pernatural gifts. lived for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years; how have you employed all the minutes? For your eternal salvation, for which alone they were given to you? or for your eternal damnation? How much time have you spent uselessly in play, amusements, and other triflings? Give an account and answer; in what manner, to what purpose have you during all that time employed the natural goods bestowed on you by God: your health and bodily stature, your understanding and memory, and other gifts, and how much have you gained with them? How have you used the goods of fortune? To what purpose have you employed your money and wealth, your high position and authority? How have you used the gifts of grace? What profit have you derived from the use of the sacraments, from the good inspirations, the clear knowledge you had of divine things, the many opportunities of doing good that were given to you in preference to others, the many sermons you heard or might have heard if your slothfulness had not prevented you, the many examples of pious Christians who walked before you on the path of virtue?
Even our good works shall be judged. Give an account; answer even for all the good works you have done in the course of your life. Of what kind were they? “When I shall take a time,” says the Lord, “I will judge justices.”[1] Now bring forward your good works, your prayers, fasting, alms-giving, hearing of Mass, confessions, Communions, mortifications, works of mercy and charity, the daily duties of your state of life. Perhaps you have a great heap of them; but answer and say whether they were always performed in a proper manner, with due devotion and zeal as becomes a Christian? Oh, how many of them you will find to have proceeded from a bad source: from hypocrisy, vainglory, and self-complacency! How many were performed without the good intention, without being directed to God, out of human respect, through a natural taste, or self-love, or for convenience sake, and by chance? How many were without all zeal and devotion, attention, and reverence: tepid, cold, distracted, performed negligently? If all these faulty good works that deserve punishment rather than reward are separated from the remainder of your justices, alas! how many shall then remain? Then indeed you would seem to me like the unhappy Urias, who imagined that a great favor had been granted him when he received a letter from his king; but the poor man did
- ↑ Cum accepero tempus, ego justitias judicabo.—Ps. lxxiv. 3.
