Chapter V. The Prodigality of the Precious Blood

Let us kneel down before the magnificence of God. It is outstretched as an ocean of manifold Being and yet of indivisible, uncreated Lizs, intolerable in its splendor, uncircumscribed in its simplicity. His magnificence is the vastness of his beauty, the multitude of his perfections, the coruscations of his sanctity, the impetuosity of his communicativeness, the t.inuteness of his government, the strange celestial sweetness of his gifts, the prodigality of his tenderness, the abysses of his incredible condescensions, and the exuberance of his simplicity. These are many words; but the idea is one. Our thought of God’s magnificence is asasea. It changes not; but it changes us while we look upon it. Wesee the calm of eternity upon its waters, peaceful as an endless evening. Airs from a far country come quivering over its shining tracts, freighted with aromatic odors, which are diffused around and sensibly deepen the tranquillity. Then again the freshness of morning is upon its swaying fields; and a thousand waves crest themselves with foam, and fling up star-showers into the sunlight; and it booms upon the shore; and it makes us feel the gentleness of power which knows how to become terrible; and the visible unexerted omnipotence is an admonition to prayer

Then it clothes itself with the plumage of darkness, and murmurs in the midnight as if it were gone down to a great distance; in order that we may know how different it is when it is felt from what it is when itis seen. Another while it lies gray-green beueath a sunless sky, with snow-capped cliffs around, sovereign when all else is subject, free when all else has lost its liberty, immutable when all else has suffered winter’s change. It has also its tempests, more beautiful and more terrible than the glorious storms of earth. Its lightnings make the darkness round it palpable and solid. Its thunders command a universal silence. Its decrees rush after each other in mighty waves of orderly confusion, menacing the land like falling towers, and breaking in dull inarticulate shocks against the precipices of the divine justice. Yet evermore, in storm or calm, there lies upon the ocean the light of the Precious Blood of Jesus, restful as the golden red of evening, hopeful as the rosy fiush of dawn. This is the figure of the magnificence of God.

There is nothing more glorious upon earth than magnificence, nothing which more delights the mind or expands the soul, while it gratifies the senses at the same time that it ennobles their pleasure. But, among creatures, magnificence is always a revelation of defects. Indeed, it not only discloses imperfections, but causes them. It is too great an effort. It calls for sacrifices which had better not be made. It is often vbliged to be regardless of justice. It is made up of imprudences.

There is for the most part a tyranny about it.

Much suffering has generally tobe contributed to

Pee - i > it; and the suffering falls mostly on those who — have not the glory of the magnificence. Moreover, it is debased by ostentation, and disfigured by pretence. Nevertheless it wins the applause of _ men, and even lives in history. The nations will pardon almost any thing to magnificence. It seems to satisfy a want of the soul which is rarely satisfied. It refreshes the littleness of the creature; and, even when it is the glory of one man, it is felt as if it were that one man’s gift to all mankind. What then must be the beauty and the delight of “mMagnificence when it is supremely holy? What must be its grandeur where it is natural? How great must be its splendor when it is the normal expression and the simple exercise of innumerable perfections! There is no effort in the magnificence of God, and no display. It is not a higher height rising above the lowlands. It is not a transient demonstration. It is the refulgence of his eternal quietude. It is the brightness of his infinite justice. It is the unchanging aspect of his glorious sanctity. It is the inevitable light of the riches of the Godhead. It is the selfpossessed enjoyment of his beatitude. To us all holiness is a form of restraint. We can hardly form to ourselves any other conception of it. If we try to do so, we shall be surprised to find how difficult it is. Think then what holiness must be, where it is a form of largeness, of prodigality, of boundless freedom! Yet this is the magnificence of God.

Roses grow on briers, say the wise men of thé world, with that sententious morality which thinks to make virtue truthful by making it dismal. Yes! but, as the very different spirit of piety would say, it is a truer truth that briers bloom with roses. If roses have thorns, thorns also have roses. This is the rule of life. Yet everybody tells.us one side of this truth, and nobody tells us the other. A kind-hearted man finds life full of joys, for he makes joys of things which else were not joys; and a simple-hearted man can be very joyous on a little joy; and to the pure-hearted man all things are joys. How can the world be an unhappy world, which has so magnificent a God? His magnificence is the fountain of all our joys; for it is the fountain of salvation. Here lies the secret of the inveterate happiness of the world. Even in its fall, it is so implicated in the blessedness of God that it has not a darkness anywhere without its light, nor a bitter without its sweet. God’s simple presence is an overflowing of delight. His inanimate creatures have a changeless joy stamped upon their mute features. The multitudinous species of unreasoning creatures, whether they belong to the earth, to the air, or to the waters, plainly revel in life as a joy which fills their natures to the brim. We ourselves have a hundred happinesses, even when we fancy ourselves quite desolate. There is no real desolation except mortal sin. There is too much of God everywhere to allow either of permanent or general unhappiness. He, who can find his joy in God, is in heaven already; only it is a heaven which is not secured to him, unless he perseveres to the end. Yet is it hard to find our joy in God? Rather, is it not hard to find our joy in any thing else? The magnificence of God is the abounding joy of life. It is an immense joy to belong to God, It is an im- 21* mense joy to have such a God belonging to us. Like the joys of heaven, it is a joy new every morning when we wake, as new as if we had never tasted it before. Like the joys.of earth, it is a joy every evening resting and pacifying the soul. But it has a gift of its own besides. For its novelty grows fresher and more striking daily, and its repose more satisfying and more complete. The joy of God’s magnificence more than counterbalances all mortal griefs. When I think of his magnificence, of all that his magnificence implies, of its intimate concernment with myself, and of the way in which I am always sinking more and more irretrievably into the abysses of his sovereignty, I often wonder how we can contain ourselves with joy at having such a God.

In treating of the prodigality of the Precious Blood, it is necessary that we should have clear ideas of the magnificence of God: for the one is a part of the other. No one, of course, doubts the magnificence of God. Our loftiest conceptions must fall infinitely below the gorgeousness of the reality. No accumulation of beautiful ideals can reach the incredible glory of the truth. An immensity of omnipotent beauty is a thing which it bewilders us to think of. We should suppose that a single glimpse of the magnificence of God would annihilate us by its excess of impetuous light. Yet, notwithstanding all this, the character of God is never revealed to us more intimately or more clearly than when he is disclosed to us as the God who “orders all things in measure, in number, and cf = v i. cf ei, CS ee weight:’¹ He does every thing by measure. The Immeasurable decrees by measure, works by mea- _ gure, rewards by measure, punishes by measure, delights in measure. The Eternal, of uncounted ages, of uncounted spaces, loves to count by numbers. He counts all things, and calls them by their names. He surrounds each unity with his whole Self, with his entire justice, with his complete love. He leaves out nothing. He overlooks nobody. It belongs to him as Creator to be accurate, to be methodical, to be infallible in his minuteness. The Illimitable weighs all things, as if their weight were an object even to his unsearchable riches. His magnificence delights in nothing more than in the strictness of proportions. His justice weighs out glory with the most unblemished accuracy. Even his measure that is pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, has all its merciful superfluity weighed out with minutest carefulness. The very orbs that roll in heaven keep up the universal harmony by the exceeding nicety and adjustment of their weights. So is it in the world of grace. So is it in the world of glory. Our God is an accurate God; and in nothing is he more adorable than in his accuracy.

Magnificence, in our idea of it, is above law. Now, to our eyes, the divinest of all God’s propensities is his love of law. The grandeur of his liberty is, that it is an uncircumscribed law. Within his own infinite life all things are absolutely necessary, all things are, in the most transcendental sense of the word, laws. His knowledge of himself is not the Holy Ghost; but it is the Word. His love of himself is not the Word; but it is the Holy Ghost. Much more is this magnificent attribute of law-lovingness shown forth in his external works, wherein there is no necessity. He is himself a sufficient living law to his creation. Yet everywhere in the universe he is at once multiplying and simplifying laws. Hvery thing is done by law, the least no less than the greatest of things. He almost hides himself behind an impenetrable screen of laws. It is as if he wished to fetter his infinite freedom with an infinity of finite laws. He seems to make himself the captive of his own punctuality. Hvery time and place have their laws. There is not a corner of creation where there is not a whole code of laws. His omnipresence is an omnipresence of law. Every thing wears the chains of order, of sequence, of repetition. From this adorable love of law comes the unutterable tranquillity of all the divine operations in the world. It is this tranquillity which makes the earth so like a sanctuary, it is so manifestly the covering under which God hides himself. The silent calm of so much onward overwhelming power, the gentleness of such a gigantic pressure, the graceful, unsuspecting liberty amidst such a complication of restraints, the unhindered exuberance of such multitudinous and ‘seemingly eccentric life, the unending soundless conflict of opposing forces which ends in such unhindered amplitude of repose and harmony,—all these things are from that gracious propensity to law which belongs to the sweet majesty of God.

It is his way to love uniformity; and the Creator’s uniformity is the creature’s liberty. It is his uniformity and his slowness which at once represent his eternity and yet hinder it from oppressing time.

The magnificence of God, then, is no waste of splendor. It is no lavish prodigality of glory. It is not a mere pageant of his royal state. It is, _if we may use the word, a necessity to God. He cannot be otherwise. He is magnificent, simply because he is God. He cannot lay down his grandeur, or be less grand, or be grander at one time than at another. Magnificence is his divine life. It does not cling to his perfections like arobe. It is inseparable from him. It is the outward operation of his wonderful attributes. It is the inward tranquillity of his incomprehensible life. His accuracy, his punctuality, his love of law, his propensity to number, measure, and weight, his fashion of uniformity, his ways of order and seguence,—all these things are part of the magnificence of God; and they are the ways by which his magnificence is imparted to his creatures. This is very different from our human ideas of magnificence, and must be borne in mind. The truth is, that God is so high that we can only approach to truth in speaking of him by speaking in superlatives. Thus we often speak of his love and his compassion as if he did more for us than he need do, as if less would be sufficient, as.if he wasted grace with a kind of spendthrift generosity, as if his magnificence were always in excess. All this expresses a most holy truth, so far as the inconceivable magnificence of his goodness toward us is concerned. Yet it is not true, so far as re. gards the awful magnificence of God himself. In like manner we,sometimes speak of the Incarnation and of the Atonement, as if they had persuaded God to be less God than he really is, as if they had given mercy some sort of advantage against justice, as if God would overlook now what he would not overlook before, as if the terms of forgiveness of sin had become easier because God’s sanctity was content with less. This also expresses a kind of truth. I am not quarrelling with the language. Holy Scripture sometimes uses it, in order to make things plain tous. All language about God labors under the necessity of being inaccurate. It cannot even escape by being merely short of truth. But, when it becomes of importance to us to obtain a somewhat clearer view of any particular attribute of God, then we must do our best to correct this otherwise harmless error in our minds. It is necessary now, in order to understand what we popularly term the prodigality of the Precious Blood, to understand also that God’s magnificence does not overwhelm; as with an inundation of glorious light, his love of law, repetition, order, and accuracy, or his methodical uniformity, or his punctual strictness, or his undistracted attention to details; but rather it brings out all these characteristics still more strongly, because it shows him to be mag- © nificent precisely in these things, and because — of them.)

