tation through men, are at peace; and the children of peace, and the disciples of him who, this day, comes to bring it to men, have their hands continually armed with fire and sword against each other! Kings rise up against kings, nations against nations; the seas, which separate, reunite them for their mutual destruction: a vile morsel of stone arms their fury and revenge; and whole nations go to perish and to bury themselves under its walls, in contesting to whom shall belong its ruins: the earth is not sufficiently vast to contain them, and to fix them each one in the bonds which nature herself seems to have pointed out for states and empires; each wishes to usurp from his neighbour; and a miserable field of battle, which is scarcely sufficient to serve as a burial-place to those who have disputed it, becomes the prize of those rivers of blood with which it is for ever stained. O divine Reconciliator of men! return then once more upon the earth, since the peace which thou broughtest to it at thy birth still leaves so many wars and so many calamities in the universe!
Nor is this all: that circle itself, which unites us under the same laws, unites not the heart and affections; hatred and jealousies divide citizens equally as they divide nations; animosities are perpetuated in families, and fathers transmit them to their children, as an accursed inheritance. In vain may the authority of the prince disarm the hand, it disarms not the heart; in vain may the sword be wrested from them, with the sword of the tongue they continue a thousand times more cruelly to pierce their enemy; hatred, under the necessity of confining itself within, becomes deeper and more rancorous, and to forgive is looked upon as a dishonourable weakness. Oh! my brethren, in vain then hath Jesus Christ descended upon the earth! He is come to bring peace to us; he hath left it to us as his inheritance; nothing hath he so strongly recommended to us as that of loving each other; yet fellowship and peace seem as if banished from among us, and hatred and animosity divide court, city, and families; and those whom the offices, the interests of the state, decency itself, and blood, ought, at least, to unite, — tear, defame, would wish to destroy, and to exalt themselves on the ruins of each other: and religion, which shows us our brethren even in our enemies, is no longer listened to; and that awful threatening, which gives us room to expect the same severity on the part of God which we shall have shown to our brethren, no longer touches or affects us; and all these motives, so capable of softening the heart, still leave it filled with all the bitterness of hatred. We tranquilly live in this frightful state: the justice of our complaints with regard to our enemies calms us on the injustice of our hatred and of our rooted aversion toward them; and if, on the approach of death, we apparently hold out to them the hand of reconciliation, it is not that we love them more, it is because the expiring heart hath no longer the force to sustain its hatred, that almost all our feelings are extinguished, or, at least, that we are no longer capable of feeling any thing but our own weakness and our approaching dissolution. Let us then unite ourselves to the newly-born Jesus
