Section II. Nature, Grace, and Glory

When we gaze with love and awe and bashful loyalty upon the Blessed Sacrament in His monstrance on the throne, we know that it is Jesus Himself who is behind those thin mysterious veils. Jesus is God and man; but He is especially and pre-eminently present there in His Human Nature. This is the prerogative of the Blessed Sacrament. It is Man abiding with men, to govern and console them. It is God^ sweetly and familiarly present, not as God only, but as God-man. He is finding his "delights with the children of men," and in the same impassible and glorious Flesh in which, according to our view, He would have come among us and been one with us, if Adam hud never fallen, and sin been a name and thing unknown upon the earth. Countless are His rights and titles as God, marvellous His uncreated wisdom and glory as the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, and boundless His absolute sovereignty as our Creator, He is there in the monstrance clothed in the seven magniBcent rights of His Human Nature, as Mary's Son, as Head of the Church, as Prophet, Priest, King, Owner of all temporal things, and Judge of angels and men. Such are the joys and honours of His Sacred Humanity, which fie, the living Lord, is wearing at all hours in His great Sacrament of love.

It is a joy to Him to be the Son of the Mother of His own eternal choice, so sinless and so pure, and by the abundance of His own gifts so like Himself, and in her solitary pre-eminence of an Immaculate Conception re deemed by His Precious Blood. It is a joy to Him to be Head of the Church, the Head of Angels and of men, ruling the one in a nature inferior to their own, and meriting for the other in their very own nature, and making a unity of all intellectual creatures, save those who by their own perversity have fallen from Him and are lost. He is our Prophet j for He gives us laws, and teaches us wisdom, and reads our hearts, and foretells our secret future. He is our King; and there is no potentate on earth, emperor or king, prince or republican president, but rules in His Name, and with His delegated* authority, not as God only, but in His universal dominion * ^oiue thco1- ' --MS would gay " permitted" rather than "delegated."

as the Son of Man. He is our Priest, for He laid down His life once for us in the bloody Sacrifice of Calvary, and renews that very sacrifice ten thousand times a day, in the unbloody mysteries of the altar. He is the Owner of all temporal tL/ngs, according to the promise made Him in the Pwtm'Sj that He should have the uttermost parts of the ew.lb for His possession. There is no property, personal or real, inherited or acquired, by whatever right, title, o/ tenure held, which is not His as Man, apart from His bbftolute possession as Creator. All other owner ships a?o &i'i»f/y permissions, stewardships, delegations, from Hifo. He is our Judge also; He judged His Mother, not as b*7 «V/i, but as her Son. He will judge the angels, not as Gf>J, nor as an angel, but as man; and He judges us not ao God but as Man. From the moment of His Conception, say some theologians, or from the moment of JtJ.is Resurrection, as others say, every soul of man that died was judged by Him in His Human Nature. And it is both our joy and His, that to Him as Man the dread magnificence of judicial power should be thus con signed. 0 that we could admire and worship His Sacred Humanity according to its deserts! Verily there is no pomp but that of a believing and loving Heart, which pays welcome or respectful court to this Sacramental King. When we gaze therefore upon the white robes of the Immaculate King, the lights and flowers of the sanctuary seem to fade away, and there open before the eyes of faith interminable regions of various splendour and consummate beauty, over which as Man He is at this moment wielding His far-reaching sceptre of dominion. One after another we seem to behold the three immense king doms of nature, grace, and glory, and the pre-eminence which belongs to the Sacred Humanity in each of them.

All the provinces of nature are His and exist because of Him. The diversified inanimate matter which com poses, adorns, and surrounds the earth, and suns, and moons, and stars, and planets, with all its mysteries and enormous forces, its hidden secrets or its open splendour, is all for Jesus. It was created for Him, and with a view to Him, and in some way modelled upon Him, and marked with His seal, and is His property in right of the created nature which He has so admirably wedded to the Divine. Doubtless if our weak-eyed science could penetrate so deeply into things, we should see with what astonishing fitness and truth all matter, in every shape, under the agency of every force, the direction of every law, and the convulsions of every catastrophe, had reference to the Incarnate Word, 'and could be known as His, in like manner as the sheep upon the mountains are known by the owner's mark upon their fleeces. There have been theologians who have gone so far as to teach that our Lord in His Humanity was the Head of all natural things, and merited for them their creation and conversation. But this is surely an exaggeration, which modern theologians almost unanimously reject. Head ship is something more than ownership, and cannot be applied to our Blessed Lord in the theological sense, except with reference to angels and men. What is true of His pre-eminence over inanimate matter, is much more so in the case of the animal creation; all were for Him, and are as they are because of Him; and His driving the swine into the sea was a use of His owner ship, and His command to the fish to bring Peter the tribute money was an instance of His pre-eminence. In like manner, as His saints advance in holiness and in 37* 2o likeness to Himself, the animals oboy their words, revere their sanctity, and minister to their wants.

When we come to human nature, Adam himself was but a copy of the predestinated Humanity of Jesus. The delights of the Eternal Word were especially with the children of men before the foundation of the world. The Blessed Sacrament has the same nature as ourselves, a Human Body and a Human Soul, taken from an immaculate but a purely human Mother. Our Lord's presence in the Blessed Sacrament is peculiarly the presence of His Human Nature; and therein, to repeat, He is the Son of Mary, the Head of the Church, our Prophet, Priest, and King, the Owner of all temporal things, and the Judge of angels and men. Men are His own family; and He belongs to them and they to Him in such manifold and incomparable ways as pass our power to tell. He did not take upon Himself the nature of angels; yet He is their Head, their mystical, though not their natural Head. They were created because of Him, and to be a court to Himself and His sinless Mother. Even in His Human Nature He illuminates their various choirs, as St. Denys tells us. Nay more than this, to side with Suarez against Vasquez, though He did not redeem the angels, for they needed no redemption, and He assumed not angelic nature, I believe there is not a grace amid their countless graces, nor a glory amid their resplendent glories, which He did not merit for them, and which was not conferred upon them for His foreseen merits. Most theologians agree that the Incarnation was revealed to the angels, and that they had the faith of Christ; and when the holy angels stood, while their brethren fell, some say it was the refusal to worship an inferior nature united to the Person of the Word which caused their fall; and certainly when St. Michael and his angels drove Lucifer from heaven, as it is said in the Apocalypse, they overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb.

Thus all nature, angelic, human, brute and inanimate, is gathered to the feet of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. The Blessed Sacrament is the King of nature, and the government is upon His shoulder, and His Name shall be called Wonderful, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of peace; and His empire shall be multi plied, and of His peace there shall be no end. And what shall I say more but that one other truth in which is our beatitude? With unutterable joy, with a complacency so worshipful and vast, a jubilee so inconceivably above all natural raptures, the Person of the Word has united this Sacred Humanity to the Divine Nature in Himself; so that that Human Nature is anointed and flooded with the torrents and abysses of uncreated per fections; and creation enters in beneath the veil, and the Creator has a created Nature, and takes intimate part in His own Creation. And there in the Blessed Sacrament is the actual living accomplishment of that tremendous mystery, the source of all our hopes, the fountain of all our joy, the eternal blessedness of every elect soul of man. 0 what should we be, if God were not made Man? If the sun fell from the heavens, it were less dismal ruin than if Jesus had never been, if the Word had never assumed our human nature to His Divine. How is it we can ever distract ourselves to think of earthly things? Are not all thoughts gathered into this one thought? Do not all lights go out in this light? What are all truths but pale satellites to this, shining only with a borrowed radiance from the Word made Flesh, the light that lighteth every man that is born into the world? All worship therefore be to the King of nature, dwelling amid His subjects in the lowly guise of the Sacramental Veils!

