Plan of Discourse.
Where do you go, man? Your body shall go into the grave. Such shall be the answer in the first part. Where do you go man? Your soul shall go into eternity. The answer in the second part. From the first we shall learn to despise all temporal things; the second should urge us to greater zeal in striving for eternal goods.
God of goodness! we beg of Thee, by the intercession of Mary and of our holy guardian angels, to make those truths sink deeply into our minds.
There is a well-known anecdote recorded of St. Jacoponus, who through humility pretended to be a fool. He one day met in the market a citizen, who had just bought a pair of chickens. "Here," said that latter, "bring these home for me, and I will follow you shortly and pay you for your trouble." " Willingly," the Saint; and taking the chickens, he went to the church, in which the citizen had already caused his tomb to be prepared, and placing the chickens in the grave, went his way. The citizen comes home and asks about the chickens, but no one knows anything of them. What is the matter now? he thinks; can that fool have run away with them? He runs off again to the market and finds Jacoponus standing in the same place as before. "What have you done with my chickens?" he asks in an angry tone. "I did as you told me," was the answer of the seeming fool. "You did no such thing," said the other; "for no one in my house knows anything of them." "Come with me, then," said Jacoponus, "and I will show you that I have done what you told me." He brought the man to the grave; "see, there they are," said he; "for that is your house; the one you are living in now is not your home in reality; it belongs to the world; but this will be your home till the last day." And he was quite right; but the citizen had not thought of that before.
And we too, my dear brethren, are very apt to forget that the true home of the body on this earth is the grave. "My days shall be shortened," says Job, " and only the grave remains for me." (Job 17:1) Nothing shall remain to me of all the lands I have owned; nothing of all the houses I have lived in; nothing of all the money I have amassed, which has made me so important
