out any additional heat to your lukewarmness; to appear there with faults a hundred times detested, yet still dear, with habits of imperfection, which, though light in themselves, are no longer so, however, through the attachment and the bent which render them inevitable to us, and through the circumstance of the sacrament which there is the risk of profaning; to make profession of piety, of estrangement from the world, to be almost every day in the commerce of holy things, and to have determined, as it were, upon a limited point of virtue, beyond which never to rise, and, after ten years' exercise of piety, to be no farther advanced than at first; on the contrary, to have rather relaxed from the first fervour; to be continually applying to this divine remedy, yet to feel no alteration for the better in the disease; to heap sacrament upon sacrament, if I may dare to say so, yet never to empty the heart in order to make room for this heavenly food; to nourish envies, animosities, secret attachments, a fund of sensuality, of vain desires to please, to be courted, to be prosperous; to permit, in conversation, the habit of witticisms and every freedom of speech upon others, of endless nothings, of sentiments wholly profane, of quibbles which wound sincerity, of concealments by which falsehood becomes familiar, of hastiness and bursts of passion; to be jealous to an extreme wherever self is concerned; to rise indignant at the smallest appearance of neglect, and to be incapable of digesting a single disobliging gesture; and yet, with all this, to feed upon the bread of angels: O my God! how much less than this ought to make us tremble!
But, is it to eat of this bread unworthily, to eat it with so many imperfections and weaknesses? Who knows this, O Lord, but thee? All we know is, that it is not communicating in remembrance of thee; that many righteous shall appear in thy sight, at the great day, as a soiled cloth; that many, who had even prophesied in thy name, shall be rejected; and that every thing is to be dreaded in this state. Peter is not admitted to thy supper till after thou hast washed his feet; nevertheless thou assurest us that he was altogether pure. Magdalene is sent away, and thou sayest to her, "Woman, touch me not/' because a too sensible affection was the cause of her eagerness; and, nevertheless, her love had been great, and she had washed thy sacred feet and her own sins with her tears. And we, Lord, full of wants, empty of sincere fruits of penitence, made up wholly of effeminacy and sensualities, lukewarm, and without desire, fixed in a certain state of languishing and imperfect piety, more sustained by habitude and the engagements of a holy profession than by thy grace or by a lively and solid faith, alas! we make thy body our ordinary food. What inexplicable gulfs, Lord! What a train of crimes, perhaps, not known, unrepented of, multiplied to infinity, and which are as the shoot upon which a thousand new profanations are afterward grafted! What gulfs, once more! And what terrible secrets shall thy light make manifest to us at the great day! In thy sight, O my God, what am I! I can neither offend nor please thee by
