Chapter V. The Riches of our Poverty
If we are in earnest about our souls, with a quiet fidelity to those duties, practices, and devotions, which obedience sanctions to us, our love of God increases without our knowing or feeling it. It is only now and then, in certain temptations, or on great feasts, or sometimes without apparent cause, that God allows us to perceive that we have really made some progress, and that we care more for Him and less for any thing else but Him, than we used to do. One sign to us of this increase of love is the growing sense of our own unworthiness, and of the extreme littleness of every thing we do. It becomes a pain to us that we have so little to offer to God, and that our service of Him is after all so wretched and ungenerous. The more we know Him, and the more we approach to thoughts at least a little more worth}' of His blessed Majesty, the more this feeling increases upon us, and, as I say, becomes a pain. It is this which drives the saints to yearn for suffering and to pray for crosses. The common cares, the ordinary weariness of life, are not enough to satisfy them, because they do not give them room for their heroic love. They want, a vain yet loving strife! to keep pace with the generosity of Jesus. Why should they do so little for him? Why should they be thus imprisoned and kept in by the littleness of every thing round about them? If sin was once a misery to them, now their inability to love God royally and magnificently, to spend themselves and to be spent for Him in glorious sacrifices — this has become a greater misery to them. Like Areuna, they would give to their King as kings give, with full hands and prodigal expenditure. When God Himself gives them quiet times, and multiplies their joy and peace, they turn against Him, so to speak, with amorous complaint, "Nay, but I will buy it of thee at a price, and I will not offer to the Lord my God holocaust free-cost."1 Then they say strange things, that sound undoctrinal, about their being ready to endure all the pains of hell to all eternity, if only they can thereby promote God's glory one little degree; and they talk of disinterested love until they almost seem to incur the censures of condemned propositions.
These thoughts are not for us. They would be unreal in us. But we too, in our measure, feel this pain. We want to do more for Jesus, and our own cowardice when we come to the point is a keen misery and a sensible shame to us. " Copious redemption," says the Psalmist, " there is with God; " and it is this copiousness of our redemption which at once stimulates our love, and makes it discontented with itself. All that Jesus has done for us has been done with such unnecessary abundance, with such outpouring of affection, with such supernatural profuseness of mercy and compassion, that it is plain at every step, in each separate mystery of the Incarnation, that what He wants is, not our salvation only, but our love also. The same longing and luxury (deliciee) to be with the children of men, His creatures, which would have led Him, if man had never fallen, to come to us in an impassible body, and of the same Virgin Mother, now that we have fallen and He has had to come to us as a passible Redeemer, seems only to run riot all the more in the depths of its own tenderness and love. He cannot pardon, but He must at the same time adopt as sons. He cannot cleanse us from sin without making us heirs of heaven. He cannot absolve from the past, but at the same time He stores us with grace for the future. Every gift He gives is double, treble, or a hundred-fold. One drop of blood would have done, and He shed every drop. Grace would have sufficed for His sacrament of love, but He must needs give Himself, Body, Soul, and Divinity. The Blessed Sacrament is a superfluous mercy, an unnecessary love. Only that to show most love and to get most love — this was what was intended. This is His way. And as we get to know Him and to love Him more, we want it to be our way also. And the little we can do seems so little, so very little!
Now, from what we know of Him we may be sure He would never leave us in this predicament. He desires nothing so much as our love; He would never leave us without adequate means of loving Him. If an earthly father knew that his child was longing to make him a present, but had not the means, with what prompt hand and overflowing heart would he furnish him with the means! Will Jesus do less?
That at least is not His way. Look at what He did to His Mother at the Presentation. No creature, nor all creatures put together, ever loved God as she did at that hour. And never yet had that ever-blessed and most dear Majesty been worshipped with an adequate act of worship. The angels, with all the varied powers and faculties and manifold affections of their nine choirs, had been casting their gifts before the throne with fiery love and burning songs of praise these thousands of years, and the Divine Complacency had mercifully stooped to feed itself upon them. Mary herself, the lowly and the chaste, was a more sweet act of worship to the Most High, and all the everlasting praise of the heavenly hierarchies would fill up but a little corner in her Immaculate Heart. Yet even she fell short, and oh how far short! Sweet Mother! she knew this well; none knew it better; and if ever love could have run wild in the blessed and worshipful calmness of her immense virtue, as it did with her children the saints, and their weaker grace, she might have wished to be annihilated, if so only she could have worshipped God with a sufficient love. But Jesus came to the rescue of her love. He put Himself into her arms, and said to her, " Offer Me! I am equal to My Father! I am a gift, not worthy only but of the selfsame price and value, infinite, unutterable as Himself!" Now for the first time shall the most Holy Trinity have an act of fitting worship. Every Attribute shall be glorified, every perfection crowned with a crown of love and adoration, every mercy be recompensed; every debt and duty of every creature shall be satisfied; nay, the love and worship of all possible creatures shall be by one act outrun and overpassed for ever! Oh joy, exceeding joy, yea, to those who love our most dear God, a joy beyond all other joys! And heaven was silent, and the angels with spirits gushing with love looked down adoringly, and on this earth of ours in Sion's temple, Mary took her Babe into her arms, and held Him up, and gave Him with all the might and impetus of self-sacrifice to the Eternal Father. And so she, the first of all creatures who did so, worshipped God aright, and gave due glory to the Eternal. And now, oh mysterious love, whereby our dear Lord will persist in making Himself so common! there is not a moment, day or night, on this round globe of earth, that the same Child, the Living Host, is not being elevated by mortal hands between earth and heaven, here, or at our antipodes!
