Chapter I. The Interests of Jestjs

Jesus belongs to us. He vouchsafes to put Himself at our disposal. He communicates to us everything of His which we are capable of receiving. He loves us with a love which no words can tell, nay, above all our thought and imagination; and He condescends to desire, with a longing which is equally indescribable, that we should love Him, with a fervent and entire love. His merits may be called ours as well as His. His satisfactions are not so much His treasures as they are ours. His sacraments are but so many ways which His love has designed to communicate Him to our souls. Wherever we turn in the church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning, middle, and end of every thing to us. He is our help in penance, our consolation in grief, our support in trial. There is nothing good, nothing holy, nothing beautiful, nothing joyous, which He is not to His servants. No one need be poor, because, if he chooses, he can have Jesus for his own property and possession. No one need be downcast, for Jesus is the joy of heaven, and it is His joy to enter into sorrowful hearts. We can exaggerate about many things; but we can never exaggerate our obligations to Jesus, or the compassionate abundance of the love of Jesus to us. All our lives long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to an end of the sweet things that are to be said about Him. Eternity will not be long enough to learn all He is, or to praise Him for all He has done; but then that matters not; for we shall be always with Him, and we desire nothing more.

He has kept nothing back from us. There is not a faculty of His Human Soul which has not had to do with our salvation. There is not one limb of His Sacred Body which has not suffered for us. There is not one pain, one shame, one indignity, which He has not drained to its last dreg of bitterness on our behalf. There is not one drop of His most Precious Blood which He has not shed for us; nor is there one beating of His Sacred Heart which is not an act of love to us. We read wonderful things in the Lives of the Saints about their love of God, wonderful things which we dare not think of imitating. They practised fearful austerities, or they spent years in unbroken silence, or they were ever in ecstasies and raptures, or they were passionately in love with contempt and suffering, or they pined and wasted away in holy impatience for death, or they courted death, and expired in the long tortures of an excruciating martyrdom. Each one of these things separately fills us with wonder. Yet, put them all together, conceive all the love of Peter, Paul, and John, of Joseph and of Magdalen, of all the apostles and martyrs, the confessors and virgins of the Church in all ages, thrown into one heart made, by miracle, strong enough to hold such love; then add to it all the burning love which the nine choirs of multitudinous angels have for God, and crown it all with the amazing love of the Immaculate Heart of our dear Mother; and still it comes not near to, nay, it is but a poor imitation of, the love which Jesus has for each one of us, however lowly and unworthy and sinful we may be! We know our own unworthiness. We hate ourselves for our own past sins. We are impatient with our own secret meanness, irritability, and wretchedness. We are tired with our own badness and littleness. Yet, for all that, He loves us with this unutterable love, and is ready, if need be, as He revealed to one of His servants, to come down from heaven to be crucified over again for each one of us.

The wonder is not merely that He should love us so much, but that He should love us at all. Considering who He is, and what we are, have we any one single claim to His love, except the excess and, without Him, the hopelessness of our misery? We have no claims upon Him, but those which He Himself in His compassion has invented for us. What can be more unlovely than we are, what more ungenerous, what more ungrateful? And yet He loves us with this excess of love! Oh, how is it we can ever turn ourselves away from this one idea! How is it we can take an interest in any thing but this surpassing love of God for His fallen creatures! It is almost surprising how we can bear to go through our ordinary duties, or how it is that, like men in love with created loves, we do not forget to eat and drink and sleep, feeling ourselves every hour of the day and night the object of the most profuse tenderness and the most unutterable abundance of the love of God, the Almighty, the All Wise, the All Holy, the All Beautiful, the Everlasting! Oh most incredible of startling wonders! Blessings are heaped upon us till we are almost out of breath with them. Graces are multiplied upon graces till they get beyond our power of reckoning. His compassions are new every morning. And then, after all, there is yet to come the recompense which eye has never seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived! This is His side of the question.

Alas! for our dearest Lord! Up to this day, what have we done for Him? And see what He has done for us; and the end of His doing it all was to gain our love! We look upon a crucifix, and it hardly moves us. We hear of His bitter Passion, but our eyes are dry, and our hearts indifferent. We kneel down to pray, but we can hardly keep our thoughts fixed upon Him for a quarter of an hour together. We go into His own most holy presence, and we hardly bend the knee before the Tabernacle, lest it should spoil our clothes. We see others sin, and what matter is it to us that Jesus is offended, so long as it is not we who are risking our souls by offending Him? Oh, these are strange signs of love! Surely Jesus cannot be much to us, if this is the way we feel about Him. Yet so it is. We go our own way, and do our own will. The great thing is to please ourselves, and to make things easy to us. Life must be taught to run smooth. As to penance, it must be kept at arm's length. We must have bodily comforts and worldly conveniences, and our spiritual life must be nothing but a sufficiency of those inward consolations, without which our souls give us pain, because they are not at rest. If we worship God, it is for self; if we do good to others, it is self we are seeking, even in our charity. Poor Jesus Christ! as St. Alphonso used to say, poor Jesus Christ! Who thinks of Him? who weds His interests?

