Chapter I. The Martyrdom of Mary

Tue beauty of Jesus is inexhaustible. Like the Vision of God in heaven it is ever diversified, yet always the same, always cherished as an old and familiar joy, yet ever surprising and refreshing the spirit as being, in truth, perpetually new. He is beautiful always, beautiful everywhere, in the disfigurement of the Passion as well as in the splendour of the Resurrection, amid the horrors of the Scourging as well as amid the indescribable attractions of Bethlehem. But above all things our Blessed Lord is beautiful in His Mother. If we love Him we must love her. We must know her in order to know Him, As there is no true devotion to His Sacred Humanity, which is not mindful of His Divinity, so there is no adequate love of the Son, which disjoins Him from His Mother, and lays her aside as a mere instrument, whom God chose as He might choose an inanimate thing, without regard to its sanctity or moral fitness. Now it is our daily task to love Jesus more and more, Year follows year; the old course of feasts comes round; the well-known divisions of the Christian year overtake us, make their impresI sion upon us, and go their way. How we have multiplied Christmases, and Holy Weeks, and Whitsuntides, and there has been something or other in each of them which makes them lie like dates in our mind! We have spent some of them in one place, and some in another, some under one set of circumstances, and some under another. Some of them, all thanks to God! have been distinguished by remarkable openings of heart in our interior life, such as to change or to intensify our devotion, and materially influence our secret relations with God. The foundations of many buildings, which did not rise above ground till long afterwards, have been laid almost unconsciously in those times. Yet whatever may have been the changes which these feasts have brought or seen, they have always found us busy at one and the same work, trying to love Jesus more and more: and through all these changes, and in all this perseverance at our one work, unerring experience has told us that we never advance more rapidly in love of the Son than when we travel by the Mother, and that what we have built most solidly in Jesus has been built with Mary. There is no time lost in seeking Him, if we go at once to Mary; for He is always there, always at home. The darkness in His mysteries becomes light when we hold it to her light, which is His light as well. She is the short road to Him. She has the “grand entry’ to Him. She is His Esther, and speedy and full are the answers to the petitions which her hand presents.

But Mary is a world, which we cannot take in all at one glance. We must devote ourselves to particular mysteries. We must set aside certain regions of this world of grace, and concentrate ourselves upon them. We must survey them and map them accurately, before we pass on to other regions, and then we shall learn much, which a general view would have omitted to notice, and store our souls with spiritual riches, riches both of knowledge and of love, which will draw us evermore into closer union with our dearest Lord. As God’s blessed will still persists in keeping us alive, and for His own gracious purposes detaining us amid all this cold weariness and these dejecting possibilities of sin, let us at least determine to occupy ourselves with nothing but God; for we have long since learned that there is truly no other occupation which is worth our while. He has a thousand Edens still, even in the bleak expanse of this salt steppe of a world, where we may work, to the sound of running waters, not without colloquies with Him in the cool time of the day; and we may wander from Eden to Eden, either as the weakness or the strength of our love impels us. For the present let us shut ourselves up in the garden of Mary’s sorrows. It is one of God’s choicest Edens, and we cannot work there otherwise than under the shadow of His presence, nor without the love of Jesus taking a marvellous possession of our souls. For love of Jesus is in the very viewless air of the place, in the smell of the upturned soil, in the fragrance of the flowers, in the rustling of the leaves, in the songs of the birds, in the shining of the sun, in the quiet tunes of the waterfalls as they dash down its rocky places. There for a while, for our Lord’s love, we will enclose ourselves as in a cloistered place, and let the world, in which we are of no great importance, and which is even of less importance to us than we are to it, miss us for a seasop from our post. The law of the Incarnation is a law of suffering. Our Blessed Lord was the man of sorrows, and by suffering

He redeemed the world. His Passion was not a mystery detached from the rest of His life, but only the fitting and congruous end of it. Calvary was not unlike Bethlehem and Nazareth. It exceeded them in degree; it did not differ from them in kind. The whole of the Three-and-Thirty Years was spent in consistent suffering, though it was of various kinds, and not of uniform intensity. This same law of suffering, which belongs to Jesus, touches all who come nigh Him, and in proportion to their holiness, envelopes them, and claims them wholly for itself. The Holy Innocents were, in the counsels of God, simply our Lord’s contemporaries, but that is similitude enough to plunge them in a sea of suffering, and for His sake their fresh lives must bleed away in their distracted mother’s arms, to be followed by eternal crowns and palms: a happy merchandize, a huge fortune swiftly made, and then so marvellously secured! ‘The same law wound itself round each of the apostles, upon whom the indescribably blessed choice of the Incarnate Word had fallen. It was a cross to Peter and his brother, a sword to Paul, hard stones to James, the flaying-knife to Bartholomew, and the boiling oil and the long years of wearisome delay to John. But in whatever shape it came outwardly, inwardly it was always suffering. It went with them into all lands, It overshadowed them in all vicissitudes. It walked with them along the Roman roads, as if it was their guardian angel; it strode by the side of their uneasy galleys on the stormy waters of the Mediterranean. They were apostles. They must be like their Lord. They must enter into the cloud, and the darkness of the eclipse must fall upon them on the top of some Calvary or other, from Rome to Bactria, from Spain to Hindostan, The same law has environed the martyrs of all ages. Their passions have been living shadows of the great Passion, and the blood they shed mingled its kindred stream with the Precious Blood of their Redeemer, the King of Martyrs. So with the saints. Whether they have been bishops or doctors, virgins or matrons, seculars or religious, unusual love and unusual grace have always reached them in the shape of unusual trial and unusual suffering. They too must be drawn into the cloud, and they will come out of it with their faces shining, because they have seen, and seen closely, the Face of the Crucified. It is so in its measure with all the elect. They must stand at least within the fringes of the dark cloud, or it must overshadow them in transit, perhaps more than once, in order to secure the salvation of their souls by giving them at least an adequate likeness to their Lord. What then must we think of His Mother, who came nighest to Him of all?

It can plainly be no wonder, if she shall suffer more than any one but Himself. The immensity of her sorrows will neither be a distress nor a surprise to us, but rather the obvious conclusion from all we know of the grand mystery of the Incarnation. The amount of her sufferings will be the index of the magnificence of His love for her. The depth of her pains will come the nearest of all things to fathom the abyss of her love for Him. Her far-rolling sea of sorrow will measure the grandeur of her holiness. The loftiness of her divine Maternity will raise her dolours close up to His gracious Passion. Her sinlessness will almost seem to enclose it within the same lifegiving law of expiation. Her union with Him will render her Compassion inseparable from His Passion, even while for a thousand reasons it is so manifestly distinguishable from it. The Woman clothed with the Sun will be wrapped round and round with the bright darkness of that same terrible destiny, which He vouchsafed first to appoint and then to accept as the great law of His Incarnation. We must be prepared to find Mary’s dolours beyond the reach of our imagination, above the possibility of our description. We can only gaze upon them with such instruments as faith and love supply, and note the beauty and the strangeness of many phenomena which we can only imperfectly comprehend. Especially can we thus increase our devotion to the Passion, many unknown regions of which are momentarily lighted up for us by the contact of her dolours, just as in the occultation of Jupiter, the luminous tearlike planet, as it touches the dark portion of the moon, scatters a momentary line of light along the unseen edge, like a revelation, and then by its disappearance proves the reality of that which we cannot see.

But, before we ask St. John the Evangelist to hold us by the hand, and go down with us into the depths of that broken heart, which he, the saint of the Sacred Heart, knew better than others, we must take a general view of our Blessed Lady’s dolours, just as we familiarize ourselves with the general outlines of the geography of a country, before we endeavour to master its details. There are seven points, cn which it is necessary for us to have some information, before we can study with advantage the separate mysteries of her surpassing sorrow. We must know, as far at least as lies in our power, the immensity of her dolours, why God permitted them, what were the fountains of them, and what their characteristics, how it was that she could rejoice in them, in what way es ee ee eae ae the Church puts them before us, and what should be the spirit of our devotion to them. These are questions which need answering, and the answers to them, however imperfect, will serve as a sort of introduction to the subject.

Section I. The Immensity of our Lady’s Dolours

When we think how we can best describe our Lady’s dulours, it gradually dawns upon us that they are in fact indescribable. We see but the outside show of them, and there are no adequate figures by which even that can be represented. He who looks over the wide Atlantic sees a waste of waters with a white horizon on every side; but that waste of waters tells nothing either of the multitudinous manifold life which it contains within its bosom, nor of the fairy-like ocean-gardens of vivid painted weeds, its woods of purple, deep thickets of most golden green, grottoes of fantastic rock with tufted palmlike yellow trees overhanging, and the blue water flowing all round, park-like vistas of glossy, spotted, arborescent herbs, or leagues on leagues of rose-coloured forests teeming with strange, beautiful, heretofore unimaginable life. So is it with the sea of sorrows which rolls over the secret depths of the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God. What we see is amazing, yet it hardly indicates what is below. How then shall we say what her woes are like? Holy men have tried to do so, and they have done it by calling her the co-redemptress of the world, and speaking of her sorrows as they blended with the Precious’ Blood, and the two made but one sacrifice for the sins of the world. There is a deep truth, and a most substantial one, hidden under these great words, and yet they may easily be understood in a sense in which they would not be true. They are the expressions.

of an excellent devotion, striving to assist the feebleness of our understandings to a true conception of.

Mary’s grandeurs. ‘They are accuracies, not exageerations. Yet they need cautious wording and careful explanation. We shall consider them in the ninth chapter; and in the rest of the treatise we shalf travel to our end by some other road, not only because we dare not trust ourselves to such a method of procedure, but also because it is against our habits and predilections, and in matters of devotion what does not tome natural is not persuasive. We will prefer therefore to approximate to our subject, inevitably falling short, rather than to overshoot it, making things indistinct by too strong a light, and dissatisfying by a feeling of unreality, like a sunset in the hands of an unskilful painter. We shall come at last to the same end, in a manner which is not only most fitted to our own infirmity, but also most calculated to win the confidence of our readers,

The first thing, then, which strikes us about our Lady’s Dolours is their immensity, not in its literal meaning, but in the sense in which we commonly use it with reference to created things. It is to her sorrows that the Church applies those words of J eremias, * O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow. To what shall I compare thee, and to what shall I liken thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? To what shall I equal thee that¹

I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Sion? for great as the sea is thy broken-heartedness: who shall heal thee? Mary’s love is spoken of as that which many waters could not quench. In like manner the saints and doctors of the Church have spoken of the greatness of her sorrows. St. Anselm² says, Whatever cruelty was exercised upon the bodies of the martyrs was light, or rather it was as nothing, compared to the cruelty of Mary’s passion. St. Bernardine of Sienat says that so great was the dolour of the Blessed Virgin that if it was subdivided and parcelled out among all creatures capable of suffering, they would perish instantly, An angel{ revealed to St. Bridget that if our Lord had not miraculously supported His Mother, it would not have been possible for her to live through her martyrdom. It would be easy to multiply similar passages, both from the revelations of the saints and the writings of the doctors of the Church.

But the immensity of Mary’s dolours is especially shown in this, that they exceeded all martyrdoms. Not only was there never any martyr, however prolonged and complicated his tortures may have been, who equalled her in suffering; but the united agonies of all the martyrs, variety and intensity all duly allowed for, did not approach to the anguish of her martyrdom. No thoughtful man will ever speak lightly of the mystery of bodily pain. Possibly in that respect his own experience may have shamed him into wisdom. It was in a great measure through bodily pain that the world was redeemed; and is it not mainly by the same process that we ourselves are being sanctified at this hour?

p. xx. t In sermone angelico ap Revelat. S. Birgitta. c. 17.

° 4 iii tae ee ee! a a i “

It is the unerring justice of God which places on the heads of the martyrs that peculiar crown which belongs to those, who in the heroism of physical endurance have laid down their lives for Christ. But even in respect of corporal anguish Mary exceeded the martyrs. Her whole being was drenched with bitterness. The swords in her soul reached to every nerve and fibre in her frame, and we can hardly doubt but that her sinless body with its exquisite perfections was delieately framed for suffering beyond all others, but that of her Son. Moreover in the case of the martyrs, they had long looked at their flesh as their enemy and their hindrance on the heavenward road. They had punished it, mortified it, cruelly kept it under, until they had come to regard it with a kind of holy hatred. Hers was sinless. Jt was the marvellous: mine, the purest, sublimest matter that the world knew, out of which our Lord’s Sacred Flesh and Precious Blood had been obtained, and she could know nothing of that exulting revenge with which heroic sanctity triumphs in the sufferings of the flesh. But what is the grand support of the martyrs in their tortures? It is that their minds are full of light and radiance. It is that their inward eye is bent on Jesus, by whose beauty and glory they are fortified. It is this which puts out the fires, or makes them pleasant as the flapping of the /warm wind in spring. It is this which makes the scourges fall so soft and smooth, and causes the lash to cheer like wine. It is this which makes the sharpness of the steel so dull to the divided flesh and wounded fibres. What is within them is stronger than that which is without them, It is not that their agonies are not real, but that they are tempered, counteracted, almost metamorphosed, by the succours which their soul supplies, from the influx of grace and love wherewith their generous Master is at that moment filling them to overflowing. But where is Mary to look with her soul’s eye for consolation? Nay, her soul’s eye must look where her bedy’s eye is fixed already. It is bent on Jesus; and it is that very sight which is her torture. She sees His Human Nature; and she is the mother, the mother beyond all other mothers, loving as never mother loved before, as all mothers together could not love, if they might compact their myriad loves into one intensest nameless act. He is her Son, and such a Son, and in so marvellous a way her Son. He is her treasure and her all, What a fund of misery, keen, quick, deadly, unequalled, was there in that sight! And yet there was far more than that. There was His Divine Nature.

