Epilogue: Reparation

We began with Triumph j we must end with Reparation. Poor race of men 1 so must it ever be with all the gifts God gives us, with all the merits He compassionately showers down upon us. Earth is not the home of triumph. It must be the exception here, and not the rule. There must be something sorrowful even about our joy; and we never love God so deeply as when we are touched by the wrongs which we have done Him. Sorrow is the Divine part of earthly goodness, a sorrow that soothes the heart, enriches the soul, and makes the whole man happy with a durable and contented happiness. So must it be now. We began with Triumph; we must end with Reparation.

What a vision of the Divine Magnificence it is, which we have seen in the Blessed Sacrament! It is the sun and centre of our mysteries, the fountain of our doctrines, the inspiration of our art, the perfection of our worship, the food of our souls, and the resurrection of our bodies. We have seen that it is God's greatest work and as it were the crown of all His works, that it is the most full representation of the perfections of the Undivided Trinity, the epitome of all Jesus, His lives, mysteries, character istics, ends, and unions, the magnet of souls, and the real life of the whole Church, full to overflowing with a variety of touching manifestations, and rich and incessant in its graces to men. In what way should we expect that our Blessed Lord would give us this sublime institution? We might have thought He would have founded it with all the solemnities of a Divine Legislator, that it would have been given to us as a boon for which we could never sufficiently thank Him, as a trust the responsibility of which ought to weigh gravely upon our whole lives, as the reward of our faith in Him, over which we might triumph and rejoice perpetually. It would seem as if the Holy Eucharist rather than the Resurrection would be put forward as the reason for completing the number of the apostles, as the prime evidence of the mission and love of the Son of God, and as the glorious end of His merciful coming. We might suppose that the epistles of the New Testament would contain little more than the enforcing of the doctrine of the Eucharist, or the rubrics for its consecration, or the varieties of loving devotion with which it would be our duty to surround it. Yet if we fancied this, we should have sho#rn how little we knew our Lord's way, or had caught the true spirit of the Incarnation. He came in the Blessed Sacrament as He came into the world. He says little of it, and makes no parade. He clings to His old silence, to His customary obscurity. He lets Himself be found out rather than displays Himself. He comes in that quiet, modest, unassuming way which is His wont, with what I may call that bashfulness, which is the most amazing characteristic of all the Divine Works.

He waits till He is standing on the very threshold of His Passion. Its shadows are already cast over His spirit, and their chief effect is to increase His love for His disciples. Having loved His own who were in tho world, He loved them to the end. The clouds of gloom had begun to encompass them also; and how much deeper would that darkness have been if they had known then, as He so terribly knew it at that hour, that they would all forsake Him and fly! It is then that He institutes the Blessed Sacrament, as if to give them His greatest consolation when they were in great est need. And yet even then, so like Him, so like the spirit of His love, He does not put it to them as a gift or a consolation; He hardly bequeaths it as an affectionate legacy; but He makes as if He were the person obliged, not they, and begs of them, as a kindness in their power, a token of love which they could give and He should value, that they would do it always in remembrance of Him. It was a last dying wish. He did not claim it as a right, nor exact from them an acknow ledgment of the magnitude of the blessing; but He put enough of precept into it to re-assure their timid love and shrinking awe in celebrating mysteries so august and dreadful. 0 to what an art did not Jesus reduce the delicacy of love! He would persuade us that when we say Mass or receive Holy Communion it is He who profits rather than we, His glory that is fed rather than our souls, His interests that we seek before our own; and all this that our devotion to the Blessed Sacrament may be both a worship and a love, yet not so much a worship as a love.

