Chapter VIII. Praise and Desire

Men of science lead us into every nook and corner of the world to show us, even in the case of the vilest insects and the adaptation of their habits and instincts to their wants and weaknesses, how full creation is not only of the wisdom and the power, but of the minute considerateness and tender compassion of the Almighty. We have seen precisely the same thing in the spiritual world, and its supernatural arrangements. All is for love; and that to an extent which almost tries our faith. God loves us with a surpassing love, and He longs to be loved by us, and He lavishes upon us with an incredible profusion the most unthought-of means of loving Him and increasing His glory. Theology is the counterpart of physical science. It can tell us quite as wonderful things of the angels whom we have never seen, as astronomy can of the stars we can never reach. The science of the laws of grace is a parallel to the science of the laws of life. The history and constitution of the Church is as startling in its wonders as are the records of geolog}\ With the help of revelation, the Church, reason, and the light of the Holy Ghost, Catholic theologians have explored spirit with at least quite as much certainty and success as modern science has explored matter. Those who smile when we speak so intimately of the different choirs of angels, are like those who smile when they are told the bulk of a planet, or that it is made of some material as light as cork. The unbelief of ignorance causes the smile in both. The immense intellect of man was once directed upon the. life of God, His perfections, His incarnation, and His communications of Himself. Revelation gave it countless infallible axioms, and that greatest glory of the human mind, Catholic theology, was the result. The same immense power is now brought to bear upon the currents of the ocean and the circles of the winds, upon electrical phenomena, and the chemistry of the stars, and the result is wonderful enough in the system of modern science; yet hardly so wonderful, even as an exhibition of mental power, as are the summas of scholastic theology.

It is our ignorance of our religion which more than any thing else prevents our discerning the extreme lovingness of God. To the savage, on whose inobservant mind no phenomena are forced but those of power, such as the storm, the flash, the sun, the sea, the wind, — the Creator is simply a Spirit of might. Could he see the affections and instincts of animals, as science would put them before him, then he would come to change his notion of the Creator. So when men are absorbed in worldly pursuits, and do not occupy themselves in the things of God, it is only the phenomena of power in religion, such as death, mortal sin, judgment, hell, predestination, which engage their intention. They must descend into the minute laws of grace, the secrets of prayer, the arrangements of merit and glory, the affectionateness of indulgences, the sweet mysteries of Jesus and Mary, in order to get any thing like a true idea of the length and breadth of God's amazing love. The thunderclap can strike the inattentive; but it is only the listener that catches the sealike whispers of the summer air in the pine-tree tops.

We have seen how God enables us to love Him by-giving us all His own perfections, and the mysteries of His dear Son, to offer as our very own to His blessed Majestj', and further, by teaching us how to unite our little services to the intentions and actions of our Lord; and how all these things can be used alike for intercession, for thanksgiving, or for praise. But we may now go a step farther, and say that in His anxiety to beloved, and to give us the means of loving Him, He raises even our ineffectual desires to the dignity of effectual acts, and enables us to worship Him with a most heavenly and delightful worship, with the passing wishes of our loving hearts. He does not call only for blood, and pain, and sacrifice. He does not refuse to feed His glory on any thing short of heroic self-immolation. The faintest heart in creation may love Him, and love Him with an abundant love.

We can all perhaps remember when we were young the books called the Tarry -at-Home Traveller, and the objects they put before us. We could sit at ease in our sunny nursery, rocking on a rocking-chair, with the scattered toys and the dilapidated houses of wooden bricks around us, — tokens of a play which had interested and tired us an hour ago, and amid all these comforts we could cross the sandy plains of Africa, or thread the flowering forests of Brazil, amuse ourselves with the mud volcanoes of Iceland, or watch the Tartars from off the Great Wall of China; and if when night came on we did look into our little beds to see if a cobra di capello were lurking there, or we were mayhap shipwrecked in a dream, they were but the vainest of alarms, and even they could give a zest to the morrow. Now, God's love has realized in our devotions something very like this Tarry-at-Home Travelling. We can go from country to country on the earth, wishing God more glory, and worshipping Jesus in neglected tabernacles. We can brood over the dim realms of purgatory, and sigh and wish for God's glory and the interests of Jesus. We can range the courts of heaven with undazzled eye, and worship there by inward wishes and by mental praises. We can pass from attribute to attribute of the Divine Majesty with congratulations, joys, desires, nay, even with impossible wishes it were more perfect. And all the while this is no mere amusement, no merely lawful occupation of our minds with the dear and deep things of God. But it is substantial worship, something with which the eternal Majesty is positively pleased, adoration impetrating actual graces, and securing corresponding degrees of glory.

In truth there is nothing in the world so substantial as all these things. The rocky mountain is less real than true worship. Suffering even is but an unreality compared with that which has power to please the incomprehensible God. Grace being a participation of the Divine Nature, is a thousand times more solid than all the natures of men and animals: and the law of gravity is less certain than the unimaginable glory of the Blessed. Truly the ways of God, are above our ways, and we soon get out of our depth in His loving counsels! If we, with the little dim discernment we can have of spiritual things, can touch and handle the amazing reality of every thing which has to do with God, what wonder that the saints should have spoken so lightly and so contemptuously of the things of earth, as if pain and pleasure, life and death, were so indistinguishably small, that it mattered not whether the one or the other befell a man. Verily there is no science like the science of loving God.

The subject then that I want to bring before you now is that of Praise and Desire, with the devout practices of them left on record for us by holy men. Praise is something more than thanksgiving. It is blessing God for His goodness, His power, His purity, His beauty. It is congratulating Him that He is what He is, and that there is none like Him. It is calling on all His angels and saints to praise and glorify Him with all their might: and rising from them to Mary, we implore her to praise the Majesty of God for us more worthily than we ourselves can do; and exhausting all the treasures of her almost divine prerogatives, we rise to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is like a boundless sea, every one of whose waves gleams and lightens with unutterable praise of God; but even that has limits, though the dear little French picture of the angel trying to fathom the Sacred Heart, and his lead not reaching half way, may be true enough so far as the power of men or angels to fathom it is conceived; and by love, from excess of love becoming unabashed, we dare to throw ourselves into the bosom of the Most High, and listen ecstatically to His many-voiced praise and benediction of

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Himself. This is a different spirit from that which measures the necessities of obedience, investigates its claim on God, ascertains the extent to which He has bound Himself by covenant, and follows the probable opinion which is in favor of the laxest practice. I am not saying this latter spirit is wrong. I am neither criticizing nor finding fault with any thing. I am only saying, what is clearly undeniable, that it is a very different spirit from the spirit of Praise. Moreover, the spirit of Praise is easier and sweeter. It brings no suffering along with it; it involves no austerity; it implies no arduous heights of prayer. There is not in devotion a more childlike spirit than it is. But it is not only a different spirit; it produces a different character, a different kind of spirituality. It entices us to serve God out of love. Hence it finds its proper place in this treatise, which would not be complete without it.

By desire, I do not mean what theologians call the love of concupiscence, by which we all covet God as our own ultimate end and sovereign good. That love of concupiscence does not enter into my subject. But by Desire I mean the devotion which results in the heart from the two loves of Complacency and Benevolence, to be afterward explained. It is wishing God more love, more obedience, more glory from men. It is desiring for Him, out of love, the augmentation of every thing in heaven, earth, hell, and purgatory, on which His accidental glory can feed and be increased. It is wishing even impossible wishes, as that He were more perfect and beautiful than He is, who is simple perfection and absolute beauty. It is wishing we could be martyred for the faith, or clear hell, or empty purgatory. It is wishing, even till sorrow and condolence spring up in our hearts, that sins might cease, and scandals disappear, and lukewarmness evaporate from the face of the earth, and most of all, that we ourselves could serve so drear and dread a Majesty otherwise than we do, and could have other hearts than those miserable icy stones which, so far as God is concerned, we carry about in our bosom all our lives long. It is wishing that every grain of the sea-sands, and every leaf of the forests had a seraph's intellect and voice to swell the chorus of God's praise. This, again, is a different spirit from wishing to escape hell-fire, from desiring a short purgatory, or to skip it altogether, from praying for a quiet life and an easy death-bed, from asking temporal blessings, and seeking cures from the relics of the saints, from coveting after the peace, and joy, and stability of heaven, merely or mainly, because of the irksomeness of earth's contraries. Once more, let me not be misunderstood. I am not saying that this last spirit is wrong. Not at all. I wish all the children of men were infected with it. But it is cognizably a different spirit from the spirit of Desire. And the spirit of Desire is easier and sweeter, and gives God greater glory. Besides this, it also, like the spirit of Praise, produces a different spirituality, and leads to the service of love.

These are the two things, Praise and Desire, which we are now to consider. Henceforth, I shall not speak of them separately; for they run in and out of each other so perpetually, that for convenience sake we may very well regard them as one thing. You see, to go back to my old story — what I want of you is confidence in God. There is no worship worth the name of worship, which is not the voice of confidence. There is no love which is not confidence. But there can be no confidence without the filial feeling. We always get back again to the same point, God is our Father! Look at the perfections of God, His power as well as His love. His justice as well as His mercy. Consider one as much as the other; be as fair to one as to the other. So far as in our blindness we can at all estimate the character of God, or appreciate Him, we must acknowledge that there can be no acceptable worship of Him which is not based on confidence. This is the proper homage of the creature to its Creator. From the dreadful fear which worships the spirit of power with human sacrifice and fanatical suicide, to the mixed impertinence and superstition of fetishism, the absence of this filial feeling of confidence is the characteristic of every modification of false worship. The beautiful worship of God as our Father is distinguished by this very thing, that its chief exercise of love is in putting trust in the very perfections of God, which, to an unloving mind, would produce fear. It is a great act of love to trust, like a son, God's tremendous power. It is a greater still to remember what we are, and in spite of it to put all our confidence in His justice, to repose, as in a mother's lap, upon that very attribute which haunts the unloving like an unconquerable spectre, so long as they believe and live. All for love, and love for us all. All for Jesus, and Jesus for all. These are the two sides of religion. Every thing is here, all theology, earth, purgatory, heaven. Even the Jews perceived how every thing turned on men remembering that God was their Father. " Nothing," says one of the Rabbinical books, " proves ardor in the worshipper more than the use of the words, Our Father." " Thrice blessed is he," says another, " who does good through love of God, over and above him who serves through fear." Such were even the traditions of the Jews. And now Jesus has come, softening and subduing all things to Himself, vailing His eternal glory in the sweet regards of human eyes, like unto His Mother's, pleasing not Himself, pouring love over the whole earth, to change the face of things; and yet — alas for the interests of Divine Love! alas for the Sacred Heart! how many Catholics contrive to make of this blessed faith and service, a dry, cold, formal, stingy, ungraceful worship, which the very prostrations and ablutions of a Mohammedan might upbraid and put to shame!

