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all such ideas of imperfection as must carry with them the further idea of disciplinary correction and a progressive purification? That pure Vision must demand of all called to the joys of Paradise a heart made clean and eyes made pure with a perfected purity, unless it is to be to them a vision of intensest pain, like an unclouded sun to sore and diseased eyes. But, then, how could 'to be with Christ' be any longer a passionate longing and desire? This thought would instead be an intolerable agony, that the bitter cry of a remorse, like that of St. Peter, must make one long wail, instead of the songs, in Paradise: 'Depart from me, for I am sinful, O Christ!'

Of the occupations of Paradise we have no sure knowledge. It must be pre-eminently a place of immediate communion. It may be a preparation of quiet rest for the service of the Beatific Life. It must have its own holy solemnities, as a choir railed in from the lower worship of this imperfect life. There must be a freedom in its beautiful ritual, and in the spontaneity of its devotion, from all those rubrics of necessary decency and order, which yet so sadly interfere with the spirituality of our highest worship in the Church on earth. Not only heart-wanderings and the distractions, unhappily incident to our most sacred seasons of holy service here, but those needful interferences, also, of rubrical observance, as well as all the weariness of preparation, which tease and tire and seem to make all our earthly devotion so wretchedly mechanical and artificial,— all these will be infinitely impossible there. Perpetual adoration, the spontaneous outflow of the heart in the full stream of praise, is to the blessed souls in Paradise their one habit of supernatural life, and the groves of that dear garden are full of joyous singing and of the sound of holy voices. The souls of the blessed, those birds of Paradise, have the gift of perfect song, as well (a rare gift in nature)

as the beautiful piumage of the perfect life. To all who know the spiritual fatigue which comes from a constant ordering of the routine of worship, and to those who fret and sigh often under its unspiritualising effects, chaining down, as it does, the devotion of the soul, for the necessary order and decency of worship, to artificial rubrics and uses, this is a most happy expectation. And it may be here added, that we are very sure that no highly-strung spirituality could long tolerate, even in the choirs of the Church on earth, the laborious rehearsals and the most irreverent repetitions, interruptions, and corrections (even of the most holy words), during those rehearsals, which are yet necessary for the popular and artistic services now so much and so unhappily in fashion. It would say with a sacred impatience : Give me the rudest song and the barest music, only deliver my soul from the jar and shock of this insufferable irreverence !'* How melodious must be the happy concert of those voices which, united even now' (says St. Anselm) 'to the choirs of the angels, rejoice in the sweetness and light of the society of all the saints without any ending, and in the presence of the King'†

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Oh, surely we scarcely do unkindness to the unhappy souls of the unsanctified dead in the bitterly sad belief, as the Divine word compels us to believe, of their perpetual exclusion from that most blessed garden, the everlasting adoration and the unimagined sanctities of which would become their greatest and most intolerable hell, could they have even one hour's entrance there! To the very saintliest an entire transfigurement of the whole powers and habits of the soul must be imperatively requisite for the happy translation into, and fruition of the high and perpetual adoration in those choirs of Paradise. And what an utter

* Cf. the confession of St. Augustine, 'Confessions,' x. 33, tom. i. 141. + St. Anselm, i. 213.

excess of unendurable misery, then, would seize upon the hearts, could they be translated there, which had on earth an infinite repulsion to any holy thoughts and conferences, as well as to the shortest spiritual devotion !

