Sermons (Massillon)/Sermon 26
SERMON XXVI.
FOR CHRISTMAS DAY.
" For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people; for unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." — Luke ii. 10, 11.
Behold, in effect, the grand tidings which, for four thousand years, the world had expected; behold the grand event which so many prophets had foretold, so many ceremonies had figured, so many righteous had awaited, and which all nature seemed to promise, and to hasten by the universal corruption spread through all flesh: behold the grand blessing which God's goodness prepared for men, after the infidelity of their first parent had rendered them all subject to sin and death.
The Saviour, the Christ, the Lord, at last appears this day on the earth. The over-shadowed brings forth the righteous; the star of Jacob appears to the universe; the sceptre is departed from Judah, and he, who was to come, is arrived; the age of darkness is accomplished; the promised sign of the Lord to Judea hath appeared; a virgin has conceived and brought forth, and out of Bethlehem comes the leader who is to enlighten and govern all Israel.
What new blessings, my brethren, doth this birth not announce to men! It would not, during so many ages, have been announced, awaited, desired; it would not have formed the religion of a whole people, the object of all the prophecies, the unravelling of all the figures, the sole end of all the proceedings of God toward men, had it not been the grandest mark of his love which he could give them. What a blessed night is that which presides at this divine bringing forth! It hath seen the light of the world shine forth in its darkness; the heavens resound with joy and songs of thanksgiving.
But, my brethren, we must participate in the blessings which this birth is meant to bring us, in order to enter into all the transports of delight which it spreads, through the heavens and the earth. The common joy is founded only on the common salvation which is offered to us; and if, in spite of this aid, we still obstinately persist in perishing, the church weeps over us, and we mingle mourning and sorrow with that joy with which such blessed tidings inspire it.
Now, what are the inestimable blessings which this birth brings to men? The heavenly spirits come themselves to make it known to the shepherds; it comes to render glory to God, and peace to men; and behold the whole foundation of this grand mystery laid open. To God, that glory of which men had wished to deprive him; to men, that peace of which they had never ceased their struggles to deprive themselves.
Part I. — Man had been placed upon the earth for the sole purpose of rendering, to the author of his being, that glory and that homage which were his due. All called him to these duties; and every thing, which ought to have called, removed him from them. To his Supreme Majesty he owed his adoration and his homage; to his paternal goodness, his love; to his infinite wisdom, the sacrifice of his reason and of his lights. These duties, engraven on his heart, and born with him, were still also incessantly proclaimed to him by all creatures; he could neither listen to himself, nor to all things around him, without finding them; nevertheless, he forgets, he effaces them from his heart. He no longer saw, in the work, that honour and that worship which were due to the sovereign Architect; in the blessings with which he loaded him, that love which he owed to his benefactor; in the obscurity spread through even natural causes, that impossibility, much less, of fathoming the secrecies of God, and that mistrust, in which he ought to live, of his own lights. Idolatry, therefore, rendered to the creature that worship which the Creator had reserved for himself alone: the synagogue honoured him from the lips, and that love, which it owed to him, was confined to external homages totally unworthy of him: philosophy lost itself in its own ideas, measured the lights of God by those of men, and vainly believed that reason, which knew not itself, was able to know all truth: three sores, spread over the face of the whole earth. In a word, God was no longer either known or glorified, and man was no longer known to himself.
And, first, to what excesses had idolatry not carried its profane worship? The death of a person loved, quickly exalted him to a divinity; and his vile ashes, on which his nothingness was stamped in characters so indelible, became themselves the title of his glory and of his immortality. Conjugal love made gods to itself; impure love followed the example, and determined to have its altars: the wife and the mistress, the husband and the lover, had temples, priests, and sacrifices. The folly, or the general corruption, adopted a worship so ridiculous and so abominable; the whole universe was infected with it; the majesty of the laws of the empire authorized it; and the magnificence of the temples, the pomp of the sacrifices, the immense riches of the images, rendered that folly respectable. Every people was jealous in having their gods; in default of man they offered incense to the beast; impure homages became the worship of these impure divinities; the towns, the mountains, the fields, the deserts, were stained with them, and beheld superb edifices consecrated to pride, to lasciviousness, to revenge. The number of the divinities equalled that of the passions; the gods were almost as numerous as the men; all became god with man; and the true God was the only one unknown to man.
