Section II. The Passion

I. The darkness of an eclipse it gradually light ens the white towers of a city not far in land at the end of the Mediterranean slowly being disclosed against the darkness is the Body of Jesus hanging on the Cross, facing the grand west, disfigured by suffering; and a broken-hearted mother standing beneath the Cross now wet with Blood.

1. This is the fountain of all supernatural things, and flows both before and behind.

2. Henceforth the history of the world can never get from under the influence of this.

3. The sorrow and happiness of each individual soul starts at the foot of the cross.

4. It is the only earthly object of any real abiding value: all is dross compared to it; it is the marriage of heaven and earth.¹

5. Its effects are eternal and unspeakable.

II. The Passion considered as a history.

1. The congruous end o: the Thirty- three Years of the Incarnate Word.

2. The Supper Room.

3. The Garden.

4. The City.

5. The Mount.

On earth we can get no higher idea of God than that which the Passion gives us.

III. Considered as a doctrine.

1. The two Natures and the one Person.

2. The accomplishment of redemption: a different idea from the Incarnation 1. Of glory. 2. Of suffering.

3. The Sacraments come out of it.

4. The daily sacrifice is a continuation of it.

5. The unnecessary suffering in it an ahyss of divinest doctrine. It is also remarkahle that our Lord s satisfactions were not in voluntary penances, but in things which came on Him through His Father s will this is a characteristic of His sanctity the consolation of it to us.

IV. Considered as affecting the ritual of the Church.

1. The Blessed Sacrament the living Lord.

2. The connection of the Passion with the Blessed Sacrament mass, communion, use of the Blessed Sacrament as reparation, Holy Sepulchre.

3. In the Calendar The Church nowhere dramatises so much then there are memo rial feasts all the year round.

4. As a devotion characterised by 1. Its abidingness, 2. Universality, 3. Connection with other devotions, 4. Variety, Stations, Wounds, Words, Trials, Blood, Dolours.

5. The calm grave endless thought and memory of the Passion by angels and souls even amid the joys of heaven. V. Its mystical character.

6. It produces a whole inward life of its own, on peculiar supernatural principles.

7. To effect this more abundantly God has poured abundant revelations of its details into the Church through the contemplative saints.

8. He has also impressed the Passion on them in physical and moral miracles.

9. He has strewn over the world the instruments and relics of the Passion. Just think what it is to be in the same room with a piece of the true Cross.

10. All holiness, high and low, is imitation of the Passion, while the Passion has and com municates a substantial virtue which enables us to imitate it, and exercises a mysterious attraction over us.

The fervour of the primitive Church was owing perhaps to a livelier memory of the Passion. The days of creation their wonders these days were more wonderful, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday: the Triduo of the Passion was the creation of an invisible world.

THE EXCESS OF THE PASSION.

The beauty of sorrow its poetry, romance, philosophy, and literature the pathos of God s world none like to the Passion it is a very world, the flowers of suffering made beautiful by the innocence and also the divinity of Him Who bore it: we must get a view of its extent. I. The Thirty- three Years up to the Passion were a Passion in themselves.

1. Sufferings of the first tw r elve> years poverty, weariness, use of reason, prevision of Passion, view of sin.

2. Sufferings of the Hidden Life the same, with toil and Joseph s death.

3. Sufferings of the three years Ministry, hornelessness, disciples, persecutions, fatigue, failure.

4. Steady, incessant, vehement, energetic view of the Passion throughout.

5. His Mother involved in the same law of suffering, although exempt from the law of sin.

Thus the Passion is not one separate mystery, but the blood-stained diadem of all. II. The Mystery of unnecessary suffering in the Passion.

1. Why it was so long, and not done all at once.

2. Infinite value of each one of His satisfac tions.

3. Prodigality of everything pains bodily and mental, shame, all exhausted it is hard to conceive of more.

4. It cannot have been really unnecessary this is a profound mystery.

5. Probable reasons, at least on the surface.

6. Because being God, He would do all things in the most excellent and superabundant way. We do not sufficiently look at the Passion on God s side. It is a many-sided mystery.

7. In order to make a more royal satisfaction to the justice of God.

8. To give us a deeper and more dread view of the horror of sin.

9. To exhibit the illimitable excesses of the divine mercy.

10. Because it was all for love, and of love.

11. That God s glory in creation, and that in the Sacred Humanity alone, might far sur pass the curse of sin.

12. To show what manner of service ice should render to Him, and to take away our hardness of heart, which nothing short of omnipotence can soften. III. The Deep Sea.

13. The number of the sufferings count up from the Garden to the Cross. The unknown sufferings, like the unknown perfections of God. There is a sort of secrecy in the Passion: half is not told; men could not bear the details; the revelations of saints disclose now and then these secret depths in the Passion.

14. The variety: every affection of the heart, every faculty of the mind, every sense and nerve of the body.

15. Intense degree of them in themselves from the circumstances and to Him.

16. Concentration of them in a short time no respite to collect self, &c.

17. Aggravating circumstances of them site, time, company, presence of* mother, specta tors, and their malice.

18. Inward circumstances mental perturbation and oppression, shame, injustice, view of each kind and class of sin for which lie suf fered.

19. The indifference of those for whom He Buffered this was unbearable to His Sacred Heart. They were inflicting, and did not know it, a most dreadful outward Passion on One who had already an unspeakable Passion within.

20. Aggravation from those who afflicted Him 1. Rude Romans, 2. His own Jews, 3. Powers of Hell, 4. Mary, 5. Eternal Father think of Him with these five ene mies hemming Him in in seeming appalling alliance.

21. The horror of that for which He suffered, viz. sin.

22. The love with which He suffered was of itself an indescribable martyrdom.

23. Augmentation of suffering from the exquisiteness of His Human Nature.

24. Augmentation of it by His Divine Nature 1. What it withheld, and so contrast. 2. Strengthening Him to bear. 3. Adding something peculiar to each torture.

IV. Results.

1. All martyrdoms as nothing to His sufferings, (against Suarez).

2. All human suffering, inclusive of seven do lours, far outstripped by them.

3. In intensity they exceed all the pains of purgatory because of His Soul.

4. In sensible pain they possibly exceed in intensity all the pain of the lost, and of their bodies after the resurrection.

5. He Himself could of God s absolute power have suffered more this is all we can say.

6. Only His Divinity without alleviating any enabled Him to bear all.

7. We shall perhaps never understand them St. Jerome says that what our Lord suffered on the Thursday night will not all be known until the doom, when the Father will reveal it according to the prophecy of Nahum, Revelabo cunctis regibus et gentibus ignominiam tuam.

What a scene! God out in the darkness of that night, amid the mountainous billows of that storm where all humanity and all angelic nature would have foundered and gone down: God! God! the Eternal God! That night, in that dark sea, with that affliction and fatigue, my soul was saved!

THE BODILY PAINS.

The Ecce Homo! a worm and no man: His beauty crushed out of Him; the nature almost trodden out of Him; life held in that mangled wreck by simple power. I. The bitterness of bodily pain.

1. Our own experienced inability to bear it.

2. All generations have made their punish ments out of it.

3. The way in which it afflicts the soul.

4. The revolution it works in our characters.

5. The amazing merits and crowns of martyr dom.

6. Purgatory and Hell.

7. By this pain was redemption to be effected.

II. General view of the Bodily Pains of the Passion.

1. Their length some eighteen hours but especially long to the swift operations of His Soul.

2. Their variety, and their being constantly intermingled; and all over His Body. Revelation to the V. Paola Maria Scalza, that the Wounds and Disfigurements of our Lord s Body were above all that had been said, written, or thought.²

3. Their keenness, from their seventy and rapidity, and from His sensitiveness.

4. Their all being violently contemporaneous one with another.

5. Without respite, or refreshment, or time to collect self; save only visit of angel in the garden.

III. Their kinds.

1. Stunning, aching bruises, Cedron, up the hill, the Via Dolorosa.

2. Stricture of ropes.

3. Flesh wounds down to the bone, and all over.

4. Dislocations, with ropes, of jaws when struck, and stretching on the Cross, and hanging from it.

5. Excessive bleeding intense anguish caused by it, no repose allowed.

6. Stabbing through nerves with thorns and nails.

7. Flaying, with the two strippings.

8. Tearing flesh off, as martyrs had, at the scourging.

9. Cold, Cedron, the night.

10. Fatigue to its uttermost limit of throbbing, dull, seemingly impossible pain.

11. Hunger all those hours, and with such nervous suffering.

12. Thirst after the loss of blood.

N.B. Breaking of bones and fire were the only two pains not applied. IV. His Sacred Limbs.

1. Head blows, hair, crowning.

2. Eyes filled with clotted blood, inverted lashes blows.

3. Mouth swollen with blows,, teeth loosened, lips cracked, tongue swollen.

4. Face blows, spittings, thorns half down the brow.

5. Shoulders raw with scourgings, laid open at stripping.

6. Arms ropes, bruises, scourges, out of joint.

7. Hands blood from under nails with ropes, nails on the Cross.

8. Breast torn with scourges, painfully dis tended to cracking.

9. Sides bones laid bare with scourging, bruised and livid with blows of staves.

10. Knees broken with falls, skin hanging down, as in various revelations.

11. Feet bleeding, sore, nailed, dislocated, wrung into unnatural positions.

12. Heart fever, anguish, bursting, fainting, irregular, spasms.

V. The instruments of His Passion.

1. Eopes.

2. Gauntlet.

3. Scourges.

4. Thorns.

5. Reed.

6. Spears to prick Him with in the Via Crucis.

7. Hammer and nails.

VI. His five Blessed Senses mixed bodily and mental sufferings.

1. Hearing.

Blasphemy denial Mary s sighs awfulness of the cries of a crowd.

2. Seeing.

Sin Mother instruments of Passion ab sence of apostles wicked faces.

3. Smelling.

Odours of sin, which sickened the saints corruption of Golgotha the well on Thursday night.

4. Tasting.

Gall, blood, mud, spittle, hunger, thirst.

5. Touching.

Scourge, thorns, nails, men s rude hands.

VII. His death.

1. Not the gradual failing of power, so as to be easy.

2. The horror of the position to die in.

3. The combined unity of all the pains mounting to one head and crisis.

4. The loud cry, so unlike Him.

5. It has been said that the greatest pain in the passion was the act of death, because of the inexplicably perfect union of His Body and Soul.

the tranquillity of the Dead Christ on Mary s lap; we breathe now, like men just saved from shipwreck, after this roaring sea of horrors which has stunned and bewildered us has gone in its great ebb far down the beach. This is that sweet stillness round the tomb, that fatigue in tranquil rest recovering its bruised heart and scattered mind, which makes the peace of Holy Saturday almost a dearer gift than the joy of Easter.

IV. THE MENTAL SUFFERINGS.

The feelings of Jesus, when for the last time, whatever day it was, He woke from sleep before His Passion.

I. The mystery of our Lord s sleep.

1. Not suspending the use of reason, nor the capability of meriting.

2. Peopled with the prevision of His Passion.

3. Scantily taken through all the Three-and-thirty Years.

4. Yet a real rest to His Sacred Humanity, the more so from His sinlessness, and perfection of Body.

5. But His waking was not a gradual dawning on Him when He cast off drowsiness; clear as an Asiatic landscape, defined as a Greek sea-view, lay His Passion close at hand.

II. Mental sufferings.

1. Mind has much greater capabilities of suffering than the body, in variety, acuteness, depth, so that there is hardly any limit to mental suffering, except physical death.

2. And by His divine power that limit in His own case was miraculously thrust back.

3. In purgatory and hell the pains of sense are incomparably below those of mind.

4. The way in which apprehension magnifies coming evils, and is a more real suffering than the actual endurance. 5. But who shall estimate rightly the capabili ties of His Soul and Heart, or the wonderful torture of wounded feelings and violated sen sibilities in Him?

III. The mental sufferings of the Passion considered generally.

1. Fear. Intense pain of it. 1. Foresight. 2. Faces of multitude. 3. Their cries. 4. Being hated. 5. Eternal Father. He was like a hunted animal, yet was the great God omnipotent.

2. Horror. 1. Of the Passion. 2. From the vision of sin. 3. From the excesses of unappeased justice.

3. Feeling of defilement. 1. Clothed in all sins. 2. Stuck close to Him. 3. Burnt into His Soul.

4. Shame, as if He would have.hidden Himself in nothingness; Adam s shame was nothing to His.

5. Sadness for the lost, for all sinners, for all that sin should make any of us suffer.

6. Compassion, for each and all of us in our lost state. St. Bonaventure thinks His Compassion was a greater suffering than His Passion, not only for each soul lost, but for each pain of the elect: it was coextensive

7. With the Blessed Virgin Mary s dolours.

8. All martyrdoms. 3. All griefs. 4. All voluntary austerities. 5. All our own private sorrows and pains. 7. Love as it were barbed and poisoned every shaft that stung Him.

IV. The Agony was the Crucifixion of His Soul, and may be taken as a specimen of these Mental Sufferings. Look at the process of the Agony, and see how the pains took possession of His Soul progressively for three interminable hours.

1. Fear, with its alarms, unsettlements, shadows, panics, chills.

2. Disgust, as if it was all so loathsome that He could not persevere.

3. "Weariness, so that all power to make head against the commonest sorrow was gone.

4. Drenching bitterness, so that He had no vicissitude, no relief of posture in His mind, no refuge in Himself, no privacy in His own Nature.

5. Fight in His Human Nature, the novelty of it, and the vehemence.

6. Tightness, or narrowness, and anxiety, as if He was pressed in some spiritual instrument of torture.

7. Desolation, deep darkness, accumulation and acme of interior trials and anguishes, all void and vast around Him, with nothing to lean against.

8. Crushing oppression, as if all His faculties were squeezed into one immense sort of suffering.

9. Exhaustion, such as would Lave made death sweet, such a mixture of restlessness and the loss of all power of exertion.

10. Eush of love into this w r ounded Nature, like drenching a wound in spirit or in acid; it was like goads. St. Bernardine says that the alternate charges of fear and love against each other, and with all the power of His Soul, caused the Bloody Sweat.

