us fear, not so much him who kills the body, but rather him who after he hath killed the body can destroy both soul and body unto hell. The greatest saints, SS. Ambrose, Basil, Jerome, etc., felt, confessed, and taught the fear of the Lord, and St. Augustine, while assigning it as the cause of his own conversion, declares it to be the climax of every call to repentance. This, no doubt, is why the Church in her liturgy so often addresses herself to our sense of fear, as, for instance, on the first Monday in Lent, and again in the gospels of the cockle and good wheat, and the net cast into the sea, and especially on this, the last, and on next Sunday, the first, of the Ecclesiastical Year, in the awful pictures of the Last Judgment.
Brethren, the reasons are not far to seek why the gospel of the year's last Sunday should be the gospel of the last day, but it is not so clear why on the first Sunday of Advent the Church takes for her theme the terrors of judgment. Her object in placing in such close juxtaposition Christ's first and last coming is to remind us that, while contemplating God's infinite mercy in the person of the humble and pathetically helpless babe, we must not forget His equally infinite justice, to be revealed in the majestic coming of the Judge of the living and the dead. Moreover, the portentous events which shall presage the Lord's second coming were in a mystical sense realized at His birth. The Sun of Justice was darkened when the Word of God clothed Himself in human flesh, and the moon, God's kingdom on earth. His Church, which
