EXTRACTS FROM "A TROUBLED HEART."
How often have I been touched at the respect paid the dead in Catholic countries; at the reverence with which the business man, hastening to fulfil the duties of the hour, pauses and lifts his hat as the funeral of the unknown passes him in the street! What pity streams from the eyes of the poor woman who kneels in her humble doorway, and, crossing herself, prays for the repose of the soul that was never known to her in this life; but the body is borne towards the cemetery, and she joins her prayer to the many that are freely offered along the solemn way (pp. 151-2).
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So passes the faithful soul to judgment; after which, if not ushered at once into the ineffable glory of the Father, it pauses for a season in the perpetual twilight of that border-land where the spirit is purged of the very memory of sin. Even as Our Lord Himself descended into Limbo; as He died for us, but rose again from the dead and ascended into heaven, so we hope to rise and follow Him,—sustained by the unceasing prayers of the Church, the intercession of the Saints, and all the choirs of the just, who are called on night and day, and also by the prayers and pleadings of those who have loved us, and who are still in the land of the living.
The prayers that ease the pangs of Purgatory, the Requiem, the Miserere, the De Profundis—these are the golden stairs upon which the soul of the redeemed ascends into everlasting joy. Even the Protestant laureate of England has confessed the poetical justice and truth of this, and into the mouth of the dying Arthur—that worthy knight—he puts these words:
"Pray for my soul! More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of; wherefore let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day;
For, what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." [1]
[Footnote 1: These exquisite lines will be found elsewhere in this volume in the full description of King Arthur's death from Tennyson. But they bear repetition.]
O ye gentle spirits that have gone before me, and who are now, I trust, dwelling in the gardens of Paradise, beside the river of life that flows through the midst thereof,—ye whose names I name at the Memorial for the Dead in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,—as ye look upon the lovely and shining countenances of the elect, and, perchance, upon the beauty of our Heavenly Queen, and upon her Son in glory,—O remember me who am still this side of the Valley of the Shadow, and in the midst of trials and tribulations. And you who have read these pages, written from the heart, after much sorrow and long suffering, though I be still with you in the flesh, or this poor body be gathered to its long home, —you whose eyes are now fixed upon this line, I beseech you,
Pray for me!—Anon.