Sermons from the Latins/Sermon 13
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany.
Hell.
"Gather up the cockle and bind it into bundles to burn" — Matt. xiii. 30.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex.: I. Love and fear. II. Fear a worthy motive. III. Parable.
I. Existence : 1. Various opinions. 2. Proofs from Scripture. 3. From reason.
II. Nature: 1. Inconceivable. 2. Buried alive. 3. Lost soul.
III. Pains: 1. Of sense. 2. Of loss of God. 3. Eternity. Per. : Self-examination as to mortal sin.
SERMON.
Brethren, hope and fear are the two great master-passions of every human soul. We become virtuous either through love of God or fear of hell. Hence it is that God and the Church appeal now to our love and again, and alas! oftener, to our fear, for so selfish are we that fear will drive us where love was powerless to lead. Nor is fear an altogether unworthy motive, sanctified as it has been by the Saviour Himself. " Fear not them," He says, " that kill the body, but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body unto hell." If in the Old Law the fear of the Lord was held to be the beginning of wisdom and had power to expel sin, how much more so in the New. Say what you will, but as long as the way to hell is so broad and pleasant, fear of God's threats will be an essential element of religion. " For," says St. Augustine, " fear precedes love as the needle does the thread, so that love can neither enter nor come forth from the soul unless preceded by a salutary fear." Such being the case, let us reflect a while on that terrible sentence of the Gospel: " In the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers: gather up the cockle and bind it into bundles to burn." According to Christ's own explanation God is the sower of the seed; His field, men's souls; His servants, the Church's ministers; His enemy, the devil; the cockle, sinners; and the harvest, the end of the world, when God's angels shall cast the wicked into hell to be burned forever.
Brethren, is there a hell? The world seems strangely divided on this subject. Some admit it, but they contend that hell will cease to exist after the General Judgment. Others say there is a hell, but they hold that out of hell there is redemption even for the devils. Others still go so far as to deny there is a hell at all. But our holy religion lays it down as an article of faith, and common sense, supplying a reason for the faith that is in us, asserts that there is a hell, an eternal hell. Holy Writ, the infallible word of God, in both Old and New Testaments, teems with allusions to the existence of hell. We find it spoken of first in respect to the rebel angels, where Christ says: " I saw Lucifer, like a thunderbolt, fall from heaven." And whither did he fall? We find the answer in the words God will address to the rebel souls on the judgment day: " Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels." There is scarcely one sermon of all those Our Lord preached during His ministry in which He does not warn sinners of the hell that awaits them. For example,, speaking of scandal, He says: " If thy hand or thine eye scandalize thee, cut it off or pluck it out, for it is better to enter life blind and maimed than having two hands and two eyes to go down to hell." And this hell, He tells us, is eternal. He compares the world of souls to a great field of cockle and good wheat, to be separated in the great harvest time — the end of the world, but then separated forever — the wheat to be gathered into His barn and the cockle bound into bundles to be burned. His Church, He tells us, is a net cast in the night of time into the sea of this world, to be drawn forth by the angels in the morning of eternity, when they will separate, and separate forever, the good fishes from the bad — the virtuous souls from the wicked. The story of Dives and Lazarus which we have often read — could words assert more plainly a heaven for the blessed and a hell for the damned? So plain, indeed, is this truth, that all men admit it either explicitly or implicitly, for, if they deny a punishment after death, why do they not enjoy this life to the full? Why do they obey human laws or abide by a code of human morality? Why do they not plunder and outrage and murder? Why fear man? Why fear God? Ah, I deny hell with my lips to soothe my guilty conscience, but my life and heart and soul cry out there is a hell — an eternal hell. For I know that my God is a God of infinite majesty and, hence, that an offence against Him is an infinite offence calling for an infinite punishment. And since I am a finite being, incapable of sustaining torments of infinite intensity and still bound to undergo an infinite punishment, therefore will my torments be infinite not in intensity but in duration. For my God is a just God, bound by His very nature to fit the punishment to the crime. He has promised explicitly to reward every man according to his works. Now, where is this promise fulfilled? On this earth? No, no, for I see around me a world of saints and sinners — the saints in poverty and misery all their lives, the sinners in affluence and happiness. In the next life? Therefore I say there must be a heaven of delights for the good and a hell of torments for the wicked! Or is it not fulfilled at all? Therefore my God is an unjust God and His promise of reward and punishment is a lie; and since a God who is unjust and untrue is no God at all, therefore, either hell exists or God is not. If I deny the existence of hell I must, to be consistent, deny the existence of God Himself. But I know that I have a God, just and true, and, therefore, reason and faith bid me receive His words as infallible when He says : " In the last day the wicked shall go into everlasting punishment, but the just into life everlasting."