Our Lord has done everything to strip His sacra mental Presence of the apparel of fear or the brightness of His proper regalia. Even the devotion to it is charac terized by an affectionateness which enables us at once to see that the fountain of the Blessed Sacrament is the Sacred Heart of the Incarnate Word. It was its greatest effort, its richest effusion of itself, far more so than that love which even when it was dead made it court the spear to let out its last few drops of blood and water. Yet, for what end is it that men seem mainly to use the Blessed Sacrament? Alas! only to make the wound of that dear Heart wider! For what is the life of the Blessed Sacrament but a life of eloquent sufferings? The Eueharistic Sufferings are quite a mystery of themselves, a mystery apart. As our Lord is dead in the Blessed Sacrament, yet only mystically dead; so does He suffer, yet only mystically, therein. It is the living Lord, the glorified Lord, yet suffering. And these Eucharistic Sufferings are at once the strong meat of the highest and most sublime sanctity, and also the sweet nutritious milk of babes in Christ, of hearts that are hardly clear of their sins, but are clearing themselves day by day.

II.

The principal of these Eucharistic Sufferings are five in number. The first is the Helplessness of His sacra-; mental life. The magnificent spaces of the wide heavens^ are the room He claims for the vastness of His glorified Humanity. Freedom and power and joy belong unto Him as they belong to none else, and to nothing save the omnipotence of the Most High. All the help of all creatures is from Him, and none can help Him. There is not an intelligence that knows, or a mind that

REPARATION.

reasons, or a pulse that beats, or a limb that moves, Dut the knowing, the reasoning, the beating and the moving are all from Him. Yet was ever helplessness like His in the tabernacle? Was there ever captive cooped up in narrow cell, as He in the little circular dungeon of the pyx? Was ever infirmity more complete? The bedridden patients of the hospital havo more control over themselves than this King of glory whom love has caught in the meshes of the Sacrament. He is our prisoner under lock and key, and we bring Him out when we will, and show Him to the assembled people that they may be certified that He has not escaped. 0 my captive God! what words can I use which have the sound of weakness in them, which are sufficient to tell the weakness to which Thou hast willed that my priestly power should bring Thee, as if Thou hadst said, 0 sinful man! if Thou wilt not honour Me as Thine Omnipotent God, at least Thou shalt pity Me as thy helpless prisoner? Any how, cost what it will, Thou wilt have love. And Thou shalt have it, dearest Lord! for if I can do no more, I can at least hate my self for my little love, and that counts for love with Thee.

The second Eucharistic Suffering is Persevering Obedience. Our Lord is not a prisoner only; He is a slave also. He is essentially a King; His Name is written on His garment and on His thigh, King of kings and Lord of lords. It is His business to command; and He rejoices in the vastness of His power, the immensity of His supreme dominion. For empire is to Him the occasion of munificence, and sovereignty multiplies the opportunities of mercy and compassion.

He waves His sceptre over eternity, and over millions of uncreated worlds, as well as the countless creatures He has already made. For aught we know the mystery of creation may be yet in its infancy; it may but have begun with the angels and ourselves, and space may yet have to be strewn with numberless creations. Yet never did monarch abdicate his throne with circum stances of more humiliating pomp than Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. It is as if all kingdoms were His, but the kingdom of men's free hearts. Even from His power they could withhold them, if they pleased. But that kingdom of free hearts was just the very kingdom He had set His own heart upon; and he has flung away the rest, and come to win this one for Himself, and He will serve for it as a bondsman rather than miss it, even as Jacob served for Rachel, only it is not for fourteen years that He will serve, but even up to the day of doom. There is not a depth of obedience to which He will not descend when bidden. The voice of a wicked priest, the gutter of an heretical city, the heart of a loathsome sinner, all these try, and only try that they may demonstrate the obedience of the Heavenly and Almighty Slave. 0 why is it we do not flock, we sons of men, to our dear Saviour's Coronation? Why do not our hearts rise up and crown the Uncrowned, Him who uncrowned Himself of His great crowns, that we with nervous happy hands might put our little crowns of puny love on the long hair which covers His beautiful Head?

