Chapter III. The Midnight Cave

Childhood is a time of endless learning. It learns at play, as well as at school. Its lessons hardly teach it more than its idleness. It observes without knowing that it observes, and imitates without suspecting that it is not original It is the strangest mixture of the restless and the passive, always moving yet always brooding also. There are few men who will ever in after-life be half so contemplative as they were amidst the changeful and capricious activities of childhood.

There are many harvests in a lifetime, but there is only one seed-time; and all the crops are sown in seeming confusion at once, yet come up in an orderly succession which betokens law, not uninfluenced by circumstances. After-life is the theatre on which childhood produces its spectacles one after another, like so many dramas, whose lightness or sadness, beauty or harshness, tell recognisable tales of birth-place and its scenery, of early schools with their dark and bright, of the impress of a father's mind, or the moulding of a mother's skilful love, of the grave touches of a brother's affectionate influence, or the ineffaceable memories of an idolatrous sister's touching partisanship. But, as life goes on, it is above all things the father's influence which manL fests itself more and more. The voice takes his tone, the gait his peculiarity. Many little ways unconsciously develop themselves, which have never been remarked in past years, and can now be hardly an intentional imitation of one who has been in his grave for a quarter of a century. The old family home is renewed, and they that remember old times look on with smiles and tears, both of which are at once painful and pleasant, because they raise the dead, and put new life and colour into memories that were fading away in grey time.

Now all this may be applied to the subject of religion. What childhood is to after-life, so far as this world is concerned, this life is to the life to come. We are always learning, and learning more than we suspect. If we are earnestly striving to serve God, we are observing Him when we do not think of it. Our likeness to Him is growing, like a family likeness in a child, sleeping or waking; and its progress is hardly noted.

We are conscious of it only at intervals. Our nature is becoming secretly and painlessly supernaturalised, even at moments when the painful efforts of mortification may happen to be comparatively suspended. God's ways are passing into ours, though for the present it is all under the surface; and not unfrequently appearances are even the other way. Sometimes, as we advance in the spiritual life, we are taken by surprise at finding how much more deeply heavenly principles have sunk into us than we had supposed, and how, almost intuitively, we put ourselves on God's side, take His view of things, and even in a far-off way imitate what we may reverently term His style of action. Long daily intimacy with our Heavenly Father is beginning to tell upon us. Habits of childlike reverence are almost implicitly habits of filial imitation. Great results follow even on this side the grave; but surely much greater ones will follow on the other. The degree of our likeness to God there may depend more than we suppose on the secret undergrowth of that likeness here. As childhood's best harvests are those which come latest in life, so may it be that our imitation of God may not merely secure our bliss hereafter, but may give a character to our blessedness, and exercise no little influence over it for ever.

At any rate the mere observation of God is of immense importance to our sanctification. To see Him at work, even without our endeavouring to imitate Him, is in itself a sanctifying process, and one too which, as a matter of fact, will never rest in itself, but sooner or later will issue in real imitation. Principles of celestial beauty grow into us, and mould us with quiet vehemence, just as exquisite models make artists; and time and love are all the while doing a joint work deeper down in us than we can see ourselves. To watch God seems to put a new nature into us. "We grow like Him by seeing Him, even in the twilight of this Arctic world. We turn away from the sight of Him for a moment, and lo! all things look unbeautiful, because God is not there. We have already watched Him bring forth His decrees from their eternal hiding-place in His mind, and gently lead them to execution; let us now see how He will fling open the doors of His own concealment, and take visible possession of His kingdom. This must be the one idea of the present chapter, God's way of manifesting Himself after being so long invisible, nay, from the first invisible, invisible till now. A filial creature can hardly see his Heavenly Father's behaviour in critical circumstances and at a solemn time, and not himself grow heavenly thereby.

There have been many wonderful pictures on this earth. The sorrows and the joys of men have brought about many pathetic occurrences, while their virtues and their vices have led to many catastrophes of the most thrilling dramatic interest. Indeed, the constantly intersecting fortunes of men are daily acting tragedies in real life, which, like the too faithful sunset of the painter, would seem in fiction to be lo6 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

unreal and exaggerated. There have been many mysteries too on earth, in which man was comparatively passive, and God acted by Himself, times when the Creator Himself has been pleased to fill the whole theatre of His own creation, times also, as in the cool evenings of Eden or at the door of Abraham's tent, when He has mingled with marvellous condescension among His creatures. But earth has seldom witnessed such a scene as Mary, and Joseph, and the Eternal Word, in the streets of Bethlehem at nightfall.

The cold early evening of winter was closing in. Mary and Joseph had striven in vain to get a lodging. St. Joseph was such a saint as the worid had never seen heretofore. Mary was above all saints, the first in the hierarchy of creatures, the queen of heaven, whose power was the worthiest similitude of omnipotence, and who was the eternally predestinated Mother of God. Within her Bosom was the Incarnate God Himself, the Eternal Word, the Maker and Sovereign of all in Bethlehem, the actual Judge of every passing soul that hour. But there was no room for them. The village was occupied with other things, more important according to the world's estimate of what is important. The imperial officers of the census were the great men there. Rich visitors would naturally claim the best which the inns could give. Most private houses would have relations from the country. Every one was busy. This obscure group from Nazareth, that carpenter from Galilee, that youthful Mother, that hidden Word, there was no room for them.

They did not even press for it with enough of complimentary importunity. It is not often that modesty is persuasive. A submissive demeanour is not an eloquent thing to the generality of men. If God does not make a noise in His own world. He is ignored. If He does, He is considered unseasonable and oppressive. Here in Bethlehem is the true

Caesar come, the monarch of all the Roman Csesars*, and there is no room for Him, no recognition of Him. It is His own fault, the world will say. He comes in an undignified manner. He makes no authentic assertion of His claims. He begins by putting Himself in a false position; for He comes to be enrolled as a subject instead of demanding homage as a sovereign. This is His way, and He expects us to understand it, and to know where to look for Him, and when to expect Him. There was even a shadow of Calvary in the twilight which gathered round Bethlehem that night. Just as no one in Jerusalem would take Him in during Holy Week, or give Him food, so that He had each night to retire to Bethany, in like manner no one in Bethlehem will take Him in, or give Him a shelter beneath which He may be born.

To all but its Creator the world makes no difficulty of at least a twofold hospitality, to be bom and to die, to come into the world and to go out of it. Yet how did it treat Him in both these respects? He was driven among the animals and beasts of burden to be born. That little village of the least of tribes said truly it had no room for the Immense and the Incomprehensible. Bethlehem could not indeed hold her, who held within herself the Creator of the world. There was an unconscious truth even in its inhospitality. He was to be born outside the walls of Bethlehem, as He died outside the walls of Jerusalem. Thus He had truly no native town. The sinless cattle gave Him ungrudging welcome, and an old cavity in the earth, fire-rent or water-worn, furnished Him with a roof somewhat less cold than the starry sky of a winter's night So far as men were concerned, it was as much as He could do to get bom, and obtain a visible foothold on the earth. So He was not allowed to die a natural death. His life was trampled out of Him, as something tiresome and reproachful, or rather lo8 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

dishonourable and ignominious. He was buried swiftly, that His Body might not be cumbering the earth, polluting the sunshine, or offending the gay city on the national festival. And all the while He was God! These are old thoughts, but they are always new. They grow deeper, as we dwell upon them. "We sink further down into them, as we grow older. Every time we think them, they so take us by surprise that it is as if we were now thinking them for the first time. No words do justice to them. The tears of the saints are more significant than words; but they cannot express the astonishing mystery of this inhospitable Bethlehem, which will not give its God room to be bom within its walls.

Alas! the spirit of Bethlehem is but the spirit of a world which has forgotten God. How often has it been our own spirit alsot How are we through churlish ignorance for ever shutting out from our doors heavenly blessings! Thus it is that we mismanage all our sorrows, not recognising their heavenly character, although it is blazoned after their own peculiar fashion upon their brows. God comes to us repeatedly in life, but we do not know His full face. We only know Him when His back is turned, and He is departing after our repulse. Why is it that with a theory almost always right, our practice should be so often wrong 1 It is not so much from a want of courage to do what we know to be our duty, although nature may rebel against it. It is rather from a want of spiritual discernment. We do not sufficiently, or of set purpose, accustom our minds to supernatural principles.

The world's figures are easiest to count by, the world's measures the most handy to measure by. It is a tiresome work to be always looking at things from a different point of view from those around us; and, when this effort is to be lifelong, it becomes a strain which cannot be continuous:

and it only ceases to be a strain, by our becoming thoroughly supernaturalised. Thus it is that a Christian life, which has not made a perfect revolution in a man's worldly life, becomes no Christian life at all, but only an incommodious unreality, which gets into our way in this life without helping us into the life to come. Hence it is that we do not know God when we see Him. Hence it is that we so often find ourselves on the wrong side, without knowing how we got there. Hence it is that our instincts so seldom grasp what they are feeling after, our prophecies so often come untrue, our aims so constantly miss their ends. God is always taking us by surprise, when we have no business to be surprised at alL Bethlehem did not in the least mean what it was doing. No one means half the evil which he does. Hence it is a grand part of God's compassion to look more at what we mean than what we do. Yet it is a sad loss for ourselves to be so blind. Is it not, after all, the real misery of life, the compendium of all its miseries, that we are meeting God every day, and do not know Him when we see Him 1

Nothing can trouble the inward peace of those who are stayed on God. If a gentle sadness passed over Joseph, as he was repulsed from house after house, because he thought of Mary and of the Child, he doubtless smiled with holy peacefulness when he looked into her face. The unborn Babe was rejoicing in this foretaste of His coming humiliations. Each unsympathetic voice that spoke, the noise each door made as it was closed against them, was music in His ear. This was what He had come to seek. This, almost more than the virginal purity of Mary's Bosom, was what had drawn Him down from heaven. It was the want of this which had made the Father's Bosom lacking in something which He craved.

Doubtless Mary and Joseph, who knew Him so well already, and were versed in His unearthly ways, shared no THE MIDNIGHT CAVB.

somewhat in this His exultation. It was plain there was to be no home there. They knew how to excuse each refusal. They, in their unselfishness, were almost ashamed to ask a hospitality, which the exquisite considerateness of their charity made them see might be thought unseasonable in the crowded condition of the town. They would be pained to put others to the pain of refusing them. They would only ask because it was a duty to ask, and they would not ask twice anywhere. Oriental hospitality is common as the flowers of the field; but we have seen enough of the world now to know, that even the commonest services are more than God is expected to demand; and that what is common for others is rare for Him. They quit the town therefore in sweetness, patience, and love, leaving a blessing, aa unbought as it was unsuspected, behind them. It is not infrequent for God to leave a blessing even when He is rejected; for His anger is so gentle, that sin must have gone far indeed, before His unrequited love becomes dislike. Yet His blessings are strange, and sometimes wear the aspect of a punishment, as perhaps the women of Bethlehem thought when they became the mothers of martyrs, and were ennobled by their children's blood.

The twilight deepens. Mary and Joseph descend the hilL They find the Cave, a Stable-Cave, a sort of grotto with an erection before it, so common in those lands, by which depth and coolness are both attained. The Arab builds by preference in front of a cave, because half his dwelling is thus built for him from the first. The cavern seems to draw them, like a spell. Souls are strangely drawn, and to strangest things and places, when once they are within the vortex of a divine vocation. There are the lights, and songs, and music of the crowded village above them, turning into festival the civil obligation which has brought such unwonted numbers thither. Beneath that gay street, a poor couple

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE. in from Nazareth have sought refuge with the ox and ass in the stable.

