THE

FOOT OF THE CROSS
OR

THE SORROWS OF MARY

BY

FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, D. D.
Author of
"All for Jesus," "Growth in Holiness," "The Blessed Sacrament,"
"Creator and the Creature," "Bethlehem," etc., etc., etc.

"Tanto dolore compassa est Virgo, ut inexplicabile sit linguæ angelica:; et
solus Jesus dicere potuit, qui solus potuit maternos penetrare dolores."
St. Bernardine of Siena.

NEW EDITION

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

Nihil Obsiat

Joseph A. M. Quigley
Censor Librorum

Imprimatur
ψ J. F. O'Hara, C.S.C.

Archiepiscopus Philadelphiensis

Feast of the Assumption, 1956

TO

THE LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
THIS VOLUME
IS INSCRIBED IN AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE OF A
SEASON OF DARKNESS
WHICH GOD CONSECRATED FOR HIMSELF

BY A MORE THAN COMMON SORROW

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I

The Martyrdom of Mary
SEC.

I

PAGE

The Immensity of Our Lady’s Dolors ................

II Why God Permitted Our Lady’s Dolors..............
III The Fountains of Our Lady’s Dolors...................
IV The Characteristics of Our Lady’s Dolors .......
V How Our Lady Could Rejoice in Her Dolors .
VI The Way in Which the Church Puts Our Lady’s
Dolors Before Us .....................................
62
VII The Spirit of Devotion to Our Lady’s Dolors ..

15
27
36
48
58

65

CHAPTER II
The First Dolor

The Prophecy of St. Simeon ..........................................

74

CHAPTER III
The Second Dolor
The Flight into Egypt ..................................................

CHAPTER IV
The Third Dolor

The Three Days' Loss .....................................................
vii

107
IW/

CHAPTER V

The Fourth Dolor

Meeting Jesus

with the

Cross ..............................................

CHAPTER VI

The Fifth Dolor
The Crucifixion ..........................................................................

240

CHAPTER VII

The Sixth Dolor

The Taking Down

from the

Cross ......................................

286

CHAPTER VIII

The Seventh Dolor
The Burial

of

Jesus ..................................................................

329

CHAPTER IX
The Compassion of Mary
sec.

rage

The Divine Purpose

Mary’s Compassion..........

368

Her Compassion ............................

380

III The Actual Effects of Her Compassion ................
IV Our Compassion with Her Compassion ..................
V The Passion and Compassion Compared ................
VI The Seeming Excess of the Compassion ..................
VII The Measures of Mary's Compassion ...................

388
394
400
402
404

I
II

The Nature

of

of

PREFACE
This Treatise was sketched for the first time at St. Wilfrid’s
in the summer of 1847, more than ten years ago. It has, however,
been several times revised, and more than once entirely recast.
It was not, however, finally settled in its present shape until the
spring of 1855; for not till then was the Author satisfied with
the consistency of our Lady’s position throughout, nor with its
adaptation to the requirements of scholastic theology. The Author
has had the completed Treatise by him for some time, as the stage
of preparation in which his materials were for a work on the
Passion rendered it necessary for him to ascertain how much of
that ground would be occupied by the Dolors, and in what
manner; and it appeared better to compose the present Treatise,
and even finish it for the press, before advancing his book on the
Passion into another stage of its preparations, in order that the
ultimate harmony between the two might be the more complete.
But, as the time was not come for the publication of the Dolors
in its predetermined place in the series of books which the Author
has planned, it was laid by until its turn should arrive.
It is now twelve years since the Author became a tertiary of
the ancient Order of the Servîtes, and so bound to advance, as
much as he might be able to do so, the Devotion to the Seven
Dolors; and he has always confessed to himself the obligation.
When the London Oratory was founded in 1849, the Rosary of
the Seven Dolors was adopted as one of its public characteristic
practices, and other measures were taken with success to propa­
gate the devotion. There seems some warrant for believing that
graces and blessings have accompanied this humble apostolate of
that practice so dear to our Blessed Mother.
The Treatise is now submitted with much diffidence to those
who love our Lady’s honor, and the spread of all devotion to her,
ix

PREFACE

with a hope that they may feel less disappointment in reading
it than the Author has done in writing it, and may not be
haunted, as he has been throughout, with an ideal which he
could not reach, and a vexation that, when he had said all he
could in the best way he could, it should always seem so little to
be said of Mary, that it almost appeared as if it had better not
have been said at all. The thought of the love that prompted the
endeavor is, however, some compensation for the imperfection
of its success.
The London Oratory,
Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, 1857.

Chapter I

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY
The beauty of Jesus is inexhaustible. Like the Vision of God
in heaven, it is ever diversified, yet always the same, always
cherished as an old and familiar joy, yet ever surprising and
refreshing the spirit as being, in truth, perpetually new. He is
beautiful always, beautiful everywhere, in the disfigurement of
the Passion as well as in the splendor of the Resurrection, amid
the horrors of the Scourging as well as amid the indescribable
attractions of Bethlehem. But above all things our Blessed Lord
is beautiful in His Mother. If we love Him we must love her.
We must know her in order to know Him. As there is no true
devotion to His Sacred Humanity, which is not mindful of His
Divinity, so there is no adequate love of the Son, which disjoins
Him from His Mother, and lays her aside as a mere instrument,
whom God chose as He might choose an inanimate thing, without
regard to its sanctity or moral fitness. Now it is our daily task
to love Jesus more and more. Year follows year; the old course
of feasts comes round; the well-known divisions of the Christian
year overtake us, make their impression upon us, and go their way.
How we have multiplied Christmases, and Holy Weeks, and
Whitsuntides, and there has been something or other in each
of them which makes them lie like dates in our mind! We
have spent some of them in one place, and some in another,
some under one set of circumstances, and some under another.
Some of them, all thanks to Godl have been distinguished by
remarkable openings of heart in our interior life, such as to
change or to intensify our devotion, and materially influence
our secret relations with God. The foundations of many build­
ings, which did not rise above ground till long afterward, have
11

12

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

been laid almost unconsciously in those times. Yet whatever may
have been the changes which these feasts have brought or seen,
they have always found us busy at one and the same work, trying
to love Jesus more and more: and through all these changes,
and in all this perseverance at our one work, unerring experience
has told us that we never advance more rapidly in love of the
Son than when we travel by the Mother, and that what we have
built most solidly in Jesus has been built with Mary. There is
no time lost in seeking Him, if we go at once to Mary; for He
is always there, always at home. The darkness in His mysteries
becomes light when we hold it to her light, which is His light
as well. She is the short road to Him. She has the “grand entry”
to Him. She is His Esther, and speedy and full are the answers
to the petitions which her hand presents.
But Mary is a world, which we cannot take in all at one
glance. We must devote ourselves to particular mysteries. We
must set aside certain regions of this world of grace, and con­
centrate ourselves upon them. We must survey them and map
them accurately, before we pass on to other regions, and then
we shall learn much, which a general view would have omitted
to notice, and store our souls with spiritual riches, riches both
of knowledge and of love, which will draw us evermore into
communion with our dearest Lord. As God's blessed will still
persists in keeping us alive, and for His own gracious purposes
detaining us amid all this cold weariness and these dejecting
possibilities of sin, let us at least determine to occupy ourselves
with nothing but God; for we have long since learned that there
is truly no other occupation which is worth our while. He has
a thousand Edens still, even in the bleak expanse of this salt
steppe of a world, where we may work, to the sound of running
waters, not without colloquies with Him in the cool time of the
day; and we may wander from Eden to Eden, either as the
weakness or the strength of our love impels us. For the present
let us shut ourselves up in the garden of Mary’s sorrows. It is
one of God's choicest Edens, and we cannot work there otherwise
than under the shadow of His presence, nor without the love of

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

13

Jesus taking a marvellous possession of our souls. For love of
Jesus is in the very viewless air of the place, in the smell of the
upturned soil, in the fragrance of the flowers, in the rustling of
the leaves, in the songs of the birds, in the shining of the sun,
in the quiet tunes of the waterfalls as they dash down its rocky
places. There for a while, for our Lord’s love, we will enclose
ourselves as in a cloistered place, and let the world, in which
we are of no great importance, and which is even of less im­
portance to us than we are to it, miss us for a season from our post.
The law of the Incarnation is a law of suffering. Our Blessed
Lord was the man of sorrows, and by suffering He redeemed the
world. His Passion was not a mystery detached from the rest of
His life, but only the fitting and congruous end of it. Calvary
was not unlike Bethlehem and Nazareth. It exceeded them in
degree; it did not differ from them in kind. The whole of the
Three-and-Thirty Years was spent in consistent suffering, though
it was of various kinds, and not of uniform intensity. This same
law of suffering, which belongs to Jesus, touches all who come
nigh Him, and in proportion to their holiness, envelops them, and
claims them wholly for itself. The Holy Innocents were, in the
counsels of God, simply our Lord's contemporaries, but that is
similitude enough to plunge them in a sea of suffering, and for
His sake their fresh lives must bleed away in their distracted
mother’s arms, to be followed by eternal crowns and palms: a
happy merchandise, a huge fortune swiftly made, and then so
marvellously secured! The same law wound itself round each of
the apostles, upon whom the indescribably blessed choice of the
Incarnate Word had fallen. It was a cross to Peter and his
brother, a sword to Paul, hard stones to James, the flaying-knife
to Bartholomew, and the boiling oil and the long years of weari­
some delay to John. But, in whatever shape it came outwardly,
inwardly it was always suffering. It went with them into all lands.
It overshadowed them in all vicissitudes. It walked with them
along the Roman roads, as if it was their guardian angel; it strode
by the side of their uneasy galleys on the stormy waters of the
Mediterranean. They were apostles. They must be like their

14

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

Lord. T hey must enter into the cloud, and the darkness of the
eclipse must fall upon them on the top of some Calvary or other,
from Rome to Bactria, from Spain to Hindostan. The same law
has environed the martyrs of all ages. Their passions have been
living shadows of the great Passion, and the blood they shed
mingled its kindred stream with the Precious Blood of their
Redeemer, the King of Martyrs. So with the saints. Whether they
have been bishops or doctors, virgins or matrons, seculars or
religious, unusual love and unusual grace have always reached
them in the shape of unusual trial and unusual suffering. They
too must be drawn into the cloud, and they will come out of it
with their faces shining, because they have seen, and seen closely,
the Face of the Crucified. It is so in its measure with all the elect.
They must stand at least within the fringes of the dark cloud, or
it must overshadow them in transit, perhaps more than once, in
order to secure the salvation of their souls by giving them at
least an adequate likeness to their Lord. What, then, must we
think of His Mother, who came nighest to Him of all?
It can plainly be no wonder, if she shall suffer more than
any one but Himself. The immensity of her sorrows will neither
be a distress nor a surprise to us, but rather the obvious conclu­
sion from all we know of the grand mystery of the Incarnation.
The amount of her sufferings will be the index of the magnificence
of His love for her. The depth of her pains will come the nearest
of all things to fathom the abyss of her love for Him. Her farrolling sea of sorrow will measure the grandeur of her holiness.
The loftiness of her divine Maternity will raise her dolors close
up to His gracious Passion. Her sinlessness will almost seem to
enclose it within the same life-giving law of expiation. Her union
with Him will render her Compassion inseparable from His
Passion, even while for a thousand reasons it is so manifestly
distinguishable from it. The Woman clothed with the Sun will be
wrapped round and round with the bright darkness of that same
terrible destiny, which He vouchsafed first to appoint and then
to accept as the great law of His Incarnation. We must be pre­
pared to find Mary’s dolors beyond the reach of our imagination.

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

15

above the possibility of our description. We can only gaze upon
them with such instruments as faith and love supply, and note
the beauty and the strangeness of many phenomena which we can
only imperfectly comprehend. Especially can we thus increase
our devotion to the Passion, many unknown regions of which
are momentarily lighted up for us by the contact of her dolors,
just as in the occultation of Jupiter, the luminous, tearlike planet,
as it touches the dark portion of the moon, scatters a momentary
line of light along the unseen edge, like a revelation, and then
by its disappearance proves the reality of that which we cannot see.
But, before we ask St. John the Evangelist to hold us by the
hand, and go down with us into the depths of that broken heart,
which he, the saint of the Sacred Heart, knew better than others,
we must take a general view of our Blessed Lady’s dolors, just
as we familiarize ourselves with the general outlines of the geogra­
phy of a country before we endeavor to master its details. There
are seven points, on which it is necessary for us to have some
information, before we can study with advantage the separate
mysteries of her surpassing sorrow. We must know, as far at
least as lies in our power, the immensity of her dolors, why God
permitted them, what were the fountains of them, and what
their characteristics, how it was that she could rejoice in them, in
what way the Church puts them before us, and what should be
the spirit of our devotion to them. These are questions which
need answering; and the answers to them, however imperfect,
will serve as a sort of introduction to the subject.

Section I
THE IMMENSITY OF OUR LADY’S DOLORS

When we think how we can best describe our Lady’s dolors,
it gradually dawns upon us that they are in fact indescribable.
We see but the outside show of them, and there are no adequate
figures by which even that can be represented. He who looks over

16

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

the wide Atlantic sees a waste of waters with a white horizon on
every side; but that waste of waters tells nothing either of the
multitudinous manifold life which it contains within its bosom,
nor of the fairy-like ocean-gardens of vivid, painted weeds, its
woods of purple, deep thickets of most golden green, grottoes of
fantastic rock with tufted palmlike yellow trees overhanging, and
the blue water flowing all round, parklike vistas of glossy, spotted,
arborescent herbs, or leagues on leagues of rose-colored forests
teeming with strange, beautiful, heretofore unimaginable life.
So is it with the sea of sorrows which rolls over the secret depths
of the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God. What we see is
amazing, yet it hardly indicates what is below. How then shall
we say what her woes are like? Holy men have tried to do so,
and they have done it by calling her the co-redemptress of the
world, and speaking of her sorrows as they blended with the
Precious Blood, and the two made but one sacrifice for the sins
of die world. There is a deep truth, and a most substantial one,
hidden under these great words, and yet they may easily be
understood in a sense in which they would not be true. They are
the expressions of an excellent devotion, striving to assist the
feebleness of our understandings to a true conception of Mary’s
grandeurs. They are accuracies, not exaggerations. Yet they
need cautious wording and careful explanation. We shall con­
sider them in the ninth chapter; and in the rest of the treatise
we shall travel to our end by some other road, not only because
we dare not trust ourselves to such a method of procedure, but
also because it is against our habits and predilections, and in
matters of devotion what does not come natural is not persuasive.
We will prefer therefore to approximate to our subject, in­
evitably falling short, rather than to overshoot it, making things
indistinct by too strong a light, and dissatisfying by a feeling of
unreality like a sunset in the hands of an unskilful painter. We
shall come at last to the same end, in a manner which is not
only most fitted to our own infirmity, but also most calculated
to win the confidence of our readers.
The first thing, then, which strikes us about our Lady’s dolors

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

17

is their immensity, not in its literal meaning, but in the «ense
in which we commonly use it with reference to created things.
It is to her sorrows that the Church applies those words of
Jeremias,* O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there
be any sorrow like to my sorrow. To what shall I compare thee,
and to what shall I liken thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? To
what shall I equal thee, that I may comfort thee. O virgin
daughter of Zion? for great as the sea is thy broken-heartedness
who shall heal thee? Mary’s love is spoken of as that svhich many
waters could not quench. In like manner the saints and doctors
of the Church have spoken of the greatness of her sorrows. St
Anselm f says, Whatever cruelty was exercised upon the bodies of
the martyrs was light, or rather it was as nothing, compared to
the cruelty of Mary’s passion. St. Bernardine of Siena | says that
so great was the dolor of the Blessed Virgin that if it was sub­
divided and parcelled out among all creatures capable of suffering
they would perish instantly. An angel § revealed to St. Bridget
that if our Lord had not miraculously supported His Mother, it
would not have been possible for her to live through her martyr
dom. It would be easy to multiply similar passages, both from
the revelations of the saints and the writings of the doctors of
the Church.
But the immensity of Mary’s dolors is especially shown in this,
that they exceeded all martyrdom. Not only was there never any
martyr, however prolonged and complicated his tortures may
have been, who equalled her in suffering; but the united agonies
of all the martyrs, variety and intensity all duly allowed for, did
not approach to the anguish of her martyrdom. No thoughtful
man will ever speak lightly of the mystery of bodily pain. Possibly
in that respect his own experience may have shamed him into
wisdom. It was in a great measure through bodily pain that the
world was redeemed; and is it not mainly by the same process
that we ourselves are being sanctified at this hour? It is the un• Lament., i. and ii.
t De excell. Virg., cap. 5.
t Ap Novatum, i. 359. Also Sinischalchi, Preface to his Polori di Mana, p. xt.
§ In sermone angelico ap Revelat. S. Birgittae. c. 17

18

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

erring justice of God which places on the heads of the martyrs
that peculiar crown which belongs to those who, in the heroism
of physical endurance, have laid down their lives for Christ. But
even in respect of corporeal anguish Mary exceeded the martyrs.
Her whole being was drenched with bitterness. The swords in
her soul reached to every nerve and fibre in her frame, and we
can hardly doubt but that her sinless body, with its exquisite per­
fections, was delicately framed for suffering beyond all others
but that of her Son. Moreover, in the case of the martyrs, they
had long looked at their flesh as their enemy and their hinderance
on the heavenward road. They had punished it, mortified it,
cruelly kept it under, until they had come to regard it with a
kind of holy hatred. Hers was sinless. It was the marvellous
mine, the purest, sublimest matter that the world knew, out of
which our Lord’s Sacred Flesh and Precious Blood had been
obtained, and she could know nothing of that exulting revenge
with which heroic sanctity triumphs in the sufferings of the flesh.
But what is the grand support of the martyrs in their tortures?
It is that their minds are full of light and radiance. It is
that their inward eye is bent on Jesus, by whose beauty and glory
they are fortified. It is this which puts out the fires, or makes
them pleasant as the flapping of the warm wind in spring. It is
this which makes the scourges fall so soft and smooth, and
causes the lash to cheer like wine. It is this which makes the
sharpness of the steel so dull to the divided flesh and wounded
fibres. What is within them is stronger than that which is without
them. It is not that their agonies are not real, but that they are
tempered, counteracted, almost metamorphosed, by the succors
which their soul supplies, from the influx of grace and love where­
with their generous Master is at that moment filling them to over­
flowing. But where is Mary to look, with her soul’s eye, for
consolation? Nay, her soul’s eye must look where her body’s
eye is fixed already. It is bent on Jesus; and it is that very sight
which is her torture. She sees His Human Nature; and she is
the mother, the mother beyond all other mothers, loving as
never mother loved before, as all mothers together could not

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

19

love, if they might compact their myriad loves into one intensest
nameless act. He is her Son, and such a Son, and in so marvellous
a way her Son. He is her treasure and her all. What a fund of
mystery—keen, quick, deadly, unequalled—was there in that
sight! And yet there was far more than that. There was His
Divine Nature.
We talk of mothers making idols of their sons; that is, wor­
shipping them, turning them from creatures into creators, regard­
ing them as truly their last end and true beatitude, so giving
their hearts to them as they have no right to give them to any one
but God. This Mary could not do, and yet in another sense might
well do. For Jesus could be no idol, and yet must of necessity be
worshipped as the Eternal God. None saw this as Mary did. No
angel worshipped Him with such sublimely abject adoration as
she did. No saint, not even the dear Magdalen, ever hung over
His feet with such mortal yearning, with such human fondness.
Yesl He is God,—she saw that through the darkness of the
eclipse. But then the blood,—the spittings, the earth-stains, the
unseemly scars, the livid, many-colored bruises,—what did all
that mean on a Person only and eternally divine? It is vain to
think of giving a name to such misery as then flooded her soul.
Jesus, the joy of the martyrs, is the executioner of His mother.
Twice over, to say the least, if not a third time also, did He
crucify her; once by His Human Nature, once by His Divine,
if indeed Body and Soul did not make two crucifixions from
the Human Nature only. No martyrdom was ever like this. No
given number of martyrdoms approach to a comparison with it.
It is a sum of sorrow which material units, ever so many added
together, ever so often multiplied, do not go to form. It is a
question of kind as well as of degree; and hers was a kind of
sorrow which has only certain affinities to any other kinds of sor­
row, and is simply without a name, except the name which the
simple children of the Church call it by, the Dolors of Mary.
Her dolors may also be called immense, because of the propor­
tions which they bore to other things in her; for even immensity
must have proportions in its way. If she was to sorrow perfectly,—

20

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

if after Jesus, and because of Jesus, she was to have a pre-eminence
of sorrow,—then her sorrows must be proportioned to her great­
ness. But she was the Mother of God! Who will take the altitude
of that greatness? St. Thomas tried to do so, and said that omnip­
otence itself could not contrive a greater greatness. It had done
its utmost, though it has no utmost, when it had imagined and
effected the dignity of the Divine Motherhood. What are we to a
saint, or a saint to the highest angel, or the highest angel to Mary?
Perhaps we are nearer—it is to be suspected that we are much
nearer—to Michael or Raphael, than they are to Mary; yet it is
weary even for a strong mind to think how far off we are from
those tremendous intelligences and uncomprehended sanctities.
Yet a sorrow proportioned to our capacities, and even indulgently
measured to our grace, can be something so terrific that it makes
us dizzy to think of what God might will about us. And then,
what can those spirits bear, and yet perish not, who have left
the world wrongly, and fallen out of time when there was no
root of eternity within them? Their strength is laden now in
their hopeless home, yet not overladen; and who thinks of their
burden without forthwith hiding his thoughts in God, lest some­
thing should happen to him, he knows not what? Yet Mary’s soul
was as immortal, as indestructible, as their spirits, and stronger
far; and her body was miraculously supported by the same om­
nipotence which confers an imperishable resurrection. Nay, it
was perhaps the same blessed Sacrament unconsumed within her,
and in all of us the seed of a glorious resurrection, which was
the miracle that kept her standing and alive at the foot of the
bleeding Cross. What then must that sorrow have been which
was proportioned to her greatness, to the greatness of the Mother
of God, to her vast strength to bear, to her manifold capability
of suffering? If we pause and think, we shall see how little our
thinking comes to.
But her dolors must have been proportioned also to her sanc­
tity. The trials of the saints have always an analogy with their
holiness, and match it in degree as well as adapt themselves to it
in its kind. If Mary’s sorrow was the work of God, and was to

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

21

do work for Him,—if it was meritorious, if it closely resembled
our Lord's, if it hung to His, subordinate^, yet inseparably, if it
was populous with supernatural actions, if it multiplied her
graces,—then must it have been suitable to the excellences of
her soul, and proportioned to her sanctity. But that arithmetic
of Mary’s merits has long been a bewildering question; bewilder­
ing, not because a shadow of doubt hangs over, but for the want
of ciphers to write it down in—of factors whereby to work the
gigantic multiplication. The holiness of the Mother of God was
not absolutely illimitable; and this is the lowest thing which can
be said about it. If then we cast the most cursory glance over the
number of her graces, their kinds, and their degrees, if starting
at the Immaculate Conception we make a sort of reckoning up
to the Incarnation, using angels' figures because men's have failed
us long ago; and then if we think, however briefly, of the wav in
which at the moment of the Incarnation our figures fell over into
the infinite, or something very like it; and then if sve contemplate,
stupidly and wildly as sve must do, the velocity of indefinable
grace during three-and-thirty years, all thickly strewn with infinite
mysteries, we may form some idea, not of the amount of sanctits
ready to bear its proportionate amount of sorrow at the foot of
the Cross, but of the impossibility of our forming any clear idea
of such a sanctity at all. So that sve go asvay with a most overwhelming impression, but it is an impression like a faith, of the
enormous sveight of suffering svhich such a sanctity required, in
order to engross it, to match it, to accelerate it, to complete it. to
crosvn it, and to augment it by another infinity.
Neither can sve doubt that her sorrows were proportioned to
her enlightenment. Knowledge alsvays puts an edge on grief. Sen­
sibility gives it additional acuteness. For the most part, when we
suffer sve hardly know half our actual misfortune, because we
hardly understand more than half of it. Neither are we generally
in full possession of ourselves. Some part of us is deadened and
dulled by the blosv svhich has been dealt us, and all that portion
of our soul is a refuge to us from the sensitiveness and vigilance
of the rest. A child sveeps when his mother dies; but alas! hosv

22

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

many a long year it takes to teach both boy and man what a
mother’s loss really means! Now, our Lady’s whole being was
flooded with light. Not only did a reason and intelligence of
the most consummate perfection illuminate every faculty, and
secure the utmost excellence in the exercise of it, but she lived
within herself in a very atmosphere of supernatural air and light.
In her dolors this light was a torture to her. We may well suppose
that no one, except our Blessed Lord Himself, ever fully under­
stood the Passion, or grasped all its horrors in their terrible and
repulsive completeness. Yet Mary’s knowledge of it is the only
one which came at all near to His, and simply because of the
excess of heavenly light which shone unsettingly upon her sinless
soul. We have but narrow ideas of the light which God can pour
into the spacious intelligences of the angels, much less into the
vast amplitude and serene capacity of His Blessed Mother. Hence
it is that we find the theology of the Beatific Vision so singularly
difficult. What blindness is to the blind, and deafness to the deaf,
that is ignorance to us. We cannot comprehend its opposite. We
make guesses, and draw the most erroneous pictures. Our way
lies through darkness, and the twilight is the utmost our weak
sight can bear. Light is painful to us, and puzzles us, and troubles
our thoughts, and makes us precipitate. Even with the saints,
sudden light let in upon them acts as with us, and partially blinds
them, until they learn how to suffer the keen ecstatic operations
of grace. It brings to mind what a devout writer on the Passion
has said of our Lord, following probably some revelation, that
after he had been violently struck by the gauntleted hand of the
soldier His eyes were so affected that He could not bear the light,
so that the sunshine caused exquisite suffering, and He went
about through the streets from shame to shame, from violence to
violence, like one dazed, and that can only imperfectly see his
way. Ignorance is so completely our atmosphere, that we can
conceive less of an excess of spiritual light, an intellectual
effulgence, than of anything else. So here again the extent of our
Lady’s sorrows escapes us, as we have no means of measuring

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

23

the supernatural enlightenment to which they were proportioned,
or which perhaps rendered them co extensive with itself.
Their multitude is equally beyond our powers of measure
ment. Every look at Jesus drove the swords deeper into her soul.
Every sound of His dear voice, while it lifted her far up on
the wings of maternal transport, brought with it its own bitter
ness, which pierced all the deeper and the keener for the joy
that went along with it. Every action of His came to her with
a multitude of pains, in which past and future blended in one
terrible provision which was always actual to her blessed soul.
Every supernatural act which rose up within her heart, and such
acts were forever rising there, was a new dolor; for either it taught
her something new of Jesus, or it was a response to some fresh
love of His, or it was a growth of new love in her, or it drew
her into closer union with Him, or it illuminated her mind, or
it ravished her affections, or it intensified her worship; and in all
these things the dearer and the more precious our blessed Lord
became to her, the more unutterable were the heart-rending woes
of the cruel and ignominious Passion. Thus, full as her life was
of great events, rapidly succeeding each other, the multitude of
her sorrows was being swollen every hour by the mere hidden
life of grace in her heart. They came together like the streams
of people in a huge city, swelling the crowd from every side, and
swaying it to and fro. They were independent of external events,
whose necessary sequence, with the time and room they occupy,
keeps the intolerable fulness of human life within limits. It was
more like a perpetual creation. They created themselves, only
it was not out of nothing: it was out of her own exceeding holiness,
and still more out of the exceeding beauty of her Son. If the
number of her woes is beyond our power of counting, what must
their pressure have been, when they concentrated themselves as
one weight upon one point of her affections, and then ever and
anon distractedly dispersed themselves all over her soul with an
amazing universality of suffering, which it is not easy to picture
to ourselves? We need not fear for her. She who was as tranquil

24

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

as though she had been divine, in the moment of the Incarnation,
can forfeit her peace for nothing else: but oh, how bitter must her
peace have been! In pace amaritudo mea amarissima!
There was also another very true sense in which the sorrows
of Mary were immense, in that they were beyond the power of
human endurance. They went beyond the measure of the natural
strength of life. It is the unanimous verdict of the devout writers
on our Blessed Lady, supported by the revelations of the saints,
and indeed founded upon those revelations, that she was miracu­
lously kept alive under the pressure of her intolerable sufferings.
In this, as in so many other things, she participated in the gifts
of our Blessed Lord during His Passion. But this is true of our
Lady, not only during the horrors of Calvary, but throughout
her whole life. Her prevision of all her sorrows, at least from
the moment of St. Simeon’s prophecy, was so vivid and real, that,
without a peculiar succor from the omnipotence of God, it must
have separated her soul and body. She could not have lived under
so dense a shadow. She could not have breathed in so thick a
darkness. She must have been suffocated in the deep waters in
which her soul was continually sinking. It was impossible in so
perfect a creature that her reason should be perturbed. It was
impossible that peace should ever be dislodged from a heart in
such transcendently close union with God. But her beautiful
life might have been, nay, would have been, extinguished by
excess of sorrow, unless God had worked a perpetual miracle to
hinder this effect, just as through her whole life she was always on
the point of dying from excess of love, and when His appointed
moment came, and He withdrew His extraordinary succor, she
did in fact die of simple love. What then must that sorrow have
been, which required a standing miracle not to force body and
soul asunder; and this, too, in a sinless soul, where remorse could
never come, where doubt never harassed the judgment, unless it
were once during the Three Days' Loss, and where perpetual peace
reigned amid the quietness and subordination of all the passions?
Our Lady’s dolors also went in their reality beyond the
measure of most human realities, and this both in reason and

THF. MARTYRDOM OF MARY

25

sense. In our sorrows there is generally a great deal of exaggera­
tion. We fancy almost as much more as we have really to bear.
If our suffering comes from others, we dress it up in circumstances
of unkindness, which never had any existence. We impute mo­
tives, which never crossed the mind to which we impute them.
We throw a strong, unequal and unfair light on little trivial
occurrences, which are probably altogether disconnected from the
matter. Or if it is some loss we are undergoing, we picture con­
sequences far beyond the sober truth, and bearing about as much
proportion to the real inconveniences implied in our loss, as a
boy with a lantern bears to the prodigious tall shadows he is
all the while unconsciously casting on the opposite wall. The
combined weakness and activity of our imaginations envelop our
sorrosv in a cloud of unreality, which is still further increased by
a kind of foolish wilfulness, leading us to refuse comfort, and turn
a deaf ear to reason, to give way to culpable indolence and
brooding, and to interrupt the continuity of our ordinary duties
and responsibilities. Now in all this wilfulness and weakness
there is a sort of pleasure, which is a great condescension to
endurance. But with our Blessed Lady all was thoroughly true.
Her sorrows went up into regions of sublimity, of which we can
form only the vaguest conceptions. They went down into pro­
found depths of the soul, which we cannot explore because they
have no parallel in ourselves. They were heightened by the unappreciable perfection of her nature, by the exuberant abundance
of her grace, by the exceeding beauty of Jesus, and above all by
His Divinity. Each of these enhancements of her griefs carries
them out of sight of our limited capacities. But to her. in the
midst of the most serene self-collection, each was perfectly real,
thoroughly comprehended in all its bearings, and heroically
embraced with full intelligence of all that was either actual or
involved in it. Her physical nature, free from all the ruin of
disease, exempt from the disorganization consequent on sin, was
full of the keenest vitality, of the most delicate susceptibilities,
of the most tender and lively sensitiveness, and endowed with a
most fine and amazing capability of suffering. Hence there was

26

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

nothing, either in reason or sense, to deaden a single blow. Use
did not make her sorrows more tolerable. Continuity did not
confuse their distinctness. Not one of them was local; they were
felt all through, with a swift circulation and a fiery sharpness
which exempted no part of her body or soul from its piercing
anguish, nor gave so much as a transient dispensation to this
or that particular faculty. Tranquil herself with that unutterable
tranquility of hers, there was no repose in her sorrows. They
never left her. They never slept. They gave her no truce. Day
and night was their uproar heard round the walls of the city of
her soul. Day and night their flaming shafts fell in showers all
over her most sacred shrines. There was not one, a jot of whose
malice was lost upon her. She missed none of the bitterness. She
knew their full value, and had none of those surprises which
sometimes force us suddenly across great trials we hardly know
how. There was no succession in them, because they all stuck
in her, like Sebastian’s arrows, and their poisoned barbs were all
rankling there at once. It is terrific, this reality of Mary’s sorrows.
It is a feature of them which must not be forgotten when we
cease to speak of it, else we shall understand but very imperfectly
what has yet to follow. Truly this is an immense reality, such
as could not be found anywhere out of Jesus and Mary, another
participation in the depths of the Passion.
But these sorrows of hers had some sort of share in the redemp­
tion of the world; and this gives them a peculiar immensity of
their own. This, however, is a matter to be examined hereafter,
and at length. It is sufficient then to say now that by the ordinance
of God, Mary was mixed up with the Passion, that her dolors
were added to our Lord’s sufferings, not without a purpose, but,
as is the case with all divine things, with a most real and mysteri­
ous purpose, and that as the Mother and the Son can in no wise
be separated at any other point in the Thirty-Three Years, least
of all can they be separated on Calvary, where God has joined
them so markedly, and almost unexpectedly.
Of the diversified romance and artistic beauty of Mary’s
dolors we need not speak. Such things belong of right to all

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

27

divine works. Her compassion was part of the great epic of crea­
tion, a pathos and a plaintiveness not to be disjoined from the
sublimities and terrors and sacred panics of the Passion of the
Incarnate Word. But it is not touching poetry of which we are
in search. Rather it is plain piety, and a downright increase of
love of Mary, and of devotion to her Son. If there be one depart­
ment of practical religion from which we could desire that a sen­
tence of perpetual banishment were passed upon mere sentiment
and feeling, it would be the department of Mary. Mary is a great
reality of God, and sentiment is prone to rob us of our reality
by turning substance into fancy, solidity into prettiness, and so
overclothing the outside that we almost come to doubt whether
there be an inside at all. Let then the exceeding beauty of Mary's
martyrdom find us out, if it will, and catch us up into the air.
and surprise us into sweet tears, and calm the trouble of our sym­
pathies; but do not let us seek it, or go out of our doctrinal,
devotional way for it. Yet if artistic things can in any way increase
our genuine love of God, let even them be welcome.