We talk of mothers making idols of their sons, that is, worshipping them, turning them from creatures into creators, regarding them as truly their last end and true beatitude, so giving their hearts to them as they have no right to give them to any one but God. This Mary could not do, and yet in another sense might well do, For Jesus could be no idol, and yet must of necessity be worshipped as the Eternal God. None saw this as Mary did. No angel worshipped Him with such sublimely abject adoration as she did. No saint, not even the dear Magdalen, ever hung over His feet with such mortal yearning, with such human fondness. Yes! he is God—she saw that through the darkness of the eclipse. But then the blood, the spittings, the earth-stains, the unseemly scars, the livid many-coloured bruises, what did all that mean on a Person only and eternally divine? It is vain to think of giving a name to such misery as then flooded her soul, Jesus, the joy of the martyrs, is the executioner of His Mother, Twice over to say the least, if not a third time also, did He crucify her, once by His Human Nature, once by His Divine, if indeed Body and Soul did not make two crucifixions from the Human Nature only. No martyrdom was ever like to this. No given number of martyrdoms approach to a comparison with it. It is a sum of sorrow which material units, ever so many added together, ever so often multiplied, do not go to form. It is a question of kind as well as of degree; and hers was a kind of sorrow which has only certain affinities to any other kinds of sorrow, and is simply without a name, except the name which the simple children of the Church call it by, the Dolours of Mary.

Her dolours may also be called immense, because of the proportions which they bore to other things in her; for even immensity must have proportions in its way. If she was to sorrow perfectly, if after Jesus, and because of Jesus, she was to have a preeminence of sorrow, then her sorrows must be proportioned to her greatness. But she was the Mother of God! Who will take the altitude of that greatness? St. Thomas tried to do so, and said that omnipotence itself could not contrive a greater greatness. It had done its utmost, though ii has no utmost, when it had imagined and effected the dignity of the Divine Motherhood. What are we to a saint, or a saint to the highest angel, or the highest angel to Mary? Perhaps we are nearer —it is to be suspected that we are much nearer—to Michael or Raphael, than they are to Mary; yet it is weary even for a strong mind to think how far off we are from those tremendous intelligences and uncomprehended sanctities. Yet a sorrow proportioned to our capacities, and even indulgently measured to our grace, can be something so terrific that it makes us dizzy to think of what God might will about us. And then what can those spirits bear, and yet perish not, who have left the world wrongly, and fallen out of time when there was no root of eternity within them? Their strength is laden now in their hopeless home, yet not overladen, and who thinks of their burden without forthwith hiding his thoughts in God, lest something should happen to him, he knows not what? Yet Mary’s soul was as immortal, as indestructible as their spirits, and stronger far; and her body was miraculously supported by the same omnipotence which confers an imperishable resurrection. Nay, it was perhaps the same Blessed Sacrament unconsumed within her, and in all of us the seed of a glorious resurrection, which was the miracle that kept her standing and alive at the foot of the bleeding Cross. What then must that sorrow have been which was proportioned to her greatness, to the greatness of the Mother of God, to her vast strength to bear, to her manifold capability of suffering? If we pause and think, we shall see how little our thinking comes to.

But her dolours must have been proportioned also to her sanctity. The trials of the saints have always an analogy with their holiness, and match it in degree as well as adapt themselves to it in its kind. If Mary’s sorrow was the work of God, and was to do work for Him, if it was meritorious, if it closely resembled our Lord’s, if it hung to His, subordinately, yet inseparably, if it was populous with supernatural actions, if it multiplied her graces, then must it have been suitable to the excellences of her soul, and proportioned to her sanctity. But that arithmetic of Mary’s merits has long been a bewildering question, bewildering not because a shadow of doubt hangs over it, but for the want of ciphers to write it down in, of factors whereby to work the gigantic multiplication. The holiness of the Mother of God was not absolutely illimitable; and this is the lowest thing which can be said about it, If then we cast the most cursory glance over the number of her graces, their kinds, and their degrees, if starting at the Immaculate Conception we make a sort of reckoning up to the Incarnation, using angels’ figures because mens’ have failed us long ago, and then if we think, however briefly, of the way in which at the moment of the Incarnation our figures fell over into the infinite, or something very like it, and then if we contemplate, stupidly and wildly as we must do, the velocity of indefinable grace during three-and-thirty years, all thickly strewn with infinite mysteries, we may form some idea, not of the amount of sanctity ready to bear its proportionate amount of sorrow at the foot of the Cross, but of the impossibility of our forming any clear idea of such a sanctity at all. So that we go away with a most overwhelming impression, but it is an impression like a faith, of the enormous weight of suffering which such a sanctity required, in order to engross it, to match it, to accelerate it, to complete it, to crown it, and to augment it by another infinity.

Neither can we doubt that her sorrows were proportioned to her enlightenment. Knowledge always puts an edge on grief. Sensibility gives it additional acuteness. For the most part when we suffer we hardly know half our actual misfortune, because we hardly understand more than half of it. Neither are we generally in full possession of ourselves. Some part of us is deadened and dulled by the blow which has been dealt us, and all that portion of our soul is a refuge to us from the sensitiveness and vigilance of the rest. <A child weeps when his mother dies; but alas! how many a long year it takes to teach both boy and man what a mother’s loss really means! Now our Lady’s whole being was flooded with light. Not only did a reason and intelligence of the most consummate perfection illuminate every faculty, and secure the utmost excellence in the exercise of it; but she lived within herself in a very atmosphere of supernatural air and light. In her dolours this light was a torture to her. We may well suppose that no one, except our Blessed Lord Himself, ever fully understood the Passion, or grasped all its horrors in their terrible and repulsive completeness. Yet Mary’s knowledge of it is the only one which came at all near to His, and simply because of the excess of heavenly light which shone unsettingly upon her sinless soul. We have but narrow ideas of the light which God can pour into the spacious intelligences of the angels, much less into the vast amplitude and serene capacity of His Blessed Mother, Hence it is that we find the theology of the Beatific Vision so singularly difficult. What blindness is to the blind, and deafness to the deaf, that is ignorance to us. We cannot comprehend its opposite. We make guesses, and draw the most erroneous pictures. Our way lies through darkness, and the twilight is the utmost our weak sight can bear. Light is painful to us, and puzzles us, and troubles our thoughts, and makes us precipitate. Even with the saints sudden light let in upon them acts as with us, and partially blinds them, until they learn how to suffer the keen extatic operations of grace. It brings to mind what a devout writer on the Passion has said of our Lord, following probably some revelation, that after He had been violently struck by the gauntleted hand of the soldier His eyes were so affected that He could not bear the light, so that the sunshine caused exquisite suffering, and He went about through the streets from shame to shame, from violence to violence, like one dazed, and that can only imperfectly see his way. Ignorance is so completely our atmosphere, that we can conceive less of an excess of spiritual light, an intellectual effulgence, than of anything else. So here again the extent of our Lady’s sorrows escapes us, as we have no means of measuring the supernatural enlightenment to which they were proportioned, or which perhaps rendered them co-extensive with itself.

Their multitude is equally beyond our powers of measurement. Every look at Jesus drove the swords deeper into her soul. Every sound of His dear voice, while it lifted her far up on the wings of maternal transport, brought with it its own bitterness, which pierced all the deeper and the keener for the joy that went along with it. Every action of His came to her with a multitude of pains, in which past and future blended in one terrible prevision which was always actual to her blessed soul. Every supernatural act which rose up within her heart, and such acts were for ever rising there, was a new dolour; for either it taught her something new of Jesus, or it was a response to some fresh love of His, or it was a growth of new love in her, or it drew her into closer union with Him, or it illuminated her mind, or it ravished her affections, or it intensified her worship; and in all these things the dearer and the more precious our Blessed Lord became to her, the more unutterable were the heart-

Oe rending woes of the cruel and ignominious Passion. Thus, full as her life was of great events, rapidly succeeding each other, the multitude of her sorrows was being swollen every hour by the mere hidden life of grace in her heart. They came together like the streams of people in a huge city, swelling the crowd from every side, and swaying it toand fro. They were independent of external events, whose necessary sequence, with the time and room they occupy, keeps the intolerable fulness of human life within limits. It was more like a perpetual creation. They created themselves, only it was not out of nothing; it was out of her own exceeding holiness, and still more out of the. exceeding beauty of her Son. If the number of her woes is beyond our power of counting, what must their pressure have been, when they concentrated themselves as one weight upon one point of her affections, and then ever and anon distractedly dispersed themselves all over her soul with an amazing universality of suffering, which it is not easy to picture te ourselves? We need not fear for her. She who was as tranquil as though she had been divine, in the moment of the Incarnation, can forfeit her peace for nothing else: but O how bitter must her peace have been. In pace amaritudo mea amarissima!

There was also another very true sense in which the sorrows of Mary were immense, in that they were beyond the power of human endurance. They went beyond the measure of the natural strength of life. It is the unanimous verdict of the devout writers on our Blessed Lady, supported by the revelations of the saints, and indeed founded upon those revelations, that she was miraculously kept alive under the pressure of 4 her intolerable sufferings. In this, as in so many other things, she participated in the gifts of our Blessed Lord during His Passion. But this is true of our Lady, not only during the horrors of Calvary, but throughout her whole life. Her prevision of all her sorrows, at least from the moment of St. Simeon’s prophecy, was so vivid and real, that, without a peculiar succour from the omnipotence of God, it must have separated her soul and body. She could not have lived under so dense a shadow. She could not have breathed in so thick a darkness. She must have been suffocated in the deep waters in which her soul was continually sinking. It was impossible in so perfect a creature that her reason should be perturbed. It was impossible that peace should ever be dislodged from a heart in such transcendently close union with God. But her beautiful life might have been, nay would have been, extinguished by excess of sorrow, unless God had worked a perpetual miracle to hinder this effect, just as through her whole life she was always on the point of dying from excess of love, and when His appointed moment came, and He withdrew His extraordinary succour, she did in fact die of simple love. What then must that sorrow have been, which required a standing miracle not to force body and soul asunder; and this too in a sinless soul, where remorse could never - come, where doubt never harassed the judgment, unless it were once during the Three Days’ Loss, and where perpetual peace reigned amid the quietness and subordination of all the passions?

Our Lady’s dolours also went in their reality beyond the measure of most human realities, and this both in reason and sense. In our sorrows there is generally a great deal of exaggeration. We fancy almost as much more as we have really to bear. If our suffering comes from others, we dress it up in circumstances of unkindness, which never had any existence. We impute motives, which never crossed the mind to which we impute them. We throw a strong, unequal, and unfair light on little trivial occurrences, which are probably altogether disconnected from the matter. Or if it is some loss we are undergoing, we picture consequences far beyond the sober truth, and bearing about as much proportion to the real inconveniences implied in our loss, as a boy with a lantern bears to the prodigious tall shadows he is all the while unconsciously casting on the opposite wall. The combined weakness and activity of our imaginations envelope our sorrow in a cloud of unreality, which is still further increased by a kind of foolish wilfulness, leading us to refuse comfort, and turn a deaf ear to reason, to give way to culpable indolence and brooding, and to interrupt the continuity of our ordinary duties and responsibilities. Now in all this wilfulness and weakness there is a sort of pleasure, which is a great condescension to endurance. But with our Blessed Lady all was thoroughly true. Her sorrows went up into regions of sublimity, of which we can form only the vaguest conceptions. They went down into profound depths of the soul, which we cannot explore because they have no parallel in ourselves. They were heightened by the unappreciable perfection of her nature, by the exuberant abundance of her grace, by the exceeding beauty of Jesus, and above all by His Divinity. Each of these enhancements of her griefs carries them out of sight of our limited capacities. But to her, in the midst of the most serene self-collection, each was perfectly real, thoroughly comprehended in all its bearings, and heroically embraced with

Up ahs oe pat a THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY.

full intelligence of all that was either actual or involved in it. Her physical nature, free from all the ruin of disease, exempt from the disorganization consequent on sin, was full of the keenest vitality, of the most delicate susceptibilities, of the most tender and lively sensitiveness, and endowed with a most fine and amazing capability of suffering. Hence there was nothing, either in reason or sense, to deaden a single blow. Use did not make her sorrows more tolerable. Continuity did not confuse their distinctness. Not one of them was local; they were felt all through, with a swift circulation and a fiery sharpness which exempted no part of her body or soul from its piercing anguish, nor gave so much as a transient dispensation to this or that particular faculty. Tranquil herself with that unutterable tranquillity of hers, there was no repose in her sorrows. They never left her, They never slept. They gave her no truce. Day and night was their uproar heard round the walls of the city of her soul, Day and night their flaming shafts fell in showers all over her most sacred shrines. ‘There was not one, a jot of whose malice was lost upon her. She missed none of the bitterness. She knew their full value, and had none of those surprises which sometimes force us suddenly across great trials we hardly know how. ‘There was no succession in them, because they all stuck in her, like Sebastian’s arrows, and their poisoned barbs were all rankling there at once. It is terrific, this reality of Mary’s sorrows. It is a feature of them which must not be forgotten when we cease to speak of it, else we shall understand but very imperfectly what has yet to fol- ‘low. Truly this is an immense reality, such as could not be found anywhere out of Jesus and Mary, another. participation in the depths of the Passion,

But these sorrows of hers had some sort of share in the redemption of the world; and this gives them a peculiar immensity of their own. ‘This however is a matter to be examined hereafter, and at length. It is sufficient then to say now that, by the ordinance of God, Mary was mixed up with the Passion, that her dolours were added to our Lord’s sufferings, not without a purpose, but, as is the case with all divine things, with a most real and mysterious purpose, and that, as the Mother and the Son can in nowise be separated at any other point in the Thirty-Three Years, least of all can they be separated on Calvary, where God has joined them so markedly, and almost unexpectedly.

