Introduction.
If this transfiguration of Our Lord, in which He manifested for a short time some few rays of His divinity, and the figure of His eternal glory in heaven—if this occasioned such lively joy to His disciples that Peter, ravished out of himself, wished to remain in that place forever, what must be the joy of the elect in heaven, where the God of all beauty shows Himself face to face as He is, and allows Himself to be possessed by them for all eternity? “Lord, it is good for us to be here,” we shall all cry out in ecstasy, if we shall have the happiness of gaining heaven. Unhappy, reprobate sinners! you, alas! shall never for all eternity have any share in this manifestation of heavenly glory, or in the joy of the elect. Yet what am I saying? Truly, even you shall have your share in it. But how? you will ask, my dear brethren. Are the damned to be one day released and to be admitted to the glory of heaven and the joys of the blessed? Ah, no! they have no hope of that; they are buried in hell forever; but they shall, quite against their will, turn their thoughts and minds to heaven, and contemplate the glory of God and the bliss of the saints. This thought shall be present to their minds for all eternity, and it will make another hell for them, as I now propose to show.
Plan of Discourse.
Heaven and its elect shall be to the reprobate an eternal hell. Such is the whole subject of this meditation. Ah, dear Christians! let us so live that we may one day possess heaven, not in hell, but in heaven itself. Such shall be the conclusion.
Do Thou, O gracious Saviour, help us thereto by Thy powerful grace, which we beg of Thee through the intercession of Thy Mother Mary, who is ours also, and of our holy guardian angels.
The damned shall be incessantly tormented by the thought that they have lost heaven.
Heaven, a hell! The country of eternal joys, a prison of everlasting torture! The palace of the sovereign Monarch, in which God bestows all the treasures of His goodness, according to the greatness of His magnificence and glory, and inundates His chosen children with a torrent of delights, the least drop of which, according to the holy Fathers, would suffice, if it were let fall into hell, to extinguish that fire and turn the place of torments into a delightful paradise; is that palace, I ask, to be