I have said before, that perhaps nothing strikes converts in the devotional system of the Church so much as the value and importance assigned to interior acts. They are surprised at the duty under pain of sin of acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition, at recurring periods or under given circumstances. They are startled at the commentaries on our Lord's doctrine about committing sin in our hearts. They have to reconcile themselves to the influence attributed to intention. Now all this, just like the rest of the Catholic system, brings out God. God is a simple act. Whatsoever is done stands in a certain relation to

God. All its meaning and reality is from this. Words, therefore, are but accidents. Nay, overt acts add but little, comparatively, to the malice of the interior will. The thought has been assented to: the intention has been formed; the temptation has been deliberately admitted. The thing is irrevocable. It has touched God, and is stereotyped. He needs no index of the voice, nor consummation of the hands. It is an act, and ranks as such with Him, for good or evil, for reward or punishment. Sins of thought, says the Council of Trent, have these frightful characteristics; first that they sometimes make a greater wound in the soul than sins of deed, and secondly, that they are sometimes more dangerous. Nonnunquam animam gravius sauciunt, et periculosiora sunt iis quae manifeste admittuntur. They are also more numerous, more easily committed, and their approaches frighten us less. Now the reality of the merit of devout desires, of mental praise, and of all interior as well as spoken acts of devotion is the loving side of this question. They need be nothing more than interior acts. Nothing more is necessary. They have touched God as such, and so have received their value and their merit. Thus, turning the tables on sins of thought, we may say that these interior acts of piety sometimes make a greater impression on the soul than exterior ones; while they have the further advantages of being more numerous and more easily performed. But is it not enough to vex our love, to go and stand by the countless seas of men's hearts, and to watch the innumerable waves that stir and brighten in every one of them every minute, and to think there is not one wave or ripple that might not rival an angel's song for worth before the dear Majesty of God; and yet, that this treasure is so little used, that men take so little pains about it, and that God is so defrauded of His glory? So He loves us, and so He longs for our love, that He has made it almost as easy, by the merits of Jesus, for our hearts to praise Him, as for the thurible to let the spires of sweet smoke issue through its perforated cover; and yet we will not do it!

It is hard to appreciate at their true value these interior acts. There was a nun in the convent of St. Mary Magdelene of Pazzi, by name Sister Maria Benedetta Vettori, whom the saint saw five hours after her death in a glory exceeding the beatitude of many other virgins of the monastery, and fearlessly gazing on the Humanity and Divinity of the Word. The Jesuit confessor then proceeds, " Wherefore, after having been a long time in admiring rapture, through joy at such a delightful sight, the saint began to exclaim at intervals, Oh happy thou, who knewest how to bear the hidden treasure! Oh what a great thing to be singular among the singular, and yet regarded as an ordinary one! The Word, had He merely regarded the works, would have had little to reward, for short has been the time for working. But oh, the goodness of God! who rewards every thought, and word, and wish! Great and continual were thy works, and practised by few, for they were interior! Oh the greatness of interior works, so little understood! One interior work is worth a thousand years of exterior exercises! " Orat. Life, p. 119.

Remember, then, this is what we start with. There is nothing in the world so real and substantial as the love of God. One act of Divine Love is a more finished thing than a statue of Phidias or Praxiteles. It is more firm than the foundations of the Alps. It is more enduring than the round world which God hath made so strong. All things are bubbles to it. They have nothing in them. They mean little. They soon pass away. An act of love is a complete work, and has greater power and greater consequences than any other act. The mere act of dying is not equal to it. And yet this act of love can be made by a mental glance, quick as lightning, and piercing heaven. Such acts can be multiplied at will beyond our power of reckoning, and in the midst of apparently the most distracting occupations. So far from being weakened by repetition, they only grow more intense and more powerful. Yet they require no effort. To elicit them is even a pleasure to us. But when we put these facts alongside of our practice, it looks as if there must be a fallacy somewhere. All this can hardly be true, and yet we remain as we are. How incredible is the hardness of our own hearts! It is a fair match for the excess of God's love. Oh welcome then that beautiful spirit of reparetion to the Majesty of God which so many of the saints have had! It is like making swef-t honey out of bitter flowers. The little love we have for God thus, by this dear right of reparation, furnishes us with another means of loving Him still more. Who will say that all things are not contrived for love?

In order to get a clear idea of Praise and Desire, it will be necessary for us to enter somewhat into the question of Divine Love, its different kinds and manifestations. This, however, will be so far from leading us away from our subject, that it will throw great light upon many of the preceding chapters. Indeed, if All for Jesus be the same thing as All for love, then Divine Love is the very subject of the treatise. What is called by theologians the love of concupiscence is, I have said before, a holy longing after God as our last end, our sovereign good, our exceeding great reward: as when St. Paul exclaimed, I desire to be dissolved, and to be with Christ. This love we ought to have all our lives long, though God may not always give us the gift to feel it sensibly. There is a remarkable passage in the revelations of St. Gertrude, which shows how acceptable to God is this longing to see Him, while it illustrates also the drawing which devout people mostly hare to gaze intensely on the Blessed Sacrament. She was divinely instructed that as often as a man gazes with desire and devotion on the Host, where the Body of Christ lies hid sacramentally, so often does he increase his merit in heaven; and that in the future Vision of God to all eternity there shall be to him so many special and congruous joys as the times that on earth he gazed with desire and devotion on the Body of our Lord, or, which is greatly to our present purpose, when he so much as desired to do so, and was reasonably hindered from doing it.¹ Hence Lancisius f gives it as one of his special devotions for the octave of Corpus Christi to try to hear mass where you can see the

Host lying on the corporal, or, if this be impossible, to look intently at It in the monstrance. So necessary in Christian things is familiarity in order to reverence! And observe well, that God is pleased to attach the same promise to the desire to see Him as to the actually doing so; so that the remarkable words of St. Lawrence Justinian * were no devotional exaggeration, when he said, " Let us persist in our prayers that better gifts may be daily given to us. For it very often happens that what merits cannot do, the intercession of desires effects. Truly God rejoices so much in the prayers of supplicants, that He grants their wishes if only they come from a simple heart, an humble mind, and a faithful devotion. Only let these three conditions be united in a prayer, and whatever a man shall ask, according to God, he shall receive from the Father of lights and His Son Jesus Christ."

"What is unknown," says St. Austin, "cannot beloved; ' non enim diligitur nisi cognitum,' for, except as known it is not loved; " and St. Thomas expands this axiom very beautifully in the Secunda Sdcundse. It is this knowledge of God which leads us to those further kinds of love which we need to illustrate our subject of Praise and Desire; so I must try to do what seems very foolish— describe God.

God is simple, without body or distinction of parts. He is simple, because He has nothing borrowed. He is good without qualities, great without quantity, Creator, yet needing nothing, everywhere, yet without place, eternal, without term, and changing all things, without change Himself. He is good with an infinite² goodness, and good to all, but especially good to men. He is infinite in the multitude of His perfections, in their intensity, and in their magnificence. He is present everywhere, in different manners, yet nowhere contracting soil or stain. He is immutable; His eternity defends Him from time, His immensity from change of place, and His wisdom from change of purpose. He is eternal without beginning as well as without end, and eternal with a life which exists all at once and altogether, and with a perfect possession of it. He subsists by the incomparable unity of His blessed nature, and it is the crowning interest of every man in the world that God should be but One. He is sovereign purity, unspeakable sanctity, and most resplendent beauty. He is always in adorable tranquillity; no trouble can come nigh His Being. He is known to nature, to faith, to glory, yet He is incomprehensible by all. His name is the ineffable God. His science is beyond our thought, and is the source of His ravishing joy. His being is truth itself, and His life is the inexhaustible fountain of life. His will is worshipful, unblamable, supreme, and His liberty is without parallel and beyond words. His love of His creatures is eternal, constant, gratuitous, and singular; and His mercy is an unfathomable abyss of the most beautiful compassions and condescensions, and no less also of the most delicate judgments and the most tender retributions. His justice is as irreproachable as His sanctity, and as benevolent as His mercy. His power is illimitable, and full of love; and His blessedness is inaccessible. Yet all these are not separate perfections: but He is Himself all these excellencies, and He is one: Three co-equal, co-eternal, and consubstantial Persons, One only God. Such, in the dry language of the schools, is the description of Him who is our loving and indulgent Father, God over all blessed for evermore! Amen.

Can we read it, and not see that no half- allegiance will do for Him? He cannot reign over a divided heart, for who is he that can share the throne with Him? What but love can be our religion? for with what else can we worship Him? When we have dared to trust Him, then we have worshipped Him. And are not these attributes like the circles of the whirlpool, drawing us into themselves with the strong fascination of His beauty? What can we do more than cry out with St. Francis of Sales, " O goodness so infinite, O infinity so good! " Yet it is only in proportion as these dry definitions breathe and burn with the heat and light of the Holy Spirit, that they touch our hearts with genuine love of God. But when they are so touched, as yours have long since been, then they lead us not only to long for God as our own Sovereign Good, but to long for something more. But let us first see what comes of this sweet-flavored knowledge of God, where the will tastes what the mind perceives.

Now, if God cannot be loved unless He is first known, and if also He has arranged all creatures for the express purpose of communicating Himself to them and being loved by them, then it must follow that it is for the glory of God that His perfections should be known, and His goodness acknowledged.. As our Lord said that when He was lifted up He should draw 21 all men unto Him, so when the Divine Majesty is raised up before the eyes of men, the hearts of multitudes will be drawn toward it in adoration and trembling love. Hence, as the glory of God is one of the three objects we are putting before ourselves at present, we see how much we can promote it, no matter what our rank and condition may be, by making God better known by those who come in our way.

It is remarkable how few persons meditate on the attributes of God. They seem to imagine that little can be known, said, or thought about them; or at best that they are a subject for lofty contemplation rather than the humble meditation of beginners. If the mys-teries of Jesus, the actions of the Sacred Humanity, were to be neglected for the divine attributes, there can be no question it would be a delusion, and as St. Theresa teaches us, a very dangerous delusion. But it really seems almost necessary to fruitful meditation on the Sacred Humanity of our dear Lord, that meditation of the attributes of God should go along with it; and it is observable that when Blessed Paul of the Cross founded his Passionist nuns, their two objects of prayer were to be the Passion, and the attributes of God. It is sadly true, however, that with all classes of men, the perfections of God are infrequent subjects of thought. People will often start at being told things about God, as they would at some vision about the unrevealed actions of our Blessed Lord and our dear Lady, or at some tremendous announcement of modern science which upsets half our previous knowledge, and for the time throws, it all into confusion. Surely this is the reason why God is so little loved, and why we are all so dry and unamiable in our way of serving Him, and especially why there is such an universal complaint that of all devotional practices, that of the presence of God is the hardest and most tedious. Now we are all of us having continual opportunities of saying a word for God, of making others recognize His wisdom, or acknowledge His goodness, of taking His side, and of contrasting what He would like with what men at large are actually doing. We see pious and worthy people with their instincts in the wrong direction; we are pained by the inconsistencies of those whose fervent self-denial we joyfully admire; and it is all because God is not known, and His true glory not discerned.

But even if opportunities of thus glorifying God by teaching Him to others were wanting to us, we can always glorify Him by learning Him ourselves, by reading about Him and meditating upon Him, and by perpetually offering to His Majesty reverential and affectionate acts of Praise and Desire. We are dependent on nobody for this. We do not so much as need to speak. Yet we continue to glorify Him while we make acts of loving admiration of Him, or congratulate Him that His perfections are unspeakable, or offer to Him with humble reparation the praise due to Him from all those creatures that are this hour forgetting Him. Oh, how much could we do by patient love, by thoughtful love, by assiduous love!