Of the diversified romance and artistic beauty of Mary’s dolours we need not speak. Such things belong of right to all divine works. Her compassion was part of the great epic of creation, a pathos and a plaintiveness not to be disjoined from the sublimities and terrors and sacred panics of the Passion of the Incarnate Word. But it is not touching poetry of which we are in search. Rather it is plain piety, and a downright increase of love of Mary, and of devotion to her Son. If there be one department of practical religion from which we could desire that a sentence of perpetual banishment were passed upon mere sentiment and feeling, it would be the department of Mary. Mary is a great reality of God, and sentiment is prone to rob us of our reality by turning substance into fancy, solidity into prettiness, and so overclothing the outside that we almost come to doubt whether there be an inside at all. Let then the exceeding beauty of Mary’s martyrdom find us out, if it will, and catch us up into the air, and surprise us into sweet tears, and calm the trouble of our sympathies; but do not let us seek it, or go out of our doctrinal, devotional way for it. Yet if artistic things can in any way increase our genuine love of God, let even them be welcome.

Section II. Why God Permitted our Lady's Dolours

But may we now ask why God permitted these dolours of Mary? Is it reverent to institute such anenquiry? All things are reverent which are done in love. We do not enquire because we are in doubt, or as if we were calling God to account, or as though we had a right to know; but we enquire in order that we may gain fresh knowledge to mint into fresh love. Perhaps there is no one work of God, of which we are capable of knowing all the reasons, or of understanding them if He vouchsafed to tell them. Things, which God does, come out of infinite depths. But we find that the more we know the more we love, and therefore we enquire into many things, where love alone gives us the right of questioning, and the courage also. Why did God permit the dolours of His Mother, whom He loved so unspeakably, who was sinless and had nothing in herself to expiate by penance, and whose tears were in no way needful to the Precious Blood, which was of its sole self the redemption of the world? Such reasons as we see on the surface of the matter are these. It was because of His love for her. What can love give, which is better than self? But, with Him, self was suffering. Even in the matter of earthly greatness high destinies are destinies of glorious pain and more than common trial. And how human and earthly, even when most heavenly, is all in the Three-and-Thirty Years! The same law which lies round

Him must also lie round her. She could not havea more passionate wish than this in her tranquil soul. But the law is a law of suffering, of sacrifice, of expiation, of ignominy, of abjection almost touching on annihilation. She would have been a mere instrument rather than a Mother had she been disjoined from all this, had she lain like a quiet low-lying landscape with the sun on it, away from the storm-enveloped glory of those heights of Calvary, more terrible by far than the ledges of ancient Sinai. Is it not even now, even to those far off from Him compared with the nearness of His Mother, is it not the fashion of His love to show itself in crosses? He left heaven because pain was such a paradise for Him, and it was an exclusively terrestrial paradise; and if He loved it so, He may well expect that those who love Him shall love it also, Great graces are the mountain chains thrown up by the subterranean heavings of pain. Martyrdoms have crowns belonging to them of right. Was Mary to be uncrowned? Would not the excess of His love for her be likewise an excess of suffering? But why waste many words, when it is enough to appeal to our own Christian instincts? What would an unsuffering Mary be like? The idea implies nothing less than the disappearance of the Madonna from the Church. An impassible Incarnation would have brought in its train an unsuffering Mother; but the passible Babe of Bethlehem has swathed His Mother in the same bands of suffering which compass Himself. The keenness of her martyrdom is the perfection of His filial piety.

The augmentation of her merits is another reason of her dolours; and nowhere has the force of merit such velocity as in suffering. Her being the Mother of God will not raise her high in heaven, apart from the eas sanctifying grace preceding and following the dignity of the Divine Maternity. The greatness of her dignity is an argument with us for the greatness of her grace, because in the purposes of God the two things are inseparable; and thus the dignity which we see is an index to us of the grace which we do not see. Her exaltation must depend upon her merits, and her merits must be acquired by lifelong suffering. O who shall tell the crowds of nameless raptures this day in heaven, and within her soul, in which our Blessed Mother recognizes the distinct rewards of each separate suffering, the special crown of each supernatural act? And in all these, discerning it even through the amazing excess of the recompense, she beholds a congruity, a suitableness, to the sorrows rewarded, nay even a sort of natural growth of them, though in a supernatural way. For grace is not a different thing from glory. It is only glory in exile, while glory is but grace at home. Grace is the solid treasure; glory is only its exultation and success. So that huge Compassion of Mary’s has come to be glory by the ordinary and lawful processes of the kingdom of heaven. Sixty-three years of extatic joys would never, under the present dispensation of things, have raised that Maternal Throne in such extraordinary vicinity to God. The queen of heaven must of necessity be trained as a queen, that she might queen it the more lawfully and the more supremely, when the day of her accession came. The buoyancy of the Assumption was due to the bitterness of the Compassion,

_There is always a look of cruelty in high destinies, Fortune drags its favourites through drawn swords. Mary’s high destiny is not without this look of cruelty; and that which seems so cruel is the Divine Nature of her Son. It is the result of the infinite perfection of God that He must necessarily seek Himself, and be His own end. It is thus that He is the last end of all creatures, and that there is no true end in the world but Himself. Hence it is part of His magnificence, part of His deep love, that all things were made for Him, and that His glory is paramount over all things else. His greatest mercy to His creatures is to allow them to contribute to His glory, and to permit them to do it intelligently and voluntarily. Rightly considered, the creature can have no blessedness so great as that of increasing the glory of his Creator. It is the only true satisfaction both of his understanding and his will, the only thing which can be to him an everlasting rest. Here then is another reason for the divine permission of our Lady’s dolours. They were permitted in order that God might receive from her more glory than from any other creature whatsoever, or from all creatures taken together, always excepting the created nature of our Blessed Lord, They were permitted that she might have the surpassing privilege of being equal to the whole creation in herself, nay, absolutely and transcendently surpassing it, in the praise and worship, the glory and adoration, which she paid to the Creator. Terrible as the heights were which she had to climb, far removed beyond all sympathy and intelligence of the saints, deep as were the torrents of blood and tears through whose rocky channels she had to make her way, exacting as were the mighty graces which claimed so wonderful a correspondence, there was not a gift that Jesus ever gave her which she prized so highly as her stern Compassion. O not for worlds would she have been excused one least exaggerating circumstance of her sorrow! In the very excess of the most intolerable of her afflictions, she enjoyed in the spirit of deep worship the inexorable sovereignty of God. It was God who hung upon the Cross, Her Son was God. It was the Crucified, pale and faint and feeble and bleeding, whose glory was more illimitable than the world-girdling ocean, and was feeding itself with unimaginable complacence on the streams of supernatural beauty and consummate holiness, which the deeply piercing swords of her grief were drawing from the caverns of her immaculate heart. She as it were supplied for all that the saints owed Him for His Passion, but could never pay. At the foot of the Cross she was the world’s worship; for what else in the world was worshipping Him in His abasement at that hour? And all this cruelty of God’s avaricious glory, this insatiableness of His thirst for creatures, was to her the perfection of delight, the supremest exercise of her royalty, while it was on the part of her Divine Son by far the most inconceivable outpouring of His love, which she had received since the midnight of the Incarnation. The Church would be a different thing from what it is, if the sea of Mary’s worship in her dolours were not part of its beauty, its treasures, and its powers before God. We can think less uneasily, less despondingly, of the unrequited Passion of our dearest Lord, when we remember the sorrow, like no other sorrow but His own, with which His Mother worshipped Him.

We too make our appearance in the matter. She must suffer for our sakes as well as for His. For is she not to be the mother of consolation, the comfort of the afflicted? And for this end she must go down into the depths of every sorrow which the human heart can feel. As far as a simple creature can do so, she must fathom them all, and experience them in her own self, without even excepting sorrow for sin, though it cannot be for sin of her own, but in fact for ours. She must know the weight of our burdens, and the kind of misery which each brings along with it, It must be a science to her to be sure of the measure of consolation which our weak hearts require in their various trials, and what soothes and alleviates our suffering in all its manifold, unequal, and dissimilar circumstances. Our Blessed Lord did not save us from our sins by a golden apparition in the heavens, by a transient vision of the Cross shown in the far-seen glory from the green dome of Tabor, or by an absolution once for all pronounced over the outspread west from seaward-looking Carmel. It was not His will that redemption should have the facility of creation, facility to Him at least, for to us the facilities are wonderful enough. He accomplished our salvation in long years, with infinite toilsome sufferings, out of abysses of shame, with the shedding of His Blood, and with unutterable bitterness of soul. He earned it, merited it, struggled for it, and only mastered it by the prodigies of His Passion. All this need not have been so. A word, a tear, a look, might have done it, nay an act of will, with or without an Incarnation. But it was not His good pleasure that it should beso. In His infinite wisdom | He chose not to lean on His infinite power alone, but took another way. So is it with Mary. She is not at once created mother of the afflicted, as by a sudden patent of nobility. She does not become the.consolation of mourners by a mere appointment emanating from the will of the Divine Majesty. It might have been so, but it is not so. Her office of our Mother is along and painful conclusion worked out from her

Divine Maternity. She has toiled for it, suffered for it, borne herculean burdens of sorrow in order to merit it, and has mastered it at last on Calvary. Not that she could strictly merit such an office, as Jesus merited the salvation of the world; nay, rather her motherly office to us was part of the salvation which He merited. Yet, nevertheless, according to a creature’s capacity, she came nigh to meriting it, and met God’s gratuitous advances to her on the way. How needful then was it for us that God should permit her dolours! What would the sea of human sorrows be without Mary’s moonlight on it? The ocean, with the dark, heavy, overspread clouds lowering upon it, does not differ more widely from the silvery plain of green and whitely flashing waters, exulting in the sunlight, than the weary expanse of life's successive cares, without the softening and almost alluring light which falls upon it from Mary’s love, differs from life as it now lies before us beneath her maternal throne. How many a tear has she not already wiped away from our eyes! How many bitter tears has she not made sweet in the shedding! And there is age, and the yearly narrowing circle of those we love, and sickness, and death, all yet to come, and to what amount may we not have to draw upon the treasure of consolations in her sinless heart? O it was well for us, and it was most entirely to her heart’s content, that God permitted her dolours, that she might be so much the more really the mother of the afflicted; for the heaviness of her sorrows is daily the lightening of ours; and how little it is that we can bear, and how great the load which she could bear, and how royally she bore it!

Our Blessed Lord was at once our atonement and our example. He redeemed the world solely by His

Precious Blood. By His merits alone are we saved, His prerogatives as our Redeemer are simply unshared by any one. His Mother had to be redeemed as well as the rest of us, though in a different and far higher way, by prevention, not by restoration, by the unmated grace of the Immaculate Conception, not by regeneration from a fallen state. Yet it was His will that His Mother, her office, her consent, her graces, her sufferings, should be so mixed up with the scheme of redemption, that we cannot separate them from it. It was His ordinance that her Compassion should lie close by His Passion, and that His Passion without her Compassion would be a different Passion from what it actually was. Thus He seems to draw her almost within the same law of expiation which surrounded Himself, so that it should be true that there are many © senses in which she may be said to have taken part in the redemption of the world. But if this is true of Christ as our atonement, where the union of the Divine Nature with the Human was needful to the infinite satisfaction of the work, much more is it true of Christ as our example. This was an office which she was more nearly competent, through His own grace, to share with Him; and one which the fact of her being simply a creature, and altogether human, would bring more touchingly home to us. Thus we may perhaps venture to suppose that God permitted the dolours of Mary, in order that she might be all the more excellently our example. Sorrow is more or less the characteristic of all human life; and it is one which, while it contains within itself especial capabilities of union with God, also deranges and perturbs our relations with Him more than anything else. It assaults our confidence in Him, and confidence is the only true worship.

It engenders temptations against the faith, or finds something congenial in them when they come. It leads to a certain kind of peevishness and petulance with God, which comes from the very depths of our nature, from the same depths as love and adoration, and which, while it is secretly alien to both of these, often succeeds in destroying both, and usurping their vacant places. That this petulance is a true phenomenon of the creature’s nature is shown by the surprising manner in which God justifies the petulance of Job, and finds sin that needed expiation in the criticism of his friends upon him, while He, the Searcher of hearts, discerns in Job’s bold querulousness nothing that damages the integrity of his patience, and much that is in harmony both with reverence and love. The endurance of sorrow is perhaps the highest and most arduous work we have to do, and it is for the most part God’s ordinance that the amount of sorrow to be endured should increase with the amount of holiness enabling us to bear it. We must bear it naturally even while we are bearing it supernaturally. There is no sanctity in unfeelingness, or in the blunting of the soul, even when religious interests have blunted it by a superior engrossment anda higher abstraction. Spirituality no doubt hinders us from feeling many sorrows, and no one will say that such indifference is not in many ways a privilege. But it must not be confounded with an heroic endurance of sorrow. ‘To be heroic in this matter, the heart must feel to the quick, and divine love must barb the more cruelly, and drive the deeper in, the shafts with which we are wounded. Now, in all this, Mary is our example, and a purely human example, an example moreover which has as a matter of fact produced such results of exceeding sanctity and supernatural gracefulness in the Church, that we may safely venture the conjecture that it was one of the reasons for which God permitted her surpassing martyrdom.

