hail-storm, the sailor whose vessel has been buried beneath the waves of the ocean, lament their misfortune; their condition is a sad one, and no doubt deserves our compassion; but the fate of the unfortunate soul that loses its merits, its heaven and its God, is infinitely more lamentable. It is true that, if the sinner have recourse to the Sacrament of Penance, and obtain the pardon of his crimes, his merits revive; but as long as he remains in the deplorable condition of sin, they are lost, and in that state he can never recover them. Nothing that you can do in the deplorable state of sin can ever merit for you an eternal reward. If you are in Mortal Sin, deprived of the grace of God, you are enemies of your Lord; your souls defiled, degraded and profaned, are objects of abomination in His sight; because, being sanctity itself, He necessarily detests iniquity wherever it is found. In that lamentable state, you are, as the prophet Isaias says, "full of the indignation of the Lord."* Practice every virtue, pray as much as you please, fast and give abundant alms; your works are excellent in themselves, but they have no value before God, they are not meritorious works. Why so? Because sanctifying grace no longer abides in your hearts, and by it alone good works become precious in God's sight, and worthy of being counted among the number of those works which give a right to the recompenses of the Lord. you to Sinners, are then all your good works, no matter how praiseworthy, useless? Yes, if you continue to love sin; no, if you detest it, for then these good works aid app ease the anger of God, and by a sincere repentence, you can obtain the happiness of being restored to the divine favor and friendship. You will hear His voice addressing you in the secret recesses of your hearts, how dreadful is the evil of sin, how bitter a thing it is to have forsaken the Lord your God, and how terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. Even in this life the lot of the sinner is bitter; for, he who but awhile ago was the friend of God, the child of heaven, an heir to the eternal kingdom, sees himself, when he sins, become a poor exile, wounded to death, stripped of all his wealth, hated by God and a slave to the devil. But still more sad and terrible is the sinner's lot in the life to come. Let us say it with the Gospel, * Isaias, li: 20. let us say it indeed with awe and trembling, but still let us say it, for it is necessary, useful, and an act of Christian charity to give warning of coming evils that they may be avoided,-let us then with the Gospel proclaim the awful truth, that hell with its eternal torments is the grave of souls whom Mortal Sin has killed. Whether they be rich or poor, learned or ignorant; whether their bodies repose in marble or lie buried beneath the green sward of earth, it matters not,-hell is the grave, the frightful sepulchre, the everlasting abode of every soul that passes out of life sullied by the stains of Mortal Sin hell,-out of which there is no redemption, which never restores what it has once received. Sin places you over this frightful precipice,-suspends you there by a single thread, the frail thread of life; God, whom you have offended and whom you still continue to offend holds that thread in His hand; at any moment He may cut it, and bury you in this awful prison, and once there, O sinners, its gates are closed against your release for ever! 66 But what emboldens you is, perhaps, that you have not committed a great many Mortal Sins; that you can not be placed among the number of those great sinners, whom the Apostle declares excluded from heaven, when he says: no fornicators, nor unclean, nor covetous person, nor thieves, nor slanderers, nor calumniators, nor drunkards, nor gluttons, whose God is their belly and whose glory is their shame, shall ever possess the kingdom of Christ." Do not deceive yourselves, my Brethren; not alone those who heap sin upon sin, shall become the prey of hell; every soul that departs out of this world in the state of Mortal Sin, though it had committed but one, and that one the least Mortal Sin, shall see his name blotted out from the book of life; heaven shall be closed against it, and it shall hear the terrible words of divine Justice: "Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire." Every Mortal Sin deprives us of the grace and friendship of God, of heaven and its ineffable delights. Alas! when grace is lost, all is lost. We become the enemies of God, the foes of the Almighty, who may in an instant immolate us to his just indignation, against which all men and all angels can not defend us! How then can we deliberately commit sin? And after having committed it, how can we rest one moment, without taking the proper means to rise from the grave of sin? One single Mortal Sin in sufficient to cause our eternal misery! Think seriously of this. Do you desire that I should adduce examples in support of this awful truth? The angels sin in heaven; a single sin, the sin of pride defiles them; God immediately drives them from His kingdom, and for them and for all who follow their example He creates and opens hell. Adam and Eve committed but one sin, and God expelled them from the terrestrial paradise; they would have perished forever, had not a long and painful penance opened for them the bosom of divine mercy. For one sin Core, Dathan and Abiron were swallowed up alive. How dangerous then is sin? How terrible the injury which it offers to God, since the divine Justice punnishes it so severely! How true it is that we ought to shun it as the greatest of evils! I am not astonished to hear a holy father exclaim, "Unfortunate sinner! You lose your immortal soul, and you drink and eat as if this loss concerned you not! By walking as you do in the ways of iniquity, you bear death in your bosom, and yet you weep not, you do not even sigh!" You carry in your breast a soul dead in the sight of the Lord, and yet you cease not to abandon yourselves to the false joys of the world, though you are hanging over the precipice of hell. Is it faith you want?