Section II
WHY GOD PERMITTED OUR LADY’S DOLORS

But may we now ask why God permitted these dolors of Mary?
Is it reverent to institute such an inquiry? All things are reverent
which are done in love. We do not inquire because we are in
doubt, or as if we were calling God to account, or as though we
had a right to know; but we inquire in order that we may gain
fresh knowledge to mint into fresh love. Perhaps there is no one
work of God of which we are capable of knowing all the reasons,
or of understanding them if He vouchsafed to tell them. Things,
which God does, come out of infinite depths. But we find that
the more we know the more we love, and therefore we inquire
into many things, where love alone gives us the right of question­
ing, and the courage also. Why did God permit the dolors of His

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

Mother, whom He loved so unspeakably, who was sinless and had
nothing in herself to expiate by penance, and whose tears were in
no way needful to the Precious Blood which was of its sole self
the redemption of the world? Such reasons as we see on the surface
of the matter are these. It was because of His love for her. What
can love give, which is better than self? But, with Him, self was
suffering. Even in the matter of earthly greatness high destinies
are destinies of glorious pain and more than common trial. And
how human and earthly, even when most heavenly, is all in the
Three-and-Thirty Years! The same law which lies round Him
must also lie round her. She could not have a more passionate
wish than this in her tranquil soul. But the law is a law of suf­
fering, of sacrifice, of expiation, of ignominy, of abjection almost
touching on annihilation. She would have been a mere instrument
rather than a Mother had she been disjoined from all this, had
she lain like a quiet low-lying landscape with the sun on it, away
from the storm-enveloped glory of those heights of Calvary, more
terrible by far than the ledges of ancient Sinai. Is it not even
now, even to those far off from Him compared with the nearness
of His Mother, is it not the fashion of His love to show itself in
crosses? He left heaven because pain was such a paradise for
Him, and it was an exclusively terrestrial paradise; and if He
loved it so, He may well expect that those who love Him shall
love it also. Great graces are the mountain-chains thrown up by
the subterranean heavings of pain. Martyrdoms have crowns be­
longing to them of right. Was Mary to be uncrowned? Would
not the excess of His love for her be likewise an excess of suf­
fering? But why waste many words, when it is enough to appeal
to our own Christian instincts? What would an unsuffering
Mary be like? The idea implies nothing less than the disap­
pearance of the Madonna from the Church. An impassible In­
carnation would have brought in its train an unsuffering Mother;
but the passible Babe of Bethlehem has swathed His Mother in
the same bands of suffering which compass Himself. The keenness
of her martyrdom is the perfection of His filial piety.
The augmentation of her merits is another reason of her

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

29

dolors; and nowhere has the force of merit such velocity as in
suffering. Her being the Mother of God will not raise her high
in heaven, apart from the sanctifying grace preceding and fol­
lowing the dignity of the Divine Maternity. The greatness of
her dignity is an argument with us for the greatness of her grace,
because in the purposes of God the two things are inseparable;
and thus the dignity which we see is an index to us of the grace
which we do not see. Her exaltation must depend upon her merits,
and her merits must be acquired by lifelong suffering. Oh, who
shall tell the crowds of nameless raptures this day in heaven, and
within her soul, in which our Blessed Mother recognizes the
distinct rewards of each separate suffering, the special crown of
each supernatural act? And in all these, discerning it even through
the amazing excess of the recompense, she beholds a congruity.
a suitableness, to the sorrows rewarded, nay, even a sort of natural
growth of them, though in a supernatural way. For grace is not
a different thing from glory. It is only glory in exile, while glor­
is but grace at home. Grace is the solid treasure; glory is only its
exultation and success. So that huge Compassion of Mary's has
come to be glory by the ordinary and lawful processes of the king­
dom of heaven. Sixty-three years of ecstatic joys would never,
under the present dispensation of things, have raised that Ma­
ternal Throne in such extraordinary vicinity to God. The queen
of heaven must of necessity be trained as a queen, that she might
queen it the more lawfully and the more supremely when the day
of her accession came. The buoyancy of the Assumption was due
to the bitterness of the Compassion.
There is always a look of cruelty in high destinies. Fortune
drags its favorites through drawn swords. Mary's high destiny
is not without this look of cruelty, and that which seems so
cruel is the Divine Nature of her Son. It is the result of the
infinite perfection of God that He must necessarily seek Himself,
and be His own end. It is thus that He is the last end of all
creatures, and that there is no true end in the world but Himself.
Hence it is part of His magnificence, part of His deep love, (hat
all things were made for Him, and that His glory is paramount

30

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

over all things else. His greatest mercy to His creatures is to allow
them to contribute to His glory, and to permit them to do it
intelligently and voluntarily. Rightly considered, the creature
can have no blessedness so great as that of increasing the glory
of his Creator. It is the only true satisfaction both of his under­
standing and his will, the only thing which can be to him an
everlasting rest. Here then is another reason for the divine
permission of our Lady’s dolors. They were permitted in order
that God might receive from her more glory than from any other
creature whatsoever, or from all creatures taken together, always
excepting the created nature of our Blessed Lord. They were
permitted that she might have the surpassing privilege of being
equal to the whole creation in herself, nay, absolutely and tran­
scendently surpassing it, in the praise and worship, the glory
and adoration, which she paid to the Creator. Terrible as the
heights were which she had to climb, far removed beyond all
sympathy and intelligence of the saints, deep as were the torrents
of blood and tears through whose rocky channels she had to make
her way, exacting as were the mighty graces which claimed so
wonderful a correspondence, there was not a gift that Jesus
ever gave her which she prized so highly as her stern Compassion.
Oh, not for worlds would she have been excused one least exag­
gerating circumstance of her sorrow! In the very excess of the
most intolerable of her afflictions, she enjoyed in the spirit of
deep worship the inexorable sovereignty of God. It was God
who hung upon the Cross. Her Son was God. It was the Cruci­
fied, pale and faint and feeble and bleeding, whose glory was
more illimitable than the world-girdling ocean, and was feeding
itself with unimaginable complacence on the streams of super­
natural beauty and consummate holiness, which the deeply pierc­
ing swords of her grief were drawing from the caverns of her
immaculate heart. She as it were supplied for all that the saints
owed Him for His Passion but could never pay. At the foot of
the Cross she was the world’s worship; for what else in the world
was worshipping Him in His abasement at that hour? And all
this cruelty of God's avaricious glory, this insatiableness of His

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

31

thirst for creatures, was to her the perfection of delight, the
supremest exercise of her royalty, while it was on the part of
her Divine Son by far the most inconceivable outpouring of His
love which she had received since the midnight of the Incarna­
tion. The Church would be a different thing from what it is,
if the sea of Mary’s worship in her dolors were not part of its
beauty, its treasures, and its powers before God. We can think
less uneasily, less despondingly, of the unrequited Passion of our
dearest Lord, when we remember the sorrow, like no other sorrow
but His own, with which His Mother worshipped Him.
We too make our appearance in the matter. She must suffer
for our sakes as well as for His. For is she not to be the mother
of consolation, the comfort of the afflicted? And for this end she
must go down into the depths of every sorrow which the human
heart can feel. As far as a simple creature can do so, she must
fathom them all, and experience them in her own self, without
even excepting sorrow for sin, though it cannot be for sin of
her own, but in fact for ours. She must know the weight of our
burdens, and the kind of misery which each brings along with it.
It must be a science to her to be sure of the measure of consolation
which our weak hearts require in their various trials, and what
soothes and alleviates our suffering in all its manifold, unequal,
and dissimilar circumstances. Our Blessed Lord did not save us
from our sins by a golden apparition in the heavens, by a tran­
sient vision of the Cross shown in the far-seen glory from the
green dome of Tabor, or by an absolution once for all pro­
nounced over the outspread west from seaward-looking Carmel
It was not His will that redemption should have the facility of
creation, facility to Him at least, for to us the facilities are won­
derful enough. He accomplished our salvation in long years,
with infinite toilsome sufferings, out of abysses of shame, with
the shedding of His Blood, and with unutterable bitterness of
soul. He earned it, merited it, struggled for it, and only mastered
it by the prodigies of His Passion. All this need not have been so.
A word, a tear, a look, might have done it, nay, an act of will,
with or without an Incarnation. But it was not His good pleasure

32

THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

(hat it should be so. In His infinite wisdom He chose not to lean
on His infinite power alone, but took another way. So is it with
Mary. She is not at once created mother of the afflicted, as by
a sudden patent of nobility. She does not become the consolation
of mourners by a mere appointment emanating from the will of the
Divine Majesty. It might have been so, but it is not so. Her office
of our Mother is a long and painful conclusion worked out from
her Divine Maternity. She has toiled for it, suffered for it, borne
herculean burdens of sorrow in order to merit it, and has mastered
it at last on Calvary. Not that she could strictly merit such an
office, as Jesus merited the salvation of the world: nay, rather her
motherly office to us was part of the salvation which He merited.
Yet, nevertheless, according to a creature’s capacity, she came nigh
to meriting it, and met God’s gratuitous advances to her on the
way. How needful then was it for us that God should permit
her dolors! What would the sea of human sorrows be without
Mary's moonlight on it? The ocean, with the dark, heavy, over­
spread clouds lowering upon it, does not differ more widely
from the silvery plain of green and whitely flashing waters, exult­
ing in the sunlight, than the weary expanse of life's successive
cares, without the softening and almost alluring light which falls
upon it from Mary’s love, differs from life as it now lies before us
beneath her maternal throne. How many a tear has she not
already wiped away from our eyesl How many bitter tears has
she not made sweet in the shedding! And there is age, and the
yearly narrowing circle of those we love, and sickness, and death,
all yet to come; and to what amount may we not have to'draw
upon the treasure of consolations in her sinless heart? Oh, it
was well for us, and it was most entirely to her heart’s content,
that God permitted her dolors, that she might be so much the
more really the mother of the afflicted; for the heaviness of her
sorrows is daily the lightening of ours; and how little it is that we
can bear, and how great the load which she could bear, and how
royally she bore it!
Our Blessed Lord was at once our atonement and our ex­
ample. He redeemed the world solely by His Precious Blood.

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

33

By His merits alone are we saved. His prerogatives as our Re­
deemer are simply unshared by any one. His Mother had to
be redeemed as well as the rest of us, though in a different and
far higher way, by prevention, not by restoration, by the unmated
grace of the Immaculate Conception, not by regeneration from a
fallen state. Yet it was His will that His Mother, her office, her
consent, her graces, her sufferings, should be so mixed up with
the scheme of redemption that we cannot separate them from it.
It was His ordinance that her Compassion should lie dose by
His Passion, and that His Passion without her Compassion would
be a different Passion from what it actually was. Thus He seems
to draw her almost within the same law of expiation which sur­
rounded Himself, so that it should be true that there are many
senses in which she may be said to have taken part in the re­
demption of the world. But if this is true of Christ as our atone­
ment, where the union of the Divine Nature with the Human was
needful to the infinite satisfaction of the work, much more is it
true of Christ as our example. This was an office which she was
more nearly competent, through His own grace, to share with
Him; and one which the fact of her being simply a creature,
and altogether human, would bring more touchingly home to us.
Thus we may perhaps venture to suppose that God permitted the
dolors of Mary, in order that she might be all the more excel­
lently our example. Sorrow is more or less the characteristic of
all human life; and it is one which, while it contains within itself
special capabilities of union with God, also deranges and per­
turbs our relations with Him more than any thing else. It assaults
our confidence in Him, and confidence is the only true worship.
It engenders temptations against the faith, or finds something
congenial in them when they come. It leads to a certain kind of
peevishness and petulance with God, which comes from the very
depths of our nature, from the same depths as love and adora­
tion, and which, while it is secretly alien to both of these, often
succeeds in destroying both, and usurping their vacant places.
That this petulance is a true phenomenon of the creature's
nature is shown by the surprising manner in which God justifies

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

the petulance of Job, and finds sin that needed expiation in the
criticism of his friends upon him, while He, the Searcher of
hearts, discerns in Job's bold querulousness nothing that damages
the integrity of his patience, and much that is in harmony both
with reverence and love. The endurance of sorrow is perhaps
the highest and most arduous work we have to do, and it is for
the most part God’s ordinance that the amount of sorrow to
be endured should increase with the amount of holiness enabling
us to bear it. We must bear it naturally even while we are
bearing it supernaturally. There is no sanctity in unfeelingness,
or in the blunting of the soul, even when religious interests have
blunted it by a superior engrossment and a higher abstraction.
Spirituality no doubt hinders us from feeling many sorrows, and
no one will say that such indifference is not in many ways a
privilege. But it must not be confounded with an heroic endur­
ance of sorrow. To be heroic in this matter, the heart must feel
to the quick, and divine love must barb the more cruelly, and
drive the deeper in, the shafts with which we are wounded. Now,
in all this, Mary is our example, and a purely human example,
an example moreover which has as a matter of fact produced
such results of exceeding sanctity and supernatural gracefulness
in the Church, that we may safely venture the conjecture that it
was one of the reasons for which God permitted her surpassing
martyrdom.
There is yet another reason which we may dare to suggest
for the permission of her sorrows. As the Bible is a spoken
revelation, so in a certain sense Mary is an emblematical revela­
tion. God uses her as an instrument whereby to make many
things plain which would otherwise have rested in obscurity. It
is a line of thought familiar to theologians, which regards her as
a kind of image to the Most Holy Trinity. As the Daughter of
the Father, the Mother of the Son, and the Spouse of the Holy
Ghost, she shadows forth in herself, faintly of course because
she is a creature, but nevertheless truly, the relations of the Three
Divine Persons. She is as it were a still translucent lake in whose

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

35

bosom wonderful attributes of God, and far-distant heavenly
heights, are mirrored with faithful distinctness. We know more
of God’s mercy, of His condescension, of His intimacy with His
creatures, of His characteristic ways, because of the light which
He has made to shine on Mary, than we should else have known,
and we have come also to understand better what we either knew
or might have known in other ways. Thus God's perfection in
Himself, His dealings with His creatures, and the fashion of His
redeeming grace, the possibilities of holiness, the inventiveness
of divine love, His training of the saints, His guidance of the
Church, His inward walk with the souls that seek Him,—all these
things are written upon Mary like hieroglyphical inscriptions,
easily to be deciphered by the light of faith and the intelligent
surmises of devotion. So, by her dolors, He has hung about her
a complete revelation of the great mystery of suffering. He has
illuminated in her that pregnant doctrine, that suffering is the
only true conclusion to be drawn from love, where divine things
are concerned. She had no sin of her own for which to suffer.
She had no penalty to pay for the fall of Eve. She was not
included in the law of sin. She was, in the order of heaven's
purposes, foreseen before the decree permitting sin. She also
had no world to redeem. All her dear blood, the sweet fountain
and well head of the Precious Blood, could not have washed
away one venial sin, nor saved the soul of one new-born babe
who had no actual sin at all to expiate. She was simply im­
mersed in an unspeakable sea of love, and therefore the deluge
of sorrow passed over her soul, and into it, by right, just as the
great turbulent rivers run down unquestioned into the sea. Her
sufferings close the mouth of complaint forever. With sweet con­
straint and unanswerable persuasiveness they impose silence on
all the suffering children of our heavenly Father. The saints can
doubt no longer that suffering is the one grand similitude of
Christ. We too in our extreme lowness, whose patience is of so
thin a texture that it was threadbare almost when it was new,
learn, not to be silent only, but to bear with gentleness, and
even wistfully to think the time may come when we shall

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

actually love, that suffering which seems to be the golden coin
in which love repays our love.

Section III
THE FOUNTAINS OF OUR LADY’S DOLORS

We may now proceed to our third inquiry: What were the
fountains of our Lady's dolors? By fountains we do not exactly
mean causes, but rather the peculiar sources of feeling in her
heart, which gave to her sorrows their distinguishing bitterness.
When a mother loses her only son, the loss is of itself bitterness
enough; but a character and intensity are given to it by circum­
stances which awaken particular feelings within her breast. Either
he was so beautiful that the loss seems all the more intolerable,
or he was so full of moral or intellectual promise, or he was
taken so young, or there was something which, humanly speaking,
might have been so easily prevented in the actual cause of his
death, or there was a special combination of family circumstances
which just at that time made his death a greater blow than at
any other date it would have been; these, and similar things
which might be indefinitely multiplied, are centres of peculiar
bitterness round which sorrow gathers, deepening, broadening,
magnifying, embittering it, far beyond the measure of the real
affliction. Yet all these things are to the mourner the most stern
realities, and by no means imaginary or merely sentimental ag­
gravations. In the case of our Blessed Lady nothing could go
beyond the real affliction, because of Him whose sufferings were
the cause of hers. On the contrary, human sorrow, even Mary’s
sorrow, could not equal the real cause of grief. Nevertheless, there
were centres also in her heart round which her sorrows gathered
more thickly, and ached more cruelly, and throbbed more ve­
hemently than elsewhere. It is these centres which we must now
consider, these special fountains of perennial bitterness, premising
that of course the perfections of Mary’s heart are so far beyond

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37

our understanding, that there were doubtless many sources of
keen suffering to her which we cannot appreciate, perhaps not
even imagine, and that while we traverse the ground which is
known to us we must not forget all the regions which lie beyond
it still undiscovered, the exploring of which may perhaps be one
of the many delightful occupations left for heaven.
The first of these fountains was in the thought that she could
not die with Jesus. There is hardly any mother who would not
under such circumstances have longed to die. Death is better
than life to a broken heart; and where death is not a separation,
but an unbroken companionship, only a companionship trans­
ferred from the desolate earth to the bosom of our Heavenly
Father, to what stricken mother would it not have been a boon
beyond all worlds? How incomparably such to Mary! Never
was son so much to earthly mother as Jesus was to her; never
was any son so good and beautiful and dear a son, never any so
much a son. The rights of both father and mother centred in
the one heart of the Virgin Mother; so that He was twice her
Son, double her Son. Who can tell the attractions of His Sacred
Humanity, or how the love of Him took root in that deep
maternal heart? Then He was God beside, and for three-andthirty years had been living in obedience to her, in a union of
love so transporting that it would have taken her life a thousand
times if He had not hindered it, and that, not by tempering the
sweet vehemence of love, but by strengthening her heart with
His omnipotence. He was going. His sun was sinking in a red
sea of blood, among the wildest clouds of shame. She could never
forget. Calvary would be in her heart to the last. It would be
one of those remembrances which time could never soften, one
of those horrors which grow more horrible in the distance, when
we can take them in and not be confused by the presence of
their excess. But even if it were not so, Jesus would be gone,
and why should she live? What was there to live for? The sun­
shine was put out. It was more of an end than the end of the
world could be. It was a darkness inconceivable, nay, it might
appear a downright impossibility: for how was the world to go

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

on without Jesus? With the closing of His eyes, it might appear
as if all benediction were withdrawn from the earth, and a cold
freezing shade come over all its brightness. When His sweet
accents were heard no more, surely all nature would keep an
unbroken silence, unless those awful cries of the maddened
people were to go on multiplying and reverberating through all
space forever. The earth was to have Peter; Mary was to have
John. One was to be the apostle of the world, the other the
apostle of the Mother. But Jesus was to go.
But it is not only why should she live, but how could she
live? Was there a possibility of living without Jesus? None,
dearest Mother, except by the help of His omnipotence! Oh,
how wonderful must have been her love to accept His will on
Calvary, His will that they should part, His will that she should
linger on through fifteen mortal years of unimaginable martyr­
dom! She asked once for water to be turned into wine, and He
said His time was not yet come; nevertheless at her will the
miracle was wrought, without her asking twice. She could hardly
have forgotten that on Calvary. These fifteen years were His
will, but what if she for a moment shows her will that it should
not be so? will the Mother have to plead long with the dying
Son? A word, a look, were possibly enough. How is it that she is
still? Is it that she loves Him better now than at Cana of Galilee?
And it is a higher love to stay and do His will, than to go with
Him and enjoy His beauty. Is she holier now than she was then?
For holiness, as it rises, loses more and more its individual will
in the will of God. Both are doubtless true, and both facts are
in no slight measure owing to her dolors. But is it not rather
perhaps that she, like her Son, has gone down into the depths
of suffering, and has become as it were enchanted with it, and
as He thirsts for more suffering, in divinest discontent even with
the excesses of Calvary, so she too thirsts to suffer more, and He
gives to her, what His Father grants not to Himself, another
passion of a hundred and eighty waxing and waning moons?
It must be remembered also that there was a peculiar grief to
our Lady in not dying with Jesus, which we cannot appreciate,

39

but only contemplate far off. Union with Jesus was so habitual
to her, and union of so close and vital a nature, that it had become
her life; and now, in the most important act of all, she was not
to be united with Him. She was to differ when she most longed
to resemble Him. Nay, it was a want of union which was to
involve actual separation. Who can estimate what this absence
of union was to her? Yet her love had this prerogative, to suffer
longer than our Lord, and to outlive Him by well-nigh half His
life in suffering. Deep down in very deep sanctity indeed we find,
that never scarcely was she more intimately united with Him
than when she let Him go without her.
Another fountain, which yielded additional bitterness to
Mary’s sorrows, was the knowledge that her dolors increased
the sufferings of Jesus, nay, that they were actually among the
worst agonies He had to endure. There was not one pain which
she would not have given worlds to alleviate. There was not one
fresh indignity offered to Him, which did not pierce her soul,
and make her bleed inwardly. As blows and blasphemies, insults,
derision, and rude handlings were multiplied, it seemed at each
new violence as if she could bear no more, as if the sea of sorrow
needed but another drop to break in upon the fountains of her
life and wash them away in one terrific inundation. And yet
she had to feel that the sight of her broken heart, ever before
Him, was more dreadful to our Blessed Lord than the scourging,
the crowning, the spitting, or the buffeting. She was made as it
were executioner in chief of her own beloved Son. The more
tenderly she loved Him, the more fondly she clung to Him. the
more willingly she bore her griefs, so much the deeper the iron
of them entered into the Soul of Jesus. She knew all this; and
yet her grief was not beneath her own control. Her very holiness
increased it a thousandfold. It was in vain she strove to repress it.
The very effort was anguish, and no calmness of face, no firmness
of attitude, no tearlessness of eye, could have hidden from Jesus
the secret abysses of her immaculate heart. Who shall tell the
torture of all this to her unselfish devotion? Oh, the seeming
cruelty of that exceeding great love which had actually insisted

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

on her being an integral and prominent part of His bitter Pas­
sion! How well He knew the plenitude of grace that was in her!
How thoroughly He trusted the immensity of her holiness! Life
had not been without joys to Him, not even without earthly joys.
His Mother had been a whole world of sweetness to the Man
of sorrows; and now, in His love of God, in His love of her, in
His love of us, He turns all those sweet waters to an ocean of
saltiest bitterness for Himself, and keeps slaking His thirst from
it incessantly all through the various mysteries of His tremen­
dous Passion. He knew her love so well, and calculated its forti­
tude so truly, that He hesitated not to lay upon her a cross so
nearly the weight of His own. But what all this was, in spite of
the eager conformity of her willing heart, what intensity of misery,
what unparalleled kind of woe it brought along with it, it is
beyond our power to say. It is very deep sea close to shore, where
Mary’s dolors are concerned.
But is she then to be simply passive? If it is His will that she
should be part of His Passion, may she not think that the fondness
of her love will really be some alleviation of His pains? She has
been too near the Incarnate Word not to comprehend that
strange union of intensest pain with intensest joy, which was the
normal state of His blessed Soul on earth; and deep down, deeper
than the fountains of grief, might not her love be a wellspring of
gladness in His heart? The heroic devotedness of the Mother
must surely be a most pathetic contentment to the Son. Yet we
venture to suppose that it was not so. The analogies of the
Passion seem all to point the other way. He shut off from His
lower nature the sensible beatitude of the unbroken Vision of
God. He stripped Himself by an amazing detachment of all that
could have consoled Him. The dereliction of His Father was
an abyss into which He purposed to descend. He can hardly
have allowed His Mother’s love to have been a consolation and
support to Him. He can hardly have kept to shine upon Him in
His darkness the greatest earthly joy His Sacred Humanity had
ever known. It would be out of keeping with the Passion, with
that completeness of bleak desolation which He spread around

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

41

Himself, the vastest, direst wilderness of soul that ever man had
known, worse round Him, the sinless Saviour, than was the home­
less earth that lay outstretched, with all its haunting shapes and
shadows of terror, before the blood-stained, impenitently re­
morseful Cain! No! Mary might not think that in that hour
her love could soothe His Sacred Heart. But were there no
maternal offices which she might fill toward Him? Alas! only
such office as the mother of the Maccabees had filled of old.
Slowly and incommodiously the blood from the thorns was
trickling into His eyes; but she could not reach to wipe away
the blood from Him, whose special office it is to wipe away
tears from all eyes forever. His lips are parched with thirst,
white, bloodless, cracking; but she may not damp them for one
moment with her moistened veil, though His blood shall hence­
forth daily damp the fires of purgatory for a thousand souls. His
poor unpillowed head, that beautiful head, to her the most beau­
tiful of created things,—if He leans back the thorns are driven
in, if He leans forward His whole body drags from the nails,—
may she not hold it in her Motherly hands, and let Him rest so
for a little while until He dies? Nol neither for Him nor for
her is there to be any alleviation. O Mother! rob Him not of
one jewel of His perfect Passion; for see how generously He is
enlarging for thee every hour the bounds of thy great sea of
sorrow! But this is a third fountain of her grief, that she cannot
alleviate the Passion of her Son.
It was another fountain of peculiar sorrow to her that she
was an eyewitness of the Passion. We learn from the revelations
of holy persons that, though she was absent in body, she was
present in spirit at the sufferings of Gethsemane, and even fol­
lowed in her soul with mysterious and supernatural sympathy the
various phases of our Saviour's agony. She was present bodily
at the scourging, at the Ecce Homo, along the way of the Cross,
and for the whole time on Calvary. It appears most probable
that she was not in the houses of Annas and Caiaphas, but that she
was at the doors, and heard not only the insults, but even the
blows, which were given to Jesus, and that she suffered an especial

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torture in the separation from Him at those moments. Yet it was
a fearful thing for a mother, particularly one of such exquisite
sensibilities and profound love as Mary, to have to follow her
only child through every step of that bloody drama. It would
have been a terrific martyrdom, if she had spent those hours
retired in the women’s apartments of an Oriental house, hearing
the distant cries of the raging multitude, or listening to the
mournful intelligence which would be brought her from time
to time. Still, she could better have collected herself there to
suffer in quietness and peace. Others at least could have spent
the time all the more undistractedly in prayer. But it was not so
with her. Her Son was God. It was better to be nigh Him. The
nigher God the better, always, for all of us; but for God’s Mother
most of all. Unbroken as was her union with the invisible God
at all times and in all places, she would pray better when she
saw Jesus. Besides, she had not the helpful distraction which
Christian women have in their afflictions. She was not divided
between the dear Child who was being taken from her, and the
all-holy God who was inflicting this blow upon her. Her grief
and her religion did not fall two different ways. The suffering
Child and the all-holy God were one and the same. This was
the overpowering unity of her dolors. She must go forth there­
fore, and follow the footsteps of Jesus, and wet her feet in the
blood He has left behind Him. She must listen to the fierce
singing of the scourges as they cleave the air, and count the stripes,
and take into her heart the variety of deadly sickening sounds
they made as they lit on this or that part of His Sacred Body.
She must see the mock king of Jews and Gentiles, as Pilate,
half in worthless pity, and half in merciless derision, exposed
Him to the crowd, and she alone adored His royal majesty almost
out of the very annihilation of herself by the violence of grief.
She must hear the dull hammering of the nails on Calvary, whose
sounds, muffled by the soft flesh of His Hands and Feet, pierced
her soul through and through. She must listen to the seven
beautiful words upon the Cross, as if He Himself were singing his
own dirge, with such melancholy sweetness as was enough to have

