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.