Chapter IX. The Compassion of Mary
At first we stood on the shore of Mary’s sorrows, and gazed upon them as one vast ocean. We then sounded, one after another, the seven abysses of that ocean, which the Church selected and presented to us. Now we look at her dolours again as one, but pouring their waters through the strait of Calvary into the mightier ocean of the Precious Blood. ‘This peculiar point of view is called the Compassion of Mary, the right understanding of which involves several grave theological questions, and yet is most necessary to make our devotion to the dolours real and profound. ‘There are in fact seven questions for us to consider; the divine purpose of her Compassion, its nature and characteristics, what it actually effected, the relation in which it stands to our own compassion with her, a comparison of the Passion with Mary’s Compassion, the seeming excess of the Compassion over the Passion, and lastly, the measures and dimensions of her Compassion.
Section I. The Divine Purpose of Mary's Compassion
First of all, then, we have to consider the divine purpose of her Compassion. It is very questionable whether we might ever say of anything in God’s works that it was merely ornamental. There is something in the idea of mere ornament which seems at variance with the actuality of God, with the magnificence of His simplicity, with His adorable reality. To suppose our Lady’s dolours to be so much ornamental pathos, added to the Incarnation even for the holy end of exciting some additional degrees of love, would involve still further questions regarding the character and perfections of God, His tenderness towards His creatures, and the merciful significance which there is in every pain and sorrow through all creation. It is not easy to see how he, who should hold such a view of our Blessed Lady’s sorrows, could be excused from the highest irreverence, or even from implicit blasphemy. God certainly had a purpose in them. He has a purpose in everything which He ordains. But His purpose in so very marked a feature of the Incarnation, as the unutterably woful destiny of the Mother of God, must have been proportioned to the magnitude of the mystery itself, and of that larger mystery of which it is a part. It could not have been a simple pathos. God could not have martyred one of His creatures only to throw a poetical halo round the intense realities of Calvary. Neither could it have been merely a lesson tous. For much of her Compassion is not only inimitable by us, and so beyond our reach, but also incomprehensible to us, and so beyond our understanding. It is true we learn lessons frum it, because there is teaching in all that God does. But this is a different thing from God’s having no further intention in a mystery, than that it should be a lesson to us, Neither can it have been only for her sanctification, though no doubt this was one great purpose in it. She had become the Mother of God before her dolours commenced; and they were a consequence of her divine maternity, not a preparation for it. They did sanctify
Ss ee her. Indeed they were in an especial sense the sanctification of one who, being sinless, could not be sanctified as the saints have been, by struggle, evil propensity, or inward temptation. But it is hard to contemplate them at all studiously, and believe that their purpose ended here. We crave a deeper and diviner purpose, and one more closely knit to the whole scheme of the Incarnation; and we may be sure that such an one exists, even though it may be beyond our discovery.
If then we reject all the views mentioned above, as unreal and unworthy, and clearly at variance with the phenomena to be explained, are we on the other hand to suppose that our Lady’s Compassion was part of the redemption of the world, that the salvation of souls was merited by it, and that sin was expiated by it? Many writers have used language which seems to imply as much as this. Saints and doctors have united in calling our Blessed Lady co-redemptress of the ‘world. ‘There is no question of the lawfulness of using such language, because there is such overwhelming authority for it. The question is as to its meaning. Is it merely the hyperbole of panegyric, the affectionate exaggeration of devotion, the inevitable language of a true understanding of Mary, which finds common language inadequate to convey the whole truth? Or is it literally true, with an acknowledged and recognized theological accuracy attached to it? This is a question which has presented itself to most minds, in connection with devotion to our Blessed Mother, and there are few questions to which more vague and unsatisfactory answers have been made, than to this. On the one hand, it seems rash to assert of language used both by saints and doctors, that it is only exaggeration and hyperbole, flowery phraseology intended to startle, but without any real meaning hidden beneath it. On the other hand, who can doubt that our most Blessed Lord is the sole Redeemer of the world, His Precious Blood the sole ransom from sin, and that Mary herself, though in a different way, needed redemption as much as we do, and received it in a more copious manner and after a more magnificent kind in the mystery of the Immaculate Conception? Thus, so far as the literal meaning of the word is concerned, it would appear that the term co-redemptress is not theologically true, or at least does not express the truth it certainly contains with theological accuracy. We are distracted between the desire to magnify our Blessed Mother, the authority of the saints and doctors, and the supremely sovereign requirements of a sound theology. We certainly shrink from asserting that the language of the saints has no meaning, or is inadvisable; and at the same time we have no doubt that our Blessed Lady is not the co-redemptress of the world in the strict sense of being redemptress, in the unshared sense in which our Lord is Redeemer of the world, but she is co-redemptress in the accurate sense of that compound word. But these are not times, in which it is desirable to use words, the real meaning of which we have not distinctly ascertained. Hence, while it would be sad indeed for any one to attempt to deprive Mary ofa title which saints and doctors have conferred upon her, for we are living in days when the growth of devotion to our Blessed Mother is our surest augury of a better future, at the same time it is of importance, even in a devotional point of view, for us to know what we mean by a title, which certainly conveys a real truth, and a truth which could not very easily be otherwise expressed. The ia Peet ya ANd a ir ety | DES mh: apr e id wee BF Uo Pare F mS aie following conclusions may perhaps be taken as true, finding truth in the mean, and avoiding both the somewhat violent alternatives of censuring the saints, or of infringing on the prerogatives of our Blessed Lord.
Our Blessed’ Lord is the sole Redeemer of the world in the true and proper sense of the word, and in this sense no creature whatsoever shares the honour with Him, neither can it be said of Him without impiety that He is co-redeemer with Mary.
In a secondary dependent sense, and by participation, all the elect co-operate with our Lord in the redemption of the world.
In the same sense, but in a degree to which no others approach, our Blessed Lady co-operated with Him in the redemption of the world.
4, Besides this, and independent of her dolours, she co-operated in it in a sense, and after a manner, in which no other creatures did or could.
- Furthermore, by her dolours, she co-operated in the redemption of the world in a separate and peculiar way, separate and peculiar not only as regards the co-operation of the elect, but also as regards her own other co-operation, independently of the dolours.
