You all know enough about Judas Iscariot, to concur in Christ's awful words respecting him: It were better for him if that man had not been born. I will call your thoughts to him now, to show the end to which association in sin may conduct. Sin began on earth by severing the bond between man and his Maker, and what bond between man and man can henceforth be regarded as permanent? Sin, if left to work its will., would separate God's intelligent creatures into atoms of selfishness. It is observable that while the cross of Christ was being raised as a centre of spiritual attraction, and of union of man with man, sin exhibited its opposite character of selfish repulsion in its darkest colours, in the case of Judas. Sin produces, as in him, a separation of heart from the good and the pious, with whom we may be mixing in common life, and in the House of God. If this is felt, as often it is, by the touches of conscience, delay not repentance and change of life. Break off the bond of besetting sin, and of evil companions, at once and resolutely. Companionship with the good and pious, when it is only formal, customary, and really hypocritical, will not please God, nor benefit ourselves. It is a tie that may be broken at any time, as was the case of Judas and the eleven Apostles, with whom he had been joined. David's prayer, Let my heart be undefiled in thy justifications, that I may not be confounded, was reversed in Judas's case. Sin is like a combustible material, which if it once explodes may leave the soul a shattered and hopeless wreck: and whatever strips sin of its true deformity, and gives it to you in a milder and attractive character, and all temporising and coquetting with it, whether it be in your own heart, or in association with others, is full of this danger; till, like the play of children with lucifers, it fires, to what may be an irreparable ruin. Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the council of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners.
- text taken from Daily Bread - Bring a Few Morning Meditations for the Use of Catholic Christians by Father Richard Waldo Sibthorp