Chapter VII. Calvary Before its Time

Sorrow is the substance of man's natural life, and it might almost be defined to be his natural capability of the supernatural. Joy is but a thin shade, except when it is in alternation with sorrow. The power of art is in the sorrowful. No poetry finds its way into a nation's mind, or can dwell there, unless it have a burden of sorrow in it. To glorify sonow is one of the highest functions of song, of sculpture, or of painting. Nothing has a lasting interest for men which is not in some way connected with sorrow. All that is touching, pathetic, dramatic, in man's life has to do with sorrow. Sorrow is the poetry of a creation which is fallen, of a race which is in exile, in a vale of tears closed in at the end by the sunless defile of death. Religion has rathei added to all this than taken from it.

Our sorrow is now more purely sorrow since gloom and despair have been chased away from it. "We have been redeemed by sorrow. The mysteries of our Lord are chiefly mysteries of sorrow. Our Lady is the Mother of woes. The offices and ceremonies of the Church incline rather to be pensive than to be triumphant. Joy on earth is confessedly for a time. It rises out of sorrow, and it falls back upon it again. All devotion has an element of softness in it, which, if it is not sorrow, is at least akin to it and congenial to it. Sympathy is the bond of hearts, and all sympathy has some of the blood of sorrow in its veins. While joy often jars upon our spirits, sorrow hardly ever seems misplaced, even when it is unwelcome.

The old mystics spoke of two kinds of men, the solar and the lunar. Some were in occult sympathy with the sun, and were ruled by its mysterious influences. Their temperament and their intellect bore some analogy to the character of the sun. Their power of working, their way of work, and the kind of work they chose, were all under the influence of his sovereign beam. Their very diseases were supposed to arise from some malignity of the solar ray, which settled by preference on certain members of the body rather than others. Then there were others who went through life almost as if there were no sun, or at least who quietly used its material light, as a lamp which Providence had placed at their disposal. But they were under equal subjection to the moon and her wayward beam of cold nocturnal silver played upon their sensitive frames and their responsive souls, as the winds play upon an aeolian harp. So there are men in the world who are better for joy, who are humbled by its sweetness, and expand imder its shining; and on the other hand there are men who are better for sorrow, and to whom it is the altogether necessary atmosphere of goodness. These last outnumber the first by many millions. The souls, whom joy nurtures in holiness, are so completely the exceptional cases, that for the multitude of hearers or of readers we may speak as if all men were at home with sorrow, and lived with it as with their guardian angel.

There are some men to whom sorrow teaches all things and to whom also sorrow is the sole revelation. They can only learn by sorrow. They do not understand any other language. They are not capable of taking in any other experience. What is clear as light they cannot see, until the shadow of sorrow has fallen upon it. We come ^croas these men daily on our way through life. There are others who go further than this. They are men who can only work in the shade of some supposed impending catastrophe. They feel always that they are walking into a darkness and down a gulf, and the belief cheers them, and the darkness recedes and the gulf travels backwards, but their idea of them both is the mainspring of their activity and power. Others, who can do without sorrow in other things, cannot do without it in their religion. It becomes to them their fear, their reverence, and their love. It is the fountain of their devotion, and the stimulus of their duty. They find sorrow in all the mysteries of Jesus, no matter how joyful or glorious they may be. Sorrow is the condition of all their heavenlymindedness. Sorrow converted them; sorrow perfects them; sorrow is their final perseverance.

It is in these sorrow-sainted men that life sometimes appears to faint as if it must needs end before the harbour of death is visible; and then they are strangely, and to our eyes supernaturally, as if they were heaven's favourites, refreshed by gales from the other world, like the landwinds that came fraught with the fragrance of the sassafras to Columbus and his faltering crew. There are other men whose characters are only brought out by sorrow, timid, feminine natures, whose true grandeur is as little suspected by themselves as it is by those around them. From outward circumstances or from inward shrinking, sometimes it may even be from indolence, they have left their own nature unexplored. They are like the unadventurous dwellers among the hills, who have no true idea of the vastness of that mountain-range upon whose outskirts they have pitched their tents, and who never suspect how the valleys fall back upon each other, and wind inward like the convolutions of a mighty shell. It needs a storm to tell them this, and then the thunder makes trumpets of the y glens and reveals to them by its rolling echoes the inaccessible recesses of the inner mountains. So it is with these men. The cry of sorrow goes forth in their soul, and its echoes come trembling up from depths of which they never dreamed. Others there are whom sorrow shames into goodness. Too much happiness often makes men prematurely old by anticipating the passive tranquillity of weariness and years, while sorrow, especially if it comes in the shape of disappointment, thrusts middle life back into youth, by keeping alive an activity always fretful and mostly persevering. They are in general the youngest^looking men in mind and heart who come latest in life to that which they have lived for. It is sorrow which tows them into harbour at the last.

But, on the other hand, with characters where premature old age is needed, to conquer, to soften, and to sanctify, it is sorrow which does the characteristic work of age by humbling their highmindedness. Then all their nature is transfigured. Sorrow beautifies their harshness, as blue distance or golden light glorify the cliflFs. They are children now, who from childhood have been rebels. They worship now, in whose nature worship had seemed an element that was wanting. Sorrow has done the work of grace, and grace has done time's work better and more speedily than time could do it. In what an evening light the age which sorrow works, and not time, can clothe a once ungenial nature! How often in the slanting shades of evening, the mountains seem to come down into the valley, and kneel to pray, while the starry lamps of the eternal sanctuary are being lighted above their heads. This is what happens to the soul when sorrow ages it; it ages it so graciously.

There are unquiet characters also, which sorrow seems to lull, just as the placid country appeases the city-wearied epirit with a soothing which is half pain and half pleasure, like the balm that mothers pour over the chafed limbs of their little ones. They have sought peace for years and have never found it. Now sorrow has come, and lo! peace was hidden in its folds. So also to unsuccessful men sorrow comes like a success. They sit down contented now. They look with indifference on their broken idols. They no longer care to succeed in those things in which they have been unsuccessful Sorrow has come, and they have found in it just what they looked for in success. Some men are deluded through half their lives, and for the most part deluded precisely where they least doubted that they were right; and sorrow is their disenchanting. It is their merciful fairy, who breaks the spell, and restores them to their proper shapes. Then there are souls who cannot keep a direct road. Indeed it is so natural to men to wander, that their feet cannot cross a field but in a tortuous path. For such men sorrow makes life an alley, with a clipped and prickly hedge on either side, which, if it be ungraceful, at least is safe; and to those who will not seek perfection safety is salvation. Some men have lives apart, destinies so singular that they resemble no other human fortunes, but, like the strange scenery of Tierra del Fuego, mate with nothing else on earth. These men are hard to sanctify. Sorrow must come first, and envelope them in all its soft humanities, and make them commonplace, and, after that, grace will sow its seeds.

Then there are volcanic characters. Yolcanic soil is wonderfully productive; so it is with volcanic characters. They take long to ripen; but their maturity is incredibly prolific; and it is sorrow rather than time which matures them. Then there is also a quiet painless stun of sorrow, under which men walk about as in a dream, wliile all life appears to stand still in ominous silence round them; only reversing the phenomena of dreams, these men rather have a lack of faith than believe too much; for they disbelieve in all realities, no matter how practical or solid. Yet for some men this stun is good; if not for more, at least for a transition state.

Then there are others who are always wishing life away. Our own hearts go along with these. We leave no place, however beautiful, however endeared to us by a thousand recollections, so much with regret as with the feeling wherewith a man turns away from an enemy he has beaten, and with whom he has no more to do. So much at least is past. So much is over. Another chapter is done. Another step is taken, which, thanks to Heaven! is an irrevocable progress elsewhere. Such men's associations even are prophecies of the future rather than reminiscences of the past. Their scenery is in heaven. It is their native land, and the yearnings of their love of country tend only there. Their local attachments are rooted in invisible homes. Their very unrealities are not idle regret-tings of the past, but calentures of heaven. Such are men to whom all presents are weary, because all presents are sorrowful. But, by way of compensation, to the same men all pasts are presents, and no futures are disquieting. Thus it is, that, in one way or in another, we have nearly all made our professions of its faith, and are all picking our way heavenward as best we can, under that softly-stern vicariate of Christ, the apostolate of sorrow.

There is sorrow therefore even in Bethlehem. Though it seems to be a place of pure joy, and fountains of joy stream from it daily over the whole earth, there is a deep sorrow in it also: a sorrow so universal that it makes all its brightness pathetic. Although in the hearts of men it must lie in light for ever, a thundercloud can hang even over Bethlehem. But it is not merely the shade of a distant foreseen sorrow which is cast over that sunny slope.

There is a real sorrow there, deeper than common human sorrow, such a divine sorrow as belongs only to the mysteries of the Incarnation. It will end, so far as Bethlehem is concerned, in the wildest mother's wailings that have ever wakened the echoes of the earth. We shall not rightly understand the Sacred Infancy until we have walked and mused by the shores of this great sorrow, seemingly so out of place and season. A devotion, which is founded on the Sacred Infancy as if it were simply the opposite of the Passion, will neither be deep nor lasting. If it is not altogether untrue, it is at least inadequate.

In order to see of what nature this sorrow is, how it pervades all the mysteries with its universal presence, and at the same time how congenial it is to them all, we must begin by taking a survey of the world, as we may call it, of the Sacred Infancy, the world of which Bethlehem is the metropolis and centre. It is not a world of one idea only, though one spirit is sovereign there, and gives to all its diversified mysteries an obvious as well as an internal unity. It is a world full of landscapes, both of a spiritual and a material kind, out of which comes deep heavenly poetry, and upon which heavenly poets form themselves. Or we may liken it to a gallery of works of divine art, from the study of which a supernatural beauty rises in the beholder's mind, rises until it masters it and likens it to itself. But no word-painting can describe the pictures that are there. Fortunately for us, in all the mysteries of Jesus, it is only necessary that we should indicate them, and then the love that is in Christian hearts illuminates its own ideal, and reproduces in itself the mystery.

Bethlehem itself supplies us with many of these sweet pictures. We have the Birth at midnight, with the kneeling Mother, and the adoring Joseph, the light of his red dusky lantern blending with the white splendour that radiates from the Little Infant on the floor, and the eyes of the beasts in the shadowy background, which have caught the reflection and are looking through the gloom. No painter can paint it as it lies in the believer's soul, and as the bells of Christmas wake it up in that gay winter midnight, which is brighter than a summer noon, because of the inward light by which the heart sees and worships. While we look, we love and grow holy. Yet, as we are gazing, the scene shifts as of itself, and we behold the first adoration of Mary and Joseph, and the unspeakable smile with which Jesus repaid their worship. The animals have vanished from the dusky illuminated gloom, and, — are they real faces, or only the outlines into which all visible darkness wreathes itself? the ages, the ages of the old Hebrew and heathen past, and the unborn ages of the teeming future, are gathered round, muffled in vague shapeless mantles, with their shadowy expressive faces, as if they were summoned there to be representatives, or were projected out of the Heart of the Child or out of the soul of the Mother by the very force of love and prayer.

