Hunolt Sermons/Volume 10/Sermon 44

by Franz Hunolt

FORTY-FOURTH SERMON.

ON THE JUSTICE AND MERCY OF GOD IN CONDEMNING THE SINNER.

Subject.

In sentencing the sinner to eternal fire God shows, first, His equity and justice towards the dead; secondly, His goodness and mercy, love and kindness towards the living.—Preached on the fifth Sunday in Lent.

Text.

Quis ex vobis arguet me de peccato?—John viii. 46.

“Which of you shall convince Me of sin?”

Introduction.

After the last meditations in which we have been representing to our minds the terrible torments of hell, many a one will perhaps say to himself: O my God! what is this I hear? If it is true that the mercy of God is infinite, that the works of His mercy exceed all His other works; if it is true that “His mercy endureth forever,”^[1] as the Prophet David repeats five and twenty times in his psalm, how then can it be that God will thunder forth against the sinner for one mortal sin that terrible sentence to everlasting fire and to the torments of hell? Is not that unjust, nay, cruel? But no more of those blasphemous thoughts! “Which of you shall convince Me of sin?” asks the Lord. True, my dear brethren, it seems incomprehensible; and yet it is in reality right and just; it seems to contradict the infinite love and mercy of God, and yet even therein He shows His love and mercy, as I shall now prove in this sermon.

Plan of Discourse.

In sentencing the sinner to eternal fire, God shows His equity and justice towards the dead: how great must be the malice of it in! This we shall see in the first part. He shows thereby His goodness and mercy, love and kindness towards the living: how foolish for men not to love a God who means so well with them! This we shall see in the second part.

Just and at the same time merciful God! impress this truth deeply on the hearts of us all, that we may never forget it, and that we may order our lives according to the lesson it teaches. This we ask through the Mother of mercy and the intercession of the holy angels.

It must be right and just to punish mortal sin with eternal fire, because it is a most just God who inflicts that punishment. But, you will ask again, is it right for one sin, yes, often for one solitary sin, to punish a poor mortal in such a terrible manner? For one sin that may have lasted but a moment to inflict an everlasting punishment in eternal fire? For a false oath, for instance, or a curse uttered in earnest from which a person derives no profit whatever? for a scandal given, although there may not have been the least intention of leading others into sin, nay, although no one may have taken scandal, if the word, or act, or manner of dress, or conduct was in itself scandalous? for the unjust gain of a few shillings that may have been lost immediately after? for a sin wilfully concealed in confession, and what is still more incomprehensible, for a mere thought of vindictiveness or impurity deliberately indulged in, although no act follows it?—how, I ask, can it be right or just to punish such sins with eternal fire? Every law says that the chastisement should, as far as possible, be in proportion to the crime, and not be greater than the criminal deserves. Now if the pleasure of the sin be so short-lived, how can the punishment be terribly and almost infinitely severe? If the sin is momentary, how can the punishment be eternal and incessant? If the sin is committed with the will alone, how can the punishment, and that too an eternal one, be inflicted on both soul and body? What proportion is there between a moment and eternity? between such a wretched, short-lived pleasure and everlasting fire? Yes, my dear brethren, that is what we cannot grasp with our weak intellect now, and that very consideration led Origen into an error that has been long ago condemned and rejected by the Catholic Church; for he held that the punishment of the damned would come to an end some time or other. But, great God! we submit our minds, we believe with a simple faith what we cannot understand, because Thou hast said that the man who dies with even one mortal sin on his soul unrepented of must be punished with eternal fire. And since it is Thou who pronouncest that severe sentence on the sinner, and breakest the staff and decidest his destiny, since Thou art justice itself, Thy sentence cannot be otherwise than right and just. This should be enough for us without any further examination or scrutiny, and we should humbly acknowledge with Thy servant David: “Thou art just, O Lord! and Thy judgment is right.”^[2] Meet and just is it that Thou shouldst condemn the sinner to eternal fire!

