lasting fire!” Here is food for thought. Fire! Eternal fire! These words alone suffice to represent to the imagination that terrible final sentence. Loss of heaven! Separation from the sovereign Good! The gnawing worm of conscience! Mental anguish and desperation! Mad rage and fury against one’s companions! Hideous goblins and devilish shapes of horror! Mad howlings and curses and blasphemies of the damned! Intolerable stench of so many bodies burning in a pit of sulphur! Hunger and thirst! Serpents and the gall of dragons! Torments without alleviation, comfort, or hope! These and similar horrors are ascribed to hell in the Holy Scriptures; but I need not refer to them now. I may afford to treat them as if they were mere fables. Fire! Eternal fire! This one thought is enough to make the hair stand on end. O fire! eternal fire! who can dwell in thee? My dear brethren, we think so seldom of this; and yet if we reflected on it as frequently as we should, eternal fire would not be the lot of so many. We shall consider this subject to-day, according to the warning of the Holy Ghost: “Let them go down alive into hell;”[1] go down in thought into hell during life, that you may not have to go there after death.
Plan of Discourse.
Therefore the wicked shall be condemned to fire by the final sentence. Ah! what terrible pain for them; as we shall see briefly in the first part. They shall be condemned to eternal fire. Ah! what an incomprehensible pain: the second part. The folly of the sinner in wilfully choosing that terrible fire shall be the concluding thought.
All shall find some useful considerations in this meditation. Great God! my words are powerless; Thy grace must now speak and work with special strength and emphasis! We do not implore Thee on behalf of the unhappy wretches who are now burning in hell, for Thou hast no more grace for them; but we do beg of Thee to impel us, who are still living, so to order our lives that not one of us may have to suffer in that fire. This we beg of Thee through Mary, the Mother of mercy, and our holy guardian angels.
Of all earthly torments, that caused by fire is the worst Of all the elements, the most active and penetrating is fire; of all torments, the worst and most intolerable is that caused by fire. The hardest stones and metals, steel and iron, brass and copper,
- ↑ Descendant in infernum viventes.—Ps. liv. 16.
