Chapter VI. The Devotion to the Precious Blood
Most men live in an imaginary world; and yet their imaginary world is areal one. They make a beauty for themselves, and throw their heart into it. Some men live among the stars, either as observers or as astronomers. It becomes the passion of their lives to do so. The movements of the heavenly bodies are to them as the activities of practical life. To watch, to discover, to verify, up in the heavens, is their vocation. It is the way in which they will enjoy themselves, and the way also in which they will benefit their kind. Others |
‘spend their lives with equal devotion among the strata of the earth and the long interesting epochs of geology. Others give themselves up to dwell with patient vigilance among the secret laboratories of matter, where its separations, combinations, and transmutations are discovered, and whose mysteries are yearly spreading themselves more and more over daily life in the shape of most important practical utilities. Another becomes the companion of animals, and reigns like a
_. natural king, as he is, among his beasts and birds and fishes and reptiles. Another is the doctor and prophet of plants, and another of minerals. Men can make fascinating scientific worlds for themselves out of the flooring of the sea, out of
U 26* the stormy circles of the air, out of the rushing thread-like arteries of electric force, and out of many other subprefectures of nature. These worlds are imaginary, and yet real: real because of the substantial truth and practical utility of them; imaginary because of the exclusive enthusiasm with which they are dwelt upon, and the breadth of responsible life which is consumed in them. The world is not only or altogether a celestial globe, or a geological map, or an arithmetic of chemistry, or a_ hierarchy of animal life.
Neither again, indeed much far is the length and breadth of human life contained in the straits of politics, the shallows of diplomacy, the quaking mosses of balances of power, or the frail clockwork of constitutions. JI can understand better than most of these idolatries a passionate occupation of the mind with statistics, out of which time will evolve revelations of the nature of man and of the laws and storms and methodical fluctuations of human actions, which cannot fail to illuminate in some wonderful way and with unexpected light the adorable character of God. But statistics are not commensurable with life. Men may easily live in an epic of metaphysics and psychology, and neglect all else; but they can establish no right to such a concentration of themselves, any more than the physiologist with the patient slowness of his singularly attractive pursuit. Life is broader than any science of life; for it is a law, a duty, a responsibility, an affection, a religion. Yet all natures have their poetries. Most men must have their ideal, or one of these imaginary real worlds which subserve all the better purposes of an ideal. These are the devotions of the intellect, which absorb within themselves the interests of the heart. We are placed in creation as kings; and, often quite unconsciously, our kingly instincts work in our souls; and we take creation to pieces, and choose the provinces over which we intend torule. But we are quarrelsome kings. We do not like neighboring rulers. The proverbial jealousies of scientific men are like the peevish diplomacies of fretful politicians.
Now, what astronomy, and geology, and chemistry, and other cognate sciences, and what as: tics, statistics, metaphysics, and their congenial sciences, are to many men, and to most men, the Church is to us. It is our devotion, our purauit, our passion. It is our favorite science, our chosen study, our life’s enthusiasm. Asa matter of taste no one can blame us; for tastes are facts, and facts. which are mostly inculpable, and hardly admit of criticism. One man has as much right to be immensely interested in a Sacrament, as another in a curious dip of strata, or. the varying magnitude of a perplexing star, or in some new property of a metalloid, or in the dethroning of an old element by dividing it. If one man may without blame make all other sciences, literatures, and pursuits, subordinate to his one science, literature, and pursuit, another may make all sciences, literatures, and pursuits, subordinate to his exclusive devotion to the Church. This is putting devotion to the Church upon its lowest ground. It is well sometimes to remember lowest grounds for things. Important rights are often fuunded in them. Not unfrequently the essences of things lie hidden in them. They ought not therefore to be abandoned or despised. To me, then, the Church is what the starry skies are to the astronomer. 1 know there are other things in creation besides the Church; but I am only very partially interested in them. Practically to me the world means the Church. For the only interest I can take in the world outside the Church arises from the fact that the Church must be affected by its movements. I delight in all progresses of science, because they are an addition to the science of theology. I sympathize ardently with all social progresses, because they are at once, whether as difficulties or as facilities, questions of soul-saving. The revelations of statistics form a sort of hand-book for catholic charity. Psychology illustrates the Sacraments. Political changes interest me; for they all act upon the wonderful fortunes of the Holy See, and are mostly for its ultimate advancement. All real widening of men’s minds by education, or literature, or art, is an effacing of prejudices against the Church, and facilitates conversion. In almost every department of knowledge the world, as it advances, keeps answering its own objections to religion; and this is both grateful and interesting. All that is wide, deep, forward, active, trustful, is most congenial with the spirit of the Church. Even the grand old science of history has taken to discovery; and its discoveries, one after the other, are so many reparations to the Church. The Church is my centre. I look at all things as revolving round it; and my interest in them is proportioned to their action upon it. The Church is my science, my taste, my interest, and my attraction. Ido not sneer at the devotion of the astronomer, and he must not sneer at mine. I tolerate the metaphysician, and he must tolerate me. I have neither fears, suspicions, nor jealous-ies of his philosophy; he must have none of my theology.
But, in reality, devotion to the Church may rest upon higher grounds than these. In my own mind it rests upon this,—and I say it with all reverence,—that it is God’s own devotion. It is God’s creation within his own creation, a creation called into being with’a specialty of love, created with the miraculous toil and human Bloodshedding of the Omnipotent. It is his own life, his own created life, in creation. Its history is his biography upon earth. Its form is the abiding of his Incarnation among men. It is thus forever repeating his Three-and-Thirty Years. It is not that he does not love the whole world, and the most out-lying souls in the world, with a strange surpassing love. On the contrary, it is for the very sake of the world that he loves the Church with a better love. If his almighty wisdom saw fit to overwhelm our liberty with its constraints, its first act would be to turn the whole world into the Church, making the Church and the world one and the same thing. The world is his creation ag Creator; and our wretchedness did not find its prodigality of love sufficient. The Church is his creation as Redeemer; and it lies in furnaces of divine love heated seven times hotter than the furnaces of creation. Thus the Church is his devotion, his complacency. He loves it with a special, an electing love. This is the true ground of our devotion to the Church. It is God’s own devotion. It is his choicest way of loving us. It _ is our choicest way of loving him.
But let us think of this, both more in detail and more at large. As a place the Church is a crea- _ tion within creation, the royal residence of the Creator-King. To its privileged jurisdiction is granted the full royalty of the whole world. Its laws are holiness. Its atmosphere is grace. Its forms are copies of divine things. Its nature is transfigured with supernatural energies. Its solemnities are celestial mysteries. It is a life, and a giving of life. But it is not only a divine copy of divine things. It contains. divine things, and lives by them. In peculiar ways of its own, it contains the Divine Persons. Thus, its life is not a mere likeness of God, though it is a likeness of him. But, when faith looks upon his likeness, it sees a further vision. The tabernacles of the Church blossom as with light; the lineaments of the Church fade as in a glorious conflagration, obliterated by the intensity of splendor; and, behold! it is Jesus himself, God and Man, within whose life we have been living; and the glory had been so gentle that we perished not! The mystery of the Blessed Sacrament is the truth of the life of the Church. We can see and revere the magnificence of the Church. But we shall know the Church better, and appreciate it more _ truly, when we have seen God. We shall perceive then, that the Church was even more full of divine mysteries than we supposed it was. This is the case with all created things. We must see — the Creator, in order to understand the plenitude of their beauty. But it will be more especially _ 80 with the Church, because of its special dignity
Jn creation. We see the mountains mirrored in the lake with exquisite distinctness. But when we have looked up to the mountains themselves, and learned them in themselves, the images in the lake are more charming, more distinct, more evidently like, more fascinatingly like, than they seemed to be before. To the eye of God the | Church must look most wonderful. It is the work of art on which all the adorable incredibilities of redemption have been expended. Every attribute has tried its handicraft upon it. It expresses the secrets of the Incomprehensible, the yearnings of the Ever-blessed, the desires of the Eternal. It is draped with the golden magnificence of everlasting decrees. The beauty of the Divine Mind is suffused around it like an impalpable atmosphere of loveliness. Once he saw the woods, and the mountains, and the lakes, and the foaming rivers, and the flowery plains, which he had made, and he remained outside them, and gave them his paternal benediction. But when he had created the Church, not of earth and of his word, but of his Blood and Breath, its fair beauty so won upon him that he came into it, and multiplied himself, and hid himself, in her tabernacles, _as the birds hide themselves within the mighty woods.
This is the simple account of the Church, the chief thing to be said of it, but not the only thing.
It mirrors the hierarchies of the angels as well as the magnificence of God. It not only imitates their orders and operations, but it supplies them with new ministries, and is every day enlivening them with fresh joys. Its life is hound up with theirs, and its children mingle with them and become members of their choirs. As to men, it initiates them into a divine citizenship. It explains their destinies. It ennobles their disabilities. It anticipates their glory. It gives a value to their sorrows and a significance to their joys. It emancipates them from their own littleness, and it conveys to them God’s forgiveness of their sins. It puts them to dwell in the suburbs of heaven even while they are still being tried on earth. Asa power, the Church has been the most unearthly, the most remarkable, the most successful upon earth. It has no parallel and no analogy. Itisa problem which neither historical nor political nor philosophical solutions satisfy. It has a history of peculiar interest and of the most extraordinary variety. In duration its chronicles surpass those of the most ancient monarchy. The records of revolutions are less various, while the history of a single town is less consistent. In the romance of vicissitudes and in dramatic changes no history is to be compared to it. In our own times it is leading avery peculiar life under entirely novel circumstances; and in the midst of universal fluctuation and distrust it is a monument of self-confident tranquillity. It is certain of ultimate conquest, and equally certain of present suffering. Its power and its spirit are felt in the most retired sanctuaries of the private life of a hundred bloods and1 nations. Yet all this is without sound and without effort. While it is as solid as adamant, it is as pervasive as the air. Who ever saw any thing earthly like it? Moreover, it is the only institution of time which wi!! be prolonged into eternity. The grandest monarchies of earth will cast no shadow in heaven. Dumbness and oblivion will pass upon all philosophies. Not a single literature has any eternal meaning. The most magnificent civilization represents nothing on the other side of the grave. The most glorious revolutions have only a temporal significance. The fortunes of the whole earth will leave no impression, will transfer no lines, upon eternity, further than as they may have helped or hindered the salvation of this or that individual soul; whereas the grandeur of the Church on earth is but a prelude to its grandeur up in heaven.
It is no wonder, then, that the Church should lay such a singular grasp on our affections and our loyalty. On the lowest grounds it may rank © with astronomy, or psychology, or politics, as the devotion of a life; only that the exclusiveness of the devotion, which in the case of those sectional sciences is a narrowness and a defect, is here a devotedness rather than an exclusiveness, because that which is universal cannot be exclusive. Devotion to the Church combines all interests. It takes in every duty. It provides for every responsibility. It intensifies every love. It embraces all social life, and ennobles it by its embrace. It penetrates all private life, and sanctifies it by its penetration. It is the unity of all knowledge and the harmony of all philosophy. It is interested in all diploma- 27 cies, and it survives them all. Its minuteness allows nothing to be overlooked, while its comprehensiveness includes every thing within its influence. In a word, the Church is that part of every thing, that side of every thing, that view of every thing, that interference with every thing, which represents the double sovereignty and jurisdiction of the Creator and the Redeemer.
