Madam and my sister in Jesus Christ: It is you who have given me the text and the subject of this exhortation. It is you who, overflowing with gratitude toward him who has called you from darkness to his admirable light, have asked me to forget this audience and to think only of you and of God, and to speak only of his loving-kindness which has been manifested in every event of your life. I will obey you; and, taking this life in its three divisions which mark time, I will endeavor to speak in simple truth, and the pious confidence of an overflowing heart, of the mercies of God over your past, your present, and your future career. The history of Christian souls is the most marvellous and yet the most hidden of all histories. The more exterior events which agitate society find only in these interior histories their true sense and their highest reason; and when we shall read these entire in the book of life, and by the light of eternity, we will find therein the unanswerable justification of the providence of God over human affairs, and the true titles of the nobility of mankind in the blood and by the grace of Christ. "We will sing eternally the mercies of the Lord!" I. And first, madam, what were these mercies of your past life? Or, to be better understood, what were you? What have you been until now? I acknowledge some embarrassment in giving an answer to my own question. Although born in the bosom of heresy, you were not a heretic. No, by the grace of God you were not a heretic; and nothing shall force me to give you this cruel name--justly cruel--against which cries out all the knowledge I have of your past. One of the doctors--the most exact and the most severe--of Christian antiquity, Saint Augustine, refuses in several of his writings to class among heretics those who, born outside the visible communion of the Catholic Church, have kept in their hearts the sincere love of truth, and are disposed to follow it in all its manifestations and in all its requirements. [Footnote 66] [Footnote 66: See particularly the letter xliii. of the edition of the Benedictines of Saint-Maur: "Qui sententiam suam, quamvis falsam atque perversam, nulla pertinaci animositate defendunt, praesertim quam non audacia praesumptionis suae pepererunt, sed a seductis atque in errorem lapsis parentibus acceperunt, quaerunt autem cauta sollicitudine veritatem, corrigi parati, cum invenerint; _nequaquam sunt inter haereticos deputandi_."] That which makes heresy is the spirit of pride, of revolt, and of schism, which burst forth in heaven when Satan, separating the angels of light, attempted to remodel, according to his liking, the theology of eternity, and reform the work of God in the world; it is that breath blown from the nostrils of the archangel in wrath to stir up about him his propagandists throughout time. Gentle and humble of heart, you have never breathed that breath. You are not, then, a heretic.