Even the death of the wicked is not in itself bad or terrible. Shown by a simile. Death, I say, is not to be feared in itself; for not even the death of the wicked, considered in itself, is terrible or evil. Suppose a thief breaks into your house at night, and succeeds in carrying off some of your things; at last your servant awakes, runs after the thief, and, since he cannot get him into his power otherwise, kills him. What would you think of that servant? Would you call him a wicked murderer? No; he is a faithful servant, who protects his master’s property, and prevents it from being stolen. But the poor thief fared badly enough at the hands of the servant. True; but whose fault was it? The servant’s or the thief’s? The former only did his duty, and in fact could not have saved his life otherwise; while if the thief had kept his hands off other people’s property he would not have suffered as he did. Nay, under the circumstances the thief came off better than he otherwise might have done; for if he had fallen into the hands of justice he would have died a shameful and public death on the gallows.
For it ends a bad life, hinders many sins, and lessens eternal punishment. What is the man, my dear brethren, who leads a wicked, godless life. He is a thief and a robber, who wrongs his neighbor taking away his property unjustly, or lessening his good name by detraction, calumny, or contumely, by cursing, swearing, hatred, revenge, thus depriving him of rest and peace, or by improper conversations, caresses, or allurements, or bad example, thus robbing him of his innocence; he wrongs himself by depriving himself of his health through drunkenness; he robs the Almighty of the honor due to Him; he robs his own soul of grace and merit by impurity and other sins. He has continued in this wickedness for one, two, three, or more years without doing penance; if he goes now and then to confession, no improvement follows, and he continues on in the old way. Now, when God has looked on at all this with patience for a time, death comes like a messenger from the Almighty, and seizes on the guilty man in the midst of his sins, so that, although he might have recovered the grace of God at any moment, he dies in his sins. What is the terrible part of all this? That the man is dead? No; for we must all die. But is death frightful or terrible in itself? By no means! It is rather good and advantageous, because it puts an end to a wicked life, and thus prevents many sins, and moreover it has hindered the sinner, who would not in any case be converted, from adding to his eternal torments in hell.
