In a previous section, we mentioned Hegel's crucial concept of the development of self-consciousness and his argument that self-consciousness requires encounters with "otherness". A self-consciousness has to recognise what it is not. It must interact with entities external to itself. Above all, it requires other self-consciousnesses. In other words, self-consciousness cannot appear by itself. It manifests itself gradually in a community of others like itself. These self-consciousnesses start off in a primitive state of animal-like consciousness and, over time, become increasingly sophisticated and able to reflect on their own existence. The first humans, shaking off their ape ancestry, were not fully realised self-consciousnesses; rather they were potential self-consciousnesses.
The development of human self-consciousness ran parallel to the development of language skills. Language is the key driver of self-consciousness. Humans are the only creatures on earth with highly developed language skills, and we are also the only self-consciousnesses on the planet. Language is the tool we use for advanced communication. That communication allows us to gain incredible insights into the modus operandi of other self-consciousnesses. When someone else is talking to us and telling us of his plans and dreams, we know for certain that we are in the presence of another self-consciousness.
Only humans have a sophisticated "theory of mind" - awareness that others are in possessions of minds distinct from our own, having their own thoughts and beliefs. It is because of the theory of mind that humans are able to deceive others. We are the only creatures that deliberately lie. We take advantage of the differences between minds, the different levels of knowledge. Severe autistics can't lie because they have no theory of mind and they think that everything they know is equally well known by everyone else. You could never lie to another person if you thought they were already party to everything you know.
If you sat down at a table with a curtain across the middle so that you couldn't see who was on the other side and then you and the person opposite started exchanging emails or text messages, you might quickly gain a lot of information about the other person. Imagine that the curtain was removed and you discovered that you were actually sitting opposite a sophisticated robot. Would you conclude that you were in the presence of a programmed machine or another self-consciousness? This is a variation of the "Turing Test", devised by computing genius Alan Turing. The Turing Test is used by experts in artificial intelligence, their aim being to reach a stage where a human cannot tell if he is communicating with another human or with a machine. Apparently, they have succeeded, albeit by keeping the communication to a restricted level. In some cases, a human on one side of the screen has believed that he was sitting opposite a machine only to discover that it was another person. Many humans, especially those with autistic spectrum disorder, fail the test.
If a machine could talk to you for hours about its hopes and dreams, its existential worries, its thoughts about an afterlife, would it not be impossible to fail to conclude that it was another self-consciousness?
The supporters of the God of Being claim that he always existed and was always self-aware, that he always possessed language and intelligence. All of this is false and impossible. God did not always exist. If a creature had existed on its own, it would have had no need of language since there was nothing else with which to communicate. It would have had no self-consciousness because that requires the presence of at least one other self-consciousness. Without self-consciousness, language and others with whom to interact, God would not have developed intelligence and hence would not have become powerful.
It is laughable when anyone talks about "God" creating the universe. It is impossible. It is laughable when anyone says that God existed on his own before creation as an omniscient, omnipotent, perfect being without a single deficiency. It is impossible.
God does not stand outside existence. He is the maximum expression of existence. He evolves, like everything else. His personal qualities evolve: his intelligence, his power, his self-awareness. He is the supreme outcome of evolution. We can understand God by understanding our own evolution, not by consulting a "holy text" by some false prophet. Where in the Torah, the Bible or the Koran does it talk about God's intelligence evolving? What is the likelihood that a creature with infinite intelligence has existed eternally? Zero. What is the likelihood that the universe, after many eons and a vast amount of natural selection, gave rise to a being that, slowly and surely, painfully and arduously, acquired astonishing intelligence, sufficient to alter the course of evolution away from apparently blind natural selection and towards his own personal will? One hundred percent.
It cannot be emphasised enough: to understand God we need only understand ourselves. As below, so above, to quote the alchemists. We will never do that if we look away from firm knowledge and instead embrace faith based on ludicrous holy books that contain nothing but lies, fabrications and fantasies. Knowledge not faith is the key. Gnosis and science.
It has been catastrophic for humanity that its most successful religions have been based on faith. It was faith that drove a wedge between religion and science, that allowed any number of preposterous ideas to take root and flourish, providing fertile soil for Satan's endless lies. In the world of faith, any fantasy can be taken seriously. Humanity needs knowledge, not delusion. Religion should be rational and scientific.
The Cloning of God
God had an inner compulsion to externalise himself: to make a consciousness outside and beyond himself, and through this otherness to come to full consciousness.
Hegel, one of the greatest grandmasters of the Illuminati, said, "The divine Idea is just this: to disclose itself, to posit the Other outside itself and to take it back again into itself in order to be subjectivity and mind/spirit."
