Section V. The Blessed Sacrament All for Men

The more we realize the grandeurs of the Ble?ped Sacrament, the more amazing do they seem, simply as an excess of love to us on the part of our Blessed Lord. It is the characteristic of this devotion that we never become altogether familiarized to it. So long as we are devout at all, it grows upon us like an inexhaustible mystery, like the Beatific Vision itself. For He whom we are loving, and who so unspeakably loves us is the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. Indeed the Blessed Sacrament is the Second Person of the adorable Trinity, in His Human Nature, arrayed in the sacra mental veils. When we worship the Three Divine Persons co-equal, co-eternal, and con-substantial, we cannot but have a peculiar feeling towards the Son. I do not say a greater love or a more fervent devotion: the idea would at once shock and pain us; but a peculiar feeling, which it is not easy to define. The Eternal Son is the Word of the Father, the expression of His knowledge of Himself, He is uncreated Wisdom, and from Him, together with the Father, the Holy Ghost proceeds. Thus he seems to have, as the Word, a peculiar connection with creatures. Creation is on a finite scale what He is as a living, infinite, and co-eternal Person, the expression of the Divine Perfections.

Moreover He has been especially for men from the very beginning. He was the Person who was decreed to assume our nature from all eternity. All the Three Persons chose it, blessed be Their infinite condescension! All Three elected Him to assume it. But He, alone, the Second Person, did actually assume it. Out of His predestination come Mary, creation, the Church, and the glories of heaven. He knew us eternally, chose us eternally, loved us eternally, and from all eternity vouch safed to desire the moment when He should take our nature upon Himself. The foresight of sin only determined Him to do it in a more loving and pathetic way. Hence it is, that while we know by faith that whatsoever God works outside Himself, the same is the work of the whole Trinity, we nevertheless have a peculiar feeling with regard to the Sacred Person, the Eternal Son; for while we distinguish Him in the inaccessible majesty of His co-equal Godhead, we nevertheless remember even then that He is Jesus and that Jesus is He.

Thus He was all for men even before He was actually man. If we take Him at any moment of His sojourn upon earth, He was all for us, and all of Him was for us, and He was our all. This expresses the whole Gospel. He was on earth in a state of suffering and humiliation j and this was on our account. It was a change upon the original decree. Because more was needed now than that the Creator in glory, joy, and radiant majesty should assume a created nature, more was given. There were the passible flesh, the life of ignominy, the mysteries of Gethsemane, and the horrors of Calvary. His Immaculate Mother was what He prized most on earth, and in the very moment of His deepest sufferings, in the very hour of His awful dereliction, He gave her away to us, to be our Mother as well as His. The glory of His Father was as it were His ruling passion; but that glory was in reality our salvation. He made it His own interest, and His Father's, that He should save souls in the most easy, prodigal, arid abundant manner, and that He should niultiply.beyond all counting the numbers of the redeemed. It was His love of His Father, and His Father's love of Him, and the Holy Spirit's jubilee in Him, to increase in all ways, short of taking from us our free will, the innumerable crowds of us who should be saved and glorified. Everything was turned to us, and made our interest, and treated as our cause. Nay while He was on earth He had an irresistible leaning towards sinners. He seemed to gravitate to them, as if a predilection for them was the genius of His Human Nature; antf He did not care to hide it, but freely and quietly let men take scandal at it as they pleased, to the detriment of their own souls. If there was anything on earth low and despised, He was attracted to it. What repels other hearts, from its miserable abjection or uninteresting vileness, drew His like a loadstone. However deep it was, or however dark the depth, He sank to it swiftly and naturally as the stone sinks to the bottom of the lake. And all that He did of this description was meanwhile sowing the seeds of countless generations of large-hearted soul-saving saints, and generous, unjealous, wide-spirited religious orders. For He was God, and dwelt always in the calm possession of His conscious omniscience. So that all that He was always doing was meant foreseeingly for the example of us all; even to the divine wastefulness with which He scattered His Precious Blood on all sides, till His Heart had not another drop to give. 43

