Here figure to yourselves, then, my brethren, the criminal soul before the tribunal of Christ, surrounded by angels and men; the just, the sinful, his relations, his subjects, his masters, his friends, his enemies, all their eyes fixed on him, present at the terrible scrutiny which the just Judge will make into his actions, his desires, and his thoughts; forced, in spite of themselves, to assist at his judgment, and to witness the justice of the sentence which the Son of Man shall pronounce against him. All the resources which, on this earth, might soften the most humiliating confusion, shall fail, on that day, to the unfaithful soul.
First resource. On this earth, when guilty of a fault which has sunk us into contempt, the whole has turned on a certain number of witnesses confined to our nation, or to the place of our birth; we may have removed ourselves from them, in the course of time, to avoid continually reading, in their eyes, the remembrance and reproach of our past shame; we may have changed our place of dwelling, to go elsewhere among strangers, to recover a reputation which we had already lost: but on that grand day, all men assembled shall be acquainted with the secret history of your manners and of your conscience: you shall no longer have it in your power to hide yourself far from the looks of the spectators, to seek new countries, and, like Cain, to fly into the desert. Each shall be fixed immoveable in the place, marked out for him, bearing on his forehead the sentence of his condemnation and the history of his whole life, obliged to sustain the eyes of the universe and the whole shame of his weaknesses. There shall no longer, then, be any hidden spot wherein to conceal himself from the public regard; the light of God, the sole glory of the Son of Man, which fill the heavens and the earth; and in all that immensity of space around you, you will, in every part, discover from afar only watchful eyes fixed on you.
Second resource. On the earth, when our shame is even public, and when degraded in the minds of men, in consequence of some striking fault, yet there are always some friends grounded in our favour, whose esteem and society recompense us, in some measure, for the public contempt, and whose kindnesses assist us in sustaining the inveteracy of the general censure: but, on this occasion, the presence of our friends will be the object by far the most insupportable to our shame. If sinners, like ourselves, they will cast up to us our common pleasures and our example, which, perhaps, have been the first rock upon which their innocence split: if just, as they had believed us to be children of light, ah! they will reproach to us their good opinion abused and their friendship seduced. You loved the just, shall they say to us, and you hated righteousness; you protected virtue, yet, in your heart, you placed vice on the throne: in us you sought that probity, that fidelity, and that security which you found not in your worldly friends, but you sought not the Lord who formed all these virtues in our heart: ah! did not the author of all our gifts deserve to be more loved, more sought after than we!