What is about to happen there 1 It must be differently described, according to the points of view from which we consider it. Angels would say that some of God's eternal decrees were on the eve of being accomplished in the most divine and beautiful of ways, and that the invisible King was about to come forth and take visible possession of a kingdom, not narrower than a universe, with such pomp as the spiritual and godlike angels most affect. The magistrate in Bethlehem would say, that, at the time of the census, a pauper child had been added to the population by a houseless couple who had come from Nazareth, noting perhaps that the couple were of good family but fallen into poverty. This would be the way in which the world would register the advent of its Maker. It is a consistent world, only an unteachable one. It has learnt nothing by experience. It registers Him in the same manner this very day.

Let us go forth upon the slopes, and watch the night darkening, and think of the great earth that lies both near and far away from this new and obscure sanctuary, which God is about to hallow with such an authentic consecration. Much of earth is occupied with Koman business. Couriers are hastening to and fro upon the highways of the empire. The affairs of the vast colonies are giving employment and concern to many statesmen and governors. The great city of Kome itself is the centre of an intellectual and practical activity, which makes itself felt at the furthest extremities of the empire. Upon some minds, and especially those of a more philosophical cast, the growth of moral corruption, and other grave social questions, are weighing heavily. There are lawyers also intent upon their pleadings. Huge armies, which are republics of themselves, are fast rising to be the lawless masters of the world.

But nowhere in the vast world of Roman politics does there seem a trace of the Cave of Bethlehem. No prophetic shadows are cast visibly on the scene. All things wear a look of stability. The system, ponderous as it is, works like a well-constructed machine. No one is suspecting anything. It would not be easy for the world to be making less reference to God than it was making then. No one was on the look-out for a divine interference, unless it were that here and there some truth-stammering oracle perturbed a narrow circle, whose superstition was the thing likest religion of all things in the heathen world. In the palace of the Caesars, who suspected that unborn Caesar in His Cave? How often God seems to give nations a soporific, just when He is about to visit them, and the appearance of it is not so much that of a judgment upon them as of a jealous desire to secure His own concealment!

There is a Greek world also lying within that Roman world. It is a world of intellect, and thought, and disputation, the honourable trifling of the conquered, the refuge of those whose national independence has passed away. Many a brain is spinning systems there. Many find life full and satisfactory in the interest of a barren eclecticism. There is a populous world of countless thoughts, and yet how few of them for God! Everywhere there is a grandeur of disfigured truth, everywhere magnificent tokens of what reason can achieve, coupled with sad indications of what it fails to do. But the strongest systems are to be broken into a thousand pieces by the unborn Sage who is hidden in that Cave. His philosophy will be antagonist to theirs. The Christiau child of modern Bethlehem has more in his catechism than Plato ever could divine, together with a practical wisdom which the Stoic might envy and admire. The world of philosophy needed the Babe of Bethlehem. But it was not conscious of its need, neither did it suspect His coming;

neither, though it had sought truth these hundreds of years, would it know Truth when He came and looked it in the face. The wind is sighing through the leafless plains on the borders of the Hyssus: but who dreams there, that, when midnight comes, the Unknown God of the dissatisfied schools of Athens will be a speechless Child upon the earth t

Bound about, there is a nearer and a narrower world of Jewish uneasiness. A conquered nation is a tiresome spectacle. But never is it so disheartening as when it is tossing in unhelpful and inefficacious sedition without rising to the heroism of a crusade for freedom. So was it with the Jewish world that night. The census would doubtless let loose much futile talk about the Machabees, among those who did not enjoy the incomes of Roman office. There was ungraceful obedience to the foreigner, and the burning heat of old memories. There were the intrigues of domestic factions, and the littleness of a shadowy nationality, to which a grievance was more precious than the manly patience that waits the right hour to strike the blow for liberty. Like all uneasy nations, the Jews were looking out for a deliverer, and dreaming every moment that they had found him. But their discernment was gone. They were blinded by the very spiritual magnificence of their ancient prophecies. They were looking in all directions rather than towards the Cave of Bethlehem; and, when Messias came, He was their scandal rather than their hope; and, while they shed their own blood for pretenders, they spilt the blood of their true King in disappointment and disgust. The gorgeous martial procession, which was to go forth to conquer and redeem the world, will issue from the Cave of Bethlehem, when forty days are passed; but the fallen people have no eye to recognise the celestial splendour of that new manner of warfare, whose triumphs are in the depths of its abasement.

The new Machabee is not according to their reading of the national traditions.

Or let us take another scene. The nations of the earth have greatly changed since then. But look at that unchanging empire, that highly-wrought and yet ungrowing civilisation, of the Chinese, the empire that as if in sport had taken to itself the title of celestial because its genius is so eminently and so exclusively material. Look along those brimming rivers which are made to irrigate a myriad gardens, and to spread incessant verdure over plains almost tapestried with ornamental patterns of minutest cultivation. Look at those quaint mountains delved into slopes and terraces, with every basketful of earth economised, and every trickling moisture curiously hoarded. See how the realm teems with human life, till there is scarcely any room left for any other life than that of men, and how imperiously, and yet how grotesquely, tradition, law, and custom have parcelled out and organised and perfected that human life! The very throng of the thickly congregated bodies drives our minds painfully on the thought of such innumerable souls, densely crowded souls that are single to the eye of God, souls perishing for the lack of the Precious Blood.

China has bred in our little faith and little love more hard thoughts of God than all the other nations of the earth besides. We ponder in a puzzled way over that enormous hive of human life, where age has followed age, and God is still unknown. How little did it feel the need of a Kedeemer on that December night; how little does it feel it now! Perhaps no nook of earth has changed less than that huge empire seething and surging with incredible masses of population. As it was then, so is it now, wise and yet so ignorant, strange and yet so practical, civilised and yet so rude, promising and yet so hopeless, so far advanced and yet so singularly backward, so undecaying and yet in such irrecoverable decadence. Blood has flowed there for Christ; yet ia it the only blood of martyrs which has not yet been visibly the seed of a future Church. If anywhere on earth we can see unaltered what we might have seen that first Christmas Eve, it is in that strange, attractive, vexatious, disappointing land. As the winter stars shone unconsciously that night on the hurrying currents of those turbid rivers or in the stagnant pools of the rice- fields, so were the hearts of the dwellers there unconscious then, so are they almost unconscious now. It is chiefly the speechless unconscious babes * of China that are the sweet prey of the Babe of Bethlehem, an artifice of grace which almost looks as if it stooped to suit itself to the condition of the land it fain would bless.

There was the world also of the barbarians, wandering or fixed. The rude cradles of modern civilisation were already seething with numbers by the Sea of Azof, or beyond the Danube, or amid the pine woods of Sarmatia. There were nations which were evermore at war, nations sunk almost to the level of the lower animals, nations with a hundred religions, all of them fierce, sanguinary, abominable, degrading. Our own ancestors, stained with deep dyes, were in their earthen huts that night amid the withered fern and moonlit hollies of their native chases. That very night of the twenty-fourth of December the Mexican tribes near the Gulf of California were wandering about the woods and sandy dunes, dressed in the skins of beasts and the plumage of large birds, and imitating their voices, keeping the eve of the grand festival of the Sun's nativity on the twenty-fifth, at whose first beams they would fling off their savage masquerade, and bless the god of the sun who had raised them above the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, and made them men. When the first cry of the Infant Jesus¹

Bounded in the Cave, the melancholy splashing of those fai western waters was mingled with the imitated howls of beasts in that strange typical festival of heathenism. There was need for the Babe of Bethlehem among these unshepherded multitudes of God's dear creatures, who were trying to draw near to Him in these dark, wild ways. But they heard not that angelic music in the skies, which was one day to charm them from their ferocity, and bow their heads in childlike awe at the Name of Jesus, and make their strong frames tremble at the gentle shock of the baptismal waters.

Wherever we look, to Rome, to Greece, to Jewry, to China, or to the Barbarians, the picture is the same. There is everywhere a fearful indifference to the things of God, everywhere an unconsciousness of His vicinity, an unsuspectingness that His marvellous interference was so near at hand. Each hour of that night was being laden by men with its own tremendous burden of malignant sin. As the sands of the glass or the drops of the water-clock ran through, the nations of earth were unthinkingly filling up the foreseen measure of iniquity, which the sole virtue of Mary's Immaculate Heart is precipitately cutting short, through her having merited that the hour of the Incarnation should have been anticipated. Perhaps the secret few, those whom Simeon and Anna represent, have sweet unwonted perturbations in their prayers, those divine perturbations which so strangely deepen inward peace. It is thus that His servants often know when God is drawing nigh, and from what quarter He will come. Moreover the prayers of the saints are the nearest approach to a disclosure of the secret operations of God. He inspires them to pray for the coming of those things which He Himself is on the point of revealing. Perhaps all men in earnest prayer are more inspired than they suppose. If we could at any time see the hearts of the saints, we should come nearest to a sight of the Invisible God, the Beatific

Vision excepted. So doubtless on that night images of the mysteries of Bethlehem were mirrored on the souls of some, who knew not the significance of the heavenly beauty which was alluring and fortifying their inward lives. Meanwhile birth and death were going on as usual, and the passing souls were judged, as usual, by the unborn Child.

But there is one feature of the scene which must not be omitted. It is the quiet order of the elements, and their uninterrupted sameness. It is like God that it should be so. The night-wind rose among the low hills as it always rose. The stars leapt into their places, one by one, the brightest first, as the darkness of the night increased. The dusky features of the landscape wore the same physiognomy as usual, in the indistinctness of the quiet night. There was a look of unmovedness, of independence, of want of sympathy, in the face of nature, which was out of harmony with the expectation of the creature or the near approach of the Creator.

The scenery was unconcerned. It was as if nature stood on one side, and let God pass, and made no obeisance, and altogether had nothing to do with what was going on, as if it was a world by itself, and did not interest itself in the worlds of spirit and of will. Has not this sometimes happened to ourselves in life? When a friend has died in the night, we may have opened the casement and looked out into the clear darkness. Our hearts are full. It seems as if all hearts were in our one heart. We almost dream that at that moment we monopolise in our single selves and in our new sorrow all the interests on earth. We look out upon earth, as if its silence would answer what we are feeling. But the moon is mockingly bright; there is the not unmusical moaning of the night- wind; the birds are restless upon theil roosts. Whoever knew them not so in moonlight?

All is as usual The lineaments of nature are expressionless. There is plainly no sympathy there with our sorrows, our fears, our hopes, or our regrets. We look to Nature; but her blank unresponsive face, happily, yet not without some unexpected rudeness, flings us back on God. There was an earthquake upon Calvary, but all is still, careless, uniform, regardless, in the winter night of Bethlehem. Earth shows herself expressively inanimate, painfully so. It is not the look of death, for that is full of mute disclosures. It is like a fair face, with the mind gone from within. It is below the eyeless beauty of the sculptured marble, a kind of stolid beauty, making the heart heavy that looks upon it. To me there is something quite awful in the silent drifting of the stars over Bethlehem that night.

