and how little shall we then estimate nobility of blood, the glory of ancestry, the blaze of reputation, the distinction of talents, and all the pompous titles with which men endeavour, on this earth, to puff out their meanness, and to found so many vain distinctions and privileges, when we shall see, amidst that crowd of guilty, the sovereign confounded with the slave, the great with the meanest of the people, the learned promiscuously blended with the ignorant and mean, — the gods of war, these invincible and far-famed characters who had filled the universe with their name, at the side of the husbandman and the labourer! Thou alone, O my God! hast glory, power, and immortality; and, all the titles of vanity being destroyed and annihilated with the world which had invented them, each will appear before thee accompanied solely by his works!
Secondly. That examination will be universal, that is to say, it will comprehend all the different ages and circumstances of your life: the weaknesses of childhood, which have escaped your remembrance; the transports of youth, of which almost every moment has been a crime; the ambition and the anxieties of a riper age; the obstinacy and the chagrins of an old age, still perhaps voluptuous. What astonishment, when repassing over the diverse parts which you have acted on the earth, you shall find yourself every where profane, dissolute, voluptuous, without virtue, without penitence, without good works; having passed through a diversity of situations merely in order to amass a more abundant treasure of wrath; and having lived in these diverse states as if to a certainty all were to die with you!
The variety of events which succeed each other here below, and divide our life, fix our attention only on the present, and do not permit us to recollect it in the whole, or fully to see what we really are. We never regard ourselves but in that point of view in which our present situation holds us out; the last situation is always the one which leads us to judge of ourselves; a sentiment of salvation, with which God sometimes indulges us, calms us on an insensibility of many years; a day passed in exercises of piety, makes us forget a life of crimes; the declaration of our faults at the tribunal of penitence, effaces them from our remembrance, and they become to us as though they had never been: in a word, of all the different states of our conscience we never see but the present. But, in the presence of the terrible Judge, the whole will be visible at once; the history will be entirely laid open. From the very first feeling formed by your heart, even to its last sigh, all shall be collected before your eyes; all the iniquities, dispersed through the different stages of your life, will then confront you; not an action, not a desire, not a word, not a thought, will there be omitted; for, if our hairs be numbered, judge of our deeds. We shall see spring up the whole course of our years, which though as if annihilated to us, yet lived in the eyes of God; and there we shall find, not those perishable histories in which our vain actions were to be transmitted to posterity, not those flattering recitals of our military exploits, of those brilliant events which had filled so many volumes,
