title, a nod of the head, a rank that seems to place you a finger’s breadth higher than others in the social scale? “O ye sons of men!…why do you love vanity and seek after lying?”[1] Do you really wish to gratify your ambition? Then you have a most glorious opportunity of so doing; it is in your power, by increasing your merits daily, hourly, and every moment, to raise yourselves higher and higher in true honorin heaven. But, alas! who thinks of this?
In greater joy. Finally, the difference of glory in heaven consists in the greater happiness one saint shall have above another in the eternal possession of God. For just as in hell, although all the damned lie in the same fire, yet their torments are different according to the debts they have incurred and sins committed, so the blessed in heaven shall share its joys and delights according to the measure of their merits, although they shall all see the same God. Of the blessed in general the prophet David says: “They shall be inebriated with the plenty of Thy house: and Thou shalt make them drink of the torrent of Thy pleasure;”[2] so that they shall swim as it were in an ocean of delights and pleasures. Now if there is such an inundation of joy in the vision and love of God, even in the case of those blessed souls who have brought only one degree of sanctifying grace, received in the sacrament of baptism, with them out of this life into eternity, how immense must not be the eternal joys of a saint who is higher in bliss, who kept on increasing sanctifying grace and thereby everlasting glory in heaven every hour, nay, every moment sometimes, for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years, during which time he lived in the state of grace on earth?
So that we must be most grateful to God, who preserves us that we may earn more glory in heaven. O joys! O joys of, heaven! O eternal joys of heaven! so it depends on myself then, if I only choose, to make you always greater and greater for myself? O my God! what thanks do I not owe Thee for having preserved me in life for so many years, and offered me so many graces that I might increase my great happiness in heaven! On one occasion a demon was exorcised, and while he was yet in the body of the possessed person was asked what he would do to arrive at the vision of God. His answer was that if he had a passible body, such as we have, and if God were to create a fiery pillar, beset all round with sharp swords and knives, and that pillar reached from the lowest
