on that account. As long as we are in this life we have time to regain what we have lost, and to wipe out our sins so that they will not be brought up against us in the judgment. Now, O incarnate God, Thy thoughts are full of peace towards me, and Thou art not minded to do me the least harm! Thine eyes are now opened to look on me with favor; Thine arms are stretched out to embrace me; Thy sacred head is bowed down; Thy whole body suspended on the cross, and all for my salvation and eternal happiness! Without danger I may hide myself in Thy wounds, and eve a if I have often dealt Thee a death-blow by my sins, provided I now sincerely repent and implore Thy mercy, Thy sacred Heart pierced with the lance shall be my sure Eefuge, in which Thou wilt receive me again into favor! But if through my own fault I allow the time of grace to pass by, alas! then it is all up with me forever! Thy Godhead, Thy humanity, Thy love and fidelity towards me, Thy life and example, Thy very looks shall overwhelm me with shame and condemn me! And that this may not be the case let my life be always conformed to Thine in future, and this resolution, which I now renew, shall be the fruit of this and the other meditations I have made on the last judgment and Thy second coming.
Conclusion and exhortation to sinners.
Sinners! I have said nothing yet of the terrible sound of the final trumpet which shall summon the dead out of their graves; nothing of the examination that shall take place in the judgment; nothing of the accusers and witnesses; nothing of the public manifestation of consciences and the intolerable shame of sinners before the whole world; nothing of the final sentence that shall call the just to the kingdom of heaven and condemn the wicked to the fire of hell. What I have hitherto treated of concerns only the Person of our future Judge, and this in itself is terrible enough, so that the bare remembrance of that Judge should fill even the most pious with fear and anguish. But there is yet another point which to my mind is still more terrible and worthy of admiration. What is that? Hear first what Father Ambrose Cataneus of the Society of Jesus writes of a celebrated preacher in Spain. The latter was once representing to his audience, in his usual eloquent style, the terrors of the last judgment; he portrayed its severity, its strictness, and all the other circumstances of it in such lively colors that every one was stricken with fear. “See there,” he cried out, “in the midst of that altar, in a heavy, black cloud, from which come forth fear-