be his sweetness,"[1] which St. Gregory thus explains: "The remembrance of their past pleasures will make their present sufferings more keen; and the contrast of their short-lived happiness with this endless misery will fill them with rage and despair."[2] They will recognize too late the snares of the evil one, and will exclaim in the words of the Book of Wisdom: "We have erred from the way of truth, and the light of justice hath not shone unto us, and the sun of understanding hath not risen upon us. We have wearied ourselves in the way of iniquity and destruction, and have walked through hard ways, but the way of the Lord we have not known."[3] The contemplation of this terrible truth cannot but rouse us from our indifference and excite us to practise virtue. St. John Chrysostom frequently uses it as a means to exhort his hearers to virtue. "If you would labor effectually," he says, "to make your soul the temple and the abode of the Divinity, never lose sight of the solemn and awful day when you are to appear before the tribunal of Christ to render an account of all your works. Represent to yourself the glory and majesty with which Christ will come to judge the living and the dead. Consider the irrevocable sentence which will then be pronounced upon mankind, and the terrible separation which will follow it. The just will enter into the possession of ineffable joy and happiness; the wicked will be precipitated into exterior darkness, where there