And no injustice is done the sinner, because he makes deliberate choice of it. Yet to represent in some degree to our weak understanding the justice of this sentence, I will tell you, my dear brethren, what I have learned of the matter from the holy Fathers and Scripture. In the first place it is a common saying that no injustice is done by acting towards a man according to his will.^[3] He who can choose between good and bad and deliberately selects the latter, cannot complain of being ill-treated; if he did so we might say to him: but, you fool! why did you not make a different choice? You were quite at liberty to do so. He who voluntarily and without compulsion takes up a heavy load cannot have the least right to say that people oppress him. It is no doubt very painful to burn in a fire; but if I wilfully leap into it, or compel another to throw me in by violence, can I say that I am treated unjustly and cruelly? No; let the punishment be as severe as you wish, the man who undergoes it has no right to complain if he chooses it himself. Now who is there to compel a man to go into that terrible fire of hell? Has not every one, as long as he lives, the free choice of making his eternal dwelling in heaven or in hell? God, says the wise Ecclesiasticus to us all, “hath set water and fire before thee: stretch forth thy hand to which thou wilt. Before man is life and death, good and evil; that which he shall choose shall be given him.” You must either keep the commandments of God, and then heaven is your own: “If thou wilt keep the commandments,…they shall preserve thee;”^[4] or else if you are not pleased to do that, hell is the place appointed for you. The reprobate man, before things came to such a pass with him, knew all this very well; why then did he choose hell? Who forced him to commit sin? No one but himself. So that he did not wish to be better off. And even if there is such a great difference between a momentary pleasure and eternal sorrow, is it not in your power and mine, O sinner! to enjoy the pleasure, or to reject it? Therefore you are indeed foolish and mad to purchase it at such a dear price; but God is and remains just in demanding the payment agreed on for it, and in chastising you with the rod that you knew well He had in readiness for your crime.

Nay, he even compels the just God to punish him, though such is not God’s will. Moreover the sinner forces the God of justice, and so to say compels Him by violence to condemn him to hell. How so? God seeks and desires nothing more than that man by keeping the commandments should escape hell and be eternally happy in heaven; to that end He gives us so many warnings to be on our guard against the fire of hell, and He threatens us with that terrible punishment that fear may urge us to work out our salvation, as we shall see more in detail in the next part. And how long does He not wait for the sinner who is actually in mortal sin, although He has then the undoubted right of sending him at once into hell? How often does He not, as it were, beg and pray, and urge him to come back, promising to receive him again as His dear child, and assuring him that the angels will rejoice at his conversion? Is not that a clear proof that the good God does not wish the sinner to be lost? Now, if in 6pite of all this the sinner obstinately persists in wickedness, and continues to be the enemy of God; if he says, by his actions: I do not wish to be free from sin; I know that eternal fire is my doom; let it be so; let me go to hell; it is nothing to me: I will not be converted; then is the Lord God, on account of His infinite holiness and justice, which do not allow Him to leave wickedness unpunished, compelled, as it were, to do what He is unwilling to do, and to condemn to hell that man whom He would willingly have had with^ Himself in heaven. Hence the man cannot complain of being unjustly treated, or say that his punishment is too great, for he himself has wilfully chosen that punishment. “It belongs to the justice of the strict Judge,” says St. Gregory, “that they should never be without punishment whose minds during life were never without sin, and that there should never be an end of punishing that wicked man who, when he could have done so, was unwilling to desist from crime.”^[5]

Because the malice of sin is much greater than this eternal punishment. Besides, on account of His infinite majesty God has full power and authority to compel man under pain of eternal punishment to obey His law. And we see in earthly tribunals and in the affairs of common life that the length and severity of the punishment is not always according to the duration of the crime, or the damage done by it. The thief who has injured another man in his property, an injury that is easily repaired, must lose his life and everything else with it, a loss that is an eternal one for him, for life cannot be again restored to him; he is hung up on a gallows and remains there until his carcass rots away, although the theft did not take more than a minute to accomplish. A poor soldier is often sentenced to death by court-martial for a fault that he may not have looked on as even a venial sin, for going a few steps away from his post, or as often happens, for taking a few apples or turnips out of another person’s garden. Now if those punishments are looked on as right and just under the circumstances, what are we to think of the gravity of a crime that is committed against the sovereign God? Oh, truly in this case we must look, not at the crime committed, but at the Person who is thereby insulted and offended. The gravity and malice of a mortal sin is, according to St. Thomas, in a certain sense infinite, because it is an offence against the infinite majesty of God, who is worthy of infinite honor, fear, and love. Now if the punishment is to equal the guilt, mortal sin deserves infinite punishment, because its guilt is in a sense infinite, and if the sinner departs this life uurepentant and without being reconciled to God and atoning for his sins, he is justly condemned to suffer never-ending pains and torments. Therefore no wrong is done him, nor is he treated cruelly in being sentenced to eternal fire, which, although it will never come to an end, could still be infinitely worse than it is. Hence it is the general teaching of theologians that God shows mercy even in hell, and chastises sin much less than it deserves.

