our happiness, and our affection renders easy and delightful the sacrifices, subjection, and constancy which duty imposes upon us. We become better through the same means that enable us to love, and, on the other hand, our friendships and affections are purified by the trials of devotion, by the warmth of virtue.

My brethren, God knoweth whereof we are made, and his religion is a law of love.

One of the greatest benefits conferred on the world by the Gospel was to teach man how to love. To love is easy enough, but to love according to one's duty is less so. Thus when pagan antiquity often exhibits to us some of the noblest affections carried to excess, as patriotism, for instance, we find that even by that very excess these affections lead to hardness of heart instead of pity, and eventually change to egotism. Man then loved without knowing how to love. The Gospel, by its mild and practical lessons, above all by the example of our Divine Master himselfthe Gospel, which regulates all our instincts and powers, regulates also our affections; it assigns to each its value, degree, and season; it ranges them all in their several order; some are made to serve as counterpoise to others, and are thus prevented from injuring or crushing one another, or being led away to mistaken or unjust preferences; they are tempered without being equalized; without being chilled they are restrained within proper limits, and their action directed without being compressed; they are held together and sanctioned by the common bond of charity, by the influence of that law which commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves. This is not all: as the heart of man is too vast for man to fill it, the Gospel presents to him a fresh object for his love-God, God himself; and reducing all religion, all worship to love, the Gospel tells us to love God with all our heart, with all our strength, and with all our thoughts. And as just motives for this love, the Gospel lays before us the creation with its wonders, Providence with its cares, redemption with its mercies, immortality and its hopes. All this is expressed by the Gospel in one single line-God first loved us. Only love is required as a return for so much love, and Christianity teaches us that we have always lived long enough when we have loved enough.

My brethren, behold man, and behold his religion; what harmony between them! Man is endowed with reason, imagination, conscience, and sensibility; God knoweth whereof we are made; our religion includes science, poetry, morality, and a law of love. If then the harmony of our nature and our religion be so complete, how comes it that its effect is so often lost? This we have still to examine.

One single cause explains how a religion otherwise so con

formable

formable to our faculties, our instincts, and our feelings, should often exercise but a feeble influence on those even who profess and admire it. It is that they make use of their religion, they believe and practise it, if we may so speak, with only one of their faculties instead of all; they are Christians, some through reason, others through imagination; some through conscience, others again through sensibility; and the consequence is, if I may reduce my thought to figures, that they are Christians through a fraction only of the faculties of their soul; what remains neither believes nor worships. Their Christianity then adopts the colouring of the faculty which has laid hold of it, and they possess and admire but a curtailed, disfigured Christianity, which must prove utterly powerless in supporting them in the great occasions of life and in the great shadows of death.

Be religious through your reason only, and your religion will be insensibly reduced, perhaps without your perceiving it, to be but a course of history or a philosophical system. You will store your mind with one more science, you will have added nothing to your heart, your mind will be greatly enlightened, and you will learnedly discuss the truths of faith and the scenes of the Gospel, your heart will remain cold and unmoved. You will find a very curious epoch to study in the annals of mankind, viz., the mission of a Saviour and the establishment of Christianity; you will meet with an historical personage whose life and death are deserving of great attention-Jesus Christ; you will find a collection of perfectly connected precepts, Christian doctrine; a masterpiece of philosophy effacing every system of antiquity, and which has inspired every modern system; a complete theory, which embraces as much as the human mind can comprehend, and whose principles have placed the social condition of humanity on a new footing. . . . . And reasoning in this way, all these convictions will result from science and not religion; your belief will be historical and philosophical instead of being fervent and pious; it will prove listless instead of being lively, sterile instead of fruitful; it will occupy your intellect without finding its way to your heart. I know not what it may profit you for this life, still less how it will profit you in death; I see that you are learned and wise much more than a Christian. You are religious through reason only; you possess but a science.

Be religious only through your imagination, and you will inevitably fall into mysticism; your belief will be a dream, a chimera, a fantasy: it will be satisfied with words; it will be puffed up with emptiness; it will feed on pious deceptions; it will gain a strange and perilous taste for the marvellous; it will fear to understand; it will avoid light, and willingly envelope itself in cunning

cunning and convenient darkness; as the High Priest of Israel, who entered once a year into the sanctuary, it dares not gaze on the ark of the covenant but through a cloud of incense; and at length by seeking such a quintessence of truth, your mysticism will become error. And do not imagine this extreme point so very difficult of attainment. When imagination rules faith, we soon fall into a curious habit of exaggeration, which consists in thinking the Gospel not sufficiently beautiful-as it is. Without exactly confessing it, we begin to embellish, and in the secret recesses of our heart we delight in darkening its mysteries, increasing its holiness, adding yet more shades to its colouring, heightening its grandeur; we take pleasure in adding yet more innocence to the manger, yet more agony to the cross; we finish by introducing into Christianity supposed severity or mercies; wo render the grave more gloomy, heaven more beautiful, hell more hideous, and by means of thus losing ourselves in the clouds we have drawn around us, by means of resting upon mere shadows, these shadows vanish when we would fain seek the foundation of our faith. In the midst of these reveries we have taken a distaste to the realities of life and religion; we have made to ourselves a poetical Christianity, which is but badly applicable to the events of everyday life; we are poets and artists in our religion much more than Christians; we are religious only through imagination; our religion is but mystical, is but poetical.

