On the Joy the Elect shall have in Heaven.
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sess in God Himself if we shall only have the happiness of being in the number of the elect.
The mind shall be filled with joy in understanding all the mysteries of the faith.
With regard to the understanding, it has its greatest and highest pleasure in the knowledge of those things that it wishes to know and understand; a desire of knowledge, as we have seen al ready, that has induced many to renounce all their possessions, to sacrifice their repose and comfort, their health, and even life itself, that they might devote themselves altogether to the study and investigation of interesting facts with which they were after all only dimly acquainted, llave a little patience, curious souls! in heaven your desire for knowledge shall be fully satisfied. Besides what we have seen with our bodily eyes in the triumphant procession from the valley of Josaphat to the city of God, oh, what new and beautiful objects shall be offered to our minds to know and clearly understand when we shall be together in the heavenly Jerusalem! And in the first place we shall understand those truths that are now incomprehensible to our minds, and that the brightest intellectshave in vain tried to master; truths that would never have occurred to us as possible even, if faith had not suggested them to us. Then we shall understand the mystery of the resurrection of the dead, and how the same body, this very flesh of ours, after having decayed in the earth and been eaten by worms, after the bones have crumbled away into dust and been converted into earth,—how the same flesh shall rise in its integrity and become alive again as it was before. We shall see and experience how these bodies of ours, that are now so gross, shall after having been glorified be able to pass through the hardest stone, steel, and iron without trouble, and without leaving behind the slightest trace of their passage; and how they shall be able to accomplish in a moment, if we only wish, the immense journey between heaven and earth, just as we now ascend in thought into heaven and come back to earth again in a moment. We shall understand the wonderful power of the fire of hell, and how the souls and bodies that are confined therein burn forever without being consumed. We shall know and clearly understand all the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, all the prophecies contained therein, all the mysteries of the incarnation, birth, passion, and death of Our Lord, the oft-repeated and still existing incomprehensible mystery of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar: how, namely, the whole of Our Lord’s humanity is completely present in every particle of the elements in vir-
