Chapter VI. The Temporal Glory of the Sacred Heart

His eyes shall see the King in His beauty. ISAIAS xxxiii. 17.

When the prophet spoke these words, Jerusalem was in fear and desolation. The hosts of Assyria were coming up round about its walls, and the enemy was mighty and confident in his strength. The people of Jerusalem were terror-stricken and conscious of their own weakness. And in that time of anxiety and fear the prophet lifted up his voice, and promised to the inhabitants of Jerusalem that they should yet ' see the King in His beauty;' that is, the glory of the Son of David, the peace and victory of His Kingdom over all its enemies. But the prophet was gazing on no earthly king when he spoke these words. He was looking upon no created beauty; the throne of David disappeared in the glory that arose before him; the walls of Jerusalem passed out of his sight; it was not Ezechias, it was the Word Incarnate reigning upon His throne, of whose beauty the prophet spoke.

It was the Saviour of Israel, because it was the God of Israel; it was the King of Israel, because it was the Incarnate Son of God. This promise was indeed made to the Jews: but the prophet also says, ' He that walketh in justice... and shaketh his hand from bribes, and stoppeth his ears lest they hear blood, and shutteth his eyes that they look not upon evil,'1 he shall see the King in His beauty. That is to say, no unjust man, no man that worketh iniquity, no man that speaketh falsely, no man that barters truth and justice for bribes, no man that listens to evil, or that looks upon wickedness, shall 'see the King in His beauty.' These words are therefore spoken to every one of us; and the promise and the prophecy shall be fulfilled in us if in the sight of God we be just.

But when and how shall we ' see the King in His beauty'? They saw ' the King in His beauty,' in that midnight when His Blessed and Immaculate Mother laid Him as an infant in the manger at Bethlehem; the shepherds saw Him, and the angels of God worshipped Him. They saw ' the King in His beauty' when the kings from the East came up, bearing their gifts, to lay at the feet of a King greater than themselves. They also saw ' the King in His beauty' who, during the three-and-thirty years of His life

1 Isaias xxxiii. 15.

while He was visible among men, saw the Son of God Incarnate, of whom the Evangelist writes when he says, ' The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and we beheld His glory, the glory as it were of the Only -begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.' And we too shall see ' the King in His beauty' if we be pure and just of heart; if we keep a custody over our senses, and guard our soul free from sin, the promise shall hereafter be fulfilled to us, ' The clean in heart shall see God;' we shall see our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords, sitting upon the great white throne, the splendour of which surpasses the noonday sun, in the glory of His Eternal Father. But was this prophecy and this promise only to be fulfilled in the past, or only to be fulfilled in the future? Has it no fulfilment now? Is not this beauty of the King now visible to our eyes? Has it no manifestation except by the light of natural sense as it was in the beginning, or by the light of glory as it shall be hereafter? The beauty of the King is visible now, manifest at this time. There is a perpetual manifestation of the beauty of the Word Incarnate; from that hour to this it has never ceased upon earth. There is a vision of faith which is the prelude of the vision of glory. The vision of faith is the vision of the eye and of natural sight taken up into a higher region, according to the words of Jesus Himself when He said, ' Because thou hast seen Me thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have helieved.'2 And therefore now, at this time, to you and to me, this vision of beauty is granted, if we have the light of faith and the eyes of faith to see it.

Let us go on, then, and draw out briefly how this vision of beauty is manifested to us now.

1. First of all, the glory of the Incarnate Word from that hour to this has shone upon the earth, and in that light the beauty of the Eternal Son of God made Man for us is visible to those who believe. The world was dark, because it had lost the light of the knowledge of God; the world was dark in its intellect, because it had lost the illumination of the knowledge of the true God; and the world was dark in its heart, because it was dark in its intellect. Therefore, having lost the knowledge of the true God, it formed to itself hideous and perverted conceptions of many gods, the incorporation of the passions of man; and because its conception of God was perverted and hideous its heart was base, sensual, and depraved. Such was the state of the old world; and the prophet describes it when he says, ' Darkness 2 S. John xx. 29.