There is yet another reason which we may dare to suggest for the permission of her sorrows. As the Bible is a spoken revelation, so in a certain sense Mary is an emblematical revelation. God uses her as an instrument whereby to make many things plain which would otherwise have rested in obscurity. It is a line of thought familiar to theologians, which regards her as a kind of image of the Most Holy Trinity. As the Daughter of the Father, the Mother of the Son, and the Spouse of the Holy Ghost, she shadows forth in herself, faintly of course because she is a creature, but nevertheless truly, the relations of the Three Divine Persons. She is as it were a still translucent lake in whose bosom wonderful attributes of God, and far distant heavenly heights, are mirrored with faithful distinctness. We know more of God’s mercy, of His condescension, of His intimacy with His creatures, of His characteristic ways, because of the light which He has made to shine on Mary, than we should else have known, and we have come also to understand better what we either knew or might have known in other ways. Thus God’s perfections in Himself, His dealings with His creatures, and the fashion of His redeeming grace, the possibilities of holiness, the inventiveness of divine love, His training of the saints, His guidance of the Church, His inward walk with the souls that seek Him,—all these things are written upon Mary like hieroglyphical inscriptions, easily to be decyphered by the light of faith and the intelligent surmises of devotion. So, by her dolours, He has hung about her a complete revelation of the great mystery of suffering. He has illuminated in her that pregnant doctrine, that suffering is the only true conclusion to be drawn from love, where divine things are concerned. She had no sin of her own for which to suffer. She had no penalty ‘to pay for the fall of Eve. She was not included in the law of sin. She was, in the order of heaven’s purposes, foreseen before the decree permitting sin. She also had no world toredeem. All her dear blood, the sweet fountain and well-head of the Precious Blood, could not have washed away one venial sin, nor saved the soul of one newborn babe who had no actual sin at all to expiate. She was simply immersed in an unspeakable sea of love, and therefore the deluge of sorrow passed over her soul, and into it, by right, just as the great turbulent rivers run down unquestioned into the sea. Her sufferings close the mouth of complaint for ever. With sweet constraint and unanswerable persuasiveness they impose silence on all the suffering children of our Heavenly Father. The saints can dowbt no longer that suffering is the one grand similitude of Christ. We too in our extreme lowness, whose patience is of so thin a texture that it was threadbare almost when it was new, learn, not to be silent only, but to bear with gentleness, and even wistfully to think the time may come when we shall actually love, that suffering which seems to be the golden coin in which Love repays our love, i

Te tee as ge eran St eee Ree Bea

Section III. The Fountains of our Lady’s Dolours

We may now proceed to our third enquiry, What were the fountains of our Lady’s dolours? By fountains we do not exactly mean causes, but rather the peculiar sources of feeling in her heart, which gave to her sorrows their distinguishing bitterness. When a mother loses her only son, the loss is of itself bitterness enough; but a character and intensity are given to it by circumstances which awaken particular feelings within her breast. Either he was so beautiful that the loss seems all the more intolerable, or he was so full of moral or intellectual promise, or he was taken so young, or there was something, which, humanly speaking, might have been so easily prevented in the actual cause of his death, or there was a special combination of family circumstances which just at that time made his death a greater blow than at any other date it would have been: these, and similar things which might be indefinitely multiplied, are centres of peculiar bitterness round which sorrow gathers, deepening, broadening, magnifying, embittering it, far beyond the measure of the real affliction: Yet all these things are to the mourner the most, stern realities, and by no means imaginary or merely sentimental aggravations. In the case of our Blessed Lady nothing could go beyond the real affliction, because of Him whose suffer~ ings were the cause of hers. On the contrary, human sorrow, even Mary’s sorrow, could not equal the real cause of grief. Nevertheless there were centres also in her heart round which her sorrows gathered more thickly, and ached more cruelly, and throbbed more 3 vehemently than elsewhere. It is these centres which we must now consider, these special fountains of perennial bitterness, premising that of course the perfections of Mary’s heart are so far beyond our understanding, that there were doubtless many sources of keen suffering to her which we cannot appreciate, perhaps not even imagine, and that while we traverse the ground which is known to us we must not forget all the regions which lie beyond it still undiscovered, the exploring of which may perhaps be one of the many delightful occupations left for heaven.

The first of these fountains was in the thought that she could not die with Jesus. There is hardly any mother who would not under such circumstances have longed to die. Death is better than life to a broken heart; and where death is not a separation, but an unbroken companionship, only a companionship transferred from the desolate earth to the bosom of our Heavenly Father, to what stricken mother would it not have been a boon beyond all words? How incomparably such to Mary! Never was son so much to earthly mother as Jesus was to her, never was any son so good and beautiful and dear a son, never any so much @ son. The rights of both father and mother centered in the one heart of the Virgin Mother; so that He was twice her Son, doubly her Son. Who can tell the attractions of His Sacred Humanity, or how the love of Him took root in that deep maternal heart? Then He was God beside, and for three-and-thirty years had been living in obedience to her, in a union of love so transporting that it would have taken her life a thousand times if He had not hindered it, and that, not by tempering the sweet vehemence of love, but by strengthening her heart with His omnipotence, He was going. His sun was sinking in a red sea of blood, among the wildest clouds of shame. She could never forget. Calvary would be in her heart to the last. It would be one of those remembrances which time could never soften, one of those horrors which grow more horrible in the distance, when we can take them in, and not be confused by the presence of their excess. But even if it were not so, Jesus would be gone, and why should she live? What was there to live for? The sunshine was put out. It was more of an end than the end of the world could be. It was a darkness inconceivable, nay it might appear a downright impossibility: for how was the world to go on without Jesus? With the closing of His eyes, it might appear as if all benediction were withdrawn from the earth, and a cold freezing shade come over all its brightness. When His sweet accents were heard no more, surely all nature would keep an unbroken silence, unless those awful cries of the maddened people were to go on multiplying and reverberating through all space for ever. The earth was to have Peter; Mary was to have John. One was to be the apostle of the world, the other the apostle of the Mother. But Jesus was to go.

But it is not only why should she live, but how could she live? Was there a possibility of living without Jesus? None, dearest Mother, except by the help of His omnipotence! O how wonderful must have been her love to accept His will on Calvary, His will that they should part, His will that she should linger on through fifteen mortal years of unimaginable martyrdom! She asked once for water to be turned into wine, and He said His time was not yet come; nevertheless qt her will the miracle was wrought, without her asking twice. She could hardly have forgotten that on Calvary. These fifteen years were His will, but what if she for a moment shows her will that it should not be so, will the Mother have to plead long with the dying Son? A word, a look, were possibly enough. How is it that she is still? Is it that she loves Him better now than at Cana of Galilee? And it is a higher love to stay and do His will, than to go with Him and enjoy His beauty. Is she holier now than she was then? For holiness, as it rises, loses more and more its individual will in the will of God. Both are doubtless true, and both facts are in no slight measure owing to her dolours. But is it not rather perhaps that she, like her Son, has gone down into the depths of suffering, and has become as it were enchanted with it, and as He thirsts for more suffering, in divinest discontent even with the excesses of Calvary, so she too thirsts to suffer more, and He gives to her, what His Father grants not to Himself, another passion of a hundred and eighty waxing and waning moons. It must be remembered also that there was a peculiar grief to our Lady in not dying with Jesus, which we cannot appreciate, but only contemplate far off. Union with Jesus was so habitual to her, and union of so close and vital a nature, that it had become her life; and now in the most important act of all, she was not to be united with Him. She was to differ when she most longed to resemble Him. Nay, it was a want of union which was to involve actual separation. Who can estimate what this absence of union was to her? Yet her love had this prerogative, to suffer longer than our Lord, and to outlive Him by well nigh half His life in suffering. Deep down in very deep sanctity indeed we find, that never scarcely was she more intimately united with Him, than when she let Him go without her.

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY. oe

Another fountain, which yielded additional bitterness to Mary’s sorrows, was the knowledge that her dolours increased the sufferings of Jesus, nay, that they were actually among the worst agonies He had to endure. There was not one pain which she would not have given worlds to alleviate. There was not one fresh indignity offered to Him, which did not pierce her soul, and make her bleed inwardly. As blows and blasphemies, insults, derision, and rude handlings were multiplied, it seemed at each new violence as if she could bear no more, as if the sea of sorrow needed but another drop to break in upon the fountains of her life, and wash them away in one terrific inundation. And yet she had to feel that the sight of her broken heart, ever before Him, was more dreadful to our Blessed Lord than the scourging, the crowning, the spitting, or the buffeting, She was made as it were executioner in chief of her own beloved Son. The more tenderly she loved Him, the more fondly she clung to Him, the more willingly she bore her griefs, so much the deeper the iron of them entered into the Soul of Jesus. She knew all this; and yet her grief was not beneath her own control. Her very holiness increased it a thousandfold. It was in vain she strove to repress it. The very effort was anguish, and no calmness of face, no firmness of attitude, no tearlessness of eye, could have hidden from Jesus the secret abysses of her immaculate heart. Who shall tell the torture of all this to her unselfish devotion? O the seeming cruelty of that exceeding great love which had actually insisted on her being an integral and prominent part of His bitter Passion! How well He knew the plenitude of grace that was inher! How thoroughly He trusted the immens sity of her holiness! Life had not been without joys to Him, not even without earthly joys. His Mother had been a whole world of sweetness to the Man of sorrows; and now, in His love of God, in His love of her, in His love of us, He turns all those sweet waters to an ocean of saltest bitterness for Himself, and keeps slaking His thirst from it incessantly all through the various mysteries of His tremendous Passion. He knew her love so well, and calculated its fortitude so truly, that He hesitated not to lay upon her a cross so nearly the weight of His own. But what all this was, in spite of the eager conformity of her willing heart, what intensity of misery, what unparalleled kind of woe it brought along with it, it is beyond our power to say. It is very deep sea close to shore, where Mary’s dolours are concerned.

But is she then to be simply passive? If it is His will that she should be part of His Passion, may she not think that the fondness of her love will really be some alleviation of His pains? She has been too near the Incarnate Word not to comprehend that strange union of intensest pain with intensest joy, which was the normal state of His blessed Soul on earth; and deep down, deeper than the fountains of grief, might not her love be a wellspring of gladness in His heart? The heroic devotedness of the Mother must surely be a most pathetic contentment to the Son. Yet we venture to suppose that it was not so, The analogies of the Passion seem all to point the other way. He shut off from His lower nature the sensible beatitude of the unbroken Vision of God. He stripped Himself by an amazing detachment of all that could have consoled Him, The dereliction of His Father was an abyss into which He purposed to descend. He can hardly have allowed His Mother’s love to have been a ¢onsolation and support to Him. He can hardly have kept to shine upon Him in His darkness the greatest earthly joy His Sacred Humanity had ever known. It would be out of keeping with the Passion, with that completeness of bleak desolation which He spread around Himself, the vastest, direst wilderness of soul that ever man had known, worse round Him, the sinless Saviour, than was the homeless earth that lay outstretched, with all its haunting shapes and shadows of terror, before the bloodstained, impenitently remorseful Cain! No! Mary might not think, that in that hour her love could soothe His Sacred Heart. But were there no maternal offices which she might fill towards Him? Alas! only such office as the mother of the Machabees had filled of old. Slowly and incom- - modiously the blood from the thorns was trickling into His eyes; but she could not reach to wipe away the blood from Him, whose special office it is to wipe away tears from all eyes for ever. His lips are parched with thirst, white, bloodless, cracking; but she may not damp them for one moment with her moistened veil, though His blood shall henceforth daily damp the fires of purgatory for a thousand souls, His poor unpillowed head, that beautiful head, to her the most beautiful of created things,—if He leans back the thorns are driven in, if He leans forward His whole body drags from the nails, may she not hold it in her Motherly hands, and let Him rest so for a little while until He dies? No! neither for Him nor for her is there to be any alleviation. O Mother! rob Him not of one jewel of His perfect Passion; for see how generously He is enlarging for thee every hour the bounds of thy great sea of sorrow!

But this is a third fountain of her grief, that she cannot alleviate the Passion of her Son,

It was another fountain of peculiar sorrow to her that she was an eye-witness of the Passion. We learn from the revelations of holy persons that, though she was absent in body, she was present in spirit at the sufferings of Gethsemane, and even followed in her soul with mysterious and supernatural sympathy the various phases of our Saviour’s agony. She was present bodily at the scourging, at the Ecce Homo, along the way of the Cross, and for the whole time on Calvary. It appears most probable that she was not in the houses-of Annas and Caiaphas, but that she was at the doors, and heard not only the insults, but even the blows, which were given to Jesus, and that she suffered an especial torture in the separation from Him at those moments. Yet it was a fearful thing for a mother, particularly one of such exquisite sensibilities and profound love as Mary, to have to follow her only child through every step of that bloody drama. It would have been a terrific martyrdom, if she had spent those hours retired in the women’s apartments of an oriental house, hearing the distant cries of the raging multitude, or listening to the mournful intelligence which would be brought her from time to time. Still she could better have collected herself there to suffer in quietness and peace. Others at least could have spent the time all the more undistractedly in prayer. But it was not so with her. Her Son was God. It was better to be nigh Him. The nigher God the better, always, for all of us; but for God’s Mother most of all, Unbroken as was her union with the invisible God at all times and in all places, she would pray better when she saw Jesus. Besides, she had not the oe oo setae A Sia, sania Ptr ae ike FP ee Te

Ee ee Eee helpful distraction which Christian women have in their afflictions. She was not divided between the dear Child who was being taken from her, and the all-holy God who was inflicting this blow upon her. Her grief and her religion did not fall two different ways. The suffering Child and the all-holy God were one and the same. This was the overpowering unity of her dolours. She must go forth therefore, and follow the footsteps of Jesus, and wet her feet in the blood He has left behind Him. She must listen to the fierce singing of the scourges as they cleave the air, and count the stripes, and take into her heart the variety of deadly sickening sounds they made as they lit on this or that part of His Sacred Body. She must see the mock-king of Jews and Gentiles, as Pilate half in worthless pity, and half in merciless derision, exposed Him to the crowd, and she alone adored His royal majesty almost out of the very annihilation of herself by the violence of grief. She must hear the dull hammering of the nails on Calvary, whose sounds, muffled by the soft flesh of His Hands and Feet, pierced her soul through and through. She must listen to the seven beautiful words upon the Cross, as if He Himself were singing His own dirge, with such melancholy sweetness as was enough to have drawn her living soul out of her weak, worn, and aching body. All this was terrible. Yet she was a true mother. Not for one instant would she have consented to have it otherwise. It was a portion of the royalty of her heart. Nevertheless it was an unspeakable aggravation of her suffering. It was true that the whole of it had lain before her in clearest prevision, at least since the hour of Simeon’s prophecy. But sense is something more than prevision, something different from it. The senses

“a

“‘betray the succours which reason gives.” They interrupt that interior tranquillity in which the dark. est visions may possess the soul, without disturbing it. Sight interferes with that self-collection, which is our attitude of strength in the endurance of interior pains. It throws the soul off its guard, or elicits from it a painful strain of inward fortitude in order to preserve its guard. Moreover the senses have special things of their own in sights and sounds and touches of grief; and they pierce the flesh causing it to tremble with chilly pains, torturing the nerves, freezing and firing the blood by turns, stabbing the brain like daggers, and nipping the convulsed heart as if it were within an iron vice. It was this eye-witnessing of the Passion, which made Mary’s martyrdom to be in her body as well as in her soul, and which was something more than the aching physical exhaustion in which excess of mental effort leaves the frame, because it laid each limb upon the rack, and made every pulse a beating instrument of pain.

