perate impressions; when the passions, still in their growth, bend easily toward good, and make virtue, as it were, a natural inclination to us! What happiness when we have been able to put an early check upon our heart; when we have accustomed it to bear the yoke of the Lord; and when we have arrested, almost in their infancy, passions which render us miserable in our guilt, and which likewise occasion all the bitterness of our virtues! How many uneasinesses, how many pangs does it prevent! How many, consolations does it prepare! How many comforts spread through the rest of life! and what a difference for the ease and tranquillity of our future years, between days whose primitive ones have been pure, and those which, infected in their source, have felt flow from thence a fatal bitterness, which has blasted all their joys, and spread itself through all the remainder of their career! It is ourselves alone, says a holy father, who render virtue disagreeable; and we are wrong to complain of an evil, in which we have such a share ourselves, or to attribute faults to virtue, which are our own handy-work.
But granting these reflections to have even less solidity; were it even true, that we are not the first and original cause of our disgusts at virtue; it is at least incontestable, that the longer we defer our return to God, the more invincible do we render that distaste which separates us from him; that the more we shrink and draw back, the more do we fortify that repugnance within us to virtue; that if the Christian life offers, at present, only melancholy and tedious duties, they will appear more insupportable in proportion as we grow old in the ways of the world, and in the taste for its iniquitous pleasures. Could the delay of our conversion sweeten the bitter and painful portion of virtue, by holding out a little longer against grace; could we obtain a more favourable composition, as I may say, and, as an article of it, stipulate, that piety should afterward be presented to us with more charms and graces, and with conditions more agreeable and flattering; — alas! whatever risks we may run by deferring it, the hopes of softening our pains and sufferings might serve in some measure to excuse our delays. But delay only prepares new sorrows for us; the more we accustom our heart to the world, the more do we render it unfit for virtue. It is no longer, says the prophet, but a polluted vase, to which the passions we have allowed to settle in it have communicated a taste and smell of death, which generally last the remainder of life. Thus, my brethren, when, after a long course of crimes and deeply-rooted passions, we must return to God, what obstacles do not these frightful dispositions present! What insensibility toward good do we not find within ourselves! Those hearts which the world has always engrossed, and who afterward wish to consecrate to God the remains of a life entirely mundane; what a buckler of brass, says the prophet, do they not oppose to grace! What hardness of heart to the holy consolations of virtue! They may find it just, but it is impossible, they say, to find it amiable: they may return to God, but they
