in the kingdom of God, in the
sanctuary of those ungrateful human beings whom he was about to redeem
with his blood at the cost of unspeakable sufferings.

The scandals of all ages, down to the present day and even to the
end of the world--every species of error, deception, mad fanaticism,
obstinacy and malice--were displayed before his eyes, and he beheld, as it
were floating before him, all the apostates, heresiarchs, and pretended
reformers, who deceive men by an appearance of sanctity. The corrupters
and the corrupted of all ages outraged and tormented him for not having
been crucified after their fashion, or for not having suffered
precisely as they settled or imagined he should have done. They vied
with each other in tearing the seamless robe of his Church; many
illtreated, insulted, and denied him, and many turned contemptuously
away, shaking their heads at him, avoiding his compassionate embrace,
and hurrying on to the abyss where they were finally swallowed up. He
saw countless numbers of other men who did not dare openly to deny him,
but who passed on in disgust at the sight of the wounds of his Church,
as the Levite passed by the poor man who had fallen among robbers. Like
unto cowardly and faithless children, who desert their mother in the
middle of the night, at the sight of the thieves and robbers to whom
their negligence or their malice has opened the door, they fled from
his wounded Spouse. He beheld all these men, sometimes separated from
the True Vine, and taking their rest amid the wild fruit trees,
sometimes like lost sheep, left to the mercy of the wolves, led by base
hirelings into bad pasturages, and refusing to enter the fold of the
Good Shepherd who gave his life for his sheep. They were wandering
homeless in the desert in the midst of the sand blown about by the
wind, and were obstinately determined not to see his City placed upon a
hill, which could not be hidden, the House of his Spouse, his Church
built upon a rock, and with which he had promised to remain to the end
of ages. They built upon the sand wretched tenements, which they were
continually pulling down and rebuilding, but in which there was neither
altar nor sacrifice; they had weathercocks on their roofs, and their
doctrines changed with the wind, consequently they were for ever in
opposition one with the other. They never could come to a mutual
understanding, and were forever unsettled, often destroying their own
dwellings and hur