Section IV. The Thirty-three Years

In order to have a true devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and to the different mysteries of Jesus, it is necessary to have a devotion first of all to the mystery of the Incarnation itself. Very wonderful, and fraught with intense love, are the truths which theology teaches us of the union of the Divine and Human Natures in the Person of the Eternal Word. But these fountains of knowledge are not open to all, nor suited to the capacities of all. For the great majority of persons such a devotion to the Incarnation in itself may be obtained by a special devotion to the mystery and feast of the Annunciation, or to the communion of Jesus, a mystery-full of unction and sweetness. Such a devotion to the Incarnation is also a frequent grace accorded to pilgri mages to Loreto. But however it is to be gained, gained it must be, if we are to excel in devotion to the Blessed 41* 2*

Sacrament, or to any of the particular mysteries of Jesus; for in both these cases the continual remembrance of the Incarnation of the Word is as it were the foundation of our devotion. It is on this account that in the three last sections I have spoken of the Blessed Sacrament in connexion with the Incarnation in general, prior to speaking of its relation to the various mysteries of our Lord's life, which is now to occupy our attention.

If we look at the Thirty-Three years, we shall see that during that time our Blessed Lord lived various lives, vouchsafed to perform divers mysteries, to exhibit certain characteristics, to do peculiar worts, and to effect a certain union between Himself and us. Now the pro positions before us are these. In the Blessed Sacrament He lives all His lives, fully repre>ents all His mysteries, combines all His characteristics, fulfils His work, and accomplishes His union; and therefore It is in itself a faithful and perfect picture of Jesus.

Our lord may be said to live eight different kinds of lives; each of them so full of gracious mysteries, of divine teaching;, and of attractive love, that long years of extatic contemplation would be unable to exhaust any one of them. His Life in Mary has already been considered, and what were its characteristics but helplessness and imprisonment, and yet the helpless Prisoner the while giving grace, and causing exultation in all who came nigh unto Him? And is not this at once the life of the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle? His Infant Life formed the subject of the greater part of the second book; so that it is needless to repeat here the many minute similitudes which exist between it and the Blessed Sacrament. His Hidden Life in the holy house of Nazareth seems to our natural views the most wonderful of all. It is so unlike our own impatience. It re bukes all our- standards, sets at naught our worldly prudence, and puts aside with lofty disdain all our means of compassing success. It is a very mine of supernatural principles. If He is in the world, and for the world's sake, and if His sojourn is to be for so short a period, why spend so large a portion of that small period, in the inactivity of Nazareth? Yet as the Creator of the world w«as then, so is He now. What more secret and hidden than the Blessed Sacrament? What less attractive to the world than His present Nazareth? They who live as it were next door to Him know Him Dot. Strangers do not suspect Him, any more than they did in the narrow streets of the little Nazareth. His own Josephs, His priests, comprehend not all his glory. And if it be true, as some theologians have said, that lie instituted the Blessed Sacrament more for the sake of Mary than for all the rest of the world put together, the parallel will be still greater with that life of eighteen years for Mary and three for His ministry and Passion.

How beautiful also is the Blessed Sacrament as a picture of His Life of Ministry! What silent words, what works of mercy, what miracles of grace, are issuing from Him all the day long in the darkness of the tabernacle! And if He does not tell us parables, is it not partly that it is given to us, as to the apostles, to know all things openly and without parable, and partly is not lie Himself the while the sweetest and the deepest of all parables? The Blessed Sacrament is avowedly and intentionally a picture of His Suffering Life. It recalls His Passion. It is a state of mystical death. It is being continually visited with outrage, both intellectual and moral; and the Bacrifice in which it is both consecrated and consumed, is a renewal of the very Sacrifice of Calvary itself. As He was adorned in His Risen Life with the gifts of His glo rified Body, so is He in the Blessed Sacrament; and as the occupations of His Risen Life were teaching and in structing His apostles in the things pertaining to the Church, so is He in the Blessed Sacrament eminently the fountain of all the ecclesiastical sciences, while the worship of Him in it is the true source of the ecclesiastical spirit,¹ which is the health and vigour of the Church; and as the lesson on which He dwelt during His risen life as nearest and dearest to His Sacred Heart, was the thrice-repeated commission to Peter by the shore of His favorite inland sea, Feed My sheep, Feed My lambs, so also is this His own very work in the Blessed Sacrament. He is there that He may become our food. It is the stupendous way whereby God made Man renders Himself capable of being eaten by His creatures. Moreover the ologians refer to the forty days of His Risen Life, the delivery of the doctrine of the sacraments, ordinances concerning their matter and form, and the method of their administration, and more especially with regard to the Holy Eucharist itself. So that it would seem as if one main cause of that loving delay of His Ascension was to provide for the worship of the Blessed Sacrament in the future ages of the Church.

