How could it be
otherwise?
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
What his sin was we cannot
say. Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful
thought conceived in an instant: NON SERVIAM: 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 hell for ever.
--Adam and Eve were then created by God and placed in Eden, in the
plain of Damascus, that lovely garden resplendent with sunlight and
colour, teeming with luxuriant vegetation. The fruitful earth gave them
her bounty: beasts and birds were their willing servants: they knew not
the ills our 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 shining
angel, a son 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
for ever. He came to the woman, 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 archtempter. She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had not
the moral courage to resist her. The poison 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, 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 labour 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 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.
--He came. He was born of a virgin pure, Mary the virgin mother. He
was born in a poor cowhouse 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 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 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. 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
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 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
strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost
souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house
is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused 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 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 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 God, the
fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, 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 were smitten one plague
alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we
give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone
but for all eternity?
--The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful
stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the
world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when 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 intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned
themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure
says, one of them alone would suffice 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, a jelly-like 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 millionfold again from the
millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the
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 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 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 preparations
to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which
burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for
ever and for ever 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 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 for ever.
--Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be,
is always of a limited extent; but the lake of 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 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. O, how terrible is the lot of those
wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains
are boiling in the skull, 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 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 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 odours, the ears with yells and
howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption,
nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot 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 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 the plants, as if by instinct, 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 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 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 the company of hurtful and hateful
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 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 to those damned souls,
tempters 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
Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather
than look again for one single 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 dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons,
who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did
you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? 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 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, 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 no reason to 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 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 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.
--O, my dear 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 today may be found among those miserable
beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever 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 aisle of the chapel, his legs 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 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 poring over it. Every word for
him. It was true. God was almighty. 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 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. 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!
Voices spoke near him:
--On hell.
--I suppose he rubbed it into you well.
--You bet he did. He put us all into a blue funk.
--That's what you fellows want: and plenty of it to make you work.
He leaned back weakly in his desk. He had not died. God had spared him
still. He was still in the familiar world of the school. Mr Tate and
Vincent Heron stood at the window, talking, jesting, gazing out at the
bleak rain, moving their heads.
--I wish it would clear up. I had arranged to go for a spin on the
bike with some fellows out by Malahide. But the roads must be
knee-deep.
--It might clear up, sir.
The voices that he knew so well, the common words, the quiet of the
classroom when the voices paused and the silence was filled by the
sound of softly browsing cattle as the other boys munched their lunches
tranquilly, lulled his aching soul.
There was still time. O Mary, refuge of sinners, intercede for him! O
Virgin Undefiled, save him from the gulf of death!
The English lesson began with the hearing of the history. Royal
persons, favourites, intriguers, bishops, passed like mute phantoms
behind their veil of names. All had died: all had been judged. What did
it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul? At last he
had understood: and human life lay around him, a plain of peace whereon
ant-like men laboured in brotherhood, their dead sleeping under quiet
mounds. The elbow of his companion touched him and his heart was
touched: and when he spoke to answer a question of his master he heard
his own voice full of the quietude of humility and contrition.
His soul sank back deeper into depths of contrite peace, no longer able
to suffer the pain of dread, and sending forth, as he sank, a faint
prayer. Ah yes, he would still be spared; he would repent in his heart
and be forgiven; and then those above, those in heaven, would see what
he would do to make up for the past: a whole life, every hour of life.
Only wait.
--All, God! All, all!
A messenger came to the door to say that confessions were being heard
in the chapel. Four boys left the room; and he heard others passing
down the corridor. A tremulous chill blew round his heart, no stronger
than a little wind, and yet, listening and suffering silently, he
seemed to have laid an ear against the muscle of his own heart, feeling
it close and quail, listening to the flutter of its ventricles.
No escape. He had to confess, to speak out in words what he had done
and thought, sin after sin. How? How?
--Father, I. . .
The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh:
confession. But not there in the chapel of the college. He would
confess all, every sin of deed and thought, sincerely; but not there
among his school companions. Far away from there in some dark place he
would murmur out his own shame; and he besought God humbly not to be
offended with him if he did not dare to confess in the college chapel
and in utter abjection of spirit he craved forgiveness mutely of the
boyish hearts about him.
Time passed.
He sat again in the front bench of the chapel. The daylight without was
already failing and, as it fell slowly through the dull red blinds, it
seemed that the sun of the last day was going down and that all souls
were being gathered for the judgement.
--I AM CAST AWAY FROM THE SIGHT OF THINE EYES: words taken, my dear
little brothers in Christ, from the Book of Psalms, thirtieth chapter,
twenty-third verse. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost. Amen.
The preacher began to speak in a quiet friendly tone. His face was kind
and he joined gently the fingers of each hand, forming a frail cage by
the union of their tips.
--This morning we endeavoured, in our reflection upon hell, to make
what our holy founder calls in his book of spiritual exercises, the
composition of place. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the
senses of the mind, in our imagination, the material character of that
awful place and of the physical torments which all who are in hell endure.
This evening we shall consider for a few moments the nature of the
spiritual torments of hell.
--Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity. It is a base consent to the
promptings of our corrupt nature to the lower instincts, to that which
is gross and beast-like; and it is also a turning away from the counsel
of our higher nature, from all that is pure and holy, from the Holy God
Himself. For this reason mortal sin is punished in hell by two
different forms of punishment, physical and spiritual.
Now of all these spiritual pains by far the greatest is the pain of
loss, so great, in fact, that in itself it is a torment greater than
all the others. Saint Thomas, the greatest doctor of the church, the
angelic doctor, as he is called, says that the worst damnation consists
in this, that the understanding of man is totally deprived of divine
light and his affection obstinately turned away from the goodness of
God. God, remember, is a being infinitely good, and therefore the loss
of such a being must be a loss infinitely painful. In this life we have
not a very clear idea of what such a loss must be, but the damned in
hell, for their greater torment, have a full understanding of that
which they have lost, and understand that they have lost it through
their own sins and have lost it for ever. At the very instant of death
the bonds of the flesh are broken asunder and the soul at once flies
towards God as towards the centre of her existence. Remember, my dear
little boys, our souls long to be with God. We come from God, we live
by God, we belong to God: we are His, inalienably His. God loves with a
divine love every human soul, and every human soul lives in that love.
