Your dead soul is in the hands of the bearers, your companions in sin, your fellow cursers and blasphemers. The grog-shop keepers have got hold of you, and every step is a closer approach to the tomb, the gates of hell, the last home of fornicators, liars, and drunkards. {85} How insensible you lie in their hands! The multitude may weep, in company with your poor mother, piercing cries and sobs which are heard throughout heaven and hell, but make no impression on your dull ears. No! there is no sound [that] can wake you now, but the voice of Jesus Christ, or the last trump which will summon your guilty soul to judgment. Will that voice of Jesus Christ be heard? I know not. Will the Lord be moved to pity toward his weeping Church? I know not. Will he touch the bier upon which you are stretched stark dead, and command those companions of yours in sin to stop? I know not. Will Jesus arrest the steps of that infamous woman, of those debased, pitiless, heartless, unfeeling dram-sellers? (Did I not say that the widow was right--that they are heartless and unfeeling?) I know not. What I do know is that, if Jesus is not moved to pity, if he does not strike fear into the heart of that young man or woman, your companion in sin, if the arm of the vengeance of Christ does not fall upon that grog-shop keeper,--no other sound will waken you, so dead in sin, but that one upon the Last Day, which rather than to hear, it were better for you to sleep in eternal oblivion. {86} "Ah! father," you say, "that's dreadful doctrine." Yes; and there is something more dreadful about it. It is true. What saith the Apostle? "_It is impossible for those who were once illuminated and have tasted the heavenly gift, and are fallen away, to be renewed again to penance, crucifying again to themselves the Son of God, and making him a mockery._" [Footnote 41] [Footnote 41: Heb. vi., 4-6.]