that must be felt for a
blissful past; the consciousness of a flying present; and the fear of an
uncertain future? Yet the idea of time does not seem necessarily
excluded from a conception of the essence and operations of God. Does
there in very reality exist such an absolute opposition between time and
eternity, that it is quite impossible for them to subsist in any mutual
contact or relation? Is there no transition from the one to the other
conceivable? Is eternity anything more than time vitally full,
blissfully complete? If eternity is nothing more than the living, full,
essential time, and if our earthly, fettered, and fragmentary time is,
as the great poet says, 'out of joint,' fallen with man's disobedience
to his God into a state of strange disorder--it is easily conceivable
that the two do not stand apart so as to have no mutual contact. Those
who have seen a holy death leave a calm and beautiful smile upon the
face of a dying Christian, can scarcely help believing that the
beginning of a blissful eternity has impressed itself upon the rapt
features, actually breaking through the shackles of time before the
prisoner was emancipated from its fetters. And those brief intervals of
rapture which are sometimes experienced in the midst of earnest and
ardent devotion--what are they but eternity thus manifesting itself
through time in the soul? Those who have been rescued from the very jaws
of death, frequently tell us that the moment preceding insensibility was
crowded and filled with vivid recollections of the whole apparently
forgotten past--thus bringing into the soul in the midst of time, a
foretaste and interval of eternity! and those prophetic intimations of
things yet to be, which frequently break in with startling power upon
the human spirit, what indeed are they but sudden contacts between our
fettered time, 'so out of joint,' and the fulness of eternity? Men rave
against the justice of eternal punishment, as if its duration were not
essentially part of their own immortality! Ah! if the memories of the
deeds done in the body are essentially undying, were it not well for us
that the writing traced against us by our own hands should be nailed to
the cross, obliterated in the blood of the Immaculate Victim? that
mystic blood which has bathed the universe!

The innate longing for the infinite, with its accompanying intuitions of
the eternal love, and the yearnings for that fulness of time when the
past and futur