libraries and instruments of research, the lover of artistic pleasures his marbles and pictures and other art treasures, he who delighted in the pleasures of the table his gorgeous feasts, his dishes prepared with such delicacy, his choice wines; the miser will remember his hoard of gold, the robber his ill-gotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers their deeds of blood and violence in which they revelled, the impure and adulterous the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which they delighted.  They will remember all this and loathe themselves and their sins.  For how miserable will all those pleasures seem to the soul condemned to suffer in hellfire for ages and ages.  How they will rage and fume to think that they have lost the bliss of heaven for the dross of earth, for a few pieces of metal, for vain honours, for bodily comforts, for a tingling of the nerves.  They will repent indeed:  and this is the second sting of the worm of conscience, a late and fruitless sorrow for sins committed.  Divine justice insists that the understanding of those miserable wretches be fixed continually on the sins of which they were guilty, and moreover, as saint Augustine points out, God will impart to them His own knowledge of sin, so that sin will appear to them in all its hideous malice as it appears to the eyes of God Himself.  They will behold their sins in all their foulness and repent but it will be too late and then they will bewail the good occasions which they neglected.  This is the last and deepest and most cruel sting of the worm of conscience.  The conscience will say:  You had time and opportunity to repent and would not.  You were brought up religiously by your parents.  You had the sacraments and grace and indulgences of the church to aid you.  You had the minister of God to preach to you, to call you back when you had strayed, to forgive you your sins, no matter how many, how abominable, if only you had confessed and repented.  No.  You would not.  You flouted the ministers of holy religion, you turned your back on the confessional, you wallowed deeper and deeper in the mire of sin.  God appealed to you, threatened you, entreated you to return to Him.  O, what shame, what misery!  The Ruler of the universe entreated you, a creature of clay, to love Him Who made you and to keep His law.  No.  You would not.  And now, though you were to flood all hell with your tears if you could still weep, all that sea of repentance would not gain for you what a single tear of true repentance shed during your mortal life would have gained for you.  You implore now a moment of earthly life wherein to repent:  In vain.  That time is gone:  gone for ever.

—­Such is the threefold sting of conscience, the viper which gnaws the very heart’s core of the wretches in hell, so that filled with hellish fury they curse themselves for their folly and curse the evil companions who have brought them to such ruin and curse the devils who tempted them in life and now mock them in eternity and even revile and curse the Supreme Being Whose goodness and patience they scorned and slighted but Whose justice and power they cannot evade.