11. Loss of hlood and consequent increase of all the former mental tortures left a complete wreck.

12. Aggravating circumstances. 1. Multiplicity of the objects which distracted Him. 2. The vehemence of the impressions they made on His Soul; angels could not have borne it. So that His Will seemed to totter: one angel, Michael or Gabriel, comes to comfort Him. If Michael, can that be the Word for whom He fought in heaven his grand battle? if Gabriel, he thinks of Mary on Annunciation night, the same 25th March.

V. The revelations to Battista Varani are like an insight into the character of our Lord, and His personal feelings as Man; this is their especial beauty.-

1. First Dolour. From the view of those who should be lost eternally: like dislocation of limbs the eternity of the separation, qucl mai mi cniciava: but as separate from Him, their torments after death did not enter into this woe.

THE SACRED HUMANITY OF JESUS. 20J

3. Second Dolour. From the sins of the elect, and all their pains, penances, persecutions, and temptations. As if He had millions of eyes, and each eye in the insupportable agony which the eye can feel. As not separate from Him, the pains of purgatory did enter into this woe.

4. Third Dolour. From His Mother s suffer ings. This was the one alleviation, the only one He did crave for, that His Mother should be exempt from suffering. With filial tenderness and many tears did He pray His Father for this. It was like all His Passion a second time on the crushed Soul and sore raw Body.

5. Fourth Dolour. From the grief of Magdalen. Except His Mother, none grieved as she. He had told John secrets which supported him. John would have crucified Him him self to get the good which, when leaning on his Master s Bosom, he learned was to come from the Passion. This upheld him: but Magdalen knew nothing of this. Heaven and earth seemed gone to her; as her glorious love was without order or measure, so was her woe. This was why He appeared to her at the Eesurrection.

6. Fifth Dolour. From the dismay and desolation of His Apostles and disciples. His grief in His last sermon to them on Thursday night.

7. Sixth Dolour. From the treachery of Judas, after all He had done for him. " When I bent over to wash his feet, My long hair fell over My face, and when I pressed his foot to My mouth and kissed it, I bathed it a second time with hot tears of love."

8. Seventh Dolour. From the ingratitude of the Jews. All the old history, and then, Crucify Him, crucify Him! That Thursday night long centuries ago, the Exodus of the chosen people from Egypt, and now the Exodus of all Humanity through the dry bed of our Lord s Soul out of the darkness of the land of the shadow of death.

9. Eighth Dolour. The ingratitude of all crea tures. To each of us He has done what He did to Judas, to each of us what He did for the Jews, and yet we love Him as we do. B. Battista Yarani, * when she saw Him in such a "hell of amorous pains," almost doubted His being God: but rather the very excess of the love, so far beyond either the reason or romance of earthly love, might have shown her that it could be God alone who could love in such a way.³

V. THE SHAME.

Look at that figure in the streets of Jerusalem, the unresisting Captive; men are pulling His beard, spitting in His face, and kicking Him, as if they were driving some stupid ox to slaughter, while then as ever countless angels, awe-smitten and in extasy with the beauty of His holiness, are singing Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, round His throne! I. The Worship of the beautiful Incarnate Word.

1. In heaven, since the trial of the angels, and all through the Three-and-thirty years.

2. The dignity of His Sacred Humanity, and the inconceivable glory prepared for It.

3. It was both sun and moon to the whole enormous heaven: one spark could lighten all the earth.

4. To Him belongs the right of judging all men; He has ere now judged the smiters and the spitters.

5. To see Him is to be happy eternally: it needs no more.

II. Phenomenon of contempt of God.

1. It is earth s lowest depth of sin the stupidity of earth is necessary to it hell is too intelligent to have it.

2. It combines hatred and indifference about God in one act.

3. It only comes out in great sinners; and seems to rise round saints, as if their exceeding holiness drew it out of the most pestilential part of our corruption.

4. In our degree we all misjudge God; it is the grand grief of those who love Him.

5. Hell swallows up contempt in fear; contempt is earth s own peculiar affront to God.

III. Contempts and insults and shame of the Thirty-three Years.

1. His poverty and obscurity and dwelling-place. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?

2. His wisdom. Is a devil and is mad. (John iii). How doth this man know letters, having never learned? (John vii.) We know God spoke to Moses, but as to this man we know not from whence He is. (John ix. 29.)

3. His doctrine. Called a Samaritan and a heretic.

4. His power. His miracles were attributed to the devil and to magic.

5. His innocence. Called 1. A sinner, 2. Glutton and wine-bibber. (Matt, xi.) 3. Seducer of the people. (Luke xxiii.) 4. Prevaricator of the law. 5. Blasphemer. (John ix.)

IV. Shame and indignities of the Passion.

1. Words the opprobrious acts doubtless not half recorded.

2. Actions blows, kicks, pulling hair, spitting, mock homage, Ecce Homo.

3. Thoughts cowardice, vile magician, stupid fool.

4. Manner Annas, Caiphas, Herod, Pilate, all others; death by crucifixion, thieves.

5. Circumstances His triumph on Palm Sun day, the feast and multitude.

6. From whom it all came His Jews, those whom He had fed and healed, those who had cried Hosanna.

7. Sheer barbarities, hell-inspired blasphemies scene at Herod s court.⁴

V. What was wounded by this shame.

1. His love contempt is the hardest of all things for love to bear and then it was such love and such contempt.

2. The gracefulness of His patience He felt how this aggravated their sin.

3. His honour and reputation how nature feels this, and His Nature most of all as being most sensitive.

4. His venerable -dignity He had always been so mature and grave, and unseemliness was torture to Him.

5. His intellectual perceptions of what was right, and due to Him, and base in them.

6. His modesty especially in the stripping, both for the scourging and the crucifixion.

7. His holiness by coarseness, rudeness, sin, scurrility, blasphemy, insolence.

8. His Divine Majesty who can tell the horror of this to His Holy Soul?

VI. The mystery of what shame was in His Soul.

1. In us shame is chiefly the undue revelation of our true selves, of that which w r e most wish to keep concealed.

2. The intense suffering of shame.

3. Its keen penetrativeness into every recess of our nature.

4. Its nervous raw feeling, becoming unbear able, like touching the quick of a wound.

5. The way in which it prostrates all our powers.

6. It makes everything around us an instrument of suffering.

7. It drives us from our kind, into a mental solitude.

8. It surrounds us with darkness, deluding, puzzling, bewildering us.

9. Its confusion is the painful death of all that is most sensitively alive within us. And yet, for the most part, all this comes from the laying bare of our true selves.

10. Its office.

11. The shame of the Passion is dwelt upon in Scripture as an essential element in it.

12. Its presence in all holiness: all saints are in their measure made by shame.

13. What it was in His Soul we can only guess. He doubtless had shame from many things which we are too obtuse and coarse to understand. 4. We may guess that in Him it was

14. A false imputation of what was not due to Him, and the mere imputation of which was suffering to His pure Soul.

15. It was an accumulation of opprobrious and vile and ludicrous positions in which He was placed, which to His keen sensi bilities were inconceivably more so than they could be to us.

16. It was like the flaying alive of the un imaginable modesty of His Sacred Humanity.

17. It was the glare of publicity, to shyness which eyes looked through as if they were swords.

18. It came upon Him when weakened and crushed by tortures both of mind and body.

19. It was a violence to the tranquil depths of His humility, digging them deeper all the while by its outrages.

20. It was immensely heightened by the sense of injustice.

21. Glory was as it were the natural life and repose of His Soul because of the Hypostatic Union.

22. His Divine Person may have been in this respect a source of suffering to His Holy Soul.

The shameful Way of the Cross, His Mother bathed in shame: the blasts of the Roman trumpets in the streets reminded Him, if He ever needed His self- collection reminded, of the angelic trumpet of the Day of Doom that day when all creation, even its holiest heights, shall be put to shame, and God s lovely purity gleam unspeakably bright above us, through the holy Soul of our dearest Lord and Judge.

OUTWARD DEMEANOUR AND INWARD DISPOSITIONS.

The rough men of sequestered Nazareth, when they were sad, used to say, " Let us go and see Mary s Son!" This was revealed by our Lady to St. Bridget. We have treated of the bodily sufferings and mental sufferings, and the shame; now all these three things affect outward demeanour and inward dispositions: we must bear those three chapters in mind now, and see how He bore up under them. I. The external beauty of our Lord.

1. Everything about Jesus was full of living grace: nothing was merely exterior.

2. His beauty and venerable appearance, breeding holiness, yet attracting sinners.

3. It was the reflection of His holiness, and even the working of His Divine Nature.

4. This beauty was part of Mary s love of Him.

5. It is part of the joy of heaven at this hour.

6. How it added to the pathos of the Passion, amid those harsh voices and dreadful faces.

7. While it was defaced, it still remained venerahle and attractive as a spell.

II. His manner during the Passion.

1. His unselfishness, and unobtrusive considerateness, as, let these go their way; also His words on the cross.

2. Voluntary obedience, as in the garden when men fell before Him.

3. Kind words, and grave pitiful tone of voice, never changed or quickened or heightened.

4. His look under the worst indignities was full of mild forgiving sorrow.

5. The beauty of His patience was so imperturbable and winning.

6. His silence was the more wonderful because of His eloquence, and His exquisite sense of injustice, which last so rouses our nature, even in reading history.

7. Yet He was neither stunned nor stupified, but collected, sensitive, attentive, observant, prompt to the last. And all this with such natural grace that we hardly come to think of it until we meditate.

III. His demeanour to those who came near Him. 1. To St. Peter in the supper room when sleeping after the denial then, as if He carried His loving thoughtfulness unbroken through cross, and death, and limbus, and resurrection, He says, go and tell Peter.

2. To St. John on His bosom at supper in the garden at the foot of the cross.

3. Judas making three attempts to soften him, one in the supper room, eating out of the same dish; yet the others were not sur prised; this shows how usual this courtesy was.

4. Jews He wept over the city from the hill top in the garden His gentleness women in Via Crucis no reproach no anger at the cry of crucifige prayer on the cross.

5. Pilate sent his wife to Him admission of less fault.⁵

6. Herod His silence with the excommuni cated sinner His dignity overawing any but a brutal mind, combined with the sweetness of childlike unresisting humility.

7. The thief sweet words instant forgiveness.

8. His Mother in the Via Crucis on the cross with less sweetness, as if He were in full intelligence with her, and treated her on a sort of equality.

9. To us with our sins and waywardness His thought for all His Sacred Heart almost smiling on us with encouragement and welcome through the dun eclipse on Calvary.

IV. The inward beauty of our Lord.

1. Interior beauty compared to exterior not the natural gifts of all angels are equal to one poor soul in the lowest state of grace.

2. Not all saints and angels are equal to Mary, nor countless Maries to the soul of Jesus.

3. Wherein it consisted union with God merits acquired sublimity of dispositions their intensity.

4. All this was heightened hy the illumination of His faculties, the capacity of His affections, the order of His appetites, and the serenity of His sensitive nature.

5. Then there was the glory of His Divinity which was shed so sweetly, softly, fittingly over all: the point of contact of His two Natures, riveted together, yet unconfused; this union, or junction is itself the most unsurpassed of all created beauties.

6. To us all this is more beautiful, because it is for us.

V. His interior dispositions.

1. The most unbroken peace.

2. Unspeakable conformity of will with the Father.

3. Inconceivable horror of sin.

4. Incomparable tenderness and allowance to sinners.

5. Undistracted love of each one of ns.

6. The royalty of His spirit of sacrifice: re straint of consolation, &c.

7. His thirst for suffering.

8. The keen presence of every natural human feeling: no insensibility, nor loss of humanness such as perhaps some saints had. 9. His intense adoration of the justice and sanctity of God.

my beautiful Lord! Like the moon on wild nights, the clouds of Thy Passion crowded round Thee, and Thou movedst on in Thy heavenly gentleness, softening and silvering all things around, so that Thou art still concealing what Thou hast done for us, Thy very beauty making Thy Passion seem less a Passion than it really was!

VII. THE SOLITARINESS.

In the vastness and crowdedhess of Creation there is something overwhelming in the Unity of God. The Trinity seems to save the solitude of the Unity so also in the haunted darkness and wild clamours of the Passion, it is terrible to think of the loneliness of Jesus, the one Mediator between God and man. I. Solitude: the solitary saints are the fewest in number the most unknown have the highest vocation. 1. How it ties our nature down to its deepest depths and brings up strange things.

2. Impossibility of not leaning on things to love, and in this life on created things.

3. Desertion and estrangement are hard to bear, because of the loneliness they bring.

4. The solitude of being misunderstood, and being out of sympathy with those around.

5. The loss of friends desolating and diminish ing our circle leaving fewer to love us, fewer for. us to love.

6. Old age is a kind of solitude only in sensibility tempers it, and God is perhaps more with us.

7. Sickness is a drawing of us into still farther solitude yet kind ministries are round.

8. Death is a very lonely action yet we have priest and sacraments and a personal visit from our Lord.

9. Judgment is swift, but fearfully lonely, yet even there is our Guardian Angel, and the Human Heart of our Judge.

II. The outward solitude of the Passion.

1. His Mother absent during part of the Passion.

2. His disciple whom He loved was gone.

3. Of those whom He had fed and healed not one came nigh Him.

4. The usual kindlinesses shown to the worst criminals were not shown to Him.

5. In all the steps of His Passion He was alone, in the garden, well, guard-room, Herod s court, streets.

6. The solitude of His silence no one to speak to: except the women of Jerusalem.

7. The angels seemed withdrawn at least so

CV far as their presence comforted Him.

III. The Inward Solitude.

1. None could appreciate His horror of sin, nor the multitude of sins He had to bear.

2. None could understand His pains, not even His Mother.

3. Where the eye looked for consolation, there was aggravation, in Mary, John, and the Apostles.

4. Accumulation of the burden on Him alone.

5. The abysses He saw before Him of 1. the divine anger if one sin deserved hell, what must all the sins of the world have deserved? And it was just that which He suffered. 2. hungry justice 3. breathless suffering: these were all like so many huge unpeopled creations which He had to traverse alone.