Thus the divine magnificence is a divine method of order and measure. So far from being above the restraints of law, its grandest developments

THE PRODIGALITY OF THE PRECIOUS lee AND, a C!

of itself are by means of laws. So far from be oblivious of petty details, its infinity confounds the distinction between great and, small, and makes all things equal in its sight. May I not even say that in some mysteries, and from some human points of view, there is even an appearance of parsimony in the magnificence of God? Is there not, to our ignorance, this semblance about the fall of the angels, and about the long delay of the Incarnation, and about the low tides of grace which are known to the experience of most men in their own lives? It is not so, but it seems so. God is never parsimonious; but he is sometimes sparing. He proportions graces to temptations in a way which disquiets us because it makes our risks plainer. “His very liberality is adorably just. His gifts are given under laws. They are the administration of his laws. Thus it comes to pass that his magnificence. partakes of the severity of his holiness. What looks to us like economy is in fact the operation of his exceeding sanctity.

Nevertheless, when all this order, and sequence, and law, and proportion, and number, and weight, and measure, and accuracy, are upon a scale which is infinite, when they are all clothed in immensity, when they are the vast sweeping circuits of everlasting decrees, when they hold a love which is inexhaustible and a compassion which is unwearied and a tenderness which has no lixeness to itself outside of God, they have all that exuberance, lavishness, and prodigality, which are the characteristics of magnificence. Only they have these things without the corresponding imperfections which are inseparable from them in the case of creatures. Prodigality in this higher sense is a characteristic of all the -divine works. Finite and limited as they are, nothingness and the children of nothingness, yet in that they are also the creations of God they wonderfully shadow forth the munificence of his immensity. We have already seen this in the number of the angels. _ We cannot meditate upon their countless multi-

= ~“tades without astonishment. So vast a populace, of such surpassing beauty, of such gigantic intelligence, of such diversified nature, is simply overwhelming to our most ambitious thoughts. A locust-swarm, and each locust an archangel, the myriads of points of life disclosed to us by the microscope, and each point a grand spirit, the sands of the seas and the waters of the ocean, and each grain and each drop a beautiful being the brightness of whose substance we could not see and live,—this is but an approximation to the reality. So theologians teach us. Or, again, let us think of the multitudinousness of the starry skies. Astronomers tell us that our Milky Way “1s but one of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, of nebule, to which our instruments may hope to reach. Yet our one Milky Way, in which we ourselves are dwellers, is reported to contain thirty millions of suns; and we are but a little planet of one of the lesser suns. Moreover, it is probable that the depth in space in which our instruments can reach is but as the ankle-deep water on the shore, through which the fearless child can wade in sport, compared with the yet unfathomed depths of the mid-ocean. Figures are hardly a ie AS 1

J) a help to us in estimating the probable number of

• God’s worlds. St. John speaks with rapture of the multitude of the saved, as of a number that no man can count. The same magnificence of numbers reigns in the laws and the lives of tho material world; and who can doubt but that the spiritual far outstrips the material world in its prolific exuberance of graces and inspirations? We are speaking only of numbers; and yet see the magnificence of God! For the vastness of the numbers is but a lesser development of the boundless love from which creation springs. It is the royalty of his love which the blameless custom of the faithful has named his prodigality.

Now let us apply all this to the prodigality of the Precious Blood. In nothing was he more likely to be prodigal than in this work, which was especially to minister to his Dominion and his Magnificence. In nothing was he more likely to be prodigal than in that which represented in itself the whole series of his divine decrees. In nothing is it of so much importance to us that he should be magnificent as in the shedding of his Blood. It would be part of his Dominion, part of his Magnificence, to be accurately prodigal of that which made his Dominion more dear

-to him, and his Magnificence more magnificent.

Yet I would fain keep before you what I hinted at, in the Second Chapter,—that’ the prodigality of the Precious Blood is simply necessary for our wretchedness, that we could not do with less of it, that, if so infinite a price were to be paid for our redemption, it must be infinitely paid. I said a while ago that magnificence was a kind of neces. 22 sity to God. He could not help being magni. ficent, precisely because he is God. Now, I want to say that, in a sense which is full of devotional reality, the magnificence of the Creator is the ereature’s necessity. We could not do without it. We could not live, still less rejoice, if God were Jess magnificent. It is true we cannot comprehend God. But we can possess him, we can enjoy him; nay, we must possess him, we must enjoy him, in his whole Self. We must do so, or fall into the abyss of eternal death. Unless his infinity thus supports, sustains, fulfils, our finiteness, we are but ruin and desolation. It is his infinity thus compassionately and delightedly acting upon our finiteness, which we call his magnificence. It is an attribute which ought to be most dear to us, and which we should honor with a special devotion. If the tranquillity of holiness comes of our loving to be overwhelmed by the sovereignty of God, we come to love his sovereignty by delighting in his magnificence.

What we have said amounts to this. The magnificence of God was nowhere more needed than in the Precious Blood; and, as a matter of fact, it has been nowhere more -shown. It was of surpassing importance to us that it should be so. Moreover, we have seen all along that the magnificence of God is the attribute to which the Precious Blood is very specially addicted, and that the attribute of dominion is never separated from that of magnificence. The Precious Blood conquered creation back for the Creator, and reconquered the lordship of creation for the Sacred Humanity of Jesus. It is a magnificent price for sin, because it is infinite; and sin is only infinite by a figure of speech aes an invention of mind. We did not therefore require an infinite redemption: though on the side of God’s sanctity there may have been a propriety, looking to us like a necessity, for an infinite expiation. Furthermore, one drop of the Precious Blood would suffice to redeem all possible worlds; so we did not require more than our share of that drop. We did not require of absolute necessity that it should be so often shed; or that it should be shed under such a variety of pathetic circumstances, every one of - which is a beautiful allurement of love; or that it should be all shed, shed even by a miracle of jealous prodigality after death. In all this, the magnificence of God goes beyond our necessities, and envelops us in its own immensity. But those other wonders of his magnificence, that we should have unrestricted, repeated, incessant access to the Precious Blood, that it should be tous more copious, more prompt, more at hand, more abundant, than the water of our wells and streams, that at every turn of life it should be conveyed to our souls by glorious aqueducts of divine invention, namely, the Sacraments, that it should be as common and as convenient to the life of our souls as the air is to the life of our bodies,— all these wonders are simply necessities to a wretchedness and a feebleness so utter and prostrate as ours. The sinfulness of sin causes us to require nothing short of this. Thus there are two prodigalities of the Precious Blood, both belonging to the adorable magnificence of God; but one of which is a simple necessity to us, while the other is a liberality of his magnificence, befitting his love, in keeping with his perfections, but not a necessity to us.

I have laid some stress upon this, for the following reason. There is often a good deal of exaggeration in devotional books, and it is for the most part practically harmless. Yet there are cases in which it may come at last to be mischievous; and these are generally cases where the exaggeration in question tends to give an erroneous idea of God, and especially of his strictness and sanctity. Thus, writers, as I have said before, sometimes speak of the Incarnation as if God were less strict and jealous in consequence of it; and this leads men not to think sufficiently of mortification and good works. So, if we dwell one-sidedly upon the goodness of God in giving us such abundant access to the Precious Blood, we may easily fall into an unreality. Of course, it would have been a wonderful disclosure of God’s magnificence, if he had justified us once for all in Baptism through the Precious Blood. It would have been worthy to have sustained the wonder of the angels through eternity. What then are we to say to the bewildering varieties, facilities, repetitions, and exuberances of the Precious Blood? Plainly, no language that we can use can really exaggerate the magnificence of God’s goodness in this respect. But we may come to think that we wanted less than God has given us, that his magnificence was not a necessity to us, but that the very meaning of his magnificence is excess, is his doing more than we require. Thus, we become less careful about corresponding to grace and about fidelity to inspirations. We imagine ourselves in a great wasteful sea of grace, which we may move about in, as a fish moves about in the waters of the ocvan, drinking when it will, but not requiring for its whole life more than a few sips of the unfathomable depths. Whereas the truth is, that not a single grace comes to earth which does not come addressed to some individual soul, and is not noted by God, and has not to be given account for at the last. There is not one least grace, not one most transient inspiration, which is not part of God’s accurate and orderly providence over each one of us for the salvation of our souls. Consequently there is not one which can safely be neglected. We have no more grace than we require. St. Teresa tells us that, even where the grace of perfection is given, it is often necessary for mere salvation. As a theological speculation, we could be saved with less; but in practice we should be lost if we had less.

