From the first dawn of reason I can hardly point to one day of my life on which my conscience has not reproached me with sin:
“When He shall examine, what shall I answer Him?” If He asks me for an account of the many graces and benefits He bestowed on me; what shall I answer Him? If He asks me how I have performed the duties and obligations of my state of life; what shall I answer Him? If He asks me how I have spent the precious time for so many months, days, and hours, of which not one moment should have passed without my doing something for my salvation; what shall I answer Him? If He asks me whether I have ordered my whole life according to the law of His holy Gospel; what shall I answer Him? And when in addition to all these questions He will deal with me in the strictness of His justice without any mercy, and not allow an idle thought or a vain word to escape notice; what shall I do?
St. Jerome and other hermits. Alas! I hear, too, in the midst of the desert among wild beasts, a St. Jerome, emaciated with penances, striking his breast with a stone, and crying out: “When I think of that day, my whole body trembles,”[1] and a death-sweat breaks out on my forehead! Whether I am eating or fasting, sleeping or praying, the sound of the terrible trumpet echoes in my ears: “Arise, ye dead, and come to judgment!” If I go in thought farther into the desert, there I find the holiest of the hermits, Hilarion, Arsenius, Agathon, who could not conceal their fear and dismay; and when asked by their disciples what cause they had to fear, “Ah,” they replied, “the judgments of God are different from those of men!”[2] I read of three devout pilgrims who travelled to the Holy Land; they came to the valley of Josaphat, which is surrounded by forests and mountains, and has by no means a melancholy aspect. Wandering to and fro, one of them found a large, flat stone; he considered it for a while and said: as this is to be the place in which the whole world shall be judged on the last day, I will now seek out a suitable position for myself, and take possession of it. He sat down on the stone and raised his eyes with awe-stricken devotion to heaven, when he had a momentary vision of Our Lord as He shall come to judge the living and the dead at the last day. The pilgrim was so terrified thereat that he fell in a swoon from the stone and was picked up half dead. Little by little he came to himself, but from that day forward was never