6. His Human Nature as it were deserted by His Divine: the torture of this, as if Hypostatic Union was going to be broken.

7. Thus left, It was beset with the usual assail ants, fear, sadness, wish to escape, fainting, all the wild beasts of our own terrors let loose on His exhausted strength.

IV. The presences which deepened His solitude. 1. The angel comforting Him, as lightning deepens the night; it also showed that the solitude was intolerable, one ray of light had to break in.

2. Mary: her Immaculate Conception was to be paid for then.

3. John, whom He so intensely loved.

4. The crowd, which always intensifies solitude. He had stilled the stormy lake, but as He looked over the wild sea of stormy heads, He was silent and alone; His power lay by His side like a paralysed arm, unnoticed or re strained.

5. The external hurry of being dragged about from place to place.

6. The distractions of trials and questions, each making His loneliness more painfully sensible: distracted loneliness is peculiarly painful.

7. A raining tempest of momentarily diversified physical sufferings, attempting to dislodge His self- collection.

V. The Dereliction of the Father.

1. Fearfulness of spiritual trials, evidenced by the writhings of manly souls under them.

2. Horror of even great saints at the temporary hidings of God s countenance, which they can hardly bear. God justified even Job for his words.

3. Usually solitude from creatures brings to us a more intimate presence of God.

4. No interior trials were like those of the Soul of Jesus, because no soul had so enjoyed Hia presence, and none probably was ever left in an abandonment so nearly total, or so complete.

5. The Father abandons Him: we have no line to fathom this depth of the Passion: as if the Unity of the Trinity were going to break up; creation opened under Him, and He sank, oh horror! He cried out piteously, and that moment the angelic songs were all thrilled into mute amazement; it was as if He were slipping out of creation the Creator losing Himself in the depths of a Created Nature, as if He had trusted Himself to a spell, and was now spellbound, and could not help Himself.

Let us turn away, or we shall go wild. Look at Him on His lonely Cross; He hangs there as it were till the end of the world; but men fall off from the crucifix, like a crowd at a fair tired of some exciting show: all are busy, in the fields, or on the roads, or keeping the feast at home, or clustered like Sunday idlers at the city gates. Jesus is left upon His mount alone!

VIII. THE CIRCLE OF EYIL.

Those who have a devotion to the Passion must to some extent share in it, especially in its want of repose, and in the irritating presence of repulsive horrors and violent images. "We must be ware of false delicacies in this respect.

I. The presence and overshadowing of evil.

1. The keen and various suffering which it is to us, increasing with our holiness.

2. The fear which great sinners, murderers, and even drunkards, inspire into men.

3. The acute torture of coarseness and vulgarity to extreme sensitiveness.

4. Dread of extreme cruelty joined with great power.

5. Horror of lawlessness; multitudinous cla mour, when justice and fairness seem unreali ties, or out of reach.

6. The loathsome presence of the wicked in hell is one of its most exceeding tortures to the wicked even.

7. What all this was to the sensitive and holy Soul of our Blessed Lord.

II. The representative wickedness of all ages gathered round Him.

1. The High Priests falsehood, injustice, rage, conspiracy, hypocrisy.

2. Herod loathsome sin, sensual brutality, rude blasphemy, daring to tempt to miracles, the base violent pride of mere overbearing power.

3. Pilate the cruelty of weakness, contempt of worldly indifference, paltering with conscience, which was sacrificed to love of popularity.

4. The Jews possessed, surges of howling passion, natures transfigured, irresponsible fury.

5. The Ptoman soldiers debauched ruffians, offscouring of all nations, sinful hands, stench of sin.

6. Even women: as the one who made Peter fall: children are not named perhaps they kept to their Hosannas; children crying after Him would indeed be earth s rejection of Him.

7. Judas: treachery, avarice, hardness of heart, stupidity in not seeing beauty and truth, contempt of great graces, personal dislike of the Saviour, despair, which rightly considered is a sort of personal dislike of God.

8. Impenitent thief: low base sin, vulgarity and meanness consummated in impenitence close to our Blessed Lord s dying bed, so that He is almost in contact with the damned.

9. Invisible legions of evil spirits each of whose history, and the horrible interior foulness of whose spirit, during a long and crowded biography of thousands of years, were known to Him an agony of desolation to His Soul, which was shaken to its centre.

10. And where was the good? It had fled, forsaken, denied Him, was ashamed of Him,, doubted Him, as at Emmaus the disciples did, or at best followed Him afar off. There was no fidelity anywhere but in His Mother, and she drew John after her to represent us all beneath His Cross, and have His last breath, which was to be our new life, breathed upon us in the person of that dear Apostle.

III. The Creator s visit to His creatures.

1. He comes with His eternal love, laden with gifts, and beautiful exceedingly.

2. The holy intelligent stupor of the angelic creation.

3. He comes with a created nature on Him, and that nature is man s.

4. With what love will they not receive Htm? for they are captives, sick, hungry, thirsty, naked, cold, homeless, condemned criminals runaway slaves with inevitable arrest before them and He is all to them.

5. The understandings of men not only cannot understand Him, but so misunderstand Him that they have a plain view that He is mad.

6. Their wills are so corrupt that eternal fresh-is ness, beauty, and truth are to them tiresome, ugly, and unpersuasive.

7. All that is most divine about Him, viz. His doctrine, patience, absolution, miracles, and Divinity itself, is just what is most repulsive and hateful to them. IV. The phenomenon considered.

8. He had doubtless mysterious reasons for choosing that time and place.

9. His presence drew out the evil by some hidden law, as goodness always seems to do.

10. Every nation and blood was perhaps repre sented there.

11. The world may possibly have been less wicked since, just as Satan has been more bound.

12. Satan had now found out the Incarnation, and it was the great battle, greater than St. Michael s of old.

13. The extremity of iniquity hunted and brought to bay the extremity of holiness as its prey. Oh, how men hunt in packs like winter wolves!

14. Human nature, around the sinless Humani ties of Jesus and Mary, became half devil and half beast, and was the fittest of all natures, because of its double capability of spiritual and material wickedness, for the awful in surrection of matter and spirit combined against the Incarnate Creator.

V. The Creator in the power of His creatures. 1. The ring of evil drawn closely round Him in one city in four-and-twenty hours.

2. It was made up of, 1. rage, 2. hatred, 3. scorn, 4. indifference, 5. disgust, 6. weariness, 7. petty spite, 8. political jealousy, 9. foreign disdain, (God a foreigner!) 10. national faction, 11. persecution of false doctrine, 12. unreasoning cruelty, 13. malicious cruelty, 14. inventive cruelty, 15. imitative cruelty.

3. And all this was at once triumphant, and outbursting in barbarities and indignities, which one human life could not have had concentrated in itself without the aid of omnipotence.

4. The phenomena are inexplicable except on the supposition of the heights of human guilt being topped, and its energies reinforced, by the awfulness of demoniacal possession. This makes the Passion part of the sin of the angels.

5. The tempest is at its height in the streets of Jerusalem awful end of creation, the crea tures triumphant, crowding in on their Creator, treading on His heels; God is in their power, and the wickedness of all generations is charging down upon Him, to trample Him beneath their feet: they will pull Him down as if to worry Him.

6. God s ordinary control over corruption is apparently withdrawn: awful unboundedness of the freedom of sinful wills.

7. In the midst, almost trampled out of existence, was a young man of three-and-thirty, well nigh disfigured out of human shape, staggering under a cruel instrument of punishment, and falling with a dull sound upon the street, and a weak woman, the victim s heart-broken mother, flung almost under the feet of the mob and the hoof of the centurion s horse, with her blue mantle stained with mud. That young Man was God! Has not evil won the battle? Is there one hope left of triumph for eternal love?

IX. HIS DIVINITY IN THE PASSION.

Listen! the noise of frantic Jerusalem has died away, or sounds faint and far off: and there are the soft strains of celestial music with calmest rapture and most penetrating melodies winding around the throne of the Eternal Word, and dying down,into pauses of the most profound and restful silence.

I. Devotions to the Incarnation, and especially to the Passion, require a constant remembrance of our Lord s Divinity.

1. He is Himself that Ecce Homo, the Ever lasting God, in all things equal to the Father and the Holy Ghost, no faintest shadow of subordination falling on the measureless waters of His Divine Nature.

2. His Person is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, and so the truth, beauty, and wisdom of the Father.

3. His Advent and Passion are equally the act of all the Three Divine Persons.

4. It was His own free will to come, and to be sent by the Father, and to rejoice in His Mission, which in no way encroached on His Equality.

5. No created holiness, singly or collectively, could have merited His coming.

6. It need not have been with such profusion of suffering and shame; that was His choice with a view to our enthusiasm, loyalty and love and perhaps, for other mysterious rea sons, to slake the celestial thirsts of His dear Human Nature.

7. His Sacred Humanity claims fullest divinest worship, because of its union with His Per son and Divine Nature.

II. How this affects all the mysteries of Jesus.

1. It even seems to make them more human; as His own Creator, He understands His own created nature, and like one sfcled in a perfect bat difficult instrument, draws out new and enchanting sounds, in marvellous entrancing cornLinjitions.

2. It gives an unerring beauty to ail He said and did; evei-ytLiog is a model, a type, an ideal.

3. It throws a tenderness over all His mysteries, like the revealed love of the Father, not like any thin human love.

4. But especially it gives the uttermost pathos to the Passion.

5. It is the only true basis for our real intelligent horror of sin, which must always he measured not hy the weakness of our nature, but by the Divinity of Him who made the expiation.

6. It alone gives a light strong enough to re veal the depths of His love for us.

7. It alone can nourish to its gigantic propor tions our love of Him by infallibly persuad ing us of the immensity of the value which He sets upon our love.

III. What His Divinity conferred In the Passion.

1. His omnipotence enabled Him to live to suffer more.

2. His wisdom enabled Him to penetrate the revolting abominations of sin."

3. By it He could fathom the anger of the Father, and know what it meant to have an angry Grid, and how beautiful is the imperturbable dread glory of anger in the Divine Nature.

4. By it He could pierce the darkness of hell, and estimate sin s punishments.

5. By it He could foresee the comparatively few who would appreciate His Precious Blood, the low esteem of It in those who should love Him best, and the almost forgetfuluess of those whom It would save.

6. By it He was enabled to feel all the tor ments there and then unconfusedly, and with indescribable reality and vividness, both His own and those of His elect.

7. It flooded His lower nature with a light, in which it grew unspeakably refined and sensitive, and which made shame an unspeakable stabbing, sharp, deep, fiery, to a quick which other men have not.

IV. What His Divinity withheld.

1. It withheld the joy-bringing effects of the Beatific Vision from His sensitive nature; and probably also restrained His intellectual nature from comforting and illuminating and restoring His sensitive nature, at least to some degree.

2. It froze up all the joys of the human Nature, except the point of the Soul, where the Vision was.

3. It did not alleviate one single pain, or make it less intolerable.

4. Neither did it console one single mental agony.

5. It did not let loose its omnipotence, which, seeing how it loved the suffering nature with which it was so intimately united, was a sort of constraint and loss of liberty.

6. It doubtless withheld other mysterious in fluxes of which we know nothing, but which

Lad to do with the living communion of the two blessed Natures.

V. The use of His Divinity in the Passion, so far as it regarded ourselves.

1. By it we know that we were separately and distinctly before Him in all that Passion.

2. It teaches us not to shrink in thought, as it did not shrink in fact, from the distressing horrors of the Passion, as modern weak faith and fastidiousness are fain to do. Oh, if it rends our body and soul asunder, let us not be so irreverent as to shrink from fathom ing the terrible things into which and through which we ourselves actually thrust Him.

3. His Divinity teaches us that love alone can repay Him, for love alone approximates to the infinite.

4. It intensifies our spirit of adoration.

5. It tries, stretches, invigorates, and gives new capabilities to our faith, like exercise and mountain climbing to the muscles.

6. It discloses in all its real grandeur the copiousness of our redemption, each of those countless pains being simply infinite expia tions.

7. It shows us that part of our own deification must be -imitation of the Passion, nay, more than imitation, even true participation in it.

then let us kneel down before the Divine Nature of the Eternal Word, and feel our thoughts and imaginations travelling away far beyond our reach, and the fires of love burning with unconsurning heat our holiest affections, and the deep, deep spirit of dreadest speechless adoration taking possession with its calm strength of our soul and flesh, and let us so love that illimitable Nature in its pale, bleeding, disfigured, crucified tabernacle, that we shall cease to pine on earth for heaven, because earth contains what we most desire in Heaven; for Calvary is changed to Tabor, because of the Divinity of Him who with sweet tones like His Mother s is speaking His beautiful words upon the Cross.

THE SPECTATORS OF THE PASSION.

Around that marvellous mystery were gathered such spectators! The whole universe was there to see; the angelic creation; past generations whose eyes had been fixed upon it, and were now in limbus, purgatory, or hell; and all generations to come; probably representatives of all peoples were actually on the spot; and more than that, the Uncreated, God Himself, was there to witness. I. It was a trial

1. Which decided the greatest interests.

2. Which exhibited the highest sublimities.

3. Whose effects were to be for ever.

4. Which wedded temporal and eternal as never had been done before, and up to the limits of what is possible.

5. Which involved the deepest and most numerous mysteries.

6. Which resolved more of God s secrets.

7. Which was more wonderful than even the surpassing pomp of the world s last day.

IT. The Spectators: what they saw, and how it looked to them,

1. God. * -

2. The beautiful accomplishment of eternal decrees.

3. The exhibition of the most surpassing excellence of created sanctitv.

P

3. The completest worship which ever sa tiated His hungry glory,

4. The greatest event in the history of creation.

5. The furthest stretch of love out of Him self. what a mystery that it could not increase His love of the Eternal Word, already immutable in its Uncreated Ex cess!

6. Mary.

7. She so penetrated each horror, that even the prevision of it had taken nothing out of it,

8. She saw each as the price of her own graces,

9. She saw the redeemed Church in dusky shadowy magnificence rising like a grand and endless procession out of the tumult of noise and blood and shame.

10. Her heart was in completest union 1. With her Son. 2. With the Saviour. 3. With her own martyrdom. 4. With sin ners. 5. With the Apostles. 6. With the Eternal Father.

