spend their days in wealth.”[1] Pious, just Christians, many of you on the other hand are poor and despicable in the sight of the world; you are oppressed with labors and trials, and have to earn your bread in the sweat of your brow, and you are, so to speak, harnessed to a wretched peasant’s wagon.
This inequality will be quite different at the end. But be not troubled at this. Wait till the end, till evening comes, till the hour of death, and then you will find that the difference between you and the wicked will be a consoling one for you, but a very deplorable one for them. When your souls, laden with the merits you have acquired by your patience and good works, are awaiting joyfully to have the gates of heaven opened to them, the wicked shall against their will be stripped of their gorgeous trappings, and be thrust naked and wretched into a place where they never thought of entering. The goods they possessed in life will, although dumb, cry out to them on their death-beds, to their great terror and despair, what Our Lord says to His disciples in to-day’s Gospel: “A little while, and now you shall not see Me.”[2] For a little while, shall cry out the lusts and delights of the world, we have served for your comfort and enjoyment; now we can remain no longer; our successors shall be pains and torments, which are already knocking at the door and turning us out of the house. For a little while, the money shall cry out, I still regard you as my master; afterwards I shall belong to others, and not a farthing of me shall you be able to take with you on your journey to eternity. In a little while, honor shall say, I shall leave you; my years of service are at an end, and presently there will be no more thought of you. Truly those are bitter words for him who has set his heart during life on such things, and forgotten his God! Too faithfully will be fulfilled in his regard the words that Baruch spoke in the person of the world: “I nourished them with joy;” I have kept them well for a short time, and fed them with sugar and honey: “but I sent them away with weeping and mourning.”[3] I dismissed them at last, sad and sorrowful. And, most terrible of all for the wicked at the end, where shall they go to after death, when their short career of happiness is over? Into a stable like the horse stripped of his trappings? Ah, they would wish to have even as good a place as that to re-
