most secret evils, and the succours of our most righteous inclinations; and that none but He alone who knoweth the bottom of hearts, could be capable of laying down such maxims to men. The heathens themselves, in whom all truth was not yet extinguished, rendered this glory to the Christian morality; they were forced to admire the wisdom of its precepts, the necessity of its restraints, the sanctity of its counsels, the good sense and sublimity of all its rules; they were astonished to find, in the discourses of Jesus Christ, a more sublime philosophy than in the Roman or Grecian schools; and they could not comprehend how the Son of Mary should be better acquainted with the duties, the desires, and all the secret folds of the human heart, than Plato and all his disciples.
Will you tell us, after this, that nature is our first law, and that tendencies to pleasures, inherent in our being, can never be crimes? I have often said it; it is an impiety only of conversation; it is an ostentation of freethinking, of which vanity makes a boast, but which truth inwardly belies. Augustine in his errors had spared no pains to efface, from the bottom of his heart, those remains of faith and of conscience which still recalled him to the truth; he had eagerly sought, in the most impious opinions and in the most shocking errors, wherewithal to comfort himself against his crimes; his mind, flying the light which pursued him, wandered from impiety to impiety and from error to error: nevertheless, in spite of all his efforts and flights, the truth, always victorious in the bottom of his soul, proclaimed its triumph in spite of himself: he could succeed neither in seducing nor in quieting himself in his disorders: " I bore, O my God," says he, " a conscience racked, and still bleeding, as it were, from the grievous wounds which my passions incessantly made there: I was a burden to myself; I could no longer sustain my own heart; I turned myself on every side, and no where could it find ease; I knew not where to lay it, that I might be delivered from it, and that mine anxiety might be comforted."
Behold the testimony which a sinner, who, to all the keenness of the passions, added the impiety of opinions and the abuse of lights, renders of himself. And these examples are of every age: our own has beheld famous and avowed sinners who made an infamous boast of not believing in God, and who were looked upon as heroes in impiety and freethinking: we have seen them touched at last with repentance, like Augustine, and recalled from their errors; we have seen them, I say, make an open avowal, that they had never been able to succeed in effacing the rules and truth from their soul; that, amidst all their most shocking impieties and excesses, their heart, still Christian, inwardly belied their derisions and blasphemies; that before men they vaunted a strength of mind which forsook them in private; that that apparent unbelief concealed the most cruel remorses, and the most gloomy fears; and that they had never been firm and tranquil in guilt.
Yes, my brethren, guilt, always timorous, every where bears a witness of condemnation against itself. Every where you render homage, by your inward anxieties and remorses, to the sanctity of
