Part I, Chapter XV

Seventh Meditation: On Hell

Preparation

1. Place yourself in the presence of God. 2. Humble yourself, and implore his assistance. 3. Represent to yourself a city involved in darkness, burning with brimstone and stinking pitch, and full of inhabitants who cannot make their escape.

Considerations

1. The damned are in the abyss of hell, as within a woful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments in all their senses and members, because as they have employed all their senses and their members in sinning, so shall they suffer in each of them the punishment due to sin. The eyes for lascivious looks shall endure the horrible sight of devils and of hell. The ears, for having taken delight in vicious discourses, shall hear nothing but wailings, lamentations, desperate howlings; and so of the rest.

2. Besides all these torments, there is yet a greater, which is the privation and loss of the glory of God, from the sight of which the damned are excluded for ever. Now, if Absalom found the privation of the amiable, face of his father, David, more grievous to him than his banishment, good God! what grief will it cause to be forever excluded from the sight of thy most sweet and gracious countenance?

3. Consider, above all, the eternity of those pains, which alone makes hell insupportable. Alas! if a little insect in your ear, or the heat of a fever, makes one short night seem so long and tedious, how terrible will the night of eternity be, accompanied with so many torments! From this eternity proceed eternal despair, infinite rage, and blasphemies, etc.

Affections and Resolutions

Terrify your soul with the words of the prophet Isaiah. O my soul! art thou able to dwell with this devouring fire? Canst thou endure to dwell with everlasting burning? Canst thou think of parting with thy God forever?

Confess that you have often deserved it. But henceforward I will take a new course; for why should I go down into this bottomless pit? I will use such and such endeavors to avoid sin, which alone can bring me to this eternal death. Give thanks, offer, pray.

Our Father. Hail Mary.

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