11. Even to her it was like a new revelation of her Son s beauty and sanctity.

12. Angels.

13. A fountain of heavenly amazement, which they looked into with intense desire, yet which even their vast intelligences could not fathom.

14. It gave a new character to their devotion.

15. Their having to be neutral, ibeing bidden to stand back.

16. It seemed a new disclosure of God to them., far more than the mere foresight of it could be.

17. It taught them in a more excellent way the science of loving men.

18. The Apostles and Disciples.

19. It stunned and overwhelmed them.

20. They were simply supported by their Master s prayer and their Queen s example

21. It explained to them so much of the past.

22. Their faith in His Divinity took root in all this shame.

23. They, like the angels, began to learn the true science of loving men instinct for souls: souls were in the world of the Passion what hodies and hearts are in the common world.

24. Evil Spirits.

25. A terrible bewildering amazement.

26. An intensification of their misery.

27. A piercing fear which loosened and made faint all the compactness of their strength.

28. An excitement of their rage and envy against men: increased fury as fighting a losing battle.

29. Yet an actual diminution of their power.

30. The Jews.

31. Everything indistinguishable in the first fury of their possession.

32. A source of aching misgivings when excitement evaporated.

33. A national shame, and a corporate sin not to be retracted.

34. The end of their history in a second Exodus, when they would not cross: Titus was only wanted to burn up the ruins.

35. Yet a curse, and a living energetic stigma, which they had evoked like a spirit out of its awful depths they branded themselves with the Precious Blood like Cains, and the world watches them.

36. Gentiles.

37. It lay before them like the great sea before an idiot, an unmeaning common place expanse.

38. Not of more consequence than to be the talk of the guard-room for a day or so.

39. It was their first actual contact with God since the fall or the Flood.

40. The Eoman empire really the servant and lacquey of the Passion.

41. It transferred to the gentiles the divine empire of the world.

42. The rest of the world at the time.

43. A piece of news flying without much excitement along the Roman roads.

44. In some places combined with various frightening phenomena of nature.

45. Like God s great works generally, it did not disturb the ordinary current of affairs.

46. Yet there was not a nation there, whose future light was not to rise out of that darkness.

47. For each one apart, and with diversified special application, that Passion is suffered.

48. Subsequent generations.

49. A perfect revolution of ideas: strength of weakness, wisdom of folly, glory of shame, &c.

50. New standards of moral excellence, forgiveness, patience, silence, &c.

51. The deep imbedding of the supernatural in the natural.

52. The irresistible mould of their future literature, history, art, law, and even false hoods.

53. At once the creator and the destroyer of their successive civilisations. 10. Ourselves.

54. The deep in which to drown our past lives.

55. The buoyant waters of the harbour where our present rides at anchor securely.

56. Out of which all hopes and successes for the future are to come.

57. Its shores are our sole terrestrial home in the life of grace, exiled from which we pine and die.

58. The literal Red Sea through which must be our Exodus to our eternal home.

III. Let us look again.

1. There is no tranquillity anywhere but in Jesus and Mary.

2. Hurry, precipitation, noise, frenzy, mental darkness, moral delirium no one thinks or sees what it all means, but He and she.

3. Oh the unsuspicious impetuosity with which men accomplish God s decrees for Him.

4. Jesus still beautiful in His patience, venerable in His sufferings, though sunk almost out of sight in the depths of woe.

5. The quietness which follows round Calvary, the new Sabbath after this second terrible creation of the world. The second Adam has been the Creator, and He lies cold and still in His desolate garden, and the dark night falls on the second Eve, driven with her broken heart in that desolate wilderness of the cruel city.

The green hill of Calvary all the ages of the world beat at its foot, and fling their surge over its base: the ages before our Lord flooded darkly up, and sank back, rolling the stones down the beach with hoarse murmur, like the vain efforts of an ebbing tide. High above all civilisations rises the green hill, with the sun upon its sides, and the beacon of the crucifix, far- seen and radiant, and in the dark night giving out unobscured light it is the sole harbour of tempest-tossed humanity, its sole safe anchorage, where anchors never drag, and the rolling billows fall back from its base, as if tamed on the instant by a spell!

XI. THE SHADOWS OF CALVARY.

It is more hard to think of God within us than of God without us, yet it is the best way of prac tising His Presence; so it is hard to think of the Passion, not as an historical fact or a mystery accomplished, but as a living surviving thing, a power, a presence, a divine energy; yet this last is the true view of it. I. The Passion living on in the Church.

1. Eeally in the Mass, which is the continuation or renewal of the same sacrifice on ten thou sand altars daily; and thus the abiding presence in the tabernacle is through the continuation and memory of the Passion.

2. In the sacraments, whose living efficacy in each case is the application of the Passion to the soul.

3. Martyrdoms are deep real shadows, nay, true participations of it.

4. All the sufferings of the elect are sanctified and made meritorious by the shadow of the Passion.

5. All the spiritual realities of inward and out ward mortification shadow forth the Passion, and they are innumerable daily.

6. The shadow of the Passion on men and things is the badge of Christ s ownership.

7. The hearts of the saints, like sea-shells, murmur of the Passion evermore.

II. The Passion an attraction.

1. Our Lord s prophecy that it should be so; If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself.

2. Its attraction to sinners from the plentifulness of its redemption.

3. To those who are simply world-wearied, like the restful darkness of the welcome night.

4. To those who love God and are aiming at perfection.

5. Even to little children, who as yet hardly understand sin.

6. It satisfies the doubts and cravings of all hearts by reassuring them.

7. There is something quite supernatural in this attraction, over and above the beauty of the mysteries. III. The Passion in the active life.

8. The grand fountain of unworldliness, and supernatural principles.

9. The daily works of mercy endlessly flowing out of it, all over the Church.

10. Holy Week a sort of universal retreat to the whole world; one use of the functions is to make it unlike all other times.

11. The stimulus of missionaries, and the converting persuasion of nations and sinners.

12. Power of endurance of the calamities of life.

13. Excessive sweetness and mutual forbearance all over society.

14. The constant occupation of the mind of Christendom.

IV. The Passion in the contemplative life.

1. With most contemplative orders the Passion is the chief thing, and expiation the basis: some are founded on the Passion.

2. Individual contemplative souls are brought by attrait into some peculiar relation to the Passion.

3. The way in which it out-tops with them all other mysteries.

4. How it fixes the gaze of the contemplative soul.

5. It becomes at last a kind of sacred possession.

6. It is lifelong, and runs the year round, deepening in Passiontide.

7. Its process is firstly compassion, then imitation, then actual participation in the Passion.

V. The Passion working inward similitude.

1. The spirit of sacrifice and expiation.

2. Love of suffering independent of the idea of expiation: thirst for it increasing with the amount of it.

3. Supernatural horror and sadness, because of the sins of others.

4. Efficacious desire to expiate the sins of others, thus passing beyond the sins of self.

5. Suffering in silence, and abandoning with unearthly discretion all selfdefence.

6. Inward trials distantly resembling our Lord s, with mysterious operations of grace in the soul, mixed up of deep joy and intense suffering.

7. Transformation of the whole man, intellect and will, who views and feels towards all things as He did then: the world gone out of sight, hardly realisable even to the imagination in strange thick oblivion, so that the powers of thought cannot advance in that direction.

VI. The Passion working outward similitude.

1. Revelations: constant increase of knowledge poured into the Church through contemplative s.

2. Visions, both intellectual and imaginary; hardly a saint is without them.

3. Pilgrimages, either outward like St. Bridget s, or inward like St. Lidwine s.

4. Inwardly feeling the actual pains of the different mysteries, sometimes of the whole Passion successively.

5. Stigmatisation partial complete visible invisible gradual instantaneous transient perpetual recurring.

6. Postures of body, acting out in extasy a real drama of the Passion, called Mystical Sta tions.

7. Supernatural states, having reference to the-Passion either habitual, or in sympathy with the Christian calendar; even martyrdoms of saints shine forth through other souls.⁶

VII. Conclusion of all this.

1. The greatness of the Passion, and so the duty of steadfastly contemplating it all.

2. Its everliving power, fresh as the first day, and multitudinously reduplicated.

3. The mysterious way in which it works in soul and body, like plants and flowers shaping, colouring, and scenting themselves by hidden chemistry.

4. How Jesus clings to it, thus renewing it in the mass and the saints, and keeping His Five Wounds in heaven.

5. How it is a great deep world underlying all common holiness, which is overarched above it, with saints perpetually working through it, and all perhaps doing so in their death agonies.

6. It is not therefore an historical fact done and over.

7. It is a perfectly furnished world, with crea tures of its own, and a way of life, and stan dards of practice, and ideals of beauty, quite unearthly, not formed on earth s life, but as if creatures and life of some other planet.

Thus everywhere is the vast Church resounding with the Passion; over its rich and populous low lands lies for ever the shadow of Mount Calvary, and all things good grow beneath its cool defence: in its highest mountains its mystical echoes sound strangely, from noon to midnight, and from midnight back to noon, fearful and beautiful for us dwellers on the plain to hear, while its rivers that wind everywhere amid the close woods and peaceful fields, and through great cities, bring down the plentiful Blood that was shed on Cal vary, from altars where the real Sacrifice, the very Calvary, is transfiguring earth with its transcendent truthfulness in the daily mass; so that our sights and sounds, the supernatural odours on our river banks, what we touch and taste, and feed upon, feeding with mouth no less truly than with mind, is all from Calvary, where those rivers rise and the mouths of those rivers are the har bours of eternity!

XII. THE ABYSS.

Tabor! Calvary is far better than thou art, for all thou didst catch such a flush of glory once from the open heavens. It is far better to be with John on Calvary than with our great father St. Peter upon Tabor; and Peter thinks so too now, and thought so upon his inverted cross at Rome, when he found his Calvary so near the Vatican. But now is the great three hours on Calvary.

I. The Seven Words. St. John s word about silence in heaven for half an hour: so now is there silence and a beautiful darkening of the world in the hearts of millions of God s creatures. The whole Church is as it were gathered on the top of the platform of Calvary, to receive into its heart the last words of its dying Lord.

1. First word. Father! forgive them, for they know not what they do. Its circumstances. Elevation of the cross, blast of trumpets from the temple below, insults, many minutes as if dead, then the voice of the Creator heard.

2. The beauty of its being the first thought.

3. It sums up all the Passion He breaks the silence in behalf of sinners.

4. The power of that word going on to this very day.

5. Second word. Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise. Dismas and Gesmas, the two thieves darkness grows birds and beasts hushed by the eclipse men whispered only Mary prayed for the thief then came the word of the Incarnate Word. " [

6. No single soul was forgotten in the multitude; but the thief was a happy type of multitudinous souls.

7. Exulting abundance of omnipotent grace, going beyond the thief.

8. Oh! when we come to die how that word will make music in our ears.

9. Third word. Woman, behold thy son; behold thy Mother. Not Me, but thy new son He looks at her, as if to thank her for her prayer for Dismas the whole history of the world in His look, and oh! the love of it.

10. This is her second Annunciation.⁷

11. How He sanctifies thereby the holy solici tudes of domestic love.

12. The grandeur and sweetness of the legacy He left us.

13. Fourth Word. My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me? There is trouble in the city He is like God in the cloud of Sinai.

14. He has given away His Mother: now His Heavenly Father leaves Him.

15. Momentary revelation of the depth to which our sins had sunk Him.

16. Yet He will reproach His Father rather than us: not one word against us was wrung from Him.

17. Fifth Word. I thirst. Light glimmers His whiteness red-streaked His voice beautiful, but faint.

18. Kevelation of His true Human Nature.

19. He thirsts for more suffering.

20. He thirsts for more souls, and is disappointed with the scanty draught; so few, and those so ungenerous.

21. Sixth word. It is finished. Vinegar and gall the sweat St. John wipes His feet coming of death voice very faint.

22. We repay His love with vinegar and gall, and thus our malice is finished.

23. The work His Father gave Him is finished: think of Him in the temple at twelve years old.

24. Our redemption is finished: oh! the joy of this as in His Sacred Heart He saw each one of us.

25. Seventh word. Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit. Silence His Wounds grow red He lifts His weary head earth quakes, rocks are rent, air is darkened, and in the midst of all that the great God s loud cry.

26. He is going home it is to His Father so creation after all is no home for the Creator: yes, there is still the Blessed Sacrament.

27. He is the more homeless, as He has just given His Mother away to us.

28. The model of deathbeds: trust in God is the last of all things, and the whole of all things.

II. Death is drawing nigh; watch

1. The fountain of salvation bleeding away in human blood.

2. The Eternal ending, Life unbeginning suc cumbing now to death.

3. Omnipotence engulfed in the weakness of the last faint of mortality.

4. The King of kings the slave, with all men and all things for His rightful owners.

5. The Creator held to die by His creatures, by nails through Hands and Fe et.

6. The perfection of beautiful love pressed and tortured to death by unmitigated diversified hatred.

7. The All-holy indistinguishably confounded among sinners it is hard to identify Him.

III. Death lays hands upon Him.

1. Creation is first silent, then broken up; its material horror; what was it among angels in the depths of their intelligences?

2. Angels are withheld, yet their forms are gleaming like bristling silver as they lean eagerly out of the gloom towards the Cross; but the dead burst out of their tombs.

3. God all signs of Him are absolutely invisible; the world was never so left to itself.

4. The sweet patience and excessive love of Jesus His Heart all on fire that moment: oh! those flames shall one day burn up the world.

5. The depths of Mary s martyr heart, firm to receive the blow of the last faint breath.

6. Time and eternity come to take their law from His lips in death.

7. Actual separation of Soul and Body. He bowed His Head, His feet turned slightly on the nail that fastened them. Mary! thou art childless: the Babe of Bethlehem is dead, thy beauty, thy wonder, thy love. He is dead. The earthquake passed away, the darkness rolled off; there arose a cool fresh wind, which blew over the face of the earth, and round the cross, and stirred His hair. See! it lifts the few locks not matted with blood, and gives a momentary look of life to His Face. But the rocks of Calvary, the ears of John, the Heart of Mary, nay the very silence of the air still rung with the Creator s cry, nay at this moment the world over many a Christian deathbed is faintly, sweetly echoing back that Word, Father! into Thy hands I commend My Spirit!

