its consequences, for all errors but this, have their remedies. If a person lose his property, he may be able to recover it in some other way; if he lose a place, he may be able to regain it; even if he should lose this life and yet be saved, there is a remedy in all these cases. But for him who is lost, there is no further help. We die once; the soul lost once, it is lost for ever. Nothing now remains but to weep for ever in hell with those wretched ones, where the greatest punishment which torments them, will be the thought, that for them to remedy their misery, the time of all help has passed by. " The summer is ended, and we are not saved?" (Jer. viii. 20.) Ask the wise ones of this world, who are in that pit of fire, what sentiments they now hold, whether they are contented to have made their future on earth, now that they are condemned to this eternal prison; hear how they weep and say, " On this account we erred." But what does it avail them to know the mistake they have committed, now that there is no escape from eternal condemnation? What grief would not any one feel in this world who had been able at a little cost to mend some defect in his palace, and yet one day afterwards, should find it fallen down: he would have good cause to reflect upon his own carelessness when he could no further remedy it.
This will be the greatest punishment of the lost; the thought that they have destroyed the soul, and that they are condemned for their own sin. " O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in Me is thine help." (Hos. xiii. 9.) S. Teresa says, that if any one lose, through their own fault, a coat; a ring, even the smallest trifle, he has no peace, he neither eats nor sleeps. O God! what grief will the condemned feel at that moment in which he enters hell, when he finds himself so shut up in that prison of torments and reflects upon his disgrace, and sees that through all eternity it can never be blotted out! Then he will say, I have lost my soul, lost heaven, lost God. I have lost all, and for ever, and for what? By my own fault.
But some will say, if I have committed this sin, wherefore am I condemned? "It may be, that still I may be saved." I answer, that it may be still nay, I say it is much easier to be condemned; since Holy Scripture threatens with condemnation such obstinate transgressors as thou art now. "Woe
