Chapter IV. The History of the Precious Blood

Wry is it so hard to be at peace in life? Way do little things, and such very little things, trouble us? Wecame forth from God, who is the Father of peace: why then are we so restless? We are but winging our flight over this narrow gulf of time, and the great eternity is already in sight - why are we so full of volatile distractions? Ever in our flight God still holds us in his Hand: why then do we flutter so? It is strange we cannot lie still even in the Hand of God. It is because our minds are at once so active and so wandering They need continual occupation. They require tec be fed incessantly with images, which they con. sume rapidly, and are insatiable. It is this which makes a contemplative life so difficult. It is this need of images. Our minds are restless if they de not see a thousand varying objects before them ir constant motion, with light and color upon them They are fatigued with stiliness. They pine wher they are kept to one thought, to one object. They sicken even of one range of thought, one class of objects. The weary sea with its monotonous clask of waves is not more restless or more mobile thar our minds. Here is the grand difficulty of prayer, the fixing of our minds on the object of our worship. Most of the things which are hard in the spiritual life, are hard because of the unity, tine simplicity, the concentration of mind, which they require or imply. The chief power of the world over us arises from our having given it possession of our minds. It would be a much less difficult task to dislodge it from our hearts, if we could only once expel its images from our minds. Satan’s power over the heart comes from his power over the mind. Here then is the universal work of every body’s spiritual life, either the getting rid of images or the changing of them.

Now, the first of these processes is a very difficult one, and belongs to a high region of the spiritual state, with which we have nothing whatever to do just now. The second, the changing of our images, is more within our reach. In fact, we must absolutely reach it, if we are to be devout at all. Our hearts will be what.our minds are. If our minds are full of images of the world, we shall never be weaned from the world. If they are full of images of self, we shall never conquer our self-love. If our minds will never rest, unless endless processions are forever winding their way across them, then let us have our processions religious;:

let our images be of God, of Jesus, of Mary, and of heavenly things. I do not say this is altogether easy to do; hut it is comparatively easy; and moreover it must be done. Let me refer to childish things for our example. W-hen sleep was coy and would not visit us, when the pains, or the sorrows, or the excitements of childhood banished slumber from our eyes, they used to tell us, at least among the hills of the north, to make a picture in our minds, and to count the very white sheep as they passed across the very green slope of the mountainside: and so of a truth sleep was often won; and the opiate at least was innocent. In later years, when the sense of pain was keeping the mind awake, sleep has been wooed after a somewhat similar fashion. We filled our minds with images; only, books and travels made them of a more ambitious and complicated sort. We bent our minds on placid objects such as we knew to be somewhere on earth that night. We looked down the golden green vistas of tropical forests, or on the calm shores of very solitary shining seas, or on the perfumed shrubby tangles of islets in the ocean, or on some dusky glen which a cataract fills with silence by deadening all other sounds except its own: and so also sleep has come. It were better to have thought of God, and so have rested. Still we may learn a lesson from our success. It is even so with the restlessness and perturbation of our minds in the spiritual life. If we will shut our eyes to the world, and make pictures of heavenly things, and watch the Thirty-Three Years of Jesus, or the Mysteries of Mary, or the flights of angels, or the panoramas of the Four Last Things, or the figurative pageants of the Divine Perfections, pass studiously before our inward sight, then that sweet, facile, rapid, undistracted prayer, which is the soul’s sleep, the soul’s renewal of its vigor, will soon come to us. An*oblivion of the world, less and less disturbed by dreams, will steal over us, and we shall taste the gift of peace.

This is not the highest of spiritual ways; I know it well. Yet is the highest one fittest for you and me? Are we yet in such a state that we should strive to banish all images from our minds, and think only of the indistinct and formless majesty of God? We know not what God may do with us in time. One thing, by his help, we have resolved upon. It is that we will not stand still, neither will we be contented with any grace, with any degree of love. All life long we will advance. Daily will we climb higher. Constantly will we trim the fires of our love, and make them burn more ardently. We know not, therefore, what God may do with us in times tocome. But for the present we must endeavor to cast one set of images out of our minds by,introducing another set. So shall we fill our minds with God continually, and be delivered from the burden of self and from the thraldom of the world.

Our present task, then, is to marshal a Procession of the Precious Blood, with all its various yet kindred images, through our minds. It shall be to us like the defiling of soldiers over the mountain-passes. The bravery of war shall add to the beauty of the scenery, and the scenery shall set off the bravery of war. Tar off we shall see the glittering pomp, and then again so near that the martial music shall strike upon our ears. Here the light shall fall upon it in all its beautiful array, and there the clouds shall obscure its path, and the crags appear to swallow up the pageant. Much we may see which we cannot understand; but much also which we can both understand and love. From first to last it all tells of Jesus. From first to last it is a thing of God. Nay, we must not be strange to it ourselves.. We too must fall in with the Procession. We must climb with it, as part of its life, its beauty, and its music, until we are lost to sight among the cloud- covered mountains of eternity. Our soul longs for rest. It would fain seek some peaceful solitude, where the sights and sounds of the world cannot intrude. It yearns to repose itself on God in the vigilant sleep of prayer. How shall it attain its end? We read in the Book of Esther that, when King Assuerus could not sleep, “he commanded the histories and chronicles of former times to be brought him,” and they read them before him. So may we have the history and chronicle of the Precious Blood brought to us. It will make music in our ears, like the reading of a famous ancestry to the highborn and the royal. It will be a picture before our eyes, like a procession emerging out of that first dark eternity of God, winding over the picturesque inequalities of time, and re-entering the second illuminated eternity of God, up which we see in a vista of confused gorgeousness, as those who look through the doorway of some vast ¢athedral, and behold the banners waving, and the masses of gold and color all tinted with the hues of the painted windows, moving slowly in indistinct progress to the distant starry altar. If with this pageant we can fill our minds, for a time at least the hold of the world upon us will be loosened. The things of God will interest our hearts, and many acts of divine love will flow from us, as from a fountain. Let us then turn aside from the images of earth, and rest a while, and watch this venerable Procession.

To what shall we dare to liken the Mind of God? With what shapes of allegory shall we venture to clothe that infinite eternal object, which is the fountain of all our destinies? ‘To us it looks like some tremendous chain of mountains, whose sublimities are inaccessible, whose heights are hidden always in the darkness, whose shapes are not the shapes of earthly scenery, whose sound and silence are alike terrible, and yet whose sides are always clad in the beautiful repose of radiant light. But it is a chain of mountains which has only one side, one descent. None has ever climbed those heights, nor ever shall. But we know that, if they were surmounted, there would be no descent upon the other side. A vast table-land stretches interminably there into the boundless distance, an unbeginning, uncreated land, of which faith alone, itself a supernatural virtue, can report; and it reports only, together with some few facts, the unchanging peace of awful sanctity which is the life and joy of God. That is the land of the Divine Decrees. There is the cradle of Eternal Purposes, which were never younger than they are to-day, and needed no cradle, because they had neither beginning, growth, nor change. In the trackless distances of that nameless upland have we ourselves been hidden from all: eternity: so that, in some sense, our nothingness is clothed in the robes of God’s eternity. In those untravelled, unimaginable plains, the Divine Perfections have been tranquilly occupied with us in unbeginning love, an unbeginning love which does the work of everlasting justice. In those fastnesses, round which a glory of impenetrable darkness hangs, lie the living mysteries of Predestination, of the Divine Permissions, and of that unnamed

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perfection out of which the gift of Freedom to creatures came. It isa land before whose misty regions we bend our knees in breathless adoration, in prayer which ventures not to clothe itself with words. A sacred horror fills our souls as we think of the irresponsible power which reigns there, of the mightiness and the celerity of that all-absorbing will, of the resistless march of that all-devouring glory, of the unfathomable abysses of that incomprehensible secrecy, of the unswerving exactions of that appalling sanctity, and of that amazing plenitude of life, to which no creations have been able to add, and which no incarnations could intensify. Ifthe mysteries which we know to lie there undivulged are so tremendous, what may we not conceive of other grander mysteries which are simply unimagined? Yet one thing we know of that pathless world of the Mind of God, pathless because neither reason of man nor intelligence of angel has ever wandered there, pathless because God himself traverses it not by any process of remembrance or discourse but always possesses it in simple act,—one thing we know of it, and cling to: it is, that everywhere its vastest solitudes, its farthest-withdrawn recesses, are all resplendent with the most tender justice, and are all beautified by the omnipotence of love. Nothing is small to a God so great. It is this thought. which renders so vast a majesty, not tolerable only, but so sweetly intimate and so intensely dear.

Over then those fertile deserts, fruitful though nothing grows there, unpeopled but where all is life, coming out of the interminable dark distances, we behold the Procession of the Precious Blood emerging. We could not see its starting-point, if it had had one. But it never had. In the Mind of God it was an unbeginning Procession of created things. It went forth from his power, and it returns into his love. The Precious Blood is the crowned king of all his decrees. All other creation sprang from it in prolific, multitudinous diversity, and it is forever fetching creation back to the Creator. Wesee it only as it were through dazzling mists. Yet it seems to come with banners flying, whereon the names of the Divine Perfections are emblazoned. The Divine Decrees hover above it like glorious clouds, which are dark from their exceeding luminousness. All the Types of — created things appear to follow in its train. Onward it comes, so like an uncreated splendor, that it is hard to think it a created thing. We kneel to worship, because faith, like a herald, proclaims it as it comes, as the Created Life of an Uncreated Person. Ages of epochs hang like shapeless mists about the long Procession, as if there were even in eternity some divisions which would seem to us like time, or as if eternity were thus striving to - make its length and its endurance visible to mortal eyes. The whole of that illimitable country is © somehow covered with the Precious Blood. It ‘s like the spirit of the place, or at least the atmosphere which hinders its being mere darkness to our view. The light is colored by it. The darkness is thickened by it. The silence makes it felt; and, if there be any sound, it is the sound of that Blood lapsing in its channels.