Brethren, now that we feel sure there is a hell, let us try to realize what hell is. Let us go down in spirit to that gloomy cavern, that city of pain and woe, the abode of the damned; and let us pause a moment, before entering, to read the dread inscription on the grimy portal: "Abandon hope, all ye that enter here." Let us pass on into the gloom beyond, and view the exquisite tortures prepared for man by an almighty and implacably just God; let us see the frightful aspect of the devils and the damned; let us hear the whirlwind of sighs and moans, the shrieks of pain, and the vile blasphemies against the Most High, and let us go on and explore hell from top to bottom and paint it to ourselves in the most horrible colors — and after all we shall not have realized even a shadow of the reality — for " eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive what things God has prepared for those that hate Him." Suppose all the arch-tyrants and cruel savages that ever lived or will live, were to come together to devise new means of torturing one poor martyr, what an excruciating series of agonies they would invent! And yet, all that would be ease and comfort compared with the torments God has prepared for His enemies. For, alas, and alack! God is almighty and all-wise, not only in preparing good things for His faithful children, but also in preparing woes for His rebel subjects. O God forbid that we should ever experience the sensations of a man who goes to sleep in death with mortal sin upon his soul, and wakes up immediately in a miserable eternity — God forbid it, I say, but God grant we may feel enough of that anguish now, to drive us in fright to God. Let me, therefore, imagine myself to have been struck down in a moment and laid on my death-bed — dying. My heart ceases to beat, my breath stops, my eyes are fixed and glassy, and my whole body is rigid and cold. The doctor bends over me and says: " He is dead," and my sobbing friends cry: " Lord have mercy on his soul." But now suppose I am not dead at all but only in a trance, conscious of all going on around me but unable to move a muscle. I feel them prepare my body and lay me in state, and friends come and weep over me, and they talk of me and they pray for my soul and, my God! they never dream that I am still alive. And now the coffin comes and they lift me into it and they bid me a last farewell and oh, horror! the coffin lid closes above me and still I cannot move. They bring me to church and lay me before the high altar, and I hear, as though afar off, the pealing of the organ and the priest's voice faintly intoning: " Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine." Ah! now, we are in the cemetery and I hear the grating of the ropes as they lower me into the grave, and then comes the awful rattle as fast and furious they shovel in the earth. Oh, horror of horrors! In a frenzy of anguish, with one last supreme effort I cast off my lethargy, and commence to struggle with the blind fury of despair. Oh God! it is too late, I am lost; fainter and fainter grows the noise of the shovels, and soon all is silent and I am left alone in my living tomb. But still I struggle in my narrow cell. My hands and feet are bound fast, but I hammer my head against my coffin lid, and I plunge wildly, and turn round and round and bite and gnaw with my teeth until my whole head Is one mass of bleeding wounds; and ever and anon I raise my voice in an unearthly cry that serves only to curdle my own blood with its weird horror. At last, smothered and exhausted, I sink down in stolid despair to die. Buried alive — buried soul and body — buried when one little puncture of the skin would have saved me; lost perhaps through my pet vice, for which I sacrificed my life and my all; abandoned by the world and my dearest friends; crazed with hunger and thirst, tortured in every sense; mad with vain regret for what I have lost and lost forever. O God, the cup of my bitterness is filled, let me die. Ah, well might I say with my last breath: " Oh, all ye that pass by the way, come and see if there is, or ever was, woe like to my woe." But a damned soul may answer me from hell: "Alas! multiply your miseries ten thousand times and even then they will fall infinitely short of mine. Could I change places with you, your condition would be heaven for me after the horrors of my present abode. I am buried body and soul, not in the cool earth with a rich and padded casket around me, but in a sea of fire which penetrates my very vitals. I am not alone with only myself to wound and my own yells to terrify me, but I am in the midst of loathsome devils who cut and tear me limb from limb, and terrify me with howls, compared with which the yell of a maniac is a whisper. I have lost, not the world, but God. i cannot hope for death to come and