This is the light, the brilliancy which is promised to the saints by our Blessed Lord himself, when He says: "Then shall the just shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father."* Thus shall the soul that is now united to God, in the Beatific Vision, and already a partaker of the divine nature, communicate her own dazzling splendor to the body, and surround it with an aureola of glory, which will form a portion of her blessedness for evermore. * Matt. xiii. But, although all the just must rise in glory and in the perfection of human nature, you must not, therefore, infer that all shall rise in the same degree of beauty and splendor of form. For, as the resurrection is a reward to the just, it follows that each one shall have a body glorified in proportion to his own individual merits. Any contrary doctrine would sound like heresy. If you were told, for instance, that the murderer who dies on the scaffold, after making an act of perfect contrition, will rise on the last day with a body as beautiful and glorious as that of the Blessed Virgin, or of the Apostles, martyrs, and holy virgins, your whole soul would revolt at such a doctrine. You would maintain, that if the resurrection is a reward to the just, the beauty of their bodies should bear some proportion to their merits. You would certainly be right in maintaining this; for it is the very doctrine taught by St. Paul, when he says: "One is the glory of the sun, another the glory of the moon, and another the glory of the stars, for star differeth from star in glory: so also in the resurrection of the dead."* Each one, therefore, shall rise in that particular degree of glory which he has deserved by the more or less holy life he has led in this world. * 1 Cor. xv. 41. It will no longer be as it is in this world, where personal beauty is a free gift of God, but no reward. Hence we see personal beauty in pagans and infidels, as well as in Christians. Its possession does not, in the hast, denote sanctity; nor does its absence denote moral depravity; and, therefore, beautiful persons may be very wicked, while deformed ones may be very holy. Not so after the resurrection. Perfect personal beauty, accompanied with a heavenly splendor, being one of the rewards in store for the children of God, will then denote sanctity in the just. The more holy they have been in this life, the more beautiful and conformable to the glorious body of Jesus they shall be.