Now it has reached the edge of that boundless upland. Now it stands revealed upon the heights, which face down upon creation. It passes from the region of bright bewildering mists, mists which vewilder the more because they are so bright; and it emerges into light amidst created things. Or rather, to speak more truly, it comes, the Procession of Divine Decrees, the pageant of the Precious Blood, to that invisible, imperceptible point in eternity, when time should fittingly begin. At once a whole universe of fairest light broke forth, as if beneath the tread of those Decrees, as if at the touch of that Precious Blood. It was but an instantaneous flash, the first visibility of the invisible God; and there lay outspread the broad world of angels, throbbing with light, and teeming with innumerous and yet colossal life. The brightness that silvered them was the reflection of the Precious Blood. From it and because of it they came. Out ofit they drew their marvellous diversity of graces. Their sanctities were but mantles made of its royal texture. They beautified their natures in its supernatural streams. It seemed as if here the Procession halted for a moment; or perhaps it was only that the sudden flash of light looked like a momentary halt. The new creatures of God, the first created minds, the primal offspring of the Uncreated Mind, were bidden to fall in, and accompany the great Procession: Oh, it was feastful,-—that first sight outside the immense serenity of God! Then truly, too truly, there was a halt, as if homage and obedience were refused. There is a gleam as of intolerable battle, and a coruscation of archangelic weapons, and Michael’s warery, echoing, the first created cry, among the everlasting mountains. A third of that creation of purest light has refused to adore the Human Blood of the Incarnate Word, and is flung speedily into the dread abyss; and the ranks close in, and the unfallen light now beams more resplendently with its thinned array than ever it beamed before the fallen fell; and onward the Procession moves. To our eyes it has a firmer footing when it comes among material things. It is a material thing itself. It has passed the world of angels, who are now following in its train. Suddenly, on its advance, or even before it has advanced at all, another universe springs up to life, the immense universe of matter. Perhaps there was hardly any gulf between this creation and that of spirit. But it was a new manifestation of the Divine Perfections. In some respects it was more wonderful than the creation of spirit, because its product was less like any thing in God. It was a wider thing than spirit, and perhaps more various. It carried God further out of himself. It was a longer reach of his perfections. It was a more unexpected thing than spirit. Yet it was in some way older in the decrees of God. It was the creation in which his predilections lay. It was here that he had selected the created nature which he would assume to himself. It should be a nature neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual, but which should bridge the interval between the two. It was a creation also which should be more under the dominion of time. It should be left to ripen through long epochs for human habitation. Material life should be tried in a gradually ascending scale. The laws of physical nature should be allowed to operate for long successions of periods upon the huge masses of matter Moreover, God himself, by a series of secondary creative acts, would set in order and adorn in a sequence of six divine days the matter, which in one instant, without succession, he had evoked from nothingness. Moreover, alongside the secular mutations of matter, God would move in a series of unresting creative acts. Age after age, every hour of every day, would he call up from nothing beautiful souls to tenant the new bodies perpetually budding forth and growing upon the earth. So that this creation of matter was in all respects avery peculiar and notable creation, not to be thought meanly of because of its manifold imperfections, but to be deeply studied and reverently admired as the locality and material of the Incarnation. It was now to this point that the Precious Blood had come, to a world which was as it were its natural home. The Types of created things, which had surrounded it from the first, now suddenly as if at some divine command spread themselves out in front. With lightning’s speed they flew in showers of golden fire into the vast realms of space created to contain them. It was like a vast swarm of locusts gleaming, now lonely, now in troops, in the distinct blackness of space. Orbs, and pairs of orbs, and brotherhoods of orbs, and hosts of brotherhoods of orbs, sprung off exultingly on their immense careers. It was a scene that looked to be one of wild terrific power, of ruin rather than of creation: only that on closer view there was such unstriving peace, such harmony | among the unimpeded crowds of worlds, such a magnificent gentle self-confidence of order, that it M was amazing to behold. Minerals and vegetables, solids and fiuids, shone in families with hitherto uncovered types, which had come from the exhaustless beauty of the Maker. It was all so ponderous and yet all so light, so multiplied and yet so simple, so profuse yet so economical, so free and yet loving law so strangely, that we could never weary of admiring this spectacle of the material creation. It was created also expressly as the equipage of the Sacred Humanity. It was formed upon its model. It was in intimate relations with it. The Precious Blood was beneath the jurisdiction of its laws, even while it was advancing like a lawful king and like a heavenly conqueror. Verily the Divine Decrees are coming now in sight of their magnificent conclusion.

For a long while the road of our Procession has lain over lonely worlds, now in lifeless chaos, in heaps of mineral ruin or in fantastic crystal shapes, now clamorous with life which, to our eyes used to other types, seems portentous and uncouth, now through periods of glacial cold when life died out, and then again through epochs of streaming heat when life was almost strangled in the green density of colossal verdure. Order grows beneath the feet of the Procession, as if the earth were beautified by its advance: when, all at once, in a mountain-girdled garden of this uncentral planet there are seen amid the shades two startling shapes, shadows to the angels they would seem, shadows of Jesus and Mary whom those blessed spirits had been allowed to gaze upon in the Divine Decrees. Now from out eternity that beautiful patient pomp has reached so near to us, has reached the father and

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the mother from whom we ourselves ‘are sprung. But why does it linger on the banks of Eden’s fourfold river? Why does it not rather come on with quickened step, quickened by love to meet us, the children of centuries still far on, who are so yearning for its coming? Alas! there are mists ‘covering the mountains. There are rude winds waving the boughs of Eden, and displacing its quiet foliage. The powers of evil, through mysterious permission, are breaking up out of their dark imprisonment. There is a stir among the angels. The faces of the Divine Decrees are clouded. The Procession has halted, not in confusion, yet abruptly. Man also has sought himself, and has used his liberty against the divine dominion. The beautiful paradise is overcast with shades. The rivers brawl more hoarsely in their beds. There are sounds of tempests among the mountains. The quiet beasts are seized with a panic which they do not comprehend. Yet there is no suddenness of God’s glorious anger now, as with the angels. It is as if there were heavenly deliberations, as if mercy were pleading against justice, and staying the uplifted arm. Those two human faces, the likenesses of Jesus and of Mary, are sweet to the eye of God even in their fall. That look of human sorrow and of human penitence, why should it be s0 availing? Why should he pause to look at it, and as if to let it work upon him, when he dashed in pieces with so summary a wrath the surpassing beauty of those countless angels? It is the Precious Blood itself which seems to interfere. It glows with unusual light. The splendor of it appears to clothe the justice, and the mercy, and the sanctity of God with a glory which to our eyes makes those perfections softer, while it also makes them more resplendent. A kind of glorified sadness, yet also of well-pleased love, comes over all countenances in that Procession; and it looks even more divine. Now angels join the ranks, bearing new banners in their hands, emblazoned with mysterious symbols. They are the emblems of the Passion. The vision of the blissful Mother passes into the Queen of dolors; and the Incarnation forsakes the white brightness of Thabor for the unutterable gloom of Calvary. Yet the human sadness beautifies it all: That Precious Blood was human from the first; and now that those two human faces of Adam and of Eve have joined it, and have not only joined it but called forth new possibilities in its nature, there seem, if we may dare to say it, a more congruous loveliness, a more harmonious unity, in the wonderful Procession. But it turns away from the mountainous frontiers of Eden, and advances slowly over the expanses of the untilled earth. Men built cities for themselves, because they had instincts of the heavenly city which was above; and Damascus was the first city which they built, the first Jerusalem of the Precious Blood. Then for four thousand years the ever-widening and ever-lengthening Procession wended on. They were four thousand years of those grand vicissitudes which form the traditions and religions of all the nations of the earth. There was a murder and a martyrdom just outside the gates of paradise. The first brother shed his brother’s blood, and the hitherto unpolluted earth cried aloud c & 4 ¢ toGod. Yet, rightly considered, that elder brother was not the first to shed fraternal blood; Adam had already shed the Blood of his Elder Brother, who should also be his Son, in Eden itself: and now Abel, like another St. Stephen, was the martyr of the Precious Blood, and went to dwell, himself the first inhabitant, in the peaceful expectation of the limbus of the Fathers. They were wild scenes, amidst which the Procession had now to move. The glorious science of Adam faded from the minds of men. The patience of God seemed at last worn out, and the deluge came. But the Precious Blood, with its retinue of angels, was everywhere on ‘the face of the angry waters. It was not only in the ark with the chosen eight. It was cleansing countless souls among the drowning. It was shriving them upon the high hill-tops. It was uttering brief but victorious prayers out of their souls, as they sank like stones into the depths. That Flood was astern mission. Yet the Precious Blood was a marvellous missionary, and a glorious harvest of souls was garnered, with Abel and the primeval saints, into the limbus of the Fathers. But the new earth grew colossal sins. It was like the time when the steaming soil had grown the gigantic ferns of the coal-beds. The cries of the hunters filled the glens, and the animaijs fell off from human-kind in terror and alarm. Had God’s judgments only quickened the fertility of sin? Truly a singular portentousness of sin answered to a singular immensity of mercy. Multitudes banded together to build a high tower to reach to the low-seeming heavens; but their tongues were confounded, and they could no longer sing the same songs in the Procession. Still everywhere that Procession was reflected; for their religion and their worship were nothing but bloodshedding and prayer.

It would take too long to tell all the travels of the Precious Blood during those wistful ages, while it was at once a pilgrim and a warrior, an explorer and a king, a conqueror going up to take possession and a victim led forth to sacrifice and to be slain. We know of it by the tents of Abraham on the Chaldean plains. It was Isaac’s evening meditation in his pastoral fields. Jacob dreamed of it in the dark nights upon the lonely wolds of Mesopotamia. Job sang of it wonderfully amid the ruddy cliffs of the Stony Arabia. Moses shed the glory of it over the gravelly desert and round the haunted sanctuaries of Sinai. It shone like moonlight over Palestine, and it was the dim but sufficient light of all the rest of earth. The time of sunshine was not come. It was a voice of minstrelsy in the heart of David, ravishing the world. It was the sun behind the clouds of prophecy, making them to glow with such a crimson glory. The temple of Jerusalem was its well-head; but its tricklings reached to the newest-peopled island ‘in the far Pacific. It had made the limbus of the Fathers populous with the accumulated generations of the saints. Angels cannot tire. Yet there was a look of weariness about the long Procession. It went slowly, was often silent, and was manifestly travel-stained. Sighs. took the place of songs. Hearts made faces beautiful by the intensity of their desires. Yet on many countenances there was an air of doubt which mingled sadly with their wistfulness. Everywhere there were bands of brave Maccabees,. whose hearts could be unmanned by no captivity. But the greater part of men marched on like slaves going toward the land of their foreign bondage, rather than pilgrims to their homes. Nevertheless, in the foresight of the shedding of that Blood, grace took possession of those four thousand years, and delighted itself in incessant victories, victories that were not confined to the chosen race of Israel. But now a great and sudden change comes over the aspect of our Procession. It is not so much a change in the retinue of the Precious Blood, as it was in the case of Adam and Eve: this time it is a marvellous change in the Precious Blood itself. It has prepared all things for itself in secret; but its preparations have been hidden mysteries. The souls of Joachim and Anne have been adorned with unusual graces. The yearnings of the saints in Israel have burned within them, until their hearts have hardly been able to endure the fire. The instincts of all the earth have grown uneasy, as if some unwonted thing were coming upon nature. In secret the Precious Blood has done a work which may vie with the great work on Calvary. It has effected the Immaculate.Concep-- tion, wherein heaven was opened, and*such abysses. of grace poured out upon the earth, that the accumulated graces of the four thousand years of human history, and even the worlds of grace with which the angels were so munificently endowed, were as drops to the ocean compared with the grace of the Immaculate Conception. Beautiful as an unexpected sunrise seen suddenly as we turn out of the dark defiles of a mountain-pass, was the Nativity of Mary, as the Procession of the Precious Blood came all at once into its visible effulzence. Perhaps there is not among the divine mysteries one of such unblemished gladness, of such unmixed joy, as the. Nativity of our Blessed Mother. It was like Bethlehem, without those grave foreshadowings of Calvary which give to Bethlehem such pathetic solemnity. The birth of Mary was like a mystery of the unfallen world. It was the sort of mystery unfallen worlds would have, and its feast the sort of feast unfallen souls would keep. Swiftly the Procession advances. The shapes, the figures, and the symbols of the pageant seem to furl themselves one by one, while the Precious Blood assumes the distinct features of an actual Human Life. It is more heavenly now, because it is more earthly. Its actual creation renders yet more visible those uncreated perfections out of which it sprang. It is more manifestly a glory to be worshipped, now that it can be seen in the Face of the Infant Jesus.

