speak of it to you with the experience of more than sixty years. Yes, my dear children, of one hundred thousand people who have lived badly there will scarcely be one who will have a good death!” This is not, it is true, a quotation, but it is obvious that the Curé of Ars brought it in here with a certain amount of willingness.
In preaching to the fathers and mothers of families about their duties towards their children he made their duties appear so difficult that these poor people had to decide either not to fulfill them or to become saints.
It is absolutely essential to see in these doctrinal exaggerations either oratorical amplification or the desire to inspire in the souls (of his listeners) a salutary apprehension, “But,” our saint makes an imaginary opponent say in his sermon on The Delay in Conversion, v. . . that would be enough to throw one into despair.” “Ah! my friend,” retorts the preacher, “I would like to be able to bring you to the edge of despair so that, struck by the terrifying state you are in, you would at least take the means that God offers you even to-day to get out of it.”
M. Vianney, wishing to impress souls vigorously, had surely the need to “exaggerate” certain details of morality in order to make them more understandable to the least instructed portion of his audience. In addition, his austere temperament inclined him to preach the terrible truths: he returned, in almost every sermon, to the last end, to death, to judgment, to hell.
Experience in dealing with souls taught him to be a less stern moralist, However, as a missionary who heard him in his last years has said, he preserved right up to the end “a slight tendency to severity, when he was speaking with such energy on the threats of divine justice, on the terrors of the judgment, on hell.” For he treated of all these frightening subjects as continually as ever when numerous pilgrims were mingling with the people of his parish.
Nevertheless, he never excluded from his theology the dogma of the divine mercy. We have a special sermon by him on that