For the damned are never freed from their sins, and shall remain obdurate in evil forever. Thirdly, this punishment is, according to St. Bernard, right and just, “because with reason is the chastisement eternal, since the guilt can never be blotted out.”^[6] You know, my dear brethren, what goes on in the workshop of the artist who is making a statue out of metal; while the furnace is glowing, the metal melting, and the tools all in readiness, he can make whatever statue he pleases—a man, an angel, a lion, a devil. But when the metal has been already poured out and has grown cold, can he then improve on or change the statue that has just been made? No; as it comes from the mould so it must remain. Christians! as long as we are in this life we are like the molten metal, and can become a likeness of God by grace, or a likeness of the devil by sin; when death comes, the casting is over, and we retain the figure we receive therein, that is, in our last moment. If it is the diabolical figure of a reprobate sinner it cannot be changed any more, and the sin ner is no longer in a state to do proper penance or to awaken a meritorious contrition for his sins. Nay, according to St. Gregory, the reprobate are not only incapable of meritorious contrition and sorrow, but for all eternity they will retain obstinately and pertinaciously the wicked will in which they died. Although they know that God is their only happiness and is worthy of all love, they will hate and curse Him forever. From this again the conclusion is evident: since the malice of sin lasts forever, God must hate and punish it forever; and since the sinner, now obstinately persisting in his wickedness, does not cease to be wicked and to curse his Creator, neither can God cease to take vengeance on the sinner. Consequently it is and must be true that eternal fire is meet chastisement, for even one mortal sin. Yes, O Lord! we again acknowledge that “Thou art just, and Thy judgment is right.” The damned themselves, in spite of their torments, shall to their own greater confusion be forced to make the same confession and to acknowledge that they are justly treated, rightly condemned to eternal fire.

From this we see what a hideous monster it is and yet it is committed so wantonly. My dear Christians, what are we to think of all this? O sin, sin! what a terrible monster thou art, since thou alone compellest the infinitely merciful and good God to punish without mercy in everlasting fire the creatures whom He loved even to the death of the cross; and that punishment too is not only meet and just, but is even far too mild and merciful to compete with thy malice! O sin! would that men knew thee as thou art, and hated and detested thee as thou deservest! Meanwhile, how little thou art feared! how easily committed by all sorts of men! how increased and multiplied without number every day! As little is thought of thee as of a pane of glass falling out of a window; nay, many a one is sorely troubled at the latter trifling accident who can laugh and joke after having committed a grievous sin! Can we still wonder, my dear brethren, that the just God inflicts the terrible punishment of hell-fire on sin, since even by the threat of that direful penalty He has been able so little to destroy sin? Can we still have a doubt of His justice when He threatens the obstinate sinner with eternal flames? To my mind He shows therein not merely His equity and justice towards the reprobate, but also His infinite mercy, goodness, and kindness towards the living, as we shall see in the

Second Part.

By the threat of eternal punishment God shows His love for us, and His earnest desire for our salvation: like a father. What greater proof of goodness, kindness, and mercy could the Almighty give us than His earnest effort and desire to make us all happy, to give Himself and infinite joys to us as our possession, and to have recourse to all possible means to carry out this design of His? Now when we consider the matter duly, we shall see that He has given us no clearer proof of His will to make us happy, no more powerful means to compel us, so to speak, to attain happiness, than the threat to punish us with eternal fire if we refuse to do His will, to fulfil His desire to have us in heaven. For when I hear a father saying to his son with a friendly, smiling countenance: my dear child, be good; conduct yourself becomingly, and you shall remain with me always, and I shall leave you a hundred thousand ducats in my will; and threatening him moreover with a serious face, saying: but if you lead a bad, scandalous, reckless life, and bring shame and disgrace on yourself before the world, and reject the inheritance I offer you, be assured that whenever I lay my hands on you I will not only disinherit you completely, but will moreover shut you up in prison, and daily have you scourged till you bleed: what should I think of that father? That he is a cruel, unmerciful man, who is altogether too severe with his children, and takes pleasure in their misfortunes? Eh! that might be said with reason of those parents who through foolish love or damnable sloth allow all liberty to their children, and never chastise their vices or put any restraint on them, or who try to do all with sweet, honied words, like Heli with his wicked sons. My dear children, they say, what is this I hear of you? You must not do that again! It is easy to say, you must not do that again! The children pay little heed to such words, and are only worse than before. Parents of that kind, I say, are really cruel to their children, and actually desire and cause their ruin. But that cannot be said of the father of whom we first spoke; for he shows by his threats that he truly loves his son, and that he is in earnest in desiring to have him prosperous and happy.