The world was plunged, almost from its creation, in the horror of this darkness; every age had added to it fresh impieties. In proportion as the appointed time of the Deliverer drew near, the depravity of men seemed to increase. Rome itself, mistress of the universe, gave way to all the different worships of the nations she had subjugated; and beheld, exalted within her walls, the different idols of so many conquered countries, that they became the public monuments of her folly and blindness, rather than of her victories.
But, after all, though all flesh had corrupted bis way, God no longer wished to pour out his wrath upon men, nor to exterminate them by a fresh deluge; he wished to save them. He had placed in the heavens the sign of his covenant with the world; and that sign was not the shining, though vulgar rainbow which appears in the clouds; it was Jesus Christ his only Son, the Word made flesh, the true seal of the eternal covenant, and the sole light which comes to enlighten the whole world.
He appears on the earth, and restores to his Father that glory of which the impiety of a public worship had wished to deprive him. The homage rendered to him, by his holy soul united to the world, at once makes amends to his Supreme Majesty for all the honours which the universe had hitherto denied him, in order to prostitute them to a creature. A Man-God adorer renders more glory to the Divinity than all idolatrous ages and nations had deprived him of; and such homage must indeed have been agreeable to the sovereign God, seeing it alone effaced idolatry from the earth, made the blood of impure victims cease to flow, overturned the profane altars, silenced the oracles of demons, reduced to dust the vain idols, and changed their superb temples, till then the receptacle of every abomination, into houses of adoration and prayer. Thus was the universe changed: the only God, unknown even in Athens, and in those cities most celebrated for knowledge and polished manners, was worshipped: the world acknowledged its Author: God entered into his rights; a worship worthy of him was established over the whole earth; and he had every where adorers, who worshipped him in spirit and in truth.
Behold the first blessing accruing from the birth of Jesus Christ, and the first glory which he renders to his Father. But, my brethren, is this grand blessing for us? We no longer worship vain idols, — an incestuous Jupiter, a lascivious Venus, a cruel and a revengeful Mars; but is God, therefore, more glorified among us? In their place do we not substitute fortune, voluptuousness, court favour, the world, with all its pleasures? For, whatever we love more than God, that we worship; whatever we prefer to God, that becomes our God: whatever becomes the sole object of our thoughts, of our desires, of our affections, of our fears and hopes, becomes likewise the object of our worship; and our gods are our passions, to which we sacrifice the true God.
Now, what idols of this kind still remain in the Christian world? You, that unfortunate creature, to whom you have prostituted your heart; to whom you sacrifice your wealth, your fortune, your glory, your peace; and from whom neither religious motives, nor even those of the world, can detach you, that is your idol; and what less is she than your divinity, since, in your madness, you do not refuse her even the name? You that court that fortune which engrosses you, to which you devote all your cares, all your exertions, all your movements, in short, your whole soul, mind, will, and life, that is your idol; and what criminal homage do you refuse from the moment that it is exacted of you, and that it may become the price of its favour? You, that shameful intemperance, which debases your name and birth; which no longer accords even with our manners; which has drowned and besotted all your talents in the excesses of wine and debauchery; which, by rendering you callous to every thing else, leaves you neither relish nor feeling but for the brutal pleasures of the table, that is your idol: you think that you live only in those moments given to it: and your heart renders more homage to that infamous and abject god than your despicable and profane songs. The passions formerly made the gods; and Jesus Christ hath destroyed these idols only by destroying the passions which had raised them up; you exalt them again, by reviving all the passions which had rendered the whole world idolatrous. And what matters it to know a single god, if you elsewhere bestow your homages? Worship is in the heart; and if the true God be not the God of your heart, you place, like the pagans, vile creatures in his place, and you render not to him that glory which is his due.