Thus, while, on the one hand, the masters of the spiritual life warn us not to attempt to go beyond our grace, they teach us still more emphatically that we must be faithful to the grace we have. We read that one -Communion is enough to make a saint. So it is in itself; and it is important that we should know this, as it brings home to us the value of Communion. Yet, in fact, hundreds of Communions may in our case be practically necessary, not to make us saints but just to save our souls. The grand practical mischief to men’s souls is the neglect of the Sacraments. The grand practical mistake of pious people is the neglect of fidelity to grace. I

R 22% believe that unintentionally spiritual writers are somewhat to blame for both these. unfortunate delusions. They cannot magnify too much the magnificence of God. They cannot magnify too much the redeeming grace of our Blessed Lord But they may magnify both one and the other without making proper distinctions. What I have wanted to dwell upon, and experience has shown me the utility of it, is that, while God’s magnificence gives us a superabundance of grace, that superabundance is not in reality a superfluity. We have not a grace which we can afford to spare. Our frequent absolutions are not too frequent for us; nor our many Communions, if under obedience, too many. One grace may be enough in itself to save a soul; but it will not save it if it was not precisely meant to do so. It does not derogate from God’s magnificence, that we should stand absolutely in need of its grand largeness. But the knowledge of this necessity gives us a truer view of our wretchedness, and fos. ters our humility. So also God’s magnificence is not a perfection which rough-rides his exactness, his accuracy, his punctuality, his methodical minuteness, his jealousy of law, and his scrupulous distributions and proportions. Yet we often speak as if it did do so; and hence we come to think, not to put into words, but practically to think, that God in Jesus Christ is God with one half of his ever-blessed perfections dispensing themselves from the other half. This lowers our standard of his sanctity; and whatever lowers that lowers also our estimate of the sinfulness of sin, and our carefulness in avoiding little sins. May I consider that I have proved that God’s magnificence is sometimes a necessity to us, and that it is not on that account less magnificent?

There are then two prodigalities of the Precious Blood, both belonging to the magnificence of God; and one of the two belonging also to our necessities. We must examine both of them. As I said _ before, the very choice of the Precious Blood as the instrument of our redemption is part of God’s magnificence. There were merit and satisfaction enough in a single tear of the Infant Jesus to have redeemed us all. Nothing in the external works of God is necessary; and therefore the Precious Blood is not necessary. God was free to have chosen some other expiation, or he was free to have pardoned us without any expiation at all. Yet nothing is merely gratuitous with God; nothing is unnecessary, even though it be not necessary. There was doubtless on the side of the divine perfections such a propriety and fitness in the choice of an infinite sacrifice for sin, that it was in one sense necessary to have one ‘There were doubtless, in the depths of the same perfections, reasons and fitnesses for the Precious Blood of the Incarnate Word being chosen for that sacrifice, which may form part of the blessed science of another life. Divine love, divine justice, and divine sanctity, have necessities of their own, which do not interfere with their freedom. All this, then, belongs to the magnificence of God without belonging to our necessity; and may be considered truly as a prodigality of the divine compassion. But I will illustrate what I may now venture, without fear of being misunderstood, te call the unnecessary prodigality of the Precious Blood by the manner and circumstances in and under which it was shed during the Three-and-Thirty Years; and we shall be most closely following the mind of the Church, if we select, as our examples, the Séven Bloodsheddings, which are put before us as the objects of indulgenced devotions.

There has been some variety in the enumeration of the Seven Bloodsheddings by different holy persons, though the difference has been little more than one of division. The enumeration which we shall follow is the one approved and indulgenced by Pius the Seventh. The Seven are the Circumcision, the Agony, the Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Way of the Cross, the Crucifixion, and the Piercing of the Sacred Heart. There is no doubt a divine intention in these particular seven mysteries. We shall find that they illustrate in a most complete and touching manner the spirit of the Precious Blood. While they are like each other, they are also different. They have that mixture of likeness and of difference, which so often makes up the beauty of divine works. One of them belongs to the Infancy, and the other six to the Passion. Six of them were sufferings of Jesus, and one was that mute preaching of his love which took place after he was dead. The first and the last had nothing to do with the redemption of the world; the first because it had no connection with his death, and the last because it only took place after he was already dead. Of some of the others also, but less certainly, we may say that they did not belong to our redemption

At all of them our Blessed Lady was present, in spirit, if not in body, and all of them were sorrows to her immaculate heart. In the number of times that the Blood was shed, in the quantity shed, and in the mysterious manners of its shedding, it is the magnificence of God which is revealing the excesses of his love. Hach Bloodshedding has its own way of touching our hearts, and its own attraction for our devotion. The whole Seven together have also a distinctive unity, and form a complete picture and a definite spirit in our souls.

The first Bloodshedding was the Circumcision. To the Heart of Jesus, already enamored of sorrow and suffering, seven days were enough for the tranquil joys of Bethlehem, joys over whose tranquillity the shadow of Calvary was already cast. The stainless Mother had only one short octave of the Precious Blood for her own delight. She knew its mission and its mystery. She saw it in the almost transparent vase of the Infant Body. She saw the pulses of its life beat with all the natural rapidity of childhood. Through the veil of snowy skin she saw its purple streams. From time to time she saw it mantle in his Face, and flush his little cheek. She saw its coral upon those tiny lips, over which were to flow the words of everlasting life, and also the awful judgments of uncounted rnillions of human souls. In the still night she heard its throbbing, and adored the mysteries of that busy sleep, the secrets of that silent Heart. When she clasped him to her breast, she felt the beatings of the Precious Blood, and knew that it was the harmless force of the vast omnipotence, which had with such sweet craft imprisoned itself in the frailty and the littleness of a new-born Babe She knew it was that Blood, which the justice of the Father sought after. She knew how lovingly and how severely his sanctity thirsted for its shedding. She was awe-struck with the thoughts which crowded upon her; and yet, those amazing thoughts! how full of joyousness they were! She knew the temper of that dear Blood, and bore with its impatience, an impatience which love might have deemed unreasonable; only that the love of Jesus is the adoration of him also. He had hastened the time of his coming, because of the loveliness of Mary. He had been impatient even in heaven. Now he had come into her arms. He had looked in her eyes but seven short days. How much the two silences of the Mother and the Son had to say to each other! Could he not rest a while? Need he begin redeeming all at once? Nay, he cannot redeem yet. There are Three-and-Thirty Years to be spent before that, crowded with the fulfilment of numerous eternal purposes. No! he cannot rest. He could not rest in his Father’s Bosom. He cannot rest in his Mother’s arms. His rest is in the shedding of his Blood. Let the Child shed his Blood, and then he will be content to rest: and so he shed it in the Circumcision, being yet but eight days old.

Strange thought! but there were seven days during which our Blessed Lord was nameless. How did Joseph name him? if indeed, in the fulness of his joy, that peaceful saint needed to speak at all. Now with the Blood comes the sweet Name of Jesus, as if he had no right to it, until he shed his Blood. Impatient Blood! Yet its first

Lup ee: aie act is to put itself beneath the law! It will begin by obeying, though it is in no wise bound to such obedience. It will let itself be taken captive by a ritual, as soon as it is born. See how full it is, from the first, of the law-loving instincts of God’s magnificence. But of what use were those first drops of that Precious Blood? They had no redeeming power in them, because they were disconnected from his Death. They were not a part of the Blood shed for the sins of the world. Doubtless they had special purposes and did secret wonders, as we have already seen in the revelation to Frances of the Mother of God.² All the things of God are pregnant with undisclosed mysteries, are endowed with unsuspected powers, and have eternally-foreseen destinations. For us it is enough to see in this dear impatience, in this sweet childlike waste, if we may dare thus to speak, most touching revelations of our Savior’s love. The days of type and figure had not yet gone by; and he gave us this mystery as a type and figure of his future life and work. He taught us doctrine by it also, the doctrine that, now that man had fallen, he had only assumed his Blood in order that he might shed it. It was so completely for us, that it was more ours than his. By needing redemption, we made his Blood more utterly and more intimately ours, than if we had never sinned. All things turn to love, all things turn to our profit, when they belong to Jesus. Perhaps, too, this mystery was also very specially for St. Joseph. It was his Calvary. He saw no more of the Passion, except that it was shown him mystically, and that, after the fashion of the saints, he was perhaps made partaker of its mysteries and inward stigmata. Otherwise he saw the Precious Blood no more, until the morning of Easter. Joseph counted for much in the plans of God. He shared all, or most, of those Mary-haunting years at Nazareth, when the whole wide world without had but a three years’ Ministry bestowed upon it. Doubtless many mysteries of the early years of Jesus were meant singularly for St. Joseph. This Circumcision was his one mystery of the Precious Blood. It begins each year for us. It is our new year’s day. It braids upon the front of every coming year of life the Name of Jesus, our’ life’s dear Lord, and it braids it in those red snow-drops of his Infancy, the first blossoms of his Precious Blood.

But who shall tell the share of Mary in this mystery? It was an exceeding joy to her; for to what holy heart would not the sight of the Precious Blood be ajubilee? It had been a wondrous joy to her, after her months of expectation, to see the Face of Jesus in the cave of Bethlehem. It was a beauty, the thought of which had fed her desires, but the reality of which was bliss unspeakable. So now it was a joy, in which was mingled perhaps still more of wonder, to see the Precious Blood, which had purchased her own Immaculate Conception, and the redemption of all mankind. It was a joy to her also to read in our Lord’s translucent Heart the inward dispositions in which he first shed his Blood. His abounding gladness, -his inexpressible adoration of God, his intense love of to ub often souls, the unsearchable riches which his own Blood was to himself, as enabling him to satisfy so many loves and so many worships,—all these things she saw, and rejoicing she adored. Doubtless also many hidden meanings of the mystery were visible to the clear eye of her sinless soul. At the same time it was a bitter grief as well. It was a public beginning of sorrows, as the marriage at Cana was the public beginning of miracles. As her dolors at the foot of the Cross made her one of his executioners, so his little Passion now was her own ministry. If, as some think, and it seems by far the truest thought, it was her own hand which shed the Blood, who does not see how fitting it was that she first should shed that Blood which, before all others and above all others, was to be shed for her?

