hat doing all things according to God's
will, we may be found worthy of the mercy which is from Him, through the
grace and compassion of His only Son.

IV. JACQUES BENIGNE BOSSUET

ON THE DEATH OF THE PRINCE OF CONDE

Our lamentations ought to break forth at the loss of so great a man. But
for the love of truth and the shame of those who despise it, listen once
more to that noble testimony which he bore to it in dying. Informed by
his confessor that if our heart is not entirely right with God, we must,
in our addresses, ask God Himself to make it such as He pleases, and
address Him in the affecting language of David, "O God, create in me a
clean heart," the Prince is arrested by the words, pauses, as if
occupied with some great thought; then calling the ecclesiastic who had
suggested the idea, he says: "I have never doubted the mysteries of
religion, as some have reported." Christians, you ought to believe him,
for in the state he then was he owed to the world nothing but truth.

What was then taking place in his soul? What new light dawned upon him?
What sudden ray pierced the cloud, and instantly dissipated, not only
all the darkness of sense, but the very shadows, and if I dare to say
it, the sacred obscurities of faith? What then became of those splendid
titles by which our pride is flattered? On the very verge of glory, and
in the dawning of a light so beautiful, how rapidly vanish the phantoms
of the world! How dim appears the splendor of the most glorious victory!
How profoundly we despise the glory of the world, and how deeply regret
that our eyes were ever dazzled by its radiance! Come, ye people, or
rather ye princes and lords, ye judges of the earth, and ye who open to
man the portals of heaven; and more than all others, ye princes and
princesses, nobles descended from a long line of kings, lights of
France, but to-day in gloom, and covered with your grief, as with a
cloud, come and see how little remains of a birth so august, a grandeur
so high, a glory so dazzling. Look around on all sides, and see all that
magnificence and devotion can do to honor so great a hero; titles and
inscriptions, vain signs of that which is no more--shadows which weep
around a tomb, fragile images of a grief which time sweeps away with
everything else; columns which seem as if they would bear to heaven the
magnificent evidence of our emptiness; nothing, indeed, is wanting in
all these honors but him to whom they are ren