Another fountain of sorrow is to be found in her clear view and appreciation of sin. We cannot doubt that, independent of her own sinlessness and of the magnificence of her reason, our Blessed Lord allowed her to participate in some degree in that supernatural perception of sin, of its exceeding malice and of God’s adorable hatred of it, which distinguished Himself, and actually gave its character to the suffering of the Passion. It was the view of sin which crucified His soul in the garden of Gethsemane, It was the weight of sin which pressed Him down to the ground. It was the chalice of His Father’s anger, which He so plaintively desired might pass from Him. We read of St. Catherine of Genoa fainting away, when it pleased God hee cae i nk, ma to show her in vision the real horror even of a venial sin. There could be no fainting with Mary. She was too strong, too perfect, too complete, for weaknesses like those. Her use of reason, which had begun at the moment of her Immaculate Conception, and had never been interrupted for one instant since, could not decorously be suspended by any trance or fainting-fit. But we must necessarily suppose that, whatever supernatural gift of insight into sin was granted to St. Catherine of Genoa or any other saints, our Lady’s gift of that sort must have unspeakably transcended theirs. Indeed, when we consider on the one hand the part which His deep view of sin played in our Blessed Saviour’s Passion, and on the other the ** communication of attributes,” so to call it, which passed between His Passion and her Compassion, we cannot but suppose that our dear Lady was gifted with no inconsiderable portion of His amazing and overwhelming insight into sin. None estimated, as she did, the spotless innocence of the victim. None so truly appreciated the beauty and sublimity of His goodness. None so fathomed the ingratitude of those whom He had taught, and fed, and healed, and comforted, with such unselfish patience and such considerate affection. None felt more acutely the barbarous excesses of those eruel hours of Thursday night and Friday morning, When all these thoughts rushed into one, what a view it was which broke upon her of the amount, variety, intensity, malignity, of sin which there was in the Passion, But she saw more than that. She saw, hideous, appalling, mountainous vision! the sins of the whole world on the stooping shoulders of her blessed Son. But yet more—she saw up to the heights of His Divinity; she saw that it was truly

God whom all this sin reached, assailed, defiled, and murdered; and then such a light, as from another universe of diviner things, broke in upon the sin ot the Passion that none but Jesus and herself could have confronted and endured. O that we could better tell what this pain of sharp light was like! But it is far from us. Could we live if God showed us our real selves? We have need to be immortal before our hour of judgment comes. But the sins of the whole world, the concentrated sin of the Passion,—Mary saw it all, and died a thousand inward deaths in the agony it made her bear.

It is not easy to say what was the highest point, or what made the deepest wound, in the Passion. The instruments of the Passion were not material only, There were invisible lances, and nails, and hammers, and thorns, and stripes. They were intellectual and moral, as well as physical. And in all these three departments the implements of torture were both numerous and diversified. Each of them went to the quick. None of them deserve to be considered subordinate or inferior. Each had its preeminence in its own way. All ran up higher than our eye can follow them. But it is not easy to say which of them, if any of them, reached higher heights in Him than others did. The Passion was an excess of excesses. Everything belonging to it was in excess. It is this in great measure which hinders it from being lowered into a mere epic of human suffering, even independently of the consideration of His Divinity. But there are some things which we can conceive of as being sharper than others, or wounding in more tender places. There is one of these, a participation in which will furnish us with a sixth fountain of Mary’s sorrow. It is the foreseen py tela bea Rar gh. Teli yee Oe ge ae ee Brits" Ain atl ae Be ee See josie ders cea aes Sy i! phate aire iil ah apces ott a, ee PASTS HAUS Meee age arith) Eee ingratitude of the faithful for the Passion of our dearest Lord. The Mother of the Church, the queen of the apostles, sees it allin her heart. Such a scroll is unrolled before her eyes of carelessness about forgiven sin, of relapses into deadly sin, of astonishing prolific broods of venial sins, swarming in hordes all over the soul and laying waste that paradise of God, of coldhearted negligences, of unbecoming imperfections, of immortified, consciously immortified lives, of distaste for spiritual things, of careless freedom with great sacraments that cost her Son so dear, of narrow, jealous, suspicious tempers, of the sickening lukewarm ways of conceited human prudence, and of all that dismal infinite of pusillanimity, out of which here and there a saint stands up but half distinguishably, like a palm m the sand-fog of the wilderness. Neither was it altogether a vision of the future. Where was Peter? Was he weeping in some grotto outside the walls in the luxury of his new-found grace? Where was Andrew, who was to be the model of all lovers of the Cross? Where was James, in whose diocese his Master was at that moment crucified? There was the passionate Magdalen, there was the beautiful heart of John, there was herself, to represent the world on Calvary. Alas! if from that day forth every baptised soul was to be a saint as high as an apostle, how fearful would the Passion have been, and how sadly unrequited too. But if this was not to be, surely those who love Jesus should love Him well. All the saved should be saints, saints before they reach heaven, saints that need not an exodus through the sea of fire beneath the earth, saints even while on earth. Half-hearted creatures hanging on to God by an occasional sacrament, clinging to the Church by a jubilee, balancing in silly indecision, like wayward stupid animals, between the shepherd and the hireling, giving their love of love to the world, and now and then their love of fear to God when He thunders, enjoying life and time and earth uncommonly, and making a clutch at eternity and heaven upon their deathbeds—is the Crucified to be the own Father of such as these? O to the generous heroic heart of Mary’ this was a sight that was equal to a whole Passion in itself! She saw how the dear Heart beneath that white blood-seamed side upon the Cross was sickening over that very vision, and her heart yearned over it also with indescribable faintness and repugnance.

But what shall we say of the sight of those who should be lost? Think of the value of each drop of blood! But why talk of drops? She is slipping in it. It has trickled all over her hands as she clasped the Cross, It lies like a red line between the foot of the Cross and the pillar of the scourging. The gnarled roots of the olives on Gethsemane are ruddy with it in more spots than one. Look up at the countless stars, strewing like luminous dust the purple concave of midnight. One stripe would have redeemed them all, if all had fallen a thousand times. And if there were six thousand stripes! What a calculation of the infinities of redemption! And all that blood and all those stripes given for each soul, each soul to have unshared for its own self all those infinite salvations; and yet to be lost eternally! Christ to pay that price, and then to be defrauded of its value! If one soul, for whom all that Passion has been thinkingly and intentionally under-gone, and then with such solemnities as creation never saw before, and with such inconceivable priesthood, offered by God to God,—if one soul should perish ever-

2 ae ee eae sitet aA aes tera oa tas eh id EA tt Pues folie Se eo RANTS aL rete ea r °

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY. _ 4G lastingly, should triumph by its guilt over its Saviour’s love, should dry up the oceans of His Blood by the fiery heats of hell, what an anguish to the Sacred Heart of Jesus! It might have wrung from Him a worse cry than leaped out of the passionate broken heart of Jacob, when Joseph’s many coloured coat, with blood-stains on it, was held up before his eyes. But if not one soul only, but millions, and millions of millions, should be lost, what then? Nay, ifit should have to bea doubt, of which we might not be sure even while we believed it, whether as inany adult believers are saved as are lost, what then? Well! He did not repent of the Cross, as He hung upon it. ‘That is all we can say. But He had another crucifixion that was invisible, far worse than that one of wood, and iron, and red blood, and a mock title, which we see. It was the crucifixion of a Heart already crucified, because of the thought of the countless multitudes who would fall from Him and be lost and be no more members of Him, but turn from Him through the triumphant envy and rage of Satan with cruel sundering, with helpless, irremediable dismemberment. They ‘‘brake not His bones;” but the bones of His Soul were all broken by this cruel inward Passion. And in this dark agony, in this special chalice apart, Mary also had her share; and if in that moment she could distinguish between what this thought made her suffer because she so loved Jesus, and what it made her suffer because she so loved souls, then did she see two separate, most frightful abysses, into which, half suffocated with anguish, she must enter with shrinking yet unreluctant horror.

These were the seven fountains of Mary’s dolours, beneath which, and underlying all of them, was the grand parent source of all, the incomparable divine beauty of our dearest Lord Himself. It was this which gave the vitality and keenness to every pain. It was this which aggravated everything, but could exaggerate nothing, because it could magnify nothing to a greater size than itself. Even she did not know all that beauty. It was incomprehensible, absolutely in itself incomprehensible. But what she did know is incomprehensible to us, it is so far above us and beyond us. Yet we can speak great words of our Saviour’s beauty, and think thoughts of it far greater than any words, and when even thoughts fail, we can weep, weep tears of heavenly feeling. We can burn away with love, and die of His beauty; yet, though thus we shall reach Mary’s home, we shall not attain to her comprehension of the exceeding loveliness of Jesus. ‘There was an ocean of it in the lowest, most unfathomable caverns of her heart, which ever and anon broke upward in other seas that rolled above, and made them bitter beyond endurance.

Section IV. The Characteristics of our Lady’s Dolours

The characteristics of our Lady’s dolours are, as might be expected, closely connected with the fountains cut of which they spring, and these must now be the subject of inquiry. Although they will come out strongly and clearly as we consider the different dolours in succession, yet a general view of them is necessary in order to a true idea of her martyrdom as a whole. When we have once seen it as a unity, we shall the better understand the marvellous details which a nearer inspection will disclose to us. The first charac. teristic of her sorrows was that they were lifelong, or nearly so. It is generally agreed that our Blessed Lady did not know she was to be the Mother of God before the moment of the Incarnation. Until that time, therefore, she might have had such a gift of prophecy as to foresee confusedly that her life was to be one of great sorrow and heroic endurance, but her particular dolours could not have been distinctly before her. But when she actually bore within herself the Eternal Word made flesh, a great change must have come over her in this respect. She was in such unutterable union with God, and understood so deeply and truly the mystery of the Incarnation, and such a light was shed for her upon the depths of Hebrew prophecy, that it is impossible not to believe that the Passion of Jesus lay clearly before her, with all the Thirty-Three Years of poverty, hardship, and abasement, and consequently with it, at least in its main outlines, her own Compassion. ‘This is the least we can think, but in truth we think much more. We cannot agree with those writers who make her dolours to begin with the prophecy of Simeon. No doubt God may have been pleased at that moment to bring the whole sorrowful future more distinctly before her, and to have painted the vision in more vivid colours. That Simeon’s words were divine instruments for effecting a change within her soul is more than probable. But it seems hardly honourable to her to conceive that during the nine months of her intimate union with the Incarnate Word she should not have understood His mission of suffering and blood, or the laws of expiation and redeeming grace, or the certainty that she also would have to drink deeply of the same cup with Him. At all events from the time of Simeon’s prophecy, if not from the first moment of the Incarnation, her sorrows were lifelong. Like those of Jesus, 4 ees) Pe tee ae Sahl ie Geach eh, (\ Unk eB ac erat Me Sear SS Ba Bae re ‘ a s Baie 3 tid el eee Es pee ce aie 2 7 t; re F ‘ ry ah es a ey they were ever before her. She had no bright intervals over which impending evil cast no sorrow. There was an inevitable uniformity of shade over her path, The darkest destinies of men are unequal, and in this inequality there is relief. The sorrow, that clings ~ closest, sometimes relaxes its hold. The clouds now and then give way before strong sunshine, even though it be but for a while. The misfortune, which occasionally dogs a man all through life, at times seems to grow weary of its chase, and turns backward, as if it had forsaken its prey, or at least allowed him breathing-time. But Mary’s subjection to sorrow was riveted upon her as if with iron. It never relaxed. It never grew milder. It gave her no respite. It was in her life, and only by laying down her life could she extricate herself from its inseparable companionship. The Passion was not a dark end to a bright life, or an obscure sunset after a checkered day of light and gloom, or an isolated tragedy in sixty-three years of common human vicissitudes. It was part of a whole, with consistent antecedents, a deepening certainly of the darkness, but a portion of a lifelong darkness, which for years had ¥ known, in this respect at least, no light. We must bear this in mind throughout, if we would understand her sorrows rightly. ‘They were not so much separate events; they were the going on of a charmed life, round which heaven had wrapped a singular law of sorrow, only with a stronger light cast upon some of its abysses than upon others.

