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phet Isaias has been literally verified in them, in just punishment of their ingratitude and contempt of the laws of God; they abused his mercy, and therefore they now experience the severity of his justice; they neglected to produce the good fruits he expected from them, and are therefore deprived of that special providence which was their safeguard and protection. The kingdom of God, and those heavenly succours which they would not profit of, have been withdrawn from them and given to other nations. The light of the Gospel has crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and darted its beams to the new world in South and North America, and to the very cor ners of the East and West Indies; it has penetrated to the most barbarous parts of the earth, and one single ray of it has not as yet enlightened that stiff-necked people. This example of God's avenging justice should teach all sinners to learn wisdom at their expense, and to profit by their disgrace; it should be a warning to Christians and Catholics to be more attentive to their religious duties, and to beware of provoking Heaven to punish them in like manner, by a subtraction of its gracious favours and blessings, and by depriving them in its wrath of the great advantages and benefits of the true saving faith, as has happened to many extensive nations where the Christian religion heretofore flourished with great splendor. What is become of Greece, once the seminary of learning and the nursery of piety? What is become of Egypt, heretofore inhabited by twenty-seven millions of Christians? What is become of so many other kingdoms and provinces in Asia Minor, and in Africa? Those vast regions which enriched the Church with Cyprians, Augustines, Jeroms, Chry sostoms, Brasils, Gregories, and numberless other illustrious doctors and saints, are no longer watered with the dew of divine grace; they are become the seat of infidelity and irreligion; they are overspread with the darkness of paganism. O my brethren, how deplorable would our condition be, were we so unfortunate as to experience the severity of God's justice in this respect; and to be treated in like manner in punishment of our sins? O merciful Jesus, preserve us from this misfortune; remove all scandals from thy Church, and give us grace to become worthy members of so illustrious a body. O may those unquenchable flames which are prepared for the fruitless tree, for the slothful and indolent servant, rouse our sluggish souls from the lethargic sleep of tepidity and indolence, and excite us to improve the talents and graces we have received to thy honour and glory, and to the edification of our neighbour. Grant us, we beseech thee, a lively, active and practical faith, animated with charity and accompanied with good works, that by living here in a manner worthy of our vocation and profession, we may have the happiness to see and enjoy thee hereafter in the kingdom of Heaven. Which I wish you all, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

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"Redde rationem villicationis tuæ. Luc. c. xvi. v. 2.

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109 Give an account of thy stewardship.-Luke, c. xvi, v. 2.

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THE subject of this day's Gospel is the parable of the unjust Pisteward, who being accused of having wasted his master's goods, was called upon to give an account of his stewardship, and who, therefore, managed his affairs with such ingenuity, and settled his accounts so artfully, that he was continued in his employment and gained his master's applause, not for his fraudulent and unjust proceedings, but for the prudent expedients and cautious measures he adopted and contrived, in orwder to prevent his own ruin, and avert the danger of being dismissed from his office with disgrace, and reduced either to beggary or to very hard labour, which he found himself unequal to. This parable gives us to understand, that we are all stewards of the Almighty God, and that there is a day of reckoning to come, on which we must appear before his awful tribunal, to give a strict account of our stewardship, and to shew in what manner we have corresponded with his graces, managed his gifts, and employed his favours and blessings. A diligent enquiry will then be made, whether we have improved the talents entrusted to our care for God's honour and glory, and the bu benefit of our neighbour, or buried them under ground like the indolent servant, or misapplied them to answer the inordinate cravings of self-love, pride and vanity. The most effecCatual means you can devise, my brethren, to avert the wrath of Heaven, and gain the friendship of the Sovereign Judge on that great accounting day, is to make good use at present of the gracious favours and blessings that are conferred on you, in order to enable you to accomplish the grand and important affair of your salvation. If you abuse and reject them; if you reap no benefit or advantage from them but render them unprofitable, you have reason to apprehend that your ingratitude will draw down on you the most formidable vengeance of Heaven, and provoke the Lord your God to withdraw from you those graces which you slight and despise, and give them to others who will profit of them, according to these words which Jesus Christ formerly said to the Jews, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation yielding the fruits of it, Mat. c. xxi. v. 43. To engage you, then, to correspond

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faithfully with the graces of God, is the design of the following discourse. If you continue to render unprofitable the graces of God, he will deprive you of them. This is my first point. He will give them to others who will profit by them. This is the second point, and the whole subject of your favourable attention. Let us previously implore the light of the Holy Ghost, through the intercession of the blessed Virgin. Ave Maria.

St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, c. i. v. 18. informs us of the dreadful punishment that God inflicts on those who abuse his graces; for he says, The wrath of God is revealed from Heaven upon all impiety, and upon the iniquity of those men who detain the truth of God in iniquity, that is, on all those who receive his grace, and reap no benefit by it, and who detain in an unjust captivity all those grand truths which he has been pleased to make known to them. But what is the wrath of God, that falls on the heads of those who abuse his graces and despise his goodness? Is it that he commands Heaven and earth, and all the elements to arm and revenge the contempt of his favours? No, my brethren; for since such chastisements could only punish that which is the least culpable in man, and affect the body alone without touching the soul, it is not in this sensible manner that the anger of God is always made manifest. But as it is the most tender proof of his infinite bounty towards sinners to go in search of them in the midst of their criminal engagements, to speak to them in the bottom of the heart, to press, invite and solicit them to return to their duty; so it is the greatest mark of his wrath and justice to abandon them, to retire from them, and to speak to them no more. It was this dreadful chastisement that David so much apprehended, when he prayed thus to the Lord, Ps. xlix. O my God be not silent; let your sacred voice still echo in the bottom of my soul. It was this punishment that the Almighty heretofore so often threatened by his Prophets to inflict on his people. I have spoken, I have raised my voice to press and conjure you to return to me, but you have been deaf to all my amorous invitations, wherefore; I shall in my turn be silent; I shall no more disturb your false, your fatal repose, which will end in your eternal ruin, in death everlasting. Thus it is that God threatens to manifest his wrath to sinners who are unfaithful to his graces. We have taken care of Babylon, says the Lord, Jerem. c. li. v. 9. and Babylon is not cured; let us abandon it, and have its welfare no longer at heart. It is true, indeed, God does not abandon us unless we first abandon him, as St. Augustine says; he is undoubtedly a God full of mercy and bounty for those who attentively listen to his calls and faithfully correspond with his graces; but he is armed with wrath and vengeance against those who despise his goodness, are deaf to his inspirations, and reject his invitations. For this reason Christ assures us in the Gospel, that the servant who has received but little, and

