Chapter VIII. Heaven Already

There are some who have said that joy is a more shallow thing than sorrow. Surely this is not a just view to take of God's creation, even since the fall. Truly joy is undermost, and sorrow is uppermost; but from this very cause joy is the deepest of the two. The heart of the spiritual world, where its central fires are, is deepest joy. The world of sorrow rests upon it, as on its secure foundation. As under every stone there is moisture, so under every sorrow there is joy; and when we come to understand life rightly, we see that sorrow is after all but the minister of joy. We dig into the bosom of sorrow to find the gold and precious stones of joy. Sorrow is a condition of time, but joy is the condition of eternity. All sorrow lies in exile from God; all joy lies in union with Him. In heaven joy will cast out sorrow, whereas there is not a lot on earth from which sorrow has been able altogether to banish joy. Joy clings to us as the creatures of God. It adheres to us wherever we go. Its fragrance is palpable about us. Its sunshine lights upon us, and gives us some sort of attractiveness above that which is our own. Joy hangs about everything which God has had to do with. There is only one place where there is no joy, and that dark region is under a special law of its own, and is darkness because it would not be light. There is an inevitable joyousness about all that belongs to God.

We are angry with ourselves because we do not sorrow long enough for our dead. We think it almost a wrong to the memory of those we loved. But it is the elasticity of life. Our hearts bound upwards, because God is above. We cannot help ourselves. The very purling of our blood in our veins is joyous, because life is a gift direct from God. In truth joy and sorrow are not contradictories. Sorrow is the setting of joy, the foil of joy, the shadow which softens joy, the gloom which makes the light so beautiful, the night which causes each morning to have the gladness of a resurrection. They live together, because they are sisters. Joy is the eldest-born, and when the younger dies, as she will die, joy will keep a memory of her about her for evermere, a memory which will be very gracious, so gracious as to be part of the bliss of heaven.

There are souls too in the world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere, and of leaving it behind them when they go. Joy gushes from under their fingers, like jets of light. There is something in their very presence, in their mere silent company, from which joy cannot be extricated and laid aside. Their influence is an inevitable gladdening of the heart It seems as if a shadow of God's own gift had passed upon them. They give light without meaning to shine; and coy hearts, like the bashful insects, come forth, and almost lay aside their sad natures, and weave dances in the golden beams of these bright natures. Somehow too the joy all tnrns to God. Without speaking of Him, it preaches Him. Its odour is as the odour of His presence. It leaves tranquillity behind, and not unfrequently sweet tears of prayer. All things grow silently Christian under its reign. It brightens, ripens, softens, transfigures, like the sunlight, the most improbable things which come within its sphere. A single gifted heart like this is the apostle of its neighbourhood. Every one acknowledges its divine right, which it never thinks of claiming. There is no need to claim it; for none resist its unconquerable gentleness.

Joy is like a missioner who speaks of God; sorrow is a preacher who frightens men out of the deadliness of sin into the arms of their heavenly Father, or who weans them by the pathos of his reasoning from the dangerous pleasures of the world. These bright hearts are more like the first than the second. They have a great work to do for God; and they do it often most when they realise it least. It is the breath they breathe, and the star they were born under, and the law which encircles them. They have a light within them, which was not delusive when they were young, and which age will only make more golden without diminishing its heat. To live with them is to dwell in a perpetual sunset of unboisterous mirth and placid gaiety. Who has not known such souls? Who has not owed all that is best in him, after grace, to such as those? Happy is he who had such for the atmosphere of his parental home! Its glory may have sunk beneath the horizon: but he himself will be illuminated by its glow until the hour comes for his own pensive setting. Of a truth he is the happiest, the greatest, and the most godlike of men, as well as the sole poet among men, who has added one true joy to the world's stock of happiness.

There are other souls who for their own good are in want of joy, whose gift is rather that of an unusual capacity of joy than a giving of it forth They drink it in as thirsty land drinks in the rain; and it is to be remembered we are speaking, not of pleasure, but of joy. It seems necessary to them for the healing of their souls, as necessary as sorrow is for the great multitude of men. Nevertheless these souls, who are as it were saved by joy, are many more in number than we should at first sight suppose. Our observations in the world are continually bringing them to light in the most unlikely places. They are perpetually taking shelter under the secret ministrations of the Christian priesthood. Joy seems to be as needful for them as the sunlight is for plants. They grow and expand under it, and colour themselves with the blossoms of various virtues. Neither is their growth altogether upward, as unkindly judgment, which is always shallow judgment, commonly supposes. They take deep root, the deeper root the hotter the sun shines. They seek the coolness and the moisture which are only deep down. They are for the most part humble souls, and very steadfast ones; and it is rather the excess of their power, than the vacillation of their weakness, which makes them need so much of the spirit of gladness. Joy is ballast to them, and not sails. Their nature is made for swift sailing; it is joy that makes them safe sailers. Joy is a perpetual presence of God to them, and a clear well out of which the spirit of prayer is lading the cool waters at all hours. It is joy which gives them their love of mortification. It is joy which furnishes the exuberant charity of their judgments of others. Joy softens them, deepens them, elevates them. They can do all things well when they are joyous, and better when they are in exceeding joy.

The height of their joy is always the measure of the depth of their humility. They cannot understand how it should be otherwise, when they are warned lest it should delude them or puff them up. They have their share of sorrows, and bear their part in the world of sorrow very gracefully. But they have communications with that deep underworld of joy which lies beneath the world of sorrow, and by these communications the life of their souls is set free. They have an unbroken inward contentment, because they are always successful, as successful as they desira For the spirit of joy enables them to realise a truth which becomes the anchor of their lives that the endeavour is always grander than the work, because it has a greater capacity of holding the divine. They are unworldly; because the greater light within them extinguishes the lesser light without them. Yet they are happy in the world with the world's common simple blameless happiness. For does not earth look more than ever beautiful, when our ears are stopped with the sounds of heaven 1 The deaf ear gives all its lost power to the eye. He who hears only angels' songs, while he looks on a fair scene of earth, what brighter vision may he covet on this side the grave? He realises the world too little to perceive its evil, or he does not dwell on it, even if he perceives it, much less does he become entangled in its defilement. It is but a show to him; and he needs but a show to make him happy; for those sounds in his ears are causing beatitude in his heart. The windmills in the green landscape go round as silently and almost as gracefully, as the distant woods wave in the wind; but, when we come near, they creek and clatter, like the grating tongues of wicked men. But the gay pageants of earth's landscapes are always silent windmills to the happy man. He does not go near enough to hear them, and if he did, there are other voices in his ear, and he would hardly hear the outward noise. Joy too can try the soul no less than sorrow, and it has mystical implements of its own wherewith to do the work. It has fears also of its own, like its sister sorrow; and it is a gift of the Holy Ghost, which she is not. She is but the dower of a judicious providence. Finally, joy has its own saints to be examples to its own souls; and they are of all saints those, the shining of whose light the world is least able to comprehend.

Beauty is akin to joy, and the beauty of heavenly things has the same effect of making us unworldly. Much of worldliness consists in a mental and moral atmosphere; and the beauty of divine things, bringing with them their own special joy, surrounds us with a supernatural atmosphere, which assimilates our inward life to itself after a tima We shall find that this will be the result of our reflections upon the joys of the Sacred Infancy. If it prophecies of earthly years by its shadows of Calvary, it prophecies also of the eternal years by the Heaven which it has already in its heart. As Calvary is the ground-melody of Bethlehem, so is Heaven the deeper ground-melody of both.

But where is there room for joy in an Infancy so preternaturally peopled with sorrows and perpetually eclipsed with a startling gloom, as we have seen it to be in the last Chapter 1 If there is a realm of joy to be opened out before us equal in extent to that other one of woe, how can it be that the one will not neutralise the other, and that both will not seem to us but fictitious unrealities of the schools? Our faith will teach us that so it was, even though it may not make clear to us the method of this supernatural harmony. We do not doubt our Lord's agony in the garden to have been mental torture of the most exquisite description. Yet we as little doubt that at that very time He enjoyed the beautifying Vision of the Most Holy Trinity. We cannot understand the operations of Two Natures in One Person: we cannot understand the operations of a Human Nature with a Divine Person; so neither can we understand the twofold life of Yiater and Comprehensor, which our faith teaches us that the Soul of Christ lived on earth. So neither can we allow ourselves to speak as as if the Two Natures were but two voices or two musical instruments, and that the Person of the Word now sounded upon one, and now upon another, in alte^ nation or snccession. As the operations of the Divine Kature were incessant, so also ivere the operations of the Sacred Humanity incessant also; while the perfect science of the Human Soul rendered His whole inward life simultaneous and unsuccessive, so that He did not merely change from joy to sorrow, and from sorrow back to joy. It is true then, that within the limits of the Sacred Infancy there is a world of joy as vast, complete, and wonderful, as the world of sorrow which we have seen already to be there. They were two lives, and yet but one life. They went on together uncommingling, yet at the same time neither independent nor apart No boundary can be drawn between the two, any more than we can trace a boundary between the waters of the river and the waters of the lake even while as yet they are unconfused. The lower phenomena of the impressionable part of His human nature were so far overruled and constrained, as that His beatitude should not deaden the anguish of His Agony, or His foresight of the Passion embitter His joy in the love of His immaculate Mother.

The world of sorrow then, with all its consequences, was as real and substantial as if it was His only world, as if it were the length and breadth of all His life. The world of joy also, with all its consequences, was no less of a reality, and covered His whole life with as remarkable a universality of glory as His sorrow did. Only, because of the circumstances of the Incarnation, and the prominence of our Lord's redeeming work, the world of joy is least known to us, because it is undermost. It had no such outward revelation of itself on earth, as Calvary was an outward revelation of the inward sorrow. His life in heaven now is the out-blossoming of His secret beatitude on earth. Neither does His joy appeal to our sympathies so directly or so touchingly as His sorrow. We are selfish even in our purest love of ouf Blessed Lord. We cannot do without His Calvary. We are drawn to His Cross, because by His Cross He has drawn us to Himself. What have we to do with His brightness yet, who are trembling applicants for His Precious Blood? Moreover His joy was His own; and, although we were not altogether without our place in it, as in what that belongs to Him has not His love given us a place? nevertheless we have not to do with it as we have to do with His sorrows, who have caused them by our sins. By virtue of the Hypostatic Union there was an adorable vastness in our Lord's Soul which enabled these two worlds of joy and grief to coexist, and to be coeval fountains of innumerable tender mysteries.