Thus, Jesus Christ doth not confine himself to manifesting the name of his Father to men, and to establishing, on the ruins of idols, the knowledge of the true God. He raiseth up worshippers, who reckon external homages as nothing, unless animated and sanctified by love; and who shall consider mercy, justice, and holiness, as the offerings most worthy of God, and the most shining attendants of their worship. — Second blessing from the birth of Jesus Christ, and second sort of glory which he renders to his Father.
In effect, God was known, says the prophet, in Judea; Jerusalem beheld no idols in the public places, usurping the homages due to the God of Abraham; " There was neither iniquity in Jacob, nor perverseness in Israel:" that single portion of the earth was free from the general contagion. But the magnificence of its temple, the pomp of its sacrifices, the splendour of its solemnities, the exactitude of its lawful observances, constituted the whole merit of its worship; all religion was confined to these external duties. Its morals were not less criminal. Injustice, fraud, falsehood, adultery, every vice subsisted, and was even countenanced by these vain appearances of worship. God was honoured from the lips; but the heart of that ungrateful people was ever distant from him.
Jesus Christ comes to open the eyes of Judea on an error so gross, so ancient, and so injurious to his Father. He comes to inform them, that man may be satisfied with externals alone, but that God regards only the heart; that every outward homage which withholds it from him, is an insult and a hypocrisy rather than a true worship; that it matters little to purify the external, if the internal be full of infection and putrefaction; and that God is truly worshipped only by loving him.
But, alas! my brethren, is this mistake, so wretched, and so often reproached to the synagogue by Jesus Christ, not still the error of the majority of us? To what, in fact, is the whole of our worship reduced? To some external ceremonies; to fulfilling certain public duties prescribed by the law; and even this is the religion of the most respectable. They come to assist in the holy mysteries; they do not, without scruple, depart from the laws of the church; they repeat some prayers which custom has consecrated; they go through the solemnities, and increase the crowd which runs to our temples: — behold the whole. But are they, in consequence, more detached from the world and from its criminal pleasures; — less occupied with the cares of a vain dress, or of fortune; — more inclined to break off a criminal engagement, or to fly opportunities which have so often been a rock to their innocence? Do they bring to these external practices of religion, a pure heart, a lively faith, a guileless charity? All their passions submit amid all these religious works, which are given to custom rather than to religion.
And remark, I pray you, my brethren, that they would not dare to dispense themselves altogether from them; to live, like the impious, without any profession of worship, and without fulfilling at least some of its public duties. They would consider themselves as anathematized, and worthy of the thunder of heaven. And yet they dare to sully these holy duties by the most criminal manners! and yet they do not view themselves with horror, while rendering useless these superficial remains of religion, by a life which religion condemns and abhors! and they dread not the wrath of God, in continuing crimes which attract it on our heads, and in limiting all that is his due to vain homages which insult him!
Nevertheless, as I have already said, of all the worldly, these are the most prudent, and, in the eyes of the world, the most regular. They have not yet thrown off the yoke, like so many others; they do not arrogate to themselves a shocking glory in not believing in God; they blaspheme not what they do not know; they do not consider religion as a mockery and a human invention; they still wish to hold to it by some externals; but they hold not to it by the heart; but they dishonour it by their irregularities; but they are not Christians but in name. Thus, even in a greater degree than formerly under the synagogue, the magnificent externals of religion subsist among us, along with a more profound and more general depravity of manners than ever the prophets reproached to the obstinacy and hypocrisy of the Jews: thus, that religion, in which we glory, is no longer, to the greatest number of believers, but a superficial worship: thus, that new covenant, which ought to be written only in the heart; that law of spirit and life, which ought to render men wholly spiritual; that inward worship, which ought to have given to God worshippers in spirit and in truth, — has given him only phantoms, only fictitious adorers; the mere appearances of worship: in a word, but a people still Jewish, which honours him from the lips, but whose corrupted heart, stained with a thousand crimes, chained by a thousand iniquitous passions, is always far distant from him.