Yet this is the very object of our Confraternity of the Precious Blood — to look after the interests of Jesus, and to forward them in every way we can. There is hardly any worldly object of importance which has not got some association to defend its rights and to forward its interests; why should not the interests of Jesus have one also? Science has its meetings, and its corresponding societies. Men band together in order to gain the victory for some favorite political opinions. They make companies for railways and for steam-packets and for coal-mines. Why should not we open an office to transact the affairs of Jesus, to protect His rights, and advance His interests? Now remember! this is just the business of the Confraternity of the Precious Blood. When we join it, we must leave self at the door. There is no self in it. It is all for Jesus. It is the office of the interests of Jesus.

Now, let us try to get an idea of the interests of Jesus; else, how shall we be able to do any thing to advance them? Men cannot work in the dark; they must know what they are about. You know what it is to have an interest. If you look over the world, you will see that everybody has some interest at heart, and is working hard for it. There are almost as many interests in the world as there are men. Every one you meet in the streets is going after something. You see it in his face, his quick eye, and his rapid walk. Either it is political, or literary, or mercantile, or scientific, or fashionable, or simply ambitious, or dishonest. Still, whatever it is, every man has wedded the interest of his choice, and is doing his duty to it. He works hard for it all day; he goes to bed with the thought of it, and he wakes with it in the morning. Even on Sunday, it is rather his hand that is resting, than his head or his heart: they are full of his interest. Look what men will do, singly, or banded, to put down slavery, or to get free trade, or to compete for a large order, or to carry the mails, or to make new railroads. It is plain men have interests enough in the world, that they love them dearly, and work for them manfully. Oh that it were all for God, the good, the merciful, the eternal God!

The devil also has his interests in the world. He has been allowed to set up a kingdom in opposition to God, and, like all sovereigns, he has a multitude of interests. Thus he has ageiats everywhere, active, diligent, unseen spirits, swarming in the streets of the cities, to push on his interests. They canvass the laborers in the field. They see what they can do with the monk in his cloister and the hermit in his cell. Even in the churches, during Mass or Benediction, they are hard at work, plying their unholy trade. Our fellow-men also, by thousands, let themselves out to him as agents; nay, numbers work in his interests for nothing; and, what is more shocking still, many do his work, and almost fancy it is God's work they are doing, it looks so good and blameless in their eyes. How many Catholics oppose good things, or criticise good persons; yet they would never consent to be the devil's agents, if they really knew what they were about. These interests of the devil are very various. To cause mortal sin, to persuade to venial sin, to hinder grace, to prevent contrition, to keep back from sacraments, to promote lukewarmness, to bring holy people and bishops and religious orders into disrepute, and to stand in the way of vocations, to spread gossip, to distract people at prayer, to make men fall in love with the frivolities and fashions of the world, to get men to spend money on comforts, furniture, jewels, nicknacks, parrots, old china, fine dress, instead of on the poor of Jesus Christ, to induce Catholics to worship great people and put their trust in princes, and fawn upon political parties in power, to make them full of criticism of each other, and quick as children to take scandal, to diminish devotion to our Blessed Lady, and to make people fancy divine lor* is an enthusiasm and an indiscretion: these are the chiet interests of the devil. It is amazing with what energy he works at them, and with what consummate craft and dreadful ability he advances them in the world. It would be a thing to admire, if it did not make us afraid for our own souls, and if all things which are against God were not simply abominable, and to be Viated. The dark enemy of the Creator is mysteriously allowed a marvellous share of success in that creation which the All Holy once looked down upon, and blessed in His unspeakable complacency. Men's interests put the interests of Jesus on one side, partly as 2 troublesome, more often as insignificant. The devil's interests are directly opposed to those of Jesus, and where they are successful, either debase them, or kill them altogether.