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

43

drawn her living soul out of her weak, worn, and aching body.
Λ11 this was terrible. Yet she was a true mother. Not for one
instant would she have consented to have it otherwise. It was
a portion of the royalty of her heart. Nevertheless, it was an
unspeakable aggravation of her suffering. It was true that the
whole of it had lain before her in clearest prevision, at least
since the hour of Simeon’s prophecy. But sense is something more
than prevision, something different from it. The senses "betray
the succors which reason gives.” They interrupt that interior
tranquility in which the darkest visions may possess the soul,
without disturbing it. Sight interferes with that self-collection,
which is our attitude of strength in the endurance of interior
pains. It throws the soul off its guard, or elicits from it a painful
strain of inward fortitude in order to preserve its guard. More­
over, the senses have special things of their own in sights and
sounds and touches of grief; and they pierce the flesh, causing it
to tremble with chilly pains, torturing the nerves, freezing and
firing the blood by turns, stabbing the brain like daggers, and
nipping the convulsed heart as if it were within an iron vice. It
was this eyewitnessing of the Passion, which made Mary’s martyr­
dom to be in her body as well as in her soul, and which was
something more than the aching physical exhaustion in which
excess of mental effort leaves the frame, because it laid each limb
upon the rack, and made every pulse a beating instrument of pain.
Another fountain of sorrow is to be found in her clear view
and appreciation of sin. We cannot doubt that, independent
of her own sinlessness and of the magnificence of her reason, our
Blessed Lord allowed her to participate in some degree in that
supernatural perception of sin, of its exceeding malice and of
God’s adorable hatred of it, which distinguished Himself, and
actually gave its character to the suffering of the Passion. It was
the view of sin which crucified His soul in the garden of Geth­
semane. It was the weight of sin which pressed Him down to the
ground. It was the chalice of His Father’s anger, which He so
plaintively desired might pass from Him. We read of St. Cath­
erine of Geonoa fainting away, when it pleased God to show her

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in vision the real horror even of a venial sin. There could be
no fainting with Mary. She was too strong, too perfect, too com­
plete, for weaknesses like those. Her use of reason, which had
begun at the moment of her Immaculate Conception, and had
never been interrupted for one instant since, could not decor­
ously be suspended by any trance or fainting-fit. But we must
necessarily suppose that, whatever supernatural gift of insight
into sin was granted to St. Catherine of Genoa or any other saints,
our Lady’s gift of that sort must have unspeakably transcended
theirs. Indeed, when we consider on the one hand the part which
His deep view of sin played in our Blessed Saviour’s Passion, and
on the other the "communication of attributes,’’ so to call it,
which passed between His Passion and her Compassion, we
cannot but suppose that our dear Lady was gifted with no incon­
siderable portion of His amazing and overwhelming insight into
sin. None estimated as she did the spotless innocence of the victim.
None so truly appreciated the beauty and sublimity of His good­
ness. None so fathomed the ingratitude of those whom He had
taught, and fed, and healed, and comforted, with such unselfish
patience and such considerate affection. None felt more acutely
the barbarous excesses of those cruel hours of Thursday night
and Friday morning. When all these thoughts rushed into one,
what a view it was which broke upon her of the amount, variety,
intensity, malignity, of sin which there was in the Passion! But
she saw more than that. She saw, hideous, appalling, moun­
tainous vision! the sins of the whole world on the stooping
shoulders of Her blessed Son. But yet more: she saw up to the
heights of His Divinity; she saw that it was truly God whom all
this sin reached, assailed, defiled, and murdered; and then such
a light, as from another universe of diviner things, broke in upon
the sin of the Passion that none but Jesus and herself could have
confronted and endured. Oh that we could better tell what this
pain of sharp light was like! But it is far from us. Could we
live if God showed us our real selves? We have need to be im­
mortal before our hour of judgment comes. But the sins of the
whole world, the concentrated sin of the Passion,—Mary saw it

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45

all, and died a thousand inward deaths in the agony it made
her bear.
It is not easy to say what was the highest point, or what made
the deepest wound, in the Passion. The instruments of the
Passion were not material only. There were invisible lances, and
nails, and hammers, and thorns, and stripes. They were intel­
lectual and moral, as well as physical. And in all these three
departments the implements of torture were both numerous
and diversified. Each of them went to the quick. None of them
deserve to be considered subordinate or inferior. Each had its
pre-eminence in its own way. All ran up higher than our eye
can follow them. But it is not easy to say which of them, if any
of them, reached higher heights in Him than others did. The
Passion was an excess of excesses. Every thing belonging to it was
in excess. It is this in great measure which hinders it from being
lowered into a mere epic of human suffering, even independently
of the consideration of His Divinity. But there are some things
which we can conceive of as being sharper than others, or wound­
ing in more tender places. There is one of these, a participation
in which will furnish us with a sixth fountain of Mary’s sorrow.
It is the foreseen ingratitude of the faithful for the Passion of
our dearest Lord. The Mother of the Church, the queen of the
apostles, sees it all in her heart. Such a scroll is unrolled before
her eyes of carelessness about forgiven sin, of relapses into deadly
sin, of astonishing prolific broods of venial sins, swarming in
hordes all over the soul and laying waste that paradise of God,
of cold-hearted negligences, of unbecoming imperfections, of
immortified, consciously immortified lives, of distaste for spiritual
things, of careless freedom with great sacraments that cost her
Son so dear, of narrow, jealous, suspicious tempers, of the sicken­
ing lukewarm ways of conceited human prudence, and of all that
dismal infinite of pusillanimity, out of which here and there a
saint stands up but half distinguishably, like a palm in the sand­
fog of the wilderness. Neither was it altogether a vision of the
future. Where was Peter? Was he weeping in some grotto outside
the walls in the luxury of his new-found grace? Where was

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Andrew, who was to be the model of all lovers of the Cross?
Where was James, in whose diocese his Master was at that moment
crucified? There was the passionate Magdalen, there was the
beautiful heart of John, there was herself, to represent the world
on Calvary. Alas! if from that day forth every baptized soul was
to be a saint as high as an apostle how fearful would the
Passion have been, and how sadly unrequited too! But if this
was not to be, surely those who love Jesus should love Him well.
All the saved should be saints, saints before they reach heaven,
saints that need not an exodus through the sea of fire beneath
the earth, saints even while on earth. Half-hearted creatures
hanging on to God by an occasional sacrament, clinging to the
Church by a jubilee, balancing in silly indecision, like wayward,
stupid animals, between the shepherd and the hireling, giving
their love of love to the world, and now and then their love
of fear to God when He thunders, enjoying life and time and
earth uncommonly, and making a clutch at eternity and heaven
upon their deathbeds,—is the Crucified to be the own Father of
such as these? Oh, to the generous, heroic heart of Mary this
was a sight that was equal to a whole Passion in itself! She saw
how the dear Heart beneath that white blood-seamed side upon
the Cross was sickening over that very vision, and her heart
yearned over it also with indescribable faintness and repugnance.
But what shall we say of the sight of those who should be
lost? Think of the value of each drop of blood! But why talk
of drops? She is slipping in it. It has trickled all over her
hands as she clasped the Cross. It lies like a red line between
the foot of the Cross and the pillar of the scourging. The gnarled
roots of the olives on Gethsemane are ruddy with it in more
spots than one. Look up at the countless stars, strewing like
luminous dust the purple concave of midnight. One stripe would
have redeemed them all, if all had fallen a thousand times.
And if there were six thousand stripes! What a calculation of
the infinities of redemption! And all that blood and all those
stripes given for each soul, each soul to have unshared for its
own self all those infinite salvations, and yet to be lost eternally!

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

47

Christ to pay that price, and then to be defrauded of its value!
If one soul, for whom all that Passion has been thinkingly and
intentionally undergone, and then with such solemnities as
creation never saw before, and with such inconceivable priest­
hood, offered by God to God,—if one soul should perish ever­
lastingly, should triumph by its guilt over its Saviour's love,
should dry up the oceans of His Blood by the fiery heats of
hell,—what an anguish to the Sacred Heart of Jesusl It might
have wrung from Him a worse cry than leaped out of the
passionate, broken heart of Jacob when Joseph’s many-colored
coat, with blood-stains on it, was held up before his eyes. But
if not one soul only, but millions, and millions of millions,
should be lost, what then? Nay, if it should have to be a
doubt, of which we might not be sure even while we believed it,
whether as many adult believers are saved as are lost, what then?
Well! He did not repent of the Cross, as He hung upon it.
That is all we can say. But He had another crucifixion, that was
invisible, far worse than that one of wood, and iron, and red
blood, and a mock title, which we see. It was the crucifixion of a
Heart already crucified, because of the thought of the countless
multitudes who would fall from Him and be lost and be no
more members of Him, but turn from Him through the trium­
phant envy and rage of Satan with cruel sundering, with help­
less, irremediable dismemberment. They "brake not His bones;"
but the bones of His Soul were all broken by this cruel inward
Passion. And in this dark agony, in this special chalice apart,
Mary also had her share; and if in that moment she could
distinguish between what this thought made her suffer because
she so loved Jesus, and what it made her suffer because she so
loved souls, then did she see two separate, most frightful abysses,
into which, half suffocated with anguish, she must enter with
shrinking yet unreluctant horror.
These were the seven fountains of Mary's dolors, beneath
which, and underlying all of them, was the grand parent source
of all, the incomparable divine beauty of our dearest Lord Him­
self. It was this which gave the vitality and keenness to every

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

pain. It was this which aggravated every thing, but could exag­
gerate nothing, because it could magnify nothing to a greater
size than itself. Even she did not know all that beauty. It was
incomprehensible, absolutely in itself incomprehensible. But
what she did know is incomprehensible to us, it is so far above
us and beyond us. Yet we can speak great words of our Saviour’s
beauty, and think thoughts of it far greater than any words, and,
when even thoughts fail, we can weep, weep tears of heavenly
feeling. We can burn away with love, and die of His beauty;
yet, though thus we shall reach Mary’s home, we shall not attain
to her comprehension of the exceeding loveliness of Jesus.
There was an ocean of it in the lowest, most unfathomable
caverns of her heart, which ever and anon broke upward in
other seas that rolled above, and made them bitter beyond
endurance.

Section IV
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF OUR LADY’S DOLORS

The characteristics of our Lady’s dolors are, as might be
expected, closely connected with the fountains out of which they
spring, and these must now be the subject of inquiry. Although
they will come out strongly and clearly as we consider the dif­
ferent dolors in succession, yet a general view of them is necessary
in order to give a true idea of her martyrdom as a whole. When
we have once seen it as a unity, we shall the better understand
the marvellous details which a nearer inspection will disclose
to us. The first characteristic of her sorrows was that they were
lifelong, or nearly so. It is generally agreed that our Blessed
Lady did not know she was to be the Mother of God before
the moment of the Incarnation. Until that time, therefore, she
might have had such a gift of prophecy as to foresee confusedly
that her life was to be one of great sorrow and heroic endurance,
but her particular dolors could not have been distinctly before

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49

her. But when she actually bore within herself the Eternal Word
macle flesh, a great change must have come over her in this
respect. She was in such unutterable union with God, and
understood so deeply and truly the mystery of the Incarnation,
and such a light was shed for her upon the depths of Hebrew
prophecy, that it is impossible not to believe that the Passion
of Jesus lay clearly before her, with all the Thirty-Three Yean
of poverty, hardship, and abasement, and consequently with it,
at least in its main outlines, her own Compassion. This is the
least we can think, but in truth we think much more. We
cannot agree with those writers who make her dolors to begin
with the prophecy of Simeon. No doubt God may have been
pleased at that moment to bring the whole sorrowful future
more distinctly before her, and to have painted the vision in
more vivid colors. That Simeon's words were divine instru­
ments for effecting a change within her soul is more than prob­
able. But it seems hardly honorable to her to conceive that
during the nine months of her intimate union with the Incarnate
Word she should not have understood His mission of suffering
and blood, or the laws of expiation and redeeming grace, or
the certainty that she also would have to drink deeply of the
same cup with Him. At all events, from the time of Simeon’s
prophecy, if not from the first moment of the Incarnation, her
sorrows were lifelong. Like those of Jesus, they were ever before
her. She had no bright intervals over which impending evil
cast no sorrow. There was an inevitable uniformity of shade
over her path. The darkest destinies of men are unequal,
and in this inequality there is relief. The sorrow that clings
closest sometimes relaxes its hold. The clouds now and then
give way before strong sunshine, even though it be but for a
while. The misfortune, which occasionally dogs a man all
through life, at times seems to grow weary of its chase, and
turns backward, as if it had forsaken its prey, or at least allowed
him breathing-time. But Mary’s subjection to sorrow was riveted
upon her as if with iron. It never relaxed. It never grew
milder. It gave her no respite. It was in her life, and only by

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

laying down her life could she extricate herself from its in­
separable companionship. The Passion was not a dark end to a
bright life, or an obscure sunset after a checkered day of light,
and gloom, or an isolated tragedy in sixty-three years of common
human vicissitudes. It was part of a whole, with consistent
antecedents, a deepening certainty of the darkness, but a portion
of a lifelong darkness, which for years had known, in this respect
at least, no light. We must bear this in mind throughout, if
we would understand her sorrows rightly. They were not so much
separate events; they were the going on of a charmed life, round
which heaven had wrapped a singular law of sorrow, only with
a stronger light cast upon some of its abysses than upon others.
But her sorrows were not only lifelong; they were con­
tinually increasing. The more she became familiarized with the
vision of them, the more also she realized them, and the more
terrible they seemed. This growth of them does not appear
incompatible with the immensity of her science, or do any
dishonor to it. They gave up new features, new pains, new
depths, new possibilities to her continual meditation, just as in
a far lower degree they do still to ours. The more we occupy
our minds with the mysteries of the Incarnation, the more
do we learn about them. The horizon grows wider the higher
we climb. When our eye gets used to the peculiar soft dark­
ness, the more unfathomable do we perceive the depth of the
abyss to be. What then must all this have been to her, whose
penetrating steadfast gaze was so unlike our cursory distracted
meditation, whose meditation was unbroken for years, and whose
own heart was so deeply interested in the subject? Moreover,
as they came nearer, they naturally became more terrible. They
threw a deeper shadow. They inspired greater fear. The first
breaths of the storm began to blow cold upon her heart. She
clung to Jesus. He seemed more beautiful than ever. But there
was no hope. The wide sea was around her, without a harbor.
She had no home but the great deep. It was the will of God.
Meanwhile Jesus waxed more beautiful day by day. The first
twelve years ran out, leaving results of heavenly loveliness and

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51

love beyond our power of summing. Then the next eighteen,
when every word, and every look, and every meek subjection
were thick with mysteries of heaven. Her life had almost pawed
out of her into Him, so exceedingly had He become her light,
and life, and love, and all. Then came the three years’ ministry,
and it seemed as if the Babe of Bethlehem, or the Boy of Nazareth,
had been nothing to the Preacher of love, whose words, and
works, and miracles appeared to charge the world with more of
supernatural beauty than it could bear, so that men rose up
madly to put out the light which hurt them by its strong
shining. As this loveliness increased, her love increased, and
with her love her agony; and all three were continually in­
creasing, with majesty and with velocity. The transcendent
beauty of the three years’ Ministry seemed to make it impossible
for her to endure the Passion; and did it not seem to show as if
by the beauty of His preaching alone, and by His human tears,
and His vigils on the mountains, and His footsore journeys, and
His hunger, and thirst, and sweet patience, and the persuasiveness
of His miracles, and the wondrous enticing wisdom of His par­
ables, the world might be redeemed, and Calvary be spared? It
is a short word to say, but there are volumes in it: Jesus had
become a habit to her; could He be torn from her and she
survive? And so one motive grew to another, and one thought
quickened another, and one affection intensified another, and
thus her dolors grew, quicker than the gourds grow in summer,
and all the quicker as the time grew near.
It was also a characteristic of her sorrows that they were in
her soul, rather than in her body. Not that her body was with­
out its fearful and appropriate sufferings. We have seen that al­
ready. But they were nothing to the sorrows of her soul. The
one bore no proportion to the other. Physical pain is hard to
bear, so hard that when it comes to a certain point it seems
unbearable. It lays hands upon our life, which shrinks away at
the touch. No one can think lightly of bodily pain. Yet how
light is it compared with mental sufferingl Even to us the agonies
of the soul are far more dreadful than the tortures of the body.

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THF. FOOT OF THE CROSS

Yet we are gross and material, compared to our Blessed Lady,
almost as if we were creatures of another species. The more
refined and delicate the soul, the more excruciating is its agony.
What then must have been the pains of a soul which was such
an immaculate vessel of grace as hers was! We have no standards
by which to measure what she felt. Her powers of suffering are
beyond our comprehension. All we know is that they transcended
all human experience, and that the two Hearts of Jesus and
Mary were raised into a world of suffering of their own, where
no other hearts of flesh can follow them. Her pains were martyr­
dom reversed; for the seat of the anguish was in the soul, and
flowed over, blistering and burning, on the sympathetic flesh;
while with the martyrs the soul poured sweet balm into the
wounded flesh, and the heaven within burned more brightly than
the lighted fire or the wild beast’s eye without. In this also she
was distinguished in some respect even from Jesus. His Soul
was crucified in Gethsemane, His Body upon Calvary. On her
body not a wound was made; from her veins not a drop of blood
was drawn. His Body and His Blood had come from hers, and
it was enough that His should suffer for them both. This per­
fectly interior character of her dolors, so often independent
of external circumstances, and requiring in order to its just ap­
preciation a spiritual discernment, must not be lost sight of as
one of their most distinguishing characteristics.
If we may make bold to think for a moment of what theology
calls the Circuminsession of the Three Divine Persons, the way
in which Each lies in the lap of the Others, it will carry us far
beyond any prerogatives of Mary, putting a simply infinite
distance between the Creator and the creature. Nevertheless, the
idea of that eminent unity will draw us out of our low thoughts
more nearly to a just appreciation of the union between Jesus
and His Mother. The Heart of each seemed to lie in the Heart
of the other. This was especially true of Mary. His beauty
drew her out of herself. She lived in His Heart rather than
her own. His interests were hers. His dispositions became hers.
She thought with Him, felt with Him, and, as far as might be,

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

53

identified herself with Him. She lived only for Him. Her life
was His instrument to be done with what He willed. In this
union sometimes she was the Mother, with her whole heart
poured out upon her Son, rejoicing in all she was, in all she
had, in all she could do or suffer, simply as so much material to
sacrifice for Him. Sometimes it was almost as if she were the child
and He the Father, she so leaned upon Him, and obeyed Him,
and had not a thought which was not His, hardly a thought even
for Him. It was for Him to think and to dispose; she would
follow, minister, sympathize, agree, worship Him with her love.
We read wonderful things of the saints, and of their union with
God; but there never was any to compare with this union of
Jesus and Mary. It stood alone in degree; it stood alone in kind.
It was like itself, and it was like no other union, except that
which it distantly, and yet so softly and so truly, shadowed, the
Unity of the Most Holy Trinity. Now, she lived far more vitally
in this outward life than in her inward life; or, to speak more
justly, this outward life, this life in Jesus, was more inward,
more really her own life, than the other; and it was one of the
characteristics of her dolors that they were not so much in herself
as in Him whom she loved far more than self. There are some
human sorrows which have faint parallels to this. Shadows
of it have crossed widowed mothers’ hearts, when their first-born
stood glorious on manhood’s threshold, and death put out his
light and drew him under. But none have felt as Mary felt, for
none have lived in such union with the object of their love, and
none have had such an object at once divine, and human, and
their own, which they might so dare to love, with a love which
they need not be at the pains to distinguish from absolute
worship.
Another characteristic of our Lady's sorrows is the union of
their great variety with the fact of their being interior, that is,
of their being unitedly felt in one place, her heart. Indeed, this
follows from the fact of their being interior, and is the cause
of a very peculiar kind of suffering. When the instruments of
torture went from one limb of the martyr to another, there

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

was almost a relief in the vicissitude. We most of us know what
the concentrated pressure of pain upon one nerve is like, especially
when that pressure is kept tight for hours, or days, or even weeks.
It is quite a different sort of agony from flying, shifting pains,
or even from the fiery shooting pains which are so hard to bear.
But when we transfer this uniform pressure from a limb or a nerve
to the heart, the result of suffering must be incalculable. The
variety of her sorrow’s was almost infinite. Both His Natures,
human and divine, supplied countless diversities of grief, mul­
tiplied its motives, intensified its bitterness. The bodily pains of
the Passion, the mental sufferings, the deep abasements, the cries,
the faces, the very visible thoughts of the multitudes around,
were so many different kinds of pain to her. And then the com­
plete unity of her undivided affections added immensely to
them all. She loved only One. The causes of her martyrdom
were all centred in one. There was no other object in her heart
to call off some portion of her grief and distract it from its over­
whelming fixity. How sweet are the child’s cries to the fresh
widow’s heart! what an eloquent distraction, better than if an
angel spoke! Oh, that cry is like a great grace from heaven,
strong-shouldered to bear so much of the dark burden! But Mary
had no diversion to her woes. Innumerable as they were, they
ran up into one supernatural, many-headed point, and pierced
with all their might the very centre of her life, the beautiful
sanctuary of her loving heart.
But this was not all. Not only was she without other objects,
other duties, other loves, to distract her in her misery, but actually
that which should naturally have alleviated her sorrows only
embittered and poisoned them. What should have been light was
w’orse than Egyptian darkness. What ought to have given life
was in her case enough to kill. The goodness of our Blessed
Lord put a special barb of its own on every shaft that pierced
her heart. It was His holiness that made His death so awful.
His love of her, which in its own nature was more than a con­
solation to her, nay, was positively her life, was the grand cruelty
of her Compassion. Had she loved Him less, or had He loved

THE MARTYRDOM OF MARY

55

her less, her dolors would not have so far transcended all human
parallel. The exquisiteness of each torture was precisely in her
love. But His Divinity! the secret glory of His bright impassible
Nature, might she not pillow her weary head thereon? 0 dearest
of all the dogmas of the faith! how many an aching heart and
outworn spirit and tempest-troubled soul, when all the world
had gone to shipwreck round it, has lain down upon thy soft and
welcome bed, and tasted peace when all was trouble above and
beneath, within and without! To how many thousands has that
doctrine been like an angelic visitant, bidding the storms cease,
and smoothing even the bed of death! And shall it be nothing
to her who has more to do with it than any other of God’s
creatures? Nothing? Oh, far from that; it shall be to her a new
abyss, unknown hitherto, of human sorrow, in which she shall
sink immeasurable depths and yet find no end. It shall so swathe
her in suffering that she shall lie to all appearance helpless on
a vast sea of sorrow. Every thing went by the rule of contraries
in her martyrdom. The very things which of themselves would
lighten her load were like murderous hands that held her under
the dark waters with cruel force. And because she was too strong
to suffocate, she suffered the more terribly. This also is not
without parallel in human sorrow, though none such ever came
nigh to hers.
But a sorrow without a sympathy is a rare phenomenon,
even on this unkindly earth. Yet where shall she find sympathy
with hers? There is but one in the whole world who can under­
stand her, and it is He who, by His sufferings, is inflicting all
this suffering upon her. She will give all her sympathy to Him
rather than seek it from Him. She must bear in secret. St
Joseph knew her well, but he never knew her fully. Her heart
is a mystery even to St. John, although he had been initiated
into the secrets of the Sacred Heart. And that dear apostle him­
self needs her love to keep him upright beneath his Master’s
Cross. Even in the eighteen years it is not easy to think that
Jesus and Mary talked much of their future sorrows, or sought
sympathy in each other’s love. To me it seems more probable

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

that they never spoke of the matter at all. Besides which, her
sympathy with Him was simply worship; it was love indeed, true,
fond, maternal love, yet it was worship also, and unlike all
common sympathy with grief. When she slowly walked away
from the garden-tomb on Friday night, she re-entered a world
where not one soul could understand her, not even the holy
passionate Magdalen. It was darkness without one gleam of light,
a wilderness all terrors, a life without one point of attraction,
one resting-place for her broken heart. She shut her sorrows up
within herself, enduring them in a hot-hearted silence, and there
were none who could do more than guess the aching void that
was beating like a wild pulse in that maternal heart.
These were the characteristics of her sorrows; and what is
every word that has been said but a deepening shade to the
dark, dark picture? What then shall we think of that last char­
acteristic of her dolors, which so amazed St. Bernard, the modera­
tion with which she bore them? Who is ever able to forget, when
they meditate upon our Blessed Mother, the heavenly tranquility
of her "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," at the Annunciation?
The same tranquility is unbroken even when her heart is break­
ing beneath the Cross. Except in the case of very high sanctity,
and even there the exception does not always hold, moderation
in sorrow would imply something like coldness or insensibility.
We should hardly love very tenderly any one the even tenor
of whose way deep affliction could not disturb. In the case of
the saints the love of God acts as a countercharm to the spells
of sorrow. It at once distracts and compensates, and so makes
endurance easier. But with Mary it was just in her love of God
that the exceeding bitterness of her agony consisted. If then we
figure to ourselves the bewildering complications of misery, the
enormous weight of sorrow, the supernatural aggravations also
of it, which she had to bear, and then the way in which with such
resistless might it bore down upon her solitary heart, it is amaz­
ing to see it all break upon her tranquility, as a billow breaks
in idle foam upon some huge promontory, which quivers to its
base as it flings the wild waters back, and yet remains unbroken.

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57

So it was with her. She was not insensible like the cold granite.
On the contrary, the tempest went through her, searched every
corner of her capacious nature, filled to overflowing every possi­
bility of suffering, and drenched with bitterness every faculty and
affection. Yet not a ruffle passed on her tranquility. Her peace
within was as untroubled as the cavities of the ocean when the
surface is wildly rocking in the storm. Nevertheless, this tran­
quility was no protection to her against the intensity of suffering.
It rather enabled her to suffer more. It allowed the grief to pene
trate more unresistedly into every part of her. Yet there was no
wildness, no loud sighs, no broken sobs, no outspoken words of
complaint. Still less—the thought is one which would never have
crossed the mind of an intelligent lover of Mary, if careless,
untheological pictures had not indecorously brought it before
so many of us—still less were there any vehement attitudes of
grief, any contortions of the venerable beauty of her face, any
womanish wringing of the hands, any negligence of dishevelled
hair, any prostrations on the ground as of one overcome with
mortal anguish, least of all any fainting away, any need of a sup­
porting arm around her, whether it were that of John or Mag­
dalen, any suspension of that glorious reason which sleep even
had not interrupted in its magnificent exercises since the very
first moment of the Immaculate Conception. Let us in indig­
nant love give to the flames these ignorant, dishonorable repre­
sentations, and drive out of ourselves the odious images which
their skill and beauty may have left upon our minds. Mary
“stood” beneath the Cross: that is the simple grandeur of the
scriptural picture, which represented the actual truth, and whose
artist was her own Spouse, the Holy Ghost. And it was on
the picture of that calm standing woman on which her fond
child, St. Bernard, gazed in admiring love. This too is the attrac­
tiveness of our Lady’s apparitions in the revelations of Mary of
Agreda, compared with her portrait in the visions of Sister
Emmerich. The instincts of the Spanish nun were more true
than those even of the artistic soul of the ecstatic German. Never
then must we put away from ourselves the thought of this mod­

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eration of Mary in her woes. There was nothing wild, nothing
unsettled, nothing dramatic, nothing passionate, nothing demon
strative, nothing excessive; but she stood in calmest, queenliest
dignity, quiet, not as a sweet evening landscape, or a noontide
summer sea, or a green wood at dawn, or a moonlit mountain-top,
or as any other image in the poetry of nature, but quiet, in her
measure and degree, as the Divine Nature of our Lord while
the tumult of the Passion was trampling His Human Nature to
death. Her tranquility was the image of that tranquility. It
was one of many participations in Himself which Jesus gave
to her in those dark hours.

Section V
how our lady could rejoice in her dolors

Having thus considered the characteristics of our Lady’s
dolors, we must now pass to a peculiarity of them which it is
necessary always to bear in mind, namely, their union with the
intensest joy. That her dolors were accompanied throughout
with floods of heavenly joy, she herself revealed to St. Bridget.
But indeed it could not be otherwise. Can we suppose it possible
that a sinless, rational creature can ever be otherwise than bathed
in joy? Beatitude is the life of God, and it is out of that life
that torrents of gladness inundate His whole creation. It is sin
only that brings sorrow, and if the sins of others can make the
sinless grieve, they can never interfere with that abiding glad­
ness deep down, which union with God must of necessity pro­
duce. Moreover, there is no merit where there is no love. If
our Lady’s dolors had not risen out of her love and been ani­
mated by it, they would not have been meritorious. But in truth
love was the very cause of them. Out of the excess of love came
the excess of sorrow. Now, it is undeniable that love cannot
exist without delectation. Love is of itself essentially a joy;
and in proportion to the eminence of our Mother’s love must

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59

also be the eminence of her celestial joy. To sorrow and rejoice
at once is possible even for us, whose inward life sin has dis­
tracted, and made irregular and uncompact. We have all of us
done so, even though our sensitive nature is a battlefield where
the struggles are quickly over, and one or other of the con­
tending passions is left master of the field. But it is in Jesus
and Mary that this perfect union of the uttermost of joy and
sorrow has taken place, and been an abiding, lifelong, normal
state. It is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the Incar­
nation, and has seemed, in our Lord's lower Nature, to be a
sort of adumbration of His union of Two Natures in one
Person. It is also one of His characteristics in which He has
given His Mother largely to participate. In His Passion He
restrained His Divinity, and would not let it sensibly penetrate
His Human Nature with its light and glory. Nay, He even laid
His hand upon that Beatific Vision, which was due to His Saaed
Humanity, and which was uncloudedly before His Soul from
the first moment of His Incarnation, and would not allow it to
include within its sphere of gladness His sensitive nature, lest
it should blunt His suffering and quench the fire of His great
agony. So, in her measure, our Blessed Lady in the depths of
her soul was filled with gladness because of her intimate union
with God, and yet the gladness had a sphere of its own, and
was not allowed to break out with its vast world of light, so
at least as to banish all sorrow from the heart. As was said before,
her joy, so far from alleviating her sufferings, probably made
her suffer more. But once again we must remember it was not
with her as with the martyrs. They sang among the fires and
exulted among the panthers, because their soul was all whole and
joyous, while their flesh was tom and their bones broken. But
with her the soul was the chief sufferer; and joy and sorrow
divided it against itself. This was nearer to a mystery. Indeed,
it was a true participation in the characteristics of Jesus, a cleav­
ing asunder of the soul without disturbing its simplicity, a divi­
sion without sedition, a wound which was a new life, a batde
while all was harmony and peace. O Mother! we cannot tell

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

how it was, only that so it wasl Thou wert all joy, and, being
so near God, how couldst thou help but be so? Thou wert all
sorrow, and what else couldst thou be in those dark abysses of
the Passion? And thy sorrow had no power over thy joy; but thy
joy had power over thy sorrow, and gave it a brisker acid, a
more volatile and pervasive bitterness! Glad creature! sorrow
crushed thee, and then a joy, like that of heaven, sat upon thy
burden, and made it ten-fold more hard to bear!
Yet we are hardly doing justice to her sorrows, when we say
that they had no influence upon her joys. Doubtless they in­
creased them, and were to her the fountains of new joys which
she had never had before, or of new degrees of old accustomed
joys. It is not as if her joy and sorrow were two oceans in her
soul, which had no mutual inlets, and did not commingle with
each other, or ebb and flow in sympathy. So far from that, there
is a sense in which we might say that her sorrow and her joy were
almost identical; for her joys were sorrows, and her sorrows joys.
They might be the one or the other, according to the double
life that was in them. Truly in her sorrows were many reasons
for joy such as the grandest and happiest archangel of heaven
has not in himself. If we look long at the darkness of Calvary,
a beautiful light breaks out of its gloomiest centre. What is it
all but a magnificent reparation of the Divine Honor? Not
Michael, when flushed with triumphant sanctity he drove usurp­
ing Lucifer out of heaven, so rejoiced in the honor of God, as
Mary did. She, who had been allowed to fathom sin so deeply,
and who in the spirit of Gethsemane had tasted somewhat of
the Father’s anger, could exult in the satisfaction of His justice
as neither angel nor saint could do. She, who had lived thirtythree years with Jesus and had caught from Him His passionate
yearning for His Father’s honor, could find depths of blissful
congratulation in the restoring of that honor, which not all
creatures together could discover. Sometimes there has been a
minutest drop of that joy in our hearts, and we know what it
was like, but could not tell even if we would. Oh for that land
where it will be an uncheckered, eternal habit!

