Divine displeasure

“ When, therefore, we have a sincere love of God, and consider our sins as a grievous outrage and injury by which we have offended Him, and on that account feel a regret in our heart, a pain and displeasure in our mind, that pain, that regret, that displeasure is the sorrow which constitutes true repentance. ”

“ I seem to understand that the sorrow of the souls in purgatory for having in themselves the cause of God's displeasure, resulting from their past offences against his great goodness—I seem to understand, I say, that this sorrow surpasses all the other torments which they endure in this place of purification. Being in a state of grace, they comprehend the force and seriousness of the obstacle which hinders their union with God. ”

“ Roscoe.—"No, certainly not; but if there be sorrow in the heart for having incurred the displeasure of a holy God, ought we to be surprised if the eye be suffused with tears? and if there be a rational conviction of the danger to which the commission of sin exposes us, ought we to be surprised if the breast heave with tumultuous swellings of alarm and dread? Shall an apprehension of deserved wrath awaken no terror? or a hope of redeeming love inspire no joy? ”

“ Will you not for the future try to love Him more, and serve Him better?
Think what grief of soul your sins caused your Divine Saviour! And yet you pay so little heed to your sins, and have so very little sorrow for them. Reflect on the number and grievousness of your sins, confess your ingratitude and indifference, and ask our dear Lord — for the sake of His bitter agony — to instil into your heart a great hatred of sin. ”

“ Had an earthly father manifested his displeasure as emphatically as God had now shown His, Miriam could not for a time have held up her head. God desires that the shame which results from a sense of His displeasure should last at least as long. He therefore enjoins something like a penance; He removes His stroke, but provides for the moral effects of it being sufficiently impressed on the spirit to be permanent.
Three points are involved in the words: 1. Our keener sense of man's displeasure than of God's. 2. The consequent possibility of accepting pardon with too light a heart. ”

“ You and I have been taught to see there is nothing but misery and destruction out of Christ, nor any hope but in his word and work. The Lord has opened to us the spirituality of his law, and often reflected an humbling sense of his displeasure on the mind. Sin has been felt, and guilt has laid us low—fear, dread, and darkness has been on the soul, and bondage, enmity, rebellion, and distance, has been most sensibly experienced. ”

“ O what a terrible day is the day of God’s wrath! where the inmost recesses of the heart shall be openly exposed — where every fault shall be strictly examined, if the just themselves shall be hardly found just, what will become of unhappy sinners? ”

“ But relentless is the wrath of God, and none knows its bounds! And when, in grief and sorrow, the Holy Virgin lowers Her eyes again, She sees that the innocent cups of gentle flowers are filled with bloody dew. ”

“ Already a great calm was broadening down over the world, because the abomination of desolation, the usurper of divine attributes and honours, the false god and true devil, the grim, huge, hideous, overshadowing, bearded idol of a thousand centuries or more, tottered to its fall ”

“ Having seen so many great things, and knowing the Lord visits His children in mercy,
why should my heart and soul continue in sorrow and the strength of my spirit weaken in despair? Why should I let the devil continue to afflict my soul, to destroy my peace and have a place in my heart? Why am I angry with myself and the devil because of the weakness of my flesh, which has given in to temptation and sinned? Awake, my soul! ”

“ What wilt thou do, O man, when God shall come to tear thee in pieces, and there be none to help; when God shall grant the devil leave to take thee into his accursed mansions, and there shalt thou lie, weeping and gnashing of thy teeth for ever; there shalt thou lie blaspheming, with God's wrath, like a pile of fire upon thy soul, burning with floods and seas of tears, which thou mayest shed, but shall never quench it. Which way soever thou lookest, thou shalt see matter and cause of everlasting grief. Look up to heaven, and there thou shalt see, O! that God is good for ever. ”

“ And as there rose before Him the reality of man's desolation through sin, and the thought that all this misery, loss, pain, parting, death, was a contradiction of the divine purpose, and an interruption of God's order, and that it had all been pulled down upon men's desperate heads by their own evil and their own folly, there rose in His heart the anger which is part of the perfectness of humanity when it looks upon sorrow linked by adamantine chains with sin. ”