All this, as we shall see shortly, is part of the devotion to the Precious Blood. But we must pass on at present to look at the Church from one particular point of view,—its life of devotions. In nothing is the beauty of the Church more ravishing, or its disclosures more intimately divine. Full of divine instincts, its worship grows with all the exuberance of a tropical forest, covering itself with verdure and with blossoms. It puts forth its devotions with all the freedom of a tree which has liberty to spread on all sides. Everywhere it is free of the sun and air. There is nothing to hinder its development, nothing to hamper its genius, nothing to disfigure its natural forms and amplitudes of beauty. The diversity of its blossoms is astonishing. It makes devotions out of joys, out of sorrows, and out of glories. It has a treasury of innumerable mysteries, and out of every mystery it can unfold many devotions. Ages roll on. None of the old blossoms wither or fall off. Yet new varieties are added. Its colors grow more beautiful than ever, and its fragrances are multiplied. This is the way in which the age of the Church is forever clothing itself with the loveliness of a new youth. It is more beautiful now than it was three centuries ago; and three centuries hence we shall almost envy out of our calm in heaven the fortune of those who come after us, and are sanctified by the novelties of glory in the Church. Taken with all its array of manifold devotions, the Church worships the Holy Trinity with such magnificently expansive freedom and such large variety that we can hardly, even in our imagination, embrace it in one view. Yet there is a deep-seated unity in this diversity of worship. When we see a tree in a favorable soil and position as it were wantoning in its robust vigor, flinging out its year’s growth on this side and on that, here filling itself in with close pendant foliage in curves which might have been drawn with instruments, there presenting an indented outline with inlets of blue sky among its branches, it seems hard to believe that there is a law under all this irregular exuberance; and yet so it is. In like manner dogmatic theology is the hidden law, the infallible unity of all this multiform devotion of the Church. It is a law, whose control is unerring and never relaxed, and yet whose pressure in no way checks exuberance. Indeed, it would be more true to say that the very law itself is the prolific fountain of these varieties. The science of theology is forever passing into love, and, as love receives it, it transmutes it into devotion. These devotions of the Church are the giving forth of its private affections and secret inner life. By them we know the Church better than by eny thing else. They are the action of the Holy Ghost upon her heart, made visible by this perennial springtide of heavenly flowers. We may say that we come to know that Ever-blessed Spirit better by these devotions than by any thing else. They are a revelation of himself. If we examine this seemingly confused multitude of devotions, we shall find that they may be parted.
_ off into two spheres, forming indeed but one world, and the one sphere for the most part lying within the other. Nevertheless, we shall attain clearness by so regarding it; and in fact the division is a real one. One sphere of devotions is based upon the Incarnation. It glasses the Thirty-Three Years, and continually lives them over again in devotions. The Soul of Jesus, his Body, his Blood, and the Divinity, as united to the Sacred Humanity, are abysses which seem to give forth devotions inexhaustibly. In reading the lives of saints and holy persons we are constantly coming across devotions which we never heard of before. The seventeenth century alone gave birth to some hundreds. Among the Carmelites they have gone on blooming as in a garden ever since the days of St. Teresa. Sometimes a holy man has looked at the Incarnation under a new aspect, due partly to the peculiarity of his own genius and partly to the characteristics of his times,—not of course without God impressing a direction upon these things,— and then his influence or his writings have given birth to manifold devotions. This is the case with Cardinal Berulle, with Father Condren, Father Eudes, and also with Olier, in France. The same may be said of Maria Tommasi, Isabella Farnese, Domenica del Paradiso, St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi, and Cherubina dell’ Agnus Dei, among the Italians. St. Gertrude, St Mechtildis, and Elizabeth of Schaunberg have done the same in Ger-
THE DEVOTION TO THE PRECIOUS Dp. Sb many; and Marina d’Escobar, Mary of Mary of Antigua, and Isabella of Beniganim, for the Spanish peninsula. While one set of devotions have followed the division of the Soul, the Body, the Blood, and the Divinity of Jesus, another set have gone by times and places. Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth, Galilee, and Jerusalem have each their constellations of devotion proper to them. Then again, devotions follow the different lives of our Blessed Lord,—his Life in the Womb, his Infant Life, his Hidden Life, his Public Life, his Suffering Life, his Risen Life, his Ascended Life, and his Sacramental Life. Or they follow his offices, or his Names, or his joys, or his sorrows, or his glories, or his journeys, or his words, or his apostles, or classes of his actions. Again, his Mother is a perfect world of devotions, with her various mys-teries and ministries and offices and graces and endurances and identifications with himself. For eighteen hundred years Catholic devotions have come forth from the Incarnation, as from an inward world of spiritual beauty, in magnificent procession. There is no sign of their ending. Each new devotion seems to make more devotions possible. They multiply by the very outpouring of them. Each devotion becomes the head of a family of devotions. It seizes upon some saint or upon some religious congregation, and perpetuates itself, and multiplies itself, and is a fresh visible adornment to the Church. Nothing gives us such a vivid idea of the inexhaustible treasures of the Thirty-Three Years as this multiplicity of devotions. We see how the eternal contemplation of the Blessed may feed itself upon those years, and 27% they shall yet remain unfathomed and, by created intellect, unfathomable.
These devotions are like particular revelations. They are constantly telling us either what we did not know before about our dearest Lord, or what had never struck us before. It is the Holy Ghost adding to our knowledge of Jesus, or bringing to.
our minds his sayings, his doings, and his ways. The theology of these devotions, and the way in which they are started and propagated by the private revelations of the saints, by visions, voices, and apparitions, make them to bea sort of complement to the Four Gospels. This, then, is one view which the Church presents to us in her devotions. If we could see her in her whole extent, we should see this Bride of Christ living over again, in all its breadth, if not in all its depth, the earthly life of Jesus: or, to speak more accurately, he is living it endlessly over again in her. There are a thousand Bethlehems, a thousand Nazareths, and a thousand Calvaries, scattered through the Church. There are visible similitudes of his outward actions. There are ascetical reiterations of his inward dispositions. There are mystical continuances of his various lives. The whole earth has come to be a Holy Land. Palestine has swelled out into a world. Every Christian family is a Bethlehem. Every catholic village is a Nazareth, every -city a Jerusalem. All shrines of human ~ sorrow are Gethsemanes. There are Calvaries everywhere. ‘There are countless cloisters, nay, countless single hearts, which are in themselves Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Calvary at once. Look over the Charch with this light upon it; and then look upward to the Face of Jesus bending over it in tenderness and joyous love, and think how holy and how zealous and how ardent miust be our devotion to the Church, if it is to resemble his complacency.
The other sphere of the devotions of the Church is based upon the Attributes of God. What the various mysteries of Jesus are in one sphere of devotions, the various Attributes of God are in the other. The Church receives from heaven upon its placid bosom the image of Jesus; it receives also the image of the Uncreated. We can worship God in his simplicity. We can also have a special devotion to his simplicity. But in this latter case we are regarding his simplicity as one of his Attributes. We cannot have a devotion to God as. God. Wesimply worship the Majesty of the Godhead with trembling adoration. The feeling and the act are distinct from devotion. But we can be said to have a devotion to the various Attributes into which we divide his simplicity and by which we conceive his perfection. In strict truth, as I have warned you before, he is all his Attributes, and all his Attributes are himself. But, in our language and in our conceptions, his Attributes are not himself: they are less than himself; they are parts, for so our ignorance necessitates us to depict them, of Him who is indivisible. Thus they stand in the same relation to God that the mysteries of the Incarnation stand in to our Lord. When we have a devotion to one of our Lord’s joys, we know that there is something which it does not include, either other joys, or his sorrows, or his glories. So when we have a devotion to God’s justice, we know that we are for the present leaving out of direct view his mercy. The finite may worship the Infinite as infinite, and in his unity. It can only study the Infinite in detail; and these details are the creations and conveniences of its own limited mind, not substantive external truths. Thus there is no such thing as omnipotence: but there is a Being who is omnipotent, or (if the idiom of our language would have permitted me so to express myself) who is omnipotence. ‘There is no such thing as omnipresence: but there is a Being who is omnipresent. I say this for the sake of accuracy, and to anticipate misunderstanding. But the devotion to the Attributes of God is practically a very simple matter to the most ordinarily pious believer.
Among the children of the Church, chiefly but not exclusively those who are aiming at perfection, there exists this devotion to the Attributes of God. It is less universal, as a special devotion, than devotions to the Incarnation; and if has also this peculiarity, that, whereas devotion to the mys-teries of the Sacred Humanity can exist without any special or pronounced devotion to the Attributes of God, this last devotion is always accompanied by some special devotions founded on the Incarnation. It is one of the common marks of a spiritual delusion, when men are without some special devotion to the mysteries of Jesus, and affect to meditate or contemplate the divine perfections instead. Some holy persons have a peculiar devotion to the Attributes of God in general, and in their prayers change from one to another; and this change is very often influenced by the feasts and seasons of the year, in consequence of the connection and sympathy which appear to exist between particular Attributes of God and particular mysteries of the Incarnation. Others, again, devote themselves to honor some one Attribute, and to make it the main, if not the sole, subject of their meditations. There are examples of this devotion, which carry with them great authority. Some have always had this attraction to the Attributes of God; and it has even given a peculiar shape to their devotion to the mysteries of Jesus, especially the Passion. Some have arrived at it through long meditation on the Sacred Humanity, as if they had been raised by the contemplation of the Sacred Humanity to that of the Divinity. But even in this case the devotion to the Sacred Humanity is rather heightened than abandoned. These positive devotions to the divine Attributes arise very often from the characteristics of the mind and disposition, not of course without the concurrence of grace, and even some special leadings of the Holy Ghost. Sometimes the attraction seems to be entirely supernatural, and not unfrequently distinct and sudden like a vocation.
But these attractions to the Divine Attributes, like those of the mysteries of the Incarnation, do not always rest in devotion. They assign vocations and pursuits. They cast a man’s external actions into some peculiar mould. The whole life becomes shaped on the Attribute to which the soul is specially devoted. This is more particulariy the case with the two Attributes of justice and sanctity. Some saintly persons, devoted to these
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322 THE DEVOTION TO THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. Attributes, have been bidden to lead lives of marvellous expiations or reparations. The instincts of the Holy Ghost have urged them into terrible novelties of penance, or strange depths of inward self-abasement. Their lives have been admirable rather than imitable. Instances of this might be given from the Chronicles of Religious Orders, especially those of Carmel and the Visitation, and also from the lives of many of those who have had the stigmata. If devotion to the Attributes of God proceeds to the extremity of moulding the outward life, much more may we expect to find it shaping inward holiness, and stamping a peculiar eharacter upon our spirituality. Even the eternity of God, seemingly the least likely of his Attributes for such a purpose, has been made to be the form of the holiness of some very interior and elevated souls.2
I believe the agency of the Attributes of God in the spiritual life to be much more extensive than is commonly supposed. In other words, the Church is a truer image of the invisible majesty of God than our faith is ordinarily allowed to perceive. His perfections impress themselves upon.
his creatures, very deeply, even when invisibly. There are certain phenomena in the-spiritual life, very delicate and very volatile, which lead to the supposition that the action of some one Attribute lies at the bottom of each man’s vocation, as well as of each devotion in the Church. If this be so, and if we consider it in connection with the affinity between nature and grace, we shall sometimes wonder whether each soul that is created is not created in the special likeness of some one Attribute of God, ranged as it were under the banners of that one Attribute, and called by a very sweet vocation to form its life upon it.
But these are speculations. Certain it is, that the Church worships God in all his breadth, so far as creatures can do so, and produces a unity of worship through this multiplicity of devotions to his perfections. One soul, one saint, one order, cannot do the whole work by itself; but the whole work is done, and it is done by the harmony and conjunction of them all. It is the affectionate conspiracy of all created beauty to make a worthy offering to the Uncreated Loveliness. It is difficult ~ to make pictures of spiritual things. But it brings wonderful thoughts into our minds, and vast indescribable images, if we try to picture the Church to ourselves as thus outstretching itself to enclose all the Attributes of the Most High, one while rising to each of them, like the arms of the great sea flung upward to the moon, and offering to each the incense of a peculiar devotion,—and then another while lying passive while they descend upon it, and leave upon it nameless signs of their mysterious contact. The depths of the Church, like the depths of ocean, are fields of wild flowery loveliness, strangely lighted by the sun through the translucent waters; and thither the glory of God descends, at twilight as he came to Adam, or at midnight as he came to Mary, or in the morning as he came to Israel in the wilderness, to pasture the beautiful flock of his perfections. The Churcb
——.t is the fairest of her splendors—is the mother of her Maker’s glory.