But her sorrows were not only lifelong; they were continually increasing. The more she became familiarized with the vision of them, the more also she realized them, and the more terrible they seemed. This growth of them does not appear incompatible with the immensity of her science, or do any dishonour to it They gave up new features, new pains, new depths, new possibilities to her continual meditation, just as in a far lower degree they do still to ours. The more we occupy our minds with the mysteries of the Incarnation, the more do we learn about them, The horizon grows wider the higher we climb. When our eye gets used to the peculiar soft darkness, the more unfathomable do we perceive the depth of the abyss to be. What then must all this have been to her, whose penetrating steadfast gaze was so unlike our cursory distracted meditation, whose meditation was unbroken for years, and whose own heart was so deeply interested in the subject? Moreover, as they came nearer, they naturally became more terrible. They threw a deeper shadow. They inspired greater fear. The first breaths of the storm began to blow cold upon her heart. She clung to Jesus. He seemed more beautiful than ever. But there was no hope. The wide sea was around her, without a harbour. She had no home but the great deep. It was the will of God. Meanwhile Jesus waxed more beautiful day by day. The first twelve years ran out, leaving results of heavenly loveliness and love beyond our power of summing. ‘Then the next eighteen, when every word, and every look, and every meek subjection were thick with mysteries of heaven. Her life had almost passed out of her into Him, so exceedingly had He become her light, and life, and love, and all. Then came the three years’ ministry, and it seemed as if the Babe of Bethlehem, or the Boy of Nazareth, had been nothing to the Preacher of love, whose words and works and miracles appeared to charge the world with more of supernatural beauty than it could bear, so that men rose up madly to put out the light which hurt i aA eee | az “espe a Sk Be ar ea Le She Oo ee “ake Sect oy RR a er ek ee ae oe Set A ce tad a Ss SS CATT EE. aha PST LO gy ay Pe Sen ar ame ORE Rr ys AME ae Reet Ly TY ON pny eee oc cae a RNR tear pee a epee MSR LER T-tree ENCES vont pis eA Ma SS ee mam ny ay she Wie reed ¢. Yes ‘ RRL Ps a

Bat them by its strong shining. As this loveliness increased, her love increased, and with her love her agony; and all three were continually increasing, with majesty and with velocity. The transcendent beauty of the three years’ Ministry seemed to make it impossible for her to endure the Passion; and did it not seem to show as if by the beauty of His preaching alone, and by His human tears, and His vigils on the mountains, and His footsore journeys, and His hunger, and thirst, and sweet patience, and the persuasiveness of His miracles, and the wondrous enticing wisdom of His parables, the world might be redeemed, and Calvary be spared? It is a short word to say, but there are volumes in it: Jesus had become a habit to her; could He be torn from her, and she survive? And so one motive grew to another, and one thought quickened another, and one affection intensified another, and thus her dolours grew, quicker than the gourds grow in summer, and all the quicker as the time grew near.

It was also a characteristic of her sorrows that they were in her soul, rather than in her body. Not that | her body was without its fearful and appropriate sufferings. We have seen that already. But they were nothing to the sorrows of her soul. The one bore no proportion to the other. Physical pain is hard to bear, so hard that when it comes to a certain point it seems unbearable. It lays hands upon our life, which shrinks away at the touch. No one can think lightly of bodily pain. Yet how light is it compared with mental suffering! Even to us the agonies of the soul are far more dreadful than the tortures of the body. Yet we are gross and material compared to our Blessed Lady, almost as if we were creatures of another species. The more refined and delicate the soul, the more excruciating is its agony. What then must have been the pains of a soul which was such an immaculate vessel of grace as hers was? We have no standards by which to measure what she felt. Her powers of suffering are beyond our comprehension. All we know is that they transcended all human experience, and that the two Hearts of Jesus and Mary were raised into a world of suffering of their own, where no other hearts of flesh can follow them. Her pains were martyrdom reversed; for the seat of the anguish was in the soul and flowed over, blistering and burning, on the sympathetic flesh, while with the martyrs the soul poured sweet balm into the wounded flesh, and the heaven within burned more brightly than the lighted fire or the wild beast’s eye without. In this also she was distinguished in some respect even from Jesus. His Soul was crucified in Gethsemane, His Body upon Calvary. On her body not a wound was made; from her veins not a drop of blood was drawn. His Body and His Blood had come from hers, and it was enough that His should suffer for them both. This perfectly interior character of her dolours, so often independent of external circumstances, and requiring in order to its just appreciation a spiritual discernment, must not be lost sight of as one of their most distinguishing characteristics.

If we may make bold to think for a moment of what theology calls the Circuminsession of the Three Divine Persons, the way in which Each lies in the lap of the Others, it will carry us far beyond any prerogatives of Mary, putting a simply infinite distance between the Creator and the creature. Nevertheless the idea of that eminent unity will draw us out of our low thoughts more nearly to a just appreciation of the union between Jesus and His Mother. The Heart of each seemed to lie in the Heart of the other. This was especially true of Mary. His beauty drew her out of herself. She lived in His Heart rather than her own. His interests were hers. His dispositions became hers. She thought with Him, felt with Him, and as far as might be, identified herself with Him. She lived only for Him. Her life was His instrument, to be done with what He willed. In this union sometimes she was the Mother, with her whole heart poured out upon her Son, rejoicing in all she was, in all she had, in all she could do or suffer, simply as so much material to sacrifice for Him, Sometimes it was almost as if she were the child, and He the Father, she so leaned upon Him, and obeyed Him, and had not a thought which was not His, hardly a thought even for Him. It was for Him to think and to dispose; she would follow, minister, sympathize, agree, worship Him with her love. We read wonderful things of the saints, and of their union with God; but there never was any to compare with this union of Jesus and Mary. It stood alone in degree; it stood alone in kind. It was like itself, and it was like no other union, except that which it distantly, and yet so softly and so truly, shadowed, the Unity of the Most Holy Trinity. Now she lived far more vitally in this outward life than in her inward life; or to speak more justly, this outward life, this life in Jesus, was more inward, more really her own life, than the other; and it was one of the characteristics of her dolours that they were not so much in herself, as in Him whom she loved far more than self. There are some human sorrows which have faint parallels to this. Shadows of it have crossed widowed mothers’ hearts, when their first-born stood glorious on manhood’s threshold, and death put out his light, and drew him under. But none have felt as Mary felt, for none have lived in such union with the object of their love, and none have had such an object at once divine, and human, and their own, which they might so dare to love, with a love which they need not be at the pains to distinguish from absolute worship. Another characteristic of our Lady’s sorrows is the union of their great variety with the fact of their being interior, that is, of their being unitedly felt in one place, her heart. Indeed this follows from the fact of their being interior, and is the cause of a very peculiar kind of suffering. When the instruments of torture went from one limb of the martyr to another, there was almost a relief in the vicissitude. We most of us know what the concentrated pressure of pain upon one nerve is like, especially when that pressure is kept tight for hours or days or even weeks. It is quite a different sort of agony from flying, shifting pains, or - even from the fiery shooting pains which are so hard to bear. But when we transfer this uniform pressure from a limb or a nerve to the heart, the result of suffering must be incalculable. The variety of her sorrows was almost infinite. Both His Natures, human and divine, supplied countless diversities of grief, multiplied its motives, intensified its bitterness. The bodily pains of the Passion, the mental sufferings, the deep abasements, the cries, the faces, the very visible thoughts of the multitudes around, were so many different kinds of pain to her. And then the complete unity of her undivided affections added immensely to them all. She loved only One. The causes of her martyrdom were all centered in one. There was no other object in her heart to call off some portion of her grief, and distract it from its overwhelming fixity.

How sweet are the child’s cries to the fresh widow’s heart! what an eloquent distraction, better than if an angel spoke! O that cry is like a great grace from heaven, strong-shouldered to bear so much of the dark burden! But Mary had no diversion to her woes. Innumerable as they were, they ran up into one supernatural, many-headed point, and pierced with all their might the very centre of her life, the beautiful sanctuary of her loving heart.

But this was not all. Not only was she without other objects, other duties, other loves, to distract her in her misery; but actually that which should naturally have alleviated her sorrows, only embittered and poisoned them. What should have been light was worse than Egyptian darkness. What ought to have given life was in her case enough to kill. The goodness of our Blessed Lord put a special barb of its own on every shaft that pierced her heart. It was His holiness that made His death so awful. His love of her, which in its own nature was more than a consolation to her, nay was positively her life, was the grand cruelty of her Compassion, Had she loved Him less, or had He loved her less, her dolours would not have so far transcended all human parallel. The exquisiteness of each torture was precisely in her love. But His Divinity! the secret glory of His bright impassible Nature, might she not pillow her weary head thereon? O dearest of all the dogmas of the faith! how many an aching heart and outworn spirit aud tempest-troubled soul, when all the world had gone to shipwreck round it, has laid down upon thy soft and welcome bed, and tasted peace when all was trouble above and beneath, within and without! To how many thousands has that doctrine been like an angelic visitant, bidding the storms cease, and smoothing even the bed of death! And shall it be nothing to her who has more to do with it than any other of God’s creatures? Nothing P O far from that; it shall be to her a new abyss, unknown hitherto, of human sorrow, in which she shall sink immeasurable depths, and yet find no end. It shall so swathe her in suffering that she shall lie to all appearance helpless on a vast sea of sorrow. LEverything went by the rule of contraries in her martyrdom. The very things, which of themselves would lighten her load, were like murderous hands that held her under the dark waters with cruel force. And because she was too strong to suffocate, she suffered the more terribly. This also is not without parallel in human sorrow, though none such ever came nigh to hers.

But a sorrow without a sympathy is a rare phenomenon, even on this unkindly earth. Yet where shall she find sympathy with hers? There is but one in the whole world who can understand her, and it is He, who by His sufferings, is inflicting all this suffering upon her. She will give all her sympathy to Him rather than seek it from Him. She must bear in secret. St. Joseph knew her well, but he never knew her fully. Her heart is a mystery even to St. John, although he had been initiated into the secrets of the Sacred Heart. And that dear apostle himself needs her love to keep him upright beneath his Master’s Cross. Even in the eighteen years it is not easy to think that Jesus and Mary talked much of their future sorrows, or sought sympathy in each other’s love. To me it seems more probable that they never spoke of the matter at all, Besides which, her sympathy with Him was simply worship; it was love indeed, true fond maternal love, yet it was worship also, and unlike all common sympathy with grief. When she slowly walked away from the garden-tomb on Friday night, she re-entered a world where not one soul could understand her, not even the holy passionate Magdalen. It was darkness without one gleam of light, a wilderness all terrors, a life without one point of attraction, one resting-place for her broken heart. She shut her sorrows up within herself, enduring them in a hot-hearted silence, and there were none who could do more than guess the aching void that was beating like a wild pulse in that maternal heart.

These were the characteristics of her sorrows; and what is every word that has been said but a deepening shade to the dark, dark picture? What then shall we think of that last characteristic of her dolours, which so amazed St. Bernard, the moderation with which she bore them? Who.is ever able to forget, when they meditate upon our Blessed Mother, the heavenly tranquillity of her “ Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” at the Annunciation? The same tranquillity is unbroken even when her heart is breaking beneath the Cross. Except in the case of very high sanctity, and even there the exception does not always hold, moderation in sorrow would imply something like coldness or insensibility. We should hardly love very tenderly any one, the even tenour of whose way deep affliction could not disturb. In the case of the saints the love of God acts as a countercharm to the spells of sorrow. It at once distracts and compensates, and so makes endurance easier. But with Mary it was just in her love of God that the exceeding bitterness of her agony consisted. If then we figure to ourselves the bewildering complications of misery, the enormous weight of sorrow, the supernatural aggravations also of it, which she had to bear, and then the way in which with such — resistless might it bore down upon her solitary heart, it is amazing to see it all break upon her tranquillity, as a billow breaks in idle foam upon some huge promontory, which quivers to its base as it flings the wild waters back, and yet remains unbroken. So it was with her. She was not insensible like the cold granite. On the contrary the tempest went through her, searched every corner of her capacious nature, filled to overflowing every possibility of suffering, and drenched with bitterness every faculty and affection. Yet not a ruffle passed on her tranquillity, Her peace within was as untroubled, as the cavities of the ocean when the surface is wildly rocking in the storm. Nevertheless this tranquillity was no protection to her against the intensity of suffering. It rather enabled her to suffer more. It allowed the grief to penetrate more unresistedly into every part of her. Yet there was no wildness, no loud sighs, no broken sobs, no outspoken words of complaint. Still less—the thought is one which would never have crossed the mind of an intelligent lover of Mary, if careless untheological pictures had not indecorously brought it before so many of us —still less were there any vehement attitudes of grief, any contortions of the venerable beauty of her face, any womanish wringing of the hands, any negligence of dishevelled hair, any prostrations on the ground as of one overcome with mortal anguish, least of all any fainting away, any need of a supporting arm around her, whether it were that of John or Magdalen, any suspension of that glorious reason which sleep even had not interrupted in its magnificent exercises, since the very first moment of the Immaculate Conception. Let us in indignant love give to the flames these ignorant dishonourable representations, and drive out of ourselves the odious images which their skill and beauty may have left upon our minds, Mary “ stood” beneath the Cross: that is the simple grandeur of the scriptural picture, which represented the actual truth, and whose artist was her own Spouse, the Holy Ghost. And it was on the picture of that calm standing woman, on which her fond child, St. Bernard, gazed in admiring love. This too is the attractiveness of our Lady’s apparitions in the revelations of Mary of Agreda, compared with her portrait in the visions of Sister Emmerich. The instincts of the Spanish nun were more true than those even of the artistic soul of the extatic German. Never then must we put away from ourselves the thought of this moderation of Mary in her woes. ‘There was nothing wild, nothing unsettled, nothing dramatic, nothing passionate, nothing demonstrative, nothing excessive; but she stood in calmest queenliest dignity, quiet, not as a sweet evening landScape, or a noontide summer sea, or a green wood at dawn, or a moonlit mountain-top, or as any other image in the poetry of nature, but quiet, in her measure and degree, as the Divine Nature of our Lord while the tumult of the Passion was trampling His Human Nature to death. Her tranquillity was the image of that tranquillity. It was one of many participations in Himself which Jesus gave to her in those dark hours.

