grace to enable you to resist the many opportunities which drag you away. Ah! you will then see that your whole life has been a continued abuse of his mercies; you will see that, among so many infidel nations which know him not, you have been privileged, enlightened, called to faith, nourished in the doctrine of truth and the virtue of the sacrament, incessantly supported by his inspirations and his grace; you will be shocked to see all that God hath done for you, and the little that you have done for him; and your complaints will quickly be changed into an utter confusion, destitute of every resource but in the horrors of your own despair.
Hitherto the just Judge hath examined you only on those crimes which are especially your own; but what will it be when he shall enter into a reckoning with you on the sins of others, of which you have been either the occasion or the cause, and which will, consequently, be charged to your account! What a new sink! All the souls to whom you have been a subject of scandal and ruin will be presented to you; all the souls whom your discourses, your counsels, your example, your solicitations, your immodesties, have precipitated, with yourself, into eternal destruction; all the souls whose weakness you have either seduced, or whose innocence you have corrupted, whose faith you have perverted, whose virtue you have shaken, whose freethinking you have authorized, or whose impiety you have strengthened by your persuasions, or by the example of your life. Jesus Christ, to whom they belonged, and who had purchased them with his blood, will demand them at your hands, as a dear heritage, as a precious conquest, which you have unjustly ravished from him; and if the Lord marked Cain with the sign of reprobation in demanding account from him of the blood of his brother, judge with what sign you shall be marked when you shall be brought to a reckoning for his soul.
But this is not all. Were you a public character, and high in authority, what abuses authorized! What iniquities glanced over! What duties sacrificed, either to your own interests or to the passions and interests of others! What respect of persons, in opposition to equity and conscience! What iniquitous undertakings counselled! What wars, perhaps, what confusions, what public evils, of which you have either been the author or the infamous agent! You will see that your ambition or your counsels have been as the fatal source of an infinity of miseries, of the calamities of your age, of those evils which are perpetuated, and pass from father to son: and you will be surprised to find that your iniquities have survived yourself, and that, even long after death, you were still culpable, before God, of an infinity of crimes and disorders which took place on the earth. And now it is, my brethren, that the danger of public stations shall be known, the precipices which surround the throne itself, the rocks of authority, and with what reason the Gospel denominated happy those who live in the obscurity of a private station; with what it was that religion wished to inspire us with so much horror at ambition, so much indifference toward the grandeurs of the earth, so much contempt for all
