Chapter IX. The Feet of the Eternal Father

"We must end almost as we have begun. We dared at first to climb up to the Bosom of the Father, and look over into its ineffable abysses. Breathless with all we have seen, and heard, or perhaps in our bewilderment have dreamed, we come now to lie down at the Father's Feet, hushed and trembling, yet with a contentment beyond what we ever dared to hope. In His Bosom or at His Feet, it is enough for us if the Father's shadow rest upon as. If the Babe of Bethlehem will show us the Father, that will suffice us. It would be a life well spent, for so Margaret of Beaune was inspired to spend it, in learning the lessons and loves, the sorrows and the joys, of the Holy Childhood. But we must come now to what we may call the final disposition of the Infant Jesus, that which represents His whole Infancy, and indeed His whole Self — represents, as it seems, both His Natures, and is at once the greatest joy of His Divine Nature in His Human, and the greatest contribution of His Human Nature to His Divine — Devotion to the Eternal Father. Hitherto we have been learning devotions to the Infant Jesus; now we come to practise devotion with Him, and to learn His own special devotion from Him; and this is in reality the highest devotion to Him.

We must begin by making sure that we understand what we are speaking of. We are speaking of devotion in our Blessed Lord. Now devotion is a virtue of creatures. It is the truthful attitude which creatures assume in respect to their Creator, an attitude of the soul expressive of the life of the soul, at times gathered up into particular actions and concentrated in special rituals, yet not the less expressive of its whole normal and habitual life. A devout man is not merely devout when he is at his devotions. He is always actually devout, or is always tending to become so. The word devotion implies the immensity of God's majesty, upon whose altar it lays the sacrifice it has vowed. It expresses also the nothingness of the creature, and the propriety, amounting to a necessity, of its devoting itself to Him who called it out of nothing for Himself. It signifies that promptitude and agility of self-immolation, which is the perfect state to which it is continually aspiring. It is the natural inward life of the creature before the face of its Creator. But by grace it is raised to a supernatural end, and is more than a becoming posture in the presence of the Creator. It tends to union with Him, to acceptable love of Him, to intelligent worship of Him, to the possession of the Beatific Vision of Him, and to a world of supernatural acts which bring about what mystical theologians have dared to call a deification of the creature. It is the mother of prayer, the admonitress of humility, the hand and tongue of faith, the heart of charity, the intelligence of self-abjection, the vitality of perseverance. In short, it is the essence of our createdness, pure, wholesome, legitimate, and full of fragrance.

Now we are predicating the existence of this quality in our Blessed Lord, who was God Himself, altogether divine in Person, but having an assumed and for ever now inseparable Human Nature. We are not only predicating its existence in Him, but also its perfection. What then do we mean by it in Him? It is the excellence of His created Nature, but in Him it is utterly dependent on His divine. It belongs to Him exclusively in virtue of His created Nature, yet its acts are not unaffected by His uncreated Nature. It is tinged in some inefifable way with the ineradicable unction of His Divine Person, so that its worth becomes infinite, while itself remains finite. Devotion is not the same thing in Him which it is in the saints, or would have been in Him had He been simply an incomparably, even to us unimaginably holy person, but a created person, not a Divine Person. Like all else about Him, and indeed more than anything else about Him, His devotion is steeped in the Hypostatic Union. For, while His devotion can only come from His Human Nature, it must be its characteristic that it is worthy of God and, in a sense, equal to God's requirements, and it can only be so in virtue of the Hypostatic Union, because it can only be so through being glorified by the contact of His Divine Person.

We must observe therefore that our Lord's devotion is a true and real one, and not a mere figure of speech. For the Sacred Humanity is not exempted from any of the legitimate conditions of a created nature, except the possession of a created person, and such consequences as follow from * personality, in the matters of conscience, self-consciousness, and the like. But this absence of a human person in no way impaired the humanness, so to call it, of His Human Nature. It was not in any sense an imperfect humanity. On the contrary, it was the most perfect of all humanities. It concentrated in itgelf all those human peculiarities, belonging to humanity as it was devised by God, and for which it was so tenderly beloved by Him; and it concentrated them in its single self to a degree unknown to any other single human nature, perhaps indeed so pre-eminently above those of all men collectively that His single humanity represented in itself the perfections of the whole human race, and something more than was represented in the rest of the collective race, a something belonging to His sovereign Humanity alone. It might almost be an axiom: — The more human, the more Christ-like. It is important to master this truth. For it is not uncommon for pious believers, whose orthodoxy is unimpeachable in the profession of their faith, to fall into a practical error in their meditations, and so in their spiritual life, most of whose elements make their ingress into it through our meditations. These persons realise the Hypostatic Union so badly, or with such an ill-instructed indistinctness, that they practically conceive of our Blessed Lord, as of some portent, as if there were something monstrous (we must venture to write the dreadful word), colossal, titanic, disproportionate, in His union of Two Natures in one Person. Gradually in their minds the miraculous, in the popular sense of that word as implying some violation or suspension of nature, steals over our Lord's life, and sequesters whole regions of it as lying outside of what is imitable, and not to be regarded as offering even a proportionate pattern to ourselves. Thus the motives of perfection are weakened, and its treasures of example fatally impoverished. Many other evil consequences follow from the distortion of all the landscapes of the Incarnation, which comes from this inaccurate and untruthful view. From all this men would be delivered, if they bore in mind that the absence of a human person is no deficiency in a human nature. Our Lord's Human Soul was not blessedly crippled, or gloriously deformed, because it had no human person to rest upon. In ways we do not understand, but which the secret laboratories of creation might disclose to us, it was among the possibilities of creatures that an Uncreated Person might be substituted for a created one, and that such a substitution should not be a violence, but a divinely congruous exaltation.

Supposing that we did not already know from our catechism that the Person of the Holy Trinity, who was incarnate, was the Second Person, we should gather it from our Lord's human devotion as it transpires in the four Gospels. When we have long and deeply meditated on the Incarnation, there is a new and peculiar interest to us in every word which our Lord utters with respect to God. We feel certain that much more is implied than is actually said, and that the very manner in which things are said is of itself full of disclosures to us of the majesty of God. First of all, when we collect those of His sayings which may be regarded as revelations of God, and view them as one collected body of teaching, much results from the contemplation which we had not before suspected. We then review them all over again from a somewhat different point of view, considering that He who uttered the words was God Himself, and therefore spoke from something more than either the abundance or the certitude of His knowledge. In this fresh light we perceive new depths of meaning, and glimpses of significancy which disclose to us places where there are depths, though as yet we are unable to look down into them.

But the full purport of His teaching about God is not apprehended, even so far as we are able to apprehend it, until we consider it from yet another point of view, remembering that He who speaks is not the First or the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, but the Second. This sheds quite a peculiar light upon His words. Expressions, which hardly delayed our attention before, are now found to be pregnant with meaning. Sometimes a distinctive light is shed over whole couversatious, or on connected passage? oi

Scripture, like the prayer to the Father in the Gospel of St. John. Reading and re-reading the Gospels, as those -will naturally do who are striving to be men of prayer, it is of no slight importance to us to have different and successive points of view, whence we may look at that ground which we are traversing so repeatedly that at last there is a danger of the eye and the memory playing into each others' hands, and whole pages of the Gospel sliding under our notice, rather than engaging our reverent attention. Some have striven to obviate this by reading the New Testament in various languages, with which they are for the most part less familiar than their own, and the amount of the difficulty which the foreign language presents, however trifling it may be, is sufficient to arrest the mind, and make the old narrative in some sense new, and capable of striking us by salient points which in more familiar languages we had not perceived. This truly is a helpful practice. But so also is that other one of reading the Gospels from some one carefully selected point of view, a point of view selected for a reason, and then from another point of view, and then another; and a very moderate acquaintance with theology will enable us to vary them even beyond our needs. No life, however long, will suffice to take us into the deepest depths of the Gospels; but it is not a slight thing to be always going deeper, or even to be only learning more and more how astonishingly deep they are.

We gather then from the exhibitions of our Lord's human devotion in the Gospels, apart from direct texts otherwise establishing the doctrine, that He was the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. We gather it from the wonderful things said of the Father and the Holy Ghost, and His silence about the Word. He indicates His own place in the Holy Trinity in this covert way, as if it was not so much that He was teaching us, as that He was practising His own devotion. Who would be silent about the Word, unless it were the Word Himself 1 When He speaks the most strongly of His own Divinity, it is His oneness with the Father upon which He dwells, while He speaks of the Father and the Holy Ghost as if in some way external to them. He conceals Himself under the shadow of the Father. He asserts His own Divinity, as it were with some reluctance, though decisively. But, while He asserts it, He hides Himself in His identity with the Father, as if the Father were ampler and broader than Himself, and His Paternity a screen to Him. He is continually putting forward His Father's glory as the one object He is seeking, the one passion which possesses Him.

Even His intense love of souls is to be gathered rather from what He did and suffered, than from the direct manifestations of His devotion. If we were left to judge of His office from His devotion, we should consider Him rather as the restorer of His Father's glory than as the Saviour of mankind, as a victim of reparation rather than a victim of expiation. He is so jealous of the honour of the Holy Ghost that He waxes warm when He speaks of it, and uses words of a fearful severity, not only unusual on His lips, but without any other example than the one furnished by this solitary subject. He declares, that, while words against Himself shall be pardoned, there is a peculiar limit with regard to the Holy Ghost, which it is fatal for us to transgress. Against the Second Person of the Holy Trinity all things may be forgiven; but against the Third there is an unnamed sin, or state of sin, which is especially declared to be beyond the reach of mercy, some stain which the Precious Blood refuses to wash away on this side the grave, and on which the wholesome fires of purgatory shall not be allowed to act when the grave is passed.

We may perhaps be pardoned, if, in order to make our meaning clear, we speak for a moment in a human way and according to human conceptions. It is as if our Lord could do no more for His love of the Father by being the Eternal Word. This was an old glory, because it was in truth an unbeginning one. Hence it was His grand delight in the Incarnation that it furnished Him with a new way of loving and glorifying the Father. Of course this is not true. It is untrue, first of all, because of the adorable self-sufficiency of God, and secondly, because the Eternal Generation is not a mystery done, but for ever doing, like a pulse of the Divine Life which as it never began to beat can never cease beating. Yet this way of putting the matter represents to us a truth which would otherwise be inexpressible, and enables us to bring, at least imperfectly, into view an impression which results from the study of our Lord's words, read by the light of His Divine Person rather than by that of His simple Divinity. It serves also to illustrate our Lord's extreme joy in His Sacred Humanity, in connection with His peculiar devotion to His Father's glory. It was not merely falling from a higher fountain to a lower, nor even adding a lower fountain to a higher. It was the gaining of another fountain for it, lower indeed, not less than infinitely lower, but at the same time new.

But are we warranted in saying that devotion to His Father's glory is a characteristic so observable and so strongly marked in our Blessed Lord during the Three-and-Thirty Years t We have said that it amounted to what in the saints would be called a passion, so vehemently did it appear to possess His Soul. Let us reconsider the appearances of it in the Gospels. When we reflect that our Lord was Himself God, we must feel some surprise that He should so seldom speak as if He were Himself the original fountain of truth and the ultimate authority for what He might vouchsafe to teach. With a few exceptions, He speaks as one sent, as one under authority, as one who is delivering another's message. So far as He Himself was concerned, He claims to be believed rather on account of His miracles than for His own sake. He expressly says that He does not bear witness of Himself. On the other hand. He is constantly referring to the Father. He is continually magnifying Him who sent Him. His Father's will is all in all to Him, His Father's glory the end He has not so much come of His accord, as He has been officially sent, to seek. Even His own immediate disciples are made to feel, that it is the Father who is brought so prominently before them, that He almost eclipses the dignity and authority of our Lord Himself, which are sedulously put forward rather as borrowed than as His own. His words to St. Peter, when the apostle made public confession of His Divinity, show that He Himself had never explicitly taught His own Divinity even to those nearest and dearest to Him. It was the Father who had revealed it to Peter. This then is the first thing we notice in our Lord's devotion, the constant reference to the Father as if it was His own habit of mind, and as if He wished also to make it the habit of mind of those around Him.