Behold the second blessing of the birth of Jesus Christ, in which we have no part. He comes to abolish a worship wholly external, which was confined to sacrifices of animals and lawful ceremonies, and which, in not rendering »to God the homage of our love, alone capable of glorifying him, rendered not to him that glory which is his due: in place of these appearances of religion, he comes to substitute a law which ought to be fulfilled wholly in the heart: a worship, of which the love of his Father ought to be the first and principal homage. Nevertheless, this holy worship, this new precept, this sacred trust, which he hath confided to us, has miserably degenerated in our hands; we have turned it into a worship wholly pharisaical, in which the heart has no part; which has no influence in changing our irregular propensities; which has no effect upon our manners, and which only renders us so much the more criminal, as we abuse the blessing which ought to wash out and purify all our crimes.
Lastly, men had likewise wished to ravish from God the glory of his providence and of his eternal wisdom. Philosophers, struck with the absurdity of a worship which multiplied gods to infinity, and forced, by the sole lights of reason, to acknowledge one sole Supreme Being, disfigured the nature of that Being by a thousand absurd opinions. Some figured to themselves an indolent god; retired within himself, in full possession of his own happiness, disdaining to abase himself by paying attention to what passes on the earth, reckoning as nothing men whom he had created, equally insensible to their virtues as to their vices, and leaving wholly to chance the course of ages and seasons, the revolutions of empires, the lot of each individual, the whole machine of this vast universe, and the whole dispensation of human things. Others subjected him to a fatal chain of events; they made him a God without liberty and without power; and, while they regarded him as the master of men, they believed him to be the slave of destiny. The errors of reason were then the only rule of religion, and of the belief of those who were considered as even the wisest and most enlightened.
Jesus Christ comes to restore to his Father that glory of which the vain reasonings of philosophy had deprived him. He comes to teach to men that faith is the source of true light; and that the sacrifice of reason is the first step of Christian philosophy. He comes to fix uncertainty, by instructing us in what we ought to know of the Supreme Being, and, what, with regard to him, we ought not to know.
It was not, in effect, sufficient that men, in order to render glory to God, should make a sacrifice to him of their life, as to the author of their being, and should, by that avowal, acknowledge the impiety of idolatry; that they should make a sacrifice to him of their love and of their heart, as to their sovereign felicity, and thereby proclaim the insufficiency and the inutility of the external and pharisaical worship of the synagogue; it was likewise required, that to him they should sacrifice their reason, as to their wisdom and to their eternal truth, and thus be undeceived with regard to the vain researches and the conceited knowledge of philosophers.
Now, the sole birth of a Man-God, the ineffable union of our nature with a divine person, disconcerts all human reason; and this incomprehensible mystery held out to men as their whole knowledge, their whole truth, their whole philosophy, their whole religion, at once makes them feel that the truth, which they hitherto had in vain sought, must be sought, not by vain efforts, but by the sacrifice of reason and of our feeble lights.
But, alas! where among us are believers who make a thorough sacrifice of their reason to faith; and who, rejecting their own lights, humble their eyes, in a respectful and sile/it adoration, before the majestic impenetrability of religion? I speak not of those impious, still to be found among us, who deny a God. Ah! we must leave them to the horror and the indignation of the whole universe which knows a Divinity, and which worships him; or rather leave them to the horror of their own conscience, which inwardly invokes and calls upon him in spite of themselves, while outwardly they are glorifying themselves in professing not to know him.