So does God act with us. Even so does God, our heavenly Father, act towards us, His adopted children. He offers an eternal inheritance of infinite goods, an eternal heaven filled with all imaginable joys as the reward of our obedience and service, and that too a short service that lasts only as long as this mortal, uncertain life of ours. See, He says to every one; take upon you My sweet yoke; remain faithful to Me only for a short time; love Me and keep My commandments; I will give you help and grace enough to do what I require of you; if you go wrong now and then, come back to Me and do penance; My sole desire is to make you happy in that way forever; even in this life you will have a most sweet consolation, and rest, and joy of conscience; hereafter you shall be where I am Myself; I will give you Myself as your eternal reward; for every thought, act, and word of yours that is prompted by love for Me I will bestow on you a special joy that shall last forever. But if you refuse Me that short service, if you abandon and msult Me, although I have given you no occasion to do so, and persist in your obstinacy till death, and thus prevent Me from fulfilling My desire to make you happy, then I will cast you into the lake of fire in which you shall burn forever without hope of release. You must either go to heaven, where I wish you to be, or else suffer for eternity in hell.

And if He had not treated us with that punishment hardly one would be saved. Suppose now, my dear brethren, that God had said nothing of this threat, and that the sinner had nothing to fear but the loss of the promised reward, although that loss would be in itself a most severe punishment; or take away hell and put in its place a temporal fire that sooner or later shall come to an end, how many would then, do you think, go to heaven and be eternally happy there? O holy souls! who inflamed by the love of God serve Him, not through fear of punishment or hope of reward, but simply for His own sake, and desire nothing more than that His holy will should be perfectly accomplished in von, and that you could thereby give Him some pleasure—holy souls, I say, how few you are compared to the vast multitude of men! And indeed at first even you were not so perfect, but had to begin by the fear of hell before ascending to such a high degree of charity. Ah, if we were all like yon in this particular, the fire of hell might well be extinguished! I acknowledge that we have all reason enough to have the same sentiments as you; for the great, good, and infinitely amiable God deserves that we should all serve Him in the most perfect manner, and gratuitously, and the heaven of joys merits well that we should spend a thousand million years and a million of lives, if we had them, in all sorts of penitential works to gain it; but, alas!—ah, how blind we are!—although faith assures us that besides heaven there is the everlasting fire of hell, that every mortal sin deserves hell, that he who dies in mortal sin shall lose heaven and be condemned to that fire, how recklessly and carelessly we live on in sin! Purgatory? But what is it after all? Why should we be afraid of it, so to speak? It lasts only for a time. And what sort of a life would there be in the world if there were nothing of the kind to fear? Oh, I repeat, if God were to extinguish the fire of hell the world would be a thousand times worse than it is; if God were to extinguish the fire of hell there would be no human souls in heaven.

Hence we should thank Him for having appointed hell as a punishment for sin. Therefore, since God earnestly desires to make all men happy, He is compelled to threaten us with that grievous penalty; so that they who refuse to be led gently by love and the desire of a reward may at least be driven into heaven by violence through the fear of eternal punishment. And hence in this respect we owe the Almighty our sincerest thanks for His great goodness and mercy in thus menacing us with hell-fire, and compelling us to work out our salvation, to avoid evil, to strive after virtue, in order to be happy with Him forever in heaven.

Folly of most men in wilfully hurling themselves into hell. But what should be my thoughts now? What should first and most excite my astonishment? Thy eager desire, O God of goodness! to make us happy? for in order to drive men into heaven Thou hast been compelled to make hell; or rather the stupidity of most men, which is enough to make heaven and earth wonder? for even the threat of hell is not powerful enough to curb their madness and folly; in spite of it they refuse to serve such a well-meaning God; they will not allow Him to drag them to heaven even by the fear of such a penalty. There is a hell and an eternal hell, and yet there are sinners who offend God! There is an eternal hell; Christians know it, and yet that hell is daily filled with Christians! O my God! is it possible that such wretched creatures are to be found whose doom is already sealed? who while I speak of them are actually immersed in those hellish flames? Is it possible that there are amongst us some whose lot will be to be buried in that lake of fire? Ah, truly, my dear brethren, the most of us should be there now if God had dealt with us according to our merits; and most men shall one day burn in hell forever, because in spite of all warnings and threats they recklessly persist in sinning. What am I to think of this? What to attribute it to? Whence cornes such amazing stupidity? Yet why do I ask?

