shall behold in eternity the heavenly city Jerusalem with all its joys, Paul and the other apostles on their thrones, and Christ, my Saviour, in His glory! Then shall I cry out with Peter: “Lord, it is good for us to be here.”[1] Here we wish to remain forever! If there was no other pleasure in heaven than this, it would be enough to make a heaven of itself.
Of the ears. Besides, how the ears of the elect shall be delighted when they hear the sweet music and* the delicious harmony that so many millions of angels offer their God, as St. John tells us in the fifth and fourteenth chapters of the Apocalypse, according to what he heard himself: “And I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the living creatures and the ancients: and the number of them was thousands of thousands.…And the voice which I heard was as the voice of harpers harping on their harps. And they sung, as it were, a new canticle.”[2] Then I heard the voices of a great multitude in heaven crying out: Alleluia! O my God! what singers, and voices, and melodies shall be heard at Thy throne! Let all musicians of earth be still before that harmony. A single note of the violin that an angel played for the seraphic St. Francis in his illness sounded so wonderfully sweet that the saint thought he was already in heaven, and was on the point of expiring for happiness. We read the same in the Lives of St. Nicholas of Tolentino, of St. Martin, of the Blessed Servulus, and of other servants of God who heard the song of the angels before their death; the effect of that was to fill them with such a great desire of getting to that place of joys, a drop of which had fallen on them, that they were filled with disgust of this earthly life.
Of the smell. And what are we to say of the pleasures of smell in that heavenly garden where there are so many glorified bodies of the saints, of whom the Church sings: “They shall be before Thee as the odor of balsam”?[3] The world knows by experience that the bodies of many saints gave forth a most sweet odor after their death, and what is still more wonderful, that a sweet perfume came frequently from their bones, a perfume such as could not be found in any earthly spices. Baronius writes that even during their lives the martyrs, when they were brought out of
- ↑ Domine, bonum est nos hic esse.—Matt. xvii. 4.
- ↑ Et audivi vocem angelorum multorum in circuitu throni, et animalium et seniorum; et erat numerus eorum illia millium.…Et vocem quam audivi sicut citharædorum citharizantium in citharis suis. Et cantabant quasi canticum novum.—Apoc. v. 11; xiv. 2, 3.
- ↑ Sicut odor balsami erunt ante te.
