SERMON XXIX.
ON THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS.
"Come and see." — John xi. 34.
The most hardened sinner could never submit to the horror of his situation, were he able to see and to know him self such as he is. A soul grown old in guilt, is only bearable to itself, because that the same passion, from which all his miseries spring, conceals them from him, and that his disorder is, at the same time, both the weapon which inflicts the wound and the fatal bandage which hides it from the eyes of the patient.
Behold wherefore the church, in order to lay the sinner open to himself during this time of penitence, almost continually displays to us, under various images, the deplorable state of a soul who has grown old in his iniquity: one while under the figure of a paralytic young man; that is, to mark to us the insensibility and fatal ease which always follow habitual guilt: another, under the symbol of a prodigal reduced to feed with the vilest animals; and, under these traits, it wishes to make us feel his abasement and his infamy: again, under the image of a person born blind, and that is in order to paint to us the depth and the horror of his blindness: and, lastly, under the parable of a deaf and dumb person possessed with a devil; and that is, more animatedly to figure to us the subjection under which habitual guilt holds all the powers of an unfortunate soul.
To-day, in order, as it were to assemble all these traits under a single image, still more terrible and striking, the church proposes to us Lazarus in the tomb, dead for four days, emitting stench and infection, bound hand and foot, his face covered with a napkin, and exciting only horror even in those whom affection and blood had most closely united to him in life.
Come then and see, you, my dear hearer, who live, for so many years past, under the shameful yoke of dissipation, and who are insensible to the misery of your situation. Approach this tomb which the voice of Jesus Christ is now to open before your eyes; and, in that spectacle of infection and putrefaction, behold the true picture of your soul. You fly to profane spectacles in order to see your passions represented under pleasing and deceitful colours: approach, and see them expressed here such as they are: come, and, in that infectious and loathsome carcass, behold what you are in the sight of God, and how much your situation is worthy of your tears.
But in exposing here only the horrible situation of a soul who lives in disorder, lest I trouble and discourage, without holding out to him a hand in order to assist him in quitting that abyss,— that
