There is a substantially correct translation of the final verse of the Shepherd Psalm, which may be rendered as follows: “And Thy goodness and kindness pursue me all the days of my life, _that I may dwell_ in the house of the Lord forever.” It is the special wording of the second clause of the stanza that expresses the real purpose of divine Providence in regard to the elect. Everything in life has been ordained and arranged for their eternal salvation, and for the increase of their heavenly rewards. “Therefore,” wrote St. Paul to Timothy, “I endure all things for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation, which is in Christ Jesus, with heavenly glory.”(112) It is this firm conviction that infinite love is at the bottom of all the workings of Providence, doing everything for the sake of the elect, that consoles and steadies the souls of the just throughout all the trials and crosses of life. In the thick of the battle they never lose sight of the faithful Shepherd that leads them, and they ever behold by faith the unspeakable delights He has prepared for them that love Him. What joys are there in our faith and hope! If by the mercy and goodness of God we succeed in saving our souls, how cheap will seem the price we shall have paid for Heaven, and how benign and ineffably loving will appear the Providence of God which is leading us there! At times now in our fervor we can faintly and feebly imagine what it will mean to throw off forever this veil of faith and see distinctly and continually the Shepherd of our souls. But our liveliest conceptions here are infinitely inferior to the vision to come. “To see God face to face, as He is; to gaze undazzled on the Three Divine Persons, cognizable and distinct in the burning fires of their inaccessible splendors; to behold that long-coveted sight, the endless Generation of the All-holy Son, and our hearts to hold the joy, and not die; to watch with spirits all out-stretched in adoration the ever-radiant and ineffably beautiful Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son, and to participate ourselves in that jubilee of jubilees, and drink in with greedy minds the wonders of that Procession, and the marvelous distinctness of its beauty from the Generation of the Son; to feel ourselves with ecstatic awe, and yet with seraphic intimacy, overshadowed by the Person of the Unbegotten Father, the Father to whom and of whom we have said so much on earth, the Fountain of Godhead, who is truly our Father, while He is also the Father of the Eternal Son; to explore, with exulting license and with unutterably glad fear, attribute after attribute, oceans opening into oceans of divinest beauty; to lie astonished in unspeakable contentment before the vision of God’s surpassing Unity, so long the joyous mystery of our predilection, while the Vision through all eternity seems to grow more fresh and bright and new: O my poor soul! what canst thou know of this, or of these beautiful