the praiseworthy lives of men, if Thou dost examine them without mercy!”[1]
Examples showing how severe that punishment is. We can learn something of the intensity of the pains endured in the next life from one who suffered them for a day. St. Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, in a letter to St. Augustine, relates how three dead men, whose bodies had been touched by the hair-shirt of St. Jerome, came to life again; one of them he met and had a chance of speaking with. “This man,” writes Cyril, “seemed quite discomposed and almost exhausted by the quantity of tears he had shed.” “I asked him,” continues the Saint, “why he wept so extravagantly; and after a long silence and with many sighs, he finally yielded to my importunity and answered my question. ‘If you knew, holy Bishop,’ he said, ‘what I suffered yesterday you would not be surprised at my tears, but would acknowledge that I have cause to weep for the rest of my life. What do you think of the pains of purgatory? If you put together all the torments, pains, punishments, and sufferings that I will not say are actually endured on earth, but that can be imagined, they are nothing but a cool, refreshing dew compared to the least pain of purgatory. There is no man in the world who would not rather suffer all that people have ever suffered from the beginning of the world till now, and suffer that to the end of the world, rather than undergo the least pain of purgatory if he had experience of it even for one day. If you ask me then why I weep so much, I confess that it is for fear of the punishment that every sinner has reason to dread in the next life. There is no difference between the pains of hell and those of purgatory, except that the latter will one day come to an end; but in hell there will never be an end or alleviation to the torments of the damned.'" Such is the testimony of one who was an eyewitness of the pains of purgatory, and we have it on the authority of St. Cyril. St. Augustine paints in lively colors the cruel torments that the martyrs had to undergo during the persecutions; but he goes so far as to assert that all those torments put together are far less than those suffered by the souls in purgatory. “Never could such punishment be inflicted on a mortal body, although the martyrs suffered atrocious torments.”[2]
Cantipratanus writes of a sick man who was so impatient at the length and severity of his illness that he earnestly begged
