Concerning Those Who Do Not Do Penance

But all those men and women who are not doing penance and do not receive

the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and live in vices and sin and

yield to evil concupiscence and to the wicked desires of the flesh, and

do not observe what they have promised to the Lord, and are slaves to the

world, in their bodies, by carnal desires and the anxieties and cares of

this life.

These are blind, because they do not see the true light, our Lord Jesus

Christ; they do not have spiritual wisdom because they do not have the

Son of God who is the true wisdom of the Father. Concerning them, it is

said, "Their skill was swallowed up" and "cursed are those who turn away

from your commands". They see and acknowledge, they know and do bad

things and knowingly destroy their own souls.

See, you who are blind, deceived by your enemies, the world, the flesh

and the devil, for it is pleasant to the body to commit sin and it is

bitter to make it serve God because all vices and sins come out and

"proceed from the heart of man" as the Lord says in the Gospel. And you

have nothing in this world and in the next, and you thought you would

possess the vanities of this world for a long time.

But you have been deceived, for the day and the hour will come to which

you give no thought and which you do not know and of which you are

ignorant. The body grows infirm, death approaches, and so it dies a

bitter death, and no matter where or when or how man dies, in the guilt

of sin, without penance or satisfaction, though he can make satisfaction

but does not do it.

The devil snatches the soul from his body with such anguish and

tribulation that no one can know it except he who endures it, and all the

talents and power and "knowledge and wisdom" which they thought they had

will be taken away from them, and they leave their goods to relatives and

friends who take and divide them and say afterwards, "Cursed be his soul

because he could have given us more, he could have acquired more than he

did." The worms eat up the body and so they have lost body and soul

during this short earthly life and will go into the inferno where they

will suffer torture without end.

All those into whose hands this letter shall have come we ask in the

charity that is God to accept kindly and with divine love the fragrant

words of our Lord Jesus Christ quoted above. And let those who do not

know how to read have them read to them.

And may they keep them in their mind and carry them out, in a holy manner

to the end, because they are "spirit and life".

And those who will not do this will have to render "an account on the day

of judgement" before the tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.