There is in many hearts a morbid longing to realize as still near them the presences of their dead, and a craving to know that they, even now, may invisibly intermingle with this earthly life. They like to imagine themselves watched over by the yearning eyes, and attended by the unseen love of their lost ones. But, if we truly love them, is it not infinitely happier, and is it not safer also for our idolatrous hearts, to know them at rest in their inviolable home, where no painful echoes, no impure sights or shameless voices of this miserable and fallen life can intrude, than to believe them wandering in spectral shadowy raiment through the wide earth, watching us in our sorrow with eyes that must then invisibly weep over the sad spectacle of our lonely wretchedness, and yet remain unable-the worst misery! -to dry our passionate tears by returning to us in the visible vesture of mortality? How infinitely sweeter to conceive of them in Paradise, ‘in peace,' unvexed in their crowned and perfected love and purity by any of the sights. and sounds of earth, quietly longing for our coming, and leaving us trustfully awhile to His safeguard and to His compassions, whose faithful Heart is there revealed to them as beyond all other faithfulness in Its Divine constancy of love! The utmost we can concede is, with St. Augustine,* in his cautious and reverent treatment of this 'difficilis quæstio,' that perhaps other souls, entering in, may be suffered to bring some tidings of dear ones left in this weary life, and that Christ, who is ever with us, may speak of and tell to them what He will of us.

* 'De Curâ pro Mortuis,' tom. vi., p. 384. It is infinitely sad that he abuses this sweet thought afterwards to a superstitious use.

It has been asked if we must suppose the Blessed Dead to be wrapped each in his own solitary contemplation of the Divine and eternal Sanctities, and as if they were isolated from one another, each in the cell of his separate life in God? Whether, also, they have no ministries there, no sweet services of grace and mutual love? In the indistinctness of our present knowledge, no more definite answer can he offered than that they may have such offices to their fellow-souls, and especially to those who, resting with them in God, were once dear on earth,—a continuance, but without failure or fatigue, of their former life of love and religion. We dimly know what we have, though distantly and unconsciously sustained, a real communion with their secret and hidden life in God in some hardly-understood manner. This the Apostolic words surely imply: "Ye are come to the spirits of just men made perfect.' If with us there remains, even in our far-off land of imperfect pilgrimlife, some ineffable union with their blessed home-life, we cannot conceive, in the retreat of Paradise itself and among the holy souls, an aching solitude of perpetual silence to reign, in a sort of unearthly correspondence to the silent communities so much and so superstitiously venerated and lauded in the false Church. No! the Blessed Dead form one congregation, one society of happy souls, mutually rejoicing in the light and love of Christ, whose Presence walks among them as lovingly and gently as any shepherd with his white-fleeced flock. Paradise is in our belief no Carthusian cloister, no place of conventual silence, as though it were an enclosed life, in which, therefore, the human eyes, made of God to express and reflect all the lights and shadows of sympathy, would have become like the image of a dead face, with its strangely fixed look, and its unresponsive, inexpressive stillness; or where the flexible human voice, dowered with such wealth of modulation, dies

away into a deep silence as of the grave! Ah, no! the atmosphere of that dear garden, cloistered only from the rude unrests of the world, thrills and palpitates with warmth, and throbs with light, and is filled with the sounds and melodies of holy, blessed voices.

Is there not a vein of glorious and golden irony to be found in the triumphant words, 'Mortality shall be swallowed up of life'? It is the expression of a glorious Lex talionis, of a most happy retribution. As we watch the bier of death slowly lowered into the grave, made open, as though with parted lips, to seize it, does not the thought irresistibly force itself upon our minds that we can almost see the cruel and ever-unsatiated jaws of Death widely parted to swallow and enclose another victim, another morsel? But this Death itself shall be conquered at last. The Devourer of the generations of frail human life shall be itself devoured, and the Destroyer of hearts by this just retribution for ever destroyed. 'When Death and Mortality' (says St. Anselm) are together swallowed up, what can remain then but eternal and everlasting Life ?'* St. Methodius, also, has well remarked that Christ has overcome death by resurrection, not that He might restore the flesh for corruption to inherit incorruption, but that incorruption might inherit, possess, and transfigure that which is corruptible.' (Cf. Tertullian, 'De Resur. Carnis,' 54; and the beautiful words of Irenæus, 'Adv. Hær.', v. 133.)

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But one more tender and gentle thought underlies the beautiful words of this meek song, the song of faith victorious over death. Some would give them indeed a purely general sense. 'The comparison,' it has been said, 'is not of one body with another, but of one house with another. We dwell now in an earthly tabernacle; after death we shall

* Med. xvii., tom. i., p. 235 A.

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