wealth enough here, but it is a very disturbed and turbulent place; it cannot be the happy island. He spent seven years in the search; but in one place he found an excessive heat, in another a piercing cold, in another terrible earthquakes, in a fourth violent storms; here he saw blind people, there cripples and deformed, everywhere sickness, weakness, and death. At the end of the seven years his eyes were opened, and he acknowledged that no place of perfect happiness can be found on this earth, and that therefore all his labor and research were in vain; he then resolved to renounce all earthly things, to shut himself up in a monastery, and there by diligently serving God seek heavenly and eternal happiness. And this resolution he carried into effect.
In heaven there will be nothing of the kind to fear. Christian faith, give us the same light! Open our eves, show us the place where a far different, better, and truly happy life awaits us! Raise our hearts to heaven, for the possession of which after death we are all created! There alone is the truly happy country in which not the least of the evils enumerated can be found or feared. “They shall no more hunger nor thirst,” says St. John in the Apocalypse, speaking of the inhabitants of the heavenly Jerusalem, as they were described to him by the infallible word of God Himself, “neither shall the sun fall on them, nor any heat.”[1] There shall be no cold or harsh weather there to annoy them, for summer, winter, spring, autumn., and the other changes of the seasons find no place in the city of God. There will be no darkness or night there, because that heavenly sun is no movable body that hides the light now and then and disappears behind a cloud, marking by its rising and setting the day and night, as we now experience on earth; but it will shine by an invariable light and will make one everlasting and most joyful day. “Nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more;…death shall be no more;”[2] no fear of death shall ever trouble the elect, for they shall enjoy an everlasting life, and that too a life free from all discomfort and sickness, a life without, change, without chagrin and old age; in a word, a life in which not the least thing can be found to cause pain, sorrow, or annoyance. “You know not what you ask,”[3] such is the reproof given by Our Lord to the mother and sons of