But it might seem that Jesus on earth was naturally all for us; for to that end He vouchsafed to come, and for that end remained on earth His appointed time to teach, to do, and to suffer. The Thirty -Three Years are an historical fact, and like other facts in history come and go, pass and are complete, and have only to be looked back upon. Yet if we look at Jesus Ascended He is as much all for us, and when He was on earth. His Hu man Nature He retains in His perfection and in the truth of its Humanity to all eternity. This we might have expected. What He once assumed, He was not likely to relinquish. But there are many tokens of His enduring affection which we should not have ventured to anticipate. By a mystery of the most touching love He has retained His Five principal Wounds, in token of His still being all for us. These wounds, as theologians tell us, are His perpetual sacerdotal intercession. Their silent eloquence is for ever speaking to the Father on man's behalf. They glow like radiant suns, as the hymns of the Church speak, and all heaven is filled with the beauty of their mild effulgence. On His mediatorial throne in heaven now He is the living fountain of all grace more universally, more abundantly, more potently, than ever He was on earth. The Church is filled to overflowing with fringes of His garments of all shapes and sizes and kinds, through which virtue is ever passing out of Him into us. There is not a benediction of the Church, whether it light on salt, water, candle, palm, ashes, vestment, sacred vessels, images, or any other matter, but it is full of Jesus, and has its own peculiar grace, and is destined to its own beneficent end. The Church is the multiplication of Jesus, the omnipresence of Jesus, the energy of Jesus. It is all Jesus. The Church exists not, but in Him and for Him. To use the apostle's word, it is His Body, and so Himself. Earth has no privilege equal to that of being a member of His Church; and they dis honour both it and Him who extenuate the dismal hor rors of that outer darkness in which souls lie that are aliens from the Church. The greatness of our privilege, and therefore of the glory of the Sacraments, is necessarily diminished by anything that makes less of the unutterable miseries, and most appalling difficulties of salvation outside the Church.¹ This is the reason why the saints have ever been so strong in the instincts of their sanctity, as to the wide, weltering, almost hopeless deluge which covers the ruined earth outside the ark. Harsh, to unintelligent uncharitable kindness intolerably harsh, as are the judgments of stern theology, the saints, as a matter-of-fact which I have already noticed, have even felt and spoken more strongly and more peremptorily than the theologians. The more dear to the soul the full light and sacramental life of Jesus, the more utter the darkness, the more dismal the death, of those who are without that light and life, in their fulness and their sacra mentality. The eternal possession of Mary's Immaculate Heart, together with all the intelligences of the countless angels, would not suffice to make one adequate act of thanksgiving for the single comprehensive mercy of being Catholics, and of acknowledging St. Peter's paternal supremacy. It was Jesus Ascended from whom we received this royal grace.

Let us look at the occupations of Jesus Ascended. If He exalts and assumes His Mother, it is for our sake, as well as His own or hers. How little He lets us think of Mary's unrivalled vision and enjoyment of the Most High, and how much He leads us to think of her as the Mother of Mercy, engaged and engrossed, as it would seem, exclusively for us! What effect the affairs of earth are taking on the employments of the whole of heaven I Angels are ministering spirits sent to minister to the heirs of heaven, or offering the prayers of the elect to the Supreme Majesty in their golden thuribles. The souls of the saints are all occupied in their magnificent function of intercession. Into whatever part of heaven we look, the blessed are being busied about our interests; for such is the sweet will of the ascended Jesus. But most of all for us is the very presence of His Sacred Humanity in heaven, worshipping and delighting the Holy Trinity in our name and for our exiled race. No where can angelic nature, singly or combined, make one transient adequate act of worship of God, no act strictly worthy of Him and co-extensive with His dignity. But the human race is doing so all day and night in the Per son of the Incarnate Word. God sees us as it were through the medium of His Sacred Humanity, so that everything is tinged and softened by it, and as if it were that Humanity itself; and thus the poor fallen earth is even more beautiful to His complacent eye than when it lay before Him, young and sinless, and He blessed it for its beauty. Truly Jesus Ascended is all for us.

