worms as if they were two ant-heaps, so that they rotted away while still alive, and the flesh fell from them in pieces, the stench meanwhile that proceeded from them heing so insupportable that it was with the utmost difficulty and only by offering an exorbitant remuneration that any one could be found to wait on them. Yet their bodies were tender, princely, and royal. Wise and prudent is the law that forbids the interment of a body until twenty-four hours after death; the object of it is to prevent the recurrence of a sad misfortune that has happened more than once already, namely, the interment of a living body. Now let each one imagine that he is the victim of an accident like that which befell a noble lady of Rhodes, according to the account given by Father Engelgrave. She fell suddenly into a trance, and lay there as if dead, not giving the least sign of life, and was without delay thrown into a hole with other dead bodies, uncoffined (as is the custom in some countries, especially in Italy), and buried. She awoke out of the trance and came to her senses, and we may easily imagine what her feelings were when she became aware of the insufferable stench that arose from so many decaying bodies and rotten bones. To my mind she must have wished to die then and there. Therefore it is looked on as one of the greatest cruelties of the tyrant Maxentius that he caused a living man to be bound to a decaying corpse, until the fetid exhalations from it put an end to him. Ah, delicate worldlings! may God save you from hell! You cannot bear the smell of a smoking lamp; what will you do in that abyss in which, for all eternity, you will not have a breath of fresh air? into which, according to St. Thomas of Aquin, all the filth of the earth flows as to its common centre? What will you do in that lake of sulphur in which the bodies of the reprobate shall seethe and boil, each one of them emitting such a fearful odor that, as St. Bernard says, it would be enough to fill the whole world with pestilence? “Out of their carcasses shall rise a stench,”[1] says the Lord by the Prophet Isaias. The devil appeared once to St. Martin, clothed in purple, with a precious crown on his head, and said to him: I am Christ; adore me! Oh, no! replied the holy man; my Lord Jesus Christ is crowned with thorns and clothed with blood. I do not recognize my humble Saviour in the magnificent dress that you wear. These words filled the evil spirit with confusion, and he disappeared, leaving behind him such a
- ↑ De cadaveribus eorum ascendet fœtor.—Is. xxxiv. 3.
