quality which it may possess, is it not the sole gift of him who alone is worthy of all love?
What prophet prior to Jesus Christ had ever spoken thus to men, You shall love me: whatever you do, you shall do it for my glory? You shall love the Lord your God, said Moses to the children of Israel. Nothing is amiable in itself but what can bestow happiness upon us: now, no creature can be our happiness or our perfection: no creature, consequently, is worthy of being loved for itself; it would be an idolatry. Any man, who comes to propose himself to men as the object of their love, is impious and an impostor, who seeks to usurp the most essential right of the Supreme Being: he is a monster of pride and folly, who wants to erect altars to himself, even in hearts, the only sanctuary which the Divinity had never yielded up to profane idols. The doctrine of Jesus Christ, that doctrine so divine, and so much admired even by the pagans, would no longer, in that case, be but a monstrous mixture of impiety, of presumption, and of folly, if, not being himself the God blessed in all ages, he had made that love which he exacted of his disciples the most essential precept of his morality; and it would be a ridiculous mark of ostentation in him to have held himself out to men as a model of humility and modesty, while, in fact, he was carrying presumption and unlimited compliance to a degree far beyond all the proudest philosophers, who had never aspired to more than the esteem and the applauses of men.
Nor is this all: not only Jesus Christ insists that we love him, but he also exacts of men marks of the most disinterested and most heroical love: he insists that we love him more than our relations, than our friends, than our fortune, than our life, than the whole world, than ourselves; that we suffer all for his sake, that we renounce all for him, that we shed, even to the last drop, our blood for him: whoever renders not to him these grand homages is unworthy of him: whoever puts him in competition with any creature, or with himself, insults and dishonours him, and forfeits every pretension to his promises.
What! my brethren, he is not satisfied, as the idols, and even the true God himself had appeared to be, with the sacrifices of goats and bulls! — he carries his pretensions still farther, and requires of man the sacrifice of himself; that he fly to gibbets; that he offered himself to death and to martyrdom for the glory of his name! But if he be not the master of our life, by what right doth he exact it of us? If our soul be not originally come from him, is it to him that we ought to return it? Is that regaining it, to have lost it for his sake? If he be not the Author of our being, do we not become sacrilegious and murderers, when we sacrifice ourselves for his glory, and when we transfer to a creature, and to a simple messenger of God, the grand sacrifice of our being, solely destined to confess the sovereignty and the power of the eternal Maker, who hath drawn us from nothing? That Jesus Christ die for himself, well and good, for the glory of God, and even that he exhort us to follow his example: many prophets before him had died for the Lord's sake, and had exhorted their disciples to walk