has profited by this little, that more shall be given to him; but that he who has buried his talent, this talent shall be taken from him, and he himself as an unprofitable servant, shall be cast into exterior darkness, where there will be perpetual weeping and gnashing of teeth. This, alas! will be the fate of the unhappy soul that slights and abandons God, and in its turn is abandoned by him. It will fall from sin into sin, from crime into crime, without being sensible of the misery of its unhappy condition; or if sensible, it will still flatter itself with the pleasing hopes that it will one day renounce its criminal engagements. In the interim, God in his anger suffers it to be deceived by this pernicious illusion, and to fall into a spiritual lethargy, which insensibly conducts it into endless misery. He permits it to be overpowered with a fatal blindness, and to sleep peaceably in the arms of perdition without disturbing its repose, until it awakes to feel the rigour of his justice in hell. Such is the order of his providence, that when the sinner has filled up the measure of his iniquities, and deserves to perish, God withdraws those powerful and those efficacious graces, which would not only enlighten his understanding to see the horror of his condition, but would also inflame his will with an ardent desire, and with a generous resolution to overcome all these obstacles that oppose his conversion; and the subtraction of these graces is the most formidable punishment that the Almighty can inflict on him in this life, because nothing removes the sinner farther from his last end, which is eternal salvation; and consequently, nothing makes him approach nearer the greatest of all misfortunes, eternal damnation; since without these graces he never will be saved. Moreover, this subtraction of grace hardens the sinner and makes him grow obdurate in his unhappy state; he no longer discovers the deadly poison and fatal effects of sin, but becomes enamoured of it; be doats on the pleasing object that gratifies his passions, and is captivated by its engaging aspect; for when grace ceases to shine on the eyes of his soul, and to display the grand ideas of a just and avenging God, of a judgment without merсу, of a sentence without appeal, of a miserable eternity, he is deprived of those interior lights, by means of which he might be alarmed and terrified, and might discern how odious and frightful sin is in itself, and be roused to have recourse to a remedy, and use his best endeavours to rise out of the deplorable state to which he is unfortunately reduced. On the other hand he is allured and attracted by the false and deceitful charms of sin, and by his inordinate affection to it he justly forfeits his right to Heaven, and loses his soul for all eternity. Nay, this subtraction of grace is a punishment which the Almighty not only inflicts on those declared libertines who make open profession of violating his laws, and who rejoice and glory in their criminal excesses, but also on those who lead an idle, inactive, unprofitable life, without performing any good

works; for why should the Almighty bestow his favours on us if we are unwilling to profit by them? Is it not to reject and profane his graces, not to employ them for the end which they were designed for? The fruitless fig-tree, mentioned in the Gospel, was struck with an anathema because it bore not fruit; the barren land was cursed because it yielded not grain in abundance; the servant was condemned, and lost the talent he had received, because he did not make the proper use of it. Such is the punishment which God inflicts on those who do not correspond with his favours; it is thus they are cursed, anathematized and abandoned by Heaven, who reject his graces, who despise, insult and outrage his goodness, and who, notwithstanding his many efforts to withdraw them from their criminal engagements, persist obstinate in vice, closing their ears to all his charitable admonitions, and refusing for whole years together to listen to his fatherly entreaties. Were they but obedient and submissive to his voice, his providence would never abandon them, his eyes would be constantly fixed upon them to watch for their security and defence, all his treasures would be open for them, and his bounty would engage him still to heap new favours on them; but it is most just that he should at length despise them as they have despised him; that he should be hardened against them as their heart has been so long har. dened against him, and that he should punish the so often repeated abuses of his heavenly favours. It is thus, in fine, my brethren, that those obdurate souls perish, who, after having often rejected the inspirations of the Holy Ghost, fall from small sins into great, from sins often reiterated into a deplorable habit, from this habit into a kind of necessity, from this necessity into contempt and obduracy, from obduracy into despair, from despair into hell, and when they are buried in these mansions of misery, it is then that God will no longer have compassion on them. Burn, unhappy sinners, burn, cry, lament, roll yourselves in this devouring fire, God will never more look on you with the eyes of pity; he never will commisserate your distressed condition. There are so many ages that Cain burns in these flames, so many ages that the Sodomites suffer; God beholds their unspeakable torments without pity; his anger is never to be appeased; his justice is to be for ever inflexible, inexorable. Can you, then, my brethren, after such instances of the formidable judgments of God, can you any longer continue to despise his goodness, to reject his graces, to resist his inspirations? If you do he will withdraw his graces from you in this world as a prelude to that eternal punishment which awaits obstinate sinners in the next, as you have already heard, and these graces he will bestow on others, who will profit by them. This leads me to my second point.

It is a received maxim in philosophy, that God and nature do nothing in vain, and of course, grace, which is one of the most noble productions of the Almighty, never remains unprofitable.

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