announcing to him the birth of a son, commanded him to offer up a sacrifice, and then, like a devouring fire consumed the victim and the pile, and vanished from his sight; that, terrified, I say, at the spectacle, he was convinced that both himself and his wife were to be struck with death because they had seen the Lord. But his wife, holy and enlightened, condemned his mistrust. If the Lord, said she to him, wished to destroy us, he would not have made fire from heaven to descend on our sacrifice; he would not have accepted it from our hands; he would not have discovered to us his secrets and his wonders, and what we had hitherto been ignorant of.
And behold what I now answer to you. You believe your death and your destruction to be inevitable; the state of your conscience discourages you; in vain do sparks of grace and of light fall upon your heart; in vain do they touch you, solicit you, and almost gain the point of consuming the sacrifice of your passions; you persuade yourself that you are lost beyond resource. But, if the Lord wished to abandon and to destroy you, he would not make fire from heaven to descend upon your heart; he would not light up within you holy desires and sentiments of penitence: if he wished to let you die in the blindness of your passions, he would not manifest to you the truths of salvation; he would not open your eyes on those miseries to come which you prepare for yourself. Besides, how do you know if Jesus Christ has not permitted your falling into such a deplorable state, for the purpose of making a prodigy of your conversion an incitement to the conversion of your brethren? How do you know if his mercy has not rendered your passions so notorious, in order that thousands of sinners, witnesses of your errors, despair not of conversion, and be inflamed at the sight of your penitence? How do you know if your crimes, and even your scandals, have not entered into the designs of God's goodness with regard to your brethren; and if your situation, which seems hopeless, like that of Lazarus, is not rather an occasion of manifesting God's glory than a presage of death to you?
When grace recalls a common sinner, the fruit of his conversion is limited to himself; but when it singles out a grand sinner, a Lazarus, long dead and corrupted, ah! the designs of its mercy are then much more extensive; in one change it prepares a thousand to come; it raises up a thousand out of one; and the crimes of a sinner become the seed of a thousand just. You give way to despondency in feeling the extremity of your wretchedness; but it is perhaps that very extremity which draws you nearer to the happy moment of your conversion, and which the goodness of God has reserved for you, that you might be a public monument of the excess of his mercies toward the greatest sinners. Only believe, as Jesus Christ said to the sisters of Lazarus, and you shall see the glory of God; you shall see your relations, your friends, your inferiors, and even the accomplices of your debaucheries, become imitators of your penitence: you shall see the most hopeless souls sighing after the happiness of your new life; and the world itself