Long years have passed since that cruel New Year’s Day of the guiltless Babe of Bethlehem; and now another scene opens to our view. It is the Agony in the Garden. The spot looks tranquil, innocent, and unconscious now, when the crisp foliage of the olives turns its silver lining to the wind, and, within the latticed fence of the Franciscan friars, the tall sceptres of the golden-rod rise up from among the trailing gourds, and the roses bloom among the yellow flowers, and all is gay and garden-like. But it was once the scene of a fearful mystery, the mystery of the. second Bloodshedding. Jesus kneels there. He is now a grown-up man. ‘Three-and-thirty years have passed over him. They have been the longest, because the fullest, years that earth has ever known. His weary Ministry of three years has drawn to 23 its close. He has often been weary He was weary when he sat by Jacob’s well and asked the Samaritan woman for an alms of the cold fresh water which he himself had created. He has been weary on the mountain-sides, when he prayed instead of sleeping, while the moon shone tremulously on the limestone rocks, as if it hardly dared to light up the furtive figure of its Creator keeping watch among the crags. But his love of souls has never yet been tired. His weariness has never reached the yearnings of his Sacred Heart. This Thursday night amidst the olives we find him still - unchanged. We ventured to charge his dear love with impatience three-and-thirty years ago. We charge it with impatience now. Why will not the Precious Blood keep back until its time? Can it not wait now some twelve or fifteen hours more for Calvary? It is the way of human desire to grow more impatient, as it draws nearer to its object. See what a true human heart this Heart of Jesus is! We dare to love it more when it looks so very human. ‘To-morrow men will crucify his blessed Body, and pour out his Blood like water. But to-morrow is not soon enough. To-night his adorable Soul, that King among creatures, that royallest of all the works of God, will itself crucify his Body. He will suffer a martyrdom to-night even more mysterious than that martyrdom on Calvary. Whatimpatience! What precipitation! He began his ministry by an act of precipitation, by working a miracle before his time, because his Mother asked him. He ends it with another act of precipitation: he anticipates his Passion. But what is it about him which is so impatient? It is his

Blood. It is burning to be shed. It longs to leave its sanctuary in the Sacred Heart, as if it were wearied with so much waiting. He himself had waited four thousand years before he came.

There was delay enough then. Now all things are quickened, are even anticipated. It is the pulses of the Precious Blood which are hurrying all things forward. See now what that Soul is doing. It gathers round it all the sins of men, manifold, multitudinous, ponderous. Over its beautiful sanctity it puts on all this hideous apparel, which burns like poison and like fire. It clothes itself thus with the most awful human shudderings. He only preserves his life by an energetic miracle. Never on earth was there such mortal heaviness, such aching sadness, such a drying up of life’s fountains, such a tormenting languor, such an exceeding sickening of soul. Then it lifts up its hands, that mighty Soul, as if with more than Samson’s strength it were about to pull down the big heavens upon itself; and it draws down upon itself the huge storm of God’s eternal justice and overwhelming wrath, and then lies crushed beneath it, a plaintive Human Life almost extinguished, and only not extinguished because it is a Divine Life as well. Such Manhood! Such Godhead! Who is equal to so terrible a mystery? Ah, Jesus! how dreadful is this solitude, which is even deepened by the presence of that one trembling angel whom thy cries have drawn from heaven! The Sacred Heart can bear no more. It gives out its red life, as in a wine-press. Drop by drop, unnaturally, through the burning pores of the skin, the beads of Blood ooze out. They stand upon his brow, and then roll down his face. They clog his hair. They blind his eyes. They fill his mouth, otherwise than as the chalice of his Blood filled it three hours ago. They. mat his beard. They wet his hands. They suffuse every limb as in a universal Sweat of Blood. They stain his garments. They ruddy the olive-roots. They spot the white dust with black. Truly, if ever suffering was beautiful,—and how little suffering there has been on earth that was not beautiful!— it was the woe which the paschal moon beheld beneath the olive-trees that night.

Who ean tell the mysteries of this Second Bloodshedding? Yet here again we have the same feature of prodigality. This Blood shed itself through the desire of redeeming the world; yet it did not itself redeem it, because it was not the Blood of bis death. It was his own act, not the appointed sacrificial act of others. But what a vast significancy of love there was in this miraculous portent of the Bloody Sweat! He was straitened, it was his own word, with eagerness for his Passion. He had desired with desire, it is his own expletive, to drink his own Blood with his disciples. So had he desired with desire to shed it, and thus he had anticipated noonday at midnight, and had made a Calvary of Olivet. Mary was present in the garden, though she war also in the house of John. All men were asleep. Alas! even the three Apostles close at hand were © sleeping. Only Judas was awake, and the handful of the servitors of tyranny that were with him. Yet even for them Jesus would not wait. His Blood so burned with love of souls that it could not contain any longer its impetuous instinct to be shed. He could get no man to wotnd him in that lonely garden, which had been to him so often a sweet haunt for prayer. So he let his heart wound him from within. Observe also that the very pressure of his Passion in thought could only translate itself into the language of a Bloodshedding. When the vehement, ponderous justice of God crushed him to the earth, the mark that it left upon the earth, as afterward on the napkin of Veronica, was an impression traced in Blood. The sin he had assumed was within him; it had sunk into him; the anger of the Father was upon him. Thus the inward and the outward of his Passion met, and they were one—in Blood.

The sun in the heavens and the shadows in the streets mark it to be about nine of the morning in Jerusalem. It is the hour of the Third Bloodshedding, the Scourging. This is the most intolerable of all the mysteries of our Blessed Savior’s Passion. It is the one which is the hardest to contemplate in the quietness of prayer. There is something revolting in the anguish of sheer bodily pain. There is something degrading in the intentional infliction of shame. Yet these two horrors are combined in the mystery of the Scourging. Our Lord is left in the hands of the vilest satellites of criminal justice. There is neither the pomp of a court, nor the pageant of an execution. He is at the mercy of the vilest and most abhorred of men. The punishment is one, in his case, without check, without measure, and without order. When we think of the contact of their loathsome hands, and their abominable sacrilege in stripping his

Sacred Body, a shudder of anguish passes all through us, as though some secret sanctuary of God were being violated. The shame of it seems to gather round ourselves, and we are hardly able to hold up our heads. We pray about it with our eyes shut as if by instinct. The shape, the gaze, the variety, of the instruments of torture are alike Horrible. The muscular violence and_ brutal gestures of the executioners offend our very thought. Then the sounds! the dull sounds of the scourges as they fall upon the living Holy of Holies, monotonous yet various, changing as the _whips are changed, and then the wet sound as the thongs become soaked with Blood,—who can bear them? ‘The echoes from the houses in the place, and the spiritual echoes from out the indignant meek heart of the outraged Mother,—are they not fearful also? ‘The sound, hardly perceptible till the ear becomes unnaturally quickened by excitement, as of light-falling rain, which we know to be the Precious Blood, mingles with that. still fainter sound, as of the almost inaudible bleating of a dying lamb, which we know to be the Voice of God, complaining with that inextinguishable human tenderness. Though our eyes are closed, we see the staring looks, the compressed lips, the ferocious countenances, the knotted arms, the rude swarthy chests, of the myrmidons of cruelty, denaturalized by the brutality of their task. We see them sprinkled with Precious Blood, which mixes with their sweat and rolls down their limbs with discolored stains. Him we do not see, even with the eyes of our souls; for we have thrown ourselves on the pavement in his Blood, and are holding his feet and are devouring them with kisses. It is an intolerable mystery; yet, if we love him, we must endure it. We must not be fastidious. He was not. We sent him tothis. It was suffered for us. We must not turn away. It is an intolerable mystery; but it has a sweet gift. There is no mystery of the Passion which so uncovers his Divinity to us. It is almost like a vision of the Godhead. There is no mystery which fills our souls so full of so deep an adoration.

But in this third Bloodshedding there is the same character of prodigality. It was shed in an excess of pain and an excess of shame; and it was shed in an excess of wasteful copiousness. It was as if it foresaw how on the Cross it would have but five local vents, five wells distilling salvation _ for the world, and it could not bear to be thus restricted. So now it presents the whole surface of the Body, that it may be able to gush forth in unrestrained abundance, as from one vast wound. A thousand channels, all gifted with exquisite senation, and now burning with insufferable fire, ar torn up and lacerated with the scourges. Streams of Precious Blood, infinite in price, each of them laden with the magnificence of God, broke forth in hundreds of places. Yet the Blood of the Column was not the Blood shed upon the Cross. It did not redeem the world, nor was it necessary to its redemption. It was simply one of the mysterious magnificences of the Precious Blood Moreover the Blood of the Scourging was sprinkled | as it were at random over careless multitudes, as if it were in type or prophecy of its future sacramental prodigality. Our blessed Lord himself appeared in strange symbolical guise in this Third. Bloodshedding. In the Agony he had been seen by the Father clad in all the darkness of human sin. No human eye saw him in the shadowy moonlight, nor could have discerned his fearful transfiguration, even if it could have seen him. But now he was an open symbol to the city and the people. He was bathed in his own Blood. He was clad in a living robe of royal purple. He, the Redeemer, put on the image of the redeemed. As his Church was always to be, so was he then, all red with Precious Blood. As he was in the open place of Jerusalem, so are we in our Father’s eyes at this hour, so shall we be in our happiness through ali eternity, red, and red all over, with the glorious dye, better than that old imperial dye of Tyre, of his most Precious Blood. As he was in his shame and misery,so shall we be in our glory and our joy, all beautified with Blood, that self-same Blood wherewith they clothed him when they had stripped him of his garments.

But now the Precious Blood has swiftly formed a habit of being shed; and who shall stay it? It * was with no bitterness, but with truthfullest love, that Jesus named that Friday the Day of his Espousals. But we read that his Jewish mother crowned him with a diadem in the day of his espousals. Whose heart does not leap up at the thought of such a mystery,—the Coronation of the Creator by his creatures? Crowned as is each man’s life with a beautiful coronal wreathed for him by divine love out of all God’s perfections, what grateful crown shall they set upon His Head who has set them free by reigning over them as are ee

