the sinner comes chiefly from want of faith in a future life. utterly subversive of that faith. For the fact that pious servants of God generally had sorrow and tribulation to suffer while the wicked servants of the world lived in peace and plenty was the very circumstance that in former times led heathens and infidels, who followed the light of reason alone, to this conclusion: either Christians had not the true God, or else their God was blind and forgetful of them. The sufferings of the good and the prosperity of the wicked seemed even to St. Augustine difficult to harmonize with faith; and even King David and other Prophets seemed to have experienced the same difficulty almost to the point of wavering in their belief as to whether such an arrangement could really come from divine Providence. But, my dear brethren, you will soon be of my opinion when we have duly examined the matter. Give me your attention now. How comes it that we find so many, even amongst Catholics, who are at least half atheists? I allude to those who live according to the senses, who trouble themselves least of all about how they stand with God, who put in an appearance at church through worldly motives and for fashion’s sake, while they remain in the state of sin from year’s end to year’s end. How does that occur? I ask. Why are these people found in such numbers? My idea is that they have no faith, or at all events a very weak and cold faith, in a future life, in which the just shall have eternal joys in heaven while the wicked shall be tormented forever in hell. They know by daily experience that we must all die; but they imagine that death is the end of all things, and hence they say with the wicked in the prophecy of Isaias: “Let us eat, and drink, for to-morrow we shall die;”[1] let us enjoy the good things of this world as long as we can, for we may soon die, and then we shall have nothing more to expect. They often indeed read, or hear in sermons, when they come to listen to them, of a happy or unhappy eternity after death; but they imagine those things to be an empty dream, or idle threat, or a baseless fiction. They have gone so far in sin and the blindness it causes that they are like the wicked of whom David speaks: “God is not before his eyes: his ways are filthy at all times.”[2] What is the result of that? “Thy judgments are removed from his sight.”[3] If they had a lively faith in an eternal heaven and an