To Saint Joseph the Sacred Infancy was his cross. Bethlehem was to him instead of Calvary. The earthly troubles and inconveniences, which the Incarnation brought along with it, fell in great measure upon him as his peculiar burden. It came too when he was comparatively old. The end for which he lived he did not arrive at until he was mature in years. The treasures of God were committed to his sole keeping. Doubts and fears, anxiety and haste, public notice and difficult responsibility, are trials which press heavily on those whose first manhood is passed, and more heavily than common on a tender and afi'ectionate heart like that of Joseph. We cannot avoid picturing him to ourselves as one who was rather fitted for contemplation than for action, both on account of his exceeding tenderness, and also of his remarkable quietness of spirit; yet out of the bashful timidity of a contemplative he had to draw the bravery of an apostle. For well nigh thirteen years the Incarnation hardly allowed him one day of peace; and then when something of an anxious peace came to him at Nazareth, the fires of divine love from the vicinity of Jesus silently fretted his life away. We feel that his whole early life was but a preparation for the unworldly office he was at last to assume.

Most saints have one eminent cross, which towers above their other crosses, and gives the character as well to their sanctity as to their lives. AVho can doubt but that Bethlehem was Joseph's cross? Yet was it also a land of pleasantness, a very world of joy, even to him. He would hardly have exchanged Bethlehem for heaven, just as we know Simeon had prayed for his rest and release to wait, until he had seen the Lord's Christ on earth. It was dear to him, not only because it was a cross and he a saint, and the saints are ever enamoured of their crosses, but because it was a marvellous and abounding joy. The mysteries which chequered the twelve years were fountains to him of holy gladness and of divine love. The sight of Jesus was an endless vision, not only soothing the soul, but filling it to overflowing with spiritual sweetness. The light in His eyes, the tones of His voice, the play of His fingers. His attitudes in His various occupations, were all an overwhelming delight to Joseph's soul. His spiritual discernment, and his union with God, enabled him to penetrate deeply into all these things.

If the unborn Baptist leaped for joy when he heard the sound of Mary's voice, what must the company of the sinless Mother have been to Joseph, to whom next to Jesus she most belonged 1 His conjugal love was actually part of his religion.¹ His tender ministries to her were a worship which sanctified him and raised him near to God. Mary is the copious fountain of joy to the whole earth; and it was Joseph who dwelt nearest to the fountain where it sprang all fresh and abundant from the rock. What a joy must she not have been to him! His office towards the Incarnate Word was one which he could hardly ever exercise without trembling. But surely it was as the Thrones are said to tremble in heaven, with an excess of reverence which is also an excess of bliss. If exaltation humbles the saints, and if humility is of all graces the grace most prolific of interior joy, how great must have been the humility of Joseph, how transcending the rapture of his joy! Love wore him out, and so he died. But w^e may well believe it was through the concussions of joy within his soul that love came to slay him. At Nazareth his outward cares were fewer. His attention was more exclusively concentrated on Jesus. Jesus also, as He grew up, and took His share in the toils of the poor household, in some sense passed more from the jurisdiction of Mary to that of Joseph. Thus Joseph's commanding of Jesus, teaching Him, coming in contact with Him, were more frequent and more direct; and if, as we believe, each order that he gave Him shook his own soul to its centre with thrills of trembling rapture, we can understand how the aged saint, in the beautiful furnace of those last burning years, would become the helpless prey of love. Moreover, the shadow of the Eternal Father, as it settled down upon him, could not do otherwise than bring with it a joy too full of profound reverence to be agitation, but one which would have laid too great a weight of bliss upon a soul that was not expressly chosen to bear such an incomparable burden. He was drawn within the ring of those unutterable shadows which the Holy Trinity is pleased to cast around itself; and if Abraham's bosom was sweet rest, full of visionary beatitude, where the old patriarchs awaited the opening of heaven by the Risen Jesus, what must the bosom of that awful divine cloud have been, in which the soul of Joseph was involved? Even to our hearts, devotion to the Holy Trinity is one of simple exultation, because it is also one of the purest adoration. What must have been the jubilee of Joseph's Spirit 1 That it was the shadow of the First Person which was on him, unspeakably intensified his joy. To him was communicated the likeness of the incommunicable Father, of whom even apostles said, Show us the Father, and it is enough for us. He was like a sort of visible mission of the Unsent Father, to whose Person mission does not belong; only His peculiar presence goes along with the mission of the Other Two. Thus also by his similitude to the Father did he enjoy a mysterious similitude to the Son, and by his office towards Mary he wore also the likeness of the Holy Ghost, the uncreated jubilee of the Godhead. Who is sufficient to analyse the heavenly joy, which was blended in the waters of fountains such as these? Who can name its kind, or test its virtues, or put into figures its proportions and its quantities 1 Yet this shadow of the Eternal Father was cast on Joseph by the Sacred Infancy. Was it not then to him a land of pleasantness, and in its own way, also, a land of peace, even though it fell to his lot as a heritage of suffering 1 The same is still more true of Mary. Her double simultaneous life of sorrow and of joy is one of the most striking similitudes between her Immaculate Heart and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She was the queen of joys, as well as the mother of dolours. Her sorrows during the Sacred Infancy were little less than a transcript of His, proportioned to the measure of her souL The words of Simeon had lodged Calvary in her heart almost in its fulness. But, independently of this, the greater number of the mysteries of the Sacred Infancy were mysteries of sorrow to her. The joy of the Nativity was dashed by much that was bitter, not for her own sake, but for the

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adoring love she bore her Son. The Presentation was a joyous mystery, and yet it was the first of the seven dolours which the Church selects for our especial commemoration. All bright things had their dark side with her. As it was the self-imposed law of His heart, so was it the love-imposed law of hers. The Flight into Egypt was a sorrow that would have been wild, had wildness comported with the perfections of her queenly soul. Her sojourn there was a sorrow also; and her return was fruitful in hitherto inexperienced vicissitudes of sufiering. The turning away from Jerusalem brought with it fresh grief; and the Infancy ended with that terrible trial, His dereliction of her for three days. Surely never did land more truly bring forth sorrows a hundredfold, than did the Sacred Infancy to Mary.

Yet what were all the joys of all the saints to hersi Her very sorrows were so full of joy that she would not have exchanged them for the most ravishing sweetness that ever fettered a holy soul in a perfect captivity of delights. If we except the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was ever any fountain of joy opened in creation to compare with her Maternity? The splendour of its purity, the depth of its affections, the heavenliness of its mystery, the loveliness of its exaltation, the magnificence of its prerogatives, the divine beauty of its object, the ineffable raptures of its experience, what has there ever been in God's wide world to compare with the wonderful realities of the Virgin-Mother's bliss, realities which we are so far from comprehending, that the greater part of them we are unable even to conjecture or suspect 1 There are differences in degree so great as almost to constitute a difference in kind, in consequence of their rising into other atmospheres. So the multiplication of all the ardent love of all human mothers will not figure for us Mary's maternal love of Jesus: and what is love, even while it is weeping, but the intensest of earthly joys 1

Indeed it would be no extravagance to say, that all the joys of the angelic world could make no joy that should compare, either for quantity or quality, with the single joy of Mary's Motherhood. She had many joys besides that; although, whether we look forward to her Assumption or backward to her Immaculate Conception, the Maternity was the fountain of them all. But, considering exclusively the direct joy of her Maternity, it overtops and outshines the entire joy of the angelical creation. From the day of the Nativity this joy was always at its height in her soul. We have no reason to believe that it ever was suspended. We cannot so think of our Blessed Lady's soul as to suppose that even her dolours overwhelmed it, or that her pain ever concentrated exclusively upon itself, as on one point, the capacious, far-reaching faculties of her highly-gifted and Christlike mind. Doubtless such a thing may be said; but the more we think of her marvellous inward life, the less can we bring ourselves to say such things. At any rate, during the Sacred Infancy, with the Babe upon her lap, touching Him, seeing Him, hearing Him, feeding, clothing, washing, nursing Him, with all the varieties of a Mother's fondling gracefully blending with the creature's delighted adoration and the ever new bliss of a fresh astonishment, the joy of her Maternity must have reigned, if ever, over her magnificent soul. Indeed her joy is one of her wonders, to the contemplation of which the Church calls us by the devotion which she authorises and suggests.

She chooses seven joys in particular out of our Mother's life, which we are to contemplate. Of these seven five are confined to the period of the Sacred Infancy, while the Resurrection is as it were the joyous finding in the temple renewed a second time, the restoration of that Babe of Bethlehem, who, when He was taken down from the Cross, assumed again His old childish resting-place upon Hia

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Mother's lap; and the Ascension was the exaltation of that Flesh and Blood to which such honour was no less due in the crib of Bethlehem than it was that bright afternoon on Olivet. The Ascension was but the publication of tJie sweet secret of the Infancy. He, who studiously and intently meditates on Mary's seven joys, will soon perceive lihat, among all the glories of creation, the joy of that sinless being is among the greatest, catching inner lights from heaven and wonderfully reflecting them in its calm profundities, shifting from diversity to diversity of splendour, each change of which makes eye-music to him who gazes thereon in reverential love, unfolding for us jealous folds in the character of God, and disclosing Him to us in the grandeur of His exceptional ways and engaged upon His unusual works. At times too the mists part in the bright landscape of her joys, and we seem to see, as through cloud-windows, or glowing fissures in a sunset, into the marvel creation would have been had it never fallen, and indeed actually was when it came fresh and virginal from the Creator's hand. But it is especially in the mysteries of the Infancy, that these gleams are most vivid and most frequent. In her, therefore, throughout our Lord's Childhood there was a heaven of light as well as an earth of darkness. She, too, like Him walked the world in the darkness of her exile. She too, imperfectly like Him, had nearly attained her heavenly home, though she had not, like Him, perfectly attained it. With her, as with Him, it was the very splendour of her heaven of light, which made the darkness of her earth so pathetically dark.