But who can tell the beauty of that Precious Blood, as it moved about the earth with slow human movement during the Three-and-Thirty Years? Saints rapt in ecstasy may see, and haply may in part understand a spiritual loveliness, which they cannot express in words. Like other artists, their conceptions are mostly above the level of language. But to us the Thirty-Three Years are an indistinct wonder, distinct enough to fix us in admiration, and to make our hearts burn with love, but indistinct so far as understanding goes. There is something in our Lord’s mysteries, which

THE HISTORY OF THE PRECIOUS y ANB aS is akin to the Divine Perfections. They are seen in indistinctness. An indistinet view seems to teach us more than a distinct one. We see more truthfully, if not more clearly, when our view is less defined. When our view is distinct, it is like a beautiful picture or a beautiful poem. It pleases and soothes; it elevates and chastens; it sobers and refines. It fills us full of sweet thoughts, noble sympathies, and heavenly imaginations. But it is not the repose of prayer. It is not the heat of the mysticallife. It is not the swiftness of spiritual growth. It only unites us to God ina distant ora circuitous way. The saints perhaps may see these mysteries clearly, and yet at the same time with such a viewas transforms their souls and unites them to God inthe crowning grace of the divine espousals. Tothem, aspiritual beauty may be alwaysa spiritual grace. Yet even to contemplatives there is for the most part more of heavenly and supernatural operation in an indistinct view of the Divine Perfections and of the Mysteries of Jesus, than in a distinct one. We only desire to know, in order that we may increase our love. To love is better than to know. Indeed, it is itself a higher knowledge. Here, then, at the point of Bethlehem, the Procession of the Precious Blood comes out into a light too strong for us to see the details of its magnificence. It is too near to us to be seen except in detail, and its details are too bright to be distinct. Like all the works of God, it hides itself by coming close up tous. We must speak of it hereafter from a different point of view, rather as of a Life, than as of a Procession Nevertheless it moved in fairest pomp along those Three- 16* and-Thirty Years of visible, earthly, human life. Now and then it appeared upon the highways of the world and in the streets of cities; but for the most part it haunted sequestered retreats of its own, and it haunted them with mysterious delays. Jt bore its banners furied. No voice of song, but the low strains of the Mother’s Magnificat, were heard in its encampments. A saint, whose very soul was part of the silence of heaven, alone guarded it for nearly all its appointed years. For thousands of years the world had looked for its manifestation; and now, behold! that manifestation was a concealment. Before it came, it was a palpable pageant of history. When it came, it melted, as a cloud melts in the sunshine, into the more substantial reality of a divine mystery. It hid itself in Mary; and we see it for an instant passing in unwonted haste over the uplands of Judea. We hear it in the tones of Mary’s voice. We taste it in the sweetness of her chosen words. By the light of Joseph’s lantern we catch a glimpse of it at midnight on the floor of a cave at Bethlehem,where shepherds gaze in silence, and Oriental kings are kneeling to adore, while the angels, who that night could not be so silent as their God, sing high up in heaven as if they feared lest their jubilee should wake the earth and divulge the secret of their King. In the courts of the great temple we see the humble pomp of its dear Candiemas, a sort of childish anticipation of its second triumph on Palm Sunday more than thrice ten years hereafter. It moves along the sandy depressions and stone-sprinkled troughs of the desert, not in a glorious caravan of merchants laden with canted the gold and jewels of India or with the drugs and gums of Araby, but in a timid pilgrimage with Joseph and with Mary. It hides amidst the bulrushes of the Egyptian river, as the cradle of the Hebrew lawgiver had hidden centuries ago.

Once more it wound its way across the desert. Its pilgrimage was one of three now, whereas— seven years before it seemed only to be of two, itself being nothing more than the alternate burden of the foster-father and the mother. The Boy can walk now, though the sands weary his Feet with their burning, and the pebbles bruise him with their hardness. But the thorns of the acacias and the prickles of the salt-plants pierce him, and his Feet leave a faint line of red behind them, which angels adore and recognise as the veritable Procession of the Precious Blood.

As if impelled by its kingly instincts, it drew near its own lawful palace in Jerusalem; and then, as if glad of an excuse to hide itself afresh, it turned aside through fear of a usurping king, and sank, like a bird whom the hawk has been pursuing, into that hidden bowl of mountain-meadows which men call Nazareth. Here it disappeared, like a river which has gone under ground. There was a long halt of three-and-twenty years. Occasionally, when the crowding of the feasts gave greater facilities for its disguise, it went over the steep paths to its sacred metropolis, and worshipped in the temple amidst the multitude. Once very notably it appeared there, five years after the return from Egypt; and its voice was heard in the Jewish schools; and its beauty looked out of boyish eyes into the hearts of old men and wise scholars and profound interpreters, and puzzled them with its loveliness, which needed a more spiritual interpreting than they could give. This was a moment in the Procession of the Precious Blood, of all moments the most difficult to understaud; for it seemed to turn away from that fountain i Mary’s heart, round which it had been flowing in rings which seemed to draw nearer at every circuit. But it had this time only fetched a wider circuit, that it might better turn, and flow straight back into its fountain, and live hidden there in indistinguishable distinctness for eighteen years of another childhood, which the strength of size and age only adorned with more tender ministries and only graced with a more beautiful docility. Even the appearances, the looks, the outward shows of divine mysteries are full of significance. In this staying behind at Jerusalem it seems as if the Eternal Father and the mortal Mother were beckoning the Procession of the Precious Blood different ways, and as if in the end the Creator had given way to his chosen creature. This is the look of that secret parting of the Boy of twelve at the gate of Jerusalem.

But now, as through some gateway on which the sun is brightly shining, or some triumphal arch hung round with braided flowers, the Procession of the Precious Blood issues out of the pas-tora) solitude of Nazareth at Cana of Galilee in the unexpected light of a marriage-feast. It was as if the multiplying of the human family was a joy to its love of souls. With how exquisite a fittingness, and with how much disclosure of his own character, did our Lord make that first of his public mysteries a triumph to his Mother! We know not how to express the glory.of that feast to her. The eternal counsels were anticipated at her word. The time, which in our Lord’s mind had not come, came at his Mother’s will: and the first refulgence of his miracles shone forth on her, and at her bidding. Through her he had entered on the earth: through her he entered on his Ministry. With her he went up Calvary: with her he mounted the Till of the Ascension. All the mys-teries of Jesus are glories of Mary. The Ministry is not less full of her fragrance than the Childhood or the Passion. As the Father’s work was deferred for Mary when her Son was twelve, the same work was precipitated for her when he was thirty. Through this portal, then, of Cana in Galilee, this Gate of Mary, as we may call it, the Precious _ Blood issued forth from its concealment. The | white houses gleamed with their flat roofs améng the pomegranate-trees, and the broad-leaved figs, and the skrubby undergrowths, while the plain below was all waving with the billowy corn. The corn below, even if it bore a thousandfold, was but a poor figure of the harvest that Blood should gather now, that Blood which shone more rubylike than the ripest pomegranate in Cana. A little water from the village well was turned into generous wine; but that Blood, which men will spill like water, shall be the wine of immortality to all the world. Now for three years the Procession of the Precious Blood moved to and fro within the precincts of the Holy Land. One while it was upon the hill-tops, which look down upon the lake, the lake of the Great Vocations, as we may fitly name it. Another while it was winding aleng the paths which clove the tall corn in the fields. The day saw it in the temple-courts; the moonlight disclosed it in the gray hollows of the stony mountains. It went to carry blessing to the houses of the poor; and it crossed the inland sea in the boats of fishermen. Yet it did not move at ran- -dom. Its very journeys were a ritual. It was like the procession in the consecration of a church. Its movements have a meaning, and make up a whole. Whether it goes round the walls with the bunch of hyssop, or writes alphabets on the ash-strewn floor, or clusters in seeming confusion round the yet unconsecrated altar, there is a symbol and a law in every posture. So was it with the sinuous wanderings of the Precious Blood in Palestine. Like the course of the Israelites in the desert, it had a pattern to the eye of God, and betokened some hidden wisdom, which we are unable to decipher. It was beautiful beyond words, beautiful beyond our comprehension. It had no ornaments. Its figurative pageantry was gone. The words of life were its only music. It was now neither like a pilgrimage nora march. There was nothing to which it could be compared. It was a Countenance which moved to and fro, intensely human because it was more than human, smiling, weeping, looking downeast, adoring, speaking, clad in wonderful anger, bound in placid sleep, pale, weary, meek, submissive, yet unspeakably commanding. All human expressions gathered > there, save one; and that was the expression of surprise. Sometimes in his words there was what sounded like a tone of surprise, escaping plaintively from some wounded love within his Heart. But on the vastness of his mind nothing like surprise could dawn, nor any perplexity pass upon the serenity of his Face. ‘To see that Face was a heaven to the pure and good; and when the heart came to fear too much, because the beauty of the Face was so reverend, its likeness to the Mother’s face confused it sweetly with earthly things, and enabled the heart to repose on its divinity. Thus the Procession came to Olivet and Calvary.

Who can gaze steadily on the intolerable brightness of that Procession now, all flashing with a crimson light which blinds the eye of the beholder? As, when we gaze upon the sun, we seem to see it double, and the two orbs quiver in our wounded eyes with a vermilion haze, so is it with the Precious Blood amid the mysteries of the Passion. It appears double. There are two Processions instead of one. One is all shame, and suffering, and defeat. We might almost have said © disorder; but there is something so venerable in its diserace, something so imposing in the tranquillity of that Countenance, that there is order and self-mastery in its abasement, The other Procession is all triumph and exultation. Hager mercy hurries to and fro. Hidden counsels of the Hternal open their banners for the first time, and wave them joyously; and the jubilant silence of the angels is so intense that we might almost dream we heard it, a8 some strain of music in which the complain-ings of blameless envy mingled with the impassioned notes of self-forgetting victory. How dark the stains looked in the moonlight that silvered ' the olive-tops of lone Gethsemane! How the red rain spotted the pavements of Jerusalem, like those portentous showers of blood which pagan history records with fright! How red the streams looked upon the white Body, and then how black! and how the eclipse, which came on and hid it all, made the spectre of it burn with a fiery reality in our eyes, because we knew so certainly and so exactly what the darkness contained! At the foot of the Cross also the Blood itself looks double; for, if the Face of Jesus was like the face of Mary, now the tears of Mary are like the Blood of Jesus. They were tears of blood, and of the very blood which had been the fountain ot the Precious Blood.

Then a change comes over our Procession. The Blood goes alone. It is no longer in the Sacred Heart as in its living tabernacle. It is no longer mantling in the Mary-like Face. It is apart and uncompanioned now, and by itself is absolutely adorable. The souls of men have got the Soul of Jesus to themselves beneath the earth, where it is brightening the caverns with the Beatific Vision. The love and piety of men have tended the Body, embalmed it, and laid it in the tomb. To whom shall the Blood belong? Even to those for whom only it was not shed in expiation, to those for whom only it was not a ransom, to the multitudes of the delighted angels! Who can tell their jubilee in that brief but sole possession of the ransom of mankind? They are sentinels over it, where it lay. On the hard stones of the street and on the stained plants of Calvary, on the accoutrements of the soldiers and on the garments of the great Mother, in the dry dust of Olivet and on all the instruments of the Passion, they kept watch and _ward, and adored the Precious Blood. Mary saw them, and blessed them in their deed. Through the Friday night, and the Saturday, and till the Sunday dawned, they sang their voiceless songs in those low-lying crevices of earth, finding thei¥ heaven amid the dust of men’s feet. Then they raised each drop with touch of reverent fear and tremulous abasement, and set it up as a grand thing of beauty and of worship, and went in un: imaginable procession to the sepulehre.. Who can tell how they marshalled that pomp upon the éarth, nor how like it was to that simultaneous order of the Incarnation, of which theology teaches such marvellous things, nor how like it was to the Chalice which Jesus himself had consecrated, as it were an external Sacred Heart, on the Thursday night, nor how like it is now to the daily separation of the Blood in the Chali¢e of the Mass? Alongside of the Soul returned from limbus, and énjoying the same Divine Union 4s the Soul, the Precious Blood re-entered the Sacred Heart, filled with the sounds of life its silent halls, and poured the glorified beauty of an immortal human life Over every sacred Limb, effacing all vestige of the Passion, save where it gathered itself up and burst forth into five roseate suns in the Hands and Feet and Heart, suns whose exuberant radiance is causing unsetting day this hour in the farthest extremities of heaven. But that separate procession, that exclusive keeping of the Precious Blood, is a glory and a pride of the angeli¢ kingdom, which their songs will tell of te all eternity. N 17

Green Nazareth was not a closer hiding-place than the risen glory of the Forty Days. As of old, the Precious Blood clung round the sinless Mother. Like a stream that will not leave its parent chain of mountains, but laves them incessantly with many an obstinate meandering, so did the Blood of Jesus, shed for all hearts of men, haunt the single heart of Mary. Fifteen times, or more, in those Forty Days, it came out from under the shadow of Mary’s gladness and gleamed forth in beautiful apparitions. Each of them is a history in itself, and a mystery, and a revelation. Never did the Sacred Heart say or do such ravishing things as during those Forty Days of its Risen Life. The Precious Blood had almost grown more human from having been three days in the keeping of the angels. But, as it had mounted Calvary on Good Friday, so now it mounts Olivet on Ascension Thursday, and disappears into heaven amidst the whiteness of the silver clouds. It had been but a decree in heaven before, a divine idea, an — eternal compassion, an inexplicable complacency of the life of God. It returns thither a Human Life, and is throned at the Right Hand of the Father forever in right of its inalienable union with the Person of the Word. There is no change in the Unchangeable. But in heaven there had never been change like this before, nor ever will be again. The changes of the Great Doom can be nothing compared to the exaltation of the Sacred Humanity of the Eternal Word. The very worship of the glorious spirits was changed, so changed that the angels themselves cannot say how it is that no change has passed on God. Somehow the look of change has enhanced the mag ificence of the divine immutability, and has given a new gladness to their adoration of its unspeakable tranquillity.