It is natural, almost necessary, when we are speaking of the devotions of the Church, to speak also, and once again, of devotion to the Church; but it is still more necessary to do so, when we have to speak of the devotion to the Precious Blood. The Church, as we have already said, is the creation of the Precious Blood, the institution which it has founded, and wherein its virtue continues to reside. It is impossible to study the grandeurs of the Precious Blood without being led at almost every step into the magnificences of the Sacraments; and then again the Sacraments are the structure of the Church. The theology of the Sacraments and the theology of the Church are but one. We cannot separate them without making both of them unintelligible. With these theologies, the theology of the Precious Blood is also inextricably intertwined. This will strike any thoughtful student of theology. Moreover, as we have seen, the Precious Blood ministers especially to the dominion and magnificence of God; and the Church is the living vicegerent of God’s dominion, and the Sacraments are a peculiar and unparalleled emanation of his magnificence; and thus from another point of view the Precious Blood is bound up with the Church and the Sacraments. The instincts of the saints have united the two devotions. Those, whose lives strike us because of the active interest they took in the outward politics and destinies of the Church, an interest often at seeming variance with their manifest call to contemplation, are almost always found to have had a peculiar devotion to the Precious Blood. The Precious Blood magnifies the Church, and the Church magnifies the Precious Blood. There was once a narrow-minded heresy which denied that the Precious Blood was shed for all, maintaining ‘that it was shed only for a chosen fow. Like all heresies which depreciate the grandeurs of Jesus, it was an especially soul-destroying heresy; and, like all soul-destroying heresies, it clothed itself in the garb of harshness, as if the pomp of rigor was to give it the venerable dignity of holiness. We shall avoid falling into cognate errors about the Church, if we remember its connection with the Precious Blood. The object of the Church, like the object of the Precious Blood, is universality. It is not a snare of God to overwhelm poor souls with the insupportable responsibilities of terrible privileges. It is an institution for the express purpose of making salvation easier, shorter, safer, more various, and more universal. Its exclusiveness is concentration rather than exclusiveness. It is its surest and its swiftest road to being universal. If the responsibilities of grace were actually difficulties in the way of salvation, it is plain that heathenism would be the best religion, bevause it would be the least perilous. If the prodigality of God's love be only a burden made the more crushing by its beautiful excess, then God’s gifts are snares to entrap his creatures, for the future purpose of justifying his vengeance. If men are less likely to be saved because they have more - to answer for, it is cruel to preach the Gospel, barbarous to invite them into the Church, treacherous to allure them to the Sacraments. On this theory, 28 the Church is part of the machinery of God’s vindictive justice; and it is not life, as the Bible calls it, but a greater likelihood of death, “to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” This unfilial depreciation of the Church is also a depreciation of the grandeurs of Jesus, similar to that of Jansenism, though coming by a different road and from an opposite quarter. It will be found to be accompanied with the same disesteem of the Sacra-_ ments, and to delight in the same parade of rigor. But it is a theory which cannot consist with a life of prayer, and which will wither before a growing devotion to the Precious Blood. We must learn _ the theology of the Church and of the Sacraments in its union with the theology of the Precious Blood. Theology will make our devotion more devout; and devotion will make our theology more true.
In treating of the devotion to the Precious Blood we naturally begin with its history. In one sense, and a very notable sense, the whole history of the Church is a history of the devotion to the Precious Blood; for it is a history of the preaching of the Gospel, and of the administration of the Sacraments. It is the prominent devotion of dogmatic theology; for it is that upon which the doctrine of redemption lays the greatest stress. But we are speaking of it rather as a special and separate devotion. It certainly seems to have existed as such in the mind and heart of St. Paul, if we may judge from the evident fondness with which he dwells upon it in his epistles, with reiterations made on purpose, as if they were grateful to his love. We may call him the doctor of the Precious eee eT ome Sy ee
Blood, and the author of the special devotion to it. It was in this devotion that the strength of his -apostolic instinct lay. It was the natural fruit of the peculiar magnificence of his conversion and vocation. Among the Fathers we have St. Chrysostom in the Kast and St. Austin in the West, who may be regarded as striking examples of a special devotion to the Precious Blood. The zeal for souls, which burned in St. Chrysostom, and the enthusiasm for the liberalities of redeeming grace, which was quite a passion with St. Austin, explain the prominence of this devotion in their writings. Among the saints, St. Gertrude’s revelations are full of the sweetest and deepest things about the Precious Blood. But the devotion seems to take its modern form and consistence chiefly in St. Catherine of Siena, whom we may justly term the Prophetess of the Precious Blood.3 She has singled out this devotion with a more obvious predilection; and she has singled it out as a remedy needful for her times, and one upon which, in her judgment, sufficient stress had not been laid. We read of Osanna of Mantua, that, so vehement was her devotion to the Precious Blood, she could never see any human blood without at once going into an ecstasy. Coupled with her singular devotion to the Person of the Eternal Word, St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi had also a special devotion to the Precious Blood.
The lives of the saints are of course replete with instances of devotion to the Precious Blood; and it would be impossible to enumerate them all. Let it suffice to give some specimens. The Venerable Maria Francesca of the Five Wounds, an Alcantarine nun at Naples, was communicated by St. Raphael out of the chalice, the priest missing it at the time of mass, and observing a diminution in the Sacred Blood. We can hardly doubt that this grace was an answer to an intense desire, and a reward for a special devotion to the Precious Blood.4 In that amazing and delightful repertory of spiritual science, the Chronicles of the French Carmelites, we read of Frances of the Mother of
God, that one day before Communion those words | of the Apocalypse were deeply imprinted on her mind:—He hath loved us and washed away our sins in his Blood. Presently our Lord said to her interiorly, I have shed my Blood for your sins, and now I come in Holy Communion to wash away the stains which remain. When she had received our Lord, she saw her soul all covered with Blood. In the life of the Venerable Anne of Jesus, the companion of St. Teresa, we read that once in communicating she had her mouth sensibly filled with very sweet Blood, which flowed from the Host; and another time she had a vision of the joy which an infinite number of blessed souls have in that Blood in heaven.t Marcello Benci often when he hes ae to ly OW eee fa [ie served St. Philip’s mass, saw after consecration the chalice full of Blood.5 Margaret of Beaune, the Carmelitess, is well known in the Church for the new devotions to the Infant Jesus with which she enriched it. Patrignani, in his life of her, tells us that she so habitually saw the Blood of Jesus in the souls of men, and saw them so beautified by it, that she could not bear to hear any one blamed, however justly; because of the reverence she felt for wicked souls through the Blood of Jesus which she beheld in them. When Margaret of the Passion, Carmelitess at Rouen, was on her death-bed, she said that the Blood of Jesus had been applied to her, and that it had caused her a light and brief pain, while it had filled her soul with God, and infused into her a profound peace, and had par- - doned all her sins.{ But it is useless to multiply instances.
Another development of the devotion to the Precious Blood has arisen from the possession of relics, whether of what was once Precious Blood or of miraculous Blood. These have been the object, not only of a local worship, but of devout pilgrimages, which have often led to signal conversions of sinners. Beyrout, Bruges, Saintes, Mantua, the imperial monastery of Weingarten, which claimed to possess the portion of the Blood. of Mantua which had been given to the Emperor Henry the Third, and the English monasteries of Ashridge and Hailes, may be quoted as instances of this kind of devotion.§
- Vita, p. 99. ¢ Chroniques, ii. 417
2 See Haag Sanguis Christi in terra vindicatus, 1758. 28*
There is no surer sign of the growth of a special devotion in the Church than the erection of a Confraternity, representing and embodying it. There was an ancient confraternity of the Precious Blood at Ravenna. Another was erected in Rome in the Pontificate of Gregory XIII. which was confirmed by Sixtus V. It was afterward merged in the confraternity of the Gonfalone. Its members were priests, and took upon themselves the obliga- — tion of preaching missions. But the pontificate of Pius VII. was the great epoch in the history of this devotion. An archconfraternity of the Precious Blood was set up at Rome in the Church of San Nicola in Carcere by Albertini, Bishop of Terracina, Bonanni, Bishop of Norcia, and Gas-pare del Bufalo, Canon of San Marco. The pope enriched this confraternity, and also the devotion independently of the confraternity, with great indulgences. He also granted indulgences to the Passionists and to the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, in favor of this devotion. The Congregation of the Missioners of the Precious Blood was founded in the same pontificate by Gaspare del Bufalo, who was likewise the founder of a congregation of religious women devoted to the worship of the Precious Blood. He died at Rome in the odor of sanctity on the 28th of December, 1857. It was in the church of his Missionaries of the Precious Blood at Rimini, that the miraculous appearances took place a few years ago, in connection with a picture of our Lady; and this fact is probably not without some supernatural significance regarding the devotion to the Precious Blood.
I have not been able to trace satisfactorily the rise of confraternities of the Precious Blood. But their existence in Spain seems to betoken some special devotion to the Precious Blood in that country, which has been the nursery of so many grandeurs of the faith, and which the supernatural has so often chosen with a kind of predilection as the theatre of its manifestations, as if it were a kind of Western Palestine shutting up the end of the Mediterranean, to pass the faith across the broad Atlantic. In the life of Anne of St. Augustine, the Carmelitess, it is said that she always received with hospitality those who went about collecting alms for the confraternities of the Precious Blood, which are spoken of as having been “erected in many places.” She died in 1624.6 In the life of Brother Francis of the Infant Jesus, a Carmelite lay-brother, mention is made of a confraternity of the Precious Blood in the street of St. Vincent at Valentia in 1601.7 But I have not been able to find any account of these confraternities. These scattered notices suffice to show that it was a popular Spanish devotion.
Among the reforms of the Cistercianesses, there arose a Congregation of Divine Providence, with which St. Francis of Sales had to do, as it was founded with his assistance, and by the Mother de Ballon, a near relation of his. Out of thi Congregation, and under the auspices of the Mother de Ponconas, sprang another Congregation, entitled Bernardines of the Precious Blood, which reached its full development in Paris in 1654. The strife between the Mothers de Ballon and de Pongonas occupies perhaps the least edifying chapter of monastic history, and it is only alluded to here because of its connection with the history of the devotion to the Precious Blood. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Vincent of Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, founded a military order of Redemptorists of the Precious Blood, in order to guard the relic of the Precious Blood in the cathedral of St. Andrew at Mantua. Our own England was not without its place in the history of this devotion. Richard of Cornwall, brother of Henry the Third, brought from Ger-many a large relic of the Precious Blood, and founded a Congregation entitled the Congregation of Good-Men, (Bonhommes,) in order to keep, to watch, and to honor this relic. He placed two-thirds of it in a monastery which he built at Ash-ridge near Berkhampstead, in Buckinghamshire, and the other third in a similar monastery at Hailes, in Gloucestershire. The Bonhommes had the reputation of being great mystics. They lived under the rule of St. Augustin.7
Leo XII. enriched this devotion with indul- ' gences. But the present pontificate of Pius 1X. has been another grand epoch in the history of this devotion, similar to that of Pius VII. In this pontificate the red scapular of the Vincentians has been instituted, in consequence, it is said, of some private revelation; and it has been indulgenced by the Sovereign Pontiff. The confraternity of the Precious Blood has been enriched with still further indulgences; and similar confraternities have been multiplied. One—it is believed the first in England since those of Richard of Cornwall in the middle of the thirteenth century—was established in the Church of St. Wilfrid among the Staffordshire hills in 1847, with the approval of the bishop, and had a great success. It was afterward transferred to the church of the London Oratory, and was re-erected by a papal rescript, August 12,1850. In this confraternity more than thirty-eight thousand members have been enrolled, and one hundred and four religious communities; and the numbers are increasing daily. Besides this, there are several other local confraternities affiliated with it; and others which have been independently erected at a subsequent date, both in England and Ireland.
