terrupted pains and torments, without any alleviation or change? and unless you alter your mode of life that will most certainly be your fate.
What then must pain be when it lasts long and indeed forever? My dear brethren, let us often think of this. If long continuance makes even pleasure painful, how intolerable must not pain itself be when it lasts long? It is painful to have a bad tooth drawn; yet it is not difficult to console the patient in such a case. Have courage, you say to him; it will soon be over; the whole thing will be done in a moment, and you will have no more pain to suffer. If it took one, two, or three hours to perform the operation, who would submit to such torture? And not only is the actual suffering of a long agony intolerable to us, but the mere sight of such agony in others fills us with pity and terror. A robber or murderer is condemned to the gallows or to the sword; if the executioner bungles in his work, and keeps the poor wretch suffering a long time, how the bystanders murmur and express their disapproval of him! Make haste! they all cry out, and put the poor fellow out of pain; do not torture him so long. Now, I ask myself, if the pain of having a tooth drawn, or of dying by the rope or the sword, is rendered so acute by being lengthened that we cannot even behold it in another person without being horrified at the sight, what must be the state of one who has to live for a long time in a burning fire? How must it be with him who has to spend not one or two hours, nor one or two days, nor one or two years, but a whole endless eternity in the terrible and most painful fire of hell?
We cannot describe eternity. O eternity! exclaims St. Augustine; what art thou? "Say what you will of it, and you will never have said enough."[1] Say that it includes as many millions of years as there are stars in the firmament, grains of sand on the sea-shore, leaves on the trees, drops of water in all the rivers in the world, "you will never have said enough;" when you have counted up that im- mense number, you are still far from the total of eternity. Why? Because all those things bear some measure and proportion; thus, so many drops make a gallon, so many gallons a cask, so many casks a stream, so many streams a great river, so many rivers a sea; and the drops, no matter how small they are, can be so increased and added to that they will make an ocean. But no time, no matter how long, has any proportion to eternity. Add millions of years to it and it will not become greater; take away millions
- ↑ Quidquid de æternitate dixeris, minus dicis.
