The apostle[1] commands us, beholding Jesus, the author and consummator of our faith, sedulously to consider what and how great contradiction he sustained from sinners against himself, lest, wearied out by hardships and dangers, we may at length fail in our spirits, and in a manner sink. That we be fortified and strengthened by this most wholesome reflection is then most necessary, when against the body itself of Christ, which is the Church,[2] the tide of that dread conspiracy which is never to cease rages more intensely, that comforted by the Lord, and in the power of his might, protected by the shield of faith, we may be able to resist in the evil day, and to extinguish[3] all the fiery weapons of the most unjust. In this commotion of the times, in this most perturbed overturning of all things, all good men have to undergo a serious strggle against all the enemies of the Christian name, of what kind soever; we a still more serious one, on whom, in consideration of the care and management of the entire flock committed to our pastoral solicitude, a greater zeal for the Christian religion is incumbent[4] than upon all others. But in this very weight of the burden which has been placed on our shoulders, that of bearing the burdens of all who are oppressed, the more we are conscious to ourselves of our own weakness, into so much the firmer hope does the divinely established principle of the apostolic duty instituted in the person of Saint Feter, raise and exalt us, that he who was never to abandon the government of the Church once delivered to him by Christ, should not cease to carry the burdens of apostolic government among those whom God had given to him to be protected by perpetual succession, and to be guarded as his heirs.
And amid these miseries which surround us on all hands, it has been added as an accumulation of all our other troubles, that from that quarter whence we should rejoice, from thence we should derive greater sorrow; inasmuch as when[5] any governor in the sacred Church of God under the name of priest turns away the very people of Christ from the path of truth into the precipice or a devious persuasion,