To this Helpless Life and Persevering Obedience must be added the Eucharistic Suffering of Outraged Love. The very thing for which He has made Himself both a prisoner and slave is withheld from Him by the cruel free-will of His neglectful creatures. He knew He could not be worthily loved. He knew that none could love Him worthily but Himself. Even His Mother and St. Michael cannot but fall short of what He deserves. But at least the sons of men could love Him more than all things else beside. At least they could mourn that they did not love Him more, and mutually inflame each other's heart to worship Him with a more abundant generosity and a more filial tenderness. Yet some outrage His love by open blasphemy, and denial of His presence. Some by abandoning Him, and refusing to come to Him when He calls. Some by coining uncalled, and outraging Him by irreverence and by sacrilege. Alas! what do we ourselves, but outrage Him by carelessness, unthankfulness, coldness, familiarity, or voluntary distractions? For one who out rages the majesty of the Blessed Sacrament, a hundred outrage His love. Because love is its very crowning excellence, men take love as the especial object of their wrong and injury. 0 my Jesus! how is it that Thou so bearcst with our sins? How is it that Thou hast not altogether withdrawn this dear mystery to heaven, and hushed the sound of mass, and unveiled the empty tabernacles? When Thou didst choose Judas, Thou knewest he would betray Thee. When Thou wentest up the hill to Calvary to drink the last dregs of Thy tremendous chalice, Thou didst foresee how little the world would come to care that its Creator had died for it upon the Cross. But couldst Thou have foreseen, that Thursday night, the return that men would make Thee for that Blessed Sacrament, and yet for all that, 49 as if every rag from the poverty of our love were so precious in Thy sight, couldst give Thyself up to us in this mystery? 0 how wonderful Thou art! How unfathomable is Thy love! How past all understanding Thy passion to be loved!

The fourth Eucharistic Suffering is insulted Abjection. Why has He come to us in such miraculous littleness, and with an equipage of such appalling humiliations? Why in this mysterious Sacrament have His wisdom and His power played with the similitudes of annihilation, as if He would bring Himself to the very verge of nothingness, and seem to disappear in it, to be created afresh out of fresh nothingness? Why has He studiously excluded from Himself everything outward which could conciliate respect or inspire esteem, and clothed Himself with the commonest and ignoblest materials that earth could furnish? Why all this abjection, except that love was to find its account therein? Yet the very vileness of His apparel, the very facility of His approach, the very cheapness of His maintenance, are all turned against Him, and what love meant for points of attraction man's coldness makes opportunities of insult. They repel Him by the very arms He holds out to embrace them. They deny His reality, or they leave His altars unfurnished, or they look upon the Blessed Sacrament rather as their own convenience than His condescension. Surely, to look at, or to be weighed in the scales of this world, He is the most unkingly of kings. But it is love has made Him so. And our love, were it wise and enlightened, would see that God was never so wonderful as in abjection, never so visibly omnipotent as when He shows that He can abase His infinite majesty down to the dust of earth, never so worshipfully pure, as when He lies beneath the feet of men and is not stained by their treading on Him. Ah! Lord! which shall outdo the other, our malice or Thy love? Thou wilt invent artifices of abjection to win our love by their very pitifulness, and we shall convert every one of Thine own artifices into fresh capacities of wounding Thy Sacred Heart! But Thou wilt weary our wickedness by the excess of Thy beautiful patience, and wilt disarm our insolence by the gentleness of thy forbearance and the charm of Thy fidelity. 0 majesty whom nothing can provoke! 0 power without Thy thunderbolts! They trample Thee under foot and Thou utterest no complaint: they pierce Thee, and Thou bleedest, and yet no voice. 0 how Thy silence pleads with the hearts of men, and what conquests art Thou not ever winning by the very utterness of Thine inglorious abjection: for Thou wilt not so much fight with the pride of men and tame it, as cheat it and take it unawares, and make it only a reason for loving Thee, and a means whereby to love Thee more!