But let us turn from earth's fair material landscapes, and from its dismal spiritual scenery, to the sights and occupations of heaven in that momentous night. At the moment of the Incarnation had the angels seen anything in the Vision, anything which was almost like a change 1 Had they seen the Sacred Humanity lying in the lap of the Holy Trinity 1 Now on the night of this twenty-fourth of December was there any visible movement in God? Was there any stir upon the broad ocean of His adorable tranquillity 1 Did the shadow of the Babe rest on His sea of silent fire 1 How deeply must they have seen into God to behold that the Incarnation was in truth no change, but that, like all God's external works, it flowed naturally, so to speak, from His perfections, and was in fact the original, exemplary model-work of all God's outward works I How intensely beautifying must the science be, which accompanies such a Vision as this! All eternity is one present point to God.

But, in our way of thinking, if He could have had memory, how would He have pondered then the old silence before creation, and this night's fulfilment of visible creation eternally predestined I If there could be successive thoughts in the great God, how adorably wonderful would have been the thoughts of the divine mind at that midnight hour! Such must have been the sight which the angels, the eldest-born of time, must have seen that night It would appear to them as a beautiful procession, a procession of the Divine Decrees, seeming to climb their successive heights, and shine, like risen suns, upon the angelic spirits. It is these Decrees, which men make the subject of so much controversy, but which seem fitter matter for devotion, to whose sweet fires they minister abundantly.

Controversy does but desecrate their silent sovereignty. How the intelligences of the heavenly hosts must have thrilled with magnificent worship and ecstatic delight, aa they watched these eternal Decrees, slow, gigantic, venerable, yet sweet-faced exceedingly, as though they had the countenances of children, come up one after another out of the abysses of God, and shine forth into their victorious accomplishment! Each sun, as it rose over some immaterial mountain-height discernible by the angels in the divine ocean of essence, poured its golden effulgence into their vast spirits, and filled them with throbbing tides of joy. Each sun flung its grand dawn over them like a new world of light, each seeming more beautiful than its predecessor, each indeed appearing to exhaust all that was beautiful in God, until it was presently outshone by another yet more incredible grandeur, quietly and noiselessly streaming out of the plenitude of God, as the speechless sun rises from the ocean. Next to the Uncreated Procession of the Holy Ghost the procession of those Divine Decrees, which represent creation and its consequences, is the glorious pageant which makes eternal festival for the blissful understandings of angels and of men. One of the most dazzling of its sinuous bends was passing before the raptured gaze of the angelic hierarchies, on that night of the twenty-fourth of December.

In all that assembly, in all the courts of highest heaven that night, there was, except the shadow of the Babe, no figure or form of man, no shape of human soul. The thousands and tens of thousands of the redeemed saints were waiting elsewhere, to be delivered only when the Babe had died, and risen again, and to enter heaven only when He first of all had triumphantly ascended thither. Surely we may say with all reverence, that if God had been less than God that night, His providence could not then have been mindful of the countless details of His vast creation. Hia own personal concurrence to every action, inward and outward, rational and irrational, throughout the wide world would have been unequal and irregular. Nature would have fallen into the hands of its blind laws, like a child deserted by its mother, and confusion and ruin would have ensued. The equability of God's power and presence is most adorable, and when we see it acting in its even, calm, unwithdrawn extent even at the moment of such great mysteries as those of Nazareth and Bethlehem, we get some faint idea of the grandeur of His majesty, because, unworthy as even that comparison may be, mysteries of such surpassing wonder seem to be no more to Him, than the common actions, which we are eliciting hourly with only a half-consciousness of them, are to us.

As we read, and know not that we are actually spelling while we read, so, from one point of view. Creation, Incarnation, and Grace seem to flow out of God without His moving; while, from another point of view, we see Him bending over a mystery like an intensely studious artist, or over an individual soul, with all the anxious minute fondness of a mother or a nurse. There was not a rude Briton in the weald of Kent, nor a Gaulish Druid at his vigil on the seaward-looking promontories, but God was assiduously attending to him that night, without an appearance of His attention

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. I2X being distracted by other things. There were thousands of villages, in hollows or on hills, upon which the quiet moonlight was as softly falling, and calm Providence as noiselessly busying itself, as at Bethlehem. The sleep, the food, the health, the pulses of all the multitudinous beasts and birds were being looked to in all places and at each moment by our heavenly Father. He was dexterously saving animal life among the grinding floes of the polar seas. He was measuring the progress and weighing the falling out-thrust masses of the glaciers amidst the reverberating mountains. He was guiding with rudders of intervening love the lava streams of southern volcanoes. He was intimately occupied with each voiceless coral insect, that was laying the foundations of new worlds, or crowning with rough diadem the craters of a sunken world, in many an ocean far and wide. He was concurring in His omnipresence to a whole world of fantastic dreams, that hovered on the wings of night over countless sleepers, civilised or savage. Yet so tremendous was the mystery of Bethlehem, that had He been less than God He must have been caught and stayed by its excessive beauty, and His complacency abstracted and absorbed in its ministrations to His glory.

Let us descend beneath the earth, and see how that night passed there, in the world of spirit which fills the planet, as well as in that world which peoples its crust, and that which encompasses its atmosphere. If we look into the limbus of the fathers, there are surely silver flakes of light falling even there. As there are degrees in sleep, and one sleep is sweeter than another, so doubtless there were degrees in that repose within Abraham's bosom. There might be more contentment in their expectation, more sweetness in their conformity to the will of God, more jubilee in their tranquil patient love. Their life was as the lives of saints in ecstasy, and so they waited. Their faith had become attainment, although they had not yet attained; for it was turned into joy, although it had not yet come to sight. There were pulses doubtless in that realm of peaceful caves; there was a heart, and but one heart, in Abraham's bosom. There were times when expectation trembled, and its tremulousness was an increase of its joy. Adam and Eve were there, Abel and Noe too, Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph also and Daniel, Moses and Aaron and Josue and Samuel, the Christlike David, the good kings, the grand prophets, the brave Machabees, Job and the multitude of the sanctified heathen, and the penitents who had swum for life in the great deluge and had found a better life through penance, even while they lay in the lap of God's judgment. Perhaps there were angelic visitations there that night to tell them the glad tidings of Bethlehem, the village of the favourite Benjamin, who thus had his peculiar joy that hour.

There was also the painless limbus of the children, souls who had gone through no probation, and so had never stained themselves with actual sin, and yet whom no sacrament had brought into supernatural covenant with God. Perhaps in their dimness there might be additional light that night, something more like a shining in the pearly softness of their perpetual dawn. There might be thrills in their unintelligible beatitude, a quickening in the low-lying contentment of their undeveloped lives.

Why do the fires of Purgatory all at once sink so low, and why does the bitterness of their taste seem so diluted? In that realm it is a night of universal relief, perhaps also of abundant release. Souls look at each other in astonishment The release of the others is a joy even to those who remain; for it is an abode of consummate charity, although in exquisite suffering. But now the Precious Blood is about to appear upon the earth, where it can be shed, and in eight days will be shed in fact That Blood is the cooling dew of

Purgatory. It fulfils an office there, which nothing but itself can fill. For nine months a stream of divinest satisfactions has flown out from the unborn Babe, and worked wonders among those holy souls. The breath of those satisfactions has passed over that sea of fire like a refreshing air, wafting balm and coolness to the prisoners and exiles there. But now these satisfactions are to find a wider outlet, and to flow in a vaster channel, pouring their magnificent infinities orer all creation; and Purgatory is thronged with releasing angels, waiting the midnight hour.

In that subterranean realm of spiritual suffering and refining fire, St. Michael will display his exulting devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem. 0 King Solomon! art thou so happy as to be there? The true Solomon, the wise Prince of peace is coming; will He bring rest to thee, who wert the chosen type both of His wisdom and His peace? It is a night in Purgatory, the very opposite of the night of the slaying of Egypt's first-bom upon earth, a night truly to be "much remembered before the Lord," but remembered for that Grand Pardon, which has only been equalled and surpassed by that other Pardon three-and-thirty years later, when the Soul of the Babe left the Body upon Calvary.

Even in hell we must believe there was some stir. The whole spiritual creation of God, even where it goes down under the darkness in the inextricable eternal swamps, must have felt such a mystery as the temporal Nativity of the Incarnate Word, The mystery of hell is in close connection with the mystery of Bethlehem. The latter recounts the history, explains the significance, and justifies the difficulties of the former. Doubtless there was an increased oppression there, a nameless fear among the proud terrified spirits, obstinate but horror-stricken, remorseful yet not repentantj coveting God as the miser covets gold, and yet turning away from Him with a scared loathing, and only worshipping Him with the wicked worship of their curses. It is a world of ruined grandeurs, a realm of blighted intelligences and tortured lives, a multitudinous chaos which the vindicti\e justice of the All-seeing and All-holy alone can disentangle or understand, and yet which that justice has marvellously sorted, named, and numbered. When the midnight struck on earth, and was told by watchmen in its streets, there must have run from the Cave of Bethlehem, swifter than the vivid lightning, into the depths of hell a panic which stunned the rebel hosts and made them cower. It would increase perchance the hatred of the devils to the souls of men, which now became exasperating monuments to them of what they vainly try to think is a divine injustice. The grand conspiracy of hell, the very malice of which had something gorgeous about it, something which perhaps horridly fascinated the guilty, is now baffled, baffled by the quiet gentle might of the Incarnation, disclosed, frustrated, put to scorn, by the speechless look of an Infant's eye in the deep midnight at Bethlehem. He has come, whom His Mother now addresses by that musical yet potent Name, which had clashed all the bars and bolts of hell, a while ago, when Gabriel first pronounced it.

But let us return to the Cave. If places are consecrated in the eyes of whole generations by having been the birthplaces of great men, or the spots where they have produced immortal works of genius, what shall we say of the spot where the Incarnate God was bom? Surely it must be a place of pilgrimage to the end of time. They, who cannot visit it in the body, must make their pilgrimage to it in spirit. It is not merely devout curiosity which we shall thus gratify, or even fresh fuel for the fires of meditation which we shall lay up; but, according to our usual way of regarding things, we shall learn much about God, His character and His way, by our study of the Cave of Bethlehem.

When we enter it, and attentively consider its furniture, it seems to set before us the whole mystery of the Incarnation. It lights up entire regions of the mind of God, and discloses it to us with a mixed representation of symbols and realitiea For what is it, which the red wind-shaken lantern-light of St. Joseph reveals to us 1 The centre of the Cave is as yet hidden from us. It is the Word made flesh, the unborn Babe, around whom all the other things are grouped. He is the centre of all worlds, and for the most part invisible. His very creatures form a screen around Him, as His Mother did at that moment Yet from time to time He discloses Himself, as He will now do at midnight, remaining this time obscurely visible for three-and- thirty years. But even when hidden, He is still the attraction, the unity, the life, the significance, the success, and the sublime repose, of all the worlds of which He is the centre.

Round Him, as if it were the cloister of His sanctuary, are the beauty and the strength of created holiness, guarding His ineffable purity from the contact and the neighbourhood of common creatures. In the midst of the cavern Mary is at prayer. There was nothing commanding or persuasive at first sight in her spiritual beauty. Many women in Bethlehem had seen her leave their doors that afternoon, and had discerned nothing in her to rouse admiration, or even to waken interest. They had known perhaps by some peculiarity of her dress, or by Joseph's accent, that she was from Kazareth. They might have thought her young for so aged a husband, and might have looked at her for a moment with transient kindness, which the evidence of her being soon about to be a mother would naturally excite. But this was all. They dreamed not of her unspeakable dignity. They perceived not the light of almost habitual ecstasy lurking in her eye. No odour went from her, which environed them with an atmosphere of heaven. There was nothing in themselves, upon which the attractions of her awful holinesi could act.