Now, let us look at the interests of Jesus. Let us take a view of the whole Church, which is His Spouse. Look first into heaven, the Church triumphant. It is the interest of Jesus that the glory of the most Holy Trinity should be increased in every possible manner, and at every hour of night and day; and this glory, which is called God's accidental glory, is increased by every good work, word, and thought, every correspondence to grace, every resistance to temptation, every act of worship, every sacrament rightly administered or humbly received, every act of homage and love to Mary, every invocation of the saints, every bead of the Rosary, every sign of the Cross, every drop of holy water, every pain patiently endured, every harsh judgment meekly borne, every good wish, though it end only with the wishing, and never sees fulfilment — provided there be a devout intention along with all these things, and they are done in union with the merits of our sweet Lord. Every hour, at least so we trust, a new soul lands in heaven from Purgatory or from earth, and begins its eternity of rapture and of praise. Each soul that swells the throng of worshippers, each silent voice added to the angelic choirs, is an increase to the glory of God; and so it is the interest of Jesus to make these arrivals more frequent, and that they should bring more merits and higher degrees of love with them when they come. Even in heaven the Confraternity has work to do, and power to do it.

Heaven is one of our offices, and there is much business to be despatched in its beautiful courts, business for the interests of Jesus, business which He has at heart, and, therefore, which it behooves us to have in hand.

Next, look at that vast kingdom of Purgatory, with its empress mother, Mary. All those countless throngs of souls are the dear and faithful spouses of Jesus. Yet in what a strange abandonment of supernatural suffering has His love left them! He longs for their deliverance; He yearns for them to be transferred from that land, perpetually overclouded with pain, to the bright sunshine of their heavenly home. Yet He has tied His own hands, or nearly so. He gives them no more grace: He allows them no more time for penance; He prevents them from meriting; nay, some have thought they could not pray. How then stands the case with the souls in the suffering Church? Why, it is a thing to be meditated on when we have said it — they depend almost more on earth than they do on heaven, almost more on us than on Him; so He has willed it on whom all depend and without whom there is no dependence. It is clear then that Jesus has His interests there. He wants His captives released. Those whom He has redeemed He now bids us redeem, us whom, if there be life at all in us, He has already Himself redeemed. Every satisfaction offered up to God for these suffering souls, every oblation of the Precious Blood to the Eternal Father, every Mass heard, every communion received, every voluntaiy penance undergone: the scourge, the hair-shirt, the prickly chain, every indulgence gained, every jubilee whose conditions we have fulfilled, every De Profundis whispered, every little alms doled out to the poor who are poorer than ourselves, and, if they be offered for the intention of these dear prisoners, the interests of Jesus are hourly forwarded in Mary's kingdom of Purgatory. This is another office of the Confraternity, and there is no fear of overworking the glorious secretary of that wide realm, the blessed Michael, Mary's subject. See how men work at the pumps on ship-board when they are fighting for their lives with an ugly leak. Oh that we had the charity so to work, with the sweet instrumentality of indulgence, for the holy souls in Purgatory! The infinite satisfactions of Jesus are at our command, and Mary's sorrows, and the Martyr's pangs, and the Confessor's weary perseverance in well-doing. Jesus will not help Himself here; because He loves to see us helping Him, and because He thinks our love will rejoice that He still leaves us something we can do for Him. There have been saints who have devoted their whole lives to this one work, mining in Purgatory: and to those who reflect in faith, it does not seem, after all, so strange. It is a foolish comparison, simply because it is so much below the mark, but on all principles of reckoning, it is a much less work to have won the battle of Waterloo, or to have invented the steam-engine, than to have freed one soul from Purgatory; and I should be slow to think there was a single member of the Confraternity who had not done more than that already. Now look at the Church militant on earth. The interests of Jesus are rich and plentiful enough here.

