LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 MRS. R.C. DUNCAN
 
 LIBRARY 
 
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 4 
 
 ELEVEN ADDRESSES 
 
 DURING A RETREAT 
 
 OF 
 
 THE COMPANIONS OF THE LOYE OF JESUS.
 
 PLYMOUTH : 
 
 PRINTED AT THE FEINTING PRESS OF THE DEVONPORT SOCIETY. 
 1868.
 
 ELEVEN ADDRESSES 
 
 DUHING A EETREAT 
 
 THE COMPANIONS OF THE LOYE OF JESUS, 
 
 ENGAGED IN PERPETUAL INTERCESSION FOR 
 THE CONVERSION OF SINNERS. 
 
 THE REV. E. B. PUSEY, D.D. 
 
 SOLD BY JAMES PARKER & CO., OXFORD, 
 
 AND 377, STRAND, LONDON; 
 
 AND RIVINGTONS, 
 
 LONDON, OXFORD, AND CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 1868.
 
 TO THE FOUNDBESS 
 
 OP 
 THE SOCIETY OF THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 AND OF 
 
 THE COMPANY OP THE LOVE OF JESUS, 
 
 AND, UNDEE GOD, 
 
 THE EESTOEEE, AFTER THBEE CENTUEIES, 
 
 OF 
 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE IN THE ENGLISH CHURCH, 
 
 WITH THE PEA YE E 
 
 THAT THE WOEK OF LOVE FOE SOULS 
 
 WHICH SHE HAS SO MANIFOLDLY DESIGNED, 
 
 AND IN WHICH SHE HAS SO UNCEASINGLY LABOUEED, 
 
 MAY BE TO HEE ENDLESS BLISS AS TO THE GLOEY OF 
 
 THE REDEEMER, 
 AND THAT THE PEAYEES 
 
 WHICH SHE HAS CAUSED TO BE MULTIPLIED 
 MAY EETUEN INTO HEE OWN BOSOM.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 ADDRESS I. 
 
 Page 
 
 Introductory. Object of the retreat to renew fervour 
 as to the object of the Company of the Love of Jesus, 
 prayer for the conversion of sinners ... 1 
 
 ADDRESS II. 
 
 What is a soul ? God's individual love for it in His 
 creation of it . . . . . . .12 
 
 ADDRESS III. 
 
 God's love for each soul in the Incarnation . . 21 
 
 ADDRESS IV. 
 
 Love of God and of Jesus, God -Man, for each soul in 
 tJw Passion 32 
 
 ADDRESS Y. 
 
 Love of God and of Jesus for each soul : some special 
 sufferings in the Passion ..... 42 
 
 ADDRESS VI. 
 
 Love of Jesus in His continual High Priest's Office 
 for us 57
 
 viii CONTENTS. 
 
 ADDEESS VII. 
 
 Love of God the Holy Ghost for individual souls . 72 
 
 ADDEESS VIII. 
 
 Horribleness of sin ...... 85 
 
 ADDEESS IX. 
 
 Necessity of Intercession . . . . .97 
 
 ADDEESS X. 
 
 Helps far Iceeping up Intercession . . ' ..110 
 
 ADDEESS XI. 
 
 On prayers for departed Companions . . 126
 
 INTKODUCTOKY ADDKESS. 
 
 WE meet to day under different circumstances from 
 those of ordinary retreats. For we meet, not to 
 consider about any vocation, to which some of us 
 may trust that God is calling them. We come, not 
 to break off the old, but to renew it. It is like the 
 renewal of vows to the religious; to begin anew with 
 greater fervour, not to make a beginning from the 
 first. We have all long ago chosen Jesus, in the 
 society of Whose love we have enrolled ourselves. 
 We must all have seen the deadliness of sin, its awe- 
 fulness, its dreadful antagonism to God and to the 
 Blood of Jesus ; its terrible wasting of souls, whom 
 God formed for Himself, and for whom Jesus died. 
 For our common bond has been, to pray for souls, 
 who are wasting themselves and the Price at which 
 they were bought, the Precious Blood of Jesus, that 
 they for whom He died might be converted to Him, 
 and the Price of His Blood might not be wasted in 
 them. We must know something of the value of 
 souls and of the end of our being, here, because we 
 have been engaged, more or less, in praying that 
 those countless souls, whom Jesus redeemed by all 
 those untold Sufferings and that terrible Agony and 
 Death, might not miss the end, for which God cre- 
 ated them, one by one ; for which Jesus, God-Man, 
 redeemed them; for which God the Holy Ghost
 
 2 Object of the Retreat ; 
 
 drew them from without, even if, not being made 
 members of Christ, He did not dwell in them. 
 
 The object of this society has been and is as wide as 
 the world. For it is as wide as the love of Jesus ; and 
 Jesus shed His Blood for all in every generation, for 
 those who should know Him and those who should 
 in the flesh never come to know Him; for those 
 with whom, amid whatever ignorance of Himself, 
 His Spirit pleads, among the Heathen or Jews or 
 Mohammedans or Heretics, that they, obeying this 
 inward grace from Him "Whom they know not, may 
 live. 
 
 And yet, it has also its nearer objects ; those who 
 are dear to us individually, but are lapsed into sin ; 
 those around us, near our homes ; those in this great 
 wilderness of souls, in which we are now gathered ; 
 those three millions, among whom, in so many faces, 
 the world, vanity, sin, levity, sensuality, leave such 
 distressing traces, and scarce any gladden one, 
 except the yet innocent gaiety of children. How 
 can we endure to be ever so short a time in the 
 midst of them, and not be, as the Psalmist was, all 
 ' ' prayer a " f or them ? How many of them may die to- 
 night ! How many may be dying at this moment, 
 and Satan may be disputing their souls with God ! 
 Let us at least now say, "Miserere, Domine," and 
 repeat to-night our " Miserere, Domine," "Lord have 
 mercy, Lord Jesu, mercy." How many sins will 
 there be to-night ! Once more, "Lord Jesu, mercy, 
 save this dishonour to Thy Name, this waste of souls." 
 
 Yet we are, some of us, seldom here. Alas, and 
 is not the same sad history repeated in those other 
 
 a Ps. cix. 4.
 
 Reneival of fervour. 3 
 
 great spiritual deserts, instinct and thronged with 
 human life, our mines or manufactories ? Wherever 
 those are gathered together, who minister to our ma- 
 terial prosperity or our comforts, there full often the 
 bodily life is wasted, oftener still the soul. Our 
 cheapened luxuries are the price of blood. They 
 are not luxuries, they are men's souls which are for 
 sale. Then there are those who belong to the body 
 of the Church, and not to her soul, or those who be- 
 long neither to her soul or body ; those who, it may 
 be, are being tempted to their first sin and are becom- 
 ing, in their childhood, estranged from God, or those 
 who have been hardened in sin yet still hopeful per- 
 haps in this, that the light of God's grace has not 
 yet markedly visited them, and been, face to face, 
 rejected. There is such variety, for whom we may 
 pray, that, if one thought but of the interests of Je- 
 sus and the bonds of our common humanity, and 
 what we owe Him, and the greatness of the privilege 
 of being co-operators with God and of joining our 
 intercessions with the ever-living Intercession of our 
 Great High Priest, it would seem as if we could 
 never flag. Alas for our misery ! To whom of us 
 does not our Lord seem to say anew, " Could ye not 
 watch with Me one hour ? " 
 
 But we know that perseverance in any good is the 
 chiefest of God's gifts. We are made up of failures. 
 The freshness, with which we first begin, fades. We 
 seem to have a great tide of grace to set us afloat : 
 and then perhaps the tide seems even to set against 
 us, or we are in a dead calm. Piety becomes mono- 
 tonous. We see very few of the fruits of our pray- 
 ers ; for they are chiefly for those, whom we do not 
 
 B2
 
 4 Object of the Retreat ; 
 
 know and shall never know in the flesh. We are 
 creatures of sight and sense ; the whole domain of 
 prayer is faith. And so perhaps we flag and are 
 discouraged ; and we continue, rather because it is a 
 duty which we have undertaken, and which we dare 
 not abandon, than because we have much heart to it, 
 or much hope about it. 
 
 I do not mean, of course, to set forth this as the 
 state of mind of members of this Company generally, 
 or indeed of any one of it. I know that very many in 
 it pray very zealously ; and that God has heard and 
 hears them. We have had marvellous instances of 
 the miraculous power of united prayer, besides all 
 those which the Judgement-Day alone will reveal. 
 He Who willed to hear the prayer, suggested it, and 
 heard the Spirit's " b unutterable groanings," and it 
 came to Him blended with and enmightened by the 
 Intercession of Jesus. I am speaking of temptations 
 incidental to any persevering effort to pray, not of 
 yielding to those temptations or of failure. 
 
 But because perseverance is so difficult, even when 
 supported by the grace of God, thence is the value 
 of new beginnings, such as this retreat is intended 
 to be. For new beginnings are the life of perseve- 
 rance, though they seem at first sight contradictory 
 to it, or to presuppose its absence or suspension. 
 
 God, by nature alike and by grace, makes new 
 beginnings the whole history of our being. We 
 shall only know at the Judgement-Day the value 
 of those new beginnings, which God gives us daily 
 by the very disposition of day and night and the 
 necessity of sleep. We can have no thought 
 b Rom. viii. 36.
 
 Renewal of fervour. 5 
 
 what we should lose, if we could dispense with 
 sleep and prolong day into day, by the loss of new 
 beginnings. 
 
 " New every morning is the love 
 
 Our wakening and uprising prove ;" 
 
 "New blessings, each succeeding day, 
 
 Hover around us while we pray ; 
 
 New perils past, new sins forgiven, 
 
 New thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven." 
 
 What a world of life and strength there is in that 
 fresh self-oblation every morning ! What a mercy to 
 have had yesterday past, with its wearinesses and its 
 failures and its burdens, to have had its venial sins 
 washed out by the Lord's prayer, and to begin anew, 
 with self-devotion to Jesus. What a life there is, if 
 we be not in the reach of or do not venture upon 
 actual Communion, in that first spiritual Commu- 
 nion, when God the Holy Ghost comes into our souls, 
 like the air which we breathe, yet the Very and Eter- 
 nal God. Every three years, we have a thousand 
 of such new beginnings. Then, still in their yearly 
 dance, the seasons in their annual round of increase 
 and decay : the years, in their ever-increasing rapidi- 
 ty of whirling flight : the annual commemoration of 
 God's individual mercies and judgements, the days 
 of our birth or of our re-birth in our Baptism or those 
 which are marked by the loss of friends, what is the 
 one low chant of them all but, "Time is ebbing : 
 time is ebbing ; when it has reached its last ebb, l c no 
 man can work ; ' no grace can be gained, no work can 
 be done, through grace, to God: no fresh capacity of 
 c St. John ix. 4.
 
 6 Object of the Retreat ; 
 
 the love of God can, through His grace, be won ; no 
 growth will be possible. ' d As the tree falleth, so it 
 must lie.' Begin anew." Advent, Lent, Easter- tide 
 preach the same, in earnest expectation of our Judge, 
 or meditation on His Passion, or joy in His Eisen 
 life, or ascent with Him, or awaiting the descent 
 of the Holy Ghost. Each Advent, Lent, Easter, 
 Ascension, Whitsuntide, preach to us those same 
 solemn words, " Begin anew ; " and, if we have not 
 so begun, we feel that that Lent or Eastertide has 
 been wasted to us. It is a jewel lost ; something for 
 eternity dropped out of our lives ; lost for eternity ! 
 what easy words to say ; what terrible realities ! 
 Lost, dropped, sunk in the boiling, tumultuous ocean, 
 over which we are passing to eternity ; not a trace 
 of them ; gone for ever ! 
 
 And as of our lives as a whole, so of each employ- 
 ment in them. Nay, they are those inward lives, 
 which we have by God's grace to renew, to which wo 
 have chiefly to look. The bodies of our lives, the 
 outward or inward works, remain in their great out- 
 lines, the same. The soul of each act, how zealously 
 it is done, with what dependence upon God ; how 
 purely it is done to Him, with how much love, how 
 much self-forgetfulness, with what perseverance amid 
 outward weariness, or, if the act be inward, amid 
 spiritual dryness ; what inventiveness we use to pre- 
 vent weariness or disgust or dull mechanical ways 
 coming over us, how much we ask continually His 
 present help, on these things the life of our acts, 
 their value for eternity, their influence on our eternal 
 Being, our contribution to our Dear Lord's work on 
 d Eccl. xi. 3.
 
 Renewal of fervour \ 7 
 
 earth, our " Well-done, good and faithful servant," 
 depend. 
 
 That to which we pledged ourselves, when we 
 were enrolled as members of this Company, is one of 
 those spiritual acts, which have much influence over 
 our own lives. In itself, it had nothing great in it. 
 The conception was great; but that was the Foun- 
 dress', not our's. That perpetual adoration, that un- 
 broken succession of intercessions, united with our 
 Blessed Lord's Intercession, so that night should make 
 no break in it, is a magnificent thought ; relay after 
 relay, year after year, and at every second in each 
 year, besieging God to pour out more powerful con- 
 verting graces upon sinners, it is like those Choirs 
 before the Throne, with which we unite ourselves, 
 where they rest not, day nor night, saying, Holy, 
 Holy, Holy ! But the parts in this great work, which 
 most of us have to bear in it, are small. The night- 
 watches fall upon the few, the most devoted. For 
 most of us, it is but for us the Priests, to present the 
 prayers of the whole Congregation in union with the 
 Adorable Sacrifice of the Lord; it is but for us. 
 Priests and laity, to fill up the continued Miserere, 
 u Lord, have mercy upon the souls which Thou hast 
 made, and hast redeemed with Thy Precious Blood," 
 with scarce any difficulty except that of perseverance 
 in maintaining unbroken that link in the chain of 
 perpetual prayer, which we have undertaken. Still, 
 simple though it be, what does it imply ? That souls, 
 which God created, perfect in beauty, for Himself and 
 His endless love, are in danger of forfeiting the end 
 for which they were created and of losing the sight 
 of God and all share in God, for ever ; that an active
 
 8 Object of the Retreat ; 
 
 warfare is momentarily going on between Satan, 
 with his marvellous talent and ever-increasing expe- 
 rience during these 6000 years, with all the evil know- 
 ledge which he gains from the terrible history of his 
 slaves, the damned souls, and each human soul; that, 
 when souls have forfeited the grace of God or cease to 
 ask or wish for it, God gives on the prayers of others 
 that first re-awakening grace, which should dispose 
 the soul to grace and to salvation. We cannot, most 
 of us, do great things visibly in this world. Nay, 
 what those few do, whom God highly endows with 
 spiritual gifts, seems as nothing. Every thing seems 
 wasted. A deluge of evil seems to overspread the 
 world. Who, in this vast wilderness of souls, seems 
 ever to think of Jesus, or to win others to think of 
 Jesus ? Poor Jesus ! He seems to wander through the 
 world, as when He was in the flesh, and not to find 
 where to lay His Head ! Where are the hearts, which 
 respond to His love ? "Vanity of vanities, all is vani- 
 ty !" Of material interests, of luxury, of pride, of 
 pomp, of degradation, there is alas ! no end. Every 
 where we see bars and bolts to keep out Jesus ; but 
 where is there a home for Him? where are the breasts, 
 on which He may rest ? where are they who mourn for 
 sin, and for the loss of souls, and for the dishonour 
 done to Jesus and His Love ? Where are they who 
 zealously seek for His lost sheep in the wilderness ? 
 And so by that act, whereby we enrolled ourselves 
 as, "Companions of the love of Jesus," we pledged 
 ourselves to be on the side of Jesus ; we avowed our 
 conviction, that, whether Priests or only having the 
 " e royal priesthood" of all members of Christ, we had 
 c 1 St. Pet. ii. 9.
 
 Renewal of fervour,' 9 
 
 something more to do in this world, than to pass 
 through it, and be just saved ourselves somehow 
 through the mercy of Jesus. We avowed that we 
 knew of the deadly strife for souls, which was going 
 on, how terrible the loss of a soul must be, how im- 
 minent the peril,' and that we ourselves at least 
 could do something for our King, Who reigns in 
 heaven, yet Who seems an outcast in the world 
 which He came to save. We pledged ourselves to 
 do that " something" every day; to part every day 
 with something of our own, our time ; to let no day 
 pass in which we would not use our appointed 
 prayers to Jesus, for His redeemed but forgetful 
 souls. 
 
 Simple as we are, we might have done much by 
 this time. For God loves to hear prayer ; He longs 
 to be overcome by it. A simple form of prayer for 
 others, is to pray, that God would, for our prayer 
 and for the love of Jesus, stop one sin that day or 
 that night. Be that prayer earnest, for the glory of 
 God, it is one very likely to be heard. If said per- 
 severingly, who knows but that, in ten years, God 
 may not have employed us to stop nearly four 
 thousand sins? We leave to Him, what sins and 
 in whom. But, as every sin is the parent of other 
 sins, and as every sin resisted may be the turning- 
 point of a man's life, who can say, that there may 
 not have been as many souls saved, as there were 
 sins checked ? Again, if we have prayed daily for 
 those nearest to His grace, who shall say that our 
 prayer, if earnest and effective, might not have ob- 
 tained that last grace for some soul, which should 
 gain him to God ? Of course, such power given by
 
 10 Object of the Retreat ; 
 
 God to our prayers would imply great earnestness, 
 and zeal, and God-given power of love on our side. 
 I am not speaking any thing to lift up ourselves, as 
 if God is likely to do great things for us, but of 
 what might have been or what might be, if we gain 
 from Him such devoted love. 
 
 The object of this retreat will be, by God's grace, 
 to kindle in us fresh devotion for the souls for whom 
 Christ died, fresh zeal for His glory, fresh anxiety 
 for their salvation, by dwelling on God's love for 
 souls, on the horrible dishonour of sin, on the abso- 
 lute duty and necessity of using intercessory prayer, 
 as an integral part of Christianity itself. 
 
 But now, at the beginning, let us look back, each 
 by himself, to his short-comings since he has taken 
 this office on himself; what have been his hindran- 
 ces ; whether over-occupation, or sloth, or a mechani- 
 cal way of doing most things, or the lack of stirring 
 himself up, or self-pleasing, or self-confidence, or 
 thinking that he had made progress, when he was 
 really at the very beginning, or omission of medita- 
 tion on eternal truths, or a way of taking all things 
 too easily ; or lack of cherishing and fanning his own 
 love for Jesus ; or a dull despondency and a sort of 
 fatalism, as if things always had been bad and 
 always would be ; or too much of self, even in self- 
 depreciation, as if God heard our prayers for our own 
 sakes after all, and not for the merits of Jesus ; or 
 the presence of that sceptical atmosphere around 
 him, which hangs like a damp fog around us, as if 
 God, Who said, "Ask, and ye shall receive," would 
 fail our prayers, if we do not fail Him ; or that dull 
 mist, rising out of all the interests of this passing
 
 Renewal of fervour. 11 
 
 world which distract us so much, hiding from our 
 eyes that unseen world which is yet so near us, and 
 in which we are so much concerned ; or that weari- 
 ness of the world's sickening ways, stifling the love 
 of souls in us, of which our Lord warned us, "' be- 
 cause iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall 
 wax cold." Let us look, to-night, each into our 
 own hearts, and, imploring the light of God's Holy 
 Spirit, look, whence our own short-comings and 
 failures have come, and at Holy Communion to- 
 morrow, offer ourselves to Him, in union with that 
 Precious Blood which He shed for us sinners, to be 
 more zealous in prayer for those, for whom with us 
 He died, to be more jealous for His Glory and His 
 interests, remembering for our own comfort too, the 
 words of God, " g he which convertcth the sinner from 
 the error of his way, shall save a soul from death 
 and shall hide a multitude of sins." 
 
 f St. Matt. xxiv. 12. s St. James, end.
 
 ADDRESS II. 
 
 The Love of God for individual souls. 
 
 THE subject of our thoughts is, the love of Al- 
 mighty God for souls individually. 
 
 "What is a soul ? It almost takes away one's breath 
 to think of it ; yet the thought is the groundwork of 
 any estimate of its value. One hardly knows, where- 
 with to begin, wherewith to end ; yet since the soul 
 was made by God, and God made it for Himself, we 
 had best begin by its relation to Himself. So mag- 
 nificent is the soul, such a marvellous creation of 
 God, that thoughtful but misled minds of old have 
 thought that, where it is said, " God breathed into 
 his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a liv- 
 ing soul," Scripture meant that God breathed man's 
 soul into his body, as something of Himself a . 
 
 a Some of the Greek Fathers understood the words of the in- 
 breathing, not of the soul but of the Holy Spirit into or with the 
 soul of the man, already created, corresponding to our Lord's 
 breathing upon the Apostles when He said " Receive ye the Holy 
 Ghost" (St. John xx. 22,). In this way, the words would ex- 
 press the truth of the Gift of original righteousness to Adam by 
 the Indwelling of God the Holy Ghost, which man lost by Adam's 
 fall. But in this sense, it would rather be an application of the 
 words, than their literal meaning. See Petav. de Trin. viii. 5. 
 4 sqq.
 
 The Love of God for individual souls. 13 
 
 This were a very frightful heresy ; for if the soul 
 were something of God, a part of God, then, when 
 the soul sinned, the blasphemy would follow, that 
 God sinned. Yet such is the majesty of the soul, 
 that some of old thought this, and some still think 
 it ; only they thereby do not exalt the soul, but 
 degrade God. Yet what Holy Scripture does speak 
 of, is a very near close relation of the soul to God. 
 " God breathed into him the breath of life." It ex- 
 presses more than the mere act of will, by which " God 
 made the heaven and the earth." By an act of will, 
 by His word, He created things in all space, " b heaven 
 and the heaven of heavens," heavens, to which our 
 heavens are as earth; " c He spake, and they were 
 made ; He commanded and they stood." Man He 
 created individually. All besides was finished. Sun 
 and moon and stars revolved in their courses ; all the 
 living creatures in air, earth, sea, were disporting 
 themselves; each was arrayed in all its multitudinous 
 beauty ; and God paused ! Time elapsed. The an- 
 gels looked on wondering. And God, to express His 
 thought of us, represents Himself consulting within 
 Himself and resolving to make man, " In Our Image 
 and likeness." He saith ; He, Father, Son and Holy 
 Ghost. wonderful soliloquy of God, Three but 
 One ! God consults within Himself as to creating 
 man, in redeeming and restoring whom the Three 
 Blessed Persons were again to co-operate. They, 
 through that mutual thought, which is expressed to 
 us as the speech of God, determined to produce in 
 act then, him our forefather, and in him ourselves, 
 foreshadowing His individual love for us, in that He 
 b Deut. x. 14. c Ps. xxxiii. 9.
 
 14 The Love of God for individual souls. 
 
 created us in one ; us, whom He had determined in 
 all eternity to create, knowing that we should be 
 sinners. In that eternal counsel it lay, how the 
 Father should then create, and the Son in the fulness 
 of time should redeem, and God the Holy Ghost 
 should re-create, and how our wasted nature should 
 be restored by the common counsel of the Trinity. 
 
 Then followed the second dignity of man ; that He 
 should form us " in the image of God, after His like- 
 ness." Our being in His " image " consisted perhaps 
 in the created correspondence of our being with His 
 Divine Nature. Our mind, our knowledge, our love, 
 have been thought to be a created image of the All- 
 holy Trinity d . And our " likeness " has been thought 
 to be in those moral qualities, which are shadows of 
 the infinite perfections of God benevolence, gentle- 
 ness, justice, truthfulness, and the rest ; as Jesus also 
 said to us, " e Be ye then perfect, as your Father which 
 is in heaven is perfect ; " " f be ye merciful, as your 
 Father also is merciful." He made us likenesses of 
 Himself, not in those incommunicable attributes of 
 All-mightiness, Omniscience, Incomprehensibility, 
 &c. ; but He made us like Him in all His attributes, 
 which are communicable to the creature, and reserved 
 to Himself His Infinity, whereby He has ever more, 
 and will everlastingly have more and more, to give 
 us. He has given to the soul to be immaterial, 
 spiritual, individual as Himself ; to be henceforth 
 eternal, deathless, ever-sentient as Himself. He en- 
 dowed it with freewill, free as His own, which He 
 Himself will not break, will not force, will not con- 
 
 d St. Aug. Conf. xiii. 1 1 . and note to p. 283, 4. e St.. Matt. v. 48. 
 f St. Luke vi. 36.
 
 The Love of God for individual souls. 15 
 
 strain, except by the drawings of love. He gave it 
 power, absolutely to rule itself and to rule the body, 
 in which He had given it a sort of ubiquity, so that it 
 inhabits the whole in the whole, and yet the whole 
 in each part of the body. But He has, further 
 beyond these positive endowments, given it an almost 
 boundless capacity of growth and enlargement, a 
 capaciousness to contain His own wisdom, grace, vir- 
 tue, goodness, beatitude. These are, so to speak, the 
 soul's natural endowments. If such is the glass, 
 what is the pearl ? All these natural endowments 
 were ensouled by the supernatural. In the first in- 
 stant of His creation, God infused the soul into the 
 body by creating it, and created it by infusing it, 
 and into the soul itself He, with grace, infused 
 all virtues moral and theological, and gave it ori- 
 ginal righteousness, whereby He Himself was pre- 
 sent to it and held it to Himself, so that, without 
 man's own will, no inordinate emotion could arise 
 in it, or disturb the peace and holy uprightness, 
 whereby all within him was subject to reason, and 
 himself to God. 
 
 Yet even created grace were little for the soul. 
 For God made the soul capable to contain Himself, 
 of union with Himself by containing Him. The 
 soul is so large that, although it may be occupied by 
 many things, although it is occupied, in turns, by all 
 sorts of labour or knowledge or vanity, the whole 
 world could not fill it. " For the soul which can 
 contain God, nothing can fill which is less than God." 
 
 This was figured in the words : " He breathed into 
 his nostrils." It was not Himself that He inbreathed. 
 Yet He wished to shew God's especial nearness to
 
 16 The Love of God for individual souls. 
 
 mail, and man's to God, the likeness of our spiri- 
 tual nature to God, in that God inbreathed it, and 
 that, at one time, God would be the Indweller of the 
 soul. the marvellous condescension of our God, so to 
 speak of our nearness to Him, that we have to say that 
 we are not part of Him, that we are not what He Is ! 
 What God did, in the creation of Adam, is re- 
 peated in the creation of each individual soul. The 
 creation of those, to us countless, souls, is part of the 
 perpetual immediate working of God, of which our 
 Blessed Lord says, "*My Father worketh hitherto, 
 and I work." All the. rest of the visible creation 
 He either "upholds by the word of His power," as 
 sun, moon, stars ; or those things, which are liable 
 to decay, He ordains that they should be repaired by 
 that mysterious law whereby He continues on the 
 generations of the world. All things around us He 
 worketh by such regular law, that men forget Him- 
 self, the Great King, in the reign of His law. The 
 Angels, in their several Orders, serve Him in the 
 fixed immutable allegiance of their love. Their num- 
 bers remain unchanged, except as far as they be 
 replenished from our race. The object, wherein 
 God's immediate creative power and wisdom and 
 love are seen, is man. He commits our guardian- 
 ship to Angels ; no Angel or Archangel or Princi- 
 pality or Power is admitted to any instrumentality 
 in the creation of the human soul. The creation, pos- 
 sible to God, is infinite. Eternity could not exhaust 
 it, if in all eternity God should create. Now He 
 limits His creativeness and His will to communicate 
 Himself anew, to His one creature, the human soul, 
 s St. John v. 17.
 