Li the next place, as has already been intimated. He expressly brings forward the will of the Father as His own rule. It is the religious obedience He is under. It is to Him both precept and counsel of perfection. His life is in many respects a strange one, because of its unearthliness. Its relation to the religious rulers of the nation is outwardly equivocal. It is a life of homeless wandering, with unfixed occupations, and duties self-imposed. His movements sometimes wear an appearance of waywardness. He calls others from the relative duties of their stations in life, as if all established rules were to give way to the expression of His cnoice. He works His miracles, sometimes with a secrecy which hinders their effect as authentications of His mission, aometimes in such a way as to give scandal, sometimes undei such circumstances as to perplex, sometimes with words which sound untruthful, sometimes with a look of caprice, and once does He adorably condescend to work a miracle with a mysterious appearance of human petulance. He offends the prejudices of the Jews by a certain amount of intercourse with those outside the synagogue, yet He will not go so far as to preach His Gospel to them. In certain matters He takes His stand as a reformer, and disregards the traditional method of observing some of God's commandments. He wilfully forfeits His influence with those for whose conversion He is labouring, by seeming to transgress the bounds of discretion in His openly expressed attraction to sinners. He speaks against the rulers in terms of the most startling condemnation, yet when pressed to declare His Divinity He almost eludes the question. How are all these inconsistencies to be reconciled? Under what system of commandments or code of duty is He living 1 His disciples have been taught by Him to consider that He has an invisible rule in all He does, a heavenly harmony to which He times all His adorable and inexplicable movements. It is His Father's will. That is His religion. He lives in secret intercourse with the Father. It is not so much that He is inspired by Him, as that He communes with Him uninterruptedly. Whether He is hiding Himself or showing Himself, whether He is among the mountains, in the plain, upon the lake, or amongst the streets of the city, they feel that it is the golden thread of His Father's will which He is following. He does nothing at random, and yet, so it seems, nothing on any preconcerted system of human prudence. Some one leads Him. He talks with some one by His side, and it is some one too whose companionship does not oppress Him. He hints at it, more than hints at it, sa His Father's will

The doctrine which He puts forward about the Father is not less remarkable. He will introduce others to something of the same sort of intimacy with the Father which He Himself enjoys. This is part of His office. He has come to communicate the incommunicable Father. He teaches that the way to the Father is through Him. His Father's house is the many-mansioned home to which He has come to invite us. It is the Father who stands behind His parables, and is the king, and the husbandman, and the giver of the feast. He goes away, and it is to the Father He is going. He will prepare a place for those who love Him, but it is in His Father's house that the place shall be prepared. Faith in Himself is urged because it is acceptable to the Father. He will pray to His Father for those who love Him, and the Father will also grant to us all we ask, if we ask it in the name of this His Messenger. When it is good for those around Him, He asks the Father to glorify Him with some of the old glory which He enjoyed with Him before. When He comes out of the waters of Jordan to begin His Ministry, He will have this grave commencement authenticated by the testimony of the Father. When it is His will to reach the uttermost limit of His fearful sufferings, that last excess is to be the dereliction of His Father; and what does not this reveal?

He is Himself infinite Wisdom, and, as the Word, He is in a specially appropriated sense the wisdom of the Godhead; yet He seems to speak as if it were not out of His own abundance, as if it were not the spontaneous outpouring of His own magnificent intelligence, but as if He were simply an inspired prophet, as if He were only and precisely the accredited mouthpiece of the Father. He acts as the Word of the Father, which indeed He was, yet rather as if an exalted created Word, than as the consubstantial Word eternally out-spoken. He calls Himself the Son of

4S8 THE FBBT OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

God, and then purposely wraps the title round with ambiguity and double meaning, as if He were indeed by special ennobling and by singular unction the Son of God, but by no means the everlasting and coequal Son. As was said before, when He does assert Himself, when for the sake of others His love leads Him to magnify Himself, when He overawes us by the majestic gentleness with which He utters His own praises, the form it all takes is the declaration of His oneness with the Father. These are but specimens of the instances with which the Gospels so abundantly supply us. When we have received them into our souls, they seem to form the best part of our most intimate knowledge of our dearest Lord.

All these instances are taken from His own teaching during His three years' Ministry. It might be thought, that in the Infancy there was no scope for the exhibition of a similar devotion. As He was pleased to observe silence, as though, like other children, He had to learn to speak, and as He assumed the disguise of a child's passiveness, and never laid it aside for a moment, we are left to conjecture the dispositions of His Sacred Heart by the aid of theology; and the teaching of the Infancy is altogether by example. In those first years His mysteries were His oracles. Nevertheless, if we look at the Childhood attentively, we shall find most interesting traces of the same position with regard to the Father, which He openly put forward afterwards in His express teaching.

The providential arrangements of Bethlehem and Nazareth look as if they were purposely ordered with this view. It is as if His Sacred Heart had planned everything with reference to this branch of His teaching, as if it expressed more of His Heart than any other. Rather it is not a branch of His teaching, but His whole teaching, the framework in which all the work of our redemption was accomplished. When we begin to reflect upon the Incarnation we cannot but be struck with our Lord's condescending to have a human mother. It appears as if it was the deepest of His condescensions, and on that account, not only the sweetest and most delightful for His creatures to contemplate, but an actual channel of the most substantial and exuberant benefits to themselves. If our Lord was to have a human mother, it must be plain to one who knows the ways of God, that she must occupy some such place in the world as that which the Church teaches us God has assigned to her. Nay, we should expect her place to be higher, more influential, and in some sense perhaps more independent; and it is our firm belief, that, hereafter, so it will be found to be, and that we shall learn in heaven that of a truth Mary's grandeurs are such as could not safely be taught on earth because of our infirmities. No province of theology will have to widen itself so much as that which speaks of her. In her measures she will be as new to the saints who have loved her most, as the Vision of Bliss itself will be. Even on earth the last ages of the Church are to have a knowledge of her, which would amaze and oppress us now.* But though an earthly mother formed an essential part of the Incarnation, He is without earthly Father. He draws His Human Nature from His Immaculate Mother alone; but no created Father may come nigh His eternal filiation, the glory of which is His exclusively, and He cherishes it with the utmost jealousy.

This one fact is full of significance in itself. But it be-

• Grignon de Montfort. Vraie Devotion, p. 29. St. Vincent Ferrer has prophesied the same. In the Mystical City our Lady complains to Sister Blary of Agreda that most writers about her have been too timid; she says that their "reserve" is in reality "indevotion," and assigns this as the reason of our Lord's having arranged that devotion to her in the Church should grow in the way of development.— P. iii. 1. viii, cap. xir.

46o THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER, comes still more significant when we observe, that, although He cannot have an earthly father, He immediately places close to Himself a created shadow of the Eternal Father in the person of St. Joseph. At least the shadow of the divine paternity must be there. The Holy Family cannot be the Earthly Trinity, unless this be so. Bethlehem and Nazareth cannot be heavens on earth, unless a fountain of meek government is flowing there, to represent the fountain of Godhead and Self-sufficiency which flows in heaven. When He looks around for apt insignia in which at once to shroud and to symbolise the grand majesty of His Father, He finds it in the extreme of humble tenderness and bashful gentleness. Where His teaching is to be by example, He is not content until He has put Himself under the shadow of obedience to the image of His Father. Thus St. Joseph furnished Him even with what He could not find in heaven. Tauler and St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi are not blamed for saying that the Word searched heaven for the stole of sufi'ering, and found it not. Yet it was so beautiful in His eyes, that He could not brook the disappointment, and therefore took flesh, and came down to enjoy on earth a joy which heaven denied Him. Devotion will often express itself by doctrinal allegories of a similar description, nor will the large heart of severe theology condemn the practice by which love speaks what is unspeakable, and comes to understand what was already in herself, but which she did not understand until it found utterance like this. So let us say now that here was one of St. Joseph's most glorious prerogatives. He gave our Lord what heaven could not give Him. There was an impossibility in heaven which Joseph made possible for Him on earth; and it was a possibility fraught with a peculiar joy to the Sacred Heart. St. Joseph enabled Him to find, in the trinity below, a subordination, of which He could not find so much as a shadow in the Trinity above.

Not a vestige of subordination could be seen upon Hia eternal filiation. He was in all things coequal with the Father. What an intense delight therefore was it now to His Human Soul to be able to express His love of the Father by this peculiar devotion, this subordination to His created shadow and earthly representative!

Moreover, in the days of Bethlehem and Egypt, it was not He, the Eternal Son, nor was it the Holy Ghost, whose relation to Mary Joseph symbolised, but it was particularly the Father, who communicated with Joseph, gave him his orders, and warned him as he needed it. We know it is an axiom in theology, that whatever God does outside Himself is done by the whole Trinity. Yet nevertheless certain operations are assigned to the different Persons by an attribution or appropriation, the mystery of which is so delicate that it can be no otherwise expressed than by such appropriation. So it most often happens that when God is mentioned, without the designation of the Divine Person, we appropriate to the First Person the action in question, as in the case of the dreams, communications, and warnings of St. Joseph.

Even the virginity of our Lord's earthly Mother is a kind of worship of His Heavenly Father, as if to have had a created father would have dimmed the Father's glory in the Eternal Generation. Thus did Mary's virginity rise up for ever in voiceless waves of exquisite incense, or like the fragrance of a spice-tree shaken by the wind, before the Paternity on high, an incense of which she herself in silent ecstasy was ever conscious, and which the Babe watched as it rose at all hours, gently forcing its way to the distant throne, like the spiral smoke-wreaths of the sweet gums climbing the altar to the Blessed Sacrament; and He watched it with His Infant eyes with an ineffably tender jubilee. But even independently of these mysteries, the whole spirit of the

Sacred Infancy is always taking us by the hand and leading us softly up to the Eternal Father.

For a child naturally points our thoughts to his parents. A child is not a child, when we disentangle him from the idea of his parents. Even orphanhood only brings out the lost relation the more strongly. This is the reason why the mysteries of the Infancy give out so much indirect devotion to Mary, so much more than the other divisions of our Lord's life, not even excepting the Mary-haunted Calvary. Rightly therefore and more deeply considered, they do the same, and in a much higher degree, to the Eternal Father. Indeed there is a point of view in prayer, from which devotion to Him and devotion to Mary blend with heavenly confusion into one. It passes, and is gone. It was but for a moment. Only we saw it, and were sure of it, and what it left in the soul we never shall forget.

But we must venture into details, trying the depth of the water as we go. We must endeavour to bring before ourselves several manifestations of this devotion to the Eternal Father, proceeding from the greater to the less, until it shall die away into a devotion possible even to our extreme littleness and lowness.