His Life of Glory is the very life which He is living now. He has ascended. The Holy Ghost has come;

and Jesus Himself has returned, according to His promise, that He might not leave us orphans. As He is in heaven at the moment of consecration, so is He in the adorable Host, only veiled, and without dimensions. As He is in the exaltation of His Ascension, so is He in the abasement of the Bles-ed Sacrament. His Life above is one and the same Life as that which He leads below. The Ascension, as the angelic doctor teaches us, brought no change over Him. It only elevated His Human Nature to a more befitting place. At first this teaching dis appoints us, as if we would fain accumulate glory upon glory on our dearest Lord; and we are inclined to catch at certain expressions in other writers which seem to be token that some change did come over Him, either of ex ternal glory or of His interior dispositions.² But after all, the other is not only the truer, but it is the more attractive doctrine; or rather it is more attractive because it is more true. It is rest and joy and love to think that as He left the earth on sunny Olivet that Thursday after noon, so heaven keeps Him as earth saw Him last, familiar and unchanged; and that when He comes in His glory to judge the world, He shall come as He went, "in like manner/' as the angels told the men of Galilee, so that all shall know that it is He, and His elect shall weep for joy.

Thus the Blessed Sacrament represents as in a picture all these seven lives of Jesus, His life in the Womb, His Infant Life, His Hidden Life, His Public Life, His Suffering Life, His Risen Life, and His Ascended Life. Yet it does not represent them as if it were itself but a mere figure. It shows them forth with a reality equal to their own, and unites in itself all their wonderful condescen" sions, and the peculiarities of all their mysterious variety. But besides this, the Blessed Sacrament has a life of its own, a distinct life of Jesus, which is commonly called His Mystical Life. It is as it were a double life; for it is a true life, yet another life from His life of glory in heaven. It begins daily, and ten thousand times a day, and in ten thousand places; and it comes to an end as often. Yet neither its beginning nor its ending interrupt for one moment the life of visible glory in heaven. It but this last is far from attributing to our Risen or Ascended Lord any change of interior dispositions. He only distinguishes between our Lord's " works in the infirmity of His flesh and His works in the virtue of His glory." Vie, lib. ii. chap. xvii. p. 473. Edit. 1657. The sentence M. Olier quotes from St. Ambrose, de Fide Resurrectionis, will not carry the inferences he draws, and when looked at in the context even makes against him. S. Ambros. de Fid. Rea n. 91.

is a life of its own, because of its peculiarity. It is there by a method, which the word Transubstautiation is used to designate rather than to explain. Its state is one of mystical death, of separation of flesh and blood, of voluntary renunciation of the use of the senses; and lie is there not by virtue of the Soul, which our Lord did not receive from Mary, but by virtue exactly of that, of all that and of no more than that, which He vouchsafed to owe to her, namely, His Flesh and Blood. Moreover the Blessed Sacrament with its peculiar life is itself the very life of the Church; for as De Lugo observes, while the sacraments of the old law are but conditions, and were the works of the Church, the sacraments of the new law are causes, and are the works of Christ Himself, for which He does but borrow the hands and tongues of His min isters; and of no sacrament is this true in so real and transcendental a sense as of the Holy Eucharist. Thua our Lord's life, with its manner, way, circumstances, state, occupation, and mystery in the Blessed Sacrament, is as peculiar, distinct, and worshipful as any one of His other lives, and is unlike them all, while it embraces all. If we look at the Three-and-Thirty Years, not as divided into lives, but as marked by certain grand prominent mysteries, we shall see that the Blessed Sacrament fully represents them all in their chief excellencies and peculiarities. The Incarnation was not the instantaneous production of the Human Nature united to the Divine, but the instantaneous production of the Human Nature and its coeval assumption by the Word. By it God be came Man; and five words from Mary's lips were sufficient for the Divine operation. So the Blessed Sacrament is a continuation of the Incarnation; it is instantaneous j one moment and Jesus is not there; five words of Ilia own in the mouth of His priest, and He is there. The Nativity was the manifesting of Him to mankind among visible creatures, as the Blessed Sncrament exhibits Him for the adoration of the people. There the Flesh veiled His Godhead; here the accidents veil both the Manhood and the Godhead. Bethlehem was the House of Bread j and here He is the Bread of men. As in the Circumcision, so in the Blessed Sacrament, the Flesh and the Blood are separated, and the accidents of bread and wine are miraculously detached from their substance. As the truth of the Blessed Sacrament is, that it brings us our Lord as He really is at the moment of consecration, passible if passible, glorious if glorious, without soul if without soul, as would have been on Good Friday; so the peculiarity of the mystery of the Transfiguration was that it was our Lord as He really was not at the time. It anticipated the glory which was not yet His normal or abiding state. It was an apparition of Him as He was to be, and was not yet. Thus the Transfiguration illus trates the Blessed Sacrament by its contrast rather than its comparison. We may indeed compare the two; for as our Lord was for the moment in the Transfiguration, He is now abidingly in the Blessed Sacrament. But in the way of contrast, as the Transfiguration was the glo rifying of the Hidden, so is the Blessed Sacrament the hiding of the Glorified.