relieve me, for I seek and pursue the demon of death but it flies from me and mockingly shouts back 'eternity.'" Ah, no! the greatest torments of this life, how horrible soever they may seem, bear no kind of proportion to the tortures of hell. Christ our Lord described hell in these words: "Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire," but only a God could express so much in so few words. In them He tells us there are three kinds of torments in hell; first, the pain of the senses; secondly, the pain of the loss of God — " Depart from Me," and thirdly, and worst of all, the fact that these pains are eternal — everlasting. " In what things soever a man shall have sinned, in these also shall he be punished." Hence, I will be tortured in every one of my five senses. These eyes, through which the devil so often gained admission to my soul — so eager for filthy and adulterous sights, so baneful, probably, to my neighbor's salvation — ah, what horrid things will these eyes then see! Were I to find myself alone in a cemetery at midnight and there to be confronted by a grim spectre — a living skeleton half hidden, only, in its snowy shroud — what would be my terror! Now, if the devil is so frightful in human shape, what must he be in his own native ugliness? If so unpleasant to look at here on earth, what will he be when I see him at home in hell? The lost souls, too, what a shocking sight they will present and that, too, in the dim light of hell, for the hell-fire gives not light enough to comfort the eye, but only enough to reveal to it everything that may torment it. Oh, if I am ever to go to hell, it is small comfort for me to reflect I will not be there alone, for the presence of other lost souls will only serve to aggravate my misery. I will be forced to listen to their eternal moans and cries, and hear their hoarse voices shout blasphemies and curses against themselves, their companions, their parents; against their partners in sin, against the saints and angels and against God. Parents curse their children and children their parents, and one sinner upbraids another for causing his ruin. Such are the sounds I will have to hear, while I myself lend my voice to swell the chorus of universal woe which will proclaim God's justice as long as the choir of heaven proclaims His mercy. Weeping and gnashing of teeth and woe eternal. My sense of taste, too, shall be tortured. " They shall suffer hunger like dogs," says Holy Writ. Josephus relates that at the siege of Jerusalem, so great was the famine, that men drew lots and devoured one another and that even the mothers cooked and ate their own nurslings. That siege, Our Lord tells us, was a figure of the woe to come — the torments of hell. Gnawing hunger and a burning thirst, worse than the thirst of the famished Arab in the desert; worse than that of Christ on the cross — a thirst so consuming that the lost soul dares even to turn to God and cry out: "Father Abraham, have pity on me, send the humblest among the blessed that he may place one drop of water on my tongue to cool this raging thirst with which I am devoured." Aye and it will cry in vain, for there is no relief. Again, my sense of smell — alas! another agony; for hell is, as it were, a vast cesspool into which all the impurities of the world, like the contents of so many teeming sewers, are poured. Since the bodies of the damned are in a state of never-ending decay, a fetid stench will arise from them as from the bodies of a mighty host slaughtered and abandoned on the field of battle. Packed in like sheep in a pen, unable to move a muscle to alleviate their pain, handcuffed to the decaying body of a fellow-sufferer and saturated through and through with a living flame that devours but does not consume, tortures but does not kill! Oh, let me look at a burning building, and ask myself if this fire, which God created for man's use and comfort, is so awful in its nature and so destructive in its effects, what must that fire be which God created expressly to be the instrument of man's punishment! The sufferings of St. John cast into a caldron of boiling oil; of St. Lawrence slowly roasted on a gridiron; of the blessed martyrs cast into fiery furnaces and vats of molten metal; of the early Christians covered with pitch and tar and set fire to by Nero to light the streets of Rome; the sufferings of all these were as nothing beside the burning of a soul in hell. Ah! well they knew it, for did they not suffer so in order to avoid the greater pains of hell? For the fire of hell is a spiritual living thing that feeds alike on soul and body. But this is the least part of the anguish of my soul — its worst pain is the pain of the loss of God — the one being in all the world for whom my soul craves. God who lifted me out of the dirt of my nothingness and