sometimes made that we render piety disgusting
and impracticable, by prohibiting many pleasures which the world
authorizes. But, my brethren, what is it we tell you? allow yourselves
all the pleasures which Christ would have allowed himself; faith allows
you no other; mix with your piety all the gratifications which Jesus
Christ would have mixed in his; the gospel allows no greater
indulgence--O my God, how the decisions of the world will one day be
strangely reversed! when worldly probity and worldly regularity, which,
by a false appearance of virtue, give a deceitful confidence to so many
souls, will be placed by the side of the crucified Jesus, and will be
judged by that model! To be always renouncing yourselves, rejecting what
pleases, regulating the most innocent wishes of the heart by the
rigorous rules of the spirit of the gospel, is difficult, is a state of
violence. But if the pleasures of the senses leave the soul sorrowful,
empty, and uneasy, the rigors of the cross make her happy. Penance heals
the wounds made by herself; like the mysterious bush in the scripture,
while man sees only its thorns and briers, the glory of the Lord is
within it, and the soul that possesses him possesses all. Sweet tears
of penance! divine secret of grace! O that you were better known to the
sinner!" "The pretended esprits forts," says Bourdaloue, in his sermon
on the scandal of the cross, and the humiliations of Jesus Christ, the
noblest of all his sermons, in the opinion of the cardinal de Maury, "do
not relish the rigorous doctrines announced by the Son of God in his
gospel; self-hatred, self-denial, severity to one's self. But when
Christ established a religion for men, who were to acknowledge
themselves sinners and criminals, ought he, as St. Jerome asks, to have
published other laws? What is so proper for sin as penance? what is more
of the nature of penance, than the sinner's harshness and severity to
himself? Is there any thing in this contrary to reason? They are
astonished at his ranking poverty among the beatitudes; that he held up
the cross as an attraction to his disciples to follow him; that he
declared a love of {032} contempt was preferable to the honors of the
world. In all this I see the depth of his divine counsels." Such is the
language of Bourdaloue and Massillon, preaching before a luxurious
court, to the best-informed and most polished audience in the Christian
world. It is apprehended that no other language