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greater than all the others. Saint Thomas, the greatest doc-
tor of the church, the angelic doctor, as he is called, says
that the worst damnation consists in this, that the under-
standing of man is totally deprived of divine light and his
affection obstinately turned away from the goodness of God.
God, remember, is a being infinitely good, and therefore the
loss of such a being must be a loss infinitely painful. In this
life we have not a very clear idea of what such a loss must
be, but the damned in hell, for their greater torment, have a
full understanding of that which they have lost, and under-
stand that they have lost it through their own sins and have
lost it for ever. At the very instant of death the bonds of the
flesh are broken asunder and the soul at once flies towards
God as towards the centre of her existence. Remember, my
dear little boys, our souls long to be with God. We come
from God, we live by God, we belong to God: we are His,
inalienably His. God loves with a divine love every human
soul, and every human soul lives in that love. How could
it be otherwise? Every breath that we draw, every thought
of our brain, every instant of life proceeds from God’s in-
exhaustible goodness. And if it be pain for a mother to be
parted from her child, for a man to be exiled from hearth
and home, for friend to be sundered from friend, O think
what pain, what anguish it must be for the poor soul to be
spurned from the presence of the supremely good and lov-
ing Creator Who has called that soul into existence from
nothingness and sustained it in life and loved it with an im-
measurable love. This, then, to be separated for ever from
its greatest good, from God, and to feel the anguish of that

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