would she speak or answer anything but these or similar words. St. Jerome asked her why she refused to speak; was there perhaps something that troubled her? And she replied that she had not the least trouble, but rather the greatest repose and an almost heavenly consolation. At last she heard the beloved voice of her celestial Bridegroom calling to her: “Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come.”[1] “I believe,” answered Paula,“to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living,”[2] and therewith she breathed forth her happy soul. There are countless similar examples in the Lives of the Saints. “O happy conscience,” exclaims St. Jerome, “which in the time of affliction remembers its good works!”[3] And thrice happy those who die, not on a magnificent bed of state, and after having left great legacies behind them, but who die in the Lord with a good conscience and with a treasure of merits that they bring with them into heaven.
On the other hand, the death of the wicked is rendered terrible by the thought of their sins. Ah, how unlike to this and how sad will be the wicked when they think of the past in their dying hour! If ever the worm of conscience gnaws and disquiets the heart of man, it will then whet its teeth to inflict a most intolerable torture on the already uneasy and troubled soul, and will keep before it constantly the sins it has committed and not repented of. While we are still in the vigor of life our numerous and unruly desires, as we have seen before, make us look on even grievous sins as mere bagatelles; the conscience becomes seared by the frequency and habit of sin, so that like a chained dog it can neither bite nor assert it self; the sins, too, creep away and hide themselves to such an extent that sometimes the sinner has a difficulty in finding them when he desires to confess them; they fly out of his memory so that he cannot easily recall them. St. Chrysologus assigns a reason for this; he who tries to remember his sins in order to confess them seeks for them to kill them; the devotion of the penitent is a sharp knife that gives the death wound to vice,[4] and therefore they hide so as not to be caught; but when the man goes on sinning to the end, and is about to leave this world, then all his sins creep out of their hiding-places, and seek for the sinner in order to kill him; then they show themselves to him in all their deformity, and call out in a terrible voice: we are your
