pleasure in the possession of all they enjoy: in a word, considering as the greatest misfortune the least interruption, however trifling, to their sensual happiness.
Yes, my brethren, it is the great and powerful alone who complain; who continually imagine themselves the only unhappy; who never have enough of comforters; who, on the slightest reverse, see assembled around them, not only those worldly friends whom their rank and fortune procure, but likewise all the pious and enlightened ministers of the gospel, distinguished by the public esteem, and whose holy instructions would, in general, be much better bestowed on so many other unfortunate individuals who are destitute of every worldly resource and religious assistance, and to whom they would likewise be so much more beneficial. But, before the tribunal of Jesus Christ, your afflictions shall be weighed with those of so many of your unfortunate fellow-creatures, and whose misfortunes are so much the more dreadful as they are more hidden and more neglected. It will then be demanded of you, if it belonged to you to complain and to murmur. It will be demanded, if you were entitled to lay such stress upon calamities which would have been consolations to so many others: if it was your business to murmur so highly against a God who treated you with such indulgence, while his hand was so heavy on such an infinity of unhappy fellow-creatures: if they had less right to the riches and to the pleasure of the earth than you: if their soul was less noble, and less precious before God, than yours i in a word, if they were either more criminal, or of another nature than you?
Alas! it is not only our own self-love, but it is likewise our hardness toward our brethren, which magnifies to us our own misfortunes. Let us enter those poor, unprovided dwellings, where shame conceals such bitter and affecting poverty; let us view those asylums of public compassion where every calamity seems to reign: it is there that we shall learn to appreciate our own afflictions: it is there that, touched to the heart with the excess of so many evils, we shall blush to give even a name to the slightness of ours: it is there that our murmurs against Heaven shall be changed into thanksgivings, and that, less taken up with the slight crosses sent us by the Lord, than with so many others from which he spareth us, we shall begin to dread his indulgence, far from complaining of his severity. My God! how awful shall be the judgment of the great and the mighty, since, besides the inevitable abuse of their prosperity, the afflictions, which ought to have sanctified its use and expiated its abuses, shall become themselves their greatest crimes!
But how employ afflictions in sanctifying the dangers of their station, or in working out salvation, since they seem to cast such invincible obstacles in their way? This is the last pretext drawn from the incompatibility which afflictions seem to have with our salvation.
Part III. — It is very surprising, that the corruption of the human heart finds, even in sufferances, obstacles to salvation, and