But the grand creation of joy is in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Never has the blessedness of God been poured forth outside Himself with such overwhelming splendour or with such unstinted munificence, as over the created nature which He vouchsafed to assume to Himself. At all moments, even during the dereliction upon the Cross, and without impeding the vehemence of His affliction, Jesus was almost infinitely blessed. But, if there was a time during His sojourn upon earth, which was more eminently than another a period of joy, it was during what are called the joyful mysteries of His Childhood. The usage of the faithful, which is mostly very accurate theology, assigns joy to the Infancy as instinctively as it attributes sorrow to the Passion, and glory to the forty days which followed the Kesurrection. It is true that the perfection of our Lord's science give an extraordinary equability to His life, by enabling Him to live as it were different lives simultaneously. But, at least for our devotion, if we may not look for joy during His Childhood, where may we look for it at all? Moreover the object of our present enquiry is not so much, or at least not so directly, the whole joy of Jesus, as the special joys of His Infancy. But we must consider first of all the joy of the Eternal Word, the joy of that Divine Person who had assumed this Human Nature, and to whom this Human Heart belonged, which was a cabinet of gladness enough to beatify a thousand heavens.

If we might say of one attribute rather than another, that in it resides the life of God, we should say that it was in His beatitude. It is in His understanding, because His understanding is the utmost bliss. It is in His uncreated sanctity; for His holiness beatifies Him, It is in His self-sufficiency; because His self-sufficiency is the realisation of His bliss. He is a simple act, and we cannot otherwise qualify the act or characterise it than as bliss. The eternal life of glorified spirits and souls, which He pours into them, is an outpouring of His bliss. To see Him as He is, is simply bliss. Beatitude is joy, divine joy. If it is allowable to use such words, joy is the vital thing in God. He must be God, because He is eternally and self-sufficiently

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blessed. He must be eternally and self-sufficiently blessed, precisely because He is God. God is not filled with life, as He fills created vases with angelic, human, or other life. He is Himself life, absolute life, a living act. But in our necessarily indistinct conceptions of Him, joy is to His being what life is to ours, only that His being and His joy are not only inseparable, but identical, and therefore cannot stand in any relation to each other, as our being and our joy stand to one another. God is what He is, and we cannot change Him by any views of ours. But much depends for ourselves upon the view we take of God. Some one view of Him is always to each mind the truest view; and those, whose ideas of God become simplified and luminous by looking at His majesty from the point of view of His beatitude, will find that it will materially influence their choice of opinions in theology, and bring forth many fruitful consequences in their practical devotion.

To my eyes, I confess, that the longer I am allowed by His forbearance to look at God, the more one twofold view of Him fills my soul with a love which is always maturing itself in fear, and an astonishment which never wears off, and overawes while it attracts; — outside Himself, and towards us. His simplicity appears to resolve itself into a love, which is intensified by His justice, while inside Himself, and independent of us, it seems to resolve itself into a beatitude, whose placidity is deepened by a creative yearning to communicate His bliss. It is as if His love were dissatisfied with His inward contentment, and broke forth, and ran beyond Him, while His beatitude brooded over the abysses of its own eternity, and islanded His unapproachable purity from the contact of created things. Such is the semblance with which the mind disguises God, as if His life were thus mystically a taking in of breath and a breathing it forth like ours. He has much to pardon in our worthiest conceptions of His majesty; and to holy fear all that it requires will be condoned.

It is only with feelings of speechless adoration that we can venture to look on the Person of the Unbegotten Father with His infinite fecundity. There is something awful in the joy which He has in Himself. His complacency in His illimitable perfections has not the shape and fashion of any created thing, however magnificent or marvellous. He knows Himself. He comprehends His own immensity. He fathoms the depths of His beauty. His life is beatitude. It cannot be otherwise than an infinity of glorious bliss. But His joy is not the effect of His exploring His own Being by His self-knowledge. All things begin equally in Him in whom is no beginning, or shadow of beginning, at all. His joy is His fecundity, and His fecundity His joy. His knowledge of Himself, a knowledge which cannot but unspeakably beatify Him, though not as cause, is the production of another coequal Person. His simple beholding of Himself is not a process; it is substantial and vital, a living consubstantial Person. He gazes upon Himself in gladness, and He beholds the Word, whom that self-knowledge has produced; and in the perfect similitude of the Word He beholds Himself. The Word is the Father's joy in Himself, because He is His knowledge of Himself, and His knowledge is unbeginning, uncreated joy. The Word Himself, thus eternally produced, is an infinity of joy in Himself also, co-equal in vastness, in magnificence, in eternity, with the joy of the Father. Thus the Generation of the Word is the illimitable joy of the Divine Understanding.

The meeting, we are speaking human words which are necessarily false, of these two Oceans of bliss, the Father and the Son, causes as it were a double infinity of joy which is as unimaginable as it is indescribable. But so fruitful is this joy, so joyous the fruitfulness, that it is absolutely necessitated to produce a third infinity of joy, the Person of the Holy Ghost. So universally is this Divine Person, who is produced by the love of the Father and Son, as by one principle, — so universally is He referred to joy, that the ancient Fathers named Him the Jubilee of the Father and the Son, an uncreated Jubilee, the never beginning and the always-beginning self-exultation of the Godhead. As the Son is light, the Spirit is fire. As the Son is wisdom, the Spirit is love; while the Father is eminently self-sufficiency and power. Thus the necessary inward emanations of the Godhead seem to simplify themselves in joy the further they advance, and their Term, who can never be overpassed, is named of the Christian Church the everlasting eternally-proceeding Jubilee. Thus the Procession of the Holy Ghost is the illimitable joy of the Divine Will.

Thus contemplating the joy of the Father and the joy of the Holy Ghost, we may now gaze upon the joy of the Word, which is as it were contained between those other Two Divine Persons. We are looking on an ocean, as it were from above, from a cloud in the air, an impossible station which we may imagine. It is an ocean which has no shores, and yet millions of beings lie external to it. It is as unfathomable as it is vast, yet it was all contained in the littleness of the Babe of Bethlehem. Nevertheless through the indistinctness of this mighty ocean, we seem as we gaze to distinguish eight oceans in the bosom of the one, as the one itself is but one of three. There is, first of all, the joy of the Son in having such a Father. The delight, which is His life, is a perfect knowledge of the inexhaustible grandeurs of the Father. His Father's excellence is so infinite that it fills His own infinity. But that such an excellence should stand to Him in the relation of Father is a joy so unspeakable, a contentment so peculiar, a glory so singular and so unshared, that we cannot compass it with the extremest subtlety of thought.

Yet the second joy, that He Himself is such a Son, is a joy as vast and as unspeakable as the other. The perfection of His likeness to the Father stirs His joy like a tide, and stirs it even to its lowest depths. It is as great a bliss to Him, and yet a distinct bliss to be Himself the Son as it is to Him to have the Father for His Father. His simple filiation, apart, if we can think of it apart, from the excellences which it combines, is in itself an abyss of uncreated exultation. He broods over it with everlasting complacency. It is a filiation always actual, for He is being eternally begotten every moment, and therefore it is a beatitude always fresh and always new, like morning on the sea.

The third ocean gleams dazzlingly under the mist which always lies unuplifted over the secret things of God. He and the Father are one; and from Them, as from a single fountain, proceeds the Co-equal Spirit in a silent motionless Procession of uncreated splendour, an adorable fiery Jubilee, completing, binding, limiting the Godhead, and exhausting the mysterious necessities of the Divine Nature. It is God Himself, building Himself up like a fortress of fire between Himself and all possible things besides, the ever-burning, eternal Watchtower overlooking all creation's realms, a Limit to creation, as well as a Limit to the Godhead, a Limit to creation which can itself have no created limit, but to which the Third Person of the Holy Trinity is the Limit in sight of which the farthest ascending creatures come, and yet come not up to it, like the far-seen palisades of mountains that bound some earthly view, the feet of which the misty outstretched plains do not appear to reach, or touch. The joy of the Son in His fecundity, His bliss in producing with the Father a Spirit so adorably co-equal with Himself and with Them both, is His third joy, a glory which is a mere assemblage of definitions when we describe our faith, but which, like all definitions, is a glorious transfiguration of sanctity within our hearts. There is a power of holiness in true theology, which they who slight it will one day uselessly regret..

There is a fourth joy of the Son in the might and sweetness of that mutual love of the Father and Himself, which mingling in one fountain, had the power from its commingling to produce the Holy Ghost. The method, if we may so speak, by which the Holy Ghost was produced, is to the Son a joy as infinite, as the fact of His production. Under what similitude shall we speak of that mutual love of the Father and the Son, and of its unutterable operation 1 We might perchance find some figure in the beautiful magnificence of fire, only that its loveliness is too terrible both to eye and ear to let our frightened nature be at peace in the presence of its power; and its power becomes beautiful in proportion as it is beyond control. That love is two fountains, and yet they were never two. They unite, yet they never were disunited. They produce, yet they never were without Him whom they produce. He is not a consequence of the love which produces Him but coequal with it, coeternal with it, consubstantial with it. There are mysteries which even heaven will not make plain. They will be among the most peculiar of the joys of heaven. Such perhaps will be the method by which the Holy Ghost proceeds from, yet is not generated by, the mutual love of the Father and the Son. The Word is the wisdom of the Godhead. The possession of secrets is one of wisdom's jo}t^ a different joy from that of its communicating them. The incommunicable knowledge of the manner of the Holy Ghost's Procession is perhaps one of the glad secrets of the Word. It is a divine jubilee to Him that none can comprehend the outflow of His Uncreated Jubilee.