There was already a commemorative feast of the Precious Blood in Lent. But when Pius IX. returned to the Holy City from his exile at Gaeta, he issued a decree to the whole world, instituting a new feast of the Precious Blood on the first Sunday of July. There is surely a great significance in this decree. The Holy See has taken the lead in this special devotion, and has thereby immensely increased its popularity, the usual result of authority. Moreover, the selection of the devotion is of still greater significance. The latest new devotion of the Church was the devotion to the Sacred Heart. The choice has fallen next upon the Precious Blood, which is as it were a development of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. So that there is a sort of historical or chronological fitness in it. It seems part of catholic piety to believe that, while these things are by no means supposed to lie within the gift of infallibility, there is a peculiar guidance of the Holy Spirit in them. It is he who as it were writes the history of the Church. It is to his instincts that we reverently refer all movements which have to do with the spiritual life and devotion of the faithful, and also the choice of the times at which these movements are made. Such movements are parts of a whole, steps toward an end; but the whole and the end only become visible to us when they have grown a portion of past history. They mean much more than we see, or than can be comprehended by one generation. The circumstances, under which this decree of a new feast of the Precious Blood was issued, stamp upon the feast the same character of thanksgiving which belongs to the feast of the Help of Christians. It is an historical monument of a vicissitude of the Holy See, a perpetual Te Deum for a deliverance of the Vicar of Christ.
All devotions have their characteristics; all of them have their own theological meanings. We must say something, therefore, upon the characteristics of the devotion to the Precious Blood. In a? “, _ Lait, K4 reality the whole Treatise has more or less illustrated this matter. But something still remains to be said, and something will bear to be repeated.
We will take the last first. Devotion to the Precious Blood is the devotional expression of the prominent and characteristic teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul is the apostle of redeeming grace. <A devout study of his epistles would be our deliverance from most of the errors of the day. He is truly the apostle of all ages. To each age doubtless he seems to have a special mission. Certainly his mission to ours is very special. The very air we breathe is Pelagian. Our heresies are only novel shapes of an old Pelagianism. The spirit of the world is eminently Pelagian. Hence it comes to pass that wrong theories among us are always constructed round a nucleus of Pelagianism; and Pelagianism is just the heresy which is least able to breathe in the atmosphere of St. Paul. It is the age of the natural as opposed to the supernatural, of the acquired as opposed to the infused, of the active as opposed to the passive. This is what I said in an earlier chapter, and here repeat. Now, this exclusive fondness for the natural is on the whole very captivating. It takes with the young, because it saves thought. It does not explain difficulties; but it lessens the number of difficulties to be explained. It takes with the idle; for it dispenses from slowness and research. It takes with the unimaginative, because it withdraws just the very element in religion which teases them. It takes with the worldly, because it subtracts the enthusiasm from piety and the sacrifice from spirituality. It takes with the controversial, because it is a short road and a shallow ford. It forms a school of thought which, while it admits that we have abundance of grace, intimates that we are not much the better for it. It merges privileges in responsibilities, and makes the sovereignty of God odious by representing it as insidious. All this whole spirit, with all its ramifications, perishes in the sweet fires of devotion to the Precious Blood.
The time is also one of libertinage; and a time of libertinage is always, with a kind of practical logic, one of infidelity. Whatever brings out God’s side in creation, and magnifies his incessant supernatural operation in it, is the controversy which infidelity can least withstand. Now, the devotion to the Precious Blood does this in a very remarkable way. It shows that the true significance of every thing is to be found in the scheme of redemption, apart from which it is useless to discuss the problems of creation. Itis a revelation to us of the character of God as well as of the work of Jesus. By bringing out the wonders of the Church and the energies of the Sacraments, it insinuates into our hearts the love of the sovereignty of God, together with a sense of perfect freedom and enlargement. By drawing out into strong lights the most intimate human realities of the Incarnation, it meets the false spirituality, which sometimes runs into heresy, about the Sacred Humanity. More especially does it war against that dangerous fastidiousness which even believers sometimes feel, through want of reverential discipline of mind, about the physical mysteries of Jesus, especially those of his Passion.
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This fastidiousness is a deep source of widely-spreading evil. It makes us ungenuine and profane. Reverence contemplates divine things, and does not divert its thoughts from the physical horrors in which, because of our sins, those divine things have deigned to manifest themselves.. Magdalen holds Jesus by his feet, while the Gerasens entreat him to depart from their vicinity. We lose much which we cannot afford to lose, by any thing which makes our devotion to the Passion less faithful and less real.
Another characteristic of the devotion to the Precious Blood is the way in which it brings out and keeps before us the principle of sacrifice. Sacrifice is peculiarly the Christian element of holiness; and it is precisely the element which corrupt nature dislikes and resists. There is no end to the delusions which our self-love is fertile enough to bring forth in order to evade the obligation of sacrifice, or to narrow its practical appli. — cation. If it were enough to have correct views, or high feelings, or devout aspirations, it would be easy to be spiritual. The touchstone is mortification. Worldly amusements, domestic comforts, nice food, and a daily doing our own will in the lesser details of life, are all incompatible with sanctity, when they are habitual and form the ordinary normal current of our lives. Pain is necessary to holiness. Suffering is essential to the killing of self-love. Habits of virtue cannot by any possibility be formed without voluntary mortification. Sorrow is needful for the fertility of grace. If a man is not making constant sacrifices, he is deceiving himself, and is not advancing in spirituality. If a man is not denying himself daily, he is not carrying the cross. These are axioms which at all times offend our weakness and self-indulgence. But they are of peculiar importance in times like these, when comforts and even luxuries are almost universal. It is comfort which is the ruin of holiness. Gayety, fashion, ostentation, expensiveness, dissipation, frivolity, and the other things which make up a London season, are undoubtedly not the component parts of sanctity. But in my estimation they are far less worldly, have far less of the poison of worldliness in them, than the daily worship of comfort which distinguishes the great bulk of quiet people in these days. Many are not attracted by balls, parties, and similar fashions of amusement, and therefore have no merit in keeping away from them. But these same persons may set a great value upon the uninterrupted course of their daily comforts. They rise when they will, and gather every convenience round their rising. Their meals must be elegant, and pleasant, and faultless. Their servant-machinery must go smoothly, anticipating wants and keeping out of sight annoyances. Their time must be for the most part at their own disposal. They must have the pastime of amusing conversation and of social intercourse; and they. must be able to satisfy their restlessness, when they please, by change of air and scene and company. There is generally a far greater intensity of worldliness in all this than in the pleasure-hunting riot of a London season. Thus we often find, in connection with this last, great graces, generous sacrifices, unexpected mortifications, and unkilled _ heavenly longings. - But these are hardly ever found in the quiet unobtrusive worship of domestie comfort. Yearly out of the dissipations of the great world come grand vocations. Every London season inscribes against its will some few glorious conversions in the annals of grace, conversions whose peculiar glory is the frankness of their generosity. Nothing grand ever comes out of the daily round of comfort. The heroic things of Christian attainment have less chance in quiet gardens and by pleasant river-sides than in the ball-room or the court. There is a smoothness in the mere lapse of a comfortable life which is fatal to holiness. Now, all the forms, and images, and associations, and pictures, and ideas, of the devotion to the Precious Blood breathe sacrifice. Their fragrance is the odor of sacrifice. Their beauty is the austerity of sacrifice. They tease the soul with a constant sense of dissatisfaction and distrust with whatsoever is not sacrifice; and this teasing is the solicitation of grace. In time they infect us with a love of sacrifice; and to gain this love of sacrifice is to have surmounted the first ascent of holiness, and to be breathing the pure air and yet treading the more level road of the upper table-land of the mountains of perfection. It is the very mission of the devotion to the Precious Blood to preach a crusade against quiet sinless comforts. The Mass is the compendium of the Gospel. Itisa heresy in doctrine to acknowledge the Sacrament and to deny theSacrifice. Worldliness is guilty of asimilar practical heresy with regard to holiness. It admits the claims of all its obligations but one; and that is the obligation of sacrifice.
It is another characteristic of the devotion to the Precious Blood that it does not usurp the place of other devotions, but by its own growth makes more room for them. We cannot have an equal devotion for all the things to which we ought to be devout. We have not breadth enough for it. We are obliged to take things in detail. Calvary on the whole turns our thoughts from Bethlehem, and Bethlehem on the whole turns our thoughts from Calvary. One mystery comes in the way of another. Devotions stand in each other’s light. There is no harm in this. It is a blameless imperfection. But it is a peculiarity of the devotion to the Precious Blood that it does not interfere with other devotions. On the contrary, it rather fosters them. For it is not only a devotion by itself, separate from other devotions, and with a spirit of its own, but it is also a part of other devotions, a particular form of other devotions, a shape which many other devotions may assume. It mingles in the most natural way with devotion to our Blessed Lady. It is an additional splendor to every one of her mysteries. It throws light upon them. It brings her into the mysteries of Jesus. It has, as we shall see afterward, a peculiar connection with the Immaculate Conception. It forms in itself a separate devotion to our dearest Mother, as the fountain of the Precious Blood, a devotion of the most inexpressible tenderness, a devotion to her immaculate heart and sinless blood. |
It is also a variety of devotion to the Passion. It furnishes a point of view from which we may regard each separate mystery, while it is also a mould in which we can fuse all the mysteries of the Passion into one. It is thus a unity of the devotion to the Passion as well as a variety of it, besides being in itself an additional devotion to the Passion. When we wish to range the whole Passion into one view, we find that simply to look upon it as the single mystery of the Passion, it is too large for us, and becomes vague. Now, vagueness is precisely what we must try to avoid in devotion to the Passion. Its virtue resides in its vividness. Unless it be vivid, it will not be true; and unless it be true, it will not be reverent. Thus we have various devices by which we make the Passion into one mystery and yct preserve its details. We take the five trials of our Lord, or the seven journeys, or the seven words, or the five wounds. All these are excellent contrivances of love. But the Precious Blood supplies us with a more natural unity and also with a more vivid detail.
We may say the same of devotion tc Jesus Risen. It is a devotion which we cultivate by separate meditation on the beautiful apparitions of those Forty Days. It is a devotion out of which we draw bright thoughts of God, the sunniest views of his adorable sovereignty, heavenly yearnings, a more reverential and amazed devotion to our Lady, an increased zeal for souls, and all that ministers to the alacrity of holiness. Alacrity is the characteristic of this devotion. But, when we desire to make a unity of this devotion to Jesus Risen, we find it either in devotion to the Soul of our Blessed Savior, or to his Precious Blood.
Devotion to the Precious Blood also supplies us with an additional form of devotion to the Blessed
Sacrament. The devotion to the Precious Blood in the chalice may be considered not merely as an additional form of devotion, but as an additional devotion, to the Blessed Sacrament; while the special adoration of the Precious Blood, when we are kneeling before the tabernacle, is a form of devotion bringing much doctrine before us, and enabling us better to comprehend the august _ realities of that tremendous Sacrament.
But the closest alliance of the devotion to the Precious Blood is with the devotion to the Sacred Heart. The Precious Blood is the wealth of the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart is the symbol - of the Precious Blood; yet not its symbol only, but its palace, its home, its fountain. It is to the Sacred Heart that it owes the joy of its restlessness and the glory of its impetuosity. It is to the Sacred Heart that it returns with momentary swiftness, and assails it, as a.child assails his mother, for fresh powers, for new vigor, and for the continuance of its unwearied impulses. The devotion to the Precious Blood is the devotion which unveils the physical realities of the Sacred Heart. The devotion to the Sacred Heart is the figurative expression of the qualities, dispositions, and genius of the Precious Blood,—only that the figure is itself a living and adorable reality. The Sacred Heart is the Heart of our Redeemer: yet it was not the Sacred Heart which redeemed us. It was precisely the Precious Blood, and nothing but the Precious Blood, which was the chosen instrument of ourredemption. It is this singular reality, this. anmated office, this unshared privilege, in which the grandeur of the Precious Blood resides, a grandeur which is also communicated to the devotion. lf it were not for this, the devotion to the Precious Blood and the devotion to the Sacred Heart would - be bat one devotion, two aspects of the same devotion. ‘The one would honor the actual workings of the Human Nature of our dearest Lord, while the other would magnify its inward dispositions, its hidden sweetness, its tender characteristics, its profuse liberalities, and its magnificent affections. One would have to do with operations, the other with significances. One would be occupied with processes, the other with consequences. ‘The one would be the meaning of the other, and a commentary upon the other. So close is their alliance. But the mysterious fact that the Blood, and only the Blood, of Jesus, was the chosen price of man’s redemption, and that it was only the Blood, and the Blood shed to death, which did actually redeem us, confers a distinctive majesty upon the Precious Blood, in which our Lord’s Body and his Soul only participate concomitantly. Hence, while we commonly see that a devotion to the Precious Blood and a devotion to the Sacred Heart go together, we also see occasionally, and it is an exception to the rule given above, that the one does stand in way of the other, as if it were only a different aspect of the other, more congenial to the spiritual taste of the worshipper. But in reality this seeming opposition is only an evidence _ of the closeness of their alliance.