We have already considered our Lord's devotion to the Father, as it is implied in the mysteries of the Infancy, and as it is taught in the doctrine of the Gospels. But we may also regard it in an historical, or rather biographical point of view, as distinguishing in a remarkable manner our Lord's own life. Suarez, in this respect differing from St. Thomas, thinks it most probable that our Lord, at the first moment of the Incarnation, made a vow to give Himself up to the Father to redeem the world by His death; and that the perfection of this vow involved every one of His actions in detail, so that, not only were all His actions in point of fact always directed with an actual intention to the glory of the

Father, but He had made away His human liberty from the first, as far as a vow implies such a surrender, and that all His actions were therefore so directed by vow. Here is another instance of a fresh point of view from which the Gospels may be read, whatever becomes of the controversy among theologians as to the likelihood or unlikelihood of such a vow. Vowed or unvowed, it is most certain, as the combined thought of His science and His grace assures us, that every one of the minutest actions of His Childhood, His sleeping, waking, weeping, smiling, taking the breast, being dressed, undressed, or washed, distinctly each time was done, with the full use of reason and under the sovereignty of grace, for the Father's glory. Thus the Sacred Infancy was a continuous function, celebrated in the temple of that blissful Humanity, in honour of the Eternal Father. Priest, and sacrifice, and sacrificial vestments, and bells, and incense, and flowers, and angelic ministers, all were there, and the august solemnity knew no interruptions, the ceremonial ever changing, the function never ceasing. It ranged from one beauty to another, from one splendour to another, from one mystery to another, and yet was all harmoniously one. It could shift the scene from Bethlehem to the Desert, from Egypt to Nazareth, but there were no pauses in that magnificent worship of the Father. Who can say, why, when His Human Soul loved the Holy Ghost so amazingly. He put forward His Father's glory with such an impressive emphasis?

If we look at the still night in the dark room at Nazareth and the desolate afternoon on Calvary, it is this devotion to the Father which brings them together and clasps them into one. His very beginning, whether it was vow or not, we know from the Apostle was. Behold I come to do Thy will. It was that He might do this will that a Body had been prepared for Him, and therefore it was as soon as He came into the world that He aaid, Behold I come! In the head of the book it is written of Me, that I should do Thy will; 0 God! When He goes out of the world it is, Father 1 into Thy hands I commend My spirit. As the beginning was, so was the ending. He rose out of one sea of the Father's will, like the sun of a peninsula, and He sank into another sea; the Three-and-Thirty Years was the narrow strip of earth which He illuminated in His course. Then what came between the rising and the setting? His perseverance. His perseverance in a life of humiliation, sorrow, and suffering, His perseverance in the same solemn worship of His Father's glory which had occupied His Infancy, only now the music was yet graver, the ceremonies more numerous, the pageant more austere. Moreover how does He express His perseverance 1 My meat is to do the will of Him who sent Me.

If we might detach one portion of His life, and isolate it, as sufficiently indicating the great work which He came to do, it would obviously be the Passion. Our belief that He would still have been incarnate, supposing man had not fallen, no doubt affects even our view of the Passion, and makes our eyes keen to observe its character of reparation as well as its accomplishment of redemption. "We more naturally, or at least with greater facility, look at each mystery as primarily intended to glorify the Father rather than to redeem sinners, or, to speak more strictly, we look at it as redeeming sinners by making reparation to the glory of the Father. The primary end of a glorious Incarnation would have been to glorify God by exceeding love of man. After the fall the glorifying of God assumed a deeper and more uniform character of reparation, deeper and more uniform, rather than new, — for may we not say, when God's all-holy majesty is so spotless, that even for an unfallen world something like reparation would have been required? The Passion is the miraculous piling up, on one sensitive human life, of all woes of soul and all torments of flesh, one upon another until they culminate. Surely then there is great significance in the fact that His Passion culminated in His being abandoned by the Father. Could any further anguish lie beyond the confines of that appalling dereliction, or had it actually exhausted the possibilities of suffering 1 We may never limit the omnipotence of God. But we may say that such an abandonment did positively exhaust all the possibilities of suffering. Nothing now was left but death. In the grandeur of His unspeakable grace. His Soul held on, as if within finite length of arm, to the Father who so awfully withdrew: and His last words were, Father! into Thy hands I commend My spirit.

Each Christmas, as it comes, brings back to us old charms, familiar joys because they have been joys from childhood. One of these is the power of Mary over Jesus. Who does not remember the astonishment of his early years, when he had come to appreciate the meaning of our Lord being God, and yet in pictures and in Christmas mysteries saw Mary make free with Him as if He were a common child? Was He really as helpless as He seemed, or was He only feigning helplessness? Neither; yet He lay on Mary's lap Hke any other babe, and after all. He was God. Then for the first time we felt an awe of Mary, because we seemed to see her more nearly and more truly. New thoughts struck us. We had, so it appeared, discovered something for ourselves beyond what we had ever been told; and it is always true that what we learn of ourselves goes deeper into us than what others teach us. Thus the mysteries of the Infancy opened out before us, and we read them all in the single light of His visible obedience to Mary. From the night when she showed Him to the shepherds, to the day when He seemed to adjourn His Father's business and went back with her to Nazareth for eighteen years, and again when, at the outset of His ministry, He began it with anticipating His time for working miracles, that He might still obey her, all seemed plain in that single light of His filial obedience, Nothing was left uninterpreted. It was a scene of heavenly wonders, but all was harmonious, and one spirit brooded over it all. Even over the Childhood of the Everlasting God Mary's maternal jurisdiction lay outspread like a golden glory. Were other thoughts, were fresh discoveries, to break up this vision, as the wind breaks up the visionary landscapes in the still water? Never. Fresh discoveries would be made. Unsuspected invisible things would be seen behind, would be seen through that glory; yet only to make it yet more glorious. Our youth's dream of the Mary-governed Infancy was never to pass away. For, as with most of our childish apprehensions of truth, the matter had been most truly apprehended, and in the truest way. Years have gone on, and with the years the heart has gone on also making many discoveries by that light of Mary. Age will not have done discovering; and then heaven will meet us with its last discovery, which will neither dishonour those which have gone before, nor eclipse the light in which they have been made. But what is it which this light of Mary's maternal jurisdiction shows us now 1 Another jurisdiction which lies beneath, another obedience which stands behind, supporting, ennobling, glorifying Mary's power. It is His sovereign obedience to the Eternal Father: and once, by the darkest mystery in the Gospel, for the still further exultation of His Mother, and for other divine reasons, the two obediences are allowed, not truly to come in conflict, but to seem to do so; as when without her leave and to her intense anguish He stayed behind in the temple when He was twelve years old. The hand of the Eternal Father seems to put aside the cloud of light, and let in the dazzling brightness of deep heaven upon us, and for the moment Mary's light is darkened, not so much darkened in itself, as darkened to the weakness of our sight, thus suddenly overpowered from on high.

We must observe also that double action of the Father and the Son, in consequence of which no man comes to the Father but by the Son, while on the other hand no one truly knows the Son except the Father teach him. It is as if it was the Father's will that Jesus should not bear witness of Himself, in order that He, the Father, might reserve to Himself the joy of bearing witness of the Son, as He did over the river Jordan, and again when the heavenly Voice spoke of glorifying Him. He would magnify the Son as the Son was ever delighting to magnify Him. There should be something reciprocal even in the manner of the love which the Father bore to the Sacred Humanity. The grand instance of this, to which we shall have to refer again, was His secretly revealing to Peter the doctrine of our Blessed Lord's Divinity. Flesh and blood, said Jesus, have not revealed it to thee, but My Father who is in heaven. This secret revelation of the Eternal Father to St. Peter is one of the most striking incidents recorded in the Gospels, and fascinates our attention, as well by its singularity, as by the depths of contemplation which it opens out to us. If it be not irreverent so to speak, we might compare it with those facts in biographies, which are sometimes recorded as single incidents, to which no prominence is given, and on which no stress is laid, yet which nevertheless flash upon us as each of them the keystone of a whole biography.

There is one more event in our Lord's life, which must be dwelt upon. Yet we dwell on it with reluctance, as it is impossible to do justice either to its tenderness or to its mystery. Every one has something of his religion in his heart, which it is hard for him to put into words, just because it has grown so familiar in his thoughts, that it never assumes there the vesture of words, and we almost fear to desecrate it by clothing it in speech. Such to us is the event in question, of which we are going to speak: such has it been to us so far back as our memory can go. It dawns upon us in the Gospels that our Lord must have made the Person of the Father the subject of frequent conversation with His apostles. We are inclined to think He must have spoken most intimately, and perhaps minutely, with them on this attractive subject. He may probably have communicated to them more wonders regarding the Paternity of God than even our rich theology has taught us. Such a subject would be a natural one for Him to dwell upon, because it was that which was most in His Heart, and He Himself has said that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. Moreover He so openly put forward His devotion to the Father, that it would be likely for Him in His secret teaching to fill in the outline which He had given more openly.

There seems no improbability in this consideration, when it is suggested to us. But what is there which actually intimates it to us? Surely if much had not gone before, which is not recorded in the Gospels, St. Philip never could have said, Lord! show us the Father, and it is enough for us. Most beautiful words! The pathetic utterance of all creation allowed to articulate itself in the voice of that dear apostle! On the first reading how beautiful were the words, and now when read, when pondered, when whispered to ourselves, when breathed to the same Lord in prayer, how *housand-fold more beautiful! Lord! show us the Father, and it is enough for us! Yes! Enough — that gentle, unconstrained, most truthful word, Enough, — precisely what creation pines for, precisely what will bring that contentment which flows from the filling of our natures and the satisfaction of our holiest desires! Enough! saints and angels, Joseph and Mary, they alone could tell us of that Enough.

We must tear ourselves away from those little words, each of which has so great a soul, so large a heart within it. We must turn to observe our Saviour's answer to Philip, an answer with what a look of love assuredly accompanied! He is not so much surprised that the apostle should have received thus deeply into his soul what He had taught him about the Father, as surprised that his knowledge had not led him further. Here again we have indications of a world of secret teaching. So long a time have I been with you, and have you not known Me 1 Philip! he that seeth Me seeth the Father also. How sayest thou, Show us the Father? Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? Otherwise believe for the very work's sake. Amen, Amen, I say to you, he that believeth in Me, the works that I do, he also shall do, and greater than these shall he do, because I go to the Father. And whatsoever you shall ask the Father in My Name, that will I do, tJiat the Father may be glorified in the Son. His oneness with the Father is dearer to Him than His distinctness. Wonderful! for He was the express image of the Father, the brightness of His glory, and the figure of His substance.

Thus they who were nearest to our Blessed Lord, and whose souls were nurtured on His secret teaching, may be described as men who pined to see the Father, who were discontented with all things else, who did not rest even in the presence of the Son, but whose wants were measured exactly by the Vision of the Father. It would be enough. But there would be no enough short of that, no enough elsewhere, no enough till then. Ages have passed since, and Jesus is leading His royal life in heaven. But is He changed in this respect? Ages perhaps, — it is sad to think, yet surely not an unwise humility so to think, for there is not a grain of despondency in the thought, — ages perhaps may pass amidst the cleansing fires before the divine mercy shall bid

St. Michael lift us out of the burning sea and place us on the coasts of heaven. Will Jesus have changed by that time in this respect? No! strangely in unison with the spirit of the Three-and-Thirty Years will His greeting be, and expressive of the same, not unforgotten only, but unbroken thought, Come, blessed of My Father! Blessed of My Father! that is our eternal name, the name giving us in our first baptism of heavenly beatitude. Blessed of My Father! How those words come to us in the tingling stillness of the night, when panic fears oppress our loneliness, and so strangely vex our souls! How they rise soft and clear above the rolling of the world, in hours of weariness, and of obstinate temptations which grace seems at times to multiply rather than repel. How they sing songs to the fear of death, and lull it when it wakes and cries! Blessed of My Father! Why Blessed of My Father 1 Do the words lead on to that date at which He shall deliver up the kingdom to God and the Father, and the Son Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him that God may be all in all? For, says the apostle, when all things are put under Jesus, He is undoubtedly excepted who put all things under Him; and who is He but the Eternal Father? But we are reaching into the darkness of unapproachable mysteries. Enough for us, it was Philip's chosen word, enough if only we be blessed of the Father.