I speak of the majority of believers, who have an idea of the Divinity, almost equally false and equally human, as had formerly the pagan philosophers; who consider him as nothing in all the accidents of life; who live as if chance, or the caprice of men, determined all things here below; and who acknowledge good luck and bad luck as two sole divinities which govern the world, and which preside over every thing relative to the earth. I speak of those men of little faith, who, far from adoring the secrecies of futurity in the profound and impenetrable councils of Providence, go to search for them in ridiculous and childish prophecies; attribute to man a knowledge which God hath solely reserved to himself; with a senseless belief await, from the dreams of a false prophet, events and revolutions which are to decide the destiny of nations and empires; found thereupon vain hopes for themselves, and renew either the folly of pagan augurs and soothsayers, or the impiety of the pythoness of Saul, and of the oracles of Delphi and Dodona. I speak of those who wish to penetrate into the eternal ways of God on our lots; and who, being unable, by the sole powers of reason, to solve the insurmountable difficulties of the mysteries of grace with regard to the salvation of men, far from crying out with the apostle, " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God V* are tempted to believe, either that God doth not interfere in our salvation; or, if he do, that it is needless for us to interfere in it ourselves. I speak of those dissolute characters in the world, who always find plausible and convincing, though, in fact, weak and foolish in the extreme, whatever unbelief opposes to faith; who are staggered by the first frivolous doubt proposed by the impious; who appear as if they would be delighted that religion were false; and who are less touched with that respectable load of proofs which overpowers a conceited reason and its truth, than with a senseless discourse which opposes it, in which there is generally nothing important but the boldness of the impiety and of the blasphemy. Lastly, I speak of many believers who turn over to the people the belief of so many wonderful actions which the history of religion has preserved to us; who seem to believe that whatever is above the power of man is likewise beyond the power of God; and who refuse credit to the miracles of a religion which is solely founded on them, and which is itself the greatest of all miracles.
Behold how we still snatched from God that glory which the birth of Jesus Christ had rendered to him. It had taught us to sacrifice our own lights to the incomprehensible mystery of his manifestation in our flesh, and no longer to live but by faith; it had fixed the uncertainties of the human mind, and recalled it from the errors and the abyss in which reason had plunged it, to the way of truth and life, and we abandon it: and even under the empire of faith we wish still to walk as formerly, under the standards, if I may venture to speak in this manner, of a weak reason: the mysteries of religion, which we cannot comprehend, shock us; we suspect, we reform all; we would have God to think like man. Without altogether losing our faith, we suffer it to be inwardly weakened; we allow it to remain inactive: and it is this relaxation of faith which has corrupted our manners, multiplied vices, inflamed all hearts with a love of things present; extinguished the love of riches to come; placed trouble, hatred, and dissension among believers, and effaced those original marks of innocence, of sanctity, and of charity, which at first had rendered Christianity so respectable even to those who refused submission to it. But not only doth the birth of Jesus Christ restore to God that glory of which men had wished to deprive him; it likewise restores to men that peace, of which they had never ceased to deprive themselves: " And on earth peace, good-will toward men."
Part II. — A universal peace reigned throughout the universe, when Jesus Christ, the "Prince of Peace," appeared on the earth. All the nations subject to the Roman empire peaceably supported the yoke of those haughty masters of the world. Rome herself, after civil dissensions, which had almost depopulated her walls, filled the islands and deserts with her proscribed, and bathed Europe and Asia with the blood of her citizens, breathed from the horror of these troubles, and reunited under the authority of a Caesar, experienced in slavery, a peace which she had never, during the enjoyment of her liberty, been able to accomplish.
The universe was then at rest; but that was but a deceitful calm. Man, the prey of his own violent and iniquitous passions, experienced within himself the most cruel dissension and war: far from God, delivered up to the agitations and frenzies of his own heart, combated by the multiplicity and the eternal contrariety of his irregular propensities, he was unable to find peace, because he never sought it but in the source of all his troubles and disquiets. Philosophers made a boast of being able to bestow it on their followers; but that universal calm of the passions which they gave hopes of to their sage, and which they so emphatically announced, might suppress their sallies, but it left the whole venom in the heart. It was a piece of pride and ostentation; it masked the outward man; but under that mask of ceremony, man always knew himself to be the same.
Jesus Christ comes to-day upon the earth, to bring that true peace to men which the world had never hitherto been able to give them. He comes radically to cure the evil; his divine philosophy is not confined to the promulgation of pompous precepts, which might be agreeable to reason, but which cured not the wounds of the heart; and, as pride, voluptuousness, hatred, and revenge, had been the fatal sources of all the agitations experienced by the heart of man, he comes to restore peace to him, by draining them off, through his grace, his doctrine, and his example.
