dom and glory. Lastly, against the pretext, drawn from the weakness of man, that it is justified even by the testimony of his own conscience. The certainty of a future state; the necessity of a future state; the inward acknowledgment of a future state. Behold the subject and arrangement of my discourse.
O God! attend not to the insults which the blasphemies of impiety offer to thy glory: regard only, and see, of what reason is capable when thy light is withdrawn. In the wickedness of the human mind, behold all the severity of thy justice, when it abandons it, that the more I expose the foolish blasphemies of the impious soul, the more may he become, in thy sight, an object worthy of thy pity, and of the treasures of thine infinite mercy.
Part I. — It surely is melancholy to have to justify, before believers, the most consolatory truth of faith; to come to prove to men, to whom Jesus Christ has been declared, that their being is not a wild assemblage, and the wretched offspring of chance; that a wise and an almighty Artificer has presided at our formation and birth; that a spark of immortality animates our clay; that a portion of us shall survive ourselves; and that, on quitting this earthly mansion, our soul shall return to the bosom of God, from whence it came, and go to inhabit the eternal region of the living, where to each one shall be rendered according to his works.
It was with this truth that Paul began to announce faith before the Athenian judges. We are the immortal race of God, said he to that assembly of sages; and he has appointed a day to judge the universe. By that the Apostles spread the first principles of the doctrine of salvation through infidel and corrupted nations. But we who come after the revolution of ages, when the plenitude of nations has entered into the church, when the whole universe has professed to believe, when all the mysteries have been cleared up, all the prophecies accomplished, Jesus Christ glorified, the path of heaven laid open; we, who appear in these latter times, when the day of the Lord is so much nearer than when our fathers believed, alas! what ought our ministry to be, unless to dispose believers for that grand hope, and to instruct them to hold themselves in readiness to appear before Jesus Christ, who will quickly come; far from having still to combat these shocking and foolish maxims which the first preaching of the gospel had effaced from the universe.
The pretended uncertainty of a future state is, then, the grand foundation of the security of unbelievers. We know nothing, say they, of that other world of which you tell us so much. None of the dead have ever returned to inform us; perhaps there is nothing beyond the grave: let us enjoy, therefore, the present, and leave to chance a futurity which either exists not, or is meant to be concealed from our knowledge.
Now, I say, that this uncertainty is suspicious in the' principle which produces it, foolish in the proofs on which it depends, and frightful in its consequences. Refuse me not here your attention.