adopted me as His son, and promised me a throne in heaven if I would keep His commandments — bear a burden that was light and a yoke that was sweet. God who, when I disobeyed, came down from heaven and wiped out my sin with His precious heart's blood. God who, like a tender father, followed me to the gate of hell itself and all but forced me back — that God is now lost to me and I to Him. I have heard the sentence: " Depart from Me, ye cursed," and oh, was there ever exile so bitter and desolate? Exiled from my rightful home — heaven; from the one near and dear to me — God; into a wild and blazing desert — hell; to be tortured by the savage inhabitants, the devils. And all this through my own fault, when I might have gained heaven by one-half the labor and anxiety I expended to purchase hell — through my own fault, through my most grievous fault. O God, what a maddening thought that is! If I were innocent like Job — if some one else were solely responsible for my misfortune I would, like Job, be patient in the midst of my afflictions, but no, I am lost through my fault, through my most grievous fault. My fate is sealed and sealed forever. Forever, never; never, forever, are the words that resound continually through hell and add the last drop of bitterness to the misery of the damned For in the thought of eternity consists the real sting of hell. Desire without hope, torture without respite or end. If the damned could only feel that their sufferings would cease even after millions and billions of years, hell from that moment would be no longer hell for them, for the hope of redemption would console and sustain them through it all. But as it is, there is no such hope. " Forever, never," the demons cry, and the dismal echo answers back from the lowest pit: " Never, forever." Oh, eternity! I tremble at thy very name, but at the bare mention of an eternity of hell, I seem to myself to fairly shrivel up and wither away for very fear. Oh, eternity, how shall I ever even imagine thy unlimited immensity! As well might I sit down by the sea and attempt to take the ocean drop by drop and place it in the hollow of my hand, as to try to get the idea of eternity into the little compass of my shallow brain. For eternity spreads out before me as a limitless sea, over which, if I should travel forever, I would find in the end the same dreary waste before me. By what measure shall I compute the vastness of eternity? The sun is ninety millions of miles from me. Light travels twelve millions of miles a minute, and yet the light from the nearest fixed star takes three and a half years to reach me. There are actually stars in the firmament whose light, travelling twelve millions of miles a minute since the creation, has not reached the earth yet and will not until the end of time. And to all these millions and billions of years add every atom of which this earth is composed, every drop of water in the ocean, every particle of the air, every leaf of the forest, and every blade of the field, and let each atom and drop and particle and leaf and blade represent a million years, and taken all together do they equal eternity? Alas, no; when they shall have passed, eternity shall have scarcely begun. The mind loses itself and stands astonished on the verge of that illimitable space, and the heart stands still in an ecstasy of terror when we reflect on the unspeakable despair this thought must bring to the lost soul. If God were for once to relent and allow Lazarus to place one drop of water every million years on Dives' tongue, the time would come when every lake, sea and ocean would be exhausted in that work of mercy, and still eternity had scarcely begun. Were Dives then every million years to miserably shed one tear over his loss, time would be when every lake, sea and ocean would be restored, and yet eternity and still an eternity beyond. Forever, never; never, forever.
Brethren, there is a hell, an eternal hell, a hell of inconceivable torments, prepared for the devil and his angels. How far away from, or how near to, the edge of that abyss stand we to-night? Heaven is never sure until you are safely there, but not so hell. Be assured that if to-night you find yourself in mortal sin; if you are doing the devil's work by sowing the devil's seed in your own or your neighbor's soul; if you are habitually inclined to disregard not only God's love but His fear as well, — be assured, I say, there is a place in hell for you, and the chances are you will one day occupy it. But no; oh, I beg you to turn to God while you may. Fear Him, the avenger; love Him for having spared you so often; persevere in His service for very gratitude, and let God do the rest. It will be of you He will be speaking when " in the time of the harvest He will say to the reapers: Gather ye the wheat into My barn."