Section II. Purgatory

It is a wonderful thing to be a Christian. The world of the saints in heaven is all ours. So also, though in another way, is the world of the dead of those who are one day to he saints, with new glories, new delights, new juhilees in heaven. I. "We each of us have our own treasures among the dead.

1. Some who have shared the joys of our past years, and some who have shared their sor rows.

2. Some whom we have not loved as we could now wish we had loved them some whom we have loved too much, and perhaps harmed by doing so.

3. Some whom we have injured by example, scandal, harshness, or indulgence some whom we have done good to, and perhaps converted.

4. Some who have gone too soon, some mature and old, yet even then too soon.

5. Some whose deathbeds have left scarce a doubt upon our minds, some whose deaths have been sudden, overclouded, or distressingly uncertain.

II. Our feelings about them all.

1. We grudged them to God but we do not do so now.

We would have them back to behave differently to them: yet, no! for their own sake we would not have them back for worlds.

3. We envy them the certainty of -their glory, and perhaps its nearness; it is hard to think without a thrill of a soul very near its release.

4. Yet we pity them because of the extremity of their sufferings.

5. And some perhaps died in such a state that we may fear their sufferings will be unusually terrible, and their absence from God unusually long.

III. Conclusion.

1. God loves them with an unspeakable yearning love.

2. Yet He has, in the case of the dead, made His love depend on ours we are to them somewhat like what the saints in heaven are to us on earth.

3. Their state is one of incomparable, unimaginable pain.

4. And our hands are full of the most wonderful and most powerful means to help them.

ft. What then must be our devotion for the dead? A little or a passing thing? Need I answer this? Have you not echoes in your own hearts that are answering it even while I speak? Oh think, dearest Brethren, of your past years, and of your past loves, of those old faces, of those unforgotten eyes, and of those well-remembered voices, that are silent now.

THE SEVERITY OF PURGATORY.

We think of lands we shall never see we picture them to ourselves out of books of geo graphy, with their animals, and plants, and scenery can we think of purgatory as a land below our rocks and mines and subterranean rivers, as a land whose gloomy fire-illumined corridors we shall never see?

I. Severity of its punishments.

1. The time when they come, just when wo hoped to rest.

2. The intolerable delay of the sight of God.

3. Their severity in themselves.

4. The fire.

5. The soul the part tortured, so that all suffers at once, and penetratingly.

6. Worse than all martyrdoms.

7. No parallel to them in earthly suffering.

8. Long endurance, because there is no merit to shorten them.

9. So far as pain goes, they are a participation of hell, and in awful vicinity to it.

II. What sends us there?

1. We might almost say that that land is the creation of venial sin.

2. Cowardice in the matter of penance.

3. Want of perfect sorrow for mortal sin.

4. Slovenly confessions and examens of conscience.

5. Being comfortable, which makes the soul sickly.

II 1". How then to avoid going there.

1. Recollection, which is the grand impossibility of lukewarmness.

2. Manful, discreet, habitual penance.

3. Carefulness about the sacraments.

4. A devotion to indulgences and the Precious Blood.

5. Charitable devotion to the holy souls.

6. Aiming at perfection.

7. Fervour, which is a more effectual fire than those of purgatory.

Oh, it is really anything but a hopeless thing to hope to escape purgatory. I can hardly think all is quite right with us in the spiritual life, if we have not that humble hope.

III. THE CONSOLATIONS OF PURGATORY.

I. The entrance into purgatory.

1. The moment of death.

2. The act of renunciation of sin.

3. The sight of Jesus in the particular judgment.

4. The voluntary flight into purgatory: no c:nveying angels needed. Beautiful worship of God s purity: His love of the soul at that moment.

II. The consolations of purgatory.

1. The soul is in unbroken union with God.

2. Conformity to the Divine Will, so that they abide their purification with the most perfect contentment.

3. They are not teased with any vision of self or sin, according to St. Catherine of Genoa.

4. They are impeccable, and cannot commit the slightest imperfection or have the least movement of impatience.

5. They love God above everything with a most pure and disinterested love.

6. They are consoled by angels.

7. They are in confirmed assurance of their salvation.

8. Their bitter agonies are accompanied by a profound peace.

III. Why then have such devotion for their sake?

1. Chiefly for the sake of God s glory.

2. Because their pains are extreme.

3. Because, like Mary in her Compassion, we often feel more for a sufferer than he feels for himself.

4. Because they are helpless.

beautiful region of the Church of God! O lovely troop of the flock of Mary! The beauty of those souls the loveliness of their patience the majesty of their gifts the dignity of their solemn and chaste sufferings the eloquence of their silence the moonlight of Mary s Throne lighting up that empire silver-winged angels voyaging through the deeps of that mysterious pain sinless purity of the worship it all gives to God. world weary, clamorous, sinful world! who would not break away, if he could, like an un caged dove, from thy perilous toils and unsafe pilgrimage, and fly with joy to the lowest place in that most pure, most safe, most holy land of suffering and of sinless love?