The fifth Eucharistic Suffering is His mournful Uuvisited Solitude. Solitude must press on Him whose innumerable court in heaven sleeps not day or night, but is ever surrounding Him with the festive ceremonial of a sinless worship. And what prophet would have fore told that God would come, the beautiful Uncreated Wisdom, and have pitched His tent amid wandering men, and that they should have fallen away from Him, as if he were an uncouth foreigner, a repulsive leper, " a worm and no man?" It is as if He were a stricken sheep; and so He is. We might have thought the very inanimate mountains would have been moved, and would have risen and made new chains and ranges, grouping themselves around His tabernacles. The very beasts we might have supposed would have come to Him, domesti cated by His presence, and have asked His benediction, as they did to Adam amid the shades of paradise. Much more the hearts of men. When the light of heaven came and lit Himself on earth, surely earth would be so far like heaven that it would be every man's trade, occupation, profession, leisure, and ambition, to worship the Blessed Sacrament. We must have ate and drunk arid slept, for He willed it so, and we must have earned wherewithal to feed and clothe ourselves; but otherwise the church would be our home. We should need no other lodging. Moreover it was not some elect sou.-s that were to come to Him, but all those for whom he died, and that is all the souls that ever were and ever will be on the earth. For as a French philosopher has well said, " God loves each man as much as the whole human race. Weight and number are nothing in His eyes. Being eternal and infinite, He has no loves which are not immense."¹ And yet see in what solitude His people leave Him. When they wished to make Him king in Judea, He hid Himself and left them. Now that He asks only love, they in their turn leave Him and hide themselves from Him. When He was in the solitude in the wilderness the wild beasts came and bore Him company. They were glad to troop around Him, and fix their great gazing eyes upon the human beauty of their Creator. There was worship in their wonder, and homage in their companionship. But 0! the awful solitude that reigns around the tabernacle! The rich olive tree feeds a little star of unsteady light in tho heaven of His sanctuary, and for how many hours night and day, in how many sanctuaries, is that His only ho nour! Sometimes He must forego even that, lest thieves should come and steal Him, not for His beauty, oh no! they will fling Him on the ground, but for the thirty pieces of silver that the vessel which contains Him may be worth. He will not let His angels help Him. Nay, rather the very permission of the awful deed can He convert into an artifice to win unusual love, because of the processions and benedictions of expiation to which it will give rise. And art Thou then, dear Lord, no company to Thy creatures, or at least unwelcome company? Is not the very air near Thee life and joy to our hearts; and the little lamp, and the veil upon the tabernacle, the token of Thy residence, and all the other signs of Thy Nazarene poverty, are they not all dear to us as memo rials of the Saviour's home? Why stay, 0 Lord, why stay? Dost Thou not miss the songs of heaven, and the unfailing incense of its praise, and the multitude of spirits and of souls whose beings are nothing else but one burning love of Thee? What can I do that I have not done? said God of old. Nay, Lord! I cannot tell Thee. Thou hast long since exhausted all I could have conceived, as well as depths I durst not have dreamed; and now these Eucharistic Sufferings, this Helpless Life, this Persevering Obedience, this Outraged Love, this In sulted Abjection, this mournful Unvisited Solitude, this

Second Passion worse than that other one of Calvary indeed what canst Thou do that Thou hast not done, O Lord?

49* 2M

III.

In a word, God is a mendicant for love in the tabernacle of the Blessed Sacrament. In the manner of His Sacramental advent He compressed into one all the mysteries of the Infancy and outdid them; and now in the fashion of His Sacramental residence He compresses into one all the mysteries of His Passion and outdoes them. How do we receive the Divine Mendicant's petition? In what way do we minister to Him in this His second Passion? Men either believe or they do not believe. If they do not believe, their treatment of the Blessed Sacrament is accordingly; and, however unworthily we may in reality treat Him ourselves, there is hardly a day passes when keenest acutest pain is not caused to us by what is said and done and written about our Incarnate Love in this mystery of His predilection. Sometimes they whom He has loaded with blessings repay Him with insults and blasphemies. In the co lumns of some miserable journal, or on the platform of an excited meeting, whose tumultuous feelings are not truly the intoxication of divine love, men whom the prayer of some unknown nun before the Blessed Sacrament has just rescued from a tremendous calamity, or from whom the Mass oifered that morning in the neighbouring catholic chapel has averted the uplifted arm of an angry God, will pour out scurrilous pro fanities either with open and avowed unbelief, or with a professed belief in the Incarnation of the Son of God, which life-giving mystery their impieties are in reality assailing quite as much as the glorious and salutary dogma of the Blessed Sacrament. Or a man whom the Incarnate Word has been pursuing with minutest love and most forbearing grace through long years of intol lectual vanity, puerile self-praise, and the baneful indul gences of luxurious effeminacy, will fill His purse with gold by holding up before a deluded crowd an unconsecrated altar-bread, which either in his ignorance or his imposture he declares to be the object of catholil worship, the Body of our dearest Lord. Some men live by the altar, not by serving it, but by blaspheming its mysteries. Awful thought! Quiet, soft, enervated, domestic men, easy-living, and comfort-seeking, yet kind-hearted in their sphere and amiable in their circle, will rise up in their pulpits, and fulminate eloquent anathemas against a belief which their mis-statements show they do not understand, and whose appalling thoughtless blasphemies fall as much on the Immense Omnipotent Babe of Bethlehem as on the Adorable Host of Catholic altars, while to wife and child and family amid the soothing comforts and delicate softness of a modern parsonage they will read, not deeming they apply to them, the words of Holy Writ, The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.²