IV. The thought which at the foot of the Cross overwhelms the individual soul.

1. A God is dead for me: the occupation of all holy souls on earth.

2. A God is dead for me: the ravishment of the angels in heaven.

3. A God is dead for me: the endless despair of the lost.

4. A God is dead for me: and ready to die for me again, and as many times in numher as my sins are numerous, rather than that I should be lost.

5. A God is dead for me: and I know myself to he what I am.

6. A God is dead for me: and He knows what I am in His sight, so much more than what I am in my own.

7. A God is dead for me: and for this was needed 1. A God s wisdom to plan it. 2. A God s power to execute it. 3. A God s love to suffer it. 4. An Incarnate God s mind to conceive it. 5. A supernatural gift of faith to be able to believe it. 6. An inability on the part of all creation to repay it. 7. The hardness of a reprobate heart not to be touched by it. He was the Man of Sorrows because He was the God of love!

,V. Forthwith the soul under the pressure of that thought, a God dead for me, begins to sink out of its depth the seven descents of the soul in the deeps of the Passion. 1. Wonder which is part of contemplation and of the Beatific Vision, arising from the thought of Who suffered, what He suffered, how He suffered, for whom He suffered.

2. Exultation that it is so divine a work, so much our concern, so abundant, oh! such a grand glory of God*

3. Liquefaction all dispositions running into one, barriers melting down it was all with such intense love of us, and so pathetically, so beautifully done, so unparalleled, and sim ply like Himself.

4. Conflagration heart growing hot, each affection ready to ignite, each faculty of mind getting hot as if it were an affection, in an outburst of fire consuming world, sin, self, and even imperfect goodness.

5. Foolishness of Love fire like wine, wine too strong for the soul, half involuntary ges tures and exclamations, holy indiscretions, yet wisdom of much of the seeming folly like foreign ways which men laugh at, heaven the foreign country from which they come.

6. Contemplative Union annealed, steadfast, fixed gaze, supernatural tranquillity of will, close union, real contact with Christ calms weak transports, and effaces previous signs of mortal want of self-collection, and of inebriation, strong efficacious languor, like the weakness out of which His loud cry came.

7. Possession the Passion wholly possessing mind, heart, will, even body; Jesus possessing the soul, the soul in another sense possessing

Jesus, espousals, mystical marriage, the boundary of heaven and earth worn indistinguishable by fretting flames of love. Each of these seven descents has been like a fall from the starry heights of heaven, and yet far down and down and down I see angels in the darkness, just visible by the light they shake from off their wings, and as they rise, they tell me they are faint with their long breathless fathoming, and they have seen no end, they verily believe there is none, to the ABYSS.

CALVARY.

CHAPTER I. THE PASSION:

ITS HISTORICAL, DOCTRINAL, AND MYSTICAL CHARACTER.

Jesus Christ and Him Crucified this is the object of our present contemplations. In an age of abounding knowledge, this is the knowledge which concerns us most of all. It was the one sufficient science which St. Paul desired to know. We grow older; and, as age comes upon us, it seems as if the very years as they passed drew us closer to the Cross. Life extinguishes its own lights one after the other, until the darkness of Calvary is brighter than the obscurity of a world, which has first played us false, and is now deserting us. As we grow older, we set a greater price upon fidelity; and where is there such faithfulness as in the Cross? Devotion to the Passion is at once the surest sign of predestination, and the shortest road to heaven. Happy are they whom the cruelty and treachery of life have driven to the Cross! But happier far are they the chivalry of whose youth drew them there in early days, and who have spent their lives in its mysterious sanctuary! In the cloister and in the world, to young and old, to rich and poor, for clergy and for laity, the Passion is the grand object of devotion. Its intensity was the characteristic of primitive times. All that was beautiful in the Middle Ages shaped itself preeminently upon the Passion. It has been the especial work of modern saints to propagate and heighten this devotion. The Church herself is perpetually adding feast, and song, and pensive commemoration, although it seemed long since as if she had left herself no fuller means of honouring the Passion of her Spouse. All this is a warrant for another devotional treatise on the Passion. There is nothing new to be said of it; but every man has his own way of saying old things, by which he reaches unexpected places in the hearts of men, and kindles fresh varieties of love. Let us ask St. Mary Magdalen to lend us her heart, while we wade as far as we dare into the depths of the Passion. Let us study the science of Jesus Crucified with her for our mistress, whose name and memory perfume the whole Church with the balm of the Blessed Passion. It is a science wherein we learn by prayer, and in whose deep places our hearts see further than our eyes. It will give us what in these days we want most of all, the old simplicity of faith. What is progress but an entanglement? What is the breadth of literature but a distraction from God? What are the endlessly successive theories, each in its turn claiming to be final, but a weariness, under which we grow reasonably impatient? What are the vaunted discoveries of science, but either lights which blind by night, or heights from which the horizon of our ignorance is for ever widening? What are material prosperities, but a slavery of increasing wants increasingly dissatisfied? There is no grandeur in our work, there is no heavenliness in our repose, except through the old simplicity of faith.

There are many ways in which we may treat of the Passion. The majority of books lead us through the mysteries in detail, from the Last Supper or the Agony in the Garden to the Burial of Jesus or His Resurrection. Upon the whole this is the best way to consider the Passion, because it is the most necessary to the devotion of the faithful. Every mystery has its own lesson to teach, and contains its own treasures of prayer and contemplation. We can never understand the Passion, unless by repeated meditation we have mastered it in detail. If then this successive consideration of each mystery is not the only way of handling the Passion, it is at least the method which is most indispensable. We can do without other methods; we cannot do without this. But there are so many books which follow this method, that it is not my intention to add to them by this treatise. I propose to treat of Calvary after the same fashion in which I have treated of Bethlehem. The Passion, like the Sacred Infancy, is not only an assemblage of divine mysteries, united to each other by a similitude of spirit as well as by the order of time. It has also a unity of its own as a whole. Like the Hidden Life at Nazareth, or the Three Years Ministry, it admits of being regarded as a constellation apart. It sometimes happens that, by exclusive meditation on separate mysteries, we lose sight of many important truths. We have a less distinct understanding of our Lord s Three-and-thirty Years. We do not appreciate, even so far as we might, the magnificence and the lovingness of the divine works. Nay, we do not even do such justice, as it is in our power to do, to the separate individual mysteries, because their connection with other mysteries, or tjieir position in the constellation to which they belong assist us in no slight degree to the right understanding of themselves.

The way then, in which it is proposed to treat the Passion in this volume, is to look at it as a whole, not to follow it in order of time, nor to break it up into its component mysteries, such as the Scourging, the Crowning, and the like, but. rather to break it up into its characteristics, characteristics which enter as ingredients into each of its separate mysteries. For instance, we shall have to consider the Excess of the Passion, its Bodily Pains, its Mental Pains, its Shame, our Lord s Outward Demeanour and Inward Dispositions, His Solitariness, the Circle of Evil which surrounded Him, His Divinity in the Passion, the Spectators of the Passion, the Shadows of Calvary which are cast over the world at this hour, and the Abyss which the Death of God opens to Contemplative Souls. These eleven subjects will furnish us with as many chapters, as soon as we have considered in this preliminary chapter the Passion generally, in its historical, doctrinal, and mystical bear ings. By this means we shall get a different view of the Passion from that furnished us by meditation on its separate details, and at the same time a view which will give to our subsequent meditations a light, a force, and a touchingness beyond what they had before.

Let us begin by making a simple picture of the Passion for ourselves, one which shall not distract us by any multiplicity of detail. We stand upon the low top of Calvary, that Calvary which in so many senses is the highest mountain in the world. There is a preternatural darkness, like the luminous gloom of an eclipse, all round us. But it is preternatural, no mere eclipse. There is silence there, only mingled with a few sounds, there were some people in the darkness stirring, yet only stirring as if afraid to move. It gradually grows lighter. The white roofs of a city, not far inland at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, become visible. As the light waxes clearer, sounds increase both in number and in loudness. Slowly disclosed against the darkness is the bloodless Body of the Son of God, indescribably venerable in the excess of its dis figurements, hanging on the Cross, facing the west as if in prophecy of its grand Christian future. Standing beneath the Cross, now wet with blood, is the brokenhearted Mother, Mother of God, and now also Mother of men. There also is the Virgin apostle John, with such impassioned calm upon his woe-worn features as his knowledge of the secrets of the Sacred Heart would be certain to imprint upon them. Among all the sons of men there are few so great, so holy, so privileged as he who by his beauty took captive the Human Heart of his Creator. There also is the glorious Magdalen, the brightest trophy of God s love, which men take heart when they look upon, a very picture of the uttermost forlornness of human sorrow transfigured by the radiance of adoration into more than angelic beauty. Magdalen! thou art there to tell how the hopes of all men may be so bold as to take refuge upon Calvary.

This is the Passion, the Passion consummated. This is the grand event in the world s history, giving the law to all other events whatever. This is the visible impression made on the decrees of the Creator by the free-will of the creature. This is the incredible revelation of the Divine Perfections, which an angel s intelligence could never have imagined, and even now is unable to fathom. Incredible, even when revealed, unless also a supernatural gift be given with the knowledge, whereby we may be strengthened to believe it. That mystery on the hill-top, which we express by the name of Calvary, is the foun tain of all supernatural things, flowing both before and behind. That darkness has illuminated forty centuries of time already, before it actually overspread the green sward of the suburban hill. That blood has inundated all the children of those centuries, with innumerable graces, while it was still unshed itself. There has not been a grace in any human soul from Adam onwards, but it came from the foresight of that Calvary. In all those dark, dreary, lagging ages, there has been no lightening of any human burden, no brightness in any human destiny, no possibility of virtue, no struggle of manful hearts against overwhelming evil, no birth of infancy, no death of age, which have not been full of anticipations and prophecies of Calvary. Even the inanimate creation had some sort of consciousness that Calvary was the centre of the world, when, as old tradition held, the waters of the Deluge drifted thither the body of Adam, and entombed it in the yielding soil.

But if the whole history of the world previous to the Passion is filled with presentiments of it, nay, is wholly unintelligible except by the light of it, much greater is the influence of the Passion upon the history which follows. Henceforth the annals of the world are little more than the chronicles of the Passion. It has implanted new ideas in men s minds. It has worn deep traces upon their language. It has renovated their philosophy. It has given another form and a different spirit to their literature. It has enlarged their moral in stincts, while it has also refined and quickened them. The victory of defeat, the triumph of selfahasement, the divinity of suffering, the magnificence of shame, the power of silence, all these are ideas from the world of the Incarnation; and they have supplied men with weights and measures, which, if not in all respects literally new, are practically new from that irresistible authentication which the Passion has conferred upon them. As time goes on, the Passion will give out from itself, as its own creation, a peculiar civilization. Great social institutions shall be based upon it. Governments shall acknowledge it as their authoritative guidance. Peace and war shall often become questions of the Passion. It shall shape and fashion private life. Hence forth, from the day on which the mystery is accomplished, the world shall never get from under the influence of Calvary. Civil history shall more and more tend to merge itself in ecclesiastical. Even when the outward monarchy of the Holy See shall appear to have passed away, or rather to have cast aside its medieval insignia, when the days of Concordats shall have come, and it shall be the ambition of states, especially of those which are destitute of ennobling traditions, to stand apart from the Church, when the empire shall dream that it is glorifying itself anew by working itself clear from the priesthood, when diplomacy shall have had most cause to congratulate itself on the unity which the balance of power, its own invention, has brought about, when earth shall seem more visibly man s because it is less visibly God s, even then, more than ever, shall civil history become religious. Alliances, instincts, sympathies, literatures, philosophies, the temper of cabinets, all these Bhall grow not only more religious, but even positively theological. Christ has been crucified; and every event in the world shall draw from this fact more or less of its significance. The world, as it gets further from Calvary, shall become more personal in its hostility to Christ. The dominance of heresy is but Satan s protest against Calvary; and when the world comes to its worst, and to its end, it shall be so influenced by Christ that it shall instinctively concentrate itself into an Antichrist. It is travelling thither daily, and in this day it would appear to be attaining its end with more than usual celerity.

But from the great outward world let us come to our own secret selves. The sorrow and happiness of each individual soul starts at the foot of the Cross. However remote our generation may be from the era of the mystery, whatever our lot may be among the seemingly inexhaustible diversities of human fortune, however far off from Judea our home may lie, and however deeply hidden we may be in the indistinguishable obscurities of private life, our darkness and our light come from the top of Calvary. It is well or ill with us according as we are in harmony with the Passion which was accomplished there. To that hill-top centuries ago came every grief and joy of ours, every word and work and thought, every sin and every temptation, every secret shame and every undisclosed design. They came there clearer than objects in the noonday. They were seen by the inward eye of our dying Lord. They were understood as a whole, as composing one consecutive biography. They were weighed in detail. Nothing escaped Him. Grace was apportioned to each of them. His Precious Blood was offered and accepted for each. Sorrows were sanctified beforehand, and joys came out of the pure superfluous mercies of the Passion. Every excess of His torments was bidden to do its part, as a motive of more fervent love within our hearts: and there were colloquies between the Son and His Eternal Father, as if our" single soul were the exclusive cause of all that happened upon Calvary, the one engrossing interest regarding which the Divine Perfections came to reconcile themselves upon that mountain-top. Our eternity was negotiated there, if we may use of these divine things those figures of vulgar commerce which God Himself by His apostle has conde scended to make use of. Thus it comes to pass that, even when our life is thickest and widest, there is no earthly object of any real abiding value to us compared with the Passion of our dearest Lord. All is dross compared with it; nay, all is dross compared with the knowledge of it. It is an earthly object and yet a heavenly one as well. It is the peacemaking, or rather the nuptials, of heaven and earth. In the uttermost distances of our eternal life, where in truth there are no distances, it is the Passion which will still support us, the Passion which will still keep the Vision open, the Passion out of which the inebriating torrents of God s splendours will still renew our souls.