 The Love of God for individual souls. 17 
 
 It seems as if all His intelligent creation was to be 
 fixed on this one transcending subject, the history of 
 His love to our race. The Angels, we know, " h desire 
 to look into" and know more of the mysteries of our 
 redemption. Now all is suspended, that ' ' [ through the 
 Church, " i. e. through the mysteries of God's love in it, 
 "may be known unto the principalities and powers 
 in the heavenly places the manifold wisdom of God." 
 And this His Church He fills up continually, and 
 will fill up to the end, with human souls, which are, 
 one by one, the subjects of His individual thought, 
 of His individual care. Each one is as much the 
 object of that Infinite Mind and Counsel, as if it 
 was the solitary production of His Omniscience. 
 
 NOT is it a mere production of His mind. That 
 continual companion and brother of the soul, this 
 poor body of our's, receives its being in God's Pro- 
 vidence, and God creates and infuses into each, just 
 that soul, which is most fit to be associated with 
 each body. He combines soul and body, and en- 
 dows the one by His Providence, the other by His 
 own immediate creation, with those qualities, which, 
 together, may work most harmoniously to His glory, 
 and to the salvation of the being which He has 
 created to find its bliss therein. We have been 
 tempted, some of us, to wish we had this or that 
 endowment, that we had been born under this or that 
 outward circumstance. Faith tells us, that He Who 
 loved us eternally, and created us because He loved 
 us, and for His love, so tempered us together, that He 
 could not have given us one gift, which He has not 
 given us, nay, not one degree of one gift, without 
 
 h 1 St. Pet. i. 12. J Eph. iii. 10. 
 
 C
 
 18 The Love of God for individual souls. 
 
 risking our salvation. And this marvellous work 
 is going on continuously. As, it is calculated, 
 not a second passes but in it some human being 
 is passing into eternity, so then, in every second, 
 God is creating a new human soul, to replace, on 
 this earth, the soul which has been removed from it. 
 It may be, at one time, in England or Europe, 
 or in China or New Zealand. Wherever it is, 
 God's omnipotent wisdom, Whose " mercy is over all 
 His works," is indivisibly, wholly there, in His own 
 unchangeable rest, creating just that soul, which 
 will be, if it wills, most adapted to glorify Him. 
 
 Yet this is only the general outline of His care. 
 For He creates them not only for Himself, but as 
 He said in the beginning, in His own "image and 
 likeness." Every soul then bears some likeness 
 to some perfection of God. As blade of grass differs 
 from each other blade, and leaf from leaf, so, and 
 much more, does soul from soul. And each soul, 
 either in some one beauty or some ever- varied com- 
 bination of different beauties, is an image of some 
 perfection or combined perfections of Almighty God. 
 We can think of this, more readily, as to any one 
 natural grace. Thus we see, prominent in one, an 
 exact uprightness; in another, tenderness; in another, 
 benevolence ; in a fourth, love ; in a fifth, an imper- 
 turbable patience and meekness ; in a sixth, fiery 
 zeal; in a seventh, a yearning over every form of 
 human misery ; and all these and more, blended in 
 as many proportions as there are human souls. 
 
 We are such souls ; such is every soul, for whom 
 we pray. ' ' The piece of silver " may be trampled upon 
 in the mire of our Babylon. It has " the image and
 
 The Love of God for individual souls. 19 
 
 superscription " of God. It may be cleansed anew in 
 the Blood of Jesus, to shine for ever in that place 
 around the Eternal Throne, which God created it to 
 fill, and to illuminate with His indwelling Light. 
 God Himself can, and wills to be again the Soul of 
 that soul. He is the natural life of the soul by cre- 
 ation ; He wills to be its Life supernaturally by grace. 
 Ul Because God is the life of the soul, as, when it is 
 in the body, it gives it vigour, beauty, power of 
 motion, use of its every part, so, when God, its Life, 
 is in the soul, He gives it wisdom, righteousness, 
 charity." "JBut as the body is dead when it hath 
 not the soul ; so the soul is dead, when it is without 
 God." 
 
 This is the aweful reverse side of the picture. 
 God has endowed the soul with this vast capacity, 
 even of Himself, with this insatiable thirst even for 
 Himself, with this incapacity of being satisfied with 
 any thing, out of Himself. What then must it be, 
 to be eternally shut out from God? to have this 
 knowledge, that God Alone is the good of the soul, 
 and yet to be incapable of loving Him? to know 
 that beings innumerable are in the full enjoyment of 
 bliss in Him ; to be able to conceive something of 
 the magnificence of that bliss ; to know that it might 
 once have attained to it ; to remember all the graces, 
 which God offered to it, or wherewith He arrayed it ; 
 to know, that had it used them, it would be in that 
 unspeakable bliss ; and yet to be incapable of re- 
 penting, to cast all the blame upon God, to hate 
 Him, as being, it thinks, the Author of its misery ; 
 to accuse Him for having given it that aweful free- 
 
 ' St. Aug. in S. Joann. Tract. 19. J De cogn. verse vitse c. 31. 
 
 C2
 
 20 The Love of God for individual souls. 
 
 dom to choose amiss ; to feel the agony of everlast- 
 ing hate, and yet to be incapable of repenting; to 
 be encompassed with beings, in whose horrible power 
 it is, whom it hates, by whom it is hated, and this, 
 without hope ! 
 
 These are the two states of the soul, for which 
 every choice, good or ill, prepares it. Can we need 
 more, to make us pray earnestly for souls, who are 
 balancing between good and ill, or who have chosen 
 ill, and who, if any abide in that choice, must 
 lose God eternally, whom God's grace solicits and 
 almost torments, but who have not yet resolved to 
 embrace it ? were it not worth a whole life, to have 
 won by our prayers one soul, to live for ever with 
 God?
 
 ADDRESS III. 
 
 God 's Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 
 
 " WHAT is the value of a soul ? " "We might an- 
 swer by another question, " What was the Price of a 
 soul ?" " The Blood of God ! " For what God did 
 for all, He did for each, as St. Paul says, " He loved 
 me and gave Himself for me." Nay, our Blessed 
 Lord has been thought to have said, that He would 
 be crucified again, if so He could save one single soul 
 more. It is thought that God would have become 
 incarnate, even if Adam had not fallen. This too 
 would be part of His infinite love for our human 
 souls, that He would have been willing to take our 
 manhood into Himself, even if there had been no 
 ground for it, except that love, whereby He would 
 unite us as closely as He could to Himself. God 
 the Word would have united, it has been thought, 
 our human nature to His Divine, even if He had 
 had no occasion to pay the penalty of our sins, to 
 suffer and to die for us. He would have willed, it 
 is thought, to have chosen us, the least and lowest 
 of His rational creation, to unite in us His creation 
 with Himself. His creation was, so to speak, out- 
 side of Himself. He had endowed Angels and man
 
 22 God's Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 
 
 with free-will. Angels too He must have made in 
 a likeness of Himself; yea, in a nearer likeness to 
 Himself than man, because they are purely spirits. 
 He had bound them to Him, if their free-will would 
 be bound, by that created grace, with which He in- 
 vested them. He had clothed both angels and man 
 with His grace. Yet His creation stood in a manner 
 over-against Himself, a beautiful kingdom, of which 
 He was the supreme King ; but still there was no 
 link, no bond of union, between the creature and 
 God, except the profuseness of the out-pourings of 
 His love, and their God-enabled allegiance, returning 
 love for love; free created love, reflecting, pene- 
 trated with, gushing back to meet that Infinite tide 
 of love. 
 
 But this was not enough, it never had been 
 enough, for the boundless love and condescension 
 of our God. In all eternity, when God had not 
 made time, when there was no creature out of God, 
 when He had not gone forth out of Himself, find- 
 ing the full adequate object of His love within 
 Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, He willed to 
 create ug, and in us, by becoming one of us, to unite 
 in one the creature with the Creator. Yet then too 
 He foresaw Adam's wasting of His grace, where- 
 with He would hold him to Himself. Then too He 
 knew, that the fascination of free-will would be too 
 mighty for the attractiveness of His grace, and that 
 Adam would fall, and our race would be lost. Even 
 then, although the Divine Mind can behold as se- 
 parate, what would never in act be separate, He 
 willed, in that eternity, to take our human nature, 
 in us fallen and sinful, in Him sinless, that in it He
 
 God's Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 23 
 
 might suffer, be blasphemed, mocked, scourged, cru- 
 cified, spat upon ; that He might bear the weight of 
 our sins, and give up His soul to death. Would we 
 know the value of a soul, it is not only in the Gar- 
 den of Gethsemano or in those dread indignities 
 before Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, or on that aweful 
 road to Calvary, or in the "My God, My God, why 
 hast Thou forsaken Me?" that we must learn it. 
 The beloved disciple said of the things which Jesus 
 did, Ua l suppose that the whole world could not 
 contain the books which should be written." For al- 
 though the outside acts could be written, yet the 
 acts, as a whole, the soul of the acts, that which 
 made the acts what they were, could not be written 
 adequately. For every act was instinct with His 
 Divinity ; all had a Divine excellence which is be- 
 yond the grasp of men or angels, which not this 
 world only, but eternity itself could never fully 
 comprehend. Especially, then, must this be true of 
 that, which was the centre of all His acts, that for 
 which, since we are sinners, He came into the 
 world, to do His Father's will, by suffering for us. 
 " b God so loved the world that He gave His Only- 
 begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, 
 should not perish, but have everlasting life." The 
 measure, then, of the value of the soul, is the love 
 of the All -Holy Trinity, Father Son and Holy 
 Ghost, Who cooperated in our redemption and in 
 saving us. What few simple words to say this in ! 
 They are bald naked words. I have stated the bare 
 fact in the barest words ! The fact itself embraces 
 eternity, is coextensive with the Being of God. The 
 a St. John xxi. 25. b Ib. iii. 16.
 
 24 GocVs Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 
 
 love of the human soul was ever, is, ever will be, a 
 passionless, changeless, effluence of the Being of 
 God, Who " is Love." This we know, because God is 
 God, " in Whom is no variableness neither shadow of 
 turning," Who Is what He Is, in oneness of Being, 
 unchanging in Himself while changing in act. He 
 loved us transcendently, infinitely, when He brought 
 into act that mysterious order of our Eedemption. 
 Then, in all eternity, that Infinite transcendent love, 
 which when, or long after He had created time, He 
 willed to shew, was part of His Being. One might 
 boldly say, in reverence, since He has so loved the 
 soul of man, that God would not have been the same 
 God, if He had not loved it. His love of us is no ac- 
 cident of His being, so to speak ; it is not a function 
 of His Being, which might have been shewn to 
 other beings, far worthier than we, and not to us. 
 We know that that love is shewn to those, to the 
 magnificence of whose powers the greatest of our 
 created powers is as nothing. It may be, that He will 
 create countless other rational beings, better than us : 
 it would be difficult to conceive that He should 
 create any rational beings lower than us : for then 
 His infinite love would not have stooped as low as it 
 could, in taking our flesh. But His love to the 
 soul of man exhibits to us a distinct side or aspect 
 of His love ; so that His love for us, free though it is, 
 is an essential part of His Being. It is free, because 
 perfect freedom is inseparable from the Being of 
 God ; but freely to love us, before we were, and not- 
 withstanding what we became, was part of the Eter- 
 nal Being of God. Such was His love of the human 
 soul, which He willed to make, that He willed in all
 
 God's Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 25 
 
 eternity to create that human Soul, with which was 
 to be for ever united the Godhead of the Son. Into 
 this Union, closer than any union except that perfect 
 Unity of the Trinity Itself, not for any foreseen 
 merits even of His absolute essential sinlessness, but 
 out of the Infinite forecoming love of God, was to 
 be admitted that Human Nature of Jesus, which, 
 though absolutely perfect, had no separate existence 
 from, was never apart from, had no separate Per- 
 sonality from, God. To me more overwhelming, 
 though not so touching, not so wounding, is the 
 thought of the condescension, that God should will 
 to have our Human Nature, however Deified, for 
 ever united with His Godhead, than even those dread 
 Sufferings of the Cross. They were indeed an un- 
 utterable extension of His condescension, that God 
 not only took our nature, but that God was not blas- 
 phemed only face to face, (that alas ! He is every 
 where as God,) but that God was spat upon, God 
 was mocked, God was buffeted, God was crucified, 
 God died ! Those Sufferings were an intense aggra- 
 vation of His humiliation. Only, they were not so 
 lasting. For they, although in conception they 
 would fill eternity, infinity, still were limited in 
 extent to those aweful hours. His whole Suffer- 
 ings were restrained to those thirty-three years and 
 the nine months, during which He " abhorred not the 
 Virgin's womb ; " for then too His own words must 
 have been fulfilled, Uc 'I have a Baptism to be bap- 
 tised with, and how am I straitened, until it be ac- 
 complished ! " Then too (although His "Will was im- 
 moveably conformed to the Will of God,)He must have 
 c St. Luke xii. 50.
 
 26 GocVs Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 
 
 burned with the longing to " d be about His Father's 
 business." Then too, since His soul was united with 
 His Godhead, He must have had the prevision of all 
 those sufferings of mind and body, which He was 
 to endure for love of us, and (worse still) of our in- 
 gratitude and horrible waste of them, for whose love 
 He endured them. But these, although infinite in 
 degree and in value, were bounded in time. His 
 existence upon earth as Man, His work in meriting 
 our salvation, was to be compressed within those 
 thirty -four years. The condescension of that Union, 
 whereby His Divine and Human Natures are never to 
 be divided, is for Eternity. In all Eternity we shall, 
 in the Light of the Godhead, see the especial lustre 
 of those glorious Suns, the sacred Five, the Blessed 
 Wounds, which for us He received. In all Eternity, 
 it will be a special glory to us, that it is our Na- 
 ture, which for ever exists enGodded, the own Body 
 and Soul of God. 
 
 And that neither sex might feel itself neglected, 
 whose is that throne, close to the Throne of the God- 
 Man Christ Jesus ? who is she, on whom those Di- 
 vine eyes, radiant with His Godhead, which survey 
 all things in heaven and on earth, must rest with an 
 especial love, with the love of a son to His mother ? 
 What must the love and humility of that highest 
 being of the heavenly Hierarchy, whether it be St. 
 Michael or any of the Seraphim, belonging to those 
 ranks which never fell, that he adores the condescen- 
 sion of God, not only in taking into Himself our na- 
 ture, but in placing nearest to Himself, the God-Man, 
 His purely human Mother, above himself, above every 
 i St. Luke ii. 49.
 
 God's Love for each soul in the Incarnation, 27 
 
 possible creature ! For, grand and magnificent and 
 highly-endowed as may be any the highest creature 
 which God could create, none could have the near- 
 ness of her, the Mother of God ! Where are we ? 
 Are we standing on earth ? Are we in heaven, where 
 He our Head is, Who has taken a body like our's, a 
 Soul like our own souls, a Soul created and infused 
 into His Human Body, like our's ; a Soul, endowed 
 indeed with all but Divine attributes, and ever, from 
 it's first creation, admitted to the beatific Vision, 
 and seeing and knowing all things through the know- 
 ledge of God the Son, the Word and Wisdom of the 
 Father, Who took it. Yet still a Soul, Which could, in 
 the Flesh, sorrow like our's, suffer like our's, should 
 I say ? nay which could by His upholding Deity suf- 
 fer in Itself Sufferings, unimaginable by us, in It's 
 Body ; Sufferings, which all the suffering, from right- 
 eous Abel to those whom Anti-Christ shall torment, 
 could not, if all were concentrated in one, ever 
 reach ? 
 
 We may see something of the greatness of this love 
 of God, in men's difficulty to receive or believe it. 
 It were easier almost, but that God has placed the 
 faith in our heart, to believe any thing, rather than 
 the intensity of the condescension of the love of our 
 God. We could not believe it, but that God gave and 
 supported our belief! We may be sure that our 
 faith is of God, because we have it ; for none save 
 God could give it us. People could believe anything, 
 rather than that God, such as we believe and know 
 Him to be, could take to Himself our human soul and 
 body in the Yirgin's womb. It were no tax on faith, 
 to imagine, like various heretics of old, that God ap-
 
 28 God's Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 
 
 peared in the unsubstantial likeness of the human 
 form ; or that He intimately conjoined to Himself the 
 Man Christ Jesus ; or that He descended upon Him 
 in His Baptism ; or that (shocking as were the blas- 
 phemy which it involved) He dwelt in our Lord's 
 Human Body, in place of His Soul ; or that He so ab- 
 sorbed His Humanity into Himself that It had no se- 
 parate existence. Our mind, unless enlightened to 
 know God, can imagine any thing, bear any thing, ex- 
 cept the Truth. It were nothing to imagine, like the 
 poor Heathen, that u the gods had come clown in the 
 likeness of men." Every shadow of the truth has 
 some attractiveness, because it is it's shadow. The 
 truth alone has something, marvellously attractive 
 indeed, yet also repelling to those who gaze on it 
 with more human eyes, because it is such a transcen- 
 dent paradox of love. "We could bear any thing al- 
 most, of our mere human minds, rather than the be- 
 lief which God has revealed, that He, existing Un- 
 changeable in His immutability, has yet conjoined 
 with Himself a Soul, such as the very soul, with 
 which wo hear and think and speak of it, a Body 
 like our's in form, and to which our incorruptible 
 body shall be like ; that He, remaining what He was, 
 God, is yet what He was not, Man ! Any thing ra- 
 ther than the overwhelming truth ! To believe that 
 one, in whose human being God especially was, died 
 for us, would have no such difficulty of mystery. 
 But to believe that Man is personally united with 
 God, that He has no human, has nothing but a Di- 
 vine Personality, that He lives, is adored by every 
 creature in Heaven, by one act of worship with the 
 God-head, wherewith He is united, this is an ex-
 
 God's Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 29 
 
 tent of humiliation, which we cannot imagine, but 
 must adore. 
 
 Yet this is not all. Every thing, which God 
 would ever do, must have been unchangeably pre- 
 sent to the Divine Mind. To think of the Incarna- 
 tion, as only a remedy for Adam's fall, is to imagine 
 chaugeableness in God. There can be no after- 
 thought in God. God must have eternally known 
 and provided for it. The All-Holy Soul of Jesus 
 must ever have been the Object of his choice. It 
 must have been the centre of His Creation, the Pri- 
 mal conception of His Mind, when He willed to put 
 in act what He ever had in mind. The central idea 
 of His Mind, that, wherein things in heaven and 
 things in earth were to be united, was a Human Soul. 
 He conceived Angels and Archangels, Cherubim and 
 Seraphim with their vast knowledge and intellec- 
 tual capacities and their almost boundless fervour of 
 adoring love. But He took not on Him the Nature 
 of Angels. The Perfection of creation, all but Infi- 
 nitely above them, save that nothing created can be 
 infinite, was the Human Soul of Jesus, such as the 
 Holy Trinity conceived It and loved It in Their 
 unchangeable Eternity. 
 
 Yet neither was this all. God willed not that the 
 Soul of Jesus should be invested with a Body, cre- 
 ated anew, like our body. He willed that that Body 
 should be formed of our very Flesh. In all Eter- 
 nity, it was part of His counsel, in uniting Himself 
 to man, not to " abhor the Virgin's womb." The 
 Church, in choosing the word " abhor," expressed her 
 thought of the depth of this condescension. The Soul 
 of Jesus lay in the Eternal Mind of God, yet a Soul
 
 30 God's Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 
 
 to be united in the Virgin's womb with an All-per- 
 fect Body, which was also the object of the Eternal 
 satisfaction of God ; a Body, the Perfection of 
 Beauty, yet framed to suffer, beyond the capacity of 
 all other suffering. So close did He will His one- 
 ness of nature with our's to be, that He would not 
 choose to take that Soul and Body, except, as far as 
 possible, as our's are derived, the Body from the sub- 
 stance of His Virgin-Mother, the Soul contemporane- 
 ously created by God. 
 
 Nor is this again all. Our nature was fallen. 
 We ourselves aggravate to ourselves the almost in- 
 credibility of that Infinite love of God, by the ways 
 through which we degrade our nature. He took 
 "the likeness of our sinful flesh; h " i. e. He took that 
 our very Flesh, like in every thing except sinfulness. 
 Yet in us how loathsome, how manifoldly degraded is 
 that flesh, which He vouchsafed to take ! He took, 
 He loved unspeakably that nature, which we lay low, 
 lower than the beasts which perish. He took it, not 
 to redeem it only, but so unspeakably to exalt it. 
 He gave it in His own Person attributes belonging 
 to His Humanity only. He arrayed His Soul, from 
 the first moment of its existence, with His own un- 
 speakable glory : He bestowed upon It from that 
 moment the Beatific Vision of God : He framed It, 
 so that, while capable of the extremity of suffering, It 
 should also be capable of the utmost possible fulness 
 of grace : He infused into It all knowledge, by the 
 union with His Godhead. But He also framed It, 
 so that It should be capable of meriting, meriting 
 for Itself, meriting for us, meriting that exaltation 
 which It should have u above every name which is
 
 Gfod's Love for each soul in the Incarnation. 31 
 
 named, in this world and in that to come : " meriting 
 that restoration from the grave without corruption, 
 and the re-union of the Body and Soul in that God- 
 head, Which was ever present with both; meriting, 
 by His life-long perfect Obedience and by every act 
 of His unceasing "Will to do His Father's Will; merit- 
 ing, above all, by His Death. What a glory to our 
 souls, what a love for them, that they should be of the 
 same substance, the like creation to that Soul which 
 is so hyper-exalted : that that Soul, in its creation, 
 should be the archetype of our's, that that Soul in 
 Its created graces, should be the pattern for our's ! 
 
 Yes, this is a separate manifestation of the love of 
 God for the soul, that He would conform our souls 
 to His Soul, our bodies hereafter to His glorious 
 Body. He would, by His merits and by His inwork- 
 ing, make us capable of working and of meriting. 
 He creates our souls pure and undented, but He 
 makes them capable of increase of grace here and of 
 glory hereafter. He has set no bound to the grace 
 and glory which they may attain ; for He has me- 
 rited that they should attain it, He gives grace that 
 they may attain it. "Not I,'" says the Apostle, 
 " but the grace of God which is in me." 
 
 how God must have loved the soul, which He 
 has so formed and re-formed, which we so degrade, 
 which He so longs to exalt, for each of which souls 
 He has made its own place in the Heavenly Choir 
 to which in His eternal love He willed it to belong, 
 in His own image and likeness, conformed to His 
 Son ! How can we love enough the souls, which, 
 with our's, God so loved I 
 
 h Eom. viii. 3. J 1 Cor. xv. 10.
 
 ADDKESS IV. 
 
 The Love of God and Jesus for single souls, as seen in 
 His Sufferings. 
 
 WHAT, again, we may ask, is the value of a soul ? 
 the souls of those we pray for, or our own ? The 
 price paid for them is the Blood of God ; the Suffer- 
 ings of Him Who is, in his own Nature, impassible, 
 yet Who still, since His Person was Divine, was God, 
 the Sufferings of God. One could repeat them, 
 as the Holy Gospels tell them, or as what those sacred 
 words involve, without distinctly saying them ; but 
 to tell of them as proofs of His Love, what soul, un- 
 less especially enlightened by His Spirit, can lift the 
 veil, and enter ever so little into the Ocean of love 
 in that agonising Heart, which burned to vindicate 
 in itself the aweful righteousness of God, to meet 
 its dread requirements, and to win back to His love 
 and allegiance our bewildered passion-tossed world ? 
 
 It would, as St. John says, " a fill the world with 
 books to write the things which He did; " and no ac- 
 tion of His was without suffering. Let us think then 
 of some aggravations of them, which most of us per- 
 haps do not commonly think of, and thence gather 
 a St. John xxi. 25.
 
 The Love of God and Jesus for single souls. 33 
 
 some thoughts of His love for single souls and for our 
 own. 
 
 1st then, to think of His prevision of them. His 
 continual sight of them. We can hardly ever know 
 certainly, that any suffering either of mind or body 
 will come upon us. We cannot imagine beforehand, 
 what they would be. We can commit them to God's 
 Hands, and look away from them, and are distracted 
 from the anticipation of them by life's manifold cares 
 and duties. How little do we think of that one suf- 
 fering, which alone is absolutely inevitable, our 
 Death ! If once the dread of it does take possession 
 of any soul, even though intermitting, as it must be, 
 how does it change life ! what a piercing, purifying, 
 yet often bewildering, suffering, continually wakes 
 up anew in the soul, transpiercing it ! And yet then 
 too it comes only at intervals, and is broken by sleep, 
 or becomes a dull anxiety, or is mitigated by prayer : 
 else reason would give way. And then too it is either 
 a shrinking from something unknown, or, as far as it 
 is dread of ub judgement to come," it does not know 
 the awef ulness of that judgement ; and the suffer- 
 ing is softened by some hopefulness of the unknown, 
 unfelt mercy of God. 
 
 But to Jesus, every detail of suffering of mind or 
 body, every source of agony, to the withdrawing of 
 His Father's Face and of the consolations of His Di- 
 vinity, the whole of His Sufferings and every sepa- 
 rate pang or throb, or piercing, heart-crushing, op- 
 pressive, stifling agony, were unchangeably present. 
 He knew them in their exact "number and weight 
 and measure." The sight of them never left Him. 
 
 b Acts xxiv. 25. 
 D
 
 34 The Love of God and Jesus for single souls , 
 
 He ever felt them. Whether He was doing His deeds 
 of love, or was followed by the admiring multitudes, 
 or was teaching those who, for the time, hung upon 
 His lips, and said " c never man spake as this Man," 
 the issue of it all was ever entirely before His Eyes. 
 He knew that those same multitudes would be stir- 
 red up to cry, " d Crucify Him, crucify Him." That 
 one occasion, when He " looked up to heaven and 
 sighed ," when about to perform a miracle, revealed 
 one side of His inner self, sorrow for the hardness of 
 heart, which would not be converted and live. We 
 count our chequered years by something, which was 
 predominant in them, something which gave them 
 their colouring. Some change came over our lives, 
 and left us other than we were. But each year, and 
 each day and hour in each year, has been made up of 
 countless variations of thoughts and feelings, chasing 
 one another, like clouds hurrying before the wind ; 
 and even those clouds which hang the heaviest were 
 ever stirring, and were mitigated by the fact that they 
 were passing. Even if they were to be succeeded 
 by the like, it was something that so much of them 
 was passed through. It is a mercy to us, that " no- 
 thing continueth at one stay." There is no absolute 
 monotony of suffering. We cannot sustain long any 
 fixed thought, any more than we can any one motion- 
 less posture of the body. We cannot conceive it. 
 But then we have no thought, whereby to imagine 
 what those His sufferings, mental and bodily, were. 
 But being so intensely beyond all human thought, 
 this we know, that, for love of us, Jesus beheld them 
 as though they already were, with that unbroken 
 c St. John vii. 46. a St. Luke xxiii. 21. e St. Mark vii. 34.
 
 as seen m His Sufferings. 35 
 
 fixed gaze of those some 300,000 hours of His earth- 
 ly existence. Never did they fade from His sight ; 
 never did His gaze falter. He ever longed that they 
 should come ; He ever willed that the Eighteousness 
 of God should be justified. He had to endure at 
 once the unutterableness of those Sufferings and their 
 delay. The Sufferings which He was not in act bear- 
 ing, were ever present to His Soul. The Sufferings 
 were enhanced through delay ; the joy in their ac- 
 complishment was put off. 
 
