self-love; it is to give all to nature, and nothing to faith; it is to give way to every impulse of inclination, and to live solely for ease and self-enjoyment, as constituting the chief happiness of man.
Now, in this situation, and with this excessive fund of love for the world and for yourself, if the Lord were not to provide afflictions for your weakness; if he did not strike your body with an habitual languor which renders the world insipid to you; if he did not send losses and vexations, which force you, through decency, to regularity and retirement; if he did not overthrow certain projects, which, leaving your fortune more obscure, remove you from the great dangers; if he did not place you in certain situations where irksome and inevitable duties employ your best days; in a word, if he did not place between your weakness and you a barrier which checks and stops you, alas! your innocence would soon be wrecked; you would soon make an improper and fatal use of peace and prosperity? — you who find no security even amid afflictions and troubles. And seeing that, afflicted and separated from the world and from pleasures, you cannot return to God, what would it be did a more happy situation leave you no other check to your desires than yourself? The same weakness and the same load of self-love which render us so feeling to sorrow and affliction, would render us still more so to the dangerous impressions of pleasures and of human prosperities.
Thus, it is no excuse for our despondency and murmurs, to confess that we are weak and little calculated to support the strokes with which we are afflicted by God. The weakness of our heart proceeds only from the weakness of our faith; a Christian soul ought to be a valiant soul, superior, says the apostle, to persecution, disgrace, infirmities, and even death. He may be oppressed, continues the apostle, but he cannot be vanquished; he may be despoiled of his wealth, reputation, ease, and even life, but he cannot be robbed of that treasure of faith and of grace which he has locked up in his heart, and which amply consoles him for all these fleeting and frivolous losses. He may be brought to shed tears of sensibility and of sorrow, for religion does not extinguish the feelings of nature; but his heart immediately disavows its weakness, and turns its carnal tears into tears of penitence and of piety.
What do I say? A Christian soul even delights in tribulations; he considers them as proofs of the tender watchfulness of God over him, as the precious pledges of the promises to come, as the blessed features of resemblance to Jesus Christ, and which give him an assured right to share after this life in his immortal glory. To be weak and rebellious against the order of God under sufferance, is to have lost faith, and to be no longer Christian.
I confess that there are hearts more tender and more feeling to sorrow than others; but that sensibility is left to them only to increase the merit of their sufferings, and not to excuse their impatience and murmurings. It is not the feeling, it is the immoderate use, of sorrow which the gospel condemns. In proportion as we are born feeling for our afflictions, so ought we to be so to the con-