Meanwhile, although we are looking inward to the head of the Cave, the whole external world is somehow visible, lying quiet in the cold star-light. We see Rome, with all its stern life of government hardly sleeping, and all its popular life of circus-loving indolence and wanton citizenship sleeping off" its wicked wassaiL We see Athens, the city of the bright-hearted, with its philosophers still at their vigils, though they are not the giants that their forefathers were. We behold Alexandria, whose nights a thousand coloured lanterns turn to day, shooting fitful gleams of unsteady radiance on one side over the waters that flap against her mole, and on the other upon the white sands, which are gemmed with palms, and where night-breathing gardens fight with the encroaching barrenness.

We see the strange cities of the Chinese empire, seething with population whose multitudinous souls provoke the appetite of missionary zeal, and whose civilisation even then was old and fixed. The haunts of many false religions disclose themselves to us as we look, the shrines of Indian worships, the oak groves and rings of stone of the Gaulish druids, the Persian sun-temples on the mountain-tops, the cruel sacrificial stones of the American Aztecs and the huge hands of their idols filled with bleeding human hearts. Over the wide forest, and the dismal steppe, and in all the indentations of the sea, where the pagan pirates dwell, Mary's worship seems to steal like a gentle breath, and a responsive ray of light meets it out of the Infant's Heart, and steals over all the earth, and mercifully takes it for His own. Utter darkness there shall nowhere be any longer.

Again the scene changes. The Cave re-adorns itself, as if it were a living thing that had hands wherewith to deck itself with images, as though they were jewels, and it was but changing its apparel The shepherds come in to worship; and the faces of Jesus and Mary are both new. They have got another kind of beauty now, differing from the one they wore but a while ago. Moreover in this scene the Babe is in the Manger, and the shadow of the Eternal Father has fallen more deeply on Joseph, now that the external world has begun to come, to serve, and to adore. We can see sounds also in our spiritual pictures; and we behold the skies resonant with angelic melodies. The heavenly sounds make the colours and the outlines speak. Instantly all things have their meanings. All things wear on their faces beautiful significances. We read as in a book, but it is the book of the wisdom of heaven. Every accident is a mystery. Every circumstance becomes an allegory.

But this picture vanishes also. The Babe is no longei in the Manger. He lies upon His Mother's knee. The kings are there, dark-featured and gleaming in their oriental bravery. How strange the gold and silver seem, the pearls, the rubies, and the diamonds, giving a scattered light where they lie in negligent profusion on the floor, and the casket of frankincense with its gorgeous barbaric art, and the silent myrrh that holds its tongue, yet says so much! All this splendour is harmoniously out of keeping with the rough Cave, with its walls here and there glistening with streaks of subterranean moisture, with its rugged angles where the bats are wont to hang, with its littered straw, and its projections polished with the rubbings of generations of animals whose dwellings have been there. The snorting breath of the ungainly camels is heard outside, and now and then they jangle their bells in their uneasiness, as they kneel upon the sward. The division of races, the history of the Gentiles, God's secret witnessing of Himself in dark places, the pathos of old primitive traditions, are in the faces of the kings; and the countenance of that swarthy one, the presence of a black in the Cave of Bethlehem, is more than a moving incident; it is pregnant with saddest history, and yet with sadder prophecy. Once again the scene changes, and Jesus is shedding His first drops of Blood, whether it be by His Mother's hand within the Cave, or by the hand of the priest in the synagogue upon the hilL Close by, as through sunlit openings among the clouds in famous pictures, we see the whole mystery of redemption mistily revealing itself through a strong golden haze, shapes of light lost in light, indistinct, yet fastening strongly on the soul. Such are the pictures of Bethlehem, and they might easily be multiplied.

The Desert is not less rich in the light-chequered monotony of its landscapes. Look at it with the flush of sunrise on its dewless sands. That misty blue line behind represents the distant undulations of Judea's southern hills. Here and there on the ground sparry stones glisten, like rain-drops on the boughs; but there are no rain-drops there. It is a weary land which stretches out before us, flat plain with scattered tufts of stunted thorny shrubs, or wavy hollows in whose grooves no streamlet flows, but only a dry motionless torrent of stones, as if they got together there for company, and all as tawny as a lion's coat. There is a look of haste about the flying figures of the Mother and the Foster-father. Yet no garments are in disarray, or straggling out upon the morning wind. It is a modesty of precipitation, such as once before carried her so swiftly over the hill-country of Judea, and which does no dishonour to the tranquillity of her holiness. Her look breathes calm, even as she flies. Yet there is a timid clasping of the Infant to her bosom, which is more than the common embrace of an unanxious mother. Two creatures flying with the Creator across the wilderness, and invisible satellites far behind hunting the Creator to His death, but baffled by a woman's speed, to whose feet a mother's love, which is also a creature's worship, has given wings.

The wilderness trembles in the mist, dissolves and changes. The sun has ridden from east to west. There is a piece of broken ground, either as if some time the fiery earth had gaped, or as if the action of vehement waters had scooped rude lineaments of itself round about. Under the shadow of a cliff, which is not tall, but lies so low, that afar off the eye would look over it without suspecting the undulation in which it lies, there is a crystal well, a spring of modest volume, and separate spikes of grass stand up like miniature palisades in the sand, and some desert-haunting plants, with brittle, fleshy stalks grow near, and in the cool shade are Mary and Joseph resting. The shadow of the Eternal

Father has grown even yet deeper upon Joseph; and somehow, if we might dare to depict it so, the grace of maternity sits more gravely upon Mary's brow. The Child visibly understands it all, but is mysterious, and holds His peace. The bird of prey that is floating over Him, like a spot of gold struck by the sunset in the air, is as large as He, and seems the more rightful master of the place.

Again — and it is now the heart of the wilderness. Even the robbers have no homes here. It is a desolate spot, remote from the track of the caravans. It is the dead of night. But there is no silence. The wilderness has many voices. It would puzzle us to know where they come from, but they do come, sad, moaning, and inarticulate. Is it the wind grating on the sand 1 Is it the sobbing of the reedy springs taken up by the quiet night from a thousand places, and breathed through a tube of darkness as if it were one murmuring note 1 Is it the sighing of the distant palm-trees, blending their solitary whispers into one 1 Is it the clefts of the rocks that make organs for the wind? Is it the very earth sleeping uneasily, and dreaming of its own desolate sterility 1 Or is it the joints of the great world that are creaking in the silent night, like a distant tramp of men walking upon snow 1 It is a strange lullaby for God. The moon shines down upon the group. All Three are sleeping, sleeping in the arms of solitude, in the midst of creation. God is sleeping between His two chosen creatures, the Son between the shadow of the Father and the shadow of the Holy Ghost. Who then is watching? In the bright darkness of the upper air we feel a Watcher, to whom our very thoughts dare not give any form. Is it His presence that makes the elements and inanimate things wail, as if they were in suffering, and were striving to let no sound of suffering escape '

But now it is bright morning. The day is fairly advanced

Into the hours when even the winter's sun is incommodious there. The Infant is being changed from Mary's arms to Joseph's. The angels press round with envy. It is but an incident of the journey; yet it is also a mystery. Mary is without her Child, and we think of Calvary, the Garden-tomb, and the House of John. Joseph is bearing the Babe, and has now grown so vivid a shadow of the Eternal Father that he almost startles us into worship. The immense Word filled the whole Bosom of the Eternal Father. He nestles well now in one comer of Joseph's bosom. Behind him, visible only in uncertain aerial outlines, follows a procession, a pageant of grand and gorgeous apparitions, at which we gaze in breathless awe. It is the historical priesthood of the whole long-enduring Church up to the last ordination before the day of doom, and the young priest who will have but one mass to say. Popes are there, with their meek faces overshadowed by their tiaras; bishops whose countenances beam with masculine holiness, looks of paternal softness unbending the austere lines of science on their brows; priests also, men of manifold gifts, fountains of sacred light, sparkling with the strange inventions of self-crucifying charity, hearts large as oceans, men that knew how to multiply their lives a hundred times for souls, the diversity of whose eloquent lineaments, silently speaking as many tongues of love as there are languages on earth, is controlled into unity by one pervading, sovereign, air of tenderness, as if they were the sisters of souls rather than their rulers.

All these with countless pure-faced Levites, and youthful ministers beautiful in boyisK chastity, mingling the impulses of a free graceful artlessness with the self-controlling happiness of a downcast bashful mien, — all these are ehadowily following Joseph as if they were his one shadow variously multiplied, while he bears the Infant in his arms.

They follow, not in the sinuous bends of a festal pageant, but like a broad serried band of Roman soldiers marching on the straightest road. The Face of Jesus looks the meaning of it all, but is as silent in His swaddling-clothes, as the Blessed Sacrament is upon the corporal.

Time seems to pass, and a river to lapse invisibly at our feet There is a mirage near the head of the Red Sea. But its palaces fall, its palms totter and break, and its blue lagoons shiver, and part, and show the true scenery beneath. It is the wilderness again. The Three are treading the wilderness. This time they are all treading it. There is no Infant. The Boy is at their side. He keeps up with them in a kind of running walk, and does penance by it, and deceives even Mary, that she may not find it out. The breezes of Judea are blowing in their faces. The leagues of hot sand have not sucked up the breath of the thyme, with which it was laden as it blew over the pale green sward and pastoral grounds of Judah and of Benjamin. Joseph is aged; and the shadow of the Eternal Father is yet deeper on him. There is a fuller heart in Mary's face, as of one who has been living so much longer in the awful intimacy of God, Calvary is meeting Bethlehem in the Boy's Soul, and there is something eternal in His eyes which comports itself marvellously with boyhood; and the clear speaking of His tones seems to make even the desert silent, as if it wished to absorb them in its loose sands, and keep them in its bosom as a compensation for its barrenness. Sunset and dawn, midnight and noon, wind and calm, storm and shower, darkness and starlight, ride over the wilderness, like the wind-driven cloud-spots on the mountain side, and vary its pictures almost endlessly, and in the heart of each picture sits a mystery, of whose beauty the generations of men will never tire.

Egypt is not less fertile than the Desert in images of beauty. "V\Tiat are these white walls which are laved by the flood when it is out, but otherwise rise out of that luxuriant green flat of densest herbage, sward so inveterately green that it seems proof almost against the scorching of the Egyptian sun 1 It is Heliopolis. We will enter on the evening of its pagan holyday. All the morning there have been endless sacrifices. All the day there have been crowds of worshippers. The streets are full of people. The evening star will rise upon the grave riot of an Egyptian festival. Towards sunset there is a pause in the streets. The multitudes stand still. It is as if a mighty city had been paralysed by some dreadful shock. A fearful dubious rumour has gone forth, stilling all that noisy populace, so that men could hear each others' hearts beating. A moment's pause, the multitude sways uncertainly like a huge tree in the first blast of the tempest, and then rolls onward to the temples, in waves and waves of men, pressing upon each other as billow chases billow up the sand. As the sun was sloping, while the lanterns were just being lit, while the incense was smoking tranquilly before the idols, and the sacred doves were settling themselves to roost in the plane trees of the outer courts, the images of the gods fell without warning from their bases with a hideous crash, and are lying mutilated and in fragments on the ground.

