prepared themselves on Sundays and holy-days for me as well as for others, to speak to our hearts, to warn us against hell, to exhort us to good, to deter us from sin, to urge us to zeal in the service of God, and to lead us to heaven. Ah, would that I had been diligent in attending to them! What beautiful exhortations and salutary doctrine I might have received from them for the good of my soul! Was I rich and blessed by God with temporal means? That very wealth furnished me with the opportunity of heaping up vast treasures in heaven by generosity to the poor. Was I poor and needy? My very poverty gave me opportunity of practising patience and resignation to the divine will, and thereby making all the surer of gaining great wealth in heaven. Did I abound in joy and consolation? Then I had occasion humbly to thank my God and to serve Him all the more zealously. Was I laden with many crosses and trials? Then I had in my hands a ladder by which I might have mounted, through Christian patience, all the higher in heaven. Even my daily business and occupation, no matter how onerous, did not of itself in the least hinder me in the divine service, but rather helped me therein; for I need only have kept a pure conscience and performed my duties with a good intention for God’s sake; had I done so, while working, studying, dealing with the cares of my state, eating, drinking, or sleeping, I should have been serving my God, doing His will, and earning a great reward in heaven.
And time enough.
Ah, what a beautiful time I have had in the twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years that were given me on earth! There was not a moment of them in which, if I had so willed, I might not have gained eternal glory in heaven! If I had made a good use of only the fiftieth part of the time I spent in vanity, idleness, and sin, how rich I should now be in eternity! What a high place I should have among the blessed in heaven! O fool that I am! and how I reproach myself when I think of it! Even in the last moment of my life, when my friends and my increasing weakness announced to me the approach of death, the merciful God was ready, if I had only been willing, to receive me again into His grace and friendship, although for the greater part of my life I had treated Him as my worst enemy; there was still time for me to repent of and blot out my sins, to be reconciled to my enemy, to restore ill-gotten goods, to remove out of the house the proximate occasion of sin; there was still time to detest and