His fifth joy lies before our imagination as something so surpassingly beautiful, that we long to have words to express even what our poor inadequate thoughts are able to think. It arises from another twofold love, like the twofold love of the Father and Himself, by which the Holy Spirit was produced. It is the love of the Holy Ghost and Himself, His blissful love of the Spirit and the Spirit's blissful love of Him. In His love of the Holy Spirit there is that peculiar blessedness, which forms an element in the joy of the Father's love of Him, as of the Person He has produced, and which the Son could not have felt were He not with the Father the producer of the Holy Ghost. His joy would have wanted this particular eminence, if the Holy Spirit had proceeded from the Father alone. In the same manner also that other element in the Father's joy, which arises from the love of the Person whom He has produced and is producing, enters into the Son's inheritance of joy, as He receives the same kind of love from the Holy Ghost who is proceeding from Him, which He Himself renders to the Father by whom He is being begotten. Here is a joy, the very double of that joy which produced a Third Person in the Holy Trinity; yet there is no more production; the bliss falls back and scatters itself in showers of uncreated light over the Three Blessed Persons, Who is able even to dream worthily of such things as these 1

A sixth ocean of joy now succeeds, though its succession is but an appearance and a show to the infirmity of our unsteady sight. It is the joy of the Word in the coequality of the Three Persons. The Godhead is now complete, as it always was. The Procession of the Holy Ghost is the perfection of that ever-living Life, It is a joy to the Son that He is coequal with the Father, and an equal joy to Him that the Holy Ghost is coequal with Himself. It is a further joy to Him that this sovereign coequality remains undisturbed by the seeming inferiority of Generation and Procession. It is a rapture even to the quietude of the Divine Nature, that the Limit placed to Itself by the mutual love of the Father and the Son should be in the most absolute manner coequal with the awful unbegotten Fountain of Godhead, from whom the Son Himself proceeded and proceeds.

But there is a seventh joy which transcends even this joy. Coequality does not adequately express the perfection of the blessedness of God. Though doubtless every distinction in the Holy Trinity is infinitely beatific, nevertheless the majesty of uncreated bliss reposes in its unity rather than in its distinctions. The Unity of the Godhead would seem to be its crowning joy. The Three Persons are not only coequal Persons, but they are one God; and it is only in this Unity that Their mutual love is majestically consummated. God's delight in His own Oneness is inexplicable; but we feel sure it is the mountain-top of all that mountainous world of glories, sublimities, and joys; and, by the miracle of His Nature, not to be depicted by art or fancy of man, while it is the top, and because it is the top, of all that infinite mountain-range, it is the outspread base, and the magnific root as well. We might dare to think, that, as by some special appropriation the Son is the wisdom of the Godhead, so there was to Him, in the same sense that injures not the equal eminence of the Other Two, some special delight in the Unity of the Godhead which His wisdom would so specially appreciate.

Who would have believed that another, an eighth ocean, could have opened to our view 1 The joy of the Son as it were comes down from the lone heights of the Divine Unity, and broods with scintillations of quivering peaceful splendour over the eminence of His own Person. He joys in His own unity as Son. He exults that He is the only Son of the Father, and that there can be no other, though to satisfy the Father and Himself He will, in special alliance with the Holy Ghost, multiply His own titles of filiation by becoming incarnate, to show how infinitely dear to Him that mystery of filiation could be. He too had His unity, and His joy of unity. He was the only Son. He rejoiced also that He was the Eternal Son, that the Father had been for ever a Father, and only by Him could be a Father. He rejoiced that the Father never had been without Him; for the Father's sake He rejoiced as well as for His own. He rejoiced that His own Generation had never begun, and equally He rejoiced that it was always going on, and would never end; for His Father's sake He rejoiced in this also, as well as for His own. He rejoiced that He was the Eternal Son, because thus He entered into the breathing forth of the Holy Ghost. By His eternal Generation it was that He took, and for ever takes, part in the eternal Procession of the Spirit. In this also He rejoiced, as well for the Spirit's sake as for His own. He rejoiced that the Holy Ghost should have the jubilee of proceeding from a Person like His, with a joy which equalled that other joy of being Himself one of the Persons from whom the Holy Ghost proceeded. In this too He rejoiced, as well for the Spirit's sake as for His own. It was by the eternity of His Sonship that all this joy was gained.

Furthermore, He rejoiced that He was the necessary Son of the Father. He rejoiced that He was no free emanation of God, like the beautiful created worlds, but that the Father could not do without Him, nor without Him could the Holy Spirit be the jubilee He is. His Sonship was the first sweet necessity of the Godhead, which yet could have no first because it could have no beginning. He rejoiced that the majestic freedom of the Godhead, to the full size of which freedom its mighty gladness swells, should reside in its necessities, and that His Sonship should be the necessity of the Father, who could not but beget Him, and the necessity of the Holy Ghost, who could not but proceed

4i8 HEAVEN ALREADY, from Him together with the Father, and His own necessity, who could not but be everlastingly and jubilantly begotten. Thus His eighth joy was a triple joy, one joy made of three, a threefold unity of joy which simply concerned His own Person, as being the only, the eternal, and the necessary Son of God. These were His joys, ages back and from the beginning. But we need not speak of them in the past tense only. They are His life, not His history. These are His joys at this moment of the dawning of a summer day; they will be His joys for ever. How beautiful is Thy life, Eternal Word! Such are the joys of the Three Divine Persons, and in particular the eight beatitudes of the Person of the Son. But, as all within God is joy, all His outpourings are joy also. If sorrow is the child of the fall, as was said before, joy was the intended state of the unfallen world. Because God is God, creation must needs swim in joy, as if joy were air and space to it. This was the primary intention. This is the inextinguishable brightness in the idea of creation. Even now how joyous it all is, with gladness almost divinely rebelling against its penal destiny of grief. Earth is like a minstrel beside herself, making songs of her sorrows, and setting even her lamentations to inspiring music. Sin brings the reverse of joy, because it is the contradictory of God. It puts out the light of the world, so far as it can put it out, because it obscures or falsifies the intent of creative love. Redemption is to bring back joy, and tc recover creation's lost birthright for it; for what is the end of creation, but to enter into the joy of its Lord 1 Redemption is thus a second outflow of joy, as creation was a first. Grace itself is a sovereign joy, even in what is painful and harsh to nature, as the blythe austerities of the saints assure us, and the raptures of martyrdom authentically testify. But the Divine Person who has redeemed us is the Word, that Person whose own joys we have ventured to contemplate in

Buch detail, that Person who has sheathed His infinite grandeur in the littleness of that infantine frame at Bethlehem.

Thus our joy stands in a peculiar relation to the joy of the Eternal Word. All the joys we have are in a very real sense from the Eternal Word, who has redeemed us by His Incarnation, and did thereby even merit grace for the angels, who needed not redeeming grace. From the joy therefore of the highest seraphim to the blythe play of the Christian child on the village green, all joy is from Him. Nay, because of the Word's peculiar connection with creation, we may reverently say that the joys in the brighteyes and inarticulate thanksgivings of animals are from Him. He is joy, because He is light. This is very noticeable. He is the light of creatures, because He is the brightness of the Father; and where there is light, there is joy. Light is the peculiar outpouring of the Second Person, outpoured over every man that comes into the world, the outpouring of the Person of the Word. It seems to come from His personality and from what constitutes it, which lets in the light, and so the joy, of the Godhead upon us. His Sacred Humanity lies in the very focus and fountain of this light, or rather call it light-joy, and, catching and making visible the splendour, as bright objects catch and diffuse the light, it illuminates all the heaven both of angels and of men. Thus the joy of the Word is eternal, illimitable, all-seeing, almighty, all-holy, and quite incredibly communicative; and, if communicative in such an excessive degree to all creatures, what must it have been, what must it be, to His Sacred Humanity? Joy is an inevitableness of God, if we may so express ourselves in every one of His operations. There is a joy to the rest of His admiring creation even in the most appalling exhibitions of His justice; and, while we are still in the light of earth and the faith of Christ, it seems as if He could not touch us, but joy comes. Even in chastisements it is a deep joy, and the most availing consolation, that the infliction is from Him. Joy is in some sense our final idea of God; for it is the conception of Him which we are to realise to ourselves in Heaven What we have now to contemplate is the joy of the Eternal Word as it was and is communicated to His Sacred Humanity, and especially as it was communicated to it in the Infancy. Sprinklings of the fountain rained even on Mary and Joseph. Shadows from those heights fell also on them, and beautified them where they fell. St. Joseph's awe-stricken joy in being the shadow of the Father was a communication to him, in its measure, of the joy of the Word in being the express similitude of His Eternal Father; while Joseph's love of Jesus, having in it none of the natural love of an earthly father, was a shadow of the blissful love of the Father for His Eternal Son. Moreover, his office of special minister and steward of the Sacred Humanity privileged him to participate in his degree in the joyous love which the Holy Ghost bore to that dear Humanity. Mary's joy in Jesus was a still deeper and more substantial shadow of the complacency of the Father in Him, because of the reality of her maternal office; and, loving the Father as the Father of her Son, and her Son more as the Son of the Father than as her own, there was a blessedness in her love resembling the jubilee of the Holy Ghost in the Divine Persons from whom He is eternally proceeding. Meanwhile if it ever might be said that deep joyous love identified a mother and her child, what identity of love was there not between Mary and the Eternal Son. The authority of Catholic writers has allowed us to call the Holy Family the Earthly Trinity; and thus, like the soft-footed shadows of the cedars moving in slow silence with the sun over the sequestered lawn, the flake-like shadows of divine things drop, as noiselessly as night-fall, over the Holy Family, making the Earthly Trinity a transcript of the Three-fold Majesty in heaven.