shall cover the earth, and a mist the people; but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee; and the Gentiles shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising.'* This was the first manifestation of the glory of the Sacred Heart, and its light rose upon the earth in the star which led the kings from the East, a single ray of light from heaven in the midnight of the world. ' The Bright and Morning Star'4 shone in Bethlehem, and from the lowly roof of the stable it spread its rays little by little. In His childhood, in His boyhood, in His youth, in His manhood, in the humble life which He lived at Nazareth, and in the public life which He lived in Jerusalem the glory and the beauty were waxing always brighter. Then He manifested Himself to His disciples; and He was manifested as the Son of God in His baptism, when the Holy Ghost came down, and the voice of the Father declared Him to be the Son of His good will. Then He manifested His glory when He came to dwell in Galilee, where He wrought His first miracle; He was manifested in the Transfiguration, where His countenance ' shone as the sun, and His raiment became white as snow.' But these were only the outward symbols, the visible tokens of a vision of

3 Isaias Ix. 2, 3. 4 Apoc. xxii. 16.

His beauty and His glory, which was for ever growing broader and more luminous in the hearts of His disciples as the light of faith came down upon them. Finally, when He rose from the dead, and in the forty days when He came back to them, He was manifest in His Godhead and His power, and the beauty and the glory of the Incarnate Word were fully revealed. Lastly, the ' Light of the world' which, as the prophet foretold, arose as the 'Star out of Jacob,'5 became as the noonday sun in its strength, when, on the Day of Pentecost, the illumination of the Holy Ghost was shed forth as a flood, first upon the Apostles, and then through them upon the nations of the world. In that great depth of light the words of the prophet were fulfilled, that ' the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the covering waters the sea.'6 The glory of the Incarnation, shining out from Jerusalem, has filled the whole world. The Christian world has light in its dwellings; beyond it the nations lie in darkness. Wheresoever the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ is known, there hangs before the intellect and the heart of men a vision of beauty; and that vision of beauty is the vision of God fcimself Incarnate, verifying the words of the Apostle, ' God, who com-

5 Numbers xxiv. 17. 6 Isaias xi. 10.

manded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.'7 The human countenance of Jesus, radiant with the perfections of the Sacred Heart, is the vision of beauty which has hung for these eighteen hundred years before the intellect and the heart of the Christian world. No vision of beauty ever surpassed this; none but this has ever manifested the glories of God and the perfections of manhood in one Person. We see there the beauty of the Divine Person of Jesus Christ, the beauty of His sacred countenance, the beauty of His divine character, and the beauty of His deified human Heart. It is the beauty of the Incarnate Word, clothed in all the tenderness of our manhood, elevated and glorified in the Person of the Eternal Son. Here, then, is the first fulfilment; and you, if you be among the just, if you keep custody over your senses, if your heart be clean, have the light of this beauty shining upon you. If you live lives of prayer and piety and faith, it is as visible before you as the beauty of the world which we see with our eyes of sense.

2. Once more. This beauty of the heart of Jesus was impressed upon the world. For it was not only

7 2 Cor. iv. 6.

a vision; it was a power. It not only hangs before us as an object of contemplation, but it has a power of transforming all things into its own likeness. The Apostle says, ' We, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord;' that is to say, God has manifested His beauty to the world that He may change the world into its likeness. The first creation which fell from Him by sin fell likewise under the sentence of death; and because it was darkened and defiled, it needed to be regenerated and renewed and created again. The second creation of God is not only perfect, as in the beginning, but is raised to a perfection above its former state.' The transfiguration of the world is accomplished by the beauty of the Incarnate Word, that is, by the beauty of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Wheresoever the light of His knowledge has spread, He has changed the face of the world. He has fulfilled the words of the prophet: ' The land that was desolate and impassable shall be glad; and the wilderness shall rejoice, and flourish as a lily; it shall bud forth and blossom. The glory of Libanus is given to it; the beauty of Carmel and Saron. They shall see the glory of the Lord and the beauty of our God.'8 That 8 Isaias xxxv. 1, 2.

