vices: to all we owe the truth. The different situations in which rank and birth place us in the world, diversify our duties with regard to our fellow-creatures: in every situation of life that of truth is the same. We owe it to the great equally as the humble; to our subjects as to our masters; to the lovers of it, as to those who hate it; to those who mean to employ it against ourselves, as to those who wish it only for their own benefit. There are conjunctures in which prudence permits to hide and to dissemble the love which we bear for our brethren: none can possibly exist in which we are permitted to dissemble the truth: in a word, truth is not our own property, we are only its witnesses, its defenders, and its depositaries. It is that spark, that light of God, which should illuminate the whole world; and, when we dissemble or obscure it, we are unjust toward our brethren, and ungrateful toward the Father of Light who hath spread it through our soul.
Nevertheless, the world is filled with dissemblers of the truth. We live, it would appear, only to deceive each other: and society, the first bond of which ought to be truth, is no longer but a commerce of dissimulation, duplicity, and cunning. Now, in the conduct of the priests of our Gospel, let us view all the different kinds of dissimulation of which men render themselves every day culpable toward truth; we shall there find a dissimulation of silence, a dissimulation of compliance and palliation, a dissimulation of disguise and falsehood.
A dissimulation of silence. Consulted by Herod on the place on which the Christ was to be born, they made answer, it is true, that Bethlehem was the place marked in the prophets for the fulfilment of that grand event; but they add not, that the star foretold in the holy books, having at last appeared, and the kings of Saba and of Arabia coming with presents to worship the new chief who was to lead Israel, it was no longer to be doubted that the overshadowed had at last brought forth the righteous. They do not gather together the people, in order to announce this blessed intelligence; they do not run first to Bethlehem, in order, by their example, to animate Jerusalem. Wrapped up in their criminal timidity, they guard a profound silence — they iniquitously retain the truth; and while strangers come from the extremities of the east, loudly to proclaim in Jerusalem that the king of the Jews is born, the priests, the scribes are silent, and sacrifice, to the ambition of Herod, the interests of truth, the dearest hope of their nation, and the honour of their ministry.
What a shameful degradation of the ministers of truth! The good-will of the prince influences them more than the sacred deposit of the religion with which they are intrusted; the lustre of the throne stifles, in their heart, the light of Heaven; by a criminal silence, they flatter a king who applies to them for the truth, and who can learn it from them alone; they confirm him in error by concealing that which might have undeceived him; and how, indeed, shall truth ever make its way to the ear of sovereigns, if even the Lord's anointed, who surround the throne, have not the cou-