d'ignobles images C'est bien encore du blaspheme; mais on le dit ge"n6ralement aveo une certaine politcsse; on se sort le plus aouvent, pour le rendre, d'exprcssions mesur6es; 1'accent qu'on y met, a part quelques emporteinents dont nous avons g6mi nagudre, cat calme, ruode>6, respecteux, et c'est, pour ainsi dire, en lui

Sometimes a feeling will break out in a town against the Church of God. It has been so in England, it has been so in America, as I have already said. No one can tell whence or why it comes. Yes! whence it comes is^ plain, — from the spirit of all evil, for by his works may we know him. But it seems as if it was it! the air like a pestilence, or as if the people had been chafed by some devilish mesmerism, and were, as in truth they are, possessed with devils. For awhile they toss about like an unquiet sea getting up a storm. When Satan perceives that his tools are in order, the crowd proceeds to the catholic church, with yells and cries of hideous import, with which I will not pollute my page. They may be grave Englishmen professing intense respect to the order and majesty of law, or liberal Americans where each man's own liberty seems to make him so impatient and intolerant of his neighbour's equal liberty. They break down the doors, do much wanton mischief in the church, yet gather no spoil. They let the priest pass; for though they hate him, he is a citizen, and has personal rights, and after all it is not him they seek. They want God. Their ferocity is only inspired for the Blessed Sacrament. They wish to tear Him limb by limb, or float Him down the sewers, and they are at once appeased and quelled when they have consummated the terrific Deicide. And yet who are they? Often honest workmen, with many natural virbaisant les mains, qu'on arrache le sceptre a ce geant du passe", sur la couche glorieuse ou 1'on suppose qu'il expire. Certes, il y a loin, Messieurs, de cette hostilite" honnete aux grossiers persifflages du dernier sieele. On a franchi tout un abime. Conference! de 1847, p. 15.

tues. There is one whose child Jesus healed of the small-pox last month because the rough father's heart was breaking with the prospect of parting with his boy. There is another whose wife lay in the collapse of cholera a week ago, and though prayer was infrequent with him, he wrestled in his agony with Jesus, and Jesus raised her up when human skill could do no more. There is not one in all that multitude whom our Blessed Lord does not know and does not love, for whom He did not shed every drop of His Precious Blood, and vouchsafes now to yearn for his conversion with a love whose fondness, intensity, and fidelity the wildest romance of earthly passion cannot adequately shadow forth.

Or sometimes thoughtless protestants, who if they realized what they were doing would never do it, will wander into a catholic church almost more to show their contempt and wound the feelings of some poor worship pers, than even to satisfy an idle curiosity. It is their glory to stand while we are kneeling, to put themselves between us and the altar, to go nearer than they see us go, to assume attitudes which they would think it ill manners to assume in an anglican or wesleyan meeting house. They will make remarks out loud, or utter in articulate noises of contempt, or even so far forget themselves as to put on their hats, or stare into people's faces as they return from Communion, or stand by the holy-water stoop and ridicule the piety of the poor. Yet these are persons who would behave well in a drawing-room. They are men or women of education and of good breeding, more often women because the devil can more easily beguile their sensibility, and they would not in society say a word or broach a subject that would pain the feelings of one whom they met. Their manners may be faultless, their demeanour grave, their deportment stately and correct, yet here they are grimacing like possessed people before a catholic altar* just as the possessed in the gospel " wallowed foaming" before the visible Jesus. Why is this? Surely it is not all themselves. It is the demon who enters into' them that he may the more flagrantly and with greater scandal insult the mystery of our faith, which he hates above all others, because above all others it is a mystery of love.

