the innumerable obstacles which check our progress, do not therefore comprise only a simple advice, and a practice reserved for the cloister and the desert alone, — they form the essential state of a Christian, and the life according to faith on this earth.
For the life according to faith, which the just man leads, is only an uninterrupted desire that the kingdom of God may be accomplished in our hearts; a holy eagerness to form a perfect resemblance in us to Jesus Christ, and to increase even to the plenitude of the new man; a continual lamentation, excited by the internal sensibility of our own miseries, and by the load of corruption which oppresses the soul, and makes it to bear so many marks still of the worldly man; a daily struggle between the law of the spirit, which continually wishes to raise us above our sensual appetites, and the dominion of the flesh, which incessantly draws us back toward ourselves: such is the state of faith, and of Christian piety. Whoever you be, great or of humble rank, prince or subject, courtier or recluse, behold the perfection to which you are called; behold the ground-work and the spirit of your vocation. The austerities of an anchorite, the silence and solitude of the desert, the poverty of the cloister, are not demanded of you; but you are required to labour incessantly toward the repression of those internal desires which oppose themselves to the law of God; to mortify those rebellious inclinations which so unwillingly submit to order and duty; in a word, to advance, as much as possible, your perfect conformity with Jesus Christ. Behold the degree of perfection to which Christian grace calls you, and the essential duty of a just soul.
Now, from the moment you give way to every inclination, provided it extends not to the absolute infraction of the precept, from the moment you confine yourselves to the essentials of the law; that you establish a kind of system of coldness and negligence; that you say to yourselves, "We are unable to support a more exact or more exemplary life;" — from that moment you renounce the desire of perfection. You no longer propose to yourselves an unceasing advancement toward that point of piety and holiness to which the Almighty calls you, and toward which his grace never ceases to impel you in secret; you no longer grieve over those miseries and weaknesses so inimical to your progress; you no longer wish the kingdom of God to be established in your hearts; you abandon, therefore from that moment, the great work of righteousness, at which you are commanded to labour; you neglect the care of your soul; you enter not into the designs of grace; on the contrary, you check its holy impressions: you are no longer Christian: that is to say, that this disposition alone, this formal intention of limiting yourselves to the essentials, and of regarding all the rest as laudable excesses, and works of supererogation, is a state of sin and death, since it is an avowed contempt of that great commandment which requires us to be perfect, that is to say, to labour toward becoming so.
Nevertheless, when we come to instruct you with regard to
