The Spiritual Life

Cassandra in the streets of Troy, obliged to prophecy, although she knew nobody would believe her, a type of preachers and writers of spiritual books. This is especially the case about begin ning over again.

I. New beginnings.

The authority of the saints, even of recluses like S. Antony.
The simple necessity of the case for what else is to be done?
It was an absurdity not to expect it before hand.
Souls are never lost because their beginnings breakdown, but because they won t make new beginnings.
Why don t we believe this? Because our old beginnings have disheartened us.

II. Well, then, what has become of our old beginnings?

We think them so many mistakes, shames, failures, and cowardices.
But they are in reality gone to heaven as merits.
"We should have been much worse now, if we had not made them.
They are capital foundations for new begin nings.
We are distinctly so much dearer to God be cause of them, and therefore distinctly so much more likely to succeed in our fresh beginnings.
We have gained many graces by failure, which we should never have gained by success.
It is often a remarkable mercv for a new v beginning to break down, because it was in a wrong groove, and would have come to grief at last.
In truth, the disappointments of our past spiritual life, its heaps of rubbish, as I may call them, are incredibly full of choicest reve lations of the tenderness of God.

III. Therefore, I say, begin again Lent is the time for new beginnings but how to begin?

Begin generously, not with much, only with out any definite limit or reserve.
Break distinctly at once with some one thing which is not for God we will pray for each other that God may show us some such thing within our souls.
Do not think whether it will be a failure or not what matter? it is the battle, not the victory, which is the real success in divine things.
Found it more deeply in prayer than your other beginnings were.
Whatever the beginning is, accompany it with a greater effort after humility.

I believe many heroic and saintly lives will be found at last to be simply an entanglement of generous beginnings.

LITTLE ENCOURAGEMENTS.

A journey uphill all the way crossing the sea where it is always rough running for life with a wild beast pursuing us having to do something very accurately, yet having to do it in the dark having to pick our way speedily over slippery rocks with the tide rising round us faster than we can advance; all these are figures of the Christian life, of the hot, arduous, doubtful, nervous race for the salvation of our souls. I. Reflections suited to our present state.

The thought of hell is intolerable, and yet multitudes go there daily.
The avoiding of sin is not so easy.
Many think they will be saved, and are not.
Many begin well, go on a long time, and end badly.
We hate trouble, and yet we must take considerable trouble to be saved. Now all this looks amiss have we any encouragements?

II. Shadows of predestination- their value, and substantial comfort.

Sweetnesses in devotion they don t often come to the worldly they are little shadows, but still shadows.
Temptations do we resist do we over come do we lessen them? anyhow, do we fight?
Pleasure in Church services and devotions this shows a taste which may be a root of heaven.
Frequenting the sacraments; this is not a certainty, but near to it, a bright shadow.
Improvement of temper we are slower to anger anger lasts less time we are more sorry afterwards.
Feeling humble, i. e., thinking less well of ourselves than we did last year a grand shadow.
Getting kinder more thought for others a gentler tongue more charitable judgments more generosity more forgetfulness of self this is the shadow of Jesus Himself.

III. How we may safely use all these as encou ragements.

If we refer them all to God and His goodness.
If they increase our faith, quicken our hope, heat our love.
If we do not rest contented in them, but press on.

Encouragement is a grand help to holiness. I know that from one point of view we are all of us much worse than we believe ourselves to be; but I believe also, that from another point of view we are all of us better than we think. Our dearest Lord contrives to be pleased with many things about us, which we shall never know till we are dead, and judged, and saved.

LITTLE DISCOURAGEMENTS,

I. How matters stand now.

God loves us more daily, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and angels, and saints joy of being loved, and so loved.
Yet we feel discouraged, and are quite eloquent on the gloomy side.
Well, this too is an encouragement; for it shows we have the matter at heart.
Besides, we do feel a peace and pleasantness really in our hearts.
Moreover, every day is a piece of final perseverance only be true and unaffected..

II. Now let us discuss the discouragements.

We do not reach our mark.

Of course not, but this shows we aimed generously.

We are intermitting in our efforts.

Did we not expect to be so? Else would it not be a miracle?

Our temptations are more vehement. Capital sign the devil has had to put out more power; besides, so long as the tempta tions displease us, they are as good as beaten. Sometimes we ourselves make them more vehement by arguing with them, or being too frightened of them.
New kinds of temptation assail us, and new kinds of faults are disclosed.

Best sign of growth more light and more light makes more room for love.

We fall most when and where we try most.

This shows we have hit the right when and where: 1. God, 2. the devil, 3. nature ex plain these falls. God lets us fall for humility, the devil causes falls by extra assaults, nature through weariness and petulance.

The things we took on ourselves have grown miraculously heavy and are too much for us. Then change them and take something less: change is a relief: gentleness is not always cowardice, or if it is, then cowardice is some times wise: all I wish for you is a good-natured director, and then I like your feeling these things heavy. if priests were more gooduatured, how many more souls would be saved!
Weariness grows upon us, and also grows less bearable.

Well! this shows that nature is suffering, and so that you are really mortifying yourselves: every pious person has the fidgets occasionally and like a successful vaccination, it shows that grace has taken.

The exercise of charity is more difficult. Invariable sign of first progresses, like the irritabilities of convalescence, our fresh light, our very increased love of God make us less charitable.
Prayers and spiritual exercises seem more dull, and have to be done with effort.

God would not let this be, if He did not think you had got on: take it as your mortification, and your only one, and never mind other mortifications just now: the effort is just the violence which our Lord says takes the kingdom of heaven by force: ask God for sweetness and complain to Him of His having taken it away.

III. I am afraid you will think me most provokingly and perversely cheerful. But the fact is, I have no eye for darkness. I can never see anything but light anywhere. It puts me quite in spirits arguing with these dis couragements: you are getting on famously; there is a fine quiet work going on in your soul, as all these things tell me.

If you fret, be more generous with God, and then you will get it more quickly over; generosity makes short work with difficulties, but it is a very sharp operation.
But sometimes it is safer to be longer: vehemence does not suit brittle things.
But will this state of things last long? Certainly not, if you keep your spirits up.
What shall I do, what is best for me just now? Increase in devotion to the Saints! I lay great stress on this.
But what if I die as I am now? Well! you will be saved!

THE GOD WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH.

In the spiritual life there are two people at work God and ourselves: and who works most? God; who can doubt it?

I. Spiritual life is an estimating things at their true price, weighing them by their true weights, measuring them in just measures, and numbering them in right order.

But price, weight, measure, and order are the character of God, that is, depend on it and Him. Hence the indispensable necessity of a right view of God.
One of the devil s chief arts is to give us wrong thoughts, hard thoughts, or too easy thoughts of God.
God requires to be revealed separately to each soul.
Our idea of God almost involves our future life, and even the success of our eternity.
Intense reverence for God is the best augury for our new beginnings.

II. ISfow let me see how God deals with us in our beginnings.

Content with very little, if it is from the heart. Dear St. Francis of Sales said one day, in that nice way in which he used to say things: God is content with little; for He knows we have not much to give*
Beady to wait our time in prayer^ penances, and resolutions.
Kewards minutely on the whole makes more of little things than we do;
Revives merits, and does not revive demerits.
Makes immense allowances: using His in exhaustible wisdom: all through the Bible God is on the side of laxity ^ man on the side of strictness example of the woman taken in adultery.
Is more anxious for our salvation than we are ourselves: suck that wonderful truth.
Sees good where we cannot see it e. g. faults of beginners which piety itself engen ders: just as strengthening medicines give headaches, bring out rashes on the skin, or otherwise derange us.
Sets His value on efforts as the real things which are personal to Himself: efforts are easier than accomplishments, and are always successes.
As Creator He is drawn to our weakness, and attracted by it.
Inexplicable leniency of all His judgments were He not God, and so holy a God, it could not be.
Follows our lead, and goes our road with us. What a sight the angels see God following His creatures all the world over, like a lacquey, following the lead even of school boys or of school-girls and respecting the free will of children in the nursery.
Yearns to be familiar with us, and hence is sometimes pleased even with our petulancy, which shows trust) and wounded feeling, which shows love.
His understanding of our nature, and so of the sinlessness of first motions which we can hardly realise, as in temptations, dis tractions, and first thoughts.
The immense value He sets on faith is an immense consolation to us: for faith is a gift: we are almost passive; it is a grace w r hich we can increase without penance.
He will do anything for us, and vary it for our own private selves and peculiar souls, if only we are 1, very reverent, 2. full of thought and 3. desire Him. Blosius says that the desire of contrition or of devotion to the Passion is often dearer to Plim than the reality. There is something beautifully piteous to Him in the sight of our desiring good things too high for us: this is in itself a revelation of God.

III. "What follows from all this? That we must have

An immense esteem of grace: this runs like concrete under all the foundations of the spiritual life.
A filial confidence in our Heavenly Father.
An abiding gentle sorrow for sin.
The contentment of humility with little things, and with our own outward slowness.
The vigour of encouragement, and the elasticity of inveterate cheerfulness,,

St. Francis of Sales says that the best and most successful beggars are those who are the most deformed, and have the most frightful sores; they attract alms: so is it with us when we lie before the door of God s compassion: so that our very wretchedness is our treasure to trade with in the things of God. Our misery seems positively to widen the immensity of His mercy.

ON THE MANAGEMENT OF OUE GEACE.

Questa e la maggiore perfezione di tutte le virtu, e grazie, mantenere umilmente i doni ricevuti. BEATO EGIDIO.

The management of our grace is our one work, the occupation of time, and the securing of eternity the sole occupation by which eternity is secured.

I. Our position in the world.

Its beauty and magnificence in a physical point of view.
The grandeur of our intellectual gifts.
The power and diversity of our moral en dowments.
The manifold glory of civilization.
The magnificence of the world in a social point of view.
The gorgeous destiny of humanity considered as one the progress and good of the race.
Yet all this is merely subordinate to the end for which we were created.
Which is, to become likened to God, and to see Him eternally face to face.
To this end all our natural gifts, and all conceivable natural gifts conceivably multi plied avail nothing; not even a little, but, standing by themselves, absolutely nothing.

II. The necessity of grace.

We need some supernatural gift in order to attain our end.
This gift must be a created thing, working within, gratuitous, for an eternal end.
It is either a certain communication of the Divine Nature, or an impulse of the Divine Will.
It surrounds us in both these shapes in in describable variety, and incredible abundance.
It weds itself to all our natural gifts and en dowments, but as sovereign to them.
We are therefore on the earth as the old astrologers imagined themselves to be, sur rounded with strange powers^ and instruments and potent spells^ and heavenly witchcraft.
Holding sweet substantial communion with the invisible God, such as no legends ever dared to depict no matter if rich Or poor, scholar or simple.

8 This is our real life, using all the grandeurs of mind, morals, civilization, and physical things, as mere means to our end.

Our spiritual life, therefore, is the wise or unwise management and administration of our grace: and this is our present subject a very grave one, to the careless, full of such shadowy fears to the earnest, full of brave encouragement. Pelagianism is the strength of all that seems most delusively fresh in the aspect of the times, and especially wears the look of a false healthiness. III. The abundance of grace.
In kind.
Actual grace, of which there are many subordinate kinds.
Sanctifying grace.
In quantity.
Never beneath, i. e., falling short of the amount of temptation.
Often quite irrespective of any temptation. 8. A sort of supernatural inundation of our natural life,
In number.
Yet though an inundation, it is not in distinguishable or uniform.
Several of them are given to each of our deliberate actions, words, thoughts, and endurances,
Graces for past, present, and future, are in us in some sense all at once,
In weight.
Greater than that of the temptation, taken by itself ivithout our totality of corruption.
Pressing just where our character would desire the weight should press.
Yet never so as to violate the freedom of our will; not even by the efficacious suavity of victorious grace.
In seasonableness.
Prophetically preparing us for what is coming.
Concentrating itself on opportune con junctures of time.
Suiting the peculiarities of our characters, which requires grace to time itself very differently, as for instance with a slow man or a swift one.
In superabundance.
Almost embarrassing and distracting; graces seem all around, not so much coming as already come, and we only have to put ourselves in connection with them, just as the earth and air are always charged with electricity.
At least this is the case, provided we are earnestly striving to love God.
Each of its probably has more grace than the highest saint has ever corresponded to. Yet some seem to have it only by drops; perhaps some really have it only so there is great inequality, as in Tyre and Sidon, Bethsaida and Corozain¹
In unintermittingness.
Sanctifying grace is an unintermitting state, only forfeited by deliberate sin.
Actual graces are most likely unintermitting. Council of Sens, also of Trent,* Christus jugiter inflidt virtutem. Nieremberg saysf that now under the Christian dispensation there are probably more saints in a few years than there would have been in thousands of years in a state of innocence.
Suspended only when we sleep our under standing always being illuminated also one grace involves another, and so makes life an enchainment of graces. To me there is at first sight something almost depressing in these thoughts, because our respon sibilities are proportioned to the abundance of our grace, and our lives are so mean and scanty. We seem to be floating evermore in the sea of God s magnificence, catching His sunlight on us, and yet, alas! we are what we are. It is not only the

Xaviers who have need to say to God, Forbear! forbear! But what a deeply sobering, hushing thought it is, that we shall be judged, not only according to our works, but according to our grace!

THE VARIETIES OF GRACE,

They are more various than the flowers and perfumes of the earth; they are almost as various as the individualities on earth at least in their combinations. I. What regulates these varieties.

Our needs, which are changing almost hourly.
Our position, with its own dangers and there fore its own requirements.
Our time of life, with which our temptations vary.
The age in which we live, whose dominant spirit affects every one of us, up to the degree of almost seeming to control our liberty.
Our own characters, with which that spirit of the age combines.
The country which we inhabit both because of its circumstances and its national character.
The particular prayers of our Blessed Lady, the Angels, and Saints, who see God s particular design upon us.

x"8. Those with whom we associate, or who lie around us, seemingly passively even, in life.

What the good of the Church may require from us.
Our vocations and interior attractions,
The character of our favourite devotions.
Also the various perfections of God: graces often seem to come from some one attribute of God, and then from some other: also they sometimes seem as if they come more appropriately from One Divine Person rather than from Another.

II. The common forms, under which these various graces come to us,

Warnings.
Sometimes in prayer.
Sometimes in apparent chances.
Sometimes in the unintentional words of others.
Depressions,
Shadows, apparently causeless, cast over our spirits.
An inward melancholy in the midst of sunshine.
Inexplicable presentiment of evil, drawing us hack to God, and so hindering its fulfil ment.
Touches.
As if the finger of God rested on some part of self hitherto unknown to us.
Causing sharp pain, with peace, and no warning beforehand.
Very sudden and brief, so that we can hardly recal them; they come even out of times of prayer, though oftenest then.
Sweetnesses.
Sometimes sudden and unexpected.
Sometimes slowly oozing up from beneath.
Seeming to change our whole man, and make us forget the past.
Chances.
Outward accidents and apparent judg ments.
Curious conjuncture of outward occurren ces with some inward change of grace just before: probably the arrangement of our Guardian Angel.
Books, sermons, meetings, and conversa tions.
Lights.
After earnest prayer in difficulties.
Or quite sudden and unsought for, and before the difficulty comes.
Flashes, or steady lights, or a mere thin ning of the darkness.
Sacraments.
Which seem to vary their operations as we need.
Also other graces are commonest while under their operation.
So many of our graces are hiddenly de pendent on their frequency.

III. The graces of individuals.

Each man has his grace, in kind and in degree, not to be passed.
Few even of the saints fulfil this intention of God upon them.
Distinctly, all men have not the grace given to be technically saints.
Many failures in the spiritual world, because of shooting ahead of our grace.
Some are called to perfection, who will not even be saved short of it. Judas possibly an instance of this.

Again, holy fear comes over us; grace makes us afraid. What we want in this world of delicate operations is clear spiritual discernment; and discernment comes of three things 1. slowness a contented slowness based on a knowledge of Our misery 2. recollectedness 3. the practice of the Presence of God.

THE JEALOUSY OF GRACE,

There is hardly a single subject connected with our salvation, which is of more importance than this, the frivolity of all of us. There is a certain flightiness and flippancy, a certain deeplaid frivolity in the soul of man, which is to me the most inexplicable of its phenomena, by far the most painful of its problems.

I. The practical acknowledgment of the sove- 10 reignty of God is the basis of the spiritual life.

All dealings with God are necessarily full of grace.
The very vicinity of the Creator to the creature is fall of risk and nervousness.
Above all is it so in supernatural matters.
His will is our law, and the one form of our sanctification,
We often do not understand Him and His ways.
Yet He is absolutely beyond our criticism criticism is irreverence.
We cannot prophecy what He will do with us, we can only trust.
Thus in the spiritual life we are as it were environed with huge, intricate, seemingly capricious, and swift machinery.
All we can do is to fear greatly, and to fear lovingly, and to shrink as far as we can from woiidliness.

II. The jealousy of God.

This is His own revelation of Himself; He complains like an injured lover; awfully seems to give way to wails of wounded feeling. God is like a wounded eagle in the echoing mountain vales, or as a sorrow-stricken poet on the forlorn heights of song.
He will have the whole heart, not half; His love must be exclusive, and sovereign, and absorbent.
His dealings with the Jewish people exemplify this.
The way He withdrew from those who did not trust Him, as from King Joas,² and from the young man in the Gospel, who cared more for his gold and silver and precious stones, for his orchards, and vineyards, and cornlands, and sheep-walks, and pastoral wells.
His turning to the Gentiles, as if jealousy were His road to them, a passionate feeling.
So with nations in Christian history, He withdraws, as from the Gerasenes.
So with the rise and fall of religious orders, sometimes such swift decadence.
So even with His saints, when they hesitate.
So in the peculiar grace of vocation to in dividuals.

III. The extreme jealousy of grace.

Its changeable demeanour.
Sometimes importunate, knocking long, for years, at our hearts; sometimes asking only once.
Sometimes slow we see the grace long before it comes sometimes very swift; the only thing is to sit watching with door open in the heavenward side of our hearts, and the other side shut close enough.
Sometimes it knocks loudly, sometimes inaudibly low.
The higher the graces the more jealous they are.
Because of their rarity.
Because we are to be passive, and so with detached hearts.
Because such graces calculate on bur sensitiveness to divine things.
The delicacy of its touch.
Hardly felt in the crowd and hurry of life.
Often seems an imagination only, not a real spiritual touch.
An eifusion of talk or a loud laugh is enough to make us insensible to it. A long talk however innocent is uncongenial to the Holy Ghost, a loud laugh frightens Him away like a startled antelope flying to its coverts.
It is easily oppressed, as if its life was frail and invalid-like.
Missing our prayers and other spiritual exercises can suffocate grace.
Soon overlaid by love of bodily comforts, nice eating, clean arrangements, punctual service, recreation, fresh air, solicitude about health, a little inconsiderateness to servants, &c.
It is almost instantly obscured and para lyzed by worldliness.
Withdrawal of grace: frequent, unexpected, seemingly wayward.
Because of our not corresponding to it.
Because we have presumed upon it.
Because we have been discouraged by the sacrifices it entails.
Withdrawn graces seldom come again.
We see this in the matter of rejected voca tions.
Also when our answers to God have been ungraciously delayed.
Also certain kinds of prayer and other gifts, when forfeited, seem forfeited finally: we may have others, we shall not have those again.
Any loss of grace is irreparahle.
A lower degree of glory for ever.
Fewer graces henceforth in life, and those fewer probably of a lower kind: no con versions are so rare as those from an un generous subsidence in the spiritual life.
Each loss is a weakening of the assurance of final perseverance.