Or it may be that ridicule is the weapon which is to pierce the Sacred Heart of the world's indulgent Saviour. Sit at that barrister's table, or listen in that college common-room, or stand by that mess of youthful officers, and see how similar are the phenomena. They are the sons of gentlemen and gentlemen themselves. They pique themselves upon it. You could not without danger of being honourably murdered, express a doubt of it. And in truth you will find that they are generous, kind, for giving, forbearing, even unselfish, through the livelong day. Life might pass delightfully among such men. Their delicate considerateness and affectionate courtesy could never become tedious or commonplace. Though grossness is not the world's worst evil, it is its most un comfortable one; and the society of these men would keep it from you like an invulnerable shield. Yet let the catholic religion, or especially the Blessed Sacrament, come up in conversation, and every vestige of the gentle man has disappeared. Your feelings are no longer re« spected. They are outraged in every way they can be, and the more the pain is visible, the more their vulgar, boisterous, angry, unintellectual rudeness is delighted. They have forgotten their breeding; they have descended from their rank and high position; they have defiled their caste; they have become vulgar. Yet in the one case they are men whose noble profession teaches them nothing so much as judicial calmness and manly command of temper; in the other they are men of intellectual pursuits and above the average both of ability and erudition and accomplishments, and living in cities whose very air should kill littleness or shallowness or flippancy; and in the third case they are men whose light-hearted youth is not without its attractions, and which will leave behind it often in after years a worth that need not be ashamed to be compared with ancient chivalry. In all other affairs of life you may trust implicitly to the honour and the kindliness of men, who, if brought across the Blessed Sacrament, seem to strip themselves of every gentlemanly feeling, of every moral principle, and even of the very beliefs of natural religion. How shall we explain this, except that it proves our Blessed Sacrament to be indeed our Lord? It is supernatural: it is possession. They have become devils who were gentlemen, and they will be gentlemen again when the devil has gone out of them.

Even the ignorance of the Blessed Sacrament is a dishonour to its majesty and gentleness. Men, who are ashamed to be ignorant of some popular science, feel no shame in being utterly without knowledge of the religion of so many millions of their fellow-creatures, of the greater number of the kingdoms of civilized Europe, of so many millions of their own fellow-subjects, and of their own ancestors in bygone days. It would not be possible to exaggerate the ignorance of Catholicism which reigns among Protestants. To give it anything like a fair representation of its reality, we should be thought to be drawing a caricature, ludicrous and extravagant, incredible simply because of its outrageousness and apparently monstrous exaggeration. And there is no part of our holy religion of which this is more true than the Blessed Sacrament. None of them knows what it means or how we understand it. They only have a dreadful instinct that it is God, and hate it with a hatred which outstrips literary dislike or controversial bitterness. And this ignorance does itself dishonour Jesus. When He has done such won ders for His creatures, filled the earth with the miracles of His mercy, and asks only in return that He should be known and loved, surely it is an outrage of His honour and His goodness, that men should remain ignorant of Him, and refuse to study what professes to be His work, and of which they are not slow to glory, most inconsistently, at once in their hatred and in their ignorance.

But I am sick at heart with what I have already said. Such thoughts, such words, such facts, in connection with such a subject! There is much more of a like sort: but let us take it for granted and pass on.

IV.

