God, His Unity and Perfection: The Love of God, Despised and Implacable

The next part of Bossuet’s Elevations on the Mysteries, 1,9:

Because you have not wanted to serve the Lord your God with pleasure and in the joy of your heart, in the abundance of all of his good things, you will be subjected to an implacable enemy which the Lord will send over you, in hunger and thirst, in nudity and famine, and he will place on your heads a yoke of iron which will overwhelm you. (Deuteronomy 28:47) And as the Lord took pleasure in doing well to you, of multiplying you, to enrich you to full hands, likewise he will take pleasure in losing you, in destroying you, in crushing you. (v. 63) Weigh these words: the measure of torments will be love scorned.  Why do you vainly cry (Jeremiah 30) and what use is it to you to push to the heavens your useless whining under the hand which breaks you? Your breakage is incurable: gangrene is in your wound and there is no cure: there is no longer for you either balm or splint. I have struck you with the blow of an enemy, of a cruel wound: not a father’s punishment to correct you, but a vengeful and pitiless punch to satisfy inexorable justice.  Your sins have become hard by the hardness of your heart, by your inveterate habits, by your inflexibility in evil. And I also, says the Lord, I will harden myself towards you: and I will forget that I am your father. You  will implore in vain my mercy pushed to the limit by your ingratitude: your insensibility will become mine.  I have done to you this cruel and insupportable treatment on account of the multitude of your crimes and your hard sins: on account of the inflexible hardness of your rebellious and self-willed heart.  It is time that judgement begins by the house of God (1 Peter 4:17) Lead to me Jerusalem: lead to me this soul piled up with such graces: I will lose it: I will erase it like one erases writing so as not to leave a trace: I will pass and pass again a sharp knife on his forehead and there will not remain anything sane or whole.