For a moment nothing on earth is visible. The white light of the Ascension has dazzled our eyes. We see a confused splendor, and nothing more. It is but for a moment; and then, more wonderful than ever, the Procession lies outstretched before the vision of our minds. It is no longer single. It is not even double, as it was on Calvary. It is treble now. Girdled with amazing refulgence, it fills all heaven. Upon earth, breaking away beyond the confines of Palestine, it is visible in all nations of the globe, and crossing the broadest seas. Everywhere it is traversing the plains, scaling the mountains, and penetrating the sanctuaries of the wilderness. The Procession in repose above is like the Procession of the Thirty-Three Years. It is the actual life of the Precious Blood. The Procession below is the omnipresence of its power, the outstreaming of grace from its treasuries, faith’s veritable application of the Precious Blood to the souls of men. This last is like the Procession of ~ the four thousand years before the Incarnation, only that it has now sacramental realities of its own, and looks backward to the past, not, as that other Procession, forward to a future. The third Procession is not one, but manifold, and multiplied incessantly. Swifter than the sunbeam, from out the opened heavens the Precious Blood is flowing upon the altars of the Church. It is filling innumerable chalices at the same moment in the most distant places. The Sacred Heart, which is its natural tabernacle, is halting in countless tabernacles of human artifice, or is being borne about the fields and streets to the dying by the anointed servants of our Lord. This last Procession is not less actual than the one which is in heaven. It lives the same glorified life. It is but one life, and the same life. This is the threefold vision of the Precious Blood, which we see when the radiance of the Ascension has passed away. The one in heaven ministers in unknown mys-teries to the Majesty of the Father. ‘The one that moves over the earth is the minister of the Holy Spirit, who guides and rules the Church. The mingled activity and rest of the Blessed Sacrament is the human life of the Eternal Son himself, haunting the earth which he loved so dearly as to redeem it with his Blood. So the glory of the Holy Trinity satiates itself upon the Precious Blood.

The Upper Room of Pentecost is another Bethlehem. It is the birthplace of the Church. There is the same Mother as in the midnight cave. But, instead of Joseph, there are apostles. Instead of angels’ songs in the quiet midnight, there is the rushing wind of the Eternal Spirit; and his fiery tongues, instead of the wintry brightness of the stars. From that Upper Room the Procession seems to start again. Not that the Precious Blood had left the earth, even at the Ascension. The whole of those ten days it lay, in real sacramental presence unconsumed, on Mary’s immaculate heart as onareposoir. But it is not our present purpose to dwell upon the analogies between Bethlehem and the Room of Pentecost. We must still follow our Procession. From the day of Pentecost we can see-its course onward for ages. The scenery of history is more varied than even that of geography. It has its bleak mountains and its cultivated lands, its valleys and its plains, its forests and even its deserts, its cities and its solitudes, its beautiful maritime borders and its gray expanses of melancholy wold. Across all this various scenery the Procession of the Precious Blood moves on, sometimes in single pomp, sometimes multiplied into many pomps, then again reuniting in one, or again sending forth a branch which shines for many a league and then disappears gradually or at once, as if the earth had drunk it up, as the sands drink the rivers of the desert. Still its course is plainly onward, from the east to the west; and its metropolis is changed, from Jerusalem to Rome. Its pageantry is more magnificent than ever. The choirs of angels still attend it; but its sacred vessels are borne by a resplendent human hierarchy, which is a copy of the hierarchies of heaven, and an emanation of the eternal priesthood of Jesus. At its head moves the never-dying Peter, the prince of the apostles and the vicar of his Lord, while by his side moves evermore the glorious St. Michael, the captain of the hosts of God and the famous zealot of his honor. So multiplied are the symbols and the blazonries of Mary, that we might sometimes take it for a procession of our Lady. But then again, from its more solemn pomp, and more austere observance, we perceive that it is in truth a Procession of the Blessed Sacrament. Above it all, in a glory of sweetest light, hovers the Eternal 17*

Dove, who. has come. to be to the Church what, Jesus was to his disciples during the Three-and-Thirty Years. Beautiful Spirit! He has clothed the Procession with his beauty. He has shed over it the whiteness of his holiness. He, who fashioned the Sacred Humanity after hisown model of Mary’s loveliness, has imprinted the thousandfold expression of the likeness of Jesus upon the Church. So the Procession moves on, bearing on high the strange heaven-invented vessels of the Sacraments, and attended with this amazing equipage. It fits all times. It harmonizes with all scenery. Its bravery does not flaunt the twilight of the catacombs, while it is in equal keeping with imperial courts. It illuminates ages which else were — dark, and the eye rests reposefully upon its placid glories when false glitter all around at once deludes, and fatigues the sight. With appropriate magnificence it adorns institutions venerable for their long antiquity, while with equal fitness, it inaugurates the unprecedented novelties of daring epochs,, as calmly as if it had been used to them for centuries. In the desert of the Thebais and amidst the. temples of Athens, in the white squares of Iconium. and by the thousand runlets of Damascus, amidst the swamps of Bulgaria and the mosques of Granada, in the oak sanctuaries of Scandinavia or the colleges of Paris, in the market-places of the

Flemish towns or by the missionary rivers of La, Plata, it is at once the light of the supernatural ennobling nature, and at the same time a beauty which seems as natural as the gray ruin which an aged wood so well knows how to incorporate with its quiet self. We have seen all this; for the light of history falls clearly upon it. But we trace the Procession far onward, toiling over the unborn ages, where the starry indistinctness of prophecy reveals it to our eyes. There are times to come, which shall be very different both from the times that have been, and from the times that are. The later ages of the Church will be portentous epochs. The times of Antichrist will never have been paralleled, although they may have been foreshadowed chiefly by the primeval centuries of Scripture history. But even amid those monstrous novelties the Procession of the Precious Blood, with its miraculously-preserved Sacraments, will move on with the same ready gracefulness, the same instinctive plability, the same tranquil consciousness of its mission, which have distinguished it since Pentecost. Oh, happy we, who shall see that marvellous future in peaceful admiration from out the Bosom of our heavenly Father, and may have to help it with our prayers!

But this Procession is not to be always a splendor of the earth. Its eternal sanctuary is heaven. It will pass from earth to heaven through the dark portal of the Valley of Josaphat, the Valley of Universal Doom. That will be the day of his earthly triumph, the crown of that other day of shame and outpouring upon Calvary. The lone trumpet of the archangel, which shall wake the dead, is part of the pageantry of the Precious Blood. The union of the souls and bodies of the just is its work. The transfiguring of all glorified bodies into the likeness of the Body of Jesus is due also to the energy of its merits. Out of the Human Life, which is in that

Blood, all judgment will proceed. The Blood itself will be the measure of justice, and the immeasurableness of mercy. All that will be magnificent in the vindictive sanctity of God that day will be a glory of the Precious Blood. In all that will be sweet, and gentle, and compassionate, it will seem as if the Precious Blood led the very love of God captive through its owrm greater capacities of love. Then too will all its difficult secrets be told, and its honor gloriously restored. Its mysteries of election, its seeming inequalities of grace, the irregularities of its patience, its varying prodigality, the apparent caprices of its impetuosity, its predilection for particular races and climates, its choice of favorite epochs, its look of waywardness with each individual soul, the amazing revelations of the saving grandeur of the Seven Sacraments,—all these things will then be made plain, all will magnify its justice and its lovingness, all will illustrate the Godlike equality of its beneficence, and all will redound to its eternal praise. The Universal Doom will be nothing else than a grand Feast of the Precious Blood, a Feast solemnized by the most marvellous functions, ushered in by the archangel’s trumpet at the dead of night. The rendering of their dead by land and sea, the jubilee of countless resurrections, the leading in chains of Satan and the rebel populace of hell, the superb gathering of the angels, the radiant Advent of the Judge and his Mother from heaven, the silent pomp of the all-holy judgment, the ascent at eventide back to the palaces of heaven with very worlds of material beauty won to God by the resurrection of the just,—these are the sacred pageants of that supreme Feast of the Precious Blood.

After this, what shall we dream of the history of the Precious Blood in heaven? Will it still be like a Procession, though gathered round the High Altar of creation? Will it still have new works to do, new glories to contribute to the Uncreated Majesty? What means that mysterious laying down of the kingdom by the Sacred Humanity, of which the apostle speaks to the Corinthians? What side are we to take in that thrilling controversy of theologians about the eternity of the priesthood of our Lord? Will not the repose of heaven be more energetic than the activity of earth, and be the more energetic because its peace is so profound? At least we may say so much as this:—-No work of God is a work done; but rather it is eternally a grand work, being grandly, and always more and more grandly, done. It seems to my ignorance that, with God, all his works will be, now that they have once begun, like the Generation of his word and the Procession of his Spirit; they will not be done, but will be being done forever. So perchance there will be in the Precious Blood eternal novelties eternally to magnify the glory of the Uncreated Trinity. All works of God are completed as soon as they are begun; and yet they are also endless in the unity of their accom-. plishment: and which of his works is invested with such royal rights as is the Precious Blood?

Our object in this chapter was to get a clear idea of the history of the Precious Blood. There are¹ we have done every thing. This is the case with the history of the Precious Blood. The price of our redemption is full of unfathomable mysteries. We cannot hope to understand them all, or indeed any of them, fully. That single divine law, that without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin, is beyond our grasp. It only clothes for us with dim magnificence that gift of God, which of a:i his natural gifts we least understand, the gift of life. What we want is to understand so far as to be able to worship and to love. Our best understanding of the Precious Blood is the sight of what it has done, the enumeration of its deeds, the narration of its history. So far we have endeavored to get a clear idea of its history under the figure. of a Procession. Most divine works liken themselves better to processions than any thing else. Any one, who has tried to make theology clear to those who are not theologians, must have dis-. covered this; and a great deal that is very remarkable is implied in the fact. All that is outside of

God has an inveterate likeness to that which is. within. It is the genius of creative acts to put on the semblance of processions. At the same time we look upon a procession from without. Things seen from without are seen more definitely. Their form and figure are more palpable. Hence we gair in clearness. But the outside is never more than a partial manifestation. Besides this, it is liable to erroneous impressions which can only be — corrected by some knowledge of what is within. Having asked you, then, to look at the history of the Precious Blood as a Piicobajon: I must now, at * the risk of some repetition, ask you to look at it as a Life, or as a series of lives. We shall thus complete our study of this marvellous history, and do our best to guard against any such misapprehensions as might interfere with our devotion.

All God’s works are in a certain sense part of the life of God. It is this which gives to creation its interest as well as its significance. It is in this

-way that time participates in eternity. The life of the Precious Blood may be divided into seven epochs; or it would be more true to call them seven lives, both because they do not follow each other in order of time, and also because they are not all actual periods of its existence. These seven lives are as follows: the life of the Precious Blood in the Mind of God before creation; its life of efforts in the world from creation to the Incarnation; its life upon earth during the Thirty-Three Years; its life of energy in the Church afterward, up to the day of Doom; its contemporaneous life all that time in heaven; its contemporaneous life on earth in the Blessed Sacrament during that same time; and finally its eternal life in heaven, when the Doom is past. In all these lives of the Precious Blood there is a hidden life which we cannot reach, and whose mysteries are not only above our comprehension but beyond our imagination. Its union with the Divinity is inexplicable. Its peculiar redeeming value, in that it is blood, is also a secret’ hidden from our intelligence. It represents abysses of the divine wisdom, which are not only unfathomable but nameless. It bears upon itself the imprint of unsuspected perfections in the broad majesty of God. The jubilee of its _ life is a height of creation lost to our eyes in the o.

d sell 2: wal burning vicinity of the uncreated. To this inner: — most inward life we cannot penetrate; but we can see, and understand, and love much of an inward, though less secret, life, which we could not see when we regarded the Precious Blood under the figure of a Procession. It is of this inward life ~ we must now endeavor to get some idea.