Nor less all for us is Jesus returned again to us in the Blessed Sacrament. What a mystery this is, looking at it merely as a return, without adverting to its own intrinsic mysteriousness. When He rose, dear Saviour of mankind! He lingered upon earth, as though He waa loath to leave it. Who can think of those Forty Days without a hot heart or delightful tears? Then, when He had ascended and placed His Human Nature on the exalted throne due to its eminent merits, His eye was cast downward on His Church, on Stephen before the Council, or Paul on the greensward by Damascus, or wherever else necessity or sorrow drew His loving look. He vouchsafed to seem as if He hankered after earth. Surrounded as He was by spotless sanctity, human and angelic, He still leaned towards the sinful and the low. The angels themselves had caught the spirit of His Sacred Heart. They came to rejoice more over one sinner that did penance than over ninety and nine that needed no penance. Could there be a condescension of a lower depth than this? It is as if He resolved, I am speaking humanly, for He knew no change, nor were His appointments the expressions of a mutable will, nor His plans the caprice of affection or the taking advantage of an occasion — it is as if He resolved to make by means of His Incarnation another disclosure of the divine per fections more wonderful than the Incarnation itself had been, and that this disclosure was the Blessed Sacrament. It appeared as if He could not part with Bethlehem and Egypt, Nazareth and Jerusalem, Gennesareth and Be- 48* thany, Gethsemane and Calvary, as if He could not forego one mystery of the Three-and-Thirty Years, and therefore by means of His Human Nature and through His omnipotence, He would combine and renew them all; and this combination and this renewal were the Blessed Sacrament. It is as if He would have all worship and all love and all faith and all religion collected and thrown into one mystery, and that single mystery should be His own pre-eminent Self; and this concentration of Himself, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, Babe and Man, glorious and ignominious, on earth and in heaven, Sacrifice and Sacrament, should be the Adorable Host of the altars of the Church.

The magnificence of heaven becomes at once, not a home, but an exile. It cannot help Him to this consummate mystery. It gives Him no occasion; it opens to Him no abyss; it cannot tempt Him with the exquisite bait of manifold humiliation. He turns from it with a look as if it had played Him false and disappointed Him. But earth can promise all He asks, and keep its promise with prodigal abundance. Vast and seemingly interminable as were the depths of its misery and nothingness which He had already filled, fresh abysses of unfathomable nothingness yawned before Him, and wooed Him down into themselves, as the deep of Mary's lowliness had wooed Him to earth before. It made earth seem at once a paradise and a home, and He took glad possession, He the Incarnate Word, of its lowest depths, with the sublime abjection of the Blessed Sacrament

This is a very human way of putting it; and while it is not literally true itself, it places in its only true light the love of Jesus for us in the Blessed Sacrament. Now He is here, all the world over, in tens of thousands of places, beautifying the world in the sight of God, and winning for it countless, unthought-of blessings. Not in heaven only, but now on earth, and multiplied a million limes, He worships the Holy Trinity for us, and a million tf mes worships worthily. His vicinity is an inexpressible support to us in our exile; and while the awful and mysterious way in which He renews His Sacrifice for us iu the mass is our daily life and our daily salvation, He al lows Himself to be kept for our comfort in worshipping Him; and more especially for the sick and dying; and He goes to them, as He will one day come to us, if St. Barbara be true to her clients, and lets us not die without viaticum, like a Father to His timid little ones who so dreadfully fear to cross the dark gulf to Him. He comes and carries us over in His arms Himself. And where is the gain of the Blessed Sacrament to Him? O if He did not condescend to count our little love His great gain, the gain would all be ours, not His. What a Saviour! What a Sacrament! What a God!

If the Blessed Sacrament is Jesus all for us, is it not, the most legitimate of conclusions that we should be all for Him? We should be all for Jesus, if Jesus is our all. And what does this mean? Surely, among other things, that the Blessed Sacrament should be to us just the single overpowering fact of the world. Our hand hold Him; our words make him; our tongue rests Him; our body compasses Him; our soul feels Him; our flesh feeds upon Him, Him, the Infinite, the Incomprehensible, the Immense, the Eternal. Must not all life b* looked at in this light, just as the whole Church lies in this light and has no other? What more attentive, what more reverent, what more familiar, what more timid, what more happy, than the worship of the Blessed Sacrament, and the peculiar practice of the presence of God which it is to all of us! Our whole being from year's end to year's end resolves itself into one double duty, one while praise, and another while reparation,.to this Most Holy Sacrament. And what else will the grand ceremony of our entrance into eternity be, but simply the unveiling of the Blessed Sacrament?

