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"The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of malice shall not touch them: in the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, but they are at peace." (Communion Antiphon, Vigil of All Souls)

"Pour forth abundantly upon us of Thy mercy, O Lord our God, and grant us grace to follow in the joy of their holy testifying, all they blessed servants the ever of whose glorious and solemn Commemoration we are keeping. ( Collect)

Pope Pius Sixtus IV in 1484 established November 1, the feast of all Saints, as a holy day of obligation and gave it both a Vigil (known today as "All Hallows' Eve" or "Hallowe'en") and an eight-day period or octave to celebrate the feast.  By 1955, however, the octave of All Saints was removed, and the current missal does not have a vigil Mass for the feast." Father Vierling

"The great feasts of All Saints and All Souls, preceded by vigil and fast, bring their annual blessings to us, and make the month of November the most unearthly, unworldly month of all the year to those who dwell, during its too brief thirty days, with the radiant inhabitants of heaven and with purgatory's blessed dead.  It is a time for quiet thought, for many memories, for many hopes, and God alone knows many fervent prayers; a time when hearts "through all the faithful past go sorrowing," and, through all the lonely future, look forward to a day when the reapers shall come with rejoicing, bring their sheaves with them, and when God, the loving Father, shall gather His dear children, reunited forever, into an eternal home.

Look upwards and behold them, they who stand there now already, a multitude whom no man can number,assembled triumphant before the great white throne. What do those radiant faces tell you, as they gaze in ecstasy upon the face of Him Who bears continually the glorious scars that proclaim Him King of kings and Lord of lords forever? Over and over again, they say that these saints whose day we celebrate came, like
their Leader, out of a sore conflict, and that they were possessed by a passionate love of the unseen.

"Salt of nations! Twelve foundations!
Twelve apostles - see them all!
Trumps of thunder, and the wonder
Of the Gentiles, holy Paul -
Loving Peter, and still sweeter,
Friend of Jesus, blessed John.
Full of gladness - no more sadness
Clouds the face Christ shines upon!

High procession! great confession!
Hear the loud triumphal tones!
Martyrs bleeding - Stephen leading
With this crown of precious stones.
Warriors glorious and victorious,
Tried companions of the Lord,
Fall before Him and adore Him.
He, the Lamb, is their reward.

It is the old lesson which Venerable Bede teaches, that lesson steeped in the life-blood of the Kind of Martyrs, and which deserves repeating every year, as these festivals return: "Dearly beloved brethren! This day we keep with one great cry of joy, a feast in memory of all God's holy children; His children, Whose presence is a gladness in heaven; His children,  prayers are a blessing to earth; His children, whose victories are the crown of Holy Church; His chose, whose testifying is the more glorious in honor, as the agony in which it was given was the sterner in intensity. For, as the dreader grew the battle, so the grander grew the fighters; and the triumph of martyrdom waxed the more incisive by the multiplicity of suffering; and the heavier the torment, the heavier the prize."

What cowards we are, we lesser men who nevertheless have the saints' seven sacraments, the saints' Mother Church, the saints' hope set before us, yet who shiver and shrink at the sound of suffering, and run away from pain!  I know not what stuff we are made of, in these mean, pleasure-loving days. Is it not better to suffer now than to suffer hereafter? Pere de Ravignan says that God in His goodness mingles purgatory with every day of our lives, and so we should accept and clasp to our breasts the crosses He offers us. Fenelon declares that it is a blessing to have our purgatory in this world, but that we by our cowardice endure two instead of one. "Our resistance," he says, :"makes earthly trials so ineffectual, that all has to be begun again after death. We should be in this life like souls in purgatory, supple and at peace in God's hand, yielding ourselves up to destruction in the avenging fire of love. Happy those who suffer thus."

Happy? Yes, my God! Teach us this happiness, this deep delight of pain. Teach us two lessons, - to fight, and to suffer, for Thee and under Thy red-cross flag!  Blessed who suffer - blessed who mourn - blessed who wounded and bleeding, still face untiring the tireless foe! We are sinners; and we must, here or hereafter, do penance for our sins. We are called to be saints; and like the saints we  must war unflinching in the tremendous warfare, if we would win the saints' reward and follow the mighty army into heaven.

"Cut, scourge, purge, burn here," prayed the penitent Augustine, "yea, burn here so as by fire, and spare there!" Yet not only for the cleansing and the penance do we fling ourselves, O God! into the red fire of earth's purgatory but because pain purges out the dross, and brightens the gold, and brings us closer to Thee. Strike and spare not, O God! and, even though we cry out otherwise, heed not, till every fiber of our being is one with Thee!
 
Sometimes, gazing steadily upward at the Blessed, radiant in their rapture which sin mar no more, a light flashes over the soul for a moment, and dazzles it; and it seems to comprehend, for that moment, that pain is heaven! For what is heaven but union with God/ and odes not he who clings closest to the Sacred Heart find union with God among the thorns, and does he not behold, in that darkness which makes earthly things invisible, the vision of Christ's face?

Cowards that we are, to shrink from pain or from insult; to fear this world's disgrace, or failure as worldly men count failure; when the question is of God's will, God's honor, God's eternal cause! We are soldiers in His army by the ineffaceable character of our Baptism. If we have been cowards, deserters, traitors, a hundred times, then the keener ought to be our soldierly longing to endure and encounter all in order that we may retrieve our honor, and far more, our Lord's honor! But if He has kept us from open treason, who shall tell with what loyal love we ought to follow after Him, down into the very valley of the agony and up the heights of Calvary, upward, with all the saints, to Heaven!"

The Inner Life of the Soul, Short Spiritual Messages for the Ecclesiastical Year by Susan L. Emery, 1903

Book also available at Barnes and Nobles