King? Alas! it is another Bloodshedding, the Fourth Bloodshedding, the Crowning of Thorns. It is his dear dominion which is distasteful to their hearts. They cannot bear that he should call himselfa King. They would fain deride his kingship; but they feel and fear it all the while. If he had never been a King before, had he not become one now through the very royalty of his gentleness under the ignominies of the past night and the outrages of that morning? Only a king’s face could look so venerable through such disfigurement. But bis sweetness embittered them. It sank them in their own estimation. It taunted them by the mildness of its silence. There was something so worshipful in his woe that it uncrowned their vulgar bravery. His look humbled them, because it was so beautiful. So in the blindness of their malice they wrought a divine mystery. They crowned him King. The oppressed are given to be oppressors, and the violent to be brutal. If there be no other use of the Eternal God for Roman soldiers, at least he shall relieve the tedium of a Syrian guard-room. They have trouble enough with these Jewish criminals; they shall have sport out of them also. Sun and rain had come alternately on the green briers, which the unsuspecting earth had grown for the Creator. They had trailed over the sward. They had tangled themselves with many a juicy shoot. They had grown up into matted bushes, and the sun of autumn had hardened their soft spikes into strong, tough barbs. Perhaps the honey-bees had come to their flowers to extract sweetness, and the restless butterflies had been attracted for a 58 moment by their aromatic fragrance, or the birds had rifled their golden berries with their beaks. But who would have dreamed that they were yet to be gilded with the Blood of their Creator? Protecting their hard-skinned hands with their leathern gauntlets, the soldiers weave a crown of these sharp and obstinate thorns. What matter if it be not exactly round? What matter if it be not made to fit the head of their mock Cesar? With jest, and gibe, and heathen oath, the rough work is speedily accomplished. Then they rise and come near their King. It is not as we draw near to the Blessed Sacrament, or the angels to the Throne. Jesus is sitting ona bench. We hardly dare to look at him, he is so God-like in his abjection. How love constrains our hearts to worship, and then how worship encourages our hearts to love! How patiently he sits, blood-stained, dishonored, wan and pale, yet strangely pleasant to look on, and exceeding gracious!. They come nigh to the Eternal. They are reeking with sin, and swaggering in their recklessness. The guard-room is silently filling with the splendor of his God- ‘ head. Do they not see it? No! Fearless and peremptory and loud, they lay hands on his long hair. If they only waited a moment, they might feel the pulses of that blessed life beating in his Head. They swear by their gods, and make vulgar pleasantries in their Roman tongue, as if before a foreigner. But they see by the Hebrew’s face that he knows Latin. It is but an amusement the more. They thrust the crown upon his Head with rude vehemence. Itis not round. It will not fit. They force the spikes into his skin; and the Blood comes, blackly and slowly, and with excruciating pain. The Jews cheer these Romans in their barbarity; and one of them, not without loud jocose applause, takes a heavy reed and beats the crown into the Sufferer’s Head. Long spikes go under the skin of the forehead, and come out above the eyes. Others pierce hisears. Others fret against the nerves of his neck. Others penetrate the skull, and burn like prickles of fire. He trembles from head to foot with the intolerable agony. His beautiful eyes are clouded with pain. His lips are bloodless with the extremity of endurance. But the face of a sleeping child is not more sweet than his, nor its heart more calm. He has grown more beautiful, now that he is crowned. O Precious Blood! Lover of God’s Dominion! Thou hast thirsted for thy kingdom long; but with what strange and startling ritual hast thou ordained thy Coronation!

In this Fourth Bloodshedding there was not much Blood. Yet it was not without its note of prodigality. Ifit was little, it was very precious; for it was the Blood of his Head. It was the Blood which had just been feeding his brain, the Blood by the help of which he had been thinking unutterable thoughts. Hach of those thoughts had been broader and deeper than an angel’s science. They had been sweeter and gentler than a mother’s love. They had all been tinctured with that passionate love of souls which was the spirit of the Precious Blood. The Blood shed was little: but why was it shed at all? Our. Lord’s Head had envied his Body. His whole Body had been ploughed and seamed by the scourges. Hach limb had made its offering of Blood. But they were not to slay him; and so they had not scourged his Head, though doubtless in their careless fury chance bruises were made upon it. Now the Head will take its turn. It will have a whole Bloodshedding to itself. Indeed, it will do more than take its turn. If the Heart loves, is it not the Head which rules? Moreover, is not the Precious Blood in a special way the minister of his royalty and of his headship? It then must shed its Blood, and shed it in a mystery apart.

Sweet Blood of Jesus! longing to be shed and loving to be shed, impatient and yet so patient too, prodigal yet counting itself out drop by drop with a kind of avaricious pleasure, thou, like all other loves, wert driven to be inconsistent in order to preserve consistency! But a while ago it was hurrying on and would brook no delay. It was anticipating time, and precipitating mysteries. Now it is all for delay. Now, in the Fifth Bloodshedding, it enters upon a mystery of slowness. But there are still the same instincts, still the same ends. It contrives to be prodigal by being tardy. This Bloodshedding is the Way of the Cross, that singular mystery of the Passion in which the Hearts of Mother and Son, hitherto to outward eye divided, meet in one current, and flow together till the end. The two victims of the Scourging, the Son’s Body and the Mother’s Soul, come forth into the streets. The King and the queen both wear their Crowns of Thorns, the King wears his upon his Head, while the queen wears hers upon her heart-; for the queendom of Mary is in her heart. We spoke. in the last chap-oe..

ter, of the procession of the Precious Blood, out of an unbeginning eternity, over long epochs and ages, until it re-enters the portals of its second eternity. This Fifth Bloodshedding is a veritable procession of the Precious Blood. Slowly winding and unwinding itself out of the streets of Salem up the ascent of Calvary, it had not far to go; but it was long in slowness, long in suffering, long in the manifold mysteries. which were densely compressed within it. Every wound was bleeding. The drops from the Crown trickled slowly down, or gathered and curdled upon the Face of Jesus. The hundred fontinels of the Scourging oozed out into his garments, as the wet rocks on the mountains ooze through their robes of moss. ® The wounds of the night’s arrest, and of the indignities before the High-Priests, and in the yard of Herod, flow silently with Blood. The weight of the Cross opens the wounds wider still, and increases the Bloodshedding. It also disturbs the Crown, and keeps it freshly bleeding; while it makes another wound of its own upon the shoulder, and is the cause of new wounds in the knees through the cruel falls which it occasions. The sight of Mary’s face quickens the beating of his Heart, and makes the Blood flow more freely. He leaves his footprints in the way; and they are of Blood. He imprints the likeness of his features on the napkin of Veronica; and the impression is in Blood. They that brush against him are stained with Blood. They that walk after him dye their sandals in his Blood. His march to Calvary is a perfect triumph of the Precious Blood. It covers every thing. Itclingsto the meanest objects It seem: 24 to multiply itself. Its old fountains in Mary’s heart break up in sympathy with it; and she sheds tears of blood. The Way of the Cross is a mystery of many objects, of constant movement, a transition from one mystery to another. What is its unity? It isin its prodigality, in its endless, manifold Bloodshedding. It seems a time, an interval, a journey, contrived for the very purpose of letting the Blood flow, and flow in the most indiscriminate way, and in the most promiscuous places. For the most part it flowed from old wounds. It was the going on of the Scourging and the Crowning. It was as if when those mysteries ceased the Blood loved still to flow, and therefore took a mystery to itself, which was to be engrossed simply with its flowing.

But there are also other peculiarities in this Fifth Bloodshedding which should not be overlooked. It was a mystery of unions, of meetings, of harmonies. We have already seen that it was the mystery of the Passion in which the Mother and Son came together again. In the Agony, and the Scourging, and the Crowning, they had been visibly separate, though closely and miraculously united in a mystical way. She had seen in spirit, and suffered in soul, all that he had enda: 4. Her body also had mysteriously sympathized with each changing state of his. But now they °-~ » visibly together again, and are not disunited until the tomb is closed. ‘Then also the Cross and the Precious Blood are now for the first time united. Hitherto the saving Blood has flowed apart from the saving Cross. It is the union of the two in which the secret virtue of redeeming grace re-sits ear

Pea eas a sides. Now the weight of the Cross, as we have seen, opens old wounds and causes new ones. The Blood and the Cross are together now. -This is the Betrothing; and the Marriage will be on Calvary. Here is the actual prelude of redemption. Moreover, the Way of the Cross is a great mystery of prophecy and figure. It is a prophecy of the history of the Church; it is a prefiguring of the fortunes of the Holy See; it is a type of our Lord’s own life in the Church through all the ages of unjudged time,—a Blood-dropping life, wearily up to the Doom. This is the meaning of its indiscriminate profusion. Good and evil alike are stained with it. It flows to save souls; but it will flow over souls who will not let it save them. It has but one law: it must flow. Anywhere, everywhere, always, it must flow. It is the one mission of the Precious Blood,—to be shed. Then see how the Way of the Cross ends! It finishes in another shame, another stripping, another tearing open of the wounds of the Scourging. It looks as if, to the Precious Blood, the Scourging were its mystery of predilection. It returns to it again now, and, as nearly as possible, repeats it over again. The Bloodshedding of the Scourging was the most exuberant, the most vehement, the most penal, the most universal.,Thus it coincides most with the genius of its love. Hence it will have it reiterated, so far at least as Bloodshedding is concerned, at the foot of the Cross. Now that it is going to begin the strictly needful work of our redemption, it seems to hanker after the freedom of its unnecessary sheddings. ‘There is a great deal to think of here. In this Fifth Bloodshedding the Precious

Blood begins to be unlike itself, in order that 4 may be more like itself than ever. A while agu it was impatiently looking onward; now it is looking half regretfully backward; yet it is the same spirit which rules it in both these dispositions,— its love of being shed.

Men eun lie for hours, and look upon a running stream. It seems to afford them at once occupation and repose. Its uninterrupted sameness fills them with tranquillity, while its unintermitting lapse gratifies their sense of life. They feel that they are thinking; yet they are hardly conscious of their thoughts. Their eye is fixed with a sort of fascination on the noiseless gliding waters, and they are soothed, rested, and engaged. ‘This is a faint picture of what often happens to us in our prayers, especially with regard to certain mys-teries, such as the Crucifixion, which is the Sixth Bloodshedding. It is so familiar to us that, like the river, we understand it all at sight. We cannot reason about it. It is too much part of our daily lives for that. We do not need to elicit the right affections; for they come unbidden, and flow in an order of their own. The significance of the mystery is at once too deep and too plain for words. It is so vast an object of faith, that simply to gaze upon it seems to be the broadest study of it. Moreover, like all large objects, it is one of those mys-teries which are best seen at some distance. We see the whole of it then. We comprehend its size, its shape, its fashion, and the disposition of the groups round about it. Who does not know the strange, vivid, palpable peace which distance gives to sunlit vistas in a forest? There is something of this kind about meditation on the Crucifixion. How almost visionary looks the bone-strewn sward and the tufted grass of that green hill-top, with its crosses standing against the dark sky, and a kind of wan sunshine creeping up the mound, as if it. came rather from the white roofs of the city than from the sun in heaven! The Precious Blood has been out in the vast calms and ocean-solitudes of the mind of God. It has voyaged through the beautiful tranquillities of the creations of spirit, matter, and men. Its lanterns have gleamed like red beacons in the unspeakable tempests of the divine anger, in falls of angels and of men, in floods and fires, in judgments and captivities, in discordant panics of Babel and bituminous up-heavings of Gomorrah. It has kept its course over thousands of years of the uneasy currents of human history; and lo! that hill-top was all the while its haven! The Cross was its predestinated anchor, holding it to earth. How marvellous a harbor! How like one of those plans of God, which are so little like any plan of ours!

