Importance of salvation
“He sent them into his vineyard.”—Matthew 20:2
The vines of the Lord are our souls, which he has given us to cultivate by good works, that we may one day be admitted into eternal glory. But how strange it is! “How does it happen,” says Salvian, “that a Christian believes in the things to come, and yet does not fear them?” Christians believe in death, judgment, hell, and Paradise; but they live as if they did not believe them—as if these truths of faith were fables, or the inventions of clever minds.
Many live as if they were never to die, as if they did not have to give God an account of their lives, as if there were neither hell nor heaven. Do they perhaps not believe in these things? They believe, but they do not reflect on them; and so they are lost. They take every possible care of worldly affairs, but pay no attention to the salvation of their souls.
I wish, then, to set before you this day that the saving of the soul is the most important of all affairs.
First Point.—Because, if the soul is lost, all is lost.
Second Point.—Because, if the soul is once lost, it is lost forever.
First Point.—If the soul is lost, all is lost.
1. “But we entreat you, brethren,” says St. Paul, “that you do your own business” (1 Thess. 4:10–11). The greater part of worldly men give all their attention to the business of this world. What diligence they employ to win a lawsuit, to obtain a post, to secure a marriage! How many schemes they devise, how many measures they take! They neither eat nor sleep. And to save the soul—what do they do?
Everyone is ashamed to be told that he is careless in the affairs of his own house; and yet so many are not ashamed to neglect the salvation of their souls. “Brethren,” says St. Paul, “I entreat you that you do your own business”—that is, the business of your eternal salvation.
2. Nugae puerorum, nugae vocantur, nugae maiorum negotia vocantur—“The trifles of children are called trifles, but the trifles of grown men are called business,” says St. Bernard; and for these trifles many men lose their souls. If you suffer a loss in one piece of worldly business, you can repair it in another; but if a man dies in enmity with God and loses his soul, with what can he ever make up for such a loss? “What exchange shall a man give for his soul?” (Matt. 16:26).
To these men so careless about their souls, St. Euterius says: Quam pretiosus sis, homo, si Creatori non credis, interroga Redemptorem—“How precious you are, O man: if you will not believe the Creator, ask the Redeemer” (Hom. 2 in Symb.). If you do not grasp the worth of your soul by believing God, who created it to his own image, then learn it from Jesus Christ, who has redeemed it with his own blood. “You were not redeemed with corruptible things, as gold or silver, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled” (1 Pet. 1:18–19).
3. God, then, sets so high a value on your soul; and the devil too values it so highly that, to make himself its master, he never sleeps, but is continually prowling around it to make it his own. And so St. Augustine exclaims: “The enemy keeps watch, and you sleep?” The enemy is always awake to injure you, and you slumber.
Pope Benedict the Twelfth, being asked by a prince for a favor which he could not grant without scruple of conscience, said to the ambassador: Write to your prince that, if I had two souls, I might lose one of them to please him; but since I have only one, I cannot lose it. And so he refused the favor the prince sought of him.
4. My brother, understand this well: if you save your soul, it matters little that you fail in every other worldly affair; for, being saved, you shall be perfectly happy for all eternity. But if you lose your soul, what will it profit you to have had riches, honors, and pleasures in this world? In losing your soul you will have lost all. “What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26).
By this maxim St. Ignatius of Loyola drew many souls to God, and among them the soul of St. Francis Xavier, who was then at Paris, given over to acquiring the goods of this world. One day St. Ignatius spoke to him and said: “Francis, whom do you serve? You serve the world, a traitor that promises and does not keep its word. And even if it did keep its word, how long do the goods it promises last? Can they last longer than this life? And after death, what will they profit you, if you shall not have saved your soul?”
He then reminded Francis of the saying of the Gospel: “What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?” “But one thing is necessary” (Luke 10:42). It is not necessary to grow rich on this earth, to acquire honors and dignities; but it is necessary to save the soul, because, unless we enter heaven, we shall be condemned to hell. There is no middle way: we are either saved or damned. God has not created us for this earth, nor does he preserve our lives that we may grow rich or take our pleasures. “And the end life everlasting” (Rom. 6:22). He has created us and given us life that we may gain eternal life.
5. He who does not seek the salvation of his soul above all things, St. Philip Neri used to say, is a fool. If there were on this earth men who were mortal and men who were immortal, and the mortal saw the immortal wholly given over to procuring the goods of this world, would they not cry out to them: O fools that you are! You have it in your power to win the immense and eternal goods of Paradise, and you waste your time procuring these wretched goods of earth, which soon come to an end at death? And for these you put yourselves in danger of going to suffer forever in hell? Leave the care of these earthly things to us poor wretches, for whom everything ends at death.
But no—we are all immortal, and each of us, in the other life, must be either eternally happy or eternally miserable. Yet this is the misfortune of so many: they think only of the present and nothing of the future. “Oh, that they would be wise, and would understand, and would provide for their last end!” (Deut. 32:29). Oh, that they knew how to detach themselves from present goods, which last but a short time, and to foresee what must befall them at death—to be made either kings of heaven or slaves of hell for all eternity!
This same St. Philip, conversing one day with a young man named Francis Zazzera, who, being talented, hoped to make his fortune in the world, said to him: “Cheerfully now, my son! You shall make a great fortune; you shall be a good lawyer, then a prelate, then perhaps a cardinal, and who knows but even pope. And then? And then?” “Go,” he said at last, “think on these two words.” The young man departed, and as he meditated at home on those two words—and then? and then?—he abandoned his earthly hopes and gave himself wholly to God; and, leaving the world, he entered St. Philip’s own congregation, where he afterward died a holy death.