There are things to be done, and things to be left undone. Hearts to be persuaded, and hearts to be dissuaded. There is so much to do, the puzzle is where to begin, and what to do first. Men who do not love Jesus are to be made to love Him, and men who love Him to love Him a great deal more. Each of us might take one department, and we should find more work to be done in it than we can get through in our best of times. There are so many people in their agony, and dying every minute, all over the world. Oh, in what danger the very dearest interests of Jesus are at their dying beds! Satan is hard at work; temptations thicker than flakes in a snow-storm; and whoso wins this battle, Jesus or the devil, is so far conqueror for ever; for there is no fighting it over again. There are Catholics who have not been near the sacraments for years, and there are saints whose half-century of merits and heroic love is positively in peril of being lost; they only want one thing, and let them suffer ever so much they cannot merit it, and that is, final perseverance. There are heretics who never suspected they were in heresy, and heretics in bad faith, who have told falsehoods about the Church, and have run down the Mother of God. There are Jews descended from those who crucified our Lord, and there are Mohammedans who are the masters of Jerusalem. There are Hottentots who worship loathsome images, and there are American Indians who have no higher thought than to hunt for all eternity, their merits proportioned to the number of their murders. There are men whom the unthawing snows whiten, and men whom the fierce heats of the south scorch, on the mountain tops, in the deep valleys, in the city and in the wilderness, on the land and on the sea, in the dungeon and in the palace; all dying, many a minute, in the most frightful unpreparedness that can be conceived; and Jesus died for every one of them, as exclusively as if there had been nobody else to die for, and He is ready this moment to come down and die for each one again, if it were needed. Go all through His long Passion, mark His steps, His tears, His drops of blood; count the thorns, the blows, the spittings, the falls; fathom the interior depths of the shame and shrinking, the torture and the sickness of His Sacred Heart; and it was all for that poor Indian, dying far away this hour beneath the shadow of the Andes; and if he dies and is not saved, it will have been in vain. This is but one department of the interests of Jesus, men in their last agony; and St. Camillus was raised up to found an Order expressly for them. What might I not say of souls in mortal sin, of heretics and infidels, of criminals in prison, of persons under calumny, of others in scruples or temptations? I should never have done if I described all the interests of Jesus upon earth.

As, however, I have mentioned the dying, and the dangers of the death-bed, as the object of a special devotion, it will not be out of place to remind you that Pius VII. attached indulgences to the recital of three Paters and Aves for the dying, in honor of the Agony of Jesus, which will be found in the Raccolta. Many saints and holy persons have had this special devotion for souls in their agony. In the life of one of the first mothers of the Visitation we read that, as she was watching before the Blessed Sacrament during the night of Holy Thursday, 1644, she saw a vision of our Lord in His agony, and with this vision there was given her a light and an efficacious grace to pray for the intentions of persons in their agony. " Alas! " she said, " the agonies of poor creatures are strange hours," and, in truth, that moment, decisive of eternity, is the only important affair we have to transact. From the hour she received this admirable grace, she often seemed to hear the sighs of dying persons; and the effect this had upon her was so great, that ever afterward she said, night and morning, the prayers of the Church for those in their agony. She often meditated on the words which our Lord said of Himself a little before His death, " The prince of this world is come, and finds nothing in Me," as if all life was to be so directed as to enable us to make these words in some measure our own when we come to die. Of the same religious we are told, in another place, that when the Bishop of Geneva came, on St. Jerome's day, to consecrate the Church of the order at Annecy, and the superioress wished one of the six chapels to be dedicated to St. Joseph, this good sister begged her to let it be dedicated to St. Joseph dying in the arms of Jesus and Mary. " Ah! my good mother! " she cried, " God has made known to me that, by this devotion to St. Joseph Dying, His goodness wills to give many graces to persons in their agony, and that, as St. Joseph did not go to heaven at once, Jesus not having yet opened it, but that he descended to the limbus of the fathers, it is a most efficacious devotion for the agonizing, and for the souls in purgatory, to offer to God the resignation of the great St. Joseph in dying and leaving Jesus and Mary, and to honor the holy patience of his tranquil expectation, till the dawn of Easter, when the Risen Jesus set him free." So much for this devotion; but, I repeat, I should never have done if I described all the interests of Jesus upon earth.

There is not a public-house or a gin-palace, not a threatre or a casino, not a ball-room or a concert, not a public meeting or a parliament, not a shop or a wharf, not a fair, a race-course, or a market, not a carriage or a ship, not a school or a church, where His interests are not in danger at all hours, and where He is not calling on us to help Him. This is the fighting part of the Church; no wonder there is so much to do, and so little time to do it in. There is not a thing which has not two sides, and one side belongs to Jesus, and the other side is against Him. The devil has other interests besides sheer sin. He can fight against Jesus with low views almost as successfully as with mortal sins. The slow poison of souls sometimes does his work better than the quick. See, then, the multiplicity, the ubiquity, the urgency, of the interests of Jesus; and it is to meet all this that we are members of the Confraternity.

Yet although it is impossible to go through all the interests of Jesus on earth with any thing like minuteness, it is necessary to have somewhat more of a clear and definite view about them; in order that we may understand our office and work as members of the Confraternity. If we study the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as He lias revealed it to us in the Gospel, in the history of the Church, in the lives of His saints, and as we have found it ourselves in prayer, we shall see that the multitudinous and manifold interests of our most dear Lord may be gathered up into four classes; and a short sketch of these classes will put us in possession of that clear view of our work which we are seeking-after. The first interests of Jesus are, of course, in our own souls. The kingdom of heaven is within us. Yet, all important as it is, the question of our own holiness is not, at least directly, the one we are concerned with just at present. Without personal holiness we shall do nothing; but this is not the time or place to speak of that. The four great interests of Jesus to which I am now alluding are, 1, The glory of His Father, 2, The fruit of His Passion, 3, The honor of His Mother, and 4, The esteem of grace. Let me say a word on each of these.

