united, is but the impulse of an inconstant disposition and the restlessness of desire. Habit and length of time are more necessary to happiness, and even to love, than may be imagined. A man is not happy in the object of his attachment till he has passed many days, and, above all, many days of adversity, in her company. They ought to be acquainted with the most secret recesses of each other's soul; the mysterious veil with which husband and wife were covered in the primitive Church, must be lifted up in all its folds for them, while to the eye of others it remains impenetrable. What! for the slightest pretence or caprice must I be liable to lose my partner and my children, and renounce the pleasing hope of passing my old age in the bosom of my family? Let me not be told that this apprehension will oblige me to be a better husband. No; we become attached to that good only of which we are certain, and set but little value on a possession of which we are likely to be deprived.

Let us not give to matrimony the wings of lawless love; let us not transform a sacred reality into a fleeting phantom. There is something which will again destroy your happiness in your trancient connections: you will be pursued by remorse. You will be continually comparing one wife with another, her whom you have lost with her whom you have found; and, believe me, the balance will always be in favor of the former. Thus has God formed the heart of man. This disturbance of one sentiment by another will poison all your pleasures. When you fondly caress your new child, you will think of that which you have forsaken. If you press your wife to your heart, your heart will tell you that it is not the bosom of the first. Every thing tends to unity in man. He is not happy if he divides his affections; and like God, in whose image he was created, his soul incessantly seeks to concentrate in one point the past, the present, and the future.

These are the remarks which we had to offer on the sacraments of Holy Orders and Matrimony. As to the images which they suggest to the mind, we deem it unnecessary to present them. Where is the imagination that cannot picture to itself the priest bidding adieu to the joys of life, that he may devote himself to the cause of humanity; or the maiden consecrating herself to the silence of retirement, that she may find the silent repose of her

heart; or the betrothed couple appearing at the altar of religion, to vow to each other an undying love?

The wife of a Christian is not a mere mortal. She is an extraordinary, a mysterious, an angelic being; she is flesh of her husband's flesh and bone of his bone. By his union with her he only takes back a portion of his substance. His soul, as well as his body, is imperfect without his wife. He possesses strength, she has beauty. He opposes the enemy in arms, he cultivates the soil of his country; but he enters not into domestic details; he has need of a wife to prepare his repast and his bed. He encounters afflictions, and the partner of his nights is there to soothe them; his days are clouded by adversity, but on his couch he meets with a chaste embrace and forgets all his sorrows. Without woman he would be rude, unpolished, solitary. Woman suspends around him the flowers of life, like those honeysuckles of the forest which adorn the trunk of the oak with their perfumed garlands. Finally, the Christian husband and his wife live and die together; together they rear the issue of their union; together they return to dust, and together they again meet beyond the confines of the tomb, to part no more.

CHAPTER XI.

EXTREME UNCTION.

BUT it is in sight of that tomb, silent vestibule of another world, that Christianity displays all its sublimity. If most of the ancient religions consecrated the ashes of the dead, none ever thought of preparing the soul for that unknown country "from whose bourn no traveller returns."

Come and witness the most interesting spectacle that earth can exhibit. Come and see the faithful Christian expire. He has ceased to be a creature of this world: he no longer belongs to his native country: all connection between him and society is at an end. For him the calculations of time have closed, and he has already begun to date from the great era of eternity. A priest,

seated at his pillow, administers consolation. This minister of God cheers the dying man with the bright prospect of immortality; and that sublime scene which all antiquity exhibited but once, in the last moments of its most eminent philosopher, is daily renewed on the humble pallet of the meanest Christian that expires!