Of what use frightening us with all this, unless you point out how we are to meet our difficulties? Why even if I did not do that, it would be of great use. Mere frightening is of great use, so long as there is a chance of being lost: for being frightened is a chance less of being lost: so that in truth being frightened is itself a grace, and a very jealous one. We are not often frightened and we might make much of it if we chose. But I am going to tell you the means, &c. IV. By what means we must meet this jealousy of grace. 1. By swiftness, so as to keep pace with tho rapid magnificence of God.

By slowness, so as not to overlook Him as He hides by the way.
By vigilance, so as to see Him in the dark, and where He is burying His graces.
By prepared attitude, ready to seize the grace as it flashes past us.
By generosity, to avoid the ungraciousness of delay, when God purposes anything suddenly.
By self-oblivion, so as to have an undistracted instinct for God.
By holy covetousness of grace, so as to win grace to us, for it is equally covetous to possess our hearts.
Sometimes taking the initiative, because such reverent venturesomeness is dear to God.
By growing in love, because love simplifies all things, and by one process accomplishes the other eight.

Is the spiritual life then a walk of terror? Indeed it has its times of terror, panics which love knows how to seize upon, and use. It is not a walk of terror but a walk of fear and it is fear which makes sensible the sweetness of love. And what are love and fear together but a happy timid trustfulness?

" This is not a pleasant view of the spiritual life." But will you have pleasantness instead of truth: do you require comfort rather than salvation? Let me remind you of the two Apostles Peter and Paul. St. Peter sojourning here in fear. St. Paul he that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall. No! comforting sermons do not make comfortable ways of salvation nor do hard sermons make them harder than they really are. God made them, and there they are. You cannot make another God: you must take Him as you find Him. I can but draw one conclusion from this study of the jealousy of grace that it is an extremely serious thing to have to do with God.

THE KNOWLEDGE OF OUB GRACE.

The knowledge of our grace is very necessary to the right management of it. I. The Pelagianism of worldliness.

Worldliness stops all our senses and in stincts against God.
It makes us indifferent and callous to our eternal interests.
It is the spirit of a region in which we settle everything for ourselves.
A certain amount of unbelief always goes along with it.
It is unable so much as to apprehend the true idea of grace; for worldliness is chiefly the inordinate and supreme satisfaction of natural propensities which are not in themselves sinful: utter delusiveness of all spirituality which is not accompanied by some amount of bodily discomfort.

II. The knowledge of our grace.

Most men have it not.
Waste of grace from the ignorance of it.
We should have at least a general idea of what God is doing with us.
We miss inspirations from not discerning them: and God s work in our souls is a continuous whole, seriously marred by breaks so we should avoid them,
The knowledge of our grace is no interference with humility; on the contrary it rather deepens it.
It also breeds reverence rather than familiarity.
Yet it must not lead to excessive self-introversion.

III. How to acquire the knowledge of our grace.

By doing always God s present will. Se fate il bene die conoscete, arriverete a quello die non conoscete. (A saying of Blessed Egidio.)
For this is the best exercise of simplicity.
And simplicity is light.
God is only availably present in the present: past and future are in the spiritual life only forms of self.
By a life of prayer.
Prayer also is an atmosphere of light: in it we see far, we see clearly, we see truly.
It is also an atmosphere of sensitiveness to supernatural things.
We must, like St. Austin, make special prayer for self-knowledge.
By taking great pains to be recollected.
Recollection is the absolute condition on which many graces are held.
It has power to detain God.
It is an almost infallible amulet against delusion.
By assiduous ransacking of our conscience.
In the practice of both general and particular exainen: especially this last, which in the purgative way is almost the highest kind of prayer,
It must be continued for a long time: for it only tells in the long run.
The mere absence of it is the tangled growth of abundant faults.
By spiritual direction.
We must be honest in it: i. e. seek only God and improvement.
We must distrust our own self love, and above all, our own untruthfulness: people true with every one else are often untrue with their directors.
We must act by it: there are few things in which obedience is of more value than the matter of our actions.
By abiding sorrow for sin.
No better or more successful stock to graft graces on.
It enables us as it were to feel the weight of each separate grace.
It allures fresli grace to us by the grateful wonder in which it keeps us at the grace we already have. 7. But still we shall not know all our grace:

for such is God s will.

For the sake of humility: we shall he allowed to gain as much knowledge as is adequate and practical.
More knowledge might hinder God s further purposes upon us: He is always a hidden God, especially in His sanctifying operations.
"We never see ourselves quite truly until we see Him; and in the vision of Him we shall find ourselves out for the first time.

IY. Unknown graces.

These are prohahly more than those we know of.
Good people, earnestly good people, are always hetter and deeper than they think themselves.
The most important graces generally work underground for a long time.
In all graces the being fitted for some un known post in eternity may be more considered by God, than mere fitness for our post on earth.
Unknown graces, or the thought of them, a source of fear and wariness.
But also a source of most happy confidence.
The practice of thanksgiving for them a wise and acceptable devotion.

Observe that the knowledge of our grace is less dangerous, because less likely to lead to scruple and faintheartedness, than the knowledge of our faults. For in the case of knowing our graces, our knowledge of God is increasing out of proportion with our knowledge of ourselves; whereas in knowing our faults, although the knowledge of God increases with our knowledge of self, it does not increase proportionately, and so becomes exaggerated and falsified.

CORRESPONDENCE TO OUR GRACE.

Whole sanctities may follow from corresponding to one single inspiration. Look at the avenue of graces from the Immaculate Conception! It almost tries our faith, and yet correspondence is the adequate account of it all, so far as Mary was concerned. I. What correspondence is and implies.

It implies an habitual attitude of waiting for grace.
A quick discernment and intelligent perception of it.
Prayer for grace to use grace rightly.
Immediate deliberation.
Renewal of our intention for the glory of

God.

Quietly beginning to act on the grace.
Obstinacy and heroism in difficulties.
A constant lifting up of our hearts to God.
Our Lady is the trophy of perfect cor respondence to grace.
All others, even saints, have failed.
It is an absolutely necessary thing.
Yet in its perfection the rarest of graces. II. What our correspondence must be like.
It must be prompt.
No deliberation when we know the movement to be grace.
Yet no hurry or bustle: which is always a loss of time, and a slackening of speed.
Generally what our instincts first prompt is best, if we are otherwise habitually recollected.
It must also be brave.
"We must gaily disbelieve in the impossible.
We must not listen too much to the querulousness of nature.
Yet we must remember that spiritual bravery is always very self- diffident: it is chiefly encouraged by its distrust of itself, because it realises God more.

III. We must be passively indifferent to all wills of God, which grace may reveal.

Our own will must disappear as far as possible.
We must not stop to see too much how our new grace will fit in with old plans.
We are more often attached to our work than to Him for whom we work, and many graces are lost in this way.

IV. We must reverence our grace and vocation.

God disposes of us reverently. See Wisdom xii. 18, in the Latin*
We must reverence our grace, because it is in a measure a revelation from Him.
When we Jook at our graces simply as comforts or facilities, we are in evil plight, and in the act of sinking to a lower spiritual level.

T. We must increase our fear as our gifts in crease.

The gifts of God have their dangers.
They are only means: therefore we must not rest in them.
We must especially be afraid of our power of deluding ourselves by them.

VI. We must be slow.

Slowness is the characteristic of those who have a great presence of God.
We must be slow, even while we are swift. Some men mix up deliberation with action: this won t do: act always swiftly, but be as long as you please deliberating beforehand.
Recollection is the secret of the union of the two things.

VII. Correspondence is our sole work.

Of itself it will do everything: for grace mostly takes the initiative adequately: we need seldom invent anything ourselves, or make experiments.
Without it nothing else will do anything.
It was in itself, as we have seen, our Lady s perfection.

VIII. The horror of grace uncorresponded to wasted grace.

It is a secret reserve of God s wrath.
An important unexpected witness at the judgment.
It holds back graces that want to come to us.
Through it they come to us with their freshness taken off.
It is a disability for many higher graces.
It affords secret nutriment to old habits of sin.
It is a hidden fountain chilling fervour into lukewarmness.
Many efforts of our wills, and powers of forming habits, and precious time are sunk in it as in a frozen sea.
It is another whole life, invisible, alongside of our visible life.
It hardens our hearts, and intercepts the grace of final perseverance, for no grace comes without some effort if it does not soften it hardens.

IX. Dependence upon grace is the result of our whole enquiry.

It must be utter, and cannot be exaggerated.
But it may become lazy, and superstitious.
It reveals to us our own nothingness.
Yet at the same time the power of our generous wills for God,
We must remove nature as far as possible, and substitute grace, as a new foundation, as if we were underpinning a house.
It must be a dependence on detail, not merely in general.
Alas! how very little we do depend upon grace.
This the cause of nearly all our past failures.
This dependence is the best earnest of final perseverance.
And why? Because it is the most copious and stimulating source of prayer.

Correspondence was the devotion of Mary, the shape of her holiness. Our Lord did not correspond, because His grace did not grow; His was another kind of correspondence. It belonged to her as a creature; so let it be our love of her, and our imitation of her, which is our highest devotion to her; so also let it be our love of Jesus, as it was her love of Him; He was to her, as He is to us, the Giver of all graces, great and small.

If you are young, look onward to the opening trials of life; if you desire to find yourself strong in God s grace, and established in holiness, you must be sure of prayer; if you are middleaged, and not so holy as you feel you should be, and look on to old age and its peculiar difficulties, you must be sure of prayer; if you are old and look on to death, &c., be sure of prayer. Let us all look into the bright heaven above us; are you to be there? is it to be your everlasting home? be sure of prayer. I have said many things of grace, many hard things, many practical things, but the answer to all questions, the solution of all difficulties, the inference of all enquiries, the conclusion of the whole matter, all these lie in one thing, in lives of prayer! You have only two things to be frightened at, your great grace and your little prayer.

III. THE FEAR OF GOD.

THE UNITY OF GOD.

The strength of the Creator makes His creature incredibly strong. A sudden death gives us a kind of measure of the strength of a human soul. We could hardly have conceived that so delicate a creation could have borne such an instantaneous transition from this world to the next, and yet have continued to live. When long sickness, or the still longer noviciate of old age, have sequestered us from outward life and have gradually un dermined the connections between the body and the soul, it is more easy for us to conceive the soul enduring its great change, simply because it has been forewarned of the change, and because the change has been very gradually effected. But when a man, full of hopes and plans and impetuous activities, drops down dead in the middle of the street, and enters at once, in the midst of a train of thought or with a half finished sentence upon his lips, into the unimaginable silences and solitudes of the immaterial world, we cannot help feeling that there is a wonderful indestructibility in the soul which hinders it from rushing back into nothingness in the panic of so unutterable a change. Yet the soul goes through something of the same kind when it is converted from worldliness to God.

The ordinary life of the present day seems an almost impossible life for the salvation of our souls. The strength of religion is in its simplicity. The strength of worldliness is in its variety. Each succeeding age the world appears to acquire a new multiplicity. Knowledge multiplies it. Education multiplies it. It is multiplied by whatever makes it more rapid, and gives it a greater mastery over time. It is multiplied by whatever renders it more crowded and more diversified. If we know what is required for the salvation of a soul, even carrying laxity to the very limit of what is safe, and that itself would not be a very safe thing to do, we shall be exceedingly frightened if we look out upon the ordinary life of the present day. The number of things which there are to do, the rapidity with which we are to do them, the instantaneous succession of new works and new duties, the coming of these new duties not singly but in crowds, the serious and imperative exacn tions of religion alongside of all these occupation^ and objects, these things really make life to be nothing but a disheartening fight against time, distance, numbers, and impossibilities. The fight is the more oppressive, because it never intermits, and the more disheartening because it must necessarily be unsuccessful. It is impossible to do what we have to do. It is impossible to do well what we actually do. It is like trying to make our meditation in the streets. Everything around us is crowd and distraction. Duties contradict duties. One responsibility hampers another. Every business entangles itself with other business. Uncongenial work always arrives at the most in opportune moment, and incompatible things perversely make a point of coming together. De liberation only precipitates matters; and life, like a river, merely delays in order to get up its speed. We are bewildered, and bewilderingly fascinated, by the look of inextricableness which there is everywhere around us. Modern life rejoices in strong lights; and its lights are too strong to see by. We are dazzled with the glitter; and a daz zled man is worse off than a blind man, because he has all the disadvantages of blindness without its tranquillity. We are deafened by the clamour of impatient intersecting interests; and deafness more than anything else makes a man lose his head, and stand still when he ought to go on. A deaf man is always more likely to be driven over than a blind man. Everything around us is self-important; and the bluster of so many self-impor-

THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 16<j tances wearies us like a high wind. Manifold occupations lay siege to us all day long, and they open their batteries against us even in our dreams at night. The whole world is always showing fight; and it cows us like a loud disputant who never convinces us and whom we know it is hopeless to think of convincing. There are so many things to see, so many things to hear, so many things ta say, so many things to suffer, and so many things, to do, that we become stupified by trying to be. active. What would we give, if the planet and the whole thing might only stop for a few minutes till we had time to take breath, and look about us, and see where we are, and what is the next best thing to do? But it may not be. Wave comes on the top of wave. We shall reach the shore; we may trust the very waves themselves for that; but shall we reach it alive?

Let us change the scene, and make a silence round us. Let us go back some three thousand three hundred years. It is not as a moment to God. It will be but as a moment to us hereafter in our eternity. Thousands of years then will be swifter than moments now. We are amongst the ravines of Sinai. Here we have room. Here we can breathe. The silentness of the desert is full of peace. We are come to Horeb, the mountain of the Law. Its ancient peaks, weather-streaked with red and grey, rise up like monumental pil lars in the clear sky. The tents of Israel, dusky tents woven of camels hair, brown as if the sun had scorched them, are all around. All is unnaturally still. A whole people is listening. If a pebble were to detach itself from the cliffs, and roll down into the ravine, the noise would sound like a profanation. The very outspread wilderness lies listening. The noiseless sunshine rests motionless on the stones, and casts no shadows, as if it feared to make audible footfalls if it moved. Moses, the herald of the Eternal, is making a proclamation to heaven and earth, as well as to the Jewish people, to all ages as well as to the one to which he spoke. In that peculiar impressive scene of oriental barrenness, sequestered from the great nations and the highways of the nations, he is uttering the whole meaning of life, the whole secret of creation. The echoes of the rocks drink in the sound, and do not give it back again. Ages afterwards Mahomet s false creed echoed it, as if it had become the very genius of the place, as if the very air of Arabia, its soil, its sand, its rifted crags, were impregnated with the doctrine of the Unity of God, as if the voice of Moses had written it in picture-characters upon the monotonous countenance of the wilderness! " Hear, Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord!" All truth and all wisdom, all time and all eternity, all counsel and all law, were in that single proclamation. If the people, clustered round their tents, were silent that they might hear, surely, now that they have heard, they are yet more silent. For a while at least, eternity displaces time, and crea tures hush themselves in unconscious adoration. " Hear, Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord!"

Yes! " One Lord." Yet who would have thought it? Life does not look like it. Simplicity, unity, oneness all things are to be reduced to these. The doctrine of the Unity of God is not merely an external truth. It is our rule, our meaning, our own life. There is no God hut God; and the One God is all in all. The proclamation of Moses is a heavenly revolutionising of earth. " This was the covenant which the Lord our God made with us in Horeb."

" Hear, Israel, the Lord thy God is one

Lord." Let us take this truth to pieces, that we may see how vast a truth it is. By dwelling in its magnificent spaces the soul becomes magnificent itself. Our littleness clothes itself with grandeur out of the very boundlessness of this truth. The sunken stony troughs of the desert, and the cloistered defiles of its rocks melt away from our minds as if they bounded our thoughts too much. All creation lies before us without horizon, and its immensity proclaims the

Unity of God. We look outside of ourselves, and all belongs to God, conies from Him, goes to Him, leans upon Him, witnesses of Him. He is in us, and in what we see, and between us and what we see, and far onward where we cannot see, where we shall never see. Within us, all belongs to Him;

all came from Him, except sin; and all, sin most of all, is going to Him to be judged. Behind us lies that interminable wilderness of unintelligible beauty, the unbeginning eternity of God, and then the abrupt chronicle of the angels, and then the world s pathetic history, and a planet strewn with generations of the dead. Before us lies some unknown unexhausted lapse of time, and then the grand, the jealous, the exclusive, the absorbing eternity. Everywhere, always, helplessly, inevitably, inextricably we are clasped in the arms of God. What a fear must this be to him to whom it is not the one joy of life!

The Unity of God! Beautifullest of doctrines! What we see, then, is not true. Things are not as they seem. The look of things is a deception. They are not in reality manifold* They are only one. All things are one because God is one. They are one in their origin, one in their meaning, one in their mission, one in the unity of their conclusion. Time is number, order, and multitude. This is what tries us, tempts us, perfects us. But the singleness of eternity is the unity of multitudinous time. God is one. The one God is our one occupation. We have no right to have any other. Any other is trivial, nay, is even wrong, if it excludes God, or so much as forgets Him. Nothing is to the point except God. One thing is necessary, said our Blessed Lord, compressing the whole gospel into one sentence. The whole of wisdom consists in a clear view of the unnecessariness of all other things. Because God is one, He is everywhere; because He is one, all things belong to Him; because He is one, nothing is worth anything but Himself. All our life that lies away from God is dissatisfying vanity now, and everlasting bitterness hereafter. Are we then leading one life, having one care, busied with one occupation, engrossed with one thought, mastered by one love? Are all things about us one even as God is one, so awfully, so simply, so wonderfully, so adorably, so triumphantly one? It is in the Unity of God that all contradictions agree, and all difficulties disappear^ that all little things are made great, and all great things small, that all liberty is controlled and all captivity set free. weary, loud, secret, monotonous, changeful^ self-occupied London! is there not an eai* deep down in our hearts, which, clear amidst the shouts and clangours of the modern capital, is for ever hearing that old Hebrew voice from the Arabian solitudes, "Hear, Israel! the Lord thy God is one Lord?"

The Unity of God! There are many things which look important, many things which have a great deal to say very speciously in behalf of their importance. But faithj like death, silences many voices, and answers many questions very quietly, and makes many important things unimportant without taking the trouble to degrade them. In truth there is nothing important to God. Ail the questions of life become one question as they revolve round Him. Is there any God? What sort of God is He? "What does He want to do with us? What does He expect us to do for Him? What will happen to us if we refuse or neglect to do it? In the answers to these questions, or rather the answer to this one question, lies all practical religion, the entire significance of life, and its sole importance. There is a God. He is a God of unspeakable sanctity. He wants us to copy His holiness, that we may be with Him in open vision to all eternity! and if we do not copy His holiness, whether through rebellion or neglect, He will punish us with a punishment so horrible and so endless that it will not bear being dwelt upon.