Thus, also, does He come to the rescue of our love as well. He can do so in two ways. First of all, by giving to the littleness of our actions an immensity of value by uniting them to His own, and letting the worth of His own flow into them. Of this hereafter. Secondly, He can do so by treating us as he treated Mary, giving us Himself and all that belongs to Him to do with what he will, and to offer to God, as and when we please. And it is of these riches of our povert}' I am going to speak at present.
It is really very difficult to believe our own greatness and nobility in Christ. The catalogue of our privileges always seem to be only a sort of devout exaggeration. Take yourself at any given moment, whether of pain and weariness, or of satisfaction and sensible devotion, and you will see how difficult it is not so much to hope, as to believe that some day you will really be saved, dead, judged, crowned, in Heaven, and eternity before you. It is not so much that you fear the opposite, as that the greatness of the reward, the infinity of the bliss, and the contrast with your present misery and lowness, are more than you can take in. You meditate on Heaven, and then you think, Will there be a moment, or an hour, while men on earth are going on as usual, and I shall be thus, in the fixed possession and enjoyment of all this? And you smile, not exactly with incredulity, but as Sara smiled when she heard the angel say that she should have a son. So in its measure is it with the inheritance we have in Christ even when on earth. It seems too much. Yet St. Paul says to the Corinthians,* " All things are yours, whether it be the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; for all are jTours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's." And again to the Hebrews,! he says, not you shall hereafter, but you are already, " come to mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the church of the firstborn who are written in the heavens, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Testament, and to the sprinkling of blood which speaketh better than that of Abel." When Mary rules with her sweet sceptre of ever-granted prayer over the empire of the Sacred Heart, it is our kingdom over which she is the queen. *]Cor. iii. txii.22.
All it is and all it has is ours, for " all things are ours, and we are Christ's, and Christ is God's." For these are our treasures, which He has given us, having won them for us with His Blood: His own Sacred Humanity, Body and Soul, His Childhood, Hidden Life, Ministry, Passion, Blessed Sacrament, and Session at the Father's Right Hand; His Mother, all she is or has; His countless angels beautiful and strong; all the good works and penances of earth; all the masses that are said; and the countless sufferings of those in purgatory; the graces which the lost had and did not correspond to; the sanctity of the Saints, Joseph, the Baptist, the Apostles, and the rest; all the praise of birds and beasts and the orderly elements; all that possible creatures could do; God's past mercies, through the Old Testament History downward; and the love which the Three Divine Persons bear to each other, and the incommunicable love wherewith God loves Himself eternally.
These things are ours in Christ. Oh surely a fair and magnificent domain! These things He puts into our hands, just as He put Himself into Mary's hands at the Presentation, that we may be able to satisfy our love. What blessed occupation for our time! what heaven begun on earth! Every one of these things we can use, as freely as if it were our own, for three distinct purposes; and we can merit by them all, as by our own actions, for the oblation of them is our own. He gives us them to be offered. First, we may use them to make acts of love, and secondly, to make acts of thanksgiving. Of these two uses I shall speak hereafter. And thirdly, we may use them for intercession, and this is what we have to do with at present. If we have laid well to heart the lessons of the last chapter, we shall feel so drawn to the blessed practice of intercession, that we shall be discontented with our own means of interceding. We shall feel that our dry, bald petitions, our cold words, our slovenly devotions, what with the distraction of our employments, and what with the hardness of our hearts, can never satisf}' the loving desires we feel to promote by intercession the glory of God, the interests of Jesus, and the good of souls. See then! Jesus puts all these things into our hands as weapons of intercession. He fills our quiver full of these arrows, dipped in potent balms, to wound His Sacred Heart, which He uncovers to us for our aim. If aimed with devout intention, they must reach the mark, and if they reach it they must wound infallibly. As there are no bounds to His love of us, so does He seem bent that there shall be almost no bounds to our possibilities of loving Him. Love would not be love, if having these treasures it did not use them. When, therefore, we desire to intercede with God for something which is to His greater glory, we can offer to Him any of these things, presenting to Him the actions themselves, that they may appease His anger and stir His compassion toward us. The mere offering, with a devout intention, is a great thing, and avails much, just as the silent presence in heaven of the Five Wounds which our Lord deigned to keep after His resurrection, is said by theologians to be our Lord's intercession, continually pleading with the Father, though our Lord no longer prays for us as He did on earth. But we ought not to stop here with the actions only. We should endeavor to unite ourselves with the dispositions in which Jesus, Mary, the angels or the saints did the particular action in question. This will make our intercession still more efficacious and still more meritorious. We may also, if we please, wish the action could be multiplied a thousand times, so that God should have more and more accidental glory thereby. Oh, it is astonishing how the conversion of sinners will come in upon us, how quickly scandal will be abated, how the dews of grace will become heavy rains, and fructify in the Church, if we devote ourselves to this practice! And we shall not be, as in past }rears we have so often been, like Gedeon's fleece, dry, almost miraculously dry, when all was wet around!
