Ch3 Pt2

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter three, Part two of a Portrait of the Artist
as a young man by James Joyce. This is a
LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Recording by Peter Bobby. A Portrait of the Artist as

(00:23):
a young man by James Joyce, Chapter three, Part two.
Remember only thy last things, and thou shalt not sin forever.
Words taken my dear little brothers in Christ from the
Book of Ecclesiastes, seventh, chapter fortieth verse in the name

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of the Father, and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost. Amen. Stephen sat in the front bench of
the chapel. Father Arnauld sat at a table to the
left of the altar. He wore about his shoulders a
heavy cloak. His pale face was drawn and his voice
broken with room. The figure of his old master, so

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strangely re arisen, brought back to Stephen's mind his life
at Clongo's, The wide playgrounds swarming with boys, the square ditch,
the little cemetery off the main avenue of Limes, where
he had dreamed of being buried, the firelight on the
wall of the infirmary where he lay sick, the sorrowful
face of Brother Michael. His soul, as these memories came

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back to him, became again a child's soul. We are
assembled here to day, my dear little brothers in Christ,
for one brief moment, far away from the busy bustle
of the outer world, to celebrate and to honor one
of the greatest of Saints, the Apostle of the Indies,

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the patron saint also of your college, Saint Francis Xavier.
Year after year, for much longer than any of you,
my dear little boys, can remember, or than I can remember,
the boys of this college have met in this very
chapel to make their annual retreat before the feast day
of their patron Saint. Time has gone on and brought

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with it its changes, even in the last few years.
What changes can most of you not remember. Many of
the boys who sat in those front benches a few
years ago are perhaps now in distant lands in the
burning tropics, or immersed in professional duties, or in seminaries,
or voyaging over the vast expanse of the deep, or

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it may be already called by the Great God to
another life, and to the rendering up of their stewardship.
And still, as the years roll by, bringing with them
changes for good and bad, the memory of the Great
Saint is honored by the boys of his college, who
make every year their annual retreat on the days preceding

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the feast day, set apart by our Holy mind the Church,
to transmit to all the ages the name and fame
of one of the greatest sons of Catholic Spain. Now
what is the meaning of this word retreat, and why
is it allowed on all hands to be a most
salutary practice for all who desire to lead before God

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and in the eyes of men, a truly Christian life.
A retreat, my dear boys, signifies a withdrawal for a
while from the cares of our life, the cares of
this workaday world, in order to examine the state of
our conscience, to reflect on the mysteries of Holy religion,
and to understand better why we are here in this world.

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During these few days, I intend to put before you
some thoughts concerning the four last things. They are, as
you know from your catechism, Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven.
We shall try to understand them fully during these few days,
so that we may derive from the understanding of them

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a lasting benefit to our souls. And remember, my dear boys,
that we have been sent into this world for one thing,
and for one thing alone, to do God's holy will
and to save our immortal souls. All else is worthless.
One thing alone is needful, the salvation of one's soul.

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What doth it profit a man to gain the whole
world if he suffer the loss of his immortal soul. Ah,
my dear boys, believe me, there is nothing in this
wretched world that can make up for such a loss.
I will ask you, therefore, my dear boys, to put
away from your minds, during these few days, all worldly thoughts,

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whether of study or pleasure or ambition, and to give
all your attention to the state of your souls. I
need hardly remind you that during the days of the retreat,
all boys are expected to preserve a quiet and pious demeanor,
and to shun all loud unseemly pleasure. The elder boys,

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of course, will see that this custom is not infringed.
And I look especially to the prefects and officers of
the sodality of our blessed Lady, and of the sodality
of the Holy Angels, to set a good example to
their fellow students. Let us try, therefore to make this
retreat in honor of Saint Francis, with our whole heart

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and our whole mind. God's blessing will then be upon
all your year's studies. But above and beyond all, let
this retreat be one to which you can look back
in after years, when maybe you are far from this
college and among very different surroundings, to which you can
look back with joy and thankfulness, and give thanks to

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God for having granted you this occasion of laying the
first foundation of a pious, honorable, zealous Christian life. And if,
as may so happen, there be at this moment in
these benches any poor soul who has had the unutterable
misfortune to lose God's holy grace and to fall into
grievous sin, I fervently trust and pray that this retreat

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may be the turning point in the life of that soul.
I pray to God, through the merits of its zealous
servant Francis Xavier, that such a soul may be led
to sincere repentance, and that the holy communion on Saint
Francis Day of this year may be a lasting covenant
between God and that soul, for just and unjust, for

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saint and sinner alike. May this retreat be a memorable one.
Help me, my dear little brothers in Christ, Help me
by your pious attention, by your own devotion, by your
outward demeanor. Banish from your minds all worldly thought, and
think only of the last things, death, judgment, Hell, and heaven.