 2. But, at last, they came. Yet still there was that 
 same concentration of suffering. He Alone could 
 have borne all which He bore ; and His might of 
 bearing did but aggravate His Suffering. To ws, all 
 suffering comes, one by one. God so tempers it to us, 
 that wo rarely feel two bodily pains at once. "We 
 may feel them alternately ; the feelings may come so 
 quick upon each other, that we may think that we feel 
 them together. 33ut when some intenser pang comes, 
 then it arrests our thoughts, and we know on reflection, 
 that we have felt it alone. It is known how strong 
 mental pain makes people insensible to any suffering 
 of the body ; or contrariwise, strong bodily pain is a 
 distraction to the mind from its own suffering. The 
 variation of suffering, though people complain of their 
 manifold ills, is doubtless a relief. The human mind 
 can bear anything, rather than one monotony of suf- 
 fering. But this belonged to that Divine Sufferer, 
 that He ever saw all which He saw, He ever felt all 
 which He felt. His Soul, collected in itself and seeing 
 all in the light of the Godhead, was undistracted in 
 His Suffering. No pressure of one suffering drove out 
 another. They came thick upon Him, one after the 
 
 D 2
 
 36 The Love of God and Jesus for single souls, 
 
 other; but He felt them before they came; they 
 passed in act, but they passed not in effect. 
 
 3. But the Sufferings of the Soul came in no succes- 
 sion. All were upon Him at once, and unvaryingly. 
 He came to bear our sins, and His Father's displeasure 
 at sin. All the sins of the whole world were upon 
 Him at once; all which ever have been, all which there 
 are at this moment, all which there will be to the 
 end ; the sins of those who will not be redeemed ; 
 the sins of those, who would sin against the light 
 of His love ; the sins of those, whom He came to save, 
 whom He pursues with His love, -yet who flee from 
 it. All were upon Him at once ; and He saw and 
 felt the horribleness, the loathsomeness of each and 
 all, as we cannot imagine as to one sin. He saw each 
 and all, not, as we do all we can see as a panorama, 
 ill around Him ; but each by a direct vision, borne 
 ui upon His Soul, in all its individuality, and in all its 
 distinct horrors, as God Alone can see them, and 
 His God-united Soul. Those words, which in their 
 wonderful individuality of love, " f Who loved me and 
 gave Himself for me," so speak to our souls of His 
 indivisible love for each one of His redeemed, even 
 of our sinful selves, tell us also of the individuality 
 of His Sufferings. He Who had each one of us in 
 His Heart, had also the sins and ingratitude of each 
 to Him and to His Father ever before His eyes. O 
 that multitudinous ingratitude of ours. Sin and in- 
 gratitude ! sin and ingratitude ! Ug He looked for some 
 one to have pity upon Him and there was no one, 
 neither found He any to comfort Him." Every where, 
 in their varied shapes, wherever He looked, sin and 
 
 f Gal. ii. 20. * Ps. Ixix. 20.
 
 as seen in His Sufferings. 37 
 
 ingratitude ! And ! our own. We can, by our own, 
 form some estimate, what a world of sin there is in 
 every human soul, (though we each doubtless feel 
 that no one on earth has been so ungrateful as we 
 ourselves) and these to be multiplied by the millions 
 upon millions in each successive generation ; and all 
 on Him Alone ! 
 
 And as He saw, so He felt them all. Not, as we 
 do, by revolving things in our minds, not by any 
 act of will, bringing them before Him. Each weigh- 
 ed upon Him with its own individual weight ; each 
 pressed upon Him with its own individual offensive- 
 ness ; each pierced Him with its own special aggrava- 
 tions. Every sight brought its own grief; yet the 
 weight of the whole did not interfere with the pierc- 
 ingness of each. He felt all together and severally 
 at once. 
 
 It makes one dizzy, and yet it is the simplest truth. 
 The world seems to reel round one, as one thinks of 
 it. It is like setting oneself to calculate eternity. 
 How many sins are there being enacted at this mo- 
 ment in this one city ; and this which is called a 
 Christian city ! Neither night nor day gives any 
 respite to sin. Is there day or night, in which there 
 are not many more millions of sins, than there are mil- 
 lions of people ? Each day or night has sins of its 
 own, besides all which they have in common. The 
 sun never sets on sin. Every moment, in this round 
 world of our's, some are waking to a fresh day of sin. 
 Eight hundred millions of human beings ! how many 
 living in direct enmity of God ! How many griev- 
 ing Him ! Day by day, the same horrible history ! 
 It is the reversal of the Psalmist's words as to the
 
 38 The Love of God and Jesus for single souls , 
 
 material creation, " h Day unto day uttereth speech, 
 and night unto night shewcth knowledge." Through 
 our free choice, day unto day transmitteth sin, and 
 night unto night, ungodliness. It is such a comfort 
 to think of the little ones, who cannot knowingly 
 offend God ! And all this sin from these eight hun- 
 dred millions of human beings, has been going on 
 during these more than sixteen millions of hours, 
 since our Lord died for us ! And all rested on Him, 
 with all sin's terrible aggravations of wilfulness, 
 ingratitude, contempt of God. Nor this only, but 
 all the sins, which were committed before He died 
 for sin, rested on Him. For all sin, which ever was 
 forgiven to those who knew Him not or before He 
 came, was forgiven for His merits alone. It rested 
 on Him, as we saw, not in one confused undis- 
 tinguishable mass, but to His Eye, which illumined 
 by His Godhead, saw things, which had been or as 
 yet were not, in one dreadful present, each bore up- 
 on His soul its own separate pang. 
 
 And to what a Soul ! we cannot imagine It, any 
 more than we can imagine God. But this was a 
 separate aggravation of His suffering, His All-Holi- 
 ness, His Love for His Father, His being so separate 
 from sinners, and yet brought into such close contact 
 with its leprous touch. There are some sins, which 
 wound even us, which pierce us with a thrill of hor- 
 ror, which we loathe, as though to hear of them de- 
 filed us, which make our flesh creep, as if some very 
 loathsome creature left its slime upon us. Yet this 
 is the very least part of sin's horrible nature. The 
 especial malice of sin is, that it is against God. And 
 h Ps xix. 2.
 
 as seen in His Sufferings. 39 
 
 God was His very own Father. But from our loath- 
 ing at some sin, from the instantaneous piercing shock, 
 which some sin gives us, even when we are not elec- 
 trified by our love for the sinful being, we may, (I 
 say not, estimate, but we may) have a faint shadowy 
 notion of what it was to His All-purity. For the 
 feeling belongs to us, as we belong to God, and His 
 Image is on our souls. But each aspect of sin had 
 its own separate suffering for His Soul. Its loath- 
 someness crept around His All-purity ; its coarseness 
 grated against His holy delicacy; its brutality crushed 
 His tenderness ; its fierceness glared upon His meek- 
 ness ; its blasphemy wounded His One-mindedness 
 with God : its hatred breathed a withering scorching 
 poisoned death-blast against His love. All, all was 
 aggravated a million fold by His love. The blas- 
 phemous mocking or horrible hate of devils, as they 
 crowded, in legions, round His Cross, and taunted 
 Him doubtless with the impenitent robber, who 
 would not be saved, and whose soul they were about 
 to snatch from the side of His lifeless Body, as soon 
 almost as His Spirit was gone to the Father, did not 
 wound Him so, because they had shut themselves out 
 for ever from His love. They are all hate, and are 
 none of His. Their blasphemies were wounding, only 
 as far as they were grounded on truth, that men for 
 whom He died, would not be redeemed, would become 
 such as they, ivoidd, as they did, hate Him everlastingly. 
 " Why endure such agony," the devils might say, 
 "for those who will not thank Thee, who will not 
 believe in Thee, who will mock at Thee, who will 
 hate Thee as we do for whom Thou didst not die, 
 for whom Thou didst prefer that wretched form of
 
 40 The Love of God and Jesus for single souls, 
 
 clay to our grand pure ethereal being ? Justly did 
 we rebel against Thee for preferring their material 
 form to our's ! Now Thou hast it, what hast Thou 
 gained by it ? They would crucify Thee again, as 
 far as they can ; they will despise Thee, or will patro- 
 nise Thee, but will not obey Thee. Thou a king ! 
 We will dispute Thy kingdom, we will rend Thy sub- 
 jects from Thee ; they shall again choose Barabbas, not 
 Thee. Why suffer thus, when Thou canst not save 
 those for whom Thou dost suffer ? " They would 
 have had no power to wound Him, but for us and 
 for His love for us. They but echoed in their hor- 
 rible malice what He knew too -well. Yes ! they 
 were our sins which drove the thorns into His sacred 
 Brow ; our sins they were, which pierced like the 
 piercing of a sword. Our sins, because He loved us, 
 because He knew, if we should be saved at all, how 
 we should waste the Price of His Blood, how we 
 should grieve His love ; how, perhaps, we should be 
 on the very verge of Hell, if we did not fall over into 
 the bottomless pit ; how we should tarnish the crown, 
 which He prepared for us, how we should lose, per- 
 haps, some nearness to Himself, some capacity for 
 His love, which He, in His eternal love, prepared 
 for us, if we would accept it. And we would not 
 have it ! He stretched forth those Holy Arms so 
 wide upon the Cross, to embrace the whole world, 
 and in it, each of us, one by one, in His love, and we 
 would not ! He ui stretched forth His Hands," as of 
 old, " to a disobedient and gainsaying people." But 
 we have seen Him, and have neglected Him or done 
 despite to Him. 
 
 1 Rom. x. 22.
 
 as seen in His Sufferings. 41 
 
 And yet He loved us ! What must have beeu 
 His love to those who remained, when, for their sake, 
 He endured all this for those who would reject it, 
 and endured it though we should waste it. Oh love, 
 love, love ! love of our God, love of our Jesus ! must 
 thou for ever be wasted ? must thou ever be wander- 
 ing up and down our earth, homeless and a stranger, 
 and so few to take thee in, and those grudgingly, 
 and after having perhaps long shut thee out? shall we 
 not say, " Love, Love Incarnate, Love Infinite, too 
 late have I loved Thee ! would, for love of Thy love, 
 I had ever loved Thee ! would I could win some other 
 souls to love Thee ! Do Thou Thyself give might 
 to our prayers, that we may win some to love Thee, 
 some to be for ever blessed in Thy love. Grant us 
 more who shall pray, that Thy love be spread abroad. 
 i k that Thou wouldest rend the heavens asunder 
 and come down,' and melt the mountains of our 
 rocky hearts ; that they may be molten into the fire 
 of Thy love, and the smoke arise to Thee, as the in- 
 cense of prayer, that the smoke of the torments of 
 Thy lost ones may not ascend so terribly ! " 
 k Is. Ixiv. i.
 
 ADDBESS V. 
 
 Jesus' love for souls, seen in some special Sufferings 
 of the Passion. 
 
 JESUS' love for souls, for the souls for whom we pray 
 and for our own, what did it not make Him bear ! 
 I have dwelt only on some few aggravations of those 
 Sufferings. They are but a few hints for love to 
 ponder over, and, it may be, to help to deepen our 
 thought of the Infinite Love for us sinners, shewn 
 in every pang, which for us He invited and heaped 
 upon Himself, and clothed Himself with them as a 
 robe and a diadem. I would now add only three 
 more. 
 
 Consider 1, The exceeding delicacy of His Hu- 
 man Frame. I do not mean by this any comparison 
 with our human frames, conceived as they all arc 
 in original sin, of which the one may yet be more re- 
 fined than another. Our frames are all made for suf- 
 fering and for death, the penalty of our human sin. 
 They are framed for dissolution. "Dust thou art, 
 and unto dust shalt Thou return," was the sentence 
 passed upon us all alike in Adam. To be " sown in 
 dishonour, in weakness, in corruption 3 ," is the con- 
 a 1 Cor. xv. 42-44.
 
 Jesus' love for souls. 43 
 
 dition of our rising to "power, _ to incorruption, to 
 glory." His Body could not "be holden of death b ;" 
 His purity could not " c see corruption." But then, in 
 that proportion was every Suffering aggravated, which 
 prepared for that three days' severance of Soul and 
 Body, though of neither from His Godhead. "We can 
 see, in our human frames, how a blow or a piercing 
 pang, which falls harmlessly or dully upon one frame, 
 shoots through another with an electric shock. But 
 in our case, such a delicate frame is simply crushed 
 by such a pang. It endures it, and all is over. Suf- 
 fering with us is for the most part evenly distributed 
 by God's tender justice, that, if it is heavy, it does 
 not endure ; if protracted, it is mitigated. To His 
 Martyrs God has often given painlessness amid torture, 
 and has allowed brute rage to spend its violence un- 
 felt, in order to show by Whose might they were up- 
 held and were invincible. " d The Lord laid upon 
 Him the iniquity of us all." " He was wounded for 
 our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities ; 
 the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; by 
 His stripes we were healed." Each Suffering was a 
 part of our redemption ; and so each was felt to the 
 utmost, as only Innocency could suffer, as only Di- 
 vinity could uphold. We have gone over those out- 
 ward sufferings one by one, in Passion-tide. We 
 have watched that dread Agony, in which " e His pores, 
 dissolving, wove a winding-sheet of Blood." We 
 know what scourging is even to the roughest of our 
 human frames, how it tears the flesh open, even to 
 the bone ; how the nerves are racked and riven, and 
 
 * Acts ii. 24. c Ib. 31, xiii. 37. a Is. liii. 5, 6. 
 
 e Hymn in Paradise for the Christian soul, P. v.
 
 44 Jesus' love for souls, seen in 
 
 human science hag to watch, how much the frame can 
 endure, and whether it will die under the stroke. 
 The Eoman soldiers knew of no such measures of 
 mercy ; they had no " f forty stripes save one ;" their's 
 was not even an abuse of human justice, whereby 
 the penalty of guilt may fall upon the innocent. 
 Jesus was delivered to their will, and we know how 
 human injustice intensifies human hate ; human hate 
 hates to be overcome by human endurance, by its 
 own powerlessness to inflict more than human pati- 
 ence can suffer. We see this before our eyes in the 
 histories of martyrs. "We know how brutality calls 
 out brutality ; how a brute crowd can vie in doing, 
 what any one, however brutalised, would cower back 
 from doing alone. And here was a Sufferer, aged 
 apparently and worn by His life-long sufferings, His 
 inseparable friends and acquaintances ^, who alone 
 never left Him, so that His people coiild say, " h Thou 
 art not fifty years old," to one who had not seen 
 three and thirty years, who had not yet reached the 
 period of our greatest physical strength. Yet tender 
 and delicate as was His Virgin-born frame, it was 
 formed to endure what iron sinewy strength has sunk 
 under. But He was Almighty God, and Almighti- 
 ness was put forth to enable Him to suffer. How 
 those poor brutalised soldiers must have blinded 
 themselves, ere they could have struck that sacred 
 Face, so meek in all Its demeanour, out of "Whose 
 Eyes shone those rays of pitying love ! Perhaps 
 they struck Him the more, that they might not sec 
 It. And then, when they had * marred that Face, so 
 
 f Dcut. xxv. 3, 2 Cor. xi. 24. s Is. liii. 3. 
 
 h St. John viii. 57. > Isa. Hi. 14.
 
 some special Sufferings of the Passion. 45 
 
 that It ceased well-nigh to be the face of man, then 
 they could wreak their hatred on the Jew who would 
 be a king, who disputed the rule of the world with 
 Ceesar: they could mar it, undisturbed by His 
 Majesty, except the majesty of suffering. 
 
 That dreadful horrible scourging was one aggrava- 
 tion of all the later Sufferings of Jesus. "We can guess, 
 in our coarse frames, what must have been the pres- 
 sure of the heavy Cross on that tender Frame, or on 
 those mangled Shoulders. I have seen temporary de- 
 lirium under the pain of the removal of the clothes or 
 dressings from the wounds to which they adhered. 
 What when the brutal soldiers' hands tore off again 
 roughly the dress which had been pressed into those 
 deep wounds by the heavy Cross, the deep wounds of 
 a tender frame exhausted by the draining of His 
 Blood, which He had shed for us. And then again, 
 when those tender Hands and Feet were riven by the 
 nails, and that torn Divine Body was racked on the 
 hard bed of the Cross, the bones, as the Psalmist tells 
 us, were dislocated one from the other. A strong 
 man, who loved life, has willed to die, sooner than 
 endure the suffering of having a dislocated limb 
 stretched out, to be replaced. And David says in the 
 Person of Jesus, ub All my bones are severed, one 
 from the other." 
 
 Not that we should think that, by putting any or 
 all of this together, we can form any idea even of His 
 bodily sufferings. I say it only, that we may be sure 
 that we can form none, that we may not think that, 
 because we hear in the Gospels some details, and some 
 only, of those aweful Bodily Sufferings, we know any 
 
 k Ps. xxii. 14.
 
 46 Jesus' love for souls, seen in 
 
 thing of what they were to that Holy Virgin-born 
 Form. We may see before our eyes, those Cheeks 
 swollen with the blows of the iron-gloved hand of 
 the soldier, the Jaw dislocated with the blow, the 
 Breast, itself too furrowed with those harrowing 
 lashes, and distended as it hung on the Cross, almost 
 to bursting ; the thorns driven into the Brow first by 
 the rude blows of the soldiers, and then by the hard 
 Cross into His Sacred Head ; we may imagine the 
 most intolerable thirst, such as has driven men mad ; 
 we may picture to ourselves, how there was sharpest 
 pain in every limb, in every spot, of His Sacred 
 Body (the consolation, among other things, of our 
 bodily sufferings, that we so far suffer with Him, that 
 each bodily pain may be hallowed by union with 
 His) ; we may picture to ourselves every sharpest con- 
 ceivable pain in every point of our human frame, the 
 sharpest torture we have ever heard of, the rack, by 
 which the distended nerves in each joint are so al- 
 most torn asunder, that the sufferer, who is unsup- 
 ported by Divine Grace, jerks out the required blas- 
 phemy with scarce a will; or the Back so forced 
 asunder in each vertebra, that each such suffering 
 would convulse the whole frame in death; or the 
 Holy Cheeks so shaken by the blows, that every tooth 
 should have its own fiercest pain ; or every cell of 
 the Brain, shooting with sharp pang of pain, that it 
 seems as if every shoot were all which the frame 
 could endure and still live. But if we picture these, 
 all the very utmost which human frame has ever 
 endured separately, concentrated in Him, so that 
 every point in His Human Form should be a sort 
 of focus of suffering, each piercing to the utmost,
 
 some special Sufferings of the Passion. 47 
 
 Brain, Eyes, Ears, Tongue, Teeth, Arms, Hands, 
 Feet, Nails, Back, Breast, Heart (for of this too the 
 Psalmist specially speaks, before His Death 1 ), the 
 racking of every nerve along their whole course in 
 His Divine Frame, and that terrible exhaustion, which 
 has made the being bled to death alone an aweful 
 suffering, so that the frame, it seems, cannot live and 
 yet does not die, when we have completed all which 
 imagination could supply, drawn from cA 7 ery acutest 
 suffering we have witnessed or heard of, gathered 
 into one, then too we have not begun the Suffering 
 of that Divine Form. For It had indeed " the like- 
 ness of our sinful flesh." Yet, in the exquisite sensi- 
 bility of that Frame, which God the Holy Ghost 
 created anew in the Virgin's womb of her cleansed 
 substance, but by His own Divine Operation, what 
 the pains were, which corresponded to the pains of our 
 coarse natures, we cannot even imagine. Only 
 when we think of those Precious Sufferings which 
 were the price of our redemption, we must not think 
 of them, as of one altogether like ourselves. They 
 were all that, but they were a fierceness of suffering 
 in a Frame, which had a capacity of, to us unimagina- 
 ble, Suffering. And all this He endured, of His own 
 choice as a whole, but as a passive Sufferer in each in- 
 fliction, for love of us sinners and for our redemption, 
 for love of the sinners, one by one, for whom, with 
 ourselves, we pray. Oh how inestimable must be the 
 value of the soul in the sight of Him Who made it 
 for Himself, and so redeemed it, that He might not 
 lose it ! 
 
 2. Akin to this tenderness of His sacred Flesh 
 1 Ps. xxii. 22.
 
 48 Jesus' love for souls, seen in 
 
 was the tenderness of His Human Soul, "Which was 
 outraged more than His Human Body was torn, and 
 Which endured those outrages for love of us sinners. 
 We are wont to speak of the soul, as if, because it is 
 one thing, it were therefore much the same in differ- 
 ent human beings. We understand, of course, the 
 difference between a soul in sin and a soul in grace ; 
 the soul of one who, like some degraded forms of 
 humanity, is seemingly acted upon by some unknown 
 dealings of grace only, or, if acted upon, is acted up- 
 on, only thence to derive a fresh occasion of doing 
 despite to the grace of God, and a soul, like those of 
 the Blessed Apostles " filled with the Holy Ghost." 
 But these distinctions relate to qualities superinduced 
 for good or ill, not to the original structure of the soul. 
 Yet human souls, in their original structure and ca- 
 pacity too, vary indefinitely one from another, even 
 as those blessed spirits do, in their several Choirs, to 
 whose broken ranks they are, if they persevere, to 
 be advanced, as, to fill them up those souls were cre- 
 ated. Our Blessed Lord's Human Soul, having been 
 created to be for ever united with the Person of God 
 the Son, was like to our human souls in all their sin- 
 less infirmities ; it was like them as being a soul, in 
 every thing belonging to the nature of a soul, with- 
 out which it could not be such. But the Soul of Christ, 
 being created in order to be united with the Word, 
 was created with greater perfections and greater ca- 
 pacities and was a higher Object of the love of the 
 Holy Trinity Who created It, than all the rest of 
 creation or all possible creations collectively. Such 
 was the Soul, united with God the Son, seeing all 
 m Acts ii. 34, iv. 8, vi. 3, 5, vii. 55, ix. 17, xi. 24, xiii. 9, 52.
 
 some special Sufferings of the Passion. 49 
 
 things in the Word, with more than all other created 
 perfections, yet with all the perfection of human ten- 
 derness, Which had to suifer during those aweful 
 hours, in which all malice, human or diabolical, was 
 let loose upon It. 
 
 That tenderness was wounded in all the most op- 
 posite ways, yet, by reason of the perfection of His 
 knowledge, in all those ways at once. He never 
 lost sight of one. Consider we apart, the good 
 and the evil. Now was- the hour, prophesied of by 
 Symeon, when the sword was to pierce His Mother's 
 soul, and what a soul this must have been, which 
 was created to be His Mother's soul, which had been 
 prepared to be the soul of that Tabernacle wherein 
 God was to dwell, sanctified by His Presence for 
 those nine months in her womb, who nursed His 
 Divine Infancy with a mother's love, upon whom the 
 Eyes of the Divine Infant must have shone conti- 
 nually with Divine but also Human love, she, the in- 
 separable companion of those thirty hidden years, 
 nearly His whole life ; and yet her soul was to be 
 pierced ! He spared not, could not spare, His Mo- 
 ther's grief; yet how must such grief pierce the Divine 
 Son ! What a parting ! And that, to be the begin- 
 ning of those long years of severance, in which the 
 disciple and the creature, though the beloved disciple, 
 was to be her son, instead of her Creator ! All sor- 
 row would to us be swallowed up in such a sorrow. 
 But this hindered not the sorrow for the few who 
 then loved Him besides, the Apostles in their stupe- 
 faction, St. Mary Magdalene in her doubtless empas- 
 sioned grief, St. John, silently looking up to that 
 Breast, on which his head had lain, to those Eyes,
 
 50 Jesus' love for souls seen in 
 
 now well-nigh blinded by those swollen cheeks, yet 
 still beholding him ; the women who lamented Him 
 and whose coming sorrows He foretold them of; those 
 who should be moved by that sad sight, and who 
 should " smite their breasts and return," and the faith- 
 ful ones, who should, when all was over, ask His Body 
 from Pilate, and bury It in all the greater grief, be- 
 cause in perplexity. We have had before, our minds 
 already, all those other sufferings from the sufferings 
 of all His elect, from the shortcomings, open sins, 
 ingratitude, of so many who would yet be saved, 
 and the misery even of their repentance. 
 
