Wednesday, September 19, 2007

St. Alphonsus on salvation

"The greater number of men still say to God: Lord we will not serve Thee; we would rather be slaves of the devil, and condemned to Hell, than be Thy servants. Alas! The greatest number, my Jesus - we may say nearly all - not only do not love Thee, but offend Thee and despise Thee. How many countries there are in which there are scarcely any Catholics, and all the rest either infidels or heretics! And all of them are certainly on the way to being lost. "

"The greater part of men choose to be damned rather than to love Almighty God."

"What is the number of those who love Thee, O God? How few they are! The Elect are much fewer than the damned! Alas! The greater portion of mankind lives in sin unto the devil, and not unto Jesus Christ. O Saviour of the world, I thank Thee for having called and permitted us to live in the true faith which the Holy Roman Catholic Church teaches. [...] But alas, O my Jesus! How small is the number of those who live in this holy faith! Oh, God! The greater number of men he buried in the darkness of infidelity and heresy. Thou hast humbled Thyself to death, to the death of the cross, for the salvation of men, and these ungrateful men are unwilling even to know Thee. Ah, I pray Thee, O omnipotent God, O sovereign and infinite Good, make all men know and love Thee!"

"In the Great Deluge in the days of Noah, nearly all mankind perished, eight persons alone being saved in the Ark. In our days a deluge, not of water but of sins, continually inundates the earth, and out of this deluge very few escape. Scarcely anyone is saved."

"We owe God a deep regret of gratitude for the purely gratuitous gift of the true faith with which he has favored us. How many are the infidels, heretics and schismatic who do not enjoy comparable happiness? The earth is full of them and they are all lost!"

“(St.) Robert Bellarmine relates that having gone to assist a certain dying person, and having exhorted him to make an act of contrition, the man replied that he did not know what contrition was. Bellarmine endeavored to explain it to him; but the sick man said: ‘Father, I do not understand you; I am incapable of these things.’ And thus he died, ‘leaving clear signs of his damnation,’ as is recorded in the writings of Bellarmine. The just punishment of the sinner, says St. Augustine, will be, that having forgotten God in his lifetime, he shall forget himself in death.”

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