disappointments, and their unpleasant reports: theatres, no longer having as spectators but souls grossly dissolute and incapable of being roused but by the most shocking excesses of debauchery, become insipid while moving only those delicate passions, which only serve to show guilt from afar, and to lay snares for innocence. Lastly, the world is a place where hope itself, considered as a passion so sweet and so pleasing, renders all men unhappy; where those who have nothing more to hope, believe themselves still more miserable; where every thing that pleases soon ceases to please: and where inanity or listless insipidity is almost the best and the most supportable lot to be expected. Such is the world, my brethren; nor is this that obscure world, to which neither the great pleasures, nor the charms of prosperity, of favour, and affluence are known: it is the world in its most brilliant point of view; it is the world of the court; it is you yourselves who now listen to me. Such is the world; nor is this one of those fanciful paintings of which the reality is no where to be found. I paint the world after your own heart, that is to say, such as you know it to be, and such as you yourselves continually experience it.
Such, nevertheless, is the place in which all sinners seek their happiness. That is their country. There they would willingly eternize themselves. Such is that world which they prefer to the eternal inheritance, and to all the promises of faith. Great God! how just art thou in punishing man through his passions themselves, and to permit that, wishing to seek his happiness elsewhere than in thee, who alone art the true peace of his heart, he forms for himself a ridiculous felicity of his fears, his disgusts, his wearinesses, and his disquietudes!
But that which is so fortunate here for virtue, is, that the same world, so tiresome and so insupportable to sinners who seek their happiness in it, becomes a source of the most soothing reflections to the righteous, who consider it as an exilement and a foreign land.
For, in the first place, the inconstancy of the world, so dreaded by those delivered up to it, supplies a thousand motives of consolation to the believing soul. Nothing appears to him either constant or durable upon the earth; neither the most flourishing fortunes, nor the warmest friendships, nor the most brilliant reputations, nor the most envied favour. He sees a sovereign wisdom through all, which delights, it would appear, in making a sport of men, by alternately exalting them on the ruins of each other; by hurling down those at the top of the wheel, in order to elevate those who, only a moment before, were groveling at the bottom: by introducing every day, on the theatre of life, new heroes to eclipse all those who formerly played on it so brilliant a part; by incessantly giving new scenes to the universe. He sees men passing their whole life in ferments, projects, and plots; ever on the watch to surprise each other, or to avoid being surprised; always eager and active to profit of the retreat, the disgrace, or the death of a rival; and of these grand lessons, so fitted to inculcate contempt