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61

There was joy too through all the immense wisdom with which
God had endowed her, because of the divine wisdom which was
apparent to her in the whole scheme of our redemption. There
was not a cavern of shame, but it was illuminated by several
of the divine perfections, shedding over it a perfect blaze of
beautiful splendor. There was not a physical honor in the
Passion, from which an unloving faith shrinks back in vulgar
fastidiousness, but was clothed with a strange loveliness out of
the treasures of the divine mind and will. The science of the
Incarnation never came out, even to her, in such amazing,
fascinating clearness as it did in her Compassion, with all its
reasons, possibilities, adaptations, and conveniences. The sight
she saw would have been enough to feed the worship of the nine
choirs of angels forever.
There was joy also in her foresight of the exaltation of Jesus.
She saw Him already at the Right Hand of the Father, His Sacred
Humanity enthroned there as an object of highest wonhip for­
ever. To her eyes the bright clouds of Ascension Day were
strangely interlaced with the darkness of the dun eclipse on
Calvary. She saw the feet that were dropping blood, as if they
were rising up in the sunny air, each with its glorified stigma
gleaming like a roseate sun. She almost saw the angels in their
glistening white, moving about amid the horses of those ruthless
foreign centurions. The darkness of the depth set off the bright­
ness of the exaltation, as if it were a background of storm throw­
ing forward the bright things in front of it with vivid, lifelike
light. There was joy also in her participation at the time in the
interior joy of Jesus. For that failing Heart upon the Cross had
a very ocean of gladness within itself, a gladness none on earth
but His Mother knew, a gladness none else could share, because
none else could understand it. If her share of it were parted
among the numberless elect, we should each have more than we
could bear. It was a joy also, of a peculiar kind, to see Him
paying then and there for the glorious prerogatives He had
given her. When the blood moistened her hand and stained its
whiteness, she recognized and worshipped it as the price of her

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

Immaculate Conception. Could she sec that, and then not love
Him ten thousand times more than she had loved Him hitherto?
And with the rush of love must needs come a rush of joy as well.
It is impossible also not to rejoice in the operations of grace
within our souls. Each augmentation of grace is a mission of a
Divine Person, a contact with God, a more intimate and ex­
quisite union with Him. If we were slower, graver, less occupied,
and less precipitate in our spiritual life, we should feel this
more than we do. How greatly then must she have rejoiced in
the magnificent supernatural acts which her sorrows were causing
her to elicit all the while! Such faith, such hope, such love, such
fortitude, such conformity, such love of suffering, such spirit
of sacrifice, such intelligent worship, such incomparable union!
Millions of saints could have been made out of each of these royal
magnificences, and yet have left a marvellous amount to spare.
There was joy too, who can disbelieve it? in her thought that
her Compassion should be so rich a boon to us, that it should
win us so many graces, give us so many examples, excite so
much devotion, lead us so much nearer Jesus, and fill us with
a wiser spirit of more profound adoration. Here are seven joys,
which came out of her very sorrows. They might be multiplied
indefinitely; but these are enough for love, and more than enough
for our comprehension in their fulness.

Section VI
THE WAY IN WHICH THE CHURCH PUTS OUR LADY’S DOLORS BEFORE US

Such is a general description of the dolors of Mary. The
Church puts them before us as part of the gospel, as one of the
facts of the gospel, and as an object of special devotion. Marchese,
in his Diario di Maria, mentions an old tradition, which would
carry devotion to the sorrows of our Blessed Lady up to apostolic
times. Some years after her death, while St. John the Evangelist
was still grieving over his loss and longing to see her face again,

THF. MARTYRDOM OF MARY

63

it pleased our Blessed Lord to appear to him in a vision, ac­
companied by His Mother. The sorrows of Mary, together with
her frequent visits to the holy places of the Passion, were natu­
rally a constant subject of devout contemplation to the Evangelist,
who had watched over the last fifteen years of her life; and, as if
it were in response to these continual meditations, he heard her
ask Jesus to grant some especial favor to those who should keep
her dolors in remembrance. Our Lord replied that He would
grant four particular graces to all those who should practice this
devotion. The first was a perfect contrition of all their sins
some time before death; the second was a particular protection
in the hour of death; the third was to have the mysteries of the
Passion deeply imprinted in their minds; and the fourth a
particular power of impétration granted to Mary’s prayers on
their behalf. St. Bridget relates in the seventh book of her revela­
tions that she saw in a vision, in the Church of Santa Maria Mag­
giore at Rome, the immense price which was set in heaven
upon the dolors of Mary. To the Blessed Benvenuta, the Dom­
inicaness, it was granted to feel in her soul the sorrow which our
Lady suffered during the Three Days’ Loss. The Blessed Veronica
of Binasco had several revelations regarding this devotion, in
one of which, as related by the Bollandists, our Lord said that
tears shed over His Mother's sorrows were more acceptable to
Him than those which are shed over His own Passion. In like
manner Gianius, in his history of the Servîtes, relates that, when
Innocent IV. was raised to the apostolic chair, he felt some alarm
regarding the new order of the Servîtes of Mary. There were
several false and counterfeit religions, which had troubled the
Church about that time, the Poor of Lyons, the so-called Apostolic
Men, the Flagellants, and the followers of William de Saint
Amour, and the pope was anxious to assure himself that the
Servîtes, lately instituted near Florence, were not of the same
character as these. He therefore commissioned St. Peter Martyr,
the Dominican, to investigate the matter. Our Lady appeared to
the inquisitor in a vision. He saw a lofty mountain, covered
with flowers, and bathed in shining light, and on the summit of

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it sat the Mother of God as on a throne, while angels offered
garlands of flowers before her. After this they presented to her
seven lilies of exceeding whiteness, which she placed for a moment
in her bosom, and then wreathed them like a diadem round her
head. These seven lilies, as she explained the vision to Pietro,
were the seven Founders of the Servîtes, whom she had herself
inspired to institute the new order in honor of the dolors which
she suffered in the Passion and Death of Jesus. When St. Cath­
erine of Bologna was one day weeping bitterly over our Lady’s
sorrows, she suddenly saw seven angels near her, weeping also,
and joining their tears with hers. But it would not be difficult to
compile a whole volume of visions and revelations regarding the
dolors of Mary. The reader will find abundance of them in
two books especially, both of which are of easy access, Marchese’s
Diario di Maria, and Sinischalchi's Martirio del Cuore di Maria:
the first writer was an Oratorian and the second a Jesuit.
This devotion has received the highest sanction of the Church,
for it enters both into the Missal and the Breviary. Two dis­
tinct feasts are appointed in honor of these sorrows; one falls in
September, and the other on the Friday in Passion Week. The
Rosary of the Seven Dolors, as well as several other devotions,
have been richly indulgenced. Among these may be mentioned
the Hymn Stabat Mater, an hour at any time of the year spent
in meditation on the Dolors, an exercise in honor of her sorrow­
ing heart, seven Aves with the Sancta Mater istud agas, another
exercise for the last ten days of the carnival, and an hour or
half an hour’s prayer on Good Friday and other Fridays. Nothing,
therefore, is wanting to the sanction of this devotion, nor has
the Church spared any means to attract her children to it.
She has, however, especially selected seven of Mary’s sorrows
for our more peculiar devotion. She has embedded them by
means of antiphons in the divine office, and she has made them
the seven mysteries of the Rosary of the Dolors. They are,
Simeon’s prophecy, the Flight into Egypt, the Three Days’ Loss,
the Meeting Jesus with the Cross, the Crucifixion, the Taking
down from the Cross, the Burial of Jesus. Thus, in one way of

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65

dividing them, three belong to our Lord's Infancy, and four to
His Passion. Or, again, one covers His whole life, two His
Infancy, and four His Passion. Or, again, one puts before us
all the Thirty-Three Years, two the Child Jesus, two Jesus
Suffering, and two Jesus Dead. These seven are mysterious
samples of her multitudinous other sorrows, and we shall find,
perhaps, that they are types of all human sorrow whatsoever.
The seven chapters, therefore, which follow will consider one by
one these seven dolors, observing the same simple and easy
method in the investigation of all of them. Each dolor will
present four points for our consideration: first, the circumstances
of the mystery itself, secondly, its peculiarities, thirdly, our Lady's
dispositions in it, and fourthly, its lessons to ourselves. A ninth
chapter will be added on the Compassion of Mary, in order to
explain the relation in which it stands to the Passion, whether it
had any share in the redemption of the world, and what the true
meaning is of those puzzling expressions, co-redemptress, and the
like, which are sometimes found in approved writers on the
grandeurs of Mary.

Section VII
THE SPIRIT OF DEVOTION TO OUR LADY’S DOLORS

Before concluding this introductory chapter, however, it
seems necessary to say something on the spirit of this beautiful
and popular devotion. It produces in our minds an extreme ten­
derness toward our blessed Lord, united with the profoundest
reverence. Jesus demands from us our wonhip of God. He
claims our undoubting faith in His goodness and in the abun­
dance of His redeeming grace. He expects from us a rational con­
viction that our only trust is in Him, and that we should conse­
quently discharge our duties to Him and obey His command­
ments as our necessary' and reasonable service. But He wants far
more than this. He has something much nearer His heart. He

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desires our tenderness. He wishes to see us with our hearts
always in our hands for Him. He would fain win us to Himself,
and unite us with Himself in the bonds of the most familiar
and intimate affection. He would have us identify our interests
with His, and concentrate our sympathies in Him. The thought
of Him should fill our eyes with tears, and kindle our hearts
with love. His name should be the sweetest music that we know;
His words the laws of all our life. He wishes us, as it were,
to forget the precise amount of our actual obligations to Him.
Indeed, what is the use of remembering them when we know that
it is beyond our power to fulfill them? He would have us deal
with Him promptly, generously, abundantly, with the instincts
of love, and not as if the life of faith were a spirit of commerce,
the balance of justice, the duty of gratitude, or the wise cal­
culations of an intelligent self-interest. We should cling to Him
as a child clings to its mother. We should hang about Him as
a friend whose absence we cannot bear. We should keep Him
fondly in our thoughts, as men sometimes do with a sweet
grief, which has become to them the soft and restful light of
their whole lives. Now, the way in which our Lady's dolors
keep His Passion continually before us has a special virtue to
produce this tenderness in us. We love Him, who is infinitely
to be loved in all ways, in a peculiar manner when He is reflected
in His Mother’s heart; and although it is absolutely necessary
for us perpetually to contemplate His Passion in all the naked­
ness of its harrowing circumstances and revolting shame, for else
we shall never have a true idea of the sinfulness of sin, yet there
is something in the Passion, seen through Mary, which makes
us forget ourselves, and tranquilly engrosses us in the most melt­
ing tenderness and endearing sympathy toward our Blessed Lord.
The emotions which are awakened by the Passion in itself are
manifold and exciting, whereas the spirit of tenderness presides
over Mary's sorrows with one exclusive, constraining presence.
But out of this tenderness comes also a great hatred of sin.
If God were to let us choose which of the great and extraordinary
gifts that He has given to His Saints should be conferred upon

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67

ourselves, we could not do better than ask for that piercing and
overwhelming hatred of sin which some have had. It is a gift
which lies at the root of all perfection, and is the supernatural
vigor of all perseverance. It is at once the safest and the most
operative of all singular graces. Devotion to our Lady’s dolors
is a great help both to acquiring the hatred of sin as a habit,
and to meriting it as a grace. The desolation wrought by sin
in the heart of the sinless Mother, and the reflection that her
sorrows were not, like those of Jesus, the redemption of the
world, fill us with horror, with pity, with indignation, with selfreproach. There is nothing to distract us from this thought, as
there is in the sacrifice of our Lord, who was thus accomplishing
His own great work, satisfying the justice of His Father, earning
the exaltation of His Sacred Humanity, and becoming the Father
Himself of a countless multitude of the elect. The Mother’s
heart bleeds, simply because she is His Mother; and it is our sins
which are making it bleed so cruelly. We are ourselves part
of the shadow of that eclipse which is passing so darkly over her
spotless life. We can never help thinking of sin, so long as we
see those seven swords, springing, like a dreadful sheaf, from the
very inmost sanctuary of her broken heart.
Yet there is something also in the dolors, and even in this
abhorrence of sin, to make us forget ourselves, without at all
perilling our safe humility. We rise up from the contemplation
of them with a yearning for the conversion of sinners. As if
because they were the travail of the queen of the apostles, they
fill our minds full of apostolic instincts. Whether this is a
hidden grace which they communicate, or whether it follows
naturally from the subject of meditation, it is certain that this is
a favorite devotion with all missionary souls.· The fearfulness of
losing Jesus, the unbearable anguish of ever so short a separation
from Him, the darkness and the dreariness which comes where
He is not, these are notable figures in each of the seven pro­
cessions of those mysterious woes. And how far from Jesus are
sinners, misbelievers, heathen I How far out of sight of Calvary
See the Author's Essay on Catholic Home Missions, p. S.

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have they wandered! How many in number, and in so many
ways how dear, are the wanderers! How unfathomable a misery
is sin! And to us what a misery those merry voices and bright
faces that care not for the misery, but go singing on their way to
a dark eternity, as though they were wending gallantly to a
bridal feast! Who can see so great a wretchedness, and not long
to cure it? Then, again, sin caused all that Passion, all these
sorrows. Perhaps one heart in the heat of love forgets itself,
and thinks for the moment that by hindering sin it can spare
our dearest Lord some pain. Yet is this altogether a mistake?
is it quite an unreality? Anyhow, it will busy itself with repara­
tion, and there is no reparation like the conversion of a sinner.
And the lost sheep shall be laid at Mary’s feet, and she shall
gently raise them and lay them in the oustretched arms of the
happy Shepherd; and we will sit down and weep for joy that we
have been allowed to do something for Jesus and Mary; and we
will ask no graces for ourselves, but only seek glory and love and
praise for them.
He who is growing in devotion to the Mother of God is grow­
ing in all good things. His time cannot be better spent; his
eternity cannot be more infallibly secured. But devotion is, on
the whole, more a growth of love than of reverence, though
never detached from reverence. And there is nothing about
our Lady which stimulates our love more effectually than her
dolors. In delight and fear we shade our eyes when the bright
light of her Immaculate Conception bursts upon us in its heavenly
effulgence. We fathom with awe and wonder the depths of her
Divine Maternity. The vastness of her science, the sublimities
of her holiness, the singularity of her prerogatives, fill us with
joyful admiration united with reverential fear. It is a jubilee to
us that all these things belong to our own Mother, whose fond­
ness for us knows no bounds. But somehow we get tired of
always looking up into the bright face of heaven. The very silver
linings of the clouds make our eyes ache, and they look down
for rest and find it in the green grass of the earth. The moon is
beautiful, gilding with rosy gold her own purple region of the

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69

sky, but her light is more beautiful to our homesick hearts when
it is raining over field, and tree, and lapsing stream, and the great
undulating ocean. For earth, after all, is a home for which one
may be sick. So, when theology has been teaching us our Mother’s
grandeurs in those lofty unshared mysteries, our devotion, be­
cause of its very infirmity, is conscious to itself of a kind of strain.
Oh, how, after long meditation on the Immaculate Conception,
love gushes out of every pore of our hearts when we think of
that almost more than mortal queen, heart-broken, and with
blood stains on her hand, beneath the Cross! O Mother! we
have been craving for more human thoughts of thee; we have
wanted to feel thee nearer to us; we can weep for joy at the
greatness of thy throne, but they are not such tears as we can
shed with thee on Calvary; they do not rest us so. But when
once more we see thy sweet, sad face of maternal sorrow, the
tears streaming down thy cheeks, the quietness of thy great woe,
and the blue mantle we have known so long, it seems as if we
had found thee after losing thee, and that thou wert another
Mary from that glorious portent in the heavens, or at least a
fitter mother for us on the low summit of Calvary, than scaling
those unapproachable mountain-heights of heaven! See how
the children’s affections break out with new love from undis­
covered recesses in their hearts, and run round their newlywidowed mother like a river, as if to supply her inexhaustibly
with tears, and divide her off with a great broad frontier of love
from the assault of any fresh calamity. The house of sorrow is
always a house of love. This is what takes place in us regarding
Mary’s dolors. One of the thousand ends of the Incarnation was
God’s condescending to meet and gratify the weakness of hu­
manity, forever falling into idolatry because it was so hard to be
always looking upward, always gazing fixedly into inaccessible
furnaces of light. So are Mary’s dolors to her grandeurs. The
new strength of faith and devotion, which we have gained in
contemplating her celestial splendors, furnishes us with new
capabilities of loving; and all our loves, the new and the old
as well, rally round her in her agony at the foot of the Cross of

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Jesus. Love for her grows quickest there. It is our birthplace.
We became her children there. She suffered all that because
of us. Sinlessness is not common to our Mother and to us. But
sorrow is. It is the one thing we share, the one common thing
betwixt us. We will sit with her therefore, and sorrow with her,
and grow more full of love, not forgetting her grandeurs,— oh,
surely never!—but pressing to our hearts with fondest predilection
the memory of her exceeding martyrdom.
What is the wise life but that which is for evermore living
over again the Thirty-Three Years of Jesus? What is all else but
a waste of time, a cumbering of the world, a taking up room on
earth which men have no right to? We should ever be in attend­
ance upon some one or other of the mysteries of Jesus, steeping
our thoughts in it, acting in the spirit of it. Our blessed Lord’s
interior dispositions are the grand practical science of life, and
the sole science which will carry away any of time's products into
eternity. The way in which we should both learn and exercise
this science is by pondering on the mysteries of Jesus, or indeed
by faith personally assisting at them in the spirit of Mary. This
imitation of Mary must be the lifelong attitude of Christians.
She read off our Lord’s Sacred Heart continually. She saw
habitually, as in a glass before her, all His inward dispositions,
whether they regarded His Father, herself, or us. There were
times when He drew a veil over it; but, ordinarily speaking,
that vision was abidingly before her. So say the Agredan revela­
tions. But even if this were not so, who can doubt that Mary
understood Jesus as no one else could do and was in closer and
more real union with Him than any saint could be? Hence, no
one doubts that her sympathy with Him in all His mysteries
was of the most perfect description, and in keeping with her
consummate holiness. We must, therefore, learn her heart. We
must strive to enter into her dispositions. An interior life, taken
from hers, faint and disfigured as the copy at best must be, is
the only one which is secure from manifold delusion. Yet no­
where can we penetrate so deeply into her heart, or be so sure
of our discoveries, as in the case of her sorrows. Moreover, the

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71

field for participation in the spirit of Jesus which they open to
us is wider; for, immense as was His joy, nay, even perpetually
beatific, His life was distinguished rather by sorrow than by
joy. Sorrow was, so to speak, more intimate to Him than joy.
Joy was the companion of the Thirty-Three Years; sorrow was
their character, their instrument, their energy, their discovery
of what they were to seek. Thus, a participation in the spirit of
Jesus through the spirit of Mary is the true spirit of this
devotion to our Lady’s Dolors. Those who have lived for some
years amid their quiet shadows can tell how they are almost
a revelation in themselves.
But when we speak of the spirit of this devotion, we must
not omit to speak also of its power. We must not dwell ex­
clusively on the spiritual effects it produces on ourselves, with­
out reminding ourselves of its real power with God. In this
respect one devotion may differ from another. One may be more
acceptable to God, even where all are acceptable. He may
promise prerogatives to one which He has not promised to an­
other. Now, there are few devotions to which our blessed Lord
has promised more than He has done to this. There is a perfect
cloud of visions and revelations resting upon it, and, in con­
sequence, of examples of the saints also. Moreover, there are
reasons for its being so, in the nature of the devotion itself.
We know what a powerful means of grace our Blessed Lady is,
and our devotion to her must for the most part take its form
either from her sorrows or her joys. Now, in her joys, as St.
Sophronius says, our Lady is simply a debtor to her Son, whereas
in her sorrows He is in some sense a debtor to her. St. Methodius,
the martyr, teaches the same doctrine. Hence, if we may dare to
use words which holy writers have used before, by her dolors
she has laid our blessed Lord under a kind of obligation, which
gives her a right and power of impétration into which some­
thing of justice even enters. Yet when we think of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus, of the immensity of His love for Mary, and
of the great part of the Passion which it was to Him to see her
suffer, we cannot for a moment doubt, without thinking of

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obligation, the extreme persuasiveness to Him of devotion to
her dolors, a devotion which He Himself began, a devotion
which was actually a solid part of His ever-blessed Passion. We
draw Him toward us the moment we begin to think of His
Mother's sorrows. He is beforehand, says St. Anselm, with those
who meditate His Mother's woes. And do we not stand in need
of power in heaven? What a great work we have to do in our
souls, and how little of it is already donel How slight is the
impression we have made yet on our ruling passion, on our
besetting sin! How superficial is our spirit of prayer, how
childishly timid our spirit of penance, how transitory our
moments of union with God! We want vigor, determination,
consistency, solidity, and a more venturous aspiration. In short,
our spiritual life wants power. And here is a devotion so solid
and efficacious, that it is eminently calculated to give us this
power, as well by its masculine products in the soul as by its
actual influence over the Heart of our Blessed Lord. Who, that
looks well at the saints, and sees what it has done for them, but
will do his best to cultivate this devotion in himself?
In the affairs of this world steadiness comes with age. But
who has not felt that it is not so in spiritual things? Alas!
fervor is steadiness there, and that is too often but for a while;
when we have held on upon our way for some years, we grow
tired. Familiarity brings with it the spirit of dispensation. Our
habits become disjointed, as if the teeth of the wheels were worn
down and would not bite. Our life gets uneven and untrue,
like a machine out of order. So we find that the longer we
persevere, the more we stand in need of steadiness. For behold!
when we had trusted to the doctrine of habit, and dreamed that
age would bring maturity in its own right, the very opposite has
been the case. In easy ways, and low attainments, and unworthy
condescensions, and the facility of self-dispensing indulgence,
in a word, in all things that are second best, the power of habit
is strong enough, indeed altogether to be depended on. But in
what is best, in effort, in climbing, in fighting, in enduring, in
persisting, we seem to grow more uncertain, fitful, capricious,

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73

irregular, feeble, than we were before. A worse weakness than
that of youth is coming back to us,—worse because it has less
hopefulness about it, worse because time was to have cured the
old weakness, and now it is time which is bringing this weakness
on,—worse because it makes us less anxious, for we have hard­
ened ourselves to think that we attempted too much when we
were young, and that prudence indicates a low level, where the
air is milder and better for our respiration. Then do not some
of us feel that the world grows more attractive to us as we grow
older? It should not be so; but so it is! This comes of luke­
warmness. Age unlearns many things; but woe betide it when
it unlearns vigor, when it unlearns hope! Rest is a great thing.
It is the grand want of age. But we must not lie down before
our time! Ah! how often has fervent youth made the world its
bed in middle life! and when at last the world slipped from under
it, whither did it fall? If we live only in the enervating ring
of domestic love, much more in the vortex of the world, we
must live with Jesus in the spirit of Mary, or we are lost. Let
us learn this in increased devotion to her dolors. When we lie
down to rest, we persuade ourselves it is but for a moment, and
that we shall not go to sleep. But only let this most pathetic
romance which the destinies of humanity have ever brought
before men sound in our ears and knock at the doors of our
hearts, and it will become in us a continually-flowing fountain
of supreme unworldliness. Torpor will become impossible. Obli­
vion of supernatural things will be unknown. We shall feel
that rest would be pleasant for a while; but we shall disdain the
temptation. Mary will teach us to stand beneath the Cross.

Chapter II
THE FIRST DOLOR
THE PROPHECY OF ST. SIMEON

Nowhere in the Old Testament do we seem to come so near
to God as in the book of Job. Nowhere is He more awfully
enshrouded in mystery, or more terrible in His counsels regard­
ing the children of men; and yet nowhere is He more plainly
or more tenderly our Father. It is because the mystery of suffer­
ing is depicted therein. Because it is all so human, it seems to
lead us so far into the divine. Because it is the uttermost trial
of the creature, he lies the more completely in the Creator’s
arms. The calamities of Job are to the Old Testament what the
Passion of our Lord is to the New, and the one was an inten­
tional foreshadowing of the other. When we come to speak of
our Lady’s dolors, we remember the touching picture of Job’s
friends, when they heard of his afflictions and came to visit him.
“When they had lifted up their eyes afar off, they knew him
not, and crying out they wept, and rending their garments, they
sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. And they sat
with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no
man spoke to him a word; for they saw that his grief was very
great.’’ They knew that silence was the best consolation. There
was nothing which could so touch the heart of the mourner, as
the fact that his friends appreciated the excess of his bereavement.
When at last they spoke, then they irritated. The charm of their
sweet silent presence was gone. Sympathy degenerated into an
argument. An unconvincing argument could end only in re­
proach. They, more than Job himself, “wrapped up sentences
in unskilful words.” But still more wonderful than this silence
74

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75

of the friends of Job was the silence of Jesus on the Cross,
deeply suffering a distinct inward martyrdom because of the
sorrows of His Mother. He spoke no word to her, but that one
whereby He made her over to St. John. No maxim full of
celestial wisdom, no tone of filial endearment, no acknowledg­
ment that He saw and felt her sufferings, no blessing full of
grace and fortitude, fell on her ear as He hung upon the Cross.
In truth, she needed none of them. She saw His Heart. She
understood her Son. She was by this time marvellously accus­
tomed to the ways of God. Silence was His devotion to her
sorrows, just as silence was the magnificence of her suffering.
Silence was in truth a wonderful thing with Jesus and Mary.
Indeed, it was almost the colloquy they had held together for
Three-and-Thirty Years. But His silence was the silence of a
full heart; and it is somewhat of that fulness which we must
ask of Him when we meditate on His Mother's sorrows. We
cannot think rightly of them, unless He vouchsafes to help us to
the truth. All we ask is one spark of what burned in Him during
those silent hours: one spark would be enough to set our hearts
on fire, and consume us with keenest love for the remainder of
our mortal years. He must be our model in sympathy with
Mary, as He is in all things else. Like all the rest of sanctity, it
is He Himself who taught devotion to our Lady, both by precept
and example.
Forty days had gone since the angels sang at midnight. Mary
and Joseph had been deep down all the while in divine mys­
teries. The shepherds had worshipped the new-born Babe. The
three kings had laid their mystic offerings at His feet, and the
new star had melted away in the purple of the nocturnal skies.
The world had gone upon its road as usual. Every morning
there was political news in Rome, every morning philosophical
discussions in the schools of Athens. The caravans went in and
out of the gates of the white Damascus, and the sun shone on
the bend of the Orontes at Antioch. The imperial officials made
up their books and lists at Bethlehem, and Joseph and Mary
were items in the account of the provincial taxation. In the

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common course of things, and according to the law, on the first
of January Jesus for the first time had shed His blood. How
much had passed since the twenty-fifth of Decemberl Since that
day the Creator had been visible in His own creation, though
it was almost under ground, in a kind of grotto, or natural stable
for kine. Now the second of February was come. Joseph and
Mary, with the Child, leave the spot where those Forty Days
have fled as swiftly as a heavenly vision. They wind round the
skirt of the narrow hill whereon the city is built. The pruned
vineyards on the steeps have scarcely yet begun to weep their
vernal tears where the knife has wounded them. But the corn­
fields where Ruth gleaned are green, and the clear sunshine of
early spring is on the gray rocks by Rachel’s tomb. The roofs
of the Holy City are in sight, with the glorious temple shining
above all. To that temple, His own temple, the visible Infant
God was now going.
Mary had spent twelve years of her sinless life in the courts
of the temple. It was there that she had outwardly dedicated
her virginity to God, which she had vowed in the first moment
of her Immaculate Conception. It was there she meditated over
the ancient scriptures, and learned the secrets of the Messias.
She was coming back to it again, still virgin, yet, mystery of
grace! a mother with a child. She came to be purified, who was
purer than the untrodden snow on Lebanon. She came to present
her Child to God, and do for the Creator what no creature but
herself could do, give Him a gift fully equal to Himself. When
the second temple was built, the ancients of the people lifted
up their voices and wept, because its glory was not equal to
the glory of the first; but the first temple had never seen such a
day as that which was now dawning on the temple of Herod.
The glory of the Holy of Holies was but a symbol of the real
glory, which Mary was now bearing thitherward in her arms.
But she had two offerings with her. She bore one, and Joseph
the other. She bore her Child, and he the pair of turtle-doves,
or two young pigeons, for her purification. Many saw them
pass. But there was nothing singular in them, nothing especially

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77

attractive to the eyes of the beholders. So it always is where
God is. Now that He is visible, He is in truth, except to faith
and love, just as invisible as He ever was.
Others, too, were drawing toward the temple for the morn­
ing sacrifices. There was the aged Simeon. The blossoms of the
grave were clustered thickly on his head. He had outlived his
own day, with its men and things, its sympathies and associations.
He was not mixed up with the spirit of the times. He was above
its politics. He kept apart from the conflicts of its disputatious
Pharisees and Sadducees. The world seemed to him to be
growing more and more intolerably wicked, and less and less
a place for him, less and less a home at all possible for weary
souls. But there was one thing he had longed to see. He was
willing heaven should be put off, if only he might see that
sight on earth. The Christ! God had promised him that so it
should be. “He had received an answer from the Holy Ghost,
that he should not see death before he had seen the Christ of
the Lord." He was coming that day to the morning sacrifice,
whether with clear views, or any spiritual presentiments, or an
unwonted fire in his heart, who can tell? There was another,
also, that morning in the temple, a widow of fourscore years
and four, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser, from the
olive-spotted plain of Acre and the mild inlets of the western sea.
The spirit of prophecy dwelt within her. She needed not to
come to the temple; for she never departed from it. by prayers
and fasting serving night and day.” And now Mary and Joseph
have entered with the Child. What preparations has not God
vouchsafed to make for that solemnity in the temple on the
second of February! How many graces have gone to sanctify the
aged Simeon! What long years of austerity and what great
heights of prayer are known to the soul of Anna! There has been
more work in the soul of Joseph than went to the creation of
the world. Mary is the very chosen trophy of the divine mag­
nificence. Volumes of commentary have been written on her
gifts, her graces, and her interior beauty, and yet how little do
we know! Then there is the Incarnate Word, whom the silent