In connection with this harmony of the devotion to the Precious Blood with other devotions, we should mention another of its characteristics, which is of much interest in a devotional point of view. This is the way in which it links all the lives of Jesus into one. It does in devotion what it does also in reality. As it pervades the whole Body of our Lord and is its life, so does it mould into one all those lives, into which we are accustomed to divide our Lord’s most blessed life, for the purposes of devotion. Every thing about our dearest Lord is so adorable, and at the same time so full of manifold attractions, that love is compelled to feed itself upon all the details which it can understand. Thus the divisions, and subdivisions, and the divisions of the subdivisions, which give the theology of devotion so technical an appearance, are in reality so far from being evidences of dryness that they are the very work of the assiduity and faithfulness of love. Jesus in the Womb, and an Infant, and a Boy, Jesus in his Ministry, in his Passion, and his Risen Life, and in his Ascended Life, and Jesus in his Sacramental Concealment, are all different lives, and yet the same. His Nine Months in the Womb are an epoch of the most amazing mysteries, the pleasant food of deep and contemplative worship. His Infancy is not his Boyhood, nor his Boyhood his Infancy. The Preacher in the green fields is not the Sufferer upon Calvary, —is not, and yet also is. The Risen Jesus haunting the seclusions of his dear Galilee is not the ’ Ascended Jesus whom the angels are welcoming with triumphal pomp in heaven upon his Session at the Father’s Right Hand. He is not the same, and yet he is the sar.e. Jesus in the miraculous coverts of the deep-enfolding Sacrament, hiding in the profound recesses of the light thinness of the Host, is another Jesus from any of the other seven; and yet it is the same dear Lord, so wondrously like himself in all the transmutations of his love. What interminable regions of delight are there not to traverse in these eight lives of our Blessed Lord! His sacred Humanity seems to grow to the dimensions of his divine immensity. _ Any one of these lives is too big a world for the mightiest scholar to fill with his intelligence. What could St. Michael himself do with the very shortest of them? Even Mary does not fully comprehend the beauty of her Son, nor has she ever come to the last.depth of his sweetness. Yet we shall understand nothing of these lives sepa-. rately, unless we also realize them as one. This is the secret charm of the Rosary. It simplifies whileit divides. It is a unity, while itis a variety as well. It parts our Lord in the Joys, the Sorrows, and the Glories of his Mother, and five times subdivides each of those three divisions; and yet it is all the one Jesus as Mary saw him, Mary’s Jesus, Mary’s view of him, love of him, and worship of him, which the complete Rosary brings before us. The devotion to the Precious Blood performs thesame office differently to those eight lives; and in this function lies that affinity to the Rosary which those who practise it are not slow to discover. The Precious Blood runs through all those lives, and is the one human life of all of them. Yet it is not a mere fanciful string upon which our devotion may hang them for convenience’ sake, as if they were so many beads. It is a living unity. It runs them into one, and gives a special meaning and imparts a special light to each. It is the one devotion to the Precious Blood eight times multiplied by the thoughtfulness of love.
Its use as a power of intercession is another characteristic of the devotion to the Precious Blood. It is a special office of our Saviour’s Blood to plead. Itsvery existence is the mightiest - of prayers. Its presence in heaven is a power which nothing but omnipotence exceeds. It was the power by which God redeemed man. It is the power by which man prevails with God. It. was the oblation which, when actually.offered, reconciled the offended Creator to his sinful creatures. It was the oblation the mere foresight of which made God overflow the world with mercies, and the imitation of which, in the blood of animals, was once the acceptable religion of the earth. It is the oblation, in spiritual union with which all Christian oblations are efficacious now. It is the oblation, the real repetition of which upon the altar is the continuance of the world’s right to its Maker’s forbearance. In this respect, also, the devotion to the Precious Blood has a more lively and intimate reality than other devotions. We shall speak hereafter of the spirit of this devotion, which we shall see to be a spirit of intercession. We are speaking of it here as a power, or instrument, of intercession. Many revelations from the - other world testify to the peculiar devotion of the Dead to the Precious Blood. Souls in Purgatory have been allowed to appear and to tell how, in their patient land of woe, it is Blood, and only Blood, the Blood of the Adorable Mass, which can quench the flames. The pictures, which represent the angels holding chalices to the Wounded Side of Jesus, while Mary prays beneath, and then pouring those chalices into the fires of Purgatory, simply represent this catholic truth, as it exists in the sense of the faithful. Prayers for the conversion of sinners naturally seek their efficacy in the oblation of the Precious Blood. The Precious Blood shed itself for their conversion. Conversion is its principal occupation upon earth. It is its own work more thanitisours. Used for this purpose, it is something more than intercession: it is the doing of the work, at once the prayer and the answer to the prayer. Prayer for the exaltation of the Church spontaneously flies to the Precious Blood; for the Church is the peculiar creation of that Blood. Its own devotion is devotion to the Church. It hastens therefore with promptitude to overwhelm our petitions with an unexpected magnificence of fulfilment. If we pray for the extirpation of heresies, it is the glory of the Church which weareseeking. If we pray against schisms, it is for the peace of the Church that we are pleading. If we pray for Christian kings, it is the freedom of the Church for which we are interceding. If we pray for the missions, it is the fertility’of the Church upon which we ask a blessing. If we pray for the intentions of the Sovereign Pontiff, it is the sweet Spirit-guided will of the Church which we are assisting to its accomplishment. In all these things we are exercising devotion to the Church, in which devotion the Precious Blood only waits our invitation in order to join us with impatient love. Hence we may name the devotion to the Precious Blood the Apostolic Devotion.
There is yet another characteristic, which the history of this devotion suggests to us, but which by no means depends only upon the circumstances of its history,—its peculiar alliance with the Immaculate Conception. Itis curious that both these devotions have received great contemporary developments during the present pontificate. After venturies of growth, first in popular piety and then in the schools of theology, the Immaculate Conception has received its crown in the glorious definition of the dogma. This is the grandest event of the nineteenth century. The devotion to the Precious Blood has also had its indulgences and privileges augmented, and a new memorial feast instituted in its honor. The Pope’s exile at Gaeta was sweetened by his Encyclical in favor of the Immaculate Conception. His return to Rome was celebrated by the institution of the new feast of the Precious Blood. The chief function of both these mysteries is to illustrate redeeming _grace. They both preach redemption. The Precious Blood was the very instrument which redeemed the world. The Immaculate Conception was the first, as it is the grandest, victory of redemption. Thus the Immaculate Conception is
- the highest and the eldest work of the Precious
Blood. But there is more than this in the matter. There is a sweet circle of cause and effect; now the cause is effect, and now the effect is cause For in the Immaculate Conception, which was its choicest work, the Precious Blood first took its rise. The Immaculate Conception was for the sake of the Precious Blood. It was for the insuring of its purity and the protecting of its honor. The Precious Blood raised up the mountains of the
Immaculate Conception by the subterraneous heayings of its fiery love, and then flowed down from the summits as a sweet fountain for the gladdening of the nations. The Immaculate Conception is therefore actually part of the devotion to the Precious Blood. It is creation’s richest offering, made by the queen of creatures, who thus in the jubilee of her sinless dawn crowned the Precious Blood by being crowned herself with its choicest crown.
It is no wonder, then, that we find in the two devotions, the devotion to the Precious Blood and the devotion to the Immaculate Conception, a similarity of spirit, a similarity of gifts, a similarity of graces. But what is the unshared distinction of the devotion to the Precious Blood? Has it no solitary grandeur of itsown? It has one, which is not solitary, but which it shares only with devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. The distinctive privilege of the devo-~ tion to the Precious Blood is that it has the peculiar union of adoration and devotion which is the spirituality of heaven. But let us look more minutely into the spirit of this devotion, as witnessed by the fruits which it produces in the soul.
First of all, it breeds in us an unexhansted loving wonder of the common things of the faith. The supernatural is not necessarily the same thing as the wonderful. A love of the supernatural is a higher thing than an appetite for the wonderful. It is a great grace, a mother-grace containing many graces. There are few graces more to be coveted; for many reasons, but for this reason especially, that it gives such fertility to the three theological virtues. People are attracted by miracles, by prophecies, by apparitions, by visions, and by strange heroisms of an inimitable Sanctity. We ought to be attracted by them. God puts them out as attractions. He meant them to attract us. But, to the thoughtful and to the loving, the common things of the faith are a hundred times more attractive; and for the most part they are in themselves more wonderful. Graces and inspirations, services and functions, beads and scapulars, jubilees and indulgences, the common marvels of prayer, and the commonplace blessings of the Church —these are what we ought most to wonder at, most to prize, and most to love. What is shared by the greatest number of the faithful ought to be more dear to us than what is shared by few or is singular to ourselves. Surely it is a higher thing to be a priest and to participate in the grand universal priesthood of the Church, than to be a canon of a chapter which may wear a bishop’s mitre or a eardinal’s red. In religion what is common is better than what is uncommon, because the common is universal; and it is his highest gifts which God gives to all men, and his peculiar gifts which he gives to the few. This is one of God’s ways, to _be observed and made much of:—his choicest things are the most universal. Now, the Precious Blood is the commonest of all supernatural things, the most accessible, and the most universal. It enters into all the commonest things of religion with an unfastidious ubiquity; and the devotion to it partakes of the universality which belongs to tself. In spirituality, wise men value more and more each passing year this esteem and love of the.
common things of faith.
Here is sibs fruit of the spirit of tie dovo- 24 tion to the Precious Blood. It is easier to love God than to trust in him. In human things it is not easy to doubt and yet to love; but in divine things it is not uncommon. The greatest defect in our worship of God is want of confidence in him. Confidence is the genuineness of worship, and the tranquil plenitude of love. What can give us more confidence in God than the study of the Precious Blood? Who can doubt Jesus, when he bleeds? Whether we look at the grandeurs of the Precious Blood, or its liberalities, or its tendernesses, or its peculiarities, the result of our contemplations is a steadfast childlike confidence in God. Out of this comes generosity with God, that other of our great wants, which we are always mourning over and never taking the pains to supply. It is more easy to be generous when we have come thoroughly to trust the object of our love. Moreover, we catch generosity, by a kind of infection, from the prodigality of the Precious Blood. We can hardly live in fire, and not grow hot ourselves. The excess of love betrays itself in unconscious imitation. We shall do great things for God, if we are conversant all day with the great things which God has done for us.