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He who remembers these things, says Ecclesiastes, shall not sin forever.
He who remembers the last things will act and think
with them always before his eyes. He will live a
good life and die a good death, believing and knowing
that if he has sacrificed much in this earthly life,
it will be given to him a hundredfold and a

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thousandfold more in the life to come in the Kingdom.
Without end. A blessing, my dear boys, which I wish
you from my heart, one and all, in the name
of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost. Amen. As he walked home with silent companions,
a thick fog seemed to compass his mind. He waited

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in stupor of mind till it should lift and reveal
what it had hidden. He ate his dinner with surly appetite,
and and when the meal was over, and the grease
strewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose and
went to the window, clearing the thick scum from his
mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips.

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So he had sunk to the state of a beast
that licks his chaps after meat. This was the end,
and a faint glimmer of fear began to pierce the
fog of his mind. He pressed his face against the
pane of the window and gazed out to the darkening street.
Forms passed this way and that through the dull light,

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and that was life. The letters of the name of
Dublin lay heavily upon his mind, pushing one another, surlily
hither and thither with slow, boorish insistence. His soul was
fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper
in its dull fear into a somber, threatening dusk, while

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the body that was his stood listless and dishonored, gazing
out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed, and human for a
bovine god to stare upon. The next day brought death
and judgment, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair.
The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit.

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As the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into
his soul, he suffered its agony. He felt the death chill,
touch the extremities, and creep onward towards the heart, the
film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centers of
the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last

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sweat oozing upon the skin, The powerlessness of the dying limbs,
the speech thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing
faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished. The breath, the
poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing,
gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help, no help.

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He he himself, his body to which he had yielded,
was dying into the grave. With it, nail it down
into a wooden box. The corpse carried it out of
the house on the shoulders of hirelings, thrust it out
of men's sight, into a long hole in the ground,
into the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of

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its creeping worms, and to be devoured by scuttling, plump
bellied rats. And while the friends were still standing in
tears by the bedside, the soul of the sinner was
judged at the last moment of consciousness. The whole earthly
life passed before the vision of the soul, and ere
it had time to reflect. The body had died, and

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the soul stood terrified before the judgment seat. God, who
had long been merciful, would then be just. He had
long been patient, pleading with a sinful soul, giving it
time to repent, sparing it yet awhile, But that time
had gone. Time was to sin and to enjoy. Time

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was to scoff at God and at the warnings of
his holy church. Time was to defy his majesty, to
disobey his commands, to hoodwink one's fellow men, to commit
sin after sin and sin after sin, and to hide
one's corruption from the sight of men. But that time
was over. Now it was God's turn, and he was

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not to be hoodwinked or deceived. Every sin would then
come forth from its lurking place, the most rebellious against
the divine will, and the most degrading to our poor
corrupt nature, the tiniest imperfection, and the most heinous atrocity.
What did it avail then, to have been a great emperor,
a great general, a marvelous inventor, the most learned of

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the learned. All were as one before the judgment seat
of God. God. He would reward the good and punish
the wicked. One single instant was enough for the trial
of a man's soul, One single instant after the body's death,
the soul had been weighed in the balance, The particular
judgment was over, and the soul had passed to the

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abode of bliss, or to the prison of purgatory, or
had been hurled howling into hell. Nor was that all
God's justice had still to be vindicated before men. After
the particular there still remained the general judgment. The last
day had come, Doomsday was at hand. The stars of

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Heaven were falling upon the earth like the figs cast
by the fig tree which the wind has shaken. The Sun,
the great luminary of the universe, had become as sackcloth
of hair. The moon was blood red, the firmament was
as a scroll rolled away. The archangel Michael, the Prince
of the Heavenly Host, appeared glorious and terrible against the sky.