We have seen the joys of the Eternal "Word in the Bosom of the Father; let us look at them now on the lap of Mary. The first joy of His Sacred Humanity was in His adoration of God. The highest happiness of the creature is in his adoration of the Creator, with the closest adoration of which a created spirit is capable. Now the sight of God produces in the soul the highest adoration of which it is capable. Hence whether we look at a created spirit as passively receiving into itself through the light of glory the Beatific Vision of the Most High, or as it were rising up aided by that same light of glory, to meet the magnificence of the Vision by its own acts, we shall find that adoration expresses more nearly than any other word the glory and the bliss of its union with God. If the sight of God did not awaken within the spirit the music and the splendour of devotion, it would be but like the sun pouring the gorgeousness of its unfertile radiance on the naked crags of some dreary mountain. But such a supposition is impossible. The Vision carries with it into the creature a very world of light, and joy, and love, and glory, which form an ecstasy of rapturous adoration. Sin so impedes our love on earth, and our love of God is 80 ungenerous, and our attainments in holiness so mean, that we do little but accumulate words when we speak of the processes of beatitude in heaven. Yet surely our own poor experience on earth must have already taught us that there is no pleasure, in life's best experience, equal to that pacific tumult of delight which has many times stirred within our souls when we have been worshipping God.

Our very senses seem to partake of the general gladness of our nature. Nothing is wanting. The rough is smoothed, the empty is filled up. A contentment, which is mighty although it is calm, insinuates itself everywhere, and even finds depths in our souls which we ourselves hardly suspected, and takes possession of them with a fulness which appears to double our life for the moment both in breadth and depth. "We are so completely made for God, that we are not fully ourselves except when we are united with Him. The joy of that union, and it seems to be precisely the joy of it, makes our nature sensibly one. Nothing but adoration will fill a created spirit to the brim with joy. The lives of the saints illustrate this truth to us in ways which are almost beyond our comprehension. What then must it be in Jesus 1 If His adoration was, in a sense, equal to God Himself, what must His joy have been? How far off were all the ecstasies of the saints from that rapture, which bore up on its wings His marvellous Soul right into the fires of the Divinity 1

Look at the adoration of the Soul of Jesus! That vast ocean of created worship, in whose immense tranquillity each spirit of angel and each soul of man is but a wave rolling onward to the throne of God, and breaking there in soft thunders of perpetual song, — how refreshing is the inward picture of it to our love of God and to our pining for His glory! The eye travels over that radiant ocean, exults in its vastness, tranquillises itself in the certainty of its profound invisible depths, drinks in the unearthly, and yet not wholly unearthly, sounds of its majestic waters, and watches with an unwearied pleasure, in which hours pass like moments, each wave as it approaches the shining coast crest itself with light, lift up on high its green transparent wall of water, break with solemn sound in showers of light, and creep with its sheet of broken silver up the sloping shore, as if to kiss the sand and to be sucked in while in the act of kissing it. Of a truth the adoration of the Soul of Jesus was in itself a creation tenfold more magnificent than the whole of this grand universe. It was a depth which only the pleased mind of God could search; and only the divine wisdom could disport itself in the secret life of those enchanted gardens which decked the bottom of that ocean. It lay ever before God in the peace of unutterable gladness. Yet the varieties of His acts, such as His acts of consecration, oblation, praise, thanksgiving and congratulation, were so many quickenings of His vast joy. They were almost momentary new creations of it, fresh worlds, endless self-outpouring oceans, successive infinities, because of the worth each act received from the touch of the Person of the Word.

How gently He sleeps on Mary's knee, and yet how beautiful the vigil He is keeping in His unslumbering Soul! At this moment He is exulting with joy in all creation. The wisdom which made it all lies open before Him. The grandest advance of human science hardly gets beneath the surface of this wisdom; it can scarcely sink deep enough to hide itself under the waters, while it often wrinkles the surface and disturbs the clearness by the vehemence of its efforts. To the poet, the artist, and the man of science, creation, seen through the mists which always teasingly envelope it to us, is so beautiful that it often fascinates our souls, and leads them away from God, as if the medicines which should strengthen us only made us light-headed because we are so weak. What then must creation be when it stands unclouded and confessed in the splendour of the divine wisdom 1 Yet so it always stood to the rejoicing Soul of Jesus. Even to us the power which made it all seems marvellously gentle; it sleeps under the green turf that is earth's vesture, or whispers in the leafy woods, or tinkles in the streams, or hides under the blue calms of ocean, or comes with its awfulness smoothed into quiet beauty from the distant starry spheres. It only speaks a loud word now and then in the threatening earthquake, or the sullen storm, or in the brief fury of the volcano. But the calm majesty of omnipotence, its gentleness, its tenderness, its love, the exquisite delicacy of its self-restraints, combined with its terrific and immeasurable strength, — how wonderful must they have seemed to our Lord's Human Soul! Still more, if we may talk as if He made comparisons, did His Infant Heart rejoice in the love which circulates in every sinuous pore of the vast universe, as though it were the blood within its veins. He travelled in delighted thought, with speechless accompaniment of praise, along all these innumerable winding-paths of creative love, sedulous that there should not be one obscure corner in all the countless worlds, where His Father's love should not be discovered, confessed, and worshipped with created love. But nature was almost a second beatific vision to Him, when from the eminences of His science He looked over all its regions in one comprehensive view, and beheld there, mirrored with astonishing fidelity, the image of the Most Holy Trinity. All the joys, and surely they have neither been few nor shallow, of poets, artists, and philosophers, were united and surpassed in this joy of the Babe of Bethlehem in the radiant significance and divine enigma of creation.

He rejoiced too, with a second joy, and one in which creatures can have some share, to whom the unquestioned sovereignty of God is the dearest of all doctrines and the sweetest of all devotions, — He rejoiced in the decrees of His Divine Person regarding creation. To His Human Soul the splendours of the Divine Attributes nowhere shone more clearly or more attractively than in the Divine Decrees. One while they were glorious with the beauties of the storm, another while no less glorious in the beauties of the calm. They sang songs around the throne. They were universal harmonies, in whose concords all the divine perfections and all created things were blended into melody. They embroidered eternity into the grand patterns of time, and somehow eternity was brightened, not disfigured, by the work. In their light the perfections of God contended not with one another, but all throbbed in the one pulse of the divine simplicity. In their light all the difficulties of creation were seen to be but the exquisite workmanship at the points where it was most closely joined to God. In their light He saw the mystery of God's liberty magnified, not restricted, by the fixity of His decrees; while the liberty of the creature was secured, by their limitations alone, in a plenitude which could not otherwise have belonged to it.

How unutterable must have been the joy of His Human Soul in the knowledge that all these decrees were but the beams of His own brightness, only seemingly parted by the inaccessible clouds through which they come to us, and which separate them into beams, while of a truth the brightness behind is indivisible and one! His decrees made creation so much more dear to Him, that in them chiefly we seek for the deep-lying reasons of His love of creatures. Hence it was also because of them, that the Divine Babe exulted so ineffably, as the Book of Wisdom teaches us, in sharing now through His created nature in His own creation, as if creation were at once so lovely, and by Him so tenderly beloved, that it drew Him out of Himself into its bosom. He could not let us have creation all to ourselves. He too must share it. A created nature shall be the choice inheritance of the Uncreated Son of God.

The third joy of the Infant Jesus was His delight in His Sacred Humanity. The use of His reason was an endless pleasure to Him. Every operation of His mind was accompanied with joy, and that from various causes. It rose from the harmony and perfection of His Human Kature, from the excellence of His science, from His sanctity, and from the Hypostatic Union. Even His senses were inlets to Him of holiest joy, as they will be with the Glorified in heaven, although His sensible glory lay shrouded under the common veils of infancy. To His man-loving Heart there was also a peculiar joy in His feeling of kin to all humankind. A brother multiplies himself in the love of his brothers. There is something special in fraternal love to double and treble self, and to add to the lives we already live. This is a gift peculiar to fraternal love, which filial, parental, or conjugal love have not, or have it differently. They create other coequal selves. Fraternal love miraculously multiplies our one same self. The Infant Jesus was brother to every born and unborn child of man, He saw all His brothers the world over in all its successive ages. He lived by anticipation in their hearts with minutest knowledge and most detailed sympathies. Their hearts had all their separate places in His Sacred Heart, and were cherished there as if He had but one brother, and could not sufficiently environ him with love. From eternity His delight had been to be with the children of men, and now His eternal desire was satisfied, and His Soul drank always and drank deeply of this perennial fountain of fraternal love.²

From His love of men, fallen or unfallen, the transition is natural to His redeeming love, and to His love of suffering which by His own law that redeeming love involved. He rejoiced therefore in His Sacred Humanity, as giving Him, what His Divine Nature could not by possibility have given Him, and which but for the miraculous intervention of infinite wisdom it must even have rendered impossible for His Human Nature, namely, the power of sufi'ering. It opened out for Him three regions of suffering, every one of which He traversed in its fullest extent, and as never man has traversed them before or since. The body is gifted with powers of diversified agony, which it makes us sometimes shudder to think of. The possibilities of fleshly pain, which may intervene between ourselves and the shelter of the grave, are so overwhelming that the contemplation of them is unwise. Yet there never was a body, which was gifted to open out such avenues of pain as His; and, as far as we have light to see in the dim depths of the Passion, all of them were pursued to the uttermost. With a like completeness He explored the Soul in all its capabilities of anguish; and here again His Soul was like no other soul, because it was so pre-eminently endowed with the ability to suffer. A man's reputation is his external self, and is a third department of suffering in which we are all most tender, and where the bitterest part of our probation here is destined to be inflicted upon us. Jesus gave His away, as a man flings his garment to an angry beast, and it was torn in shreds; so that His nakedness upon the Cross became but the outward symbol of the extremity of His shame. These were three kingdoms with which His Human Nature gifted Him, and He wore them amongst the dearest jewels of His crown. It is true that sufi'ering had become necessary, by the necessity of redemption. Yet we must look somewhat deeper. His Sacred Heart was probably not different from what it would have been in a purely glorious Incarnation, had there been no sin at all. Hence His love of suffering was not a new original instinct, an exotic transplanted into His Heart with the passibility of His Flesh, but only a new form which His exceeding love of creatures necessarily took under the circumstances of a fallen world.

