasons, the revolutions of empires, the lot of each individual, the whole machine of this vast universe, and the whole dispensation of human things. Others subjected him to a fatal chain of events; they made him a God without liberty and without power; and, while they regarded him as the master of men, they believed him to be the slave of destiny. The errors of reason were then the only rule of religion, and of the belief of those who were considered as even the wisest and most enlightened.
Jesus Christ comes to restore to his Father that glory of which the vain reasonings of philosophy had deprived him. He comes to teach to men that faith is the source of true light; and that the sacrifice of reason is the first step of Christian philosophy. He comes to fix uncertainty, by instructing us in what we ought to know of the Supreme Being, and, what, with regard to him, we ought not to know.
It was not, in effect, sufficient that men, in order to render glory to God, should make a sacrifice to him of their life, as to the author of their being, and should, by that avowal, acknowledge the impiety of idolatry; that they should make a sacrifice to him of their love and of their heart, as to their sovereign felicity, and
