e great day! Stand forth now, ye
righteous! where are you? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right
hand! True wheat of Jesus Christ, disengage yourselves from this
chaff, doomed to the fire! O God! where are thine elect? and what
remains there for thy portion?

Brethren, our perdition is well-nigh assured, and we do not give it
a thought. Even if in that dread separation which one day shall be
made, there were to be but a single sinner out of this assembly
found on the side of the reprobate, and if a voice from heaven
should come to give us assurance of the fact in this sanctuary,
without pointing out the person intended, who among us would not
fear that he might himself be the wretch? Who among us would not at
once recoil upon his conscience, to inquire whether his sins had
not deserved that penalty? Who among us would not, seized with
dismay, ask of Jesus Christ, as did once the apostles, "Lord, is it
I?"

What is there wanting in such eloquence as the foregoing? Wherein lies
its deficiency of power to penetrate and subdue? Voltaire avowed that he
found the sermons of Massillon to be among "the most agreeable books we
have in our language. I love," he went on, "to have them read to me at
table." There are things in Massillon that Voltaire should not have
delighted to read, or to hear read,--things that should have made him
wince and revolt, if they did not make him yield and be converted. Was
there fault in the preacher? Did he preach with professional, rather
than with personal, zeal? Did his hearers feel themselves secretly
acquitted by the man, at the self-same moment at which they were openly
condemned by the preacher? It is impossible to say. But Massillon's
virtue was not lofty and regal; however it may have been free from just
reproach. He was somewhat too capable of compliance. He was made bishop
of Clermont, and his promotion cost him the anguish of having to help
consecrate a scandalously unfit candidate as archbishop of Cambray.
Massillon's, however, is a fair, if not an absolutely spotless, fame.
Hierarch as he was, and orthodox Catholic, this most elegant of
eloquent orators had a liberal strain in his blood which allied him
politically with the "philosophers" of the time succeeding. He, with
Fenelon, and perhaps with Racine, makes seem less abrupt the transition
in France from the age of absolutism to the age of revolt and final
re