tend to his studies and to cultivate the moral virtues, freely renounced all his property. What answer will you make, avaricious Christian, you who spare no effort to amass money, while you neglect your soul? you who refuse to restore the ill-gotten goods you have in your possession, and thus lose your chance of heaven? There will appear against us the hero Phocion, renowned among the Greeks, who being betrayed to death by envious people, was asked before he drank the poison what last command he had to leave his son; he answered: he must forget all the injuries done his father, and return his enemies good for evil. What answer will you make, vindictive Christian, who cannot bear the least insult, and who often repay good with evil? There will appear against us the heathen warrior Manlius Torquatus, who put his only son to death for having disobeyed his orders regarding a battle, although he was victorious. What answer will you make, Christian parents, who allow your sons and daughters to grow up in all freedom from restraint, in vanity and wantonness? That is what Our Lord prophesied: “The men of Ninive shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it.”[1] O sinners! what answer will you make if you do not repent of your manifold sins? There is no hope for you; none at all! No denial or excuse will be of any avail. You are convicted of having lived bad lives; you are convicted of having been able to live better. And you still go on adding sin to sin, increasing every day the number of witnesses to your eternal damnation? Ah, how I bewail your present blindness and your future everlasting misfortune!
Exhortation and resolution often to think of the last judgment, in order to live well. My dear brethren, you will say perhaps that the subject of our past meditations was chosen only with a view to frighten think of the and terrify you. And you are perfectly right. Would to God that all who need to be frightened were filled with terror by it! I should congratulate myself and thank God from my heart, but in the way which St. Paul speaks of: “I am glad: not because you were made sorrowful, but because you were made sorrowful unto penance.”[2] I do not rejoice at the grief caused you by my Epistle, but because that grief has urged you to do penance. Even so should I rejoice if some of you were terrified and dismayed by the meditation on the last judgment; not by a