Take the Sacred Humanity of our dearest Lord. We may offer to God the perfections and powers of His Human Soul, the abysses of grace, science, and glory, which are in it; the love with which it loves God at this moment, and all the love with which it will ever love Him, to all eternity. We may ask for the conversion of a sin-stained soul, by the beauty and brightness of his Soul which at this hour is so lighting up the heavenly Jerusalem, that it needs "neither sun nor moon to lighten it, for the Lamb is the light thereof." We may ask health and strength for the preachers and missioners of our Lord by all the perfections of His glorified Body at this hour. Or leaving heaven, we may come down to earth, and offer to the Father all the unspeakable worship which our Lord's mystical life in the Blessed Sacrament is offering Him from a thousand thousand tabernacles; the poverty, the humiliation, the obedience to His priests, the zeal for souls, the refraining of His senses, the endurance of sacrileges, the patient love, the miraculous manifestations of that Hidden Life. Or, again, we may draw upon the past. There is the act of love in the moment of the Incarnation, the imprisonment for nine long months in Mary's Blessed Womb, the virtues practised there, and the world governed from thence. There is the Nativity, and the mysteries of the first twelve years, Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, all they mean and contain of the unfathomable humiliations of the Incarnate Word, and of His inexpressible love for Mary and for men. There is the Hidden Life at Nazareth, the hiddenness of the Omnipresent, the obedience of the Omnipotent, the poverty of the All-rich, the fatigue of the Great Creator, the prayer of God, the love for Joseph, the sanctification of Mary, the merits and the satisfactions, and the complacency of angels, Mary, and of God in the wonders and virtues of those eighteen years. There is the Three Years' Ministry, the baptism by John, and the fasting in the wilderness, His way with His disciples, and His way with sinners, the contradictions He encountered, the sermons He preached, the miracles He wrought, the weariness He endured. Then we come to the shore of the illimitable sea of His most dear Passion, the seven journeys, the five trials, the seven words; and beyond that we have the Risen Life, the various apparitions, specially that first one to His Mother, the forty days of secret legislation for the matter and form of the sacraments and for the Church, all the beauty, charity, and hiddenness of those days, the words spoken, the wonders done, the graces given, the blessings imparted, and then the admirable pomp of His ascension. When will this fountain have run dry? When, if we never repeated the same thing twice over, shall we have exhausted these marvellous infinite acts, infinite not in themselves, but by their union with His Divine Person, and which have such unlimited power with God? All these are at our disposal for intercession; and we may well believe they will have especial efficacy when suited to the sacred seasons of the year, all except the Passion, which has all seasons for its own.
Now, to speak of the intercessory use we may make of the Passion. We should naturally expect to find that as the work of our redemption was principally achieved through the mysteries of our Blessed Lord's Passion, He should desire those mysteries to be especially in our remembrance, and should allow them to prevail with His Sacred Heart over all others, when offered to Him in love, thanksgiving, or intercession. St. Bernard declares that the mere thought of our Lord's Passion is a spiritual communion. Father Balthazar Alvarez not only made it the ordinary subject of his meditations, but he used to say to his novices, "We must not think we have done any thing until we have reached this point, that we never in our hearts forget Christ crucified." F. Benedict, of Canfield, declares, that souls in the highest mystical union with God still retain meditation on the Passion; though F. Baker and others deny it in the sense of express meditation. Our Lord Himself said to St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi, " If, every Friday, you will pay attention to the hour in which I expired upon the cross, you Avill at once receive particular graces from My spirit, which I then returned to the Eternal Father; and although you do not feel this grace, it shall always rest upon you." And the great bell of the Duomo still calls the faithful of Florence to this sacred remembrance. The Blessed Clare of Monte Falco had the Passion so perpetually in her thoughts, that everything she saw became instantly an ingenious memorial of something connected with our Blessed Saviour's sufferings. Our Lord said to the Blessed Veronica, the Augustinianess, "I wish all men to do their best to sorrow in their hearts through veneration for My Passion, as if compassionating Me. If they shed one little tear over it, they may be sure they have done a great thing; for the tongue of man cannot tell what joy and satisfaction that one little tear causes Me." The angels revealed to the Blessed Joanna of the Cross, that the Divine Majesty took such complacency in sorrow for the Passion of Christ, and that such sorrow was so grateful a sacrifice, that it was reckoned equal to the shedding of our blood, or the endurance of great afflictions. St. Theodore Studita cautions us that though Easter is come, we must on no account let the memory of the Passion fade away, but keep the life-giving wounds, the cross, and sepulture always before our eyes. Orlandini tells us of a saying of Father Peter Faber, that as the Passion was Christ's road to glory, so compassion for the Passion is ours. Our Lord said to St. Gertrude, " Every one, 11 even though he should feel himself weighed to the ground with great sins, may breathe freely with the hope of pardon, if he will only offer to God the Father My most innocent Passion and Death; let him be sure that by this he shall receive the saving fruit of indulgence; for there is no remedy on earth so efficacious against sin, as a devout recollection of My Passion, joined with true repentance and a right faith/' The Blessed Albertus Magnus used to say that a single tear shed over our Lord's Passion, was better than a year's fast on bread and water, with watchings and disciplines St. Mary Magdalene revealed to a certain holy Dominican, that when she retired into the wilderness to do penance, after our Lord's ascension, she desired to know from Jesus how she was to occupy herself, and our Lord sent St. Michael to her with a most beautiful cross which he planted at the door of her cell, that she might spend her days in incessant meditation on the Passion. Once, when St. Gertrude was meditating on the Passion, she understood by a light from heaven that to ruminate on the sufferings of Christ is an exercise of infinitely greater efficacy than all others. Lastly, St. Augustine says,2 'k What kindles, urges, inflames and drives me to love Thee more than any thing else, and to make Thee lovely above ever}r thing else, is the most ignominious and bitter death, which Thou, O good Jesus, didst endure for the work of our redemption. This alone, this altogether, easily claims for itself all our life, all our labor, all our devotion, and, finally, all our love.
