Note 5 — Chapter IX · [CONTINUATION OF STERN’S COMPOSITION.]

“There are ignorant men, my beloved, who think that it is sufficient to love wife and child, and not to take from their fellow-beings what does not belong to them, and that they may then calmly lay down their heads and sleep! Do you not shiver with horror at this picture? does not your heart shrink when you think of what will be the fate of all those fools as soon as the trumpet shall sound which will summon the dead and separate the faithful from the unfaithful? Do you not hear? Yes, you do hear; for from the text you have perceived that your God is a mighty God, and a God who will inflict vengeance—yes, you hear the breaking bones, and the crackling of the flames in the eternal Gehenna, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth:—there, there they burn and perish not, for the punishment is eternal:—there the flame licks with a never-satisfied tongue the screaming victims of unbelief:—there the worm dies not that gnaws their hearts through and through without destroying them, that there may always remain a heart to gnaw in the breast of the God-forsaken. Look how they strip off the black skin of that unbaptized child, that, scarcely born, was slung away from the breast of its mother into the abyss of eternal damnation——”5