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angels of the temple are worshipping in tremulous awe, as He
crosses the threshold of His earthly house. Was there any
lighting up in the Infant’s eye as He took possession of His
temple? Did the lights go out in the Holy of Holies, now that
the Holiest of all was outside the veil, throned in a mortal
Mother’s arms?
Mary made her offerings, and "performed all things accord­
ing to the law of the Lord." For the spirit of Jesus was a
spirit of obedience; and, although the brightness of angelic
innocence was dull beside the whiteness of her purity, she
obeyed the law of God in the ceremony of her purification, the
more readily as it was in fact a concealment of her graces. But
she bore also in her arms her true turtle-dove, to do for Him
likewise "according to the custom of the law." She placed Him
in the arms of the aged priest Simeon, as she has done since
in vision to so many of the saints; and the full light broke on
Simeon’s soul. Weak with age, he threw his arms around His
God. He bore the whole weight of his Creator, and yet stood
upright. The sight of that infant Face was nothing less than the
glory of heaven. The Holy Ghost had kept His promise. Simeon
had seen—nay, was at that moment handling—"the Lord’s Christ.”
O blessed priest! worn down with age, wearied with thy long
years of waiting for the "consolation of Israel," kept alive in
days which were out of harmony with thy spirit, even as St.
John the Evangelist was after thee, surely He who made thee,
He who is so soon to judge thee, He whom thou art folding so
fondly in thine arms, must have sent the strength of His omnipo­
tence into thy heart, else thou wouldst never have been able to
bear the flood of strong gladness which at that moment broke
in upon thy spirit! Look at Him again. See those red lips
so soon to speak thy sentence of eternal life. Light thy heart
at the fire of those little eyes. It is the Christ! Oh, how much
prophecy is fulfilled! The history of the world is finding its
accomplishment. The crown is being put upon creation. The
long secular yearnings of patriarchs, and kings, and prophets,—
they were all after the beauty of that Infant Face. Thou hast

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seen the Christ. Every thing is in that word. The sight was
heaven. Earth has nothing more to do with thee. It had best
roll itself away From under thy feet as quickly as possible, and
let thee drop into the infinite Bosom of thy Father, the beauty
of whose Son may kill thee by the gentlest and most beautiful
of deaths.
It is hard for him to part with that sweet burden from his
arms. In that extreme old age the vents of song have been
opened in his soul, and in the silence of the temple he sings his
Nunc dimittis, even as Zachary sang his Benedictus, and Mary
her Magnificat. Age after age shall take up the strain. All the
poetry of Christian weariness is in it. It gives a voice to the
heavenly detachment and unworldliness of countless saints. It
is the heart’s evening light, after the working hours of the day,
to millions and millions of believers. The very last compline that
the Church shall sing, before the midnight when the doom
begins and the Lord breaks out upon the darkness from the
refulgent east, shall overflow with the melodious sweetness of
Simeon’s pathetic song. Joseph was wrapt even then in an ecstasy
of holy admiration. Even Mary “wondered" at the words, so
deep, so beautiful, so true; for she knew, as no others knew, how
marvellously her Babe was of a truth the light of all the world.
And when, in her humility, she knelt for the blessing of the aged
priest, had he Jesus in his arms still when he blessed her. and
did he wave the Child above her in the sign of the cross, like a
Christian Benediction, or had she Jesus in her arms, holding
Him at His own creature's feet to get a blessing? Either way,
how wonderful the mystery! But what a strange blessing for
thee, happy sinless Mother! There is other poetry in Simeon
than those strains of light which flashed from him but a while
ago. There is other music now for Mary's ear, the terrible music
of dark prophecy which the Holy Ghost utters from His sanc­
tuary in the old priest’s heart; and we would fain think that
Simeon held Jesus in his arms when he uttered it, by the very
way in which he begins. “Behold, this Child is set for the fall,

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and for the resurrection of many in Israel; and for a sign which
shall be contradicted. And thy own soul a sword shall pierce,
that out of many hearts thoughts may be revealed.”
Simeon was silent. But over Mary’s soul there came an inex­
plicable change. Perhaps she learned now what she had not
known before. But more probably it only came to her then in
another way. Yet it was a change, an operation of grace, a new
sanctification, an immense work of God. A clear and detailed
vision of all her sorrows, especially of the whole Passion, was
with its minutest circumstances instantaneously impressed upon
her soul; and her immaculate heart was deluged with a sea of
sorrow, which was supernatural both in its kind and its intensity.
It seemed as if the vision came from the very face of Jesus, as
if His eyes looked it into her and engraved it there. She saw
His own Heart all unveiled, with all its inward dispositions. It
was as if the Incarnation had come upon her again, and in a
different way. She was raised to fresh heights of holiness. She
entered upon another vast region of her appanage as the Mother
of God. She was the same Mary, and yet a different one, who
but a while ago had entered the temple. But there was no sur­
prise with this portentous change. No starting, no weak tremor,
no fluttering of the spirit. Her unshaken peace grew more peace­
ful, because of the world of bitterness that had gone down into it.
The Light of the World had flashed up on high in Simeon’s arms,
in Simeon's song, and there followed darkness, deeper, thicker,
more palpable, than that of Egypt. Suddenly out of the sunshine
of Bethlehem, she found herself in the heart of the eclipse on
Calvary; and she was calm as before, with unastonished dignity,
with the tranquility of unutterable love, with the strength of
divinest union, and with the sword right through her broken
heart, which should remain there for eight-and-forty years, and
then, when Jesus should draw it out of the wound, she would
bleed to death with love.
She heard Anna come into the temple, and acknowledge
Jesus as her God. She heard the words the aged prophetess spoke
about Him to those there who "looked for the redemption of

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Israel.” She was careful that the least things which the law or­
dained should be obediently fulfilled; and then, with Joseph and
the Child, she wended her way back to the green hollow of
Galilee, to the steep sloping streets of the sequestered Nazareth,
with the sword, that sharp sword of the Holy Ghost, within her
heart. Since she left her home in December, how much has
passed! But the sunset looks on Nazareth, gilding its white cot­
tages, as though all things had gone on the same from the begin­
ning. Oh, how cruel unchanging nature looks to a heart that
has been changed in its own despite!
Such is the mystery of our Lady’s first dolor. Let us now
pass to the consideration of its peculiarities. The time at which
it came, the action in which it found her engaged, are remark­
able. She had just given to God a gift equal to Himself. There
never had been such an offering made to Him since creation began.
There never can be such another, only repetitions of the same.
She had thus surpassed all angelic worship; and she well knew
that in giving Jesus back to God she was giving Him away from
herself. Her reward was immediate: it was an unutterable life­
long sorrow. Such is the way of God. This first dolor discloses to
us one of the most universal supernatural principles, which char­
acterize His dealings with His saints. Earthly sorrows are the
roots of heavenly joys. A cross is a crown begun. Suffering is
dearer to the Saints than happiness; for the similitude of Christ
has passed upon them. They have His tastes, His inclinations.
They thirst for suffering, because there is something in it which
is favorable to union with God. It puts out the deceitful lights
of the world; and darkness is the light by which we can most
spiritually discern God. Moreover, the immensity of the sorrow,
and the instantaneous manner in which it followed upon her obla­
tion, illustrate the surpassing holiness of our Blessed Mother.
God proportioned her cross to her powers of bearing it. Nor
was there any reason for delay. She needed no preparation, no
gradual process of inferior graces, no ascending scale of lesser
crosses. A whole world of sorrow might fall at once upon her.
She was ready for it, more immovable than the hills which stood

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around Jerusalem. Oh, who would ever have dreamed that
human fortitude could have been so like divine omnipotence?
Henceforth every action became a suffering, every source of
joy a fountain of bitterness. There was no hiding-place in her
soul, whither the bitterness did not penetrate. Every look at
Jesus, every movement that He made, every word He uttered,—
all stirred, quickened, diffused, the bitterness that was in her.
The very lapse of time itself was bitterness, for she saw Geth­
semane and Calvary coming down the stream toward her. Pos­
tures and attitudes, in which she saw her beloved Son, no matter
how natural they were, or, as we should speak, accidental, had
some startling likeness in them to something which was to happen
in the Passion. He was a constant study to her for the Passion,
a model which she had always before her. When a carpenter’s
tool pressed against the palm of His hand, she saw the wound
of the nail there. The white brow of boyhood often seemed as
if it had a coronal of rosy spots around where the thorns should
be. The prickly pears, that made garden-hedges for the villagers
of Nazareth, always reminded her of the crown of thorns. The
Passion had become an inevitable vision to her. It was always
before her eyes. She could not look away. She could not see
either to the right or the left of that apparition, which like a
blood-red sunset occupied the whole field of sight. Never was
there such a strange alchemy of life. Every thing about it was
commuted into bitterness. The brightest joys made the most
rigorous bitters; and the process went on the most successfully,
when the sun was shining brightest, and the mother’s heart ex­
panded to its genial light and heat. We could not bear so much
as five minutes of the suffering she then endured: and hers was
lifelong. She belonged to sorrow. It had drawn her life under
its dark waters. Her life was hidden in the Heart of Jesus, amid
gloomy forms, appalling shadows, dread insights into horrible
gulfs of sin, thunders and lightnings of divine wrath, frenzies of
lawless demons, excesses of human cruelty, and a very living
show of instruments of the Passion.
But common life was still to go on; common duties had still

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to be performed. No truce was given her, no dispensation. It is
not often that extreme poverty can grant a dispensation even
to the extremest grief. And in her life the hardships of poverty
were carried to the uttermost. Whenever she had aught to spare,
it went straightway to the poor. Joseph and herself had to earn
their livelihood, and Jesus must share the task when He is old
enough. Now let us think of this. When grief has come and
fastened its burden upon our backs, when the white-faced dead
is lying in a silent room upstairs, we have tried to move about
the house as usual, and to give our orders, and to take an
interest, or to seem to do so, in a variety of things, and to appear
calm. And did it succeed? Was it not just the most heart-breaking
thing of all? Oh, yes! we should have rested. The planet should
have stopped whirling eastward for a while, and all the world’s
duties stood still in a dead calm, till we had lain down and
wept, and then got up again to go about our work. Yet we never
had more than the touch of God's little finger upon us, while
both His Hands, heavier than a thousand worlds, held Mary down
in the dust. Nevertheless, no duty saw her absent. No common
thing missed at her hands the same degree of zeal and attentive­
ness which the greatest could require. She seemed busy every­
where, engrossed in every thing, with a mind all free and at
her own disposal. She went and drew water from the well.
She cleaned the house, and prepared the food, and spun the
flax. Every thing was at its right time and in its proper place.
But the sword was there, in the very quick of her heart.
It stirred at each step, till it made very nerve shrink, and her
whole being thrill with agony. And this did not last a week,
until her dead was buried, and the green grass of the grave­
mound waved above it, and time went by shaking healing off
its wings on the soul which sorrow had parched and dried. Oh,
no! Her dead was never buried. There He was, living before
her, and it was His very life that to her was continual death.
What a life,—to work, to be active, to be collected, to be unselfish,
under such an overwhelming burden! Her grief was all in­
terior. She was obliged to deny it the satisfaction of an outlet.

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She would have seemed beside herself, and would have been
treated accordingly, had she allowed it to appear. Her very
thoughts were poisoned with wormwood: but she must not speak.
Who would have understood her, if she had spoken? She must
not weep, or only in secret and at dead of night; for why should
she weep without visible cause for it? She had food, she had
raiment, she had Joseph for a husband, Jesus for a son. Summer
came, and filled the hollow valley with greenness and with
plenty. Away from the great roads, peace and tranquility were
round Nazareth. Why should she mourn? Never has the earth
seen a grief like this, never a grief like it in magnitude, never
a grief of like kind with this.
Time brought no relief. The vision was always there with
a terrible fidelity. And it was the same vision, too. There was
not even the cheerless comfort of a vicissitude of sorrow. It be­
longed to the greatness of her mind that she could call before
her at any moment all the impressions which had ever been
made upon her, that they should continually be present to her
inward eye in multitudes, and that there should be in her as
little succession of ideas as comports with the imperfection of
a created mind. Thus the past was one present to her, and the
future was a second present, and the present was a third present.
The greatness of her science was simply converted into an incal­
culable power of suffering. The clearness of her perceptions was
as knives in flesh and soul. There was something dreadful in the
immutability of the vision. Moreover there was something in­
finite in the vision. For custom did not familiarize it to her; on
the contrary, it became fresher, its edges grew sharper, it went
in deeper. There was a perpetual novelty about its monotonous
images. Depths of significance kept opening out in it, like the
interlacings and unfoldings of an unwieldy thunder cloud; and
each of these depths pushed the boundaries of her possibility of
suffering far further than they were before. Who can think of
any alleviation she could have had? Can the imagination suggest
any? None! none! The beauty of Jesus, we know, was hourly
driving Simeon's sword in. It was a hammer that rose and

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fell with almost every pulse that beat in His veins. The Light
of the world was forever passing in and out of the house; but,
strange to say! He cast terrific shadows upon her, her whom He
enlightened most of all; and the more she exulted, the more
intolerably she suffered. And so her days went by, in the village
of Nazareth, and among the bazaars of Heliopolis.
It was occupation enough to her to attend to her sorrows.
It was a cruel distraction to have to go through her ordinary
actions, and the round of daily domestic duties. Is it not our
experience that almost all distractions are cruel, even when they
are kindly meant? We had rather weep than be consoled. We
shall come round sooner, if those who love us will only let us
muse on our sorrow for a while. But Mary had other sorrows
to look to than her own, sorrows that not only caused hen, but
absorbed them again, and made them so forgetful as to be hardly
conscious of themselves, the sorrows of Jesus. Yet this was no
alleviation to her lifelong woe. On the contrary, it was an aggra­
vation. It barbed every one of them afresh with a double bark.
Thus each sorrow was double. It echoed in two hearts. And the
reverberation made both hearts ache. What she suffered in the
heart of Jesus was far worse than what she suffered in her own.
And all this mysterious process went on in secrecy and conceal­
ment for years and years. She sought no sympathy; she made
no lamentation. She was as quiet as heaven when its songs are
silent.
A life, with a heart broken almost from the first! This it
was to be the Mother of God. This came of her being so bound
up with Jesus. A heart-broken life? And what is life? What
does the word represent? Oh, such a breadth of diversified ex­
periences, such multitudinous flocks of thoughts, such crowds of
complicated actions, such weariful endurance, such tiresome
coming round of the four seasons, such a swift slowness of time,
every thing so long in coming, and then coming before its time!
And to her powers of soul life was so much broader, so much
deeper, so much longer, so much more vital! And her life was
a heart-broken life. What is a broken heart? Hearts do not often

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break. But we can tell what an aching heart is, or a wounded
heart. Nay, we have lived on, when our heart got crushed once.
It was only a momentary crush. The wheel of life went over it.
Then it was over. Yet the surviving it seemed a miracle. But
what is a broken heart? And then a life, with a heart broken
all the while, almost from the first! O Mary! thou wert the
Mother of God, and therefore thou knowestl
But if we look attentively at this first dolor, we shall see
that it contains five distinct dolors, five separate wounds in itself.
First of all, in the offering she had made to God, she had offered
Jesus of her own free will to death. Strange fruit of the greatness
of a mother’s love! Yet it was out of love that she had made the
offering, out of the holiest, purest, most disinterested love of
God. For He who was her Son was also God, and He who was
God was the victim likewise. But could she have foreseen all
that was involved in this? Oh, yes! every thing. Nothing had
escaped her. Nothing could be more intelligent, nothing more
mature, than the offering she had made. And when long years
of oppressive sorrow had come to lay their added weights upon
her broken heart, the very thought of retreating would have
seemed worse than Calvary; for it would have been an infidelity
to Him whom she so lovingly adored. But she had given Him
away; she had given Him to death. For nine months she had
possessed Him. Never was creature so rich, never creature so
supremely blessed. Even then almost her first thought had been
to bear Him over the hill-country of Juda to Elizabeth and John.
All the while she had been longing to see His Face, and behold
the light in His eyes, to hear the tone of His infantine voice,
to throw her arms around Him and press Him, her treasure, the
world’s treasure, the Father’s treasure, to her bosom. She was
His human Mother, and her heart was human, exquisitely human.
She woke from her ecstasy, and He was lying on her robe upon
the ground on Christmas night, stretching out His little hands
to her, as if her arms were His home, as they were. She had
only had Him forty days. Her maternal love had not begun to
satisfy itself, though it had been feeding all the while on His

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perfections. Nay, it was further from being satisfied than when
she first saw Him. Forty days, not a thousand hours; and now
she was giving Hirn away, giving Him to death, and the sword
of Simeon had gone deep into her heart to show her what a
gulf henceforth lay between herself and Him. She could have
no more quiet possession of Him. She could not forbid His
Passion. He belonged to sinners. He belonged to the anger of
His Father. He was a victim, whom she was to guard until the
hour of sacrifice was come. What an office for a mother to holdl
This is what came of being the Mother of God.
But, if she had thus made Him over to the cruelty of His
divine office, she could the less bear the contradictions of others
to His honor, His happiness, or His doctrine. Simeon had spoken
of contradictions. What! would not the whole world be at His
feet? Even if He was to die, because by the divine ordinance
without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin, surely till
then men will hang upon His lips, will follow Him wherever
He goes, to feed on His celestial words. Sinners will everywhere
be converted. The days of the saints will come back again to the
chosen people and the promised land. And when He has died
upon the Cross, the whole world will hasten to confess His royalty,
and will throng into the Church which He has founded. No!
it was not to be so. She knew it was not to be so. But what was
there to contradict about Him? He was beauty, He was truth,
He was love, He was gentleness itself. Who could be rude to
Him? Who could contradict truth, eternal truth? But she saw
how it was all to be. He showed it to her in Himself, when He
unveiled to her the secrets of His soul. There was not a dark
look ever cast on His venerable face, there was not a cold word,
or a wilful misunderstanding, or a petulant retort, or an unbe­
seeming liberty, or an irreverent taunt, or a dire imprecation,
or a chilling blasphemy, from that hour to the day of doom, which
did not go into her heart with excruciating distress. The howling
cries of those multitudes at Jerusalem, ravening for His Blood,
echoed day and night within her maternal heart. This then was
to be the firstfruits of that magnificent oblation, in order to make

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which grace had to raise lier almost to heights, certainly to neigh­
borhoods, divine! Men would not appreciate her offering. They
would not understand it. They would scout it, mock it, contra­
dict it, be cruel to it. No one yet has ever understood it, either
in heaven or earth, save the Eternal Father to whom she made it.
He alone knew the worth of what she gave, the worth of Jesus,
of the Incarnate Word. Do we know it? Impossible; for, if we
did, our lives would not be what they are. There is a knowledge
which brings practice along with it: it is the knowledge by which
sanctity knows, not the mere knowledge of the understanding.
Alas! poor Mother! Her heart is all wounds, one opening
into another, lifelong wounds, which, like the stigmata of the
Saints, bleed, but never ulcerate. At least those who contradict
Him shall learn at last to see the greatness of their error. They
shall come back to Him like wanderers. They shall one day
become themselves triumphs of His redeeming grace. Out of
Him flow grace, and sweetness, and attraction, and healing. His
beauty, confessed at last, shall wind itself around them as a spell.
Thus the grief of all this contradiction may be endurable. But, no!
the sword of Simeon, like the sword of the Cherubim that guards
the entrance of the earthly paradise, ‘‘flames and turns every
way.” Positus in ruinam multorum, set for the fall of many, their
utter fall, their ruin, their irreparable ruin! Is Jesus to lose
forever some of His own creatures? Nay, is He to drive them
from Himself by the very brightness of His light, by the very
heavenliness of His beauty? Are there to be souls for whom it
would have been better had He never come? Oh, cruel thought,
cruellest of all! For the more Mary mused upon the Passion,
and the longer she had it all before her eyes, all the more avari­
ciously she coveted souls, the more she hungered and thirsted
after the harvest of the Passion, and became the Mother of sinners
because she was the Mother of the Saviour, the Mother who gave
Him away to death when she had possessed Him but forty days
in Bethlehem. The countless multitudes of those who were to
be saved were the nearest approach to an alleviation of her incon­
solable sorrow. But even upon this semblance of a consolation

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she was not to lean. Oh, it was a fearful thought to think of her
beautiful Child, that He was to be in some sense a destroyer.
Not altogether a Saviour, but a law of life which was to be a
sentence of death to some, nay, to many. Things had become
very grave now between God and His world. Jesus would be a
touchstone. Men must take their sides now, more definitely,
more intelligently. God was weary of their sins, weary of waiting
for their return. The very greatness of this last long-prophesied
mercy made the rejection of it the more fatal and irretrievable.
The salvation of men would now be in some respects more like
that of the angels. Their probation was becoming more divine,
and therefore more decisive. To reject Jesus was to be lost eter­
nally, and yet the “Rejected of men’’ was one of the very names
which Scripture gave Him. If any thing could have been hard to
Mary’s faith, it would have been that Jesus was to be the ruin of
many souls; and faith’s heroic acceptance of this worshipful
truth only made the edge of it keener, and the point sharper, to
go down into her heart.
It is part of our imperfection that one impression upon our
mind dulls another. We cannot attend to many things at once.
Even sorrows, when they come thickly, in some measure neutralize
each other. Great sorrows absorb us, and then little ones fall
upon us, and we hardly feel them more than the drops of a
thunder-shower. We are conscious of them: but the suffering
they cause is hardly distinct. But it was not so in our Lady,
with the perfections of her unfallen nature. Her self-collection
was complete, and embraced every thing. There was no confu­
sion in her mind from want of balance. It received, appreciated,
and thoughtfully handed on to her exquisite sensibilities of pain,
every slightest aggravation of any one of her multiplied sorrows.
So it was now. The curse incurred by her native land, because
of the rejection of Jesus, was a distinct and bitter grief. All the
glories of its past history, from the Exodus to the Maccabees, rose
up before her mind. Her heart swelled over the vicissitudes,
now sad, now glorious, of her people. She thought of the Tombs
of the saints and prophets scattered among the hills. Her eye

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traversed the battlefields, where the sword of man had so often
avenged the majesty of God. It was the land of promise, very
various, very beautiful. It had what no other land had upon it,
the golden light of God's mysterious choice. It was the holy East
advancing to the water’s edge, and confronting that grand West
which it was first to convert, and then civilize, and last of all
to glorify. It was not a mere feeling of patriotism which stirred
within her. That land had been the earthly home of heavenly
truth, when the rest of the world lay in the cold shadow of spir­
itual darkness. It was more like a sanctuary than a region of the
earth’s geography. There was hardly a mountain which had not
seen some miracle, hardly a hollow to which some promise was
not attached. The banks of its river, the shores of its inland sea,
were overhung with clouds of sacred poetry. A very network of
prophecy lay over the whole land, over all the localities of the
separate tribes. Their virtues and their faults had to do with the
geography of the regions allotted for their dwelling. The peculiar
scenery of the country was the imagery of the Scriptures; and it
was soon to be something more, because of the teaching of her
Son. Then there was Jerusalem. Even the great God had loved
that city, almost as if He were a man, with a human affection.
He had cherished it in His heart as fondly and as wistfully as
any Hebrew who mused upon it beneath the willows by the
waters of Babylon. Jesus Himself wept over it, as if His heart
would break, from the top of Olivet. Poor city! fair city! it was
the trophy of so many mercies, of so much divine tenderness,
of so many victories of divine love. It was the tabernacle of the
visible glory of the Most High. The sweet savor of sacrifice rose
from it evermore. And now the adorable blood of Jesus was to
lay it all desolate, and the Roman fire, and then the ruin of ages,
were to lick up almost the vestiges of its holy places! What made
Jesus weep, what made Him feel like a mother who would fain
shelter her young beneath her wings, must needs have been to
Mary the intensest misery. And Simeon’s sword had not forgotten
even this! Sweet Mother! Thy Son and thyself must ruin Judah,
the çhosen, the long-endured, the delightful of the world. Fain

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as thou art to be nothing but the glad channel of God's love to
earth, thou must be content to be an instrument of His wrath
as well. Thou, too, Mother of mercy! art not thou thyself, even
to this day, set for the fall of many, both in the old Israel and
in the new? Sweet is the will of God, even when it is terrible
in its counsels over the children of men!
This was not altogether such a picture of Jesus and of the
consequences of His coming, as a mother’s heart would have
desired, if nature had been bidden to paint it. The sun should
have been without clouds. The shadows that darkened the land­
scape were too many and too heavy. Around the Infant Jesus
what should there be but light and joy, unmingled mercy, un­
broken peace, all night and the relics of night passed away and
gloriously melted down to gold in the sunrise? He came with
the sole intention of love, and lo! the immediate consequence of
His coming is contradiction, ending with the everlasting ruin of
many souls, and the laying waste of His earthly country, and the
dispersion of His chosen people. But the blood of the Holy In­
nocents would have been a lesson to Mary, if she had needed
teaching, of what those are to expect, and in what mysterious
dark laws they are involved, who come very near to Jesus. Now,
at least if His coming shall not exclusively accumulate praise and
worship for the single attribute of the divine clemency, the justice
of God shall find its glory therein. All things, at any rate, shall
be for the great, the greater, the greatest glory of God. Yes, they
shall in truth; but not altogether as might have been expected.
The mission of Jesus was an infinite possibility of glory for God.
But what was infinite in it rested at the possibility. God was
not to have one tithe of the glory which was due to Him for
the sending of His Son. The wills of men should contrive to
frustrate it at every' turn. To such an extent should their malice
succeed, that there should actually be an appearance of failure
over the whole scheme of redemption. It should be possible, in
time to come, for theologians to speak as if the redemption of
Mary in the Immaculate Conception were the grand, almost suffi
cient, work of redeeming grace. The very sweetness, and humility,

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and forgiveness of Jesus should act as stumbling-blocks in the
way of His Father’s glory. Nay, the very things which, because
they were so divine, should have fructified most to the glory of
God. shall furnish occasions and opportunities for greater out­
rage against the Divine Majesty than sinners could have had
without the Incarnation. Alas! how darkness is gathering round
the very cradle of the Child! Christmas is deepening into Passion­
tide, with unnatural, unseasonable combination. Poor Mother!
here are five wounds in one. Thou hast offered Him to death:
His appearance will be the signal for numberless contradictions to
start up against Him: He is set for the downright ruin of many:
Because of Him the land and the people will be cursed: He will
enable men to desecrate God’s glory more than all generations
have done before. Poor Mother! which way wilt thou look? Jesus
Himself has the crown of thorns round His Infant Heart, which
will one day be seen upon His brow; and is it less cruel on the
heart than on the head? As to sinners, there is to be no such
universal salvation of them as might come near to a compensa­
tion for all this grief. As to God, there is far from free course to
His glory; much glory, doubtless, but then also unheard-of
impiety, the ways and means thereto being furnished by His
own exceeding paternal love.
Such were the peculiarities of the first dolor. Not much need
be said about her dispositions in it. Partly they have been in
great measure anticipated in what has been said, and partly
they are, many of them, so far above our comprehension, so
indistinguishable in the dazzling brightness of the inward beauty
of "the King’s daughter,” that we know not what to say. A book
might be written on Mary’s interior beauty; and in these days
it greatly needs writing. Meanwhile we will delay a while on
three graces which our Lady exercised in a heroic degree in this
first dolor. The first was her practical acknowledgment of the
sovereignty of God. There can be no doubt that this is the
fundamental idea of all worship. There is no making terms with
God. The obligations are all on one side. The completeness
of our subjection is the perfection of our liberty. God is Master.

