When time is rolled away for us like a scroll
The perfecting of our faculties hereafter, requires the sacrifice of all here
When our covering of a day is dissolved, when time is rolled away for us like a scroll, then we shall more fully enjoy the spirit of life, and drink, with the Redeemer, the fresh juice of the eternal vine, which will restore our faculties to their perfect fulness, to be employed as it may please Him to ordain.
But, in vain should we promise ourselves such enjoyment hereafter, if we have not faithfully performed all our sacrifices here below, not only those belonging to our personal renovation, but those which concern the voluntary offer of our whole earthly and mortal being, by a daily care, on our part, to become orderly victims, without spot and blameless. For, in that invisible region which we enter on leaving this world, we shall find no more earth to receive those different kinds of blood, which we must necessarily pour out, to recover our liberty;and, if we carry with us the corruption, which these different kinds of blood may contain, there would remain nothing for us but suffering and anguish, since the time and place for voluntary sacrifices would be past.
Man: His true nature and ministry, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin
But you who have entered the stewardship of the Word, only after every door, spiritual and divine, has been opened, do you not think you have sometimes laboured to shut them? Why, in your solemnities, do you give merely as a commemoration, what ought to be given only to an ever-increasing real work in us? For them to be truly religious festivals, the spirit which presides over these solemnities should, by your means, make us rise at each period to the same degree of virtuality which divine things attained at the corresponding epoch in the world.