Section V. How our Lady Could Rejoice in her Dolours

Having thus considered the characteristics of our Lady's dolours, we must now pass to a peculiarity of them, which it is necessary always to bear in mind, namely, their union with the intensest joy. That her dolours were accompanied throughout with floods of heavenly joy, she herself revealed to St. Bridget. But indeed it could not be otherwise, Can we suppose it possible that a sinless rational creature can ever be otherwise than bathed in joy? Beatitude is the life of God, and it is out of that life that torrents of gladness inundate His whole creation. It is sin only that brings sorrow, and if the sins of others can make the sinless grieve, they can never interfere with that abiding gladness deep down, which union with God must of necessity produce. Moreover there is no merit where there is no love. If our Lady’s dolours had not risen out of her love and been animated by it, they would not have been meritorious. But in truth love was the very cause of them. Out of the excess of love came the excess of sorrow. Now it is undeniable that love cannot exist without delectation. Love is of itself essentially a joy; and in proportion to the eminence of our Mother’s love must also be the eminence of her celestial joy. To sorrow and rejoice at once is possible even for us, whose inward life sin has distracted, and made irregular and uncompact. We have all of us done so, even though our sensitive nature is a battle-field where the struggles are quickly over, and one or other of the contending passions is left master of the field. But it is in Jesus and Mary that this perfect union of » the uttermost of joy and sorrow kas taken place, and been an abiding, lifelong, normal state. It is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the Incarnation, and has seemed, in our Lord’s lower Nature, to be a sort of adumbration of His union of Two Natures in one Person. It is also one of His characteristics in which He has given His Mother largely to participate. In His Passion He restrained His Divinity, and would not let it sensibly penetrate His Human Nature with its light and glory. Nay, He even laid His hand upon that Beatific Vision, which was due to His Sacred Humanity, and which was uncloudedly before His Soul from the first moment of His Incarnation, and would not allow it to include within its sphere of gladness His sensitive nature, lest it should blunt His suffering and quench the fire of His great agony. So, in her measure, our Blessed Lady in the depths of her soul was filled with gladness because of her intimate union with God, and yet the gladness had a sphere of its own, and was not allowed to break out with its vast world of light, so at least as to banish all sorrow from the heart.

As was said before, her joy, so far from alleviating her © sufferings, probably made her suffer more. But once again we must remember it was not with her as with the martyrs. They sang among the fires and exulted among the panthers, because their soul was all whole and joyous, while their flesh was torn and their bones broken. But with her the soul was the chief sufferer; and joy and sorrow divided it against itself, This was nearer toa mystery. Indeed it was a true. participation in the characteristics of Jesus, a cleaving asunder of the soul without disturbing its simplicity, a division without sedition, a wound which was a new life, a battle while all was harmony and peace. O Mother! we cannot tell how it was, only that so it was! Thou wert all joy, and being so near God, how couldst thou help but beso? Thou wert all sorrow, and what else couldst thou be in those dark abysses of the Passion? And thy sorrow had no power over thy joy; but thy joy had power over thy sorrow, and gave it a brisker acid, a more volatile and pervasive bitterness! Glad creature! sorrow crushed thee, and then a joy, like that a / I i: ot; f 3 of heaven, sat upon thy burden, and made it tenfold more hard to bear!

Yet we are hardly doing justice to her sorrows, when we say that they had no influence upon her joys. Doubtless they increased them, and were to her the fountains of new joys which she had never had before, or of new degrees of old accustomed joys. It is not as if her joy and sorrow were two oceans in her soul, which had no mutual inlets, and did not commingle with each other, or ebb and flow in sympathy. So far from that, there is a sense in which we might say that her sorrow and her joy were almost identical; for her joys were sorrows, and her sorrows joys. They might be the one or the other, according to the double life that was in them. ‘Truly in her sorrows were many reasons for joy, such as the grandest and happiest archangel of heaven has not in himself. If we look long at the darkness of Calvary, a beautiful light breaks out of its gloomiest centre. What is it all but a magnificent reparation of the Divine Honour? Not Michael, when flushed with triumphant sanctity he drove usurping Lucifer out of heaven, so rejoiced in the honour of God, as Mary did. She, who had been allowed to fathom sin so deeply, and who in the spirit of Gethsemane had tasted somewhat of the Father’s anger, could exult in the satisfaction of His justice, as neither angel nor saint could do, She, who had lived thirty-three years with Jesus and had caught from Him His passionate yearning for His Father’s honour, could find depths of blissful congratulation in the restoring of that honour, which not all creatures together could discover. Sometimes there has been a minutest dropof that joy in our hearts, and we know what it was like, but could not tell even if we would. O for that land, where it will be an unchecked, eternal habit!

There was joy too through all the immense wisdom with which God’ had endowed her, because of the divine wisdom which was apparent to her in the whole scheme of our redemption. There was not a cavern of shame, but it was illuminated by several of the divine perfections, shedding over it a perfect blaze of beautiful splendour. There was not a physical horror in the Passion, from which an unloving faith shrinks back in. vulgar fastidiousness, but was clothed with a strange loveliness out of the treasures of the divine mind and will. The science of the Incarnation never came out, even to her, in such amazing, fascinating clearness as it did in her Compassion, with all its reasons, possibilities, adaptations, and conveniences, The sight she saw would have been enough to feed the worship of the nine choirs of angels for ever.

There was joy also in her foresight of the exaltation of Jesus. She saw Him already at the Right Hand of the Father, His Sacred Humanity enthroned there as an object of highest worship for ever. To her eyes the bright clouds of Ascension Day were strangely interlaced with the darkness of the dun eclipse on Calvary. She saw the feet that were dropping blood, as if they were rising up in the sunny air, each with its glorified stigma gleaming like a roseate sun. She almost saw the angels in their glistening white, moving about amid the horses of those ruthless foreign centu-

‘ rions. The darkness of the depth set off the brightness of the exaltation, as if it were a background of storm throwing forward the bright things in front of it with vivid, lifelike light. There was joy also in her participation at the time in the interior joy of Jesus.

For that failing Heart upon the Cross had a very ocean of gladness within itself, a gladness none on earth but His Mother knew, a gladness none else could share, because none else could understand it. If her share of it were parted among the numberless elect, we should each have more than we could bear. It was a joy also, of a peculiar kind, to see Him paying then and there for the glorious prerogatives He had given her. When the blood moistened her hand and stained its whiteness, she recognized and worshipped it as the price of her Immaculate Conception. Could she see that, and then not love Him ten thousand times more than she had loved Him hitherto? And with the rush of love must needs come a rush of joy as well.

It is impossible also not to rejoice in the operations of grace within our souls. Each augmentation of grace is a mission of a Divine Person, a contact with God, a more intimate and exquisite union with Him. If we were slower, graver, less occupied, and less precipitate in our spiritual life, we should feel this more than we do. How greatly then must she have rejoiced in the magnificent supernatural acts, which her sorrows were causing her to elicit all the while! Such faith, such hope, such love, such fortitude, such conformity, such love of suffering, such spirit of sacrifice, such intelligent worship, such incomparable union! Millions of saints could have been made out of each of these royal magnificences, and yet have left a marvellous amount to spare. There was joy too, who can disbelieve it? in her thought that her Compassion should be so rich a boon to us, that it should win us so many graces, give us so many examples, excite so much devotion, lead us so much nearer Jesus, and fill us with a wiser spirit of more profound adoration. Here are seven 5 joys, which came out of her very sorrows. They might be multiplied indefinitely; but these are enough for love, and more than enough for our comprehension in their fulness, f

Section VI. The Way in Which the Church Puts our Lady’s Dolours Before Us

Such is a general description of the dolours of Mary. The Church puts them before us as part of the Gospel, as one of the facts of the Gospel, and as an object of special devotion. Marchese, in his Diario di Maria, mentions an old tradition, which would carry devotion to the sorrows of our Blessed Lady up to apostolic times. Some years after her death, while St. John the Evangelist was still grieving over his loss and longing to see her face again, it pleased our Blessed Lord to appear to him in a vision, accompanied by His Mother. The sorrows of Mary, together with her frequent visits to the holy places of the Passion, were naturally a constant subject of devout contemplation to the Evangelist, who had watched over the last fifteen years of her life; and, as if it were in response to these continual meditations, he heard her ask Jesus to grant some especial favour to those who should keep her dolours in remembrance. Our Lord replied that He would grant four particular graces to all those who should practice this devotion. ‘The first was a perfect contrition of all their sins some time before death; the second was a particular protection in the hour of death; the third was to have the mysteries of the Passion deeply imprinted in their minds; and the fourth a particular power of impetration granted to Mary’s prayers on their behalf. St. Bridget relates in the seventh book of her Revelations that she saw in a vision, in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome, the immense price which was set in heaven upon the dolours of Mary. To the Blessed Benvenuta, the Dominicaness, it was granted to feel in her soul the sorrow which our Lady suffered during the Three Days’ Loss. The Blessed Veronica of Binasco had several revelations regarding this devotion, in one of which, as related by the Bollandists, our Lord said that tears shed over His Mother’s sorrows were more acceptable to Him than those which are shed over His own Passion, In like manner Gianius in his history of the Servites relates, that, when Innocent IV. was raised to the apostolic chair, he felt some alarm regarding the new order of the Servites of Mary. There were several false and counterfeit religions, which had troubled the Church about that time, the Poor of Lyons, the so-called Apostolic Men, the Flagellants, and the followers of William de Saint Amour, and the pope was anxious to assure himself that the Servites, lately instituted near Florence, were not of the same character as these. He therefore commissioned St. Peter Martyr, the Dominican, to investigate the matter. Our Lady appeared to the inquisitor ina vision. He saw a lofty mountain, covered with flowers, and bathed in shining light, and on the summit of it sate the Mother of God as on a throne, while angels offered garlands of flowers before her. After this they presented to her seven lilies of exceeding whiteness, which she placed for a moment in her bosom, and then wreathed them like a diadem round her head. These seven lilies, as she explained the vision to Pietro, were the seven Founders of the Servites, whom she had herself inspired to institute the new order in honour of the dolours which she suffered in the

Passion and Death of Jesus, When St. Catherine of Bologna was one day weeping bitterly over our Lady’s sorrows, she suddeuly saw seven angels near her, weeping also, and joining their tears with hers. But it would not be difficult to compile a whole volume of visions and revelations regarding the dolours of Mary.

-The reader will find abundance of them in two books especially, both of which are of easy access, Marchese’s

Diario di Maria, and Sinischalchi’s Martirio del Cuore di Maria, the first writer was an Oratorian, and the second a Jesuit.

This devotion has received the highest sanction of the Church, for it enters both into the Missal and the Breviary. Two distinct feasts are appointed in honour of these sorrows; one falls in September, and the other on the Friday in Passion Week. The Rosary of the Seven Dolours, as well as several other devotions, have been richly indulgenced. Among these may be mentioned the Hymn Stabat Mater, an hour at any time of the year spent in meditation on the Dolours, an exercise in honour of her sorrowing heart, seven Aves with the Sancta Mater istud agas, another exercise for the last ten days of the carnival, and an hour or half an hour’s prayer on Good Friday and other Fridays. Nothing therefore is wanting to the sanction of this devotion, nor has the Church spared any means to attract her children to it.

She has however especially selected seven of Mary's sorrows for our more peculiar devotion. She has imbedded them by means of antiphons in the divine office, and she has made them the seven mysteries of the Rosary of the Dolours. They are, Simeon’s prophecy, the Flight into Egypt, the Three Days’ Loss, the Meeting Jesus with the Cross, the Crucifixion, the Taking down from the Cross, the Burial of Jesus. Thus, in one way of dividing them, three belong to our Lord’s Infancy, and four to His Passion. Or again, one covers His whole life, two His infancy, and four His Passion, Or again, one puts before us all the Thirty-Three Years, two the Child Jesus, two Jesus Suffering, and two Jesus Dead. These seven are mysterious samples of her multitudinous other sorrows, and we shall find perhaps that they are types of all human sorrow whatsoever. The seven chapters therefore, which follow, will consider one by one these seven dolours, observing the same simple and easy method in the investigation of all of them. Each dolour will present four points for our consideration, first, the circumstances of the mystery itself, secondly, its peculiarities, thirdly, our Lady’s dispositions in it, and fourthly, its lessons to ourselves, A ninth chapter will be added on the Compassion of Mary, in order to explain the relation in which it stands to the Passion, whether it had any share in the redemption of the world, and what the true meaning is of those puzzling expressions, co-redemptress, and the like, which are sometimes found in approved writers on the grandeurs of Mary.