Yes, my brethren, I say that pride had been the original source of all the troubles which tore the heart of men. What wars, what frenzies, had that fatal passion not lighted upon the earth! With what torrents of blood had it not inundated the universe! And what is the history of nations and of empires, of princes and of conquerors, of every age and people, but the history of those calamities with which pride from the beginning had afflicted men! The entire world was but a gloomy theatre, upon which that haughty and senseless passion every day exhibited the most bloody scenes. But the external operations were but a faint image of the troubles which the proud man inwardly experienced. Ambition was a virtue: moderation was looked upon as meanness: an individual overthrew his country, overturned the laws and customs, rendered millions miserable, in order to usurp the first place among his fellow-citizens; and the success of his guilt insured him every homage; and his name, stained with the blood of his brethren, acquired only additional lustre in the public annals which preserved its memory: and a prosperous villain became the grandest character of his age. That passion, descending among the crowd, became less striking; but it was neither less animated nor furious: the obscure was not more at his ease than the public man; each wished to carry off the prize from his equals: the orator, the philosopher, wrangled for, and tore from each other that glory, which, in fact, was the sole end of all their toils and watchings; and, as the desires of pride are insatiable, man, to whom it was then honourable totally to yield himself up to it, being unable to rest in any degree of elevation, was likewise incapable of peace and tranquillity. Pride, become the sole source of human honour and glory, was likewise become the fatal rock of the quiet and happiness of men.
The birth of Jesus Christ, by correcting the world of this error, re-establishes on the earth that peace which pride had banished from it. He might have manifested himself to men, with all the marks of splendour which the prophets attributed to him: he might have assumed the pompous titles of conqueror of Judah, of legislator of the people, of deliverer of Israel: Jerusalem, in these glorious marks, would have recognized him whom she awaited: but Jerusalem, in these titles, saw only a human glory; and Jesus Christ comes to undeceive, and to teach her, that such glory is nothing; that such an expectation had been unworthy of the oracles of so many prophets who had announced him: that the Holy Spirit, which inspired them, could hold out only holiness and eternal riches to men; that all other riches, far from rendering them happy, only increased their evils and crimes: and that his visible ministry was to correspond with the splendid promises, which had, for so many ages announced him, only by being wholly spiritual, and that he should intend only the salvation of men.
Thus, he is born at Bethlehem, in a poor and abject state, without external state or splendour; he whose birth the songs of all the armies of heaven then celebrated: without title which might distinguish him in the eyes of men; he who was exalted above all principality or power: he suffers his name to be written down among those of the obscurest subjects of Caesar; he whose name was above all other names, and who alone had the right of writing down the names of his chosen in the book of eternity: vulgar and simple shepherds alone came to pay him homage; he, before whom whatever is mighty on the earth, in heaven, and in hell, ought to bend the knee: lastly, whatever can confound human pride is assembled at the spectacle of his birth. If titles, rank, or prosperity, had been able to render us happy here below, and to shed peace through our heart, Jesus Christ would have made his appearance clothed in them, and would have brought all these riches to his disciples; but he brings peace to us only by holding them in contempt, and by teaching us to hold them equally in contempt: he comes to render us happy, only by coming to suppress desires which hitherto had occasioned all our disquiets: he comes to point out to us more solid and more durable riches, alone capable of calming our hearts, of filling our desires, of easing our troubles; riches of which man cannot deprive us, and which require only to be loved and to be wished for, to be assured of possessing them.