How could it be otherwise? Every breath that we draw, every thought of
our brain, every instant of life proceeds from God's inexhaustible
goodness. And if it be pain for a mother to be parted from her child,
for a man to be exiled from hearth and home, for friend to be sundered
from friend, O think what pain, what anguish it must be for the poor
soul to be spurned from the presence of the supremely good and loving
Creator Who has called that soul into existence from nothingness and
sustained it in life and loved it with an immeasurable love. This,
then, to be separated for ever from its greatest good, from God, and to
feel the anguish of that separation, knowing full well that it is
unchangeable: this is the greatest torment which the created soul is
capable of bearing, POENA DAMNI, the pain of loss.
The second pain which will afflict the souls of the damned in hell is
the pain of conscience. Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by
putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual
remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the
worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting. The
first sting inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memory of past
pleasures. O what a dreadful memory will that be! In the lake of
all-devouring flame the proud king will remember the pomps of his
court, the wise but wicked man his libraries and instruments of
research, the lover of artistic pleasures his marbles and pictures and
other art treasures, he who delighted in the pleasures of the table his
gorgeous feasts, his dishes prepared with such delicacy, his choice
wines; the miser will remember his hoard of gold, the robber his
ill-gotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers
their deeds of blood and violence in which they revelled, the impure
and adulterous the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which they
delighted. They will remember all this and loathe themselves and their
sins. For how miserable will all those pleasures seem to the soul
condemned to suffer in hellfire for ages and ages. How they will rage
and fume to think that they have lost the bliss of heaven for the dross
of earth, for a few pieces of metal, for vain honours, for bodily
comforts, for a tingling of the nerves. They will repent indeed: and
this is the second sting of the worm of conscience, a late and
fruitless sorrow for sins committed. Divine justice insists that the
understanding of those miserable wretches be fixed continually on the
sins of which they were guilty, and moreover, as saint Augustine points
out, God will impart to them His own knowledge of sin, so that sin will
appear to them in all its hideous malice as it appears to the eyes of
God Himself. They will behold their sins in all their foulness and
repent but it will be too late and then they will bewail the good
occasions which they neglected. This is the last and deepest and most
cruel sting of the worm of conscience. The conscience will say: You had
time and opportunity to repent and would not. You were brought up
religiously by your parents. You had the sacraments and grace and
indulgences of the church to aid you. You had the minister of God to
preach to you, to call you back when you had strayed, to forgive you
your sins, no matter how many, how abominable, if only you had
confessed and repented. No. You would not. You flouted the ministers
of holy religion, you turned your back on the confessional, you
wallowed deeper and deeper in the mire of sin. God appealed to you,
threatened you, entreated you to return to Him. O, what shame, what
misery! The Ruler of the universe entreated you, a creature of clay, to
love Him Who made you and to keep His law. No. You would not. And now,
though you were to flood all hell with your tears if you could still
weep, all that sea of repentance would not gain for you what a single
tear of true repentance shed during your mortal life would have gained
for you. You implore now a moment of earthly life wherein to repent: in
vain. That time is gone: gone for ever.
--Such is the threefold sting of conscience, the viper which gnaws the
very heart's core of the wretches in hell, so that filled with hellish
fury they curse themselves for their folly and curse the evil
companions who have brought them to such ruin and curse the devils who
tempted them in life and now mock them in eternity and even revile and
curse the Supreme Being Whose goodness and patience they scorned and
slighted but Whose justice and power they cannot evade.
--The next spiritual pain to which the damned are subjected is the
pain of extension. Man, in this earthly life, though he be capable of
many evils, is not capable of them all at once, inasmuch as one evil
corrects and counteracts another just as one poison frequently corrects
another. In hell, on the contrary, one torment, instead of
counteracting another, lends it still greater force: and, moreover, as
the internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses, so
are they more capable of suffering. Just as every sense is afflicted
with a fitting torment, so is every spiritual faculty; the fancy with
horrible images, the sensitive faculty with alternate longing and rage,
the mind and understanding with an interior darkness more terrible even
than the exterior darkness which reigns in that dreadful prison. The
malice, impotent though it be, which possesses these demon souls is an
evil of boundless extension, of limitless duration, a frightful state
of wickedness which we can scarcely realize unless we bear in mind the
enormity of sin and the hatred God bears to it.
--Opposed to this pain of extension and yet coexistent with it we have
the pain of intensity. Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know,
things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.
There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften
in the least the pains of hell. Nay, things which are good in
themselves become evil in hell. Company, elsewhere a source of comfort
to the afflicted, will be there a continual torment: knowledge, so much
longed for as the chief good of the intellect, will there be hated
worse than ignorance: light, so much coveted by all creatures from the
lord of creation down to the humblest plant in the forest, will be
loathed intensely. In this life our sorrows are either not very long or
not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts
an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments
cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity
they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak,
taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it
with a still fiercer flame. Nor can nature escape from these intense
and various tortures by succumbing to them for the soul is sustained
and maintained in evil so that its suffering may be the greater.
Boundless extension of torment, incredible intensity of suffering,
unceasing variety of torture--this is what the divine majesty, so
outraged by sinners, demands; this is what the holiness of heaven,
slighted and set aside for the lustful and low pleasures of the corrupt
flesh, requires; this is what the blood of the innocent Lamb of God,
shed for the redemption of sinners, trampled upon by the vilest of the
vile, insists upon.
--Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is
the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What
mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain.
Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet
they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But
while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know,
intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an
insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be,
then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all
eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the
awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore.
How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains
go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now
imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from
the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad,
extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness;
and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand
multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water
in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on
animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the
end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and
carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions
upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away
even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages
before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch
of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.
At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would
have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been
all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away
again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there
are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea,
leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon
animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of
that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity
could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period,
after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain
reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.
--A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once
vouchsafed a vision of hell. It seemed to him that he stood in the
midst of a great hall, dark and silent save for the ticking of a great
clock. The ticking went on unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint
that the sound of the ticking was the ceaseless repetition of the
words--ever, never; ever, never. Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven;
ever to be shut off from the presence of God, never to enjoy the
beatific vision; ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded
with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains; ever to have
the conscience upbraid one, the memory enrage, the mind filled with
darkness and despair, never to escape; ever to curse and revile the
foul demons who gloat fiendishly over the misery of their dupes, never
to behold the shining raiment of the blessed spirits; ever to cry out
of the abyss of fire to God for an instant, a single instant, of
respite from such awful agony, never to receive, even for an instant,
God's pardon; ever to suffer, never to enjoy; ever to be damned, never
to be saved; ever, never; ever, never. O, what a dreadful punishment!
An eternity of endless agony, of endless bodily and spiritual torment,
without one ray of hope, without one moment of cessation, of agony
limitless in intensity, of torment infinitely varied, of torture that
sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of anguish that
everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an
eternity, every instant of which is itself an eternity of woe. Such is
the terrible punishment decreed for those who die in mortal sin by an
almighty and a just God.
--Yes, a just God! Men, reasoning always as men, are astonished that
God should mete out an everlasting and infinite punishment in the fires
of hell for a single grievous sin. They reason thus because, blinded by
the gross illusion of the flesh and the darkness of human
understanding, they are unable to comprehend the hideous malice of
mortal sin. They reason thus because they are unable to comprehend that
even venial sin is of such a foul and hideous nature that even if the
omnipotent Creator could end all the evil and misery in the world, the
wars, the diseases, the robberies, the crimes, the deaths, the murders,
on condition that he allowed a single venial sin to pass unpunished, a
single venial sin, a lie, an angry look, a moment of wilful sloth, He,
the great omnipotent God could not do so because sin, be it in thought
or deed, is a transgression of His law and God would not be God if He
did not punish the transgressor.
--A sin, an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect, made Lucifer
and a third part of the cohort of angels fall from their glory. A sin,
an instant of folly and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and
brought death and suffering into the world. To retrieve the
consequences of that sin the Only Begotten Son of God came down to
earth, lived and suffered and died a most painful death, hanging for
three hours on the cross.
--O, my dear little brethren in Christ Jesus, will we then offend that
good Redeemer and provoke His anger? Will we trample again upon that
torn and mangled corpse? Will we spit upon that face so full of sorrow
and love? Will we too, like the cruel jews and the brutal soldiers,
mock that gentle and compassionate Saviour Who trod alone for our sake
the awful wine-press of sorrow? Every word of sin is a wound in His
tender side. Every sinful act is a thorn piercing His head. Every
impure thought, deliberately yielded to, is a keen lance transfixing that
sacred and loving heart. No, no. It is impossible for any human being to
do that which offends so deeply the divine majesty, that which is punished
by an eternity of agony, that which crucifies again the Son of God and
makes a mockery of Him.
--I pray to God that my poor words may have availed today to confirm
in holiness those who are in a state of grace, to strengthen the
wavering, to lead back to the state of grace the poor soul that has
strayed if any such be among you. I pray to God, and do you pray with
me, that we may repent of our sins. I will ask you now, all of you, to
repeat after me the act of contrition, kneeling here in this humble
chapel in the presence of God. He is there in the tabernacle burning
with love for mankind, ready to comfort the afflicted. Be not afraid.
No matter how many or how foul the sins if you only repent of them they
will be forgiven you. Let no worldly shame hold you back. God is still
the merciful Lord who wishes not the eternal death of the sinner but
rather that he be converted and live.
--He calls you to Him. You are His. He made you out of nothing. He
loved you as only a God can love. His arms are open to receive you even
though you have sinned against Him. Come to Him, poor sinner, poor vain
and erring sinner. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the hour.
The priest rose and, turning towards the altar, knelt upon the step
before the tabernacle in the fallen gloom. He waited till all in the
chapel had knelt and every least noise was still. Then, raising his
head, he repeated the act of contrition, phrase by phrase, with
fervour. The boys answered him phrase by phrase. Stephen, his tongue
cleaving to his palate, bowed his head, praying with his heart.
--O my God! --
--O my God! --
--I am heartily sorry--
--I am heartily sorry--
--for having offended Thee--
--for having offended Thee--
--and I detest my sins--
--and I detest my sins--
--above every other evil--
--above every other evil--
--because they displease Thee, my God--
--because they displease Thee, my God--
--Who art so deserving--
--Who art so deserving--
--of all my love--
--of all my love--
--and I firmly purpose--
--and I firmly purpose--
--by Thy holy grace--
--by Thy holy grace--
--never more to offend Thee--
--never more to offend Thee--
--and to amend my life--
--and to amend my life--
* * * * *
He went up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul,
and at every step his soul seemed to sigh; at every step his soul
mounted with his feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of
viscid gloom.
He halted on the landing before the door and then, grasping the
porcelain knob, opened the door quickly. He waited in fear, his soul
pining within him, praying silently that death might not touch his brow
as he passed over the threshold, that the fiends that inhabit darkness
might not be given power over him. He waited still at the threshold as
at the entrance to some dark cave. Faces were there; eyes: they waited
and watched.
