sufficiently embellished to receive thee; but come and be thyself all its ornament. Perhaps thou perceivest stains which repel thee from it; but thy divine touch will purify them all. Perhaps thou discoverest invincible enemies still there; but art not thou the Mighty? Thy sole presence will disperse them, and peace alone will reign there when once thou shalt be in possession of it. Perhaps it has wrinkles which render it forbidding; but thou wilt renew its youth like that of the eagle. Perhaps it is still stained with the blemishes of its former infidelities; but thy blood will wash them entirely out. Come, Lord, and tarry not; every blessing will attend me with thee: despised, persecuted, afflicted, despoiled, calumniated, I will consider as nothing my sorrows from the moment that thou shalt come to alleviate them: honoured, favoured, exalted, surrounded with abundance, these vain prosperities will cease to interest me, will appear as nothing from the moment thou shalt have made me to taste how sweet thou art. Such are the desires which ought to lead us to the altar.
But, alas! many bring there only a criminal disgust and repugnance: occasions are required to induce them to determine upon it; of themselves they would never have thought of it. But, what do I say, occasions? Thunders and anathemas are required. Good God! that the church should be reduced, through the lukewarmness of Christians, to make a law to them of participating in thy body and in thy blood! That penalties and threatenings should be required to lead them to thy altar, and to oblige them to seat themselves at thy table! That the Christian's only felicity on earth should be a painful precept to him! That the most glorious privilege with which men can be favoured by thee should be an irksome restraint to them! Others approach it with a heavy heart, a palled appetite, a soul wholly of ice: people who live in the commerce of pleasures and of the sacrament; who participate at the table of Satan and at that of Jesus Christ; who have stated days for the Lord, and days allotted for the age; people to whom a communion costs only a day of restraint and reservation; who, on that day, neither gamble, show themselves, see company, nor speak evil. But this exertion goes no farther; all devotion ceases with the solemnity; it is a deed of ceremony; after this short suspension they are at ease with themselves; they tranquilly return to their former ways, for that was a point agreed upon with themselves; they smoothly continue to live in this mixture of holy and of profane; the sacrament calms us upon pleasures; pleasures to be more tranquil on the side of the conscience lead us to the sacrament; and they are almost good in order to be worldly without scruple. Thus they bring to the altar a taste cloyed with the amusements and the delights of the age, with the embarrassments of affairs, with the tumult of the passions: they feel not the ineffable sweets of this heavenly food; they retrace, even at the foot of the throne of grace the images of those pleasures they have so lately left: interests which occupy us, projects which puzzle us, ideas which force us from the altar to drag us back to the world, make much deeper impres-