So is it always with the things of God. They do not make their claims out loud. Their eloquence is their silence. Their beauty is their mysterious unobtrusiveness. They do not flash upon the eye, and so compel conviction. They touch the heart, melt it, enlarge it, transform it, and, when they have made it in some measure like themselves, they enter into it and possess it. They require study. This is their characteristic. Holiness is the science, by whose rules, and in the light of whose discoveries, and by the delicacy of whose processes, the study must be carried on. The nearer a thing is to God, the more blinding is the light in which it lies, and therefore the more assiduous and patient must the study of it be. Hence it is that nothing requires so much study as the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, and next to Him, the chosen Mother of His Humanity. Very nigh indeed to them comes the tranquil magnificence and unruffled depths of Joseph's sanctity.

It is this then which occupies the centre of the Cave. Uncreated Holiness and Created Holiness in One Person and in Two Natures, the Incarnate Word, the Infant Creator, there, but not yet visible, — this is the object of our wonder, our love, our thanksgiving, our most absolute adoration. He has around Him, almost blended in His beauty and His light, two worlds of created holiness, vast and glorious, and both of them without parallel In one of these worlds He has dwelt Himself for nine months, and out of its material has He vouchsafed to draw the materials of His own created Body and Blood. The other of these worlds He has placed near Him, just outside, and yet hardly outside, the actual mystery of the Incarnation, as the outpost to defend Him, as the satellite to minister to His Mother and Himself, as the shadow under whose safeguard and concealment the mystery might be operated in the way most suitable to the divine perfections, as the shadow of the Eternal Father following Him from heaven.

These three worlds form one system, which we name the hierarchy of the Incarnation, in the stricter sense of the words, or the nucleus of that hierarchy, if we speak less strictly, although with perfect propriety; and in this latter case, the Apostles, the Baptist, the Evangelists, and others, come into the system. Theologians have been bold enough to name these three worlds of holiness the Earthly Trinity, and the usage of the saints and of devotional writers has now consecrated the reverently daring language. Thus is the Cave of Bethlehem an awful image of the Threefold Majesty in Heaven. It is there that the Divine Shadows are deepest, and most clearly defined. It is there that all similitudes between the Creator and the creature are drawn together and concentrated. It is thus the very holiest core of creation, the Creator Himself being there in a created nature. It presents us with a kind of earthly beatific vision, in which the unity, the distinctions, the relationships, and the processions, of the Most High are marvellously pictured, filling the beholder's soul with rapture, fear, and love. What are the mysteries of music and of poetry, what the wonders of the starry skies, what the stirring science of past creations disinterred from the cyphered chambers of the taciturn rocks, what the exciting pursuit of fugitive protean matter retreating, amid endless unexpected changes, into the fortresses of its last elements, behind which the bafiled chemist with prophetic genius ever suspects other last, and last resolutions, and more and more ultimate refuges, to which he can at present come no nigher, what the physiologist's intense and joyous awe as with silent patience and his microscope he tracks the principle of life amidst its labyrinthine cells, — what are all these intellectual joys compared with the joy of that mother-science, heaven-bom theology, which takes na thus into the central sanctuaries of creation, and shows, and illumines for us, the Earthly Trinity in the Cave of Bethlehem t

Around that centre, what is the characteristic furniture oi the Cave! Who can doubt that all was there which was most fitting, most divine, most in harmony with the incomparable mystery t Yet all is so unlike what we should have imagined! Five material objects stand round about, and, as it were over the shoulder of each of them, we discern an ethereal form looking on, a spiritual presence -assisting there, of which these five material things are as it were the representatives and symbols.

First of all there are the Beasts, the ox and the ass. There is surely something inexpressibly touching in this presence of the inferior animals at the nativity of the Incarnate Creator. In the Incarnation God has been pleased to go to what look like the uttermost limits of His divine condescension. He has assumed a material, although a rational, nature; and, according to our understanding, it would not have been seemly that He should have assumed an irrational nature. Nevertheless He is not unmindful of the inferior creatures. Their instincts are in some sort a communion with Him, often apparently of a more direct character than reason itself, and bordering on what would commonly be called the supernatural.

At times there is something startling in the seeming proximity of the animal kingdom to God. Moreover all the inferior animals, with their families, shapes, colours, cries, manners, and peculiarities, represent ideas in the divine mind, and are partial disclosures of the beauty of God, like the foliage of trees, the gleaming of metals, the play of light in the clouds, the multifarious odours of wood and field, and the manifold sound of waters. It was then, if we may use such an expression, a propriety of divine art, that the inferior creatures should be represented in the picture of their Maker's temporal nativity. While the sheep lay on the starlit slopes outside, the ox and the ass stood sentinels, full of patient significance and dumb expression, at His manger. The herds of cattle, which were collected within the walls of Ninive, were one of God's reasons for sparing the repentant city. The wild beasts in the wilderness were His companions during His mysterious Lent; and, as all beasts are symbols of something beautiful and wise in God, so has He many times vouchsafed in His revealed word to make them the symbolical language, by which He has conveyed hidden truths to men. They were not without their meaning in the scene of the Nativity. They remind us that the Babo of Bethlehem was the Creator. Their presence is another of His condescensions. He is not only rejected of men, but He trespasses, so to speak, on the hospitality of beasts. He shares their home, and they are well content. They welcome Him with unobtrusive submission, and do what little they can to temper with their warm breath the rigour of the winter night. H they make no show of reception, at least they deny Him not the room He asks on His own earth. They make way for Him, and there was more worship even in that than Bethlehem would give Him.

We reckon such things as these among the humiliations of our Blessed Lord, and rightly. Every circumstance, every detail, every seeming accident of the Incarnation is full of humiliation. It follows by a necessary consequence from every mystery. Even the praise of men is a deep humiliation to the Most High in His Incarnate form, when we consider who they were that passed the favourable judgment upon His actions, and with what mind, as if they had a right lA) judge and patronise, they passed it, and also who He was whom they were praising. All praise of God, unless it be worship also, is humiliating to Him. Thus everything about the Incarnation was humiliating. Our Lord's Divinity as it were holds a strong light over all His human actions and sufferings, and shov/s each of them to us in its real character as an unfathomable abyss of condescension, no matter whether the mysteries be those of glory or of suffering. There are even some points of view from which the mysteries of Tabor and the Risen Life seem to be more truly, and also more unnecessarily, humiliations than the mysteries of Bethlehem or Calvary.

Nevertheless, after long meditation, together with an habitual remembrance of our Blessed Lord's Divinity, there are often times when we lose sight of this character of humiliation altogether. As the Divine Nature can suffer nothing, so its adorable impassibility seems to pass in a certain way to the Human Nature which was joined with it. Our Lord's Divinity appears to hinder anything from becoming a humiliation. It raises ignominies into worshipful mysteries. It clothes shame with a beauty which beams so brightly, that it almost hides from us the horror of the outxage. His lowness becomes a divine height, a height which none could reach but God. His disgraces are crowned with lustre, and become nobilities. He raises what He touches to His own height; it does not sink Him to its vileness. There are men who weep over our Lord's Passion, yet who have almost to do a violence to themselves to realise His humiliations, so strongly and so brightly is the grand thought of His Divinity before their minds. Moreover it is just these men, who, because they are so exclusively possessed with the idea of His Godhead, honour with the tenderest minuteness and with the most astonishing unforgetting detail the mysteries of His Humanity.

Our Lord's companionship with the inferior animals was one of these glorious humiliations, which have become honourable mysteries. But He was not only their companion. He was laid in their Manger as if He was their food, the food of beasts, that so He might become in very truth the food of sinners. This Manger was the second of the material objects which were round about Him. While it was a deep shame, it was also a sweet prophecy. It foretold the wonders of His altar. It was the type of His most intimate and amazing communion with men. It was a symbol of the incredible abundance and commonness of His grace. It was a foreshadowing of His sacramental residence with men from the Ascension to the Doom. It was like the sort of box or crib we sometimes see at foundling hospitals, into which the deserted child is put, with none to witness the conflict of agony and love in her who leaves it there. It is as if He were placed in the Manger like a fatherless foundling, with the whole of the unkind world for His hospital.

The rough Straw is the quilting of His crib; and the refuse of an oriental threshing-floor is not like the carefully husbanded straw of our own land. Men made Him as a worm, and no man, in the onslaughts of His Passion. He Himself in His first infancy makes His bed as though He were a beast of burden, a beast tamed and domesticated for the use of men. The vilest things in creation are good enough for the Creator. He even exhibits a predilection for them. The refuse of men, — that is the portion of God. It is not only that we give it Him; He chooses it: and His choice teaches us strange things, and stamps its peculiar character on Christian sanctity. Such is the furniture of the nursery of the King of kings. The light of Joseph's lantern shoots here and there redly and imperfectly through the darkness, and we see the faces of the dumb Beasts, with the pathetic meekness in their eyes, and the rough Manger worn smooth and black and glistening, and the Straw scattered here and there, and bruised beneath the feet of the animals, and so perchance rendered less sharp and prickly as a couch for the new-born Babe.

We must add to these features that very Darkness, which the lantern so indistinctly illumines. The Darkness of earth's night is the chosen, the favoured time of the Uncreated Splendour of heaven. It is the curtain of His concealment, the veil of His tabernacle, the screen of His sanctuary. He came first to Nazareth at dead of night. At dead of night He is coming now at Bethlehem. At dead of night also will He come, if we rightly penetrate His words, to judge the world. There is no darkness with Him, and He needs no light to work by, who called the sun itself from nothing and hung it over with a white mantle of blinding light. He came to darkness. It was His very mission. He came when the darkness was deepest, as His grace comes so often now. The very depth of our darkness is a kind of compulsion to the immensity of His compassion. This Darkness is the fourth material thing which is round about them.

Lastly, we must note as another feature of the Cave its excessive Cold. The very elements shall inflict suffering upon their Creator as soon as He is born in His created form. The air, which He must breathe in order to live, shall be as inhospitable to Him as the householders of Bethlehem. The winter's night will almost freeze the Precious Blood within His veins. But what is the whole world but a polar sea, a wilderness of savage ice with the arctic sunshine glinting o2 from it in unfertile brightness, a restless glacier creeping onwards with its huge talons, but whose progress is little better than spiritual desolation? The Sacred Heart of the Babe of Bethlehem has come to be the vast central fire of the frozen world. It is to break the bands of the long frost, to loosen the bosom of the earth, and to cover it with fruits and flowers. As He came to what was dark, so He came to what was cold, and therefore Cold and Darkness were amongst the first to welcome Him.