Neither is it less for the interests of Jesus that the knowledge of God should be spread upon the earth. He came to save sinners, not only by dying for them, but by making His Father known to them. This is eternal life, that we should know God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. Our Lord is Himself the brightness of His Father's glory and the figure of His substance. As the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, He is the Eternal Word, the Father's knowledge of Himself, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, and by whom also He made the world. Thus to publish the perfections of God to others, or to acknowledge them ourselves, is of all works the most acceptable to our dearest Lord, for it is the likeness of His own work, nay, rather it is His own work with which He allows us to co-operate. It is His own grandeur, they are His own perfections, which we are thus publishing and acknowledging. There is no fitter devotion to the Person of the Eternal Word than to laud and magnify the splendors of the Most Holy Trinity. The salvation of souls, is equally concerned in the matter. What has been the experience of converts to the Catholic Church? It is not so much knowledge and love of Mary which they have acquired, as those they have left behind so often fancy. It is not so much the efficacy of grace, and the reality of the Sacraments which they have come to learn by their new religion: though what they have learned of these things, and especially of the doctrine of grace, is indeed most wonderful. But the great, the pre-eminent change in them since they became Catholics, has been their knowledge of God. The thought of God has been growing and expanding in them ever since, until their whole minds have become overshadowed with it. The chief fruit of an intense and enthusiastic devotion to our dear Lady has been to teach them more and more of God, and to magnify Him in their souls. When they look back on the old days of error, it does not look so much as if their ignorance had consisted in a disesteem of Mary or of the Blessed Eucharist, of penance or of purgatory, as in having a low idea of God; so that on the retrospect a man is led involuntarily to exclaim, " Why, I did not believe in God! " and the cry is hardly an exaggeration. Then first they know what a solid thing religion is. And oh! how sweet has the knowledge of God been, as well as a solid gain! It has put another face on life, on trial, pain, vicissitude, and suffering. It has been within them a fountain of refreshment springing up continually, or, as the prophet says, " The shadow of a great rock in a barren land." And it is not only sweetness which has been in it, but power also, power to do and power to endure. Yes! men little know how great and good a work it is they are doing, when they increase by ever so little another's knowledge of the Most High. They have not stopped one sin, but hundreds. They have not been the channels of one grace, but of thousands. They have not taught one devotion, but all, all devotions in that one which comes of knowing one thing more of God than we knew before. The knowledge of God is the establishment of Christ's kingdom in the soul. How many more would be converted if they would only read and meditate on God! How many would advance in the spiritual life who now stand still, because the Divine Perfections are not preached to them, or do not make part of their spiritual reading! How many more Catholics would serve God out of pure love if they would make His character and attributes their study! I believe the bare perusal of the treatise De Deo, even with the dry harshness of its technical language, would do more to convert souls than any half-dozen of the most fervid and affecting spiritual books that ever were written. All glory be to God at least for those who have been led out of heresy into the bosom of the true Church, and have thus felt all that the growing knowledge of God has done for them, especially through devotion to His ever blessed Mother! For of their souls may it be most truly said,³ "that the land that was desolate and impassable hath been glad; and the wilderness hath rejoiced and flourished like the lily. It hath budded forth and blossomed, and rejoiced with joy and praise. The glory of Libanus hath been given to it, the beauty of Carmel and Saron; they have seen the glory of the Lord, and the beauty of our God. And so the feeble hands have been strengthened, and the weak knees confirmed; and it has been said to the faint-hearted, Take courage, and fear not; and the eyes of the blind have been opened, and the ears of the deaf been unstopped. The lame man has leaped as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb been set free; for waters are broken out in the desert and streams in the wilderness. That which was dryland has become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. In the dens where dragons dwelt before, now rises up the verdure of the reed and the bulrush. A path and a way are there, and are called the Holy Way; and no lion can be there, nor any mischievous beast go up by it, or be found there; but they walk there that are delivered; and the redeemed of the Lord have returned, and have come into Zion with praise, and everlasting joy is upon their heads; for they have obtained joy and gladness, and sorrow and mourning have fled away."

Let us now see what comes of this knowledge of God, which we receive by faith. We perceive Him to be the unspeakable fulness of all possible and incomprehensible perfections. As He is then an object immensely beautiful, He must therefore be immensely desirable, and is discerned as such by the understanding using the light of faith. Now, whenever the understanding beholds any thing which is desirable, there is an immediate feeling in the will, which is not a free act, but the necessary result of the law of our nature. This feeling is called complacency. But although this is not itself a free act, it at once begins to act unless the reason forbids it. It begins at once to exercise itself freely in expressions or sentiments of joy, pleasure, praise, and desire. It is thus we come to this second kind of Divine Love, the love of complacency, rejoicing in God because he is so good, because He is Himself, because He is God. We congratulate Him on all this.. Nay more, we wish an impossibility which goes beyond complacency, that He could be more good and more perfect; and this wish is a real mode of manifesting our love to Him. We desire also that as we can do nothing to increase His glory in Himself, we should at least increase His accidental glory, which comes from the obedience and love of His creatures, whom He has created for this end. This complacency comes, I say, from the very knowledge of God which faith imparts to us; and it is continually growing in us, unless sin and lukewarmness hinder and kill it. The case between God and the soul then stands thus, if we may venture to use Scripture language for these mutual acts of love. The soul, looking in delighted wonder over all this sea of beautiful attributes and perfections, seems to hear a Voice rising up from the surface of the many waters, and borne to its inmost ear, " I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore have I drawn thee, taking pity on thee; and I will build thee again, and thou shall be built, O virgin of Israel." * And the soul murmurs, half in thought, half in reply, " Know ye that the Lord, He is God. I have said to the Lord, Thou art my God — -Thou art the God of my heart, and the God that is my portion for ever." f The Voice of the many waters comes again, " If any man shall hear My voice, and open to Me the gate, I will come into him, and sup with him, and he with Me." $ And the soul, charmed out of herself, replies, " Let my Beloved come into His garden, and eat the fruit of His apple-trees." § Then, as if turning to angels and men, the Voice exclaims, " Behold, the smell of My son is as the smell of a plentiful field, which the Lord hath blessed; " || and the soul hears, yet knows that nothing of its own is good, and so it too turns to angels and men, and says, " See how it is, the King brought me into His storerooms, and His breasts are more than wine. God forbid that I should glory but in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me. A cluster of⁴ cypress my love is to me, in the vineyards of En-gaddi." *

How delightful is this complacency in God! There need be no bounds to it; it may be, if it could be, wide as God Himself. There can be no talk here of limit or of moderation. Moderation is baseness, fraud, and infidelity, where God is concerned. All God is before us, infinitely perfect, infinitely desirable, for us to rejoice in. What is earth? What are the things of earth? Shall we not be lifted up far above ourselves, our own petty wretchedness and misery, our own grovelling interests and low-born desires? God grows like a dawning splendor before us. We become like that good man mentioned in St. Philip's life who was seen retreating from the altar, step by step, with wonder and rapture depicted on his face, and who said that he was meditating on the Greatness of God, and it was growing upon him like something in pursuit, and thrusting him backward. The more we know of God, the more our complacency increases; because, to fill our minds and engross us, the simple thought of God must be multiplied and repeated from a thousand objects. It is like the sun lighting up a mountain chain. He is not multiplied himself, but as his golden magnificence lights up peak after peak, we become more and more surrounded by his effulgence. It is thus with God: each attribute to which we give a name, though His attributes are in truth His Simple Self, is to us as a separate height crowned and glowing with His glory, and so reflecting Him upon our souls; while the multitude of nameless perfections,

•Cant. i. 3. Gal. vi. 14. Gal. ii. 20. Cant. 1. 13.

for which we have neither ideas, words, nor standards, are to us like the consciousness of the glorious sea of mountain tops which are beyond our ken, but which we know to be resting in that furnace of golden light, and adding to the burning splendor which is circumfused over earth, and sea, and sky.

Who can think of self, when he is thus with God? And who can have hard thoughts of His absolute empire and uncontrolled sovereignty, when he is lost, sweetly lost in this complacency, joying over God that He is God, that He is just what He is, and that nothing is wanting to Him? He is the Lord; let Him do what seemeth Him good. What Eli said in sorrow, we may surety say still more in joy. Ah! dear Jesus! how is it we do not cultivate this blessed complacency? It is so full of gladness and of peace, and of self-forgetting, childlike love! Oh teach us to be ever looking over the sea of thine interminable magnificence, and rejoicing that Thou art what Thou art, that Thou hast been thus from unbeginning eternity, and shall be thus, adorably immutable, for never-ending ages! "The soul," says St. Francis of Sales,⁵ " that exercises the love of complacency, cries perpetually in her sacred silence, It is enough for me that God is God, that His goodness is infinite, that bis perfection is immense. Whether I die or live, matters little to me, for my Well-beloved lives eternally with a liie all triumphant. Deatli cannot sadden a heart which knows that its Sovereign Love is living. It is enough for the soul that loves, that He whom it loves more than itself, is heaped with eternal blessings; for such a soul lives more in Him whom it loves than in the body that it animates; for in truth it does not live itself, but its Well-beloved lives in it."

The love of complacency, strictly speaking, is the joy we feel in the infinite perfections of God, that He is what He is. But just as the knowledge of God, by faith, cannot stop at knowledge, but passes into a necessary complacency, and that necessary complacency into free acts of Praise and of Desire; so also this free love of complacency cannot terminate in itself. It passes on to another and a further love, which is called the love of benevolence. Our love of God is just the opposite of God's love of us. He loves us first with a love of benevolence, working in us all the good we have, and then when it is worked, loving us with a love of complacency in His own work within us. But our benevolence toward God is, as St. Francis of Sales points out, merely the natural consequence of our complacency in Him. We first rejoice that He is so good and perfect, and then wish Him, if it were possible, more goodness and perfection; and this last act is the love of benevolence. To explain this I will use the words of St. Francis himself.*

" As it is not easy to understand how man can wish any increase of happiness or perfection to God, let us examine how far the love of benevolence we bear Him is a real and solid love. As God is the centre of all good, as His perfections are infinite, and consequently beyond the reach of our desires and thoughts, it is evident that we cannot wish Him, at least with an efficacious desire, any perfection which could add to * Amour de Dieu, lib. v. 6.

what He is in Himself. Besides, the object of desire is some future blessing, whereas in God all perfection is present, and so present that it forms one and the same thing with the Divine Essence, which exists from all eternity, and acquires no increase. As we cannot form any real or absolute desire, with regard to God, we form imaginary and conditional wishes. Thou art my God; Thou art so rich in Thyself that Thou needest not my possessions. But if it were possible that there was anything Thou didst not already possess, I should wish it to Thee, O my God! I should long to procure it for Thee, at the expense of my life. If, being what Thou art, and what thou canst not cease to be, it were possible that some new perfection could be added to those Thou hast already, with what ardor should I desire it were Thine! I should wish that my heart were transformed into desires and that ray life were consumed in sighs. Yes, O Lord! I am far from desiring that we could have room to wish Thee any increase of perfection. My greatest happiness is to think that we cannot add to Thy Sovereign Goodness even in desire. But if thou couldst acquire any new advantage, if the desire of seeing Thee more perfect or more happy, chimerical as it is, could be realized, I should wish that my soul were totally transformed into this desire, that my ardor in wishing Thee any perfection which Thou didst not already possess, were as lively as the pleasure I now feel in not being able to desire Thee any thing Thou hast not. How sweet this impotence becomes to me, O my God! when I reflect that it is founded on Thy sovereign, immense, incomprehensible riches, which would be capable of satiating an infinite desire, could it exist, so as to be transformed from desire to infinite enjoyment.