The Precious Blood has found at last a home, which is seemingly dearer to it than the Sacred Heart. It is the wood of the Cross. It has been so impetuous, that it has shed most of itself before it reached the Cross. It flows very slowly now. Those wounds in the Hands and Feet are too parsimonious; and, besides that, they are almost obstructed by the nails themselves. But the discomfort of the Cross makes the Sacred Body hang downward and outward, and so reopens the almost exhausted wounds of the previous Bloodsheddings. The Blood flows very slowly. In some places it still trickles over the pale limbs. In others it only blackens round the wounds. Here we may see just a visible oozing, while there it barely keeps itself red and blood-like. It flows very slowly, as if it would prolong its delight in flowing. It looks as if it were conscious of the grandeur of its work. This is redemption; this is the world-saving flow; this is the crown of all its flowings; this is the enduring and omnipotent shedding of itself, the end of the battle it has won for God, the final and total accomplishment of that array of eternal decrees which all along have clothed it like royal robes. How slowly it flows, with a fascinating slowness, and so silently! Yet the scarcely-moving streams blend with each other in many places, and steal down upon the Feet. The Cross is wetted by it, and the wood is darkened. Mary’s hands are red. The dear Magdalen has an unconscious consciousness that the Blood of her Love is upon her hair; and the innermost wells of the Sacred Heart drop and drop as if with pulses upon the disciple, who had pillowed himself upon that Heart the night before. Here and there a blade of grass is ruddy. ‘There are spots on the skulls of the dead; for the dead also have their interest in the Precious Blood. The torturers and soldiers have gone down the hill with their garments and their accoutrements discolored; for the Precious Blood shrinks not from the vilest resting-places. How slowly it flows, as if the very grandeur of redemption made it cautious, or caused some difficulty! The slow-ness fascinates us more and more. But it is a relief to have the silence broken. There is no look of life but in the Blood. Nothing is moving but © the Blood. Blood is life. It was within him. Now it is almost all outside him. Those seven words are the voices of his Blood. With what a clear ringing sweetness they come forth, and the darkness round the mount murmurs with them as if it were tingling with delight! How beautiful are his thoughts upon the Cross, beautiful like the beauty of God! How beautiful are the seven words, with their revelations of the beauty of God! Each word is a ravishing melody, in which the Eternal Word utters himself with human utterance. Then what a perfect abyss of rest is the interval between each word, silences like the silences which the angels keep in heaven! The soul flutters over them as over hollow seas, and wellnigh faints with love. But in the silence the Blood creeps slowly, outward, onward, earthward. Still it flows, but so industriously, so carefully, so methodically, and yet so secretly, so noiselessly, so mysteriously. It not only evades the ear by its soundless footfalls: but now it almost evades the eye. Its movement is scarcely visible over the pale Form, like the hands of a timépiece. It seems as if we should never see that dear impetuous Blood precipitate again. But do not old habits come back at last in all created things, and youth rise again to imprint its character on death? The Precious Blood has come within reach of its end, so near it as to be impatient. It abandons the slowness of its oozing it will be precipitate once more; and, as if to show that all shedding of itself, all surrendering of its precious life, was voluntary, it bids one cell of the Hfeart to keep what it contains, dislodges all the rest of itself with a loud cry of miraculous strength, and leaps forth at once from every cavern of the Body; and death accomplishes itself, so far as it was a natural death, by the shedding of the Blood.

Is there to be more Bloodshedding still? Why, like a miser on his death-bed, had the Precious Blood hidden that little treasure? Why did it die, hoarding itself? It was that the Dead Body might shed Blood. It was to deride death, to survive death, to proclaim love’s victory over death, to show that its own propensity to shed itself had not been killed by death. Hence the Seventh Bloodshedding, the Piercing of the Sacred Heart. We often know men best by what they do when they come to die. So it is with the Precious Blood; or rather we know it best by what it did when it was dead. It was so liquefied by love that death could not curdle it; and still it flowed, as if flowing were the unchangeable feature of its character. ‘Death contents men. JHearts ask no further proof of love. Monarchs consider it the extremity of - loyalty. Death contents God. He asks no more than martyrdom; and he cherishes the martyrdoms of his Saints as the inestimable rubies of his crea- - tion. But death does not content the Precious Blood. That Sixth Bloodshedding was necessary. In many ways it was prodigal; but it was also necessary. Redemption was a needful task, a task of love, but still a task. The Precious Blood, as I have said, hankered after the days of its unnecessary sheddings, the days when its love wantoned in the pure prodigality of its royal riches. As it shed itself before the work of redeeming the world, and without redeeming it, so will it shed itself again now that the work of redemption is accom:

plished. Once more it will reveal its character in that wastefulness which is a secret of divine economy. O Divine Love! there is no more inveterate prodigal than thou!

Moreover, the work must be a complete work. All the Blood must be separated from the Body, and enjoy, by itself and in its separation, its union with the Person of the Word. It must be a total outpouring. Divine things are never done by halves; and mercies above all insist upon completeness. The Heart had been bidden to keep some of the Blood within itself, and had obeyed. It was undecided whether to obey reluctantly or gladly. On the one hand it was the home of the Precious Blood, and loved it with the fondest love. To be untenanted by the Precious Blood would be its uttermost desolation. Yet, on the other hand, that Heart had learned the instincts of its inhabitant. Mothers have sent forth their own sons to martyrdom with a strange covetous love, which had more of heaven in it than of earth. So would the Saered Heart fain send forth that lingering Blood to the cruel glory of its shedding. As the Head in the Crowning had been jealous of the Body in the Scourging, and so had claimed the joy and dignity of a Bloodshedding to itself, so now the Heart was jealous of the Hands and Feet. It envied them their dripping wells of life. It grudged them the beauty of their eternal stigmata. Even when dead the Sacred Heart has ° irresistible attractions The Soul of Jesus beneath the earth felt the dea amiliar constraints of that grand Heart; and so the Heart wooed the lance of the centurion, and the hidden Blood sprang forth, baptized as if in gratitude its heathen liberator with all the cleansing graces of conversion, and stole gently down the Side of Jesus, kissing the Flesh which it had animated so long.

The time was to come when the Body was to resume the Blood. While the Sacred Humanity had been as it were unloosed and dispersed for the salvation of mankind, the Soul busied in brightening limbus, the Body reposing in the borrowed grave of the Arimathean, and the Blood scattered with a sort of wasteful ubiquity all over the vicinage of Jerusalem, the Hypostatic Union of the Divine and Human Natures had never been broken, nor even impaired, for one moment. The separate Soul was to be worshipped with divine worship still. The Body lay peacefully among the rocks, always and absolutely to be adored. The Blood, vagrant, outlying, parcelled, indistinct, apparently commingled with or adhering to other substances, was also in each drop, in each stain, in each colored impression, in each voluntary burial-place of its own, to be adored with absolute adoration, in virtue of its unbroken and - unstrained union with the Godhead in the Divine Person of the Word. But these worshipful Three, the Soul, the Body, and the Blood, were to come together again in one of the holiest of all mysteries, the Resurrection. It was to be the grandeur of this mystery that it should as it were open to us the magnificent abysses of the Hypostatic Union, and show us the glorious strength and the invincible bond of the Incarnation, while it should also seem to be like a new Incarnation in itself. But even amidst the repairing and beautifying force of the Resurrection, it was the will of our dearest Lord, one of the most affectionate and characteristic of all his wills, that some marks at least of the old Bloodsheddings should be retained Ten thousand times a day should his whole Blood be poured forth from heaven into the Chalices of the Mass. But thiswas not enough. He clung to the memory of those old Bloodsheddings. He would have us cling to the memory of them also. It should be a new joy to the angels forever to see his stigmata. They should fill the souls of his elect with fresh jubilee for all eternity, and keep their angelic glory tempered with the human tenderness he loves so dearly. So he bade the glory of the Resurrection, as it beautified him by its immortalizing fires, not only to respect and te retain the Five Wounds of his Sacred Body, but to beautify them with a tenfold beauty. They were to be roseate luminous suns to gladden the palaces of the Heavenly Jerusalem, which the cruel artificers of earth’s Jerusalem had wrought upon him with such unintending skill. He keeps _his stigmata for the love of us. He keeps his stigmata for the love of his Precious Blood. Many single mysteries seem to tell me the whole of Jesus; yet I find I cannot spare the rest; for each has its needful revelation of his sweetness. But, if I were compelled to choose one thing only as being all memorials of my Saviour in one, I would choose this keeping of his stigmata. It signifies so many things, and it signifies them all so tenderly. When one we love does something more than usually like himself, our love leaps up with joy; and when he does it unexpectedly, our hearts burn hotter for being taken unawares. Jesus has described his whole Self, as in a concise Gospel, in this one act of keeping the stigmata of his blessed Wounds. I seem to know | him better, and to be more sure I know him rightly, because of this dear pathos which abides unconsumed amidst the burnings of that Haster-glory, this lingering of the Passion among the splendors of the Resurrection.

Let us now turn from all this prodigality of the Precious Blood, which was unnecessary for us, but necessarily befitting the magnificence of God; and let us turn to that other prodigality which is so needful for us that we could not afford to spare one out of the numberless reiterations of its exuberance. What an incredible history it is! and yet of such daily occurrence, of such commonplace appearance, of such matter-of-fact practice, that it is difficult to steady our minds to the right understanding of it. We grow confused with numbers, or teased with the childishness of imaginary calculations, when we come to think of the sacramental applications of the Precious Blood, which the souls of the living and the dead are receiving daily. The bounty of redeeming grace, state it as soberly as we please, has all the unnatural unpersuasive dazzle of an Arabian tale. It is all gold and precious stones in impossible profusion. It seems like a fairy-land vision rather than a human reality. The ungenuineness of devotional exaggerations makes us angry and incredulous. But divine love has a marvellous sobricty; and under its restraints let us speak of this matter more coldly than we feel.