This, I say, best excites, most sweetly seeks, most amply multiplies our devotion."
With what sweet artifices of love our Lord can repay this devotion is most beautifully shown in the life of St. Gertrude. One Friday, when it was now near evening, she cast her eyes upon a crucifix, and, moved with compunction, she cried out, " Ah, my sweetest Creator and Lover! what and how great things didst Thou bear for 1113^ salvation to-day! and I, oh so unfaithful! have made no account of them, and the day has gone by while I have been occupied with other things. Alas! I have not devoutly called to mind hour after hour that Thou, dear Life that giveth life to all, for the love of my love, hast died! " The Lord from the crucifix answered her: " What you neglected I have supplied for you; for every hour I gathered into My heart what you ought to have collected in yours; and this has made My heart swell with such an excessive fulness, that I have waited for this hour with great desire that this intention might be made to Me on your part. And now with this intention which you have just made, I will offer to God My Father all that I through the day have sup-plied for you, because without your own intention, it could not be so salutary for you! " " In this we may remark," says St. Gertrude, " the most faithful love of Jesus for man, which, solely on account of that intention by which He grieves over what he has neglected, amends it all with God the Father, and supplies for all deficiency in such a most lofty way." Once also, when the saint was handling a crucifix very devoutly, she understood by a supernatural light, that when any one looked with devotion on a crucifix, he was looked upon by God with such benignant mercy, that his soul, like a shining mirror, received into itself from divine love such an exceedingly delectable image, that all the heavenly hosts are delighted with it; and for as often as he shall have done this on earth, he shall have these images for so many increases of eternal glory in heaven.
Neither is this a mere devotion of feeling. " Ah! " said St. Gertrude once, " Ah! my only hope, and the salvation of my soul! tell me how I can do Thee at least a little good, then, for this Thy passion, to Thee so bitter, to me so salutary." And this was our Lord's answer: " When a man follows another's interests in preference to his own, he repays Me the captivity which I endured in the morning, when I was taken, pinioned, and grievously tormented for men's salvation. When he humbly acknowledges himself to be in fault about any thing, he recompenses Me for the judgment which I underwent at the first hour, when I was accused by false witnesses, and sentenced to death. When he refrains his senses from things which delight him, he repays Me for the scourging which I endured at the third hour. When he obeys an ill-natured superior, he relieves the pain of My crown of thorns. When he is the injured party, but asks pardon first, he compensates for My carrying of the cross. When he almost goes beyond what he can do in extending charity to others, he repays Me for that extension which I so sharply endured when distended on the cross at the sixth hour. When, to hinder a sin, he does not mind sorrow or reproach, he pays Me for My death, which
I suffered for the salvation of the world at the ninth hour. When he is reproached, and answers humbly, he, as it were, takes Me down from the cross. When he prefers his neighbor to himself, and thinks him more worthy of honor, or any other good thing, than himself, he pays Me for My burial."
On another occasion a similar revelation was made to the same saint. She said to our Lord, " Ah! Lord, tell me how I can laudably venerate Thy Passion." He replied: " By more frequently revolving in your mind that anxiety by which I, your Creator and Lord, when in My agony, prayed the more intensely, and through the excessive vehemence of My solicitude, desire, and love, I moistened the ground with My Bloody Sweat. Then you must commend to Me all you do, and all that has to be done about you, in union with that subjection wherewith I, for the same reason, said to the Father, ' Not my will, but Thine, be done.' So you must receive all prosperous or adverse things with the same love with which I send them all to you for your salvation. You must receive prosperous things with gratitude, in union with that love by which I am your lover, and condescending to your frailty, I procure them for you, that by them you may learn to hope for eternal prosperity. You must receive adverse * things in union with that love with which, out of the affection of My paternal fidelity, I send them to you, that by them you may earn for yourself an everlasting good."
Our Lord said to St. Bridget, "I counsel you to have always two thoughts in your heart; first, the remembrance of what I have done for you in suffering and dying; this thought will excite love of God; secondly, the consideration of My justice, and the future judgment; this will strike fear into your soul." When He speaks to her of the praises of good Christians, He counts, as one, that the whole of their thoughts go to His Passion. This, too, was the great devotion of our Blessed Lady, as she herself revealed to St. Bridget: " My thoughts and my heart were always in the sepulchre of my Son; " and again, she bade the saint always to be considering His Passion. So successfully did St. Bridget train her daughter Catherine in this devotion, that we read in Catherine's Life that every night, before going to bed, she spent four continuous hours making genuflections, and beating her breast, with many tears, because of the remembrance of Christ's Passion, and that all the while she offered herself as a holocaust to God. When the Blessed Angela of Foligno asked God what she could do to please Him more, He vouchsafed to appear to her several times, both sleeping and waking, always as crucified on the cross, and He told her to look at His wounds, and then showed her, in a marvellous manner, how He had endured all those things for her; and lastly, He said, "What then can you do for Me which would be enough? " Another time, as the Bollandists relate, He appeared to her, and said, "Whosoever wishes to find grace, let him never take his eyes from the cross, whether My providence be visiting him with sorrow, or with joy."
