trials with patience.
“Come to Me, all,” He says; but how? “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me”[1] on the way in which I travelled while on earth, and in which My holy servants have come after Me: the way of meekness, humility, patience, poverty, crosses, and sufferings. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory?”[2] There is no other road to heaven for you: “Through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of God,”[3] as I have warned you by My Apostle. An invitation that is apparently hard to hear; but “look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is at hand.”[4] Think of the day on which that invitation shall be changed into another joyful one, when to your great consolation you shall hear the words, “Come, ye blessed!” He who now gladly hears the word of the cross, says Thomas à Kempis (a chapter of whose golden book of the Imitation of Christ you ought daily to read), he will hereafter hear the glad invitation to eternal joys. “A patient man shall bear for a time, and afterwards joy shall be restored to him,”[5] such are the comforting words of the Holy Ghost by the wise Ecclesiasticus.
For after a short sorrow eternal joy shall come. Shown by similes. Not without reason did our dear Saviour adduce the simile of the trees when He was speaking of the last judgment, and encouraging us all to be constant and patient: “See the fig-tree, and all the trees: when they now shoot forth their fruit you know that summer is nigh.”[6] Go into a garden in winter and look at all the trees, one after the other; how miserable they seem! They are bare, dry, and sapless; not a green leaf is to be seen on them; they are covered with snow and have hardly the appearance of trees; we cannot tell whether they are to bear apples, pears, or other fruit; they look just like old brooms, and one hardly cares to see them. But what is there to wonder at? It is winter time, and we cannot expect anything else. Wait, however, till the cold is past, and the pleasant spring-time arrives; then the dry, leafless, naked trees shall clothe themselves again;
- ↑ Si quis vult post me venire, abneget semetipsum, tollat crucem suam, et sequatur me.—Matt. xvi. 24.
- ↑ Nonne hæc oportuit pati Christum, et ita intrare in gloriam suam?—Luke xxiv. 26.
- ↑ Per multas tribulationes oportet nos intrare in regnum Dei.—Acts xiv. 21.
- ↑ Respicite et levate capita vestra; quoniam appropinquat rederoptio vestra.—Luke xxi. 28.
- ↑ Usque in tempos sustinebit patiens, et postea redditio jucunditatis.—Ecclus. i. 29.
- ↑ Videte ficulneam et omnes arbores. Cum producunt jam ex se fruetum, scitis quoniam prope est æstas.—Luke xxi. 29, 30.