Be religious from motives of conscience only, and you will exchange the name of servant, and bought of Christ, for that of a just or honourable man. My brethren, our conscience is always that of our country and our age; the virtues of the world in which we take our place, the virtues of the time in which we live, are those which our conscience without further examination exalts and approves; and if you reduce your religion to be but a system of morality, which will inevitably happen if you seek it with the help of conscience only, you will practise merely what is practised around you; you will honour in your own conduct that which is honoured; you will applaud according as the wind shall bring you the applause of the day, and satisfied, with yourselves to that extent, you will admit no further obligation of perfection. Your religion will become of convenient rigour, and you will imagine yourselves sufficiently religious without a positive belief, without a worship, without prayers, and without communion. What is religion worth, in fact, if probity suffice, and if, without believing or professing anything, conscience afford all the requisite resources for life and death, with all their changes and chances; if we know how to sacrifice and devote ourselves in the hour of need;if we know, what is still more difficult to learn, how to resign ourselves,

selves, and hope? But how often has this been proved! This morality without faith abandons us when most required-in adversity, in neglect, in mourning, in death-and when one or other of these storms arises, and envelopes and shakes us, we regret, alas! too late, that we sought for strength in ourselves and not in Christ, not in God. There is no longer time; religion is absent; we are not Christians; we are moralists; we are religious only through morality.

Lastly, be religious only with your sensibility, and love becoming the spring instead of the crowning point of the work; love, absorbing all-reason, imagination, conscience-without being able to replace all, love will become so vapid, loose, and shadowy, that it no longer deserves its name, that it loses its power and beauty, that it possesses no more true charity, and degenerates into a sickly habit of sterile emotion. The usual feature of this sonorous and empty charity is to be greatly moved, at least outwardly and in appearance, and to do but little; sympathy and tears are showered on the miserable and wicked, but nothing more is done for them, and the sight of so much misery is thought too painful for such profound commiseration. This sort of religious sensibility has caused God to be loved with an affection akin to sacrilege; has caused Jesus to be loved even to profanation; and more frequently still has mankind been loved with such fervour and pity-that no love remained for a family, for children, friends, or benefactors. These vulgar affections, felt by the generality of men, cherished by the generality of Christians, what are they indeed for a heart whose vast charity embraces with burning compassion the whole of the human race! This sort of sensibility loves from afar, and forgets the natural family at its side to pour forth its interest only upon the great family of men, who are all brothers. Sometimes taking a still more vague and mistaken direction, this sensibility loves God to the point of loving no one else, to the degree of crushing all other affection, to the degree of being selfishly lost in ecstacy and rejoicing at the death of a fellow-creature, because then the love for the creature is no longer put in competition with that for the Creator; and when we find faith with such hardness of heart, when we would fain have the duties of earth and family ties remembered, we are languidly told that we must love our relations in God. . . . What an impious play on words! what irreligious confusion of thought! what a corruption of the pure instinct of sensibility! .... My brethren, sooner or later we are entrapped in these snares of vanity if we try to love otherwise than man can love-when we assimilate our love for our neighbour with our love for God-when we refuse to leave God in His place and man in his. It has been thought that sensibility might engender

religion,

religion, and religion thus becomes a mere reverie of sensibility

Christians, behold the shoals of danger, but the port of refuge is at hand. When you cultivate your religious sense, and lay hold of the Christian faith with only one of your faculties, the faculties which you leave undisturbed, forgotten, or idle, become discontented with this piety, in which they take no part, and rebel and cast it off. Recollect to make use of all your faculties then when appropriating Christianity to yourselves; work in good earnest; unite, bring together all your faculties, that through their general assistance you may believe. If it be possible let not one of them predominate in your profession of Christianity; if, indeed, one or other must prevail, if you be more of a logician than a poet, more a moralist than a being of affection, at all events do not sacrifice the weaker to the more active influences. . . Encourage the weak to resist the strong; and as you are commanded by God to love Him with all your strength, so seek his truth likewise with all your strength. Let a fruitful and salutary harmony enlighten your reason, elevate your imagination, sanctify your conscience, and purify and excite your sensibility. This is asking, it would seem, very much, but not too much. God has not endowed our soul with such admirable faculties for them to be at variance with one another; he established peace between them, and we ourselves are the authors of this intestine discord, by our ambitious partiality for one or the other. Try then to maintain or renew the divine equilibrium in these internal qualities, and your reason in its researches, your imagination in its flights, your conscience in its warnings, your sensibility in its ardour will then make you discover, believe, profess, cherish, one only and the same religion. Studies, poetry, morality and love, all will constantly lead you to the delightful certainty of one only God, our common Father, one only Christ, our universal Saviour, one only revelation as the complement of our faculties, one only Church on earth, and one only immortality in heaven; all will lead to this delightful thought that Christianity is sufficient for us, since it was given us by that All bountiful God who knoweth whereof we are made, and who will equally well know, at the moment of our death, how to confirm our salvation, and how to receive us into his paternal bosom, when on the threshold of eternity.

RECOLLECTIONS