See, then, for how much we children of the Blessed Sacrament have to make reparation; and how fervent as well as abundant must our reparation be! Have we any work in life which presses so much as this? Is there any better use of time, any fitter preparation for eternity? And are we doing anything else? Surely day after day we are rejoicing in the mass, or setting aside our other occupations to go to benediction. Day after day we are gathering round the tabernacle, and telling Jesus how we love Him, and how with bleeding hearts we mourn over the daily dishonour of His real presence and residence amongst us. We should feel a day incomplete, even our busiest day, if we had not made some act of tender reparation to our sacramental God. How beautiful must the sight of catholic believing hearts be to that dear Inmate of the Sanctuary, overflowing with faith and love, like so many Magdalenes devouring his feet with kisses, washing the very dust away with tears, each one of which has a whole heart in it, and wiping them with the hair of our head, as if what our vanity had most prized was only to be reinstated in its honour by some menial use for Him! 0 how the incense of unbroken prayer is ever rising from us to His sacramental throne; and the perpetual flames of ardent reparation light up His altars as on the night of some exulting feast! But is all this true? It seems unavoidable: the contrary is inconceivable: yet is it true?

Alas! if we turn from those who do not love because they do not believe, to those who because they believe cannot help but love, it is a sad and wintry scene on which we are called to look. If the sins of unbelievers were materially more startling and repulsive, there is a greater formal want of love in the coldness of believers. We wound the Heart of Jesus more keenly and acutely than they who do not believe. IU can look on them 50 with the forbearance of pity, as we look on one beside himself. But we, His own familiar friends, how deep are the wounds which we have the power to inflict upon Him! At mass how weary, distracted, and irreverent we often are, though our faith tells us it is the same thing as if we had stood with our Lady and St. John beneath the Cross on Calvary! At benediction, how little are we filled with a spirit of interior devotion, and how often are little domestic arrangements allowed to interfere with our going there! Are our communions at all what we could desire in the way of preparation, or of thanksgiving, or of fervour in the receiving? Are our visits to the Blessed Sacrament as numerous as our facilities and our leisure would allow, to say nothing of the necessities of our own soul and those of others to drive us there? Nay, are we not sometimes ashamed of our faith in the Blessed Sacrament, when in the presence of unbelievers and called upon for some outward recognition of our worship? And on the whole, do not we ourselves, as much as any one else, compel Him to lead the life of poverty and abandonment which so touchingly characterizes the Blessed Sacrament? So it is that with those who believe and those who do not be lieve, our Blessed Lord in His Sacrament is surrounded, not with choirs of angels or rings of various saints, so much as by groups of every variety of evil character, as He vouchsafed to be in His blessed Passion. They who do not believe represent one class of them, the Jews, another Herod, another Pilate, another the Roman sol diers, and so on; while alas! we who believe are either Judas who betrayed Him, or Peter who denied Him, and Peter unfortunately without Peter's teurs, or the rest

REPARATION. f,91 who ran away and fled, or at best the curious and indevout spectators of the Crucifixion, some indifferent with out dislike, and others sentimental without compassion.

V.

What remains then for us but reparation? There is no true child of the Church of whom it must not be true to say that devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is his special devotion. It cannot be otherwise. Without it there are no other devotions, and of its supremacy over all the rest catholics cannot lawfully have two opinions. For it is the only devotion which is a divine worship at the same time that it is a devotion also. This is its peculiarity and its pre-eminence. But whether we look at if; as a devotion or as a worship, in both points of view reparation occupies a most prominent position; and it belongs to all. For all souls who have a right to love are bound to reparation.

Plow immense is the reparation which the poor can make to the majesty of Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament! for what is more dear to God, more precious in His sight, than the worship of the poor? Jesus was poor Himself; He is poor now; the Blessed Sacrament is the very depth of His poverty. He chose to redeem the world as a pauper, when He might have redeemed it as a king. Poverty suited Him, had attractions for Him. It was His taste, His bent. There was something conformable in it to His infinite wisdom which he did not find in wealth. As the Saint of saints, He was the founder of a huge religious order, the order of the poor; and He meant the rich to exist principally as benefactors of His order. 0 it rejoices me to see the poor around the tabernacle of our Sacramental Lord, getting as near to Him as they can, and drinking in the beauty of His marvellous veils. They seem to understand Him, and He them. Life is so dark and dreary, so strong and harsh, that it drives them to Him with a reality and simplicity that even sorrow can only imitate far off. Worship on, dear Poor of Christ! you are doing for Him what none but you can do. 0 that it might be given Him to feed ever on your continual love!