The Passion separated Body and Blood; so does Transubstantiation. If we look at the Eucharist as a Sacrifice it is the real, renewed drama of the Passion; and if we look at it as a Sacrament, its circumstances of humiliation and its treatment at the hands of men have no parallel but in the awful Passion. As His Insurrection was in impassible flesh, so is His Eucharistic Life. He enters through the closed doors of hearts; the secret is only thoroughly known to the faithful; for the literary belief of a real presence outside the Church is but a suspicion of the living dogma and life-giving worship of the Blessed Sacrament within the pale. Moreover, it is the seed and the cause of our own future happy resurrection. So it is the link between our Lord's Resurrection and our own. It is the efficacious and omnipotent re, production of His in ours. As in the Ascension the weight of His Body was gone, and He rose upward through the air to His befitting height and glory; so now He is without weight in the hands of His priests, and were it not for the inexpressible burden of deep dread upon their hearts, chilling the blood and piercing the flesh sensibly with darts of acute fear, they could bear Him round the Church in long procession, and feel no weight and no fatigue. Thus it is that the Blessed Sacrament represents the seven chief mysteries of our dearest Lord, the Incarnation, the Nativity, the Circumcision, the Transfiguration, the Passion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, while it is, moreover, in an especially real sense the descent of the Holy Spirit also, whose marvel lous illapsc, to use the word of the ancient fathers, over shadows the altar and the sacrifice.

But the Blessed Sacrament does more than live all the lives of Jesus, and represent all His mysteries; it also combines all His characteristics. In the inspired records of the New Testament a distinctly human character is perceptible in our Blessed Lord, which we can compare with other characters, and give it a name, and imitate its 42 spirit, and of which we can have quite an intelligible and familiar idea. It is an immense condescension on His part, and is not either to be mentioned or contemplated, except with extreme reverence and a continual recollection of His Divinity. It is more the case with Him than with our Blessed Lady. It is difficult to form a conception of her personal character. She is all suffused with His magnificence. She is so clothed with the sun, that much of herself is invisible. She is partially eclipsed by the excess of her own glory. This character is indeed one of the differences between herself and Him, as I have observed elsewhere.