Consciousness, including that of God, requires interaction with otherness if it is to develop. God is compelled to create otherness - to externalise himself - and through a study of that otherness we can gain sure knowledge of God.
Hegel criticised conventional Western religion on the grounds that it separates God from the universe, and makes all of his attributes independent of the universe. God, according to the traditional view, would be exactly the same whether or not anything else existed. His nature wouldn't alter in the slightest even if there were no universe and no other creatures. Hegel fiercely attacks this view. If God had no inner need to create anything else then why did he? Is he capricious? Was he bored? Curious? None of these make any sense in relation to a perfect God without deficiency. God is entirely self-sufficient and needs nothing else according to the tenets of mainstream Western religion. Hegel said, "If God is all sufficient and lacks nothing, how does he come to release Himself into something so clearly unequal to him?"
No Christian, Jew or Muslim can answer why God creates the world when he has no need to do so. If he does it for a reason such as wanting to spread his love then it implies that he has a need to do that, yet God, by definition, needs nothing. If he does it because he wants to be obeyed and worshipped then that also indicates deficiency on his part. If God is truly self-sufficient, it is impossible that he would ever have felt the need to create anything. Therefore God is not self-sufficient. Therefore a God of whom it is claimed that he is self-sufficient cannot exist. God creates otherness because he must. He has no choice. He is compelled. Creation is an act of inner necessity. God needs others as much as they need him. Anyone who doesn't understand that single truth can never understand God. They will always believe in a fantasy.
God created many things as he evolved - a dazzling realm fashioned from light - but none of them gave him what he needed: an otherness comparable to himself. Eventually, after endless experiments, God succeeded in cloning himself. The clone was the being that is now known as Lucifer, Son of God, the Angel of Light, the Morning Star, Lux Mundi, the Light of the World.
God, through his interaction with Lucifer, became fully self-conscious, as did Lucifer. Between them, they created the first language, the divine language. Then Lucifer wanted a brother as a companion and God granted his wish. The second son of God was a fateful being. His original name was Paracletus, meaning "the Comforter" or "one called to help" because he was to be Lucifer's brother and friend. But religion knows him by his later name of Satanel, then simply Satan. Satan means "accuser/adversary". It will be explained below why Paracletus, second son of God and beloved brother of Lucifer, became the sworn enemy of his father and brother and acquired his dread new name.
Satan's fatal flaw was "hyperephania" - extreme pride. Afflicted by doubts about himself, lacking self-esteem, in awe of his father, envious of his radiant brother, unsure of his identity, Satan compensated by cultivating an exaggerated ego. After an age, he believed himself superior to Lucifer and even God. He resented their relationship and was jealous of it. He resented being the youngest and least powerful. Resentment became hate. Hate became action. That action was rebellion. He stood as the adversary of God and Lucifer. He accused them of plotting against him. He opposed all of their plans.
Having created Lucifer and Paracletus, God provided his sons with the secret of how to clone themselves. The clones of the two sons were the beings now known as angels. The realm of light became populated by many beings of light: God, his two sons and the choirs of angels. But the angels were loyal to their respective creators and reflected their natures. Satan's angels were infected with his discontent.
Satan and his army of angels rebelled against God, Lucifer and their loyal angels. The struggle was long and furious, but Satan and his followers lost and fell. They were banished from God's realm, being cast out into darkness where the light of God never penetrated.
Satan wanted his own realm where he was the sole master. He discovered the secret of matter and fashioned a rival universe of matter rather than light. This was the universe of the Big Bang - our universe. "Let there be light," Satan announced as he brought this universe into existence: a mockery of God's light. Satan is the creator and ruler of our universe of the Big Bang, and he's assisted by his rebel angels - called the archons, groups of whom were given regions of the universe to rule on Satan's behalf. 144 archons are assigned to earth. They are responsible for most of the secret history of earth. They are opposed by two groups within that secret history: the Illuminati (consisting of approximately 6,000 people i.e. a similar number to that of the Old World Order), and the small group that created the Illuminati but stands outside of the society, just as the archons stand outside the Old World Order. That small group consists of 36 angels of Lucifer.
The Illuminati and the Old World Order are mirror images. Both groups know the secret history of earth, and the strange and fateful struggle that takes place behind the scenes and to which the rest of humanity is mostly oblivious.
Satan was almost as bright as Lucifer in his earliest days, but he grew repelled by light and made himself dark. He became "darkness visible" to use John Milton's immortal phrase. He is truly the prince of darkness, yet it must never be forgotten that he is the Son of God and contains the divine spark.
Through Satan, evil entered the universe. The birth of evil is not difficult to understand. It is a product of a damaged self-consciousness, of low self esteem finding a way to overcompensate. It is exactly the sort of situation with which Freud and Jung would be familiar. Why should gods be any different from humans? We are made in their image.
