This is one in a series from Jaques-Benigne Bossuet’s Elevations on the Mysteries, and specifically the Fifth Day. There is more here on the Bossuet Project.
But the great penalty of sin, which alone is proportionate, is eternal death, and this punishment of sin is locked up in sin itself; for sin being nothing other than the voluntary separation of man from God, it follows from this that God also withdraws from man, and forever withdraws from him, a man having nothing by which he can reunite himself; so that by this single blow which the sinner gives himself, he remains eternally separated from God, and God is therefore forced to withdraw from him; until, by a return of his pure mercy, he is pleased to return to his unfaithful creature; that which arrives only by a pure goodness which God does not owe to the sinner, it follows that he owes him nothing but eternal separation and subtraction of his goodness, grace, and presence; but from that moment his misfortune is as immense as it is eternal.
For what can happen to the creature deprived of God, that is, of all good? What can happen to him, if not all wrong? Go, cursed, to eternal fire; and where will they go, these wretched ones, driven away from the light, if not into eternal darkness? Where will they go, far from peace, except to trouble, despair, the grinding of teeth? Where will they go, in a word, far from God, if not in all the horror that will be caused by the absence and deprivation of all the good that is in him, as in the source? I will show you all the good, he said to Moses, showing myself. What, then, may happen to those to whom he will refuse his face and his desirable presence, except that he will show them all evil, and that he will show them not only to see it, which is frightful; but, what is much more terrible, to feel it by a sad experience. And this is the just punishment of the sinner who withdraws from God, that God also gets rid of him, and by this subtraction deprives him of all good, and invests him irretrievably and inexorably will all evil. God! O God! I tremble, I am seized with fear at this sight. Console me with the hope of your goodness; refresh my bowels, and comfort my broken bones, by Jesus Christ, your Son, who bore death to deliver me from these terrors, and from all these terrible consequences, the most inevitable of which is hell.
Positive Infinity 