If we turn from the manifold domains of nature, and look over the vast realms of grace, still more wonderful will seem the pre-eminence of that Sacred Humanity, which lives with us in the Blessed Sacrament. For so completely is Jesus the sole fountain of all grace that ever was, or is, or will be, that the liberality of God has never conferred a single one on angel or man, before the Incarnation or after it, without respect to the Incarnate "Word. Of His fulness we have all received. So could the angels say, before yet the first sun had dawned on the rivers of Eden. So must the wandering multitudes of earth's sin-stricken exiles say at this hour, and at the day of doom, and in the immutable enjoyment of their immortal bliss. When we look at the Blessed Sacrament we behold the fountain of all the grace which has evei inundated the creation of God.

Many an unkindly thought which foolish men think ot God would be rebuked almost before it could rise, if we remembered, that, glorious and gifted as were the unfallen natures of angels and men, the creation of both those reasonable creatures resulted in a state of grace, and not in a state of nature. They were created not only with a nature all beautiful, and orderly, and capacious, and powerful, and good, but superadded to their nature, and coeval with it, was a glorious participation of the Divine Nature which we call sanctifying grace, which is either love itself or brings love inseparably in its train. Faultless as His creations were, God left neither of them to themselves. Wenkness attaches to the very essence of a finite created spirit, and He brought them forth therefore in a higher state than their mightiest efforts ever could have merited for them. They were created and sanctified at once. The Immaculate Conception of our dearest Lady is a specimen of those primal creations, made like to them by the new gr^co of redemption, which the fall had rendered needful. But the mercy, that creation was in a state of grace rather than in a state of nature, was due to Jesus. It was the work of the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Creation itself, both in respect of nature and of grace, takes root in the excellent and supereminent predestination of Jesus.

Consider the immense multitudes of the angels, with all their hierarchies, choirs, and species, and calculate the oceans of divine grace which have deluged their beati fied spirits. Their mighty intelligences, their deep serene affections, their vast fiery zeal! how they must have drunk in torrents of grace, as the thirsty earth drinks in the thunder-shower of the torrid autumn! Yet they were filled, and to overflowing, and were inebriated with their abundance. Some theologians say that the grace of each angel is separate and different from the grace of the rest; BO that the kinds of herbs and flowers on earth are but the faintest shadows of the diversity of the angelic graces. If each single leaf of the crowded forests of earth's historical five thousand summers were a separate kind, it would hardly represent the multitude of those celestial graces. The heavenly prince, our own Guardian, who is at our sides this moment, is a very world of grace in him self; and who can speak of Michael, of Gabriel, of Raphael, and the other five that stand alway before the

Throne of God? Try to fathom this universe of angelic grace, in its kind, its degree, its variety; and you will sink down in sheer amazement, and a silence that will nardly dare to think. Place yourself in heaven at the awful moment of the angelic probation; look at the two-thirds of its populous empire whose eternity of glory is in that moment immutably secured. What positive floods of grace with their exuberant tides are at that instant flowing majestically into their open spirits! What floods are striking on the unopened spirits of the rest, and are breaking against them, and falling back on God in streams of light and glory and resplendent justice, as the billow breaks upon a rock and bathes it in showers of starry spray! Look at the Blessed Sacrament: all that grace was from the foresight of the Sacred Human Heart that is beating behind those veils. 0 King of Angels! who can tell Thy worth? The angels round Thy tabernacle know how far too short eternity will prove, to exhaust the hymns, that should enumerate the wonders of Thy Sacrament of Love!

Adam, the newly created master of the Eden God Him self had planted, was bright with a thousand gifts. The radiant panoply of his original justice is almost too bright for eyes so weak as ours. But all was from Jesus, all from the Incarnate Word, all from the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. All the glory which Adam enjoys now in heaven is from the merits of Christ. It is of faith. Every degree therefore of grace, and all the merits to which the degrees of glory correspond, are from His merits. Even they, who teach that Adam's merits in a state of innocence were from the gift of the sole liberality of God, and not from Jesus, admit that, when lost by the fall, they were vivified by the grace of Christ.

and are now rewarded only for His merits. Again, all the merits uf Adam in a state of innocence were the effects of his predestination; and that was, as we have ieen, posterior and subordinate to the predestination of Jesus, which is the exemplar of all predestination. And again, Tertullian, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Epiphanius, and St. Bernard tell us, and the followers of Vasqucz admit it, that the Incarnation was revealed to Adam in a state of innocence, so that, as the angels had, so Adam had the faith of Christ before the fall, and lost not the faith in his fall; and Hurtado himself, arguing against the Scotist view of the Incarnation, admits that this revelation to Adam in a state of innocence is undoubted, and that it did not reveal the Incarnate Lord as a Redeemer, because the occasion of redemption had not yet come in Adam's sin. Surely we may well deny to the first Adam any grace which was not from the merits of Him who condescends to be styled the Second Adam, the Lord from heaven.

There is the grace which expels from the soul original sin, both as to its guilt and punishment; and which the sacrament of baptism applies, even before the use of reason dawns. There is the grace by which men repent of mortal sin and are forgiven; and though they fall many times, yet still repent and are forgiven again. There is the grace, which is a participation of the Divine Nature, and whereby we are the friends of God and the heirs of heaven; and there is the grace, which is an impulse of the Divine Will, which illuminates our minds and bends our wills. Even outside the Church there is exciting grace, pouring its light into the intellect, not only on great occasions, but almost always while reason is awake and clear, enticing us to gODd, and beguiling us from evil. There is the grace whereby men hate venial sin more than death, and repent of it when they fall. There is the special grace by which some souls are said to have been preserved through life from all wilful venial sin, a grace attributed to Jeremias, St. John the Baptist, and St. Joseph. There is the further grace of being sanctified in the womb, and so being saints before birth, as is said of Jeremias and the Baptist. There is the solitary star-like grace of our Mother's Immaculate Conception, which leads us up at once to the confines of the immeasurable grace of Jesus Himself. And there is not one of all these graces, from the Creation of the world till now, which has not in its time come from Jesus, as God-Man, or which is not streaming now from that Blessed Sacrament. Over all this beautiful and compassionate kingdom He reigns supreme, the most blessedly indulgent Potentate that man's fondest desires could have conceived.

