well weighed: — to get angry — to show one’s anger by some passionate expression — and to offer atrocious insults and treat one’s brother as a fool. They must further be compared with the three corresponding penalties: — the judgment, the Council, and the fire.
'The judgment’ means capital punishment, since, according to the ancients, it followed murder, which the Law punished infallibly by death. But Christ, in order to show how slight a thing is human justice compared to Divine, allots the penalty of ‘judgment’ — that is, the extreme punishment inflicted by human judgments — to the lowest degree of injury: to simple anger. He means by this that anger against a brother is in itself a sin worthy of death before God. Hence we must not doubt that a mortal sin is committed when anybody remains voluntarily estranged from his brother, which is the case when we keep up anger against him, because then anger is turned into hate. The only way by which we can avoid mortal sin when we have such feelings, is by fighting hard against the bad inclination; for, if we let it get mastery over the heart, charity is destroyed.
The second degree of punishment is ‘the