" These desires, though founded on imaginary and impossible suppositions, are very pleasing to God, and are usually formed amid the transports and holy ecstasies of charity. St. Augustine frequently experienced such feelings, and the words in which he expressed them were like so many burning arrows impelled by the hand of love. « Yes, Lord! ' said he, ' I am Augustine and Thou art God; but could it be possible that I were God, and Thou Augustine, I should wish to change conditions with Thee that Thou mightest be God! ' * We also testify love of benevolence for the Almighty, when, reflecting that we cannot add any degree to His perfections, which are His infinite and essential immensity, we endeavor to increase in ourselves His accidental greatness, which consists in the complacency we derive from knowing that He is infinitely perfect, and which increases in proportion as this complacency becomes more ardent. We do not then exercise the love of complacency on account of any pleasure we derive from it, but because it is a source of delight to God. We do not seek our happiness therein as our own happiness, but as conformable to that of God, and thereby calculated to unite us to Him, and procure us the enjoyment of His infinite perfections. To render this union and enjoyment more excellent, we desire to communicate, if it⁶ were possible, an infinite strength and boundless extent to complacency. The ever blessed Queen and mother of holy love gives us an example of this, when she says, ' My soul doth magnify the Lord! ' To leave no doubt that the ardor of her gratitude derives its increase from complacency, she immediately adds, ' My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.' "

These explanations are sufficient for my purpose. What I want to bring you to is this, just as I have urged you to promote the glory of God, the interests of Jesus, and the saving of souls, by what is called the love of condolence, or sorrowing for other men's sins, and also by the use of intercessory prayers and thanksgivings, by offering up your own actions to God in union with those of our dear Lord, and also by offering up to Him His own perfections, and the mysteries of Jesus and Mary, the angels and the saints; so now I want you to glorify Him in like manner by those acts of Praise and Desire, which come of these two loves of Complacency and Benevolence. Such are, 1, acts of joy that God is what He is; 2, acts of congratulation with Him on His perfections, His works, and the mys-teries of His Sacred Humanity; 3, acts of desire, wishing for Him impossible things, which St. Francis of Sales has just told us are acts of real love, and very acceptable to Him; 4, acts of desire, wishing for Him that He might have had more glory from the world in years gone by, from the lost souls, and the like; 5, acts of desire, which intercession may make efficacious, that He maybe more glorified than He is now, through the perfection of the saints and the conversion of sinners, and the more rapid liberation of souls from purgatory; 6, acts of praise, wishing that every sand of the sea and leaf of the woods had an angel's intelligence to praise Him, and offering to Him again and again with loving ardor the actual angelic praise of heaven; and 7, sighs of loving sorrow, condolence, and reparation, over His slighted love, His outraged Majesty, His forgotten goodness, and His defrauded glory. It is true that all these things sound like the breathings of very saints. Yet they need not the austerities which repel us, nor the supernatural powers from which we shrink as much in dismay as in humility. And, as with all the other things recommended in the previous chapters, so with these, how much might we do at such a little cost!

If you look at any of the Saints, you will see that they are made up of six things. First of all, obedience to the commandments of God and the precepts of the Church; secondly, thirdly, and fourthly, strong and loving instincts for the glory of God, the interests of Jesus, and the salvation of souls; fifthly, an intense love of suffering and voluntary austerities, accompanied by terrific interior trials and, what mystics call, passive purgations of spirit; and sixthly, supernatural states of prayer, unusual gifts, and miraculous powers. Now the first of these things we may put aside, because we must all have it, or else we shall not be saved. The fifth, most likely, we honestly confess we do not feel, and we shrink from it, as well out of humility as out of cowardice; and, as a consequence of this shrinking, we are not quite so blinded by self-love as not to see that the sixth point is far above us, and unsuited to our present attainments.

Thus the second, third, and fourth points remain, as something beyond the common necessary practice of the faithful, and below the pinnacles of the saints. These three instincts seem open to us, inasmuch as the austerities which frighten us, and the supernatural heights of prayer which are out of our sight, are not requisite for them. Moreover, which is a singular consolation, the beauty of the saints lies rather in the three instincts that are open to us, than in the two heights to which we dare not aspire.

Now, devout people formed upon the three instincts for the glory of God, the interests of Jesus, and the welfare of souls, abound in Catholic countries in good times, and seem to be to the Church what the middle classes are to the prosperity of the state, — not its heroes, but its life, strength, muscle, and independence. They are the growth of quiet times. MartjTS can be, and will be made out of them by scores, when troubles come. But saints, the spiritual creations of an interior life, belong to another order of things. It is plain, then, that in uneventful times it is our chief work to increase this middle class of the faithful; otherwise we shall be such dry and uninteresting Christians, that we shall never convert those outside the fold, and, what is even of more importance, we shall have nobody to love our multitudinous poor, or to take any generous, persevering pains about them. It is equally obvious that it is the devil's game to lessen the number of this class; and this he does in two ways especially — first, by giving devotion a bad name, inspiring men to call it romantic, enthusiastic, pretty, youthful, the fervor of converts, fanciful, novel, unpractical, and the like; and secondly, by leading people to aim too high, to attempt too much, to effect mystical books, to run after miracles and portents, to make rash vows, and to tempt God by burdening themselves with a multiplicity of prayers: and then, when their wax wings are melted off, in weariness and disgust, they sink down to the merest observance of precepts, and, not seldom, even lower still.

The aim of this treatise is to draw a picture of this middle class, to give a view of their life, to exhibit samples of their devotion, and to make out a case for them. It was mainly this sort of people St. Philip set himself to multiply in Rome, and it is substantially the chief work he left his sons to do. I do not say the exclusive work, else we should lose our right to the crowds of dear sinners that are ever gathering themselves to the odor of the saint's name, and to the lures of his little apostolate. If then you want to be a saint, like to one of the canonized, this is not the book for you. I hope I should never have dreamed of writing it, if it were meant for you. He that has climbed the rocks can alone tell you the secrets of the rough ascent. This is a map of the easy ways of Divine Love, higher than the plains and above their dust, yet not so high as to be beyond the region of sweet flowers and shady trees, and the coolness of bubbling springs. If you have ever read the life of St. Philip, you may remember how some one who wanted to be a saint dreamed that the holy Father was dragging him through rude and prickly briers. I wish we all had the heart to face the briers; but it is not so, and it is of no use trying to be good by 22 theories. Still, to love God is a great thing, to love Him more and more a greater, and to make others love Him so great that it is a joyous surprise, ever fresh, and new every day, that God should let such as we are do so great a thing.

You must not suppose that I hold cheap the practices of mortification, whether outward or inward, or that I think affective love renders effective love unnecessary, or even that I believe interior mortification can dispense from the obligation of bodily penances and discomforts, in the case of those who are aiming at perfection. My little book is not a summa of ascetical theology. But because we cannot rise so high, there is no need surely to sink so low. Some severe spiritualists speak as if affective love were little better than a delusion, or at best a mere service of hot feelings. Oh surely this is hasty, peremptory, unkind, not like the Church, or God. I grant we must not stop there, that we must go on to mortify our inordinate passions, and work and suffer. Yet surely merely affective love is good as far as it goes; neither can it be with Catholics nothing more than a worship of feelings; for I have shown all along, and theology most amply bears me out, that the practices of it may be made most solid, nay, almost inevitably are so. And then affective love is the way to effective. Besides this, by aiming exclusively at one only, we most commonly lose both. I know there are many people who have made up their minds not to be saints. Well! if God was angry with them, and counted their pusillanimity as sin, if Jesus turned away from them and left them out of His reckoning, we need take no pains for them. But He does not do so: and therefore we may well affectionately ask them to think, if they will not be saints, whether they will not love our dearest Lord as far as Calvary, without committing themselves to the crucifixion. This will come home to us most feelingly, when our poor ashamed hearts tell us that we ourselves are at least among the well-intentioned faint-hearted cowards of the army of our generous and unselfish Lord.

It is not unfair, though I pretend to be pleading for God's glory and a service of love, to assail you with arguments drawn from your own interests. I am sure many of you are not contented with yourselves. You want to love God more, and to make more of Jesus. You want to get out of your cold, dry, unhandsome way with Him. You would fain have more liberty of spirit, and feel your affections more at large in religion, and be unaffectedly more familiar with the instincts and interests of Heaven. You see that the service of love has common sense on its side, that these half and half measures with God make you neither happy nor holy, and, besides, something in your heart is drawing you closer to God, and winning you to better things. Now look what these acts of Praise and Desire will do for you. They will take the world out of your hearts, and make its pleasures look small and dull to you. They will draw you into quite a different set of ideas and associations, of affections and sympathies. They will make the practice of God's presence as easy to you as it will be delightful. They will settle a host of cases of conscience for you, by raising you at once into a clearer atmosphere, where the doubts and difficulties in question do not exist. They will make idleness, frivolity, and dissipation intolerable to you, because of the change which they will bring about in your tastes. Beautiful angels were dull to St. Mary Magdalene; for she was seeking Jesus that Easter morning. What were their celestial faces and their dazzling raiment to her? They had taken away her Lord, and she knew not where they had laid Him. The gardener, too, as St. Francis sweetly says, reminded her only of flowers, while her head was full of nails and thorns and crosses; yet as he has come in her way, she will out with her one thought, " Sir, if thou hast taken Him hence, tell me where thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away." The three kings hurried through Jerusalem; the court only made them fret; they could rest nowhere but with their star at the crib of Jesus in the cave of Bethlehem. The spouse met the watchmen of the city, and her heart also was on her lips: " Have you seen Him whom my soul loveth? " So these acts of Praise and Desire make new men of us. We are all for heaven. Death even changes its aspect. All things seem easy which are for Jesus, all things welcome which are steps to Him. How differently people feel! When some one told Father Dominic, the Passionist, whose memory is dear to so many of us, that she feared the particular judgment, the tears started into his eyes, and he cried out in his natural way, " Oh, but how sweet to see for the first time the Sacred Humanity of Jesus." This is what Praise and Desire bring us to. We cannot be all we wish on this side of the grave. But we can get on toward it by means of love. We can bring matters to this comfortable simplicity of the Spouse, " My beloved to Me, and I to Him, who feedeth among the lilies till the day break, and the shadows retire."⁷ Yes, there it is! till the day break, and the shadows retire: till the day break, and the shadows retire: till the day break, and the shadows retire!

