They have lost the Beatific Vision, the sight of God in all His love and His beauty.
They have lost their position of dignity and the company of the blessed.
Also such supernatural advantages as they had before the trial, including faith, hope and charity.
Although they retain their natural faculties and powers, yet they have lost the natural happiness which springs from employing these in the natural apprehension and service of God; for God is the only object which can satisfy even the natural faculties and elicit all their activity, and He has been utterly rejected and lost.
Thus are these perverted beings deprived by their own choice of every advantage but bare existence and the faculties that belong to their nature. Consider what it is to lose at once all that is good, and for ever.
What a multitude of things you require to make life happy or even endurable: the angels require much more on account of their greater activities and capacities. Think what it is to lose but one of the minor gifts of God, a sense or bodily liberty or health, wife or child, fortune, good-name or employment. Such a loss often makes life unendurable, makes all other goods worthless, drives men to desperation. What will it be to lose everything!
II. The sin of the bad angels further inflicts a direct and most fearful punishment on them. In virtue of the transformation of energy, every cause produces effects adequate to its character. Sin, as the supreme evil, inflicts a supreme injury on the sinner, where it is not, as here, restrained by God’s power. It inflicts evils such as the creations of God’s goodness cannot cause; for every action of God is good and produces only good, excepting such superficial evils as are substantially for the good of His creatures. Thus sin becomes its own avenger and the exact measure of its punishment.
The revolted angels chose sin for their lot, and it worked itself out upon them as soon as its full power was unchained against them by the withdrawal of God whom they rejected. Beware how you admit sin into your heart. It comes under the guise of pleasure or gain or false honour. It seems harmless, for its evil effects are known as yet only by faith. Its activities are half dormant at present, restrained by God, who has not yet withdrawn from you, and they are mitigated by the other gifts of God which you still retain. One false step leads to others. Then death comes; the soul is fixed in the evil it has chosen; all else drops away, and sin stands revealed in all its horror and cruelty as the condition of the soul for eternity.
III. This state of things will never change. It is fixed by the indomitable will of the wicked angels formed with full deliberation. Now that they find themselves stricken and powerless, their pride hardens them still more in their rebellion. They will not yield under punishment to Him whom they defied; their hatred will not transform itself into ecstatic love. They will for ever prefer hell itself with the power of blaspheming the Most Holy, to the delights of intercourse with Him purchased only by humility and submission.
“The pride of them that hate Thee ascendeth continually” (Ps. lxxiii. 23).
This is the most terrible effect of sin. It so transforms the mind and will as to make them impervious to the light of truth and warmth of God’s love.
The merciful calls to repentance and offers of pardon become an unendurable irritation, and only move the sinner to greater hostility towards infinite holiness. Still less do the horrible consequences of their sin excite tenderness and contrition: on the contrary “they gnawed their tongues for pain: and they blasphemed the God of heaven for their pains and wounds, and did not penance for their works” (Apoc. xv. 10, 11). This is the only obstacle to the forgiveness of sins; this turns the transitory act into an eternal sin.
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