Would to God, Christians,
that what I am going to say to you were only a figure, and that you
were justified in vindicating yourselves to-day against the horrible
expressions which I am obliged to employ! I speak in the literal
sense, and you ought to be more affected with this discourse, if what
I advance appears to you to be overcharged; for it is by your excesses
that it is so, and not by my words. Yes, my dear hearers, the sinners
of the age, by the disorders of their lives, renew the bloody and
tragic passion of the Son of God in the world; I will venture to say
that the sinners of the age cause to the Son of God, even in the state
of glory, as many new passions as they have committed outrages against
Him by their actions! Apply yourselves to form an idea of them; and in
this picture, which will surprize you, recognize what you are, that
you may weep bitterly over yourselves! What do we see in the passion
of Jesus Christ? A divine Savior betrayed and abandoned by cowardly
disciples, persecuted by pontiffs and hypocritical priests, ridiculed
and mocked in the palace of Herod by impious courtiers, placed upon a
level with Barabbas, and to whom Barabbas is preferred by a blind and
inconstant people, exposed to the insults of libertinism, and treated
as a mock king by a troop of soldiers equally barbarous and insolent;
in fine, crucified by merciless executioners! Behold, in a few words,
what is most humiliating and most cruel in the death of the Savior of
the world! Then tell me if this is not precisely what we now see,
of what we are every day called to be witnesses.
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