I have said more particularly that in the world in which you live,--I mean the court,--the disease of a perverted conscience is far more common, and far more difficult to be avoided; and I am sure that in this you will agree with me. For it is at the court that the passions bear sway, that desires are more ardent, that self-interest is keener, and that, by infallible consequence, self-blinding is more easy, and consciences, even the most enlightened and the most upright, become gradually perverted. It is at the court that the goddess of the world, I mean fortune, exercises over the minds of men, and in consequence over their consciences, a more absolute dominion. It is at the court that the aim to maintain one's self, the impatience to raise one's self, the frenzy to push one's self, the fear of displeasing, the desire of making one's self agreeable, produce consciences, which anywhere else would pass for monstrous, but which, finding themselves there authorized by custom, seem to have acquired a right of possession and of prescription. People, from living at court, and from no other cause than having lived there, are filled with these errors. Whatever uprightness of conscience they may have brought thither, by breathing its air and by hearing its language, they are habituated to iniquity, they come to have less horror of vice, and, after having long blamed it, a thousand times condemned it, they at last behold it with a more favorable eye, tolerate it, excuse it; that is to say, without observing what is happening, they make over their consciences, and, by insensible steps, from Christian, which they were, by little and little become quite worldly, and not far from pagan. What could surpass the adaptedness of such preaching as that to the need of the moment for which it was prepared? And how did the libertine French monarch contrive to escape the force of truth like the following, with which the preacher immediately proceeds?-- You would say, and it really seems, that for the court, there are other principles of religion than for the rest of the world, and that the courtier has a right to make for himself a conscience different in kind and in quality from that of other men; for such is the prevailing idea of the matter,--an idea well sustained, or rather unfortunately justified, by experience.... Nevertheless, my dear hearers, St. Paul assures us, that there is but one God and one faith; and woe to the man who dividing Him, this one God, shall represent Him as at court less an enemy to human transgressions than He is outside of the court; or, severing this one faith, shall suppose it in the case of one class more indulgent than in the case of another.