Page:Sermons by John-Baptist Massillon.djvu/126

 is a weight, as it were, which we support in the midst of the world, while incessantly in search of some one who may ease us of its burden. In this manner, time, that gift of God, that most precious blessing of his clemency, and which ought to be the price of our eternity, occasions all our embarrassments, all our weariness, and becomes the most oppressive burden of our life.

But a second reason which makes us feel still more sensibly our absurdity in setting so little value upon the time the Almighty leaves to us, is, that not only it is the price of our eternity, but likewise it is short, and we cannot hasten too much to employ it to advantage. For, my brethren, had we even a long series of ages to exist upon the earth, that space would, in truth, be still too short to be employed in meriting everlasting happiness; yet its duration would at least enable us to retrieve those accidental losses. The days and moments lost would at least form only a point, scarcely perceptible, in that long series of ages we should have to pass here below. But, alas! our whole life is but an imperceptible point. The longest endures so little; our days and our years are shut up in such narrow limits, that we see not what we can have still to lose, in a space so short and rapid. We are only, as I may say, a moment upon the earth: like those fiery exhalations, which, in the obscurity of night, are seen wandering in the air, we only appear to vanish in a moment, and be replunged for ever into our original and everlasting darkness. The exhibition we make to the world is but a flash, which is extinguished almost in the same moment it exists: we say it ourselves every day. Alas! how can we take days and hours of rest from a life which is itself but a moment? And besides, if you retrench from that moment all you are under the necessity of allowing to the indispensable necessities of the body, to the duties of your station, to unexpected events, and the inevitable complaisances due to society, what remains for yourself, for God, and for eternity? And are we not worthy of pity; we, who know not how to employ the little which remains to us, and who fly to the assistance of a thousand artifices to abridge its duration?

To the little time, my brethren, we have to live upon the earth, add the number of past crimes which we have to expiate in this short interval. How many iniquities are collected upon our heads since our first years! Alas! ten lives, like ours, would scarcely suffice to expiate a part of them; the time would still be too short; and it would be necessary to call upon the goodness of God to prolong the duration of our penance. Great God! what portion can remain to me for pleasures and indolence, in a life so short and criminal as mine? What place, then, can frivolous sports and amusements find in an interval so rapid, and which altogether would not suffice to expiate a single one of my crimes?

Ah! my brethren, do we even think upon it? A criminal condemned to death, and to whom a single day is only allowed to endeavour toward obtaining his pardon, would he find hours and moments still to trifle away? Would he complain of the length of the time which the humanity and goodness of his judge had