Who is not full of joy when a feast of our Lady comes, those bright days that strew the year with stars? It is as if the Church called us to leave the noise and distraction of the world, and walk by the shores of some calm majestic lake, in whose unruffled and translucent depths are imaged the mountains of Divine Perfection. We remember the various splendours of the angelic kingdom; and we remember how that in the one first moment of her Immaculate Conception the imperial Mother of God was adorned with greater graces and shone with greater merits than all the angels put together, were they to add their merits into one for a million years. If we do the sum of her grace and merits by the arithmetic of Suarez, for which that saintly theologian was thanked by Mary herself, how far beyond the expression of our figures has the sum advanced when fifteen years of moments, each moment with the full use of reason, each moment, even of slumber, meriting on a gigantic scale, are fully accomplished! To our eyes she is almost lost in the light of grace. We can hardly make a picture of what she was like as a Jewish woman of royal birth. You may measure her grace by the marvel of her divine tranquillity under the visitation now about to come. The jubilant ocean of Uncreated Love rose like a cloud, and hung with His deluge of graces and gifts over the kneeling maiden. His angel went before Him, and He overBhadowed the soul aud body of Mary, while He waited for her sweet word. In that shadow no created eye could see her. Her word was hardly spoken, fleeting away on the silence of the swift night, but the Eternal Word was incarnate in her ever-blessed womb. What is Mary now, compared with what she was before? Like an in land sea girt round with the mountains of God; or rather herself compassing the Incomprehensible and Illimitable, fifteen years older than the Eternal, and the Eternal's Mother. Why do you weep, Christian soul? It is be cause there is no prayer and no thanksgiving but tears, when we think of the Incarnation. Each mystery of Jesus and Mary is so touching, that no tale of earthly joy or woe is half so pathetic; but the tendcrest and most overwhelming of all is the unspeakable mystery of the Incarnation itself. The Annunciation is the hardest feast in the year to keep as it should be kept.

Now for our arithmetic again. We have the sum of three-and-thirty years to do, and such years! We have

Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth, the sea of Tiberias, the mountain and the plain, Jerusalem, Bethany, Olivet, and

Calvary, to add together and cast up. When Jesus as cended into heaven, Mary had become our Mother as well as His; and what can be said of her accumulated graces and merits, except that it was a miracle she still remained the same Mary, and a lowly dweller upon earth, so un utterable had been the torrent-like influxes of all the communicable excellencies of God, which had poured into her soul and mind and flesh for now well nigh half a century of human years. There was nothing like her among creatures. She herself was like nothing but the Most Holy Trinity, who is virginal and yet prolific. She has need now to say to our admiring love, what Jesus said to the disciples after His Resurrection, Handle me and see: for a spirit hath not flesh and blood, as ye see me have! Yes! there are the beatings of her Immaculate Heart, the accents of a voice reminding us of the tones of Jesus, the tones of the voice that will pronounce our endless doom. There is the mingled look of joy and sadness, of triumph and patient expectation, in her human eye. She can feel pain; she has to die; she will be judged. You see she is still one of ourselves.

The day of Pentecost is come. 0 Eternal Spirit! what canst Thou give her, which Thou hast not given her heretofore? She is full to overflowing with the plentitude of grace. But the mighty Wind that will not be stayed rushes round her, shaking the strong temple to its huge foundations; and tongues of fire fall like a shower of snow-flakes into the very depths of her capacious soul. It is a moment only to be compared to the Immaculate Conception and the Incarnation. Yet^ where is the theologian who will express for us in sober and intelligible words what happened to Mary in that her third sanctification? Let it pass. She remained Mary still. That is all we know. She was queen of the apostles and nurse of the infant church. Do the sum of fifteen more years, and add to the manifold virtues of each moment an intensity of patience, of palient absence from her Son, which outdid, each instant, all the accu mulated endurance of the Arabian Job. Is not the death-bed often a revolution in the soul, and of all men most particularly so to saints? What was it to Mary when she died of divine love, dissolved at la*t like sweetest frankincense in the fire which had burned around her and within her unconsumingly these three-and-sixty years? From all the quarters of the globe the apostles were gathered round their dying queen, and gazed as tonished at this last marvel of her grace. Who can doubt that the graces and merits of her death-bed only were far beyond the collective excellencies both of angels and of men? And when she stood before her Judge, who was her Son as well, when the command ments and the counsels were applied as tests and measures to her soul, when she had not one sin whereof to be accused, and yet threw herself more utterly on redeeming mercy, than ever judged creature did before or since, what a resplendent universe of grace she was in her own single self! Yet what was it all but one single splendour shed around her from her Son? When the mountain uprises in the clear sunshine, beautiful, well-edged, and fair, it steals nothing from the sun, and its leagues of radiant land and rock and wood and water are no drain upon the solar fountains of beautifying light. So was it with Mary and her Son. 0 Blessed Sacrament! and Thou art so near, Thou fountain of immortal grace! Thou art there who did all this to Mary! And I have held Thee in my hand, 0 13ody of Jesus, O soul of the

Incarnate Word, 0 Son of Mary, 0 God made Man! And I fainted not! I held Thee whom Mary compassed; while thou didst enclose the nothingness of us both within Thy bewildering incomprehensibility!

If it may be reverently said that Malpighi's maxim, Nature exists entire in leasts, is true, in the highest and most transcendental sense, of the Blessed Sacrament, may we not also say that the whole world of grace is there as well? From that Blessed Sacrament we have seen radiating forth all the vast regions of angelic holiness, all the gifts of Adam and his race, and the created immensity of the Immaculate Mother's sanctity. Nay, His grace runs over and abounds upon the ungracious. Sinners are struggling against God in a very sea of grace, which blessedly impedes their movements, and quenches the fire of their malice, and makes their hearts happier and gentler than they would have them to be themselves. Long ago have the saints noticed how fires and plagues and wars and earthquakes and pestilences had been bridled by the Sacrifice of the Mass, and were at once fewer in number and less disastrous in their ruin than they were wont to be: while the same Sacred Humanity is ever pouring over the wounds of earth's miseries oils and balms of miracles, and healings, and revelations, and almsgivings, and heroisms of evangelic charity. The Eternal Father sees the world through the Blessed Sacrament, and mercy blesses where justice must have else prolonged the ancient malediction. The very furnaces of hell are cooled seven times lower than their due, because of the Incarnation, so that even there the Blessed Sacrament has a kind of empire, and the rebel fiend and perverse impenitent suffer less than condignity requires O Adorable Host! and has Thy mercy strayed so far as there, like a sunbeam wandering with its gladness into the murderer's cell? What shall we then do, who at least are not there yet, but bask in the beams of Thine unclouded mercy, and lay down all anxious fears in the embrace of Thy compassion?

