with all that is good, is incompatible with all that is wicked. As to mercy, it is the loving kindness of God that finding us evil, would render us good. That mercy which makes itself sensible to us in time, is in its source, an eternal love of God for his creatures. He alone gives true goodness. Woe to that presumptious soul that hopes to find it in itself! It is the love which God has for us that gives us all; but the greatest gift he can bestow on us, is to give us the love we ought to have for him. When God loves us, so as to make us love him, he reigns in us; he then constitutes our life, our peace, our happiness, and we begin already to live at blessed life in him. That love which he has for us, bears the stamp of infinity, he does not love like us, with a limited and circumscribed love; when he loves, all the fruits of his love are infinite. He descends from heaven to earth, to seek us, his creatures, whom he loves. He takes our nature on him, and clothes us with his own. It is by such prodigies of love, that the infinite surpasses all the affections which men are capable of. He loves as God, and this love has every thing incomprehensible in it, so that it is the height of folly, to endeavour to measure infinite love by a finite wisdom. Far from losing any of his greatness in these excesses of his love, he thereon engraves the stamp of his immensity, by marking in them the sallies and transports of an infinite love. O! how great and lovely is he in his mysteries, but we have not eyes to see them, and we want such sentiments as would enable us to perceive God in all things.

CHAP. 11.

The necessity of knowing and loving God.

WE must not be surprised that men do so little for God, and that the little they do costs them so much; they do not know him, they scarcely believe that he exists, their faith in him is rather a blind deference to the authority of common opinion, than a living and clear conviction of the Deity; they suppose it because they dare not examine it, and because their stupid indifference, and their distraction, occasioned by their passions which draw them towards other objects, will not suffer them to search into it: so that they know not God, but in a wonderfully obscure manner, and as a God afar of; they regard him as a severe and powerful being, who requires much of us, who thwarts our inclinations, who threatens us with great evils, and against whose judgments we ought to provide. Thus it is that those think who make serious reflections on religion, and they are but few. We say there is a person who fears God, and in effect he only fears without loving him, as children fear the master that corrects them, and as a bad servant fears the lash of him he serves through fear alone, without having any regard to his interest. Would they be treated by a son or even a servant as they treat God? It is because they know him not, for if they knew him they must love him. "God is love," as says St. John, he who loves him not does not know him, for how is it possible that we should know the love he has for us, without loving him again?

But who is it, O my God, that can know thee? he only who can know nothing but thee, who no longer knows himself, and to whom all that is not thee shall be as if it was not. The world may be surprised at such language, because the world is full of itself, of vanity and lies, and void of God: but I trust, that there will always be found in it, souls that thirst after God, and who can taste the truths I am about to declare. O my God, before thou madest the heavens and the earth, there was only thee, thou wast, for thou never didst begin to be, but thou wast alone. Besides thee, there was no other, thou didst enjoy thyself in that blessed solitude, thou wast all-sufficient, and hadst none oc casion to find any thing out of thyself, since it is thee, who, far from receiving, bestowest on every being, by thy Almighty word, all that they have; that is to say, by thy mere pleasure to which all things are easy, and which effects all that it desires by its mere will, without succession of times or labour. Thou didst cause that this world that was not should begin to be. Thou didst not, as the artists of this world, who, having the materials of their work only join them together, and whose art consists in ranging by degrees with a great deal of pains, those materials which they did not make. Thou foundest nothing made, and thou thyself madest all the materials of thy work. It was on the void that thou wroughtest, thou saidst let the world be, and it was, thou hadst only to speak and it was done. But why didst thou make all these things? they were all made for man, and man was made for thee. This is the order which thou hast established: woe to the soul that overturns it: who would that all was made for him, and makes himself the centre of all; this is breaking the fundamental law of the creation. No, my God, thou

canst not give up thy essential right as Creator, that would be to degrade thyself. Thou canst, for the sake of Jesus Christ, pardon the guilty soul that has offended thee, but thou canst not cease to be against the soul that assumes to itself all thy gifts, and refuses to return itself by a sincere and disinterested love to thee its Creator. Only to fear thee, is so far from giving itself up to thee, that it is only thinking of thee with regard to self; to love thee only with regard to the advantages which it finds in thee, is to bring thee to self, instead of raising self to thee. What then ought to be done, to give up ourselves entirely to thee, our Creator? We ought to renounce ourselves, lose ourselves, enter into thy interests; in a word, O my God, we must love thee without loving ourselves. Alas, how many souls go out of this world loaded with virtues and good works, yet wanting that purity, without which, they cannot see God.

But to return; such then is the greatness of God, that he can do nothing but for himself and his own glory, that incommunicable glory, of which he is necessarily jealous, and which he cannot give to another: (Isa. xliii. 8.) on the contrary, such is the baseness of the creature, that it cannot without usurping a false divinity, and without violating an immutable law of the creation, do any thing, say any thing, think or will any thing, for itself and its own glory. O thou nothing, thou wouldst give glory to thyself, yet thou existest only on condition never to be any thing in thine own eyes; thou breathest only for him, from whom thou didst receive thy being. He owes all to himself, and thou owest all to him; he can make no concessions; all that he leaves to thee must proceed from the inviolable law of his wisdom and goodness. One single moment, a

single sigh devoted to thine own interest, essentially wounds the end of the Creator in the creation. He wants nothing, but desires all, because all is due to him, and all is not too much for him, so great is he; but even that greatness is the cause that he can produce nothing out of himself that is not all for him; it is the desire to please him, that he wishes to find in his creature; he has made for me the heaven and the earth, but he cannot suffer that I should voluntarily, and by choice, take a single step for any other end, than to accomplish his will. Before he produced his creatures, he had in him no other will but his own; can we suppose that he created reasonable creatures to will otherwise than he wills? No: it is the sovereign reason that must enlighten them, and be their reason; it is his will, the rule of all good, that must will in us: all our wills must be one with his, and therefore we say to him "thy kingdom come, thy will be done." The better to comprehend all this, we must consider that God who made us out of nothing, re-makes us again, as I may say, at every instant. It is by no means necessary that we are the same to day, which we were yesterday; we might cease to be, and effectually fall back into that nothingness out of which he has drawn us, if that same almighty hand that brought us forth did not prevent our falling again into it. We are nothing by ourselves, we are only what God made us to be, and only for such time as he pleases; he need only withdraw his hand, which supports us, to plunge us into the abyss of our own nothingness, as a stone which we hold in the air, falls by its own weight when we no longer hold it. We have not therefore being or life, but through the gift of God. Again, there are other blessings of a still more pure and elevated kind; a good life is worth more than the life itself; virtue is of