“ In sorrow, and with a mind broken with grief, We address you—you, whom We know from your devotedness to religion, to have suffered proportional anxiety of mind in witnessing the depravity of the times with which religion has now to struggle. ”

“ Whatsoever be our distress, whether it arise from past guilt and the torments of an anxious and troubled conscience, or whether it arise from the working of indwelling sin, the strength of temptation, or the violence of temporal afflictions, still God is able and willing to give relief. ”

“ Ah, when that dark day seems coming on us, and bringing some misery which looks to us beforehand quite unbearable—then how our lip-belief and book-faith is tried, and burnt up in the fire of God, and in the fire of our own proud, angry hearts, too! How we struggle and rage at first at the very thought of the coming misery; and are ready to say, God will not do this! ”

“ This was most upon his heart, and should be most upon ours when we are in affliction, that, however God rebukes and chastens us, it may not be in wrath and displeasure, for that will be wormwood and gall in the affliction and misery. Those that would escape the wrath of God must pray against that more than any outward affliction, and be content to bear any outward affliction while it comes from, and consists with, the love of God. ”

“ For then he shall see that all the woe and tribulation that he hath done to them shall be turned to increase of their joy, without end; and all the pain and tribulation that he would have brought them to shall endlessly go with him to hell. ”

“ We are given pain to balance every joy,
We tragic-eyed divinities in dust.
Many the hearts life bleeds with little wounds,
The souls bewildered between God and lust.
We know the way of pity and pity's pain ”

“ If I had wist what it had been, loth me had been to have prayed it. For methought it passed bodily death, my pains.
I thought: Is any pain like this? And I was answered [Pg 40] in my reason: Hell is another pain: for there is despair. But of all pains that lead to salvation this is the most pain, to see thy Love suffer. How might any pain be more to me than to see Him that is all my life, all my bliss, and all my joy, suffer? Here felt I soothfastly [2] that I loved Christ so much above myself that there was no pain that might be suffered like to that sorrow that I had to [see] Him in pain. ”

“ But when we see our self so foul, then ween we that God were wroth with us for our sin, and then are we stirred of the Holy Ghost by contrition unto prayer and desire for the amending of our life with all our mights, to slacken the wrath of God, unto the time we find a rest in soul and a softness in conscience. ”

“ It is so that this sorrow’, under the burden and weight of sin, will pierce a man's soul to the quick, and grind him as it were to powder, being run through by the arrow’s of the almighty, and that it is of so great necessity to be humbled and soundly sorrowful for sin? ”

“ This is designed to arrest our attention, and call forth our love, wonder, admiration, and praise—to lead us to the contemplation of his Agony and bloody Sweat—when in a cold night, such was the agitation of his Soul, beneath the Wrath of God, the Guilt of our Sin, and his Struggles with the Powers of Hell, that he exclaimed My Soul (being truly human) is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. ”

“ Nay, the mind itself may be deeply distressed, may be exceeding sorrowful, may be perplexed and pressed down by heaviness and anguish, even to agony, while the heart cleaves to God by perfect love, and the will is wholly resigned to him. Was it not so with the Son of God himself? Does any child of man endure the distress, the anguish, the agony, which he sustained? And yet he knew no sin. ”

“ But now, when the Lord comes to lay a heavier weight on this man's shoulders than those wicked sins, which were so sweet before, he finds them now as bitter as gall and wormwood; and now he lies down in sorrow, and cries out, "Oh is sin such a deadly killing evil, as it will certainly destroy body and soul in hell. And is there no entering into heaven with the guilt of these upon my soul. Oh, good Lord, do what thou wilt with me, only take my soul and save me, and take away my lusts and corruption from me." ”