Not a tremour of earthquake could be felt. The marble pavements have not given, nor one slab been raised. The air was so still, there was hardly a breath to set a broad plane leaf turning on its little unwieldy pivot. What omen is this? What fearful unlooked-for anger of the Sun? Meanwhile some pilgrims are entering the city-gate unnoticed. Who would notice pilgrims on such a day as that, when every town of Egypt, the ports at the Nile-mouths, the dwellers above the cataracts, even the peasants from the distant oases, had gathered to the sanctuary of the Sun? Through streets, silent, vacant, in the rear of the multitudes that have rushed to the temples, Mary, clasping to her bosom her slumbering Child, follows Joseph faintly and wearily to the khan to find a corner amidst its crowded inmates, or to find all places full, the old experience of Bethlehem.

The streets of Heliopolis come before us on a later day. Mary is carrying the Infant in her arms. It is a manycoloured scene. Crowds are moving to and fro, buying and selling, in parties or alone. Every one, it should seem, must be intent upon his own occupations. Strangers are no strange things. Sanctuaries and pilgrimage-places are hardened to the sight of strangers. Yet somehow that Jewish mother and her Child draw all eyes upon them. Every one looks up, and follows them with his look, so long as they are in sight. It is something more than beauty which overflows the countenance of the Child. There is an attraction in Him which will not give an account of itself. He is like a light in a dark place, an apparition that fascinates the beholders, and awakens deep nameless emotions in the heart, which are akin to worship and religion. The dark eyes of those bronzed faces cast wild looks upon the glorious Child. There is something in them which makes the Mother tremble instinctively. She has no superstition of the evil eye; but she looks onward to another crowd in another place, to other wild eyes cast yet more wildly upon her Love upon a far darker day than these days of exile. She folds Him to her bosom, as if they were going to rob her of Him, when it is truly, and she knows it, only the fierceness of their admiration which so lights up their swarthy features.

He also seems to feel the presence of that pagan multitude, and in some way to resent that which causes Hia

Mother fear. He gazes on the people unblenchingly, as if it were in the bold simplicity of infancy, not without deep love, yet with something flashing kinglike in His air. He even stirs in her arms uneasily, as if He would defend her, and take her part against that multitude. His face is set like that of a young eagle in a storm, beating up against the channels of the wind: another sort of beauty from that which He will wear, when He is driven to and fro, like a hunted thing by the maddened populace of Jerusalem.

The Egyptian city rises up before us again with its narrow streets, its quaint bazaars, and the menageries of its multitudinous temples. It is now indeed, as its name imports, the City of the Sun; for the true Sun is there, and the place looks darker for His shining. Over the hot Nile-valley antiquity broods like a cloud. The old fortunes of the people of God rest there like a shadow. The ancient plagues of the unbelieving king still seem to load the air. The river is as silent as a river in a dream. There is an atmosphere of fate over the picture. The bright lights seem burdened with something which is not bright. In an alley of high walls, near the city gate, in a dim street with buildings so tall that the sun lights it only in its meridian transit, is Joseph's dwelling of poverty and exile. The implements of work lie round about. But there is a pause. Mary has suspended her spinning. Joseph holds in his hand the piece of wood he was fitting to another. Their eyes are fixed upon the Child, who is on his feet upon the ground, but clinging to the lap of Mary's garment Of Himself, unpersuaded, unexpected, without a pattern sedulously given Him to mimic, He has spoken His first word. Perhaps it was the Name of God, perhaps His Mother's name. Because He was Himself God, skilful in the craft of love, exquisitely considerate m the inventions or compassions, we will deem it was His Mother's name. Look at the eyes of the Mother and the Foster-father. An earthquake might rend Heliopolis in twain, and they would not hear or feel. The glow of ecstasy, puzzled but not disquieted, is on their features. The Word the Father spoke eternally now has spoken Himself. Who would dare to think that even Mary taught the Word to speak? The cloud of silence broke suddenly from before His mind, as from off a mountain top, and the little house at Heliopolis was flooded with refulgence. The very sound gave light. The very light played music. The ears of those two had heard the midnight Gloria of the angelic choirs; but it had no such melody as this. It well-nigh called their souls out of their bodies, it was so wonderful. To that picture we listen rather than look.

It has passed away. Evening has come down upon the land, the brief evening. The Nile glows like a glossy creature, swift, broad-backed, and almost noiseless, in the crimson sunset. Only at the edge the quick waters make the reeds twitter a little, except in the little earthy bays where the lotus-lily rises and falls at anchor quietly, just tremulously enough to shake its odours out upon the air, like incense from the thurible. The incarnate God is musing on the bank, Mary withdrawn a stone's throw from Him, as if she had felt it was His will, and yet withdrawn less far than the apostles at Gethsemane. Her gaze is as fixed upon Him, as an angel's look is fixed upon the Vision. His mind opens before us, as if a sanctuary were being unveiled, and it flows out of His eyes, as they are bent upon the stream, and catch the reflection of the golden light from the shining waters. In the scarce audible murmur of the river He hears the cry that rang through Egypt in the night, that terrible night of the first-born. It is as if the echoes of that wail had been undulating over the desert ever since. The tears gather in His eyes; for He thinks of Bethlehem, its mothers, and its Innocents. But He hears now in the stillness, while the evening breeze scarce waves its indolent pinions over the sun-shrivelled land, the trampling of countless hurrying feet. It is the children of Israel going forth in the darkness upon their Exodus; and there is the Exodus of a whole world to be accomplished now, and it is He who must cleave the sea, and how shall it be cloven? The twilight deepens. Almost suddenly it is dark. The eyes of the Child have gone out in the darkness, and the wind rises, and the mist gathers on the stream.

Once more we see Him in the early dawn passing through the gate of Heliopolis after Joseph's dream. The freshness of the morning is on the Nile. The sails of the boats catch the sun above the high banks of the river. In the faces of all the Three, there is a sense of freedom after imprisonment. The brightness of a return from exile breathes in every feature. The careworn look is gone. The step is elastic. It is morning in their souls as well as morning on the outside earth. They are like those who have had a recent message from heaven. They have a glory round them, like wreaths of angels manifest. The pagan faces have been a grief to Joseph. They were a dread to Mary. They breathe more freely now that they are out of the city of those dark men, and away from the strange closeness of the dim bazaars and many-latticed walls. They are now like the singing-birds of the woods and fields, free, and living on the providence of their Heavenly Father, to find food on all roadsides, and to drink of the brook in the way, and to sing that perpetual voiceless song which a quiet heart is always singing in the ear of God. But there is something more in the Boy of seven years old. The growth of His Humanity seems to betray the Divinity more and more, as if it had more room to display itself, and anticipated each new human gesture, and made it all divine. The light in His clear eyes is deep, and in their depths are mysteries. Jerusalem is in His Heart. There is a desolate green hill outside its gates which is a magnet to His Soul. There is the same wonderful look upon His boyish Face which amazed the apostles so much in Him when He hurried along the road to Jerusalem, as if to be in time for His Passion, as if it might else elude His thirst for suffering. That look upon His Face is printed now on Mary's heart, and overflows her face as well. Those two faces belong to Calvary. Upon the face of Joseph there still rests the old tranquillity of Bethlehem.

Nazareth also contributes to this land of the Sacred Infancy many fair scenes, in truth, a complete pictured theology of the Incarnation. We often come near to rest in life, and then are cheated of it, and after that we reach a better rest through disappointment, better because it was not our own choice, and better, as it proves, in its very self. Such seems to be the significance of that holy calm which shines on the features of Mary and Joseph, as they draw nigh to Nazareth after they have been disappointed in their desire of dwelling at Jerusalem. I should not say disappointed; for there are no disappointments to those whose wills are buried in the will of God. With the Boy also Jerusalem is to be delayed. Yet on His Face there is the same intense tranquillity, as if the coming rest sent its peace before it into soul and countenance. All Three wear the look we might expect to see on the faces of those who are first entering heaven. There is no trouble, no surprise, no voice, no jubilee, but a flush of peace, arising from the intensity of joy kept down and deepened by the nearness to God, and the momentarily expected Vision. Even to those, whose souls are God's sanctuary on earth, Nazareth is itself a sanctuary, to be approached with awful memories.¹ It is the dread scene of the Incarnation; and now it is to be the home of Jesus for many uneventful years, whose uneven tfulness, if we could read it rightly, is the most eventful page in all creation's history. Its glory now consists in its being the harbour of the Boy, and the witness of continual hidden wonders. For eighteen years each day, which to us seems to have been but one brief waving of time's soundless wing, will teem with wonders inexhaustible even by angelical intelligence. Quiet sequestered Nazareth, which the green hills sentinel so pleasantly, how didst thou suck in those three tempest-tost souls, as the harbour draws in the ships with the setting of the tide! Look upon those faces. Calvary seems further off than ever now; yet there is some-

3S6 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

thing which speaks of it in the eye. It is not forgotten. It is only waiting. In Mary there is a look of reprieve. In Jesus it is steadfast calm, and a certainty which needs not to be precipitate. Joseph has the air of age musing contentedly on the pleasant place which it has chosen for its burial. Altogether a complicated contentment is the ruling genius of the picture.

Then the interior of the Holy House comes before us. We behold the outer chamber of the house, and Joseph's shop; and the green swelling hills are seen through the open doorway. Mary is seated in the doorway spinning, though at that moment her work is arrested, and Jesus is near her, looking fixedly at some doves that are feeding in front of the door. The Mother is gazing upon her Son in astonishment; yet it is an astonishment which is passing rapidly into adoration, and every moment we expect to see her at His feet. She does not know exactly why this is. Yet it is not new there. There have been times like this before, times when His apparent growth in wisdom and grace have dawned upon her, and come home to her, through some look or gesture seemingly trivial in itself. It is just as with mothers, whose eyes, however love may quicken them, do not see their children grow, but who wake up now and then to the fact that they are grown, and that some sweet interesting change has taken place in them. It is the hour of one of those heavenly surprises now. Mary looks as we might fancy an angel would look who has been gazing on the Beatific Vision these thousand years, and now for the first time sees something new in God, which yet was always there. The creature rather than the mother is working in her features.

Let the scene change to the inner room, where Jesus sleeps. It is just after the return from Egypt. Mary has helped Him to undress, and has arranged Him in His bed. Her face glows with a loving familiarity, as if the very offices, in which her fingers had been engaged, made her heart more free. He has been forward in His caresses, those caresses which become more touching to a mother when childhood is passing into boyhood, as if they were of more value because they are more conscious and deliberate, and perhaps more rare. Her heart is overflowing with an earthly mother's love. Yet there is some contradictory look in her eye, something which controls love, but does not lessen it. It is not as if she had for one moment forgotten, or as if she otherwise than calmly realised, her Son's Divinity: but it is as if love and worship were not always like two rivers blending in an inland lake, but as if they sometimes alternated in quiet waveless tides, as in a landlocked bay far up in the embrace of mighty hills, yet whither the sea travels with his ebb and flow. She looks less the creature, and more the mother now.

