Chapter VI.

Comparison Illustrating The Ardent Love With Which The Souls In Purgatory Long For Union With God.

If in all the world there were but one loaf, the mere sight of which would satiate the hunger of all creatures, what would be the feelings of a man, with a natural instinct to eat when he is in health, if he were neither able to eat, nor yet to be ill or to die? His hunger would always be increasing with its undiminished instinct, and, knowing that he could be satiated by the very sight of this loaf of which he is deprived, he remains in unbearable torments. The nearer he approaches it, the more ravenous is his hunger, which draws him toward this food, the object of his desire.

If he were sure of never beholding this bread, he would endure a kind of hell, like that of the eternally lost, who are deprived of the Bread of Life and of the hope of ever beholding Christ our Redeemer.

The souls in purgatory, on the contrary, hope to behold this bread and to eat their fill thereof; but meanwhile they suffer the torments of a cruel hunger after it--that is to say, after Jesus Christ, the God of our salvation and our love.