sinners become the apologists of virtue, and the life of the world to pass sorrowfully away in doing what they condemn, and flying from what they approve.
Such is the manner in which the present age becomes a source of consolatory reflections to a Christian soul; but, in the thought of futurity, he also finds consolations which are changed into inward and continual terrors for sinners: last advantage drawn by the just from the lights of faith. The magnificence of its promises sustains and consoles them: they await the blessed hope, and that happy moment when they shall be associated with the church of heaven, reunited to their brethren whom they had left on the earth, received eternal citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, incorporated in that immortal assembly of the elect, where charity will be the law that shall unite them; truth, the flame that shall enlighten them; and eternity the measure of their felicity.
These thoughts are so much the more consoling to the godly, as they are founded on the truth of God himself. They know that, in sacrificing the present, they sacrifice nothing; that in the twinkling of an eye, all shall have passed away; that whatever must have an end cannot long endure; that this moment of tribulation ought to be reckoned as nothing, when put in competition with that eternal weight of glory which he prepareth for us; and that the rapid passage of present things scarcely deserves that we should be at the pains of numbering the years and the ages,
I know that faith may subsist with criminal manners; and that the sanctifying grace is often lost without losing a sincere submission to the truths revealed to us by the Spirit of God. But the certitude of faith, so consoling to the righteous soul, is no longer for the sinner who still believes but an inexhaustible fund of inward anxieties and cruel terrors. For, the more that sinners like you, who bear upon your conscience the sink of a whole life of irregularity, are convinced of the truths of faith, the more inevitable must the punishments and the misery appear with which it threatens such sinners. All the truths offered to your faith, in the holy doctrine, excite fresh alarms in your breast. Those divine lights, which are the source of all consolation to believing souls, become, within you, only avenging lights, which disquiet, agonize, and judge you; which, like a mirror, hold up continually to your sight what you would wish never to see; which enlighten you, in spite of yourselves, on what you would wish to be for ever ignorant. Your faith itself constitutes your punishment before-hand. Your religion is, here below, if I may venture to say so, your hell: and the more you are convinced of the truth, the more unhappy do you live. O God! how great is thy goodness toward man, in having rendered virtue necessary even to his quiet, and in thus attracting him to thee, by making it impossible for him to be happy without thee!
And here, my dear hearer, allow me to recall you to yourself. When the lot of a criminal soul should not be so fearful for the age to come, see if, even in this world, it appears much to be envied:
