And to remember how uselessly he spent his time. The time that the divine liberality bestowed on me was a rich property that I could have left to my soul as an inheritance; but how much remains to me of it when I reckon up all that I have spent for other purposes than the good of my soul? The heirs receive no more of a legacy than what is left after all debts have been paid; deducto œre alieno, according to the terms of the law; and moreover whatever the testator has given away during his lifetime must be deducted also, as well .as what he has left to others in his will. Oh, what a number of creditors surrounds my death-bed, to whom I have irrevocably made over the time of my life! How much time have I not spent in sleep, in idleness? In dressing? In immoderate eating and drinking? In receiving and paying useless visits? In gratifying my curiosity at the door and the window? In playing cards, amusements, and sinful talk? In excessive care for temporal things? In sensuality and impurity and all kinds of sin and vice? Ah, my poor soul, if all that time has to be taken away, how small thy inheritance will be! And what wilt thou live on during eternity? Thou shalt resemble the poor woman whose husband spends at the ale-house all he has earned during the week—and there are only too many nowadays who do that—so that she has nothing but her tears for herself and her starving children!
For which he must give a strict account to his Judge. And in what state wilt thou be to present thyself before thy Judge, when He shall say to thee: “Give an account of thy stewardship”?[1] Tell me how thou hast worked the land I lent thee; what fruit thou hast garnered from the precious seed of time. “What answer will you make on that day?“is the question that St. Anselm asks of the dying man who has spent a useless life, “when you shall be required to give an account of all the time conceded to you during life, and of the manner in which you passed it?”[2] Oh, truly, the Judge will not need other witnesses against you to pronounce on you the sentence of condemnation; for the time you spent so ill will be your accuser and witness, so that you shall lose your case. “He hath called against me the time.”[3] He shall bring up as witness against me the time in which I could and should have done good, but which I used only to secure my own condemnation. And that time in which I could have avoided evil, escaped hell, and gained heav-
