hell! And so you wicked ones, you do not believe in hell because no one has come back from there to tell you what it is like? Why then do you believe that there is one God in three Persons? Yet no one has come from the other world to tell you about that. But if yon believe one and not every thing, you are unbelievers, and deny the Holy Scriptures. If you are right, we have reason to think that the Lord is making fools of us, and that He is uttering only an empty threat when He tells sinners that they shall burn forever in hell. Then must the Catholic Church be a false one, and the holy Fathers and interpreters mere deceivers. Then must you deny your religion, which teaches us this article of faith as well as all the others. Wo, I repeat, wo to those who must experience these things before they believe them! Wo to you if you must go to hell before you rightly believe in it!
Or who do not fear it, and they are still more numerous.
Ah, Father, others of you say in your own minds, truly I believe in hell, and only too much do I fear it! A cold sweat breaks out on me whenever I think of being damned and burning in that fire forever! Good! so you think and say; but what sort of a life do you lead? Do you show that you really fear hell and dread the idea of suffering forever therein? It is not true; for wherever you go or stay you carry about with you the burden of grievous sin. You eat and drink according to your sensuality, and your sins are seated at table with you; you sleep and idle away your time till late in the day, and your sins are in bed with you; you clothe and adorn yourself, and your sins peep out from your extravagant dress; you go about amongst people, and walk, and joke, and laugh, and play, and amuse yourself at balls and parties, sometimes even during the holy season of Lent, and your sins are with you all the time; you go to church, to the confessional, even to the Table of the Lord to be fed with the immaculate flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, and you bring your sins, and more still than you had before, back with you. What sins? Ah, that you know yourself only too well! Ask your conscience what are the sins that you have not yet properly confessed, or truly repented of, or seriously amended! Ask your coffers in which you hoard up ill-gotten goods! Ask that house, perhaps it is your own, in which you keep the object of an impure love! Ask that room in which men and women meet and spend the whole night, sometimes, in all sorts of dissipation; that you allow, and thus make yourself participator in all the sin
