You a Christian soldier?--and flaunting on the devil's parade-ground, the theatre, the ballroom where the lascivious waltz goes on, the midnight revel of thoughtless and giddy young people, flushed with wine, intoxicated with excitment, whirled away by the tide of passion, where they know not and care not, until at length remorse, disgrace and ruin tell them where, but too late to save them. These are the pomps of the devil which you renounced and foreswore at your baptism. If you take them up again, you are an outcast from Jesus Christ, and a servant of the devil. You dare to call yourself a Christian, and all the while you are living on the devil's pay, feeding on sensuality, plunged overhead in impurity, the miserable, beastly reward that the devil gives to his followers. By the law of Moses, those who committed such crimes were to be stoned to death without the camp. Is the camp of Jesus Christ less holy, think you, that an impure man or woman can be tolerated within its sacred precincts? {139} You pretend to wear the livery of Jesus Christ. What, then, is that badge, what are those insignia you are wearing? They tell that you belong to some secret society, that you have defied the law of the Church, and braved her excommunication. You are then shut out from the sacraments, and not only are you no soldier of Jesus Christ, but you belong to the devil's own body-guard. Tell me, you pretended soldier of Jesus Christ, where are you on your King's parade days, his Sundays and Festivals, when he requires his servants on earth and his angels in heaven to present themselves in review before him? Where are you during the holy solemnity of the Mass? Absent; your place vacant, and you asleep, or lounging, or doing the devil's work. At the Easter Communion, where are you? You are not to be found, or still worse, you present yourself without that rich and ornamental dress of sanctifying grace, which your king requires, under pain of death. Blush to call yourself a soldier of Jesus Christ, for if you are one, you are a delinquent and a faithless one. You profess yourself so loudly a Christian soldier, what then are you straggling for, behind your column? Jesus Christ allows no stragglers in his army, and the enemy has ambuscades everywhere to cut them off. {140} These are those heretical churches into which you stray, in ignorance or neglect of Catholic order and discipline. Hasten out of these ambuscades of error, delusion and eternal death. Rejoin your column quickly, and keep within the serried ranks of the Catholic host, or you are lost.