 Yet all these sorrows ended in their endless joy. 
 There were other sorrows which were remediless. 
 There is something so terrible even to us, such as 
 we are, in human hatred. It is related of a cele- 
 brated poisoner of noble family, how terrible was 
 the sight of all that sea of heads, which came to wit- 
 ness her execution, since she felt that she must be 
 the object of all their hate. Except the loss of God, 
 I cannot conceive a suffering in Hell greater than 
 that of the horrible hate of one another, especially 
 of those who, by mutual sin and chiefly by un- 
 lawful love, have brought each other thither. But 
 these Un hated Him without a cause." This causeless 
 hate is so spoken of in the Psalms as an aggravation 
 of those Sufferings. We see them in the Psalmist 
 all around Him. " Many oxen are come about Me : 
 fat bulls of Basan close Me in on every side. They 
 gape upon Me with their mouths, as it were a ram- 
 ping and a roaring lion. Many dogs are come about 
 Me ; the council of the wicked layeth siege against 
 n Ps. xxxv. 19. xxxviii. 19. Ixix. 4. Ib. xxii. 12, 13, 16, 17. 6, 7.
 
 some special Sufferings of the Passion. 51 
 
 Me. They stand staring and looking upon Me. 
 I am a very scorn of men and the outcast of the peo- 
 ple. All they that see Me laugh Me to scorn : they 
 shoot out their lips and shake their heads." And 
 then, he tells beforehand the blasphemy, which 
 they, of their free-will, would use P. Prophecy tells 
 of all those gibes and fierce hate, as though they 
 were the fiercest part of that superhuman suffer- 
 ing. Look at them one by one ; listen to the hypo- 
 critical blasphemy of the Pharisees, insulting Him 
 with His inability to save Himself q (and He knew 
 that He was unable, else He could not have saved 
 us), and the coarse crowd, justifying their choice of 
 Barabbas by blaspheming Him for saying, " r l am 
 the Son of God ; " and this echoed by the two male- 
 factors s , who hung by Him, as though He were the 
 third and chief : so close to Him, that they might al- 
 most hiss it in His Ears. And this was the lan- 
 guage of all who passed by. The crowd, as the coarse 
 multitude do at executions, were all anxious to catch 
 a sight of their work, to see how He, Whom they 
 had rejected and for Whose crucifixion they had 
 clamoured, bore Himself, and so they "* passed by, 
 reviling Him, wagging their heads." Each seasoned 
 his blasphemy with some separate addition of his 
 own ; and every coarser or more telling blasphemy 
 was doubtless received with the bravoes of that hor- 
 rible applause ; the duller only followed his fellows 
 with that long monotonous gibe. Each glared at 
 Him, with that expression of fierce hatred, such as, I 
 believe, only a Jew can wear. I never saw any look 
 
 P ver. 8. St. Matt, xxvii. 43. 1 Ib. xxvii. 42. r Ib. 39, 40. 
 Ib. 44, St. Mark xv. 32. * St. Matt, xxyii. 39. 
 E 2
 
 52 Jesus' love for souls, seen in 
 
 so Satanic, as that wherewith a Jew spake to me some 
 traditional blasphemy. And that poor Jew's was but 
 the memory of 1800 years, the shadow of an inex- 
 tinguishable hate. And this was but the winding 
 up of all that previous hate, the eager antipathy of 
 those, who suborned perjurers, appealing to His Fa- 
 ther for their truth ; ever sending forth fresh victims 
 of hell, as the former could not agree in their false- 
 hoods : then the cold-blooded hypocrisy of Caiaphas, 
 blaspheming Him Whom he accused of blasphemy, 
 and leaguing others in his blasphemous sentence up- 
 on his Judge; then the mad multitude of them, 
 thronging as one man u to Pilate, clamouring to him, 
 bearing in on him the more fiercely with their accu- 
 sations for his weak resistance v ; then the vehement 
 passionate accusation before Herod w ; and Herod's 
 wrath at His unresisting silence, and his impious 
 mockery of Him, Who would not vindicate Himself by 
 miracles ; and the profane mock-royalty with which 
 he arrayed Him x : then His own Jews, those whom 
 He had so loved, whom He had healed, among whom 
 He had gone about doing good, rising from rage to 
 rage, as they plunged themselves deeper into sin, 
 from the cry for Barabbas, the "Crucify Him, crucify 
 Him," to the ">His Blood be upon us and upon our 
 children : " that terrible imprecation, whose eifect 
 on their outcast race He so well knew : then the 
 hatred in the scourging, the blindfolding, the buffet- 
 ing, the insults to Him even as a prophet z , and that 
 dreadful road to Calvary. How terrible a thing is 
 knowledge without love ! The more they knew, the 
 
 u St. Luke xxiii. 1. v Ib. 5. w Ib. 10. x Ib. 11. 
 y St. Mutt, xxvii. 25. z Ib. xxvi. 68.
 
 some special Sufferings of the Passion. 53 
 
 worse they hated. How horrible a thing is sin ! The 
 more they sinned, the madder they became in sin. 
 
 And He, the All-Holy, knew their hearts too. 
 We hear but some outward cry or yell of passion or 
 of rage : ive may hope that the inmost self may not 
 be so bad as the outward expression. Jesus knew. 
 This was, in many, but the culminating point of the 
 hatred of years. It was gathered into one, as the 
 fruit of all before, " Now ye have both seen and 
 hated both Me and My Father*." And now, He 
 knew who would not repent. Some of them, a father 
 says, ab the Blood which in their raging they shed, 
 believing they drank." But He knew that Judas, 
 whom He had chosen to be one of the twelve, whom 
 He had admitted to His friendship, whom, to the 
 last, He had sought in vain to win back, would " c go 
 to his own place." One robber by His side would 
 not be converted. Jesus, Salvation, hung by his 
 side ; and he would not ! The Price of his salva- 
 tion was trickling down the Cross by him ; and he 
 was obdurate ! He took up the rude cries of those 
 around ; he heard them die away on the other side 
 of Jesus, as his happy fellow-robber was converted ; 
 perhaps he had some hope, amid his blasphemy, to 
 goad Jesus to save his miserable death-like life. 
 He heard the promise to his penitent brother ; Jesus 
 spoke to his soul through him ; but for him Jesus 
 was shedding His blood in vain. Perhaps he hated 
 Jesus the more, thinking that He had some magi- 
 cal power, whereby He might save him, and did not. 
 
 a St. John xv. 24. 
 
 b St. Aug. on St. John Horn. xl. 2 p. 541. and p. 527, 1104, 
 1200. Oxf. Tr., and passim in his works. c Acts i. 25.
 
 54 Jesus' love for souls^ seen in 
 
 He knew what minds those horrible cries issued 
 forth from : He knew where, through their impeni- 
 tence, those blasphemies would be prolonged. He 
 had said of Judas at the beginning, " d One of you is a 
 devil ; " and now He was surrounded by a legion of 
 devils. He had said to the emissaries of the Chief 
 Priests, Ue This is your hour and of the powers of 
 darkness." And now Satan seemed to speak audi- 
 bly by the mouths of all that miserable multi- 
 tude ! For how else could they endure so to speak 
 against the All -holy, "Who had ever sought their 
 good? that " f and ye would not!" from what 
 depths of tender, persevering, grieved love, it sprang ! 
 "Ye would not!" It is like the unwilling clos- 
 ing of a door, as He had to leave them without g . 
 But what a parting ! worse than the parting from 
 His Mother ; for to her too it was " h expedient that 
 He should go away." "What a parting ! of the 
 dying Saviour from those who would not be saved, 
 but who hated Him for His love. This suffering 
 too He endured, fruitless for them, but full of grace 
 and salvation for us, and those we pray for, who will 
 be converted and live. 
 
 3. Once more, there was one seeming severance, of 
 which we scarce dare speak. "We may have known 
 what misery it was, to try to convert a soul which 
 would not be converted. Of the aweful seeming 
 forsaking by the Father, we can have no thought. 
 Yet it was the one Suffering, which it seemed as if 
 His Human Nature could hardly bear. All the accusa- 
 tions before Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, had not wrung 
 
 d St. John vi. 70. e St. Luke xxii. 53. f St. Matt, xxiii. 37. 
 St. Luke xiii. 25. * St. John xvi. 7.
 
 some special Sufferings of the Passion. 55 
 
 one word or sound from Him. " [ As the lamb before 
 his shearers is dumb," so " He " a the Lamb of God," 
 " opened not His Mouth." Herod and his court and 
 men of war had counted Him a fool for His persever- 
 ing silence. The blows, the mocking, the blasphe- 
 mies, the riving nails, had not extorted one sound 
 from Him. He prayed for His executioners : He 
 promised Paradise to the penitent robber : He gave 
 St. John to His Mother as a son, His Mother to be his 
 Mother; He spake to fulfil prophecy, and heeded not 
 the insult which it elicited. One loud cry alone was 
 heard, and that at the ninth hour k , at the close, when 
 all was all-but-finished. Then, after all besides was 
 over, came that one last trial. It came doubtless, in 
 part, to sanctify and to impart Its saving virtue to 
 our last struggle with death. We have, some of us, 
 seen, perhaps felt, what it is to be, as though for- 
 saken by God. Yet we could but say, with the 
 penitent robber, ul we indeed justly; for we receive 
 the due reward of our deeds." It has indeed been the 
 annealing of saints : it is mostly the invigorating sti- 
 mulus to deep repentance, calling out the latent love 
 and faith, even amid all-but-hopelessness, and issu- 
 ing in the heartbroken cry, "I deserve it, Lord; I 
 deserve it ; yet let me not be separated from Thee 
 for ever ! " In Jesus it was the pure Agony of a 
 Soul, Which had ever loved with love, such as none 
 but that God-united Soul could love with, Which had 
 ever been loved with that Divine Complacency ex- 
 pressed by the words, " This is My Beloved Son, in 
 Whom I am well-pleased." Complacency, which 
 could rest on no being, out of, and yet not out of, 
 1 Is. liii. 7. k St. Matt, xxvii. 46. 1 St. Luke xxiii. 41,
 
 56 Jesus' love for souls, in His Passion. 
 
 the Holy Trinity, as it rested on that Humanity 
 which was co-united with God the Son. There was 
 still the full knowledge of His love of God ; there, 
 that all-but-Infmite love, to which all possible love 
 of all possible creatures collectively was as nothing, 
 still gushed forth to the Infinite Love of God, and, 
 the black cloud m of all our sins came between. God 
 could not console Him, for it was to be borne for us ; 
 the Godhead of the Son, with Which that forsaken 
 Manhood was inseparably united, seemed apart. 
 "Where was He ? "Who was He ? He had no perso- 
 nal Being, save in God the Son. What was to be- 
 come of that Manhood ? Was it to be dissolved ? But 
 It could not cease to be. Was It to be separated ? 
 But It was to return to the Father. We seem to be 
 separated from God ; Jesus seemed to be rent asun- 
 der from Himself, and that, for love of us and of 
 those for whom we pray. Love Divine, how can 
 it be, that Thou art so little loved, so hated by some, 
 so forgotten by the many, so jostled out and thrust 
 into corners, to dwell in Lazarus' heart ? what 
 an office Thou hast given us to pray, that those, 
 who love Thee not, may know what Thy love to- 
 wards them is, and may return Thee the renewed 
 love of their whole souls for all Thine Infinite Love ! 
 M Lam. iii. 44. *
 
 ADDRESS VI. 
 
 "Love of Jesus for individual souls in His continuous 
 High Priestly Office for us" 
 
 HOW little have I said of the Passion, when the 
 whole world might be filled with It, when all eter- 
 nity will be full of It, when, in all eternity, we shall 
 never weary of admiring, thanking, adoring It ! 
 Shall we perhaps know more and more of It through- 
 out eternity and love It more ? I cannot but think 
 that we shall, if through Its precious merits we attain 
 thither. Our's will be no mere reflection upon It ; 
 we shall ever see It : for we shall for ever see the 
 prints of the nails in the glorified Body of Jesus. 
 
 Yes, this is an addition to the condescension of His 
 Passion ; this is part of the mystery of His love, that 
 the Passion lives on there eternally. Perseverance 
 is our highest conception of love ; we are so change- 
 able, so unpersevering ! The Passion lives on in 
 Heaven : it lives on upon earth in the Sacraments. If 
 one must turn from the Passion, as He endured It, 
 in order to say something of God's manifold love of 
 souls, we can, at least, turn to It in Heaven. " a He 
 ever liveth to make Intercession for us." Intercession 
 * Heb. vii. 25.
 
 58 Love of Jesus for individual souls 
 
 for us is spoken of, as though it were the object of 
 His Life there. " b He, on account of His abiding for 
 ever, hath His Priesthood unchangeable. Whence 
 also He is able to save to the uttermost ," (wholly, 
 entirely, completely, from every thing, from which 
 we have to be saved,) " those who approach unto 
 God through Him, ever living as He does to make 
 intercession for us." And again, " d He hath entered 
 into the heaven itself," the .visible Presence of God, 
 " there to be manifested to the face of God for us ;" 
 there, face to face, to be, Himself, by His very Pre- 
 sence, our Intercessor with God. And yet again ; 
 " e It is God Who justifieth : Who is he that condem- 
 eth ? Christ Who died ? yea rather Who is risen 
 again, Who also is at the Eight Hand of God, Who 
 also maketh intercession for us ?" That perpetual in- 
 tercession for us is a matter of faith. His Presence 
 intercedes ; the Wounds, which for us He endured, 
 intercede. He intercedes as our High Priest. How 
 did the High Priest intercede ? Ey presenting the 
 blood of the sacrifice. Jesus intercedes then by pre- 
 senting Himself. Yet this is again another conde- 
 scension of the love of our God. He wills not, that 
 the memory of the contumely and contempt, which 
 He endured for us, should fade or pass away. It is 
 part of the continual outstretched contemplation of 
 the blessed Angels. We know that the prints of the 
 nails, and the spear-pierced Side, are, as they were, 
 in glory. For the Angel said to the Apostles, that 
 " f this Jesus, Who is taken up from you into heaven, 
 shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him 
 
 b Heb. vii. 24. c 's TO Tran-eXe's. d Ib. ix. 24. 
 
 e Rom. yiii. 33, 34. f Acts i. 11.
 
 in His continuous High Priestly Office for us. 59 
 
 go into heaven." But He went with those prints of 
 the nails, into which St. Thomas put his fingers, and 
 that wound in the Side into which he was bid to 
 thrust his hand. Well then may we think, that there 
 are the traces of the Crown of thorns, the punctures 
 in the Forehead through which they pierced Him, 
 and perhaps the wales of the scourges. There they 
 arc, but in what glory ! All creation, to its utmost 
 bounds, adores the condescension of its God. But 
 the love of that condescension was for us. 
 
 In this Form, as " s He Who was dead and is alive 
 and liveth for evermore," His Presence has pleaded 
 and pleads for us. During those sixteen millions of 
 hours, which I spoke of, it has been one unbroken 
 intercession for us. " h All things in heaven and in 
 earth and under the earth, bow before Him." " An- 
 gels bow and devils cower, in transport or dismay." 
 And He, what doth He ? ' ' k He upholds all things 
 by the word of His power." ul He delivereth the 
 needy, when he crieth ; the poor also and him that 
 hath no helper. He spareth the poor and needy, and 
 saveth the souls of the needy." This He does as 
 King and Lord of all ; but He also " m intercedeth for 
 us ; first by presenting His Humanity, which He took 
 for us ; also, by expressing the longing of His All-Holy 
 Soul, which He had for our salvation." For Un it is 
 more consonant to Holy Scripture and to piety, to 
 hold that Christ, not only by a silent conveying, but 
 by an open and express representation and manifes- 
 
 Eev. i. 18. h Phil. ii. 10. 
 
 1 Breviary Advent Hymn. Dr. Newman's translation. 
 
 k Heb. i. 3. 1 Ps. Ixxii. 12, 13. 
 
 111 S. Thorn, lect. 4, sup. ad Heb. vii. 
 
 n Suarez in 3 p. q. 21, disp. 44, s. 2.
 
 60 Love of Jesus for individual souls 
 
 tation of His will, prayeth for us in heaven;" and 
 that, individually. For He said, a I will ask the 
 Father, and He will give you another Comforter." 
 Where, when He saith, "I will ask," He speaketh 
 plainly of the time, when He shall be gone away, 
 after His Resurrection. So that when He says, " P In 
 that day I say not unto, you, that I will ask the 
 Father for you, for the Father Himself loveth you," 
 He as much as says, " CJ In that day ye shall not only 
 be heard, when ye ask in My Name, because I will 
 ask for you, but also because the Father Himself 
 loveth you." But then, since He intercedes for us, 
 He intercedes for us individually. ' i No greater gift," 
 says St. Augustine r , "could God give to men, than 
 that He should make His Word, through Whom He 
 created all things, their Head, and unite them to Him 
 as members ; so that He should be Son of God and 
 Son of Man ; One God with the Father, One Man with 
 man ; so that, when we speak to God in prayer, we 
 should not separate the Son from Him, and, when 
 the body of the Son prayeth, it should not sepa- 
 rate its Head from it, and that He Himself, our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, should be the 
 One Saviour of His body, Who both prayeth for us 
 and prayeth in us and is prayed by us. He prayeth 
 for us, as our Priest ; He prayeth in us, as our 
 Head ; He is prayed by us, as our God." " s Our 
 Lord Jesus Christ still intercedes for us. All the 
 martyrs who are with Him intercede for us. Their 
 intercessions pass not away, unless our groans have 
 
 St. John xiv. 16. P Ib. xvi. 26, 27. 
 
 i St. Cyril in St. John L. ii. c. 9. r In Ps. Ixxxv. init. 
 
 Ib. n. 24.
 
 in His continuous High Priestly Office for us. 61 
 
 passed away." "We pray to Him, with Him, in 
 Him ; and we speak with Him and He speaks with 
 us." 
 
 Yet this life of continual Intercession for us in 
 Heaven is not enough for His Love. More visibly 
 individual is our Dear Lord's condescending love 
 for us on earth. I speak not now of the marvellous 
 hearing of prayer which, if we ask for things accord- 
 ing to His Will, we may know of, but of those gifts 
 which belong to us all of granted right (so to speak), 
 if we do not place an obstacle to them by our own 
 fault. I spoke, before, of that condescending love, 
 with which, moment by moment, He is ever making, 
 one by one, our human souls. Yet owing to the 
 mode of our birth, they contract original sin through 
 their union with our body. Yet the remedy, nay the 
 more than remedy, is coextensive with the calamity to 
 all of us who are Christians. At least it is our fault, 
 if it is not. But then observe we the individuality. 
 " The things which are done on the earth, He doeth 
 them Himself." What is done in His Name, He is 
 the Doer of it. Man, as we know, visibly poureth 
 water on the child or adult, in the Name of the 
 Holy Trinity ; man placeth his hand on the person 
 to be confirmed, or on the penitent, or on the obla- 
 tions with the words of Consecration, " This is My 
 Body," "This is My Blood;" and Jesus baptizes 
 with the Holy Ghost ; Jesus enlarges His gift of the 
 Holy Ghost; Jesus forgiveth the sins of the peni- 
 tent and washes them away in His own Blood ; Jesus 
 makes the elements of this world His Body and 
 Blood. These are such common every-day doings of 
 His, that, as in the workings of God in His visible
 
 62 Love of Jesus for individual souls 
 
 creation, people forget what His individual love is. 
 He still taketh up the children in His arms, one by 
 one, and blesseth them. One by one, He makes them 
 members of Himself. It is not less, it is greater, love 
 to each of us, that what He doeth to each, He doeth 
 to so many besides. For the good of one is the good 
 of all, and the good of all is the good of each ; the 
 bliss of all the beatified will be an added bliss to 
 that of each. Each will have his own joy, and each 
 will joy in the joy of all besides, as his own joy. 
 But though He does it to so many, He does it to 
 each, one by one. One by one, He took us out of our 
 state by nature, and, Himself the Baptiser, made us 
 members of Himself, integral parts of His mystical 
 Body, so that, without us, that mystical Body would 
 not be what it is. If any of us (God forbid) fell away 
 finally, there would be another purpose of His love 
 frustrated, another star lost out of His creation ; He 
 would replace us with some other soul, as He re- 
 places with human souls those of the rebel Angels 
 who refused His love ; but He does all which His 
 Almightiness can to retain us, short of violating the 
 nature which He gave us, and taking from us the 
 blessed privilege of freely loving Him. One by one, 
 He more than repaired to us Adam's loss ; one by 
 one, He took us up in His Arms ; one by one, He 
 made us children of God in Himself; one by one, 
 He united us with the Father and Himself in the 
 Holy Spirit ; one by one, He made us members of 
 Himself, of His Flesh, of His Bones ; one by one, 
 " *we were bedewed with the Blood of Christ ; " " Hhe 
 body of the regenerated became the flesh of the 
 1 St. Leo. See in Scriptural doctrine of Holy Baptism," p. 197.
 
 in His continuous High Priestly Office for us. 63 
 
 Crucified." "We," they are words of God as to us, 
 " u put on Christ," we were clothed with Christ the 
 Son of God, as with a robe, as our bodies are by the 
 dress which we wear; "we co-died with Christ," 
 " were co-crucified, were co-interred, were co-im- 
 planted in His Death ; God co-raised us in Christ : 
 He co-vivified us, He co-seated us in heavenly places 
 in Christ Jesus v ." 
 
 And then again, one by one, in the Sacrament of 
 Confirmation, He gave each one of us a fuller mea- 
 sure of His Spirit, and sealed us anew : one by one, 
 He fed us anew with His own Body and Blood : He 
 gives Himself to us, one by one, to take Unseen into 
 our hands w , before we lay Him up in our breasts x . 
 Our senses report nothing to us, any more than they 
 do the Presence of God, in Whom " we live and move 
 and are." We walk about in Almighty God, in the 
 Ocean of Almighty Love. He is closer and more 
 inward to us than the air which blows upon us, and 
 sustains our animal life. Yet we discern Him not. 
 It needs but an act of faith that we are in the Ocean 
 of God's Being, and we seem to be immersed in It. 
 It is closer to us than those who throng upon us in 
 
 u Gal. iii. 27. 
 
 v o-waTre^uvo/Atv, 2 Tim. ii. 11, oweoTavpoo^, Rom. vi. 6, add 
 Gal. ii. 20, crvveT(i(j)r)fj.fv, Bom. vi. 4, add Col. ii. 12, crv//,<vroi 
 yeyova/jLfv, Rom. vi. 5, <rwrjyape, Eph ii. 6, add Col. ii. 12, iii. 1, 
 crvve^woTTonjo-e, Eph. ii. 5, Col. ii. 13, oweKa&o-ev, Eph. ii. 6. 
 
 w The hand receives the Lord's Body," S. Cyprian Ep. 58 ad 
 Thibar. 10 p. 149, Oxf. Tr. "Eat, drink; having Jesus Christ, 
 the Son of God, the Saviour, in Thy hands," Inscrip. Augustod. 
 [2nd Cent.] in Spicil. Solesm. i. 557. See " The Presence of Christ 
 in the Holy Euch." (a Sermon) p. 48 sqq. and " Doctrine of the 
 Beal Presence as contained in the Fathers," p. 33-7. 
 
 * S. Clem. Al. Peeclag. i. C, Beal Presence, p. 329.
 
 64 Love of Jesus for individual souls 
 
 the crowded streets. We seem almost to feel His 
 pressure. It severs us by His presence from all be- 
 sides. We are as motes, playing, moving, joying in 
 the Sun of His love. Yet we perceive it not, except 
 by the eyes of faith. We know that, had we power 
 of vision, we could see Him in this Chapel, just as 
 the Blessed Angels see Him, as the Seraphim adore 
 Him in the Highest heavens in all the Majesty of 
 His glory, in that Beatific Vision, for which we were 
 created. We know it, because He has said, " In 
 Him we live and move and are." But so He has 
 said, " This is My Body," " This is My Blood ; " and 
 by His saying He effects what He said. It is a great 
 mystery of His Love that, being for ever, in His 
 Natural mode of existence, in His Human Body at 
 the Eight Hand of God, He should so " delight to be 
 among the sons of men," that He should invent, so 
 to speak, another mode of existence of His Body 
 and Blood, a spiritual existence, in order to be with 
 us, to be with each one of us, to be so wholly with 
 each one of us, as if He were with none besides. It 
 is a miracle, the most marvellous of miracles ; but a 
 miracle, for which we have His Word, Who is the 
 Truth Itself. His glorious Body is in heaven, where 
 It is to remain " until the restitution of all things." 
 Yet He made Himself present to St. Paul in his way 
 to Damascus, " I am Jesus, Whom thou persecutest." 
 He is not present, in the same mode of existence, in 
 the heavens and on the Altar. But " by a Divine 
 virtue He raises His Body above the condition of a 
 body and gives it a spiritual mode of existence," as 
 He Himself speaks, when speaking of that great 
 mystery in the words which St. John has recorded ;
 
 in His continuous Iliyk Priestly Office for us. 65 
 
 11 so that it exists as if it were a spirit, invisible and 
 indivisible ; " a likeness of which we see in the soul, 
 which exists everywhere in the body and wholly in 
 each part of it. But then the same Body, which is 
 locally at the Right Hand of God, is supralocally, 
 under a diiferent mode of existence, present with 
 us, really, truly, substantially, though spiritually. 
 And since His Body is there, there must His Soul be 
 also, there also His Divinity. For they are insepa- 
 rable. And all this for us, all this for each one of 
 us, all this to unite each one of us as closely as is 
 possible with Himself. He does not leave Heaven 
 for us ; His Presence there is necessary for us ; yet, 
 ere He left earth, He contrived a way, whereby 
 He should be continually present on earth; pre- 
 sent, not, as when on earth, in one single place, but 
 throughout the whole earth, wherever Christians 
 are, for Him to come to, wherever, according to 
 His holy Institution, His Words consecrate the 
 oblations to be His Body and Blood. Truly "it is 
 expedient for us that He should go away ; " for we 
 could not every where have been present with Him 
 in His Bodily Form, but He is every where present 
 with us, to be to each one of us, what He is to all. 
 When Jesus was on earth, He merited for His Human 
 Soul and Body too. Every moment's suffering and 
 humiliation and obedience was adding to the ineffable 
 glory of His Human Body and Soul. Now He comes 
 to be present, simply for us, to allow Himself to be 
 sacramentally offered, in order to apply to our wants 
 the Infinite merits of His own Sacrifice on the Cross ; 
 to come to dwell in us, to unite Himself with us, to 
 be our Food, not changed into us, but changing us into 
 
 P
 
 66 Love of Jesus for individual souls 
 
 Himself; that we, "spiritually eating the Flesh of 
 Christ and drinking His Blood, may dwell in Christ 
 and Christ in us, may be one with Christ and Christ 
 with us." Such was the devout language of the 
 early Christians. " v We drink the Blood of our re- 
 demption: " Ux we drink His Holy Blood, to be the 
 propitiation for our sins:" " a We receive Himself, 
 and lay Him up in our breasts." 
 
 " b Upon the Cross was fixed the Flesh I feed on, and 
 
 the Blood 
 Whence I drink life and cleanse my heart, 'twas 
 
 from the Cross it flow'd." 
 
 " c Thou dost mingle Thy Body with our body and 
 dost blend Thy Spirit with our spirit. In our per- 
 sons is Thy living Body." U(1 He who loveth good, 
 becometh also himself good, the goodness of Him 
 "Who comcth to be in him transmaking him into Him- 
 self." " e A spiritual well of fire gushes up out of this 
 Table." " f He hath mixed up Himself with us, He 
 has kneaded up His Body with ours." " % This Blood 
 is the Salvation of our souls; by this the soul is 
 washed; by this is beautified; by this is inflamed. 
 This causeth our understanding to be more bright 
 than fire, and our soul more beaming than gold ; 
 
 y S. Leo Serm 42. (de Quadr. iv.) c. 5. p. 161. 
 
 z S. Cyril. Al. in Myst. Coma. T. v. P. ii. p. 378. 
 
 * S. Clem. Al. Predag. i. 6. p. 123. 
 
 ' S. Paulin. Ep. 32 ad Sev. 7. T. i. p. 125. 
 
 c S. Ephrem Can. 12 T. iii. p. 246. 
 
 (1 S. Greg. Nyss. in Eccl. iii. Horn. 8. T. i. p. 456. 
 
 u S. Chrys. on S. Matt. Horn. vii. 7. p. 103. 
 
 1 Id. on St. John vi. Horn. xlvi. 1. p. 399. 
 
 B lb. 5. p, 407.
 
 in His continuous High Priestly Office for tis. 67 
 
 this I31oocl was poured forth, and made heaven ac- 
 cessible." 
 