Now let us venture for a while to look at the King of Saints, as if He were a saint Himself. He will indulge us in all liberties which we take in order to love Him more. He had an extraordinary love of silence. His words, as tradition tells us, were few and rare. He was collected in His Blessed Vision of God. He passed amid earthly things, as if He floated over their service rather than mingled in their crowds, or vouchsafed to sympathize with their interests. All detached men are silent men. Thus, we are told that a more than monastic silence reigned in the holy house of Nazareth, with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; and indeed the contrary supposition would have in it something unworthy and repulsive. Then, again, with this love of silence was the congenial love of hiddenness, which we have already seen to be a mysterious characteristic of God himself. He was hidden everywhere; hidden when He was in secret, and almost more wonderfully hidden when in public, with the gaze and criticism of men fall upon Him. But His silence was not taciturnity, nor His hiddenness sullen or unaffectionate. Hence there was about Him a sweetness such as no saint ever had before or since. Nothing tried Him He was never surprised. Rudeness did not unsettle Him. Injustice kindled no human heat in His heart. Importunity never wearied Him. Unseasonableness never provokcd Him. In look and word, in gesture, smile, and tear, He was above all the saintly sweetness which our rough natures can conceive. Out of this came His patience, which was absolutely godlike. What is the life of Job to the mysteries of Holy Week? Indeed, patience, whether in the womb, or in the eighteen years, or in the crowded endurance of His last triduo, seems to have been the way by which He accomplished all His great things. His delay of four thousand years before He came was but a type and prophecy of all that was hereafter. But what shall we say of His humility? The Eternal Word was so enamoured of that virtue that it was the lowliness of Mary which merited to hasten the time of the Incarnation and drew Him down from heaven. With what surpassing beauty of humility would He not then adorn His own Sacred Humanity? And as His humility was just the virtue which He would have us to imitate in Him, so was it the virtue which shed over Him His preternatural attractiveness. No matter how austerely pure His doctrine, or how lofty the holiness He required, sinners were at tracted to Him in spite of themselves, and the chains of sin and the world fell off from their souls in the light of His sad yet unrebuking eye. Never was attractiveness like His. It was inexplicable, as the charm of beauty is, or the magnetism of personal influence. Perhaps the secret of it was, not only in the mysterious atmosphere. of the Hypostatic Union, but in the heroism of His un-

.5ss.. The apostle sums up the whole of His life in thai one emphatic phrase, He pleased not Himself; just as the whoie perhaps of our half century of life would he faithfuKy abridged in the saying, For all these years we have dooo our best to please ourselves. Such were the seven eleivn.ts of our Lord's human character. He might have been gay, cheerful, quick, fluent, active, playful, commanding, and foremost j and have been by His pre-eminent sanctity tae King of Saints. But He chose to be silent, hidden, sweet, patient, bumble, attractive, and unselfish.

And by what other words cau we characterize the sweet life of the Blessed Sacrament? So near us, so always with us, so full of love toward us, so many widowed, orphaned, tompted, tried, weary, sin-worn, and broken hearts pouring their griefs into His ear, and yet He speaks not; though He knows one word would make a heaven in the mosfc aching heart, an<2 be a spell of peace and power such.HS i.be world did not give and cannot take away. He is wiled down from heaven; and He comes when He is called. But He comes in silence, obeys in silence, is broken in silence, umains in silence, and in silence is consumed. Nay, even in miraculous manifestations, He has spckeii many times by pictures, images, and crucifixes; but hmlly ever, or very rarely, has the voice been heard from the Host, and when it is, it is not His own voice that we hear. So deeply does He love His characteristic silence, that we can think of nothing more silent than the Blessed Sacrament. Neither do we know of anything more hidden. It is the very deepest of His hiding-places. His DiviJty was hidden in Judea; His Humanity also is hidden in le tabernacle.

IV.] A PICTURE OP JESUS. 4l> (

The method of His sacramental life itself is hidden, and the doctrine of it hidden, and even the very truth of it hidden from multitudes of men, He was not so hidden at Nazareth, as He is in this secrecy of His predilection. In the days of His Three-aud-Thirty years He was sweetness itself to all who came near Him. The darker were the •poor penitent's sins, the more sweet was the welcome and the mercy of his Redeemer. Yet, where or when was He so sweet as He is now in His Sacrament of love? Sweetness is the very word which theology sets apart to express the effect of that mystery on the soul; and we look for it so naturally in communion that we are disappointed when our own unworthiness has hindered its delightful plenitude. If we picture to ourselves our Lord abiding week after week in the dishonourable tabernacle of some lonely unfrequented Church, or in the rude hands of an insolent heretical multitude, we shall see that the patience of the garden, the praetorium, and the way of the Cross, has so charmed the Heart of Jesus Glorified, that He has contrived to make it part of this new artifice of love, His sacramental life. As to His humility, He has united in the Blessed Sacrament all His preceding humiliations, with circumstances of abasement peculiar to itself, and in themselves so tremendous that they have sometimes been a stumbling-block to the proud intellect of man. Yet, notwithstanding.all His silence and hiddenness, He is so attractive in the Blessed Sacrament, that it is difficult to account for it upon any natural prin ciples. Nothing draws the faithful to churches, feasts, functions, and services, so surely as this most venerable Sacrament. He said while He was on earth, referring to His Crucifixion, When I am lifted up, I Fill draw all 42* men unto Me. This is especially true of RII* ow in the Blessed Sacrament when He is raised on Hi throne for Exposition or Benediction. And think of Him in His life of glory, worshipped in celestial amazement by the hierarchies of spirits and souls, and then think of Him in the little pyx, why He is there, and how, and under what laws of mysterious abjection, and what must the Blessed Sacrament seem but the very crown of all His inexhaustible unselfishness? In a word, the character of the Blessed Sacrament, as the Blessed Sacrament, is precisely the same with the character of the Teacher of Judea and the Sufferer of Jerusalem, — silent, hidden, sweet, patient, humble, attractive, and unselfish.

