ing and imprecations! Amidst these despairing cries the valley of Josaphat will at length be cleft asunder, and swallow up the unhappy wretches like so many rabid dogs, and their memory will not remain any more.
We should now fear this sentence with a wholesome fear, that we may avoid sin. Christians, what are our thoughts now? Does not our hair stand on end with terror? O my dear brother, writes St. Augustine to a certain person, O dearest brethren, I say now: “is our flesh of iron that it does not tremble?”[1] Are our hearts marble that they do not become soft? Is our spirit sunk in such a deep sleep that it refuses to awaken even at the terrible voice of the angry Judge: Depart from Me, you cursed? Ah, fear; fear by all means, but fear no one except that just Judge who alone has the power of passing such a terrible sentence on us! Fear, but fear nothing except sin, for it alone can bring down that sentence on us! Fear, but not with an empty fear, that remains only in the imagination, and leaves the mind anxious and dispirited. Fear with an effectual fear that strides on to action, repressing our evil inclinations, withdrawing our hearts from the world and its vanities, confining us always within the bounds of the divine and Gospel laws! If we know that we are free from sin, or even if we have committed all the sins in the world, but our conscience gives us testimony that we have repented of them sincerely, confessed them candidly, and amended our lives, and if moreover we have the earnest will never again to offend God deliberately, and always to do His holy will as well as we know how: then we can and shall always rejoice in the Lord that we have not to fear that terrible sentence; a sentence that the divine goodness and mercy often suggests to us, now while there is still time, as a subject of meditation to inspire us with a wholesome child-like fear, that we may resolve to be true to Him always, and with this resolution to enjoy even in this life a foretaste of the happiness to which we shall be called with His chosen children by the divine Judge on that day.
Yet in spite of that fear, most people shall be lost. Why so? Meanwhile, my dear brethren, of all the reprobates who are now in hell, how many think you are there who during life heard in sermons, or read in spiritual books, and that too with fear and trembling, of the last judgment and the terrible sentence on the wicked? How many of those here present (ah, I sincerely hope that may not be the case!) who are now filled with fear
- ↑ Numquid ferreæ sunt carnes nostræ, ut non contremiscant?