Most Holy Sacrament! misery is good for earth, and pain is the healing of souls. Yet there is one misery, one pain, which is at once so grievous and has so much to do with Thee, that we should never come into Thy presence without asking for it to be lightened all over the earth. It is, that they who love Thee should be tempted to disbelieve Thee, that they who have given up all for Thee, a cheap and joyous sacrifice, should have that most terrific of Thy rewards, temptations against faith in Thy sacramental love. Poor hearts! I weep to think of them. The light of the world is to them Egyptian darkness, and the sweetness of the world has turned bitter: consolation is mockery to them, and their Saviour has unvested Himself of the familiar whiteness of His modest accidents and has put on the garment of the Destroyer. Has earth another pain like this? Their mind is ever giving the lie to their hearts. The earth under their feet is as iron, and the heavens above them riveted with roughest brass. And yet, 0 most gentlo Sacrament! how Thou dost love them, and how accept able to Thee is the compulsion of their dry, dutiful devotion! If the vitality of self-love is so tenacious in their souls that no other rack but this has power to stretch its contracted sinews and to tear it limb by limb* then Lord! Thou wilt turn it gently, and not beyond their power to bear. But speak kind words the while, and invite those most often to communion, who never can 38* see Thee in Thy sweet Sacrament but they are fain to cry out in anguish, Lord! I believe; help Thou mine unbelief. It must be their hope, as it is our trust, that He who predestinated them, will strengthen the vessels of His own election, and reserve them for those great graces which are laid up in store at last for souls that are tempted with this needful yet horrible temptation. Faint not! sadly yet mercifully visited souls! Fear not, little flock, it is the Father's good pleasure to give yon the kingdom in the end. Was not Joseph tempted about Mary and her Son and the great mystery of the Incarnation, after a like fashion with yourselves? And do you not remember the blessings which the dying Israel left to the first Joseph, " the blessings of heaven above, with the blessings of the deep that lieth beneath, with the blessings of the breasts and of the womb?"¹ And how beautifully is it said afterwards,f and for gentle suffering souls what exquisite consolation, " Of the race of Juda, who was the strongest among his brethren came the princess; but the first birth right was accounted to Joseph I" But we have not traversed yet the whole of this king dom of grace. We have seen what realms of grace have as it were issued for the benefit of others from the Sacred Humanity; we have now to see the grace of that blessed Humanity itself. Who can declare the grace of Christ? For in what conventional language shall we express it, by what measure mete it out, according to what standards compare it, and with what instruments take its altitude? We may weigh the huge sun in our scales, and ascertain his bulk: but divine theology herself can give us but a wide, misty, hill-top view of the grace of Jesus, like a desert landscape to which we know that the horizon is but an imaginary bound. But let us fix our eyes upon the Blessed Sacrament, and feast them on His supernatural littleness, and then name the abysses, one deepening after another, which that littleness contains and compasses.

The created Soul that is living there, assumed by the Person of the Eternal Word, was anointed and pene trated through and through by the Divinity Itself. It is sanctified not merely by its union with the Godhead, still less by habitual grace, but formally by the Godhead Itself; so that no words can express the measure of its sanctification. In the schools this is called the Grace of the Hypostatic Union. The Soul of Jesus is BO sanctified by the Deity formally, that if the Personality of the Word could in imagination be separated from the Divinity, the Soul would be sanctified utterly by that Personality, or by each separate one of the Divine Attributes, if in truth they were separable, because of the substantial union of the Sacred Humanity with the Divine Person of the Word.

Besides this Grace of Union there is in the Soul of Jesus immense habitual grace of the same nature as that which sanctifies all just men; and this has been in it from the first moment of its creation, because in that first instant it was blessed with the Beatific Vision and loved God aupernaturally. Yet that beautiful Soul in the Blessed Sacrament needed not this habitual grace either to make it dear and acceptable to God and holy ir His sight, or to give an infinite value to its works an enable it to merit, not only congruously, but condignly. For both these results the superior and ineffable grace of union had already secured. It enjoyed this habitual grace that it might be holy and adorned with every kind of sanctity; and because the Soul of Christ was above mil souls adapted to receive it, and because the sanctity of habitual grace which was to adorn all other just souls was to be simply derived from His. Nay, it was not to Him, as it is to us, a grace of adoption; for he who is without is adopted, not He who is within, as was our Blessed Lord. Moreover this habitual grace was needed in the Soul of Christ, that by its means He might elicit connaturally supernatural acts of the love of God. The great doctors of the Church discuss if the habitual grace of the Soul of Christ was infinite. So far as intensity is concerned, it might have been so, if so God had pleased; but it was not needed, and its infinity would not even have conduced to make the operations of His Sacred Humanity infinitely meritorious. The grace of union alone could do so, and had already done it. Yet, relatively and in a certain sense, His habitual grace was in finite, because it was the principle of an infinite work, not according to the infinity of dignity, but because it substantially elicited by charity His love of God and His other virtues; and in this sense every virtue in the Sacred Humanity is relatively infinite.

Some theologians have maintained that the habitual grace of the Soul of Jesus could not be increased even by the absolute power of God; because it was conferred upon Him in the highest degree of which either grace itself or a created soul are capable. But others main tain the affirmative, not as wishing to derogate from the grace of Christ, but some because they do not believe our Lord's habitual grace to be in fact infinite, and others because they dare place no such limitation to divine omnipotence. Nay, they will not allow that a mere creature might not receive habitual grace by God's absolute power in like measure with our Lord's. Nevertheless it is impossible for any mere creature, even by absolute power, to equal the sanctity of Jesus, because infinite in finities of the grace of adoption could never reach the un utterable grace of union. Moreover this habitual grace of our Blessed Lord does not necessarily arise from the Hypostatic Union; and it is connatural to His blessed Soul.

Actual grace is not a participation of the Divine Nature, but an impulse of the Divine Will, and it would seein at first sight, as if the Soul of Jesus would not have actual grace. But as His Human Nature required the ordinary concurrence of God, which all creatures re quire, in order to discharge its natural functions, so was He pleased to need for His Soul the impulses of actual grace in order to the free supernatural operations which belonged to His Soul while He was a Viator as well as a Comprehensor. The holy thoughts of exciting grace, which move the understanding, and the assisting grace which bends the will to the acts which the illuminated understanding commands, were both in Him. As He vouchsafed not to allow the grace of union to do the work of habitual grace without that grace, so neither was it His will that it should supersede the excitation and assistance of transient actual grace.² All grace was to be in Him. I am using dry words; but I dare not depart from them.

All grace was in Jesus. What then shall we give of our own to the Blessed Sacrament which was not in His own Soul while He was on earth? The worship of our

2n faith; for that one theological virtue was not, could not be, in Him. Neither a pious affection towards believing,f nor a habit of believing, if in truth such a habit there be, were in His Soul. And if ever there were hope in Him, it could be but hope of the future glory of His Resurrection. Of love why need we speak; for He was love itself, and His name was love. Of the moral virtues, all were in perfection in His Soul, except those whose acts are inconsistent with a state of union and beatitude, such as penance and some others: and those, which of their own nature are only acquired by their own acts, were infused into Him at the moment of Conception. The seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, even the gift of fear, adorned His Soul beyond all words, together with the miraculous gifts of gratuitous grace, even that of prophecy, which His clear Beatific Vision did not hinder.

Look once more at the Blessed Sacrament and think of all this plenitude of grace. We have seen His glory, the glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. 0 beautiful Human Soul, through Thy Union with the Word at once beatified and beatifying! Thou art full of grace, not as Thy Mother or any creature, but simply, and absolutely, and divinely. Full of grace because full of all virtues and all gifts of grace which were not incompatible with the excess of Thine exaltation. Full of grace because full of the Divinity. Full of grace because of the fountain-head of all grace. Full of grace because as it were infinite in the intensity and operation of habitual grace. Full of grace because of the copiousness, exuberance, and fertility of each grace that was in Thee!³

Let us call to mind all we have ever read of the lives of the saints. How enormous were their graces, how astonishing the heroism of their actions, how magnificent the perpetual youth of their perseverance! And how different they were, one from another. Yet all of them collectively would have been a thousand times more marvellous if they could have had amongst them one millionth part of the grace that was in the Sacred Humanity of Jesus. 0 then if to have spoken with Mary, to have helped Joseph, to have had Peter's blessing, and to have been taught lessons by Paul, were a privilege, one and all, great enough to have gilded a whole life of slow martyrdom, what is it to have Jesus with us, His Sacred Humanity within our reach, lifted up to bless us, and almost touching us, nay at Communion resting on our tongues as on His Mother's lap, and going down into our hearts to unite Himself with us in the closest tie of mystical union?

