a wonderful fire of sulphur that shall not give forth the least ray of light, for our infallible faith teaches us that hell is an eternal fire and at the same time exterior darkness. Now you often sully yourselves with lustful glances; you take pleasure in contemplating the beauty of others, in looking at impure objects, and in contemplation of vain apparel before the looking-glass; how fearful your punishment will be in hell, where you will behold nothing but shapes of deformity into which all the bodies of the damned shall be transformed, and hideous spectres with which the demons shall terrify you forever! How one shudders and grows cold with fear sometimes on entering alone a large room in which there is no light, if only a cat creeps from under the bed and he happens to see its glistening eyes. A shock of the kind would be enough to frighten a timid man to death. How terrible then must it not be to live in eternal night, surrounded by countless hellish phantoms and grizzly spectres that pass before you in all their deformity? Now the eyes are delighted in company, and glisten with laughter and fun, nor do we think of shedding tears of repentance in order to wash out our sins; alas! how that laughter shall be changed in that place of torments, in which, according to the words of Our Lord, there shall be nothing but weeping and gnashing of teeth: they “shall be cast out into the exterior darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”![1]
Of the ears. The same weeping and gnashing of teeth shall be a torment for the ears. An ill-tuned instrument is intolerable to a skilled musician; a crying child in a room, women quarrelling in a house, the howling of a dog in the street, is a torment to many a sensitive individual. Ah, may God save you and me from hell! How intolerable it must be for the ears to have to listen to that hellish and hideous music made by the shrieks and howlings and curses and blasphemies of so many millions of demons and lost souls, a music that shall last for eternity!
Of the smell. One of the worst pains of sense is a foul stench. You hold your nose if a dead dog or other carrion is lying in the street as you pass by. Sometimes when graves are opened a foul effluvium rises from them, strong enough to cause the death of any one who happens to be present. Revolting was the illness that carried off Lucius Sylla, the Roman tyrant, and Herod Ascalonita, the Jewish king, the bodies of both these men swarmed with
- ↑ Ibi erit fletus et stridor dentium!—Matt. viii. 12.
