happiness or misery, and I know not which shall fall to my lot. Is that all? Have you nothing else to be afraid of? Then I shall not have much trouble with you; your fear helps me to prove my proposition that there is nothing in death itself or its circumstances that is terrible, except a bad conscience. You acknowledge, then, that you would rejoice at the arrival of death if you were sure of going to heaven? Now if you doubt of that, why do you doubt? Have you lived hitherto according to the Christian law without committing any grievous sin? Or even if your sins have been countless, have you repented of and confessed them as well as you could? And if your conscience does not now reproach you with any mortal sin, a testimony, as I have shown elsewhere, that is humanly speaking infallible as to your being in the state of grace, how can you doubt about going to heaven if you die with such a conscience? Where are your hope and faith in God? Can He become a liar, a traitor? Can He break His promise? Has He not pledged His infallible word that heaven is opened to all who die in the state of sanctifying grace? If you end a pious life by death, your salvation is as certain as that God is in heaven. Therefore if you have nothing else to object, give up that fear and rejoice at the thought of death.
It is only a bad conscience that makes this entrance terrible. But if you have lived a wicked life, in the state of sin; if after due consideration your conscience warns you that you have a mortal sin on your soul, or if you are minded to commit one; then indeed you have good reason to doubt as to the nature of your death. Fear! Fear and tremble lest it should be for you the beginning of an unhappy eternity! “You may now see clearly,” says St. Chrysostom, “that it is this one thing alone, a bad conscience, that makes the circumstances of death bitter.”[1] And hence I repeat that the conclusion is inevitable: death in itself is not terrible, nor is the separation from the world fearful, nor is the entry into eternity a cause of terror. O accursed sin and sinful conscience! you and you alone are the bitter wormwood, the intolerable, infernal poison that makes death so terrible and so grisly!
Exhortation to sinners to amend. Truly it is a bitter and terrible thing to die in sin! to die at enmity with God! to die with a conscience which cries out to the poor soul: you are a child of destruction! to die without comfort from creatures, who have to be abandoned with all
- ↑ Vides non esse mortem, quæ dolorem affert, sed malam conscientiam.