No wonder, then, that the same Angela should have heard from our Lord that these were the benedictions which He would multiply upon those who were devoted to His Passion, and upon those who imitate it, and upon those who compassionate it. " Blessed are you of My Father, who compassionate Me, and who are sorrowing with Me, and who, walking My road, have merited to wash your stoles in My Blood. Blessed are you who compassionate Me crucified for you, and afflicted with immense griefs, that I might satisfy for you, and redeem you from immense and eternal pains: for compassionating Me in My poverty, sorrow, and contempt borne for yourselves, you have been found wortlry. Blessed are you who shall be mindfully and devoutly compassionate toward My Passion, which is the miracle of all ages, the salvation and life of the lost, and the sole refuge of sinners; for you shall be truly partakers with Me of the kingdom, and glory, and resurrection which I have acquired by it, and co-heirs with Me for ever and ever. Blessed are you of My Father, and of the Holy Ghost, and truly blessed with the benediction which I shall give in the last judgment, because, when I came unto My own, you have not repulsed Me, as My persecutors did; but, by your compassion, have received Me, a desolate stranger, into the home and hospitality of your heart. You have compassionated Me, stretched naked on the cross, hungering, thirsting, weak, nailed, and dying. You have willed to be My companions, and in this you have truly fulfilled the works of mercy. Therefore shall you hear in that terrible hour, ' Come, you blessed of My Father, receive the kingdom which was prepared for you before the foundation of the world/
For I was hungry on the cross, and, at least by compassion, you gave Me to eat. Oh, happy you, truly happy, and blessed altogether! for if upon the cross I prayed to My Father with tears and weeping for My crucifiers and torturers, and excused them, saying, ' Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,' what shall I say for you who have compassionated Me, and been My devout partners, when, not upon the cross, but all blissful in My glory, I shall judge the world?"
Now, what do all these examples and revelations show, except that our Lord has been pleased to give us over His Passion as if it were really more utterly and completely our own, to do with it what we willed, than the pains we ourselves suffer, or the afflictions we have to bear? But to come to the use of the Passion in intercession, which is our immediate subject. Lancisius tells us,* " That the offering of the blood of Christ, or of His Passion and death, to the Eternal Father, or to Christ Himself, in order to appease Him for the sins of the world, is of boundless efficacy." This practice was taught by God to St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi, when he vouchsafed to complain to her that there were so few in the world who made any effort to appease His anger against sinners. In consequence of this, many times in the day she offered up the blood of Christ for sinners of all classes, and her ordinary practice was daily to offer it fifty times for the living and the dead. She did this with so much fervor, that God repeatedly showed her multitudes of souls whose conversion she had thus.
» ii. 18.
obtained, as well as multitudes released from purgatory. Once in a rapture she cried out, " As often as the creature offers this Blood, by which it is redeemed, it offers a gift which has no price, that it can be paid back. Nay, the gift is so great, that the Eternal Father reckons Himself under obligation to His creature; for He sees it in its misery, which His infinite goodness desires to compassionate, and compassionating to communicate Himself to it; and thus this offering is the cause of His communicating now, and for ever continuing to communicate, His goodness to His creature."
"This devotion," says Lancisius, "glorifies and recreates God with the most excellent and noble of all offerings. It asks, or rather in a certain sense exacts, for our past sins remission, preservation from sin in time to come, the conversion of sinners and heretics, and freedom from the temporal pains due to sin. It avails, also, as a thanksgiving for all public and personal blessings, for the impetration of the Divine assistance, and for the relief of the numberless necessities both of the living and the dead."
- Persons often wish to know how much devotion they ought to have to our Blessed Lady, and where their love ought to stop. They are dissatisfied if they are told that they can never have enough devotion to her, that so far as degree is concerned there is no possibility of excess, and that there is no limit at which their love need stop. True as this is, it does not content them. They think it a sort of pious exaggeration, which is true in a sense, but no real answer to their question, or solution to their difficulty. But they could hardly object, if it was said to them, You are to love Mary as much as Jesus loved her, and you are to have as great a devotion to her as Jesus wishes you to have, and you can have no scruple in praying to Jesus for this devotion according to His will. It is impossible to know Jesus, much more to love Him, if we have not a warm devotion to His ever-blessed Mother. Neither can we conceive of any devotion to her more sure to move the Heart of Jesus to listen to our intercessions, than the offering to Him those graces which He Himself bestowed upon her, those acts of love by which the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity adorned her as their choice trophy of compassion, and those mysteries in which she corresponded to these graces, and merited so unspeakably. She is so mixed up with the glory of God, that every act of homage to her is a plain act of love of God. She is herself so completely the choice interest of Jesus, that He has none on earth to compare with the defence and propagation of her honor! For, if His Sacred Heart be mercifully bent upon the salvation of souls, He has chosen Mary as the refuge ©f sinners and the advocate of souls. If all God's works praise Him, and if when He looked upon the earth that He had made He was moved to bless it and to pronounce it very good, while the morning stars sang together, and the angels shouted for joy, how much more do his own works and gifts in Mary praise him everlastingly, while she furnishes an unending theme for the songs of angels and of men! Oh, for the sake of Jesus we must learn to increase in our love of Mary. It must be a devotion growing in us like a grace, strengthening like a habit of virtue, and waxing more and more fervent and tender until the hour when she shall come to help us to die well, and to pass safely through the risk of doom.
