from sin and dangerous occasions; if you had taken more care of my spiritual and less of my temporal needs; if you had not prevented me from following my religious vocation, I should now be in heaven, and should have escaped the eternal torments which are caused me by your hateful presence in hell! Accursed daughter, a mother will say, my foolish love for you has been my ruin; I allowed you to spend your time in idleness, vanity, and worldliness, and did not chastise you for your bad and scandalous conduct! Truly, accursed mother, the daughter will reply, you should have kept me in check; it was your duty as a mother; if you had been attentive to it I should not now be lying in hell. The bad example you gave me, the dangerous company into which you brought me, the pride you inspired me with, the vanity in dress that you encouraged or permitted in me by your silence, has brought me to eternal ruin, to everlasting fire! Cruel mother! did you bring me into the world that you might have a hellish fury to be your companion here, and that one of us might eternally torture the other? Accursed the day and the hour in which you gave me birth! Such is the manner in which brothers and sisters, friends and relations will rage and storm at each other.
How terrible the company of the demons must be!
O ye demons! you are not needed in hell, since the wicked themselves will thus torture each other unceasingly! It is true; still those evil spirits will also enter into that dreadful company, not merely as hateful and odious enemies, but also as cruel executioners of the divine justice, and they will strain every nerve to heap torments on the damned. For this their terrible appearance should alone suffice, for they are so hideous that the seraphic St. Francis, to whom a demon once showed himself in visible shape, acknowledged to his companion Ægidius, that if God had not miraculously preserved his life, the mere sight of such a hellish monster for one moment would have been enough to deprive him of life through fear and terror. St. Antoninus writes of a priest who once saw a devil, and who said that he would rather leap into a flaming furnace than look at that evil spirit or one like him again. St. Catharine of Siena in her dialogue with Our Lord offered to walk on burning coals till the day of judgment rather than look at a devil again. Now, I ask, if one demon seems so terrible to a mortal who merely looks at him, what must it be in hell where there are so many millions of evil spirits who not only terrify the damned by their appearance,