But the Blessed Sacrament not only combines the characteristics of our Blessed Lord; it also excellently and pre-eminently fulfils His various works within us and without us. We have to declare war against the visible world, its pomps, pageants, pleasures, vanities, and its spirit, which is the negation of the Gospel; and it is by the Blessed Sacrament that we are victorious in this war. We have to fight against the invisible world of demoniacal power; and it is by the strong Bread of the Eucharist that we are conquerors. We have to do battle with the intense corruption and prolific miseries of self; and it is the same mystery which in that conflict also is our all in all. We have to live a life of supernatural love; and in the Blessed Sacrament is the foun tain from which the waters of continual gladness can alone be drawn to feed that love. Our Blessed Lord crowns in us the grace of all His other Sacraments by the overwhelming and inclusive grace of this. He hag to feed in us the various appetites of the spiritual life;

and here is the manna which has all tastes- according as the soul may desire. He sows in our bodies the seeds of a glorious resurrection; and His seedtime is communion. Thus it is by the most holy Eucharist that He co-operates with us or of His bounty blesses us in these seven great works, which are set before our souls, and have to be accomplished in the Christian life.

But the grand aim and object of His love of us is our union with Him and His with us; and here is almost the specialty, the distinctive grace of the Blessed Sacrament. There are four sorts of union, in the wide sense of the term, which we possess with Him independently of the Blessed Sacrament. We are united to Him by essence, by presence, and by power, as our omnipresent Creator; and by ordinary grace as our Incarnate Re deemer. But there are five other unions of a closer and more intimate character which are effected by the Blessed Sacrament. There is first of all a closer union be tween His Divinity and ourselves in the Blessed Sacrament, than the one which exists in virtue of the divine immensity. We receive His Divinity concomitantly with His Flesh and Blood in the Holy Communion; and both our bodies and our souls are filled with inexplicable bene dictions because of the mystical contact. Secondly, we have a personal union with Him, as the Eternal Word, as the Son rather than the Father or the Holy Ghost, by which we receive wonderful graces, and augmentation of grace even when the species are gone: thus Cornelius a Lapide says, As food, when it is digested, still leaves in the body its nutritive virtue, so the species of the Eucharist leave their virtue of nourishing unto eternal life, and they leave it after a certain fashion with the deity of Christ, which remains with grace. Thirdly, there is the sacramental union of His Body, His Flesh and Blood, with us,³ which is the direct union effected by the Sacrament iu its own right. Fourthly, there is the union of His Soul with ours, as if It stretched itself over ours, as the prophet stretched himself over the dead child, with marvellous vivifying power. Of this " union of the redoubled Soul of Christ," Schram thus speaks:f "Another way in which Christ permanently unites Him self with us in the Holy Eucharist, independently of His union with us by His Divinity, and by His Person, is by His most holy Soul; for when the species are corrupted, and so the Body and Blood have passed away, there is retained a certain replication of the Soul of Christ, by which He permanently and after a most special manner unites Himself to perfect souls, and in their measure to the rest of the just; His Soul conjoined to the Word being as it were an immediate instrument of a union more intimate than that effected by the Divinity alone: as Cardinal Cienfuegos teaches in his Vita Abscondita, and Cardinal Belluga in his preliminary judgment of that work." Fifthly, there is a personal presence, accompanied with a great augmentation of grace, which is as it were the odour and impression of His Flesh, Blood, and Soul after the species have departed. Questions of mystical theology are foreign to the present treatise; so we must be content with thus barely naming⁴ these five unions, though each of them are magnificent and beautiful abysses of redeeming grace.

