spread understanding, light, and the knowledge of God. What! my brethern, Paul and Barnabas rend their garments when they are taken for gods; they loudly proclaim to the people who wished to offer up victims to them — Worship the Lord alone, whose servants and ministers we are. The angel in the Revelation, when St. John prostrates himself to worship him, rejects the homage with horror, and says to him, " Worship God alone; I am only thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus." And Jesus Christ tranquilly suffers that they render divine honours to him! And Jesus Christ praises the faith of the disciples who worship him, and who, with Thomas, call him their Lord and their God! And Jesus Christ even confutes his enemies who contest his divinity and divine origin! Is he, then, less zealous than his disciples for the glory of him who sends him? Or is it a matter of less importance to him, pointedly to undeceive the people on a mistake so injurious to the Supreme Being, and which, in fact, destroys the whole fruit of his ministry?
Yes, my brethern, what a blessing hath the coming of Jesus Christ brought to the world, if those who worship him be idolatrous and profane! All who have believed in him have worshipped him as the eternal Son of the Father, the image of his substance, and the splendour of his glory. There is but a small number of men in Christianity, who, though they acknowledge him as a messenger of God, yet refuse to him divine honours; even this sect, universally banished, and execrable even in those places where every error finds an asylum, is reduced to a few obscure and concealed followers, every where punished as an impiety from the instant that it dares to avow itself, and forced to hide itself in obscurity, and in the extremities of the most distant provinces and kingdoms. Is it, then, that numerous people of every tongue, of every tribe, and of every nation, which Jesus Christ came to form upon the earth? Is it a Jerusalem, formerly barren, and become fruitful, which was to contain tribes and nations in its bosom, and where the most distant isles, princes, and kings, were to come to worship? Are these the grand advantages which the world was to reap from the ministry of Jesus Christ? Is this, then, that abundance of grace, that plenitude of the Spirit God shed over all men, that universal regeneration, that spiritual and lasting reign which the prophets had foretold with such majesty, and which was to attend the coming of the Redeemer? What, my brethren, an expectation so magnificent is then reduced to the miserable sight of the world plunged into a new idolatry? That event, so blessed for the earth, promised for so many ages, announced with so much pomp, so earnestly longed for by all the righteous, and held out from afar to the whole universe as its only resource, was then to corrupt and to prevent it for ever? That church, so fruitful, of which kings and Caesars, at the head of their people, were to be the children, was then to contain, in its bosom, only a small number of men, equally odious to heaven and to the earth, the disgrace of nature and of religion, and obliged to seek, in
