other forever. an impure passion so that they could hardly bear to be separated for one hour, and were ready to share all they had, nay, to give up their very lives for each other, shall they have no consolation or pleasure in being together in hell, in seeing that their torments are shared between them? For we know that people of that kind are wont to comfort each other in sorrow, and thus to lessen considerably the weight of the blow. Shall it not be so, I ask, in hell? Ah, nothing of the kind! All this intimacy and friendship, this love and confidence, shall disappear amongst the damned, or to speak more correctly, this former love and confidence, intimacy and friendship, shall rather increase their mutual hatred and aversion, their madness and despair, their curses and imprecations. For it is but right that they who in any way have been instruments and co-operators during life in tasting the forbidden pleasure and offending an infinite God, should also in hell be instruments and co-operators in torturing each other and satisfying the just anger of God.
Especially they who lived together in impure love.
Mark this well, O impure man and woman! who now receive so many fatherly warnings and exhortations in sermons and in the confessional, to leave the proximate occasion of sin, to give up the unlawful intimacy, to turn out of the house the person who has captivated you with impure passion (for until you have done this you cannot receive absolution, even if you told your sins to the Pope himself and he pronounced the form of absolution over you), and each time think or say: I cannot abandon that person; my love is too great; I cannot, even if I saw hell opened before me. Nay, so far do you go in your madness sometimes, that you do not hesitate to say or think: I do not care about hell; I should rather be damned (what a thing for pious ears to listen to!) if I was sure of having that person in hell with me. Ah, senseless creature! I sincerely wish that this foolish desire of yours may never be fulfilled! But if it should happen to your eternal misfortune that you are condemned to hell with the object of your sinful love—and that will certainly be the case if you continue in your present mode of life without doing penance for the abominable sins you are committing,—then I tell you, and you may be quite sure of what I say, that there will be no demon in hell for whom you will have more hatred and fear, no demon who will torture and afflict you so cruelly as the person whom you now love in such a senseless and brutish manner. The beautiful countenance that you now call