6. “The fashion of this world passeth away” (1 Cor. 7:31). On these words Cornelius à Lapide writes that “the world is like a stage.” Our present life is a play that passes and comes to an end. Happy the man who in this play acts his part well by saving his soul; for otherwise, if he has spent his life heaping up riches and worldly honors, he shall rightly be called a fool, and at the hour of death he shall hear the reproach addressed to that rich man in the Gospel: “Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee; and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?” (Luke 12:20).
Explaining the word “they require,” Toletus says that the Lord has given us our souls in trust, to guard them from the assaults of our enemies; so that at death the angels will come to require our souls of us and to present them at the tribunal of Jesus Christ. But if we have lost our souls by attending only to the gaining of earthly goods, these goods will be ours no longer, but will pass to others; and what then will become of our souls?
7. Poor worldlings! Of all the riches they gained, of all the pomp they displayed on this earth, what will they find at death? “They have slept their sleep; and all the men of riches have found nothing in their hands” (Ps. 76:6). At death the dream that is this present life will be over, and they will find that they have gained nothing for eternity.
Ask the many great men of this earth—the princes and emperors who in life abounded in riches, honors, and delights, and who are now in hell—tell me, what do you find now of all the riches you possessed in this world? They answer, weeping: What should we find of them? Nothing, nothing. And of all the honors you enjoyed, of all the delights you tasted, of all the pomp and triumphs—what do you find now? They answer with howling: Nothing, nothing.
8. With reason, then, did St. Francis Xavier say that in the world there is but one good and one evil: the one good is to save the soul, the one evil to lose it. And so David said: “One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after—that I may dwell in the house of the Lord” (Ps. 27:4). One thing only have I sought, and shall ever seek, of God: that he grant me the grace to save my soul; for if I save my soul, all is saved, and if I lose it, all is lost.
And what matters most of all, if my soul be once lost, it is lost forever. Let us pass to the second point.
Second Point.—If the soul be once lost, it is lost forever.
9. The whole matter rests on this, that we die but once. If a man died twice, he might lose his soul the first time and recover and save it the second. But no—we die only once: lose it the first time, and it is lost forever. This truth St. Teresa often impressed on her nuns. “Daughters,” she would say, “one soul, one eternity.” She meant to say: one soul—if this be lost, all is lost; one eternity—if the soul be once lost, it is lost forever. Periisse semel aeternum est—“To have perished once is to have perished forever.”
10. St. Eucherius says that there is no greater error than to neglect the business of eternal salvation. Sane supra omnem errorem est dissimulare negotium aeternae salutis—“Surely, above every error is to make light of the business of eternal salvation.” It is an error beyond all errors, because it is an error without remedy. Other errors may have their remedy: if a man loses property in one way, he may gain it in another; if he loses a post or a dignity, he may afterward recover it; even if he loses his life, provided his soul be saved, all is remedied. But for the man who is damned and loses his soul, there is no longer any remedy for such a loss.
This is the lament of the poor damned: the thought that for them the time of salvation is over, so that there is no longer any hope of remedy for their eternal ruin. “The summer is ended, and we are not saved” (Jer. 8:20). And so they weep, and shall weep forever inconsolably, saying: “Therefore we have erred from the way of truth, and the light of justice hath not shined unto us” (Wis. 5:6). But what will it profit them to know the error they have made, when there is no longer any repairing it?
11. This is the greatest pain of the damned: to think that they have lost their souls, and lost them through their own fault. “Destruction is thy own, O Israel; thy help is only in me” (Hos. 13:9). O wretched soul! God says to each of the damned: thy destruction is thy own—that is, it comes from yourself. By sinning you have been the cause of your own damnation, while I stood ready to save you, had you been willing to attend to your salvation.
St. Teresa writes that when a person loses a ring, a garment, some trifle, through his own carelessness, he can neither eat nor sleep nor find peace, for the thought that he has lost it through his own fault. O God! what pain, then, will the damned soul feel, once it has entered hell, at the thought that it has lost its soul—lost all—and lost it forever through its own fault!
12. From this day forward, then, we must give all our care to the saving of our souls. The question, says St. John Chrysostom, is not of losing some earthly good, which in the end we must one day leave behind at death; the question is of losing Paradise, and of going to suffer forever in hell. De immortalibus suppliciis, de coelestis regni amissione res agitur—“The matter at hand concerns punishments that never end, and the loss of the heavenly kingdom.”
We must have great fear, and tremble at the thought of being damned; thus we shall be able to secure for ourselves eternal salvation. “With fear and trembling work out your salvation” (Phil. 2:12). And so, if we wish to be saved, we must do violence to ourselves to flee dangerous occasions, to resist temptations, and to frequent the sacraments. Heaven is not gained without labor. “The violent bear it away.”
The saints tremble at the thought of eternity. St. Andrew Avellino wept and said: Who knows whether I shall be saved or damned? St. Lewis Bertrand trembled and said: What will become of me in the other world? And shall we not tremble? Let us pray to Jesus Christ and his most holy Mother to give us their help to save our souls; for this is for us the most important of all affairs. If it turns out well for us, we shall be happy forever; if it turns out ill, we shall be forever miserable.
Points for Reflection
1. “Brethren, I entreat you that you do your own business—that is, the business of your eternal salvation” (§1)
2. “One thing only have I sought, and shall ever seek, of God: that he grant me the grace to save my soul; for if I save my soul, all is saved, and if I lose it, all is lost” (§8)
3. “If we wish to be saved, we must do violence to ourselves to flee dangerous occasions, to resist temptations, and to frequent the sacraments” (§12)