is to say, ' the nations that sat in darkness and in the shadow of death' shall first he illuminated; * they shall see the glory of the Lord and the beauty of our God:' even the very soil under their feet shall bud forth in goodness, and blossom in purity as the lily; the impassable way shall become plain, the path of justice shall be clear as light, men shall walk where before the wilderness was never trodden by foot. The nations of the world, which were as a desert, shall become a garden; from a wilderness they shall be made the paradise of God; that is to say, out of the heathen world shall arise the Christian world; out of the world that was dead in sin shall arise a world of sanctity and life. Such is the one Holy Catholic Church, the mirror of the beauty of the Incarnate Word; holy, because He is holy and the Giver of all holiness; one, because He is the Only-begotten of the Father; universal, because He has shed abroad His light in all the world; imperishable, because He is eternal life. The Kingdom of Jesus Christ has changed the face of the world; wheresoever it has spread it has reclaimed the waste places of the earth, it has subdued them by culture, and has made them to be a field white for the harvest. Such has been the work of the Incarnation. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is the love of God clothed in the sympathies of our humanity, has been not only glory and beauty, but an assimilating power, the principle of a new life, changing the inward hearts of men and of nations into the likeness of itself. Every soul born again of the Holy Ghost receives this seed of God. And S. John writes, ' Whosoever is born of God committeth not sin; for His seed abideth in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God.' If any man be in Christ Jesus — and all who are baptised and are born again are in Christ Jesus — ' old things are passed away; and all things are become new." Wherever the hearts of men have been thus changed, first one by one, then by households, then by villages and towns and cities and peoples and nations, the world has changed its face. It has put off its own likeness, and has put on the image of Jesus Christ. The outward life and the inward Heart of our Divine Kedeemer have become the pattern and law to men. And as the world was changed in individuals, households, and kingdoms, the Church of God became the mother and the queen of the nations. They were thereby redeemed from the bondage and corruption of sin into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. In them have been verified the words of Jesus Christ, ' If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.'10 ' You shall know the truth, » S. John iii. 9. 10 Ibid. viii. 36.

and the truth shall make you free.'11 As in the beginning the serpent tempted man with a false knowledge to rob him of the truth, so Satan now tempts men with a false liberty to rob them of the freedom of the sons of God. Liberty is not license; liberty is not the freedom of madmen; liberty is not the power to do wrong, nor to believe falsehood, nor to err out of the way of justice. Liberty means redemption from sin, from falsehood, from human teachers who may err and therefore can mislead. It is redemption from all spiritual tyranny of man over man, and the liberation of the whole man, with all his faculties, bis intellect, his heart, his will, his affections; it is a redemption of the soul in all its actions towards God, in its obedience, in its faith, in its adoration, by the divine authority of Jesus Christ, who has purchased us with His Precious Blood, and has folded us within a unity where falsehood cannot enter, and under the divine guidance of a Teacher who can never err. Such is true liberty, and there is no other. The Church of God, then, is the mother of all true spiritual and religious freedom, for she it was who taught the nations of the earth the true domestic, public, civil, and political liberties of mankind. There was never liberty before Chris-

11 S. John viii. 32.

N tianity; liberty there will never be when Christianity shall cease to guide the government of men. All true liberty came into the world with Jesus Christ; all true liberty spread from Him among the nations of the world, and with Him true liberty will depart. If men reject the beauty of that King reigning on the throne of truth they will fall under the dominion of falsehood and of force, which will put a yoke of iron on their necks. The Word Incarnate, who is the second Adam, came and impressed upon the whole race of mankind, so far as they are His disciples, the likeness of Himself. He has made His own Most Sacred Heart the model and the pattern and the principle by which men may both form their lives and govern the world. He has stamped a new likeness upon the race of mankind, and that new image is His own, more perfect than the likeness of the first Adam in which we are born, for he was only man; but the second Adam, of whom we are born again, is the Incarnate God. We are thereby made ' partakers of the Divine Nature,'12 and are conformed to the divine perfections. This also is the vision of ' the King in His beauty' by the light of the Sacred Heart.

3. Thirdly and lastly, ' the King in His beauty' may be seen in the personal and temporal reign of 12 2 S. Peter i. 4.

Jesus Christ in heaven and on earth. How does He reign on earth temporally and personally? He reigns by one whom He has appointed to reign in His stead, to speak in His name, and to exercise His supreme jurisdiction. He has not left Himself without a Vicar. When He said, ' Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it;' and when He added, ' and to thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven/ He chose out and constituted one who should reign in His stead and fill His own place. He created also an office which should be perpetual on earth. He willed that there should for ever be one who should represent Him, one who should feed His sheep, as the Chief Shepherd of the universal flock. Therefore he is called His Vicar, because he holds the keys and rules by the authority which belongs by right to Himself. And when He said, ' Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world,' He promised that the office of His Vicar should never cease. The world will not believe this. If men will not believe it, let them account for the fact that there is at this hour a succession of Pontiffs ruling from the See of Peter. Its presence claims a lineal identity. It is here living and reigning; and if the world will not believe it to be unbroken, if it will not believe it to be divine, let it account for its existence and for the obedience of men to its voice. Let the world tell us why the See of Peter has never been destroyed. The world has never ceased to strive against it, and if it had been in the power of man to destroy it, it would have been destroyed long ago. If the world could have wrenched its links asunder they would have long ago been broken. But here it is at this hour. Pius IX. speaks in the name of all the Pontiffs that have ever gone before him — speaks as they ever spoke, full of the living consciousness of a divine commission, in the Name and with the authority of His Divine Master. Here then is ' the King in His beauty,' (though his visage be inglorious among men, and his form among the sons of men;'13 ' despised and the most abject of men.'14 Yet from him alone is derived the j urisdiction to speak to you the words that I am speaking now; and from him alone is received the power to absolve; and the authority to delegate the power of absolution to those who apply to you the pardon of the Most Precious Blood. But I said men will not believe it, and 13 Isaias lii. 14. l4 Ibid. liii. 3.

