operations of the Holy Spirit; you insist that such a new life is only a fresh snare to entrap the public credulity, and a new path more securely to attain some worldly purpose. Thus, the works of the almighty power of Jesus Christ harden you; thus even the wonders of his grace complete your blindness; thus, you make every thing conducive toward your destruction. Jesus Christ becomes to you a stumbling-block, when he ought to have been a source of life and salvation. The examples of sinners stain and corrupt you: their penitence revolts and hardens you.
Great God! suffer, then, in order that a life altogether criminal at last be terminated, that I now raise my voice to thee out of the depths in which I have, for so many years, languished. The impure chains with which I am bound, attach me, by so many folds, to the bottom of the gulf in which I drag on my gloomy days, that, in spite of all my good desires, I still remain fettered, and almost incapable of any effort toward disengaging myself and returning to thee, O my God, whom I have forsaken. But, Lord out of the depths even in which thou seest me, like another Lazarus, fettered and buried, I have, at least, the voice of the heart free to send up, even to the foot of the throne, my sorrows, my lamentations, and my tears.
The voice of a repentant sinner is always agreeable, O Lord, to thine ear; it is that voice of Jacob which awakens all thy tenderness, even when it offers to thy sight but hands of Esau, and still covered with blood and crimes.
Ah! thine holy ears, O Lord, have now been sufficiently turned away from my licentious and blasphemous words; let them now be attentive to the voice of my supplications; and let the singularity of the words which T now address to thee, O my God! attract a more favourable attention to my prayer.
I come not here, great God! to excuse my disorders in thy sight, by alleging to thee the occasions which have seduced me, the examples which have led me astray, the misfortune of my engagements, and the nature of my heart and of my weakness; cover thine eyes, O Lord, upon the horrors of my past life , the only possibility of excusing them is, not to behold or to know them. Alas! if I am unable myself to support even their view; if my crimes dread and fly from mine own eyes, and if my terrors and my weakness render it absolutely necessary to turn my sight from them, how, O Lord, should they be able to sustain the sanctity of thy looks, if thou search into them with that eye of severity which finds stains in the purest and most laudable life?
But thou, O Lord, art not a God like unto man, to whom it is always so difficult to pardon and to forget the injuries of an enemy: goodness and mercy dwell in thine eternal bosom; clemency is the first attribute of thy supreme being; and thou hast no enemies but those who refuse to place their trust in the abundant riches of thy mercy.
Yes, Lord! be the hour what it may when a criminal soul casts himself upon thy mercy; whether in the morning of life or in
