you say nothing; if you spoke in this manner, you would speak the language of faith, and that of a penitent king, who, contemplating his repeated relapses, and no longer daring to speak to his God in prayer, said, " Lord, I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long; for mine iniquities are gone over my head; as a heavy burden they are too heavy for me. My heart panteth, my strength faileth me; for I will declare mine iniquity, I will be sorry for my sin. Forsake me not, O Lord: O my God! be not far from me. Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation." Such is the silence of compunction which forms before God the true prayer.
But to complain that you have no longer any thing to say, when you wish to pray: alas! my dear hearer, when you present yourself before God, do your past crimes hold out nothing for you to dread from his judgments, or to ask from his mercy? What! your whole life has perhaps been only a sink of debaucheries; you have perverted every thing, grace, your talents, your reason, your wealth, your dignities, all creatures; you have passed the best part of your days in the neglect of your God, and in all the delusions of the world and of the passions; you have vilified your heart by iniquitous attachments, defiled your body, disordered your imagination, weakened your lights, and even extinguished every happy disposition which nature had placed in your soul; and the recollection of all this furnishes you with nothing in the presence of God? And it inspires you with no idea of the method you ought to adopt, in having recourse to him, in order to obtain his forgiveness of such accumulated crimes? and you have nothing to say to a God whom you have so long offended? O man! thy salvation, then, must either be without resource, or thou must have other means of accomplishing it than those of the divine clemency and mercy.
But, my dear hearer, I go farther. If you lead a Christian life; if, returned from the world and from pleasures, you are at last entered into the ways of salvation, you are still more unjust in complaining that you find nothing to say to the Lord in your prayers. What! the singular grace of having opened your eyes, of undeceiving you with regard to the world, and withdrawing you from the bottom of the abyss; this blessing, so rare, and denied to so many sinners, doth it give rise to no grateful feeling in your heart, when at his feet? Can this recollection leave you cold and insensible? Is nothing tender awakened by the presence of your benefactor, you who pride yourself upon having never forgotten a a benefit, and who so pompously display the feeling and the excess of your gratitude toward the creatures?
Besides, if you feel those endless tendencies, which, in spite of your change of life, still rise up within you against the law of God; that difficulty which you still have in doing well; that unfortunate inclination which you still find within you toward evil; those desires of a more perfect virtue, which always turn out vain; those resolutions to which you are always faithless; those opportunities