Another gift of this devotion is a vehement and intelligent hatred of sin. It is useless for the hatred to be intelligent unless it be also vehement, and worse than useless for it to be vehement unless it be intelligent as well. In these days what our loyalty to God most needs is sternness to the disloyal. This should be shown first and foremost to ourselves. Whom do we know to be so disloyal as _ ourselves? What resistance to grace, what contempt of warnings, what neglect ofinspirations, what slovenliness of performance, make up ourlives! If we hated sin, as we ought to hate it, purely, keenly, manfully, we should do more penance, we should inflict more self-punishment, we should sorrow for our sins more abidingly. Then, again, the crowning disloyalty to God is heresy. It is the sin of sins, the very loathsomest of things which God looks down upon in this malignant world. Yet how little do we understand of its excessive hatefulness! It is the polluting of God’s truth, which is the worst of all impurities. Yet how light we make of it! We look at it, and are calm. We touch it, and do not shudder. We mix with it, and have no fear. We see it touch holy things, and we have no sense of sacrilege. We breathe its odor, and show no signs of detestation or disgust. Some of us affect its friendship; and some even extenuate its guilt. We do not love God enough to be angry for his glory. Wedo not love men enough to be charitably truthful for their souls. Having lost the touch, the taste, the sight, and all the sense of heavenlymindedness, we can dwell amidst this odious plague, in imperturbable tranquillity, reconciled to its foulness, not without some boastful professions of liberal admiration, perhaps even with a solicitous show of tolerant sympathies. Why are we so far below the old saints, and even the modern apostles of these latter times, in the abundance of our conversions? Because we have not the antique stern. ness. We want the old Church-spirit, the ol@ ecclesiastical genius. Our charity is untruthful, because it is not severe; and it is unpersuasive, — because it is untruthful. We lack devotion to truth as truth, as God’s truth. Our zeal for souls is puny, because we have no zeal for God’s honor. We act as if God were complimented by conversions, instead of trembling souls rescued by a stretch of mercy. _We tell men half the truth, the half that best suits our own pusillanimity and their conceit; and then we wonder that so few are converted, and that of those few so many apostatize. We are so weak as to be surprised that our half-truth has not succeeded as well as God’s whole-truth. Where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no holiness. A man, who might be an apostle, becomes a fester in the Church for the want of this righteous abomination. We need St. Michael to put new hearts into us in these days of universal heresy. But devotion to the Precious Blood, with its hymning of the Church and its blazoning of the Sacraments, will give us Michael’s heart and the craft to use Michael’s sword. Who ever drew his sword with nobler haste, or used his victory more tenderly, than that brave archangel, whose war- “ery was, All for God?
The Precious Blood is His Blood, who is especially Uncreated Truth. It is His Blood who came with his truth to redeem souls. Hence, love of souls is another grace, which comes from the spirit of this devotion. I wish “the love of souls’ were | words that were not so shortly said. They mean so much that we should linger over them, in order to imbibe their sweetness, perhaps also their medicinal bitterness as well. A volume would hardly say all that wants saying upon this matter. In all ages of the Church a zeal for souls is a most necesgary grace; and this is hardly an age in which it me X 30% | is less necessary than usual. Alas! it is a rere gift, incredibly rare, rare even among us priests, and a gift unfortunately dishonored more than most gifts by base counterfeits and discreditable impostures. Of all things that can be named, the love of souls is perhaps the most distinctively catholic. It seems to be a supernatural sense, belonging only to the Church. There are several classes of saints, classes divided from each other by wide discrepancies of grace, and a dissimilitude, almost an incompatibility, of gifts. Yet the love of souls is an instinct common to all saints of whatever class. It is a grace which implies the accompaniment of the greatest number of graces und the exercise of the greatest number of virtues. It is the grace which irreligious people most dislike; for even sin has its instinct of self-preservation; and it is a grace which is peculiarly obnoxious to the worldly. It is a gift, also, which requires an unusually fine spiritual discernment; for itis always and everywhere the harmony of enthusiasm and discretion. Natural activity, vulgar emulation, the bustle of benevolence, the love of praise, the habit.of meddling, the over-estimate of our own abilities, the hot-headedness of unripe fervor, the obstinacy of peculiar views, the endless foolishnesses of indocile originality,——all these things prepare so many delusions for the soul, and so multiply them by combining in varieties, that the gift of counsel and the virtue of prudence, as well as the cool audacity of an apostle, are needed for the exercise of this love of souls. It is also a very laborious grace, wearing the spirit, fatiguing the mind, disappointing the heart. This is the reason why in so many persons it is a short-lived grace. almost everybody’s fervor, while it ‘is part of the perseverance of very few. It is a grace which never grows old, never has the feelings of age, or the repose of age, or the slowness of age. Hence many men cast it aside as a thing which belongs to youth, as if it were a process to be gone through and then there-were an end of it. The soul of an apostle is always youthful. It was mature in its young prudence; and it is impetuous in its gray-haired zeal.
But, if it is a grace hard to persevere in, it is one which gives marvellous unity and consistency to a man’s life, and ultimately crowns it with inevitable and enviable success. If there is nothing in which work is harder, there is nothing in which © success is more certain, than the love of souls. It is a perfect combination of spiritual nobilities. Of all single expressions of the Sacred Heart it is the broadest. It unites, as nothing else does, charity to God.and man. On the one hand it seems intuitively to understand God, and on the other hand to have a supernatural attractiveness about it, which crowns it a king of men. It is a grace which makes a man surprisingly genial and inveterately happy. It delivers the heart from jealousy, rivalry, and all littleness; and by this especially do we know it from its counterfeits. Moreover, it works little miracles of its own; for it increases a man’s intellectual power, at least in its own direction. This is a beautiful sight, and one of those palpable things of grace, which seem to supersede faith by sight,—the beholding of the grand things accomplished, and the broad regions covered, by mediocrity of talent when raised above itself by zeal for souls. It lives equally in action and contemplation, and thereby supplies for a number of omissions in the spiritual life. It imparts a detightful simplicity to the character, sobering all. gayety, and enlivening all seriousness. It is an emanation of apostolic grandeur, a touch of the vocation of the Apostles whose calling was above all others in the world, as their sanctity was special among other sanctities. It impregnates the soul with a strong personal love of Jesus, and is a participation in the adorable communicativeness of God. What a grace is this to possess! It is the grace which perhaps of all others is the most direct, natural, and inevitable grace of the Devotion to the Precious Blood. In close connection with this grace we should name, as another fruit of the spirit of this devotion, a great devotion to the Sacraments. But this has been sufficiently dwelt upon in the course of the Treatise. A zeal for souls is naturally given to magnify the Sacraments. An apostolic man knows of them by experience. He has seen the magic of their operations. He has seen how they can lie in the bosom of corruption, like God’s amulets, and charm away the vicinity, the relics, the associations, the roots, the attractions, of sin. He has handled their divine realities, and worships rather what he sees than what he knows of by the hearing of faith. But a great devotion to the Sacraments is not only an inseparable accompani-- ment of zeal for souls: it is alsoan antidote against = all that is worldly, material, and anti-supernatural = in the tendencies of the present day. It will ins _ erease in us, in proportion as we grow in devotion to the Precious Blood.
-The effect of this devotion upon our devotion to our Blessed Lady may well be named as one of its graces, one of the revelations of its spirit. It makes our devotion to her an integral part of our devotion to Jesus. It makes the two devotions one. It draws her into the scheme of redemption so intimately, and at the same time with such splendors of separate exaltation, that the very highest language of the saints about her becomes easy to us, and is the only natural expression of our inward love. To be enthusiastic, our love of Mary only needs to be theological. The devotion to the Precious Blood clothes her with a new glory. It makes Mary magnify Jesus, and Jesus magnify Mary. It causes her individual mysteries to shine forth like stars, the Precious Blood forming the clearness of the purple night in which their peculiar brightness is more visible and more distinctive. He that can find another point of view, from which our dear Lady seems greater than before, has got a new means of sanctification; for he has acquired a new power of loving God: and the devotion to the Precious Blood is full of such points of view.
The devotion to the Precious Blood must also obviously impart to us a special love of the Sacred Humanity. It admits us into the most secret recesses of our Lord’s Human Life. Like its own reiterated pulsations, each one of its mysteries urges upon our faith and love the dreadest realities.of his Created Nature, while at the same time it seems to lay open before us the Hypostatic Union, and to illustrate its strength. Our Lord is God;
and we all worship him as such. But there is a peculiar adoration of his Divinity, which comes from a special love of his Humanity. We would fain love God as he loves us. But there is a tenderness in his love of us, which we dare not return because of his infinite majesty. Yet somehow there is something in the particular adoration of our Lord’s Godhead arising from special devotion to his Humanity, which insinuates this element of tenderness into our adoration without diminishing the sacred terror of our self-abasement. This ele-. ment is one of the peculiar gifts of the devotion to the Precious Blood.
One thing more. Where Jesus is, all honors and all glories and all loves gather round the Father. Who can doubt, then, but that the devotion to the Precious Blood is also a devotion to the Eternal Father? Think of the immensity of the Father’s love for that redeeming Blood. Out of all possible creations he chose it alone for the price of our redemption. Only its value could enrich the glory of the Creator, which the creature’s sin had striven to impoverish. Only from its victory would he condescend to receive back the dominion of which he had been despoiled. Only its fulness could satisfy the claims of all his outraged perfections. Only its sweetness could, make universal peace in heaven and on earth. It was to the Person of the Father, by appropriation, that this dear price of our souls: was paid. Nay, our devotion to the Blood of his Son is only an imitation of the Father's complacency therein.. It is his joy, and
_. kis devotion. To join him in this devotion to the
Blood of his Son is in truth to practise a distinct a devotion to himself. Devotion to the Eternal Father! this is the sweet grace to’covet. Show us the Father, said Philip to his Lord, and it is enough for us.
Now, reader, our task is done, and yet we would fain linger over the subject. It so fascinates us that any conclusion we can make seems to be abrupt. The more we say, the more appears to remain unsaid. New glories of the Precious Blood are constantly coming into view, and new abysses opening to our contemplation. So it is with all divine things. They clothe themselves in the changefulness of divine love. They shine with a divine light upon them, and therefore their brightness is always new. They borrow the beauty of God, and so they satisfy our love by making it still more insatiable. We feel that all that has been said has been unworthy of the Precious Blood. Indeed, it has been unworthy even of our own conceptions of it. But what love has taught to one soul may waken the chords of love in others. What has been a light to one mind, and a joy to one heart, may carry light to other minds and joy to other hearts. May it be so, and Jesus more loved and God more glorified!
Let us recapitulate. We began with reflecting on the mystery of the Precious Blood, because all devotion starts best with doctrine. The incredibilities of divine love become more credible when we have learned them first as dogmas. It was also the more necessary to begin with doctrine in the case of a devotion which claims to be an adoration also..-We then turned from God to man, and strove to form a right estimate of the
Precious Blood by studying from various points of view our extreme need of it, and our immeasurable wretchedness without it. We then traversed its empire, learned its character by studying the method of its government, and judged of its magnificence by the splendor of its dominion. Our next step was to unfold its chronicles. We found there a whole revelation of God, and much of the secret history of his eternity. We discovered there our own place in creation by discovering our place in the procession of the Precious Blood. From its history we passed to its biography, to that notable characteristic of it which especially reveals its spirit,—its prodigality. We saw then how God’s prodigalities are not excesses, but most orderly magnificences; and also how our poverty is so extreme that we can only live on from day to day by being economical of God’s most exuberant liberalities. As we had begun with doctrine and adoration, we have had to end with practice and devotion. The history, the characteristics, and the spirit of the devotion to the Precious Blood have been the concluding subjects of our reflections. We have thus considered the Precious Blood as a Doctrine, a Necessity, an Empire, a History, a Divine Prodigality, and a Devotion. In all these six aspects of it we have found it continually disclosing certain affinities, running into certain subjects, illuminating certain depths, and connecting itself with certain mysteries, and all this with so much repetition and so much constancy that we cannot believe its sympathy with them to be accidental.. It bespeaks rather a divine law, and is a disclosure ~ of the Divine Mind. These cognate subjects with the Precious Blood are three in number. They are first the Magnificence of God’s Dominion, © secondly the Church, and thirdly the Sacraments. As we grow in devotion to the Precious Blood, the sovereignty of God will become more dear to us, and clearer as it grows more dear. Our loyalty to the Church will become more and more a pars of our spiritual life, and more and more a saactifying exercise of the special virtue of religion. Our faith and joy in the Sacraments will be continually ‘increasing, and our devotion to them will be at once our shelter and our shield from the dangers which at this day threaten both the minds and hearts of the faithful, while our more reverent frequentation of them will augment our union with God and make us saints. Such is devotion to the Precious Blood. It is a glory and an ornament to the Church. It is the life of the living, and the thirst of the Holy Dead. It is the song of angels. It was the light of all Mary’s darkness, and the jubilee of all her woes. It was the device of the Holy Ghost, and the devotion of his love. It was the devotion and singular possession of Jesus himself. It was the devotion, the choice, and the complacency of the Eternal Father.