These five propositions seem to place the whole question in a tolerably clear light. It does not appear to be necessary to say anything about the first. It is of faith that our Blessed Lord alone redeemed the world. The elect co-operate with Him in this work as His members. They have become His members by redeeming grace, that is, by the application to their souls of His sole redemption. By His merits they have acquired the ability of meriting, Their works can satisfy for sin, the sins of others as well as their own, by their union with His. Thus, to use St. Paul’s language, by their sanctified sufferings or by their voluntary penances they “fill up in their bodies that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ, for His Body’s sake, which is the Church.” Thus by the communion of the saints in their Head, Jesus Christ, the work of redemption is perpetually going on by the accomplishment and application of the redemption effected on the Cross by our Blessed Lord. It is not a figurative and symbolical, but a real and substantial, co-operation of the elect with our Blessed Redeemer. There is a true secondary sense in which the elect merit the salvation of the souls of others, and in which they expiate sin and avert its judgments. But it is by permission, by divine adoption, by participation, and in subordination to the one sole and complete redemption of Jesus Christ. But the holiness of all the saints together does not even approximate to the holiness of Mary. Her merits have a sort of infinity as compared with theirs. Their martyrdoms and dolours are little more than shadows, when placed by the side of hers, Thus in their own sense of co-operation, she exceeds them in degree immeasurably, so that her co-operation with our Lord almost throws theirs into the shade, On this account she might be called co-redemptress with a truth, which would be far less applicable to the saints.:
But this is not all. She co-operated with our Lord in the redemption of the world in quite a different sense, a sense which can never be more than figuratively true of the saints. Her free consent was necessary to the Incarnation, as necessary as free-will is to merit according to the counsels of God. She gave Him the pure blood, out of which the Holy Ghost fashioned
His flesh and bone and blood. She bore Him in her womb for nine months, feeding Him with her own substance. Of her was He born, and to her He owed all those maternal offices which, according to common laws, were necessary for the preservation of His inestimable life. She exercised over Him the plenitude of parental jurisdiction. She consented to His Passion; and if she could not in reality have withheld her consent, because it was already involved in her original consent to the Incarnation, nevertheless she did not in fact withhold it, and so He went to Calvary as her freewill offering to the Father. Now this is co-operation in a different sense from the former, and if we compare it with the co-operation of the saints, their own cooperation in which Mary herself alone surpassed them all, we shall see that this other peculiar cooperation of hers was indispensable to the redemption of the world, as effected on the Cross. Souls could be saved without the co-operation of the saints, The soul of the penitent thief was saved, with no other co-operation than that of Mary, and, if our Blessed Lord had so willed it, could have been saved without even that. But the co-operation of the Divine Maternity was indispensable. Without it our Lord would not have been born when and as He was; He would not have had that Body to suffer in; the whole series of the divine purposes would have been turned aside, and either frustrated, or diverted into another channel. It was through the ‘free will and _ blissful consent of Mary that they flowed as God would have them flow. Bethlehem, and Nazareth, and Calvary came out of her consent, a consent which God did in nowise constrain. But not only is the co-operation of the saints not indispensable of itself, but no one saint
<e1 by himself is indispensable to that co-operation. Another apostle might have fallen, half the martyrs might have sacrificed to idols, the saints in each century might have been a third fewer in number than they were, and yet the co-operation of the saints would not have been destroyed, though its magnificence would have been impaired. Its existence depends on the body, not on the separate individuals, No one saint, who can be named, unless perhaps it were in some sense St. Peter, was necessary to the work, so necessary that without him the work could not have been accomplished. But in this co-operation of Mary she herself was indispensable. It depended upon her individually. Without her the work eould not have been accomplished. Lastly, it was a co-operation of a totally different kind from that of the saints. Theirs was but the continuation and application of a sufficient redemption already accomplished, while hers was a condition requisite to the accomplishment of that redemption. One was a mere consequence of an event, which the other actually secured, and which only became an event by means of it. Hence it was more real, more present, more intimate, more personal, and with somewhat of the nature of a cause in it, which cannot in any way be predicated of the co-operation of the saints. And all this is true of the co-operation of Mary, without any reference to » the dolours at all,
But her dolours were of themselves another cooperation still more peculiar. The Incarnation might have taken place without its sorrowful mysteries. Indeed, if there had been no sin, it would have taken place in glorious and impassible Flesh, and of the same Mother with a different destiny, a destiny of joy as marvellous and inexplicable as was in fact her destiny of sorrow. The joys of Mary are like flashes from some other set of divine decrees, which was not wholly overlaid by the present dispensation. This is their peculiarity. They are tokens of a mystery existing in the mind of God, but which to us is no more than a possible world, or rather a world which our sin would not allow to realize itself. Thus it is impossible to separate the dolours of Mary from. her divine Maternity. They follow from it in the way of consequence as necessarily as in the free divine counsels the Incarnation of shame and suffering followed from the necessity of expiating sin. Her sorrows were caused by and inextricably commingled with His sorrows. They came from the same source; they led into the same depths; they were connected with the same circumstances. The two sorrows were but one sorrow afflicting two hearts. Besides this, as we shall see afterwards, there were many peculiar points, not only of striking resemblance, but of actual union between her dolours and His. Yet, though we cannot separate her dolours from her Maternity in fact, her Maternity is quite conceivable without her dolours, and its peculiar co-operation with our Lord in the redemption of the world depends on other things than the dolours, things to which the dolours are by no means indispensable. So in like manner, or rather as a consequence, the co-operation of her dolours was a distinct co-operation from that of her Maternity, and has a character of its own.
Thus Mary has three distinct rights to the title of eo-redemptress. She has a right to it, first of all, because of her co-operation with our Lord in the same sense as the saints, but in a singular and superlative degree. She has a second right to it, which is peculiar to herself, because of the indispensable co-operation of
= Lees 0 her Maternity. She has a third right to it, because of her dolours, for reasons we shall see presently. These last two rights are unshared by any other creature, or by all creatures collectively. They belong to the incomparable magnificence of the Mother of God.
It has been our privilege, more than once during the course of this enquiry into our Lady’s dolours, to ascend some fresh height from which a new view of her grandeur has presented itself to us, Like the great summits in the mountain ranges of Alps, Andes, or Himalay, each new aspect of Mary’s glory looks grander than the others. In truth it is with her greatness as well as the greatness of sublime mountain scenery; we cannot carry its magnitude away with us in our minds. We see it, and appreciate it, while we are actually gazing on it: but when we turn away, the image of it in our minds is less than the reality. So, when we see the mountain again, from whichever side we get the view, it looks larger than it did before, because it is larger than our remembrance of it. So is it with our Blessed Lady. The momént we cease to rest our eye upon her in deep meditation, our idea of her is less than it ought to be. We never do her justice except when we gaze upon her. Perhaps it is so with all God’s greatest works, as we know it is with God Himself. Hence it is that we so often hear objections to statements about the glory of Mary, coming even from pious believers. ‘Their eye is not on her, and therefore what is said is incredible to them. Nay, they are the more convinced that the statements are ex-_ aggerated, because they so far transcend the image of Mary which is impressed upon their minds. They be-— lieve more of her, and they believe it more readily, as her feasts come round, for then their eye is on her, and they conceive more justly of her vastness. In nothing is she more like God than in having to be thus learned in order to be understood, and in having to be kept before us in vision, because our memory is not wide enough to hold her vast proportions, when she is out of sight.
This co-operation of our Blessed Lady is, therefore, another summit from which we gain a fresh view of her magnificence. It is the grandest privilege of the creature to be a fellow-labourer with the Creator, just as it will be our home and blessedness to enjoy His everlasting sabbath. But what is to be said of cooperating with Him in such a work as the redemption of the world, and co-operating in it with such efficacy, intimacy, and reality, nay, with a co-operation simply indispensable to its accomplishment? What an idea does it convey to us of immeasurable holiness! What gifts and graces does it not presuppose! What maryellous union with God does it not imply! It is as if He vouchsafed to select the very things about Him which are most incommunicable, and in a most mysteriously real way communicate them to her. It is as if, in those things in which He stands alone and solitary, He drew her so nearly to Himself, that to us it should seem as if He was not solitary, because she was with Him. See how He had already mixed her up with the eternal designs of creation, making her almost a partial cause, and partial model of it. Yet this, while it accounts also for her share in the redemption, does not make her co-operation less wonderful. Divine works grow more wonderful in our eyes, as we discern more of their consistency and unity. No wonder then the saints should have sought to invent a word, a bold and startling word, which should express such an indes-eRe a ee Canes ee er aes ee
2 are een §.
