purpose all that vain ostentation? Are you afraid that the Lord forgets your offerings? If you wish only to please him, why expose your gifts to any other eye? Why these titles and these inscriptions which immortalize, on sacred walls, your gifts and your pride? Was it not sufficient that they were written, even by the hand of God, in the book of life? Why engrave on a perishable marble the merit of a deed which charity would have rendered immortal?
Solomon, after having completed the most superb and the most magnificent temple of which the earth could ever boast, engraved the awful name of the Lord alone upon it, without presuming to mingle any memorial of the grandeur of his race with those of the eternal majesty of the King of kings. We give an appellation of piety to this custom; it is thought that these public monuments excite the liberality of believers. But the Lord, hath he charged your vanity with the care of attracting gifts to his altars? And hath he permitted you to depart from modesty, in order to make your brethren more charitable? Alas! the most powerful among the primitive believers, carried humbly as the most obscure their patrimony to the feet of the apostles: they beheld with a holy joy their names and their wealth confounded among those of their brethren who had less than they to offer: they were not distinguished in the assembly of the faithful in proportion to their gifts: honours and precedency were not yet the price of gifts and offerings, and they knew better than to exchange the eternal recompense which they awaited from the Lord for any frivolous glory they could receive from men; and now the church has not privileges enough to satisfy the vanity of her benefactors: their places are marked out in the sanctuary; their tombs appear even under the altar, where only the ashes of martyrs should repose. Custom, it is true, authorizes this abuse; but custom does not always justify what it authorizes.
Charity, my brethren, is that sweet smelling savour of Jesus Christ, which vanishes and is extinguished from the moment that it is exposed. I mean not that public acts of compassion are to be refrained from: we owe the edification and example of them to our brethren: it is proper that they see our works; but we ought not ourselves to see them, and our left hand should be ignorant of what our right bestows: even those actions which duty renders the most shining, ought always to be hidden in the preparation of the heart: we ought to entertain a kind of jealousy of the public view on their account, and to believe their purity in safety only when they are exposed to the eyes of God alone. Yes, my brethren, those liberalities which have flowed mostly in secret, reach the bosom of God much more pure than others, which, even contrary to our wishes, having been exposed to the eyes of men, become troubled and defiled, as I may say, in their course by their inevitable flatteries of self-love, and by the applauses of the beholders: like those rivers which have flowed mostly under ground, and which pour their streams into the ocean pure and undefiled; while,