How immense also is the reparation that the rich can make to this sweet Sarcrament! And how needful for themselves, as it is welcome to Him! So far as the best interests of the soul are concerned, we know from His own lips that riches partake somewhat of the nature of misfortune. The possessors of them therefore have by their own acts to compensate for their disadvantages as regards salvation. They can never get over the fact that He chose to be poor rather than rich: they can only get round it; and this it behooves them to do. The Blessed Sacrament is everywhere regarded by the world as an intruder in His own creation; but when He is, as in an heretical country, an exile, nay more, a prescript and an outlaw, who has forfeited even the rights of a citizen, and like a felon cannot by law inherit property, while He is a nuisance and a misdemeanour if He appear in the streets, — it deepens the mystery, and adds ineredible pathos to His Eucharistic Sufferings. Now, the rich are either those who have inherited the faith from the martyrs, or those whom God has gone out of His way by a miracle of mercy to call into the true Fold; and both these classes have peculiar obligations of their own to the Blessed Sacrament; the one because He was always theirs, the others because He was not always theirs, but is theirs now. What Jesus gives us in this mystery is His whole Self and His time; in these two things con sists the peculiarity of His sacramental life. It is Him self, and He abides with us even to the evening of the world. So as He gives Himself wholly to tho rich, they must be generous with Him, not in mere money, but in sacrifice and self-denial and love and an undivided Heart. So as He gives the rich His time, and receives them when they will, and occupies Himself with their affairs, and makes them His business, and puts forth especial wisdom and especial forbearance to direct them through the needle's eye into the heavenly kingdom, they too must give their time to Him, to His Sacrifice, His Bene diction, His Exposition, His Tabernacle; and so make reparation for the outrages His love endures.

How beautiful is reparation, and what a mystery that God allows so high a work to creatures so poor as we! As if we could build up His ruined glory, and raise temples out of ruins, we who are what we know ourselves to be, something so much worse than those who know us best could for a moment suspect! Reparation! the very thing for which He Himself exists in the Blessed Sacrament; for if it had not been necessary He should come in humiliation to redeem us, it had not perhaps been necessary He should have hidden Himself in this lowest depth of secret silent love. What is so full of heart as reparation, or more full of joy eveu while we mourn? What is redemption but reparation? What else was Mary's compassion? What else was the earthly occupation of the Sacred Heart? And is it not its occupation in heavenly glory, as well as in the mysterious Host, this very hour? 0 my poor country! how much she needs, and how beautiful she is"! How rich in all else; but in God's gifts, in God's graces, how sadly poor! Not because His Hand is less munificent, but because her heart is closed against Him. 0 my countrymen! who have seen days almost of persecution, at least of deadness and obscurity, who have seen the dry bones of heresy come to life and give out punctual harvests every year of numerous and manifold conver sions, how dear to you and to the strength of that faith which has been in you pure and firm and bright from reason's earliest dawn, how dear to you should this deep and quiet devotion be of reparatory love! And you whom God has called so marvellously and so sweetly into the inheritance of catholic truth, which was not yours by birth, do you not feel as the people in the Gospel must have felt on whom Jesus had worked a miracle, almost ready out of love to disobey Him, and to proclaim His love even when He bids you nourish your humility in silence? How dear, how doubly dear must the task of reparation be to you, who love much because you have been forgiven much, arid have a whole life's work for God to do in half a life or less! See! what began in the high notes of triumph, how naturally it ends in the sweet low strains of plaintive sympathy, and dies down into the eilent full heart of grateful pensive Reparation!

Footnotes

1. Joubert. Pensees. i. 103. ↩

2. We in England are not yet so fortunate as to be able to congratulate ourselves, as our neighbours across the Channel have done, on the changed tone of controversy. Plantier, in his Conferences at Notre Dame, in the Lent of 1847, uttered these words. A Fe"quit6 de ces aveux, nous avons joint, depuis assez longtcmpa la biensfance du langage. On ne ramasse plus dans la boue, pour les jeter 4 la face du catholieisme, des terines de mauvais gout ou ↩