Chapter I. Motives for imitating our Lord

Jesus Christ desires that we should be His images, as He is the image of God His Father, not only as He is Qod, but also as He is man. And as the perfections of God shine forth in His sacred Humanity, He desires that we should manifest His spirit and His graces in our conduct, and by a perfect expression of His virtues make ourselves like unto Him. The acts of virtue produced by this motive of imitating our Lord and resembling Him are far more noble and more pleasing to God than such as are formed by the motives proper to the virtues themselves.

§ n. Jesus Christ is the model of Saints, and His life bears all the features of the virtues and the perfection which He has communicated to the Saints ; so that His life is, as it were, a mirror of the whole life of the Church in general, and that of each of the faithful in particular, even to the end of time. Every one beholds therein the very pattern of his own state.

§ m. The Apostles and first Christians were all full of Jesus Christ ; the love and imitation of Him were the idea of perfection they set before themselves ; as we may observe in the Epistles of St. Paul. He who had this idea fixed deeply in his heart would exercise virtues from no other motive ; for, remembering that Jesus Christ did this or that, and acted thus on such and such occasion, he would immediately desire to do the same, and would be led thereto far more readily, effectually, and meritoriously, than by proposing to himself all the motives of each virtue. We may indeed love virtues for their own beauty and excellence ; but when we consider them as they are displayed in the adorable Person of the Son of God, we find them to be incomparably more worthy of love and esteem, such consideration clothing them with a divine lustre. In Jesus Christ they are not only consecrated as in the Saints, they are also, in a manner, deified.

Add to which, that we can enjoy no greater or more glorious distinction in this life than to wear the badge and livery of our Lord ; nor have the greatest Saints practised, or taught others to practise, virtues, except from the motive of imitating Him. St. Paul laboured only to form Jesus Christ in the faithful. "My little children," he says to the Galatians, " of whom I am in labour again, until Christ be formed in you." And St. Ignatius, exhorting us to that which is most difficult in the spiritual life, viz. the love and desire of contempt and ignominy, adduces no other reason to urge us on to this point of perfection, than that in so doing we shall shew in an excellent manner our love and gratitude towards our Lord, and shall attain the honour of resembling Him.

Father Balthazar Alvarez used to say, that he considered himself to have made no way in the spiritual life until he had formed in his heart Jesus crucified.