What more can we say? Sweet worship of the Blood of God! a-worship with so many of man’s peculiar rights in it, embracing all theology in itself, and then turning all its vast theology into tenderly triumphant song! Dear Fountain, that rises in the heart of God’s human Mother, and flows down over the glorified souls of men into the 31
Bosom of the Eternal Father, while those countless souls, like the pebbles of the stream, make everlasting music as it flows! It is earth’s beatitude to feel that the Precious Blood is bearing us onward into that adorable Abyss of Love. It is heaven’s jubilee to be sinking evermore through that same Blood in the unfathomable depths of the Uncreated Bosom of the Father. All glory and all worship be to that mysterious River of the City of God, whose Spirit-fashioned streams are carrying us this hour with such breathless swiftness to our home,—our home with the Mortal Mother and the Unbeginning Father of the Eternal Son!
Absolution. 290.
Actions, outward, liable to misapprehension, 29; supernatural, of the Church, 300.
Adoration of the three kings, 186.
Age, spirit of the, evil infiuence of, 154.
Ages of the world, 29.
Agony, the, 265.
Alacrity, 341.
Almsgiving, whence it comes, 67; what it would be without faith, 71; of obligation, 73.
Angela B. of Foligno, 217.
Angels, creation of the, 18,175; graces of, 25; their worship of the Precious Blood, 34; created in a state of grace, 101; multitude of, 117, 252; glory of, 160; fall of, 176; guardians of the Precious Blood during the three days, 193, 297; ministers of it in purgatory, 297; mirrored in the Church, 312.
Anne of the Cross, 208,
Anne of Jesus, 328.
Anne of St. Augustine, 331.
Antichrist, times of, 199, 230.
Apostates, what makes them, 132.
Apostasy, the general, 230.
Ascension, the, 195.
Ashridge, monastery of, 329, 332.
Attributes of God, 95; devotion to them, 319; fruits of devotion to, 322; mystery of, 323.
Attrition, 87.
Authority of the Church, by whom hated, 155.
Barbarians less wicked than the civilized, 63.
Baptism, 86, 135, 186; character of 149; the application of the Precious Blood, 289.
Beatitude, natural, 86.
Beauty of the Church, 314.
Ballon de, Mother, 331.
Benci, Marcello, 328.
Blessed, the, rejoice in the vision of the Precious Blood, 237.
Bloodsheddings, the seven, 260.
Blood, the Precious, 11; the source of salvation, 14, 342; Eternal, 17; influences of, 23-25; worship of, 21; during the Passion, 33, 120, 286; in the chalice, 35, 342; infinity of its worth, 37, 115; the shedding of it free, 38, 242; is invisible, 38; how assumed, 39; God’s daily gift, 44; reveals the character of God, 45, 99; prodigality of its shedding, 47, 84; a voice which God hears, 50; necessity of, 52; hinders millions of sins, 62; the protection of the poor, 67; the cause of all temporal blessings, 69; everywhere accessible, 89; operations of, infallible, 91; unmerited, 93; unimaginable, 94; destiny of, changed by sin, 98, 108; inseparable from the life of God, 99; empire of, 100; glories of, 106; relations of, to Creation, 103; and to the Incarnation, 107; reinstated the dominion of God, 101, 109; how spoken of in the Holy Scriptures, 111, 115; converts, 120; work of, incessant, 125; builds up the Church, 129; instru-
364 ments of, 133; flows through the Sacraments, 142, 156; effect of on hell, 158; on purgatory, 258, 297, 347; sung by the angels, 161; flowed from the heart of Mary, 162; appeases the anger of God, 163; in the Unity of God, 164; an unbeginning procession of created things, 174; the beginning of creation, 176; in the fall, 179; in the flood, 181; among the patriarchs, 182; in the Immaculate Conception, 183; in Bethiehem, 185; in the desert, 187; in Nazareth, 187; in Cana, 189; in the Holy Land, 189; on Olivet and Calvary, 191; in the charge of the angels, 193, 293; on Ascension-day, 195; on the day of Pentecost, 196; in Rome, 197; through the world, 199; at the last day, 199; in the mind of God, 204; before the Incarnation, 206; in adoration, 212; life of, a great secrecy, 214; life of, on earth, 216; in conversion, 220, 225; life of, in the Church, 226; joy of the blessed, 237; in the Sacred Heart, 247, 342; in the chalice, 239; conquered back creation, 254; exuberance of, 256; in the circumcision, 262; in the Agony, 266; in the Scourging, 270; in the Crowning, 275; on the way of the Cross, 276; in the Crucifixion, 281; in the piercing of the Sacred Heart, 285; in Baptism, 289; in Absolution, 290; in the Sacraments of Marriage, 291; of Orders, 292; of Confirmation, 204; of Extreme Unction, 294; of. the Eucharist, 296; in the Papacy, 298; Extra-sacramental effects of, 299; History of,326; the most common of all supernatural things, 350. |
Bonhommes, 332.
Books of devotion, comnsionrliy rane: gerated, 256.
- Boulier, Mother Anne Seraphim, y
Bufalo del, Gaspare, 330.
Cain,.60, 88.
Cana, the marriage-feast of, 188. Captiousness, 132. Catherine, St., of Siena, 327. Centurion, the, lance ef, 255. Change, none in God, 97, 110.
Character, Sacramental, 140, 257;. Eternal, 149. ‘ Charity, Christian, 72‘ more than philanthropy, 81.
Child-murder, 289.
Chalice, reveals character, 103.
Church, relation of, to the world, 30; blessedness of being in the, 60; the work of the Precious Blood, 1380, 134,
824; power of, in relation to the
Sacraments, 145; palace of the Precious Blood, 226; not to be criticized, 231; to be feared, 232; devo- _ tion to the, 309; a special creation, 310; how she appears to God, 311; grandeur of, 313; vicegerent of God’s dominion, 324. Circumcision, the, 261; what it was to St. Joseph, 263; to our Lady, 264. Cities, types of heaven, 180. Civilization increases sins, 635; be comes a tyranny, 69; perishes with the world, 313. Column of the Scourging, 271. Comfort of good people, 339. Communion, grace of; 147, 257.
Conception, the Immaculate, 40, 123,
183; definition of, 348.
Confidence in God, 351.
Confirmation not prefigured in the old law, 185; character of, 149; effects of, 294.
Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 330; in England, 333.
Congregation of the Missioners of the Precious Blood, 330.
Consolations of philanthropy, 75.
Controversy, 30.
Conversion of St. Paul, 121
Conversion,. 116; resembles creation, 118, 124; operation of the Precious Blood, 221; agencies of, 222.
Corruption of men, 181.
Creative love, expression of, 29.
Creation, 17; in what sense eternal, 17; how to be viewed, 23, 85; free, 98, 119, 122; instantaneous, 117, 118.
Crown of thorns, 273.
Cross, the, 278.
Crucifixion, the, 271.
Days, the Six, 177.
Dead, devotion of the, to the Precious Blood, 346.
Decrees, the divine, 172.
Deliverance from sin, when it comes, 10.
Delusion, sign of, 320.
Depreciation of the Church, 325.
Destitution of the world without grace, 55.
Devotion to the Sacraments, necessary, 142; why, 154; perils it wards off, 155; to the Church, 228, 307; combines all interests, 318; to the attributes of God, 319.
Devotions, 316, 334.
Devotion to the Precious Blood, 326, 835; destroys Pelagianism, 3385; and libertinage, 336; brings out the principle of sacrifice, 337; does not usurp the place of other devotions, 340; is a variety of devotion to the Passion, 340; an additional form of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, 342; unveils the physical realities of the Sacred Heart, 342; comprehends the life of our Lord, 344; hasan affinity with that of the Rosary, 345; has a power of intercession, 346; its peculiar alliance with the Immaculate Conception, 348; begets love of the common things of faith, 349; begets cenfidence, 351; creates hatred for
' sin, 351; begets a love of souls, 353; a great devotion to the Sacraments, 356; effect of, on devotion to our Lady, 357; imparts a special
365 — love of the Sacred Humanity, 357; is a devotion to,the Eternal Father, 358.:
Diplomacy, 131.
Discontent, 232.
Doctrine of the Sacraments the touchstone of all the theology of the day, 228.
Dole, Carmelite convent at, 208.
Dominion of God, 101; reinstated by the Precious Blood, 109, 254; ministered to by the Precious Blood, 324.
Dying without religion, 77.
Earnestness, 235; dependent on faith, 303.
Earth, creation of, 21; special glory of, 21; changes of, 129; special station of the Precious Blood, 177.
Eden, 179.
Education helps men to sin, 63.
Elevability of the creature, 1386.
Emery, of St. Sulpice, on the doctrine of hell, 158.
Empire of our Lord, established by the Precious Blood, 116.
Empires, human, of less importance than one soul, 221,
Epochs of life, 27..
Espousals, the divine, 185; day of, 272.
Eternity, 17; hard to realize, 51.
Eucharist, sacrament of the, might have been instituted, if Adam had not sinned, 108; what it is, 134, 135, 136; the great laboratory of the Precious Blood, 296.
Exclusiveness of the Church, 325.
Extra-sacramental effects of the Precious Blood, 298.
Face, the, of Jesus, 190.
Failure, the most universal unhappiness, 76.
Fall, the, 85; consequences of, 86;
. effects Of, on creation, 179; where the remedy of, precisely consists, 214,;
C
Fastidiousness, 336.
Father, Eternal, devotion to the, 358.
Fear of the Church, 232. /
First-fruits of creation, 157.
Flight, the, into Egypt, 187.
Flood, the, 181.
Forms of the Sacraments, 141, 145,
Frances of the Mother of God, 209, 215, 328.
Francis of the Infant Jesus, 331.
Francis, St., of Sales, 331.
Fruits of devotion to the Precious Blood, 349.
Garden of the Agony, 265.
Gertrude, St., 327.
Ghost, the Holy, 126; fertility of, 127.
Gladness of salvation, 11.
Glories of the Precious Blood, 95.
God, presence of, 34, 52; life of, 95; simplicity of, 96; dominion of, 101; magnificence of, in the Sacraments, 148; revealed more intimately in the Sacraments, 154; vastness of, 211; secrecy of, 214; magnificence of, 242, 247, 250; infinity of, 254.
Grace of the Sacraments, 140; never exhausted, 148.
Grace, all to be accounted for, 257.
Greek civilization, 70.
Ground, lowest, 307.
Hailes, monastery of, 329, 332. »Happiness of sinners, 12; whence it comes, 82.
Heart, the Sacred, 31; emptied of the Precious Blood, 192; filled with it, 238; in the Agony, 267; piercing of, 284; symbol of the Precious Blood, 342.
Heathen, state of the, 57; influenced by the Precious Blood, 128.
Hell. fires of, 140; doctrine of, 158; the descent into, 192.
Heresy of society, 238; effects of, on converts, 232; the sin of sins, 352.
_ Heretics, misery of, 59, 92. Hierarchy, the, 197,
Holiness, a restraint, 244; cannot exist where there is no hatred of heresy, 353.
Horrors of unrestrained sin, 65.
Host, bleeding of the, 43.
Humanity, exaltation of the Sacred, 194,
Hypostatic Union, 39, 237; never interrupted, 286.
Ideas of God, 27.
Ignatius, St., 40.
Images in the mind, use and abuse of, 168.
Immutability of God, 110.
