Conclusion and exhortation to shun bad company, to love one another, and to serve God truly. My dear brethren, shall all of us who are here present be together in that happy society? Ah, if things turn out as we hope and trust, how shall we not congratulate each other, and exult and rejoice, that we at all events have all found our way without exception to the heavenly marriage-feast! Eh? he is no good who keeps away when true friends meet, as the old saying has it; and wo to that one of us who so lives as to be excluded from that heavenly society! Therefore as long as we are all here together, let us all serve God faithfully, give up that bad company that has hitherto kept us from good and led us into sin; let us now renounce that wicked intimacy, sustained by unlawful love, that has been such a hindrance to our returning to God with our whole hearts. Away out of the house with the person who has been an occasion of sin to me! I shall see and know you no longer; and we shall both of us bewail our blindness and wickedness, that we may meet and see each other in heaven. At once I will leave the house in which unlawful proposals have been made to me, in which I have been tempted to offend God grievously; never more shall I set foot therein, even if I have to suffer temporal loss and seek my bread elsewhere. Now let us avoid and shun dangerous company in which even the least stain might be attached to our hearts and consciences; those nightly gatherings in which, amid dancing and other amusements, the vain world endangers the purity of young people of both sexes. We shall say to ourselves: will this company be a consolation to me at the hour of death? If not, then I shall have nothing to do with it. I will rejoice, but in the Lord, as becomes the children of God, so that my conscience may remain pure and unstained. In heaven I shall have a perpetual feast; I shall console myself with that hope and reserve all my enjoyment till then. Now let us live in Christian unity and charity, and bear each other’s faults and shortcomings with meekness and patience, pardon all injuries, and say to ourselves: all men are my neighbors, my brothers and sisters, whom I hope to have as companions in heaven; therefore I will love them all as myself according to the law of my Saviour, that we may be one day together forever. If premature death separates one good friend from another, husband from wife, wife from husband, little children from their parents, why should you weep so much for that, and give way to such inordinate grief? Think for your consolation: they are gone before into the eternal dwelling, which is