--We knew perfectly well of course that though it was bound to come to
the light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to try
to induce himself to try to endeavour to ascertain the spiritual
plenipotentiary and so we knew of course perfectly well--
Murmuring faces waited and watched; murmurous voices filled the dark
shell of the cave. He feared intensely in spirit and in flesh but,
raising his head bravely, he strode into the room firmly. A doorway, a
room, the same room, same window. He told himself calmly that those
words had absolutely no sense which had seemed to rise murmurously from
the dark. He told himself that it was simply his room with the door
open.
He closed the door and, walking swiftly to the bed, knelt beside it and
covered his face with his hands. His hands were cold and damp and his
limbs ached with chill. Bodily unrest and chill and weariness beset
him, routing his thoughts. Why was he kneeling there like a child
saying his evening prayers? To be alone with his soul, to examine his
conscience, to meet his sins face to face, to recall their times and
manners and circumstances, to weep over them. He could not weep. He
could not summon them to his memory. He felt only an ache of soul and
body, his whole being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed
and weary.
That was the work of devils, to scatter his thoughts and over-cloud his
conscience, assailing him at the gates of the cowardly and
sin-corrupted flesh: and, praying God timidly to forgive him his
weakness, he crawled up on to the bed and, wrapping the blankets
closely about him, covered his face again with his hands. He had
sinned. He had sinned so deeply against heaven and before God that he
was not worthy to be called God's child.
Could it be that he, Stephen Dedalus, had done those things? His
conscience sighed in answer. Yes, he had done them, secretly, filthily,
time after time, and, hardened in sinful impenitence, he had dared to
wear the mask of holiness before the tabernacle itself while his soul
within was a living mass of corruption. How came it that God had not
struck him dead? The leprous company of his sins closed about him,
breathing upon him, bending over him from all sides. He strove to
forget them in an act of prayer, huddling his limbs closer together and
binding down his eyelids: but the senses of his soul would not be bound
and, though his eyes were shut fast, he saw the places where he had
sinned and, though his ears were tightly covered, he heard. He desired
with all his will not to hear or see. He desired till his frame shook
under the strain of his desire and until the senses of his soul closed.
They closed for an instant and then opened. He saw.
A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle-bunches. Thick
among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots
and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggling upwards
from all the ordure through the bristling grey-green weeds. An evil
smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of
the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.
Creatures were in the field: one, three, six: creatures were moving in
the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces,
hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as india-rubber. The malice of
evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither,
trailing their long tails behind them. A rictus of cruel malignity lit
up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about his ribs a torn
flannel waistcoat, another complained monotonously as his beard stuck
in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless lips
as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding
hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid
the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and
closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips,
their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards
their terrific faces. . .
Help!
He flung the blankets from him madly to free his face and neck. That
was his hell. God had allowed him to see the hell reserved for his
sins: stinking, bestial, malignant, a hell of lecherous goatish fiends.
For him! For him!
He sprang from the bed, the reeking odour pouring down his throat,
clogging and revolting his entrails. Air! The air of heaven! He
stumbled towards the window, groaning and almost fainting with
sickness. At the washstand a convulsion seized him within; and,
clasping his cold forehead wildly, he vomited profusely in agony.
When the fit had spent itself he walked weakly to the window and,
lifting the sash, sat in a corner of the embrasure and leaned his elbow
upon the sill. The rain had drawn off; and amid the moving vapours from
point to point of light the city was spinning about herself a soft
cocoon of yellowish haze. Heaven was still and faintly luminous and the
air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket drenched with showers; and amid
peace and shimmering lights and quiet fragrance he made a covenant with
his heart.
He prayed:
--HE ONCE HAD MEANT TO COME ON EARTH IN HEAVENLY GLORY BUT WE SINNED; AND
THEN HE COULD NOT SAFELY VISIT US BUT WITH A SHROUDED MAJESTY AND A
BEDIMMED RADIANCE FOR HE WAS GOD. SO HE CAME HIMSELF IN WEAKNESS NOT IN
POWER AND HE SENT THEE, A CREATURE IN HIS STEAD, WITH A CREATURE'S
COMELINESS AND LUSTRE SUITED TO OUR STATE. AND NOW THY VERY FACE AND
FORM, DEAR MOTHER SPEAK TO US OF THE ETERNAL NOT LIKE EARTHLY BEAUTY,
DANGEROUS TO LOOK UPON, BUT LIKE THE MORNING STAR WHICH IS THY EMBLEM,
BRIGHT AND MUSICAL, BREATHING PURITY, TELLING OF HEAVEN AND INFUSING
PEACE. O HARBINGER OF DAY! O LIGHT OF THE PILGRIM! LEAD US STILL AS
THOU HAST LED. IN THE DARK NIGHT, ACROSS THE BLEAK WILDERNESS GUIDE US
ON TO OUR LORD JESUS, GUIDE US HOME.
His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he
wept for the innocence he had lost.
When evening had fallen he left the house, and the first touch of the
damp dark air and the noise of the door as it closed behind him made
ache again his conscience, lulled by prayer and tears. Confess!
Confess! It was not enough to lull the conscience with a tear and a
prayer. He had to kneel before the minister of the Holy Ghost and tell
over his hidden sins truly and repentantly. Before he heard again the
footboard of the housedoor trail over the threshold as it opened to let
him in, before he saw again the table in the kitchen set for supper he
would have knelt and confessed. It was quite simple.
The ache of conscience ceased and he walked onward swiftly through the
dark streets. There were so many flagstones on the footpath of that
street and so many streets in that city and so many cities in the
world. Yet eternity had no end. He was in mortal sin. Even once was a
mortal sin. It could happen in an instant. But how so quickly? By
seeing or by thinking of seeing. The eyes see the thing, without having
wished first to see. Then in an instant it happens. But does that part
of the body understand or what? The serpent, the most subtle beast of
the field. It must understand when it desires in one instant and then
prolongs its own desire instant after instant, sinfully. It feels and
understands and desires.
say. Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful
thought conceived in an instant: NON SERVIAM: 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 hell for ever.
