nothing is said against them: the madness of gambling has its declared partisans, and they are quietly put up with: ambition has its worshippers and slaves, and they are even commended: voluptuousness has its altars and victims, and no one contests them; avarice has its idolators, and not a word is said against them; all the passions, like so many sacrilegious divinities, have their established worship, without the smallest exception being taken; and the sole Lord of the universe, and the Sovereign of all men, and the only God upon the earth, either shall not be served at all, or it shall not be with impunity, and without every obstacle being placed in the way of his service?
Great God! avenge then thine own glory; render again to thy servants that honour and that lustre which the impious unceasingly ravish from them: do not, as formerly, send ferocious beasts from the depths of their forests to devour the contemners of virtue and of the holy simplicity of thy prophets; but deliver them up to their inordinate desires, still more cruel and insatiable than the lion or the bear, in order, that, worn out, racked by their internal convulsions and the frenzies of their own passions, they may know all the value and all the excellence of that virtue which they contemn, and aspire to the felicity and to the destiny of those souls who serve thee.
For, my brethren, you whom this discourse regards, allow me, and with grief, to say it here, — must you be the instruments which the demon employs to tempt the chosen of God, and, if it were possible, to lead them astray? Must it be that you appear upon the earth merely in order to justify the prophecies of the holy books with regard to the persecutions, which, even to the end, are inevitable to all those who shall wish to live in godliness which is in Jesus Christ? Must you alone be the means of sustaining the perpetuity of that frightful succession of persecutors of faith and of virtue, which is to endure as long as the church? Must you, in default now of tyrants and of tortures, continue to be the rock and the scandal of the Gospel? Renounce, then, yourselves the hope which is in Jesus Christ; join yourselves with those barbarous nations, or with those impious characters who blaspheme his glory and his divinity, if to you it appears so worthy of derision and laughter to live under his laws, and according to his maxims. An infidel or a savage might suppose that we, who serve and who worship him, are under delusion; he might pity our credulity and weakness, when he sees us sacrificing the present to a futurity, and a hope which, in his eyes, might appear fabulous and chimerical: but he would be forced, at least, to confess, that, if we do not deceive ourselves, and if our faith be justly grounded, we are the wisest and the most estimable of all men. But for you, who would not dare to start a doubt of the certitude of faith, and of the hope which is in Jesus Christ, with what eyes, with what astonishment would that infidel regard the censures which you so plentifully bestow upon his servants! You prostrate yourselves before his cross, he would say to you, as before the pledge of your salvation; and