Some have believed that so dear to Jesus is the union between Himself and the sacramental species that He will preserve it to all eternity. They say that when the last Host is consecrated, after the persecution of Antichrist is over, it will be borne to heaven by a procession of jubilaut angels, and will be preserved without corruption, to serve as an eternal monument of the eminent love which Jesus bore His Church.⁵ There is much to be said in the way of fitness both for and against this idea; but as lying beyond the province of theology proper, I leave it, as the authors cited leave it, in the uncertainty of a devout opinion.

But let us look nearer home; what an abyss it is to look into — the occupations of Jesus in our own selves, so long as the species abide! Beatific Vision is actually within us, to angels and to saints. The magnificence of His glory is in our flesh and blood and bone and living soul. He is working there as God: He is working there

Some theologians have held and defended this opinion. They have rested chiefly on the case of the True Cross eternally reserved in heaven, and on a revelation to St. Veronica di B nasco of solem nities and processions by which the feast of Corpus Christi is observed in heaven. But, 1, the case of the True Cross is doubtful, and Suarez inclines against it: 2, if it were true, it is not parallel; for it is not our Lord Himself: and 3, on examining the revelation it appears that our Lord was in visible glory in the procession, not under the accidents; and 4, private revelations need roomy interpre tations. Raynaudus in his Heteroclita attacks the opinion in his own rudo way. Pars I., Sect. I. Punct 7, sub fine. Wnldensia maintained that the Host would be kept in the translucent Heart of Mary as a tabernacle.

2a as man; strange works, and like no other works. He, busy, as it were, is engrossed j we are often heedless and distracted. Whether His efficacy be physical, or moral, or both combined, it is equally wonderful, equally gracious, equally transcendental. 0 of what wonders are not we the theatre by the love of Jesus! We are lost in God. We are heavens on earth already, we, even we, who miserably know ourselves to be what we really are. Let us collect ourselves within our own souls, and hushing every noise of earthly care and worldly wish, let us refresh ourselves with the odour of Jesus haply still within us, and worship Him in the silent interior temple from which He has but just withdrawn, and where the fragrance of His incense is clinging still to the flesh-built walls. Would that He might hasten the hour when He will dwell within us with an eternal dwelling, the hour when we shall have Him as we never have Him have Him so as never to lose Him more I

Footnotes

1. Thus M. Olier, the great reformer of the Secular Clergy in France, says: J'ai toujours eu ce desir de pouvoir contribuer a faire connaitre Notre- Seigneur, surtout au tres-saint Sacrement. Ce devait 6tre 1'occupation de tous les prStres; et je dis un jour a M. de Foix, par un esprit particulier: Ne voulez-vous pas m'aider & former des prStres du trgs-saint Sacrement, c'est a-dire, qui portent partout la devotion due a- cet adorable mystere? Vie, i. 140. ↩

2. I know of no theologian who speaks differently from St. Thomas on this matter; but some devotional writers do, and one especially who was said to have an infused science of our Lord's mysteries. But of course such a gift does not cover all opinions or expressions, and infused theology must be subordinate to the theology of the schools. " The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets." I. Cor. xiv. 32. M. Olier in his Catechism of the Interior Life, (part ii., lesson ii.), speaks of our Lord's interior dispositions having un dergone a change since His glorification, and of His having entered more thoroughly into the dispositions of His Father with regard to sinners, so as to find a difficulty in changing His character of judge for that of advocate; and he gives this as a reason for devotion to our Blessed Lady. His words are: Nous sommes trfcs-indignea d'approcher de Jesus, et il a droit de nous rebuter par sa justice • puis qu'ctant entre" dans tous les sentiments de son Pfcre, depuis sa eninte Resurrection, il se trouve dans les m£mes dispositions que le Pere contre les pecheurs pour les rebuter; tellement que la difficult^ consnpte a lui faire changer sa quaJite" de juge en celle d'avocat, et de ju-reant, a le rendre suppliant; or c'est ce que font lea saints et pnrtjoulierement la trds-sainte Vierge. M. Olier's devotion to our Lord's glorified life was taken from his master, Father de Condrco: ↩

3. The most perfect discussion of the controversy about the union of the Flesh of Christ with the flesh of the communicant, and the real mind of the fathers on the subject, is to be found in the fourth chapter of the 204th disputation of Vasquez. ↩

4. Theolog. Myst. i. 295. ↩

5. Nouet. Octave du S. Sacrament, p. 34. Lallemant Entretiena ri p. 83. ↩