Nevertheless, who tastes of this blessed peace? Wars, troubles, frenzies, are they more rare since his birth? Are those empires and states which worship him, in consequence more peaceful? Does that pride which he came to destroy occasion less commotion and confusion among men? Alas! seek among Christians that peace which ought to be their inheritance, and where shall you find it? — In cities? Pride sets every thing there in motion; every one wishes to soar above the rank of his ancestors: an individual, exalted by fortune, destroys the happiness of thousands who walk in his steps, without being able to attain the same point of prosperity. In the circle of domestic walls? They conceal only distresses and cares: and the father of the family, solely occupied with the advancement, rather than the Christian education of his offspring, leaves to them, for inheritance, his agitations and disquiets, which they, in their turn, shall one day transmit to their descendants. In the palaces of kings? But there it is that a lawless and boundless ambition gnaws and devours every heart; it is there that under the specious mask of joy and tranquillity, the most violent and the bitterest passions are nourished; it is there that happiness apparently resides, and yet where pride occasions the greatest number of discontented and miserable. In the sanctuary? Alas! there ought surely to be found an asylum of peace; but ambition pervades even the holy place; the efforts there are more to raise themselves above their brethren, than to render themselves useful to them; the holy dignities of the church become, like those of the age, the reward of intrigue and caballing; the religious circumspection of the prince cannot put a stop to solicitations and private intrigues; we there see the same inveteracy and rivalships, the same sorrow in consequence of neglect, the same jealousy toward those who are preferred to us; a ministry is boldly canvassed for, which ought to be accepted only with fear and trembling: they seat themselves in the temple of God, though placed there by other hands than his: they head the flock without his consent to whom it belongs, and without his having said, as to Peter, ** Feed my sheep;? and as they have taken the charge without call and without ability, the flock are led without edification and without fruit: alas! and often with shame. — O peace of Jesus Christ! which surpassest all sense, sole remedy against the troubles which pride incessantly excites in our hearts, who shall then be able to give thee to man?
But, secondly, if the disquiets of pride had banished peace from the earth, the impure desires of the flesh had not given rise to fewer troubles. Man, forgetting the excellency of his nature, and the sanctity of his origin, gave himself up, like the beasts, without scruple, to the impetuosity of that brutal instinct. Finding it the most violent and the most universal of his propensities, he believed it to be also the most innocent and the most lawful. In order still more to authorize it, he made it part of his worship, and formed to himself impure gods, in whose temples that infamous vice became the only homage which did honour to their altars: even a philosopher, in other respects the wisest of pagans, dreading that marriage should put a kind of check on that deplorable passion, had wished to abolish that sacred bond; to permit among men, as among animals, a brutal confusion, and only multiply the human race through crimes. The more that vice became general, the more it lost the name of vice: and, nevertheless, what a deluge of miseries had it not poured out upon the earth! With what fury had it not been seen to arm people against people, kings against kings, blood against blood, brethren against brethren, every where carrying trouble and carnage, and shaking the whole universe! Ruins of cities, wrecks of the most flourishing empires, sceptres and crowns overthrown, became the public and gloomy monuments which every age reared up, in order, it would seem, to preserve, to following ages, the remembrance and the fatal tradition of those calamities with which that vice had afflicted the human race. It became itself an inexhaustible source of troubles and anxieties to the man who then gave himself up to a boundless gratification of it: it held out peace and pleasure; but jealousy, excess, frenzy, disgust, inconstancy, and black chagrin, continually walked in its steps; till then, that the laws, the religion, and the common example authorizing it, the sole love of ease, even in these ages of darkness and corruption, kept free from it a small number of sages.
But that motive was too feeble to check its impetuous course, and to extinguish its fires in the heart of men; a more powerful remedy was required, and that is the birth of the Deliverer, who comes to draw men out of that abyss of corruption in order to render them pure and without stain; to break asunder those shameful bonds, and to give peace to their hearts, by restoring to them that freedom and innocence, of which the slavery and tyranny of that vice had deprived them. He is born of a virgin-mother, and the purest of all created beings: he thereby gives estimation and honour to a virtue unknown to the world, and which even his people considered as a reproach. Besides, in uniting himself with us, he becomes our head, incorporates us with himself, makes us become members of his mystical body, of that body which no longer receives life and influence but from him, of that body whose every ministry is holy, which is to be seated at the right hand of the living God, and to glorify him for ever.