The life of the Precious Blood in the Mind of God from all eternity is in one sense a real life, and in another sense an unreal one. It was not an actual life. It was a life of predestination, of foreseen beauty, of multiplied divine intentions. It was a specially divine invention, if we may use such a word. It was an idea which could not have come to any mind but that of God, and there- © fore the complacency which it caused in the Divine Mind was immense. It was a sort of second Word to God, a created expression of his uncreated perfection. It was part of the most grand and glorious thought of God, the Incarnas tion. It was a most important part of it. It was also a specially chosen part, selected for the accoms plishment of our redemption, and for the restoring of a revolted creation to the dominion of its Maker. In the most dear and dread Mind of God it was a fountain always flowing. The beauty of its flowing had been one of his unbeginning gladnesses. It was the fountain which gave forth, multitudinous and beautiful as the creation of the radiant angels, the countless predestinations of the infinitely varying souls of men. The mystery of all election was from the first glassed in its beaming depths. It was its spray, which caught the golden light of eternal things, and fell down before the throne, even as it is still falling now, in starry showers of splendor. It was a mirror too in which the manifold countenances of the divine perfections looked always, and loved to make their beauty bearable to mortal eye. It is there to this day, that the oppositions in God are seen to be harmonies most simple and most worshipful. All parts of creation give us double views of God, simultaneous views of his seeming opposite perfections, just as on the Mount of Olives the eye may rest at will either on the Dead Sea or on the

Holy City. But of no part of creation is this so true, or true in so high a sense, as of the Precious Blood. Redeeming grace tells the whole history of God, so far as it can be told, unfolds his character in all of its breadth which is comprehensible, and as it were recites and magnifies each separate perfection; and redeeming grace is the specialty of the Precious Blood. Moreover, the Precious

Blood dwelt also in the Mind of God as the type and model of all creation, whether fallen or unfallen. In its unity lay the germs of all created loveliness and of all created variety. Mary was its first shadow, its first reflection, the freshest copy of the original. No wonder then that it was an infinite delight to the Three Divine Persons. To them it was none the less real because it was not yet actually created; for to God the solidest created. substance is but as shadow compared with the reality of his ideas. Thus from all eternity did the Precious Blood reign like a sovereign thing in the adorable complacency of God. As it had lived an eternal life in the Mind of God before creation, so also did it live a life of 18

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visible effects and real jurisdiction from the beginning of the world, before it had become itself an actual created thing in the mystery of the Incarnation. It was the Precious Blood which hindered the fall of man from being as irretrievable as the fall of angels had been. It did real work in every single soul which was created in those four thousand years. It altered their position in the world. It made the eye of God look differently on them. It rained supernatural graces upon their hearts. It diminished temporal chastisements. Neither was it less influential in the counsels of God than in the souls of men. It caused his compassion to overspread the whole earth. It turned the chronicles of the world into a succession of types, and shadows, and predictions of itself. While it was itself preparing all things for its own coming and — shedding, it so controlled all things that they rather seemed to be a preparation for itself. It sounded in every thing that God said. It impressed its character upon every thing that God did. It underlay all heathen life, and all Hebrew life. It was the significance of the most significant, and also of the most insignificant, events. It moulded all sanctity into an onlooking for itself. It beauti-fied the hearts of men for God with supernatural desires. For ali those forty ages it was the secret meaning and the hidden agent of the world. All that blossomed upon earth blossomed only because the Precious Blood watered the soil under ground Who would not long to see it, as it would one day be, in the actual Human Heart which was to be its living chalice? Even the patience of the long-waiting God might vouchsafe to yearn for the ©

Sie actual creation of the Precious Blood. How sweet then to him must haye been that dear

“sanctity of Mary, whose beautiful compulsion caused the Word to anticipate his time!

But the-hour arrived, and the Creator became a part of his own Creation. The Precious Blood was actually created, and rose and fell in pulses of true human life, and filled with joyous being the Sanctuary of the Sacred Heart, and lived its life of Three-and-Thirty Years among men. These Three-and-Thirty Years formed in all true senses the longest and most important epoch of the history of creation. They were filled with countless actions, the value of each one of which was infinite. The vocations stamped upon millions of souls came from those actions of God made man. Their energies are vigorously ruling the world at this hour. They have moulded age after age since then. All holiness has been but. an infinitely diversified copy of them. Out of their merits the attributes of God daily drink their fill, and yet those merits still abound and overflow. Out of their merits the Sacraments are drawing incalculable exuberances of grace all day and night; and they are still full to the very brim, and capable of saving unnumbered new creations. Out of the satisfactions of those years the jurisdiction of the Church has drawn almost unlimited indulgences; yet no visible impression has been made on their abundance. Poetry and art go to those years as to a school of heavenliest beauty; and all times and all minds find the lessons fresh and new Theology sits by them as by abysses of divine wisdom, and one while is actively weaving her wondrous science out of them, and another while, captivated by their beauty, forgets to weave, is rapt in contemplation, and becomes devotion. As_ to devotion, those years are its very cloister and its garden. That life is God made visible to his creatures as the rule of life. It lays bare the very foundations of morals. It reveals the possibilities of human actions, while it also paints as in a picture the indefinable operations of the Holy Ghost. It is a freshness and a joy to think that, at this hour of the peaceful dawn, thousands of souls are silent before God, caught in the sweet snares of the beauty of these earthly years of Jesus. Our Lord revealed to the Blessed Michael of Florence, the Camaldolese, how he longed that those who loved him should honor the Thirty-Three Years with affectionate minuteness. It has been the characteristic devotion of all the saints. The souls that have been most drawn to meditate upon the attributes of God have learned their scienve in that other science of the Three-and-Thirty Years. Sometimes this devotion takes special possession of a religious order for some length of time. Sometimes it fastens upon a single religious house, and develops itself with marvellous fertility. This appears to have been the case with the Carmelite convent-at Dole in the seventeenth century. To Sister Anne of the Cross, a lay-sister, it was the form and type of her whole life. It came natural to her to do even her ordinary actions in thirty-threes. Still more did her penances and devotions take that shape. When she was asked if she did not weary of such a reiterated devotion, she replied that, so far from it, it always came to her as new. The devotion of Mother Louisa of Jesus was even yet more remarkable. She could hardly occupy her soul with any thing but the Thirty-Three Years; and the abundant lights she received - from God in prayer had chiefly reference to this devotion. The first years of the Sacred Infancy were “delicious” to her soul. She had an especial attraction-to contemplate the first time our Lord bent his knees, and clasped his hands, in prayer to the Father. Her holiness seemed always to be a participation in some of the interior dispositions of Jesus upon earth; and the characteristics of her Spiritual life, consequent upon this devotion, were persevering fervor and extreme joyousness.’ She imprinted this devotion upon the whole community, and also upon the externs who came across her.

We see remarkable traces of the same devotion in our Lord’s answer to the prayers of Frances of the Mother of God, Carmelitess at Dieppe, distinguished for her devotion to the Precious Blood. — When she was praying for the soul of Sister Catherine of the Angels, she asked our Lord after Communion to apply to Sister Catherine’s soul one drop of his Precious Blood in order to achieve her deliverance. Our Lord answered, “I have given her one of my steps,” thus showing the value of his least actions. At another time she made the same prayer for Sister Elizabeth of the Nativity, asking for one drop of the Precious Blood; and our Lord answered, “I will give her one of my tears, the efficacy of which is.so great that it would turn hell into paradise, if it were applied there.” These answers seem to imply a special devotion in Frances of the Mother of God to the Thirty-Three Years; and that saintly religious was one of the most remarkable among the holy persons of the seventeenth century.

We speak very truly when we divide the world into many worlds. We talk of the vegetable world, and the mineral world, and the animal world. We even subdivide these into lesser worlds. We go to the sidereal world to learn the immensities of space. Geology opens a world to us, which overshadows us with its distances of time. We call man a little world in himself; and the microscopic world, while it is so rife with new aspects of God, delights us with all that it insinuates of the possibilities and likelihoods of the invisible world of immaterial and angelic life. We call these by the name of worlds, because they seem like complete creations in themselves, and are each of them a distinct revelation of God, distinct from all other revelations of him, and yet harmonizing with them all. They are separate shadows of God. They are his wisdom and his beauty, his power and his love, seen from different points of view. He is many Creators in one Creator. We > are very right in making his one world into many worlds. So it is with the Incarnation. The whole material universe is not so vast as that one world of the Incarnation, nor capable of so many or such magnificent subdivisions. Intellectually or spiritually, the Thirty-Three Years form a world far vaster than the world of stars. They can even bear to be subdivided into many other worlds, which are still spacious enough for the swift intelligences of angels, as well as the rapidity of glori.

fied human minds, to traverse for eternity, finding fresh wonders evermore. The Precious Blood has one biography in Mary’s Womb, where it issued from the lone sanctities of her immaculate heart. It has another in Bethlehem, and another in Egypt, and another in Nazareth, and another on the shores of Gennesareth, and another in Jerusalem, and another in Galilee. Hach of these is a world beyond the-measures of our science, a cloister for devotion, and yet a cloister in which eternity has ample room. God’s vastness is a living vastness. It carries itself everywhere, and everywhere ip entire and transcends the necessities of space. Each of these separate worlds of the life of Jesus upon earth is tied by some occult sympathy to some particular attribute, or group of attributes, in God. Thus we learn in the life of Mother Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament, Carmalitess at Dijon, that the souls which are called to a special devotion to our Lord’s Resurrection have always a peculiar attraction to worship the divine sanctity. These are glimpses of that glad science of the Three-and-Thirty Years, which will be part of our unutterable bliss beyond the grave. Surely it makes the world seem wearier than ever, to think of the unsuspected grandeurs which the mysteries of our sweet Jesus are waiting to pour out into our souls, when he has ‘received us into his kingdom.

It is plain, from what has been said, that our knowledge of the inward life of the Precious Blood during the Thirty-Three Years must bo very superficial. Nevertheless, we must put it before ourselves as clearly as we can. Its first beginning was in the thrills of beatific joy. We shall see reasons afterward for carefully noting this. The beginning of the Human Life of Jesus was not gradual. It had no dawn. Its very union with the Divinity rendered this impossible. It broke out of nothingness into the blaze of conscious and blessed ecstasy. It saw God as not even Mary sees him now. It saw him, went out of sight of all creation toward comprehending him, enjoyed him as not all heaven after the Doom will enjoy him, and adored him as no fabulous number of possible worlds could ever have adored him. This was the first pulse of the Precious Blood. The very first throb had in it an incalculable immensity of gladness. Out of its first moment all worlds might be gladdened beyond their power of bearing gladness. Save the Uncreated Jubilee, the sweet Spirit of the Father and the Son, never was there jubilee like that of the Precious Blood in its beginning. Yet from that hour the jubilee has never ceased; it has never lessened; it has never changed. Its pulses are not tides. They imply no vicissitudes. They betoken only an equable impetuosity of immutable delight. The gladness which flashed like lightning out of the eyes of the Infant into the heart of Mary was unabated when the same eyes drooped languidly toward her upon Calvary. ' The blessedness which broke forth like a creation of light in the glory of the Resurrection had never left the Sacred Heart even during the Way of the Cross. But, with the beatific joy, the Precious Blood had all other joys as well. That Human Life was a joy in itself, a joy in its divine union, independently of its vision of God. It was a joy in the love and possession of so sweet. a. Mother. It was a joy in the unearthly tranquillity of Joseph’s deep, loving, adoring heart. It*was a joy in the jubilee of the worshipping angels. It was a joy in the very bitterness of its redeeming woes, and it was a joy in the intensity of its own loves of God and men.

