Christian perfection, you look upon it as to be found only in cloisters and solitudes, and scarcely will you deign to give the smallest attention to our instructions. You deceive yourselves, my brethren. The individuals who adopt retirement, certainly employ austerities, fastings, and watchings, as means to succeed in that mortification of the passions to which we are all equally invited. They engage themselves to a perfection of means, which I confess our state will not admit of; but the perfection of the end to which these means conduct, namely, the command and regulation of the affections, proper contempt of the world, detachment from ourselves, submission of the senses and the flesh to the Spirit, and renovation of the heart, are the perfection of all states, the engagement of all Christians, and the covenant of our baptism. To renounce this perfection, therefore, by limiting ourselves from choice, or in consequence of our rank in the world, to an effeminate, sensual, and worldly life, exempt only from striking enormities, is to renounce the Christian calling, and change the grace of faith, which has made us members of Jesus Christ, into a shameful and unworthy indolence: — first reason.
But were this state even not so dubious for salvation, with respect to the desire of that perfection essential to a Christian life, and which is extinguished in a lukewarm and unfaithful soul, it would become so by the imbecility which it occasions, and in which it places itself, of distinguishing in its conduct the infidelities which may extend to guilt, from those which may be termed simple errors. For though it is true that all sins are not sins which bring death, as St. John observes, and that Christian morality acknowledges errors, which only grieve the Holy Spirit within us, and others which extinguish it altogether in the soul; nevertheless, the rules which it furnishes to distinguish these, can neither be always certain nor general at the moment they are applied; some circumstances relative to ourselves continually change their nature. I speak not here of those manifest and absolute transgressions of the precepts marked in the law, which leave no hesitation respecting the enormity of the offence. I speak of a thousand doubtful and daily transgressions; of hatred, jealousy, evil speaking, sensuality, vanity, idleness, duplicity, negligence in the practice of our duties, and ambition; in all which it is extremely difficult to define how far the precept may be violated: now, I say, that it is by the disposition alone of the heart that the measure and guilt of these faults can be decided; that the rules there, are always uncertain and changeable; and that frequently what is only weakness or surprise in the just, is guilt and corruption not only in the sinner, but likewise in the lukewarm and unfaithful soul. This is proved by the following examples taken from the holy writings.
Saul, in disobedience to the order of the Lord, spared the king of the Amalekites and the most precious spoils of that infidel prince. The crime does not appear considerable; but, as it proceeded from a fund of pride, of relaxation in the ways of God, and a vain com-