1. The glory of His Father. When we study our Blessed Lord as He is represented to us in the Gospels, nothing, if we may venture to use such an expression, seems so like a ruling passion in Him as His longing for His Father's glory. From the time when at the age of twelve He left Mary, and stayed behind in Jerusalem, to His very last word upon the Cross, this devotion to the glory of God comes up at every turn. As it is said of Him on one occasion that the zeal for God's house ate Him up, so may we say that He was eaten up continually with hungering and thirsting after His Father's glory. It was as if God's glory had been lost upon the earth, and He was come to seek it and to find it, and how was His Sacred Heart straitened until He did find it! Thus was He our example! for this end does He give us grace, that we may glorify our Father who is in Heaven. Now, who can look into the world, and not see how God's glory is lost upon the earth? It is the interest of Jesus that we should seek and find it. Apart from clear acts of great and grievous sin, how is God forgotten, clean forgotten, by the greatest part of mankind! They live as if there were no God. It is not as if they openly rebelled against Him. They- pass Him over and ignore Him. He is an inconvenience in His own world, an impertinence in His own creation. So He has been quietly set on one side, as if He were an idol out of fashion, and in the way. Men of science and politicians have agreed on this, and men of business and wealth think it altogether the most decent thing, to be silent about God; for it is difficult to speak of Him, or have a view of Him, without allowing too much to Him. Here is a desperate, if it were not for grace we should say altogether desperate, obstacle to the interests of Jesus, this great huge impenetrable mass of forgetfulness of God, of ignoring of God. Oh, how it turns our hearts sick, and makes us long for death; for what can we do in so hopeless an affair as this? Yet we must try. A string of beads and a blessed medal! There is no saying what they cannot do! And a single Mass, is its power far short of infinite?

Then unfortunately there are a great many religious people who by no means give God's glory its fitting place; many, called spiritual, who give Him but the second best of every thing. They want light to know

God's glory when they see it. They want discernment to detect the world and the devil under the show of reason and moderation, whereby they would defraud Him of his glory. They want bravery to set the world's opinion at defiance, and consistency to make their lives all of a piece with their religion. Good souls! they are the very pestilence of the Church, and yet they never for one moment suspect it; and it is very much for the interest of Jesus that they should see themselves, and other things as well, in their true light. So here also we have some work to do, to pray that all good men, and men trying to be good, should be able to see what is for God's glory and what is not. Oh, what ground we lose every day for the want of this discernment!

Then, there are religious orders, set apart with the blessing of the Church, each in its own particular way, to work out this glory of God. There are bishops and priests, all supposed to be toiling with a single aim and an exclusive perfection for this one thing. There are guilds and confraternities without number, and is not this their end? Calamities have to be endured, dangers faced, scandals exposed, the Church has to knock under to the world to-day, and to roughride it to-morrow; and Jesus has interests in all these things; and it is our work to help Him. Half-a-dozen men, going about God's world, seeking nothing but God's glory, — they would remove mountains. This was promised to faith; why should not we be the men to do it?

2. The fruit of His Passion. This is the second great interest of Jesus. Every sin we can prevent, no matter how venial, is a great thing for the interests of Jesus. We can see how great a thing it is, if we remember that if we could shut hell for ever, save all the souls that are in it, empty purgatory, and make all the men and women on earth persevering saints, equal to St. Peter and St. Paul, by telling one little, and such a little! lie, we might not do so on any account; for God's glory would suffer more by that little lie, than it would gain by all the rest. What a work then will it be for the interests of Jesus to prevent one mortal sin! Yet how easy! If every night, before we go to sleep, we begged our dear Lady to offer up to God the Precious Blood of her dear Son for grace to hinder one mortal sin somewhere in the world, during that night, and then renewed the same offering in the morning for the hours of daylight, surely such an offering, and by such hands, could not fail to win the grace desired; and then each one of us might probably hinder seven hundred and thirty mortal sins every year; and if a thousand of us made these offerings, and persevered in them for twenty years, why, it would give none of us any trouble, and to say nothing of the merit we should gain, here would be more than fourteen million mortal sins prevented; and if all the members of the Confraternity did it, you would have to multiply it again by ten. Ah! at this rate the interests of Jesus would prosper, and how happy, how immensely happy should we be!