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There can be no questioning of justice or of goodness, where
He is concerned. The essence of sanctity lies in the enthusiastic
acknowledgment of this sovereignty. Our prerogative is in our
responsibility. It is by this that we come to have royal hearts
toward God. It is comparatively easy to say this, when the sun
shines, and even to fancy that we believe it. But when darkness
closes in, and sorrows give us no respite, and the doors of heaven
seem barred to prayer, and human injustice makes us its victim,
and human unkindness tramples on us when we are fallen, and
human love betrays us, and God’s face is turned the other way,
then it is hard, with whole-hearted sincerity and royal equanimity,
to confess the absolute, irresponsible, majestic sovereignty of God,
with no desire to tear the veil from off its mysterious reasons,
with no shadow of desire to turn ever so little the other way the
Will that seems riding us down so fiercely. We hold all from
God. Who does not know that? All good comes from Him. All
good must go to Him. His glory is the sole significance of all
good. His will is law, and the sole law. All laws that are eternal
are only so because He is eternal from whom they flow. They
are manifestations of Him, not His obligations. It cannot be
otherwise; for the nature of things, as we speak, what is it but
the character of God? All this is very clear when the sun shines
on it. Happy they whose natures are such that all through life
there is a fixed sunbeam on this grand truth of God's sovereignty!
But listen to the cries of anguish from Job, which make the rocks
of Edom ring again, till the whole world hears. By the side of
his magnificent patience whose clamorous submission God has
bidden to pass into a proverb of sanctity, place the silent endur­
ance of the Mother of God, her heart quelled, beautified, made
glorious, well-nigh beatified, by the exulting sense of God’s su­
preme sovereignty. There can be no magnificence among aeatures equal to the perfection of obedience. God-made-man was
so enamored of the loveliness of obedience, that He clung to it
for thirty years, and left Himself barely three wherein to save
the world, and, in order even to do that, only changed the out­
ward form of His obedience. And this old wicked world, why is

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it rocking to and fro, and getting weary of itself, but for the
want of that spirit of subjection in which alone terrestrial beati­
tude consists?
Furthermore, in this dolor our Blessed Lady entered perfectly
into all the dispositions of God about Jesus, herself, and us.
We are often told in spiritual books that we ought to enter into
the dispositions of God about us, or conform ourselves to the
interior dispositions of Jesus. Since the seventeenth century such
language has become universal among spiritual writers, ex­
pressing an old truth in a new way, a way adapted to the change
which has come over the modern mind. Let us try to affix a
definite meaning to this language. Everybody has a certain way
of looking at things, especially things which concern himself.
He has a point of view peculiar to himself. This is the reason
men can so seldom agree perfectly about the commonest things,
hardly indeed about matters of fact; and this shows how intimate
to a man is this private point of view, how much of himself is
implicated in it, how it helps to fix and stereotype his character.
Now, this point of view arises from a variety of causes, a man's
own disposition, the disposition of his parents, his early asso­
ciations, the circumstances and localities of his youth, and,
above all, his education. Nearly every family and household have
mental peculiarities of their own, which others recognize and
appreciate far more distinctly than themselves. The same is true
of religious communities, of large cities, and finally of nations
themselves. In this peculiarity we shall for the most part find
that the weaknesses and unworthinesses of our character intrench
themselves. There is a necessity of littleness in all peculiar
spirit, whether it be family spirit, party spirit, community spirit,
or national spirit. In the case of the individual there is a neces­
sity of selfishness. It is from our own point of view that we are
able to take magnified views of self: it is that which supports
our vanity, and make it seem reasonable and true; it is that which
is the standard whereby we judge others; it is that out of which
all misunderstandings come. It is plain therefore that, in the
work of the spiritual life, this stronghold has, if not to be de-

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stroyed,—and destruction is a rare work in holiness,—at least to
be taken, sacked, and garrisoned afresh. How is this to be done?
Let us turn from ourselves to God. God also has His point
of view. In Him it is essentially true. He has His view of the
world, of the vicissitudes of the Church, of certain maxims of
life, of vocations, of duties, of sin. He intends each of us for a
particular work, and gives us the number and the kind of graces
requisite to fit us for that work. He gives us light up to a given
point and no further, grace in certain quantity and not beyond,
and of one sort, not of another. He has dispositions about us,
both with reference to our natural characters, and to our super­
natural correspondence to His grace. He has certain disposi­
tions with regard to our sanctity. This is the foundation upon
which all spiritual direction rests. It is of immense importance
to us to know what God's particular dispositions are about our­
selves; and these are chiefly discernible in the operations of
grace in our souls. But we ourselves cannot see these operations,
nor pass any safe judgment upon them, at least in the long-run,
because of the disturbing force of self-love. Hence we put our­
selves under the guidance of others, of men who have a particular
gift in them because of their priestly character, and whose
prayers for light God will answer very specially, in reward of
our obedience and in aid of their responsibilities.
When we come to know God’s dispositions about us,—and
many of them, the most important, we may know at once, be­
cause they are general, and follow from His being God, then
the next step is to enter into them, tiiat is, to banish from our
minds our own corresponding dispositions, and put His in their
place. This is not done all at once, but by degrees. Gradually,
first in one thing, then in another, we come to take God's views
of things. We look at them from His point of view, either forget­
ful or disdainful of our own. It is His interests, or the super­
natural principles He has infused into us, or the disclosures He
has made to us of His will, which regulate this point of view,
and not our own likings and dislikings, our natural tastes or
acquired character. This emancipates us from die littleness of

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family, from the littleness of community, from the littleness
of country, but, above all, from the littleness of self. The work
implies nothing less than a complete inward revolution. It
makes the new man. It is the similitude of Jesus. It is the mystical
death of self. But there are seasons of fearful struggle to go
through, before we reach the goal. It is a long, an arduous trans­
formation, with many digressions, many wilful retrograde move­
ments, many dull times of stupefied cowardice. There are ex­
cesses of acute suffering to be endured, for the whole operation
goes on in the very quick of our nature.
In Mary this deifying operation was complete. This was owing
to her immense graces, and also to the perpetual nearness of
Jesus. The prophecy of St. Simeon, though it did not lay bare
to her for the first time, brought formally before her for her
acceptance, manifold dispositions of God regarding Jesus, her­
self, and us sinners. As she had been formally called upon to give
her consent to the Incarnation, so now she was definitely called
upon to enter into these dispositions of God and make them her
own, to appropriate them to herself by a heroic sanctity. We
have already seen that these dispositions were by no means such
as the mother’s heart would naturally have desired. They involved
terrible sacrifices. They raised her to heights where mere hu­
manity could hardly respire. They plunged her in oceans of
supernatural sorrow. Indeed in the sorrow of this first dolor
there is something which we might also venture to call un­
natural, because, not only of the relation in which it placed the
Mother to the Son, but also of thd free will of the Mother in
the matter. Into these dispositions, and with the most perfect
intelligence of them which a creature could have, she entered
heroically. A ship could not sail into harbor with more calm
dignity or more irresistible grace, than she glided out of nature,
earth, and self, into the deep bosom of her Heavenly Father.
The third disposition we shall notice is her generosity in
the acceptance of this dolor. With us, generosity in spiritual
things is often to be measured by the degree of struggle and re­
luctance through which the virtue forced its way. But it was not

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so with our Blessed l>ady. It was with her supernatural generos­
ity as it is with our natural generosity. Its gracefulness was in
the absence of effort. It was born without the pains of birth,
out of the abundance of her heart. It leaped forth spontaneously.
It waited to make no calculations. It fought no battle. What
had it to fight within a nature so subjected to grace in its inmost
recesses, as hers was? From the greatness of her grace what was
supernatural came as obviously to her as what is natural comes
to us: and it is in this instantaneous, almost unconscious alacrity,
that the attractiveness of generosity consists in us. Suffering and
reluctance are two different ideas. She suffered intensely; but
there was no rebellion in her lower nature. There was no conflict
in her will. There could have been, but there was not. It was
inconsistent with the grandeur of her union with God. What
took place in our Lord in the garden of Gethsemane had no
parallel in His Mother. She had no chalice of sin to drink, no
chalice of the Father’s anger; but a cup of simple bitterness
which Jesus Himself was forever holding to her lips. Could she
have struggled against Him ever so little? Could the slightest
ripple pass over her conformity to His will, when He Himself
was her cup-bearer? In the Agony in the Garden we have to
suppose our Lord’s Divine Nature mysteriously cloistered off,
so far as regarded many of its principal effects, from the human
nature to which it was united. Nay, more than this, we have
to suppose a miraculous desertion of the lower part of His human
nature even by the higher human faculties, in order to arrive at
that stupendous conflict in His all-holy Soul, that momentarv
and apparent, yet intensely mysterious, insurgency of His lower
will against His higher. But surely this is a specialty to Him.
It is part of the world’s salvation. It is a sublimity in Him of
which she is not capable, without being lowered. It has to do
with sin and with the angry justice of the Father. It was the
revolt of His purity against the loathsomeness of the manifold
iniquity in which He was to clothe Himself. It was the culminating-point of the magnificence of His sacrifice. In Mary it would
simply be the transient failure of her consummate holiness,

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without the necessity or the dignity of redemption. We cannot
therefore admit it for one moment. It would have broken her
tranquility. It would have loosened the compactness of her per­
fect nature. It would have exaggerated the womanly element in
the exalted Mother of God. It would have brought her down
to a lower level. It would have made her more like one of the
saints. For one moment her will was visible in the mystery of
the Annunciation, and then it sank down into the deep will of
God, and was never seen again. Far out at sea, in the wide
calm a wave will rise up from the heaving plain of waters, crest
itself with silver, catch the light, and fall back again all noise­
lessly into the huge deep, and leave no traces, no wake, behind.
So it was with our Lady’s will. God called it up in the Annuncia­
tion. It shone for the moment, and withdrew itself again into
His, and was seen no more. She who often saw God, she who
was so united with Him as never saint or angel was, she who
had more grace than all the world beside, she who was more
glorious than the blessed in their glory, who have no will apart
from the will of God,—could it be otherwise with her? No! the
generosity of our Blessed Mother was in the spontaneous alacrity
and untroubled calm of her conformity to the sweet will of God.
She, who had given without struggle all that God had asked
of her in the Incarnation, gave also without struggle all that
followed from that first consent.
But let us now consider the lessons which this first dolor
teaches to ourselves. It was a lifelong unhappiness. Unhappiness
is not without mystery even in a fallen world. By rights there
should be no unhappiness at all. For is not the whole world
full of God everywhere, and can there be unhappiness in the
neighborhood of God? How much goodness and kindness is
there in every one around us, if we only take a kindly view of
them ourselves! Sin is easily forgiven to those who are in earnest.
Grace is prodigally bestowed. There is an almost incredible
amount of actual enjoyment, and pain and suffering themselves
are quickly turned to sanctity. Yet for all this the unhappiness of
the world is real. Almost every heart on earth is a sanctuary

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of secret sorrow. With some the grief is fresh. With others it is
old. With immense numbers the unhappiness is literally life­
long, one out of which there is no possible escape except through
the single door of death. With some it arises from having chosen
an unfit lot in life from the first. With others it is from the
unkindness, misconduct, or misunderstanding of those they love.
In some cases men have to suffer for their religion, and its con­
sequences are made by the cruelty of others to last to the end
of their days. Not unfrequently it comes from men's characters,
or from their sins, or from some consequences of these. Now
and then it is the burden of a broken heart, a heart which has
been overweighted, and so has snapped, and thus lost its elasticity
and the power of throwing off its sorrow. To such suffering time
brings no healing. The broken heart lies bleeding in the hand
of its Heavenly Father. He will look to it. No one else can. It is
astonishing how shallow all human consolation is. The waters
glitter so in the sun, we do not see the sandy bottom only just
below the surface. We believe it deep, till we have once been
to draw water there, and then we learned all about it, for we
drew as much sand as water.
Now, what is to be done with this lifelong sorrow? Let our
Lady teach us out of the depths of her first dolor. Her sorrows
were lifelong. This was the characteristic the first dolor im­
pressed upon them. She suffered without seeking consolation. She
suffered without needing to lean on human sympathy. She suf­
fered in silence. She suffered in joy. Let us put this aside, not as
inimitable; the time will come when we shall be able to imitate
even these things; but let us put it aside as beyond us now. But
she had no suffering which was dissociated from the Passion of
Jesus. We can make our sorrows in a measure like hers by con­
tinually uniting them to the sorrows of our dearest Lord. If our
sorrow comes from sin, of course it cannot be like Mary’s sorrow;
but it can be just as easily, just as acceptably, united with the
passion of our Lord. He will not despise the offerings. The fact
of our griefs being a consequence of sin need not even increase
the measure of our grieving. Happy they, and true sons, whom

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our Father punishes in this life! Like Mary, we must be loving,
sweet, and patient with those who cause us any unhappiness, and,
laying our head with unrestrained and unashamed tears on our
Lord’s Bosom, let us think quietly of God and heaven. It is not
a slight consolation for lifelong mourners to know that our
Blessed Lady was a lifelong mourner too. Let us be of good
cheer. Let us look our great sorrow in the face, and say to it,
"You have made up your mind not to part with me till I go down
to the grave: be, then, a second guardian angel to me, be a shadow
of God, hindering the heat and glare of the world from drying
up the fountains of prayer within my heart." All of us, even if
we have not a lifelong sorrow, have a guardian angel of this de­
scription. Our sorrows may not be one, but many. They may
come on guard, like sentinels, one following the other as each
watch of this earthly night is done. Unhappiness is like a secret,
subterranean world. We are perpetually walking over it without
knowing it, and so seeming unkind and thoughtless one to another
when in our hearts we are not really so. What a consolation,
then, it is to us to reflect that the lives both of Jesus and Mary
were lives of one incessant, secret unhappiness! With confidence,
therefore, may we seek the Mother of sorrows, and ask her to be
the Mother of our sorrow. Jesus has a special love for the unhappy.
The longest day has its evening, the hardest work its ending, and
the sharpest pain its contented and everlasting rest.
Another lesson which we learn from this first sorrow of Mary
is, that the highest use of God’s gifts is to give them back to Him
again. Nothing is in reality our own, except our sin. God is
jealous of any thing like a proprietary feeling, even in the gifts
of nature; but in respect of the gifts of grace this jealousy is in­
creased a thousandfold. We must make Him the depositary of
His own gifts, because we do not know how to use them rightly.
We must be like children who bid their father keep the little
treasures which he himself has given. So with the gifts of God.
They are more ours when in His keeping than in our own.
Everything which increases our feeling of dependence upon Him
is sweet, and safe, and true, and right, and the best thing. Besides

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which, God is the end for which all things were given. Nothing
good is meant to stay with us. It would not keep good. It would
spoil. Every creature is a channel, through which things find their
way back to God as surely as blood finds its way back to the heart,
through endless turnings, and has done its work, not in delaying
anywhere,—which would be disease,—but in passing on, and in
passing swiftly, kindling and making alive as it went along.
Moreover, our humility is always in peril if we detain a gift of
God, even if it were for no longer than to look it in the face,
and love it, and then think of it with complacency when it is gone.
We must refer every thing to God. It is the secret of being holy
Grace comes, and temptations give way, and great things are
done, and love is all in a jubilee, and then self begins to sing
an undersong; but we arc making such a noise with praising God
that we do not hear, and she is wounded, and holds her tongue,
and we know nothing of it. Could we not keep up that beautiful
noise forever? Oh, yes! for graces are always coming; like the
people in the streets, there is no end to them,—sometimes a thin­
ning, never a break. So we could be always praising God, always
sending back to Him, when we have humbly kissed them, the gifts
and graces He has sent us. Besides which, God and His gifts are
two very different things. Sometimes He feigns as if He would
overreach us, in order to try our love. He sends us some very
heavenly gift, and then watches to see if we will take it for
Himself, and rest in it, not as if it were our own, yet not as if
it were His, but as if it were Himself. But the soul that loves
truly can never fall into this mistake. It no more thinks of
lying down on one of God’s best gifts to rest itself than we
should dream of lying on the green, yielding billows of the sea
to sleep. It must reach God, nothing short of God. It keeps
giving back His gifts, as if in constant protest that, needful as
they are, they are not Himself, and cannot stand in His stead.
Another lesson to be learned is, that in this world sorrow is
the recompense of sanctity. It is to the elect on earth what the
Beatific Vision is to the saints in heaven. It is God’s presence.
His manifestation of Himself, His unfailing reward. We must

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not be amazed, therefore, if new efforts to serve God bring new
sorrows in their train. By the supernatural principles of the spir­
itual life they ought to do so. If we are able to bear them, these
sorrows will come at once. Their delay is only the index of
God’s estimation of our weakness. Yet we need not fear that they
will be disproportioned to our strength. God’s blows are not dealt
out at random. Our crosses are poised to a nicety by divine wis­
dom, and then divine love planes them, in order to make them
at once smoother and lighter. But we can have no real comfort
in devotion if we are without trials. We have no proof that
God accepts us, no security against delusion. We know that the
stars are in their old places in the sky; but in different states
of the atmosphere they seem much farther off than at other times,
or again much nearer, like teardrops of light on the very point
of falling to the earth. So is it with God. Joy makes Him seem
far off, while sorrow brings Him near, almost down into our
bosom. When sorrows come, we feel instinctively their connec­
tion with the graces which have gone before, just as temptations
so often have an odor about them of past victories. They come
up one after another, dealing their several blows upon our poor
hearts, with such a modest heavenly significancy upon their faces,
that it is easy to recognize angels beneath the thin disguise. As
we touch them, even while the thrill goes through us, we feel
that we are almost handling with our hands our own final perse­
verance, such solid evidences are they of our adoption, so full
of substantial graces in their presence, and leaving such a legacy
of blessings when they go. A heart without sorrows is like a
world without a revelation. It has nothing but a twilight of
God about it.
Furthermore, our sorrow must be our own. We must not
expect any one else to understand it. It is one of the conditions
of true sorrow that it should be misunderstood. Sorrow is the
most individual thing in the whole world. We must not expect,
therefore, to meet with sympathy at all adequate to what we are
suffering. It will be a great thing if it be suitable, even though
it is imperfect. It is a very desolate thing to have leaned on

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sympathy, and found that it would not bear our weight, with
such a burden of sorrow upon our backs. It is very difficult to erect
ourselves again. The heart sinks upon itself in dismay. It has
used its last remaining strength to reach the place where it would
rest itself, and now what is left for it but a faintness which opens
all the wounds afresh, and a dismal conviction that the grief is
less tolerable than it was before? It is best, therefore, to keep
our sorrows as secret as we can. Unfitting sympathy irritates us,
and makes us sin. Inadequate sympathy lets the lame limb fall
harshly to the ground. The denial of sympathy excites almost a
querulous despair. God knows every thing. There are volumes
of comfort in that. God means every thing. There is light for
every darkness out of that simple truth. Our hearts are full of
angels when they are full of sorrows. Let us make them our
company, and go on our road, smiling all the day, scattering
such sweetness round us as mourners only are allowed to scatter,
and God will understand us when we go to Him. Who can
comfort like those who also mourn?
We must expect also that it will be in some measure with us
as it was with Mary; our sorrows will be fed even by our joys.
God sends us joys before sorrows, to prepare our hearts; but the
joys themselves contain prophecies of the coming sorrows. And
what are those sacred fears, those strange presentiments, those
vague expectations of approaching evil, by which joys are so often
accompanied, but the shadows which they bring along with them?
It is out of the brightness of life that its darkness mostly comes.
In all manner of strange ways joys turn to sorrows, sometimes
suddenly, sometimes gradually. Sometimes what was expected as
joy comes in the shape of sorrow. Sometimes the very enjoyment
of the joy turns it into sadness, as if an enchanter’s wand had
been waved over it. Sometimes it is gladness to the last, but when
it goes it leaves grief behind, a grief it was all the while concealing
under its cloak, and we never suspected it. So again when a sorrow
has become calm, and the freshness of its sting seems worn off by
time, by endurance, or by the distraction of our duties, a joy
comes to us, makes us smile as it enters our souls, but, when

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there, goes at once to the fountain of sorrow, wakes up the slum­
bering waters, digs the source deeper, and shakes the earth around
to make the spring flow more abundantly. There are few who
have not experienced this kindling and enlivening of grief by
the advent of gladness. But, in truth, in a world where we can
sin, in a strife where we so often lose sight of God, in a dwelling
which is rather an exile than a home, all joys are akin to sorrows,
nay, are almost sorrows in holiday attire. Joy is life looking like
what it is not. Sorrow is life with an honest face. It is life
looking like what it is. Nevertheless, there is the truest, the
heavenliest of all joys in sorrow, because it detaches us from the
world, and draws us with such quiet, persuasive, irresistible
authority to God. The sunrise of grace within the soul is full of
cloud, and doubt, and uncertain presages, even amid the flash­
ings of beautiful light which are painting the troubled sky every­
where. But when the orb has mounted to the top of its noonday
tower, all clouds will have melted away into the blue, no one
knows how. For to turn joys into sorrows is the sweet, safe task
of earth: to turn sorrows into joys is the true work of heaven,
and of that height of grace which is heaven on earth already.
There is still another lesson to be learned. We must all
enter into this dolor in some way or other in life. The charac­
teristic of Mary’s sorrow is that Jesus caused it. But this is not
peculiar to her affliction. He will be a cause of blessed sorrow
to every one of us. There are very many happy earthly things
which we must sacrifice for Him; or if we have not the heart to
do so, He will have the kind cruelty to take them from us.
Persecution is a word of many meanings, a thing of countless
shapes. It must come infallibly to every one who loves our dearest
Lord. It may come through the hard tongues of the worldly, or
in the suspicions, and jealousies, and judgments of those we love.
In the peace of family love and domestic union it often comes
from hands which make it hard to be endured; and, because of
religion, there is keen misery where the casual visitor sees nothing
but the edification of mutual love. Who was ever let alone to
serve Jesus as he wished? It is idle to expect it. The husband's

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love rises against it in the wife. The mother will tear her children
from the Saviour's arms. The father looks with suspicion on
the claims of God, and jealousy of the Creator will make him
harsh to a child who has never given him an hour of trouble in
life beside, and to whom he never has been harsh before. The
brother will forego the manliness of fraternal affection, and bring
the bitterness of the world’s judgments into the sacred circle of
home, if Jesus dares to lay a finger on his sister. Oh, poor, poor
world! And it is always the good who are the worst in this
respect. Let this be laid to heart and pondered. Outside of us.
beside this inevitable persecution, our Lord will bring trials and
crosses round us, at once to preserve our grace and to augment it.
The more we love Him the thicker they will be. Nay, our love
of Him often gets us into trouble we hardly know how. It almost
leads us into faults, into imprudences to be repented of. Sud­
denly, especially when we are fervent, the ground gives way under
our feet, and we sink into a pit, and in the retrospect our fall
seems inexcusable, and yet how did it all come to pass? How
also is it within the soul? Are there not such things as the pains
of love? Are they not more common than its joys? Then there
is the worse pain of not feeling our love, of seeming to lose our
love, of its forever slipping away from us. There are also interior
trials, by which self-love is put to a painful death, and a cleansing
of our inmost soul by fire which is exceeding agony. Then there
are the distresses into which the love of Jesus entraps us. It per­
suades us to give up this world, to put out all the lights where­
with earth had made our hearts gay, to break ties, to eschew loves,
to commit ourselves to hard, dull lives, and then it leaves us.
God hides His countenance from us. All view of the other world
is shut off from us. Just as it is at sundown, no sooner has the
last rim sunk below the horizon, than, as if evoked by a spell,
from river-side, from woody hollow, from pastures where the kine
are feeding, from meadows with the haycocks standing, there
rises up a cold, white, blinding mist; so is it in the soul: no
sooner is God’s Face gone, than past sins, ghastly things, break up
from the graves in which absolution laid them, and present im­

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perfections, and unknown temptations, and chilling impossibili­
ties of perseverance, all rise up together, and involve the soul in
the coldest, gloomiest desolation, through which no star can
pierce, and it is much if a sickly whiteness tells us that there is a
moon somewhere. Who does not know these things? It is no
use shuddering. They are not on us now; but they will come
back again, be sure, when their hour arrives. Thus Jesus is in
us a cause of sorrow, in us He is a sign to be contradicted, in us
is He set for the rise and fall of many.
These are the lessons which the first dolor teaches us, and
they are lifelong lessons, as its sorrow was. Let us now go home
to Nazareth with Mary. Angels accompany her steps, full of
astonishment and reverence at her grief. Perhaps it is their first
lesson in the profound science of the Passion. So she went her
way through the streets of Zion, and over the hills, and through
the glens by the watercourses, until she came to the green basin
of Nazareth, the Mother bearing her Child! And they were all
in all to each other. And who shall tell what mute language they
spoke, as the Child’s Heart beat against the Mother’s heart in
sorrow and in love? And each was dearer to the other than
before, and we also perhaps were dearer to them than an hour
ago? for the shadow of Calvary had already fallen, both on the
Mother and the Son; and they loved the shadow, and it was we
who cast it.

Chapter III

THE SECOND DOLOR
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT

The Flight into Egypt has always been a fountain of poetry
and art in the Church at large, while it has been a source of
tears and of rich contemplation to religious souls. It is not only
that the mystery is so exceedingly beautiful in itself; but the
Gentiles have loved to regard it as, after the Epiphany, the begin­
ning of our Lord’s dealings with them. He flies from His own
people to take refuge in a heathen land. He consecrates by His
presence that very land which had been the great historical enemy
of the chosen people, and which was, as it were, the express type
of all heathen darkness. Amid those benighted Gentiles He finds
a peaceful home, where no persecutions trouble the even tenor
of His childish life. The idols fall from their niches as He moves.
A power goes out into the rich Nile-valley, nay, overflows it,
and runs far into the yellow sands of the desert, sanctifying and
setting apart the whole region as a future Church, as a blossoming
wilderness, as a barren mystical paradise populous with saints.
The fathers of the desert are to pass into a Christian proverb
throughout the magnificent West, a phenomenon which men will
never be weary of admiring, a living discipline, an enduring
academy, in which all future generations of catholic saints are
to be brought up and to take their degrees. Thus the Gentile
West has loved to accumulate traditions about the Flight into
Egypt, the Sojourn there, and the Return.
If there is not peace in sequestered Nazareth, where shall we
find it? Can the eye of jealous power, quickened by the acute
discernment of selfish fear, find out the Holy Child amid the
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many children of that retired village? The evil one will see to
that, we may be sure. Peace is not the inheritance either of Jesus
or Mary. It is true that he is the Prince of Peace, but not of such
peace as earth dreams of. Mary has but lately reached her home.
Her heart is broken. She needs rest. It shall come to her in the
time of rest, but otherwise than might have been expected. In
the dead of night the Lord appeared in sleep to Joseph, the
keeper of heaven’s best treasures on earth, and bade him rise,
and take the Child and His Mother, and fly into Egypt. The
three kings had gone back to the east without letting Herod
know whether they had found the newborn king, and who He
was. Herod had bidden them return to him; but Scripture does
not tell us that they had promised to do so; or if they had, the
commandment of God, which came to them in a dream, super­
seded the promise they had made. Tyranny was not, however,
to be so balked, and, lest it should miss its aim, involved all
Bethlehem in blood by the massacre of the Innocents. Oh, Mary!
see what a stern sister thou hast been to those poor mothers of
Bethlehem, who saw thee on Christmas Eve wandering home­
less through their streets, they perhaps fondling their little ones
at their doors! What a concourse of wailing sounds rose to heaven
from that narrow hilltop, while the gutters of the steep streets
ran down with blood! It was the law of the Incarnation, the
law that was round the gentle Jesus, which was beginning to work.
Dearest Lord! His great love of us had already broken His
Mother’s heart. It was now desolating the happy hearths of
Bethlehem, and staining its inhospitable doorposts with blood.
And all to keep Himself for Calvary, where He was to shed with
a thousandfold more cruel suffering His Precious Blood for usl
The night was dark and tranquil over the little town of
Nazareth, when Joseph went forth. No commandment of God
ever found such promptitude in highest saint or readiest angel
as this one had found in Mary. She heard Joseph’s words, and
she smiled on him in silence as he spoke. There was no perturba­
tion, no hurry, although there was all a mother’s fear. She took
up her treasure, as He slept, and went forth with Joseph into

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109

the cold starlight; for poverty has few preparations to make.
She was leaving home again. Terror and hardship, the wilder­
ness and heathendom, were before her; and she confronted all
with the calm anguish of an already broken heart. Here and
there the night-wind stirred in the leafless fig-trees, making their
bare branches nod against the bright sky, and now and then a
watch dog bayed, not because it heard them, but from the mere
nocturnal restlessness of animals. But as Jesus had come like
God, so He went like God, unnoticed and unmissed. No one
is ever less missed on earth than He on whom it all depends.
The path they took was not the one which human prudence
would have pointed out to them. They returned upon the
Jerusalem road they had so lately trodden. But, avoiding the
Holy City, they passed near Bethlehem, as if His neighborhood
should give a blessing to those unconscious Babes that were still
nestling warmly in their mothers’ arms. Thus they fell into the
road which leads into the wilderness, and, Joseph going before,
like the shadow of the Eternal Father, they crossed the frontier
of the promised land far on until they were lost to the eye, like
specks on the desert sand. Two creatures had carried the Creator
into the wilderness, and were taking care of Him there amid
the stony sands of the unwatered gullies. Sunrise and sunset, the
glittering noon and the purple midnight, the round moon and
the colored haze, came to them in the desert for many a day.
Still they travelled on. They had cold to bear by night, and a
sun from which there was no escape by day. They had scantv
food, and frequent thirst. They knew whom they were carrying,
and looked not for miracles to lighten the load they bore.
Old tradition said that one night they rested in a robber's
cave. They were received there with rough but kind hospitality
by the wife of the captain of the band. Perhaps it was her sorrow
that made her kind; for it is often so with women. Her sorrow
was a great one. She had a fair child, the life of her soul, the
one gentle, spotless thing amid all the lawlessness and savage life
around. Alas! it was too fair to look at; for it was white with
leprosy. But she loved it the more, and pressed it the more

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fondly to her bosom, as mothers are wont to do. It was more than
ever her life and light now, because of its misfortune. Mary and
Jesus, the robber's wife and the leprous child, together in the
cave at nightfall I how fitting a place for the Redeemer! How
sweet a type of the Church which He has founded! Mary asked
for water, that she might wash our Blessed Lord, and the robber’s
wife brought it to her, and Jesus was washed therein. Kindness,
when it opens the heart, opens the eyes of the mind likewise.
The robber’s wife perceived something remarkable about her
guests. Whether it was that there was a light round the head
of Jesus, or that the Holy Spirit spoke in the tones of Mary, or
that the mere vicinity of so much holiness strangely affected her,
we know not: but, in much love and with some sort of faith, the
mother’s heart divined;—earth knows that maternal divination
well. She took away the water Mary had used in washing Jesus,
and washed her little leprous Dimas in it, and straightway his
flesh became rosy and beautiful as mother’s eye could long to
see it. Long years passed. The child outgrew its mother's arms.
It did feats of boyish daring on the sands of the wilderness. At
last Dimas was old enough to join the band; and though it seems
he had to the last somewhat of his mother's heart about him, he
led a life of violence and crime, and at length Jerusalem saw him
brought within her gates a captive. When he hung upon the
cross, burning with fever, parched with agony, he was bad enough
to speak words of scorn to the harmless Sufferer by his side. The
Sufferer was silent, and Dimas looked at Him. He saw something
heavenly, something unlike a criminal, about Him, such perhaps
as his mother had seen in the cave three-and-thirty years ago.
It was the Child in the \vater of whose bath his leprosy had been
healed. Poor Dimas! thou hast a worse leprosy now, that will
need blood instead of water! Faith was swift in its work. Perhaps
his heart was like his mother’s, and faith a half-natural growth
in it. He takes in the scene of the Crucifixion, the taunts, the
outrages, the blasphemies, the silence, the prayer for their pardon,
the wishful look cast upon himself by the dying Jesus. It is
enough. Then and there he must profess his faith; for the

THE SECOND DOLOR

1Π

Mother’s prayers are rising from beneath, and the sinner is being
enveloped in a very cloud of mercy. Lord! remember me when
Thou comest into Thy kingdom! See how quickly he had outrun
even some of the apostles. He was fastened to the cross to die,
and he knew it was no earthly kingdom in which he could be
remembered. This day shalt thou be with Me in paradise! Para­
dise for thy cave's hospitality, poor young robber! And Jesus
died, and the spear opened His heart, and the red stream sprang
like a fresh fountain over the limbs of the dying robber, and
though his mother from the cave was not there, his new Mother
was beneath the cross, and she sent him after her Firstborn into
paradise, the first of that countless family of sons who through
that dear Blood should enter into glory.
Ages ago the Jewish people, after their deliverance from
Egypt, had wandered over that desert. Its gray sands, its ruddy
rocks, its stonestrewn plains, its regions of scant verdure, its sea­
coast, and its wells of pastoral renown, had been the scenes of
such wonders as the world had not beheld before. Never had
the Creator interfered so visibly, or for so long a time together,
in favor of His creatures. The whole camp, with its cloud and
fire, its cruciform march, with Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasses,
bearing the relics of Joseph, its moving church beautified with
the spoils of Egypt, was a standing miracle. In Sinai God had
thundered from the heights, pouring through that wandering
Hebrew people over the whole world the glorious light and
transcending faith of the Unity of God, a doctrine that came
to the world most fitly from the austere grandeur of a wilderness.
There had those commandments of heavenly morality been given,
under which we are living at the present day, and which shall
be men’s rule of life until the doom, the Judge’s rule in fixing
the doom of each. In our Christian childhood we have wan­
dered with the Jews over that silent wilderness, learning the
fear of God. In their pilgrimage we have seen a type of our own.
In their vicissitudes we seemed almost to take part ourselves.
The very names of the wells and halting-places sound like old
songs in our ears, songs so early learned that they can never be

