hope for it; but you may be disappointed! How many people there are who die a sudden and unprovided death? Many young and healthy people whose last thought was death, have thus left the world and gone to eternal ruin, because it never entered their heads to be reconciled with God. Almost every day you hear something of this kind; so-and-so was carried oft* by a stroke of apoplexy; another was shot by accident; a third was struck by lightning; a fourth was drowned. Do you think that God will let you know the day of your death a longtime beforehand,, so that you may continue offending Him by sin until the last moment, and then recover His friendship by a tardy repentance? Open the holy Scriptures and the History of the Church and you will see that God foretold the day and hour of their death to some holy servants of His; but that very few sinners ever received such a revelation. In the Old Testament, as far as I remember, there is no case of the kind except King Saul, whose death was announced a day beforehand by the Prophet Samuel. In the New Testament the only instance we have is that of the foolish rich man, to whom God said a few hours beforehand that He would come that night for him. How can you, then, dare to flatter yourself with the assurance that you will not die this very day? “Even if the day of judgment is far away from us,” says St. Augustine, “is your last day far off? And how can you know when it will come? Have not many gone to bed in good health and died in the night? Do we not bear about the seeds of death in this body of ours?”[1] The most famous anatomists and naturalists wonder, when they consider the structure of the body, how a human being can live even for one day; for in even the smallest member of it there is enough to cause death. “Are we not more fragile than if we were made of glass?”[2] What could our bodies do to resist the different exterior accidents that may and often do befall us? Now, if it is so easy for me to die suddenly, and I am in the state of sin, I am in as great danger of dying in sin as I am of dying suddenly. You think to yourself, the number of those who die suddenly is small; it is not likely that I shall be amongst them. But how do you know that? Death will not come so soon for me! But he might come: and if he did? Oh! there is no fear of that.