At length the decisive moment arrives. A sacrament opened to this just man the gates of the world; a sacrament is about to close them. Religion rocked him in the cradle of life; and now her sweet song and maternal hand will lull him to sleep in the cradle of death. She prepares the baptism of this second birth: but mark, she employs not water; she anoints him with oil, emblem of celestial incorruptibility. The liberating sacrament gradually loosens the Christian's bonds. His soul, nearly set free from the body, is almost visible in his countenance. Already he hears the concerts of the seraphim: already he prepares to speed his flight to those heavenly regions where Hope, the daughter of Virtue and of Death, invites him. Meanwhile, the angel of peace, descending toward this righteous man, touches with a golden sceptre his weary eyes, and closes them deliciously to the light. He dies; yet his last sigh was inaudible. He expires; yet, long after he is no more, his friends keep silent watch around his couch, under the impression that he only slumbers: so gently did this Christian pass from earth.

BOOK II.

VIRTUES AND MORAL LAWS.

CHAPTER I.

VICES AND VIRTUES ACCORDING TO RELIGION.

MOST of the ancient philosophers have marked the distinction. between vices and virtues; but how far superior in this respect also is the wisdom of religion to the wisdom of men!

Let us first consider pride alone, which the Church ranks as the principal among the vices. Pride was the sin of Satan, the first sin that polluted this terrestrial globe. Pride is so completely the root of evil, that it is intermingled with all the other infirmities of our nature. It beams in the smile of envy, it bursts forth in the debaucheries of the libertine, it counts the gold of avarice, it sparkles in the eyes of anger, it is the companion of graceful effeminacy.

Pride occasioned the fall of Adam; pride armed Cain against his innocent brother; it was pride that erected Babel and overthrew Babylon. Through pride Athens became involved in the common ruin of Greece; pride destroyed the throne of Cyrus, divided the empire of Alexander, and crushed Rome itself under the weight of the universe.

In the particular circumstances of life, pride produces still more baneful effects. It has the presumption to attack even the Deity himself.

Upon inquiring into the causes of atheism, we are led to this. melancholy observation: that most of those who rebel against Heaven imagine that they find something wrong in the constitution of society or the order of nature; excepting, however, the young who are seduced by the world, or writers whose only object is to attract notice. But how happens it that they who are deprived of the inconsiderable advantages which a capricious fortune gives or takes away, have not the sense to seek the re

medy of this trifling evil in drawing near to God? He is the great fountainhead of blessing. So truly is he the quintessence itself of beauty, that his name alone, pronounced with love, is sufficient to impart something divine to the man who is the least favored by nature, as has been remarked in the case of Socrates. Let atheism be for those who, not having courage enough to rise superior to the trials of their lot, display in their blasphemies naught but the first vice of man.

If the Church has assigned to pride the first place in the scale of human depravity, she has shown no less wisdom in the classification of the six other capital vices. It must not be supposed that the order of their arrangement is arbitrary: we need only examine it to perceive that religion, with an admirable discrimination, passes from those vices which attack society in general to such as recoil upon the head of the guilty individual alone. Thus, for instance, envy, luxury, avarice and anger, immediately follow pride, because they are vices which suppose a foreign object and exist only in the midst of society; whereas gluttony and idleness, which come last, are solitary and base inclinations, that find in themselves their principal gratification.

In the estimate and classification of the virtues, we behold the same profound knowledge of human nature. Before the coming of Jesus Christ the human soul was a chaos; the Word spoke, and order instantly pervaded the intellectual world, as the same fiat had once produced the beautiful arrangement of the physical world this was the moral creation of the universe. The virtues, like pure fires, ascended into the heavens: some, like brilliant suns, attracted every eye by their glorious radiance; others, more modest luminaries, appeared only under the veil of night, which, however, could not conceal their lustre. From that moment an admirable balance between strength and weakness was established; religion hurled all her thunderbolts at Pride, that vice which feeds upon the virtues: she detected it in the inmost recesses of the heart, she pursued it in all its changes; the sacraments, in holy array, were marshalled against it; and Humility, clothed in sackcloth, her waist begirt with a cord, her feet bare, her head covered with ashes, her downcast eyes swimming in tears, became one of the primary virtues of the believer.