 But what if a soul be out of the reach of those 
 special gifts of the Love of God ? "What, if, like those 
 for whom we are combined to pray, a soul have 
 closed itself against all. have wasted its Baptismal 
 grace, neglected or profaned the Sacrament of the 
 Lord's Body and Blood, have forgotten God, or, by 
 deadly sin, be in open rebellion against Him ? Then 
 too, perhaps most of all, is visible God's individual 
 love for souls. What a work is the conversion of a 
 soul to God ! It seems as if the whole power and 
 wisdom and love of the Holy Trinity were concen- 
 trated on each single soul. It is the Will of the Al- 
 mighty Father, that none " h should perish, but that 
 all should come to repentance." ui As I live, saith 
 the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the 
 wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and 
 live : turn ye, turn ye, from your evil ways ; for 
 why will ye die? " "JGod, because He can swear by 
 no greater, sweareth by Himself," that He willeth 
 not, that those souls should perish. Then there is 
 the all-prevailing Intercession of the Son. He be- 
 holdeth each soul, for whom He shed His Precious 
 Blood. For many of them He yet repeateth His 
 words on the Cross, " k Father, forgive them, for they 
 know not, what they do." And God the Holy Ghost, 
 what doth He but perpetually besiege the soul ? By 
 afflictions, by miseries, by deaths of others, by hopes 
 of heaven, by fears of Hell, by dread of being severed 
 from God eternally, by yearning for His love, by the 
 
 11 2 St. Pet. iii. 9. j Ezek. xxxiii. 11. 
 
 i Heb. vi. 13. * St. Luke xviii. 34, 
 
 F2
 
 68 Love of Jesm for individual souls 
 
 unsatisfactoriness and weariness of things temporal, 
 by sonic glimpse or passing sweetness of things eter- 
 nal, by some memory of past good, perhaps of child- 
 hood's purity and a mother's love, or by the weight 
 of present evil, by disappointments or satiety, by the 
 loathsomeness of evil or by the sight or hearing of 
 some good, God the Holy Ghost from time to time 
 speaks to the soul. If He is silent, it is but that 
 He may take the soul by surprise, and speak the 
 more effectually, because the ear has not been shut- 
 ting itself vehemently against Him, and deafening it- 
 self against Him. what millions of conversions 
 there may not be going on in the world ! "What pre- 
 parations there are going on for each individual con- 
 version! And each conversion is as much the object 
 of God's multiplicity of contrivance, of the inventive- 
 ness of His grace and love, as if Jesus had died for 
 that soul alone. 
 
 And when a soul is converted, what a jubilee of 
 joy in heaven ! Angels have watched over the pro- 
 cess. They have wondered whether this soul, it 
 may be, so black and bemired with sin, is to be a 
 fellow-citizen with them, whether it's lost graces can 
 be restored, whether it's obduracy can be softened, 
 whether omnipotent grace can find access to it, 
 whether it will ever yield itself, or whether it is to 
 drop out of sight, their ministries vain, and they to 
 wait for some other soul to join in their Halleluias 
 for ever. And then the ice has cracked ; the spell- 
 bound soul is awakened ; it resists no more ; it has 
 become captive to the love of Jesus, and to His Pre- 
 cious Blood. And then, our Lord says, the Heavens 
 ring with joy, " There is joy in the presence of the
 
 in His continuous High Priestly Office for us. 69 
 
 angels of God over one sinner that repenteth 1 ." It 
 may be that on earth there was no sign of it. Grace 
 may have conquered on the death-bed. "When souls 
 have been out of reach of much grace before, doubt- 
 less grace is very busy then. God so loves the soul, 
 that He will not part with it, if He can help it. It 
 may have been, that the soul then first heard the 
 Name of Jesus, and the sweetness of a Saviour's 
 love won him, and he may have breathed out his soul 
 with the Name of Jesus, or with the cry, "Jesus, 
 Saviour, save me;" and the lost was found! We 
 hear but little here of the triumphs of the Precious 
 Blood. It's workings are mostly secret. But the 
 contest for souls is the one history of earth. Every 
 thing is of moment, as it bears upon it. "What sig- 
 nifies any material prosperity, any knowledge, any 
 power, unless it furthers the glory of God and the 
 salvation of souls ? And this, the real history of the 
 world, this, for which alone the world exists, is carried 
 on with individual love for every single soul. In 
 each soul, Avhich is won to God, Jesus " m sees of the 
 travail of His Soul, and is satisfied ; " each lost sheep 
 which is found Jesus lays on His shoulders rejoicing, 
 and says to His friends, the blessed Angels, " "Rejoice 
 with Me ; for I have found My sheep which was lost." 
 Such joy there is in Heaven over every converted 
 Jew or Heathen, who is won to the faith. Such joy 
 there is over every one, who has forfeited his Bap- 
 tismal grace, and is restored by true repentance and 
 entire conversion, so that he who was dead, again 
 lives ; such joy there is over every true confession, 
 in which the soul, whose Uo sins were as scarlet," is 
 
 1 St. Luke xv. 10. m Is. liii. 11. St. Luke xv. 5, G. Is. i. 18.
 
 70 Love of Jesus for individval souls 
 
 washed " white as snow " in the Blood of Jesus, and 
 Jesus says, "PThy sins be forgiven thee." 
 
 O that grand jubilee in heaven ! Countless more 
 beings than we can imagine, in their several choirs, 
 but one in their love of Jesus and of souls. It may 
 be one despised of men ; it may be one degraded be- 
 yond the common degradation ; it may be, that men 
 would scarce believe the conversion; it may be a crimi- 
 nal dying by public execution, the object of common 
 execration ; it may be some poor drunkard, his in- 
 tellect steeped and confused by His drink ; it may 
 be one of the outcasts whom the world loathes. It 
 matters not. A soul is won by grace ; it is radiant 
 with the Blood of Jesus. The Blessed Angels see it, 
 not as it has been, but as it is. And they sing aloud 
 for joy ; they hymn the victory of God's long- 
 suffering grace, the might of the Blood of Jesus, 
 the sweet attractiveness of His Kame, the enfolding 
 of His Love. Grod must endow them with a portion 
 of His own knowledge, that they should see each 
 separate victory of His grace and love. And since 
 these victories, throughout this our redeemed earth, 
 are unceasing, there can be no break in that heavenly 
 music of their jubilant praise. But each individual 
 sinner who repenteth must swell their varied notes of 
 triumphant thanksgiving; for they "joy over each 
 one sinner that repenteth," 
 
 Into their joy we cannot yet enter ; but we can 
 add to it. They do not only praise ; they pray ; 
 they pity us, who have the trials of this poor ma- 
 terial body, which they know not of ; they wonder 
 at us, that it so clogs us ; but they pity us, as we 
 
 P St. Matt, ix. 2. 5, vii. 48, St. Mark ii. 5-9, St. Liike v. 20. 23.
 
 in His continuous High Priestly Off ce for us. 71 
 
 should pity a weak man, borne down by an over- 
 powering weight too heavy for him. They pray for 
 us, in whom they long that their Lord and King's 
 love should be accomplished ; they long to bring us 
 off victorious from the field ; they watch its dizzy 
 strife ; they grieve, as far as blest spirits can grieve, 
 at it's uncertainty ; how we let it go against us ; how 
 we lay aside our armour of prayer ; how we walk 
 carelessly amid the beleaguering foes whom they see 
 around us. But we cannot pray, without praying in 
 unison with those countless, blessed, untiring spirits. 
 It is an Angel-like work on earth, to pray that they 
 should be saved, who struggle weakly, who are all 
 but overborne, who are all but sucked into the 
 eddying whirlpool, where no strong swimmer can, of 
 himself, fail to sink. Yet if he but cry, "Lord, save 
 me, I perish," a Hand will reach from Heaven and 
 will raise him out of those aweful, boiling surges, 
 and will place him in the Ark, out of which he had 
 cast himself. It may be that he has sinned away the 
 last grace ; it may be that his heart is seared as with 
 a red-hot iron, and is as hard as the nether millstone : 
 it may be that he has long ceased to pray for him- 
 self. But Jesus has delegated to us here below a 
 part of His office. He wills that we should intercede 
 for those who pray not for themselves ; it is not we, 
 it is His love, which saves them, but it is His love 
 in us. If we should weary, of ourselves, how can 
 we weary, when it is our Dear Lord Who has saved 
 us, Who bids us help those whom also He bought with 
 His Precious Blood ? He will help us ; only let us 
 thirst, through His grace, for that for which He said 
 on the Cross, " I thirst," the salvation of mankind. 
 Lord, teach us to pray, as Thou wilt hear !
 
 ADDEESS VII. 
 
 The love of God the Holy Ghost for individual souls. 
 
 IN dwelling on the love of Jesus for individual 
 souls, the Glory of the Godhead has been shrouded 
 by the Humanity, Which, for love of us, He assumed. 
 We have seen " God manifest in the flesh," though 
 the sight of His Godhead, with that of the Father 
 and of the Holy Ghost, is the fruition of eternity. In 
 thinking of the love of God the Holy Ghost, we are 
 brought face to face with God's immediate invisible 
 but unveiled Presence. May He enable us to think 
 reverently and lovingly at once of His Love ! 
 
 His office and love for the souls of men are coex- 
 tensive with our humanity. There is not a human 
 soul, which He does not visit by His Grace. Jesus 
 has merited His Grace for the whole world, and the 
 whole world is full of His love. His love covers and 
 overspreads it, as the light arrays so tenderly and 
 so lovingly all our material creation, transforming 
 things cold and hard and dead and unattractive 
 into its own unspeakable beauty. But in all this 
 wide world the province of His love is every indi- 
 vidual soul of man. He works where He is un- 
 acknowledged, unknown, unfelt, among those whose
 
 The Love of God the Holy Ghost for individual souls. 73 
 
 language has no name for His operations. "What 
 seem like the motions of conscience are the attrac- 
 tive movements of His grace, appealing to man, and 
 drawing him, if even to the Unknown God. 
 
 To us Christians He is the special gift of Jesus. 
 He is the common Gift of the Father and the Son ; 
 but Jesus sends Him from the Father. " When the 
 Comforter is come, Whom I will send unto you from 
 the Father," He says, " even the Spirit of truth Which 
 proceedeth from the Father 8 ." Jesus merited His 
 coming for us ; but we cannot come to Jesus, except 
 through Him. " ISTo man can come to Me," said our 
 Blessed Lord b , " except the Father which hath sent 
 Me, draw him." And He " draweth with bands of 
 love," through the Holy Ghost, Who is the Love 
 of the Father and and of the Son. 
 
 He cannot suffer, as Jesus did, because He is only 
 God, and God is impassible. Yet there must be 
 something analogous to our created affections, in that 
 " God is Love," and, when His Love is repelled, He 
 seemeth to be pained. " d Grieve not the Holy Spirit 
 of God, whereby ye were sealed unto the day of re- 
 demption." He is not visibly insulted, as was Jesus, 
 but He is insulted more manifoldly. The contu- 
 melies of Jesus were mostly during His presence on 
 earth. His worship was disputed during those cen- 
 turies of persecution. They had crucified the Man ; 
 and they were maddened to find, that the Man Jesus, 
 Whom they had crucified, was worshipped, as being 
 what He is, Very and Eternal God. They tried to 
 extirpate the faith of the Crucified. The appointed 
 trial-time was completed. Those assaults passed by. 
 
 n St. John xv. 26. '' Ib. vi. 44. c Ho.. xi. 4. d Eph. iv. 30.
 
 74 The love of God the Holy Ghost 
 
 Heresy succeeded. Blasphemers still insult Him. 
 His Body and Blood are profaned by hypocritical 
 communicants. But these are comparatively the 
 few. Those who do not love Him, still are mostly 
 afraid to defy Him. 
 
 God the Holy Ghost offers His grace to each of 
 those ever-renewed 800 millions of human souls. 
 Every contumely which could be shewn, has been 
 and is shewn to Him. He, the Spirit, Who ' ' e brooded 
 over" and vivified the creation, cometh to His crea- 
 tures, soliciting their love ; and there is no contumely, 
 wherewith they do not repel Him. To reject Him, to 
 refuse to listen to Him, to drown His Voice in some 
 recklessness or vanity ; to embolden themselves against 
 Him ; to stupefy reason itself by intoxication, in 
 order that the instrument which He acts upon, may 
 not be able to listen to Him ; to go and do quickly 
 the things which He implores us not to do, in order 
 to get rid of His importuning : is a rudeness, which 
 we do not often shew to a fellow-creature. But there 
 is no end of man's shewing it to Him. Would that we 
 were as much afraid of Him, our God, as we are of 
 the meanest of our fellow-creatures ! The presence of 
 one of them will prevent the commission of a sin, 
 which all the pleadings of God the Holy Ghost will 
 not dissuade from. 
 
 What is all the excitement of the world, what are 
 the things by which people, as they say, " kill time," 
 destroying, as far as they are themselves concerned, 
 that time wherein they should " work out their sal- 
 vation " ; what mean those manifold contrivances 
 not to be alone, or the dull, insipid, or sensational, 
 e Gen. i. 2.
 
 for individual souls. 75 
 
 tales with which they occupy the hours, iu which 
 they cannot otherwise escape from themselves, and 
 in which they must be alone what does it all mean 
 but this, to escape the whispers of God the Holy 
 Ghost, which He is ever waiting to utter gently in- 
 to the ear of the solitary, undistracted, unoccupied 
 soul ? Men, or especially women, wish to feel, be- 
 cause feeling is a token of life ; but they wish to 
 avoid any real feeling which must in the end cost 
 them something, because it comes from God the 
 Holy Ghost, Who is " f the Spirit of truth" and is 
 very earnest, because it is for their salvation. How 
 will people read all the most insipid pages of a news- 
 paper, because it dulls the craving of the soul after 
 true knowledge, and stops up the avenues to the soul, 
 lest it should be forced to hear the whispering voice 
 of God the Holy Ghost ! 
 
 At times men call His whispers by rude names. 
 They will call them cowardice, weakness, "want of 
 proper spirit," poor-spiritcdness, and the like; any 
 thing to get rid of them ! They have to justify them- 
 selves to themselves, and so they miscall His love. 
 Into what miseries or brutalities will they not 
 plunge themselves, to avoid Him ! Indifference is 
 even harder to love, than passionate rejection, and 
 more hopeless. For passionate rejection at least im- 
 plies strong temptation, and when the temptation is 
 worn out or disappoints, the soul may turn to Him. 
 
 And yet He bears with it all, throughout all this 
 
 vast number of human souls. How few yield to Him 
 
 at first; how much fewer continually, persevering- 
 
 ly ! How few are not wrecks of what they might 
 
 f St. John xv. 26,
 
 76 The love of God the Holy Ghost 
 
 have been, had they ever yielded to Him ! Aiid yet 
 He did not come to us, a stranger from without. 
 We were baptized into Him, with the Father and 
 the Son. He was our Indweller. We became His 
 temples &. He was the Voice of Jesus to our souls. 
 If the words of Jesus in the Gospel spake to us, 
 it was He Who spake to us through them, and light- 
 ed them up and put the fire of His love into them, 
 and made us susceptible of that Fire. It was He 
 Who spake to our young hearts. Whether we per- 
 ceived it or no, it was He Who warned us not to speak 
 or listen to a bad word, to speak the truth, not to 
 be curious, or whatever else He bade us. 
 
 If any chased Him away by deadly sin, He sought 
 to be re-admitted. We did not seek Him, but lie 
 sought us. God became the Suppliant to us, that we 
 would receive Him back again, that we would not 
 remain unten anted by Him. And this He does con- 
 tinually with each individual soul. There is not a soul 
 among the damned, to whom He has not said, " Listen 
 to Me, and it shall be well with thee : " there is not 
 a soul among them, who has not turned away and 
 said, " I will not obey Thee ! " 
 
 Then too He adapts Himself with all His Infinite 
 Wisdom to each human soul. We count it, among 
 created beings, a great token of love, if any one con- 
 siders us and our case with any special care, if they 
 expend thought upon us individually, if they contrive 
 plans for our good, for the good developement of our 
 mind or intellect. We have, many of us, a life-long 
 gratitude for such thought and care, though he who 
 showed it, has long been removed out of sight. Yet 
 * 1 Cor. iii. 16, 17, vi. 19, 2 Cor. vi. 16.
 
 for individual souls. 77 
 
 hero it is not only one provision, but manifold ; not 
 for a time only, but hourly, all our lives through ; 
 not a human benefactor, who thinks of us now and 
 then among many others, but the Omniscient Wis- 
 dom of God, Who, acting indivisibly as God, counsels 
 for our souls with the whole fulness of His Wisdom. 
 And as we have listened to it, amid whatever short- 
 comings, we have found by experience in our own case, 
 what we must have known beforehand if we thought, 
 that His counsel at each time was just what was 
 needed for us perhaps to save us from Hell. It was 
 the undivided thought of God, counselling the very 
 best thing for us individually, just what we needed, 
 being exactly those beings which we are, with just 
 that combination of gifts, qualities, endowments, fail- 
 ings, which, if they were good, God united in our 
 particular soul ; if bad, we made for ourselves. 
 
 These were His ways, more or less, with most of 
 us, when God the Holy Ghost was imploring us in 
 our childish days, not to be drawn away by bad ex- 
 amples of others, or by the ridicule of the thought- 
 less, or, somewhat later, by human respect, or was 
 drawing us to choose God above all created things 
 to be our Portion here and for ever. This soliciting 
 from without concerns us now too, in our character 
 of suppliants for our unconverted fellow-sinners, Yet 
 they are but the beginning of His ways. For they 
 are mostly His entreaties to those who have become 
 external to Himself, to come to Jesus, and to be re- 
 conciled to God. They are His calls to those who, 
 by some grievous sin or continuity of sin, have chased 
 Him from themselves, and have become again the 
 property of the Evil one. They are the conditions
 
 78 The love of God the Holy Ghost 
 
 of His working upon the soul, the vestibule of His 
 presence, the passing " h from darkness to light, from 
 the power of Satan unto God." They signify His 
 love for individual souls, in that He, like Jesus, will 
 bear with any thing, sooner than part with them. 
 
 2. But His love can then first find scope to shew 
 itself to the soul, when it has received Him. He 
 shews His love, by giving Himself with His gifts. 
 He could not become Incarnate ; but He does Avhat 
 has its own special condescension of love. God the 
 the Son united to Himself a pure, deified, human na- 
 ture ; God the Holy Ghost comes, abidingly to dwell 
 in each single soul, notwithstanding all its imper- 
 fections, weaknesses, venial sins : and He returns to 
 it, when chased away by mortal sin, through contri- 
 tion and the Sacrament of penitence. Some Sacra- 
 ments are especially His own, as Baptism, Confirma- 
 tion, Orders ; in the Holy Eucharist He participates 
 in the consecration. He operateth through our 
 Blessed Lord's words of Consecration, to sanctify the 
 oblations presented to God 1 , and makes them, by His 
 Divine and spiritual Operation, in a real but ineffable 
 way, "the Body and Blood of Christ." He is ever 
 ready to come, when the soul invites Him. We 
 might make as many spiritual communions as we 
 draw breaths. He would enter into our souls anew 
 in every moment. He waits upon us, like a servant. 
 "We say to Him, " k Come, and He cometh." So great 
 is His love to be with us, that He awaits only our 
 
 11 Acts xxvi. 18. 
 
 1 " Come, to sanctify the oblations here presented, and those 
 for whom, and by whom, and the things for which, they are 
 offered." Bp Andrewes' Devotions. k St. Matt. viii. 9.
 
 for individual souls. 79 
 
 wish that He should enter more into us. He knocks 
 unto the door of our hearts by His Inspirations : He 
 says, " * Come to Me, My sister, My love, My clove, 
 My undefiled." " m If any hear My voice, and open 
 the door, I will come in to him and will sup with 
 him and he with Me." And what an entrance ! 
 The Creator comes anew into His creatures, not by 
 any influence only, but substantially, Very God, to 
 be Himself his Indweller and his Friend. Greater, 
 more inward, fuller dwelling of God in the soul, they 
 say, and nearer union with Jesus might come through 
 a devout spiritual communion than through a tepid 
 actual Communion. The Church has taught us to 
 pray Him to come into our souls. Our Lord has 
 promised to those who love Him and keep His com- 
 mandments, Un My Father will love him, and We 
 will come unto him and make our abode with him.'' 
 And so the Church has learned and taught us the 
 language; "Come, Holy Ghost, Who ever One art 
 with the Father and the Son ; Come, Holy Ghost, our 
 souls possess, With Thy full flood of Holiness." 
 u Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, And lighten 
 with celestial fire : Thou the anointing Spirit art, 
 Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart." It was noted 
 as a marvellous thing, when God heard the voice of 
 Joshua, and sun and moon stood still . More mar- 
 vellous is it, when the creature calls the Creator into 
 himself, and He comes. 
 
 What words they are ! What we believe of all, 
 we must believe of ourselves, if we will. For Ho 
 has said, "Ask, and ye shall receive." He, Al- 
 
 1 Cant. v. 5. m Kev. iii. 20. 
 
 n St. John xiv. 23. Jos. x. 14.
 
 80 The love of God the Holy Ghost 
 
 mighty God, He, the mutual Love of the Father and 
 the Son, He Himself vouchsafes, not only to kindle 
 the fire of love in our hearts which Jesus willed to 
 have kindled, but Himself to be, within us, that Fire 
 of love. How often we have heard the words, that 
 we are "the temple of God!" But what do they 
 mean ? Not that God dwells in us, as by any created 
 symbol, as He manifested Himself by a symbolic Pre- 
 sence in the Jewish temple of old ; not that He should 
 be within us only ; but that He should interpenetrate 
 the substance of our souls, that we should be united 
 with God. Jesus becomes one with us, and we with 
 Him through His Spirit Who dwelleth in us. 
 
 This He will do for each soul ; but in so doing He 
 adapts Himself to the needs, the character, the spe- 
 ciality of each soul. He gives to each soul the special 
 and peculiar graces which it wants, over and above 
 that " p fire of love" which we all want. Our Lord 
 said, " He shall take of Mine, and shew it unto you." 
 He gives us what the prophet foretold should be 
 especially in Christ, those seven-fold gifts r . In the 
 Man Christ Jesus, He accustomed Himself to dwell 
 anew in man, and then, what in Him was " without 
 measure 5 ," He gives to us in measure, as we can 
 bear or as we can receive it. Still He gives us those 
 same gifts which were in Christ. He gives to each 
 of us a continual increase of grace, and with each 
 increase of grace He dwells in the soul, not as before 
 only, but with something more of Himself than we 
 could before contain. Wonderful creation as grace 
 is, almost unimaginable proximity to God, of that 
 
 P St. Luke xii. 49. 1 St. John xvi. 15. 
 
 ' Is. xi. 8 St. John iii. 34.
 
 for individual souls. 81 
 
 which is yet not God, still He is not content 
 to give it without Himself. glorious wondrous 
 Spirit, Who hast all in Thee ! All wisdom, un- 
 derstanding, counsel, might, knowledge, dwell in 
 Thee ; and Thou impartest to each that of Thee 
 which he can contain, and which is most needful 
 and useful to him. Nay, not even these alone, but 
 "'Love," which Thou Thyself art, and "Joy" 
 which Thou hast in Thyself in the abundance of Thy 
 love; and "Peace" from the tranquillity of Thine 
 eternal oneness of joy ; and " Long-suffering," Thine 
 own characteristic towards us; and "Meekness," 
 which was the special attribute of Jesus, that which 
 He came to teach ; and " Goodness," which is Thine 
 own quality, communicating Thyself to man. 
 
 This is, if one may so speak, the continual 
 thoughtful operation of the Spirit. This is His crea- 
 tive work now ; through this He, Whose special 
 perfection it is to be the term and bound of Deity, 
 is continually communicating the Trinity to all souls 
 which will receive It. He comes closest to us of the 
 Holy Trinity. Of Him we were born again"; "in the 
 Spirit we live v ; "we walk in the Spirit*;" "by the 
 Spirit we mortify the deeds of the body x ;" "by the 
 unction from Himself He teacheth us all things ;>'" 
 "He searcheth out all things, even the deep things 
 of God 1 '," but for us; by Him "the love of God is 
 emptied forth (so the word means) into our hearts*;" 
 He vivifies us b ; He purifies our hearts by faith c ; by 
 
 4 Gal. v. 22. " St. John iii. 5. * Gal. v. 25. 
 
 w Ib. and 16. x Kom. viii. 13. y 1 St. John ii. 20. 
 
 ' 1 Cor. ii. 10. il Rom. v. 5. '' St. John vi. 63. 
 
 c Acts xv. 17. 
 G
 
 82 The love of God the Holy Ghost 
 
 Him we have access to the Father d ; through Him we 
 become the habitation of God c . So closely is His 
 presence inworked in our souls, that we often scarce 
 know whether, when He is speaking in Holy Scrip- 
 ture of His operations, He means to speak of Him- 
 self the operator of the grace, or of the grace which 
 He operateth. 
 
 But this is not enough for His love. "We are 
 taught to pray for His "holy inspiration," that we 
 may " think thereby those things which are good," 
 And that we "may perfectly love God." And His 
 inspirations are ever encompassing us, wasted alas ! 
 like the Blood of Jesus, but countless ; always end- 
 ing, if listened to, in some diminished unlikeness to 
 God ; coming to us the more, the more we listen to 
 them ; sometimes issuing in devoted vocations, some- 
 times in striking more towards the centre of "the 
 narrow way," sometimes in increased devotion to 
 Himself and to all good, sometimes in greater jea- 
 lousy of evil. 
 
 But He does not limit Himself to His operations in 
 us. He too has an Office towards the Father. He 
 too intercedeth for us, in us. He does not only 
 "help our infirmities:" He does not only intensify 
 our prayers : He does not only give us perseverance 
 in prayer : He does not only teach us what to pray 
 for, and is the life of our prayers. He Himself in- 
 tercedeth for us. The prayers which we utter ac- 
 cording to the Mind of God, the secret unspoken 
 yearnings of the soul, He suggests, He inspires, He 
 enables, He upbears. But also He Himself inter- 
 cedeth for us. He Himself expresses within the 
 a Eph. ii. 18. c Jb. 22.
 
 for individual souls. 83 
 
 Holy Trinity, the longings, which He has suggested : 
 He uttereth them there with that Love which He Is ; 
 and we are heard, not only through the All-availing 
 Intercession of our Divine Lord; but the Holy 
 Ghost Who dwelleth in us, Himself is our Advocate 
 in the Holy Trinity, and obtains what He wills and 
 knows to be best for us. How should we be hope- 
 less about our prayers, when they are no longer our 
 prayers, but His prayers in us Who is Almighty 
 God ; His prayers, Who Himself utters our longings 
 as His own? 
 
 Would that He may give us one special gift, and 
 for this let us ask Him ; that Spirit of Fire which 
 He is, which shall burn out in us all which is alien 
 from Him, all " wood, hay, stubble," ere it be burned 
 out at the great Day ; which shall burn out of us all 
 self and self-seeking, and make us count the good of 
 others as if it were our own ; which shall make us 
 long for the glory of God purely, through whom- 
 soever it is promoted; which shall refine all our 
 dross, kindle what is cold, melt what is hard ; which 
 shall give us especially a burning zeal for the in- 
 terests of Jesus and for the salvation of souls for 
 whom Jesus died; which shall give us burning 
 prayers, as knowing and feeling that, in praying for 
 the salvation of a single soul, we pray for more than 
 the whole world and its glories, more than the em- 
 pire of the world, more than all possible inanimate 
 creations. For we pray for one, formed in the image 
 of God ; for one, for whom Christ died ; for one, on 
 whom the good pleasure of the Holy Trinity rests ; 
 for one, whom the Father willeth to be saved, for 
 whom the Son was incarnate, with whom the Holy 
 
 G 2 *
 
 84 The love of God the Holy Ghost, fyc. 
 
 Ghost has pleaded and will plead. for hearts of 
 fire, for fiery zeal for souls ; that, if we can do no 
 more, we may yet plead with God with burning 
 longings, burning thoughts, burning desire for God's 
 glory in the salvation of that soul, that it may be 
 God's and God may be its own, and it may be to the 
 praise of His love and longsuffering for ever !
 