1. My first example of practices of Praise and Desire shall be taken from no less authoritative a book than the Raccolta of Indulgences. There is in it a chaplet of acts of divine love, indulgenced by Pius VII. in 1818. I will extract some of those which illustrate the present subject. I desire, O my God, to see Thee loved by all. Oh, happy me! if I could give my bipod to make all men love Thee. Come, all creatures, and love my God. O my God! that I had a thousand hearts to love Thee with, or that I had the hearts of all men, that I might love Thee with them. Oh, that there were more worlds than there are, that all might love Thee! What a joy it would be! Happy he who could love Thee with the hearts of all possible creatures. I rejoice that the angels and the blessed love Thee in heaven; and I desire to love Thee with all the love wherewith the saints most enamored of Thee loved Thee, and St. Joseph, and our blessed Lady in each one of her mysteries, and our dearest Lord in each one of His mysteries, and in all the tabernacles where He is now lying hid in the Blessed Sacrament. I would fain love Thee with that very love with which He loves Thee in heaven at this hour, and will love Thee to all eternity; and, last of all, I desire and intend to love Thee with all that love wherewith, O my God! Thou lovest Thyself.

2. The following congratulations are recommended by Lancisius in his devotions to Jesus Risen.⁸ 1. To congratulate Jesus Risen on the gifts of His glorified Body, and on all He merited by his death, such as His triumphant ascension, royal dignity, and dominion over the whole world, and plentitude of power in heaven and on earth, the supreme headship of the Church, and His judicial office, and other things which we do not know, and which are not enumerated by theologians. 2. To congratulate Him on the manifold fruit of His life, Passion, and death, both among angels and men, and especially all the grace whereby the good angels were confirmed in grace, and all the graces of all kinds, innumerable and indescribable, which men have had, to hinder sin, or to raise them out of sin, or to lift them to perfection, all sacraments and indulgences, and finally, the resurrection of our bodies. It will not be out of place here to mention the particular devotion of Sister Maria Denise, of the Visitation, to her Guardian Angel. It was to congratulate him on the one only fact of his past history of which she had sure knowledge, the grace he received to stand in grace when the angels were falling all round him. 3. To congratulate Him on the innumerable choirs of angels and holy souls in heaven, who adore Him as their supreme Head, the giver and cause of all their graces and honors, and on the divine worship which is paid to Him in heaven and out of heaven, on earth, in purgatory, by masses, churches, images, vows, and all the good works which will ever be done up to the last day. 4. To praise Him for that immense charity by which, as St. Dionysius tells us, He revealed to St. Carpus that He was ready to suffer death over again for the salvation of the human race; and by which also He revealed the same to St. Bridget: " Oh, my friends," said He, " so tenderly do I love My sheep, that rather than be without them, I would, if it were possible, die over again by a special death, equal to the one upon the cross, for each separate one of them! " Another time He said, " Oh, if it were possible, I would, with most eager love, die over again as many times as there are souls in hell! " These things, alas for our stony hearts! help us, by our dearest Lord's (may I say it?) extravagant love of us, to measure our miserable pretence of loving Him!

3. As the acts I am dwelling on are principally interior ones, it will not be out of place to quote St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi's preparation for Whitsuntide. She uttered it in a rapture on Ascension Day. "O Holy Apostles, when the Lord ascended into heaven, He taught you what to do before receiving the Holy Ghost: do you now teach me! O pure John! O amiable Philip! you will not deny me. Tell me what my upper chamber ought to be, and what my interior and exterior operations in these few days. It will be well to build my chamber on high. It shall be the Side of the Word, in which I will dwell in the union of love. What must be my spiritual meat and drink? I will masticate it well, as if with every tooth, and it shall be the consideration of all the operations, great or most humble, of the Incarnate Word while

He abode with us. My drink shall be the Blood which flowed from those four fountains of His sacred Hands and Feet; and sometimes I will go to draw of that fountain of many rivulets, His adorable Head. O enamored Word! thirty-three years Thou didst abide with us, and I ought to make thirty-three acts of self-annihilation between day and night. And this will be one of my interior operations. Eight days after Thy Nativity Thou didst shed Thy Blood for us, and I ought to make eight examens of conscience in the day; for if the soul is not well examined and cleansed from its defects, it is not fit to shed its blood for Thee, that is, to offer itself to Thee in the act of martyrdom; and, as often as I make this examen of conscience, I will add a renewal of my religious vows. Forty days didst Thou abide upon the earth after the resurrection, and forty times ought I to elevate my mind to Thee between day and night. Seven years wert Thou in Egypt, and seven times a day must I offer to Thee those who lie in the darkness of sin. Forty days didst Thou remain after Thy birth before Thou wert offered in the temple, and forty times a day must I offer myself to Thee to execute Thy good pleasure. My spiritual nourishment will be the daily meditation of Thy most hoty Passion joining with it the meditation of that ardent love wherewith Thou wert incarnate, of that humility wherewith Thou didst converse with men, of that gentleness wherewith Thou didst preach, and of that joy wherewith Thou didst listen to the Chanansean and Samaritan woman. She did not ask Thee, but Thou didst invite her to ask. I will meditate also on those words, ' This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; My meat is to do the will of My Father; Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart.' Twelve years Thou didst delay, before Thou didst show Thy wisdom; I will make twelve interior acts of love of my neighbor, and twelve more of humility, also interior. Oh how many occasions of these interior acts offer themselves to us, how many captivities of the judgment and the will! Seven times will I adore the Blessed Sacrament, in the room of those who do not do so; seven times, too, will I adore my Christ, who bears His cross with His Head bowed down for all the elect. Thrice will I give particular praise to the most holy Virgin, as mother and special protectress of all religious souls, that she may concur particularly with her assistance to our observation of our religious vows. And as often as opportunity offers will I perform acts of charity to my neighbor, with all possible love and gayety of mind. I will keep an unbroken watch over my senses, and, not to be reputed singular, I will do this at proper times and in proper ways; for, if I never looked at any one, they might think that I was angry with them, and if I never answered them, they would suspect something. Thrice in the day I will remind my sisters of the dignity of our vocation, saying something in praise of it, and I will bear it in mind myself continually. As often as occasion offers, I will console the afflicted, whether their pains be interior or exterior; and at the end of each action, I will endeavor to remain in a continual unbroken act of charity, and of custody of the heart." This devotion is plainly not suitable for all; but it is edify iug and instructive for all. For, what a real gain it is, to find out how little we love God, and how shabbily we serve Him! This is one great good of reading the Lives of the Saints. Because a saint is not imitable, it does not follow his life is not practical. Nay, for the most part it is the admirable lives of saints which teach us most humility, and kindle in us greatest love.

4. Under this head will come the custom which prevails in some religious orders of renewing the vows of religion at certain times. This will equally apply to the renewal of any vow by which a devout person may have bound himself to God, or any solemn purpose short of a vow. It is another instance of the artifices of God's love. Just as He allows us to offer to Him the mysteries of Jesus, as if they were our own, so does He allow us to offer to Him our own vows again and again, and thus to multiply His own glory and our merit many times by the same action. We learn from St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi how acceptable this renewal of vows is to God. She says,* ' As often as promises made to God are renewed, a renewal of union with God takes place, and the beloved soul acquires more or less union with Him, according to the state of perfection in which it is at the time, and to the degree of charity it has. This renewal, made by the soul interiorly, is a solace to the Holy Trinity, because it is a renewal of the interior complacency of the soul, made with this oblation to God, and always recalling the first pleasure of the first oblation with new complacency and new delight: and it is as grateful to Mary, as if she herself renewed her vow of "VH.0.U8.

chastity. It is the glory of the angels, because it is the fulfilling of the holy inspirations which have been sent us by their ministry; and it is also the exultation of the saints, because they see others following their Creator in the same steps wherein they followed Him themselves. It is a solace to the choir of virgins who repeat their new song, seeing that that virtue is increased which they practised with such special affection; and it increases their glory, because as often as this renewal is made, it is as if a feast of the virgins were being celebrated. The soul itself acquires great fruit by it. For all graces are increased in it, all its promises strengthened, a new peace and union begin in it, whose fruit is seen in its conversation and works. Oh, of how great dignity are these vows and promises to God at solemn profession, since the mere renewal of them has such effects, and produces such fruit to the soul! It is not wonderful, therefore, O Word! that they who have light, the order of Thy most Holy Name (Jesuits) should celebrate this renewal as a solemn feast, especially as worldly men make so much of their birthday, or the anniversary of some great dignity. Ah! how much more ought we to celebrate with spiritual feast and jubilee the day on which we were united to God by so strong a chain never to be snapped asunder! " The saint herself used to renew her vows daily, because she regarded them as something divine, and a singular privilege conferred by God on the souls whom He calls into holy religion. She considered them as the " price and treasures of Paradise," and she loved them as the " chains of Divine Love."

St. Francis Xavier used to renew his vows frequently, and said that whenever he did so, he felt his youth renewed as an eagle's; and he often told his brother Jesuits that a daily renewal of their vows was one of the best defences against the attacks and snares of Satan. Lancisius tells us that Father Cerruto, an Italian Jesuit, used to renew his vows mentally three thousand times a day: and one octave of the Epiphany, he completed faithfully the twenty-four thousand times. So also in the life of the Blessed Alphonso Rodriguez, a Jesuit lay-brother, we read that he used to renew his vows every day, and that this renewal kept him always in a state of fervor. Our Lord signified to Him that this devotion was acceptable to Him. and showed him as well the profit that would come of it to his soul, as the gifts with which He was going to enrich him because of it. One day when he was hearing mass, renewing his vows, and thanking God for his vocation to the Society with great fervor, he was visited with an extraordinary light, which seemed to him to exceed all created light whatsoever. By this light he perceived the magnitude of the blessings which he had received up to this time, his own indignity and misery, and the impossibility of adequately thanking God for them. Feeling his heart filled with a pious shame, he did not dare to look up toward his Benefactor, nor even to open his mouth in thanksgiving, but recollected and abased himself in silence. But God, to whom the prayer of the humble is always pleasing, showed Himself pleased by this new kind of thanksgiving with the silence of the tongue, and said to him with a voice heard by his outward ears, " Alphonso! walk always before Me in this exercising of renewing thy vows, and all things shall turn out well to thee! " This favor threw the humble lay-brother into still greater confusion, and mindful of his own unworthiness, he thought it was si delusion of the devil. But again he heard God speaking, " Alphonso! why dost thou fear? Here is no cause for fear; for there is no delusion in it; do what I bid you! " And at the same time He gave him an interior conviction that all this was from Himself.

Lancisius⁹ relates an anecdote of a man of great prudence and judgment who joined the Society. Everything in it pleased him except the renewal of vows, which seemed to him a frivolity and impertinence. When the day for the renewal of vows came round, he felt the greatest repugnance in his mind; but mortifying his own judgment and self-love, he made the renewal, though with such confusion, that he hardly knew where he was. God, however, rewarded his obedience. When the priest before whom he had made the renewal, came to him with the Blessed Sacrament to communicate him, he saw our Lord in the Host, and was filled with wonderful consolation, and a light which disclosed to him how acceptable to God was this renewal of vows. Bursting into tears, he perceived his mistake, and the abundance of divine grace continued pouring into him for ii, long time, so that he was not able to speak.

