The spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius : $b adapted to...

Remarks: The purpose of the first days of the Exercises being to inspire an intense and lasting hatred of sin, it is highly proper that we should meditate on the principal punishment of sin, the eternal loss of the soul, the pains of Hell. Many Saints have been led to Heaven by the road of fear, some religious Orders acknowledge this as their chief spirit. No one can afford to do without the fear of God; we should all nourish it; so that, if ever our love of God should be too weak to keep us from sin, the fear of Hell may restrain us. We descend into that abyss in thought at present, that we may not hereafter be cast into it in reality.

1. That its existence and its dreadful nature are as clearly revealed in Holy Writ as any truth whatever. For instance, Christ said: “If thy eye scandalize thee, pluck it out. It is better for thee with one eye to enter into the kingdom of God, than having two eyes to be cast into the hell of fire; where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished. For every one shall be salted with fire” (St. Mark ix, 46, 48). Then there is the parable of Dives and Lazarus (St. Luke, xvi, 19-31).

All the senses will be tormented, as for their gratification God has been offended. Chiefly the sense of touch, and that by the horrible torture of fire: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire” (St. Matth. xxv, 41), “Which of you can dwell with everlasting burnings?” (Is. xxiii, 14).

God showed St. Teresa in a vision the place the Devil had prepared for her in Hell. She narrates it thus: “I was one day in prayer, when I found myself in a moment, without knowing how, plunged apparently into Hell. I understood that it was our Lord’s will that I should see the place which the devils kept in readiness for me, and which I had deserved by my sins. It was but a moment, but it seems to me impossible that I should ever forget it, if I were to live many years. The entrance seemed to be by a long and narrow pass, like a furnace, very low, dark and close. The ground seemed to be saturated with water, mere mud, exceedingly foul, sending forth pestilential odors and covered with loathsome vermin. At the end was a hollow place in the wall, like a closet, and in that I saw myself confined. All this was even pleasant to behold in comparison with what I felt there” (Coleridge, “Life of St. Teresa,” Vol. I, p. 133). “She says,” Father Coleridge adds, “she cannot describe what she felt. There was a fire in her soul. She suffered unendurably in her body. All that she had suffered in diseases, or in what Satan had been allowed to inflict upon her, was as nothing in comparison; and she saw there was to be no intermission, no end to the pain. But the pains of the body were as nothing to the pains of the soul. She describes the anguish as a sense of oppression and stifling in the soul, all the while tearing itself to pieces with remorse and despair.”

1. The memory will recall the abundance of graces, by which salvation could so easily have been secured; the example of companions who were innocent or sincerely penitent, who are now in Heaven; the soul’s own goodness and happiness at the time of its first Communion and at other periods of its life.

2. The understanding will then fully realize that one thing alone was necessary while on earth, that life was given to work out salvation, that all the rest was vanity, that all illusions are now dispelled, and there is no happiness to be found by the creature except in God; there is only total disappointment, absolute loss of all satisfaction; and this pain of disappointed love will then be greater than all the other sufferings.

3. The will then will desire only God, for the love and possession of whom all its nature longs, because it was made for Him alone. Therefore the soul will hate its own perverseness with a sovereign hatred, and curse itself in its absolute despair.

4. The soul will always have present to its mind the awful sentence pronounced by the Supreme Judge: “Depart from me into eternal fire.” “Eternal”: What, in comparison, are days, or nights, or months, or years of suffering? Ever in pain, ever in despair; no end, no hope of an end or of any mitigation.