revolution of fears, desires, jealousies, mistrusts, disgusts, and frenzies? And since that passion has stained your soul, have you enjoyed a moment of peace? Let Jesus Christ again be born within your heart; he alone can be your true peace: chase from it the impure spirits, and the mansion of your soul will be at rest; become once more a child of grace: innocence is the only source of tranquillity.
Lastly, the birth of Jesus Christ reconciles men to his Father; it reunites the Gentile and the Jew; it destroys all those hateful distinctions of Greek and Barbarian, of Roman and Scythian; it extinguishes all animosities and hatreds: of all nations it makes only one people, of all his disciples only one heart and one soul: last kind of peace which it brings to men. Formerly they were united together neither by worship, a common hope, nor by the new covenant, which, in an enemy holds out to us a friend. They considered each other almost as creatures of a different species: the diversity of religions, of manners, of countries, of languages, of interests, had, it would appear, as if diversified in them the same nature: scarcely did they recognise each other by that figure of humanity which was the only sign of connexion still remaining to them. Like wild beasts, they mutually exterminated each other: they centred their glory in depopulating the lands of their fellow-creatures, and in carrying in triumph their bloody heads as the splendid memorials of their victories: it might have been said that they held their existence from different irreconcilable creators, always watchful to destroy each other, and who had placed them here below only to revenge their quarrel, and to terminate their disagreement by the general extinction of one of the two parties; every thing disunited man, and nothing bound them together but interest and the passions, which were themselves the sole source of their divisions and animosities.
But Jesus Christ is become our peace, our reconciliation, the corner-stone which binds and unites the whole fabric, the living head which unites all its members, and makes but one body of the whole. Every thing knits us to him, and whatever knits us to him unites us to each other. It is the same Spirit which animates us, the same hope which sustains us, the same bosom which brings us forth, the same fold which assembles us, and the same Shepherd who conducts us: we are children of the same Father, inheritors of the same promises, citizens of the same eternal city, and members of the same body.
Now, my brethren, have so many sacred ties been successful in binding us together? Christianity, which ought to be but the union of hearts, the tie to knit believers to each other, and Jesus Christ to believers, and which ought to represent upon the earth an image of the peace of heaven; Christianity itself is no longer but a horrible theatre of troubles and dissensions: war and fury seem to have established an eternal abode among Christians; religion itself, which ought to unite, divides them. The unbeliever, the enemy of Jesus Christ, the children of the false prophet, who came to spread war and devas-
