ery? No, you think; God forbid! Yes; but see how you are living; and as you live so you shall die without the least doubt. Of a hundred thousand who put off repentance to the hour of death there is hardly one who repents sincerely. You are minded to amend before death; but when? After a time. Have you a document to show how long your time is to last? There are millions of souls in heaven who would not be there now if they had deferred their conversion never so little. Millions of souls are burning in hell forever, because they have thought and acted as you do now, and have deferred repentance though only for one hour. Oh, how stupid we mortals are! We are certain that we have grievously sinned; we are certain that we have merited an eternal hell; we are certain that we must die; we are certain that we may die at any moment; we are certain that most people die unhappily; we are certain that the same fate may be ours this very night, this day, this hour even; and yet we remain for hours, days, weeks, years, in the state of sin, although if death surprises us in that state we shall be dragged down to hell by the demons! Good God! what blindness and folly!
Exhortation to them not to defer repentance. Ah, sinner, if it were only probable that we should die, what depends on death is so weighty that it should be our greatest care not to die unhappily. If there were but one of us here in church who had such a death to fear, it would be reason enough to make us all shudder with terror, and to say to ourselves: perhaps it is I. O sinner, do penance! penance! and do not delay about it, “for tribulation is very near.”[1] Well-known and remarkable is the picture of human life given us by St. John Damascene. A traveller, he says, runs as hard as he can off the road in pursuit of game into the desert. While running he falls into a trap covered with leaves, and as one naturally does when falling, he stretches out his hands, and happens to catch hold of a bush growing on the side of the hole. Meanwhile he sees at the bottom a terrible serpent, ready to devour him as soon as he falls. But the worst of all is that two mice, one white, the other black, are gnawing at the weak roots of the bush he is holding. What his thoughts are likely to be in those circumstances is easy to imagine. O sinner! such is the state in which we all are. Death is the poisonous serpent that awaits us in the grave; the weak thread of our life is the only thing that supports us; at this thread are constantly gnawing two mice, one black and the
- ↑ Quoniam tribulatio proxima est.—Ps. xxi. 12.