But this is not all which may be said of His grace. There is the grace of headship which concerns us most of all. He whom we see in the monstrance is Head of the Church, and that not as God, but as M«n; and this is of faith. From Him flows into the Church its wholp spiritual life, together with the plenitude of His life-giving merits. It is by that influx that you and I live and love God and please Him day by day, and hour by hour. The blood in our veins is much to us; but it i& nothing to that influx of Christ our Head. Yet though the Blessed Sacrament is the Head of His Church, He is not a member of it; for we can return to Him no life nor vital energy, in return for the all in all which He is ever pouring into us. 0 look at that Veiled Redeemer, and bless a thousand times the beneficence of His Headship over all. He is Head of the blessed; for at this moment He is pouring every motion of glory and every thrill of beatific joy into their countless souls. He is Head of the just on earth; for He is the life-blood of their grace at this instant, wheresoever they dwell. He is the Head of be lievers in sin; for the life of faith which they live is from Him, and every remnant and relic of supernatural health which is left about them. He is head of the unbelievers, baptized or unbaptized; for He is communicating to all of them various auxiliaries of grace and motions of God, though not with the vitality wherewith He is Head of those who live the life of faith and grace. Of all in their mother's wombs He is the Head by right, and will one day be the gracious Head in act. Of the reprobate alone He is in no sense Head, in His Human Nature; for they are the one withered portion of creation, and between Him and them no vital union can exist. In this same Human Nature He is Head of the angels, illuminating and ruling all; and He was no less Head of Adam and Eve in their state of innocence; for their life cf faith and grace was but the influx of His abounding and foreseen merits.

St. Bonaventure and some other theologians hold that this grace of Headship is in our Blessed Lord simply tho same thing as His habitual grace. Vasquez, Suarcz, and St. Thomas, as I think he should be interpreted, affirm on the contrary that our Lord is Head of the Church by reason of the grace of union. This seems the more true opinion. Nevertheless the grace of Headship is evidently connected with His habitual grace, as it was the principle by which He merited for others.

0 how each new truth as it comes out from amongst the difficulties of theology, and we are enabled to master it, makes us send look after look of more ardent love to the monstrance, and its dear Inmate, our Saviour, our Brother, and our God! How can there ever be gloom again in our minds, since He who is the light of the world has humbled Himself to the darkness of our taber nacles? Yes, we may well gaze upon Him. He is the Head of the Church, so the Head that no creature can be its Head in the same sense as He. Theologians here observe, what is of no trifling importance. Satan's head ship for evil is no parallel to the Headship of Christ for good. It is an external headship, causing evil in angels and men, not by an interior influx, like the communication of the grace of Jesus, but by government, administration, malice, example, and persuasion; and the future headship of Antichrist is only a human⁴ derivation from the demoniacal headship of Lucifer. Thus there is no comparison nor contrast between Christ and Satan in respect to headship. The heavenly counterpart of Satan's headship, as Hurtado has observed, is the headship of the pope, which is external, and answers on the side of God and truth to what Satan's is on the side of falsehood and sin. So that the combat of the Church is no duel between the Blessed Sacrament and Satan; but between the fallen angel and Christ's Vicar upon earth, the Sovereign Pontiff, and so will it continue to be when the persecution of Antichrist shall come: just as the old combat in heaven was not between God and Lucifer, but between Michael and Lucifer, the same Michael who is piously believed to be always the guardian angel of the reigning pontiff. Jesus the Head has delegated to His earthly Vicar the task of quelling Satan, and chaining within appointed bounds the fury of the rebel fiend, and all insurgencies of the evil principle. Upon the shoulders of the aged and the outworn and the weak, as the world counts such things, our Lord has laid the government, that each defeat of Satan may be more opprobrious, and that we may learn that no service is so unmistakeably for God as that which is at the same time loyalty, obedience, and love to the Holy See.

Such is the wonderful kingdom of grace, coeval with creation, over which Jesus in His Human Nature reigns the undisputed king, and the second of the three king doms which He is ruling at this moment from the monstrance, as erewhile He ruled the world from Mary's womb. How calm and strange all is above the altar around His sacramental throne! The very air seems filled with some great presence, burdened with some weighty secret, entranced by some unseen power. The garish light of day is excluded from the sanctuary. The pictures of the saints are veiled, as the stars hide themselves down in the blue deeps of ether when the sun shines. Men are silent, or deepen the silence by speaking in timid whispers. The tapers are wasting away at His Feet, like loving souls. The flowers shed their odours on the warm air, as if to make an atmosphere of Eden around their King. And there, behind those veils, is the Soul that holds all those abysses of grace, there is that living union of God and Man, there are the Five glorious wounds, whose bright scars are the unspoken eloquence of the Sacred Heart, there is Mary's Son, and Adam's Saviour. One who knew me from all eternity and loved me, and made me, and redeemed me, and will one day judge me, more indulgently I believe than even my own mother could do, who saw no evil in the child of her foolish love. What shall I ask of Him? Shall I be so close to the fountain of grace, and not drink of its abundance? Thy kingdom come! 0 King of grace, Head of the Church! let there be no corner in all Thy vast dominions where Thy royal rights are less disputed than in our generous and loving hearts. If they that have sinned much love much, oh what should our love be like? But the wind is chill, and the world is wintry, and our hearts wax cold. Let us nestle closer to the King of grace, and evermore closer still, and warm ourselves at the fires of the Sacred Heart in this Blessed Sacrament. Yet not as Peter warmed himself at that other high priest's fire, to lose His courage and deny his Master afterwards. Any cflfd were better far than that. But alas! this very mystery is the spot men choose most often to wound Him with a treacherous kiss, the kiss of a cold heart and an unloving service. It is an awful thing to be so near Jesus, because of the mere chance of being a Judas. Gaze on, pious souls, gaze on; drink your fill of love in this adorable Sacrament, but remember, it is always true of God, it is most of all true of our Sacramental God, that he who would intensely love must also intensely fear.