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With one foot on the sea and one foot on
the land. He blew from the archangelical trumpet the brazen
death of Time. The three blasts of the angel filled
all the universe. Time is, time was, but time shall
be no more. At the last blast, the souls of
universal humanity thronged towards the valley of jehosephat rich and poor,

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gentle and simple, wise and foolish, good and wicked. The
soul of every human being that has ever existed, the
souls of all those who shall yet be born, all
the sons and daughters of Adam. All are assembled on
that supreme day. And Lo, the Supreme Judge is coming.

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No longer the lowly Lamb of God, no longer the
meek Jesus of Nazareth, no longer the man of sorrows,
no longer unger, the good Shepherd. He is seen now
coming upon the clouds in great power and majesty, attended
by nine choirs of angels, angels and arch angels, principalities,

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powers and virtues, thrones and dominations, Cherubim and Seraphim, God omnipotent, God, everlasting.
He speaks, and his voice is heard, even at the
farthest limits of space, even in the bottomless abyss. Supreme
judge from his sentence, there will be and can be

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no appeal. He calls the just to his side, bidding
them enter into the kingdom, the eternity of bliss prepared
for them. The unjust he casts from him, crying in
his offended majesty. Depart from me, Ye, curse it into
everlasting fire, which was prepared for the devil and his angels.

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Oh what agony then for the miser miserable sinners. Friend
is torn apart from friend, children are torn from their parents,
husbands from their wives. The poor sinner holds out his
arms to those who were dear to him in this
earthly world, to those whose simple piety perhaps he made
a mock of, To those who counseled him and tried

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to lead him on the right path, to a kind brother,
to a loving sister, to the mother and father who
loved him so dearly. But it is too late. The
just turn away from the wretched, damned souls which now
appear before the eyes of all in their hideous and
evil character. O you hypocrites, O you whited sepulchers, Oh

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you who present a smooth, smiling face to the world,
while your soul within is a foul swamp of sin.
How will it fare with you in that terrible day?
And this day will come, shall come, must come, the
day of death and the day of judgment. It is
appointed unto man to die, and after death the judgment

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death is certain. The time and manner are uncertain, whether
from long disease or from some unexpected accident. The Son
of God cometh at an hour when you little expect him.
Be therefore ready every moment, seeing that you may die
at any moment. Death is the end of us. All
death and judgment brought into the world by the sin

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of our first parents are the dark portals that close
our earthly existence, the portals that open into the unknown,
and the unseen portals through which every soul must pass alone,
unaided save by its good works, without friend or brother,
or parent or master to help it, alone and trembling.

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Let that thought be ever before our minds, and then
we cannot sin death a cause of terror to the sinner,
is a blessed moment for him who has won in
the right path, fulfilling the duties of his station in life,
attending to his morning and evening prayers, approaching the Holy
Sacrament frequently, and performing good and merciful works. For the

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pious and believing Catholic. For the just man, death is
no cause of terror. Was it not Addison, the great
English writer, who, when on his death bed, sent for
the wicked young Earl of Warwick, to let him see
how a Christian can meet his end? He it is,
and he alone, the pious and believing Christian, who can say,

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in his heart, O grave, where is thy victory? O death?
Where is thy sting? Every word of it was for him,
against his sin, foul and secret. The whole wrath of
God was aimed. The preacher's knife had probed deeply into
his diseased conscience, and he felt now that his soul

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was festering in sin. Yes, the preacher was right. God's
turn had come like a beast in its lair. His
soul had lain down in its own filth, But the
blasts of the angel's trumpet had driven him forth from
the darkness of sin into the light. The words of
doom cried by the angel, shattered in an instant his

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presumptuous peace. The wind of the last day blew through
his mind, his sins. The jeweliyed harlots of his imagination
fled before the hurricane, squeaking like mice in their terror,
and huddled under a main of hair. As he crossed
the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a girl

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reached his burning ear. The frail, gay sound smote his
heart more strongly than a trumpet blast, and not daring
to lift his eyes, he turned aside and gazed. As
he walked into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame
rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being.
The image of Emma appeared before him, and under her eyes,

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the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart.
If she knew to what his mind had subjected her,
or how his brute like lust had torn and trampled
upon her innocence? Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry?
Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank

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under his very nostrils. The soot coated packet of pictures,
which he had hidden in the flu of the fireplace,
and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness
He lay for hours, sinning in thought and deed, his
monstrous dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by harlots with
gleaming jewel eyes. The foul long letters he had written

