leaves to them, for inheritance, his agitations and disquiets, which they, in their turn, shall one day transmit to their descendants. In the palaces of kings? But there it is that a lawless and boundless ambition gnaws and devours every heart; it is there that under the specious mask of joy and tranquillity, the most violent and the bitterest passions are nourished; it is there that happiness apparently resides, and yet where pride occasions the greatest number of discontented and miserable. In the sanctuary? Alas! there ought surely to be found an asylum of peace; but ambition pervades even the holy place; the efforts there are more to raise themselves above their brethren, than to render themselves useful to them; the holy dignities of the church become, like those of the age, the reward of intrigue and caballing; the religious circumspection of the prince cannot put a stop to solicitations and private intrigues; we there see the same inveteracy and rivalships, the same sorrow in consequence of neglect, the same jealousy toward those who are preferred to us; a ministry is boldly canvassed for, which ought to be accepted only with fear and trembling: they seat themselves in the temple of God, though placed there by other hands than his: they head the flock without his consent to whom it belongs, and without his having said, as to Peter, ** Feed my sheep;? and as they have taken the charge without call and without ability, the flock are led without edification and without fruit: alas! and often with shame. — O peace of Jesus Christ! which surpassest all sense, sole remedy against the troubles which pride incessantly excites in our hearts, who shall then be able to give thee to man?
But, secondly, if the disquiets of pride had banished peace from the earth, the impure desires of the flesh had not given rise to fewer troubles. Man, forgetting the excellency of his nature, and the sanctity of his origin, gave himself up, like the beasts, without scruple, to the impetuosity of that brutal instinct. Finding it the most violent and the most universal of his propensities, he believed it to be also the most innocent and the most lawful. In order still more to authorize it, he made it part of his worship, and formed to himself impure gods, in whose temples that infamous vice became the only homage which did honour to their altars: even a philosopher, in other respects the wisest of pagans, dreading that marriage should put a kind of check on that deplorable passion, had wished to abolish that sacred bond; to permit among men, as among animals, a brutal confusion, and only multiply the human race through crimes. The more that vice became general, the more it lost the name of vice: and, nevertheless, what a deluge of miseries had it not poured out upon the earth! With what fury had it not been seen to arm people against people, kings against kings, blood against blood, brethren against brethren, every where carrying trouble and carnage, and shaking the whole universe! Ruins of cities, wrecks of the most flourishing empires, sceptres and crowns overthrown, became the public and gloomy monuments which every age reared up, in order, it would seem, to preserve, to following ages, the remembrance and the fatal tradition of those calamities