There are many pictures also which remain to this day in heaven, painted upon the unforgetting intelligences of the angels, of which the scene was Joseph's shop. The common litter of a carpenter's working place is there. Boards propped up against the walls, pieces of wood lying over each other in all shapes and at all angles, the floor strewn with chips, and straight lines of sawdust under the place where he has been sawing, various tools mingling in the apparent confusion, and mutilated implements of agriculture lying outside the door: this is the scene which presents itself, and Mary is standing in the doorway of the house hard by. Joseph is showing Jesus how to do some work, and his broad man's hand is laid on the small hand of the Boy, and is gently guiding His fingers. He is doing it mechanically; for he is gazing rather on the Saviour's face than on the work. He sees the Boy all resplendent with glory, and his faith recognises in Him the omnipotent Creator, the Eternal

Worker, who so deftly fashioned the countless worlds, and whose fingers he, the aged carpenter, is now venturing to press, to guide, and to manipulate as he wills. The old man's soul overflows with adoration, but tranquilly, without wave or sound, as if fed by silent springs from underneath. Nevertheless he does not desist from guiding the hand of Jesus. He does not interrupt the lesson, which he knows to be so little needed. He is too humble for that. He understands his office. It was incomprehensible to him always from the first. The exercise of his authority could never be otherwise to him than the exercise of a sublime obedience. Then, as his soul swells with adoration, self-abjection falls over his features like a veil of light, as the sun breaks the clouds and unrolls his splendour downwards from the brow of the hill to the vale beneath His humility so clothes him with majesty that he looks almost godlike, and his age is transfigured into a semblance of eternity.

As He is older now, and stronger, the water-pitcher is not too great a weight for the Creator of the world. Yet it bows Him forward, and makes Him tread with a difi'erent step, as He climbs up that grassy path with His burden. Many are coming and going from the well. All have a word to say to Mary's Son; and He answers, sometimes with a word, more often with His eye. All are contented. He is a silent Boy; but there is something in His presence in that little town, like the sun in heaven, whose shining and obscurity makes more difference to man and beast and herb than words can tell. Women with their pitchers upon their heads stop, and turn, and gaze upon Him, and then sigh with envy at Mary's lot, contrasting it with secret sorrows of their own in which their sons bear mournful part. The rough manners of the Nazarenes soften, when ^he sunbeam of His smile is on them. Cold hearts warm, and hard hearts grow gentle, and anger dies away, and all are divinely unmanned as He comes among them.

He is already a king, a little king of men's hearts, crowned in the love and loyalty of the most boorish village in all Syria. They have crowned the Boy; but they will uncrown the Man, when His royalty becomes a serious thing. He knows this already. He looks at them with more than sorrow, with more than love, with an indescribable yearning which attunes all His features. They have made Him king: but for their sakes He is rather longing to be priest The water as it gurgles in the pitcher is like a heavenly temptation to Him. His thoughts are onward upon Jacob's well and the woman of Samaria. His thoughts are over all the world in countless Christian fonts. The Blood in those veins must mingle with the water in that pitcher, before it will cleanse the sins of Nazareth away. The thought is an ever-present one with Him; yet His Heart leaps up now as if it were new, and the face of the Boy broadens into the countenance of the Man of Calvary, and, almost mastering the characteristic sweetness of His youth, it is clothed, as with a fire, in the mature beauty of the Redeemer.

But is Jerusalem nowhere in the landscapes of the Sacred Infancy*? Let us go back to the day when the fortieth sun rose upon the new-born Babe. The early dawn had seen Mary and Joseph wending their way from Bethlehem to the Holy City. It was the clear cold of a bright spring morning. The dewdrops glistened like diamonds on the grass, and the palms as they waved flung off their harmless crystal showers on the passers-by. Jesus lay a seemingly unconscious Infant, now in His Mother's arms, and now in Joseph's. White in the morning light were the terraces and towers and temple roofs of magnificent Jerusalem, growing like a natural growth from the dark

36o CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

edges of its steep ravines. He looked upon it all from out the envelopment of His swaddling-clothes, as a bird looks on a human face from the leafy covert which fringes and conceals its nest. The Passion is in His eyes. The very separate scenes of that terrific drama may be read there, even when in their liquid lustres the buildings of Jerusalem were mirroring themselves with soft impression. It was as if, in the grandeur of a heavenly vision, some glorious poet, or mighty warrior, or high-souled statesman, were allowed to see that sublime thing for which he was born, that world-wide work for which he was to live, that grand end for which all life was to be but scanty measure.

There would be much in such a vision to terrify; but the sublimity of terror is the increase of courage to noble souls; and how superb would be their look as they gazed on the bravery of their success, yet saw meanwhile that by the universal law their greatness must be their martyrdom! Yet such was only the groundwork of the light that shone in those infantine eyes. It was only the human element which beautifully ranged and reconciled itself there with the divine. It was the invisible Soul become visible in the swaddling-clothes. The Body had almost disappeared, effaced by that deluge of inward light.

The Mother goes up to sacrifice. Let us follow her to to the temple; for never before was sacrifice like this. It is the interior of the temple. A strong light falls upon the central figures. The others are lost in the very indistinctness which the contrast of the strong light causes. Simeon and Anna, and a group of holy souls — we know that they are there, but they are only shadows, broken outlines. They take up no room in our eye. Joseph is the silent presence of the Eternal Father, witnessing, ratifying, accepting, overshadowing the sacrifice. In this mystery Joseph is rather part of heaven than of earth. He is more a symbol than an actor. He fulfils his office as shadow of the Everlasting. There is Mary, and the Child, and the Priest. This last seems rather to be a type of priesthood than an individual priest. His lineaments are manifestly ideal. He is the representative shadow of invisible and sacerdotal power. So much of Joseph's office he usurps for the time, while Joseph is intent upon that higher one. His very garments are embroidered allegories. He is not a human figure. Mary is giving away her Child, and putting Him into the arms of the priest. The spirit of sacrifice is going from her countenance like rays of light. She seems to rise into the air, and to widen with majestic grace into colossal dimensions. The Mother's heart shines through the magnificence of the glorified heroine, not as if it were outshone, but as if its light were magnified by that other radiance through which it shines. There is no struggle. Her will does not resist the will of God, yet neither is it overlaid or effaced by the Divine Will. It is present; it is unquenched; its pathos is inimitable; but it is subject, subject with the most free and meritorious subjection, seen through the transparent will of God, which never oppresses the glories it over-rules.

Victims have a beauty of their own, a beauty not the less touching because it is for the most part dumb. The poor sheep is glorified in the eyes of art, not so much by the garland of flowers that hangs about its neck, as by the circumstances round it, the priest, the temple, the sacrificial knife. But the beauty of this Victim, the glory of this mute Infant, is all His own. In His eyea, which look so many volumes in each single glance, we read His perfect knowledge of the unutterable justice of God and the all-holy greediness of its requirements. His Mother is lifting Him into it as into the mouth of a devouring fire. But His Soul is on fire already with the promptitude of His own human will, and it almost out-glows the furnace of that eternal will which is opening to receive its victim. Love yearns more to be sacrificed, than justice to consume the sacrifice. We remember another scene far olf. It was when the Son hung upon the Cross, and put His Mother away from Him that He might be poor with the perfection of poverty. He had given Himself to His Father, and could not offer Himself again, and so He offered His Mother in His stead. It was a scene of cruellest magnificence. He was the Bacrificer there, and she the Victim, They had simply changed places. This picture in the temple was the opposite of that on Calvary. She was the Sacrificer here, and He the Victim. Yet was He not also, and especially, the Victim on Calvary? How marvellously all mysteries are one mystery, because they are divine!

Twelve years are gone, and the Boy kneels as a worshipper in the temple. His single kneeling figure is all we picture to ourselves. But alas! where are the words to say what it is we seel Is it all the realm of angels, with the manifold beauty of their choirs, expressive, in ten thousand diversities, of the almost infinite spirit of adoration? Is it the beauty of all heaven, caught up by God, and cast into one point of exceeding light, and then doubled in the eyes of Jesus 1 No! that is not all. Is it then the beauty of all holy hearts throughout the earth and the earth's ages, worshipping their Heavenly Father in their gladness, in their sorrow, in their pensiveness, in the fortitude of their humility, under all the never-repeated variety of their pathetic circumstances? Are all hearts worshipping in that heart, and all the world's worship working in that radiant countenance 1 No! there is also more than that. There is the indescribable fulness, the unimaginable repose, of the worship of the Sacred Humanity, encompassing the majesty of God, enveloping each and all of His lightning-like Attributes, and bearing on itself, as the great tidewave bears the sun-struck foam upon its crest, all the worship of angels and of men up to the foot of the Eternal Throne, ever rising, ever falling, ever giving light, like the spray in the dark night-time, upon the Eternal Shore.

Let us look again. It is two hours past noon, and there is a gathering of the pilgrims at the gate of Jerusalem, through which the road goes northward. Joseph and the band of men are together, and Mary and the band of women. The two companies will travel separate till nightfall. There is something of the picturesqueness of an encampment about the meeting-place; and the faces are all fresh, and seem to witness to the soul being in a state of grace after the spiritual renewal of the feast. Between the two bands the Boy Jesus passes like a wandering sunbeam, with less of notice than we have ever seen Him receive in any other picture. He withdraws and is not missed. There is a spell on Mary's heart, a viewless band over Joseph's eyes. He stands in the shadow of the gate, and sees the company of women start, to be followed in another hour, and by a different route, by the troop of men. The Boy clings to the City, as if it were His Mother, as if those rugged ravines were the very skirts of her garment. 0 Jerusalem, and thou wert such a mother! The vision of the Holy City, as He saw it that February morning twelve years ago, is graven on His Soul. He saw it by the Nile-bank. He came home from exile with it in His Heart. He drew near to it, and Joseph was warned in a dream to take Him from it. He will wean Himself now from Mary and from Nazareth, or at least will seem as if He were bent on doing so; for His doings are unfathomable just now. No one yet has sounded them, 01 unriddled their significance. Hereafter the tempter from a mountain-top shall show Him all the kingdoms of the earth, their pageants and their treasures, and His eye shall wander coldly over them from the summit of Quarentana. His covetousness is of an exclusive sort. Sufferings and souls are the only treasures that He craves. But the vision of Jerusalem, its stones to His prophetic eye already stained with blood, its streets ringing with the furious acclaim which met Pilate's appeal to the popular compassion, the crisp rustling of the old olive trees in the neighbouring Gethsemane, the bones whitening in the sun on the pale turf of Calvary, this was a more tempting sight than that from Quarentana. It drew Him from Mary's side. For a triduo at least, like the triduo of His Passion, He will beg His bread, a heavenly mendicant, in the streets of Sion, and lay His delicate limbs on the rude pavement. He will have the very stones, which He will one day mark with His Precious Blood, leave their marks now on His yielding Flesh. Yet, as He stands in the shadow of the gateway, His eye follows His Mother's figure till it disappears, and there are many things, which seem contrary yet not conflicting, eloquently speaking out of those eyes, whose language is more easily to be read because their brilliance is softened in the gateway's shade.²

Once more we see Him in the temple. He is in the hall of the doctors, the school of theology. The gravest men in Israel are gathered round Him; almost every form of wonder is depicted on their faces, while their limbs are perfect studies, because of the various ways in which their attitudes express the intensity of their attention. Angry wonder blends with sweet surprise, and zeal, that needs but the spark to fire its train, mingles with the only half -intelligent delight which illuminates the features of some of the aged men. But on many faces there is the beginning of a look which can darken some day into the darkness of an awful cruelty. The door of the hall is half open, and Mary and Joseph stand there, not amazed, not petrified into statues, but in unspeakable repose, as if they had had to journey to the world's end and had got there now, and there was nothing more to do and no further to be gone; for they had come to Him, who was the end of all worlds. As to Himself, never was the bashfulness of His Boyhood more obviously, more winningly displayed, than now, when the Creator was sounding the intelligences of His creatures, and sprinkling them with a shower of His own celestial wisdom. He was asking questions, who was in Himself the sole sufficient answer to all questions that could be asked. He was seeming to learn in order that He might more sweetly teach. He was blamelessly deceiving, that the seers of Israel might behold the truth. More and more He grew like a Boy, as more and more the light of the Godhead within Him was burning away the thin veils of flesh and blood. Surely in another moment He will bloom into confessed, undoubted God, and the life will be scared out of their stricken souls. The angels remember Him as He was at that astonishing moment, to Mary's love and Joseph's faith manifest God, to the others a wonder, a portent, an anigma, a suspicion, yet to all of them a not unchildlike Child.