The joy of His Human Nature in His Divinity was a fourth fountain of blessedness in His Infant Heart. It is useless to speak of its joy in its union with the Divine Person. We cannot only conceive no greater joy, but we cannot conceive how so great a one as this was possible to a created natura

No power short of God's could have upheld it from sinking intc annihilation under a burden so overwhelming. How was it not shivered to pieces, how was it not burned up, how did it not escape out of its own existence to elude the intolerable glory of such a fiery yoke? These are the questions we ask ourselves. We cannot describe such things. There is always something of a literary weariness in writing of these things of God. Epithet must be piled on epithet, like Pelion upon Ossa; adverb must qualify adjective, or intensify substantive, to distinguish between the manner in which what is said of creatures may also be said of God; reiterated superlatives annoy the taste and tease the attention, and yet how dare we write otherwise than superlatively of the mysteries of God? It is not the style only that is studded with superlatives; the subjects treated of are themselves intrinsically superlative, and whichever way we turn, all are equally superlative, leaving upon our minds, when the dew of sensible devotion is exhaled, a weary sense of tryannical exaggeration. Thus the Areopagite, striving up to his subject with his new-coined words, displeases us, and doubtless displeased himself still more, with his " super-essential," " super-celestial," and the rest; and yet he ends by making deep things clear to us, though reader and writer both pay for it by the uniformity of exaggeration. The matter spoils the style; but it is a matter for which it is well worth while to spoil even less external things than style. But even so, with all the license of exaggeration, we can neither find nor fancy words to picture the joy of our Lord's Human Nature in His Divinity.

Nevertheless the manner of the union is also to be considered as a distinct and separate joy from the union itself, leading deeply down into the divine perfections, and having the eminence of singularity, which belongs to so very few of the works of God. That work, utterly hidden from us in its secret method, was joyously explored by His amazed and delighted Soul. In this joy, there was another joy, which also lay apart. He rejoiced particularly in the ravishing beauty of the Person of the Word, in those mysterious appropriations which distinguished the Second Person from the First or Third. Doubtless also, in the obscure caverns of His incomprehensible gladness, there was even a joy in the absence of a human personality from His Human Nature. There was an incomparable dependence in this, which was full of excess of bliss, like the transported tremblings which have seized the saints when their souls within them suddenly widen into immensities, without land-marks, beacons, or pole-star, and they float helplessly out to sea upon the sovereignty of God. We must add to all this, His Soul's enjoyment of the Beatific Vision, and the marvel of its already enjoying it while He lay an Infant upon Mary's knee. The saints lead joyous lives even amidst their austerities and suflferings. Blind as we are, we can see that there is a vaster joy in one hour of a saint's holiness, than in all the outspread mediocrity of lives like ours, prolonged for any number of years. If all emanations of God are joyous, holiness is confessedly the most joyous of them all. Have we ourselves ever experienced a joy in life, which was equal to the common joy of being in a state of grace 1 But the joy of holiness is this joy intensified, and perhaps indeed it is something more than even that. Holiness is a very spacious thing, and God always fills in all hearts all the room which is left Him there. But holiness is not only an exceeding joy, but it is gifted with a serene capacity of enjoying its own joy, which is by no means universal in the case of other joys. Nevertheless by thus thinking of such joy of holiness in the saints as we can ourselves imperfectly understand, are we really approaching to any standard by which we can measure this fifth joy, the joy of the Infant

Jesus in His surpassing holiness 1 If the holiness is like no other, so is the joy Hke no other also. We have seen how lovingly He rejoiced in creation. But it is just His lovingness which makes creation perfect. Creation culminates in Him. This is the reason all else looks so imperfect. Creation to be understood must be looked at in Him. His holiness is the filling up of all its empty places, the fruitful crop of its salt seas, the habitableness of its mountain-tops, the verdure of its deserts, the sweet God-praising population of its solitudes. He rejoices in His unspeakable purity. Purity is most dear to God. He bears His own spotlessness in His Bosom as if it were the attribute of His predilection, which He cherishes as a mother cherishes her first-born. He rejoices in the purity of creatures.³ He finds no other fault, where things are pure. Purity of intention is the wood that sweetens all bitter waters. The power of a pure intention is the natural miracle of the spiritual life. The purity of Mary ravished the Eternal Word Himself from heaven. But what is her purity, immaculate Mother as she was, compared with the purity of His Human Nature, and how inexpressibly dear to His Divine Person must it be, while He rejoices to find united to Himself, and so singularly His own, a spotlessness far excelling that which drew Him down to earth when He beheld it in His Mother 1

It was a joy to Him, and a joy for almost a hundred reasons, that He was the fountain of holiness and merit to so many millions of His creatures, both before His coming and after it. It was a delight to Him, that, like a forecast shadow. His holiness had had such imperial power before ever it was yet created. He exulted to see the legions of angels, like an endless perspective of light, clothed in splendour out of His human holiness. He looked onward into the ages wearily climbing the mountains of time one after anotlier, and it gladdened Him to see how all earth was growing like a garden as the breath of His holiness blew upon it. Unrisen suns rose in His Soul, and touched with light the fruits and flowers of far- distant sanctity. Their fragrance came up to Him from a long way off, as the spice winds tremble far over the bosom of the Indian seas. He saw Egyptian Thebaids, and many another unlikely spot, studded with enclosures of such rare exotic foliage and scent and bravery, that no fabulous garden of the Hesperides might come near to their spiritual beauty. They were corners of earth, despised nooks of the world, in which the odour of His sanctity hung for a moment, and exhaled to heaven in these gorgeous though transitory Edens. All Edens, alas! are transitory; but all Edens are the breath of the holiness of Jesus. He looked up to heaven. His human holiness was outstretched above like the canopy of its roof, and outspread below like the glowing pavement of its courts, and diffused through its magnificent abodes as the light that lighted it and the odour that made it sweet. Thus it is His sanctity that colonises heaven, while it is also the sole ever-active principle of beautiful life on earth. As God, so Goethe said (for big divine thoughts wandered strangely in his pagan mind), is ever in higher natures attracting lower, and so working in creation, Jesus, we may add, is the lever, or rather the magnet, to raise and elevate all creation to its resting-place in the Creator, whence it has so sadly fallen. It is by His holiness that He does this work; and with what astonishing activity of joy must not such a work be necessarily accompanied^

There are many things we wait to learn in heaven, because out of heaven they are so poorly taught. Is not Mary one of these, and her love of Jesus, and His love of her, and a thousand secrets of her Immaculate Heart, which have not teased us here, because it was so sufficiently sweet to love that we did not care to know? Thus we come to the fountain of His love of Mary in the Heart of the Infant Jesus, His sixth joy, and we sit down there, as if idly musing. We know it is an unfathomable fountain, and it is joy enough for us to sit and watch it flow. So men watch mountain springs for hours, throwing up their pulses of crystal water with the lightest tinkling sound, like the laughter of children. Uninjured, the charmed margin of parti-coloured moss cushions that little sighing mouth of the huge mountain, and indeed of the old ancient earth, and the gleaming pebbles lie just inside its lips, as if to make it articulate and give it the power of song. They who sit there care not for the rocky veins in which those crystal threads have flowed so slenderly, until many of them were gathered into one to form this spring. They do not puzzle themselves with the subterranean wonders those bright wavelets have seen, or the remote action of the uneasy earth which long epochs since may have settled that this rocky pore should be their orifice. The flowing of the water is enough for them, a joy to mark a day with such strong light that it shall be visible in memory when years have passed away.

So it is with this fountain of filial love in the Heart of the Babe of Bethlehem. It was a joy of which we see but the outward signs of life, as the pulses beat beneath the skin. Who can tell His power of loving 1 Who can tell her worthiness of being loved 1 Yet, till he has first told these, who shall tell our Lord's joy in loving her 1 He rejoiced in the perfection of His natural filial love of her. This seems an easy thing to say; yet the thing intended, and so simple-sounding, passes our comprehension: for He is God. How shall God, in the exclusive majesty of His paternity, burn with filial feeling towards one whom He has created out of nothing 1 Everywhere the grand portenli of the Hypostatic Union stands in our path, not so much forbidding ingress to the inner shrines, as giving light to illuminate the wondrous way. Everywhere it meets us, and makes things astonishing which would else be commonplace. Everywhere it refuses to explain itself, and faith has to render those truths certain and familiar, which else would, even to our reverence, be incredible.

He rejoices also in her sweet love of Him. The incense of a whole creation is less to Him than the grateful purity of her fragrant love. It is the breath of her beautiful being, and He nestles in it as if it were a new life even to Him. He grows upon her love, as if it were His nourishment. He lays His Infant Life down in it that the splendour may play upon it, and lets it rest there as if it had found a heaven upon earth. He clothes His little frame in her love, as if it were in shining angelic garments, and His bath is in the warmth of that clean love which His own Precious Blood has rendered thus incomparably bright. As He inhales her love, He delights in having created her. It is a joy beyond all price, a marvellous joy, that the Son should have created His own Mother. He delights in having saved her, saved her from sin by His never letting it come nigh her, redeemed her from captivity by never allowing her to be taken captive; and is it not an even yet more marvellous joy, that the Son should be the eternal Saviour of His youthful Mother, and should have saved her with so glorious a salvation before ever He Himself was born 1 In both cases — such a Son! such a Mother! It is a jubilee to have one so like Himsell It is another jubilee for Him to take His likeness from another, as He did eternally from His Father. It is another jubilee for Him to have a creature to whom He can be like, who wore His features before He wore them Himself, and who was the dear cause of His wearing them at alL The uncreated son exults in having a created type. Furthermore, there ia another joy which we will daringly conjecture in His love of Mary. As the Trinity of Persons makes the Godhead never lonely, though it is supremely one, so Mary's love, which was the offspring of her immense holiness, may please Him by making His human merits seem less lonely, less exceptional, less utterly detached from the rest of created holiness.