Do we think sufficiently of this, — that devotion to our Blessed Lady is not a thing which, like the possession of a book or a rosary, we have once for all, final and complete? It would be no less untrue to say that when we have received from God the grace of humility, we have simply to hold fast what we have got, and never dream of getting more, than to say that devotion to Mary was an ungrowing thing. I repeat, it must grow like a virtue, and strengthen like a habit, or it is worth nothing at all. Nay, it is worse than worth nothing, as a little thought will show you. Love of Mary is but another form, and a divinely appointed one, of love of Jesus: and, therefore, if love of Him must grow, so also must love of her. If a person were to say, You must not mingle prayer to Mary with prayer to Jesus, he would show that he had no true idea of this devotion, and that he was already on the brink of a very dangerous error. Yet people sometimes thoughtlessly speak as if devotion to the Mother was a little trifle allowably cut off from devotion to the Son, that it was something surrendered by Jesus to Mary; that Jesus was one thing, and Mary was another, and that devotion to the two was to be divided between them proportionably to their respective dignities, say a pound to Him, and an ounce to her. If such persons really saw what they mean, which they do not, they would perceive that they were talking impiety. Love of Mary is an intrinsic part of love of Jesus, and to imagine that the interests of the two can be opposed, is to show that we do not understand Jesus, or the devotion due to Him. If devotion to Mary is not already, and in itself, devotion to Jesus, then when we show devotion to her we are consciously subtracting something from Him, and so actually robbing God, which is sacrilege. So that when people tell us to keep within bounds, to moderate our devotion, and not to go too far, or to do too much for Mary, they are not, as they fancy, securing to Jesus His rightful honor, but they are making the horrible confession that they themselves do take something from Jesus to give to Mary, though they are careful it should not be very much. How dreadful this sounds, when put in plain words! Devotion to Mary, can get wrong in kind; it can never err in degree. If love of Mary be not love of Jesus, if devotion to Mary be not one of His own appointed devotions to Himself, aye, and the chief one too, then my theology as well as my love tells me I can have no room for Mary at all, for my heart cannot adequately hold Jesus as it is. Dearest Mother! how little I should know of you, if I could think of you so dishonorably! And what a poor, low notion should I have of God Himself! I might as well think grace kept me from God, or sacraments enabled me to do without Jesus, as imagine that you did aught else but gloriously magnify His love of me, and wonderfully intensify my love of Him!
Now see what materials the life of our Blessed Lady presents to us, that we may offer them again to God! Is there any disclosure of His love to a simple creature, or to all creatures together, equal to the grace of her Immaculate Conception, or of her election to the Divine Maternity? Whether we go through her life by the sixty-three mysteries of which it is composed, or sum it up in what theologians call her three sanctifications, at her Immaculate Conception, the moment of the Incarnation, and the descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, it furnishes us with innumerable motives most dear and persuasive to the Heart of Jesus. Every act is full of His grace and of Her heroic love; every one is more pleasing to Him than all the heroism of His saints; and out of every one of them, because of the supreme love that was in her soul, God gains more glory than out of all the services of three hierarchies of heaven.
The two devotions, to her Dolors and her Joys, might furnish illustrations of this. Passing over the devotion to her dolors as better known, and hoping to treat of it in another work, I will speak only of the devotion to her joys, which may be called the Franciscan devotion. It was the practice of our own St. Thomas of Canterbury, to say the Ave Maria three times in the day, in honor of our Lady's seven earthly joys, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Epiphany, the Finding in the Temple, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. One day our Blessed Mother appeared to him, and said, " Thomas, your devotion is most acceptable to me; but why do you only call to mind the joys which I had on earth? Henceforth remember those also which I now enjoy in heaven; for every one who honors both these I will console, exhilarate, and present to my most dear Son at the hour of death." St. Thomas felt his heart filled with a marvellous exultation, and he cried out, " And how, my sweetest lady, can I do this, when I do not so much as know what these joys are? " Our Blessed Lad}' then told him, " that he was to honor with seven Hail Maries the following joys: her joy first, because the Most Holy Trinity honors her above all creatures, secondly, because her virginity has set her above all angels and saints, thirdly, because the great light of her glory illuminates the heavens, fourthly, because all the blessed worship her as the Mother of God, fifthly, because her Son grants her whatever she asks, sixthly, because of the grace given her on earth and the glory prepared for her clients in heaven, and lastly, because her accidental glory goes on increasing to the day of doom." St. Thomas is said to have composed a sequence, " Gaude flore virginali," on these joys, which was sung in some churches, and which is quoted in the Parnassus Marian us.3 In the life of St. Catherine of Bologna, we read that she had a great devotion to St. Thomas, and used to practise this devotion. Br. Francis of the Cross relates also of the Blessed Ranulph, that while he was commemorating our Lady's seven earthly joys, she appeared to him, and revealed to him her heavenly joys, the same, but in different order, as those revealed to St. Thomas.
There is another revelation, to the Blessed Joseph Herman, the Premonstratensian, which shows how dear to our Blessed Lady is this devotion to her joys. There were at that time constant instances of sacrilegious plunder of churches, and it often fell to the lot of the Blessed Joseph to act as sentinel in the church. This caused him occasionally to intermit one of his usual devotions, which consisted in reciting certain Hail Maries in honor of Mary's joys. She appeared to him, and not as usual, in youth and beauty, but old and wrinkled. He ventured to inquire the reason of the change, and she replied, " I am become old to you; where is now the representation of my joys? Where those Hail Maries? Where those exercises of piety, by which I was made young to you and you to me? Do not intermit my service under the pretext of guarding the monastery, for I am its best guardian." Whereupon the Blessed Joseph returned to his usual exercises, much consoled at finding how much his Blessed Mother rejoiced in this devotion to her joys. St. Peter Damian also, in his Epistles,* mentions a similar incident. There was a certain monk who every day as he passed in front of our Lady's altar, used to salute her with the following antiphon, " Rejoice, O Mother of God, immaculate Virgin, rejoice with the joy thou receivedst from the angel; rejoice thou who didst bring forth the brightness of eternal light; rejoice, O Mother, rejoice Virgin Mother of God, rejoice thou the sole Virgin Mother; all creation praises thee; Mother of Light, intercede for us." One day as he was crossing the church, he heard a voice from the altar, saying. " Thou announcest joy to me, and joy shall happen to thyself." * Lib. 3. Ep. 10.
