y two
different forms of punishment, physical and spiritual.

Now of all these spiritual pains by far the greatest is the pain of
loss, so great, in fact, that in itself it is a torment greater than
all the others. Saint Thomas, the greatest doctor of the church, the
angelic doctor, as he is called, says that the worst damnation consists
in this, that the understanding 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 understand 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 inexhaustible
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 loving
Creator Who has called that soul into existence from nothingness and
sustained it in life and loved it with an immeasurable love. This,
then, to be separated for ever from its greatest good, from God, and to
feel the anguish of that separation, knowing full well that it is
unchangeable: this is the greatest torment which the created soul is
capable of bearing, POENA DAMNI, the pain of loss.

The second pain which will afflict the souls of the damned in hell is
the pain of conscience. Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by
putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual
remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the
worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting. The
first sting inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memor