Self-consciousness is a prerequisite for distinguishing good from evil. Animals cannot commit acts of evil. Evil can be defined according to three levels: strong, medium and weak. Strong evil is the voluntary commission of malicious, harmful and even fatal acts towards others, to suit the selfish desires of the perpetrator. Medium evil is the voluntary commission of acts to promote a selfish agenda, regardless of the impact on others. Weak evil is captured by Burke's famous aphorism: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Goodness, likewise, comes in three strengths. Strong goodness is the voluntary commission of benevolent, helpful acts towards others to promote cooperative, altruistic ends. Medium goodness is the commission of acts that are intended not to have any ill impact on others. Weak goodness is where someone does nothing to stand in the way of good acts by others.
Only a self-consciousness is capable of making a choice between good and evil acts. The Tree of Knowledge of good and evil is a metaphor for that choice. Knowledge, arising from self-consciousness, allows the commission of moral or immoral acts. Without knowledge, without choice, without self-consciousness, good and evil would not exist.
The reason that evil triumphs is simple: most people are evil.
The Satanic Religions
Satan, in his pride, set himself above God. He refused to acknowledge that he was a created being. He detested God and Lucifer. He claimed that he had always existed, that he was omnipotent, omniscient and perfect. He claimed that the universe he created was the only one (rather than the universe of matter within God's universe of light), and that he was the controller of the fate of all souls, and could send them to a place of punishment or reward depending on his judgement alone.
In other words, the Creator who appears in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran is Satan, as Gnostics have always known.
Satan wants to seem as mysterious as possible so that his true nature and ancestry cannot be discerned. He wants no one to know anything of the True God and Lucifer, except through the prism of his dark dissimulation. He is the Father of Lies, the master of deception and illusion. He constantly manipulates the minds of humanity. He demands worship and submission from them, like the tyrant he is. "Thou shalt not," he pronounces, rather than, "Thou shalt."
You will often hear priests and preachers, rabbis and imams, saying that God is unknowable, that he is so far above us that we can never hope to understand him. Which makes it difficult to comprehend why they bother believing in him. If people don't know what God wants from them and can't understand him, why should they worship him? How do they know that's the right thing to do? Perhaps he's looking for something entirely different from humanity.
"God works in mysterious ways," we are told. We finite, mortal creatures can never grasp the infinite mind of an eternal God. Does such a God have any relevance to us? Hasn't he become a complete abstraction, utterly remote from our lives? God must be knowable, even if only after a great journey of discovery, or he's pointless. Life cannot be about taking a leap of faith across a bottomless chasm.
One thing that can be said for certain about the traditional God believed in by so many billions is that he has never made it clear what he wants from us. The message seems to change every few centuries. Jehovah, the God of the Jews, is astoundingly partisan, even going so far as to call the Jews his Chosen People. He actively helped help them to attack and slaughter non-Jews in the "Promised Land" of Canaan. What does this tell us about the nature of this God? He is violent, hateful, murderous, aligns himself to a particular group of people rather than to all peoples, allocates the land inhabited by others to his favourite people. Can any sensible person believe in this God?
Jehovah is, obviously, a God designed by and for Jews. Jews dispensed with the many gods that proliferated amongst other peoples and declared that their God was the one, true God. Why would the only God be obsessed with Jews? Why wouldn't he reach out towards other peoples rather than waging genocidal war against them? (This same God, we are told, drowned the whole world apart from Noah and his Ark.)
The Old Testament God is, in truth, simply a primitive, savage, tribal God that the Jews had the impertinence and arrogance to proclaim as a universal god. It is absurd that any non-Jews should take this God seriously. Even Jews should have grown up by now and rejected this petty tribal deity of theirs. The Gnostics of Biblical times were the only ones brave enough to stand up and say what needed to be said: Jehovah was so evil, violent and despicable that he could be none other than Satan.
Then the Christian God appeared on the scene. Strangely, this God decided to incarnate himself in Israel and to follow the Jewish faith, thereby endorsing the message of the Old Testament and demonstrating that he must also be Satanic.
Christ could have chosen to incarnate in any country other than Israel and to proclaim a new, non-partisan, universal religion of peace, love and compassion. He didn't. He was so Jewish that he was circumcised - and a debate has arisen as to what happened to his foreskin. By the time Christ died, his religious message was one of total confusion, so confusing that his own Chosen People didn't understand it and rejected him. What kind of God can't even persuade his own Chosen People that he is genuine? One thing's for sure, he's not a God worth worshipping.