Thus the Passion rules the history of the world, the history of the world before the Flood, of the world of the patriarchs, of the Israelites, of the heathen, before the coming of our Lord, and in a still stricter sense is it almost itself the history of the world from the Crucifixion to the Doom. Thus is it also the secret of all biographies of individual souls. All their ruin comes from their disloyalty to the Passion. All their holiness in time, and their glory in eternity are the conse quences of their loyalty to the Passion.

III. MEDITATIONS ON THE CRUCIFIX,

THE HEAD AND EYES.

Introduction. Jesus All in All. The crucifix is a revelation. Our Lord said to St. Gertrude, that as often as a man looks tenderly on the crucifix, Jesus looks tenderly on him. Blessed Bernard of Corlione wanted to learn to read it. St. Philip Benizi called it his hook, kissed it and died. Consider St. Alphonso at seventy-seven looking at his crucifix, and writing his meditations. Why should earthly lovers have the poetry and romance all on their side? Now come, let us learn Jesus. Mary will help us how well she knew His blessed Features. St. Peter too, with his devotion to our Lord s Face. Seek ye My Face; Thy Face, Lord, will we seek.

THE HEAP.

The voice of my Beloved knocking: open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is full of dew, and my locks of the drops of the night. His head is as the finest gold: his locks as branches of palm trees, black as a raven.*

I. No golden crown! how is this? He is King of the world.

II. Crown of thorns mud blood handfuls of hair gone Head swollen bruised aching.

III. Our hearts the garden where those thorns were grown blame not the innocent earth or its guiltless fields.

IV. That head which Mary nursed, the hair she smoothed, the brow she washed, and then dared to kiss.

V. Watch Him! He droops His head to die

He droops it to us as a father to His children, that we may kiss Him.

VI. Look upon Him once again, and now with the eye of faith, and not of sight bright upon His throne, flashing in the light; Mary is wrapt in exultation, wondering angels worship, saints rejoice: Jesus, dear Jesus! we would see that: we would go thither: ah! sweetest Lord! Thou canst do this for us, and Thou wilt!

THE EYES.

I. Once the joy of Mary, and the wonder of Joseph: the sunshine of Bethlehem and⁸

Nazareth, the light across the wilderness; the revelations their looks made of the joyous secrets of His Sacred Heart.

II. The vigils they kept for us.

III. The tears they shed in infancy, for Lazarus, and over Jerusalem.

IV. The looks upturned to Him in prayer.

V. The wistful look on the young man, and the converting look on Peter.

VI. The scene before Him on Calvary.

VII. The blows, spittle, and blood: yet it is He who gave sight to others.

VIII. Sun and moon darken as His eyes fade.

IX..His eyes turned to Mary on Easter morning; in heaven now, they are turned on us.

shall we one day see them, and live and love in their sweet light? Mine eyes have failed with weeping⁹ His eyes are as doves upon brooks of waters which are washed with milk and sit beside the plentiful streams.! my Jesus, give us the gift of tears, affectionate tears, holy tears. Dear est Lord! we have not loved Thee; no! hitherto we have not loved Thee, but we will love Thee now: make us love Thee, make us love Thee more and more. Thy servants sometimes ask many things of Thee, but we will ask but one Love, Lord, love, love, and then more, and then eternal love!

THE LIPS, AND MOUTH, AND CHEEKS.

I. Filled with earth and blood in the garden:

once with the breasts and milk of Mary.

II. The spittle of the soldiers mingling with His own.

III. The blows breaking His lips, and making them deformed and swollen: sweet lips that spoke words of peace and love divine: His cheeks which Mary fondled.

IV. The kiss of Judas: the kisses of Mary.

V. The sighs that come from that sacred month upon the cross.

VI. The white parched lips, once red and plump at Bethlehem.

VII. The burning thirst, the vinegar and gall. Evil words, detractions, impurities, oaths, &c.

THE TONGUE.

I. A hidden member, sheltered from the assaults of blows, &c. and our teacher.

II. Why He kept it without suffering till the last, except His Heart (and that too was wounded inwardly): that He might with it penetrate the ear and heart of the Eternal Father, to pray for His murderers, to absolve the thief, to bequeath His Mother, to show the great-

2G8 ness of His woes, to proclaim His dear thirst of souls, to teach us what to say when we too come to die. 0, what love! For our sake He keeps it, not for His own.

III. His thirst the bloody sweat the night before jaws dry tongue swells no drop of water

-Mary cannot reach see a dying man, when his tongue is dried up! Ah! what suffering was the drink they gave Jesus.

IV. Our tongues how are they employed? they are Mary s lap on which Jesus lies at Holy Communion awful sins of the tongues of men!

V. What is the tongue of Jesus doing now? what will it say to us when the last day comes?

THE FACE.

I. The appearance of It. 1. the forehead, 2. the eyebrows, 3. the eyes and eyelids, 4. the cheeks, 5. the lips, 6. the nostrils, 7. the chin, 8. the beard, 9. the long flowing hair: the horror of this to the angels, who knew that Face to be the beauty, joy, and brightness of eternity.

II. How Mary looked upon that Face when it was small and infantine. Will she forgive me who have now covered that Face with such a fearful veil of shame and of confusion?

III. Implore the Eternal Father to look upon the disfigured Face of His only-begotten Son. Jesus offers it for our sins, offers it to obtain pardon and grace for us.

IV. But see! the Face moves, the eyes close, it is no longer uplifted heavenwards, it droops, it sinks upon the breast, awfullest of all awful things that ever were on earth! Jesus breathes His last God is dead!

V. Now I will think of my deathbed may I see that Face then, shining, beaming, smiling, on me! Say for ejaculation Blessed be the beautiful Face of my Jesus to all eternity!

THE EARS.

I. The delicacy and tenderness of them. The misery of noise to the sick and dying. The roar of the blaspheming multitude, like a pack of cruel howling wolves in the ears of Jesus. Noise, cruelty, hatred, sin, all so many causes of pain.

H. The names they called Him:

1. Malefactor He who had done all things well.

2. Impostor He who was eternal truth, and kind teacher of truth to all.

3. Guilty of death He was life, and gives life to us, and was that hour giving His dear life for us.

So the streets, the judgment-hall, and Calvary resounded and how do we bear one word of just reproof? Think too of the sins committed with our ears.

III. There is a heart breaking at the foot of the Cross! the deep sighs, the stifled sobs that come from it; they are darts of fire entering in at the ears of Jesus, and piercing His Sacred Heart. Think of the sighs of the poor in our ears.

IV. Where are the ears of Jesus now? 1. in heaven, hearing what we ask, and what Mary is asking for us, 2. in the tabernacle, drinking in the acts of love that we may make.

THE ARMS.

I. What they suffered in the garden with the thick ropes tied in front of Him, then at the scourging behind Him swollen torn bleeding weakened.

II. He opens them to embrace the Cross, while

He kisses it most tenderly, and then takes it on His shoulders.

III. Those arms bound in swaddling clothes twined round Mary s neck, as the ivy twines round a tree.

IV. Dislocated on the Cross the whole weary weight of His Body hanging upon them with agony unspeakable.

V. Look well at those arms, omnipotence is in them: they are the arms of Him Who made the world, and could move it from its place at this moment they could loosen themselves from the Cross if they pleased.

VI. How those arms embraced Mary at her As sumption; us too He will perhaps raise up when we run and fall adoring at His feet at our first entry into heaven.

THE HANDS.

I. The sweetness and the beauty of tiose Hands little in infancy, working in St. Joseph s shop, all the beneficent miracles and works of the thirty- three years, lifted up in prayer for us, laid on little children s heads.

IT. Handcuffed, struck with lashes, broken and wounded with falls, swollen fingers, bleeding: so they grasp the mock sceptre, and so the cruel Cross.

III. The nailing to the Cross, the agony of the redoubled blows, the dislodging of the nerves,, the jostling of the Cross into its place, the burning wounds.

IV. Those Hands created me; those Hands elevated the Host at the first mass; those Hands are above me in the confessional, though I see them not.

V. Those Hands how beautiful and bright in heaven now, angels adore them, they put the crown on Mary s head, ravishing sight!

VI. To be at that Eight Hand is all our joy, our bliss. Ah! may we be allowed to kiss the shining wound on that Right Hand, when we are admitted to the peace and joy of Heaven!

THE BREAST.

I. The Breast of the Infant Jesus, rising and falling Mary s love of it.

II. St. John reclining on it, the heat he felt in it; St. Philip, the beatings of the Sacred Heart.

III. How we look at the blue sky, and think of heaven behind it; so at the white breast of Jesus the Eternal God there as in a treasure-house how frail a wall! yet who would dare to break it through?

IV. The Breast of Jesus as it was seen upon the Cross outrages in the garden stamping on it lashes of scourging distension from outstretched arms.

V. The Breast of Jesus dead on Mary s lap.

VI. The Breast of Jesus now in glory the Sacred Heart beats there once more rises and falls with love of Mary and love of us.

THE FEET.

I. Feet of the Infant Jesus return from Egypt three days loss in Jerusalem.

II. Feet of the Boy in Joseph s shop, or fetching water from the well.

III. Feet of the Man weary, sore, throhbing, cold, hot.

IV. Feet of Jesus with Magdalen kissing them,

&c.

V. Feet of Jesus on the Cross dragged down with ropes broken, wounded, nailed, the weight of the Body resting on them.

VI. Feet of Jesus ascending, leaving prints be hind.

VII. Feet of Jesus in glory shall we one day print a kiss of burning love upon them?

IV. OUK LOBD S INNOCENCE.

Do we not feel how the love of Jesus is growing into us with our meditations on His Passion? If our hearts do not burn, there is something like burning beginning in them. That woe- worn Face is getting so worn into our hearts that we shall hardly love His Easter beauty.

I. Manifold views of the Passion enough to distract the contemplations of an angel.

1. The awful profane wickedness and diabolical inspiration of it.

2. Its crowded and multiform cruelty.

3. The venerable glory of His everlasting Divinity.

4. The extreme human sweetness of His demeanour.

5. But there is another point, which I venture to think was exceedingly foremost in our Lady s mind, almost jealously prominent His innocence. Eightly considered, it is the most heartbreaking thing about the Passion.

II. Innocence on earth.

1. Its look of strangeness and of wonderfulness. We never saw any one who w r as quite innocent except the Blessed Sacrament.

2. Its look of exile there is something heavenly in slavery detained on earth/

3. Its look of peril, yet of helplessness.

4. Its look of exquisite reproachfully unreproachful pleading. There is some hidden sympathy between innocence and silence. It our/lit to be eloquent as an angel, but it is silent as God. And yet there is a look of guilt about its silence which is in reality the artlessness of its simplicity or the holy trouble of its humility.

5. The way in which Jesus and Mary loved it in each other, because it was their exclusive wealth on earth.

III. Innocence suffering.

1. Horror of innocence suffering at all: e. g. a child, a baby in its agony.

2. Innocence treated as guilt, yet it was the very artifice of love in His Passion to clothe the innocent with guilt.

3. Innocence enveloped in rudest maddest violence.

4. Innocence tortured with cruelty.

5. The peculiar agony of injustice to the delicate sense of innocence. Innocence is so gentle, so un-selfdefending.

IV. Quid mali fecit? Pilate certainly was not blinded by hatred as the Jews were: but yet what spiritual discernment had he? imagine it dream it and yet he discerned His innocence.

1. His face was piteous then, yet not wholly disfigured. Yes truly: what evil has He done? name it.

2. The miserable Pilate saw all His spotlessness in the silent face. Pilate forsooth falls in love with innocence, and says, Innocens ego sum. St. Matth. xxvii. Oh, if we could but see that face in vision for one moment, could we ever sin again, or ever cease to love?

3. They chose Barabbas: I was going to say this was a wickedness without name but we had best say little about it: alas! our choices have been the worst features of our life. Dear Jesus! how many Barabbases have we preferred to Thee!

4. Why does He not speak? One word, a tone, a sound, would have made that beauty irresistible: it would have calmed that raging sea of hatred, it would have cowed the multitude into adoring love. There were mothers in the crowd, yet no one saw what to Mary was so infinitely beautiful.

5. Yet, oh! do not speak, lest Thou shouldst clear Thyself and then what should we do? oh, it is almost a relief to us, a joyous deliverance from our suspense, to hear that discordant crucifige! As in the agony in the garden, our salvation seemed for a moment to tremble in the balance for they might have let Him off: but if His Father would not hear Him then, will He hear the Jews now?

V. Nidlam causam invenio. A third time Pilate said, Quid mail fecit? Then, I find no cause. A third time he could not believe the Jews would still persist to him the face was such conviction. Yes, the beauty of that face gave a kind of obstinacy even to that weak and vacillating judge.

1. Are we getting frightened at the innocence of Jesus? at least we are eager to tell Pilate that he is wrong with his nullam causam. Pilate, thou art blinded by His beauty!

2. All the sins of the world are on Him is not that guilt?

3. He alone can expiate them is not that cause? and cause of death also, for so only can He expiate them. Now again we are uncertain: will Pilate give way against hia own conviction of His innocence? But they were instant with loud voices requiring that He might be crucified. And their voices prevailed, and Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required, (St. Luke, xxiii. 23-4.) and as we require, oh, yes! and as we require. Ah! if there is a necessity on earth it is salvation.

4. Dearest Jesus! Yet His innocence so works in us, that in hot times of prayer, we feel as if we could almost sacrifice ourselves to save Him. But, no! oh Mother Mary! be content. Jesus has made it a greater love in us to let ourselves be saved by Him than that we should save Him from the cross.

THE FACE OF JESUS.

Passiontide veils the face of the crucifix, only that it may be more vivid in our hearts. I. The face of Jesus in the Thirty- three Years.

