Chapter XII. What God is to the Reprobate

What is God ? Not less the punishment of the perverse than the glory of the humble. For He is the living and intelligent Rule of equity, inflexible and inevitable, because reaching everywhere, to Which no wickedness can oppose itself without being confounded. | And how can it be but that everything inflated and everything distorted shall impinge upon It and be broken ? But woe to whatever stands in the way of this Rectitude, Which knows not how to yield, because « It is also Fortitude ! What can be so opposed, so contrary to the perverted will as to be always straining, always struggling against the Divine Will, and always in vain ? Woe to such rebellious wills, for the only fruit v of their strivings is the penalty of their opposition ! What misery can be greater than to be for ever desiring that which shall never be ? What doom can be more horrible than that of a will subject to such a necessity of loving and hating that it can no longer either love or hate anything otherwise than perversely, or without as much misery as malice ? * For ever it shall be denied what it covets, and what it hates it shall for ever endure. And surely it is just that the will for which nothing good and holy has ever any attraction should never attain to the object of its desires. By whom has this been brought about ? By our righteous .Lord and God Who " with the perverse will be perverted " (Ps. xvii. 27). There can never beany concord between the will that is perverse and the Will That is all-righteous. These two must be always at variance with one another, although they cannot hurt one another. Only one of the two can suffer hurt and it would be blasphemous to believe this one to be the Will of God. Hence to Saul it was said, " It is hard for thee to kick against the goad " (Acts ix. 5) ; hard, take notice, not for the goad but for him who kicked against the goad.

God is likewise the punishment of the unclean. For God is light. And what is so unwelcome as light to impure and degraded souls ? Therefore is it written, / " Everyone that doth evil hateth the light " (John iii. 20). But I ask : can they not hide themselves from its rays ? No, that is impossible. For the light shines everywhere, albeit not for all. It shines in darkness and the darkness does not comprehend it (John i. 5). The light beholds the darkness, because for it to shine is to see ; but it is not beheld by the darkness, since the darkness comprehends it not. The impure, therefore, are seen that they may be confounded, and are prevented from seeing lest they should be consoled. Not only are they seen by the light, but they are also seen in the light. By whom dost thou ask ? By all who have eyes to see, so that their confusion may be the greater in proportion to the number of beholders. But amongst such a countless multitude of spectators, there is no gaze more troublesome to them than his own is to each : there is no eye either in heaven or on earth which the darksome conscience is more anxious and less able to avoid than its own. For not even from itself can the darkness be concealed. They see themselves who cannot see aught besides. The works of darkness follow them, from which there is no place of concealment, not even in the very darkness itself. This is the worm that " dieth not " (Mark ix. 43), the memory of the past. Once this worm is admitted, I should rather say once it is engendered in the conscience by unrepented sin, it clings there tenaciously and can never more be removed. It gnaws without ceasing the conscience where it dwells, and nourished with this inexhaustible food, it lives on for ever. I shudder with fear whenever I think of this gnawing worm, of this life in death. The very thought of falling into the hands of this living death or dying life overpowers me with horror.

Such is the "second death" (Apoc. ii. 11), the death of the reprobate, which, although it is for ever killing them, never deprives them of life. Oh, who will grant them to die once and for all, so that they may not have to endure the eternal death ! They that " say to the mountains : fall upon us, and to the hills : cover us " (Luke xxiii. 30), what do they ask but the benefit of an utter death whereby to end or escape from the living death ? But it is written, " They shall desire to die, and death shall fly from them " (Apoc. ix. 6). Let us examine this more minutely. Consider then that the soul is most certainly immortal and shall never exist without her faculty of memory, for otherwise she would cease to be the soul. Consequently, as long as the soul survives, so long shall the memory, too, survive. But in what state in the case of the damned ? Defiled with deeds of shame, rendered horrible by criminal actions, swollen with vanity, squalid and grown wild as a field which, through contempt, has been left uncultivated. For although " the former things are passed away " (Apoc. xxi. 4) in one sense, they are not passed away in another. They have passed away out of sight, yet not out of memory. What has been done is done and can never be undone. Therefore although the doing of it occupied only a little time, the having done it shall endure for ever.f That which transcends all f On these words the great Bourdaloue comments as follows in his Sermon on the Pains of Hell : " One of the greatest punishments of hell will be to have committed sin, and to have been defiled with crimes in the course of life. But these crimes will no longer exist ? True, replies the holy Father, they will no longer exist in the reality of their being, but they will still exist in thought and remembrance. Now it is in remembrance and thought that the soul reprobated by God shall suffer.

time does not pass away with time. Consequently, the crimes which the lost shall eternally remember to have committed must be for them eternally the cause of torment. Thus shall they see verified by experience the truth of what is written, " I will reprove thee and set before thy face " (Ps. xlix. 21). These are the words of the Lord, to Whom no one can be opposed without being also set at variance with himself, so that he shall have — even though late — to cry out, " O Keeper of men, why hast Thou set me opposite to Thee, and I am become burdensome to myself " (Job vii. 20) ? So in truth it is, Eugenius. It is impossible for any man to be at peace with himself whilst he is at enmity with God, and he that is reproved by God shall also be reproved by himself. This is more particularly true of the future life, when the reason

The crimes will exist no longer, but they will have had existence. Neither will it be in the power of the sinner or of any other to hinder them from having had existence. Now they will not torment, either on earth or in hell, but because they have existed ; and therefore they torment when their existence ceases : or rather they do not begin to torment before their existence ceases. And as not to be and to have been are two infinite terms, terms which will equal the eternity of God, and will subsist according to their manner of subsisting while God is God, those crimes which have been and are now no more, will have, if I may venture the expression, an eternal activity in hell to torment the damned soul. . . . Observe what happens to a choleric man, when in the heat of passion he imbrues his hands in his neighbour's blood. Scarce has he given him the death wound when he is disturbed in mind and disordered in his senses. His peace is flown and his reason almost lost. What would he not do, what would he not give, what would he not suffer, to have still in his power not to perpetrate what he has now perpetrated and what he shall never be able to repair ? Now this is but a shadow and figure of hell. Inasmuch as to have sinned implies something eternal, the torment, by a just though dreadful sentence, shall also be eternal ; and the soul shall be unhappy without end or intermission because it was for a moment culpable." — (Translator.)

can no longer shut its eyes to the truth, and the soul, disencumbered of these bodily members and wholly concentrated in herself, shall be unable to avoid the gaze of reason. How indeed shall this be possible to her when death shall have paralysed and sealed up the sensitive faculties through which she is now accustomed to issue forth to gratify her curiosity, and, leaving herself, to go out into the world the fashion whereof passeth away (1 Cor. vii. 32) ? Seest thou not that nothing shall be wanting to the confusion of the unclean, since they shall be exposed and made a spectacle to the eyes of God, of the holy angels, of men, and of themselves ? Oh, in what a horrible position all the reprobate shall find themselves, opposed as they . shall be to the mighty torrent of inflexible Justice, exposed to the light of naked Truth ! Is it not manifest that they must be everlastingly crushed, everlastingly confounded ? Hence we read in the Prophet, " Bring upon them the day of affliction, and with a double destruction destroy them, O Lord our God ,; (Jer. xvii. 18).