soul? — that ends with a temporal death, but this hath a death everlasting. O eternal God, illuminate me with Thy sovereign light, that through the fear I conceive of the evils of the body I may learn to feel the evils of the soul! Amen.
POINT II.
Secondly, I must consider that sin is an evil incomparably greater than all the temporal evils that have been spoken of, and that with them we cannot pay the least part of the penalty that only one mortal sin deserves; considering some manifest reasons of this truth alleged by the saints.
1. The first is, that all the evils that have been spoken of deprive us of goods created, which are very much limited; but sin deprives of an infinite good, which is Almighty God. [1] And as God only is for excellence called good, [2] because the other things created, though they have some goodness, yet being compared with that of Almighty God it is as it were nothing, so sin alone may be called absolutely evil, and the malice of other miseries is as if it were not in comparison of it; nor are altogether sufficient to impose upon me the title of evil, if I be without sin; for by sin alone shall I be evil, though I be exempt from all other miseries. [3]
Hence it is, that if all the pains of this life were joined together in me, as poverty, dishonour, sickness, pain, grief and persecution, with all the torments that the martyrs have endured, yet they equal not the evil of one mortal sin, and I ought willingly to offer myself to suffer them all rather than to commit one; in imitation of that renowned Maccabean martyr, who answered those that threatened him with grievous torments if he would not break one commandment of God's law, " Praemitti se velle in infernum," " that he