they tell us, ' The whole world is rejecting this Vicar of Jesus Christ, as you call him.' I answer, They rejected his Master; and if they rejected the Master, is it any wonder that they reject His Vicar? And did not the Master Himself foretell? — * The disciple is not ahove the Master, nor the servant above his Lord.' ' If they have called the good man of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household.'15 It is but a fulfilment of the prophecy, ' You shall be hated of all men for My name's sake.' If the world loved us, the prophecy would not be fulfilled, and our faith might be shaken; but the prophecy is fulfilled in this, that the world rejects now the Vicar of Jesus Christ, as then it rejected Jesus Christ Himself. Ay, more than this: if there be any head upon earth, sacred and venerable, which is the mark of every stone that every evil or wanton hand can fling, which is pelted every day with all the storms of proud and rebellious tongues, it is the head of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. The world says to us, ' Look at your Vicar of Jesus Christ: the whole world has not only rejected him and his Temporal Power, but every day in all its tones is telling both him and you what we think of him.' Is it a wonder that the Vicar should not be above his Master? Did they not 15 S. Matt. x. 24, 25.

refuse to believe in Him? Did they not revile Him? Did they not mock Him? Did they not blindfold Him? Did they not say to Him, * Prophesy who it is that smote thee'? And if they are slighting and mocking His Vicar now it is more than the fulfilment of a prophecy; it is a conformity between the servant and the Master, it is therefore a luminous proof and confirmation of our faith. Once more the whole world is making war against him. 'You tell us,' the world says every day, 'that the nations of the world are Christian, that they are the offspring of the Church of God. Why, these nations have all rejected the Head of your Church; they are making war against him, they are pulling him down on every side.' Why not? They crucified his Master. Is there not here again another fulfilment? Did they not, for three hundred years, crown almost every successive Pontiff with martyrdom? Has not the world, for fifteen hundred years, by subtilty and by force endeavoured to overthrow that sacred throne, and to rob it of the sovereignty which his Divine Master gave to Peter? When the sheep that were appointed for slaughter in the beginning ascended the hill of the Capitol, they, all in one day, found the wolves lying dead upon it. The wolves were dead, and the sheep entered into possession of the inheritance which their

Lord had given them. Nevertheless from that hour to this they have always been the objects of the world's scorn and hatred. Five-and-forty times the Vicars of Jesus Christ have been driven out of Rome, or have never set their foot in it; they have been, from the beginning, martyrs, exiles, fugitives, and prisoners. It has been their common fare, it has been the lot and the inheritance of him who bears the office of the Vicar of the Son of God, who was the first to be mocked, bound, scourged, and crucified; and in this there is revealed the ' beauty of the King,' the beauty of meekness, the beauty of faith, the beauty of inflexibility, the beauty of fearlessness, the beauty of fortitude, and the beauty of fidelity to God and to His truth even unto martyrdom. No man that has the light of faith in him, no man that has a Christian and a manly heart, can surely read the history of the Pontiffs without seeing there a reflection at least of their Divine Master's shame; and this too is the glory of the Sacred Heart.

But Jesus not only reigns personally among men, by an outward sovereignty; He reigns also by an inward sovereignty, by the inflexibility of justice over the will, and by the infallibility of truth over the intellect and the conscience of men — over those that believe, for their joy and their salvation;

over those that will not believe, for their peril and for their sentence hereafter. Those who, in bad faith, lift up their heel against the authority of the Church of Jesus Christ are condemned of themselves. Jesus has said, ' For judgment I am come into this world, that they that see not may see, and they that see may become blind.16 If you were blind, you should not have sin; but now you say, We see. Your sin remaineth.'17

The old world was so full of a belief in God that it fell into the worship of a multitude of gods. So far was atheism from the heart of men in the beginning, that they invested the visible objects of the world, even the world itself, with divinity.