1. The most beautiful of all the beauties earth has ever seen.

2. As predestined by God, and the model of all beauty.

3. The devotion of Mary and Joseph to it.

4. The devotion of Peter and the apostles.

5. In Infancy, Boyhood, and Manhood,

II. His face during the Passion.

1. In the agony in the garden.

2. Before His various judges.

3. When He met His Mother.

4. On the cross.

5. In death, on Mary s lap.

III. What thoughts this gives us.

1. Hatred of our own sins which caused it.

2. A truer idea of the Father s anger with sin.

3. Intense love of our Blessed Lord.

4. Deepest compassion with His Mother.

5. A yearning to be more holy. IY. His face now.

6. It is being seen in numerous particular judg ments momentarily.

7. The saints have sometimes seen it as it is, and nearly died of ravishment.

8. It is the bliss and extasy of hea ven.

9. It is the most beautiful sight God sees out side Himself, and yet in so strange and wonderful a sense hardly outside Himself.

10. It is there in the Blessed Sacrament, with the eyes, the mouth, the brow: most thrilling, most hushing mystery.

Oh, to look upon that face eternally, how sweet a destiny! A humble, reverent, familiar, affectionate devotion to the Passion is one chief sign of our predestination to see the face of Jesus for evermore!

VI. THE DESERTION OF THE APOSTLES.

It is Passion Sunday; we must take our lesson from the Passion.

We have a great deal to do to be saved: and

God does not save us without ourselves, i.e. we must do our part, we must correspond to grace.

Now here comes a most important question: to what amount can we trust ourselves, and what can we trust ourselves for?

I. Our salvation looks safer the longer we persevere in the spiritual life. Does this come from any change in ourselves; any change which we may safely trust? Grounds of trust are

1. Strength of character, which may be partly natural and partly acquired.

2. Habits of virtue, which certainly make the exercise of virtue easier.

3. Great graces, which are not only signs of predestination, but inward revolutions.

4. Perseverance in good, up to the silencing of temptations.

5. Amount of actual sincere love of God, which even humility must admit.

All this is true; but what I want to bring out is that it is not our own but God s, and more than this, that it is not a gift of God which we hold in our own dominion it is not so much something done and over, as a present grace, depending upon grace and therefore, while it is an immense reason for infinitely trusting God, it is no just reason at all for trusting ourselves. II. I infer this from that most painful mystery of the Passion, the desertion of Jesus by His own Apostles.

1. It is probahle, from what we know of the usual customs of divine grace, that they had beautiful natural characters to start with, and had led pure lives.

2. The grandeur of their vocations, next to the Divine Maternity.

3. Their novitiate with Jesus, its inexhaustible benedictions.

4. The bewildering amount of love He had lavished on them.

5. The immense enthusiastic love they had for Him no saints have attained it.

IH. Yet the most melancholy incredibility we have ever been called upon to belifeve they fell

1. Fell after all those repeated miracles, after two in the garden itself, namely the falling back, and the healing of Malchus ear.

2. Fell at a small danger for they were not aimed at and at ike first danger.

3. Fell just when common love and loyalty would have called them forward, especially as it was all done through the treachery of one of their own body.

4. Fell after solemn reiterated warnings and solemn reiterated protestations of all. And in like manner said all the disciples. (Matt. xxvi. 35.)

5. Fell just after first Communion and that the first Communion in the world, just as the first man fell, and the first among the angels fell. Merciful God! what then have we to trust to hut His mercy?

Hence I infer that we can trust ourselves for nothing. dear Brethren! that I could write this single truth so deeply in your hearts that no length of years nor adventurousness of life should ever efface it, that in order to secure our salvation, life must he one long, unsuspended, unforgetting dependence upon grace!

JUDAS.

I. Jesus had a secret sorrow Judas He never alluded to the cross hut often said, one of you shall betray Me.

II. Judas in childhood.

1. Winning ways.

2. A mother s love.

3. A promise dear to his mother. 4. Little faults may have preluded his great ones.

4. Unsuspectingness of his future doom.

III. Jesus with Judas.

1. His first love of Judas.

2. The fall of Judas began with taking scandal, i.e. at St. Mary Magdalen.

3. How Jesus spares him at the supper, not naming him openly. Dear Jesus!

4. Washes his feet.

5. Communicates him.

6. That which thou dost do quickly.

7. Then in the garden horror of the words of Judas tenete Eum.

IV. Judas despair ah, where is Jesus? He takes the money back, and they jeer him how unlike Jesus, who would have so soothed him where is Jesus? (No soul so needed Him because of the thought of Him no soul was so despairing as Judas was then.) Gone to death by treachery.

Does not all this give me comfort? Will He bear with me? I don t know: I am worse than Judas, I fear. Jesus was troubled in spirit, and the disciples looked one upon another. (St. John xiii.

V. If we love Jesus, we hate Judas. We should like to know what his character was like, whether it was like ours. At least we have resemblances to him.

1. He had a sweet and potent call from Jesus so we.

2. He once loved Jesus, perhaps so we.

3. He got to know Him on familiar terms so we*

4. He began with venial sins and self-seeking so iv e.

5. He did not know how hard his heart was getting so we.

VI. See life of St. Joseph of Cupertino, which says that the loss of Judas was the worst pain of the Passion*

HIS BLOOD BE UPON US AND UPON OUR CHILDREN.

Night over the valley of the Nile destroying angel doorposts stained with hlood so now it is night this life is a night incessant flight of the destroying angel in company with the angel of death souls stained with blood. If the Blood of Jesus is not on us then, we are lost to all eternity. But how was this mystery of the Precious Blood proclaimed in the Passion? I. The mystery.

1. Pilate washing his hands with water: the Jews were wiser who took blood. An act of the greatest human childishness done by the side of and in the face of Divine Wisdom Jesus looking on, listening, silent as usual

His eyes look on the crowd, not with the piercing dignity of a judge, nor even the meek reproachfulness of a sufferer, but with the clear beaming of unmingled, unaccusing love.

2. They saw Blood on Him, and thirsted for it like beasts, yet did not know ivhat It really was.

3. They had reached now the height of the sin of putting the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to death universus populus yes! unwersus! what a sweet propbecy.

4. They were ready to be victims themselves, if only tbey can make Him a victim: oh, what wise theology, what Christian science in all this mad blind sin. They threw tbeir hearts wide open, turned God s grandest blessing into a curse, and took it in, and made it from that time forth their life, a chained life, a life of most horrible chaining an d enchantment.

5. The cry so wild, so thrilling, so enormous, so unanimous! like the cry from a ship going down, or the cries at the deluge till Noe heard them no more.

G. The silence after the cry, like the silence which Noe felt, nay heard above the turbid waters, for there are silences which are so silent that they can be heard more the city so silent, their own hearts so hushed by the panic of their own cry, Pilate so astounded it was a wonder that an angel did not speak, if only to break the intolerable silence. Perhaps the angels thought God would speak, as over the Jordan, and when the multitude said it thundered.

7. Jesus in that silence and the Holy Trinity. God even then was silent: that inveterate silence of God! what an endless revelation it is!

II. The Saviour! We look on that furious crowd on the blue vault of sky filled with the noiseless shining of the sun on the silent buildings how dumb they look in their brightness, on the cowering Pilate, on the blue mantle of Mary then on THE SAVIOUR OF THE WORLD with the morning sun shining whitely on Him.

1. His look how could anguish be so beautiful when it was visibly so bitter? lips goldened as it were by the heavenly words He had for years been uttering.

2. His silence He had not sentenced them, it was themselves. He had thought of this hour, when He was weeping over Jerusalem!

3. His thoughts angels adored His wisdom, could come nearer to fathoming that than to fathoming the bitterness and yet the sweetness of His thoughts.

4. His Heart its love, its exultation, its faintness, its pang, its augmentation of love for them. It rushed out upon this crowd in augmentations of love which were like new creations for impetuosity and magnificence.

5. It was a wonder they did not see He was

God. Aye, see with the very eyes in their heads that He was God!

III. The pain of that cry.

1. As an immense sin and to Him a gigantic ingratitude. How ingratitude crushes tender and affectionate natures.

2. As coming from those He so specially loved and the love of whom was communicated to His Human Nature by His Divinity.

3. As a true prophecy of their future misery another wandering than that glorious one in the wilderness, and with quite another sort of melancholy miracle about it. Homeless, unsanctuaried people!

4. The foreseen sacrilegious use of His Precious Blood nay was it not a torture to Him that the first use of His Precious Blood should be a sacrilege? of His Precious Blood which He loved so amazingly, just as He was tur-latus spiritu, (St. John xiii. 21) from fore sight of Judas Communion?

5. As an intense sorrow to His Mother, be cause she loved her people, and because it was always an incredible surprise to her to see Him not loved. Dear Mother! she had been used to it from early days, and yet could not get used to it.

IV. The joy of that cry.

1. Because the last obstacle to His Passion was now removed.

2. Because all allusion to the shedding of His Blood was a delight to Him, just as a generous man rejoices in the abundance lie has to give away. The cry roused Him as the trumpet rouses the warhorse.

3. Because of the conversion of the Jews at last and of many now, e.g. three thousand by the sermon of St. Peter, who is now hiding away for fear and shame.

4. Because of the fulness of the Gentiles: He saw the crowd of all men; He saw us with His Blood upon us; the thrones of some of us in heaven; nay, why should I say some, why not all? it is my want of faith.

5. Exultation at the immensity, continuity, completeness, and magnificence of His redemption.

There are two prayers which never cease from off the earth; one the Lord s prayer, taught on a grassy hill of Galilee notable for the thick tuftings of its grass, overlooking the quiet lake, the other by a whole people in the frenzy of their sin in the streets of the Holy City; the blasphemy and curse have turned into a blessing and a worship, and a wild, wild prayer for the Precious Blood! All the day and all the night throughout the whole earth the silent eloquence of Christian faith, and the speechless song of Christian hope, and the endless wistful sigh of Christian humility are for ever rising to the throne of our Heavenly Father, beautifully and adoringly pro longing the cry of that dark day of poor Jerusalem: His Blood be upon us and upon our children.

HE SAVED OTHEKS: HIMSELF HE CANNOT SAVE.

Is it not strange that such wicked words can be so beautiful? Yet are they not beautiful? Oh, beautiful as some fragment of an angel s song! He saved others: Himself He cannot save.

I. What He looked like to those who saw Him on the cross.

1. Description of Him all disfigured.

2. So changed from what they had seen Him in the temple, or on Palm Sunday. He was not an object of horror. Suffering can beautify with a pitiable beauty. It can make reverend. Even death can beautify. Its rigid repose can even be # more graceful thing than the supple grace of life.

3. At the least He was an object of pity: horror of gibing the pitiable, and in the hearing of His Mother! What a dreadful thing hatred is! and such a hatred!

II. What He looks like to us.

1. The Godhead shining through the disfigurement.

2. His love of men beautifying the very disfigurement itself.

3. to us such an object of love, of pity also, yet much more of love and of adoration.

III. He saved others.

1. What! did they hate Him for saving men?

2. But the fact, how true it is! He did indeed save others, He saved us, perhaps them; some who jeered, e.g. the good thief, are now with Him in heaven.

3. He did not care to save Himself, so long as He saved us. He never thought of Himself: this was His human character, He pleased not Himself; it was this which so touched St. Paul.

IV. Himself He cannot save.

1. Can this be true? He is the omnipotent God; angels are waiting His sign.

2. Yet it is true. He is helpless; He cannot save Himself; He cannot come down from the Cross.

3. But what hinders? such a might of love, of love only, of love for us.

V. We.

1. Did we then seem so beautiful? oh no! how far from that!

2. But we did seem so pitiable! He lost all pity for Himself and for His Mother, because we did look so infinitely pitiable.

3. And yet, even after it all, we can scarcely force ourselves to pity Him; we can hardly strain a tear, or force a sigh, because of the pains of our dear crucified Love!

How much the Passion has saved us from! Out of what a depth it has rescued us! Truly we can now use those merciless words of the Jews in quite another sense. We can take up our crucifix, and kiss the Five Wounds with at least so much love as to grieve we have not more love, and then looking at our Saviour s Face we can say, Yes, my Jesus, my Lord and my God: Thou Bavest others, Thyself Thou canst not save!

OUR LORD S COMPLAINTS IN HIS

PASSION.

If one you loved lay dying, would you rather he were silent or complained? Sorrow has many ingenious questions to settle, but hardly any more interesting than this. I. The Doubt.

1. How much from one point of view silence on their part enables us to bear the sufferings of those we love! Our heart is less wounded, and our mind estimates the suffering less.

2. One of the ends of the silence of Jesus was to spare us. Had He complained we should have sickened with sorrow over His Passion, with too much sorrow to have left room for love.

3. Yet somehow we love the pain complaint gives us; if not a solace, it is a pain such as sorrow covets.

4. There is something graceful in the complaining of those who suffer: something which discloses the inward beauty of their souls; to me it seems of all human sounds not only the most beautiful but the most dignified and the most religious. *

5. It is often an index of great conformity to God s Will; complaint is the voice of patience.

6. We cannot bear for long the silence of those we love: looks speak, and sighs speak, nay the silence speaks, but love craves words.

7. In memory how precious, like far off music, are the complaints of those we have lost.

II. Jesus complaining.

1. The mystery of God complaining: how this ^ would strike a heathen in the Old Testament; it reveals God so marvellously as a God of love, as the God who out of love made us free, that He might want our love the more, and then is endlessly, pathetically, almost humbly complaining that He does not get our love.

2. The special mystery of the complaints of the uncomplaining Jesus: His whole life was so uncomplaining.

3. The taciturnity of the Word makes His words so precious, especially in the silent Passion.

4. The inexhaustible beauty of His complaints, so like Him and yet so unlike; somehow they increase our devotion to His silence by making us feel it to be so Godlike.

5. The extreme unexpected simplicity of His complaints; unexpected because of their plain, artless, spontaneous humanness. The Human Nature united to the Divine must have had a singularly simple, translucent, guileless character.

III. The Five Complaints; all of personal things and to persons. Simon, sleepest thou? Couldst thou not watch one hour?

1. What! Could you not watch one hour with

Me? L_.r"..