USN L ONT AE Ie TALS CMO TS BIST OS PANE IER TSG MP IN Loo vs SO saa PRUE EE treo Seance RP Ocak ee eee LAT ee: (i ae, ada! ie Ly ima Let ea oh cribable grandeur in a creature, as is involved in this threefold co-operation of Mary in the redemption of the world. Our Lord had taken a created nature, in order that by its means He might accomplish that great work; so it seemed as if the highest honour and the closest union of a sinless creature with Himself should be expressed in the title of co-redemptress. In fact there is no other single word in which the truth could be expressed; and far off from His sole and sufficient redemption as Mary’s co-operation lies, her co-operation stands alone and aloof from all the co-operation of the elect of God. This, like some other prerogatives of our Blessed Lady, cannot have justice done it by the mere mention of it. We must make it our own by meditation before we can understand all that it involves. But neither the Immaculate Conception nor the Assumption will give us a higher idea of Mary’s exaltation, than this title of co-redemptress, when we have theologically ascertained its significance. Mary is vast on every side, and as our knowledge and appreciation of God grow, so also will grow our knowledge and appreciation of her His chosen creature. No one thinks unworthily of Mary, except because he thinks unworthily of God. Devotion to the Attributes of God ig the best school in which to learn the theology of Mary; and the reward of our study of Mary lies in a thousand new vistas that are opened to us in the Divine Perfections, into which except from her heights we never could have seen at all. What then is the place which our Lady’s Compassion holds in the purposes of God? This grandeur of co-operation in a great measure answers the question. Her dolours were not necessary for the redemption of the world, but in the counsels of God they were insepara-
Mal et ble from it. They belong to the integrity of the divine plan; and they doubtless perform many functions in it which we are unable to apprehend, and which perhaps we do not so much as suspect. According to God’s ordinance, without shedding of blood there is no remis~ sion for sin. One of our Lord’s infantine tears had enough in it of worth, of humiliation, of merit, and of satisfaction, to redeem the sins of all possible worlds, Yet as a matter of fact we were not redeemed by His tears, but only by His Blood. Hence Bethlehem was not necessary for our salvation, nor the worship of the three kings, nor the presentation in the temple, nor the flight into Egypt, nor the disputing with the doctors. Nazareth was not necessary for our salvation, with all the beautiful mysteries of those eighteen years of hidden life. The public ministry, with its three years of miracles, parables, sermons, conversions, and vocations of apostles, was not necessary to our salvation. Indeed our Lord might have suffered as a Child, or He might have come fullgrown like Adam, and simply suffered death at once. His Blood was all that was absolutely necessary. But Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee belonged to the integrity of the diyine plan. They were not only congruous, and beautiful, and significant, and full of teaching: but there are deeper mysteries in them, and a diviner reality, simply because God planned it so. All His works partake in their degree of His perfections: in what degree then must the mysteries of the Thirty-Three Years partake of His perfections? ‘The creation of the world was as nothing compared to the spiritual cosmogony of those Thirty-Three Years, except that it was the root of them. No one would dream of thinking lightly of the mysteries of our Blessed Lord’s Sacred Infancy, because we were not redeemed by them. They are part of a whole, a divine whole. We do not know what would have happened, or what we should have lost, and what eternal consequencés might have come, if they. had not been there. So it is with our Lady’s dolours, Her Maternity was indispensable to the Passion. Her dolours do not appear to be so. But they were an inevitable consequence of her Maternity under the circumstances of the Fall. They take their place among the Gospel mysteries. They rank with the mysteries of Bethlehem and Nazareth, not perhaps in their intrinsic importance, but in the relation in which they stand to the redemption of the world. Indeed we may be allowed to say that even in their intrinsic importance they might be compared with some of our Lord’s own mysteries. For is it quite clear that His mysteries and hers can be divided off in this way? Are not her mysteries His, and His mysteries hers? Is not the Immaculate Conception a glory of His redeeming grace? Is not her Purification as much His mystery as His own Presentation? And in the case of the dolours the union of the Mother and Son is greater than in any other mystery. He is Himself her one dolour seven times repeated, seven times changed, seven times magnified. In our belief the dolours of our Blessed Lady rank very high indeed among the divine mysteries, and have a more privileged precedence there than is commonly suspected. But, at any rate, so far as their relation to the redemption of the world is concerned, they are not further off from it than the unbloody mysteries of Jesus, and perhaps nearer, because of the immediateness of their connection. The truth appears to be, that all the mysteries of Jesus and Mary were in God’s design as one mystery: We cant not break it up, and divide, and parcel it out, and classify the importance of its various glories, This is a task beyond our science. Who can doubt, that it is true to say that many, who now are saved, would have been lost ‘except for Mary’s dolours; while yet her dolours do not bear the samé relation to us as the Passion of our Blessed Lord, even in their subordinate degree? The whole of the Three-and-Thirty Years, and the Hearts of Jesus and Mary in all the mysteries of those Years, are tinctured with the Passion: yet outside the Passion itself, where are the colours deeper, and the traits more lifelife, than in the Mother’s dolours? Mary’s Compassion was the Passion of Jesus, as it was felt and realized in His Mother’s Heart.
Is this then the whole account of the matter, that the Passion was necessary, and the Compassion unnecessary? Who would venture to say so? Who would dare to say that the Hidden Life of Nazareth was unnecessary? There is surely a very grave sense in which all the component parts of a divine work are necessary; for God is not such an artificer as man. If we are to rest simply on the doctrine that it was precisely blood-shedding by which our redemption was accomplished, then in the Passion itself were there not many things which were by no means - necessary? There were the mental agonies, the public shame, the varieties of corpora] torture, the insults, the lassitude, the thirst, the fear, the dereliction on the Cross. In that sense none of these things were necessary for our redemption. Even in the matter of Blood-shedding one drop would have sufficed; why was it all shed? Why the Sweat, the Scourging, the Crowning, the violent Unvesting, the Piercing after death? The profusion of the infinite was surely unnecessary, in our sense of that word. Now these are precisely the mys-teries among which we ought to rank the dolours of Mary. They belong to the class of what we call the Unnecessary Sufferings of the Passion.* Indeed they were literally our Lord’s own Unnecessary Sufferings; for were not her sorrows by far the most cruel instruments of His Passion? Her co-operation with the Passion by means of her dolours is wanting certainly in that indispensable necessity which characterizes the co-operation of her Maternity, But it far more than compensates for that by the heroic detailed endurance of such griefs, the everflowing fountain of freewill and promptitude, the unmingled and disinterested suffering, and its immediate contact with the Cross of Christ, which distinguishes it. In her Maternity she had joy as well as sorrow, and an unexampled dignity. Her consent to it was given once for all; and the co-operation of her Motherhood with the Passion was rather material than formal. This second co-operation of her dolours had more of herself in it and more similitude to her Son; it cost her more, and the very absence of necessity. for it made the sacrifice the more generous and wonderful. Her Maternity had to. do with the Incarnation as the Incarnation: her dolours with the Incarnation as it was redemption also.
Section II. The Nature of her Compassion
Having thus considered the divine purpose of Mary’s Compassion, as far as it is in our power to do so, we may now pass to our second question, the nature
« For an account of these sufferings see the Second Chapter of the Author's Treatise on the Passion, now preparing for publication.
and characteristics of her Compassion, What do we mean by the word Compassion? All sorrow for our Lord’s Passion is compassion with Him. The contemplations of the saints, their painful extasies, their stigmata and thorny crowns, the engraving of the emblems of the Passion on the flesh of their hearts, and the miraculous inward sympathies with the Passion in their souls, are all but so many forms of Compassion, in the theological sense of the word. In like manner the tears and prayers and devout meditations of common Christians, the penances of Holy Week both among. seculars and religious, the frequency of making the Stations or joining in other devotions to the Passion, are also Compassion, in the same strict sense. Hence it would appear that all sorrow of which the Passion is the cause, all sorrow which is the echo of the Passion in our hearts, no matter whether this sorrow takes the form of prayer, of penance, or of merciful deeds to others, is what we mean by Compassion.
It isa great part, and truly an indispensable part, of the deep inward life of every believer. The more holy the heart in which it exists, the closer is its union with the life-giving Passion of our Lord. The intimacy and mystical beauty of this union depend on the vigour of the operations of grace, on the intensity of the will in identifying itself with the will of our
Saviour, on the absence of all sin and self-seeking to mar the completeness of the union or retard the processes of grace, and finally onthe tenderness of heart and the self-oblivion of extatic love which accompany it. Now in all these respects our Lady’s Compassion is beyond all comparison with the Compassion of the saints, so far beyond it that we may use the word Compassion of her companionship in the Passion, and use other and commoner words for the union of the saints with the sufferings of our Lord.
But as in the matter of co-operation, our Lady not only co-operated with Jesus in the same sense as the saints, only in a superlative degree, but also co-operated more intimately with Him in ways the saints could not share, so is it with her Compassion. It was actually contemporaneous with the Passion, and took place in © the presence of the Passion, Indeed it is remarkable that all our Lady’s dolours are compressed within the Thirty-Three Years. None fell in the fifteen years pefore, none fell in the fifteen years after. They came from the presence of Jesus. They were the very contact of His Heart with hers, The actual presence of our Lady’s Compassion at the time and place of the Passion gives it a union therewith, which no other sorrow for our Lord can share. It was part of the living mystery itself. It was not the gradual result of long meditation. It was not a sorrow felt in the calm seclusion of the undistracted cloister, or a pious emotion roused by the marvellous ceremonial of a believing Church. It did not come from literature, or ritual, or history, or private revelation, or mysticism, or art, or poetry: but from the sights and sounds of the very Passion, in which it was immersed, and of which it formed an integral portion. It was part of our Blessed. Mother’s life. It was a series of events which happened to herself, outward sorrows of her own making these inward wounds. She had distinct rights, by which she was entitled to share in the Passion. It needed not to be trans-_ ferred to her by grace, or love, or participation, or the power of faith. It was hers already as a mother, She suffered it in all the rawness and dishonour of its existing reality. She was in the crowd; she was jostled in it, and derided by it; she was distracted by the tumult; her inward tranquillity was assailed by the agitation and horror of the senses, All this is true of her Compassion, and of hers only.