--Adam and Eve were then created by God and placed in Eden, in the
plain of Damascus, that lovely garden resplendent with sunlight and
colour, teeming with luxuriant vegetation. The fruitful earth gave them
her bounty: beasts and birds were their willing servants: they knew not
the ills our 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 shining
angel, a son 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
for ever. He came to the woman, 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 archtempter. She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had not
the moral courage to resist her. The poison 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, 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 labour 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 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.
--He came. He was born of a virgin pure, Mary the virgin mother. He
was born in a poor cowhouse 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 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 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. 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
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 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
strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost
souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house
is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused 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 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 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 God, the
fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, 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 were smitten one plague
alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we
give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone
but for all eternity?
--The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful
stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the
world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when 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 intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned
themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure
says, one of them alone would suffice 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, a jelly-like 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 millionfold again from the
millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the
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 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 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 preparations
to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which
burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for
ever and for ever 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 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 for ever.
--Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be,
is always of a limited extent; but the lake of 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 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. O, how terrible is the lot of those
wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains
are boiling in the skull, 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 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 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 odours, the ears with yells and
howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption,
nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot 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 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 the plants, as if by instinct, 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 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 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 the company of hurtful and hateful
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 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 to those damned souls,
tempters 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
Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather
than look again for one single 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 dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons,
who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did
you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? 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 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, 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 no reason to 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 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 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.
--O, my dear 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 today may be found among those miserable
beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever 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 aisle of the chapel, his legs 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 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 poring over it. Every word for
him. It was true. God was almighty. 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 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. 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!
Voices spoke near him:
--On hell.
--I suppose he rubbed it into you well.
--You bet he did. He put us all into a blue funk.
--That's what you fellows want: and plenty of it to make you work.
He leaned back weakly in his desk. He had not died. God had spared him
still. He was still in the familiar world of the school. Mr Tate and
Vincent Heron stood at the window, talking, jesting, gazing out at the
bleak rain, moving their heads.
--I wish it would clear up. I had arranged to go for a spin on the
bike with some fellows out by Malahide. But the roads must be
knee-deep.
--It might clear up, sir.
The voices that he knew so well, the common words, the quiet of the
classroom when the voices paused and the silence was filled by the
sound of softly browsing cattle as the other boys munched their lunches
tranquilly, lulled his aching soul.
There was still time. O Mary, refuge of sinners, intercede for him! O
Virgin Undefiled, save him from the gulf of death!
The English lesson began with the hearing of the history. Royal
persons, favourites, intriguers, bishops, passed like mute phantoms
behind their veil of names. All had died: all had been judged. What did
it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul? At last he
had understood: and human life lay around him, a plain of peace whereon
ant-like men laboured in brotherhood, their dead sleeping under quiet
mounds. The elbow of his companion touched him and his heart was
touched: and when he spoke to answer a question of his master he heard
his own voice full of the quietude of humility and contrition.
His soul sank back deeper into depths of contrite peace, no longer able
to suffer the pain of dread, and sending forth, as he sank, a faint
prayer. Ah yes, he would still be spared; he would repent in his heart
and be forgiven; and then those above, those in heaven, would see what
he would do to make up for the past: a whole life, every hour of life.
Only wait.
--All, God! All, all!
A messenger came to the door to say that confessions were being heard
in the chapel. Four boys left the room; and he heard others passing
down the corridor. A tremulous chill blew round his heart, no stronger
than a little wind, and yet, listening and suffering silently, he
seemed to have laid an ear against the muscle of his own heart, feeling
it close and quail, listening to the flutter of its ventricles.
No escape. He had to confess, to speak out in words what he had done
and thought, sin after sin. How? How?
--Father, I. . .
The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh:
confession. But not there in the chapel of the college. He would
confess all, every sin of deed and thought, sincerely; but not there
among his school companions. Far away from there in some dark place he
would murmur out his own shame; and he besought God humbly not to be
offended with him if he did not dare to confess in the college chapel
and in utter abjection of spirit he craved forgiveness mutely of the
boyish hearts about him.
Time passed.
He sat again in the front bench of the chapel. The daylight without was
already failing and, as it fell slowly through the dull red blinds, it
seemed that the sun of the last day was going down and that all souls
were being gathered for the judgement.
--I AM CAST AWAY FROM THE SIGHT OF THINE EYES: words taken, my dear
little brothers in Christ, from the Book of Psalms, thirtieth chapter,
twenty-third verse. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost. Amen.
The preacher began to speak in a quiet friendly tone. His face was kind
and he joined gently the fingers of each hand, forming a frail cage by
the union of their tips.
--This morning we endeavoured, in our reflection upon hell, to make
what our holy founder calls in his book of spiritual exercises, the
composition of place. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the
senses of the mind, in our imagination, the material character of that
awful place and of the physical torments which all who are in hell endure.
This evening we shall consider for a few moments the nature of the
spiritual torments of hell.
--Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity. It is a base consent to the
promptings of our corrupt nature to the lower instincts, to that which
is gross and beast-like; and it is also a turning away from the counsel
of our higher nature, from all that is pure and holy, from the Holy God
Himself. For this reason mortal sin is punished in hell by two
different forms of punishment, physical and spiritual.
Now of all these spiritual pains by far the greatest is the pain of
loss, so great, in fact, that in itself it is a torment greater than
all the others. Saint Thomas, the greatest doctor of the church, the
angelic doctor, as he is called, says that the worst damnation consists
in this, that the understanding of man is totally deprived of divine
light and his affection obstinately turned away from the goodness of
God. God, remember, is a being infinitely good, and therefore the loss
of such a being must be a loss infinitely painful. In this life we have
not a very clear idea of what such a loss must be, but the damned in
hell, for their greater torment, have a full understanding of that
which they have lost, and understand that they have lost it through
their own sins and have lost it for ever. At the very instant of death
the bonds of the flesh are broken asunder and the soul at once flies
towards God as towards the centre of her existence. Remember, my dear
little boys, our souls long to be with God. We come from God, we live
by God, we belong to God: we are His, inalienably His. God loves with a
divine love every human soul, and every human soul lives in that love.