All this will apply in its measure to the renewal of ${Ood purposes and heroic desires. Thomas a Kempis tells us in the Imitation to renew our good purposes every day, and excite ourselves to fervor as if we had only been converted to-day; and Lancisius recommends certain classes of heroic acts and desires, which it would be well for us thus to renew. 1. Acts of humiliation, and our own nothingness. Our Blessed Lord said to St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi, " Whenever 3'ou make an act of your own nothingness, remember, that as a creature cannot live without a heart, so you cannot live without Me. As long as this knowledge remains in you, you may be sure that you will remain united with Me; and My peace shall be with you even while you seem to be waging perpetual war against temptations, which, by My permission, shall assail you, but shall not overcome you; the more sharply they attack you the more shall my favorable assistance superabound in you, though you shall not feel its presence or its sweetness." Another time He said to Her, " They who serve Me, should do so with such humility as plunges their souls to the centre of the earth; for just as a falling arrow does not rest until it touches the ground, so My Spirit rests only in the soul which it finds in the centre of its own nothingness." Elsewhere God the Father said to her, " The ladder of the words of My Word is loftier than Jacob's ladder, for its foot is in the soul, which, by humility and self-knowledge, is lower even than the abyss in which, by lowly opinion of itself, it plunges, and by the true knowledge of itself it comes even unto My inmost being. And this is the difference between the two ladders, that Jacob's ladder did not reach beyond heaven, nor descend lower than the face of the earth; but this ladder goes beyond the stars, in proportion as the soul humbles itself; nay, it is exalted even to My inmost being, for the soul's humility is its exaltation." 2. Desires and purposes to avoid all deliberate sin and even imperfection: so that with St. Augustine we would rather die than sin, with St. Chrysostom rather see the face of hell than offend God, and with the heroic paradox of the Blessed Alphonso Rodriguez, rather be thrust into hell for no fault at all, than offend God by the very least conceivable venial sin. 3. Desires and purposes to endure all sorts of things for the sake of our dear Lord, such as St. Ignatius puts in the contemplation of the kingdom of Christ in the second week of the Exercises, " Behold, O supreme King and Lord of all, I, though most unworthy, yet relying on Thy grace and help, offer myself entirely to Thee, and submit all I have to Thy will, declaring before Thine infinite goodness, and in the sight of the glorious Virgin Thy Mother, and all the heavenly court, that this is my mind, my desire, and my decree, to follow Thee as nearly as I can, and to imitate Thee in bearing insults and adversities with true patience, both interior and exterior. 4. Desires and purposes about the love of our enemies. 5. Desires and purposes to give up all our will and liberty to God, without ever retracting them, and without excepting any thing from the sacrifice.

That these mere desires are, as sacrifices of love, most acceptable to Almighty God, may be seen also from the fact of His so often inspiring His servants with pious designs, which He never intends them to accomplish, as in the case of Abraham's sacrifice of

Isaac, and St. Philip's desire to go to the Inaies to preach the Gospel and to shed his blood. The lives of the Saints furnish us with repeated instances of this. Thus it comes to pass that what St. Francis of Sales says is true, that even to wish impossible wishes about God Himself and His perfections is real worship and substantial love, and acceptable to Him. This opens out to us many trains of thought, and if our hearts were what they ought to be, it would open out to us many fountains of loving tears.

While, for the good of our own souls as well as for the glory of God, we take pains to cultivate the spirit of praise in ourselves, we must not forget that in reality it is not so much a virtue of our own as a gift of God; and so to be sought from Him by special prayer. Neither should we omit to claim for this purpose the patronage of St. Gertrude, who was eminent even among the saints for her wonderful spirit of incessant praise. If we could imitate her in this, we might come at length to a participation in her equally wonderful liberty of spirit. How much depends upon this liberty, and how intimately it is connected with a spirit of praise! I wish men could be persuaded to study St. Gertrude more than they do; for most certainly our great defect is the want of liberty of spirit. This is the chief reason why the service of love is comparatively so rare among Christians. Surely, if persons living in the world, and in society, wish to lead a devout life, they should not suppose that a conventual life, diluted and lowered, can be the proper fashion of spirituality for them. From their position and their duties they cannot command their own time, or break up their day into halves and quarters of hours, as if they were in a quiet cloister, and had nothing to do but to follow the chimes of an abbey clock. Hence, in nine cases out of ten, to tell such people that they must draw up a written rule and keep to it; and that the captivity of set times for spiritual drill is their only hope, is as good as telling them that persons living in modern society must not attempt to lead what is called a devout life. How many have given devotion up altogether, because they have tried a rule, and found they could not keep it! How many have leaned their whole weight upon fixed hours and appointed ways of doing things, upon clockwork and over-division, and have broken down, because weak health, or a change of duties, or the interference of a London season have made their fixed hours and stereotyped ways impossible! If spirituality is made dry, it will never wear. It will crack in a dozen places in a week, like the skin poncho of a Patagonian. People living in the world are sure to put it disdainfully on one side very shortly, and to make themselves at home in a state of low attainments. They have tried spirituality, and it did not answer. It did not last. And so because their own kind of spirituality was a failure, they have no faith in any other kind. It is incredible how soon people can make themselves comfortable in low things. It is as frightening, too, as it is incredible. If it were not for this fatal facility of settling down, common sense, honest shame, and reasonable discretion might win the day at last. But this settling down is like the hedgehog policy. Roughness does not hurt it; sweetness cannot 23 win it; and persuasion leaves it as it found it, prickly and imperturable.

Now, the failure of this regimental kind of holiness, as well as the idea that no other kind is safe or solid, comes entirely from the want of liberty of spirit. Where the law of the Lord is, where the Spirit of Christ is, there is liberty. No one can be at all acquainted with the old-fashioned Benedictine school of spiritual writers, without perceiving and admiring the beautiful liberty of spirit which pervades and possesses their whole mind. It is just what we should expect from an Order of such matured traditions. It were well if we had more reprints and translations of them. St. Gertrude is a fair specimen of them. She is thoroughly Benedictine. There are whole treatises on the spiritual life which people living in the world read through, and feel quite honestly that the method proposed to them is a bondage which it would be a simple indiscretion for them to attempt. Every young gentleman must be a quasi-seminarist, or give up devotion. Every young lady must be a kind of half nun, without a habit, or she may as well cease to attempt to be any thing better than all the other young ladies round about her. Oh, how all this stands in the way of love, of wise love, of such love as Jesus would have from every one of us! To turn the world into a great lax convent is not the way to further the cause of our dearest Lord. Spiritual postures may create self-righteousness. They are but poor helps to real, unaffected, enduring piety. A spirit of breadth, a spirit of liberty, that is the Catholic spirit; and it was eminently the badge of the old

Benedictine ascetics. Modern writers for the most part have tightened things, and have lost by it, instead of gaining. By frightening people they have lessened devotion in extent, and by overstraining they have lowered it in degree.

It is difficult to speak well of liberty of spirit without seeming to recommend negligence, or to countenance unpunctuality, slovenliness, and caprice. But we may safely illustrate the manner from St. Gertrude herself. The following may be taken as specimens of her delightful liberty of spirit. We are told* that she never stayed away from holy communion through fear of the dangers which her spiritual books told her were incurred by those who communicated unworthily. On the contrary, the more keenly she felt her imperfections, the more eagerly she ran to our Blessed Lord, sustained by a lively hope and a zealous love of God. She was excited thereto by a sentiment of humility which caused her to regard as useless, and almost unworthy of consideration, all the good works she could do, and all the practices by which men ordinarily prepare themselves for Communion. On this account, also, she never abstained from Communion, as many people do, when she happened not to have gone through her ordinary exercises, esteeming all the efforts of human devotion in comparison of the free gift which is given us in the Holy Eucharist, as a single drop of water to the vastness of the sea. Thus, without too great an attachment to any of her particular preparations, she leaned upon the infinite condescension of

Vita, i. 92.

God, and cared only to receive that august Sacrament into a loving heart.

On one occasion, when she was travelling, she fell by some accident from a dangerous height. Full of joy, she cried out, "Oh, my sweet Saviour! what a blessing it would have been for me, if this fall had shortened my road to Thee! " Some of her companions were a little scandalized at this, and asked her if she was not afraid of dying without the sacraments. " I should wish from the bottom of my heart," she answered, " to be fortified by the sacraments before I die; but I have the hardihood to prefer the providence of my Lord and my God to all sacraments, and I think this the worthiest preparation for death. It is a matter of indifference to me whether my death be slow or sudden, provided it be agreeable in the sight of Him to whom I trust it will conduct me. Fori hope, however I die, to find the mercy of God, without which I shall be lost eternally, no matter how long a preparation I may have made for death."

A pious person had prayed for a long time for some particular grace, and God had never answered her prayers, at which she fell into a state of dangerous discouragement. At last God said to her, " I have delayed answering you, because you have not sufficient confidence in the effects which My mercy produces in you. You should imitate My chosen virgin, Gertrude, who takes her stand so firmly upon My providence, that there is nothing she does not hope from the plenitude of My grace; and hence it is that I can never refuse her any thing she asks."

Another characteristic exhibition of her spirit is to be found in the following custom. She never would choose her habits, or any thing else in which choice was offered her, but she shut her eyes, put out her hand, and took what she first touched. Then when she had taken it, she immediately became attached to it, as a present which had come to her from God's own hand, and she conceived quite an affection for it, and was no longer indifferent about it. Think a little of this. There is that in it which may correct stiffness, and rearrange our ideas of holy indifference.

Here is a picture of Gertrude's life. One day, when St. Matilda was singing in choir, she saw Jesus sitting upon a lofty throne, and Gertrude walking up and down before Him, without ever taking her eyes off His face, whichever way she walked, and at the same time she seemed busily occupied with a host of exterior duties. While Matilda was gazing in astonishment on the vision, she heard our Lord say, " This is the image of the life which My dear Gertrude leads before My eyes. She walks always in My presence. She allows no rest to her desires, no truce to her anxieties, to find out what is nearest and dearest to My heart; and as soon as she has discovered it, she executes it with care and fidelity. But the great thing is that she does not rest upon it, but is off again, always seeking some new thing in My will, in order to redouble her zeal by new actions and fresh practices of virtue. And thus her whole life is nothing but a linked chain of praises consecrated to My honor and glory." St. Matilda thought at once of the besetting infirmity of active and zealous piety; for she had seen it, so she believed, in her dear Gertrude; and she ventured to say, "But,

Lord! if Gertrude's life is so perfect, how is it she cannot bear the defects of others, and exaggerates them so much?" Our Lord, with admirable sweetness, re-plied, "It is because she cannot bear the least stain on her own heart, that she feels so keenly the failings of her neighbors! " Nearly a volume of spiritual commentary might be written upon this.

Once more: let us listen to the testimony of God Himself. A holy man pressed God in prayer to reveal to him what it was in which His Divine Majesty took so much pleasure in His beloved Gertrude. God vouchsafed to reply that it was her liberty of heart. The holy man having esteemed the excellence of this gift much less than it deserved, answered in surprise: "And I, Lord, thought that what pleased Thee most in her soul, was her perfect knowledge of herself, and the great love to which, by Thy grace, she has attained." "It is true," replied our Lord, "that those are two great perfections; but this liberty of heart implies both of them, and it is a precious gift, and a good so perfect that it is enough to raise a soul to the summit of perfection. It is this which disposes the heart of Gertrude to receive every moment of her life some new favors; and it is this which hinders her heart from attaching itself to any thing which can displease Me, or dispute with Me the empire of her love."

Such was the Saint, the special saint of praise and of devout desires! Oh that she could be in the Church once more, as she was in ages past, the doctress and the prophetess of the interior life, like Debbora, who sat beneath her palm in Mount Ephraim, uttering her canticles and judging Israel.