 ADDKESS VIII. 
 
 Horribleness of sin. 
 
 How horrible it is, to turn from the thought of 
 the Love of God and Jesus to the thought of sin, even 
 if it were not for those most miserable of all sins, 
 our own. The earthly cloud never looks so black, as 
 when the sun is shining full upon it. The depth of 
 its blackness none can thoroughly know, save God 
 Himself. For God Alone knows the infinity of that 
 Love and Holiness, against which we sin. It is 
 offence against God's Infinite Majesty ; and that, from 
 us His poorest and lowest creatures, whom He has 
 endowed with reason. It is offence against His In- 
 finite "Wisdom, "Who chose for us what would be our 
 perfection, what would raise our nature not only to 
 the perfection of its natural being, but to heights in- 
 conceivable by us now, and, in their highest degrees, 
 for ever inconceivable by ordinary Christians, heights 
 of supernatural endowments. It is offence against 
 Him, our Lord and God, to Whom we belong by vir- 
 tue of our creation, as His subjects, whom He created 
 for His good pleasure and glory. It is rebellion 
 against His most righteous "Will, withdrawing from 
 Him His lawful possession, our souls, and transferring
 
 86 Ilorriblencss of sin. 
 
 them to His and our enemy, the devil, who disputes 
 His sovereignty over us. It is offence against Infi- 
 nite Goodness, bringing a black spot into His crea- 
 tion ; a putrid foulness, marring its beauty, as He 
 made it, to be a mirror of some of His own perfections. 
 It is a defiance of His power, as though He could 
 not requite. It is contempt of Himself, the Infinite 
 Good. For what is all sin, except a choice, more or 
 less deliberate, of some of God's creatures, or of the 
 abuse of God's creatures against Himself; and that, 
 of things so vile, so wretched, so passing, that we are 
 sick of them or revolted at them, when the choice 
 has been completed? God created us to be like unto 
 the Angels ; our spiritual sins are an imitation of the 
 sins of devils, without the temptation of the enormous 
 intellect at least of some of them ; our fleshly sins 
 are disordered below the beasts that perish. When 
 people lead others into sensual sin, they enact at once 
 the sins of devils, and of a beast's nature. But we do 
 not choose either, without having first rejected God. 
 So God Himself complains, Ua My people have com- 
 mitted two evils. They have forsaken Me, the foun- 
 tain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, 
 broken cisterns that can hold no water." " b ~Will ye 
 pollute Me among My people for handfuls of barley 
 and for pieces of bread ? " All this makes sin a sort of 
 insanity. But it does not yet touch the depth of sin. 
 Again ; look we at sin in ourselves, in its conse- 
 quences to us. It is the loss of God, and of every 
 thing whereby we may gain God. The loss of God, 
 the loss of the eternal fruition of God, the loss of the 
 end of our being, for which God created us ! And 
 R Jor. ii, 13. b Ezck. xiii. 19.
 
 of sin. 87 
 
 such an end ! The sight of Him as He Is ; the 
 possession of His love; the entering into our Blessed 
 Lord's joy, God and Man ; the unfolding of His wis- 
 dom, Goodness, Love, Joy ; the likeness to Him, to 
 God ; the beholding Him, because we have been 
 made like unto Him, and have been endowed by 
 Him with the power to behold Him, and being trans- 
 formed more and more into His likeness, because 
 we behold Him. Uc We shall be like Him, for we 
 shall see Him, as He is ! " And not this only, but all in 
 God is Infinite ; so that it is self-evident, that if the 
 highest Intelligence and most burning Love, which 
 Almighty God could create, and endow with gifts, 
 which He could Alone conceive, almost infinitely be- 
 yond our conception) of wisdom and of love, should 
 throughout eternity receive more of the wisdom and 
 love of God and become more Deiform in wisdom or 
 love, so that if we did not see God, as He Is, we might 
 mistake what is so full of the Wisdom and Love of 
 God for Himself still, in all eternity, (I must not 
 say at the end of Eternity, since Eternity has no end, 
 but at every, to us inconceivable, prolongation in 
 eternity, only that as to eternity all human words 
 are indescriptive, because taken from time,) such a 
 creature would have made not even the very slightest 
 approximation to know fully the wisdom or the love 
 of God. Plainly. For the finite cannot approxi- 
 mate to the Infinite. And all this men fling away 
 by sin, as if it was not of so much value as a night's 
 debauch, or the passing breath of man's praise, or 
 some trifling vanity, contemptible even to ourselves ! 
 God, (and what have we not pronounced, when we 
 
 c 1 St. John iii. 2.
 
 88 Horribleness of sin. 
 
 have said, God !) Father Son and Holy Ghost, the 
 All-Holy and Ever-Blessed Trinity, are compared, as 
 it may be, to the excitement of a glass of brandy, and 
 the glass of brandy is preferred to the Trinity ! 
 
 Many of the damned may not know what they 
 have lost, unless it be those who have had faith in. 
 this world without love, and that they, remembering 
 what they knew of Him Whom they have lost and 
 what was revealed to them of Him, do, out of that 
 hatred which will be the ruling passion of Hell, ag- 
 gravate the sufferings of those who know it not, by 
 telling them of their common loss. We see, from 
 time to time, something of this sort on earth, how 
 hatred will mock another with the knowledge of 
 what she has forfeited, it may be, for some profession 
 of love. But, apart even from this, there must be 
 in Hell a burning restlessness, because the soul was 
 made for God, and, when the things of this world 
 shall no more entice it, the soul must know that God 
 was the End of its being (for it is part of the soul to 
 know it at least indistinctly), and then, though it 
 know not what God is, and can hardly imagine His 
 Love, being itself all hate, it must hate Him, be- 
 cause He withholds from it what it was made for. 
 
 But we are Christians, and have to pray most es- 
 pecially for bad Christians ! And lost Christians 
 must have a knowledge of what they have lost, be- 
 yond what others have. And this may be part of our 
 Lord's meaning, " d That servant, which knew his 
 Lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did 
 according to His will, shall be beaten with many 
 stripes," while "he that knew not," like that other, 
 d St. Luke xii. 47.
 
 Horribleness of sin. 89 
 
 "and did commit things worthy of stripes shall be 
 beaten with few stripes." what an aggravation 
 of the misery even of Hell will be the memory of 
 past graces ! How will the grace of Baptism be 
 a brand-mark on the deserter ! What a source of 
 mockery to the other damned ! What a triumph to 
 Satan ! " Thou wast called by His Name ; thou be- 
 camest the dwelling-place of the Trinity ! thou wast 
 washed with the Blood of Jesus, and didst own Him 
 God. Aha! Aha! And thou ' e art become like unto 
 us' !" that hideous laugh and mockery of devils ! 
 And the soul will know it to be true, better than they ! 
 It will have the memory of its baptismal, its childish, 
 innocence ; it will remember the grace it once had, its 
 natural good feelings and how grace worked upon 
 them, and by what act it first parted with them, and 
 how that act became the parent of others, and those 
 others of others, and how it repented, and how it re- 
 pented of its repentance, and how it became obdurate ! 
 That first act, by which it offended against Baptismal 
 grace, was its first deadly sin. Eepeated relapses into 
 deadly sin did the rest. Each deadly sin is a prepara- 
 tion for the everlasting hate of God ; it is loss of all 
 former grace, of all former good ; it is, unless God send 
 some fresh grace into the heart, an impossibility to re- 
 pent ; for it cuts off past grace, and, without some new 
 inspiration of God, the soul cannot repent. (God does 
 give such inspirations ; but I am speaking of sin in 
 itself, and of what, if left to itself, it would work.) It 
 deafens the soul to the Voice of God ; it renders her 
 insensible to its own bitterness, its own foulness. It 
 is the death of the soul, the rejection of the friendship 
 e Is. xiv. 10.
 
 90 Horrible-ness of sin. 
 
 of God ; it is an incredible foulness and stain of the 
 soul (the soul, if it died in it, would bear a stain, 
 which would itself be its condemnation) ; it obscures 
 and corrupts even the good of nature. It makes the 
 soul to cease to be the dwelling-place of the Trinity, 
 and makes it " f the dwelling-place of devils, and the 
 hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean 
 and hateful bird," the abode of Satan. Sacraments, 
 until God give it repentance, have lost their power, and 
 could be received only to hurt. It gives to the soul 
 the devil as its father, instead of God ; as Jesus said, 
 11 g ye are of your father, the devil, and the lusts of 
 your father ye will do ; " " h the tares are the children 
 of the wicked one;" ui he that committeth sin, is of the 
 devil." It makes the soul, by the abuse of the soul's 
 own free-will, sin's slave. For " k whoso committeth 
 sin is the servant of sin ; " and God speaks of those 
 ul sold under sin." It has forfeited its share of the 
 merits of Christ, and has made itself unworthy of 
 them and of all gifts and fruits of the Spirit. 
 
 But further still ; sin is very seldom confined to the 
 sinner. It is a great mercy of God, when it is. Some, 
 and those the heaviest sins, necessarily involve others : 
 others are necessarily public and infectious. Sin has 
 a horrible infectiousness. Multitudes do evil to- 
 gether. Sin is such a horrible evil, that men can 
 scarcely endure it alone. They corrupt others, be- 
 cause the sight of the good is a reproach to them. 
 It is well known, how every public report of sin pro- 
 duces like sins. The knowledge of sin is like a spark 
 
 f Eev. xviii. 2. s St. John viii. 44. 
 
 h St. Matt. xiii. 38. j 1 St. John iii. 8. k St. John viii. 34. 
 
 1 1 Kings iii. 20, 25, 2 Kings xvii. 17, Rom. vii. 14.
 
 Horribleness of sin. 91 
 
 on gunpowder to the prepared heart. One who has 
 been remarkable for sin tempts to sin by example, 
 even after his death. How horrible must be the 
 malice and hatred in Hell, when some fresh victim of 
 the scoffs and blasphemies of Voltaire, or of the death- 
 attracting foulnesses of some fonl writer, meets him 
 in Hell ! What a horrible greeting ! One can con- 
 ceive the infidel, out of malice, acting the moralist 
 and retorting upon his victim, that it was his own 
 fault that he believed him and not God ; or one 
 may conceive his exulting in his horrible victory ; 
 " God has sentenced me here, but I have had a 
 power against God. I have robbed Him of thee ! " 
 But there can be no mere triumph in Hell. Chief 
 in malice must be chief in torment. They who corrupt 
 others prepare for themselves a more horrible damna- 
 tion. Even in Hell itself, one can scarcely imagine 
 any thing so horrible, as the sight of one, who came 
 thither through the participation of any one's sin. 
 who has also perished. the horrible cry and yell 
 through the vaults of hell, "but for thee, I had 
 not lost heaven." Horror of horrors all this ! The 
 flesh creeps when one speaks or hears it. It is like 
 seeing Hell upon earth. And what alas ! is very much 
 upon earth, but Hell ? Men speak thoughtlessly of 
 certain dens of sin, as if it were a proper name, as 
 "Hells;" they must have much like Hell in their 
 malice and hatred ; but coarse vulgar Hells are pro- 
 bably not the worst. The more refined sin is always 
 the more diabolic. what is so much on earth but a 
 living death ; a Hell, except that there is yet space for 
 repentance, that the day of grace is not absolutely 
 past, that the door is not shut, that the irrevocable
 
 92 Horribleness of sin. 
 
 sentence has not yet been passed ? Yet horrible as 
 it is, this is not yet the most piercing view of sin. 
 
 It is not the sight of Hell, it is not the loss of God, 
 it is not the offence against our Maker, which will 
 work in us true hatred for sin. The thought of Hell 
 alone might rather produce rebellion against God. 
 It will be, much more, the thought of the blackness of 
 our ingratitude in our contempt of His love. Such 
 was the penitence of the Prodigal Son. He says, not 
 like the Pharisee, "0 God," but " m Father, I have 
 sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no 
 more worthy to be called Thy son." It aggravates 
 the ingratitude, that, except those who have severed 
 themselves for ever from God, we are the only blot 
 in God's creation. Inanimate creation reproaches us; 
 for they all act according to their nature and obey 
 God's laws. " n All things serve Thee." But we 
 God ennobled us by that almost Divine gift of free- 
 will, and we ungrateful have abused the gift of God 
 to offend God. "We had the privilege freely to serve 
 Him, and, whenever we sinned, we have rejected 
 it. Sin itself were ingratitude, even had we not 
 been grace-endowed. "What a gift to be endowed 
 with the capacity of doing the will of God, of being 
 in the relation of a creature to Him in "Whom is all 
 Perfection, all Goodness, all Beauty, all "Wisdom, all 
 Love, even if we had been created such beings as 
 should never see Him. ! But, as creatures only, to 
 have been endowed with His grace, to have had our 
 will inclined by Himself to Himself, to have been, 
 over and over again, called by His love, pricked and 
 goaded by His love, almost melted by His love, and 
 ra St. Luke xv. 19. Ps. cxix. 91.
 
 Horribleness of sin. 93 
 
 then to have lain down as sluggishly as the poor 
 animal, whom we hold to be specially obstinate, or 
 to have gone fiercely and recklessly to the object 
 of onr passion, to have gone as fiercely to what 
 God forbade, or to have held back as sluggishly from 
 what God commanded, as if God had never loved us, 
 this, this is the misery of sin. 
 
 This is the wretchedness of our own sins, what- 
 ever they have been, not only because of the ever- 
 lasting fire which we deserved and incurred, but for 
 Jesus' sake ; not only for the loss of God and of all 
 that unspeakable love and joy ; not only because we 
 are wrecks of what we might have been, (wretched as 
 it is to have missed, so far, what God designed us 
 for) : but that God has ever been good and loving to 
 us, and we, evil and ungrateful to Him ! He has 
 " daily loaded us with His benefits." The powers 
 of mind or body, the instruments of our will, which 
 we misused against His Holy Will, were His. He 
 created us for His glory and our bliss in Him. He 
 ordered all things for our well-being and salvation. 
 He redeemed us by the Blood of His Only-begotten 
 Son ; He more than repaired our loss in Adam by 
 His gifts to us in Christ. Our natural will has indeed 
 a hankering towards evil which Adam had not, but wo 
 have had gifts of grace which Adam had not, being 
 made members of Him, God's well-beloved Son. We 
 had power given us to u P trample upon the lion and 
 the adder," and all the snares and assaults of the Evil 
 one. God became more than our own Father by 
 creation. He gave us in our Baptism habitual grace, 
 the Presence of the Comforter; He gave us conti- 
 
 Ps. Ixviii. 19. P Ib. xei. 13.
 
 94 Horribleness of sin. 
 
 nually, over and above, actual grace according to our 
 needs. He gave us, as our inseparable companion, 
 our own Guardian Angel, to "keep us in all our 
 ways," and to " drive far from us all the snares of 
 the Enemy." Jesus ever interceded for us. In our 
 Confirmation, God the Holy Ghost gave us new gifts 
 of strength : He continually drew us to Jesus and the 
 Father ; He continually asked for our love ; He aided 
 our prayers with His own " unutterable groanings ;" 
 there has not been a prayer, however poor, for spiri- 
 tual graces, which God has not heard. He taught 
 us and besought us to pray : He prayed us more than 
 we prayed Him : He drew our young hearts to Him ; 
 He set before us a bright pure future of joy and 
 peace and service; every childish sin He washed 
 away, when we said to God the words which His Son 
 had given us, u Forgive us our trespasses." When 
 older, He increased His drawings : He gave us His 
 own Body and Blood, to hallow us and unite us to 
 Him. Our whole life, as far as we would admit 
 of it, has been supernatural. Well may He say, 
 "4 What could have been done more to My vine- 
 yard, which I have not done in it ? Wherefore, 
 when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, 
 brought it forth wild grapes?" The mighty spiri- 
 tual works which He has worked, or has been will- 
 ing to work in us, have been greater than the works 
 which He worked in Chorazin and Bethsaida. How 
 should He not say to us, Ur lf the mighty works 
 which have been done in you, had been done in Tyre 
 and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in 
 sackcloth and ashes ? " 
 
 q Is. v. 4. ' St. Matt. xi. 21.
 
 Ilorribleness of xin. 95 
 
 This then should be the especial grief as well for 
 our own sins as for others, that they are contrary to 
 the love of God. Then shall we gain a loving sor- 
 row for sin ; then shall we grieve that Jesus is so 
 little loved ; then will God give us a true zeal for 
 souls ; then will time seem to be lost when we are 
 not praying to God, or working for God, or doing 
 something for the glory of God ; then will our pray- 
 ers be animated with faith and love and hope, when 
 God, on our prayers, brings home to our souls, how 
 grievous sin is, as being against His love and ho- 
 nour and glory, how He loves the souls, which He 
 has made and redeemed with His Precious Blood, 
 how all those whom we see around us, those for 
 whom we should pray, those who are every minute 
 dying, are the objects of His love ; how, if we pray, 
 we are " s workers together with Him." 
 
 How can we think that we love God, if we are 
 not anxious that others should love Him ? How can 
 we think that we believe sin to be the horrible thing 
 which it is, if we are not anxious that others should 
 cease to sin, that this dreadful reign of sin should 
 be checked ; if we go on indulging self, giving to the 
 world and to appearances, what may be consecrated to 
 God's service and the salvation of souls; if we employ 
 what God has given us, in " * things which perish in 
 the using," Uu in a vain shew, "and do not zealously 
 promote works of piety, whereby souls may be saved ? 
 How can we think that we love God, if we will not 
 pray earnestly, as with agony, as we should, if wo 
 could save a drowning child of our own, that God 
 would save the souls, which, with us, He redeemed ? 
 
 2 Cor. vi. 1. * Col. ii. 22. u Ps. xxxix. 6.
 
 96 Jlorribleness of sin, 
 
 We should, many of us, scream loud enough, if a fire 
 were kindled around those we love, and we saw them 
 out of an upper window stretching out their hands 
 towards us, and the fire mounting higher and higher, 
 nearer and nearer, and we thought that our screams 
 might still bring help. We should scream, many 
 of us, loud enough, if a face which we loved were 
 sinking for the last time under the water, and we 
 thought that our cries would bring help to save them. 
 But they are our brothers and sisters, who with 
 us were redeemed by the Blood of our Redeemer, 
 who were made members of Himself, whose condition 
 should cry aloud to us, even if they are too lost to 
 cry. We should not scream the less, though the 
 child we loved lay asleep, and was insensible to its 
 danger, while the fire was kindling around it. And 
 what is our earthly fire to the fire of Hell ? What 
 is sinking under the waves, compared to sinking down 
 the bottomless pit ? And yet some yet living, or the 
 saints of old, have seen by God's revelation, how souls 
 who had cast aside as " v an unholy thing," "the 
 Blood " by which they were redeemed, were cast down 
 thither, one after another, heap upon heap. 
 
 The strong desire of the heart is a loud cry to the 
 Heart of God. Then let us cry more devotedly than 
 we ever did, let us pray with greater fervour of 
 earnestness than we ever did, " Save them, Lord, 
 save them, most sweet, most loving Jesus ! Let not 
 Thy Blood have been shed for them in vain ; save 
 them with us, most loving Jesus. Saviour of sin- 
 ners, save them ! " 
 
 * Heb. x. 29.
 
 ADDRESS IX. 
 
 Necessity of Intercession. 
 
 To pray for others is an indispensable duty. It is a 
 very grave part of our self-examination. It is a 
 duty which we were, most of us, taught when we 
 lisped our first prayers. As soon as we were taught 
 to pray, as soon as we knew that there was a God to 
 pray to, and that He heard prayers, we were taught 
 not to pray for ourselves alone. 
 
 We should have felt it unloving then, not to 
 have included others in our prayers. It was an in- 
 stinct, on which our childish minds acted, as soon 
 as it was put before us, to add, father, mother, bro- 
 ther, sister. Every childish duty, every childish 
 prayer ought to have expanded with our growth. It is 
 a graver thing, if a duty, impressed on us in our very 
 earliest childhood, which became a part of ourselves, 
 so that we could not even imagine saying our morning 
 and evening prayers, without praying for those natu- 
 ral objects of our affection, remained stunted to its then 
 measure. We were taught too, why our dear Lord 
 bade us say, "our Father," not "my Father," that 
 we prayed to Him, as the common Father of us all. 
 
 We cannot be Christians without intercessory 
 
 H
 
 98 Necessity of Intercession. 
 
 prayer. For we should be breaking a primary law of 
 love, which our Lord has given us. He has hedged 
 us in by His prayer which He has given us. We can- 
 not say an " Our Father" without doing it, at least 
 Avith our lips. We must have emptied our Blessed 
 Lord's prayer of its meaning, before we can have ceased 
 intercessory prayer. We ask in it for exactly the 
 same gifts for others as for ourselves. 
 
 I fear that there is a very heartless way of saying 
 our Lord's prayer, and so also of many of the comnon 
 public prayers, which have been framed upon it, that 
 people rather use one prayer in common, each praying 
 for himself in it, than one common prayer, each for 
 all. This is, of course, a great loss, as all unloving 
 things are. For if five hundred people pray to- 
 gether, then, if, each time they say " Forgive us our 
 trespasses," or " Give us this day our daily bread," 
 or " Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from 
 evil," each prays for all those present, under the 
 word, "us," then each will have had five hundred 
 prayers for himself; for each, five hundred voices 
 will have gone up to the Throne of God ; for each, 
 in those five hundred prayers, the Holy Ghost will 
 have interceded with those unutterable Divine groan- 
 ings ; for each, those intercessions will have been united 
 with the Perpetual Intercession of the Intercessor. 
 And if any one has so prayed, he will have set to 
 his account the love with which he so prayed, what- 
 ever others may have done. So that in all interces- 
 sory prayer there are these three things ; 1) we shall 
 have fulfilled so far a duty, commanded to us by 
 Jesus ; 2) we shall become sharers of the prayers of 
 others ; 3) we shall obtain grace for our own act of
 
 Necessity of Intercession. 99 
 
 love ; according to that, " my prayer returned into 
 my own bosom." But, however people may evade 
 it in common prayer, it seems hard to think how 
 they can use the Lord's Prayer for themselves alone, 
 when they use it, as our Lord bids, in their private 
 devotions. And in the public use of it, we cannot 
 tie it down even to that particular congregation, with 
 whom we pray. For those great words, which we 
 have to take first into our mouths and hearts, " Hal- 
 lowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will 
 be done in earth as it is in heaven," are manifestly 
 coextensive with the whole world. They pray for 
 the extension of the Church, and, which is one, for 
 the conversion of the Heathen, of Jews, Turks, infi- 
 dels, and heretics ; they pray for the well-being of 
 the Church, that Christ may indeed reign in the 
 hearts of all those whom He has made members of 
 Himself; that all hindrances to the coming of His 
 Kingdom may be removed ; that all may live as they 
 believe ; wo ourselves lose ourselves in the deep 
 compass of those three notes from the seven-stringed 
 harp which make such beautiful music in the ears of 
 God. We are taken out of ourselves into the society 
 of Saints and Angels ; we are borne along with the 
 interests of Jesus throughout the world. We were 
 taught that His Glory, the fulfilment of His Will, 
 were to be the primary object of our prayer; that the 
 Angel-like fulfilment of His Will in each was to oc- 
 cupy our thoughts and prayers, before we asked for 
 any thing directly for ourselves; that we were to 
 desire that His Name should bo hallowed ; that His 
 Kingdom in the heart of men should be expanded and 
 should grow, prior to all besides. His Glory, in the 
 
 ii 2
 
 100 Necessity of Intercession. 
 
 fulfilment of His Blessed Will and salvation of man- 
 kind, came (we were taught by the very form of 
 prayer which was put into our mouths, as our Lord's 
 own teaching and bequest) before all besides, all of 
 our own, except as we were included in it. 
 
 Again, when our Lord bids us " a pray for them, 
 which despitefully use us and persecute us," it cannot 
 but presuppose all the rest of intercessory prayer. 
 He singles out those whom we should be most inclined 
 to except, and, when removing the exception, con- 
 firms the universality of the duty of intercession. 
 This became the habit of His disciples. Every thing, 
 good or bad, became the occasion of intercessory 
 prayer. " b Being reviled, we bless ; being defamed, 
 we entreat. ' ' What our Lord provided for in general, 
 the Holy Ghost, Who was to teach those self-same 
 things which He taught, bringing to the Apostles' 
 remembrance whatever He had said, taught in more 
 detail. " C I exhort that, first of all, supplications 
 prayers intercessions and giving of thanks be made for 
 all men ; for kings and for all that are in authority ; 
 for this is good and acceptable in the sight of God 
 our Saviour, Who will have all men to be saved and 
 to come unto the knowledge of the truth." Here, 
 besides, the duty of the universality of the prayer, we 
 have the acceptableness of it. "It is good and ac- 
 ceptable in the sight of God our Saviour." How 
 devotedly things ought to be done, of which we are 
 told, that they are " good and acceptable " to Him ! 
 And besides this, we have the ground of that accepta- 
 bleness, " Who will have all men to be saved and to 
 come to the knowledge of the truth." 
 
 > St. Matt. v. 44. b 1 Cor. iv. 12, 13. c 1 Tim ii. 1-4.
 
 Necessity of Intercession. 101 
 
 See how He admits us into a part of His own office. 
 He has bequeathed to us a portion of His work to do. 
 He has made us "fellow-workers with God." He 
 has left part of " the travail of His Soul," to behold 
 which is a part of His satisfaction, to be filled up by us, 
 as St. Paul says of the afflictions, which He endured for 
 the Gospel's sake, " d l fill up that which remaineth 
 over of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His 
 body's sake, which is the Church." He wrought 
 our salvation Alone : He Alone atoned : He Alone 
 gives grace ; all creation, all creatures, the highest 
 which He could form, could not give us one grace 
 from themselves. For all grace is the direct creation 
 of God the Holy Ghost. It is His creation for the 
 heart alone. The heart is so God's own, that we all 
 can indeed, by His grace, pray for His enlarged gifts 
 for it ; but God Alone can dwell in the heart. He so 
 loves the heart, that He reserves it as His own pre- 
 rogative, to pour grace into it; He admits us to a 
 part of His office in asking Him for it : the last act of 
 love in bestowing it He, for love of us, reserves to 
 Himself. He seems, so to speak, jealous of it and His 
 own relation to it. As we like to reserve to ourselves 
 the special gift of some great token of our love to 
 those whom we love, so this last final gift God 
 keeps for Himself. It is good for us that we should 
 receive and hold it from Him Alone ; He makes it 
 part of His loving relation, Alone to give grace to the 
 soul, as He Alone can dwell in it. 
 