Moreover her Compassion was part of the Passion, in the sense of having actually increased the Passion, With Judas and Annas and Caiaphas, with Pilate and Herod, with the Roman soldiers and the Jewish rabble, we must reckon Mary among those who wrung our Saviour’s Heart with sorrow. Except the dereliction of His Father, we may well suppose that there was no pain in all His Passion equal to that which the vision of His Mother’s broken heart supplied. Thus her Compassion was an integral part of His sufferings. Beautiful as it was, and exceedingly holy, a very worship in itself, and avery growth of heaven, to Him it was simple anguish. Intensely as He loved each soul of man, and therefore loved all souls collectively with an amount of burning desire which bewilders our conjectures, the single soul of His Mother was with Him an object of amazing love far beyond what He felt for all other creatures together. To see her therefore tempest-tossed on a dark ocean of unutterable woe was of itself a fearful torture to Him; but that woe was caused by Himself; it was being poured out of His soul into hers each separate moment, at each separate shame, pain, outrage, and indignity. It was He who was stretching her on the rack, He who was turning the instruments of her torture perpetually beyond the limits of human endurance, He who was thickening the inconsolable darkness round about her. It was He only who was doing all this, Without Him she would have had no dolours. It was her embrace of Him that was oe eae
RTS IM Uitte ST END EL Sabad), 0 LG E aN pe Py TER Ye RANE age Sint tee EM Ne eee ae oe en nates ge en at ss casement PAN Nh Sle ARSE Aa ans er ik 9 a ONS Sree ioaces Ueno 4 eri pa ‘ 1%, uly Deh actos See ee Mat Tee eee PA ES bah i Ae he her agony. He was a fiery sharp-edged cross to the heart He loved best of all, Then all the incalculable bitterness that He had poured out of Himself into her, He took back into Himself without taking it away from her. It re-entered His Sacred Heart as another separate Passion, another great creation of sorrow by itself, and overwhelmed Him with a very deluge of tempestuous grief. Thus her Compassion came out of the Passion, and went into it again, so that there was rather an identity between the two, than a union of them. Her Compassion was the Passion taking a particular form. Her words to St. Bridget express this;2 **The sorrow of Christ was my sorrow, because His Heart was my heart. For, as Adam and Eve sold the world for one apple, my Son and I redeemed the world with one heart.”’
. From the Compassion of Mary being contemporaneous with the Passion, and indeed an integral part of it, there flowed into it the character of sacrifice and expiation which belonged to the Passion, and this in a degree and after a kind which does not belong to the sorrows of the saints. As the Passion was the sacrifice which Christ made upon the Cross, so the Compassion was the sacrifice of Mary beneath the Cross. It was her offering to the Eternal Father. It was an offering made by a sinless creature for the sins of her fellow-creatures. Their gain was her loss. The lightening of their hearts was the burdening of hers. Her darkness was their light. Their peace was her agony. Her Son was their victim. Their life was her tre-. mendous martyrdom, Her offering rose to heaven | together with the offering of Jesus. They were as two grains of incense on the burning coals of one thurible. a
With various fragrance they rose up to the throne in the same thin circles of blue smoke, perceptibly different, yet utterly inseparable. When the sound of the scourging went up to heaven, the smothered sighs of Mary’s bursting heart went up with it. When the Barabbas of the multitude rang fiercely in the hollow vaulted sky, the agony of Mary went floating up, sweet music mid the fierce clamour, to the Father’s ear. With the dull knockings of the hammer, the beatings of her heart went up and Jay down at the foot of the throne, and did not pass unheeded. Her voiceless aspirations flew upward in equal flight with the seven words which Jesus uttered on the Cross. His loud ery at the end was heard twice in heaven, the second time as it echoed thither out of Mary’s heart. Thus, during those hours of the Passion, each oblation was a double one; the offering of Jesus and the offering of Mary were tied in one. They kept pace together; they were made of the same materials; they were perfumed with kindred fragrance; they were lighted with the same fire; they were offered with kindred dispositions. Thus there is a sacrificial and expiatory character in Mary’s Compassion which is peculiar to itself. The world was redeemed by the Passion of our Lord. But there never was, in the ordinance of God, such a thing as a Passion of Jesus disjoined from the Compassion of Mary. The two things were one simultaneous oblation, interwoven each moment through the thickly crowded mysteries of that dread time, unto the Eternal Father, out of two sinless Hearts, that were the Hearts of Son and Mother, for the sins of a guilty world which fell on them contrary to their merits, but according to their own free will, Never was any sanctified sorrow of creatures so 30 confused and commingled with the world-redeeming sorrow of Jesus, as was the Compassion of His Mother.
Furthermore, the Compassion of Mary was an example to the whole Church. It is part of the teaching of the four Gospels. It performs a function for all ages of the world. It is a continual source of holiness in the midst of each generation of the faithful. It is a living, grace-diffusing power among the children of God. It actually leads multitudes of souls to Jesus. It breaks the bonds of sin and evil habits. It melts cold hearts, and stimulates the lukewarm affections of the torpid and the worldly. It pours light, and tenderness, and a spirit of prayer, and a love of suffering, and a thirst for penance, into countless souls, between the sunrise and sunset of each day, and in the whole breadth of the world from pole to pole, It models saints; it animates religious orders; it is the type of a special spiritual life to individual souls. It rises up to heaven like an endless angelic song. Everywhere in the Church there is a sound of it. Out of seven deep places it echoes everlastingly. Time and space have nothing to do with it. Simeon still prophecies, and we hear it, and a lifelong sadness runs thenceforth along-side of our perseverance in the ways of grace. Still Mary flies with Jesus into Egypt, and dwells — there, and the Nile lapses by, and the shadows in our souls are the substances of grace. Still for three days does the childless Mother wander with darkened spirit, seeking for her Child, and finding Him at last in the temple. Still is she meeting Him again and again with | the heavy Cross upon His shoulders, and we the while meeting Him in her. Still is she at the foot of the Cross, alluring all her children to her. Still is she at the Deposition from the Cross, and at the burial, acting over again and again those pathetic mysteries in the new hearts which the children of each generation give her. ‘Thus her compassion is not merely her own. It authoritatively and authentically represented the whole Church on Calvary. She was present at the Passion, as it were officially, and in a double capacity, as co-operating with the Redeemer, and as representing the redeemed.
The Compassion of our Lady may also be regarded in a twofold point of view, according as we consider our Lord as God, or as Man. As God, His Divine Nature was fearfully outraged by the Passion. Not all the sins of the world put together so dreadfully and sacrilegiously violated the glory of God, as that particular sin out of which He worked the redemption of the world. Never did the disloyalty of a rebellious creation make so deep an impression upon the divine honour, or seem so inexpressibly to endanger the sovereignty of God. This is a view of the Passion, which we must never losesight of. It needed another Passion to expiate itself. It needed a second Passion to make reparation to God for the first. Mary’s Compassion occupies this place. The sin produced a double Passion, one in Jesus and one in Mary; but it produced it without double sin, So that her Compassion needed no expiation; though, had it done so, there was expiation enough in the Passion to satisfy for itself and for her Compassion, But she stood at the foot of the Cross as the minister of God’s glory. Her sorrows, even while they are fresh sorrows to Him, were also the nearest approach to a perfect reparation which creatures could make. We have seen in the preceding chapters that reparation is an essential element in all holiness. Now if the collective sanctity of all the apostles, martyrs, confessors, and virgins through all time had dedicated itself, on the earth until the day of judgment, to the sole work of making reparation for His Passion, (and, rightly considered, the whole action of His Church is in effect reparation for the Passion,) it could not by the end of the world have produced a reparation anything like so complete as the Compassion of Mary. It exceeded in efficacious holiness all other reparation. It was offered to our Lord’s Divine Nature instantaneously, indeed simultaneously with the outrage, and almost co-extensively with its excess. It came from His own Mother, which added to it an incomparable acceptableness. It fitted His Passion in kind, fashion, method, and degree, as nothing else could fit it. Lastly, it drew its efficacy, not merely or so much from its own intrinsic worth, as from its real and vital union with His Passion, Mary’s Compassion was the reparation she made to her Son as God,
If Mary at the foot of the Cross was the minister of our Lord’s glory as God, she was no less the minister of His Sacred Humanity. Ina merely human point of view, we might be surprised at Mary’s presence upon Calvary. It was not the fitting place for a mother, the scaffold of her Son; and her Son, we might have expected, would have spared her the agony. But she was the minister of the Incarnation. She was His sole human parent. She represented in herself the human obedience under which the Incarnate Word had lived, and which was, as the Apostle has remarked, to characterize His death as perfectly as it had modelled His life. He had waited for her consent, before He took flesh of her. When He had inflicted her worst sorrow on her by leaving her at the age of twelve, He also in ‘the same mystery especially showed forth His obedience to her in returning to Nazareth for eighteen years. He began His miracles at her suggestion. He had her permission for His public ministry. He had vouchsafed to ask her leave and blessing for His Passion, Perhaps His Heart may have silently asked her heart leave to die. From the first, Jesus and Mary had never been separated. It seems to have been a sort of law of the Incarnation that they should be together. Her As. sumption, Coronation, and Mediatorial Throne, would be but the final instances of the operation of this law. Now that God has let us see the Thirty-Three-Years in their perfection as a whole, we perceive that the absence of Mary from Calvary would have offended our Christian instincts as much as her absence from Bethlehem, or Nazareth. She was the minister of the Incarnation: it all lies in that. She had no more right to come down from Calvary, than a priest would have to leave the altar in the midst of the Sacrifice of the Mass. There would have been an incongruity in it. On one twenty-fifth of March she had given Him His Precious Blood; on another twenty-fifth of March she must minister at the shedding of it. She must swathe the Man as she had swathed the Child. She must lay Him in the tomb, who had already laid Him in the manger. She must preside at the end as she had presided at the beginning. There must be an overshadowing of the Holy Ghost at the last, as there had been one at the first. As she had waited fifteen years for His coming, she must wait fifteen years after His departure. Her priesthood consisted in this continuity of ministry to Him. Her Maternity was not to Him a mere means, occasion, instrument, or access, but an enduring ministry under which His obedience was consummated. Mary’s Maternity was her Compassion at Bethlehem; Mary’s Compassion was her Maternity at Calvary.