We are now, in tracing still further this special devotion to the Father, brought again to that frequently recurring difficulty of speaking of our Blessed Lady without doing despite to our own conceptions of her. We must consider her devotion to the Eternal Father, and how in her also it was special. But when we have seen what it was in the Soul of Jesus, we can understand what it was in hers. According to the proportions of her inferiority it was the same besetting thought, the same holy possession of soul, the aame solitary and sacred enthusiasm which it was in Hia

But there were circumstances in her position and influence which gave a peculiar character to this devotion in her, and these we must examine. She was the sole earthly parent of Jesus. In herself she enjoyed the rights both of father and of mother. This was one of the miraculous glories of her Maternity, a subject to her of frequent meditation and of incessant joy. It was not only that her own honour was as it were doubled thereby; but the glory of God was concerned in it. It was for the honour of Jesus. It was for the honour of the Eternal Father. The Incarnation would have been quite a diflferent mystery if it had been otherwise; and therefore we may believe that some of its especially divine splendour was involved in this very fact of Mary's being His sole earthly parent. She felt therefore that this peculiarity in her position reflected peculiar honour upon the Eternal Father, and therefore was a ground of devotion to Him^ which, while all could feel it, belonged eminently to herself. Moreover the same fact would cause her thoughts to be continually resting on her Son's Heavenly Father. The mother's love of her child is always entwined with thoughts of its father, and with continual reference to him. A widowed mother has a double love of hor child, because she loves him for her husband's sake as well as for her own. Conjugal aff'ection is an element which can never be absent from the perfection of maternal love.

Now in Mary's case there were heavenly peculiarities in every one of these circumstances. Her love of Jesus was necessarily entwined with thoughts of His Father; but He was God, and the First Person of the Holy Trinity. She had nothing to do with the Eternal Generation of the Son, except to be a portion of the shadow of it. She also was in a certain sense widowed, and St. Joseph did but veil her widowhood. Yet she had not to love two in one. She had not to love the lost Father in the Child, as well as the Child

Himself. She had to love her Child doubly, to love Him as being both His Father and His Mother, and to love Him thus doubly for His own sake alone. What conjugal affection does in the maternal love of others, adoration had to do in hers, a double adoration both of the invisible Father and of the visible Son. Furthermore, her Maternity was part of her religion. It occupied a great space in her faith. It was linked with some of the most inscrutable mysteries of the Godhead. It never could be out of her thoughts for a moment, even without any reference to her own delight in it, because it was the created echo of the uncreated Generation of the Word. The result of all these things was, not only that the interior of her mind belonged so singularly to herself that it could not be shared, nor even fully apprehended, by any other creature, but that the unity into which it resolved itself was, as consideration shows us, devotion to the Eternal Father. All the circumstances rose upward to His throne. They were like flights of steps from the north and the south, from the east and the west, but all ascending to that single throne. It takes long to master these things in all their bearings, even so far as we are able to master them, but can time be better spent than in elucidating the grandeurs of Mary? We remember that text of Scripture which the Church applies to her; — They, who elucidate me, shall have eternal life.

We must consider also that one of the prerogatives of Mary's singular holiness was that she could enter more than any other mere creature into the inward dispositions of God. The mind of God was more open to her. The affections of God were more intimately communicated to her. She saw the Father's exceeding love of Jesus more clearly than any »7ondering angel sees it now. She saw down into its pellucid depths, and worshipped in the thankfulness of profoundest fear. The vision of this love of the Father for Jesus doubtless excited in her heart a new love of Jesus. It was a new pattern for her to copy. It was another proof to her, that even she did not love Jesus as He deserved. It was a fresh incentive to her to dilate her heart more and more. It was a substantial and efficacious fire which actually effected the dilatation of her heart for her. It was the Father's love. But He did not keep it to Himself. He communicated to her so much of it as she could bear, and benignantly made it hers as well as His. But while it was in her a new light by which to see and appreciate Jesus, and at the same time a new power to love Him, it also, because of her own immense love of Jesus, produced in her heart a new love of the Father. She loved Him the more because He so loved the Son. She loved Him for so far overshooting her own maternal love. She loved Him because He loved Jesus to the full, and left nothing wanting in the perfection of His love. She loved Him, because His love at once took her office out of her own hands, and at the same time enabled her to fulfil it as she could not otherwise have done. She loved Him because His love was a revelation of Jesus, and a revelation made in so touchingly maternal a manner. It was the confidence of the Heavenly Father to the Earthly Mother, confiding to her in secret the real worth, and character, and dearness of Him who was the Child of both in two such mysterious ways. Thus she ventured on this account to love the Father with a sort of timid exultation, as if she had a kind of right to share in the Father's peculiar parental love of Jesus. It is impossible for us to realise the depths of profoundest adoration into which Mary's soul must have been cast by this awful communication with the Father in that which is His own eternal singularity, in that which actually makes Him to be the Father and is the fountain of His Paternity, in that which would have seemed to all creatures to be in any measure or degree absolutely incommunicable. See how for the moment Mary and the Eternal Father blend uncomminglingly in one! In many lights the Mother of God is worshipful in her dread majesty; in none does she so completely strike us dumb before her majesty as in this.

Her own similitude to Jesus would naturally involve her having caught from Him this the master-devotion of His Sacred Heart, to which she knew, and rejoiced it should be so, that even His love of her was utterly subordinate. But these other peculiar circumstances of her own gave her devotion to the Eternal Father a character and distinctness, which make it something more than a copy of our Lord's reduced to the lesser dimensions of her heart. But hei communication with the Father in His Paternity, out ol which flows a special love both of Him and of the Son, is not her only fountain of devotion to Him, nor the only mystery which seems to draw her from her visible vicinity to God into the blinding splendours of the very Throne. A? she shares in the Father's Paternity, so also she shares in the Son's Filiation. She was herself in a special way, through predestination and because of the Infant Jesus, the eternal daughter of the Father.

Here too was a fresh source of the love of Jesus, a beautiful strange love from the mingling of the mother and the sister in one heart; it was a different tie to Him from the direct tie of the Incarnation, though even this new tie came from the selfsame mystery. Here also was a look, a shadow, a fair umbrage, it could not be more, yet how much was even this 1 of dear equality with Jesus, dearer far than the apparent superiority over Him, which her maternal jurisdiction conferred upon her. Here also was another fountain of love of the Eternal Father, another marvellous foundation on which the temple of her devotion to Him might be raised. Her grandeurs dazzle us. But it is not so much the glory of them which we are to look at now, as the wonderful intricate simplicity with which they all converge upon her devotion to the Eternal Father.

Now let us advance a step further in the history of this devotion. When we first entered upon our enquiry into the mysteries of Bethlehem, we compared the Sacred Infancy to a forest, and St. Joseph to its odorous under-growth, whose fragrance would be to us, whichever way we bent our steps, like the atmosphere of the place. So has it been throughout; and now, when we come to speak of his devotion to the Eternal Father, we shall have to repeat many things which have been said before, or which at least have been treated from a different point of view. But repetition about him is hardly wearisome. It is plain at first sight that devotion to the Eternal Father must have been the length and breadth of his whole sanctity. It was the characteristic, from which his holiness derived its genius and its unity. His dread office of being the shadow of the Father could not import less than this. His loving care of Mary came out of it, and was included within it. He was the shadow of the Father to her as well as to Jesus. His tender ministries to our Blessed Lord, and the exercise of authority with which he worshipped Him, a worship solitary among all the worships that surround the Word, — all came out of his office. Indeed it was to Jesus primarily that Joseph was the Shadow of the Father. It might even be said that to himself also he was the shadow of the Father; for in that shadow his soul grew, and his predestination was accomplished. It was a deep, soft, beautifying, soothing shade over his life perpetually. It was his light. He saw, and worked, by the light of that shadow.

Moreover it was his form of love of Jesus. For as he had to imitate the office of the Eternal Father, so likewise did he imitate His love. There was something more truly paternal in his tenderness to our Lord than the tenderness di common earthly fathers, because, though he was not a true father, his office came out of a deeper Paternity. Divine shadows are substantial. They are shadows in relation to the eternal height which casts them, but they lie defined, substantial, and transfiguring, on created things. We must remind ourselves of this, although we have indicated the same truth before. This communication of the Divine Paternity was Joseph's highest right to love Jesus. He might love Him as His creature. He might love Him as one of His redeemed. He might love Him with a personal love, as having been laden with gifts and graces by Him. He might love Him as Mary's Child, with a love into which he might throw all the intensity of his love of Mary. He might love Him for His own sake, because He was so winning, and attractive, and encompassed with divine fascinationa He might love Him as we come to love all whom we have saved from death or danger, or who have permitted us to show them kindness; and this love would be in proportion to the dignity of his own office, and the excellence of his Foster-child. But his highest love of Him was from his highest right to love Him, and that resided in his being the shadow of the Father. He loved Jesus in and by his love of the Eternal Father, and by the likeness to the Father which the Eternal Father had communicated to him, whereby he was raised to the further and inexpressible dignity of likeness to the Son Himself, who was also the image of the Father. Thus it is that the loves of the Earthly Trinity are illuminated by quivering beams, by shooting splendours, by pulses of throbbing light, which seem to belong rather to the inward life of the Heavenly Trinity, adorably communicated to that sweetest growth of all creation, the Holy Family.

Joseph's devotion to the Eternal Father was also his form of love of Mary. He was especially her husband as the foster-father of Jesus. His conjugal office was simply part of his shadow of the Father. His office to her rose out of the same source as his office to Jesus, namely, out of the same shadow. As with Jesus, so with Mary, he might love her for many reasons, and with various pure and holy loves. As his spouse, as the Mother of Jesus, as the spouse of the Holy Ghost, as the daughter of the Father, for her love of Jesus, for her love of himself, for her own transcending excellence, — for all these things he might love her, and did love her, as only so holy a heart could love. But his love of her, inasmuch as he was the shadow of the Father, was a wider love than any or all of these, and rested upon a yet more divine appointment. Indeed it did in matter of fact presuppose and include all those other loves. Thus his devotion to the Father sank into all the details of his life, by the necessity of the case. It was his vocation, the end for which he was created, the reason of his immense grace on earth, the explanation of his stupendous glory in heavea "We may thus see how true the doctrine was with which we started, that his whole spiritual life, that peculiar sanctity which he shares with no other saint, was built upon, and resolves itself into, a most incomparably special devotion to the Eternal Father. St. Joseph's name expresses to our thoughts the shadow of the Father, and the name of the shadow of the Father leaves nothing about St. Joseph unexpressed.

The Apostles were a body of men unlike the rest of the saints, both in the greatness of their gifts, the magnitude of their office, and the special relation in which they stood to our Blessed Lord. We may not liken the other saints to them, much less exalt any of them above the Apostles of the Word. Theologians teach us that we should incur the note of temerity if we did so. The litanies of the Church seem to warrant us in excepting St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist There are some of the Apostles, of whom we know nothing but their names as enumerated in the Gospel, o?

some uncertain traditions of the localities of their preaching. Yet the choice of Jesus has put a golden crown upon their heads, which is an index to us, not only of their rank, but also of the sublimity of their holiness. We cannot doubt that the peculiarity of their office betokens a corresponding peculiarity in their grace. We look upon them with awe, and yet at the same time with a very familiar love. We see them always by the side of Jesus, and there they look so little, that we hardly estimate their proportions justly. We see them also in the very process of being made the great saints they were, and their infirmities endear them to us without degrading them. We are told little of them as saints. We only or chiefly know them as novices; and even so how wonderful they look, how wonderful, and yet how human too! Hence it is that devotion to the Apostles is a very affectionate devotion,¹ of the same kind, though far higher in degree, as that which we feel to the patriarchs of the Old Testament. When the Church desires especially to honour a saint, it calls him, though in a lower sense, an apostle, as it called St. Philip Neri the apostle of Rome.

