The Book of Heaven
—Unofficial Version—

January 27, 1900

The order of the virtues in the soul.

I continue to be almost without my sweet Jesus; my life is leaving me because of the pain; I feel such tedium, boredom, tiredness of life… I kept saying in my interior:  ‘Oh, how my exile has been prolonged!  Oh, what happiness would be mine if I could loosen the bonds of this body so that my soul might take wing, freely, toward my highest Good!’  A thought said to me:  ‘And what if you go to hell?’  And I, so as not to call the devil to fight me, immediately snapped out of it by saying:  ‘Well then, even from hell I will send my sighs to my sweet Jesus – even from there do I want to love Him.’  While I was amid these and other thoughts – the story would be too long if I wanted to repeat them all – lovable Jesus made Himself seen for just a little, but with a serious aspect, and He told me:  “Your time has not yet come.”

Then, with an intellectual light He made me comprehend that everything must be orderly in the soul.  The soul possesses many little apartments in which each virtue takes its place, even though it can be said that one single virtue contains all others within itself, and that the soul, by possessing only one of them, comes to be endowed with all the other virtues.  However, in spite of this, they are all distinct among themselves, so much so, that each of them has its own place in the soul.  And here is how all virtues have their origin in the mystery of the Sacrosanct Trinity:  while It is One, there are Three distinct Persons, and while They are Three, They are One.  I also understood that these apartments in the soul are either full of virtue or of the vice opposite to that virtue; and if there is neither virtue nor vice, they remain empty.  It seemed to me that they are like a house which contains many rooms, all empty; or some rooms are full of snakes, some of mud; some are full of pieces of furniture full of dust, and some are dark.  Ah, Lord, You alone can put my poor soul in order!