you feel not the secret testimony of a clear conscience, which soothes and supports the fervent Christian. You shun, perhaps, certain occasions of pleasure, where innocence is sure of being shipwrecked; but you only experience, in the retreat which divides you from them, a wearisomeness, and a more lively desire for the same pleasures from which you have forced yourself to refrain. You pray, but prayer is no longer but a fatigue; you frequent the society of virtuous persons, but their company becomes so irksome as almost to disgust you with virtue itself. The slightest violence you do upon your inclinations for the sake of heaven, costs you such efforts, that the pleasures and amusements of the world must be applied to, to refresh and invigorate you after this fatigue; the smallest mortification exhausts your body, casts uneasiness and chagrin through your temper, and only consoles you by an immediate determination to abandon its practice. You live unhappy, and without consolation, because you deprive yourself of a world you love, and substitute in its place duties which you love not. Your whole life is but a melancholy fatigue, and a perpetual disgust with yourself. You resemble the Israelites in the desert, disgusted, on the one part, with the manna upon which the Lord had ordered them to subsist; and, on the other, not daring to return to the food of the Egyptians, which they still loved, and which the dread alone of the Almighty's anger induced them to deny themselves. Now, this state of violence cannot endure; we soon tire of any remains of virtue which do not quiet the heart, comfort the reason, and even flatter our selflove; we soon throw off the remains of a yoke which weighs us down, and which we no longer carry through love, but for decency's sake. It is so melancholy to be nothing at all, as I may say, — neither just nor worldly, attached neither to the world nor to Jesus Christ, enjoying neither the pleasures of the senses, nor those of grace, — that it is impossible this wearisome situation of indifference and neutrality can be durable. The heart, and particularly those of a certain description, requires an avowed object to occupy and interest it: if not God, it will soon be the world. A heart, lively, eager, always in extremes, and such as the generality of men possess, cannot be fixed but by the feelings; and to be continually disgusted with virtue, shows a heart already prepared to yield to the attractions of vice.
I know, in the first place, that there are lazy and indolent souls, who seem to keep themselves in this state of equilibration and insensibility; who offer nothing decided, either for the world or virtue; who appear equally distant, by their dispositions, either from the ardours of a faithful piety, or the excesses of profane guilt; who in the midst of the pleasures of the world, preserve a fund of retention and regularity which proves the existence of some remains of virtue, and, in the midst of their religious duties, a fund of carelessness and laxity which still breathes the air and maxims of the world. These are indolent and tranquil hearts, animated in nothing, in whom indolence almost supplies the place of virtue,
