God showed St. Teresa in a vision the place the Devil had prepared for her in Hell. She narrates it thus: “I was one day in prayer, when I found myself in a moment, without knowing how, plunged apparently into Hell. I understood that it was our Lord’s will that I should see the place which the devils kept in readiness for me, and which I had deserved by my sins. It was but a moment, but it seems to me impossible that I should ever forget it, if I were to live many years. The entrance seemed to be by a long and narrow pass, like a furnace, very low, dark and close. The ground seemed to be saturated with water, mere mud, exceedingly foul, sending forth pestilential odors and covered with loathsome vermin. At the end was a hollow place in the wall, like a closet, and in that I saw myself confined. All this was even pleasant to behold in comparison with what I felt there” (Coleridge, “Life of St. Teresa,” Vol. I, p. 133). “She says,” Father Coleridge adds, “she cannot describe what she felt. There was a fire in her soul. She suffered unendurably in her body. All that she had suffered in diseases, or in what Satan had been allowed to inflict upon her, was as nothing in comparison; and she saw there was to be no intermission, no end to the pain. But the pains of the body were as nothing to the pains of the soul. She describes the anguish as a sense of oppression and stifling in the soul, all the while tearing itself to pieces with remorse and despair.”

POINT III. What are the sufferings of the soul?

1. The memory will recall the abundance of graces, by which salvation could so easily have been secured; the example of companions who were innocent or sincerely penitent, who are now in Heaven; the soul’s own goodness and happiness at the time of its first Communion and at other periods of its life.

2. The understanding will then fully realize that one thing alone was necessary while on earth, that life was given to work out salvation, that all the rest was vanity, that all illusions are now dispelled, and there is no happiness to be found by the creature except in God; there is only total disappointment, absolute loss of all satisfaction; and this pain of disappointed love will then be greater than all the other sufferings.

3. The will then will desire only God, for the love and possession of whom all its nature longs, because it was made for Him alone. Therefore the soul will hate its own perverseness with a sovereign hatred, and curse itself in its absolute despair.

4. The soul will always have present to its mind the awful sentence pronounced by the Supreme Judge: “Depart from me into eternal fire.” “Eternal”: What, in comparison, are days, or nights, or months, or years of suffering? Ever in pain, ever in despair; no end, no hope of an end or of any mitigation.

Colloquy with Jesus crucified, dying for our sins; with Mary, the refuge of sinners.

THE THIRD DAY

THE FIRST MEDITATION
A Preparation for Death

1st Prelude. A captain of infantry had been ordered by his general to lead his company at the first dawn of light the next morning up a neighboring hill where the enemy had just planted a masked battery. To spend the intervening night he had a log cabin allotted him. He felt it was a dangerous task assigned him, as he was likely to be shot while ascending the hill at the head of his men. Yet he faltered not, for he was brave. But before lying down to rest, he lit a candle, pulled out his prayer book, and knelt down to prepare himself for a good death.