your duties and rules appear. What formerly appeared essential, no longer appears but a vain scruple. The omissions, which, in the period of fervour for duty and religion, would have excited in you the warmest compunctions, are now no longer regarded even as faults. The principles, the judgment, the light of the mind, are all changed.
Now, in this situation, who has told you, that, in the judgment which you form on the nature of your infidelities and your daily departure from virtue, you do not deceive yourselves? Who has told you, that the errors which you think so slight are in reality so; and that the distant boundaries which you prescribe to guilt, and within which every thing to you appears venial, are really the limits of the law? Alas! the most enlightened guides know not how to distinguish clearly in a cold and unbelieving conscience. These are what I may call the evils of that langour in which we know nothing; where the wisest of us can say nothing with certainty; and of which the secret cause is always an enigma. You are sensible yourselves, that, in this state of relaxation, you experience in your hearts certain doubts and embarrassments which you can never sufficiently clear up; that in your consciences there always remains something secret and inexplicable, which you never wish to search into, or above half expose. These are not exaggerations, it is the real state and bottom of your soul, which you feel a reserve to lay open. You are sensible, that, even when prostrating yourselves before the Almighty, the confession of your guilt never entirely corresponds with the most intimate dispositions of your heart; that it never paints your internal situation such as in reality it is; and, in a word, that there always exists in your heart something more criminal than what in any statement of it you can bring yourselves to avow. And, indeed, how can you be certain, that in those continual self-gratifications; in that effeminacy of manners which composes your life; in that attention to every thing which may flatter the senses, or remove disquiet from you; to sacrifice to indolence and laziness, all which appears not essential in your duties; how can you be certain, I say, that your self-love is not arrived at that fatal point which serves to give it dominion over your heart, and for ever banish from it Christian charity? Who is able to inform you, in those frequent and voluntary infidelities, where, comforted by their pretended insignificancy, you oppose the internal grace which endeavours to turn you from them; you continually act contrary to your own reason and judgment: whether this internal contempt of the voice of God, this formal and daily abuse of your own lights and grace from God, be not an outrage upon the Divine goodness; a criminal contempt of his gifts; a wickedness in your deviations from virtue which leaves no excuse; and a deliberate preference to your passions and yourselves over Jesus Christ, which can alone proceed from a heart where the love of all order and righteousness is extinguished? Who can tell you, if, in these recollections where your listless mind has a thousand times dwelt upon objects or events dangerous to mo-