But it is not only to our Blessed Lord that we may offer the sorrows, and the joys, the gifts, graces, and greatness of His Mother, but to herself also. One day, when St. Gertrude was invoking her with those words of the Church in the Salve Regina, " Ah! then, our advocate," she saw our dear Mother, as if drawn by ropes, incline toward her. By this she understood that as often as any one names Mary his advocate with devotion, her motherly tenderness is so much moved by the name, that she is as it were unable to prevent herself from granting his prayers. At these words, " Those thine eyes of mercy," our Lady gently touched her Son, and turned Him toward the earth, saying to St. Gertrude, " These (meaning the eyes of Jesus) are those most merciful eyes of mine, which I can incline to the salvation of all who invoke me, from which they receive the most rich fruit of eternal salvation." Hence she learned from our Lord at least once a day to invoke that most kind Mother with these words: " Eja ergo, Advocata nos-tra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte; " and she was assured by Him, that she would thus secure for herself no little consolation in the hour of death.*
St. Bernard tells us to offer all our offerings to God through the hands of Mary; and though the passage is so well known, I must not omit it here.f " Whatever you are going to offer, remember to commend it to Mary, that grace may return to the Giver of grace through the same channel whereby it flowed into you. Not that God was unable to infuse grace as He willed, • Rev. lib. iv. t De Aquaeductu.
without this aqueduct, but He chose to provide a channel for you. For your hands, perhaps, are filled with blood, or soiled with gifts, which you have not altogether shaken off from them: therefore that little which you are going to offer, take care, if you do not wish to be repulsed, to give it to Mary to offer with those most worthy and acceptable hands of hers. For those hands are as whitest lilies, and the lover of lilies will never reprove as not found among the lilies what is found in Mary's hands." And Lancisius says we should do this for two reasons: first, because as God has willed that we should receive His gifts through Mary, so we should offer our gifts to Him through Her; and secondly, because oblation through her implies the great esteem which God has for her, which is at once the essence of her interior veneration, and the origin of her public honor.
Thus the beautiful life of the angels, God's eldest-born, may also furnish us with most ample materials for intercession: and our Lord seems to call our attention to it, when He bids us pray, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Scripture teaches us a great deal about the augels, their worship of God, their ministries toward other creatures, their individual characters, as in the case of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, their multitude, and their nine choirs by name. Some theologians have taught that each angel is a species of himself, which would indeed open out quite an overwhelming view of the magnificence of God. Others, with more show of reason, make twenty-seven species, three in each choir, as there are three choirs in each hierarchy; and even this gives us amaz- 12 ing ideas of the court of heaven, when we remember how hard it is for us to conceive of any further specific division of reasonable creatures than into those with bodies, and those purely spiritual. Others, without entering into the question of species, tell us that the grace of each angel is something quite different in beauty and excellence from the grace of his fellows; and if we follow out this thought also, it will be a joy to us to think of all the perfection of sweet worship which God is receiving in Heaven while we are serving Him so meanly upon earth. Thus, Sister Minima of Gesu Nazzareno, a Carmelite nun of Vetralla, who lived at the time of the French invasion of Italy, and spent a life of incessant and Wonderful intercession, used continually to offer to the Divine Majesty the love of the first choir of Seraphim, in reparation for all the outrages then going on in the world. So also we are supplied with fresh materials for intercession by the various magnificence of worship which the different orders of saints are at this hour, and every hour, offering to God in Heaven, a worship and a glory which is increasing constantly as fresh souls from earth or purgatory attain to bliss. And in all this we satisfy our love, while we are with gentle efficacy influencing the Sacred Heart to grant our prayers.