The Beasts, the Manger, the Straw, the Darkness, and the Cold I Such were the preparations which God made for Himself. From the first dawn of creation every step, and there were countless of them, in the worlds both of spirit and of matter, was a preparation for Jesus. It was a step towards the Incarnation, which was at once the cause and the model of it. While each step seemed to take creation further on, it also brought it a step backward, a step homeward, a step nearer to the original idea of it all in the mind of God. The Creation of the angels was a step towards Jesus. The successive epochs in which our planet was ripening for the abode of man, and the successive forms of vegetation and of life, which God caused to defile before Him in the slow order characteristic of all His works, were all steps towards Jesus. The patriarchs and the prophets, the history of the chosen people which was a prophecy of the future at the same moment that it was a free drama of the present, the unconstrained realised allegories of the lives of the typical saints, the rise and fall of each system of Greek or Oriental philosophy, the fortunes and destinies of the empires which thrust each other from the stage of the world's history, all these were steps to Jesus, all were the remote or proximate preparations for the Incarnation. When the Babe Mary was born of Anne, the world little dreamed how God was quickening His step. Mary and Joseph were the proximate preparations for Nazareth, and for the midnight mystery of the unspeakable Incarnation. Each of these steps, as we study them, tells us something more about God than we knew before. The knowledge of Him grows into us through the contemplation of them. But the grace of the Immaculate Conception was like the opening of heaven. It seemed as if the next moment men must see God; and so it was, as momenta count with God. Kow we have come to the proximate preparations of Bethlehem, the Beasts, the Manger, the Darkness, and the Cold.

But these things are spiritual types as well as material realities. Matter has many times masked angels. There were five spiritual presences in the Cave of Bethlehem, which these five material things most aptly represented. There were Poverty, Abandonment, Rejection, Secrecy, and Mortification. They started with the Infant Jesus from the Cave, and they went with Him to the Tomb. They are stern powers, and their visages unlovely, and their voices harsh, and their company unwelcome to the natural man. But to the eye, which grace has cleansed, they are beautiful exceedingly, and their solemnity inviting, and their spells, like those of earthly love, making the heart to burn, and full often guiding life into a romance of sanctity. The companionship of the Beasts, and the room they had as it were lent Him to be born in, betokened His exceeding Poverty. The Manger was the type of His Abandonment. Could any figure have been more complete? The refuse Straw, on which He lay, and which perhaps Joseph gathered from under the feet of the cattle, well expressed that Rejection, wherewith men have visited and will visit Him and His Church through all generations till the end.

The Darkness round Him was a symbol of those strange and manifold Secrecies in which He loves to shroud Himself, like the eclipse on Calvary, or the impenetrable thinness of the sacramental veils. The wintry Cold, which caused His delicate frame to shudder and to feel its first pain, was the fitting commencement of that incessant penance and continuous Mortification which the All-holy and the Innocent underwent for the redemption of the guilty. These five things stood like spiritual presences around His crib, waiting for His coming, Poverty, Abandonment, Rejection, Secrecy, and Mortification. Alas! we must be changed indeed before such attendance shall be choice of ours! Yet have they not been evermore the five sisters of all the saints of God 1

There was something, therefore, in these five things, which expressed the character of the Incarnate Word. They pourtrayed His human sanctity. They were a prophecy of the Three and-Thirty Years. They foreshowed the spirit and genius of His Church in all ages. They reversed the judgments of the world, and were the new standards according to which the last Universal Judgment was to be measured. They were in themselves a revelation; for the ancient Scriptures had but very dimly intimated them, and the philosophy of the heathen had not so much as dreamed of them. Even now, what are all heresies, which concern holy living, but a dishonouring of themi Asceticism is part of the ignominy of the Cross; and modem heathenism turns from it with the same disdain, which the elder heathenism of Greece and Rome showed for it in the days of the persecuting Caesars.

Yet these five things not only contain the peculiar spirit of the Incarnation, and embody its heavenly characteristics, they also express the character of God Himself, and throw light upon the hidden things of His divine majesty. Is not created poverty the true dignity of Him whose wealth is uncreated? Shall He, whose life has been eternal independence and self-sufficing beatitude, lean upon creatures? Can the very thought of comfort come nigh to the Omnipotent, and not dishonour Him 1 Silver and gold, diamonds and pearls, houses and lands, all these things surely would have seemed more truly ignominies to God, than the reproaches of Sion or the cruelties of Calvary. It was enough that He let our nature lean upon His Person. It was enough that He abased Himself to lean upon the sinless beauty of His mortal Mother, and owe to her the possession of that which He had Himself created.

Even the abandonment of Bethlehem was worthy of His self-sufficing loneliness. Men fell off from Him, as if He were not altogether of themselves, as truly He was not He was used to stand alone. It was the habit of an unbeginning eternity. It was the work of His own grace, the permission of His own condescension, which allowed any one, even Mary and Joseph, to remain with Him and be on His side. There was something like worship in His abandonment though they who abandoned Him meant it not as such. It was an acknowledgment, blind, erring, even malicious, yet still an acknowledgment of His unapproachable grandeur. When men tacitly permit another's right to be alone and not to mingle with the crowd, it is because their instincts divine something in him which is entitled to the homage either of their love or of their fear.

He was passive when men abandoned Him. When He was active and offered Himself to them, they rejected Him. Has not this been God's history with His creatures from the first, independently of the Incarnation, if any passage in the history of creation can be said to be independent of it? Awful as is the guilt of this rejection, it glorifies God unconsciously and beyond its own intention, even like the despair of those who have chosen to hide themselves from Him in everlasting exile. It is a mark by which we may measure how far the finite falls off from the Infinite. It is a token of the magnificent incomprehensibility of God. It is the wickedness of ignorance which simply rejects God; the clear light of immortal despair defies, because it knows that acceptance is now impossible.

The secrecy of Bethlehem is no less becoming to the inscrutable majesty of God. He is invisible because created eye cannot see Him. He shrouds Himself when He works, lest creation should be blinded with the very reflection from His laboratories. He needs to wear no other veil than Hia own wondrous nature. The brightness of His uncreated sanctity is a more impenetrable concealment than the darkness of the old chaos. Secrecy alone becomes so great a majesty, so resplendent a beauty, so unutterable a sanctity as His. All revelation is on God's part a condescension. If we may dare so to speak, it is rather love which humbles Him to disclose His goodness, than glory which constrains Him to manifest His greatness.

Last of all, mortification also is becoming to the majesty of God. Even had He come not to suffer, but in a glorious, blissful, impassible Incarnation, He would surely have moved amidst the sensible delights and lovelinesses of earth as the sunbeam moves through the wood, gilding trunk and leaf, ferny dell and mossy bank, the stony falls of the brook and the tapestry of wildflowers, the pageant of the bright insects and the plumage of the shy birds, yet mingling not itself with any of them, giving beauty, not taking it, colouring all things, yet admitting no colour into its own translucent whiteness, a heavenly yet an earthly thing, a loving light upon us and amongst us, intimate, familiar, independent, universal and yet unsullied.

It is by sensible things that we go deeper down into creation, and confuse ourselves with its lower lives. Mortification is the ministry of the senses to the God-seeing soul. Immortification is the captivity of the soul to sing sweet songs to the senses, and give an intellectual relish to their enjoyments. Asceticism is simply an angelic life, grace raising nature to a nature higher than itself, yea nigh, amazingly nigh to the very nature of God. There is a mortification which is a fight for freedom. Such a mortification could in no way belong to our Blessed Lord. There is also a mortification, which is the full liberty of holiness; and such was

His. It was not that lie did not assume our senses and the sensible fashions of our lives, but that He bore Himself as was becoming God towards those outward things. God reveals Himself to us, as wishing, yet not constraining our freedom so as to secure His desires; as claiming rights, yet contenting Himself with what is far below His claim; as giving grace, and letting men make waste of its abundance; as pleading when it would have seemed more natural to command; as coveting the hearts of men, yet being unspeakably less rich in His creature's love than He craves to be; as aiming at a mark, of which He is content to fall short; as compassing whole creations in His nets of love, and taking but a partial prey. What is aU this but something of which mortification is a created shadow? Surely there is no truth we need in these times to lay to heart more strongly, than that the character of Jesus is the character of the invisible God, and the fashions of the Incarnation the fashions also of the Divine Incomprehensibility. What truth holds more teaching that this 1 What teaching refutes at once a greater number of untruths, and those too the special errors of our day?

But why are we thus lingering so long on the threshold of the great event? Is it that the night draws on so slowly, or that our desires are cold and unimpassioned 1 Love surely knows full well of that impatience which delays, whose very fire causes it to hesitate, to tremble, to grow calm. We are looking on the sights which Mary's eyes beheld. It is sometimes said that she was so poor, that she was unable to make better preparation for the coming of the Babe. By no means let us think this. It could have been otherwise, had Mary so chosen. If the Birth of her Beloved was to be in a stable, and after the rejection of inhospitable Bethlehem, she could have furnished other lining for the manger than the crisp and prickly straw. She, who was prepared with the swaddling-clothes, might have been ready with better protecti«jn against the cold of the rigorous night.

These accidents were not the necessities of the Mother's poverty; they were the heroisms of her obedience. They were the Son's choice, and the Mother knew well beforehand what He had chosen. For nine months at least, if not before, she had seen only with His eyes, and loved only with His heart. She was in His confidence, and His tastes were her tastes. His heavenly standards her weights and measures also. Often in vision had she seen the Cave, and had been ravished with the spiritual beauty of the unworldly preparations. Now the hour was come, and she was looking on the realities. They were a heavenly science to her, a most beautiful theology. She saw them not as we see them, merely on the surface, as mirrors imaging divine things, but mistily and brokenly. She saw deep into their wonderful significance. Long processions of fair truths rose up and came out of each of them. Their mysteries stood still, while she gazed upon them. She beheld the accomplishment of their prophecies, the strangeness of their proprieties, the gracefulness of their unworldly lineaments. Light from heaven was round about them, the radiance of the eternal splendours. They raised her soul to God, and she entered into a blissful ecstasy, a state which, if not natural to her, as some suppose, was at all events ever nigh at hand, when she let her thoughts fly freely to the centre of their rest.

Such was the unspeakable magnificence of her soul, that we cannot doubt that the operations of grace within it during that ecstasy were more numerous and manifold, as well as incomparably more elevated, than those which fill a saint's whole life, and call forth in us intelligent wonder, and enthusiastic praise of God. Yet in her these operations were also divinely simple, with an absorbing simplicity which no saint has ever known. Her mighty soul strives to grow to the height and stature of the mystery, and falls far short oi its incomprehensibility. It is a fresh joy, a rapturous redoublement of ecstasy, that it is in truth beyond her comprehension; and more than ever she desires to look upon that little Face, which shall express to her in its silentness those mysteries which words cannot paint, and to the conception of which busy thought can give neither hue nor form. Evermore the Beasts, and the Manger, and the Straw, and the Darkness, and the Cold seem to flit before her in her ecstasy, uncertainly and double-faced, one while showing their definite material features, and another while turning upon her the beautiful countenances of Poverty, Abandonment, Rejection, Secrecy, and Mortification.

She looked upward, and beheld those abysses in God, which these outward things betokened. She looked inward, with her new nine-months habit; for that was to her what upward was to all other adoring souls of men, and she trembled at the greatness of the mystery; she desired, even while her humility feared lest a desire should be a will: but the desire of her heart, like a shaft that cannot be recalled, had sped its way. It reached the Heart of the Babe, and at once she felt the touch of God, and was unutterably calm, and Jesus lay on the ground on the skirt of her robe, and she fell down before Him to adore. Twice had her pure desire drawn Him from the home of His predilection, once from the uncreated Bosom of the Father, and once from her own created Bosom which He tenanted. It was as if the sweet will of Mary were the time-piece of the divine decrees.