So, again, every time we get any one to go to confession who stands in need of it, even though it be only to confess venial sins, we increase the fruit of our beloved Redeemer's Passion. Every act of contrition we persuade men to make, or by prayer obtain them the grace to make, increases the blessed fruit. Every additional strictness or trifling penance, of which we are the promoters, answers the same good end: and so do all our efforts to advance frequent communion. When we get people to join in devotions to our Lord's Passion, or to read about it, and meditate upon it, we are forwarding the interests of Jesus. Some one said, if my memory does not fail me, it was Albertus Magnus, that one tear shed over the sufferings of our dear Lord was worth more than a year's fast on bread and water; what then if we get others to weep with us in our tenderness for the Passion of Jesus! What a great deal a little prayer will do! Sweet Jesus! why are we so hard and cold? Oh, kindle in us the sweet fire which Thou earnest to kindle on the earth!

3. The honor of His Mother. This is another chief interest of Jesus, and the whole history of the Church shows how near it lies to His Sacred Heart. It was the love of her that specially drew Him down from heaven, and it was she who merited the time of the Incarnation. She was the chosen one of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, the elected daughter of the Father, the predestinated Mother of the Son, and the chosen Spouse of the Holy Ghost. The right doctrine of Jesus has in all ages been wrapped up with the true devotion to Mary; and the Mother can be wounded only through the Son. Thus Mary is the heritage of humble and obedient Catholics. As devotion to her increases, so does holiness increase. The saints are moulded on the love of her. Sin has no greater enemy than Mary, for the thought of her is a charm against it, and the devils tremble at her name. No one can love the Son, but the love of the Mother grows in Him also; no one can love the Mother, without his heart melting with tenderness toward the Son. Thus has Jesus put her in the front of His Church, that she should be the token of all good, and the stumbling-block of His enemies. What wonder then that His interests are deeply concerned with her honor. Every heretical blasphemy against her dignity, for which you make reparation by an act of love, or an act of thanksgiving for her Immaculate Conception and her Perpetual Virginity, gives you an opportunit}T of advancing the interests of Jesus. Every thing you can do to spread devotion to her, and especially to make Catholics feel more tenderly toward her, is a distinct work for Jesus, and one which He will most lovingly repay. To get people to go to communion on her feasts, to be enrolled in her Confraternities, to have a picture of her, to gain indulgences for the souls in purgatory that in lifetime were most devoted to her, to pray for the speedy definition of her Immaculate Conception, to say one-third of the Rosary every day, — everybody has an opportunity of doing one or the other of these things, and they are all for the interests of Jesus. Ah! there is one devotion I will mention! I wish we were all inspired with it. We should do well then for the interests of Jesus, and our dear Lord would get such abundance of new love all the world over! It is, — to have more confidence in our Blessed Mother's prayers, more undoubting trust, more bold petition, more real faith' in her. There would be more love for Mary, if there were more faith in Mar}'. But we are in an heretical country; and it is hard to live among the icebergs, and not be cold. O Jesus! animate our confidence in Mary, not only that we may work more for Thy sweet interests, but that we may work in the way Thou wouldst have us work, letting no creature be dearer to us than the one who was dearer to Thee than all other creatures put together!

