Page:Sermons by John-Baptist Massillon.djvu/16

 the good it was permitted to do, without injuring a single person, even an enemy; which, in fine, has at all times obtained the regard of the wise by practising religion without littleness, and preaching it without fanaticism.

Massillon's superiors soon formed a presage, from his first essays, of the honour he would confer on the congregation. They destined him to the pulpit; but it was only from obedience that he consented to fulfil their intentions : he alone did not foresee the celebrity with which they flattered him, and which was to be the recompense of his modesty and submission. There are some confident minds which recognize, as it were by instinct, the object marked out for them by nature, and seize it with vigour; while others, humble and timid, require to be apprized of their powers, and by this honest ignorance of themselves are rendered only the more interesting, and the more worthy of being snatched from obscurity, and presented to the renown which awaits them.

The young Massillon, at first, did what he could to withdraw himself from this glory. He had already, from pure obedience, while yet in the province, pronounced funeral orations on M. de Villeroy, archbishop of Lyons, and M. de Villars, archbishop of Vienne; and these two discourses, which were indeed first attempts, but attempts of a young man who already announced what he afterwards became, had the most brilliant success. The humble orator, affrighted at his rising reputation, and fearing, as he said, "the demon of pride," resolved to escape from him for ever, by devoting himself to the profoundest and even most austere retirement. He went and buried himself in the abbey of Sept-fons, where the same rule is followed as at La Trappe, and there took the habit. During his noviciate, the Cardinal de Noailles sent to the abbot of Sept-fons, whose virtue he respected, a Charge which he had just published. The abbot, more religious than eloquent, but still retaining a degree of self-love, at least on account of his community, wished to make the prelate a reply worthy of his Charge. He committed the task to his exoratorian novice, and Massillon executed it with as much success as promptness. The Cardinal, astonished at receiving from this Thebais a work so well written, was not afraid of wounding the vanity of the pious abbot by asking him who was the author. The abbot named Massillon; and the prelate told him that it was not fit such a genius should, in the Scripture-phrase, remain "hidden under a bushel." He required the novice to quit his habit, and resume that of the Oratory; and he placed him in the seminary of St. Magloire, at Paris, with an exhortation to cultivate pulpit eloquence. At the same time he took upon himself, as he said, the young orator's fortune; which Massillon limited to that of the apostles, that is, to the merest necessaries, and the most exemplary simplicity.

His first sermons produced the effect that his superiors and the Cardinal de Noailles had foreseen. Scarcely did he begin to show himself in the pulpits of Paris, than he eclipsed almost all those who at that period shone in the same career. He had declared