Section VII. The Spirit of Devotion to our Lady’s Dolours

Before concluding this introductory chapter, however, it seems necessary to say something on the spirit of this beautiful and popular devotion, It produces in our minds an extreme tenderness towards our Blessed Lord, united with the profoundest reverence. Jesus demands from us our worship as God. He claims our undoubting faith in His goodness and in the abundance of His redeeming grace. He expects from us a rational conviction that our only trust is in Him, and that we should consequently discharge our duties to Him and obey His commandments, as our necessary and reasonable service. But He wants far more than this, He has something much nearer His Heart. He desires. our tenderness. He wishes to see us with our hearts always in our hands for Him. He would fain win us to Himself, and unite us with Himself in the bonds of the most familiar and intimate affection. He would have us identify our interests with His, and concentrate our sympathies in Him. The thought of Him should fill our eyes with tears, and kindle our hearts with love. His Name should be the sweetest music that we know; His words the laws of all our life. He wishes us, as it were, to forget the precise amount of our actual obligations to Him. Indeed what is the use of remembering them, when we know that it is beyond our power to fulfil them? He would have us deal with Him promptly, generously, abundantly, with the instincts of love, and not as if the life of faith were a spirit of commerce, the balance of justice, the duty of gratitude, or the wise calculations of an intelligent self-interest. We should cling to Him as a child clings to its mother, We should hang about Him as a friend whose absence we cannot bear. We should keep Him fondly in our thoughts, as men sometimes do with a sweet grief, which has become to them the soft and restful light of their whole lives. Now the way in which our Lady’s dolours keep His Passion continually before us, has a special virtue to produce this tenderness in us. We love Him, who is infinitely to be loved in all ways, in a peculiar manner when He is reflected in His Mother’s heart; and although it is absolutely necessary for us perpetually to contemplate His Passion in all the nakedness of its harrowing circumstances and revolting shame, for else we shall never have a true idea of the sinfulness of sin, yet there is something in the Passion, seen through Mary, which makes us forget ourselves, and tranquilly engrosses us in the most melting tenderness and endearing sympathy towards our Blessed Lord. The emotions, which are awakened by the Passion in itself, are manifold and exciting, whereas the spirit of tenderness presides over Mary’s sorrows with one exclusive, constraining presence.

But out of this tenderness comes also a great hatred of sin. If God were to let us choose which of the great and extraordinary gifts, that He has given to His Saints, should be conferred upon ourselves, we could not do better than ask for that piercing and overwhelming hatred of sin which some have had. It isa gift which lies at the root of all perfection, and is the supernatural vigour of all perseverance. It is at once the safest and the most operative of all singular graces. Devotion to our Iady’s dulours is a great help both to acquiring the hatred of sin as a habit, and to meriting it asa grace. The desolation wrought by sin in the heart of the sinless Mother, and the reflection that her sorrows were not, like those of Jesus, the redemption of the world, fill us with horror, with pity, with indignation, with self-reproach. ‘There is nothing to distract us from this thought, as there is in the sacrifice of our Lord, who was thus accomplishing His own great work, satisfying the justice of His Father, earning the exaltation of His Sacred Humanity, and becoming the Father Himself of a countless multitude of the elect. The Mother’s heart bleeds, simply because she is His Mother; and it is our sins which are making it bleed so cruelly. We are ourselves part of the shadow of that eclipse, which is passing so darkly over her spotless life. We can never help thinking of sin, so long as we see those seven swords, springing, like a dreadful sheaf, from the very inmost sanctuary of her broken heart.

Yet there is something also in the dolours, and even in this abhorrence of sin, to make us forget ourselves, without at all perilling our safe humility. We rise up from the contemplation of them with a yearning for the conversion of sinners. As if because they were the travail of the queen of the apostles, they fill our minds full of apostolic instincts. Whether this is a hidden grace which they communicate, or whether it follows naturally from the subject of meditation, it is certain that this is a favourite devotion with all missionary souls.³ The fearfulness of losing Jesus, the unbearable anguish of ever so short a separation from Him, the darkness and the dreariness which come where He is not, these are notable figures in each of the seven processions of those mysterious woes. And how far from Jesus are sinners, misbelievers, heathens! How far out of sight of Calvary have they wandered! How - many in number, and in so many ways how dear, are the wanderers! How unfathomable a misery is sin! And to us what a misery those merry voices and bright faces that care not for the misery, but go singing on their way to a dark eternity, as though they were wending gallantly to a bridal feast! Who can see so great a wretchedness, and not long to cure it? Then, again, sin caused all that Passion, all these sorrows. Perhaps one heart in the heat of love forgets itself, and thinks for the moment that by hindering sin, it can spare our dearest Lord some pain. Yet is this altogether a mistake, is it quite an unreality? Anyhow it will busy itself with reparation, and there is no reparation like the conversion of a sinner. And the lost sheep shall be laid at Mary’s feet, and she shall gently raise them and lay them in the outstretched arms of the happy Shepherd; and we will sit down and weep for joy that we have been allowed to do something for Jesus and Mary; and we will ask no graces for ourselves, but only seek glory and love and praise for them.

He, who is growing in devotion to the Mother of God, is growing in all good things. His time cannot be better spent; his eternity cannot be more infallibly secured. But devotion is, on the whole, more a growth of love than of reverence, though never detached from reverence. And there is nothing about our Lady which stimulates our love more effectually than her dolours. In delight and fear we shade our eyes when the bright light of her Immaculate Conception bursts upon us in its heavenly effulgence. We fathom with awe and wonder the depths of her Divine Maternity. The vastness of her science, the sublimities of her holiness, the singularity of her prerogatives, fill us with joyful admiration united with reverential fear, It is a jubilee to us that all these things belong to our own Mother, whose fondness for us knows no bounds. But somehow we get tired of always looking up into the bright face of heaven. The very silver linings of the clouds make our eyes ache, and they look down for rest and find it in the green grass of the earth. The moon is beautiful, gilding with rosy gold her own purple region of the sky, but her light is more beautiful to our homesick hearts when it is raining over field, and tree, and lapsing stream, and the great undulating ocean. For earth after all is a home, for which one may be sick. So, when theology has been teaching us our Mother’s grandeurs in those lofty unshared mysteries, our devotion, because of its very infirmity, is conscious to itself of a kind of strain. O how, after Jong meditation on the Immaculate Conception, love gushes out of every pore of our hearts when we think of that almost more than mortal queen, heartbroken, and with blood-stains on her hand, beneath the Cross! OQ Mother! we have been craving for more human thoughts of thee; we have wanted to feel thee nearer to us; we can weep for joy at the greatness of thy throne, but they are not such tears as we can shed with thee on Calvary; they do not rest usso. But when once more we see thy sweet sad face of maternal sorrow, the tears streaming down. thy cheeks, the quietness of thy great woe, and the blue mantle we have known so long, it seems as if we had found thee after losing thee, and that thou wert another Mary from that glorious portent in the heavens, or at least a fitter mother for us on the low summit of Calvary, than scaling those unapproachable mountain-heights of heaven! See how the children’s affections break out with new love from undiscovered recesses in their hearts, and run round their newly widowed mother like a river, as if to supply her inexhaustibly with | tears, and divide her off with a great broad frontier of love from the assault of any fresh calamity. The house of sorrow is always a house of love. This is what takes place in us regarding Mary’s dolours. One of the thousand ends of the Incarnation was God’s condescending to meet and gratify the weakness of humanity, for ever falling into idolatry because it was so hard to be always looking upwards, always gazing fixedly into inaccessible furnaces of light. So are Mary’s dolours to her grandeurs. ‘The new strength of faith and devotion, which we have gained in contemplating her celestial splendours, furnishes us with new capabilities of loying; and all our loves, the new and the old as well, rally round her in her agony at the foot of the Cross of Jesus. Love for her grows quickest there. It is our birth-place. We became her children there. She suffered all that because of us. Sinlessness is not common to our Mother and to us. But sorrow is. It is the one thing we share, the one common thing betwixt us. We will sit with her therefore, and sorrow with her, and grow more full of love, not forgetting her grandeurs,—Oh surely never!—but pressing to our hearts with fondest predilection the memory of her exceeding martyrdom.

What is the wise life, but that which is for evermore living over again the Thirty-Three Years of Jesus? What is all else but a waste of time, a cumbering of the world, a taking up room on earth which men have no right to? We should ever be in attendance upon some one or other of the mysteries of Jesus, steeping our thoughts in it, acting in the spirit of it. Our Blessed Lord’s interior dispositions are the grand practical science of life, and the sole science which will carry away any of time’s products into eternity. The way, in which we should both learn and exercise this science, is by pondering on the mysteries of Jesus, or indeed by faith personally assisting at them in the spirit of Mary. This imitation of Mary must be the lifelong attitude of Christians. She read off our Lord’s Sacred Heart continually. She saw habitually, as in a glass before her, all His inward dispositions, whether they regarded His Father, herself, or us. There were times when He drew a veil over it; but, ordinarily speaking, that vision was abidingly before her, So say the Agredan revelations. But even if this were not so, who can doubt that Mary understood Jesus as no one else could do, and was in closer and more real union with Him than any saint could be? Hence no one doubts that her sympathy with Him in all His mysteries was of the most perfect description, and in keeping with her consummate holiness. We must therefore, learn her heart. We must strive to enter into her dispositions, An interior life, taken from hers, faint and disfigured as the copy at best must be, is the only one which is secure from manifold delusion. Yet no-where can we penetrate so 'deeply into her heart, or be so sure of our discoveries, as in the case of her sorrows. Moreover the field for participation in the spirit of Jesus, which they open to us, is wider: for, immense as was His joy, nay even perpetually beatific, His life was distinguished rather by sorrow than by joy. Sorrow was, so to speak, more intimate to Him than joy. Joy was the companion of the Thirty-Three Years; sorrow was their character, their instrument, their energy, their discovery of what they were to seek. Thus a participation in the spirit of Jesus through the spirit of Mary is the true spirit of this devotion to our Lady’s Dolours, Those, who have lived for some years amid their quiet shadows, can tell how they are almost a revelation in themselves, But, when we speak of the spirit of this devotion, we must not omit to speak also of its power. We must not dwell exclusively on the spiritual effects it produces on ourselves, without reminding ourselves of its real power with God. In this respect one devotion may differ from another. One may be more acceptable a ee to God, even where all are acceptable. He may promise prerogatives to one, which He has not promised to another. Now there are few devotions to which our Blessed Lord has promised more than He has done. to this. There is a perfect cloud of visions and revelations resting upon it, and, in consequence, of examples of the saints also. Moreover there are reasons for its being so, in the nature of the devotion itself. We know what a powerful means of grace our Blessed Lady is, and our devotion to her must for the most part take its form either from her sorrows or her joys.

Now, in her joys, as St. Sophronius says, our Lady is simply a debtor to her Son, whereas in her sorrows He is in some sense a debtor to her. St. Methodius, the martyr, teaches the same doctrine. Hence, if we may dare to use words which holy writers have used before, by her dolours she has laid our Blessed Lord under a kind of obligation, which gives her a right and power of impetration into which something of justice even enters.

Yet when we think of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, of the immensity of His love for Mary, and of the great part of the Passion which it was to Him to see her suffer, we cannot for a moment doubt, without thinking of obligation, the extreme persuasiveness to Him of devotion to her dolours, a devotion which He Himself began, a devotion which was actually a solid part of His ever-blessed Passion. We draw Him towards us the moment we begin to-think of His Mother’s sorrows.

He is beforehand, says St. Anselm, with those who meditate His Mother’s woes. And do we not stand in need of power in heaven? What a great work we have to do in our souls, and Irow little of it is already done! How slight is the impression we have made yet on our ruling passion, on our besetting sin! How superficial is our spirit of prayer, how childishly timid our spirit of penance, how transitory our moments of union with God! We want vigour, determination, consistency, solidity, and a more venturous aspiration. In short, our spiritual life wants power. And here is a devotion, so solid and efficacious, that it is eminently calculated to give us this power, as well by its masculine products in the soul, as by its actual influence over the Heart of our Blessed Lord. Who, that looks well at the saints, and sees what it has done for them, but will do his best to cultivate this devotion in himself?

In the affairs of this world steadiness comes with age. But who has not felt that it is not so in spiritual things? Alas! fervour is steadiness there, and that is too often but for awhile; when we have held on upon our way for some years, we grow tired. Familiarity brings with it the spirit of dispensation. Our habits become disjointed, as if the teeth of the wheels were worn down and would not bite. Our life gets uneven and untrue, like a machine out of order. So we find that the longer we persevere, the more we stand in need of steadiness. For behold! when we had trusted to the doctrine of habit, and dreamed that age would bring maturity in its own right, the very opposite has been the case. In easy ways and low attainments, and unworthy condescensions, and the facility of self-dispensing indulgence, in a word, in all things that are second-best, the power of habit is strong enough, indeed altogether to be depended on. But in what is best, in effort, in climbing, in fighting, in enduring, in persisting, we seem to grow more uncertain, fitful, capricious, irregular, feeble, than we were before. A worse weakness than that of youth is coming back to us, worse because it has less hopefulness about it, worse because time was to have cured the old weakness and now it is time which is bringing this weakness on, worse because it makes us less anxious, for we have hardened ourselves to think that we attempted too much when we were young, and that prudence indicates a low level where the air is milder and better for our respiration. Then do not some of us feel that the world grows more attractive tous as we grow older? It should not be so; but soitis! This comes of lukewarmness. Age unlearns many things; but woe betide it when it unlearns vigour, when it unlearns hope! Rest is a great thing. It is the grand want of age. But we must not lie down before our time. Ah! how often has fervent youth made the world its bed in middle life; and when at last the world slipped from under it, whither did it fall? If we live only in the enervating ring of domestic love, much more in the vortex of the world, we must live with Jesus in the spirit of Mary, or we are lost. Let us learn this in increased devotion to her dolours. When we lie down to rest, we persuade ourselves it is but for a moment, and that we shall not go to sleep. But only let this most pathetic romance, which the destinies of humanity have ever brought before men, sound in our ears and knock at the doors of our hearts, and it will become in us a continually flowing fountain of supreme unworldliness. Torpor will become impossible. Oblivion of supernatural things will be unknown. We shall feel that rest would be pleasant, for awhile: but we shall disdain the temptation. Mary will teach us to stand beneath the Cross,

Footnotes

1. Lament i. and ii, ↩

2. De excell. Virg. cap. 5. ¢t Ap Novatum i. 359. Also Sinischalchi, Preface to his Dolori di Maria, ↩

3. See the Author’s Essay on Catholic Home Missions, p. 3. ↩