But their peculiar office and peculiar grace imply also a peculiar devotion; and we cannot but believe that devotion to the Eternal Father was their special and characteristic devotion. They were brought up in the school of Jesus. He Himself was their master. The spirit of Jesus was their spirit. They were formed upon it. It rested upon them. It transformed them at last into itself. When they went forth to preach, it was the living spirit of Jesus which from the narrow confines of Judaea broke forth and inundated the whole heathen world. But we have seen that the spirit of

Jesus was a special devotion to the Eternal Father. His spirit was the energy of that uncreated Spirit, whose change of our hearts is shown by the cry of Abba, Father. Who can doubt then that a special devotion to the Father was also the characteristic devotion of the Apostles 1 We may legitimately infer it from our Lord's teaching, which we have already considered, from their special and privileged knowledge of Jesus, as His Apostles, which knowledge the Father alone could teach them, and also from the fact that imitation of their Master was the distinctive genius of the members of the apostolic college.

But instances of individual Apostles will supply us with something more than inferences. In the case of St. Peter we have the Eternal Father acting in an apparent independence of Jesus, and as we should say, except for the science of our Lord, without His privity, and becoming in secret St. Peter's master in the theology of our Lord's Divinity. St. Peter's magnificence is so broad, that what seem single incidents are lost and confounded in the whole. But, supposing such an event to have happened to any of the greatest saints, should we not have considered it tantamount to his whole life, to his whole vocation, to his whole sanctity ] It would have coloured everything about him. It would have been the master-fact of his life, taking up to itself, and calling round it, and subordinating, all other facts. We should seem to have expressed ourselves feebly, if we had merely said that henceforth devotion to the First Person of the Holy Trinity had become his special devotion.

In the case of St. John, his Gospel furnishes us with indirect testimony of this special devotion, particularly in the conversations which he selects, doubtless under Mary's guidance, to record; for, in inspiration, the Holy Ghost animates and presides over the natural bias of the writer, rather than supplants or supersedes it. But, above all, his

48o THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

devotion to the Eternal Generation of our Lord is in itself most ample proof of his devotion to the Father, because the mystery in question is inseparably linked with it. In his epistles it is gleaming out perpetually, like the light through the chinks of a secret chamber. He calls Jesus the life eternal which was with the Father. He declares Jesus to us, that we may have fellowship with the Father. He writes unto the babes, because they have known the Father. His consolation, if we sin, is that we have an advocate with the Father. He says if we love the world, the charity of the Father is not in us, and that the pride of life is not of the Father. Anti-Christ is he who denies the Father and the Son; and the horror of denying the Son is that then we have not the Father, while he, who confesses the Son, has the Father also, and we are to abide in the Son and in the Father. That we should be the sons of God is the manner of charity which the Father hath bestowed upon us. We are to walk in the truth, he tells the elect lady, as we have received a commandment from the Father, and that he, who continues in the doctrine, the same hath both the Father and the Son.

St Philip's devotion to the Father is revealed in his speech to our Lord, which we have already commented on at length, but which we must not omit to remember in the present connection. It is perhaps the most striking, as it is certainly the most touching, of all the instances of this apostolic devotion. It has certainly been enough to give to many of us an intense personal devotion to this dear Apostle himself.

The same devotion is quite one of the most distinguishing characteristics of Si Paul. He names the Eternal Father forty times in his different epistles, and sometimes seems to go out of his way to do it. He repeatedly blesses Him in outbursts of the love of praise and of congratulation. Except the one to the Hebrews, he begins all his epistles with th« formula, Grace to you, and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ. In the beginning of the first epistle to the Thessalonians he merely says, Grace be to you and peace, but in the next verse speaks of their enduring in the hope of our Lord Jesus Christ before God and our Father. In the two epistles to St. Timothy he slightly but touchingly varies the formula, adding mercy between grace and peace: and in the conclusion of the epistle to the Hebrews he alludes to the Father and to the peace of the Father, when he implores a blessing on them from the God of peace, who brought again from the dead the great pastor of the sheep, our Lord Jesus Christ, in the blood of the everlasting testament Indeed the practice of some holy men of making genuflections * many times a day in honour of the Eternal Father, was based upon that passage of St. Paul in the third chapter to the Ephesians: For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named.

These are the indications of this apostolic devotion, which have been allowed to transpire. Who will not see that they are indications of much more which has been hidden from us, and also that what is left us is enough? The great hearts of the apostolic college were moulded by the chosen devotion of the Sacred Heart, devotion to the Eternal Father.

The First Person of the Holy Trinity is the Father of the Angels as well as our Father, although He is our Father in an additional sense because of His Son having assumed our nature. Were we sufficiently instructed in the bright worships of those glorious eldest-bom of God, we might doubtless trace some devotion amongst them analagous to this of ours. Their amazing science of the Holy Trinity will furnish them with intelligent varieties of praise and congratula-² tion to the Divine Persons, which surpass onr skill ani comprehension. There is reason to believe that one whole choir of the Angels, that of the Thrones, is in some special manner devoted to the worship and science of the Father.

The world of the Saints supplies us also with instances of this devotion. But we must remember that there is much which lies too deep for instances. Devotion to the Father is the groundwork of a vast amount of peculiar sanctity, which never reveals on its surface the nature of the ground beneath. It is moreover just the devotion to keep itself secret and invisible, the more so as the instruments on which it makes its music are the mysteries of the Sacred Humanity. It will almost always be found that any soul, which is remarkable for a more than common devotion to the Sacred Humanity, will also be distinguished by a more silent and deeper-seated, yet not the less intense, devotion to the Eternal Father. The same may be said of those who have a special devotion to St. Joseph. The school of French piety in the seventeenth century, of which we may take as the representative Father Condren, the General of Cardinal Berulle's Oratorians, moulded itself on the spirit of Jesus, with a view to the revival of the ecclesiastical spirit, and, as might have been expected, the writings and lives of its members are full of indications of a special devotion to the Father. Among the canonised Saints we find St. Aloysius keeping every Monday holy in honour of the Eternal Father. St. Mechtildis was told by our Lord to adopt as a peculiar devotion the offering of His praises to the Eternal Father. St. Lutgarde was instructed by Him to address especially to the Eternal Father her prayers for those in mortal sin. Nouet, in his preface to his Conduct of Souls, tells us that the Jesuit, Father Ferdinand Monroy, used to go about the house exclaiming, Ardenter diligamus Patrem iEternum. Let us ardently love the Eternal Father. Of all the modern Saints St. Ignatius appears to be the most distinguished by a special devotion to the Eternal Father. The inspiration to found his order came in some special way from the Father, and was the Father's gift to the Son. The whole history of it reminds us of the Father's revelation to St Peter in the Gospel. The wonderful fragments of St. Ignatius' journal, given in Bartoli's life of him, also contain some interesting traces of this dominant devotion of the saint. Doubtless a little reference to the lives of the Saints would enable us to multiply these instances. But this is enough for our purpose. "We have traced the devotion down from our Blessed Lord, through His Mother, St. Joseph, the Apostles, and the Saints, not without a suspicion of it among the Angels, and we have landed ourselves amid simple practices, which are not above the attainments of the lowest of us.

But something should be said of the grounds of this devotion, what it rests upon, what it involves, and what spirit it brings along with it. It is based on the distinct Person of the Father. It is He who without precedence is the First of the Holy Trinity, He who is the fountain of Godhead to the Son, and also, with the Son, to the Holy Ghost, He who is Unbegotten, He who alone of all the Three cannot be sent on any mission. He who is the chief symbol to us of the invisibility of the Godhead, He who is every moment beget-ting His Eternal Son, He from whom with the Son the Holy Ghost is every moment eternally proceeding. He who is clothed in the mantle of all paternities, like the splendour of shot gold wherein are curiously, inextricably wrought the fatherhoods of heaven with the fatherhoods of earth. It is He, it is His distinct Person, who is the base of our devotion, the object of our adoring love, a love specially expressed by this devotion. What He is to us His creatures, as our Father, flows from His Person. As He is the fountain of

Godhead to the Son and the Holy Ghost, so is He in a preeminent sense the fountain of creation, redemption, and sanctification to us. He is to us, and here opens a wide, indeed an illimitable, field for our devotion, the Giver and Sender of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was He who so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to die for our sins. It is He who to our jubilee has constituted Himself the teacher of the grandeurs of Jesus to all of us. It is He who has made the road to Himself to be through Jesus, the pleasantest of homeward-leading paths. It is He who will cast out none who come to Him by Jesus. It is He who is Himself the grand highway to Jesua It is He who gave Mary and Joseph the gifts which made them what they are, and then gave Mary and Joseph to us. It is He who gave the kingdom to Jesus, and will one day receive it back from Him, so that God may be all in all, and the kingdom of Jesus not one of time but of eternity. It is He who is one with the Son and the Holy Ghost, and will come with Them into our souls, and make His mansion there. It is He who, having been our Father in His love from all past eternity, will be our Father in His glory for all the eternity to come. These are the grounds which His ever-blessed Person furnishes for our devotion.

The sweet relationship of His Paternity to us is not so much another ground of our devotion, as another way of looking at it But the consideration of it is of vital importance. There is something especially reliable or trustworthy in paternal love. Other love may seem more quickly excited, or more outwardly demonstrative, or less chequered with shades of austerity, or less chastened with fear, or less sparing in its words. But there is something ultimate in a father's love, something that cannot fail, something to be believed against the whole world. We almost attribute practical omnipotence to our father m the days of our childhood.

There is always against everybody an appeal to him, whose judgment is infallible, whose decision is certain to be on our side, and who has means of his own to execute his sentences irresistibly. Fire will not bum us, if he is near. The thunderbolts must turn aside, when they see him. The high winds can only rock us to sleep, the rough seas are only laughing at us, and we can have them punished when we will. Nightly terrors disappear in his arms, and even ghosts from the land of death dare not pursue us there. A mother's love, dear as it is, is not a thing like this. This love is a picture of our affectionate dependence on our Heavenly Father; for with Him we are always children, not on this side of the grave only, but on the other also. Heaven is eternal childhood in the mansion of our Father. Many children, who fear their fathers, will yet take liberties with them which they will not take with their mothers. Their very fears lean upon their father, as completely as their love. Thus, timid and daring at once, we feel so at liberty with our Heavenly Father, that it seems to us, in our weak way of conceiving things, as if we were more at home with Him than with the Word or the Holy Spirit. The Word has to be veiled in flesh that He may not frighten us with His splendour, and then the Father will take us by the hand and teach us the Word. The Holy Ghost is inexpressibly dear to us; but we are afraid of Him because of the possibility of the unpardonable sin, because of His sharpness with Ananias and Sapphira, and also because we ourselves know something of the sensitiveness and jealousy of His grace. Yet the Son throws His fraternal arms of flesh around us in the embraces of His love; and the Holy Spirit is fain to nestle like a dove in the bosom of our souls. What then must be our feeling of the tenderness of the Father, to whose justice we dare to confide ourselves and our eternity, as placidly as if He could not, if He would, cut off the entail of our eternal inheritancel Words cannot tell what that word says, and sings, and shows, and works, within our souls, — our Heavenly Father.