IV. DEVOTION TO THE PASSION.

Pain is a desperately difficult thing to bear: is bodily or mental pain worst?

But the soul made miraculously to feel the pain of sense, and this by God this must be terrific. Will it ever happen to us? Yes, to most of us, probably to all, for a long time, and to such a degree that the very angels shudder at the vision of it. Let us think of this. I. Of course the great thing is to be saved: yet purgatory presents most serious reflections.

1. Any terrible punishment hanging over us is a fear.

2. Its uncertain severity: yet all divine punish ments are necessarily severe.

3. Thus death is not a rest, but the beginning of a punishment.

4. All little carelessnesses are laying up more fire for us.

5. Our own experience of the little charity there is for the Holy Souls: it is astonishing how little.

II. It seems from revelations as if the length of purgatories were increasing. Why?

1. From want of bodily penances.

2. From the increase of comforts and luxuries.

3. From the worldliness of modern devout people.

4. From the quickness, multitude, and variety of occupations.

5. From a singular want of discernment of God and His claims, brought about by the atmosphere of heresy and unbelief.

III. The Carmelite revelation about Purgatory and Devotion to the Passion.

1. The Passion obviously the standing, unintermitting devotion.

2. Only from it can true contrition come, because only from it comes a real understanding of sin.

3. From it also comes the spirit of mortification and robust piety.

4. It supplies instincts and principles of a Christian sort more than any other devotion.

5. It is the best protection against the self-indulgent and self-dispensing spirit of worldliness.

6. How acceptable to our Lady.

7. Because it is the tenclerest worship of Jesus, and so most like her own.

8. Because it roots the love of Him most deeply in us which is her grand joy, her double love, yet single love, of Him and of us.

9. Because it is the continuation of her own Dolours, and of the worship they were to Jesus.

10. Because it best enables us to understand her.

11. Because her Maternity of us came out of it.

The heart can have tears even when the eyes have none. One tear of the heart over the Passion of our Blessed Lord! how much of the cruel fire beneath the earth has it the power to quench and how piercingly we shall one day moan for ever so little a quenching!

THE LOVE OF JESUS FOR THE HOLY

No life would be long enough for us to find out the wonders there are in the grand mystery that God loves us. Nothing about us is so wonderful, neither our creation, nor our redemption, nor our glorification. It is wonderful to think of all the scenes we shall pass through at the end of the world: vet not so wonderful as to think that at v this very moment the great God loves us, that we have actually each of us a distinct place in the Heart of Jesus. This also is one of the wonders of purgatory.

I. The wonder of the love of Jesus for the Holy

Souls.

1. The immense sea of pains and torments in which they lie.

2. Their utter inability to merit anything.

3. The fact that they are there simply for lack of generosity to Him.

4. That in life they had graces far more than sufficient to avoid all purgatory.

5. Yet Jesus looks upon them with a most special and peculiar love.

6. Because they are actually saved, and can never belong to His enemy, or fall from Him.

7. Because they are in such intolerable suffer ings.

8. Because of the beautiful holiness with which they suffer.

II. Description of the love of Jesus for the Holy

Souls.

1. He looks at their long lives of virtue, grace, conversion, perseverance.

2. He thinks of those mysteries of His own to which they had, or spread a special devotion.

3. He looks at His Mother and thinks how they loved Her; how she loves them, and how He loves her.

4. He loves them, out of the amazing generosity of His Sacred Heart, just "because they are drawing- so largely on the treasures of His Precious Blood, and the alms of the Communion of Saints.