How could it be otherwise? Every breath that we draw, every thought of
our brain, every instant of life proceeds from God's inexhaustible
goodness. And if it be pain for a mother to be parted from her child,
for a man to be exiled from hearth and home, for friend to be sundered
from friend, O think what pain, what anguish it must be for the poor
soul to be spurned from the presence of the supremely good and loving
Creator Who has called that soul into existence from nothingness and
sustained it in life and loved it with an immeasurable love. This,
then, to be separated for ever from its greatest good, from God, and to
feel the anguish of that separation, knowing full well that it is
unchangeable: this is the greatest torment which the created soul is
capable of bearing, POENA DAMNI, the pain of loss.
The second pain which will afflict the souls of the damned in hell is
the pain of conscience. Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by
putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual
remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the
worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting. The
first sting inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memory of past
pleasures. O what a dreadful memory will that be! In the lake of
all-devouring flame the proud king will remember the pomps of his
court, the wise but wicked man his libraries and instruments of
research, the lover of artistic pleasures his marbles and pictures and
other art treasures, he who delighted in the pleasures of the table his
gorgeous feasts, his dishes prepared with such delicacy, his choice
wines; the miser will remember his hoard of gold, the robber his
ill-gotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers
their deeds of blood and violence in which they revelled, the impure
and adulterous the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which they
delighted. They will remember all this and loathe themselves and their
sins. For how miserable will all those pleasures seem to the soul
condemned to suffer in hellfire for ages and ages. How they will rage
and fume to think that they have lost the bliss of heaven for the dross
of earth, for a few pieces of metal, for vain honours, for bodily
comforts, for a tingling of the nerves. They will repent indeed: and
this is the second sting of the worm of conscience, a late and
fruitless sorrow for sins committed. Divine justice insists that the
understanding of those miserable wretches be fixed continually on the
sins of which they were guilty, and moreover, as saint Augustine points
out, God will impart to them His own knowledge of sin, so that sin will
appear to them in all its hideous malice as it appears to the eyes of
God Himself. They will behold their sins in all their foulness and
repent but it will be too late and then they will bewail the good
occasions which they neglected. This is the last and deepest and most
cruel sting of the worm of conscience. The conscience will say: You had
time and opportunity to repent and would not. You were brought up
religiously by your parents. You had the sacraments and grace and
indulgences of the church to aid you. You had the minister of God to
preach to you, to call you back when you had strayed, to forgive you
your sins, no matter how many, how abominable, if only you had
confessed and repented. No. You would not. You flouted the ministers
of holy religion, you turned your back on the confessional, you
wallowed deeper and deeper in the mire of sin. God appealed to you,
threatened you, entreated you to return to Him. O, what shame, what
misery! The Ruler of the universe entreated you, a creature of clay, to
love Him Who made you and to keep His law. No. You would not. And now,
though you were to flood all hell with your tears if you could still
weep, all that sea of repentance would not gain for you what a single
tear of true repentance shed during your mortal life would have gained
for you. You implore now a moment of earthly life wherein to repent: in
vain. That time is gone: gone for ever.
--Such is the threefold sting of conscience, the viper which gnaws the
very heart's core of the wretches in hell, so that filled with hellish
fury they curse themselves for their folly and curse the evil
companions who have brought them to such ruin and curse the devils who
tempted them in life and now mock them in eternity and even revile and
curse the Supreme Being Whose goodness and patience they scorned and
slighted but Whose justice and power they cannot evade.
--The next spiritual pain to which the damned are subjected is the
pain of extension. Man, in this earthly life, though he be capable of
many evils, is not capable of them all at once, inasmuch as one evil
corrects and counteracts another just as one poison frequently corrects
another. In hell, on the contrary, one torment, instead of
counteracting another, lends it still greater force: and, moreover, as
the internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses, so
are they more capable of suffering. Just as every sense is afflicted
with a fitting torment, so is every spiritual faculty; the fancy with
horrible images, the sensitive faculty with alternate longing and rage,
the mind and understanding with an interior darkness more terrible even
than the exterior darkness which reigns in that dreadful prison. The
malice, impotent though it be, which possesses these demon souls is an
evil of boundless extension, of limitless duration, a frightful state
of wickedness which we can scarcely realize unless we bear in mind the
enormity of sin and the hatred God bears to it.
--Opposed to this pain of extension and yet coexistent with it we have
the pain of intensity. Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know,
things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.
There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften
in the least the pains of hell. Nay, things which are good in
themselves become evil in hell. Company, elsewhere a source of comfort
to the afflicted, will be there a continual torment: knowledge, so much
longed for as the chief good of the intellect, will there be hated
worse than ignorance: light, so much coveted by all creatures from the
lord of creation down to the humblest plant in the forest, will be
loathed intensely. In this life our sorrows are either not very long or
not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts
an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments
cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity
they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak,
taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it
with a still fiercer flame. Nor can nature escape from these intense
and various tortures by succumbing to them for the soul is sustained
and maintained in evil so that its suffering may be the greater.
Boundless extension of torment, incredible intensity of suffering,
unceasing variety of torture--this is what the divine majesty, so
outraged by sinners, demands; this is what the holiness of heaven,
slighted and set aside for the lustful and low pleasures of the corrupt
flesh, requires; this is what the blood of the innocent Lamb of God,
shed for the redemption of sinners, trampled upon by the vilest of the
vile, insists upon.
--Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is
the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What
mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain.
Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet
they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But
while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know,
intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an
insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be,
then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all
eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the
awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore.
How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains
go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now
imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from
the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad,
extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness;
and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand
multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water
in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on
animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the
end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and
carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions
upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away
even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages
before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch
of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.
At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would
have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been
all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away
again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there
are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea,
leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon
animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of
that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity
could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period,
after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain
reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.
--A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once
vouchsafed a vision of hell. It seemed to him that he stood in the
midst of a great hall, dark and silent save for the ticking of a great
clock. The ticking went on unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint
that the sound of the ticking was the ceaseless repetition of the
words--ever, never; ever, never. Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven;
ever to be shut off from the presence of God, never to enjoy the
beatific vision; ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded
with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains; ever to have
the conscience upbraid one, the memory enrage, the mind filled with
darkness and despair, never to escape; ever to curse and revile the
foul demons who gloat fiendishly over the misery of their dupes, never
to behold the shining raiment of the blessed spirits; ever to cry out
of the abyss of fire to God for an instant, a single instant, of
respite from such awful agony, never to receive, even for an instant,
God's pardon; ever to suffer, never to enjoy; ever to be damned, never
to be saved; ever, never; ever, never. O, what a dreadful punishment!
An eternity of endless agony, of endless bodily and spiritual torment,
without one ray of hope, without one moment of cessation, of agony
limitless in intensity, of torment infinitely varied, of torture that
sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of anguish that
everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an
eternity, every instant of which is itself an eternity of woe. Such is
the terrible punishment decreed for those who die in mortal sin by an
almighty and a just God.
--Yes, a just God! Men, reasoning always as men, are astonished that
God should mete out an everlasting and infinite punishment in the fires
of hell for a single grievous sin. They reason thus because, blinded by
the gross illusion of the flesh and the darkness of human
understanding, they are unable to comprehend the hideous malice of
mortal sin. They reason thus because they are unable to comprehend that
even venial sin is of such a foul and hideous nature that even if the
omnipotent Creator could end all the evil and misery in the world, the
wars, the diseases, the robberies, the crimes, the deaths, the murders,
on condition that he allowed a single venial sin to pass unpunished, a
single venial sin, a lie, an angry look, a moment of wilful sloth, He,
the great omnipotent God could not do so because sin, be it in thought
or deed, is a transgression of His law and God would not be God if He
did not punish the transgressor.
--A sin, an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect, made Lucifer
and a third part of the cohort of angels fall from their glory. A sin,
an instant of folly and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and
brought death and suffering into the world. To retrieve the
consequences of that sin the Only Begotten Son of God came down to
earth, lived and suffered and died a most painful death, hanging for
three hours on the cross.
--O, my dear little brethren in Christ Jesus, will we then offend that
good Redeemer and provoke His anger? Will we trample again upon that
torn and mangled corpse? Will we spit upon that face so full of sorrow
and love? Will we too, like the cruel jews and the brutal soldiers,
mock that gentle and compassionate Saviour Who trod alone for our sake
the awful wine-press of sorrow? Every word of sin is a wound in His
tender side. Every sinful act is a thorn piercing His head. Every
impure thought, deliberately yielded to, is a keen lance transfixing that
sacred and loving heart. No, no. It is impossible for any human being to
do that which offends so deeply the divine majesty, that which is punished
by an eternity of agony, that which crucifies again the Son of God and
makes a mockery of Him.
--I pray to God that my poor words may have availed today to confirm
in holiness those who are in a state of grace, to strengthen the
wavering, to lead back to the state of grace the poor soul that has
strayed if any such be among you. I pray to God, and do you pray with
me, that we may repent of our sins. I will ask you now, all of you, to
repeat after me the act of contrition, kneeling here in this humble
chapel in the presence of God. He is there in the tabernacle burning
with love for mankind, ready to comfort the afflicted. Be not afraid.
No matter how many or how foul the sins if you only repent of them they
will be forgiven you. Let no worldly shame hold you back. God is still
the merciful Lord who wishes not the eternal death of the sinner but
rather that he be converted and live.
--He calls you to Him. You are His. He made you out of nothing. He
loved you as only a God can love. His arms are open to receive you even
though you have sinned against Him. Come to Him, poor sinner, poor vain
and erring sinner. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the hour.
The priest rose and, turning towards the altar, knelt upon the step
before the tabernacle in the fallen gloom. He waited till all in the
chapel had knelt and every least noise was still. Then, raising his
head, he repeated the act of contrition, phrase by phrase, with
fervour. The boys answered him phrase by phrase. Stephen, his tongue
cleaving to his palate, bowed his head, praying with his heart.
--O my God! --
--O my God! --
--I am heartily sorry--
--I am heartily sorry--
--for having offended Thee--
--for having offended Thee--
--and I detest my sins--
--and I detest my sins--
--above every other evil--
--above every other evil--
--because they displease Thee, my God--
--because they displease Thee, my God--
--Who art so deserving--
--Who art so deserving--
--of all my love--
--of all my love--
--and I firmly purpose--
--and I firmly purpose--
--by Thy holy grace--
--by Thy holy grace--
--never more to offend Thee--
--never more to offend Thee--
--and to amend my life--
--and to amend my life--
* * * * *
He went up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul,
and at every step his soul seemed to sigh; at every step his soul
mounted with his feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of
viscid gloom.
He halted on the landing before the door and then, grasping the
porcelain knob, opened the door quickly. He waited in fear, his soul
pining within him, praying silently that death might not touch his brow
as he passed over the threshold, that the fiends that inhabit darkness
might not be given power over him. He waited still at the threshold as
at the entrance to some dark cave. Faces were there; eyes: they waited
and watched.
