of cities and countries. lives made certain vices actually respectable, and took away from them the shame that should attach to them. These are they who could have prevented and punished evil, but did not do so. Angels of houses and dwellings! what a great register of complaints you will have regarding what happened here and there between man and wife, parents and children, masters and servants, incomers and outgoers, day and night, while you had to look on all the time to your great sorrow! “We would have cured Babylon,” the angels shall say of the souls entrusted to them, “but she is not healed;”[1] we wished to save that soul, O God, and bring it to Thee, but all our labor was in vain: not through our fault, but because it would not come with us. Now we demand justice for the labor and care that we have employed to no purpose. Thus the words of Jeremias in the Lamentations shall be verified for the sinner on that day: “All her friends are become her enemies.”[2]
Even the Mother of God, and all pious Christians shall accuse him. Refuge of sinners! Help of the desolate! Mary, Mother of mercy! thy very name fills my heart with sweet joy and consolation! Surely I shall have nothing to fear from thee at all events? But alas for a lost cause! If I die in the state of sin even thou shalt be among the number of my accusers. Sentence him, she will say, O just Son! Through me he could easily have been saved; through my hands went all the graces and blessings Thou didst so generously bestow on him, but he rejected them. And a similar complaint will be made against me by all good Christians who have lived in the same town and house with me: We gave that man good example of the Christian virtues; we have shown him the narrow way that leads to heaven; he did not follow us, but went on the broad road that leads to hell. Such too shall be the testimony of the priests from the confessional: We have warned that man not to sin any more, but he kept on adding sin to sin; we begged him as gently as possible to leave that house, that person, to avoid the occasion of sin, saying to him that otherwise all his confessions would be of no avail, and that we dared not give him absolution, but he paid no attention to us; he promised indeed to do as we said, but his promises came to naught; he went from one confessor to another, and as the latter did not know the state of his conscience, nay, as he deliberately concealed it from him, he succeeded in