1. Said to Peter by name as the next was to Judas by name,

2. As if Peter had only just finished his pro testations.

3. Surprise. What! as if He had believed the protestations.

4. Disappointment.

5. Pain, but un-upbraiding. One hour! it was such a small thing to do to keep awake for an hour!

6. Judas! Dost thou betray the Son of Man with a kiss?

7. Judas by name.

8. The tone of the voice.

9. Its sweet gentleness, as if not angry but lovingly incredulous.

10. The word betray.

11. With a kiss had the apostles, ever kissed Him before, and on the mouth? if so, how terrible were Judas memories, if not, how terrible was the familiarity!

12. Are you come out as against a thief with swords and clubs?

13. Said to His dear Jews.

14. A thief as if the disgrace affected Him, and the sense of dishonour.

15. Still more that His people should not have recognised His Godhead, Who thought it not robbery to be equal with God.

16. With sivords and clubs, when He had always been so gentle, and said, Look at Me, I am gentle and meek.

17. As if it was pain to think that they imagined He was not ready to die for them without any violence; this last was the worst wound.

18. If well, why smitest thou Me? these words are naturally in St. John s Gospel, because of his devotion to the Word, who for words is now smitten.

19. Said in the house of Annas.

20. His sense of injustice.

21. He remembers all His kind and beautiful words; now it is for His words that He is struck.

22. Sense of inhumanity, the first out of the way violence.

23. His sense of innocence if evil, give testimony of the evil. He was being judged, and He thought of the justice and the indulgence of His own court of justice.

24. My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken

Me?

1. Speaking no longer to creatures, but to His Father.

2. In a loud voice, as if His Father was so far off, or was getting deaf to Him, as creatures were.

3. Amazement. Forsake!

4. Sense of intolerableness.

5. Yet somehow this is the most uncomplaining of the complaints, though the most heartrending because there is such adoration in it.

Note that all the complaints are questions not upbraidings but pleadings, unwillingnesses to believe evil, the surprises of love at being wronged their unrhetorical simplicity quite divine.

dearest Lord! how sweet to us are Thy beautiful complaints, the five wounds of Thy feelings! for we seem to get nearer to Thee, or Thou to come nearer to us, when Thou condescendest to complain!

OUK BLESSED LORD BOWING HIS HEAD UPON THE CROSS.¹⁰

Passage from mere Lent to Passiontide from examining self to contemplating Him. Look at Him on the cross, feature by feature. The drooping of a man s head, when he dies sitting up: it is as if he were pondering some difficult question, yet untroubled and unperplexed.

The bowing of His head, His head crowned with that cruel crown of thorns.

I. As if He was weary and would fain rest and did He not grievously want rest? and what a comfortless deathbed we had given! Com pared with this, there was luxury in the ashes on which saints have died. The Passion was more fatigue than creation. How His head must have ached! How the angels longed to hold it up!

II. As if He yearned to lean it on His Mother s lap.

1. How sweetly it had rested there at Bethlehem and in the wilderness! What she felt when she saw it move and droop.

2. How it said to her, (Cant, v.) Open to me, my love, my dove, my undenled; for my head is full of dew, and my locks of the drops of the night.

3. How afterwards she touched, and pressed, and kissed the dead Head beneath the cross.

III. In token of respect to His Father.

1. As if His Father had spoken, and accepted the cross just then.

2. As if now all was consummated what an All! what a consummation!

3. To give death leave to touch Him, Who was eternal Life.

IV. As though to welcome us and give us leave to kiss Him.

1. The love He had for each of us at that moment.

2. What is our love for Him? What our delighted worship of His Passion? Dearest Lord! Why do we ever think of any one but Him? How can we manage to love any one but Him? 0, may we come to feel and to know that we have but one faith, one hope, one love, one consolation in weary, painful time, and one reward in the grand, jubilant eternity Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

THE PASSION OUR DEVOTION THE WHOLE YEAR ROUND.

Seeming strangeness of speaking of the Passion at Eastertide.

I. The Passion is an abiding devotion,

1. Because in it redemption was accomplished.

2. Because the Sacraments come out of it.

3. Because Mass is a continuation of it.

4. Because it most safely suits our condition on earth.

5. Because it is a special antidote to hardness of heart. Examine this.

II. All holiness depends upon our hearts not heing hardened; yet this is the great difficulty of life.

1. Because all that is seen (world so bright, people so kind and good,) hardens the heart, while what softens it is unseen and supernatural.

2. Sin breeds sin, and so habits are formed which obscure the mind and harden the heart.

3. Low views of sin from the world s favourite notion that all duty to God is fulfilled in duty to our neighbour.

4. The very easiness of forgiveness helps to harden a wilful heart.

5. Natural corruption inclines that way, just as water gets cold if taken from the fire.

6. Because we pay so little attention to sins of thought.

7. Because we are so careless about venial sins, especially those of the tongue and untruths.

8. We have so little striving after perfection, and consequently little knowledge of our own vileness.

9. Because even good people act commonly from the sole motive of duty, without that of love.

III. Reasons why the Passion is so touching and heart- softening.

1. Because of the atrocity of the sufferings hoth mental and bodily.

2. The unparalleled heartlessness of the inflicters there was every reason against their doing it.

3. The enchanting sweetness and patience of the Sufferer.

4. The thought that He was God.

5. That all these sufferings were for our sake.

6. That we have felt this a hundred times, and yet have so ill requited Him.

7. The fear that we might have acted as His executioners did, had we been there.

8. All the other circumstances of the Passion are so exquisitely pathetic. 1. The betrayal. 2. The Blessed Virgin Mary. 3. The Last Words. 4. The Centurion. 5. Pilate s ad mission of His innocence.

9. Because from His Passion, as from a treasure-house of Divine Love, come

10. All our hopes for the future.

11. All our security about the forgiveness of the past.

12. All the grace of our present life.

13. The Presence of the Blessed Sacrament. Hence the Passion is the daily hread of Christian souls.

XIII. THE LEGACIES OF JESUS.

If sons, heirs indeed of God, and joint heirs with Christ. (Eom. viii. 17).

Jesus, the poorest of earth s poor, leaves His legacies to His lovers: come to Calvary, come to the foot of the Cross: they are diceing for His seamless garment: we too must be there at that deathbed, to catch, if nothing else, the Seven last Words of wise and burning love that fall from His everblessed lips. I. His Peace:

1. Interior mastery over self.

2. Satisfyingness of our love for Him.

3. Quiet certainty of our holy faith.

4. Sweet inclination to judge well of and do good to all men.

II. His Cross:

1. To make us carpenters for ourselves.

2. To carry for Him, like Simon of Gyrene.

3. To be nailed to, like Peter and Himself: and this

4. In heart.

5. In soul.

6. In body.

Ah! who that has a loving heart will be cast down at such a legacy as this?

III. His Mother: as to St. John.

1. Talk to her.

2. Listen to what she shall tell us of Jesus: devotion to her opens mysteries.

3. Defend her honour.

4. Beg her blessing as if she was in our house as she was in St. John s.

IV. Himself:

1. As the sweet Burden of Joseph s arms.

2. As on Mary s lap to make our hearts tender.

3. As in spices for sepulture in Communion. now with riches like to these that we would take heart and give ourselves utterly up to God. Jf life be bright and smiling, Jesus is the brightness and the smile and how will He enhance that brightness. If our road lie through sorrow and through clouds, what a light ever shining is He. If our measure of life be well nigh spent, ah what reparation have we not to make, and love alone can catch up lost time. If we be young, just leaving port in the gallant trim of youth with the bright flags of a hundred hopes flying at our masts, then with Jesus on board we shall be secure against wreck, and reach at once the haven where we would be. that the mighty and Eternal Wisdom, the Eloquence of the Father, and yet the humblest of loving friends to poor venturesome sinners that He for the sake of these sorrowful mysteries and deep humiliations which we are all thinking of at this sacred season of Lent that He would speak one of His never failing words in the hearts of each of us, and make us by a real conversion and a heavenly love His own, His Heritage for ever!

XIV. SETTING UP THE STATIONS.

"We are about to engage in an act to which the Church attaches great importance is strict about and enriches with quite unusual indulgences. I. Devotions of the Jews to holy places Jacob at Bethel, &c. Also the heathen.

1. It implies that we are in a state of exile, and that heaven is our real country.

2. It is a means of reverence and adoration of God.

3. It is an act of love and softens the heart.

4. It is a touching and eloquent witness to the world.

5. Unusual grace and supernatural gifts often go with sanctity of place.

II. Devotion of the Stations,

1. Beauty and naturalness of it considered in itself.

2. Our Lady began it herself on Good Friday.

3. How she continued it in after years in Jerusalem.

4. Pilgrimages in the early and middle ages.

5. The ardent love of Christians as it were invoked the holy places to their own homes, as St. Paula (so St. Jerome says), Blessed Columha of Pdeti, and St. Lidwine of Schiedam visited the Holy Land bodily in extasy..

III. Fruits and benedictions of this devotion.

1. It is an act of faith, of hope, and of charity.

2. A thanksgiving to the Most. Holy Trinity. 8. An exercise most fruitful of contrition, penance, and humility.

3. Most acceptable to Jesus and Mary.

4. Most supernatural in its effects on Purgatory. The best way of making the Stations is to unite ourselves to the interior dispositions of Mary.

XV.

THE PAIN OF JESUS FROM OUR LITTLE DEVOTION TO HIS PASSION.

I. Have you ever been in great sorrow? Then you know how much harder to bear is want of sympathy than want of kindness. Kindness is a want without, sympathy a want within. Now with that thought come up Calvary.

1. Did you ever see any beauty like the beauty of that dying Face?

2. But is there not a look of surprise upon it? not that death is so hard; no! not that!

3. And a look of being pained not by physical pain, not by nails or crown; oh no!

4. We each see that expression for ourselves others do not see quite what we see.

5. It is our Lord s pain at our want of devotion to the Passion: it is a pain we each of us have caused, apart from our causing the Passion altogether.

II. His pain at our want of devotion to His

Passion.

1. It was a separate pain for each one of us; for wounded love never repeats itself or its pangs.

2. It was a very great pain, for love was just what He was craving, and it was just the one possible consolation. We are too coarse to do justice to the mystery of the Passion; our lives are not sufficiently purified by penance.

3. It was a peculiar pain; and all peculiarity in pain is especially sensible.

4. It was a heightening of each and all of His other pains want, ache, absence, feeling of wasted, unappreciated tenderness.

5. It was a separate thing for Him to forgive yet not a sin exactly, and somehow this made it more intolerable to bear.

III. "What we may reverently conceive to have been His dispositions about it.

1. Almost surprise or what in any other human heart would have been surprise; we are surprised, indeed we cannot explain our own insensibility.

2. Intense sorrow I had almost dared to say disappointment. The more intense because His own exceeding love made it altogether unreproachful.

3. An increased yearning for our devotion, as if its absence made Him hunger.

4. An increased passion to suffer, as if that might move us, and so get Him what He craves.

5. The pitiful pleading of His silence: in the garden He complained, what! could ye not watch? Yet on the Cross not one of His seven words was about it. But oh! how He intended that silence to speak, to speak in the hearts of His servants!

IV. What He thought or rather what His silence said.

1. He had made His Passion so thick and so various in order to wound all hearts: I be lieve He meant some one touchingness of it for each heart.

2. He had run into all manner of excesses and enthusiasms, what could He do more?

3. Then He gave it all to each of us: He made what belonged to the whole world personal to each one of us.

4. His behaviour and manner had all been so beautiful and gentle: angels even felt the sweet piteousness of His courteous love.

5. Then He had plunged His Mother in it, to break our hard hearts, because He knew with what intensity we should love her. Who can resist the piteousness of innocence suffering? and such dear innocence as hers?

I cannot go on multiplying thoughts: it is getting more than we can bear. my Saviour! my Saviour! how I wish I could think He had had some consolation from knowing that I should be devoted to His Passion before I died!

XVI. THE SEVEN JOUBNEYS.

I. From the supper-room to Gethsemane.

1. The departure of Judas on his accursed work.

2. The presentiments of the disciples.

3. The unspeakable calmness of Jesus.

II. From Gethsemane to the house of Annas.

1. The violence of those who drag Him.

2. The plunging Him in the brook Cedron.

3. His entry amid shame and abjection into the house of Annas.

III. From the house of Annas to the house of Caiphas.

1. The insults of His enraged enemies.

2. The disturbance in the dark streets.

3. The interior occupations of Jesus.

IV. From the house of Caiphas to the hall of Pilate.

1. The weariness and faintness of Jesus.

2. His confusion at being made over to the heathen governor.

3. The mingled feelings of those who see Him pass.

V. From the hall of Pilate to the court of

Herod.

1. Increased faintness of Jesus.

2. His sweetness in suffering.

3. His patient charity.

VI. From the court of Herod to the hall of Pilate.

1. His submission to rude hands.

2. His acceptance of the humiliation.

3. His generous facing of death.

VII. From the hall of Pilate to Calvary.

1. His meeting His Blessed Mother.

2. His three falls.

3. His arrival at Calvary.

XVII. THE FIVE TRIALS OF JESUS.

I. Before Annas.

1. Jesus justifies Himself.

2. He receives a blow.

3. His sweet patience and defence of Himself.

II. Before Caiphas.

1. The silence of Jesus.

2. The false witnesses.

3. The adjuration.

III. Before Pilate and acquitted.

1. The reluctance of Pilate.

2. The modest defence of Jesus.

3. Pilate s acquittal of Him and unlawful cruelty.

IV. Before Herod.

1. Solemnity and seventy of the silence of Jesus.

2. His refusal to work a miracle.

3. His being derided as a fool. V. Before Pilate and found guilty.

4. Pilate s human respect.

5. The proposal of Barabbas.

6. Jesus receives sentence.

PART THIRD.

Footnotes

1. The twelve following chapters are the sketch of a proposed treatise. ↩

2. Vita, pp. 289, 290. ↩

3. See Battista s postscriptum about devotion to interior and to exterior pains in the French life of her, p. 155. ↩

4. v. page 149. ↩

5. John, xix. 11. ↩

6. Gorres, Mystik, 1. iv, c. 20. ↩

7. T. Foot of the Cross, p. 302. ↩

8. Cant. v. 2, 11., ↩

9. Lament, ii. 11. t Cant. v. 12. ↩

10. The last sermon which Father Faber preached, Passion Sunday, 1863. ↩