_If we go round the world, there can hardly ever be an hour in which some children are not being baptized. Baptism is the application of the Precious Blood to their souls. No act in life can surpass it in importance. It effects a most complete spiritual revolution even in the unconscious child. It effects it in a most wonderful way, and by means of mysterious infusions, and in consequence of a mysterious Incarnation, and through the virtue of mysterious Bloodsheddings; and these things take their effect through the pouring of water simultaneously with the pronunciation of the grand Names of the Divine Persons, accompanied by an intention on the part of the person baptizing, priest or lay, man or woman, or even child. Theology composes volumes in order to elucidate scientifically the group of mysteries which lie compressed in the Sacrament of Baptism. It is enough for us to remember that it is the difference between heaven and hell. Hach Baptism is a greater, a diviner, a more magnificent work than the creation of the material world. Yet, in suber truth, the waters of Baptism are flowing perennially, so that if they could run together they would form a flowing rivulet, undried throughout the year. The creation of a new star every second of time would be but a little thing by the side of this. Even in heathen lands this amazing stream is flowing. Amid the dense populations of China it moves visibly to God’s eye like a sweet silver brooklet. It has made the national atrocity of child-murder the channel in which its beautifying love might ingeniously run. Children in fair France, and in green England, ime 25 and in German towns, and over the Atlantic, contribute to keep up this strangely-characteristic work of Christianity. European and American children send their baptismal missionaries to take up the exposed and dying children from the fields and from the dung-heaps, and to baptize them, in thank-offering to God for the grace of Baptism to which they themselves have reached. European and American mothers send to purchase of Chinese parents the children they would slay, or at least to purchase permission to baptize the doomed innocents, in thank-offering for their own children having attained to the grace of Baptism. If we put all this continuity of Baptism into numbers, and remember meanwhile the spiritual magnificence of Baptism, we shall be able to form some idea of the prodigality of the Precious Blood hidden in those waters of salvation.

What is Absolution? It is the authentic dripping of the Precious Blood upon the head of the repentant sinner. It is God’s patience grown so patient as to be magnificent. It is, almost but not quite, the limit of the outstretching of the eternal arms of mercy. In it human acts reach to one of their highest heights. They are lifted up to merit salvation by the merits of the Precious _ Blood. Human sorrow is consecrated and made divine by the touch and the ‘anointing of the sorrow of Jesus; and that unction was only to reach us with the flowing of his Blood from his gracious Wounds. Without shedding of Blood there was to be no remission. Millions of souls are at large in heaven this day, who without Absolution would have been in hell. Yet it were better a whole solar system should be shattered to pieces than a single soul lost. If there is something very divine in the facility of Baptism, reminding us of creation when the word was spoken and forthwith the work was done, there is also something very divine in the difficulty and effort of Absolution, reminding us of redemption which was only accomplished by a Passion and with Blood. Hearts have to be softened, habits weakened, dispositions changed, occasions de-— serted, new tastes infused, entanglements untied. The Precious Blood has to put forth more of its strength here than in Baptism; because it has to overcome more inveteracy and resistance. It has also to venture its sacred riches more prodigally here than in other Sacraments. In all Sacraments it runs two generous risks, the risk of invalidity, and the risk of sacrilege. Both these risks are more especially run in the Sacrament of Penance. Yet what numberless confessions are daily heard! What hundreds, or thousands, of Absolutions are daily given, the greater portion of which I am undoubtingly certain, from the character of God and the experience of the confessional, are valid! How many Absolutions have we ourselves received in our lives, and hope still to receive! Surely, if we could see as God sees, and as perchance the angels are allowed to see, we should behold innu- — merable streams of Blood intersecting the crowded souls of men, as @ vast river-system shows like a net-work on a map; and this would be a vision of the prodigality of Absolution.

How beautiful are the graces of the Sacrament of Marriage! Full of human tenderness, yet so softly insinuating the sovereign love of God; teeming with habitual self-sacrifice, yet filling the sacrifice with such sweetness that it becomes, not painless only, but a joy; breeding in young hearts such a gravity of new heavenly duties, and yet flinging over life the lustre of an additional light; hardening the changeful heart with a supernatural preparation of perseverance, and yet softening every harshness and making every sensitiveness more exquisitely keen; fortifying the soul with boldness to do right, at the very moment it is gracing it with all the bashful timidities of love; elevating affection into devotedness, and giving therewith a beautifulness of purity which is akin to the white innocence of virginity:—these are the graces of the Sacrament of Marriage; and they are all creations of the Precious Blood. They are all of them working daily in millions of hearts, hearts in sorrow and hearts in joy; and their life is in the throbbing and pulsation of the Precious Blood. This time it is not a stream of Blood we see, but a wide-stretching inundation.

Of all the Sacraments, Ordination is the most like marriage. It weds heartsto Jesus. It makes those hearts his homes. The priesthood is his domestic life in the Church. It is replete with images of Mary and of Joseph. It repeats Nazareth. But what a complication of graces is implied in Ordination, and then also what a magnificence of powers! Moreover, it is a manifold Sacrament. Its unity is a threefold unity in Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, a shadow of unutterable divine grandeurs. Furthermore, it is as it were the sacred vessel in which the other six Sacraments f are kept, and out of which they radiate their glory __ and their life. This grand Sacrament is the earthly heart of the Precious Blood. It is to it on earth what the Sacred Heart is toitin heaven. It gives the movement to its life. It takes it back and gives it forth. It regulates its energy, and makes its beatings equable as well as forcible. It concentrates the Precious Blood in itself, and then vehemently diffuses it all over the earth through every remotest vent of missionary fervor. The graces of this Sacrament are like the graces of angels; and yet they are of all graces the most human; for they impart the likeness of the Sacred Humanity as no other graces can impart it. Each grace of Ordination is a characteristic of Jesus. Its gift is to make the clear heart of the priest a mirror into which the Savior is for ever looking down, and his Countenance is marvellously glassed therein. Yet, for all this, men must be partially changed into angels by the operation of these intensely human graces. In truth, Ordination is specially a Sacrament of the Precious Blood. Jesus became a priest by the shedding of his Blood, by the offering of his Bloody Sacrifice. His Blood is the virtue of his priesthood. Yet when it lay separate from the Soul and from the Body, it was angels who kept it, and not men. This is the figure of the strange mixture of the human and angelic in the graces of the priesthood. But how many are the anointed of the Lord, how multiplied are their works, how manifold their vocations, how vast their missions, how continuous their reeruits! All this implies so much prodigality of - the Precious Blood.

a

Jesus once looked into a young man’s face, and loved him. He has perpetuated this incident in his Church. It is perpetuated in the Sacrament of Confirmation. When Jesus went, and the Holy Ghost came to take his place and to administer the Church, he also was forever looking into the faces of the young; and his look was a gift, a magnificent substantial love, an imparting of that fortitude which youth so much requires, and the want of which made the young man of the Gospel turn away in the cowardice of an earthly sorrow. But the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost were only purchased for us by the Precious Blood. The very title, which the Gospel gives to the times before the sacrificial shedding of our Redeemer’s Blood, was “ ese times when the Holy Ghost was not yet given.” Now look at the multitude of Christian youth. If there is much to sadden, how much also is there to cheer! How much generous piety do we behold, how many early breakings with the world, how many works of mercy, how many edifying confraternities, how many levites in the seminaries, how many beautiful vocations in the cloisters!} What is all this but Confirmation’s gift of fortitude, made fertile by the Precious Blood?

We have seen that the Precious Blood shed itself chiefly round about the death of Jesus; and that his Death was in reality a death by bleeding. Hence the hour of death is the chosen hour of the Precious Blood. It. is the favorite season of its ingenuities. Thus it makes a Sacrament for itself at that precise time, the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, the last of its anoiutings, the anointing reserved for the supreme contest of the soul, the last of its sacramental visitations to the elect. This wonderful Sacrament shrouds its graces in mystery, a mystery congenial to the darkness which belongs to its dread hour. But the very fact of its being a Sacrament at all, and the season of its administration, sufficiently testify to the grandeur of the graces which it must convey. God is eminently a God of time and place, as we have seen; and his places and times are the measures of his gifts. Extreme Unction, like the oil of the Grecian wrestlers, anoints us for our mortal struggle. Whatever relics of sin there may be in us, the powers of darkness will fasten upon them. But the grace of this Sacrament searches them out with a mysterious penetration, and puts them to a supernatural death. The best name for its grace is the grace of health; and so, if God does not will that it should impart health to our bodies, it turns its exotic medicinal virtues upon the soul. Other Sacraments liken our lives to the life of Jesus. This likens our deaths to the death of Jesus. It diffuses itself over our souls, strewn with the work of a whole life, and gathers up the fragments which other Sacraments have left untouched. It cleanses them with a last cleansing. It arranges them with neatness and order for the coming of our Lord. It puts them in their right posture and attitude for being most safely judged. Must not its graces be very peculiar, and yet also very magnificent? Throughout the world there is a whole population dying daily. A section of the world is always on its death-bed and in its agony. How prodigal then must the Precious Blood be ot its magnificent peculiarities in this pathetic Sacrament!

