flocks are better able to supply their necessities and increase their store, but are they more disposed to profit of their instructions? The thorns and solicitudes of riches choke up the divine seed among them; the field appears more beautiful, but the soil is barren and ungrateful, and yields no fruit.* And whilst the pastor of a poor parish, who instructs and exhorts simple and docile souls, men who are penetrated and confounded by the most ordinary truths of faith, and who, in all their miseries, bow down their necks in meek submission to the hand that strikes them, has the consolation of seeing his ministry produce, every day, an abundant harvest for heaven; the other sees his cares and toils almost always unfruitful, except for himself. Let us not, my brethren, reckon our labors well rewarded, except when they bear the fruits of life and salvation, nor estimate the value of our places or of our duties, save by the gain which may accrue from them to Jesus Christ.

*Luke. c. viii. v. 14.

FOURTEENTH DISCOURSE.

OF INSENSIBILITY IN THE WAYS OF GOD.

It is a truth, my brethren, which cannot be too often repeated, that there is nothing more essentially necessary for us, in the exercise of our functions, than that interior spirit of religion and piety which would continually animate and sanctify them, and that, perhaps, at the same time, there is nothing more rare amongst us; that there is no evil to be compared with the insensibility of the pastor, in the discharge of his duties, and yet no evil more common. Thanks to the unbounded mercies of the Lord, we no longer live in those dark and corrupt ages, when the ignorance and the disorders of the clergy covered the holy ministry with pub

lic opprobrium, and when the general depravity seemed to leave to the church, no other trace of her ancient beauty than the learning and fervor of the cloisters. The spirit of the priesthood has been, since, renewed by the foundation of seminaries and colleges, where the candidates for holy orders are early formed to the duties of the ministry, and where they imbibe from their very infancy, the doctrine and the piety of their holy state. Scandals are not now, as formerly, either common or tolerated in the clergy; the functions of the ministry have resumed the form and the decency prescribed by the sacred canons; instructions formerly so rare and so coarse, have become more frequent and more enlightened; in a word, the church has again recovered that exterior of dignity, of piety and decorum, of which the licentiousness and calamities of former ages had stript her. Yet whilst the face of the church, of that daughter of the king, has regained its beauty, her glory which is all from within, has not therefore returned: Omnis gloria ejus, filiæ regis ab intus;* and we may still say, that amongst us, as in the days of

*Psalm. 44. v. 15.

the Apostle,* a faithful dispenser must be sought for, and that it is hard to find him. And why, my brethren? it is not the public irregularity of their morals, which renders them now, as rare as in former times: through the bounty and favour of Jesus Christ, scandalous crimes in the clergy, now-a-days seldom wound the tenderness, and aggravate the solicitude, of the Bishop. No, my brethren, it is not crying transgressions that degrade the greater part of us, from the august appellation of faithful dispensers, but the want of those virtues, which are inseparable from it, and in which we are lamentably deficient: it is the absence of that interior spirit of piety and religion, and of that priestly and tender heart which the exercise of our duties would warm into devotion; it is because that sensibility, that respect, and that religious awe, which we owe to every thing that has reference to the occupations of the sacred ministry, are weakened and extinguished in us, even by the daily use of the most holy things, Behold, my brethren, our most ordinary, and

*Hic jam quæritur inter dispensatores, ut fidelis quis inveniatur. 1. Cor. c. iv. v. 2.

most formidable evil: our disorders are not notorious, but we are insensible and numb, as it were, in regard to the most terrific objects of religion, so that all that daily affects and rouses the piety and faith of ordinary christians, instead of even awakening our attention, augments our lethargy that is to say, and this truth makes me tremble for you and for myself, my brethren; that is to say, that all those resources of religion, which grace, continually employs to touch and change the hearts of our people, confirm us in an insensibility which is at once both the most general and the most terrible malediction attached to the functions of the sacred ministry. The proofs of this tremendous truth, are but too common and too clear; they are disheartening, indeed, to us, my brethren.

The

The participation of holy things is a principal resource of religion, in which the ordinary faithful, every day, find the renovation of their piety or the remedy of their disorders. christian who approaches seldom to the altar, is struck with a sacred terror, when he is about to perform so awful an action: the approach of a solemnity, which imposes this duty on him, makes him enter sincerely into himself; he has a profound feeling of his own unworthiness;