TradCatKnight: True Conversion For Hardened Sinners

But, was it to the rich alone thou didst address it, Jesus, Savior of all? Ah no. Answer it then, likewise, O ye Poor! Say, what doth it profit you to gain the world to gain, did I say?–what doth it profit you, to lose the whole world; to live, to die, bereft of every, even the most trivial, comfort which the world affords; and, after all your sufferings, to lose your immortal souls into the bargain? To spend your days in the most toilsome labour, (happy, even when you so can spend them) and your nights in a desponding anxiety, how you shall fare on the morrow; to eat, through life, the bread of bitterness, and quaff the water of affliction; uneducated and ignorant, to know almost nothing, save the wretchedness under which you groan; in cold, hunger, filth, distemper, and nakedness, with your wives and your hapless little ones, whose future prospects are no better than your own–to drag on a miserable existence, despised, neglected, unpitied, and forlorn, till death comes to close your eye-lids; and then–and then (to fill up your cup of woe for ever to the brim) instead of passing from labour to ease, from distress to comfort, from tears to joy, from exile to your country, from misery to happiness; in a word, instead of passing from earth to heaven–only to exchange your burthen of temporal affliction, for the eternal weight of God’s eternal vengeance, which begins to wreak its fury on your devoted heads. O my brethren, the Poor! Say, speak; if it profiteth nothing to the rich, to gain the whole world, while they lose their own souls; say, speak; who can imagine the misfortune of you, O Poor, who, gaining nothing but affliction in this life, earn for yourselves the horrors of endless darkness in the next?

But, my brethren, in addressing to you this all-important question of your Redeemer, shall I consider only your high, or low station in society? or shall I not, likewise, and principally, consider the respective condition of your souls with regard to salvation? Shall I speak to you only as men, and in the order of nature? or shall I not, likewise, and principally, speak to you as Christians and in the order of grace? Answer me, then, O ye members of unorthodox communions, and in me, his minister, answer your Redeemer. What doth it profit you to have gained, not the whole world, (for I no longer allude to temporal prosperity) but what the whole world could not give you–the knowledge of the true God–if, nevertheless, you lose your souls for ever? What doth it profit you to submit your reason to revelation, in your belief of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and some other incomprehensible truths, announced by Christ Jesus–if, nevertheless, you give Him the lie, in such of His mysteries as your fancy has rejected, and thus, according to St. James, ii, 10, by offending in one point, become guilty of all?” What doth it profit you to boast your Savior’s name, if, by refusing to “hear His Church, you are to Him as heathens and as publicans?” What doth it profit you to call Him “Lord, Lord,” if He will not admit you into His kingdom; and when, on the day of mankind’s doom; you shall beseech Him to receive you, His reply is to be, “I know you not. Depart from me all ye workers of iniquity?” What doth it profit you to read and con by rote His sacred scriptures, if by your own prejudices and willful ignorance, you find but death in the words of life, error in the oracles of truth, and eternal ruin in the pages of salvation? 

Oh England! England! the rebellious daughter of the Church of God, tossed about by every wind of doctrine; let three centuries of revolt and terror suffice for thy unhappy wanderings. Return, return to thy ancient mother; to Her who preached Christ to thy pagan Saxon ancestors; to Her whom thy forefathers faithfully loved nine hundred years; to Her, from whom thou didst receive those very scriptures, which Thou hast so misinterpreted and abused; to Her who is the Church built by Christ upon Peter, against which the gates of Hell shall never prevail; the pillar and the ground of truth, with whom the Son of God hath promised to be for ever, even to the consummation of the world. Return, O England! return to the Lord thy God; for what doth it profit thy children to gain the whole world, or to see thee at the head of the nations, if they are to suffer the loss of their own souls?

You, my Catholic brethren, have not rebelled against the Church of God. You have not swerved from your allegiance to the Spouse of Christ. You, therefore, cannot, like your unhappy neighbors, be charged with defection from the “faith, once delivered to the saints.” But, shall your fidelity to the only true and ancient creed of Christians, exempt, either me from putting, or you from answering, the awful interrogation of your Savior? Shall it not, on the contrary, give to that question, when addressed to you, a ten-fold terror?

Answer me than, you, too, O Catholics! what doth it profit you, to have received your birth, your baptism, and your early impressions, in the pale of the Church of Christ; taught, from your infancy, to reverence His truths, frequent his sacraments, and live according to His laws; conscious of the, happiness, and glorying in the honor, of being the sheep of His ancient, only fold; ready to shed your blood, rather than renounce the name your bear; moving heaven and earth, on the bare suspicion of any attempt to injure your religion;–answer me, O Catholics! what do your faith, your zeal, and all your advantages profit you, if your lives square not with your professions; if your faith work not by charity; if it be a dead faith, which condemns, not justifies you; if you be the mere hearers, not the performers of the law; if you neglect those sacraments, which you so highly venerate; if, through your crimes, the name of our God, the character of His Church, be blasphemed among the Gentiles, among the separatists and the impious; if your condition, on that awful day prove, consequently, worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Tyre and Sidon, of the nations, who have never known the Catholic faith of your Savior, or who, for centuries, have deformed and lost it; if, in a word, with all our justly boasted privileges, you, you too, suffer the loss of your own souls? What doth it profit you, if, in the course of the present year, you have formed resolutions of conversion, which, however, you have left unexecuted? What doth it profit you, if even now you be in the state of grace, but will not persevere unto the end? And what doth it profit me, if (soul-shivering word of the vessel of election, St. Paul!) dum aliies praedico, ipse reprobus fiam–while I preach this day so ardently to others, I, myself, be among the reprobates on the last?