Having said so much of the failure of persons who live in the world and aim at devotion, I cannot refrain, though it is not necessarily connected with my subject, from adding a few words more. Since God sealed up the garden of Eden, and hid it from our curious approach, it is said that there has been nothing so like a paradise on earth as a Jesuit novitiate. The world, alas! cannot be turned into this. In it men must try to lead angelic lives, but still, not in the tranquil, saint-infected air of Sant' Andrea, but with all the distractions of noisy life around them. To make a cloister about us in the world, is to enclose the world along with us in our cells, and not to see the suspicious companion we have got. Thus trying to lead the lives of religious in the world, by a sort of spurious adaptation of monasticism to the world's circumstances, is one reason why so many good people fail in trying to be better.

But there is another reason too. The contemplative life is one thing, and the active life another, and each has its own retinue and appurtenances; and consistency is the secret of success. Now, except a few, a very few singular vocations, devout people living in the world are called, as living in the world, to an active life. Yet here is a mistake into which they constantly fall. They make their spirituality to be all interior, while the whole of their active- life is for the world, and essentially worldly, just like methodists, who keep Sunday for religion, and the week days for the world. These good people have no Christian active life, and so the prayers and the church-goings will not keep the peace with the parks and the parties, and at last devotion gets the worst of it, and signs away its rights in a base concordat. In other words, dear reader! I suspect, — I only say suspect, for I have no right to any thing beyond a suspicion in spiritual science, — I repeat, I suspect that we can have no devout lives in the world without some active tending of the poor! Visiting the sick, looking after schools, attending hospitals, having to do with penitents and foundlings, emigrants and soup-kitchens, I suspect the secret of perfection in the world, and of perseverance in devotion in the world, lies in these things. To live interior contemplative lives in the world for three hours a day is a glorious thing. But you see, unluckily, it hardly ever lasts. What now, if it really be that I am right, and that the reason of the failure, is, that to give all your interior life to God, and all your exterior life to the world, is an unlawful division; and that, if the rich are to be holy, they must either strip themselves of their riches, and hide themselves behind a convent grille, or they must labor with their own hands for those below them, and make themselves companions of the poor?

You see your Christian life is made up of mass, communion, meditation, examen, some little austerities, and the like. But all this is more or less contemplative, so long as it stands by itself. It is all most excellent. But you are called to something additional, to an active Christian life, to the apostolate of the rich, which consists in assiduous and affectionate works of mercy for the poor. Look abroad into Catholic countries, where the middle class of holy people so abounds, and is so fruitful of good works, and so graceful in its spiritual beauty. It looks as if the secret there was in this glorious activity for the poor. When you come from prayer, or from church, you cannot without singularity carry your outward recollection into company, and somehow, prayer is like a delicate bloom upon the soul; the hot air of the world's rooms dissipates it speedily. But if you come from the garret or the hospital, the workhouse or the cellar, you have a charmed atmosphere around }T)U, which is a sort of panoply of paradise, from which the venomous arrows of the world glance off blunted and innocuous. It wears well. It cannot be smiled away, or talked of, or gossipped to pieces, like the exotic bloom of prayer. Everywhere, where the world is, there is danger to the soul; but the gayety, the pleasure, or the fashion can hardly be named, which active mercy to the poor cannot disarm of all its perils, and even sanctify. Depend upon it, with you who live in the world, mercy is but another word for perseverance, and the touch of the poor the Real Presence of your Lord.

What a wonder it is that God should love men! Intrinsically, what is there in them to love? If we compare our own natural gifts with those of an angel, how miserable we appear! If we consider how much more faithfully the beasts answer the end of their creation than we do, of what shall we be proud? Moreover, God has tried men over and over again, and they have always failed Him, and failed Him with every circumstance of unamiable selfishness which can be conceived. There was, first of all, Paradise and the Fall. Every one knows what came of it. God was matched against an apple, and the apple carried it. The Flood was an awful judgment; but mercy went along with it. Yet we soon find the knowledge of God almost confined to one family, and one line of Patriarchs. Then came the Jews. Job's patience is hardly a picture of God's long-suffering with His people. He rewarded, and they despised Him. He punished, and they hardened their hearts. He sent them His Son, and they crucified Him; and the Romans had to go and take away their place and nation, and burn up their city and temple. Then here is the world since the Crucifixion. To look at it you would say that our dearest Lord's Passion had been a simple failure. So little is the face of the world, or the tone of the world, or the ways of the world changed. The results of the gospel on the world seem to be, first a tinge of unusual romance in its history, and secondly, a great number of new words brought into its various languages to express the phenomena and genius of the Incarnation. Can anybody say that much else has come of it, looking at the world at large? Then here are we Christians, a most unsatisfactory sight indeed! How do we treat our sacraments? How many of us are serving our Crucified Lord generously and out of love? Verily, God's love of men is a simple wonder. Yet how He must love them, seeing that He became not an angel for angels, but He did become a man for men! There is no other account of the matter, than the Scripture account of it. It is simply one of the mysteries of the character of God, as the Eternal Wisdom says of Himself.* " I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not yet, and I was conceived; neither had the fountains of water as yet sprung out. The mountains with their huge bulk had not as yet been established. Before the hills I was brought forth. He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world. When He prepared the heavens, I was present; when with a certain law and compass He enclosed the depths, when He established the sky above, and poised the fountains of the waters, when He balanced the foundations of the earth. I was with Him forming all things and was delighted every day, playing before Him at all times, playing in the world, and My delights were to be with the children of men! "

But it is a greater wonder still that He lets men love Him. Where are the words to tell the privilege which it is to love the incomprehensibly beautiful, infinitely good, and immensely holy God? One would have thought such love as ours would be but an insolent profanation; and that were we allowed to be before God with such instinctive love as that of the patient cattle or the drinking birds, it would have been honor enough for us. Yet if, by permission of His inexhaustible compassions, we might love Him, fcilien surely it must be by blood, and pain, and suffering, and shame, and penance, and the costly offerings of a terrific austerity, and an appalling self-sacrifice. iVh! dearest Lord God! and so, in truth, it is; but the blood and the pain, the suffering and the shame, aire not ours, but His own! He weeps that we may

*Prov. viii.

smile; He bleeds that we may be whole; He is put to shame, that we may be glad and joyful; He is afraid, and anxious, and heavy, and sweating blood, that we may be at ease about our past sins, drinking in the sunshine of the earth, familiar with God, and sweetly confident about eternity. So far does He go, that not only may we love Him most earnestly, but He has arranged all things to entice us into love. He coins our very desires into worship; and He lets us love Him, and glorify Him, and earn glory for ourselves by what would almost provoke a smile, from an unbeliever, it looks so like a mere make-believe, the artifice of a good-natured father, a very child's play of love. If all this on earth, what will He be, what will He do in heaven? Isaias and St. Paul have both told us how useless the inquiry is. We must have other eyes to see it with, other ears to hear it with, and a far other range of thought to compass it and take it in. And will all this one day be ours? By the Blood of our sweet Jesus, we trust undoubtingly it will. And what ever have we done for it? Where is the proportion between it and our deserts? There is none, none, none. It is all because of Jesus. Jesus is the secret of every thing. Jesus is the interpretation of all the secrets of God. What a religion is this! and what a God! Oh let it be told to every inhabitant of the earth that it is not as he thought it must be. We may all love God as much as ever we please, and in as many ways as we can think of. Would that angels might proclaim it every hour of the day and night, with the sound of the trumpet, to all the dwellings in the four quarters of the world.

If, when they hear it, they neglect their worldly interests, and become like the men of Galilee, gazers into heaven, it is only what we might expect. Infinite permission to love! Infinite permission to love! There is the creature's charter. The blood of a God bought it. What a religion! What a God!

Do wonders end here? No! there is a greater still. It was passing wonder that God should love men. It was more marvellous that He should let men love Him. But man can outdo God; for his is the greatest wonder of all; it is that he does not love God when he may. This is hardly to be believed, though we see it. Oh, if we were not hardened by custom to this fact, it would breed in us some such horror as a cruel and savage parricide would do. It would take our breath away. We should not know what to make of it. Belief in it would only grow slowly into us, and would stupefy us as it grew. But to forget God is the order of things, and we hardly notice the phenomenon at all. Alas! if we could see it altogether as faith would have us see it, we should long for tears of blood to wash away our infamy! And what can be said to make men love God, which is one half as strong as what God has actually done for them? His mercy is so eloquent, His bounty so touching, His indulgence so persuasive, that if He has failed to win, why need men trouble themselves to proclaim His love? This is what St. Paul must have meant when he talked about the foolishness of preaching. Christ crucified was Himself the sermon and the preacher, what need of more? It was foolishness. Only in His love again God let us do this; we are always meeting love and running against it at every turn; He allowed us to take the words of His covenant into our mouths, and show our little love of Him by telling others His great love of us. And He showed His love again by letting the conquest of the world depend upon this foolishness of preaching. But you and I love Him! Well! and this is another wonder; for how come we to do so, when so many more around us do not? It is simply His own gift, simply grace. Here is Jesus again. He taught us how to love, and seeing what unapt pupils we were, He took some of His own love out of His Sacred Heart, and put it into ours, that we might love God with it. And all our share in the matter is that we have left the lamp untrimmed, and caused the fire to burn far duller than it did before. It almost seems as if He purposely chose those who were least capable of loving Him. You and I must surely feel this. We could point to scores who do not love Him; and yet are a thousand times nobler and more generous of heart than we are, and would have made far finer characters.

How miserable we are! Why did not God call other souls out of nothing that would have loved Him gloriously, and not been the mean things that we are? He loved us, our souls, ourselves. He chose us with an eternal choice, gave us an eternal preference, and loved us with, an everlasting love. Why? There is no answering the question. Simply, He loved us, and so He chose us. Then what are we to do with this world, which will not love God? Ah! there is the question. We may well have our heads and hearts full of all manner of wild heroic schemes for His love and honor. But it chafes us. What can we do? What is the nearest thing to infinite which we can attempt? How can we be in all quarters of the world at once? Here is an answer; not equal to the necessity, I admit; still it is an answer. By love and the spirit of reparation.

Oh, for the love of Jesus, do something! Can you see Divine Love begging from heart to heart, and not be touched by the piteousness of His poverty! There is no medicant on earth so spurned as He who made it of old, and supports it now. Make one heart give Him an alms, in honor of the Father; make reparation for another heart's denial, in honor of the Son; and grow in love yourself, in honor of the Holy Ghost. Do we not see that a man hardly ever makes up his mind to a thing, but he does it? Few men miss their end when they are obstinately bent on gaining it. I wonder what would take place, if a few of us would do this, if we were to say resolutely, I am determined to have God better loved in the world. I will not come into the world for nothing. Somebody shall love God the more for my having been created. If it be ever so little, Divine Love shall have been increased in the world by me. Have we ever made such a determination? Let us make it now. I have huge faith in it. When do we begin? To-day. Very well. Now we have a definite work before us, a work which shall be done. Dear Majesty of God! By the Heart of Jesus, we will do something great and generous for Thee!

