dark night, risking at the same time your good name and reputation in order to gratify your sensual desires! You have felt how bitter a thing it is to abandon your God, and yet you have constantly despised Him to cleave to me. You were always ready to serve me and to do my will, but the least difficulty in pleasing your God was enough to frighten you away from Him.
Wherefore they will demand justice on him from the Judge. “Now therefore, most just Judge,” he will exclaim, as St. Augustine says, “judge this man!”[1] I have not become man for this man, as Thou hast done. I have not endured hunger and thirst, and buffets and scourges, and nails and the cross for him, as Thou hast done. I have not shed my blood for him, given my life for him, as Thou hast. I have not promised him heaven, which I could not do, but I have kept him in the way of sin and wearied him in it. I have often betrayed and deceived him; so that he himself knew well that I sought nothing but his ruin and eternal damnation; nevertheless he has served me like a slave, and shamefully despised and rejected Thee, his Lord and God, to whom he had sworn eternal fidelity. He has treated Thee as if Thou wert a God of wood; as if Thou hadst no eyes to see his wickedness, no power to punish it. “Now therefore pronounce sentence, and let him be mine through his own fault, who refused to become Thine by grace.”[2]
And show that he belongs to them by right. He is Thine by the title of creation, I acknowledge that; he is Thine too by the title of preservation, but he belongs to me by donation or gift, for while still in life he withdrew himself from Thy rule and gave himself to me altogether; nor canst Thou say anything against this! Just God! remember how Thou didst act towards me and my companions. We unhappy spirits committed only one momentary sin of thought against Thee and Thou didst at once sentence us to hell without mercy, without giving us time for repentance; Thou didst hurl us like lightning into the abyss in which we have been now for many thousand years, and where we shall burn forever without hope of release. Holy and just is Thy judgment! Yes, we have deserved our fate. But if this punishment of ours is just, consider now what sort of a hell this man has deserved to whom Thou hast shown such unheard-of love, whom Thou hast waited for so patiently for many years, whose repentance Thou wert ready to receive at any hour or moment, and who nevertheless has so often
