BETHLEHEM
BY

Frederick William Faber, D. D.
PRIEST OF THE ORATORY OF ST. PHILIP NERI

Author

of

"All for Jesus," "The Blessed Sacrament," "Growth in Holiness," "Creator and
Creature," "Foot of the Cross," "Spiritual Conferences,"
"Precious Blood," etc., etc.

Ecce Deus Magnus vincens scientiam nostraml Numerus annorum ejus
inæstimabilis.-JoB xxxvi, 26.

1955

THE PETER REILLY CO.
131 North Thirteenth Street
Philadelphia, Pa.

This book is property of

Rev. Donald J. Sanborn
on loan to this library

2.31·^
F/ /^· ! b

Nihil Obstat

Joseph Λ. M. Quigley

Censor Librorum
Philadelphia?, dic 27 Novembris 1955

Imprimatur
ψ J- F. O’Hara, C.S. C.

Archiepiscopus Philadelphiensis

Philadelphia?, die 28 Novembris 1955

THIS TREATISE
ON

The Sacred Infancy
OF

Our Most Dear and Blessed Redeemer
IS LAID
WITH THE MOST TENDER DEVOTION,

THE MOST HUMBLE CONFIDENCE, AND THE MOST REVERENTIAL
WORSHIP,

AT THE FEET OF

Saint Joseph,

THE SPOUSE OF MARY,

AND THE GREAT FOSTER FATHER OF OUR LORD

PREFATORY EPISTLE
TO THE REVEREND

WILLIAM ANTONY HUTCHISON
PRIEST OF THE LONDON ORATORY

My Dear Father Antony:
Six years ago it seemed natural to me to cast what I had to say
in the way of Preface to “Growth in Holiness” into the shape
of a Prefatory Epistle to you: so much and so affectionately were
you mixed up with the past life and the past experience which
that Book represented. It seems still more natural now that 1
should do the same in the case of "Bethlehem."
For this Book not only represents a past in which you are
as much mixed up as with that other past six years ago, but,
by God’s appointment, it calls up associations which, if they are
less joyous, are on that very account more tender. That Will of
God, which has laid you aside and given you, apparently for life,
only pain and endurance for your portion in the work of his
vineyard, has disappointed many hopes and frustrated many
schemes, which were more dear to us than strangers can ever
understand. Yet I trust that neither of us have, even so much as
in thought, rebelled against it.
Your pilgrimage to the East did not, so God willed it! restore
the health which you had lost in his service, and which, I have
a right to say, was of even more value to me than to yourself.
Neither has it pleased him to give you the strength necessary to
turn your journey to account in a literary way, for the good of
his Church or the illustration of his Word. But much of this
Book is yours. To you is owing all that is correct and accurate
and pictorial about the scenes which it describes. It gives the
Book a sort of sad value to me, to think that it is, with all its

PREFATORY EPISTLE

incompleteness, the only record of your painstaking visit to the
Holy Places.
Moreover, where the imagery bears upon itself so many traces
of the lochs of the Clyde, and the mountains of Argyll, it is
pleasant to me to remember that the images arc common to us
both; for, after your long absence, we were first together in the
kind and hospitable seclusion of Ardencaple.
The various ways of dividing or regarding the Life of our
Blessed Lord have always interested you with a peculiar interest,
and have indeed occupied you not a little. You sent me from the
Holy Land a scheme of narrating His Life, in connection with the
topography of Palestine, Egypt, and the Desert, which I once
fondly hoped you would have been allowed to execute. I will now
tell you what it is that I proposed to myself in this Book.
There are several ways in which we may treat of the mysteries
of the Three-and-Thirty Years of our dearest Lord. We may
look at each of them singly, as it is in itself, full of grace and
beauty, and distinctively unlike any other. Secondly, we may
gather them up into departments, and call them the joyful, the
sorrowful, and the glorious mysteries, the three sets differing thus
from each other, and, in the unity of each set, each mystery having
its own distinctness. Or, thirdly, we may view them as clustering
in constellations, and yet these constellations unities, as the Child­
hood, the Hidden Life, the Public Ministry, the Passion, and the
Risen Life or Great Forty Days. Each of these constellations has
a more perfect unity than the divisions of mysteries according to
their joyous, sorrowful, or glorious character, while at the same
time the single mysteries, which compose the unities, have also a
greater variety. Fourthly, we have much to learn by putting out
of view the separate mysteries, and studying the contrasts and com­
parisons of those five constellations one with another. It is hard
to say whether their analogies or diversities are the most full of
theology and devotion.
The following Treatise is a specimen of the third method of
considering the Thirty-Three Years, united, where it was naturally
suggested, with the fourth. In my own mind, probably from a

PREFATORY EPISTLE

VH

poetical habit of localizing things, 1 have become accustomed to
know those Five Constellations of Mysteries by the names of Beth­
lehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Calvary, and Gennesareth, names which
will be seen at once to be only approximately true, yet sufficiently
so for my purpose.
I must also warn you, and through you my readers, that there
arc parts of the Treatise liable to be misunderstood without the
reading of the whole. In all other respects it will explain itself;
and I confide it to your indulgence and theirs, praying our Blessed
Lord, if he sees fit, to allow it to quicken and brighten the fires
of Christmas in child-like hearts.
I cannot conclude without saying that I feel a kind of un­
seasonableness and incongruity in publishing a Book just now.
The Church is in deep affliction; and devotion to the Church
ought to be nowhere a more absorbing passion than in the hearts
of St. Philip’s sons. The Vicar of Christ is in cruel distress, which
is not the less painful to his children because it is far from being
without parallel in the annals of the Papacy; and those who own
a special obedience to the Saint whom the Church has canonized
as the apostle of Rome, cannot have other than bleeding hearts
when our holy Father is wearing so manifestly his Crown of
Thorns. This Year, blessed be God it is drawing to its close!
has had more than its fair share of sorrow, both within and with­
out. It has been a year strewn with losses, as the wrecks strew
the angry sea. Nay, even at this hour, both to you and to me, and
indeed to our Brothers no less than to ourselves, it is another
tender and most sacred association, that I am writing to you from
this house, and on this Feast of St. Catherine, the Egyptian martyr,
and the dear Saint of Sinai.
Ever, my dear Father Antony,
Most affectionately yours,
Fred. W. Faber,
Arundel Castle,
Feast of S. Catherine,
1860.

CONTENTS
PAGE

Chapter I
The Bosom of the Eternal Father....................................

11

Chapter II
of Mary..............................................................

51

Chapter III
..............................................................

99

The Bosom

The Midnight Cave
The

Chapter IV
First Worshipers............................................................ 150

Chapter V
The Infant God...................................................................... 205

Chapter VI
248
Soul and Body.........................................................
Chapter VII
90g
Calvary Before Its Time.......................................................
Chapter VIII
Heaven Already....................................................................... 549

Chapter IX
The Feet of the Eternal Father......................................... 595

IΛ

Chapter I

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER
Jesus Christ yesterday, and today, and the same foreverl
These words of the apostle express at once the noblest and the
most delightful occupation of our lives. To think, to speak, to
write, perpetually of the grandeurs of Jesus,—what joy on earth is
like it, when we think of what we owe to him, and of the relation
in which we stand to him? Who can weary of it? The subject is
continually growing before our eyes. It draws us on. It is a
science the fascination of which increases the more deeply we pene­
trate into its depths. That which is to be our occupation in
eternity usurps more and more with sweet encroachments the
length and breadth of time. Earth grows into heaven, as we come
to live and breathe in the atmosphere of the Incarnation. Jesus
makes heaven, wherever he is, whether it be in the tabernacle,
or in the heart of the communicant, just as he took the Beatific
Vision with him into limbus when he died, and turned the pensive
shadows of the patriarchs’ home into the full glow of heaven.
But the contemplation of his grandeurs is not merely a joy. It
is something beyond an ennobling occupation. It does an actual
work in our souls, and a work which the grace of perseverance can
make immortal. Rigoleuc has well said, “It is sufficient to look
on Jesus, and to contemplate his perfections and his virtues. The
very view is of itself capable of producing marvelous effects upon
the soul, just as a simple look at the brazen serpent, which Moses
reared in the wilderness, was enough to heal the bite of the
serpents. For every thing in Jesus is not only saintly, but sanctify­
ing also, and imprints itself on the souls which apply themselves to
the consideration of it, if they do so with good dispositions. His
humility makes us humble; his purity purifies us; his poverty,
his patience, his sweetness, and his other virtues imprint them11

12

BETHLEHEM

selves on those who contemplate them. This may take place
without our reflecting at all upon ourselves, but simply by our
viewing these virtues in Jesus with esteem, admiration, respect,
love, and complacency.” · Let it be with this hope that we now
draw nigh to Bethlehem to study the mysteries of his Sacred
Infancy. Love labors under the sweet impossibility of ever com­
prehending the majesty of our dearest Savior. We shall see more
at Bethlehem than we can understand; and even what we cannot
understand will fill us full of love, and it is love which makes us
wise unto salvation.
There are two ways in which we can look at the mysteries of
the Thirty-Three Years. We can either examine each mystery by
itself, as it is revealed to us in the Gospels, or we can arrange the
mysteries in classes, representing certain divisions of our Lord’s
life. Thus, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Calvary, and Gennesareth, will stand for his Infancy, his Hidden Life, his Public
Ministr)', his Passion, and his Risen Life; and each of them will
represent many events under one head. Bethlehem will comprise
the actions and sufferings of twelve years, and contain within itself
the Desert, Egypt, a sojourn at Nazareth, and mysteries, the scene
of which was in Jerusalem. So Nazareth represents eighteen years,
and Galilee three, while Calvary occupies barely three days, and
Gennesareth forty. At the same time the groups of mysteries repre­
sented by these names have each of them a unity of their own.
Hence it comes to pass that we may also contemplate them in
two ways. For instance, we may either study the Passion by taking
its several mysteries in succession, and feeding our souls in each
of them by itself, or we may regard the Passion as in effect one
mystery, complete in itself, and in a certain sense indivisible, and
its different actions and sufferings as various disclosures of its unity.
It is in this last way that I propose to consider our Lord s
Sacred Infancy. We may regard the first twelve years as forming
one mystery, with a character and spirit of its own, quite dis­
tinguishable from the character and spirit of the Hidden Life or
of the Public Ministry. The different subordinate mysteries,
• Rigoletic, L’Honune d'Oraison, p. 35.

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

13

which it contains, have all the same stamp upon them, and are
congenial to each other. There is no need to compare these two
methods of handling our Lord’s mysteries. I have not chosen one
rather than the other, because it was better than the other. They
arc quite distinct. Perhaps the method 1 have selected mingles
more doctrine with our devotion, and so has unconsciously at­
tracted me. It is less common than the other method, and so leads
us into less repetition. Bethlehem is a most beautiful and inviting
subject, well worthy of the exclusive contemplation of a long life.
We have to penetrate into the Bosom of the Eternal Father, and,
shading our eyes as best we can, to behold the everlasting genera­
tion of the Word. The Bosom of Mary has to be to us, as it was
to him, an "ivory Palace" of unspeakable delights. The cave at
Bethlehem and the courts of Sion, the sands of the wilderness and
the green Nile-bank, the bazaars of Heliopolis and the sequestered
fields of Nazareth, angels singing in mid-air, shepherds watching,
the three kings journeying by the star, the piteous cries of the
innocents and the wailing of their inconsolable mothers, Mary and
Joseph, Simeon and Anna, the rustics of Nazareth and the doctors
of Jerusalem,—these have to occupy us in turn, as the scenes or
the actors in ravishing mysteries, which light up for us the deep
places in the character of God, and most intimately concern our­
selves and our own salvation.
The Sacred Infancy is a world of its own. It is not indeed a
creation apart, for none of God's creations are creations apart.
They are parts of a whole. Yet there is this peculiarity in the
world of the Sacred Infancy, that the fountain of all creation rises
there. It is the home of the predestination of Jesus, the land of his
eternal beginnings in the mind of God. It does not commence
with the angelic salutation at Nazareth. It runs up into eternity.
It begins with the beginnings of Jesus, and runs down to the
twelfth year after his temporal generation. The Babe of Bethle­
hem lies in the Bosom of the Father on high, and is the cause
there of all creation, and its model as well as its cause. We cannot
detach his earthly childhood from these heavenly beginnings; for

14

BETHLEHEM

without them it would be unintelligible. It is a beautiful land to
traverse, more wonderful than the regions childhood drcams of
in its inarticulate poetry as lying somewhere beyond the gates of
the golden sunset. The reasons of the Creator for having a créa
tion, the preparations of die Creator for his entry into his own
creation, the unexpected method of his coming, the beauty, spir­
itual, intellectual, and artistical, of his mysterious demeanor, the
Immutable mutably adapting himself to the condition of a weak,
mute, mortal childhood,—these are the wonders that throng our
path through that divine land which we are now venturing to
explore. We shall learn most of them by being simple with them;
and we must be patient and attentive with the difficulties; for
some difficulties there must be. At the least we shall love God a
degree better at the end of our task, and one fresh degree of love
for him is worth many martyrdoms; and with this hope and this
conviction we will begin.
Whom shall we ask to go with us in our journey? Who shall
be to us the doctor of the Sacred Infancy? Surely St. Joseph, so
near to the Infant Jesus, so dear to his sinless Mother 1 If ever
Saint was penetrated with the spirit of Bethlehem, doubtless it
was he. Before the toil of the Public Ministry began, before the
shadows of the Passion had begun to thicken palpably on the
horizon, St. Joseph had finished his vocation. He belonged to
Bethlehem and Nazareth; and God took him when Nazareth was
ending. He lay in the contented tranquillity of Abraham’s bosom,
while Jesus was drinking his cup of sorrow, and Mary was bearing
her broken heart about with her through the crowded mysteries
of those three eventful years. The spirit of the Sacred Infancy is
as it were his whole sanctification. No one can tell us more than
he can of the young Mother’s heart, and of the Heart of the Divine
Child. So we must intreat him to go with us, and to help our
prayers for light, and to surround us with the atmosphere of his
own meek and meditative spirit; and we too must remember his
presence, even when we do not mention him, so that our very
thoughts and words may unawares be impregnated with the odor
of his fragrant soul.

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

15

When the lark mounts up to heaven to sing its morning hymn,
the sounds of labor and the cries of earth, the lowing of the
cattle, the rushing of the waters, and the rustling of the leaves,
grow fainter and fainter as the bird rises in the air. The wind
waves the branches of the trees, but to the bird they wave noise­
lessly. The morning breeze bends the silvery side of the uncut
grass, where its nest lies hid, till the whole field rises and fails
in green and white waves, like the shallows of the sea; but it is
all a silent show. No sound reaches the secluded bird in that region
of still sunshine where he is pouring out those glorious hymns, of
which we catch only either the prelude as he soars or the last pre­
cipitate fragments as he falls to earth from out his shrine of light.
So is it with us in prayer, when we rise above our own wants
or the outcries of our temptations, and soar in self-forgetting
adoration toward the throne of God hidden in light inaccessible.
The sounds of earth go first of all. Then the waving, soundless
show seems fixed, and still, and motionless, and diminished. Next
it melts into a confused faint-colored vision, and soon it lies below
in a blue mist, like land uncertainly descried at sea. Then, last
of all, the very attraction of earth seems gone, and our soul shoots
upward, as if, like fire, its centre was above and not below. Thus
must it be with us now; for we have to rise to the Bosom of the
Eternal Father.
St. Joseph is kneeling by the Child in the Cave of Bethlehem.
Let us draw near, and kneel there with him, and follow his
thoughts afar off. It is but an hour since that Babe was born into
the world, and gladdened Mary’s eyes with the divine consola­
tions of his Face. It is but nine months since he was incarnate in
the inner room at Nazareth. Yet neither Nazareth nor Bethlehem
were his beginnings. He was eternal years old the moment he
was born. Time, which had already lived through’ such long
cycles, and had perhaps endured through huge secular epochs
before the creation of man, was younger by infinite ages than the
Babe of Bethlehem. The creation of the angels, with the beauty
and exultation of their first graces, the orderly worship of their
hierarchies, their mysterious trial, the dreadful fall of one-third

16

BETHLEHEM

of their number, and Michael’s battle with the rebels, lie dim
and remote beyond the furthest mists of human history. Yet the
Babe of Bethlehem is older far than that. Indeed, it was around
him that all angelic history was grouped. He was at once their
Creator and the pattern after which they were created, the fall
of those who fell, and the perseverance of those who stood. Here­
after he will spend a three years’ Ministry in Galilee and among
the towns of Judah and Benjamin; yet, in truth, all the history
of man’s world, from the times of paradise to the hour of the
Immaculate Conception, had been his Ministry. He preached
before the flood. He gave his benediction to the tents of the patri­
archs. He imparted grace, and saved souls, and wrought miracles
in Jewry and in heathendom, for some thousands of years. But
now by the sand-glasses of men he is one hour old.
This one of the heavenly bodies, which we tenant, was created
to be as it were the garden, the Eden, of his Incarnation; and he
adorned it in his love before Adam, the first copy of him, lived
among its Asiatic shades. Perhaps it lay for ages in the glad sun­
shine, solitary, silent, in beautiful desolation, and he took com­
placence in the adorning of it. He loved perchance to see its
beauty ripen, rather than to rise up at once complete. Continents
sank slowly at his will, and new oceans rolled above their mountaintops or elevated steppes. New lands rose out of the bosom of the
deep. Floras of marvellous foliage waved in the sun, and the
wisdom and joy of the Babe of Bethlehem was in them. Faunas,
strange, gigantic, terrible, possessed the waters and the land, of
his fashioning, and for the delight of his glory. The central fires
wrought beautifully and delicately the metals and the gems which
were for the altars of the Babe of Bethlehem, for the tiara of his
Vicar, or the chasubles of his priests. The rocks and marbles
ripened on the planet, as the fruits ripen on a tree; and the Babe,
the Wisdom of the Father, disported himself in the vast operation,
the pacific uniformity, and the magnificent slowness of his own
laws. The grandeur of those huge-leaved trees, the unwieldy life
of those extinct monsters, the loveliness of now sunken lands,

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

were all for him who has just now been born in Bethlehem, and
were not only for him, but were also his own doing.
Bethlehem then was not his first home. We must seek him in
an eternal home, if indeed he be older than the angels, the eldestborn of creatures. The dark cave within and the moonlit slope
without are not like the scenery of his everlasting home. He is
the Eternal Word. He is the first Word ever spoken, and he
was spoken by God, and he is in all things equal to him by whom
he was spoken. He was uttered from eternity, uttered without
place to utter him in, without sound accompanying the utterance,
and the Father who uttered him, or rather who is forever uttering
him, is not prior to the Word he utters. His home has no
scenery, no walls, no shape, no form, no color, no spot which can
be loved with a local love. It is not in space, nor in imaginary
space, nor within the world, nor at the world’s edge, nor beyond
it. It is the Bosom of the Father. It is amid the unlocalized fires
of the Godhead. There, in the white light, inaccessible through
the brilliance of its whiteness, we confusedly discern the magnifi­
cence of a Divine Person. He is unbegotten. He is not a word
whom any one could utter; for there is no one to utter him, and
he is besides adorably unutterable. He is not a Breath breathed
forth of divine love; for there were none whose mutual love
could breathe him forth, and he is besides adorably unproceeding.
The Word expresses him, not because he utters him, but because
he is uttered by him. The Holy Spirit is his fiery Breath, the
Breath of the Father and the Son, coequal with them both, but
with no procession from his blessed Self. This Divine Person,
whom we confusedly discern, is like a Fountain, a fountain of
golden light flowing with uncreated waters. Yet the Fountain is
not a fountain without its waters, and the waters are coeval with
the Fountain. Out of him flows the Son; from him and from his
Word proceeds the Holy Ghost, all coequal, coeternal, consul»stantial. Yet he is the First Person, and gloriously without superi
ority or precedence. He is the sole Fountain of Godhead, yet it
is the very glory of the Fountain that its double streams are co-

18

BETHLEHEM

equal with itself. He in his adorable sublimity is the unsent
inseparable Companion of the Two Divine Persons who are sent
and who send themselves. Him, without figure, we picture to
ourselves amid those unlocalized fires. Him, without images, we
discern in the breathlessness of our far-seeing faith. Him, without
light, we behold in the darkness of his blinding majesty. Him,
in his outstretched immensity, we compass in the fondness of our
adoring love. Him, in his nameless incomprehensibility, we
sweetly understand in the knowledge that we are his sons. His
Bosom, an abyss of unfathomable beauty, the shrine of unruffled
peace, the furnace of the divine beatitude, is the home of the
Babe of Bethlehem, his only native place.
Unbeginning is the life in that paternal Bosom. Yet what do
we mean by unbeginning? It is a thought we cannot think, too
real a reality to be other than a mere word to finite creatures like
ourselves. It is good to try to stretch ourselves to its height and
breadth; for there is no rest equal to the weariness that comes of
striving to embrace the thought of God. In that Bosom the
Divine Person, who is the Babe of Bethlehem, was born, who yet
never began to be bom, and has never done being born. Never
was the Unbegotten Father with the unborn Son. Unbegotten
and eternally begotten! what but faith shall distinguish between
the two?—faith, or the vision which is faith’s crown hereafter?
As there never was a time when the Son was yet unborn, so
can there never be a time when he will cease being born. It is
in eternity, and not in time, that his inexplicable Generation finds
room. He proceeds from the Father by way of generation. He pro­
ceeds from the understanding of the Father. He is the Father’s
understanding of himself, or rather he is produced by it. He is
the expression of all the Father’s perfections. He is not merely
the similitude of the Father, because he is something more. He
is consubstantial with him. Yet he is not identical with the
Father, because he is a distinct Person from him. The Father
knows himself, and by his knowledge of himself the Son is
born amid the splendors of uncreated holiness, amid the in­
conceivable jubilations of the divine perfections. Thus the

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATTIER

19

Generation of the Son is not a mystery done and over. It
was not an event at some remote point before ever time was.
That which is eternal must always be going on. That which can
end must have begun. We must be careful therefore always to
bear in mind that the coequal, coeternal Son is ever being begotten
in the Bosom of the Father, at this moment as well as from forever.
There was no moment when he was not begotten, no moment
when he is not being begotten, no place through all the amplitudes
of omnipresence in which his eternal Generation is not forever
going on, close to us, or far away from us, outside us in outward
space, inside us in the noiseless centre of our souls. Yet nowhere
is the silence broken by that stupendous utterance of the Father.
The omnipresent Word does not so much as vibrate on the air,
when he rushes forth with the irresistible might of the Godhead.
The clangor of his omnipotence is unheard. His all-embracing
light coruscates through the quiet night, and the darkness remains
calm and still, like the plumage of a sleeping bird. Oh, how can
we ever find a home where we are out of sight and hearing of
that Utterance of the Father? See how the spirits of angels and
the blessed souls of men throng in, all day and night, to witness
that eternal utterance, to bathe in its beatific light, and to be en­
chanted with its spiritual sound! This is the true birth of that
Babe of Bethlehem, forever older than the hill on which Bethle­
hem is built, forever younger than the blossom of the wild thyme
which opened its pink eye this morning on the greensward where
the sheep were lying when the angels sang in heaven.
Unutterably blessed is the life within that Bosom of the Father.
For while the Father is forever uttering his eternal Word, he and
the Word are forever breathing forth the Holy Ghost, the un­
created fire of their mutual love and boundless jubilee, a Person
distinct from themselves, yet as it were the bond of the Two,
coequal, coeternal with them, the Term of God, the Limit of
the Illimitable, so that God, penetrating his whole creation, is
not commingled nor confused with things. Such are the im­
mutable necessities of the Divine Life, the inevitable uncreated
productions of its understanding and its will, the twofold pulse

20

BETHLEHEM

of Generation and Procession, the beating Heart of that exhaust­
less sea of Being, with Persons more distinct than any distinctions
among creatures, and yet with a Unity which transcends all the
identities of earth. Who can think of such a sanctuary, and yet not
tremble with excess of love? Who can fix his eye of prayer upon it,
and yet not tremble with excess of fear, lest haply he should miss
of its unending vision? It was in that deep recess of an incalculable
eternity that the Babe of Bethlehem dwelt, before lie vouchsafed
to take visible possession of the Cave of Bethlehem. It is there
that we must seek his beginnings, which began not: it is thence
we must date the pedigree of the Eternal, who has no ancestry:
it is in the light of that darkness that we must search Bethlehem
and Nazareth, Egypt and the Wilderness, to learn the mysteries of
that mortal Childhood of the Eternal Word. Deep in our souls
can we not see that Bosom of the Father? Yet it is beautiful
beyond thought, adorable beyond the stretch of created spirit.
Created things give us no parallels; they furnish us with no images,
the poetry of earth is but a distraction: the definitions of the faith
only catch us as we fall. Yet somehow we see that Bosom of the
Father deep within ourselves, and it is familiar to us as a house­
hold sanctuary. We know that with all its immeasurable capacity
of the divine life it is actually within ourselves, and we hold our
breath, and seem to faint away upon it in sweetest trance of
helpless love.
What manner of life was it which the Word led in the Bosom
of the Father? It was a creatureless life. There were no creatures,
except in the purposes and decrees of the divine mind, and in
the inexhaustible storehouses of the divine wisdom. God had
always determined to create, because he was always love, and
love craved more room, if we may dare so to speak of him who
is infinitely self-sufficient, for the exuberant generosity of his
justice as well as for the incredible fertility of his wisdom. It is
the justice of creation which makes it so loving a mystery. Time
is an old creation, the most ancient of all creations. We look
upon the myriads of many-circled ages, as on a vast ocean, which
stretches out of sight, and is lost in the haze on the horizon when

THF. BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

21

the angels came into being, together with the elements of the
material creation. Yet the furthest age spends its billows on the
shore of time, infinitely short of the creatureless life of the Word
in the Bosom of the Father. The Ages seemed like a help to the
comprehension of the Unbeginning; but they play us false, and
only puzzle us the more. How can a life be otherwise than inde­
scribable to us creatures who live on matter and know by images,
when it was a life without world, without time, without place,
without motion, without fixedness, without parallels, without
comparisons, without similitudes, almost without shadows? Only
in each vast department of creation, in each huge epoch of time,
part of the shadow of that divine life lies for our tracing; yet, like
a village at the mountain-foot, all creation lies in the shadow,
but the shadow of the peak overshoots it, and is cast far beyond.
Its bliss was in its unity; but, unlike created unities, it was free
from the imperfection of solitude. It was the simplicity of one
boundless life in the pacific jubilant companionship of Three
distinct Persons. There was no hierarchy among the Persons;
so that the imperfection of superiority did not attach to the Father
any more than the infirmity of subordination to the Holy Ghost
or to the Son. The distinctness of the Persons only enhanced the
unity of the Godhead, because the Persons were unspeakably
coequal.
It was a life of infinite complacency. God rested in himself.
In himself his infinity was satisfied. The immensity of his own
perfections lay before him, and he traversed them, so to speak,
with his blessed understanding. To know himself infinite by his
infinite knowledge was to be infinitely blissful. The imperfection
of our human words is such, that we cannot speak of God without
seeming to divide him. We must therefore bear the adorable sim­
plicity of God in mind, while we thus discourse of the abysses
of his divine life. It cannot be too often repeated that God
has not many several attributes, nor even one; but he is simply
God. He is not different from his perfections, nor are his perfec
tions, strictly speaking, different from each other. He is himself
infinite perfection in manifold simplicity. He is what he is. a

22

BETHLEHEM

simple act, God. But we may conceive of him as thus reposing
in unutterable tranquillity upon his knowledge of himself. We
may imagine all his perfections to which theology has given cog­
nizable names. Each one of them would give out to us multiplied,
or rather immeasurable, wisdom, many sciences, many divine the­
ologies, many rapturous contemplations. There were oceans of his
own being in whose deeps he could become divinely entranced.
The very comprehension of himself, which no possible creature
could share, was in itself unutterable bliss. There arc also doubt­
less many perfections in him for which our created natures fur­
nish no analogies, and for which therefore we have no name;
and each of these was a fresh infinity for the embrace of his
jubilant self-comprehension. The simplicity of act, which char­
acterized this illimitable self-comprehension, was most of all a
delight beyond our imaginations. Here we must worship, for we
must cease to reason or to portray. Even thought here is silent
and formless. The confused thought of God must fill our vacant
minds. There is more light in the indistinctness of that thought
than in the clearest demonstrations of human science.
The life in the Bosom of the Father was also a life of love, but
of such love as passes our limited comprehension. Even created
love is a very world of delights, and in one or other of its many
departments it is the sunshine of life. It can bear the pressure
of time, and not give way. It can outlive wrong. It is mightier
than death. It can change darkness to light. But, if love has all
these prerogatives among men, where it is so debased by its alliance
with matter, how grand must be its empire among the pure and
intellectual angels! With what spotless fires must it not burn in
their magnificent intelligences! How many nameless species of
transcending love must not those various species of glorious spirits
know! We can hardly picture to ourselves angelic love, except as
something fabulously bright and inexpressibly wonderful. We can
think of the love of a Seraph as all fire, the love of a Cherub
as resplendent light, or the love of a Throne as deepest living
peace, stability and force combined; for it is to the choir of
Thrones that God has given the most special communication of

THF. BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

23

his attribute of eternity. But what can we think of the angelic
life of a thousand loves, so various because of their numbers and
their kinds, so simple because of the uncomplicated excellence of
their keen intelligence? Yet all this is nothing to the love in the
life of God. It is an emanation from it, but infinitely diluted, a
shadow of it, yet not only faint and faithless, but fragmentary
and partial also.
Who can ever dream of the love of the Father and the Son?
Who can see in the depth of his mind, even far down among the
thoughts which lie too deep for words, how that Love proceeds
from them both for evermore? It is a procession of Uncreated
Fire, the outrolling of an Uncreated Ocean, out-rolled beyond
Themselves, yet within the Bosom of the Godhead. It is a
jubilee with none to hear, the soundless thunder of eternal bliss
beating on an immaterial shore. It is, or rather he is, a Divine
Person, coequal with the Father and the Son, a person of un­
imaginable beauty, of incomprehensible sanctity, and of incom­
parable cognizable distinctness from the Other Two, who cease
not, and by necessity cannot cease, from actively breathing him
forth for evermore. What companionship also is there in that
love! What exultation in the completion of the Godhead, which
never was incomplete, never without its complement in that
Third Person, never unlimited, but always inimitably what it is!
Then, while the Holy Ghost is produced by the love of the Father
and the Son, there are the loves of all the Three Divine Persons
for each other, those twice three loves which are the six pulses
of the unity of God. Each Person has two loves, in his love for
the other Two and each of the two loves of each of the Three
Persons is simply a boundless world of life, of wisdom, and of
jubilation. What then must the one love be, the single simple
divine love, which is the union of all these? Could any thing less
adorably profound, less unimaginably capacious than an illim­
itable Trinity of Persons contain the vast waters of such an uncre
ated sea of love, or any thing less omnipotently simple than
the Divine Unity hold without breaking the everlasting pacific
tempests of such tremendous and impetuous love?

24

BETHLEHEM

What words we have heaped together! Yet we may hope
it has not been altogether without ideas. It is one of the thoughts
beneath whose broad shadow all the nations of the earth may
gather and sit musing, that, while the sun is shining, or the moon
silvering the woods, or the noontide being lulled to sleep by its
own fragrances, or the river lapsing down to the sea through tune­
ful groves and over cattle-spotted plains, this wonderful divine
life is going on everywhere, close to us and far off, in our own
country and in other lands, far above the empyrean heaven and
down in our own souls. It is a thought to make us very grave,
that this life of God holds us like a hand, penetrates us like a
sword, and knows nothing of the space which gives us room or
of the time which is flowing above our heads. As it has been
from all eternity, so is it now. It has found no new place. Crea­
tion has not in any way displaced it. It has undergone no modi­
fication. It has acquired nothing, experienced nothing. Its un­
growing magnificence is ever fresh as the dawn, ever new as the
first creation. It is always the same, yet never monotonous,
inimitably outspread beyond all imaginary space, it is full, com­
plete, intense, in every point of space, at every point of time. A
paradise of intellectual delights, a boundless fire of uncreated
loves, an ocean of glad, wise, resistless being, it is glorious in its
liberty, and glorious in the grandeur of its necessities. It is a
silence of amazing colloquies, a sanctuary of restful joys, a life
of omnipotent and omnipresent simplicity, a unity of Three
distinct adorable Persons. Surely all creation is not as a feather
in comparison of this. How little, by the side of this awful
majestic life, are all the schemes of men, how paltry their interests!
How tame and tiresome seem the political revolutions of earth,
the greatest discoveries of science, the most golden epochs of
literature, when we think of this omnipresent life of God! All
human joys appear but like the bursting of the foambells on the
crest of the wave, and all human sorrows but as the sighing of
the night-wind in the distant wood; and yet this vast life of God
compasses both the sorrows and the joys with tranquillest, watchfullest, minutest love. But to us they should seem even smaller

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

25

than they seem to God, because the thought of the Infinite dwarfs
all things in our sight, and ourselves also in our own estimation.
What a wonderful permission to us is the permission to love
God! What then shall we say, when we consider that we our­
selves are to be admitted to the sight and enjoyment of this life
of God? It is the very end for which we were created. Nay, more,
we ourselves have been in some sense, as we shall see presently,
part of that divine life. We have been known and loved, up in
those regions of eternity, in those boundless tracts of uncreated
being, before the birth of time; and it is our very destination to
enter into the joy of that exulting life, to see God as he is, and
to live in endless companionship with him. It is our incredible
bliss to be allowed to add one spark more to the glory, the out­
ward glory, of that blessed majesty. We can be one flash of light­
ning more round the immensity of his throne, one additional
coruscation in the intolerable radiance of the merciful crown
which he vouchsafes to wear. Infinitely little as we are, we are—
and it is our joy of joys to be so—a fresh exercise to him of his
irresponsible sovereignty. We are large enough to catch the light
of his justice, and be another place for it to shine upon. His
mercy can beautifully reflect itself even in the shallows of our
tiny souls. We can lie upon the shore of that exulting life, and
shine and glow and murmur while its bright waters wash over
us forever. Oh, beautiful destiny of men! how happy is our
present, our future how much happier! How happy is our wor­
ship! how happy even the very fear with which we work out a
salvation so magnificent and so divine!
Such was the creatureless life which the Eternal Word lived in
the Bosom of the Father, creatureless yet not creatureless The
Babe of Bethlehem was that Eternal Person, and in some sense
he was eternally the Babe of Bethlehem. From the first, his pre­
destined Humanity entered into that divine life, or lay visibly
upon its surface. In the Fountain of the Godhead, as in a most
pellucid mirror, there was an eternal view of creatures.—creatures
which should one day be, creatures perhaps of endlessly successive
creations, and creatures which were possible to infinite power and

26

BETHLEHEM

inexhaustible wisdom, which yet should never actually be. The
knowledge of creatures, and especially the knowledge of his own
Sacred Humanity, was part of that knowledge by which the Word
was eternally produced. With this eternal view of creatures, it
seems a mystery that the actual creation was so long delayed;
and yet eternity is not time, and there was no delay. But creation
is not eternal; and thus, had the creation of the angels and of
matter taken place millions of ages earlier than it did, in our
manner of speaking, it would truly have been no earlier; or had
it been only last year, it would truly have been no later.
*
In both
cases there would simply have been an immeasurable and unsuccessive eternity before it. Some speak as if God humbled himself
out of the sublimity of his divine life, in order to create. Yet
this can be but a figure of speech. There can be no humility in
God. God could only touch lowliness through the assumption of
a created nature. Rightly considered, it is more honorable even
to the divine self-sufficing life of God to say, what is the truth,
that creation was worthy of him, both the act of creating and the
actual creation. In God, what is free is lower than what is neces­
sary; and creation was a free act outside himself, not a necessary
act inside himself, like the Generation of the Son or the Proces­
sion of the Spirit. He was not by his own nature bound to create,
nor, when he created, was he bound to do so after one fashion
rather than another, or with one degree of perfection rather than
another. Thus the glorious tracts of world-peopled space, and all
the sun-illumined beauty of the little world which we inhabit,
are nothing more than marvellous monuments of the liberty of
God visibly outspread before our eyes. It is part of our own
exultation in being creatures, that we are in ourselves such a mass
of evidences of the wonderful and attractive things which there
are in God.
What then was the first aspect of creation in the divine mind,
if we may use the word “first,” of that which was eternal? There
• The reader must bear in mind that it is so far the received doctrine of the
Church that spirit and matter were created simultaneously, that many theologians
call it temerarious to teach the opposite doctrine since the Lateran Council (in
capite Firmiter).

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

27

may at least be a priority of order, even though there be no
priority of time. There is precedence in decrees, even where there
is not succession. The first aspect of creation, as it lay in the mind
of God, was a created nature assumed to his own uncreated nature
in a Divine Person. In other words, the first sight in creation
was the Babe of Bethlehem. The first step outside of God, the
first standing-point in creation, is the created nature assumed to a
Divine Person. Through this, as it were, lay the passage from
the Creator to creatures. This was the point of union, the junc­
tion between the finite and the Infinite, the creature blending
unconfusedly with the Creator. This first-born creature, this
Sacred Humanity, was not only the primal creature, but it was
also the cause of all other creatures whatsoever. It was the central
creature as well as the first. All others group themselves around
it, and are in relations with it, and draw their significance from it,
and moreover are modelled upon it. Its predestination is the
fountain of all other predestinations. The whole meaning of cre­
ation, equally with the destinies of each individual creature, is
bound up with this created Nature assumed to a Divine Person.
It is the head of creations, angelic, human, or whatsoever other
creation there may ever be. Its position is universal; for it couples
all creations on to God.
But by which of the Three Divine Persons was this created
Nature to be assumed? By the Second Person, the Word, who
had been living everlastingly in the Bosom of the Father the life
we have been attempting to describe. There were doubtless many
reasons why it should be the Second rather than the First or
Third Persons, which are beyond our comprehension or suspi
cion. We probably get but a glance at any divine work, and there
is radiance enough to blind us in the single glance; yet even so
it is no measure of the resplendent light of uncreated wisdom
which is in the least of the doings of the Most High. There are
nevertheless certain conveniences, as theologians have named them,
certain congruities and fitnesses, in the assumption of a created
nature by the Son rather than by the Father or the Holy Ghost,

28

BETHLEHEM

which we may reverently consider, and which disclose to us some­
what more of the adorable life of God.
There is a special connection between the Word and creatures,
independent of the fact of his having assumed a created nature,
and which seems to be part of the reason why he—not the other
Two Persons—should have been the One to assume it. As the
Word, he is the utterance of the Father, the expression of him,
the image of him. Creation is in a finite and created way what
he is infinitely and uncreatedly. Creation is a divine word, an
utterance, an expression, an image of God, faint, feeble, far-off,
external, mutable, free; while the Word is the image of God
within God, consubstantial, eternal, immutable, and necessary.
We venture to think it most probable that all creatures have some
distinct relations to the different Persons of the Holy Trinity,
and that the Trinity of God, as well as his Unity, is impressed on
his creation. Nevertheless, quite apart from this idea, there is a
special connection between the Son and creatures, as between the
inward and the outward Word of God. So that his assumption
of a created nature was the congruous way in which creation ex­
pressed itself. It was the inward Word becoming outward. It was
the eternal generation followed by the temporal generation. If
we might dare to use such an expression, the assumption of a
created nature by the Word was the way in which the creatureless
God vouchsafed to get at creation. He was as it were necessitated
to speak one Word; and that Word, because necessary, could not
be otherwise than coeternal and cosubstantial with himself. In
his love he freely spoke a second word, which was creation, and
that Word, because free, was finite and temporary. It was by his
first Word that he spoke his second Word. For creation is more
than an echo of the eternal generation of the Son, in the reality
of that created nature which the Son has stooped to wear. Thus
there is a congruity in the Son’s assumption of a created nature
which there would not have been, at least in our indistinct vision
of divine things, in a similar assumption by the Father or the
Holy Ghost.
But there is a second congruity, which may be evolved out of

THE BOSOM OF THF. ETERNAL FATHER

29

the first. He is not the Word only; he is the Son also. In his rela­
tion of Son we discern another fitness for his assumption of a
created nature. He is the Son of God by nature, and rational
creatures were to be the sons of God by adoption, through their
justification. It was the end of their creation that they were to be
admitted to share in his filiation. The communication of his Sonship was to be their way into glory. As God appeared as if he
entered into creation through the Person of the Son, so through
the same Person does creation find its way to rest in God. Hence
it was fitting that the Second Person should be the One to assume
a created nature, in order that he might not only be the Son
of God in his divine nature, but also the Son of God in his cre­
ated nature. This second sonship · he obtained through his
created nature, through which also he comes to be the Head of
all God’s adopted sons, the Sonship of his created nature being
the model and the cause and the means of their adoption; though
its own Sonship is natural and not adopted. This is a congruity
founded upon his being the Son as well as the Word.
If we are right in thus imagining that we discern these two
fitnesses in the Person of the Son for the assumption of a created
nature, when, which neither man nor angel could have assumed,
it was to be that a Divine Person should assume a created nature,
we may also venture to behold what looks like an incongruity in
such an assumption taking place by the Father or the Holy Ghost.
By virtue of the assumed nature, the Divine Person assuming it
must become the Son of God.f God’s movement toward creation
• Constat in Christo esse triplicem filiationem, aliam, qua, ut homo, refertur .id
Virginem, et est filius Virginis: aliam sanctificationis naturalis divinx. qua. ut homo,
refertur ad Deum, ut commune toti Trinitati, quae est denominatio proveniens a
natura et entitate divina: et tertiam, qua. ut Deus, refertur ad Patrem primam
Personam Trinitatis, et qua Christus, ut homo, nequit referri, nec esse Filius.
Hurtado, xvii., diff. iii. But see Siuri. De Novissimis. Tract xxxvi. cap. ii. sect. 33
and Bernal's theory of a third kind of filiation, filiatio propria, qui modus filia
tionis medius est inter filiationem naturalem et adoptivam Bernat. De Ineam.,
disp. Ixv. sect. 4. This is to escape Suarez's two orders of natural filiation.

f Si humanitas Christi unita fuisset hypostatice Patri aut Spiritui Sancto, et non
Filio, Christus ut homo esset eodem modo filius naturalis Dei. quia eodem morio
esset natura conjunctus Deo. et habens jus ad vitam aeternam. Hurtado, De hiram..
disp. xvii. diff. iii.

50

BETHLEHEM

is a movement of paternity; creation corresponds to that move­
ment of God by a filial worship and obedience. If a Creator, who
is not also the Father of his creatures, is conceivable, the dispensa­
tion it would betoken would be so entirely different from that
under which the actual creation finds itself, that the hypothesis
would displace all our ideas, and we could hardly arrange matters
in an imaginary world of this sort without doing some dishonor
to those perfections of God which the bare act of creation would
imply. We take for granted, therefore, speaking of what we know
and see, and according to the analogy of present things, that in
virtue of his assumed nature the Person assuming would become
in the most sublime manner the actual Son of God, by nature
rather than by adoption. Now, there would be a manifest incon­
gruity, to our weak eyes at least, in the Father becoming also the
Son, even by means of a created nature.
*
A temporal generation
does not seem suitable to that Divine Person, whose distinct per­
fection is his innascibility. There would appear a sort of violence
in die Unbegotten Father being also the Babe of Bethlehem. So
also in the case of the Holy Ghost, the assumption of a created
nature and a temporal generation would not be in harmony with
the method of his proceeding from the Father and the Son, which
is not a Generation, but a Procession of another sort. It has not
the similitude of a Sonship, even though the Person proceeding
is consubstantial with those from whom, as from one principle,
he eternally proceeds. He is fruitful within the Godhead; for
he is the Breath, the Fire, the Love, the Jubilee of the divine life.
He is fruitful outside; for he is the Giver of gifts, and the Gift
given, the unction and outpouring of the Holy Trinity upon
creation. Marvellous both within and without the Godhead is
his adorable fecundity; but it is of a different sort from that of
the Father and the Son. He produces no Fourth Person in the
Godhead. Now, as there is something incongruous in the First
• Durandus and some others taught that Christ as man is the adopted Son of
Cod, but St. Thomas, with Vasquez, Suarez and others, will not allow of this being
taught. The reception of the Council of Frankfort seems to put it beyond doubt.
Indeed, there is a consent of the great theologians against even saying that the
Humanity was adopted by God.

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

31

Person, as the Unbegotten Fountain of Godhead, from whom all
paternity in heaven and earth is named, assuming a created nature
and becoming the adopted Son of God, so also is there something
unsuitable in the same assumption by the Third Person, who is
unproducing, and who returns back upon the Father and the
Son, the adorable Limit of the Godhead. It seems as if it would
not be at the limit, but in the centre, that God would open on
creation. At least all this is what seems to us, now that we know
things as they actually are. May God forgive us, if we have thought
too boldly! It is such a delight to speak of him, that we are some
times beguiled onward we hardly know how far.
All this has no concern with the prevision of sin and the fall
of man. Indeed, it would be equally consistent with the assump­
tion of an angelic nature by the Person assuming. For we have
spoken hitherto of the assumption of a created nature by one of
the Three Divine Persons in connection with the mystery of cre­
ation generally. The created nature, which he chose, remains for
future consideration. But if, for the moment, we take for granted
his choice of a human nature, and add to it the further considera­
tion of the fall, we come in sight of a fresh congruity in the assump­
tion of the created nature by the Second Person rather than the
First or Third. Adam fell in the lawless search after science. His
sin was a traitorous attempt to force the divine wisdom to give
up the secrets which it chose to conceal. He endeavored to force
his way through the beautiful marvels of God’s own creation into
the counsels of God. He made a disloyal use of his science to
increase that science in spite of God. He leagued with die mighty
fallen intelligence of God’s enemy, in order to learn what God
had forbidden him to know. Now, the Word is the substantial
wisdom of the Father. It is by the Father’s knowledge of himself
that the Word is produced. So, when in the prevision of sin the
Incarnation took its remedial form, it was most suitable that he,
who is the substantial wisdom of the Father, should be the Person
to assume that nature, which now needed redeeming because it
had fallen, and fallen in the unlawful and disobedient pursuit
of divine knowledge.

32

BETHLEHEM

But, although it was the Person of the Son, and not the Person
of the Father or the Holy Spirit, which assumed a created nature,
we must bear in mind that that assumption was the work of the
whole Trinity. It was not more the work of the Person assuming,
than it was of the Two Persons not assuming. Every work, which
God does outside himself, is the work of all the Three Persons
equally, even when there is something special in the mission and
operation of the different Persons. This is hard to understand,
but to believe it is an undoubted necessity of the catholic faith.
It is equally of faith with the doctrine that it was the Son, and
not the Father or the Holy Ghost, who assumed a created nature.
It seems hard to say that the Incarnation is not more the work of
the Second Person than it is of the First or the Third; yet we
must cling most jealously to this faith, or we shall throw all divine
truth into hopeless confusion. The Holy Trinity acts as One
God, even when creatures may come into special relations with
One of the Divine Persons. The doctrine of mission is not at
variance with the unity and coequality in the Godhead. Neither
must we listen to some of the older theologians, who held that the
Father and the Holy Ghost are in the Sacred Humanity of the
Word merely by essence, presence, and power, as they are in all
creatures. On the contrary, the Other Divine Persons are very
specially in the Sacred Humanity, by a most intimate connection
and concomitance, though not by the intrinsic force of the In­
carnation, just as the Soul and Divinity of our Lord are in the
Blessed Sacrament by concomitance, and not by the force of the
words of consecration. The very fact that the Divine Essence
dwells in a peculiar way in the Sacred Humanity involves a
peculiar indwelling of the Father and the Holy Ghost, because
the Divine Essence is one. Nevertheless we may have special
feelings, not feelings of comparison or of preference or of distinc­
tion, yet special feelings toward the One Person who was actually
incarnate; and we may base our devotions on such feelings, without
any fear of deflecting from the analogy of the faith. Piety must of
necessity have its special feelings toward Each of the Three Divine
Persons, which feelings flow from their personal distinctions; and

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

33

in the same way their missions to creatures, and the absence of
all mission in the Father, are the ground for similar and still more
special feelings. Still more shall we feel this, when we remember
what has been already said, that the Second Person was incarnate
precisely because he was the Second Person. This is difficult doc­
trine. It would even be dry, if doctrine could be dry. But we
must bear with a few difficulties at first. They will make what
follows easier, and they will illuminate many beauties, which
except by their light we should either never see, or see only as
a confused and dazzling indistinctness.
Thus the predestined created nature of the World lay ever­
lastingly in the vast Bosom of the Father. It was a human nature
eternally chosen with a distinct and significant predilection. It
was the first creature. It is he who in his assumed nature we
call Jesus. All angels, men, animals, and matter were made because
of him and for him simply. He is the sole reason of the existence
of every created thing, the sole interpretation of them all, the sole
rule and measure of every external work of God. It is in the
light of this predestination of Jesus that we must regard all life,
all science, all history, all the grandeurs of angels, all the destinies
of men, all the beautiful geography of this variegated planet­
garden, all the problematical possibilities of world-crowded space.
Our own little tiny life, our own petty orbit, like the walk of an
insect on a leaf, lies in the soft radiance of the predestination of
Jesus, as in a beautifying sunset, and has a sweet meaning there,
and is wellnigh infinitely dear to God, who clothes it with an
importance to himself which it is the hardest of all mysteries to
understand, because it is the most incredible of loves.
Last of all, there was a time at which this eternal counsel of
God was to take effect, and to become actual, as we creatures speak,
actual outside his own divine mind. Why the Babe of Bethlehem
was to come, and came, when he did, and not before, why so
early, and why so late, it is beyond our power to say. Many
reverent and lawful guesses have been made: but we pass them
all over, as plainly below the majesty of the occasion, and the
sublimity of the decree which they profess to explain. But God's

34

BETHLEHEM

love of his creatures so often condescends to wear the look of im­
patience, that we are not surprised when theologians tell us, after
our own human way of speaking, that the Word impatiently an­
ticipated his time through the attraction of the purity of Mary.
Oh, how like God always, patient for so long, and then seemingly
so impatient and sudden at the last! But is it not always so with
grace? There is a kind of suddenness in its most deliberate opera­
tions, which recommends itself only to a spiritual discernment.
It is thus conversions come. It is thus vocations ripen. God is
always taking us unawares when he means love, while justice on
the other hand, gives long notice and makes noisy preparations,
as if it magnified itself by its inseparable accompaniments of mercy.
The occupation of God has been from all eternity what it is
now, and will ever be, his own blessed Self. He is bounded as it
were by that blissful infinity. His life turns upon it. His mag­
nificence consists in it. His necessary actions rise within it, and
perpetuate themselves there for evermore. He dwells in himself,
and is his own eternity. But when we think of him as from all
eternity our Creator, in design even when not yet in fact, it
comes to us almost unconsciously to picture him to ourselves as
greatly occupied in choosing. From this point of view, choice
seems almost his principal occupation. He is electing, distinguish­
ing, preferring.
*
Even when in our own thoughts we give the
amplest room to his foresight, we cannot obliterate the view of
his choosing, electing, and preferring. We cannot even bring our­
selves to think that he was bound to create the best kind of world,
or to do the best with it when created. We cannot bring the
shadow of necessity near God, when we look at him at work outside
himself. His blissful necessities lie within the Most Holy Trinity.
Outside of himself all is uncontrollable freedom, the freedom of
a boundless wisdom which is also boundless power, of an infinite
justice which is indistinguishable from infinite love. In like man­
ner, when we meditate on the life of the Word who was to assume
• Mary of Agreda says our Lord revealed to her that he never exercised the
act of choice but once, and that was when he chose suffering. Perhaps he refrained
his Human Nature from it as from something belonging peculiarly to God. What
a grand spiritual life might be based on this one thoughtl

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

35

a created nature, we conceive of him as making choice of many
things, as he lay in the Bosom of the Father. He lived a life of
elections; and every one of his elections most nearly and affection­
ately concerns ourselves, while it is also based on nothing less
than his own infinite perfections; and all these elections are eternal.
His first choice was of his nature. Countless possible rational
natures lay before him in the clear landscape of his wisdom.
They must all have had attractions and congruities, inasmuch
as they were the ideas of his own divine mind. He had to choose
amongst them, and to found his choice on reasons of infinite
beauty and unerring wisdom. We dare not attribute a causeless
predilection to God, though his predilections may be unaccount­
able to us. Especially he had to compare, only that comparison
implies too much of a process for infinite wisdom, the natures of
angels and of men, and perhaps other existing rational natures
also. How much depended upon this choicel The whole history
of creation will simply flow out of it. The reasons seem on the
side of his assuming an angelic nature. It is higher, and therefore
nearer to him. It is much more magnificent, and therefore more
suitable to him. It is purely spiritual, and we may conceive a
Divine Person to abhor the contact of matter. The Church ex­
pressly thanks him for not abhorring the virginal bosom of his
sinless Mother. If we look at his compassion, we shall remember
that the angels had fallen no less than man, and that the human
race could be stopped with Adam and Eve, whereas one-third
of the multitudinous angels had already fallen, or were actually
falling, into the abyss, in the sure prevision of the Most High.
The angels also love him better than men. They seem to love
him more in fact, as well as to have greater powers of loving him.
Yet it is he, who in the flesh seemed to love John more than
Peter, though Peter loved him more than John. He chose human
nature for his assumption, rather than angelical, and he chose it
with the unerring choice of God. A thousand sciences lay deep
within that choice; and it is only the knowledge of the character
of God, which that choice has given us, that enables us to con
jecture any ground for the choice, while in our estimation all

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BETHLEHEM

the reasons would else have seemed against it. There was an ex­
tremity of condescension in his choice of a human nature, which
better satisfies the divine perfections.
*
By the lowness of his
descent he gained more of what he could not have as God; and it
appears as if no additional degree of humiliation was of little
consequence in his sight. He got deeper down into his own cre­
ation by this choice, and came nearer to the edge of that nothing­
ness which is as it were the antipodes of God. If we could con
ceive of a moment in which that choice was not yet made, but in
which it was at the very point of being made, how should we
not feel our own destinies trembling in the balancel All that
makes this life endurable to us, all that mellows the past or gilds
the future, the whole vista of the endless life before us,—all this,
and much more about us that we know not of, was involved in
that eternal choice of the nature to be assumed by the Person of
the Eternal Word. That choice is the rudder which is still at this
moment steering both our time and our eternity. Happy are we,
beyond all angels, to be of the family whose nature was chosen
for himself by the Eternal Word. This is one of those happinesses
which make real unhappiness so impossible.
When we enumerate all these choices of the Word in the
Father’s Bosom, we do not forget that, as they were eternal, they
were also unsuccessive. But as we must name them in some order,
we arrange them as they would come according to our notions of
things. His nature chosen, and that nature human, his next choice
would be of his blessed Soul. Perhaps no two souls of men are
alike. The products of grace in each soul are as various as the
productions of the different soils of earth. The variety of the
saints is one of the most glorious varieties on earth. Thus count­
less beautiful souls, radiant in their vast capabilities of super­
natural holiness, exulting in the range and completeness of thennatural powers, arrayed in spiritual beauty of the most enticing
purity, hung before his eye, like shining orbs, in the dark abyss
of nothingness. Of all possible souls he had his choice; and he
had to choose on which could bear to dwell in the furnace of the
• See B. Sacrament. Book I, sect. 1.

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

37

Hypostatic Union, could light up all heaven, in lieu of sun and
moon, by its created sanctity, and could hold an ocean of grace
which was only not absolutely illimitable. With what joy must
not such a choice have been accompanied! With what unspeak
able complacency must he not have rested not only in the wisdom
of his choice, but also in the precious object of it!
He chose likewise the Body in which he was to be incarnate.
The pure Flesh and the precious Blood, which were to be assumed
by a Divine Person, and then remain forever in worshipful union
with him, were worthy objects of his eternal choice. He chose
such a temperament of Body as should be able to endure the
floods of glory he would pour into it. He chose one whose extreme
sensitiveness might almost aid, rather than impede, the delicate
operations of his magnificent Soul. He chose one whose beautiful
texture caused it to be hereafter such an instrument of suffering
as has never existed elsewhere amid all the immense capabilities
of created life. His future human lineaments were of his own
designing. It was a joy to him from all eternity to read the loveli­
ness of their varying expression. His bright eye was a new
eloquence which spoke to him even in that profound divine life
of eternity. The accents of his voice were even then a perpetual
soundless music in his ear. His likeness to his Mother was one of
his eternal joys. Thus did the heavenly Artist portray from all
eternity, upon the darkness of the uncreated waste, that beauty
of form and feature which was to ravish angels and men with an
exceeding and unchanging Love. Was he not himself delighted
with his work?
He chose his Mother also. When we reflect upon the joy which
it is to ourselves to think of Mary, to brood upon her super
natural loveliness, and to study the greatness of her gifts and the
surpassing purity of her virtues, we shall get such faint idea, as
lies within our compass, of the unspeakable gladness which it must
have been to the Word to have chosen Mary, and to have created
her through that very choice. He must choose a Mother who shall
be worthy of being the Mother of God, a Mother suitable to
that tremendous mystery of the Hypostatic Union, a Mother fitted

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BETHLEHEM

to minister that marvellous Body out of her own heart's blood,
and to be herself for months the tabernacle of that most heavenly
Soul. All God's works are in proportion. When he appoints to
an office, his appointment is marked by extreme fitness. He ele­
vates nature to the level of his own purposes. He enables it to
compass the most supernatural destinies by fulfilling it with the
most incredible graces. There was no accident about his choice
of Mary. She was not merely the holiest of living women on earth
at the time when he resolved to come. She was not a mere tool, an
instrument for the passing necessity of the hour, to be used, and
flung aside, and lie indistinguishable in the crowd, when her use
was gone. This is not God’s way. He docs not deal thus with the
least of his elect. His whole revelation of himself renders such a
supposition as impossible as it would be profane. There is nothing
accidental or of mere ornament in the works of the Most High.
His operations have no excrescences, no extrinsic appendages. God
does not use his creatures. They enter into his purposes, and are an
integral part of them; and every part of a divine work is one of
that work’s perfections. This is a characteristic of divine working,
that everj' thing about it is a special perfection. Mary thus lies
high up in the very fountain-head of creation. She was the choice
of God himself, and he chose her to be his Mother. She was the
gate by which the Creator entered into his own creation. She
ministered to him in a way and for an end unlike those of any
other creature whatsoever. What then must have been her beauty,
what her holiness, what her privileges, what her exaltation! To
depreciate them is to depreciate the wisdom and the goodness of
God. When we have said that Mary was the Word’s eternal choice,
we have said that which already involves all the doctrine of the
Church about her, and all the homage of Christians to her. When
we consider the Word’s desire to assume a created nature, when
we ponder his choice of a human nature, when we reflect on his
further choice of his Soul and Body, and add to all these con­
siderations the remembrance of his immense love, we can see how
his goodness would exult in the choice of his Mother, whom to
love exceedingly was to become one of his chiefest graces, one of

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

39

the greatest of all his human perfections. All possible creatures
were before him, out of which to choose the creature that was to
come nearest him, the creature that was to love him, and to have
a natural right to love him, best of all, and the creature whom
duty as well as preference was to bind him to love with the intenscst love. Then, out of all he chose Mary. What more can be
said? She fulfilled his idea, or rather she did not so much suit his
idea, but she was herself the idea, and his idea of her was the
cause of her creation. The whole theology of Mary lies in this
eternal and efficacious choice of her in the Bosom of the Father.
The Word’s next choice was of the place where he and his
Mother were to dwell, that part of the material creation which
was to be the scene of his assumption of a created nature, and
of a nature itself partially material. It does not seem as if our
ignorance could obtain so much as a glimpse of any of the reasons
which lay embedded in his choice of earth. The advancement of
science only dishonors old guesses, without apparently leading the
way to new ones. The more unimportant and uncentral we learn
ourselves to be physically in the huge creation round us, and the
more lost we are in the fabulous probabilities of sidereal space,
the less can we discern what it was which guided the Creator’s
predilection this way. We know not why he chose for man's
abode our solar system rather than any other solar system, or why
he chose a satellite instead of a central body, a planet rather than a
sun, or why of the planets of this system he chose the third one,
which is neither eminent in size or in position. There seems no
physical propriety, no material symmetry, in his choice. The
reasons therefore must be of a sublimer kind, and lie deep in
the wisdom of the Word unfathomable to us. God deals with his
creatures in a very individual way. He tells us what concerns
ourselves, as far as it concerns us and when it becomes practical
to us. He is at no pains to explain himself, or to reveal systems.
He speaks to us according to our real wants. He is a teacher of
law rather than of science. He is a Father whom we must trust
rather than a potentate with whom we must keep up a diplomatic
understanding. His reasons for choosing earth as the theatre of (he

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BETHLEHEM

Incarnation lie at one side of our road to heaven, and off the
road, and therefore are not told us. There was doubtless deep
and blissful wisdom in the choice. We may lawfully love the
particular world which is our home, seeing that he loved it so
himself and crowned it with this eternal choice. Material pro­
prieties are not the measures of divine decisions; and that is a
thought which holds many thoughts in these days of ours.
But there was another choice of his which leads our ignorance
into still more hopeless depths of helplessness. In the Bosom of
the Father the Word chose his eternal companions, the elect
among angels and men. We know that all angels and all men
were created for him, and to be his companions. We know that
he desires the eternal companionship of them all. We shrink
with righteous horror from supposing that the permission of evil
was granted simply that he might take occasion by it to ruin
everlastingly multitudes of creatures, whom it is of faith that
he loved intensely. We cannot tell why the two creations of angels
and of men should have been created in a sinless liberty, which
needed not this permission to its freedom. We are absolutely
certain from what he has revealed of himself that there were
reasons in infinite goodness that it should be so, and that the
freedom, by which angels and men merit and sin, was suitable
to his eternal designs of creative love. We know also that the
permission of evil was not necessary to the exhibition of his justice,
because his justice is more wonderfully illustrated in the exalta­
tion of Mary than in the condemnation of sinners. We know,
furthermore, that his choice of his elect in no wise interfered
with the liberty of any one of them, and yet, incomprehensible
mystery! that it was truly an efficacious choice. “Whom he fore­
knew, he also predestinated.” This is the nearest approach which
he himself allows us to the solution of this mystery. It was not
a choice only, it was a foreknowledge also; and it was not a fore­
knowledge only, it was a choice also. He himself will not allow
us to contemplate this mystery otherwise than in the sweet con­
fidence which the theological virtue of hope imparts to us, that
we ourselves were among the number of those elect whose cor­

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

41

respondent to his grace and participation in his glory gladdened
his eye from all eternity. Meanwhile this is one of the darkest
parts of that marvellous life of elections which he led before the
beginnings of actual creation. We can trust him for it. No one
can be astonished at getting out of his depth in God. We shall
not have a just idea of the life of the Word in the Bosom of the
Father if we keep out of sight his wonderful jubilee in the choice
of his elect, and we fearlessly adore a joy which we know must
have rested on an absolutely boundless love; for the justice of an
all-holy love is a justice which even those who suffer from it
cannot reasonably gainsay.
He chose also the glory which his Sacred Humanity was to
enjoy. He chose that dignity and splendor of his Body which he
should merit for it himself in his Three-and-Thirty Years, from
the first instant of his Conception to the moment of his Death; and
he looked with complacency on the glory and blessedness which
was thus to be enjoyed by that Flesh which he should take from
Mary, and with which he should feed the generations of men in
the realities of the Blessed Sacrament. We may conceive that, when
he foresaw his Passion, he felt an increased tenderness, to speak
thus foolishly of eternal things, for that Body which was to be the
instrument of those terrific sufferings whereby he should redeem
the world. He chose also that exaltation of his Holy Name, which
he also merited himself, and which represents the whole history of
his Church, and the wonders of his Saints, and the supernatural
chronicles of religious orders. He chose, too, among the things
which he himself should merit, the magnificence of his judicial
power by which he should judge the world in his Human Nature
rather than his Divine, and by which he began from the first
moment of his Conception to judge every soul of man that passed
from this life to another. He exulted in the immensity of glory
which his Sacred Humanity should give to the adorable justice of
God by the exercise of his judicial power alone. He foresaw his
judgment of his sinless Mother, and rejoiced unspeakably in the
wise righteousness with which he apportioned to her merits their
wonderful rewards. He foresaw his judgment of St. Joseph, whom

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but a moment before he had assisted to die with filial solicitude
and the thought was dear to him of the words which should con­
firm to his glorious foster-father the intensity of his peace in
limbus for a while, and the admirable splendor of that throne in
heaven which he should enjoy. He looked over the gigantic ocean
of human actions and merits, and his justice exulted royally in
beholding not one trivial kindness, not one single cup of cold
water, forgotten or unrewarded, or rewarded otherwise than with
a divine munificence, in all that astonishing multitude of things
which he should have to judge. It was the Sacred Humanity scat­
tering the largesse of the divine justice profusely over all creation.
His spotless holiness too found matter for true and solemn jubila­
tion in those other awards of severity, awards slowly made, yet
without reluctance when the measure of slighted mercy is filled
up, whereby the majesty of an offended God is vindicated with a
rigor which only the unrequited love of a Creator can display.
He chose also to be indebted to his own merits for the mys­
terious reunion of his Body, Blood, and Soul in the glorious
mystery of the Resurrection, the nearest approach which merit
could make toward the Hypostatic Union, unless perchance he
merited the extension of that Union to those fresh additions to
his Body which age and growth and food added to it. He chose
also the countless graces which he should merit for the children of
men, and what he should merit also for the world of angels. How
many sciences were opened to his view, how many abysses of rap­
turous contemplation outstretched before him, in this one matter
of his merits, his election of them, their kind, their number, their
value, their beauty, their operation, both for himself and othersl
One little section of this fair world of choices were enough to fill
a created spirit with bliss for all eternity.
Yet all these glories, which his Sacred Humanity merited for
itself, were as nothing to those which belonged to it in right of
the Hypostatic Union, the unmerited fountain of all its surpassing
splendors. The glories which his divine Filiation conferred upon
his Humanity were the objects of an eternal choice, in which we
may reverently conceive the Word to have exulted with a still

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

4S

more marvellous delight. The glory of his Soul lay beyond the
reach even of his far-stretching merits. Vasquez went so far as to
teach that, even by the absolute power of God, he could not have
merited the glory of his Soul,—in which opinion we might venture
to differ from him. Nevertheless, most true it is that in the Bosom
of the Father the Word chose the beatific glory of his Soul, the
immensity of its infused science, the magnificence of its habitual
grace, the grace of headship, his royalty, his priesthood, and the
boundless supremacy of his spiritual power, as seven wide and
deep and resplendent creations lying within the compass of his
Human Soul, and lying outside the influence of his own amazing
merits. All these glories he chose with ineffable exultation, and
he exulted the more in choosing that they should flow from his
Divine Sonship, and not from his merits. It was his choice that
the Hypostatic Union should endow his Sacred Humanity, not
merely with the capabilities of meriting immense glories, but
directly and of itself with those splendors which should be its
greatest and most wonderful magnificences. We have but got to
think for a moment of the glory of his Soul, of its science, and its
grace, in order to see what almost illimitable fields of jubilant con­
templation lay before the Word in the Bosom of his Father, merely
respecting the created nature which it was decreed he should
assume. There was a heaven of divine joys in the multitude of
manifold choices which lay before him, and to which his own
decrees with beautiful compulsion drew him.
It is twice said of heaven, first by a prophet and then by an
apostle, that its joys are absolutely inconceivable by the mind of
man, and that these joys have been prepared by God for those
who love him, “prepared,” as if God had taken pains about them
and spent time over them, in order to make them a gift worthy of
his magnificence. Yet, from what theology teaches us, how mar
vellous is the picture which we can make to ourselves of the joys
of heaven, to what sublime heights faith elevates our imagina
tions, how grand are the conceptions which we can form of that
glorious home even now in the darkness of our exile! Neverthe
less, as Scripture tells us, the reality of its grandeur it has never

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entered into out minds to conceive! The joys of men on earth
are almost as countless as their souls. The joys of the angels arc
above our comprehension; but they far outstrip those of men both
in multitude and in magnificence. We can imagine hosts of de­
lights arising from intellectual enjoyment, or again from our
affections, or again from the supernatural tastes which our souls
acquire through grace. We can multiply these into fabulous sums.
We can magnify them into gigantic forms by the thought of
God, his power, his wisdom, and his love. We can conceive of
them all as blessedly fixed in a secure eternity, and our own
natures unspeakably widened and deepened for new capacities
of joy. But beyond all this there lies a world of heavenly joys
which we do not suspect, because it is not in our power to con­
ceive their kinds or their methods of operation. Who can dream
what will come of seeing God as he is? Now, all this multitude
of joys rose up at the choice of the Word in the Bosom of the
Father. There was not one which he did not devise, and create,
and stamp with the deepest impress of his love. He set them
aside for each spirit of angel and soul of man which should enter
into his joy. He proportioned them with an exuberant liberality,
which was also at the same time an unerring justice. He made
them special to each spirit and soul that should enjoy them. He
counted their infinity, weighed their ecstatic thrills, and measured
to each spirit the measure of the light of glory which should
strengthen him to bear such impetuous excess of joy; and the
whole was to him a work of the most unutterable gladness and
divine complacency. He chose, too, that fresh outpoured sunshine
over immortal souls in heaven, which should be cast by his Sacred
Humanity in the pleasures of the glorified senses after the resur­
rection of the body. He saw heaven suddenly flushed with a new
verdure, and its gardens blossoming with the translucent bodies
of his elect, as if they were multiplied images of himself, voice­
less echoes of light to the light that streams from the Lamb himself.
One choice more, and we will close our list of the thrice three
choices of the Word. The vision of sin lay before him. He saw
it all, as we can never see it, in its intensely horrible nature, in

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

45

the breadth of its empire, in its radical opposition to God, in
the tremendously fearful doom wherewith the divine justice
would ultimately suffocate it. It lay before him, but his tran­
quillity was unmoved. Not a breath of disturbance passed even
over the surface of his blessedness. Not one of his decrees was
turned aside. They all flowed on in their immutable channels
of eternal love. But a new choice arose before him. The sphere
of his justice was widened, while the objects of his love were
multiplied. He added to the choices he had already made of his
Soul and Body. He chose now the power of suffering, the capa­
bility of feeling sorrow, the vibrations of sensible fear, the in­
firmity of wonder, the emotions of human anger. He chose pov­
erty, and shame, and death, and the Cross. Over the bright and
glorious destiny of the Mother of the impassible Humanity, in
which he would have come, he drew a mysterious cloud of im­
penetrable dolors, and the great queen of heaven was magnified
beneath its shadows. He marked out for himself a pathway of
Blood to the hearts of his sinful creatures—those at least who
bore the same nature which he himself had elected to assume.
The elder family of angels he passed over in their fall, but not in
disregard. They fell into the gulf of his justice, and were drawn
in and swallowed up forever. Now Bethlehem and Calvary lay
before the Word as objects of intense desire, and of what we
have dared to call divine impatience. But there was no stir in
the Bosom of the Father. The pulses of the Divine Life were
not quickened for a moment. Nothing was precipitated. The
decrees went on with irresistible slowness, like the huge glowing
lava-streams down the flanks of Etna,—only that these were cre­
ative, prolific, fertilizing, streams of wisdom and of love. Still
every moment was the Son eternally generated of the Father.
Still every moment was the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from
the Father and the Son. Not a sound was heard. Not a sight
was seen. There was no time to lapse by uncounted. There was
no vacancy, no void, no hollow, which might one day be the
room of space. There was only the unfixed yet immovable Life,
to which neither past nor future reach. There was the Blessed God.

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BETHLEHEM

Such were the occupations of the Word in the Bosom of the
Father, such was the life of that Person to whom our special
attention is drawn, because he was the Person who was to assume
a created nature. It was, so far as that assumption was con­
cerned, a life of choices, and each choice was as much the choice
of the Father and the Holy Ghost as it was of the Word himself.
Such was his everlasting life in the Bosom of the Father, creature­
less, and yet not without creatures, only distinguishable to us in
its outermost edges where the decrees of creation shine upon its
waters. It was a creatureless life, because creatures were not yet
in actual existence. It was a life with creatures, because they were
in reality eternal in the Divine Mind. To us it is as if we were
gifted with preternatural sight, and could look up an endless
vista, broad at its opening as the breadth of the all-but boundless
creation, and rising up in flights of marvellous gigantic steps on­
ward and upward, narrowing and narrowing to a point, with the
decrees of God like marble statues standing in speechless rows on
either hand, and the eternal splendors shining white on their colos­
sal figures, until the vista enters into God, and the beautiful
simplicity of immense creation lies visibly in the predestination
of Jesus, and flows out from the central fountain of the Undivided
Trinity, an emanation of the Divine Life in infinite separation
from it. Then actual creation comes, and still God lies in his
eternal Sabbath, even while he works. Time and the world lapse
by, and far off is the tranquillity of God.
What can ever equal in magnificence the first outward burst
of the Omnipotent, when the angels broke forth out of nothing
in cataracts of light, more numerous than the sands of the sea,
each of them huge worlds of fire, with the intellectual effulgence
of their majestic spirits beaming far and wide in transcending
loveliness! We are blinded by the very thought. The eyes of
our mind ache, as with lightning, while we picture to ourselves
this first thunder-storm which broke forth at an instant from the
feet of the inaccessible throne of God. At the selfsame moment,
out of nothing rose the ponderous universe of matter, far outspread

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

47

fields of the gauze-like breath of an immeasurable heat, and the
scarce-visible tissue of simplest elements, perhaps of one element
only, but of a myriad myriad forms, wheeling off and condensing
into numberless huge worlds, all chained together by the fila­
ments of an invisible attraction. There was a magnificence even
in chaos which fed the glory of the Creator.
Then perhaps came the vast geological epochs, revolving cycles
of ages unnumbered, because there was none but God to number
them. Marvellous floras covered our own earth like a gorgeous
tapestry. Wonderful faunas filled the seas with life and took
possession of the continents. All the while God was tranquil, and
time and the world lapsed by. The days of Adam came and went,
and the strangeness of antediluvian life. The flood came and
did its stern work; and the pastoral plains of Mesopotamia were
studded with the tents of the patriarchs, until God’s love lit upon
the hills and dells of Syria. The exodus of the chosen people
from the typical Egypt, the wilderness, the kingdom, the cap­
tivity, the wide spread heathendom, and the Immaculate Con­
ception, succeeded one another, as we speak, but in truth lay all
present at once to the eye of God, and his same tranquil life
went on. The Incarnation was realized in Nazareth and made
manifest in Bethlehem. The beautiful ages of the catholic church
began, and came to an end in the Valley of Judgment. Each
individual soul lay out before God clear and separate, in an
orbit of its own, until all met in conjunction in the same Valley
of Judgment. Then—we shall speak thus hereafter, when all is
past, and it is even now passing quietly—this family of creation
was gathered home into the Bosom of the Father, by the Word
who ever dwelt there, and by means of his Incarnation.
All this went by, and there was the same tranquil life of God.
unchanged, unchangeable. Yet God was not inactive. Language
cannot express to us in its reality the over-fulness of God’s con­
currence with every thing, or the thrilling omnipotence of his
penetrative activity. The mystery is how he can so concur, so
interpenetrate and underlie all matter and all spirit, and yet

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BETHLEHEM

forever be by himself, in unutterable and adorable unconfusion
with created things. Thus all this life in the Bosom of the
Father, so far as it regarded outward things, was from eternity
steadily advancing to the assumption of a created nature by an
Uncreated Person. All that is outside of God therefore bears ex­
clusively on this. There is no exception. Yet the tranquil eternal
life within that Bosom went on as ever. And now—we speak as
we must one day speak—the mighty populous heavens lie with
their worshipping crowds at the very feet of God. The activity
of heaven far transcends the feeble agitations of earth. Its power,
with Jesus and Mary and the angels and the souls, is fearfully
majestic to think upon. Its sciences are like the sciences of God.
Its loves are like the procession of the Holy Ghost. The realities
of its doings, and its energies, and its discoveries, and its con­
templations, and its beauties, are simply unimaginable by us
who know only the feverish intermittent indolence of mortal
civilization. Its very created infirmities are hidden, almost healed,
by the near shadow of the Uncreated. Yet that tranquil life in
the Bosom of the Father is unchanged. As it was in the creature­
less eternity, so is it now. Every moment is the Son eternally
generated of the Father. Every moment is the Holy Ghost pro­
ceeding from the Father and the Son. Everywhere there is the
Blessed God, tranquil and self-sufficing, unchanging and unchange­
able; and we, it is the only change, happy we, are lying in the
lap of his eternity!
But between those two points, between the eternity before
creation and the eternity after the judgment shall have fixed the
endless lot of this family of the Incarnation, there is the point to
each of us which is our present, and in which we are arduously
working our way home to our Heavenly Father. Our past and
our future are both in our to-day. How is our to-day by the side
of the Bosom of the Eternal Father, and of the Divine Life going
on therein? Let us revive our faith, and the world will at once
drop down below us, and the chains of a thousand petty interests
fall from us. There is no liberty of spirit except when we are
breathing the air of God. Let us mount up on high, and look

THF. BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

49

at the earth as it lies beneath us. There are creatures bom and
dying every moment, the one have to be started on their desti­
nies which are unending, the others to be seen through that last
conflict in which all the threads of life are to be gathered up,
and the doom to be not merely according to the past life, but
according to the dispositions of that dread Today. There is all
the turmoil of a resonant world rising up toward the throne of
God. The thunders of the imprisoned fires of hell reach his ears.
There are the high winds and storms of the enormous atmosphere,
and below it the uneasiness of the throbbing feverish volcanoes,
and the perpetual, tremulous, elastic shiverings of the crust of
the earth. Above, there is the dazzling velocity of stupendous
revolving orbs in mute unechoing space, the wild rushing of
comets which law is spurring on at such headstrong speed, and
here and there among the countless worlds the crash of some
catastrophe which is part of the uniformity of their system. God
has to be busy with all this. Then down in the forests of sea­
weed on the pavement of the ocean, under the bark and among
the leaves of the forest of the land, amid the thick, viewless insect­
life of the populous air, he is busy also, minutely occupied, inces­
santly occupied, personally occupied with every individual form
of life. Yet at this moment there is no stir over the pellucid
abysses of his shoreless life. His Bosom is all tranquil as before.
The Father, calm and dread and beautiful, whose freshness
eternity cannot age, is in repose and majesty. The Son is still
issuing forth in his Bosom, noiselessly begotten in the ravishing
splendors of an Eternal Generation. The Holy Spirit is still the
actually proceeding Jubilee of Both, out-flowing, distinct, eternal,
the same One Life.
But at this hour, somewhere in creation, that Bosom is laid
bare to spirits and to souls, so that they can see It as It is. This
is a change from the old uncreatured life; but the change is
altogether outside the Unchangeable. There is no time, no lapse,
no succession, there. There are no measurable epochs in that
unadvancing, stationary, self-sufficing, indescribably blissful Lite.
Progress is the radical infirmity of creatures. Yet the creature

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BETHLEHEM

time has surrounded the Eternal and Uncreated with its sweet
growths and secular harvests in rings of created beauty and super­
natural holiness. He is showing them the Vision of himself, local­
ized somewhere. Radiant fringes of saints and angels are stirring
in his light, as if they were the edges of his royal robes, and
prostrate multitudes lie like a golden pavement, thrilling with
light, around his throne. But are we sure the change is all
outside? The faith will not allow us to doubt of it. Then is it
most true that faith is more than sight. For it looks as if there
was a change inside. Far down, amid the central lightnings of
the Godhead, those lightnings which feed instead of blighting the
spirits and souls of creatures, it is as if there was a human Babe,
not an adopted foundling whom his mercy has taken up in its
necessity, but his own eternal idea, realized in time, the cause of
all creation whatsoever, the cause of all that makes up our present
life today, except the evil which may hang about us like a clinging
mist. That Babe is the Causal-Idea of all things. The spirits of
the souls see him there, and worship him with the thunders of
ecstatic song. Yet still the Divine Life goes on, with its unsuccessive, endless, unbeginning pulsations. Still is the Son being
begotten, still is the Spirit proceeding, still is the Father the
Unbegotten Fountain of the Godhead.
Lonely, with leagues between, angels and souls far off, as
earth counts farness, nearest to the Throne sits a Virgin-Mother,
a creature who once was nothingness, and who would fall back
into nothingness this hour if God did not fulfil, sustain, uphold
her with all his might and main, as it were, by his essence,
presence, power, grace, and glory. The Babe in the Bosom of
the Father is the likeness of that created Mother, and is ever
looking out at her, as if her Bosom might tempt him from that
Bosom of the Father. She is ever looking at him, as she taught
St. John to look at him, “in the Beginning,” in the Bosom of the
Father. This is Mary’s fixed view of her Child. This is John’s
fixed view of his dear Master. He lay in that dread Bosom in
idea from all eternity. He lies there at this hour with his Incar­
nation realized. It is the Babe of Bethlehem, Jesus Christ, yes­
terday, and today, and the same forever!

Chapter II

THE BOSOM OF MARY
The Incarnation lies at the bottom of all sciences, and is their
ultimate explanation. It is the secret beauty in all arts. It is
the completeness of all true philosophies. It is the point of arrival
and departure to all history. The destinies of nations, as well
as of individuals, group themselves around it. It purifies all
happiness, and glorifies all sorrow. It is the cause of all we see,
and the pledge of all we hope for. It is the great central fact
both of life and immortality, out of sight of which man’s intellect
wanders in the darkness, and the light of a divine life falls not
on his footsteps. Happy are those lands which are lying still in
the sunshine of the faith, whose wayside crosses, and statues of
the Virgin Mother, and triple angelus each day, and the monu­
ments of their cemeteries, are all so many memorials to them
that their true lives lie cloistered in the single mystery of the
Incarnation! We too are happy, happy in thinking that there
are still such lands, few though they be and yearly fewer, for the
sake of Him whom we love and who reaps from them such an
abundant harvest of faith and love. Yet who is there that does
not love his own land best of all? To us it is sad to think of
this western island, with its world-wide empire, and its hearts
empty of faith and the true light gone out within them. Multi­
tudes of saints sleep beneath its sod, so famous for its greenness.
No land is so thickly studded with spire and tower as poor mute
England. In no other kingdom are noble churches strewn with
such a lavish hand up and down its hill and dale. Dearest land!
thou seemest worth a martyrdom for thine exceeding beauty! It
must be the slow martyrdom of speaking to the deaf, of explaining
to the blind, and of pleading with the hardened.
Time was, in ages of faith, when the land would not have lain
51

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BETHLEHEM

silent, as it lies now, on this eve of the twenty-fifth of March.
The sweet religious music of countless bells would be ushering
in the vespers of the glorious feast of the Incarnation. From the
east, from central Rome, as the day declined, the news of the
great feast would come, from cities and from villages, from alpine
slope and blue sea-bay, over the leafless forests and the unthawed
snow-drifts on the fallow uplands of France. The cold waves
would crest themselves with bright foam as the peal rang out over
the naiTow channel: and if it were in Paschal-time, it would
double men’s Easter joys; and if it were in Lent, it would be a
very foretaste of Easter. One moment, and the first English bell
would not yet have sounded; and then Calais would have told
die news to Dover, and church and chantry would have passed
the note on quickly to the old Saxon-mother church of Canterbur}'. Thence, like a storm of music, would the news of that
old eternal decree of God, out of which all creation came, have
passed over the Christian island. The saints “in their beds"
would rejoice to hear Augustine, Wilfrid, and Thomas where
they lie at Canterbury, Edward at Westminster, our chivalrous
protomartyr where he keeps ward amidst his flowery meads in
his grand long Abbey at St. Alban’s, Osmund at Salisbury, Thomas
at Hereford, Richard the Wonderful at Chichester, John at Bev­
erley, a whole choir of saints with gentle St. William at York,
onward to the glorious Cuthbert, sleeping undisturbed in his
pontifical pomp beneath his abbey fortress on the seven hills of
Durham. With the cold evening wind the vast accord of jubilant
towers would spread over the weald of Kent, amid its mossgrown oaks and waving mistletoe. The low, humble churches
of Sussex would pass it on, as day declined, to Salisbury, and
Exeter, and St. Michael’s fief of Cornwall. It would run like
lightning up the Thames, until the many-steepled London, with
its dense groves of city churches, whose spires stand thick as the
ship-masts in the docks, would be alive with the joyous clangor
of its airy peals, steadied as it were by the deep bass of the great
national bell in the tower of Old St. Paul’s. Many a stately shrine
in Suffolk and Norfolk would prolong the strain, until it broke

THE BOSOM OF MARY

53

from the sea-board into all the inland counties, sprinkled with
monasteries, and proud parish churches fit to be the cathedrals of
bishops elsewhere, while up the Thames, by Windsor, and Reading
Abbey, and the gray spires of Abingdon, Oxford with its hun­
dred bells would send forth its voice over wold and marsh to
Gloucester, Worcester, and even down to Warwick and to Shrews­
bury, and its southern sound would mingle with the strain that
came across from Canterbury, amid the Tudor churches of the
orchard-loving Somerset, at the foot of Glastonbury’s legendary
fane, and on the quays of Bristol, whose princely merchants ab­
jured the slave-trade at the preaching of St. Wulstan. In the
heart of the great fen, where the moon through the mist makes
a fairy-land of the willows and the marsh-plants, of the stagnant
dikes and the peat embankments and the straight white roads,
the bells of the royal sanctuary of Ely would ring out merrily,
sounding far off or sounding near as the volumes of the dense
night-mist closed or parted, cheating the traveller’s ear. A hun­
dred lichen-spotted abbeys in those watery lowland would take
up the strain; while great St. Mary’s, like a precentor, would lead
the silvery peals of venerable Cambridge, low-lying among its
beautiful gardens by the waters of its meadow-stream. Lincoln
from its steep capitol would make many a mile of quaking moss
and black-watered fen thrill with the booming of its bells. Mon­
astic Yorkshire, that beautiful kingdom of the Cistercians, would
scatter its waves of melodious sound over the Tees into Durham
and Northumberland, northward along the conventual shores of
the gray North Sea, and westward over the heath-covered fells
and by the brown rivers into Lancashire, and Westmoreland, and
Cumberland, whose mountain-echoes would answer from blue
lakes, and sullen tarns, and the crags where the raven dwells, and
the ferny hollows where the red deer couches, to the bells of
Carlisle, St. Bees, and Furness. Before the cold white moon of
March has got the better of the lingering daylight, the island,
which seemed to rock on its granite anchors far down within the
ocean, as if it tingled with the pulses of deep sound, will have
heard the last responses dying muffled in the dusky Cheviots,

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BETHLEHEM

or in the recesses of gigantic Snowdon, and by the solitary lakes
of St. David's land, or trembling out to sea to cheer the mariner
as he draws nigh the shore of the Island of the Saints. Every­
where are the pulses of the bells beating in the hearts of men.
Everywhere are their hearts happier. Everywhere, over hill and
dale, in the street of the town, and by the edge of the fen, and
in the rural chapels on the skirts of the hunting-chase, the
Precious Blood is being out poured on penitent souls, and the
fires of faith burn brightly, and holiest prayers arise; while the
angels, from the southern mouths of the Arun and the Adur to
the banks of the brawling Tweed and the sands of the foaming
Solway, hear only, from the heart of a whole nation, and from
the choirs of countless churches, and from thousands of reeling
belfries, one prolonged Magnificat.
These things are changed now. Let them pass. Yet not with­
out regret. It is the Feast of the Incarnation. God is immutable.
Our jubilee must be in him. We must nestle deeper down in his
Bosom, while science, and material prosperity, and a literature
which has lost all echoes of heaven, are thrusting men to the
edge of external things, and forcing them down the precipice.
It may be a better glory for us, if our weakness fail not in the
tvilderness, that our faith should have to be untied from all helps
of sight and sound, and left alone in the unworldly barrenness
where God and his eagles are. Poor England! Poor English souls!
But it is the Feast of the Incarnation. God is immutable. Our
jubilee must be in him.
God is incomprehensible. When we speak of him, we hardly
know what we say. Faith is to us instead both of thought and
tongue. In like manner those created things, which lie on the
edges of his intolerable light, become indistinct through excess
of brightness, and are seen confusedly as he is himself. Thus he
has drawn Mary so far into his light, that, although she is our
fellow-creature, there is something inaccessible about her. She
participates in a measure in his incomprehensibility. We cannot
look for a moment at the noonday sun. Its shivering flames of
black and silver drive us backward in blindness and in pain.

THE BOSOM OF MARY

55

Who then could hope to see plainly a little blossom floating like
a lily on the surface of that gleaming fountain, and topped every­
where by its waves of fire? So is it with Mary. She lies up in the
fountain-head of creation, almost at the very point where it issues
from God; and amid the unbearable coruscations of the primal
decrees of God she rests, almost without color or form to our
dazzled eyes; only we know that she is there, and that the divine
light is her beautiful clothing. The longer we gaze upon her,
the more invisible does she become, and yet at the same time
the more irresistible is the attraction by which she draws us
toward herself. While her personality seems to be almost merged
in the grandeur of her relationship to God, our love of her own
self becomes more distinct, and our own relationship to her more
sweetly sensible.
It was a wonderful life which the Eternal Word led in the
Bosom of the Father. It fascinates us. We can hardly leave off
speaking of it. Yet beholdl He seeks also a created home. Was
his eternal home wanting in aught of beauty or of joy? Let the
raptured seraphs speak, who have lain for ages on the outer edge
of that uncreated Bosom, burning their immortal lives away in
the fires of an insatiable satiety, fed ever from the vision of that
immutable Beatitude. There could be nothing lacking in the
Bosom of the Father. God were not God, if he fell short of
self-sufficiency. Yet deep in his unfathomable wisdom there was
something which looks to our eyes like a want. There is an
appearance of a desire on the part of him to whom there is
nothing left to desire, because he is self-sufficient. This apparent
desire of the Holy Trinity becomes visible to our faith in the
Person of the Word. It is as if God could not contain himself,
as if he were overcharged with the fulness of his own essence and
beauty, or rather as if he were outgrowing the illimitable dimen­
sions of himself. It seems as he must go out of himself, and
summon creatures up from nothing, and fall upon their neck,
and overwhelm them with his love, and so find rest. Alasl how
words tremble, and grow wild, and lose their meanings, when
they venture to touch the things of God! God’s love must out­

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BETHLEHEM

flow. It seems like a necessity; yet all the while it is an eternally
pondered, eternally present, freedom, glorious and calm, as free­
dom is in him who has infinite room within himself. What
looks to us so like a necessity is but the fulness of his freedom.
He will go forth from himself, and dwell in another home, per­
haps a series of homes, and beatify wherever he goes, and multiply
for himself a changeful incidental glory, such as he never had
before, and scatter gladness outside himself, and call up world
after world, and bathe it in his light, and communicate his inex­
haustible Self inexhaustibly, and yet remain immutably the Same,
awfully reposing on himself, majestically satiating his adorable
thirst for glory from the depths of his own Self. Abysses of being
are within him, and his very freedom with a look, of imperious­
ness allures him into the possibilities of creation. Yet is this
freedom to create, together with the free decree of creation, as
eternal as that inward necessity by which the Son is ever being
begotten, and the Holy Spirit ever proceeding. All this becomes
visible to us in time, and visible in the Person of the Word,
and only visible by supernatural revelation, which reason may
corroborate, but never could discover.
The Word in the Father’s Bosom seeks another home, a
created home. He will seem to leave his uncreated home, and yet
he will not leave it. He will appear as though he were allured
from it, while in truth he will go on filling it with his delights,
as he has ever done. He will go, yet he will stay even while he
goes. Whither, then, will he go? What manner of home is fit
for him, whose home is the Bosom of the Father, and who makes
that home the glad wonder that it is? All possible things lay
before him at a glance, as on a map. They lay before him also
in the sort of perspective which time gives, and by which it makes
things new. His home shall be wonderful enough; for there is
no limit to his wisdom. It shall be glorious enough; for there
is no boundary to his power. It shall be dear to him beyond
word or thought; for there is no end to his love. Yet even so,
nothing short of an infinite condescension can find any fitness
for him in finite things. Nevertheless such as a God’s power and

THE BOSOM OF MARY

57

a God’s wisdom and a God's love can choose out of a God’s
possibilities, his created home shall be. Who then shall dream,
until he has seen it, what that thrice infinite perfection of the
Holy Trinity shall choose out of his inexhaustible possibilities?
Who, when he has seen it, shall describe it as he ought? The
glorious, adorable, and eternal Word, in the ample range of his
unrestricted choice, predestinated the Bosom of Mary to be his
created home, and fashioned, with well-pleased love, the Immacu­
late Heart which was to tenant it with himself. O Mary, O
marvellous mystical creature, O resplendent mote, lost almost to
view in the upper light of the supernal fountains! who can suffi­
ciently abase himself before thee, and weep for the want of love
to love thee rightly, thee whom the Word so loved eternally?
There were no creatures to sing anthems, in heaven, when
that choice was made. No angelic thunders of songs rolled round
the Throne in oceans of melodious sound, when the Word
decreed that primal object of his adorable predilection. No crea­
tions of almost divine intelligence were there to shroud their
faces with their wings, and brood in self-abasing silence on the
beauty of that created Home of their Creator. There was only
the silent song of God’s own awful life, and the eternal voiceless
thunder of his good-pleasure. Forthwith—we must speak in our
own human way—the Holy Trinity begins to adorn the Word's
created home with a marvellous effluence of creative skill and
love. She was to be the head of all mere creatures, having a cre­
ated person as well as a created nature, while her Son’s created
nature, with the Uncreated Person, was to be the absolute Head
of all creation, the unconfused and uncommingling junction of
God and of creation. She was to be a home for the Word, as
the Bosom of the Father had been a home for him, realized
and completed in unity of nature. The materials which the
Word was to take for his created nature were once to have been
actually hers, so that the union between the Word and herself
should be more awful than words can express. Each Person of
the Holy Trinity claimed her for his own by a special relation
ship. She was the eternally elected daughter of the Father.

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BETHLEHEM

There was no other relationship in which she could stand to
him, and it was a reflection of the eternal filiation of his uncre­
ated Son. She was the Mother of the Son; for it was to the
amazing realities of that office that he had summoned her out
of nothing. She was the Spouse of the Holy Ghost; for he it
was who was wedded to her soul by the most transcendent unions
which the kingdom of grace can boast, and it was he who out of
her spotless Blood made that undefiled Flesh which the Word
was to assume and to animate with his human Soul. Thus she
was marked with an indelible character by Each of the Three
Divine Persons. She was Their eternal idea, nearest to that Idea
which was the cause of all creation, the Idea of Jesus; she was
necessary, as They had willed it, to the realization of that Idea;
and she came before it in priority of time and in seeming authority
of office. Such is the bare statement of the place which Mary
occupies in the decrees of God. All we could add would be
weak compared with this. Words cannot magnify her whom
thought can hardly reach; and panegyric is almost presumption,—
as if what lies so close to God could be honored by our approval.
Our praise of Mary, in this one respect like our praise of God,
of which it is in truth a part, is best embodied in our wonder
and our love.
Was it as if God lost something, when he realized his beautiful
ideas, and so creatures came in some way to share with him in
the enjoyment of their beauty? Was it as if, when his idea thus
escaped him in act, he was bereaved of his treasures, and was
less rich a God than he was before? Surely not; for what was
all creation, but the immensity of his communicative love finding
undreamed-of outlets into unnumbered worlds? Yet the Divine
Persons seem—again it is seeming of which we must speak, we
whose tenses and moods are always dishonoring the inexplicable
present of eternity—to brood, and wait, and ponder, and feed
upon the wisdom and loveliness which lay hid in Their idea of
the Word’s created home. To create was to unveil the sanctuary,
and they appeared to pause. At length, after an eternity which
could have no Afterward, actual creation began. Angels, and

THE BOSOM OF MARY

59

matter, created together that spirit might be humble in its
precedence, and then men, were as three enchanting preludes to
Jesus and Mary, preludes of surpassing sweetness, full of types
and symbols and shadows cast forward from what was yet to be
in act, though it was prior and supreme in the divine decrees.
The Fall has come, and still God waits. The sun has set on
the now tenantless Eden, but the decrees make no haste. They
quicken not their pace. Four thousand years are truly as nothing,
even in the age of the planet; yet they are long when souls are
sinning, and hearts are pining, and the footsteps of generations
fainting, because of the delay of the Messias. God still lingers.
His glory seems to stoop and feed on the desires of the nations
and the ages, while the shadows of doubt and the sickness of
deferred hope gather round them so disconsolately. As the Sacred
Humanity is the head of creation and the fountain of grace both
to angels and to men, and perhaps to other species of rational
creations still unborn, so was it meet, in the divine dispensations,
that the Precious Blood of Jesus should merit all the graces
necessary to ornament the Word's created home. Now that the
Incarnate Word was to come as a Redeemer, his Mother must
be redeemed by him with a singular and unshared redemption.
Beautiful as she was in herself, and incalculable as were her
merits, her greatest graces were not merited by herself, but by
that Precious Blood which was to be taken from her own. The
first white lily that ever grew on that ruddy stem was the Im­
maculate Conception; and when the time for Mary's advent
came, that was the first grace with which the Divine Persons
began Their magnificent work of adorning. It was a new crea­
tion, though it was older in the mind of God, as men would
speak, than the first-born angels, or die material planet, which,
if we are to credit the tales of science, so many secular epochs and
millenniums had at last matured for the Incarnation.
It was on the eighth of December that those primeval decrees
of God first began to spring into actual fulfilment upon earth.
Like all God’s purposes, they came among men with veils upon
their heads, and lived in unsuspected obscurity. Yet the old

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BETHLEHEM

cosmogony of the material world was an event of less moment
far than the Immaculate Conception. When Mary's soul and
body sprang from nothingness at the word of God, the Divine
Persons encompassed their chosen creature in that selfsame instant,
and the grace of the Immaculate Conception was their welcome
and their touch. The Daughter, the Mother, the Spouse, re­
ceived one and the same pledge from All in that single grace,
or well head of graces, as was befitting the grandeur of her Pre­
destination, and her relationship to the Three Divine Persons,
and the dignity she was to uphold in the system of creation.
In what order her graces came, how they were enchained one
with another, how one was the cause of another, and how others
were merely out of the gratuitous abundance of God, how they
acted on her power of meriting, and how again her merits reacted
upon them,—all this it is beside our purpose to speak of, even
if we could do so fittingly. But the commonest grace of the lowest
of us is a world of wonders itself, and of supernatural wonders
also. How then shall we venture into the labyrinth of Mary’s
graces, or hope to come forth from it with any thing more than
a perplexed and breathless admiration? It was no less than
God who was adorning her, making her the living image of the
August Trinity. It was that she might be the mother of the
Word and his created home, that omnipotence was thus adorning
her. To the eye of God her beautiful soul and fair body had
glided like stars over the abyss of a creatureless eternity, discern­
ible amid the glowing lights and countless scintillations of the
angelic births, across the darkness of chaos and the long epochs of
the ripening world, and through the night of four thousand years
of wandering and of fall. How must she have come into being, if
she was to come worthily of her royal predestination, and of the
decrees she was obediently to fulfil, and yet with free obedience!
Out of the abundance of the beautiful gifts with which God
endowed her, some colossal graces rose, like lofty mountaintops,
far above the level of the exquisite spiritual scenery which sur­
rounded them. The use of reason from the first moment of her
Immaculate Conception enabled her to advance in grace and

TKF. BOSOM OF MARY

61

merits beyond all calculation. Her infused science, which, from
its being infused, was independent of the use of the senses,
enabled her reason to operate, and thus her merits to accumulate,
even during sleep. Her complete exemption from the slightest
shade of venial sin raised her as nearly out of the imperfections
of a creature as was consistent with finite and created holiness.
Her confirmation in grace made her a heavenly being while she
was yet on earth, and gave her liberty and merit a character so
different from ours that in propositions regarding sin and grace
we are obliged to make her an exception, together with our
Blessed Lord. So gigantic were the graces of that supernatural
life, which God made contemporaneous with her natural existence,
that in her very first act of love her heroic virtues began far
beyond the point where those of the highest saints have ended.
All this is but a dry theological description of the Word’s created
home, as it was when the Divine Persons clothed and adorned
it as it rose from nothingness. Yet how surpassingly beautiful
is the sanctity which it implies! Fifteen years went on, with those
huge colossal graces, full of vitality, uninterruptedly generating
new graces, and new correspondences to grace evoking from the
abyss of the Word new graces still, and merits multiplying merits,
so that if the world were written over with ciphers it would not
represent the sum. It seems by this time as if her grace were as
nearly infinite as finite thing could be, and her sanctity and purity
have become so constrainingly beautiful that their constraints
reach even to the Eternal Word himself, and he yields to the
force of their attractions, and anticipates his time, and hastens
with inexplicable desire to take up his abode in his created home.
This is what theology means when it says that Mary merited the
anticipation of the time of the Incarnation.
But let us pause for a moment here. St. Denys, when he saw
the vision of Mary, said with wonder that he might have mistaken
her for God. We may say, in more modern and less simple Ian
guage, that Mary is like one of those great scientific truths, whose
full import we never master except by long meditation, and by
studying its bearings on a system, and then at last the fertility

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and grandeur of the truth seem endless. So it is with the Mother
of God. She teaches us God as we never could else have learned
him. She mirrors more of him in her single self, than all intelli­
gent and material creation beside. In her the prodigies of his
love toward ourselves became credible. She is the hill-top from
which we gain distant views into his perfections, and see fair
regions in him, of which we should not else have dreamed. Our
thoughts of him glow worthier by means of her. The full dignity
of creation shines bright in her, and, standing on her, the perfect
mere creature, we look over into the depths of the Hypostatic
Union, which otherwise would have been a gulf whose edges we
never could have reached. The amount of human knowledge in
the present age is overwhelming: yet the deepest thinkers deem
science to be only in its infancy. Many things indicate this truth.
Just as each science is yearly growing, yearly outgrowing the old
systems which held it within too narrow limits, so is the science
of Mary growing in each loving and studious heart all through life,
within the spacious domains of vast theology; and in heaven it
will forthwith outgrow all that earth’s theologies have laid down as
limits, limits rather necessitated by the narrowness of our own
capacities than drawn from the real magnitude of her whom
they define.
Yet we should ill use Mary’s magnificence, or rather we should
show that we had altogether misapprehended it, if we did not
use it as a revelation of God, and an approach to him. What
was it in her which so attracted God? What drew the Word from
the Bosom of the Father into her Bosom with such mysterious
allurement? It was as if he were following the shadow of his
own beauty. It was because the delights of the Holy Trinity were
so faithfully imaged there. All was his. It was to his own he
went. It was his own which drew him. He was but falling in
love with his own wisdom, when he so loved her. Her natural
life was his own idea, her beauty a sparkle of his science, her birth
an effortless act of his own almighty will. Her graces were all
from him. She had nothing which she had not received. Like
the moon, her loveliness was all from borrowed light, softening

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63

and glorifying even in her a thousand craters of finite imperfec­
tion, which would have yawned black and dismal if the endless
shining of the sun had not beaten full upon her, making beautiful
and almost luminous the very shadows that are cast from her
unevenness. Her grandest realities are but pale reflections of
himself. Her immense sanctity is less than a dew-drop of his
uncreated holiness, which the beautiful white lily has caught in
its cup and holds up trembling to the sunrise. Thus it is that
God is all in all. Thus it is that the higher we rise in the scale
of creatures, the less we see that is their own, and the more we
see that all is his. The angels gleam indistinguishably bright in
their individual brightnesses, because they lie so near to God.
In Mary, character, personality, special virtues, cognizable fea­
tures, the creature’s own separate though not independent life,
are to our eyes almost obliterated, because the bloom of God
flushes her all over with its radiance, making herself and the
lineaments of self as indistinguishable as a broad landscape beneath
the noonday sun. The orb must have sloped far westward before
we can measure distances, and discern the separate folds of wood,
and the various undulations of the champaign. With Mary, the
Orb will never slope westward. It will stand vertical forever.
But we shall have a light of glory, like a new sense, fortifying
our souls, and we shall go into the blaze, and see her there with
magnificent distinctness lying deep in the glow of God. She will
be a million times more great and beautiful to us then than she
is now, and yet we shall see that less than a mote is to the mag­
nitude of the huge sun, so much less that it is a littleness inex­
pressible, is Mary, the creature, to the greatness, the holiness,
the adorable incomprehensibility of her Creator! Yet in him,
not in her, will be our rest. Even him we shall see as he is!
Oh, dizzy thought! Most overwhelming truth! Yet nothing less
than this Vision, to the very least of us, was the almost incredible
purpose of our creation, the glorious consequence of our faint
similitude to that Incarnate Word of whom Mary was the
elected Mother!
The divine decrees came onward in their mysterious slow

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nets. They appeared on earth, and then paused, as it seemed, for
fifteen years, and then, as it were, leaped precipitately and out
of course to their fulfillment. There is almost always this double
appearance, first of slowness and then of precipitation, in all
divine works. It is a characteristic of them, the pondering of
which will reward us when we have leisure to do so. It is as
if wisdom waited and was slow, till love called in omnipotence
to its aid, and forthwith gained its end. Meanwhile we must wait
on the grand decree which is trembling on the very verge of
its accomplishment. The Eternal Word is about to assume his
created nature. All things are subordinate to this. The mag­
nificence of Mary is but his road, his instrument, his means. Her
magnificence is simply in her ministering. The day, the hour,
the place, the messenger, all come at last; for his beautiful created
Home is ready for him, shining with the greatness of its graces,
fragrant with the perfume of its holiness. The day has come.
According to our counting, it is Friday the twenty-fifth of March.
Why has it been so long delayed? This is a mystery which does
not concern us. Why is it that preparation always forms so much
greater a part of the Creator’s works than it docs of the crea­
ture's? Is it wholly for the creature’s sake, or is it indicative
of some perfection in the Creator? It is at least a disclosure of
his character, which fixes our attention, and is not without its
influence on our conduct. Why was he so long in preparing the
world for the habitation of man? What means the old age of
the lifeless rocks? Wherefore were those vast epochs of gigantic
foliage, as if it were not beneath the minute considerateness of
his love to be laying in wealth and power for generations of
unborn men? Why were land and sea distributed and re­
distributed again and again, as if he were a fastidious artist who
could not please himself because he could not express his idea
except through repeated experiments? What end did those secular
periods of huge sea-monsters and terrific creeping things sub­
serve? Why was man so late a birth in the epoch of those perfect
animals which were either his predecessors or his companions?
Why should earth have to be the teeming burial-ground of

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65

dynasties dethroned and tribes extinct, before the true life for
which it was meant came upon it? Who can tell? Perhaps it
was not so. But, if it was so, it was his will. The delay of the
Incarnation is parallel to what geology professes to reveal to us
ol the fitting and adorning and re touching of the planet, if that
can be called re-touching which was doubtless the simple develop­
ment of a vast and tranquil uniformity. But the day came at
last, the twenty-fifth of March, ever memorable among men as
the date of the Incarnation. There was doubtless some deep and
beautiful reason why it was not on the twenty-fourth or on the
twenty-sixth, and why it should be on the anniversary of Adam's
fall, and hereafter of the Crucifixion,—there was doubtless some
deep reason, because God has no surface; all things are deep which
are in him.
But of the chosen day the first moment was chosen also. The
stars had scarcely marked the midnight in the sky, when the
decree accomplished itself. Perhaps the greatest silence of created
things, the hush of the nocturnal earth, was most suited to the
Creator’s coming, just as it was with Adam in the old Asiatic
Paradise. Goodness, also, like evil, though for opposite reasons,
affects darkness and obscurity. God seem marvellously to shun
witnesses. The Resurrection manifests this to us, that unwitnessed
mystery, the witnessing of which was nevertheless to be a main
function of the college of apostles. Yet they even were only
allowed to bear witness, not to its taking place, but to its having
undoubtedly taken place. So it is in science, in all questions of
life, in the creation of species, in God’s viewless omnipresence,
in the operation of his supernatural sacraments, in the actual
communications of grace, in all positive contacts with him, our
research is baffled on the very threshold of discovery. We just
reach the point where we should see God the next moment;
and without any visible obstacles, without walls or rocks or any
palpable fences, we are mysteriously stayed. We can advance no
further. We seem to hear the sound of God working, almost to
feel his breath; but he will not be witnessed. He remains invisible.
As it is in his lesser works, so was it in this his greatest. He came

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in the dark night, when men were unsuspecting: yet lie did not
take them by surprise; for, when the morning broke, lie did not
even tell them that he had come. Do we not know ourselves
that, although we are God’s creatures, and creation is full to
overflowing of him, and is meant to raise us to him, we never­
theless feel we are most with God when least occupied with his
outward creation, and draw nearest to him in proportion as we
draw back furthest from creatures? So, on his side, he seems to
keep aloof, even when he is coming in closest contact with us.
He shrinks from view, whose blaze we could not bear.
The place, where the Word's assumption of his created nature
was to be effected, was the inner room, or woman’s apartment, of
the Holy House of Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph dwelt. It
was an obscure dwelling of humble poverty in a rustic and
sequestered village of a small land, whose days of historic glory
had passed away, and whose destiny in the onward inarch of
civilization would seem, as philosophical historians would speak,
to be exhausted. The national independence of the people had
come to an end. The questions, which divided their sects, were
narrow and trivial. Jerusalem, long since eclipsed by Athens
and outgrown by Alexandria, sat now, humbled and silent,
beneath the sombre shade of Rome. Even in this land Nazareth
was almost a byword of contempt. Fold of pastoral green hills
shut it up within itself, and its men were known beyond their
own hills only for a coarse and fierce rusticity, with perhaps a
reputation for something worse. The Eternal God was about to
become a Nazarene. He, whose eye saw down into every wooded
hollow and penetrated every sylvan glen upon the globe, who saw
the white walls of fair cities perched jealously on their hill-tops
or basking in the sunshine by the blue sea, chose that ill-famed,
inglorious Nazareth for the scene of his great mystery. Who
can deem that aught with God is accidental, or that anything
happened as it might chance to happen with the central wonder
of the Incarnation? It was his choice; and to us Nazareth, and
its Holy House, exiled, wandering, and angel-borne, Syrian,
Dalmatian, Italian, all by turns, are consecrated places, doubly

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67

consecrated by their old memories, and also by their strange
continued life of local graces and the efficacious balm of a Divine
Presence, awful and undecayed.
I'he occupations of that Holy House at Nazareth must not
pass unnoticed. The minutest feature in the most ordinary
circumstance of the Creator’s assumption of a created nature
must be full of significance. From the Gospel narrative of the
Annunciation we should infer that Mary had received no warn­
ing of what was about to happen, still less therefore of the time
when the mystery should be accomplished. Great events com­
monly cast a peaceful trouble into great souls before they come,
as if there was deep down in heroic natures something like a
natural gift of prophecy. Such vibrations awakening yet indis­
tinct, may have thrilled through Mary’s soul. Otherwise the
mystery took her unawares; and, till the moment came, the great­
ness of her science and the wonder of her conscious holiness had
not so much as excited a suspicion in her beautiful humility. Her
unpreparedness thus gives a greater significance to her occupa­
tions at the time. The night was still and calm around her. We
know not whether Joseph was wakefully pondering on the divine
mercies, or whether that man of heavenly dreams was resting from
the toils of the artisan's rude day in holy sleep. When the shadow
of the everlasting decree stole upon her, Mary the wonderful
and chosen creature, was alone, and, according to the universal
belief, immersed in prayer. She was spending the hours of the
silent night in closest union with God. Her spirit, then, as
always, was doubtless raised in ecstasy to heights of rapturous
contemplation. It was in the act of her prayer that the Word
took possession of his created home. It was perhaps the immense
increase of merit, and so the immense increase of her interior
beauty, in that very prayer, which ended the delay, and precip­
itated the glorious mystery. It was perhaps one of her intense
aspirations, an aspiration into which her whole soul and all the
might of its purity were thrown, that drew the everlasting Son
so suddenly at last from the Bosom of the Father. How often
have the desires of the saints been their own immediate fulfilment,

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because of their intensity! But what desire ever had such in­
tensity as Mary’s yearning for Messias, unless indeed it were his
own eternal longing for his created nature? It was at least in
an hour of awe-stricken worship that God visited her. 11er created
spirit was busied in adoration, when the Uncreated came, and
took his Flesh and Blood, and dwelt within her. In all this too
we see the fashion of God's ways.
Yet his coining was not abrupt. I le sent his messenger, before
he came himself. We know nothing of the antecedents of the
individual angels; but Gabriel appears throughout Scripture,
in the days of Daniel as well as those of Mary, to be the angel
of the Incarnation.
*
There was doubtless something in his own
character, something in his special graces, something in the part
he had taken against the rebellious angels, which peculiarly fitted
him for this office, to which also he had unquestionably been
predestinated from all eternity. It implies an extreme beauty of
character, and a special relationship to each of the Three Divine
Persons, and also a peculiar angelical similitude to Mary. He
had been throughout the official herald of the decrees regarding
the Incarnation, and he appears at this time in the midnight
room at Nazareth, because the weeks of Daniel have run out, and
he is preceding now, hardly by a moment, the everlasting decrees.
But what is the especial purpose for which he has come? To ask
in the name of God for Mary’s consent to the Incarnation. The
Creator will not act in this great mystery without his creature’s
free consent. Her freedom shall be a glorious reflection of his
own ineffable freedom in the act of creation. The Omnipotent
stands on ceremony with his feeble, finite creature. He has already
raised her too high to be but a blind instrument. Moreover, the
honor of his own assumption of a created nature is concerned
in the liberty wherewith creation shall grant him what he re­
quires. He would not come, claiming his rights or using his
prerogatives. Sometimes we have seen the tide pile up its welter­
ing waves one upon another, as if it were building a tower of
water, before some insignificant obstacle which the pressure of
• See Honoratus Nicquetus, S. J., de Angelo Gabriele. Lyons, 1653.

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69

one rolling billow would have driven before it far up the
sounding beach. This is a picture to us of the moment of the
Incarnation. Innumerable decrees of God, decrees without num­
ber, like the waves of the sea, decrees that included or gave
forth all other decrees, came up to the midnight room at Nazareth,
as it were to the feet of that most wonderful of God's creatures,
with the resistless momentum which had been given them from
eternity, all glistening with the manifold splendors of the divine
perfections, like huge billows just curling to break upon the
shore; and they stayed themselves there, halted in full course,
and hung their accomplishment upon the Maiden's word.
It was an awful moment. It was fully in Mary’s power to
have refused. Impossible as the consequences seem to make it,
the matter was with her, and never did free creature exercise
its freedom more freely than did she that night. How the angels
must have hung over that moment! With what adorable delight
and unspeakable complacency did not the Holy Trinity await
the opening of her lips, the fiat of her whom God had evoked out
of nothingness, and whose own fiat was now to be music in his ears,
creation's echo to that fiat of His at whose irresistible sweetness
creation itself sprang into being! Earth only, poor, stupid,
unconscious earth, slept in its cold moonshine. That Mary should
have any choice at all is a complete revelation of God in itself.
How a creature so encompassed and cloistered in grace could
have been free in any sense to do that which was less pleasing
to God is a mystery which no theology to be met with has ever
yet satisfactorily explained. Nevertheless the fact is beyond con­
troversy. She had this choice, with the uttermost freedom in
her election, in some most real sense of freedom. But who
could doubt what the voice would be, which should come up out
of such abysses of grace as hers! There had not been yet on earth,
nor in the angels' world, an act of adoration so nearly worthy of
God as that consent of hers, that conformity of her deep lowliness
to the magnificent and transforming will of God. But another
moment, and there will be an act of adoration greater far than
that. Now God is free. Mary has made him free. The creature

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has added a fresh liberty to the Creator. She lias unchained the
decrees, and made the sign, and in their procession, like moun­
tainous waves of light, they broke over her in floods of golden
splendor. The eternal Sea laved the queenly creature all around,
and the divine complacency rolled above her in majestic peals
of soft mysterious thunder, and a God-like Shadow falls upon her
for a moment, and Gabriel had disappeared, and without shock,
or sound, or so much as a tingling stillness, God in a created
nature sate in his immensity within her Bosom, and the eternal
will was done, and creation was complete. Far off a storm of
jubilee swept far-flashing through the angelic world. But the
Mother heard not, heeded not. Her head sank upon her bosom,
and her soul lay down in a silence which was like the peace of
God. The Word was made flesh.
Even to us in the retrospect it is a moment of unutterable
gladness. Love ponders it many times, when the world presses
heavily and life goes wearily. When all things, but God, give
way, because they are void and empty, and our pursuits are like
the colored ends of rainbows, seen through even while we pursue
them, and always receding before us as we advance, then we find
such rest and such sufficiency and such transcending calm in God,
that love weeps over the weakness of its own worship, and frets
with a tranquil fretfulness because it cannot love him more. It
is then that the first act of love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus rises
consolingly to our remembrance. It was a finite act, and yet of
value infinite. Then first was the blessed majesty of God wor­
shipped as it deserved to be. His glory lay outspread in all its
broad perfection, in all its unembraced immensity, and that first
act of love embraced it. Its worship was as broad as the uncompre­
hended breadth that lay before it. To our thoughts, to the
foolishness of our venturous thoughts as finite beings, there was
something desolate in that creatureless eternity of God. It was
not an uncompanioned life, because of the Three Divine Persons
in One God. But worship is our highest thought, and there is
something dreary in the idea of an unworshipped splendor, some­
thing appalling, like a scene oppressively sublime, in an unwor­

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71

shipped God. It is our own foolishness, our own littleness. Yet
what vent has love except in worship? We turn from our own
worship of God as beneath even the complacency of our own
vain glory. We think with joy of the saints and of the angels,
whose adoration reaches so much nearer to the Throne. Mary s
worship of God is all-but rest to our eagerness to see him loved
exceedingly and worthily. But love’s rest, love's sweet satiety,
is in the worship of the Sacred Heart, and there alone. So that,
in the first moment of the Incarnation, not only were the amazing
decrees of everlasting wisdom fulfilled, and creation with incred­
ible magnificence completed, but the creation thus completed
turned round as it were to the Face of the Creator, and wor­
shipped him with a worship equal to himself. When the heart
is sick because “truths are diminished among the children of
men,” and the weight of unintelligibly triumphant and abundant
sin lies heavy on it, and the mind is dragged through thorny
places till it bleeds, then the frightened soul flies back to that
moment of the first love of Jesus, and rests there with the more
full assurance and abiding calm, because it knows that that first
act of love is not ended yet. It has stretched from that old mid
night at Nazareth to this hour, and is not weakened by the stretch.
It can bear the weight of millions of new creations. It will wear
for untold eternities. Old as it is, it is new still. It is unending
Its arms are round the majesty of God, its kiss is on his feet,
for evermore.
Thus had the Eternal Word begun his created life on earth.
He had taken possession of that fair home which he had pre­
destinated for himself from everlasting. He had begun to live a
life so full and broad and deep, that, if all the lives of angels and
men ran into one confluent stream, they would make but an
insignificant and impoverished rill compared with the flood of
real, enduring, solid, efficacious life which was his. It was a life
without intermittence, without experiments, without failures,
without inequalities. It was always at hightide, always succeeding,
always reaching the ends at which it aimed, always fulfilling its
purposes in the loftiest manner. It was a life without advance,

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without growth, beginning with its fulness both of science and
of grace. It was a life which had measures, but its measures were
practically immeasurable. Its worth was infinite, even while it
was not absolutely infinite itself. It was a life also which com­
prehended all lives both of angels and of men, touched them,
vivified them, ennobled them, immortalized them. It ran over
and abounded in mysteries, in merits, in satisfactions. It was
the perpetual plenary indulgence of all other life that ever was.
It was a life of the most absorbed contemplation, and at the same
time of the most beneficent and heroic activity. It was a life of
incomparable intellectual excellence, of unsurpassed moral wis­
dom, and of unexampled sanctity. It was a life so real and so
true, so self-conscious and substantial, creating, perfecting, con­
solidating so much, that all other life by the side of it is but a
shadow of life, a bare taking hold and letting go again, a mere
ineffectual clutching of the hands in sleep. It was the life on
which all noble, manful, divine lives were to be modelled, and
moreover it contained the energetic cause and efficacious prophecy
of all such lives within itself.
Such was the existence which began that night in Mary’s
Bosom. If we look at it in the general, so as to get a view of its
characteristics, it seems to us, first of all, a life of oblation. Wor­
ship was its predominant idea. Adoration was the mould in
which it was cast. It continually reflected God. Yet it was not a
private life, not a life which looked only to God and itself, and
so was sanctified. Its oblations were not simply its individual
worship of God, but they belonged to all creation, and were
offered in its name. They were coextensive with creation. They
covered all the ground which created worship could cover, and
satisfied all the claims of the Creator. In this life oblation was
not so much a distinct virtue, as the attitude of all its virtues. Its
destiny was that of a victim, and from its place and bearing as
victim it never stirred for one moment, not even when it was
working miracles. It contained within itself the infinite materials
of an infinite and endless sacrifice. The business set before it was
to consume these materials perpetually for the glory of God.

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73

Thus it was incense, as well as victim, incense ever rising up with
all commingled aromas of created sanctity, before the Throne
on high. It was always burning, and never burned itself away.
Its human soul was the thurible in which it was fragrantly con­
sumed, offered, asleep or waking, by night or day, with every
pulse of its human life. It was the priest also, as well as the victim
and the incense. With a divine bravery it slew itself. It was
incessantly slaying itself, and delighting in the slow martyrdom.
The unction of an eternal priesthood was upon it, raising its
self-sacrifice far above the level of mortal heroism. The mere
thought that created life, a human life, should have reached the
height, which that life reached, is a joy forever.
This was the grand characteristic of the life, its posture of
oblation, its ever-smoking unconsumed sacrifice, its ministration
at its own altar. Then it was also a life of imprisonment. Broad,
exulting, magnificent as it was, it was imprisoned. It was im­
prisoned while it was outflowing over all creation. Confinement
in the little created home of Mary's Bosom was the lot of that
which was almost infinite. Darkness was around the life which
was the beacon of all ages, the far-reaching light of all created
spirits. Obscurity environed that life over which the angels were
keeping jubilee, and which was in God’s eye as thought it were
no less than all creation, including, comprehending, imaging,
surpassing all. Its energy needed not the limits of our activity. A
cloistered life among men may cover the whole earth with its
activity, if it be a life of worship, while the conqueror, the states­
man, or the man of letters have at most but a circle which they
only influence partially, and in which their influence is but one
of many influences. Worship alone is power, intellectual power
and moral power, the power of world-wide change and of all
beneficent revolution. We not only learn this lesson from the
life of confinement which the Incarnate Word led in Mary's
Bosom, but it is that life which gives our life power to become
universal like itself.
It was a life of silence also. The great Teacher, the utterer
of the marvellous parables, the preacher of the world-stirring

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sermons, the oracle whose single words have become vexations,
institutions, and histories, finds silence no bar to the fertility of
his action. Silence has ever been as it were the luxury of great
holiness, which implies that it contains something divine within
itself. So it is the first life which he, the eternally silent-spoken
Word of the Father, chooses for himself. All his after-life was
colored by it. In his childhood he let speech seem to come slowly
to him, as if he were acquiring it like others, so that under this
disguise he might prolong his silence, delaying thus even his
colloquies with Maty. Mary also herself, and Joseph, caught
from him, as by a heavenly contagion, a beautiful taciturnity. In
his eighteen years of hidden life, silence still prevailed in the
holy house of Nazareth. Words, infrequent and brief, trembled
in the air, like music which was too sweet for one strain to efface
another, while the first still vibrated in the listening ear. In the
three years' Ministry, which was given up to talking and teaching,
he spoke as a silent man would speak, or like a God making
revelations. Then in his Passion, when he had to teach by his
beautiful way of suffering, silence came back again, just as an old
habit returns at death, and became once more a characteristic
feature of his life. So now he, who was the expressive eloquence
of all the hidden grandeurs of the Father, was mule and dumb
in Mary's Bosom.
It was a life also of weakness. Helplessness, humiliation, and
a kind of shame were round about him. He chose them as his
first created state. This choice was one of the primary laws of the
Incarnation, as a mission to fallen man. He clung to it through
the Three-and Thirty Years. He made it to be the supernatural
condition of his Church, that sort of continual triumphant defeat
in which her life so visibly consists. He perpetuated it for himself
in the Blessed Sacrament. It was as if weakness was so new to
omnipotence that there was an attraction in its novelty. To show
forth power in weakness, to be feeble and yet to be strong also,
and not only strong together with the weakness, but actually
because of it—this was to display one of those hidden and name­
less perfections in God, which we should perhaps never have seen

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75

except by the light of the Incarnation, though by that light we
see it now in nature also. Yet what was the strength of all creation
to that single created weakness of hisl All the world's helpful­
ness was but a ray out of his helplessness. No man’s work, be it
for himself or for his fellows, has any true strength in it, no man's
strength is any thing better than effort and gesticulation, except
the weakness of Christ have touched it, nerved it, and made it
manful with a heavenly manfulness. What are half the literatures
and philosophies in the world but gesticulation, men in attitudes
which effect nothing, voices raised to screaming partly from irrita­
tion at the sense of impotence and partly to save appearances and
counterfeit strength by noise? The strong man is he who has
gone deepest down into the weakness of Christ. The enduring
work is that which Christ’s humiliation has touched secretly, and
made it almost omnipotent.
His life in Mary’s Bosom was also a life of poverty. This is
perhaps the most notable among all his predilections. He loved
poverty among things, as he loved Mary among persons. It was an
acting out in the multiplicity of creation the unity of the Creator.
The soul is hampered by material helps. Strength is in fewness.
Work lies in singleness of purpose. The victory is with him who
has nothing to lose, and, if so be, needs less than the nothing he
has got. Though God himself is untold wealth, riches are not
godlike. For it is not so much that God has wealth, as that he is
his own wealth. They are rich who possess God; but they are
richest who possess nothing but God. All creation belongs to
him to whom God is his sole possession. The idea of wealth
would uncrown Jesus in our minds, and desecrate the sacredness
of the Incarnation. Humanity, at its highest point of holiness,
is ever enamored of poverty. Yet it was almost more as God than
as man, that Jesus put riches away from his Sacred Humanity.
For his poverty went further than created riches. Although he
had so marvellously endowed his human nature with the riches
of the Godhead, there were many mysterious ways in which during
his whole life, and especially in his Passion, he put aside from
his Sacred Humanity even the riches of his Godhead, and the

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legitimate, wc might have said inevitable, inheritance of the
Hypostatic Union, as if even that wealth were an encumbrance.
Look at the Eternal Word, first in the Bosom of the Father, and
then in the Bosom of Mary, and say whether a lower depth of
poverty can be conceived. Is it not one of those things which
comes so nigh to a change in the Unchangeable, that wc hardly
see how it is not a change?
Such was the character of the life which God began to lead in
his own creation, as soon as ever he had assumed his created
nature. It is surely a most unexpected one, and full of disclosures
which take away our breath by their divine strangeness. It is most
deeply to be studied, giving us as it does almost an insight into
the interior of God, and making us acquainted with him in a
different way from his great attributes, of which theology takes
direct cognizance. Surely this life is a fact in history, more sig­
nificant than all its other facts put together; nay, rightly con­
sidered, it is itself the true significance of those other facts. But
let us pass from his manner of life to his actual occupations, and
endeavor to construct a biography of the Eternal Word during
those Nine Months in Mary’s Bosom.
His chief and sovereign occupation was in adoring God as
the author both of nature and of grace. His infused science, in
union with his incomparable holiness, rendered his worship of
God quite a distinct service from ours, though it is both the
cause and the example and the merit of ours. It was a pouring
out before God of multiplied infinities of worship. He saw in
their entireness the immeasurable claims of God’s glory, and he
sent forth continuous streams of worship to all points at once.
He saw reasons we can never see for adoring God, and he saw
them also transcendentally and eminently, and in a certain most
true sense he satisfied all of them to the full. He covered, and
covered at once massively and beautifully, every perfection of the
Divine Majesty with the pure gold of his oblation. This was his
incessant occupation. All other occupations centered in this, re­
solved themselves into this, identified themselves with this. It is
the single occupation, of which the rest are manifold develop-

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ments. Hence also, as we shall see hereafter, he occupied himself
with rejoicing in his created nature, and not least of all because,
by its seeing God clearly, it possessed such an idea of worship,
which the Hypostatic Union gave him the capabilities of satisfying.
Incessantly also was he sanctifying Mary with the most mar
vellous operations of unitive love. She was penetrated, as with
innumerable arrows, by the constant, keen, effulgent irradiations
of his grace. Her whole being was saturated with his. She was
transformed into his image as no saint has ever been. It is im­
possible for us to imagine how he was occupied with her, or how
her finite nature and limited capacities gave him so much to do.
The variety of her graces, as well as their eminence, is beyond
our comprehension. Nevertheless he had been using his wisdom,
his power, his providence, his mercy, and his love, upon this single
planet of ours perhaps for millions and millions of cycles of ages,
advancing and developing his idea, like some sublime workman,
without changing or modifying, even while he was variegating his
original and irreformable conception. So was it with the cos­
mogony of grace in Mary. She had her epochs, and her genera­
tions, and her developments, in the long life of her sanctification,
longer than it can be counted by mere days and months; onlv
that in her nothing passed away, no graces became extinct. They
grew in size, and they multiplied in virtue. New species were
created in her constantly, but the old ones did not die away,
either before the face of the new ones, or to make room for them.
She was a world, in which he occupied himself perpetually; and.
if his paradise was so beautiful to begin with that it drew him
down from the Father’s Bosom, what must have been his love of
us which drew him out of it nine months afterward, when by his
own handiwork it had become so unspeakably more beautiful!
The government of the world was another of his occupations
in the Bosom of Mary. Worlds far off in the starry distances pre
sented him with innumerable occasions every hour for his far
reaching providence. The countless meteors that flashed through
space were guided by him. The ripening of invisible worlds, 01
worlds which from Nazareth seemed but like a needle’s point of

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unsteady light, and which perhaps were one clay to be the abode
of rational creatures, was presided over by him, and none of its
minutest details was without him. His influence was felt in in­
cessant vibrations all through the vast realms of space, while he
lay hidden in his obscure planetary residence in the Bosom of
Mary. In that same recess mighty effluxes of glory went forth
from him, like the outpouring of an ocean through ample straits,
into the wide realm of angels. He managed with minutest man­
agement the health and sickness, the joy and sorrow, the fountains
of thought and the energies of action, of all the dwellers upon
earth, who little deemed that their centre and their cause was in
the Bosom of a little Hebrew maiden. He was already occupied
in that created home with our concerns of this far-distant age.
He saw us in the light of his redeeming love, and apportioned to
us that superabundant share of graces which we all feel that we
have received—graces more than sufficient many times over to
have secured our salvation. Already in that hiding-place was he
saving souls. Already did men feel in temptation stronger helps
of grace than they had felt before. Already was there a light round
death-beds which there had seldom been in the elder times. Al­
ready did something like day begin to dawn on those who lay in
honest questioning darkness. In the Bosom of Mary also he en­
tered upon his office of judge. We know that he judges us, not
as God, but as man. It is one of the grandest prerogatives of his
Sacred Humanity. The grounds seem most insufficient for sup­
posing that he delayed the exercise of this power until after the
Resurrection. We believe therefore that the first soul that left its
body after the moment of the Incarnation, and thenceforth all
departing souls, were solemnly judged by him in his created
nature, and that for nine long months he held his solemn assize
in Mary’s Bosom. Heaven also, and hell, and purgatory, and
limbus, felt him as he waved his sceptre behind the curtain,
pavilioned, true monarch of the Orient as he was, in the fragrant
inner chamber of his Mother’s life.
There are flowers which give out their perfume in the shade,
and grow more sweet as the sun mounts higher in the sky. They

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79

lie hidden under cool beds of rank green herbage, beneath the
shadow of mighty trees; and yet when the warm air of the noon
has heated the unsunny forest, these blossoms fill the foliaged
aisles with their prevailing incense. Their odor gives a poetry
and a character to the woodland scene, and by that odor the spot
lives in our memory afterward. Such is the sweet fragrance of St.
Joseph in the Church, stealing upon us unawares, perpetually in­
creasing, and especially filling with itself all the shades of Naza­
reth, Bethlehem, and Egypt, but not reaching to the bare exposed
heights of Calvary. Throughout the Sacred Infancy, St Joseph is
the odorous undergrowth of all its mysteries. We cause the per­
fume of his blossoms to rise up as we stir among them; and while
we seem to be heeding it but little, because the Mother and the
Child are so visible and beautiful, nevertheless we should miss
it, and stay our steps, and wonder, if it were to cease. Who can
doubt but that his dear and chosen foster-father was another of
our Lord’s occupations in Mary’s Bosom? Of all sanctities in the
Church, St. Joseph’s is that which lies deepest down and is the
hardest to see distinctly. We feel how immense it must have
been. The honor of Jesus, and the office of St. Joseph toward
his Mother and himself, all point to an unusual effusion of graces
upon him, while the lights, which transpire as it were through
chinks in the Gospel, indicate a most divine, and at the same
time a most deeply hidden, life. At times we seem to see renewed
in him the character of one of the old patriarchs, especially
Abraham when in his simple tent-life amidst the pastoral solitudes
of Mesopotamia; or we are reminded of the first Joseph, like the
second Joseph by contrast, on the margin of the Nile. Then
again there are glimpses which betoken the fashion of New Testa­
ment sanctity, which make us hesitate in taking the view, in
many respects so fitting, that in him the Old Testament holiness
reached its highest and most beautiful development, and so
touched Jesus, and abode in the circle of the Incarnation as
representing that more ancient sanctity. At any rate, most mar­
vellously must our Lord have enveloped St. Joseph with light
and love, and wrought diligently in his soul with operations of

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the most astonishing and consummate grace. If magnificence is
the inseparable accompaniment of all the divine perfections,
there are none which it accompanies in a more special, though at
the same time hidden, manner than the attribute of justice; and
it was peculiarly from God’s justice that the exuberance of St.
Joseph’s graces proceeded. Who does not know the beautiful
munificence of gratitude even among the sons of men? What
then must gratitude be like in God? The sanctification of St.
Joseph, the eminence of his interior beauty, must represent it.
Our Lord as it were put himself under obligations to St. Joseph,
as well as in subordination to him. His fair and spotless soul was
the cloister built round Mary’s innocence. In his paternal foster­
ing arms the Child was laid, who had no father but the Eternal.
On Mary’s score, and on his own, how much had Jesus con­
descended to owe to Joseph! His payment was in holiness. When
therefore we think of the offices for which he was paid, and who
it was that paid him, must we not confess that Joseph also was
a world by himself in the vast resplendent creation of grace,
whose beautiful light and fair shining in its huge orbit we per­
ceive with exultation, while it is hidden from us in its details by
the immensity of its distance, and also by the strangeness of its
phenomena, which will not altogether keep to our more limited
analogies? On him truly the AVord in Mary’s Bosom spent much
labor, in God’s sense of labor, with jubilee of love, and exulta­
tion in the glorious perfection and variety of his loving work.
The peerless jewel of redeeming grace, that highest point to
which redeeming love ever attained, the Immaculate Conception,
had been effected by him, when he dwelt only in the Father’s
Bosom. In it he laid the foundation-stone of his created home,
being himself external to it; for it was yet unbuilt. Since he had
taken up his abode in Mary’s Bosom, his work on her had rather
been the continuing and perfecting of that adornment of her in
which we have already seen the Holy Trinity especially engaged.
In the soul of St. Joseph also his work had been eminently one
of sanctification, though of course sanctification through redeem­
ing grace. But now, rejoicing like a giant to run his course, he will

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&1

signalize his advent by work of sheer redeeming grace, which should
be second to none but the Immaculate Conception, unless indeed
the same unrevealed privilege had beenaccordedtoSt. Joseph. Hid­
den upon earth in his Mother’s bosom, like himself, there is an
unborn child, somewhat older, indeed six months older, than
himself who is eternal. This child has been from everlasting
elected to mighty things. He has been chosen to be our Lord’s Pre­
cursor. He is the old world’s second Elias, a burning as well as
a shining light. His destiny is so great that hitherto no man born
of woman has had a greater; and in some sense, therefore, was
it greater than St. Joseph’s. St. Joseph perhaps was more deeply
embedded in the divine light. God pressed him more closely to
himself, as a mother almost hides her child in her bosom by the
closeness of her embrace; while the Baptist was more held forth
at arm’s length to men, that they might see his light, and his
light shine free and full upon them. This child also is one of the
Word’s primal ideas, and one of his most beautiful elections,
part of the gorgeous circle or hierarchy of the Incarnation. But
at the present moment he lies in darkness. The stain of original
sin is on that soul, so capable of such a mighty indwelling of
divine light. He is in the power of the evil one. God’s great
enemy has a kind of dominion in him, and, by the common laws
of things, he must be bom before he will be capable of any
merciful ordinance by which his fetters can be broken and he can
be free to fly and nestle in the bosom of his Creator. The time
of reason God in his compassion will anticipate for the children
of all those who are in covenant with him, but the time of birth
he has never yet anticipated for any one included in the decree of
sin, unless it was for the prophet Jeremias, and for St. Joseph.
By a wonderful untimeliness of mercy, the unborn Jesus will
now go and redeem the Baptist gloriously, while he too is vet
unborn. The unincarnate Savior redeemed millions before his
actual Incarnation, his Mother singularly above the rest. The
incarnate but unborn Savior too shall redeem millions in those
nine months, the unborn Baptist singularly above the rest. Like
a new pulse of impetuous gladness, the Babe in Mary’s Bosom

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drives her forth. With swift step, as if the precipitate gracefulness
of her walk were the outward sign of her inward joy, and she
were beating time with her body to the music that was so jubilant
within, the Mother traverses the hills of Juda, while Joseph
follows her in an amazement of revering love. I.ike Jesus walking
swiftly to his Passion, as if Calvary were drawing him like a mag­
net, so the staid and modest virgin sped onward to the dwelling
of Elizabeth in Hebron. The Everlasting Word within trembled
in the tone of Mary’s voice, and the Babe heard it, and "leaped
in his Mother’s womb," and the chains of original sin fell off
from him, and he was justified by redeeming grace, and the full
use of his majestic reason was given to him, and he made acts of
adoring love such as never patriarch or prophet yet had made;
and he was instantaneously raised to a dazzling height of sanctity,
which is a memorial and a wonder in heaven to this day; and the
inspiration of the Holy Ghost thrilled through his mother at the
moment, and she was filled full of God, and her first act, in con­
sequence of this plenitude of God, was a worshipful recognition
of the grandeur of the Mother of God; and all these miracles
were accomplished before yet the accents of Mary’s voice had
died away upon the air. Straightway the Word arose within his
Mother’s Bosom, and enthroned himself upon her sinless heart,
and, borrowing her voice, which had already been to him the
instrument of his power, the sacrament of John’s redemption, he
sang the unfathomable Magnificat, out of whose depths music
has gone on streaming upon the enchanted earth all ages since.
But what must a life of nine whole months have been, when
such occupations as these were but a moment's miracle I Almost
always we may be sure that what we see of God is less grand than
what we do not see. He shows us what we can bear, and
strengthens us to see much which our weak nature could never
bear; and yet after all it is little better than the surface of his
brightness, the back of his glory, as Moses calls it, which we see.
Even the grandeur, which we see, we do not see in its real great­
ness, its absolute and essential gloriousness. Yet how wonderful
are these few samples of the occupations of the Nine Months,

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83

which we have been allowed to seel If these are few, and super­
ficial, and not in their true depth comprehended by us, what
must have been the works of that active and contemplative life,
so full of reality, energy, substance, and accomplishment, as we
have already seen it to be! What must they have been in multi­
tude, since these were momentary! What in grandeur, since these
lie within our reach! What in unknown wonders, of whose ex­
istence we cannot dream, because they are so far down in God'.
It comes before us sometimes in confused sublimity at prayer.
Our eyes are turned upward, like the eagle’s in its flight, yet we
feel that we are wheeling, nay, almost resting, over an abyss of
unfathomable divine depth below, having seemed to cross the
edge from the firm land of faith in our fervor, and unconsciously
to intrude upon the happier land of sight. But it is one of faith’s
gifts, and not its least, to find repose, security, and the sense of
home precisely in the dark, vacant magnificence of the mysteries
of God.
Let us turn from this life in Mary's Bosom to her own con­
temporary life. It too is full of God and of divine significances,
very needful to be contemplated if we would rightly understand
the life of the Word within her. All the wide kingdoms of God’s
creation are fair to look upon. There is not a single province
of it which is not so beautiful as to fascinate the mind and heart
of man. It is no wonder men fall into such an idolatry of science.
Even departments of science which concern themselves with the
details of but one section of creation, rather than a kingdom of
it, can readily so absorb the faculties of a large mind as to make
it almost dead to other truth, blind to other beauty, and incapable
of other interests. The animal propensities of men must be
strong indeed to keep down intellectual idolatry even to the pitch
which it has attained in the present age, when the alluring charms
of science, with its broad regions of exhilarating discovery, are
taken into consideration. Surely nothing but the better enchant­
ment of God, the nobler spells of spiritual wisdom, the emanci­
pating captivity of divine faith, can withstand the attractions of
scientific research; more especially in the case of the physical

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sciences, where God’s actual works arc more immediately the
objects of our investigation, and not, as in the case of mental and
moral sciences, the systems in which other men have embodied
their puny views of what God has done. The contact with God
is less immediate in these latter sciences, and the very phenomena
have an uncertainty about them. The recesses, in which physical
science works, are more authentic divine laboratories, where
man’s meddling has less overlaid God’s footprints, and the dis­
turbing force of moral evil is less perceptible. But if the physical
sciences are, in our present imperfect state, more attractive to most
men than the mental sciences, they in their turn must yield in
interest and beauty to the sciences which are divine. Theology
is the proper interpretation of all sciences. It is the central science
in which alone all sciences are true, and all sciences one. The
objects of faith, while they are more cosmic than any phenomena,
are also unspeakably more beautiful, because they are divine, and
more interesting, because we each of us have an individual interest
in them, and they concern our eternity as well as our time. The­
ology has some departments which more resemble the physical
sciences, such as the treatises on God, the Holy Trinity, the In­
carnation, and Beatitude; others again are more akin to the mental
sciences, as the treatises on Grace, on Human Actions, and on
Laws; while the treatises on the Sacraments unite, and often in a
perplexing way, the characteristics of both.
But of all the kingdoms of God’s creation, there are none,
the paradise of the Sacred Humanity excepted, to compare with
the interior of Mary’s soul, the inward beauty, the marvellous
wisdom, the consummate graces of that chosen queenly creature.
We must try to bring before ourselves some picture of her life
during those Nine Months from the Annunciation to the Nativity.
She bore the Incarnate God within herself. She had an unclouded
consciousness of her rank in creation. She possessed such a degree
of infused science as enabled her more clearly to comprehend the
vast mystery within her than the most piercing intelligence in all
the realm of angels. She stood already upon a height of sanctity,

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85

which no definitions can at all adequately express,· so that there
was a sense in which God found her worthy of the sublimity of
her exaltation. Like a material world being fashioned and com­
pleted, so was she a spiritual world, grander and broader than all
material creation, being fashioned by her Creator, and she was
conscious of the unutterable process, and adoringly passive under
it, with the most meritorious of all possible consents. She was
placed even in a kind of created superiority over him, because
she possessed the rights of a Mother, and his physical life was
dependent upon her, and his possession of his Soul had hung for
a moment on her consent. Now, can we at all put ourselves in
the position of such a creature? Can we divine how she would
feel and act, how she would love, and hope, and believe, and
worship? There must be guesses in all sciences. We advance by
guessing, as often as by discovery. All that is needful is that our
guesses should be in harmony with the indubitable and authentic
analogies of our science.
We must suppose, then, that, short of the Beatific Vision and
also of the joys of the Sacred Heart, no creature ever had a jov
equal to the delight of Mary in possessing the Incarnate God
within herself, compassing the Incomprehensible, exercising
dominion over the Omnipotent, and being united with Him who
is infinite Beatitude, in such a union that his life and hers were
one. Is it even clear that the Beatific Vision is equal to this joy
simply in the greatness of the joy? From some points of view we
should consider Mary’s bliss in this respect to be greater than
many degrees of the Beatific Vision; and still more if, as some
revelations of the saints would seem to intimate, she did transi
ently, and from time to time, during those nine months enjoy the
Beatific Vision also. But in kind at least this joy of hers stands
• It is probable that our Lady had grace ex opere opernto all the nine months
she bore our Lord. See Siuri. De Novissimis. Tract xxxi. cap, iv. sec. 76. Vega
and Mendoza teach that she received grace ex opere operalo every time she touched
our Lord; and Sister Agreda tells us that the grace which she received in order
to minister to her Son aright was a special and distinct grace, and expressly com
municated to her by the Holy Trinity for that purpose, and not merely an exerror
of the common virtues under which it would otherwise naturally fall

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alone. None other is like it. It is single in creation. It is obviously
a different joy from the Beatific Vision, because it is quite a dif­
ferent possession of God. It is as it were the other side of our
Lord’s joy in his Sacred Heart, which arose from the sense of his
being the Creator, and yet being in such a wondrous and singular
union with a created nature: while the joy of Mary resided mainly
in the sense of her being a creature, yet in such solitary and
peculiar relations to the Creator. It could not help but be an
exceeding joy, and yet it could not help also but be the masterful
unity of her whole life. It must not only have colored every thing
else, but every thing else must simply have subsided into it. It
must have made every other component part of life different,
because of its sovereign presence. Yet Mary knew that it was
only for a season. She was conscious that the mystery must pass
on into another, and that his present state must give place to a
new state. Moreover, our Lord’s mysteries did not merely change.
They rose as well as changed. They developed. They grew in
beauty, and had a multiplied significance. Thus her first sight
of his new-born Face at Bethlehem was a kind of Beatific Vision
for her still to desire, something which seemed to leave her present
joy incomplete as well as transitory. Yet the enjoyment of God,
however transitory, is in another sense never incomplete. Thus
her bliss was like that of the Blessed in heaven, in so far as it
united in itself satiety and desire, the most complete enjoyment,
and yet a sweet insatiable hungering for more, which last in her
case was a certain expectation. She had satiety; for how could she
be other than satisfied when she possessed God within her bosom,
and possessed him in such a singular way and with such a trans­
cending reality? He surely filled her nature, vast as its capacities
were, to overflowing. Every pulse, that beat in her, reposed upon
him in a way in which no creature out of heaven reposed on him
before. Yet her very satiety fed her intense desire. She yearned
for more, without being the less satisfied with what she now en­
joyed. A tranquil disquietude, a hungry contentement, a restful
craving, these are the contradictory expressions by which we ex­
press to ourselves our own idea of her state. To use the word of

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37

the Church, it was a state of "expectation," that beautiful and
touching mystery in honor of which she keeps a special festival,
whereby she helps her children to clothe themselves with some
portion of the grandeur of the Mother's mind, as fitting prepara­
tion for celebrating the Son’s Nativity.
In order to understand Mary’s expectation, we must bring
before ourselves a picture of her mind, one falling far below the
original in brightness of coloring and in fulness of representation,
yet such a picture as we can make for ourselves. No creature out
of heaven, save the Soul of the Babe within her, ever saw the
Divinity so clearly as she; and she saw it, as none else can see it,
substantially in herself, and physically compassed there. What
must that be which shall waken further expectations, when she is
brooding over such a sea of glorious light and speechless calm as
that? Moreover, no doctor of the Church, not even the apostles,
comprehended the scheme of redemption, with all its complicated
graces, its magnificent disclosures of the divine perfections, its
marvellous compensations, its abundant triumphs, the delicate
machinery of its supernatural operations, more truly or completely
than she did. She took in at a glance its colossal proportions as a
whole, while she read off the ever-varying expressions of each
lineament of that mystery which may be defined as the full Face
of God turned toward creation. The past history of the world,
with all its needs of a Savior, lay before her, with a divine light
interpreting the entangled puzzles which human actions have
painted upon it, and showing how tranquilly God’s glory is un­
ravelling it all into the orderly and ornate unity in which it
originally lay in the intention of the Creator. The grand depths
of Scripture were giving out to her perpetually a magnificent
wisdom, as if the inner folds of the Divine Mind were being un­
rolled before her. The schools of Athens would have been rich
indeed if they had been endowed with one scintillation of the
wisdom, which out of the Hebrew oracles was falling evermore
in showers of light upon her. The Thirty-Three Years lay before
her, as a painted country with its provinces lies before us in a
map, and as she gazed upon the crowded vision, every faculty of

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her soul was heroically clothed with the spirit of sacrifice and the
enthusiasm of magnanimity. Shadows fell upon her soul out of
the cloudless skies of that vision, and her divine life deepened as
ever and anon they passed upon her. They, who have spent their
boyhood among the mountains, may remember the sacred awe
which passed upon them, as they lay upon the lonely heights,
when under the blue and cloudless heavens a strange shadow fell
over them and rested vibratingly upon them, and yet they knew
themselves to be alone upon the mountain-top; and, at last, they,
perceived that it was some huge falcon or eagle in the sunny air,
balancing itself high up betwixt the sun and them and gazing
down upon them, a shadow not wholly free from fear. Thus it
was with our Lady’s dolors in the vision of the Threc-and-Thirty
Years. They cast shadows when there were no clouds, as if, like
birds of prey, they had been allowed to sail through the unbroken
brightness of that heavenly mystery.
She also saw before her in true perspective the future of the
Church, its trials, and its triumphs, and her own vast influence
in every age upon doctrine, devotion, and the outward fortunes
of the Holy See. With its millions of figures, bearing their own
blazonings with the sun full upon them, it passed like a gorgeous
procession before her, wonderfully interpreted, as it passed, in the
amazing soliloquies of her own supernatural philosophy. She saw
the battling forms of darkness and of blood in which the Church
shall close her terrestrial pilgrimage, ever fighting her way to her
eternal home, and engaged in the most dire of all her conflicts
on the very confines of the promised land, on the very eve of the
final doom. She looked on through the mists of time, and all was
clear to her. She saw the great world rocking almost off its
equilibrium, not with material catastrophes—for in matter all
was lawful, meek, and uniform—but with moral convulsions and
mental revolutions. She saw it plunging on through space so
unsteady that it seemed ever about to fling the Church off from
itself, as a beast shakes off an uneasy load, or to swerve desolately
from its spiritual orbit, so that in some generations good men—
that is, God’s men—should almost hold their breath in the

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terrible suspense of some inevitable and yet incredible finality.
She saw it cleave through ages without precedent, through civil­
izations without parallel. She saw how its life of ponderous rev
olutions was one of lightning-like progress also, and there was a
recklessness about its moral speed, and a daring in the manner
with which it entangled itself in all manner of social complica­
tions, which might have depressed a seer less grand than she was.
But no panic passed on her. The Babe within her was stronger
than the world. His tiny infant Hand, his thin treble Voice,
were enough to confine it in its groove, and to speak peace to those
warring elements of mind and will which sin has thrown into
ruinous combustion. Then at last she saw the great wandering
creation housed in its Father’s mansion, and bathed in the
splendors of his eternal love, through the Precious Blood made
from hers, and whose pulses she felt with unspeakable thrills
throbbing within her at that moment. To what emotions of
thanksgiving, to what hymns of praise, to what sciences in her
soul—which were worships also—to what numberless unlanguaged
and unsung Magnificats, did not all this give rise? And yet she
was expecting something more!
Thus it was with the great Mother of God, still in the dawn
of her virginal youth. All created things had a new meaning to
her, now that they were governed from out of her. Men's faces
and actions were the language of a new science to her, which
philosophy might envy. Meanwhile she was sensibly receiving
graces from the Babe, and those graces were unparalleled, not to
be so much as imagined by any of us, perhaps barely compre­
hended by herself. She was consciously growing, too, in reverence
and devotion to St. Joseph, as the image of the Eternal Father.
She was growing out of herself into her office, out of the daughter
of Anne into the Mother of God. The marvellous permitted
intimacies of the saints with God were as nothing to her colloquies
—her spiritual colloquies—with the Infant Jesus. Yet with all this
growth, her Expectation was growing also. But what was her
Expectation like? It was a mystery of incomparable joy. All god­
like things are joyous. They inherit joy by their own right. They

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sing songs in the soul even amidst the agonies of nature. There is
no making them otherwise than joyous. They have touched God,
and so they carry with them an irresistible gladness everywhere.
They have an unquenchable sunshine of their own, which the
surrounding darkness only makes more startlingly bright. The
thorns of mortification thus become a bed of roses: yet not a thorn
is blunted, nor is nature spared a wound. The pains of martyr­
dom attune themselves to this inward jubilee, and yet are pains as
they were before. Now Mary’s Expectation was full of God, and
therefore it was joyous. It had two intensities of joy in it: the
intensity of created holiness thirsting for the sight of God; and
the intensity of an earthly mother’s desire—natural, simple, and
human, but immensely sanctified—to see the Face of her Babe,
whom she knew to be God as well.
In the Scriptures the Face of God is spoken of as if it were the
magnet of creatures. There is no doubt that by the word Face is
commonly meant the Vision of God, together with all sensible
presences of him, but especially the Vision of him. Men lived
on sight. Faith was the soul’s sight of the unseen. It was the
attraction of created sanctity to yearn for the Face of the Creator,
or rather such yearning was itself sanctity. There are many faces
of things in the world, and almost all of them are very beautiful.
Even those, which are not joyous, have a beautiful sadness about
them. There are frowning faces of things, expressions which sin
has brought over the countenance of nature, as age brings
winkles. Life too has weary-looking aspects: yet in truth there
is nothing in life to weary us but sin, or the sinless want of God.
But all these faces of things, beautiful, or beautifully sad, or dark
and frowning, have all a look of expectation upon them. Their
features say they are not final. There is no resting in the best of
them for any soul of man. Even in an unfallen creation the face
of things would never satisfy the soul. There is a kind of infinite
capability about it, which glorious and lovely creations by thou­
sands might flow into forever and yet leave it an everlasting void,
an unfertile desolation. The hidden Face of the Creator, the
unveiling of that hidden Face—it was this for which men were

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to yearn. It was the lesson life was to teach them, that there was
no true life away from the Vision of that blessed and beatifying
Face. Hence it is, that, when God has allured his saints up to
great heights of sanctity, beyond the cheering companionship of
creatures, into the frightening divine wastes of contemplation,
where nature finds only an echoing solitude, and a wilderness of
bristling rocks, and the dread of preternatural ambushes, he visits
them with visions, when even their heroic courage is failing and
their hearts are sinking within them. Such visions are like lights
held out on the shore to those who are fighting with the stormy
waters. They are disclosures beforehand, anticipations of that
abiding and full Vision from which those often think themselves
furthest who are in truth drawing nighest to it.
It was thus that Mary yearned for that earthly beatific Vision,
the Face of the Incarnate God. She had doubtless intellectual
visions, as mystics call them, of die beauty of the Sacred Human­
ity, before that night at Bethlehem. But these would rather
increase the burning of her desire, than be a satisfaction to it.
Transient sights of God—do not even we know so much as that,
who are lowest in grace?—only stimulate the appetite of the soul.
They quicken rather than feed; or, if they feed, it is the craving
of the soul which they feed, rather than the soul itself. The awful
nearness of that vision, actually at the moment infolded within
herself, must have thrilled through her, as she thought of it. She
knew how that to her immense science that infantine human Face
of the Eternal Word would be an illuminated picture of the
divine perfections. It would be a new disclosure of God to her.
new as all God’s disclosures of himself are daily to every soul.
She would gaze on that Countenance, whose expressive beauty,
even when it was mute and still, would, like the voiceless music
of light playing on the forest, the mountain, and the sea. trans­
parently display to her the workings of the Sacred Heart. She
was on the point of seeing that human Face which was to light
up all the vast heaven for eternity, and be to it instead of sun and
moon. She was to drink filial love and welcome and complacency
out of die very eyes, whose beams would pour everlasting coment-

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ment into the millions of the Blessed round the throne. She was
to see this Face daily, hourly, momentarily, for years. She was to
watch it broaden, lengthen, and grow larger, putting off and
taking on the expression of the successive ages of human life. She
was to see it in the seeming unconsciousness of childhood, in the
peculiar grace of boyhood, in the pensive serenity of the upgrown
man; she was to see it in the rapture of divine contemplation, in
the compassionate tenderness of love, in the effulgence of heavenly
wisdom, in the glow of righteous indignation, in the pathetic
gravity of deep sadness, in the moments of violence, shame, physi­
cal pain, and mental agony. In each of its varying phases it was
to her not less than a revelation. She was to do almost what she
willed with this divine Face. She might press it to her own face
in the liberties of maternal love. She might cover with kisses the
lips that are to speak the doom of all men. She might gaze upon
it unrebuked, when it was sleeping or waking, until she learned it
off by heart. When the Eternal was hungry, that little Face would
seek her breast, and nestle there. She would wipe off the tears
that ran down the infant cheeks of Uncreated Beatitude. Many
a time in the water of the fountain would she wash that Face,
while the Precious Blood mantled in it with the coldness of the
water or the soft friction of her hand, and made it tenfold more
beautiful. One day it was to lie white, blood-stained, and dead
upon her lap, while for the last time the old ministries of Beth­
lehem, so touchingly misplaced, would have to be renewed on
Calvary.
In this Face she would see a likeness of herself. She would be
able to trace her own lineaments in his. What an overwhelming
mystery for a creature—overwhelming especially to her immense
humilityl No other creature was ever in like case on earth, nor
ever will be. He will give all of us his glorious likeness in heaven
after the resurrection; but she first gave to him what he will give
to us. God gave her his own image; she, as it were, returns it to
him after another sort. His very likeness to his Mother makes
him seem to fit more completely into his own creation. In truth
it was a Face of a thousand mysteries, and she might well long to

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see it unveiled, and as it were inaugurated among the visible
things of earth. As a creature, and as the highest of all mere
creatures, she might long to see it: but her longing as a mother
was something more than that. When we have imagined to our­
selves all that we can imagine of the purity, intensity, and gladness
of a mother’s love, we have still to remember that she, who longed
to see her Child's Face, was the Mother of God, and the Face she
longed to see the Face of the Incarnate God. Yet the human
element of maternal love in its highest perfection must always
remain in our minds as an ingredient of her Expectation. More­
over, the Vision, for which she was yearning, was the vision of
that same Face and Features which the Eternal Word himself had
been looking at with love, desire, and unspeakable expectation
from eternity. It was a dear vision which he had cherished and
made much of all through the creatureless eternity. So that Mary's
devotion to the sight of that blessed Face was one of those shad­
ows of eternal things, which were cast upon her from out of God,
as the mountains are imaged in the placid lake.
Such was her life of Expectation. It was a life of the highest
spiritual perfections, occupied with divine mysteries, and anticipa­
ting celestial bliss. It was a life which was raising her sanctity
hourly to greater heights of wonderful attainment. It was a life
without precedent, a life inimitable, a life to which only silent
thought can do any sort of justice, and that in most inadequate
degree. Yet withal it was a life of extremely natural beauty, a life
exceedingly human. It was as if grace had become nature, rather
than superseded it. The earthly element seemed to be that which
held it together and gave it unity. It was feminine as well as
saintly. It was precisely its sanctity which appeared to make it
so exquisitely feminine. It was a possibility of beautiful nature
realized by Him who is the author both of nature and of grace.
It was the canonization of a mother's love, in the light of which
we see for a moment that deep tenderness in God out of which
maternal love proceeds, and whose pure delights it adumbrates.
Thus her life, while it was contemporary with the life of the Word
in her Bosom, was a thoroughly human life, altogether a created

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life, and as characteristically a created life as the life of the Father,
with the Eternal Son in his Bosom, was an uncreated life. Of a
truth it was often thus with Mary, that, when she was most won­
derful, she was then most human! It was so now; it was so at the
end of the twelve years in the temple at Jerusalem; it was so
beneath the Cross, with the dead Body lying on her lap. Her
royal womanly nature lent a grace to the very graces which
adorned her, and it was in the light of earth, which was round
her brow, that the jewels of her heavenly crown shone with the
sweetest, and even with the divinest, radiance. He, who left
heaven in quest of an earthly nature, has enhanced, not over­
whelmed, by his excess of glory, the earthly beauty of his Mother.
Mar}’ is not a thing, a splendor, a marvel, a trophy; she is a living
person; and therefore it is her nature as woman which crowns her
unspeakable maternity. God has not overpowered her with his
magnificence. Rather he has given her distinctness by his gifts,
and has brought out in relief the beauty of a sinless nature. Her
created maternal love of the Incarnate Word is a substantial par­
ticipation in the Father’s uncreated paternal love of the Coequal
Word; and yet, among all the loves that are, there is no love
more distinguishably human than this love of hers.
But, peculiar and unprecedented as was this life of Mary, her
Expectation is nevertheless a beautiful rich type of all Christian
life. Jesus is in each of us by his essence, presence, and power,
and is inwardly and intimately concurring to every thought of
our minds, as well as to all our outward actions. His supernatural
indwelling in our souls by grace is a thing more wonderful than
all miracles, and has a more efficacious energy. An attentive and
pious meditation on the doctrine of grace positively casts a
shadow over our spirits, because of the greatness of our gifts and
our dizzy nearness to God, and we work under that shadow in
hallowed fear, those fearing most who love most. Through grace
he is continually being born in us and of us, by the good works
which he enables us to do, and by our correspondence to grace,
which is in truth a grace itself. So that the soul of one, who is in
a state of grace, is a perpetual Bosom of Mary, an endless inward

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Bethlehem. In seasons, after Communion, he dwells in us really
and substantially as God and Man; for the same Babe that was
in Mary is also in the Blessed Sacrament. What is all this, but a
participation in Mary’s life during those wonderful months? What
comes of it to us is precisely what came of it to her—a blissful
Expectation. We are always expecting more holiness, more of
him in future years, new sights of his Face in the stillness of
recollection down in the twilight of our souls; and, like Mary,
we are expecting Calvary as well as Bethlehem. Who is there
before whose eyes at least a confused vision of suffering is not
perpetually resting? What is past of life assures us that suffering
must form no trifling part of what is yet to come. Besides, we all
have prophecies of cares and troubles, and there is no sunshine
into which the tall ends of the shadows of coming sorrows do not
enter, and repose there with a soft umbrage which is almost
beautiful and almost welcome. At any rate, there is death to
come, and that is a strait gate at its best estate. But we are ex
pccting also, as Mary was, the sight of our Lord’s Human Face.
In all our time there will not be a point more notable, more truly
critical, than that at which the Vision of his Face will break upon
us. Our judgment on the outskirts of the invisible world will be
our Cave of Bethlehem; for then first shall we really see his Face
Yet even that sight will not altogether end our expectation; for
we shall take sweet expectation with us into purgatory, where it
will feed on the memory of that Divine Face which for one
moment had been unveiled before us. After that, there is a home
close by the Babe of Bethlehem. It is our Home as well as Mary’s
Home. It is an eternal Home; and there, and there only, we shall
expect no more.
Such was the life of the Word in the Bosom of Mary; and such
was the life of Mary while the Word dwelt in her Bosom. We
have now to meditate on the last act of that wonderful life. The
nine months draw to a close, and our Lord’s last act is to journey
from Nazareth to Bethlehem. It is toward us, as well as toward
Bethlehem, that he is journeying. He is about to leave his home
a second time for the love of us. As he had left his uncreated home

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in the Bosom of the Father, so is he now going to leave his created
home that he may come to us and be still more ours. He will show
us in this last action that he is not obedient merely to his holy
and chosen Mother, but that he has come to be the servant of our
commands and to wait upon our forwardness. He journeys to
Bethlehem at the command of an earthly sovereign; and although
he is a Jew, and for ages has loved, with a divinely obstinate and
most unaccountable predilection, his own people, he is obeying
now a foreign sovereign, who by right of conquest is holding his
people in subjection. He comes at the moment when that foreign
master is enumerating his subjects and making a census of the
province—as if there was something which tempted him on the
occasion, and that his humility hastened to seize upon the oppor­
tunity of being officially and authentically enrolled as a subject
the moment he was born. Is it not strange that humiliation, to
which the creature has such an unconquerable repugnance, seems
to be the sole created thing which has an attraction for the
Creator?
As he journeyed along the roads from Nazareth to Bethlehem,
all the while governing the world and judging men, how little did
the world suspect his presence in Mary’s Bosom! Could any
advent come upon us more by stealth than this? Even the un­
named midnight when he will break upon us from the east and
summon us to the final doom will hardly come more like a thief
in the night, than when he came to be born at Bethlehem. There
is no sign. Mary’s face tells nothing. Joseph is evermore in silent
prayer. It is wonderful how taciturn and secret people grow when
they come near God. Yet everywhere there is that impatience
which we have so often observed in the things of God, that
strange mixture of slowness and precipitation which characterizes
the execution of his purposes. What is the fire that burns in
Mary’s expectation, but a heavenly impatience? Even Joseph’s
tranquillity is not insensible. His is too divine a heart to be in­
sensible. He also, with his will laid alongside the will of God,
is impatient for that hour of gladness which is to make the very
angels break forth from the coverts of their hidden life into

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audible and clamorous song. The hot and uneasy heart of the
world, burdened, in the dark, seeking and not finding, is im­
patient for its deliverer. The unwearied angels are love-wearied,
waiting for their Head, whom they expect the more eagerly now
that they have seen the glorious holiness of their human Queen.
The Father is, if we may dare to say it, adorably impatient to give
his only-begotten Son to the world, to take his place among visible
creatures. The Holy Ghost burns to bring forth into the light of
day that beautiful Sacred Humanity which has been especially of
his own fashioning. The Word himself is impatient now for
Bethlehem, as he will hereafter confess himself to be for Calvary.
Meanwhile we, we ungenerous sinners, who know ourselves to be
what we are, are actually part of his attraction. We are helping
to hasten on this stupendous mystery. It is we who by our little­
ness and our vileness are making the incredible love of God so
much more incredible that it is only a divine habit of supernatural
faith which can reach so far as to believe it.
Let us look at him once more in Mary’s Bosom. How beauti­
fully he nestles there! An eternity of purpose has come to its
fulfilment there. An eternity of desire has found contentment
there. Has he really left the Bosom of the Father for the greater
attraction of the Bosom of the Creature? So we, indeed, are
obliged to express ourselves: yet, if we look up, he is there also,
there always. He has never left the Bosom of the Father: for he
never could leave it. He would not be God were he so much as
free to leave it. Yet is he not the less in Mary’s Bosom now, pre­
paring soon to leave it, and to be cast forth as a heavenly exile
amidst visible created things, unknown, unrecognised, as maker
and lord of all, nay, even rejected, disesteemed, excommunicated,
and his human life violently taken from him, as though he were
unworthy to be part of his own Creation.
The sun sets on the twenty-fourth of December on the low
roofs of Bethlehem, and gleams with wan gold on the steep of its
stony ridge. The stars come out one by one. Heaven is empty of
angels, but they show not their bright presences up among the
stars. Rude men are jostling God in the alleys of that Oriental

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village, and shutting their doors in his Mother's face. Time itself,
as if it were sentient, seems to get tremulous and eager, as though
the hand of its angel shook as it draws on toward midnight. Beth
lehem is at that moment the veritable centre of God’s creation.
Still the minutes pass. The plumage of the night grows deeper
and darker. How purple is the dome of heaven above those
pastoral slopes duskily spotted with recumbent sheep, and how
silently the stars drift down the southern steep of the midnight
sky! Yet a few moments, and the Eternal Word will come.

Chapter HI

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE
Childhood is a time of endless learning. It learns at play, as
well as at school. Its lessons hardly teach it more than its idleness.
It observes without knowing that it observes, and imitates without
suspecting that it is not original. It is the strangest mixture of
the restless and the passive, always moving, yet always brooding
also. There are few men who will ever in after life be half so
contemplative as they were amidst the changeful and capricious
activities of childhood. There are many harvests in a lifetime,
but there is only one seed-time; and all the crops are sown in
seeming confusion at once, yet come up in an orderly succession
which betokens law, not uninfluenced by circumstances. After­
life is the theatre on which childhood produces its spectacles one
after another, like so many dramas, whose lightness or sadness,
beauty or harshness, tell rocognizable tales of birthplace and its
scenery, of early schools with their dark and bright, of the impress
of a father’s mind, or the moulding of a mother’s skilful love, of
the grave touches of a brother’s affectionate influence, or the in­
effaceable memories of an idolatrous sister’s touching partisanship.
But, as life goes on, it is above all things the father’s influence
which manifests itself more and more. The voice takes his tone,
the gait his peculiarity. Many little ways unconsciously develop
themselves, which have never been remarked in past years, and
can now be hardly an intentional imitation of one who has been
in his grave for a quarter of a century. The old family home is
renewed, and they that remember old times look on with smiles
and tears, both of which are at once painful and pleasant, because
they raise the dead and put new life and color into memories that
were fading away in gray time.
Now, all this may be applied to the subject of religion. W hat
99

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childhood is to after-life, so far as this world is concerned, this
life is to the life to come. We are always learning, and learning
more than we suspect. If we are earnestly striving to serve God,
we are observing him when we do not think of it. Our likeness
to him is growing, like a family likeness in a child, sleeping or
waking; and its progress is hardly noted. We are only conscious
of it at intervals. Our nature is becoming secretly and painlessly
supernaturalized, even at moments when the painful efforts of
mortification may happen to be comparatively suspended. God's
ways are passing into ours, though for the present it is all under
the surface; and not unfrequently appearances are even the other
way. Sometimes, as we advance in the spiritual life, we are taken
by surprise at finding how much more deeply heavenly principles
have sunk into us than we had supposed, and how almost intui
tively we put ourselves on God's side, take his view of things, and
even, in a far-off way, imitate what we may reverently term his
style of action. Long daily intimacy with our Heavenly Father is
beginning to tell upon us. Habits of childlike reverence arc
almost implicitly habits of filial imitation. Great results follow
even on this side the grave; but surely much greater ones will
follow on the other. The degree of our likeness to God there
may depend more than we suppose on the secret undergrowth
of that likeness here. As childhood’s best harvests are those which
come latest in life, so may it be that our imitation of God may
not merely secure our bliss hereafter, but may give a character
to our blessedness, and exercise no little influence over it forever.
At any rate, the mere observation of God is of immense impor­
tance to our sanctification. To see him at work, even without
our endeavoring to imitate him, is in itself a sanctifying process,
and one, too, which, as a matter of fact, will never rest in itself,
but sooner or later will issue in real imitation. Principles of
celestial beauty grow into us, and mould us with quiet vehemence,
just as exquisite models make artists; and time and love are all
the while doing a joint work deeper down in us than we can see
ourselves. To watch God seems to put a new nature into us. We
grow like him by seeing him, even in the twilight of this arctic

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world. We turn away from the sight of him for a moment, and,
lo! all things look unbeautiful, because God is not there. We
have already watched him bring forth his decrees from their
eternal hiding-place in his mind, and gently lead them to execu­
tion; let us now see how he will fling open the doors of his own
concealment, and take visible possession of his kingdom. This
must be the one idea of the present chapter, God’s way of mani­
festing himself after being so long invisible—nay, from the first
invisible—invisible till now. A filial creature can hardly see his
Heavenly Father's behavior in critical circumstances, and at a
solemn time, and not himself grow heavenly thereby.
There have been many wonderful pictures on this earth. The
sorrows and the joys of men have brought about many pathetic
occurrences, while their virtues and their vices have led to many
catastrophes of the most thrilling dramatic interest. Indeed, the
constantly-intersecting fortunes of men are daily acting tragedies
in real life, which, like the too faithful sunset of the painter,
would seem in fiction to be unreal and exaggerated. There have
been many mysteries, too, on earth, in which man was compara­
tively passive, and God acted by himself; times when the Creator
himself has been pleased to fill the whole theatre of his own
creation; times also, as in the cool evenings of Eden or at the door
of Abraham’s tent, when he has mingled with marvellous con­
descension among his creatures. But earth has seldom witnessed
such a scene as Mary, and Joseph, and the Eternal Word, in the
streets of Bethlehem at nightfall. The cold, early evening of
winter was closing in. Mary and Joseph had striven in vain to get
a lodging. St. Joseph was such a saint as the world had never seen
heretofore. Mary was above all saints, the first in the hierarchy of
creatures, the queen of heaven, whose power was the worthiest
similitude of omnipotence, and who was the eternally predesti­
nated Mother of God. Within her Bosom was the Incarnate God
himself, the Eternal Word, the Maker and Sovereign of all in
Bethlehem, the actual Judge of every passing soul that hour. But
there was no room for them. The village was occupied with other
things, more important according to the world’s estimate of what

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is important. The imperial officers of the census were the great
men there. Rich visitors would naturally claim the best which
the inns could give. Most private houses would have relations
from the country. Every one was busy. This obscure group from
Nazareth—that carpenter from Galilee, that youthful Mother,
that hidden Word—there was no room for them. They did not
even press for it with enough of complimentary importunity. It
is not often that modesty is persuasive. A submissive demeanor
is not an eloquent thing to the generality of men. If God does
not make a noise in his own world, he is ignored. If he does, he
is considered unseasonable and oppressive. Here in Bethlehem
is the true Caesar come, the monarch of all the Roman Caesars,
and there is no room for him, no recognition of him. It. is his
own fault, the world will say. He comes in an undignified man­
ner. He makes no authentic assertion of his claims. He begins
by putting himself in a false position; for he comes to be enrolled
as a subject instead of demanding homage as a sovereign. This
is his way; and he expects us to understand it, and to know where
to look for him and when to expect him. There was even a
shadow of Calvary in the twilight which gathered round Bethle­
hem that night. Just as no one in Jerusalem would take him in
during Holy Week, or give him food, so that he had each night
to retire to Bethany, in like manner no one in Bethlehem will
take him in, or give him a shelter beneath which he may be born.
To all but its Creator the world makes no difficulty of at least
a twofold hospitality—to be born and to die, to come into the
world and to go out of it. Yet how did it treat him in both these
respects? He was driven among the animals and beasts of burden
to be born. That little village of the least of tribes said truly, it
had no room for the Immense and the Incomprehensible. Beth­
lehem could not indeed hold her who held within herself the
Creator of the world. There was an unconscious truth even in
its inhospitality. He was to be born outside the walls of Beth­
lehem, as he died outside the walls of Jerusalem. Thus he had
truly no native town. The sinless cattle gave him ungrudging
welcome; and an old cavity in the earth, fire-rent or water-worn,

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furnished him with a roof somewhat less cold than the starry sky
of a winter’s night. So far as men were concerned, it was as much
as he could do to get born, and obtain a visible foothold on the
earth. So he was not allowed to die a natural death. His life was
trampled out of him, as something tiresome and reproachful, or
rather dishonorable and ignominious. He was buried swiftly, that
his body might not be cumbering the earth, polluting the sun­
shine, or offending the gay city on the national festival. And all
the while he was God! These are old thoughts; but they are
always new. They grow deeper, as we dwell upon them. We sink
further down into them, as we grow older. Every time we think
them, they so take us by surprise that it is as if we were now
thinking them for the first time. No words do justice to them.
The tears of the saints are more significant than words; but they
cannot express the astonishing mystery of this inhospitable Beth­
lehem, which will not give its God room to be born within its
walls.
Alas! the spirit of Bethlehem is but the spirit of a world which
has forgotten God. How often has it been our own spirit also!
How are we through churlish ignorance forever shutting out from
our doors heavenly blessings! Thus it is that we mismanage all
our sorrows, not recognising their heavenly character, although it
is blazoned after their own peculiar fashion upon their brows.
God comes to us repeatedly in life; but we do not know his full
face. We only know him when his back is turned, and he is
departing after our repulse. Why is it that with a theory almost
always right our practice should be so often wrong? It is not so
much from a want of courage to do what we know to be our
duty, although nature may rebel against it. It is rather from a
want of spiritual discernment. We do not sufficiently, or of set
purpose, accustom our minds to supernatural principles. The
world’s figures are easiest to count by, the world's measures the
most handy to measure by. It is a tiresome work to be always
looking at things from a different point of view from those around
us; and, when this effort is to be lifelong, it becomes a strain
which cannot be continuous; and it only ceases to be a strain by

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our becoming thoroughly supernaturalized. Thus it is that a
Christian life, which has not made a perfect revolution in man’s
worldly life, becomes no Christian life at all, but only an incom­
modious unreality, which gets into our way in this life without
helping us into the life to come. Hence it is that we do not know
God when we see him. Hence it is that we so often find ourselves
on the wrong side, without knowing how we got there. Hence it
is that our instincts so seldom grasp what they are feeling after,
our prophecies so often come untrue, our aims so constantly miss
their ends. God is always taking us by surprise, when we have no
business to be surprised at all. Bethlehem did not in the least
mean what it was doing. No one means half the evil which he
does. Hence it is a grand part of God’s compassion to look more
at what we mean than what we do. Yet it is a sad loss for ourselves
to be so blind. Is it not, after all, the real misery of life, the com­
pendium of all its miseries, that we are meeting God every day,
and do not know him when we see him?
Nothing can trouble the inward peace of those who are stayed
on God. If a gentle sadness passed over Joseph, as he was repulsed
from house after house, because he thought of Mary and of the
Child, he doubtless smiled with holy peacefulness when he looked
into her face. The unborn Babe was rejoicing in this foretaste of
his coming humiliations. Each unsympathetic voice that spoke,
the noise each door made as it was closed against them, was music
in his ear. This was what he had come to seek. This, almost more
than the virginal purity of Mary’s Bosom, was what had drawn
him down from heaven. It was the Avant of this which had made
the Father’s Bosom lacking in something which he craved. Doubt­
less Mary and Joseph, who knew him so well already, and were
versed in his unearthly ways, shared somewhat in this his exulta­
tion. It was plain there was to be no home there. They knew how
to excuse each refusal. They, in their unselfishness, were almost
ashamed to ask a hospitality which the exquisite considerateness
of their charity made them see might be thought unseasonable
in the crowded condition of the town. They would be pained to
put others to the pain of refusing them. They would only ask

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because it was a duty to ask, and they would not ask twice any­
where. Oriental hospitality is common as the flowers of the field;
but we have seen enough of the world now to know that even the
commonest services are more than God is expected to demand,
and that what is common for others is rare for him. They quit
the town, therefore, in sweetness, patience, and love, leaving a
blessing, as unbought as it was unsuspected, behind them. It is
not infrequent for God to leave a blessing even when he is re­
jected; lor his anger is so gentle that sin must have gone far in­
deed before his unrequited love becomes dislike. Yet his blessings
are strange, and sometimes wear the aspect of a punishment—as
perhaps the women of Bethlehem thought when they became the
mothers of martyrs and were ennobled by their children s blood.
The twilight deepens. Mary and Joseph descend the hill. They
find the Cave—a Stable-Cave—a sort of grotto, with an erection
before it, so common in those lands, by which depth and coolness
are both attained. The Arab builds by preference in front of a
cave, because half his dwelling is thus built for him from the first.
The cavern seems to draw them, like a spell. Souls are strangely
drawn, and to strangest things and places, when once they are
within the vortex of a divine vocation. There are the lights and
songs and music of the crowded village above them, turning into
festival the civil obligation which has brought such unwonted
numbers thither. Beneath that gay street a poor couple from
Nazareth have sought refuge with the ox and ass in the stable.
What is about to happen there! It must be differently described
according to the points of view from which we consider it. Angels
would say that some of God's eternal decrees were on the eve
of being accomplished in the most divine and beautiful of ways,
and that the invisible King was about to come forth and take
visible possession of a kingdom not narrower than a universe,
with such pomp as the spiritual and godlike angels most affect.
The magistrate in Bethlehem would say that, at the time of the
census, a pauper child had been added to the population by a
houseless couple who had come from Nazareth—noting, perhaps,
that the couple were of good family but fallen into poverty. This

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would be the way in which the world would register the advent of
its Maker. It is a consistent world—only an unteachable one. It
has learned nothing by experience. It registers him in the same
manner this very day.
Let us go forth upon the slopes, and watch the night darken­
ing. and think of the great earth that lies both near and far away
from this new and obscure sanctuary, which God is about to
hallow with such an authentic consecration. Much of earth is
occupied with Roman business. Couriers are hastening to and
fro upon the highways of the empire. The affairs of the vast
colonies are giving employment and concern to many statesmen
and governors. The great city of Rome itself is the centre of an
intellectual and practical activity which makes itself felt at the
farthest extremities of the empire. Upon some minds, and espe­
cially those of a more philosophical cast, the growth of moral
corruption, and other grave social questions, are weighing heavily.
There are lawyers also, intent upon their pleadings. Huge armies,
which are republics of themselves, are fast rising to be the lawless
masters of the world. But nowhere in the vast world of Roman
politics does there seem a trace of the Cave of Bethlehem. No
prophetic shadows are cast visibly on the scene. All things wear
a look of stability. The system, ponderous as it is, works like a
well-constructed machine. No one is suspecting any thing. It
would not be easy for the world to be making less reference to
God than it was making then. No one was on the look-out for
a divine interference—unless it were that here and there some
truth-stammering oracle perturbed a narrow circle, whose super­
stition was the thing likest religion of all things in the heathen
world. In the palace of the Caesars, who suspected that unborn
Caesar in his Cave? How often God seems to give nations a
soporific just when he is about to visit them, and the appearance
of it is not so much that of a judgment upon them as of a jealous
desire to secure his own concealment!
There is a Greek world also lying within that Roman world.
It is a world of intellect and thought and disputation—the honor­
able trifling of the conquered, the refuge of those whose national

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independence has passed away. Many a brain is spinning systems
there. Many find life full and satisfactory in the interest of a
barren eclecticism. There is a populous world of countless
thoughts, and yet how few of them for God! Everywhere there is
a grandeur of disfigured truth, everywhere magnificent tokens of
what reason can achieve, coupled with sad indications of what it
fails to do. But the strongest systems are to be broken into a
thousand pieces by the unborn Sage who is hidden in that Cave.
His philosophy will be antagonist to theirs. The Christian child
of modern Bethlehem has more in his catechism than Plato ever
could divine, together with a practical wisdom which the Stoic
might envy and admire. The world of philosophy needed the
Babe of Bethlehem. But it was not conscious of its need; neither
did it suspect his coming; neither, though it had sought truth these
hundreds of years, would it know Truth when he came and looked
it in the face. The wind is sighing through the leafless plains on
the borders of the Ilyssus; but who dreams there that, when mid­
night comes, the Unknown God of the dissatisfied schools of
Athens will be a speechless child upon the earth?
Round about, there is a nearer and a narrower world of Jewish
uneasiness. A conquered nation is a tiresome spectacle. But
never is it so disheartening as when it is tossing in unhelpful and
inefficacious sedition without rising to the heroism of a crusade
for freedom. So was it with the Jewish world that night. The
census would doubtless let loose much futile talk about the
Machabees, among those who did not enjoy the incomes of Roman
office. There was ungraceful obedience to the foreigner, and the
burning heat of old memories. There were the intrigues of
domestic factions, and the littleness of a shadowy nationality, to
which a grievance was more precious than the manly patience
that waits the right hour to strike the blow for liberty. Like all
uneasy nations, the Jews were looking out for a deliverer, and
dreaming every moment that they had found him. But their
discernment was gone. They were blinded by the very spiritual
magnificence of their ancient prophecies. They were looking in
all directions rather than toward the Cave of Bethlehem; and.

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when Mcssias came, he was their scandal rather than their hope;
and, while they shed their own blood for pretenders, they spilled
the blood of their true King in disappointment and disgust. The
gorgeous martial procession, which was to go forth to conquer and
redeem the world, will issue from the Cave of Bethlehem when
forty days are passed; but the fallen people have no eye to recog­
nize the celestial splendor of that new manner of warfare, whose
triumphs are in the depths of its abasement. I he new Machabee
is not according to their reading of the national traditions.
Or let us take another scene. The nations of the earth have
greatly changed since then. But look at that unchanging empire,
that highly-wrought and yet ungrowing civilization, of the Chinese
—the empire that as if in sport had taken to itself the title of
celestial because its genius is so eminently and so exclusively
material. Look along those brimming rivers which are made to
irrigate a myriad gardens and to spread incessant verdure over
plains almost tapestried with ornamental patterns of minutest
cultivation. Look at those quaint mountains delved into slopes
and terraces, with every basketful of earth economized and every
trickling moisture curiously hoarded. See how the realm teems
with human life, till there is scarcely any room left for any other
life than that of men, and how imperiously, and yet how gro­
tesquely, tradition, law, and custom have parcelled out and
organized and perfected that human lifel The very throng of the
thickly congregated bodies drives our minds painfully on the
thought of such innumerable souls, densely-crowded souls that
are single to the eye of God, souls perishing for the lack of the
Precious Blood. China has bred in our little faith and little love
more hard thoughts of God than all the other nations of the earth
besides. We ponder in a puzzled way over that enormous hive of
human life, where age has followed age and God is still unknown.
How little did it feel the need of a Redeemer on that December
night! how little does it feel it now! Perhaps no nook of earth
has changed less than that huge empire seething and surging with
incredible masses of population. As it was then, so is it now—
wise and yet so ignorant, strange and yet so practical, civilized and

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yet so crude, promising and yet so hopeless, so far advanced and
yet so singularly backward, so undecaying and yet in such irre­
coverable decadence. Blood has flowed there for Christ·, yet is
it the only blood of martyrs which has not yet been visibly the
seed of a future church. If anywhere on earth we can see unaltered
what we might have seen that first Christmas Eve, it is in that
strange, attractive, vexatious, disappointing land. As the winter
stars shone unconsciously that night on the hurrying currents of
those turbid rivers or in the stagnant pools of the rice-fields, so
were the hearts of the dwellers there unconscious then, so are
they almost unconscious now. It is chiefly the speechless uncon­
scious babes * of China that are the sweet prey of the Babe of
Bethlehem, an artifice of grace which almost looks as if it stooped
to suit itself to the condition of the land it fain would bless.
There was the world also of the barbarians, wandering or fixed.
The rude cradles of modern civilization were already seething
with numbers by the Sea of Azof, or beyond the Danube, or amid
the pine-woods of Sarmatia. There were nations which were
evermore at war, nations sunk almost to the level of the lower
animals, nations with a hundred religions, all of them fierce,
sanguinary, abominable, degrading. Our own ancestors, stained
with deep dyes, were in their earthen huts that night amid the
withered fern and moon-lit hollies of their native chases. That
very night of die twenty-fourth of December, the Mexican tribes
near the Gulf of California were wandering about the woods and
sandy dunes, dressed in the skins of beasts and the plumage of
large birds, and imitating their voices, keeping the eve of the
giand festival of the Sun’s nativity on the twenty-fifth, at whose
first beams they would fling off their savage masquerade, and
bless the god of the sun who had raised them above the beasts
of the field and the birds of the air, and made them men. When
the first cry of the Infant Jesus sounded in the cave, the melan­
choly splashing of those far-western waters was mingled with the
imitated howls of beasts in that strange typical festival of heathen• In allusion to the work of the Sainte Enfance for the baptism of Chittrsr
children.

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ism. There was need for the Babe of Bethlehem among these
unshepherded multitudes of God's dear creatures, who were trying
to draw near to him in these dark, wild ways. But they heard not
that angelic music in the skies, which was one day to charm them
from their ferocity, and bow their heads in childlike awe at the
name of Jesus, and make their strong frames tremble at the gentle
shock of the baptismal waters.
Wherever we look—to Rome, to Greece, to Jewry, to China,
or to the Barbarians—the picture is the same. There is every­
where a fearful indifference to the things of God, everywhere an
unconsciousness of his vicinity, an unsuspectingness that his mar­
vellous interference was so near at hand. Each hour of that night
was being laden by men with its own tremendous burden of
malignant sin. As the sands of the glass or the drops of the water­
clock ran through, the nations of earth were unthinkingly filling
up the foreseen measure of iniquity, which the sole virtue of
Mary’s Immaculate heart is precipitately cutting short, through
her having merited that the hour of the Incarnation should have
been anticipated. Perhaps the secret few, those whom Simeon
and Anna represent, have sweet unwonted perturbations in their
prayers, those divine perturbations which so strangely deepen
inward peace. It is thus that his servants often know when God
is drawing nigh, and from what quarter he will come. Moreover,
the prayers of the saints are the nearest approach to a disclosure
of the secret operations of God. He inspires them to pray for the
coming of those things which he himself is on the point of reveal­
ing. Perhaps all men in earnest prayer are more inspired than
they suppose. If we could at any time see the hearts of the saints,
we should come nearest to a sight of the Invisible God, the Beatific
Vision excepted. So doubtless on that night images of the
mysteries of Bethlehem were mirrored on the souls of some, who
knew not the significance of the heavenly beauty which was allur­
ing and fortifying their inward lives. Meanwhile birth and death
were going on as usual, and the passing souls were judged, as
usual, by the unborn Child.
But there is one feature of the scene which must not be

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Hl

omitted. It is the quiet order of the elements, and their unin­
terrupted sameness. It is like God that it should be so. The
night-wind rose among the low hills as it always rose. The stars
leapt into their places, one by one, the brightest first, as the dark­
ness of the night increased. The dusky features of the landscape
wore the same physiognomy as usual, in the indistinctness of the
quiet night. There was a look of unmovedness, of independence,
of want of sympathy, in the face of nature, which was out of
harmony with the expectation of the creature or the near approach
of the Creator. The scenery was unconcerned. It was as if nature
stood on one side, and let God pass, and made no obeisance and
altogether had nothing to do with what was going on—as if it
was a world by itself, and did not interest itself in the worlds of
spirit and of will. Has not this sometimes happened to ourselves
in life? When a friend has died in the night, we may have opened
the casement and looked out into the clear darkness. Our hearts
are full. It seems as if all hearts were in our one heart. We almost
dream that at that moment we monopolize in our single selves
and in our new sorrow all the interests on earth. We look out
upon earth, as if its silence would answer what we are feeling.
But the moon is mockingly bright; there is the not unmusical
moaning of the night-wind; the birds are restless upon their roosts.
Who ever knew them not so in moonlight? .All is as usual. The
lineaments of nature are expressionless. There is plainly no sym­
pathy there with our sorrows, our fears, our hopes, or our regrets.
We look to nature; but her blank, unresponsive face, happily,
yet not without some unexpected rudeness, flings us back on God.
There was an earthquake upon Calvary; but all is still, careless,
uniform, regardless, in the winter night of Bethlehem. Earth
shows herself expressively inanimate, painfully so. It is not the
look of death, for that is full of mute disclosures. It is like a fair
face with the mind gone from within. It is below the eyeless
beauty of the sculptured marble, a kind of stolid beauty, making
the heart heavy that looks upon it. To me there is something
quite awful in the silent drifting of the stars over Bethlehem
that night.

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THE MIDNIGHT CAVE

But let us turn from earth’s fair material landscapes, and from
its dismal spiritual scenery, to the sights and occupations of heaven
in that momentous night. At the moment of the Incarnation
had the angels seen any thing in the Vision, any thing which was
almost like a change? Had they seen the Sacred Humanity lying
in the lap of the Holy Trinity? Now, on the night of this twenty­
fourth of December, was there any visible movement in God?
Was there any stir upon the broad ocean of his adorable tran­
quillity? Did the shadow of the Babe rest on his sea of silent fire?
How deeply must they have seen into God to behold that the
Incarnation was in truth no change, but that, like all God’s
external works, it flowed naturally, so to speak, from his perfec­
tions, and was in fact the original, exemplary model-work of all
God’s outward works! How intensely beautifying must the sci­
ence be which accompanies such a Vision as this! All eternity is
one present point to God. But, in our way of thinking, if he
could have had memory, how would he have pondered then the
old silence before creation, and this night’s fulfilment of visible
creation eternally predestined! If there could be successive
thoughts in the great God, how adorably wonderful would have
been the thoughts of the divine mind at that midnight hour!
Such must have been the sight which the angels, the eldest-born
of time, must have seen that night. It would appear to them as
a beautiful procession, a procession of the Divine Decrees, seem­
ing to climb their successive heights and shine, like risen suns,
upon the angelic spirits. It is these Decrees, which men make the
subject of so much controversy, but which seem fitter matter for
devotion, to whose sweet fires they minister abundantly. Con­
troversy does but desecrate their silent sovereignty. How the
intelligence of the heavenly hosts must have thrilled with mag­
nificent worship and ecstatic delight, as they watched these eternal
Decrees, slow, gigantic, venerable, yet sweet-faced exceedingly,
as though they had the countenances of children, come up one
after another out of the abysses of God and shine forth into their
victorious accomplishment! Each sun, as it rose over some im­
material mountain-height discernible by the angels in the divine

113

ocean of essence, poured its golden effulgence into their vast
spirits, and filled them with throbbing tides of joy. Each sun
flung its grand dawn over them like a new world of light, each
seeming more beautiful than its predecessor, each indeed appear­
ing to exhaust all that was beautiful in God, until it was presently
outshone by another yet more incredible grandeur, quietly and
noiselessly streaming out of the plenitude of God, as the speechless
sun rises from the ocean. Next to the Uncreated Procession of
the Holy Ghost, the procession of those Divine Decrees which
represent creation and its consequences is the glorious pageant
which makes eternal festival for the blissful understandings of
angels and of men. One of the most dazzling of its sinuous bends
was passing before the raptured gaze of the angelic hierarchies
on that night of the twenty-fourth of December.
In all that assembly, in all the courts of highest heaven that
night, there was, except the shadow of the Babe, no figure or
form of man, no shape of human soul. The thousands and tens
of thousands of the redeemed saints were waiting elsewhere, to
be delivered only when the Babe had died, and risen again, and
to enter heaven only when he first of all had triumphantly as­
cended thither. Surely we may say, with all reverence, that, if
God had been less than God that night, his providence could not
then have been mindful of the countless details of his vast crea­
tion. His own personal concurrence to every action, inward and
outward, rational and irrational, throughout the wide world,
would have been unequal and irregular. Nature would have
fallen into the hands of its blind laws, like a child deserted by
its mother, and confusion and ruin would have ensued. The
equability of God's power and presence is most adorable; and
when we see it acting in its even, calm, unwithdrawn extent even
at the moment of such great mysteries as those of Nazareth and
Bethlehem, we get some faint idea of the grandeur of his majesty,
because, unworthy as even that comparison may be. mysteries of
such surpassing wonder seem to be no more to him than the
common actions, which we are eliciting hourly with only a
half-consciousness of them, are to us. As we read, and know not

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that we arc actually spelling while we read, so, from one point
of view, Creation, Incarnation, and Grace sectn to flow out of God
without his moving; while, from another point of view, we see
him bending over a mystery like an intensely studions artist, or
over an individual soul, with all the anxious minute fondness of
a mother or a nurse. There was not a rude Briton in the weald of
Kent, nor a Gaulish Druid at his vigil on the sea ward looking
promentories, but God was assiduously attending to him that
night, without an appearance of his attention being distracted
by other things. There were thousands of villages, in hollows or
on hills, upon which the quiet moonlight was as softly falling
and calm Providence as noiselessly busying itself as at Bethlehem.
The sleep, the food, the health, the pulses, of all the multitudinous
beasts and birds, were being looked to in all places and at each
moment by our heavenly Father. He was dexterously saving
animal life among the grinding floes of the polar seas. He was
measuring the progress and weighing the falling out-thrust
masses of the glaciers amidst the reverberating mountains. He
was guiding with rudders of intervening love the lava-streams of
Southern volcanoes. He was intimately occupied with each voice­
less coral-insect that was laying the foundations of new worlds,
or crowning with rough diadem the craters of a sunken world,
in many an ocean far and wide. He was concurring in his omni­
presence to a whole world of fantastic dreams, that hovered on
the wings of night over countless sleepers, civilized or savage. Yet
so tremendous was the mystery of Bethlehem, that had he been
less than God he must have been caught and stayed by its excessive
beauty, and his complacency abstracted and absorbed in its
ministrations to his glory.
Let us descend beneath the earth, and see how that night
passed there, in the world of spirit which fills the planet, as well
as in that world which peoples its crust and that which encom­
passes its atmosphere. If we look into the limbus of the fathers,
there are surely silver flakes of light falling even there. As there
are degrees in sleep, and one sleep is sweeter than another, so
doubtless there were degrees in that repose within Abraham’s

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bosom. There might be more contentment in their expectation,
more sweetness in their conformity to the will of God, more
jubilee in their tranquil, patient love. Their life was as the lives
of saints in ecstasy, and so they waited. Their faith had become
attainment, although they had not yet attained; for it was turned
into joy, although it had not yet come to sight. There were pulses
doubtless in that realm of peaceful caves; there was a heart, and
but one heart, in Abraham’s bosom. There were times when
expectation trembled, and its tremulousness was an increase of
its joy. Adam and Eve were there, Abel and Noe too, Abraham,
and Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph also and Daniel, Moses and Aaron
and Josue and Samuel, the Christ-like David, the good kings, the
grand prophets, the brave Machabees, Job and the multitude of
the sanctified heathen, and the penitents who had swum for life
in the great deluge and had found a better life through penance
even while they lay in the lap of God's judgment. Perhaps there
were angelic visitations there that night to tell them the glad
tidings of Bethlehem, the village of the favorite Benjamin, who
thus had his peculiar joy that hour.
There was also the painless limbus of the children, souls who
had gone through no probation, and so had never stained them­
selves with actual sin, and yet whom no sacrament had brought
into supernatural covenant with God. Perhaps in their dimness
there might be additional light that night, something more like
a shining in the pearly softness of their perpetual dawn. There
might be thrills in their unintelligible beatitude, a quickening
in the low-lying contentment of their undeveloped lives.
Why do the fires of purgatory all at once sink so low, and why
does the bitterness of their taste seem so diluted? In that realm
it is a night of universal relief, perhaps also of abundant release.
Souls look at each other in astonishment. The release of rhe
others is a joy even to those who remain; for it is an abode of
consummate charity, although in exquisite suffering. But now
the Precious Blood is about to appear upon the earth, where it
can be shed, and in eight days will be shed in fact. That Blood
is the cooling dew of purgatory. It fulfils an office there whit h

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nothing but itself can fill. For nine months a stream of divinest
satisfactions has flown out from the unborn Babe, and worked
wonders among those holy souls. The breath of those satisfactions
has passed over that sea of fire like a refreshing air, wafting balm
and coolness to the prisoners and exiles there. But now these
satisfactions are to find a wider outlet, and to flow in a vaster
channel, pouring their magnificent infinities over all creation;
and purgatory is thronged with releasing angels, waiting the mid­
night hour. In that subterranean realm of spiritual suffering and
refining fire St. Michael will display his exulting devotion to
the Babe of Bethlehem. O king Solomon! art thou so happy as to
be there? The true Solomon, the wise Prince of peace, is coming:
will he bring rest to thee, who wert the chosen type both of his
wisdom and his peace? It is a night in purgatory the very opposite
of the night of the slaying of Egypt’s first-born upon earth, a night
truly to be “much remembered before the Lord,” but remembered
for that Grand Pardon, which has only been equalled and sur­
passed by that other Pardon three-and-thirty years later, when
the Soul of the Babe left the body upon Calvary.
Even in hell we must believe there was some stir. The whole
spiritual creation of God, even where it goes down under the
darkness in the inextricable eternal swamps, must have felt such
a mystery as the temporal Nativity of the Incarnate Word. The
mystery of hell is in close connection with the mystery of Beth­
lehem. The latter recounts the history, explains the significance,
and justifies the difficulties of the former. Doubtless there was an
increased oppression there, a nameless fear among the proud
terrified spirits, obstinate but horror-stricken, remorseful yet not
repentant, coveting God as the miser covets gold, and yet turning
away from him with a scared loathing and only worshipping him
with the wicked worship of their curses. It is a world of ruined
grandeurs, a realm of blighted intelligences and tortured lives,
a multitudinous chaos which the vindictive justice of the Allseeing and All-holy alone can disentangle or understand, and yet
which that justice has marvellously sorted, named, and numbered.
When the midnight struck on earth, and was told by watchmen

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in its streets, there must have run from the Cave of Bethlehem,
swifter than the vivid lightning, into the depths of hell a panic
which stunned the rebel hosts and made them cower. It would
increase perchance the hatred of the devils to the souls of men,
which now became exasperating monuments to them of what
they vainly try to think is a divine injustice. The grand con­
spiracy of hell, the very malice of which had something gorgeous
about it, something which perhaps horridly fascinated the guilty,
is now baffled, baffled by the quiet, gentle might of the Incarna­
tion, disclosed, frustrated, put to scorn, by the speechless look of
an Infant’s eye in the deep midnight at Bethlehem. He has come,
whom his Mother now addresses by that musical yet potent Name
which had clashed all the bars and bolts of hell, a while ago, when
Gabriel first pronounced it.
But let us return to the Cave. If places are consecrated in the
eyes of whole generations by having been the birthplaces of great
men, or the spots where they have produced immortal works of
genius, what shall we say of the spot where the Incarnate God
was born? Surely it must be a place of pilgrimage to the end of
time. They who cannot visit it in the body must make their pil­
grimage to it in spirit. It is not merely devout curiosity which we
shall thus gratify, or even fresh fuel for the fires of meditation
which we shall lay up; but, according to our usual way of regard­
ing things, we shall learn much about God, his character and his
way, by our study of the Cave of Bethlehem. When we enter it.
and attentively consider its furniture, it seems to set before us the
whole mystery of the Incarnation. It lights up entire regions of
the mind of God, and discloses it to us with a mixed representa­
tion of symbols and realities. For what is it which the red windshaken lantern-light of St. Joseph reveals to us? The centre of the
Cave is as yet hidden from us. It is the Word made flesh, the
unborn Babe, around whom all the other things are grouped. He
is the centre of all worlds, and for the most part invisible. His
very creatures form a screen around him, as his Mother did at
that moment. Yet from time to time he discloses himself, as he
will now do at midnight, remaining this time obscurely visible

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for three-and-thirty years. But, even when hidden, he is still the
attraction, the unity, the life, the significance, the success, and the
sublime repose, of all the worlds of which he is the centre.
Round him, as if it were the cloister of his sanctuary, arc the
beauty and the strength of created holiness, guarding his ineffable
purity from the contact and the neighborhood of common crea­
tures. In the midst of the cavern Mary is at prayer. There was
nothing commanding or persuasive at first sight in her spiritual
beauty. Many women in Bethlehem had seen her leave their doors
that afternoon, and had discerned nothing in her to rouse admira­
tion or even to waken interest. They had known perhaps by
some peculiarity of her dress, or by Joseph's accent, that she was
from Nazareth. They might have thought her young for so aged
a husband, and might have looked at her for a moment with
transient kindness, which the evidence of her being soon about
to be a mother would naturally excite. But this was all. They
dreamed not of her unspeakable dignity. They perceived not the
light of almost-habitual ecstasy lurking in her eye. No odor went
from her which environed them with an atmosphere of heaven.
There was nothing in themselves upon which the attractions of
her awful holiness could act. So is it always with the things of
God. They do not make their claims out loud. Their eloquence
is their silence. Their beauty is their mysterious unobtrusiveness.
They do not flash upon the eye, and so compel conviction. They
touch the heart, melt it, enlarge it, transform it, and, when they
have made it in some measure like themselves, they enter into it
and possess it. They require study. This is their characteristic.
Holiness is the science by whose rules, and in the light of whose
discoveries, and by the delicacy of whose processes, the study must
be carried on. The nearer a thing is to God, the more blinding
is the light in which it lies, and therefore the more assiduous and
patient must the study of it be. Hence it is that nothing re­
quires so much study as the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, and, next
to him, the chosen Mother of his Humanity. Very nigh indeed to
them come the tranquil magnificence and unruffled depths of
Joseph’s sanctity.

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It is this then which occupies the centre of the Cave. Un­
created Holiness and Created Holiness in One Person and in
Two Natures, the Incarnate Word, the Infant Creator, there,
but not yet visible—this is the object of our wonder, our love,
our thanksgiving, our most absolute adoration. He has around
him, almost blended in his beauty and his light, two worlds of
created holiness, vast, and glorious, and both of them without
parallel. In one of these worlds he has dwelt himself for nine
months, and out of its material has he vouchsafed to draw the
materials of his own created Body and Blood. The other of these
worlds he has placed near him, just outside, and yet hardly out­
side, the actual mystery of the Incarnation, as the outpost to
defend him, as the satellite to minister to his Mother and himself,
as the shadow under whose safeguard and concealment the mystery
might be operated in the way most suitable to the divine perfec­
tions, as the shadow of the Eternal Father following him from
heaven. These three worlds form one system, which we name the
hierarchy of the Incarnation, in the stricter sense of the words,
or the nucleus of that hierarchy, if we speak less strictly, although
with perfect propriety; and in this latter case, the Apostles, the
Baptist, the Evangelists, and others, come into the system. Theo­
logians have been bold enough to name these three worlds of
holiness the Earthly Trinity, and the usage of the saints and of
devotional writers has now consecrated the reverently daring
language. Thus is the Cave of Bethlehem an awful image of the
Threefold Majesty in Heaven. It is there that the Divine Shadows
are deepest and most clearly defined. It is there that all similitudes
between the Creator and the creature are drawn together and
concentrated. It is thus the very holiest core of creation, the
Creator himself being there in a created nature. It presents us
with a kind of earthly beatific vision, in which the unity, the
distinctions, the relationships, and the processions of the Most
High are marvellously pictured, filling the beholder’s soul with
rapture, fear, and love. What are the mysteries of music and of
poetry, what the wonders of the starry skies, what the stirring
science of past creations disinterred from the ciphered chambers

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of the taciturn rocks, what the exciting pursuit of fugitive protean
matter retreating, amid endless unexpected changes, into the
fortresses of its last elements, behind which the baffled chemist
with prophetic genius ever suspects other last, and last resolutions,
and more and more ultimate refuges, to which he can at present
come no nigher, what the physiologist's intense and joyous awe as
with silent patience and his microscope he tracks the principle of
life amidst its labyrinthine cells—what are all these intellectual
joys compared with the joy of that mother-science, heaven-born
theology, which takes us thus into the central sanctuaries of crea­
tion, and shows, and illumines for us, the Earthly Trinity in the
Cave of Bethlehem?
Around that centre, what is the characteristic furniture of the
Cave? Who can doubt that all was there which was most fitting,
most divine, most in harmony with the incomparable mystery?
Yet all is so unlike what we should have imagined 1 Five material
objects stand round about, and, as it were over the shoulder of
each of them, we discern an ethereal form looking on, a spiritual
presence assisting there, of which these five material things are as
it were the representatives and symbols. First of all there are the
Beasts, the ox and the ass. There is surely something inexpressibly
touching in this presence of the inferior animals at the nativity
of the Incarnate Creator. In the Incarnation God has been
pleased to go to what look like the uttermost limits of his divine
condescension. He has assumed a material, although a rational,
nature; and, according to our understanding, it would not have
been seemly that he should have assumed an irrational nature.
Nevertheless he is not unmindful of the inferior creatures. Their
instincts are in some sort a communion with him, often apparently
of a more direct character than reason itself, and bordering on
what would commonly be called the supernatural. At times there
is something startling in the seeming proximity of the animal
kingdom to God. Moreover, all the inferior animals, with their
families, shapes, colors, cries, manners, and peculiarities, represent
ideas in the divine mind, and are partial disclosures of the beauty
of God, like the foliage of trees, the gleaming of metals, the play

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of light in the clouds, the multifarious odors of wood and field,
and the manifold sound of waters. It was then, if we may use such
an expression, a propriety of divine art that the inferior creatures
should be represented in the picture of their Maker’s temporal
nativity. While the sheep lay on the star-lit slopes outside, the ox
and the ass stood sentinels, full of patient significance and dumb
expression, at his manger. The herds of cattle which were col­
lected within the walls of Ninive were one of God’s reasons for
sparing the repentant city. The wild beasts in the wilderness
were his companions during his mysterious Lent; and, as all
beasts are symbols of something beautiful and wise in God, so
has he many times vouchsafed in his revealed word to make them
the symbolical language by which he has conveyed hidden truths
to men. They were not without their meaning in the scene of
the Nativity. They remind us that the Babe of Bethlehem was
the Creator. Their presence is another of his condescensions. He
is not only rejected of men, but he trespasses, so to speak, on the
hospitality of beasts. He shares tlieir home, and they are well
content. They welcome him with unobtrusive submission, and
do what little they can to temper with their warm breath the rigor
of the winter night. If they make no show of reception, at least
they deny him not the room he asks on his own earth. They make
way for him; and there was more worship even in that than
Bethlehem would give him.
We reckon such things as these among the humiliations of our
Blessed Lord, and rightly. Every circumstance, every detail, every
seeming accident, of the Incarnation is full of humiliation. It
follows by a necessary consequence from every mystery. Even the
praise of men is a deep humiliation to the Most High in his In­
carnate form, tvhen we consider who they were that passed the
favorable judgment upon his actions, and with what mind, as if
they had a right to judge and patronize, they passed it, and also
who he was whom they were praising. All praise of God, unless
it be worship also, is humiliating to him. Thus every thing about
the Incarnation was humiliating. Our Lord’s Divinity as it were
holds a strong light over all his human actions and sufferings.

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and shows each of them to us in its real character as an unfathom­
able abyss of condescension, no matter whether the mysteries be
those of glory or of suffering. There arc even sonic points of view
from which the mysteries of Tabor and the Risen Life seem to be
more truly, and also more unnecessarily, humiliations than the
mysteries of Bethlehem or Calvary. Nevertheless, after long
meditation, together with an habitual remembrance of our Blessed
Lord’s Divinity, there are often times when we lose sight of this
character of humiliation altogether. As the Divine Nature can
suffer nothing, so its adorable impassibility seems to pass in a
certain way to the Human Nature which was joined with it. Our
Lord’s Divinity appears to hinder any thing from becoming a
humiliation. It raises ignominies into worshipful mysteries. It
clothes shame with a beauty which beams so brightly that it almost
hides from us the horror of the outrage. His lowness becomes a
divine height, a height which none could reach but God. His
disgraces are crowned with lustre, and become nobilities. He
raises what he touches to his own height: it does not sink him to
its vileness. There are men who weep over our Lord’s Passion,
yet who have almost to do a violence to themselves to realize his
humiliations, so strongly and so brightly is the grand thought
of his Divinity before their minds. Moreover, it is just these men
who, because they are so exclusively possessed with the idea of
his Godhead, honor with the tenderest minuteness and with the
most astonishing unforgetting detail the mysteries of his Hu­
manity.
Our Lord’s companionship with the inferior animals was one
of these glorious humiliations, which have become honorable
mysteries. But he was not only their companion. He was laid in
their Manger, as if he was their food, the food of beasts, that so
he might become in very truth the food of sinners. This Manger
was the second of the material objects which were round about
him. While it was a deep shame, it was also a sweet prophecy.
It foretold the wonders of his altar. It was the type of his most
intimate and amazing communion with men. It was a symbol of
the incredible abundance and commonness of his grace. It was a

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foreshadowing of his sacramental residence with men from the
Ascension to the Doom. It was like the sort of box or crib we
sometimes see at foundling-hospitals, into which the deserted
child is put, with none to witness the conflict of agony and love in
her who leaves it there. It is as if he were placed in the Manger
like a fatherless foundling, with the whole of the unkind world
for his hospital.
I'he rough Straw is the quilting of his crib; and the refuse of
an Oriental threshing-floor is not like the carefully-husbanded
straw of our own land. Men made him as a worm, and no man,
in the onslaughts of his Passion. He himself in his first infancy
makes his bed as though he were a beast of burden, a beast tamed
and domesticated for the use of men. The vilest things in crea­
tion are good enough for the Creator. He even exhibits a pre­
dilection for them. The refuse of men,—that is the portion of
God. It is not only that we give it him; he chooses it: and his
choice teaches us strange things and stamps its peculiar character
on Christian sanctity. Such is the furniture of the nursery of the
King of kings. The light of Joseph’s lantern shoots here and
there redly and imperfectly through the darkness, and we see
the faces of the dumb beasts, with the pathetic meekness in their
eyes, and the rough Manger worn smooth and black and glisten­
ing, and the Straw scattered here and there, and bruised beneath
the feet of the animals, and so perchance rendered less sharp and
prickly as a couch for the new-born Babe. We must add to these
features that very Darkness which the lantern so indistinctly
illumines. The darkness of earth's night is the chosen, the favored
time of the Uncreated Splendor of heaven. It is the curtain of
his concealment, the veil of his tabernacle, the screen of his sanc­
tuary. He came first to Nazareth at dead of night. At dead of
night he is coming now at Bethlehem. At dead of night also will
he come—if we rightly penetrate his words—to judge the world.
There is no darkness with Him, and He needs no light to work by,
who called the sun itself from nothing and hung it over with a
white mantle of blinding light. He came to darkness. It was his
very mission. He came when the darkness was deepest, as his

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grace conies so often now. The very depth of our darkness is a
kind of compulsion to the immensity of his compassion. This
Darkness is the fourth material thing which is round about them.
Lastly, we must note as another feature of the Cave its excessive
Cold. The very elements shall inflict suffering upon their Creator
as soon as he is born in his created form. The air, which he must
breathe in order to live, shall be as inhospitable to him as the
householders of Bethlehem. The winter’s night will almost freeze
the Precious Blood within his veins. But what is the whole world
but a polar sea, a wilderness of savage ice with the arctic sunshine
glinting off from it in unfertile brightness, a restless glacier creep­
ing onward with its huge talons, but whose progress is little better
than spiritual desolation? The Sacred Heart of the Babe of Beth­
lehem has come to be the vast central fire of the frozen world.
It is to break the bands of the long frost, to loosen the Bosom
of the earth and to cover it with fruits and flowers. As he came
to what was dark, so he came to what was cold: and therefore
Cold and Darkness were among the first to welcome him.
The Beasts, the Manger, the Straw, the Darkness, and the
Coldl Such were the preparations which God made for himself.
From the first dawn of creation, every step (and there were count­
less of them), in the worlds both of spirit and of matter, was a
preparation for Jesus. It was a step toward the Incarnation, which
was at once the cause and the model of it. While each step seemed
to take creation further on, it also brought it a step backward,
a step homeward, a step nearer to the original idea of it all in
the mind of God. The Creation of the angels was a step toward
Jesus. The successive epochs in which our planet was ripening for
the abode of man, and the successive forms of vegetation and of
life which God caused to defile before him in the slow order
characteristic of all his works, were all steps toward Jesus. The
patriarchs and the prophets, the history of the chosen people
which was a prophecy of the future at the same moment that it
was a free drama of the present, the unconstrained realized alle­
gories of the lives of the typical saints, the rise and fall of each
system of Greek or Oriental philosophy, the fortunes and destinies

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of the empires which thrust each other from the stage of the
world s history,—all these were steps to Jesus, all were the remote
or proximate preparations for the Incarnation. When the Babe
Mary was born of Anne, the world little dreamed how God was
quickening his step. Mary and Joseph were the proximate prepara­
tions for Nazareth, and for the midnight mystery of the unspeak­
able Incarnation. Each of these steps, as we study them, tells us
something more about God than we knew before. The knowledge
of him grows into us through the contemplation of them. But
the grace of the Immaculate Conception was like the opening of
heaven. It seemed as if the next moment men must see God;
and so it was, as moments count with God. Now we have come
to the proximate preparations of Bethlehem, the Beasts, the
Manger, the Straw, the Darkness, and the Cold.
But these things are spiritual types, as well as material realities.
Matter has many times masked angels. There were five spiritual
presences in the Cave of Bethlehem, which these five material
things most aptly represented. They were Poverty, Abandonment,
Rejection, Secrecy, and Mortification. They started with the
Infant Jesus from the Cave, and they went with him to the Tomb.
They are stern powers, and their visages unlovely, and their
voices harsh, and their company unwelcome to the natural man.
But to the eye which grace has cleansed they are beautiful exceed
ingly, and their solemnity inviting, and their spells, like those of
earthly love, making the heart to burn, and full often guiding life
into a romance of sanctity. The companionship of the Beasts,
and the room they had as it were lent him to be bom in, betokened
his exceeding Poverty. The Manger was the type of his Aban­
donment. Could any figure have been more complete? The refuse
Straw on which he lay, and which perhaps Joseph gathered from
under the feet of the cattle, well expressed that Rejection where
with men have visited and will visit him and his Church through
all generations till the end. The darkness round him was a
symbol of those strange and manifold Secrecies in which he loves
to shroud himself, like the eclipse on Calvary, or the impenetrable
thinness of the sacramental veils. The wintry Cold, which caused

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his delicate frame to shudder and to feel its first pain, was the
fitting commencement of that incessant penance and continuous
Mortification which the ΛΙΙ-Holy and the Innocent underwent
for the redemption of the guilty. These five things stood like
spiritual presences around his crib, waiting for his coming, Poverty,
Abandonment, Rejection, Secrecy, and Mortification. Alas! we
must be changed indeed before such attendance shall be choice
of ours! Yet have they not been evermore the five sisters of all
the saints of God?
There was something, therefore, in these five things, which
expressed the character of the Incarnate Word. They portrayed
his human sanctity. They were a prophecy of the Three-andThirty Years. They foreshowed the spirit and genius of his Church
in all ages. They reversed the judgments of the world, and were
the new standards according to which the last Universal Judg­
ment was to be measured. They were in themselves a revelation;
for the ancient Scriptures had but very dimly intimated them,
and the philosophy of the heathen had not so much as dreamed
of them. Even now, what are all heresies, which concern holy
living, but a dishonoring of them? Asceticism is part of the
ignominy of the Cross; and modern heathenism turns from it
with the same disdain which the elder heathenism of Greece and
Rome showed for it in the days of the persecuting Caesars. Yet
these five things not only contain the peculiar spirit of the In­
carnation and embody its heavenly characteristics, they also express
the character of God himself, and throw light upon the hidden
things of his divine majesty. Is not created poverty the true
dignity of Him whose wealth is uncreated? Shall He, whose life
has been eternal independence and self-sufficing beatitude, lean
upon creatures? Can the very thought of comfort come nigh to
the Omnipotent, and not dishonor him? Silver and gold, diamonds
and pearls, houses and lands, all these things surely would have
seemed more truly ignominies to God, than the reproaches of
Sion or the cruelties of Calvary. It was enough that he let our
nature lean upon his Person. It was enough that he abased
himself to lean upon the sinless beauty of his mortal Mother

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and owe to her the possession of that which he had himself created.
Even the abandonment of Bethlehem was worthy of his selfsufficing loneliness. Men fell off from him, as if he were not
altogether of themselves,—as truly he was not. He was used to
stand alone. It was the habit of an unbeginning eternity. It was
the work of his own grace, the permission of his own condescen­
sion, which allowed any one, even Mary and Joseph, to remain
with him and be on his side. There was something like worship
in his abandonment, though they who abandoned him meant it
not as such. It was an acknowledgment, blind, erring, even mali­
cious, yet still an acknowledgment, of his unapproachable gran­
deur. When men tacitly permit another’s right to be alone and
not to mingle with the crowd, it is because their instincts divine
something in him which is entitled to the homage either of their
love or of their fear.
He was passive when men abandoned him. When he was
active and offered himself to them, they rejected him. Has not
this been God’s history with his creatures from the first, inde­
pendently of the Incarnation, if any passage in the history of
creation can be said to be independent of it? Awful as is the guilt
of this rejection, it glorifies God unconsciously and beyond its
own intention; even like the despair of those who have chosen
to hide themselves from him in everlasting exile. It is a mark
by which we may measure how far the finite falls off from the
Infinite. It is a token of the magnificent incomprehensibility of
God. It is the wickedness of ignorance which simply rejects God:
the clear light of immortal despair defies, because it knows that
acceptance is now impossible.
The secrecy of Bethlehem is no less becoming to the inscrutable
majesty of God. He is invisible because created eye cannot see
him. He shrouds himself when he works, lest creation should
be blinded with die very reflection from his laboratories. He
needs to wear no other veil than his own wondrous nature. The
brightness of his uncreated sanctity is a more impenetrable con­
cealment than the darkness of the old chaos. Secrecy alone be­
comes so great a majesty, so resplendent a beauty, so unutterable

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a sanctity, as his. All revelation is on God's part a condescension.
If we may dare so to speak, it is rather love which humbles him
to disclose his goodness, than glory which constrains him to
manifest his greatness.
Last of all, mortification also is becoming to the majesty of
God. Even had he come not to suffer, but in a glorious, blissful,
impassible Incarnation, he would surely have moved amidst the
sensible delights and loveliness of earth as the sunbeam moves
through the wood, gilding trunk and leaf, ferny dell and mossy
bank, the stony falls of the brook and the tapestry of wild flowers,
the pageant of the bright insects and the plumage of the shy
birds, yet mingling not itself with any of them, giving beauty,
not taking it, coloring all things, yet admitting no color into its
own translucent whiteness, a heavenly yet an earthly thing, a
loving light upon us and among us, intimate, familiar, inde­
pendent, universal, and yet unsullied. It is by sensible things
that we go deeper down into creation and confuse ourselves with
its lower lives. Mortification is the ministry of the senses to the
God-seeing soul. Immortification is the captivity of the soul to
sing sweet songs to the senses and give an intellectual relish to
their enjoyments. Asceticism is simply an angelic life, grace raising
nature to a nature higher than itself, yea, nigh, amazingly nigh,
to the very nature of God. There is a mortification which is a
fight for freedom. Such a mortification could in no way belong
to our Blessed Lord. There is also a mortification which is the
full liberty of holiness; and such was his. It was not that he did
not assume our senses and the sensible fashions of our lives, but
that he bore himself as was becoming God toward those outward
things. God reveals himself to us as wishing, yet not constraining
our freedom so as to secure his desires; as claiming rights, yet
contenting himself with what is far below his claim; as giving
grace, and letting men make waste of its abundance; as pleading
when it would have seemed more natural to command; as coveting
the hearts of men, yet being unspeakably less rich in his creatures’
love than he craves to be; as aiming at a mark of which he is
content to fall short; as compassing whole creations in his nets of

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love, and taking but a partial prey. What is all this but something
of which mortification is a created shadow? Surely there is no
truth we need in these times to lay to heart more strongly, than
that the character of Jesus is the character of the invisible God,
and the fashions of the Incarnation the fashions also of the Divine
Incomprehensibility. What truth holds more teaching than this?
What teaching refutes at once a greater number of untruths, and
those too the special errors of our day?
But why are we thus lingering so long on the threshold of
the great event? Is it that the night draws on so slowly, or that
our desires are cold and unimpassioned? Love surely knows full
well of that impatience which delays, whose very fire causes it to
hesitate, to tremble, to grow calm. We are looking on the sights
which Mary’s eyes beheld. It is sometimes said that she was so
poor that she was unable to make better preparation for the
coming of the Babe. By no means let us think this. It could have
been otherwise, had Mary so chosen. If the Birth of her Beloved
was to be in a stable, and after the rejection of inhospitable Beth­
lehem, she could have furnished other lining for the manger than
the crisp and prickly straw. She, who was prepared with the
swaddling-clothes, might have been ready with better protection
against the cold of the rigorous night. These accidents were not
the necessities of the Mother’s poverty; they were the heroisms
of her obedience. They were the Son’s choice; and the Mother
knew well beforehand what he had chosen. For nine months at
least, if not before, she had seen only with his eyes and loved
only with his heart. She was in his confidence, and his tastes were
her tastes, his heavenly standards her weights and measures also.
Often in vision had she seen the Cave, and had been ravished
with the spiritual beauty of the unworldly preparations. Now
the hour was come, and she was looking on the realities. They
were a heavenly science to her, a most beautiful theology. She
saw them not as we see them, merely on the surface, as mirrors
imaging divine things, but mistily and brokenly. She saw deep
into their wonderful significance. Long processions of fair truths
rose up and came out of each of them. Their mysteries stood

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still while she gazed upon them. She beheld the accomplishment
of their prophecies, the strangeness of their properties, the grace­
fulness of their unworldly lineaments. Light from heaven was
round about them, the radiance of the eternal splendors. They
raised her soul to God, and she entered into a blissful ecstasy, a
state which, if not natural to her, as some suppose, was at all events
ever nigh at hand, when she let her thoughts Uy freely to the
centre of their rest.
Such was the unspeakable magnificence of her soul, that we
cannot doubt that the operations of grace within it during that
ecstasy were more numerous and manifold, as well as incompar­
ably more elevated, than those which fill a saint's whole life, and
call forth in us intelligent wonder and enthusiastic praise of God.
Yet in her these operations were also divinely simple, with an
absorbing simplicity which no saint has ever known. Her mighty
soul strives to grow to the height and stature of the mystery, and
falls far short of its incomprehensibility. It is a fresh joy, a rap­
turous redoublement of ecstasy, that it is in truth beyond her
comprehension; and more than ever she desires to look upon that
little Face, which shall express to her in its silentness those mys­
teries which words cannot paint, and to the conception of which
busy thought can give neither hue nor form. Evermore the Beasts,
and the Manger, and the Straw, and the Darkness, and the Cold
seem to flit before her in her ecstasy, uncertainly and double-faced,
one while showing their definite material features, and another
while turning upon her the beautiful countenances of Poverty,
Abandonment, Rejection, Secrecy, and Mortification. She looked
upward, and beheld those abysses in God which these outward
things betokened. She looked inward, with her new nine-months
habit: for that was to her what upward was to all other adoring
souls of men, and she trembled at the greatness of the mystery;
she desired, even while her humility feared lest a desire should
be a will: but the desire of her heart, like a shaft that cannot be
recalled, had sped its way. It reached the Heart of the Babe, and
at once she felt the touch of God, and was unutterably calm, and

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Jesus lay upon the ground on the skirt of her robe, and she fell
down before him to adore. Twice had her pure desire drawn
him from the home of his predilection, once from the uncre­
ated Bosom of the Father, and once from her own created Bosom
which he tenanted. It was as if the sweet will of Mary were the
time-piece of the divine decrees.
Mary has looked upon the Face of the Incarnate God. In one
glance she has read there voluminous wonders of heaven, and
yet sees that its loveliness is inexhaustible. The Vision has sur­
passed all expectations, even such expectations as hers. She gazes:
and, as she gazes, she can understand how the mightiest spirits of
angels and of men in the full-grown stature of their imperishable
glory will unfold themselves in the sunlight of that beautiful
Countenance, and feed forever on the manifold expression of its
sweet worshipful solemnity. A change comes over her, of which
this visible change is the stupendous token. It is an unspeakable
crisis in her life of grace, one of those new beginnings, of which
the Annunciation was one and the Descent of the Holy Ghost
another. She was no longer the tabernacle of the hidden God.
God had changed his position toward her, and so her graces were
changed, changed with the only kind of change they ever knew,—
an incredible augmentation. She was suddenly clothed in a new
purity: for Jesus had again magnified her spotlessness by the man­
ner of his Nativity, as he had done before by the manner of his
Incarnation. It was a purity such as no creature has ever shared.
There had never been heretofore a created purity which at all
resembled hers. She looks upon his Face, and grows more like
him by looking. One while he wears an expression as if he were
created, another while as though he were that moment judging
His great reason, with its plenitude of consciousness and its
abysmal science, was manifest; and yet it overlaid not the delicate
gracefulness of infantine infirmity. There was something in the
silentness of his look, which compelled worship by its palpable
mysteriousness, even while it allured familiarity by its almost
pitiful and plaintive eloquence. As at the moment of the Immacu­

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late Conception, as in the hour of the Annunciation, so was it at
the Nativity. The Mother began for the third time a new life of
gigantic sanctities.
Joseph likewise draws near to adore. The earthly shadow of
the Eternal Father rests softly on the Child. His temporal birth
is complete in its adumbration of his unbeginning and unending
Nativity. Joseph draws near, that most hidden of all God’s saints,
shrouded in the very clouds and shadows which surround the
Unbegotten Fountain of the Godhead. His soul is an abyss of
nameless graces, of graces deeper than those from which ordinary
virtues spring, roots which make no trial of the winter of this
world, but wait to bear marvellous blossoms before the Face of
God in the world to come. We can give no name to the character
of his sanctity. We cannot compare him with any other of the
saints of God. As his office was unshared, so was his grace. It
followed the peculiarities of his office. It stood alone. He was
to Mary among men what Gabriel was to her among angels; but
he came nearer to her than Gabriel; for he was of her nature.
What St. John was to Mary after Calvary, Joseph was to her after
Bethlehem: so that probably, if we could perceive it, there was
an analogy between his holiness and that of the Beloved Disciple.
But his sanctification is hidden in obscurity. It is probable that
he had received the gift of original justice, as the Baptist had,—
though whether it was restored to him before birth, as with John
and Jeremias, we cannot tell. It is becoming to think also that by
a special grace he was preserved from venial sin. It is most certain
that he was a peculiar vessel of the divine predilection, eternally
predestined to a singular and incomparably sublime office, and
laden with the most magnificent of graces to fit him for that office.
For, wonderful as was his office to Mary, his office to Jesus far
surpassed it,—unless, as is more true, the former was but a portion
of the latter.
He stood to Jesus visibly in the place of the Eternal Father.
He was loved therefore in a most peculiar way by the Divine
Person whom he thus awfully represented, and also in a most
peculiar way by the Second and Third Persons of the Most Holy

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m

Trinity, because of that mysterious representation. The Human
Soul of Jesus must have regarded him not only with the tenderest
love, but also with deep reverence and an inexplicable submission.
Meek and gentle, blameless and loving, as St. Joseph was, it is
not possible to think of him without extreme awe, because of that
shadow of identity with the Eternal Father which belongs to him
and hides him from our sight even while it presents him to our
faith. We cannot describe his holiness, because we have no term
of comparison. It was not only higher in degree than that of the
saints, it was also different in kind. But it was eminently hidden
with God. His life was an unearthly life. His very place in the
world was but a seeming place. He was an apparition in the
world, an apparition of the Unbegotten and Everlasting. His
soul was as it were withdrawn into itself. He was weak, and in
*
years,
mild and unresenting, poor and obscure, passive and
docile, and yet an inexpugnable fortress behind which the honor
• In the controversy about St. Joseph's age, I must admit that the majority of
great names arc on the side of his being in the prime of life, between thirty and
forty. This is the opinion of Gerson, Vigerius, Theophilus Raynaudus, Essclius,
Baronins, Suarez, Vasquez, Capisucchius, Serry, Sandinus, Salianus, Torniclli,
Toletanus, De Castro, Trombelli, Isidore Isolanus, and Bernardino di Busto. The
Apocryphal Gospels, St. Epiphanius, Cedrenus, Nicephorus, with antiquity gen­
erally, anil especially ancient pictures, represent St. Joseph as quite old. Gerson
feels the difficulty of the ancient pictures, but says, in his usual and quite char­
acteristic way of referring to development in doctrine as the explanation of every
thing, that painters did this purposely because the tenet of the perpetual virginity
of our Blessed Lady was not well rooted in the minds of the ruder faithful. This
reply is quoted with applause by Raffaello Maria the Cannelite in his very full book
on St. Joseph. The habit of contemplating St. Joseph as the shadow of the Eternal
Father has led me instinctively to take the side of antiquity in this dispute. Without
tradition, the text of Isaias Ixii. 5 is hardly convincing. The opinion in favor of
St. Joseph's youth makes him more than double our Lady's age: and this would
make him seventy when he died, as traditions about his death seem only to hesitate
between a little while before our Lord's baptism or a little while after it. The
other opinion would add from ten to twenty years to this. I may embrace this
opportunity of naming here some of the books most to be recommended on devotion
to St. Joseph; Istoria di San Giuseppe, by Raffaello Maria. Carmelite; Synopsis
Magnalium Divi Josephi, by Ignatius of St. Francis, also a Carmelite: St. Theresa's
friend Father Gracian of St. Jerome, whose Spanish treatise has been recently
translated into French; Glorie di San Giuseppe, by Don Giuseppe Loxada Becerra,
written in St. Alphonso’s lifetime, and in imitation of the Glories of Mary; Jacquinot’s Gloires de St. Joseph, recently reprinted; and Vita di San Giuseppe, by Antonia
Maria dalla Pergola, a Franciscan. The treatises of Gerson and the Sermons ol
San Bernardino are, however, the fountains from which all have drawn.

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of Mary and the life of Jesus was secure. If his hiddenness was
like that of God, so also was his tranquillity. His justice, like that
of God, was so tempered with mercy that it almost lost its look
of justice and wore the semblance of indulgence. I lis holiness was
one of God’s eternal ideas, one of those which he most cherished
and kept nearest to himself. He communicated with God in his
hours of sleep, as if his sleep was but the mystic slumber of con­
templation. Even now in the Church he stands back under the
shadow of the Old Testament, as if that were rather the dispensa­
tion of the Father, and therefore the most congenial place for him.
He draws near to the new-born Jesus, that he may adore before
he commands. His vast soul fills silently with love, and his life
would have broken and ebbed away at the Infant’s feet upon the
floor of the Cave, as it did years afterward on his lap, but the time
was not come, and the Babe sanctified him anew, and fortified
him with amazing quiet strength and robust gentleness, and raised
him into a higher sphere of holiness and of grace unspeakable,
in order that he might be the official superior of his God.
Who shall dare to guess what Jesus thought with his human
thoughts, as he lay there for a moment on the ground, beholding
with his eyes that furniture of the Cave which Mary had been
beholding, and which he had chosen from all eternity? Who
would essay to fathom the unfathomable depths of that love and
worship which he gave to God,—a finite worship, but of value
infinite? The whole history of creation, past, present, and to
come, was before him. He saw it all, embraced it all, understood
it all. He felt himself to be the centre round which all else re­
volved, the hinge upon which all things turned, the light in which
all was plain, the dread lovely meeting-point of the Creator and
the creature. He was busy worshipping, he was busy redeeming,
he was busy judging, at that moment. All hearts of men lay in
his Heart at that hour. We too were there, centred in a little
sphere of his loving knowledge and his merciful consideration.
We too were inmates of the Cave of Bethlehem, and of the Cave’s
divinest centre, the Heart of the new-born Babe. Is not that
thought enough to set the rudder of our life heavenward once

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for all? Who shall tell the ineffable love which he bore to Mary,
whom he was then first looking on with his human eyes, and
whose fair soul lay open to his inward eye and pleased discern­
ment? Who shall tell with what exulting reverence he yearned
toward Joseph? For Mary and Joseph were both radiantly wet
all over with that Precious Blood, which, yet unshed, was flowing
in his veins and throbbing in his Heart. Those Three! they were
three kingdoms of God, but one King; three creations, and the
Creator one of these creations; three, yet as it were but one, one
with an amazing unity, a unity which made them one, yet left them
three, the Earthly Trinity!
From the Earthly Trinity the adoring soul looks up abashed to
the Most Holy Trinity on high, thus wonderfully forthshadowed
on the earth. Prostrate before the Incomprehensible Majesty the
hierarchies of the angels were bowed down at the hour of the
Nativity in Bethlehem. Through all the illimitable depths of
the Godhead, profoundest oceans of unfathomable being opening
out everywhere into like profoundest oceans, through all the
immeasurable realms of Essence which space girdles not, over all
the outstretched, unsuccessive Life which time recounts not, was
there an immense Complacency, an unutterably tranquil, brooding
glory, at the moment when the Babe was bom in Bethlehem.
There were immaterial waves of divine exultation, the very spray
of which might have been the star-dust of countless, countless
worlds, which passed at that hour over the abysses of the divine
mind, over the radiant, far-withdrawn furnaces of the divine life.
Yet was there no change in the Immutable. There was no stir
in God. Gathered up, as from the beginning, whole and entire
and full, into each possible point of space and time, that divine
life abode in its stationary calm, just as it had been from before
the beginning, when there were neither space nor time. There
was no sound. Creation would have perished if that divine glad­
ness had sounded. At the voice of such thunder nature must have
fled away. There was no movement: all things must have been
displaced had God moved. They would have dropped back into
indefinable nothingness from before any gesture of God's sim­

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plicity. The Infinite encroached not on the finite with the bound­
ing of that unutterable joy. Its presence broke not the slightest
vessel which it filled, nor tore the frail rose-leaf within whose count­
less arteries it can confine itself by its essence and its power. Not
a thrill was felt through the delicate framework of nature, which
one sunbeam of the daybreak can cause to tremble, to vibrate,
and to glow. Vast, colossal, resistless, unbounded, incomprehen­
sible, was the Divine Complacency; yet the hush of midnight was
not stiller, the breath of sleeping babe was not so gentle. There
was no change in the Unchangeable. Yet to angelic eyes the
Father seemed not more a Father, yet in a new way a Father, as
he bent over the Babe in the Cave of Bethlehem. Not unmarked
surely in the Person of the Son was his sweet condescending joy
in that Sacred Humanity, now among the visible things of a glad
earth which already so teemed with loveliness. Surely with more
than common predilection the invisible lightnings of the Holy
Ghost played round Bethlehem, and the joy of Mary was but an
emanation from the joy of her Uncreated Spouse. They saw,
those bright angelic hosts, they saw with trembling adoration,
and the sight gladdened their endless gladness, and made their
glory glow more wondrously, the Complacency of the Most Holy
Trinity in the new-born Child, as it were a new jubilee in the
Immutable, a new Father because the Eternal Father was newly
a Father, a new Son because the Everlasting Son was now also
a Son in time, a new Holy Ghost, because he was from old the
Unbeginning Jubilee both of Father and of Son, and now the
jubilee was new, new without novelty, new without mutation,
new with an eternal newness. It was as if creation were making
ripples on the shining, glancing depths of the Uncreated, while
the Word was being still and again begotten and begotten of the
Father, begotten eternally at the selfsame moment he was being
born in time, begotten eternally the moment after he had been
born in time, and while the jubilant Spirit was still and again
proceeding and proceeding, eternally proceeding from the Father
and the Son in the selfsame moment that Jesus was being born

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in Bethlehem, and still, and not anew, proceeding and proceeding
the moment after that Birth in Bethlehem.
Thus it was, with such strange divine triumph, that the
Creator came forth to be as it were a part of his own visible
creation. But how did his creation receive him? What welcome
did it give him? What response did it make to the mystery of
Bethlehem? Λ response altogether worthy of him it could not be;
for that was impossible, nay, beyond all possible power with
which omnipotence itself could endow creation. But it welcomed
him as it best could, and it was very gloriously. Mary’s first act
of worship met him the very moment he was born. No sooner
had she seen his face than she adored him more perfectly than all
the angels had been able to do in their thousands of years before
the throne. Except by the Incarnate Word himself, never had the
Divine Majesty been worshipped so worthily, so near to adequately,
if we can speak of nearness when we think of that gulf which lies
between the finite and the infinite. Never creature so cowered
down before God in the sense of its own exceeding nothingness
as Mary did. She could stoop lower than any one else, because
she was so much higher in holiness. Joseph also had worshipped
him as no saint before had done. From his deep calm soul he
had poured out a very ocean of love, tenderest love, humblest
love, love shrinking from being like the Father's love, yet also
daring to be like it, as Mary’s had been like the conjoined loves
of Father and of Spirit, as she was Mother and Spouse conjoined.
No angel might love Jesus as Joseph loved him, as Joseph was
bound to love him. No temporal love but Mary’s could be more
like an eternal love than the love of Joseph for the Child, because
of its likeness to the love of the Everlasting Father. The choirs
of angels also sang out loud in the midnight heavens, while the
winter night ran over with the sweetness of their strains. Every
note in their music, every pulse in their exulting song, represented
a whole world of supernatural acts in their mighty spirits, acts
of love, of complacency, of worship, of adoring grat illation, of
self-oblivious jubilee. Never had creation been so wonderful as

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it was that night! never had it gathered round its God so glori­
ously as it did then! Never did it look less imperfect than when
at that still hour it strove to lift itself to the height of the grand
mystery, and while it fell short infinitely, yet it fell short worthily!
Who would have dreamed that finite worship could be so nearly
infinite as it was that night? Oh, joyous thought, oh, grateful
remembrance, that Jesus was thus welcomed into the world!
But we must try to enter further into this thought. Our view
of the mystery of Bethlehem is incomplete without it. Fresh
light is thrown on the Creator’s coming by creation's response
to his coming, its welcome, its salutation, its recognition of him.
The true history of his triumph is not told, if the applauses
which greeted him are not mentioned also. The scene of the
Creator’s installation in his own creation is imperfect, unless we
depict also creation doing its homage, and swearing its oath of
fealty before his throne and at his human feet. Now Mary is
not only the sovereign creature, but she is the representative
creature also. While therefore the worship of Joseph and the
songs of the angelic hosts are magnificent incidents in the coming
of our Lord, we may consider Mary’s first act of worship as by
itself substantially the welcome of creation to its Creator; and,
even at the risk of a little recapitulation, we must consider it
attentively.
The most difficult fact for us to apprehend rightly about our
Lord’s Three and-Thirty Years’ life is the amount of it which
was lived to God, to God only, to God secretly, without any
apparent connection with the great work of redemption, or
without any visible benefit there and then to the welfare of
mankind. Next to God, Mary seems to usurp an unexpected
amount of his time, presence, and divine communications, yet
with how legitimate a usurpation! As it is the tendency of our
modern mind in science, rightly rebuked by the geological dis­
coveries of the secular epochs of our planet untenanted by man,
to make ourselves the centre of God’s works, and to look out
only for adaptations, ministries, and subserviencies to ourselves
in all the glorious kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral

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magnificence, so are we apt in theology too much to regard our
Lord as coming to do one two-sided work, first to teach us lessons
of heavenly wisdom, and then to suffer and die for our redemption.
We almost picture him to ourselves, more or less unconsciously,
as a modern man of active habits, engrossed with his work, losing
no time about it, bending all things to it, and, if not precipitate
about it, at least diligent, exclusive, and decisive. In the light of
this modern view we construe his words to Mary in the Temple,
forgetting the eighteen years of apparently inactive seclusion which
as a matter of fact followed the utterance of those words; and
again we put a like construction on his seemingly impatient speech
about his passion, not discerning those supernatural principles
of love of souls and thirst for suffering and appetite for shame
which our Lord’s example has impressed forever upon Christian
holiness. It seems to us strange that our Lord’s human life should
be of any use to God, except as the instrument of our own redemp­
tion. The idea of worship is faint and feeble in our minds. Work,
utility, success, palpable results,—these are what we look for.
Hence we neither habitually see how inexplicable on our prin­
ciples our Lord’s division of his life into thirty years of seclusion
and three of active work really is, nor discern the divine signifi­
cance of it when it is pointed out to us. We thus do an injustice
to his secret created life of adoration before God, and almost
ignore his wonderful exclusive occupation with Mary, which ab­
sorbed so much of the time he spent on earth. This causes us to
misread the Gospels, to arrange the mysteries of our Lord in
wrong order and with bad lights upon them, and to miss in
many of the mysteries that which is most specially divine about
them.
In their measure, these remarks apply also to the mysteries
of Mary, and to the place which they occupy in the life of our
Blessed Lord. The tilings of God have an air and odor about
them unlike the things of the world. Like the fragrance of the
woodlands, we are conscious of the sweetness, but do not trace it
to the mossy bank, or to the withering herbs, or to the dew-bathed
flowers, from which it comes. We may even see the things of

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God, and not know them when we see them. They seldom
bear their divinity on their outward appearance. It is not stamped
upon them, but hidden in them. However much we have pre­
pared ourselves for their secrecy, they arc in the experience more
secret than we were prepared for. Hence it comes to pass that
divine things almost always take us unawares. There is also a
noiselessness about them which brings them upon us when we
are least suspecting their neighborhood or dreaming of their ap­
proach, while at the same time they are so swift that they have
come and gone without our having had time to pause upon them.
We only know, from the breathlessness of our souls, that we have
suffered some divine thing. They pass upon us not as growths
of earth. They only float over it, like the clouds that dapple the
moon, never anchoring their shadows there, but always passing,
though sometimes with an imperceptible slowness. They seem
even to be regardless of their influence upon earth. They look
as if they did not intend to influence it, or as if their influence
were a by play, a consequence of their presence which they could
not avoid, but which they did not value, an accident, inseparable
from them, certainly, yet still an accident, about which they
were not anxious and on which they laid no stress. It is as if they
had derived some of his self-sufficiency from the God who is their
author. Their value—and they are conscious of it,—is, not their
having done a work on earth, but their abiding life and beauty
with God forever. The individual soul is world enough for them;
for they only want a kneeling-place on which to put themselves
before the majesty of God and in the sunlight of his glory. When
they have reflected back upon his magnificence one of his own rays,
their mission is accomplished, but their work passes not away.
That reflected light of theirs lies over the vast awfulness of God,
and is beautiful there, forever.
So was it with Mary’s first worship in the Cave. The light of
it is lying upon God this hour. A century of church-history is
a less event in the chronicles of the Incarnation than that act of
Mary. The supernatural value of our actions depends upon our
degree of union with God at the time we do them. But what

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spirit of angel or soul of man was ever in such union with God
as the soul of his blessed and sinless Mother? Neither had there
yet ever been a moment in which she had been so closely united
to God as at the moment of our Saviour’s birth. The moment
of the Immaculate Conception was indeed a marvellous epoch
in the world of grace, momentary in lapse of time, secular in the
immensity and durableness of the work. The moment of the
Incarnation had been yet more wonderful. Who can say how
wonderful? But her union with God had grown inconceivably
during his nine months’ residence within her bosom. How could
it be otherwise? Thus, at the moment of the Nativity she was
more closely united to God than she had ever been before; for
union was the especial distinguishing grace of those nine months;
and she was united to him with a union compared to which the
most glorious mystical unions of the saints are but as shadows
and as semblances. Her ecstasy at midnight was as it were a fresh
spiritual rivet to that union. When she saw the Child bom, lying
on her veil, with hands stretched out to her as if mutely asking
to be taken up,—he asking, the orphan God, for the embrace of
a mortal mother’s arms!—and when she saw the beauty of his
Face, and felt it passing into her soul, was she not immersed
in God as never creature had been before? Her first act was an
act of love; but it was the highest love, the love of adoration.
Although she had languished to see the Human Face of our
Blessed Lord, yet, now that she gazed upon it, it was his Divinity
she saw, rather than his Humanity. To her his Human Nature
unveiled, rather than veiled, his Godhead. She saw in him, and
worshipped especially, the Person of the Word, the Second Person
of the Undivided Trinity. As none had ever been so near to
God, so none had ever worshipped him so well. The angels, who
had been lying for ages in the blaze of the uncovered Vision,
saw not so far as Mary, though they saw differently, and, while
they worshipped with all the capacities of their grand natures,
they worshipped not so wonderfully as she worshipped; for they
were in shallower depths of divine union and of transforming
love than was she, the Mother of the Most High.

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She as it were encompassed our Lord witli her ecstatic worship.
All he was and is and has, she covered with her praise, her wonder,
her fear, her joy, her love, her jubilee. She, who had more than
miraculously compassed him in her bosom, went as near to com­
passing him with the immensity of her worship as it was possible
for mere creature adequately to compass his illimitable and uncre­
ated glory. His Divine Person, his Divine Nature, his Human
Nature, with his Soul as well as his Flesh, the passible state in
which he had vouchsafed to come because of sin,—all these she
worshipped, mindfully and tenderly, separately and together,
with clearest intelligence, with deepest abasement, with sweetest
love, with most awe-stricken admiration. All his perfections as
God came before her in wonderful order, enchained together,
flowing out of each other and back into each other, each looking
both backward and forward at once. She saw them also as one
perfection, as the divine simplicity, and then she saw them as no
perfections at all, but as his simple Self, a Self with no perfections
but the Act which he himself is, a Self with no separable attributes,
but only an eternal life which is ever living in Itself, too simple
for thought, too beautiful for speech, too magnificent for love, too
jubilant for fear, only to be rapturously adored, with a timidity
which transcends all fear, and with a familiarity which far out­
grows all audacities of love.
In adoring the divine perfections of the new-born Babe, we
may well believe that Mary worshipped particularly those attri­
butes seemingly most opposed to his infant state. The instincts of
prayer would lead her that way. The very circumstances of the
mystery would suggest it. She adored profoundly the eternity
of Him who was but a minute old. She congratulated him in the
boldness of holy love on his having been from everlasting co­
eternal with the Father, and at the same time eternally a Son.
She exulted in the knowledge that from all eternity her Babe
had with the Father breathed forth the Holy Ghost, and had
been with the Father the principle from which the coeternal
Spirit had proceeded, and was forever proceeding, and was to
proceed for all eternity. It was a joy to her that time, old as it

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was, was a younger birth than Him whose birth in time was one
short minute since. She was abased with sweetest reverence when
she looked into his childish Face, and with delighted faith hailed
him as time's Creator.
She looked upon him in his weakness and his helplessness.
His beauty was so frail that it seemed as if a breath of summer
wind might have blown him away. It was as if he could not lift
himself from the ground on which he was lying, or raise himself
into his Mother’s arms. Yet in that weakness she adored his
almighty power. She worshipped him as the unfatigued Creator,
who had built up the massive worlds with an act of his will, who
held the mountains in the hollow of his hand without the eSort
of sustaining them, and who directed the earthquakes and the
storms, as pliant and docile creatures, where he pleased. She
exulted in the boundless majesty of his tremendous power. She
congratulated him that at that moment all creation hung upon
him with its whole weight, and that were he to loosen his hold of
it for an instant it would fall back into that nothingness from
which it came and to which, through its own finite imbecility, it is
ever tending. She felt, and joyed to feel, that she herself was but
as the breath of his mouth, and that she too was relapsing into
nothingness unless he held her up by the irresistible gentleness of
his vast power. She worshipped him as the God to whom nothing
is impossible, and yet whose power works with such facility, such
smoothness, and such delicacy that it makes no sound in its going,
feels no effort in its magnificence, and strives not in its career.
He upheld all things even while he slept; and yet his features
were sweetly relaxed in the graceful abandonment of infantine
slumber, and upon his countenance there was no sign of care,
nor strain of labor, no shadow of government, nor semblance of
occupation.
She beheld him speechless on the ground. Only perhaps an
inarticulate cry was rising from his childish lips. But she wor­
shipped him as the articulate Word of the Father, pronounced
from all eternity, and even notv being eternally pronounced, with
most inexplicable articulation. He who expressed, not to creation

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only, but to the Father himself, the whole of his marvellous per­
fections, He who with unutterable distinctness outspoke the
whole mystery of the Godhead, He who pronounced in the lan­
guage of his coequal beauty all the hidden things of the Divine
Nature,—he it was who was lying speechless on the ground; and
Mary adored him in his truth, not in his seeming. He wore the
same look of unconsciousness which other infants wear. His life
looked the animal life of infantine wants and woes and little
jubilees, to be expressed by bright eyes, or by sounds which are
language only to a mother's ear. But in this apparent unconscious­
ness she not only recognized the mighty reason in full possession
of itself, but she also adored that immense and uncreated wisdom
which is in some sense the favorite attribute of the Word. She
exulted in the thought that there was no wisdom among angels
or men which was not simply a derivation from his wisdom, and
that there were no philosophies or sciences which were not the
merest scintillations of his uncreated knowledge. All the impen­
etrable secrets of creation were out of the hidden treasures of his
wisdom. The marvellous plans of nature, grace, and glory, count­
less in number, bewildering in variety, incalculable in their pro­
fundity, were all but as the merest surface of his ever-blessed mind.
The intricacies of providence, those dark and seemingly contra­
dictory problems which have often driven to wildness or despair
the irreverent questioning and profane inquisition of the human
understanding, were all calmly evolved by his skill in lucid beauty
and admirable sequence. The very unconsciousness of the Babe
held a light over all this abyss, and Mary looked down, and saw,
and worshipped.
Thus also to the Mother’s eye his littleness magnified his
immensity. He seemed all the more illimitable, because he was
so small. He lay upon her veil a mere span of fair human life;
but she knew that in truth he was outstretched beyond all possible
spheres of imaginary space. She adored the omnipresence of that
tiny prisoner, whom a delicate frame of flesh and blood was now
containing. For nine months she herself had compassed the In­
comprehensible, and now she saw as it were with her bodily

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eyes the immensity which had lain so long like an unopened
flower in her own virginal bosom. She rejoiced with him in his
universal presence, in his immeasurable essence, in his unconfined
liberty, in his inexplicable unlocalized simplicity. She congratu­
lated him that all about him was boundless, not only putting away
from itself all the limits of imaginable perfection, but far tran­
scending, in its own awful truthfulness, not only all actual
existence, but all possible existence. The possibilities of omnip­
otence far outstrip the flight of created imagination; but to equal
the immensity of God is impossible even for God himself.
Finally, when Mary beheld him trembling with the cold, and
discerned the pathetic sadness which mingled with the brightness,
and perhaps saw him weeping human tears, she worshipped Him
whose eternal life was an unspeakable beatitude. She recognised
in him the uncreated fountain of all created joy. She knew that
at. that instant he was filling to the brim myriads and myriads
of angelic spirits with celestial exultation. She knew that there
was not a joy on earth among men or animals but it was a sparkle
mercifully struck from his abounding and self-sufficing gladness.
Nay, when our lives, and the lives of those we love, are dense with
sorrows, there is a joy even in the sorrow, like the fragrant damps
of the close dripping woods of midsummer, and that joy is but
the sweet bliss of God, compassionately making its way even
thither. Thus it was, that, while Mary worshipped Jesus with
the most perfect worship of which a mere creature is capable, she
especially adored those perfections which to outward seeming
were least compatible with his infant state.
She beheld also how his Human Nature lay in Hypostatic
Union with his Divine, and therfore was itself entitled to the
honors of divine worship. Hence she worshipped the spiritual
beauty of his Sacred Humanity. She worshipped the Flesh, which
he had taken from herself, and in which he was to suffer, and by
his suffering to redeem the world. She worshipped it as the real
Sacramental Food of all the generations to come, to be adored by
all the faithful upon the altar. She adored it also as impassible and
glorious, gifts which it already contained within itself. She adored

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with the most delighted reverence the Precious Blood which was
flowing in his veins. She exulted in the abundance and even
prodigality of the redemption which the munificent shedding of
that Blood was to accomplish. She congratulated him on the
countless victories of grace which it would procure for him, the
marvellous holiness of the saints, and the magnificent conversions
of sinners, and the glorious perseverance of all who should die in
union with him. She saw that Precious Blood in its course over
the world as a broad and brimming river, carrying fertility into
every' land, flushing the face of nature with the verdure of grace,
causing the wilderness to blossom as the garden, and the barren
rocks to be covered with shadowy woods, redolent of odors, golden
with fruits, and resonant with songs. She beheld on its broad
bosom huge fleets freighted with heavenly treasures sail onward
to the eternal sea. She admired the silent, irresistible beneficence
of its sweet streams, and adored it in the veins of the Child, and
wept tears of humblest joy as she thought of its fountains in her
own Immaculate Heart.
She worshipped his Sacred Heart, with all its sanctified affec­
tions. She saw his immense love of herself therein, and penetrated
the wonders of which that love was full, and how gloriously the
human and divine were blended in it and were one unequalled,
unprecedented love. She beheld also the place which each of us
occupied at that moment in his all-embracing Heart; and surely
it would seem to her that there was nothing about him more
adorable than his inexplicable love of sinners. More wonderful is
that love than even the all-wise means by which he emancipated
sinners from their sin. She adored his Soul, with all its marvellous
operations, and its depths of wisdom and of joy. Nothing was
omitted in that act of worship. Every thing found its place. Every
thing came in its right order. To every thing its due honor was
paid,—so far at least as a mere creature could pay what was due
to God. Such was Mary's first act of worship, an act of which
we shall be able to conceive more worthily when we have con­
sidered in subsequent chapters the Babe’s perfections as God, and
the eminences and excellences of his Soul and Body as Man, con-

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sidérations which we have been here obliged in some measure to
anticipate. But these are things which bear repetition well.
Now, let us reflect on ail that was involved in this act of
adoration. As was said before, Mary is not only the sovereign
creature, she is the representative creature also. Thus her worship
was offered in the name of all creatures. It was creation's recogni­
tion of its Incarnate Creator. Moreover, she began in it, and
as it were officially inaugurated, all the manifold catholic devo­
tions to the Sacred Humanity, such as those to the Sacred Heart,
to the Precious Blood, to the Blessed Sacrament, to the Infancy,
to the Passion, and the like. She not only began them, anticipating
the loving inventions of the saints, but she surpassed all that the
saints have ever done in each. That act of worship is a life in
the Church at this present hour, passing daily into holy hearts,
guiding the sense of the faithful, supplying fair types of various
devotions, and queening it with tranquil pre-eminence over all
other collective homages of redeemed love to the Sacred Humanity
of the Redeemer. Her worship also, let it be observed, was not
disjoined from the worship of St. Joseph, with whom she was in
the closest spiritual union, as God had united them in the tran­
scending unity of the Earthly Trinity. His worship and hers had
one prerogative which the worship of none else could have; for
they offered to Jesus with it the authority they were to exercise
over him. From Joseph, as from Mary, our Blessed Lord received
the worship of those whom he himself had constituted his supe­
riors. If the bent of the hearts of the saints is a token of the
bent of Mary’s heart, and is itself the instinctive inspiration of
the Heart of Jesus, then in these latter days it would seem that
by nothing could we so effectually unite ourselves to the Hearts
of Jesus and Mary, as by a loving and reverent devotion to
St. Joseph.
Moreover, in this act of worship our Blessed Lady recognizes
us as her children. She was conscious of the place she occupied in
the creation of God. She began already to fulfil that office with
the insignia of which she was publicly invested upon Calvary.
She offered herself to the new-born Babe for us. She was willing

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to be our Mother. She was ready to endure for us those dolors with
which she was to travail with us her second-born, so unlike the
painless childbirth of that night. She was prepared to represent
us in all her tender ministries to him. She offered us also to
Jesus. She offered us to his love. She freighted her prayers with
our names. She yearned for our more and more complete con
version, and longed that we might be part of the happy triumph
of his Passion. By her effectual intercession she bathed us in his
Precious Blood, and was forward to accept that active and promi­
nent place which she occupies in the secret life of grace with every
one of us. For us also she offered Jesus to the Father. With
heroic love she gave back for our sakes what for her own much
more than for ours she had just received. She saw that Calvary
was in the offering, and yet she drew not back her uplifted hands.
Such was her beautiful three fold oblation. She offered herself
to Jesus for us. She offered us to Jesus. She offered Jesus to the
Father for us. Then from the height of Calvary she turned round
and faced the Church of all coming ages, and offered to us all our
Blessed Lord for our acceptance and our love. So she climbed
from the Cave to the Eternal Father, from the offering of herself
to Jesus to the offering of Jesus to the Father. For, if the first
thought of the Mother is for the Child, is not the second for its
Father?
Thus was completed the mystery of Bethlehem. Thus were
we present there in our Mother's hands and in our Savior’s Heart.
It has taken long to tell you: yet it was but for a moment that
Jesus lay upon the ground. In a moment all these things had
been accomplished. The tyranny of time sits lightly on divine
works. They have other measures. The infinite must needs be
instantaneous. O happy Mother, happy beyond all thought! she
has seen the Face of Jesus, and he smiled into her face. Was it
through tears? What significance was there not in that celestial
human smile! He smiled as a Son smiles to a doting mother.
He smiled as the victorious Savior who had redeemed her by
the Immaculate Conception. He smiled as the Creator who com­
placently regards the most lovely of his works. He smiled as the

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Last End and Beatitude of her whom he rejoiced to glorify and
to have with him for eternity. He smiled as God, smiling unut­
terable and unimaginable things. Of a surety there was some
special expression in that first look, in that many-meaning smile,
which reminded her of the Immaculate Conception as distinctly
as if he had spoken. Nor was the joy of that smile less to her
than its significance. But she alone can tell it. It makes us tremble
with expectation to think that that same smile will one day be
a joy to us, and a joy which will not pass away! But, like all
the aspects of God, that smile brought with it a world of grace.
It was substantial, as God’s visitations ever are, substantially
effecting that which it expressed. How therefore must it have
lifted her in sanctity, and been to her almost like a new creationi
Λ look of his converted Peter: what must a smile do, and a smile
into his sinless Mother's face! O sweet Babe of Bethlehem! when
shall we too kneel before thy face? When shall we see thee smile,
smile on us our welcome into heaven, smile on us with that smile
which will sit upon thy lips as our own glory and possession
for evermore?
Listen! the last strip of cloud has floated down under the
horizon. The stars bum brightly in the cold air. The night-wind,
sighing over the pastoral slopes, falls suddenly, floats by, and carries
its murmuring train out of hearing. The heaven of the angels
opens for one glad moment, and the midnight skies are over­
flowed with melody, so beautiful that it ravishes the hearts of
those who hear, and yet so soft that it troubles not the light
slumbers of the restless sheep.

Chapter IV

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS
Long centuries have come and gone. The world has plunged
forward through many revolutions. Almost all things are changed.
There has been more change than men could have dreamed of.
It seems incredible, even as a matter of history. The actual past
has been more wonderful than any sibylline oracle would have
dared to depict the future. History is more fantastic than prophecy.
Time moves, but eternity stands still; and thus amidst perpetual
change the faith, which is the representative of eternity on earth,
remains, and is at rest; and its unchangeableness is our repose.
The Bethlehem of that night, of those forty days, has never passed
away. It lives a real life,—not the straggling Christian village on
which the Mussulman yoke seems to sit so lightly, on its stony
ridge, but the old Bethlehem of that momentous hour when the
Incarnate God lay on the ground amid the Cattle in the Cave.
It lives not only in the memory of faith, but in faith’s actual
realities as well. It lives a real, unbroken, unsuspended life, not
in history only, or in art, or in poetry, or even in the energetic
fertile worship and fleshly hearts of the faithful, but in the wor­
shipful reality of the Blessed Sacrament. Round the tabernacle,
which is our abiding Bethlehem, goes on the same world of
beautiful devotion which surrounded the new-born Babe, real,
out of real hearts, and realized by God’s acceptance.
But, independently of this august reality, Bethlehem exists
as a living power in its continual production of supernatural
things in the souls of men. It is forever alluring them from sin.
It is forever guiding them to perfection. It is forever impressing
peculiar characteristics on the holiness of different persons. It is
a divine type, and is moulding souls upon itself all day long,
and its works remain, and adorn the eternal home of God. A
150

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supernatural act of love from a soul in the feeblest state of grace
is a grander thing than the discovery of a continent or the influence
of a glorious literature. Yet Bethlehem is eliciting tens of thou­
sands of such acts of love each day from the souls of men. It is
a perpetual fountain of invisible miracles. It is better than a
legion of angels in itself, always hard at work for God, and mag­
nificently successful. Its sphere of influence is the whole wide
world, the regions where Christmas falls in the heart of summer,
as well as in these lands of ours. It whispers over the sea, and
hearts on shipboard are responding to it. It is everywhere in
dense cities, where loathsome wickedness is festering in the haunts
of hopeless poverty, keeping itself clean there as the sunbeams
of heaven. It vibrates up deep mountain-glens, which the foot
of priest rarely treads, and down in damp mines, where death is
always proximate and sacraments remote. It soothes the aching
heart of the poor pontiff on his throne of heroic suffering and
generous self-sacrifice; and it cradles to rest the sick child, who,
though it cannot read as yet, has a picture of starry Bethlehem in
its heart, which its mother's words have painted there. Bethlehem
is daily a light in a thousand dark places, beautifying what is
harsh, sanctifying what is lowly, making heavenly the affections
which are most of earth. It is all this, because it is an inexhaustible
depth of devotion supplying countless souls of men with stores of
divine love, of endless variety, and yet all of them of most exquisite
loveliness. This then is what we are to consider in the present
chapter,—Bethlehem as a sea of devotion, an expanse of super­
natural holiness, a wide field of sanctities, which are a great part
of the daily life of the Church of God.
The mysteries of the Incarnation are a sort of disclosure to us
of the infinity of God. They reveal him by the very manner in
which they compress his immensity. When we come to consider
any one of these mysteries by itself, we are continually being aston­
ished by the number of phases under which it presents itself to us.
It seems to diversify itself endlessly, to pass from one light to
another, like the hues of the prism, or to enter into an inex­
haustible series of combinations, momentarily changing, like the

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play of gold and color in (he sunset. The different circumstances
of life, bright or dark, overshadow or illumine the mystery, and
reveal to us depths in it which we had never suspected, and
beauties which we had hitherto omitted to observe. Sorrow and
joy are both of them instruments of the soul; and both of them
are at once telescopes and microscopes. With our growth in grace
the changes of the mystery are yet more remarkable. It puts on
something more than fresh significance; it is like a new revelation.
Who has not felt how every Holy Week brings the Passion to him
new, astonishing, and untasted? The odor and the savor of the
mystery change, as it combines with our changed and augmented
grace. No Christmas is like its predecessor. Bethlehem grows more
enchanting. The strain of the angels is sweeter. We know more
of Mary and of Joseph. The Child surpasses himself year after year.
Moreover, the significance of our Lord’s mysteries are not mere
theological allegories; much less are they poetical interpretations.
They mean all that they can mean. They mean the same to all
men, and yet different things to each man. They unfold fresh
meanings to fresh generations. The ages of the world comment
differently upon them, and there is always new matter for each
new commentary. This comes from the unutterable prolific truth­
fulness of God. No one has ever fathomed yet the least mystery
of the Three-and-Thirty Years. Angelic spirits are hanging over
the abyss deep down, like sea-birds over the dizzy cliff, and far
below them, because of such sublimer wing, the soul of Mary
floats softly, and wafts herself over depths to which they dare not
descend; and yet even she has not fathomed yet the fair mysteries
to which she ministered.
If we think of the different ways in which our loving fear
could approach the Cave of Bethlehem, we shall find on reflection
perhaps that there are nine spirits of devotion which take posses­
sion of our souls. There are nine attitudes in which our hearts
will naturally put themselves before the Babe. The genius of the
sanctuary seems ninefold. It is not easy to express these nine loves,
these nine worships, in words; for not only does one follow hard
upon another, but they borrow from each other, pass off into

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each other, return upon each other, reflect or anticipate each other,
blend, intermingle, and melt into one, after such a marvellous
and characteristically divine fashion, that it is impossible to define
them. To portray them is as much as we can do. Now, when we
come to this historical Bethlehem, we find as a matter of fact
that the first worshippers there may be said to be nine in number,
a coincidence which seems to raise our ninefold division of the
devotion to the Sacred Infancy to something more than a devo­
tional conjecture. As there were nine choirs of angels round the
throne of the Eternal Word in heaven, so were there, in type and
semblance at least, nine choirs of worshippers round the Incarnate
Word in Bethlehem. Nine choirs of angels sang in heaven, nine
kinds of worshippers silently adored on earth.
Yet we must not forget that amidst all this variety there is at
the same time a complete and higher unity. All devotions to the
Sacred Infancy have one spirit in them, however diversified they
may be. It is a spirit by which they are distinguished from devo­
tions to the Passion, or to the Hidden Life, or to the Public Life,
or to the Risen Life. Spiritual writers may differ as to the defini­
tion or description of this spirit. They may not agree in what
it consists. They may hold conflicting opinions as to the peculiar
graces which this spirit forms.
*
But there is no simple lover of
Jesus, who does not as it were with an undelaying and unerring
• When this was written I did not possess, as I do now, the bulky quarto on
the Infancy of Jesus by Father Joseph Parisot, of the French Oratory (1665). It is
extremely prolix, as all the books of the disciples of the Venerable Berulle seem to
have been, and, as was their fashion also, the facts are drowned in perfect inunda
tions of tiresome moral reflections. Nevertheless it is a complete repertory of the
history, spirit, and hagiology of the Devotion to the Sacred Infancy. Ordinary
readers will find enough in Patrignani’s abridgment of the long and also longwinded French life of Margaret of Beaune. M. Bray of Paris has published a re­
markably pleasing life of her by M. de Cissey, which is of course to be procured
without any difficulty. M. Bray is also the publisher of the Manuel de I’Archiconfrérie de la Sainte Enfance, and likewise of the Ame à l'Ecole de Jésus Enfant. One
of the volumes of Patrignani has also been translated into French under the title
of Le Livre de la Sainte Enfance (Avignon: Seguin Aîné. 1857). It contains the
examples from the lives of the saints. The Life of Mother .Mary of the Holy
Trinity, novice-mistress to Margaret of Beaune, and, even mote, the Life of
Elizabeth of the Holy Trinity, in the third volume of the Chroniques des Carmel­
ites Françaises, are full of wonderful things both about Sister Margaret and the
devotion which she propagated in the Church.

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instinct discern the spirit of these devotions io the Sacred Infancy,
and see how one is like to another in some essential property, while
they arc all different among themselves in other respects, and
different also in that particular spirit from other devotions to
the Incarnation. Then again in another way they all belong to
a still higher unity. There are points in which devotions to the
Sacred Infancy touch upon devotions to the Passion, and indeed
identify themselves with them. The same may be said of devo­
tions connected with the other divisions of our Lord’s life. These
junctions, or points of union, indicate the unity of all devotions
to the Sacred Humanity, and the oneness of spirit which pervades
them all. It is sometimes wonderful to see the results which grace
produces in the soul by means of the congenialities of seemingly
opposite devotions, and how an old grace lives on in a new voca­
tion, feeding on something in a fresh devotion which has an
affinity to devotions that have now been changed for others, and
superseded by them. Thus, while we speak of the diversity of
devotions to the Sacred Infancy, we must keep steadily before us
that they are a family of kindred devotions with the same spiritual
blood in them, and that they have this separate unity of their own
distinct from that higher unity to which they all belong as devo­
tions to the Sacred Humanity.
The special devotion to the Childhood of Jesus, which has
distinguished the later Church, was a growth of the Carmelite
Order, in whose blooming wilderness it was planted by the Holy
Ghost at Beaune in France. The Venerable Margaret of Beaune
was the instrument whom he raised up to propagate this devotion,
not only by her teaching but by her mystical life and states of
prayer, which were a sort of dramatic representation of the mys­
teries of the Sacred Infancy. Many older saints, such as St. Antony
of Padua and St. Cajetan, had been distinguished by a like special
devotion. But it was systematized in the hands of the French
Carmelites, and took a more tangible and exclusive shape than it
had ever done before. We have thus received it from one of the
grandest congregations of the grandest order in the Church, and
the order which belongs to our Blessed Lady by a more ancient

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and especial right than any other. The present devotion to the
Sacred Infancy is as much the gift of the Carmelites, as the present
devotion to the Sacred Heart is the gift of the lowly sweet spirited
daughters of the Visitation. But it is remarkable how seldom, if
ever, the works of God spring from one fountain. There were
many persons in France, contemporaries of Margaret of Beaune,
who had at the same time been led by the impulses of the Holy
Ghost to a special devotion to the Sacred Infancy. Among these
the well-known De Renty should have the highest place, although
he was not singular in his devotion. It is said of him by his
biographer that "he existed in the grace of the Infancy of Jesus
as a sponge exists in the sea, only that he was incomparably more
lost and confounded in the exhaustless ocean of the infinite riches
of that divine Infancy than a sponge is in the waters of the sea."
While some have made purity, and others innocence, and others
simplicity, the distinguishing spirit of all these devotions, it seems
as if De Renty, and others of his time, considered the acting in all
things according to a pure movement of grace, as the special spirit
of the Sacred Infancy. An attentive study of the lives of those
saintly persons, whom the Holy Ghost has formed on these devo­
tions, seems to bear out this conclusion. But, at any rate, the
unity of these devotions is undeniable, as is also their power
to form a character of very peculiar and cognizable sanctity proper
to themselves. At the same time, their attraction is less universal
than that of the Passion, and is seldom disjoined from it.
Before we proceed to examine the nine types of devotion with
which the Cave of Bethlehem will furnish us, we must remind
ourselves of the difference between devotions to the Sacred Human­
ity, and those to angels and saints, or even to the mysteries of
our Blessed Lady, which are so inextricably blended with the
mysteries of our Lord that they may almost be said to be one
phase, and that a universal one, of all his mysteries. Mary is
present almost everywhere, and her shadow falls on pictures where
she is not represented on the canvas. Well as we know this differ
ence between devotions to the Sacred Humanity and those to
angels, saints, or even our Blessed Lady, we should never spare

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ourselves the admonition of it, because of its surpassing im­
portance, especially as securing that doctrinal accuracy which
should distinguish all devotions to the Sacred Humanity, and
which, by keeping our Lord's Divinity before us every instant,
deepens our devotion and encompasses it with that breathless
reverence which is the very life of heavenly love.
We must bear in mind, then, throughout, that devotions to
the Sacred Humanity involve nothing less than divine worship.
We pay to the Sacred Heart or the Precious Blood of our Blessed
Lord precisely the same adoration as to the Most Holy Trinity,
because his Divinity communicates to them its own worth by
virtue of the Hypostatic Union. Although his Two Natures are
uncommingled and unconfused, so that his Divine Nature receives
no admixture and his Human Nature loses none of its genuine­
ness, and although his Two Wills, human and Divine, are quite
distinct, nevertheless his Two Natures are united in One Person,
and that Person is divine. The union of the Two Natures takes
place, not by the blending of the Two, but in the unity of the
Person; and this is what is meant by the term Hypostatic Union.
This confers an infinite value and dignity on the operations of his
Human Nature, and entitles each drop of Blood, and indeed
whatsoever belongs to the integrity of his Human Nature, so long
as it remains in the Hypostatic Union, to the honors of divine
worship. Almost all the objections which unthinking persons
sometimes urge against particular devotions to the Sacred Human­
ity, or against the forms which those devotions take, arise from
a forgetfulness of this fundamental doctrine of the faith. All such
devotions imply habits of mental prayer, and mental prayer in a
school in which even the simplest learn much theology. Perhaps no
one who had a real habit of mental prayer was ever found among
the objectors to the devotion to the Sacred Heart; but without
this habit such objections are most intelligible, because of the
way in which the dogmas of the faith can remain undeveloped,
and their inferences unsuspected, in those who, not being theo­
logians by education, have not become such by prayer.
Yet, while adoration in the strictest sense of the word enters

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into, and gives an august solemnity to, all our devotions to the
Sacred Humanity, they are nevertheless tempered with a famili­
arity unlike the worship of the divine perfections. It is not that
they are more tender; for the tenderest and most tearful of all
worships is that of the inscrutable grandeurs of the Most Holy
Trinity. No devotion can equal that for melting the heart, and
filling it full of the most childlike happiness and softness. But
there is a certain boldness of approach, a certain freedom of human
language, a certain deeply reverential familiarity, yet still a famili­
arity, which distinguishes devotions to the Sacred Humanity. We
have a distinct picture of the object of our worship in our minds,
which affects both our language and our feeling. Our Lord's
assumption of our nature is a peculiar approach to us, to which
we on our side have to correspond, and we correspond by this
familiarity. Thus the familiarity becomes itself part of our rever­
ence for the Incarnation, an element in our worship of it. A
devotion which rests upon created images and historical facts
must have a character of its own. Even the worship of the Unseen
God, when it is pleading past mercies and reposing on the re­
membrance of old compassions, imbibes a kind of familiarity
without any detriment to its reverence, as we may see by com­
paring the worship of Job with that of the patriarch Jacob. The
latter speaks and entreats almost as man with man, whereas the
former cowers before the whirlwind of the divine majesty, while
the boldness of his expostulations is wrung from him by the very
agony of his fear. Devotions to the Sacred Humanity are a kind
of divine worship, of which neither angels nor men could ever
have dreamed without revelation, but which have been invented
by God himself, and contain in themselves the spirit and signifi­
cance of that mystery of the Incarnation which was the cause,
and type, and rule of all creation. They form a liturgy of divine
composition, a missal and a breviary of the divine ideas, such as
would be unimaginable by any mere created intelligence. What
the Lord’s Prayer is as a form of words, these devotions are as
the attitude of adoring minds; and from their divine authorship
they have a sacramental power and a privileged acceptance.

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They are therefore of an entirely different nature from devo­
tions to the angels or the saints. In common with those devotions
they have an intercessory character, only of a far more efficacious
and irresistible kind; while at the same time they approach God
directly by divine worship. They unite all the excellences of
other devotions, only in an unspeakably supereminent degree,
with the awfulness of perfect adoration, and have also a peculiarity
of their own derived from the grand mystery of the Incarnation,
out of which they flow. They are necessary also to a worship which
is mystically higher and more perfect than themselves. As our
Lord's Sacred Humanity is our way to God, so in ordinary cases
these devotions are the way of the soul to the contemplation of
the Divine Attributes and of the secrets of the Undivided Trinity.
Devotions to the Sacred Humanity can never be dispensed with.
They will not allow themselves even to be depreciated in com­
parison with what are technically higher contemplations. They
do not form a stage in the spiritual life, which we ultimately
transcend. They are not merely an ascent to a table-land on a
higher level, from which we may look back upon them. They are
indispensable from the first. They are indispensable to the last.
A disesteem of them, if it is intellectual, is heresy; if it is prac­
tical, is delusion. These devotions also have a peculiarly substan­
tial effect upon our spiritual character, and mould our spiritual
life with an irresistible pacific force, which belongs only to them­
selves, and which distinguishes their action in the work of our
sanctification. There are many reasons for this, many which we
cannot explain, although we divine them and arc sensible of their
presence. But the chief reason is the amount of the living spirit
of Jesus which they both contain and communicate, contain in
an inexhaustible measure, and communicate according to the
degree of our purity and fervor; and all holiness is but a trans­
formation of us into the substantial likeness of our Lord.
Our Blessed Lady presents us with the first type of devotion
to the Sacred Infancy. We have already seen how in her worship
of the Child she represented all creation, and immeasurably sur­
passed it. Her worship was in many respects a different kind from

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what ours can be, independently of its exceeding in degree even
the worship of the saints. She herself occupied a singular position
in God's creation, which as it were spheres her apart from all
other creatures. Her height is not only unattainable by any other,
it is also unapproachable. She belongs to the hierarchy of the
Incarnation, and has what may be called rights over our Blessed
Lord, which are sufficient of themselves to give a distinct character
to her worship of him. In all this, therefore, she was admirable
rather than imitable, and it is not of such things that we are now
going to speak. She is an example as well as a wonder; and it is
her pattern which we are at present to put before ourselves. Our
possibilities of holiness are greater than we like to suppose. We
estimate them below the truth, because it is painful to our selflove to contemplate such a gulf as really exists between what we
actually attain and what we might attain. For the same reason
we under-estimate the amount of grace which we receive, in order
that we may not have to force upon our own notice the difference
between the height which is practicable to us through correspond­
ence to grace positively conferred upon us, and the lowness of our
real state in the spiritual life. A detailed correspondence to grace
in things quite within our compass would lead us almost unawares
to heights of sanctity, which nature trembles to contemplate when
it beholds them in their full abrupt altitude, and not as a gradual
ascent. If a man saw in one collective vision all the bodily pain
and mental suffering which would successively accumulate upon
him during his whole life, he would perhaps be driven to despair,
or at least a shadow would lie over his spirit which would blacken
all that was bright around him. In like manner men shrink from
the pursuit of perfection when they realize the amount of self­
crucifixion which will have taken place by the time the purposed
height is gained. Thus it frightens us to think of Jesus and
Mary as our examples. In our Lord's case we take refuge in his
Divinity, and narrow unwarrantably the sphere of his human
action. In our Lady’s case we magnify her exceptional greatness,
and think we do her virtues homage by putting them beyond the
reach of our imitation. Even with the saints our cowardice loves

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to exaggerate the admirable at the expense of the imitable. Alas!
if we would but let each day's grace lead us whither it wills,
with its gentle step, its kind allurement, and its easy sacrifice, in
what a sweetly incredible nearness to the world of saints should
we not find ourselves before many years were gone! It was cor­
respondence to grace which was Mary's grandest grace. It is her
correspondence to grace which interprets and accounts for her
immense holiness. It was her correspondence to grace which made
her sanctity congruous to her unparalleled exaltation. If we will
be but as faithful to our little graces as she was to her great ones,
we shall at last draw near to her, or what we may call near, by
following her example in this one respect.
The distinguishing characteristic of her worship of Jesus was
its humility. Those who are raised on high have a lower depth
to which they can stoop, than those whom grace has simply lifted
out of the abyss and left almost on its brink. But, independently
of this, great sanctity seems to have a power of humiliation which
is the result of all its combined graces, and not of any one of them
in particular. For both these reasons, Mary’s humility has no paral­
lel among the saints. It distantly approaches to that unutterable
self-abasement which belongs to our Blessed Lord himself,—that
grace to which he clung, and in the Blessed Sacrament still clings,
with such an adorable predilection. It was through her humility
that Mary received her various sanctifications. Indeed, it was
through her humility that she became the Mother of God. The
love of that grace fixed the eye of the Word, the eye of his
eternal choice, upon her. He looked upon the lowliness of his
handmaid. We speak of great graces raising us up on high; but
our language would express more truth if we spoke rather of their
sinking us deep in God. To sink in our own nothingness, provided
we love while we are sinking, is to sink deep in God. When we
sink out of sight in him, not only out of sight of the world, but
also, and much more, out of sight of self, then is our life really
hidden in God, and hidden there with Christ, because his Sacred
Humanity dwells so deep in God by virtue of its marvellous abase­
ment. Thus, we cannot doubt that, at the moment when our Lady

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received the grace of the Immaculate Conception, she humbled
herself before God in a manner which one of the saints even
would hardly understand. By this act of humility she at once
established a kind of proportion between her merits and the mag­
nitude of the grace she had received. It was the allurement of her
beautiful humility which caused the Word to anticipate the time
of his Incarnation. At the moment of the Incarnation she was
clothed afresh with an indescribable humility. In the creature
humility is the infallible accompaniment of nearness to the Cre­
ator. It is the only created thing which enables creatures to live
in the atmosphere which is immediately around the Throne.
When therefore the august majesty of the Eternal lay awfully
furled within her bosom, the humility which possessed her whole
soul must plainly have been beyond our conceptions of that
heavenly grace. But, as all her graces were ever growing, and as
for nine long months there was the same abiding reason for this
unspeakable self-abasement, to what a depth in God must not
her humility have reached by that midnight hour in Bethlehem!
Yet when she beheld her own Son, her new-born Babe, lying on the
ground, and remembered that he was truly none other than the
everlasting God, and the very Son of her own substance, the flower
which had blossomed of her own virginal blood, she must at once
have sunk into fresh and nameless depths of holiest abjection. No
creature ever made an offering to the Eternal Father from lower
depths than Mary when she offered Jesus to him at the moment
of his birth, except Jesus when he offered himself to his Father
at that selfsame moment, blending his oblation with his Mother s;
and he found unshared depths of self-annihilation which he could
not have reached had he been less than God. This then is the first
example which Mary gives us,—an example whose importance
and significance are greatly increased when we regard it in con­
nection with devotion to the Sacred Humanity. It is only by an
intense spirit of adoration that the heavenly virtues of these devo­
tions are extracted and distilled into our souls.
The first fruit of humility is joy. The grace which we find in
the depths to which we sink is spiritual buoyancy; and our light­

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ness of spirit is in proportion to the profoundness of our abasement.
A mother’s joy over her first born has passed into a proverb. But
no creature has ever rejoiced as Mary did. No joy was ever so
deep, so holy, so beautiful, as hers. It was the joy of possessing
God in a way in which none had possessed him heretofore, a way
which was the grandest work of his wisdom and his power, the
greatest height of his inexplicable love of creatures. It was the joy
of presenting to God what was equal to himself, and so covering
his divine majesty with a coextensive worship. It was the joy of
being able by that offering to impetrate for her fellow-creatures
wonderful graces, which were new both in their abundance, their
efficacy, and their excellence. It was the joy of the beauty of Jesus,
of the ravishing sweetness of his Countenance, of the glorious
mystery' of every look and touch of him, of the thrilling privileges
of her maternal love, and of the contagion of his unspeakable
joy, which passed from his Soul into hers. The whole world, by
right of its creation, by right of having been created by a God so
inimitably and adorably good and bright and loving, is a world
of joy. Joy is so completely its nature that it can hardly help itself.
It blossoms into joy without knowing what it is doing. It breaks
out into mirthful songs, like a heedless child whose heart is too
full of gayety for thought. It has not a line or form about it which
is not beautiful. It leaps up to the sunshine, and, when it opens
itself, it opens in vernal greenness, in summer flowers, in autumnal
fruits, and then rests again for its winter rest, like a happy cradled
infant, under its snowy coverlet adorned with fairy-like crystals,
while the pageantry of the gorgeous storms only makes music
round its unbroken slumber. Mary, the cause of all our joy, was
herself a growth of earth, a specimen of what an unfallen world
would have been; and it was on an earthly stem that Jesus him­
self, the joy of all joys, blossomed and gave forth his fragrance.
Thus nature and life tend to joy at all hours. Joy is their legiti­
mate development, their proper perfection,—in fact, the very law
of living; for the bare act of living is itself an inestimable joy.
Nothing glorifies God so much as joy. See how the perfume lingers
in the withered flower: it is the angel of joy who cannot take heart

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to wing his flight back from earth to heaven, even when his task
is done. It is self which has marred this joy. It is the worship of
self, the perpetual remembrance of self, the making self a centre,
which has weighed the world down in its jubilee and almost over­
ballasted it with sadness. It is humility above all other things
which weakens or snaps asunder the holdfasts of selfishness. A
lowly spirit is of necessity an unselfish one. Humility is a per­
petual presence of God; and how can self be otherwise than for
gotten there? An humble man is a joyous man. He is in the world,
like a child, who claims no rights, and questions not the rights of
God, but simply lives and expands in the sunshine round about
him. The little one does not even claim the right to be happy:
happiness comes to him as a fact, or rather as a gracious law, and
he is happy without knowing of his happiness,—which is the truest
happiness of all. So is it with him whom humility has sanctified.
Morever, as joy was the original intent of creation, it must be
an essential element in all worship of the Creator. Nay, is it not
almost a definition of grace, the rejoicing in what is sad to fallen
nature, because of the Creator’s will? Thus Mary’s devotion to
the Babe of Bethlehem was one of transcending joy. There is no
worship where there is no joy. For worship is something more
than either the fear of God or the love of him. It is delight in him.
With Mary’s joy, if not out of it, came also a fresh increase of
her unutterable purity, a grace whose perfection is the complete
loss of self in God. There is something in purity which is akin
to infinity. It implies a detachment from creatures, an emanci­
pation from all ignoble, even though sinless, ties, which sets us free
to wing our flight to God and to nestle in him alone. All attach­
ment to creatures narrows our capacity for holding God. There
are many earthly loves which ennoble us; but they do so by saving
us from lower things, not by leading us to higher. When the com­
petition is between earthly love and divine, it is the last which
suffers, because it is its nature to possess hearts, and not to share
them. Multitudes of men often come to love God by loving men.
It belongs to the saints to have a love of men, which is nothing
else than a portion of their love of God. Mary could love her

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Child with all the passionate fondness of a heroic mother; for her
fondness was literally worship also. The excess of human love,
which we name idolatry in others, in her was simple adoration.
The mystery of our Lord’s Nativity was in itself a mystery of
purity. It was a new miracle adorning her virginity. It would
therefore of itself immensely increase her purity, and render it yet
more sublime. But her heavenly joy brought with it also an
augmentation of this loveliest of graces. Purity is the proper gift
of joyous spirits. Its home is in the sunshine, and its voice an
endless song. Even while clouds and light are struggling for the
mastery on earth, purity turns faith into sight; for the pure in
heart wait not for heaven. They see God now, and they sec him
every where; and as joy brought purity, so purity brings fresh joy;
for what is the sight of God but jubilee?
From our Blessed Lady’s purity came her deep simplicity.
This is a grace which belongs to the regions near God. In our
close valleys we know but little of it. It is the soul’s highest imita­
tion of the Divine Nature. It betokens already that great victory
of grace when oblivion of self no longer requires an effort, but
has become like a second nature. Mary did not reflect upon
herself. She did not refine with the subtleties of her lofty science
on the mystery before her. She blended the earthly and divine in
her one act of worship, with something like the simplicity with
which they were blended in the union of the Incarnation. Her
worship sought for nothing. It rested in its object, and was content.
It was not aware of itself. It took no count of things. It had lost
itself in God. Yet this simplicity, whose life is in self-oblivion,
how thoughtful does it make us of others, of multitudes of others,
of no less a multitude than all the dwellers upon earth! Mary
gives away her joy as soon as she has got it. She gives him away
for us. In the very heaven of Bethlehem she consents to the horrors
of Calvary. Her first devotion to the Sacred Infancy ends in devo­
tion to the Passion. What else but a spirit of oblation could come
of such unselfishness? How many lessons are there for us in all
this! How beautifully can the devotion that is forever unselfing
itself perfect itself in all its various degrees by copying Mary at

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the feet of her new born Babe! It is a venturous humility, and
yet, after all, a true humility, which dares to take no less a pattern
for its worship than that of God's own Mother, who worshipped
for all God's creatures with a worship to which their united
worship, endlessly prolonged, never can come near. St. Joseph
presents us with a similar, yet somewhat different, type of devo­
tion to the Sacred Infancy. We know nothing of the beginnings
of this wonderful saint. Like the fountains of the sacred river
of the Egyptians, his early years are hidden in an obscurity which
his subsequent greatness renders beautiful, just as the sunset is
reflected in the dark and clouded east. He was doubtless high in
sanctity before his Espousals with Mary. God's eternal choice
of him would seem to imply as much. During the nine months
the accumulation of grace upon him must have been beyond our
powers of calculation. The company of Mary, the atmosphere
of Jesus, the continual presence of the Incarnate God, and the
fact of his own life being nothing but a series of ministries to the
unborn Word, must have lifted him far above all other saints,
and perchance all angels too. Our Lord's Birth, and the sight of
his Face, must have been to him like another sanctification. The
mystery of Bethlehem was enough of itself to place him among
the highest of the saints. As with Mary, self-abasement was his
grandest grace. He was conscious to himself that he was the shadow
of the Eternal Father, and this knowledge overwhelmed him. With
the deepest reverence he hid himself in the constant thought of
the dignity of his office, in the profoundest self-abjection. Com­
manding makes deep men more humble than obeying. St. Joseph s
humility was fed all through life by having to command Jesus,
by being the superior of his God. The priest who has most reason
to deplore the poverty of his attainments in humility is humble
at least when he comes to consecrate at Mass. For years Joseph
lived in the awful sanctity of that which to the priest is but a
moment. The little house at Nazareth was as the outspread square
of the white corporal. All the words he spoke were almost words
of consecration. A life worthy of this, up to the mark of this,—
what a marvel of sanctity it must have beenl

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To be hidden in God, to be lost in his bright light, is surely
the highest of vocations among the sons of men. Nothing, to a
spiritually discerning eye, can surpass the grandeur of a life
which is only for others, only ministering to the divine purposes
as in the place of God, without any personal vocation, or any
purpose of its own. This is the exceeding magnificence of Mary,
that her personality is almost lost in her official vicinity to God.
This too in its measure was Joseph’s vocation. He lives now only
to serve the Infant Jesus, as heretofore he has but lived to guard
Mary, the lily of God. He is as it were the head of the Holy
Family, only that, like a good superior, he may the more com­
pletely be the servant, and the subject, and the instrument. More­
over, he makes way for Jesus, when Jesus comes of age. He passes
noiselessly into the shadow of eternity, like the moon behind a
cloud, complaining not that her silver light is intercepted. He
does not live on to the days of the miracles and the preaching,
much less to the fearful grandeurs of Gethsemane and Calvary.
His spirit is the spirit of Bethlehem. He is, in an especial way, the
property of the Sacred Infancy. It was his one work, his single
sphere.
He is thus an object of imitation to those souls who have
seasons when they are so possessed with devotion to the Sacred
Infancy, that it appears to them impossible to have any devotion
at all to the Passion, and who are very naturally disquieted by
this phenomenon, and distrustful of it. Singularity is always to
be distrusted. If we are out of sympathy with the great multitude
of common believers, the probability is that we are in a state of
delusion. There are indeed such things as extraordinary impulses
of the Holy Ghost; but they are rare; and even they follow analo­
gies, and follow them most when they seem strangest and most
singular. Thus, there is no instance of any of the saints having
gone through life so absorbed in any other of our Blessed Lord's
mysteries as to have disregarded the Passion, or not placed it among
their foremost devotions. The prominence given to the Passion in
the spiritual life of Margaret of Beaune, especially during her
latter years, is a remarkable confirmation of this doctrine. Yet

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with some there arc seasons, seasons which come, and do their
work, and go, during which they seem blessedly possessed with
the spirit of Bethlehem, and in those times nothing is seen of
Calvary but its blue outline, like a mountain on the horizon.
Grace has something special to do in the soul, and it does it in
this way. St. Joseph must be our patron at those seasons, as having
been sanctified himself with an apparent exclusiveness by these
very mysteries of Bethlehem. Yet it was not with him, neither
will it be with us, a devotion of unmingled sweetness. At the
bottom of the Crib lies the Cross; and the Infant's Heart is a
living Crucifix, for all he sleeps so softly and looks so fair. From
Joseph’s first fear for Mary, and the mystical darkness of his
tormenting perplexity, to the very day when he laid his tired
head on the lap of his Foster-Son, and slept his last sleep, it was
one continued suffering, the torture of anxiety without the im­
perfection of disquietude. The very awe of the nine months must
have killed with its perpetual sacred pressure all that was merely
natural within him; and our inner nature never dies a painless
death, as the outer sometimes does. Poverty must have appeared
to him in a new light, less easy to bear, when Jesus and Mary
were concerned. The rude men and unsympathizing women of
Bethlehem were but the forerunners of the dark-eyed idolaters of
Egypt, with their jealous suspicions of the Hebrew stranger, while
his weak arm was the only rampart God had set round the Mother
and the Child. The flight into Egypt and the return from it, the
fears which would not let him dwell in the Holy City, and the
rustic unkindliness of the ill-famed Nazarenes,—all these were so
many Calvaries to Joseph. Sweet and beautiful as is the look of
Bethlehem, they who carry the Infant Jesus in their souls carry
the Cross also, and where he pillows his head he leaves the marks
behind him of an unseen Crown of thorns. In truth, the death
of Joseph was itself a martyrdom. He was worn out with love of
the Holy Child. It was love, divine love, which slew him, so that
his devotion was like that of the Holy Innocents, a devotion of
martyrdom and blood.
The foundation therefore of Joseph’s devotion was, as with

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*,
Man
his humility. Yet his humility was somewhat different from
hers. It was another kind of grace. It was less self-forgetting. Its
eye was always on its own un worth incss. It was a humility that
forever seemed surprised at its own gifts, and yet so tranquil that
there was nothing in it either of the precipitation or the ungrace­
fulness of a surprise. He was unselfishness itself, the very personifi­
cation of it. His whole life meant others, and did not mean
himself. This was the significance of his vocation. He was an
instrument with a living soul, an accessory, not a principal, a
superior, only to be the more a satellite. He was simply the visible
providence oi Jesus and Mary. But his unselfishness did not take
the shape of self-oblivion. Hence his peculiar grace was self­
possession. Calmness amid anxiety, considerateness amid startling
mysteries, a quiet heart combined with an excruciating sensitive­
ness, a self-consciousness maintained for the single purpose of an
unintermitting immolation of self, the promptitude of docility
grafted on the slowness of age and the measuredness of natural char­
acter, unbroken sweetness amid harassing cares, abrupt changes
and unexpected situations, a facile passiveness under each move­
ment of grace, each touch of God's finger, as if he were floating
over earth rather than rooted in it, the seeming victim of a way­
ward romantic lot and of dark divine enigmas, yet calm, incuri­
ous, unquestioning, unbewildered, reposing upon God,—these are
the operations of grace which seem to us so wonderful in Joseph’s
soul. It was a soul which glassed in its pellucid tranquillity all
the images of heavenly things that were round about it. When
mysterious graces were showered down upon him, there is hardly
a stir to be seen upon his silent passiveness. He seems to take
them as if they were the common sunshine, and the common air,
and the dew which fell on all men and not on himself alone. He
was like the speechless, silver-shining, glassy lake, just trembling
with the thin, noiseless rain drops, while it rather hushes than
quickens its only half-audible pulses on the blue gravelled shore.
It almost seems as if joined with his self-possession there was also
an unconsciousness of his great graces, if we could think that great
saints did not know their graces as none others know them. He

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was not a light that shone, he was rather an odor that breathed, in
the house of God. He was like the mountain-woods in the wet
weeping summer. They speak to heaven by their manifold frag­
rances, which yet make one woodland odor, like the many dialect,
of a rich language,—as if the fresh wind-driven drops beat the
sensitive leaves of many hidden and sequestered plants, and so
made them give out their perfumes, just as sorrow by its gentle
bruising brings out hidden sweetness from all characters of men.
So it was with St. Joseph. He moves about among the mysteries
of the Sacred Infancy, a shy, silent figure. Between the going and
coming of great mysteries we just hear him, as we hear the rain
timidly whispering among the leaves in the intervals of the deeptoned thunder. But his odor is everywhere. It is the very genius
of the place. It clings to our garments, and lingers in our senses,
even when we have left the Cave of Bethlehem and gone out into
the world’s work.
His mind was turned inward, upon his dread office, rather than
outward, on the harvest of God’s glory among men. This follows
from his self-possession. He stood in an official position; but it
was only toward God, not toward both God and men, as was our
Lady’s case. Hence there was less of the spirit of oblation about
Joseph than about Mary. He and God were together. He knew
not of others, except as making him suffer, and so winning them­
selves titles to his love. The sacerdotal character of Mary's holiness
was not apparent in him. He was a priest of the Infant Jesus,
neither to sacrifice him nor to offer him, but only to guard him.
to handle him with reverence and to worship him. Like a deacon
he might bear the Precious Blood, but not consecrate it. Or he
was the priestly sacristan to whose custody the tabernacle was com­
mitted. This was more his office than saying Mass. All this was in
keeping with his reserve. It was to be expected that the shadow
of the Eternal Father should move without sound over the world.
Shadows speak only by the shade they cast, deepening, beautify
ing, harmonizing all things, filling the hearts they cover with the
mute eloquence of tenderest emotions. God is perhaps more com
municative than he is reserved. For, though he has told us less

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than he has withheld, yet how much more, out of sheer love, has
he told us than we needed to know! and what has he kept back
except that which because of our littleness we could not know, or
that which lor our good it was better we should not know? Some
saints represent to us this communicativeness of God, and others
his reserve. St. Joseph is the head and father of these last. It is
strange that, while saints have often shown forth to men the union
of justice and of mercy which there is in God, or the combination
of swiftness and of slowness in the divine operations, and others
of the apparent contrarieties in God, no saint appears to have
ever copied him in the union of communicativeness and of re­
serve. We find that illustrated only in the Incarnate Word and his
Immaculate Mother. St. Joseph was the image of the Father. The
Father had spoken once, speaks now, his unbroken Eternal Word.
Joseph needed but to stand by in silence and fold gently in his
arms that Word which the Father was yet speaking. The mani­
fested Word, the outpoured Spirit, of them Joseph was not the
representative. They only hung him round with the splendors of
their dear love, because he was the image of the Father. Such does
he seem to our eyes, such is the image of him which rests in our
loving hearts,—mute, rapture-bound, awe-stricken, with his soul
tranquil, unearthly, shadowy, like the loveliness of night, and the
beautiful age upon his face speaking there like a silent utterance,
a free, placid, and melodious thanksgiving to the Most Holy
Trinity.
We find our third type of devotion to the Infant Jesus in St.
John the Baptist. As to Joseph, so also to John, Jesus came through
Mary, as he comes to us. In the sweet sound of Mary’s voice came
the secret power of the Infant Redeemer’s absolving grace. John
worshipped behind the veil Him who also from behind his veil
had absolved him from his original sin, had broken his fetters,
fulfilled him with eminent holiness, and anointed him to be his
own immediate Precursor. He too, like Joseph, was simply to be
an instrument. He too was to prepare the way for the Child of
Bethlehem. His light was to fade as the light of Jesus grew fuller
on the sight of men. He too,—strange tenant of the wilderness,

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in grotesque apparel, companion of angels and of wild beasts, a
feeder on savage food!—he too was to be hidden from the gaze
of men during the long first years of his life, as Joseph had been,
and as his own forerunner Elias was to be through the long re­
volving centuries of his closing life up to the very scenes which
should herald the coming Doom. Like Joseph, the Baptist was
withdrawn from Calvary, and stood on the borders of the Gospel
light, only half emerging from the shadows of the Old Testament.
Like Joseph, he was bidden to be our Lord’s superior, but, with
humility unlike that of Joseph, and yet a veritable humility, he
argued against his own elevation, and bowed only to the gentle
command of Him who sought baptism at his hands, and gave
for others a cleansing sacramental power to the water that could
but simulate ablution to his spotless Soul. His too was a hermit
spirit, like Joseph’s; but his was calmly cradled in the solitudes of
the desert, not chafed evermore by the crowding of uncongenial
men. He was a light that burned as well as shone; and of him
it was that the Incarnate Word declared that none born of woman
had yet been so great as he. He also belongs, like Joseph, to the
Sacred Infancy, handing over his followers to Jesus, ending where
his Lord began, like the moon setting as the sun rises, and. like
the Holy Innocents, worshipping his Savior with his blood.
The Baptist was our Lord’s first convert. His redemption was.
so to speak, the first sacrament which Jesus administered. Through
Mary’s voice the gift of original justice was miraculously given
him, the complete use of reason conferred upon him, and the
immense graces communicated to him which were implied in his
extraordinary office and our Lord's marvellous words about him.
When we consider all these things, our Lord’s quickening his
Mother’s steps to go and work this stupendous conversion, the
grandeur of the mission to which Elizabeth’s unborn child was
destined, his exulting use of the reason supernaturally anticipated
in his soul, his redemption as the first work of our Lord’s love of
souls in person, and possibly the next steps in the scale of graces
to the Immaculate Conception, and his reception of all these
things through the sweet mouth and salutation of Mary, we may

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form some idea of the characteristics of his devotion to the Babe
of Bethlehem. Christian art has loved to depict them as children
together. Yet the thought is most overwhelming, when we come
to meditate upon it. Art can never express our Lord's Divinity;
and so all devotional pictures fall short of the visions of our
prayers. With what haste—as if Mary’s haste to him were passed
into his spirit and had become the law and habit of his life—
would not St. John press into the presence of Jesus, his soul
bounding with the exultation of his sinless sanctity, his heart
overflowing with the exuberance of speechless gratitude, feasting
his eyes on the beauty of that Face, while the mother’s accent in
the Child's voice thrilled through his whole being, like the keen
tremulous piercings of an ecstasy! Yet how, while he ran forward
with all this in his soul, would it not be arrested all at once, and
changed to something unspeakably higher, as he passed within
the circle of our Lord’s Divinity! How his thanksgiving, which
ought to be so eloquent, would be offered in a song-like silence
to the Incarnate God, while sacred fear would turn his spell-bound
gladness to mutest adoration, and his gratitude become speechless
before the majesty of the Eternal thus transparently veiled in
human flesh! He would tremble with delighted awe, while he
felt the streams of grace, ever flowing, ever new, flooding his glori­
ous soul from the nearness of the Divine Child. Exultation, grati­
tude, generosity with God, a magnificent incapacity of consorting
with earthly things,—these were obviously the characteristics of
his devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem. Happy they who catch
his spirit! Happy they on whom God bestows an especial attrac­
tion to this resplendent saint!
Attraction to St. John the Baptist is one of the ways to Jesus,
and a way of his own appointment, and upon which therefore a
peculiar blessing rests. He was chosen to prepare men's hearts to
be the thrones of their Lord. It was even he who laid the founda­
tions of the college of the Apostles in Peter and Andrew and
John, who were his disciples. Attractiveness was hung around
the Baptist like a spell. In what did it consist? Doubtless, in
gifts of nature as well as grace; for such is God’s way. Yet it is

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difficult to see in what it resided. As the world counts things, he
was an uncouth man. The savage air of the wilderness affected
his rugged sweetness. His austerity, we might have imagined, had
not the lives of the saints in all ages taught us differently, would
have driven men away from him either as an example or a teacher.
His teaching was ungrateful to corrupt nature. It was reforming,
unsparing, and dealt mainly in condemnations. Its manner was
vehement, abrupt, and singularly without respect of persons. Yet
all men gathered near him, even while he taught that his teaching
was not final, that his mission was but a preparation, and that he
was not the deliverer whom they sought. All classes, trades, ranks,
and professions fluttered around him, like moths round the candle,
sure to be scorched by his severity, yet, whether they would or not,
attracted to his light. What could his attraction be, but the sweet
spirit of Bethlehem, the spirit of exultation, of generosity, of
earthliness, of the freshness of abounding grace? The whole being
of that austere man, most awe-inspiring as he was of all anchorets
that ever were, was overflowed with gladness. He had drunk the
wine of the Precious Blood when it was at its newest, and he was
blessedly intoxicated to the last. It was said of him before he was
born, that at his birth men should rejoice, and yet there seemed
no obvious reason that it should be so. When he heard the sound
of Mary’s voice, he leaped with exultation in his mother's womb.
It was the gladness of grace. It was the triumph of redeeming
love. It was the first and freshest victory of the little Conqueror
of Bethlehem. When his ears were first opened with the new gift
of reason, the sounds that smote them were from Mary singing
her Magnificat. How could a life ever know sadness that had so
joyous, so musical a beginning? In very childhood he went away
into the wilderness, lest the world should break the charm that
was around his soul. He who did no miracles was himself a miracle.
His life was a portent. As Elias is hidden now on some bare cloudcapped mountain or in the shades of unknown groves, wearing out
in placid ecstasies his patient expectant age, so John, who was
both successor and forerunner of Elias, was hidden in the wilder­
ness, with the beautiful spirit of Bethlehem within his soul, alhir-

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ing angels to the desert spot, soothing the fierce natures of the
beasts, making him insensible to the wayward tyranny of the ele­
ments. and nurturing his soul in spiritual grandeur. Innocent as
he was, he would do penance as if he were a sinner, partly because
he would not be outdone in generosity by God, and partly because
the spirit of Bethlehem led him, like the Holy Child, to love
hardship and to espouse poverty. Such was the child of the Precious
Blood, whose unborn soul had been steeped in the beauty of the
Magnificat. Such was die first conquest of the Babe of Bethlehem,
the fair creation of grace which the Infant Creator in one instant
made through the sound of his Mother’s voice. Happy they who,
by a special devotion to him, make themselves the companions of
him who was the companion of the Infant Jesus!
Our fourth type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy is to be
found in the Angels. How beautiful to our eyes is that vast
angelic world, with its various kingdoms of holy wonders and of
spiritual magnificence! It is well worth while for a theologian to
spend his whole life lying on the confines of that bright creation
to mark the lights and gleams which come to him from out of
those realms of the eldest-born sons of God. It is not only sweet
to learn of those whose companions in bliss we hope some day
to be, and one of whose royal princes is ever at our side even now,
ennobling rather than demeaning himself by ministries of secret
love. But it is sweeter still to know so much more of God as
even our imperfect theology of the Angels can teach us. No one
knows the loveliness of moonlight till he has beheld it on the sea.
So does the ocean of angelic life on its clear field of boundless
waters reflect, and as it were magnify by its reflection, the shining
of God’s glory. Devotion to the Angels is a devotion which eman­
cipates the soul from littleness and gives it blissful habits of
unearthly thought. Purer than the driven snow are all those
countless spirits, pure in the exuberance of their own beautiful
natures, not by the toilsome chastening of austerity, nor by the
quick or gradual death of nature at the hands of grace. Mary,
their queen, looks down into them for evermore, and the white
light of her exceeding purity is reflected in them, as in deep.

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still waters. They come nearest to God, and it is one of the
rubrics of heaven’s service that the incense of men's prayers should
be burned before God by Angels. Yet they are our kin. We
look up to them more as elder brothers than as creatures set far
apart from us by the pre-eminence of their natures. We love
them with a yearning love; we make sure of being the comrades
of their eternal joys; we even imitate their impossible heights
without despair, for their beauty invigorates rather than dis­
heartens us. It is an endless delight to us that they serve God so
well while we are serving him so poorly, and that they themselves
so abound in love that they joy in the love of men. Yet, truly,
why should they not prize what even God so ineffably desires?
Beautiful land! beautiful bright people! how wonderfully the
splendor of creation shines in them, while from off their ceaseless
wings they are ever scattering lights and odors which are all of
God and from God's home, and make us home-sick, as exiles are
who smell some native almost-forgotten flower or hear the strains
of some long-silent patriotic melody! No cold gulf is between us
and those angelic spirits. Like a ship that hangs upon a summer
sea with its fair white sails, and one while seems to belong to the
blue deep and another while to be rather a creature of the sunny
air, so do the dear Angels hang, and brood, and float over this
sea of human joys and sorrows, never too high above us to be
beyond our reach, and more often mingling, like Raphael, their
unsullied light with our darkness, as if they were but the best,
the kindest, and the noblest of ourselves.
Immense was their devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem. He was
the cause of their perseverance, and its means. There is not a
grace in the deep treasuries of their rapturous being which is not
from the Babe of Bethlehem, and from him not simply as the
Word, but as the Incarnate Word. It was the vision of his Sacred
Humanity which was at once their trial, their sanctification, and
their perseverance. The Babe of Bethlehem was shown to them
amid the central fires of the Godhead, and they adored, and loved,
and humbled themselves before that lower nature which it was his
good pleasure to assume. They greeted with acclamations of ex

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lifting loyalty the announcement that his mortal Mother was to be
their queen. They longed for the day when Anna’s child should
gladden the distant earth; and heaven has scarce heard sweeter
music than they made on the day she was assumed and crowned.
Thus, devotion to the Holy Child was more than a devotion to
them: it was their salvation; it was their religion. They almost
longed it was their redemption also. If the weakness and infirmity
of his Incarnation was a glorious probation to them, and to their
fallen brethren a fatal stumbling-block, the littleness and seeming
dishonor of his Childhood formed as it were the extreme ease of
the Incarnation; for they had not even the dignity of victim and
of sacrifice which clad as with a mantle the shame and violence of
Calvar}'. We cannot doubt, therefore, of their special attraction
to the Sacred Infancy. Christmas has always seemed to all men
as one of the Angels’ feasts. With what holy envy then must they
not have regarded the fortunate Gabriel, waiting on a Daniel, the
man of desires, and inspiring him with sweet precipitate prophe­
cies, and still more when he went forth on his embassies that
were preparatory to the great mystery, bearing messages to Joachim
and Anne, to Zacharias and Elizabeth! but most of all they envied
him when he went to Nazareth at midnight, and saluted Mary
with a salutation which was not his alone, but the salutation of
the whole angelic world, and then stood back a little, in blissful
trembling reverence, while the Eternal Spirit overshadowed their
young queen, and the sweet mystery was accomplished. They
envied Michael, the official guardian of the Sacred Humanity,
whose zeal devoured his unconsuming spirit even as the zeal of
Jesus devoured the Sacred Heart. They envied Raphael, the man­
like Angel, the healer and the redeemer, because he was so like
to Jesus in his character, and made such beautiful revelations of
the pathos there was in God.
But they did not envy Michael or Raphael as they envied the
fortunate Gabriel. Oh, how for nine months they hung about the
happy Mother, the living tabernacle of the Incomprehensible Cre­
ator! Yet none but Gabriel might speak, none but Gabriel float
over Joseph in his sleep and whisper to him heavenly words in

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the thick of his anxious dreams. But. when the Little Flower
came up from under ground, and bloomed visibly in Bethlehem
at midnight, and filled the world with sudden fragrance, winter
though it was, and dark, and in a sunless Cave, then heaven was
allowed to open, and their voices and their instruments were
given to the Angels, and the flood-gates of their impatient jubilee
were drawn up, and they were bidden to sing such strains of
divinest triumph as the listening earth had never heard before,
not even when those same morning stars had sung at its creation,—
such strains as were meet only for a triumph where the Everlasting
God was celebrating the victories of his boundless love. Down
into the deep seas flowed the celestial harmony. Over the moun­
tain-tops the billows of the glorious music rolled. The vast vaults
of the purple night rung with it in clear, liquid resonance. The
clouds trembled in its undulations. Sleep waved its wings, and
dreams of hope fell upon the sons of men. The inferior creatures
were hushed and soothed. The very woods stood still in the night­
breeze, and the star-lit rivers flowed more silently to hear. The
flowers distilled double perfumes, as if they were bleeding to
death with their unstanched sweetness. Earth herself felt lightened
of her load of guilt; and distant worlds, wheeling far off in space,
were inundated with the angelic melody. Silent, in impatient
adoration, they had leaned over toward earth at the moment of
the Incarnation. Silent, and scarce held in by the omnipotent
hand of God, they pressed like walls of burning fire around the
Cross on Calvary. But at Bethlehem the waters of their inward
jubilee burst forth unreproved, and overran all God's creation
with the wondrous spells of that Gloria in excelsis which is
itself not only a beautiful revelation of angelic nature, but also
the worship round the Throne made for one moment audible
on this low-lying earth. Who does not see that Bethlehem was
the predilection of the Angels?
It is not possible for us to apprehend all the spiritual beauty
which Jay deep down, glorifying God, in this devotion of the
Angels. It was plainly a devotion of joy, of such joy as Angels
can feel. It was joy in a mystery long pondered, long expected,

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yet whose glory took them by surprise when at length it came.
It was at once a joy that so much was now fulfilled, and also that
God had, as usual, so outstripped all hopes in the fulfilment. It
was a joy full of unselfishness toward men, whose nature was at
that moment so gently, yet so irresistibly, triumphing over theirs.
In their song they made no mention of themselves,—only of God
in the highest, and then of men on earth. How beautiful, how
holy, is this silence about themselves! They gave way to their
younger brothers with the infinite gracefulness which nothing but
genuine superiority can show. It was a joy full of intelligent
adoration of the Word, an intelligence which none on earth could
equal but the Mother of the Word. It was thus a reparation for
the ignorance of man, for the rudeness of Bethlehem, and for all
that was yet to come of the inhospitality of earth to its Incarnate
Maker. It was more like Mary’s worship than like Joseph’s, because
it was so full of self-oblivion. If an Angel could ever be otherwise
than self-possessed, we might have called it too spontaneous to be
recollected, too jubilant to be self-abased. It was more like an
outburst of grandeur which they could not help, than an offering
of deliberate and meditative worship. It was the overflow of heaven
seeking fresh room for itself on earth. It was also a devotion like
the Baptist’s; for it was freighted with long ages of angelic grati­
tude, teeming with mysterious memories of their ancient proba­
tion, the welcome beatitude of the reality of that primal worship
in whose visionary beauty their predestination had been accom­
plished.
From the Angels who sang we pass to the Shepherds who heard
their heavenly songs,—a simple audience, yet such as does not
ill assort with a divine election. They are our fifth type of devo­
tion to the Sacred Infancy. We know nothing of their antecedents.
We know nothing of what followed their privileged worship of
the Bible. They come out of the cloud for a moment. We see
them in the starlight of the clear winter night. A divine halo is
around them. They are chosen from among men. Angels speak
to them. We hear of the Shepherds themselves speaking to others
of the wondrous Babe that they had seen, a King, a concealed

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King, born in a Stable-Cave, yet for all that a heavenly King.
Then the clouds close over again. The Shepherds disappear. We
know no more of them. Their end is as hidden as their begin­
ning was. Yet, when a light from God falls upon a man, it
betokens something in his antecedents which heaven has given
him, or which has attracted heaven. Those lights do not fall by
accident, like the chance sunbeams let through the rents in the
pavilion of the clouds, shedding a partial glory with their tran­
sient gleams on rock and wood and fern and the many-colored
moss-cushioned water-courses, but leaving others in the cold shade
that arc as beautiful as those which they carelessly illumine. Their
early history is as obscure to us as that of Joseph. Nor are they
unlike Joseph. They have his hiddenness and his simplicity,
without the self-awed majesty of his stupendous office. They were
self-possessed, not by the hold which an interior spirit gave them
over themselves, but through their extreme simplicity. An angel
spoke to them, and they were neither humbled by it nor elated:
they arc only afraid of the great light around them. It was as
much a matter of course to them, so far as belief in the intelli­
gence, as if some belated peasant neighbor had passed by them
on their pastoral watch and told them some strange news. To
simple minds, as to deep ones, every thing is its own evidence.
They heard the angelic chorus, and were soothed by it, and yet
reflected not upon the honor done themselves who were admitted
to be its audience. Theirs was the simplicity of a childlike holi­
ness, which does not care to discriminate between the natural
and the supernatural. Their restful souls were all life long be­
calmed in the thought of God.
The faith and promptitude of simplicity are not less heroic
than those of wisdom. The Shepherds fell not below the Kings
in the exercise of these great virtues. But there was less self­
consciousness in the promptitude of the Shepherds than in the
marvellous docility and swift sacrifice of the Kings. They represent
also the place which simplicity occupies in the kingdom of Christ;
for, next to that of Mary and Joseph, theirs was the first external
worship earth offered to the new-born Babe of Bethlehem. Sim

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plicity comes very near to God, because boldness is one of its
most congenial graces. It comes near, because it is not dreaming
how near it comes. It docs not think of itself at all, even to
realize its own unworthiness; and therefore it hastens when a
more self-conscious reverence would be slow, and it is at home
where another kind of sanctity would be waiting for permissions.
It is startled sometimes, like a timid fawn, and once startled it is
not easily reassured. Such souls arc not so much humble as they
are simple. The same end is attained in them by a different grace,
producing a kindred yet almost a more beautiful holiness. In like
manner as simplicity is to them in the place of humility, joy often
satisfies in them the claims of adoration. They come to God in an
artless way, with a sort of unsuspecting effrontery of love, and
when they have come to him they simply rejoice, and nothing
more. It is their way of adoring him. It fits in with the rest of
their graces; and their simplicity makes all harmonious. There is
something almost rustic, at times, in the way in which such souls
take great graces and divine confidences as matters of course, and
the Holy Spirit sports with their simplicity and singleness of soul.
They are forever children, and, by an instinct, haunt the Sanctu­
aries of the Sacred Infancy. Their perfection is in truth a mystical
childhood, reflecting—almost perpetuating—the Childhood of our
dearest Lord.
How beautifully, too, is our Lord’s attraction to the lowly
represented in the call of these rough, childlike, pastoral men!
Outside the Cave, he calls the Shepherds first of all. They are
men who have lived in the habits of the meek creatures they tend,
until their inward life has caught habits of a kindred sort. They
lie out at night on the cold mountain-side, or in the chill blue
mist of the valley. They hear the winds moan over the earth,
and the rude rains beat them during the sleepless night. The face
of the moon has become familiar to them, and the silent stars
mingle more with their thoughts than they themselves suspect.
They are poor and hardy, nursed in solitude and on scant living,
dwellers out of doors and not in the bright cheer of domestic
homes. Such are the men the Babe calls first; and they come as

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their sheep would come to their own call. They come to worship
him, and the worship of their simplicity is joy, and the voice of
joy is praise. God loves the praises of the lowly. There is some­
thing grateful to him in the faith, something confiding in the
love, which emboldens the lowly to offer him the tribute of their
praise. He loves also the praises of the gently, meekly happy.
Happiness is the temper of holiness; and if the voice of patient
anguish is praise to God, much more is the clear voice of happiness,
a happiness that fastens not on created things, but is centred in
himself. They have hardly laid hold of God who are not supremely
happy even in the midst of an inferior and sensible unhappiness.
They whose sunshine is from him who is within them worship
God brightly, out of a blessedness which the world cannot touch,
because it gushes upward from a sanctuary that lies too deep for
rifling. Sadness is a sort of spiritual disability. A melancholy man
can never be more than a convalescent in the house of God. He
may think much of God, but he worships very little. God has
rather to wait upon him as his infirmarian, than he to wait on
God as his Father and his King. There is no moral imbecility so
great as that of querulousness and sentimentality. Joy is the fresh­
ness of our spirits. Joy is the life-long morning of our souls, an
habitual sunrise out of which worship and heroice virtue come.
Sprightly and grave, swift and self-forgetting, meditative and
daring, with its faiths all sights and its hopes all certainties, full
of that blessed self-deceit of love that it must give to God more than
it receives, and yet forever finding out with delighted surprise that
it is in truth always and only receiving,—such is the devotion of
the happy man. To the happy man all duties are easy, because
all duties are new; and they are always done with the freshness
and alacrity of novelty. They are like our old familiar woods,
which, as each day they glisten in the dawn, look each day like
a new, unvisited, and foreign scene. But he who lies down at full
length on life, as if it were a sick-bed,—poor languishing soull
what will he ever do for God? The very simplicity of the Shep­
herds would not let them keep their praise a secret to themselves.
If there are saints who keep secrets for God's glory, there are

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saints also whose way of worshipping his glory is to tell the won­
ders which he has let them see. But such saints must have a rare
simplicity for their presiding grace, and this simplicity is a better
shield than secrecy. Thus secrecy, which is almost a universal
need of souls, is no necessity for them. Hence the Shepherds were
the first apostles, the apostles of the Sacred Infancy. The first
apostles were shepherds, the second fishermen. Sweet allegory I
it is thus that God reveals himself by his choices, and there are
volumes of revelation in each choice.
The figures of the Shepherds have grown to look so natural
to us in our thought-pictures of Bethlehem that it almost seems
now as if they were inseparable from it, and indispensable to
the mystery. What a beautiful congruity there is between the
part they play, and their pastoral occupation! The very contrasts
are congruities. Heaven opens, and reveals itself to earth, making
itself but one side of the choir to sing the office of the Nativity,
while earth is to be the other; and earth’s answer to the open
heavens is the pastoral gentleness of those simple-minded watch­
men. She sets her Shepherds to match the heavenly singers, and
counts their simplicity her most harmonious response to angelical
intelligence. Truly earth was wise in this her deed, and teaches
her sons philosophy. It was congruous, too, that simplicity should
be the first worship which the outer world sent into the Cave of
Bethlehem. For what is the grace of simplicity but a permanent
childhood of the soul, fixed there by a special operation of the
Holy Ghost, and therefore a fitting worship for the Holy Child
himself? Their infant-like heavenly-mindedness suited his infan­
tine condition, as well as it suited the purity of the heavenly hosts
that were singing in the upper air. Beautiful figures! on whom
God's light rested for a moment and then all was dark again!
they were not mere shapes of light, golden imaginings, ideal forms,
that filled in the Divine Artist’s mysterious picture. They wore
living souls, tender yet not faultless men, with inequalities in
the monotony of their human lot that often lowered them in
temper and in repining to the level of those around them. They
were not so unlike ourselves, though they float in the golden

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haze of a glorious picture. They fell back out of the strong light,
unrepiningly, to their sheep-flocks and their night watches. Their
after years were hidden in the pathetic obscurity which is common
to all blameless poverty; and they are hidden now in the sea of
light which lies like a golden veil of mist close round the throne
of the Incarnate Word.
But now a change comes over the scene, which seems at first
sight but little in keeping with the characteristic lowliness of
Bethlehem. A cavalcade from the far East comes up this way. The
camel-bells are tinkling. A retinue of attendants accompanies
three Kings of different Oriental tribes, who come with their
various offerings to the new-born Babe. It is a history more
romantic than romance itself would dare to be. Those swarthy
men are among the wisest of the studious East. They represent
the lore and science of their day. Yet have they done what the
world would surely esteem the most foolish of actions. They were
men whose science led them to God, men, we may be sure, of
meditative habits, of ascetic lives, and of habitual prayer. The
fragments of early tradition and the obscure records of ancient
prophecies, belonging to their nations, have been to them as
precious deposits which spoke of God and were filled with hidden
truth. The corruption of the world which they, as Kings, might
see from their elevation far and wide, pressed heavily upon their
loving hearts. They too pined for a Redeemer, for some heavenly
Visitant, for a new beginning of the world, for the coming of a
Son of God, for one who should save them from their sins. Their
tribes doubtless lived in close alliance; and they themselves were
bound together by the ties of a friendship which the same pure
yearnings after greater goodness and higher things cemented.
Never yet had Kings more royal souls. In the dark blue of the
lustrous sky there rose a new or hitherto-unnoticed star. Its ap­
parition could not escape the notice of these Oriental sages, who
nightly watched the skies; for their science was also their theology.
It was the star of which an ancient prophecy had spoken. Perhaps
it drooped low toward earth, and wheeled a too swift course to be
like one of the other stars. Perhaps it trailed a line of light after

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it, slowly, yet with visible movement, and so little above the
horizon, or with such obvious downward slanting course, that it
seemed as if it beckoned to them,—as if an angel were bearing a
lamp to light the feet of pilgrims, and timed his going to their
slowness, and had not shot too far ahead during the bright day,
but was found and welcomed each night as a faithful indicator
pointing to the Cave of Bethlehem. How often God prefers to
teach by night rather than by day! Meanwhile, doubtless, the
instincts of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of these wise rulers drew
them toward the star. They followed it as men follow a vocation,
hardly seeing clearly at first that they are following a divine lead.
Wild and romantic as the conduct of these wise enthusiasts seemed,
they did not hesitate. After due counsel, they pronounced the
luminous finger to be the star of the old prophecy, and therefore
God was come. They left their homes, their state, and their affairs,
and journeyed westward, they knew not whither, led nightly by
the star that slipped onward in its silent groove. They were the
representatives of the heathen world moving forward to the feet
of the universal Savior. They came to the gates of Jerusalem;
and there God did honor to his Church. He withdrew the guidance
of the star, because now the better guidance of the synagogue was
at their command. The oracles of the law pronounced that Beth­
lehem was to be the birthplace of Messias; and the wise men
passed onward to the humble village. Again the star shone out
in the blue heavens, and slowly sank earthward over the Cave
of Bethlehem; and presently the devout Kings were at the feet
of Jesus.
It would take a whole volume to comment to the full on this
sweet legend of the gospel. The Babe, it seems, will move the
heights of the world as well as the lowlands. He will now call
wisdom to his crib, as he has but lately called simplicity. Yet
how different is his call! For wise men and for Kings some signs
were wanted, and, because they were wise Kings, scientific signs.
As the sweet patience and obscure hardships of a lowly life pre­
pared the souls of the Shepherds, so to the Kings their years of
Oriental lore were as the preparation of the gospel. Yet true

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185

science has also its child-like spirit, its beautiful simplicity. Learn­
ing makes children of its professors, when their hearts are humble
and their lives pure. It was a simple thing of them to leave their
homes, their latticed palaces or their royal tents. They were
simple, too, when they were in their trouble at Jerusalem because
of the disappearance of the star. But when the end of all broke
upon them,—when the star left them at that half-stable and
half-cave, and they beheld a Child of abject poverty, lying in a
manger upon straw between an ox and an ass, with, as the world
would speak, an old artisan of the lower class to represent his
father, and a girlish ill-assorted Mother,—then was the triumph of
their simplicity. They hesitated not for one moment. There
was no inward questioning as to whether there was a divine likeli­
hood about all this. Their inward eye was cleansed to see divine
things with an unerring clearness and to appreciate them with an
instantaneous accuracy. They had come all that way for this.
They had brought their gleaming metals and rich frankincense
to the caverned cattleshed, where the myrrh alone seemed in
keeping with the circumstances of the Child. They were content.
It was not merely all they wanted: it was more than they wanted,
more than they had ever dreamed. Who could come to Jesus
and to Mary, and not go away contented, if their hearts were
pure,—go away contented, yet not content to go away? How kingly
seemed to them the poverty of that Babe of Bethlehem, how right
royal that sinless Mother’s lap on which he was enthroned!
The grand characteristic of their devotion was its faith. Next
to Peter’s and to Abraham s, there never in the world was faith
like theirs. Faith is what strikes us in them at every turn, and
faith that was from the first heroic. Had they not all their lives
long been out-looking for the Promised One? and what was that
but faith? They rested in faith on the old traditions which their
Bedouin or Hindoo tribes had kept. They had utter faith in the
ancient prophecies. They had faith in the star when they beheld
it, and such faith that no worldly considerations could stand before
its face. The star led them on by inland track or by ribbed sea
shore, but their faith never wavered. It disappeared at Jerusalem.

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it, slowly, yet with visible movement, and so little above the
horizon, or with such obvious downward slanting course, that it
seemed as if it beckoned to them,—as if an angel were bearing a
lamp to light the feet of pilgrims, and timed his going to their
slowness, and had not shot too far ahead during the bright day,
but was found and welcomed each night as a faithful indicator
pointing to the Cave of Bethlehem. How often God prefers to
teach by night rather than by day! Meanwhile, doubtless, the
instincts of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of these wise rulers drew
them toward the star. They followed it as men follow a vocation,
hardly seeing clearly at first that they are following a divine lead.
Wild and romantic as the conduct of these wise enthusiasts seemed,
they did not hesitate. After due counsel, they pronounced the
luminous finger to be the star of the old prophecy, and therefore
God was come. They left their homes, their state, and their affairs,
and journeyed westward, they knew not whither, led nightly by
the star that slipped onward in its silent groove. They were the
representatives of the heathen world moving forward to the feet
of the universal Savior. They came to the gates of Jerusalem;
and there God did honor to his Church. He withdrew the guidance
of the star, because now the better guidance of the synagogue was
at their command. The oracles of the law pronounced that Beth­
lehem was to be the birthplace of Messias; and the wise men
passed onward to the humble village. Again the star shone out
in the blue heavens, and slowly sank earthward over the Cave
of Bethlehem; and presently the devout Kings were at the feet
of Jesus.
It would take a whole volume to comment to the full on this
sweet legend of the gospel. The Babe, it seems, will move the
heights of the world as well as the lowlands. He will now call
wisdom to his crib, as he has but lately called simplicity. Yet
how different is his call! For wise men and for Kings some signs
were wanted, and, because they were wise Kings, scientific signs.
As the sweet patience and obscure hardships of a lowly life pre­
pared the souls of the Shepherds, so to the Kings their years of
Oriental lore were as the preparation of the gospel. Yet true

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS

185

science has also its child-like spirit, its beautiful simplicity. Learn­
ing makes children of its professors, when their hearts are humble
and their lives pure. It was a simple thing of them to leave their
homes, their latticed palaces or their royal tents. They were
simple, too, when they were in their trouble at Jerusalem because
of the disappearance of the star. But when the end of all broke
upon them,—when the star left them at that half-stable and
half-cave, and they beheld a Child of abject poverty, lying in a
manger upon straw between an ox and an ass, with, as the world
would speak, an old artisan of the lower class to represent his
father, and a girlish ill-assorted Mother,—then was the triumph of
their simplicity. They hesitated not for one moment. There
was no inward questioning as to whether there was a divine likeli­
hood about all this. Their inward eye was cleansed to see divine
things with an unerring clearness and to appreciate them with an
instantaneous accuracy. They had come all that way for this.
They had brought their gleaming metals and rich frankincense
to the caverned cattleshed, where the myrrh alone seemed in
keeping with the circumstances of the Child. They were content.
It was not merely all they wanted: it was more than they wanted,
more than they had ever dreamed. Who could come to Jesus
and to Mary, and not go away contented, if their hearts were
pure,—go away contented, yet not content to go away? How kingly
seemed to them the poverty of that Babe of Bethlehem, how right
royal that sinless Mother’s lap on which he was enthroned!
The grand characteristic of their devotion was its faith. Next
to Peter’s and to Abraham s, there never in the world was faith
like theirs. Faith is what strikes us in them at every turn, and
faith that was from the first heroic. Had they not all their lives
long been out-looking for the Promised One? and what was that
but faith? They rested in faith on the old traditions which their
Bedouin or Hindoo tribes had kept. They had utter faith in the
ancient prophecies. They had faith in the star when they beheld
it, and such faith that no worldly considerations could stand before
its face. The star led them on by inland track or by ribbed sea
shore, but their faith never wavered. It disappeared at Jerusalem.

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BETHLEHEM

tranquillity of contemplation, too manifold in the objects it brings
before us, too various in the images it leaves behind. Truly it is
beautiful beyond words! a household mystery to those eagles of
prayer to whom beauty brings tranquillity, because they live in
the upper voiceless sunshine! With most of us it is not so. They
who feed on beauty must feed quietly, or it will not nurture the
beautiful within them.
But our seventh type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy brings
us to a very different picture. The world of the Church is itself
a hidden world; but even within it there is another world still
more deeply hidden. It is the very cloister of the Holy Ghost,
though without any show of cloister, a world of humblest peace,
of shyest love, and of most secret communion with God. It gives
us much to think of, but little to say. There is little to describe
in its variety, but much in its heavenly union to feed the repose
of prayer. The gorgeous apparition of the Kings in the gloomy
Cave has passed away. The Babe, too, has left the Cave. Our
present picture is the same humble mystery of Bethlehem which
is now enacted on a gorgeous scene. We must pass to the glorious
courts of the magnificent temple, when its little, unknown Master
has come to take possession, the true High-Priest, with a thicker
veil of incredible humiliation round him than that which shrouded
the local Holy of Holies from the gazing multitude. It is the
mystery of Mary’s jubilee, the Presentation of our Lord, mingling
with that true-hearted deceit of humility, her needless Purification.
The Babe’s new worshippers are Simeon and Anna, who so
resemble each other amidst their differences that we may regard
them as forming one type of worship. Anna was a widow of the
tribe of Aser, who filled no place in the public eye, but in whom
her little circle of friends had recognised and revered the spirit
of prophecy from time to time. She thus had an obscure sphere
of influence of her own. She was a figure familiar to the eyes of
many in Jerusalem whose piety led them to the morning sacrifices
in the temple. Bowed down with the weight of fourscore years
and four, her own house was not her home,—even if she had a
house she could call her own. The temple was her home. It was

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189

rarely that she left its hallowed precincts. She performed in her
single self the offices of a whole religious community; for she
carried on the unbroken round of her adoration through the
night as well as through the day. Long past the age when bodily
macerations form an indispensable element in holiness, her life
was nevertheless a continual fast. Prayer was the work of her life,
and penance its recreation. Herod most likely had never heard
of her, but she was dear to God, and was known honorably to
his servants: God has widows like her in all Christian cities.
Simeon also was worn out with age and watching. He had
placed himself on the battlements of Sion, and, while his eyes were
filled with the sweet tears of prayer, he was ever looking out for
Mcssias that was to come. Good people knew him well, and they
said of him that he was a just man. Even and fair, striving for
nothing, claiming no privileges, ready to give way, most careful
to be prompt and full and considerate and timely in all his dealings
with others, giving no ground for complaint to any one, modest
and self-possessed, attentive yet unobtrusive, such was the char­
acter he bore among those of his religious fellow-citizens to whom
he was known. But to the edification of his justice he added the
beautiful and captivating example of the tenderest piety. Devo­
tion was the very life of his soul. The gift of piety reigned in his
heart. Like many holy persons, he had set his affections on what
seemed like an earthly beatific vision. He must see the Lord’s
Christ before he dies. Tiiere is a look of something obstinate and
fanciful in his devotion: it is in reality a height of holiness. He
has cast his spiritual life in one mould: it was a life of desire, a
life of watching, a life of long-delayed but never despondent
waiting for the consolation of Israel. There is an humble perti­
nacity about his prayer, which is to bend God’s will to his own.
It was a mighty fire of love which burned in his simple heart,
and the Holy Ghost loved to dwell among its guileless flames. It
was revealed to him that his obstinate waiting had been a dear
worship to God, that he should have his will, and that he should
see with his aged eyes the beauty of the Lord's Christ before he
was called away from earth. He therefore was a haunter of the

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temple; for where should he be more likely to meet the Christ
than there? How God always gives more than he promises!
Simeon did not only sec the Christ, hut was allowed to take him
up in his arms, and, doubtless, to print a kiss of trembling rev­
erence upon the Creator’s human lips. How else could his lips
have ever sung so beautiful a song,—a song so sunset-like that one
might believe all the beauty of all earth’s beautiful evenings since
creation had gone into it to fill it full of peaceful spells? He was
old for a poet; but his age had not dried or drained his heart.
The infirm old man held bravely in his arms the strength of
the Omnipotent. He held up the light of the world on high in
the midst of his own temple, just before he himself was lost in
the inaccessible light of a glorious eternity. His weak eyes, misty
with age and dim with tears, looked into the deep eyes of the
Babe of Bethlehem, and to his faith they were fountains of eternal
light. This was the vision that he had been seeing all his life long.
He had wept over the drooping fortunes of Israel, but much more
over the shepherdless wanderings of the souls of his dear country­
men. But he had ever seen through his tears,—as we may see
through a thick storm of rain, waving like a ponderous curtain to
and fro, while the wind is slowly undrawing it, a green mountain,
bright and sun-stricken, with patches of illuminated yellow corn
upon its sides, and strips of green ferny moorland, and jutting
knolls of purple heather, and the wet silvery shimmering on the
roofs of men’s dwellings. Νολν the evening of life was come. The
rain was passed away, and the Lord’s mountain came out, not
bright and radiant only, but so astonishingly near that he might
have thought his eyes were but deceiving him. But nol the face of
Jesus was close to his. Heaven had come to him on earth. It was
the heaven of his own choosing. Strange lover of his land and
people! he had preferred to see Jesus on earth, and so be sure
that now poor Israel might possess him, rather than have gone
long since by an earlier death to have seen the Word through the
quiet dimness of Abraham’s Bosom. Was it not the loveliest of
mysteries to see those arms, that were shaking and unsteady with
long lapse of time, so fondly enfolding the ever-young eternity

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of God? Was it not enough for Simeon? Oh, was it not unspeak
ably more than enough? As nightingales are said to have sung
themselves to death, so Simeon died, not of the sweet weariness
of his long watching, but of the fulness of his contentment, of the
satisfaction of his desires, of the very new youth of soul which the
touch of the Eternal Child had infused into his age, and, breaking
forth into music which heaven itself might envy and could not
surpass, he died with his world-soothing song upon his lips.
There is a little world of such souls as Simeon and Anna
within the Church. But it lies deep down, and its inmates are
seldom brought to the light, even by the honors of canonization.
It is a subterranean world, the diamond-mine of the Church, from
whose caverns a stone of wondrous lustre is taken now and then,
to feed our faith, to reveal to us the abundant though hidden
operations of grace, and to comfort us when the world’s wicked­
ness and our own depress us, by showing diat God has pastures
of his own under our very feet, where his glory feeds without our
seeing it. So that, as sight goes for little in the world of faith, in
nothing does it go for less than in the seeming evil of the world.
Everywhere evil is undermined by good. It is only that good is
undermost; and this is one of the supernatural conditions of God's
presence. As much evil as we see, so much good, or more, we do
know assuredly lies under it, which, if not equal to the evil in
extent, is far greater in weight, and power, and worth, and sub­
stance. Evil makes more show, and thus has a look of victory;
while good is daily outwitting evil by simulating defeat. We
must never think of the Church without allowing largely for the
extent of obscure piety, the sphere of hidden souls. We can form
no intellectual judgment of the abundance of grace, of the number
of the saved, or of the inward beauty of individual souls, which
even intellectually is worth any thing, unless we form our esti­
mate in the light of prayer. Charity is the truest truth; and the
judgments of charity are large. The light of our own unsanctified
judgment is at best but as moonlight in the world of faith,
strangely distorting, grotesquely disfiguring, every thing. The
light of prayer is as the beam of steadfast day. Who does not know

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how sunshine positively peoples mountain-side and wood?—how,
as it rests, it builds homes we could dwell in, so our fancy deems,
in the rifted crags or under the leafy shades?—how wherever it
has touched it has located a beauty, and has left it when it passes
on? So is it with the light of prayer when it plays upon this difficult
questionable world around us. It alone lights up for us continually
this incessant heaven upon earth, this precious region of obscure
souls, in which God is always served as if it were one of the angelic
choirs. Who does not remember when a supernatural principle
first unveiled itself before him and showed that it was a thing
of God? It was some one moment in a dawn of prayer, which was
like day's first inroad upon night. So will it be with us to the end.
Faith has a sort of vision of its own; but there is no light in which
it can distinguish objects, except the light of prayer.
We must always, therefore, keep our eye fixed on this obscure
world of holy hidden souls, that private unsuspected stronghold of
God’s glory upon earth, where so much of his treasure is laid up.
Simeon and Anna are disclosures to us of that hidden world. They
have a place, an office, and a power in the life of the Church,
which is not the less indispensable because it is also indefinable.
The Father's glory would not have been adequately represented
at the court of the Infant Jesus if this obscure region had not sent
thither its embassy of lowly beauty and of venerable grace. Much
of our most intimate acquaintance with the adorable character of
God arises from our observations of this hidden world. It is the
richest of all worlds in its contributions to the science of divine
things. If we may venture so to speak, God is less upon his guard
against our observations there than elsewhere. He affects secrecy
the less himself, because the particular world in which he is work­
ing is itself so secret. He is content with the twilight round him,
without pitching his well-known tent of darkness each time he
vouchsafes to camp. In the case of the Shepherds we saw how
they came up out of darkness, stood for a moment in the splendor
of Bethlehem, and then passed on into the dark again. Here we
see with Simeon and Anna what long preparation God makes in
the soul for what appears to be only a momentary manifestation.

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It shows of what deep import a brief transient mystery is, when
a novitiate of perhaps fourscore years is barely long enough to
fit those for their part in it who are after all but accessories and
incidents. If it be true to say that with God all ends are only
means, because he is himself the only veritable End, so also is it
true in a sense that all means with him are ends, because he is
present in those means. Thus these long lives of preparation for
one momentary appearance on the stage of the world s drama are.
when we view them supernaturally, ends themselves, and each
step of grace in the long career, each link of holiness in the vast
chain, is itself a most sufficient end, because it holds in itself Him
who is the only end. But this is not the way men judge of history.
With them it is wandering humanity which is made to confer the
importance on the actors in the world’s theatre, and to confer
it in proportion to the visible results between the actors and
humanity. With God it is his own glory which is the hidden centre
of all history; and it requires a special study, with a strong habit
of faith and a steady light of prayer, to enable us to read history
in his way.
But besides this long preparation for a momentary and sub­
ordinate appearance in a divine mystery, we must observe also
how God often comes to men in their old age. They have lived
for that which only comes when real life seems past. What a
divine meaning there is in all this! The significance of a whole
life often comes uppermost only in the preparation for death.
Our destiny only begins to be fulfilled after it appears to have
been worked out. Who knows what he is intended for? What we
have dreamed was our mission is of all things the least likely to
have been such. For missions are divine things, and therefore
generally hidden, generally unconsciously fulfilled. If there are
some who seem to have done their work early, and then live on
we know not why, there are far more who do their real work
later on, and not a few who only do it in the act of dying. Nay,
is it not almost so in natural things? Life for the most part blooms
only once, and, like the aloe, it blooms late.
Neither must we fail to note under what circumstances it is

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God’s habit to come to these hidden souls. The devotion of Simeon
and Anna is eminently a devotion of prayer and church-frequent­
ing. In other words, God comes to holy souls, not so much in
heroic actions, which are rather the soul’s leaping upward to
God, but in the performance of ordinary, habitual devotions, and
the discharge of modest, unobtrusive duties, made heroic by long
perseverance and inward intensity. How much matter for thought
is there in all these reflections! and in divine things what is matter
for thought is matter for practice also! Thus, if the angelic song
was the opening of heaven before our eyes, this apparition of
Simeon and Anna is the opening beneath our feet of an exquisite
hidden world, a realm of subterranean angels, a secret abyss of
human hearts in which God loves to hide himself, a region of
evening calmness and of twilight tranquillity, a world of rest and
yet of power, heated with the whole day’s sunshine and giving
forth its fragrance to the cooling dews, a world which not only
teaches us much, but consoles us also, yet leaves us pensive, (for
does not consolation always leave us so?) casting over us a profit­
able spiritual shadow, like the melancholy in which a beautiful
sunset so often steeps the mind, breeding more loving thoughts of
others, and in ourselves a more contented lowliness.
The lake lies smooth and motionless in the quiet light of
evening. The great mountains with their bosses of mottled crag
protruding through die green turf, and the islets with their aerial
pines, are all imaged downwards in the pellucid waters. Even
the heron that has just gone to roost on the dead branch is mir­
rored there. The faintly-rosy sky between the tops of the many­
fingered firs is reflected there, as if it were fairy fretwork in the
mere. But upon yon promontory of rock a little blameless boy,
afraid of the extreme tranquillity, or angry with it, or to satisfy
some impulsive restlessness within him, has thrown a stone into
the lake, and that fairy world, that delicate creation, is instantly
broken up and fled. So is it with that spiritual world of placid
beauty, which we have been contemplating in the worship of
Simeon and Anna. Our next type of devotion to the Sacred
Infancy drives us with shout and cry from its pleasant melancholy,

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as if we were trespassers in such a gentle world. Yet it is not alto­
gether a scene of unmingled violence which is coming. But who
does not know those plaintive sounds, sad in themselves but
sadder in their circumstances, which can sometimes extinguish
even the shining of bright light, making one sense master another,
like the cry of the lapwing among ruins? So is it with us now.
Like silent apparitions, Simeon and Anna pass away. We hear
loud voices and shrill expostulations, as of women in misery
talking all at once, like the jargon in the summer woods when
the birds have risen against the hawk, and then the fearful cry
of excited lamentation, with the piteous moaning of the infant
victims mingled with the inconsolable wailing of their brave,
powerless mothers. It is the massacre of the Holy Innocents. Yet
even this dismal scene is a scene of worship. Tragic as it is, it
has a quiet side, and a beauty, which, blood-stained though it be,
is not unbecoming to the meek majesty of Bethlehem. Alas! how
the anguish of those mothers, that were so inconsiderate to her
who was on the point of becoming a mother like themselves, and
how the wrathful but more silent misery of the fathers, is expi­
ating in its own streets the inhospitality of Bethlehem!
But those little ones are mighty saints of God. and their infant
cries were a most articulate revelation of many of his mysterious
ways. The apparent contradiction that innocence should do pen­
ance is one of the primary laws of the Incarnation. The Infant
Savior himself began it. It was involved in the state of humiliation
in which he came. It was part of the pathos of a fallen world.
But none shared it with him at Bethlehem, except the Holy
Innocents. To Mary he brought a new access of heavenly joy.
and when the tender hand of Simeon was nerved by the Holy
Ghost to plant in her heart the first of the seven swords she was
to bear, it was the untimely woe of Calvary that pierced her soul,
and not the penances of Bethlehem. To Joseph the joy the Infant
brought was yet more unmingled. The Baptist leaped with exulta­
tion in his mother’s womb, when the Babe came near. The Angels
sang because the mystery was full of jubilee. To the Shepherds
it was good tidings of great joy, and to the Kings contentment

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and delight. To Simeon and Anna also he came as light, and
peace, and satisfaction, and jubilee. His brightness had made
earth so dull, that all which was left them now was speedily to die.
But the Holy Innocents joined their infant cries with his. To
them the glad Christmas and the singing Angels brought but blood
and death. They were the first martyrs of the Word, and their guilt
was his—that they were born in Bethlehem.
Renewing the miracle which he had wrought for John the
Baptist, our Lord is said to have conferred the full use of reason,
with immense and magnificent graces, on these little ones at the
moment of their martryrdom, so that they might see him in the
clear splendor of their faith, might voluntarily accept of death
for his sake, and might accompany their sacrifice by the loftiest
acts of supernatural holiness and heroism. The revelations of the
saints also tell us of the singular power now accorded in heaven
to these infant martyrs, especially in connections with death-beds,
and St. Francis of Sales died reiterating with marked emphasis
and significance the invocation of the Holy Innocents. They, too,
were beautiful figures in the court of Bethlehem. They were
children like the Prince of Bethlehem himself. They were his
companions in nativity, his mates in age and size; and though it
was no slight thing to have these natural alliances with him, by
grace they were much more, for they were likenesses of him, and
they were his martyrs. A twofold light shines in the faces of this
infant crowd, the light of Mary and the light of Jesus. They resem­
bled Mary in their sinless purity; lor even if our Lord had not
constituted them in a state of grace before, their original sin
would be more than expiated by their guileless blood, when it was
shed for him. It was a fearful font, a most bloody sacrament, at
which an Infant like themselves held them as their god-father,
that they might lie in his paternal bosom for evermore. They
were like Mary in their martryrdom for Jesus, as all the martyrs
were; but they were like her also, in that their martyrdom was
as it were the act of Jesus himself. He was the sword which slew
them. He was the proximate cause of all they suffered. It is only
more remotely so with the other martyrs. This is one of their

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distinctions. They resembled her also in their nearness to Jesus.
They were among the few who were admitted into the hierarchy
of the Incarnation. Their souls were amidst the attendants who
waited on his Human Soul when he rose on Easter morning, and
who ascended with him into heaven. But the light of Jesus also
was in their faces. It was not only in the material similitudes of
being born when he was born and where he was born, that they
were like him. They resembled him with a most divine truthful­
ness, by being bidden to counterfeit him. Their mission was to
represent him, to stand in his place, to be supposed to contain
him among themselves. Simeon and Anna lived long lives before
they reached their work, and it was laid gently at their doors at
the very extremity of life. Their earthly work lay almost at the
threshold of heaven. The lot of the Innocents was the reverse
of this. They were just born, and their mission was handed to
them instantly and abruptly, and its fulfillment was death. Yet
in what a sense is it true of all of us that we are but bom to die!
Happy they who find the great wisdom which lies in that little
truth! But there was more than this in their likeness to our Lord.
In one way they outstripped him. They died for him as he died
for all. They paid him back the life he laid down for them. Nav.
they were beforehand with him, for they laid their lives down for
him before he laid his down for them. They saved his life. They
put off his Calvary. They secured to us his sweet parables, his
glorious miracles, and those abysses of his grown-up Passion, in
which the souls of the redeemed dwell in their proper element,
like fish within the deep. Yet, again, is there not a sense in which
we all pay our dear Lord back with our lives for the life that he
gave us? What is a Christian life but a lingering death, of which
physical death is but the last consummating act? and if it be not
all for Christ, how is it a Christian life? Nevertheless, in the his­
torical reality of all this lies the grand prerogative of the Holy
Innocents.
Notwithstanding their miraculous use of reason, they are still
types to us of that devotion so common among the higher saints,
the devotion of almost unconscious mortification. They are like

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those who commit themselves to God, and (hen lake what is sure
to come. They not only commit themselves to him without condi­
tions, but they do not count the cost, because to them his love
is cheaply bought at the price of all possible sacrifices. Hence
there is no cost to count. The truest mortification does not fore­
cast, because it is self-oblivious. Thus it was with James and John,
when they offered to drink our Savior's cup; and how heroically
they did drink it, when it camel Thus it is that heroic mortifica­
tion is so often taken by surprise, and men, who cannot discern
the saints aright, think that the grandeur of their purpose for a
moment faltered, when all the while the surprise was only stirring
up deeper depths of grace, and meriting the more divinely. These
infant martyrs represent also what must in its measure befall
every one who draws near to Jesus. Suffering goes out of him,
like an atmosphere. The air is charged with the seed of crosses,
and the soul is sown all over with them before it is aware. More­
over, the cross is a quick growth and can spring up, and blossom,
and bear fruit almost in a night, while from its vivacious root a
score of fresh crosses will spring up and cover the soul with the
peculiar verdure of Calvary. They that come nearest to our Lord
are those who suffer most, and who suffer the most unselfishly.
With his use of reason he could have spoken and complained: so
might the Innocents, but they worshipped only with their cries.
One moment they were made aware of the full value of their
dear lives, and the next moment they were of their own accord
to give them up, and not to let their newly-given reason plead, but
even to hide it with the cries of unreasoning infancy. Never were
martyrs placed under so peculiar a trial. How well they teach
the old lesson, that unselfishness is its own reward; and that to
hold our tongues about our wrongs is to create a new fountain of
happiness within ourselves, which only needs the shade of secrecy
to be perennial I If they paid dear for the honor of being the fellow­
townsmen of our Lord, how magnificent were the graces, which
none but he could have accumulated in that short moment, and
which he gave to them with such a regal plenitude 1 To be near
Jesus was the height of happiness, yet it was also both a necessity

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and a privilege of suffering. We cannot spare the Holy Innocents
from the beautiful world of Bethlehem. Next to Mary and Joseph,
we could take them away least of all. Without them we should
read the riddle of the Incarnation wrong, by missing many of its
deepest laws. They are symbols to us of the necessities of near­
ness to our Lord. They are the living laws of the vicinity of Jesus.
Softened through long ages, the mothers’ cries and the children’s
moans come to us almost as a sad strain of music, sweeter than it
is sad, sweet even because it is so sad, the moving elegy of
Bethlehem.
There is still another presence in the Cave of Bethlehem which
is a type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy. Deep withdrawn into
the shade, so as to be scarcely visible, stands one who is gazing
on all the mysteries with holy amazement and tenderest rapture.
He takes no part in any of them. His attitude is one of mute
observance. He is like one of those shadowy figures, which painters
sometimes introduce into their pictures, rather as suggesting some­
thing to the beholder than as historically part of the action repre­
sented. It is St. Luke, the “beloved physician" of St. Paul, and
the first Christian Painter. He forms a type of worship by himself,
and must not be detached from the other eight, though he was
out of time with them. To us he is an essential feature of Bethle­
hem. The Holy Ghost had elected him to be the historiographer
of the Sacred Infancy. Without him we should have known
nothing of the Holy Childhood, except the startling visit of the
three heathen Kings, which was so deeply impressed on St. Mat­
thew’s Hebrew imagination, together with the massacre of the
Innocents and the flight into Egypt, which were the consequences
of that visit, and so part of the one history. In the vision of
inspiration the Holy Ghost renewed to him the world of Beth­
lehem, and the sweet spiritual pageantry of all its gentle mysteries.
To him, the first artist of the Church, we fitly owe the three
songs of the Gospel, the Magnificat, the Benedictus, and the Nunc
dimittis. He was as much the Evangelist of the Sacred Infancy,
as St. John was the Evangelist of the Word’s Divinity, or St.
Matthew and St. Mark of the active life of our blessed Lord.

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lie represents the devotion of artists, and the posture of
Christian art at the feet of the Incarnate Savior. Christian art,
rightly considered, is at once a theology and a worship; a theology
which has its own method of teaching, its own ways of representa­
tion, its own devout discoveries, its own varying opinions, all of
which are beautiful so long as they are in subordination to the
mind of the Church. What is the Blessed John of Fiesolc's life
of Christ, but, next to St. Thomas, the most magnificent treatise
on the Incarnation which was ever conceived or composed? No
one can study it without learning new truths each time. It gives
up slowly and by degrees to the loving eye the rich treasures of a
master-mind, full of depth, and tenderness, and truth, and heav­
enly ideal. It is a means of grace which sanctifies us as we look
upon it, and melts us into prayer.
Of a truth art is a revelation from heaven, and a mighty power
for God. It is a merciful disclosure to men of his more hidden
beauty. It brings out things in God which lie too deep for words,
things which words must needs make heresies, if they try to
speak them. In virtue of its heavenly origin it has a special grace
to purify men’s souls, and to unite them to God by first making
them unearthly. If art debased is the earthliest of things, true art,
not unmindful that it also, like our Lord, was born in Bethlehem
and cradled with him there, is an influence in the soul so heavenly
that it almost seems akin to grace. It is a worship too, as well as
a theology. From what abyss rose those marvellous forms upon
the eye of John of Fiesole, except from the depths of prayer? Have
we not often seen the Divine Mother and her Blessed Child so
depicted that it was plain they never were the fruit of prayer,
and do we not instictively condemn them even on the score of
art, without directly adverting to religious feeling? The temper
of art is a temper of adoration. Only an humble man can paint
divine things grandly. His types are delicate and easily missed,
shifting under the least pressure, and bending unless handled
softly. An artist, who is not joined to God, may work wonders
of genius with his pencil and colors; but the heavenly spirit, the
essence of Christian art, will have evaporated from his work. It

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may remain to future generations as a trophy of anatomy, and a
triumph of peculiar coloring; but it will not remain as a source of
holiest inspiration to Christian minds, and an ever-flowing foun­
tain of the glory of God. It may be admired in the gallery, it
would offend over the altar. Theology and devotion both owe a
heavy debt to art, but it is as parents owe debts to their loving
children. They take as gifts what came from themselves, and they
love to consider that what is due to them by justice is rather paid
to them out of the spontaneous generosity of love. St Luke is
the type and symbol of this true art, which is the child of devo­
tion and theology; and it is significant that he is thus connected
with the world of Bethlehem.
The characteristics, which have been noticed in his Gospel,
seem to be most congenial to his vocation. Our Lord's life is every­
where the representation of the beautiful; but in none of its mys­
teries is it a more copious fountain of art than in those of his
Sacred Infancy; and it is these which inspiration has especially
loved to disclose to St. Luke's predilection. A painter is a poet
also, and hence his Gospel is the treasury in which the Christian
canticles, all of them canticles of the Sacred Infancy, are laid up
and embalmed for the delight and consolation of all time. The
preservation of them was a natural instinct of an artistic mind,
which was already fitted to receive a bidding of inspiration so con­
genial to itself. He was a physician as well as a painter, and there
is something kindred in the spirit of the two occupations. The
quick eye, the observant gentleness, the appreciation of character,
the seizing of the actual circumstances, the genial spirit, the
minute attentiveness, the sympathizing heart, the impressionable­
ness of all that is soft, and winning, and lovely, and weak, and
piteous,—all these things belong to the true physician as well as
to the true artist. Hence has it come to pass that the physician
of the body has so often been the physician of the soul as well.
That which is truly artistic in him makes him a kind of priest;
and what above all things are priests, artists, and physicians, but
angelic ministers to human sorrow, ministers of love and not of
fear, vested with a pathetic office of consolation, which, strange to

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say, seems the more tender and unselfish because it is official?
Thus St. Luke is noted for his instinct for souls. His Gospel has
been named the Gospel of mercy, because it is so full of incidents
of our Lord’s love of sinners. It is from him chiefly that we have
the conversions of sinners, and the examples of our Lord’s amazing
kindness to them, or we may say rather of his positive attraction
to them, like the physician’s attraction to the sick, to use the
figure which he himself vouchsafed to use in order to justify
himself for this compassionate propensity. After Mary, Luke is
the beginner of the devotion to the Precious Blood, whose appar­
ently indiscriminate abundance and instantaneous absolving power
he so artfully magnifies in his beautiful Gospel.
*
It is a Gospel
of sunshine. It throws strong light into the darkest places, and
loves to use the power it has to do so; and is not all this painter­
like? The examples, to which the fallen sinner turns instinctively
when hope and despair are battling for his soul, are mostly in the
Gospel of St. Luke. He chose what he most loved himself; and
inspiration ministered to the bent of his genius, rather than
diverted or ignored it. He is known, like all artists, by his choice
of subjects. What wonder he was the dear companion of St.
Paul, when their minds were so congenial? The magnifying of
grace, the facility and abundance of redemption, the vast treasures
of hope, the delight of reconciliation with God, the predilection
for the grand phenomena of conversion, all these peculiarities
of St. Luke’s genius would recommend him to the apostle of the
Precious Blood, and would also give him swift admission to the
intimacy of Mar}'.
It was perhaps through her that the Holy Ghost revealed to
him the mysteries of Bethlehem. To John she spake of the Eternal
Generation of the Word, to Luke of Nazareth and Bethlehem, of
the Angels, and the Shepherds, and the Gospel Songs. For devo­
tion to Mary is an inalienable inspiration of Christian art, and it
is akin also to devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem. Luke, with
•This does not contradict the sixth chapter of iny Treatise on the Precious
Blood, where St. Paul is called the "doctor of the Precious Blood"; for St. Lukes
Gospel is said to have been written under the eye of St. Paul.

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the painter's license, gazed into Mary’s face as none other but
the Infant Jesus had ever gazed into it. He read the mysteries of
Bethlehem depicted there. He drank, the spirit of the Sacred
Infancy in the fountains of her eyes. He lived with the Mother of
Mercy until he saw nothing but mercy in her Son. The image
in his heart, which was the model of all other images, was the
countenance of the divine Mother. His idea of Jesus was his
marvellous likeness to Mary,—likeness not in features only, but
in office and in soul. Thus was the spirit of beauty within him
instinctively drawn to Bethlehem, just as Bethlehem has been the
most queenly attraction of holy art ever since. Then, when he
comes to our Lord’s public life and his intercourse with men, it is
just such manifestations of his Sacred Heart, as are the most con­
genial to the spirit of the Sacred Infancy, which his predilection
chooses for his written portrait of the Incarnate Word. Let us
place him then in the Cave of Bethlehem, withdrawn into the
shadow, and looking out from thence with the boldness of his
tender eyes upon the mysteries around him. He is there, by the
appointment of the Holy Ghost, as the painter of Mary, and the
secretary of the Infant Jesus.
Such were the first worshippers of Bethlehem, nine types of
devotion showed to us there, full of spiritual loveliness and attrac­
tion: nine separate seas that image heaven in their own way, or
form all together one harmonious ocean of worship of the In­
carnate Word. We may join ourselves first to one, and then to
another, of these nine choirs of first worshippers, and adore the
Incarnate Word. How wonderful is the variety of devotion!—
more endless than the variations of light and shade, or the ever­
shifting processions of the graceful clouds, or the never-twicerepeated tracery of the forest-architecture, as endless apparently
as the excellences of Him who is the centre of all devotion! We
may venture, not uninvited, into that dear sanctuary of Bethlehem,
and be as heart to Mary or as thought to Joseph, as voice to John
or as harps to die Angels, as sheep to the Shepherds or as incense
to the Kings, as sweet sights to Simeon and to Anna, or as soft
sighs to the Holy Innocents, or as a pen for Luke to write with,

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and to write of the Babe of Bethlehem. Is it not a beautiful sea of
tranquillest devotion, with the spirit of Bethlehem settling down
over the purple of its waters, like one of those silent sunsets which
arc so beautiful that it seems as if they ought to make music in
the air?

Chapter V

THE INFANT GOD

There is no poem in the world like a man’s life, the life of
any man, however little it may be marked with what we call
adventure. For real life—even the most commonplace—is strongfeatured, if we look at it attentively. No poet would so dare to
mingle sweetness and strangeness, simplicity and peculiarity, sub­
limity and pathos, as real life mingles them together. The char
acters of the poet either stand out from the common lot of men
as exceptional cases, or else lose distinguishable individuality alto­
gether. But a man’s real life is at once a bolder and a simpler
thing than the creation of the poet. It is like a grand heavenly
recitative which Providence itself pronounces, as the years go on,
with a sort of eloquent dramatic silence, from one point of view
inventive as the improwisatore, from another merely interpreting
the waywardness of a man's own will. True, however, it is, that
the very barrencst life of man that ever was lived is, if we take
the inward and the outward together, a truly divine poem, to
which he who listens becomes wise. Each single human life in
the world amounts to nothing less than a private revelation of
God, a revelation which would be enough for the whole world, if
an inspired pen recorded it. But when a man is living in a state
of grace, and is giving himself up to God and leading an interior
life, then his secret biography becomes still more wonderful,
because it is more consciously supernatural. Most inward living
men have some special attraction of grace, some divine mould in
which their spiritual lives are cast, a mould which God uses not
for classes, but for individuals. Each man stands in a relation to
God which is peculiar to himself. He shares it with no other man.
lie has had more graces or fewer, larger or smaller, of a different
character, and blending differently with the varying circumstances
20S

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of his outward life. These external circumstances are never the
same to any two men, as far as we can see. The alternations of
bright and dark are differently distributed to each, so that each
outward life forms a different amalgamation with grace from any
other outward life. The very geography of a man’s life changes
his grace. If God allows the angels to behold the multiform lives
of men in a clear light from his point of view, the world must
be to them almost like a second beatific vision; such a glorious
and bold revelation must it be to them of the inaccessible character
of the Creator.
A spiritual man may be defined to be one who has received a
second life from God, a life which he lives privately with God,
and which is itself a kind of divine law to his outward life, standing
in the relation of supremacy to it, and at the same time leaving
free play to circumstances. This second life is heavenly. Its vitality
is from heaven. Its powers are heavenly. It is conversant with
heavenly things, and deals with earthly things only to transmute
them into heavenly things by the alchemy of grace. In nothing is
this individual attraction of grace more observable than in a man’s
devotions; and, because of the relation in which devotion stands
to virtue, in nothing is it more important. With some men it is
the same all through life; with others it changes with the seasons
and circumstances of life. Sometimes a man sees it plainly him­
self; at other times others can see it, while it remains invisible
to himself; sometimes it is hidden altogether, yet not necessarily
absent because it is hidden. In some souls it is so strong that it
moulds their entire life; with others it is so weak that their
devotion seems to have no rule beyond that seemingly external
rule, which is more mysterious and excellent than men believe,
the Calendar of the Church.
Some men, for instance, have a sovereign attraction to the
mysteries of the Incarnation, but without a special drawing to any
one of them. Some are drawn to portions of our Lord's life, as
the Infancy, the Passion, or the Ministry, while others fix upon
some one of the subordinate mysteries contained in one of those
portions, as St. Charles Borromeo fixed upon the Agony in the

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Garden and worked that one mystery out in the grandeur of his
heroic life. The spiritual life of some is more at home in the
mysteries of the Incarnation as expressed in Mary, than in the
same mysteries as expressed by Jesus, or rather it is their bent to
find Jesus in Mary, where more or less all must find him who love
our Lord's own ways and follows his divine leading. The devo­
tion of some is to the Sacraments, and thereby they reach an
amazing, and very distinctive, sanctity. Some have their spiritual
hearing so haunted that all life long they hear the souls in purga­
tory forever bleating in their ears, like the strayed lambs crying
aloud far up among the stony mountains. The devotion of some
is fed by the pageants and functions of the Church, while other
souls fare better in a quiet catacomb, with St. Philip, or on the
hill-top, with St. John of the Cross, or under the nightly canopy
of stars, with St. Ignatius.
But there is one devotion in particular, with which we are at
present concerned; devotion to the Attributes of God. All be­
lievers worship God, and therefore all believers worship those
divine perfections which we conceive to exist in him in some
supereminent way. But a special devotion to the Divine Perfec­
tions is something in addition to this worship. All Christians wor­
ship our Blessed Lord as God and Man; yet some have a special
devotion to him in the Blessed Sacrament, some in his Infancy,
others in his Passion, while the devotion of others is to the In­
carnation in general. Thus it is with devotion to the Attributes
of God. Some are altogether without this devotion, the absence
of which in no way impairs their worship of God. But just as
some devout souls live in the Passion, without any more special
attraction toward the Infancy than is implied by holding the faith,
so some souls live among the Attributes of God by a sort of daring
predcliction, and this dwelling-place of their devotion is to them
what Calvary, or Bethlehem, or the Tabernacle, are to others.
Some also have a special attraction to one Attribute rather than
to the rest. Sister Benigne Gojos was drawn especially to honor
the divine Justice, Father Condren the divine Sanctity; and
Lancisius mentions a Spanish lady whose peculiar devotion was

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to the divine Patience. We know that there can in reality be no
such things as separate Attributes in God, because he is a Simple
Act, and is therefore his own Attributes. But these perfections
are the ways in which he invites us to regard him.
*
They are
different sides of his character, different aspects of his majesty,
and therefore appeal differently to our souls, and appear to work
different works of grace within us. Hence it is that they become
the subjects of a special devotion, or of several special devotions.
But this devotion to the Attributes of God stands in a very
particular relation to devotions to the Incarnation. If we were
to suppose that devotion to the Incarnation was one kind of
devotion to God, and devotion to the Divine Attributes another,
and that we were free to pass the one by and to adopt the other,
we should fall into the most deadly error which could beset the
spiritual life. Our Lord is the appointed way to God. The
Incarnation lies all round him, and faith has no access to the
Throne except over that region, whether they who traverse it
have explicit knowledge of its true significance or not. Neither
again is devotion to the Incarnation a stage through which we
can pass and then have done with it. It is no scaffolding whereby
we mount to the higher devotions to the Divine Attributes or
the Holy Trinity, which may be dispensed with when the con­
templative soul has climbed those fortunate heights. For our
Incarnate Lord is the life as well as the way. We cannot dispense
with his Sacred Humanity either in time or in eternity. It is
our abiding life. Neither, last of all, can we separate devotion
to the Divine Attributes from devotion to the Incarnation; for
• It is certain that the Divine Attributes are not really distinguished from the
Divine Essence, nor among themselves. The Scotists teach that the Attributes are
distinguished from the Essence and among themselves by a sort of distinction,
difficult to define, but which is midway between a real distinction and a simple
distinction of reason. The Nominalists occupy the other extreme, and teach that
there is not even a distinction of reason between them. The Thomists teach that
they are distinguished, but merely by a distinction of reason. See Lezana, De
Attributis Dei. Tract. 2, Disp. 2. The theological student may be referred to the
question in Theology, An distingui possint Attributa in Deo sine respectu ad
creaturas. Amicus, De Essentia Dei, Disp. iii. sect, vi., and also the other question.
Utrum Attributa divina sint multitudine infinita, aut certo aliquo numero compre­
hensa. Izquierdo, De Deo Uno, Tract, i. Disp. 2 quest. 8.

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our Lord, once more, is the truth as well as the way and the life:
and the truth is one and indivisible. We cannot sunder what
God has joined. It is just those souls, who have laid the strongest
hold upon the mysteries of the Incarnation, that are most likely to
be distinguished for special devotion to the Attributes of God.
When the Blessed Paul of the Cross fixed the Passion and the
Attributes of God as the two subjects of meditation for his order
of nuns, he implied that there was in mystical theology an occult
connection between the two devotions. So in like manner our
reading of the lives of the saints must often have brought before
us the fact that sotds, immersed in the spirit of the Sacred Infancy,
seem to imbibe a special fitness for an eagle-like contemplation of
the fastenesses of the Divine Nature. The infantine simplicity of
soul, which comes from Bethlehem, claims kindred with that
heavenly sublimity of spirit, which hovers almost unalarmed
around the mountain-tops of God. Thus, to express shortly
what seems to contain the chief truth of the matter, there are
some souls whose chief devotion to the Incarnation consists in a
devotion to our Lord's Divinity in each and all of his mysteries,
or in some particular favorite mysteries. It is thus through the
Incarnation that they approach the Divine Perfections, and in the
Divine Perfections that they most realize the inexpressible sweet­
ness of the Incarnation.
Any special drawing in devotion is a great gift from God. It is
one of the most powerful of all the secret influences of the spir­
itual life. It is therefore of great importance to a man not to
mistake or overlook such a heavenly attraction. Such a mistake
is like a man’s missing his vocation. Every man, doubtless, has a
vocation: so every spiritual man has a devotional attraction, or a
succession of them. For a spiritual man is one who dwells in­
wardly in the supernatural world, amid God's mysteries and re
vealed grandeurs. He is not a mere tourist who is struck by the
sublime or the picturesque of theology, and admires the scenery
as a whole, and has not such a familiarity with it as to enable him
to break it up into separate landscapes, nor time to brood tran
quilly over any of them so as to have a rational predilection for

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them. He dwells in the world of theology. He is like one whose
fixed abode is in grand scenery. He secs it in the morning light
and in the sunset’s glow. He knows how it looks when the misty
calm of summer noon is wafting fragrance over wood and water.
He is familiar with it in the vicissitudes of storm and calm. When
the distant mountains are hidden by summer’s impenetrable ram­
part of green leaves before his window, he feels that they are there,
and that winter's leafless woods will let them in upon his sight.
He knows how the faces of the mountains change, according as the
light strikes them in the front or from behind, and how a stranger,
who has seen them in the morning, would in the evening, spite
of all landmarks, be doubtful of their identity. He cannot help
having preferences. Predilections are almost a necessity to him.
Or at least he must honor, like a true poet, each coming season
with an admiration which seems, if it only seems, to do injustice
to the season that is past, like the souls who in devotion follow
the Calendar of the Church, and honor most the feast under
whose shadow they are sitting. So it must be to those to whom
the supernatural world is a genuine home. Their life is a life
of loves, and therefore of predilections also.
All spiritual souls are thus haunted souls. They see sights
which others do not see, and hear sounds which others do not hear.
This haunting is to them their own secret prophecy of heaven.
It would be sad to miss so choice a grace by inattention, sadder
still to follow a fantastic delusion of earth instead of the heavenly
reality. The soul cannot hear God unless it listens for him; and
listening is the devoutest attitude of a wise and loving soul. Yet
they who listen hear many sounds which others do not hear,
many sounds for which they themselves are never listening. There
are false sounds on earth, which have a trick of heaven in them.
They are like the phantom-bells that ring for vespers, as from
viewless convents, in the wilderness of Zin. Yet the Bedouin deems
that, with his practised ear, he can discern their thin tolling from
the real sounds of the sandy solitude. The avoiding of delusion
is not the whole of safety in the spiritual life. When a man turns
his entire life into a cautious self-defence against imposture, he is

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leading perhaps the falsest life a man can lead. There is more
danger in missing a grace from God, than in mistaking an earthly
beckoning for a divine. For in the last case, purity of intention
soon rectifies the error, while in the other, the loss is for the most
part irretrievable. Even in the natural life, and in the spiritual
life much more, they are the most unfortunate of men, who linger
behind their lot. They are like those who loiter behind the desert
caravan. Straightway, as Marco Polo tells us, a shadowy voice
calls them by their name, and allures them to one side of the
route. T hey follow, and still it calls, and when they have wan­
dered from the path, a mocking silence follows, more terrible
than the deceiving voice. The wind of evening has lifted the
light sands, and quietly effaced the marks of feet and camel-hoofs
upon the wilderness, as the breeze ruffles out the wakes of ships
on the yielding deep, and smooths the water by its ruffling. They
have missed their vocation. It is no use their living now. They
might as well lie down and die. Such are they who in the spiritual
life linger behind their grace. They, of all men, are the most
haunted by delusions, and have the least discernment by which
to tell them from realities. A soul that has let grace outstrip it
will never see its caravan again. It may die with God; for God is
in the wilderness; but faint indeed is the chance of its not dying
in the wilderness. Let each man look well to see if he has not
within himself a leading from God; and if he has, let him know
that it is his one saving thing to follow it.
In the kingdom of grace, the law, which has the fewest excep­
tions, is the one which rules that supernatural things shall graft
themselves on natural stocks. Hence it is that a man's devotional
attraction is for the most part congenial to his natural turn of
mind. Now, it is with spiritual men as it is with poets. Some
delight in quiet, modest scenes, in woodland bowers, in tinkling
brooks, in rivers that lapse so quietly with their brims on the
level of the meadows that the sedge scarce twinkles in the stream,
in cottages jasmine-mantled, in kine knee-deep in the cool shallow,
in village spires scarce over-topping a coronal of ancient elms, in
the fragrance of the bee-laden limes, and in all those evening

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sights and sounds which tell of weary labor set I rec and wending
to its home, which is an allegory that bears a thousand gentle
interpretations. Others delight in the misty plain, in the forest
solitude, in the distant horizon of the steppe, in the solemnity of
the over clouded fen, in vast outspread scenes of moonlit sea,
or in the silence of deserted cities and neglected ruins. These
are the images which recur in their works again and again, as
if those aspects of nature were the entire expressions of their
minds. There are some whose imagery is all from the tangled lives
of men, and the many-sided aspects of human actions, poets who
have no still life within their souls, except when they reach the
intensest depths of passions, which at such depths are gestureless
and mute. They can clothe in marvellous beauty the objects whose
daily commonness most dishonors them. The streets of the city
become beautiful in their word-pictures, and the trampling of a
multitude makes music in their verse, while the familiar thoughts
and things of their own day impart a livingness to their sotds,
full of nerve and of significence, yet dignified and beautified by
the excellence of their art. There are others who like to live in
echoing thunder-storms, among the rifted crags of the hollow
mountains, who go far out of the sound of suffering humanity,
and are dwellers with the eagles. The stun of the thundering
avalanche, the black, mountainous, and shipless seas bursting on
the iron-bound coast, the cloud-pageanty of magnificently ap­
palling storms, the sobbing and moaning of the winds in purple
unsunny glens, the overwhelming silence of the central desert,
the creaking of the huge cordillera as the earthquake stretches its
stiff limbs upon the rack, the unwitnessed volcanoes that wave
their red torches over the silent ghastly whiteness of the creature­
less south-pole, as if they were earth’s fiery banners hung out in
space as she races onward, the terrific regions of tumultuous
mountain-tops with misty breaks between the ridges where humble
sequestered vales might be, shapeless waving forms and throbbing
silences, shadows in the gigantic gloom of unsunny caves, immense
precipices that sleep forever in shadows of their own even when
the brightest sun is shining,—these are images, expressed or unex­

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pressed, which overcast the works of such minds, and are their
genius, their inspiration, their native grandeur. It is in a world
of these dread forms that their minds breathe most freely, or rather
they breathe freely nowhere else but there. It is to these last that
we may compare the souls whose attraction in the spiritual life
is to the Divine Perfections. Majestic deserts as they are to the
bounded intelligence of man, yet some souls find better nurture
there than in the verdant pastures lower down. The eagle chooses
his dwelling with as faultless an instinct as the nightingale deep
hidden in its bush, or the robin trilling its winter song upon the
window-sill. We must not call such souls ambitious. They have
been lured thither by wiles of grace as gentle and as gradual, as
those who have been drawn to the crib of Bethlehem. They arc
humble, and therefore they are not deluded. Is it not the men
of the loftiest conceptions who for the most part have the
humblest minds?
It is to such souls that this chapter is especially, though by
no means exclusively, addressed.
*
The deepest and most profit­
able devotion to the Incarnation is that which never loses sight,
for a single moment, of our blessed Lord's Divinity; and the richest
as well as the safest devotion to the Divine Perfections is that which
contemplates them in connection with the mysteries of the In­
carnation. Our present object, therefore, is to furnish the mate­
rials for such devotion in especial connection with the mysteries
of the Sacred Infancy, though for a while we must seem to be
going away far from them.
There are almost as many points of view from which we may
contemplate the Attributes of God, as there are individual souls
in the Church. Yet there is a similarity of method even among
these differences. Some fix their attentions and affection on the
Attributes which assert all possible positive perfection, beauty,
and goodness of the Most High; and it is plain that the height
of this devotion will depend very much upon the height of our
own conceptions, although the practice of it will infallibly elevate
• The same subject has been treated in the last chaptai of my Treatise on the
Precious Blood.

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and ennoble those conceptions in the end. Others, on the con­
trary, magnify God by their negations. In other words, they fix
their loving and admiring look on those Attributes which deny
of him all such imperfection, limitation, partial possession, and
mixed sovereignty as seem to us essential to every thing else in
the world but God. On the whole, there is more truth to be at­
tained, a nearer approach to a worthy idea of God, by this nega­
tive method than by the positive; for it leaves us what the positive
runs the risk of not leaving us, that vague and indefinite magnifi­
cence which must cling to our idea of God when we have done
our utmost to comprehend him. There are others again who use
these negations as if they were rather affirmations, that is, as affirm­
ing of God an excellence not in the limited degree or imperfect
kind in which possible creatures may possess it, but in a supereminent, supersubstantial, superessential manner, to use their own
style of speaking. But this method will be found in reality to be
nothing more than a union of the other two. At one time devotion
will fix itself on God as he is visible in his works. Some souls
will remain all their lives long chiefly conversant with those
Attributes which shine forth most manifestly in the mysteries of
Creation and Redemption; and other souls will remain for weeks,
months, or even years in this contemplation. There are some
again whose love allures them rather to lose themselves in the
glad thoughts of that inward life which God is leading, and ever
has been leading, in his own blessed and sufficient Self. To some
the Divine Attributes lie always in the light of the Most Holy
Trinity, and they can read God best by the splendor cast upon
him by the Eternal Generation of the Son or the Unbeginning
Procession of the Spirit. To others, again, the treasures of the
Godhead are unlocked by a series of shocks or sweet surprises, as
is the case when we allow the mystery of the Incarnation to
unfold for us the hidden recesses of the Godhead. Thus the
littleness of the Babe of Bethlehem, touched in our hearts by the
faith in his Divinity, sends us by a kind of impulse far into the
understanding of his infinity. The shame of Calvary lets us deeper
down into his essential glory than we should else have had the

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215

momentum to penetrate; tor the abysses of God are waters in
which it is hard for nature to sink. Of itself it only Boats like
driftwood on the surface. The thirst and fatigue of Jesus at the
well of Jacob throw a light around him as Creator which has a
startling clearness and compels an instantaneous worship of speech­
less tears. This is the characteristic of devotion to the Divine
Perfections through the Incarnation, that it impels us by these
shocks deeper into the hiding-places of the Immense Majesty than
we should otherwise have been able to go. It is then of this last
sort of devotion to the Attributes of God that we shall have chiefly
to speak in this chapter. We must, however, bear in mind that
the more excellent our devotion to these Attributes becomes, also
the more vague, indefinite, obscure, and shadowy becomes our
view of God’s sublimity.
It is not with this devotion as with some others. Here we
always purchase clearness at the expense of height and depth and
breadth. We contract the dimensions of God and diminish him,
nay, not seldom we must also reverse his image, in order to see
him clearly. Hence, therefore, this devotion, to become a devo­
tion of predilection, implies in the soul abundant gifts of faith
and of tranquillity,—two graces so congenial that they seldom lie
far apart. We must have a great gift of faith; because then we
feel the less painfully poor nature’s hungry gnawings to see and
to understand. We must also possess tranquillity of spirit, dovelike brooding souls, else the vast outspread magnificence will only
wink, before us like lightning, showing nothing when it lightens,
but only dazzling us with its after-darkness. We shall discern
nothing in it. We shall never accustom ourselves to it as a light
to read by. We shall see it double, or divided or restless, or col­
ored, by straining at it unquietly. A soul truly versed in this devo­
tion to the Divine Perfections is one who has learned to see in
divine darkness, in a holy night, better than in terrestrial day, and
to whom the indefinite has become more defined than the definite.
Distance is necessary to vision. A man whose spiritlal life is in
this glorious devotion is one who, like many men physically, sees
tilings far off better than things which are near, and who has

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removed God further off from him by (he magnificence of his
conceptions of him rather than brought him nearer by the famili
arity of his contemplation, and who now sees him better in the
immensity of that distance and in the confusion of that light in
which to unpractised eyes he is simply invisible altogether. He
who looks with quiet patience into any unoccupied spot of blue
in the midnight heavens will soon people it for himself with stars.
So arc they who look for God.
Now, it is a characteristic of devotion to the Divine Perfec­
tions through the Incarnation that the Incarnation supplies us
with a number of legitimate and not delusive images, and even
with measures of distance, which, as it were, bring the infinite
within our compass by breaking it up into many infinities. Yet
it is at the same time a characteristic of such a devotion that
these images and measures of distance, being themselves divine
things, do not in any way impair that vagueness, indefiniteness,
and obscurity which are absolutely essential to true ideas about
God. This is another of its recommendations. We have seen
already how by its shocks and surprises it enables us to penetrate
further into each of the Divine Attributes than we should other­
wise have done. We now see also that it brings this sublime devo­
tion to God’s Perfections within the reach of many more souls
than could otherwise have practised it, inasmuch as they could
not have existed without the nutriment of images, or without the
resting-places of those measures of distance which the union of
our Lord's Human Nature with his Divine supplies to us in every
mystery, and back to which we can always retreat without in
reality losing any ground we may have gained. The entire world
of devotion to the Incarnation has perhaps never yet been ex­
plored. Almost every age of the Church develops some new
treasures in it, discovers gold in unsuspected places, and even
widens the horizon so as to enlarge the view. Perhaps the least of
divine mysteries must of necessity be unfathomable, simply because
it is divine. This much, at any rate, may be said, that no one
has gained even a comparative perfection in his devotion to the
Incarnation who has not applied it to the purposes of discovery

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217

in God, of observations on his Attributes, oi anticipations of that
Blissful Vision in which eternal life consists.
But, while out of the seven methods
*
of devotion to the
Divine Attributes enumerated above we couple the last with the
Incarnation in a special manner, we must not suppose that the
other six are in reality independent of that life-giving and God­
reveal ing mystery, or can be detached from it. All that can be
said is that it is less prominent in them. Let us then begin by
occupying ourselves with a method of using all these six methods,
cither separately or collectively, which will be found exceedingly
congenial to the mystery of the Incarnation, and, if original in
form, guilty, we may hope, of no other originality. It is this. God
is especially Life. The Life of God is his Blessedness. It is Himself.
To have life in himself is the unshared prerogative of God. The
Son drew it eternally from the Father's fountain. The Holy Ghost
rejoiced in the eternal possession of it from the one fountain of
the Father and the Son. Not so much as a shadow of this excel­
lence rests upon any created thing or person. It is a height in
God too high to cast any shade over creation which lies in its
littleness close under his feet. From the more or less unconscious
feeling of this characteristic of Life in God's incommunicable gran
deur it has come to pass that it is not an uncommon form for
devotion to the Incarnation to adopt, that of throwing itself upon
the various lives which our Lord is supposed to have lived. When
we cast the mysteries of the Incarnation together into great groups
and masses, we make his life threefold, Joyful, Suffering, and
Glorious. The most complete form is that which distinguishes
eight lives in him, his Unborn Life, Infant Life, Hidden Life.
Public Life, Suffering Life, Risen Life, Ascended Life, and Sacra
mental Life. Into these moulds devotion to the Incarnation pours
itself, and comes out in forms and shapes of the most surpassing
•They may be thus named: 1. The Affirmative Method. 2. The Negative Method
3. The combination of the two. 4. Through the medium of the phenomena of
Creation and the Doctrines of Redemption. This fourth method might technically
be divided into two, but never is so in fact. 5. Through Conceptions of the Inward
Life of God. 6. Through a special devotion to the Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity.
7. In connection with some Mystery or Set of Mysteries of the Incarnation. The
Method which is diffidently proposed in the text may be considered as an eighth.

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beauty. Some of us get so used to these life-moulds that we
transfer them to our devotion to the Attributes of God, and,
besides their facility from habit, we find many unexpected con­
veniences and congruities in them of exceeding value, whilst they
not only help to keep the Incarnation continually before us, but
lead us to find our actual devotion to the Divine Perfections in
the depths of the Incarnation,—thus landing us, though starting
from different points, at the seventh method of devotion to the
Divine Attributes of which we have already spoken. It is difficult
to make this clear to any one who has not practised it, while to
one who has, it has already made itself so plain that it does not
need an explanation.
There are two peculiar advantages of this method of devotion
to the Perfections of God. The first is, that it does not confine
us in any single contemplation to the use of only one of the seven
methods enumerated above. We can use them all, separately or
collectively. We may pass from one to the other with the rapidity
of thought, playing upon them as musicians play upon the keys,
or we may glance at them in their unity and completeness. We
may weave, unweave, interweave, our thoughts of them as we
please, at once gaining variety for our contemplation without
any damage to its simplicity, and also emancipating ourselves from
the trammels of too much formality and legislation, which are less
applicable to this devotion than to any other, and which most
men have already outlived when they have reached this stage in
the cycle of prayer,—outlived at least so far as the amount of it is
concerned which once was needful, and so far as the minute sub­
jection to it is concerned, which, at the outset of prayer, is often
the best part of the prayer itself as well as of the systematic legis­
lation. The other advantage is that its forms singularly fall in
with and minister to correct theology, in a manner which turns
out to be of no slight consequence as we advance in devotion to
the Divine Attributes. We look at God as living so many different
lives, though there is neither time, space, succession, nor muta­
tion in him. When we are thinking of one of his lives, or, to
describe the process more accurately, gazing at it, we put aside

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219

altogether the other countless lives which he is at that eternallypresent moment contemporaneously living. It is not that we
forget them; for they are always lying half consciously in the
background, and influencing us by keeping us indefinite, which
is what we require. But we purposely put them aside, and look
at that life of God as if it was his whole life, that is, as if it were
God himself. Thus, by degrees, we get well into ourselves as our
standing idea of God that he is what he is, that he is the infinite
things which he is, that his perfections are not perfections of his,
but are himself. To say of God that “he has," is to be thinking
of creation and outward things; to say of God that "he is," is to
be thinking of himself. Thus the simplicity of God comes to be
the foundation of all our devotions to his Attributes from the
beginning, and not merely the ultimate idea reached, and often
uneasily as well as imperfectly reached, after many trials and fail­
ures, imperfectly, that is, even with reference to our capabilities
of reaching so sovereign an idea.
When we are contemplating our Blessed Lord’s Public Life,
we do not advert to his Infant Life. The one idea would inter­
fere with the other, unless we were purposely passing from one
to the other in order to bring out contrasts or similitudes. When
we are with him on Calvary, we know that Easter lies in front
of us, ready to dawn, but we shut ourselves up purposely, lest
some streak of that dawn should surprise us, and we gaze upon
our Lord in his depths of agony, as if they were his whole mission,
as if he had always been there and always would be there, as if
all his mysteries were states and permanences, which in a very
high sense they are. Our prayer would be speculation or contro­
versy, rather than meditation, if we dealt otherwise with it. So
do we deal with these lives of God, which we put before ourselves
as the objects of our contemplation. Moreover, that which lies
at the bottom of all the eight lives of Jesus, not only giving them
their unity, but also the vitality, significance, and tenderness by
which they elicit and exercise our devotion, is our faith in his
Divinity, which is always working indistinctly in the mysteries of
the Incarnation, even when we perceive it least or are even wil­

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fully prescinding from it. His Divinity, the Divinity of the Word,
occupies the same position with regard to all these eight various
lives, which the Simplicity of the Divine Nature occupies with
regard to the perhaps eighteen lives in which our prayer may be
used to look at God. So that, from the point of view of this peculiar
method here advocated, the analogies between the devotion to the
Divine Attributes and the devotion to the Incarnation are most
singular and most important. Finally, we connect these lives of
God with the Incarnation in a most direct and obvious manner,
by which also wc gain for all the first six methods of devotion to
the Attributes what seemed at first sight the peculiar privilege
of the seventh, namely, those sweet shocks of surprise which carry
us so deeply into God. In other words, wc reduce our first six
methods into our Seventh, without deducting from any one of
them that which is most special and characteristic about them­
selves. For when we have contemplated these lives of God, or any
number of them, we fall back in a sort of repose of spirit upon
the Babe in his manger, or the Carpenter-Boy at Nazareth, or the
Man upon the Cross, and behold him at that moment awfully
and worshipfully living all those lives in the fleshy recesses of a
Sacred Human Heart, or, in another way, the Sacred Human
Heart living them in God.
When a finite mind occupies itself upon an object which is
vast and simply infinite, as God is, its observations will almost
present the appearance of its having itself created the object
in the contemplation of which it has been engaged. The va­
riety of men’s views of God will equal the variety of minds
which take views of him at all. We seem to make our own God,
because we see but a part of him. The character of our own
mind imprints itself so strongly on our conceptions of him,
that it really looks as if we had but projected him from our
own thoughts and then called him God. Every thing is true
of God which may be honorably said of him. Apparent con­
tradictories will be found true of one who is infinite. But in
truth all this appearance of unreality thrown over our concep­
tions of God is but the tribute of our ignorance and blindness

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to his unimaginable infinity. Thus the life of God will divide
itself differently to different minds. Things in God, which ap­
pear to one mind to lie apart from each other, to another mind
will seem identical. All that is absolutely necessary is that all
divisions, whatever they may be, should be understood to be
faulty divisions. If they were not acknowledgedly such, they
wotdd lead to falsehood, and not to truth. They must all con­
tain each other, repeat each other, and be at once complete
and incomplete each of them in itself. We must be aware that
this is the case throughout, just as much as we must be aware
of our Lord's Divinity while we are musing on the mysteries
of his Humanity. God stands so full in his own light that, when
we look at him in front, he is invisible. We must throw his
own light upon himself by changing our position, first here
and then there. He does not move. He is in omnipresent repose
forever. But we catch glimpses of him by the aid of our own
mutabilities. Not one of these lights is true, not one of them
false. For practical purposes they are all true. They only be­
come false when they claim to be an adequate illumination of
God. Some of these lights we gain by looking at God as an
external immensity, which is the loosest and least accurate view
of him there is, yet the one commonest to most minds. Others,
and of deeper import, we obtain by looking at God as enclos­
ing us, as a tree sometimes encloses a stone, as if we were
within God, as we might be inside a temple, or inside the ocean,
yet uncommingled with it. Then we do not so much look at
him as an external immensity. We are in contact with him.
We only stand straight, because we are built up in him. walled
up on all sides against our own tendency to struggle and melt
back into our original nothingness. This is more nearly our
true position than the other. We are all built up in God.
and can only act toward each other through him and in him.
This is a terrifying view of life to those who do not love. Pan
theists break down the partitions, and make us dissolve into the
divine life, so that we ourselves are part of God. and. if a part
of him. then, God being God. in some sense the whole of him.

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This is but the poetic form of atheism. But our best and deepest
lights, the fewest in number because the observations are so
hard to take, are gained from our looking at God as inside
ourselves, with our littleness compassing his infinity, so that
we are all likenesses of Mary during the nine months she carried
Jesus in her bosom. These lights are very rare; but they are so
much nearer the truth that they are worth almost any number
of the rest.
\renturing then to look at God’s eternity as we look at our
Lord's Three-and-Thirty Years, it seems as if we might view
him leading eighteen different lives, different lives which are
yet but one adorable life, that has neither past nor future, but
an eternal present,—neither movement nor inequality, but an
everlasting equable tranquillity. Much worship comes out of
few thoughts, where God is concerned. His magnificence in
our conceptions is not in the richness of detail, but in the
vastness of solitary grandeurs set in immense spaces, like the
constellations of the Southern seas. Thus we may adore his
secret life out of sight of all his creatures, hidden from the
first, hidden now, forever hidden. We may worship his secret
life as it is disclosed to those who see the Vision in heaven,
the object of our own yearnings and perpetual patient discontent
with self. We may worship, it is the one business of our lives,
his secret life as far as it is shown to faith. We may contemplate
with perplexed wonder the life of God as it is affected both
by the existence of his creatures, and their worship. He has
a life in the material world, a life in the moral world, a life
in the intellectual world, a life in the spiritual world of grace,
a life in the world of glory. God has also a public life in
external government, which is his life as king. He has a life
in punishing; for his vindictive justice is one of his incessant
grandeurs. He has a life in rewarding, in which he manifests
his inner treasures by the copious outpouring of them upon
his creatures. He has a different life in each of his different
creations. He has a life in the fortunes of humanity, con­
sidering our whole race as one, and he has another life in

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each individual soul of man. He has a life which is imitable,
and which is disclosed to us in order to be imitated, and a
life which is visible but perplexing to our finite views, and
so not imitable, and finally an unimaginable life. These are
the lives of God with which our prayer may reverently and
fruitfully employ itself. We know that he has many more lives
than these, and that many more will strike other minds. We
know that he is living all these lives at once, and that he cannot
live any of them separately. We know that he is complete in
each one of them, and self-sufficient, and infinitely adorable. We
know that of him in each of these lives we may predicate all
conceivable positive perfection, and deny of him all conceivable
possible infirmity. We know also that the beautiful transitory
darkness, which he sometimes deigns to throw over our breathless
souls, is a better and a nearer thing to him than all these lights
of ours,—better than words, for it is simply indescribable,—
nearer than thought, for thought dies in worship then. But
when he withholds that gift, which we must not ask, when
he does not come down himself, and proclaim silence in our
souls, and press us to him in the dark, then is it by these other,
or like modes, of conceiving of our ever-blessed Maker and
Father, that he himself mercifully invites, nay, even lovingly
provokes, the daring littleness of our prayer to compete with
his magnificence.
There are three imaginary epochs in all the lives of God,
according to the view which the creatures of any of his creations
take of him. There is the eternity before creation at all. There
is the time which is the duration of our own particular creation.
There is the subsequent eternity, which, whether occupied with
other creations or not, is only occupied with us as being our
home attained and our beatitude fulfilled. From our point of
view all these epochs have strongly-marked characteristics of
their own. The eternity before creation is distinguished by the
blissful self-companioned solitude of the Most Holy Trinity.
The act of Creation, and its prolonged continuity in the Preserva­
tion of creatures, appear to confer upon God Attributes which he

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could not have had except as Creator, or at least to bring
into action beautiful depths of his Nature which, so in our
ignorance it seems to us, could have had no functions in his
own inward life of Three Persons. The eternity after the Doom,
whether occupied with fresh creations or not, to us represents
God as joyously reposing upon the immense family of glorified
creatures whom he has introduced into his own home. Now,
some of the lives of God, which we contemplate in our prayer,
belong to one or other of these epochs, while others belong
to two of them at once, and others abide unchanged during
all the three. But we take no count of this in our contempla­
tions. It is essential to us that each life of God should seem
his whole life while we are gazing upon it. We are not musing
on the history of God, but on God. We must have him there­
fore before us as the eternally and immutably present God.
There are other times when we may venture to look at God’s
eternity, as if it were a successive biography; and deep thoughts
of adoration will flow in upon us as we so regard it. But it does
not belong to that peculiar method of devotion to the Divine
Attributes with which we are now concerned.
When we contemplate the secret life of God, which is out
of sight,—space, which to our conceptions at least is practically
boundless; for what will that thing be like which confines upon
us, yet lies outside its boundary?—space, although populous with
possible creations, dwindles to a point, becomes too insignificant
to be taken into account, and does not affect the life of God.
His own life as God is something vaster than his occupation
as Creator, and it is upon that invisible life that we fix our
eyes, and worship. There is a joy so limitless that it fills the
infinite nature of the Three Divine Persons, which in no way
flows from creatures, nor is it in any degree influenced by them.
In this indescribable, self-sufficing beatitude resides this secret
life of God, which he is living at each point of space, in each
point of time, and far away beyond all space, and unbeginningly
and unendingly before and after all time. We gaze upon it,
and see nothing, and are satisfied. The very shapeless thought

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of it is happiness to our love. We have no figures to express
it by. no analogies by which we can bring it home to ourselves,
no comparisons the use of which would not seem to us an irre­
verent license of the imagination. We know that such an adorable
life exists, and the mere knowledge bathes our souls in joy. We
arc out upon it ourselves, and it is a deep sea. without features,
landmarks, or constellations. There is no compass to point, to
vary, or to dip; for it is itself,—that deep, horizonless, glad ocean,
it is itself the ever-present home of the Eternal.
Then, again, the boundless waters of that sea suddenly of
themselves change the scene. They come nigh to a lovely coast,
studded beautifully with the spirits of angels and the souls of
men, who gaze in silent or vocal rapture upon that many-featured
deep, which rolls without resonance before them. One while
it is a halcyon calm, such a calm as creatures do not know,
and its peacefulness tingles through their spirits. There is a
brooding beauty over the waves which would destroy life by
the vehement ecstasy which it produces, were not the immortality
of the fortunate elect immensely fortified by God himself. Then
again come storms of such exceeding grandeur as to turn their
whole capacious lives of glory into pure music, loud, and swell
ing, and glorious, sounding along the eternal shore. There are
mornings there, dawning upon new sights seen far off in God.
like flashing things coming into view from inexhaustible eternities
which lie far onward still, and out of which fresh splendors may
be travelling toward the Blessed perpetually.· There are noons
also, hushed, deep, entrancing, which appear to make visible,
or sensible, or intelligible, the stationariness of eternity. Then
come evenings of such restful loveliness, that the spirit is
drowned in the contentedness of their uncreated beauty, and
Joses itself in a trance of unutterable satisfaction on the bosom
of God. It is these evenings which make eternity a home. There
is no night there, but there is the gorgeous spirit of nocturnal
beauty, at once brightly, softly, starrily shading the depths of
• We must remember the axiom of theology about the Vision Deu» totus visus
est, sed non totaliter.

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the Incomprehensible, and by shading them enabling the eye
to see far down into their glancing and mysterious caverns. But
there is no succession of these visions. Al 1 are at once, (inc does
not paint out the other. The storms do not break up the calms,
nor the calms assuage the storms. It is dawn, and noon, and
evening-light always on that exulting sea. It is the life of God
disclosed in abiding vision to the loyal and the pure.
There is, again, the secret life of God, as it is shown to
faith. It is no mere boundless presence to which we strain
our imaginations, no mere exquisitely piercing essence which
we vainly endeavor by the eloquent exaggerations of language
to express. God bids faith unveil no little of his hidden life
even to us distracted wanderers amidst the excessive occupations
and uncongenial weariness of life. One while as the exulting
Trinity of Persons, another while as the infinitely blissful Unity
of Essence, God manifests himself to us with immutable variety.
Ever before us we behold the Unbegotten Father, out of whose
pacific fountains all God head is rapturously flowing; evermore
magnifying and adorning his own primacy by the coequality of
the Spirit and the Son; evermore seated on his awful throne
with a peace and a stability which it almost oppresses created
spirit to contemplate; lone yet not alone, in a peculiar grandeur
which is the more solitary because it is equally and rightfully
shared with his Word and with his Love; a Person to whose
supremacy there is no corresponding subordination; hidden in
the blaze of the incomprehensible love wherewith the Spirit and
the Son environ him; the home of the Divinity where no
mission reaches; the Person furthest in Name from creatures,
yet with the most creature-like relations of the Three; a Father
in whom all sweet fatherhoods have been eternally combined,
out of whom comes the indulgence of all justice, and the omnipo­
tence of all forbearance; unspeakably compassionate yet unspeak­
ably immutable, infinitely tender yet infinitely imperturbable;
a Person so inaccessible and yet so incredibly familiar that it
is hard to think of him wthout tears of love. Ever before us
we behold the Eternally-Begotten Son, in his unbeginning begin-

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nings, in his never-ending ends, issuing forth from the Father
in blinding abysses of light; glowing from out the ineffably
refulgent sanctuaries of uncreated life; always being begotten,
always the very actual, instantaneous, coequal, coetemal image
of the mighty Father, and whose Generation is a glory and a
loveliness enough of its own self to fascinate numberless creations
with its beauty and its splendor, and to overwhelm them in an
intolerable excess of unending jubilation. Ever before us we
behold the Eternally-Proceeding Spirit, in his Procession at
once beginning and yet being perfect for evermore; flashing
before us like a sea of light from out the blazing ocean of the
Father and the Son, in an uspeakable orderly tumult of un
created gladness; jubilant exceedingly with speechless cries and
silent music and all the unvocal clangor of unutterable triumph,
whose beauty is as that of fire, with banners flying and golden
chariots mutely rolling along its everlasting march, as if the
vast Godhead were blissfully unfolding itself in its own un­
imaginable sunshine. Yet ever before us also we behold, likest
of all things to the Vision of the Blest, the fixed, immutable,
simple, self-sufficient, featureless Unity of Essence, upon whose
formless lineaments is written unchangeable, unbeginning, un­
finishing repose; one point of indefinite whiteness; a splendor
which stirs not and does not flash; far-withdrawn yet everywhere,
all-embracing yet separate as a sanctuary, whose adorable mono­
tony, seen at one glance, yet brooking, unmoved and unscintil­
lating, the searching gaze of all creations, is of its own sole Self
light, and nourishment, and rest, and jubilee, and immortality,
to the believing soul.
There is the life of God, again, as it is affected by the existence
of his creatures, and their worship, flow could he be just, if
he had no subjects to whom out of the plenitude of his power
he had made concessions and given rights, or with whom in
the condescensions of his familiarity he had made covenants and
had entered into engagements? How could the Father be merci
ful to the Son, or the Father and the Son to the Holy Ghost?
How can there be compassion for the Coequal? Yet how sweetly

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God triumphs in his mercy, as if—dare we say it?—lie were proud
of that most gorgeous Attribute! But in some sense is it not
to us he owes the possession of this Attribute, over which he
broods with such complacency? Oh, in how many ways, ways
we should never have dreamed of, had he not revealed them,
ways still unrevealed and so undreamed-of still, does he allow
creatures to enter into his deep tranquil life, and as it were to
make currents on its surface! What an endless field of contem­
plation there is here! We may not roam in its wide pastures
now, or we shall lose sight of Bethlehem; but how adorable the
while is that dread immutability, into which such changes are
ever flowing, and ceasing to be changes when it has silently
engulfed them!
What are all sciences but sparkles of the life God leads in
the world of nature and of matter? Every phenomenon is a
transparency in the many-colored mantle in which he has ar­
rayed his immensity. Every law is but a fraction of his will,
and therefore a partial revelation of himself. Yet the sciences
are many, and each science has many kingdoms, and each of
those kingdoms many provinces, and each province its sub­
divisions and departments; and the mightiest intellect, in the
activities of a long life, is unequal to the exhaustion of one of
these departments. Discovery advances with gigantic strides,
and at each step rather destroys all limits to our conjectures
of our ignorance, than widens the horizon of our knowledge;
while at each step it is always adding to the bulk of those beau­
tiful revelations of God, which are the treasures as well as the
records of the sciences. The symmetry of each whole science
is another kind of divine revelation, and the connection of the
sciences another, and the unity of all collective sciences yet
another and more magnificent. God has a life in the wayward
uniformities of each wild flower in the fields, in the inexplicable
instinct of each variety of animal and insect, in the quivering
orbits of rolling worlds, in the stately stepping of the clouds
which march to the music of the upper winds, in every sight
and sound and fragrance and taste of nature. All comes, not

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merely came at the first, but comes now, forever comes out of
the mind of God, and is a disclosure to us of his life, holding
undisclosed in every atom more mysteries of that life than the
countless ones which it discloses.
The material world is as when we look through the pellucid
sea and behold the many-colored pebbles, catching the sunlight
and glinting at the bottom, and the fairy-like gardens of the ocean
flora, and the radiant fauna feeding or basking or making beau
tiful war amidst those submarine groves and rosy shades, and
the gauze-like medusae floating, like the bells out of which the
musical sea-murmur is ever ringing as the restless water swings.
But the moral world, the world of wills and crimes and virtues, is
as when the sun is overcast, and the blue sky is an inky gray, and
the rude wind ruffles the waves, and the subaqueous revelation is
withdrawn. Yet even there, too, is an order, and a legitimate
recurrence of phenomena, and a beautiful harmony of cycles, and
an imposing majesty of law, all full of revelations of that stormy
life of unattainted peace which God lives in the wills of men, a
life sometimes awfully incrusted with human crime and worthless­
ness, like the life of unknown brightness which the diamond leads
in its unviolated mine. This, too, is a life of God which we often
ponder; and the past lives of every one of us must have written
volumes of it in our thoughts, with hardly one sentence in them
all which would not feed a hundred controversies, but which for
us have done something better in feeding our devotion.
From the right point of view, what is the whole of the intel­
lectual world but one enormous realm of inspiration, a singular
gifted creation of power and beauty, of eloquence and song, with
the life of God deep hidden in its thought-mines, nay, with
millions of divine lives flung off in the shining spray of its cata
racts of glorious words? In each felicity of the human under
standing there is a life of God, in the glow of each discovery a
thrill of his eternal jubilee. The philosopher’s chains of cogent
reasoning, the historian’s just and faithful eye, and the benignity
of his appreciation, the creations of the poet, with his glorynurtured mind and grandeur-haunted imagination, the articulate

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speaking of the artist’s pencil, the chisel of the sculptor filling the
dead marble with looks and voices which speak, an intelligible
eloquence for ages, an eloquence whose silence all nations listen
to and understand, the almost creative breath of the Christian
statesman’s sympathetic science, who is all artists in himself, and
whose divine occupation reflects a sort of divinity on his mind,
the fanciful fabrics of fiction-writers that hang for a few moments
across the sky like the gay arches of the rainbow, or like the tran­
sient prismatic belts round the waists of the fluent waterfalls,
the new life which the fruitful formality of diligent induction is
everywhere calling up, making the old new, and the barren to be
the mother of many children,—what are all these but inspirations,
pieces of divine life which lose their bloom in our hot hands,
plastic things from heaven taking endless shapes, yet never alto­
gether losing the ancestral look and air of their divinity? Wild
world of intellect! even amidst its life of riotous beauty and degen­
erating truth God lives a life solemn, holy, calm, and nigher to
the surface than his life mostly lies.
In the world of grace the pulses of the divine life are almost
visible. Each actual grace is an impulse of the divine will pro­
ceeding out of the depths of an illimitable mercy, an exquisite
justice, and an infinite intelligence. And who shall number each
day’s actual graces on the earth? Each additional degree of sancti­
fying grace is a still more wondrous mystery; for it is a distinct
communication of the divine nature. Yet the drops of a rain­
shower which covered a square league would scarce equal the
number of these additions of grace which souls on earth receive
in the course of one solar day. The extraordinary graces of the
saints are all different revelations of God. Each saint is a gospel
of himself, notably different from all other living gospels, yet
harmonizing almost to miracle with them all. Each conversion—
and there are thousands daily—is a divine work of art, standing
by itself, each in its own way being a heavenly master-piece. Every
Christian death-bed is a world, a complete world, of graces, inter­
ferences, compensations, lights, struggles, victories, supernatural
gestures, and the action of grand spiritual laws. Each death-bed,

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explained to us as a God could explain it, would be in itself an
entire science of God, a summa of the most delicate theology. The
varieties of grace in the individual soul are so many infinities of
the one infinite life of God. The world of grace is truly the
theatre of his visible miracles. God is marvellous, says Scripture,
in his saints.
In the world of glory, too, there is another life of God. There
is one life of him as he is seen in the Vision; and to that we have
already alluded. But there is another life of him as he lives in
the glory and blessedness of those who are admitted to gaze upon
that Vision. The varieties of grace seem to come the nearest of
all created things we know of to being strictly innumerable. But
we may well believe that the varieties of glory, which we hardly
know at all, far out-number those of grace. If God has a life in
each wild flower, what a beautiful immortal life must he not
have in each discriminating shade of glory! Look over that huge
empire of the angelic legions, and over the multitude of human
souls which the Holy Ghost himself calls countless, sum up the
variety of their powers, and the serene capacity of their faculties,
and their almost fathomless affections, all filled full to overflowing
with indescribable beatitude, and what a life of God, what a
manifold tranquillity and work of all his blissful Attributes are
there! That vast world is a lake which images the mountains of
the Beatific Vision which surround it, and, by imaging it, changes
it, and makes it, as it were, a second created Beatific Vision, another
life of the blessed God.
God has a life also in his government. Upon what strange
principles, as we count them, does his providence frequently pro­
ceed! His justice is not as our justice, nor his kindness as our
kindness. He has other measures. Sometimes how swift his justice
is, sometimes how slow! sometimes how proportionate his retribu­
tions look, and sometimes how disproportionate they seem! How
swiftly he flies to his end, and then another while by what cir­
cuitous routes and stealthy feet, as if they were shod with moss,
does he circumvent his end! Why does he claim here, and then
concede there? What must the divine logic be like, when to finite

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apprehensions it is so often necessitated to look illogical? How
he drives his creatures like sheep, and again how he caresses them,
as if he were their nurse! He makes himself poor that he may
have the pleasure of begging from them, and then opens heaven
and rains down incredible happiness upon them. On this side
there is punishment almost preceding the offence, and on the other
a tortoise-footed vengeance pacing after a guilty nation for cen­
turies and purposely failing to come up with it. There are few
things out of heaven which teach us so much of God as his style
of government.
His life in punishment is wide enough to be a life of itself,
apart from the other functions of his government; and the same
also may be said of his life in rewarding. In both he is an unknown
God, whom we never come to know, and yet practically always
know. Both in punishing and rewarding he always takes us by
surprise, because his processes are always unexpected. What act
of God is more like a law of natural development than that which
consigns the finally impenitent soul to its hopeless doom? Yet
can we believe that ever soul yet has heard that sentence at his
judgment-seat but it has been horribly taken by surprise? Must
it not also require a special concurrence of Omnipotence to hinder
the glad soul from breaking, and so spilling its immortal life,
during the first moment which follows the judicial decree of its
everlasting bliss? There is science enough to be inferred from
hell to construct a very faithful and adorable image of God. As
he rewards, so he punishes, yet with differences. As he punishes,
so he rewards, yet with differences also. The punishments of
purgatory, are they not a Bible in themselves? The punishments
of earth! if we think of them, what are our thoughts but either
adoration or unbelief?
How differently God has dealt with his creation of men from
what he did with his creation of angels! yet the two were one
family of Jesus. So God may have—may have them now or may
have them in time to come—millions of creations; and it is plain
that his life in every one of them will be different. As these
differences of creations, though not beyond the possibility of being

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conceived, are in fact beyond our conceptions, so also must the
differences be of those mysterious, half-hidden and half disclosed
lives which God may lead in them. Again, it is manifest that
humanity, the whole human race of all times and climes, is a
unit, and has a progressive history and a very significant destiny
of its own, apart from the separate fortunes of the individuals who
compose it, the living atoms so dear to God as we each of us
know ourselves to be. Now, God must have some life of glory
in this humanity as a whole; for heaven transfers to itself none
of the history of earth, but only earth s biographies. Empires cast
no shadows over the population of the courts above, neither do
nationalities erect partitions there. The discoveries of the scien­
tific few are obliterated there by the instantaneous superior intui­
tion of the baptised child. The mightiest revolutions of earth,
the grand streams of its ethnography, the fertile consequences of
its physical geography, the stupendous developments of its civiliza­
tion, the immense catastrophes of its historical ruins, are no further
represented in heaven than as they told for or against the salvation
of this or that particular soul, who now because of them, or in
spite of them, is safely housed in its Father's home. Yet humanity
has its significance as a unit, and finds it in some mysterious life
of most hidden glory which God lives beneath its vicissitudes and
its destiny. The life of God in the individual soul is still more
intimate and intelligible. Who does not know how true this is?
The moment our past becomes plain to us we see that it has been
full of God. There is nothing of which we are more sure than
that we have never been left to ourselves, never left to live this
life of ours alone. In every thing we have been two, not one.
Hence it is that there is no such thing as unhappiness in life except
when through a mistake we feel or fancy ourselves alone. More­
over, what a life of wonders our life has been!—such a scriptural
thing, when we come to consider it, so like the lives of the patri
archs of old, God with us and we not afraid, the commonest events
being under another aspect divine interpositions, all our sorrows
judgments, all our joys the comings of angels, as if each of us were
Isaac or Jacob, Samuel or David! When our outward life has

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all been uneventful smoothness, our inward life has often been
a romance of almost thrilling interest, full of situations too bold
for a dramatist’s invention. Surely God cannot have been to
others as he has been to usl they cannot have had such boyhoods,
such minute, secret buildings up of mind and soul! We have a
feeling that about our own lives there has all along been a marked
purpose, a divine specialty. Yet, in truth, how many millions of
such tender and equally special biographies is the most dear and
blessed God living in men's souls throughout all years and all
generations! We are not singular among men: it is God’s love
which is singular in each of us.
God also lives a visible life which is imitable, and which is
intended to be imitated. We cannot conceive of any creation
which should not, even unconsciously, copy its Creator. All cre­
ated life must in its measure imitate the Uncreated Life out of
which it sprung. The very habits of animals, and the blind evolu­
tions of matter, are in some sense imitations of God. The fern,
that is forever trembling in the breath of the waterfall, in its
growing follows some pattern in the mind of God. Much more
then is it so in the moral world. The character of God is the one
foundation of all morality. The principles of morality are im­
mutable, because He is immutable, the beauty of whose holiness
they faithfully though faintly represent. God is our model. The
Incarnation even has not given us another standard. It has but
made visible, with an application to creatures, the ways and fash­
ions, the characteristics and propensities,—if we may venture on
such terms,—of the Invisible God. To watch God, and do as he
does, startling as it sounds, is the rule of holiness. We are to be
perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect,—not as perfect as he is,
but perfect with the same kind of perfection.
But God has also another life, which is visible, but not imitable.
We feel that while he is our rule in some things, in others he is
simply the object of our timid worship. This life of his is not
merely admirable, as being above us, but it is perplexing, as being
apparently contrary to his own character. Eternal punishment is
no model for unforgivingness. The adorable look of wayward­

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ness, which there is in God sometimes, is one of his inscrutable
terrors, before which we cower and weep silent tears: it is not a
justification for any unequability of ours. The courtesy of a sov
ereign is a different thing from that of a subject. The immensity
of God's sovereignty is visible upon his lineaments in the most
familiar condescensions of his love. Even his forgiveness is some­
times rough, because of the sublimity of his justice.
Then, last of all, there is a life of God which is simply un­
imaginable, and this brings us back almost to the first life of him
we mentioned,—his secret life out of sight. It would be natural,
in speaking of God, to end where we began. But this unimag­
inable life is something more than hidden. It is the infinite
residue of all that is unknown about God. It is the life in which
his nameless Attributes, those unrevealed perfections of which
theology can take no cognizance, come into play. It is all the
possible life of God, beyond what is known, beyond what is con­
jectured, beyond what is probable. It is the divine line in its
deepest depths, self-poised, self-centred, self-glorifying, unrevealable to any possible creature, uncomprehended even by the Human
Soul of the Incarnate Word. We can make no picture of it to
ourselves, because it is based on no ideas. If we think of it, a mist
falls on us through which loom forms without outlines, propor
tions without shape, splendors without color. Only to know
that there is such a life as that, is a new kneeling-place for our
worship, a new home for the soul. As we see on earth by the
light of the unrisen day, so our souls see fresh worship, fresh
fear, fresh love, in the light of this dawn, which is not only now
unbroken, but which shall never break at all on any possible
created mountain-top.
We have but glanced at these various lives of God, in order
to illustrate the kind of materials which they furnish for contem
plation. The division of them is perfectly arbitrary. They might
be divided differently, and yet with equal truth; or they might be
multiplied almost indefinitely. We find in all of them the attri­
butes of God under somewhat varying aspects: so that if our
devotion is resting at the time on any one particular Attribute

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rather than the others, we may fix our gaze upon it as it is mani­
fested in any of these lives. Above all, we must discern in every
one of them an undistracted love of ourselves, a love not averted,
suspended, weakened, or less minute for one moment, but as if it
were the exclusive and full occupation which engrosses the vast
being of God. In certain wide perplexing fields of view it occa­
sionally seems to us as if some of the many threads of govern­
ment might be falling out of God’s hand, or as if some pressing
business of the world might have to wait until other more pressing
business had been attended to; and even the appearance of this,
for all we know it to be impossible, will make us tremble. Nay,
we sometimes unsuspectingly act on what we intellectually know
to be an unworthy thought of God. It is therefore of great im­
portance to us, unless when we are under strong impulses in
prayer, to remember God’s remembrance of ourselves; for what­
ever excites our confidence in him at the same time quickens our
own sense of responsibility toward him. Lastly, we may apply
all these lives to any of the mysteries of the Incarnation, and
especially, because of the obvious contrasts they furnish, to the
mysteries of the Sacred Infancy. In whatever situation the gospel
narrative, the necessity of the case, or our own tender imagina­
tion, may place the Holy Child at Bethlehem, in Egypt, or at
Nazareth, he was at that moment leading all these lives. Not one
of them was obscured in him for an instant. There was not one
of them which he was not always embracing with the fulness of
divine self-consciousness. Moreover, the affinity between some of
these lives and some of those mysteries will give rise to many most
touching meditations, which will show us new truths, or old truths
in a new light, and at the same time inflame our hearts with new
love, and therefore with more abounding reverence.
But in all devotions to the Incarnation it is necessary, together
with our love and worship of our Blessed Lord's Divinity, to join
also a love and worship of his Person. It is not enough to remem­
ber that he is God. We must remember also that he is the Word,
the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. The Babe of Bethle­
hem in his Mother’s lap is living all those divine lives as God,

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yet not as the Unbegotten Father or the Proceeding Spirit, but as
the Eternally-begotten Son. It is the Word who is incarnate,
because there is a fittingness in him for such a mystery. It is the
Second Person who is a Babe at Bethlehem, and to whom there­
fore the Father and the Holy Ghost stand now in new and peculiar
relations. It is the Second Person Incarnate who is one of the
earthly Trinity, and therefore gives the character of the Father
and the Holy Ghost to be borne by Joseph and Mary. It is the
eternally, invisibly, silently spoken Word of the Father, who is
now in time visibly and audibly outspoken to men. It is by one
Person of the Three, rather than by the other Two, that creation
is brought into such transcendent union with its Creator. The
particularities, which theology instructs us to ascribe to the Son,
are deeply marked upon the Incarnation. By virtue of them the
Incarnation of the Son is a different mystery from what the In
carnation of the Father or the Holy Spirit would have been. It
would not perhaps be affirming too much to say that there is not
a single mystery of the Three-and-Thirty Years which does not
owe some of its features to our Blessed Lord’s Person, that is. to
the fact of his having been not the First or the Third Person, but
the Second Person, of the Holy Trinity. Thus in all our devo­
tions to the Incarnation, as we must never separate his Human
Nature from his Divine, so also we must not separate his Divine
Nature from his Divine Person. Four elements compose all the
mysteries of Jesus,—his Body, his Soul, his Divine Nature, and
his Divine Person. The different position of these four elements,
or rather the different lights cast upon them by the events of
his human life, are the causes of the differences in the mysteries.
Distinct meditation therefore on our Lord's Person, and a distinct
adoration of it, cannot be too strongly urged on those who wish
to profit to the uttermost by the rich food which the Incarnation
ministers to the soul in prayer. On the whole, the distinction is
often not sufficiently kept in mind. Hence arise vague ideas of
our Lord's Divinity, as if it was even hardly so definite a thing as
a nature, much less in a Divine Person; and the consequences are
a confused generality in devotion, which often hinders the develop

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ment of reverence, and also a missing altogether of the delicacies
and refinements and spiritual subtleties in the Incarnation, which
are of themselves such marvellous disclosures of the divine mag­
nificence.
We may now proceed to consider that other and simpler
method of devotion to the Divine Attributes, which is so directly
connected with the mysteries of our Lord that it may almost
rather be considered a branch of devotion to the Incarnation,
seeing that no devotion to the Sacred Humanity is complete with­
out it. It consists, as has been said, of the contrasts and surprises
which arise from the Divine Perfections being brought into con­
tact with any of the mysteries of the Three-and-Thirty Years, or
of the Blessed Sacrament, which is the prolongation of the Threeand-Thirty Years up to the Doom, or beyond it, if there be any
ground for the opinions in favor of an eternal reservation of the
Blessed Sacrament in heaven. It furnishes us, therefore, with end­
less, yet very similar, meditations, founded on the model of what
we have already supposed was Mary’s first act of worship in the
midnight cave. The extreme similarity of the meditations is, how­
ever, accompanied by that invariable freshness and sensation of
unworn novelty which always go along with the great thought of
boundless Godhead.
Let us take an imaginary scene in which to contemplate the
Divinity of the Babe of Bethlehem. Let us hasten into the wilder­
ness, where there are the fewest real images of creatures to distract
us, and those of the most placid kind, and in themselves, as well
as because of their fewness, full of thoughts which lead to God.
Thither we can summon all the creatures of the universe to adorn
and illustrate the glorious Attributes of the Infant God. Our
Lady and St. Joseph are in the very heart of the desert on their
flight into Egypt, weary, yet less anxious now that Palestine is
left so far behind. It is in itself an astonishing mystery, the Cre­
ator flying from his own creatures, and in such helpless guise.
Two creatures only are with him, to wait upon his created nature;
and those two are of such exceeding holiness as to be the wonders
of creation not only till the end of time, but forever. We will

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suppose a pair of thin-foliaged acacia-trees islanded as it were in
the desert scene, a well between them, with a marge of faint ver­
dure, and some of the gray aromatic desert-plants creeping over it,
and all around nothing but a shining extent of tawny sand, out­
spread like an interminable lion’s skin. Mary lays the Child gently
on the dry sand under such shade as the acacia affords, near to
the edge of the well, while the sun is sloping to its setting, so near
that the risen moon is momentarily filling with distinctive light.
Let us draw near in spirit to adore.
As we gaze upon him, we are struck by his likeness to his
Mother. That likeness is one of his veils,—also, well considered,
one of his disclosures too, disclosing the reality of his Mother's
grandeur, disclosing also that Divinity which she resembles, in
whose image man was originally created, and no man such an
image of it as he, because all others were but images of his cre­
ated nature, images of God through him. So that even the Human
Face of Jesus was unspeakably divine.
What can be more weak and helpless than that little weary
Child, in whose first months this hard pilgrimage to Egypt was
to be endured? Yet both that weakness and that weariness are full
of mysteries. In his weakness faith sees his omnipotence. That
little One is boundless, boundless as an unimaginable sea; and
what awful might does not such immensity suppose? We are
obliged to call his power by the name of power, because we have
no other word to express that sovereignty which our highest ideas
of power dishonor rather than rightly estimate. It is something
which can reach strange, nameless heights beyond the region of
any intelligible miracles. It implies unthinkable depths and possi­
bilities of facile, gigantic, indefinable energy, all lying as it were
coiled up in that handful of human life, that tiny burden of
swaddling-clothes upon the sand. He is weary because he has been
carried all day, poor, uncomplaining Babe, hunted by men as if
he were some beautiful wild beast of the wilderness whom they
were eager to slay for the loveliness of his spoils. He has been
for hours helpless and cramped in the bandages that swathed him,
and his limbs ache with the monotonous posture. Yet not the less,

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radier all the more, we recognise him as the strong, unfatigued
Creator, who built the mountains, anchored the seas, lighted the
volcanoes, and is at that moment making the crust of the great
and ever-quaking earth undulate like a poplar in the wind or an
uncut hay-field in the breath of the sunrise. He it is who sent the
swift stars on their rushing courses, and built the ponderous worlds
out of an evcr-flucnt web of weightless elements, and is now undistractedly attending to all those things as he lies upon the sand.
It is he—to take but one instance from nature’s least important
provinces—who is at that moment thoughtfully, considerately, spe­
cially, proportionately ministering to every atom of phosphoric
life in all the transitory, heaving, moon-sparkling hollows of the
liquid sea.
Sleep comes over him, as he lies upon the sand. What a wonder
also is his sleep! He is the Unbeginning Eternal. He was an
eternity old before creation began, and has never known vicissi­
tude. Yet to his creature’s eyes he has had a grand everlasting
life of portentous changes, which yet stir not his adorable immuta­
bility. To him what a mysterious mutation is the shadowy spell
of sleep, which takes the light of his eyes captive so swiftly and
so stealthily, his infantine weakness succumbing to its approach!
He has shut his eyes to the sunset, and is in the dark. Yet there
is no night to him. We know him best as unapproachable light.
Were God,—do not look up to heaven, but on that little Slumberer beneath the acacia-branches, —were God to close his eyes in
sleep one instant, all created life would perish utterly. All matter
and spirit would rush together, and cease to be, and time and
space be buried in the instantaneous universal grave of things.
Yet look how closely the eyelids are drawn down, how regularly
the bosom lifts itself in little heavings, how more and more the
audible the deeper breathings are! God is really asleep.
He wakes and weeps. He wakes, the intermission of whose
vigilance is impossible. He weeps, who is illimitable, uncreated
joy. All pleasures that we can think or name, or think further
than we can name, vast, deep, rich, unutterable, steadfast, ungrow­
ing, are in him, or rather he is a gladness beyond them all. In

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truth, the very perfections of all conceivable joys would be im­
perfections in his joy, and detractions from his blessedness. Look
at the little bird sipping from the huge sheet of an American
lake, then back to its nest in the silver fir. So will countless angels
and men be eternally drinking vast torrents of joy on the merest
brink of that Babe's being, and he be no more drained, and no
more affected by it,—nay, less so, because in reality not at all,—
than gigantic Lake Superior, whence the little singing-bird took
one sip and flew away. Is it the bands which are around him that
hurt him, and make him stoop to the facile tears which are the
law of childhood? Infancy is truly a prisoner in the incommodious
swaddling-clothes of those lands, but in that Prisoner on the sand
we recognise and worship the Immense. It is he who is the ever­
lasting freedom of the world. He, who is there circumscribed
within a given number of inches, in reality is at that instant
expatiating beyond the clouds, and the sunsets, and the great stars,
and the frightening vastness of the heavy circling systems, and
finds no term, comes to no limit, overflowing all possibilities of
space in the grandeur of his simplicity. When we have filled with
him all the worldless abysses that we can imagine, we are then
no nearer to an external edge of that Babe's life than we were
before. But are his tears always silent tears, or does he, like other
children, utter cries, cries of piteous eloquence, inarticulate ap­
peals to a mother’s love which somehow finds the right interpreta­
tions for them? If it were so, how his puling cry would thrill
our inmost soul, a thousand times more than the archangel's
trumpet in the night of doom! From out of the complaining
treble of that cry faith would disembarrass the Voice of the Ever­
lasting, the Voice which Scripture compares to the sound of many
waters: yet, like the noises of the dumb, his cry is without lan­
guage. He is without words, who is the Father’s Word. He seems
to know no language, of some one sound of whose inward music
all languages are but a fragmentary, yet what a ravishing revela­
tion, a revelation which cannot now gather itself up or back into
the oneness which it has forgotten! All language is but one strain,
escaped to earth, from that silent jubilee of the creatureless maj­

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esty of God, in those old inconceivable epochs, which were not
epochs, because there was no time.
Look at his poverty, whose every circumstance claims tenderest
pity and devoutest tears. We see it in the faces and the garb of
Mary and of Joseph, and in the barrenness of provision which is
around, beneath the tent of the open sky. Yet in that Child of
poverty we adore the majesty before whom the heavenly hier­
archies are at that instant prostrate, and tremble, even though
they comprehend it not in its fulness. His riches arc inexhaustible
and incalculable. He is the plenitude of creation, out of whom
millions of new hungering and thirsting creations could draw
their manifold gleaming wealth and make no impression on the
fulness. His treasures are not only indescribable in their degree,
but unimaginable in kind, with infinities which arc not suited to
our wants, or to any expenditure of creatures, but belong, if we
may so speak, to the transcendental seeming needs of the illim­
itable intelligence and holiness of God, to those adorable necessi­
ties of the Divine Life out of which inevitably proceed the Eternal
Generation of the Son and the Eternal Procession of the Spirit.
In the Child vouchsafing to be eager at his Mother’s breast,
we adore, as the hymn of the Church suggests to us, the God who
feeds the world, and all its creatures, with unforgetting providence.
The beasts in their desert lairs, the birds of the untrodden woods,
the fishes of the sea, the populous insects beneath the barks of
trees or under the stones of the fields,—all these, together with
sinners in their palaces and the homeless poor in the rich men's
streets, are being fed by him. He is catering for them even at
that very hour, feeding Mary and Joseph themselves by that desert
well, and managing, with all the strange varieties of climate and
season, the provisioning of the million-peopled earth, with all its
attendant arrangements of meteorology and chemistry. In those
two sciences, infants now, but promising some day to be giants,
the Babe could have told us secrets which would startle the wisest
scholars of the present generation and revolutionize all the science
of the world.
As the breaths of wind pass momentarily over the evening

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waters, dimpling them with smiles of light, so the unaccountable
smiles of childhood light themselves in the infant face, and pass
away. The Babe on the sand also smiles; and his smile is the
expression of his innumerable perfections in the marvellous unity
of a human countenance. Smiles reveal character: so his reveals
the character of the All-holy. It is the smile of Him who is per­
haps at that moment judging a soul, and saving it by his mercy.
It is the smile of Him who sees hell, and is keeping it in order,
feeding its fires, and by his momentary judgments adding to its
desolate population in the glory of his justice. It is a smile in
which we may catch, like the glow of sunset on tower or tree, the
reflection of that grand worship in heaven, which He there beholds
who is still there, having come on earth without ever leaving the
Bosom of the Father, and which he not only beholds but is actually
receiving. There is a wondering look, too, in his little eyes, when
he smiles. Yet what wonder can he have? To him belong the
knowledge and the sight of all hearts. His glances illuminate all
secrets. His eye without effort takes in at one gaze all the realms
of space and all the kingdoms of spiritual intelligence. To it lie
open at that moment all the hordes of thoughts of each angel or
soul that ever was or will be, whether expressed in conversation,
treasured up in books, or embedded in the unuttered silentness of
profoundest cogitation. Must not his look of wonder be part of
the dissembling of his lowliness, when his consciousness is at
that moment dwelling in the light of all possible science, counting
every sand in the wide wilderness, and noting the movements and
biography of every errant fish in the vast seas, down even to each
light-flash that glances from their silver scales? He sees Calvary
also, and the dread monotony of the changeful Passion, and us
with our sins, and himself, and the Father, and the Holy Ghost,
and wonders not, though in his beautiful sincere deceit he wears
that wondering look of human infancy.
What separate claims also to our worship has every feature of
his countenance! The lips which Mary with timid frequency will
dare to kiss, they are the very lips which are one day to pronounce
our last irrevocable doom. They will perhaps speak words in

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heaven, like the grave niinute-bells of eternity, each of which will
surpass the revelations of earth, and will feed our souls with
tingling wisdom and divinely impassioned love. Those lips are
rosy now in the freshness of their childhood; but they have one
day to be white, withered, parched, and blood-mottled on the
Cross. But to speak not of separate features, but of his whole
beauty, it is not so much a disguise, as a tempering down, of his
uncreated loveliness, a sheathing of his Godhead incomparably
compassionate and wonderful. It is like himself, like his own love,
nearest to a revelation of what he is. We all long to see the Father.
Ages ago, Philip, the Apostle, told his Master so in the name of
all of us. Why is it that the Father so draws us, so pulls at the
strings of our hearts, as if we must see him, or be homeless and
holily repining till we have seen him? Look at the Child upon
the sand. He is the veritable beauty of the Father, the beauty the
Father sees in himself, all of it, a complete as well as a faithful
representation of it. Moreover, the Father’s love of him, that
beautiful coequal Word, and the beautiful Word’s love of him,
not return of love, but contemporary, unbeginning love, are, or
is, (what shall we say?) the beautiful, jubilant, ever-proceeding
Spirit. If we sin-maimed creatures, who have barely crawled out
of our evil into the sunshine of God’s compassion, can see all
this in his childish beauty on the sands, what did Mary see?
But the sun is setting fast. Now the orb has sunk, sending
a quivering effulgence of gold and crimson from its low level
on the horizon over the unbroken smoothness of the stony sands.
Mary and Joseph fall on their knees to pray, as if the pulses of
light rang golden bells up in heaven to tell them it was compline­
time. It is not to the heaven above they look, nor to the ever­
present Invisible, whose presence men acknowledge by shrouding
their faces with their hands; but, like believers who steady them­
selves in prayer by fixing their eyes upon the tabernacle, they
look and pray to that Almighty Child whom Mary has laid for a
moment on the sand.
Who can doubt the subject of their contemplations? Verbum
caro factum est: the Word was made flesh! It is the joy of joys

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to the whole earth. It is the mystery within whose precincts other
mysteries dwell in light. It is the making visible of the invisible
queen of all mysteries, the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Of all
other mysteries but that, the Incarnation is itself the chief.
Creation ranges itself beneath its banners. It was therefore the
Divinity of the Word which Mary and Joseph were adoring.
I he more that visible circumstances seemed to put forward em­
phatically and prominently our Lord's Humanity the more did
they provoke faith in his Divinity. But the Mother and the Fosterfather did not approach that mystery as we have done. We have
had to feel our way to it, to persuade ourselves of it by as it were
touching it, and making sure of it palpably, by means of geography,
scenery, and the measures of time and space which science gives
us, limiting even while enlarging our conceptions. They saw it
in a simpler way, by higher processes of the soul, as became
the grandeur of their holiness and the privilege of their vicinity
to God. Still it was faith in his Divinity, which was the soul of
their communing with him. The actual practical faith, that our
Lord is God, is something higher and sweeter than meditations on
the mystery of the Incarnation, or on his Divine Perfections. It is
our very life as his redeemed and pardoned creatures. It is the
basis of all devotion, as it is the ground of all holiness. Without
this faith, and the holy fear and reverence which spring from it.
devotions to the Sacred Humanity have little better than an artistic
beauty. The deeper we go into this doctrine, the more real seems
the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament, the more lofty the majesty
of Mary. But the Sacred Infancy is the especial field in which this
faith should expatiate. Comparisons are seldom true in sacred
things; else we might almost say that Bethlehem is more a devo­
tion of our Lord’s Divinity even than Calvary; and yet it is his
Divinity which is the soul of each mystery of the Passion. The
vision of the Holy Child to the Venerable Margaret of Beaune,
with the words Verbum caro factum est written on the palm of
his hand in letters of gold, is a kind of symbol of what our devo­
tion to the Sacred Infancy ought to be. We should desire that
our Lord would do for us spiritually what he did for St. Mary

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Magdalen of Pazzi materially, on whose heart those same words
were engraven. He himself told St. Gertrude that every time a
Christian bowed reverently when they were uttered, he offered
for him to the Eternal Father all the fruits of his Sacred Human­
ity; and on one occasion—by divine suggestion, if I remember
rightly—Margaret of Beaune spent several hours simply repeating
these potent words, in order to impetrate from the Eternal Father
mercy for blasphemers. With a like spiirt the Church bids us sink
upon our knee as we daily pronounce these words in the last
Gospel at the altar.
In these days we must take great heed to our faith in our
Lord's Divinity. Heresy one while neglects our Blessed Lord’s
Humanity, and another while his Divinity. In our own times it
is the fashion of men to develop, as they phrase it, the human
features in Christ. They talk, in the empty, pedantic grandilo­
quence of the day, of exhibiting and producing the human ele­
ment of Jesus. Thus to an unbelieving people religion has neither
facts nor doctrines in the strict sense of those words, but only
symbols and views. In astronomy men delight in making the
dubious nebula resolve itself into the lucid separateness of indi­
vidual stars; but in theology they reverse this process. There
they are fain to superinduce vagueness over what has once been
clear, so as to make theology a shapeless nebular light, about
which they can theorize and conjecture as they please, finding
in its huge spiral convolutions or the lineaments of its ragged
edges such fantastic likenesses as made the men of old give their
names to the constellations. Now, whence this love of vagueness
in the matter of religion, joined with such a craving for definite­
ness in all other departments of human knowledge, but from a
desire to evade the yoke of faith without the inconvenient bold­
ness of publicly rejecting it? On our part, therefore, the spirit
of reparation must be always on the watch to bring its tender
succors to the rescue of our Lord’s honor at the point of attack,
wherever that may be. So now, while the faith keeps us in an
equable and intelligent entireness about our belief, reparation

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will lovingly devote itself to a more than usually fervent worship
of the Eternal Word.
But in the desert of Mary, Joseph, and the Babe, we almost
need to be forgiven even this momentary glance at an evil world.
The swift twilight passes. The night-wind sighs heavily over the
wilderness. All but the wild beasts and the houseless poor are in
their homes. But tonight the Creator himself is one of the house
less poor. He is without a home, the hollow of whose hand is all
creation’s home. He is without shelter, whose Heart is the one
eternal shelter of all angelic spirits and of all human souls. He is
homeless who is as it were himself the home of that Eternal
Father, whose Bosom is in return his own eternal home.

Chapter VI
SOUL AND BODY

The fountain of creation is the mind of God. Hence there is
a light and odor of eternity even about the most perishable of
creatures, or the most evanescent of material phenomena. They
reveal God. They are emanations of his wisdom and disclosures
of his beauty. They are his works of art, his peculiar thoughts,
his music and his poems. There is nothing in creation which does
not bring something of his along with it,—nothing which a student
of God would not recognise for his by the fashion of it, inde­
pendent of his knowledge that all things are from God. A single
tree is a divine poem. It is unimaginable to any creature, to whom
the model has not been shown. It is a many-sided wonder, having
a deep science in it as well as a deep fountain of beauty. Yet
no two trees, even of the same kind, are alike in the interlacing
of their branches, the arrangements of their foliage, or their posi­
tion with regard to the light of the sun, whose beams play silent
music on its rising or depressed boughs and amidst its quivering
leaves, as fingers play upon the keys. Yet trees are but one class,
an inferior and subordinate class, among the countless poems
which form the harmonious unity of creation. When we rise,
therefore, through the rational world into the world of grace,
still more complete and awe-inspiring are the creatures of God,
regarded as manifestations of his invisible beauty and the literally
infinite variety of his simply unity. But it is the lowest creatures
which bring most home to us that all creatures have a real dignity,
and a significance which entitles them to reverence, simply as
being the creatures of God, as having his mark upon them and
savoring of his fragrance, which is as well known to our spiritual
senses as the odor of that flower on earth which we may happen
most of all to love. It is but one proof of the consistency of the
248

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Scotist theology that the same school which gives so dignified a
place to creation in its philosophy should also differ from other
schools in treating the beauty of God as a separate divine Attribute
in itself. A beauty-haunted mind, such as the minds of poets are,
secs the wisdom and the potver, the justice and the mercy, of
God all the more clearly in creation, because it sees them ah in
the light of God's beauty. For beauty is something more than
either wisdom or power: it is something additional to them, the
lustre which make them plain, as the sun makes plain the sep­
arate crags of the distant mountain, which in the shade appear
to be one smooth and purple mass. A thing might conceivably
be wise yet not beautiful, teeming with evidences of power yet
repulsive because disproportionate or inharmonious. But all
things in nature and grace are beautiful as well as wise, beautiful
as well as powerful; and they are beautiful because the beauty of
God clings to them in virtue of their origin, and to the very last
there is something worshipful in the least of them, because that
clinging beauty never altogether leaves them.
From these considerations we gain a view of creation which
in these days it is of great importance to keep before us. The
battle-fields of the world change with the history of nations. So
is it in the history of intellect. It can hardly be doubted that the
battle-field of faith and unbelief is moving from the Incarnation
to the mystery of Creation, from the Divinity of our Lord to the
Attributes of God. It is true that faith and unbelief are always
fighting at all their points of contact; out the thick of the battle
now is amidst the facts and difficulties of creation. Hence a true
view of creatures and their significance is of the greatest conse­
quence, as well that we may avoid unintelligently defending what
we are not bound to defend and what may turn out at last to
have all along been indefensible, as that we may know better how
to defend what otherwise our ignorance might betray. No erudite
theologian will refuse to admit that his science owes more to
Aristotle, and even to Plato, than it has suffered from them, though
he will not be backward to acknowledge that the influence of
those two mighty heathen has not been an unmixed benefit. So

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in the present circumstances of the world, and looking at theology
as the science upon which the practical conversion of souls is
based, it seems as if the physical sciences were the natural allies
of theology, and a profound study of them an essential part of
a theological education. They are of far greater importance now
than metaphysics or psychology, and have connected themselves
with a greater number of fundamental questions, while they are
also in a state of forwardness and system which renders them
much more capable of being used by the theologian. Perhaps it
would not be rash even to prophesy that the fresh start and new
development of the mental sciences, to which we must all be
anxiously looking forward, are waiting for the further advance
of certain of the physical sciences, in whose future discoveries
mental science will find another starting-point.
Hence there are two Christian views of creatures, one belong­
ing to theological speculation, the other, not without an accurate
theological account of itself, to practical asceticism. Both views
are so true, and at the same time so indispensable, that no devout
believer can hold the one to the exclusion of the other without
damaging his devotion, as well as making his faith less intelligent;
for both views are necessary to holiness, and both are necessary
to a just appreciaton of doctrine. If we look at creatures in com­
parison with God himself, we are so struck with their vileness,
their nothingness, and their transitoriness, that, for the moment,
we can see nothing else about them; and all else which is predi­
cated of them seems untrue. In such a comparison as this, crea­
tures are simply passive. But it will happen not unfrequently,
through our fault rather than through theirs, that they appear
to us as obscuring God and eclipsing him; and we are then led
to regard them with something like an indignant contempt. Or
again we look at God full of love, and we burn as love will burn,
with a desire to make sacrifices for him, and so prove our love,
and then creatures present themselves to us as victims, as mate­
rials for sacrifice, and for sacrifices in which we ourselves are
the sufferers rather than the creatures which we offer, and it is
by this process that we gain our entrance into the wide fields of

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voluntary mortification. Another while our piety takes the shape
of self-distrust, and we forbear to use creatures even where we
may lawfully use them, because our experience of ourselves teaches
us that such a use unmans us, or in our particular case is likely to
run into indulgence. Out of a combination of these views pro­
ceeds asceticism. It is therefore founded not so much in a disesteem of creatures as in a homage to their attractiveness, a homage
prompted by the generosity of our love of God, or wrung from
us by an exceeding fear of ourselves, or stimulated by the gen­
erous spirit of uncommanded sacrifice. What more honorable
office can creatures fill than to supply us with a means of serving
God by a voluntary or prudential abstinence from the pleasures
which they put before us?
This ascetical view of creatures is practical to us every day
of our lives, and therefore is the most ordinary and common
point of view for us. Yet, if we make it too exclusive, we shall
some day wake up to a sense of unreality in it, an unreality which
is not properly in the view itself but in our exclusive way of
holding it; and the consequence of this will be that we shall recoil
too far the other way. Experience unfortunately presents us with
many instances of this. Men, whose fervor began with an immod­
erate, indiscriminate, and exaggerated view of the evil of creatures,
have actually become worldly, self-indulgent, and comfort-loving
as soon as they have perceived that their own excessive opinions
were untheological and unintellectual. Yet they still use their
old language, even when their practice has changed. A man who
talks loudly against worldliness and yet is wedded to his little
personal comforts is harder to convert to a real inward life than
the vilest and most habit-ridden sinner among the sons of men.
So seldom is fierceness in earnest, even when it believes itself
to be most so; for, if true earnestness is not sharp with self only,
it is so at least with self only, it is so at least with self first of all
and most of all.
From the other point of view, which is equally true, creatures
seem full of dignity and greatness, because they are the creatures
of God. They are manifestations of his inward life. They are,

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each and all of them, master-pieces. They have had no patterns
outside of God himself. They copied no pre-existing models.
They are, as was said above, unimaginable by angels or men. Λ11
things are unimaginable which have neither predecessors nor ana­
logies. The meanest creature upon earth is mantled with the
refulgence of God's beauty, and betokens what we can only call
an unspeakable inventiveness, though that is too mean a word to
use of creative wisdom. Thus it is that creatures teach us so much
of God, and lead us to him by the very pleadings of their loveli­
ness. They can be even elevated, as in the case of the Sacraments,
into physical communications of God, and celestial agents in the
kingdom of grace. The blessing of the Church can surcharge
matter with the most wonderful powers, and endow it with a sort
of supernatural life stretching even beyond the energy of angels.
There are no portals like the Sacraments for introducing us into
the actual realities of human life; but they also open directly
into the mysterious movements of the life-giving life of God.
Creatures are the materials of our duties, the objects of our sci­
ences, the divine ideas of our arts, the discipline of our affections,
and the ministers of pure and intellectual and blameless enjoy­
ment. Who then can think lightly or speak disparagingly of
them? Even to God himself we would dare to say that creatures
are of importance; else why should he create them? Can any
thing God does be unimportant, or not be founded in deepest
reasons, the least of which are of more consequence than the wars
and revolutions of earth? Creation was not a necessity with the
Creator, but also it was no mere accidental overflow, no irre­
pressible surplus of wisdom and power, no simple incident in the
eternity of God. It is an action deeply rooted in him, and separable
from him only by a mental violence, which is practically an
untruth. Above all things it must be remembered that creation
was more for his own sake than for ours, as it is the blissful per­
fection of his Nature to seek himself in all things. It is because
self-seeking is the rule of the divine sanctity, that it is the negation
of all sanctity in a creature. Such a primary seeking of self is
in us the practical impiety of trying to change places with God,

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while a certain orderly love of self is the foundation of our duty,
and a dim shadowing in our finite natures of the magnificent and
adorable self-seeking of God. Hence we venture to say that créa
lures are, in some inexplicable sense, of importance even to the
unbeginning majesty of God.
Creation can add nothing to the essential glory of God. We
are the creatures of comparisons, because we are finite. We can
only learn values or estimate truths by comparing them with
others. We honor one thing by despising another. We can hardly
do justice to a thing without first doing an injustice to some­
thing else. Hence it comes to pass that God's accidental glory
seems a very slight thing to us compared with the immeasurable
ocean and indefinable splendor of his essential glory. Yet God's
accidental glory, and indeed the slightest measure of it, is a greater
thing than we can reach even by our conceptions. It is the result
of the total of creation, and is its final cause as well. Yet, as we
saw just now, it is irreverent to suppose creation to be otherwise
than of great moment even to God himself. His accidental glory
is of moment to him; for he cannot pursue what is of no moment.
It is indeed infinitely below his essential glory; but it is at the
same time infinitely above our powers of measurement. It is
something very intimate to him, although it is not intrinsic. In
truth, the whole idea of sanctity would be lowered if we lightly
esteemed God’s accidental glory; for what is all sanctity, even
the sanctity of our Blessed Lord’s Human Nature, and indeed
the whole scheme of redemption, but a contribution to the acci­
dental glory of the Most High? Thus there is a very important
sense in which it is true that the worth of creatures to God is
greater than their worth to us. His possession of them is great
riches, even to him. Every thing about God is unfathomable;
and it is far beyond the stretch of our minds to conceive what
glory, and what gladness, and what manifold unutterable com
placency he may have in his properly of creation. The single fact
that we ourselves are part of that complacency is a lifelong con­
tentment to our souls.
Now, looked at from this point of view, all creation is as it

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were in each separate creature. Each creature is a distinct, unre­
sembled, and unequalled disclosure of the divine beauty, and at
the same time has such a relation to the whole, most often invisible
to us, that it cannot be separated from it, and thus it enters into
the rights of the whole, so far as it is God’s, even though it may
be very low in the graduated scale upon which the hierarchies
of creatures are constituted. The bearings of theology, regarded
as a whole, are sure to be misapprehended, if this view of creatures
is not borne in mind; and there are not a few separate and most
important problems in theology to which this view of creatures is
the only key. To him who for his own good or that of others
would speculate upon God, this view of creatures must be as
familiar as the other view must be to him in his daily ascetical
relations with God himself. Yet it has been not an uncommon
thing for men to miss this truth, and then to wonder at the con­
fusion and want of coherence which they detect in their own
speculations. Many systems of theology are ragged and ungainly
for want of a philosophical view of creatures and creation.
While then believing love humbly dares to congratulate God
upon any one of his intrinsic perfections, it may also congratulate
him upon his absolute possession of creatures, as upon something
altogether worthy of his own blessed Self. God is indeed rich
in his creation. How wonderful are the revelations of science!
Yet they have hardly got below the surface of things. Rather it
is with the surface of things that they mainly deal. Geology
unveils to us but the surface of time, astronomy the surface of
space. It has but just opened to us “the delicious sense of inde­
terminate size.” More will come of it. The microscope rather
enables us to suspect the delicacy of creation than actually makes
it visible to us. Chemistry makes us wonder at the character of
matter rather than explains its nature. The doctrine of probabili­
ties is but a murmur of laws speeding on their courses in cycles
more vast than we can comprehend. Our whole science is but
a faint outline of what science will be to the generations which
come after us; and the science of the future, what will it be in
comparison with the realities of creation as God knows them?

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255

What are the kingdoms of matter to the kingdom of men, and
what the kingdom of men to the gorgeous empire of the manykinded angels?
We must learn to look at creatures from God’s point of view,
and we have seen that his own perfections involve the importance
of creatures in his sight. If we lay this view aside, our theology
will detach itself more and more from the mind and movement
of the living generations, and so will abdicate that sovereignty
over other sciences which is not only its lawful heritage, but is
now more than ever within its grasp. Better times are coming;
yet these times also are very good. All things considered, the
times are miraculously good. Their very darkness is in favor of
divine things, and the light of all times is already both the produce
and the property of that which is divine among us. As theology
is the science of all others which takes its stand upon the past,
so there is no science which has so many duties to the future.
It is a living science, not a lifeless standard. It is a life of itself,
not a mere measure of other lives,—a limit, certainly, yet a limit
enlarging all other limitations. The vast circuit and wide expan­
sion of scientific discovery is an augury of a yet more magnificent
theology, one which will enable us to envy less those scholastic
glories in whose sunset we are living. The world of mind may
have glacial periods analogous to the geological one; but in this
respect they differ, that they are mostly short, and look darker
at a distance than they were when they were present. There are
nights in the world’s history; but they are more like eclipses than
nights, because they are so brief, and, moreover, there is light
enough in their darkness to see with. To a man who lies wakeful,
unless he be ill also, the morning always comes suddenly, and
earlier than it seemed due. So will it be with that better future
of the Church and world, for which we are all looking somewhat
wearily, but quite undoubtingly. Even now does not the future
at times dart into our very present with a kind of frightening con­
solation, and break upon our ears in silent hours of inward listen­
ing like a song of joy, and of such joy as is not the joy of our own
day, but a joy surprised with its own exceeding joyfulness? We

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BF.TH LEU F. Μ

hear evermore the tread of the future, like the footsteps of a bene­
factor coming to us in our hour of need. The times arc good,
and on no account to be complained of; but in a wicked world all
good times are always better for what they promise than for what
they give. They arc times singular and apart, and visibly burdened
with a mission, as all good times seem to be to those who live in
them, and think. We cannot think without hoping. Thought in
God's world is hope, because the world is God's. It is a bright
gift, for others’ good as well as for our own, when we can under­
stand and welcome the future, while it is yet only pushing its
fibres under the present, and so to unloving minds seems rather
like a disturbance than a quiet blessing.
But let us return from this digression. We may think for
long of the riches of God in the possession of creatures before
we exhaust the thought; and when we have thought it out as far
as we can, it will lift us so high that we shall be able to take a
more worthy view of his essential glory and his own intrinsic
plenitude, a view more worthy than we ever dreamed was pos­
sible. A high view of creation does for our idea of God what the
true doctrine of our Blessed Lady does. For every measurable
height to which it raises her, it raises our appreciation of him
immeasurably. We find God everywhere, in our low thoughts
as well as in our high. But it is the inevitable result of mean
views of creation to give us poor views of God. Yet mean views
are tempting, because they are easy, and because they dispense
our minds from cbracing so wide a circle of intelligence.
God possesses wonderful creatures in this creation, of which
we know something. In other distant outlying creations he may
possess creatures yet more wonderful. But nowhere does he pos­
sess any creature which is to compare with the Sacred Humanity
of Jesus, the type and cause of all creation. It is this Sacred
Humanity, the Soul and Body of the Incarnate Word, which
we are to consider in the present chapter; and the remarks which
have paved the way to it will be found not to have been irrelevant
to the purpose.^ All parts of creation influence all other parts. The
most distant star tells in some way upon the most lowly wild

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257

flower on our insignificant planet. But no part of creation is so
vastly influential as the Sacred Humanity of our Blessed Lord,)
the Humanity which is above the angels, and adored by them!
'Fake away the Church, which is built upon it, abrogate the Sacra
ments, which are his own personal residence and agency among us,
remove him from his mediatorial throne in heaven, abolish the
Four Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, take out of
language, literature, and thought all the ideas which are growths
or prophecies of the Incarnation, extract out of false religions
all the semblances and counterfeits of the Incarnation, take away
from sorrow and gladness and strife even the mere material pic
tures of Jesus and his Mother, and would not the extinguishing
of the light of the sun be radically a less change, in effect a milder
revolution? Arhe Sacred Humanity is a creature the uprooting of
which would be the unbinding of all creation J
Let us attentively consider the influence of the Sacred Human­
ity at this very hour, at any given hour, while we write or while
we read. The vast heaven, where the Vision of God is unveiled,
is all thrilling with its influence. The huge circumferences of
heaven’s various spheres are trembling with the life and pulses
of the Sacred Humanity. It has unveiled that Vision, unveiled it
even to the angels. At this moment it is peopling heaven with
continual fresh multitudes, even of infants, earth’s infants, who
enter there through it magnificent, wise, full-grown, Christ-like
men, who through the marvellous waters of baptism have pierced
the earth, grown, budded, bloomed, borne fruit, and garnered
themselves in heaven, in less than an hour perhaps of time. Re­
deemed penitents are entering there, with long inward histories
all full of the mysterious action of the Sacred Humanity. Perfect
love has leaped at once a minute ago, this minute also, and the
next minute will do so, and all minutes, from earth straight to
heaven; but it had hold of the hand of Jesus while it leaped.
Long sojourners in purgatory have just arrived upon the bright
shores, to begin their eternal youth, miracles of salvation, hardwon trophies of the Precious Blood, whose drops made those
fires medicinal even while it allayed them. Look at the un-

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wearied angels, upright spirits, beaming in their magnificence!
They are the subjects of the Sacred Humanity. That Human
Nature is the cause of their being in heaven, the fountain as well
as the occasion of all their graces, the means as well as the sus­
taining of their prolific glory. There is not an angel in those
burning rings, but Man made him what he was, enabled him
to do what he did, and placed him royally and securely there.
The Sacred Humanity is the actual light of the heavenly
Jerusalem,—whatever that may mean; and it doubtless means a
thousand things. It is both sun and moon, and other sun and
moon are needed not because of it. It is the light in which the
Vision is seen. The manifold functions of light to terrestrial life
are but so many faint foreshadowings of what the light of the
Lamb is to that grand, deep, broad life above. How fair in
that light, meek, distinct, yet in a jewelled blaze of spiritual
splendor, a very unspeakable starry heaven of itself, rises Mary’s
throne! Yet she was placed there by the Sacred Humanity. The
Sacred Humanity is the whole account of her of whom the highest
theology on earth can give no account that may content us.
Throughout all those vast courts of blessedness, living that dread
life before the unaverted Face of the Most Holy Trinity, a life
of overwhelming, blissful fire, there is no adequate worship of
the Blessed Trinity except by the Sacred Humanity. The souls
of men make lowly music there. The spirits of angels tune louder
lyres with a more daring inspiration. The being of Mary throws
up soft ocean-waves to the foot of the throne, which come so near,
yet fall short so infinitely. The Sacred Heart alone worships the
Threefold Majesty in adorable perfection, by virtue of its union
with the Word. Heaven therefore is not imaginable without that
Human Nature enthroned and worshipped there.
If we look at earth, we find the action of the Sacred Humanity
no less potent, no less universal, no less indispensable. Can the
grace, which there is upon the earth this day, be measured by
any one but God? In how many millions of souls, whether in
the Church or slowly drawing toward it, is not grace at work,
manifold and multiform, wedding itself to all manner of opposite

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259

occasions, steering all manner of diverging circumstances, adapt­
ing itself to how many varieties of fortune and position! Here
with a sort of feeble beauty it is preluding in a heathen soul, or
hiddenly sweetening the bitterness of misbelief. Here it is faintly
prophesying over the soul, softly as a cloud-shadow rests upon the
lea, of some supernatural vocation which is gathering to a head
all day, like the stately preparations of a summer storm. There
it is fighting with sin, clamoring in the soul, yet inaudible, striking
hard, but in the fury of battle all unfelt. There again it is keep­
ing at high-tide the calm fulness of grace in some holy practised
soul. Elsewhere it is coming in various sevenfold array to those
Sacraments which are streaming, and rushing, and glancing, and
resounding all day and night in the Church, like the mountain
cataract in the woods. Elsewhere again its name is legion, and it
is trooping to the death-beds of men. In darkness and in light,
upon bad and good, in the safe ark of the Church or amidst those
drowning in the outer deluge, grace is at work, even beyond the
suspicion of those of us who deem of it most liberally; and the
single sufficient fountain of all this grace is the Sacred Humanity,
whether the grace scatter itself ubiquitous over the outlying world,
or be almost irresistibly concentrated in the Church and Sacra­
ments.
Neither are the effects of this singular and pre-eminent Human
Nature less wonderful, although they are less important, on the
mind of earth. The Incarnation has been built up into the whole
fabric of our present literature, even in its most irreligious parts.
The commonest notions of what is divine have taken their shape
from it. The sickly eulogies of a misty, progressive, unindividual­
ized humanity have caught from it whatever in them is not mere
sound or insane affectation. Every tenth stone at least in the
palace of literature is an idea of the Incarnation. It is the novelty
and freshness of all that the modern world has thought, and sung,
and said. Without it unbelief would not know how to make
itself attractive for an hour. Art lives by it. and without it would
descend into a pagan copyist to-morrow. Take away the Incarna­
tion, and we may doubt whether art would ever recover itself

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BETHLEHEM

from the abyss of unhelpful antiquarianism into which it would
fall. Systems of philosophy either embody the Incarnation as an
element in what they affirm, or they take their shape and con­
sistence from their antagonism to it. In no way and by no manner
of device can they clear themselves of it, and exist and utter
themselves calmly and loftily as if it had never been. Politics
borrow from it even while they are limiting its action; and diplo­
macy, just in proportion as it is inwardly hostile, grows outwardly
respectful. That enthroned Human Nature is the keystone of
every arch which sustains modern civilization. Any sort of glory
the world could attain to without it now would be but the glory
of a ruin. Is there any province of the human mind in which we
could now do without it and the congenial ideas to which it has
given birth? No present is possible which the past has not begot­
ten, and the present is the only road to the future. Hence the
Sacred Humanity has become simply indispensable and inevitable
to every possible development and most unthought-of revolution
of the world’s life, even in spheres the most remote from truth
and from religion.
The Sacred Humanity is the king of earth, and is actually resi­
dent among us in countless palaces. It leads a hidden life, one
most fruitful department of which consists of nothing else than
a continual averting of judgments and calamities from the whole
race whose nature has been honored by the Word’s assumption
of it.) It holds the elements in control, and renders their might
more benignant than their laws would have led us to anticipate.
It bridles the earthquake, and tames the pestilence. It keeps
men safe on an earth which is always quivering and dipping,
turns the wild floods at their most perilous angles, guides into
the soft unhurt earth thousands of thunderbolts which would have
scathed life, or limb, or property. It beautifies the rough ways of
death, even while it bids us tread them as a punishment from
which there can be no dispensation. There is not perhaps one
human heart from which it has not averted many unknown yet
once imminent sorrows, and which it has not saved from pains
of the flesh which would have been harder to bear than we like

SOUL AND BODY

now to think.

261

Wc do not know what we owe to Mass, and the

Blessed Sacrament, of comfort, peace, and unharmed common

life. Last of all, and this would fill a volume, this Sacred Human
ity is itself the love of earth, and the magnet of all earth’s holy
love, causing life to be softer and more bearable, making all that

is noble in us divine, ennobling what would else be mean, and
just when life seems coming to a point when it must become unen­
durable, opening a way and letting us down into some sudden bed

of roses, which have no thorns, and are so far from enervating
the soul that they fortify it as with some heavenly elixir.
Beneath the earth is that strange, almost unimaginable, Church

of the suffering souls, a work of divine art, a creation of love
which is never at fault for means to secure its ends, yet not sup­

plementary, as nothing in creation is, but part of the great merciful

design for the discipline and success of man. Over that strange
life of fiery suffering and of assured love, blended in equal and
equable intensities, are cast the spells of the Sacred Humanity.

Nowhere is gloom so soft, nowhere are shadows so beautiful, as
in the land of purgatory. There are few of the redeemed to whom
the geography of that valley of expectation must not one day
become familiar. But it is through the Sacred Humanity that we
enter there.

Jesus is our judge as Man, not as the Word; and

it is at his bidding, almost anticipated by our own love of perfect

purity, that we enter there. His sentence is the gateway by which
we gain access to those fires of the predestinate, a happy gateway

to a land of pain, because implying a sentence of immortal happi­

ness. We shall have seen the Sacred Humanity before we enter

there.

A momentary intellectual vision of it will have passed

before us, momentary, yet so engraven on our souls that we can
never forget it, even if our pathway of fire lies before us in per
spective for centuries of earth's slow time.^It is in our Blessed

Lord’s Sacred Humanity, as the Head of creation, that the com­
munion of saints is consummated; and it is by that communion

that any help can find its road to our souls while they are impris­
oned there, the captives of patiently impatient hope. It is by the

satisfactions which he made in his Human Nature, that all those

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holy souls arc gradually relieved and finally released?) for even
our own satisfactions would have been no satisfactions if his had
not gone before^ It is his Unman Blood, freshly outpoured in the
daily Mass, which quenches the bitter flames. It is the second
vision of his Sacred Humanity for which every soul in all that
soft and soundless realm of tranquil martyrdom is craving at this
very hour. Purgatory is a province of our Lord’s kingdom which
seems privileged to stand in peculiarly close relations to his
Humanity.
Even in hell that gentle Humanity is active and energetic.
Hell itself is but the consequence of the rejection of the Incarna­
tion. There are none there but those who with assiduous per­
versity have placed themselves there. There are none there whose
going there it was not the intention and the wish of the Sacred
Humanity to hinder. There are none there who had not with
unprofitable valor to gain a miserable conquest over Jesus in
order to get there. His mere Name receives there endlessly a
kind of horrified worship, the unwelcome tribute of a terror that
is not beautified by hope. Lucifer became the mean king of hell,
a baffled inglorious tyrant, because he would not keep his glorious
throne in heaven as a vassal king to the Babe of Bethlehem. It
was as Man that Jesus, over whose shadow the miserable angel
had stumbled in heaven, conquered hell's king on earth, and dis­
jointed the compactness of his kingdom beneath the earth. All
the clocks, that strike the hours on earth, mark some new victory
of the Sacred Humanity over the rebel spirit. Each grace given is
a blow struck. Each Sacrament administered is a fortress taken.
Each mercy granted is a gain for heaven. Each intervention of
death-bed absolution is an actually robbing hell of what seems
by earthly justice to be its due. Nay, down in the pit itself the
Sacred Humanity is sensibly felt, like a throbbing heart, in the
intolerable darkness. The skirts of his love trail over the fires,
while the outcasts curse it as it passes. All the sufferings there,
faithfully, eloquently as in their immeasurable intensity they
express the grandeur of the divine justice, are less terrible than
they ought to be, because of the merits of that supcrangelic Human

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263

Nature. For that Nature, ubiquitous in its benignant power, per­
mitted master as it were of the resources of the Divinity, lengthens

the slanting beams of the divine compassion, and prolongs then»

under the green earth even till they silver somewhat of that outei

darkness.
May we be forgiven, if we say a word or two of other worlds
of which we know nothing? Their possibilities at least will help

to complete our idea of the empire of the World's Humanity.
The question of the inhabitation of the other planets, or of the

distant central stars, by reasonable creatures, is one which it
docs not appear likely that science will ever settle, and on which

revelation has

not

authentically

spoken.

Minds which love

analogy find a difficulty in conceiving that all the orbs which
night braids upon her forehead, and yet which are still invisibly

looking down upon us through the white light of day, should
be meant for nothing more than the lamps of a Chinese feast,

or a colossal game of material laws, and a puzzle of interchanging

attractions and repulsions.

tenanted by

Gigantic wildernesses of matter, un-

moral agents, appear out of keeping

analogies of creation.

with

the

On the other hand, minds to whom

theological truth is almost the only attractive truth, and. rightly

considered, is properly itself all truth, are met by inferences from
the mystery of the Incarnation, which seem to them irresistible,

and yet which will not fit in with the notion of this world, the

scene of the Incarnation being but one, and a very insignificant
one, in a crowd of reasonable worlds.

But the man of science

must be less bigoted, and leave more room for fresh analogies,
such as perhaps he has never dreamed of yet: and the theologian

must beware of narrowness, the disease to which he is most sub­

ject, and must eschew that miserable haste of little minds to
close questions which legitimate authority has left wide open.
A theologian above other men should be one who can take

into his

large heart, with genial sympathy rather than with

critical distrust, the whole of the century in which he lives.

Surely it would be a downright grief to any thinking and heaven
hoping man to dream for one moment that any, the least, of

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BETHLEHEM

God's mysteries had room enough in our widest systems, and
was not a thousand times bigger truth than it seems to those
whose intelligence magnifies it most. The doctrine of the
Incarnation is in no peril from the inhabitants of a million other
worlds. God's centres are different from ours, and the Sacred
Humanity, assumed on earth, would remain the centre of all
those numberless creations, just as it is now the Centre, Head,
King. Type, and Cause of the angelical creation, which needs
not a material home at all, much less has any necessary connection
with the matter of this particular planet.
The dogma of the Incarnation is not then committed to
any view upon the plurality of worlds; while, at the same time,
the scriptural revelation of the existence of the angels, and their
manifold relations to men, may breed in the theologian’s mind
a presumption that the silence of the Scripture upon beings who,
if they exist, must be with the angels and ourselves of the one
family of Christ, is against the notion that other orbs are yet
inhabited by reasonable beings. Nevertheless, as I have already
suggested in another work, the modern discoveries of geology
seem at once to permit the theologian to take the view to which
he is perhaps most inclined, and also to meet the common
objection on the other side of the unlikelihood of so many
huge bright worlds being left untenanted. Many writers have
argued as if those who held the other planets to be unpeopled
now must hold also that they would remain unpeopled; and
hence much fallacy and confusion have arisen. To repeat what
I have said elsewhere, we have no right to conclude as certain
that the creation of rational beings took place all at one time.
The corporeal and incorporeal creations were simultaneous; but
not all corporeal or incorporeal species. Indeed, we know that
the angels belonged to an elder creation than ourselves. Man’s
creation was subsequent to the creation of the very matter out
of which God formed his body. So that the only instance with
which we are acquainted would favor the supposition that God,
in his adorable love of order, might begin creation in one spot,
and go on to others, as he has done with angels and men, and

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265

with men in their various dispensations.

After the angels he

came to men and began with earth. There is no intrinsic unlike­

lihood of his beginning with our system, and with this particular

planet in our system, which can be set for a moment against
what we know at all events to be a fact, that God chose to take
the particular nature of man, who is the inhabitant of this
planet, and to choose this orb as the scene of his Incarnation

and the locality of his redeeming sacrifice.

From this orb, and

from this system, he may proceed to others, and so spread

reasonable life and worship through starry space. The old argu­
ment, that it is unlikely such bright worlds should not now

be furnishing God's glory with reasonable worship, might just

as much have been urged against the unpeopled earth through
all those interminable epochs during which geology thinks it

can show it to us as with incredible slowness ripening for the
habitation of men.

We cannot talk much of analogies, when

we know but one case. Yet the one case of earth, as interpreted

by geology, discloses God to us as conducting his designs in
creation by a circuitous series of preparations of such gigantic
dimensions as almost

of science.
But, whatever

to unsettle our belief in

the sobriety

these speculations,

if the other

comes of

worlds were or are inhabited by moral agents, the probability

is as irresistible as a probability can be of their being under
the Sacred Humanity of Jesus as

their Head.

They would

belong to him in an especial way as the Word, through the
Word’s relation to creatures; and it is surely unlikely and un-

analogous that he should be to some worlds as incarnate, and
to some as not incarnate, particularly when we consider that he
is Head of the angels in his Human Nature, and that they

among themselves are in reality not one family in their nature,

in the same sense as men are, but an immense number of

species, one possibly differing more from another than a stellar
creature would differ from us, or we from a supposed inhabitant

of another planet.

Creatures in other worlds would probably

be created in a state of grace, like the two creations of men and

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BETHLEHEM

angels. It looks as if it were a part of God s magnificence that
it should be so. But grace would hardly come from the Word
in his one Nature now that he has two, when it did not do so,
as we think die more probable opinion, when his Human Nature
was only foreseen. If these worlds, thus created in a state of
grace, are unfallen, they are probably standing upright by the
grace of the Incarnate Word. If they are fallen, and not restored,
whether the fall was partial as with the angels, or universal
as with men by their descent, the Incarnation probably would
mingle with the fall, as it did in the case of the angels. If they are
fallen and restored, for the same reasons we should believe
that they were restored by him. The locality of his Blood­
shedding on this particular planet would be no objection, as
the angels, although not redeemed by him, as either not need­
ing or not being allowed redemption, have nevertheless gained
by his merits. They who meditate much on the Unity of God—
and such meditation is the marked characteristic of those who
have an especial devotion to the mystery of the Most Holy
Trinity—will almost daily see new probabilities that the family
of the glorified would be one. Poles further apart than men
and angels could hardly have to be brought together. Yet they
are brought together under one Head, and it is in his Human
Nature that the Word is Head of both. If then the marvellous
work of the Hypostatic Union is adequate for this, why multiply
Headships, and so lose the Unity of the family, which is the
grand shadow of the Unity of God?
We have hinted at these speculations not as if they were
of importance in themselves, but as showing that the idea of
the Incarnation, as here brought forward, finds no difficulties
in those problems which have been started by the scientific con­
troversies of the day. Thus, wherever we look, whether with
upturned heart and eye we blind ourselves by looking into
heaven, or range through the manifold kingdoms of earth, or
explore the holy hospitals of purgatory, or venture to hang
over the dread abyss of the condemned, or imagine theologies
for worlds from which we are cut off by gulfs of impassable, un-

SOUL AND BODY

267

navigable space, everywhere we see the Sacred Humanity to be
the Primal Creature of God, to be what no other creature is

or can be, and to contain and imply all other creatures in
itself with a certain sovereign eminence which belongs to it

in right of its eternal predestination.
There are fertile times when a man's thoughts float out

from him like the gushings of his life, becoming part of truth
rather than expressing it, and making the mind a worshipper
rather than a teacher.

It is in such seasons that we see how

all things are theology, and how in it all other sciences regain
themselves rather than melt away.

It is in such seasons that

the chambers of space open out to us, their far-off walls dissolv­

ing into clearest ether, and we behold the vast empire of the
Sacred Humanity running out with its glorious promontories

into the infinite life of God, where we had never dared to

drcam. It is in such seasons that we hear the invisible, although

we cannot see it; and thenceforth the next world haunts us
here with a teasing like that of an unrecovered thought.

It is

the vision of the Sacred Humanity which the sick world wants

this hour. We want daring men, men made daring by depth of
erudition as well as by breadth of sympathy.

We need men

who are audacious because they are humble. We seek for men,
or, if so be, a man, who shall wed all the sciences with theology,

who shall reconcile faith and reason in one large, lucid philoso­
phy', and who shall teach the nations how the Church can dilate

herself to the size of all the social questions which so vex hu­

manity.

O mistaken generation that would worship power, not

beholding that such a worship is but an insincere confession
of our weakness, and therefore of all seeming heroisms the most
unhelpful and imbecile. There are some men who are all light,
not so much because they see so much more than other men.

as because other men see so much more in them, and by their
means see also so much beyond them.

It is such men as these

that God is waiting to give us when we have grown wise enough

to lose all hope in ourselves.
Full then of reverence for the Person of the Eternal Word,

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let us now come to adore his holy Flesh and his glorious Human
Soul. Strict theology must attend us on our way; and while
we search we must adore, and while we adore wc must also
search. In matters of doctrinal devotion false reverence is a
common form of indevout impatience. We must be upon our
guard against this. God gives us the Incarnation that we may
exercise our thought and love upon it. It is hardly possible for
us to be too minute in our devotions to the Sacred Humanity,
so as to implant the reality of it most deeply in our souls. Our
minuteness is authorized by the example of the Church, or
rather the Church beckons us to follow her example in this
respect. The feasts which she celebrates, such as those of the
Sacred Heart, the Precious Blood, the Five Wounds, the Agony
in the Garden, the Crown of Thorns, and others, and then the
devotions which she not only permits but indulgences, are pat­
terns which she puts before us, not so much to limit our devo­
tions to those as to point the way to others. There is an
essential irreverence, and a tendency, which is at least implicitly
heretical, to fastidiousness in this matter, which we shall have
to consider also in the treatise on the Passion. It is an irrever­
ence similar to that false devotion which the prophet rebuked
in Achaz when he refused to ask a sign of God, though God
through his prophet had bade him do so; the irreverence of
not investigating the signs which God gives us for the purpose
of being investigated, as if we knew better than he, and were
more delicate and circumspect in our operations. The mere
fact of the Sacred Humanity is a revelation in its sole self. We
cannot think now what we should have thought of God without
it. He himself would have seemed different to us, because we
should not have had even the half-light we now have regarding
the mystery of creation. We know that an uncreating God would
have been equally adorable with a creating God; but the wor­
shipfulness of the creatureless God would have been simply
unimaginable, a possibility lighted only from his own side,
inasmuch as none of his glory would have been projected in
the shape of creatures to light it from the other. But it is not

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269

only new ideas of God which we receive from the Sacred Hu­

manity; it is also a positive way to him, an approach which may
be trodden, which must indispensably be trodden, even by such
souls as know not they are treading it, like the straggling pil­

grims who reach God spent and wearied and surprised out of
the countries of the heathen.

Out of it, moreover, come new

kinds of union between the soul and its Creator, unions such
as occupy mystical theology, and many of them of such a sacra­

mental character as to have been unknown even to the Hebrew
saints.

Hence there is no minuteness about Jesus which does

not concern us.

For every conceivably varying contact with

him is the communication of some new grace. It is itself some

new method of transformation into him.

His innumerable mys­

teries are compounds of many mysteries, and the far-reaching
glass of love can resolve them into almost countless worlds of

distinct beauty, separate power, and individual significance. Of
each of them it is true that it is not merely a picture, but a
power, not a beauty only, but a grace also.

We must look upon the Sacred Humanity as a world by

itself, the head of all worlds, their pattern and their cause. The
stars fly upon their silent courses.

plexity of

laws, whether it

be

Some law, or some com­

those already discovered or

something simpler and more universal, the discovery of which
awaits science further on, enables orbs of immense ponderous ­

ness to wheel through the slightly resisting space, as if it were
in grooves of ice, while space is mercifully made soundless, lest
all creatures should be killed by the roaring and clattering and
booming of all these worlds in their tremendous velocity.
these worlds are sustained by God.

All

All are supported by him

on the three pillars, which are but one pillar, of his essence,

presence, and power.
sustained.

But the Sacred Humanity is differently

It is immediately supported by One of the Three

Divine Persons.

It rests wholly on the Person of the Word

in a way in which no other creature can rest on a Divine Person.

It has not even the support of a human personality of its own.
By a glorious privation it lacks this natural support of its nature,

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while by a miraculous union, transcending all unities whatsoever
except the Unity of God, it is united to the Person of the Word.
It is this Humanity, this compound of a human soul and a
human body, thus lying in unspeakable repose on the Person
of die Word, which we are now to consider more closely and
more in detail than we have done before.
But where shall we get nearest to it? From what point of
view shall we be able most clearly to see those marvellous opera­
tions which it so studiously conceals? Yet, while it conceals them,
is it not also inviting us to the research of its secret wonders?
When we desired to contemplate the Divinity of the Babe of
Bethlehem, we let Mary lay him down upon the sands beneath
the acacia of the wilderness: whither shall we go now to behold
the operations of his Sacred Humanity? It is clear that we must
look at it from more than one point of view. We must go and
live with him in the Holy House of Nazareth, a sanctuary so
saturated with his long presence, so ineffaceably consecrated
by his miraculous years of hidden holiness, that God has set
it up, for the present, on the Adriatic shore, as a wonder-working
tabernacle, a living House of Grace in the midst of the Church,
his larger House of Grace, until the end of time. Through the
months of the four seasons, through the days of the week with
their varying occupations, through the hours of the day from
die pearly dawn until the starry dusk, through the quiet watches
of the nights of sleep and prayer, we must familiarize ourselves
with our Lord’s Hidden Years at Nazareth. His real growth
of Body, perceptible to us from time to time, would seem a
worshipful mystery, when we considered who he was. Here in
autumn he is lifting weights which in spring he could not have
lifted. The light is changed in his eye, because the maturity
of years is deepening it. The tone of his voice is graver, be­
cause the power of years is toning it. The voice of the Eternal
Word broke, like the voices of other boys. His Mother’s ways
come up upon the surface of his bodily gestures and surprise
us into tears. His limbs are longer, thicker, broader. The color
of his hair becomes darker. With years the beard of manhood

SOUL AND BODY

browns his chin.

271

We cannot watch this common growth of his

human Body without adoring; for all proofs of the reality of
his Human Nature are always new, always penetrate into the

deepest recesses of the soul, and always take our love and wor­
ship by surprise.
But the seeming growth of his Soul is yet more wonderful.
He appears more holy than he was a month ago. Grace looks

as if it had developed in him.

It does not seem merely as if

circumstances had opened wider fields for his grace, or had

conferred upon them more advantageous positions. But it seems
as if he grew in grace. The very seeming of such a thing is

adorable, the more adorable because we know it is but seeming.
His grace never grew from the first moment of his Conception.

But greater wisdom gives grace more liberty.

Does he then

seem more holy simply because he has grown wiser?

But he

has not grown wiser. This also is but a mysterious semblance,
as we shall see presently; but here again the semblance is of

itself adorable.

Nevertheless he makes acquisitions, and this

is truly a growth, yet in him hardly a growth.

one of his loving condescensions.

Rather, it is

He gains no new knowledge.

He does not grow in science: he only becomes master by acquisi­
tion of the same science of which he was master before in
He knows certain things, such things as life’s

higher ways.

experience is capable of teaching, in two ways, instead of know­

ing them in one way. He has now a double knowledge of them,
an acquired knowledge in addition to the infused knowledge
he had before.

But this learning by experience is a marvellous

mystery in him.

Then in that life of Nazareth how much is there which we
cannot see!

Every moment, waking or sleeping, that Sacred

Humanity is the scene of endless and most heavenly operations

by virtue of its union with the Word. At all hours the Divine
Nature is sending forth a power which as it were oozes down

into all the faculties of the Soul and all the senses of the Body,
interpenetrating them all with singular virtue and with exceed­

ing glory, now as it were giving free course to its love of the

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BETHLEHEM

inferior nature, and now marvellously suspending such of its
excellent effects as arc incompatible with the suffering or hum­
bled state in which our Lord at the time vouchsafed to be. The
secret life of the simple union of the Two Natures in the Divine
Person is a vast series of wonders, whose scene is the House
of Nazareth, but whose grandeur outshines that of all creation
beside.
At times, too, as if the better to realize the deep-lying marvels
and shy magnificence of Nazareth, we must fly to the summit
of Tabor and anticipate the day of the Transfiguration. There
we behold those things blooming which at Nazareth were kept
jealously closed in the modest-seeming sheaths of the most trivial
actions. Yet in this respect there is more comparison than
contrast between Nazareth and Tabor. The mountain-top was
itself a privacy, and the refulgence a “holy house” of light
which screened him as effectually as the sacred walls of Nazareth.
Even the manifestations of God are shrouded in secrecy. Yet
the Transfiguration was especially a manifestation of the splen­
dor of his Sacred Humanity. It was not a change which came
over it, nor a gift which was then and there granted to it, nor
a mere external ratification of its honor from heaven. It was
the outward blooming of that which had always been within,
and had been ready to unfold its astonishing blossoms at any
hour in the privacy of Nazareth. There could be no strife
between the two Natures of our Blessed Lord. Nevertheless
we can hardly bring home to ourselves under any other figure
their relation to each other during the days of his humiliation.
It was as if the Human Nature were resisting the communica­
tions of the Divine. It was as if the glories of the Divine Nature
were being muffled in the imperfections of the Human. It was
as if the one Nature were getting the upper hand of the other
alternately. So we should express, with obvious inaccuracy, the
appearance of several of the mysteries of the Three-and-Thirty
Years. The Transfiguration, under this figure, would be a
visible strife of the two Natures manifested to a chosen few.
Except in the case of his miraculous works of mercy,—and

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273

those need hardly be excepted,—it was perhaps in all his years
before the Resurrection the solitary victory of the Divine Nature
over the

Human, the single instance in which the veils of

humiliation were burned away and the Human Nature persuaded
to display those gifts which belonged to it in virtue of its union

with the Word.

Habitually it kept its own proper glory sup­

pressed, as if it were a slumbering volcano within him; and
now on the top of Tabor a momentary eruption of its splendor

was permitted.

Yet it was all in such secrecy that it almost

seems—we may reverently say it—as if it were less for the sake

of the few spectators, less to prepare with compassionate artifice
the weakness of Peter and James and John for the Passion, than

to ease the love which his Divine Nature had for the Human,

and as it were bribe it to keep quiet during the derelictions
of the Passion.

We must gaze upon it now, that we may re­

member what that natural state was to which the Child, and

then the Boy, of Nazareth was always tending, and which in
his love of suffering and of us he was always purposely suppress­

ing.
We shall not also understand Nazareth unless we compare
the Sacred Humanity in the Holy House with the Sacred Human­

ity in its proper place in heaven. In the hour of his Ascension
heaven became a new place.
before.

It was not like what it had been

There was the same Vision of the Most Holy in the

quietude of its immutable magnificence.

There were the same

songs of the ancient kingdoms of the angels, swelled perhaps
by the voices of the little human multitude that was newly

come, and varied somewhat, it might be, in their doxologies
by the presence of Mary's Son. Yet this could not change heaven
Nevertheless it was completely changed, changed by a greater

change than creation was upon nothingness.

in the presence of the Sacred Humanity.

This change was

It may be expressed

in a word, but it is a word lying far beyond the compass of
our understanding.

Here was God adoring God.

Here was a

finite nature out of which infinite worship was streaming. Here

was a created life which was in a most awful way a double of

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the Holy Trinity. Here was a human Soul wrapped in the
flames of the Divinty, and blazing there unharmed and insepar­
ably one with the Divine Person. Here was an unveiled eminence
of Soul with operations so transcendent as to inspire the highest
angels with awe. Here was a dazzling effulgence of Body in such
an inexpressible shining of material beauty as to light up the
almost boundless world, wherein God has been pleased to locate
the Beatific Vision of himself. All this is summed up, and
depths after depths far beyond it indicated, and to our blindness
only momentarily illuminated, by the fact that here now for
the first time in heaven was God worshipping God, the Co-equal
adoring the Co-equal. I believe the glory of the Sacred Humanity
in heaven to be simply incomprehensible even by the highest
angels. Yet no change had come over it since Nazareth. The
Resurrection was no transformation. The Ascension gave it
nothing more than a local throne. Like the sensitive blossoms
which close when but a handsbreadth of cloud floats over the
sun, so the Sacred Humanity concealed altogether this intrinsic
glory in the Holy House of Nazareth, with its flower-leaves
closed in upon themselves under the chill shade of humiliation;
yet was it only so kept down by the might of a love which was
vehement enough to redeem a world. Heaven has made no
change in that marvelous blossom; but earth, before the dear
glory left it, painted five red marks upon its snowy leaves.
But let us venture to look more minutely into this Sacred
Humanity. We cannot picture to ourselves the likeness of a
soul. The spiritual lineaments of our own immortal being
are strictly unimaginable by us, much more so the lineaments
of the Soul of Jesus. Yet theology teaches us no little about its
operations and its eminence. As we have seen before, the beauty
of God, that fountain in him so little honored in the present
day, but in which the greatest minds of old were wont to
feed their deep conceptions of his majesty, is as it were the
abyss out of which the divine wisdom omnipotently evokes such
devices as shall satisfy his insatiable goodness. It is thus we
would express the relations of these Attributes to each other.

SOUL AND BODY

275

There is a perfect facility in all the divine operations.

would not be God if it were not so.

He

Indeed, facility is too

difficult a word, inasmuch as it expresses the littleness of re­

sistance, and therefore implies that there is some resistance; just

as we speak of God choosing, though the word "choice" implies
comparison, and at least a momentary hesitation, neither of

which we can admit in God. This superfacility, to coin a word,

of the divine operations is something beyond the powers of

our language, and out of reach of comparisons drawn from
created things. So that when we come to speculate upon any of

God’s greater works, most of all his singular works, such as the

Soul

and Body of Jesus, we almost unconsciously express to

ourselves in the silence of our conception the magnitude of
the divine work, by imagining the shadow of an effort even on
the part of omnipotence.

It is one of the necessary infirmities

of our minds that we should do so. Now, if we conceive the

almost infinity of space, the vast capabilities of the elements,
the terrific ponderousness of matter, the huge orbs of millions

of suns, the slinging and poising of these immense yet arrowy

systems of worlds, and the complicated paths of all those rushing

systems in their irresistible velocities, to have cost God no more
effort than it costs the frosty air on a still autumnal morning

to loosen a single golden leaf from off the tree and let it waver
down upon the silent stream below, and if we add to this

the unmeasured realms of the spirit, populous with angelic
species, each angel perhaps being worth, as a divine work, all

the systems of the midnight sky, and still suppose them all to
have flowed out of God’s hand without its stirring, as a thing

falls from the hand of a man asleep,—yet. when we come to

think of the creation of the Soul of Jesus, at once, to our
imperfect ideas, the divine wisdom seems busy thinking, the

divine goodness intently choosing, the divine beauty studiously
reflectng itself, the divine power gathering itself up for the

effort implied in the grandeur, the eminence, and the singu­

larity of the work in which it is about to be engaged.

This is

our way of putting the matter to ourselves,—untrue in itself.

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BETHLEHEM

and yet helping us toward the truth. For this creation, the
Soul of Jesus, is lovelier than the intelligences of the angels;
it is vaster than sidereal space; it is more various than material
nature. Or it would be more true to say that it united in itself
and unutterably surpassed all the actual magnificences of all
other creations, whether Mary, angels, men, matter, or new
creations yet to be. We can say almost all things of it. We
can only not say of it that creative omnipotence so exhausted
itself in it that now it cannot equal or surpass it. Perhaps in
one sense no better soul was strictly possible, because no fitter
one is possible. For the optimism of the divine works consists
rather in the eminence of their fitness than in their absolute
excellence.
Let us imagine this Soul to ourselves as a world of light,
with its shores and waters, its woods and mountains, all fash­
ioned of the purest glowing light, transparent throughout the
whole of its immense orb, full of variety, full of softly flashing
depths, unpartitioned yet unconfused, a translucent crystal world,
seen through on every side, and on every side through its calm
rich light God is seen, the beautiful Godhead self-disclosed by
excess of beauty and self-obliterated by excess of light. With­
out, it is piled high with intolerable sublimities of light whose
pinnacles are hidden in the lightnings of the Eternal Throne.
Within, it appears to withdraw itself in four abysses, now blend­
ing in one effulgence, now floating off from each other as if
they were distinct, and now opening out one into another
with such perspective that we cannot discern where one begins
and the other ends, for, like light in unstable water, the divi­
sions bend and gleam forever. Then, though they seemed to
be abysses, they are rather plenitudes,—plenitudes of living
brightness.
The first is the plenitude of nature. All nature seems to
be there, and all the excellences of all natures. We perceive
nature to be there in such wise as that this Soul is the Centre,
the Cause, the Model, the Completion, and the Crown of all
nature, whether angelical, human, or material, as we have

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277

already seen elsewhere. |Such a beautiful perfection and glorious

abundance of nature is in that Soul as to include in it the

rightful sovereignty over all natures/the root on which the
grace of Headship is grafted /belonging to it rather in right
of its Humanity than of its union with the Divinity, for the

sovereignty of this last is of a different sort, resting on other

grounds and due upon other counts.

It has even a natural

« apacity, or rather a capacity in consequence of its nature, of

receiving such a communication of the Divine Nature as no

other creature, however sanctified, ever has received/ God, it
is said, communicates himself to creation in four ways,—by

nature, by grace, by glory, and by the Hypostatic Union. But

we better perceive the unity of creation as itself a transcript

of the Divine Unity, if we say that God creates for the purpose
of communicating himself to things outside himself, which are
creatures, and that the way in which he does so is one, namely,

by the Hypostatic Union. For, rightly considered, nature, grace,
and glory are mere corollaries of the Hypostatic Union.

They

flow out from it, being already virtually included in it.

All

natures outside God exist because of this assumed nature of the

Word.

All grace is not only because of his grace, but from

his grace and through his grace. All glory, angelic or human,
is some sort of a transformation into the likeness of the Incarnate
Son of God.
The second plenitude of our Lord’s Human Soul is the ful­
ness of its grace. We must but sketch in a few sentences what

it would require a whole treastise to evolve.
enclosed within this depth.

Four depths are

He has, and none other has but

he, the unshared grace of union, that irresistible penetrative
unction of the Divinity which steeps, as in beatifying fire, the
faculties of his Human Nature, and gives to its operations an

illimitable worth.
alone;

It is God’s greatest work, done for this Soul

and it implies a

union of the Father and the Holy

Ghost with the Soul of a kind quite as unimaginable as its
union with the Person of the Word, though of a totally different

character, another sort of indefinable intimacy with the Godhead.

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Then follows an abyss of sanctifying grace, which none can
fathom,—though we arc told it comes within the possibility
of being fathomed, because it is just short of infinite. Theologians
not a few have absolutely pronounced it infinite.
*
If the least
fraction of sanctfying grace literally outvalues all that nature
has of dignity and worth, what must the grace of the Soul of
Jesus be, to which the combined graces of men, angels, and
Mary, multiplied in countless individuals, outspread over patient
ages, hardly afford an approximation? Nay, if the opinion of
some theologians be true, that all the graces of Christians were
once numerically in our Blessed Lord, that all grace in us is
only the presence by replication, as the schools speak, of some
of the identical grace which was actually and physically in our
Lord’s Soul, and therefore that every grace is or has been actually
and physically in him before, then our graces are something
more than approximations to his.f This doctrine presents us
with a picture of his Soul, the fascinations of which can only
be appreciated by long and loving meditation. It brings us into
startling relations with Bethlehem, with Nazareth, and with
Calvary. Yet there is another depth beyond, a serene capacious
land filled to overflowing with the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost.
Not even excepting the higher angels, there are no spiritual
creatures which we know of, of such ravishing beauty as these
peculiar created gifts of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.
A slight lustre of them makes a man shine on the altars of
the Church as a saint, and the nations see him afar off, and
shout with joy as at a new creation of our heavenly Father,
and he does not wax dim through the thick ages, but is a
steady light, giving light in the darkness of time, yet only
like an unrisen sun, compared with the light, distinctive and
distinguishable, which he will give throughout eternity. These
gifts sparkled in the angels, and even apostles fell down to
• Penafiel, Hurtado, Bernal, Vega, and many of the later scholastics.
fThis opinion was taught by some of the doctors of Salamanca; also by
Cardenas, De Infinita Gratia Deipara, by Meratius, De Incarnatione, disp. 23, sect.
4, and by Nieremberg, Prezzo della Divina Gratia, lib. iii. cap. 12.

SOUL AND BODY

worship

divine.

when

279

they saw,—mistaking so great a splendor for

They gleam in Mary with so full a ray that we are

blinded to her true greatness, and only see her as we see shapes

in the quivering shield of the sun. But they blaze their highest,

unconfined and unconsuming, in the Soul of Jesus, in a breadth
and depth and with a piercingness of which the most heroic
saints would be incapable.

Beyond this again there is another

depth, where, sweetly mastering all creations, meekly enthroning

itself by the side of God, the grace of headship dwells. Behold!
its unebbing tide leaves not one rim of shore, yet out of it

all the graces of angels and of men have been drawn, and the
deep feels it not. Through seven kingly arches, with no stint

of magnificence in their vast design, but of giant stride, the
grace is rushing at all hours in sacramental streams—or better

say deluges—of love, over the outspread world. Countless other

rents let out that sea of light in a thousand directions.

The

whole world outside of it streams like a cavern under ground,
and drips and shines forever. Yet the inward ocean sinks not.

All government, all right of judging, all dominion and all
usufruct of creatures, all spiritual eminence, all infallible inde­

fectible pontificates, all the prophetical, sacerdotal, and regal
prerogatives of Jesus, come from this grace of headship.

binds

It

the two ends of time together, and carries them on

with itself into an eternity which, though it had a beginning,
can never know an end.

Look at the top of heaven, and see

the sweet grandeur, tender for all it is so colossal, man-loving

if ever there were love of man, of the glorious prince St. Michael;

and remember that he was saved by the grace of this Human
Soul equally with the relapsed sinner whom the Precious Blood

has saved by the peculiarly human method of redemption, and
whom the single touch of a single Sacrament has just borne

through a safe judgment into a secure eternity.
The third plenitude of our Lord’s Soul was the fulness of

his science.

It must be remembered that we are not speaking

of his omniscience as

the Word, but, quite strictly, of the

science with which his Human Soul was superna turally gifted,

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or which it had naturally acquired. It lies before us in theology
as two vast kingdoms, which we sec, as from a mountain, in
confused loveliness, but into whose recesses the eye cannot
penetrate, and whose horizon we cannot explore. We cannot
even descend from our point of view to examine the landscape
more nearly. If we go lower down, it has disappeared altogether.
It is like the view we may have often seen from a high hill-top,
a banner of green and gold and blue unrolled under a flashing
sun, with the silver rivers striping it, and the purple ocean
fluttering in the distant haze as if it was a fringe. There is also
a third kingdom, which is shadowy and thin, as if it were but
some images of the other kingdoms painted by the light upon
the clouds, and moving there with indistinct outlines, as though
it were a pageant rather than a possession. It is thus we may
dare to picture to ourselves the science of our Lord’s Human
Soul. There is first his beatific science, whereby, in every
moment and from the first moment of his life, he beheld the
Divine Essence more clearly than all the heavenly hosts, and
went nearer toward comprehending God than the highest angels
have done in their long ages of intuitive vision, or will have
done in the remotest epochs of eternity which we can intelligibly
picture to ourselves. His Soul did not comprehend God, simply
because such a comprehension is not within the compass of
any possible creature. He saw more deeply into God, and he
saw more in God, and what he saw he saw more lucidly, than
any other of the Blessed; and it is probable also that he saw it
in a more perfect way as well as in a more eminent degree. In
every one of his mysteries, whether of joy or sorrow or glory,
he possessed this science and beheld this Vision; and, in treating
of the Passion, we shall have to consider those strange operations,
by which in certain depths of woe this science was mysteriously
turned off from the inferior part of his Human Nature. Thus
the whole width of heaven’s best beatitude was with him always.
If it is true that eye cannot see, nor ear hear, nor heart con­
ceive, the blessedness of the baptized infant deceased in its
fresh sacramental innocence, how far must we be from any

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thing like a just appreciation of the beatific science of the Soul
of Jesus!

Wc may add figure to figure, it is true; but we are

only losing ourselves all the while in painted splendors, such

as sunset writes upon the countenances of the passing clouds.
Of the next kingdom of his science we may know some­
thing more; but it is only as geographers know of lands they
have not seen.

Their brightest words are cold, and they hardly

leave a picture on the soul. His infused science was his posses­
sion from the first.

It was, as theologians say, infused into him

in the first moment, because there was no reason why it should

be deferred, neither is there any other time which for any cause

could seem more congruous. By this infused science he surpassed
all theologies and philosophies, all modem sciences and discov­

eries, and new sciences not yet dreamed of, and read all the
secrets of angels and men, and all the griefs and wants, the

exultations and contentments, of animals.

Some theologians,

and one of no mean fame, Hugh of St. Victor, have held that
he knew things by an uncreated as well as a created knowledge.

From this opinion higher authorities and the reason of the
thing persuade us to dissent. It even seems more probable that
he did not know by the infused science of his Human Soul all

possible things, though of course he knew them as the Word.

This is the nearest approach to a limit which we dare to set
to the infused science of his Soul. We hold that it was infused

into him in the highest manner of infusion.

We hold, with

St. Thomas, that by this infused science, all presents, pasts,
and futures lay clearly and unconfusedly and in infallible light

before him, without effort or investigation, whether they be
of natural or supernatural objects.

By this science he knew

without images, and therefore needed not the use of his senses

to it, and so it was not suspended in his sleep.

He knew all

that he knew simultaneously, without succession or development,
because, as Vasquez acutely remarks, if it were not so, then

ignorance might in some sense be imputed to him at least
at certain given moments. The species, to use the old scholastic
word,

by which he knew were more universal, or, to speak

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modern language, his ideas were more real and absolute,· than
those of the angels, and accompanied by a more self-evidencing
light: for his science was infused into him in proportion to his
grace rather than his nature, which is an important principle
to hear in mind throughout the whole of this subject. He saw
things, moreover, as they are in themselves, and consequently
in a loftier, nearer, more real, and more divine manner. How
beautiful therefore must all the physical sciences have been to
his Soul, thus seeing things down in their real beings, unbewild­
ered by the fallacies of phenomena, and unfatigued by the
processes of induction! All knowledge was necessarily theology
to him from this truthful method of his science. Thus there
passed no shadow of ignorance over his soul, not the faintest
or the most gauze-like veil of it, so far as it is an intellectual
imperfection: and that, be it remembered, not because he saw
all things as the Word, but by the perfection of the infused
science of his Human Soul.
The third kingdom of his science comprises the knowledge he
condescended to acquire; and of this we have spoken before. He
knew nothing by acquisition which he had not already known by
infusion. He stooped to learn in a lower way what he knew
before in a higher way without learning at all. His acquired
science is rather a revelation of his character than an addition
to his glory. He would be more like us. He would know things
in our way, and come to know them as we do. As he let the rain
beat upon his Face and the wind play with his Hair and the light­
ning blind his Eyes and the thunder vibrate in his Ears, so he let
experience beat upon him; and what came of it was what we call
his acquired science. He will allow himself to receive the im­
pressions of experience, not deceitfully, but silently, as fathers let
their children tell them what they knew before, and out of love
will not backen their forwardness by declaring their intelligence
to be needless. They give pleasure by seeming to learn. It was in
• See the most interesting chapter of Amicus on the perfection of our Lord’s
infused science as compared with that of the angels. De Incarnatione, Disp. χχ.
Sect. xiv.

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some such way that our Lord condescended to acquired knowledge
by undergoing experience. It is not so much a matter of his Mind.
It is rather one of those attitudes which reveal his Heart. He
clings to all the imperfections of our nature to which he can
decorously submit himself, even although they be not necessary
to the grand work he has come to do. Or rather it intimates to us
how much more true a view of the Incarnation we should take,
if we could more habitually think of the Incarnation as itself his
work, rather than of the work he did when he became incarnate,
regarding this last but as a manifestation of the first. But in this
matter of his acquired science we must never forget that the
theologians are agreed that he learned nothing directly either
from angels or men. They regard such an idea to be inadmissible,
because it is unbecoming to his dignity as Head, Master, Teacher,
and Illuminator, both of angels and of men; and he filled these
offices, not simply as the Word, but in the Human Nature which
he had assumed.
The consideration of these plenitudes of his grace and of his
science leaves us little to say of the fourth plenitude of his Soul,
the fulness of glory. Indeed, it is in its own self unspeakable.
We may contemplate the glory of his Soul either as it is in heaven
now, or as it was in the years of his Childhood. Like his gface,
because answering to his grace, it lies before us in four regions of
astonishing splendor, lost in light yet cognizably differing from
each other. There is first of all his beatific glory, which answers to
his sanctifying grace. It is the world of his sanctifying grace in the
full bloom of its magnificence, and thus immensely surpassing
in its radiance that grace which we have already seen to be marvel­
lous. On no side is there any limit to be discovered to this country
of beatitude. Its confines are lost beyond all the imaginable limits
of which we have the power to dream. Its vast plains stretch on
ward and onward, until the soul is wounded with gazing upon
such outspread immensities of light. All we know is that it has
limits somewhere. In our manner of speaking, it is close upon
infinite, and yet it is truly finite,—finite to the eye of God, prac­
tically infinite to the thought of creatures. We need not linger to

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inquire of what multitudinous bright things this light is made,
nor how piercingly bright each element of it is even in itself.
Thoughts become dreams and dazzle us, when wc try to fix them
on such a subject.
Beyond those distant confines, which our fancy has not reached,
and yet also as if by some play of light represented inside the
kingdom of his beatific glory, is his exemplary glory, which answers
to the heroic grace of the gifts of the Holy Ghost. It is this glory
by which he is the pattern and model of all the glory of all
glorified creatures. There is not an angel, but his glory, differing
characteristically from the glory of all other angels, is as it were a
drop of resplendent spray flung from the mighty cataract of the
glory of the Soul of Jesus. Each saint is an orb of himself,—a star,
as St. Paul calls him. He is known by the light he gives, and can
be named from the coronal he wears, and there is no other coronal
in heaven like his. Yet he is but a beauty borrowed from the glory
of Jesus. Each saint, each of the redeemed, each boy in heaven
who had the use of his reason for a month or two, has a sanctity
with a character of its own, and that character is substantially
expressed in the features of his glory. Perhaps each baptized infant
may have one sort of natural character rather than another upon
which his future grace would have been grafted; and the glory
won for him by the waters of the font may be allowed to fulfil that
undeveloped sanctity, and give him a beauty of his own in heaven.
This seems the more likely when we consider that reasons are never
alike, and that he will at least have the full use of reason, and of
his own reason, in heaven. The gestures, the tempers, the play of
unreasoning children form a prophetic mirror on which their
future good and evil are frequently depicted with minute fidelity.
It is but a step further for glory to anticipate sufficient of the
developed character to give a fashion to the radiance of the soul.
The pattern of our Lady’s glory is taken from the glory of the
Soul of Jesus. She perhaps may represent all his glory upon a
lesser scale. At all events he is the glorified Soul, on the model of
whom the glory of all spirits and souls has been moulded, and

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285

there is none comes so near to that magnificent exemplar as the
soul of his own Mother Mary. In the countless darting splendors
and innumerable refulgences of heaven, to which the little silver
flashings of all the sunlit oceans are as nothing in their multi­
tude, there is not one gleam, one play of light, which in its cause
and pattern is not already visible from the throne of the Sacred
Humanity.
A. third region of glory opens on our sight, his sovereign glory,
which answers to the grace of headship. This is the glory of his
human royalty. It is in this glory that he rules the whole creation
of God. The manifold attributes of his kingship over the angels
belong to this. The sceptre with which he sways the empire of
the redeemed is a ray of this brightness. The beautiful operations
of his judicial potver, exercised many times in a moment the
whole world over, are illuminated and made worshipful by the
shining of this glory. There is a moonlight even over purgatory
caught from the luminous mountains of this land. We know
Jesus chiefly as our Savior now, and he is endless in his loveliness,
continually disclosing himself to us in new relations, and detain­
ing our delighted love in new captivities. In heaven, without
losing him as our Savior, we shall see more of him as our King,
and many an unsuspected grandeur and many an unimagined
attraction will reveal themselves to us in his royalty. All this
will be from the region of his sovereign glory. They who have
an enthusiastic devotion to the Church are at once meriting a
share of this glory, and anticipating it.
But, once more, a fresh region of glory opens upon our sight.
It is his glory of filiation, which answers to the grace of union.
It is here his glory seems to lose itself in the abysses of divine light,
and to merge in the lightnings of the Godhead. His Sonship is
no mere adoption, like that of the highest saints and of all glorified
creatures. We shun the very word adoption, when we speak of
him, lest we should seem to derogate from the immensity of his
exaltation. Eternally the natural Son of God as the ever-begotten
Word, he is also the natural, and not the merely adopted, Son

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of God as Man, because of the union of his Humanity with the
Person of the Word. This is the topmost pinnacle of his glory. Wc
have nothing to do here but to be silent and adore.
If from the courts of heaven we turn to the Infant Soul in
Bethlehem, the same glory is already there, not only in its causes
and its roots, but in its substance and possession. It has not to be
achieved. It is already won. It lies in his grace, and his grace was
ungrowing from the first. The vastness of his merits and the
marvellous series of the Three-and-Thirty Years may deck it with
some external ornaments, which would not else have shown there.
But upon its substance they made little or no impression. It be­
longed to his Soul, it was in his Soul, when he lay upon his
Mother's lap. What are the triumphs of his Church, what is the
outward exaltation of his Name, what even the multitude of glori­
fied companions whom he won for himself by his merits, com­
pared with those interminable realms of glory which belonged
to him in his own right from the first?
We have multiplied words, not without the guidance of the­
ology, in order that we might obtain some remotely worthy con­
ception of our Lord’s Human Soul. Let us look at it for a moment
from one other point of view. Every creature has a worth of its
own, with which its Creator has mercifully enriched it. Yet it is
more to us to know what his Creator thinks of him, than to know
what he is worth himself; and it is not so much his own worth,
as God’s love, which is the measure of the divine appreciation of
him. Nevertheless God’s esteem of creatures becomes the crea­
ture’s real worth, because it raises him to his own height. Let us
think then of the divine complacency in the Soul of Jesus, in
order that we may thus understand its singular eminence in all
creation. The Holy Trinity loved it more than all creatures put
together. We could not doubt this for a moment without impiety.
The Father has himself declared it from heaven. He rejoices in
it as giving him room for the liberality of his gifts, and space in
which to mirror his own perfections. Everywhere else in creation,
even in the vastness of sidereal space, his glory is cramped. The
littleness of creation will not hold the grandeur he longs to pour

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2*7

into it. But the Soul of Jesus is a spiritual super-angelic heaven

in which the sanctity of God can expatiate, and reproduce itself

in a created form, not altogether unworthy of his magnificence.

There is enough in that soul to form the joy of all creatures for­
ever; yet all that joy is from the love which God bears to it. The

Holy Trinity broods over it in adorable delight. Yet each of the
Divine Persons also has his own complacency therein. Its natural

Sonship makes it unspeakably dear to the Father. His Paternity is
his own blessedness. So content is he with being the Father of
the Son, that he never began begetting him and never will desist,
so dear to him is that unutterable mystery. But here is a second

filiation of the same Son accomplished in that miracle of the
Incarnation, which contains and involves all his external glory,
because it contains and involves all creation; and beholdl as in

return, the especial characteristic of the created sanctity of that
dear Soul is intense devotion to the Father’s glory. The Holy

Spirit loves that Soul with a love peculiar to himself.
some special manner his own appropriate creation.

It is in

He lingers

over it with a dove-like complacency. He is forever drawn to it

because of the abundance of his own gifts which it contains. To
the Word who shall say how inexpressibly dear that Soul must be,

to which he has united himself with such an unparalleled union?

We sink out of our depth the moment we enter upon the thought
of the love between the Person of the Son and the glad Nature

which he assumed. Hence it is that our devotion to the Divine
Person of our Lord is always the measure of our devotion to his

Human Soul; and Mary is the pattern to us of both these two
devotions, which the fire of love soon melts and mingles into one.
Such in the gorgeous creation of God is the Human Soul of

Jesus.

From his Soul let us turn to his Body. Let us consider it

first of all in its relation to his Soul. The body of man is a mystery
which on this side of the grave we can never hope to comprehend.

Admirable as are the things which philosophy or

science can

teach

us of it now, they are as nothing to what the resurrection of the

flesh will teach us hereafter. This is one of the reasons why the
Resurrection of our Lord is a mystery so dear to our devotions.

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We dare to regard it as a portrait of ourselves. Wc feel our bodies
here on earth more than we feel our souls, and we come to love
them more; and almost unconsciously, even in spite of Christian
mortification, we put them uppermost in our thoughts. Wc listen
with awe to the accounts of the inward trials of the saints, not
without sympathy, but with less sympathy than awe; but our
heart leaps up, as all hearts do, to the heroes who suffer corporal
martyrdom. Jesus Risen is what we are to be, what we are
traveling toward, our pattern, the earnest of our own transforma­
tion into its likeness, nay, in itself containing the very living
power by whose energy we shall be transformed. Our whole frame
is sown with wonderful possibilities. Roots of glory are embedded
in it everywhere. Every pore of it may be a new sense under other
circumstances. It can put on immortality. It can clothe itself in
more than solar light. It can compass worlds in its mature agility.
It can rival spirit in its amazing subtlety. If all this is true of
all the bodies of the just, what must be said of the body of Jesus,
the cause, the model, the sovereign, the very food, of our bodies?
Its relation to his Soul is not therefore to be lightly thought of.
His Body was itself a beautiful creation, a world of wonders, a
master-piece of God. It has been the greatest and most energetic
power in the history of the world; it was the instrument of cre­
ating the world over again, and its sufferings have shaped the
destinies of every man that has been born into the world. It was
necessary to our Lord’s Soul in order to complete his Human
Nature. The Hypostatic Union could not have been accomplished
without it. While the momentary separation of his Body and
his Soul was an awful mystery, involving the very accomplishment
of our redemption, their permanent separation would be an im­
perfection and a dishonor. Neither was our Lord’s Body a clog
to his Soul, as ours is, enfeebling its grasp, shortening its reach,
obstructing its sight, and hindering its aspirations. It was to him
an additional power of sanctity, an additional breadth of life.
The Soul loved it for many reasons, but perhaps for none so much
as its being the special instrument of suffering, and so enabling
the Soul to quench, if not wholly yet with fearful copiousness,

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the thirst for suffering with which it was inflamed, and which it
declared at the last moment to be still unsatisfied upon the Cross.
Moreover, his Body was that portion of his Nature for which he
put himself directly in debt to Mary, and, while this was another
source of the love which he bore it, the immense exaltation of his
Mother is also a measure not only of his love of his Body, but of
its place and dignity in the creation of God. His Body also height­
ens the mystery of his assumption of a created nature, because it
brings him lower down into creation, even among material things.
This makes his condescension the more wonderful, and his em­
brace of the universe the more complete. There would be a sad­
ness and a forlornness in the exile of matter from the Hypostatic
Union, which it is now difficult for us to calculate, so entirely has
the opposite and most consolatory fact grown into our minds and
become part of ourselves. Infinitely loving as it would have
seemed, how much less touching, benignant, pathetic, would the
mystery have been, had the Word taken to himself an angelical
rather than a human nature! How different would all our theology
have been, and how unspeakably different our idea of God! Ban­
ished to the confines of his creation, in what a region of cold
and darkness should we have wandered, where the fires of his
central throne would scarce have warmed us, whether left to the
punishment of our sins, or contented with some poor natural
beatitude, or, if saved by his grace, on such other terms of inti­
mate love and glad familiarity from those on which we are now,
when the dear angels seem strangers in heaven rather than
ourselves.
By the Body, also, the Soul of Jesus has in some sense learned
new things, and now enjoys peculiar pleasures through it, and
gains especially the multiplied presence of the Blessed Sacrament.
Moreover, it has an independence of the Soul, which is a part of its
relation to it. For it has its own immediate union with the Word.
It has not been assumed through the Soul, but separately and in
itself. So that when the Soul left the Body on the Cross, the Body
was still united to the Person of the Word, and, dead as it was,
claimed absolute worship and all other divine honors. It is en-

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titled to a separate worship of its own, and its divine union was in
no wise impaired by the absence of the Soul.
Surely then it must be with intense reverence that we draw
near the Infant Body of our Lord to gaze upon it, not with a
careless curiosity, but with adoring love and a wonder which for
his honor longs to become more and more intelligent. He tells
us his whole Heart at first sight; for he lies before us in all the
littleness of an Infant. He is not full-grown as Adam was. Though
he was to be the second Adam, while he was in reality the first
Adam, before Adam, the type of Adam, and not Adam his type,
nevertheless he will be unlike Adam rather than forego any shade
of humiliation which he can obtain by being but as one of Adam's
children. He will have a Mother, like the rest of us. He will owe
his Flesh and Blood to another, as we do. He will surrender the
privilege of being fashioned immediately by God’s own hand, as
Adam was. He will be little, and helpless, and hampered by all
the incommodities of infancy, because, although he is in that way
less like Adam, he is more like us, and participates deeper down
in our dishonors. Thus it is that every thing he does tells us all
about him. Every shifting attitude in each of his mysteries is a
breathing-place to relieve the immense love of his Sacred Heart.
In this sweet choice of infant stature he reveals his character,
and supplies us with a new motive of happy confidence.
We must consider also the exquisite delicacy of his Body. It
was formed by the Holy Spiirt, and bears upon its workmanship
the marks of that Divine Person’s peculiar complacency. It was
formed out of Mary's purest blood, in which the pulses of sin
had never beaten, upon which the kingdom of darkness had never
had so much as the shadow of a claim, out which had stood from
the first in the broad light of God’s choicest grace. His Precious
Blood was a beautiful emanation from a fountain already in­
comparably beautiful in itself because of its exceeding purity. All
the works of God are faultless in their fitness, whatever other
imperfections it may be his good pleasure to leave, as if inevitably
attaching to their created nature. Now, the Body of Jesus was
created a fit dwelling for his Soul; and we have seen already how

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291

great the dignity of that Soul was in the esteem of God. ft was
formed also to suffer exquisitely, in order to accomplish the great

work of our redemption. Hence its sensibilities were quickened
and refined, and all its capabilities of feeling rendered delicate,
and active, and rapid, and acute, with the power of communicating

thrills of an intensity which we could hardly comprehend. It was

in these respects like no other human body that ever was. If we
could have seen it as it really was in itself, we should have been

both amazed and terrified to see a vessel of such heavenly fragility
moving about among the coarse forms and in the jarring complexi­
ties of common earthly life. Neither must we forget that it was

formed also to bear, without breaking, impetuous torrents of glory.
That little infant frame, white as a snow-drop on the lap of winter,

light almost as a snow-flake on the chill night-air, smooth as the

cushioned drift of snow which the wind has lightly strewn out­
side the walls of Bethlehem, is at this moment holding within

itself, as if it were of adamantine rock, the fires of the beatific
light, the stupendous ocean of the mighty Vision, the gigantic

play of eternal things that come and go and live within its Soul.

A Person, omnipotent and infinite, sits within those white walls
of fleshly marble, and they do not even vibrate with the marvellous

indwelling.
The beauty of his Body is beyond what art has ever dreamed;
and it is a beauty only to be discovered by eyes which have been

touched with the special euphrasy of heaven, in order that they

may know God’s beautiful things when they behold them.

Its

beauty is a joy in heaven at this hour; and what must beauty be
which can gladden the Blessed there? The immaterial angels gaze

upon it with astonishment and delight. The saints yearn after it

until in some spiritual way they become shadowy likenesses of it

themselves. Theology does injustice to art, and yet must be al­
lowed to go unblamed for what it does. It cannot help itself. It is

a necessity of the eyesight of its science. It turns from the loveliest

divine Babes of Rapahel, deeply wounded, almost angry, only
dissipating its anger by clearing its heart with tears. So dishon­

orable—even unlovely, we must say—are all pictures of the Holy

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Child compared with that colorless unoutlined vision of him
which theology sees always in her mind. But what have the lines
and colors of earth to do with the beauty which is a magnet
up in heaven?
Its likeness to Mary is something more than part of its ex­
ceeding beauty; and it is a characteristic of it which we must
never fail to notice. Part of the mystery of her greatness is in
that adorable similitude. At the first, God communicated his
image to man; now woman communicates her image to God.
Who does not tremble at the mention of such incomprehensible
condescension? Whose heart does not burn with joy at the
thought of what his Mother was allowed to do? Of how much
spiritual nearness and of how many deeper similitudes is not
this likeness the symbol and the sufficient evidence! Oh, won­
derful to think of! the little white lily is blooming below the
greater one, an offshoot of its stem, and a faithful copy, leaf
for leaf, petal for petal, white for white, powdered with the
same golden dust, meeting the morning with the same fragrance,
which is like no other than their own! God copying his own
creature:—creation has seldom had a sight so fair to see!
But the urn full of Blood, the urn of Flesh within that Body,
is the most wonderful of all. Doubtless there were other hearts
of new-born babes in Bethlehem that night, which, measure for
measure, might be of the same dimensions as his own, and
with the same curves of the common human heart as his; and
the blood in them was dear to him, and allied to his, because it
was soon to be poured out for him in cruel martyrdom. But
there was no heart like to his, and there was no good in any
heart which was not there because of the good that was in his.
But that infant Heart which sent forth the tears he shed, which
gave the tone and impulse to the sighs he uttered, which played
upon his lips in smiles so full of meanings for Mary to interpret,
which rose and fell during his wakeful sleep,—it was one of
the greatest wonders in God’s creation. Its adoration was worthy
of God. It was a more gigantic choir of the divine praises than
all the stupendous worlds of which God is master. The impetu-

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293

osity of its littleness wrapped the majesty of God round aitetti
in the strong embraces of its worship. It sang more songs than

all the angels, and sweeter songs, and they were more divinely

It kept more lamps burning before the Throne than

sung.

there will be spirits and souls in heaven when it shall be fullest.
Nay, they were fires rather than lamps, unquenchable watch-

round the Uncreated Fire, and not unseemly in their

fires

exceeding nearness to it. It could offer oblations in some sense

equal

to God himself, and matching his immensity.

Its love

was a very living shadow of the Holy Ghost. Itself unconsum­

ing, it consumed all things else in honor of the Most High. It
had more love of God in it than all the love that God gets else­

where, outside himself.

It had more love of man in it than

there is elsewhere in the world, outside of God.

It confused

nothing, and forgot nobody. We were in it. We had our own

place in it at that very hour.

nowhere out of God.

It rested in us; yet it rested

It reposed upon our little returns of

love with a repose more real than our love, and yet which
was unreal compared with the tranquillity with which it reposed
Its love of Mary was its nearest approach to rest in

in God.
creatures.
The

Its utter rest was only in the deep will of God.

Blood that went and came, that ebbed and flowed,

in that heart-shaped urn of Flesh,—what volumes might not be
written of its grandeurs! By it alone is accomplished the whole

spiritual chemistry of the regenerate earth.

It washes away the

foul taints of an unclean world, and defiles not its own rosy
brightness in the washing.

It dilutes and neutralizes all the

poison of creation, and absorbs no poisonous qualities itself.

It

transfigures what it touches. It glorifies where it falls. It deifies

that which it rests upon. Its miracles are the most prodigious
of all miracles.
credible.

Their instantaneous conversions are almost in­

It hides itself in Sacraments in a manner which the

highest science is unable to detect.

It acts upon the substance

of the soul with the keenest and most spiritual transmutations.

The more it sheds, the more it has to shed. It distils freely out

of the glorious veins of heaven into thousands of chalices every

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day. Vet the veins bleed not, and no one sees it fall. The Sacred
Heart sends it at each pulsation to the uttermost ends of crea­
tion; and it returns momentarily as pure as when it left the
Heart, but laden with booty for God’s glory so plentiful that
it seems to encumber heaven. It must communicate itself. This
is the blessed necessity of its life, as it is also so adorably the
case with the full life of God. We are always wet with this
Blood. It is perpetually falling upon us. Wc leave the marks
of it on every thing we touch. There is the stain of Blood upon
our whole Christian life. It is this which makes life so awful,
because it is such an endless deifying of what is human. We
are so marked with it that our guilt in the Crucifixion is brought
home to us beyond a doubt; and yet it is just these stains
which are our acquittal. We weep because it has been shed,
and we do well in weeping. Yet if it had not been shed, we
should all have wept eternally.
His flesh is hardly a mother’s arm-full. Yet by an astound­
ing miracle it is the food of all other flesh in the grand Sacrament
of the altar. It is our Lord’s body with which we have most
to do on earth. It is his Body which is prominently worshipped,
rather than his Soul, in the Blessed Sacrament. It is his Body
pre-eminently which is trusted to our keeping, and which resides
abidingly among us in tabernacles made with hands. It is his
Body which we ourselves spiritually are; for his Church is truly
his Body, and it is this which makes the condition of schism so
blighted and forlorn. He touches us by his Body, feeds us by
his Body, makes us one by his Body, yea, makes us his Body. It
is the Hand both of his Soul and of his Divinity, the Hand to
baptize, the Hand to confirm, to absolve, to communicate, to
anoint, to marry, to ordain, the Hand that touches and does
the miracles, that takes hold and lifts up, that points the way
and leads on, that strikes those who deal over-lightly with it,
and that heals so often with the compassionate roughness of its
blow. That Infant Body is shrouding its glory, as we gaze upon
it; but that is no trial to our faith. We see the glory there,
for all it makes itself invisible. But there is one thing wanting

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295

in the Infant Body, one thing which may make ns slow to
recognize it for the same as the Body in heaven.
earth’s seals.

It wants

It lacks the Five Wounds, to which it clings so

fondly as to retain them on its throne, not for our reproach,
but for our everlasting jubilee.

The Infant Body needs thus

to be more earthly in order to be more manifestly heavenly.

Wc have clone.

The union of this Body and Soul is the

Sacred Humanity of our Lord, a Nature with no personality
of its own lying under it and supplying it with a human self-

consciousness.

It lies upon the Person of the Word, not inertly

as the whole helpless creation lies in the sustaining hand of its

Almighty Maker, but united to the Divine Person and instinct
with richest life. Exuberant in its own nature, it is exuberant

most of all in its Divine Union. Such is the Sacred Humanity.
Its perfection is in the union of the Body and the Soul. We

have seen that it is acknowledged and worshipped as their Head

by the angels who are of a different and superior nature. The
likeness to it in glory is the end to which all that is high and
holy among men is tending.

It is capacious enough to satisfy

an eternal desire of the Eternal Word. It is the greatest world
of all the worlds, the Central World of the Divine Decrees. By

the separation of the Body and the Soul, and exclusively and

precisely by that, the Passion was consummated and the atone­
ment made; and by the reunion of them in the Resurrection,

and exclusively and precisely by that, our justification was com­
pleted.

He died for our sins, says the apostle, and rose again

for our justification. As the magnificence of God is in his Unity,

so the grandeur of creation is in its unities, which shadow forth
the

Unbeginning Unity.

Second among these unities is the

union of our Lord’s Soul and Body.

There is no other such

union in creation, except that greater union, belonging to them
only, and belonging to each of them, by which they are both
united to the Divine Person of the Word: and of this union
the Holy Ghost was the principle. It was his fecundity outside
of God, who had no fecundity within God; and thus did the
fruitful Spirit carry on outside of God that free divine life

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whose necessary course was closed in his own infinite and eternal
Procession.
From this dread thought comes one thought more. Inside
the Most Holy Trinity it is equally divine, equally adorable,
to produce, to be produced, or not to produce. Much more
therefore to create or not to create were in God equally adorable.
Thus we gaze with astonishment upon this world of the Sacred
Humanity, the magnificence of the Hypostatic Union, the re­
splendency of our Lord’s Human Soul, the energy and beauty
of his Body, the sublimity of their union, and the natural im­
personality of them both. We see with amazement how all these
things are mixed up with God, and how God would be un­
known and inconceivable without them, and how the whole
of his external glory is implicated in them. Yet were they, and
with them all creation which hangs like pendants from them,
to wither away, and dissolve, and be effaced in its own original
nothingness, and divinest oblivion to cover it all, the whole
system might drop from God, as the ragged silver mists drop
from the sunrise, and melt into nothing, and go nowhither,
and his grandeur would arise the same, and shine into itself,
pouring into its own bosom all its splendor, and upon its bright­
ness there would be no vestige of the vanished worlds, the lost
creation. The ruin of things would be but a fresh flash of his
magnificence. The loss could in no wise attaint his grandeur.
The Threefold Solitude of the old eternity would come back
again, and he would have been immutable all the while. Oh,
what must thy grandeur be, O God, in whose light the great­
ness of the Sacred Humanity thus pales to nothingness!
But let us turn back, like frightened children, to that mystery
of love. It is no show, no festal pageant, not a brightness fol­
lowed by a darkness, not a glory that can pass away. The Eternal
has become a little Babe. That will now be true eternally. The
Incomprehensible lies infantine, and smiling joyously, on the
lap of an earthly Mother, who loves us more dearly than our
own unselfish mothers ever loved us. She gazes on him: so
do we. It is Flesh. That light is out of an Infant’s eyes. We,

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297

with her, privileged by faith as she by sight, watch the pulses
rise and fall.

We listen to the beating of his Heart. It is all

flesh and blood, beautiful exceedingly, mysterious exceedingly.

We lean over; we stoop down; we feel his warm breath against
our faces; we kiss his living lips.

Mary would have it so: it

was she who taught us to be venturesome and free;—and who,
if not she, would know his will? Verily it is all flesh and blood.
Are we not disquieted to do great things for him?

It is the

wonderful, the terrible, the all-knowing, the unbeginning God,
who lies so little and so calm on Mary's knee. It is the infinite

Creator, blessed a thousand times for his uncreated majesty, and
now equally a thousand times for his created littleness and lowli­
ness and loveliness.

It must be the masculine effort, the per­

severing strain of a life-long dependence upon grace, which alone
can rightly honor the all-holy Babe, the almighty Little One,
the eternal Child, as well for the mystery of his gentleness as
for the exulting faith whereby, with our hearts upon our lips,

we can say witli the Church those few tremendous words, which

make the angels and archangels to bow down, and the strong
bright thrones of heaven to totter and to tremble in an adoration
which blends fear and joy in one,—Et incarnatus est de Spiritu
Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et Homo factus est!

CHAPTER VII
CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME
Sorrow is the substance of man’s natural life, and it might
almost be defined to be his natural capability of the supernatural.
Joy is but a thin shade, except when it is in alternation with
sorrow. The power of art is in the sorrowful. No poetry finds
its way into a nation's mind, or can dwell there, unless it have
a burden of sorrow in it. To glorify sorrow is one of the highest
functions of song, of sculpture, or of painting. Nothing has a
lasting interest for men which is not in some way connected
with sorrow. All that is touching, pathetic, dramatic, in man’s
life has to do with sorrow. Sorrow is the poetry of a creation
which is fallen, of a race which is in exile, in a vale of tears
closed in at the end by the sunless defile of death. Religion
has rather added to all this than taken frojn it. Our sorrow
is now more purely sorrow since gloom and despair have been
chased away from it. We have been redeemed by sorrow. The
mysteries of our Lord are chiefly mysteries of sorrow. Our Lady
is the Mother of woes. The offices and ceremonies of the Church
incline rather to be pensive than to be triumphant. Joy on
earth is confessedly for a time. It rises out of sorrow, and it falls
back upon it again. All devotion has an element of softness
in it, which, if it is not sorrow, is at least akin to it and con­
genial to it. Sympathy is the bond of hearts, and all sympathy
has some of the blood of sorrow in its veins. While joy often
jars upon our spirits, sorrow hardly ever seems misplaced, even
when it is unwelcome.
The old mystics spoke of two kinds of men,—the solar and
die lunar. Some were in occult sympathy with the sun, and
were ruled by its mysterious influences. Their temperament
and their intellect bore some analogy to the character of the
298

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299

sun. Their power of working, their way of work, and the kind

of work they chose, were all under the influence of his sov­

ereign beam.

Their very diseases were supposed to arise from

some malignity of the solar ray, which settled by preference
on certain members of the body rather than others. Then there

were others who went through life almost as if there were no
sun, or at least who quietly used its material light, as a lamp

which Providence had placed at their disposal. But they were
under equal subjection to the moon, and her wayward beam

of cold nocturnal silver played upon their sensitive frames and
their responsive souls, as the winds play on an æolian harp. So

there are men in the world who are better for joy, who are
humbled by its sweetness and expanded under its shining; and

on the other hand there are men who are better for sorrow,
and to whom it is the altogether necessary atmosphere of good­

ness.

These last outnumber the first by many millions.

The

souls whom joy nurtures in holiness are so completely the

exceptional cases, that for the multitude of hearers or of readers
we may speak as if all men were at home with sorrow and lived

with it as with their guardian angel.

There are some men to whom sorrow teaches all things,

and to whom also sorrow is the sole revelation. They can only
learn by sorrow. They do not understand any other language.

They are not capable of taking in any other experience. What
is clear as light they cannot see, until the shadow of sorrow

has fallen upon it.
way through life.

We come across these men daily on our

There are others who go further than this.

They are men who can only work in the shade of some sup­

posed impending catastrophe.

They feel always that they are

walking into a darkness and down a gulf, and the belief cheers

them, and the darkness recedes and the gulf travels backward,
but their idea of them both is the mainspring of their activity

and power. Others, who can do without sorrow in other things,

cannot do without it in their religion. It becomes to them their

fear,

their reverence, and their love.

It is the fountain of

their devotion, and the stimulus of their duty.

They find sor-

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row in all the mysteries of Jesus, no matter how joyful in­
glorious they may be. Sorrow is the condition of all their
heavcnly-mindedness. Sorrow converted them; sorrow perfects
them; sorrow is their final perseverance. It is in these sorrowsainted men that life sometimes appears to faint, as if it must
needs end before the harbor of death is visible; and then they
are strangely, and to our eyes supernal urally, as if they were
heaven’s favorites, refreshed by gales from the other world,
like the land-winds that came fraught with the fragrance of
the sassafras to Columbus and his faltering crew. There are
other men whose characters are only brought out by sorrow,
timid, feminine natures, whose true grandeur is as little sus­
pected by themselves as it is by those around them. From out­
ward circumstances or from inward shrinking, sometimes it
may even be from indolence, they have left their own nature
unexplored. They are like the unadventurous dwellers among
the hills, who have no true idea of the vastness of that mountain­
range upon whose outskirts they have pitched their tents, and
who never suspect how the valleys fall back upon each other
and wind inward like the convolutions of a mighty shell. It
needs a storm to tell them this, and then the thunder makes
trumpets of the glens, and reveals to them by its rolling echoes
the inaccessible recesses of the inner mountains. So it is with
these men. The cry of sorrow goes forth in their soul, and its
echoes come trembling up from depths of which they never
dreamed. Others there are whom sorrow shames into goodness.
Too much happiness often makes men prematurely old by
anticipating the passive tranquillity of weariness and years, while
sorrow, especially if it comes in the shape of disappointment,
thrusts middle life back into youth, by keeping alive an activity
always fretful and mostly persevering. They are in general the
youngest-looking men in mind and heart who come latest in
life to that which they have lived for. It is sorrow which tows
them into harbor at the last. But, on the other hand, with
characters where premature old age is needed to conquer, to
soften, and to sanctify, it is sorrow which does the characteristic

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME

vn

work of age by humbling their high-mindedness. Then all their
nature is transfigured.

Sorrow beatifies their harshness, as blue

distance or golden light glorifies the cliffs. They are children

now,

who from childhood have been rebels.

now,

in whose nature worship had seemed an element that

was wanting.

They worship

Sorrow has done the work of grace, and grace

has done time’s work better and more speedily than time could
do it.

In what an evening light the age which sorrow works,

and not time, can clothe a once ungenial nature!

How often

in the slanting shades of evening the mountains seem to come

down into the valley and kneel to pray, while the starry lamps
of the eternal sanctuary are being lighted above their heads!

This is what happens to the soul when sorrow ages it,—it ages
it so graciously.

There are unquiet characters also, which sorrow seems to
lull, just as the placid country appeases the city-wearied spirit
with a soothing which is half pain and half pleasure, like the

balm that mothers pour over the chafed limbs of their little
ones.
it.

They have sought peace for years, and have never found

Now sorrow has come, and, lo! peace was hidden in its

folds.

So also to unsuccessful men sorrow comes like a success.

They sit down contented now. They look with indifference on
their broken idols.

They no longer care to succeed in those

things in which they have been unsuccessful. Sorrow has come,
and they have found in it just what they looked for in success.

Some men are deluded through half their lives, and for the

most part deluded precisely where they least doubted that they
were

right;

and sorrow

is

their disenchanting.

It is their

merciful fairy, who breaks the spell and restores them to their
proper shapes. Then there are souls who cannot keep a direct

road. Indeed, it is so natural to men to wander, that their feet
cannot cross a field but in a tortuous path. For such men sorrow

makes life an alley, with a clipped and prickly hedge on either

side, which, if it be ungraceful, at least is safe; and to those
who will not seek perfection safety is salvation. Some men have
lives apart, destinies so singular that they resemble no other

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human fortunes, but, like die strange scenery of Tierra del
Fuego, mate with nothing else on earth. These men are hard
to sanctify. Sorrow must come first, and envelop them in all
its soft humanities, and make them commonplace, and after
that giace will sow its seeds. Then there arc volcanic characters.
Volcanic soil is wonderfully productive: so it is with volcanic
characters. They take long to ripen; but their maturity is in­
credibly prolific; and it is sorrow rather than time which matures
them. Then there is also a quiet, painless stun of sorrow, under
which men walk about as in a dream, while all life appears to
stand still in ominous silence round them,— only, reversing
the phenomena of dreams, these men rather have a lack of
faith than believe too much; for they disbelieve in all realities,
no matter how practical or solid. Yet for some men this stun
is good,—if not for more, at least for a transition-state. Then
there are others who are always wishing life away. Our own
hearts go along with these. We leave no place, however beau­
tiful, however endeared to us by a thousand recollections, so
much with regret as with the feeling wherewith a man turns
away from an enemy he has beaten and with whom he has
no more to do. So much at least is past. So much is over. Anodier chapter is done. Another step is taken, which, thanks to
Heaven! is an irrevocable progress elsewhere. Such men's asso­
ciations even are prophecies of the future rather than remi­
niscences of the past. Their scenery is in heaven. It is their
native land, and the yearnings of their love of country tend
only there. Their local attachments are rooted in invisible
homes. Their very unrealities are not idle regrettings of the
past, but calentures of heaven. Such are men to whom all
presents are weary because all presents are sorrowful. But, by
way of compensation, to the same men all pasts are presents,
and no futures are disquieting. Thus it is that, in one way
or in another, we have nearly all made our professions of its
faith, and are all picking our way heavenward as best we can,
under that softly-stern vicariate of Christ, the apostolate of sorrow.
There is sorrow therefore even in Bethlehem. Though it

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303

seems to be a place of pure joy, and fountains of joy stream
from it daily over the whole earth, there is a deep sorrow in
it also,—a sorrow so universal that it makes all its brightness
pathetic. Although in the hearts of men it must lie in light
forever, a thunder-cloud can hang even over Bethlehem. But
it is not merely the shade of a distant foreseen sorrow which
is cast over that sunny slope. There is real sorrow there, deeper
than common human sorrow, such a divine sorrow as belongs
only to the mysteries of the Incarnation. It will end, so far
as Bethlehem is concerned, in the wildest mother’s wailings
that have ever wakened the echoes of the earth. We shall not
rightly understand the Sacred Infancy until we have walked
and mused by the shores of this great sorrow, seemingly so out
of place and season. Λ devotion which is founded on the Sacred
Infancy as if it were simply the opposite of the Passion, will
neither be deep nor lasting. If it is not altogether untrue, it
is at least inadequate.
In order to see of what nature this sorrow is, how it per­
vades all the mysteries with its universal presence, and at the
same time how congenial it is to them all, we must begin by
taking a survey of the world, as we may call it, of the Sacred
Infancy, the world of which Bethlehem is the metropolis and
centre. It is not a world of one idea only, though one spirit
is sovereign there and gives to all its diversified mysteries an
obvious as well as an internal unity. It is a world full of land­
scapes, both of a spiritual and a material kind, out of which
comes deep heavenly poetry, and upon which heavenly poets
form themselves. Or we may liken it to a gallery of works of
divine art, from the study of which a supernatural beauty rises
in the beholder’s mind, rises until it masters it and likens it
to itself. But no word-painting can describe the pictures that
are there. Fortunately for us, in all the mysteries of Jesus it
is only necessary that we should indicate them, and then the
love that is in Christian hearts illuminates its own ideal and
reproduces in itself the mystery.
Bethlehem itself supplies us with many of these sweet pic

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lures. We have the Birth at midnight, with the kneeling Mother,
and the adoring Joseph, the light of his red dusky lantern
blending with the white splendor that radiates from the Little
Infant on the floor, and the eyes of the beasts in the shadowy
background, which have caught the reflection and are looking
through the gloom. No painter can paint it as it lies in the
believer’s soul, and as the bells of Christmas wake it up in
that gay winter midnight, which is brighter than a summer
noon, because of the inward light by which the heart sees
and worships. While we look, we love and grow holy. Yet, as
we are gazing, the scene shifts as of itself, and we behold the
first adoration of Mary and Joseph, and the unspeakable smile
with which Jesus repaid their worship. The animals have van­
ished from the dusky illuminated gloom, and—are they real
faces, or only the outlines into which all visible darkness
wreathes itself?—the ages, the ages of the old Hebrew and
heathen past, and the unborn ages of the teeming future, are
gathered round, muffled in vague shapeless mantles, with their
shadowy expressive faces, as if they were summoned there to
be representatives, or were projected out of the heart of the
child or out of the soul of the Mother by the very force of love
and prayer. Meanwhile, although we are looking inward to
the head of the Cave, the whole external world is somehow
visible, lying quiet in the cold starlight. We see Rome, with
all its stern life of government hardly sleeping, and all its popular
life of circus-loving indolence and wanton citizenship sleeping
off its wicked wassail. We see Athens, the city of the brighthearted, with its philosophers still at their vigils,—though they
are not the giants that their forefathers were. We behold Alex­
andria, whose nights a thousand colored lanterns turn to day,
shooting fitful gleams of unsteady radiance on one side over
the waters that flap against her mole, and on the other upon
the white sands, which are gemmed with palms, and where night­
breathing gardens fight with the encroaching barrenness. We
see the strange cities of the Chinese Empire, seething with popu­
lation, whose multitudinous souls provoke the appetite of mis­

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME

305

sionary zeal, and whose civilization even then was old and fixed.
The haunts of many false religions disclose themselves to us
as we look,--the shrines of Indian worships, the oak groves
and rings of stone of the Gaulish Druids, the Persian sun-temples
on the mountain-tops, the cruel sacrificial stones of the American
Aztecs and the huge hands of their idols filled with bleeding
human hearts. Over the wide forest, and the dismal steppe,
and in all the indentations of the sea, where the pagan pirates
dwell, Mary’s worship seems to steal like a gentle breath, and
a responsive ray of light meets it out of the Infant’s Heart, and
steals over all the earth, and mercifully takes it for his own.
Utter darkness there shall nowhere be any longer.
Again the scene changes. The Cave re-adorns itself, as if
it were a living thing, that had hands wherewith to deck itself
with images, as though they were jewels and it was but changing
its apparel. The shepherds come in to worship; and the faces
of Jesus and Mary are both new. They have got another kind
of beauty now, differing from the one they wore but a while
ago. Moreover, in this scene the Babe is in the Manger, and
the shadow of the Eternal Father has fallen more deeply on
Joseph now that the external world has begun to come, to serve,
and to adore. We can see sounds also in our spiritual pictures;
and we behold the skies resonant with angelic melodies. The
heavenly sounds make the colors and the outlines speak. In­
stantly all things have their meanings. All things wear on their
faces beautiful significances. We read as in a book, but it is the
book of the wisdom of heaven. Every accident is a mystery.
Every circumstance becomes an allegory.
But this picture vanishes also. The Babe is no longer in
the Manger. He lies upon his Mother’s knee. The kings are
there, dark-featured and gleaming in their Oriental bravery.
How strange the gold and silver seem, the pearls, the rubies,
and the diamonds, giving a scattered light where they lie in
negligent profusion on the floor, and the casket of frankincense
with its gorgeous barbaric art, and the silent myrrh that holds
its tongue yet says so much! All this splendor is harmoniously

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ont of keeping with the rough Cave, with its walls here and
there glistening with streaks of subterranean moisture, with
its rugged angles where the bats are wont to hang, with its
Jittered straw, and its projections polished with the rubbings
of generations of animals whose dwellings have been there.
The snorting breath of the ungainly camels is heard outside,
and now and then they jangle their bells in their uneasiness,
as they kneel upon the sward. The division of races, the history
of the gentiles, God's secret witnessing of himself in dark places,
the pathos of old primitive traditions, are in the faces of the
kings; and the countenance of that swarthy one. the presence
of a black in the Cave of Bethlehem, is more than a moving
incident: it is pregnant with saddest history, and yet with sadder
prophecy. Once again the scene changes, and Jesus is shedding
his first drops of Blood, whether it be by his Mother’s hand
within the Cave, or by the hand of the priest in the synagogue
upon the hill. Close by as through sunlit openings among the
clouds in famous pictures, we see the whole mystery of redemp­
tion mistily revealing itself through a strong golden haze, shapes
of light lost in light, indistinct, yet fastening strongly on the
soul. Such are the pictures of Bethlehem, and they might easily
be multiplied.
The Desert is not less rich in the light-checkered monotony
of its landscapes. Look at it with the flush of sunrise on its
dewless sands. That misty blue line behind represents the distant
undulations of Judea’s southern hills. Here and there on the
ground sparry stones glisten, like rain-drops on the boughs, but
there are no rain-drops there. It is a weary land which stretches
out before us, flat plain with scattered tufts of stunted thorny
shrubs, or wavy hollows in whose grooves no streamlet flows,
but only a dry motionless torrent of stones, as if they got
together there for company, and all as tawny as a lion’s coat.
There is a look of haste about the flying figures of the Mother
and the Foster-father. Yet no garments are in disarray, or
straggling out upon the morning wind. It is a modesty of pre­
cipitation, such as once before carried her so swiftly over the

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307

hill-country of Judea, and which does no dishonor to the tran­
quillity of her holiness. Her look breathes calm, even as she
flies. Yet there is a timid clasping of the Infant to her bosom,
which is more than the common embrace of an unanxious
mother. Two creatures flying with the Creator across the
wilderness, and invisible satellites far behind hunting the Creator
to his death, but baffled by a woman's speed, to whose feet a
mother s love, which is also a creature's worship, has given
wings!
The wilderness trembles in the mist, dissolves and changes.
The sun has ridden from east to west. There is a piece of broken
ground, either as if some time the fiery earth had gaped, or
as if the action of vehement waters had scooped rude lineaments
of itself around about. Under the shadow of a cliff, which is
not tall, but lies so low that afar off the eye would look over
it without suspecting the undulation in which it lies, there is
a crystal well, a spring of modest volume, and separate spikes
of grass stand up like miniature palisades in the sand, and some
desert-haunting plants, with brittle, fleshy stalks, grow near,
and in the cool shade are Mary and Joseph resting. The shadow
of the Eternal Father has grown even yet deeper upon Joseph;
and somehow, if we might dare to depict it so, the grace of
maternity sits more gravely upon Mary’s brow. The Child
visibly understands it all, but is mysterious, and holds his peace.
The bird of prey that is floating over him, like a spot of gold
struck by the sunset in the air, is as large as he, and seems
the more rightful master of the place.
Again—and it is now the heart of the wilderness. Even the
robbers have no homes here. It is a desolate spot, remote
from the track of the caravans. It is the dead of night. But
there is no silence. The wilderness has many voices. It would
puzzle us to know where they come from; but they do come,
sad, moaning, and inarticulate. Is it the wind grating on the
sand? Is it the sobbing of the reedy springs taken up by the
quiet night from a thousand places, and breathed through a
tube of darkness as if it were one murmuring note? Is it the

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sighing of the distant palm-trees, blending their solitary whispers
into one? Is it the clefts of the rocks that make organs for
the wind? Is it the very earth, sleeping uneasily, and dreaming
of its own desolate sterility? Or is it the joints of the great
world that are creaking in the silent night, like a distant tramp
of men walking upon snow? It is a strange lullaby for God.
The moon shines down upon the group. All Three arc sleeping,
—sleeping in the arms of solitude, in the midst of creation. God
is sleeping between his two chosen creatures, the Son between
the shadow of the Father and the shadow of the Holy Ghost.
Who then is watching? In the bright darkness of the upper
air we feel a Watcher, to whom our very thoughts dare not give
any form. Is it his presence that makes the elements and inani­
mate things wail, as if they were in suffering and were striving
to let no sound of suffering escape?
But now it is bright morning. The day is fairly advanced
into the hours when even the winter’s sun is incommodious there.
The Infant is being changed from Mary’s arms to Joseph’s. The
angels press round with envy. It is but an incident of the
journey; yet it is also a mystery. Mary is without her Child,
and we think of Calvary, the Garden-tomb, and the House
of John. Joseph is bearing the Babe, and has now grown so
vivid a shadow of the Eternal Father that he almost startles
us into worship. The immense Word filled the whole Bosom
of the Eternal Father. He nestles well now in one corner of
Joseph’s bosom. Behind him, visible only in uncertain aerial
outlines, follows a procession, a pageant of grand and gorgeous
apparitions, at which we gaze in breathless awe. It is the historical
priesthood of the whole long enduring Church, up to the last
ordination before the day of doom and the young priest who
will have but one mass to say. Popes are there, with their meek
faces overshadowed by their tiaras; bishops, whose countenances
beam with masculine holiness, looks of paternal softness unbend­
ing the austere lines of science on their brows; priests, also,
men of manifold gifts, fountains of sacred light, sparkling with
the strange inventions of self-crucifying charity, hearts large as

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oceans, nu n that knew how to multiply their lives a hundred
times lor souls, the diversity of whose eloquent lineaments,
silently speaking as many tongues of love as there are languages
on earth, is controlled into unity by one pervading, sovereign
air of tenderness, as if they were the sisters of souls rather than
their rulers. All these, with countless pure faced levites, and
youthful ministers beautiful in boyish chastity, mingling the
impulses of a free graceful artlessness with the self-controlling
happiness of a downcast bashful mien,—all these are shadowily
following Joseph, as if they were his one shadow variously multi­
plied, while he bears the Infant in his arms. They follow, not
in the sinuous bends of a festal pageant, but like a broad serried
band of Roman soldiers marching on the straightest road. The
Face of Jesus looks the meaning of it all, but is as silent in his
swaddling-clothes as the Blessed Sacrament is upon the corporal.
Time seems to pass, and a river to lapse invisibly at our
feet. There is a mirage near the head of the Red Sea. But its
palaces fall, its palms totter and break, and its blue lagoons
shiver and part, and show the true scenery beneath. It is the
wilderness again. The Three are treading the wilderness. This
time they are all treading it. There is no Infant. The Boy
is at their side. He keeps up with them in a kind of running
walk, and does penance by it, and deceives even Mary, that
she may not find it out. The breezes of Judea are blowing in
their faces. The leagues of hot sand have not sucked up the
breath of the thyme, with which it was laden as it blew over
the pale greensward and pastoral grounds of Judah and of
Benjamin. Joseph is aged; and the shadow of the Eternal Father
is yet deeper on him. There is a fuller heart in Mary’s face,
as of one who has been living so much longer in the awful
intimacy of God. Calvary is meeting Bethlehem in the Boy’s
Soul, and there is something eternal in his eyes which comports
itself marvellously with boyhood; and the clear speaking of his
tones seems to make even the desert silent, as if it wished to
absorb them in its loose sands and keep them in its bosom as
a compensation for its barrenness. Sunset and dawn, midnight

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and noon, wind and calm, storm and shower, darkness and
starlight, ride over the wilderness, like the wind-driven cloud
spots on the mountain side, and vary its pictures almost endlessly,
and in the heart of each picture sits a mystery, of whose beauty
the generations of men will never tire.
Egypt is not less fertile than the Desert in images of beauty.
What are these white walls, which are laved by the flood when
it is out, but otherwise rise out of that luxuriant green flat of
densest herbage, sward so inveterately green that it seems proof
almost against the scorching of the Egyptian sun? It is Heliopolis.
We will enter on the evening of its pagan holy-day. All the
morning there have been endless sacrifices. All the day there
have been crowds of worshippers. The streets are full of people.
The evening star will rise upon the grave riot of an Egyptian
festival. Toward sunset there is a pause in the streets. The
multitudes stand still. It is as if a mighty city had been paralyzed
by some dreadful shock. A fearful dubious rumor has gone forth,
stilling all that noisy populace, so that men could hear each
others' hearts beating. A moment’s pause, the multitude sways
uncertainly like a huge tree in the first blast of the tempest,
and then rolls onward to the temples, in waves and waves of
men, pressing upon each other as billow chases billow up the
sand. As the sun was sloping, while the lanterns were just being
lit, while the incense was smoking tranquilly before the idols,
and the sacred doves were settling themselves to roost in the
plane-trees of the outer-courts, the images of the gods fell with­
out warning from their bases, with a hideous crash, and are
lying mutilated and in fragments on the ground. Not a tremor
of earthquake could be felt. The marble pavements have not
given, nor one slab been raised. The air was so still there was
hardly a breath to set a broad plane-leaf turning on its little
unwieldy pivot. What omen is this? What fearful unlooked-for
anger of the Sun? Meanwhile some pilgrims are entering the
city-gate unnoticed. Who would notice pilgrims on such a day
as that, when every town of Egypt, the ports at the Nile-mouths,
the dwellers above the cataracts, even the peasants from the

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distant oases, had gathered to the sanctuary of the Sun? Through
streets silent, vacant, in the rear of the multitudes that have
rushed to the temples, Mary, clasping to her bosom her slumber­
ing Child, follows Joseph faintly and wearily to the khan, to
find a corner amidst its crowded inmates, or to find all places
full, the old experience of Bethlehem.
The streets of Heliopolis come before us on a later day.
Mary is carrying the Infant in her arms. It is a many-colored
scene. Crowds are moving to and fro, buying and selling, in
parties or alone. Every one, it should seem, must be intent
upon his own occupations. Strangers are no strange things.
Sanctuaries and pilgrimage-places are hardened to the sight of
strangers. Yet somehow that Jewish Mother and her Child
draw all eyes upon them. Every one looks up, and follows them
with his look, so long as they are in sight. It is something more
than beauty which overflows the countenance of the Child. There
is an attraction in him which will not give an account of itself.
He is like a light in a dark place, an apparition that fascinates
the beholders and awakens deep nameless emotions in the heart,
which are akin to worship and religion. The dark eyes of those
bronzed faces cast wild looks upon the glorious Child. There is
something in them which makes the Mother tremble instinc­
tively. She has no superstition of the evil eye, but she looks
onward to another crowd, in another place, to other wild eyes
cast yet more wildly upon her Love upon a far darker day than
these days of exile. She folds him to her bosom, as if they
were going to rob her of him, when it is truly—and she knows
it—only the fierceness of their admiration which so lights up
their swarthy features. He also seems to feel the presence of
that pagan multitude, and in some way to resent that which causes
his Mother fear. He gazes on the people unblenchingly, as
if it were in the bold simplicity of infancy, not without deep
love, yet with something flashing king-like in his air. He even
stirs in her arms uneasily, as if he would defend her, and take
her part against that multitude. His face is set like that of a
young eagle in a storm, beating up against the channels of the

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wind,—another sort of beauty from that which he will wear,
when he is driven to and fro, like a hunted thing, by the
maddened populace of Jerusalem.
The Egyptian city rises up before us again, with its narrow
streets, its quaint bazaars, and the menageries of its multitudin­
ous temples. It is now indeed, as its name imports, the City
of die Sun; for the true Sun is there, and the place looks darker
for his shining. Over the hot Nile-valley antiquity broods like
a cloud. The old fortunes of the people of God rest there like
a shadow. The ancient plagues of the unbelieving king still
seem to load the air. The river is as silent as a river in a dream.
There is an atmosphere of fate over the picture. The bright
lights seem burdened with something which is not bright. In
an alley of high walls, near the city-gate, in a dim street with
buildings so tall that the sun lights it only in its meridian tran­
sit, is Joseph’s dwelling of poverty and exile. The implements
of work lie round about. But there is a pause. Mary has sus­
pended her spinning. Joseph holds in his hand the piece of wood
he was fitting to another. Their eyes are fixed upon the Child,
who is on his feet upon the ground, but clinging to the lap of
Mary’s garment. Of himself, unpersuaded, unexpected, without
a pattern sedulously given him to mimic, he has spoken his
first word. Perhaps it was the Name of God, perhaps his Mother’s
name. Because he was himself God, skilful in the craft of love,
exquisitely considerate in the inventions of compassions, we will
deem it was his Mother’s name. Look at the eyes of the Mother
and the Foster-father. An earthquake might rend Heliopolis in
twain, and they would not hear or feel. The glow of ecstasy,
puzzled but not disquieted, is on their features. The Word the
Father spoke eternally now has spoken himself. Who would
dare to think that even Mary taught the Word to speak? The
cloud of silence broke suddenly from before his mind, as from
off a mountain-top, and the little house at Heliopolis was flooded
with refulgence. The very sound gave light. The very light
played music. The ears of those two had heard the midnight
Gloria of the angelic choirs; but it had no such melody as this.

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It well-nigh called their souls out of their bodies, it was so
wonderful. To that picture we listen rather than look.
It has passed away. Evening has come down upon the land,
the brief evening. The Nile glows like a glossy creature, swift,
broad-backed, and almost noiseless, in the crimson sunset. Only
at the edge the quick waters make the reeds twitter a little, except
in the little earthy bays where the lotus-lily rises and falls at
anchor quietly just tremulously enough to shake its odors out
upon the air, like incense from the thurible. The Incarnate God
is musing on the bank, Mary withdrawn a stone's throw from
him, as if she had felt it was his will, and yet withdrawn less
far than the apostles at Gethsemane. Her gaze is as fixed upon
him as an angel’s look is fixed upon the Vision. His mind opens
before us, as if a sanctuary were being unveiled, and it flows
out of his eyes, as they are bent upon the stream and catch
the reflection of the golden light from the shining waters. In
the scarce audible murmur of the river he hears the cry that
rang through Egypt in the night, that terrible night, of the
first-born. It is as if the echoes of that wail had been undulating
over the desert ever since. The tears gather in his eyes; for he
thinks of Bethlehem, its mothers, and its Innocents. But he
hears now in the stillness, while the evening breeze scarce waves
its indolent pinions over the sun-shrivelled land, the trampling
of countless hurrying feet. It is the children of Israel going
forth in the darkness upon their Exodus; and there is the Exodus
of a whole world to be accomplished now, and it is he who must
cleave the sea; and how shall it be cloven? The twilight deepens.
Almost suddenly it is dark. The eyes of the Child have gone
out in the darkness, and the wind rises, and the mist gathers on
the stream.
Once more we see him, in the early dawn, passing through
the gate of Heliopolis after Joseph’s dream. The freshness of
the morning is on the Nile. The sails of the boats catch the
sun above the high banks of the river. In the faces of all the
Three there is a sense of freedom after imprisonment. The
brightness of a return from exile breathes in every feature. The

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care-worn look is gone. The step is elastic. It is morning in
their souls as well as morning on the outside earth. They arc
like those who have had a recent message from heaven. They
have a glory round them, like wreaths of angels manifest. The
pagan faces have been a grief to Joseph. They were a dread to
Maty. They breathe more freely now that they are out the city
of those dark men and away from the strange closeness of the
dim bazaars and many-latticed walls. They are now like the
singing-birds of the woods and fields, free, and living on the
providence of their heavenly Father, to find food on all road­
sides, and to drink of the brook in the way, and to sing that
perpetual voiceless song which a quiet heart is always singing
in the ear of God. But there is something more in the Boy of
seven years old. The growth of his Humanity seems to betray
the Divinity more and more, as if it had more room to display
itself, and anticipated each new human gesture and made it
all divine. The light in his clear eyes is deep, and in their depths
are mysteries. Jerusalem is in his Heart. There is a desolate
green hill outside its gates which is a magnet to his Soul. There
is the same wonderful look upon his boyish Face which amazed
the apostles so much in him when he hurried along the road
to Jerusalem, as if to be in time for his Passion, as if it might
else elude his thirst for suffering. That look upon his Face is
printed now on Mary’s heart, and overflows her face as well.
Those two faces belong to Calvary. Upon the face of Joseph
there still rests the old tranquillity of Bethlehem.
Nazareth also contributes to this land of the Sacred Infancy
many fair scenes,—in truth, a complete pictured theology of
the Incarnation. We often come near to rest in life, and then
are cheated of it, and after that we reach a better rest through
disappointment, better because it was not our own choice, and
better, as it proves, in its very self. Such seems to be the signifi­
cance of that holy calm which shines on the features of Mary
and Joseph as they draw nigh to Nazareth after they have been
disappointed in their desire of dwelling at Jerusalem. I should
not say disappointed; for there are no disappointments to those

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whose wills are buried in the will of God. With the Boy also
Jerusalem is to be delayed. Yet on his Face there is the same
intense tranquillity, as if the coming rest sent its peace before
it into soul and countenance. All Three wear the look we might
expect to sec on the faces of those who are first entering heaven.
There is no trouble, no surprise, no voice, no jubilee, but a
flush of peace arising from the intensity of joy kept down and
deepened by the nearness to God and the momentarily-expected
Vision. Even to those whose souls are God’s sanctuary on earth,
Nazareth is itself a sanctuary, to be approached with awful
*
memories.
It is the dread scene of the Incarnation; and now
it is to be the home of Jesus for many uneventful years, whose
uneventfulness, if we could read it rightly, is the most event­
ful page in all creation’s history. Its glory now consists in its
being the harbor of the Boy, and the witness of continual hidden
wonders. For eighteen years, each day, which to us seems to
have been but one brief waving of time's soundless wing, will
teem with wonders inexhaustible even by angelical intelligence.
Quiet sequestered Nazareth, which the green hills sentinel so
pleasantly, how didst thou suck in those three tempest-tost souls,
as the harbor draws in the ships with the setting of the tide!
Look upon those faces. Calvary seems further off than ever now:
• Sister Mary of Agreda has many remarkable passages in the Mislica Ciudad
on the Holy Land and the Holy Places. She says that the faithful have a special
light, over and above tradition, to keep them right about the sites of the Holy
Places, p. ii I. Hi. cap. xvi.—that devotion to the Holy Land is a hidden support to
catholic kingdoms, p. H. I. iv. cap. xviii — that our Lady prayed that catholics might
always have the sanctuary of Bethlehem in their hands, p. ii. I. iv. cap. xix.-that
heathen and misbelievers gain temporal blessings from living in the vicinity of the
Holy Places, p. ii. I. iv. cap. xxitA—that the faithful also, and especially the Fran
ciscans, get graces from living there, p. iii. I· vii. cap. xvii.—that the angels who now
guard the Holy Places are the same as those to whom our Lady spoke when she
visited the Holy Places from St. John’s house, p. iii. I. viii. cap. i — that a hidden
force against demons has been communicated by our Blessed Lord to the Holy
Places, p. iii. I. viii. cap. vi.—that the last time our Lady visited the Stations she
made especial prayers for all those who should hereafter do so. p. iii. I. viii. cap.
xviii.—that on the same occasion our Lord descended to her on Calvary, and on
the spot promised her he would be very liberal of redeeming grace, that she
kissed the ground, and made a beautiful apostrophe to the Holy Land, that she
gave the angels fresh charge over the Holy Places, and that the sms of men have
forfeited the peculiar custody of the Holy Places which she established, p. iii. I uiit.
cap. xviii.

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yet there is something which speaks of it in the eye. It is not
forgotten. It is only waiting. In Mary there is a look of reprieve.
In Jesus it is steadfast calm, and a certainty which needs not
to be precipitate. Joseph has the air of age musing contentedly
on the pleasant place which it has chosen for its burial. Alto­
gether. a complicated contentment is the ruling genius of the
picture.
Then the interior of the Holy House comes before us. We
behold the outer chamber of the house, and Joseph's shop;
and the green swelling hills are seen through the open door­
way. Mary is seated in the doorway, spinning, though at that
moment her work is arrested, and Jesus is near her, looking
fixedly at some doves that are feeding in front of the door.
The Mother is gazing upon her Son in astonishment; yet it is
an astonishment which is passing rapidly into adoration, and
every moment we expect to see her at his feet. She does not
know exactly why this is. Yet it is not new there. There have
been times like this before, times when his apparent growth in
wisdom and grace has dawned upon her, and come home to her,
through some look or gesture seemingly trivial in itself. It is
just as with mothers, whose eyes, however love may quicken
them, do not see their children grow, but who wake up now
and then to the fact that they are grown, and that some sweet
interesting change has taken place in them. It is the hour of
one of these heavenly surprises now. Mary looks as we might
fancy an angel would look who has been gazing on the Beatific
Vision these thousand years, and now for the first time sees
something new in God, which yet was always there. The crea­
ture rather than the mother is working in her features.
Let the scene change to the inner room, where Jesus sleeps.
It is just after the return from Egypt. Mary has helped him
to undress, and has arranged him in his bed. Her face glows
with a loving familiarity, as if the very offices in which her
fingers had been engaged made her heart more free. He has
been forward in his caresses, those caresses which become more
touching to a mother when childhood is passing into boyhood,

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as if they were of more value because they are more conscious
and deliberate, and perhaps more rare. Her heart is overflowing
with an earthly mother’s love. Yet there is some contradictory
look in her eye, something which controls love, but does not
lessen it. It is not as if she had for one moment forgotten, or
as if she otherwise than calmly realized, her Son's Divinity; but
it is as if love and worship were not always like two rivers
blending in an inland lake, but as if they sometimes alternated
in quiet waveless tides, as in a land-locked bay far up in the
embrace of mighty hills, yet whither the sea travels with his
ebb and flow. She looks less the creature, and more the mother,
now.
There are many pictures also which remain to this day in
heaven, painted upon the unforgetting intelligences of the angels,
of which the scene was Joseph’s shop. The common litter of a
carpenter's working-place is there. Boards propped up against
the walls, pieces of wood lying over each other in all shapes and
at all angles, the floor strewn with chips, and straight lines of
saw-dust under the place where he has been sawing, various
tools mingling in the apparent confusion, and mutilated imple­
ments of agriculture lying outside the door,—this is the scene
which presents itself, and Mary is standing in the doorway of
the house hard by. Joseph is showing Jesus how to do some
work, and his broad man’s hand is laid on the small hand of
the Boy and is gently guiding his fingers. He is doing it mechani­
cally; for he is gazing rather on the Savior’s face than on the
work. He sees the Boy all resplendent with glory, and his
faith recognises in him the omnipotent Creator, the Eternal
Worker, who so deftly fashioned the countless worlds, and whose
fingers he, the aged carpenter, is now venturing to press, to
guide, and to manipulate as he wills. The old man's soul over­
flows with adoration, but tranquilly, without wave or sound,
as if fed by silent springs from underneath. Nevertheless, he
does not desist from guiding the hand of Jesus. He does not
interrupt the lesson which he knows to be so little needed. He
is too humble for that. He understands his office. It was inconi

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prchcnsible to him always, from the first. The exercise of
his authority could never be otherwise to him than the exer­
cise of a sublime obedience. Then, as his soul swells with adora­
tion. self-abjection falls over his features like a veil of light,
as the sun breaks the clouds and unrolls his splendor downward
from the brow of the hill to the vale beneath. His humility so
clothes him with majesty that he looks almost, godlike, and his
age is transfigured into a semblance of eternity.
As he is older now and stronger, the water-pitcher is not
too great a weight for the Creator of the World. Yet it bows
him forward, and makes him tread with a different step, as
he climbs up that grassy path with his burden. Many are
coming and going from the well. All have a word to say to
Mary’s Son; and he answers, sometimes with a word, more often
with his eye. All are contented. He is a silent Boy; but there
is something in his presence in that little town, like the sun
in heaven, whose shining and obscurity make more difference
to man and beast and herb than words can tell. Women with
their pitchers upon their heads stop, and turn, and gaze upon
him, and then sigh with envy at Mary’s lot, contrasting it with
secret sorrows of their own in which their sons bear mournful
part. The rough manners of the Nazarenes soften when the
sunbeam of his smile is on them. Cold hearts warm, and hard
hearts grow gentle, and anger dies away, and all are divinely
unmanned, as he comes among them. He is already a king,
a little king of men’s hearts, crowned in the love and loyalty
of the most boorish village in all Syria. They have crowned
the Boy; but they will uncrown the Man, when his royalty be­
comes a serious thing. He knows this already. He looks at
them with more than sorrow, with more than love, with an
indescribable yearning which attunes all his features. They have
made him king; but for their sakes he is rather longing to be
priest. The water as it gurgles in the pitcher is like a heavenly
temptation to him. His thoughts are onward upon Jacob’s well
and the woman of Samaria. His thoughts are over all the world
in countless Christian fonts. The Blood in those veins must

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mingle with the water in that pitcher before it will cleanse the
sins of Nazareth away. The thought is an ever-present one with
him; yet his Heart leaps up now as if it were new, and the face
of the Boy broadens into the countenance of the Man of Calvary,
and, almost mastering the characteristic sweetness of his youth,
it is clothed, as with a fire, in the mature beauty of the Redeemer.
But is Jerusalem nowhere in the landscapes of the Sacred
Infancy? Let us go back to the day when the fortieth sun rose
upon the new-born Babe. The early dawn had seen Mary and
Joseph wending their way from Bethlehem to the Holy City. It
was the clear cold of a bright spring morning. The dew-drops
glistened like diamonds on the grass, and the palms as they
waved flung off their harmless crystal showers on the passers-by.
Jesus lay, a seemingly unconscious Infant, now in his Mother’s
arms, and now in Joseph’s. White in the morning light were
the terraces and towers and temple-roofs of magnificent Jeru­
salem, giowing like a natural growth from the dark edges of
its steep ravines. He looked upon it all from out the envelop­
ment of his swaddling-clothes, as a bird looks on a human face
from the leafy covert which fringes and conceals its nest. The
Passion is in his eyes. The very separate scenes of that terrific
drama may be read there, even when in their liquid lustres the
buildings of Jerusalem were mirroring themselves with soft
impression. It was as if, in the grandeur of a heavenly vision,
some glorious poet, or mighty warrior, or high-souled statesman,
were allowed to see that sublime thing for which he was born,
that world-wide work for which he was to live, that grand end
for which all life was to be but scanty measure. There would
be much in such a vision to terrify; but the sublimity of terror
is the increase of courage to noble souls; and how superb would
be their look as they gazed on the bravery of their success, yet
saw meanwhile that by the universal law their greatness must
be their martyrdom! Yet such was only the groundwork of the
light that shone in those infantine eyes. It was only the human
element which beautifully ranged and reconciled itself there
with the divine. It was the invisible Soul become visible in the

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swaddling-clothes. The Body had almost disappeared, effaced
by that deluge of inward light.
The Mother goes up to sacrifice. Let us follow her to the
temple; for never before was sacrifice like to this. It is the
interior of the temple. A strong light falls upon the central
figures. The others are lost in the very indistinctness which
the contrast of the strong light causes. Simeon and Anna, and
a group of holy souls,—we know that they are there, but they
are only shadows, broken outlines. They take up no room in
our eye. Joseph is the silent presence of the Eternal Father,
witnessing, ratifying, accepting, overshadowing the sacrifice. In
this mystery Joseph is rather part of heaven than of earth. He
is more a symbol than an actor. He fulfils his office as shadow
of the Everlasting. There is Mary, and the Child, and the Priest.
This last seems rather to be a type of priesthood than an indi­
vidual priest. His lineaments are manifestly ideal. He is the
representative shadow of invisible and sacerdotal power. So
much of Joseph’s office he usurps for the time, while Joseph
is intent upon that higher one. His very garments are em­
broidered allegories. He is not a human figure. Mary is giving
away her Child, and putting him into the arms of the priest.
The spirit of sacrifice is going from her countenance like rays
of light. She seems to rise into the air, and to widen with
majestic grace into colossal dimensions. The Mother’s heart
shines through the magnificence of the glorified heroine, not
as if it were outshone, but as if its light were magnified by that
other radiance through which it shines. There is no struggle.
Her will does not resist the will of God, yet neither is it overlaid
or effaced by the Divine Will. It is present; it is unquenched;
its pathos is inimitable; but it is subject, subject with the most
free and meritorious subjection, seen through the transparent
will of God, which never oppresses the glories it overrules. Vic­
tims have a beauty of their own, a beauty not the less touching
because it is for the most part dumb. The poor sheep is
glorified in the eyes of art, not so much by the garland of
flowers that hangs about its neck, as by the circumstances round

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it, the priest, the temple, the sacrificial knife. But the beauty
of this Victim, the glory of this mute Infant, is all his own. In
his eyes, which look so many volumes in each single glance,
we read his perfect knowledge of the unutterable justice of
God and the all-holy greediness of its requirements. His Mother
is lifting him into it as into the mouth of a devouring fire. But
his Soul is on fire already with the promptitude of his own
human will, and it almost out-glows the furnace of that eternal
will which is opening to receive its victim. Love yearns more
to be sacrificed, than justice to consume the sacrifice. We remem­
ber another scene far off. It was when the Son hung upon the
Cross, and put his Mother away from him that he might be poor
with the perfection of poverty. He had given himself to his
Father, and could not offer himself again, and so he offered
his Mother in his stead. It was a scene of cruellest magnificence.
He was the Sacrificer there, and she the Victim. They had simply
changed places. This picture in the temple was the opposite
of that on Calvary. She was the Sacrificer here, and he the
Victim. Yet was he not also, and especially, the Victim on
Calvary? How marvellously all mysteries are one mystery, be­
cause they are divine!
Twelve years are gone, and the Boy kneels as a worshipper
in the temple. His single kneeling figure is all we picture to
ourselves. But alas! where are the words to say what it is we
see? Is it all the realm of angels, with the manifold beauty of
their choirs, expressive, in ten thousand diversities, of the
almost infinite spirit of adoration? Is it the beauty of all heaven,
caught up by God, and cast into one point of exceeding light,
and then doubled in the eyes of Jesus? No! that is not all. Is
it, then, the beauty of all holy hearts throughout the earth and
the earth’s ages, worshipping their heavenly Father in their
gladness, in their sorrow, in their pensiveness, in the fortitude
of their humility, under all the never-repeated variety of their
pathetic circumstances? Are all hearts worshipping in that heart,
and all the world’s worship working in that radiant countenance?
No! there is also more than that. There is the indescribable

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fulness, the unimaginable repose, of the worship of the Sacred
Humanity, encompassing the majesty of God, enveloping each
and all of his lightning-like Attributes, and bearing on itself,
as the great tide-wave bears the sun-struck foam upon its crest,
all the worship of angels and of men up to the foot of the
Eternal Throne, ever rising, ever falling, ever giving light, like
the spray in the dark night-time, upon the Eternal Shore.
Let us look again. It is two hours past noon, and there is a
gathering of the pilgrims at the gate of Jerusalem through which
the road goes northward. Joseph and the band of men are to­
gether, and Mary and the band of women. The two companies
will travel separate till night-fall. There is something of the
picturesqueness of an encampment about the meeting-place; and
the faces are all fresh, and seem to witness to the sold being in a
state of grace after the spiritual renewal of the feast. Between
the two bands the Boy Jesus passes like a wandering sunbeam,
with less of notice than we have ever seen him receive in any other
picture. He withdraws and is not missed. There is a spell on
Mary’s heart, a viewless band over Joseph’s eyes. He stands in the
shadow of the gate, and sees the company of women start, to be
followed in another hour, and by a different route, by the troop
of men. The Boy clings to the City, as if it were his Mother, as
if those rugged ravines were the very skirts of her garment. O
Jerusalem, and thou wert such a mother! The vision of the Holy
City, as he saw it that February morning twelve years ago, is
graven on his Soul. He saw it by the Nile-bank. He came home
from exile with it in his Heart. He drew near to it, and Joseph
was warned in a dream to take him from it. He will wean himself
now from Mary and from Nazareth, or at least will seem as if he
were bent on doing so; for his doings are unfathomable just now.
No one yet has sounded them, or unriddled their significance.
Hereafter the tempter from a mountain-top shall show him all
the kingdoms of the earth, their pageants and their treasures, and
his eye shall wander coldly over them from the summit of
Quarentana. His covetousness is of an exclusive sort. Sufferings
and souls are the only treasures that he craves. But the vision of

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Jerusalem, its stones to his prophetic eye already stained with
blood, its streets ringing with the furious acclaim which met
Pilate’s appeal to the popular compassion, the crisp rustling of
the old olive-trees in the neighboring Gethsemane, the bones
whitening in the sun on the pale turf of Calvary, this was a more
tempting sight than that from Quarentana. It drew him from
Mary's side. For a triduo at least, like the triduo of his Passion,
he will beg his bread, a heavenly mendicant, in the streets of
Sion, and lay his delicate limbs on the rude pavement. He will
have the very stones, which he will one day mark with his Precious
Blood, leave their marks now on his yielding Flesh. Yet, as he
stands in the shadow of the gateway, his eye follows his Mother’s
figure till it disappears, and there are many things, which seem
contrary yet not conflicting, eloquently speaking out of those eyes,
whose language is more easily to be read because their brilliance is
softened in the gateway's shade.
*
Once more we see him in the temple. He is in the hall of the
doctors, the school of theology. The gravest men in Israel are
gathered round him; almost every form of wonder is depicted
on their faces, while their limbs are perfect studies, because of
the various ways in which their attitudes express the intensity
of their attention. Angry wonder blends with sweet surprise,
and zeal, that needs but the spark to fire its train, mingles with
the only half-intelligent delight which illuminates the features
of some of the aged men. But on many faces there is the beginning
of a look which can darken some day into the darkness of an
awful cruelty. The door of the hall is half open, and Mary and
Joseph stand there, not amazed, not petrified into statues, but
in unspeakable repose, as if they had had to journey to the world’s
end and had got there now, and there was nothing more to do
and no further to be gone; for they had come to Him who was
the end of all worlds. As to himself, never was the bashfulness
of his Boyhood more obviously, more winningly, displayed than
• Among the number of beautiful things in Sister Mary of Agreda, the following
is among the most beautiful,—that our Blessed Lord had in his Mother all the
intimacy and perfection he had wished for from the whole human race, and of
which our sin had disappointed him.—Mistica Ciudad, p. ii. I- iv. cap. xxix.

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now, when the Creator was sounding the intelligences of his
creatures and sprinkling them with a shower of his own celestial
wisdom. He was asking questions, who was in himself the sole
sufficient answer to all questions that could be asked. He was
seeming to learn, in order that he might more sweetly teach. He
was blamelessly deceiving, that the seers of Israel might behold
the truth. More and more he grew like a Boy, as more and more
the light of the Godhead within him was burning away the thin
veils of flesh and blood. Surely in another moment he will bloom
into confessed, undoubted God, and the life will be scared out
of their stricken souls. The angels remember him as he was at
that astonishing moment, to Mary’s love and Joseph’s faith
manifest God, to the others a wonder, a portent, an enigma, a
suspicion, yet to all of them a not unchildlike Child.
Words indeed have golden pencils; but there are unexplored
regions of the Sacred Infancy which no limning of language can
portray. The act of the Incarnation under the over shadowing
of the Holy Ghost is practically as hidden from us as the Genera­
tion of the Son up in the inaccessible sources of eternal light. The
nine months’ life in the Bosom of his Mother, evidenced outwardly
by Mary’s haste and by the sweetness of her song, by Elizabeth’s
salutation and the jubilee of the Baptist redeemed before his
birth, was a succession of spiritual pictures which we cannot
imagine, but of which it is no mean knowledge to know that such
things were. When we regard him also, wherever he was dur­
ing those twelve years, as the centre of the world’s govern­
ment, environed by multitudes of angels, giving laws to all the
phenomena of nature, shedding power and life and endurance
into all things, holding them up above the hungry abyss of
nothingness which is ever threatening to engulf all finite things,
playing upon the manifold strings of his immense providence,
and encircling every existence in the universe with the warm
clasping ring of his creative love, we see indistinctly into another
vast region, of which we can discern nothing but its vastness,
while our instincts testify to the necessity of its being also ex­
tremely beautiful. His Soul, too, had a spiritual scenery of its

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own, which nothing but his own light could by some supernatural
process transfer to our intelligences. Much also from time to time
reveals itself to the meditative eye out of the operations of grace
in the souls of Mary and Joseph from contact with him. This also
belongs to the Sacred Infancy and throws light upon its marvellous
creations. But these are unexplored regions, on the one hand not
to be attempted, on the other hand not to be forgotten.
But one thing is true of all these pictures. The shadow of
Calvary rests upon them all. Everywhere the sunlight is inter­
cepted. There is not one patch in one landscape on which the
unimpeded sun may sleep, as on a bank of flowers. The shadow
is universal. Denser here and thinner there, it is unequal, but
it is ubiquitous. The Passion is the unity of the Infancy. Calvary
gives its character to Bethlehem. It is strangely gifted for a
shadow; for it makes both the light and shade of all the pictures.
It withdraws from the eye what it would have us see but indis­
tinctly. It thrusts darkly on our notice what it would not have
us fail to see. It is the atmosphere of the Infancy, impressing its
peculiarity on the scenery. It becomes familiar to us, intelligible
to us, dear to us, by the colorless medium of that soft shading.
But it was not merely an outward thing, a haziness hung upon the
hills, a twilight sent to mellow, a memory that usurps an empire
over the eye, or a foresight that tinges the imagination. Calvary
was the real inward life of the Sacred Heart in the Infancy. It
was more the Babe’s home than Bethlehem. There was indeed an
under-ground world of ecstatic joys beneath the sorrow; but it
was jealously hidden, like a divine thing, which is meant to
transpire rather than to be seen. Neither was the shadow on him­
self only, but on all around him. It transfused itself into the
heart of Mary; for how could she see by a different light from
that with which he saw? It penetrated into the heart of Joseph.
The Venerable Jane of the Cross tells us that Joseph was allowed
to feel all the pains of the Passion in a mystical way, as some
of the saints have done.
*
But the shadow stole everywhere, just
• Sister Agreda has also a remarkable passage on the knowledge of the Passion
infused into Joseph at the time of St. Simeon's prophecy.—Mistica Ciudad, p. ii. I.
iv. cap. xx.

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as the twilight creeps noiselessly into evening’s sunniest nooks
and quietly masters all the land without the winnowing of its
silken wing being heard or seen. Everywhere there was shadow,
and it was one shadow,—the shade cast by Calvary, a low hill,
indeed, but tall enough to cast a shadow that should gird the
globe and come round to rest on the same dear height from which
it had been thrown. The Sacred Infancy may almost be defined
to be The Passion in Repose.
There is indeed at first sight an apparent contrast between
Bethlehem and Calvary, between the Crib and the Cross. Neither
can we truly say that it is only apparent. No two mysteries of
our Lord are exactly alike. They are full of analogies. A unity
of spirit reigns over them all. Yet no one is the mere double of
another, or the repetition of it under different picturesque circum­
stances. Nevertheless the apparent contrast between the Crib and
the Cross is much stronger than the real difference. The region
of Bethlehem seems to be the abode of almost perpetual calm.
There is the placid littleness of the Infant; there is the gentleness
of the meditative Joseph; there are the maternal joys of Mary,
too deep for utterance; there is beauty, sweetness, softness, some­
thing attractive to the genius and eye of art. This is all broken
up by the storms of Calvary, and Joseph has disappeared. In the
world of the Infancy we have almost total seclusion from men;
in the world of the Passion Jesus is the central figure and suffer­
ing victim of a wild and infuriate multitude. In Bethlehem,
and up to the city-gate at twelve years of age, we behold Mary’s
unbroken jurisdiction over him; one of the sorrows of Calvary
is her inability to help him, or even to minister to the thirsting
Sufferer the ministries of a common charity, to say nothing of the
offices of maternal love. Seemingly at least there is in the Crib
an absence of bodily pain, while the Cross and the antecedents of
the Cross are remarkable for an unutterable excess of it. In the
times of the Infancy those who loved him were always with him,
and, when he had to fly, it was those he loved who fled with him;
in the times of Calvary those he loved abandoned him, until at
last, after he had given away to Mary that sweet apostle who was

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her second Joseph, his solitude became without a parallel·, for
he himself had put his Mother from him, and the Eternal Father
had forsaken him. When the Infancy and Boyhood came to a
close, miraculous manifestations of the divine complacency pre­
luded to the opening of his Ministry, as he came up out of the
waters of Jordan; whereas the very last step in his Passion was
the agony of a divine dereliction. These things make a strong
contrast between the Crib and the Cross; and they are surely
more than mere appearances, more than simple varieties of
scenery.
Nevertheless, in spite of this indubitable contrast, there is
a real inward identity between the two. In the Soul of Jesus
prevision was not simply a great gift of prophecy. What we
learned of his science in the last chapter will show us that
there was a reality in his prevision of the Passion which made
it a substantial Passion already. The bodily pains were antici
pated with a vividness which, if it did not rack muscle, nerve,
and flesh as the reality was to do, at least transferred a propor­
tionate agony of fear and trembling and natural horror to his
shrinking Soul; while the spiritual tortures of the Passion were
not so much foreseen at Bethlehem as actually begun. Inasmuch
as they had not to be learned, and could not be aggravated by
any new occurrences, there was no reason why they should not
be felt from the first moment of his Conception. Indeed, some
contemplatives tell us that Jesus sweated blood repeatedly during
his Infancy. Moreover, Calvary presided over Bethlehem. The
mysteries of the Cross exercised an acknowledged sovereignty
over the mysteries of the Crib. These last were not ends. They
were roads which had to be travelled, things which happened
on the road, landscapes seen from it. They had no direct share
in the accomplishment of the great work of redemption. Blood
was to be shed, shed till it was all shed, shed until life oozed
out with it and the sacred union of Body and Soul was dissolved.
This followed from the change which sin superinduced upon
the first idea of the Incarnation. Had the Word come in a
purely glorious Incarnation, an Incarnation which was to crown

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Creation and had no Redemption to effect, perhaps the act of
his Incarnation, and his beginnings of a created life among his
creatures, might have seemed more wonderful to the eyes of
men than the triumphal Ascension with which his appointed
years would have concluded, an Ascension which would not
then have been reached through any gates of death. Death would
have been but a phenomenon of the animal kingdom, unknown
to immortal men. Rut now the eyes and hearts of men will
gather where their hopes arc, around the dim scene of Calvary
and the sacrificial horrors of the Cross. Yet even now the
operation of God is more manifest in the mysteries of Bethlehem,
and the operation of man in the mysteries of Calvary. In the
one God works, in the other he suffers. In both he is active, and
in both he is passive: yet, if we may venture to say so, we see
more of his activity in Bethlehem, and more of his passiveness
on Calvary. Bethlehem is what the Creator does to his creatures;
Calvary is what his creatures do to him.
The will of the Child was the same as the will of the Man.
The will in Bethlehem was identical with the will on Calvary.
There was the same intense desire of suffering, with the same
deep dread of it. There was the same weight of sin, torturing
his sensibility with its cruel load. There was the same anger
of the Father to be endured, perceived with the same clear­
ness, apprehended with the same fulness of science,—an ungrow­
ing anger, which would not increase with the years of Jesus,
and which did not require the co-operation of human cruelty
in order to make itself felt within his Soul. His Mother, in
whose life he lived the dearest part of his own life, was already
the Mother of Dolors, though as yet she had not stood on
Calvary. Her nine months of expectation had not been un­
checkered gladness. The immensity of her science, and the
light which to her glowed perpetually on the page of Scripture,
alike forbade it. Her forty days of peace at Bethlehem had
their shades of sorrow, which, although they were shortly to
be deepened, were still palpable shadows. But since the prophecy
of St. Simeon the seven swords had been planted in her bosom,

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and they could never be drawn out now for eight-and-forty
years,—almost half a century; for, if they were drawn out, she
would bleed to death. In both the Mother and the Son the
dispositions of sacrifice and oblation were absolutely the same.
Inwardly, therefore, there was complete identity between the
Crib and the Cross. It only needed act, to transfigure Bethlehem
into Calvary.
There was even much outward analogy between the two.
The Bcthlehemites rejected him in the person of his Mother,
as the Jew's afterward rejected him in his own. He had scarcely
made himself visible on earth, when he had to fly from his
own creatures, because his life was deemed incompatible with
their interests,—just as in his Passion his death was pronounced
by the spiritual authorities of the nation to be expedient for
the people. No one can meditate on the mystery of the Presenta­
tion without being often reminded of Palm Sunday. His infancy
had there its one brief triumph, before the Face of the Babe
was snatched away and hidden in the solitudes of the wilderness
and amid the crowd of Egyptian idolaters. Anna bore him
witness, and Simeon sang him a song of triumph as meek and
childlike as his own infantine sweetness. It was in the same
temple where the little children in later years cried Hosanna”
after him, giving tongues, as he implied, to the very inanimate
stones that were almost breaking forth to praise him. If from
the hill-top on the road from Bethany he saw the morning on
Jerusalem and shed his memorable tears, may we not suppose
also that his infant eyes were suffused with the tears of manifold
emotions when he saw Jerusalem from his Mother's arms that
February morning? From the coasts of Egypt he drew near to
Jerusalem; but, under Joseph’s authority, he turned aside. It
was not time. So afterward did he hide himself when the others
were going up to Jerusalem. He would not go up yet, because
all was not ready. To the mystery of the Circumcision his Sacred
Infancy owed its privilege of shedding blood, which is almost
its most striking analogy with the Passion. On Calvary he in­
volved all near him in the darkness and anguish of his sufferings.

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Mary was steeped in woe. Magdalen and John were broken­
hearted. The poor fugitive apostles were overwhelmed with
darkness, and with the bitterness of love self-disappointed and
self-ashamed. Peter was even driven to deny him. Persecution
awaited all. It was the same in his Infancy. At that time he
involved in all his sufferings his blessed Mother, his aged Fosterfather, and even a helpless multitude of slaughtered Innocents.
A dark-bright ring of suffering lay wide around him wherever
he moved, like a halo round the moon. It is so even now. It
will be so to the end. The vicinity of Jesus is a privilege of
delighted grace, for which nature has to pay dearly. In the
triduo of the Passion he was separated from Mary three days;
and it was a like triduo, marked by the same separation, which
brought the Infancy to a close. The Resurrection followed
the former triduo; and the eighteen years of hidden Nazareth
which followed the latter triduo are full of analogies with the
forty days after the Resurrection, in many ways besides their
hiddenness. Thus, even the outward analogies between Beth­
lehem and Calvary are neither few in number nor insignificant
in their mystery.
In the light of theology and in the fire of devotion, Beth­
lehem and Calvary are continually blending into one. There
is no more strongly marked peculiarity of theology than the
way in which it unites distant truths, harmonizes remote
mysteries, and identifies things which in matters less divine
would seem irreconcilable, if not contradictory. In the doctrine
of our Lord’s Divine Person wc see how Bethlehem and
Calvary were one to Him to whom time can bring nothing,
and to whom the Three-and-Thirty Years were but as a golden
point, which to us, when it is beaten out, and far from beaten
thin, can cover the whole world with its magnificence of mani­
fold mystery. The immense science of his Human Soul, and
his full use of reason from the moment of his Conception,
remove from his Sacred Infancy all those imperfections which
seem at first sight incompatible with his prevision and antici­
pated experience of the Passion. What we know of the exquisite

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sensibilities and delicate perfections of his Humanity relieves
us from all suspicion of exaggeration, even when we look at
Bethlehem in our own minds as an unbroken Gethsemane. The
doctrine of his ungrowing grace secures for us the fixity of his
interior dispositions, by which mainly it is that Calvary is so
imperceptibly and inseparably dove tailed into Bethlehem. The
most probable opinions about Mary's science already invest
her amply in the mantle of her dolors, and so, her science in­
volving her heart in the darkness of the great tragedy, his Heart
is involved with hers. The two hearts beat in each other, and
cannot beat otherwise. The two lives of the Mother and the
Son cannot be disentangled without many an unseemly rent in
the sacred vesture of theology. Moreover, the doctrine of his
use of reason makes the Infancy already a Passion of itself, with
a peculiar tragedy of its own, distinct from that of Calvary. For
it had pains and perils, sufferings and penances, belonging to
itself, and these, which to a common infant would have had all
the imperfect consciousness, unanticipated occurrence, rapid
transition, and speedy oblivion, common to childhood, were
to him, with his full use of reason, perfect grown-up sufferings,
with the additional uneasiness of physical infirmity, and volun­
tary speechlessness, and all the self-imposed disguise of Infancy.
But, if the Crib and the Cross so blend in the light of theology,
they are completely fused together in the fire of devotion. They
both produce the same spirit in the soul—though they produce
it variously. The spirit of Bethlehem is one of contrition, of
mortification, and of expiatory reparation: and of the same sort
is the spirit of Calvary. It is as natural for devotion to weep
by the Manger as it is to weep by the Cross. Thus, in all the
saints and holy persons who have had a special attraction to
the Sacred Infancy, it has been a pensive, pathetic devotion. It
breathes the same lowliness as Calvary. There is the same fra­
grance of self-abjection. It drives the sense of sin as deeply into
the softened heart as the scene which the moonlight of Gethse­
mane discloses. The Child Crucified and the Crucified Man
on his Mother’s lap are the echoes of each other, soundless

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echoes, seen, rather than heard, by the eye of piety. The love
caused by both mysteries is the same. It is the love ol exceed­
ing pathos, not like the love of the Resurrection or of the
Hidden Years at Nazareth. Even the very differences of Beth­
lehem and Calvary reach the same end, though it be by opposite
roads. They go round the world, one by the cast, the other by
the west. They exhibit him crucified, and they produce an
inward crucifixion in the soul. They both land us in an abnega­
tion of ourselves. They both regenerate us in a mystical child­
hood. Both arc ways of tears. Both are gateways through which
only littleness can enter. Both envelop us with the spirit of Jesus,
and unclothe us of all that is vile and ignoble in our own. They
both express themselves in the same outward symbolical reality,
speaking the same language at the same moment in one awful
and indivisible voice,—in the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament.
But we must go somewhat more into detail with the suffer­
ings of the Sacred Infancy. They may be divided into four
classes,—its outward penances, its inward penances, its states
of life, and the peculiar virtues it was called upon to exercise.
Its outward penances were its least: yet they form a dark-some
lot for the first years and helpless tenderness of the Infant God,
The Babe of Bethlehem shed many tears, and they flowed from
manifold sources of bitterness deep down within his Soul. They
came of heart-sorrows, such as were portions of his inward
penances. But they came also, perhaps,—for who shall limit
his condescensions?—from pain and feebleness, from incon­
veniences and wretchedness, which his extreme sensibility did
not exaggerate to him, but enabled him alone of babes born
of women to feel in their uttermost reality. Pain, which seems
the same, is in reality not the same to any two sufferers. Its
painfulness is varied by the delicacy and susceptibility, by the
illness or the softheartedness, and even by the momentary cir­
cumstances, still more by the inward consciousness, of him
who suffers. Now, not only was there never one whose humanity
was so finely fashioned, so unspeakably susceptible, as our Blessed
Lord's, and therefore never one to whom any pain was so intensely

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painful as the very least pain was to him, but also there was
never one whose inward feelings, self-consciousness, or rather
self-possession, made corporal pain so full of agony. We touch
on the doctrine of his Divine Person when we say this; for his
self-possession was part of the Hypostatic Union. Moreover,
except to him, and perhaps to our Blessed Lady in some measure,
yet a measure so far below his as scarcely to resemble it, never
was it given to any child to feel the fulness of a child's capability
of pain, or of childhood’s peculiar pain from its delicacy and
sensitiveness; because the child's powers of mind are dormant,
and perhaps two-thirds of bodily pain are due to the intervention
of the mind. In our Lord’s case the full use of reason and com­
plete maturity of soul were superadded to the weak impression­
ableness and delicate frame of childhood. This would give him
a peculiar fountain of tears, which without meditation we should
be slow to understand. This was his first outward penance. Tears
were to Bethlehem what Blood was to Calvary. They were the
blood of his Childhood, which yet was not without shedding
of blood itself.
In all his penances we must bear in mind what we have
said of his tears. Both the immensity of his Human Science,
and the union of his Human Nature with a Divine Person,
were sources of suffering, which made the least pain an agony,
and his agonies were something too gigantic to be compressed in
any words borrowed from the nomenclature of human woe. Tears
were his first penance; the second was the endurance of cold.
What suffering cold can cause, and how peculiar are its agonies,
the annals of arctic adventure sufficiently testify. Yet none of those
brave discoverers and hardy seamen who succumbed on the plains
of ice or snow, which might be sea or land for all they knew,
ever suffered from cold as the Babe of Bethlehem suffered,
whether from the cold in tire Cave or during his precipitate flight
across the wilderness. Cold, moreover, was but the representative
of other natural powers. His own elements made lashes of them
selves to scourge the Infant Body of their Creator. If Calvary
was the Passion which his reasonable creatures inflicted upon him.

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Bethlehem represents a Passion in which his inanimate creatures
were the executioners of the Baby Victim of the world. It is a
touching mystery,—this subjection of the Omnipotent to the feeble
stings of his own senseless ministers. His own laws of nature
pressed him, even to hurting him. He was pinched by the cold
and burned by the heat, incommoded by the light and disturbed
by the wind, jaded by fatigue and distressed by noise. The seasons
rode over him in their course, and left the prints of their hoofs
upon his Flesh, as they do on ours. To us these are the incom­
modities of a fallen nature; to him they were mysteries of the
Incarnation. They were realities, at once blessed, and dreadful,—
dreadful from the awful contact between himself and them,
blessed because they were divine satisfactions, sources of grace,
fountains of indulgences, and sufferings of meriting and atoning
power.
Poverty has been called by some the sister of Christ, by others
his bride. This was his third penance; and it was no doubt one
of the penances of his predilection. It would seem as if the cir­
cumstances of his Infancy had been providentially contrived with
a view of bringing in as many of the incidents of poverty as were
possible without seeming to be unnatural. From Nazareth to
Bethlehem, from Bethlehem over the wilderness to Egypt, from
Egypt to Nazareth again, and from Nazareth to Jerusalem for the
three days during which he begged his bread, the biography of his
Childhood spreads itself, like an ample net, to entangle in its
wide folds more and more of the varieties and pressures of his
beloved poverty. If he was born of a royal maiden, it was of one
who was poor and reduced in circumstances. He would not be
born at home, but took the occasion of the Roman census to be
as it were a child of exile, and a waif upon his own earth. He
would be rejected from the doors of Bethlehem, as the least
worthy of all the mixed multitude that had crowded thither.
He would be born in a cave, a stable, amidst the domestic animals
of man’s husbandry,—He who had come to till the hard earth
of souls and make it fertile with his Blood, to be himself the
ploughman and the bleeding ploughshare also. The poverty of the

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wilderness, the poverty of the foreign city, the poverty of narrow
straitened toil at Nazareth, all these he essayed, and suffered from
them all far more than we can tell. When age grew on Joseph, and
his infirmities multiplied, the yoke of poverty became yet more
galling to the shoulders of his tender Foster-Son. The poverty
that pressed on Mary pressed tenfold more heavily on him from
the very fact of its having first pressed on her.. Poverty is an
evangelical perfection. How many have gallantly tried to bear
the burden, and have had to lay it down again in sadness and a
not unsanctified despair! How many who have borne it to the end
have been made saints by the simple burden! How many religious
orders attest by their ingenuous chronicles how hard it is to keep
alive the spirit of truthful poverty, and how weak even vows are
found to be in stemming the current of nature which runs so
strongly the other way! Never was there a childhood of hardier
poverty than our Blessed Lord’s. It was his inseparable com­
panion, and, if he loved its austerities with so singular a love,
it was only because they were so singular a cross.
Neglect was another of his infant penances—neglect varied by
the scarcely more flattering notice of cruel persecution. He loved
men with the tenderest love. From eternity it had been his delight
that he was one day to be thus among them He had come; and
his sole presence so beautified the earth that it might almost have
outshone the highest heaven. For was not the beauty of God
himself all freshly beautified by the Incarnation? Yet. in every
sense the words can bear, there was no room for him. Hearts were
full. He was unseasonable. The miseries from which he came
to emancipate his brethren were not felt as miseries by them.
His efforts to liberate them were more irksome than the bondage
under which they suffered. He was born, and some shepherds
came to him; but none of the neighbors seem to have followed the
example. Three kings arrived from afar, and the tyrant of Judea
strove to include him in a wholesale massacre, while oblivion and
obscurity rapidly gathered over the history of that royal progress
from the East. There was safety for him only when the un
peopled sands of the desert were stretched around him; and even

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there the footprints of the dear men for whom he came to die
were terrors and portents to his Mother's eyes. For the Sacred
Heart of the Incarnate God to be a stranger to any child of Eve
was an incomparable sorrow to his philanthropy, his man-lovingness,—an affection which belonged to himself in a sense in which
no creature can share it, and which is only shadowed by his saints
in burning zeal for souls. If it were possible, the word philan­
thropy, like that of the Incarnation, should be studiously kept
sacred for him alone, the man-loving Son of God. Yet he was a
stranger in the land of Egypt; and his Heart was in captivity,
as Israel had been before, in the valley of the Nile. When his
soul yearned for Jerusalem, there were none to welcome him
there. On the contrary, he must turn aside; for they who had
power there were sure to wish him ill. Poor Child! Poor Boy!
men fell off from Him who was the uncreated beauty of heaven,
as if there were a charm of evil hung around him even in his
Childhood, as if a Cain-like brand were on his Infant browl
Who shall fathom the deep sorrows of the Babe’s Martyr-Heart?
His Bloodshedding in the Circumcision was another penance
of his Infancy, which for many reasons may be regarded as a
pattern for the unnecessary mortifications of the saints, if indeed
any mortification can be strictly deemed unnecessary even for
the most innocent of the sons of men. He needed not the rite.
He required no ceremonial covenant with God, who was God
himself. That Flesh needed no consecration, which was already
united to a Divine Person. It was a strange, separate, unaccount­
able Bloodshedding, standing, as it seems, in a peculiar relation
to the other Bloodsheddings, as it was not only no part of the
redemption of the world, but was utterly detached from the
*
Passion.
It did not keep the compact with the Father, which
was death, and nothing short of death. So that the drops that
were shed were not shed to the saving of souls. Was it the homage
of the Infancy to the Passion? Was it, like the Bloody Sweat upon
Mount Olivet, an outburst of the Sacred Heart’s impatience for
the plenitude of Calvary? To himself truly it was pain, to his
• See Treatise on the Precious Blood, Chapters I. and V.

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Mother sorrow, to Joseph a heavenly perplexity, to the Angels a
wonder, to the saints a pattern and a mystery.
His weariness was another penance of his Infancy. The
weariness of the unfatigued Creator is a marvel full of pathos,
and to tired souls—and fatigue in these days is the normal state
of Christian souls—it is full also of consolation. What weariness
did he not endure upon his comfortless bed of prickly straw
and in the restraints of his incommodious swaddling-clothes? His
very helplesness was itself an unending weariness to him, because
of the maturity of his reason. Weariness must have been one of
the especial sufferings of his Flight into Egypt, and also of his
Return. In his Flight the confinement of his bands and the
monotony of his posture must have been insufferably irksome,
hour after hour and day after day, even though it was the gentle
arm of Mary that bore him. Perhaps also the very maturity of
his mind may itself have fatigued his infant Body. His sleep,
too, a region of wonders,—was it a real test? Did it refresh him,
as our sleep refreshes us? Did it relax the stiffened limb, quiet
the beating heart, lull the busy brain, strengthen the weak eyes,
and fill the little vase of life full of new bounding lightsome
vigor, as it does with us? His Soul lay wide awake the while.
His prayer and oblation never ceased. He saw always the olives
of Gethsemane; he saw always the pillar and the crown; he saw
always the Cross against the sky on Calvary. Was his sleep per­
chance only another form of weariness, a shadowy time more
haunted by the images of the Passion than even his waking hours?
All we know is that he allowed himself no joy of any human thing,
except what in each case was indispensable to the perfection of his
Humanity.
Fear was another penance of his Infancy; and, as the suffering
of fear is usually proportioned to the giftedness of a man's soul,
to our Lord it must have been intolerable agony. His Flight
into Egypt and his sojourn there were full of terrors, some which
we can understand, and some which are beyond the reach even
of our imagination. It does not seem that we can suppose his
science to have exempted him from these impressions, when we

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know how he was ever keeping back from his inferior nature all
those succors which could in any way diminish his sufferings. He
used his privileges as ingressos to new modes of suffering, or to
more exquisite degrees of suffering. We should therefore suppose
in this matter of fear that, out of the union of a mature reason
with feeble infantine susceptibilities, his science would find the
means of increasing the pains of fear, by enabling him the better
to appreciate dangers. We shall find that fear occupied no insig­
nificant place amidst the horrors of his Passion, and we should
therefore expect to find it in his Infancy.
*
But we have purposely
enumerated it among the outward penances to show that we are
dwelling on those painful impressions of flesh and blood which
are the products of fear, rather than on the inward trouble of
soul which the imperfection of science would have caused. Even
if he did not fear, he might suffer from the impressions of fear,
in that mysterious manner in which so many of the infirmities of
our nature were made compatible with the Hypostatic Union.
Perhaps even the distressing panics of childhood were not incon­
sistent with the maturity of his reason. But, in all these questions,
what theology most imperatively requires of us that we should
leave intact the perfection of his science.
Silence has always ranked among the austerest of monastic
penances. It requires long proof and many a mark of divine
vocation before we dare trust an heroic soul to the observances
of a silent order. Silent men are men that hide themselves in
God after a most awful fashion. They even withdraw themselves
from the admiring reverence of the Church by making the pro­
cesses of their canonization almost impossible. For many months
the Infant Jesus only broke his silence by inarticulate sounds of
pleasure or of pain,—perhaps of the latter only. Yet how he must
have longed to speak, who was so marvellously eloquent! Must
he not have yearned to give forth light, in whom the whole com­
municative wisdom of the Godhead was comprised? When he was
so full to overflowing of beautiful wisdom and ravishing intel­
ligence, must not silence have burned in his Heart like a coal
See the Treatise on Calvary, Chap. IV.

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of fire? Must there not have been something in his being the
l ather’s Word, which would make him exult in speaking of the
Father with his human tongue? When he gazed with speechless
jubilee on Mary, did he not long to gladden her with the music
of his voice? Did she not look for his voice now, as during the
nine months she had looked for the appearing of his face? When
he saw Joseph pale and tired, was he not full often fain to
cheer the heart and revive the drooping spirits of the aged saint
by the magic of an articulate word? Yet he refrained. He had
put on the disguise of Childhood, and, by his perfect observation
of it, the disguise became a divine reality: nay, it was a human
reality as well, used as a disguise, yet truly no mere disguise
itself. Be sure that silence never pressed on saint in calm Car­
thusian cell, or in garden-girdled hermitage of Camaldoli, as it
pressed on the Sacred Heart of the Infant Jesus.
We should reckon also as a separate outward penance what
enters into all the other penances as an ingredient, namely, the
extreme delicacy of his Body, divinely purposed, expressly fash­
ioned, for keenness of suffering. It may be considered in itself as
a distinct suffering apart from the way in which it heightened
all his other sufferings. For we must believe him to have been so
exquisitely sensitive that many things were torments to him which
would not have been torments to us, and many things which art
indeed painful to us would become in him pains of quite a dif­
ferent character. The very winds should have blown gently on
him, the very rain-drops have fallen on him without their weight,
the very ground have smoothed itself beneath his little feet. Yet.
so far from this, we are to behold omnipotence coming to the
succor of incredible love, and holding this frail frame together
amid a tempest of woes within and barbarities without that were
enough to quench a hundred human lives.
Such were the outward penances of the Sacred Infancy. We
pass from them to consider its interior penances. As his bodily
penances were nine in number, we may also reckon nine of these.
The first was his view of the sins of men. As the soul is to the
body, so was the sensitiveness and sympathy of our Lord's Soul

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to the delicacy and susceptibility of his Body. Even to us, with
our common gift of faith, the word sin is a real terror. It ex­
presses a whole world of darkness. It is the negation of all that is
bright, hopeful, desirable, or attractive. The possibility of our
sinning is a thought to make us tremble. The likelihood of our
sinning is our deepest fear; and our actual sin is by far our most
real unhappiness. Yet we can scarcely understand the shrinking
heavenly-mindedness which caused saints to fade away at the bare
mention of the name of sin. Such a fact is an index to us of
sublimities of love and of union with God which arc to us little
better than terms of mystical theology, respectfully believed in,
but out of the range, not only of our experience, but of our
comprehension also. How far then are we from being able to
iathom our Lord's horror of sin! The uncreated sanctity of his
Divine Person had communicated to his Human Soul an un­
speakable spotlessness, together with such a tenderness regarding
the honor and purity of God as it is impossible for us to picture
to ourselves, except in the most inadequate manner. If we might
venture to think of disease as an emblem of a thing so holy, we
might say that the wretched and unclean world was to our Lord’s
shrinking Soul what the meridian beam of the sun would be to
a wounded eye. It was something intolerable. It was a spiritual
agony, seemingly unendurable for a moment, yet actually endured
his whole life long. If surprise could have found place in the
Hypostatic Union, his Soul would have been appalled by the
revelations which his science made to him of sin. They were un­
merciful, over whelming revelations. He saw the sins of men in
the horror and foulness of their kinds, in the classes of their
loathsome varieties, in the manifold uncleanness of their separate
characteristics. He saw them in the frightful array of their num­
ber, their multiplication, their relapses, their prolific families,
their long-enduring self-procreating consequences. He saw them
in their weight, in the weight by which they pressed souls so low,
in the weight by which they had almost oppressed the mercy of
God under the feet of his justice, in the weight by which they were
crushing himself every moment. He saw the sin of sins which

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enabled him in the Passion to expiate all sin, the sin of deicide,
the murder of God, the martyrdom of the Creator. Thus he had
to bear the weight of his Passion twice over,—once as the Passion,
then also as a sin or series of gigantic sins. He had to expiate
his own Crucifixion. For all this was not a mere vision of a
terrified and tormented spectator. He had to take all these ineffable
sins into his own Heart, and as it were violate the inviolate sanctity
of his Soul by clothing himself in them, making them fit tight
to him and burn into the very sanctuary of his life. Gently and
sweetly come the surges of the angelic chorus out of the lofty
skies to his car in the Cave; but the vision of all that sin is
there. The palm whispers and the sands of the wilderness steam
as with golden smoke in the slant rays of the setting sun, but the
vision has dogged him there. The lotus is slowly opening its
fragrant pitcher to the rising sun upon the tremulous bosom of
the Nile; but the vision of sin has fastened on him, never to be
shaken off till death. He is speaking kind words to the women of
Nazareth at the well, and the songs of the vine dressers are rising
gayly in the morning; but the joy of his Soul is muffled in this
masterful vision of sin, which holds him down, and seems as if it
would stifle that inward purity which is the breath of his very
being.
His Soul beheld God. It gazed into the very burning centre of
his eternal justice. It came nearer to the fires than ever creature
came before or shall ever come again. The flames of an unspeak­
able divine indignation leaped out upon it, as if it was their prey,
invested it and seemed to feed upon it, as though it were their
fuel. It was unconsumed because of the Hypostatic Union. But
the fires would have withered up any created nature if it had
not been impregnable and indestructible because of that surpass­
ing union. Nevertheless it was a created Soul, and it must have
shrunk inexpressibly from this vision of the justice of God.
Here also, as in the case of sin, it was not merely a vision. He was
the victim of that justice. It was to prey upon him until it satisfied
itself. It was preying upon him at that hour. It could not hr
evaded. It was his own will; yet was it not on that account less

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terrible. For such sins what justice had to be appeased! By such
sins what adorable consuming wrath had been holily excited!
God’s illimitable sanctity was to be the breadth of the expiation
he had to make. The very vision of it was like a living thing. It
laid hold upon his Infant Heart, bore it away to inaccessible
rocks where neither human help nor human sympathy could come
nigh it, and there like a vulture it fed upon it, taking a pleasure
in staining its plumage with the blood, as if it were thereby
beautified. What manner of life must his Infant Heart have lived
with such a dreadful guest, with so adorable a terror!
His foresight of the Passion was another penance of his Infancy.
Who does not know the pain when a single thought is stronger
than the whole mind and brings the entire life into bondage to
itself? It is a pain which cannot be endured for long. Yet the
possession of the soul by a single sorrow is even a more intolerable
lot. Under such circumstances life is not so much lived as it is
worn away, or gnawed piecemeal, with slow, dull, inextinguishable
pain. But there is another lot which is even more dreadful than
either of these. It is when some dark thought, some phantom,
whether of terror or of guilt, seizes upon life and makes it all its
own, shuts the soul up in its own gloomy, sounding galleries, and
haunts it there with a perpetual malicious ghostly haunting. Yet
these are all faint figures of the possession of our Lord’s Soul
by the foresight of his Passion. When we muse upon it, we lose
ourselves. We would fain disbelieve in its reality. We cannot bear
to think that such a life was ever lived on this fair earth of God’s.
The outward tumult of Calvary is positively a relief after the
thought of that insufferable silent woe. If we attempt to follow it
into the sweet mysteries of his dear Childhood, to accompany it
as it runs down, as on electric wires, into all the faculties of his
Soul, and to watch it mingling with his love of God, of Mary, and
of men, it becomes not only insupportable, but absolutely un­
thinkable.
His foresight of men’s ingratitude brings us to another of the
sufferings of his Childhood, intense, but more within the compass
of our understanding. We are happy now, because here we seem

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as il we could get near to him with our pity. The tenderness
of his Sacred Heart was perfect, in the fullest sense of the word.
No one had ever been gifted with affections like his. There has
never been a sensitiveness which could be thought of alongside
of his. In their strength, in their depth, in their fidelity, in their
delicacy, never had human affections been so divinely impassioned.
They borrowed strength, as it were, from his science. The purity
of their vehemence was from his surpassing sanctity. His human
love was a thing by itself, a marvellous chaste fire, a might of
vehement tenderness, to which there is no similitude in creation.
But it was divine also as well as human. No little measure of
that yearning and abounding love which the Creator alone can
feel was communicated to the affection of his Human Heart.
Hence no love of mother, wife, or sister was ever, for passionate
softness, like to his. But it had set itself especially on one created
object,—the love of men. He craved their love with all the
mysterious appetite of the Creator, adding to it the peculiar ro­
mance of a human heart, and that new love, half human and
half divine, which belonged only to him as our Redeemer. Yet
it was in this very one thing that his love was baffled. He saw how
few would love him, how few even of the few who served him
would serve him out of love, how coldly they would love who
loved at all, and how many who truly loved would fall from that
love through the preference of an unworthy love. It was all as
clear to him in the days of his Childhood, as ever the history of
the Church, as it unrolls itself in successive centuries, could
make it. What blight is there upon human happiness worse than
that of unrequited love,—especially when it is a love which has
beautified its own object by its own excess, and so been its own
cause and origin, and when no knowledge of new unworthiness in
the object gives a shelter to the wounded affections in the sense
of having been deceived? Yet with such a woe was his Infant Heart
continually pining.
There have been heroic hearts among men, who have felt the
sufferings of others more than they felt their own. But the Sacred
Heart of Jesus in an unexampled perfection possessed this heroism.

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The sufferings of those he loved were continually before him. He
saw the desolation of his Mother's heart, as her dolors grew daily
in the light of Simeon’s prophecy to their dread amplitude. He
saw the slow martyrdom of dear St. Joseph, whose quiet nature
seemed so unfit to suffer that the sight of his sufferings was a
peculiar distress, as when we look on some unnatural cruelly. He
saw the fearful austerities of the Baptist issuing in a bloody martyr­
dom. He beheld the Holy Innocents, every one of whose separate
pains his Infant Heart felt more keenly than the sufferers them­
selves or their wailing mothers. Here again his science furnishes
merciless light to his shrinking soul, while his power of light
adds intensity to his power of suffering: and to all is superadded
the exquisite pain of knowing that of all these sufferings of those
he loved he was himself the cause.
His ineffable spouse-like compassion for his Church, and his
keen sympathy with all her subsequent vicissitudes, was another
fountain of bitterness in his Infant Heart. The vision of count­
less Christians, who should carry into the endless fires of hell
their thousands of frustrated graces, and of divine purposes which
human malice had been free to fracture, was also another vision
which was always before him. It lay before him, that dreadful
homeless home of so many souls, as a miserable world of his own
disappointed and rejected love. When his childish eyes were
smiling with infantile wiles into the eyes of Mary, that vision lay
close upon his heart, breathing its fiery breath upon his gentleness.
We must add, too, as a distinct penance in itself, the weariful con­
tinuity of all these pains, sleeping or waking, clinging to his sensi­
tive heart like the burning garment of Greek mythology, whose
potent drugs enabled it to eat into the quick of life with gradual
but unsleeping fire. We must remember, too, what the doctrine
of his science teaches us,—that these fiery visions did not succeed
each other with a fearful interchange, which would have a sem­
blance of relief because it was interchange at all, but they were
all equally before him at all times, ever present, ever claiming
the entire breadth of his attention, ever exhausting the whole
depth of his power of suffering, ever illuminated by the whole

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light of his science, not the least of whose offices it was to be a
life-long instrument of torture.
The very forms of life, or states and conditions of his Infancy,
were forms of penance. He had taken upon himself the form
of a servant. The swaddling-clothes were his fetters. He was
born a subject of the Roman emperor, renouncing his own birth
right. His life was one of the most utter helplessness, from his
infant weakness to his not coming down from the Cross. Through­
out it all he was the butt of men, and the spectacle of angels. He
put himself at the mercy of the animals and elements. Yet these
were but outward shows of the inward bondage in which he was
to the justice of God, to the sins of men, to his own passionate
holiness of love, and to their unspeakable ingratitude. He took
upon himself also the form of a sinner. For he was clothed in
flesh like other men, and, to be like them, was content to have a
reputed human father. He underwent the rite of Circumcision,
that he might look still more like a sinner, paying to God a debt
which was only due because of sin. The purification of his Mother
was like a public and ceremonial acknowledgment of his shame.
He even allowed himself to be redeemed by doves, as if he
forsooth needed redemption who came to redeem us all. Toil
and pain, fatigue, infirmity, and death, were all consequences of
sin, and to all of them he submitted himself as never man was
subject to them before. Yet here also these were but outward signs
compared with the form of a sinner which he wore deep down
in his Soul before the eye of God’s exacting jealousy and justice.
He took upon himself also the form of a sufferer. Or, indeed, it
was a reality rather than a form. All forms with him were
realities. Suffering was the condition of his life. It was the un
seasonable companion of his Childhood. There was no moment
when he was free from it. He told St. Catharine of Siena that
during his Infancy he suffered especially every Friday. For there
might be degrees of pain, in spite of the steadfastness of his science
and the immutability of his love. His science and his love were
not the only fountains of suffering which he had within him. As
he was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, so, in

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the eyes of the Father and in the terrible realities of his own heart,
he was the Crucified Jesus even from the days of Bethlehem. His
sufferings exceeded all martyrdoms, even in each single hour of his
Infant life. He expressed this truth when he appeared to Domenica
del Paradiso as a Babe all wounded.
The three virtues of his Passion were also the three virtues
of his Infancy; and the heroic exercise of them furnished the
occasions for the fourth class of the penances of his Childhood.
These virtues were obedience, humility, and patience. He was
obedient with the perfection of obedience to the Eternal Father,
to the pagan emperor, to Mary, to Joseph, and to Herod. When
we remember who he was, and what and how great were the
privileges of his Human Soul, we shall understand how wonderful
this virtue of obedience was in him, and how heroic its exercise
to his science, which perceived from one point of view its most
divine incongruity, and to his love, when it came to involve
others, as it mostly did, and especially his beloved Mother, in
its difficulties. To subject Mary to the journey to Bethlehem,
to her repulse there, and to the vileness of the Cave, was a
marvellous act of obedience to the Roman government, the
absence of which would have seemed to no one an imperfection.
To be turned from his course, as an autumnal leaf is wafted
aside by a breath of wind, by the miserable Herod or Archelaus,
was a strange indignity for the Incarnate Word. But it came within
the requirements of the perfection of his obedience. It would be
endless to enter upon his humility. It runs through all the twelve
principal mysteries of the Infancy. They one and all breathe
the odor of an inconceivable lowliness. The exercise of humility
is always more or less penitential to every one. But there was a
violence in it to the glory-circled Soul of Jesus, which beheld
God and was beatified already, which gave it a peculiar character
in our Blessed Lord. His patience, too, was almost more wonder­
ful at Bethlehem than it was at Calvary. In both he was forever
holding back those succors with which his Divine Nature was
ready to assist his Humanity; in both he was refraining that
flood of beatitude which was fain to deluge all the faculties of

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his soul and to run over through the avenues of his glorified
senses. But in Bethlehem he was making the Infancy bear the
burden of his Manhood. His sufferings were as sensible there as
on Calvary; and they were more unseasonable, more inopportune,
more incommodious, more incongruous, at Bethlehem than on
Calvary, if we may dare so to speak, not forgetting how incon­
gruous always any thing but glory was to the Incarnate Word,
whose sufferings derive their sole congruity from the immensity of
his dear love.
There is something painful to the tenderness of devotion in
this view of our Saviour’s Infant Life. We do not dwell on it
with any predilection. But it is part of the solemn truth of the
Incarnation. It leads us into depths of doctrine which cannot be
otherwise than fruitful to our souls; and it discloses to us some
of the inward operations of the Hypostatic Union, which will
kindle in us more and more the spirit of adoration. What a
vision for Mary must have been this interior life of her heavenly
Babe! She saw the Eternal Word, the boundless joy of angels, the
uncreated splendor of heaven, the brightness of God’s perfections,
feeling himself the cursed of God, the outcast of creation, with
all the odious weight of the world’s impurities upon him. clothed,
disguised, and cumbered with the many-folded iniquity of its
millions of sinners through all its long thousands of years. She
beheld all this laid on the shrinking purity of his immaculate
Soul. She saw the Home of creatures away from home himself,
and lost,—lost in a sea of sin, and sick,—sick as at Gethsemane,
sick all his Three-and-Thirty Years, sick in the days of his dear
Childhood, when through his love all other children are careless,
bright and gay. She saw the tear-drops form in the eyes of the
Eternal, and she trembled as she saw. Oh, how terrible in its
sweetness was the Motherhood of Mary! Those tears flowed that
we might smile, and have a right to smile, and a cause to smile,
and might serve God with our smiles, and love him with our smiles,
and almost do penance with our smiles; for in all the happiest
deeds of easiest holiness the Babe of Bethlehem has laid up for
us now a virtue to satisfy the vastness of God’s justice. Hence

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ioitli, after those tears of Bethelhem, if we also weep human tears,
they are either tears of sweet gracious sorrow for sin, or gladsome
tears from excess of love, or tears from the pleasant pitifulness of
pathetic compassion; and even with regard to these tears, privileges
though they be rather than penances, the hour will come when
the kind hand of Jesus himself in his Father’s house shall wipe
them away forever.

Chapter VIII

HEAVEN ALREADY

There are some who have said that joy is a more shallow thing
than sorrow. Surely this is not a just view to take of God's
creation, even since the fall. Truly joy is undermost and sorrow
is uppermost; but from this very cause joy is the deepest of the two.
The heart of the spiritual world, where its central fires are, is
deepest joy. The world of sorrow rests upon it, as on its secure
foundation. As under every stone there is moisture, so under
every sorrow there is joy; and when we come to understand life
rightly, we see that sorrow is, after all, but the minister of joy.
We dig into the bosom of sorrow to find the gold and precious
stones of joy. Sorrow is a condition of time, but joy is the condi­
tion of eternity. All sorrow lies in exile from God; all joy lies in
union with him. In heaven joy will cast out sorrow,—whereas
there is not a lot on earth from which sorrow has been able
altogether to banish joy. Joy clings to us as the creatures of
God. It adheres to us wherever we go. Its fragrance is palpable
about us. Its sunshine lights upon us, and gives us some sort of
attractiveness above that which is our own. Joy hangs about
every thing which God has had to do with. There is only one
place where there is no joy; and that dark region is under a
special law of its own, and is darkness because it would not be
light. There is an inevitable joyousness about all that belongs
to God. We are angry with ourselves because we do not sorrow
long enough for our dead. We think it almost a wrong to the
memory of those we loved. But it is the elasticity of life. Our
hearts bound upward, because God is above. We cannot help
ourselves. The very purling of our blood in our veins is joyous,
because life is a gift direct from God. In truth, joy and sorrow
are not contradictories. Sorrow is the setting of joy, the foil of
349

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joy, the shadow which softens joy, the gloom which makes the
light so beautiful, the night which causes each morning to have
the gladness of a resurrection. They live together, because they
are sisters. Joy is the eldest-born, and when the younger dies—
as she will die—joy will keep a memory of her about her for
evermore, a memory which will be very gracious, so gracious as
to be part of the bliss of heaven.
There are souls too in the world which have the gift of finding
joy everywhere, and of leaving it behind them when they go.
Joy gushes from under their fingers like jets of light. There
is something in their very presence, in their mere silent company,
from which joy cannot be extricated and laid aside. Their in­
fluence is an inevitable gladdening of the heart. It seems as if a
shadow of God's own gift had passed upon them. They give
light without meaning to shine; and coy hearts, like the bashful
insects, come forth and almost lay aside their sad natures. Some­
how, too, the joy all turns to God. Without speaking of him, it
preaches him. Its odor is as the odor of his presence. It leaves
tranquillity behind, and not unfrequently sweet tears of prayer.
All things grow silently Christian under its reign. It brightens,
ripens, softens, transfigures like the sunlight, the most improbable
things which come within its sphere. A single gifted heart like
this is the apostle of its neighborhood. Every one acknowledges
its divine right, which it never thinks of claiming. There is no
need to claim it; for none resist its unconquerable gentleness.
Joy is like a missioner who speaks of God; sorrow is a preacher
who frightens men out of the deadliness of sin into the arms of
their heavenly Father, or who weans them by the pathos of his
reasoning from the dangerous pleasures of the world. These
bright hearts arc more like the first than the second. They have
a great work to do for God; and they do it often most when they
realize it least. It is the breath they breathe, and the star they
were born under, and the law which encircles them. They have
a light within them which was not delusive when they were
young, and which age will only make more golden without dim­
inishing its heat. To live with them is to dwell in a perpetual

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351

sunset of unboisterous mirth and placid gayety. Who has not
known such souls? Who has not owed all that is best in him,
alter grace, to such as those? Happy is he who had such for the
atmosphere of his parental home! Its glory may have sunk
beneath the horizon, but he himself will be illuminated by its
glow until the hour comes for his own pensive setting. Of a truth,
he is the happiest, the greatest, and the most godlike of men, as
well as the sole poet among men, who has added one true joy to
the world's stock of happiness.
There are other souls who for their own good are in want
of joy, whose gift is rather that of an unusual capacity of joy than
a giving of it forth. They drink it in as thirsty land drinks in the
rain; and it is to be remembered we are speaking not of pleasure,
but of joy. It seems necessary to them for the healing of their
souls, as necessary as sorrow is for the great multitude of men.
Nevertheless these souls, who are as it were saved by joy, are
many more in number than we should at first sight suppose. Our
observations in the world are continually bringing them to light
in the most unlikely places. They are perpetually taking shelter
under the secret ministrations of the Christian priesthood. Joy
seems to be as needful to them as the sunlight is for plants. They
grow and expand under it, and color themselves with the blossoms
of various virtues. Neither is their growth altogether upward,
as unkindly judgment—which is always shallow judgment— com­
monly supposes. They take deep root, the deeper root the hotter
the sun shines. They seek the coolness and the moisture which
are only deep down. They are for the most part humble souls,
and very steadfast ones; and it is rather the excess of their power
than the vacillation of their weakness which makes them need
so much of the spirit of gladness. Joy is ballast to them, and
not sails. Their nature is made for swift sailing: it is joy that
makes them sale sailers. Joy is a perpetual presence of God to
them, and a clear well out of which the spirit of prayer is lading
the cool waters at all hours. It is joy which gives them their love
of mortification. It is joy which furnishes the exuberant charity
of their judgments of others. Joy softens them, deepens them.

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elevates them. They can do all things well when they arc joyous,
and better when they are in exceeding joy. The height of their
joy is always the measure of the depth of their humility. They
cannot understand how it should be otherwise, when they arc
warned lest it should delude them or puff them up. They have
their share of sorrows, and bear their part in the world of sorrow
very gracefully. But they have communications with that deep
under world of joy which lies beneath the world of sorrow, and
by these communications the life of their souls is set free. They
have an unbroken inward contentment, because they are always
successful, as successful as they desire. For the spirit of joy enables
them to realize a truth which becomes the anchor of their lives,
that the endeavor is always grander than the work, because it has
a greater capacity of holding the divine. They arc unworldly;
because the greater light within them extinguishes the lesser light
without them. Yet they are happy in the world with the world’s
common, simple, blameless happiness. For does not earth look
more than ever beautiful when our cars are stopped with the
sounds of heaven? The deaf ear gives all its lost power to the
eye. He who hears only angels’ songs while he looks on a fair
scene of earth, what brighter vision may he covet on this side the
grave? He realizes the world too little to perceive its evil, or he
does not dwell on it even if he preceives it, much less does he
become entangled in its defilement. It is but a show to him;
and he needs but a show to make him happy; for those sounds in
his ears are causing beatitude in his heart. The windmills in the
green landscape go round as silently, and almost as gracefully,
as the distant woods wave in the wind; but when we come near
they creak and clatter, like the grating tongues of wicked men.
But the gay pageants of earth’s landscapes are always silent wind­
mills to the happy man. He does not go near enough to hear them;
and if he did, there are other voices in his ear, and he would
hardly hear the outward noise. Joy too can try the soul no less
than sorrow, and it has mystical implements of its own, wherewith
to do the work. It has fears also of its own, like its sister sorrow;
and it is a gift of the Holy Ghost, which she is not. She is but

HEAVEN ALREADY
the dower of a judicious providence.

353

Finally, joy has its own

saints to be examples to its own souls; and they are of all saints

those the shining of whose light the world is least able to com­

prehend.
Beauty is akin to joy, and the beauty of heavenly things has
the same effect of making us unworldly.

Much of worldliness

consists in a mental and moral atmosphere; and the beauty of

divine things, bringing with them their own special joy, surrounds

us with a supernatural atmosphere, which assimilates our in­
ward life to itself after a time. We shall find that this will be
the result of our reflections upon the joy of the Sacred Infancy.

If it prophesies of earthly years by its shadows of Calvary, it

prophesies also of the eternal years by the Heaven which it has
already in its heart. As Calvary is the ground-melody of Behle

hem, so is Heaven the deeper ground-melody of both.

But where is there room for joy in an Infancy so preter­
naturally peopled with sorrows and perpetually eclipsed with a
startling gloom as we have seen it to be in the last chapter? If

there is a realm of joy to be opened out before us equal in extent
to that other one of woe, how can it be that the one will not
neutralize the other, and that both will not seem to us but

fictitious unrealities of the schools? Our faith will teach us that

so it was, even though it may not make clear to us the method of
this supernatural harmony. We do not doubt our Lord's agony in

the garden to have been mental torture of the most exquisite
description. Yet we as little doubt that at that very time he enjoyed

the beatifying Vision of the Most Holy Trinity. We cannot under­
stand the operations of Two Natures in one Person; we cannot

understand the operations of a Human Nature with a Divine
Person; so neither can we understand the twofold life of Viator
and Comprehensor which our faith teaches us that the Soul of

Christ lived on earth. So neither can we allow ourselves to speak
as if the Two Natures were but two voices or two musical instru­

ments, and that the Person of the Word now sounded upon one.

and now upon another, in alternation or succession. As the opera­
tions of the Divine Nature were incessant, so also were the opera

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tions of the Sacred Humanity incessant also; while the perfect
science of the Human Soul rendered his whole inward life simul­
taneous and unsuccessive, so that he did not merely change from
joy to sorrow, and from sorrow back to joy. It is true, then, that
within the limits of the Sacred Infancy there is a world of joy as
vast, complete, and wonderful as the world of sorrow which we
have seen already to be there. They were two lives, and yet but one
life. They went on together uncommingling, yet at the time
neither independent nor apart. No boundary can be drawn be­
tween the two, any more than we can (race a boundary between
the waters of the river and waters of the lake even while as
yet they are unconfused. The lower phenomena of the impres­
sionable part of his human nature were so far overruled and
constrained as that his beatitude should not deaden the anguish of
his Agony, or his foresight of the Passion embitter his joy in the
love of his immaculate Mother. The world of sorrow, then, with
all its consequences, was as real and substantial as if it was his
only world, as if it were the length and breadth of all his life. The
world of joy also, with all its consequences, was no less of a
reality, and covered his whole life with as remarkable a univer­
sality of glory as his sorrow did. Only, because of the circumstances
of the Incarnation, and the prominence of our Lord’s redeeming
work, the world of joy is least known to us, because it is under­
most. It had no such outward revelation of itself on earth, as
Calvary was an outward revelation of the inward sorrow. His life
in heaven now is the out-blossoming of his secret beatitude on
earth. Neither does his joy appeal to our sympathies so directly
or so touchingly as his sorrow. We are selfish even in our purest
love of our Blessed Lord. We cannot do without his Calvary. We
are drawn to his Cross because by his Cross he has drawn us to
himself. What have we to do with his brightness yet, who are
trembling applicants for his Precious Blood? Moreover, his joy
was his own; and, although we were not altogether without our
place in it,—as in what that belongs to him has not his love given
us a place?—nevertheless we have not to do with it as we have
to do with his sorrows, who have caused them by our sins. By

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355

virtue of the Hypostatic Union there was an adorable vastness
in our Lord’s Soul, which enabled these two worlds of joy and
grief to coexist, and to be coeval fountains of innumerable tender
mysteries.
To Saint Joseph the Sacred Infancy was his Cross. Bethlehem
was to him instead of Calvary. The earthly troubles and incon­
veniences which the Incarnation brought along with it fell in
great measure upon him as his peculiar burden. It came, too.
when he was comparatively old. The end for which he lived
he did not arrive at until he was mature in years. The treasure
*
of God were committed to his sole keeping. Doubts and fears,
anxiety and haste, public notice and difficult responsibility, are
trials which press heavily on those whose first manhood is passed,
and more heavily than common on a tender and affectionate
heart like that of Joseph. We cannot avoid picturing him to our­
selves as one who was rather fitted for contemplation than for
action, both on account of his exceeding tenderness and also of
his remarkable quietness of spirit: yet out of the bashful timidity
of a contemplative he had to draw the bravery of an apostle. For
wellnigh thirteen years the Incarnation hardly allowed him one
day of peace: and then, when something of an anxious peace came
to him at Nazareth, the fires of divine love from the vicinity of
Jesus silently fretted his life away. We feel that his whole early
life was but a preparation for the unworldly office he was at last
to assume. Most saints have one eminent cross, which towers above
their other crosses and gives the character as well to their sanctity
as to their lives. Who can doubt but that Bethlehem was Joseph's
cross? Yet was it also a land of pleasantness, a very world of joy,
even to him. He would hardly have exchanged Bethlehem for
heaven, just as we know Simeon had prayed for his rest and
release to wait until he had seen the Lord’s Christ on earth.
It was dear to him, not only because it was a cross and he .1
saint, and the saints are ever enamored of their crosses, but be
cause it was a marvellous and abounding joy. The mysteries
which checkered the twelve years were fountains to him of holy
gladness and of divine love. The sight of Jesus was an endless

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vision, not only soothing the soul, but filling it to overflowing
with spiritual sweetness. The light in his eyes, the tones of his
voice, the play of his fingers, his attitudes in his various occupa­
tions, were all an overwhelming delight to Joseph’s soul. His
spiritual discernment, and his union with God, enabled him to
penetrate deeply into all these things.
If the unborn Baptist leaped for joy when he heard the sound
-of Mary’s voice, what must the company of the sinless Mother have
been to Joseph, to whom next to Jesus she most belonged! His
conjugal love was actually part of his religion.
*
His tender
ministries to her were a worship which sanctified him and raised
him near to God. Mary is the copious fountain of joy to the whole
earth; and it was Joseph who dwelt nearest to the fountain where
it sprang all fresh and abundant from the rock. What a joy must
she not have been to him! His office toward the Incarnate Word
was one which he could hardly ever exercise without trembling.
But surely it was as the Thrones are said to tremble in heaven,—
with an excess of reverence which is also an excess of bliss. If
exaltation humbles the saints, and if humility is of all graces the
grace most prolific of interior joy, how great must have been the
humility of Joseph, how transcending the rapture of his joy.
Love wore him out, and so he died. But we may well believe it
was through the concussions of joy within his soul that love came
to slay him. At Nazareth his outward cares were fewer. His
attention was more exclusively concentrated on Jesus. Jesus
also, as he grew up, and took his share in the toils of the poor
household, in some sense passed more from the jurisdiction of
Mary to that of Joseph. Thus Joseph’s commanding of Jesus,
teaching him, coming in contact with him, were more frequent
and more direct; and if, as we believe, each order that he gave
him shook his own soul to its centre with thrills of trembling
rapture, we can understand how the aged saint, in the beautiful
furnace of those last burning years, would become the helpless
• Raffaello Maria, the Carmelite, has a beautiful thought in his life of St. Joseph.
Speaking of St. Joseph’s marriage with our Blessed Lady, he says. "The Holy Ghost,
•»'ho raided in both of them, was their conjugal love."—Vita di S. Giuseppe, p. 48.

HEAVEN ALREADY

357

prey of love. Moreover, the shadow of the Eternal Father, as it
settled down upon him, could not do otherwise than bring with it
a joy too full of profound reverence to be agitation, but one which
would have laid too great a weight of bliss upon a soul that was
not expressly chosen to bear such an incomparable burden. He
was drawn within the ring of those unutterable shadows which
the Holy Trinity is pleased to cast around itself; and if Abraham's
bosom was sweet rest, full of visionary beatitude, where the old
patriarchs awaited the opening of heaven by the Risen Jesus,
what must the bosom of that awful divine cloud have been, in
which the soul of Joseph was involved! Even co our hearts,
devotion to the Holy Trinity is one of simple exultation, because
it is also one of the purest adoration. What must have been the
jubilee of Joseph's Spirit? That it was the shadow of the First
Person which was on him, unspeakably intensified his joy. To
him was communicated the likeness of the incommunicable
Father, of whom even apostles said, Show us the Father, and it is
enough for us. He was like a sort of visible mission of the Unsent
Father, to whose Person mission does not belong; only his peculiar
presence goes along with the mission of the Other Two. Thus
also by his similitude to the Father did he enjoy a mysterious
similitude to the Son, and by his office toward Mary he wore also
the likeness of the Holy Ghost, the uncreated jubilee of the
Godhead. Who is sufficient to analyze the heavenly joy which
was blended in the waters of fountains such as these? Who can
name its kind, or test its virtues, or put into figures its proportions
and its quantities? Yet this shadow of the Eternal Father was
cast on Joseph by the Sacred Infancy. Was it not, then, to him
a land of pleasantness, and, in its own way, also a land of peace,
even though it fell to his lot as a heritage of suffering?
The same is still more true of Mary. Her double simultaneous
life of sorrow and of joy is one of the most striking similitudes
between her Immaculate Heart and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
She was the queen of joys, as well as the mother of dolors. Hei
sorrows during the Sacred Infancy were little less than a trail
script of his, proportioned to the measure of her soul. The words

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hF.THLF.HEM

of Simeon had lodged Calvary in her heart almost in its fulness.
But, independently of this, the greater number of the mysteries
of the Sacred Infancy were mysteries of sorrow to her. The joy
of the Nativity was dashed by much that was bitter, not for her
own sake, but for the adoring love she bore her Son. The Pre­
sentation was a joyous mystery, and yet it was the first of the seven
dolors which the Church selects for our especial commemoration.
All bright things had their dark side with her. As it was the
self-imposed law of his Heart, so was it the love-imposed law of
hers. The Flight into Egypt was a sorrow that would have been
wild, had wildness comported with the Perfections of her queenly
soul. Her sojourn there was a sorrow also; and her return was
fruitful in hitherto inexperienced vicissitudes of suffering. The
turning away from Jerusalem brought with it fresh grief; and the
Infancy ended with that terrible trial, his dereliction of her
for three days. Surely never did land more truly bring forth
sorrows a hundredfold, than did the Sacred Infancy to Mary. Yet
what were all the joys of all the saints to hers? Her very sorrows
were so full of joy that she would not have exchanged them for the
most ravishing sweetness that ever fettered a holy soul in a perfect
captivity of delights. If we except the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
was ever any fountain of joy opened in creation to compare with
her Maternity? The splendor of its purity, the depth of its affec­
tions, the heavenliness of its mystery, the loveliness of its exalta­
tion, the magnificence of its prerogatives, the divine beauty
of its object, the ineffable raptures of its experience, what has
there ever been in God’s wide world to compare with the won­
derful realities of the Virgin-Mother’s bliss, realities which we
are so far from comprehending that the greater part of them
we are unable even to conjecture or suspect? There are
differences in degree so great as almost to constitute a differ­
ence in kind, in consequence of their rising into other atmos­
pheres. So the multiplication of all the ardent love of all human
mothers will not figure for us Mary’s maternal love of Jesus:
and what is love, even while it is weeping, but the intensest
of earthly joys?

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359

Indeed, it would be no extravagance to say that all the joys
of the angelic world could make no joy that should compare,

cither for quantity or quality, with the single joy of Mary's
Motherhood. She had many joys besides that; although, whether

we look forward to her Assumption or backward to her Immacu­
late Conception, the Maternity was the fountain of them all.
But, considering exclusively the direct joy of her Maternity,

it overtops and outshines the entire joy of the angelical creation.

From the day of the Nativity this joy was always at its height

in her soul.

suspended.

We have no reason to believe that it ever was
We cannot so think of our Blessed Lady's soul as

to suppose that even her dolors overwhelmed it, or that her
pain ever concentrated exclusively upon itself, as on one point,

the capacious,

far-reaching faculties of her highly-gifted and

Christ-like mind.

Doubtless such a thing may be said; but the

more we think of her marvellous inward life, the less can we

bring ourselves to say such things. At any rate, during the Sacred
Infancy, with the Babe upon her lap, touching him, seeing him.

hearing him, feeding, clothing, washing, nursing him, with all
the varieties of a Mother's fondling gracefully blending with

the creature’s delighted adoration and the ever-new bliss of a
fresh astonishment, the joy of her Maternity must have reigned,
if ever, over her magnificent soul.

Indeed, her joy is one of

her wonders, to the contemplation of which the Church calls

us by

the devotion which

she

authorizes and

suggests.

She

chooses seven joys in particular out of our Mother's life, which
we are to contemplate.

Of these seven, five are confined to the

period of the Sacred Infancy, while the Resurrection is as it

were the joyous finding in the temple renewed a second time,
the restoration of that Babe of Bethlehem who, when he was

taken down from

the Cross, assumed again

resting-place upon his Mother’s

lap;

and

his old childish

the Ascension

was

the exaltation of that Flesh and Blood to which such honor
was no less due in the crib of Bethlehem than it was that bright

afternoon on Olivet.

The Ascension was but the publication

of the sweet secret of the Infancy.

He who studiously and in­

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BETHLEHEM

tently meditates on Mary’s seven joys will soon perceive that,
among all the glories of creation, the joy of that sinless being
is among the greatest, catching inner lights from heaven and
wonderfully reflecting them in its calm profundities, shifting
from diversity to diversity of splendor, each change of which
makes eye-music to him who gazes thereon in reverential love,
unfolding for us jealous folds in the character of God, and
disclosing him to us in the grandeur of his exceptional ways
and engaged upon his unusual works. At times, too, the mists
part in the bright landscape of her joys, and we seem to see,
as through cloud-windows, or glowing fissures in a sunset, into
the marvel creation would have been had it never fallen, and,
indeed, actually was when it came fresh and virginal from the
Creator’s hand. But it is especially in the mysteries of the Infancy
that these gleams arc most vivid and most frequent. In her,
therefore, throughout our Lord’s Childhood there was a heaven
of light, as well as an earth of darkness. She, too, like him,
walked the world in the darkness of her exile. She, too, imper­
fectly like him, had nearly attained her heavenly home, though
she had not, like him, perfectly attained it. With her, as with
him, it was the very splendor of her heaven of light which made
the darkness of her earth so pathetically dark.
But the grand creation of joy is in the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. Never has the blessedness of God been poured forth
outside himself with such overwhelming splendor or with such
unstinted munificence, as over the created nature which he
vouchsafed to assume to himself. At all moments, even during
the dereliction upon the Cross, and without impeding the ve­
hemence of his affliction, Jesus was almost infinitely blessed.
But, if there was a time during his sojourn upon earth which
was more eminently than another a period of joy, it was dur­
ing what are called the joyful mysteries of his Childhood. The
usage of the faithful, which is mostly very accurate theology',
assigns joy to the Infancy as instinctively as it attributes sorrow
to the Passion and glory to the forty days which followed the
Resurrection. It is true that the perfection of our Lord’s science

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HEAVEN ALREADY

gave an extraordinary equability to his life, by enabling him
to live as it were different lives simultaneously.

But, at least

for our devotion, if we may not look for joy during his Child­

hood, where may we look for it at all?

Moreover, the object

of our present inquiry is not so much, or, at least, not so directly,
the whole joy of Jesus, as the special joys of his Infancy.

But

we must consider first of all the joy of the Eternal Word, the

joy of that Divine Person who had assumed this Human Nature,

and to whom this Human Heart belonged, which was a cabinet

of gladness enough to beatify a thousand heavens.

If we might say of one attribute rather than another, that
in it resides the life of God, we should say that it was in his
beatitude.

It is in his understanding, because his understanding

is the utmost bliss. It is in his uncreated sanctity; for his holiness

beatifies him.

It is in his self-sufficiency; because his self-suffi­

ciency is the realization of his bliss.

He is a simple act, and we

cannot otherwise qualify the act or characterize it than as bliss.
The eternal life of glorified spirits and souls, which he pours

into them, is an outpouring of his bliss. To see him as he is,

is simply bliss. Beatitude is joy, divine joy. If it is allowable to

use such words, joy is the vital thing in God. He must be God,
because he is eternally and self-sufficiently blessed.

He must

be eternally and self-sufficiently blessed, precisely because he
is God. God is not filled with life, as he fills created vases with

angelic, human, or other life. He is himself life, absolute life,
a living act.

But, in our necessarily indistinct conceptions of

him, joy is to his being what life is to ours, only that his being

and his joy arc not only inseparable, but identical, and therefore
cannot stand in any relation to each other, as our being and
our joy stand to one another. God is what he is, and we cannot

change him by any views of ours.

But much depends for our­

selves upon the view we take of God.

Some one view of him

is always to each mind the truest view; and those whose ideas
of God

become simplified and

luminous

by

looking at his

majesty from the point of view of his beatitude will find that
it will materially influence their choice of opinions in theology

3β2

BETHLEHEM

and bring forth many fruitful consequences in their practical
devotion. To my eyes, I confess that the longer I am allowed
by his forbearance to look at God, the more one twofold view
of him fills my soul with a love which is always maturing itself
in fear, and an astonishment which never wears off, and over­
awes while it attracts;— outside himself, and toward us, his
simplicity appears to resolve itself into a love which is intensi­
fied by his justice, while inside himself, and independent of
us, it seems to resolve itself into a beatitude whose placidity
is deepened by a creative yearning to communicate his bliss. It
is as if his love were dissatisfied with his inward contentment,
and broke forth, and ran beyond him, while his beatitude brooded
over the abysses of its own eternity, and islanded his unapproach­
able purity from the contact of created things. Such is the
semblance with which the mind disguises God, as if his life
were thus mystically a taking in of breath and a breathing it
forth like ours. He has much to pardon in our worthiest con­
ceptions of his majesty; and to holy fear all that it requires
will be condoned.
It is only with feelings of speechless adoration that we can
venture to look on the Person of the Unbegotten Father with
his infinite fecundity. There is something awful in the joy
which he has in himself. His complacency in his illimitable
perfections has not the shape and fashion of any created thing,
however magnificent or marvellous. He knows himself. He
comprehends his own immensity. He fathoms the depths of
his beauty. His life is beatitude. It cannot be otherwise than
an infinity of glorious bliss. But his joy is not the effect of his
exploring his own Being by his self-knowledge. All things begin
equally in Him in whom is no beginning or shadow of begin­
ning, at all. His joy is his fecundity, and his fecundity his joy.
His knowledge of himself, a knowledge which cannot but un­
speakably beatify him, though not as cause, is the production
of another coequal Person. His simple beholding of himself
is not a process; it is substantial and vital, a living consubstantial Person. He gazes upon himself in gladness, and he

HEAVEN ALREADY

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beholds the Word, whom that self-knowledge has produced;
and in the perfect similitude of the Word he beholds himself.
The Word is the Father's joy in himself, because he is his
knowledge of himself, and his knowledge is unbeginning, un­
created joy. The Word himself, thus eternally produced, is
an infinity of joy in himself also, coequal in vastness, in mag
nificence, in eternity, with the joy of the Father. Thus the
Generation of the Word is the illimitable joy of the Divine
Understanding.
The meeting—we are speaking human words which are neces­
sarily false—of these two Oceans of bliss, the Father and the
Son, causes as it were a double infinity of joy, which is as un­
imaginable as it is indescribable. But so fruitful is this joy,
so joyous the fruitfulness, that it is absolutely necessitated to
produce a third infinity of joy, the Person of the Holy Ghost.
So universally is this Divine Person, who is produced by the
love of the Father and the Son, as by one principle,—so uni­
versally is he referred to joy, that the ancient Fathers named
him the Jubilee of the Father and the Son, an uncreated Jubilee,
the never-beginning and the always-beginning self-exultation
of the Godhead. As the Son is light, the Spirit is fire. As the
Son is wisdom, the Spirit is love, while the Father is eminently
self-sufficiency and power. Thus the necessary inward emanations
of the Godhead seem to simplify themselves in joy the further
they advance, and their Term, who can never be overpassed,
is named of the Christian Church the everlasting eternally-pro­
ceeding Jubilee. Thus the Procession of the Holy Ghost is the
illimitable joy of the Divine Will.
Thus contemplating the joy of the Father and the joy of
the Holy Ghost, we may now gaze upon the joy of the Word,
which is as it were contained between those other Two Divine
Persons. We are looking on an ocean, as it were from above,
from a cloud in the air, an impossible station which we may
imagine. It is an ocean which has no shores, and vet millions
of beings lie external to it. It is as unfathomable as it is vast,
yet it was all contained in the littleness of the Babe of Beth

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lehem. Nevertheless through the indistinctness of this mighty
ocean we seem as we gaze to distinguish eight oceans in the
bosom of the one, as the one itself is but one of three. There
is first of all the joy of the Son in having such a Father. The
delight, which is his life, is a perfect knowledge of the inex­
haustible grandeurs of the Father. His Father’s excellence is
so infinite that it fills his own infinity. But that such an ex­
cellence should stand to him in the relation of Father is a joy
so unspeakable, a contentment so peculiar, a glory so singular
and so unshared, that we cannot compass it with the extremest
subtlety of thought.
Yet the second joy, that he himself is such a Son, is a joy
as vast and as unspeakable as the other. The perfection of his
likeness to,the Father stirs his joy like a tide, and stirs it even
to its lowest depths. It is as great a bliss to him, and yet a
distinct bliss, to be himself the Son, as it is to him to have
the Father for his Father. His simple filiation, apart, if we
can think of it apart, from the excellencies which it combines,
is in itself an abyss of uncreated exultation. Fie broods over
it with everlasting complacency. It is a filiation always actual,
for he is being eternally begotten every moment, and therefore
it is a beatitude always fresh and always new, like morning
on the sea.
The third ocean gleams dazzlingly under the mist which
always lies unuplifted over the secret things of God. He and
the Father are one; and from Them, as from a single fountain,
proceeds the Coequal Spirit, in a silent, motionless Procession
of uncreated splendor, an adorable fiery Jubilee, completing,
binding, limiting the Godhead, and exhausting the mysterious
necessities of the Divine Nature. It is God himself, building
himself up like a fortress of fire between himself and all
possible things besides, the ever-burning, eternal Watch-tower
overlooking all creation’s realms, a Limit to creation, as well
as a Limit to the Godhead, a Limit to creation which can itself
have no created limit, but to which the Third Person of the

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Holy Trinity is the Limit in sight oE which the farthest-ascending
creatures come, and yet come not up to it, like the far seen
palisades of mountains that bound some earthly view, the feet
of which the misty outstretched plains do not appear to reach
or touch. The joy of the Son in his fecundity, his bliss in pro­
ducing with the Father a Spirit so adorably coequal with himself
and with Them both, is his third joy, a glory which is a mere
assemblage of definitions when we describe our faith, but which,
like all definitions, is a glorious transfiguration of sanctity within
our hearts. There is a power of holiness in true theology which
they who slight it will one day uselessly regret.
There is a fourth joy of the Son in the might and sweet­
ness of that mutual love of the Father and himself, which,
mingling in one fountain, had the power from its commingling
to produce the Holy Ghost. The method, if we may so speak,
by which the Holy Ghost was produced, is to the Son a joy
as infinite as the fact of his production. Under what similitude
shall we speak of that mutual love of the Father and the Son,
and of its unutterable operation? We might, perchance, find
some figure in the beautiful magnificence of fire, only that its
loveliness is too terrible both to eye and ear to let our fright­
ened nature be at peace in the presence of its power; and its
power becomes beautiful in proportion as it is beyond control.
That love is two fountains, and yet they were never two. They
unite, yet they never were disunited. They produce, yet they
never were without Him whom they produce. He is not a
consequence of the love which produces him, but coequal with
it, coeternal with it, consubstantial with it. There are mysteries
which even heaven will not make plain. They will be among
the most peculiar of the joys of heaven. Such, perhaps, will
be the method by which the Holy Ghost proceeds from, yet
is not generated by, the mutual love of the Father and the
Son. The Word is the wisdom of the Godhead. The possession
of secrets is one of wisdom’s joys, a different joy from that of
its communicating them. The incommunicable knowledge of

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the manner of the Holy Ghost’s Procession is perhaps one of
the glad secrets of the Word. It is a divine jubilee to him that
none can comprehend the outflow of his Uncreated Jubilee.
His fifth joy lies before our imagination as something so
surpassingly beautiful, that we long to have words to express
even what our poor inadequate thoughts are able to think. It
arises from another twofold love, like the twofold love of the
Father and himself by which the Holy Spirit was produced.
It is the love of the Holy Ghost and himself, his blissful love
of the Spirit and the Spirit's blissful love of him. In his love
of the Holy Spirit there is that peculiar blessedness which
forms an element in the joy of the Father’s love of him, as
of the Person he has produced, and which the Son could not
have felt were he not with the Father the producer of the
Holy Ghost. His joy would have wanted this particular emi­
nence if the Holy Spirit had proceeded from the Father alone.
In the same manner also that other element in the Father’s
joy, which arises from the love of the Person whom he has
produced and is producing, enters into the Son’s inheritance
of joy, as he receives the same kind of love from the Holy Ghost
who is proceeding from him, which he himself renders to the
Father by whom he is being begotten. Here is a joy, the very
double of that joy which produced a Third Person in the
Holy Trinity; yet there is no more production: the bliss falls
back and scatters itself in showers of uncreated light over the
Three Blessed Persons. Who is able even to dream worthily
of such things as these?
A sixth ocean of joy now succeeds, though its succession
is but an appearance and a show to the infirmity of our un­
steady sight. It is the joy of the Word in the coequality of
the Three Persons. The Godhead is now complete, as it
always was. The Procession of the Holy Ghost is the perfec­
tion of that ever-living Life. It is a joy to the Son that he is
coequal with the Father, and an equal joy to him that the
Holy Ghost is coequal with himself. It is a further joy to
him that this sovereign coequality remains undisturbed by the

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seeming inferiority of Generation and Procession. It is a
rapture even to the quietude of the Divine Nature that the
Limit placed to Itself by the mutual love of the Father and
the Son should be in the most absolute manner coequal with
the awful unbegotten Fountain of Godhead, from whom the
Son himself proceeded and proceeds.
But there is a seventh joy which transcends even this joy.
Coequality does not adequately express the perfection of the
blessedness of God. Though doubtless every distinction in the
Holy Trinity is infinitely beatific, nevertheless the majesty of un
created bliss reposes in its unity rather than in its distinctions.
The Unity of the Godhead would seem to be its crowning joy.
The Three Persons are not only coequal Persons, but they are
One God; and it is only in this Unity that their mutual love is
majestically consummated. God's delight in his own Oneness is
inexplicable; but we feel sure it is the mountain-top of all that
mountainous world of glories, sublimities, and joys; and, by the
miracle of his Nature, not to be depicted by art or fancy of man,
while it is the top, and because it is the top, of all that infinite
mountain-range, it is the outspread base and the magnifie root
as well. We might dare to think, that, as by some special appropria
tion the Son is the wisdom of the Godhead, so there was to him,
in the same sense that injures not the equal eminence of the
Other Two, some special delight in the Unity of the Godhead
which his wisdom would so specially appreciate.
Who would have believed that another, an eighth ocean,
could have opened to our view? The joy of the Son as it were
comes down from the lone heights of the Divine Unity, and
broods with scintillations of quivering peaceful splendor over
the eminence of his own Person. He joys in his own unity as
Son. He exults that he is the only Son of the Father, and that
there can be no other, though to satisfy the Father and himself
he will, in special alliance with the Holy Ghost, multiply his
own titles of filiation by becoming incarnate, to show how
infinitely dear to him that mystery of filiation could be. He too
had his unity, and his joy of unity. He was the only Son He

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rejoiced also that he was the Eternal Son, that the Father had
been forever a Father, and only by him could be a Father. He
rejoiced that the Father never had been without him; for the
Father’s sake he rejoiced as well as for his own. He rejoiced
that his own Generation had never begun, and equally he rejoiced
that it was always going on, and would never end; for his Father’s
sake he rejoiced in this also, as well as for his own. He rejoiced
that he was the Eternal Son, because thus he entered into the
breathing forth of the Holy Ghost. By his eternal Generation
it was that he took, and forever takes, part in the eternal Procession
of the Spirit. In this also he rejoiced, as well for the Spirit’s sake
as for his own. He rejoiced that the Holy Ghost should have
the jubilee of proceeding from a Person like his, with a joy
which equalled that other joy of being himself one of the Persons
from whom the Holy Ghost proceeded. In this too he rejoiced,
as well for the Spirit’s sake, as for his own. It was by the eternity
of his Sonship that all this joy was gained. Furthermore, he
rejoiced that he was the necessary Son of the Father. He rejoiced
that he was no free emanation of God, like the beautiful created
worlds, but that the Father could not do without him, nor with­
out him could the Holy Spirit be the jubilee he is. His Sonship
was the first sweet necessity of the Godhead, which yet could have
no first because it could have no beginning. He rejoiced that
the majestic freedom of the Godhead, to the full size of which
freedom its mighty gladness swells, should reside in its necessities,
and that his Sonship should be the necessity of the Father, who
could not but beget him, and the necessity of the Holy Ghost,
who could not but proceed from him together with the Father, and
his own necessity, who could not but be everlastingly and jubi­
lantly begotten. Thus his eighth joy was a triple joy, one joy
made of three, a threefold unity of joy which simply concerned
his own Person, as being the only, the eternal, and the necessary
Son of God. These were his joys ages back and from the begin­
ning. But we need not speak of them in the past tense only.
They are his life, not his history. These are his joys at this moment

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of the dawning of a summer day; they will be his joy forever.
How beautiful is thy life, Eternal Word!
Such arc the joys of the Three Divine Persons, and in par­
ticular the eight beatitudes of the Person of the Son. But. as all
within God is joy, all his outpourings are joy also. If sorrow is
the child of fall, as was said before, joy was the intended state
of the unfallen world. Because God is God, creation must needs
swim in joy, as if joy were air and space to it. This was the pri­
mary intention. This is the inextinguishable brightness in the
idea of creation. Even now how joyous it all is, with gladness
almost divinely rebelling against its penal destiny of grief! Earth
is like a minstrel beside herself, making songs of her sorrows,
and setting even her lamentations to inspiring music. Sin brings
the reverse of joy, because it is the contradictory of God. It puts
out the light of the world, so far as it can put it out, because it
obscures or falsifies the intent of creative love. Redemption is to
bring back joy, and to recover creation’s lost birthright for it;
for what is the end of creation, but to enter into the joy of its
Lord? Redemption is thus a second outflow of joy, as creation
was a first. Grace itself is a sovereign joy, even in what is painful
and harsh to nature, as the blithe austerities of the saints assure
us and the raptures of martyrdom authentically testify. But
the Divine Person who has redeemed us is the Word, that Person
whose own joys we have ventured to contemplate in such detail,
that Person who has sheathed his infinite grandeur in the little­
ness of that infantine frame at Bethlehem.
Thus our joy stands in a peculiar relation to the joy of the
Eternal Word. All the joys we have are in a very real sense from
the Eternal Word, who has redeemed us by his Incarnation, and
did thereby even merit grace for the angels, who needed not re­
deeming grace. From the joy therefore of the highest seraphim
to the blithe play of the Christian child on the village green, all
joy is from him. Nay, because of the Word’s peculiar connection
with creation, we may reverently say that the joys in the bright
eyes and inarticulate thanksgivings of animals are from him. He

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is joy, because he is light. This is very noticeable. He is the light
of creatures, because he is the brightness of the Father; and where
there is light there is joy. Light is the peculiar outpouring of
the Second Person, outpoured over every man that comes into
the world, the outpouring of the Person of the Word. It seems to
come from his personality and from what constitutes it, which lets
in light, and so the joy, of the Godhead upon us. His Sacred
Humanity lies in the very focus and fountain of this light, or
rather call it light-joy, and, catching and making visible the
splendor, as bright objects catch and diffuse the light, it illu­
minates all the heaven both of angels and of men. Thus the
joy of the Word is eternal, illimitable, all-seeing, almighty all­
holy, and quite incredibly communicative; and, if communicative
in such an excessive degree to all creatures, what must it have
been, what must it be, to his Sacred Humanity! Joy is an inevit­
ableness of God, if we may so express ourselves, in every one of
his operations. There is a joy to the rest of his admiring creation
even in the most appalling exhibitions of his justice; and, while
we are still in the light of earth and the faith of Christ, it seems
as if he could not touch us but joy comes. Even in chastisements
it is a deep joy, and the most availing consolation, that the
infliction is from him. Joy is in some sense our final idea of God;
for it is the conception of him which we are to realize to our­
selves in heaven.
What we have now to contemplate is the joy of the Eternal
Word as it was and is communicated to his Sacred Humanity,
and especially as it was communicated to it in the Infancy.
Sprinklings of the fountain rained even on Mary and Joseph.
Shadows from those heights fell also on them, and beautified them
where they fell. St. Joseph’s awe-stricken joy in being the shadow
of the Father was a communication to him, in its measure, of
the joy of the Word in being the express similitude of his
Eternal Father; while Joseph’s love of Jesus, having in it none of
the natural love of an earthly father, was a shadow of the blissful
love of the Father for his Eternal Son. Moreover, his office of
special minister and steward of the Sacred Humanity privileged

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him to participate in his degree in the joyous love which the
Holy Ghost bore to that dear Humanity. Mary’s joy in Jesus
was still deeper and more substantial shadow of the complacency
of the Father in him, because of the reality of her maternal
office; and, loving the Father as the Father of her Son, and her
Son more as the Son of the Father than as her own, there was
a blessedness in her love resembling the jubilee of the Holy
Ghost in the Divine Persons from whom he is eternally proceed­
ing. Meanwhile, if it ever might be said that deep joyous love
identified a mother and her child, what eternity of love was
there not between Mary and the Eternal Son! The authority of
Catholic writers has allowed us to call the Holy Family the Earthly
Trinity; and thus, like the soft-footed shadows of the cedars
moving in slow silence with the sun over the sequestered lawn,
the flake like shadows of divine things drop, as noiselessly as
nightfall, over the Holy Family, making the Earthly Trinity a
transcript of the Threefold Majesty in heaven.
We have seen the joys of the Eternal Word in the Bosom
of the Father; let us look at them now on the lap of Mary. The
first joy of his Sacred Humanity was in his adoration of God.
The highest happiness of the creature is in his adoration of the
Creator, with the closest adoration of which a created spirit is
capable. Now, the sight of God produces in the soul the highest
adoration of which it is capable. Hence whether we look at a
created spirit as passively receiving into itself through the light
of glory the Beatific Vision of the Most High, or as it were rising
up aided by that same light of glory, to meet the magnificence of
the Vision by its own acts, we shall find that adoration expresses
more nearly than any other word the glory and the bliss of its
union with God. If the sight of God did not awaken within the
spirit the music and the splendor of devotion, it would be but
like the sun pouring the gorgeousness of its unfertile radiance
on the naked crags of some dreary mountain. But such a sup­
position is impossible. The Vision carries with it into the creature
a very world of light, and joy, and love, and glory, which form
an ecstasy of rapturous adoration. Sin so impedes our love on

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earth, and our love of God is so ungenerous, and our attainments
in holiness so mean, that we do little but accumulate words when
we speak of the processes of beatitude in heaven. Yet surely
our own poor experience on earth must have already taught
us that there is no pleasure in life’s best experience equal to
that pacific tumult of delight which has many times stirred
within our souls when we have been worshipping God. Our
very senses seem to partake of the general gladness of our nature.
Nothing is wanting. The rough is smoothed, the empty is filled
up. A contentment, which is mighty although it is calm, insinuates
itself everywhere, and even finds depth in our souls which we
ourselves hardly suspected, and takes possession of them with a
fulness which appears to double our life for the moment both in
breadth and depth. We are so completely made for God that we
are not fully ourselves except when we are united with him.
The joy of that union—and it seems to be precisely the joy of it—
makes our nature sensibly one. Nothing but adoration will fill
a created spirit to the brim with joy. The lives of the saints
illustrate this truth to us in ways which are almost beyond our
comprehension. What then must it be in Jesus! If his adoration
was, in a sense, equal to God himself, what must his joy have
been! How far off were all the ecstasies of the saints from that
rapture which bore up on its wings his marvellous Soul right
into the fires of the Divinity!
Look at the adoration of the Soul of Jesus! That vast
ocean of created worship, in whose immense tranquillity each
spirit of angel and each soul of man is but a wave rolling
onward to the throne of God, and breaking there in soft thun­
ders of perpetual song,—how refreshing is the inward picture
of it to our love of God and to our pining for his glory! The
eye travels over that radiant ocean, exults in its vastness,
tranquillizes itself in the certainty of its profound invisible
depths, drinks in the unearthly and yet not wholly unearthly
sounds of its majestic waters, and watches with an unwearied
pleasure, in which hours pass like moments, each wave as
it approaches the shining coast crest itself with light, lift up

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on high its green transparent wall of water, break with solemn
sound in showers of light, and creep with its sheet of broken
silver up the sloping shore, as if to kiss the sand and to be
sucked in while in the act of kissing it. Of a truth the ado­
ration of the soul of Jesus was in itself a creation tenfold
more magnificent than the whole of this grand universe. It
was a depth which only the pleased mind of God could
search; and only the divine wisdom could disport itself in
the secret life of those enchanted gardens which decked the
bottom of that ocean. It lay ever before God in the peace of
unutterable gladness. Yet the varieties of his acts, such as
his acts of consecration, oblation, praise, thanksgiving, and con­
gratulation, were so many quickenings of his vast joy. They
were almost momentary new creations of it, fresh worlds,
endless self-outpouring oceans, successive infinities, because of
the worth each act received from the touch of the Person of
the Word.
How gently he sleeps on Mary’s knee, and yet how beauti­
ful the vigil he is keeping in his unslumbering Soul! At
this moment he is exulting with joy in all creation. The wis­
dom which made it all lies open before him. The grandest
advance of human science hardly gets beneath the surface of
this wisdom; it can scarcely sink deep enough to hide itself
under the waters, while it often wrinkles the surface and dis­
turbs the clearness by the vehemence of its efforts. To the
poet, the artist, and the man of science, creation, seen through
the mists which always teasingly envelop it to us, is so beauti­
ful that it often fascinates our souls, and leads them away
from God, as if the medicines which should strengthen us
only made us light-headed because we are so weak. What
then must creation be when it stands unclouded and confessed
in the splendor of the divine wisdom! Yet so it always stood
to the rejoicing Soul of Jesus. Even to us the power which
made it all seems marvellously gentle; it sleeps under the green
turf that is earth’s vesture, or whispers in the leafy woods,
or tinkles in the streams, or hides under the blue calms of

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ocean, or comes with its awfulness smoothed into quiet beauty
from the distant starry spheres. It only speaks a loud word
now and then in the threatening earthquake or the sullen
storm, or in the brief fury of the volcano. But the calm
majesty of omnipotence, its gentleness, its tenderness, its love,
the exquisite delicacy of its self restraints, combined with its
terrific and immeasurable strength,—how wonderful must they
have seemed to our Lord's Human Soul! Still more, if we may
talk as if he made comparisons, did his Infant Heart rejoice
in the love which circulates in every sinuous pore of the vast
universe, as though it were the blood within its veins. He
travelled in delighted thought, with speechless accompaniment
of praise, along all these innumerable winding paths of crea­
tive love, sedulous that there should not be one obscure cor­
ner in all the countless worlds where his Father’s love should
not be discovered, confessed, and worshipped with created love.
But nature was almost a second beatific vision to him, when
from the eminences of his science he looked over all its regions
in one comprehensive view, and beheld there mirrored with
astonishing fidelity the image of the Most Holy Trinity. All
the joys—and surely they have neither been few nor shallow—
of poets, artists, and philosophers were united and surpassed
in this joy of the Babe of Bethlehem in the radiant signifi­
cance and divine enigma of creation.
He rejoiced, too, with a second joy, and one in which crea­
tures can have some share, to whom the unquestioned sover­
eignty of God is the dearest of all doctrines and the sweetest
of all devotions,—he rejoiced in the decrees of his Divine Per­
son regarding creation. To his Human Soul the splendors
of the Divine Attributes nowhere shone more clearly or more
attractively than in the Divine Decrees. One while they were
glorious in the beauties of the calm. They sang songs around
the throne. They were universal harmonies, in whose concords
all the divine perfections and all created things were blended
into melody. They embroidered eternity into the grand pat­
terns of time, and somehow eternity was brightened, not dis­

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figured, by the work. In their light the perfections of God
contended not with one another, but all throbbed in the one
pulse of the divine simplicity. In their light all the difficulties
of creation were seen to be but the exquisite workmanship
at the points where it was most closely joined to God. In their
light he saw the mystery of God’s liberty magnified, not re­
stricted, by the fixity of his decrees; while the liberty of the
creature was secured, by their limitations alone, in a pleni­
tude which could not otherwise have belonged to it. How unuttcrbale must have been the joy of his Human Soul in the
knowledge that all these decrees were but the beams of his
own brightness, only seemingly parted by the inaccessible clouds
through which they come to us, and which separate them into
beams, while of a truth the brightness behind is indivisible
and one I His decrees made creation so much more dear to
him, that in them chiefly we seek for the deep-lying reasons
of his love of creatures. Hence it was also because of them
that the Divine Babe exulted so ineffably, as the Book of Wis­
dom teaches us, in sharing now through his created nature
in his own creation, as if creation were at once so lovely, and
by him so tenderly beloved, that it drew him out of himself
into its bosom. He could not let us have creation all to our­
selves. He too must share it. A created nature shall be the
choice inheritance of the Uncreated Son of God.
The third joy of the Infant Jesus was his delight in his
Sacred Humanity. The use of his reason was an endless plea­
sure to him. Every operation of his mind was accompanied
with joy, and that from various causes. It arose from the
harmony and perfection of his human nature, from the ex­
cellence of his science, from his sanctity, and from the Hypo­
static Union. Even his senses were inlets to him of holiest joy,
as they will be with the glorified in heaven, although his sens­
ible glory lay shrouded under the common veils of infancy.
To his man-loving heart there was also a peculiar joy in his
feeling of kin to all human kind. A brother multiplies himself
in the love of his brothers. There is something special in

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fraternal love to double and treble self, and to add to the lives
we already live. This is a gift peculiar to fraternal love, which
filial, parental, or conjugal love have not, or have it differ­
ently. They create other conjugal selves. Fraternal love miracu­
lously multiplies our one same self. The Infant Jesus was
brother to every born and unborn child of man. Me saw all
his brothers the world over in all its successive ages. He lived
by anticipation in their hearts with minutest knowledge and
most detailed sympathies. Their hearts had all their separate
places in his Sacred Heart, and were cherished there as if he
had but one brother and could not sufficiently environ him
with love. From eternity his delight had been to be with the
children of men, and now his eternal desire was satisfied, and
his Soul drank always and drank deeply of this perennial foun­
tain of fraternal love.
*
From his love of men, fallen or unfallen, the transition is
natural to his redeeming love, and to his love of suffering which
by his own law that redeeming love involved. He rejoiced
therefore in his Sacred Humanity, as giving him what his
Divine Nature could not by possibility have given him, and
which but for the miraculous intervention of infinite wisdom
it must even have rendered impossible for his Human Nature,
namely, the power of suffering. It opened out for him three
regions of suffering, every one of which he traversed in its
fullest extent, and as never man has traversed them before or
since. The body is gifted with powers of diversified agony,
which makes us sometimes shudder to think of. The possibil­
ities of fleshly pain, which may intervene between ourselves
and the shelter of the grave, are so overwhelming that the
contemplation of them is unwise. Yet there never was a body
which was gifted to open out such avenues of pain as his; and,
• Sister Mary of Agieda beautifully says of our Lady that a great love of men
was one of the chief graces which she received preparatory to the Incarnation, in
order that our Lord as Man might receive this quality from her by inheritance,
as one of the transmitted dispositions of his Mother -Mistica Ciudad, p. if. /. Hi.
cap. Hi. In the whole range of Marian theology I have met with no deeper or
sweeter thought than this.

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as far as we have light, to see in the dim depths of the Passion,
all of them were pursued to the uttermost. With a like com­
pleteness he explored the Soul in all its capabilities of anguish;
and here again his Soul was like no other soul, because it was
so pre-eminently endowed with the ability to suffer. A man’s
reputation is his external self, and is a third department of
suffering in which we are all most tender, and where the bitterest
part of our probation here is destined to be inflicted upon
us. Jesus gave his away, as a man flings his garment to an
angry beast, and it was torn in shreds; so that his nakedness
upon the Cross became but the outward symbol of the ex­
tremity of his shame. There were three kingdoms with which
his Human Nature gifted him, and he wore them among the
dearest jewels in his crown. It is true that suffering had be­
come necessary, by the necessity of redemption. Yet we must
look somewhat deeper. His Sacred Heart was probably not dif­
ferent from what it would have been in a purely glorious
Incarnation, had there been no sin at all. Hence his love of
suffering was not a new original instinct, an exotic transplanted
into his Heart with the passibility of his Flesh, but only
a new form which his exceeding love of creatures necessarily
took under the circumstances of a fallen world.
The joy of his Human Nature in his Divinity was a fourth
fountain of blessedness in his Infant Heart. It is useless to
speak of its joy in its union with the Divine Person. We can
not only conceive no greater joy, but we cannot conceive how
so great a one as this was possible to a created nature. No power
short of God’s could have upheld it from sinking into annihila­
tion under a burden so overwhelming. How was it not shiv­
ered to pieces, how was it not burned up, how did it not
escape out of its own existence to elude the intolerable glory
of such a fiery yoke? These are the questions we ask ourselves.
We cannot describe such things. There is always something of
a literary weariness in writing of these things of God. Epithet
must be piled on epithet, like Pelion upon Ossa; adverb must
qualify adjective or intensify substantive to distinguish between

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the manner in which what is said of creatures may also be
said of God; reiterated superlatives annoy the taste and tease
the attention, and yet how dare we write otherwise than super­
latively of the mysteries of God? It is not the style only that
is studded with superlatives; the subjects treated of are them­
selves intrinsically superlative, and, whichever way we turn,
all are equally superlative, leaving upon our minds, when the
dew of sensible devotion is exhaled, a weary sense of tyrannical
exaggeration. Thus the Areopagite, striving up to his sub­
ject with his new-coined words, displeases us, and doubtless dis­
pleased himself still more, with his "super-essential,” "super
celestial,” and the rest; and yet he ends by making deep things
clear to us, though reader and writer both pay for it by the uni­
formity of exaggeration. The matter spoils the style; but it is
a matter for which it is well worth while to spoil even less
external things than style. But even so, with all the license
of exaggeration, we can neither find nor fancy words to picture
the joy of our Lord’s Human Nature in his Divinity. Never­
theless the manner of the union is also to be considered as a
distinct and separate joy from the union itself, leading deeply
down into the divine perfections, and having the eminence of
singularity, which belongs to so very few of the works of God.
That work, utterly hidden from us in its secret method, was
joyously explored by his amazed and delighted Soul. In this joy
there was another joy. which also lay apart. He rejoiced par­
ticularly in the ravishing beauty of the Person of the Word,
in those mysterious appropriations which distinguished the
Second Person from the First or Third. Doubtless also, in the
obscure caverns of his incomprehensible gladness, there was even
a joy in the absence of a human personality from his Human
Nature. There was an incomparable dependence in this, which
was full of excess of bliss, like the transported tremblings which
have seized the saints when their souls within them suddenly
widen into immensities, without landmarks, beacons, or polestar, and they float helplessly out to sea upon the sovereignty
of God. We must add to all this his Soul’s enjoyment of the

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Beatific Vision, and the marvel of its already enjoying it while
he lay an Infant upon Mary's knee.
The saints lead joyous lives even amidst their austerities
and sufferings. Blind as we are, we can see that there is a
vaster joy in one hour of a saint’s holiness than in all the out­
spread mediocrity of lives like ours, prolonged for any number
of years. If all emanations of God are joyous, holiness is con­
fessedly the most joyous of them all. Have we ourselves ever
experienced a joy in life which is equal to the common joy
of being in a state of grace? But the joy of holiness is this
joy intensified, and perhaps indeed it is something more than
even that. Holiness is a very spacious thing, and God always fills
in all hearts all the room which is left him there. But holiness
is not only an exceeding joy, but it is gifted with a serene
capacity of enjoying its own joy, which is by no means universal
in the case of other joys. Nevertheless by thus thinking of such
joy of holiness in the saints as we can ourselves imperfectly
understand, are we really approaching to any standard by
which we can measure this fifth joy, the joy of the Infant Jesus
in his surpassing holiness? If the holiness is like no other, so
is the joy like no other also. We have seen how lovingly he
rejoiced in creation. But it is just his lovingness which makes
creation perfect. Creation culminates in him. This is the rea­
son all else looks so imperfect. Creation to be understood must
be looked at in him. His holiness is the filling up of all its
empty places, the fruitful crop of its salt seas, the habitableness
of its mountain-tops, the verdure of its deserts, the sweet God­
praising population of its solitudes. He rejoices in his unspeak­
able purity. Purity is most dear to God. He bears his own
spotlcssness in his Bosom as if it were the attribute of his
predeliction, which he cherishes as a mother cherishes her
first-born. He rejoices in the purity of creatures.· He finds no
other fault where things are pure. Purity of intention is the
wood that sweetens all bitter waters. The power of a pure in
• It is said in some revelations of the saints that chastity is the most ipecinl of
all the fruits of redemption.

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tention is the natural miracle of the spiritual life. The purity
of Mary ravished the Eternal Word himself from heaven. But
what is her purity, immaculate Mother as she was, compared
with the purity of his Human Nature? and how inexpressibly
dear to his Divine Person must it be, while he rejoices to find
united to himself, and so singularly his own, a spotlessness far
excelling that which drew him down to earth when he beheld
it in his Mother!
It was a joy to him, and a joy for almost a hundred reasons,
that he was the fountain of holiness and merit to so many
millions of his creatures, both before his coming and after it.
It was a delight to him that, like a forecast shadow, his holiness
had had such imperial power before ever it was yet created.
He exulted to see the legions of angels, like an endless per­
spective of light, clothed in splendor out of his human holiness.
He looked onward into the ages wearily climbing the moun­
tains of time one after another, and it gladdened him to see
how all earth was growing like a garden as the breath of his
holiness blew upon it. Unrisen suns rose in his Soul, and
touched with light the fruits and flowers of far-distant sanctity.
Their fragrance came up to him from a long way off, as the
spice-winds tremble far over the bosom of the Indian seas.
He saw Egyptian Thebaids, and many another unlikely spot,,
studded with enclosures of such rare exotic foliage and scent
and bravery that no fabulous garden of the Hesperides might
come near to their spiritual beauty. They were corners of
earth, despised nooks of the world, in which the odor of his
sanctity hung for a moment and exhaled to heaven in these
gorgeous though transitory Edens. All Edens, alas! are transi­
tory; but all Edens are the breath of the holiness of Jesus. He
looked up to heaven. His human holiness was outstretched
above like the canopy of its roof, and outspread below like
the glowing pavement of its courts, and diffused through its
magnificent abodes as the light that lighted it and the odor
that made it sweet. Thus it is his sanctity that colonizes heaven,,
while it is also the sole ever-active principle of beautiful life

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on earth. As God—so Goethe said, (for big divine thoughts
wandered strangely in his pagan mind)—is ever in higher na­
tures attracting lower, and so working in creation, Jesus, we
may add, is the lever, or rather the magnet, to raise and
elevate all creation to its resting-place in the Creator, whence
it has so sadly fallen. It is by his holiness that he does this
work; and with what astonishing activity of joy must not such
a work be necessarily accompanied?
There arc many things we wait to learn in heaven, because
out of heaven they are so poorly taught. Is not Mary one of
these, and her love of Jesus, and his love of her, and a thousand
secrets of her Immaculate Heart, which have not teased us
here, because it was so sufficiently sweet to love that we did not
care to know? Thus we come to the fountain of his love of
Mary in the Heart of the Infant Jesus, his sixth joy, and we
sit down there, as if idly musing. We know it is an unfathom­
able fountain, and it is joy enough for us to sit and watch
it flow. So men watch mountain springs for hours, throwing
up their pulses of crystal water with the lightest tinkling sound,
like the laughter of children. Uninjured, the charmed margin
of particolored moss cushions that little sighing mouth of the
huge mountain, and indeed of the old ancient earth, and the
gleaming pebbles lie just inside its lips, as if to make it articulate
and give it the power of song. They who sit there care not
for the rocky veins in which those crystal threads have flowed
so slenderly, until many of them were gathered into one to
form this spring. They do not puzzle themselves with the sub­
terranean wonders those bright wavelets have seen, or the remote
action of the uneasy earth which, long epochs since, may have
settled that this rocky pore should be their orifice. The flowing
of the water is enough for them, a joy to mark a day with such
strong light that it shall be visible in memory when years have
passed away. So is it with this fountain of filial love in the
Heart of the Babe of Bethlehem. It was a joy of which we see
but the outward signs of life, as the pulses beat beneath the
skin. Who can tell his power of loving? Who can tell her

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worthiness of being loved? Yet, till he has first told these, who
shall tell our Lord’s joy in loving her? He rejoiced in the
perfection of his natural filial love of her. This seems an easy
thing to say; yet the thing intended, and so simple-sounding,
passes our comprehension: for he is God. How shall God, in
the exclusive majesty of his paternity, burn with filial feeling
toward one whom he has created out of nothing? Everywhere
the grand portent of the Hypostatic Union stands in our path,
not so much forbidding ingress to the inner shrine as giving
light to illuminate the wondrous way. Everywhere it meets us,
and makes things astonishing which would else be common
place. Everywhere its refuses to explain itself, and faith has
to render those truths certain and familiar which else would,
even to our reverence, be incredible.
He rejoices also in her sweet love of him. The incense of
a whole creation is less to him than the grateful purity of her
flagrant love. It is the breath of her beautiful being, and
he nestles in it as if it were a new life even to him. He grows
upon her love, as if it were his nourishment. He lays his Infant
Life down in it that the splendor may play upon it, and lets
it rest there as if it had found a heaven upon earth. He clothes
his little frame in her love, as if it were in shining angelic
garments, and his bath is in the warmth of that clean love
which his own Precious Blood has rendered thus incompar­
ably bright. As he inhales her love, he delights in having created
her. It is a joy beyond all price, a marvellous joy, that the
Son should have created his own Mother. He delights in having
saved her, saved her from sin by his never letting it come nigh
her, redeemed her from captivity by never allowing her to be
taken captive; and is it not an even yet more marvellous joy
that the Son should be the eternal Savior of his youthful Mother,
and should have saved her with so glorious a salvation before
ever he himself was born? In both cases—such a Son! such a
Mother! It is a jubilee to have one so like himself. It is an­
other jubilee for him to take his likeness from another, as he
did eternally from his Father. It is another jubilee for him to

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have a creature to whom he can be like, who wore his features
before he wore them himself, and who was the dear cause
of his wearing them at all. The uncreated Son exalts in having
a created type. Furthermore, there is another joy which we will
daringly conjecture in his love of Mary. As the Trinity of
Persons makes the Godhead never lonely, though it is supremely
one, so Mary’s love, which was the offspring of her immense
holiness, may please him by making his human merits seem less
lonely, less exceptional, less utterly detached from the rest
of created holiness.
Saints, like beautiful scenes, require to be learned. We must
dwell by the side of such scenes in a sort of expectant passive­
ness, and let the change of the seasons, the lights of the various
hours from dawn to deep night, the alternations of storm and
calm, and the many-colored garment of the year, disclose to
us the capabilities and realities of magnificent landscapes. So
with the saints. We do not know them at first sight. We do
not appreciate their sanctity. We do not discriminate between
the different shades of tlieir holiness. We do not instinctively
seize upon that which is their divine characteristic, the singu­
larity of their grace, the unshared peculiarity of their position
as ornaments in the Church of God. Yet some saints reveal
themselves to us more rapidly than others. They flash upon
us. They leap up before us like a sunrise at sea. Their bright­
ness tells their whole history at once. Then, again, there are
other saints, the very expression of whose sanctity is mantled
with a look of almost impenetrable reserve. The supernatural
is so deep down in them that it is hidden. The currents of life
have passed so calmly and innocuously over them that they
have not laid the character bare, or discovered the strata over
which they flow. These saints have not been placed in dramaticpositions. Their histories are veiled in commonplaces. We should
not take them for heroes on the surface. We only know that
they are heroes because the Church has raised them on the
altars. The great St. Joseph is one of this latter class of saints. We
must be a dweller in his land. We must live near his door

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at Nazareth, and watch him. He will grow upon us like a
divine thing. He will open out before us, and give out his
meanings, like a gradual patient revelation. 1 he very ages of
the Church have had thus to learn him, as well as his individual
devotees. Each age, almost, has given expression to its surprise
at finding him a mountain of much more considerable altitude
than had heretofore been supposed. It is this which makes us
feel that we are never speaking worthily about him. Yet how
often have we needful cause to speak of him in this excursion of
ours into the land of Bethlehem!
His joy in St. Joseph was the seventh joy of the Infant Jesus.
He rejoiced in the tranquil depths of his interior holiness, and
especially in the incomparable hiddenness of his spiritual life.
He rejoiced in Joseph’s love of him, and in his own love of
Joseph. He brooded with complacency on the image of the
whole Trinity which reflected itself with such calm detail upon
Joseph’s single soul. He was the shadow and created image of
the Eternal Father. Astonishingly faithful was the portraiture
in its modest created littleness. But to his inexplicable joy
the Son beheld also in his Foster-father a second Self, inasmuch
as he was the true uncreated image of the Father, while Joseph
was the Father’s authentic created shadow, and thus Joseph was
his own shadow also. Moreover, as the Spouse of Mary he
beheld in him the similitude of the Floly Ghost. Neither were
these such faint analogies as may be found in the work and
character of ordinary saints. They were actual official realities,
authentic divine appointments, with all that depth of chiselling
and sharpness of outline and unwasting hardness of material
which distinguish the mysteries of the Incarnation from all
the other operations of divine grace. Over all this, like the
unity of a pensive tender twilight, was spread a genuine human
love of the old man for his own dear sake, and simply because
he was so attractive an object of affectionate honor and of
gentlest love. It was not only the creature who was in Joseph’s
place whom he loved with such deep tenderness, but it was
Joseph himself because he was Joseph, because his peculiar, dis­

385

tinctive, personal character was so attractive and so beautiful.
His gifts indeed were lovely, but he loved, not the gifts only,
but the man himself, and with a filial love which might be
parcelled out among all the fathers upon earth and make them
all more happy than they could well believe. Joseph s love
of him, a love which far surpassed in grandeur and in tender­
ness the united loves of all the fathers that have ever been,
*
a love so amazing, so vast, and so various that we may say of
him that in his paternity all paternities on earth share and
yet exhaust it not, was to Jesus an unfathomable delight reach­
ing to unimaginable sublimities. It gave room even to his
immensities of filial love to develop and expatiate. At the same
time, Joseph’s heavenly Heart, so like Mary’s Immaculate
Heart, and yet so distinctly different, so like his own Sacred
Heart, and yet also so distinctly different, was to him a jubilee
of itself; because it was in its own self a world more than
equalling in size and price the common world of men, wherein
his insatiable love of men could outpour itself in deluges of
impetuous affection, and his unquenchable thirst for human
love find inexpressible relief, though it could not quench itself.
Joseph’s love of Mary was also an incredible joy to our
Blessed Lord, and Mary’s love of Joseph was another joy; for
it is the love of Jesus and Mary for Joseph, of Jesus and
Joseph for Mary, and of Mary and Joseph for Jesus, which
constitutes the unity of that Earthly Trinity.
The angelic hosts worship the Infant Word as he lies speech
less on his Mother’s lap. Their worship is another joy, the
eighth joy, of his Sacred Infancy. For ages they have hymned
his glory round the throne above. He knows each spiritual
voice in all that countless choir. Their adoration has been
the incessant ritual of heaven, while the huge epochs of the
ripening earth have been evolving slowly. There is not one
of those spirits who has not bathed in his splendors since
the first dawn of its existence. What then is there new in their
worship now? Why should it affect his Heart with such un­
• Mistica Ciudad, p. ii. I. iv. cap. xxviii.

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wonted joy? There is truly a new significancy in their worship.
There is an additional spiritual gracefulness in their attitude,
a peculiar loveliness which was not there before. The primal
vision of the ancient heavens has been shown them in its
reality. The Sacred Humanity, which they had been called
to worship in the mind of God, is now before them in fact and
substance. They see the very Child actually present, whose
figure in the divine decrees had been the matter of their pro­
bation and the occasion of their perseverance. He is before
them in the material loveliness of his Flesh and Blood. He is
receiving their worship now as Man. They are paying their
homage to him as their elder brother. A change has come
over the former ceremonial of their worship, or rather a fresh
service has been added to it, a new solemnity instituted, with
the jubilant applause of all those joyous hosts. They are all
of them acting over again that action in which they won their
crown, the act of swearing their allegiance to his inferior na­
ture, his nature naturally subordinate to theirs. It is a joy to
him as God, because it is a grand service of praise in honor
of the Incarnation. It is a joy to him because of his exceeding
jealous love of his Humanity. It is a joy to him, because it
is so great a joy to them.
He delights in their worship also as his Mother’s subjects.
It is an object of exultation with him that he has provided so
fair an empire for her sway, and subjects of such attractive
holiness, diversity, and multitude. He knows how she will love
the angels, and how the angels will love her, and both these
thoughts are fountains of gladness within his Soul. He sees
her unending government of them, lying before him like some
future chronicle of heaven, its pages gleaming with deeds of
sacred emprise and the heroic wonders of angelic sanctity. He
joys to think also how she and they will joy to see their vacant
ranks filled up, and all their companies augmented, by the
conquests of his incarnate love. It is always a peculiar pleasure
to him to contemplate his own exaltation of his Mother, espe­
cially when it is reflected in the rest of creation. But there is

387

a character almost pathetic in this new worship of the angels.
There is something human like in their humility, as if they had
with swiftest apprehension caught the genius of a man’s spirit
from ministering to the humanity of Jesus. How like the lowly
self abjection, the unpretending renunciation, of a normal saint,
is their disinterested joy because man's inferior nature is exalted
above their own! There seem to be no regrets travelling back
to their once bright brethren, to whom no second trial, no oppor
tunity of penance, was accorded. They appear almost to love
the assumed nature of the Word better because it is not theirs
but ours. They put themselves aside, as if they were unworthy,
and seem to forget that their nature as well as ours might
have been assumed; while, on the other hand, they seem never
to forget that they were saved themselves by the worship of
that far-seen Humanity which now they behold in Bethlehem.
The grandeur of this lowliness, the gracious sweetness of this
generosity, what joy it all is to the Heart of the Infant Jesus!
But he finds a grandeur even in us, and out of that grandeur
extracts a joy, a ninth joy of his Sacred Infancy. Admirable
in all his ways, in nothing is the goodness of God more sur
prising than in the pains which he appears to take to justify
his excess of love toward us. He condescends to look as if he
were inventing reasons by the assistance of his wisdom; and
the reasons are rather to satisfy us and remove stumbling-blocks
out of the way of our faith, than to satisfy himself; for to him
his own goodness is an all-sufficient reason, a goodness which
to us would be incredible unless it condescended to explain
itself and justify its excesses. Hence it is from the Hypostatic
Union that the Infant Jesus draws his immense joy in his love
of us, and that seemingly exaggerated appreciation of us which
is the basis of his love. He rejoices in us as his creatures, whom
his own hand has fashioned. There is not one of us whom he
has not called out of nothingness. Each of us existed in his
mind before we existed in fact. He developed a separate idea
of his own in the creation of each separate soul of man. He
meant us to be just what we are in blood and race, in genius

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and character, and in our individual work foi him. In all things,
sin excepted, and the multifarious unhappiness which comes of
sin, we are what he would have us be, and what he distinctly
intended us to be. We arc a joy to him, therefore, as his chil­
dren, with that intimate sonship which comes out of the tender
relationship of creation. But he rejoices in us as his creatures,
with a joy in which something mingles that in human love
would have looked like gratitude or the sense of obligation,—
things which cannot be in God. The meaning of this myster­
ious appearance is, that, as his creatures, we entered into the
knowledge whereby he is forever the Father's Word. We then
had our share—may we say such words?—in his Eternal Gen­
*
eration.
The Father knew himself, and in himself he knew
all creatures, singly and collectively, and it was his whole knowl­
edge which produced the Son. Together with the abysses of
his own perfections, every creature was pronounced in the un­
created Word which he uttered from the beginning. We all
entered into the speechless music of that Word: and this is a
thought to make us fear, and to abash us because it is so over­
whelming. Yet of a truth it was a thought that entered into
that joy of the Infant Jesus which arose from his love of us as
his creatures.
But he rejoiced in us as his brothers also. Our nature was
pleasant to him. From eternity it had been so delectable to
him, that he would have assumed it in an impassible Incar­
nation even if we had not fallen. Hence he feels his blood
to all of us. He rejoices, as we all rejoice ourselves, in the
feeling of kindred, and in the predilections of its mysterious
sympathies. No clansman ever felt so wedded to his clan, so
committed to its fortunes, so enthusiastic in its honor, as the
Infant Jesus felt with regard to the whole race of man. Im­
mense as was his joy in the angels, there was a joy in his
preference of our nature over theirs, not only because in all
dtings that he did there was inevitable joy, but because of the
• See Macedo. Collationes. Coll. ix. Differ, i. sect. 5. where the Thomist doctrine
is compared with that of Scotus.

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HEAVEN ALREADY
“cords of flesh" which drew him to our race.

Nay. he even

rejoiced in us as sinners, not because we were sinners, God

forbid!

but

as sinners whom

he

had come

to redeem, and

therefore whom he loved with a new love, a love additional to

the many kinds of love wherewith he would have loved un­

fallen man.

For dare we think he would have loved us more

if we had not fallen?

Does not Scripture seem to speak as if

the excess of our misery had also pushed the love of God into

excess?

Does it not speak as if our

failure

under our trial

had been itself a further trial of our Father’s love, under which
his love had not been wanting, but had outstripped in swiftness

and had outdone in quantity our own amazing guilt? This fresh
love was a love more full of pity, assuming in its sweet minis­
tries and easy condescensions the semblance of that blindness

which marks maternal love, a quickness to see all that appeals

to compassion and so will augment love, and a slowness to see
what might sadden love or dash its promptitude. We must dare

to say such things even of the immutable God.

It was a love

based on the greater efforts which it was to cost himself in his
sufferings and his death; and the grandeur of these efforts was
the measure of the grandeur of this love.

It was as if his first

love had laid broad foundations, and built a glorious temple
thereupon.

But we forfeited what little claim we might have

seemed to have to this resplendent temple of his love. Where
upon he pulled it down, and drew the lines further, and wid­

ened the trenches, and laid a vaster foundation, and raised a

fabric on the ruin of his old work, which he had caused, ten­
fold more magnificent than the original structure ever would

have been.

Is this what the Church means when she bids us

sing of Adam’s “happy fault," as if God's honor found “good
luck,” or “prosperity,” as the Psalmist words it, in the misfortune
of the fall?

But his Infant Heart finds yet a tenth joy in the foreseen
love of men for him.

At first sight there is a strangeness in

the value which he sets upon our love, and the intense desire
which he seems to have for it.

But it is a strangeness which

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is so far from wearing away that it grows upon us the longer
we look at it. It becomes more and more unfamiliar. It rather
chills us with fear than sets us at our ease. At last it grows
shadowy and indistinct, and appears to melt away as if it were
no reality; and, did not faith come to the rescue of our poorspiritedness, it would shortly seem a thing downright incredible.
Now, as he lies on Mary’s lap, what is it that he sees, which
so lights up his eye? His look is not turned upward, as it so
often is, upon his Mother's face. It is not Joseph he is looking
at, with that infantine curiosity, not wholly unmingled with
awe, which we have so often read upon his countenance when
his look has been fixed on Joseph. What is it that he sees? The
Church lies like an open field before him; and he beholds
the sufferings of his martyrs, the perfections of his saints, the
thickly-strewn heroisms of multitudes of his servants, the gran­
deur of manifold vocations, varieties of goodness which are
rather singularities than varieties, as they never seem to be
exactly repetitions of each other, triumphs of the Church diversi­
fied by the ages of the world and the shapes of successive evil
over which she triumphs, each shape of evil deeming itself new
and insuperable and raised above the lot of those other errors
which have sunk into oblivion; and with these also he beholds
faith’s endless victory, and its pre-eminence in all progresses
and over all mutable civilizations. All this spectacle is repre­
sentative to him of an immensity of human love, which flows
into his Heart like a broad stream of joy, and is received there
as in a capacious lake, dilating the Heart itself, and quickening
with delight the pulses of the Precious Blood. We too pass
before him, one by one, dust-besprinkled pilgrims, and his
eye follows us, looks long at us, and will know us again, and
smile upon us as old acquaintances, when the misty ages shall
have travelled up into the present and brought us before him
again in our actual pilgrimage,—though he will always have
been thinking of each of us through all those misty ages. He
sees our conversions, our struggles, our faith, our trembling
hopes, our timidly aspiring love, and our foreseen, if so be,

HEAVEN ALREADY

391

perseverance. Already he hears our prayers in the distance,
like the striking of the village clock at night in the valley on
the mountain’s other side. There is a vivid joy to him in it
all. Each day as we walk from morning to night across one
more breadth of life, measured out to us by that overseer of
God whose solar light calls us to our work and keeps our time,
what a chastening thought—cheering or depressing, as we choose
to make it—it is to accompany us, that we actually entered into,
and formed a part of, and sent a fresh thrill through, the joys
of the Babe of Bethlehem!
He found an eleventh joy even in the foresight of his Pas­
sion. The littleness of his Human Heart could hardly hold
the grandeur of his joy. It opened itself wide to embrace
the mighty sacrifice. It planted the Cross in the centre of its
infant flesh,—as if Calvary were henceforth to be the very
sunshine of Bethlehem and Nazareth. It bade the Passion act
itself henceforth like an endless drama before his eyes, whether
he watched or slept. He welcomed with joy, yea, with an
avidity of joy, each one of the bodily pains, each one of the
mental agonies, each one of the outward shames, of the Passion,
as if each was a consoling satisfaction of the fever of his man­
loving Heart and a grateful safety-valve of the almost unman­
ageable fire that was pent up there. His thoughts luxuriated
in the prodigal exuberance of his Blood-sheddings, until his
eye gleamed at the vision of the pavement of Jerusalem all
crimsoned with the streams of his precious life, as a mountaintop gleams down into the vale when it looks into the yet in­
visible sunrise and gives its bright witness of a spectacle which
from below we cannot see. There is something marvellous,
something which looks immoderate, as afterward when he went
swiftly up to Jerusalem straitened with impatience for his
Passion, something unlike his usual adorable tranquility, though
in truth it was but a perfection of it, in the exultation which
bounds in his Infant Heart over the unfathomable humiliations of Calvary. It seems as if it was more than he expected,more than he had dared to hope for,—a surprise, and accom

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BETHLEHEM

panied with all the gladness of a surprise which tells us that
our fortune is brighter than we had anticipated. To look at
his sparkling eye, we should have deemed this humiliation to
be another beatific vision. He is radiant, as if it were some
novelty he saw, and so had gained for himself all the impossible
glory of a novelty to the eternally enthroned God, whose own
eternity is his throne, and his own beatitude his crown.
His twelfth and last joy, that is to say, the last which we
can reach in thought, for the want of love makes us unima­
ginative in heavenly things, is his joy in being the Savior. Ί his
was to be the special gladness which he was to pour over all
nations. We were to call his Name Jesus, because he should
save his people from their sins. It was such a joy to his Sacred
Humanity as his unity is to God himself, the primal, crown­
ing, all-including, self-sufficient joy. There was to be but one
Savior. None shared his office with him. There is no God
but One. There is no Savior but One. That One is the Babe
of Bethlehem. It is a glory all his own. No saint shares with
him this exclusive privilege. No apostle is his partner in the
unity of this stupendous work. St. Joseph kneels down and
adores without co-operating. Mary co-operates; yet she has
first of all been saved by him herself. Thus his Mother falls
away into her own modest magnificence, and leaves him insphered
in the solitary light of his office as our Savior. It is he alone
who does it all. The all he does is the nearest of all created
things to a veritable infinity. The way in which he does it is
clothed with all the splendor and munificence with which the
plentitude of God can invest created office or created nature.
It is aS if at once he drew away the light and air and space
in which the million-worlded universe pursues its way, and
in their stead flung from the top of Calvary a rich immeasurable
effulgence which to all worlds and to all creatures should hence­
forth be instead of light and air space, a better thing, a fresh
receptacle for the huge creation, a new method of universal
life. He rejoiced unutterably. He rejoiced in the magnitude
of the work, in its difficulty, its beauty, its multiplication, its

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HEAVEN ALREADY
endurance, its solitariness, its acceptance by the Father.

Each

of these things have glories in themselves which a whole treatise

would fail to exhaust.

The motes in the sunbeams were but

as a poor little sheep-flock, easily counted in a mountain pad­
dock, compared to the multitudinous graces which should outflow

from the fountains of salvation.

His Heart glowed with divinest

satisfaction as he gazed on the abundance, the variety, the un­
earthliness, the efficacy, the sublimity, and, above ail, the like­

ness to himself, of the graces he should give, and give out of
his own grace, the very grace which was in him at that moment
in Bethlehem.

of

theology

Here again every word carries with it a volume

over which St.

Michael s

mind could spend an

eternity of intellectual contentment. But his jubilee rose higher
His Sacred Humanity thrilled

still.

in every faculty, as the

organ-pipes thrill with sound, with exultation in the glory of

his

Father,

the glory with

which

he

himself as

the Savior

of the world should invest the amplitude of his Eternal Sire.

He looks over the vast infinity of his Father s essential glory,
which

no created thing can touch nor outward assault come

near to violate; and he sees an outer glory, lying like a pale
rim

around the other, wounded

like the

ragged skirts of a

storm-cloud when the lightning or the wind have torn them,
the moonlight when

dim as

it is

thickened and dishonored

by the steam of the vaporous fens; and so jealous is he of the
outermost glory of his Father, of that merest skirt, of the most
external appurtenance of his honor, that he goes forth with
haste to the work of salvation, as a warrior hastens to the battle,

that the King of kings may not have to tarry for the victory. He
sees the glow of his Father's glory, when his wandering creation

is brought back to his Feet, he the Babe of Bathelehem the
sole leader of captivity, captive, the sole Savior who has saved
for his Father his Father's world.

No Mary, no angel, no saint,

shares the topmost heights of that exclusive prerogative.

Only

he has taken the Cross into his alliance, and it is he. and he
alone.

He the one Savior, and such a Savior—how unutterable

the joy!

His Soul is almost troubled with the delight, almost

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BETHLEHEM

amazed with the masterful excess of gladness. Forever that
thought is with him. Mary, even, cannot fathom such a joy
as that. He hides himself in the full depths of his own Heart,
and sings to himself silent songs because there is no other
Savior but himself, and that he with such an infinitely sweet
salvation has saved his people from their sins.
Word of the Father! who shall tell the joy thy Father’s glory
was to thy Human Nature? Who shall tell, as it should be
told, any one of the earthliest of these thy joys? All this is
but a conceivable drop or two of the ocean of bis joys, con­
ceived by one of the least of his creatures low down in an
obscure nook of his creation. Yet it is into these eternal joys
of his that he, by his saving love, will make us enter, when
he takes us out of his Bosom, and when, with a smile like
one of those he is smiling now into Mary’s face, he will lay
us down in everlasting safety, all faultlessly redeemed, at the
Father’s feet. Oh, weary life, faded and outworn before its
sands are half run out! who would not that that hour was
come, and that our soul were lying, a panting, wondering,
fresh-come thing, in its nest at the Father’s Feet, still trembling
with the surprise of its first eternal flight?

Chapter IX

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER
We must end almost as we have begun. We dared at first
to climb up to the Bosom of the Father and look over into its
ineffable abysses. Breathless with all we have seen and heard,
or perhaps in our bewilderment have dreamed, we come now
to lie down at the Father's Feet, hushed and trembling, yet
with a contentment beyond what we ever dared to hope. In
his Bosom or at his Feet, it is enough for us if the Father's
shadow rest upon us. If the Babe of Bethlehem will show us
the Father, that will suffice us. It would be a life well spent—
for so Margaret of Beaune was inspired to spend it—in learn­
ing the lessons and loves, the sorrows and the joys, of the
Holy Childhood. But we must come now to what we may call
the final disposition of the Infant Jesus, that which repre­
sents his whole Infancy, and indeed his whole Self,—represents,
as it seems, both his Natures, and is at once the greatest joy
of his Divine Nature in his Human, and the greatest contribu­
tion of his Human Nature to his Divine,—Devotion to the
Eternal Father. Hitherto we have been learning devotion to
the Infant Jesus; now we come to practise devotion with him,
and to learn his own special devotion from him; and this is
in reality the highest devotion to him.
We must begin by making sure that we understand what we
are speaking of. We are speaking of devotion in our Blessed
Lord. Now, devotion is a virtue of creatures. It is the truth­
ful attitude which creatures assume in respect to their Creator,
an attitude of the soul expressive of the life of the soul, at
times gathered up into particular actions and concentrated in
spiritual rituals, yet not the less expressive of its whole normal
and habitual life. A devout man is not merely devout when
395

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BETHLEHEM

he is at his devotions. He is always actually devout, or is always
tending to become so. The word devotion" implies the im­
mensity of God's majesty, upon whose altar it lays the sacrifice
it has vowed. It expresses also the nothingness of the creature,
and the propriety, amounting to a necessity, of its devoting
itself to Him who called it out of nothing for himself. It sig­
nifies that promptitude and agility of self-immolation which
is the perfect state to which it is continually aspiring. It is
the natural inward life of the creature before the face of its
Creator. But by grace it is raised to a supernatural end, and
is more than a becoming posture in the presence of the Creator.
It tends to union with him, to acceptable love of him, to intelli­
gent worship of him, to the possession of the Beatific Vision
of him, and to a world of supernatural acts which bring about
what mystical theologians have dared to call a deification of
the creature. It is the mother of prayer, the admonitress of
humility, the hand and tongue of faith, the heart of charity,
the intelligence of self-abjection, the vitality of perseverance.
In short, it is the essence of our createdness, pure, wholesome,
legitimate, and full of fragrance.
Now, we are predicating the existence of this quality in
our Blessed Lord, who was God himself, altogether divine in
Person, but having an assumed and forever now inseparable
Human Nature. We are not only predicating its existence in
him, but also its perfection. What then do we mean by it in
him? It is the excellence of his created nature, but in him
it is utterly dependent on his divine. It belongs to him ex­
clusively in virtue of his created nature, yet its acts are not
unaffected by his uncreated Nature. It is tinged in some ineffable
way with the ineradicable unction of his Divine Person, so that
its worth becomes infinite, while itself remains finite. Devotion
is not the same thing in him which it is in the saints, or would
have been in him had he been simply an incomparably—even
to us unimaginably—holy person, but a created person, not a
Divine Person. Like all else about him, and indeed more than
any thing else about him, his devotion is steeped in the Hypo­

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THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER
static Union.

For, while his devotion can only come from his

Human Nature, it must be its characteristic that it is worthy
of God and, in a sense, equal to God's requirements, and it

can only be so in virtue of the Hypostatic Union, because it
can only be so through being glorified by the contact of his

Divine Person.
We must observe, therefore, that our Lord's devotion is a
true and real one, and not a mere figure of speech.

For the

Sacred Humanity is not exempted from any of the legitimate

conditions of a created nature, except the possession of a created
person, and such consequences as follow from personality, in

the matters of conscience, self-consciousness, and the like.

But

this absence of a human person in no way impaired the hu­
manness, so to call it, of his Human Nature.

any sense an imperfect Humanity.

most perfect of all humanities.
those

human

It was not in

On the contrary, it was the

It concentrated in

peculiarities belonging

to

itself all

humanity as

it was

devised by God, and for which it was so tenderly beloved by
him; and it concentrated them in its single self to a degree un­

known

to any other single human nature,—perhaps,

indeed,

so pre-eminently above those of all men collectively that his
single

Humanity represented in itself the perfections of the

whole human race, and something more than was represented
in

the rest of the collective race, a something belonging to

his sovereign Humanity alone.

It might almost be an axiom:—

The more human, the more Christ-like.
master this truth.

It is

important to

For it is not uncommon for pious believers,

whose orthodoxy is unimpeachable in the profession of their

faith, to fall into a practical error in their meditations, and so

in their spiritual life, most of whose elements make their ingress
into it through our meditations. These persons realize the Hypo­
static Union so badly, or with such an ill-instructed indistinct­

ness, that they practically conceive of our Blessed Lord, as of
some portent, as if there were something monstrous, (we must

venture to write the dreadful word), colossal, titanic, dispro­

portionate, in his union of Two Natures in one Person. Gradually

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BETHLEHEM

in their minds the miraculous, in the popular sense of that
word, as implying some violation or suspension of nature, steals
over our Lord’s life, and sequesters whole regions of it as
lying outside of what is imitable, and not to be regarded as
offering even a proportionate pattern to ourselves. Thus the
motives of perfection are weakened, and its treasures of example
fatally impoverished. Many other evil consequences follow
from the distortion of all the landscapes of the Incarnation,
which comes from this inaccurate and untruthful view. From
all this men would be delivered if they bore in mind that the
absence of a human person is no deficiency in a human nature.
Our Lord’s Human Soul was not blessedly crippled, or gloriously
deformed, because it had no human person to rest upon. In
ways we do not understand, but which the secret laboratories
of creation might disclose to us, it was among the possibilities
of creatures that an Uncreated Person might be substituted for
a created one, and that such a substitution should not be a
violence, but a divinely congruous exaltation.
Supposing that we did not already know from our catechism
that the Person of the Holy Trinity, who was incarnate, was
the Second Person, we should gather it from our Lord’s human
devotion as it transpires in the four Gospels. When we have
long and deeply meditated on the Incarnation, there is a new
and peculiar interest to us in every word which our Lord utters
with respect to God. We feel certain that much more is implied
than is actually said, and that the very manner in which things
are said is of itself full of disclosures to us of the majesty of
God. First of all, when we collect those of his sayings which
may be regarded as revelations of God, and view them as one
collected body of teaching, much results from the contemplation
which we had not before suspected. We then review them all
over again from a somewhat different point of view, considering
that He who uttered the words was God himself, and therefore
spoke from something more than either the abundance or the
certitude of his knowledge. In this fresh light we perceive new
depths of meaning and glimpses of significancy which disclose

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

399

to us places where there are depths, though as yet we are unable
to look down into them. But the full purport of his teaching
about God is not apprehended, even so far as we are able to
apprehend it, until we consider it from yet another point of
view, remembering that he who speaks is not the First or the
Third Person of the Holy Trinity, but the Second. This sheds
quite a peculiar light upon his words. Expressions which hardly
delayed our attention before are now found to be pregnant with
meaning. Sometimes a distinctive light is shed over whole con­
versations, or on connected passages of Scripture, like the prayer
to the Father in the Gospel of St. John. Reading and re-reading
the Gospels, as those will naturally do who are striving to be
men of prayer, it is of no slight importance to us to have different
and successive points of view, whence we may look at that ground
which we are traversing so repeatedly that at last there is a danger
of the eye and the memory playing into each other's hands, and
whole pages of the Gospel sliding under our notice, rather than
engaging our reverent attention. Some have striven to obviate
this by reading the New Testament in various languages, with
which they are for the most part less familiar than their own.
and the amount of the difficulty which the foreign language
presents, however trifling it may be, is sufficient to arrest the
mind, and make the old narrative in some sense new, and
capable of striking us by salient points which in more familiar
languages we had not perceived. This truly is a helpful practice.
But so also is that other one of reading the Gospels from some
one carefully-selected point of view, a point of view selected for
a reason, and then from another point of view, and then another;
and a very moderate acquaintance with theology will enable
us to vary them even beyond our needs. No life, however long,
will suffice to take us into the deepest depths of the Gospels;
but it is not a slight thing to be always going deeper, or even
to be only learning more and more how astonishingly deep
they are.
We gather then from the exhibitions of our Lord’s human
devotion in the Gospels, apart from direct texts otherwise estab

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BETHLEHEM

fishing the doctrine, that he was the Second Person of the
Holy Trinity. We gather it from (he wonderful things said
of die Father and the Holy Ghost, and his silence about the
Word. He indicates his own place in the Holy Trinity in this
covert way, as if it was not so much that he was teaching us,
as that he was practising his own devotion. Who would be
silent about the Word, unless it were the Word himself? When
he speaks the most strongly of his own Divinity, it is his oneness
with the Father upon which he dwells, while he speaks of the
Father and the Holy Ghost as if in some way external to them.
He conceals himself under the shadow of the Father. He asserts
his own Divinity, as it were with some reluctance, though de­
cisively. But, while he asserts it, he hides himself in his identity
with the Father, as if the Father were ampler and broader than
himself, and his Paternity a screen to him. He is continually
putting forward his Father’s glory as the one object he is seeking,
the one passion which possesses him. Even his intense love of
souls is to be gathered rather from what he did and suffered,
than from the direct manifestations of his devotion. If we were
left to judge of his office from his devotion, we should consider
him rather as the restorer of his Father’s glory than as the
Savior of mankind, as a victim of reparation rather than a vic­
tim of expiation. He is so jealous of the honor of the Holy
Ghost that he waxes warm when he speaks of it, and uses words
of a fearful severity, not only unusual on his lips, but without
any other example than the one furnished by this solitary sub­
ject. He declares that, while words against himself shall be
pardoned, there is a peculiar limit with regard to the Holy Ghost,
which it is fatal for us to transgress. Against the Second Person
of the Holy Trinity all things may be forgiven; but against the
Third there is an unnamed sin, or state of sin, which is especially
declared to be beyond the reach of mercy, some stain which the
Precious Blood refuses to wash away on this side the grave, and
on which the wholesome fires of purgatory shall not be allowed
to act when the grave is passed.
We may perhaps be pardoned, if, in order to make our

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

401

meaning clear, we speak for a moment in a human way and

according to human conceptions.

It is as if our Lord could do

no more for his love of the Father by being the Eternal Word.

This was an old glory, because it was in truth an unbeginning
one.

Hence it was his grand delight in the Incarnation that

it furnished him with a new way of loving and glorifying the

Father.

Of course this is not true.

It is untrue, first of all

because of the adorable self-sufficiency of God, and secondly be­

cause the Eternal Generation is not a mystery done, but forever
doing, like a pulse of the Divine Life, which as it never began

to beat can never cease beating.

Yet this way of putting the

matter represents to us a truth which would otherwise be in­

expressible, and enables us to bring, at least imperfectly, into

view an impression which results from the study of our Lord s
words, read by the light of his Divine Person rather than by that

of his simple Divinity.

It serves also to illustrate our Lord's

extreme joy in his Sacred Humanity, in connection with his

peculiar devotion to his Father's glory.

It was not merely falling

horn a higher fountain to a lower, nor even adding a lower
fountain to a higher.

It was the gaining of another fountain

for it,—lower, indeed, not less

than infinitely lower, but at

the same time new.

But are we warranted in saying that devotion to his Father s
glory is a characteristic so observable and so strongly marked
in our Blessed Lord during the Three-and-Thirty Years?

We

have said that it amounted to what in the saints would be called
a passion, so vehemently did it appear to possess his Soul. Let
us reconsider the appearances of it in the Gospels.

When we

reflect that our Lord was himself God. we must feel some sur
prise that he should so seldom speak as if he were himself the
original fountain of truth and the ultimate authority for what

he might vouchsafe to teach. With a few exceptions, he speaks
as one sent, as one under authority, as one who is delivering

another's message.

So far as he himself is concerned, he claims

to be believed rather on account of his miracles than for his
own sake.

He expressly says that he does not bear witness of

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BETHLEHEM

himself. On the other hand, he is constantly referring to the
Father. He is continually magnifying Him who sent him. His
Father’s will is all in all to him, his Father’s glory the end
he has not so much come of his accord, as he has been officially
sent, to seek. Even his own immediate disciples are made to
feel that it is the Father who is brought so prominently before
them, that he almost eclipses the dignity and authority of our
Lord himself, which are sedulously put forward rather as bor­
rowed than as his own. His words to St. Peter, when the apostle
made public confession of his Divinity, show that he himself had
never explicitly taught his own Divinity even to those nearest
and dearest to him. It was the Father who had revealed it to
Peter. This then is the first thing we notice in our Lord’s devo­
tion,—the constant reference to the Father, as if it was his own
habit of mind, and as if he wished also to make it the habit
of mind of those around him.
In the next place, as has already been intimated, he ex­
pressly brings forward the will of the Father as his own rule.
It is the religious obedience he is under. It is to him both
precept, and counsel of perfection. His life is in many respects
a strange one, because of its unearthliness. Its relation to the
religious rulers of the nation is outwardly equivocal. It is a
life of homeless wandering, with unfixed occupations, and duties
self-imposed. His movements sometimes wear an appearance
of waywardness. He calls others from the relative duties of
their stations in life, as if all established rules were to give
way to the expression of his choice. He works his miracles
sometimes with a secrecy which hinders their effect as authentica­
tions of his mission, sometimes in such a way as to give scandal,
sometimes under such circumstances as to perplex, sometimes
with words which sound untruthful, sometimes with a look of
caprice, and once does he adorably condescend to work a miracle
with a mysterious appearance of human petulance. He offends
the prejudices of the Jews by a certain amount of intercourse
with those outside the synagogue, yet he will not go so far as
to preach his gospel to them. In certain matters he takes his

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TUF. FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

stand as a reformer, and disregards the traditional method of

observing some of God's commandments.

He wilfully forfeits

his influence with those for whose conversion he is laboring,

by seeming to transgress the bounds of discretion in his openlyexpressed attraction to sinners.

He speaks against the rulers

in terms of the most startling condemnation, yet when pressed
to declare his Divinity he almost eludes the question.

are

all

these

inconsistencies

to be reconciled?

Under

system of commandments or code of duty is he living?
disciples have

How

what
His

been taught by him to consider that he has

an invisible rule in all he does, a heavenly harmony to which

he times all his adorable and inexplicable movements.
his Father's will. That is his religion.
course with the Father.

It is

He lives in secret inter­

It is not so much that he is inspired

by him, as that he communes with him uninterruptedly. Whether
he is hiding himself or showing himself, whether he is among

the mountains, in the plain, upon the lake, or among the streets
of the city, they feel that it is the golden thread of his Father's
will which he is following.

He does nothing at random, and

yet, so it seems, nothing on any preconcerned system of human

prudence.

Some one leads him.

He talks with some one by

his side, and it is some one, too, whose companionship does not
oppress him. He hints at it, more than hints at it, as his Father s

will.

The doctrine which he puts forward about the Father is

not less

remarkable.

He will

introduce others to something

of the same sort of intimacy with the Father which he himself

enjoys. This is part of his office.

the incommunicable Father.

He has come to communicate

He teaches that the way to the

Father is through him. His Father’s house is the many-mansioned
home to which he has come to invite us.

It is the Father who

stands behind his parables, and is the king, and the husband­

man, and the giver of the feast. He goes away, and it is to the

Father he is going. He will prepare a place for those who love
him,

but it is in his Father’s house

that the place shall be

prepared. Faith in himself is urged because it is acceptable to

404

BETHLEHEM

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

the Father. He will pray to his Father for those who love him,
and the Father will also grant to us all we ask, if we ask it in
the name of this his Messenger. When it is good for those around
him. he asks the Father to glorify him with some of the old
glory which he enjoyed with him before. When he comes out
of the waters of Jordan to begin his ministry, he will have this
grave commencement authenticated by the testimony of the
Father. When it is his will to reach the uttermost limit of his
fearful sufferings, that last excess is to be the dereliction of his
Father; and what does not this reveal?
He is himself infinite wisdom, and, as the Word, he is in
a specially appropriated sense the wisdom of the Godhead; yet
he seems to speak as if it were not out of his own abundance,
as if it were not the spontaneous outpouring of his own magnifi­
cent intelligence, but as if he were simply an inspired prophet,
as if he were only and precisely the accredited mouthpiece of
the Father. He acts as the Word of the Father, which indeed
he was, yet rather as if an exalted created Word than as the
consubstantial Word eternally outspoken. He calls himself the
Son of God, and then purposely wraps the title round with
ambiguity and double meaning, as if he were indeed by special
ennobling and by singular unction the Son of God, but by no
means the everlasting and coequal Son. As was said before, when
he does assert himself, when for the sake of others his love
leads him to magnify himself, when he overawes us by the ma­
jestic gentleness with which he utters his own praises, the form
it all takes is the declaration of his oneness with the Father. These
are but specimens of the instances with which the Gospels so
abundantly supply us. When we have received them into our
souls, they seem to form the best part of our most intimate
knowledge of our dearest Lord.
All these instances are taken from his own teaching during
his three years’ Ministry. It might be thought that in the Infancy
there was no scope for the exhibition of a similar devotion. As
he was pleased to observe silence, as though, like other children.

405

he had to learn to speak, and as he assumed the disguise of
a child's passiveness, and never laid it aside for a moment,
we arc left to conjecture the dispositions of his Sacred Heart
by the aid of theology; and the teaching of the Infancy is alto­
gether by example. In those first years his mysteries were
his oracles. Nevertheless, if we look at the Childhood attentively,
we shall find most interesting traces of the same position with
regard to the Father, which he openly put forward afterward
in his express teaching. The providential arrangements of
Bethlehem and Nazareth look as if they were purposely ordered
with this view. It is as if his Sacred Heart had planned every
thing with reference to this branch of his teaching, as if it
expressed more of his heart than any other. Rather it is not
a branch of his teaching, but his whole teaching, the framework
in which all the work of our redemption was accomplished. When
we begin to reflect upon the Incarnation, we cannot but be
struck with our Lord’s condescending to have a human mother.
It appears as if it was the deepest of his condescensions, and.
on that account, not only the sweetest and most delightful for
his creatures to contemplate, but an actual channel of the most
substantial and exuberant benefits to themselves. If our Lord
was to have a human mother, it must be plain to one who
knows the ways of God that she must occupy some such place
in the world as that which the Church teaches us God has assigned
to her. Nay, we should expect her place to be higher, more
influential, and in some sense perhaps more independent, and
it is our firm belief that, hereafter, so it will be found to be.
and that we shall learn in heaven that of a truth Mary's gran­
deurs are such as could not safely be taught on earth because
of our infirmities. No province of theology will have to widen
itself so much as that which speaks of her. In her measure she
will be as new to the saints who have loved her most, as the
Vision of Bliss itself will be. Even on earth the last ages of
the Church are to have a knowledge of her which would amaze

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and oppress us now.
*
But, though an earthly mother formed
an essential part of the Incarnation, he is without earthly Father.
He draws his Human Nature from his Immaculate Mother alone;
but no created Father may come nigh his eternal filiation, the
glory of which is his exclusively, and he cherishes it with the
utmost jealousy.
This one fact is full of significance in itself. But it becomes
still more significant when we observe that, although he can­
not have an earthly father, he immediately places close to him­
self a created shadow of the Eternal Father in the person of
St. Joseph. At least the shadow of the divine paternity must
be there. The Holy Family cannot be the Earthly Trinity unless
this be so. Bethlehem and Nazareth cannot be heavens on
earth, unless a fountain of meek government is flowing there,
to represent the fountain of Godhead and Self-Sufficiency which
flows in heaven. When he looks around for apt insignia in
which at once to shroud and to symbolize the grand majesty
of his Father, he finds it in the extreme of humble tenderness
and bashful gentleness. Where his teaching is to be by example,
he is not content until he has put himself under the shadow
of obedience to the image of his Father. Thus St. Joseph fur­
nished him even with what he could not find in heaven. Tauler
and St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi are not blamed for saying
that the Word searched heaven for the stole of suffering, and
found it not. Yet it was so beautiful in his eyes that he could
not brook the disappointment, and therefore took flesh, and
came down to enjoy on earth a joy which heaven denied him.
Devotion will often express itself by doctrinal allegories of a
similar description; nor will the large heart of severe theology
condemn the practice by which love speaks what is unspeakable,
and comes to understand what was already in herself, but which
she did not understand until it found utterance like this. So
• Grignon de Montfort, Vraie Devotion, p. 29. St. Vincent Ferrer has prophesied
the same. In the Mystical City our Lady complains to Sister Mary of Agreda that
most writers about her have been loo timid. She says that their "reserve" is in
realitv "indevotion." and assigns this as the reason of our Lord's having arranged
that devotion to her in the Church should grow in the way of development.-p. m.
I. viii, cap. xiv.

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let us say now that here was one of St. Joseph’s most glorious
prerogatives. He gave our Lord what heaven could not give
him. There was an impossibility in heaven which Joseph made
possible for him on earth; and it was a possibility fraught with
a peculiar joy to the Sacred Heart. St. Joseph enabled him to
find in the trinity below a subordination of which he could not
find so much as a shadow in the Trinity above. Not a vestige
of subordination could be seen upon his eternal filiation. He
was in all things coequal with the Father. What an intense
delight, therefore, was it now to his Human Soul to be able
to express his love of the Father by this peculiar devotion,
this subordination to his created shadow and earthly repre­
sentative!
Moreover, in the days of Bethlehem and Egypt it was not
he, the Eternal Son, nor was it the Holy Ghost, whose relation
to Mary Joseph symbolized, but it was particularly the Father,
who communicated with Joseph, gave him his orders, and
warned him as he needed it. We know it is an axiom in theology
that whatever God does outside himself is done by the whole
Trinity. Yet, nevertheless, certain operations are assigned to
the different Persons by an attribution or appropriation, the
mystery of which is so delicate that it can be no otherwise ex­
pressed than by such appropriation. So it most often happens
that when God is mentioned, without the designation of the
Divine Person, we appropriate to the First Person the action
in question, as in the case of the dreams, communications, and
warnings of St. Joseph.
Even the virginity of our Lord’s earthly Mother is a kind
of worship of his Heavenly Father,—as if to have had a created
father would have dimmed the Father’s glory in the Eternal
Generation. Thus did Mary’s virginity rise up forever in voice­
less waves of exquisite incense, or like the fragrance of a spice­
tree shaken by the wind, before the Paternity on high, an in­
cense of which she herself in silent ecstasy was ever conscious,
and which the Babe watched as it rose at all hours, gently forc­
ing its way to the distant throne, like the spiral smoke-wreaths

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of the sweet gums climbing the altar to the Blessed Sacrament;
and he watched it with his Infant eyes with an ineffably tender
jubilee. But, even independently of these mysteries, the whole
spirit of the Sacred Infancy is always taking us by the hand
and leading us softly up to the Eternal Father. For a child
naturally points our thoughts to his parents. A child is not a
child when we disentangle him from the idea of his parents. Even
orphanhood only brings out the lost relation the more strongly.
This is the reason why the mysteries of the Infancy give out so
much indirect devotion to Mary, so much more than the other
divisions of our Lord’s life, not even excepting the Mary-haunted
Calvary. Rightly, therefore, and more deeply considered, they
do the same, and in a much higher degree, to the Eternal
Father. Indeed, there is a point of view in prayer from which
devotion to him and devotion to Mary blend with heavenly
confusion into one. It passes, and is gone. It was but for a
moment. Only we saw it, and were sure of it, and what it left
in the soul we never shall forget.
But we must venture into details, trying the depth of the
water as we go. We must endeavor to bring before ourselves
several manifestations of this devotion to the Eternal Father,
proceeding from the greater to the less, until it shall die away
into a devotion possible even for our extreme littleness and
lowness.
We have already considered our Lord’s devotion to the
Father, as it is implied in the mysteries of the Infancy and
as it is taught in the doctrine of the Gospels. But we may also
regard it in a historical, or rather biographical, point of view,
as distinguishing in a remarkable manner our Lord’s own life.
Suarez, in this respect differing from St. Thomas, thinks it most
probable that our Lord, at the first moment of the Incarnation,
made a vow to give himself up to the Father to redeem the
world by his death, and that the perfection of this vow involved
every one of his actions in detail, so that not only were all
his actions in point of fact always directed with an actual inten­
tion to the glory of the Father, but he had made away his

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Human liberty from the first, as far as a vow implies such a
surrender, and that all his actions were therefore so directed
by vow. Here is another instance of a fresh point of view
from which the Gospels may be read, whatever becomes of
the controversy among theologians as to the likelihood or un­
likelihood of such a vow. Vowed or unvowed, it is most certain,
as the combined thought of his science and his grace assures
us, that every one of the minutest actions of his Childhood, his
sleeping, waking, weeping, smiling, taking the breast, being
dressed, undressed, or washed, distinctly each time was done,
with the full use of reason and under the sovereignty of grace,
for the Father's glory. Thus the Sacred Infancy was a continuous
function, celebrated in the temple of that blissful Humanity,
in honor of the Eternal Father. Priest, and sacrifice, and sacrificial
vestments, and bells, and incense, and flowers, and angelic min­
isters, all were there, and the august solemnity knew no inter­
ruptions, the ceremonial ever changing, the function never ceas­
ing. It ranged from one beauty to another, from one splendor
to another, from one mystery to another, and yet was all har­
moniously one. It could shift the scene from Bethlehem to the
Desert, from Egypt to Nazareth: but there were no pauses in
that magnificent worship of the Father. Who can say why, when
his Human Soul loved the Holy Ghost so amazingly, he put
forward his Father’s glory with such an impressive emphasis?
If we look at the still night in the dark room at Nazareth
and the desolate afternoon on Calvary, it is this devotion to
the Father which brings them together and clasps them into
one. His very beginning, whether it was vow or not, we know
from the apostle was, Behold, I come to do thy will. It was
that he might do this will that a Body had been prepared for
him, and therefore it was as soon as he came into the world
that he said, Behold, I come! In the head of the book it is
written of me that I should do thy will, O God! When he
goes out of the world, it is, Father, into thy hands I commend
my spirit. As the beginning was, so was the ending. He rose
out of one sea of the Father’s will, like the sun of a peninsula.

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and he sank into another sea: Three-and-Thirty Years was the
narrow strip of earth which he illuminated in his course. Then
what came between the rising and the setting? His persever­
ance,—his perseverance in a life of humiliation, sorrow, and
suffering,—his perseverance in the same solemn worship of his
Father’s glory which had occupied his Infancy, only now the
music was yet graver, the ceremonies more numerous, the pag­
eant more austere. Moreover, how does he express his per­
severance? My meal is to do the will of Him who sent me.
If we might detach one portion of his life, and isolate it,
as sufficiently indicating the great work which he came to do,
it would obviously be the Passion. Our belief that he would
still have been incarnate supposing man had not fallen, no doubt,
affects even our view of the Passion, and makes our eyes keen
to observe its character of reparation as well as its accomplish­
ment of redemption. We more naturally, or at least with grcatei
facility, look at each mystery as primarily intended to glorify
the Father rather than to redeem sinners, or, to speak more
strictly, we look at it as redeeming sinners by making reparation
to the glory of the Father. The primary end of a glorious Incar­
nation would have been to glorify God by exceeding love of
man. After the fall the glorifying of God assumed a deeper and
more uniform character of reparation,—deeper and more uni­
form, rather than new; for may we not say, when God’s all-holy
majesty is so spotless, that even for an unfallen world something
like reparation would have been required? The Passion is the
miraculous piling up on one sensitive human life of all woes
of soul and all torments of flesh, one upon another, until they
culminate. Surely, then, there is great significance in the fact
that his Passion culminated in his being abandoned by the Father.
Could any further anguish lie beyond the confines of that
appalling dereliction, or had it actually exhausted the possibilities
of suffering? We may never limit the omnipotence of God. But
we may say that such an abandonment did positively exhaust
all the possibilities of suffering. Nothing now was left but death.
In the grandeur of his unspeakable grace his Soul held on, as

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if within finite length of arm, to the Father who so awfully
withdrew; and his last words were, Father, into thy hands 1
commend my spirit.
Each Christmas, as it comes, brings back to us old charms,
familiar joys because they have been joys from childhood. One
of these is the power of Mary over Jesus. Who does not remem
her the astonishment of his early years, when he had come to
appreciate the meaning of our Lord being God, and yet in
pictures and in Christmas mysteries saw Mary make free with
him as if he were a common child? Was he really as helpless
as he seemed? or was he only feigning helplessness? Neither:
yet he lay on Mary's lap like any other babe, and, after all,
he was God. Then for the first time we felt an awe of Mary,
because we seemed to see her more nearly and more truly.
New thoughts struck us. We had (so it appeared) discovered
something for ourselves, beyond what we had ever been told;
and it is always true that what we learn of ourselves goes deeper
into us than what others teach us. Thus the mysteries of the
Infancy opened out before us, and we read them all in the
single light of his visible obedience to Mary. From the night
when she showed him to the shepherds, to the day when he
seemed to adjourn his Father's business and went back with her
to Nazareth for eighteen years, and again, when, at the outset of
his ministry, he began it with anticipating his time for working
miracles, that he might still obey her, all seemed plain in that
single light of his filial obedience. Nothing was left uninter­
preted. It was a scene of heavenly wonders, but all was harmoni­
ous, and one spirit brooded over it all. Even over the Childhood
of the Everlasting God Mary’s maternal jurisdiction lay outspread
like a golden glory. Were other thoughts, were fresh discoveries,
to break up this vision, as the wind breaks up the visionary land­
scapes in the still water? Never. Fresh discoveries would be made.
Unsuspected invisible things would be seen behind, would be seen
through, that glory, yet only to make it yet more glorious. Our
youth’s dream of the Mary-governed Infancy was never to pass
away. For, as with most of our childish apprehensions of truth,

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the matter had been most truly apprehended and in the truest
way. Years have gone on, and with the years the heart has gone
on also making many discoveries by that light of Mary. Age
will not have done discovering; and then heaven will meet us
with its last discovery, which will neither dishonor those which
have gone before nor eclipse the light in which they have been
made. But what is it which this light of Mary's maternal jurisdic­
tion shows us now? Another jurisdiction which lies beneath, an­
other obedience which stands behind, supporting, ennobling, glori­
fying, Mary’s power. It is his sovereign obedience to the Eternal
Father; and once, by the darkest mystery in the Gospel, for the
still further exaltation of his Mother, and for other divine reasons,
the two obediences are allowed, not truly to come in conflict,
but to seem to do so,—as when without her leave, and to her
intense anguish, he stayed behind in the temple when he was
twelve years old. The hand of the Eternal Father seems to put
aside the cloud of light and let in the dazzling brightness of deep
heaven upon us, and for the moment Mary's light is darkened,—
not so much darkened in itself, as darkened to the weakness of
our sight, thus suddenly overpowered from on high.
We must observe also that double action of the Father and
the Son, in consequence of which no man comes to the Father
but by the Son, while, on the other hand, no one truly knows the
Son except the Father teach him. It is as if it was the Father’s
will that Jesus should not bear witness of himself, in order that
he, the Father, might reserve to himself the joy of bearing witness
of the Son, as he did over the river Jordan, and again when the
heavenly Voice spoke of glorifying him. He would magnify the
Son as the Son was ever delighting to magnify him. There should
be something reciprocal even in the manner of the love which
the Father bore to the Sacred Humanity. The grand instance of
this, to which we shall have to refer again, was his secretly reveal­
ing to Peter the doctrine of our Blessed Lord's Divinity. Flesh
and blood, said Jesus, have not revealed it to thee, but my Father
who is in heaven. This secret revelation of the Eternal Father
to St. Peter is one of the most striking incidents recorded in the

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413

Gospels, and fascinates our attention as well by its singularity as

by the depths of contemplation which it opens out to us. If it be
not irreverent so to speak, we might compare it with those facts

in biographies, which are sometimes recorded as single incidents,
to which no prominence is given and on which no stress is laid,

yet which nevertheless flash upon us as each of them the keystone
of a whole biography.

There is one more event in our Lord’s life which must be
dwelt upon. Yet we dwell on it with reluctance, as it is impossible

to do justice either to its tenderness or to its mystery.

Every

one has something of his religion in his heart, which it is hard
for him to put into words, just because it has grown so familiar

in his thoughts that it never assumes there the vesture of words,
and we almost fear to desecrate it by clothing it in speech. Such
to us is the event in question, of which we are going to speak:
such has it been to us so far back as our memory can go. It dawns

upon us in the Gospels that our Lord must have made the Person

of the Father the subject of frequent conversation with his apostles.
We are inclined to think he must have spoken most intimately,

and perhaps minutely, with them on this attractive subject. He
may probably have communicated to them more wonders regard­

ing the Paternity of God than even our rich theology has taught us.
Such a subject would be a natural one for him to dwell upon,

because it was that which was most in his heart, and he himself
has said that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
Moreover, he so openly put forward his devotion to the Father,

that it would be likely for him in his secret teaching to fill in the

outline which he had given more openly.

There seems no im­

probability in this consideration, when it is suggested to us. But
what is there which actually intimates it to us? Surely, if much
had not gone before which is not recorded in the Gospels, St.

Philip never could have said, Lord, show us the Father, and it is
enough for us. Most beautiful words! The pathetic utterance of

all creation allowed to articulate itself in the voice of that dear
apostle! On the first reading how beautiful were the words, and
now, when read, when pondered, when whispered to ourselves,

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when breathed to the same Lord in prayer, how thousandfold
more beautiful! Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us!
Yes! Enough,—that gentle, unconstrained, most truthful word.
Enough,—precisely what creation pines for, precisely what will
bring the contentment which flows from the filling of our natures
and the satisfaction of our holiest desires! Enough! saints and
angels, Joseph and Mary, they alone could tell us of that Enough.
We must tear ourselves away from those little words, each of
which has so great a soul, so large a heart, within it. We must
turn to observe our Savior’s answer to Philip, an answer with
what a look of love assuredly accompanied! He is not so much
surprised that the apostle should have received thus deeply into
his soul what he had taught him about the Father, as surprised that
his knowledge had not led him further. Here again we have indi­
cations of a world of secret teaching. So long a time have I been
with you, and have you not known me? Philip, he that seeth me
seeth the Father also. How sayest thou, Show us the Father? Believe
you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? Otherwise
believe for the very work’s sake. Amen, Amen, I say to you, he
that believeth in me, the works that I do he also shall do, and
greater than these shall he do, because I go to the Father. And
whatsoever you shall ask the Father in my Name, that will I do,
that the Father may he glorified in the Son. His oneness with the
Father is dearer to him than his distinctness. Wonderful! for he
was the express image of the Father, the brightness of his glory,
and the figure of his substance.
Thus they who were nearest to our Blessed Lord, and whose
souls were nurtured on his secret teaching, may be described as
men who pined to see the Father, who were discontented with all
things else, who did not rest even in the presence of the Son,
but whose wants were measured exactly by the Vision of the Father.
It would be enough. But there would be no enough short of that,
no enough elsewhere, no enough till then. Ages have passed since,
and Jesus is leading his royal life in heaven. But is he changed in
this respect? Ages perhaps,—it is sad to think, yet surely not an
unwise humility so to think, for there is not a grain of despondency

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415

in the thought,—ages perhaps may pass amidst the cleansing fires

before the divine mercy shall hid St. Michael lift us out of the
burning sea and place us on the coasts of heaven. Will Jesus have
changed by that time in this respect? No! strangely in unison with

the spirit of the Three-and-Thirty Years will his greeting be, and
expressive of the same, not

unforgotten only, but unbroken

thought. Come, blessed of my Father! Blessed of my Father! that
is our eternal name, the name given us in our first baptism of

heavenly beatitude. Blessed of my Father! How those words come

to us in the tingling stillness of the night, when panic fears oppress

our loneliness, and so strangely vex our souls! How they rise soft
and clear above the rolling of the world, in hours of weariness,
and of obstinate temptations which grace seems at times to multi­

ply rather than repel! How they sing songs to the fear of death,
and lull it when it wakes and cries!

Blessed of my Father! Why

Blessed of my Father? Do the words lead on to that date at which

he shall deliver up the kingdom to God and the Father, and the

Son himself be subject unto Him that put all things under him
that God may be all in all? For, says the apostle, when all things
are put under Jesus, He is undoubtedly excepted who put all

things under him; and who is he but the Eternal Father? But we
are

reaching into the darkness of unapproachable

mysteries.

Enough for us,—it was Philip’s chosen word,—enough, if only
we be blessed of the Father.

We are now, in tracing still further this special devotion to

the Father, brought again to that frequently-recurring difficulty

of speaking of our Blessed Lady without doing despite to our
own conceptions of her. We must consider her devotion to the

Eternal Father, and how in her also it was special.

But when we

have seen what it was in the Soul of Jesus, we can understand
what it was in hers. According to the proportions of her inferi­

ority, it was the same besetting thought, the same holy possession
of soul, the same solitary and sacred enthusiasm, which it was in

his.

But there were circumstances in her position and influence

which gave a peculiar character to this devotion in her. and these
we must examine. She was the sole earthly parent of Jesus.

In

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herself she enjoyed the rights both of father and ol mother. This
was one of the miraculous glories of her Maternity, a subject to
her of frequent meditation and of incessant joy. It was not only
that her own honor was as it were doubled thereby; but the
glory of God was concerned in it. It was for the honor of Jesus.
It was for the honor of the Eternal Father. The Incarnation would
have been quite a different mystery if it had been otherwise; and
therefore we may believe that some of its especially divine splendor
was involved in this very fact of Mary’s being his sole earthly
parent. She felt therefore that this peculiarity in her position
reflected peculiar honor upon the Eternal Father, and therefore
was a ground of devotion to him which, while all could feel it,
belonged eminently to herself. Moreover, the same fact would
cause her thoughts to be continually resting on her Son’s I leavenly
Father. The mother's love of her child is always entwined with
thoughts of its father, and with continual reference to him. A
widowed mother has a double love of her child, because she loves
him for her husband’s sake as well as for her own. Conjugal
affection is an element which can never be absent from the per­
fection of maternal love. Now, in Mary’s case there were heavenly
peculiarities in every one of these circumstances. Her love of
Jesus was necessarily entwined with thoughts of his Father; but
he was God, and the First Person of the Holy Trinity. She had
nothing to do with the Eternal Generation of the Son, except
to be a portion of the shadow of it. She also was in a certain sense
widowed, and St. Joseph did but veil her widowhood. Yet she
had not to love two in one. She had not to love the lost Father
in the Child, as well as the Child himself. She had to love her
Child doubly, to love him as being both his Father and his
Mother, and to love him thus doubly for bis own sake alone.
What conjugal affection does in the maternal love of others,
adoration had to do in hers,—a double adoration both of the invis­
ible Father and of the visible Son. Furthermore, her Maternity
was part of her religion. It occupied a great space in her faith.
It was linked with some of the most inscrutable mysteries of the
Godhead. It never could be out of her thoughts for a moment,

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417

even without any reference to her own delight in it, because it
was the created echo of the uncreated Generation of the Word.
The result of all these things was, not only that the interior of
her mind belonged so singularly to herself that it could not be
shared, nor even fully appreciated, by any other creature, but that
the unity into which it resolved itself was, as consideration shows
us, devotion to the Eternal Father. All the circumstances rose
upward to this throne. They were like flights of steps from the
north and the south, from the east and the west, but all ascending
to that single throne. It takes long to master these things in all
their bearings, even so far as we are able to master them; but
can time be better spent than in elucidating the grandeurs of
Mary? We remember that text of Scripture which the Church
applies to her:—They who elucidate me shall have eternal life.
We must consider also that one of the prerogatives of Mary's
singular holiness was that she could enter more than any other
mere creature into the inward dispositions of God. The mind of
God was more open to her. The affections of God were more
intimately communicated to her. She saw the Father's exceeding
love of Jesus more clearly than any wondering angel sees it now.
She saw down into its pellucid depths, and worshipped in the
thankfulness of profoundest fear. The vision of this love of the
Father for Jesus doubtless excited in her heart a new love of
Jesus. It was a new pattern for her to copy. It was another proof
to her that even she did not love Jesus as he deserved. It was a
fresh incentive to her to dilate her heart more and more. It was
a substantial and efficacious fire, which actually effected the dilata­
tion of her heart for her. It was the Father’s love. But he did not
keep it to himself. He communicated to her so much of it as she
could bear, and benignantly made it hers as well as his. But,
while it was in her a new light by which to see and appreciate
Jesus, and at the same time a new power to love him, it also,
because of her own immense love of Jesus, produced in her heart
a new love of the Father. She loved him the more because he so
loved the Son. She loved him for so far overshooting her own
maternal love. She loved him because he loved Jesus to the full.

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and left nothing wanting in the perfection of his love. She loved
him because his love at once took her office out of her own hands,
and at the same time enabled her to fulfil it as she could not other­
wise have done. She loved him because his love was a revelation
of Jesus, and a revelation made in so touchingly maternal a
manner. It was the confidence of the Heavenly Father to the
Earthly Mother, confiding to her in secret the real worth and
character and dearness of him who was the Child of both in two
such mysterious ways. Thus she ventured on this account to love
the Father with a sort of timid exultation, as if she had a kind
of right to share in the Father’s peculiar parental love of Jesus.
It is impossible for us to realize the depths of profoundest adora­
tion into which Mary’s soul must have been cast by this awful
communication with the Father in that which is his own eternal
singularity, in that which actually makes him to be the Father
and is the fountain of his Paternity, in that which would have
seemed to all creatures to be in any measure or degree absolutely
incommunicable. See how for the moment Mary and the Eternal
Father blend uncomminglingly in onel In many lights the Mother
of God is worshipful in her dread majesty; in none does she so
completely strike us dumb before her majesty as in this.
Her own similitude to Jesus would naturally involve her
having caught from him this the master-devotion of his Sacred
Heart, to which she knew, and rejoiced it should be so, that even
his love of her was utterly subordinate. But these other peculiar
circumstances of her own give her devotion to the Eternal Father
a character and distinctness which make it something more than
a copy of our Lord’s reduced to the lesser dimensions of her heart.
But her communication with the Father in his Paternity, out of
which flows a special love both of him and of the Son, is not her
only fountain of devotion to him, nor the only mystery which
seems to draw her from her visible vicinity to God into the
blinding splendors of the very Throne. As she shares in the
Father’s Paternity, so also she shares in the Son’s Filiation. She
was herself in a special way, through predestination and because
of the Infant Jesus, the eternal daughter of the Father. Here too

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was a fresh source of the love of Jesus, a beautiful strange love
from the mingling of the mother and the sister in one heart; it
was a different tie to him from the direct tie of the Inrarnation,
though even this new tie came from the selfsame mystery. Here
also was a look, a shadow, a fair umbrage,—it could not be more,
yet how much was even this!—of dear equality with Jesus, dearer
far than the apparent superiority over him which her maternal
jurisdiction conferred upon her. Here also was another fountain
of love of the Eternal Father, another marvellous foundation
on which the temple of her devotion to him might be raised.
Her grandeurs dazzle us. But it is not so much the glory of them
which we are to look at now, as the wonderful intricate sim­
plicity with which they all converge upon her devotion to the
Eternal Father.
Now let us advance a step further in the history of this devo­
tion. When we first entered upon our inquiry into the mysteries
of Bethlehem, we compared the Sacred Infancy to a forest, and
St. Joseph to its odorous undergrowth, whose fragrance would be
to us, whichever way we bent our steps, like the atmosphere of
the place. So has it been throughout; and now, when we come to
speak of his devotion to the Eternal Father, we shall have to
repeat many things which have been said before, or which at
least have been treated from a different point of view. But
repetition about him is hardly wearisome. It is plain at first
sight that devotion to the Eternal Father must have been the
length and breadth of his whole sanctity. It was the characteristic
from which his holiness derived its genius and its unity. His
dread office of being the shadow of the Father could not import
less than this. His loving care of Mary came out of it and was
included within it. He was the shadow of the Father to her as
well as to Jesus. His tender ministries to our Blessed Lord, and
the exercise of authority with which he worshipped him.—a
worship solitary among all the worships that surround the Word,
—all came out of his office. Indeed, it was to Jesus primarily
that Joseph was the shadow of the Father. It might even be said
that to himself also he was the shadow of the Father; for in that

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shadow his soul grew and his predestination was accomplished.
It was a deep, soft, beautifying, soothing shade over his life per­
petually. It was his light. He saw, and worked, by the light of
that shadow.
Moreover, it was his form of love of Jesus. For as he had to
imitate the office of the Eternal Father, so likewise did he imitate
his love. There was something more truly paternal in his tender­
ness to our Lord than the tenderness of common earthly fathers,
because, though he was not a true father, his office came out of
a deeper Paternity. Divine shadows are substantial. They are
shadows in relation to the eternal height which casts them, but
they lie defined, substantial, and transfiguring, on created things.
We must remind ourselves of this, although we have indicated
the same truth before. This communication of the Divine Pater­
nity was Joseph’s highest right to love Jesus. He might love him
as his creature. He might love him as one of his redeemed. He
might love him with a personal love, as having been laden with
gifts and graces by him. He might love him as Mary’s Child,
with a love into which he might throw all the intensity of his
love of Mary. He might love him for his own sake, because he
was so winning and attractive and encompassed with divine fasci­
nations. He might love him as we come to love all whom we have
saved from death or danger or who have permitted us to show
them kindness; and this love would be in proportion to the dig­
nity of his own office and the excellence of his Foster-child. But
his highest love of him was from his highest right to love him,
and that resided in his being the shadow of the Father. He loved
Jesus in and by his love of the Eternal Father, and by the likeness
to the Father which the Eternal Father had communicated to
him, whereby he was raised to the further and inexpressible dig­
nity of likeness to the Son himself, who was also the image of
the Father. Thus it is that the loves of the Earthly Trinity are
illuminated by quivering beams, by shooting splendors, by pulses
of throbbing light, which seem to belong rather to the inward
life of the Heavenly Trinity, adorably communicated to that
sweetest growth of all creation, the Holy Family.

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Joseph's devotion to the Eternal Father was also his form of
love of Mary. He was especially her husband as the foster-father
of Jesus. His conjugal office was simply part of his shadow of
the Father. His office to her rose out of the same source as his
office to Jesus, namely, out of the same shadow. As with Jesus,
so with Mary, he might love her for many reasons, and with vari­
ous pure and holy loves. As his spouse, as the Mother of Jesus,
as the spouse of the Holy Ghost, as the daughter of the Father,
for her love of Jesus, for her love of himself, for her own tran­
scending excellence,—for all these things he might love her,
and did love her, as only so holy a heart could love. But his
love of her, inasmuch as he was the shadow of the Father, was
a wider love than any or all of these, and rested upon a yet more
divine appointment. Indeed, it did in matter of fact presuppose
and include all those other loves. Thus his devotion to the Father
sank into all the details of his life, by the necessity of the case.
It was his vocation, the end for which he was created, the reason
of his immense grace on earth, the explanation of his stupendous
glory in heaven. We may thus see how true the doctrine was
with which we started, that his whole spiritual life, that peculiar
sanctity which he shares with no other saint, was built upon,
and resolves itself into, a most incomparably special devotion to
the Eternal Father. St. Joseph’s name expresses to our thoughts
the shadow of the Father, and the name of the shadow of the
Father leaves nothing about St. Joseph unexpressed.
The apostles were a body of men unlike the rest of the saints,
both in the greatness of their gifts, the magnitude of their office,
and the special relation in which they stood to our Blessed Lord.
We may not liken the other saints to them, much less exalt any
of them above the apostles of the word. Theologians teach us
that we should incur the note of temerity if we did so. The
litanies of the Church seem to warrant us in excepting St. Joseph
and St. John the Baptist. There are some of the apostles of whom
we know nothing but their names as enumerated in the gospel,
or some uncertain traditions of the localities of their preaching.
Yet the choice of Jesus has put a golden crown upon their heads.

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which is an index to us not only of their rank, but also of the
sublimity of their holiness. We cannot doubt that the peculiarity
of their office betokens a corresponding peculiarity in their grace.
We look upon them with awe, and yet at the same time with a
very familiar love. We see them always by the side of Jesus, and
there they look so little that we hardly estimate their proportions
justly. We see them also in the very process of being made the
great saints they were, and their infirmities endear them to us
without degrading them. We are told little of them as saints.
We only or chiefly know them as novices; and even so how won­
derful they look!—how wonderful, and yet how human too!
Hence it is that devotion to the apostles is a very affectionate
*
devotion,
of the same kind, though far higher in degree, as that
which we feel to the patriarchs of the Old Testament. When the
Church desires especially to honor a saint, it calls him, though in
a lower sense, an apostle, as it called St. Philip Neri the apostle
of Rome.
But their peculiar office and peculiar grace imply also a peculiar
devotion; and we cannot but believe that devotion to the Eternal
Father was their special and characteristic devotion. They were
brought up in the school of Jesus. He himself was their master.
The spirit of Jesus was their spirit. They were formed upon it.
It rested upon them. It transformed them at last into itself.
When they went forth to preach, it was the living spirit of Jesus
which from the narrow confines of Judea broke forth and inun­
dated the whole heathen world. But we have seen that the spirit
of Jesus was a special devotion to the Eternal Father. His spirit
was the energy of that uncreated Spirit whose change of our hearts
is shown by the cry of Abba, Father. Who can doubt, then, that
a special devotion to the Father was also the characteristic devo­
tion of the apostles? We may legitimately infer it from our Lord’s
teaching, which we have already considered, from their special
and privileged knowledge of Jesus as his apostles, which knowledge
• Thus Palafox, who was noted for his Old Testament devotion, says that his
devotion to the apostles was "mas sensitivo’” than any of his Old Testament devo­
tions, except that to Adam and Eve, which was a devotion of “gran ternura,”
extreme tenderness. Vida Interior, cap. xlviii.

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the Father alone could teach them, and also from the fact that
imitation of their Master was the distinctive genius of the
members of the apostolic college.
But instances of individual apostles will supply us with some­
thing more than inferences. In the case of St. Peter we have the
Eternal Father acting in an apparent independence of Jesus,
and, as we should say except for the science of our Lord, without
his privity, and becoming in secret St. Peter’s master in the
theology of our Lord’s Divinity. St. Peter’s magnificence is so
broad, that what seem single incidents are lost and confounded
in the whole. But, supposing such an event to have happened to
any of the greatest saints, should we not have considered it tanta­
mount to his whole life, to his whole vocation, to his whole sanc­
tity? It would have colored every thing about him. It would have
been the master-fact of his life, taking up to itself, and calling
round it, and subordinating, all other facts. We should seem to
have expressed ourselves feebly if we had merely said that hence­
forth devotion to the First Person of the Holy Trinity had become
his special devotion.
In the case of St. John, his Gospel furnishes us with indirect
testimony of this special devotion, particularly in the conversa­
tions which he selects, doubtless under Mary’s guidance, to record;
for, in inspiration, the Holy Ghost animates and presides over
the natural bias of the writer rather than supplants or supersedes
it. But, above all, his devotion to the Eternal Generation of our
Lord is in itself most ample proof of his devotion to the Father,
because the mystery in question is inseparably linked with it. In
his epistles it is gleaming out perpetually, like the light through
the chinks of a secret chamber. He calls Jesus the life eternal
which was with the Father. He declares Jesus to us, that we may
have fellowship with the Father. He writes unto the babes,
because they have known the Father. His consolation, if we
sin, is that we have an advocate with the Father. He says if
we love the world the charity of the Father is not in us, and
that the pride of life is not of the Father. Anti-Christ is he who
denies the Father and the Son; and the horror of denying the

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Son is that then we have not the Father, while he who confesses
the Son has the Father also, and we are to abide in the Son
and in the Father. That we should be the sons of God is the
manner of charity which the Father hath bestowed upon us. We
are to walk in the truth, he tells the elect lady, as we have
received a commandment from the Father, and that he who con­
tinues in the doctrine, the same hath both the Father and the Son.
St. Philip’s devotion to the Father is revealed in his speech
to our Lord, which we have already commented on at length,
but which we must not omit to remember in the present con­
nection. It is perhaps the most striking, as it is certainly the
most touching, of all the instances of this apostolic devotion.
It has certainly been enough to give to many of us an intense
personal devotion to this dear apostle himself.
The same devotion is quite one of the most distinguishing
characteristics of St. Paul. He names the Eternal Father forty
times in his different epistles, and sometimes seems to go out
of his way to do it. He repeatedly blesses him in outbursts of
the love of praise and of congratulation. Except the one to the
Hebrews, he begins all his epistles with the formula, Grace to
you, and peace, from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus
Christ. In the beginning of the first epistle to the Thessalonians
he merely says, Grace be to you, and peace, but in the next verse
speaks of their enduring in the hope of our Lord Jesus Christ
before God and our Father. In the two epistles to St. Timothy
he slightly but touchingly varies the formula, adding mercy be­
tween grace and peace; and in the conclusion of the epistle to
the Hebrews he alludes to the Father and to the peace of the
Father, when he implores a blessing on them from 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. Indeed, the practice of some holy men of making
genuflections * many times a day in honor of the Eternal Father
was based upon that passage of St. Paul in the third chapter to
the Ephesians:—For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of
See Barry's Année Saincte, the index to the devotions.

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our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all paternity in heaven and
earth is named.
These are the indications of this apostolic devotion, which
have been allowed to transpire. Who will not see that they are
indications of much more which has been hidden from us, and
also that what is left us is enough? The great hearts of the
apostolic college were moulded by the chosen devotion of the
Sacred Heart, devotion to the Eternal Father.
The First Person of the Holy Trinity is the Father of the
angels as well as our Father, although he is our Father in an
additional sense because of his Son having assumed our nature.
Were we sufficiently instructed in the bright worships of those
glorious eldest-born of God, we might doubtless trace some devo­
tion among them analogous to this of ours. Their amazing science
of the Holy Trinity will furnish them with intelligent varieties
of praise and congratulation to the Divine Persons, which sur­
pass our skill and comprehension. There is reason to believe
that one whole choir of the angels, that of the Thrones, is in some
special manner devoted to the worship and science of the Father.
The world of the Saints supplies us also with instances of
this devotion. But we must remember that there is much which
lies too deep for instances. Devotion to the Father is the ground­
work of a vast amount of peculiar sanctity, which never reveals
on its surface the nature of the ground beneath. It is moreover
just the devotion to keep itself secret and invisible,—the more
so as the instruments on which it makes its music are the mys­
teries of the Sacred Humanity. It will almost always be found
that any soul, which is remarkable for a more than common
devotion to the Sacred Humanity, will also be distinguished by
a more silent and deeper-seated, yet not the less intense, devotion
to the Eternal Father. The same may be said of those who have
a special devotion to St. Joseph. The school of French piety in
the seventeenth century, of which we may take as the representa­
tive Father Condren, the General of Cardinal Benille’s Oratorians, moulded itself on the spirit of Jesus, with a view to the
revival of the ecclesiastical spirit; and, as might have been ex-

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peered, the writings and lives of its members arc full of indica­
tions of a special devotion to the Father. Among the canonized
Saints we find St. Aloysius keeping every Monday holy in honor
of the Eternal Father. St. Mechtildis was told by our Lord to
adopt as a peculiar devotion the offering of his praises to the
Eternal Father. St. Lutgarde was instructed by him to address
especially to the Eternal Father her prayers for those in mortal
sin. Nouet, in his preface to his Conduct of Souls, tells us that,
the Jesuit Father Ferdinand Monroy used to go about, the house
exclaiming, Ardenter diligamus Patrem Æternum. (Let us ardently
love the Eternal Father.) Of all the modern Saints St. Ignatius
appears to be the most distinguished by a special devotion to the
Eternal Father. The inspiration to found his order came in some
special way from the Father, and was the Father’s gift to the Son.
The whole history of it reminds us of the Father’s revelation to
St. Peter in the Gospel. The wonderful fragments of St. Ignatius’s
journal, given in Bartoli’s life of him, also contain some inter­
esting traces of this dominant devotion of the saint. Doubtless
a little reference to the lives of the Saints would enable us to
multiply these instances. But this is enough for our purpose.
We have traced the devotion down from our Blessed Lord, through
his Mother, St. Joseph, the apostles, and the saints, not without
a suspicion of it among the angels, and we have landed ourselves
amid simple practices, which are not above the attainments of
the lowest of us.
But something should be said of the grounds of this devotion,
—what it rests upon, what it involves, and what spirit it brings
along with it. It is based on the distinct Person of the Father.
It is he who without precedence is the First of the Holy Trinity,
he who is the fountain of Godhead to the Son, and also, with
the Son, to the Holy Ghost, he who is unbegotten, he who alone
of all the Three cannot be sent on any mission, he who is the
chief symbol to us of the invisibility of the Godhead, he who is
every moment begetting his Eternal Son, he from whom with
the Son the Holy Ghost is every moment eternally proceeding,
he who is clothed in the mantle of all paternities, like the splendor

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427

of shot gold, wherein are curiously, inextricably, wrought the
fatherhoods of heaven with the fatherhoods of earth. It is he, it
is his distinct Person, who is the base of our devotion, the object
of our adoring love,—a love specially expressed by this devotion.
What he is to us his creatures, as our Father, flows from his Person.
As he is the fountain of Godhead to the Son and the Holy Ghost,
so is he in a pre-eminent sense the fountain of creation, redemp­
tion, and sanctification to us. He is to us—and here opens a wide,
indeed an illimitable, field for our devotion—the Giver and
Sender of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was he who so loved the
world that he gave his only-begotten Son to die for our sins.
It is he who to our jubilee has constituted himself the teacher
of the grandeurs of Jesus to all of us. It is he who has made the
road to himself to be through Jesus, the pleasantest of homeward­
leading paths. It is he who will cast out none who come to him
by Jesus. It is he who is himself the grand highway to Jesus. It
is he who gave Mary and Joseph the gifts which made them what
they are, and then gave Mary and Joseph to us. It is he who gave
the kingdom to Jesus, and will one day receive it back from him,
so that God may be all in all, and the kingdom of Jesus not one
of time but of eternity. It is he who is one with the Son and
the Holy Ghost, and will come with them into our souls and
make his mansion there. It is he who, having been our Father
in his love from all past eternity, will be our Father in his glory
for all the eternity to come. These are the grounds which his
ever-blessed Person furnishes for our devotion.
The sweet relationship of his Paternity to us is not so much
another ground of our devotion as another way of looking at it.
But the consideration of it is of vital importance. There is some­
thing especially reliable or trustworthy in paternal love. Other
love may seem more quickly excited, or more outwardly demon­
strative, or less checkered with shades of austerity, or less chastened
with fear, or less sparing in its words. But there is something
ultimate in a father’s love,—something that cannot fail,—some­
thing to be believed against the whole world. We almost attribute
practical omnipotence to our father in the days of our childhood

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There is always against everybody an appeal to him, whose judg­
ment is infallible, whose decision is certain to be on our side,
and who has means of his own to execute his sentences irresistibly.
Fire will not burn us if he is near. The thunderbolts must turn
aside when they see him. The high winds can only rock us to
sleep, the rough seas are only laughing at us, and we can have
them punished when we will. Nightly terrors disappear in his
arms, and even ghosts from the land of death dare not pursue us
there. A mother’s love, dear as it is, is not a thing like this. This
love is a picture of our affectionate dependence on our heavenly
Father; for with him we are always children, not on this side of
the grave only, but on the other also. Heaven is eternal child­
hood in the mansion of our Father. Many children who fear
their fathers will yet take liberties with them which they will
not take with their mothers. Their very fears lean upon their
father, as completely as their love. Thus, timid and daring at
once, we feel so at liberty with our heavenly Father that it
seems to us, in our weak way of conceiving things, as if we were
more at home with him than with the Word or the Holy Spirit.
The Word has to be veiled in flesh, that he may not frighten
us with his splendor, and then the Father will take us by the
hand and teach us the Word. The Holy Ghost is inexpressibly
dear to us; but we are afraid of him because of the possibility
of the unpardonable sin, because of his sharpness with Ananias
and Shapphira, and also because we ourselves know something
of the sensitiveness and jealousy of his grace. Yet the Son throws
his fraternal arms of flesh around us in the embraces of his love,
and the Holy Spirit is fain to nestle like a dove in the bosom
of our souls. What then must be our feeling of the tenderness
of the Father, to whose justice we dare to confide ourselves and
our eternity as placidly as if he could not, if he would, cut off
the entail of our eternal inheritance? Words cannot tell what
that word says, and sings, and shows, and works, within our
souls,—our heavenly Father.
Indulgence is die grace of justice, and it is something more
than mercy. Is indulgence then an attribute of the unutter­

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429

ably holy God? An indulgence infinitely holy, the indulgence
of omnipotence, the indulgence of unspeakable justice, the in­
dulgence of eternal love,—what can be conceived more beautiful,
more ravishing? Yet this is the Eternal Father. He, who lives
only for himself, seems to live exclusively for us. He, who is
adorably self-sufficient, only finds his sufficiency in the poverties
of our love. He will merge all his royalties in the single preroga­
tive of his Fatherhood. His length, his breadth, his depth, his
height,—all are in his compassionate Paternity. To himself, as
well as to us, his Paternity is enough. He will take no mission.
He will fill no office. He will exercise no judgment. Pater enim
non judicat quemquam: * the Father judgeth no one. He will
only be to us indulgence, reward, repose, a Father, a Bosom, a
Home. O Father! of all Fathers the most fatherlike! O uncreated
tenderness! O plenitude of paternal fondness! O dearest and
most blessed Person! so clearly seen, yet so adorably invisible,
so very near in love, yet so far off in majesty! how can we praise
thee but with our silence, how can we love thee but by the
passionate confession of our impossibility to love thee worthily?
Sweet Babe of Bethlehem. Show us the Father. It will be enough;
for there is no possible more that we can crave. It will not be
more than enough; for less will not content our craving. Simply,
as St. Philip said, he is enough,—the Father is enough!
Our relationship of brothers to Jesus is very sweet, and has
an independent sweetness of its own. But it also opens our way
deeper for us into the Paternity of the Father. We are more his
sons because we are the brothers of Jesus. He is more our Father
on that account. The Sacred Humanity has glorified us all with
its own excellent filiation. As in the days of Bethlehem the
Father imparted the shadows and rights of his blessed paternity
mysteriously to Mary and Joseph, and thus made the region of
the Infancy so glorious and so heaven-like, in like manner now
he will not leave us without similar consolations. He imparts
them to his priests in their relationship to our souls, and, above
all, in respect to the Blessed Sacrament. It is part of our Father’s
love that inside the pale of the Church earth should be one per­
St. John v. 22.

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petual, and even ubiquitous, Bethlehem. The Infant Jesus, the
joy of the Father and our joy, is forever there, and in him the
Father declared, with rare expletive, that he was well pleased.·
Still on the altar and in the tabernacle the Babe of Bethlehem is
increasing the glory of the Father. Still is he giving breadth and
space to his Father’s love by the multitude of the redeemed. Still
is he furnishing his Father with new opportunities of communi­
cating his Paternity to new children and in new graces. Still is
the novelty of the service and the love which the Father received
from the Babe of Bethlehem as new as ever, if not more wonder­
fully new, upon the altar. Still is every Mass illustrating all the
Father’s perfections in that work of his predilection, the work of
abbreviating his long, eternally spoken and unbrokenly uttered
Word. By the Father’s love we live in Bethlehem. Little Bethlehemite Calvaries we find there, whereon love tenderly crucifies
us, sparing more than it punishes, and punishing, not to punish,
but that it may more abundantly reward. To the great Calvary
we never go. The Father laid that only on our Eldest Brother.
It is not for such as we are. Our homes are Bethlehem and
Nazareth. We have our Desert and our Egypt for seasons; but
only the shadow of Calvary. More than the shadow of it our
Father cannot bear should fall upon us. How can we say what
we feel of this benignity of our Father? We will think of Mary,
and yet say that when a father is indulgent he is more indulgent
than a mother. Little ones treat their mother as the authority
of rule, and their father as the authority of dispensation; and
mothers are well pleased their children should use them so, in
order that they may thus childishly express the love they bear
their fathers, which is all too great for their little words to hold.
It is a mother’s noblest joy to watch her child increasing in love
of its father and in its father’s love.
It is easy, then, for us to discern the spirit of devotion to the
Eternal Father. A few words will depict it. It is a devotion
of immense tenderness. Tenderness is its leading feature. We
might almost say that it is all tenderness; for no tenderness is
• In quo bene complacui.

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truly tender which is not kept pure by fear. This devotion is
at least the fountain of all tenderness in us, and of all blameless
liberty of spirit. It is the charter of the Soul. It is the fulfilling
of the significancy of our creation. It is in itself the most abun
dant and the most unalloyed communication of the spirit of
Jesus. It is the ultimate devotion, and so the devotion of devo­
tions, the last point to which devotion can reach in its upward
ascension, that which is behind and beyond all else, except it be
devotion to the mystery of the most Holy Trinity. May we dare
to say it? it is in human things a sort of reverential imitation of
the love of the Word and the Holy Ghost for the coequal Father
in divine things. Nay, we must dare yet again: it is also an imita­
tion of the Father himself, eternally generating the Son by the
knowledge of himself, and with the Son eternally breathing out
the Holy Ghost as their mutual love; for it is in the knowledge
and love of him, and in union with his Son, and with the utter­
ance of the Spirit’s voice, that this devotion consists.
We have begun with the Bosom of the Father. We have ended
at his Feet. The Bosom and the Feet of the Father represent all
mysteries. Because of the Incarnate Word in his Bosom, a crea­
tion is called into existence, to lie forever at his Feet. That part
of creation which shares the created nature of the Incarnate
Word falls wilfully from the Father’s Feet. Angels who fell are
let to fall, because they did not share that nature. Men, because
they shared it, are brought back by the man-loving Word. He
who is in the Bosom comes forth, lays himself at the feet of men,
wins their love, raises them by their own love-extorted permis­
sion and lays them again—those who will permit him—in eternal
safety at the Father’s Feet. This is the history of creation. So
Creation and Incarnation, which might have been two mysteries
but were actually one, are expressed in these seven wonders of
God’s world:—An Incarnate Word in the Father’s Bosom,—A
world modelled on him at the Father’s Feet,—A world sharing
the created nature of the Word who dwelt in the Father’s Bosom,
—A world fallen from the Father’s Feet,—A world sought by
the Word from the Father’s Bosom,—A world reconquered and

BETHLEHEM

432

laid triumphantly at the Father's Feet—The Word re-entered,
and dwelling evermore in his created nature, in the Father’s
Bosom.
We have done. How unworldly is the spirit of the land of
Bethlehem! It has led us up into the heights of the Eternal
Word, and down into the depths of his unfathomable abasement.
There have been joy and sorrow. Tears have become Blood,
and Blood Tears, and then both of them Smiles. The Crib has
glanced into the Cross, and the Cross melted off into the vision
of the Crib. Now at length the Childhood of the Eternal has
sweetly cast us back on the very living fountain of eternity, the
First Person of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. The
Eternal Child and the Ancient of Days have come together. They
are one. The Babe on Mary's lap—an earthly Mother's lap—has
lifted us up above ourselves, and has borne us swiftly and softly
as a dove’s flight, and has laid us and left usuin our old home,
now a secure, everlasting home, the Feet of our Eternal Father.

Date Due
M .18'56 ! IA9

deci

se

DEC 15'56

'60

PE 7

OCT 1 8 '65

ttf JAN

UA5, '61
■ 'o6

Jan 5 '57
fE8 2?'57
>.· · ■
N01/5 ST

>171957
DEC 10'57
DEC 1τ st

JW 2 8'61
JA11 '62
AP 10'62

NO 2 b’65

Ofl 11 in
NO 2 6 '6J

■

4 '67

232.92
Fllô.lb

Faber.
Bethlehem.
22197

232.92
Fl 15-1 b
Faber.
Bethlehem.

22197

l_ibrarY