have passed a hundred and a thousand millions of years in torments, and shall see that their miserable eternity is only beginning, and shall be for ever in its commencement? But have the fifty years spent on this earth been full of pleasures? Perhaps the sinner, living in enmity with God, enjoyed uninterrupted happiness in his sins? How long do the pleasures of sin last? Only for a few minutes; the remaining part of the lives of those who live at a distance from God is full of anguish and pain. Oh! what will these moments of pleasure appear to a damned soul, when she shall find herself in a pit of fire?
8. ”What hath pride profited us? or what advantage hath the boasting of riches brought us? All those things have passed away like a shadow." (Wis. v. 8.) Unhappy me! each of the damned shall say, I have lived on earth according to my corrupt inclinations; I have indulged my pleasures; but what have they profited me? They have lasted but for a short time; they have made me lead a life of bitterness and disquietude; and now I must burn in this furnace for ever, in despair, and abandoned by all.
Third remorse of the damned, arising from the knowledge of the great good which they have lost by their own fault.
9. A certain queen, blinded by the ambition of being a sovereign, said one day: ”If the Lord gives me a reign of forty years, I shall renounce Paradise." The unhappy queen reigned for forty years; but now that she is in another world, she cannot but be grieved at having made such a renunciation. Oh! how great must be her anguish at the thought of having lost the kingdom of Paradise for the sake of a reign of forty years, full of troubles, of crosses, and of fears! ”Plus cœlo torquetor, quam gehenna," says St. Peter Chrysologus. To the damned the voluntary loss of Paradise is a greater loss than the very pains of Hell.
10. The greatest pain in Hell is the loss of God, that sovereign good, who is the source of all the joys of Paradise. ”Let torments," says St. Bruno, ”be added to torments, and let them not be deprived of God."