All this is almost universally believed: yet look at the lives of men, and see how their practice illustrates their faith! The outline of every town is broken with towers and steeples, The bells ring out on Sundays and feasts. There are crosses at the heads of the grassy graves, The name of God is on our money and in our forms of law. We garnish our conversation with it. Our libraries swarm with books about Him; and a thousand outward memorials, down even to the very dates of our inscriptions, testify to our belief in His existence and in our own relation to Him. Yet do our lives look as if we were afraid of anything except earthly enemies or earthly loss? Is there any look of fear about them at all? Do we act as if we were acting for some one else, as if we might be interrupted at any moment, as if the eye of a superior were always upon us? The presence of God is a terrific publicity, not only for the tongues and hands, but even for the unspeaking hearts of men. ^Yould men, if they saw us in private, perceive that we felt we were not alone, and that there was no such thing as loneliness for a creature? Only the Creator can be lonely. Is not our attitude that of persons who are their own masters, and have to give no account to any one, but are responsible only to their own self-respect? The pursuit of pleasure, the climbing of ambition, the nervousness of accumulation, do these things. look as if they were done for God? Cast your eye into that green field yonder those restless horses looking about them as they feed, those assiduous nibbling sheep, those quiet in curious cows feeding or recumbent flp not look as if they were worshipping any unseen king of angels: I doubt if to angels eyes there is any greater look of worship about the hordes of men.

God is unseen, Perhaps here is the secret of our indifference, Yet in Jlis being unseen is the first reason for His being feared. If there is a God He must be worshipped. If He is a holy God, He must be worshipped with fear, because otherwise our worship would not be a holy worship. If practically God is not worshipped, it is because practically God is not feared, Because God is not seen, we can forget Him, ancl so not fear Him; or we can make false pictures of Him, and so not fear Him rightly, But it is of the very nature of faith that it is a sight, the seeing of the unseen; and therefore faith in God must bring fear of God, and, as God is one, our fear is one, and, as God is everywhere, our fear is universal, and, as He is eternal, our fear of Him is incessant. Is it worth while to occupy some Conferences with proving that God is to be feared? I think so. But why have I begun by dwelling on the Unity of God? Why so especially on His Unity? Because experience seems to tell me that this is the right attribute out of which alone the right fear comes. Sinners may well fear God because of His surpassing holiness, and creatures because of His enormous power, and subjects because of His irresponsible sovereignty, and children because of His infinite paternal jealousy, and saints because of His incomprehensible judgments. All these are holy fears. Let us not be wanting in any one of them. Nevertheless our fear will not have the efficacy it ought to have, it will not persuade the heart so forcibly or rule it with so royal a constraint, unless its first source is in the glorious and overwhelming faith of the Unity of God.

There is no other God but God. Here is the grand fountain of that fear of God; which does most honour to His Divine Majesty, and which is most full of the spirit of adoration. It is the Unity of God which especially gives to His service its exclusive rights to our whole and our unintermitting attention. It is His Unity which repre sents to us His glory as everywhere and as concerned with everything, because everything exists solely for its sake. It is the Unity of God which shows us how exclusive, how absorbing, how supreme, how altogether single and alone, religion is in its claims upon us; and it is out of these considerations that a true, wise, and holy fear proceeds. We must not be content with fearing God in some of His perfections, and loving

Him in others. As we must love Him in all, so we must fear Him in all. We must not simply fear His power or fear His justice, but we must fear Him, and fear Him because He is what He is, the infinitely holy and sole God. The great fruit of the fear of God is not to make us serve Him fearingly, but to make us do nothing but serve Him, serve Him exclusively, only Him, always Him, and Him in all things. Childishly simple as this truth appears, it is not always clearly understood. Fear ought to produce, and does produce, a right and holy manner of serving God; but its proper legitimate fruit is to make us abandon everything else except His service: and this latter fear is based upon the oneness and the soleness of God. Men would have truer notions of God, if they meditated more often upon His Unity. If the spirit of adoration is essential to all holiness, we must remember also that it is a spirit which is never perfect unless it flows from our faith in the Unity of God.

Out of God s Unity comes the attribute of His immensity. His immensity includes all creatures within itself, and excludes all ends except God Himself. He occupies, and fills to overflowing all possible existence. Wherever we look, there are the rights, the claims, the properties of God. Actions become duties and involve responsibilities, only because all things are God s. It is thus that life is a worship, and furthermore that it is a worship of fear. God s immensity is His omnipresence, and the echo of His omnipresent silence in our hearts is the hush of holy fear. See how He lies inside our life, and round about it and under it, and blends it, without mixing it, with His own awful presence. In some local heaven or other there is the Vision of His open majesty. In every nook of earth there is the thrilling of His omnipresence. He concurs with every natural movement, effort, action, or repose, Grace is the invisible communication of His Divine Nature, or the vibration of His Divine Will. His sacra mental life in the Church is a practical communication to His assumed human nature of His Divine ubiquity, His personal indwelling as Three Persons in the innermost shrine of our unexplored souls is the satisfaction of His creative love, by means of His uncreated immensity. How can we say any of these things with out feeling, that, as creatures so awfully and so sacredly possessed with God, we must worship Him with fear? God is not a mere brightness of life. He is not only a grand love now, to become a grander enjoyment hereafter. He is a law, a supremacy, a sanctity, an uncreated law, a sole supremacy, an irresponsible and exacting sanctity. The love of Him is itself a law, and it is a law because of His sovereign holiness. The very fruition of Him in heaven is a law, and it is His holiness which makes it law. The answer of the human soul to all this is fear, a fear which is a love as well, and a joy, and a brightness, but still an exceeding great fear. It is fear which makes love a worship, and enjoyment an adoration.

There cannot be worship without fear, and there cannot be an unworshipped God.

You will wonder I am taking so much pains to explain what needs no explanation, and to drive into you what you have always known and always thought. I grant you have always known it, but I doubt if you have always thought it; and it is to make you think it that I am taking so much pains. A worship must be a fear. This is what I am saying. Now let us look at the two opposite poles of God s creation, heaven and hell, and see what they have to teach us about fear, and how they teach it us out of God s supreme Unity.

Everywhere God is worshipped. The diversified life of the animal kingdom is truly a worship of the Creator, though it is not a worship of intelligence. So also the life of the reprobate in hell is a worship of God, though it is not a worship of the will. Hell is the land of everlasting fear. Fear is the only reasonable thing, the only congruous thing, in that appalling life. The incongruity of fear in hell consists simply in its divorce from love. The life of the lost is not one of mere suffering, as if God had done His worst, and there was nothing more to fear because there was nothing more to expect. The desperate immutability of hell dispenses not its victims from fear. Fear is perhaps one of the most exquisite suffer ings of that manifold punishment. The very hopelessness of the state is itself an immortality of agonizing fear. The excruciating severity of the chastisement is also itself a fear. Its continuance is a terror. The thought of its endlessness onward and onward for ever keeps up an intolerable panic in the soul, from which its clear and undoubting knowledge of its own state allows it no escape, not so much as that escape of mistiness and indefiniteness where sinners upon earth contrive to find some counterfeit of peace. The hatred of God cannot of itself be otherwise than a paroxysm of infuriated fear, while God s hatred of the lost soul must be to it a fear beyond words, beyond our present thoughts, a very undying death of terror. Try to think how infinite love must hate if it hates at all, and you will see how inconceivably dreadful to a reprobate soul must be its sense of the holy hatred of God. Thus hell worships God with an equable, sustained excess of fear, which is the only truth of hell, the sole reasonable profession of its faith. God is one 5 hence there is no escape, no choice, no alternative. The Unity of God, which inundates the blessed with jubilee, is to the reprobate the very hopelessness of their punishment, the very foundation of their despair.

But the worship of heaven is not less a worship of fear; for fear is the exceeding joyousness of adoring love. All creation, whether in its extremity of bliss, or its extremity of woe, must fear a God who is the sole God, and whose glory absorbs all the possible praise of all possible creations. The fear of heaven is the thrilling of beatific joy, the trembling of an extatic adoration. This fear does not tremble because its happiness is insecure, or because there is any cloud between God and itself. It trembles because of the immense majesty which it sees, because of the amazing familiarity to which it is admitted, and because of that vehement intensity of love to which the glori fied soul is raised. All through heaven, except within the tranquil infinity of God Himself, this rapturous fear is universal. Nay the higher we ascend in heaven, the more utter and the more self- abasing is the jubilee of fear. I can conceive that the higher nature of angels would fear more than the lower nature of men; and that the highest grace would tremble more than a lower grace, because it sees God more clearly, or more deeply. I can think of Mary s fear as an ocean of purest praise lying ever before the delighted eye of God. But the fear of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus before the uncreated fires of the Holy Trinity seems to me the crowning magnificence of heaven, because it is its crowning sanctity and its crowning love. It is one of the thoughts of which I never weary, and to which I find myself returning again and again without effort and without intention. Clearly God must everywhere be worshipped. Clearly all worship of Him must be fear, because else it would not be love. Clearly fear must reach its greatest height in heaven, because the worship of heaven is the purest and the truest: as clearly, it seems to me, is the blissful Unity of God the primal fountain of all the creature s fear.

Fear then is the lesson which heaven and hell conspire to teach to earth: and fear is earth s great want in divine things. Multitudes of men are wholly indifferent about God. In hell there is no indifference. Indifference is but the want of fear. Multitudes are altogether forgetful of God. They do not advert even to His existence, much less to His law. In hell neither spirit nor soul forgets Him for one moment. Creatures must first have ceased to fear their Creator, before they can forget Him. We on earth take liberties with God. Even piety is perpetually lapsing into a kind of impertinence, and it is an impertinence brought about by weariness. But piety only becomes wearisome, when it is wanting in reverence; and the lack of reverence comes from the lack of fear. Nay the best of us are ungenerous with God; and ungenerosity is but a form of the want of fear. In some respects, you see, earth has need to learn from hell. But how much more has it to learn from heaven. Earth is certainly not the home of happiness; but how much less happiness is there upon earth than there easily might be! What there is is only solid, fresh, invigorating, at ease, and finding life sweet, when it is in the hidden hearts of those who fear God. It beams in their eyes with a special light; it gives to their voices a peculiar tone; it makes their hearts beat with a quiet gaiety, which belongs only to those who fear the Lord their God, because He alone is God, and there is none other God but He.

PUNISHMENTS AND KEWARDS.

Retribution is the complement and the consequence of creation. We came from God, and we are going back to Him. Every life, which He has called out of nothingness, is with irresistible inclination returning to Him. This return is inevitable. It belongs to the act of creation that every rational life should be solemnly and formally approved or disapproved by Him. By creating He has put Himself under an obligation to exercise His justice upon every soul of man as upon every spirit of angel. God being what He is, it is impossible to conceive of creation without a day of judgment. It is as impossible morally for creation to exist without a judgment, as it is physically impossible for judgment to exist with out creation. Reward and punishment, therefore, are not gratuitous parts of the divine economy under which we are living. They are necessities in the creation of a God who is all-holy. All reasonable life must necessarily be responsible. All human life with inevitable bent and breath less celerity is for ever streaming back to the feet of God. Helpless in its career, helpless in its velocity, its frightened cry continually is, Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, Lord. But this universal prayer cannot be answered to the letter. It can only be heard as a profession of faith, and as a petition for mercy. God must judge us. He mast exercise His censorship upon every single separate life; and His censorship, like all divine things, must be operative and efficacious. It must not only imply, but it must actually be punishment or reward. The end for which we were created involves judgment and retribution. Punishment and reward are the necessary ways in which God will exercise and manifest His perfections to each of us. Each of us will be infolded and gathered into His justice, either for weal or woe. There, inside His justice as in an impregnable fastness, lies our eternity; there and nowhere else. Blessed for evermore be the immensity, the exactitude, and the unspeak able sanctity of His justice!

But can we say these things without fear? If all creation lies and lives in the expectation of the divine justice, can its life be other than a life of fear? All judgments are nervous things. There is something in our nature which is peculiarly sensitive to all judgments, even to the very fact of being judged at all. What must this be when a divine judgment is in question? What else can it be than a fear, whose reasonable excesses nothing short of an assuring revelation can have any right, as well as any power to tranquillize? Let us consider this matter more at length. There is nothing to be said which we do not already know, and which we do not take in at a single glance. But consideration will delay us over the matter, and grace will come ^ with the delay. The worship of God is a worship of fear, because of His rewards and punishments. This is the obvious proposition with which we are going to occupy ourselves, and we will begin by speaking of punishment, not because it is either prior in God s intention or more natural to Him, but simply that we may avoid having to end with a consideration which we should not entertain at all, if it were not absolutely necessary to the health of our souls.

We must love God very tenderly to be able to think of Him in His anger. We could not bear such a thought, if our faith did not lean upon the immensity of His love. But in order to under stand rightly the fearfulness of the divine punish ments, we must first get an idea of what anger must be like in the all-holy, all-perfect God. What would not creatures do in their anger, if only they had the power? It is simply the want of power which curbs them. Anger would break the whole world to pieces, if it could. How awful is it then that God s anger, which must in itself be so much more terrible a thing than a creature s anger, is in possession of infinite power. There is nothing to restrain it. There is no limit to its energy. Anger, anger in God, anger omnipotent, it is not easy to think of these things without sinking on our knees, and hiding our faces in our hands, and praying a prayer in our hearts which we should find it difficult to put into words. But God s anger is not only infinite in power, it is also infinite in wisdom. There is no blindness in it, no ignorance, no passion, no obscurity. It is in itself nothing less than boundless, solfcollected wisdom. Neither is it ever sudden or precipitate. We are amazed at its slowness, at its patience, at its seeming deliberation, at the way in which it lets itself accumulate. Yet all this makes it a thousandfold more terrible when it comes. It gathers itself up before it springs, as if to make its aim more certain, as if to acquire velocity and force with which to spring. But, while it is slow in its growth, it is also unintermitting. It is always advancing, always multiplying itself. Not inconsistent with this characteristic slowness, anger in God is also marked by an unspeakable vehemence which is not passionate, because its impetuosity is incomparably beyond the possible energy of any created passion. It is as if the whole force of the immense divine life were thrown into it, at once expanding and yet concentrating itself in the glorious outbursts of His wrath. Yet is it also unutterable peace. It lives in an immensity of calm light. There is no quickening of the pulses. There is not a shadow of change, not a trace of perturbation. There is no burning, no ruffling. God is not agitated, He is not provoked. Hence He repents not of His anger, neither is His bliss overshadowed by the horror of the darkness or the torture of the penalties in which His anger has involved His guilty creatures. The anger, which blows through hell like the blasts of an insufferable tempest, is nothing less than uncreated tranquillity, and the beatitude of inviolable repose.

How wonderful in God are those two abysses, the abyss of power, and the abyss of wisdom* They are the wells out of which the Divine anger draws its waters everlastingly. But there is a third abyss, an abyss of love; and, alas! it is out of that depth that the anger of God draws most of its intolerable perfection* Wounded love, slighted love, despised compassion, neglected grace, and coldness which refused to be heated, a hardness which would not be softened in the furnaces of divine love, even when their fires had been fed with Gethsemane and Calvary, these are the foun tains of the overwhelming wrath of God, the imperturbable provocations of His infinite, insatiable, unsparing justice. His anger is the sister of His love. Behold, then, these three abysses, the abysses of power, of wisdom, and of love. Take them into your soul by reverent meditation. Measure them diligently, measure them repeatedly, were it only to convince yourself how immeasurable they are. Then try to conceive tho unfathomable resources of God s vindictiveness. Alas! we can only adore in panic-stricken silence the mere possibilities of the divine anger. Let us hold the painful vision well to our inward eye, that our over-buoyant nature never may forget it. There is salvation in the bare remembrance of it.

But the unfathomable resources of God s vindictive anger do not present themselves to our minds as a mere inexhaustible immensity, a vast store or treasury garnered up in His omnipotence. They are a__living unity. They have a shape, a form, a mission. They come in order. They precede and follow, by the action of a majestic law. They are not inert, unwieldy, or unsorted. They are set in array by the divine perfections. They are the wonderful and worshipful action of unbounded holiness. If they are terrible by their number, their weight, their measure, and by their kinds, kinds to which creation affords no parallel because they have no shadows in created things, they are most terrible by the appalling magnificence of their justice. The justice of God s anger is in reality its unbearable splendour. Justice! it seems as if justice must be unjust to so miserable and infirm a thing as a creature. Mercy surely, nay rather the laxity of indulgence were the only appropriate justice to such a helplessness as human frailty. Justice is so royal, so decisive, so inevitable, so intolerably truthful; how shall creation live under such a rule? Its minuteness looks like cruelty to the necessities of our negligence, its unchangeableness a tyranny to a fickleness and a levity so unavoidable as ours. Is it not, then, hard in Him to make justice the arbiter of our eternity? In all the records of the saints is there an attitude of grace which fills us more full of awe than that of St. Paul, small in stature, and with the dignity of his countenance weakened by his sore eyes, boldly throwing himself on the sheer justice of God, and claiming his " crown of justice" which it has been the business and as it were the duty of the "just Judge" to lay up for him? Surely if it be not foolish to use such words, there would be something less terrible in God s anger, if it were less just. There is something very crushing, very hopeless, in the thought that God is always so completely, so immutably, so unanswerably in the right. Even the right to complain is a right which cannot belong to creatures. It is denied to them by the very fact of their creation, a creation about which they were not consulted, and yet which must have eternal consequences to every one of them.

This is what anger is like in God. It is nothing monstrous or disproportionate, or passion ate, or loud, or tyrannical. It is calm, orderly, equitable, noiseless as omnipotence, tranquil as infinity. Our souls are attracted to the contemplation of it by its exceeding beauty. It unlocks for us the most wonderful theology of God. It illuminates the highest pinnacles of the divine perfections. It, and it alone, enables us to under stand the excesses, the disproportions, the ex travagances of divine love. How shall we speak worthily of this exceeding beauty of the divine anger? To our ideas anger is a thing which comes and goes. Who can conceive of a whole life of anger, of vehement, yet equable and sustained anger? Yet look at the inexplicable adorable permanence of anger in God through all eternity as part of the Creator s blissful life! What must His anger be for Him to rejoice with infinite jubilee therein?

Let us rest awhile, and go over again this account of what anger is like in God. We see how far short of our thoughts our words are: and how far short of the reality are our feehle thoughts! Yet what is the soul obliged to say to itself? This anger of God, this incomprehensible mystery I have actually incurred it by sin. It has once rested upon me. It once intended eternal punishment for me. Is it resting on me still? Has it withdrawn its terrible intention? I live in God. I live upon God. I cannot do without Him. He is all in all to me. Why then do I ever think of anything, except avoiding His anger and securing His love? God can be angry. God is always angiy, always angry with some of His creatures. Is He angry with me? how foolish life looks by the side of the wrath of God! It takes its pastime, parades its liberty, and makes a noise with its silly pleasures; and all the while it is hemmed in by the beautiful, holy, everlasting anger of the Most High! Incredibly, silly, unserious life! It is like a baby clapping its hands and crowing at thunder and lightning.