Words indeed have golden pencils; but there are unexplored regions of the Sacred Infancy which no limning of language can portray. The act of the Incarnation under the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost is practically as hidden from us as the Generation of the Son up in the inaccessible sources of eternal light. The nine months' life in the Bosom of His Mother, evidenced outwardly by Mary's haste and by the sweetness of her song, by Elizabeth's salutation and the jubilee of the Baptist redeemed before his birth, was a succession of spiritual pictures which we cannot imagine, but of which it is no mean knowledge to know that such things were. When we regard Him also, wherever He was during those twelve years, as the centre of the world's government, environed by multitudes of angels, giving laws to all the phenomena of nature, shedding power, and life, and endurance into all things, holding them up above the hungry abyss of nothingness which is ever threatening to engulf all finite things, playing upon the manifold strings of. His immense providence, and encircling every existence in the universe with the warm clasping ring of His creative love, we see indistinctly into another vast region, of which we can discern nothing but its vastness, while our instincts testify to the necessity of its being also extremely beautiful. His Soul too had a spiritual scenery of its own, which nothing but His own light could by some supernatural process transfer to our intelligences. Much also from time to time reveals itself, to the meditative eye, out of the operations of grace in the souls of Mary and Joseph from contact Avith Him. This also belongs to the Sacred Infancy, and throws light upon its marvel-lous creations. But these are unexplored regions, on the one hand not to be attempted, on the other hand not to be forgotten.

But one thing is true of all these pictures. The shadow of Calvary rests upon them all. Everywhere the sunlight is i itercepted. There is not one patch in one landscape on which the unimpeded sun may sleep, as on a bank of flowers. The shadow is universal. Denser here, and thinner there, it is unequal, but it is ubiquitous. The Passion is the unity of the Infancy. Calvary gives its character to Bethlehem. It is strangely gifted for a shadow; for it makes both the light and shade of all the pictures. It withdraws from the eye what it would have us see but indistinctly. It thrusts darkly on our notice what it would not have us fail to sea It is the atmosphere of the Infancy, impressing its peculiarity on the scenery. It becomes familiar to us, intelligible to us, dear to us, by the colourless medium of that soft shading. But it was not merely an outward thing, a haziness hung upon the hills, a twilight sent to mellow, a memory that usurps an empire over the eye, or a foresight that tinges the imagination. Calvary was the real inward life of the Sacred Heart in the Infancy. It was more the Babe's home than Bethlehem. There was indeed an underground world of ecstatic joys beneath the sorrow; but it was jealously hidden, like a divine thing, which is meant to transpire rather than to be seen. Neither was the shadow on Himself only, but on all around Him. It transfused itself into the heart of Mary; for how could she see by a dififerent light from that with which He saw 1 It penetrated into the heart of Joseph. The Venerable Jane of the Cross tells us that Joseph was allowed to feel all the pains of the Passion in a mystical way, as some of the saints have done.³ But the shadow stole everywhere, just as the twilight creeps noiselessly into evening's sunniest nooks, and quietly masters all the land without the winnowing of its silken wing being heard or seen. Everywhere there was shadow, and it was one shadow, the shade cast by Calvary, a low hill indeed, but tall enough to cast a shadow that should gird the globe, and come round to rest on the same dear height from which it had been thrown. The Sacred Infancy may almost be defined to be, — The Passion in Repose.

There is indeed at first sight an apparent contrast between Bethlehem and Calvary, between the Crib and the Cross. Neither can we truly say that it is only apparent. No two mysteries of our Lord are exactly alike. They are full of analogies. A unity of spirit reigns over them all Yet no one is the mere double of another, or the repetition of it under difi'erent picturesque circumstances. Nevertheless the apparent contrast between the Crib and the Cross is much stronger than the real difference. The region of Bethlehem seems to be the abode of almost perpetual calm. There is the placid littlenass of the Infant; there is the gentleness of the meditative Joseph; there are the maternal joys of Mary, too deep for utterance; there is beauty, sweetness, softness, something attractive to the genius and eye of art. This is all broken up by the storms of Calvary, and Joseph has disappeared. In the world of the Infancy we have almost total seclusion from men; in the world of the Passion Jesus is the central figure and suffering victim of a wild and infuriate multitude. In Bethlehem, and up to the city-gate at twelve years of age, we behold Mary's unbroken jurisdiction over Him; one of the sorrows of Calvary is her inability to help Him, or even to minister to the thirsting Sufferer the ministries of a common charity, to say nothing of the offices of maternal love. Seemingly at least there is in the Crib an absence of bodily pain, while the Cross and the antecedents of the Cross are remarkable for an unutterable excess of it. In the times of the Infancy those who loved Him were always with Him, and, when He had to fly, it was those He loved who fled with Him; in the times of Calvary those He loved abandoned Him, until at last, after He had given away to Mary that sweet apostle who was her second Joseph, His solitude became without a parallel; for He Himself had put His Mother from Him, and the Eternal Father had forsaken Him. When the Infancy and Boyhood came to a close, miraculous manifestations of the divine complacency preluded to the opening of His Ministry, as He came up out of the waters of Jordan; whereas the very last step in His Passion was the agony of a divine dereliction. These things make a strong contrast between the Crib and the Cross, and they are surely more than mere appearances, more than simple varieties of scenery.

Nevertheless, in spite of this indubitable contrast, there is a real inward identity between the two. In the Soul of Jesus prevision was not simply a great gift of prophecy. What we learned of His science in the last chapter will show us that there was a reality in His prevision of the Passion which made it a substantial Passion already. The bodily pains were anticipated with a vividness, which, if it did not rack muscle, nerve, and flesh as the reality was to do, at least transferred a proportionate agony of fear and trembling and natural horror to His shrinking Soul; while the spiritual tortures of the Passion were not so much foreseen at Bethlehem, as actually begun. Inasmuch as they had not to be learned, and could not be aggravated by any new occurrences, there was no reason why they should not be felt from the first moment of His Conception. Indeed some contemplatives tell us that Jesus sweated blood repeatedly during His Infancy. Moreover Calvary presided over Bethlehem. The mysteries of the Cross exercised an acknowledged sovereignty over the mysteries of the Crib.

These last were not ends. They were roads which had to be travelled, things which happened on the road, landscapes seen from it. They had no direct share in the accomplishment of the great work of redemption. Blood was to be shed, shed till it was all shed, shed until life oozed out with it, and the sacred union of Body and Soul was dissolved. This followed from the change which sin superinduced upon the first idea of the Incarnation. Had the Word come in a purely glorious Incarnation, an Incarnation which was to crown Creation, and had no Redemption to effect, perhaps the act of His Incarnation, and His beginnings of a created life among His creatures, might have seemed more wonderful to the eyes of men than the triumphal Ascension with which His appointed years would have concluded, an Ascension which would not then have been reached through any gates of death. Death would have been but a phenomenon of the animal kingdom, unknown to immortal men. But now the eyes and hearts of men will gather where their hopes are, around the dim scene of Calvary, and the sacrificial horrors of the Cross. Yet even now the operation of God is more manifest in the mysteries of Bethlehem, and the operation of man in the mysteries of Calvary. In the one God works, in the other He suffers. In both He is active, and in both He is passive; yet, if we may venture to say so, we see more of His activity in Bethlehem, and more of His passiveness on Calvary. Bethlehem is what the Creator does to His creatures: Calvary is what His creatures do to Him.

The will of the Child was the same as the will of the Man. The will in Bethlehem was identical with the will on Calvary. There was the same intense desire of suffering, with the same deep dread of it. There was the same weight of sin, torturing His sensibility with its cruel load. There was the same anger of the Father to be endured, perceived with the same clearness, apprehended with the same fulness of science, an ungrowing anger which would not increase with the years of Jesus, and which did not require the co-operation of human cruelty in order to make itself felt within His SouL His Mother, in whose life He lived the dearest part of His own life, was already the Mother of Dolours, though as yet she had not stood on Calvary. Her nine months of expectation had not been unchequered gladness. The immensity of her science, and the light which to her glowed perpetually on the page of Scripture, alike forbade it. Her forty days of peace at Bethlehem had their shades of sorrow, which, although they were shortly to be deepened, were still palpable shadows. But, since the prophecy of St. Simeon, the seven swords had been planted in her bosom, and they could never be drawn out now for eight and forty years, almost half a century; for, if they were drawn out, she would bleed to death. In both the Mother and the Son the dispositions of sacrifice and oblation were absolutely the same. Inwardly therefore there was complete identity between the Crib and the Cross. It only needed act, to transfigure Bethlehem into Calvary.

There was even much outward analogy between the two. The Bethlehemites rejected Him in the person of His Mother, as the Jews afterwards rejected Him in His own. He had scarcely made Himself visible on earth, when He had to fly from His own creatures, because His life was deemed incompatible with their interests, just, as in His Passion, His death was pronounced by the spiritual authorities of the nation to be expedient for the people. No one can meditate on the mystery of the Presentation without being often reminded of Palm Sunday. His Infancy had there its one brief triumph, before the Face of the Babe was snatched away and hidden in the solitudes of the wilderness and amid the crowd of Egyptian idolaters. Anna bore Him witness, and Simeon sang Him a song of triumph as meek and childlike as His own infantine sweetness. It was in the same temple where the little children in later years cried Hosanna after Him, giving tongues, as He implied, to the very inanimate stones that were almost breaking forth to praise Him. If, from the hill-top on the road from Bethany, He saw the morning on Jerusalem and shed His memorable tears, may we not suppose also that His infant eyes were suffused with the tears of manifold emotions, when He saw Jerusalem from His Mother's arms that February morning? From the coasts of Egypt He drew near to Jerusalem; but under Joseph's authority He turned aside. It was not time. So afterwards did He hide Himself when the others were going up to Jerusalem. He would not go up yet, because all was not ready. To the mystery of the Circumcision His Sacred Infancy owed its privilege of shedding blood, which is almost its most striking analogy with the Passion. On Calvary He involved aU near Him in the darkness and anguish of His sufferings. Mary was steeped in woe. Magdalen and John were brokenhearted. The poor fugitive apostles were overwhelmed with darkness, and with the bitterness of love self-disappointed and self-ashamed. Peter was even driven to deny Him. Persecution awaited all. It was the same in His Infancy, At that time He involved in all His sufferings His blessed Mother, His aged Foster-father, and even a helpless multitude of slaughtered Innocents. A dark-bright ring of suffering lay wide around Him, wherever He moved, like a halo round the moon.

