is how your life begins and ends: "What is your life? It is a vapor which appeareth for a little while, and afterwards shall vanish away."[1] If the sun casts a shadow on the earth; so do the days of my life pass away, as the Prophet David says: "My days have declined like a shadow, and I am withered like grass."[2] If I happen to see a cobweb in the room, I can think with the same David: "Our years shall be considered as a spider;"[3] to-day the spider runs about in its web spinning out its own entrails; to-morrow the maid comes with the broom and sweeps the whole thing away. You who are now in the bloom of youth and crown yourselves with flowers, hear what those same flowers say to you: "Man born of a woman, living for a short time,…who cometh forth like a flower, and is destroyed;"[4] to-day the flower blooms, to-morrow it decays. If you stand before the looking-glass to contemplate your beauty, even that announces death to you, for it reminds you of the words of the Psalmist:
"Surely man passeth as an image."[5] All the years, months, weeks, days, hours, and moments that we have lived say to each one of us: you are now so much nearer to the hour of your death. Fire, water, sword, bullet, poison, sicknesses of countless kinds, nay, our very pleasures cry out to us and warn as that they are the instruments that help us to death. In a word, all creatures, if we could make a quintessence of them, would cry out to us: memento mori—remember thou must die. Now, my dear brethren, why has divine Providence sent us so many messengers and warnings of death, in and outside of ourselves, and surrounded us with them in all places, if not that the remembrance of death may urge us to lead good lives, restrain us from evil, and teach us to prepare in time for eternity?
If we thought constantly of it, there would be no room for pride and vanity. Oh, if we only kept this thought before our minds, who would then dare abandon himself to a wicked life! I am altogether of the opinion that, as there is no power, no authority, no riches in the world that can protect us against the approach of death, so also there is no vice, no evil inclination, no bad habit, no matter how inveterate, that cannot be tamed, subdued, and eradicated altogether by the frequent consideration of death. The
- ↑ Quæ est enim vita vestra? Vapor est ad modicum parens, et deinceps exterminabitur.—James iv. 15.
- ↑ Dies mei sicut umbra declinaverunt, et ego sicut fœnum arui.—Ps, ci. 12.
- ↑ Anni nostri sicut aranea meditabuntur.—Ps, lxxxix. 9.
- ↑ Homo, natus de muliere, brevi vivens tempore,…qui quasi flos egreditur et conteritur.—Job xiv. 1, 2.
- ↑ Verumtamen in imagine pertransit homo.—Ps, xxxviii. 7.