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forgotten. Here now was the very Creator Himself, in the
reality of human childhood, wandering over that historic wilder­
ness, reversing the Exodus, going to make Egypt His home, driven
out of the delectable land of the old Canaanites by the very people
whom He had led thither by a pillar of light, whose battles He
had fought, whose victories He had gained, and whose tribes He
had established, each in its characteristic and suitable allotment.
There was Mary with her Magnificat, instead of Miriam and
her glorious seaside song; and another Joseph, greater and dearer
far than that saintly patriarch of old, who had saved the lives
of men by husbanding the bread of Egypt, whereas this new
Joseph was to guard in the same Egypt the living Bread of ever­
lasting life. And that very wilderness both the Josephs had
crossed.
How wonderful must have been the thoughts of Jesus and
Mary as they wandered over those scenes of God’s past mercies,
past judgments, past grandeurs! We may reverently follow them
in our meditations, but it would be hardly reverent to write
our guesses down. It was a journey of hardship and fatigue. At
last they reached the shores of the Red Sea, and saw the waters
that lay between Egypt and themselves. We can hardly conceive
that they did not as it were reconsecrate by their presence the
exact scene of the Exodus, wherever it was. Thence it would be
most likely that they would follow the coast, and round the gulf
by Suez, and so pass on to Heliopolis, now truly, for some years
to come, to be the City of the Sun. Tradition speaks of trees
that bowed down their leafy heads, inclining their branchless
stems, to shade with their fanlike plumes the Mother and the
Child. It speaks also of the uncouth images of the heathen gods
which tumbled, like Dagon, from their pedestals, when the True
God went by. There, on the banks of that old river where
Moses wrought his miracles, amid crowds of benighted idolaters,
and in all the straitnesses of poverty, the Hebrew strangers dwell,
for seven years, for five years, or for two years and a half, as
different authorities maintain. Joseph pursued his trade of
carpenter, and Mary doubtless contributed to the support of

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the modest household, while Jesus unfolded His infantine beau­
ties day after day, more delicate and lovely a thousand times in
His human loveliness than the fairest snowy lotus that was ever
cradled on the bosom of the Nile.
During those years that Egyptian city was the centre of the
world. The garden of Eden was as nothing to it in beauty or in
gifts. Thither were the angels gathered in multitudes to wonder
and adore. Thither, though men knew it not, went all the world's
prayers, its sighs, its secret expectations. Thither also went the
voices of pain and sorrow in Heliopolis itself, into God's ear,
and that a human ear, in the next street or in the selfsame house.
Supernatural actions of consummate sanctity, and of infinite
value, were pouring forth day and night from the Human Soul
of Jesus in more abundant volume than the Nile-flood at its
highest, meriting graces which should carry fertility over the
whole wilderness of a fallen world. Beautiful also was the heart
of Mary during those years. Her holiness was rising perpetually,
her union with God, the closeness of which was already far be­
yond what any technical term in mystical theology can express,
grew closer and closer; so that the Mother seemed to be well-nigh
identified with the Son, in spite of that whole infinity which
always lay between them, as between the Creator and the creature.
Her sorrows grew as well. There was still the lifelong sorrow of
the first dolor at her heart; and to this were superadded the many
new sorrows which this second dolor, this Flight into Egypt, had
of necessity brought with it. Did dark Egypt know of the great
light which was shining on the banks of its famous river? Did
the priests, in spite of themselves, offer sacrifice to the sun with
less faith, now that He was close at hand, smelling the sacrificial
odors, and in hearing of the wild worship, who invented the sun,
called it out of nothing, gifted it with all its occult influences,
set it up as a hearth at which the golden ether should kindle itself
into heat and light, and made it the centre of such vast outlying
regions of life and such magnificent far-stretching phenomena,
right away beyond still undiscovered planets, and all out of His
own unimaginable wisdom? Did no misgivings come across the

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

more thoughtful in the multitude, when they joined in the un­
dignified rites of their debasing animal-worship, now that the
Eternal had assumed a created nature, and was to be seen and
heard in their land? Some truth, some sweet gracious trouble in
many souls, must surely have stolen like an infection from the
nearness of Jesus and Mary. For are they ever near, and some
benediction does not follow? But all these things, all the secrets
of this Egyptian life, are hidden in divine concealment.
So die appointed years ran out; and, when Herod was dead,
an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in sleep, saying, Arise,
and take the Child and His Mother, and go into the land of Israel.
For they are dead that sought the life of the Child. Joseph arose
with the same promptitude as of old. There was no delay. No
one at Heliopolis would care to detain them. They were too
obscure. They were free to come and go as they pleased. The
stars of night were still standing tremulously like thin shafts of
light in the breast of the Nile, when they began their homeward
wanderings. Once more they saw the waters of the Red Sea.
Once more the weary night-wind of the wilderness sighed round
them as they sank to rest upon the sands. Once more the hills
and the vineyard-walls of Southern Judah greeted their eyes, the
welcome land which God had chosen. But the cross was not to
be removed all at once. The temple at Jerusalem was their
natural attraction. But Joseph knew the value of that treasure he
was set to guard; and, when he heard that Archelaus reigned in
the room of his father, he was afraid to go there. In his fear he
doubtless sought light in prayer, and again a supernatural warn­
ing came to him in his sleep, and he was bidden to retire into the
quarters of Galilee. So the long journey was made longer, until
at length the old home at Nazareth received the three.
Such was the mystery of the second dolor. It extended over
an uncertain length of time, for we must not confine the dolor
to the Flight only. Epiphanius thought that our Lord was two
years old when He fled, and remained in Egypt two. Nicephorus
fixed the duration of the sojourn at three years. Barradius calls
it five or six, Ammonius of Alexandria seven. Maldonatus fixes

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115

it at not more than seven, nor less than four. Baronius gathers
from a variety of considerations that our Lord fled in His first
year, and returned in His ninth, thus giving at least seven full
years to Egypt: to this Suarez also inclines, though he says that
nothing positive can be decided about it. Seven years is also the
most commonly accepted time among the faithful. This dolor
presents three different objects of devotion to us: the Flight, with
all its fears, its hardships, and fatigues, the Sojourn, with its
sense of exile and its companionship with the idolaters, and the
Return, with those peculiarities which followed from the in­
creased age and size of Jesus. Some writers dwell on one or other
of these in preference to the rest. Pious contemplation may shift
from one to another according to its mood. But to comprehend
the dolor in its unity, we must consider it as a drama in three
acts, the Flight, the Sojourn, and the Return, by which, as we
shall see presently, it is made a double dolor.
We may now therefore pass from the narrative of the mystery
to a consideration of the peculiarities of this dolor.
The first thing to be noticed is, that as Simeon was the instru­
ment of the first dolor, so Joseph was the instrument of this.
There was much in this to the loving heart of Mary. There is a
certain appearance of cruelty in sending sorrow through those
we love. Shakespeare says that the first bringer of unwelcome
news has but a losing office. Thus it was at once a sorrow to
Joseph to convey fresh sadness to Mary, and to her to receive it
from him. The world has often been glorified by heroic examples
of conjugal affection. Many have been recorded in history as
notable phenomena, which were too precious for the wisdom and
the solace of mankind to be forgotten. In the deeper depths of
private life it is a pure fire which is burning evermore. But
never did marriage throw its divine sanctions round a conjugal
love so pure, so true, so intense as that which existed between
Joseph and Mary. Never was there such oneness, such identity,
such living out of self and in each other, as was in them. It was
the very perfection of natural love. Next to her natural love for
Jesus, earth has never seen such another love as that between
Joseph and herself, unless it were also Joseph's love for the Holy

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Child. Bui added to this natural love there was so much that
was supernatural; and supernatural love is not only deeper, but
more tender, than natural love. It brings out the capabilities
and depths of the human heart far more than natural affection
can do. Joseph was to Mary the shadow of the Eternal Father,
the representative of her Heavenly Spouse, the Holy Ghost. In
him she saw with awful clearness and most reverential tender­
ness two Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. When she saw Jesus
in his arms, it was a mystery to her too deep for words. Tears
only could express it. Then the exceeding sanctity of Joseph was
continually before her, and she was privy to operations of grace
within his soul, which probably surpassed those of any other
saint. For they were the graces of him who was the master of
God’s household. While then it was an exercise of obedience to
him as her appointed master, it was also no slight aggravation
of Mary’s sorrow, that this time it should come to her through
Joseph.
There was a further aggravation in the fact that her suffering
seemed to come less directly from God, and more from the
wickedness of men, than was the case in the first dolor. There it
was prophecy, God’s disclosure of the future, and His infusion of
a vivid vision of it to be her perpetual companion. But now the
hand of sinful man was actually upon her. She was in contact
with the violence of which Jesus was to be the victim. Here was
the first touch of Calvary: and it chilled her to the heart. In our
own limited sphere of endurance, we must surely all have felt
that there is an additional difficulty in receiving a cross when it
comes to us, not directly from God, but through the hands of
our fellow-creatures. But not only is it an additional difficulty:
it often seems to be the peculiar difficulty. We fancy, doubtless
not unfrequently deceiving ourselves, that we could have borne
it patiently and cheerfully if it had come at once from Him.
But there is something which dishonors the cross in its transmis­
sion through the hands of others. Thus it is a trial, not to our
patience only, but also to our humility. There is nothing hum­
bling in having the weight of God’s omnipotence simply laid

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117

upon us by Himself, with the intervention only of inanimate
secondary causes. There is nothing humiliating in the death of
a dear child, or the taking away of a beloved sister, or in the
breaking up of a household by death, or in the desolation of
home by some terrific accident. Humility is not exactly or im­
mediately the virtue which divine catastrophes elicit from the
soul. But when God punishes us through the injustice of men,
through the base jealousies of others, through the unworthy
suspicions of unbelieving friends, through the ingratitude of
those we have benefited, or through unrequited love of any sort,
then the bravest natures will shrink back and decline the cross
if they can. It is true that reason tells them God is really the
fountain of sorrow. It comes from Him, even though it flows
through others. But nothing except an unusual humility will
make this dictate of reason a practical conviction. Even with
inanimate causes there is something of this reluctance in sub­
mission to sorrow. If a mother hears of the death of her son, her
soul is full of bitterness, yet, if she be a real Christian, full of
resignation too. But fuller tidings come. It was a mere accident.
The slightest change in the circumstances, and he would have
been saved. If it had not happened when it did and where it did,
it could not have happened at all. Take away a little inculpable
negligence, or imagine the least little common foresight, and her
son might this hour have been in her arms in the flush of youth.
His death was so exceptional, that circumstances rarely ever com­
bine as they combined then. They seem to have combined, like
a fate, on purpose to destroy him. Ah! and is not this veil thin
enough for a Christian eye to discern our heavenly Father through
it? Does it not give a softening sweetness to the death, that it
was brought about with such a manifest gentle purpose? Look
at that Christian mother, and see. Her resignation has almost
disappeared. Hard faith is all that is left to sustain her in her
sorrow. The tears have gushed out afresh. She has broken silence,
and grieved out loud. She has wrung her hands, and given up
her work, and sits by the wayside weeping. She has told the story
so often that it has grown into her mind. Each time she told it

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the slightest tint of exaggeration entered in, until now the death
of her son has become to her own self a painful mystery, an un­
accountable injustice, a blow which will not allow itself to be
borne, but is manifestly unendurable. So bitter, so trebly bitter,
does the action of creatures render the fountains of our sorrow.
But there is something more than this in our impatience at
the intervention of creatures in our misfortunes. It is a deep­
lying trust in the justice of God, which is far down in our souls,
and the foundation of all that is most manly in our lives. It
seems to be our nature to bear blows from Him; nay, there is
something comforting in the sense of His nearness to us which
the act of punishment discloses. Our whole being believes in
the infallibility of His love, and so is quiet even when it is not
content. No idea of auelty hangs round our conception of God,
even though we know that He has created hell. But every created
face has a look of CTuelty in it. There is something in every eye
which warns us not to trust it infinitely; greatly, perhaps, we may
trust it, but not to the uttermost. It is the feeling of being at the
mercy of this cruelty which makes us shrink from sorrows that
come as if directly from the hands of creatures. Our sense of
security is gone. We do not know how far things will go. Strange
to say, it seems as if we knew all when we are in the grasp of the
inscrutable God, but that, when creatures have got their hands
upon us, there are dreadful things in the background, undis­
covered worlds of wrong, subterranean pitfalls, dismal possi­
bilities of injustice, magnified like shadows, and to appearance
inexhaustible. There is the same difference between our feelings
in misfortunes coming straight from God and misfortunes that
come through men that there is between the feelings of an un­
popular criminal hearing the wild yells of the multitude that
seek his blood through the thick walls of his prison, which he
knows to be impregnable, and his terror when he is exposed to
die people in the street, with their fierce eyes glaring on him,
and a feeble guard that must give way at the first onset. In the
one case he has to confront the considerate tranquility of justice,
in the other to face the indefinite barbarity of savages. Even

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David, whose heart was after God's own heart, felt this deeply
When God gives him his choice of punishments, after he had
numbered the people, he answers, I am in a great strait: but it
is better that I should fall into the hands of the Lord, for His
mercies are many, than into the hands of men. And so he chose
the pestilence. Who is there that does not feel that the immu­
table God is more easy to persuade than the hearts of flesh in our
fellow-sinners? He will change His purpose sooner than a man.
When God stands between us and the unkind world, we feel
secure and grieve quietly, our head leaning on His feet even
while we sit desolate upon the ground. But when the merciless
world itself is down upon us, no shorn sheep on the wide treeless
wold, with the icy north wind sweeping over it, is in more pitiable
plight than we. This was what Mary felt. The partition was
wearing away. The wall was sinking that had stood between the
world’s actual rudeness and her broken heart. Her martyrdom
grows more grievous as it grows less placid, notwithstanding that
the current of her inward tranquility flows unquickened still.
So much for the manner in which this dolor came to her. But
St. Joseph’s share in it is by no means exhausted there. He is a
new ingredient throughout all the years over which this sorrow
extends. He was old, and his years had need of rest. He dwelt
forever in an atmosphere of calmness, which seemed to suit his
graces best, and in which they developed freely, like the magnifi­
cent foliage we read of in almost windless islands. His life had
been a life of outward tranquility as well as inward. Haste,
precipitation, and unsettlement were foreign to him. He com­
bined virginal meekness with the most fervent love. He was
simple like Jacob, meditative like Isaac, living a deep life of
faith, far beneath the surface of the soul's storms, like Abraham.
He was like,—at least the thought comes natural,—like the gentle
gifted Adam, full of soft sanctities and placid familiarity with God,
before he fell. He seemed rather a flower to blossom somewhere
just outside the earth, or to be caught up and planted inside
that old hidden Eden of man’s innocence. Oh, how Mary’s heart
was poured out in love and admiration upon this trophy of God's

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sweetest, gentlest graces! But she was to drag him out into the
storm. She was to throw him into life’s rude, rough, swift,
jostling, inconsiderate crowd, and see his meek spirit bruised,
wounded, and outworn with the struggle. At his age how un­
becoming the cold and heat, the wind and wet, of that houseless
wilderness! How his eye shrank from the wild fiery faces of the
Arabs and the dark expression of those keen Egyptians, and how
strangely his voice sounded as it mixed with theirs! Mary felt in
her heart every one of these things, and many more, many worse,
of which we know nothing, but may surmise much. It was only
the sight of Jesus, only the thought of the Child’s peril, which
enabled her to bear it. And then, like a transplanted flower in
a new climate, Joseph gave out such new light, such fresh fra­
grance, such altered blossoms, such different fruits. His soul was
more beautiful than ever, and with the brightness of its beauty
grew the intensity of Mary's love, and, with that love, each trial,
each grief, each incommodity of his winning old age, was a keener
sorrow and a deeper grief than it was before.
But she was positively encircled with objects of sorrow. From
Joseph she looked to Jesus. Her nearness to Him became a super­
natural habit full of consequences to her soul. It brought with
it swift growths of sanctity. It adorned her with extraordinary
perfections. It was a perpetual process of what the hard style of
mystical theology calls deific transformation. We can form no
just idea of what it was. But there are moments when we get a
transient glimpse in our own souls of what the habitual nearness
of the Blessed Sacrament has done for us. We perceive that it
has not only done something to each virtue and grace God may
have given us, but that it has changed us, that it has done a work
in our nature, that it has impregnated us with feelings and in­
stincts which are not of this world, and that it has called up or
created new faculties to which we cannot give a name or define
their (unctions. The way in which a priest says office, or the
strange swiftness of his mass, is a puzzle to those who are outside
the Church. They are quite unable to understand the reality of
the view of God which a Catholic gets from the Blessed Sacra-

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ment, and how that to him slowness, and manner, and effect,
whether they be to tell on others or admonish self, are, in fact,
a simple forgetfulness of God, and the manifest unfrightedness
of a creature who has for the moment forgotten Him, and His
terrible nearness on the altar. From this experience we may ob­
tain an indistinct conception of what the nearness of Jesus had
done in Mary. How much more sensitive, therefore, did she
become about His sufferings! The change which His presence
wrought in herself would be daily adding new susceptibilities to
her sorrow. She saw trials to Him in little things, which yester­
day, perhaps, she had scarcely discerned. For if her love grew,
her discernment must have grown also; in divine things light
and love are coequal and inseparable. Just as in our small
measure our tenderness and perception about the offended ma­
jesty of God grow* with our advance in holiness and our more
refined sensibilities of conscience, so in an astonishing degree
Mary’s capabilities of wounded feeling about Jesus were daily
being augmented.
But this was not all. There was a change in Him, as well as
in her; and it also, like the other, went as another spring to feed
the stream of her sorrows. He was not a stationary vision, just
as we all know how the Blessed Sacrament is not a stationary
presence, but one which lives, acts, grows, puts out attractions,
makes manifestations, and is as immutably changeful as the
worship of heaven, which never wearies even the vast intelli­
gences of angels. Thus the Holy Child was constantly giving out
fresh light and beauty. He was an inexhaustible treasure of
supernatural loveliness. It always seemed as if at once she knew
Him so well, and yet was but just beginning to know Him at all.
There was a mixture of custom and surprise in her love of Him.
which was like no earthly affection. For, while she felt instinc­
tively as if she could prophesy how He would act in given cir­
cumstances, she was quite sure there would be some divine nov­
elty in the action when it came, which would take her unawares.
Thus the delight of wonder forever mingled with the delight of
habit. Her powers of observation, and the completeness of her

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intelligence, must also have been quickened by the velocity and
expansion of her love. Nothing escaped her. Nothing was with­
out its significance. If there were unfathomable depths, at least
she was becoming more and more expert in fathoming them.
Jesus was a revelation, and therefore called out science as well as
faith. Even to us, to learn our Blessed Lord is a different thing
from believing in Him. Such a lesson it is,—with Himself as the
professor to teach it, divided into a million sciences, eternity the
university to learn it in, where the best of us will never finish
the course, never take our degree? Mary was learning it, as even
the angels in heaven cannot learn it. So infinite was the worth
of the grace our Lord was disclosing, so infinite the value of His
manifold daily actions, so infinite the satisfaction of each of His
least sufferings, that in this one dolor Mary had what with so
many infinities may well be called three eternities in which to
learn His loveliness and raise her own love to the mark of her
learning. There was first the wilderness, and then Egypt, and
then the wilderness again. And all these accumulated lights,
sensibilities, beauties, graces, attractions, increments of love, were
but so many fresh edges put on Simeon’s sword. The result of
each, the result of all, the product of their combination, was
simply an immensity of sorrow.
There are two ways of doing battle with grief. One is in
the privacy of our own homes, in the secrecy of our suffering
hearts, with the undistracted presence of God round about us.
But under the most favorable circumstances it is no easy task.
The common round of indoor duties is heavy and irksome; and
somehow, though if sorrow had chosen its own accidents it would
not have made itself more endurable, the cross seems always as
if it never fitted, as if there were peculiar aggravations in our
own case to justify at least some measure of impatience. But the
fight is much harder when we have to go forth to meet the enemy,
not only before the faces and among the voices of men in an
unsparing publicity, but to receive our sorrow at their hands,
and to feel the pressure of their unkindliness upon us. In this
case it is not that external work is an unwelcome distraction to

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our sorrow; it is not merely that grief gives us a feeling of right
to be dispensed from the actual conflict of work; but our very
external work is our sorrow. We go out to sorrow. We pass
from the shelter of home on purpose to meet our grief. We do
our best to let suffering take us at a disadvantage, and off our
guard, amid a multiplicity of things to do, and having to look
many ways at once. Neither is this our own choice. It is simple
necessity. Of the two battles with sorrow, this is far the hardest
to fight, and the unlikeliest to win. In passing from the first dolor
to the second, our Lady’s sorrow shifted from the easier battle
to the harder one, if battle is a right word to use of such a
supreme tranquility as hers. Her new sorrow called for actual
outward obedience, not the mere assent of an inward generosity.
She had suffered in the sanctuary of her own soul before; now
personal toil, external privation, rough work, enter into her
sorrow. They who appreciate rightly the shyness of extreme
sanctity will have some idea of what this change, in itself, and
considered apart from other aggravating circumstances, inflicted
upon the delicate nature of our Blessed Mother.
It not unfrequently happens that persons beginning in holi­
ness feel, almost in spite of themselves, a kind of disesteem for
the outward observances of religion., They may be too well in­
structed to fall into any erroneous opinion on the subject; but,
for all that, the feeling is upon them, and will show itself for a
while in many little ways. Habits of interior piety are compara­
tively new to them, and, with the fresh feeling of how little out­
ward devotion is worth without the inward, they exaggerate the
importance of interior things, and look at them in too exclusive
a light. There is something so delicious—there is no other word
for it—in the first experiences of communion with our Blessed
Lord down in our own hearts, that faith, for want of practice,
does not see Him, as it will one day, in the commonest ordinances
and most formal ceremonies of the Church. But. as the soul
grows in holiness, a reverse process goes on. Vocal prayer re­
assumes its proper importance. Sacraments are seen to be interior
things. The calendar of the Church leaves a deeper impress on

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our devotion. Reads, scapulars, indulgences, and confraternities
work ascetically in our souls,—a deep work, an interior work.
Al last, to high sanctity outward things are simply the brimming
vases in which Jesus has turned the water into wine, and out of
which He is pouring it continually into' the soul. To a saint a
single rubric has life enough in it to throw him into an ecstasy,
or to transform him by a solitary touch into a higher kind of
saint than he is now.* To an inexperienced beginner there is
nothing perhaps in St. Teresa less intelligible than her devotion
to holy water. They can understand her doctrine of the prayer
of quiet more readily than her continual reference to holy water,
and the great things she says of it. From all this it comes to pass
that there was one peculiarity of this dolor of our Lady, into
which none can enter fully but a saint, indeed even a saint not
fully; for we must remember that it is of Mary we are speaking.
This was the deprivation of spiritual advantages in the wilder­
ness and in Egypt. There was no temple, probably no synagogue.
There were no sacrifices but such as were abominations and
horrors to her soul. There was not the nameless atmosphere of
the true religion round about her but on the contrary the re­
pulsive darkness and the depressing associations of the most
abandoned misbelief and degrading worship of the inferior ani­
mals. To her this was a fearful desolation. Her height of sanctity
did not lead her to dispense with: the commonest assistances of
grace, but on the contrary to cling to them with a more intelli­
gent appreciation. It did not teach her to stand and walk merely
resting or guiding herself by outward ordinances, but rather to
lean her whole weight upon them more than ever. She felt less
able to dispense with little things, because she was so richly
endowed with great things. She had reached to that wide view
of saintly minds, and to her it was wider and more distinct, that
in spiritual things one grace never supersedes another, never
does the work of another, never stands in the stead of another.
Less intelligent piety mistakes succeeding for superseding, and
so loses in reverence, while it misses what is divine. As the loftiest
• We may instance the conduct of St. Andrew Avellino in Holy Week.

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contemplation works its way back again through the accumulated
paraphernalia of meditation almost to the indistinct simplicity
of the kneeling child’s first prayer, so is it wonderful in all things
else to see how the saints in their sublimities are forever return­
ing to the wise littleness and childlike commonplaces of their
first beginnings. The puzzles of spirituality are only the symp­
toms of imperfection. We are fording the river to reach Canaan.
The water is shallow when we first begin; it deepens as we
advance; but it gets shallow again near to the other side, and
shelves quite gently up to the heavenly shore. Hence it was
doubtless a keen suffering to Mary to be deprived of the outward
ordinances of her religion. Her spirit pined for the courts of
the temple, with its crowds of worshippers, for the old feasts as
they came round, for the stirring and the soothing show of the
ceremonial of the law, and for the sound of the old Hebrew
Scriptures from the reader’s desk within the synagogue. The
presence of Jesus, instead of being to her in lieu of these things
and superseding them, would only make her crave for all those
sacred things, which He, long years before He was her Babe,
had Himself devised and ordered from out of Sinai. We shall
not do justice to this peculiar grief of hers; but we must remem­
ber it. We shall not do justice to it, because we have no such
acute sensibilities, no such excessive hunger for the things of
God, no such visible presence of Jesus to turn that hunger into
downright famine.
It happened once to a traveller who had been long among the
sights and sounds of Asiatic life, in whose ears the musical wail­
ing of the muezzin’s voice from the gallery of the minaret over
the nightly city or amid the bustle of the day had almost effaced
the remembrance of Christian bells, that from the Black Sea he
passed up the Danube and landed nowhere till he reached the
frontier of Transylvania. He landed in a straggling village, and
heard the bells jangling with a sound of strange familiarity and
very barbarous singing; and he saw a cleric, with a Crucifix
glittering in the sun, and some rude banners, and girls in white
with tapers, and a pleasant rabble of Christian-faced boys, with

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boughs of hawthorn or some white-flowering tree in their hands;
and then a priest, in poorest cope and under humblest canopy,
bearing Jesus with him, to bless the village streets on Corpus
Christi. And there came a light, and a feeling, and an agitation,
and a most keen, most sweet pain in the traveller's heart, which
gave him a surmise far off from! the real truth—but still a sur­
mise—of what Mary felt in Egypt. Such to him was the first
sight of holy things at the gate of Christendom when he passed
out of the influence of the strange imagery of the Mohammedan
law. He only saw what he had lost; she realized what she was
losing.
But it was not only her own religious feelings which were
wounded by the false and loathsome worship round her. She
mourned for the souls it was destroying; souls that knew no
wiser wisdom, and so their ignorance at least was innocent, but
in whom it was deadening the moral sense, vitiating the con­
science, making its judgments false, and corrupting its integrity.
It was a system of wild enchantment, which held that ancient
people as in a net, entangling them in its iniquities so that they
could not escape. It was a vast, complete, national organization.
They were going down upon the silent sweep of its stream into
everlasting darkness as irresistingly as a log goes down the N ile.
Oh, how much glorious understanding gleamed out of the dark
faces of many of theml What hidden sweetness, what possibilities
of gentleness and goodness, almost trembled in the voices of
many! And she all the while holding Jesus in her arms on the
river-side, the Saviour of the world, the fondest lover of souls,
who would have drunk the whole river of souls dry if they would
have let Him! Why should He not preach to them at once, He
whose mind knew no growth but the knowing, by acquisition,
what He knew otherwise before? Why should He not let His
light shine on them at once? Was there not something cruel in
the delay, something perplexing, like the slowness of the Church
in converting the heathen? And it was not only all those Egyptian
souls which lay on her heart like an oppression in a dream, but
there was the glory of God also. One word from Jesus would

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repair it all; but that word was not spoken. It was not hard for
her to bear precisely because it was so strange a will of God. She
had too often adored the four thousand Decembers, in which
Jesus had not come, not to comprehend the mystery of the delays
of God. But it was hard to bear, because of the destiny of that
land which swarmed with souls, the multitudes which the Nile
mud was feeding and fattening for so insecure an end.
Great things look little by the side of things which are in­
ordinately greater than themselves. So it is with many of the
items in Mary’s sorrows. Things, each one of which would make
a very romance of misfortune in the commoner lots of men, gather
in almost imperceptible numbers round those tall griefs of our
Blessed Mother which pierce the storm-clouds and go up out of
our sight. Yet they must not be forgotten. We must let them
accumulate, even as they accumulated in the actual mystery.
There are many sufferings in exile, on which we need not dwell
here. They are sufferings which make the heart very sick, and
a burden which grows heavier as each year that lapses adds its
weight to those that have gone before. There is no getting used
to exile. It becomes less of a habit daily. The iron is always in
the soul. It is always hot, always burning. It makes terrible
wounds, whose lips cannot reach over, and will not heal. Poverty
is hard to bear everywhere, but it is hardest of all in a foreign
land, where we have no rights, scarcely the right to sympathy.
The land bears us because we put our feet on it and tread there.
But this is all it does. It bears us as a camel bears its load, be­
cause it is more trouble to throw it off than to carry it. It is
only because the soil is more merciful than men that a foreign
land does not fling the alien and the mendicant impatiently from
its corn-bearing fields. There was something also inexpressibly
dismal in Mary’s utter loneliness amid her own sex. She was far
more lonely in the crowds of Heliopolis than the penitent Thais
or Mary of Egypt could have been in the savagest sequestration
of the voiceless Thebaid. And she, too, so frail, so helpless, so
unknown; such a girlish mother, such a delicate flower, that the
rude wind ought hardly to blow upon! It is fearful to think of.

