tian truth, as St. Paul says, see God in part only but hereafter face to face. Our time, therefore, is the morning, the time to rise from sleep. For all of us the night is past, and for many or all the day is at hand. We should awake, therefore, spiritually, and even as the aurora develops into the brightness and warmth of the perfect day, so should we advance from one light of virtue to another, from fervor to fervor, until we arrive even at the everlasting day of God's heavenly presence. Worldly Christians and bad Catholics, on the contrary, go down from the twilight, from darkness to darkness, until they are finally swallowed up in the everlasting darkness of hell. "The path of the just," says Solomon, "is like a radiant dawn that advances and increases to a perfect day, but the way of the wicked is dark and its end unknown."
His second reason for our spiritual awakening, St. Paul takes from the nearness of the end: " For now," he says, " our salvation is nearer than when we believed." Before Christ's coming, belief in the future Messias was the key to salvation, but it was only hundreds and thousands of years after their death that heaven was opened to the patriarchal saints of God. Now, however, it is but a step from life through death into eternity, so that the world's salvation, now that it has seen Christ, is nearer than when men merely believed in His coming. And hence, just as the aerolite falls the faster the nearer it approaches its resting place on the earth; as the racer makes his supreme effort on the home stretch; as the