It comes from a want of faith. Do you all believe in hell? I must again ask you, as I did on last Sunday. Do you believe that all that has been said about the terrible sentence passed on the reprobate is true? Or do you perhaps look on it as a mere fiction and fable? Perhaps I have tried to make you swallow an invention of my own? What! you exclaim; we are good Christians and Catholics, who learn from our faith that the eternal fire of hell is an infallible truth. That I am well aware of; but still I ask the same question; do you all believe in this truth? It cannot be that you believe it. True, you all say with the lips, I believe. But you disprove your words by your actions. Those men and women live on without care or uneasiness in their old vices; they, too, say, I believe in an eternal hell. That dissolute man who does nothing but curse and swear at every one in the house, who spends in drinking what should go to the support of his wife and family: he believes in an eternal hell. That vain woman who adores the world and its luxurious customs as her God: she believes in an eternal hell. That libertine who turns to ridicule the laws of the Church, and spiritual and divine things, and even laughs at hell itself: he believes in an eternal hell. That young man, that husband, who day and night seeks the gratification of his sensual desires, who is still in the proximate occasion of sin, persisting in an unlawful intimacy: he believes in an eternal hell. That young girl who keeps bad company, and is an occasion of unlawful desires to many by her extravagance in dress, thus placing a stumbling-block in their way: she believes in an eternal hell. Those people who consume the days and years of their lives in idleness, seeking one amusement after another, and utterly ignoring and forgetting God: they believe in an eternal hell. Those people who sacrifice their souls for a wretched gain, or to gratify some evil passion or inclination: they believe in an eternal hell. Those sinners who go to confession only at Easter time, who never make a good confession, who never truly repent of their sins, nor amend their lives: they believe in a hell, in an eternal hell, in the everlasting fire of hell. But how is that possible? “Why do you believe,” I ask them all with Salvianus; “why do you believe what God says if you do not fear what He threatens?”^[7] Are you then able and willing to endure the terrible fire of hell for all eternity? No, they all answer; we have neither the power nor the will to do that. But the infallible Son of God assures you, the fundamental truths that God has revealed, the laws and ordinances of the holy Gospel of Jesus Christ, the apostles and prophets of Christ, all tell you that the life you are leading can bring you no other way but straight to the eternal fire of hell. Let each one go in spirit down to hell and see what is to be seen there. Behold that vast multitude of damned souls; who are they? Are they not the unchaste? Yes; then out with the truth at once and say: I am just like them, and am immersed above the ears in the same filth. Who are those others? The vindictive, who during their lives refused to forgive or be reconciled to their enemies. And I too am full of hatred and anger against those who offend me; I cannot and will not bring myself to pardon them according to the Christian law. Who are those? Perhaps some who, after having done penance, have relapsed into their former sins. That is exactly the way in which I act; ah, how often have I not on the very day on which I sought to be reconciled to God fallen back into the sins that I had repented of and confessed! What great crowd of souls is that? Perhaps those who, devoured by avarice, have stretched forth their hands to seize unjustly the goods of others for their own advantage and that of their friends, making use for that purpose of all kinds of underhand dealings, lies, and deceit. I too am guilty of injustice; my hands too are stained with ill-gotten gains. Who are these? Perhaps those who have deferred repentance till the end of their lives, and have gone into eternity unprepared. Even I have risked that too, and am still risking it; for I am now actually in such a state that if death surprises me I shall be found just as unprepared and unrepentant as they were. But now, if I am not less, but more guilty in the sight of God than they, why am I not afraid of being eternally rejected by God as they are, and condemned to hell forever? What reason have I to desire or ask mercy from God, since others like me, and perhaps not near so bad or wicked, have been punished by the divine justice in hell-fire? “Neither dost thou fear God,” said the penitent thief hanging on the cross to his impenitent companion; “neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art under the same condemnation.”^[8] The same you can say to yourself, turning your thoughts and the eyes of your mind to the many burning in hell who are guilty of the same sins as you: “Neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art under the same condemnation.” Neither do you fear God, that just and strict Judge, although you are as guilty as many others who are actually lying in hell, and you know that you have sins on your soul that you must suffer for eternally. Nevertheless, O sinner! you go on unconcerned in the same vicious life. How can faith harmonize with such conduct? No! no! To no purpose have I sent your thoughts down to hell to contemplate there the damned who are like you. You do not believe in hell; you do not wish to believe that an eternal fire is appointed for the wicked.