If there be an insanity among the sons of men it is unseriousness. Do not men see that the tmprovokedness of God is one of the glories of His anger? He is silent. He makes no sign. He interrupts nothing. Pleasure, folly, lightness, and selfwill run smoothly, and the mere smoothness is mistaken for a blessing. The great broad river of mercies flows from His throne with as full a current as ever; and the sunshine of forbearance, almost of complacency, is upon its waters incessantly. It is as if saints and preachers were critical, and God indulgent, because He had some higher, vaster, and more benignant principles of criticism; and of a truth omniscience must needs bring with it an immense benignity* All life is a pressure of manifold urgent laws. But it does not seem so. God s love makes Him look as if He did not notice things. There is nothing which Providence looks less like than urgency. We think God more than patient with our foolishness; we think Him pleased, just as fathers are pleased with the exuberant nonsense of their children. Why will not men see that all this is not only compatible with God s anger, but often a manifestation of it? He must be either unwise or unbelieving, who does not tremble at the slowness of God to be provoked. Nay, is not the divine patience itself part of the divine anger? In the Andes the winds are seldom still; but, when they are still, the Indians hear the indescribable moaning of the volcanic fire, and they dread that imprisoned murmur more than the howling of the angry blast or the crackling of the mountain thunder* Heavenly Father! may we never for an hour forget the glories of Thine anger, or yet that its greatest glory is that it is the anger of a Father!

The pressure of such an anger must be intolerable, and the ways in which it revenges itself unutterably terrible. Its punishments must be almost incomprehensible from the very extremity of their fearfulness. All things in God are so successful, so complete, so triumphant, so superabundant, that we tremble to think of the amazing severity of His chastisements, especially when we have rejected Him as our King, and disowned Him as our Father. Let us think of the charac teristics of the divine punishments. There is, first of all, their inexorable holiness. They are so just that they leave no ground for complaint, while we are so guilty that we have forfeited all right to complain. The sense of being wronged is a support to the pride of our endurance. It imparts a dignity to suffering and a toughness to the human will, which makes it respectable even amidst the indignities of torture. But there is no such thing in the punishments of God. Our will is unnerved and prostrated by guilt and shame and exceeding fear. The soul in its chastisement cannot collect itself, cannot put itself into an attitude to endure, cannot make out a case for itself, can neither concentrate itself nor yet distract itself. It is all loosened by fear, all abandoned to irresistible panic, all sickened by the faintness of manifold terror. This comes of the holiness of the divine punishments. More over holiness is exacting. We see this even in our own intercourse with holy men. There is something exacting about them, something which hinders our being at our ease, something which almost chafes us, as if they were not doing us justice. This is only a shadow of the exigences of God s sanctity. It demands such a full measure of retribution. It exacts such a minute correspondence of pain to guilt, throwing into the scales its own infinity of requirements besides.

It is so insatiable of reparation, and claims such unimaginable restitutions. Who can think of these things without fear? The lost soul has thrown away the Passion of our Blessed Lord, and so has left itself alone with the uncreated sanctity and the vindictive justice of God. It has to cope with these amazing perfections of His all-holy majesty, and it has to cope with them by suffering the extremes of their severity. When we add to the terrible unforgettingness of the divine justice the triumphant jubilee of its successful vengeance, the holiness of God s punish ments makes us turn away from the vision of them as something which we are too feeble to endure.

Need we add that the holiness of God s punish ments implies a most transcendent severity? Yet we have no figures by which we can even vaguely bring home to ourselves the nature or degree of this severity. Nothing about fallen man has been so inventive as his cruelty; and a very slight acquaintance with history enables us to put down a sum of barbarous infliction, of ingenious torment, of protracted misery, and of diversified agony, which it is intolerable to think of. But the severity of the divine punishments is some thing far beyond all this. Man s cruelty is limited by the powers of endurance which reside in a mortal life; and, incredibly vast as those powers are, nevertheless they form a limit and they furnish an escape. But the indestructible immortality of a lost soul even in the tightest grasp of omnipotent anger this gives us another measure of the seventy of God s punishments. It is a severity not only beyond all historical record of cruelty, or even the union of all actual cruelties* hut beyond all our imaginations of conceivable torture. I believe that God s punishments beyond the grave will completely take His creatures by surprise, from their exceeding severity. It is implied in the incredible, profuse, many-sided love of our probation here. It is implied in the malice of our own rejection of the Precious Blood. It is implied in the spotless magnificence of the divine perfections. I believe that hell will horribly astonish and amaze its victims. Hence it is that there is something so wounding to Christian reverence in light words about the chastisements of purgatory. God revealed to B. Henry Suso His displeasure at them. They come from a want of appreciation of the divine justice. God s glory requires a splendour and an exuberance in all things which are His: in His punishments there fore it requires an immense severity.

The variety of the divine punishments is another of their characteristics. As God, the one sovereign good, contains all goods within Himself in their diversity and in their plenitude, so the loss of God, the one sovereign evil, contains all evils within itself in their diversity and in their plenitude. How various are the pains which flesh and nerve can feel! How multitudinous the diseases with which suffering can play upon our bodies, as if it were some musical instrument!

These are but figures of the divine punishments. God can find unimaginable capabilities of pain in the immortal body, and yet more unimaginable capabilities in the soul. His justice will tax these capabilities to the utmost, and will exhaust their almost unfathomable resources. Kinds of punishment undreamed of lie beyond the grave. A world where anger is as much the rule as love is here, and severity as prodigal as mercy. Oh majesty of God! who can endure the thought? There are the innumerable kinds of punishment, and yet there is the monotony of their insupportable degree. But it is a monotony which, while it is a separate punishment in itself, will neither confuse the kinds of suffering, nor blunt the sense of them by the continuity of its pressure. The whole soul will be always wholly in each of these thousandfold torments at once. Alas! if men would but meditate on God, what an understanding they would get of the sinfulness of sin!

There is another characteristic of the Divine punishments which arises out of the perfections of God, and especially out of His wisdom. It is their dreadful harmony and congruity with the peculiarities of our individual character. All that He does, as I have said before, is efficacious and successful. He knows us as our Creator. He knows the punishment to which each of us is most sensible, and He awards that punishment to us, not simply because it is the one to which we are most sensible, but because our sins arise for the most part from that which is most characteristic in us. "We all have a special character. Our keenness of feeling mostly resides in our speciality of character; and it is precisely by the propensi ties which are strongest in each of us that we chiefly transgress the divine laws. Each man is haunted by some horrors and panics, which his own character and sensibility exaggerate to him. Every one has some pain which he can bear less than any other pain, and some repugnances which are in his case peculiarly insurmountable. These particularities coincide in a great degree with our faults, and with the shape of our wickedness. Hence they supply to our omniscient Sovereign peculiar resources for the most intolerable punishment. Just as the mindfulness and minuteness of God s love is such a prolific and perennial source of joy, consolation, and peace to us, so is the way in which He intently individualizes our punishment, fits it to us, makes it grow out of ourselves, and takes care to inflict it with a considerate purpose to make it unbearable to our peculiar selves, a source of wretchedness, dismay, and helpless perturbation, to those who have miserably elected to spend their eternity without

Him.

Finally, excess is in our way of speaking a necessary characteristic of the Divine Punish ments, as it is of all the divine works. The tor ments of hell would make our sensibilities sicken if we knew them as they really are. They would probably, because of the tenuity of our grace, offend our sense of justice and moderation. The saints, who have seen visions of hell, appear to have required miraculous support in order to live. The punishments of God are far beyond all moderation in the number of their kinds, and in the intensity of their degree. Neither do they fluctuate. They are always at high tide. Divine excesses are always equable. Omnipotence is at work on both sides. On the one hand it is sustaining the torture in its unmitigated atrocity and impetuous fury. On the other hand it is supporting the immortal life of the culprit, so that the heat cannot break it, nor the weight crush it, nor the blows shatter it, nor the deadliness extinguish it. How can we bring home to ourselves this excess of the Divine Punishments? Some theologians say that the Passion of our Blessed Lord was a suffering less than the pains of hell. Can we imagine an eternity of the Passion, and then add to it the absence of grace, the inferiority of our souls, the sense of personal guilt, and the heart s inward storm against God? Surely no one can do so. It is one of those few things which can be put into words, but not into thoughts. Yet this would give us some idea of the excess of God s punishments. A soul, once beautiful, with the image of God curiously and exquisitely delineated upon it, all gemmed with graces, all radiant with the Precious Blood, behold it, in solitariness, fallen into the hands of God s everlasting wrath, with all the flames and torrents of the Divine Punishments running round it like an angry sea is it not a fearful vision? So have I seen a dark rock in the midst of the stormy waves: leagues of rolling ocean were breaking upon it; gathering themselves up they ran towards it along the level of the sea, like battering rams of colossal magnitude, and the inanimate rock groaned as it was struck. Then another while the waves sank into a boiling hollow, and rose again like towers of green water, and leaned over the rock, and broke themselves in two, and fell upon it as if they must have crushed it to atoms, and the thunder of their fall could be heard for miles along the desolate coast. It looked like an emblem of the soul in the ocean of God s anger. So I thought; for there was the power in the waves to lash and buffet, and there was the power in the rock to bear and to keep its place. But I saw that no earthly image is without its accompaniment of gentleness, and so is no fitting type of the perished soul. For often the waves threatened and then withdrew, or they leaped towards the rock and swerved as if they had a will of their own and a kindly one, or they broke short of the rock and only laved its sides with soft fringes of creamy foam; the sea seemed to spare the rock, as I watched it; and then too the sun made rainbows in the breakers, and the green of the underwater light was always beautiful. But God s punishments never miss, never fail, never intermit, never swerve, never spare. There is always about them that dreadful unerringness, that dreadful success, that quiet indubitable efficacy, which makes us tremble more than any other feature of their adorable severity.

How happily, how carelessly, how thoughtlessly the summer day goes round: and so day follows day, and we are sucked in by this whirlpool of happiness, as if flowers, and song, and sunshine were the very materials of our lives, as if we had only to live as the river flows, lapsing through the green fields in the daylight and in the starlight, with no other mission than to flow! God hides Himself till He almost deceives us. We neither see nor hear His anger. Yet all the while He and His law and His justice and His wrath go on abidingly; and by the light of them there is something hideous in this unseriousness of ours. Are we going to perish for want of thought? It is not faith we want, but thought. From various and seemingly opposite texts of Scripture there is a controversy among theologians as to whether it is easy to be saved or hard to be saved. There is however no controversy as to the easiness of being lost. God so hems us in with love, and so fortifies us with grace, that we may have at some season of our lives to make an effort to break away from Him, and to stifle the remorse of our first few sins. But, if it be an effort, it is not a difficult effort; and, that first step once taken, the facility of perdition is something to take our breath away if we could see it depicted in a material shape.

Hell is a short word, but it comprehends a voluminous science. The mere fact of hell ought to be one of the supreme facts of the world. There is a part of creation erected expressly for punishment. The punishments are beyond human conception. It is very vast, and densely peopled. Its torments are not only atrocious, but eternal. Its population is being increased daily. The revelations of the saints teach us that its most fiery abysses are set aside for bad Catholics, who have known Jesus and have de spised His Passion. In all probability there are men there whom we have seen, to whom we have spoken, with whom we have lived, and whom we have loved. We believe this, and yet we are unserious!

The road thither! Let us think of that. There Is not a single difficulty in the way: not a temptation to be resisted, not a passion to be mortified. We have only to do what we are most drawn to do. We have only to omit what is irk some. We have only to please the world, and to do as the world does. Indeed we have only to take life easily, and lo! the road is travelled, and we are there; and yet we are unserious!

What is wanted to ruin a soul eternally? The mere leaving undone of many things very hard to do. A single sin, even of momentary thought, is sufficient, if the moment were sufficient for deliberation. It is easy to be lost because venial sin glides so smoothly into mortal, because habits of sin are so quickly formed, and, when formed, so obstinate, because temptations are so various, continuous, and violent, because we can only cling to God by supernatural means, because we are too easily contented with our sorrow for sin, because we make too free with God, because of the bad example of others, because vigilance is a great strain upon us, because we have all a besetting sin, which mostly ruins us through our disbelief in it, and finally because of the covert sins of worldliness. Who can deny any one of these proposi tions? Yet we are unserious!

A God, one of the occupations of whose blessed life is punishment, needs surely to be worshipped with our most humble fears. This needs no proving. Let us pass on to His rewards, and see how they also furnish us with motives for chaste and holy fear. It is vain to attempt to describe the divine rewards. We know already that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor man s heart conceived what God has in store for those who love Him. We may say all we have already said of the divine punishments, only in an opposite sense, and the picture will be more than w r e can take in. But we must remember that God is more wonderful in His rewards than in His punishments. It is more natural to Him, if we may dare to use such a word, to reward than to punish. There are two considerations especially which we ought to bear in mind. In the first place, His justice is not quite free in punishment. It cannot claim all it might claim from the lost soul, because it is already partly satisfied from another source. It is held back by the Passion of our blessed Lord, the exuberance of Whose satisfactions makes itself felt in the dungeons of bell. Even in that region of all woful things, amid those unutterably disconsolate beings, there is some smoothing of the darkness, some quelling of the fires, which comes from Calvary. But, in the rewards of God, all that holds back His vindictive justice is only a spur, an additional motive, a new urgency to the magnificence of His compassion, and to the abundance of His liberality. The very Passion, which causes hell to be less terrible than it strictly should have been, makes heaven to be a thousand fold more glorious than the most liberal justice could have made it. This is one consideration by which we can measure the glorious excess of the divine rewards over the divine punishments.

The second consideration comes from the very nature of His rewards. When He punishes He has to create the materials for punishment. He has to fashion hell, to gift its fires, to thicken its darkness, to feed its worms, and to invent its nameless unimagined torments. It all comes from without Him. It is all creation. In punishing He is limited by the capabilities of nothingness. But in rewarding He gives Himself. He communicates His own blessedness. He becomes the very possession of the blessed. Himself! All heaven lies in that one word. I believe that the acces sories of heaven, the joys of the glorified mind, the loves of the glorified heart, the delights of the glorified senses, the sights, and sounds, and fragrances, and touches, and tastes, the familiarity of the angels, the company of the saints, the intercourse with. Mary, the sight of Jesus, amount in themselves alone to an accumulation of bliss far greater than the accumulation of the horrors in hell, even comprising the indescribable pain of the loss of God. But we have to add to all that accumulation of glory in heaven heaven s own proper joy, the sight, and the possession, and the fruition of God Himself. There is thus no parity whatever between the joys of heaven and the pains of hell. There can be no comparison between them. The Incarnation which holds back the punishments, enlarges the reward. God punishes with created things, He rewards with His own uncreated Self. Heaven, therefore, is not to God s love what hell is to His anger. It is something incomparably more.

To conceive justly of heaven we know is impossible. But it is well to meditate upon it, so far as we are able. The joys of heaven have always been one of the most powerful motives of the saints, and meditation upon them is one of the most direct roads to disinterested love. The incalculable magnificence of the divine rewards is a splendour and a profusion beyond our thoughts: but we can make enormous sums of magnificent, beautiful, and refulgent joys in our thoughts; and to do that and then to reject them as being less than a drop to the ocean is a fruitful exercise for our souls, over which the things of earth still exercise far too powerful an attraction. Their satisfying sweetness furnishes matter for another kind of meditation, a meditation which grows both in power, in novelty, and In contentment, as we learn more and more the unsatisfying hollowness and inevitable treachery of all created things. Even we can see what an immensity is required to satisfy the crav ings of a soul, and what an inexhaustible plenitude it must be which shall fill up the manifold profound gulfs which there are in the soul, and of which the huge ocean-beds of the material creation are but an unworthy figure. The variety of the divine rewards is a labyrinth in which it is very salutary often to lose ourselves. It gives us courage when we despond. It gives us patience to endure. "We cannot imagine a smell we have never smelled, nor a sound we have never heard* Our fancy cannot decorate a planet or a star, except with fantastic comminglings of the rarer and the stranger forms of earth. What must it be to know that there are millions of pleasures waiting us in heaven, for which we have neither name nor thought? Most men have had sweetnesses in prayer. Is there anything to which we can compare them? Are they not simply things out of another world? St. Teresa might well say, that all earthly delights put together, even if they were made eternal, are mere vilenesses compared with the tastes which God gives of Himself even in this life. The exquisite suitableness of the divine rewards for our o-wn individual souls is another source of delighted meditation, leading at once to tears, because it is such a special revelation of the minuteness of God s love. The gift of a reverent familiarity with God conies quite peculiarly out of that meditation. Then, finally, there is the grandeur of the eternity of these rewards. TV r e can make no images, indulge in no figures here. Our prayer becomes silence, while the shadow of eternity passes over our souls, like the shadow-path of an eclipse over the landscape, transfiguring all things by the unearthliness of its gorgeous darkness. From the passage of that shadow we rise up more changed than we believe. heaven! all calm, and shapely, and orderly as thoii art, how dost thou surpass all the revels of our fancy, all the wildness of our dreams!

But how are the rewards of God a ground of fear? The question may be answered by asking another. Have we never felt a sacred fear growing in our souls as we have been thinking of the joys of heaven? Have we not felt more as if some thing were at stake which intimately concerned ourselves, as if something of our own were being perilled, as if doubts were like cold gusts of winct nobody knows whence, and as if these doubts were more painful and more unreasonable than usual, have we not felt all this more about heaven than we felt it about hell? The truth is, that the very magnitude of the divine rewards makes us nervous. We fear to lose what it would be so dreadful a thing to lose, and yet what we have so little right to expect. If the reward were less, it would seem to be more within our reach. A great prize causes more trepidation in the combatant than a little prize. This great heaven, whose golden fruit hangs so nearly within our reach, seems to grow on the edge of a precipice, and the least hreath of wind waves the hough over the abyss, and seems to take it out of reach. How near to. us it hangs, yet how easy it is to miss it; and, if it is missed we dare not think what then. It must not he missed. We think of the immensity of G-od s mercy, and the thought rests us like the sight of an outspread sea with the sun upon it, tawnily gilding the sails of the scarcely moving ships. But when we return to the thought of the magnificence of the divine rewards, somehow the thought of the divine compassion loses its mastery over us, and tranquillizes us no longer. Who has not felt this?

Moreover what wins heaven? Perseverance; and perseverance is just the grace which cannot be merited. If we are standing by the side of the cross now, how hard it is to keep our footing; and yet we are to keep it perhaps for twenty years longer. We cannot think without dismay of those unevennesses of grace, about which St. Teresa was so fond of speaking. What if God were to take us at the ebb instead of the flood? But it is St. Teresa also who tells us that He never does so, that He calls His elect when thev are at their

\j best estate.³ Then too these advancing multiplying years, what are they doing to us? Booting us in the earth, fortifying habits, accumulating interests, magnifying affections. I fear that detachment is a grace easier to the young than to the old. The huge quantity of grace which we receive also comes into the account. It is frightening tcf think of the obligations we are incurring, of the responsibilities we are multiplying, because of the grace which we receive. To how little of it do we correspond! How little of it do we turn into masculine persistent holiness! How the inspirations of the Holy Ghost fly past us unheeded, like strains of music on the wind! None of this looks like heaven. Here surely is most rational ground for fear. It is heavenly-mindedness w^hich is the prophecy of heaven: and see how w r e are clinging to the ways and loves of earth!

