A short penance in this life is far better than eternal torment
3 min • Digitized on April 26, 2024
From The Sinner’s Guide, page 119
By Venerable Louis of Granada
If you were penetrated with these reflections, what obstacle could turn you from the practice of virtue? Difficult as it may appear, is there any sacrifice you would refuse to escape these eternal torments?
Were God to allow a man to choose whether he would be tormented while on earth with a gout or toothache which would never allow him a moment’s repose, or embrace the life of a Carthusian or a Carmelite, do you think there is any one who would not, purely from a motive of self-love, choose the state of a religious rather than endure this continual suffering?
Yet there is no pain in this life which can be compared to the pains of hell, either in intensity or in duration. Why, then, will we not accept the labor God asks of us, which is so much less than the austerities of a Carthusian or a Carmelite? Why will we refuse the restraint of His law, which will save us from such suffering?
What will add most keenly to the sufferings of the damned will be the knowledge that by a short penance and self-denial upon earth they might have averted these terrible pains which they must fruitlessly endure for all eternity.
We see a figure of this awful truth in the furnace which Nabuchodonosor caused to be built in Babylon, the flames of which mounted forty-nine cubits, but could never reach fifty, the number of the year of jubilee, or general pardon. In like manner the eternal flame of this Babylon, though it burns so fiercely, filling its unhappy victims with pain and anguish, will never reach the point of mercy, will never obtain for them the grace of pardon of the heavenly jubilee.
Oh! unprofitable pains! Oh! fruitless tears! Oh! rigorous and hopeless penance! If borne in this life, the smallest portion of them might have saved the sinner from everlasting misery. Mindful of all these, send forth your tears and sighs, remembering the prophet who “lamented and howled, who went stripped and naked, making a wailing like the dragons, and a mourning like the ostriches, because her wound was desperate.”
If men were ignorant of these truths, if they had not received them as infallible, their negligence and indifference would not be so astonishing. But have we not reason to wonder, since men have received them on the word of Him who has said: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away”? Yet behold in what forgetfulness of their duty and their God they continue to live.
Tell me, blind soul, what pleasure you find in the riches and honors of this world which is a compensation for the eternal fire of hell. “If you possessed the wisdom of Solomon,” says St. Jerome, “the beauty of Absalom, the strength of Samson, the longevity of Henoch, the riches of Croesus, the power of Caesar, what will all these avail you at death, if your body becomes the prey of worms, and your soul, like the rich glutton’s, the sport of demons for all eternity? ”