trouble and discomfort; who wish and desire nothing but an easy, comfortable, sensual, pleasant life; who place their happiness in the gratification of the eyes, ears, and tongue, in the pleasures of taste, smell, and touch; who tremble and shudder when one speaks to them of mortification of the senses, of self-denial, of penitential exercises that do no hurt to the body; who, that they may devote themselves all the more freely to the gratification of their senses, laugh at the word of God, the Gospel truths, the warnings and menaces of the faith, God Himself. Good God! are those people going to hell to suffer for all eternity those terrible, general, unceasing pains and torments of that inextinguishable fire? Yes; they must make up their minds to that, for such is their belief; such must be the end of the lives they are leading. And why do they wish to go to hell? For the sake of that momentary, carnal pleasure in which they now take delight; for some temporal gain; for the love of a mortal creature; to gratify a passion; to be in harmony with the perverse world. And do they damn themselves for such trifles? Do they lose all for such worthless things? Do they choose hell, that terrible abyss of torments, for such a short-lived gain? Have those people completely lost their reason?
And yet hell shall be filled with those fools! Ah, what am I saying! Have not I myself often been such a foolish, senseless creature, when I committed mortal sin for the sake of such wretched things, and thereby made deliberate choice of hell-fire? Alas! what have I done? What is to become of me? “I am filled with fear and trembling,” exclaims St. Bernard, “and all my bones are shaken at the thought of that unhappy country of the damned.”[1] My hair stands on end, the blood stops still in my veins with fear and terror when I think of hell! O innocent Bernard! be still, and let me rather say those words and tremble with fear. If I descend in spirit into hell, I find there souls that committed the same sins that I have been guilty of, many who have committed far less sin than I; many, and indeed many millions of angels who have sinned but once by a momentary thought. Oh, wo to me then! for I have often deserved hell-fire by thought, word, and deed. Daily is this hell filled with souls, as the word of God assures us by the Prophet Isaias: “Therefore hath hell enlarged her soul, and opened her mouth without any bounds,”[2] in order to swallow down souls.