But it was a life also of colossal sorrows, even though they abated not the joy. Never did blood of man throb with such excesses of anguish as the Precious Blood of our most dear Redeemer. Its sorrows were lifelong. Their excesses exceeded all the tortures of the martyrs. There was never a moment which was not occupied with sorrow. The jubilee never commingled with the woe, nor tempered it, nor compensated for it. Nay, rather, all joys intensified the sorrows. Joy, surely, is in itself a diviner thing than sorrow; for there can be no sorrow in the Ever-blessed. But sorrow was more human; and therefore it was chosen as the instrument of man’s redemption; and thus to us it becomes more divine, because it brings God to us and raises us up to God. Thus sorrow was more natural to the Precious Blood. It was a life more congenial to its nature. Moreover, it was its official life. For by sorrow it was to accomplish its redeeming work. Its shedding was to be not only the consummation of our Lord’s suffering, but the chosen suffering, in which precisely the work of redemption was to lie. Jesus—thrice blessed be his most dear Name!—is all our own, neither can

• we spare any thing of him. Yet it was not precisely his Soul which was to redeem us, nor the Passion of his Body which was to be exactly our expiation. It was the shedding of his Blood which was to cleanse us from our sins. The remedy of the Fall was precisely in the Saviour’s Blood. All the sorrows of his life grew up to the shedding of his Blood, and were crowned by it; and his shedding the last few drops of it after he was dead was significant of the work it had to do. The Soul, and the Body, and.the Blood lay separate; and the sacrifice was thus complete.

The life of the Precious Blood was also a life of great secrecy. This is the invariable characteristic of all divine things. The more they have been the objects of God’s eternal complacency in his ever-blessed Mind, the more instinctively do they affect secrecy. God is a God who hides himself, and who even manifests himself by-means of new concealments. All holiness has the same love of secrecy imprinted on it as the seal of God. We should have imagined that the gladness of the Precious Blood would have made it prone to manifest itself, and to be forever manifesting itself out of its exuberant love of souls. We might have supposed that its intense desire to shed itself would have given it a character of publicity. Yet,as God is so secret that St. Austin ventured to name him “the most secret Being,” and at the same time is also unspeakably communicative, so is it with the Precious Blood. It hid itself all through the Thirty-Three Years, and it hid itself most effectually at the moment it was being shed. It hid itself on the roots of the olive-trees of Gethsemane, only making the brown wood a little ruddier. It sank into the thirsty ground of Calvary. It hastened to mingle with the street-dust of Jerusalem. It

THE HISTORY OF THE PRECIOUS ane LEG

: 0. ' clung to the soles of men’s shoes, so tthe, — CP might not notice it. In like manner it wor — hind a veil at this hour. It works in Sacraments, ~ in invisible communications of grace, in viewless contacts of divine things with the soul. It is only when God opens the*eyes of favored souls that it is seen working as truly the Blood of Jesus. Such a favored soul was Frances of the Mother of God, Carmelitess of Dieppe. When she held her chapters of faults, and the nuns accused themselves of their short-comings of observance, she saw Jesus by her side, touching those who accused themselves with simplicity and frankness with a drop of his Blood, and leaving untouched those who accused themselves unsimply and without any interior self-condemnation. On Palm Sunday, during a jubilee, she saw our Lord apply to the souls of the nuns at Communion the grace of the jubilee ‘by means of his Blood; and he said to her, “To persons in the world I give my Blood by drops, but here I give it in profusion.” One year, on the feast of the Circumcision, our Lord showed himself to her lying in the manger, bathed in blood and the blood dropping from him into a vessel. | Her soul became “deliciously occupied” with the dignity and price of that adorable Blood, and she cried out, in a transport of rapture, “Ah, my Lord! that was enough to redeem the world, without so much suffering.” He then vouchsafed to reveal to her that he had offered the Blood of the ‘Circumcision to the Father for two objects especially. The first was to satisfy for the sins which had been committed since creation and before the Incarnation; and the second was to obtain for souls the grace of making a right use of his mys-teries. Thus it has been in numberless revelations, that, when the realities of grace have been shown to favored souls, they have been shown as actual contacts of the Precious Blood, just as supernatural favors at Communion have so often taken the form of filling the mouths of the saints with blood, which had a sweetness beyond all known earthly tastes; and the way in which it veils its operations is but a continuance of the secrecy of the Three-and-Thirty Years.

The life of the Precious Blood on earth: was also, and eminently, a life of love, or, as we may rather call it, a life of many loves. It was such a human love of God as immeasurably surpassed the collective love of Mary, ange]s, and men. It was a joyous and yet a reverential love of Mary, such as far outdid all the nnited devotion and enthusiastic affection of the angels and the saints for their mother and their queen. It was such a love of men, and particularly of men’s souls, as the hearts of all mankind could not hold if it were divided among them and their hearts were enlarged to the magnificent capacities of apostles’ hearts. Souls were its attraction, its passion. Its genius fastened upon them as its portion and its prey. Its choice, its work, its food, its rest, its joy,—all were in human souls. The thought of it had won grace for souls before it was actually created. The figures of it cleansed souls. The shedding of it was the life of souls. It became almost omnipresent, that it might embrace all souls. It cast itself into Sacraments, that it might reach souls by a quicker road, in more diversified ways, with a more infallible operation, aa and with a more abundant success. Then, as if discontented even with the magnificence of the Sacraments, it threw itself into Indulgences and J ubilees. It made men after its own likeness, and called them Apostles. An apostolic call is a vocation of the Precious Blood. The mild judgments of moral theology are but the casuistry of the Precious Blood. Who can think unmoved of the tenderness and of the impetuosity of this soul-loving Blood? All sweet, eloquent patience in the Confessional is only the impassioned self-control of the

Precious Blood. All true, simple, evangelical preaching is only the uplifted voice of the Precious Blood. Let me tell you again that old story of the Blessed Angela of Foligno. She saw our Lord in vision embracing some Franciscan Friars, and pressing them with a yearning fondness to his wounded side. He pressed them so closely to him that their lips were tinged with his Blood, some slightly, some very much; and some had their mouths all ruddy with it, so tightly had he pressed them against the wound. He told her that these were his preachers, and that the word of the Gospel only went with power to the soul when it passed over lips that were stained with his Precious Blood. Ah, we poor preachers! we have need to hang our heads at this tale; and yet it is one full of good cheer to our humility, if only ouc humility be generous and brave.

Finally, the life of the Precious Blood on eartu was a life of incomparable sanctity. It was made up of the most gigantic operations of grace. We cannot approach to them even in thought. Let it suffice to say that they were multitudincus ana manifold all day, and that sleep by night never interrupted them; and yet that the least of them transcended in spiritual beauty and dignity the gorgeous mystery of the Immaculate Conception. It was a life made up also of interior dispositions of such vast heroism, of such fiery love, of such majestic intensity, of such delicate complications, as have no parallel in any other created holiness. What can we imagine of them, when it is sober to say of them that the least and most transient of them surpassed all the dispositions of Mary’s Dolors? and, after the virtues of Jesus, are not those the most colossal sanctities that were ever known on earth or ever crowned in heaven? In all these operations of grace, in all these inward dispositions, in all the glorious heroisms of the Sacred Humanity, the Precious Blood was ever minister. ing, with most special intention, to those two kindred Attributes of God, his Dominion and his Magnificence. Did J not speak truly when I said that the Three-and-Thirty Years were an epoch of secular duration, a kind of eternity of time?

The life of the Precious Blood upon earth after the Ascension was, as we have seen, in one sense an actual life, and in another sense not an actual life. We have lessons also to learn from this, or, at least, fresh proofs of the character and disposition of the Precious Bload. Its life upon earth may be divided into natural and supernatural, or into direct and indirect, or into religious and secular, according to the point of view from which we may regard it. For our purpose no strict division is necessary. It is enough for us to speak of it as it concerns the world and as it concerns the

Church. On the first head we need not say much, as we have already seen in the second chapter what the world would have been without the Precious Blood. Nevertheless, there is still something to be said. There is not, and has not been since Christianity was preached, a state or government which has not been materially influenced by the Precious Blood. History shows us that there is an obvious unity of life in states, of which they themselves are scarcely ever conscious, or at least conscious only during transient intervals. They do God’s work without knowing it. They serve the Church at the moment they think they are thwarting it. After centuries of self-praise and pride they lose their positions and sink into something narrower and smaller, and find that they have all along been the unintelligent and unintentional servante of the Holy See. Sometimes individual statesmen make an impression on their age and country; and it is curiously borne out by history that in this case the impression is for the most part adverse to religion at the time, but turns out to be for its advantage in the end. More often the state makes the statesman, who follows rather than leads, while the state itself is filled with a life it does not understand, and, like a tree growing in a particular position, works out its instincts unconsciously. In both cases it is the interests of the Precious Blood which are found at last to have presided over the revohitiens of states.

Civilizations and customs are also modified and controlled by its genius, character, and influence. Its work in ind'vidual souls is in the aggregate such an enormous power, that it cannot help making itself felt in all social movements. ‘To literature it has contributed fresh forms and new ideas. In art it has been a fountain of beauty and inspiration far surpassing any other both in.the quantity and the excellence of its production. Philanthropy owes more to it than it will acknowledge, and morality has hardly any independent practical life without it. In what is called the progress of humanity it has been at once a curb to restrain, and a rudder to guide, a light to see by, and a compensation enabling us to endure. But, while we must never forget that the outer world is always owing all that is good in it to the influence of the Precious Blood, we are rather concerned with its life in the Church. We have already seen that the laboratories of its life are in the wonderful Sacraments, which are the living present actions of Christ, the actual going on of the Thirty-Three Years on earth. We have seen that all processes of justification and of sanctification are in reality operations of the Precious Blood. We have remembered its ubiquitous activity in those veiled triumphs of death-bed graces, which will rank among the sweetest astonishments of heaven. But its principal and most characteristic occupation upon earth is Conversion; and, as its energy in the Church is so broad and so incessant that it is difficult to comprehend it in one view without becoming vague, we may select this particular occupation to which it is so specially addicted, as a favorable illustration of its spirit and method, and as conveying to us by a single instance the most faithful idea of its life upon earth since the Ascension. But, while we put forward the phenomenon of Conversion as the best exponent of the normal life of the Precious Blood, we must not forget that it is only one out of many specimens of its fertility. Let us then think of what is implied in the Conversion of a soul, and what that agent must be like whose main and favorite occupation is Conversion.

