In his famous sermon on “The Little Number of Those Who Are Saved,” Saint Leonard of Port Maurice taught that, according to the greatest Saints and theologians, the greater number of Christian adults are damned. For example, Saint Gregory said that “many attain to faith, but few to the heavenly kingdom.” Saint Anselm declares that “there are few who are saved.” Saint Augustine states even more clearly that "few are saved in comparison to those who are damned.”
In this book, written in his old age and in the holy calm of solitude, whither he had retired to prepare his own soul for death, St. Robert Bellarmine explains that the reason most Christian adults are damned is because they neglected to learn the most important of all sciences, i.e. the art of dying well. “For what folly can be imagined greater,” he says, “than to neglect that art, on which depend our highest and eternal interests; whilst on the other hand we learn with great labour, and practise with no less ardour, other almost innumerable arts, in order either to preserve or to increase perishable things? ... This is the reason why miserable mortals rush in crowds to hell; and as St. Peter saith, ‘If the just man shall scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?’ ”
So, in what does the art of dying well consist? How does one learn and practice this art? Is it within everyone's reach? How can one become proficient in it, and thus secure a happy death?
After establishing the general rule that a good death depends upon a good life, St Bellarmine goes on to treat “of those precepts that relate to virtue; and afterwards of those which relate to the sacraments: for, by these two we shall be especially enabled both to live well, and to die well.”
To those who master the art of dying well, death will become “the gate from a prison to a Kingdom!”