Then, again, if we descend to earth, even there we find sweet bundles of fragrant incense wherewith to appease the just anger of God, and to win a loving answer to our prayers. All that the saints have ever done in past centuries, the wonders of Joseph's hidden sanctity, the solitary austerities of the Baptist, every weary step the apostles took along the Roman roads, every pang the martyrs suffered; or farther back into the Old Testament times, the raptures of the prophets, the fidelity of the Machabees, the marvels of David's godlike heart, the fights of Josue, the meekness of Moses, the purity of Joseph, the simplicity of Jacob, the meditations of Isaac, the faith of Abraham, the priesthood of Melchisedeck, the building of Noe, the blood of Abel, and the long nights and toilsome days of Adam's nine hundred years of diligent, heroic, and accepted penance; all these we may offer humbly and confidently, as if the sweetness and freshness of yesterday were upon them. Neither can we have a method of prayer more in harmony with the mind of the Church; for it is almost the commonest form of her collects to ask God for mercies now, because of past mercies which He has vouchsafed to His saints and people. But there is the present, as well as the past. Earth brings forth its glad harvest for God's glory at every hour. Out upon its hills, and plains, and valleys this day, in the convents and in the world, from the Pope in his palace to the converted Indian in his hut, how many supernatural acts are rising up to God, how many acts of faith, breathings of hope, sighs of love and holy sorrow, how many penances, how much conformity in pain to His most blessed Will! How many masses are being said, how many communions made, absolutions given, Extreme Unctions received, and each hour how many dear though silent victories are the waters of baptism achieving for the glory of the ever-blessed Trinity! All these belong to us; all these may we gather at our will and put them on the live coals of our devotion in the thuribles of our hearts, and offer incense to the Most High-Nay, the inferior creatures are all praising God, by-answering the end of their creation: the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea, the woods and flowers, the winds and dews; and these, as they strike upon our eye or ear, we can offer in grateful love to the Majesty of God. There are, too, God's own works, from the creation of the world to the present hour of His manifold Providence; His forbearance with sin, or His judgments on it; His voices, and visions, and revelations; His interpretations in behalf of His Church; His visible protection of His ark in old times, and of the Holy See in our own. By all these He is willing to be entreated. All these He gives us as weapons for the armory of prayer. The inventive love of the saints and holy men has gone even further than this. They have offered to God in the fervor of their hearts all the homage that all possible creatures could offer to Him; that so they might come, or rather might seem to come, as near to His infinity as possible. They have dared to conceive of those three abysses the power of the Father, the wisdom of the Son, and the love of the Holy Spirit, as pouring forth in order and beauty all possible worlds, and have offered up these countless systems as an act of love and a plea of intercession. They have offered up too the manifold and unknown sufferings of purgatory, which they one day expect themselves to feel, as beautiful in their perfections, holy in their dread functions, and further sanctified by contact with the Holy Souls, and so as a sweet oblation to the justice and purity of God.
But holy men have gone further even than this. " All things are Christ's, and Christ is God's." They have felt how unequal to the majesty of God are all the praises of creatures; and therefore, when they have desired to implore of God some more than common grace, they have offered to Him His own infinite perfections, and the glory He receives from those attributes which are Himself. They have pleaded by the Eternal Generation of the Son, and by the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost. They have offered to God the knowledge and love whereby He knows and loves Himself, and the incommunicable complacency of the Three Divine Persons in Each Other. And they have found, not only an answer to their prayers, but an increase of divine love in their souls, which they would hardly have conceived to be possible. They have found the technical terms of dogmas and definitions to be, not mere words and sounds, but flames from very heaven.
It is difficult to keep to our subject, that of intercession, when we are quoting so many things which run away with us and cause us to speak of love. But let us review all these riches of our poverty, all these our possession in Christ, and see if we have not indeed an abundance of sacrifices with which to approach God in continual and fervent intercessions. Through what fields and fields of delightful meditation do they not lead us all the while! What liberty of spirit they impart to us! How easy it is to make this a service of love, where all so breathes of love that it almost causes us to forget our intercession!
Take the case of invalids, of persons, not so much suffering from the pain of serious illness, as beneath the continual pressure of ailing health. They, too, desire to devote themselves to the glory of God, to the interests of Jesus, and to the saving of souls; j^et they can do nothing, so far as external activity is concerned, neither perhaps have they the means to help good works with alms. Direct intercession, direct asking of God in so many words for grace for such and such persons, is soon exhausted. There is nothing in it to beguile the weariness of infirm health, or to lead the spirit on. But to wander through these treasuries of holy offerings, countless, various and beautiful as they are, is a placid occupation of the spirit. It recreates the flagging devotion; and thus enables us to keep up and perpetuate our affectionate and reverential intercourse with God, while we are in reality doing great and solid work for His glory and the advancement of His Church. And not to invalids only, but to all, it is an easy, because interesting practice of the presence of God, interesting to the affections as well as to the mind. The more our ideas about God are multiplied, the more various our thoughts, and images, and recollections of things which have to do with Him, of course the more our minds and hearts are engrossed with Hifji, and so it becomes easier to live all day in His sensible presence. And is not the practice of the presence of God one half of Holiness? Neither should we omit to mention the unworldly temper which this method of intercession would produce in us. The world's strong point is its multiplicity. Its objects of interest are so numerous. It addresses so many sides of our nature. It lays hold of us in such a variety of ways. Whereas, religion is to many people so intellectually uninteresting, so dry and barren, so uniform and monotonous. They know so little about it; and they cannot always keep to one thing. And thus spirituality is at a disadvantage. It is true that there is a very lofty and sublime state of the soul in contemplation where the bare thought of God is its perfection. But these things are not for us. We, and such as we, need all the interest which variety and beauty can give to devotion; and even then we tire of it before long. And thus the more interesting and various is our religious knowledge, the more easy do we find it to cast out of our souls the miserable spirit of the world, and to become engrossed with the interests of Jesus.
And what consolation too is there not in all these riches of our poverty, when low spirits are upon us, or an over-depressing sense of sin, or the thwartings of men, or the failure of good works, or the unsatisfactoriness of life and of the world? Downcast as we may be, after all, we want nothing so much as that God should be loved, and Jesus have His own. And so weary with work or foiled with disappointment, when the dark night is closing in, bringing with it to our sick spirits a sense of imprisonment, and when the dismal rain curtains us round, and we fret to be at liberty and at large, there is the very freedom of a sovereign to a soul traversing this boundless empire of God and Jesus, of Mary, angels, saints, men, and the blameless creatures, and rejoicing in that never-ceasing sacrifice of praise which is rising up from every nook and corner of creation to the dear Majesty of our most loving God and Father.
Footnotes
Chapter 6 of 11