It is so even now. It will be so to the end. The vicinity of Jesus is a privilege of delighted grace, for which nature has to pay dearly. In the triduo of the Passion He was separated from Mary three days; and it was a like tridno, marked by the same separation, which brought the Infancy to a close. The Resurrection followed the former triduo; and the eighteen years of hidden Nazareth which followed the latter triduo are full of analogies with the forty days after the Resurrection in many ways besides their hiddenness. Thus even the outward analogies between Bethlehem and Calvary are neither few in number, nor insignificant in their mystery.

In the Hght of theology and in the fire of devotion, Bethlehem and Calvary are continually blending into one. There is no more strongly marked peculiarity of theology than the way in which it unites distant truths, harmonises remote mysteries, and identifies things which in matters less divine would seem irreconcileable, if not contradictory. In the doctrine of our Lord's Divine Person, we see how Bethlehem and Calvary were one to Him to whom time can bring nothing, and to whom the Three-and-Thirty Years were but as a golden point, which to us, when it is beaten out, and far from beaten thin, can cover the whole world with its magnificence of manifold mystery. The immense science of His Human Soul, and His full use of reason from the moment of His Conception, remove from His Sacred Infancy all those imperfections which seem at first sight incompatible with His prevision and anticipated experience of the Passion. What we know of the exquisite sensibilities and delicate perfections of His Humanity relieves us from all suspicion of exaggeration, even when we look at Bethlehem in our own minds as an unbroken Gethsemane. The doctrine of His ungrowing grace secures for us the fixity of His interior dispositions, by which mainly it is that Calvary is so imperceptibly and inseparably dovetailed into Bethlehem. The most probable opinions about Mary's science already invest hei amply in the mantle of her dolours; and so, her science involving her heart in the darkness of the great tragedy, His Heart is involved with hers. The two hearts beat in each other, and cannot beat otherwise. The two lives of the Mother and the Son cannot be disentangled, without many an unseemly rent in the sacred vesture of theology. Moreover the doctrine of His use of reason makes the Infancy already a Passion of itself, with a peculiar tragedy of its own distinct from that of Calvary. For it had pains and perils, sufferings and penances, belonging to itself, and these, which to a common infant would have had all the imperfect consciousness, unanticipated occurrence, rapid transition, and speedy oblivion common to childhood, were to Him, with His full use of reason, perfect grown-up sufferings, with the additional uneasiness of physical infirmity, and voluntary speechlessness, and all the self-imposed disguise of infancy.

But, if the Crib and the Cross so blend in the light of theology, they are completely fused together in the fire of devotion. They both produce the same spirit in the soul, though they produce it variously. The spirit of Bethlehem is one of contrition, of mortification, and of expiatory reparation; and of the same sort is the spirit of Calvary. It is as natural for devotion to weep by the Manger, as it is to weep by the Cross. Thus, in all the saints and holy persons who have had a special attraction to the Sacred Infancy, it has been a pensive, pathetic devotion. It breathes the same lowliness as Calvary. There is the same fragrance of self- abjection. It drives the sense of sin as deeply into the softened heart as the scene which the moonlight of Gethsemane discloses. The Child Crucified and the Crucified Man on His Mother's lap are the echoes of each other, soundless echoes seen, rather than heard, by the eye of piety. The love caused by both mysteries is the same. It is the love of exceeding pathos, not like the love of the Resurrection or of the Hidden Years at Nazareth. Even the very dififerences of Bethlehem and Calvary reach the same end, though it be by opposite roads. They go round the world, one by the east, the other by the west They exhibit Him crucified, and they produce an inward crucifixion in the soul. They both land us in an abnegation of ourselves. They both regenerate us in a mystical childhood. Both are ways of tears. Both are gateways through which only littleness can enter. Both envelope us with the spirit of Jesus, and unclothe us of all that is vile and ignoble in our own. They both express themselves in the same outward symbolical reality, speaking the same language at the same moment in one awful and indivisible voice, — in the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament

But we must go somewhat more into detail with the suff"erings of the Sacred Infancy. They may be divided into four classes; its outward penances, its inward penances, its states of life, and the peculiar virtues it was called upon to exercise. Its outward penances were its least; yet they form a darksome lot for the first years and helpless tenderness of the Infant God. The Babe of Bethlehem shed many tears, and they flowed from manifold sources of bitterness deep down within His SouL They came of heart-sorrows, such as were portions of His inward penances. But they came also perhaps — for who shall limit His condescensions 1 — from pain and feebleness, from inconveniences and wretchedness, which His extreme sensibility did not exaggerate to Him, but enabled Him alone of babes bom of women to feel in their uttermost reality. Pain, which seems the same, is in reality not the same to any two sufferers. Its painfulness is varied by the delicacy and susceptibility by the illness or the soft-heartedness, and even by the momentary circumstances, still more by the inward consciousness, of him who suffers. Now not only was there never one whose humanity was so finely fashioned, so unspeakably susceptible as our Blessed Lord's, and therefore never one to whom any pain was so intensely painful as the very least pain was to Him; but also there was never one whose inward feelings, self-consciousness, or rather self-possession, made corporal pain so full of agony. We touch on the doctrine of His Divine Person when we say this, for His self-possession was part of the Hypostatic Union. Moreover, except to Him, and perhaps to our Blessed Lady in some measure, yet a measure so far below His as scarcely to resemble it, never was it given to any child to feel the fulness of a child's capability of pain, or of childhood's peculiar pain from its delicacy and sensitiveness; because the child's powers of mind are dormant, and perhaps two-thirds of bodily pain are due to the intervention of the mind. In our Lord's case the full use of reason and complete maturity of soul were superadded to the weak impressionableness and delicate frame of childhood. This would give Him a peculiar fountain of tears, which without meditation we should be slow to understand. This was His first outward penance. Tears were to Bethlehem what Blood was to Calvary. They were the blood of His Childhood, which yet was not without shedding of blood itself.

In all His penances we must bear in mind what we have said of His tears. Both the immensity of His Human Science, and the union of His Human Nature with a Divine Person, were sources of suffering, which made the least pain an agony, and His agonies were something too gigantic to be compressed in any words borrowed from the nomenclature of human woe. Tears were His first penance: the second was the endurance of cold. What suffering cold can cause, and how peculiar are its agonies, the annals of arctic adventure sufficiently testify. Yet none of those brave discoverers and hardy seamen, who succumbed on the plains of ice or snow, which might be sea or land for all they knew, ever suffered from cold as the Babe of Bethlehem suffered, whether from the cold in the Cave, or during His precipitate flight across the wilderness. Cold moreover was but the representative of other natural powers. His own elements made lashes of themselves to scourge the Infant Body of their Creator.

If Calvary was the Passion which His reasonable creatures inflicted upon Him, Bethlehem represents a Passion in which His inanimate creatures were the executioners of the Baby Victim of the World. It is a touching mystery, — this subjection of the Omnipotent to the feeble stings of His own senseless ministers. His own laws of nature pressed Him, even to hurting Him. He was pinched by the cold, and burned by the heat, incommoded by the light and disturbed by the wind, jaded by fatigue and distressed by noise. The seasons rode over Him in their course, and left the prints of their hoofs upon His Flesh, as they do on ours. To us these are the incommodities of a fallen nature; to Him they were mysteries of the Incarnation. They were realities, at once blessed and dreadful; dreadful from the awful contact between Himself and them; blessed, because they were divine satisfactions, sources of grace, fountains of indulgences, and sufferings of meriting and atoning power.

Poverty has been called by some the sister of Christ, by others His bride. This was His third penance; and it was no doubt one of the penances of His predilection. It would seem as if the circumstances of His Infancy had been providentially contrived with a view to bringing in as many of the incidents of poverty as were possible without seeming to be unnatural. From Nazareth to Bethlehem, from Bethlehem over the wilderness to Egypt, from Egypt to Nazareth again, and from Nazareth to Jerusalem for the three days during which He begged His bread, the biography of His Childhood spreads itself, like an ample net, to entangle in its wide folds more and more of the varieties and pressures of His beloved poverty. If He was bom of a royal maiden, it was of one who was poor and reduced in circumstances. He would not be born at home, but took the occasion of the Roman census to be as it were a child of exile, and a waif upon his own earth. He would be rejected from the doors of Bethlehem, as the least worthy of all the mixed multitude that had crowded thither. He would be born in a cave, a stable, amidst the domestic animals of man's husbandry, — He who had come to till the hard earth of souls and make it fertile with His Blood, to be Himself the ploughman and the bleeding ploughshare also. The poverty of the wilderness, the poverty of the foreign city, the poverty of narrow straitened toil at Nazareth, all these He essayed, and suffered from them all far more than we can tell. When age grew on Joseph, and his infirmities multiplied, the yoke of poverty became yet more galling to the shoulders of his tender Foster-son. The poverty that pressed on Mary pressed tenfold more heavily on Him from the very fact of its having first pressed on her. Poverty is an evangelical perfection. How many have gallantly tried to bear the burden, and have had to lay it down again in sadness and a not unsanctified despair! How many who have borne it to the end have been made saints by the simple burden! How many religious orders attest by their ingenuous chronicles how hard it is to keep alive the spirit of truthful poverty, and how weak even vows are found to be in stemming the current of nature which runs so strongly the other way! Never was there a childhood of hardier poverty than our Blessed Lord's. It was His inseparable companion, and, if He loved its austerities with so singular a love, it was only because they were so singular a cross.

Neglect was another of His infant penances, neglect varied by the scarcely more flattering notice of cruel persecution. He loved men with the tenderest love. From eternity it had been His delight that He was one day to be thus among them. He had come; and His sole presence so beautified the earth, that it might almost have out-shone the highest heaven. For was not the beauty of God Himself all freshly beautified by the Incarnation? Yet, in every sense the words can bear, there was no room for Him. Hearts were full. He was unseasonable. The miseries, from which He came to emancipate His brethren, were not felt as miseries by them. His efforts to liberate them were more irksome than the bondage under which they suffered. He was bom, and some shepherds came to Him; but none of the neighbours seem to have followed the example. Three kings arrived from afar, and the tyrant of Judea strove to include Him in a wholesale massacre, while oblivion and obscurity rapidly gathered over the history of that royal progress from the east. There was safety for Him, only when the unpeopled sands of the desert were stretched around Him, and even there the footprints of the dear men, for whom He came to die, were terrors and portents to His Mother's eyes. For the Sacred Heart of the Incarnate God to be a stranger to any child of Eve was an incomparable sorrow to His philanthropy, His man-lovingness, an affection which belonged to Himself in a sense in which no creature can share it, and which is only shadowed by His saints in burning zeal for souls. If it were possible, the word pJnlan-

38o CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

ihropy, like that of the Incarnation, should be studiously kept sacred for Him alone, the man-loving Son of God. Yet He was a stranger in the land of Egypt; and His Heart was in captivity, as Israel had been before, in the valley of the Nile. When His Soul yearned for Jerusalem, there were none to welcome Him there. On the contrary, He must turn aside; for they, who had power there, were sure to wish Him ill. Poor Child! Poor Boy! men fell off from Him, who was the uncreated beauty of heaven, as if there were a charm of evil hung around Him even in His Childhood, as if a Cain-like brand were on His Infant brow! Who shall fathom the deep sorrows of the Babe's Martyr-Heart?