We may conclude therefore that the rewards and punishments of God are both sources of holy fear, and that meditation on heaven leads us to a salutary fear with no less cogency than meditation upon hell, although in a different way. The fear of the Lord is not only the beginning of wisdom, but the fulness of it also. " The fear of the Lord is the religiousness of knowledge. Religiousness shall keep and justify the heart; it shall give joy and gladness. It shall go well with him that feareth the Lord, in the days of his end he shall be blessed. To fear God is the fulness of wisdom, and fulness is from the fruits thereof. The fear of the Lord is a crown of wisdom, filling up peace and the fruit of salvation."⁴

OUR OWN SIN AND MISERY.

If we look at religion from the point of view of our own sin and misery, we see also that it must needs be a worship of fear* Next to the majesty of God there is nothing of which we are so ignorant as the malice of sin* If it is one half of practical religion to learn the grandeurs of God, it is the other half to learn the sinfulness of sin: but St. Teresa tells us that the two lessons are in truth one single operation of grace.

If our minds are rightly balanced in spiritual things, there is nothing depressing in the consideration of our own unworthiness. Holy fear brings with it no discouragement. On the contrary, it is itself the very vigour of the soul. The fear which discourages is the fear which comes of scanty reverence, and of that offensive familiarity with God which belongs to those who do not live habitually in His presence, but who worship Him intermittingly or only on occasions. The sacred writer says,; The fear of God is the beginning of love;" but then he adds, " and the beginning of faith is to be fast joined to it*" We may there fore approach the subject of our own sin and misery without bringing upon ourselves that great est of all spiritual evils, discouragement. Our confidence in God will rise in proportion as all trust in self evaporates from our souls* There is always something cheerful in truth, simply be cause it is truth. What is practical religion but the conduct which follows from the sense of sin? Moreover it is not sin in the abstract, but our own sin which we require to know. We do not want to convince ourselves that all God s creatures must fear Him, as that we in particular should very specially fear Him. Let us now try to learn this lesson from the consideration of our own sin and misery.

Unfortunately, the exceeding sinfulness of sin is one of those matters, which has to be taken in great measure on faith. It is impossible for us to comprehend the peculiar horror which there is in a creation falling from its Creator. Nothing else is parallel to it. Nothing else supplies with prin ciples and standards for forming a judgment. We do not at all understand what it is to create; and we very imperfectly understand what it is to be created. We cannot measure the ineffable love which was the motive of creation, nor can we comprehend the mysterious sacredness and intimacy of the tie which should exist between the Creator and the creature. The meaning of creation is to be sought in the eternal loneliness of God s self-sufficing majesty, and who shall go there to seek it? He calls creation out of nothing, and it is not free not to be called. He makes it free, when it is already committed to the risks of its life, and then it falls. Its fall is the free use of its own freedom; but it has been a fatal freedom to itself, and it appears in some sense to have impaired the freedom of God Himself. He is not tranquilly supreme, as it looks to us. He has an opponent. He has not undisturbed dominion, in the highest sense of dominion. To crush a rebellion is not to reign in the highest sense of reigning. Some times it looks as if another God had appeared, as if the Supreme Sovereignty were actually divided. This is an unbearable thought, but it is one which may assist us to bring home to ourselves the real iniquity of sin. To understand sin, then, we must understand creation, we must understand hell, we must understand God, whereas we can understand none of these things. We know that all God s government is good, and wise, and beautiful, and kind. This is a truth which all who know God are ready to die for. It is not only our faith, but our common sense as well. But it cannot be proved except to love, nor explained except to those who are morally prepared to admit the explanation.

But, if the horror of sin be so inexplicable, is not that in itself a most cogent motive of fear? Imagine the unimaginable sanctity of God. I. The sanctity of God.

His spotless purity beyond word beyond thought.
The sanctity of angels is but darkness to His light.
Even our Lady s holiness is but as a blemish compared to it.
He is the Fountain of all other holiness that is,
He is the measure of all holiness: it is derived from His character, and He exults in the infinity of His sanctity.

II. Our misery.

Our sinful origin.
Our extreme weakness.
Our past sins, their number, and enormity.
The triflingness of the penance we have done, and of the sorrow we feel.
Our present state, and our idea of the future.
Our meannesses and unamiabilities, and self-loves.
The stained, mixed, polluted character of all our good.

III. This is in the hands of God s sanctity.

To give the minutest account of forgotten years.
With an incredible divine searching of mo tives.
And justice done upon each thing with exactitude.
And the divine requisitions immutable, and not to be lowered.
And we not knowing at this moment whether we deserve love or wrath at His hands.

Shall we then dare to take liberties with a God like this?

FROM THE NATURE OP GRACE.

I. The world we live in is such an unthought-of world of gifts, if we could only see.

Common mercies would seem to be almost embarrassing us.
Such a section of creation busied in looking after us.
Such a stir because of us in heaven, and such angels thronging round us.
Such showers of wonderful graces, ceaseless, ceaseless, ceaseless.
Such an entwining of the arms of God s loving presence round us.

II. All privileges fill us full of fear, grace most of all from its nature.

What it is in itself.
Its abundance.
Its delicacy.
Its swiftness.
Its individual meaning to ourselves.
A lost grace is always lost.
A rejected grace makes other graces shy.
All grace leaves us worse if not better, harder if not softer.
Grace, each grace has so many unfathomable meanings.

III. How our case stands, as a motive for fear.

Look at our past grace, wasted, or half used.
Our present irreverent carelessness about grace.
Our grace may be a fixed quantity, and we may have almost used it up.
Many great saints could have been made out of the grace which has only made us what we are.
Saint Bernard s three fears, (Serai. 54 in Cantica.)
For grace received.
More for grace lost.
More still for grace recovered. Why these three fears?

Oh, we must be patient with our gifts, their greatness and their number. God is not entrap ping us. Our salvation is His sincerest Will, only He will not save us against our own wills; only let us fear like earnest men, and all will go well for our eternity.

FEOM THE PERFECTIONS AND CHARACTER OF GOD.

How little we know of God, yet how much we know of Him! And how that little makes us long for more, and how that much makes us fear! I. The biography of God.

Eternal; this puts creation and the creature in its true light.
The fall of the angels.
The fall of man, and consequent judgments.
The Passion.
The doom, and the eternal sentence.

II. The perfections of God as sources of fear.

His omnipotence what can we do?
His wisdom how can we hide?
His mercy what must it he when slighted?
His immutability we cannot turn Him ive must turn.
His dominion, beyond all conceivable do minions.

III. What we may call the character of God.

His secrecy.
Hides His purposes and judgments.
Acts without our knowing, almost.
Yet expects us to find Him out.
His jealousy.
Something more delicate than taking offence.
More jealous the more He loves.
Jealous rather of what we prefer, than of our having but a cold preference for Him: hence the misery of worldliness.
His not repeating Himself.
In other souls, rarely.
In the same soul, more rarely.
So that we cannot get on with Him by mere habit, but adoration and taste.
His slowness.
So that He wearies us.
Sometimes a life is not long enough for His plans.
Hence exacting great promptitude from us. 5. His swiftness.
He suddenly turns to being swift from slow.
So that this swiftness frightens us.
Some lives go like lightning flashes, and the results are stereotyped and irrevocable.

Oh once get to Him, and what unfathomable seas of gladness will all these perfections and characteristics furnish us with! IV. Yet could a stranger from some other world gather this character of God from the lives we are leading?

From its obvious control over our actions.
From our deportment in prayer.
From our conversation.
From our solitary thoughts.
From the objects of our interest, and from our tastes.

wonderful holiness of God, how overwhelming, and yet how infinitely dear! our past lives are something quite terrible in the clearness of its magnifying light. Nay, there is something so fearfully unholy, even in our best deeds, that we must shut our eyes, and fall blindly into the lap of His compassion, and cry, Father! Father! mercy, eternal, boundless mercv!

THE EXCELLENCE OF FEAR.

It peoples heaven, it makes death easy, and it is the only solid happiness on earth. " Thou hast made his strength fear."⁵

I. Its place in the spiritual life.

It increases and widens our faith.
It gives vigour and activity to our hope. 8. It deepens our love and is its safeguard.
It leads with gentle compulsion to mortification.
It goes nearest of all graces to ensure perseverance.

II. Practices of holy fear.

To he slow and measured in what we do.
Specially with God s own things, such as sacraments.
Outward reverence hoth to show and to cause inward.
To meditate on the revealed terrors of God.
To cultivate abiding sorrow for sin.

III. The joys of holy fear.

Because of its safety and the feeling of safety is one of the most calming of graces.
Because of its fervour and it has the gift of making us fervent without exciting us.
Because it makes us do all things well and carefully, and this gives an elastic cheerful feeling to our souls.
Because of the power which it gives us over life, and over self, and over temptations, and over all external unhappinesses.
Because it is a supernatural joy in itself, and so partakes of the infinite bliss of God.

The grander God is, the more is He an object of adoring fear: but the grander He is> so much the grander will be our blessedness when we possess Him to all eternity; and the more we fear Him now, the more certain will our possession of Him be hereafter! Let us end with the words of David, " What have I in heaven but Thee, and besides Thee what do I desire on earth? For Thee my flesh and my heart hath fainted away: Thou art the God of my heart, and the God that is my portion for ever."⁶

IV. THE EYE OF GOD.

I. Life with a witness.

Occasional desire all have for privacy and solitude.
Constraining effect of a witness on all we do and say, and even on our thoughts.
If the witness were 1. observant, 2. silent, then so much the more.
We see the effects of the world s eye upon us; its tyranny.

PAP.T V.

We wish sometimes to escape from the presence even of those we love.

II. The Eye of God.

il. Life is in reality thus witnessed, and more than thus.

The heautiful angelic presence; often too the court of heaven sees us in God.
The Eye of God sleepless, omniscient, omnipotent.
Its.continuity, and vision of interior as well as exterior.
It sees us and knows us hetter than we do ourselves: our self-deceit.
Its overwhelming silence, even at sin.
That silence is a continual recorded judgment of us.

III. The consolation of all this.

If we have really given ourselves to God, this Eye is our joy and consolation.
Its support in temptation, injustice, wrong, and perplexities.
It makes us real and honest with God.
It rouses us out of our tepidity.
If we are in sin, it has a converting effect like the Eye of Jesus.
The honour of always heing looked at by God.
The look is one of unutterable unimaginable love.

This Eye was on us in our cradle: it is our joy to think it is on us in darkness and in light in sin in death in judgment through the Eye of Jesus then purgatory nay in heaven to all eternity we shall lie in the sunlight of that Ever-blessed and Unsleeping Eye!

V. THE ONE DRAWBACK OF LIFE".

What astonishes me most in looking at the lives of men is the look of smoothness there is ahout them; yet is there any one life which is really smooth? As we touch it in society it is smooth: as we see it in faces it seems smooth: as we hear it in conversation it sounds smooth: but in secret, in reality, is life really smooth?

What does it look like to God? To our heavenly Father human life wears an aspect of unutterable pitifulness, of failure, of dissatisfaction, of discontent, of disappointment. He bends over it in unspeakable tenderness, because it is so pathetic, so pitiful, so helpless, and yet to Him so beautiful.

What is the real secret of life? I. Each life is spoiled by one drawback one thing which mars to each soul its completeness and its rest.

The great variety of drawbacks, in heart, mind, hand, eye: yet one predominates in each soul.
It is with most a small cross: nay, often no more than an inconvenience.
It is sometimes from our own fault often, perhaps more often, not so.
It spreads over whole years of life: some times we outgrow it, sometimes we grow into it.
It is always real, however exaggerated.

II. What God means by it: earth is in fact not heaven; and rest is beyond the skies, not here.

I observe that when men get rid of it, they often fall and change for the worse.
I observe also that what is best and most loveable about men is mostly connected with it.
So that it is a law and a love of our heavenly Father, who is secretly sanctifying us by it: oh the secrecy of God s love! His secret mercies what a marvellous show they will make at the last day! What an in credible amazement of delight in our souls!
Moreover, the noiselessness of God s love! How much He is doing, which we do not hear: the comfort of this reflection when we seem not to be advancing! The one draw-bac-k is blessedly and stealthily leading us heavenward!
Lastly, the gentleness of God s love! How is it that so heavy a hand can press so lightly, so sweetly, so soothingly?

Some lives seem without a drawback: they are the lives of those who have found God their all, who have made Him their fulness, and found

Him such a fulness of contentment, as the full heart can never tell: yet have they not their drawback? If not, why do they of all souls pine so? Yes! they have their one drawback, it is that loving God so much, they do not love Him more!

Oh then, my dear Brethren, that we had some of that devotion which the saints seem to have had in so great a degree, and my dear Father St. Philip so especially, devotion to the beautiful providence of God? Is not God wonderful, is He not sweet? How much we love ourselves, and pet ourselves, and legislate for ourselves, and yet God is always doing it much more for each of us. ye that mourn, would ye might be comforted; but is it not comfort to remember that your heavenly Father knows your secret? Oh trust Him! Whom shall you trust, if not Him? Oh how He loves to see your tears, because quiet tears have so much of eternal life within them, and yet longs to dry them, and with such difficulty refrains. Soft and indulgent as we are to ourselves, God is softer far and a thousandfold more indulgent. This is why He loves so much the kind and the merciful, and those who console the afflicted because they dry His children s tears which it is not yet His time to dry Himself. Dear God! adorably dear! How is He ever thinking, as if it was His consolation as much as ours, of that day which is spoken of in the Apocalypse, when " the Lamb shall lead us to the fountains of the waters of life, and God shall wipe away all tears."*

I. We complain that life is short: yet we are always wishing it away in sections. We alternate between the two moods of considering life long, hecause it is burdensome, and short because so little seems to come of it. Well, really it is short: this is the religious view of it.

In comparison of eternity.
In face of the work to be done.
Of what our own talents and energy render it likely we could do.
Of what grace seems given us to do: good men always dying with unfulfilled graces.
Because it steals over us so swiftly and so treacherously.

II. Let us examine how it comes to be so short.

Because we waste so much time.
Sleeping, eating, civility all necessary.
Pain and ill health.
Useless occupations, talk, reading, un necessary amusement.
So much of life is already gone.⁷
This is true to all of us, however young or however old.,
Freshness and power past away: e. g. youth, conversion, &c.
"We have got fixed in our groove, and perhaps infelicitously.
So much to do in what remains.
Evil hahits to he got rid of.
Adequate penance for past sin.
Cultivation of graces and formation of habits of virtue.
So little to look back upon.
How much should we care to keep?
The past so full of failure.
So that we seem ever beginning to try to live holy lives.
It seems as if there were nothing to look for ward to.
Not a day secured to us.
"We are too tired for great changes.
Shall we have better fortune with ourselves than before?

III. The remainder of life; this is in reality the great question.

Careful use of time.
Determination to be supernatural.
Preparation for death, quiet and solemn.
Love alone makes up for lost time.

SELFDENIAL THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION.

I. The external similarity of the lives of Catholics and Infidels.

Much of it arises from evil causes so we must not exaggerate: still after all, the lives will ever be like.
Christianity is a religion of motives ways of acting and reasons of acting, more than actions.
The peculiar hiddenness of holiness: its godlike feature.

II. Selfdenial the hidden thing, which makes the difference: without it no religion.

The common sense of mankind values self-denial, and puts a price upon actions according to the amount of selfdenial which they involve.
The Scripture argument for it: 1. precept, 2. example of Jesus.
Corrupt self is our enemy.
All Christian sanctity, from martyrdom downwards, flows out of this.
It is the special note of the Gospel the doctrine of the Cross.

III. Importance of realising this.

To prevent self-delusion: e. g, in prayer and devotional exercises, in almsgiving, in bene volent bustle, plans, &c.
It is the test of hypocrisy.
It is an easy way of testing our own progress: it should be the subject of constant self-examination.

Jesus is our model, Who pleased not Himself how far is this a description of our lives? so far as it is not, so far we have reason to fear. Strive to grow in this day after day: do not despise little opportunities; go out of your way daily in search of them. A word on the sweetness and joy of selfdenial one drop of God s consolations: they are free, yet selfdenial goes nearest to the direct purchase of them.

VIII. PERSONAL HOLINESS.

What we want is poiuer, and light, and love; these are not in wealth, how could the power of poor Jesus be there? not in political success, that is not His likeness; not in natural talent, that is not His simplicity; not in the control of public opinion, that is ever at enmity with Him; we are only blessed when the world hates us: but in personal holiness: and by personal holiness I mean

Great strictness. 2. Counsels. 3. Prayer. 4. Alms up to the point of selfdenial. 5. Sacraments. 6. Weekday mass: for mass is the greatest power of the Church.

I. Why this should be. Supernatural, and there fore holy, is

Our end. 2.- Our doctrine. 3. Our position. 4. Our sacraments. Almost all failures of the Church in her crises are through want of personal holiness.

II. Holiness is power.

Power with God, and the hosts of the invisible world.
Power with self because it so heightens the bravery of our nature, emboldens its aspira tions, and deepens its perseverance.
Power with men, because it is mysteriously attractive, and gives confidence.
Power over evil spirits and bad men, because of the awe wherewith it inspires them, even while they chafe and fret.

III. Holiness is light.

To discern God s will: and so be both cheerful and hopeful.
To take the Catholic view of things and line of action: importance of this.
And because it is light, it is patience also.

IV. Holiness is love.

Towards opponents, and so has God s multi plied benedictions.
Towards souls as such, and so is never wearying, and most liberal to institutions;

and at once inventive and great-liearted in its works.

Towards God, and so becomes master of the Sacred Heart, and does what it will.

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN SUFFERETH

VIOLENCE, AND. THE VIOLENT

BEAK IT AWAY.

We have often to take serious steps in life, in volving this world, involving the other: e. g. as to vocation, and even things short of that: then sometimes comes a cold doubt if we have not got entangled in some tremendous mistake, and so gone the wrong road, and have to get back into the right one.

Now take another thought. Saints, like the great St. Antony, have been made saints by one word of the gospels: what if our Lord appeared and spoke to us? He is going to speak to us now: listen to His word. If we are in earnest, all our prayers, however various, must be the prayer of the jailor at Philippi to Paul and Silas, " Masters, what must I do that I may be saved?" Jesus answers: I. The kingdom of heaven sufferetk violence, and the violent bear it away,

What fulness in the words! What a silence they make in our souls!
It is our Lord s one view of salvation.
Said ad turbas, (St. Matt, xi,) not as a counsel to the disciples: on the contrary, the chapter says He had done with the apostles. Et factum est cum consummasset Jesus, prcecipiens duodecim discipulis.
I should like to have seen His Face, whether He looked the Saviour or the Judge sorrowful or peremptory when He said this, and heard His tone of voice: He was so per suasive; " Never man spake like this Man."
Sometimes our Lord spoke words, which might have a great many meanings: some times words which are like sunbeams, single, self-explaining, unmistakeable^darts of eternal light. These words were such.

