Introduction.
These good people who followed Our Lord, although they were hungry and had nothing to eat, were still full of courage and consolation, partly because they had with them the Son of God, whose society can easily sweeten every bitterness; partly because there was a great crowd together who were in the same necessity. For it is an old saying and one that experience proves true: “It is consoling to have a companion in suffering.”[1] And it is to this fact that the wicked generally appeal when they are threatened with hell, the intolerable pains of which we have been considering up to this. Oh, they say, as a poor sinner once said to me before his conversion: even if I am lost and have to go to hell, I shall not be the only one; I shall have plenty of companions, and amongst them the greatest and noblest. It must be a pleasant company after all. Ah, what reckless talk! May God keep you and me, my dear brethren, out of that company! If there were not in hell that terrible fire that tortures both soul and body, if there were no gnawing worm of conscience to afflict the damned with the recollection of the happiness they have forfeited, if there were no darkness, nor howling and cursing, nor stench, nor hunger and thirst, if there were no other pain in hell, the company alone that the damned find there would, to my mind, make a hell in itself, as I now proceed to show.
Plan of Discourse.
The company of the reprobate is a terrible hell in itself; let us then be on our guard against it. Such is the whole subject.
O God of mercy! move sinners to true repentance by Thy powerful grace, and all others to avoid sin and the occasions of sin, that none of those who are here present may experience what it is to have to live in the society of the damned. This we ask of Thee through the intercession of Mary and of our holy guardian angels.
Unplesant company causes much disgust here on earth. That there is comfort here on earth in having a companion when one is ailing is true enough, provided the companion is a sympathetic one. But in hell things are quite different. If, I repeat, there were no other torment there except having to live in the society of the damned, that alone would make an intolerable hell for souls. For reflect a moment on what occurs here
- ↑ Dulce est habere socium in pœna.