His Bloodshedding in the Circumcision was another penance of His Infancy, which for many reasons may be regarded as a pattern for the unnecessary mortifications of the saints, if indeed any mortification can be strictly deemed unnecessary even for the most innocent of the sons of men. He needed not the rite. He required no ceremonial covenant with God, who was God Himself. That flesh needed no consecration, which was already united to a Divine Person. It was a strange, separate, unaccountable Bloodshedding, standing, as it seems, in a peculiar relation to the other Bloodsheddings, as it was not only no part of the redemption of the world, but was utterly detached from the Passion.* It did not keep the compact with the Father, which was death, and nothing short of death. So that the drops that were shed were not shed to the saving of souls. Was it the homage of the Infancy to the Passion! Was it, like the Bloody Sweat upon Mount Olivet, an outburst of the Sacred Heart's impatience for the plenitude of Calvary? To Himself truly it was pain, to His Mother sorrow, to Joseph a heavenly perplexity, * See Treatise on the Precious Blood, chapters L and v.

to the Angels a wonder, to the saints a pattern and a mystery.

His weariness was another penance of His Infancy. The weariness of the unfatigued Creator is a marvel full of pathos; and to tired souls, and fatigue in these days is the normal state of Christian souls, it is full also of consolation. What weariness did He not endure upon His comfortless bed of prickly straw, and in the restraints of His incommodious swaddling-clothes 1 His very helplessness was itself an unending weariness to Him, because of the maturity of His reason. Weariness must have been one of the especial sufferings of His Flight into Egypt, and also of His Return. In His Flight the confinement of His bands and the monotony of His posture must have been insufferably irksome, hour after hour, and day after day, even though it was the gentle arm of Mary that bore Ilim. Perhaps also the very maturity of His mind may itself have fatigued His infant Body. His sleep too, a region of wonders, was it a real rest? Did it refresh Him, as our sleep refreshes us 1 Did it relax the stiffened limb, quiet the beating heart, lull the busy brain, strengthen the weak eyes, and fill the little vase of life full of new bounding lightsome vigour, as it does with us? His Soul lay wide awake the while. His prayer and oblation never ceased. He saw always the olives of Gethsemane; He saw always the pillar and the crown; He saw always the Cross against the sky on Calvary. Was His sleep perchance only another form of weariness, a shadowy time more haunted by the images of the Passion than even His waking hours 1 All we know is that He allowed Himself no joy of any human thing, except what in each case was indispensable to the perfection of His Humanity.

Fear was another penance of His Infancy; and, as the sujBfering of fear is usually proportioned to the giftednesa of a man's soul, to our Lord it must have been intolerable agony. His Flight into Egypt and His sojourn there were full of terrors, some which we can understand, and some which are beyond the reach even of our imagination. It does not seem that we can suppose His science to have exempted Him from these impressions, when we know how He was ever keeping back from His inferior nature all those succours which could in any way diminish His sufferings. He used His privileges as ingresses to new modes of suffering, or to more exquisite degrees of suffering. "We should therefore suppose in this matter of fear that, out of the union of a mature reason with feeble infantine susceptibilities, His science would find the means of increasing the pains of fear, by enabling Him the better to appreciate dangers. We shall find that fear occupied no insignificant place amidst the horrors of His Passion, and we should therefore expect to find it in His Infancy.* But we have purposely enumerated it among the outward penances to show that we are dwelling on those painful impressions of flesh and blood, which are the products of fear, rather than on the inward trouble of soul which the imperfection of science would have caused. Even if He did not fear. He might suffer from the impressions of fear in that mysterious manner in which so many of the infirmities of our nature were made compatible with the Hypostatic Union. Perhaps even the distressing panics of childhood were not inconsistent with the maturity of His reason. But, in all these questions, what theology most imperatively requires of us is that we should leave intact the perfection of His science. Silence has always ranked amongst the austerest of monastic penances. It requires long proof an 1 many a mark of divine vocation before we dare trust an heroic * Sp« tli« Treatise on Calvary, chap. iv.

Boul to the observances of a silent order. Silent men are men that hide themselves in God after a most awful fashion. They even withdraw themselves from the admiring reverence of the Church by making the processes of their canonisation almost impossible. For many months the Infant Jesus only broke His silence by inarticulate sounds of pleasure or of pain, perhaps of the latter only. Yet how He must have longed to speak, who was so marvellously eloquent? Must He not have yearned to give forth light, in whom the whole communicative wisdom of the Godhead was comprised? When He was so full to overflowing of beautiful wisdom and ravishing intelligence, must not silence have burned in His Heart like a coal of fire? Must there not have been something in His being the Father's Word, which would make Him exult in speaking of the Father with His human tongue? When He gazed with speechless jubilee on Mary, did He not long to gladden her with the music of His voice? Did she not look for His voice now, as during the nine months she had looked for the appearing of His face 1 When He saw Joseph pale and tired, was He not full often fain to cheer the heart and revive the drooping spirits of the aged saint by the magic of an articulate word 1 Yet He refrained. He had put on the disguise of Childhood; and, by His perfect observation of it, the disguise became a divine reality: nay, it was a human reality as well, used as a disguise, yet truly no mere disguise itself. Be sure that silence never pressed on saint in calm Carthusian cell, or in garden-girdled hermitage of Camaldoli, as it pressed on the Sacred Heart of the Infant Jesus.

We should reckon also as a separate outward penance, what enters into all the other penances, as an ingredient, namely, the extreme delicacy of His Body, divinely purposed, expressly fashioned, for keenness of sufiering. It may be considered in itself as a distinct suffering apart from the way in which it heightened all His other sufferinga For we must believfc Him to have been so exquisitely sensitive, that many things were torments to Him which would not have been torments to us; and many things, which are indeed painful to us, would become in Him pains of quite a different character. The very winds should have blown gently on Him, the very rain drops have fallen on Him without their weight, the very ground have smoothed itself beneath His little feet. Yet so far from this, we are to behold omnipotence coming to the succour of incredible love, and holding this frail frame together amid a tempest of woes within and barbarities without, that were enough to quench a hundred human lives.

Such were the outward penances of the Sacred Infancy. We pass from them to consider its interior penances. As His bodily penances were nine in number, we may also reckon nine of these. The first was His view of the sins of men. As the soul is to the body, so was the sensitiveness and sympathy of our Lord's Soul to the delicacy and susceptibility of His Body. Even to us with our common gift of faith the word sin is a real terror. It expresses a whole world of darkness. It is the negation of all that is bright, hopeful, desirable, or attractive. The possibility of our sinning is a thought to make us tremble. The likelihood of our sinning is our deepest fear; and our actual sin is by far our most real unhappiness. Yet we can scarcely understand the shrinking heavenly-mindedness, which caused saints to faint away at the bare mention of the name of sin. Such a fact is an index to us of sublimities of love and of union with God, which are to us little better than terms of mystical theology, respectfully believed in, but out of the range, not only of our experience, but of our comprehension also.

How far then are we from being able to fathom our Lord's horror of sin*? The uncreated sanctity of His Divine Person had communicated to His Human Soul an unspeakable spotlessness, together with such a tenderness regarding the honour and purity of God as it is impossible for us to picture to ourselves, except in the most inadequate manner. If we might venture to think of disease as an emblem of a thing so holy, we might say that the wretched and unclean world was to our Lord's shrinking Soul what the meridian beam of the sun would be to a wounded eye. It was something intolerable. It was a spiritual agony, seemingly unendurable for a moment, yet actually endured His whole life long. If surprise could have found place in the Hypostatic Union, His Soul would have been appalled by the revelations which His science made to Him of sin. They were unmerciful overwhelming revelations. He saw the sins of men in the horror and foulness of their kinds, in the classes of their loathsome varieties, in the manifold uncleanness of their separate characteristics. He saw them in the frightful array of their number, their multiplication, their relapses, their prolific families, their long-enduring self-procreating consequences. He saw them in their weight, in the weight by which they pressed souls so low, in the weight by which they had almost oppressed the mercy of God under the feet of His justice, in the weight by which they were crushing Himself every moment. He saw the sin of sins which enabled Him in the Passion to expiate all sin, the sin of deicide, the murder of God, the martyrdom of the Creator. Thus He had to bear the weight of His Passion twice over, once as the Passion, then also as a sin or series of gigantic sins. He had to expiate His own Crucifixion.

For aU this was not a mere vision of a terrified and tormented spectator. He had to take all these ineffable sins into His own Heart, and as it were violate the inviolate sanctity of His Soul by clothing Himself in them, making them fit tight to Him and burn into the very sanctuary of His life. Gently and sweetly come the surges of the angelic chorus out of the lofty skies to His ear in the Cave; but the vision of all that sin is there. The palm whispers and the sands of the wilderness steam us with golden smoke in the slant rays of the setting sun: but the vision has dogged Him there. The lotus is slowly opening its fragrant pitcher to the rising sun upon the tremulous bosom of the Nile; but the vision of sin has fastened on Him never to be shaken off till death. He is speaking kind words to the women of Nazareth at the well, and the songs of the vine-dressers are rising gaily in the morning; but the joy of His Soul is muffled in this masterful vision of sin, which holds Him down, and seems as if it would stifle that inward purity which is the breath of His very being.

His Soul beheld God. It gazed into the very burning centre of His eternal justice. It came nearer to the fires than ever creature came before, or shall ever come again. The flames of an unspeakable divine indignation leaped out upon it as if it was their prey, invested it and seemed to feed upon it, as though it were their fuel. It was unconsumed because of the Hypostatic Union. But the fires would have withered up any created nature if it had not been impregnable and indestructible because of that surpassing union. Nevertheless it was a created Soul, and it must have shrunk inexpressibly from this vision of the justice of God. Here also, as in the case of sin, it was not merely a vision. He was the victim of that justice. It was to prey upon Him until it satisfied itself. It was preying upon Him at that hour. It could not be evaded

It was His own will; yet was it not on that account less terrible. For such sins what justice had to be appeased? By such sins what adorable consuming wrath had been holily excited? God's illimitable sanctity was to be the breadth of the expiation He had to make. The very vision of it was like a living thing. It laid hold upon His Infant Heart, bore it away to inaccessible rocks where neither human help nor human sympathy could come nigh it; and there like a vulture it fed upon it, taking a pleasure in staining its plumage with the blood as if it were thereby beautified. What manner of life must His Infant Heart have lived with such a dreadful guest, with so adorable a terror 1

His foresight of the Passion was another penance of His Infancy. Who does not know the pain when a single tliought is stronger than the whole mind, and brings the entire life into bondage to itself? It is a pain which cannot be endured for long. Yet the possession of the soul by a single sorrow is even a more intolerable lot. Under such circumstances life is not so much lived, as it is worn away, or gnawed piecemeal, with slow, dull, inextinguishable pain. But there is another lot which is even more dreadful than either of these. It is when some dark thought, some phantom, whether of terror or of guilt, seizes upon life, and makes it all its own, shuts the soul up in its own gloomy, sounding galleries, and haunts it there with a perpetual malicious ghostly haunting. Yet these are all faint figures of the possession of our Lord's Soul by the foresight of His Passion. When we muse upon it we lose ourselves. We would fain disbelieve in its reality. We cannot bear to think that such a life was ever lived on this fair earth of God's. The outward tumult of Calvary is positively a relief after the thought of that insufferable silent woe. If we attempt to follow it into the sweet mysteries of His dear Childhood, to accompany it as it runs downs, as on electric wires, into all the faculties of Hiu Soul, and to watch it mingling with His love of God, of Mary, and of men, it becomes not only insupportable, but absolutely unthinkable.