It is through these two kingdoms of nature and grace that we are travelling now to that third kingdom of glory, which alone is our true home. It is not that nature or grace will be left behind, as if they were merely transient things. It is only that their imperfections will fall away from them. Grace itself will mount into glory, and it is nature which will be glorified. But who shall describe this third kingdom of the Blessed Sacrament? Is it not said that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor man's heart conceived, the beatific joys of that celestial realm? That Human Nature, which is especially present in the Blessed Sacrament, is at this moment, while we are gazing on the littleness of its mysterious disguise, worshipped amid shouts and hymns of joy, with pomp unutterable, and pageant brighter than the light, by the prostrate hie rarchies of universal heaven. The whole kingdom of glory streams forth like a substantial effulgence from Jesus Himself. Its existence was implied in His predestination, and His predestination in due season effected and accomplished it. As the court exists for the king, so heaven exists for Jesus. It is eminently a kingdom of light j and we are told that it needs neither sun nor moon to illuminate it, because the Lamb Himself is the light thereof. In all the varied magnificence of its unrevealed and indescribable beauty, there is nothing which is not for Him, nothing whose nature does not refer it to Him, which is not mark'ed with the seal of the Lamb, and has not a peculiar conformity to His Human Headship, and does not borrow all its splendour from His original brightness. The immensity of its glad multitudes, crowding round Him in their abundant and exulting choirs, is -for His glory. Their very number is His delight, and His insatiable love feeds upon the countlessness of their ranks and the innumerable variety of their degrees of beatific joy, as on the cherished, hard-earned fruit of His dear, life-giving Passion.

It was when the angels had adored the decrees of Di vine Compassion, and had bowed before the inferior Nature which the Person of the Word had vouchsafed to assume and exalt, and had done homage in spirit to the mortal Mother of the Incarnate God, that heaven, with its

Vision of the Most Holy Trinity, was thrown open to the angelic ranks. It was when the Soul of Jesus sank through the ground at the foot of the Cross on Calvary, that It took with It that Beatific Vision to Adam and Eve, to Abraham and David, to Moses and Isaias, to Joachim and Anne, to Joseph and the Holy Innocents, and to all the saints of the old covenant detained in the Limbus of the Fathers; and when He ascended from Olivet He bore them with Him to the glory and the grandeur of the local heaven. For no child of man had entered there, until He first, His sacrifice accomplished, with Ilia glorified Body and Soul opened the way. He conquered the kingdom of nature with the forces of the kingdom of grace; but the kingdom of glory was His regal sanctuary where He reigned undisturbed, the eternal Prince of Peace. He had no need to conquer what had never been invaded. At this hour there is no road to heaven but through the portals of His judicial power, which He exer cises not as God but as Man. When our happy souls enter there, leaving their bodies, the faithful companions of their pilgrimage, to return to dust, it is only through an operation of His grace, which shall conform those bo dies to the likeness and fashion of His glorious Body, that we shall one day be reunited to them, and enter into the plenitude of our everlasting bliss. Thus all is of Him, and by Him, and in Him. He created the kingdom of glory, and for His Human Nature was it created. The angels entered it through the acknowledgment of the mystery of His Incarnation. No son of man entered it, till He had first purchased the right of his admission by His Precious Blood. Souls, 0 happy they, the emancipated of every hour! only enter there through the verdict of 39*

His judicial love. They that die, almost in sin, but catch the Cross as they are falling into the abyss, enter there through a way of cleansing fires which are the fires of His dear love, cheating hell, and multiplying the numbers of the redeemed by this last artifice of ineffable compassion and royal munificence of pardon. The bodies that are already there, have ascended or been assumed because of His; and there is not a body will enter there on the wonderful morning of the general resurrection except by the imprint of the Body of Jesus upon it. And when all are there, spirits of angels, bodies and souls of men, and, if 60 be, the children of other natures and of future crea tions, the Lamb in His Human Nature will be the bright, sufficient, beatifying light of all. Surely then all is His and all from Him. Never was kingdom held by king with titles half so many or so rightful as those whereby Jesus holds and rules and multiplies and gladdens His favourite realm of glory. 0 that the hour were come when we shall be admitted to kiss hands and do homage for that fief of glory, of measure and of beauty known already to Himself, which he shall confer on our unworthiness as the crown of His own everlasting love of our foreseen elected souls!

But the kingdom of glory has its hierarchies, prece dencies, ceremonies, and rubrics, as well as the kingdom of grace upon earth. The highest ceremonial of the Church on earth, the very crown of all her ritual and worship, is the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. So is it with the kingdom of glory. The adoration of the Immaculate Lamb is the occupation of heaven; for they that are contemplating the Vision of the Most Holy are also worshipping the Lamb. Now, then, while at this hour our sanctuary is unnaturally still around the throne

IV.] A PICTURE OF JESUS. 46Jf of the Sacramental Lamb, let us think of the local heaven, and the worship of His Human Nature there, in its union with the Person of the Word. What bright and beautiful multitude of glorious souls is this which forms the outer ring of the stupendous court? It is that portion of the kingdom of grace which the waters of baptism alone have flooded. The little ones have become as it were men of thirty-three, like Jesus Himself, and their untried, uutempted nature has been washed white as snow in His redeeming Blood. The mightiest scholars upon earth know not so much as they, though the hearts of saints on earth have sometimes loved with a love intense as theirs, and perhaps more intense. Earth's highest joys are not so much as a shadow to the Beatific Rapture which possesses their spirits with its pulses of thrilling life. As is the pearly whiteness of the dawn of day, so is their light in the splendour of that king dom; because their Brother wrought a miracle for them, and turned His blood into water, and washed them clean, and the very Name of the Vision they are gazing OQ filled them with the grace of adoption, and gave them an eternal inheritance that fadeth not away. Is there a lot on earth round which the sunshine of prosperity and joy is shining brightest, which is not purely miserable and undesirable compared with the present glory of the infant members of Jesus whom baptism has saved for ever? I do not know but that a holy heart on earth fire-tried and cross-laden, whom love is martyring, while his inner soul is seamed with the stigmata of the blessed Passion, — I know not if such a lot, as well for its present Christ-like suffering as fur its future crown, be not preferable to the glory of the baptized children: but sure I am that there is no other lot on earth which is, beside that single one of saintly suffering.

But let us pass beyond the abounding joy of this outer ring. What other multitude is this, a multitude that no man can number? Who would have believed that so many souls of men had ever been created? 0 prolific Blood of Jesus? O joy of the mighty multitude, that it is so incalculably multitudinous! Here are all nations and tribes and tongues, all sexes, ages, ranks, occupations, and times of the world's history. How beautiful they are! how various their sanctity! how orderly their classes and degrees! See how the sacramental characters shine upon their souls, the diamond of baptism the ruby of confirmation, the emerald of order with its sevenfold depths of clear green light; and each gem pouring forth a more abundant and bewitching splendour than the great solar body that lights and fertilizes the kingdom of nature here. There are pontiffs and doctors, martyrs, confessors, and virgins, novices and lay brothers, religious and secu lars, all bathed in the sunlight of the Lamb. These are the saints who have not attained to the vacant thrones in the angelic choirs, the unplaced saints, as they may be called; and each soul among them is in itself a world of sweet worship to the Lamb. And see how each hour there are fresh arrivals at the gates of heaven, and the angels lead the new comers to Peter, and Peter to Mary, and Peter and Mary to Jesus, and Jesus to His Father; and each new soul gives force to the mighty undulations of excessive joy through all the rings of heaven, and these hourly festivals of charity beat like fresh pulses, discernible even in the extatic rapture of the Perpetual Unchanging Vision. 0 how dull earth grows as we think and speak of things like these! Blessed Sacrament 1 what should we do if we had not Thee?