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in the joy of guilty confession, and carried secretly for
days and days, only to throw them under cover of
night among the grass, in the corner of a field,
or beneath some hingeless door, or in some niche in
the he hedges, where a girl might come upon them
as she walked by, and read them secretly. Mad mad,

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was it possible he had done these things? A cold
sweat broke out upon his forehead as the foul memories
condensed within his brain. When the agony of shame had
passed from him, he tried to raise his soul from
its abject powerlessness. God and the Blessed Virgin were too
far from him. God was too great and stern, and

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the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy. But he imagined
that he stood near Emma in a wide land, and
humbly and in tears, bent and kissed the elbow of
her sleeve. In the wide land, under a tender, lucid
evening sky, a cloud drifting westward amid a pale green
sea of heaven, they stood together, children that had erred.

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Their error had offended deeply God's majesty, though it was
the error of two children. But it had not offended her,
whose beauty is not like earthly beauty, dangerous to look upon,
but like the morning star, which is its emblem, bright
and musical. The eyes were not offended which she turned
upon them, nor reproachful. She placed their hands together, hand

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in hand, and said, speaking to their hearts, take hands,
Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in
heaven you have aired, but you are always my children.
It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together,
my dear children, and you will be happy together, and

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your hearts will love each other. The chapel was flooded
by the dull scarlet light that filtered through the lowered blinds,
and through the fissure between the last blind and the sash.
A shaft of one light entered like a spear and
touched the embossed brasses of the candlesticks, upon the altar

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that gleamed like the battle worn male armor of angels.
Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on
the College. It would rain forever, noiselessly. The water would
rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering
the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops.

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All life would be choked off, noiselessly, birds, men, elephants, pigs, children,
noiselessly floating corpses, amid the litter of the wreckage of
the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would
fall till the waters covered the face of the earth.
It might be why not Hell has enlarged its soul

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and opened its mouth without any limits. Words taken my
dear little brothers in Christ Jesus from the Book of Isaias,
fifth chapter, fourteenth verse, in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The preacher took a chainless watch from a pocket within
his soutaine, and, having considered its dial for a moment

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in silence, placed it silently before him on the table.
He began to speak in a quiet tone. Adam and Eve,
my dear boys, were, as you know, our first parents.
And you will remember that they were created by God
in order that the seats in heaven left vacant by

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the fall of Lucifer and his rebellious angels might be
filled again. Lucifer, we are told, was a sun of
the morning, a radiant and mighty angel. Yet he fell,
he fell, and there fell with him a third part
of the host of heaven. He fell and was hurled
with his rebellious angels into hell. What his sin was

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we cannot say. Theologians consider that it was the sin
of pride, the sin thought conceived in an instant, non serrium.
I will not serve that instant was his ruin. He
offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of
one instant, and God cast him out of Heaven into

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Hell forever. Adam and Eve were then created by God
and placed in Eden, in the plain of Damascus, that
lovely garden, resplendent with sunlight and color, teeming with luxuriant vegetation.
The fruitful earth gave them her bounty. Beasts and birds
were their willing servants. They knew not the ills. Our

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flesh is heir to disease and poverty and death. All
that a great and generous God could do for them
was done. But there was one condition imposed on them
by God. Obedience to his word. They were not to
eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree. Alas, my
dear little boys, they too fell the devil. Once a

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shining angel, a sun of the morning. Now a foul
fiend came in the shape of a serpent, the subtlest
of all the beasts of the field. He envied them, He,
the fallen great one, could not bear to think that man,
a being of clay, should possess the inheritance which he,
by his sin, had forfeited forever. He came to the woman,

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the weaker Vessel, and poured the poison of his eloquence
into her ear, promising her o the blasphemy of that promise,
that if she and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit,
they would become as gods, nay as God himself. Eve
yielded to the wiles of the arch tempter. She ate

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the apple and gave it also to Adam, who had
not the moral courage to resist her. The poisoned tongue
of Satan had done its work, they fell, And then
the voice of God was heard in that garden, calling
his creature man to account. And Michael, Prince of the
Heavenly Host, with a sword of flame in his hand,

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appeared before the guilty pair and drove them forth from
Eden into the world, the world of sickness and striving,
of cruelty, and disappointment, of labor and hardship, to earn
their bread in the sweat of their brow. But even then,
how merciful was God. He took pity on our poor,
degraded parents, and promised that in the fullness of time

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he would send down from heaven one who would redeem them,
make them once more children of God and heirs to
the Kingdom of Heaven. And that one, that redeemer of
fallen man, was to be God's only begotten son, the
second person of the most blessed Trinity, the Eternal Word.

