the world praises and inspires, had drawn upon us the contempt even of the world; virtue, which the world censures and combats, attracts to us, however unwillingly on its part, its veneration and homages.
What, my dear hearer, prevents you then from terminating your shame, and your inquietudes, with your crimes? Is it the reparations of penitence which alarm you? But the longer you delay, the more they multiply, the more debts are contracted, the more you increase the necessity of new rigours to your weakness. Ah! if the reparations discourage you at present, what shall it one day be, when, your crimes multiplied to infinity, almost no punishment whatever shall be capable of expiating them? They shall then plunge you into despair; and you will adopt the miserable part of casting off all yoke, and of no longer reckoning upon your salvation; you will raise up to yourself new maxims and modes of reasoning, in order to tranquillise your mind in freethinking; you will consider as needless a penitence which will then appear to you impossible. When the embarrassments of the conscience come to a certain point, we feel a kind of gloomy satisfaction in persuading ourselves that no resource is left; we calm ourselves on the foundations of truths, when we see ourselves so far removed from what they prescribe; we fly to unbelief for a remedy from the moment that we believe it is no longer to be found in faith; from the moment that the chaos becomes inexplicable to us, we* have soon settled it in our minds that all is uncertain. And, besides what should there be so melancholy and so rigorous in reparations, whose only merit ought to spring from love?
Unbelieving soul! you dread being unable to support the holy sadness of penitence; yet you have hitherto been able to bear up against the internal horrors of guilt: virtue in your eyes seems wearisome beyond sufferance; yet you have long dragged on under the stings of an ulcerated conscience, which no joy could enliven. Ah! since you have hitherto been able to bear up against all internal anguish, the bitterness, the disgusts, the gloomy agitations of iniquity, no longer dread those of virtue: in the pains and sufferances inseparable from guilt, you have undergone trials far beyond what may be attached to virtue; and doubly so, because grace softens, and renders even pleasing, the sufferings of piety, while the only sweetener of guilt is the bitterness of guilt itself.
My God! is it possible, that, for so many years past, I have had strength to wander in such arduous and dreary ways, under the tyranny of the world and of the passions, and that I should be unable to live with thee, under all the tenderness of thy regards, under the wings of thy compassion, and under the protection of thy arm? Art thou then so cruel a master? The world, which knows thee not, believes that thou renderest miserable those who serve thee: but we, O Lord, we know that thou art the gentlest and best of masters, the tenderest of all fathers, the most faithful of all friends, the most munificent of all benefactors; and that thou givest a foretaste, by a thousand inward consolations with which thou indulgest thy servants here below, of that eternal felicity which thou preparest for them hereafter.