5. He measures all His great Passion, and how it was all for them.

6. He measures all their pains, so heautiful, so holy, so full of sweet desire for Himself, and only for Himself.

7. He looks at their vacant place in Heaven, and longs to see it filled.

8. He looks at us whom He has made so powerful to help these suffering souls, looks with an affectionate reproachfulness, as if we might console His Sacred Heart more plentifully hy doing more for those His Spouses in the flames.

9. He looks at the Eternal Father, and kindles with love of His glory, and sees how the souls will increase it, and rises from His Throne, I think I see Him now and, like thick silent falls of dew, sheds His Precious Blood over those vast fields of fire.

THE QUEEN OF PURGATORY.

I. God s judgments on forgiven sin, in this world and the next.

1. Purgatory, its sufferings-

2. Who the sufferers are Spouses of Jesus Christ, who have had final perseverance.

3. How they suffer in stillness, love, and conformity.

4. How God loves them as the fruit of His Son s Passion.

5. Mary the crowned Queen of purgatory Jesus looks at her.

II. Mary s love for the Holy Souls in that realm of sacred suffering.

1. Because of God s glory.

2. Because of the remembrance of the Passion of Jesus.

3. Because she remembers her prayers for them when they were alive, and their devotion to her.

4. Because of their guardian angels and patron saints.

5. Because of her delight in exercising her powers, specially as they are powers of mercy.

6. Because of her mother s instinct, for she is their real Mother.

III. The Queen of purgatory bends from her throne over that abyss of pain.

1. She adores the justice and awful purity of God.

2. She magnifies His love in providing this semblance of baptism after death.

3. She aids the souls

4. By prayers.

5. By sending angels.

6. By having her feasts kept in heaven.

7. By bidding guardian angels put prayers into the hearts of their clients.

8. By the sweet worship of the voiceless yearnings of her own heart, which constrain God.

Oh, solemn and subduing the thought of those souls that realm of pain no cry, no murmur silent as Jesus before His foes. We shall never know how we really love Mary till we look up to her out of those deeps, those vales of dread mysterious fire.

VII. THE DELIVERANCE OF A SOUL.

Make a composition of place flames sobbing on the shore of purgatory, like the chafing of the tide upon the rocks awful dreary light of the far-stretching land of fire angels white as falling snow when the sun shines on it winging their way about in all that land no sin, nothing but heroic virtues and beautiful tranquillity.

I. Of the souls who are in that land tonight, some have been long there; men have for gotten them through ingratitude, or worldliness, or false thoughts of their goodness, or low views of the exceeding holiness of God.

Some are just arrived there, with all yet to go through.

Some are just ready to come out. All know that they are saved: all know when their punishment will end: but oh! the wearying, lagging lapse of time, which seems so long.

II. But we will take one soul a London soul:

he was poor, had difficulties in keeping the faith, fought for fifty years with this hard hearted city, alas! not without sin but had faith, sacraments, perhaps attendance at church, great devotion to mass anyhow he is gone to purgatory his hour is at hand: it is depending on our prayers, on the prayers of some one of us, on the ending of this octave, on the procession of this night. Oh how he yearns to see God!

III. A growing light a silentness one comes, whom all see, beautiful exceedingly, more radiant than a thousand suns loveliness gleaming from him like a divine vision his presence seems to shed light and fragrance on every soul he descends to the level of the fire, embraces he the beautiful one that pining soul, lifts it out of its bed of suffering

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it grows beautiful in his embrace lie leaves purgatory: we see nothing, but through the still and gloom of night, St. Michael and the soul rise and rise with exceeding swiftness come within sound of the harps of Heaven and enter there. St. Peter welcomes his child St. Michael takes him through astonishing ranks of saints and angels to our Lady s throne, and leaves him there he has done her bidding she is the Queen of that dear soul she rises from her throne pre sents the soul to Jesus and He to the Eternal Father. happy soul it would be bewildered were it n-ot immortal the music of Heaven sounds louder, and the choirs of the angels wax stronger, while the new saint is set upon his throne, and crowned by God with the crown which he won in the dark streets and dull traffic of London, but which his Heavenly Father had prepared for him before the world began. happy, happy soul, happy beyond all words, happy now for ever more. Thou wilt think of us tonight, and thy thoughts of us will be blessings and graces in the morning. We too love Jesus, we too prize our faith, we too will fight our fight and then our turn will come at last, our entry into Heaven, our marvellous coronation, our first sight of the Everblessed God, the begin ning, oh! who can think of it without trembling with nervous delight? the beginning of our beautiful eternity.