 We have from Him the grace, whereby to do any 
 thing acceptable to Him : but still He has left us 
 something to do with Him and for Him, through His 
 d Col. i. 24.
 
 102 Necessity of Intercession. 
 
 grace. "Not I," St. Paul said 6 , "but the grace of 
 God which is in me "; " not I," not my natural self, 
 " not I," as if what I had received were mine own, 
 or held of myself, and not of God only ; " not I, but 
 the grace of God," beginning, continuing, ending ; 
 yet that grace of God, where was it ? where resided 
 it ? " the grace of God which was in me." All was of 
 God, but it came, it energised, it put itself forth, was 
 effectual, through man. Man was the conductor 
 which brought the lightning of Divine grace down 
 into the soul; man was the instrument, which grace 
 attuned, upon which it played, and through which 
 it brought others into harmony with itself. 
 
 2. But then too He not only commandeth interces- 
 sory prayer ; He takes away the only forcible temp- 
 tation against it. God's command ought to have 
 been enough to remove temptation. For what He 
 commands, His Wisdom will provide for, His Omni- 
 potency will fulfil. Yet the one only temptation, 
 which, in any loving heart, would have any force, is 
 this, our own unworthiness. What are we, that we 
 should ask for such a great thing, as the salvation of 
 a soul, the checking of a sin, the conversion of a soul 
 from Satan to God ? We are compassed with infir- 
 mities ; we have been ourselves, perhaps, once lepers 
 as white as snow, with that horrid leprosy of sin : we 
 see the marks and stains of it upon us : we are giv- 
 ing way to lesser sins ourselves, if not such as to cut 
 off the grace of God from us, yet we fear, so as to clog 
 our prayers : we fear that we are lukewarm ourselves ; 
 any how we are very dry ; we do not obtain grace 
 enough for ourselves ; we do not pray enough for our- 
 e 1 Cor. xv. 10.
 
 Necessity of Intercession. 103 
 
 selves : we are not earnest enough about ourselves : 
 we have something else to begin with. St. James 
 says, " the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous 
 man availeth much ; " and ice are not righteous, nor 
 is our prayer fervent or effectual. It belongs to such 
 as " f faithful Abraham" to intercede for the cities 
 of the plain. Intercessory prayer belongs to saints, 
 not to sinners. 
 
 N~ow it may be very true that we ought to be 
 about something else also. And if we do God's 
 bidding in this, He will the more give us grace for 
 our other needs. But as for the temptation of its 
 being useless for us to pray for others because we 
 are unworthy to be heard, we are only making too 
 much account of ourselves, if we feel it. It is but 
 a wrong humility, which is real pride. God does 
 not give what we ask for, for our unworthiness, but 
 for the worthiness of Jesus. The Church ends every 
 prayer, "through Jesus Christ our Lord," which 
 is one with the fuller, "for the merits of Jesus 
 Christ our Saviour." It teaches us to say, "We do 
 not presume to come to this Thy table, trusting in 
 in our own righteousness, but in Thy manifold and 
 great mercies." "We be unworthy, through our 
 manifold sins, to offer unto Thee any sacrifice, yet 
 we beseech Thee to accept this our bounden duty and 
 service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our 
 offences through Jesus Christ our Lord." So Daniel 
 prayed through the Holy Ghost inspiring him, 
 " * We do not present our supplications before Thee 
 for our righteousness, but for Thy great mercies." 
 And then too, it is not we alone who pray. " h The 
 
 f Gal. iii. 9. 8 Dan. ix. 18. h Rom. viii. 26, 27.
 
 104 Necessity of Intercession. 
 
 Spirit also helpeth our infirmities. For we know not 
 what we should pray for as we ought ; but the Spirit 
 Itself maketh intercession for us with groanings 
 which cannot be uttered. And He that searcheth 
 the hearts knoweth what is the Mind of the Spirit, 
 because He maketh intercession for the saints accord- 
 ing to God." As then our Lord forbade His Apostles 
 to take thought what they should speak, for "'it is 
 not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father Who 
 speaketh in you," so it may be said of us, in a manner, 
 " It is not ye who pray, but the Spirit of your Father 
 Who prayeth in you." We pray, as best we can : 
 we know not what to ask for, as we ought : we pray 
 in broken syllables or timid words or half-formed 
 thoughts ; but He Who made our hearts, knoweth 
 what the Holy Ghost Who prayeth in us meaneth, 
 "when He maketh intercession for the saints," and 
 He is heard. For it is God Who speaketh with God, 
 although in us, and what He saith is according to 
 the mind of God. It is again " in the spirit" that 
 the Apostle bids, " k pray always with all prayer and 
 supplication." It is " with the Spirit " that he bids us 
 " be filled" (and he would not bid us do what did not 
 depend on ourselves to do), and so to " ] speak to your- 
 selves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, 
 singing and making melody in your heart to the 
 Lord." What an office for us, to make sweet music 
 in the ears of God ! 
 
 3. Another difficulty, I think, comes to some of 
 us, as if some great effort was necessary to reach 
 God. They think of God, as far away, in the High- 
 est Heavens, in some place where Jesus is, high 
 1 S. Matt. x. 20. k Eph. vi. 18. 1 Ib. v. 19.
 
 Necessity of Intercession. 105 
 
 above all Heavens, and so they go up and up in their 
 thoughts and they send up their prayers, and they 
 can scarce believe that such prayers as their' s can go 
 up on high. God seems to them as One Who had 
 "covered Himself with a cloud, that our prayer should 
 not pass through 111 ." And yet prayer has no strain ; 
 least of all, of imagination. We pray in the midst 
 of God. For "in Him we live and move and are." 
 His Ear is ever near us. It is at our heart. The 
 lowest whisper reaches it. It is open to the faintest 
 velleity of the soul. What a great thing it is which 
 is open to us, and at what small cost ! God has laid 
 it upon us as a duty, that we may not give way to 
 sloth or unlovingness or self-deceit under some dis- 
 guise of conscious unworthiness. It is often a gain, 
 not to be able to help ourselves. It is like being 
 plunged into water out of our depth, that we may 
 learn to swim. We must strike out for our lives, 
 that we sink not. But then there is an Almighty 
 Arm under us. We must do every thing badly, in 
 order to learn to do it well. You did not get im- 
 patient with yourselves in learning any accomplish- 
 ment of this world, music or drawing or languages 
 or composition ; or, if you did, you found that it only 
 made matters worse ; and so you laid the impatience 
 aside, perhaps out of a sense of duty in part, and 
 partly because it did no good, but harm. God is very 
 patient with us. If we brought on our own incapa- 
 city to pray by our own fault, He is only the more 
 patient with us, and makes the more allowance for us, 
 because it is not our own fault now, and we have 
 difficulties, which we might have escaped, had we 
 m Lam. iii. 44.
 
 106 Necessity of Intercession. 
 
 been faithful and fixed, and been afraid to let other 
 thoughts come in, when we were in His Presence ; 
 but which we cannot help now. 
 
 "What have we to do with estimating the value of 
 our prayers? As if we could keep a debtor and 
 creditor account with God, and, if we thought our 
 prayer earnest, then God was bound to do something 
 in return for it ; if otherwise, then little or nothing ! 
 that weary endless round of self ! shall we never 
 be free from that sickening contemplation of self? 
 Prayer is especially the province of faith. From first 
 to last, it is inscrutable. It is part of that wondrous 
 harmony, whereby He has bound up our free-will 
 with His own Omnipotence. It is part of that love, 
 whereby He would bind in one the work of the crea- 
 ture with His own Omnipotence ! Men stumble at 
 prayer, because they sever what God has united, 
 the Will of God was the God-enabled will of man. 
 "What were the will of the highest seraph, that he 
 should change the mind of the Author of all ? But 
 does the fire burn less mightily, because God has 
 assigned it the fuel which it should convert into it- 
 self ? Does the river sweep to the ocean less strongly, 
 because God has appointed the channel for its tide ? 
 "We are the fuel ; the fire is the love of God : we are 
 the channel ; the tide is His perpetual flow of grace. 
 Only let us be persuaded, that it is God's voice in 
 us. Only remember we, that our Dear Lord has 
 pledged His own Almighty word, " Ask, and ye shall 
 receive ! " We spoil and defeat our prayers by think- 
 ing of ourselves. Apart from the waste of time, in 
 which unknown graces might be won, we are for- 
 getting the All-prevailing Intercession of Christ at
 
 Necessity of Intercession. 107 
 
 God's Eight Hand, the Intercession of God the 
 Holy Ghost in us, in the thought of our mise- 
 rable selves. God's command is, Pray ! This is 
 our's : the rest is His. Be we the tiniest wheel in 
 the wondrous compass of the creation, He has 
 assigned us our place. We have no imagination to 
 measure the profuse munificence of our God. Only, 
 since He has said, "Ask, and ye shall receive," we 
 know that we cannot ask things according to His Will, 
 without receiving. Every petition, which is put into 
 our mouth, is a treasure of grace to us. We have 
 admired the marvellous imagination of Eastern tales, 
 how the touch of a common household instrument 
 at once unlocked all inconceivable treasures of lus- 
 trous beauty and wealth. Faint image of the omni- 
 potence of prayer! For it is gifted by God with 
 power over Himself; it unlocks all the treasures 
 of His grace and love. The doors of heaven fly open 
 at His word, to receive the penitent stricken soul, or 
 to pour down graces upon us. Every prayer may 
 gain a grace. How differently would the Litany 
 sound in our hearts, if we had more faith in the rich 
 profusion of God's love. As many prayers, as there 
 are, so many graces we might obtain. But our com- 
 fort is this, that we must do it. His love and His 
 commands have bound us. Say we the words, 
 " Forgive us our trespasses, lead us not into 
 temptation, Deliver us from evil," and leave the 
 rest to Jesus ! that we could, more and more, 
 go forth out of ourselves and go to Jesus ! He 
 will not defeat His own end. He will not let 
 His own word fall to the ground. We have done 
 His bidding, in what poor miserable way we could.
 
 108 Necessity of Intercession. 
 
 The Omnipotence of His love will accomplish the 
 rest. 
 
 Only, then, do we what we can. God Himself 
 wishes to hear us. He wishes to give, more than we 
 to pray. It is His own plan, which He has given to 
 us, in part, to carry out. It is not for ourselves that 
 we are asking : it is for God. They are His interests 
 more directly than our's, and our's because they are 
 His. He is waiting to be gracious to those souls. 
 He longs to give Himself to them. But it is part of 
 His love, that He would give us inestimable things, 
 even the salvation of souls, on our asking. Our 
 prayers which He will inspire, are part of the plan 
 of His eternal predestination for the souls, for whom 
 He puts it into our heart to pray. We are, in pray- 
 ing, only fulfilling a purpose of His love. It is, as 
 when a king, wishing to forgive a rebel, suggests 
 to one of his friends or trusted advisers, to ask for his 
 life. When God puts it into our hearts to pray, He 
 is admitting us into the near relationship of friends 
 to Him. He might have contrived other ways, but 
 they did not satisfy His love. Nothing would satisfy 
 Him, Who " arranges the services of Angels and men 
 in a wonderful order," but to employ His creatures, 
 as far as they could be employed, and associate them 
 with Himself. Think we then nothing of ourselves. 
 If we could feel- but as that organ which peals forth 
 the praises of God, yet yields no note, but as it is 
 attuned and as those notes of joy are elicited from 
 it, then we should indeed pray as God wills, then 
 God would thank us, that we had done what He 
 longed for us to do, and had been the last link in 
 the salvation of the soul which He longed to save.
 
 Necessity of Intercession. 109 
 
 Set we the value of souls before us, how God, Fa- 
 ther Son and Holy Ghost love them, ourselves in- 
 cluded ; how sin dishonours God ; what a misery it 
 is in His creation; how souls are perishing every 
 day ; how they are for ever losing God ; and how 
 God wills that our prayers should cooperate to their 
 salvation. COl Hath He said, and shall He not do it ? " 
 He has said " Ask, and ye shall receive ; that your joy 
 may be full." " Ask ; " so ye shall have part in the 
 Saviour's joy " over each sinner that repenteth," and, 
 in helping to save the souls of others, shall the more 
 save your own. So in the Heavenly court shall our 
 Saviour say to His friends the Holy Angels, " This 
 and that soul has he and she, and she, and she, 
 (naming you) won for Me ; " so shall we together re- 
 joice before Him, Who redeemed us together, has 
 together called us, hath together given us perseve- 
 rance to the end, and will together glorify us. 
 
 11 Num. xxiii. 19.
 
 ADDRESS X. 
 
 Helps for keeping up intercession. 
 
 WE have seen and felt that, if we would pray as 
 Christians, we must pray for others, that we cannot 
 rightly say the public prayers, or use our Dear 
 Lord's own prayer without it. In joining this Com- 
 pany we took, each our part, in carrying on those 
 intercessions further, and that, for one particular class 
 of souls the most necessitous, those who seldom pray 
 for themselves, the souls which need conversion. 
 The necessity of additional prayer was borne in upon 
 the Foundress' soul some one and twenty years 
 ago, through the dreadful sounds and words which 
 went up to heaven against those who used them, in 
 the midnight or early morning hours of a great town, 
 where she lay sleepless. She set herself at once to 
 unite others in this plan, by which no second should 
 pass, so long as this Company should by God's 
 mercy continue, without its own prayer for sinners. 
 And seeing the difficulty of all continuous effort, she 
 did much to prevent monotony by those nine offices 
 or characters, under which, united with the nine 
 choirs in heaven, as the lot may fall in each month, 
 we pray to Almighty God. But as monotony is al-
 
 Helps for keeping up Intercession. Ill 
 
 ways a great difficulty in devotion, I would, on this 
 occasion, suggest some ways, by which we may vary 
 the devotion, so as to come fresher to it, remember- 
 ing always that all perseverance in every thing, and 
 so in prayer too, is the gift of God the Holy Ghost ; 
 and that from Him, "Who is the Advocate Who prays 
 in us, Who makes our prayers acceptable, we must 
 obtain the grace of persevering prayer. Ua lf ye, 
 being evil, give good gifts unto your children," our 
 Lord says, " much more shall your Heavenly Fa- 
 ther give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him." 
 Him then let us ever ask, at the beginning of these 
 prayers, that we may make intercession according 
 to the Mind of God. 
 
 The chief object of the Association, as you know, 
 is for the conversion of sinners. Special interces- 
 sions (not strictly or not at all coming under this 
 head) have been allowed, because members of "the 
 Company of the love of Jesus," must have a special 
 claim on each other's love, and on each other's 
 prayers. And God has heard some of these prayers 
 marvellously and by a spiritual miracle. 13ut the 
 chief object of the Association lies beyond them, as it 
 was also antecedent to them. That chief object is, 
 the restoration of God's grace to those who have lost 
 it; or the gift of grace, such as it is in Christ, to 
 those who never had it, as the Jews Heathen or 
 Mohammedans ; or, (one may surely add) that those 
 in danger of losing it may be kept in it. 
 
 ]S"ow these objects may be promoted in so many 
 different ways, that one might almost say that there 
 is ne end of the variety of them ; and those ways 
 St. 3Iatt. vii. 11.
 
 112 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 
 
 might be combined together or taken separately; 
 and each would pray best, as they themselves were 
 drawn by God the Holy Ghost to pray. 
 
 Only one class one would wish always to remem- 
 ber, "those who are to die in the next twenty-four 
 hours," and to pray for all of these, as to whom it is 
 possible that they should be saved, because to-morrow 
 it will be too late to pray for them. The secret of those 
 last moments no one knows on earth; not those near- 
 est to them. A whole world of life goes on, after they 
 have ceased to be able to express any thing. Men 
 call powerlessness of expression being "insensible." 
 Such creatures of sense are we, that, in despite of 
 known and repeated experiences to the contrary, 
 in which those, who were reputed to be insensible, 
 have, on recovery, shewn that they knew all which 
 went on around them, we still go on taking it for 
 granted, that, when the soul is withdrawn into itself, 
 it is gone. And so we ante-date the close of the 
 trial, and, since so few comparatively pray for the de- 
 parted, the living often lose the prayers they desire, 
 at that last decisive moment ; and survivors do not 
 pray for the living, for fear they should be praying 
 for the departed. One often hears, after long silence, 
 some broken half-framed words of prayer. What an 
 amount of prayer may they not be the indication of ! 
 what concentrated prayer may there not have been, 
 condensing into a brief time years of common -place 
 prayer ! Who knows whether, in that death-struggle, 
 all the sins of a life may not be brought before the 
 soul, to be repented of for the love of God, so that the 
 soul should be washed anew in the Blood of Jesus ? 
 Who knows whether that fixed gaze, which we often
 
 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 113 
 
 see towards death, is not a pleading for mercy ? Satan 
 is very busy about death-beds ; it is his last chance 
 with " b the lawful captive," who has sold himself by 
 his sins and been led captive by his lusts. Will he 
 be delivered ? If, by the grace of God, he repents, 
 for the love of God, that he offended God, if he re- 
 nounces his sins for ever, Jesus has the victory. 
 That soul is saved. Jesus' love for souls will not let 
 one think, that He who gave such grace to the robber 
 at His side after his blasphemy, will part at that 
 last hour with one soul, the price of His Blood, if 
 even now it will turn to Him. It hangs on the 
 balance, whether his soul be for ever with the angels 
 or the devils. God may have appointed you to be 
 His instrument of mercy for that soul. Your prayers 
 may help it. I do not believe that God will part with 
 any soul, unless it have said to Him face to face, 
 " On Thine own terms, I will not have Thee." To 
 become as devils, there must be the wilful rejection 
 of God, such as the devils used. There is so much 
 patient, almost sacramental suffering among the 
 poor, among those whom men call outcasts, whom we 
 neglect, who, perhaps not through their own fault, 
 have not heard the Name of Jesus. That still, often 
 uncomplaining, suffering must have been God's un- 
 known, unperceived grace. Now God is waiting to be 
 gracious to that soul. I doubt not that much mercy is 
 shewn in that last hour, although I should expect it 
 least for those, who delayed repentance to that hour. 
 For their's was a continued present rejection of God. 
 Then another class, for whom it is very healthful to 
 pray, for whom our prayers are likely to be at once 
 
 b Is. xlix. 24. 
 
 I
 
 114 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 
 
 earnest and humble, are they, who are under the same 
 temptations, by which we have been or are tempted, 
 whether they or we have fallen by them or no ; but 
 especially perhaps for those who have fallen. For 
 such prayers keep in our memory our past sins and 
 temptations not vividly or in detail, for so we might 
 be tempted to that horrible consent to them in mind 
 again, but that we have sinned in such and such 
 ways, and that it has been of God's grace and mercy 
 alone, that we have not done worse. "Who should say, 
 from what we have not been saved by want of oppor- 
 tunity, or by ignorance of sin, or of the ways of sin ? 
 Who can think, what they might not have fallen into, 
 had they been under the circumstances of the poor ? 
 Such prayer may gain grace and deeper repentance 
 for ourselves. Humble intercession is most likely to 
 be heard at the Throne of grace. ' ' God be merciful to 
 me a sinner," was given us by Jesus, as a pattern of 
 acceptable prayer. ' ' God be merciful to ws, miserable 
 sinners," is the prayer of the Litany formed upon it. 
 Such prayers have deep sympathy. They call out 
 sympathy to those , to whom, if we were not like, it was 
 of God's great mercy ; to whom if we are not like, it 
 is of God's great mercy still ; to whom, if we were 
 like, it is of God's yet more outstretched mercy, 
 that we are not now like. Such prayers are full of 
 the love of God. In us too they maintain that indis- 
 pensable condition of spiritual progress, nay often of 
 perseverance itself, a loving sorrow for forgiven sin. 
 They are likely to be specially heard by Him Who 
 speaketh of Himself, as "He Who dwelleth in the 
 high and holy place, with him also who is of a con- 
 c Is. Ivii. 15.
 
 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 115 
 
 trite and humble spirit," and ad who forgetteth not 
 the cry of the humble." They would also help much 
 to mould our habitual prayers, and gain us great 
 grace through them. 
 
 At another time we might pray for those who have 
 the temptations which we have not, and which God has 
 spared us. And this too might be a prayer of humi- 
 lity and love. For it is obvious to think that, hav- 
 ing failed as we have, wherein we have been tempted, 
 we should have failed in those other temptations too, 
 if God had not kept them from us. It would be the 
 very contrary to the Pharisee's prayer, " God, I thank 
 Thee, that I am not as other men." It is to own that 
 we should have been as other men, had we had the 
 temptations which those others had. 
 
 Such are for instance, in comparison I suppose 
 with most of us, the wealthy in this city or in other 
 cities, who, we know, are in special peril of losing 
 their souls, that they may rather so "make friends 
 of the mammon of unrighteousness," that they may 
 be "received into everlasting habitations." 
 
 What a life of temptation their's must be. What a 
 life from their earliest childhood ! The life of Dives 
 from infancy ! To have been ever fenced out from 
 suffering (as far as it was possible), to have been 
 lapped in luxury and pomp ; to have been ever waited 
 on ; to have had no wish, which was not forestalled ; 
 to have had no future to provide for, no necessary 
 work to do ; to have been exempted from the blessing 
 of Adam's chastening, " In the sweat of thy brow 
 thou shalt cat bread ; " to have had nothing to look 
 onto, save that unhappy self-indulgence; " e to-mor- 
 
 d Ps. ix. 12. e Is. Ivi. 12. 
 
 I 2
 
 116 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 
 
 row shall be as this day, and much more abundant." 
 How unlike our Lord's lot ! nothing in common with 
 it ; no mention of them by our Lord, except by a 
 warning woe ! 
 
 But their temptation is as nothing, compared to 
 theirs who, in our wealthy land, as it is called, 
 " make " their money ; who create it, so to speak, create 
 what, to save their souls, they must at least in some 
 measure part with. What a contradictory life! Their 
 very profession bids them accumulate wealth ; it is 
 carried on more efficiently with greater means ; lux- 
 ury is the solace of their cares. God bids them to give 
 abundantly out of their abundance, and to impove- 
 rish themselves comparatively for love of Jesus in His 
 poor. What a grace of God must be needed, that they 
 should not fall down and worship the god, " f which 
 their own fingers have made." We do know of the rich 
 man, Joseph of Arimatheea. Yet so strange was it, 
 that it was singled out in prophecy, as one of the para- 
 doxes of our Lord's supernatural history, that Ho 
 " g Whom man despised" should be " h with the rich in 
 his death." We know that, in the early years of the 
 Gospel, "'not many mighty, not many noble were 
 called." But that God had given them the poor, to 
 have mercy upon, how should they be saved ? And 
 yet what might they not do for God's glory ! what 
 abundant thanksgiving to God might they not occa- 
 sion ! What numbers of orphans might they not 
 rescue from misery and degradation ! What missions 
 might they not support, even if they should not them- 
 selves be called to be missionaries, to give up this 
 
 f Is. ii. 8. s Ib. xlix. 7, liii. 3, Ps. xxii. 6. h Is. liii. 9. 
 ' 1 Cor. i. 26.
 
 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 117 
 
 world for the next ! The blindness of the rich to 
 their true interests is one of the most appalling blind- 
 nesses of this poor blind world. What pearls of great 
 price might they not buy for their heavenly crown ! 
 How they might make God their debtor ! We confess 
 to God, that we are, as dogs, not "worthy to gather 
 up the crumbs which fall from " our Master's " table." 
 if the rich would but take as much care of Jesus, 
 as they do of their horses and their dogs ! It might 
 make saints of them. We remember how John the 
 Almoner became a saint. We do the rich great mis- 
 chief by flattering them, by accounting much of those 
 little doles, of which they should be ashamed. I have 
 never preached a sermon to the rich on almsgiving, 
 but I have felt afraid, lest I should occasion them to 
 sin against light. We are so inured to our little gifts 
 out of our large revenues ; not u of our little, gladly 
 to give of that little k ," but out of an abundance to 
 give but little ! And yet there are such crowns hover- 
 ing over the heads of the rich, which they might 
 gain, which are ready for them. There is our Lord 
 ready to say to them, " Ye have done it unto Me," 
 and they do not do it ; He has said, " 1 1 will repay," 
 and they give Him nothing to repay. He has 
 promised the hundred-fold, and they prefer their six 
 per cent, if they can get it. He has provided the 
 hundred fold for charity ; and they prefer their six per 
 cent to be spent on things of time " which perish in 
 the using." And yet they might do so much good to 
 souls ! Well ! preaching cannot teach them ; for God 
 preaches to them in His Word, which they profess to 
 
 k Tobit iv. See Communion Service, 2 Cor. ix. 
 1 St. Luke x. 35, Prov. xix. 17.
 
 118 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 
 
 acknowledge ; and they hearken not. There is no- 
 thing left, but prayer. One day in a week would be 
 well spent in prayer for the conversion of rich people ; 
 if only we thank God, that He has exempted us from 
 their temptations, and look well to ourselves, that, 
 being exempt from their temptations, we are not act- 
 ing as badly with our lesser temptations, and are 
 not making idols of our comforts, as they of their 
 wealth. 
 
 Then, again, the fashionable. They too have been 
 taught from their cradles, to live for this world. Alas ! 
 as if the world had not attraction enough of its own, 
 without people being taught to love it ! And yet, 
 what else is the one lesson which underlies all the 
 education of almost all the daughters of at least our 
 fashionable classes, of those who are to be the future 
 mothers of our aristocracy, who are to form the cha- 
 racters of their children in this world? Wherein 
 should all this education for this world end, except in 
 perishing with the world ? And yet the conversion 
 of the rich and great has always been a subject of 
 interest with the Church m . For, although all souls 
 are of equal value in God's sight, the conversion of 
 those who have position in this world may spread 
 wider towards the conversion of the world. It were 
 a charity to pray God, to teach those so mistaught 
 the nothingness of all passing things, that all below 
 is but vanity, that God taught this to one to whom 
 He had given the world to possess, and wisdom to 
 invent fresh delights in it n ; and then to pray that He 
 would give them some taste of the sweetness of 
 things eternal. 
 m See S. Aug. Cpnf. Tiii. 4. n Solomon, Ecclesiastes.
 
 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 119 
 
 Then the intellectual ! Every gift of God has its 
 own special temptations, and intellect has tempta- 
 tions, more like those of Satan than of mankind. 
 Others forget God, ignore God, steal away from 
 Him, rob Him of their hearts, and give them to the 
 world. But they do not come face to face with 
 Him. The temptation of intellect is to measure it- 
 self against God, to criticise God, to dispute His Be- 
 ing, to dethrone Him in His creation, to set up His 
 laws against Himself, to question His Providence, to 
 doubt His "Wisdom, to pull to pieces His revelation, 
 to mend it for Him, to make conditions with Him, on 
 what terms it will acknowledge Him, to require Him 
 to abdicate His absolute sovereignty, to set up an 
 idol in His room ; to re-create their Creator, instead 
 of being " re-created by Him in Christ Jesus." And 
 yet withal they often mean, poor things, nothing 
 less. They have got loose from the old beliefs in 
 God ; they have lost all knowledge of things super- 
 natural, nay, even of their own eternal existence. 
 Yet some of them have gifts, which might be used to 
 the great glory of God, if they would but cease to 
 measure by their own created Intelligence the Mind 
 of the Uncreated, which conceived their' s, and of 
 which their's is a little spark. These, and especially 
 at the Universities, where intellect has often not 
 yet taken its side, either to be willingly beneath God 
 or to be against Him, would be a special subject of 
 prayer, that they might find their wisdom in Un- 
 created Wisdom and their knowledge from the Om- 
 niscient. 
 
