the world, and iniquity is still hateful in His sight. And, alas! how many are there not in the world who have hardly a bit of dry bread to eat, and lead wretched lives in sorrow and affliction, hunger and want, and yet, because they are wicked and sinful, shall be cast into hell when the time comes to separate the wheat from the chaff! Wo to the sinful nation, no matter who or what they are! Wo to them! O sinners! do not persist in your evil ways! Wickedness is not the door to good luck and prosperity!
Yet many of the wicked abound in prosperity, while many of the just are severely tried. Meanwhile experience teaches us that although not all, yet many, and very many, and generally speaking the greater number of those who lead a pleasant, comfortable, idle, and apparently happy life are those who give least signs of Christian devotion and piety, and are frequently addicted to the worst vices, such as pride, avarice, injustice, gluttony, impurity, etc.; and in spite of their wickedness things prosper with them and they get what they wish. On the other hand we see and experience that many, very many, and generally speaking the greater number of those who live piously, serve God faithfully, and regulate their actions by the laws and maxims of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, are visited by all sorts of crosses, trials, and adversities, as the Prophet David said long ago: “Many are the afflictions of the just;”[1] those whom God loves He is wont to chastise.
An inequality that to us seems unjust. It is this inequality that generally causes us to murmur as at a thing that we cannot understand. Is it right, we ask, to see the rich glutton, whose only care is to gratify his appetites, seated at a well-spread table, while the righteous Lazarus lies at his doorstep, perishing with hunger and begging for the crumbs from the rich man’s table, a charity that is cruelly refused him? What an intolerable thing to see men who have nothing of the Christian but the bare name, while they are no better than heathens in their lives and actions, enjoying such an abundance of all things, while true servants of God, who mean so well towards their Lord, have hardly enough clothes to enable them to make a decent appearance in church! How exasperating to behold so many impious men whose sole delight is to jeer at religion and what belongs to it sitting in high places, honored by all, endowed with the best of health, and spending their lives in peaceful, undisturbed enjoyment of their pleasures, while many a good Christian has to plague himself and toil day and night, and yet can
- ↑ Multæ tribulationes justorum.—Ps. xxxiii. 20.