It is not possible to exaggerate the importance of the Conversion of a single soul. As single souls, we feel: lost in an overwhelming multitude. We are nobodies in the great grand world, and in the huge overmastering progress of human destinies. If we died, we might leave a temporary ache in some few hearts, and that would be all. But we are never lost, we are never nobodies, in the dear world of God’s all-seeing love and all-loving providence. According to his standards, an empire is a less thing than a single soul. The empire will not last so long, nor can it effect so much. Even upon earth the divine importance of its history lies simply in the amount and kind of its influence upon single souls. In the next world, the truer world, it has no representative. It is as though it had never been, or at least it is a mere item in the sanctification of the saved. The fortunes of earth’s most gorgeous empire cast no shadow upon heaven. God appears to make fewer arrangements for em- — pires than for souls; and, when he occupies himself with nations, it is for the sake of souls. The degree and manner of divine interference are less for an empire than for a soul. Heaven’s interest in an empire is less than its interest inasoul. The consequences of an empire are less than the con.

sequences of a soul. This is the estimate which the Precious Blood takes of a single soul. |

Now let us look at the machinery of Conversion. What is wanted, what is actually put forth, to convert a man in mortal sin? The Three Divine Persons. work as one in all external works. Yet the Father represents in our imperfect views the power of the Godhead; and this power is wanted to convert a soul. Nothing short of omnipotence can do it. Mary’s sceptre only reaches so far through the omnipotence of prayer. When I think of enormous power, | think of St. Michael; but he is too weak to convert a sinner: or of the choir of Thrones; but the magnificence of their repose cannot cleanse from sin, or infuse peace into a sinful soul. Secondly, it needs the wisdom of the Son. The Cherubim are very wise, and our dearest mother Mary is a very abyss of science. But they could not have invented the needful ingenuities for the Conversion of a sinner. Indeed, they are so far from being able to devise them, that they find it hard to understand them, and they are adoring them to this hour with unabated astonishment. ‘Then, also, it needs the love of the Holy Ghost. The magnificent Seraphim live in the divine fires, and are themselves vast and huge abysses of burning Jove. Yet they are but sparks from the furnace of the Holy Ghost. His love is simply incomprehensible. They can but fall down and tremble before the unutterable conflagrations of his uncreated fires. Many things are hard to understand in God, but, most of all, the excesses of his love. Yet this power of the Father, this wisdom of the Son, and this love of the Holy

Ghost, this threefold compassion of the Most Holy Trinity, have been engaged for the Conversion of souls through the exquisite pleadings and beautiful sonstraints of the Precious Blood. |

It is part of the ordinance of our Blessed Lord that the prayers and dolors of his Mother should also go to the Conversion of a soul. But the power of those prayers and the merit of those dolors came from the Precious Blood. The whole of Mary, and all the benignity of her queendom, and all the glory of her exaltation, and all the splendor of her graces, and all the mystery of her motherhood, are because of the Precious Blood. No part of creation has been made so white by its redness as her unspotted heart. She is the creature of the Precious Blood, its daughter, its mother, its. servant, and its queen. The angels of heaven must be stirred for the Conversion of a soul. Numberless ministries, each one of which is a heavenly wonder, are put forth by them. They plead in heaven. They visit earth. They do Mary’s bidding. They conspire with the saints. They procure the Sacraments. ‘They prepare. They co-operate. They confirm. They warn. They defend. They cross each other betwixt earth and heaven, like royal messengers on the highways in time of war. It is the Precious Blood which has merited these ministries for the soul. It is devotion to the Precious Blood which fills the angelic realms with jubilee when a sinner is converted. Our Lord loved to think of that jubilee, and spoke of it with pleased affirmation and tenderest delight.

The Conversion of a soul requires that a multitude of circumstances should be providentially ordered, and times, persons, and places made to fit each other in some one peculiar way. This harmony of circumstances is providence doing honor to the Precious Blood. There must be, ordinarily speaking, the knowledge of the Gospel; and the bringing of this to the neighborhood of each soul is a distinct act of love on the part of the Precious “Blood. Much has to be merited for the soul by the good works of others; and no works merit except _ through the Precious Blood. The goodness of others has to influence the soul; and goodness only influences because the Precious Blood makes it so attractive. The moment of contrition is the moment of revolution in the soul; it was a moment foreseen and foreordained from all eternity in view of the Precious Blood. It is part of God’s eternal complacency in that redeeming Blood. The Sacraments, which are the resplendent instruments of Conversion, are the application of the Precious Blood to the soul in a manner whick seems to intensify that which is already infinite. The actual shedding of the Blood on Calvary was the far-off preparation for this individual Conversion. The revival of old merits, and the restoration of forfeited rights to reward, are only instances of the energy of the Precious Blood, and of the completeness with which it does its work. This vitality of merits, this power of a resurrection in them when mortal sin has killed them, is only because it was the Precious Blood which made them merits at the first. Indulgences are the loving ministers of the Precious Blood, which understand its ways and enter into its spirit, and so go about picking up the fragments that remain after the Sacraments have had their fill. The joy of God, of Mary, vf the angels, of the saints, of the holy souls in purgatory, and of God’s priests and servants upon earth, is only an emanation of that joy of which the Precious Blood is the universal and incessant fountain. Moreover, all through this process of Conversion there is a marvellous hiding, a divine extenuation, of sin’s affront against God, which can only be because it is inundated by the Precious Blood, while at the same time there is such a revelation of the sinfulness of sin as can only be made by that same Blood, which is the beautiful reparation of God’s sanctity.

By night and by day all over the earth is the Precious Blood engaged in this occupation of Conversion. It is going on in thousands of souls at once. In all of them is all this supernatural machinery at work, and at work all at once. In each case there is the same apparently exclusive concentration of divine love upon the single soul, which makes ail God’s dealings with us seem so inexpressibly tender. This has been going on for centuries. It will go on still for many centuries: for the end of the world does not yet seem near, unless its not seeming so be indeed a sign that it is so. Who can mistake the character and office of the Precious Blood, when he studies this work of Conversion which is its work of predilection? It is the one question of life and death with each one of us, whether this change has been wrought in us, either at our baptism or since. Who then can calculate the debt he owes to the Precious Blood? Is there a joy in life more invigorating than an overwhelming sense of our obligations to the

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Blood of Jesus? Who does not long to pay him back in love, and long all the more ardently the more he sees how the greatness of his debt makes _ the payment of it impossible? To be in debt to God is the light-heartedness of life. The grace he gives us is even sweeter to us as an obligation than as a gift. The weight of our obligations is the delightful pressure of his love; and the sweet feeling of it is in proportion to the weight.

This leads me to another matter, on which, for the sake of our dearest Lord, I would that I could speak with more than usual persuasion. We are considering the life of the Precious Blood in the Church. Its supernatural works of benignity are wrought in the Church and through the Church. The Church is in an especial manner, and in strict scriptural phraseology, the creation of the Precious-Blood. It is its visible edifice, the house it — has built for itself, the home where it hides itself, the bride it has espoused and then dowered with its Sacraments, the mother of its children, the monument it has erected and hung round with trophies of its victories. It is the living palace of the Precious Blood, built with the Blood itself as with cement, and beautified by it as by the brightness of very heaven. It is the life and love of the Precious Blood, made visible to men by an institution invented by God himself, and which copies upon earth the order and the hierarchies of heaven. Hence it follows that all true devotion. to the Precious Blood must be accompanied by a hearty devotion to the Church. Heresies, which have done despite to the Precious Blood by narrowing its sphere or by limiting its prodigality, have also been distinguished by a want of loyalty to the Church. Im all times we havé seen that those who take a rigid view about the easiness of “salvation also take a lax view about the exclusive privileges of communion with the Church; while, on the other hand, those who dwell more strongly on the doctrine of exclusive salvation in the true | Church are also most given to magnify the abundance of redeeming grace within its pale. At first sight it seems a strange inconsistency, that those who make it hard to be saved in the Church should make it comparatively easy to be saved out of it. It is indeed curious that such men should regard what they must at the least admit to be one of God’s chief means of grace, namely, the Church, as adding very little to the chances of a man’s salvation. If two men, born in one country, the one in the Church with all the Sacraments, the other not in the Church at all, have, as some say, nearly the same chances of salvation, it must follow, either that God_has one standard for the forgiveness of sin in the one case, and another in the other, which is surely an impiety, or that the Sacraments are of very little consequence or efficacy, which would be hardly a less impiety. That Jesus, God and Man, should be truly received in the Blessed Sacrament, and yet that this should not make simply an incalculable difference between the religious state of those who enjoy this privilege and of those who do not, is a supposition highly dishonorable to our Blessed Lord. Yet so it is that a light esteem of the overwhelming advantages of the Church, and a want of appreciation of the Sacraments, go along with the most rigid and harsh views regarding the easiness of salvation and the number of the saved; and these errors go together for want of a true and tender devotion to the Precious Blood.. The doctrine of the Sacraments is the touchstone of all the theology of the day. He who constantly and de- _voutly adores the Precious Blood of Jesus will not think lightly of the Sacraments which are the vases to hold it and the channels to convey it. He who magnifies the glory of the Sacraments will make much of the Church whose especial possession and characteristic they are. It is thus, through the doctrine of the Sacrament, that the apparent contradiction of making salvation very difficult in the Church, and yet holding that the being out of the Church does not put a man at such a great disadvantage as regards salvation, comes from a want of devotion to the Precious Blood.

Hence it follows that all lovers of the Precious Blood should have a cordial devotion to the Church, -and should immensely honor, revere, and prize the Sacraments. Scripture calls the Church the Body of Christ; and the chief of the Sacraments is precisely the Body of Christ; and St. Paul speaks wonderful things of the mysterious union between Christ and the Church. It is one of our greatest dangers of the present day to think lightly of the Church. Now that the world is overrun with heresy, and that in social life almost all distinetions between the faithful and others are obliterated, it is convenient to men’s ease and acceptable to their cowardice to regard the faith as one of many saving opinions, and the Church as one of many saving institutions. Men will make light of the enormous privileges and of the exclu- _ give rights of the Church, either out of human respect, or as an easy way of diminishing the dif- - ficulties of a problem which they are unable to solve and do not like to face. A disesteem of the Sacraments follows upon this with a very speedy and disastrous logic. The practical consequences soon work themselves out. Such men destroy the souls of others by discouraging the frequentation of the Sacraments, and they destroy their own by that laxity of worldly, comfort-loving lives, which in almost all cases are found in conjunetion with very rigorous views. Such men either rest. in the very rigor of their view, as if its rigorousness were meritorious enough of itself to save them, or they put feelings and sensible devotions in the place of mortifications, and so make their whole spirituality a delusion. They will be found restive and uneasy under the praise of the great Sacraments; and this shows how far they have drifted from the instincts of the Church. They will be found to consider the chances of salvation for the poor as almost less, even in the point of unworldliness, than those of the rich; and this shows how far they have drifted from the mind of our Lord, who blessed the poor precisely as entering the kingdom of heaven more easily than the rich. A man who thinks lightly of the _ really inestimable privileges of the Church lets go of every thing, and must ultimately either end in - active heresy or settle down into a wearied irreligiousness. The Church is a kingdom, not a literature,—a life, not a congeries of doctrines; it is - 20

TRG ye arule and a sovereignty, a royalty which belongs to the royalty of the Precious Blood.

~ Let us then cultivate with the most jealous care a fervent devotion to the Church. Love of the Church was part, and a great part, of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Jansenists, who made so light of the maternal authority of the Church, turned away with instinctive displeasure from the devotion to the Sacred Heart. We must look at the Church habitually as the sole ark in the deluge of the world, the sole mistress of salvation. We do not bind God further than he has been pleased to bind himself. We do not limit the far-reaching excesses of his mercy. But we remember that his ordinary law is, that there is no salvation whatever outside the Roman Church. It is his ordinary institution that no accurate beliefs, no right sympathies, no generous views, no near approaches, no sensible devotions, no felt actual graces, will make a man a living member of Jesus Christ, without communion with the Holy See. We must be jealous of the uncompromising simplicity of this © old-fashioned doctrine. We must be suspicious of all the fine words, and specious theories, and ingenious abatements, which the spirit of the day would suggest. We must be misled by no circumstances of time or place, by no prevalence of heresy, by no arguments drawn from consequences, which are the affair of God’s government of the world, not ours. The sins of men cannot change the truth of God. They are at his mercy, not he at theirs. In the days of Antichrist, when two-thirds even of the faithful shall fall away from the Church, their apostasy will not make it less the exclusive mistress of salvation.

We mast be loyal to the Church in*our least thoughts of it, nor even talk lightly of its majesty. We must put faith in it in all its contacts and concussions with the world, and in all its contradictions of the assumed grandeur of this nineteenth century, which is more than half spent, and has done nothing yet to justify its boasting. We must not measure the Church by unsupernatural standards, which it is the world’s great object to persuade us to do. We must not be ashamed of it because it holds back when it seems grander to go forward.. We must not be discontented with it when its action intersects some little favorite anticipations of our own. We must merge our own selves and our own views in its consciously or unconsciously Spirit-guided policy. When we are perplexed, we must stand still and believe. Silence makes us great-hearted, and judging makes us little-minded. We must do all we can to get ourselves infected with the instincts of the Church. We must like its ways, as well as obey its precepts and believe its doctrines. We must not theorize; for, if we once begin to theorize, we shall soon come to sneer. A mind not under authority always lies under a necessity of being pert. We must esteem all that the Church blesses, all that the Church affects. When the Church suffers, or souls suffer, we must not be content with the selfish consolation that, after all, the Church is eternal, and must conquer in the long run; but we must have an active sympathy with all its present vicissitudes, and an.

r untiring zeal and an unquenchable thirst for souls; and the salvation of souls is a matter of the present; it cannot wait for a future, because men are dying daily.

