not to be at all.  They will love their state, unhappy as it will be, even as angry people, lovers, the ambitious, the [293] envious take pleasure in the very things that only augment their misery.  Furthermore the ungodly will have so accustomed their mind to wrong judgements that they will henceforth never make any other kind, and will perpetually pass from one error into another.  They will not be able to refrain from desiring perpetually things whose enjoyment will be denied them, and, being deprived of which, they will fall into inconceivable despair, while experience can never make them wiser for the future.  For by their own fault they will have altogether corrupted their understanding, and will have rendered it incapable of passing a sound judgement on any matter.’

271.  The ancients already imagined that the Devil dwells remote from God voluntarily, in the midst of his torments, and that he is unwilling to redeem himself by an act of submission.  They invented a tale that an anchorite in a vision received a promise from God that he would receive into grace the Prince of the bad angels if he would acknowledge his fault; but that the devil rebuffed this mediator in a strange manner.  At the least, the theologians usually agree that the devils and the damned hate God and blaspheme him; and such a state cannot but be followed by continuation of misery.  Concerning that, one may read the learned treatise of Herr Fecht on the State of the Damned.

272.  There were times when the belief was held that it was not impossible for a lost soul to be delivered.  The story told of Pope Gregory the Great is well known, how by his prayers he had withdrawn from hell the soul of the Emperor Trajan, whose goodness was so renowned that to new emperors the wish was offered that they should surpass Augustus in good fortune and Trajan in goodness.  It was this that won for the latter the pity of the Holy Father.  God acceded to his prayers (it is said), but he forbade him to make the like prayers in future.  According to this fable, the prayers of St. Gregory had the force of the remedies of Aesculapius, who recalled Hippolytus from Hades; and, if he had continued to make such prayers, God would have waxed wroth, like Jupiter in Vergil: 

At pater omnipotens aliquem indignatus ab umbris Mortalem infernis ad lumina surgere vitae, Ipse repertorem medicinae talis et artis Fulmine Phoebigenam Stygias detrusit ad undas.

[294] Godescalc, a monk of the ninth century, who set at variance the theologians of his day, and even those of our day, maintained that the reprobate should pray God to render their pains more bearable; but one is never justified in believing oneself reprobate so long as one is alive.  The passage in the Mass for the dead is more reasonable:  it asks for the abatement of the torments of the damned, and, according to the hypothesis that I have just stated, one must