But we must onward still into the thick of heaven. We come now to the nine concentric rings of the holy angelic kingdom, among whose thrones, human but with angelic seeming, are placed those of earth's mightiest paints, elected to fill the seats of the one-third of that bright host, whom Lucifer drew down with him in his fall. There are three gorgeous hierarchies, subordinate the lower to the higher, the lower illuminated by the higher, and the highest by God Himself. In each hierarchy are three congenial choirs, of various gifts and holiness and power, whose names the apostles have recorded for us, and of whose diversified functions and loveliness the traditions of theology have much to tell. Each angel, say some theologians, is a species by himself. But in some respects there is an unkindliness about this view; for then many million species of God's reasonable creatures were extinguished with Lucifer, so far as their means of worshipping their good Creator are concerned. Others say that in each choir there are three species, differing from each other in ways of which it is not easy for us to form a conception; while the grace of each angel is distinct and singular. Thus, as it were by twenty-seven steps, through thrice nine rings, adumbrat ing the Most Holy Trinity, we mount upwards through the angelic kingdom, mingled with the elect sanctity of earth, until we reach the royal throne of the angelical vicegerent, which Lucifer forfeited by his fall; and which is now occupied, some conjecture by St. Michael, some by St. Joseph in reward for his office of foster-father to the Incarnate Word. See to what a height we have mounted! And if we turn to look back on the magnificence we have traversed, specially those nine oceans of living intellectual light and angelic holiness, how bewildering is the prospect, how entrancing one while the music, one while the glad silence that reigns all round. How near is the Blessed Sacrament to us on earth, how far it is to reach that Human Nature in the throng of heaven!

Higher still. Beyond the vicegerent's throne come the seven mighty chosen angels that stand ever before the throne of God, Michael the guardian angel of the Church, perhaps also of the Sacred Humanity when on earth, and of the reigning Sovereign Pontiffs, the destroyer and conqueror of the rebel angels: Gabriel, the angel of the Incarnation, the guardian of Mary, the inspirer of Daniel, the lover of sacrifice and prayer, and the bearer of God's sweet messages; Raphael, the most human-like of all the angels, compassionately interesting himself in our mortal vicissitudes, as though he had a heart of flesh, and taking to the pathos and romance of human life as if it were his own, the guide of the wandering, the light of the blind, the medicine of the sick, representing in himself the triple mercies of the Three Divine Persons, and with such an abundant source of joy to shed and pour over all his clients, that if Michael is the shadow of the Father and Gabriel of the Son, St. Raphael may well be named the angel of the Holy Ghost. There also are those other four, whose names, as St. Boniface said in the counsel held at Rome under Pope Zacharias, were not publicly acknowledged by the Church, but who are called, according to certain traditions and private revelations, Uriel, the Strong Companion, mentioned in the third and fourth books of Esdras, and who is represented in Christian art as holding in his right hand a drawn sword across his breast, with flames on his left; Sealtiel, the

Praying Spirit, said to be the angel who appeared to Agar in the wilderness, whom art depicts with face and eyes cast down, and his hands clasped upon his breast, as if he were a penitent; Jehudiel, the Renmneratnr, supposed to be the angel whom God said that lie sent before the children of Israel, and who in pictures holds a golden crown in his right hand, and a scourge of three black cords in his left; and Karachiel, the Helper, said to be the angel who spoke to Abraham and rebuked Sara when she laughed, and who is painted with the lap of his cloak filled with white roses.⁵ Oh what delights does not the Incarnate Word find in the mighty beings and deep spirits and magnificent worship of these glorious crea tures! If science could walk the coral depths and explore the sunless caverns of the whole Atlantic and Pacific, the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, if it could note and class and learn the genera and the species of shells and weeds and living things innumerable, a more various, fertile world would not be opened to the discoverer, than the almost inexhaustibly rich natures and stupendous graces and amazing glories of these seven spirits, who are the chosen neighbours of the throne of God. The Soul of the In carnate Word explores them with consummate complacency, crowns their worship by His blissful acceptation, and vouchsafes to receive from their clean thuribles the earthly smelling incense of our human prayers: and

He is doing all this even DOW, He who is in yonder Blessed Sacrament.

Higher still. We now approach the far-famed hierarchy of the Incarnation, wrapt in a glory of its own, suffused with especial splendours from its vicinity to the Sacred Humanity of the Word. There are the eleven Apostles whom Jesus reassembled after His Resurrection, and Matthias whom the Holy Ghost elected into the bishopric of Judas, and Paul on his thirteenth throne, and Barnabas who filled up the apostolic college. There are the unapostolic evangelists Mark and Luke, with Simeon and Anna, Elizabeth and Zacharias, Joachim and Anne, Magdalen, Martha, and Lazarus, Simon the (Jyrenian, and Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus and Stephen, Malchus and Veronica, Longinus and Dimas, with the seventy disciples, and others, Gospel saints. There are the Holy Innocents, whose blood was the first shed for Jesus when He had first shed His for them in the Circumcision: and to whom, as some revelations to the saints disclose to us, the full use of reason, with immense capabilities of meriting, was given in the moment of their massacre, and who now enjoy singular power in heaven as the patrons of the dying, and with the double invocation of whose sweet names St. Francis of Sales fortified himself to die. There also, in unexampled height and bliss, are the two assessors of Mary's throne, the Baptist, whose life was one long unearthly miracle, and St. Joseph; who, tested and tried as the sport of God's most mysterious ways, deserved to represent the Eternal Father on earth, and lived a life as quiet as the noiseless course of Providence, and as modest and commonplace as the three-and-thirty years of the Incarnate Word. This is the hierarchy of the Incarnation.

As the clouds nighest to the sunset are shot with many, coloured gold, ever changing, ever new, glowing like celestial furnaces of beauty, at all moments wonderful arid glorious, yet ere we name shape or hue, they are other, yet still the same, alive with light, and as it seems, dilating now and now contracting with pulses of ardent fire, like hearts that beat quick with excess of joy, so are these saints of the hierarchy of the Incarnation, that are grouped close in, amid the coruscations of the Lamb.

Higher still. Within reach of the Sacred Heart of Jesus rises the mediatorial throne of Mary. There is hardly a date in the past of heaven more notable than the day of her Coronation. She is the Woman, clothed with the Sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve apostles like stars around her head. Wonderful, amazing, is her glory. It is too bright to see, save darkly and in enigma. Ocean opens out after ocean. Can we measure the munificence of God, the liberality of the Word, the extent of what is communicable by the Most Holy Trinity? Then, and not before, we may measure Mary's glory, and survey it, and note it down by acre, pole, and perch. She is the first fruit of the predestination of Jesus, nay, an integral part of it. She shares subordinately with Him in the glory of being the final cause, the model, and exemplar of all creation. From each of His three royalties of nature, grace, and glory there devolves on her a separate queendom, which is a participation of His regal jurisdiction. She is so like Him, that when we describe her, it sounds as if we were describing Him. Bossuet called her "Christ begun;" and as He began by her, so did He please to 40 2E consummate the long series of His gracious mysteries in the ceremonial of her heavenly Coronation. The justice of God is withheld from her, that she may be the exclusive spirit of the compassionate Incarnation. For in truth she is filled full to overflowing with the divine mercy, till her being seems nothing but mercy, and her name is no longer Mother of God only, but Mother of mercy also; and all this that she may shine to our eyes with a more palpable created and human loveliness. Every kind of grace in the Soul of Jesus claims the right to crown Mary on its own account, and endow her with some peculiar prerogative. The grace of union crowns her as the Deipara, the Mother of God. His habitual grace crowns her with a sanctity to which all the united holiness of angels and saints are but as glow worms to the noonday sun. The grace of union and habitual grace combine to rest upon her brows the tiara of an Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity, and the glory of her Assumption. His actual graces rain gems and jewels all over her royal robes. His gifts crown their own likeness in her spotless soul; and her miraculous powers would seem to rival His, if hers were not but the reflection of His, and that she had from Him what He held only from Himself. His grace of Headship crowns her queen of heaven, empress of the angels, mistress of the saints, lady of purgatory, and ruler of the earth; and what He may give her to hold in her own right beside, who can tell? For there are rights to those in Him, which are not the less rights because apart from Him they would not be. All I have said is as nothing. So it must be. Love can divine, but scholarship cannot tell, the glory of the

Mother of ITm who is yonder in the Bussed Sacrament.

