your fate before to-morrow away pride and ambition ; all your glory will be soon in the dust: Remember thy last things, and thou shalt never sin.

Provide every day, against your last hour; trifle not your time away, as many do, and as many have done, to their eternal sorrow: do now what you will wish to have done when death comes: you will then wish to have lived more innocently, and been more careful to shun sin; that you had done more for God's service; fasted, prayed, and given more in charities to the poor, and done more penance for your sins. Keep a good conscience now, you will never be frighted with death in your life-time, nor when it comes: The torment of death shall not touch them; that is, the good. Wisdom, iii. 1. A good conscience, with good hope in God, is the only support, both in death and judgment. Thus by your good works and virtues, by many good confessions and holy communions, dispose your house, and put your soul in order, for you shall surely die, and shall not live. But blessed are the dead who die in our Lord, for their works do follow them.

Of Judgment.

Q. WHAT is Judgment? A. It is a summons from God, to appear before the tribunal of Christ, to give an account of our whole life and actions, good and bad. Q. What is the best preparation for it? A. To live now in the fear of God; to be often doing penance for our sins; and to judge ourselves now, that we may not be judged.

INSTRUC. There are two days of judgment for every one; the first will be as soon as the soul departs out of the body in death; the soul will then be carried to the place of its deserts, by a sentence from the just Judge: the latter will be at the last day, when all will rise out of their graves, and appear, soul and body, to receive the definitive sentence: Come ye blessed, or Go cursed ye as both body and soul have been companions in life, so they will be eternal companions in everlasting bliss or everlasting misery. And what have we now to do, but

to make our life happy, our death happy, and we shall then make both judgments happy: he that has no reason to stand in fear of death, has none to fear in judgment; he that truly fears God while living, in the time of his mercy, may hope in him in the day of his just judgment : Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord.

EXHOR.-Enter not, O Lord, into judgment with thy servant, for no man living shall be justified in thy sight, Psalm cxlii. 2. Death is as nothing to what follows after death. Death may be and is truly bitter to a man that has peace in his riches, in his unlawful pleasures, in his ambition and pride; but what is it to judgment? This is far more bitter, terrible, despairing: It is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God, Heb. x. 31. to suffer and labour under his just wrath and judgments for all eternity. If judgment is terrifying to the just, O what must it be to the sinner! To have a true idea of it, must surely shock the most inveterate sinner alive. The good King David had a terror of it, and earnestly solicited, O Lord, enter not into judgment with thy servant: rebuke me not in thy fury, nor chastise me in thy wrath and holy Job beheld it with fear at a distance, What shall I do when God rises up to judgment, or what shall I answer for myself? Many saints had an equal dread of it, though they had spent their whole lives in penance and good works. O they must be blind in point of faith who have so little sense and notion of it! O judgment! O day of wrath! O day of calamity and misery! If the just will hardly be saved, where will the impious and sinner appear? The sinner, who dies hardened in his iniquity? It is a matter deserving our tears, even of the tears of Jesus over Jerusalem, to see so many slighting_this dreadful day, and blind to what is to come upon them, O my soul, O sinner, do penance in time under the hand of mercy, before judgment overtake you. If Adam, after his sin ran away, and had the greatest dread of God's presence, O where will the sinner run at this day? Where can he hide himself? What will he be able to do? His greatest sorrow, his sighs, tears and mournings, will avail him nothing, but to add to his misery

and dispair. He has a God for his judge, whose wisdom he cannot deceive; whose justice he cannot bend; whose authority he cannot decline; whose power he cannot resist. He has the devils and his own wicked works to accuse him; and hell is open to receive him ; and there is no advocate to intercede for him, no resource left: O horror! O despair! O misery beyond expression or conception! All this is yet in your power to prevent.

Q.

WHAT

Of Hell.

HAT is hell? A. It is the place of the damned. Q. What are the pains of the damned ? A. A of pain sense, pain of loss, pain of eternity. Q. What is the pain of sense? A. To be tormented in fire. Q. What is the pain of loss? A. To be deprived of the sight and enjoyment of God. Q. What is the pain of eternity? A. To know that your torment will have no end. Q. For whom is this place allotted? A. For devils and damned souls; for sinners who die in their sins and unbelief, without repentance.