—or reason?— ?—or do you merely act without reflection? You laugh, you sport, you clap your hands, and yet you are all the while running on to your destruction, and sooner than you imagine you shall reach the brink of hell, where an eternal punishment awaits you,—the brink of hell, where there is no hope, because out of hell there is no redemption! Oh! sinners, when will you be wise, when will you open your hearts to the truth? Why do you not listen to the tender invitations of your God and the remorse of your own conscience? How good it would be for you to repent, to fly to the throne of mercy, where converted, you would be absolved, replaced on the road to heaven, and rendered capable of one day attaining the unutterable happiness which inundates the saints in the mansions of the eternal God! You undersand now what Mortal Sin is, the evils which it brings along with it, the sad effects which it produces. It robs us of all our merits, strips our good works of all their value, makes us enemies of God, incapable, while under its dominion, of doing any thing pleasing to Him, and meritorious of eternal reward; it deprives our souls of life, by depriving them of sanctifying grace; it shuts heaven against us, and opens for our reception hell with its eternal torments, the bare idea of which should fill us with terror. How richly shall we deserve these chastisements if we still continue to offend God, who, to punish sin, delivered up his own Son to undergo the painful death of the cross! My Brethren, let us take care of our salvation,-of our eternity; and let us be firmly resolved to lose all, to suffer all, to sacrifice all rather than commit a Mortal Sin, or remain at emnity with God; for what doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and lose his soul? There is but one thing important,-one thing necessary,-and that is to save our souls.—AMEN. SERMON XCII. ON VENIAL SIN. "My son, take heed that thou never consent to sin, nor transgress the commandments of the Lord our God."-TOBIAS, iv: 6. MORTAL sin kills the soul, deprives it of the grace of God, strips it of all its merits, shuts the gates of heaven against it, and plunges it into hell; we must therefore detest it. There is another kind of sin which does not deprive us of the grace of God, but weakens it in us; which does not merit the pains of hell, but those of purgatory and other temporal chastisements, and which but too frequently disposes us to commit mortal sin. This sin, which is called Venial Sin, we must also dread, hate and firmly resolve to avoid. It displeases God, it is dangerous,-we must therefore shun it; this is a truth of which you will be easily convinced if you will honor me with your attention. What is Venial Sin? Venial Sin is an offence against God in a light matter, or in a grave and important matter, but without full consent. We sin venially in two ways. First, through ignorance, incon sideration or by surprise, and through a kind of human weakness, which is as it were a species of spiritual infirmity, to which our souls are subject in a state of corrupt nature. The greatest saints were not exempt from these kinds of Venial Sins. In the second place, we sin venially with advertence, with deliberate purpose, knowing well that the actions which we commit are sins. Faults become more grievous when we join the habit of committing them to the will and knowledge of sin. We would be still more guilty, if we fell into these Venial Sins without scruple and without remorse. Would not this be proving that we do not fear displeasing and offending the Lord! Do we not thereby clearly and loudly proclaim that, if we refrain from committing mortal sin, it is more through fear of hell than love of God? It is above all, when speaking of this last kind of Venial Sins, that I believe myself justified in asserting, that we should not consider them as light evils, but that, on the contrary, we should view them as very great misfortunes. Why so? Because these sins tarnish the beauty of our souls, and render them less pure and less agreeable in the sight of the Lord; because, if they do not cause us to lose divine grace, they at least diminish our fervor; if they do not deprive us of the friendship of God, they gradually weaken it. Venial Sin is therefore a great evil. Why? Because, like mortal sin, it is an act of disobedience, an exhibition of ingratitude, a rebellion against God. And who then, asks St. Basil, would dare call that fault light which God detests,-which He has often punished most severely, even in this life, and for which He reserves rigorous chastisements in the world to come? King Ezechias received embassadors from the king of Babylon. To give them an idea of his grandeur and power, he showed them his treasures and riches. This was but a Venial Sin of vain glory,—an act of vanity and self-love,-a fault such as we commit every day and which we regard as scarcely sinful before God. Nevertheless, this vanity was very displeasing to the Lord; and, would we believe it, if the Sacred Scriptures had not recorded the fact? The Lord said to Ezechias: "Behold, the days shall come, that all that is in thy house, and that thy fathers have laid up in store unto this day, shall be carried into Babylon; nothing shall be left, saith the Lord. And of thy sons also that shall issue from |