4. The esteem of grace. This is another of the chief interests of Jesus. The world would be quite a different place if men only valued grace at its proper value. What is there in the world worth any thing except grace? Oh, how childishly we let ourselves be run away with by all manner of follies, which have nothing to do with the interests of Jesus. How stupid it is of us! What time we waste! What harm we do! What good we leave undone! And how sweetly patient Jesus is with us all through it! If people esteemed grace rightly, every one of the other interests of Jesus would go right. When they go wrong, it is just for the want of this esteem. Graces keep coming; merits keep multiplying; almost as fast as the blessed beatings of the Sacred Heart. Meanwhile, all the time that Heart is yearning over us with enraptured love, we are saying, I am not obliged to do this; I need not forego this pleasure; I must keep down religious enthusiasm. God help us! I wish we could get a peep of any enthusiasm there is to keep down! Poor Jesus Christ! Poor Jesus Christ! And all this is for want of a true esteem of grace. Better die than forfeit one increase of grace: do we all believe this? No! but we say we believe it. If the funds were to fall to fifty to-morrow, it would be of less consequence than that a sick Irishman in an obscure court should by impatience forfeit one degree of grace. To receive (this is what theologians tell us) all the natural gifts and ornaments of St. Michael, his power, strength, wisdom, beauty, and all the rest, would be nothing compared with one additional degree of grace, such as we get a score of if we resist an angry feeling for a quarter of an hour; for grace is a participation of the Divine Nature. Oh, do we carry this out in our own lives, while we are going to persuade others to carry it out? Fix upon any evil or calamity of the Church you please, and I am ready to show you it would never have taken place, if her children had had a true esteem of grace; and moreover, that it would be set right by to-morrow morning, if they all took up with a true esteem of grace. To gain the whole world will be no profit to a man if he suffer detriment, any detriment, to his immortal soul. Go and persuade people of this; show them what store they should set by grace, and how one grace brings another along with it, and how all these things are merits, and how all merits turn to glories, glories which are eternal in the heavens. Ah! you will indeed forward our dear Lord's interests if you do this: you will forward them far more than you have any idea of. Only pray that men may have a truer esteem of grace, and you will be a secret apostle of Jesus. All graces are in Him; He is the fountain and the fulness of them all; He longs to pour them out over dear souls, souls that He died for; and they will not let Him; because they must esteem the graces they have, in order to gain new ones. Go and help Jesus. Why should a single soul be lost, for which He died? I say, why should one be lost? It is a horrible thing to think of a lost soul, most horrible. And why should they be lost? why? There is Precious Blood to be had for the asking; and what it gives is grace. But men do not care about grace. St. Paul spent his whole life teaching people about grace, and praying for grace for them, and that they might use grace rightly when they had got it. When the Fountain of all grace is springing up like a living well of joy in the heart after Communion, ask Him to open all men's eyes to the beauty of His grace, and so will you cause His grace to multiply, and with the multiplication of grace His interests to prosper; for thus stands the case with our dear Lord, that the more He gives away, the richer He becomes. Dear King of souls! how is it we can think of any thing but Him? To think that we should be allowed to take His interests in hand: it is amazing! I wonder it does not send us into an ecstasy. But we do not know our own privileges; and why not? Because we do not study our dearest Lord enough. Why not begin in time what we shall be delighted to do for all eternity? Study Jesus. Heaven is only heaven, because Jesus is there; and I do not understand why earth has not become heaven already, since Jesus is on earth also. Ah! it is, alas! because we have the wretched power to offend Him left us. Take that away, and there is heaven at once, or purgatory, which is the porch of Heaven. Will the day really come when we can sin no more, no more wound the 3

Heart of Jesus? O blessed Lord! let the sun rise soon that is not to set till that dear privilege is ours. Why fret and question if it is to be heaven at once, or purgatory first? what matter? The great thing is not to be able, for we should be sure to do it if we were able, ever to offend our dearest Lord and Love again.

These are the interests of Jesus, to forward which is the great work of our Confraternity. Or rather, these are samples and specimens of those interests. It may seem strange that our Blessed Lord should make use of such poor and vile instruments as we are for so great a work; but it is the same Lord who called simple fishermen from mending their nets, to be His apostles, and to convert the world. True it is we have sins enough of our own to look after, that we have imperfections enough to turn away the Heart of our heavenly Spouse from us, and that there is no place in the whole world that we know of, where the interests of Jesus are in so much danger as they are in our own souls. Yet even we must be apostles; woe unto us if we are not apostles! We must be serving the souls of others, even while we have so much to do for our own. The Gospel is a law of love, and the Christian life is a life of prayer. As the apostle tells us, we must make intercession for all sorts of men. Indeed, we shall never prosper with the work in our own souls, if we do not strive to advance the interests of Jesus in the souls of others. Many persons complain that they make no way in religion, and that they do not get on with the mortification of their evil passions, their sinful infirmities, and their tiresome self-love. They are just where they were a year ago, and that is disheartening. This often comes to pass, because they are selfish, because they only care to stand by themselves. They do not think they have any thing to do with the souls of others, or with the interests of Jesus, or with intercessory prayer; and so they keep on a low level, because they do nothing to merit higher graces. The Confraternity expects other things of us, and teaches us very differently.