 The happiest objects of intercession are those, 
 whose outward lot is most like our Lord's, to whom
 
 120 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 
 
 the Gospel especially belongs, who, if they do not 
 belong to it, we are ourselves most eminently in 
 fault, the poor. These are the great dowry of the 
 Church ; here are the great multitude of the re- 
 deemed ; here is the largest choice for grace to work 
 upon ; here are the simplest and truest hearts. God 
 has marked them for His own. If they do not be- 
 long to Him, it seems a violence to nature almost, 
 as well as grace. Here are most candidates for An- 
 gelic thrones; here are most unspoiled hearts, for 
 God, Who is Love, to reign in. Only, when we pray 
 for them, let us pray with great reverence, as for our 
 superiors, in patience, in meekness, in long-suffering, 
 in forbearance, in submission to and conformity with 
 the Will of God ! Let us pray that God would sanc- 
 tify their sufferings by the Sufferings of Jesus, and 
 make them wholly His. 
 
 Others might add other classes, or they might se- 
 lect out of these classes, those to whom they them- 
 selves are drawn ; and thus the week might be 
 distributed, so as to pray especially for some class 
 every day. 
 
 Or, again, we might pray for God's blessing on the 
 instrumentality of others, as for missions, religious 
 schools, preachers, the efforts of the religious who 
 have given themselves wholly to God (as in this Soci- 
 ety), that God would convert people through them. 
 There might be less of self, in praying that God would 
 convert souls through the instrumentality of others. 
 Our zeal for their conversion might be the purer from 
 all vain-glory. 
 
 Or, we might pray God to bring to nought the 
 counsels of those who are knowingly against the truth.
 
 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 121 
 
 It would take away from us much unlove, and be a 
 great source of deepened love to us, if we look on all 
 who oppose the truth as under grievous loss, (as we 
 know they are,) and if we prayed for them instead of 
 censuring them. 
 
 Or, we might leave to God's Wisdom the persons 
 to be converted, and pray for those, who are the near- 
 est to accepting the grace of God ; or who, He knows, 
 will accept it; or we might pray for those who (He 
 knows, leaving it still to Him) would gain greater 
 glory to Him if they were converted, and the like. 
 Only let the glory of God in the salvation of souls 
 be our one object, and He will hear us as He knows 
 best. But let us not distract ourselves by the multi- 
 plicity of our objects. Simplicity is a great help in 
 devotion. 
 
 And as in the objects, so in the language of our 
 prayers. God does not need our words. We waste 
 ourselves often, in casting about for words. We think 
 it becoming to pray in good set words. We are afraid 
 of irreverence in stammering out our broken thoughts. 
 It is well to be afraid of irreverence. But there is 
 more fear of irreverence in thinking about ourselves 
 at all. One thing we should desire, the glory of God 
 in the salvation of souls. Our Lord taught us in His 
 great prayer of resignation, that the deepest prayer 
 may consist in saying the same words. How short are 
 the words of His own prayers on the Cross ! Yet the 
 Psalmist says in His Person, " I am (all) prayer." 
 They were but short outward utterances, gushing 
 forth from the Fountain of love, His full Heart, full 
 and overflowing with love for us, sinners. If we 
 Ps. cix. 4.
 
 122 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 
 
 have but the picture of those for whose conversion 
 we pray, before our mind; and then our whole 
 prayer is but one voiceless commendation of them 
 to the love of Jesus; one long-drawn "Lord, have 
 mercy, mercy, mercy ; " like the dying away of soft 
 pathetic music on the ear, we shall very likely have 
 prayed more deeply, than by the use of any words. 
 Words are needed to instruct ourselves as to our 
 wants, or, in the Church's long intercessions, to teach 
 us for whom we ought to pray, not for God. 
 
 We joined this Company, in order to increase our 
 own intercessions, and to gain greater glory to God ; 
 and, perhaps, to vent our own desires that the great 
 misery of this sinful world, sin, might be diminished, 
 and because we hoped to contribute more to this by 
 such united prayer. And as far as the Association 
 is concerned, we have fulfilled our own obligations, 
 when we have prayed for the conversion of sinners 
 during the time for which we have undertaken to 
 pray for them. This we should esteem one of the 
 most sacred duties of our lives, that, if we are able 
 to undertake any special time, we should not be want- 
 ing to it, lest through us the chain of perpetual prayer 
 should be broken. In cases of most absolute neces- 
 sity, we might carry on a mental prayer -together 
 with the absolute imperative obligation, and perhaps 
 our Guardian Angel would fill in the break. Only, 
 nothing but the most imperative duty, something 
 which it would be absolute undoubted sin to neglect, 
 must constrain us (if it does constrain us) to miss 
 any one fulfilment of the obligation, which we have 
 undertaken. It is in itself no such great matter 
 to which we have pledged ourselves, that we should
 
 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 123 
 
 think it any vainglory to own it, if necessary to keep 
 us free from interruption. It would be making too 
 much of our poor prayers, to think so. 
 
 But this fulfilment of our own office should not be 
 enough for us. Intercession should spread through 
 our lives, so as to become part of our being. "When 
 we have an interval in our occupations, when we are 
 kept waiting, when we are held in necessary idleness, 
 being with others yet having nothing special to do 
 ourselves, when we are walking, when we cannot sleep 
 by night, intercession should be the passion of our 
 hearts. What matters to us all the news of the world, 
 except as events advance, if they do, the glory of 
 God ? We should read a paper, if we do read one, 
 interceding for those about whom they write, or, if 
 they write amiss, for themselves. But, as for many 
 of those things about which the so-called religious 
 world is so busy, it seems to me greater, more delu- 
 sive, " Vanity fair," than the world itself. It is more 
 like children with their toys, than the outward ex- 
 pression of the inward life ; as if the glory of God and 
 the salvation of souls was promoted by the use of a 
 stole the more, worn by some " crucifer," that this 
 were an event to chronicle ! Externals too may be 
 for the glory of God ; symbolic beauty may raise our 
 thoughts upwards to Him Whose Beauty it sym- 
 bolises. But to make much of the increased use of 
 those outward things, as if they were any indication 
 of the progress of the cause of God among us, it 
 would end in what the adversaries of the truths 
 which they symbolise, denounce them for, the forget- 
 ting of the intense reality of our existence, of the in- 
 ward growth of God's reign in our hearts, the one-
 
 124 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 
 
 ness with God, which is the end of all His revelation 
 and of His sacraments, the salvation of souls, for which 
 He became Man and pnt His Holy Spirit within us, 
 in some outward accidents of worship. It is an evil 
 to look out for signs, to speak of success here and 
 success there. If it were success, one could only 
 say, "Thanks be to God." It would even then be 
 what our Lord forbade us to attend to, when they 
 say "lo Christ here, and lo Christ there; " but He said 
 " the kingdom of God is within you," 
 
 "Pin the multitude of words there wanteth not sin." 
 People plan, boast, speak of what they should do or 
 should not do, if they were this or that Bishop, or 
 if they could direct, in fact, the whole bench of Bi- 
 shops, or they speculate about political or religious 
 parties or persons ; what does it all end in ? I fear 
 we might sum it all in one word, uncharitableness. 
 
 Let us cherish the inward life, let us make prayer 
 more the end of our lives. There are plenty of per- 
 sons, to theorise, plan, scheme, criticise ! Let us look 
 to ourselves and to our prayers. Let us look back 
 to our own prayers formerly, and, if we find that our 
 intercessions have been poor and infrequent, let us 
 pray our Lord to " pour out upon us the Spirit of 
 grace and supplication," and be diligent to use that 
 grace, and let it spread over our lives. 
 
 O, what a joyous reunion it will be, to see the souls, 
 unknown to us probably in the flesh, whom our 
 prayers shall have won to God ! What a joyful sur- 
 prise in the Great Day ! what an endless source 
 of joy ! oh what a jubilee of praise ! what sweetness 
 of smiles, what overflowing congratulations, what 
 P Prov. x 19.
 
 Helps for keeping up Intercession. 125 
 
 gladness, to sec those who were once degraded in 
 the world, through our prayers, on higher thrones 
 than we ! Oh what wonderful sight of the grace of 
 God, and, above all, oh that sweet look of love from 
 our Dear Lord, saying, " Yes ! these pearls of My 
 crown you have won for Me ! " Here we know only 
 of a result here or there; but we have God's infallible 
 word, that such prayers are heard. Better not to 
 know how they are heard. We can have no vain- 
 glory. We can only tell, that our prayers are very 
 poor, very unworthy to be heard, and the poorer we 
 believe them to be, the more likely they are to be 
 heard ; but, we have God's own word ; He, Who is 
 the Truth, has said, they will be heard. They will 
 be heard, not according to the poverty of our desires 
 but according to the love of the Great Lover of souls, 
 Who associates us with His availing Intercession, to 
 do, in our measure, upon earth, which He makes ef- 
 ficacious by His merits, and by the yearnings of 
 His Spirit, Whom He hath given us. To Him be 
 glory for ever and ever. Amen.
 
 ADDKESS XI. 
 
 The Prayers for departed Companions of the Society 
 of the Love of Jesus. 
 
 THERE is yet a subject of the prayers of the Society, 
 which, although not part of the original design, nor 
 essential to it (for those may pray for the living who 
 have not yet learned the comfort of prayer for the de- 
 parted), yet are engrafted into it, are a very tender 
 touching part of it. They grow out of it by way of 
 nature, as Companions of the Love of Jesus were re- 
 moved from us ; for, unless there were, in the Word 
 of God, an absolute prohibition of prayer for the de- 
 parted, how should we go on praying for those whom 
 we love until they were out of sight, and then cease 
 on the instant, as if "out of sight, out of mind" 
 were a Christian duty ? How should we not rather 
 follow the soul to the Eternal Throne, with the 
 Apostle's prayer (as seems probable, for the departed 
 Epaphroditus) " a the Lord grant that he may find 
 mercy of the Lord in that Day ?" But we have no 
 doubt that we may pray. For the whole Church so 
 prayed, much nearer to the time when the beloved 
 disciple left this earth, than many of us are to the 
 early memories of our fathers. And however, in 
 a 2 Tim. i. 18.
 
 Prayers for departed Companions. 127 
 
 evil days, the public and ritual use of those prayers 
 was laid aside in the Church of England, yet even a 
 Court of Ecclesiastical law formally decided their law- 
 fulness, according to the doctrine and discipline of 
 the Church of England, and the departed are but in- 
 distinctly yet are included in our Eucharistic prayer, 
 "by the merits and Death of Thy Son Jesus Christ 
 and through faith in His Blood, we and all Thy whole 
 Church may obtain remission of our sins and all other 
 benefits of His Passion." 
 
 I say this, in case any should be afraid so to pray. 
 But since it is lawful, what an unspeakable privi- 
 ledge ! It is so cold a thought that we have for the 
 time no more to do with those who loved us here, 
 and whom we loved, that it must needs, on that 
 ground alone, be false, because it is so contrary to 
 love. And yet much more, since the Church has al- 
 ways prayed for the departed from the very first! 
 It belongs to the Communion of Saints, that they, in 
 the attainment of certain salvation and incapable of 
 a thought other than according to the mind of God 
 and filled with His Love, shall pray and long for us, 
 who are still on the stormy sea of this world, our 
 salvation still unsecured : and that we, on our side, 
 should pray for such things, as God in His Goodness 
 wills to bestow upon them. But what things ? It 
 would not matter to us, if we knew not "what 
 things." We might leave them safely in God's 
 Hand, committing it to Him to do for them more 
 than we can ask or think. And yet one of the ear- 
 liest thoughts of the intermediate state was that it 
 was a preparation to " b contain God." Think we, 
 b " Capere Dcum." St. Iren.
 
 128 Prayers for departed Companions. 
 
 what God is, absolutely holy, undefiled, " of purer 
 eyes than to behold iniquity, " into Whose Presence 
 " nothing that defileth can enter, d " "a consuming 
 Fire, " Which must consume all rust or dross which 
 could cleave to the soul. A soul, which has any 
 spot of sin, could not endure itself in the brightness 
 of that Almighty Presence. It was shewn in vision 
 in the early Church, how one, Avho, when else ready 
 for Martyrdom, had one little grudge about the ad- 
 mission of another to Holy Communion (and in the 
 abstract he was in the right) could not endure him- 
 self in Heaven. That one little grudge was a black 
 spot in his heart, with which he could not be in hea- 
 ven. It was to be effaced, before Martyrdom should 
 transmit him to his Lord f . And we part hence, with 
 oui- old habits ingrained in us ; thoughts, which are the 
 spectres of past sins, coming to us unbidden; our be- 
 setting sins, still unextirpated, even if by God's grace 
 they do not gain the mastery over us ; our prayers 
 distracted, dry, often tepid. What are we, that we 
 are, all at once, to behold God, for Whom we have 
 most of us so little longed ? True ! God might, in 
 an instant, if it seemed good to Him, cleanse the soul, 
 in the twinkling of an eye. But who has told us 
 that He will ? The souls of those, who are departed 
 
 c Hab. i. 13. d Rev. xxi. 27. c Deut. iv. 24, Heb. xii. 29. 
 
 f See S. Cyprian's Epistle Ixxviiip. 311 note c. Oxf. Tr. There 
 is a like history, in the middle ages, of a Bishop, who, in vision, 
 saw his predecessors on thrones in glory, and a vacant throne, 
 which he advanced to occupy. "When motioned back, he saw a 
 black spot in his heart. He was told that on a fixed day he 
 should return. The black spot was some ill-will towards a city, 
 which had despised his authority. He forgave them and died on 
 the day named.
 
 of the Society of the Love of Jesus. 129 
 
 hence in the grace of God, are in unconceivable 
 bliss, a bliss, to which every spiritual bliss in this 
 life is joylessness. Conceive, what bliss to know that 
 in all that boundless Eternity they shall for ever see 
 God ! And they know what Eternity is ! Time 
 has been put aside with the mortal clay ; they live 
 years in moments ; they live already the life of spirits, 
 and in Jesus, as their Judge, they have seen God. 
 Whether the Judgement be longer or shorter, we know 
 not : one should have thought that St. Paul's descrip- 
 tion of the burning of the " s WO od hay and stubble" 
 of those, who, upon the One Foundation Which is 
 Christ, build worthless works yet not only such works 
 as are worthless, implied a prolonged Judgement. 
 But whether longer or shorter, the souls of the saved 
 must not only have seen Jesus, and His loving, even 
 though reproachful Eye, but must have seen in It all 
 that ineffable love of God. They must know what it 
 is to behold God. Although not fully (for they will 
 have seen the Godhead only through the veil of the 
 Humanity of Jesus), they will have seen That Light, 
 which on earth eye cannot see and live. They will 
 have been immersed into the Ocean of joy; they will 
 have adored Jesus face to face. " What eye hath 
 not seen nor ear heard, nor heart of man conceived," 
 and could not see or hear here and live, they will have 
 seen and heard, and have not conceived only but 
 have known the transcendent beauty and glory and 
 majesty and Divinity of Jesus. They will have 
 known "what Jesus 'tis to love," as saints too can- 
 not know in this life. What if the further sight be 
 delayed ? What if they know, that it is through 
 
 * 1 Cor. iii. 11-15. 

 
 130 Prayers for departed Companions 
 
 their own inadequate sorrow for any grievous forgiven 
 sins, or for their cleaving to things temporal, or for 
 their own lack of thirsting to behold the living God, 
 while in this life, or for tepidity, or sloth, that that 
 Beatific Vision is delayed ? They know with abso- 
 lute certainty that it is delayed only, that they 
 shall behold the All-Holy Trinity for ever. It must 
 be a suifering pining, longing, yet consoled by that 
 absolute certainty. 
 
 Then too they cannot sin. joy of joys ! joy, 
 above all other joys ! joy, beyond that of seeing the 
 Face of God Himself, Father Son and Holy Ghost ; 
 joy, without which to see the Face of God would be 
 utter misery, as it was to Satan, that the will, fixed 
 and motionless, adheripg immoveably to the "Will of 
 God, and beating with one pulse with the pulses of 
 the Divine Heart, cannot, by the very faintest mo- 
 tion of impulse, look away for one twinkling of an 
 eye from the Adorable Will of God. Temptation 
 itself, soliciting the will from without, will have 
 ceased then. victory of victories, victory com- 
 plete ! All the old slough fallen away for ever ! all, 
 even temptation gone ! The last was, when the soul 
 was about to leave the body ; the soul wonders how 
 it ever could have been tempted. It cannot will 
 any thing except the All-Holy Will of God. The 
 thought of such bliss is enough to take us out of 
 ourselves. One wonders, whether a loving soul may 
 not at times have left the body, for the transport of 
 such a thought. Fire of love, what must Thou 
 be, so to absorb us into Thyself ! 
 
 But the absence of the capability of sinning is it- 
 self not all. There are the continual inundating graces
 
 of the Society of the Love of Jesus. 131 
 
 and consolations and influences of the good-pleasure 
 of God. To those who have felt them here, it is like 
 being already out of the body, except that the weak- 
 ness of the body makes itself mostly felt. But St. 
 Paul says, " h Whether in the body, I cannot tell ; or 
 whether out of the body, I cannot tell ; God know- 
 eth." There, there is no body to fatigue, no consci- 
 ousness that the soul will have again to fall back in- 
 to its wonted state, no possibility of distractions dart- 
 ing in. For this is its one state, to long for the sight 
 of God, whenever it shall be His Good Pleasure that 
 the soul should see Him, and not one moment sooner. 
 There can be no impatience there, no anticipation of 
 God's Will ; no faintest wish that it should be 
 other than it is ; no wish to know even what it is, 
 further than it feels. It is a silent peaceful land 
 of expectation. 
 
 But then there is the other side, in reference to 
 which we pray. The soul, in the particular judge- 
 ment, has seen itself, unveiled in the light of truth. 
 Every excuse which it ever made for itself has fallen 
 off. It has seen in the Face of Jesus, what one the 
 slightest venial sin would be. It would mar heaven ! 
 And then, its own ! Sustained by its Judge, it has 
 beheld them all, the poorness of its penitences, the 
 nothing of its self-revenges 1 , the little genuine sorrow 
 for the love of God, that it has displeased Him, and 
 so it shrank back, feeling itself unworthy to approach 
 Him. It cannot wish to be in His Presence, Which 
 it feels itself unfit to enter. 
 
 And yet it must be an untold, inconceivable suffer- 
 ing, that this period might have been abridged, that 
 
 >> 2 Cor. xii. 2. l Ib. vii. 11. 
 
 K 2
 
 132 Prayers for departed Companions 
 
 it might at once have entered into the joy of its Lord, 
 had it kept from such or such sins, or had it, like 
 S. Mary Magdalene, that great noble penitent, grieved 
 all its life that it had offended Him. Strong burn- 
 ing love melts out all the dross. Had we the peni- 
 tent robber's penitence and the robber's faith, to us 
 our Lord would say, " To-day shalt thou be with Me." 
 
 Then too how poor our longing for God ! How 
 poor our desire to be for ever free from sin ! We 
 are content with the weary round of this life, not 
 only that we may (if indeed we can) obtain more 
 glory to God, at least by our prayers for our fellow- 
 sinners. "We are content with it, not only because 
 we do not feel ourselves as yet fit to behold God, not 
 because we wish to have some more victories, to be- 
 come more Deiform, but because we are inured to 
 life. We do not mostly long to see God; and so, 
 when the time comes, it is not fitting for us to bo 
 admitted at once to that Beatific Yision which we 
 have here so little longed to behold. 
 
 But whatever the past has been, whatever the 
 hindrance may be, those souls can do nothing to un- 
 do it. The time of probation is over ; and, where 
 there is no peril of forfeiting grace, there is no op- 
 portunity of gaining by grace. The disembodied soul 
 can do no act to please God, whereby it may abridge 
 its exile from God. It has but to wait in silence. 
 O how it must long that it had not so sinned, or that 
 it had repented more zealously of its sins ! And how 
 purifying that burning longing for God must be, that 
 inextinguishable thirst, and yet that meek patience ! 
 We cannot, in this flesh, in which we have so little 
 longed for God, imagine what that strong impulse
 
 of the Society of the Love of Jesus. 133 
 
 must be, with which the soul is borne towards God ; 
 what that suffering of temporary "loss" must be, 
 when all distractions of this world are removed; when 
 it has only one fixed motionless thought, " When 
 shall I be admitted to behold God ? "When shall I 
 be admitted to praise and adore Him face to face ? 
 When shall I again see Jesus, not as my Judge any 
 more, but to thank Him and bless Him for all His love 
 for me, that He has redeemed me ? When shall I be 
 admitted to join in those blissful Halleluiahs ?" But 
 we do know, what it is to be separated by death from 
 those whom we loved as our own souls : we know 
 how it is like death itself; we did not know, how we 
 should live through it. But now it is no question 
 of dying. " Death," we thought, when we had lost 
 those whom we deeply love, " v\rould rejoin us to those 
 whom we love." What must it be to long, again to 
 behold Jesus, with all that longing which the sight 
 of His forgiving love must have inspired, and yet to 
 have it for a while delayed ? The soul has seen Jesus, 
 it knows what it is to see Jesus, and it sees Him no 
 more. It is not as with those whom He left here 
 in the flesh. They gained unimaginably by their 
 loss. The love of the beloved Disciple, the love of 
 His Virgin-Mother, their conformity to the will of 
 God, must have been so intensified during those 30 
 or 70 years of absence. There , there is nothing to 
 gain, because there is nothing which could be lost. 
 In silence they wait for their perfected redemption. 
 And yet, although I have, in illustration, com- 
 pared the longing for those, whom we have loved as 
 our own souls here and have parted with out of 
 sight, the comparison is as nothing. God gave them
 
 134 Prayers for departed Companions 
 
 to us to love ; He gave us our pure love ; yet they 
 were not the end of our being, but God Alone, Who 
 made us for Himself. Towards Him, "Whom now it 
 feels, to be the one end of it's being, the soul is 
 borne ; for Him it pines ; it feels itself separate from 
 Him, not, as even here, because God has some work 
 for us on earth to do, some grace to gain, not by 
 time, but by its unfitness. It longs to divest itself 
 of that, whatever it be, which keeps it away from 
 God. If it were in the flesh, what would it not do ? 
 It might even die through the vehemence of its 
 grace -inworked longings, and through the vehe- 
 mence of its cleansed desires, might be freed 
 wholly and at once from every stain which clave to 
 it, and be admitted at once to the sight of God. 
 ]S"ow it is powerless ! And yet it's longing is undis- 
 tracted. Here, in the deepest sorrow, which does not 
 dethrone reason itself, there is duty to be done, and 
 joy in fulfilled duty, and variations of day and night, 
 and distractions of the body and it's needs ; there it is 
 one fixed gaze towards Him, the sole End of its 
 being, its sole contentment. ' ' k The eyes " of the soul 
 " fail with looking upward;" but it may not see Him. 
 What an unspeakable solace it were, to be able even 
 by one second to hasten that time ! Yet it cannot ! 
 But we (so the Church has ever thought) may 
 hasten it. The love of the departed avails for us, in 
 gaining grace for us in this our perilous voyage, 
 where there are so many shipwrecks, even, as it 
 seems, within sight of the last haven of rest. Our 
 prayers avail for them to abridge the time of their 
 waiting. So would God perpetuate Divine love be- 
 
 k Is. xxxviii. 14.
 
 of the Society of the Love of Jesus. 135 
 
 yond the grave ; so would He, in the Communion of 
 Saints, provide that ul they, without us, should not be 
 made perfect;" that they who have attained, should 
 be yet indebted to our love, while we are yet more 
 indebted to their love. For they are in certain 
 possession of the bliss of eternity, even though its 
 fruition is for a time delayed; we are still tossed 
 upon this boisterous sea, where so many around us 
 are alas ! for ever shipwrecked, and where He Alone, 
 Whom they pray, can bring us safe to the shore. 
 
 Let us then fearlessly follow the triumph of those 
 conquerors, to whom God has given the victory over 
 the devil the world and the flesh. The victory is 
 complete. " m They rest from their labours, and their 
 works do follow them." If we could have the whole 
 world and all its glories, would we not thankfully 
 exchange it for their incapability of displeasing God 
 by any the slightest emotion of their will ? They are 
 carrying on those prayers for sinners, which they 
 offered so fervently on earth. As the strife thickens 
 on earth, the number of the Church's intercessors 
 increases in heaven. The portion of the Church in 
 heaven is, oh how manifold more than the Church on 
 earth. Yet we have an office of love too for them, 
 as many as are not yet perfected. Not in vain has 
 the Church of old taught us to say, "Eternal rest 
 grant unto them, Lord, and let perpetual light 
 shine upon them ! " 
 
 And now, if Jesus has brought before you any 
 fresh thought of His great love for our own souls, and 
 for the souls of all His redeemed in those unimagina- 
 ble depths of His Passion ; if the condescending love 
 1 Heb. xi. 40. m Rev. xiv. 13.
 
 n n rv I 
 
 136 Prayers for departed Companions, 'c. 
 
 of God the Holy Ghost has become in any way more 
 vivid to you, let it not be a passing thought. Be 
 not satisfied to have felt. But when we, as we soon 
 shall, "offer up ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a 
 reasonable holy and lively sacrifice to God," hallowed 
 by that Adorable Sacrifice, whereof He has made us 
 partakers, let us pray Him for that sealing gift of per- 
 severance. To all who ask it He gives perseverance ; 
 they only do not persevere, who do not ask. 
 
 Nor let us be content with greater diligence in 
 our own prayers only. Every where the fields are 
 white to harvest. Every where there are souls, which 
 can be gathered into Christ's fold. Pray we the Lord 
 of the harvest that He would send labourers into His 
 harvest. Pray we, that He would add to the band 
 of those Christian women, to whom it has been given 
 to be missionaries in bringing the poor wanderers at 
 home or the Heathen in the isles of the sea, into or 
 back to the fold of Christ. Let us pray that God 
 Who has so wonderfully renewed among us the call 
 to devoted service, would extend that call yet wider. 
 Let us help others, as we can, to understand and to 
 follow that call, that so this our land may once more 
 be the island of Saints, the horrible dishonour to His 
 Name be mitigated, the terrible waste of souls, for 
 whom Jesus died, be stayed. This, let us ask of Him 
 Who can do abundantly more than we can ask or think. 
 Let ns ask it of Him now, by His Body which was 
 given for us, by His Blood which He shed for us. 
 
 Cijanitf 6c to 
 
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