Saints, like beautiful scenes, require to be leai-ned. We must dwell by the side of such scenes in a sort of expectant passiveness, and let the changes of the seasons, the lights of the various hours from dawn to deep night, the alternations of storm and calm, and the many-coloured garment of the year, disclose to us the capabilities and realities of magnificent landscapes. So with the saints. We do not know them at first sight. We do not appreciate their sanctity. We do not discriminate between the different shades of their holiness. We do not instinctively seize upon that which is their divine characteristic, the singularity of their grace, the unshared peculiarity of their position as ornaments in the Church of God. Yet some saints reveal themselves to us more rapidly than others. They flash upon us. They leap up before us like a sunrise at sea. Their brightness tells their whole history at once. TTxen again there are other saints, the very expression of whose sanctity is mantled with a look of almost impenetrable reserve. The supernatural is so deep down in them that it is hidden. The currents of life have passed so calmly and innocuously over them that they have not laid the character bare, or discovered the strata over which they flow. These saints have not been placed in dramatic positions. Their histories are veiled in commonplaces. We should not take them for heroes on the surface. We only know that they are heroes, because the Church has raised them on the altars. The great St. Joseph is one of this latter class of saints. We must be a dweller in his land. We must live near his door at Nazareth, and watch him. He will grow upon us like a divine thing. He will open out before us, and give out his meanings, like a gradual patient revelation. The very ages of the Church have had thus to learn him, as well as his individual devotees. Each age almost has given expression to its surprise at finding him a mountain of much more considerable altitude, than had heretofore been supposed. It is this which makes us feel that we are never speaking worthily about him. Yet how often have we needful cause to speak of him in this excursion of ours into the land of Bethlehem!

His joy in St. Joseph was the seventh joy of the Infant Jesus. He rejoiced in the tranquil depths of his interior holiness, and especially in the incomparable hiddenness of his spiritual life. He rejoiced in Joseph's love of Him, and in His own love of Joseph. He brooded with complacency on the image of the whole Trinity which reflected itself with such calm detail upon Joseph's single soul. He was the shadow and created image of the Eternal Father. Astonishingly faithful was the portraiture in its modest created littleness. But to His inexplicable joy the Son beheld also in His Foster-father a second Self, inasmuch as He was the true uncreated image of the Father, while Joseph was the Father's authentic created shadow; and thus Joseph was His own shadow also. Moreover as the Spouse of Mary He beheld in him the similitude of the Holy Ghost. Neither were these such faint analogies as may be found in the work and character of ordinary saints. They were actual official realities, authentic divine appointments, with all that depth of chiselling and sharpness of outline and unwasting hardness of material, which distinguish the mysteries of the Incarnation from all the other operations of divine grace. Over all this, like the unity of a pensive tender twilight, was spread a genuine human love of the old man for his own dear sake, and simply because he was so attractive an object of affectionate honour and of gentlest love. It was not only the creature who was in Joseph's place whom He loved with such deep tenderness; but it was Joseph himself because he was Joseph, because his peculiar, distinctive, personal character was so attractive and so beautiful. His gifts indeed were lovely; but he loved, not the gifts only, but the man himself, and with a filial love which might be parcelled out among all the fathers upon earth and make them all more happy than they could well believe. Joseph's love of Him, a love which far surpassed in grandeur and in tenderness the united loves of all the fathers that have ever been,* a love so amazing, so vast, and so various that we may say of him that in his paternity all paternities on earth share and yet exhaust it not, was to Jesus an unfathomable delight reaching to unimaginable sublimities. It gave room even to His immensities of filial love to develop and expatiate. At the same time, Joseph's heavenly Heart, so like Mary's Immaculate Heart, and yet 80 distinctly different, so like His own Sacred Heart, and yet also so distinctly different, was to Him a jubilee of itself; because it was in its own self a world more than equalling in size and price the common world of men, wherein His insatiable love of men could outpour itself in deluges of impetuous affection, and His unquenchable thirst for human love find inexpressible relief, though it could not quench itself. Joseph's love of Mary was also an incredible joy to our Blessed Lord, and Mary's love of Joseph was another joy: for it is the love of Jesus and Mary for Joseph, of Jesus and Joseph for Mary, and of Mary and Joseph for Jesus, which constitutes the unity of that Earthly Trinity. The angelic hosts worship the Infant Word as He lies * Mistica Ciudad. p. ii. 1. iv, cap. xxviii.

speechless on His Mother's lap. Their worship is another joy, the eighth joy, of His Sacred Infancy. For ages they have hymned His glory round the throne above. He knows each spiritual voice in all that countless choir. Their adoration has been the incessant ritual of heaven, while the huge epochs of the ripening earth have been evolving slowly. There is not one of those spirits who has not bathed in His Bplendours since the first dawn of its existence. What then is there new in their worship now 1 Why should it affect His Heart with such unwonted joy?

There is truly a new significancy in their worship. There is an additional spiritual gracefulness in their attitude, a peculiar loveliness which was not there before. The primal vision of the ancient heavens has been shown them in its reality. The Sacred Humanity, which they had been called to worship in the mind of God, is now before them in fact and substance. They see the very Child actually present, whose figure in the divine decrees had been the matter of their probation and the occasion of their perseverance. He is before them in the material loveliness of His Flesh and Blood. He is receiving their worship now as Man. They are paying their homage to Him as their elder brother. A change has come over the former ceremonial of their worship, or rather a fresh service has been added to it, a new solemnity instituted, with the jubilant applause of all those joyous hosts. They are all of them acting over again that action in which they won their crown, the act of swearing their allegiance to His inferior nature, His nature naturally subordinate to theirs. It is a joy to Him as God, because it is a grand service of praise in honour of the Incarnation. It is a joy to Him because of His exceeding jealous love of His Humanity. It is a joy to Him, because it is so great a joy to them.

He delights in their worship also as His Mother's •ubjects. It is an object of exultation with Him that He has provided so fair an empire for her sway, and snhjects of such attractive holiness, diversity, and multitude. He knows how she will love the angels, and how the angels will love her, and both these thoughts are fountains of gladness within His Soul. He sees her unending government of them, lying before Him like some future chronicle of heaven^ its pages gleaming with deeds of sacred emprise and the heroic wonders of angelic sanctity. He joys to think also how she and they will joy to see their vacant ranks filled up, and all their companies augmented, by the conquests of His incarnate love. It is always a peculiar pleasure to Hin to contemplate His own exaltation of His Mother, especially when it is reflected in the rest of creation. But there is a character almost pathetic in this new worship of the angels. There is something human like in their humility, as if they had with swiftest apprehension caught the genius of a man's spirit from ministering to the Humanity of Jesus. How like the lowly self-abjection, the unpretending renunciation of a mortal saint, is their disinterested joy, because man's inferior nature is exalted above their own! There seem to be no regrets travelling back to their once bright brethren, to whom no second trial, no opportunity of penance, was accorded. They appear almost to love the assumed nature of the Word better because it is not theirs but ours. They put themselves aside as if they were unworthy, and seem to forget that their nature as well as ours might have been assumed; while on the other hand, they seem never to forget that they were saved themselves by the worship of that far-seen Humanity, which now they behold in Bethlehem. The grandeur of this lowliness, the gracious sweetness of this generosity, what joy it all is to the Heart of the Infant Jesus!

But He finds a grandeur even in us, and out of that grandeur extracts a joy, a ninth joy of His Sacred Infancy. Admirable in all His ways, in nothing is the goodness of

God more surprising than in the pains which He appears to take to justify His excess of love towards us. He condescends to look as ii He were inventing reasons by the assistance of His wisdom; and the reasons are rather to satisfy us and remove stumbling-blocks out of the way of our faith, than to satisfy Himself; for to Him His own goodness is an all-sufficient reason, a goodness which to us would be incredible, unless it condescended to explain itself and justify its excesses. Hence it is from the Hypostatic Union that the Infant Jesus draws His immense joy in His love of us, and that seemingly exaggerated appreciation of us, which is the basis of His love. He rejoices in us as His creatures, whom His own hand has fashioned. There is not one of us whom He has not called out of nothingness. Each of us existed in His mind before we existed in fact. He developed a separate idea of His own in the creation of each separate soul of man. He meant us to be just what we are in blood and race, in genius and character, and in our individual work for Him. In all things, sin excepted, and the multifarious unhappiness which comes of sin, we are what He would have us be, and what He distinctly intended us to be. We are a joy to Him, therefore, as His children, with that intimate sonship which comes out of the tender relationship of creation. But He rejoices in us as His creatures, with a joy in which something mingles that in human love would have looked like gratitude or the sense of obligation, things which cannot be in God. The meaning of this mysterious appearance is, that, as His creatures, we entered into the knowledge whereby He is for ever the Father's Word. We then had our share, may we say such words? in His Eternal Generation.⁴ The Father knew Himself, and in Himself He knew all creatures, singly and collectively, and it was His whole knowledge which produced the Son. Together with the abysses of His own perfections, every creature was pronounced in the uncreated Word which He uttered from the beginning. We all entered into the speechless music of that Word; and this is a thought to make us fear, and to abash us because it is so overwhelming. Yet of a truth it was a thought that entered into that joy of the Infant Jesus which arose from His love of us as His creatures.

But He rejoiced in us as His brothers also. Our nature was pleasant to Him. From eternity it had been so delectable to Him, that He would have assumed it in an impassible Incarnation even if we had not fallen. Hence He feels His blood to all of us. He rejoices, as we all rejoice ourselves, in the feeling of kindred, and in the predilections of its mysterious sympathies. No clansman ever felt 80 wedded to his clan, so committed to its fortunes, so enthusiastic in its honour, as the Infant Jesus felt with regard to the whole race of man. Immense as was His joy in the angels, there was a joy in His preference of our nature over theirs, not only because in all things that He did there was inevitable joy, but because of the ** cords of flesh " which drew Him to our race. Nay, He even rejoiced in us as sinners, not because we were sinners, God forbid! but as sinners whom He had come to redeem, and therefore whom He loved with a new love, a love additional to the many kinds of love wherewith He would have loved unfallen man.

