holy desires, your heart ought then to be seen rekindled, and your fervour renewed: you ought then to appear all fire and animation in the practice of your duty, and astonish even the most confident witnesses of your former life by the renovation of your morals and zeal.
Alas! nothing, however, reanimates you* Even the Holy Sacrament leaves you all your coldness. The words of the gospel, which you listen to, fall upon your heart like corn upon a sterile land, where it immediately dies. The sentiments of salvation which grace operates within you, are never followed with any effect in the melioration of your morals. You continually drag on in the same indolence and languor. You depart from the holy altar equally cold, equally insensible, as you approached it. We see not in you those renewals of zeal, piety, and fervour, so common in just souls, and of which the motives are to be found in their deviations from duty. What you were yesterday, you are to-day; the same infidelities, the same weaknesses, you advance not a single step in the road to salvation; all the fire of heaven could scarcely rekindle in the bottom of your heart this pretended charity upon which you depend so much. Ah! my dear hearer, how much I dread that it is extinct, and that you are dead in the sight of the Lord! I wish not to anticipate the secret judgments of God upon the consciences; but I must tell you, that your state is very far from being safe; I even tell you, that, if we are to judge by the rules of faith, you are in disgrace with, and hated of the Lord; I tell you likewise, that a coldness so durable and constant cannot subsist with a principle of heavenly and eternal life, which always, from time to time at least, betrays external movements and signs, raises, animates itself, and takes wing, as if to disengage itself from the shackles which weigh it down; and that a charity so mute, so indolent, and so constantly insensible, exists no more.
But the great danger of this state, my brethren, is, that a lukewarm soul is so without scruple; it feels that it might carry its fervour and fidelity to a much greater length, but it looks upon that zeal, and that exactitude, as a perfection and a grace reserved only for certain souls, and not as a general duty. In this manner they fix themselves in that degree of coldness into which they are fallen. They have not made, nor scarcely attempted, the smallest progress in virtue, since the first ardours of conversion. It would appear, that having exhausted all their fervour against the criminal passions with which they had at first to combat, they imagine that nothing now remains but to enjoy in peace the fruits of their victory. A thousand damages which still remain from their first shipwreck, they think no more of repairing. So far from endeavouring to repress a thousand weaknesses and corrupted inclinations left them by their first irregularities, they love and cherish them. The Holy Sacrament no longer reanimates or invigorates their faith; it only amuses it. Conversion is no longer the end they propose, they believe it already done: and, alas! their confessions, even to the Almighty, are more for the purpose of