His foresight of men's ingratitude brings us to another of the sufferings of His Childhood, intense, but more within the compass of our understanding. We are happy now, because here we seem as if we could get near to Him with our pity. The tenderness of His Sacred Heart was perfect, in the fullest sense of the word. No one had ever been gifted with afifections like His. There has never been a sensitiveness which could be thought of alongside of His. In their strength, in their depth, in their fidelity, in their delicacy, never had human afifections been so divinely impassioned. They borrowed strength, as it were, from His science. The purity of their vehemence was from His surpassing sanctity. His human love was a thing by itself, a marvellous chaste fire, a might of vehement tenderness, to which there is no similitude in creation. But it was divine also as well as human. No little measure of that yearning and abounding love, which the Creator alone can feel, was communicated to the affection of His Human Heart. Hence no love of mother, wife, or sister was ever for passionate softness like to His. But it had set itself especially on one created object, the love of men. He craved their love with all the mysterious appetite of the Creator, adding to it the peculiar romance of a human heart, and that new love, half human and half divine, which belonged only to Him as our Redeemer. Yet it was in this very one thing that His love was baffled.

He saw how few would love Him, how few even of the few who served Him would serve Him out of love, how coldly they would love who loved at all, and how many who truly loved would fall from that love through the preference of an unworthy love. It was all as clear to Him in the days of His Childhood, as ever the history of the Church, as it unrolls itself in successive centuries, could make it. What blight is there upon human happiness worse than that of unrequited love, especially when it is a love which has beautified its own object by its own excess, and so been its own cause and origin, and when no knowledge of new unworthiness in the object gives a shelter to the wounded affections in the sense of having been deceived 1 Yet with such a woe was His Infant Heart continually pining.

There have been heroic hearts among men, who have felt the sufferings of others more than they felt their own. But the Sacred Heart of Jesus in an unexampled perfection possessed this heroism. The sufferings of those He loved were continually before Him. He saw the desolation of His Mother's heart, as her dolours grew daily in the light of Simeon's prophecy to their dread amplitude. He saw the slow martyrdom of dear St. Joseph, whose quiet nature seemed so unfit to suffer, that the sight of his sufferings was a peculiar distress, as when we look on some unnatural cruelty. He saw the fearful austerities of the Baptist issuing in a bloody martyrdom. He beheld the Holy Innocents, every one of whose separate pains His Infant Heart felt more keenly than the sufferers themselves or their wailing mothers. Here again His science furnishes merciless light to His shrinking soul, while His power of light adds intensity to His power of suffering; and to all is superadded the exquisite pain of knowing that of all these sufferings of those He loved He was Himself the cause.

His ineffable spouselike compassion for His Church, and His keen sympathy with all her subsequent vicissitudes, was another fountain of bitterness in His Infant Heart. The vision of countless Christians, who should carry into the endless fires of hell their thousands of frustrated graces, and of divine purposes which human malice had been free to fracture, was also another vision which was always before Him. It lay before Him, that dreadful homeless home of so many souls, as a miserable world of His own disappointed and rejected love. When His childish eyes were smiling with infantine wiles into the eyes of Mary, that vision lay close upon His Heart, breathing its fiery breath upon His gentleness. "We must add too, as a distinct penance in itself, the wearyful continuity of all these pains, sleeping or waking, clinging to His sensitive Heart like the burning garment of Greek mythology, whose potent drugs enabled it to eat into the quick of life with gradual but unsleeping fire. We must remember too, what the doctrine of His science teaches us, that these fiery visions did not succeed each other with a fearful interchange, which would have a semblance of relief because it was interchange at all, but they were all equally before Him at all times, ever present, ever claiming the entire breadth of His attention, ever exhausting the whole depth of His power of suffering, ever illuminated by the whole light of His science, not the least of whose ofiices it was to be a life-long instrument of torture.

The very forms of life, or states and conditions of His Infancy, were forms of penance. He had taken upon Himself the form of a servant. The swaddling-clothes were Hia fetters. He was born a subject of the Roman emperor, renouncing His own birthright. His life was one of the most utter helplessness, from His infant weakness to His not coming down from the Cross. Throughout it all He was the butt of men, and the spectacle of angels. He put Himself at the mercy of the animals and elements. Yet these were but outward shows of the inward bondage in which He was to the justice of God, to the sins of men, to

His own passionate holiness of love, and to their unspeakable ingratitude. He took upon Himself also the form of a sinner. For He was clothed in flesh like other men, and to be like them was content to have a reputed human father. He underwent the rite of Circumcision, that He might look still more like a sinner, paying to God a debt which was only due because of sin. The purification of His Mother was like a public and ceremonial acknowledgment of His shame. He even allowed Himself to be redeemed by doves, as if He forsooth needed redemption who came to redeem us all. Toil and pain, fatigue, infirmity, and death, were all consequences of sin, and to all of them He submitted Himself as never man was subject to them before.

Yet here also these were but outward signs compared with the form of a sinner which He wore deep down in His Soul before the eye of God's exacting jealousy and justice. He took upon Himself also the form of a sufferer. Or indeed it was a reality, rather than a form. All forms with Him were realities. Suffering was the condition of His life. It was the unseasonable companion of His Childhood. There was no moment when He was free from it. He told St. Catherine of Siena that during His Infancy He suffered especially every Friday. For there might be degrees of j)ain, in spite of the steadfastness of His science and the immutability of His love. His science and His love were not the only fountains of suffering which He had within Him. As He was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, so, in the eyes of the Father and in the terrible realities of His own Heart, He was the Crucified Jesus even from the days of Bethlehem. His sufferings exceeded all martyrdoms, even in each single hour of His infant life. He expressed this truth when He appeared to Domenica del Paradiso as a Babe all wounded.

The three virtues of His Passion were also the three virtues of His Infancy; and the heroic exercise of them furnished the occasions for the fourth class of the penances of His Childhood. These virtues were obedience, humility, and patience. He was obedient with the perfection of obedience to the Eternal Father, to the pagan emperor, to Mary, to Joseph, and to Herod. When we remember who He was, and what and how great were the privileges of His Human Soul, we shall understand how wonderful this virtue of obedience was in Him, and how heroic its exercise to His science, which perceived from one point of view its most divine incongruity, and to His love, when it came to involve others, as it mostly did, and especially His beloved Mother, in Its difficulties. To subject Mary to the journey to Bethlehem, to her repulse there, and to the vileness of the Cave, was a marvellous act of obedience to the Roman government, the absence of which would have seemed to no one an imperfection. To be turned from his course, as an autumnal leaf is wafted aside by a breath of wind, by the miserable Herod or Archelaus, was a strange indignity for the Incarnate Word. But it came within the requirements of the perfection of His obedience. It would be endless to enter upon His humility. It runs through all the twelve principal mysteries of the Infancy. They one and all breathe the odour of an inconceivable lowliness.

The exercise of humility is always more or less penitential to every one. But there was a violence in it to the glory-circled Soul of Jesus, which beheld God, and was beatified already, which gave it a peculiar character in our Blessed Lord. His patience too was almost more wonderful at Bethlehem than it was at Calvary. In both He was for ever holding back those succours with which His Divine Nature was ready to assist His Humanity; in both He was refraining that flood of beatitude which was fain to deluge all the faculties of His Soul, and to run over through the avenuea of His glorified senses. But in Bethlehem He was making the Infancy bear the burden of His Manhood. His sufferings were as sensible there as on Calvary; and they were more unseasonable, more inopportune, more incommodious, more incongruous at Bethlehem than on Calvary, if we may dare so to speak, not forgetting how incongruous always anything but glory was to the Incarnate Word, whose sufferings derive their sole congruity from the immensity of His dear love.

There is something painful to the tenderness of devotion in this view of our Saviour's Infant Life. We do not dwell on it with any predilection. But it is part of the solemn truth of the Incarnation. It leads us into depths of doctrine, which cannot be otherwise than fruitful to our souls; and it discloses to us some of the inward operations of the Hypostatic Union, which will kindle in us more and more the spirit of adoration. What a vision for Mary must have been this interior life of her heavenly Babe! She saw the Eternal Word, the boundless joy of angels, the uncreated splendour of heaven, the brightness of God's perfections, feeling Himself the cursed of God, the outcast of creation, with all the odious weight of the world's impurities upon Him, clothed, disguised, and cumbered with the many-folded iniquity of its millions of sinners, through all its long thousands of years. She beheld all this laid on the shrinking purity of His immaculate Soul. She saw the Home of creatures away from home Himself, and lost, lost in a sea of sin, and sick, sick as at Gethsemane, sick all His Three-and-Thirty Years, sick in the days of His dear Childhood, when through His love all other children are careless, bright, and gay. She saw the tear-drops form in the eyes of the Eternal, and she trembled as she saw.

Oh how terrible in its sweetness was the Motherhood of Mary! Those tears flowed that we might smile, and have a right to smile, and a cause to smile, and might serve God with our smiles, and love Him with our smiles, and almost do penance with our smiles; for, in all the happiest deeds of easiest holiness, the Babe of Bethlehem has laid up for us now a virtue to satisfy the vastness of God's justice. Henceforth, after those tears of Bethlehem, if we also weep human tears, they are either tears of sweet gracious sorrow for sin, or gladsome tears from excess of love, or tears from the pleasant pitifulness of pathetic compassion; and even with regard to these tears, privileges though they be rather than penances, the hour will come when the kind hand of Jesus Himself in His Father's house shall wipe them away for ever.

Footnotes

1. Sister Mary of Agreda has many remarkable passages in the Mistica Ciudad on the Holy Land and the Holy Places. She says that the faithful have a special light, over and above tradition, to keep them right about the sites of the Holy Places, p. ii. 1. iii. cap. xvi. — that devotion to the Holy Land is a hidden support to catholic kingdoms, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xviii. — that our Lady j^rayed that catholics might always have the sanctuary of Bethlehem in their hands, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xix.— that heathen and misbelievers gain temporal blessings from living in the vicinity of the Holy Places, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xxiv. — that the faithful also, and especially the Franciscans, get graces from living there, p. iii. 1. vii. cap. xvii. — that the angels who now guard the Holy Places are the same as those to whom our Lady spoke when she visited the Holy Places from St. John's house, p. iii. 1. viii. cap. i.— that a hidden force against demons has been communicated by our Blessed Lord to the Holy Places, p. iii. 1. viii. cap. vi. — that the last time our Lady visited the Stations she made especial prayers for all those who should hereafter do so, p. iii. 1. viii. cap. xviii. — that on the same occasion our Lord descended to her on Calvary, and on the spot promised her He would be very liberal of redeeming grace, that she kissed the ground, and made a beautiful apostrophe to the Holy Land, that she gave the angels fresh charge over the Holy Places, and that the sins of men have forfeited the peculiar custody of the Holy places which she established, p. iii. 1. viii. cap. xviii ↩

2. Among the number of beautiful things in Sister Mary of Agreda, the following is anaong the most beautiful, — that our Blessed Lord had in His Mother all the intimacy and perfection He had wished for from the whole human race, and of which our sin had disappointed Him. Mistica Giudad, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xxix. ↩

3. Sister Agreda has also a remarkable passage on the knowledge of the Passion infused into Joseph at the time of St. Simeon's prophecy. Mistica Ciudad, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xx. ↩