those fatigues, of those constraints which our passions impose on us; and whose only fruit is, that of augmenting our miseries, by fortifying our iniquitous passions: these are not the worldly violences which lead to nothing, are of no value, and frequently serve only to render us hateful to those whom we would wish to please; which remove to a greater distance from us the favours we wish to merit by them; which always leave us our hatreds, our desires, our uneasinesses, and our pains: these are violences which advance the work of our sanctification, which, by degrees, destroy within us the work of sin; which perfect, which adorn us; which add every day a new splendour to our soul, a new solidity to our virtues, a new force to our faith, a new facility to our approaches toward salvation, a new firmness to our good desires, and which bear along with them the fruit that rewards and consoles us.
I do not add, that the source of our disgusts is in ourselves rather than in virtue; that it is our passions which give birth to our repugnances; that virtue has nothing in itself but what is amiable; that were our hearts not depraved through love to the flesh, we would find nothing sweet and consoling but the pleasures of innocence; that we are born for virtue and righteousness; that these ought to be our first inclinations, as they are our first distinction; and if we find different dispositions within us, at least we have not virtue, but only ourselves to blame. I could add, that perhaps it is the peculiar character of our heart, which spreads for us so much bitterness through the detail of a Christian life; that, being born perhaps with more lively passions, and a heart more sensible to the world and to pleasure, virtue appears more melancholy and insupportable to us; that, not finding in the service of God the same attraction which we have found in that of the world, our heart, accustomed to lively and animated pleasures, is no longer capable of reconciling itself to the expected dreariness of a Christian life; that the endless dissipation in which we have lived, renders the uniformity of duties more irksome to us; the agitation of parties and pleasures, retirement more disgusting; our total submission to the passions, prayer more painful; the frivolous maxims with which our minds are occupied, the truths of faith more insipid and more unknown; that our mind, being filled with only vain things, with fabulous reading, if nothing worse, with chimerical adventures, and theatrical phantoms, is no longer capable of relishing any thing solid; that, never having accustomed ourselves to any thing serious, it is rare that the seriousness of piety does not disgust us, and that we find not God to our taste, if I dare speak in this manner, we who have never relished any thing but the world and its vain hopes. This being the case, what happiness when we bring back to virtue a heart yet uncorrupted by the world! What happiness to enter into the service of God, with happy inclinations and some remains of our original innocence! — when we begin early to know the Lord; when we return to him in that first season of our life when the world has not yet made such profound and des-