Section III. The Actual Effects of her Compassion
We are now in a condition to enquire, thirdly, into the actual effects of Mary’s Compassion, These may be classed under three heads, inasmuch as her Compassion was itself part of the Passion, as it fitted her for her office in the Church, and as it regarded her co-operation in the work of redemption. Yet, although these three things may be conceived of as separate, they are in reality so intertwined that, in classifying them apart, we run the risk of falling into some repetition, a risk however which, for the sake of clearness, it is worth while to incur,
As it was a part of our Lord’s Passion, Mary’s Compassion has a share in the effects which the Passion produced, in the same sense, though of course in a far lower degree, in which His dereliction by the Father assisted in producing the results of the Passion. This is but a material co-operation; yet as it is a fact, it serves to show the reality of the Compassion, and the existence of a purpose in it as part of the divine plan. Its effects upon our Blessed Lord were so terrible, that it seems probable the agony it caused Him would have put an end to His life, if His Divinity had not miraculously sustained Him in order that He might suffer more, Our Lady revealed to St. Bridget, that when Jesus saw the bitterness of her grief, He was so affected by it Himself that He became comparatively insensible to the pain of all His wounds, because of the much greater pain which the sight of her sorrow caused
Him.3 St. Bernard calls His vision of her grief “an inexplicable woe, an ineffable reciprocation of holy love.’ Thus her Compassion was not only an intrinsic part of the Passion, but among its chief and most efficacious elements. Moreover her dolours alone approached, after the Father’s abandonment, to satisfy that thirst of suffering, which the immense love of Jesus still felt, even while He was hanging on the Cross, and this was in itself one of their most remarkabie functions. All this is very obvious. Nevertheless we hardly do our Lady’s dolours justice, as divine mysteries, from our habit of regarding them too exclusively as her sorrows, and not as His sorrows also, and perhaps more His than hers, We have already expressed a doubt whether we can, without peril of inaccuracy and misapprehension, divide our Lady’s mysteries from our Lord’s. For the whole spirit of the Gospel narrative, as well as the action of what is apparently a great law of the Incarnation, seems to bring Jesus and Mary together, and make them inseparable, Now, if we detach her mysteries from His, or look at her for a moment as apart from Him and possessing anything independently of Him, we run one of two risks. Either we shrink from the language and views of the great saints and doctors of the Church, because we have already in our own minds made Mary into some kind of gigantic saint, instead of the Divine Mother, the ‘‘Woman clothed with the Sun,’’ in the Apocalypse, and so, looking at her standing by herself, we dare not use of her the almost godlike words which are common with the saints; or the authority of the saints over-rules us to use their language, and to force ourselves into their beliefs without understanding them, and so we may come to attribute to our Lady by herself what only belongs to our Lord, and thus we disturb the analogy of the faith, and bring devotion to our Blessed Mother into discredit by what is manifestly an exaggeration, as well as an infringing of the honour of our Lord.
In a certain sense the saints may stand alone, with their own individual characters. Mary cannot do so, She is too near God todo so. If there be a peculiar kind of saint with a marked character and a recognizable individuality of her own, whose name is Mary, hidden under the Divine Maternity, lurking as it were at the bottom of the mysteries of Bethlehem, Nazareth,:
and Calvary, it is at least indistinguishable to us, because of the excess of that light of the Eternal Sun in which she is all arrayed. It is not in our power to detach it from the Divine Maternity. It never works its way to the surface. If it exists, it is known to God only. If we are ever to know it, it must be by the light of the Beatific Vision, and not here or now, ‘To us she must be simply the Mother of God, not more like John than she was like Peter, not bearing a greater resemblance to St. Francis than to St. Dominic, to St. Teresa than to St. Catherine of Siena, to St. Philip than to St. Ignatius. We cannot look at her both as a saint and as the Mother of God. If we attempt to do so, one or other of the two characters will suffer. The inevitable result will be a lowering of her from the heights upon which the great doctors of the Church were wont to contemplate her grandeur, a grandeur which is not only solitary, but incomparable and incommunicable. They never looked at her as apart from Jesus. To their eyes she was blended with Him; and what she possessed, she possessed in common with ae a ee eee ee
Him. She was filled with His light, clothed with His magnificence, and as it were imbedded in the mystery of the Incarnation. The very thing which startles us about her, and which made St. Denys say he doubted for a moment if she was not a God, is that similarity to God which she appears to receive from the Divine
Nature of her Son, in return for that Human Nature which she ministered to Him. This has always been to me the most noticeable thing about her, her likeness to the Word as God, who is so like her as Man.
It is this very privilege of the Divine Maternity, which seems at times to raise her above the sphere of the
Incarnation, and place her in such an unspeakable vicinity to the invisible God. The saints appear to have looked at Mary as a created person and nature, on which all the communicable splendour of God Himself was laid which a mere creature could within the limits of the divine economy, be enabled to bear. Hence they looked at her so completely as she was in God, in the lap of His divine magnificence, that they did not shrink from using language of her, which cannot fail to be misunderstood by those who contemplate her from a different point of view. It is very important to bear this in mind. For at first sight those who love our
Lady feel a kind of sorrow at the apparent denial to her of an individual character, which should be distinctive and her own, It seems to put her at a distance from them, and so to be unloving. But a little more reflection will show them in what devotional, as well as theological difficulties, the other view cannot fail of ultimately entangling them.
With regard to the dolours, however, there can be no question of their being simply unintelligible, if we. view Mary in them as apart from Jesus. Whatever may be said of other mysteries, these are undeniably His as much as they arehers. Neither shall we ever attain to a right view of them, unless we regard them as sorrows in His Heart, as well as sorrows in hers; and thereby as helping to effect the Passion, and having in the Passion a very prominent and peculiar place assigned to them. Mary’s Compassion was the way in which her Maternity was concerned with the Passion.
