desty, your indolence in combating them has not been criminal; and if the efforts which you afterward made, were not an artifice of self-love, in order to disguise their criminality, and quiet you on the indulgence you had already yielded to your crimes? Who would dare to determine, if, in these secret antipathies and animosities, which you give yourselves but little trouble to restrain, (and that always more for the sake of appearances than through piety,) you have never exceeded that slippery line beyond which dwell hatred and death to the soul? If, in that excess of sensibility, which in general accompanies all your afflictions, infirmities, losses, and disgraces, those which you call feelings attached and inevitable to nature, are not irregularities of the heart, and a revolt against the decrees of Providence? If, in all those attentions and eagernesses with which we see you occupied, to manage either the interests of your worldly affairs, or the preservation of a vain beauty, there is not either as much forwardness as may amount to the crime of illegal ambition, or complaisance for yourself, and desire of pleasing, as may sully your heart with the guilt of sensuality? Great God! thou hast well discerned, as thy servant Job formerly remarked, the fatal limits which separate life from death, and light from darkness, in the heart. These are the gulfs and abysses over which mankind, little instructed in them, must tremble; and of which Thou reservest the manifestation till the terrible day of thy vengeance shall arrive. — Second reason, drawn from the uncertainty of the rules, which leaves the state of a lukewarm soul very suspicious, and even renders it incapable of knowing itself.
But a final reason, which to me appears still more decisive, and more dreadful to the lukewarm soul, is, there not being an appearance from which we can presume that it still preserves the sanctifying grace; on the contrary, every thing induces us to suppose it forfeited; that is to say, that, of all the symptoms of a habitual and living charity, there is not a vestige of one in it.
For, my brethren, the first character of charity is to fill us with that spirit of adoption in children, which leads us to love God as our heavenly Father, to love his law, and the justice of his commandments, and to dread the forfeiture of his love more than all the evils with which he threatens us.
Now, the attention alone with which a lukewarm soul examines whether an offence be venial, or extends farther; of disputing with God every article he may refuse him, without actual guilt; of studying the law, only for the purpose of knowing to what degree it may be violated; of unceasingly preferring the interests of his own cupidity to those of grace; and always justifying those things which flatter the passions, in opposition to the rules which check or forbid them; this attention, I say, can only proceed from a heart destitute of faith and charity; from a heart in which the Spirit of God, that spirit of love and kindness, apparently no longer reigns. For no children but the prodigal are capable of quibbling in this manner with their father and protector; of exercising to the utmost length of severity any claims they may have, and of seizing all they may think themselves entitled to.