Incarnation, mystery of, 18; how affected by sin, 22; affects all things, 69; unmerited, 94; not the consequence of sin, 102; part of the idea of creation, 107.
Indulgences, whence they come, 207; ministers of the Precious Blood, 224,
Infallibility, gift of, 223.
Infancy of Jesus, 209.
Infinity of God, 254.
Influence of the Precious Blood on states and policies, 219.
Innocents, the Holy, 157.
Intention, doctrine of, 149.
Invalidity of Sacraments, 291.
Jacob’s well, 266.
Jansenism, 230, 325, 326.
Jealousies of scientific men, 307.
Jesus Risen, devotion to, 341.
Joseph, St., greatness of his sanctity, 104; silence of, 186; at the circumcision, 263.
Joy, all, comes from the Precious Blood, 238.
Joy, human, purified by. the Sacraments, 152.
Judgment, day of, 54, 199.
Jurisdiction, in the Sacraments, 145; of the Church, the law of the Precious Blood, 159, 297.
Judging the Church, 2381.
Justification, operation of the Precious Blood, 220.
Kingliness of the Papacy, 298. Kings of creation, 307. | Kiss of the Father and the Son, 129.
Laxity and rigor, 229.
Law in God, 247.
Liberty of the creature, 102.
Liberty of God, 248.
Libertinage, 336.
Life of the Precious Blood, 203; one of joy, 218; of sorrow, 214.
Literature, helpless, 10; influenced by the Precious Blood, 220; perishes with the world, 313.
Lombard, Peter, on the doctrine of hell, 158.
Loss, the three days, 188.
Louisa of Jesus, 209.
Love of the Church, necessary, 234.
Love of Jesus, must grow, 53.
Loveliness of Jesus, 14.
Leve of souls, 353, 355.
Loyalty to the Church, 233.
Luxury, 338.
Magnificence, 243.
Magnificence of God, represented in the Sacraments, 148; in the Precious Blood, 242; the fountain of salvation, 245.
Malcontents, what makes them, 132.
Man, degeneracy of, 181.
Manna, 26.
Mantua, relics of the Precious Blood at, 329, 332. —
Margaret of Beaune, 329.
Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament, 211.
Margaret of the Passion, 329.
Maria Francesca V. of the Five Wounds, 328.
Marriage. Sacrament of, 291.
Martyrdom, 147.
Mary, her blood, 39; her grandeur,
104, 105; holds sway over the Precious Blood, 162.
Mary of Agreda, 46.
Mary Magdalen, St., of Pazzi, 327.
Mass, 35; daily effects of, 297.
Maternity, the divine, merited by the Precious Blood, 162.
Matter, creation of, 176.
Matrimony, the sacrament of, 135.
Meditation on the crucifixion, 281.
Merits, vitality of, 224.
Michael, B. of Florence, 208.
Middle Age, the time of deceptions, 132,
Mind of God, 171.
Miracle, the first, 189.
Miracles compared with the Sacraments, 144.
Miraculous Blood, 42.
Missionaries, 290.
Misery of life without God, 71.
Mortification, 337.
Mysteries in God, 173.
Mystery of the Precious Blood, 16.
Napkin of Veronica, 269, 277.
Nations, diversities of, 28.
Nativity of our Lady, 184.
Natural goodness, too much thought of, 70.
Naturalism, 335.
Nature and grace, 69.
Nature, created, 101.
Necessity of God’s magnificence, 263, 258.
Numerousness of sin, 300.
Oblations of the Precious Blood, 297, ne
Orbs of heaven, 20, 247; numbers of, 252; order of, 302.
Order, sacrament of, 134, 135; character of, 149; earthly heart of the Precious Blood, 293.
Order of all things, 247.
Oratory, London, 333.
Original sin, possible fruits of, 68 —
Osanna of Mantua, 327.
Pain, 56; physical, 73; varieties of, 74,
Parsimoniousness, apparent, in God, 251.
Passion, severities of the, 19; twofold aspect of, 191; devotion to the, 340.
Paul, St., the preacher of the Precious Blood, 16, 326; conversion of, 121..
Pelagianism, 335.
Penance, absorbs temporal evil, 78; sacrament of, 134, 135.
Pentecost, 196.
Perfection, grace of, sometimes necessary for salvation, 258.
Perfections, the divine, and the Precious Blood, 163.
Peter, St., 28; author of the title of Precious, as applied to his Master’s Blood, 116.
Philanthropy, 70; helpless, 72; cannot reach mortal pain, 75; hollowness of, 79, 80.
Philip Neri, St., 233, 2
Philosophy, helpless, 10.
Piercing of the Sacred Heart, 284.
Pius LX. instituted a new feast of the Precious Blood, 333.
Poor, the, what they might be without the Precious Blood, 66, 67.
Popes, the, present the crown of thorns, 298.
Potentia obedientialis, 137, note.
Poverty, beautiful, 72.
Prayer, difficulty of, 167; for the
‘Church, 347.
Precepts of the Church, 233.
Predestination, 91; of our Lord, 107.
Preparation of the Incarnation, 183.
Presence of God, 34.
Prietshood of our Lord, 201.
Principle, the sacramental, by whom hated, 154.
Procession of the Holy Ghost, 123, 125, 129.
Procession of the Precious Blood, 174;
visible in Bethlehem, 185; in the Desert, 187; in the Holy Land, 189; in heaven and earth, 195.
Prodigality, extra-sacramental, of the Precious Blood, 298.
Prodigality of God, 252.
Progress, 70; influenced by the Precious Blood, 220.
Prophetess of the Precious Blood, 327.
Proselytism, 81.
Purgatory, fires of, 140; how affected by the Precious Blood, 158, 347.
Queen of Creation, 10. Queendom of our Lady, 223; in her heart, 276.
Raphael, St., gave communion to Maria Francesca of the Five Wounds, 328.
Redemption, through the Precious Blood, 11, 343: might have been other wise, 37; interwoven with the Sacraments, 299.
Refinement makes sin more malignant, 63.
Reformers, what makes them, 132; spirit of, 293.
Relics of the Precious Blood, 329; at Mantua, 329; at Ashridge and Hailes, 330.
Religion, terrors of a false, 57.
Religious men alone successful, 76.
Resurrection, the, 193; effect of devo-
' tion to the, 211.
Revelations and devotions, 318.
Reverence, 337.
Richard of Cornwall, 332.
Rigorousness, 229, 325.
Rimini, miraculous apparition at, 330.
Roman civilization, 70.
Rome, seat of the Precious Blood, 197; salvation only in the Church of, 230.
Rosary, the, 345.
Sabbath, the, 97, 125.
Sacraments, the communications of - eee CCU the Precious Blood, 25, 48; the nearest approach to an assurance of salvation, 93; description of, 134, 186; causes of grace, 158; replicate the grace of Jesus in us, 141; vases of the Precious Blood, 142; inventions of God, 143; are not properly miracles, 144; special grace of each, 140, 146; have laws of their own, 144, 146; supply each other, 148; sensitiveness of, 150; influence of, 151; create joy, 152; number of, 153; conduits of the Precious Blood, 156; dowry of the Church, 226; aqueducts of the Precious Blood, 255; grandeur of, 301; power of, 356.
Sacrifice, the principle of, 337.
Sacrilege, Sacraments exposed to the risk of, 291.
Saints, intercession of the, 160; vision of, 185; the most joyful on earth, 239.
Salvation, 9; through the Precious Blood, 14; of those out of the Church, how difficult, 92; dependent on the Church, 130; none outside the Roman Church, 230; blessedness of, 240.
Sanctification, 125, 128.
Satan’s power over us, source of, 168.
Scapular, the red, 333.
Science, helpless, 10; varieties of, 305.
Scourging, the, 270.
Secrecy, characteristic of divine things, 214.
See, the Holy, fount of the Precious Blood, 130; has the jurisdiction of it, 297.
Silence, the respectful, of Jansenism, 155.
Silence, effect of, 231.
Simplicity, 234.
Sin. horrors of, 9,10; why permitted, 21; consequences of, 22; importance of realizing what it is, 46; before the flodd, 61; always growing, 62; made more malignant by civilization, 63, 70; effects of, on creation, 109.
Sinner, the habitual, 12; in the Church, 60; the educated, 63.
Sleep, artificially induced, 168.
Solitude of Jesus in his agony, 207.
Sorrow, without Christ, 56; purified by the sacraments, 151; instrument of redemption, 213.
Soul, innermost sanctuary of the, 160.
Souls, creation of, 97, 117, 125; love of, 353.
Spirit of the age, 131, 132.
Spiritual and temporal, unwisely distinguished, 69.
Stability, 235.
Stars, their number, 20.
Statistics, 306.
Stephen, St., 181.
Stigmata, the, 287.
Sufferings of lost souls, 57.
Sweating of the Blood of Jesus, 41, 268.
Temple, the, 182; the disputation in, 187.
Theology,: connection of, with sanctity, 17; changes of, 30; scholastic, 43: the fuel of devotion, 106; the ew of, 315.
Theories about heretics, 92; danger of, 231.
Thorns, the crown of, 274; how worn by the Popes, 298.
Tiara, the crown of thorns, 298.
Time, beginning of, 175.
Tongues, confusion of, 181.
Tranquillity of God, 172, 248.
Trinity, the Holy, how worshipped in the Church, 315.
Triumphs of the Holy See, 131.
Truth, danger of betraying, 358.
Unbaptized, the, 55. Unchanzeableness, the, of God, 110.
_ Unction, Extreme, not prefigured in the old law, 135; effects of, 150, 295.
Vastness of God, 211.
Veronica, St., napkin of, 269, OrT.
Vicar, the, of Christ, 131; comes to Rome, 197.
Views, worldly, the danger of, 132; rigorous, 229.
Vincent of Gonzaga, 332.
Vincentians, red scapular of, 333.
Virtue of the Precious Blood, where it resides, 324.
Virtue, habits of, impossible without mortification, 3387.
Vocations, 26, 67, 338.
Water, running, 280. Way, the Milky, 252.
Way of the Cross, 276.
Wickedness of the world before the flood, 61.
Words, divine, 119; power of, 145- the seven, 283.
Works of God, 201; none of his external works necessary, 259.
World, scientific divisions of the, 210.
World, the, without the Precious Blood, 62.
Worldliness, 338.
Worship of the Precious Blood, 31.
Wounds, the Five, 54, 287.
Yearning of our Lord for his Passion, 47; of his Sacred Heart, 266.
Years, the Thirty-Three, 184, 207; effects of meditating on, 208; ever repeated in the Church, 309, 319; source of manifold devotions, 317.
Youth, how it errs, 132; temptations of, 335.
Footnotes
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" ‘ VERO ee ee pie De dk ↩
-
See the instance of Anne Seraphine Boulier, quoted in Chapter L ↩
-
It should be remembered now thatit once pleased God to save Italy by means of St. Catherine of Siena, and to restore the Pope to Rome. By an increased devotion to the great Dominicaness may we not help the Holy See, and the poor land which does not know its own blessednessin possessing the Chair of Peter and the Holy City? ↩
-
Vita, p. 155. ¢ Chroniques, ii. 595-596. { Vie, pp. 512-513. ↩
-
Bacci, Vita di Filippo Neri, p. 82. ↩
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Vita, p. 146. + Vita, p. 826, ↩
-
See Helyot, Hist. des Ordres Rélig. under the words Divine Providence, Précieux Sang, and Rédempteurs: Morigia, Istoria di tutte le Religioni, lib. 1, cap. lx.: and Dugdale’s Monasticon, under Ashridge. Morigia gives the date of Richard of Cornwall’s foundation as 1257; Tanner dates it in 1283; Mr. Todd, whe wrote the privately-printed history ' of Ashridge for Lord Bridgewater, dates Richard, the first rector, from 1276. Thomas Waterhouse, the last rector, surrendered the house to Henry the Eighth. The seal represented the Agnus Dei with the Earl of Cornwall’s lion beneath it. ↩
Chapter 7 of 7