Her Compassion had also the effect of fitting her for her offices of Mother of Men, Queen of mercy, and Refuge of Sinners. As we have said in the first chapter, she acquired what look like rights by her dolours. They were voluntary heroic sacrifices over and above the absolutely indispensable sacrifices which the Divine Maternity entailed upon her. Jesus was as it were indebted to her for them. Jt was in them that the glorious empire over the Sacred Heart, which she exercises this day in heaven, was chartered and tock deepest root. It was in them that her almost identity with Jesus attained its highest point and most indistinguishable union. Neither can we doubt that her endurance of such fearful and at the same time such varied sorrow enlarged her heart, and rendered her more capable than she would otherwise have been of sympathizing with the sorrows of humanity. The saints learn much from sin. Apostolic zeal and charity have roots in the experience of sin as well as in the pure love of God. From all such learning our Blessed Mother was absolutely precluded. Sorrow therefore had to teach her what sin was not allowed to teach. No science of the malice of sin or of the necessity of grace could make her feel that loss of Jesus, which is sin’s primest unhappiness, as the Three Days’ Loss taught it to her, Her intercession also derives an immense power of impetration, as well as a more impressive reality, from her experience of sorrow, and the union of her sorrows with those of Jesus. Even if we look at her dolours simply as enormous accumulations of merit, they assume a considerable importance in reference to her offices towards us. There can hardly be a shade of human sorrow which is not familiar to her heart. The manifold inventions of grief are known to her. ‘The secrets of its alliance with grace, as well as its tendencies to conspire with the unworthy weaknesses of our nature, are no secrets to her. She, who is to be the prophetess of a sorrowing race, is by her own experience the grand doctress in the science of sorrow. Her Compassion also gives to her yearning to increase the harvest of the Passion an intensity, like to the blessed excesses of the Sacred Heart for souls, which perhaps she could not have had without it. Indeed her sorrows upon Calvary were the very birth-throes in which all men were born as Mary’s children, and thus her Compassion was not merely a fitness to be our Mother, but her very delivery of us as her children. In like manner as it was in her Compassion that we were born to her, so in her Compassion do we reach that wide and deep foundation on which our filial confidence may be built. Were our dearest Mother only the bright glad marvel she would be with her Immaculate Conception, her Divine Maternity, and her glorious Assumption, we should not trust her as we trust the broken-hearted Mother beneath the Cross. She would seem further off from us. We should feel towards her with feelings akin to those with which we regard the angels, full of love and worship, of tenderness and reverence, of wonder and congratulations, of holy envy and desire of union with them. We should not feel, as we do now, that she belongs to us, is near to us, and is our real Mother. It is the Compassion, which throws this filial character over our devotion to the mighty Mother of God. But this is not all. As it was in her Compassion that we were born to her, as it is in her Compassion that we find our motives for filial confidence in her during life, so it was in her Compassion that we gained our right to die in her maternal arms. For it was then that she herself received the right of the patronage of death-beds, because of her attendance at the death-bed of our Lord; and her ministry to us, as to Him, in the hour of death is part of her office upon which the Church dwells most strongly by naming it in the Ave Maria. Thus is her Compassion inseparably bound up in the manifold offices of mercy, which by the ordinance of God Mary discharges to us.
The third effect of Mary’s Compassion is her cooperation with Jesus in the redemption of the world, We have already spoken of this, but somewhat more yet remains to be said. ‘The co-operation of Mary has sundry characteristics of which we must not lose sight, in considering the question. It was the co-operation of a sinless creature with the Incarnate Creator in redeeming the world from sin. She had no sin of her own, and yet she suffered, and moreover suffered for sin, This at once distinguishes her co-operation from that of the saints who had sinned, and the angels who could not suffer. It is peculiar to herself. Besides this, her Compassion was, as we have said, one simultaneous and indeed identical sacrifice with His; so that one of the older theologians has said, “The will of Christ and Mary was altogether one, and their holocaust one; both offered alike to God, He in tie Blood of His
—— ee ee ee ee
PS Te ie et ee
Flesh, she in the blood of her heart.”4 Hence her satisfactions have a place with His in the treasury of the Church, which does not belong to the satisfactions of the saints. ‘They are more Christlike, as well as more abundant and more precious. When we offer our Blessed Lord to the Father, we are offering what is not in any proper sense ours to offer. It is only ours by the artifices of grace and the ingenuities of the communion of saints. They make it really ours in a Christian sense, a supernatural sense. But Jesus belonged to Mary, and was obedient to her, in quite a different sense. She had a right to offer Him, in which we cannot share. While our spiritual offerings cost us nothing, hers cost her a broken heart, She impoverished herself to enrich us. Moreover by offering Jesus to the Father, she did more than all creation put together could do to make reparation to His ever-blessed majesty which sin had outraged. All angels and all saints must fall no less short than infinitely short of what she did: because her offering was infinite. Consequently it made ample reparation, a reparation worthy of God and equal to God, because what she offered was the Incarnate God, who was likewise her obedient and loving Son. When Mary had made her offering, not a vestige of the outrage of sin remained upon the glory of the Creator. All wound was healed, all void filled up, all darkness illumined, if we may dare to use human words of such a mystery, inadequate as they must necessarily be. Nay this was not all,—by Mary’s offering, which was her own and which she had a right to make, a very world of glory encompassed the throne of God, which He would not have had perhaps, if sin had never been. Sin became as it were an immensity of new matter, out of which the sacrifice of Jesus and the offering of Mary evoked a fresh world cf glory, vaster than all material worlds, for the Majesty of the Most High. Even this is not enough. Mary went into the sacrifice yet deeper. She became a living crucified part of it. Her dolours, next to the dereliction of the Father, were the deepest, the bitterest, and the most extensive part of our Saviour’s Passion, and therefore co-operated, with the Divine Abandonment and the sinful cruelty of men, in enabling Jesus to offer to the Father that magnificent and super-sufficient satisfaction, which there was in the sacrifice of the Cross, These were the marvellous effects of her Compassion. We almost tremble to write of them, because we know so well how, through spiritual blindness and want of a truer love of our dearest Mother, we are stating them far below the splendour of their reality.
Section IV. Our Compassion with her Compassion
We have now to speak of our compassion with Mary as an imitation of her Compassion with Jesus, or, in other words, of our compassion with her as itself a worship of Jesus and a true compassion with Him. = First of all, devotion to the dolours of our Blessed Lady is most acceptable to our Lord Himself, We quoted in the first chapter His revelation to the Blessed Veronica of Binasco, in which He told her that tears shed over [is Mother’s sorrows were more precious in His sight than tears shed in memory of His own. We may perhaps venture to explain this as teaching us, what appears to be certainly true in
THE COMPASSION OF MARY, 479 itself, that devotion to the seven dolours brings with it by a kind of necessity devotion to the Passion, whereas devotion to the Passion does not seem so necessarily to include devotion to the dolours, Devotion to the Passion, in which the right place and participation are not assigned to Mary, is not a scriptural devotion; and in many ways, which it would be out of place to enter upon here, it betokens an imperfect and unworthy view of the Passion itself. Yet it isnot uncommon to meet with this partial devotion, and it rather tends to keep devotion to the dolours at arms’ length than to lead to it. It is based upon that untheological mistake, which some deceive themselves into thinking a theological nicety and a controversial felicity, namely, a sort of jealous ignorant accuracy in keeping Jesus and Mary apart, and not letting one intrude on the sphere of the other, as if to speak as slightingly as they dare of the Mother of God would make truth more attractive in the eyes of a misbelieving world, to which the incredible abasement of Jesus in His Sacrament is already a far greater stumbling-block than the incredible exaltation of His Mother. On the other hand we see that devotion to the dolours brings with it as its invariable practical result a deep, tender, accurate, minute, and reverential devotion to the Passion. Again, we may venture to read in our Lord’s words a loving intent to have reparation made to Mary for her Compassion, just as her Compassion was the grand reparation of His Passion. By inspiring saints and religious orders with this devotion, and sending forth His mighty grace and efficacious blessing to accompany it, He repays her for the beautiful reparation of her Compassion. But whatever other meanings there may be in this revelation to the Blessed
Veronica, and although its force as a revelation was, as in all private revelations, intended for herself, it proves at least as much as this, that the devotion to our Lady’s dolours is one of peculiar acceptableness in the eyes of our Blessed Saviour.