“ Why thus sink in sight of Heaven?
Flee, oh! flee the tempter’s snare!
There is power with God in prayer;
He is ready to forgive,
Saying, Look to me and live.
[073] The Darkness of Despair.
The heart knows its bitterness, thought ’t may be said,
You are happy and blest all the while;
The depth of your misery, your burden of sin
May in anguish be hid ’neath a smile.
Thy waves and thy billows are over me gone,
With the Psalmist, I mournfully say,
And ask, Why cast down? Why disquieted, opprest?
’Tis why I’ve no heart now to pray?
Has the Spirit been grieved? Has it taken its flight? ”

“ In such hours men and women have cursed God and life, and thrown violently down and trampled under their feet what yet was left of life’s blessings in the fierce bitterness of despair. This or nothing! ”

“ And if you should after this goodness of God towards you, grieve his holy Spirit, by suffering your heart to indulge any temper, which you know to be contrary to his will, what words would be strong enough to paint your black ingratitude? I will deal plainly with you. I think you are now in a most dangerous situation. Every thing around you will conspire to tempt you to the sin which most easily besets you, and therefore you must not be one moment off your guard. ”

“ Dissipation and pleasure keep such a hold upon them, that they seem to be more giddy and foolish as they grow older. And another cry comes up from all quarters: "How can I give my whole heart and soul to God, when the troubles and sorrows of the world, its cares and anxieties and disappointments fill me with bitterness and rage, and excite every evil passion? In this miserable world there is no such thing as tranquillity or peace, and how, without these, can the whole heart be given to God?" ”

“ O Holy Virgin, Holy Virgin, have pity on the rickety souls that struggle on so painfully when they are no longer upheld by Thee! Have pity on the bruised souls to whom every effort is painful; on the souls whom nothing can console, to whom everything is affliction! Take pity on the homeless, outcast souls, the wandering souls, unable to settle and dwell with their kind, the tender, budding souls! ”

“ Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. May this sickness be to the honor of Thy holy name, and for the good of my soul. For this end, I here offer myself with an entire submission to all Thine appointments, to suffer whatever Thou pleasest, and in what manner Thou pleasest; for I am Thy creature, O Lord, who have most ungratefully offended Thee; and since my sins have a long time cried aloud to heaven for justice, why should I now complain if I feel Thy hand upon me? ”

“ The third is foul and idle thoughts, that hinder us from thinking on our prayers. Of such false prayers, God says through His prophet: "This people honour Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me." It is great wickedness of us unworthy wretches that when we speak with prayer to Almighty God, we also unwittingly hearken not to what we say. Soothly, great displeasure we do to [111] God when we pray Him to hear our prayer, and we will not hear it ourselves: but it is worse to waste our time in foul and idle thoughts. ”

“ Casting himself with a broken heart, at the feet of the divine mercy, desiring nothing but that, from that time, every moment of his life might be given unto God, in the most perfect denial of every temper and inclination that nourished the corruption of his nature: wishing and praying from the bottom of his heart, that God would lead him into and thro’ every thing inwardly and outwardly, that might destroy the evil workings of his nature, and awaken all that was holy and heavenly within him. ”

“ The immortal agony of a man lost after all repentance—cast down from fearful hope into fearless despair—believing in Christ and bound to Venus—desirous of penitential pain, and damned to joyless pleasure—this, in my eyes, was the kernel and nucleus of a myth comparable only to that of the foolish virgins and bearing the same burden. ”

“ A spectacle for men and angels! A soul standing up under the intolerable weight of original sin! Troubled on every side! perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted by sin, the world, and the devil, but not forsaken; cast out, but not destroyed; walking on as evenly under that load of darkness, as if she had been in the broad light of God’s countenance. Whosoever thou art that seekest Christ sorrowing, go thou and do likewise.
In this agony she continued, till it pleased God to visit her with her last sickness. ”

“ Never before did I witness such sad, and heart-affecting sorrow: a gloomy Religion is always increased by scenes of melancholy, hence the horrors of my mind were beyond description. Every thing I had done, every word I had uttered, not strictly conformable to the rule of right, returned upon my mind with redoubled terror, and in the midst of these agonizing fears, I was violently seized by the same fever, which had destroyed my friend. ”