rous nations, or with those impious characters who blaspheme his glory and his divinity, if to you it appears so worthy of ridicule 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 a delusion; he might pity our credulity and weakness, when he sees us sacrificing the present to a futurity, and an 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 men. But for you, who would not dare to start a doubt of the certainty of faith, and of the hope which is in Jesus Christ, with what eyes, and 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 you laugh at those who bear it in their heart, and who ground their whole hope and expectation in it! You worship him as your Judge; and you contemn and load with ridicule those who dread him, and who anxiously labour to render him favourable to their interests! You believe him to be sincere and faithful in his word; and you look upon those as weak minds, who place their trust in him, and who sacrifice every thing to the grandeur and to the certainty of his promises! O man, so astonishing, so full of contradictions, so little in unison with thyself, would the infidel exclaim, how great and how holy must the God of the Christians therefore be, seeing that, among all those who know him, he hath no enemies but such as are of this description!

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Let us, therefore, respect virtue, my brethren; let us honour, in his servants, the gifts of God, and the wonders of his grace. Let us merit, by our deference and our esteem for piety, the blessing of piety itself. Let us regard the worthy and pious as beings who alone continue to draw down the favours of Heaven upon the earth, as resources established to reconcile us one day with God, as blessed signs, which prove to us that the Lord still looketh upon men with pity, and continueth his mercies upon his church. Let us encourage by our praises, if we cannot strengthen by our example, the souls who return to him: let us applaud their change, if we think it impossible, as yet, to change ourselves; let us glory in defending them, if our passions will not, as yet, permit us to imitate them. Let us reverence and esteem virtue. Let us have no friends but the friends of God: let us count upon the fidelity of men only in proportion as they are faithful to their Master and Creator: let us confide our sorrows and our sufferings only to those who can present them to him, who alone can console them: let us believe only those to be in our real interests who are in the interests of our salvation. Let us smooth the way to our conversion: let us, by our respect for the just, prepare the world to behold us at some future day, without surprise, just ourselves. Let us not, by our ridicule and censures, raise up an invincible stumbling-block of human respect, which shall for ever prevent us from declaring ourselves disciples of that piety which we have so loudly and so publicly decried. Let us render glory to the truth; and, in order that it may deliver us, let us religiously receive it, like the Magi, from the moment that it is mani

fested to us let us not dissemble it, like the priests, when we owe it to our brethren: let us not declare against it, like Herod, when we can no longer dissemble it to ourselves, in order that, after having walked in the ways of truth upon the earth, we may all be one day sanctified in truth, and made perfect in charity.

SERMON XXVIII.

THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST.

LUKE ii. 21.

His name was called Jesus, which was so named of the angel.

HUMAN reason is astonished and confounded at the idea of a God lowering himself to the standard of humanity; and into what an abyss of errors is it not plunged, if the light of faith come not speedily to its aid, to evince the depth of the divine wisdom concealed under the apparently absurd mystery of a ManGod? Thus, in all ages, this fundamental point of our holy religion, I mean the divinity of Jesus Christ, hath been the object most exposed to the foolish oppositions of the human mind. Men, full of pride, whose lips ought to utter only thanksgivings for the ineffable gift, made to them by the Father of mercies, of his only Son, have continually insulted him, by vomiting forth the most impious blasphemies against that adorable Son. Their blindness has prevented them from seeing that the mere name of Jesus, which was given to him on this day, the name which he first received VOL. II.

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in heaven, and which an angel conveys to the earth, to Mary and to Joseph, is the incontestable proof of his divinity. That sacred, name establishes him the Saviour of mankind; the Saviour, because through the effusion of blood, which becomes our ransom, he delivers us from sin, and from the consequences inseparable from it, the tyranny, namely, of the demon and of hell the Saviour, because by attracting upon his own head the chastisement due to our prevarications, he reconciles us with God, and opens to us afresh the door of the eternal sanctuary, which sin had shut against us. But, my brethren, if the Son of Mary be but a mere man, of what value, in the eyes of God, will be the oblation of his blood? If Jesus Christ be not God, how will his mediation be accepted, while he would himself have occasion for a Mediator to reconcile him with God?

This proof, which I only touch upon here, and so many other proofs with which religion furnishes me, would quickly stop the mouth of the ungodly, and confound his impiety, if I undertook to shew them in all their light, and to amplify them in proportion to their importance. But, God forbid! that I should come here, into the holy temple where the altars of our divine Saviour are raised up, where his worshippers assemble, to enter into argument, as if I spake in the presence of his enemies, or to apologize for the mystery of the Man-God, before a believing people, and a sovereign whose most illustrious and most cherished title is that of Christian. It is not, therefore, to combat the ungodly, that I consecrate this day my discourse to the divinity and to the eternal glory of Jesus, Son of the living God; I come for the sole purpose of consoling our faith, while recounting the wonders of