II. Well! the life you and I are living, Brethren, is it a life of violence? What violence are we doing

To self? its wills, its passions, its cowar dices.
To the world? its false maxims, its allure ments, its human respects.
To the flesh? in love of ease, of comfort, of sensuality.
To the devil? in temptations, in wearinesses, (for they are chiefly his) in unbeliefs.
To God? by prayer, by penance, by the holy audacity of love.

Is violence at all the right word for our lives?

III. But i there nothing to be said on the other side?

"We must not attempt too high things, ahove our grace. True, but the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.
We must not attempt too much, but take things in turn. True, but the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.
It is better not to begin than to begin and leave off. I doubt that: but it is useless arguing the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.
We are not saints; true we are not talking of saints, but of salvation: the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.
Slowness is the great thing in grace. Partly true but not altogether, for the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.

This kingdom of heaven is it a thing I can do without? If I must have it, I must put up with the terms the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away. dearest Brethren! when we think how idle and how cowardly we are, is it not plain that we cannot pray for a better or a safer grace than this all through life, when we are idling or when we are shrinking, to see by faith the well known face of Jesus, and to hear His voice, the voice of our dear⁸

Judge, one while thrilling through the silence of our solitude, and another while mastering all the clamours of the outward world, with that tremendous axiom of eternal life the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent hear it away.

X. LENT A CALL TO PENANCE.

I. The occupations of the Holy Land in the days of St. John Baptist.

Parties among the Jews: foreign Jews: proselytes: strangers.
Apparition of the Baptist on the banks of Jordan; mixed success and failure of his mission.
Lent a similar call to similar duties; with similarly mixed success and failure,

II. Characteristic offices of Lent, a season of the year on which the Church lays especial stress.

Heaven is more open, and grace more ahundant.
It is a time of conversion and of renewal, that renewal which is often more difficult than conversion.
It is especially a call to penance, and a help from our desperate worldliness.

III. Our state as regards penance.

Does the world look as if it were doing penance, or even acknowledged the obligation of it?
Do professedly good people look as if they were doing penance?
We ourselves are we not living as though we had never lost our baptismal innocence and have we not lost it?

Have we no cause to fear? are we quite sure we can do without this austere virtue of penance, with all its incommodious details and stern reali ties? to several among us it will be our last Lent! and how many deathbeds all through the year depend on last Lents!!! The words of Jeremias: "Hear ye, and give ear. Be not proud, for the Lord hath spoken. Give ye glory to the Lord your God, before it be dark, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains." (xiii. 14. 15.)

PUTTING HAND TO THE PLOUGH AND LOOKING BACK.

I. Wisdom to be learnt from conversing with the lost. St. Philip said, "He who does not go down into hell while he is alive, runs a great risk of going there after he is dead." 1. All or almost all are surprised by their sentence; they died not expecting it.

They had at some time begun to-be religious, and would at one time have been saved.
They are surprised to see by how little and in what half insensible ways they had missed. They put their hands to the plough and looked back.

II. "Hand to the plough and looking back: * this was spoken (St. Luke ix.) as He was on His way, " steadfastly facing" Jerusalem.

All of us have had our call, an inward call as well as an outward one.
We go on some way after the call.
Then we begin to get tired.
Then to go sorrowfully, sullenly, ungrace fully, querulously.
Then our heart gets behind us, and lags.
Then we turn round and look back, only in tending to look back.
The plough jolts, and falls: and we, for the most part quietly, as if half asleep, not by a great sudden sin, go another road.

III. " Looking back.

Why is it so fatally displeasing to our Lord? It seems so pardonable.
How it reveals His character! He in His work for us never looked back.
He must have the heart with its brightness, alacrity, and promptitude.
These are hard terms. Is it better then not to put our hand to the plough at all? No! for that would be certain damnation.
Are we looking back? For it is dreadful to tliink we may be without realising it. We do so chiefly
By worldliness rather than by sin.
In little things rather than in great ones.
After efforts, such as feasts, new begin nings, &c., as if a reaction followed them.

IV. How to avoid it?

Keep your conscience well examined.
Meditate more often on the joys of heaven.
Depend more upon grace.

My brethren! I want to put before you a frightening thought, which it is wholesome for us to reflect upon. Men speak and write as if we had to choose Jesus or to reject Him. "Well! it is most true: but it is not quite all the truth. We must not forget that He also has a choice, and very clear partialities to determine His choice, and quite a distinct view in choosing us. Many are called but few are chosen. The grand thing is

TO BE CHOSEN.

XII. JESUS CHRIST AND HIM CRUCIFIED.

When our Lord set His face to go up to Jerusalem to His last passover, His disciples were amazed. Also He walked quicker than usual, and rebuked St. Peter with a vehemence startliugly unusual with Him. Yet His whole life was in fact a going up to His Passion.

I. The example which this is to us.

A man s character must be formed by an object he is always gazing on.
So with the human character of Jesus, in desire for the glory of His Father, zeal for souls, sweet gravity.
Thus the Passion must colour all our lives, if we are to be like Him.
Tendency of man to variety, to many and different things; it is this which makes the practice of the presence of God so peculiarly hard.
Whereas Christian life is a gathering of all things into one, which is God.

II. The apostle meant to express this fundamental truth of spirituality, when he said he would know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.

The crucifix is the meaning of everything to us.
We must view all things in its light, and judge all things by its principles.
It must be the object of our imitation.
And to be so, it must be the subject of our daily meditations.
The world is in all things the opposite of the crucifix.
And hell simply the result of forgetting the crucifix.
And heaven the end of remembering the crucifix.
And saints simply striking likenesses of the crucifix.
Hence there must be a total break with the world nothing but Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.

III. Practical questions.

What is it to be crucified?
What is meant by an interior crucifixion?
What is it to be crucified to the world?
Can we name any one thing to which we are crucified?
Have we ever taken any pains to be crucified?
Have we any object in life which we think more of than being crucified?
Are we quite sure then that all our devotion is not simply a delusion?

great God! how many souls are ruined by delusions, ruined for ever by delusions which their self-love can hardly bring itself to suspect and how many people s piety is nothing better than delusion! Alas! it is not austerities that are so hard to shrinking nature; it is this extreme, lifelong, divine simplicity of faith, this one thing needful, this single matter of importance, this Jesus Christ and Him Crucified!

XIII. TODAY.

Dum Hodie cognominatur. HEB. iii. 13.

I. General considerations.

Use of our time of immense importance in the spiritual life.
Life, though long in feeling, is too short for work.
Concentration the only way to meet the crowdedness and multiplicity of life.
God is all in the present this in itself makes the present of consummate importance to us.
The present time.
Its own duty. 2. Its own grace. 3. Also its own opportunity. 4. It is a divine and human conjuncture of things visible and in visible, which never may return again.
We want, then, 1. attention for the present 2. room for the present 3. readiness for the present.
The want of these three things the cause of huge evils in the spiritual life.

II. Phenomena.

Time passes and nothing is done.
Time passes, and too much is done, out of which too much comes nothing.
Time passes, and everything is done very unsatisfactorily.
On the whole, great increase of venial sins, not so much in kind as in number.
In other respects a general stoppage.
So many things tried superficially that interest is gone for all.
General feeling of unwellness and unwashedness and dustiness in life.

III. Causes of these phenomena.

Doing things before their time; so with precipitation.
Procrastinating so with precipitation also.
Taking life too passively.
Not getting our life into our own hands; want of selfknowledge.
Letting past and future encroach on present.
So nothing done with cleanliness, clear sightedness, and vigour.
So fraudulence, negligence, slovenliness in God s service we are always under the mark our life a failure in detail.

All this comes from want of attention to the present.

XIV. ON FRITTERING-.

I. What is frittering?

As distinguished from idleness.
As distinguished from procrastination.
As distinguished from actual dawdling.
It implies want of earnestness.
Its religion has no spirit of penance in it.
It comes from weakness of character.
Too great an indulgence and repose in the present.
Dull sense of the presence of God.
Want of application to particular examen.
General want of system in devotion.

II. Its symptoms.

Always husy.
Yet always ready for what may occur.
Fondness for plans, and full of them.
Days gone no one knows how.
Feeling that we are not grasping ourselves.
Cloudiness of conscience rather than re proaching of it.
Always on the eve of taking a step, like a stone carried to a building, and left there for a hundred years, a mockery and a sadness, or at best a pathos and a moral.

III. Dangers of it.

The evil of the day.

Manifestations.
Frittering of time, 2. of mind, 3. of money, 4. of influence, 5. of conversation, 6. of study, 7. of thought and originality.
So self catches and becomes impregnated with the spirit of the age.
It destroys the reality of prayer.
Intercepts grace all day long.
Unnerves the sacraments.
Prepares a trying deathbed.
Interferes with reality of contrition.
Makes faith s vision unclear.
Works of mercy few and scanty.
Want of zeal for souls.
Life one overflowing fountain of venial sins. Cure of it a frightened use of time.

XV.

TENDERNESS IN RELIGION.

NECESSITY OF IT AND ITS NATURE.

J. Two classes of persons, trying 1. to get out of sinful habits 2. to advance to perfection they are kept back and know not why de scribe their state and efforts, high sense of duty, disgust with sin, appreciation of high things, &c.; yet they make no way, have got to a wall and can go no farther: in many cases it is from want of tenderness. This shows its necessity.

II. The nature of Christian tenderness it does not mean a mere facility of tears.

Sorrow for sin, without the thought of hell.
Touchiness about the interests of Jesus.
Great docility to director.
Not feeling things strict, or keeping to obligations.
An incipient love of humiliations.

III. The Gospel a religion of tenderness, shown by the manner of our Lord s coming.

Helplessness.
Unnecessary and unobliged suffering.
Sacrifice, not of goods, but of self.
Abasement.
The position in which He has placed His Mother.
The style of His teaching.
The way in which He has trusted Himself and His truth to the world.

IV. The advantages of this tenderness.

Love the safeguard against sin, more than fear.
Tenderness renders conversion more easy.
It attracts Jesus, who will not be outdone in tenderness.
No spiritual growth without it.
It renders duty easy.
It gives Christlike instincts, love of suffering, &c., so as to be like Him.
It deepens sorrow for sin.

It is a great gift of God; we must never rest till we have it. We must ask Mary and the holy angels, by devotion to them: they like to see it; it looks to them the right return for the In carnation.

THE TENDERNESS OF JESUS.

The whole mystery of the Incarnation is one of tenderness the Infancy the Passion the Blessed Sacrament: but take the common life of Jesus among men. I. The tenderness of His outward deportment.

Palm Sunday bruised reed way with dis ciples with sinners.
The tenderness of His looks.

St. Peter s conversion the young man whom He looked on with love.

His tenderness in conversation.

Tone of His parables absence of horrors in His sermons abyss of forgiveness which His teaching opens out.

His tenderness in answering.

When accused of being possessed when struck on the face and so all through His Passion.

The tenderness of His reprimands.

The woman taken in adultery Magdalen the Samaritan woman Judas.

The tenderness of His zeal.

Rebuke of John and James about fire from heaven also about seats in heaven also setting a child in the midst cleansing the temple sweet meekness of His divine indignation.

Compare our own conduct with all this. II. His work in our souls is a faithful reproduction of this in all its details continually; how then can our service of Him be anything but a service of tenderness?

Jesus! Thou art unknown. Men will not fathom the abysses of Thy love and Thy for bearance: make us know Thee, and melt our hard hearts every hour before the touches of Thy grace.

HOW TO GAIN IT.

If tenderness is of such importance in religion, and the only true imitation of Jesus, we must consider how to obtain it. I. Means.

Frequent confession and communion.
Familiarity with the mysteries of our Lord s life, especially the Passion.
Colloquies with our blessed Lady.
Affectionate use of pictures and images.
Devotion to the holy souls, and angels this takes away hardness and worldliness.
Alms or selfdenying courtesies.
Some bodily austerity, regular and under obedience.
Sedulous worship of the Blessed Sacrament.
Asking it by special prayer.
Of the eternal Father, by His tenderness for His Son.
Of the Holy Ghost who fashioned the Sacred Humanity.

II. Cautions.

Not to be cast down if the gift seems long in coming.
Not to make constrained efforts, as if it was in our power.
Not to say or act one jot more than we feel.
Never to flag in praying and working for it.
Not to criticise it in others, even when it manifests itself in disagreeable develop ments.

The worship of the Sacred Heart: the wish of Jesus that these latter ages should be marked by tenderness the spirit of the world opposed to it the intense happiness of it how it unites us to God! The spirit of the Oratory at once reverence and familiarity with Jesus.

XVI.

THE DELICACY OF THE OPERATIONS

OF GRACE.⁹

How little there was to lead the kings, and yet what they would have lost if they had decided not to follow the star. It may be taken as an illustration of the doctrine of vocations and inspira tions.

I. The particularity of God s Providence over us.

He has a special work for each of His creatures to do.
His outward Providence does not altogether settle what it is.
The great cases of calls to the priesthood, and the religious life.
But beyond this, every one has a sort of vocation.
And inspirations are a further development of God s special design.

II. Yet the nature of these operations has much in it to breed a holy fear.

The extreme delicacy of them; they escape unperceived if we are not interior.
Very often they require other eyes than our own to understand them.
Many of them do not solicit us, but go away if not welcomed, and return no more.
Yet our sanctity, perhaps our salvation may be much concerned in them.
We shall see at the last what a life of in spirations we have had, and what immense holiness we might have gained with comparative ease.

III. What we must do to make the most of these things.

We must not suspect God of laying snares for us: all is broad love.
We must make especial prayer for the light of the Holy Ghost.
vBe very accurate and punctual in the habit of examination of conscience.
We must seek for spiritual direction, and submit to it with docility.
Above all we must lead lives of prayer, and then we shall dwell in light, and in the companionship of God, and understand His way with us.

Oh many a star has risen to each of us in the clear blue night of faith, and we have not followed it! Many a one has stood over where the young Child was, as it were beckoning to us with a brightness, in which we felt there was something heavenly, and yet we have turned away, and have now clean forgotten it! that we had hearts to feel, and eyes in our souls to see where we really are! There are good angels round us, and graces are raining down upon us, great and small, all our lives long, and inspirations are falling upon us, thick as snow-flakes, and almost as softly and as silently, and we are fastened with a thousand fastenings to great unknown eternal purposes, and we feel them no more than a strong man feels the cobwehs and the gossamer on the autumnal grass, and all the while we are closed all round and walled in, not so much with the sun and moon and stars, with the air and the floor of our own planet, as with the living inevitable tremendous presence of our omnipotent all-holy God, Who will not spare us one moment from His sight, and Who even while we sleep expects us to do His work, Whose love of us, and therefore jealousy of us, is as everlasting as Himself.

XVII. GOD S LOVE OF PRAYER.

And it came to pass, that as He was in a certain place, praying, when He ceased, one of His disciples said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. St. Luke, xi. 1.

The disciple watches Jesus and then says, Lord, teach us to pray: evidently He had looked most beautiful at prayer, as the disciple (we should love to know what disciple it was,) gazed upon Him.

I. It is very natural that many things should surprise us in God: one of the things which surprises one most is His intense love of prayer. 1. The oyerwhelmingness of His immensity.

The blessedness of His self-sufficiency.
Yet His vast pleasure at being asked at being prayed to by creatures so low.
His desire to give yet curbed by and subjected to His love of prayer.
What immense things He does for prayer: e. g. at Ninive miracles, often doing no mighty works because of unbelief.
Yet prayer seems to alter Him, to obscure Him, His will, His unchangeableness, &c.
And after all what sort of prayer is it which He gets from us?

II. The life of prayer.

If God s great love of prayer surprises us, I could think that, if anything could surprise God, it would be our little love of prayer: for it is surprising to ourselves when we come to think of it.
Prayer is by far the greatest power in the world.
A life of prayer is a life without disappoint ments or failures; a life of victory.
It is a life of incessant progress in sanctity.
It turns everything into itself, temptations, even falls all life comes to prayer and this is easier than it sounds.
It leaves a scarce perceptible amount of unanswered prayer.
And its unanswered prayers are its greatest gifts, its heavenliest favours.

III. Practical conclusions.

Do we dwell enough on this remarkable feature of God His fondness for prayer?
How is our prayer in respect of quantity?
How in respect of reverence?
How in respect of perseverance and importunity, which is our greatest reverence?
How in respect of its sincerity? can we be insincere in prayer? Yes! perhaps in nothing more insincere.
How in respect of fervour and of fulness? To an angel what a strange thing cold prayer must seem!
How in respect of faith? to pray believingly! it does away with the necessity of faith for at once we touch God, we feel Him, we lay hold of Him, His arm is wound round us with a pressure which, when we have once felt it, we can never mistake for any thing else.

XVIII.

HOLINESS IS AN INWARD SILENCE.

Midlent Sunday! We ought now to be feeling the effects of Lent in our souls, when God has drawn us so far into the wilderness. I. Holiness is an inward silence.

Scripture represents it as a solitude; God s chosen time and place and chance, so to call it, as if He was too bashful to speak in public, or as if it was below His dignity, or as though what He had to say was meant only for ourselves.
It is crowd, and noise, and many objects which hinder our realising God.
Holiness has the same effect on the mind as the mountain, the forest, and the wilderness.
This seems to show that worldliness, even more than sin, hinders us from seeing God.
Certainly the effects of grace are to produce an inward silence.

II. The silence of God; represented by the Nativity at midnight, the Resurrection before dawn, and the Second Advent at dead of night.

This is one of His most adorable perfec tions.
The multiplicity of His operations yet no voice. The trees and the streams, the winds and the waves, the volcano and the thunder, they have voices but He has none! Silent as the grave nay, eternity is more silent than any grave.
The unimaginable outstretching of His in finity yet no voice: all sounds flow over Him, all sounds are uttered in His ears: all music is from Him, yet He Himself is an Uncreated Silentness.
The tremendous might of His inward jubilee yet all breathless silence.
Look at Him, as over a boundless ocean, an expanse of numberless perfections each losing itself interminably in another in infini ties of white light yet not a sound is heard upon that uncreated indistinguishable Sea! III. The silences of holiness.
Conversion: silencing the world sins pas sions.
Growth: silencing human interests human loves human pleasures.
Sorrow pain and sickness, all sanctify in so far as they make an inward silence in the soul.
So also shame, calumny, hatred, and all forms of human persecution: they make a solitude and a silence round us, and so give room for grace.
Prayer: a speaking to God in silence a hearing of God in silence it grows to be a speaking to God by silence: silence is the height of worship: what is extasy but the silence of the soul struck dumb with the beautifulness of God?

IT. The last silences.

The silence in which we die.
The silence the moment after death deeper; the silence of change, the silence of astonishment, the out-blaze of a new world upon our bodiless souls.
The silence in which the judgment is pronounced.
The silence immediately after the doom a tingling hush, as if all the stars and worlds had stopped rolling.
The last silence the silence round the Throne!

XIX. THE PLACE OF WEEPERS.*

God does wonderful things for those who love Him. The Red Sea and the Wilderness: the entry into the Promised Land: the death of Josue.

