Yet no religion has indicated that this was a sin; or that we were born in it; or that we were obliged to resist it; or has thought of giving us remedies for it.
493
The true religion teaches our duties; our weaknesses, pride, and lust; and the remedies, humility and mortification.
494
The true religion must teach greatness and misery; must lead to the esteem and contempt of self, to love and to hate.
495
If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God.
496
Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness.
497
Against those who, trusting to the mercy of God, live heedlessly, without doing good works.—As the two sources of our sins are pride and sloth, God has revealed to us two of His attributes to cure them, mercy and justice. The property of justice is to humble pride, however holy may be our works, et non intres in judicium, &c.;[1] and the property of mercy is to combat sloth by exhorting to good works, according to that passage: "The goodness of God leadeth to repentance," and that other of the Ninevites: "Let us do penance to see if peradventure He will pity us." And thus mercy is so far from authorising slackness, that it is on the contrary the quality which formally attacks it; so that instead of saying, "If there were no mercy in God we should have to make every kind of effort after virtue," we must say, on the contrary, that it is because there is mercy in God, that we must make every kind of effort.
- ↑ Psalms, clxiii. 2.
