see that we have so little desire for or thought of this heaven.
How He punishes that carelessness. And that is what He complains of so bitterly by the Psalmist: “They set at naught the desirable land.”[1] The ungrateful Jewish people had often and grievously sinned against God, but He patiently overlooked their vices and acted as if He did not see them; there was one thing, however, that He could not bear, and that was when on the journey to the promised land they thought of and sighed for the onions and garlic of Egypt, and valued them more highly than the heavenly manna that was rained down on them in the desert; on that account He punished several thousand of them with death. Much greater will His indignation be if He sees that we have little desire for the true and eternal happiness of heaven and its infinite delights, and that our thoughts and desires are sunk in the onions and garlic of this world. St. Gregory, the Venerable Bede, Cardinal Ballarmine, and others are of the unanimous opinion that in purgatory there is a special place where there is nothing else to suffer but an insatiable, intolerable, painful longing to see the face of God; and that is the place of punishment for those souls who during life had not a sufficient recollection of and desire for eternal happiness, although they owe no other satisfaction to the divine justice. Father Eusebius Nierenberg writes of Father John Fernandius, of our Society, that when he was professing theology in Rome, and was speaking of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity on which he had often and deeply pondered, he was inflamed with a most vehement desire to behold the supreme Godhead; whereupon he was ravished in spirit, and after many wonderful things had been shown to him, he was brought into a beautiful garden where he saw a soul adorned in the most splendid manner; the soul told him that he was one of our brethren who had spent seven years in the Society, but on account of his little desire for heaven and the beatific vision he had to suffer in that part of purgatory from a constantly increasing and constantly disappointed desire.
Much more angry will He be with those who despise heaven, and there are many such. Now if this purgatory awaits those friends of God whose only fault was that their desire for heaven was not eager enough, what shall become of those who hardly ever think of heaven? of those who never deign to raise up their hearts and minds thither? of those who actually despise heaven, and look on all that is said of it as a fanciful invention? And finally, what is to become of
- ↑ Pro nihilo habuerunt terram desiderabilem.—Ps. cv. 24.
