you attribute to the artifices of man the most shining 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 to 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 me then, in order that a life of crime may at last be terminated, to 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 so strongly to the bottom of the gulph 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 towards disengaging myself and returning to thee, O my God, whom I have forsaken. But, Lord, out of the depths 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 only the hands of Esau, covered as they are, with blood and crimes.

Thine holy ears, O Lord, have now sufficiently long been turned away from my licentiousness and blasphemy; let them now be attentive to the voice of my sup

plications; and, let the singularity of the words which I 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 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; turn away thine eyes, O Lord, from 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 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 difficult to pardon and to forget the injuries of an enemy; goodness and pity 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 the decline of age; whether after the errors of youthful manners or after an entire life of dissipation and licentiousness, thou desirest, O God! that their hope in thee be not extinguished; and thou assurest us that the highest point of our crimes is but the lowest degree of thy mercy.

Great God! if thou listen to my desires; if, once more, thou restore to me that life and that light which

I have lost; if thou break asunder my chains of death which still fetter me; if thou stretch out thine hand to withdraw me from the gulf in which I am plunged, ah! never, O Lord, shall I cease to proclaim thine eternal mercies: I will forget the whole world, that I may be occupied only with the wonders of thy grace towards my soul: I will every moment of my life render glory to the God who shall have delivered me: my mouth, for ever shut against vain things, shall with difficulty be able to express all the transports of my love and of my gratitude; and thy creature, who still groans under the dominion of the world and of sin, then restored to his true Lord, shall, henceforth and for ever more, bless his deliverer.

SERMON XXX.

ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT.

LUKE XXI. 27.

Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory.

SUCH, my brethren, will be that last spectacle which shall terminate the constant series of revolutions which the world is continually offering to our eyes, and which either amuse us through their novelty, or seduce us by their charms. Such will be the coming of the Son of Man, the day of his revelation, the accomplishment of his kingdom, and the complete redemption of his mystical body. Such will be the day of the manifestation of consciences, that day of misery and despair to one portion of men, and of peace, consolation and ineffable delight to the other; the sweet expectation of the just, the dread of the wicked; the day which is to determine the destiny of all men.

It was the prospect, ever present to their minds, of that terrible day, which rendered the first believers patient under persecution, delighted under suffering, and glorying in opprobrium. It is that which hath VOL. II.

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since supported the faith of martyrs, animated the constancy of virgins, and smoothed to the anchorite all the horrors of a desert; it is that which still peoples those religious solitudes, which the piety of our ancestors, has erected as asylums against the contagion of the age.

Even you, my brethren, when the awful solemnity of that great event hath sometimes intruded on your thoughts, have been unable to check feelings of compunction and dread. But these have been only transitory fears; more smiling and more agreeable ideas have speedily effaced them, and recalled to you your former calm. Alas! in the happy days of the church he would have been considered as renouncing faith, who did not long for the day of the Lord. The only consolation of those first disciples of faith was in looking forward to it: and the apostles were obliged even to moderate, on that point, the holy eagerness of believers; and yet, in these days, the church finds itself under the necessity of employing the whole terror of our ministry, in order to recall its remembrance to Christians, and the whole fruit of our sermons is confined to making it dreaded.

I mean not, however, to lay before you in this place, the whole history of that awful event. I wish to confine myself to one of its circumstances, which has always appeared to me the most proper to make an impression on the heart: it is the manifestation of consciences.

This is my whole design. On the earth a sinner never knows himself such as he is, and is only halfknown to men; he lives, in general, unknown to him. self, through his blindness, and to others, through his dissimulation and cunning. In that great day he will know himself, and will be known. The sinner laid