Chapter I. Motives for loving our Lord in Himself

All ima^nable reasons induce us to love and honour the sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ as much as in us lies. The principal ones are as follow :

1. This Man, who is united^ to the Person of the Word, is the Son of God, and is " made so much better than the Angels, as He hath inherited a more excellent name than they. For to which of the Angels hath God said at any time, Thou art My Son, to-day have I begotten Thee. ... Sit Thou on My right hand." He must, then, be honoured with the same honour as is given to God. The worship of Gk)d and that of the Man-God are not two different worships ; they are one and the same : accordingly, since the incarnation of the Son of God, the Church every where joins to the worship of God that of the Man-God. St. Paul almost always joins together in his Epistles " God and Jesus Christ," " God the Father and the Lord Jesus ;" and St. Ignatius, in our constitutions, says continually, " God and our Lord."

2. He Himself prayed Gk)d His Father that He might be honoured : " Father, the hour is come ; glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son may glorify Thee." Hb prayer was heard ; God promised Him the homage and adoration of the nations. To us it belongs to fulfil this promise of God the Father ; on us its execution depends.

3. God the Father was Himself the first to honour Him : before His coming into the world, by the ceremonies of the old law, which were instituted to represent the mysteries of the Man-God ; during His mortal life, by the splendour of His miracles^ and by the incontestable proofs of His divinity ; after His death, by the manifestation of His glory throughout the world, by the preaching of His Gospel, and by the foundation of His Church, by the blood of the martyrs shed for the confession of His faith, by the greatest and the most holy personages of the new law, who are all images of the greatness and holiness of the Son of Gk)d, as those of the old law were figures thereof.

4. It is God's will that we should honour Him : and to this end it is that He has placed in His hands all His power and all His rights ; that He has established Him to be the Head of Angels, Mediator and Saviour of men^ Judge of the living and the dead ; that He has made our salvation to depend upon Him, and constituted Him the arbiter of our destiny for eternity. "When God created the Angels, He made known to them the plan of the incarnation, and set before them the Man-God to be adored by them, having willed that their eternal happiness should be dependent on Him. The glory of the good Angels is their reward for the homage they rendered to the Incarnate Word. The damnation of the bad Angels is their chastisement for refusing to adore a God made man.

" All things are yours," said St. Paul to the Corinthians, " and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.'* Such is the order of the service and glory which Gk)d desires to draw from creatures, that He may be worthily served and glorified. He desires that His Son should serve Him and honour Him ; that men should serve and honour His Son ; that the whole world should be employed in the service of men. The Son of God renders to His Father an eternal and infinite honour. All the creatures of the world render us continually an infinity of services, and are consumed for our use. Such is the model and the measure of what we ought to do for our Lord ; we ought, in our degree, to honour Him as He honours God. We ought to serve Him as all creatures serve us; and we ought to he consumed in His service as they are consumed in ours.

5, Grod loves us only in Jesus Christ ; and if He looks at us out of His Son, seeing in us nothing hut sins. He prepares for us nothing hut punishment.

6. Jesus Christ is the gate and the way to go to Grod. The more we attach ourselves to Him, the more we advance in perfection. The first of the martyrs, '' seeing the heavens opened, and Jesus standing on the right hapd of God," addressed himself to the Son of Gk)d, and not to the Father, because the Son is the way, and the only way, to go to the Father.

Thus we shall never arrive at a great perfection without a great devotion to our Lord, because Gk>d has determined hy an eternal decree that no one should enter into His glories save hy Jesus Christ, who is the gate thereof. But when a soul has exercised itself well in the love and imitation of the Incarnate Word, God draws it on to the highest degrees of virtue and divine communications ; and when He has once taken possession of the interior, and has established His ahode therein. He governs from thence the whole man, interior and exterior, the mind, the heart, the imagination, the appetite, the eyes, the tongue, all the senses. The more Jesus Christ resides within, the more He reveals Himself without, the exterior clothing itself with the perfections of the interior, or rather, the interior grace difiusing itself over the body ; in the same way, after its kind, as in the mystery of the transfiguration the glory of the blessed Soul diffused itself over the Body in a sensible and wonderful manner.

7. All the good we do, Jesus Christ does in us. We may say that He has done, in a manner, all the good works of the Saints, seeing that He communicated to them the thought thereof, which He had himself first conceived, and conceived for them; seeing that they undertook them only through the movement of His Spirit, and executed them only by the help of His grace. Thus, when we keep the feast of some Saint, we keep the feast of Jesus Christ, who is the author of all the sanctity of Saints.

In fine, we are Christians, and our profession is to adore Jesus Christ, and to devote to Him our homage, our love, and our obedience. " If any man, then, love not our Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema."

We ought to consult our Lord in all things which come before us for our choice, and consider what value His Heart sets upon them ; for we must banish from our heart every thing we find has no place in the Heart of Jesus.

§ ni.

The Holy Spirit spoke by the prophets and apostles ; but as it is in His power to go on speaking for ever, still more admirably and more clearly, He has through the organ of the Incarnate Word spoken in the most perfect and the clearest manner. We ought, then, to have a most peculiar esteem and affection for the words of our Lord as related in the GospeL