Christians celebrated the "New Testament", but were forced to also accept the "Old Testament" of the Hebrews because Jesus Christ himself had not only not denounced it, but had declared himself the fulfilment of the prophecies it contained. Yet anyone reading the Old and New Testaments quickly realises that these "holy" texts have nothing in common. The God of the Old Testament is an evil, violent, cruel, sadistic, warlike, partisan, unjust, capricious monster and supports and promotes the perverse religious observances of the Jews. The God of the New Testament, while not rejecting any of the Old Testament, presents himself as a God of love and compassion, peace and charity, and goodwill to all men. He claims, now, to be a universal God. Non-Jews are welcomed into his religion. They don't have to be circumcised nor obey all of the petty, pathetic and perverse rules of Judaism.
So why didn't he say explicitly that the Jewish phase of his religion was over? He couldn't because he had a sacred covenant with the Hebrews. What sort of universal God enters into a binding contract with one group, but not with others? This must be the most stupid God conceivable. Isn't he engineering confusion, suspicion and division? Doesn't he sound like the Father of Lies - Satan? No part of the Jewish-Christian religion makes any sense. Why do Christians reject all of the religious customs of Jews even though Jesus observed them all? Why did Jesus decide to make his religion universal when he, in his alternative role as Jehovah, had previously been entirely on the side of the Jews?
Why didn't Christ write his own gospel and clear up every misunderstanding? Jesus never wrote a thing. All he left us was confused and confusing hearsay. Is that the behaviour of God? Does God not want to be understood?
If Christianity is right, Judaism is wrong. If Judaism is right, Christ is a liar, charlatan or madman. How can God, by his own actions and words, or by his failure to act and communicate, create a situation like this?
Then along came the illiterate tribesman Mohammed who encountered the Angel Gabriel in a cave and had the Koran dictated to him, which he then perfectly memorised and passed onto people who were capable of writing it all down. One wonders why Allah couldn't find someone who could write, and why he needed an Angel to pass on the holy words. Couldn't he just beam the words into the mind of a scribe? The Koran is, according to Muslims, the Word of Allah, straight from the source via one of his senior angels. In which case you would expect it to be perfect and completely free of ambiguity, yet it's every bit as muddled as all the other holy texts and doesn't make any sense at all.
Mohammed was a savage warrior, who personally gave orders for thousands of opponents to be slaughtered in the name of Islam. 700 Jews who had surrendered to him were killed in one incident. In a scene that foreshadowed SS executions of Jews in WWII, trenches were dug in the marketplace of Medina and then the Jewish prisoners were led out in batches and beheaded, their heads and bodies falling into the prepared ditches. Mohammed also kept slaves from amongst the prisoners he captured in battle.
Muslims are appalled and offended when it is suggested that theirs is a religion of violence, yet only someone who knows nothing about Islam would deny that it's violent, created by a ruthless military leader, Mohammed. Muslims are in denial when they claim that theirs is a religion of peace. Their love of "jihad" - holy war - shows their absolute commitment to violence. Being cunning, they often try to dress up jihad as a personal struggle rather than a struggle against infidels, but they fool no one. Islam, from the beginning, was a religion of conquest and bloodshed. It was carried far and wide by brutal armies, not by holy men interested in peaceful religious conversion. Muslims revere holy warriors and martyrdom. Are those the characteristics of peace and love?
Mohammed regarded himself as the last prophet of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Islam is the final fruition of that entire religious movement. But if Mohammed is right, Christ isn't God, so all Christians are wrong. If Jews don't accept Mohammed as their prophet and the Koran as their holy book then they too are wrong, according to Muslims.
These three religions are idiotic and contradictory. They all claim to believe in the same God and to all be the children of Abraham, yet their religions have nothing in common with one another. To accept one is to reject and condemn the others. In all three cases, God supposedly communicated his words via sacred texts: the Torah, the Bible and the Koran. So why are they completely different?
What is the real purpose of these holy texts? It is to create division and violence, to poison men's minds, to lead them away from the truth. They are the masterworks of a master deceiver: Satan.
Is it not time to fight back? All too many people have given their lives to the service of Satan. Is it not time to say, "Non serviam" - I will not serve.
Hell According To James Joyce
(From A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man)
http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/portrait_artist_young_man/3?term=the%20next%20day%20brought%20death
Father Arnall's speech:
-- Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
-- They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?
-- The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.
-- But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.
-- Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.
-- And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the God-head.
-- Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned - there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of those law-givers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts. But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But they are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance.
-- Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We can have no idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life along a track of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins? Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they, at least, are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was, but time shall be no more. God spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear. You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would not restore those ill-gotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy church nor attend to your religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked companions, you would not avoid those dangerous temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when they sinned, sinned by such a sin as alone was compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect: and they, even they, the foul devils must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.
-- O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels!