w ^ y^ w w • Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES I I THE PRECIOUS BLOOD; UK. THE PRICE OF OUR SALVATION. [77w Copyright is reserved.] THE PRECIOUS BLOOD; OR. THE PRICE OF OUR SALVATION. BY FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, D.D. TKIEST OF THE ORATORY OF ST. PHILIP NERI. " Habet magnam vocem Christi Sanguis in terra, cum eo accepto ab omnibus gentibus respondetur Amen. Hoc est clara vox Sanguinis, quam Sanguis ipse exprimit, ex ore fidelium eodem Sanguine redemptorum." — .S". Augitstin, contra J-austuin, 1 xii. c. lo. FIFTH EDITION. LONDON : BURNS & OATES, Limited. NEW YORK, CINCINNATI. CHICAGO: BENZIGER BROTHERS. ST 751 TO THE MEMBERS OF THE Confraternity of the Most Precious Blood IN THE CHURCH OF THE LONDON ORATORY. My dear Friends, — I have written this little Book for you, and. now dedicate it to you with feelings of the warmest affection. It is ten years next August, since the Holy Father set up our Confraternity. Since then we have enrolled upwards of thirty-eight thousand Members, and a hundred and four Religious Communities. Besides this, several other Confraternities of the Precious Blood have been set up and affiliated with ours ; and their members are also very numerous. Some others have been erected in imitation of ours ; and independently of it, and are successfully propagating our favourite devotion. The meetings at the Oratory on Sunday nights testify to the abundant blessing whicli our Lord has given to this apostolate of prayer. Letters are arriving daily, and from Hi Q viii DEDICA TION. the remotest quarters of the world, eitlier asking our prayers, or returning thanks for unexpected answers to prayer, oi recounting signal conversions, obtained through the inter- cession of the Confraternity. Of late these divine favours have greatly increased ; and, while this is a fresh motive for the love of God and for confidence in prayer, it also deepens our feeling of our own unworthiness, and greatly humbles us. The Confraternity is now so extended, that the correspondence includes letters from Ireland and Scot- land, from France and Germany, from Canada and New- foundland, from the United States and Central America, from California and Brazil, from Australia and New Zealand, from the East Indies and the Chinese Missions, from the Cape of Good Hope and other British Dependencies. When we think of all this, we must prize more and more the privileges of this grand union of intercessory prayer. The success of the Confraternity is naturally an object of lively interest both to you and me. To you, because it is con- nected now with so many secret joys and sorrows of your lives, and so many hidden imu'cies and sweet answers to prayer, which are known only to yourselves : to me, because it is the realising of my hopes beyond what I ever could have dreamed : and to both of u.s, because it is a bumble increase of the glory of our dearest Lord. I have watched the growth of the Confraternity with a pleased surprise ; and the tokens of God's blessing upon DEDICA TION. ix it have ovenvhelmed me Avitli gratitude and confusion : and I have thought Avhat I could do. Though many of you are present at the London Oratory every Sunday even- ing by your letters, comparatively few of you can be there in person. Yet I have felt that we belong to each other, and that I should satisfy my own feelings, while I should be gratifying yours, if I could make some affectionate offer- ing to the whole of my dear Confraternity. Therefore I have written this little Book. I have tried to tell you all I know about the Precious Blood, all that many years of hard study and much thought have enabled me to learn ; and I have tried to tell it you as easily and as simply as I could. I thought I could not please you better than by this. I thought I could not show my gratitude to our Blessed Eedeemer better than by striving to increase a devotion which He Himself, by His blessing on the Con- fraternity, has shown to be so pleasing to Him. I believed we could not repay the paternal kindness of the Sovereign Pontiff, our Father and Founder, who has enriched us with Indulgences, in a manner more welcome to himself, than by an effort to propagate the devotion to the Precious Blood, in whose honour he has established a new feast in the Church of God. I know that I could not please myself better, than by magnifying the Precious Blood, which of all the glorious objects of Catholic devotion has been for years the dearest to ray heart. X DEDICA TION. Accept, then, this little but loving gift. Let it stand as a memorial of my love of you, of your love of Jesus, of the filial devotion of both of us to the Holy Father, and of our united thanksgivings to our Blessed Saviour for His goodness to our Confraternity, and for our salvation through His blood. — Your affectionate Servant and Father, Frederick ^Villiam Faber, Priest of the Oratory. The London Oratobt, Feast of the Conversion of St. Pavl-, i860. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PACK THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD .... I CHAPTER J I. THE NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD . ... 36 CHAPTER III. THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD • • • • 73 CHAPTER IV. THE HISTORY OF THE P.tKCIOUS BLOOD . . . .133 CHAPTER V. THE PRODIGALITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD . . .196 CHAPTER YI. THE DEVOTION TO THE PRECIOUS BLOOD .... 249 INDE.X :99 THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. CHAPTER I. THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. Salvation ! What music is there in that word, music that never tires but is always new, that always rouses yet always rests us ! It holds in itself all that our hearts would say. It is sweet vigour to lis in the morning, and in the evening it is contented peace. It is a song that is always singing itself deep down in the delighted soul. Angelic ears are ravished by it up in heaven ; and our Eternal Father Himself listens to it with adorable complacency. It is sweet even to Him out of whose mind is the music of a thousand worlds. To be saved ! AVhat is it to be saved 1 "Who can tell 1 Eye has not seen, nor ear heard. It is a rescue, and from such a ship- wreck. It is a rest, and in such an unimaginable home. It is to lie down for ever in the Bosom of God in an endless rapture of insatiable contentment. " Thou shalt call His Name Jesus ; for He shall save His people from their sins." Who else but Jesus can do this, and what else even from Him do we require but this ; for in this lie all things which we can desire 1 Of all miseries the bondage of sin is the most miserable. It is worse than A 2 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. sorrow, worse than pain. It is such a ruin that no other ruin is like unto it. It troubles all the peace of life. It turns sunshine into darkness. It embitters all pleasant fountains, and poisons the very blessings of God which sliould have been for our healing. It doubles the burdens of life, which are heavy enough already. It makes death a terror and a torture, and the eternity beyond the grave an infinite and intolerable blackness. Alas ! we have felt the weightiness of sin, and know that there is nothing like it. Life has brought many sorrows to us, and many fears. Our hearts have ached a thousand times. Tears have flowed. Sleep has fled. Food has been nauseous to us, even when our weakness craved for it. But never have Ave felt any- thincc like the dead weight of a mortal sin. "\Maat then must a life of such sins be? What must be a death in sin] What the irrevocable eternity of unretracted sin ? From all this horror whither shall we look for deliverance 1 Not to ourselves ; for we know the practical infinity of our weakness, and the incorrigible vitality of our corruption. Not to any earthly power ; for it has no jurisdiction here. Not to philosophy, literature, or science ; for in this case they are but sorry and unhelpful matters. Not to any saint however holy, nor to any angel however mighty ; for the least sin is a bigger mountain than they liavc faculties to move. Not to the crowned queen of God's creation, the glorious and the sinless !Mary ; for even her holiness cannot .^satisfy for sin, nor the whiteness of her purity take out its deadly stain. Neitlier may we look for deliverance direct from the patience and compassion of God Himself ; for in tlie abysses of His wisdom it has been decreed, that without shedding of blood there shall be no remission of sin. It is from the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ alone that our salva- tion comes. Out of the immensity of its merits, out of the inexhaustible treasures of its satisfactions, because of the THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 3 resistless power of its beauty over the justice and the wratli of God because of that dear combination of its priceless wortlx and its benignant prodigality, we miserable sinners are raised out of the depths of our wretchedness, and restored to the peace and favour of our Heavenly Father. Is hope sweet where despair had almost begun tb reign ? Is it a joy to be emancipated from a shameful slavery, or set free from a noxious dungeon 1 Is it gladness to be raised, as if by miracle, from a bed of feebleness and suffering to sudden health and instantaneous vigour 1 Then what a glad- ness must salvation be ! For, as there is no earthly misery like sin, so is there no deliverance like that Avith which Jesus makes us free. "Words will not tell it. Thought only can think it, and it must be thought out of an enlightened mind and a burning heart, dwelt on for a long, long while. The first moment after death is a moment which must infallibly come to every one of us. Earth lies behind us, silently wheeling its obedient way through the black-tinted space. The measureless spaces of eternity lie outstretched before us. The words of our sentence have scarcely floated away into silence. It is a sentence of salvation. The great risk has been run, and we are saved. God's power is hold- ing our soul lest it should die of gladness. It cannot take in the whole of its eternity. The least accidental joy is a world of beatitude in itself. The blaze of the Vision is overwhelming. Then the truth that eternity is eternal, — this is so hard to master. Yet all this is only what wc mean when we pronounce the word salvation. How hideous the difference of that first moment after death, if we had not been saved ! It turns us cold to think of it. But oh, joy of joys ! we have seen the Face of Jesus; and the light in His eyes, and the smile ui^on His face, and the words upon His lips, were salvation. Dut there are some who do not feel that sin is such a 4 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. horror or captivity. They say it lays no weight upon their hearts. They say their lives are full of sunshine, and that time flows with them as the merry rivulet runs in summer, with a soothing brawl over its coloured stones, and its waters glancing in the sun. They say it is so with them ; and truly they should know best. Yet I hardly believe them. If they are happy, it is only by fits and starts ; and then not with a complete happiness. There is ever an upbraiding voice within. An habitual sinner always has tlie look of a jaded and disappointed man. There is weariness in the very light of his eyes, vexation in the very sound of his voice. "Why is he so cross with others, if he is so happy with him- self ? Then are there not also dreadful times, private times when no one but God sees him, when he is chilled through and through with fear, when he is weary of life because he is so miserable, when the past weighs upon him like a night- mare, and the future terrifies him like a coming wild-be^ist ] "When death springs upon him, how will he die ? "When judgment comes, what will he answer? Yet even if the sinner coidd go through life Avith the gay indifference to which he pretends, he is not to be envied. It is only a sleep, a lethargy, or a madness, one or other of these accord- ing to his natural disposition. For there must be an awaken- ing at last; and wlien and where will it be? They that walk in their sleep are sometimes wakened if they put their foot into cold water. "What if the sinner's awakening should be from the first touch of the fire that burns beyond the grave 1 But we claim no share in any foolish happiness of sin. "We are on God's side. "We belong to Jesus. Sin is our great enemy, as well as our great evil. "We desire to break Avith it altogether. Wo are ashamed of our past subjection to it. We are uneasy under our present imperfect separation from it. Our uppermost thought, no ! not mor'^Iy our THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 5 uppermost thought, our only thought is our salvation. We care for no science, but the science of redeeming grace. The cross of Christ is our single wisdom. Once we wished for many things, and aimed at many things. Eut we are changed now. Our lives are amazingly simplified, simpHfied by the fear of sin and by the love of God. Our anxiety now is, that all this may remain. We fear another change, especially a change back again. We can think calmly of no change except from little love to much love, and from much love to more love. The right of Jesus to our love, to our best love, to all our love, is becoming plainer and plainer to us. His exceeding loveliness i? growing more and more attractive, because it is revealing itself to us every day like a new revelation. What depths there are in Jesus, and how wonderfully he lights them up with the splendours of His eternal love ! Do we not feel every day more and more strongly, that we must be more for Jesus than we are, that of all growing things divine love is the most growing, that all idea of a limit to our love of Jesus, or of moderation in our service of Him, is a folly as well as a disloyalty? He was the brightness of innumerable lives and the sweetness of innumerable sorrows, when He was but the expectation of longing Israel. What must He be now, when He has come, when He has lived, and shed His blood, and died, and risen, and ascended, and then come back again in all the unutterable endearments of the Blessed Sacrament 1 Why are our hearts so cold 1 Why is our love so faithless, and our faith so unloving ? We try, and still we do not love as we wish to love. We try again, and love more ; and yet it is sadly short of the love we ought to have. We strive and strive, and still we only languish when we ought to burn. He longs for our love, sweet covetous lover of souls as He is. He longs for our love ; and we long for notliing so much as to love Him. 6 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. Surely there must be a time and a place, when both He and Ave shall be satisfied ; but the place will be heaven, and the time nothing else than the great timeless eternity. Salvation is through the Precious Blood. We will take that for our study of Jesus this time. When love is humble, it prays with David to be Avashed more and more from its iniquity. But there is no washing away of iniquity, except in the Precious Blood of our most dear Redeemer. When love is bold, it prays to be set on fire with the flames which Jesus came to kindle. But it is only the Precious Blood which makes our heart beat hotly with the love of Him. So let us take the Precioiis Blood for our study now : and let us study it in a simple loving way, not so much to become deep theologians, though deep theology is near of kin to heroic sanctity, but that our hearts may be more effectually set on fire with the love of Jesus Christ. There is so much to be said, that we cannot say it all, because we do not know it all. We must make a choice ; and we will choose these six things, the Mystery of the Precious Blood, the Necessity of it, its Empire, its History, its Prodigality, and, last of all, the Devotion to it in the Church. We must take a saint to guide us on our way. Let it be that grand lover of Jesus, the Apostle St. Paul. His con- version was one of the chief glories of the Precious Blood. Kedeeming grace was his favourite theme. He was for ever magnifying and praising the Blood of Jesiis. His heart was filled with it, and was enlarged by grace that it might liold yet more. After the Hearts of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, never was there a liuniau heart like that of Paul, in which all other human hearts might beat as if it were their own, unless it be that other universal heart, the heart of King David, which has poured ilsolf out for all mankind, in those varying strains of ever changeful feeling, by means of its sweet psalms. St. Paul's heart feels for every one, THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 7 makes every one's case its own, sorrows and rejoices with those who sorrow or rejoice, and becomes all things to all men that it may save them all. Among the wonders of creation there are few to compare with that glorious apostolic heart. The vastness of its sympathies, the breadth of its charity, the unwearied hopefulness of its zeal, the delicacy of its considerateness, the irresistible attraction of its im- perious love — all this was the work of the Precious Blood ; and that heart is still alive even upon earth, still beating in his marvellous Epistles as part of the unquenchable life of the Church. It is impossible to help connecting these characteristics of St. Paul's heart with his manifest devotion to the Precious Blood. Let us take him then as our guide amidst the unsearchable riches of Christ and the super- abounding graces of His redeeming Blood. As it was with the disciples as they walked to Emmaus with Jesus, so will it be with us as we go along with His servant Paul. Our hearts will burn within us by the way ; and we our- selves shall grow hot from the heat of that magnificent heart of him who guides us. "We are then to consider, first of all, the Mystery of the Precious Blood. It was one of God's eternal thoughts. It was part of His wisdom, part of His glory, part of His own blessedness from all eternity. You know that creation, although exceedingly ancient, perhaps so ancient as to be beyond our calculations, is nevertheless not eternal. It could not be so. To be eternal is to be without becrinninj' ; and to be without beginning is to be independent of any cause or power. This is a true description of God. But creation had a time at which it began, and it was the inde- pendent act of God's most holy, most condescending will Thus there was an eternity before creation, a vast unimagin- able, adorable life, not broken up into centuries and ages, not lapsing but always still, not passing but always stationary, S THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. a life which had no past and no future, because its whole self was always present to itself. This was the life of God before any creation, an unspeakably glorious life which we can think of with love and adoration, but Avhich it is quite impossible for us to understand. We shall say more of it in the third chapter. Some holy persons, like Mother Anne Seraphine Boulier of the Visitation at Dijon, have had such an exceeding devotion to this life of God prior to creation, that they have by God's order shaped their spiri- tuality wholly upon it. Very often, when the troubles of life vex and ruffle us, or when we are downcast and dis- trustful, it would do us good to think of that ancient life of God. It would fill us with quiet awe. We should feel our own littleness more sensibly, and we should care less about the judgments of the world. The thought of it would be like a bed to lie down upon, when we are weary with work or fatigued with disappointment. Nevertheless there is a sense in which creation was eternal. It was eternally in the mind of God. It was one of His eternal ideas, ahvays before Him ; so that He never existed without this idea of creation in His all-wise mind and in His all-powerful intention. Moreover it was alwaj's part of His intention that the Creator should become as it were part of His own creation, and that an Uncreated Person should really and truly assume a created nature and be born of a created mother. That is what we call the mystery of the Incarnation. It is this which makes creation so magnificent. It was not merely a beautiful thing which God made as an artificer, and which He set outside of Him- self, and kept at a distance from Himself to look at, to admire, to pity, and to love. He always intended to be part of it Himself in a very Avonderful way. So that there would have been Jesus and Mary, even if there had never been any sin : only Jesus would not have been crucified, THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 9 and Mary would not have had any dolours. But the sight of sin was also with God from the beginning, that is, through all His unbeginning eternity ; and thus the Precious Blood also, as the ransom for sin, was with Him from the beginning. It was one of His eternal thoughts. If we may dare to say so, it was an idea which made Him more glorious, a thought which rendered Him more blessed. That same dear Blood, the thought of which makes us so happy now, has been part of God's happiness for ever. He created the angels and the stars. How ancient the angels are we do not know : though we know that spiritual and material natures were created at the same moment. In all ways the angels are wonderful to think of, because they are so strong, so wise, so various, so beautiful, so innumer- able. But they do not lie in our way just now ; because, although they owe all their graces to the Precious Blood, they were not redeemed by the Precious Blood. Those angels, who did not fall, did not sin, and so needed no redemption ; and God would not allow those who fell to be redeemed at all. This makes us sometimes think that God was more severe with His world of angels than with His world of men. But this is not really the case. It only shows us how we owe more to Jesus than we often think of. The angels could not make any satisfaction to the justice of God for their sins. If all the angels, good and bad together, had suffered willingly the most excruciating torments for millions upon millions of ages, those willing torments could not have made up to God for the sin of the least sinful of those angels who are now devils. If our dearest Saviour had taken upon Himself the nature of angels, the case would have been different. But He became man, not angel ; and so His Passion, as man, satisfied for all possible sins of men. The sufferings of His Passion were greater and of more price than all the torments of countless angels. The severity lo THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. of God exacted more from Him upon the Cross than it ever exacted, or is exacting now, from the tortured angels. Thus you see God has not been more severe with them than with us : only that Jesus made Himself one of us, and took all our share of God's severity upon Himself, leaving us the easy happiness of faith, and hope, and love. You see we come upon the kindness of Jesus everywhere. There is not even a difficulty in religion, but somehow the greatness of His love is at the bottom of it, and is the explanation of it. "Wonderful Jesus ! that Avas the name the prophet Isaias gave Him. " He shall be called Wonderful." How sweet it is to be so hemmed in by the tokens of His love, that we cannot turn to any side without meeting them ! Yet His love would be sweeter to us, if we could only repay it with more love ourselves. God made the angels and the stars. The starry world is an overwhelming thing to think of. Its distances are so vast that they frighten us. The number of its separate worlds is so enormous that it bewilders us. Imagine a ray of light, which travels one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles in a second ; and yet there are stars whose light would take a million of years to reach the earth. We know of two hundred thousand stars down to the ninth magnitude. In one single cluster of stars, eighteen millions of stars have been discovered between the tenth and eleventh magnitudes. Of these clusters men have already discovered more than four thousand. Each of these stars is not a planet, like the earth ; but a sun, like our sun, and perliaps with planets round it, like ourselves. Of these suns we know of some which are one hundred and forty-six times brighter than our .sun. What an idea all this gives us of the grandeur and magnificence of God ! Yet we know that all these stars were created for Jesus and because of Jesus. He is the liead and firstborn of all creation. !Mary's Son is the king THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. ii of the stars. His Precious Blood has something to do witli all of them. Just as it merited graces for the angels, so does it merit blessings for the stars. If they have been inhabited before we were, or are inhabited now, or will at some future time begin to be inhabited, tlieir inhabitants, whether fallen and redeemed, or unfallen, and so not needing to be redeemed, will owe immense things to the Precious Dlood. Yet earth, our little humble earth, will always have the right to treat the Precious Blood with special endear- ments, because it is its native place. When the angels, as they range through space, see our little globe twinkling with its speck of coloured light, it is to them as the little Holy House in the hollow glen of Nazareth, more sacred and more glorious than the amplest palaces in starry space. God made the stars ; and, whether the earth was made by itself from the first, or was once part of the sun, and thrown off from it like a ring, God made the earth also, and shaped it, and adorned it, and filled it with trees and animals ; and then looked upon His work, and it shone forth so beautifully with the light of His own perfections, that He blessed it, and, glorying in it, declared that it was very good. We know what an intense pleasure men take in looking at beautiful scenery. When we feel this pleasure, we ought to feel that we are looking at a little revelation of God, a very true one although a little one, and we ought to thiidc of God's complacency when He beheld the scenery of the primeval earth, and rejoiced in what He saw. Tliere was no sin then. To God's eye earth was all the more beautiful because it was innocent, and the dwelling-place of innocence. Then sin came. Why God let it come we do not know. We shall probably know in heaven. We are certain, how- ever, that in some way or other it was more glorious for Him, and better for us, tliat evil should be permitted. Some people trouble themselves about this. It does not trouble 12 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. me at all. "Whatever God does must of course be most right. My understanding it would not make it more right ; neither could 1 do anything to mend matters, if I under- stood it ever so well. Every one should keep in his own place : it is the creature's place to believe, adore, and love. Sin came. "With sin came many fearful consequences. This beautiful earth was completely wrecked. It went on through space in the sunshine as before : but in God's sight, and in the destiny of its inhabitants, it was all changed. Jesus could no longer come in a glorious and unsuffering Incarnation. Mary would have to die ; and, though she was sinless, she would need to be redeemed with a single and peculiar redemption, a redemption of prevention, not of rescue. She also, the immaculate Mother and Queen of creation, must be bought by the Precious Blood. Had it not been for Jesus, the case of earth would have been hope- less, now that sin had come. God would have let it go, as He let the angels go. It would have been all hateful and dark in His sight, as the home of the fallen spirits is. But it was not so. Earth was dimmed, but it was not darkened, disfigured but not blackened. God saw it through the Precious Blood, as through a haze ; and there it lay with a dusky glory over it, like a red sunset, up to the day of Christ. No sooner had man sinned than the influence of the Precious Blood began to be felt. There was no ador- able abruptness on the part of God, as with the angels. His very upbraiding of Adam was full of paternal gentleness. With His punishment He mingled promises. He spoke of Mary, Eve's descendant, and illumined the penance of our first parents by the prophecy of Jesus. As the poor ofFend- ing earth lay then before the sight of God, so does it lie now ; only that the haze is more resplendent, since tlie Sacrifice on Calvary was offered. The Precious Blood covers it all over, like a sea or like an atmosphere. It lies in a beautiful THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 13 crimson light for ever, a light softening the very shades, beautifying the very gloom. God does not see us as we see ourselves, but in a brighter, softer light. "VYe are fairer in His sight than we are in our own, notwithstanding His exceeding sanctity, because He sees us in the Blood of His dear Son. This is a consolation, the balm of which is not easily exhausted. We learn a lesson from it also. Our view of creation should be like God's view. We should see it, with all its countless souls, through the illuminated mist of the Precious Blood. Its spiritual scenery should be before us, everything everywhere, goldenly red. This is the shape, then, which our Father's love takes to us His creatures. It is an invitation of all of us to the worship and the freedom of the Precious Blood. It is through this Blood that He communicates to us His perfec- tions. It is in this Blood that He has laid up His blessings for us, as in a storehouse. This is true, not only of spiritual blessings but of all blessings whatsoever. That the elements still wait upon us sinners, that things around us are so bright and beautiful, that pain has so many balms, that sorrow has so many alleviations, that the common course of daily pro- vidence is so kindly and so patient, that the weight, the fre- quency, and the bitterness of evils are so much lightened, — is all owing to the Precious Blood. It is by this Blood that He has created over again His frustrated creation. It is out of this Blood that all graces come, whether those of Mary, or those of the angels, or those of men. H is this Blood which merits all good things for every one. The unhappy would be more unhappy were it not for this Blood. The wicked would be more wicked were it not for this Blood. The flames of hell would burn many times more furiously, if the shedding of this Blood had not allayed their fury. There is not a corner of God's creation, which is not more or less under the benignant control of the Precious Blood. U THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. Our Heavenly Father, then, may well call His creatures to gather round these marvellous Fountains, and adore His wisdom and His love. Who could have dreamed of such an invention, an invention which grows more astonishing the more we penetrate its mystery ? The angels wonder more than men, because they better understand it. Their superior intelligence ministers more abundant matter to their love. From the very first He invited the angels to adore it. He made their adoration a double exercise of humility, of humility towards Himself, and of humility towards us their inferior fellow-creatures. It was the test to which He put their loyalty. He showed them His beloved Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, in His Sacred Humanity, united to a lower nature than their own, and in that lower nature crowned their King and Head to be Avorshipped by them with absolute and unconditional adoration. The Son of a human mother was to be their Head, and that daughter of Eve to be herself their queen. He showed them in that Blood the source of all their graces. Each angel perhaps had thousands of beautiful graces. To many of them we on earth could give no name, if we beheld them. But they were all wonderful, all instinct with supernatural holiness and spiritual magnificence. Yet there was not a single grace in any angel which was not merited for him by the Blood of Jesus, and which had not also its type and counter- part in that Precious Blood. The Precious Blood, man's Blood, was as the dew of the whole kingdom of the angels. It would have redeemed them, had they needed to be redeemed, or were allowed to be redeemed. But as it was not so, it merited for them, and was the source of, all their grace. Well tlien may the angels claim to sing the song of the Lamb, to whose outpoured Human Life they also owed 60 much, though not because it was outpoured. Nevertheless the Precious Blood belongs in an especial THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 15 manner to men. Much more, therefore, does God invite them to come to its heavenly baths, and receive therein, not only the cleansing of their souls, but the power of a new and amazing life. Every doctrine in theology is a call to the Precious Blood. Every ceremony of the Church tells of it. Every sermon that is preached is an exhortation to the use of it. Every Sacrament is a communication of it. Every supernatural act is a growth of it. Everything that is holy on the earth is either leaf, bud, blossom, or fruit of the Blood of Jesus. To its fountains God calls the sinner, that he may be lightened of his burdens. There is no remission for him in anything else. Only there is his lost sonship to be found. But the saints are no less called by God to these invigorating streams. It is out of the Precious Blood that men draw martyrdoms, vocations, celibacies, austerities, heroic charities, and all the magnificent graces of high sanctity. The secret nourishment of prayer is from those fountains. They purge the eye for sublime contemplations. They kindle the inward fires of self-sacrificing love. They bear a man safely, and even impetuously, over the seeming impossibilities of perseverance. It is by the Blood of Jesus that the soul becomes ever more and more radiant. It is the secret source of all mystical transformations of the soul into the likeness of its Crucified Spouse. It is the wine which "inebriates" the virgins of God. Out of it come raptures and ecstasies; and by it the strength of faith grows even to the gift of miracles. It fills the mind with heavenly visions, and peoples the air with divine voices. All the new nature of the man, who is "renewed in Christ Jesus," comes from this Blood, whether it be his love of suffering, his delight in shame, his grace of prayer, his unworldly tastes, his strange humility, his shy concealment, his zeal for souls, his venturous audacity, or his obstinate perseverance. Sinner, saint, and common Christian, all in their own ways, require the Precious i6 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. Blood each moment of their lives ; and, as the manna in the mouths of the Israelites had the savour which each man wished it to have, so is it with the sweetness, the variety, and the fitness of the graces of the Precious Blood. All men remember their past lives by certain dates or epochs. Some men date by sorrows, some by joys, and some by moral changes or intellectual revolutions. Some divide their lives according to the different localities which they have inhabited, and some by the successive occupations in which they have been engaged. The lives of some are mapped out by illnesses, while the tranquillity of an equable prosperity can only distinguish itself by the lapse of years and the eras of boyhood, youth, and age. But the real dates in a man's life are the days and hours in which it came to him to have some new idea of God. To all men perhaps, but certainly to the thoughtful and the good, all life is a continual growing revelation of God. We may know no more theology this year than we did last year, but wo undoubtedly know many fresh things about God. Time itself discloses Hira. The operations of grace illuminate Him. Old truths grow : obscure truths brighten. New truths are incessantly dawning. But a new idea of God is like a new birth. What a spiritual revolution it was in the soul of St. Peter, when the Eternal Father, intensely loving that eager, ardent follower of His Son, one day secretly revealed to him the Divinity of liis beloved Master ! It matters not, whether it were in a dream by night, or in an audible voice at prayer, or in the last noiseless step of a long-pondered train of thought. Whenever and however it came, it was a divine revelation out of which flowed that new life of his, which is the strength of the Church to this day. So in its measure and degree is every new idea of God to every one of us. The Precious Blood brings us many •such ideas. One of them is the fresh picture which it THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 17 piesents to us of His intense yearning love of souls. If we were to form our idea of God from theology, it would be full of grandeur. We should have a perception of Him as vivid as it would be sublime. But if, not hitherto having known the Bible, we were to turn to the Old Testament, and see God loving, favouring, magnifying His own historic people, and hear Him passionately pleading for their love. He would seem like a new God to us, because we should receive such a new idea of Him. Indeed it would be such an idea of Him, as would require both time and manage- ment before it would harmonize with the idea of Him im- planted in us by theology. Even our own sinfulness gives us in one sense a broader idea of God than innocence could have given. So, if we think of the almost piteous entreaties with which He invites all the wide heathen world to the Precious Blood, whether by the voice of His Church, or by the bleeding feet and wasting lives of His missionaries, or by secret pleadings down in each heathen heart, grace-solicited at every hour, we get a new idea of God, and a more com- plete conviction that His invitation of His creatures to the Precious Blood is indeed the genuine expression of His creative love. There is no narrowness in divine things. There is no narrowness in the Precious Blood. It is a divine invention which partakes of the universality and immensity of God. The tribes, that inhabit the different lands of the earth, are distinguished by different characteristics. One nation differs so much from another, as to be often unable to judge of the moral character of the other's actions. "What, for instance, would be pride in the inhabitant of one country would only be patriotism in the inhabitant of another ; or what would be falsehood in one country is only the characteristic way of putting things in another. It is not that the immutablrt principles of morality can be changed by national cliaracter B l8 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. or by climate ; but that outward actions signify such dif- ferent inward habits in various countries, that a foreigner is no judge of them. Thus a foreign history of any people is for the most part little better than an hypothesis, and is not unfrequently a misapprehension from fir^t to last. But the Precious Blood is meant for all nations. As all stand in equal need of it, so all find it just what they want. It is to each people the grace which shall correct that particular form of human corruption which is prominent in their natural character. The Oriental and the Western must both come to its healing streams ; and in it all national dis- tinctions are done away. In that laver of Salvation there is neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free : all are one in the redeeming Blood of Jesus. As it is with the countries of the world, so is it with the ages of the world. Each age has its own distinctive spirit. It has its own proper virtues, and its own proper vices. It lias its own sciences, inventions, literature, policy, and development. Each age thinks itself peculiar, which it is : and imagines it is better than other ages, which it is not. It is probably neither better nor worse. In substantial matters the ages are pretty much on a level with each other. But each has its own way, and requires to be dealt witli in that way. This is the reason why the Church seems to act differently in different ages. There is a sense in which the Church goes along witli the world. It is tlic same sense in which the shepherd leaves the sheep which have not strayed, and goes off in search of the one that has strayed. Each age is a stray sheep from God ; and the Church has to seek it and fetch it back to Ilim, so fur as it is allowed to do so. "We must not make light of the differences of the ages. Each age needs persuading in a manner of its own. It finds its own difficulties in religion. It lias its own peculiar temptations and follies. God's vcik is never done in any THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 19 one age. It has to be begun again in every age. Old contro- versies become useless, because they cease to be convincing. Old methods are found unsuitable, because things have changed. It is on this account that theology puts on new aspects, that religious orders first succeed and then fail, that devotion has fashions and vicissitudes, that art and ritual undergo changes, that discipline is modified, and that the Church puts herself in different relations to the governments of the world. But the Precious Blood adapts itself with changeful uniformity to every age. It is always old and always new. It is the one salvation. It is co-extensive with any civilization. No science innovates upon it. The world never exhausts its abundance or outcrrows its neces- sity. But why should we heap together these generalities ? Are they anything more than so much pious rhetoric ? Let us draw nearer to the mystery and see. What strikes us at the first thought of the Precious Blood 1 It is that Ave have to worship it with the highest worship. It is not a relic at which we sliould look with wonder and love, and which we should kiss with reverence, as having once been a temple of the Holy Ghost, and an instrument chosen by God for the working of miracles, or as flesh and bone penetrated witli that celestial virtue of the Blessed Sacrament, which will raise it up at the last day in a glorious resurrection. It is something unspeakably more than this. "VYe should have to adore it Avith the highest adoration. In some local heaven or other, in some part of space far off or near, God at this hour is unveiling His blissful majesty before the angels and the saints. It is in a local court of inconceivable magnifi- cence. The Human Body and Soul of Jesus are there, and are its light and glory, the surpassing sun of that heavenly Jerusalem. Mary, His INIother, is throned there like a lovely moon in the uiid-glory of the sunset, beautified rather 20 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. than extinguished by the effulgence round her. Millions of lordly angels are abasing their vast grandeur before the ecstatic terror of that unclothed Vision of the Eternal- Thrills of entrancing fear run through the crowds of glorified saints who throng the spaces of that marvellous shrine. Mary herself upon her throne is shaken by an ecstasy of fear before the mightiness of God, even as a reed is shaken by the wind. The Sacred Heart of Jesus beats with rapturous awe, and is glorified by the very blessedness of its abjection, before the immensity of those Divine Fires, burning visibly in their overwhelming sjDlendours. If we could enter there as we are now, we should surely die. We are not strength- ened yet to bear the depth of that prostrate humiliation, which is needed there, and which is the inseparable joy of heaven. Our lives would be shattered by the throbs of awe, which must beat like vehement pulses in our souls. But we know the limits of our nature. We know, at least in theory, the abjection which befits the creature in the immediate presence of its Creator. We can conceive the highest adoration of a sinless immortal soul as a worshij) Avhich it could not pay to any creature, however exalted, how- ever near to God. We can picture ourselves to ourselves, l)rostrate on the clouds of heaven, blinded with excess of light, every faculty of the mind jubilantly amazed by the immensity of the Divine Perfections, every affection of the heart drowned in some for ever new abyss of the unfathom- able sweetness of God. We know that we should lie in sacred fear and glad astonishment before the throne of Mary, if we saw it gleaming in its royalty. Yet we know aUo that this deep reverence would be something of quite a diffcnent kind froni our abjection before the tremendous majesty of God. But, if we saw one drop of the Precious Blood, hanging like the least pearl of dew upon a blade of grass on Calvary, or as a dull disfigured splash in the dust THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 21 of the gateway of Jerusalem, we should have to adore it with the selfsame adoration as the uncovered splendours of the Eternal. It is no use repeating this a thousand times ; yet we should have to repeat it a thousand thousand times, for years and years, before we should get the vastness of this piercing truth into our souls. We should worship one drop of the Precious Blood with the same worship as that where- with we worship God. Let us kneel down, and hide our faces before God, and say nothing, but let the immensity of this faith sink down into our souls. If the Easter Resurrection left any red stains upon the stones, or roots, or earth of Gethsemane, they are no longer to be found beneath the luxuriant vegetation of the Eranciscan garden there. Neither indeed if they had been left, when Easter passed, could we have worshipped them with divine worship; for they had already ceased to be the Precious Blood. Whatever Jesus did not reunite to Himself in the Resurrection remained disunited from the Person of the Word for ever, and therefore, however venerable, had no claim to adoration. But, had we been in Jerusalem on the Friday and the Saturday, we should have found objects, or rather the multiplied presence of an object, of dreadest wor- ship everywhere. The pavement of the streets, the accoutre- ments of the Roman legionaries, the floors of their barracks, the steps of Pilate's judgment-hall, the pillar of the scourging, the ascent of Calvary, the wood of the Cross, many shoes and sandals of the multitude, many garments either worn or in the clothes-presses, ropes, tools, scourges, and many other things, were stained with Precious Blood ; and everywhere the angels were adoring it. Had we been there, and had been wise with the holy wisdom of our present faith, we must have adored it also. But what a picture of the world it gives us ! What au awful taking of a place in His owu 22 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. creation on the part of the Incomprehensible Creator ! What a view of God it gives us ! "What an idea of sin ! "What a disclosure of the macrnificence of oi;r salvation ! The Blood of God, the human Blood of the Uncreated, the Blood of the Unbeginning drawn three and thirty years ago from the veins of a Jewish maiden, and she, the unproclaimed queen of creation, hidden in that very city in the depths of an immeasurable sorrow ! Millions of angels intently adoring down upon the low-lying surface of the ground, as if heaven were there, below rather than above, as indeed it was, and at each spot adoring with such singular concentration as if the Divine Life had been broken up, and there were many Gods instead of One ! Meanwhile men, tlie very part of creation which this Precious Blood most specially concerned, were passing through the streets, and over the ruddy spots, treading on adorable things, and yet never heeding, with angels beneath their sandals and yet never knowing it, com- passed thickly round with mysteries the sudden revelation of which would have struck them dead, and yet with the most utter unsuspecting ignorance. It is hard to bring such a state of things home to ourselves ; and yet it is but a type to us of what we are all of us always doing with the invisible presence of God amongst ourselves. God is within us and without us, above, below, and around us. "SMieresoever we set our feet, God is there, even if we be going to do evil. If we reach forth our hands, God is in our hand ; He is in the air through which our hand passes ; and where our liand touches, there is God also. He is there in three different waj's, by His essence, by His presence, and by His power ; and in each of those tliree ways His presence is more real tlian the hardness of the rocks, or the wetness of water, or the firm- nes!! of the earth. Yet we go our ways as we please, sinning, boasting, and committing follies, not simply in a consecrated sanctuary, but in the living God. This mystery was made THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 23 manifest, by the most wonderful of revelations, in the Precious Blood, when it was scattered about Jerusalem. But we need not go to Jerusalem, we need not have lived eighteen hundred years ago, to find the Precious Blood, and worship it. Here is part of that awfuluess of our holy faith, which makes us so thrill with love, that it is sometimes as if we could not bear the fire Avhich is burning in our hearts. "We actually worship it everj' day in the chalice at Mass. When the chalice is uplifted over the altar, the Blood of Jesus is there, whole and entire, glorified and full of the pulses of His true human life. The Blood that once lay in the cave at Olivet, that curdled in the thongs and knots of the scourges, that matted His hair, and soaked His garments, that stained the crown of thorns and bedewed the Cross, the Blood that He drank Himself in His own Communion on the Thursday night, the Blood that lay all Friday night in seemingly careless prodigality upon the pavement of the treacherous city, — that same Blood is living in the chalice, united to the Person of the Eternal Word, to be worshipped with the uttermost prostration of our bodies and our souls. When the beams of the morning sun come in at the windows of the church, and fall for a moment into the uncovered chalice, and glance there as if among precious stones with a restless timid gleaming, and the priest sees it, and the light seems to vibrate into his own heart, quickening his faith and love, it is the Blood of God which is there, the very living Blood whose first fountains were in the Immacu- late Heart of Mary. When the Blessed Sacrament is laitl upon your tongue, that moment and that act wliich the great angels of God look down upon with such surpassing awe, the Blood of Jesus is throbbing there in all its abound- ing life of glory. It sheathes in the sacramental mystery that exceeding radiance which is lighting all heaven at that moment with a magnificence of splendour which exceeds 24 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. the "lowinf:f of a million suns. You do not feel the strong pulses of His immortal life. If you did, you could hardly live yourself. Sacred terror would undo your life. But ia that adorable Host is the whole of the Precious Blood, the Blood of Gethseraane, Jerusalem, and Calvary, the Blood of the Passion, of the Resurrection, and of the Ascension, the Blood shed and re-assumed. As Mary bore that Precious Blood Avithin herself of old, so do you bear it now. It is in His Heart and veins, within the temple of His Body, as it was when He lay those nine months in her ever-blessed womb. We believe all this ; nay, we so believe it that we know it rather than believe it ; and yet our love is so faint and fitful. Our very fires are frost in comparison with such a faith as this. The whole of the Precious Blood is in the chalice and in the Host. It is not part : it is the whole. \Ve may well tremble to think what sanctuaries we are, when the Blessed Sacrament is within us. Let us think again of the innumer- able stars. Let us multiply their actual millions by millions of imaginary millions more. Let us suppose them all to be densely inhabited for countless ages by races of fallen beings. We have no figures to show the numbers of the individual souls, still less to represent the multi[)lied acts of sin of all those single souls or spirits. But we know this — that one drop of the thousands of drops of the Precious ]jlood in the glorified Body of Jesus would have been more than sufficient to cleanse all those countless fallen creations, and to absolve every separate sinner from every one of his multitudinous sins. Nay, that one drop would have given out all those worlds of redeeming grace, and yet no tittle of its treasures would be spent. The worth of one drop of the Precious Blood is simply infinite. Consequently no imaginary arith- metic of possible creations will convey any adequate idea of its overwhelming magnificence, Alas 1 the very copiousnesa THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 25 of our redemption makes our view of it less clear. The very crowding of God's love causes it to have something indistinguishable about it. "Who does not see that it will take us an eternity to learn Jesus, or ratlier that we shall never learn Him, but that the endless work of learning Him will be the gladness of our eternity 1 But this is not all the mystery. It was no necessity which drove God to the redemption of the world by the Precious Blood. He miglit have redeemed it in un- numbered other ways. There is no limit to His power, no exhaustion of His wisdom. He might have reconciled the forgiveness of sin with His stainless sanctity by many inven- tions, of which neither we nor the angels can so much as dream. There are vastnesses in Him who is incomprehen- sible, of the existence of which we have no suspicion. He could have saved us without Jesus, according to the absolute- ness of His power. All salvation must be dear : yet who can dream of a salvation wliicli should seem at once so worthy of God, and so endearing to man, as our present salvation through Jesus Christ? Even then our dearest Lord need not have shed His Blood. There was no com- pulsion in the Bloodshedding. One tear of His, one momen- tary sigh, one uplifted look to His Father's throne, would have been sufficient, if the Three Divine Persons had so pleased. The shedding of His Blood was part of the freedom of His love. It was, in some mysterious reality, the way of redemption most Avorthy of His blessed Majesty, and also tlie way most likely to provoke the love of men. How often has God taken the ways of our hearts as the measure of His own ways ! How often does He let His glory and our love seem to be different things, and then leave Hinaself and go after us ! The Precious Blood is invisible. Yet nothing in creation is half so potent. It is everywhere, practically everywhere, 26 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. although it is not omnipresent. It becomes visible in the fruits of grace. It will become more visible in the splen- dours of glory. But it will itself be visible in heaven in our Lord's glorified Body as in crystalline vases of incom- parable refulgence. It belongs to Him, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, although its work is the work of the whole Trinity. In its efficacy and operation it is the most complete and most wonderful of all revelations of the Divine Perfections. The power, the wisdom, the goodness, the justice, the sanctity of God are most pre-eminently illus- trated by the Avorking of this Precious Blood. These are the first thoughts which strike us about the Precious Blood. They are the ordinary considerations, which our faith has made familiar to us. We shall have to return to them again in a diff"erent connection ; and upon some of them we must enlarge in another place. A minuter acquaint- ance with Christian doctrine teaches us much more. Some little of this much must be introduced here for the sake of clearness, and in order that we may better understand what has to follow. The Precious Blood was assumed directly to our Blessed Lord's Divine Person, from His immaculate Mother, It was not taken merely to His Body, so that His Body was directly assumed to the Person of the AVord, and His Blood only indirectly or mediately as part of His Body. The Blood, which was the predetermined price of our redemption, rested directly and immediately on the Divine Person, and thus entered into the very highest and most unspeakable degree of the Hypostatic Union, if we may speak of degrees in such an adorably simple mystery. It was not merely a concomi- tant of the Flesh, an inseparable accid(!nt of the Body. The Blood itself, as Blood, was assumed directly by the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. It came also from Mary's blood. Mary's blood was the material out of which the Holy THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 27 Ghost, the Tliird Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the arti- ficer of the Sacred Humanity, fashioned the Blood of Jesus. Here we see how needful to the joy and gladness of our devotion is the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Who could bear to think that the matter of the Precious Blood had ever been itself corrupted with the taint of sin, that it had once been part of the devil's kingdom, that what was to supply the free price of our redemption was once enslaved to God's darkest, foulest enemy ? Is it not indeed an endless daily jubilee to us, that the Church has laid upon us as an article of our faith that sweet truth, which the instincts of our devotion had so long made a real part of our belief? Moreover, there is some portion of the Precious Blood which once was Mary's own blood, and wiiich remains still in our Blessed Lord, incredibly exalted by its union with His Divine Person, yet still the same. This portion of Him- self, it is piously believed, has not been allowed to undergo the usual changes of human substance. At this moment in heaven He retains something which once was His jMother's, and which is possibly visible, as such, to the saints and angels. He vouchsafed at Mass to show to St. Ignatius the very part of the Host which had once belonged to the sub- stance of Mary. It may have a distinct and singular beauty in heaven, where by His compassion it may one day be our blessed lot to see it and adore it. But with the exception of this portion of it, the Precious Blood was a growing thing. It increased daily, as He increased in size and age. It was nourished from His Mother's breast. It was fed from the earthly food which He condescended to take. During His three and thirty years it received thousands of increments and augmentations. But each one of those augmentations was assumed directly to His Divine Person. It was not merely diluted by that which had existed before. 28 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. It did not share in the Hypostatic Union in any lower degree. The last drop of Blood made in Him by the laws of human life, perhaps while He was hanging on the Cross, was equally exalted, equally divine, equally adorable, with the first price- less drops which He drew from His Blessed Motlier. Our dearest Lord was full and true man. He was flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone ; and His incomparable Soul, although it was incomparable, was simply and veritably a human soul. Everything in His human substance was so exalted by its union with His Divine Person as to be adorable. Yet is was only His Blood which was to redeem the world ; and it was only His Blood as shed which was to do so, and it was only His blood as shed in death which was to be the price of our redemption. The Blood shed at the Circumcision was adorable. The Blood shed in Gethsemane was adorable. If it be true, as some contemplatives have seen in vision, that He sweated Blood at various times in His Infancy because of His sight of sin and of His Father's anger, that Blood also was adorable. But it was the Blood shed upon the Cross, or at least the Blood shed in the process of dying, which was the ransom of our sins. Tliroughout the whole of the triduo of the passion all His Blood, wherever it had been shed, and wherever it M-as sprinkled, remained assumed to His Divinity, in union with His Divine Person, just as His soulless Body did, and therefore was to be worshipped with divine worship, with the same adoration as tlie living and eternal God. At the Resurrection, when His Precious Blood had been collected by the ministry of the angels, and He united it once more to His Body as He rose, some of it remained unassumed. This perhaps was for the consolation of His IMother, or fur the enriching of the Cliurch with tlio most inestimable of relics. This was the case with the Blood on the veil of Veronica, on tlie holy Winding-sheet, on some portions of THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 29 tlie Cross, and on the Thorns and Nails. But this Ulood, which was not reassumed at the Resurrection, instantly lost its union Avith His Divine Person, ceased to be wliat is strictly called the Precious Blood, lost its right to absolute adoration, and became only an intensely holy relic, to be venerated with a very high Avorship, but not to be worshipped as divine, or adored as the Blood of God. It was no longer part of Himself. But the Blood in the chalice is the Blood of the living Jesus in heaven. It is the Blood shed in the Passion, reassumed at the Resurrection, borne up to heaven in the Ascension, placed at the Right Hand of the Father there in its consummate glory and beautified immortality. Thus it is the very Blood of God ; and it is the Avhole of it, containing that portion which He had originally assumed from Mary. Miraculous Blood is not the Precious Blood. Neither is it like the unassumed Blood of the Passion. For that had once been Precious Blood, and had only ceased to be so through the special will of our Lord, whereby He willed not to reassume it at the Resurrection. The Host has miraculously bled at Mass, to reassure men's faith or to cause a reformation in their lives. It has bled in the hands of Jews and heretics, as if resenting sacrilege, and striking awe into their souls, like the deep fear which fell upon Jerusalem at the Passion. Crucifixes have sweated Blood, to convert sinners, or to portend some public calamities, or to show forth symbolically the ceaseless sympathy of our Blessed Lord with His suffering Church. But this is not Precious Blood, nor has it ever been Precious Blood. It has never lived in our Lord. It is greatly to be venerated, inasmuch as it is a miraculous production of God ; and it appeals especially to the leverence of the faithful, because of its being appointed to represent in figure tlie Precious Blood. If the angel, who passed at midnight over Kgypt to slay the 30 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. first-born, reverenced the blood of the Paschal lamb sprinkled on the door-posts of the Israelites, simply because it was a type of the Blood of Jesus, much more should we reverence the miraculous Blood, which issues from the Host or from the Crucifix, as a higher and a holier thing than the symbolic blood of animals. Kevertheless it is not Precious Blood, nor is it to be adored with divine worship. Perhaps this is enough to say of the doctrine of the Precious Blood. There are many other interesting questions connected with it. But they are hard to understand ; and, although no minutest detail of scholastic theology is other than fresh fuel to our love of God, yet it would not suit either the brevity or the plainness of this Treatise to enter upon them here. How shall we ever raise our love up to the height of the doctrine which we have put forth already ? The Precious Blood is God's daily gift, nay rather we might call it His incessant gift to us. For, if grace is coming to us incessantly, save when we sleep, it comes to us in view of the Precious Blood, and because of it. But who can estimate the wonderf ulness of such a gift 1 It is the Blood of God. It is not the giving to us of new hearts, or of immensely increased powers, or of the ability to work miracles and raise the dead. It is not the bestowing upon us of angelic natures. It is something of far greater price than all this would be. It is the Blood of God. It is the created life of the Uncreated. It is a human fountain opened as it were in the very centre of the Divine Nature. It is a finite thing, with a known origin and an ascertained date, of a price as infinite as the Divine Person who has assumed it. To ua creatures the adorable majesty of the Undivided Trinity is an inexhaustible treasure-house of gifts. They are poured out upon us in the most lavish prodigality, and with the most affecting display of love. They are beautiful beyond compare ; and they are endlessly diversified, yet endlessly THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 31 adapted to the singularities of each heart and soul. Yet what gift do the Divine Persons give us, which has more of Their own sweetness in it, than the Precious Blood? It has in it that yearning and tenderness which belong to the power of the Father, that magnificent prodigality which marks the Avisdom of the Son, and that refreshing fire which characterises the love of the Holy Ghost. It is also a revelation to us of the character of God. Nothing on earth tells us so much of Him, or tells it so plainly and so endearingly. How adorable must be the exactness of His justice, how unattainable the standard of His sanctity, how absorbing the blissful gulfs of His un- created purity, if the Precious Blood is to be the sole fitting ransom for the sins of men, the one divinely chosen satis- faction to His outraged Majesty ! Yet what a strange wisdom in such an astonishing invention, what an unintel- ligible condescension, what a mysterious fondness of creative love ! The more we meditate upon the Precious Blood the more strange does it appear, as a device of infinite love. While we are really getting to understand it more, our understanding of it appears to grow less. When we see a divine work at a distance, its dimensions do not seem so colossal as we find them to be in reality Avhen we come nearer. The Precious Blood is such a wonderful revelation of God that it partakes in a measure of His incomprehensi- bilitj'. But it is also a marvellous revelation of the enormity of sin. Next to a practical knowledge of God, there is nothing which it more concerns us to know and to realise than the exceeding sinfulness of sin. The deeper that knowledge is, the higher will be the fabric of our holiness. Hence a true understanding of the overwhelming guilt and shame of sin is one of God's greatest gifts. But in reahty this revelation of the sinfulness of sin is only another kind of revelation of God. It is by the height of His perfections '?'» J THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. that we measure the depths of sin. Its opposition to Hi3 unspeakable holiness, the amount of its outrage against His glorious justice, and the intensity of His hatred of it, are manifested by the infinity of the sacrifice which He has required. If we try to picture to ourselves what we should have thought of God and sin, if Jesus had not shed His Blood, we shall see what a fountain of heavenly science, what an effulgence of supernatural revelation, the Precious Blood has been to us. No doubt it was partly this power of revelation which made ou^ dearest Lord so impatient to shed His Blood. He longed to make His Father known ; and so to increase His Father's glory. He knew that we must know God in order to love Him, and then that our love of Him would in its turn increase our knowledge of Him. He yearned also with an unutterable love of us ; and this also entered into His Heart as another reason for His atfectionate impatience. At all events, He lias been pleased to reveal Himself to us as impatient to shed His Blood. If habits of meditation and a study of the Gospels have transferred to our souls a true portrait of Jesus, as He was on eartli, this impatience will seem a very striking mystery. There was ordinarily about our Blessed Lord an atmos]:)here of quite imearthly calmness. His human will seemed almost without human activity. It lay still in the lap of the will of God. It was revealed to Mary of Agreda that He never exercised choice, except in the choosing of sufiering. This one disclosure is enough to give us a comj)lete picture of His inward life. Yet there was an eagerness, a semblance of precipitation, a stimulating desire for the shedding of His Blood, which stand alone and apart in the narrative of His thirty-three years. "With desire had He desired to communicate with His chosen few in the IJlessed Sacrifice of the Mass, wherein His Blood is mystically shed. He shed it in that awful THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 33 miraculous reality before He slied it upon Calvary, as if He could not brook the slowness of human cruelty, which did not lay hands upon Him so swiftly as His love desired. He was straitened in Himself by His impatience for His Baptism of Blood: and He bedewed the ground at Gethsemane with those priceless drops, as if He could not even wait one night for the violence of Calvary, It seemed as if the relief and satisfaction, which it was to Him to shed His Blood, were almost an allevi- ation of the bitterness of His Passion. This impatience is in itself a revelation to us of the yearnings of His Sacred Heart. The prodigality, also, with which He shed His Blood, stands alone and apart in His life. He was sparing of His words. He spake seldom, and He spake briefly. The short- ness of His ministry is almost a difficulty to our minds. It was the instinct of His holiness to hide itself. This was one of the communications of His Divine Ifature to His Human. Even His miracles were comparatively few ; and He said that His saints after Him should work greater miracles than His. Yet in the shedding of His Blood He was spendthrift, prodigal, wasteful. As His impatience to shed it represents to us the adorable impetuosity of the Most Holy Trinity to communicate Himself to His creatures, so His prodigality in shedding it shadows forth the exuberant magnificence and liberality of God. During the triduo of His Passion He shed it in all manner of places and in all manner of ways ; and He continued to shed it even after He was dead, as if He could not rest until the last drop had been poured out for the creatures whom He so incomprehensibly loved. Yet, while He thus carelessly, or rather purposely, parted with it, liow He must have loved His Precious Blood ! "What loves are there on earth to be compared with the love of His Divine jS'ature for His Human ^Nature, or the love of His ever-blessed Soul for His Body ? ^Moreover, He must have loved His Blood with a peculiar love, because it was tho c 34 THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. specially appointed ransom of the world. His love of His dearest Mother is the only love which approaches to His love of the Precious Blood ; and, rightly considered, is not the one love enclosed within the other 1 He has continued the same prodigality of His Blood in the Church to this day. He foresaw then that He should do so ; and it was [lart of His love of that fountain of our redemption, that He beheld with exquisite delight its cease- less and abundant flowing through the ages which were yet to come. There is something almost indiscriminate in the generosity of the Precious Blood. It is poured in oceans over the world, bathing more souls than it seems to have been meant for, only that in truth it was meant for all. It appears not to regard the probabilities of its being used, or appreciated, or welcomed. It goes in floods through the seven mighty channels of the Sacraments. It breaks their bounds, as if they could not contain the impetuosity of its torrents. It lies like a superincumbent ocean of sanctifying grace over the Church. It runs over in profuse excess, and irrigates even the deserts which lie outside the Church. It goes to sinners as well as saints. Nay, it even looks as if it had a propension and attraction to sinners more than to other men. It is falling for ever like a copious fiery rain upon the lukewarm. It rests on the souls of hardened apostates, as if it hoped to sink in in time. Its miraculous action in the Church is literally incessant. In the Sacra- ments, in separate graces, in hourly conversions, in multi- l)lied deathbeds, in releases from purgatory every moment, in countless augmentations of grace in countless souls, in far-off indistinguishable preludes and drawings towards the faith, this most dear Blood of Jesus is the manifold life of tlie world. Every ])ulse which beats in it is an intense jubilee to Him. It is for ever setting Him on fire with fresh love of us His creatures. It is for ever filling llim with THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 35 a new and incredible gladness, which we cannot think of without amazement and adoration. Oh that He would give us one spark of that immense love of His Precious Blood, which He Himself is feeling so blissfully this hour in heaven' ! Such is the mystery of the Precious Blood. It makes the poor fallen earth more beautiful than the Paradise of old. Its streams are winding their way everywhere all over the earth. The rivers of Eden are not to be compared to them for fruitfulness. Poets have loved the music of the moun- tain stream, as it tinkled down the hills amidst the stones, or murmured under leafy shades. Scripture speaks of the Voice of God as the voice of many waters. So is it with the Precious Blood. It has a voice which God hears, speaking better things than the blood of Abel, more than restoring to Him again the lost music of His primeval creation. In our ears also does it murmur sweetly, evermore and evermore, in sorrows, in absolutions, in communions, in sermons, and in all holy joys. It will never leave us now. For at last, when it has led us to the brink of heaven, and when, in the boundless far-flashing magnificence, the steadfast splendours and unfathomable depths of the Uncreated joy of God lie out before us, ocean-like and infinite, that Blood will still flow round us, and sing to us beyond angelic skill, with a voice like that of Jesus, which when once heard is never to be forgotten, that word of Him whose Heart's Blood it is, Well done, thou good and faithful servant ! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord ! What is the life in heaven, but an everlasting To Deum before the Face of God ? But there also, as now in our Te Deum upon earth, we shall have a special joy, a special moving of our love, when we call our- selves " redeemed with Precious Blood ; " and, as we do now in church, so there in the innermost courts of our Father's House, we shall only say the words upon our knees, with a separate gladness, and a separate depth of adoration. ( 36 ) CHAPTER II. THE NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. It is very difficult to feel as we ought to do about eternal tilings. "We are surrounded by the sights and sounds of this short early life. "We judge of things, if not by appear- ances, at least by their earthly importance. "We cannot dis- entangle ourselves from the impressions which earth makes xipon us. We are forced to measure things by a standard, which we know to be untrue, but which we are so accus- tomed to, that we cannot even think by any other standard. Eternity is simply a word to us : and it is exceedingly hard to make it more than a word. Thus, when we try to bring home to ourselves or to others the immense importance of eternal things, and the extreme triviality of all temporal things which are not simply made to minister to eternal things, we find ourselves in a difficulty. Jf we speak of them in common words, we convey false ideas. If we use liigh-sounding language and deal in superlatives, a sense of unreality comes upon ourselves, and still more upon our hearers; and we seem to be exaggerating, even when what we say is far below the mark. Time alone enables us in .^ome degree to realise the importance of eternal things. A striking expression may rouse our attention. But eternal things, in order to be fruitful and practical, must grow into us by frequent prayer and long familiarity. Even then we fall far short of the mark. Even then we get false ideas, NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 37 and becoming used to them, are unable to substitute true ones in their place. It is almost impossible for us truly to realise the fact that lifelong pain or exuberant health,. ample riches or bitter poverty, unintermitting success or incessant failure, are matters of perfect unimportance and of absolute indifference, except so far as they concern the salvation of our souls. We recognise the impossibility by seeing how men, who talk and believe rightly, fall far short both of their faith and their words, even when they are acting up to the highest standard in their power. 'We are placed in the same difficulty now, when we want to realise truly the necessity of the Precious Blood. It is more necessary than we can say or think. What would come of being without it is inconceivable by us. When we have said that, we have said all we can say. So, as time alone will make it familiar to us, we must say it in many different ways, and look at it from many different points of view, and repeat it to ourselves as if we were learning a lesson. This will enable us to gain time, and will answer better than big words or unusual metaphors. The most recollected saint and the most thoucrhtful theo- o logian, do what they will, live in the world all day without being able to realise how much, and in what ways, they are indebted to God, receiving from Him, living upon Him, using Him, and immersed in Him, nor how indispensable He is to us. So is it in the spiritual world with Jesus. It is a wonder that He ever came among us. Yet He is simply indispensable to us. We could in no wise do without Him. We want Him at every turn, at every moment. It is the ■wisdom of life, as well as its joy, to be always feeling this great need of Jesus. A true Christian feels that he could no more live for an hour without Jesus, than he could live for an hour without air, or under the water. There is something delightful in this sense of utter dependence upon Jesus. It 38 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. is our only rest, our only liberty in the world. It is the bondage of our imperfection that we cannot be directly and actually thinking of Jesus all day and night. Yet it is astonishing how near we may come to this. Our very sleep at last becomes subject to the thought of Jesus, and saturated with it. It is part of the gladness of growing older, not only that we are thereby drawing nearer to our first sight of Him, but that we feel our dependence upon Him more and more. We have learned more about Him. We have had a longer and more varied experience of Him. Our love of Him has become more of a passion, which, by a little efTort, promises at some not very distant day to be dominant and supreme. The love of Jesus never can be an ungrowing love. It must grow, if it does not die out. In our physical life, as we grow older, we become more sensible to cold and wind, to changes of place and to alterations of the weather. So, as we grow older in our spiritual life, we become more sensitive to the presence of Jesus, to the necessity of Him, and to His indispensable sweetness. A constantly increas- ing sensible love of our dearest Lord is the safest mark of our growth in holiness, and the most tran(iuillising prophecy of our final perseverance. What would the world be without Jesus'? We may perhaps have sometimes made pictures to ourselves of the day of judgment. We may have imagined the storms above and the earthquakes underneath, the sun and the moon darkened, and the stars falling from heaven, the fire raging over the face of the earth, men crying to the mountains and rocks to fall upon them and hide them, and in the masses of the eastern clouds Jesus coming to judge the world. We think it appropriate to add to the picture every feature of physical tumult and desolation, every wildest unchaining of the elements, although doubtless the catastrophe of that day of horrors will follow the grand uniformity of a natural law, NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 39 even amidst the impetuosity of its convulsions. Yet the misery and confusion of earth at tliat day will have less of real horror in it than the earth without Jesus would . have, even though the sun were shining, and the flowers blooming, and the birds singing. An earth without hope or happiness, without love or peace, the past a burden, the present a weariness, the future a shapeless terror, such would the earth be, if by impossibility there were no Jesus. Indeed it is only in such a general way that we can conceive what the world would be without Him. We can make no picture to ourselves of the real horror. His Five Wounds are pleading for ever at the Eight Hand of the Father. They are hold- ing back the divine indignation. They are satisfying the divine justice. They are moving the divine compassion. Even temporal blessings come from them. They are brid- ling the earthquake and the storm, the pestilence and the famine, and a tliousand otlier temporal consequences of sin, which we do not know of, or so much as suspect. Besides this, Jesus is bound up with our innermost lives. He is more to us than the blood in our veins. We know that He is indispensable to us ; but we do not dream how indispen- sable He is. There is not a circumstance of life, in which we could do without Jesus. When sorrow comes upon us, how should we bear it without Him? What feature of consolation is there about the commonest human grief, which is not ministered by faith, or hope, or love 1 We cannot exaggerate the utter moral destitution of a fallen Avorld without redeem- ing grace. With the apostate angels that destitution is simply an eternal hell. Let the child of a few weeks lie like a gathered lily, white, cold, faded, dead, before the eyes of the fond mother who bore it but a while ago : and how blank is the woe in her heart, if the waters of baptism have not passed upon it ! Yet what are those waters, but the 40 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. Blood of Jesus 1 'Now she can sit and think, and be thank- ful even while she is weeping, and there can be smiles through her tears, which, like the rainbows, are signs of God's covenant with His people ; for she has volumes of sweet things to think, aud bright visions in her mind, and the sounds of angelic music in her soul's oar ; and these things are not fancies, but faiths, knowledges, infallible assurances. Even if her child were unbaptized, dismal as the thought is that it can never see God, its eternal destiny is for the sake of Jesus shorn of all the sensible pains and horrors which else would have befallen it. It owes the natural blessedness, which it will one day enjoy, to the merits of our dearest Lord. It is better even for the babes that are not His, that lie Himself was once the Babe of Bethlehem. iSorrow without Christ is not to be endured. Such a lot would be worse than that of the beasts of the field, because the possession of reason would be an additional unhappiness. The same is true of sickness and of pain. What is the mean- ing of pain, except the purification of our soul ? "Who could bear it for years, if there were no significance in it, no future for it, no real work which it was actually occupied in doing] Here also the possession of reason would act to our disadvan- tage; for it would render the patience of beasts impossible to us. The long, pining, languishing sick-bed, with its inter- minable nights and days, its wakeful memories, its keen susceptibilities, its crowded and protracted inward biography, its burdensome epochs of monotony, — what would this be, if we knew not the Son of God, if Jesus never had been man, if His grace of endurance had not actually gone out of His Heart into ours that we might love even while we murmured, and believe most in mercy when it was showing itself least merciful ? In poverty and hardship, in the accesses of temptation, in NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 4r the intemperate ardours of youth or the cynical fatigue of age, in the successive failures of our plans, in the disappoint- ments of our affections, in every crisis and revolution of life, Jesus seems so necessary to us that it appears as if He grew more necessary every year, and were more wanted to-day than He was yesterday, and would be still more urgently wanted on the morrow. But, if He is thus indispensable in life, how much more will He be indispensable in death ? Who could dare to die without Him? What would deatli be, if He had not so strangely and so graciously died Him- self? Yet M'hat is death compared with judgment ? Surely most of all He will be wanted then. Wanted ! Oh it is something more than a want, when so unspeakable a ruin is inevitably before us ! Want is a poor word to use, when the alternative is everlasting woe. Dearest Lord ! the light of the sun and the air of heaven are not so needful to us, as Thou art ; and our happiness, not merely our greatest, but our only, happiness is in this dear necessity ! Nobody is without Jesus in the world. Even the lost in hell are suffering less tlian they should have suffered, because of the ubiquity of His powerful Blood. Yet there are some nations who are so far without Him, as to have no saving knowledge of Him. Alas ! there are still heathen lands in this fair world. There are tribes and nations who worship stocks and stones, who make gods of the unseen devils, wlio tremble before the powers of nature as if they were at onco almighty and malicious, or who live in perpetual fear of the souls of the dead. There are some, whose sweetest social relations are embittered by the terrors and panics of their own false religions ; and the innocent sunshine of delightful climates is not unfrequently polluted by human sacrifices. Yet these people dwell in some of the loveliest portions of man's inheritance. Amidst the savage, sylvan sublimities of the Rocky Mountains, on the eastern declivities of the mag- 42 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. nificeiit Andes, in the glorious gorges of the Himalayas, in the flowery, coral islands of the Pacific, or in those natural Edens laved by the warm seas of the Indian archipelago, human life is made inhuman by the horrors of a false religion. Let us take a picture from the banks of the Quango in the interior of Africa. In speaking of the people, Dr, Living- stone says, " I have often thought in travelling through their land, that it presents pictures of beauty which angels might enjoy. How often have I beheld, in still mornings, scenes the very essence of beauty, and all bathed in a quiet air of delicious warmth ! Yet the occasional soft motion imparted a pleasing sensation of coolness as of a fan. Green grassy meadows, the cattle feeding, the goats browsing, the kids skipping, the groups of herdboys with miniature bows, arrows, and spears ; the women wending their way to the river with watering-pots poised jauntily on their heads ; nien sewing under the shady banians ; and old greyheaded fathers sitting on the ground, with staif in hand, listening to the morning gossip, while others carry trees or branches to repair their hedges ; and all this, flooded with the bright African sunshine, and the birds singing among the branches before the heat of the day has become intense, form pictures which can never be forgotten." * Nevertheless he tells us that they cannot "enjoy their luxurious climate," so com- pletely and habitually do they fancy themselves to be in the remorseless power of the disembodied souls. Around our daily path, on the other hand, are strewn the memorials and blessings of Jesus. There is the morning Mass, and the evening Benediction. Three times a day the Angelus brings afresh its sweet tidings of the Incarnation. Our f;arly meditation has left a picture of Jesus on our souls to last the livelong day. Our beads have to be told, and they too tell of Jesus. When we sink to rest at night, His own * Travels, i>. 441. NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 43 commendation of His Soul upon the Cross prompts the words which come most natural to our lips. Tliink of those poor heathen, wandering Saviour-less over their beautiful lands, — wliat if we were like to them 1 And what, perchance, would they have been if they had had but half our grace ? There are many who call themselves after the name of Christ who are yet outside tlie Church of Clirist. Theirs is in every way a woeful lot. To be so near Jesus, and yet not to be of His blessed fold ; to be within reach of His unsearchable riches, and yet to miss them ; to be so blessed by His neighbourhood, and yet not to be savingly united with Him, — this is indeed a desolation. Their creed is words ; it is not life. They know not the redeeming grace of Jesus rightly. They understand not the mysterious dis- positions of His Sacred Heart. They dis-esteem His hidden Sacraments. They know God only wrongly and partially. Their knowledge is neither light nor love. Everything about Jesus, the nearest accessory of His Church, the faintest vestige of His benediction, the very shadow of His likeness, is of such surpassing importance, that for the least of these things the whole world would be but a paltry price to pay. The gift of being in the true Church is the greatest of all God's gifts, which can be given out of heaven. We cannot exaggerate its value. It is the pearl beyond price. Hence also the woefulness of being out of the Church is not to be told in words. I doubt if it is even to be compassed in thought. "What then, if we had so far lost Jesus, as to be out of His Church ? Unbearable thought ! yet not without some sweetness, as it makes us feel more keenly how indis- pensable He is to us, and what a merciful good-fortune He has given us to enjoy. But even inside the Church there are wandering Cains, impenitent sinners who have gone out from the presence of God and wilfully abide there. They have lived years in 44 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. pin, and. the chains of sinful habits are heavy upon them. They have resisted grace a thousand times, and it looks as if the divine inspirations were weary of whispering to hearts so deaf. Kothing seems to rouse them. They never advert to God at all. Their conversion must be a perfect miracle. They are obdurate. They are living portions of hell, moving up and down the earth. It is only by God's mercy, and. through the merits of Jesus, that we are any better than these obdurate sinners. Yet we rightly thank God, even while we tremble at the possibility, that He has prevented our falling into such a state. What then if we were like to these ? What if we were numbered among the hardened and impenitent? AVhat if we were now even what we ourselves may have been in past years, before the strong arm of the Sacraments was held out to us, and we had the grace to lay hold of it, and let it draw us safely to the shore ? Yet if we were any of these, heathens, or heretics, or obdurate sinners, we should still be far better off than if there were no Jesus in the world ; for all these classes of men are blessed by Jesus, are visited by His grace continually, and are for His sake surrounded by hopeful possibilities of which they them- selves are not aware. How unspeakably dreadful then our life would be without Jesus, when to be a heathen or a heretic is a misery so terrible ! But surely we have said enough to show the necessity of Jesus. Let us look at the world without His Precious Blood. In the early ages of the earth, while the Primitive traditions of Eden were still fresh and strong, and when God was from time to time manifesting Himself in supernatural ways, the «'orld drifted so rapidly from God that its sins began to assume a colossal magnitude. There was a complete confu sion of all moral laws and duties. There was such an audacity in wickedness, that men openly braved God, and threatened to besii'ge heaven. He sent strange judgments NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 45 upon them, but they would not be converted. Scripture represents to us very forcibly by a human expression, the terrific nature of their iniquity. It says that the Eternal repented of having done -what He had eternally decreed to do, repented of having made man. At length the divine justice opened the floodgates of heaven, and destroyed all the dwellers upon earth, except eight persons ; as if the issue of evil could not otherwise be staunched. This is a divine manifestation to us of the nature and character of evil. It multiplies itself. It tends to be gigantic, and to get from under control. It is always growing towards an open rebellion against the majesty of God. Everywhere on the earth the Precious Blood is warring down this evil in detail. Here it is obliterating it : here it is cutting off its past growths, or making its future growth slower or of less dimen- sions. There it is diluting it with grace, or rendering it sterile, or wounding and weakening it, or making it cowardly and cautious. Upon all exhibitions of evil the action of the Precious Blood is incessant. At no time and in no place is it altogether inoperative. Let us see what the world would be like, if the Precious Blood withdrew from this ceaseless war with evil. It is plain that some millions of sins in a day are hindered by the Precious Blood : and this is not merely a hindering of so many individual sins, but it is an immense check upon the momentum of sin. It is also a weakening of habits of sin, and a diminution of the consequences of sin. If then, the action of the Precious Blood were withdrawn from the world, sins would not only increase incalculably in number, but the tyranny of sin would be fearfully augmented, and it would spread among a greater number of people. It would wax so bold that no one would be secure from the sins of others. It would be a constant warfare, or an intolerable vigilance, to preserve property and rights. Falsehood would 46 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. become so universal as almost to dissolve society ; and the homes of domestic life would be turned into the wards either of a prison or a madhouse. We cannot be in the company of an atrocious criminal without some feeling of uneasiness and fear. We should not like to be left alone with him, even if his chains were not unfastened. But, without the Precious Blood, such men Avould abound in the world. They might even become the majority. We know of ourselves, from glimpses God has once or twice given us in life, what incredible possibilities of wickedness we have in our souls. Civilisation increases these possibilities. Education multi- plies and magnifies our powers of sinning. Eefinement adds a fresh malignity. Men would thus become more diabolically and unmixedly bad, until at last earth would be a hell on this side the grave. There would also doubtless be new kinds of sins and worse kinds. Education would provide the novelty, and refinement would carry it into the region of the unnatural. All highly refined and luxurious develop- ments of heathenism have fearfully illustrated this truth. A wicked barbarian is like a beast. His savage passions are violent but intermitting, and his necessities of sin do not appear to grow. Their circle is limited. But a higlily educated sinner, without the restraints of religion, is like a demon. His sins are less confined to himself. They involve others in their misery. They require others to be offered as it were in sacrifice to them. Moreover, education, considered simply as an intellectual cultivation, propagates sin, and makes it more universal The increase of sin, without the prospects which the faith lays open to us, must lead to an increase of despair, and to an increase of it upon a gigantic scale. AVilli despair must come rage, madness, violence, tumult, and bloodshed. Yet from what quarter could we expect relief in this tremendous suffering? We should be imprisoned in our own planet. NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 47 The blue sky above us would be but a dungeon roof. The greensward beneath our feet Avould truly be the slab of our future tomb. Without the Precious Blood there is no intercourse between heaven and earth. Prayer would be useless. Our hapless lot would be irremediable. It has always seemed to me that it will be one of the terrible things in hell, that there are no motives for patience there. We cannot make the best of it. Why should we endure it? Endurance is an effort for a time : but this woe is eternal Perhaps vicissitudes of agony might be a kind of field for patience. But there are no such vicissitudes. Why should we endure then? Simply because we must; and yet in eternal things this is not a sort of necessity which supplies a reasonable ground for patience. So in this imaginary world of rampant sin there would be no motives for patience. For death would be our only seeming relief; and that is only seeming, for death is anything but an eternal sleep. Our impatience would become frenzy ; and, if our constitutions were strong enough to prevent the frenzy from issuing in downright madness, it would grow into hatred of God, Avhich is perhaps already less uncommon than we suppose. An earth, from off which all sense of justice had perished, would indeed be the most disconsolate of homes. The antediluvian earth exhibits only a tendency that way, and the same is true of the worst forms of heathenism. The Precious Blood was always there. Unnamed, unknown, and unsuspected, the Blood of Jesus has alleviated every manifestation of evil which there has ever been, just as it is alleviating at this hour the punishments of hell. What would be our own individual case on such a blighted earth as this ? All our struggles to be better would be simply hopeless. There would be no reason why we should n(jt give oui-selves up to that kind of enjoyment, which our cor- ruption does substantially (ind in sin. The gratification of 48 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. our appetites is sometliing ; and that lies on one side, while on the other side there is absolutely nothing. But we should have the worm of conscience already, even though the flames of hell might yet be some years distant. To feel that we are fools, and yet lack the strength to be wiser, — is not this precisely the maddening thing in madness 1 Yet it would be our normal state under the reproaches of conscience, in a world where there was no Precious Blood. "Whatever relics of moral good we might retain about us would add most sensibly to our wretchedness. Good people, if there were any, would be, as St. Paul speaks, of all men the most miserable : for they would be drawn away from the enjoy- ment of this world, or have their enjoyment of it abated by a sense of guilt and shame ; and there would be no other world to aim at or to work for. To lessen the intensity of our hell without abridging its eternity would hardly be a cogent motive, when the temptations of sin and the allure- ments of sense are so vivid and so strong. "What sort of love could there be, when we could have no respect? Even if flesh and blood made us love each other, what a separation death would be ! "We should com- mit our dead to the ground without a hope. Husband and Avife Avould part with the fearfullest certainties of a reunion more terrible than their separation, ^Mothers would long to look upon their little ones in the arms of death, because their lot would be less woeful than if they lived to ofi"end (!od with their developed reason and intelligent will. The sweetest feelings of our nature would become unnatural, and the most honourable ties be dishonoured. Our best instincts would lead us into our worst dangers. Our hearts would have to Icsarn to beat another way, in order to avoid the dis- mal consequences which our affections would bring upon our- selves and other.-. ]I>it it is needless to go further into these harrowing details. The world of the heart, without the NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 49 Precious Blood, and with an intellectual knowledge of God and His punishments of sin, is too fearful a picture to be drawn with minute fidelity. But how would it fare with the poor in such a world 1 They are God's chosen portion upon earth. He chose poverty Himself, when He came to us. He has left the poor in His place, and they are never to fail from the earth, but to be His representatives there until the doom. But, if it were not for the Precious Blood would any one love them ? "Would any one have a devotion to them, and dedicate his life to merciful ingenuities to alleviate their lot ? If the stream of almsgiving is so insufficient now, Avhat would it be then 1 There would be no softening of the heart by grace : there would be no admission of the obligation to give away in alms a definite portion of our incomes : there would be no desire to expiate sin by munificence to the needy for the love of God. The gospel makes men's hearts large ; and yet even under the gospel the fountain of almsgiving flows scantily and uncertainly. There would be no religious orders devoting themselves with skilful concentration to difrerent acts of spiritual and corporal mercy. Vocation is a blossam to be found only in the gardens of the Precious Blood. But all this is only negative, only an absence of God. Matters would go much further in such a world as we are imagining. Even in countries professing to be Christian, and at least in possession of the knowledge of the gospel, the poo-r grow to be an intolerable burden to the rich. They have to be supported by compulsory taxes ; and they are in other Avays a continual subject of irritated and impatient legislation. Nevertheless, it is due to the Precious Blood that the ]>rinciple of supporting them is acknowledged. From what we read in heathen history, even the history of nations renowned for political wisdom, for philosophical speculation, and for literary and artistic refinement, it would not b« 50 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. extravagant for us to conclude, that if the circumstances of a country were such as to make the numbers of the poor dangerous to the rich, the rich would not scruple to destroy them, while it was yet in their power to do so. Just as men have had in France and England to war down bears and wolves, so would the rich war down the poor, whose clamorous misery and excited despair should threaten them in the enjoyment of their power and their possessions. The numbers of the poor would be thinned by murder, until it should be safe for their masters to reduce them into slavery. The survivors would lead the lives of convicts or of beasts. History, I repeat, shows us that this is by no means an extravagant supposition. Such would be the condition of the world without the Precious Blood, As generations succeeded each other, original sin would go on developing those inexhaustible malignant powers which come from the almost infinite character of evil. Sin would work earth into hell. Men would become devils, devils to others and to themselves. Everything which makes life tolerable, which counteracts any evil, which softens any harshness, which sweetens any bitterness, which causes the machinery of society to work smoothly, or which consoles any sadness, — is simply due to the Precious Blood of Jesus, in heathen as well as Christian lands. It changes the whole position of an offending crea- tion to its Creator. It changes, if we may dare in such a matter to speak of change, the aspect of God's immutable perfections towards His liuman children. It does not work merely in a spiritual sphere. It is not only prolific in temporal blessings, but it is the veritable cause of all temporal blessings whatsoever. We arc all of us every moment sensibly enjoying the benignant influence of the Precious Blood. Yet who thinks of all this? Why is the goodness of God so hidden, so imperceptible, so unsuspected? NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 51 Perhaps because it is so universal and so excessive, that we should hardly be free agents, if it pressed sensibly upon us always. God's goodness is at once the most public of all His attributes, and at the same time the most secret. Has life a sweeter task than to seek it, and to find it out 1 Men woiild be far more happy, if they separated religion less violently from other things. It is both unwise and unloving to put religion into a place by itself, and mark it off with an untrue distinctness from what we call worldly and unspiritual things. Of course there is a distinction, and a most important one, between them ; yet it is easy to make this distinction too rigid, and to carry it too far. Thus we often attribute to nature what is only due to grace ; and we put out of sight the manner and degree in which the blessed mystery of the Incarnation effects all created things. But this mistake is for ever robbing us of hundreds of motives for loving Jesus. AVe know how unspeakably much we owe to Him : but we do not see that it is not much we owe Him, but all, simply and absolutely all. We pass through times and places in life, hardly recognising how the sweetness of Jesus is sweetening the air around us, and penetrating natural things with supernatural blessings. Hence it comes to pass that men make too much of natural goodness. They think too highly of human progress. They exaggerate the moralising powers of civilization and refine- ment, which, apart from grace, are simply tyrannies of the few over the many, or of the public over the individual soul. Meanwhile they underrate the corrupting capabilities of sin, and attribute to unassisted nature many excellences which it only catches, as it were by infection, from the proximity of grace, or by contagion, from the touch of the Church. Even in religious or ecclesiastical matters they incline to measure progress or test vigour, by other standards rather than that of holiness. These men will consider the foregoing picture 52 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. of the world without the Precious Blood as overdrawn and too darkly shaded. They do not believe in the intense malignity of man when drifted from God, and still less are they inclined to grant that cultivation and refinement only intensify still further this malignity. They admit the superior excellence of Christian charity ; but they also think highly of natural philanthropy. But has this philanthropy ever been found, where the indirect influences of the true religion, whether Jewish or Christian, had not penetrated 1 We may admire the Greeks for their exquisite refinement, and the Komans for the wisdom of their political moderation. Yet look at the position of children, of servants, of slaves, and of the poor, under both those systems, and see, if, while extreme refinement only pushed sin to an extremity of foul- ness, the same exquisite culture did not also lead to a social cruelty and an individual selfishness which made life unbear- able to the masses. Philanthropy is but a theft from tlie gospel, or rather a sliadow, not a substance, and as unhelj)ful as shadows are wont to be. Nevertheless, let us take this ])hilanthropy at its word, and see Avhat the world would be like, with philanthropy instead of the Precious Blood. We will take the world as it is, with its present evils. What amount of alleviation can philanthropy bring, suppos- ing there could be such a thing without the example and atmosphere of the gospel ? In llie first place, what could it do for poverty 1 It would be dismayed by the number of the poor, and appalled by the variety and exigency of their needs. All manner of intractable questions would rise up, for the solving of which its philosophy could furnish it with no simple principles. Men would have their own work to do, and their own business to attend to. It is not conceiv- able that mere philanthropy should make the administration of alms and the ministering to the poor a separate profession ; and self-devotion upon any large scale is not to be thought NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 53 of except as a corollarj'' of the doctrine of tlie Cross. Thus, while the ahns to be distributed would necessarily be limited, and the claims almost illimitable, there would be no means of proportioning relief. Unseen poverty is for the most part a worthier thing than the poverty which is seen : but Avho would with patient kindness and instinctive deli- cacy track shamefaced poverty to its obscure retirements'? The loudest beggars would get most, the modest least. The highest virtue aimed at in the distribution of alms, and it is truly a high one, would be justice. Thus it would come to pass that those, who by sin or folly had brought poverty upon themselves, would obtain no relief at all : and so charity would cease to have any power to raise men above their past lives, or elevate them in the scale of moral worth. Eccentricity is a common accompaniment of misery; and that which is eccentric Avould hardly recommend itself to philanthropy, even if it did not seem to be a proof of insin- cerity. Christian charity can only sustain its equanimity by fixing its eyes upon a higher object than the misery which it relieves. What is not done for God in this matter, is done but uncertainly as well as scantily, and soon wearies of the unlovely and exacting poor. It is only the similitude of Jesus which beautifies poverty. Works of mercy are not attractive to hearts untouched by love. Moreover, no slight amount of the beneficence of Christian charity resides in its irregularity. Coming from the impulses of love, it has an ebb and flow which make it like the seeming unevenncss and inequalities of outward providence ; and this, which reason would account as a defect, turns out in practice a more real blessing than the formal equality and periodical punctuality of a merely conscientious and justicedoving benevolence. Philanthropy must have a spliere, a round, a beat. It must of necessity have in it somewhat of the political economist, and somewhat of the policeman. It 54. NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. must never allow individual S3''mpathies to draw off its atten- tion to the public welfare. Its genius must be legislative, rather than impulsive. Sudden misfortunes, a bad harvest, a commercial crisis, a sickly winter, — these things would sadly interfere with the calculations of philanthropy. If the amount of self-sacrifice is so small, when we have the example of our Lord, and the doctrine that alms redeem souls, and the actual obligation under pain of sin to set aside a portion of our incomes for the poor, what would it be if all these motives were withdrawn ? Let us consider bodily pain, and the agency of phil- anthropy in alleviating it. An immense amount of the world's misery consists in bodily pain. There are few things more hard to bear. It is one of our unrealities that we write and speak lightly of it. "VVe think it grand to do so. We tliink to show our manliness. But the truth is, there are few men who could not bear a breaking heart better than an aching limb. There are many points of view from which bodily pain is less easy to boar than mental anguish. It is less intelligible. It appeals less to our reason. If the consolations of moral wisdom are of no great cogency to hearts in sorrow, they are of none at all to those whose nerves are racked with pain. Mental suffering has its peculiar extremities. To the few probably they exceed the extremities of bodily agony ; but in the majority of cases they are less intolerable ; and in all cases most intolerable when they have succeeded in deranging the bodily health, and so added that suffering to their own. Moreover, the excesses of mental anguish, while they visit chiefly the rarer and more sensitive minds, are always of brief duration : whereas it is fearful to tliink of the heights to which bodily torture can rise, and of the time extreme torment can last, Avithout producing either insensibility or death. But what can philanthropy do for bodily pain ? NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 55 Every one, whose lot it is to lead a life of pain, knows too well how little medical science avails to alleviate this par- ticular kind of human suffering. It may do much in the way of prevention. Who knows ? For the pain we might have had, but have not had, is an unknown region. Let us give medical science the benefit of our ignorance. But, as to the pains which we have actually sufTered, how often have they refused to abate one tittle of their severity at the bidding of science ! When they have done so, how slowly have they yielded to the power of remedies, and how often have the remedies themselves brought new pains along with them. The pains, which the human frame has to bear from various ailments, are terrible in their number, their variety, and the horror which attaches to many of them : over this empire, which original sin has created, how feeble and how limited is the jurisdiction of medical science ! Yet what could philanthropy do for bodily pain, except surround it with medical appliances and with physical comforts 1 Let us not underrate the consolation of the large-minded wisdom, the benevolent common-sense, and the peculiar priestly kindness of an intelligent physician. It is very great. Neither let us pretend to make light of the alleviations of an airy room, of a soft bed, of well-prepared food, of a low voice and a noiseless step, and of those attentions which are beforehand with our irritability by divining our wants at the right moment. Nevertheless, when the daily pressure of bodily pain goes on for weeks and months, when all life, which is not illness, is but a vacillating convalescence, what adequate or abiding consolation can we find, except in supernatural things, in the motives of the faith, in union with Jesus, in that secret experimental knowledge of God which makes us at times find chastisement so sweet 1 It is the characteristic of mental sufToring to be for the most part beyond the reach of philanthropy. Every heart 56 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. knows its own bitterness. Tliat part of a mental sorrow, which can be expressed, is generally the part which rankles least. The suffering of it depends mainly on feelings which belong to individual character, feelings which can hardly be stated, and which, if stated, could not be appreciated, even if they Avere not altogether misunderstood, AVho has not often wondered at the almost invariable irritation produced in unhappy persons by set and formal soothing 1 There is a pity in tlie tone of voice which wounds rather than heals. The very composure of features aggravates us by making us feel more vividly the reality of our grief. "\Ve have long since exhausted for ourselves all the available topics of con- solation. iS'ot in gradual procession, but all at once like a lightning's flash, all the motives and wisdoms, which occupy my imsuffering friend an hour to enumerate, were laid hold of, fathomed, and dismissed, by my heart, which sufTering had awakened to a speed and power of sensitiveness quite incredible. Job is not the only person who has been more provoked by his comforters than by his miseries. Even the daily Avear and tear of our hearts in common life cannot be reached by outward consolation, unless that consolation comes from above, and is divine. Philanthropy, with the best intentions, can never get inside the heart. There are sufferings there too deep for anything but religion either to reach or to appreciate ; and such sufferings are neither ex- ceptional or uncommon. There are few men who have not more than one of them. If we take away the great sorrow upon Calvary, how dark and how unbcaral^le a mystery does all sorrow become ! Kindness is sweet, even to the sorrow- ing, because of its intentions : it is not valuable because of its efficacy, except when it is the graceful minister of the Precious Blood. I reckon failure to bo the most universal unhappiness 6n earth. Almost everybody and everything are failures, NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 57 failures in tlieir own estimation, even if tlioy are not so in the estimation of others. Those optimists, wlio always think themselves successful, are few in number, and they for the most part fail in this at least, namely, that they cannot per- suade the rest of the world of their success ; and this is in itself the most provoking of failures. Philanthropy can plainly do nothing here, even if it were inclined to try. But philanthropy is a branch of moral philosophy, and would turn away in disdain from an unhappiness, which it could prove to be unreasonable, even while it acknowledged it to be universal. It is simply true that few men are successful ; and of those few it is rare to find any who are satisfied with their own success. The multitude of men live with a vexatious sense that the promise of their lives remains un- fulfilled. Either outward circumstances have been against them, or they have been misappreciated, or they have got out of their grooves unknowingly, or they have been the victims of injustice. What must all life be but a feverish disappointment, if there be no eternity in view 1 The religious man is the only successful man. Nothing fails with him. Every shaft reaches the mark, if the mark be God. He has wasted no energies. Every hope has been fulfilled beyond his expectations. Every effort has been even disproportionately rewarded. Every means has turned out marvellously to be an end, because it had God in it, who is our single end. In piety, every battle is a victory, simply because it is a battle. The completest defeats have some- what of triumph in them ; for it is a positive triumph to have stood up and fought for God at all. In short, no life is a failure which is lived for God ; and all lives are failures which are lived for any other end. If it is part of any man's disposition to be peculiarly and morbidly sensitive to failure, lie must regard it as an additional motive to be religious. Piety is the only invariable, satisfactory, genuine success. 58 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. If philanthropy turns out to be so unhelpful a thing in the difficulties of life, will it be more helpful at the bed of death 1 Death is the failure of nature. There is no help, then, except in the supernatural. Philanthropy cannot help us to die ourselves ; nor can it take away our sorrow for the deaths of others. "Without religion death is a problem and a terror. It is only by the light of faith, that we see it to be a punishment commuted by divine love into a crown and a reward. The sense of guilt, the uneasiness in darkness, the shrinking from the unknown, the shapeless shadows of an unexplored world, the new panic of the soul, the sensible momentary falling off into an abyss, the inevitable helpless- ness, the frightening transition from a state of change to one of endless fixedness — how is philanthropy to meet such difficulties as these ? Trulj', in the atmosphere of death all lights go out except the lamp of faith. But we have spoken of the actual miseries of life, and the condition we should be in, if we took the consolations of philanthropy instead of those of the Precious Blood. This, however, is in reality not a fair view of the case. Great as the actual miseries of life are, the Precious Blood is continu- ally making them very much less than they otherwise would be. It diminishes poverty by multiplying alms. It lessens the evil of pain, and to some extent even its amount, by the grace of patience and the appliances of tlie supernatural life ; not to speak of miraculous operations, occurring per- haps hourly upon the earth, through the touch of relics, crosses, and other sacred objects. The amount of temporal evil which would otherwise have come upon the earth, but is daily absorbed by the Sacrament of penance and by the virtue of penance, must be enormous. In the case of mental suffering, besides the many indirect alleviations brought to it Ijy the Precious Blood, we must remember the vast world of horrors arising from unabsolved consciences, horrors which NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 59 the Sacraments are annihilating daily. Failure is indeed the rule of human enterprise, and success is the exception. Yet there are numberless counterbalancing blessings Avon by the interest of the Mother of God, by the intercession of the saints, by the intervention of angels, by the Sacrifice of the Mass, and by the sacramental residence of Jesus upon earth, which would not exist but for the Precious Blood. Finally, as to death, whatever light is cast upon it is from the Blood of Jesus. Were it not for Jesus the dark hour would be darkened with an Egyptian darkness. It has something of the glory of a sunset round it now, and the glory is the refulgence of the Saviour's Blood. But, in this world, manner is often a more substantial thing than matter. We often care less for the thing done than for the manner in which it is done, less for the gift than for the way in which the gift is given. Now let us picture to ourselves au imaginary philanthropic city. Its palaces shall be hospitals, hospitals for every form of disease which is known to medical science. Its business shall not be politics, but the administration of benevolent societies. Its rich population shall divide and subdivide itself into endless committees, each of which shall make some human misery its specialty. Its intellect shall be occupied in devis- ing schemes of philanthropy, in inventing new methods and fresh organisations, and in bringing to perfection the police, the order, the comfort, the accommodation, the pliability of existing beneficent institutions. The strangest successes shall be attained with the blind, the deaf and dumb, and the insane. IMoreover, in this city, which the world has never seen, the philanthropy shall be the most genial and good-humoured of all the philanthropies which the world has had the good fortune to see. Yet who that has ever seen the most estimable, easy-going, and conscientious board of Poor Law Guardians can doubt, but that, on the whole, consider- 6o NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. able dryness, stiffness, -woodenness, theoretical pugnacity, benevolent pertinaciousness, vexatious generalisations, and irritable surprise at the unmanageable prejudiced poor, would characterise this philanthropic city? Misery cannot be relieved on rules of distributive justice. Masses will not organise themselves under theories. Hearts will not attain happiness through clear convictions that they ought to be happy. Individual misery has an inveterate habit of dictating its own consolations. The most openhearted bene- factors would be met by suspicion. A needy man can out- wit most committees. Machinery for men gets soon choked up by multitudes, and for the most part blows up and maims its excellent inventors. There are few who can handle a large army ; yet that is easy work compared to the question of the management of the poor. Moreover, when the best men have done their best, there always remains that instinct in the poor, which makes them see only enemies in the rich ; and that instinct is too strong for the collective wisdom of all the philanthropists in the world. I am far from saying that Christian charity is j)erfect, or that the duties of Catholic mercy, whether monastic or secular, leave nothing to be desired. Everywhere the scanti- ness of tlie alms of the rich is the standing grievance of the priest. Everywhere the breadth and activity of human misery are baffling and outrunning the speed and generosity of charity. Nevertheless, I verily believe that one convent of Sisters of Charity, or one house of St. CamiUus, would do more actual, more successful work, in a huge European capi- tal, tlian would be done in tlio whole of such a })hilanthropic city as we have been imagining. Out of tlie love of Jesus comes the love of souls ; and it is just the love of souls which effects that most marvellous of all Christian transformations, the change of philanthropy into charity. Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the side of Jacob's well, or with the NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 6i Magdalen in the pliarisee's house, inspires a spirit totally different from that which animates tlie most benevolent philosopher. It is a spirit of supernatural love, a spirit of imitation of Jesus, a spirit of gentle eagerness and affec- tionate sacrifice, which gives to the exercise of charity a winning sweetness and a nameless charm which are entirely its own. The love of individual souls is purely a Christian thing. No language can describe it to those who do not feel it. If men see it, and do not sympathise with it, they so mistake it that they call it proselytism. Tliey attribute to the basest motives that which comes precisely from the very highest. Indeed from a political or philosophical point of view those things, which are the most Christlike in charity, are the very things which men condemn as mis- chievous, if not immoral. In their view harm is done by treating men as individuals, not as masses. Alms are squandered. Unworthy objects get them. The misery which punishes vice is the object of love, as well as that which comes of innocent misfortune. Charity cares too little about being deceived : it is too impulsive, too irregular, too enthusiastic ; above all, it does not make the tranquillity and well-being of the state its sole or primary object. Evi- dently, then, the manners and gestures of ciiarity in action are wholly different from those of philanthropy in action. The one succeeds with men, and the other does not ; and the success of charity is owing to the spirit which it imbibes from the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ. Here are many words to prove a simple thing ; and a thing which needed no proving. But it brings home to us more forcibly and more in detail the necessity of the Pre- cious Blood. But, after all, the grand necessity of it is the necessity of having our sins forgiven, the necessity of loving above all created things our most dear God and Father. Let us think for a moment. The depth of summer silence 62 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. is all around. Those tall chestnuts stand uji, muffled doAvn to the feet with their heavy mantles of dark foliage, of which not a leaf is stirring. There is no sound of water, no song of bird, no rustling of any creature in the grass. Those banks of white cloud have no perceptible movement. The silence has only been broken for a moment, when the clock struck from the hidden church in the elm-girdled field, and the sound was so softened and stifled with leaves that it seemed almost like some cry natural to the woodland. We do not close our eyes. Yet the quiet of the scene has carried us beyond itself. What are time and earth, beauty and peace, to us 1 What is anything to us, if our sins be not forgiven ? Is not that our one want ? Does not all our happiness come of that one want being satisfied 1 The tliought of its being unsatisfied is not to be endured. Time, so quiet and stationary as this summer noontide, makes us think of eternity, and gives us a shadowy idea of it. Eut the thought of eternity is not to be faced, if our sins be not forgiven. But an eternal ruin — is that a possible thing? Possible ! yes, inevitable, if our sins be not forgiven. The loss of another's soul is a hideous thing to contemplate. It l^roadens as we look at it, until our head gets confused, and God is obscured. It is a possibility we turn away from : what then can Ave do witli the fact? We think of the sorrows and the joys of a soul, of tlio beautiful significance of its life, of its manifold loveliness and generosity, and of all the good that glittered like broken crystals amidst its evil. IIow many persons loved it ! How many lives of others it sweetened and brightened ! How attractive often in its good-humoured carelessness about its duty ! God loved it : it was the idea of Ilis love, an eternal idea. It camo into the world with His love about it like a glory. It swam in the light of Ilis love, as the world swims in radiance day and night. It has gone into darkness. It is a ruin, a NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 63 wreck, a failure, an eternal misery. Sin ! "What is sin that it should do all this ? Why was there any sin ? "Why is sin sin at all? We turn to the majesty of God to learn. Instinctively we lift up our eyes to that noonday sun, and it only blinds us. Sin is sin, because God is God. There is no getting any further in that direction. That soul, some soul, is lost. Wliat we think cannot be put into words. But our own soul ! That soul which is our self 1 Can we by any amount of violence think of U as lost 1 No ! our own perdition is absolutely unthinkable. Hope disables us from thinking it. But we know that it is possible. We sometimes feel the possible verging into the probable. We know how it can be lost, and perceive actual dangers. We know how alone it can avoid being lost ; and in that direc- tion matters do not look satisfactory. But it must not be lost : it shall not be lost : it cannot be lost. The thought of such a thing is madness. See then the tremendous necessity of the Precious Blood. Those heartless chestnut trees ! how they stand stooping over the uncut meadows, brooding in the sunshine, as if there were no problems in the world, no uneasiness in hearts ! They make us angrj-. It is their very stillness which has driven us on these thoughts. It is their very beauty which makes the idea of eternal wretchedness somewhat more intolerable. Yet let us be just to them : they have also driven somewhat further into our souls the understanding of that unutterable necessity of the Precious Blood ! IIow precious is every drop of that dear Blood ? How far more wonderful, than all that the natural world contains, is each one of those miracles which it is working by thou- sands every day ! How would creation be enriched by one drop of it, seeing that infinite creations could not attain to the value of it ; and how wouhl the history of creation be glorified by one manifestation of its omnipotent mercy ! 64 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. What are we to think then of its prodigality ? Yet this prodigality is not a mere magnificence of divine love. It is not simply a divine romance. It would indeed be adorable, if it were only so. But to my mind it is even yet more divine that this prodigality should itself be an absolute necessity, and, therefore, in the majestic calmness and equability of the divine counsels, no prodigality at all. We have thought of the world without the Precious Blood ; let us think of it now with only partial or inter- mitting access to its saving fountains. Man fell, and God's justice was blameless in his fall, God's mercy strove to hinder man from falling. And yet he fell. God did everything for man, short of destroying liis liberty. The very act of creation was a magnificence of mercy. But the creation of man, not in a state of nature, but in a state of grace, w-as a glorious love which could proceed only ivtmi a grandeur as inexhaustible as that of God. INlan fell, and God was justified. Adam's descendants might have found themselves hanging over the dread abyss of eternal woe. They might have felt in themselves a violent propension to evil which only just stopped short of an actual necessity. The prospect before tliem would have been terrible, and yet they would not have one intelligent word to say against it. If their minds were not darkened, they would have seen that not the justice only, but even the love, of God stood unblemished in the matter. Never- theless, how unbearable the prospect ! Earth would be almost worse than hell, because it would be hell without tlie miserable peace of its irrevocable certainty. It would be worse, in the same way that a hopeless struggle is worse tlian the death wliich follows. Truly there might still be liope, but then it would be such a hopeless hope ! Now let us suppose that God in the immensity of His compassion should tell men, in this extremity of wretchedness, that He NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 6 3 would assume their nature, die for them upon a cross, and purchase for them by His Precious Blood the inestimable grace of baptism. They should have another trial given to them. They who had blamed Adam should have a chance of their own. They should be regenerated, spiritually born again by the most stupendous of miracles. They should be justified, and sanctified in their justification. The guilt of original sin should be altogether remitted to them. Not a shadow of it should remain. Even their liability to temporal punishment for that sin in purgatory should be remitted. God's justice should be satisfied in full. But the grace of baptism is far more than this. It restores us to a super- natural standing. It makes us God's adopted children. It does not only rescue us from hell, and leave us to spend an eternity of mere natural blessedness by the streams and among the fruit trees of some terrestrial paradise. It en- titles us to possess and enjoy God for ever. Moreover this Sacrament stores our souls with most mysterious graces. It infuses celestial habits into us, and endows us with those unfathomable wonders, the gifts of the Holy Ghost. No miracle can be more complete, or more instantaneous, or more gratuitous, than the grace of baptism. This, then, should be the work of the Blood of God : and no more than this. Yet would it not seem to men to be an outpouring of the most superabounding love ? Would it not open to the wisest of men new depths in the character of God, and be a new revelation of unsuspected goodness in Him 1 The most ardent and expansive of the angelic intelli- gences might have contemplated God for ages and ages, and yet their unassisted science would never have dreamed of such a mystery as the Incarnation, of such a redemption as the price of the Precious Blood. Yet does it not make us tremble to think of no more grace after baptism 1 ^Munificent IS is that justifying grace, an invention only possible to a E 66 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. goodness whicli is simply infinite, what, with our experience of ourselves and our knowledge of others, would be our dismay if that one glorious access to the Precious Blood were the only one allowed to us 1 Surely a more frequent access to it, while it is on God's side a marvellous extension of a gratuitous indulgence, is on our side nothing less than an impei'ious necessity. Blessed be the inexhaustible compassions of the Most Hifrh, we have incessant access to the Precious Blood. Our seeking of our own interest is made to be the glory of God. Our eager supply of our own needs is counted as an act of sweetest love to Him, the more sweet the more eager it shall be. Yet it is difficult to bring this gracious truth home to ourselves, unless we put imaginary cases of a more restricted use of the Precious Blood. It would be a great thing to be forgiven once more after baptism ; whereas we are being endlessly forgiven ; and with as much facility the thousandth time as we were the first. No greater amount of attrition is needed to make our thousandth absolution valid than was required for our first. It would be a huge mercy if almost all sins were capable of absolution, but some few were reserved as unpardonable after baptism. Even this would seem to the angels a wonderful stretch of the divine forbear- ance. What then must it be to have no sins, and no reiteration of sins, exempted from the jurisdiction of that dear ransom of our souls? At first sight it looks as if such an inveterate compassion lowered the character of God, and impaired the lustre of His exceeding sanctity. In this matter, as in others, God must be loved in order to bo understood. It is the heart which must illuminate the head. Accustomed as we are to the free participation of the Blood of Jesus, how terrible seems the idea of men going about the world, visible portions of hell, because they have com- mitted some sin exempted from absolution ! To have met NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 67 Cain upon his passionate wanderings over the unpeopled earth would have been less terrible ; since we are not forbidden to have hope for him. But here, again, this in- cessant pardoning, this repetition of absolution, this endless sprinkling of our souls with the Precious Blood, — is it not a necessity to our happiness, a necessity to our salvation 1 Astonishing as is the prodigality of the Blood of Jesus, could any conceivable restriction have been endured 1 It would have been something more than a diminution of our privileges : it would have been a bar to our salvation. But let us suppose no sins were exempted from the pardon of the Precious Blood ; but only that that price of our redemption was hard to get. God might have willed that it should only be obtained in Jerusalem, and that dis- tant nations must seek it by long and painful pilgrimage. Of a truth it would be glad tidings to a sinner, that at the eastern end of the Mediterranean there was a mysterious guarded well which contained some of our Saviour's Blood ; the touch of which forgave sin to those who possessed certain inward dispositions, but only forgave it on the spot, in Jerusalem itself. Most willingly would the children of the faith undergo the toilsome pilgrimage, rather than endure the miserable weight of sin. Yet what would happen to the sick, who were too weak to go ; or to the aged, who had delayed too long ; or to the dying, who have nothing before them but despair 1 1 low would it fare with the sorely tempted poor, if absolution cost so dear 1 Shall the rich, or the young, or the robust only be forgiven ? What misery and disturbance also would there be in the social relations of life, while multitudes were evermore impulsively pouring themselves out of their homes in caravans of pilgrimage ! Or what an intolerable inhumanity would prisons be, if the law of man could secure the eternal as well as the temporal ruin of its olienders 1 Still even this single well at Jerusalem 68 NECESSITY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. would be a mercy of God so great, that it would be incre- dible, unimaginable, unless it were revealed. Or, again, we might have to gain access to the Blood of our Redeemer by going through considerable bodily pain, or passing some severe ordeals. No one could complain of this. It would be a mercy beyond the uttermost mercies of human law. Oh does it not make us weep to think then of our own care- lessness, and backwardness, and dilatory, lukewarm indiffer- ence to that most dear Blood which we can have always and everywhere ? "We have come to slight God's mercies because His amazing croodness has made them to be so common. We have not even to seek the Blood of Jesus. It comes to us : it pleads with us : it entreats us to accept it : it com- plains ; it waits ; it knocks ; it cries out to us : it all but forces itself upon our acceptance. But all this mysterious condescension of God is not the needless outburst of an excessive love. Alas for our shame that we should have to say it ! it is a downright necessity for our salvation. Look at the innumerable confessionals of the Church, at the hundreds of daily deathbeds, at the countless retreats of suffering poverty. Is the seeking for the Precious Blood what it ought to bel N"lood of F 82 THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. ' Jesus. It had to save a falling creation, which God had hindered His own omnipotence from saving, because He had conferred upon it the gift of freedom. It is hard to breathe in heights like these. We have climbed the mountains of God's primal decrees, and have penetrated to those first fountains of creation which lie far up in the solitude of eternity. It is difficult to breathe in such places, amid such lonely sublimities, in such divine wildernesses where the features are so unlike those of earthly scenery. Let us then rest a while, and think of our own poor selves. Of what avail to us is all this magnificent election of the Precious Blood, its astonishing relation to the immutable life of God, its intrinsic dignity in the plans of the Creator, and the fearfulness of its resplendent beauty as the sole successful auxiliary of the God of Hosts, unless it is the one joy of our lives that we ourselves are its happy conquest ? "What use is it to us that it looks as if it had rescued the Creator from failure, if it does not ransom us from sin 1 "What does it matter to us that it makes wonder- ful harmony between God's seemingly opposite decrees, if it does not make sweet peace between our Heavenly Father and ourselves 1 The Precious Blood saved God an empire ; and He has given it that empire for its own. It is tlie one thing needful for ourselves, that we should belong to its empire, and be happy beneath its rule. One sin forgiven, one sinful habit brought into subjection, one ruling passion uniformly tamed, one worldliness courageously kept down, — these are more to us than the theological glories of the Precious Blood. Indeed these glories are chiefly glorious to us, in that they tell us more and more of our dear God, that they widen our minds and deepen our hearts to make more room for Him, ami that they heat the furnace of our love seven times hotter tlian it was before. Theology would be a science to be specially impatient with, if it rested only in THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. S3 speculation. To my mind it is the best fuel of devotion, the best fuel of divine love. It catches fire quickest ; it makes least smoke ; it burns longest ; and it throws out most heat while it is burning. It is the best fuel of love, until the soul is raised to high degrees of mystical contem- plation ; and then, as if to show how needful it was still, God infuses theological science even into the ignorant and youthful. If a science tells of God, yet does not make the listener's heart burn within him, it must follow either that the science is no true theology, or that the heart which listens unmoved is stupid and depraved. In a simple and loving heart theology burns like a sacred fire. But, if this is the relation of the Precious Blood to Crea- tion, in what relation does it stand towards the Incarnation 1 This also we must consider. The Incarnation of One of the Three Divine Persons was part of the original idea of Crea- tion. It expresses in God the same mysterious and adorable yearning, which was manifested in His creating angels and men in a state of grace. If there had been no sin, still the Second Person of the Holy Trinity would have been man. Jesus Christ was eternally predestinated to be king of angels and of men, the sovereign of all creation in right of His created nature, even if there had been no fall, and no re- demption. I am repeating what I have said before, but I must do so in order to be clear. As God in His Divine Nature was the Sovereign Lord of all creation, so Jesus in His Created Nature was to be the King of kings and Lord of lords. He would have come and lived amongst us. He would have been born of the same blessed and most dear Mother. But His Bethlehem and His Nazareth and His Jerusalem would have been very different. He would have had no Egypt and no Calvary. He might perchance have dwelt longer with us than Three-and-Thirty years. But all the while, wherever He was, He would have been radiant as 84 THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. on the summit of Mount Thabor, the beauty and the glory streaming out from Him incessantly. He would have had no Passion, no Resurrection ; and perhaps He would not have ascended till the Day of Doom. He would have had the same Sacred Heart, the same Precious Blood. His Blood would have been a living joy to Him, a beauty and a joy to all creation. Perhaps His Blood would still have been the wine of immortality to His elect. It might have been still the Blood of the Eucharist. There midit have been the Sacrament without the Sacrifice. It might have been the chalice of His espousals with the soul. As some theologians say there might have been Communion before the Incarnation for the saints of the old covenant, if God had so willed, much more might it have been so with the impassible and glorious Incarnation, had there been no sin. The Precious Blood might still have been the sacramental fountain of eternal life. But it would not have had the office of ransoming the Avorld from sin. Sin came ; and by its coming it did to the Sacred Humanity of the Incarnate Word what it also did to the uncreated ]\Iajesty of God. It deprived it of its kingdom. It laid waste its empire. It miserably uncrowned it. It left Him only the unfallen tribes of angels to rule over. It threatened to frustrate the Incarna- tion, and to take the chiefest jewel out of His Mother's diadem, the jewel of her sinlessness. As sin had dared to impede divine love in the matter of Creation, so did it dare to hinder divine love in the matter of the Incarnation. In one case it tried to infringe the eternal dominion of God ; in the other case it strove to destroy the kingship of His created nature. As with Creation, so with the Incarnation, it was the Precious Blood which saved the kingdom. A change, as we are obliged to call it, came over its destinies. It should be created pas- sible, and not impassible. It should be endowed with a suf- fering life. It should flow out of a sufToring Heart, and should THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 85 Bustaiii a suffering Body. It should be selected by the Holy Trinity, for reasons inscrutable to us, inscrutable perhaps because we know so little about life, to be the solitary ransom for sin. If we knew the secret of life, we might perhaps know many new things about the Precious Blood. The wisdom of God beheld innumerable fitnesses in this mysterious choice. We can adore them, even though we do not know them. Thus the Precious Blood was to conquer back His kingdom for Jesus, and to secure the jewel of sinlessness for His Mother's diadem. Thus Jesus owed to His Precious Blood, His kincr- dora and His Mother. Yet this Blood, what is it but the own life of Jesus 1 Tlius was sin frustrated without the creature's liberty being forfeited. Thus did darkness war against light; and what came of it was, that, through the Precious Blood, the original idea of Creation was even beautified, without any change in the Unchangeable. These are the relations of the Precious Blood to Creation and the Incarnation. These are its titles of royalty, — that it reinstated the dominion of God, and that it restored the kingdom of Jesus. Let us pause for a moment to make an act of loving reparation to the immutability of God. We have had to speak of Him with the infirmity of human words, as if His plans had failed, or His counsels had been altered. But we must not let any such idea rest on our minds. How it is that He did not change we cannot see : but we know that He did not ; and we adore His blissful immutability. God changes His works without changing His counsels, says St, Augustine. But the change is in creatures, not in Him. Time cannot change Him, because He is eternal : nor place, because He is immense. He cannot change within Himself, because He is perfect. He cannot be changed by anything outside Him, because He is almighty. His life is absolute repose, beatitude, simplicity : and in all this there can be no change. The very necessity, which compels us to speak of 86 THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. God as if He changed, only brings home to us more forcibly the perfection of His tranquillity. Let us then boldly offer to His love these ignorant words : and, while they enable us to understand somewhat of the peculiar office and grandeur of the Precious Blood, let us lovingly adore that unchange- ableness of God, which has lain for all eternity more un- wrinkled than a summer sea, and will lie to all eternity, with almost infinite worlds round about it, and yet have neither current, stream, or pulse, or tide, or wave, with no abyss to hold it and with no shore to bound it, with no shadow from without and no throbbing from within. Now that we have endeavoured to show the place, which the Precious Blood holds in the counsels of God, with refer- ence both to Creation and the Incarnation, let us, before we advance any further, see how the Holy Scriptures speak of it, and how completely their language is in harmony with our theolog}'. "We will content ourselves with putting the texts together, as we find from experience that many persons when a special devotion to the Precious Blood is urged upon them, were not at all aware of the stress which the inspired writings lay upon it, but have rather regarded it as merely a convenient figurative expression to sum up and represent the mysteries of redemption. Then Jesus said to them : Amen, Amen, I say unto you : Except you eat the Flesh of the Son of man, and drink His Blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth My Flesh, and drinketh My Blood, hath everlasting life : and I will raise him up in the last day. For My Flesh is meat indeed, and My Blood is drink indeed. He that eateth My Flesh, and drinketh !My Blood, abideth in Me, and I in him. In Him, says St. Paul, it hath well-pleased the Father, that all fulness should dwell, and through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, making peace through the Blood of His cross, both as to the tilings on earth, and the things THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 87 that are in heaven. Christ, being come an high priest of the good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hand, neither by tlie blood of goats, or of calves, but by His own Blood, entered once into the Holies, having obtained eternal redemption. For, if the blood of goats and of oxen, and the ashes of an heifer being sprinkled, sanctify such as are defiled, to the cleansing of the flesh, how- much more shall the Blood of Christ, who by the Holy Ghost offered Himself unspotted unto God, cleanse our conscience from dead works, to serve the living God? ISTeither was the first testament dedicated without blood ; and almost all things, according to the law, are cleansed with blood ; and without shedding of blood there is no remission. It is necessary therefore that the patterns of heavenly things should be cleansed with these ; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. We have, therefore, brethren, a confidence, in the entering into the Holies by the Blood of Christ, a new and living way which He hath dedicated for us through the veil, that is to say, His I'lesh. We are come to the sprinkling of Blood, which speaketh better than that of Abel. The bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the Holies by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp : wherefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people by His own Blood, suffered without the gate. St. Peter speaks of us as elect, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, unto the sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ. St. John says, The Blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. This is He that came by water and Blood : not by water only, but by water and Blood : and it is the Spirit which testifieth, that Christ is the truth ; and there are Three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these Three are Une : and there are three that give testi- 88 THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. mony on earth, the spirit, and the water, and the Blood ; and these three are one. Tiie Ancients in the Apocalypse sung a new canticle, saying : Thou art Worthy, Lord, to take the book, and to open the seals thereof : because Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God in Thy Blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, and hast made us to our God a kingdom and priests, and we shall reign on the earth. And one of the Ancients answered and said to me : These that are clothed in white robes, who are they? and whence came they? And I said to him, My lord, thou knowest. And he said to me. These are they Avho are come out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb. Therefore they are before the throne of God, and the Lamb, which is in the midst of the throne, shall rule them. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying ; Xow is come salva- tion, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ : because the accuser of our brethren is cast forth, who accused thein before our God day and night ; and they overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb. And I saw heaven opened, and behold ! a white horse : and He that sat upon him was called Faithful and True ; and with justice doth He judge and fight ; and His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on His head were many diadems ; and He had a name written, wliich no man knoweth but Himself ; and He was clothed with a garment sprinkled with Blood ; and His name is called the Word of God : and the armies that are in heaven followed Him on white horses, clothed in fine linen Avhite and clean ; and He shall rule : and He liath on His garment and on His tliigh written, King of kings and Lord of lords. Again St. I'aul says. The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the uoiniiiunion of the Blood of Christ? 'Now in Christ Jesus, you, who some- times were afar olf, are made nigh by the Blood of Christ. THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 89 St. Peter says, "We know that we were redeemed with the Precious Blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and unde- iiled, foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world, but manifested in the last times. St. Paul also speaks of the God of peace, who brought again from the dead the great pastor of the sheep, our Lord Jesus Christ, in the Blood of the everlasting testament. To the clergy of Ephesus St. Paul speaks of the bishops who rule the Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own Blood. To the Romans he speaks of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in His Blood, to the shewing of His justice, for the remission of former sins, through the forbearance of God. Christ died for us : much more therefore, being now justified by His Blood, shall we be saved from wrath through Him. He speaks to the Ephesians of our being predestinated unto the praise of the glory of God's grace, in which He hath graced us in His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption through His Blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of His grace. Similarly to the Colossians he speaks of the Father having delivered us from the power of darkness, and translated ns into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His Blood, . . that in all things He may hold the primacy. St. John in the pre- face of the Apocalypse delivers his message as from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the first-begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth, who hath loved us, and washed us from our sins, in His own Blood, and hath made us a kingdom, and priests to God and His Father, to Him be glory and empire for ever and ever! Amen.* * S. John vi. 54, 56. Col. i. 20. Heb. ii. 14, ix. 7, x. 19, xii. 24, xiii. II. I I'et. i. 2. I John i. 7, v. 6, 8. Apoc. v. 9, vii. 14, xii. ir, xix. 13. I Cor. X. 16. Eph. ii. 13. 1 Pet. i. 19. Heb. xiii. 20. Acts xx. 28, Uom. iii. 25, v. 9. Eph. i. 7. Col. i. 14. Apoc. i. 5. 90 THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. He, who desires to attain to a deep and fervent devotion to the Precious Blood, cannot do so more readily than by taking the foregoing texts of the Holy Scriptures for tlie suhjects of his meditations. They will carry him, and very gently, far down into the mind of God. They will infuse into him a more tender and a more ardent love of the Person of the Eternal Word, while they will also increase his rever- ence for the Sacred Humanity. They, like all Scripture words, will bring forth fruit a thousandfold in his heart, ^leanwhile, with reference to our present train of thought, the reader will observe how frequently and in what a strik- ing way the mention of the Precious Blood is coupled by the Holy Ghost with the idea of kingdom, empire, and primacy, how carefully the eternal determination and foreknowledge of the Precious Blood is kept in sight, how it is put forward as the making of an offering, tlie restoring of his creatures, to God, and finally how it is to St. Peter, our Lord's Vicar upon earth, that we owe the title of Precious as applied to his blaster's Blootl I cannot but believe that many men will feel their devotion to the Precious Blood increased as a special devotion, when they see the wonderful teaching of the Bible on the subject brought into one view. There are of course many ways in which the Precious Blood establishes the empire of Jesus. We may illustrate the matter sufficiently for our purpose by selecting three of them. Conversion, Sanctification, and the Building up of the Church. We shall liave to speak more at length of Con- version in the next chapter. We shall treat therefore very briefly at present of these three things, and chiefly from one point of view, namely, tlie contrast and comparison between them and the act of Creation. We have then to remember that it is the office of the Precious Blood to reconquer for God an empire which sin lias wrested from Him, and to govern and administer this THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. qi empire in proportion as it reconquers it. Its royal rights, while they are the gratuitous appointments of God and flow from His eternal choice, are also based on the double relation of the Precious Blood to Creation and the Incarnation. Its relation to Creation makes it the rightful representative of the Dominion of God. Its relation to the Incarnation makes it the natural vicegerent of the Kingdom of the Sacred Humanity. To us fallen creatures Conversion is the most interesting divine act of which we are able to take intimate cognisance. It is an act going on in the world at all moments, and which must happen to every one of us, either in the waters of baptism, or out of tliem, if we are to be saved. Moreover, it is an act which may be repeated several times in each individual soul. It is to our supernatural being what Crea- tion is to our natural being. The one calls us out of nothing- ness into life ; the other out of darkness into light. The one makes us citizens of earth ; the other citizens of heaven. By the one we are entitled to pi eservation, and all the numer- ous means, appliances, and consequences of life : by the other we have a right to claim sanctification, and all the numerous means, appliances, and consequences of grace. The creation of our souls was the work of an instant. God willed tlie exist- ence of our souls, and exactly of such souls as He had fore- seen and chosen to be our peculiar selves from all eternity. There was no process. He willed and it was done. Where there had been nothingness, there was now a human soul, a soul beautiful in its indestructible simplicity, beautiful in its complicated life. The sum of existences had been swelled by one ; and that one had now to f ultil a strange, difficult, varied, romantic destiny which would go on to be eternal. Conversion, on the other hand, is a process, and often a very long one. Sometimes whole years of life go to its prepara- tion. Ten thousand circumstances, sweetly constrained by 92 THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. the paternal tenderness of God, gradually converge upon some pre-deterrained hour and minute. IMisfortunes are sent to prepare the ground, to plough it up with rude troubles, to soften it with silent weeping, or to break it to pieces through the kindly action of the frost. Happiness comes from God like an angel, to exorcise evil spirits from the mind, the temper, or the heart, and to clear tlie way for more supernatural operations. Accident, or seeming acci- dent, also has its function in this work. Chance books, chance conversations, chance meetings, frequently accelerate the process, and not seldom hurry it at once to its conclusion. If only we could see them, we should discover that the graces, which precede conversion, are for number, variety, strangeness, unexpectedness, and kindliness, among the most wonderful works of God and the most touching ingenuities of His love. Yet while the process of Conversion contrasts with Creation in that it is a process at all, it also resembles it in being really instantaneous. The actual justification of a sinner is the work of an instant. "We see this in the bap- tism of infants. But also in grown-up people the transition from the enmity of God to His friendsliip, from a state of sin to a state of grace, takes place in a moment. One moment, and if the soul left the body, it must perish eter- nally ; another moment, and if sudden death came, salvation Avould be secure. The cliange from the formless abyss of nothingness, to the fresh, complete soul is not more instan- taneous than the justification of a sinner. "Wliat has gone before has been merely preparatory. It might weigh in judgment as ground for abating the severity of punishment; but it could not avail to alter that slate of the suul which death has rendered fixed, certain, and irrevocable. God condescends to put Himself before us as effecting Creation by a word. Ho spoke, and it was done. Let light be, and light was. Thus Creation is eirected by the most THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 93 simple of all agencies, namely, by a single means, and that means not a work, but a mere word. The Precious Blood, on the other hand, effects its creations in Conversion by a multiplicity of means, of means which are often repeated, often varied, often intensified, often newly invented for fresh cases, and often quite peculiar to the individual case. There is nothing in the world which the Precious Blood cannot make a means of grace. Even sin, though it cannot be a means of grace, can be constrained to do the ministries of grace, just as Satan is made the reluctant bondsman of the elect, and is forced to jewel their crowns with the very temptations he has devised for their destruction. !N"everthe- less in this respect also Conversion is like Creation. It is like it in its choice of means, though not like it in its sim- plicity. For the Precious Blood also chooses words for its instruments, as if in honour of that Eternal Word whose human life it is. The Sacraments are its ordinary modes of action, as we shall see later on ; and words are the forms of the Sacraments, without which their peculiar miracles of grace cannot be wrought. Divine words are the chosen instruments of production in the supernatural, as well as in the natural world. It is one of the glories of the act of Creation, that there is no semblance of effort about it. It is the free act of God, but it is hardly an act in the sense in which we commonly use the Avord. It is an act in a much higher sense, a simpler and yet a more efficacious sense. It is an act without effort, without succession, without processes. It is an act such as befits the perfections of the Most High. His power did not rise up, as it were, to do it, nor His Avisdom deliberate about it, nor His love grow to it. Nothing went out of Him to the act, nor was the tranquillity of His life quickened by it. Conversion, on the contrary, has all the look of effort about it. Nay, effort is not the word, I should ratlier have said 94 THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. agony. The Precious Blood working its way out of our Blessed Lord's Body in the sweat of Gethsemane, the slow painful oozings from the Crown of thorns, the rude violence of the sprinkling at the Scourging, the distillation of the Blood along the streets of Jerusalem and up the slope of Calvary, the soaking of His clinging raiment, the four wells dug hy the cruel nails ehbing and flowing with the pulses of His feeble life, the violation of the silent sanctuary of His Dead Heart, to seek for the few drops of that precious treasure that might be left, — all these are parts of the effort of Conversion. IN'either is there less look of effort in the Conversion of each single soul : more with some, and less with others. In most instances the Precious Blood seems to return to the charge again and again. Here it fails, there it succeeds. Now its success is hardly perceptible, now it is manifest, striking, and decisive. The Precious Blood tries to convert every one, just as it was shed for every one. Multi- tudes remain unconverted, and are never won back to the kingdom of God. With them the battle has gone against grace. Even in defeat the Precious Blood triumphs. It gains glory for God ; but it is in ways which in this life we cannot even put ourselves into a position to understand. It can boast also of decisive victories, of great strokes of grace, of hearts carried by storm, of saints made at once out of one heroic deed. But these are not the common cases. With most hearts it strives, and pleads, and toils ; then it seems to intermit its labours, as if it were fatigued ; it retires from the heart as if in despair. Once more it returns to its task, and occupies itself with incredible patience in minutest details, often working underground, and in circuitous ways. Not seldom it retires again, as if now completely baffled ; and, finally, when least expected, it leaps upon its prey from afar, and triumphs as much by the suddenness, as by the impetuosity of the onslaught. THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. 95 Look at that soul, almost the richest booty it ever won in war, the soul of St. Paul. What long years there were of religious antecedents, what a blind generosity of misdirected zeal, what a fidelity to unhelpful ordinances, what a prepara- tion for humility in that cruel persecution of the faithful, what a prelude to apostolic fervour in that furious partisan- ship of the conscientious Pharisee, what an insensible draw- ing nigh to the Gospel through the very perfection of his Judaism ! Tlien follow St. Stephen's prayers, and things are coming to the best with Saul when they are at their very Avorst. Yet Stephen's prayers are not so much attack- ing him as circumventing him. Then the heavens opened at noonday, and the glorified Eedeemer overwhelms him with sudden light, and blinds him, and flings him. to the ground ; and the blood of Stephen, which had cried aloud to the Blood of Jesus, is sweetly avenged by the heart of Paul being cleansed by that atoning Blood, and sent ouc unto all nations to be the special preacher of that Blood Avhich had so glorified itself in his Conversion. Yet, while there is such a seeming contrast between Creation and Con- version in this matter of effort, there is also a close com- parison between them. There is in reality no effort in the operation of the Precious Blood. It only needed to let itself be shed. It only needs now to let itself be outpoured. Its touch is health, life, resurrection, immortality, and glory. Its sole touch is its sole work. It never touches but it changes. It needs but to touch once in order to make its spiritual change complete. If it seems to add, to repeat, to retouch, to deepen, to broaden, to improve on itself, all tliat comes from another part of its character. It is no sign of want of power, no necessary expenditure of artistic labour, no demand of experience, no consequence of more mature reflection. The absence of contrivance is another splendour of the 96 THE EMPIRE OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD. divine act of Creation. No plan was laid. No gradual train of thought reached the grand conclusion. No pro- visions were made, no preparations finished, no materials collected. There were no preliminaries. There was no change in the Ever-blessed Agent. "Without any prelude, and yet with a tranquillity which admitted not of sudden- ness, God created. There was no model for Him to go by. There was no law to constrain Him. He had never done a free act before. This was His first. Yet it affected not His immutability. From all eternity the Son was being born of the Father ; from all eternity the Holy Ghost was proceeding from the Father and the Son. But these were necessary actions. They were tlie inward life of God. Creation was a free act, an act which He was free to do, or to leave undone, without altering His perfections. He acted. He created. The consequences are stupendous. They are endless. They are beyond the comprehension of the highest angels. With all these consequences God Himself is most mysteriously mixed \\\x There is His concurrence witli all created actions and movements, the intricacies of His never-halting providence, the Incarnatiou, the Divine Mother, the Fall, the Precious Blood, the Church, the Sacraments, the Economy of grace, the Doom, the Wail of hell, the Jubilee of heaven. Yet He acted out of His adorable simplicity. He put Himself in no attitude to create. He made no movement. Ho contrived nothing. He spoke, but His utterance broke not the everlasting silence ; and at His voiceless word all was done. There is no calm in the universe like the calmness of the act by which the whole universe Avas created. There was not a stir in the life of God when a niilli