Page:Purgatory00scho.djvu/283

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

the benefit they receive from their liberators; that we should know what it is to enter Heaven. " Who will make known to us," says the Abbe Louvet, " the joys of that blessed hour! Represent to yourself the happiness of an exile who at length returns to his fatherland. During the Reign of Terror, a poor priest of La Vendee was condemned to be drowned. Having escaped by miracle, he was obliged to emigrate in order to save his life. When peace was restored to the Church and to France, he hastened to return to his beloved parish.

" It was a festival day in the village. All the parishioners went to meet their pastor and father; the bells in the old tower rang joyously, and the church was decorated as upon days of great solemnity. The old man advanced smiling in the midst of his children, but when the doors of the holy place opened before him, when he beheld again the altar that had so long rejoiced the days of his youth, his heart, too weak to bear such transports of joy, broke within his bosom. With a trembling voice he intoned the Te Deum, but it was the Nunc Dimittis of his priestly life; he fell dying at the foot of the altar. The exile had not the strength to support the joys of his return."

If such are the joys of the return of an exile to his terrestrial fatherland, who will make known to us the transports we shall experience upon entering Heaven, the true home of our souls? And how can we wonder at the gratitude of the blessed whom we have caused to enter there?

Father James Mumford, of the Society of Jesus, who was born in England in 1605, and who struggled during forty years in the cause of the Church in that country, given up to heresy, composed a remarkable work on Purgatory, which he had printed at Cologne by William Freyssen, a well-known Catholic publisher. This book obtained a large circulation, and effected a great good among souls, the publisher, Freyssen, being one of those who derived the