Life Everlasting

WE propose in this book to speak of life everlasting, to show what light falls on our life here below from the life there beyond. Our chief concern will be the immensity of the human soul, first in our present life, then in the particular judgment at the moment when the soul is separated from the body. Thus we shall attain a better understanding, first of what hell is: that boundless void which can never be filled; the unmeasured depths of the soul forever deprived of that sovereign good which alone could fill those depths. Secondly of what purgatory is: the state of the soul which cannot as yet possess God, which is deprived for a period short or long of the vision of God, because by its own fault it was not ready for its appointed meeting. Thirdly of what the moment of entering heaven is, an instantaneous moment which will never pass away: the unchanging possession of life everlasting, of God who alone can fill the boundless depths of the human will. This soul-depth, as we shall see, is explained by the truth that already in the natural order our will is illumined not merely by sense and imagination but by the intellect which, grasping universal reality, grasps likewise universal and boundless good, a good which, speaking concretely, is found in God alone, the infinite good.