I. The Place of Weepers.

St. Michael came up from Galgal.
The Wood in the Valley of Raphaim, on the west side of Jerusalem.
The Israelites were to have overthrown the idols, destroyed the false gods, and made no league with the wicked people.
The angel s reproach.
They lifted up their voice and wept, and offered sacrifices to the Lord.

II. All this is a heautiful figure of Lent: the

Church in Lent is the locus flentmm: we have not overthrown the idols, nor destroved the false gods, but made a league with the world the enemy of God. Let us look at our past. 1. Past sins many grievous reiterated¹⁰ peculiarly guilty in us with our peculiar grace what penance has been done?.

Past graces countless wonderful constant: what correspondence?
Past mercies so loving so much what we wanted so sweetly given; what gratitude? nay, what amount even of common remembrance?
Past crosses how borne how profited by? a terrible thing is a cross which has gone and left us unsanctified yet there are many of us whose whole lives are thus.
Nay, past virtues! yes, a virtue past, lost, good habits gone.

III. All this we have to weep.

We have an angel with us, our own, the angel of Lent, and St. Michael also, the angel of the Church, the same who was at the Place of Weepers: heaven is open, it is the time of God s great annual pardon.
How happily the Israelites returned home from the Place of Weepers.
So to us our spiritual weeping will be more a joy than a sorrow.
Joy of humility comfort of peace pleasantness of thinking better of others, be cause we think worse of ourselves the feeling of inward purity which contrition brings the sweetness of being nearer to God.
What is our Lent grace, our Lent gift? A great love of God! Love is what we want lack of love has caused all our past mistakes but it must be a great love, not a little one we have tried that and it has not been enough.

my Brethren, how much more God is longing to give us at our prayers, if only our prayers would ask for more, and would ask it more boldly, more hungrily, and more believiugly.

PROSPERITY.

To call things by their right names, and to know their right value is half the science of life. Their true names are the names God calls them by; their true value is the value He sets upon them.

True view of prosperity.

I. An account of prosperity.

The value men set upon it, and how they count it a blessing.
What it consists in, absence of pain, &c., in fact, a life least like that of Jesus.
The class of people who are most prosperous, not saints, nor great sinners, but mostly a middle class of good kind of people who act on natural motives.
A description of quiet domestic English prosperity.

II. The dangers of prosperity.

Its tendency to wean the heart from God, and to fix it on creatures: mutual worship of members of an English family.
Habit of esteeming others according to their prosperity.
As prosperity increases, so does anxiety to keep it, and this makes men restless, selfish, and irreligious.
Effeminacy of character which it produces. 6. Vanity from praise of those around us.
Low temporal style of prayer and religion which it produces, e. g., Anglican family prayers.
It unfits man for the high virtues of the Christian character; saints introduced rough penances to counteract this.

III. Possible or probable meanings of prosperity.

Absence of chastisement is anything but a mark of God s love.
If your prosperity is in anyway a blessing, it is as a condescension to your weakness.
Accepisti mercedem tuam fearfulness of this, yet its likelihood when we consider the class of characters which usually prosper.

This view changes the aspect of the world, yet it is not really a gloomy view. You cannot have both worlds; men start all manner of contrivances to serve both God and mammon, but none have ever succeeded, none ever will. Choose which world you will have. 0h happy they who say, not this, not this, but that where Jesus and where Mary are!

XXI. INWAED PEACE.

I. Our Lord s voice.

How exceedingly sweet in the ears of the disciples.
Sound takes us to the past and not to the future.
Each had operations of grace connected in his mind with that voice.
After the Resurrection association must have made it doubly sweet.
And then His favourite word was peace Pax vobis.

II. Inward peace.

It seems to rise upward as from some depth in the soul.
It is not forfeited hy activity, but rather col lects us for fresh activity.
It gives light also, and makes things clear in our minds, especially supernatural things.
Yet it is forfeited by indocility to grace, or undue interest in worldly things.
And goes suddenly, whereas, though it some times comes suddenly, it generally comes slowly.

IIT, The want of it

Is the cause of most of our sins.
And of most of our un worthinesses.
And also of most of our unhappiness.
Nothing wastes grace so much.
Hence the want of it is the chief obstacle to progress in holy living contrast lake and sea, the last images not heaven.

IV. How to gain it.

By having few wants, and thus few irrita bilities.
By not meddling with other peoples business, nor setting them right.
By not judging others.
By some sort of exercise of silence.
By looking particularly after humility.

V. Fruits of it.

Eobustness in practice of virtues.
Great sweetness to others.
Sensible sweetness in devotion.
Facility of realising the presence of God.
Enjoyment of it in itself something beyond words to say it is a TOUCH OF GOD.

XXII. HEAKING SEKMONS.

I. Christ made the spread of His gospel to depend on the foolishness of preaching.

Yet it is but the repetition of a faith already known.
And that by men of various abilities, and still more various powers of expression.
Yet its effects are very wonderful, and indeed on human principles inexplicable.
The unction of the Holy Ghost goes out with the words.
It must then be a matter of consequence to hear sermons well.

II. How to hear sermons well.

It is coming to be told something about God from one who knows better than we do.
And then going to put this something into practice.
We have to give a separate account at the last day of every sermon we have heard, though long since forgotten.
Every one brought grace, to which we were bound to correspond.
It is God waiting on us to speak, and to enlighten, and to inflame, and to bless.

III. How as a matter of fact do we hear sermons?

Either as a simple weariness.
Or to criticise, and talk, and pretend to be frightened, c.
Or to see how it applies to our neighbours.
Or to seek mere consolation to find out the least we can safely do for God.
Or because we are pleased with simple fluency, and the excitement of listening.

How few hear them humbly, or wisely, or reverently: yet the true love of hearing sermons is actually enumerated by spiritual writers as one of the signs of predestination.

The best test of sermons is whether they make good people uncomfortable.

XXIII. DEVOTION TO THE POOE.

There are some thoughts so overwhelming that we cannot take them in all at once, we have to grow to them; and even then we never become familiar with them: here is one that the world was made by God and belongs to Him, and yet that He and we come to quite different judgments about it. One great part of religion, therefore, is to reform our judgments on the judgments of God. I. God s view of poverty.

He chose it when He came among us Him self.
He has given all His saints a similar instinct.
He has revealed Himself as having a special love for the poor and God s love is true riches.
He has pronounced a solemn blessing upon the poor for ever.
He has made poverty the easiest road to heaven.

II. What is poverty?

It is hard labour, like the punishment we inflict on criminals.
It is difficulty in getting sufficient food, and also domestic discomfort.
It is not having our own time at our disposal, nor our own movements.
It is being without means to satisfy the dearest affections of our hearts, children, in illness, &c.
It is having to live from day to day, without the comfort of a settled future. All holiness is a simulation of poverty for it is utter mortification of body, or of will.

III. It is one of Mary s special worlds.

Because of the choice of Jesus and of God s divine predilection for it.
Because of her own endurance of it.
Because of its multitudinous wants and woes.
Because of the immensity of hidden virtues which it contains though externally it does not appear to do so.
Because of the means it gives the rich of saving their souls and the rich also are her children.

IV. What are the rich?

A class of people, who for no other cause have a woe standing recorded against them in the gospel.
"Who have more ties to earth than others, making death bitter.
Who have less opportunity of exercising their faith in God.
Whose state was never sanctified to Jesus.
Fewer of whom, as a revealed fact, are saved. Oh what a change it would make in the world, if the rich only knew truly how dreadfully hard it is for the rich to be saved!

V. Almsgiving. Give alms, and all things are clean astonishing word!

It exactly meets the disadvantage the rich labour under.
It is precisely God s will concerning the rich, and precisely so because they are rich: a rich man not giving alms is like a man resisting an infallible divine vocation.
Not a mere counsel; there exists regarding it a certain obligation under penalty of grave sin.
There is no point of practice in their lives more needing legislation and provision.
With what amount of generosity? One word answers that question God.

I conclude with one more grave truth I said fewer rich were saved than poor: I now add that the great multitudes of the rich who are lost are lost principally because they are stingy, irregular, or fanciful I beg of you to mark the three words! stingy, irregular, or fanciful, in their mercy to the poor.

XXIV.

THE SPIRITUAL ADVANTAGES OF HAVING A BAD MEMORY.

Wherever we turn, even in the most unlikely places, there are spiritual advantages, means of uniting ourselves more closely to God. I will take the common complaint of people as they come to middle life, that they cannot trust their memories as they did before. Some have naturally a bad memory: with others it weakens as life advances. Well! let us make the best of it. It comes from reading more than we think and from the encyclopaedical character of our modern education, I. The pleasures and advantages of memory.

It fills our minds with pleasant pictures, softening and brightening realities.
It makes us loved, by making us mindful of the past, and grateful for it.
It makes the experience of life more handy and more useful to us.
It keeps up a spirit of thanksgiving by keeping up the remembrance of past mercies.
It imparts a remarkable and winning tenderness to our characters.
It saves us from the look of insincerity, which unretentive memories give to us.
It makes onr spiritual life more clear by keeping it before us in accurate recollection. II. The other side of the question: bad memory is part of the process of sanctification in old age. Read St. Francis of Sales (Esprit, part. i. sect, xxxiv.) on bad memories.
Nearly one half of our sins are committed through memory.
All custody of our senses is intended to keep the memory empty. F. de Ravignan says, " On oublie beaucoup; car Dieu vent qu on ouUie."¹¹ Also in his last illness at S. Acheul, " oubllez tout sans cesse, autant que possible, et jetez-vous dans une purejoie de Ve sprit J
Contemplation, and all higher graces, require the memory empty as far as possible. Teresa had a bad memory.!
Destruction of particular classes of recollectibns has been a gift of God to some saints, as to St. Ignatius. Instance of high grace effacing the memory in the life of Mere E sprite de Jesus.
Half the mischief our past sins do us is through memory.
Memory is less under our control than any other faculty, even than imagination.
Writers say that God fills an empty memory as a matter of course, as air or water fill an

Giry, Paris, 1860, vol. viii. p. 557.¹²

empty vessel. Wonderful passage in Blosius on the good of spiritual reading which you forget¹³

III. Distinct spiritual advantages to be gained from a bad memory.

Use of time, not losing the present in past or future: real holiness is all in the present.
Humility not remembering praise, or past work, or graces given.
Charity not remembering sores, nor brooding over them, not being critical or suspicious; how needful love of enemies is to spirituality.!
Peace because no vivid remembrance of past disturbances, or wrongs.
Prayer less teased by distractions: keen remembrances of family history and domestic incidents are seldom found in a man of prayer.
Temptations less material for the evil one to work on; and less delusion possible.
Faith eternal things less obscured, and we more simple, and more unworldly.

Thus a bad memory may be made to do for us the work of very high graces, and may enable us to say with St. Paul "one thing I do; forgetting the things that are behind, and stretching forth myself to those that are before, I press towards the mark, to the prize of the supernal vocation of God in Christ Jesus. "J

I Pkilippians iii. 13. 17

XXV. SINS OF THE TONGUE.

We cannot better sanctify Passiontide than by a distinct attack against some one of our besetting sins; and the silence of our Lord in His Passion will be a supernatural power to help us against our tongues, wherewith we all offend.

Nature and characteristics of sins of the tongue.

I. Almost all the virtues are wounded by some of the following things.

Calumny wounds justice.
Detraction charity.
Falsehood truth.
Selfpraise humility.
Exaggeration simplicity.
Profaneness religion and reverence.
And all of these are scandals.

II. Characteristics of these sins.

Their number.
Number of words each day. 2. Proportion of criticism. 3. Of self-laudation. 4. Of exaggeration. 5. Of simple frivolity.
Their facility.
Speaking seems to hinder our thinking at the time. 2. Others lead us on. 3, What is wrong is easiest to say. 4. Cheap cleverness of criticism.
Tlieir gratuitousness.
We mostly gain nothing. 2. But lose by getting ourselves into scrapes. 3. And wound charity, without wishing to satisfy malice.
Their being forgotten.
How hard it is to remember what we said. 2. How often we are surprised when told it. 3. This hinders penance for these sins.
The invisibility of their effects.
We do not see the hearts of our listeners.
Nor can we trace their telling others.
Nor see what actions come of it.
Nor discern the deterioration of our own souls.
The lastingness of their effects.
A whole life. 2. Future generations. 3. Eternity. 4. Our places in heaven or hell. 5. The duration of our purga tory.
The chief objects of their attack are the two divine virtues of justice and charity. Impossibility of holiness without these two virtues.
Their invariable result is to hinder holiness, which is the special will of God.
In the victim, because of bitterness, &c.
In the listener; they defile his mind, destroy his sense of the presence of God, &c.
In the speaker, most of all.
An unbridled tongue is therefore more like diabolical possession than any other sin.
It is the plenitude of the devil, with abundance, persistency, irresistibility.
The whole man goes to the tongue; eyes, hands, feet, mind, will, voice.
We almost seem to lose our free will. Take one gaze at the awful, unbroken, beautiful silence of the Majesty on high!

XXYI. A CURE FOR DETRACTION.

Detraction.

Its commonness it forms almost the staple of conversation.
Its facility to clever people, and to stupid people; it is the only interest of worldly people.
Its amount, so far beyond belief, unless we practice particular examen.
Its peculiar cancerous nature tainting all our graces; it is not merely local, but a disease of the whole soul.
It is so peculiarly the vice of religious people. Remedy. Meditate often and formally on our own faults. I. Our sins.
Their number. 2. Their weight. 3. Their shamefalness. 4. Against grace and light. 5. Our little penance.

II. Our natural faults.

So many in number.
So little and undignified in character.
After so many years so little impression made on them in the way of improvement.
So much worse than the faults of others round us.
New faults rising with new circumstances, as if they were nothing but a possibility of faults.

III. Our unworthinesses.

Meannesses and stinginesses.
Falsehoods of a hundred varieties.
Plots, indirectnesses, and sneakingnesses.
Jealousies, suspicions, and inward ill tempers.
Conceits, quite monstrously absurd; we had almost rather tell our sins than detail our castle-buildings.

k IV. The world of temptations in which we live.

So prolific, and yet so humblingly peculiar.
So much our masters.
Implying so much corruption.
The pleasure we could take in them, if we chose and if we might.
Each has some he would give worlds to keep secret.

Yet all this will be made plain to all men at the last day.

Now consider

If we grow in grace, we shall come one day to see ourselves worse than this.
The saints in heaven see us worse.
Our guardian angel now at our side sees us worse. 4. But oh! how much worse are we in the sight of God!

If we keep our minds full of this, we shall he very charitable to others; whereas now, most probably, there are several of us who, if we died this moment, would, to our terrible surprise, find ourselves lost for ever, because of our detraction.

XXYII. JEALOUSY IN GOOD WOEKS.

A fault to which good people are subject, unless they have the natural gift of nobleness of heart. Picture of good people curbing and clipping the little good there is in the world; compare this with the conduct of the blessed. Picture of one of the blessed enjoying the bliss of all the other blessed as if it was his own. I. How this comes to pass.

It is a fault of middle life, and so comes after people are good.
Zeal, which is apparently opposed to it, in fact leads to it.
We think God s work must be done our way.
There is more of self than we think for in all the good we do.
Few are holily indifferent to success, and the success of others diminishes ours by diverting attention from it.

II. Features of it.

Extreme narrowness of mind.
It leads to a wish for news and gossip.
Also to talking about self and plans.
Also to tyranny towards those we work with.
It takes the shape of cold praise or of un generous silence.

III. Miseries of it.

So much of God s glory squandered.
Mens hearts cowed by want of sympathy.
Many other men hindered from joining in good works; this harms ourselves, the men hindered, the work hindered, the souls to be helped, and God also.
It affects banefully the whole of our own spiritual life, and is the negative of prayer.
Horror of the unknown evil it does, which will meet us at the last day.

IV. Rules for its cure.

Steady contemplation of its baseness and vulgarity.
Openness about.it in confession.
Punishment of the feelings.
To speak against our own feeling, not un truthfully, but with our convictions and against our feelings.
Never to seek praise for our own works.

C. The practice of intercessory prayer what a magnificent spirituality it moulds in us.

To avoid in religion all p&i ky, local prejudice, and esprit de corps.

The fact is, we must in this, as in so many other things, pass through what seems like insincerity in order to a cure. All men whose good and evil nature is struggling must look false.

Especial opposition of jealousy to the spirit of Jesus.

xxvm.

CHILDISHNESS.

Where does sin come from? On the whole from the lower part of our nature. There it is prepared in littleness, in unworthiness, in imperfection, rising up to sin at last. Therefore, this inferior part of our nature is especially to be looked to.

I. Our nature.

Its dignity from being the image of God.
Its immense powers.
Its capability of immense graces.
Human nature from God s point of view.
Our end is to see God; our magnificence in the Beatific Vision.

II. Now look at our realities. 1. What interests us?

Hardly ever religion. 2. Ends of quite a ludicrous smallness. 3. Things so transitory. 4. Things so really uninteresting. 5.

Things we should be ashamed to say interested us, not because of wrongness, but of childishness.

What amuses us?
An amusement seems no amusement un less it is undignified. 2. Seeing fine sights. 3. Dancing, though it is surely mysterious how this can be amusing. 4. Crowded rooms. 5. The fatigue we go through to be amused.
What tempts us?
Irresistibleness of very little temptations.
Nice clothes to put on. 3. Nice things to eat. 4. What others have and we can t get. 5. The notice of great people.
What rests us?
Leaving God. 2. Wasting time, doing nothing. 3. Gossip and criticism. 4. Thinking of ourselves. 5. Dreaming over novels. III. The difficulty of being good consists, then, precisely in its being an effort.
Importance, therefore, of not intermitting the habit of the effort.
Jealousy of the puerility that we find in ourselves.
Importance of Church services, High Masses, sermons, and all externals of religion.
Directly sanctifying our recreations.
Realising unworthinesses as undeveloped sins.

The childishness of my nature frightens me almost more than its corruption.

XXIX.

INDIFFEKENCE.

What have you been doing, how have you been living all last week?

All day long and a good part of the night, taking an interest in things! All life looks like a denial of indifference, like a protest against indifference. Such an interest, and in so many things, and for so long a time, and in such a succession of things! It is scarcely credible you are not worn out. Indifference is only the occasional weariness or collapse of our intense and laborious interests. But what are we interested in? Nay, rather what are we not interested in? Well! are we much interested in religion? But why many words? I ask you this you have often taken a vivid interest in spreading a piece of gossip or in discussing a neighbour s character: I do not say that has been your highest or greatest interest oh no! but have you ever taken as much interest in Jesus Christ? have you ever been as keen, as quick, as busy, as loquacious for Him? I. Human life is full of interest: look at the Human Life in the Tabernacle, the Sacred Heart of our most Blessed Lord.

The adorable activity of Its countless and intense interests.
Its passionate interests in the glory of God and the cause of holiness.
Its unutterable occupations and sensitiveness about and in belialf of the salvation of each one of us.

And our indifference!! Does not hell itself look too light a punishment for indifference?