% would be a waste of words to show how the practice of Praise and Desire would assist us here, both in increasing our own love of God, and making reparation to Him for others' want of love. But when we have done all, it seems so little, that we may well fall back upon our doctrine and practice of oblation, in order to supply for our deficiency. Where do we naturally turn? To Mary, the Immaculate Mother of God, to her who was not only conceived without sin, but was never so much as included in the decree which concerned sin. We should never know God as well as we do, if it were not for Mary. She reflects upon us the magnificence of God. Her dignity is the highest that can be, and St. Thomas tells us, even within the compass of omnipotence. She is a trophy of Divine Love, whereon the Three Blessed Persons have hung all their gifts and prerogatives which a mere creature is capable of receiving. She is clad from head' to foot in the surpassing beauty of God. He has communicated Himself to her in a manner which we dare not put into words. The Church calls her by names that startle us, as if she had borrowed the titles of the Most High, and claimed common property in His attributes. We are bidden to speak of her in words which seem to belong to the Eternal Uncreated Wisdom of the Father. The Son has transferred to the Mother what is His. She is more than all creation beside, more worthy, more beautiful, more mighty, more loved of God. Thus she is before God the unspeakable "hymn which befits Him in Sion." She is all praise, all thanksgiving. She is the repose of the Creator's merciful complacency, the plenitude of His delighted benediction. With her He is well pleased.

Thus is Mary's praise an almost boundless worship which we can offer to Him. In old times the servants of God made their Benedicite of seas and mountains, birds and fishes, heat and cold, wells and green things, cattle and men. They called upon them all to praise, exalt, and superexalt the glory of the good Creator. But Mary is the Christian's Benedicite. The Church teaches us to thank in strains of ardent love the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity for the gifts and graces of Mary, and has indulgenced several devotions to this effect. See what this implies. Enter into the Spirit of the Church. Remember, Mary is the Christian's Benedicite.

Sweet praise of Mary! Can any thing go beyond it? Dear Mother, what a joy to us to know thou art such praise to God! Sweet praise, beautiful praise, the praise of the sinless! Can any thing go beyond it? Yes! Mother! and none knoweth this so well as thou dost! There was * a cedar in Libanus, with fair branches, and full of leaves, of a high stature, and his top was elevated among the thick boughs. The waters nourished him, the deep set him up on high; the streams thereof ran round about his roots, and it sent forth its rivulets to all the trees of the country. Therefore was his height exalted above all the trees of the country, and his branches were multiplied, and his boughs were elevated because of many waters. And when he had spread forth his shadow, all the fowls of the air made their nests in his boughs, and all the beasts of the forest brought forth their young under his branches, and the assembly of many nations¹⁰ dwelt under his shadow. And he was most beautiful for his greatness, and for the spreading of his branches; for his root was near great waters. The cedars in the paradise of God were not higher than he; the fir-trees did not equal his top, neither were the plane-trees to be compared with him for branches. No trees in the paradise of God were like him in his beauty. See how sweetly the prophet speaks of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus. It is to Him incomparably more than to our dearest Mother that the Father saith, " Show Me Thy face; let Thy voice sound in My ears; for Thy voice is sweet, and Thy face comely." * And, oh, the glory of Mary! His voice sounds like hers, and His face wears the lineaments of hers! But who can tell the praise the voice of Jesus utters to the Majesty of God? When an angel sang but a moment to St. Francis, the saint felt he must have died of sweetness, had the music been prolonged an instant more; what then must be the voice of our Lord's most dear Humanity? Oh, what a joy it is to kneel in silent praise, hushed with the sweet thought of all that divine, unutterable praise which the voice of Jesus is uttering to God! Oh, the consolation that God is now at least receiving praise, the value of which is infinite, because of the blessed union of the Word with that Sacred Humanity!

But saints alone can rightly speak ot these things. Let it be St. Francis of SaleS.f " When we have listened to the united praises which all creatures render their Creator, and then hear the homage and benediction of the Eternal Son, we discover therein an inii-

*Cant. ii. 14. t Amour de Dieu, v xi nite value and worth. We wake as if from a profound sleep, and enchanted by the magical sounds of this heavenly music, we exclaim, ' It is the voice of the sovereign object of my love which strikes my ears; in comparison of this one voice, the harmony of all others is but a melancholy silence! * Behold, He cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills; ' that is, elevating far above the benedictions of all creatures the homage He renders His Eternal Father. His all-seeing eye penetrates more deeply than any other the infinite, uncreated beauty of the Divine Object He desires to glorify. The features which mark His boundless love are thus described in the Canticles: Behold, He standeth behind our wall, and clothes Himself with His Sacred Humanity. He renders himself visible through His wounds and bleeding side, looking through these apertures as through the windows and through the lattices. We may consider divine love residing in the heart of our Redeemer as a sovereign seated on his throne. Through His wounded side it beholds the hearts of the children of men, never losing sight of them. As those who look through a lattice see without being seen, so the love of this Divine Heart, which may be called the Heart of Divine love, being in reality its centre, incessantly considers all that passes in ours. As for us, we do not see Jesus Christ distinctly; we merely catch a glimpse of Him, for could we behold Him as He is in Himself, mortal beings as we are, we should expire for love of that infinite goodness which prompted

•Cant. It. 8.

Him to die for love of us, and which would induce Him to sacrifice His life for us again, if He were still liable to mortality. Could we hear the canticle which this Divine Heart sings in honor of the Father, we should endeavor to burst our ties and soar to heaven, that we might listen to it for ever. This God of charity does not deprive us of this advantage. He invites us to unite ourselves to Him, saying, 'Arise, make haste to fly to Me, My love, My dove, My beautiful one.' * Come to this heavenly abode, where every thing breathes supereminent bliss, where nothing is heard but canticles of benediction and notes of joy. The melancholy turtle-dove here changes her lamentations to the sweet strains of happiness. Come then, My love, My beautiful one, behold Me through My wounds; they are the lattices through which I see you. My dove in the clefts of the rock, come and contemplate My heart through the opening in My bleeding side, made when My house was so piteously ruined on the cross. Come and show thy face. Let thy voice sound in My ears. Let it be united to Mine, and then thy voice will be sweet, and thy face comely. What transports of delight shall we not experience, when our voices, mingling with and made one with our Saviour's, shall share in the infinite sweetness of those praises which the well-beloved Son renders to His Eternal Father."

Can the Majesty of God need more than this? Shall not the aspirations of our wildest flights of love repose delighted and contented here? No! not even here, not even with the praise of our dearest Lord's¹¹

Sacred Humanity. Love can still draw a distinction. The human actions of Jesus, such as this sweet praise, have indeed an infinite value, because of His Divine Person. But they are not infinite in themselves. Here then is something in the praise which falls short of the Majesty it praises. We must mount higher still, until we rest in that perfect, infinite, sovereign praise, which the Divinity offers to Himself. O my God! I bless Thee that Thou art so great that neither Mary, nor even the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, can praise Thee as Thou shouldest be praised; and I bless Thee too for that infinite, incessant, sufficient praise of Thine own self, the thought of which by Thy grace is my greatest contentment upon earth!

But we must again call in a saint to speak. He shall sum up all I have tried to say of Praise and of Desire, of Complacency and of Benevolence.* " Who can comprehend the sentiments of joy and complacency which animate a soul, when she sees that God is infinitely glorified by the praise He gives Himself? But this complacency gives birth to a new desire. We long to glorify God for the power He possesses of worthily honoring himself. We wish *to annihilate our whole being to return Him thanks for it. We call anew to our assistance all creatures to bless Him, because He gives Himself an infinite glory which He can only receive from Himself. Thus, pleasure at seeing God worthily praised, and an incessantly increasing desire to glorify Him, keep the heart, as it were, suspended between complacency and benevolence. It is continually wavering between these two

*St. Francis, Amour de Dieu, v. cap. ult.

sentiments, and always penetrating more deeply into the exhaustless sweets of love. It then reunites all its powers to praise God, and to thank Him that He can onl}r be adequately glorified by Himself. For though the devout soul, in the first ardent effusions of her love, aspired to nothing less than to offer her God a homage worthy of His greatness, she afterward acknowledges that she had deceived herself, and declares that she would regret possessing the power to praise Him worthily. She prefers to all her desires the humble feeling of complacency, which she derives from seeing that God whom alone she loves, being infinitely worthy of homage, must be extolled in an infinite maimer, in order to be praised as He deserves, and that He can only be thus glorified by Himself. After this avowal, the heart, unable to proceed, can only admire, and say with the prophet, 4A hymn, O God, becometh Thee in Sion! ' Isaias represents the seraphim, singing over and over again the same canticle, with their face and feet vailed, to show that they can neither know God perfectly, nor serve Him worthily. Feet, which support man, mark actions and services. However, notwithstanding their impotence which they unhesitatingly acknowledge, they always fly by the help of two wings; that is, the sentiments of complacency and benevolence keep them in continual motion. But this motion is not accompanied with agitation or disquietude, and is perfectly consistent with the calm and peaceful love by which they repose in God.

" The human heart is always agitated, when the movement by which it is incessantly dilated and compressed happens to be restrained, and it is most tranquil when this movement meets with no obstacle or resistance. In other words, its peace and calm depend on its movement. So it is with the seraphim and all who love God. Their love finds repose in the double and incessant movement of complacency and benevolence. By the first they attract, and, if we may use the expression, restrain the Almighty within the limits of their heart. By the second, they dilate their hearts in God. In this state, a heart inflamed with love, though perfectly tranquil, still experiences two kinds of movement. It desires to see the wonderful effects of God's infinite goodness, and then it wishes to render Him a worthy homage. But these two desires are the two wings which the seraphim cannot use. One they fold on their face, as if to acknowledge that God is infinite and beyond the reach of their comprehension. The other they fold on their feet, as if to express that they can do nothing worthy of the greatness and majesty of God. Love, then, retains only two wings of complacency and benevolence, which it employs to soar to the bosom of God, to absorb and engulf itself more and more deeply in the fathom, less abyss of His infinite perfections."

Ah! dearest Lord! why is it we think of any thing but this? Why is it the world does not always seem little to us, as at this hour, and life a weariness, and death a gain? Why do our hearts leap up at other things besides the thought of God? Why art not Thou our only sweetness, who art, as we have ever found Thee, so passing sweet? Why art Thou not our only rest, our choicest recreation, who art our

Father, Brother, and oar God? Why wilt Thou not take pity on our helplessness, and Touch us with Thy fire, and make us serve Thee out of love? Ah! Jesus, we shall have reason to complain of Thee for being so lovely, if Thou wilt not give us love!

Footnotes

1. L. iv. c. 25. t «. 9* ↩

2. De Exalt. Crucis. ↩

3. Isa. xxxv. ↩

4. Jer. xxxi. 3, 4. t Ps. xcix. xv. lxxii. JApoc. iii. 20. gCaut.v.l. ||Gen.xxvii.27. ↩

5. Amour de Dieu, v. iii. ↩

6. Some writers, among whom is Schram, not only deny that St. Augustine ever used these words, but object to them as unsound, and running close upon condemned propositions. Cf. Schram. Myst. TheoL ↩

7. Cant. ii. 16, 17. ↩

8. a. 90. ↩

9. ii. 2. 6. ↩

10. Ezekiel, xxxi. ↩

11. Cant. ii. 10. ↩