so? With eyes that have been used hitherto only for sin, and to seek out occasions of sin? Detest and abominate that unlawful intimacy! But how? With a mind that he could never make up to leave that intimacy, because he was too much attached to it? With a heart that considered it as his greatest pleasure and a paradise on earth? Call upon the saints in heaven, your patrons! But on whom? On those whom he dishonored instead of honoring in church, and whose feast-days he utterly neglected? And shall he call on them with a tongue that has vomited so many blasphemies, so many obscene jests, so many oaths and curses, so many calumnies and detractions? Meanwhile the priest sees that the soul is on the point of departing; what is he to do? He gives the dying man absolution under condition, that is, if he is capable of receiving it. The soul departs amid the prayers of all present. A beautiful death! Is it not? Alas! I trust that mine will not be like that! No, no! that man could not have repented with a sincere heart, or have been truly converted.
Confirmed from the holy Fathers. Ask the holy Fathers, those enlightened interpreters of Scripture, what they think of such a repentance. Ask St. Isidore; he calls it suspicious. Ask St. Bernard; he calls it rash and presumptuous.[1] Ask SS. Cyprian, Ambrose, Gregory, Chrysostom, Thomas of Aquin; they laugh at such a repentance as utterly ridiculous, and, generally speaking, useless. “I dare not say,” writes St. Augustine, “that one or the other individual who has repented on his death-bed is lost forever; but I cannot have much hope that he is in heaven. It is true that the confessions of such dying people are received by the Church; but I do not think they are much to be depended on. I do not trust in them,” continues the Saint; “I do not wish to deceive you; but I do not trust in them.”[2] “I can exhort such a man to repent; I can hear his confession and give him absolution; but I cannot say that the absolution will have any effect.”[3] I trust little in such confessions. Eusebius, one of the disciples of St. Jerome, writes that when the Saint was dying he was asked to give his disciples a last lesson, and he said these words, sighing deeply at the same time: “Of a hundred thousand men who have always led bad lives hardly one deserves pardon from God.”[4]