Mary has looked upon the Face of the Incarnate God. In one glance she has read there voluminous wonders of heaven, and yet sees that its loveliness is inexhaustible. The Vision has surpassed all expectations, even such expectations as hers. She gazes; and, as she gazes, she can understand how the mightiest spirits of angels and of men in the full grown fitature of their imperishable glory will unfold themselves in the sunlight of that beautiful Countenance, and feed for ever on the manifold expression of its sweet worshipful solemnity. A change comes over her, of which this visible change is the stupendous token. It is an unspeakable crisis in her life of grace, one of those new beginnings, of which the Annunication was one and the Descent of the Holy Ghost another.

She was no longer the tabernacle of the hidden God. God had changed His position towards her, and so her graces were changed, changed with the only kind of change they ever knew, an incredible augmentation. She was suddenly clothed in a new purity; for Jesus had again magnified her spotlessness by the manner of His Nativity, as He had done before by the manner of His Incarnation. It was a purity such as no creature has ever shared. There had never been heretofore a created purity which at all resembled hers. She looks upon His Face, and grows more like Him by looking. One while He wears an expression as if He were created, another while as though He were that moment judging. His great reason, with its plenitude of consciousness and its abysmal science, was manifest; and yet it overlaid not the delicate gracefulness of infantine infirmity. There was something in the silentness of His look, which compelled worship by its palpable mysteriousness, even while it allured familiarity by its almost pitiful and plaintive eloquence. As at the moment of the Immaculate Conception, as in the hour of the Annunciation, so was it at the Nativity. The Mother began for the third time a new life of gigantic sanctities.

Joseph likewise draws near to adore. The earthly shadow of the Eternal Father rests softly on the Child. His temporal birth is complete in its adumbration of His unbeginning and unending Nativity. Joseph draws near, that most hidden of all God's saints, shrouded in the very clouds and shadows which surround the Unbegotten Fountain of the Godhead. His soul is an abyss of nameless graces, of graces deeper than those from which ordinary virtues spring, roots which make no trial of the winter of this world, but wait to bear marvellous blossoms before the Face of God in the world to come. We can give no name to the character of his sanctity. We cannot compare him with any other of the saints of God. As his office was unshared, so was his grace. It followed the peculiarities of his office. It stood alone. He was to Mary among men what Gabriel was to her among angels, but he came nearer to her than Gabriel; for he was of her nature. What St. John was to Mary after Calvary, Joseph was to her after Bethlehem; so that probably, if we could perceive it, there was an analogy between his holiness and that of the Beloved Disciple.

But his sanctification is hidden in obscurity. It is probable that he had received the gift of original justice, as the Baptist had, though whether it was restored to him before birth, as with John and Jeremias, we cannot tell. It is oecoming to think also that by a special grace he was preserved from venial sin. It is most certain that he was a peculiar vessel of the divine predilection, eternally predestined to a singular and incomparably sublime office, and laden with the most magnificent of graces to fit him for that office. For wonderful as was his office to Mary, his office to Jesus far surpassed it, unless, as is more true, the former was but a portion of the latter.

He stood to Jesus visibly in the place of the Eternal Father. He was loved therefore in a most peculiar way by the Divine Person whom he thus awfully represented, and also in a most peculiar way by the Second and Third Persona of the Most Holy Trinity, because of that mysterious reprefeentation. The Human Soul of Jesus must have regarded him, not only with the tenderest love, but also with deep reverence and an inexplicable submission. Meek and gentle, blameless and loving, as St. Joseph was, it is not possible to think of him without extreme awe, because of that shadow of identity with the Eternal Father which belongs to him, and hides him from our sight even while it presents him to our faith. We cannot describe his holiness, because we have no term of comparison. It was not only higher in degree than that of the saints; it was also different in kind. But it was eminently hidden with God. His life was an unearthly life. His very place in the world was but a seeming place. He was an apparition in the world, an apparition of the Unbegotten and Everlasting. His soul was as it were withdrawn into itself. He was weak, and in years,* mild and unresent-

• In the controversy about St. Joseph's age, I must admit that the majority of great names are on the side of his being in the prime of life, between thirty and forty. This is the opinion of Gerson, Vigerius, Theophilus Raynaudus, Eaaelius, Baronius, Suarez, Vasquez, Capisucchius, Serry, Sandinus, Salianus, Tornielli, Toletanus, De Castro, Trombelli, Isidore Isolanus, and Bernardino di Busto. The Apocryphal Gospels, St. Epiphanius, Cedrenus, Nicephorus, with antiquity generally, and especially ancient pictures, represent St. Joseph as quite old. Gerson feels the diflBculty of the ancient pictures, but says, in his usual and quite characteristic way of referring to development in doctrine as the explanation of everything, that painters did this purposely because the tenet of the perpetual virginity of our Blessed Lady was not well rooted in the minds of the ruder faithful. This reply is quoted with applause by Kaffaello Maria the Carmelite in his very full book on St. Joseph. The habit of contemplating St. Joseph as the shadow of the Eternal Father has led me instinctively to take the side of antiquity in this dispute. Without tradition, the text of Isaias Ixii. 5 is hardly convincing. The opinion in favour of St. Joseph's youth makes him more than double our Lady's age; and this would make him seventy when he died, as traditions about his death seem only to hesitate between a little while before our Lord's baptism or a little while after it. The other opinion would add from ten to twenty years to this. I may embrace this opportunity of naming here some of the books most to be recommended on Devotion to St. Joseph; Istoria di San Giuseppe, by Raflfaello Maria, Carmelite; Synopsis Magnalium Divi Josephi, by Ignatius of St. Francis, also a Carmelite; St. Theresa's friend Father Gracian of St. Jerome, whose Sj»anisn treatise has been recently translated into French; Glorie di San Giuseppe, by Don Giuseppe Loxada Becerra, written in St. Alphonso's lifetime, and in imitation of the Glories of Mary; Jacquinot's Gloirea de ing, poor and obscure, passive and docile, and yet an inexpugnable fortress behind which the honour of Mary and the life of Jesus were secure. If his hiddenness was like that of God, so also was his tranquillity. His justice, like that of God, was so tempered with mercy that it almost lost its look of justice, and wore the semblance of indulgence. His holiness was one of God's eternal ideas, one of those which He most cherished, and kept nearest to Himself. He communicated with God in his hours of sleep, as if his sleep was but the mystic slumber of contemplation. Even now in the Church he stands back under the shadow of the Old Testament, as if that were rather the dispensation of the Father, and therefore the most congenial place for him.

He draws near to the new-born Jesus, that he may adore before he commands. His vast soul fills silently with love, and his life would have broken and ebbed away at the Infant's feet upon the floor of the Cave, as it did years afterwards on His lap, but the time was not come, and the Babe sanctified him anew, and fortified him with amazing quiet strength and robust gentleness, and raised him into a higher sphere of holiness and of grace unspeakable, in order that he might be the ofiicial superior of his God.

Who shall dare to guess what Jesus thought with His human thoughts, as He lay there for a moment on the ground, beholding with His eyes that furniture of the Cave which Mary had been beholding, and which He had chosen from all eternity 1 Who would essay to fathom the unfathomable depths of that love and worship which He gave to God, a finite worship but of value infinite! The whole history of creation, past, present, and to come, was before Him. He saw it all, embraced it all, understood it all. He felt HimSfc. Joseph, recently reprinted; and Vita di San Giuseppe, by Antonia Maria dalla Pergola, a Franciscan. The treatises of Gerson and the Sermons of San Bernardino are, however, the fountains from which all have drawn.

TUB MIDNIGHT CA VE.

US self to be the centre round which all else revolved, the hinge upon which all things turned, the light in which all was plain, the dread lovely meeting point of the Creator and the creature. He was busy worshipping, He was busy redeeming, He was busy judging, at that moment.

All hearts of men lay in His Heart at that hour. We too were there, centred in a little sphere of His loving knowledge and His merciful consideration. We, too, were inmates of the Cave of Bethlehem, and of the Cave's divinest centre, the Heart of the new-born Babe. Is not that thought enough to set the rudder of our life heavenward once for all? Who sliall tell the ineffable love which He bore to Mary, whom He was then first looking on with His human eyes, and whose fair soul lay open to His inward eye and pleased discernment? Who shall tell with what exulting reverence He yearned towards Joseph? For Mary and Joseph were both radiantly wet all over with that Precious Blood, which, yet unshed, was flowing in His veins, and throbbing in His Heart. Those Three! they were three kingdoms of God, but one King; three creations, and the Creator one of these creations; three, yet as it were but one, one with an amazing unity, a unity which made them one, yet left them three, the Earthly Trinity!

From the Earthly Trinity the adoring soul looks up abashed to the Most Holy Trinity on high, thus wonderfully forth-shadowed on the earth. Prostrate before the Incomprehensible Majesty the hierarchies of the angels were bowed down at the hour of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Through all the illimitable depths of the Godhead, profoundest oceans of unfathomable being opening out everywhere into like profoundest oceans, through all the immeasurable realms of Essence which space girdles not, over all the outstretched, uusuccessive Life which time recounts not, was there an immense Complacency, an unutterably tranquil, brooding

K glory, at the moment when the Babe was born in Bethlehem. There were immaterial waves of divine exultation, the very spray of which might have been the star-dust of countless, countless worlds, which passed at that hour, over the abysses of the divine mind, over the radiant, far-withdrawn furnaces of the divine life. Yet was there no change in the Immutable. There was no stir in God.

Gathered up, as from the beginning, whole and entire and full, into each possible point of space and time, that divine life abode in its stationary calm, just as it had been, from before the beginning, when there were neither space nor time. There was no sound. Creation would have perished if that divine gladness had sounded. At the voice of such thunder nature must have fled away. There was no movement: all things must have been displaced had God moved. They would have dropped back into indefinable nothingness from before any gesture of God's simplicity. The Infinite encroached not on the finite with the bounding of that unutterable joy. Its presence broke not the slightest vessel which it filled, nor tore the frail rose-leaf within whose countless arteries it can confine itself by its - essence and its power. Not a thrill was felt through the delicate framework of nature, which one sunbeam of the daybreak can cause to tremble, to vibrate, and to glow. Vast, colossal, resistless, unbounded, incomprehensible, was the Divine Complacency; yet the hush of midnight was not stiller, the breath of sleeping babe was not so gentle.

There was no change in the Unchangeable. Yet to angelic eyes the Father seemed, not more a Father, yet in a new way a Father, as He bent over the Babe in the Cave of Bethlehem. Not unmarked surely in the Person of the Son was His sweet condescending joy in that Sacred Humanity, now among the visible things of a glad earth which already Bp teemed with loveliness. Surely with more than common predilection the invisible lightnings of the Holy Ghost played round Bethlehem, and the joy of Mary was but an emanation from the joy of her Uncreated Spouse. They saw, those bright angelic hosts, they saw with trembling adoration, and the sight gladdened their endless gladness, and made their glory glow more wondrously, the Complacency of the Most Holy Trinity in the new-born Child, as it were a new jubilee in the Immutable, a new Father because the Eternal Father was newly a Father, a new Son because the Everlasting Son was now also a Son in time, a new Holy Ghost, because He was from old the Unbeginning Jubilee both of Father and of Son, and now the jubilee was new, new without novelty, new without mutation, new with an eternal newness. It was as if creation were making ripples on the shining, glancing depths of the Uncreated, while the Word was being still and again begotten and begotten of the Father, begotten eternally at the self-same moment He was being born in time, begotten eternally the moment after He had been bom in time, and while the jubilant Spirit was still and again proceeding and proceeding, eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son in the selfsame moment that Jesus was being born in Bethlehem, and still, and not anew, proceeding and proceeding the moment after that Birth in Bethlehem.

