as a condition of our salvation, a yoke which is sweet and a burden which is not heavy. Therefore, let your will be good, and you will find peace, you will see all difficulties and terrors vanish. Good-will! that is everything. Be of good-will, submit to the Will of God, place His Holy Law above all else, serve the Lord with all your heart, and He will give you such powerful assistance that you will enter Paradise with an astonishing facility. I could never have believed, you will say, that it was so easy to enter Heaven! Again, I repeat, to effect in us this wonder of Mercy, God asks on our part an upright heart, a good-will.
Good-will consists, properly speaking, in submitting and conforming our will to that of God, who is the rule of all good-will; and this good-will attains its highest perfection when we embrace the Divine Will as the sovereign good, even then when it imposes the greatest sacrifices, the most acute suffering. Oh, admirable state! The soul thus disposed seems to lose the sensation of pain, and this because the soul is animated with the spirit of love; and, as St. Augustine says, when we love we suffer not, or, if we suffer, we love the suffering. Ant si laboratur, labor ipse amatur.
Venerable Claude de la Colombiere, of the Society of Jesus, possessed this loving heart, this perfect will, and in his Retrait Spirituelle he thus expresses his sentiments: — "We must not cease to expiate the past disorders of our life by penance; but it must be done without anxiety, because the worst that can befall us, when our will is good and we are submissive and obedient, is to be sent for a long time to Purgatory, and we may say with good reason that this is a great evil. I do not fear Purgatory. Of Hell I will not speak, for I should wrong the Mercy of God by having the least fear of Hell, although I have merited it more than all the demons together. Purgatory I do not fear. I wish I had not deserved it, since I could not do so without displeasing God; but, as I