This devotion has also a remarkable connection with great interior holiness. This is proved by experience. Neither is it to be wondered at. For it is a devotion which naturally makes us unworldly, because we live and breathe in an atmosphere of sorrow. It brings out the unreality of worldly joys. It subers our thoughts. It keeps them close to Jesus Christ, and to Him crucified. It communicates to our souls the spirit of the Cross; and the enviable gift of love of suffering full often begins in a prayerful familiarity with the sorrows of our Blessed Mother. More than most devotions it tends to supernaturalize the mind, because it keeps us in a sphere of heavenly beauty, whose look and odour gradually pass upon ourselves. It is a sphere in which the most wonderful divine operations mingle with the common woes and sorrows of a suffering world, and so it expresses that union of self-abasement and self-oblivion in which all the greater graces of the spiritual life take root. Moreover the prevailing ideas to which it weds our minds are just those which are the most solid and essential in any persevering endeavours after holiness. For it unites us to an abiding sorrow for sin, sin which caused Mary’s sorrow, sin which caused the sorrow over which Mary sorrowed, sin of our own which was actually present and influential in both those sorrows, wronging at once the Mother and the Son. It equally unites us to the perpetual sense of needing grace, of absolute dependence upon grace, and of that ready abundance of grace on which our filial confidence ea le ALE Be Chas DT pti Wat” 5. i RETA EDEN eS bcd nae Nena i Bhat ic slat fae ed nS a SERRE C has oT} eal ak eee so sires Se aco A reposes. It is all stained with the Precious Blood; and thus it puts us into the very depths of our Saviour’s Sacred Heart. There is no soul, which worldliness finds it harder to attack, than one which is entrenched within the dolours of our Blessed Lady. There is nothing which the world can graft itself upon in that devotion. ‘There is nothing congenial to the spirit and way of the world in it, nothing even which the world can falsify for its own ends or fraudulently divert for its own purposes. Moreover it was in the dolours that the grandeurs of Mary’s sanctity were fabricated, and fabricated out of materials which in their degree are common to every one of us her sons and daughters, It is hard to live in the bosom of great examples, and be uninfluenced by them, The lessons which the dolours teach us are wanted at almost every turn of life, and are ‘most appropriate to the very seasons when grace is wont to be most active in us; and they are imparted with such loving tenderness, with such pathetic simplicity, and in the midst of such countless similitudes between our sinless Mother and our sinful selves, that it is difficult to conceive of a school in which so much heavenly wisdom is taught so winningly as in the Compassion of Mary.
Furthermore, this devotion to the dolours of Mary is reckoned by theologians among the signs of predestination. Certainly a special attraction of grace is a sweet prophecy of our final perseverance; and it is by a special attraction of grace that we addict ourselves to this devotion. Perhaps our Lord’s revelation to St. John the Evangelist, cited in the first chapter, of the four graces which it was His blessed will to attach to this devotion, one of which concerned the gift of perfect contrition before death, and another our Lady’s protection in the hour of death, may have led to its © being included in the catalogue of signs of predestination. For sorrow for sin is well-nigh the queen of graces; inclosing as it does within itself the grace and more than the grace of sacraments, Contrition is nearest of kin to perseverance, and the promise of our Lady’s assistance at the hour of death is not far removed from an assurance of our salvation, Cartagena says,5 “A man may put before himself as the most assured sign of predestination, the fact that he has had compassion for this most afilicted Mother; for the ancients tell us that it was conceded to the Blessed Virgin by Christ the Lord, that whoever should reyolve in his mind her maternal dolours, might be sure of impetrating any favour which concerned the salvation of his soul, and especially the grace of true penance for his sins before death.”
Thus also devotion to the dolours is one of the best preparations for death, not only because of the precise graces promised to it in the hour of death, but also because it concerns our Lady’s ministry to our Lord at the hour of His blessed death. Hence there is a congruity between this devotion and death. And after all what should life be but a preparation for death? And what graces should more attract our humility than those which promise us their succour in that tremendous hour? Alas! it is not for such as we are to look forward to death with triumph, or even with impatience. We are not saints. Triumph therefore would be unseemly in us, and impatience is surely | premature. It is enough for us, in our low attainments, to be content to die, and to fear bravely that which we are contented to endure. Fine words are easy, and love is very profuse of them, when we are not tempted, and when God is flooding us with that inward sweetness which gives us such a facility in prayer. But when we are tempted, we grow silent; and when to our temptation is added spiritual dryness, querulousness and peevishness are added to our silence. We are soon prostrated; and we learn thereby the good lesson of our own real inward misery and helplessness. But if dryness and temptation bring such changes, what will death bring? It will bring such an unutterable, speechless, terrified, agonizing necessity of grace as it is appalling to think of, when we bend our thoughts seriously to it. What will a devotion be worth to us then, which has two special death-bed promises attached to it? Gold and pearls could not reckon its price. But the devotion must have been a life-time devotion in order legally to inherit the death-bed promises.
It is unnecessary to speak of the authority of the Church, of the liberality of her indulgences, of the examples of the saints, or of the records of numberless conversions, all attesting the power and acceptableness of this devotion, They have already occupied our attention in the first chapter. But we must not forget that our Blessed Lady has a special claim upon our devotion to her dolours. It is part of the duty of sons to their mother to compassionate her in her trials and sorrows, of whatever nature they may be, or from whatever cause they may spring. But this is very far short of our duty towards the sorrows of Mary. We ourselves were part of them. We were the causes of her suffering. It was not only for our good that she suffered, but it was by our evil that she suffered, Hence there is no devotion to her, to which we are so bound as to her dolours. There is no expression of our love more fitting and indeed more imperative upon us, than compassion with her Compassion. It is the ‘ most inclusive of all devotions to her. It comprehends the greatest number of her mysteries. It keeps closest to her when she is in the closest union with Jesus. It goes deepest down into her immaculate ‘heart. It throws the strongest light on the summits of her Divine Maternity, and at the same time it is the special devotion of her Motherhood of us. It best satisfies our obligations to her, while it is most vividly kindling our love. It at once befits the necessities of our lowliness, and the splendours of her magnificence. Let us add to its perfection as a devotion to Mary, its perfection also as a devotion to Jesus, and the picture is complete. The highest devotion to our Blessed Lord is to possess ourselves of His spirit, to appreciate it, to welcome it, to feel in it, to act in it, to suffer in it, The more we can do and suffer all things in union with Him, the more excellently are we His disciples. We have to become Christians. It is the business of grace to ‘multiply all over the world copies and likenesses of the Incarnate Word, Union with Jesus is the shortest definition of holiness, and one which is equally applicable to all its numberless varieties. Now Mary is our model of this. The special grace of all devotions to Mary is union with Jesus. This is what they all teach. They not only teach it as a lesson, but they are the vehicle by which it is conveyed into our souls as a real predominant spirit, — a substantial transforming grace. She is inseparable from Jesus. Her spirit is the greatest possible communication of His. He is her meaning, her significance, her motive, her aim, her life. The action of
Jesus and Mary is as nearly one action, as a twofold action can be one. Jesus is our model; but we must copy Him as Mary copied Him. It is her office to teach us this, to be our model of imitation, We must © do all things in union with Mary, and then shall we best do them all in union with Jesus. But devotion to her dolours leads us most directly, most speedily, and most universally to do all things in union with her. For her sorrows were lifelong; they were the most constant of all her dispositions; they were the dispositions in which she was the most closely united with Jesus, and followed Him with the most minute and changeful fidelity through the mysteries of the Three-and-Thirty Years, Thus it comes to pass that devotion to her dolours leads us most directly, most speedily, and most universally to do all things in union with Jesus; and therefore it is the highest devotion to Him, the perfection of devotion to Jesus as well as the perfection of devotion to Mary. Thus our compassion with Mary partakes of the beauty, power, and blessing of her Compassion with Jesus, and is part of hers, as by hers it is won to Jesus, and by hers closed in His loving embrace, with the tenderest union of which we are capable, with our unspeakably tender and loving Lord.
Section V. The Passion and Compassion Compared
Our fifth point was to compare the Compassion and the Passion together. But a great deal of this has already been done by implication in the course of the preceding enquiries. The first point of similitude ig in its interior character. The mental sufferings of the Passion went far beyond its bodily tortures, not ig merely because anguish of heart is worse to bear than pain of body, but also because they were of a far more awful description, and because they were of longer duration. The inward agony, by which the shame and guilt of sin was expiated, was far more terrific than the blows and wounds and diversified atrocities which the cruelty of sinners could inflict upon the Body of Jesus, His inward pains were more numerous, more various, more vehement, burned deeper, and lasted longer. The abandonment of the Father and the weight of His angry justice were of course the most intolerable sufferings of the Passion, and both those were interior. Next to them we must rank the sorrows of Mary, and they chiefly affected Him inwardly. Sin, the third of His executioners, tortured His soul more than His Body. Thus, though our attention is naturally most drawn to His outward Passion, we shall never rightly conceive even of that, unless we remember that by far the greater portion of His Passion was interior. The visible Passion was but the tossing surface of an invisible deep. Mary’s Compassion also was interior, in her heart as well as His. It was drawn too from the same afflictive sources. It had passed through His Heart before it entered into hers. At the same time there is certainly a contrast in this respect as well as a similitude. For she had no outward Passion to correspond with His. Her interior agony was not of course without aching exhaustion of the frame, bitterest smarting and crushing of the fleshly heart, and intolerable burning of the brain. Her body suffered as well as her soul. It had to hold fire, and the fire burned it through and through. Nevertheless there was nothing at all to answer to the outward Passion of our Blessed Lord. Her outward Passion was the fifteen years of wearl-
Bay Bis aa SEA
EE ge er ee Re aa ee eee some suffering delay, which was her lot when He had ascended into heaven.