Faith is weakened by a wicked life. And why should you not believe it? Is it not an article of faith taught by the true Christian, Catholic Church, as well as all the other articles? It is as true as that we must all die. It is as true as that there is one God, and in that one God three Divine Persons. Have you perhaps lost all faith? Formerly, while you were still good and pious, you believed firmly that there is an eternal hell for impenitent sinners, because God has revealed it. Is there then in your opinion no hell any more because you live wickedly? Because you have so often deserved the fire of hell? Because you wish to sin without fear or restraint? If we knew of hell only on the authority of some profane historian worthy of credit, who has handed down the tale to posterity; if it was only a tradition that there is an eternal hell; nay, if we had only some reasonable grounds to suspect the existence of such a place for the punishment of the impenitent sinner, even then, O my God! every sensible man should shudder with fear and anguish at the bare thought of the possibility of his being hurled into such a terrible fire. Such a fearful evil, if it be true, should certainly act as a restraint on every one, and be an incentive to all to lead good lives for a short time, lest they be cast into that place of torments. But it is a truth revealed by God, who is infallible; a truth that all the faithful have up to this firmly believed; and you do not believe it? And you do not believe it, although you have deserved hell? O wo! I repeat again with Eusebius; wo to those who have to learn by experience what hell is before they believe in it!

Conclusion and thanksgiving for having been so often saved from hell. My dear brethren, you believe, do you not, that there is a hell? Yes, O God! I and all here present hold it as an undoubted truth, and we thank Thee from our hearts for forcing us to serve Thee and thus to gain heaven by threatening us with that hell! And one thing I am specially bound to thank Thee for, and that is, for having had patience with me for such a long time, although I have deserved hell many and many a time by my sins. Even at this moment there are burning in that terrible fire, without distinction, all sorts of people—mighty princes and poor beggars, nobles and common people, tender ladies and coarse peasant girls, masters and servants, superiors and inferiors, clerics and laics, learned and ignorant, old and young, all Christians who have perhaps committed less sin than I; and I am still alive! By those very lost souls Thou hast warned me to live more carefully, so as to escape sharing in their punishment. O my good God! what do I not owe Thee for this? Have I not been senseless and mad to deserve that fire for the sake of some wretched passion or worthless object? In future, O Lord! I will show by my conduct that I fear Thee and Thy threats of hell. Ah, dear Christians! for God’s sake order your lives so that you may not have one day to descend into that eternal fire. The time we have here is very short; let us use it so that we may be eternally happy! And do Thou, O God of mercy! grant that the thought of this fire may sink so deeply into my mind and into the minds of my hearers that it may never be forgotten by us! Grant that in all temptations, in all occupations, in all joys and pleasures, this thought may be present to us; that it maybe our first on awakening in the morning, our last on retiring to bed at night. For as long as we think of hell with a lively faith, it is impossible, as Thou Thyself hast assured us, for us to fall into it. Therefore we must enter on the right way, and, which is the only object Thou hast in view in threatening us with an eternal hell, arrive at the possession of Thyself in everlasting joys. Amen.

1. Quoniam in æternum misericordia ejus.—Ps. cxxxv. 1.
2. Justus es, Domine; et rectum judicium tuum.—Ps. cxviii 137.
3. Volenti non fit injuria.
4. Apposuit tibi aquam et ignem; ad quod volueris porrige manun tuam. Ante hominem vita et mors, bonum et malum; quod placuerit ei dabitur illi. Si volueris mandate servare, conservabunt te.—Ecclus. xv. 17, 18, 16.
5. Ad districti Judicis justitiam pertinet ut nunquam careant supplicio, quorum mens ni hac vita nunquam voluit carere peccato; et nullus detur iniquo terminus ultionis, quia, quam diu valuit, habere noluit terminum criminia.—S. Greg. in Moral. Id. L. 4. Dial.
6. Merito ultio sempiterna desæviet, quod nunquam possit culpa deleri.
7. Cur credis quod Deus dixit, et non times quod Deus minatur?
8. Neque tu times Deum, quod in eadem damnatione es.—Luke xxiii. 40.