--We knew perfectly well of course that though it was bound to come to
the light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to try
to induce himself to try to endeavour to ascertain the spiritual
plenipotentiary and so we knew of course perfectly well--
Murmuring faces waited and watched; murmurous voices filled the dark
shell of the cave. He feared intensely in spirit and in flesh but,
raising his head bravely, he strode into the room firmly. A doorway, a
room, the same room, same window. He told himself calmly that those
words had absolutely no sense which had seemed to rise murmurously from
the dark. He told himself that it was simply his room with the door
open.
He closed the door and, walking swiftly to the bed, knelt beside it and
covered his face with his hands. His hands were cold and damp and his
limbs ached with chill. Bodily unrest and chill and weariness beset
him, routing his thoughts. Why was he kneeling there like a child
saying his evening prayers? To be alone with his soul, to examine his
conscience, to meet his sins face to face, to recall their times and
manners and circumstances, to weep over them. He could not weep. He
could not summon them to his memory. He felt only an ache of soul and
body, his whole being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed
and weary.
That was the work of devils, to scatter his thoughts and over-cloud his
conscience, assailing him at the gates of the cowardly and
sin-corrupted flesh: and, praying God timidly to forgive him his
weakness, he crawled up on to the bed and, wrapping the blankets
closely about him, covered his face again with his hands. He had
sinned. He had sinned so deeply against heaven and before God that he
was not worthy to be called God's child.
Could it be that he, Stephen Dedalus, had done those things? His
conscience sighed in answer. Yes, he had done them, secretly, filthily,
time after time, and, hardened in sinful impenitence, he had dared to
wear the mask of holiness before the tabernacle itself while his soul
within was a living mass of corruption. How came it that God had not
struck him dead? The leprous company of his sins closed about him,
breathing upon him, bending over him from all sides. He strove to
forget them in an act of prayer, huddling his limbs closer together and
binding down his eyelids: but the senses of his soul would not be bound
and, though his eyes were shut fast, he saw the places where he had
sinned and, though his ears were tightly covered, he heard. He desired
with all his will not to hear or see. He desired till his frame shook
under the strain of his desire and until the senses of his soul closed.
They closed for an instant and then opened. He saw.
A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle-bunches. Thick
among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots
and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggling upwards
from all the ordure through the bristling grey-green weeds. An evil
smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of
the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.
Creatures were in the field: one, three, six: creatures were moving in
the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces,
hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as india-rubber. The malice of
evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither,
trailing their long tails behind them. A rictus of cruel malignity lit
up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about his ribs a torn
flannel waistcoat, another complained monotonously as his beard stuck
in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless lips
as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding
hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid
the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and
closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips,
their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards
their terrific faces. . .
Help!
He flung the blankets from him madly to free his face and neck. That
was his hell. God had allowed him to see the hell reserved for his
sins: stinking, bestial, malignant, a hell of lecherous goatish fiends.
For him! For him!
He sprang from the bed, the reeking odour pouring down his throat,
clogging and revolting his entrails. Air! The air of heaven! He
stumbled towards the window, groaning and almost fainting with
sickness. At the washstand a convulsion seized him within; and,
clasping his cold forehead wildly, he vomited profusely in agony.
When the fit had spent itself he walked weakly to the window and,
lifting the sash, sat in a corner of the embrasure and leaned his elbow
upon the sill. The rain had drawn off; and amid the moving vapours from
point to point of light the city was spinning about herself a soft
cocoon of yellowish haze. Heaven was still and faintly luminous and the
air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket drenched with showers; and amid
peace and shimmering lights and quiet fragrance he made a covenant with
his heart.
He prayed:
--HE ONCE HAD MEANT TO COME ON EARTH IN HEAVENLY GLORY BUT WE SINNED; AND
THEN HE COULD NOT SAFELY VISIT US BUT WITH A SHROUDED MAJESTY AND A
BEDIMMED RADIANCE FOR HE WAS GOD. SO HE CAME HIMSELF IN WEAKNESS NOT IN
POWER AND HE SENT THEE, A CREATURE IN HIS STEAD, WITH A CREATURE'S
COMELINESS AND LUSTRE SUITED TO OUR STATE. AND NOW THY VERY FACE AND
FORM, DEAR MOTHER SPEAK TO US OF THE ETERNAL NOT LIKE EARTHLY BEAUTY,
DANGEROUS TO LOOK UPON, BUT LIKE THE MORNING STAR WHICH IS THY EMBLEM,
BRIGHT AND MUSICAL, BREATHING PURITY, TELLING OF HEAVEN AND INFUSING
PEACE. O HARBINGER OF DAY! O LIGHT OF THE PILGRIM! LEAD US STILL AS
THOU HAST LED. IN THE DARK NIGHT, ACROSS THE BLEAK WILDERNESS GUIDE US
ON TO OUR LORD JESUS, GUIDE US HOME.
His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he
wept for the innocence he had lost.
When evening had fallen he left the house, and the first touch of the
damp dark air and the noise of the door as it closed behind him made
ache again his conscience, lulled by prayer and tears. Confess!
Confess! It was not enough to lull the conscience with a tear and a
prayer. He had to kneel before the minister of the Holy Ghost and tell
over his hidden sins truly and repentantly. Before he heard again the
footboard of the housedoor trail over the threshold as it opened to let
him in, before he saw again the table in the kitchen set for supper he
would have knelt and confessed. It was quite simple.
The ache of conscience ceased and he walked onward swiftly through the
dark streets. There were so many flagstones on the footpath of that
street and so many streets in that city and so many cities in the
world. Yet eternity had no end. He was in mortal sin. Even once was a
mortal sin. It could happen in an instant. But how so quickly? By
seeing or by thinking of seeing. The eyes see the thing, without having
wished first to see. Then in an instant it happens. But does that part
of the body understand or what? The serpent, the most subtle beast of
the field. It must understand when it desires in one instant and then
prolongs its own desire instant after instant, sinfully. It feels and
understands and desires.
