lations are disturbed even amongst the best of friends. Such is the power of that cold-hearted word, mine and thine.
Plesant company is not of long duration on earth. Even if a few good friends understand each other perfectly as far as mine and thine are concerned, and enjoy each other’s company, how long will that last? Ah, how easy it is for something to come between them and upset all their fondness! A cross look when one is not exactly in a good humor; a suspicion, a chance word taken up in a wrong sense, although it may have been well meant, is quite enough to put an end to all former confidence. Nay, the length of time that people know each other as friends, the frequency of their meetings and repeated conversations generally form a hindrance to love, as is so often the case with married people, whose love for each other should he most tender and constant. At first they think they have found a heaven on earth; for the first two, three, or four years they get on well enough, but after that love grows cold in many cases. Some go so far that they can hardly bear the sight of each other, and find nothing but a hard and intolerable cross in each other’s society, although it should be a joy and consolation for them. Thus it is not in this vale of tears that we can find true and constant friendship and really agreeable society. No, my dear brethren; we must look elsewhere for that. O heaven! O holy city of Jerusalem! O dwelling of true love and lasting peace! Thou alone art that happy place where society of the most agreeable kind constitutes an indescribable joy and pleasure, and lasts forever! We shall consider this in the
Second Part.
In heaven along are all the delights of pleasant company to be enjoyed in perfection. And what sort of society is it? “Let us consider,” says St. Augustine, “what the society of the blessed spirits is in itself.”[1] His opinion is that it is the occasion of such happiness that of although we may form some idea of it from what we know of agreeable company on earth, we can never understand or comprehend it in this life: “No one in this life can form an adequate idea of the bliss of hearing the concerts of the angels, and of being in the company of the saints.”[2] There have been occasionally on earth some great servants of God whose loss was able to fill a whole city with mourning. When the news was
