where you shall be inundated with all delights, pleasures, and joys for all eternity! Oh, truly that is a most desirable sentence to hear from the divine Judge!
The feelings of the elect and the damned on hearing this sentence. Reflect on this, Christians. What unspeakable exultation and jubilee shall be amongst the elect when they hear this welcome invitation! How they will congratulate each other when parents shall find themselves with their children, husbands with their wives, friends with their acquaintances, preachers with their hearers, and shall be led as in triumph to Our Lord and to Mary, the Mother of God, amidst throngs of angels! How they will praise and thank God the Father for having created them, God the Son for having redeemed them, God the Holy Ghost for having comforted them; the Blessed Virgin because she was their advocate; the holy angels who guarded them, the preachers, confessors, and teachers who instructed them in good! How they will bless the good works they did during life! O good cross! they will exclaim with the holy apostle St. Andrew! O sweet sorrow! O wholesome pain and suffering! O desirable poverty! O blessed contradiction! which we endured for a short time for God’s sake! What exceeding joy you have brought us! O golden tears! sweet repentance with which we formerly bewailed our sins! O blessed prayer that we sent up to heaven! Happy mortification and self-denial with which we subdued our senses! Happy alms and works of charity with which we helped Christ in His poor! to what a height of happiness you have raised us! What an immense gain you have brought us in! And what a joyous echo shall fill the heavenly courts when all the angels and elect shall sing together their canticles of praise, as St. John heard them according to what we read in the Apocalypse: “Alleluia! Salvation, and glory, and power is to our God: for true and just are His judgments.…Let us be glad and rejoice, and give glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb is come.”[1] Meanwhile the damned, filled with envy and madness at the sight of this triumph of the elect, shall howl and cry out in bitter rage: “These seeing it, shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the suddenness of their unexpected salvation, saying within themselves, repenting, and groaning for anguish of spirit: These are they whom we had sometime in derision, and for a parable of reproach. We.…
- ↑ Alleluia! Salus et gloria et virtus Deo nostro est; quia vera et justa judicia sunt ejus. Gaudeamus et exultemus, et demus gloriam ei: quia venerunt nuptiæ Agni.—Apoc. xix. 1, 2, 7.
