pin! Oh, what a poor, miserable dwelling we had! In what wretched holes we lived! Good-bye, world! thou art not worth looking at any longer; we have something better to see here. Let us hasten on to the city of God! Are we not there yet? No, incredible as it may seem, we have not yet accomplished the half of our journey; for the firmament where the stars are is as far from the dwelling of the blessed as it is from the earth; and thus from the computations of astronomers we find that if a man were to travel every day eight hundred miles upward from the earth, he could not arrive in heaven under less than eight thousand years. Nay, the distance is so great that all the mathematicians are at fault, and they candidly acknowledge that all their investigations are not enough to enable them to measure the height of heaven. Nevertheless we shall accomplish our journey with the utmost celerity, and without fatigue.
They shall see far more wonderful things in the forecourts of heaven. And thus we come to another heaven called the crystalline. The learned are not agreed as to the matter of which this sphere is formed, but that does not concern us; whatever it be made of, we know that it must be most beautiful, and that it far surpasses all the inferior heavens in brilliancy and glory; for it is nearer to the place of eternal joys, and is, as it were, the first floor, the foundation on which the city of God is built. At last, after having travelled many millions of miles, we arrive at the forecourt of the heaven we so desire, and for which the Prophet David sighed so ardently: “How lovely are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts: my soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord. For better is one day in Thy courts above thousands;”[1] one day there is better than a thousand spent in the pleasures of this world. What a wonderful place! we shall exclaim; we have seen nothing, as it were, till now. Oh, how beautiful and magnificent heaven itself must be if the vestibule to it is so grand! What must not the city of God itself be, since its very foundations are so magnificent? If the place that we now have under our feet, and that we regard only as the hut of a poor peasant, is so splendidly appointed, what must be the edifice in which we shall live with God forever?
Until they come at length to heaven Rejoice, dear souls! Lift up your eyes! Look! we are close to it now; there is the heaven of heavens which on account of its brightness is called the empyrean heaven! There is the place
- ↑ Quam dilecta tabernacula tua Domine virtutem: concupiscit et deficit anima mea in atria Domini. Quia melior est dies una in atriis tuis super millia.—Ps. clxxxiii. 2, 3, 11.