The Passion and the Compassion may also be compared together, in that each was the cause of the other. Both were causes, and both were effects. It was our Lord’s Passion which filled our Lady’s heart to the brim with bitterness; and it was our Lady’s Compassion which was one of the min ingredients in our Saviour’s Passion. Only our Lady’s Compassion was not co-extensive with the Passion, as its cause, while it was co-extensive with it as an effect, because it took it all in, embraced it, assimilated it to itself, and made it utterly its own, The contents of our Lady’s heart could not fill our Lord’s, but hers could hold the contents of His. The Mother crucified the Son, and the Son, crucified as He was, went and placed Himself with all the implements of His Passion in His Mother’s heart, making it large enough by breaking it. It was not only that each pain of the Passion was represented in her Compassion. It is most likely that she really felt it all, just as it was, not in all its intolerable reality, but in such dread reality at least as was according to the measure of her immense capabilities of suffering. The saints have felt it so, in their lesser measure, great in our eyes as that lesser measure was. They have been invisibly stigmatized, and they have been led in horrible inward unimaginable tortures through all the mysteries of the Passion, miraculous power often being — needed to prevent the separation of body and soul. Can we imagine that this inward real compassion was granted to them, and that she was without it? It is also another similitude between the Compassion and the Passion, that just as saints have been allowed in mystical ways to feel the sufferings of our Blessed Lord, so have they also been allowed mystically to participate in the sorrows of Mary. Both the Compassion and the Passion have been recognized fountains out of which have flowed some of the most singular and at the same time the best accredited phenomena of mystical theology.
Section VI. The Seeming Excess of the Compassion
But there is another point in the resemblance between the Passion of Jesus and the Compassion of Mary, which must not be omitted. It is the seeming excess of her sorrows over His, We call it seeming, because no one in his senses would dream of saying that Mary’s sufferings equalled those of our Blessed Saviour. But her Compassion, as we have seen, is a divine work, a divine mystery, and inasmuch as this semblance is an undeniable feature of it, it must have been intentional. Everything in a divine work is notable, and we learn from it by the mere noting of it, even where it is beyond our powers of explanation, It was in the joint mystery of the Compassion and Passion that the Mother and the Son saddened each other. Now in proportion as His beauty exceeded hers, His power to increase her sorrow exceeded her power to augment His. It was a more terrible thing for the Mother to see the Son expiring on the Cross, than for the Son to see His Mother broken-hearted at the foot of the Cross. But when we remember that He was God, and that her whole love of Him was what it was because He was God, still more disproportioned — will her suffering appear to His, and she too the weaker vessel, the less capable of enduring such highly-wrought agony as that on Calvary. We must bear in. mind also that inward pain is greater than outward pain, and that as she had no visible Passion to compare with His, the sorrow, which each outward pain and outrage of His caused in her, must have been inward also. His bodily Passion produced a mental counterpart in her, She was inwardly scourged, inwardly crowned with thorns, inwardly stripped, inwardly nailed to the Cross, and she died inwardly. All that was outward in Him was obliged to be inward inher. So also, when the Passion ended, the Compassion had at least three hours, perhaps six, of agony crowded with dreadful mysteries, yet torun. The fear of His limbs being broken, the wound of the lance, the taking down from the Cross, the embalming, the burial, and the desolation, all these sorrows were crucifying Mary’s woe-weary heart while He was flashing light and beauty and glory through the caverns of Limbus, and being worshipped by the congratulations of all the patriarchs, kings, and prophets of the olden time. Moreover she was left behind to mourn for fifteen years, and what was that delay but a prolongation of all that was hardest to bear in each of her seven dolours through more than twice seven years? The words are easily written, but what hidden worlds of heroic endurance and desperate heart-worn life do they not imply! And there was one thought through all that scene on Calvary which she alone could have, and which must have reigned supremely over her mind, inspiring her with an incredible hatred of sin, and throwing a peculiar light upon the Passion, which it is not easy for us to conceive. It was the knowledge that Jesus was at that moment paying the price of her Immaculate Conception,—that His Passion was for her redemption, and so principally for hers,—that it was more for hers than for that of the rest of the world together. Who then shall say what the Passion looked like to Mary’s eye?
Section VII. The Measures of Mary's Compassion
Lastly we must say a few words of the measures and dimensions of her Compassion. We have drawn such a picture of it as we are able. It not only falls far below the truth, but it sensibly falls far below the real image of it in our own minds, A thousand unexpressed thoughts are teasing us at this moment, but the difficulty is how to express them fitly. Words do not seem to be measures for them. They are thoughts of love; and love does not speak; it burns. Moreover there must be limits to all things except loving. There are no limits there. Love is an eternal work, Love alone can measure the Compassion of Mary. Think of the sufferings of Jesus. They open at our feet like a huge abyss. Can we fathom their dreadful depths? Or do we not rather shrink in conscious nothingness from a task so hopeless and so rash? Yet Mary’s Compassion contains that world-wide abyss, measures it, and holds it miraculously within its own dimensions. If we speak of the beauty of Jesus, straightway the vision of a shoreless sea, which no horizon bounds, over which the sun is rising and setting at the same moment, the half disk sunken in the west already rising in the east, and the waters rolling on and on for ever more. Yet as are the waters of that beauty, so were the waters of Mary’s bitterness. By an opposite miracle to that of Moses, the wood of the Cross thrown into those waters of beauty has
Ais SRY yea a eo es hee MAMIE CATO ar Veep. = Th Ter Cet ote mae 8) i see aa oe Ta Tete me ete s 1: mn ia ye converted them into bitterness. If we think of men’s cruelty in the Passion, it is a mystery nearer to our understanding, yet is not that nearness almost an infinite distance? Are we not obliged to call to our aid the theory of diabolical possession? Even then the horrors of the Passion are almost incredible, because they are so nearly inconceivable. Yet these horrors were but a part of Mary’s Compassion; and truly, compared with the wrath of the Father, and the beauty of Jesus, they were the very least part of it. If we think of her deep love of Jesus, it is only to delight in its interminable magnificence. It is beyond our definitions, out of the sphere of our comprehension. We; make wild comparisons of all angels and of all saints, indulge in fanciful arithmetic, repeat our superlatives, but we only do so to convince ourselves more satisfactorily that it is all beyond us, just as a man uses violence with himself to be sure he is awake. Yet the dimensions of that love do not reach to the dimensions of her Compassion, because there is another love yet, to which it marvellously outstretches. It is the deep love of Jesus for her. Who can tell it? Who can speak of it even figuratively; for where is our figure to come from? Yet the breadth, and the depth, and the height of that love of Jesus for His Mother are the only true dimensions of her Compassion. Here are five abysses,
_ five measures, five standards, His sufferings, His beauty, men’s cruelty, her deep love of Him, His deep love of her. We must do our poor best with them all, and we shall reach a view of our Blessed Mother’s Compassion which will be good for us and acceptable to her, but it will be below the truth. A work which Jesus and Mary made together, out of God’s wrath, and man’s sin, and the Hypostatic Union, and the sinlessness of a pure creature, must be a marvel about which at best we can but stammer, and lovingly go wrong; and such a work is Mary’s Compassion. Our task is ended, and love will give our poor thoughts a truth of its own which will make them good for souls.
It is a beautiful and a dread sight, to see all the sorrows of fallen earth resumed in the broken heart of our own Mother. Has it moved us? Then why not for the rest of life, in sober panic at the world and worldliness, go and sit at our Mother’s feet and meditate her griefs? Is there a fitter work for prodigals come back to their Heavenly Father? Compassion with her is already compassion with Jesus; and we may say that compassion with the Invisible Creator Himself is the devotional feeling out of which we shall serve Him most generously, and realize Him most tenderly as our Eternal Father,—eternal because He has been, blessed be His Majesty! from all eternity, and eternal because we shall be, blessed be His compassion! with Him, His happy sons, His pardoned sons, to all eternity. Truly Mary lays us evermore in the lap of God. Truly by some celestial logic of their own, all Christian things, be they doctrines or devotions, come out at last in that one compendious, melodious, alone-sufficing word, Eternal Father!
Footnotes
Chapter 10 of 10