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He came. He was born of a virgin pure marry,
the Virgin mother. He was born in a poor cow
house in Judea, and lived as a humble carpenter for
thirty years until the hour of his mission had come.
And then, filled with love for men, he went forth
and called to men to hear the New Gospel. Did

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they listen? Yes, they listened, but would not hear. He
was seized and bound like a common criminal, mocked at
as a fool, set aside to give place to a
public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes, crowned with a
crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the Jewish

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rabble and the Roman soldiery. Stripped of his garments and
hanged upon a gibbet, and his side was pierced with
a lance. And from the wounded body of our Lord,
water and blood issued continually. Yet even then, in that
hour of supreme agony, our merciful Redeemer had pity for mankind.

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Yet even there, on the hill of Calvary, he founded
the Holy Catholic Church, against which it is promised the
gates of hell shall not prevail. He founded it upon
the rock of Ages, and endowed it with his grace,
with sacraments and sacrifice, and promised that if men would
obey the word of his Church, they would still enter

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into eternal life. But if after all that had been
done for them, they still persisted in their wickedness, there
remained for them an eternity of torment Hell. The preacher's
voice sank, He paused, joined his palms for an instant,
parted them, then he resumed. Now let us try for

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a moment to realize, as far as we can, the
nature of that abode of the damned, which the justice
of an offended God has called into existence for the
eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a straight and dark
and foul smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls,

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filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison
house is expressly designed by God to punish those who
refuse to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons,
the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement,
were it only within the four walls of his cell,
or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so

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in Hell. There by reason of the great number of
the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison,
the walls of which are said to be four thousand
miles thick, and the damned are so utterly bound and
helpless that, as a blessed saint Saint Anselm writes in
his book on Similitudes, they are not even able to

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remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it. They
lie in exterior darkness. For remember, the fire of Hell
gives forth no light, as at the command of God.
The fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat, but
not its light. So at the command of go God,
the fire of Hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat,

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burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm
of darkness, dark flames, and dark smoke of burning brimstone,
amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another, without
even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with
which the land of the Pharaohs was smitten, one plague alone,
that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall

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we give to the darkness of hell, which is to
last not for three days alone, but for all eternity.
The horror of this straight and dark prison is increased
by its awful stench. All the filth of the world,
all the awful and scum of the world, we are told,
shall run there as to a vast, reeking sewer, when

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the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world.
The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity
fills all hell with its honorable stench, and the bodies
of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odor, that,
as Saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice

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to infect the whole world, the very air of this world.
That pure element becomes foul and unbreathable when it has
been long enclosed. Consider then, what must be the foulness
of the air of Hell. Imagine some foul and putrid
corpse that has lain, rotting and decomposing in the grave,

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a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse,
a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone,
and giving off dense, choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition.
And then imagine this sickening stench multiplied a millionfold, and
a million fold again from the millions upon millions of

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fetid carcasses massed together in this reeking darkness, a huge
and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will
have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.
But this stench is not horrible, though it is the
greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The

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torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the
tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger
for a moment in the flame of a candle, and
you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly
fire was created by God for the benefit of man,
to maintain in him the spark of life, and to
help him in the useful arts. Whereas the fire of

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Hell is of another quality, and was created by God
to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire
also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object
which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that
human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preps operations

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to check or frustrate its action. But the sulfurous brimstone
which burns in Hell is a substance which is specially
designed to burn forever and forever with unspeakable fury. Moreover,
our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns,
so that the more intense it is, the shorter is

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its duration. But the fire of Hell has this property
that it preserves that which it burns, And though it
rages with incredible intensity, it rages forever. Our earthly fire again,
no matter how fierce or wide spread it may be,
is always of a limited extent. But the lake of

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fire in Hell is boundless, shoreless, and bottomless. It is
on record that the Devil himself, when asked the question
by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if
a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of Hell,
it would be burned up in an instant like a
piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict

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the bodies of the damned, only from without, But each
lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless
fire raging in its very vitals. Oh, how terrible is
the lot of those wretched beings. The blood seethes and
boils in the veins, The brains are boiling in the skull,

