make us understand by it, that this disease, apparently so slight, and of which they dread not the danger, — this lukewarmness, so common in piety, is a disease which inevitably destroys the soul, and that a miracle is necessary to rescue it from death.
Yes, my brethren, of all the maxims of Christian morality, there is none upon which experience allows us less to deceive ourselves, than the one which assures us, that contempt for the smallest points of our duty insensibly leads us to a transgression of the most essential; and that negligence in the ways of God, is never far from a total loss of righteousness. He who despises the smaller objects of religion, says the Holy Spirit, will gradually fall: he who despises them, that is to say, who deliberately violates them; who lays down, as it were, a plan of this conduct: for if, through weakness or surprise, you fail in them sometimes, it is the common destiny of the just, and this discourse would no longer regard you; but to despise them in the sense already mentioned, which can happen only with lukewarm and unfaithful souls, is a path which must terminate in the loss of righteousness; — in the first place, because the special grace necessary toward perseverance in virtue is no longer granted; — secondly, because the passions are strengthened which lead us on to vice; — thirdly, because all the external succours of piety become useless.
Let us investigate these three reflections. They contain important instructions in the detail of a Christian life: useful, not only to those who make a public profession of piety, but likewise to those who make all virtue to consist in that regularity of conduct and propriety of behaviour which even the world requires.
Part I. — It is a truth of salvation, says a holy father, that the innocence of even the most upright has occasion for the continual assistance of grace. Man, delivered up to sin by the wickedness of his nature, no longer finds in himself but principles of error and sources of corruption: righteousness and truth, originally born with us, are now become as strangers; all our inclinations, revolted against God and his law in spite of ourselves, drag us on toward illicit objects; insomuch, that, to return to the law, and submit our heart to order, it is necessary to resist, without ceasing, the impressions of the senses; to break our warmest inclinations, and to harden ourselves continually against ourselves. There is no duty but what now costs us something; no precept in the law but combats some of our passions; no step in the paths of God against which our heart does not revolt.
To this load of corruption, which renders duty so difficult and irksome, and iniquity so natural, add the snares which surround us, the examples which entice us, the objects which effeminate us, the occasions which surprise us, the compliances which weaken us, the afflictions which discourage us, the properties which corrupt us, the situations which blind us, and the contradictions which we experience; every thing around us is indeed only one continued temptation. I speak not of the miseries which are natural to us, or the
