nable pleasures. food and drink, and in agreeable sensations. If all the senses have their full enjoyment at once,—and that rarely happens on this earth,—then the happiness of the body is complete. Imagine now, my dear brethren, as well as you can, each and everything that can delight eyes, ears, smell, taste, and touch in a lawful manner, and raise that delight to the highest degree that the mind of man can conceive in this life, even then you will have only an imperfect sketch of the pleasures we shall enjoy in heaven. So speaks the mellifluous doctor, St. Bernard: “that happiness exceeds all thought and all desire.”[1] And truly that the body with its senses shall have its pleasures and delights in heaven, besides the bliss that shall inundate the soul in the vision of God, is infallibly certain from the Holy Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and the very name itself of eternal happiness. For what is happiness? According to theologians with Boetius, “it is a state made perfect by the aggregation of every possible good;”[2] it is the seat and safe dwelling of all desirable pleasures, and therefore nothing can be wanting to it which is good and can serve to delight; hence since the pleasures of sense belong thereto, they also must necessarily be found in heaven.
And the body has a right to this, because it too has worked for heaven. Justice, too, and equity demand this. He who labors, as the old saying goes, must eat; and he who helps to earn must have his wages. A general would act unjustly if after having won a battle or captured a town he kept all the spoils for himself alone, and his soldiers who helped him to victory by shedding their blood and fighting for him would have good reason to complain if there were no share of the booty for them. It is true that the human soul, which alone is endowed with reason, has the chief and greatest part here in this life in serving God and gaining heaven; it must command and keep the members and senses of the body in order, and urge them on to fight and labor in order to keep the commandments of God. But what could the soul do if the body with its senses did not help it? This latter, like the common soldiers in a battle, has the heaviest part of the work to do in the observance of the commandments: the eyes must often mortify themselves so as not to see; the ears so as not to hear; the hands so as not to touch anything that could inflame the passions; the taste must fast, or against its inclination often abstain from forbidden food or from excess in eating or drinking;