We must even fear the Church with a filial reverence. If we are converts, we must never cease to dread the underground action of heretical habits of mind and heretical methods of controversy in ourselves. There is a leaven of inherent lawlessness in every man who has once been a heretic. We must be as afraid of these things as Scripture tells us to be afraid of forgiven sin. In some cases we should abstain from using all the liberty of speculation which the Church allows us, because we humbly distrust the strength or the genuineness of the principle of obedience within us, to stop us before we go too far. Neither must we allow ourselves to be discontented with the state of things anywhere or at any time. Discontent breeds in us the base and sour spirit of reformers. The chief discontent of the saints was with themselves. So should ours be. We read of saints being downcast and discontented about the sin that is in the world. We even read of their being discontented with political matters, when they concerned the free action and unhindered sovereignty of the Holy See. But I never read of any saint being discontented with the intellectual, or philosophical, or literary state of things in the Church. I doubt if such a discontent is compatible with true loyalty to the Church. |

Our attitude must be always one of submission, not of criticism. He, who is disappointed with the Church, must be losing his faith, even though he does not know it. I hear of some foreign countries where the precepts of the Church are now thought lightly of, and a marked distinction made between them and other obligations; and I feel sure that the faith of those countries is failing, although there may be a show to the contrary. When I meet with new Catholics careless about these same precepts, careless of the Masses and abstinences of obligation, I see in this, not so much a negligent spirit, as a downright want of faith. A man’s love of the Church is the surest test of his love of God. He knows that the whole Church is informed with the Holy Ghost. The divine life of the Paraclete, his counsels, his inspirations, his workings, his sympathies, his attraction, are in it everywhere. There is nothing in the Church or about it, however seemingly trivial, transient, or indirect, which is not more likely than not to contain some of the fire of the Holy Ghost; and this likelihood is the cause of a perpetual and universal reverence for the Church to the good catholic. The gift of infallibility is but a concentration, the culminating point, the solemn official out-speaking, of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the Church. While it calls, like revelation, for absolute submission of heart and soul, all the minor arrangements and ways and dispositions of the Church call for general submission, docility, and reverence, because of the whole Church being a shrine fulfilled with the life of the Holy Ghost. St. Philip Neri’s special devotion to the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity was part of that intense loyalty to the Church, which raised him to 20* the rank and title of an apostle, and the apostle of the Holy City. In a word, our feeling toward the Church should be a devotion. A grandeur faded from the page of history, when the loyalty to the old monarchies went out; but even that loyalty was not enough for our feelings toward the Church. The Church is full of God, haunted by spiritual presences, informed with a supernatural life, instinct with Jesus. Our love of the Church is one form of our love of Jesus, the form on which the saints were moulded. It is our love of our Lord’s love of us. It is the enthusiasm of our devotion to his Precious Blood. Surely it were a shame, if we did not love the Church more than the Jews of old loved their dear Jerusalem!

From this cultivation of a great devotion to the

Church weshould gain many of those graces of which we stand in especial need. It would bring with it the grace of simplicity, because it would be founded on the virtue of obedience, and because it would foster the gift of faith. In these days it is a huge evil to be inconsistent; and we are inconsistent as much from want of simplicity as want of courage. Simplicity makes a quiet spirit; and a quiet spirit is the true home of heavenly love. But times when we want simplicity are also times when we especially require prudence; and prudence is another grace which will come out of devotion to the Church. They, who have the habit of leaning upon authority, distrust themselves, and they distrust themselves, not timidly, but bravely. They are not precipitate. There is a maturity about their promptitude, and a security about their speed, and a vigorousness even in their delays, which are oe Uy ee oly eRe SELES pee res caught from the spirit and conduct of the Church itself. Moreover, devotion to the Church is a loyalty, and, further, it is a supernatural loyalty. But loyalty makes a man generous. It causes him to dare great things, to be forgetful of himself, to be disinterested, to love hard work, to delight in sacrifices, and always to be aspiring to something higher and more arduous. It makes a man genial; and it is only a genial mind which is creative, fertile, or successful. How many hearts are daily telling God that their want of wants is generosity! They will find it through devotion to the Church. Stability is another grace which the men of our day have need to covet. Multiplicity makes men vacillating. Those, who are always catching at — things, grasp nothing. To be really earnest we must be constant. But the earnest man is the man who takes every thing in earnest. He is not merely the persistent man. True stability must be elastic while it is constant; or rather it will be constant precisely because it is elastic. This is an exact description of that changeful uniformity of which the whole history of the Church is an example. Lastly, a certain grace comes from secret union with the Church, just as unction comes from union with God. This grace of union with the Church gives us a winningness in the eyes of others, a sort of inward equable sweetness, which first fills our own souls with light and gladness, and then draws the souls of others into the light and gladness which are within ourselves. Each man knows how far he needs these things as helps to him in his spiritual life. To. many of us in these days they are special needs

There are still three lives of the Precious Blood remaining to be treated of; but we may in reality consider them as one. There is the actual life in heaven, which is contemporaneous with that life in © the Church from the Ascension to the Doom, which we have just been contemplating. There is the life of the Precious Blood in the Blessed Sacrament, the heavenly life miraculously dowered with an earthly locality and with innumerous localities at once. There is, lastly, the eternal life of the Precious Blood in heaven after the Doom for all eternity, when Jesus has laid down his kingdom and changed the offices of his priesthood. These are certainly in many deep senses, and with regard to many curious yet edifying questions, different lives. Yet, for our present practical purpose, they may be regarded as one. The life of the glorified Blood is a life of beatitude. It is glad in itself, and ministers gladness to others, even to the boundless uncreated jubilee of God. The Precious Blood is the Human Life of the Word. LBeatitude is the natural life of God; and so joy is the natural life of the Precious Blood. In truth, is not joy the nearest definition of life that we can have: for is it not God’s first intention in the gift of life?

In heaven and in the Blessed Sacrament the Precious Blood dwells, incomparably glorified, in the veins of Jesus.. Its beauty there is wonderful to see, wonderful to think of. The sight of it in our Lord’s translucent Body is an immense gladness to the Blessed. Harth has no beauty to which we can compare it; yet earth is not therefore poorer than heaven; for it has this very beauty in the adorable Sacrament. But it is not only a joy to Others. Its own life is an unbroken jubilee. As it goes and returns to and from the Sacred Heart it is filled with pulses of the most abounding gladness. It thrills with the exquisite delight of created life carried to its utmost ecstatic possibility. But, over and above this, there is the indefinable, unimaginable ecstasy of the Hypostatic Union, which is felt in every particle of that Precious Blood. It throbs with such pacific tumult of immortal love, as no created life could bear without some miraculous union with the Godhead. It thrills with sacred fear, with transports of intensest. adoration, before the uncreated majesty of God. It is penetrated through and through with the excesses of this holy fear. That, which itself is worshipped by the hierarchies of heaven, trembles with a very jubilee of worship before the Throne of the Eternal. Possessed with such extremity of rapturous fear, how could the Precious Blood so tremble, and so exult, and yet live on, if it were not that it rested for its dear support upon the uncreated Person of the Word? It seems to stop the beating of one’s heart to think of this unutterable repose of that created nature, that Sacred Humanity, that personless life, on the Person of the Eternal Word! The strange beauty of such a God-invented union, the delight of the Divine Person in the touch of a created nature which yet is no touch at all, for the Divine Person can suffer none, the ecstasies of the Sacred Humanity as the unction of the Word with soft sweet fire penetrates its secret sanctuaries of life, the comprehension of that humble, affectionate, pathetic, material nature within the enfoldings of the In. comprehensible, which embrace it with such forbearing gentleness of omnipotence, and yet with such a riveted closeness of invincible union,—to what heart, sweetly smitten with love of Jesus, are not these things the unfading joys of prayer,’

the unfailing wells of tears? What a life is the life of that Precious Blood! Yet amid the untold magnificence of the Divine Union it feels its kindred to Mary, as a special joy of its abounding life. Its original fountains are still flowing in their sinless purity, beautified now with the gifts of glory, in the Mother’s Immaculate Heart; and the fountain in the Sacred Heart beats in mysterious sympathy with the source from which it came itself. Singular in all its wonderful prerogatives, it yet intertwines the life of Mary with its own.: Look at the Precious Blood for a moment as it lies within the Sacred Heart with a living peace, like the restless tranquillity of ocean. It is itself the ocean of joy from which all other joys in creation come. It is through it that the immensity of God’s gladness pours itself into all the universe, and at the same time lets itself also be mysteriously gladdened by the Precious Blood. All the joys, and they are numberless, which are still left in the fallen world, whether they be natural or supernatural, are in substance Indulgences, Indulgences which are granted because of the Precious Blood. Sinners upon earth still have joys: they come from the Precious Blood. Saints on earth are the giaddest of God’s creatures. Their lives are all flight and song, like the hot-blooded lives of the te oe eS birds of the air. All this gladness is from the Precious Blood. The saints in heaven are spirits overflowed with joy, spirits whose quietness is transport and whose soberness is ecstasy. It is the Precious Blood which flows over them forever. The wide, outspread vastness of angelic jubilee, the thing likest to immensity of all created things, created to mirror the immensity of God, is all an emanation from the Precious Blood. Nay, it isa changeful, changeless sea, with tides; for there are daily, hourly increases of new joys in the angels from the conversions of sinners; and these conversions are precisely the operations of the Precious Blood. Yet that ocean of angelic jubilee washes but the base of Mary’s throne. Her joy is like the fringe of the blessedness of God. It is all the multitudinous joys of creatures made one joy by her Divine Maternity, and multiplied, as well as intensified, by being one. Yet the bliss of Mary is all from the Precious Blood, the nearest gladness to the gladness of the Sacred Humanity, the first heart filled from the Sacred Heart. But who shall tell the nameless, immeasurable joys with which the Precious Blood fills the Sacred Heart itself? It cannot contain its own jubilee. It multiplies itself in order to relieve its exultation. It has inundated heaven; but the vast shores of the empyrean confine it and restrain its floods. By the help of its omnipotence, behold! it escapes _ as if by miracle, sparkles in countless daily chalices upon earth, and within the cup of each chalice it peacefully outstretches itself, unhindered in its infinity, with its grandeur enfranchised, and its love set free from all material laws. But the jubilee of the Precious Blood lies onward still and — onward, whither we cannot explore it. Welisten — to hear its breakers sounding on the misty shore. But there comes no sound. The shores are too far off; or are there shores at all? The Word delights eternally in his Human Blood. Its golden glow beautifies the fires of the Holy Ghost. Its ministries beget inexplicable joys in the Unbegotten Father.

I was upon the seashore; and my heart filled with love it knew not why. Its happiness went out over the wide waters and upon the unfettered wind, and swelled up into the free dome of blue sky until it filled it. The dawn lighted up the faces of the ivory cliffs, which the sun and sea had been blanching for centuries of God’s unchanging love. The miles of noiseless sands seemed vast as if they were the floor of eternity. Somehow the daybreak was like eternity. The idea came over me of that feeling of acceptance, which so entrances the soul just judged and just admitted into heaven. To be saved! I said to myself, Zo be saved! Then the thoughts of all the things implied in salvation came in one thought upon me; and I said, This is the one grand joy of life; and I clapped my hands like a child, and spoke to God aloud. But then there came many thoughts all in one thought, about the nature and manner of our salvation. To be saved with such a salvation! This was a grander joy, the second grand joy of life: and I tried to say some lines of a hymn; but the words were choked in my throat. The ebb was sucking the sea down over the sand quite silently; and the cliffs were whiter, and more daylike. Then there came many more thoughts all in one thought; and I stood still without intending it. To be saved by such a Savior! This was the grandest joy of all, the third grand joy of life; and it swallowed up the other joys; and after it there could be on earth no higher joy. I said nothing; but I looked at the sinking sea as it reddened in the morning. Its great heart was throbbing in the calm; and methought I saw the Precious Blood of Jeses in heaven, throbbing that hour with real humas: ivve of ma,

Footnotes

1. some subjects in which clearness is every thing. If we can make a definite picture in our minds, ↩