chained by the heart to all his disorders, come to accuse himself; he cannot be understood. Without any absolute intention of concealing his wounds, he never exposes all their horror, because he neither feels nor is struck with them himself; his words always relish of the insensibility of his heart; and it is impossible that he should expose, in all their ugliness, deformities which he knows not, and which he still loves. He ought, therefore, to consider the whole period of his past life as a period of darkness and blindness, during which he has never viewed himself but with the eyes of flesh and blood; never judged but through the opinions of passion and self-love; never accused but in the language of error and impenitence; never exhibited himself but in a false and imperfect light. It is not enough to have removed the stone from the tomb; the criminal soul must come forth from it himself, that he may exhibit himself, as I may say, in open day; that he may manifest his whole life; and that, from his earliest years even to the blessed hour of his deliverance, nothing be concealed from the eyes of the ministers ready to unbind him.
But this step, you say, has difficulties which may be the occasion of casting trouble, embarrassment, and discouragement through the conscience, and of suspending the resolution of a change of life. What! my brethren, you involve yourselves in discussions so arduous and so endless, for the purpose of clearing up your temporal concerns; and, in order to establish regularity and serenity in your conscience, and to leave nothing doubtful in the affair of your eternity, you would cry out from the moment that a few cares and investigations are required? How often do you proclaim, when a decisive step is in agitation which may determine the ruin or preservation of our fortune, that nothing must be neglected, nothing must be left to chance; that one's own eyes must look into every thing; that every thing must be cleared up, every thing fathomed even to the bottom, that you may have nothing afterward wherewith to reproach yourselves; and this maxim, so reasonable when connected with fleeting and frivolous interests, should be less so when applied to the grand and only real interest, that of salvation!
Ah! my brethren, how poor are we in faith! And what have we, in this life, of more importance than the care of arranging that awful account which we have to render to the eternal Judge, and to the searcher of hearts and of thoughts? That is to say, the care of regulating our conscience, of dispelling its darkness, of purifying its stains, of clearing up its eternal interests, of confirming its hopes, of strengthening ourselves as much as the present condition permits, and making ourselves acquainted, as far as in our power, with its situation and its dispositions; and not to make our appearance before God like fools, unknown to ourselves, uncertain of what we are, and of what we must for ever be. Such are the means of conversion marked out to us in the miracle of raising up Lazarus: let us conclude the history of our Gospel, and see what the motives are which determine Jesus Christ to operate it.
