the alms which have almost always rolled along in secret, have arrived much more pure into the bosom of God himself than those which, exposed even against our will to the eyes of men, have been somewhat befouled and disturbed on their course by the unavoidable complaisances of self-love and the praise of the spectators: like those streams which have almost always rolled under the ground, and which carry into the bosom of the sea waters living and pure; while, on the contrary, those which have traversed level and exposed tracts in the open ordinarily carry there only defiled waters, which are always dragging along the rubbish, the corpses, the slime which they have amassed on their Translation of J. F. B.

route.

Massillon was especially noted for the appositeness and beauty of his exordiums; and one of his sermons of great repute owes its enormous fame to that peculiarity of the text and to the action of the first three minutes. Massillon used no gestures, properly so called: but in the words of the Abbé Maury, he had an eloquent eye; which, Sainte-Beuve has added, made for him the most beautiful of gestures. The sermon in question was that which he pronounced in the final obsequies for Louis XIV. He entered the pulpit with lowered eyes, as was his custom. At length, raising them, he swept them in silence over all that magnificent funeral pomp. Then he fixed them on the lofty catafalque, and slowly pronounced the words of his text, taken from the first chapter of Ecclesiastes. in the French version of the Vulgate: "I have become great; I have surpassed in glory all who have preceded me in Jerusalem." After a long silence, and upon the excited expectation of the auditory, he began with the ever since famous words: "My brethren, God alone is great."

Perhaps this bewitching felicity was never more striking than in the exordium of his first sermon before the same Louis XIV., when, knowing that a reputation for austerity had preceded him, he made his début before that glittering earthy crowd in the following way, with the sermon on

THE BLESSEDNESS OF THE RIGHTEOUS

TEXT: "Blessed are they that mourn."

SIRE: If the world were speaking here instead of Jesus Christ, no doubt it would not offer such language as this to your Majesty.

"Blessed the Prince," it would say to you, "who has never fought but to conquer; who has seen so many powers in arms

against him, only to gain glory in granting them peace; who has always been equally greater than danger and greater than victory!

"Blessed the Prince, who throughout the course of a long and flourishing reign has peacefully enjoyed the emoluments of his glory, the love of his subject peoples, the esteem of his enemies, the admiration of all the world, the advantage of his conquests, the magnificence of his works, the wisdom of his laws, the august hope of a numerous posterity; and who has nothing more to desire than long to preserve that which he possesses!

Thus the world would speak; but, Sire, Jesus does not speak like the world.

«< Blessed," says he to you, "not he who is achieving the admiration of his age, but he who is making the world to come his principal concern, and who lives in contempt of himself, and of all that is passing away; because his is the kingdom of heaven.

"Blessed, not he whose reign and whose acts history is going to immortalize in the remembrance of men, but he whose tears shall have effaced the story of his sins from the remembrance of God himself; because he will be eternally comforted.

"Blessed, not he who shall have extended by new conquests the limits of his empire, but he who shall have confined his inclinations and passions within the limits of the law of God; because he will possess an estate more lasting than the empire of the whole world.

"Blessed, not he who, raised by the acclamations of subject peoples above all the princes who have preceded him, peacefully enjoys his grandeur and his glory, but he who, not finding on the throne even anything worthy of his heart, seeks for perfect happiness here below only in virtue and in righteousness; because he will be satisfied.

"Blessed, not he to whom men shall have given the glorious titles of 'Great' and 'Invincible,' but he to whom the unfortunate shall have given, before Jesus, the title of Father' and of 'Merciful'; because he will be treated with mercy.

"Blessed, in fine, not he who, being always arbiter of the destiny of his enemies, has more than once given peace to the earth, but he who has been able to give it to himself, and to banish from his heart the vices and inordinate affections which trouble the tranquillity of it; because he will be called a child of God."

These, Sire, are they whom Jesus calls blessed, and the Gospel does not know any other blessedness on earth than virtue and innocence.

New translation by J. F. B.

Further on in this same discourse, where he feels called upon to defend himself from the charge of preaching on imaginary or at least exaggerated delusions of the world, he draws, as follows,—

