God wished to make them happy. I cannot lay the least blame on my God, who (as my faith taught me during life, and as I now know to be the truth) has always had the earnest wish and desire, as far as in Him lay, to save all mankind, without exception, and therefore to save me also. This, was the end He had in view in making me to His image and likeness, in preference to so many others, infinite in number, whom He left in their nothingness; this is shown by the unheard-of love that forced Him, “for us men and for our salvation,” to come down from heaven, to assume our mortal nature, to live a poor, humble, and contemptible life in the eyes of the world for three and thirty years, to suffer all sorts of discomfort, hunger, thirst, ridicule and mockery, thorns and scourges, even to the painful death of the cross; and all that merely to save us from the hell we had deserved, and to open for us the gates of heaven that were closed by the sin of our first parents. And moreover, besides what is common to me with all men, oh, how rejoiced the Almighty would have been to have had me with Himself in heaven! For in preference to so many millions like me, without any preceding merits of my own, He called me to the Christian and one true Catholic faith in which alone salvation is to be found; and in that He caused me to be born and brought up. Heathens, Turks, Jews, heretics who are with me in hell, not even you have any reproach to make to your Creator on that head; for He wished you too to be saved; you might have come to the true light, and thereby to heaven, had you so wished! Much less reason have I to blame Him for my damnation; for I have had the advantage of you in the frequent graces that God gave me. If many of you had enjoyed from childhood the light that shone on me, you would now rejoice among the chosen children of God; nay, many of you found the way to heaven by a dim, obscure light; while I, a child of the light, who walked in the full noon-day, am now lying in everlasting darkness! “Son,” the Almighty can with reason say to me, in the words of Abraham to the rich glutton, “remember that thou didst receive good things in thy lifetime.”[1] Remember the great graces and illuminations you received from Me during your life. And how could I deny that? How many good inspirations have I not had to deter me from evil and urge me to good? How much interior uneasiness have I not felt when I wished to sin? How much anguish and remorse after
- ↑ Fili, recordare quia recepisti bona in vita tua.—Luke xvi. 25.