I never see the Blessed Sacrament without being re minded of the last judgment of the world. Its very merciful stillness is a continual admonition to me of that resonant pomp and burning majesty. When I hold it in my hands, I can only feel that it is my Judge that I am holding: and this seems to quicken my love rather than restrain it; and communion is the sweeter for being always in viaticum. He comes at my mass as He came at the Annunciation, from heaven, without passing through intermediate space, swifter than lightning, yet so tranquilly. I sink on my knees and worship, as Mary's extasy relaxed and she genuflected to the new-born Babe. And the stillness is so still that I hear therein the clear trumpets of the far-off doom. How different will be the sensible pomp of that magnificent advent! With what ceremonious care theology gathers it all from Scripture! A celestial fire will come forth from heaven, like a gorgeous tempest, as the precursor of the Judge, a type of the fiery spirit of Elias and the Baptist, which will involve the reprobate, and occupy tiic place where they are. They will wait there in the fire, the glorious, the jubilant, the vindictive fire. Then will corne forth the luminous Cross, the sign of the Son of man in the heavens, beautiful and majestic, borne by angels as a standard, and visible as the rallying point of the brave saints all through the judgment. Next will follow the masses of clouds, to which Scripture so constantly alludes, and to which summer sunsets are the ravishing preludes, supernatural clouds which He lights up and beautifies by His effulgence. They throw His elect into an extasy of joy and terrify the reprobate; for they look like a triumphal car, though He needs them not to lean upon. Meanwhile, clear as the voice of one we love, the wailing blasts of the arch-angelic trumpets, go round the earth, and compass its uttermost ends, compelling the cold graves and the deep sea to give up their dead. His holy angels, all of them, without exception, will be there, not one left in heaven. They will assume lucid bodies, as theologians say, for all in that great pomp is to be sensible, as it was at the Ascension, on which mystery, as the angels themselves said, the second advent should be modelled. Heaven, deserted heaven, will have again the Divine Solitude which reigned there before Creation was. Then in His beauty and His majesty, in the old glory of His Ascension, the Judge Himself will come, with His Mother and His apostolic assessors. W^o shall describe His coming? He is borne somehow, as Suarez says, by the choir of Thrones, those beings of overwhelming restful strength and loveliness, resplendent and inexplicable. And here we revert again to the Blessed Sacrament. For it was these very Thrones, as Boudon tells us, whom Surin saw always around the Host at mass, those very Thrones, in whose society Angela of Foligno² saw Jesus in the Eucharist, and their numbers, said she, were innumerable, thus, by their office connect ing the present Sacrifice with the future Doom. His love has contrived to anticipate His second Advent. He has found out a way of being with us, even when He is far from us. To what marvellous artifices has not His Human Nature helped Him! For it is by that nature that He is both Host and Judge. There is not one of us who will not see that pageant of the doom, and play a part therein. And where is He now, on whose beaming Countenance, and flashing Eye, and glowing clouds, and gleaming thrones, all eyes of all men will be turned, all in wonder, some in extatic joy and rapturous love, some in scowling hate and crouching fear? Where is He now? Let us be still, and let the mass go on. This is He, whom presently I must lift from the corporal, and in extreme fear make strangely free with Him, the Church constraining me, and the sweetness of His own command. He is the Judge. 0 for the next genuflection, to throw into it a yet intenser act of faith and love!

The silence of the Blessed Sacrament seems ever to be saying, Jesus has nothing to think of but you! And the angels «ay, 0 happy you! And heaven envies us, and earth rejoices to bear the race of the sons of men. But our own soul!• 0 perverse thing! how little it knows its own happiness! Could any misery be conceived more dreadful than that God should cease to think of us for one moment? We should drop back into nothingness. Or that He should cease to love us? It would be hell. Yet look at Him in this mystery. He puts forth all His omnipotence to hinder our forgetting Him. He exhausts His infinite wisdom to prevent our hearts growing cold towards Him. He comes into our streets, lies upon our altars, causes bells to ring, and thuribles to smoke, so that at every turn we should come across Him. And yet! we who are good, as we call it, who believe, who love, who aim at high things, who wish one day to sit among the seraphim, — how little do we think of Him, how much less do we speak of Him, though we speak so much, how almost less than nothing do we do for Him! Ah Lord! Blessed Sacrament! one thing Thou hast left undone. Thou hast let our frost be stronger than Thy fire; and if it had not been so, there need have been no heaven, for earth would have been already more than heaven; for we should have had all Thy glory, and with Thy glory Thy tweet humiliations too.

Footnotes

1. Of the contrition which will remit sin without the sacrament of confession, the Catechism of the Council of Trent speaks as follows: Ut enim hoc concedamus, contritione peccata deleri: quis ignorat, illani adeo vehementem, acrem, incensam esse oportere, ut doloris aeerbitas cum scelerum magnitudine aequari conferrique possit? At quoniam pauci odmodum ad hunc graduua pervenirent, fiebat etiam, nt a pa»cin8imi« hac via peccatorum venia speranda efset. Part iL cap. v. qua»- xxxvi. ↩

2. Vita, cap. vii. n. 112. ↩