ONE OF HIS CELEBRATED PICTURES OF GENERAL SOCIETY

WHAT is the world for the worldlings themselves who love it, who seem intoxicated with its pleasures, and who are not able to step from it? The world? It is an everlasting servitude, where no one lives for himself, and where to be blest one must be able to kiss one's fetters and love one's slavery. The world? -It is a daily round of events which awaken in succession, in the hearts of its partisans, the most violent and the most gloomy passions, cruel hatreds, hateful perplexities, bitter fears, devouring jealousies, overwhelming griefs. The world?-It is a territory under a curse, where even its pleasures carry with them their thorns and their bitternesses; its sport tires by its furies. and its caprices; its conversations annoy by the oppositions of its moods and the contrariety of its sentiments; its passions and criminal attachments have their disgusts, their derangements, their unpleasant brawls; its shows, hardly finding more in the spectators than souls grossly dissolute, and incapable of being awakened but by the most monstrous excesses of debauchery, become stale, while moving only those delicate passions which only show crime in the distance, and dress out traps for innocence. The world, in fine, is a place where hope, regarded as a passion so sweet, renders everybody unhappy; where those who have nothing to hope for, think themselves still more miserable; where all that pleases, pleases never for long; and where ennui is almost the sweetest destiny and the most supportable that one can expect in it.

This, my brethren, is the world: and it is not the obscure world, which knows neither the great pleasures nor the charms of prosperity, of favor, and of wealth, it is the world at its best; it is the world of the court; it is you yourselves who hear me, my brethren.

This is the world; and it is not, in this aspect, one of those paintings from imagination of which the resemblance is nowhere to be found. I am painting the world only after your own hearts; that is, such as you know it and always feel it yourselves to be.

There, notwithstanding, is the place where all sinners are seeking their felicity. There is their country. It is there that they wish they could eternize themselves. This is the world which they prefer to the eternal joys and to all the promises of faith. New translation by J. F. B.

An exhaustive, masterly, and tremendous discourse, perhaps without a parallel in all literature for boldness and terrible severity in scoring the sin of unchastity, was that on the 'Prodigal Son,' pronounced before Louis XIV. in the chapel at Versailles during the 'Grand Carême.' His text was: "He went into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living." His exordium consists in repeating minutely the story, dwelling on the willingness to live far from home, with swine and like swine,-the nastiness, the emptiness, the deadliness of such a life,- and closes with this affecting

PUR

PRAYER

URIFY my lips, O my God! and while I shall recount the excess of a voluptuous sinner, furnish me with expressions which will not offend a virtue, the love of which I come to-day to inspire in those who hear me; for the world, which no longer knows any restraint on this vice, exacts much notwithstanding of us in the language which condemns it.

Then he opens upon this sin his clean-sweeping artillery thus:

The vice the deadly consequences of which I am to-day undertaking to expose this vice so universally spread abroad on the earth, and which is desolating with such fury the heritage of Jesus; this vice of which the Christian religion had purged the world, and which to-day has prevailed on religion itself—is marked by certain peculiar characteristics, all which I find in the story of the wanderings of the Prodigal Son.

There is never a vice which more separates the sinner from God; there is never a vice which, after it has separated him from God, leaves him less resource for returning to Him; there is never a vice which renders the sinner more insupportable to

himself; finally, there is not one which renders him more contemptible in the eyes even of other men. Observe, I pray, all these characteristics in the story of the sinner of our gospel.

The first characteristic of the vice of which we are speaking is the putting, as it were, an abyss between God and the voluptuous soul, and the leaving him almost no more hope of return. The prodigal of our gospel went off at first into a very far country, which left no longer anything in common between him and his natural father: "He took his journey into a far country."

Indeed, in all the other vices, the sinner seems still to hold upon God by some feeble ties. There are some vices which respect at least the sacredness of the body, and do not strengthen its inordinate inclinations; there are others which do not spread so deep darkness on the mind, and leave at least some use of the light of reason; finally, there are some which do not occupy the heart to such a degree as absolutely to take away from it the relish for all which could lead back to God. But the shameful passion of which I am speaking dishonors the body, extinguishes reason, renders all the things of heaven disagreeable, and raises a wall of separation between God and the sinner which seems to take away all hope of reunion.-"He took his journey into a far country."

I said that it dishonors the body of the Christian; it profanes the temple of God in us; it makes the members of Jesus do an ignominious service: it soils a flesh nourished on his body and his blood, consecrated by the grace of baptism; a flesh which is to attain immortality and be conformable to the glorious likeness of Jesus risen; a flesh which will repose in the holy place, and whose ashes will await, under the altar of the Lamb, the day of revelation, mingled with the ashes of the virgins and the martyrs; a flesh more holy than those august temples where the glory of the Lord reposes; more worthy of being possessed with honor and with reverence than the very vases of the sanctuary, consecrated by the terrible mysteries which they inclose. But what a barrier does not the opprobrium of this vice put to the return of God into us! Can a holy God, in whose sight even the heavenly spirits are unclean, sufficiently separate himself from a flesh covered with shame and ignominy? The creature being but dust and ashes, the holiness of God must suffer by lowering himself down to it: ah, what then can the sinner promise himself who joins to his own nothingness and baseness the indignities of a XVII-613