Higher still: near, indeed, as we may count things in heaven, but higher than an eagle's flight, if our measure be human thought! There, in the very heart of the Great Mystery, as if It were the breast-plate of the Most Holy Trinity, is the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, glowing with the tire of the Divinity, with its created grace and gifts and form, all unconsumed in that light and beauty unapproachable. Shall we accumulate great great words to describe Its glory? Shall we borrow the imagery of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse to make a picture to ourselves of that enthroned, exalted Son of Man? Shall we tell how on His garment and on His thigh His Name is written, King of kings, and Lord of lords? AVhat need is there for that? Better make haste, from amid the fires of that Vision, to claim Him for our own. Himself is more to us than His glory; and we tremble to lose Him when we see Him where He is. Yes! it is Himself. See the features, without doubt the features of a man, and like to those we saw when we timidly looked up into the face of our Mother and our Queen. There is the hair; it is human; the fire has not touched it. There is the face that was once so well known to the fishermen of Gennesareth, and was once so piteous in the str-ets of the cruel Jerusalem. There is the very look of reverential fear, which was so beautiful when H prayed in the glens of mountainous Judea. There is the v«»ice of Him who preached and told the parables, cast out devils and gave absolution, spoke seven times words of love from the harsh throne we gave Him on the Cross, and who is saying now many times an hour, Come, blessed soul! enter the kingdom prepared for you before the foundation of the world, It is Himself. If we saw Him eat fish and honeycomb by the lake, we could not be more sure. 0 how He is drawing our soul- to Him! Sweet compulsion, which makes the will more free than ever! beautiful constraint, that emancipates by its captivity! whence come these attractions that are now drawing us to themselves? They come from the altar-throne, and from the Human Soul and Body that are there. I will draw them, says He in the monstrance, with the cords of Adam, with the bands of love.* Ah Lord Jesus! we spoke of Thee as in heaven, and lo! Thou art here, and all heaven is with Thee here. 0 Blessed Sacrament! Thou makest all life now like one continued walk to Emniaus. Our hearts burn, and it is not that we know not why, but that we will not remember why. "I was like a foster-father to Ephraim: I carried them in my arms; and they knew not that I healed them." But how long shall these things be. 0 that our hearts were modelled upon Thee as creation was, and crowned by Thee as creation is, and that since thou hast our nature, we might participate more abundantly in Thy grace, and that as Thou wilt lead us to glory hereafter, so now Thy hidden Sacramental presence might already be our glory here!

I can dream of no perfection like to what I find at every turn in this most Blessed Sacrament. The tapers have a little wasted, and the flowers have a little lan guished; and amid the silent throng of worshippers He has heard many a secret of the heart, healed many a wound, answered many a petition, and accorded many a benediction. 0 look upon Him! Girt with the rings of His triple kingdom of nature, grace, and glory, how beautiful He is! And what is more than beautiful, how good 1 Hosea, xi. 4.

" Why callest thou me good? There is none good but Oue, aud that is God." Even so, Lord! and therefore it is that Thou art good: because Thou art God. He is here, down on his own earth: nature is all around Him. Grace is darting from Him, like invisible sunbeams, from off His little temporary throne and from out His poor crystal prison-palace. Glory is round Him also. He has brought His own with Him. But that is not all. Wreaths of glorious angels are round His Sacramental Presence, adoring with wonder ever new the depths of this infinite compassion. To their vast intelligence the mystery of the Mass and of the Blessed Sacrament is never familiar. Not one of its least abysses could they thoroughly explore in a million of the giant years of the solar system. It is we only to whose cold love it is familiar, and to whose weak faith it is so little interesting. And with the angels, too, as revelations say, are the beatified souls of such saints as in their lifetime haunted the tabernacles for special love of this divinest mystery. Why hast Thou surrounded Thyself thus with Thy three kingdoms? Is it as a triple rampart against the coldness of my heart, and the irreverence of my scanty adoration? When I look upon Him, He reproaches me with my want of love. I could almost think those white robes stirred, and that He was going to speak, and then I should die. 0 that I might bargain with him! Ha wants nothing of me but my love; and I want nothing of Him but more love to love Him with. Why can we not agree? He is always lovely, but never so lovely as in the Blessed Sacrament. But now that I have adored His Human Nature with all its ineffable sanctity, em pires of Nature, seas of grace, realms of glory, and 40* manifold prerogatives, I feel so unspeakably U love that peculiar presence of It, which He voucb^a/^s in the Blessed Sacrament, that Mary and the angels and the saints all seem too little to praise, to love, to magnify, His Sacred Humanity as it deserves; and my love" is only satisfied, my joy alone complete, to think that that glorious Body and that blessed Soul are assumed by the Person of the Eternal Word, and are so His, so belong to Him, that no union is like to that but the unity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. All blessing be to Thee, most Holy Sacrament! for that Thou art God, and for that Thou art Man, and for that LJ lose of us Thou art so lovingly and humbly veiled^ v/v y^t withal so indubitably distinct and clear!

Footnotes

1. Genesis, xlix. f T. Paralipomenon. v ↩

2. See Frassen. De Incarnat Tract i. Disp. i. Art 2. Sect i. Ques. iii. Hurtado distinguishes the operation of actual grace 88 illuminating the mind and as moving the will; and admits our Lord'i actual grace in the latter case, and denies it in the former, as inconsistent with His infused science. Disp. vii. Difficult Lx. ↩

3. I have followed Hurtado in taking the negative side on this question. Suarez affirms it. De Lugo leaves it open. ↩

4. Hurtado, De Incarn. di?p. vii. Difficult, xxv. Quee sit gratia capitis in Christo? Not that Antichrist will bo an incarnate d«inoo, an opinion which Vasquez refutes, pars L disp. clixxir. ↩

5. For an interesting account of the rise nnd progress of the cultus of the Seven Angels, the vision of Antonio Duca, and the revelation* of the Blessed Amadeus, see Cornelius a Lapide in his Commentary on the Apocalypse. There is however a controversial Scotism about tho revelations of the Blessed Amadeus, which is very suspicious. There is also a great deal of curious information respecting the seven angels in Sarconio. Ritratto di S. Rafaele. Naples, 1<?8, j». 32 to p. 78. ↩