do not let me come to perdition! Only one quarter of an hour to do penance!" Can Jesus Christ resist such an appeal? No, my brethren, if there were a real disposition to do penance in the heart. I will undertake to say that if the devils of hell were willing to do penance, God would forgive them. But there is no penance in the other world. There is only the desire to escape punishment, not the desire to escape sin; and being out of the order of the present providence of God, which leaves the will free, there is no real conversion there. {249} Therefore Jesus Christ answers: "O wicked man, thy deeds condemn thee. Thou callest for mercy, but it is too late. The time for mercy is over! Mercy! thou hast shown no mercy to thyself, to thy wife or children. Mercy! I have shown thee mercy all the days of thy life. I sent thee my preachers, and thou didst refuse to listen. There is no mercy now but justice--and therefore I pronounce the everlasting sentence. I consign this man's soul to hell, and his body to the resurrection of damnation." Did you hear that howl? That was the devil's howl of triumph. Jesus Christ is gone. The angel is gone; and the devil goes to the body. They have not done washing it. He begins to wash too. What is he doing. He is washing the forehead; for on that forehead, the mark of Christ, the holy cross, was placed in baptism, and he is washing it out, and with a brand from hell he places there his own signet--the signet of perdition. And now the soul, feeling the full extent of her misery, cries out: "I am damned. I am damned! no hope more; not even Purgatory. Oh, I never thought it would come to this; I did but do as the others. I was no worse than my companions, and now I am lost. I that was a Catholic, I that had always a good name, and was liked by my friends. And oh, are the judgments of God so strict? What will become of my companions whom I left on the earth, wild and reckless like my self? Will they too follow me to this place of torment! Oh, why did not the priest speak of this? Alas! he did, but I would not hear. Alas, alas, it is too late now! Shall I never see Jesus Christ again? Must I forever despair?" And a voice rises from the walls of eternity with ten thousand reverberations: "Despair." Can there be any thing more dreadful still? Yes, the sinner's cup has one more ingredient of bitterness--remorse. You know what a comfort it is to be able to say, "It was not my fault, I did what I could." But the sinner will not have that comfort. On the contrary, he will say, "I might have been saved. It is all true which the angel said. {250} I was a Catholic, and had the means of salvation. I might have been saved, saved easily, more easily than I was lost. I was never happy; sin never made me happy. I sinned, and gained for myself misery even in the other world. Fool that I was, I might have done penance, and been happier after it, in time and in eternity. How little God asked of me! I had the mission, if I had