II. Description of indifference.

A dying man is unable to taste or feel, he cares about nothing: even human respect may go, though it seems the last thing to go.
Imagine a man indifferent at the Crucifixion, or a spirit indifferent in heaven.
So a Catholic indifferent among the doctrines, sacraments, spiritual presences, historical grandeurs, or present conflicts of his religion! Does such a man look as if he were pre destinated?

III. The sources of indifference.

Worldliness, with its opposite interests, heartlessnesses, its vulgarising of the good of natural character, and its manifold suffoca tions of grace. Worldliness is a supplying of ourselves with interesting things which are not God.
From habits of past sin, especially sins of thought.
From a bad use of sacraments, whether sacrilegious, invalid, or slovenly.

IV. The dangers of indifference.

It hinders present repentance, and prevents growth by stunting everything.
It makes future return to God immensely difficult, specially by making us deaf to calls and inspirations. 3. It is the worst form of tepidity, which is so hateful to God, and becomes incurable sooner than any other spiritual disease. God hates it! and is it not hateful? Oh is it not enough to rouse the whole boundless meekness and benignity of God into divinest storms of holy abhorrence? Indifference! Was God the Father indifferent when- He gave His only begotten Son to die for men? Was God the Son indifferent when He hung upon the cross, and every beating of His Heart was a martyrdom of intensest love of sinners? Was God the Holy Ghost indifferent when He sprang down from heaven, shaking the strong foundations of the temple with the mighty wind, and filling apostolic hearts and tongues with fire that they might convert the world? And the creature, the puny mean uninteresting creature, to whom God might well be indifferent, the creature who should be prostrate, shivering in the extremest terrors of a most reasonable adoration, dares to be indifferent, to care more for his money, his honour, nay, I will say it, for his carriage, his food, and his dress, than for the Majesty on high nay who has found out a lower depth still, who does not care less for God, but who does not care for God at all!

Well! the indifferent must die like others. You may die distracted and despairing, but most likely will not quite quietly stupefied like an animal, indifferent to the last; is that any comfort to you? I think not, but you may take it so if you will. But will the indifference be eternal? No! you will wake up in God s eternal prison-house of fire and there will be no indifference there!

XXX.

THE AWFULNESS OF SIN.

A word has been whispered on the earth sin! What is it? we know not what its awfulness can be, because we know not thoroughly what God is. Let us come aside from the world cross Cedron climb the Mount of Olives enter the Garden of Gethsemane see the Easter moon above the olive trees Jesus, His pallid countenance His prayer agony bloody sweat He was God with the sins of men upon Him. Devotion of St. Charles to this mystery. Pray to enter in your measure into the interior dispositions of Jesus in the Garden. I. The awfulness of sin in its effects.

The blighting of the soul by original sin; its unwearied kind of omnipresence; its mysterious transmission; the exile of unbaptized children from God transcends our comprehension, yet gives us a terrific view of sin.
One mortal sin the ease with which it is committed shortness of the act it may be all interior yet it is the death of grace, the instantaneous separation from God the loss of all former merit inevitable perdition the rupture of good habits of years the germ of everlasting hatred of God.
One venial sin penances, illnesses, in stances of God s wrath, fires of purgatory so detestable before God that hell and purga tory might not be emptied, nor all heathen lands converted, by one simple falsehood.
Consequences even of remitted sin, mortal sin, remitted quoad culpam; for all the Blood of Jesus, for all the mysteries included in the confessional the forgiven sinner leaves it owing a terrific debt to God, a debt really not short of terrific; he goes to communion, still that debt remains, the debt of purgatorial flames.
The consequences of sin to others scandal bad example propagation of sin its fear fully prolific nature one man a devil to another recriminations before the judgment seat, if the awful majesty of the Judge hush them not.
The remedy which it requires the Blood of God made man: Oh it is awful to think that He would have taken that Precious Blood, yet need not have shed it if we had not sinned.

II. The nature of sin.

Its power against the abundant grace of God.
Its punishment hell, and that is citra condignum, less than it deserves.
It is in its malice an attempt to dethrone God: the revolting horror of this, to the angels especially, who see all sins as shadows of their brothers first sin.

And we how often have we sinned how gravely? Are we prepared to sin again?

XXXI.

LAMPADES NOSTE^E EXTINGUUNTUE.

Whatever it costs, we must be saved. Certainly but from the lives we lead it does not seem as if salvation was costing much. Is it? If it is, then to you I do not speak. If it is not, then one of two things: either it is a mistake that salvation costs much or else we are not in the right way to be saved. Of the two alternatives, the last in my judgment is most likely to be true! Is a careless inattentive easy going good person better off in his chances of salvation than a downright sinner? Let us see if we can get an answer to this question from our Blessed Lord Himself.

Bead the history of the Foolish Virgins. I. Lampades nostra extinguuntur! The horror of this cry: all that is compressed in it: what secrets of slovenly lives which only half suspected their own slovenliness: numbers of dying people are uttering it daily: if it could be heard and understood, it would surely hush, all creatures into, silence, it is so thrilling, so significant, a whole boundless eternity echoing it so wildly.

II. You see they had got lamps: they had been at the pains to buy oil: once their lamps were not out: good works you see, but not enough, not persevering.

III. They had been watching and wakeful nearly all their lives: it had been the object of their lives to wait for the Bridegroom. You do not look to me as if you were doing even so much as that.

IY. And now they did not go away, go after the world: they only slept, i. e. they took things easily: it was troublesome to be always on their guard: they relaxed the wakefulness of prayer: they let their consciences get in distinct. But the good slept also: yes! and even they ran a hideous risk: but before that they had done penance, good works, mortifi cations, not trusted to faith, to feelings, and to outward devotions. The midnight cry takes all by surprise!

V. The haste to buy oil: the Bridegroom comes:

the doors are shut: Domine! Domine! aperi nobis f He can but just have gone in! He will hear.

VI. The voice from within! yes! He 7ms heard: the voice! such fearful words in so sweet a voice: I know you not! Not even know us: why! we believed in Him, we prayed to Him, we waited for Him: yet He is truth and can not lie oil! it is only to try us, to reprove us: it can be nothing more.

VII. Domine! Domine I aperi nobis! oh the agonizing cry! for what is it to be left out side? it is misery, despair, madness, hell! Domine! Domine! aperi nobis! All is still: no voice comes again. He spake once, and He confirmed it with His amen, the gentle positiveness of which had been heard by the lake side, and on the green hill, and in the cornfield, and in the temple court. Oh those shut doors! how fair, how beautiful is all within those doors, a land of golden light, of purest happiness, of everlasting life! Domine! Domine! aperi nobis. foolish, foolish Virgins, those doors will never open more!

XXXII. QUONIAM ADVESPERASCIT¹⁴

Our Lord is gone how old thoughts about Him return this is always the way with love parents die, and then we think of things it is the same with divine love the Holy Ghost s office was to bring Jesus to mind. Now He is gone, and we think of the quoniam advesperascit because it is towards evening.

I. True of old age, and of all lapse of time.

All proves itself to be vanity.
We trust Jesus more.
He is more all in all to us.
Things and times are coming when we cannot do without Him.
He is grown a necessity to our hearts, to our greater love of Him.

II. True of all growth in grace.

Growth in grace is like old age, inasmuch as it is a disenchantment.
An increase of tenderness is an inseparable accompaniment of all growth in grace.
Prayer makes death and eternity always near, more even than mere age does.
Sense of dependence on Jesus grows also with grace.
Our life passes into His, and is hid with His in God; the world slips from us, twilight of heart is coming on, the shades of evening thicken, the sense of exile presses, the feeling of homelessness is heavy. We must have Him. Like the disciples, we must " constrain" Him. All the instincts of our love combine in the one sweet petition stay with us, because it is towards evening, and the day is now far spent.

XXXIII. DUTIES OF PARENTS TO CHILDREN.

Astonishing how much of evil is from tradition, and not simply from inward corruption of nature; family traditions are often the strongholds of sin, poisoning whole generations.

I. Duties of parents.

They can have no other duties on which their own salvation will turn more exclusively.
The position they occupy to their children is that of God.
Their children are much less their own than His.
They lose their own liberty of action by hav ing continually to act so as to be a living law to their children.
They must have a definite system, and carry it on in the light of prayer.
Their influence is inevitable and continuous: i they cannot be passive if they would. You cannot really neglect your children, you can destroy them.
Their mistakes are not easily discerned, and are almost impossible to repair.

II. The commonest of these mistakes.

Careless education of children, which is quite a characteristic of the day.
Not regarding them as souls.
Inconsistency of indulging and thwarting them as variable temper leads.
Crotchets of individual character practised upon them.
Praising them and saying foolish fondnesses to them, as if they were dogs or cats.
Not cultivating their confidence enough this is a most fruitful error so far as after consequences are concerned it is often fallen into by not giving liberty enough.
Making a personal luxury of children. Necessity of not ndgetting, but having a huge confidence in God.

Sweet shadow of Mary s office! how many millions in heaven at this hour delightedly confess that of all God s natural gifts that which had most to do with putting them there was His gift of a wise and thoughtful Mother!

XXXIV. DUTIES TO SERVANTS.

I. Relative duties.

They are as it were the private revelation of God to each soul.
They are our most undoubted obligations.
They take precedence of our own personal attractions in piety.
They will form in a special manner the subject matter of our judgment.
Hence nothing is so practical or so important I will select one duties to servants.

II. Duties to servants.

The idea of family servants as children house a sanctuary a home even for them.
They are persons, not things, their character and salvation depending much on us.
Masters and mistresses are in great measure responsible before God for the sins of their servants.
Their sanctification should be a distinct principle in the arrangement of households.
Neglect of them is a source of unsuspected sins, which will be eternally fatal to many at last. So much for omissions, now for com missions.

III. Carelessness of a more active kind.

In point of time, inconsiderateness, unpunctuality.
In point of religious superintendence.
In point of illness.
In amount of work.
In wounding language, or even sulky manners.

IV. How we may sanctify ourselves by our duties to our servants.

By making them our masters in some re spects the absence of government of temper a specially modern deficiency.
By deference to their weaknesses.
By seeking tlieir happiness, and finding a pleasure in making them happy.
By looking on them as equals, or as most likely superiors in grace.
By not thinking the personal service of a fellow-being a thing which is purchaseable by money; we purchase things, not persons, except in slavedealing.
By teaching our children carefully about this matter.

V. The good we may do by the right discharge of these duties.

It is a sort of apostolate, to sanctify and convert souls to God.
Of the number of servants who go wrong, most do so through the fault of their masters and mistresses.
Either by neglect. 2. Or by unkindness, 3. Or by want of prayer.
The good to society will be very great.
It is also the best way for ourselves, to avoid the dangers of wealth and station.
We can hardly conceive a thing which, as entangling so many duties of justice and charity, will be more searched into by God at the judgment.

Yet what is your conduct as masters and mis tresses? It is known to Him who will judge you for it!

XXXV. THOUGHTS FOR ACTIVE MEN.

I. We must do

What comes to hand to do.
What belongs to our station In life.
What we are told by competent authority to do.
Not falling short of our grace.
Looking about to find good to do: much good lies hidden under us, like gold under all positions in life, even under the most commonplace.
Even making it for ourselves.
Our tasks should be exuberant and run over.
Never being content, nor thinking that we are to stop where we are.
Listening for inspirations to do more good.
There is a sort of holy restlessness but we must be careful about it.

On the whole we do too much in life rather than too little; and a great proportion of our activity is often waste of precious time.

II. To leave undone

What is too much for us.
Or too frequent for us.
Or unreasonable now.
Or beyond our grace.
Or not in keeping with our vocation.
Or unsuited to our character.
Or doing now what should have been done before.
Or anticipating what ought not to be done till afterwards.
Or doing good without reference to its suitableness to us.
Or selfwilled good which often usurps the better place of commanded good.
Or the good which it belongs to some one else to do.
Or the good which we can do, but which commits us to what we cannot do.
Or the unnecessary good likely to be mistaken, and not harmlessly so, by others.
Or good done only because we want to be active and do something we had better pray then.
Or good to which we have no actual inspiration.

Two maxims about our time.

Never put off. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
Never anticipate. Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow.

Both have their time their place their character. The one should preponderate which is most against our natural disposition. They produce different varieties of holiness.

" Work your work before the time, and He will give you your reward in His time."¹⁵

XXXVI. HINTS FOR VALETUDINARIANS.

Not to aim at making long meditations.
Not to kneel for long together, but to pray in postures which do not incommode the body.
To avoid burdening yourself with many vocal prayers.
Not to perform spiritual exercises shortly after meals.
To avoid long church functions, as lassitude brings on indevotion.
To be much given to spiritual reading, and that pausingly, as a compensation for long mental prayer.
To go very frequently to confession, and so make examen of conscience less onerous.
Not to have set times for more things than experience shows to be necessary.
To meditate chiefly on the Incarnation, not on the four last things and the like.
Never to attempt mortifications connected with eating or sleeping.
To devote yourself to ejaculatory prayer.
Never to keep a journal, or note down spiritual sentiments on paper.
To surround yourself with holy pictures and images.
To ask at all communions for a childlike humility, and for the gift of the sensible Presence of God.
To think as seldom as possible of past sins.
To avoid solemnity of manner.
The government of the tongue is the great field of valetudinarian mortification.
Considerate gentleness to servants should be an especial virtue of valetudinarians.
Thanksgivings after, or preparations for Holy Communion should not be prolonged when they require much effort.
Touchiness of temper and inordinate desire for sympathy must be guarded against.
If you have fixed mornings for communion, do not scruple to change the morning if you feel unwell, or have a presentiment of unwellness.

XXXVII.

LAY PIETY.

Hearing sermons.¹⁶ One great good of them is, that lay persons have to listen as inferiors, as to an oracle, and this is much to those whom nobody else dare thwart.

High Mass, and great functions.

"Weekday Mass.

Spiritual reading, chiefly lives of saints.

Almsgiving, not out of whim, systematic, secret, with prayer, and with the intention of satisfaction.

Carefulness to be in sympathy with the Church.

Valuing outward things of our religion, and outward professions of faith.

Regularity, at considerable personal inconvenience, in keeping to times of frequenting the sacraments.

Some annual retreat, if possible.

Cultivating the sense of sin as an antidote against the unsuspected insidiousnesses of human respect and worldliness, and meditating often on purgatory.

Diligence, because indolence is half, and the better half of worldliness.

Some very moderate and exceedingly secret bodily penance.

Profession of faith extremely open devotion extremely secret: this is the lay rule.

I. The horrible condition of a man who leads no inward life between whom and his God there is no privacy.

He does not know where he is like a man at sea, or in the wilderness, or rather in the forest where he cannot see the sun.

He Is open to all manner of delusions nay, all things turn to delusions to him.

He has not even the initial grace of suspicion and self-distrust.

Death eternity God all will "be surprises to him horror of this.

Only one thing about him is certain, viz., that he is not as God would have him be, nay, that he is without God in the world excom municated. II. How to mend. By

Daily examen of conscience.
Particular examen.
Distinct carefulness about each single confession.
Some mental prayer.
Much (at first greedy) spiritual reading.

OUR WAY WITH GOD.

We try Him last, having tried all else before Him.

We cast Him away when we have done with f

Him.

We claim Him as our right as creatures without giving Him His rights as Creator.

We think we may piece ourselves on with Him after any amount of intermission.

When we are with Him, He is to do all and to be content with our profession of allegiance.

We account Him as some one to be cautious of. At best we reckon Him an intervening God, not an everliving, everpresent, everclaiming God. Contrast an adoring angel with this!

THE WONDEKFUL REVOLUTION WROUGHT IN US BY CONTINUALLY KEEPING OUR SINS BEFORE US.

It comes with time, but is most amazing when it comes.

It renders difficult virtues easy, and especially brings within our reach the heights of humility.

It gives us patience with others, with self, with God, great sweetness in intercourse with others, and a facility of judging well of all men.

It gives quite a new keenness and freshness to our gratitude to God, and a modest surprise at little kindnesses, which enables us to win the hearts of others.

It ensures final perseverance and a safe death sooner than anything else.

EXPENSIVENESS.

Fallacy of " I can afford it." Life of immortification in little successive details of life.

Spending money weakens all our spiritual nature.

Immense work to be done for God. Disproportionate littleness of our alms to the poor: I doubt if it comes up to what theology says is obligatory. Obligations of charity are apt to slide into obligations of justice.

It is astonishing how childish we are at bottom. Expensiveness shows us this, and alas! hardens us in it.

The saints were magnificent souls, but was there ever one who was not parsimonious in personal expenses?

Money is a terrible talent to give account of.

HEAVEN IS NOT ON THIS SIDE THE GRAVE.

Yet good people commonly make the mistake of thinking it is.

They think religion brings only privileges, and not responsibilities.

They expect consolations, and those at once, and in all things.

They use sacraments for self s ends.

Penance ever centres in self.

How few seek God.

Now on this side the grave God lives in crosses, and is only sweet when He is making us suffer also.

It is the saddest time for us when He is not trying us.

Is there then happiness in religion? Yes! when our faith is so simple and so pure, that God being God, and we being we, we feel experimentally that all responsibilities are in reality condescensions and privileges.

The apostles, who lived with our Lord continually and were imbued with His spirit, are recorded to have asked only two spiritual things of Him prayer and faith. Increase our faith Teach us how to pray. How much is implied in this!

COMMON THINGS NOT REALISED SUFFICIENTLY.

That there is a huge invisible world. That it is close to us. That we have some day to be part of it. That it touches us already. That we may fall through into it any moment. That the moment of this change is uncertain. That all in it is fixed, doomed: it is a world of dooms.

That it embraces the extremes of weal and woe.

Any moment and we are stopped by some one and we look up: it is God.

Would any one seeing our lives dream we believed all this?

The best part of a man s treasure of merits are the things he has left unsaid. Have we many?

A saint is simply a man who can act as well on what he only sees by faith as on what he sees with his eves. Faith is the most real of the two to t/ him. What we see leads us away. The saint sees what he believes in, and so goes ahead.

PAET SIXTH.

Sess. vi. cap. xvi., " f Prezzo della Divina Grazia, lib. iii. cap, 12. ↩
IV Kings xiii. ↩
Cartns de S. Teresa. Madrid, 1778, vol. i. c. xxxv. Pues siempre ]]eva en el mejor estndo. The French Jansenist translation falsified this passage. Exception was taken to a similar sentiment in the Creator and the Creature (p. 382, third edition) and I did not know at that time that St. Teresa had taught the same doctrine, or that the University oi Paris had condemned it. ↩
Ecclus. i. 17-22. ↩
Ps. Ixxxviii. 41. ↩
Ps. Ixxii. 25. ↩
vii. 17. ↩
v ↩
Octave of the Epiphany, 1856. ↩
Judges ii. 5. ↩
Vie, i. 160, ↩
Vie, ii. 412. J Bouix, Vie, cap. xi, also cap. XT. ↩
Newsbam s edition, p, 37. t Aggiunta al Combattimento cap. xxxvii. ↩
Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension, 1859. I 18 ↩
Ecclus. Ii. 38. ↩
See pp. 250-2. ↩

Chapter 12 of 18

The Spiritual Life

Footnotes