have you ever even once made a candid confession with true sorrow and a firm purpose of amendment? What were you doing from morning till night but spending your time in pleasures and pastimes and in the pursuit of temporal gain, heaping sin on sin, as if God had given you time only for that purpose? And now, when time is no more for you, you ask for an opportunity to make good the great loss? No, that cannot be; your prayer cannot be granted. Ah, unhappy man! do not trust to a future repentance, which is to be when you see that you are about to die. The grace of conversion, of perseverance, of a happy death is far too great for you to hope for it then from an angry God, who will already have begun to act as your Judge. But there is another point: supposing even that there will then be still room for you in the divine mercy, and that God will not refuse you the powerful grace of conversion, yet on your own side all hopes of salvation must vanish; for then you shall be neither disposed nor able to work with the grace of God so as to be truly converted, as we shall see in the
Second Part.
In what true repentance consists.
He who thinks that he will be able to repent sincerely at the end of an ill-spent life shows that he does not understand what is meant by sincere repentance. It is easy enough to confess your sins to the first priest that comes in your way; and if he asks you whether you are heartily sorry for having offended the good God, to answer yes; and if he further inquires whether you wish to be absolved and to receive the last sacraments, to say yes to that too. But is that sufficient to obtain pardon of your sins? Gracious God! if such were the case, how many Christians would be in heaven who are actually burning in hell! Do you wish to know, O sinner! what it means to do true penance? Then pay attention. To do penance is to love sincerely and earnestly what I before hated against the law of God; sincerely and earnestly to hate what I before loved contrary to the divine will, and to detest, curse, and reprobate all such unlawful thoughts, words, and actions; to love God more than all joys, goods, honors, and creatures in the world; to hate and detest my sins more than all imaginable evils, pains, and troubles in the world, nay, more than death itself, and all that from a supernatural motive; that is, not through desire of a natural gain or profit, nor through fear of a natural misfortune, or the dread of death; but on account of