Indulgence is the grace of justice, and it is something more than mercy. Is indulgence then an Attribute of the unutterably holy God? An indulgence infinitely holy, the indulgence of omnipotence, the indulgence of unspeakable justice, the indulgence of eternal love, — what can be conceived more beautiful, more ravishing? Yet this is the Eternal Father. He, who lives only for Himself, seems to live exclusively for us. He, who is adorably self-sufficient, only finds His sufficiency in the poverties of our love. He will merge all His royalties in the single prerogative of His Fatherhood. His length, His breadth. His depth, His height, — all are in His compassionate Paternity. To Himself, as well as to us, His Paternity is enough. He will take no mission. He will fill no office. He will exercise no judgment. Pater enim non judicat quemquam; * the Father judgeth no one. He will only be to us indulgence, reward, repose, a Father, a Bosom, a Home. 0 Father! of all fathers the most fatherlike! O uncreated tenderness! 0 plenitude of paternal fondness! 0 dearest and most blessed Person! so clearly seen yet so adorably invisible, so very near in love yet so far off in majesty! how can we praise Thee but with our silence, how can we love Thee but by the passionate confession of our impossibility to love Thee worthily 1 Sweet Babe of Bethlehem! show us the Father. It will be enough; for there is no possible more that we can crave. It will not be more than enough; for less will not content our craving. Simply, as St. Philip said. He is enough, the Father is enough!

Our relationship of brothers to Jesus is very sweet, and hasan independent sweetness of its own. But it also opens our * St. John T. 22.

way deeper for us into the Paternity of the Father. We are. more His sons, because we are the brothers of Jesus. He is lij more our Father on that account. The Sacred Humanity has glorified us all with its own excellent filiation. As in the days of Bethlehem the Father imparted the shadows and rights of His blessed paternity mysteriously to Mary and Joseph, and thus made the region of the Infancy so glorious and so heaven-like, in like manner now He will not leave us without similar consolations. He imparts them to His priests in their relationship to our souls, and above all in respect to the Blessed Sacrament It is part of our Father's love that, inside the pale of the Church, earth should be one perpetual, and even ubiquitous, Bethlehem. The Infant Jesus, the joy of the Father and our joy, is for ever there, and in Him the Father declared, with rare expletive, that He was well pleased.* Still on the altar and in the tabernacle the Babe of Bethlehem is increasing the glory of the Father. Still is He giving breadth and space to His Father's love by the multitude of the redeemed. Still is He furnishing His Father with new opportunities of communicating His Paternity to new children and in new graces. Still is the novelty of the service and the love which the Father received from the Babe of Bethlehem as new as ever, if not more wonderfully new, upon the altar. Still is every Mass illustrating all the Father's perfections in that work of His predilection, the work of abbreviating His long, eternally spoken, and unbrokenly uttered Word. By the Father's love we live in Bethlehem. Little Bethlehemite Calvaries we find there, whereon love tenderly crucifies us, sparing more than it punishes, and punishing, not to punish, but that it may more abundantly reward. To the great Calvary we never go. The Father laid that only on our Eldest Brother. It is not for such as we are. Our homes are Beth- ♦ In quo bene complacuL lehem and Nazareth. We have our Desert and our Egypt for seasons; but only the shadow of Calvary. More than the shadow of it our Father cannot bear should fall upon us. How can we say what we feel of this benignity of our Father 1 We will think of Mary, and yet say, that, when a father is indulgent, he is more indulgent than a mother. Little ones treat their mother as the authority of rule, and their father as the authority of dispensation: and mothers are well-pleased their children should use them so, in order that they may thus childishly express the love they bear their fathers, which is all too great for their little words to hold. It is a mother's noblest joy to watch her child increasing in love of its father and in its father's love.

It is easy then for us to discern the spirit of devotion to the Eternal Father. A few words will depict it. It is a devotion of immense tenderness. Tenderness is its leading feature. We might almost say that it is all tenderness; for no tenderness is truly tender which is not kept pure by fear. This devotion is at least the fountain of all tenderness in us, and of all blameless liberty of spirit It is the charter of the Boul. It is the fulfilling of the significancy of our creation. It is in itself the most abundant and the most unalloyed communication of the spirit of Jesus. It is the ultimate devotion, and so the devotion of devotions, the last point to which devotion can reach in its upward ascension, that which is behind and beyond all else except it be devotion to the mystery of the most Holy Trinity. May we dare to say it 1 It is in human things a sort of reverential imitation of the love of the Word and the Holy Ghost for the coequal Father in divine things. Nay, we must dare yet again, it is also an imitation of the Father Himself, eternally generating the Son by the knowledge of Himself, and with the Son eternally breathing out the Holy Ghost as their mutual love; for it is in the knowledge and love of Him, and in union with

His Son, and with the utterance of the Spirit's voice, that this devotion consists.

"We have begun with the Bosom of the Father. We have ended at His Feet. The Bosom and the Feet of the Father represent all mysteries. Because of the Incarnate Word in His Bosom, a creation is called into existence, to lie for ever at His feet. That part of creation, which shares the created nature of the Incarnate "Word, falls wilfully from the Father's Feet. Angels who fell, are let to fall, because they did not share that nature. Men, because they shared it, are brought back by the man-loving "Word. He, who is in the Bosom, comes forth, lays Himself at the feet of men, wins their love, raises them by their own love-extorted permission, and laya them again, those who will permit Him, in eternal safety at the Father's Feet. This is the history of creation. So Creation and Incarnation, which might have been two mys-teries, but were actually one, are expressed in these seven wonders of God's world: — An Incarnate "Word in the Father's Bosom, — A world modelled on Him at the Father's Feet, — A world sharing the created nature of the "Word who dwelt in the Father's Bosom, — A world fallen from the Father's Feet, — A world sought by the Word from the Father's Bosom, — A world reconquered and laid triumphantly at the Father's Feet, — The Word re-entered, and dwelling evermore in His created nature, in the Father's Bosom.

We have done. How unworldly is the spirit of the land of Bethlehem! It has led us up into the heights of the Eternal Word, and down into the depths of His unfathomable abasement. There have been joy and sorrow. Tears have become Blood, and Blood Tears, and then both of them Smiles. The Crib has glanced into the Cross, and the Cross melted ofif into the vision of the Crib. Now at length the Childhood of the Eternal has sweetly cast us back on the very living fountain of eternity, the First Person of the Most

Holy and Undivided Trinity. The Eternal Child and the Ancient of Days have come together. They are one. The Babe on Mary's lap, an earthly Mother's lap, has lifted us up above ourselves, and has borne us swiftly and softly as a dove's flight, and has laid us and left us in our old home, now a secure everlasting home, the Feet of our Eternal Father.

Abandohmikt of Jesui at His

Viirtb, 134, 136 AbbieyUtion of the Word, 487 Abjises, four, of the Soul of Jesus,

Achaz, false reverence of, 301

Adam, how he fell, 26

Adoption, 33

Adoration of Mary, at the Incarnation, 70; at the Nativity, 148, 342; its universality, 157; offered in the name ef all creatures, 159

Age of S. Joseph, X43, note

Agonies of Jesus, 376, 400

Alban, S., 49

Aloysius, S., 48a

Amicus, 231, 316

Ancient of days, 490

Anna, 209; a type of hidden souls, 214; characteristic of her devotion, 215

Angels, creation of, 7, 19, 43, 57; their love of God, 30; irremediable fall of, 41; during the Nativity, 113; their joy at the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, 149; their worship compared with that of Mary, 154; a tjf pe of devotion to the Sacred Infancy, 192; source of their perseverance, 193; joy at the Nativity, 195; their adoration of the Incarnate Word, 437; subjects of Mary, 438

Annunciation, the, 67

Antony, S., of Padua, 169

Apostles, the, 477; devotion of, to the Eternal Father, 478

Apostolate of sorrow, 341

Alt, Christian, 189; a theology and a worship, 222; a revelation,

223; symbolized in S. Luke, 224;

failure of, 328 Aristotle, his services to theology,

279 Ascension, the, 370 Asceticism, 135 Atonement, the, 333 Attachment to creatures, 179 Attraction of special devotions,

229; importance of, 232 Attributes of God, 230; methods of devotion to, 237, 239, 241; the nameless, 262 Augustine, S. 49 Aztecs, the, 343

Bartoli, 483

Barry's Annie Saincte, 481

Beasts, the, in the Cave of Bethlehem, 128

Beatitude of God, 409, 411

Beauty of God, 300; partial disclosures of, 128; a distinct Attribute, 278; of the Incarnate Word, 272; of the Body of Jesus, 328

Beatitudes, eight, of the Son, 412, 418

Beds of the Saints, 49

Bernal, 22, 312

BeruUe, Card. 482

Bethlehem, on the eve of the Nativity, 102, 106; had no room for Jesus, 107; perpetuity of, 163; power of, 107; the predilection of the angels, 196; sorrow of, 340; compared with Calvary, 373; the cross of S. Joseph, 403

Biography, 227 Blasphemers, prayer for, 275 Blood, the Precious, first shedding of, 122, 344; power of, 330; of the Circumcision, 380 Birth of the Son, 9; in time, 146,

176 Body of Jesus, 31; creation of,

325; has its own immediate union with the "Word, 325; entitled to a separate worship,

326; prepared for suffering, 327; beauty of, 328; likeness of, to Mary, 328; in the Blessed Sacrament, 331; capacities of suffering, 376

Bosom of the Father, 3, 6; home of the Son, 8; ever tranquil, 46

Bosom of Mary, 3; home of the "Word, ss, 61; life of the Word in it, 72; seat of the Judge of all, 80, 106; joy of the Word in the, 421

Cajktan, St. 168

Calvary, 366; foreshadowed in Bethlehem, 372

Canonization, 312; of silent men, 382

Cardenas, 312

Catherine, St. of Siena, 391

Cave of Bethlehem, no; its sacredness, 125; its contents, 128; cold and dark, 132; nine spirits of devotion belonging to it, 166

Charles Borromeo, S. 229

Childhood, 103, 485

China, 114; its degradation, 115

Choice, the, of God, 29; unsuccessive, 30

Christmas, a feast of the angels, 194; familiar joys of, 456

Church, the, life of, 75; present to the soul of Mary, 92; sympathy with the vicissitudes of, the fifth inward penance of the Sacred Infancy, 389; foreseen by Jesus,

Circumcision, the, the fifth penance of Jesus, 380

Coequality of the three Persons, 415

Columbus, 363

Gold, the second penance of Jeius, 377

Coldness, the, of the Oave of Bethlehem, 132

Communicativeness of God, 187, 311

Comprehensor, 400

Conception, the Immaoolate, 58, 82

Condren, F. 230, 482

Continuity of pains, the eighth inward penance of the Sacred Infancy, 390

Concurrence of God, 44

Conversion, a divine work, 256

Cornwall, fief of S. Michael, 60

Correspondence to grace, 174; the grandest grace of Mary, 175

Creatures, two views of, 279; dignity of, 281; how important to God, 283; a distinct disclosure of the beauty of God, 284

Creation, of the angels, 6, 19, 43; of the earth, 7, 19, 43; a free act of God, 19; beginning of, 20; a divine word, 21; a step towards Jesus, 133; its reception of Jesus, 148; its relation to God, 253, 261; reveals God, 277; two Christian views of, 279; danger of low views about, 287; order of, 297; an outflow of joy, 418

Crib, the, and the Cross, 186, 368; contrast between them, 368; identity between them, 369; produce the same spirit of devotion, 374

Crucifixion, the, 362

Darkness, the, of the Cave of

Bethlehem, 132 Deathbeds, 257 Decrees, the divine, 119, 425 Deicide, 385

Deification of the creature, 448 Delicacy of the body of Jesus, the ninth penance of the Sacred Infancy, 383 Deny's, St., vision of Mary, 60 Dereliction, the, on the cross, 465 Desert, the Flight through the, 266,

345 Detachment from creatures, 179;

of the three kings, 206 Devotion, what it is, 448 Devotion to the Sacred Infancy, i66, i68— to the Pas«ion, 168; to the Sacred Humanity, how it differs from others, 176 — never yet explored, 240; cannot be too minute, 300; to the Passion, never to be disregarded, 183; to the angels, 191; to the Precious Blood, 224; to the Attributes of God, 171, 230; characteristics of it, 240; to the Incarnation, 236; should be joined to a love of the Divine Person, 264; to the Holy Trinity, 405; to the Eternal Father, 455, 468, 474; to the apostles, 477; to St. Joseph, 482.

