"All Things Betray Thee, Who Betrayest Me."

It is happiness the human soul is ever yearning for. It never ceases its quest for happiness. Night and day, year after year, it is grasping after happiness.

The weary days of labor are borne to gain the wealth with which it thinks it may buy happiness. The days of suffering and pain are spent in watching and waiting for the agony to pass, that happiness may come.

It looks for it in every creature, in the earth, in the sea, in the air. The soul asks all these things—wherein is your happiness—and the answer of earth, air, sea is "He made us." "We are for Him, for His glory."

So the soul is looking for happiness, and in all these things it will not find happiness. It will find happiness only in God. And yet instead of seeking it in God, it turns away from Him and seeks it in the creature, something that is not God.

And God is ever seeking that soul which is running away from Him. Wherever it runs, the sound of those feet, following ever after, is heard, and a voice, stronger than the beat

But with unhurrying chase, And imperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy They beat—and a Voice beats More instant than the feet, "All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." And this thought of the creature fleeing from God, and ever pursued by His love,

is most beautifully expressed in the poem of Francis Thompson, the great Catholic poet. He seems to sing in verse, the thought of St. Ignatius in the spiritual exercises,

Link (here) to the book entitled A Study of Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven, by Fr. John Francis Xavier O'Conor, S.J.