Page 160 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

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.
—The next spiritual pain to which the damned are sub-
jected is the pain of extension. Man, in this earthly life,
though he be capable of many evils, is not capable of them
all at once, inasmuch as one evil corrects and counteracts
another just as one poison frequently corrects another. In
hell, on the contrary, one torment, instead of counteract-
ing another, lends it still greater force: and, moreover, as the
internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses,
so are they more capable of suffering. Just as every sense is
afflicted with a fitting torment, so is every spiritual faculty;
the fancy with horrible images, the sensitive faculty with al-
ternate longing and rage, the mind and understanding with
an interior darkness more terrible even than the exterior
darkness which reigns in that dreadful prison. The malice,
impotent though it be, which possesses these demon souls
is an evil of boundless extension, of limitless duration, a
frightful state of wickedness which we can scarcely realize
unless we bear in mind the enormity of sin and the hatred
God bears to it.

160 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man