love Him Who made you and to keep His law. No. You would not. And now,
though you were to flood all hell with your tears if you could still
weep, all that sea of repentance would not gain for you what a single
tear of true repentance shed during your mortal life would have gained
for you. You implore now a moment of earthly life wherein to repent: In
vain. 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 subjected 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
counteracting 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 alternate 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.

--Opposed to this pain of extension and yet coexistent with it we have
the pain of intensity. Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know,
things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.
There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften
in the least the pains of hell. Nay, things which are good in
themselves become evil in hell. Company, elsewhere a source of comfort
to the afflicted, will be there a continual torment: knowledge, so much
longed for as the