But what shall we say of that twofold wonder, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrament of Communion? There the Precious Blood puts on the vesture of omnipresence, and it becomes it well. Multiplied by how many hundreds of thousands of times is it not dwelling, whole, living, and glorified, in the Hosts reserved within the tabernacles of the world? Into how many thousand human hearts does it not descend daily, whole, living, and glorified, in the glory of the dread reality of Communion? Into how many thousand chalices does it not empty itself from out the Sacred Heart in heaven. every day? The very whirling of the earth, as it makes day and night by turning to or from the sun, ministers to the longings of the Precious Blood. It is bewildering to think of the countless graces of expiation which flow daily from the Sacrifice, or the countless graces of union which flow daily from the Sacrament. This is the great laboratory in which the Precious Blood makes holiness. In the heart of the Andes, vast, interwoven, and mutually enfolding mountains cover themselves with gigantic forests. The condor,as he wheels above, looks down upon an ocean of impenetrable foliage, without a rent, or break, or insight inte the green abyss. So does the Precious Blood, in Mass and Communion, mantle the whole Church with tropical exuberances of grace, as they appear, hiding the natural features of the ground with the ample folds of their verdant overgrowth. The tinklings of the mass-bell, like new-creative. words, change the whole aspect of the unconscious world. Unknown and unsuspected temporal calamities are daily driven away, like clouds before the wind, by the oblations of the Precious Blood. Nay, through the crust of the earth the superincumbent weight of that Blood presses its way, and reaches to the sinless caves of Purgatory. Consolations of all shapes and patterns come there, and are the cooling rains of the Precious Blood. Who can class them? They are like the monotonous diversities of crystals, beautiful — for their variety, and beautiful also for their sameness. The angels, who had the Precious Blood in their keeping during the Triduo of the Passion, have also the administration of it in Purgatory, and are well pleased with this labor of congenial love. But the arithmetic of all this prodigality of the Precious Blood, is it not impossible to the imagination and distracting to the heart? It disquiets our love. Let us leave off the calculation, and contemplate in quietude the ocean of painstaking graces, of vast satisfactions, and of kingly expiations, into which the daily Masses of the Church outpour themselves, lighting the patient darkness under ground, flashing up to the skies as so much additional light and song, and beautifying the poor exiled earth in the eye of the all-holy heavens. In closest propinquity with the Sacraments we ~should make mention of the Holy See, wherein dwells the paternity of all the Sacraments, and in which resides with incredible plenitude the jurisdiction of the Precious Blood, the regalia of the kingdom of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus. At no point of history can we look at the Sovereign Pontiff without seeing as it were before us, in most vivid type, the Fourth Bloodshedding, the Crowning of Thorns. The pontifical monarchs of the Middle Ages, no less than the martyr-pontiffs who haunted the Catacombs, or the modern popes who toil, like patient. heroes, through the pusillanimous hostilities of diplomacy, equally bear upon them this peculiar image of our Lord. They administrate his Headship. They are his Head made visible to us. The tiara is the most veritable _erown of thorns, and the pontificate the most literal of martyrdoms. It is the Head ever bleeding, bleeding slowly. There is the old suffering patience in its majesty. It is a true royalty; but men mock it because its kingly mantle is soiled with all earth’s poverty. Itis a hidden kingliness, like the kingship of the guard-room at Jerusalem It is a sort of sacrament of the Sacraments, the sacrament of the royalty of the Precious Blood. The papacy is the Fourth Bloodshedding continued till the Doom.

This is one department of the prodigality of the.

Precious Blood, its sacramental prodigality. But, besides this, there is a whole world of extra-sacramental prodigality. At least we may for distinction’s sake call it so. But in reality all holiness is tied to the Sacraments by innumerous, indirect, and hidden fastenings. Good works come out of the Sacraments, or come out of other works which have done so, or they go into the Sacraments, or are the accidents and superfiuities of Sacraments, or minister to the Sacraments, or are, we know not why, contemporaneous with them. Even the grandeur of perfect contrition is tied to the Sacraments by desire. The martyrdom of the catechumen is riveted to Baptism by secret desire, desire which may even be unconscious as well as secret, yet must infallibly be there. The whole system of redemption is interpenetrated with Sacraments. The sacramental tendency in it is ineradicable. It coheres by Sacraments. Sacraments are the tissue of its life; and its life is the Precious Blood. Therefore when we come ‘to consider the daily penances and supernatural actions which are consecrated by the Precious Blood in the Church, although we may fairly call them extra-sacramental, we must at the same time bear in mind, that ‘there is probably not one which has not some relation, open or occult, with a Sacrament, and that the genius of them all is an affinity to the Sacraments and an instinctive sympathy with them. They dart into the Sacraments, and blend with them, and lose themselves in them, with a swiftness and a volatility which remind us of things in chemistry.

If we are devout to the Church, if we have keen sympathies with the Holy See, and if we are interested in missionary enterprise, we can rapidly make for ourselves a geographical picture of the Church. We know what countries belong to her, and where her ‘missions are growing, and where they are receding. We-can pass in swift thoughts from one pole to the equator, and from the equator to the other pole. We know how much life goes on in a little space,—especially spiritual life. The religious actions, inward and outward, of one rural parish are multitudinous and rapid, a dense world of thoughts, motives, words, and works. How innumerable then must be the daily supernatural actions of the wide Church! Yet wherever grace is, there is the Precious Blood. Whatever may merit. can only merit by coming in spiritual contact with the Precious Blood. In all this seething ‘mass of actions, it is the Precious Blood which is causing all the movement and all the fermentation. Wheresoever nature is raised above itself and lifted into the supernatural, there we discern infallibly the agency of the Precious Blood. But what a ubiquitous life, what a universal energy, what rapidity and what persistence of operation! Then look at the other side of the question. Who could number the sins in the world at any one given moment? Is not evil always like the sea which is with difficulty banked out from low-lying lands? It is bursting the banks, tearing away the gates, flooding the sluices perpetually. The thought of the number of sins at any given time is at once distracting and oppressive. Yet I believe that always, in some way or other, proximately or remotely, the Precious Blood is trying to hinder each one of these sins. The number of sins maxes us wonder how the Precious Blood can divide itself into such numberless activities, while the gravity of the sins shows us how prodigal it is, not only of its presence, but of its strength. The life of the Precious Blood in the religious houses of the Church is amazing. The crowds of daily heroic actions which are sustained by it, each of which seems to draw it up from its choicest depths, and then the plentiful harvest of more ordinary merits, the quantity of sanctified suffering, the amount of supernatural obedience,—how immense is all this! and yet it is but one department of the sleepless business of the Precious Blood! Another and a vaster world is to be found in its favorite sphere of death-beds. All that activity, all those inventions, all that concentration of converting love, all that precipitate accumulation of sanctifying grace, all that lightning-like formation of habits which are to be eternal, all those strange heroisms of death, those resurrections of old selves, those creations of new selves, those almost overwhelming embraces of nature by grace, must all go to the account and enter into the calculation. Nay, look at the multitudes who wander outside the Church; even those desolate tracts of the world, those unwatered regions, are yet beauti-fied in some degree by the overflowings of the Church, the prodigal outgoings of the Precious Blood.

All this prodigality of the Precious Blood, whether in the Sacraments or alongside of them, I call necessary, as distinguished from the prodigality of the Thirty-Three Years, which was not necessary to us, but belongs to the magnificence of God’s love. The other prodigality is necessary to us, because without it we should not be saved. Our corruption is so active, our weakness is so lamentable, our vileness is so great, our dangers _ are so terrible, our carelessness is so incredible, that we could not for the most part work out our salvation with any access to the Precious Blood less free, less easy, less common, less abundant, than that which God’s magnificence has opened to us. Still, if we consider the grandeur of the Sacraments in themselves, or the immense capabilities of grace, or the intrinsic glory of the mysteries so reiterated, and if we look at all these things from-a theological rather than a practical point of view, we must acknowledge that they betoken an amazing — prodigality on the part of God, even though our _ necessities be so hungry that they consume it all. ~~ We must be continually replenishing the shallowness of our finite lives, and we can only replenish them out of the Divine infinity. We cannot satisfy our thirst at any fountain less magnificent. It is another joy which God’s love added to his beatitude, that we should drink of those wells for ever: more, and drink of them with liberty and gladness. Now let us come out under the starry sky, and think of this prodigality of the precious Blood. The great tent of heaven above us seems to waver, and the stars to swing like lamps from its purple roof. But the desert could not be more silent than this outspread scene. If the uninstructed man looks at the starry skies, he either feels no mystery in them, or feels that it is a mystery which he eannot understand. Some feeling, which if it is not poetry is akin to poetry, and which if it is not religion is akin to religion, would surely be awakened within him. But all would be vague, restless, and uncertain, and therefore would soon weary him, and so be transient, and speedily forgotten. The astronomer would look on the loveliness of this spangled night with far other eyes. His knowledge would disentangle the constellations for his eyes. The orbs would be individuals to him, with names, known points, and some peculiarities. The purple concave would at once inscribe itself for him with glittering lines and orbits, better than the grooved spheres of Ptolemy. It would be a joy to him to inform so much seeming confusion with so much real order. He might think little of the beauty of night, and still less of the beauty of the God of night. But the scene would speak in grand sonorous language to his understanding. Then let us bring a poet to the place. He might know as little of the mechanism of the heavens as the uninstructed man. But he would understand the scene by feeling it. He would feel that the starry heavens outside corresponded marvellously with the starry heavens within him. Behold him. His soul is taken captive with the beauty of night. He looks. He grows calm with a sweet calmness. Chafings cease. Breathings as of far-off music rise up from some deep sanctuary within his soul. The beauty melts him; the glory masters him; and he sings the infinity of God. Both the astronomer and the poet have their truth. But the poet’s truth is a truer truth than that of the astronomer.

So it is in looking at the world redeemed. The uninstructed man sees nothing in it but puzzle and contradiction. His faith is vague; and where faith is not clear there is seldom earnestness. There is truly a look of God about the world, and a wandering fragrance of Jesus. But it breeds little more in him than a kind of incredulous superstition. To the instructed believer, who is without the poetry of religion, whose head errs because his heart does not help it, whose thoughts go wrong because they are speculations instead of prayers,—to him the aspect of redemption is what the starry skies are to the astronomer. He admires; he is amazed; he praises. Yet adoration is so little to his taste, and worship so uncongenial to his disposition, that the demand for it at once awakens a kind of skepticism even in his faith He doubts whether so much be done, because he sees so little come of it. He judges by what he sees with the eye. He does not know how to divine with his heart. He does not perceive that the world he sees is nearly as far beyond his understanding as the God who is invisible. Sight does not help us to understand men. Their actions are not their hearts. Still less does it help us to understand grace, which, when it supernaturalizes nature, lies undermost, not uppermost. ‘To understand God and God’s world, we must look at him and it from the Precious Blood point of view. The saints of the Church are the poets of redemption. Itis from this point of view that they always see the world. It was thus that Mary saw the world at all times, a vision most awful, yet most touching and most dear. It is the way in which God sees at this instant. All things to him, good or evil, are tinged with the Precious Blood. He beholds them all in his own repetition of Josue’s miracle, in that unsinking crimson sunset of the Precious Blood, which he has bidden to hang in all ‘ts beauty on the horizon of creation forever.

Ps

Footnotes

1. Wisdom xi. 21. ↩

2. See pages 215, 216. ↩