Oh God! who wilt judge every one according to his works; and whose sweeping, universal criterion, on the great accounting day, will be the distinction, not of Pagans and of Christians, not of Jews and of Gentiles, not of Heretics and of Catholics, not of Rich and of Poor, not of People and of people and of Pastors–but, embracing every condition of man, and every diversity of human act, the all-comprehensive distinction of–Sinners, and of–Just; grant, Thou, then avenging, but now pardoning God! that we, who tremble at the bare idea of Thy dread judgment, may, through our sincere amendment and unshaken perseverance, prove, by the fact, our full conviction of that truth, so often inculcated by Thee–that the very faith which we profess, and without which, as the Apostle saith, it is impossible to please Thee–instead of saving us from thy wrath, shall be but to our greater condemnation, unless, through the worthy and holy use of thy sacraments, now while we have time, we stay the arm of Thy justice, by washing away our sins in Thy mercy! 

However frightful the reflection, that sins, which arise from the infirmities of depraved nature; into which we are often hurried by the force of temptation, the allurements of the occasion, by surprise, perhaps, as much as by malice; sins, to commit which, a moment of passion suffices–however frightful, I say, the reflection, that such seemingly pardonable transgressions, should, by the vengeance of a just God, be visited in another world, with an eternity of the extremest torment;–however anxious the sinner may feel, to persuade himself, if his religion did not assure him of the contrary, that Hell was a mere fable, invented to alarm weak minds–however unwilling even pious and regular Christians maybe, to fix their thoughts on a subject so horrible; and however solicitous I myself may feel, to escape the character of a preacher, who delights in terrifying the souls of the Christian people; yet, neither my delicacy, your thoughtlessness, the scoffs of the impious, who in vain strive to disbelieve it, nor the apparently huge disproportion between the offense and the punishment, will ever make less true, less terrible, less effectual or infallible, the sentence of the God of truth and justice, in the, 25th chapter of His Evangelist Matthew, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into eternal fire, which was prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Were our forgetfulness of this dread truth, to diminish it in reality, as it diminishes it in our own imagination; were the oceans of iniquity, which inundate the world, to quench that unquenchable flame, which they kindle for the souls of sinners; were my silence to silence either the wailing or gnashing of teeth in outer darkness, or to still the fires of that unextinguishable furnace, which the breath of an angry God shall keep for ever burning; or, did I even hope, that the milder motives which prompt to virtue, could have sufficient influence on the mind of many an obstinate sinner; I should be the last priest to the Church of God, to muster up the horrors of eternal perdition before the eyes of my audience.

But, when neither the love of virtue, the hatred of vice, the example of the good, the misfortune of the bad; honor, shame, human respect; the sanctity of religion, the light of reason, the innate desire of happiness here and hereafter–no, nor the blood and sufferings of the very God who is to judge them, dying for their sins, can induce numbers of unfortunate Christians to fly that course of vice, in which they must long since have tired themselves; when I see them still rushing headlong into the bottomless pit of damnation, shall I not snatch the rod of the Almighty’s vengeance, and, as His minister, scourge them back from the brink of Hell?–You may scoff, sinners, at the uncloaked terms in which I address you.

Voltaire, the gay, the boasting, the immoral, the irreligious Voltaire, scoffed, all his life time, at the fires and furies and hob goblins, as he called them, of the Christian Hell. But in vain did he scoff, in vain did he affect, in vain did he boast, in vain did he strive with all his might to banish the distracting thought. it haunted him on his death-pillow. In his terror he sends for a priest, his philosophic friends will not allow the minister of consolation to enter. Voltaire, the wretched Voltaire, curses them for their unnatural cruelty; and turning, in his despondence, towards that Jesus, whom he had, for more than fourscore years, blasphemed; not daring to pray, with horrid execrations calls upon his Redeemer, now to wreak his vengeance on him for ever, as the hour of His justice was come; and so, expires, after having experienced, by real anticipation, for a day and a night, to the horror of those who surrounded him, all that torment, rage, fury and despair, to which he felt that his crimes were about to devote him in another world!

Christians! until you cease to sin; until you make use of the means given you for your justification–the holy sacraments of Christ’s institution; the ministers of his word will never cease to warn you with St. Paul, that it is a “horrible, horrible thing, to fall into the hands of the living God!” Oh Heavens! sinners, what are you about? do you really think? do you really believe? Come, answer; “which of you can dwell with everlasting flames?” It is not I, it is your God, it is His prophet, it is your conscience which puts you the question. Which of you, then, after such a thought, can remain, not for a moment, but for years, for your whole lives, in that state of sin, in which were you to die, you must be as certain as you are of your own existence, that Hell will be our doom…..Read more »