559 part v: daily meditations Apocalyptic prophet asserts in these words: “As much as somebody has glorified himself, and lived in delicacies, so much torment and sorrow give to him” (cf. Rev 18:7). A certain devout Doctor is not far from the above when he says: “In what things a man has sinned: in the same shall he be the more grievously punished. There shall the slothful be spurred with burning goads, and the gluttons will be tormented with vast thirst and hunger. There shall the luxurious and lovers of pleasures be bathed by burning pitch and stinking brimstone; and the envious, like wild dogs, shall howl their grief. There the proud shall be filled with all feeling of shame; the greedy shall be pinched with miserable penury. There is no vice that will not have its proper torment.”285 O most miserable one, who are found too sluggish to submit to penance and mortification here, but very quick to commit evil deeds [f.184r]. Oh, have pity on yourself: recognize the misfortune about to come! What else will that fire consume if not your sins? By how much more you spare yourself now and follow the flesh, so much the longer afterwards will you suffer and so much greater is the material you reserve for the burning.286 Come to your right mind, improve and make amends. 2. Consider more carefully that the punishment of damnation, which is nothing other than the deprivation of that most blessed vision of God, exceeds all the punishments of hell put together. For as all the joy, happiness, pleasure, and blessedness of the heavenly beings consist of delighting in this beatific vision, so on the contrary, in its deprivation is contained all of the mourning, unhappiness, torments, and the damnation itself of the damned. Alas! What a grievous misfortune this is! What a severe pain! What an unbearable punishment it is to be stripped of the good for which man was created and to be deprived forever of the heavenly Fatherland. 285 Cf. IC, Bk. I, Ch. 24, §§ 3-4. 286 Ibid.
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