pleasures and excesses, leave you all your indifference with regard to salvation, ah! insult not at least his good fortune; despise not in him the gift of God; take not even from the miracles of grace, so proper to open your eyes, a fresh motive of blindness and unbelief; and do not thus change the blessings of God to your brethren, into a dreadful judgment of justice against you.
In reading the history of our Gospel, you are sometimes astonished that the obstinacy and blindness of the Jews should be able to resist the most striking miracles of Jesus Christ; you do not comprehend how the raising up of the dead, the curing of persons born blind, and so many other wonders wrought before their eyes, did not force them to acknowledge the truth of his ministry and the sanctity of his doctrine: you say that much less would convince you; that any one of all these miracles would suffice, and that you would immediately yield to the truth.
But, my brethren, you condemn yourselves out of your own mouth; for, (without refuting here that absurd manner of speaking, by those grand and sublime proofs which religion furnishes against impiety, and which we have elsewhere employed); candidly, is it not a more arduous and more astonishing miracle, that a soul, delivered up to sin, and to the most shameful passions, — born with every propensity to voluptuousness, pride, revenge, and ambition, and more distant than any one, by the nature of his heart, from the kingdom of God, and from all the maxims of Christian piety; that all at once, that soul should renounce all his gratifications, break asunder all his warmest attachments, repress his liveliest passions, change his most rooted inclinations, forget injuries, attention to the body and to fortune; no longer have a relish but for prayer, retirement, the practice of the most gloomy and repulsive duties, and hold out to the eyes of the public, in a change, in a resurrection so palpable, the spectacle of a life so different from the former, that the world, that freethinking itself, shall be forced to render glory to the truth of his change, and that they shall no longer know him to be the same; — is it not, I say, a more arduous and more astonishing miracle?
Now, doth not the mercy of Jesus Christ operate such miracles almost every day before your eyes? Doth not his holy word, though in a weak and languishing mouth, still raise up, every day, new Lazaruses from the dead? You behold them; you know and you appear astonished at them; yet, nevertheless, do they touch you? Do these wonders which, with so much majesty, the finger of God maketh to shine forth, recall you to truth and to the light? Do these changes, a thousand times more miraculous, than the raising up of the dead, convince you? Do they bring you nearer to Jesus Christ, or restore to you that faith which you have lost.
Alas! your whole care, like the Jews, is to stand out against, or to weaken their truth. You deny that grace hath any part in the glory of these wonders: you seek to trace their motives in causes altogether worldly; you consider them as delusions and impositions; you attribute to the artifices of man the most shining