For dare we think He would have loved us more if we had not fallen? Does not Scripture seem to speak as if the excess of our misery had also pushed the love of God into excess? Does it not speak as if our failure under our trial had been itself a further trial of our Father's love, under which His love had not been wanting, but had outstripped in swiftness and had outdone in quantity our own amazing guilt 1 This fresh love was a love more full of pity, assuming in its sweet ministries and easy condescensions the semblance of that blindness which marks maternal love, a quickness to see all that appeals to compassion and so will augment love, and a slowness to see what might sadden love or dash its promptitude. We must dare to say such things even of the immutable God. It was a love based on the greater efforts which it was to cost Himself in His sufferings and His death; and the grandeur of these efforts was the measure of the grandeur of this love. It was as if His first love had laid broad foundations, and built a glorious temple thereupon. But we forfeited what little claim we might have seemed to have to this resplendent temple of His love. Whereupon He pulled it down, and drew the lines further, and widened the trenches, and laid a vaster foundation, and raised a fabric on the ruin of His old work, which we had caused, tenfold more magnificent than the original structure evei would have been. Is this what the Church means when she bids us sing of Adam's "happy fault," as if God's honour found " good luck," or " prosperity," as the psalmist words it, in the misfortune of the fall 1

But His Infant Heart finds yet a tenth joy in the foreseen love of men for Him. At first sight there is a strangeness in the value which He sets upon our love, and the intense desire which He seems to have for it. But it is a strangeness, which is so far from wearing away that it grows upon us the longer we look at it. It becomes more and more unfamiliar. It rather chills us with fear than sets us at our ease. At last it grows shadowy and indistinct, and appears to melt away as if it were no reality; and, did not faith come to the rescue of our poor-spiritedness, it would shortly seem a thing downright incredible. Now, as He lies on Mary's lap, what is it that He sees, which so lights up Hia eye 1 His look is not turned upward, as it so often is, upon His Mother's face. It is not Joseph He is looking at, with that infantine curiosity, not wholly unmingled with awe, which we have so often read upon His countenance when His look has been fixed on Joseph. What is it that He sees? The Church lies like an open field before Him; and He beholds the sufferings of His martyrs, the perfections of His saints, the thickly-strewn heroisms of multitudes of His servants, the grandeur of manifold vocations, varieties of goodness, which are rather singularities than varieties as they never seem to be exactly repetitions of each other, triumphs of the Church diversified by the ages of the world and the shapes of successive evil over which she triumphs, each shape of evil deeming itself new and insuperable and raised above the lot of those other errors which have sunk into oblivion; and with these also He beholds faith's endless victory, and its pre-eminence in all progresses and over all mutable civilisations. All this spectacle is representative to Him of an immensity of human love, which flows into His Heart like a broad stream of joy, and is received there as in a capacious lake, dilating the Heart itself, and quickening with delight the pulses of the Precious Blood.

We too pass before Him, one by one, dust-besprinkled pilgrims, and His eye follows us, looks long at us, and will know us again, and smile upon us as old acquaintances, when the misty ages shall have travelled up into the present, and brought us before Him again in our actual pilgrimage, though He will always have been thinking of each of us through all those misty ages. He sees our conversions, our struggles, our faith, our trembling hopes, our timidly aspiring love, and our foreseen, if so be, perseverance. Already He hears our prayers in the distance, like the striking of the village clock at night in the valley on the mountain's other side. There is a vivid joy to Him in

U alL Each day as we walk from morning to night across oiie more breadth of life, measured out to us by that overseer of God whose solar light calls us to our work and keeps our time, what a chastening thought, cheering or depressing, as we choose to make it, it is to accompany us, that we actually entered into, and formed a part of, and sent a fresh thrill through, the joys of the Babe of Bethlehem.

He found an eleventh joy even in the foresight of His Passion. The littleness of His Human Heart could hardly hold the grandeur of His joy. It opened itself wide to embrace the mighty sacrifice. It planted the Cross in the centre of its infant flesh, as if Calvary were henceforth to be the very sunshine of Bethlehem and Nazareth. It bade the Passion act itself henceforth like an endless drama before His eyes, whether He watched or slept. He welcomed with joy, yea with an avidity of joy, each one of the bodily pains, each one of the mental agonies, each one of the outward shames, of the Passion, as if each was a consoling satisfaction of the fever of His man-loving Heart, and a grateful safety-valve of the almost unmanageable fire that was pent up there. His thoughts luxuriated in the prodigal exuberance of His Bloodsheddings, until His eye gleamed at the vision of the pavement of Jerusalem all crimsoned with the streams of His precious life, as a mountain-top gleams down into the vale when it looks into the yet invisible sun-rise, and gives its bright witness of a spectacle which from below we cannot see. There is something marvellous, something which looks immoderate, as afterwards when He went swiftly up to Jerusalem straitened with impatience for His Passion, something unlike His usual adorable tranquillity, though in truth it was but a perfection of it, in the exultation which bounds in His Infant Heart over the unfathomable humiliations of Calvary. It seems as if it was more than He expected, more than He had dared to hope for, a surprise, and accompanied with all the gladness of a surprise which tells us that our fortune is brighter than we had anticipated. To look at His sparkling eye, we should have deemed this humiliation to be another beatific vision. He is radiant, as if it were some novelty He saw, and so had gained for Himself all the impossible glory of a novelty to the eternally enthroned God, whose own eternity is His throne, and His own beatitude His crown.

His twelfth and last joy, that is to say, the last which we can reach in thought, for the want of love makes us unimaginative in heavenly things, is His joy in being the Saviour. This was to be the special gladness which He was to pour over all nations. We were to call His Name Jesus, because He should save His people from their sins. It was Buch a joy to His Sacred Humanity as His unity is to God Himself, the primal, crowning, all-including, self-suj9&cient joy. There was to be but one Saviour. None shared His office with Him. There is no God but One. There is no Saviour but One. That One is the Babe of Bethlehem. It is a glory all His own. No saint shares with Him this exclusive privilege. No apostle is His partner in the unity of this stupendous work. St. Joseph kneels down, and adores without co-operating. Mary co-operates; yet she has first of all been saved by Him herself. Thus His Mother falls away into her own modest magnificence, and leaves Him inspired in the solitary light of His office as our Saviour. It is He alone who does it all. The all He does is the nearest of all created things to a veritable infinity. The way in which He does it is clothed with all the splendour and munificence with which the plenitude of God can invest created office or created nature. It is as if at once He drew away the light and air and space in which the million- worlded universe pursues its way, and in their stead flung from the top of Calvary a rich immeasurable effulgence which to all worlds and to all creatures should henceforth be instead of light and air and space, a better thing, a fresh receptacle for the huge creation, a new method of universal life. He rejoiced unutterably. He rejoiced in the magnitude of the work, in its difficulty, its beauty, its multiplication, its endurance, its solitariness, its acceptance by the Father. Each of these things have glories in themselves which a whole treatise would fail to exhaust. The motes in the sunbeams were but as a poor little sheep-flock, easily counted in a mountain paddock compared to the multitudinous graces which should outflow from the fountains of salvation. His Heart glowed with divinest satisfaction as He gazed on the abundance, the variety, the unearthliness, the efficacy, the sublimity, and above all, the likeness to Himself, of the graces He should give, and give out of His own grace, the very grace which was in Him at that moment in Bethlehem.

Here again every word carries with it a volume of theology, over which St. Michael's mind could spend an eternity of intellectual contentment. But His jubilee rose higher stiU. His Sacred Humanity thrilled in every faculty, as the organ pipes thrill with sound, with exultation in the glory of His Father, the glory with which He Himself as the Saviour of the world should invest the amplitude of His Eternal Sire. He looks over the vast infinity of His Father's essential glory, which no created thing can touch, nor outward assault come near to violate; and He sees an outer glory, lying like a pale rim around the other, wounded like the ragged skirts of a storm-cloud when the lightning or the wind have torn them, dim as the moonlight when it is thickened and dishonoured by the steam of the vaporous fens, and so jealous is He of the outermost glory of His Father, of that merest skirt, of the most external appurtenance of His honour, that He goes forth with haste to the work of salvation, as a warrior hastens to the battle, that the King of kings may not have to tarry for the victory. He sees the glow of His Father's glory, when His wandering creation is brought back to His Feet, He the Babe of Bethlehem the sole leader of captivity captive, the sole Saviour who has saved for His Father His Father's world. No Mary, no angel, no saint, shares the topmost heights of that exclusive prerogative. Only He has taken the Cross into His alliance, and it is He, and He alone. He the one Saviour, and such a Saviour — how unutterable the joy! His soul is almost troubled with the delight, almost amazed with the masterful excess of gladness. For ever that thought is with Him. Mary even cannot fathom such a joy as that. He hides Himself in the full depths of His own Heart, and sings to Himself silent songs because there is no other Saviour but Himself, and that He with such an infinitely sweet salvation has saved His people from their sins.

Word of the Father! who shall tell the joy thy Father's glory was to Thy Human Nature? Who shall tell, as it should be told, any one of the earthliest of these Thy joys 1 All this is but a conceivable drop or two of the ocean of His joys, conceived by one of the least of His creatures low down in an obscure nook of His creation. Yet it is into these eternal joys of His, that He, by His saving love, will make us enter, when He takes us out of His Bosom, and when with a smile, like one of those He is smiling now into Mary's face. He will lay us down in everlasting safety, all faultlessly redeemed, at the Father's Feet. 0 weary life, faded and outworn before its sands are half run out! who would not that that hour was come, and that our soul were lying, a panting, wondering, fresh-come thing, in its nest at the Father's Feet, still trembling with the surprise of its first eternal flight?

Footnotes

1. Rafifaello Maria, the Carmelite, has a beautiful thought in bis Life of St. Joseph. Speaking of St. Joseph's marriage with our Blessed Lady, he says, "The Holy Ghost, who resided in both of them, was theii conjugal love." — Vita di S. Giuseppe, p. 48. ↩

2. Sister Mary of Agreda beautifully says of our Lady that a great love of men was one of the chief graces which she received preparatory to the Incarnation, in order that our Lord as Man might receive this quality from her by inheritance, as one of the transmitted dispositions of His Mother. Mistica Ciudad, p. ii. 1. iii. cap. iii. In the whole range of Marian theology I have met with no deeper or sweeter thought than this. ↩

3. It is said in some revelations of the saints that chastity is the most special of all the fruits of redemption. ↩

4. See Macedo. CoUationes. Ooll. ix. Differ, i. sect. 5, where the Thomist doctrine is compared with that of Scotus. ↩