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the heart in the breast, glowing and bursting, the bowels
a red hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes
flaming like molten balls. And yet what I have said
as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this
fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity. An

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intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by
divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike.
It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire
of God, working not of its own activity, but as
an instrument of divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism
cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires

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of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense
of the flesh is tortured, and every faculty of the soul.
Therewith the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with
noisome odors, the ears with yells and howls and execrations,
the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth,

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the touch with red hot goads and spikes, with cruel
tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses,
the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence,
amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires, kindled in
the abyss by the offended majesty of the omnipotent God,

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and fanned into everlasting and ever increasing fury by the
breath of the anger of the god Head. Consider finally,
that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by
the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth
is so noxious that even the plants, as if by instinct,

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withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful
to them. In hell, all laws are overturned. There is
no thought of family or country, of ties of relationships.
The damned howl and scream at one another. Their torture
and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and

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raging like themselves, all sense of humanity is forgotten. The
yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of
the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are full
of blasphemies against God, and of hatred for their fellow sufferers,
and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices

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in sin. In olden times, it was the custom to
punish the parricide the man who had raised his murderous
hand against his father, by casting him into the depths
of the sea in a sack, in which were placed
a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of
those law givers who framed such a law, which seems
cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by

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the company of hateful and hurtful beasts. But what is
the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury
of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching
throats of the damned in hell? When they behold in
their companions in misery, those who aided and abetted them
in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of

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evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose
immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes
tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. They
turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them,
But they are helpless and hopeless. It is too late
now for repentance. Last of all, consider the frightful torment

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to those damned souls, temp and tempted alike of the
company of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned
in two ways. By their presence and by their reproaches.
We can have no idea of how horrible these devils are.
Saint Catharine of Siena once saw a devil, and she
has written that rather than look again for one single

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instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to
walk until the end of her life along a track
of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels,
have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful.
They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they
drag down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons

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who are made in hell. The voices of conscience, Why
did you sin? Why did you lend an ear to
the temptings of fiends? Why did you turn aside from
your pious practices and good works? Why did you not
shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave
that evil companion? Why did you not give up that
lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen

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to the counsels of your confessor? Why did you not,
even after you had fallen the first or the second,
or the third, or the fourth or the hundredth time,
repent of your evil ways and turn to God, who
only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins.
Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is

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time was, but time shall be no more. Time was
to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride,
to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of
your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field,
nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they
at least are but brutes, and have not reason to

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guide them. Time was, but time shall be no more.
God spoke to you by so many voices. But you
would not hear. You would not crush out that pride
and anger in your heart. You would not restore those
ill gotten goods. You would not obey the precepts of
your holy Church, nor attend to your religious duties. You

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would not abandon those wicked companions. You would not avoid
those dangerous temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors,
words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and of disgust.
Of disgust. Yes, for even they, the very devils, when
they sinned, sinned by such a sin as alone was

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compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect.
And they, even they, the foul devils, must turn away,
revolted and disgusted from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins
by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of
the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself. Oh, my dear

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little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot
to hear that language. May it never be our lot?
I say, in the last day of terrible reckoning, I
pray fervently to God that not a single soul of
those who are in this chapel to day may be
found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall

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command to depart forever from his sight, that not one
of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the
awful sentence of rejection depart from me, ye cursed into
everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.
He came down the isle of the chapel, his legs

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shaking and the scalp of his head trembling, as though
it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up
the staircase and into the corridor, along the walls of
which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless
and dripping and shapeless, and at every step he feared
that he had already died, that his soul had been

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wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he
was plunging headlong through space. He could not grip the
floor with his feet, and sat heavily at his desk,
opening one of his books at random, and pouring over
it every word for him. It was true. God was almighty.

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God could call him now, call him. As he sat
at his desk, before he had time to be conscious
of the summons, God had called him. Yes, what Yes.
His flesh shrank together as if it felt the approach
of the ravenous tongues of flames, dried up as it
felt about it, the swirl of stifling air. He had died, Yes,

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he was judged. A wave of fire swept through his body,
the first again, a wave. His brain began to glow another.
His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement
of the skull. Flames burst forth from his skull like
a corolla, shrieking like voices. Hell, hell, hell, Hell, Hell.

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End of Chapter three, Part two