But it is important to remember that the interests of Jesus do not follow the same rule as the interests of the world. If we were not to remember this, we should soon be disheartened at the little good we seem to be doing. The interests of Jesus are for the most part invisible interests. We must take the power of prayer on faith. We shall never know till the last day all the answers there have been to our prayers, nor how they have told upon the Church for hundreds and hundreds of years. Look, for example, at St. Stephen's prayer, when he was stoned to death. It obtained the conversion of St. Paul, who was holding the clothes of Stephen's murderers. Only think of all St. Paul has done, and continues to do daily, and will go on doing till the end of the world; and all he does St. Stephen does also, for it is all St. Stephen's prayer. So, perhaps, somebody asks the prayers of the Confraternity that obstacles to his vocation to the religious life or the ecclesiastical state may be removed, and it is granted some Friday evening to our prayers. He becomes a priest: he saves hundreds of souls; these souls save others, some b}r becoming priests themselves, some by becoming nuns, some by becoming holy fathers and mothers in the world; and so the prayer goes on spreading and spreading, and may very likely be found actually at work in the dead of that night when all the earth will be awakened to see our Lord coming in the east.

Thus you must not look too much to visible fruits and to public results. What the world calls misfortunes often turn out to be the good fortune of Jesus. For instance, a man is suffering a great injustice because he happens to be a Catholic. You pray for him. The injustice goes on; the Protestants outwardly have the best of it, and are as cruel and triumphant as ever. You fancy your prayer has not been answered. There could not be a greater mistake. Jesus wants to make that man a saint. It is better for him to be the helpless victim of that injustice. Meanwhile, because of your prayers, Jesus has granted him additional grace, which he has corresponded to. So that, actually, for your Pater and Ave he will be higher in heaven to all eternity than he would have been. There will be a gem sparkling in his crown that would not else have been there; you will see it and admire it in heaven, and you will know it was your Pater and Ave that put it there. So it is with the Pope, and the Church, and religious orders, and in fact everything that has to do with Jesus. His interests do not follow the rules of the world, but the rules of grace. We must measure them by different measures, and not use the measures of the world. Our measures, weights, and coinage must all be of the sanctuary. Jesus was never so triumphant as when He let Himself be nailed to the Cross; yet the silly world thought it had it all its own way then, and had carried the day completely. It is of importance that you should bear this iu mind. It is of faith that God always answers right prayers, and in a way and to a degree beyond our most enthusiastic expectation; but He does not yet let us see how. We must take it on faith. We are quite sure that in the long run we shall not be disappointed.

We must still say a few words on the way in which it belongs to us to advance the interests of Jesus. There are many ways of doing this: good example, preaching, writing books, lending good books, arguing gently with people and persuading them, using your influence where you have any, and exercising your authority, as parents, and teachers, and masters. All these ways are good; and if we truly love Jesus, we shall never neglect any one of them, according as opportunity presents, and in keeping with the modest propriety of our condition and place in life. Members of the Confraternity may and should use these means as they can. But the way, the real way, of the Confraternity is one way, and only one. It is prayer.

People pray very little nowadays. Indeed it is sad to see how little faith men put in prayer. They think they are to do every thing by their own cleverness, or by bustle, fidget, and activity. They think the same things which made England a great proud country will suit the interests of Jesus, and advance His kingdom upon earth. Every thing in these days goes by sight, not by faith. If Catholics undertake anything, and little seems to come of it, they are cast down, and think it has come to nought. A mission is given, one soul is saved, or one sin prevented; it was a fortnight's work, and it cost ten pounds one way or another. What a failure! Yet to hinder that one sin from soiling His Father's glory, Jesus is ready to come down and be crucified again! If we cannot publish figures, and show great results, as if we were so many Protestant members of a Bible Society, who have sent out, say a million bibles to China, and need not add the fact of the Chinese ladies of a whole province having made them into slippers, if we cannot satisfy the world, or what is called the English public, that we are doing a great work even in its discerning eyes, we all set to work to criticise each other, and sin; we have public meetings, and sin; we gossip, and sin; we form angry committees, and sin, we break up the work, and sin; and then everybody writes a letter to the newspapers, and, as likely as not, sins again; and after that we go on as before. We have tried to do a good work; and because we tried on natural principles, it has ended in a number of additional sins. All this is for want of prayer, and for want of faith in the power of prayer. So remember— the Confraternity knows nothing of any way but prayer. We may be sure, that, in an unbelieving age and country, simple-hearted prayer will have great power with God, and an especial reward. They who remembered Sion, when others were forgetting her, were wonderfully remembered by the Lord: so let us pray in a nation that is forgetting prayer, and is trusting in itself, and leaning on an arm of flesh, and God will be with us as He has never been before, and the interests of Jesus will prosper on the earth. Oh the interests of Jesus! Would to God they burned at our hearts all the day long! Life is short, and we have much to do, but prayer is mighty, and love stronger than death, and so let us all set to work, with singing and with joy, angels and men, sinners and saints, for the interests, the dear interests, the sole interests, of Jesus!

4Q SYMPATHY WITH JESUS.