INSTRUC.-Hell then is the place of just punishment which God has allotted for sin and the sinner: it is a state of just condemnation for souls and spirits that are rebellious against the Almighty. Thus Satan and his accomplices were cast into hell, for aspiring to be as God. Adam and his generation were condemned to be the same for his rebellious pride and disobedience; but through the great mercy of God, in sending his son to be our Redeemer, the first sentence was reversed, and man is now capable of heaven again: O divine mercy! Nothing to nature is more miserable than death. Nothing more terrible to obstinate sinners than judgment. Nothing more intolerable to the damned than hell and its torments. There, the scripture teaches us, is perfect despair; there is weeping and gnashing of teeth; there is the worm of conscience that will never die; there is the land of darkness covered over with the shades of death, where no order, but eternal horror dwells; there is the lake of fire and brimstone, where the devil and sinners will be tormented day and night for ever and

ever, Apoc. xx. 10. xxi. 8. Matt. viii. 9. Job x. 21; there shall the rich glutton, like Dives, beg for a drop of water to cool his tongue, and shall never obtain it; there shall they remain at an infinite distance, with an immense chaos betwixt them and heaven; there shall all sinners remain, never to see God; cast into a land of oblivion, where there is no one to pity them; no advocate, no Redeemer for them; their fate is decreed, the sentence never to be reversed: Go into eternal fire: hell is a place of infinite loss; it is the loss of God, the loss of all good, the loss of infinite happiness. Hell is a place of infinite pain; it is a fire that will never go out hell is a state of infiuite time and endless misery: Go into everlasting fire: 0 who can dwell with everLasting burnings!

EXHOR.-Descend, O christian souls, daily with Ezekiel in spirit to the gates of hell, and there you may behold, with just horror, the punishment of sin and sinners; there tormented for their past pride, vanities and folly. Methinks I hear their cries and lamentations : What! has God cast me for ever from his presence ? Must I thus remain in this everlasting fire? Will God never more recall the sentence? O torment! O despair! O dismal eternity! I see alas my folly, wickedness and ingratitude : O sad remembrance, which adds every moment new pains to my afflicted soul! O time past, which I cannot forget! How easily might I have saved myself, and how foolishly have I damned myself! O emptiness of riches! O deceit of past pleasures and delights! O vanity of all those sinful objects that turned my heart from God! These are now become as so many furies, as so many living Hydras, that haunt, perplex, and torture my soul for ever and ever. Oh! and must I still behold at a distance that glory, that felicity, that enjoyment of God, which I can never come at ? O what a gulf is fixed betwixt me and Abraham's bosom! And are not now these dismal cries sufficient, O christian soul, to awaken you from the lethargy of sin, the evils whereof are so immense ? God even now calls upon you, by the voice of the damned, to beware of sin; to arise, mend, and do penance before too late and what is all the

penance you can do, to the torments of damned souls ? No more than an imaginary shadow to them: all the torments of this life, are nothing to the torments of heil. Do you believe this ? Why then do you go on in indulging corrupt nature, caressing your passions and vicious inclinations, which will certainly bring the dismal fate on you: nay, you will certainly suffer for it for what you have done already, unless you do penance as God has enjoined: Unless you do penance you shall all per. Pray for grace, that may make you more sensible of the glory you may obtain by virtue, and the misery you bring upon yourself by vice.

ish alike.

SECT. IV.

Of Heaven.

Q. WHAT is heaven? A. Heaven is the abode of the

blessed angels and saints, or the state of bliss.Q. In what does the glory of heaven consist? A. In the clear sight and possession of God. Q. How long is this glory to last? A. As long as God is God: of whose kingdom there will be no end.

INSTRUC.-Heaven then is the place God has prepared for angels and just souls: it is the palace, if I may so call it, of the Almighty. It has no bounds or limits: O Israel, how great is the house of God, how vast is the place of his possession! Baruc. iii. 24. It is an immense space, inconceivably great: its glory, its joys, its riches, its beauty, are beyond thought or imagination; therefore St. Paul, though taken up into the third heaven, could no otherwise describe it, than by saying, That the eye hath not seen, nor the ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man, what God hath prepared for those who love him, 1 Cor. ii. 9. Man while in this life, is of too limited a nature, either to see or enjoy it; his mind is of too narrow a compass to conceive it; his understanding by far too shallow to comprehend it: No man shall see God and live, Exod. xxxiii. 20. No one enjoy him in his mortal body, or see him with mortal eyes.