the
battle they never lose sight of the faithful Shepherd that leads them, and
they ever behold by faith the unspeakable delights He has prepared for
them that love Him.

What joys are there in our faith and hope! If by the mercy and goodness of
God we succeed in saving our souls, how cheap will seem the price we shall
have paid for Heaven, and how benign and ineffably loving will appear the
Providence of God which is leading us there! At times now in our fervor we
can faintly and feebly imagine what it will mean to throw off forever this
veil of faith and see distinctly and continually the Shepherd of our
souls. But our liveliest conceptions here are infinitely inferior to the
vision to come. "To see God face to face, as He is; to gaze undazzled on
the Three Divine Persons, cognizable and distinct in the burning fires of
their inaccessible splendors; to behold that long-coveted sight, the
endless Generation of the All-holy Son, and our hearts to hold the joy,
and not die; to watch with spirits all out-stretched in adoration the
ever-radiant and ineffably beautiful Procession of the Holy Ghost from the
Father and the Son, and to participate ourselves in that jubilee of
jubilees, and drink in with greedy minds the wonders of that Procession,
and the marvelous distinctness of its beauty from the Generation of the
Son; to feel ourselves with ecstatic awe, and yet with seraphic intimacy,
overshadowed by the Person of the Unbegotten Father, the Father to whom
and of whom we have said so much on earth, the Fountain of Godhead, who is
truly our Father, while He is also the Father of the Eternal Son; to
explore, with exulting license and with unutterably glad fear, attribute
after attribute, oceans opening into oceans of divinest beauty; to lie
astonished in unspeakable contentment before the vision of God's
surpassing Unity, so long the joyous mystery of our predilection, while
the Vision through all eternity seems to grow more fresh and bright and
new: O my poor soul! what canst thou know of this, or of these beautiful
necessities, of thy exceeding love, which shall only satisfy itself in
endless alternations, now of silence and now of song?"(113)

If regret were possible for the blessed hereafter, they would never cease
to mourn over the loss of their opportunities on earth to increase their
eternal beatitude. It is only when the veil shall have been removed that
we shall fully realize how the goodness and mercy of God have