Disappointments, 354

Disputation, the, in the temple,

364 Divinity of Jesus, revealed by the

Father, 455, 467 Dolours of Mary, 91 Durandus, 23

Eabth, the chosen home of Jesus,

Edward, St., 49

Egypt, flight into, 266, 345

Eight Lives in Jesus, 242; differently regarded by different persons, 244

Election, 35

Elements, the, causes of suffering to the Infant Jesus, 377

Elements of matter, 127

Elias, 188; hidden till the last days, 191

Elizabeth in Hebron, 84

End of man, 17, 22, 63

England, its past and present state contrasted, 49

Epochs, three, in the life of God, 248

Essence, the divine, 253

Eternity of God, 249, 250

Eucharist, presence of Christ in the, 26

Evil, permission of, 35

Exodus, the, 353

Expectation of Mary, 89; a mystery of joy, 93 — of the highest spiritual perfections, 97 > » *yP« of all Christian life, 98; not uncheoquered gladaew, 371

Faob of God, 93; longed for by men, 94; of the Incarnate Word, 95; a likeness of Mary, 96; seen by Mary, 140, 152; beauty of, i6i

Facility, of the divine operations, 308

Faith of the three kings, 205; in the Divinity of Jesus, 273

Father, the Eternal, devotion to, 455; manifestations of, 462; unites Nazareth and Calvary, 463; of Mary, 474; of Joseph, 475; of the apostles, 479; grounds of, 483; spirit of, 488

Fault, the happy, of Adam, 441

Fear, the seventh penance of the Sacred Infancy, 382

Fecundity of the Holy Ghost, 332; of the Father, 411

Filiation of Jesus, 22; reflected in the relationship of Mary to the Father, 56; glory of the, 321; abysfe of uncreated exultation, 413; without subordination, 460; how shared by Mary, 474

Finding the, in the temple, 365

Flight, the, into Egypt, 266, 345

Francis, S., of Sales, invoked the Holy Innocents when dying, 217

Frankfort, Council of, 23

Gabriel, S., the angel of Incarnation, 68, 194

Generation, eternal, of the Son, 8, 9, 41, 45, 46, 47, 53, 147, 154, 238, 252, 417, 439, 454, 472, 483; necessary, 19, 418; the illimitable joy of the Divine understanding, 411

Geology, 65, 284, 296

Gertrude, S., 274

Ghost, the Holy, 15; limit of the Godhead, n, 24, 412; fecundity of, 332; the sin against, 453, 485.

Glory, accidental, of God, 283; of the Sacred Humanity in heaven, 307; essential, 445

Gloria in Exceliu, 196, 352

Glory, of the Soul of Jesus, 318; beatific, 319; exemplary, 319; sovereign, 320; of filiation, 321.

Good, hidden, 212

God, simple, 14, 230, 409; is blis*, 409

Goethe, 431

Gojos, Sister Benigne, 230

Gospels the, methods of reading,

452 Grace, suddea in its operations, 28;

works of, 99; an impulse of the divine will, 256; of union, 311;

of the Soul of Jesus, 312; ungrowing, 321, 373 Grandeurs of Jesus, i Gratitude, 81 Growth of children, 356

Headship of Jesus, 296; what arises from the, 313 Heart of Jesus, 329; joy of, 408 master devotion of, 474 Heaven, glories of, 39; on the eve of the Nativity, 120 Heliopolis, 349; inhabitants of,

350 Hell, on the eve of Nativity, 123 Heresy about our Lord, 275 Hierarchy of the Incarnation, 126;

of the Church, 347 Holiness, of Mary,;78; of St. Joseph,

81; our possibilities of, 173 Home, the created, of the Word,

Hugh of S. Victor, 316

Humanity, the Sacred, influence of in creation, 287; the light in which the Vision is seen, 289; the adequate worship of the Trinity, 289; fountain of all grace, 290; its influence on human thought and policies, 291, 292; the safeguard of the world, 292; head of the angels, 298; the primal creature of God, 297; the way to God, 302; in the transfiguration, 305; in heaven,

307 Humanity, devotion to the Sacred,

172, 231 Humiliations of Jesus, 75 Humility, of Mary, 175; first fruits of, 177; of St. Joseph, 180, 185;

compared with simplicity, 198;

safeguard against delusion, 236; Hurtado, 23, 311 Hypostatic Union, 170

Ideft of Jesus and Mary, 56

Idols of Heliopolii, broken, 349 Idolatry of science, 84 Ignatius, S., 229, 483 Ignominies of the Incarnate "Word,

Immortification, 137

Impatience of Jesus for His Passion,

Incarnation, the, conveniences of, 21; remedial character of, 25; lies at the bottom of all sciences, 48; time of, how merited by Mary, 60; humiliating circumstances of, 119; reveals the infinity of God, 165; the probation of the angels, 194; the most profitable devotion to, 236; end of a glorious, 464

Indulgence, the grace of justice, 486

Infancy, the Sacred, 3; the fountain of all creation, 4; devotion to, 167; a passion of itself, 374; penances of, 275; joys of, 399; a continuous fountain, 463

Infants baptized, intuition of, 259; their state of glory, 320

Infinity of God, 13

Ingratitude of men, the sight of, the fourth inward penance of the Sacred Infancy, 387

Innocents, the Holy, 216; first martyrs, 217; had the full use of reason, 216; their power at deathbeds, ai8; their resurrection and ascension, 218; their mission, 219; types of devotion to the Sacred Infancy, 219.

Innascibility, 24

Inspirations, 247

Insensibility of the world, iii

Intercession of Mary, 60

Invisibility of God, 65

Izquierdo, 231

Jane, V. of the Cross, 367 Jeremias, his sinless birth, 83 Jesus, the first creature, 27; refused hospitality in Bethlehem, 107; His joy in that refusal, no; likeness of, to His Mother, 266; sleeping, 268; in poverty, 270; His fiist word, 351; on the buiki of the Nile, 353; in th« carpenter's shop, 357; reyerenced in Nazareth, 358; a mendicant, 364; joy of, 401; His love of sinners, 440; devotion of, 449

John, S. the Baptist, 83; his sinless birth, 83; a type of devotion to the Infant Jesus, 187; the first convert of Jesus, 188; attraction to, a way to Jesus, 190

John, S. devotion of, to the Eternal Father, 480

John, S. of Beverley, 49

John, S. of the Cross, 229

John, B. of Fiesole, 222

Joseph S., doctor of the Sacred Infancy, 5; his death, 37; influence of, in the Church, 81; his sinless birth, 83; image of the Eternal Father, 92, 126, 142; silence of, loi, 184; singular sanctity of, 142; age of, 143; his adoration of the Infant Jesus, 159; type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy, 181; his death a martyrdom, 184; his official relation to the Infant Jesus, 186; obscurity of his early life, 197; carries God in his arms, 346; teaches God, 358; in the temple at the presentation, 360; felt mystically the pains of the passion, 367; cross of, 402; joy of, 420; gradual discovery of his sanctity, 435; his love of the Infant Jesus, 436; his devotion to the Eternal Father, 475; his love of Mary, 477

Joy, the original intent of creation, 179, 418; of Mary in the nativity, 177, 406; underlies all sorrow, 395, 399; effects of, 399; gift of the Holy Ghost, 399; of Jesus, 401; from the Eternal Word, 418; of the Word in the Sacred Humanity, 419; in the Bosom of Mary, 421; of the Word asleep, 423; of being in a state of grace, 429; of the angels in their adoration of Jesus, 438; of the Father's glory, 446

Joys of the Incarnate Word, adoration of Ood, 421; in the deoreea of BKs Divine Person regarding creation, 422; delight m His Sacred Humanity, 425; of His Human nature in His Divinity, 427; fountain of holiness and merit, 430; His love of Mary, 431; in St. Joseph, 435; the worship of the angels, 437; in the grandeur of man, 438; in the foreseen love of men for Him, 441; in the foresight of His Passion, 443; in being the Saviour, 444

Joyousness of heart, 397

Jubilee of God, 15, 24, 412, 417

Justice, slow, 28

Justice of God, the view of the, the second inward penance of the Sacred Infancy, 318

Justification, 333

KiNQDOM of grace, 334; of Jesus,

Kings, the three, 202, 379; representatives of the heathen world, 203; simplicity of, 204; characteristic of their devotion, 205; their oblations in the Cave of Bethlehem, 207, 344

Knowledge, of Jesus, 221; fulness of, 314; infused, 315; acquired, 3^7

Lanoisius, 230

Land, the Holy, 353

Lateran, council of, 19

Law, its source, 254

Learning, 204

Lezana, 231

Liberty of spirit, 45

Life of God, 16, 241; modes of meditating on the, 242; divisions of, 246; the secret out of sight, 249; in the Vision, 250; seen by faith, 251; affected by creatures, 253; in the material world, 255; in the moral world, 255; in the intellectual world, 255; in the world of grace, 256; in the world of glory, 257; in His government, 257; in punishment, 258; in rewarding, 259; in creation, 259; ia humanity,

359; in indiridual lonls, 260; a life imitable, 261; not imitable, 261; unimaginable, 262 Life of the Word, in the Bosom of the Father, 9; an infinite complacenoy, 13; a life of love, 14; creatureless, 12, 18, 42; a life of elections, 29; tranquillity of, 42; without change, 44; in the bosom of Mary, 72; a life oblation, 73; of silence, 74; of weakness, 75; of poverty, 76; its occupations,

Light, of prayer, 212; the peculiar outpouring of the Second Person, 419

Likeness unto God, 104

Limbus, i — on the eve of the Nativity, 122

Limit of the Godhead, 11, 24, 443

Literature, emptiness of, 76

Loretto, 66, 303

Loss, the Three days, 363

Love of God and love of men, 179; of Joseph and Mary, 403; of God, 410; fraternal, 426; filial, 433; maternal, 472

Luke, St. type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy, 221; Evangelist of the Sacred Infancy, 222; characteristics of his Gospel, 224; companion of St. Paul, 225; In the cave of Bethlehem, 226

Lutgarde, S. 483

Maobdo, 439

Magnificat, the, 84

Man, the spiritual, 228, 232

Manger, the, 131

Maria, Raffaello, 403

Mary of Agreda, 27, 87, 353, 364, 367, 426, 436

Mary Magdalene, St., of Pazzi, 274, 460

Mary, predestination of, 32, 55; her nearness unto God, 52, 62; Spouse of the Holy Ghost, 56; her place in the decrees of God, 56; her graces, 58; merits the time of the incarnation, 60; a revelation of God, 61; her occupation when the Angel visited her, 67; her consent to the In* eamation, 69; horsanctifioation,

78; her life during the Nine Months, 85, 87; her silence, 89; like her Son, 96; her dignity, 98; unknown at Bethlehem, 125; her poverty, 138; on the eve of the Nativity, 139; beholds the Face of God, 140; her worship of her new-born Son, 148; character of that worship, 154; its universality, 157; the first type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy, 173; her joy in the Nativity, 177; her humility, 175; her simplicity, 180; her vision of the interior life of the Infant Jesus, 393; the fountain of joy to the whole earth, 403; her love of her Son, 433, 473; her rank, 458; the knowledge of her is to increase, 459; her virginity a worship of the Father, 461; her devotion to the Eternal Father, 471, 474; entered more than any other mere creature into the inward dispositions of God, 472