The world, which is falling away from the light of faith, apostatising from Jesus Christ and persecuting His Church, is the world without God, the atheistical world; and that atheistical world is the world that is blind and cannot see the beauty of the Son of God. It is sinking below the Pantheism of the pagan world. It does not believe in Jesus, therefore it cannot see the impress of God in the creation of the world. It does not believe in a Creator, therefore it cannot read His handwriting. It sees the sky over its head, and believes in no 16 S. John ix. 39. 17 Ibid. 41.

heaven beyond it. It sees the visible horizon, and believes in no mind that governs the universe. It believes in the earth under its feet, because it has had to bury its dead, and it will be buried in the same itself. The material world of this day is without God — is simply atheistic; men live as if they were matter, dust returning unto dust, without belief in the existence of their own souls, or of the immutable distinction of right and wrong, or of judgment to come, or of a state after death. They live without God: they die like the cattle that perish. And if they who die like the cattle live like men, it is a mystery I cannot unravel. The man that lives without belief in God, if he lives a life rational, intellectual, just, pure, and merciful, is a miracle indeed. When faith in God disappears, the soul in man is degraded. In the midst of this world without God, which is enveloped and stifled in matter, the Church is conscious, with a vivid and living consciousness, of an unseen world with which it is vitally united. The Church visible on earth, militant and suffering here, lives by the same life as the Church suffering in Purgatory and triumphant in heaven. We, who believe in the Communion of Saints, are as conscious of that union as they who live in a household are conscious of the existence of all others that are under the same roof. As the Apostle says, ' You are come to Mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the Church of the first-born, who are written in the heavens, to the spirits of just men made perfect.'18 There is a cloud of witnesses hanging over your heads, you are encompassed hy the world unseen; and in the midst of that unseen world there is the heavenly court: there are the nine orders of angels, and the Patriarchs and the Prophets and the Apostles and Martyrs and the Saints and the Confessors surrounding ' the King in His beauty;' and from that throne He reigns upon earth. He governs the world by His providence, and He disposes the hearts of men by His Spirit. It is His hand which bears the rod of iron to reign over the nations of the world. He is bearing with them in patience until the time shall come when He shall bring forth justice unto judgment.

Thus far I have traced out, very imperfectly, the beauty of the King, which is visible now to faith. Therefore to us also the promise is fulfilled. But though this is visible to faith, it is not visible to those who will not believe. It is not visible except to those who are clean of heart. The manifestation of

18 Heb. xii. 22, 23.

God has never failed, but the eyes of the world have grown dim. ' The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.'19 He is hid to those ' in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, that the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.'20

The Incarnate Word dethroned the world. Its atheism, its idolatries, its corruptions, its cruelties, its immoralities, its philosophies, its superstitions, were all swept away in the light of the Incarnation; but ever since its downfall the world has been striving to dethrone the Incarnate Word. The conflict is going on at this hour; it is now closing in, round about the Church and the Head of the Church, with its last array of power. But it shall not prevail. At this moment, when the world seems to be in its greatest strength, and the Church in its greatest weakness, there never was a time from the beginning when the Church of God was so widespread among the nations of the world — so nearly reaching to its universality; nor was it ever more profoundly united in intellect and heart and will within, nor ever more solid and indissoluble in its unity without. It never manifested at any time to the world the notes of its 19 S. John i. 5. 20 2 Cor. iv. 4.

divine origin and of its divine authority with a broader light, or with a more self-evident witness, than at this day.

Therefore in this time of desolation fear nothing; have confidence in the Sacred Heart, which day by day, in all the Catholic Unity, is known and loved more and more. If the hour of deliverance tarries, it is only because the time is not ripe. Trust in the words of prophecy and of promise: ' His eyes shall see the King in His beauty.' That manifestation will come when the time is come; meanwhile rejoice and be glad. Know that your inheritance is sure, and that you shall enter into its fulness when His will has been accomplished and the number of His elect is gathered in. These dark days are not for ever. The time is at hand when it shall be said to us: ' Thy sun shall go down no more, and thy moon shall not decrease; for the Lord shall be unto thee for an everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.'21

21 Isaias Ix. 20.

VII.