goodness should be fully avenged on the presumption that so recklessly despised it? And that it will surely be. “I have always held My peace,” says the Lord by the Prophet Isaias; “I have kept silence; I have been patient.”[1] I have long listened to cursing, swearing, blasphemy, detraction; I have seen the pride of My Christians, their injustices, vindictiveness, riotings, impurities, secret adulteries; I have for a long time had to suffer patiently many acts of contempt and disobedience against My sacred laws; I have held My peace all the while; I have kept silence; I have acted as if it did not concern Me; I have restrained Myself from inflicting on men the punishments that I threatened them with in Holy Writ, and that they saw exemplified in the case of other men, as if I were powerless to defend Myself against the wantonness and wickedness of sinners; but when that time comes, that great day of wrath and anger, I will show them what I am. “I will be to them as a lioness, as a leopard in the way of the Assyrians. I will meet them as a bear that is robbed of her whelps,…and I will devour them as a lion;”[2] they will feel the heavy weight of My justice. O my good God! I acknowledge that I have up to the present moment experienced Thy incomprehensible patience and mercy, and it should impel me to love Thee with my whole heart and soul and strength; it should give me hope and courage to work out my salvation; but that very patience and mercy which I have so unjustly misused fill me with a greater dread of the severity of the judgment that awaits me.
Like David we have reason to fear this Judge. Ah, my dear brethren, then they will see the Son of man coming; then we shall all behold that almighty, all-wise God, but without mercy: just, angry, and embittered! And how will it be with us then? Quantus tremor estfuturus, quando Judex est venturus! What fear and trembling there will be among the wicked in presence of their Judge! Who can stand before Him? I consider the case of King David, hurled from his throne by a disobedient son, abandoned and hunted by his own people, and wandering about in misery, and I pity him; but I tremble at the same time when I hear him in the midst of his calamities calling out fervently to God, not for help and alleviation of his sufferings, but for grace in the day of judgment, and that, too, out of sheer fright. “Hear, O Lord, my prayer; give ear to my sup-