Margaret of Beaune, 169, 447; her vision of the Holy Child, 274

Massacre of the Holy Innocents, 380; a type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy, 216

Maternity of Mary, 407; part of her religion, 471

Meditation on the Life of God, 343, 247

Mechtildis. S., 483

Melancholy, 200

Men, solar and lunar, 335

Mendicancy of Jesus, 364, 378

Mendoza, 87

Meratius, 312

Merits of Jesus, 37

Michael, S., guardian of the Sacred Humanity, 195

Ministry of Jesus, from the beginning, 6

Mission of the Divine Persons, 27

Missions, of men, 214

Monroy, F. Ferdinand, 483

Montfort, Grignon de, 459

Morality, principles of, immutable, 261

Mortification of Jesui at Hia birib^ 134, 137

Mother of Jaias, 33, 356

Mysteries of Jesns, four elements of the, 264 Mysteries of Mary, 150; of the

Sacred Infancy, 405, 408; of the

Blessed Trinity, 414

Nativitt, the, condition of the world at, no; manner of, 140,

14s Nature, created, assnmption of, ax; the road to Creation, 21;

incongruous in the Father and

Holy Ohost, 23; congruous in the Son, 24; the work of the whole Trinity, 25 Kazarenes, evil spoken, 66, 184. Nazareth, holy house of, 65, 303;

silence of, 75; life of Jesus in,

303 Necessities of the diyine life, 11,

29 Neglect, the fourth penance of the

Infant Jesus, 379 Nicquetus, Honoratus, 68 Nieremberg, 312 Night of the Nativity, 117 Nile, the, ^52 Nine months, the, 77, 84, 366; life of Mary during, 85; joys of, 88;

special grace of, 15a Nouet, 483 Nunc dimittis, an

Obedience of Jesus, 100; source of

His inward penance, 392; to the

Eternal Father, 456, 466; to

Mary, 465 Oblation of the life of Jesus, 73 Obscurity, of God's ways, 65; of the life of the Word Incarnate,

74 Occupations of Jesus in the Bosom of Mary, 78 Omnipresence of God, 131 Oneness with the Father, 458,

469 Operations of God, slow, 63 Optimism of divine works, 310 Oracles, disturbed at the Nativity, in Orphanhood, 462 Overflow of God's love, 53 Osmund, S., of Salisbury, 49

Pain, possibilities of, 427

Palafox, 478

Palm Sunday, 371

Pantheism, 246

Passion, the, two modes of contem< plating, present to the mind of the Infant Jesus, 359; begun at Bethlehem, 369; the foresight of, the third inward penance of the Sacred Infancy, 387

Paternity, the divine, 473, 484

Patience, devotion to the divine, 230; ninth inward penance of the Sacred Infancy, 392

Paul B. of the Cross, 232

Paul, S., devotion of, to the Eternal Father, 480

Peter, St., his love of Jesus, 30; his devotion to the Eternal Father, 479

Penaflel, 312

Penances, outward, of the Sacred Infancy, 375; tears, 377; cold, 377; poverty, 377; neglect, 379; the circumcision, 380 ^ weariness, 381; fear, 382; siL nee, 382; the extreme delicacy of the Body of Jesus, 383; the inward penances, the sight of human sins, 384; of God's justice, 386; the foresight of the passion, 387; the foresight of man's ingratitude, 388; view of the sufferings of those dear to Him, 388; sympathy with the vicissitudes of the Church, 389; sight of Christians in hell, 389; continuity of suffering, 390; clear appreciation of all, 390

Perfections of God, 13; devotion to, 171, 230, 239

Phantom bells, 233

Places, the Holy, 357

Plenitudes of the Soul of Jesus; - - of nature, 311; of grace,i3ii; of science, 314; of glory, 313

Philanthropy, 380

Philip S. Ap., 468; devotion of, to the Eternal Father, 480

Philip St., Neri, 229; apostle of Rome, 478

Philosophies, emptiness of, 76

Pictures, devotional, 189; undevo* tional, 222

Planets, the inhabitation of, 295

Plato, his services to theology, 279 a I

Polo, Marco, 234

Poverty of the Incarnate Word, 76, i34» 136, 270; the third penance of Jesus, S77; of religious orders,

379 Prayer, light of, 212 Predestination of Jesus, 27, 42; of

Mary, 32, 55, 106 Predilection of God, 29 Presentation, the, a type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy, 308;

mystery of, 371 Prevision of the Passion, 368; the third inward penance of the

Sacred Infancy, 387 Procession of the Holy Ghost, 9,

252, 417, 421, 483; necessary, 19 Progress, 47 Power, worship of, 399 Pulses, of the Unity of God, 15; of the divine life, 41, 424 Purification, the, 209 Purity, of Mary, 141, 430; akin to infinity, 179; the gift of joyous spirits, 180; most dear to God,

429 Purgatory, 99, 319; on the eve of the Nativity, 123

Queen of the Angels, zox, 438:

longed for by the angels, 193; of joys, 406 Questions, open, 295

Raphael, St., 194

Reason, use of, in Mary, 59

Redemption, an overflow of joy, 418; necessitated suffering, 427

Rejection of Jesus at His birth, 134; guilt of it, 135

Renty, M. de, 169

Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament in Heaven, 265

Reserve of God, 186

Resurrection, mystery of the, 323

Richard, St., of Chichester, 49.

Rigoleuc, 2

Saobament, the Blessed, reservation of, in heaven, 267

Saints, prayers of the, 116; lives of'

429; diversities of, 434 Salutation, the angelic, 68, 193 Salvation, the work of Jesus alone,

Schism, why so blighted, 351

Sciences, physical, attractions of, 86; revelations of Ooe, 354; importance of studying them, 279, 286; must grow, 287; present to the soul of Jesui, 317

Secrecy of the Birth of Jesus, 134, 136.

Secret life of God, 249.

Self, worship of, 178.

Self-seekiog, wherein coniiiti its offensiveness, 283.

Seraphs, 53.

Seven joys of Mary, 407.

Shadows, divine, 476.

Shepherds, the, of Bethlehem, 194, 379 > * ^ypo o^ devotion to the Sacred Infancy, 197; their worship, 199, 344: first apostles of the Sacred Infancy, aoo; their obscurity, 202.

Silence of Jesus, 75, 458; eighth penance of the Sacred Infancy,

Simplicity of God, 14, 230, 409; the foundation of devotion to the Attributes, 244; His bliss, 409

Simplicity, of Mary, x8o; of the shepherds, 198; a permanent childhood, 20Z; of the three kings, 204.

Simeon, 208; characteristic of his devotion, 209, 2x5; sees God Incarnate, 211; jtype of hidden souls, 213; his waiting for Christ, 403-

Sin against the Holy Ghost, 425,

485. Sin, the vision of human, the first inward penance of the Sacred

Infancy, 383, Singularity to bo distrusted, X82. Siuri, 87 Sleep of God, 258, 346; wonders of the, 381. Solitude, the threefold, 333. Soul of Jesus, 31; glory of, 39,

S3; loveliness, of 309; had the atifio vision, 315; infused seienee of, 316; worth of, 322; appropriate creation of the Holy Ghost, 323; ocean of created worship, 422

Sorrow, 335; teaches some men all things, 336; does in some the work of grace, 338; the sister of joy, 396

Space, 249, 309

Star of Bethlehem, 203

States of the Sacrtd Infancy, 390

Straw, the, in the manger, 131

Suarez, 23; thinks our Lord made a vow of obedience at the Incarnation, 462

Subordination, none in the Eternal Filiation, 461

Suffering, 99

Super-facility, 308

" Superlatires," 426

Sweating of blood, 369

Taulxb, 460

Teaching, the leoret, of onr Lord,

„47o

Tears the first penance of Jesus,

377 Temptation, the, 363. Term of the Godhead, it, 24, 4x2 Theology, the interpreter of all

■oiences, 86; of the Angels, 191;

the Scotist, 278 Things, divine, effects of, 151 Thirst of Jesus, 238 Thirty-Three Years, 464, 470; mys-teries of the, 2, 150; never fathomed, 166 Tierra del Fuego, 339 Time, creation of, 12 Thomas, St., 23, 316, 462 Thomas, S., of Canterbury 49 Thomas, St., of Hereford, 49 Tranquillity of God, 146 Transfiguration, the, 305 Trinity, the, 9, 12; devotion to,

405; the earthly, 127, 145, 264,

Unbzldey, changes of its form, 278.

Unforgivingness, 261

Union, the Hypostatic, 170, 302;

necessity of realising it for true devotion, 450

Unity of the Godhead, 416 Unquietness lulled by sorrow, 339 Unreality in religion, 109 Unselfishness, 220 Usage of the faithful, 408 Utterance of the Father, 10; eternal, II

Vaoukness in religion, 275 Vasquei, 23; on the merits of Jesus, 38; on His infused science, 316 Vega, 87 Verbum Caro factum est, jS, 273,

Viator, 401

Vicissitudes of the Church, sympathy with the, the sixth inward penance of the Sacred Infancy, 389

View, the, of human sins, the first inward penance of the Sacred Infancy, 384

Views of God, 410

Vincent Ferrer, S. 459

Virginity of our Lady a worship of the Father, 461

Vision of God, 40, 46; transiently granted to Mary, 88; transient, 94; beatific, 253, 421; present to the Soul of Jesus, 315, 429

Vocation, the highest, 182; of every man, 232

Voice of the wilderness, 233, 345

Volcanic characters, 339

Vow of Jesus at the Incarnation 462

Watwabdnkss, apparent, in the life of our Lord, 455

"Weakness, of the Incarnate Word, 75; the sixth penance of the Sacred Infancy, 381

Wilderness, voices of the, 234, 346

Wilfrid, S. 49

WiUiam, S. of York, 50

Will of Mary, 301

Will of the Father, 456

Wonders, seven, of God's world, 489

Word, the, 8; in the Bosom of the Father, ' 12; connection of, with creatures, 21; the first creature, 27; predUections of, 28; joys of, 40 J cause of all creation, 47,

287; made flcBb, 70; goremsthe universe, 79; speechless in Beth* lehem, 155; joy of, 409, 41a, 419; the wisdom of the Qodhead,

41S, 417, 457 "World, the, during the Nativity,

106; of Rome, 112; of Greece,

112; of Judea, 113; of China,

114; of barbarians, 115 Worldliness, 281, 400 "Worlds, plurality of, 296 Works of God outside Himself, the work of the whole Trinity, 25,

42, 461; perfect, 33; effects of obeerying them, X05

"Worship of Jeans, 70, 121; In the Bosom of Mary, 78; in the temple at twelve years old, 362; in the Sacred Humanity, 422

"Wounds, the Five, 332

"Wulstan, S. 50

TsABimro of Mary for the Face of God, 94; of Jesus for men, 388

Tears, the thirty-three, mysteries of, 2; present to the mind of Mary, 91; the Eighteen, of Nasa* r«th,3SS

Footnotes

1. Thus Palafox, who was noted for his Old Testament devotions, says that his devotion to the Apostles was "mas sensitive " than any of his Old Testament devotions, except that to Adam and Eve, which was a devotion of "gran ternura," extreme tenderness. Vida Interior, cap, xlviii ↩

2. Bm Bftnj'f JkxaM S«iAct«, tii9 ibd«x to th« dsTotions. ↩