That which fills me with consternation
is, that at the same time that we render it useless to ourselves, by
an inevitable necessity it must become pernicious; for this passion,
says St. Gregory of Nazianzen, "partakes of the nature of those
remedies which, kill if they do not heal, and of which the effect is
either to give life or to convert itself into poison; lose nothing of
this, I beseech you." Remember, then, Christians, what happened during
the judgment and at the moment of the condemnation of the Son of God.
When Pilate washed his hands before the Jews and declared to them that
there was nothing worthy of death in this righteous man, but that the
crime from which he freed himself rested upon them, and that they
would have to answer for it, they all cried with one voice that they
consented to it, and that they readily agreed that the blood of this
just man should fall upon them and upon their children. You know what
this cry has cost them. You know the curses which one such imprecation
has drawn upon them, the anger of heaven which began from that time
to burst upon this nation, the ruin of Jerusalem which followed soon
after--the carnage of their citizens, the profanation of their temple,
the destruction of their republic, the visible character of their
reprobation which their unhappy posterity bear to this day, that
universal banishment, that exile of sixteen hundred years, that
slavery through all the earth--and all in consequence of the authentic
prediction which Jesus Christ made to them of it when going to
Calvary, and with circumstances which incontestably prove that a
punishment as exemplary as this can not be imputed but to decide which
they had committed in the person of the Savior; since it is evident,
says St.
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