Behold, my brethren, to what height of honour Jesus Christ, in this mystery, exalts our flesh; he makes of it the temple of God, the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit, the portion of a body in which the fulness of the Divinity resides, the object of the kindness and the love of his Father. But do we not still profane this holy temple? Do we not still turn to shame the members of Jesus Christ? Do we, in a higher degree, respect our flesh since it is become a holy portion of his mystical body? Does that shameful passion not still exercise the same tyranny over Christians, that is to say, over the children of sanctity and liberty? Does it not still disturb the peace of the universe, the tranquillity of empires, the harmony of families, the order of society, the confidence of marriage, the innocence of social intercourse, the lot of every individual? Are not the most tragical spectacles still every day furnished to the world by it? Does it respect the most sacred ties and the most respectable character? Does it not reckon as nothing every duty? Does it pay attention even to decency? And does it not turn all society into a frightful confusion, where custom has effaced every rule? Even you, who listen to me, from whence have arisen all the miseries and unhappinesses of your life? Is it not from that deplorable passion? Is it not that which has overturned your fortune, which has cast trouble and dissension through the heart of your family, which has swallowed up the patrimony of your fathers, which has dishonoured your name, which has ruined your health, and now makes you to drag on a gloomy and disgraceful life on the earth? Is it not, at least, that which actually rends your heart, at present filled with it? What goes on within you but a tumultuous 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 devastation through men, are at peace; and the children of peace, and the disciples of him who, this day, comes to bring it to men, have their hands continually armed with fire and sword against each other! Kings rise up against kings, nations against nations; the seas, which separate, reunite them for their mutual destruction: a vile morsel of stone arms their fury and revenge; and whole nations go to perish and to bury themselves under its walls, in contesting to whom shall belong its ruins: the earth is not sufficiently vast to contain them, and to fix them each one in the bonds which nature herself seems to have pointed out for states and empires; each wishes to usurp from his neighbour; and a miserable field of battle, which is scarcely sufficient to serve as a burial-place to those who have disputed it, becomes the prize of those rivers of blood with which it is for ever stained. O divine Reconciliator of men! return then once more upon the earth, since the peace which thou broughtest to it at thy birth still leaves so many wars and so many calamities in the universe!
Nor is this all: that circle itself, which unites us under the same laws, unites not the heart and affections; hatred and jealousies divide citizens equally as they divide nations; animosities are perpetuated in families, and fathers transmit them to their children, as an accursed inheritance. In vain may the authority of the prince disarm the hand, it disarms not the heart; in vain may the sword be wrested from them, with the sword of the tongue they continue a thousand times more cruelly to pierce their enemy; hatred, under the necessity of confining itself within, becomes deeper and more rancorous, and to forgive is looked upon as a dishonourable weakness. Oh! my brethren, in vain then hath Jesus Christ descended upon the earth! He is come to bring peace to us; he hath left it to us as his inheritance; nothing hath he so strongly recommended to us as that of loving each other; yet fellowship and peace seem as if banished from among us, and hatred and animosity divide court, city, and families; and those whom the offices, the interests of the state, decency itself, and blood, ought, at least, to unite, — tear, defame, would wish to destroy, and to exalt themselves on the ruins of each other: and religion, which shows us our brethren even in our enemies, is no longer listened to; and that awful threatening, which gives us room to expect the same severity on the part of God which we shall have shown to our brethren, no longer touches or affects us; and all these motives, so capable of softening the heart, still leave it filled with all the bitterness of hatred. We tranquilly live in this frightful state: the justice of our complaints with regard to our enemies calms us on the injustice of our hatred and of our rooted aversion toward them; and if, on the approach of death, we apparently hold out to them the hand of reconciliation, it is not that we love them more, it is because the expiring heart hath no longer the force to sustain its hatred, that almost all our feelings are extinguished, or, at least, that we are no longer capable of feeling any thing but our own weakness and our approaching dissolution. Let us then unite ourselves to the newly-born Jesus Christ; let us enter into the spirit of that mystery; with him let us render to God that glory which is his due; it is the only means of restoring to ourselves that peace, of which our passions have hitherto deprived us.