Thus it was, with such strange divine triumph, that the Creator came forth to be as it were a part of His own visible creation. But how did His creation receive Him 1 What welcome did it give Him 1 What response did it make to the mystery of Bethlehem 1 A response altogether worthy of Him it could not be; for that was impossible, nay, beyond all possible power with which omnipotence itself could endow creation. But it welcomed Him as it best could, and it was very gloriously. Mary's first act of worship met Him the very moment He was born. No sooner had she seen His Face than she adored Him more perfectly than all the angels nad been able to do in their thousands of years before the throne. Except by the Incarnate Word Himself, never had the Divine Majesty been worshipped so worthily, so near to adequately, if we can speak of nearness when we think of that gulf which lies between the finite and the infinite. Never creature so cowered down before God in the sense of its own exceeding nothingness as Mary did. She could stoop lower than any one else, because she was so much higher in holiness.

Joseph also had worshipped Him as no saint before had done. From his deep calm soul he had poured out a very ocean of love, tenderest love, humblest love, love shrinking from being like the Father's love, yet also daring to be like it, as Mary's had been like the conjoined loves of Father and of Spirit, as she was Mother and Spouse conjoined. No angel might love Jesus as Joseph loved Him, as Joseph was bound to love Him. No temporal love but Mary's could be more like an eternal love, than the love of Joseph for the Child, because of its likeness to the love of the Everlasting Father. The choirs of angels also sang out loud in the midnight heavens, while the winter night ran over with the sweetness of their strains. Every note in their music, every pulse in their exulting song, represented a whole world of supernatural acts in their mighty spirits, acts of love, of complacency, of worship, of adoring gratulation, of self-oblivious jubilee. Never had creation been so wonderful as it was that night, never had it gathered round its God so gloriously as it did then! Never did it look less imperfect than when at that still hour it strove to lift itself to the height of the grand mystery, and, while it fell short infinitely, yet it fell short worthily! Who would have dreamed that finite worship could be so nearly infinite as it was that night 1 0 joyous thought, 0 grateful remembrance, that Jesua was thus welcomed into the world!

But we must try to enter further into this thought. Oui view of the mystery of Bethlehem is incomplete without it. Fresh light is thrown on the Creator's coming by creation's response to His coming, its welcome, its salutation, its recognition of Him. The true history of His triumph is not told, if the applauses which greeted Him are not mentioned also. The scene of the Creator's installation in His own creation is imperfect, unless we depict also creation doing its homage, and swearing its oath of fealty before His throne and at His human feet. Now Mary is not only the sovereign creature, but she is the representative creature also. While therefore the worship of Joseph and the songs of the angelic hosts are magnificent incidents in the coming of our Lord, we may consider Mary's first act of worship as by itself substantially the welcome of creation to its Creator; and even at the risk of a little recapitulation we must consider it attentively.

The most difiicult fact for us to apprehend rightly about our Lord's Three and-Thirty Years' life is the amount of it which was lived to God, to God only, to God secretly, without any apparent connection with the great work of redemption, or without any visible benefits there and then to the welfare of mankind. Next to God, Mary seems to usurp an unexpected amount of His time, presence, and divine communications, yet with how legitimate a usurpation! As it is the tendency of our modem mind in science, rightly rebuked by the geological discoveries of the secular epochs of our planet untenanted by man, to make ourselves the centre of God's works, and to look out only for adaptations, ministries, and subserviences to ourselves in all the glorious kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral magnificence, so are we apt in theology too much to regard our Lord as coming to do one two-sided work, first to teach us lessons of heavenly wisdom, and then to suffer and die for our redemption.

We almost picture Him to ourselves, more or less unconBciously, as a modern man of active habits, engrossed with His work, losing no time about it, bending all things to it, and, if not precipitate about it, at least diligent, exclusive, and decisive. In the light of this modem view we construe His words to Mary in the Temple, forgetting the eighteen years of apparently inactive seclusion, which as a matter of fact followed the utterance of those words; and again we put a like construction on His seemingly impatient speech about His Passion, not discerning those supernatural principles of love of souls and thirst for suffering and appetite for shame, which our Lord's example has impressed for ever upon Christian holiness. It seems to us strange that our Lord's human life should be of any use to God, except as the instrument of our own redemption. The idea of worship is faint and feeble in our minds. Work, utility, success, palpable results, — these are what we look for. Hence we neither habitually see how inexplicable on our principles our Lord's division of His life into thirty years of seclusion and three of active work really is, nor discern the divine significance of it when it is pointed out to us. We thus do an injustice to His secret created life of adoration before God, and almost ignore His wonderful exclusive occupation with Mary, which absorbed so much of the time He spent on earth. This causes us to misread the Gospels, to arrange the mysteries of our Lord in wrong order and with bad lights upon them, and to miss in many of the mysteries that which is most specially divine about them.

In their measure these remarks apply also to the mysteries of Mary, and to the place which they occupy in the life of our Blessed Lord. The things of God have an air and odour about them unlike the things of the world. Like the fragrance of the woodlands, we are conscious of the sweetness, but do not trace it to the mossy bank, or to the withering herbs, or to the dew-bathed flowers, from which it comes. We may even see the things of God, and not know them when we see them. They seldom bear their divinity on their outward appearance. It is not stamped upon them, but hidden in them. However much we have prepared ourselves for their secrecy, they are in the experience more secret than we were prepared for. Hence it comes to pass that divine things almost always take us unawares.

There is also a noiselessness about them which brings them upon us, when we are least suspecting their neighbourhood or dreaming of their approach, while at the same time they are so swift that they have come and gone without our having had time to pause upon them. We only know from the breathlessness of our souls, that we have suffered some divine thing. They pass upon us not as growths of earth. They only float over it, like the clouds that dapple the moon, never anchoring their shadows there, but always passing, though sometimes with an imperceptible slowness. They seem even to be regardless of their influence upon earth. They look as if they did not intend to influence it, or as if their influence were a bye-play, a consequence of their presence which they could not avoid but which they did not value, an accident, inseparable from them certainly, yet still an accident, about which they were not anxious and on which they laid no stress. It is as if they had derived some of His self-sufficiency from the God who is their author. Their value, and they are conscious of it, is not their having done a work on earth, but their abiding life and beauty with God for ever. The individual soul is world enough for them; for they only want a kneeling- place on which to put themselves before the majesty of God and in the sunlight of His glory. When they have reflected back upon His magnificence one of His own rays, their mission is accomplished, but their work passes not away. That reflected light of iheiia lies over the vast awfulness of God, and is beautiful there, for ever.

So was it with Mary's first worship in the Cave. The light of it is lying upon God this hour. A century of church-history is a less event in the chronicles of the Incarnation, than that act of Mary. The supernatural value of our actions depends upon our degree of union with God at the time we do them. But what spirit of angel or soul of man was ever in such union with God as the soul of His blessed and sinless Mother? Neither had there yet ever been a moment in which she had been so closely united to God, as at the moment of our Saviour's birth. The moment of the Immaculate Conception was indeed a marvellous epoch in the world of grace, momentary in lapse of time, secular in the immensity and durableness of the work. The moment of the Incarnation had been yet more wonderful Who can say how wonderful? But her union with God had grown inconceivably during His nine months' residence within her bosom. How could it be otherwise 1

Thus at the moment of the Nativity, she was more closely united to God than she had ever been before; for union was the especial distinguishing grace of those nine months; and she was united to Him with a union compared to which the most glorious mystical unions of the saints are but as shadows and as semblances. Her ecstasy at midnight was as it were a fresh spiritual rivet to that union. When she saw the Child born, lying on her veil, with hands stretched out to her as if mutely asking to be taken up, He asking, the orphan God, for the embrace of a mortal mother's arms, and when she saw the beauty of His Face, and felt it passing into her soul, was she not immersed in God as never creature Had been before? Her first act was an act of love, but it was the highest love, the love of adoration. Although she had languished to see the Human Face of our Blessed Lord, yet uow that she gazed upon it, it was His Divinity she saw, rather than His Humanity. To her His Human Nature unveiled, rather than veiled. His Godhead. She saw in Him, and worshipped especially, the Person of the "Word, the Second Person of the Undivided Trinity. As none had ever been so near to God, so none had ever worshipped Him so well. The angels, who had been lying for ages in the blaze of the uncovered Vision, saw not so far as Mary, though they saw differently, and while they worshipped with all the capacities of their grand natures, they worshipped not so wonderfully as she worshipped; for they were in shallower depths of divine union and of transforming love, than was she, the Mother of the Most High.

She as it were encompassed our Lord with her ecstatic worship. All He was and is and has she covered with her praise, her wonder, her fear, her joy, her love, her jubilee. She, who had more than miraculously compassed Him in her bosom, went as near to compassing Him with the immensity of her worship, as it was possible for mere creature adequately to compass His illimitable and uncreated glory. His Divine Person, His Divine Nature, His Human Nature, with His Soul as well as His Flesh, the passable state in which He had vouchsafed to come because of sin, all these she worshipped, mindfully and tenderly, separately and together, with clearest intelligence, with deepest abasement, with sweetest love, with most awe-stricken admiration. All His perfections as God came before her in wonderful order, enchained together, flowing out of each other and back into each other, each looking both backward and forward at once. She saw them also as one perfection, as the divine simplicity, and then she saw them as no perfections at all, but as His simple Self, a Self with no perfections but the Act which He Himself is, a Self with no separable attributes, but only an eternal life which is ever living in Itself, too simple for thought, too beautiful for speech, too magnificent for loveij too jubilant for fear, only to be rapturously adored, with a timidity which transcends all fear, and with a familiarity which far outgrows all audacities of love.

In adoring the divine perfections of the new-born Babe, we may well believe that Mary worshipped particularly those attributes seemingly most opposed to His infant state. The instincts of prayer would lead her that way. The very circumstances of the mystery would suggest it. She adored profoundly the eternity of Him who was but a minute old. She congratulated Him in the boldness of holy love on His having been from everlasting co-eternal with the Father, and at the same time eternally a Son. She exulted in the knowledge that from all eternity her Babe had with the Father breathed forth the Holy Ghost, and had been with the Father the principle from which the co-eternal Spirit had proceeded, and was for ever proceeding, and was to proceed for all eternity. It was a joy to her that time, old as it was, was a younger birth than Him whose birth in time was one short minute since. She was abased with sweetest reverence when she looked into His childish Face, and with delighted faith hailed Him as time's Creator.

