instrument of all thy vengeances and bitterness; that crucified body on the seat of all thy sensualities and debaucheries. What! he shall descend to thy heart? But will he therein find where to repose his head? Hast thou not changed that holy temple into a den of thieves? What! thou art going to place him among so many impure pleasures, profane attachments, ambitious projects, emotions of hatred, of jealousy, and of pride; it is amidst all these monsters that thou hast prepared his dwelling-place? Ah! thou deliverest up to his enemies, thou once more puttest him into the hands of his executioners.
You have examined yourselves, say you to me. Before drawing near, you have made your confession. Ah! my brethren, and, with the same mouth from which you have so lately vented all your iniquities, you go to receive Jesus Christ? And, the heart still reeking with a thousand ill-extinguished passions, and which tomorrow shall see in all their wonted vigour, you dare to approach the altar with your present, and to participate in the holy mysteries? And, the imagination still stained with the ideas of those recent excesses which you have just been recounting to the priest, you go to eat of the pure bread of the chosen? What! on your departure from the tribunal, the communion, in your eyes, supplies the place, and answers the purposes of penitence? From guilt you rush headlong to the altar? In place of dissolving in tears with the penitent, you come to rejoice with the righteous? In place of nourishing yourself with the bread of tribulation, you run to a delicious feast? In place of lingering at the gate of the temple, like the publican, you confidently draw near to the holy of holies? In former times, a penitent came not to the table of the Lord but after whole years of humiliation, of abstinence, of prayer, and of austerity, and they purified themselves in tears, in grief, and in the public exercises of a painful discipline; they became new men; a heartfelt regret was the only vestige of their former life; no traces of their past crimes were to be recognized but in the grace of penitence, and of the macerations which, at last, had expiated them; and the eucharist was that heavenly bread which no man, a sinner, then ate but with the sweat of his brow. And, at present, to have confessed crimes is believed to have already punished them; that an absolution, which is only given under the supposition of a humbled and contrite heart, actually creates and renders it so; that all the purity required of those who receive the body of Jesus Christ is, that they have laid open all the virulence and infection of their sores. Unworthy communicants, my brethren! you eat and you drink your damnation! In vain may we comfort you: can man justify when God condemns?
Besides, it is pure and without leaven; it requires to be exempted from leaven to eat of it. Now, have those worldly persons, whom the cirumstances of a solemnity determine to approach the holy table, quitted the old leaven in presenting themselves at the altar? Do they not bring along with them every passion still living in its roots? Judge thereof from the consequences. On their departure
