verance of their brethren likewise serve to animate their lukewarmness and slothfulness. — Second motive which Jesus Christ proposes: he wishes by the novelty of that prodigy, to arouse the faith of his disciples still dormant and languishing.
And such is the fruit which Jesus Christ continually expects from the miracles of his grace: he operates before your eyes, you who have long walked in his ways, sudden and surprising conversions, in order by the fervour and the zeal of these newly risen from the dead, to confound your lukewarmness and indolence. Yes, my brethren, nothing is more calculated to cover us with confusion, and to make us tremble over the infidelities which we still mingle with a cold and languishing piety, than the sight of a soul buried, but an instant ago, in the corruption of death and sin, and whose errors had perhaps inflated the vanity of our zeal, and served as a butt to the malignity of our censures; than the sight, I say, of such a soul, vivified, a moment after, by grace, freed from his chains, and boldly walking in the ways of God, more eager after mortification than formerly after pleasure; more removed from the world and its amusements than apparently he was once attached; scrupling to himself the most innocent recreations; allowing himself almost no bounds to the vivacity and transports of his penitence; and every day making rapid advances in piety: while we, after many years of piety, alas! still languish on the beginning of that holy career; while we, after so many signal favours received, after so many truths known, after so many sacraments and other duties of religion attended, alas! we still hold to the world and to ourselves by a thousand ties; we are yet but in the first rudiments of faith and of a Christian life, and still more distant than at first from that zeal and that fervour which constitute the whole value and the whole security of a faithful piety.
My brethren, the dreadful prophecy of Jesus Christ is every day fulfilled before our eyes. Publicans and sinners, persons of a scandalous conduct according even to the world, and as distant from the kingdom of God as the east is from the west, are converted, repent, surprise the world with the sight of a retired and mortified life, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob; and, perhaps, we, who are looked upon as children of the kingdom, — we, whose manners present nothing to the eyes of the world but what is orderly and laudable; we, who are held out as models of propriety and piety; we, whom the world canonizes, and which we glorified with the reputation and the appearances of piety; alas! we shall perhaps be rejected and confounded with unbelievers, for having always laboured at our salvation with negligence, and having preserved a heart still altogether worldly, in the midst even of our pious works.
Thus, my brethren, you whom this discourse regards, do not judge of yourselves from the comparison which you inwardly make with those souls whom the world and the passions hurry away. We may be more righteous than the world, and yet not enough so for Jesus Christ: for the world is so corrupted, the Gospel is so