She looked upon Him in His weakness and His helplessness. His beauty was so frail that it seemed as if a breath of summer wind might have blown Him away. It was as if He could not lift Himself from the ground on which He was lying, or raise Himself into His Mother's arms. Yet in that weakness she adored His almighty power. She worshipped Him as the unfatigued Creator, who had built up the massive worlds with an act of His will, who held the mountains in the hollow of his Hand without the effort of sustaining them, and who directed the earthquakes and the storms, as pliant and docile creatures, where He pleased. She exulted in the boundless majesty of His tremendous power. She congratulated Him that at that moment all creation hung upon Him with its whole weight, and that, were He to loosen His hold of it for an instant, it would fall back into that nothingness from which it came and to which through its, own finite imbecility it is ever tending. She felt and joyed to feel, that she herself was but as the breath of His mouth, and that she too was relapsing into nothingness, unless He held her up by the irresistible gentleness of His vast power. She worfchipped Him as the God to whom nothing is impossible, and yet whose power works with such facility, such smoothness, and such delicacy, that it makes no sound in its going, feels no effort in its magnificence, and strives not in its career. He upheld all things even while He slept, and yet His features were sweetly relaxed in the graceful abandonment of infantine slumber, and upon His countenance there was no sign of care, nor strain of labour, no shadow of government, nor semblance of occupation.

She beheld Him speechless on the ground. Only perhaps an inarticulate cry was rising from His childish lips. But she worshipped Him as the articulate Word of the Father, pronounced from all eternity, and even now being eternally pronounced, with most inexplicable articulation. He, who expressed, not to creation only, but to the Father Himself, the whole of His marvellous perfections, He who with unutterable distinctness outspoke the whole mystery of the Godhead, He who pronounced in the language of His co-equal beauty all the hidden things of the Divine Nature, He it was who was lying speechless on the ground; and Mary adored Him in His truth, not in His seeming. He wore the same look of unconsciousness which other infants wear. His life looked the animal life of infantine wants and woes and little jubilees, to be expressed by bright eyes, or by sounds which are language only to a mother's ear. But in this apparent unconsciousness she not only recognised the mighty reason in full possession of itself, but she also adored that immense and uncreated wisdom, which is in some sense the favourite attribute of the Word. She exulted in the thought that there was no wisdom among angels or men which was not simply a derivation from His wisdom, and that there were no philosophies or sciences which were not the merest scintillations of His uncreated knowledge. All the impenetrable secrets of creation were out of the hidden treasures of His wisdom. The marvellous plans of nature, grace, and glory, countless in number, bewildering in variety, incalculable in their profundity, were all but as the merest surface of His ever-blessed mind. The intricacies of providence, those dark and seemingly contradictory problems which have often driven to wildness or despair the irreverent questioning and profane inquisition of the human understanding, were all calmly evolved by His skill in lucid beauty and admirable sequence. The very unconsciousness of the Babe held a light over all this abyss, and Mary looked down, and saw, and worshipped. Thus also to the Mother's eye His littleness magnified His immensity. He seemed all the more illimitable, because Ho was so small. He lay upon her veil a mere span of fair human life; but she knew that in truth He was outstretched beyond all possible spheres of imaginary space. She adored the omnipresence of that tiny prisoner, whom a delicate frame of flesh and blood was now containing. For nine months she herself had compassed the Incomprehensible, and now she saw as it were with her bodily eyes the immensity which had lain so long like an unopened flower in her own virginal bosom. She rejoiced with Him in His universal presence, in His immeasurable essence, in His unconfined liberty, in His inexplicable unlocalised simplicity. She congratulated Him that all about Him was boundless, not only putting away from itself all the limits of imaginable perfection, but far transcending in its own awful truthfulness, not only all actual existence, but all possible existence. The possibilities of omnipotence far outstrip the flight of created imagination, but to equal the immensity of God is impossible even for God Himself.

Finally, when Mary beheld Him trembling with the cold, and discerned the pathetic sadness which mingled with the brightness, and perhaps saw Him weeping human tears, she worshipped Him whose eternal life was an unspeakable beatitude. She recognised in Him the uncreated fountain of all created joy. She knew that at that instant He was filling to the brim myriads and myriads of angelic spirits with celestial exultation. She knew that there was not a joy on earth among men or animals, but it was a sparkle mercifully struck from His abounding and self-sufficing gladness. Nay, when our lives, and the lives of those we love, are dense with sorrows, there is a joy even in the sorrow, like the fragrant damps of the close dripping woods of midsummer, and that joy is but the sweet bliss of God, compassionately making its way even thither. Thus it was, that, while Mary worshipped Jesus with the most perfect worship of which a mere creature is capable, she especially adored those perfections which to outward seeming were least compatible with His infant state.

She beheld also how His Human Nature lay in Hypostatic Union with His Divine, and therefore was itself entitled to the honours of divine worship. Hence she worshipped the spiritual beauty of His Sacred Humanity. She worshipped the Flesh, which He had taken from herself, and in which He was to suffer, and by His suffering to redeem the world. She worshipped it as the real Sacramental Food of all the generations to come, to be adored by all the faithful upon the altar. She adored it also as impassible and glorious, gifts which it already contained within itself. She adored with the most delighted reverence the Precious Blood which was flowing in His veins. She exulted in the abundance and even prodigality of the redemption which the munificent shedding of that Blood was to accomplish. She congratulated Him on the countless victories of grace which it would procure for Him, the marvellous holiness of the saints, and the magnificent conversions of sinners, and the glorious perseverance of all who should die in union with Him. She saw that Precious Blood in its course over the world as a broad and brimming river, carrying fertility into every land, flushing the face of nature with the verdure of grace, causing the wilderness to blossom as the garden, and the barren rocks to be covered with shadowy woods, redolent of odours, golden with fruits, and resonant with songs. She beheld on its broad bosom huge fleets freighted with heavenly treasures sail onward to the eternal sea. She admired the silent, irresistible beneficence of its sweet streams, and adored it in the veins of the Child, and wept tears of humblest joy as she thought of its fountains in her own Immaculate Heart.

She worshipped His Sacred Heart with all its sanctified affections. She saw His immense love of herself therein, and penetrated the wonders of which that love was full, and how gloriously the human and divine were blended in it, and were one unequalled, unprecedented love. She beheld also the place which each of us occupied at that moment in His all-embracing Heart; and surely it would seem to her that there was nothing about Him more adorable than His inexplicable love of sinners. More wonderful is that love than even the all-wise means by which He emancipated sinners from their sin. She adored His Soul with all its marvellous operations, and its depths of wisdom and of joy. Nothing was omitted in that act of worship. Everything found its place. Everything came in its right order. To everything its due honour was paid, so far at least as a mere creature could pay what was due to God. Such was Mary's first act ii worship, an act of which we shall be able to conceive more worthily, when we have considered in subsequent Chapters the Babe's perfections as God, and the eminences and excellences of His Soul and Body as Man, considerations which we have been here obliged in some measure to anticipate. But these are things which bear repetition weU.

Now let us reflect on all that was involved in this act of adoration. As was said before, Mary is not only the sovereign creature; she is the representative creature also. Thus her worship was ofiered in the name of all creatures. It was creation's recognition of its Incarnate Creator. Moreover she began in it, and as it were officially inaugurated, all the manifold catholic devotions to the Sacred Humanity, such as those to the Sacred Heart, to the Precious Blood, to the Blessed Sacrament, to the Infancy, to the Passion, and the like. She not only began them, anticipating the loving inventions of the saints, but she surpassed all that the saints have ever done in eacli. That act of worship is a life in the Church at this present hour, passing daily into holy hearts, guiding the sense of the faithful, supplying fair types of various devotions, and queening it with tranquil pre-eminence over all other collective homages of redeemed love to the Sacred Humanity of the Redeemer. Her worship also, let it be observed, was not disjoined from the worship of St. Joseph, with whom she was in the closest spiritual union, as God had united them in the transcending unity of the Earthly Trinity. ' His worship and hers had one prerogative, which the worship of none else could have; for they offered to Jesus with it the authority they were to exercise over Him. From Joseph, as from Mary, our Blessed Lord received the worship of those whom He Himself had constituted His superiors. If the bent of the hearts of the saints is a token of the bent of Mary's heart, and is itself the instinctive inspiration of the Heart of Jesus, then in these latter days it would seem i6o THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

that by nothing could we po effectually unite ourselves to the Hearts of Jesus and of Mary, as by a loving and reverent devotion to St. Joseph.

Moreover in this act of worship our Blessed Lady recognised us as her children. She was conscious of the place she occupied in the creation of God. She began already to fulfil that office, with the insignia of which she was publicly invested upon Calvary. She offered herself to the new-born Babe for us. She was willing to be our Mother. She was ready to endure for us those dolours with which she was to travail with us her second-born, so unlike the painless childbirth of that night. She was prepared to represent us in all her tender ministries to Him. She offered us also to Jesus. She offered us to His love. She freighted her prayers with our names. She yearned for our more and more complete conversion, and longed that we might be part of the happy triumph of His Passion. By her effectual intercession she bathed us in His Precious Blood, and was forward to accept that active and prominent place, which she occupies in the secret life of grace with every one of us. For us also she offered Jesus to the Father. With heroic love she gave back for our sakes what for her own much more than for ours she had just received. She saw that Calvary was in the offering and yet she drew not back her uplifted hands. Such was her beautiful three-fold oblation. She offered herself to Jesus for us. She offered us to Jesus. She offered Jesus to the Father for us. Then from the height of Calvary she turned round and faced the Church of all coming ages, and offered to us all our Blessed Lord for our acceptance and our love. So she climbed from the Cave to the Eternal Father, from the offering of herself to Jesus to the offering of Jesus to the Father. For, if the first thought of the Mother is for the Child, is not the second for its Father?

Thus was completed the mystery of Bethlehem. Thus

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. i6i were we present there in our Mother's hands and in our Saviour's Heart. It has taken long to tell; yet it was but for a moment that Jesus lay upon the ground. In a moment all these things had been accomplished. The tyranny of time sits lightly on divine works. They have other measures. The infinite must needs be instantaneous. 0 happy Mother, happy beyond all thought! she has seen the Face of Jesus, and He smiled into her face. Was it through tears 1 What significance was there not in that celestial human smile? He smiled as a Son smiles to a doating mother. He smiled as the victorious Saviour who had redeemed her by the Immaculate Conception. He smiled as the Creator who complacently regards the most lovely of His works. He smiled as the Last End and Beatitude of her whom He rejoiced to glorify and to have with Him for eternity. He smiled as God, smiling unutterable and unimaginable things. Of a surety there was some special expression in that first look, in that many-meaning smile, which reminded her of the Immaculate Conception as distinctly as if He had spoken, Nor was the joy of that smile less to her than its significance. But she alone can tell it. It makes us tremble with expectation to think that that same smile will one day be a joy to us, and a joy which will not pass away! But, like all the aspects of God, that smile brought with it a world of grace. It was substantial, as God's visitations ever are, substantially. effecting that which it expressed. How therefore must it have lifted her in sanctity, and been to her almost like a new creation! A look of His converted Peter; what must a smile do, and a smile into His sinless Mother's face? O sweet Babe of Bethlehem! when shall we too kneel before Thy Face t When shall we see Thee smile, smile on us our welcome into heaven, smile on us with that smile which will sit upon Thy lips as our own glory and possession for evermore 1

L

Listen! the last strip of cloud has floated down under the horizon. The stars burn brightly in the cold air. The night-wind, sighing over the pastoral slopes, falls suddenly, floats by, and carries its murmuring train out of hearing. The heaven of the angels opens for one glad moment, and the midnight skies are overflowed with melody, so beautiful that it ravishes the hearts of those who hear, and yet so soft that it troubles not the light slumbers of the rostl^G sheep.

Footnotes

1. In allusion to the work of the Sainte Enfance for the baptism of Chinese children. ↩