that is exalted only in the eyes of men, and so frequently recommended to us to love only what we ought for ever to love.
But, exempted perhaps from all these vices which we have just been mentioning, and attached, for a long time past, to the duties of a Christian life, you presume that this terrible examination will either not regard you, or, at any rate, that you will appear there with more confidence than the criminal soul. Undoubtedly, my dear hearer, that will be the day of triumph and glory for the just; the day which will justify these pretended excesses of retreat, mortification, modesty, and delicacy of conscience, which had furnished to the world so many subjects of censure and profane derision. The just shall, no doubt, appear before that awful tribunal with more confidence than the sinner; but he will also appear there, and even his righteousness shall be judged: your virtues, your holy works, will be submitted to that rigorous examination. The world, which often refuses the praises due to the truest virtue, too often likewise grants them to the sole appearances of virtue: there are even so many just who deceive themselves, and who are indebted, for that name and that reputation, merely to the public error. Thus, it is not only Tyre and Sidon that I shall visit in the day of my wrath, saith the Lord; that is to say, those sinners whom their crimes seemed to confound with the unbelievers and the inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon: I shall carry the light of my judgments even to Jerusalem; that is to say, I will examine, I will search into, I will fathom the motives of those holy works which seem to equal you with the most faithful of the holy Jerusalem.
I will trace, even to the source, the motive of that conversion which made so much noise in the world; and it shall be seen whether I find not its origin in some secret disgust, in the declension of youth and fortune, in private views of favour and preferment, rather than in the detestation of sin and love of righteousness.
I will balance those liberalities poured out on the bosom of the poor, those compassionate visits, that zeal for pious undertakings, that protection granted to my servants with complaisance, a desire of esteem, ostentation, and worldly views which have infected them: and, in my sight, they shall perhaps appear to be rather the fruits of pride than the consequences of grace and the work of my Spirit.
I will recall that train of prayer and other holy practices of which you had made a kind of habit, which no longer roused within you any feeling of faith and compunction; and you shall know whether lukewarmness, negligence, the little fruit which attended them, and the little disposition within you previous to them, have not, before me, constituted so many infidelities, for which you shall be judged without mercy.
I will search into that removal from the world and from pleasures, that singularity of conduct, that affectation of modesty and regularity; and perhaps I shall find them more the consequence of humour, temperament, and indolence, than of faith; and that,