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But God was with her. Yes! but look at Him: less than His young
mother, more helpless even than herself. And Joseph; his very
meekness was against, him, and so old, so infirm, so uncomplain­
ing; what protection was he against the pressure of those wild­
faced Egyptians? The prophet wept over the vineyard of Zion,
because its hedge was broken down. But what Edens were these
that were left unsheltered in Egypt, and so unsheltered!
But we must; pass on to greater things. There seems nothing
contrary to our Blessed Lady's perfections to suppose that in this
dolor the fear which belongs to human nature, and which even
our Lord felt in His most holy Soul, was allowed to exercise
sway over her. If such were not the case, we should then have
to put her before ourselves as a creature apart, not belonging to
the angelic family on the one hand, nor to the human family on
the other, but as a glory of God, not singular only, as in her
office and her sanctity she truly is, but removed also from the
sphere of humanity. We should have to imagine that her gifts
did for her what His Divine Nature even did not do for our Lord,
that they should make her cease to be woman, while it left Him
true Man. She would then be no example to us, and the idea of
sorrow in her would be so strange and unsphered a thing, that
it would seem fictitious and unreal, a merely symbolical doctrine,
or a beautiful allegory of the Incarnation. There can, therefore,
be little doubt but that fear wasi one of the chief sufferings of
this Flight into Egypt. There is perhaps hardly a passion which
exercises a more tyrannical sway over the soul than fear, or any
mental impression more closely connected with physical pain.
It comes over us like a spirit from without, leaping upon us
from' some unsuspected cavern we know not where or how. We
cannot prepare for its coming, for we know not when to expect
it. We cannot resist it when it comes, for its touch is possession,
and its mere advent is already victory. It brings a shadow over
skies where there are no clouds, and turns the very sunshine into
beams of frost. It breathes through us like a wind, searching
everywhere, and chilling our most vital faculties. It goes near to
paralyzing our powers of action, so that we are like men who

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can see and hear without being able either to speak or move. If
it were not eminently a transient passion, ever flowing by the
law of its own restlessness, we should lose first of all the freedom
of our will, and then the light of our reason. Meanwhile its
presence in the soul is accompanied, one while by a disquietude
which is worse than suffering, and the continuance of which it
seems to us would be incompatible with life, and then another
while by a sharpness of anguish which is always on the very point
of being literally unendurable. It is not pain, it is torture. How
seldom have we ever found the reality of an evil so insufferable
as the terrified expectation which preceded it! Earth does not
grow a sorrow, human justice has not devised a punishment, of
which this is not true.
Now, we have to imagine the operation of this passion among
the indescribable sensibilities of our Lady's soul, and at the same
time in the midst of her incomparable holiness. There is ever
the union with God unbroken; there is ever the tranquility which
comes of that union undisturbed. The sanctuary is assailed, but
it is not desecrated. Fear dwells within the precincts, but the
cloister is not forced. She knew full well that Calvary was to
come, and she knew how far off it was. Hence, she could have
no doubt that her Child was not now to perish by the hand of
Herod. Yet fear, without obscuring her mental vision, might
destroy her feeling of security. For thoughts in fear may be just
and judicious in themselves, but they dwell alone; they are bar­
ren; they have no conclusions. Is not that just what the book
of Wisdom says of fears,* that it is "nothing else but a yielding
up of the succors from thought, and, while there is less expecta­
tion from within, the greater doth it count the ignorance of
that cause which bringeth the torment"? Besides, our Lord may
have veiled His Heart from her then. True, He was not to die;
but what other abysses of misery might not be yawning invisibly
at her very feet? There are many things short of death which
are worse than death. Possible sufferings are inexhaustible, even
within the limited lot of man. She might be separated from Him.
Cap. xvii.

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Herod might give Him to another to nurse, under his own eye.
What Egyptian darkness would be like that? The eclipse on
Calvary would be comfort and sunshine in the face of such a
woeful separation as that. Her foresight did not cover every
thing with its wide field of vision, or, if it did, she might not be
sure that it did. There might be depths which she had to come
upon unawares, like the Three Days' Loss. Might she not be
coming on some now?
What were die extremities to which a sanctity like hers could
suffer panic? Would she start at the forms of robbers, as they
distantly scoured the wilderness? When the uneasy night-wind
awoke suddenly in the muttering palm-tops, or in the tresses of
the pensile acacia, like indistinguishable human whispers, was
she afraid? Did the dark eyes of the Egyptians frighten her when
their gaze was fixed inquiringly upon the Child? Did fear spur
her footsteps, deceive her eyesight, play cruelly with her suspi­
cious hearing? Did she every now and then clasp her babe with
a more tremulous firmness, and inwardly vow she would never
part with Him without laying down her life? Did the ears of
her informed spirit ring with the lamentations of Bethlehem’s
mothers, or the heart-rending trebles of the little ones fly after
her on the winds of the desert? Thou knowest, Mother! We
must not dare to say. But who can. doubt that fear inflicted upon
her die most awful sufferings, making both the wilderness and
Egypt a Gethsemane of years? Truly it was the shadow of an
Egyptian darkness that fell upon, her; and although with her we
cannot take to the letter what Scripture says of that old Egyptian
darkness, yet there is much in it which will help us to that vague
and indefinable view of what our Lady suffered, which alone it
is desirable or reverent to take. “During that night, in which
nothing could be done, and which came upon them from the
lowest and deepest hell, they were sometimes molested with the
fear of monsters; sometimes fainted away, their soul failing them,
for a sudden and unlooked for fear was come down upon them.
Moreover, if any of them had fallen down, he was kept shut up
in prison without irons. For if any one were a husbandman, or

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a shepherd, or a laborer in the field, and was suddenly overtaken,
he endured a necessity from which he could not fly. For they
were all bound together with one chain of darkness. Whether
it were a whistling wind, or the melodious voices of birds among
the spreading branches of trees, or a fall of water running down
with violence, or the mighty noise of stones tumbling down, or
the running that could not be seen of beasts playing together, or
the roaring voice of wild beasts, or a rebounding echo from the
highest mountains,—these things made them to swoon for fear.
For the whole world was enlightened with a clear light, and none
were hindered in their labors: but over them was spread a heavy
night, an image of that darkness which was to come upon them.
But they were to themselves more grievous than the darkness."·
But the most grievous part of this dolor remains to be told,
and there is no one who can tell it as it should be told. We should
understand it, if we had a revelation of Mary's heart; but even
then we could not translate it into words. It was a mixture of
sharpest pain, wounded feeling, distress so great as to seem un­
expected, horror that yearned to disbelieve what it saw, a cruel
crushing together of all the loves of her immaculate heart. It
arose from the vision of men's hatred of Jesus, made visible in
this dolor. Beautiful Child! wonderfully sheathing the keen
grandeurs of Godhead in that scabbard of true infant’s flesh!
Was there ever any thing so winning, ever any thing so hateless,
as that blessed Child? Why should men turn against Him thus?
Why should the eyes of kings pierce the shrouds of His innocuous
obscurity, like wild lynxes, and why thirst for the little shallow
stream of His blood, as if He were a tempting prey for savage
natures? Harmless, helpless, silent, pleading, beautiful! and men
drive Him from their haunts as if He were a monster, heartless,
tyrannical, bloodstained, with all the repulsion of great iniquity
and dark secret crime about Him! And she knew how beautiful
He was, and therefore how unutterable was the sacrilege of that
cruel exile, of that murderous pursuit, which only ended in exile,
because God would not let it go further, and balked ferocity of
Wisd., cap. xvii, 13-20.

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its victim. She knew too that He was God, the Creator come
among His creatures; and although He has not interfered with
them yet, has not even spoken to them, but has only looked at
them with His sweet Face, they are tormented with restlessness,
(cel Him a burden, though she who carried Him all over the
desert can testify that He is lighter than a feather, or at least
seems so to her maternal love, and finally make Him fly before
them even before He can walk. This was the welcome God has
been waiting for, now these four thousand years! Merciful
heavens! is not Divine Love a thing simply incredible?
All the loves in her heart were crushed. Jesus was hated. Had
men simply avoided Him and got out of His way, it would have
been an intolerable sorrow. Had they gone by Him with indif­
ference as if He was no concern of theirs, but just a living man,
as their senses told them, who increased by one the population of
the world, and was otherwise poor and commonplace, even that
would have been acutest grief. For men to ignore, to misappre­
hend, to disappreciate Jesus would have been a lifelong thorn
in her heart, which nothing could have extracted. But He was
hated. And there He was flitting like a speck over the wilder­
ness out of sight of the people, whom He loved the most of all
those He came to save. She loved Him with many loves, because
by many rights, and under many titles. She was wounded sepa­
rately and bitterly in every one of these loves. She was His crea­
ture and His mother. She loved Him with the intensest natural
affection as having borne Him. Her love was marvellously grown
with His growing beauty and her increasing experience of Him.
She loved Him with supernatural love because of His holiness,
and her own which was attracted by His. She loved Him as the
Saviour and Redeemer of the world. She loved with perfect
adoration His Divine Nature, and the Person of the Eternal
Word. Beyond this, where could love go? Whither could it
reach? But she loved also, and with an enthusiasm which was
like a second life to her, the glory of God, His exaltation by His
creatures, and the honor of the Divine Majesty. She loved the
Most Holy Trinity with all the loves the saints have ever known,

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with complacency, congratulation, desire, condolence, imitation,
esteem. Now Jesus was the very end at which all these glories
of God aimed, the very monument on which they were all hung,
the very fountain out of which they all came, the very food by
which alone they were all to be satisfied, the very price which was
equal to their value, the very means, the only means, by which
Mary could love them as she desired. There was not one thing
about which God is tender, which was not outraged and wounded
in this attempt upon the life of Jesus, in this hatred of His Son
whom He had sent. And fearfully, like stigmata upon the saints,
upon Mary’s ardent love passed the many wounds of the Eternal
Object of her love.
This was not all. She loved men. Their own wives and
mothers never loved them as she did. No missionary ever burned
for souls as she burned. She had all their interests at heart, and
the interests of every one of them. She would have died to save
the lowest of them, if the limited sacrifice of a mere crea­
ture could have merited their salvation. She would have suffered
tortures to hinder any of them from a single sin, for their own
sake as well as God’s. But what need of more words? She was
going to give them Jesus. She had made up her mind to it. Nay,
virtually she had done it. Oh, how men wounded her now in
this love of hers, unrequited, disdained, as it were thrown back
upon her! She shuddered at the abysses of darkness, the capabili­
ties of separation from God, which this hatred of Jesus disclosed;
and a sort of sacred horror passed upon her, when she perceived
in it such a terrible manifestation of the power and malice of
the evil spirits. They did not yet know that Jesus was God, but
their instincts drew them round His grace and holiness by a son
of attraction which they did not understand, but which neverthe­
less rendered them furious. And men, men whose nature the
Word had assumed, men for whom Jesus was to die, men whose
mother she was to be, even the chosen tribes of Israel, were
almost possessed by these evil spirits, were following their leading,
doing their bidding, without knowing how terrible were the
things that they were doing. Oh, can we not conceive how out

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οί (he most broken of all broken hearts the Mother of mercy
would forestall that sweet omnipotent prayer of her Child,
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?
Now this second dolor, as has been already said, was not a
transient mystery. It was not a complete action, done, and over
at once. Il spread itself over a long time. It endured for years.
For all those years Mary had to suffer all these sorrows. Besides
the seven years' sojourn in Egypt, which opened the wound wider
in the exiled heart day by day, this dolor was a double dolor.
It had an echo for it; for the Return was a sort of echo to the
Flight. There was the same weary way to travel, the same fatigues,
the same privations, and many of the same dangers. The fear,
however, was less, or rather it had sunk into anxiety about the
great object, the Child’s life; though it had still many lesser
objects by the way. There were, however, some aggravating cir­
cumstances in the Return, by which it is distinguished from the
Flight. The age of Jesus presented a peculiar difficulty to their
poverty. He was in His eighth year,—too young to walk, too
old and heavy for His Mother’s arms. Either it would entail
upon them the cost of some beast of burden, which would also
materially increase the toils of St. Joseph in the wilderness, or
they must have borne their precious Burden by turns, when He
had allowed the natural consequences of weariness, or the sore­
ness caused by the burning sand and prickly sand-plants, to work
their will upon Him and make it impossible for Him to walk
farther. The increased age of St. Joseph was also a feature in
the Return which Mary never for a single hour forgot. Labor
had bent him, and years—years especially of recent disquietude—
had left their furrows on his holy face. He was easily tired;
for his strength was soon spent; and Jesus helps less with their
cross those that are near Him than those who are farther off. The
age of Jesus also brought to Mary, as usual, fresh reasons for
loving Him, and ceaseless augmentations of the old love; and
all ffiis heightened the pangs she was enduring. Moreover, she
and He were now upon the road to Calvary; their faces turned
right toward it. Can that thought ever have left her through

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the whole Return? And on the frontiers of the Holy Land
fear met them again, and turned them away from Zion, and sent
them back to the seclusion of Nazareth. Scripture says, ' There
is no peace for the wicked.” Alas! when we look at the world
we are tempted to cry out that it is rather for the good that
there is no peace!
From these peculiarities of the second dolor we may now pass
to the dispositions with which our Blessed Lady endured it.
Much may be gathered from what has been already said. But
there are three points to which our attention should be espe­
cially directed. The first is, her unselfish absorption in the suffer­
ings of others. It is as if her heart was put out into the hearts
of others, in order to feel, to love, to suffer, to be tortured.
As we pass in review the incidents of this dolor, it never comes
to us for a moment to think how cold she often was, how hungry,
how wind-burnt, how sleepless, how footsore, how harassed in
mind, how great her bodily fatigue, as if these were the elements
of her own sorrow. They were sufferings which we, her sons, do
not forget, and as sufferings they were part of her endurance.
But as subjects upon which she dwelt, or which she bewailed,
or which she even much adverted to, we should feel that we
were dishonoring her if we put them in the reckoning. Her
sorrowful sympathies were all abroad. They were lavished on
Joseph, or they were centred in Jesus. They covered the whole
majesty of God with their humblest condolence, or they went out
like a deluge over the entire earth, bathing all the souls of men
in every generation with her mournful pity and efficacious com­
passion. They were everywhere but in her own miseries. They
were for every one except herself. There seemed to be no effort
about it. It was her way. It came natural to her, because she
behaved with grace as if it really was a nature to her. As the
moon reflects the light of the sun without the least trouble to
itself, and beautifies the earth without any exertion, so Mary
reflects God, and gives light, and shines, without effort, almost
unconsciously, as if it was simply her business to be luminous
and beautiful, and that there was no wonder in it at all.

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Another disposition in this dolor was her keen sensitiveness
about the interests of God defrauded by sin. This is the new
sense developed in the soul by sanctity; and the more we grow
in holiness the more keen does this sense become. The range of
its vision is wider, while, at the same time, its perceptions are
more accurate and minute. Its ardor increases with the increase
of grace, and, by a natural consequence, its powers of making us
suffer increase likewise. In the case of very great saints it becomes
completely a passion, and, at last, possesses itself of the whole life.
There can, however, be hardly a comparison between this sensi­
tiveness, as developed in the highest saints, and the same feeling
as it existed in the Mother of God. She was drawn inside a divine
ring, and lived a divine life. She had a sort of unity with the
Divine Majesty—a spiritual unity—which gave her a right to
share in the concerns of God; a right to be interested only in His
interests; a sort of actual participation in the sensibilities of His
glory, such as can belong to no other creature whatsoever. She
is one of the household, and, therefore, feels differently from one
outside, however dear a friend, however near a neighbor. Her
prayer is not mere intercession: there is in it a permitted juris­
diction over the Sacred Heart and the Will of God, which renders
it a different thing from the intercession of the saints. All the
elect work together with Jesus in multiplying the fruit of His
Passion; but there is allowed to her an indefinable co-operation
in the redemption of the world, to which the co-operation of the
saints bears the same relation as their sympathy with our Lord’s
Passion bears to our Lady’s Compassion. If the sufferings of St.
Paul in his flesh · "filled up those things that are wanting of the
sufferings of Christ for His Body, which is the Church,” what
must be said of Mary’s dolors? These considerations, if they
cannot help our spiritual obtuseness to an adequate conception
of our Lady’s sensitiveness for the glory of God, will at least
enable us, when we are astonished at the sublimity of this instinct
in the saints, to remember that hers was so much higher as to
be out of sight of theirs.
• Coloss., i. 24.

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Even to us, down in the deep valleys where the merciful
inquisitiveness of grace has found us out, there is something inex­
pressibly mournful in the way in which God is excluded from
His own creation. We are considering now the mystery of the
Creator's flight from His creatures. Is there not also something
quite as dreadful in the flight of the creatures from their Creator,
which we see going on all day? When faith has opened our eyes,
what a scene the world presents! Everywhere God, with His
omnipresent love, is pursuing His creatures, His guilty creatures;
but it is to save them, not to punish them. There is not a
recess of the world, not a retirement of poverty, not a haunt of
sin, not an unlikely or unbeseeming place for so vast a Majesty,
where He is not following His creatures and trying almost to
force His great gifts upon them. Swifter than the lightning,
stronger than the ocean, more universal than the air, is His glori­
ous, many-sided compassion poured out over the world which
He has made. Everywhere are men flying from this generous,
this merciful, this tender pursuit. It seems as if the grand object
of their lives was to avoid God, as if time were a respite from
the necessity of God's presence in eternity, which it is unfair of
Him to interfere with, as if space were a convenience expressly
provided for creatures to get out of the way of their Creator.
Little boys even are flying from Him with all their might and
main, as if they understood the matter just as well as grown-up
men, and had made up their minds as determinedly about it.
God speaks, entreats, pleads, cries aloud; but still they run. He
doubles His sunbeams upon them, to win their hearts by the
excess of His fatherly indulgence; but they run. He throws
shadows and darkness over them, to make them sober and wise;
but they run. He will have them. Great graces go forth to
their souls, like swift stones from a sling, and they fall. But
they are up again in a moment, and continue their flight. Or if
He gets up with them, because they are too much hurt to rise
on the instant, they only let Him wipe the blood and earth
from their wound and kiss them sweetly on the forehead, and
they are off again. He will not be baffled. He will hide Himself

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in the water of a sacrament) and make loving prey of infants
before they have reached the use of reason. It is well; but then
He must slay them also if He will keep them; for almost before
they can walk they will run away from Him. And what is this
picture compared to the vision which was always before our
Blessed Mother’s eyes?
But let us make the world stand still, and see how it looks.
If our common love of God, which is so poor, is irritated by the
sight, what must Mary have suffered? For what is irritation to
our weakness to her would be the most deep and transcending
sorrow. God comes to His creation. It does not stir. It cannot.
It lies in the hollow beneath Him, and has no escape. He comes
in the beauty of a mercy, which is almost incredible, because it
is so beautiful. But seemingly it does not attract the world. He
draws nigh. Creation must do something now. It freezes itself
up before His eye. He may have other worlds, more fertile,
more accessible to Him, than this. In the spiritual tropics, where
the angels dwell, He may perhaps be welcome. But not here.
This is the North Pole of His universe. He shed His life’s blood
upon it, and it would not thaw. It is unmanageable, unnavigable,
uninhabitable, for Him. He can do nothing at all with it, but
let His sun make resplendent colored lights in the icebergs, or
bid the moon shine with a wanner loveliness than elsewhere, or
fill the long-night sky with the streamers of the Aurora, which
even the Esquimaux, burrowing in his hut, will not go out to see.
The only difference is that the material pole understands its
business, which is to make ice in all imaginable shapes; whereas
we men are so used to our own coldness, that we do not know
how cold we are, and imagine ourselves to be the temperate
zone of God’s creation.
If God gets into His world, matters are not much mended.
It is dismal to think—would that it were also incredible!—how
much of the world is tied up from Him, so as to render almost
a miracle necessary in order to insinuate grace into the soul.
Look at whole regions of fair beginnings, of good wishes, holy
desires, struggling earnestness, positive yearnings, and see how

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tyrannically the provisions of life deal with all these interests of
God. Here are souls tied up from God by family arrangements.
They have to live away from the means of grace, or they are
thrown among bad examples, or they are forced into uncon­
genial dissipation, or they are put into the alternative of either
judging their parents or blunting their perceptions of God, or
they are entangled in unsuitable marriages, or they are forced
into the ambitious temptations of worldly positions, or their
religious vocations are rough-ridden. God is not to have His
own way with them, and will not have it. He on His side will
not work miracles, and souls are lost. How much again is tied
up by money arrangements! The religion of orphans is endan­
gered by executors who have not the faith. Fortunes are left
under conditions which, without heroic grace, preclude conver­
sion. Place of abode is dictated by straitened circumstances, and
it so happens that spiritual disabilities come along with it. Ques­
tions of education are unfavorably decided on pecuniary grounds,
as also are the choices of profession. Want of money is a bar to
the liberty of many souls, who, as far as we can judge, would use
that liberty for God. Even local arrangements tie up souls from
God. There is a sort of necessity of living for part of the year
where regular sacraments are not to be had, or where men must
mix very much with people of another creed, or must lay them­
selves out for political influence, or where young people must
break off habits of works of mercy only imperfectly formed in
the great city, which after all is a truer sanctuary of God than
the green, innocent country. How many also, without fault of
their own, or fault of any one, are tied up from God by the
temporal consequences of some misfortune! Homes are broken
up. Souls are imprisoned in unsuitable occupations, and in un­
favorable places; and a host of religious inconveniences follow,
from which there is literally no escape. It may be said that,
after all, the excellence of religion is interior. But to how many
is this interior spirit given? Surely it is not one of Gods ordinary
graces. And how few really interior persons are there, who are
not visibly deteriorated when their public supplies of grace are

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impoverished! Others again are tied up from God by some irre­
trievable steps which they themselves have taken, culpably or
inculpably. It is as if an eternal fixity had insinuated itself into
some temporal decision. And now souls are helpless. They can­
not he all for God, if they would, unless He communicates to
them some of the extraordinary graces of the mystical saints. We
have often need here to remember for our comfort, that, if steps
are irretrievable, nothing in the spiritual life is irremediable.
Who could believe the opposite doctrine, and then live? It is
fearful the power which men have to tie their fellow-men up
from God. What an exercise it is for a hot temper, with a keen
sense of injustice, and an honest heartiness of love for God and
souls, to have to work for souls under the pressure of the great
public system, organizations, and institutions of a country which,
has not the faith! To watch a soul perilously balancing on the
brink of the grand eternal question, and to see plainly that the
most ordinary fairness or the cheapest kindness would save it,
and not be able to command either,—it is a work of knives in
one’s flesh, smarting unbearably. We have no right to demand
the fairness: indeed, the fairness is perhaps only visible from our
own point of view. We are more likely to get justice if we ask
for it under the title of privilege and by the name of kindness.
For the sake of Christ's poor, let us insist upon God's multiply­
ing and prolonging our patiencel Thus, all the world over, in
all classes, especially the upper classes, creation is tied up as it
were from God, and His goodness has not fair play with it, un­
less He will break His own laws, and throw Himself simply on
His omnipotence. There is a tyranny of circumstances, which
does not seem far short of a necessity of sin. It needs a definition
of the faith to assure us that such a necessity is happily an im­
possibility. We feel all this. It cuts to the quick. Now it de­
presses, now it provokes, accordingly as it acts on the inequalities
of our little grace. Multiply it till the sum is beyond figures,
magnify it till its bulk fills space and hangs out beyond, and then
we shall have our Lady's sensitiveness about the honor of God's
majesty.

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There is still another disposition in our Lady to which our
attention must be called. Her charity for sinners was propor­
tioned to her horror of sin. While on the one hand she mourned
over the slighted love of God and the scant harvest of His glory,
she had no feeling of bitterness against sinners. She was not angry
with their guilt, but unhappy for their sakes, because of the
consequences of their guilt. It was not in her heart to condemn
them, only to pity them. To her eyes sin came out clear and
hideous when seen against the honor of God, but when seen in
the sinner the horror melted away in the flood of compassion.
Her zeal was not anxious to avenge the outrage on the Divine
Majesty by startling judgments and condign penalties. It sought
rather to repair the outrage by the conversion of the sinner. She
thought herself best consulting the interests of God's justice by
wishing well to His mercy. There is, in truth, a sort of reverence
due to sinners, when we look at them, not as in their sins, but
simply as having sinned, and being the objects of a divine yearn­
ing. It is the manifestation of this feeling in apostolic men which
lures sinners to them, and so leads to their conversion. The
devotedness of our Blessed Lord to sinners transfers a peculiar
feeling to the hearts of His servants. And, when the offenders
come to repent, the mark of divine predilection in the great grace
they are receiving is a thing more to admire, and revere, and
love, than the sin is a thing to hate in connection with the sinner.
In all reformatory institutions it is the want of a supernatural
respect for sinners which, is the cause of failure, the abundance
of it which is the cause of success. When our Lord strove to con­
vert, it was always by kind looks, by loving words, by an in­
dulgence which appeared to border upon laxity. He did not
convert by rebuking. He rebuked Herod and the Pharisees just
because He did not vouchsafe to try to convert them. Because
He let them alone, therefore he spoke sharply to them. Such
were the feelings of our Blessed Lady in the view of sin, which
this dolor brought before her. She was not angry with men. She
loved them, and was in her heart so pitiful to them that she
seemed rather to think their lot a hard one than a guilty one.

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Her love for them rose with the measure of their sins, just as the
fulness of our Lord's time seems to have been the fulness of the
world’s iniquity. However much their sins widened, her love
was always wider. There is scarcely any thing in which the in­
stincts of sanctity arc more peculiar than the view which a holy
heart takes of sinners. It testifies more unerringly than any thing
else to secret communion with Jesus, to deep, tender union with
God, and to the right apprehension as well as the happy infection
of the Sacred Heart. It is always the contemplative saints who
have loved sinners best, even more than the active saints who
were wearing out their lives to convert them. Is this the reason
why the contemplative element is an essential ingredient in a
complete apostle?
But this dolor contains also many lessons for ourselves. In
fact, the Residence in Egypt is a complete picture of the way in
which God, our Blessed Lord, the Blessed Sacrament, the faith,
and the saints, are in the world. There is the life of common
things made wonderful by an interior spirit. There is the com­
pany of Mary and Joseph. There are the three evangelical sisters,
labor, poverty, and detachment. There is the mysterious hidden­
ness, with apparently nothing to hide under. There is the exile,
and an Egyptian exile. There is the love of God in supreme
sovereignty. And finally, there is our Lord in the world as a
little Child; and so is the invisible God, despite the blaze of His
perfections, in His own creation; and so is our Lord also still,
in His Church and Holy See, despite of all its triumphs; and so
is the Blessed Sacrament, notwithstanding all the luminous
theology which has been written about it, and so is the faith, in
the jostling interests and grandeurs of modern civilization, despite
of its old historic conquests and its present daily propagation;
and so are the saints, down in the hollows of life, where publicity
cannot find them out, despite the miracles they work. They are
all in the world as little children. We, too, are part of the picture.
There is the mighty Nile, “lasping through old hushed Egypt
like a dream." There are the pyramids, the monuments of pagan
greatness. There are the sandy wilds, the rich loamy fields, which

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the inundation annually renews, the palm-groves, and the manycolored life of the Oriental bazaar, and Jesus, Mary, Joseph,
somewhere. The allegory is complete. Such is the world, such
is our native land, to us. Godi is hidden in it. All is awkward
and foreign to us, though it is native; for grace has made aliens
of us after a strange fashion. Patiently we wait to do God's work,
counting the years. One will come which will be the last. It will
bear us home, and drop us at His feet; and as we have been all
for God in our exile, so God will be all to us in our eternal home.
Blessed be His mercy I it was unloving to say that; for is He not
all to us already?
But, besides the lesson which the allegory itself contains, there
are others which we must lay to heart. We must learn first of all
to sympathize with Jesus, especially in the sufferings which we
ourselves have caused Him. Religion is a personal love of God,
the sincerity of which is attested by our obedience. It is the love
which is the soul, the value, the significance of it all. To be
truly religious, our souls must live in a peculiar atmosphere of
their own, a charmed atmosphere, which the world cannot breathe
in and therefore cannot break through. We must be unable to
breathe out of an atmosphere of prayer. The soul must have
a world of hopes and fears of its own, its own set of tastes and
sympathies, instincts and forbodings of its own, its own gravita­
tions and repulsions. It will not do merely to believe a number
of doctrines, or to keep certain commandments. These things are
essential; but they do not make up the whole. They are the flesh
and the blood, but the soul is love. Now, the chief way in which
we create this charmed atmosphere around ourselves is by devo­
tion to the mysteries of our Blessed Lord. Mary sanctified henelf
in this dolor by sympathy with Jesus. The venerable Joanna of
Jesus and Mary, a Franciscaness, when she was meditating on
our Lord's Flight into Egypt, suddenly heard a great noise, like
the running and clashing of armed men pursuing some one, and
presently she saw a beautiful little boy, panting with fatigue,
and running up to her at the top of his speed, crying, O Joanna!
help Me and hide Me. I am Jesus of Nazareth, flying from sin-

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ncrs, who wish to kill Me, and who persecute Me as Herod did;
1 beseech you, save Me! The grand thing at which we must aim
is to bring it to pass that our Lord's mysteries, His Passion and
Childhood especially, should be continually in our thoughts.
They should not be in the least like some past history, about
which we may feel poetical or sentimental, or have favorite views.
But they should be as if they were living, contemporaneous, going
on perpetually before our eyes, and in which we ourselves are
actors. This is the difference between the mysteries of the In­
carnate Word in the New Testament and the glorious manifesta­
tions of God in the Old Testament. These last are our lessons;
the first are our life. They do not simply remain written there
and shine. They live, they put forth attractions, they give power,
they hold grace, they transform. The vitality of the Incarnation
has gone into them. Here is the secret reason of the preference
of the Old Testament over the New, which is so congenial to the
temper of heresy. They, who have no Blessed Sacrament, and
have dethroned Mary, have lost the meaning of the Incarnation.
The Gospels are beautiful history to them, and little else. But
the Exodus is far more romantic, more stirring, more glorious,
and so is the conquest of Canaan, and the reign of David, and
the lofty patriotism of the Prophets. Hence, the enthusiasm which
Catholics feel for the Gospel incidents heretics feel in the Old
Testament history. But with the former it is more than en­
thusiasm. It is the life of their religion, the breath of their sanc­
tity, the endless Presence and Vision of their Beloved. So by
assiduous meditation, by sorrowing love or by rejoicing love,
must we wear our way into the mysteries of Jesus, assimilating
them to ourselves, living in them, feeling with them, until their
mere character of history has added to itself the reality of a
worship, and His Heart, as it were, beats in ours, as another,
better, and supernatural life.
A further lesson, which this dolor teaches us, is that suffering,
when it is God's will, is better than external spiritual advantages.
The Blessed Veronica of Binasco, an Augustinianess, was per­
mitted in spirit to accompany Jesus and Mary in their Flight into

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Egypt, and, when it was over, our Lord said to her, "My daughter,
thou hast seen through what fatigues we have reached this
country. Learn, from this, that no one receives graces except he
suffers.” This we can better understand; but when suffering is
pitted against the means of grace, when its presence involves the
loss of our external spiritual advantages, it might have seemed
otherwise. To submit joyously to suffering under these circum­
stances involves something more than ordinary submission. To
believe that, because it is our Lord’s will, suffering is therefore
better for us than even the continuation of those advantages,
requires a large exercise of faith. The question of being religious
is the question of our eternal salvation. Experience has amply
disclosed to us how much depends on regularity in our spiritual
exercises. A day for God, what else is it but the legitimate con­
clusion from a morning with God? Many a man leans his whole
life on his daily mass, and it bears him well through to the end.
Is there a more helpless being on earth than the soul, long used
to frequent communion, and then suddenly and for a length of
time deprived of it? Besides, how many people do we see who
are the better for suffering? Does it not harden many? Guillorè
says sickness unsanctifies more than it sanctifies. This is a hard
saying. Let us make abatements from it. There is enough truth
left to make us exceedingly melancholy. Cardinal de Berulle,
speaking of interior sufferings and trials of spirit, said he had
known many eminent souls in them, and he had only seen one
who had not retrograded under their influence. He was not a
man who exaggerated. And yet, in spite of all these terrible
sayings and experiences, we are to welcome suffering from God
as better than hours of prayer, or the daily sacrifices, or heavenly
sacraments. We may look back wistfully upon those things, but
not unconformedly. It is a hard lesson to learn. Who does not
remember the first time he had to learn it? How disquieting it
seemed! Common things looked unintelligible. Conscience had
to rearrange itself on a great number of questions. Never was
more spiritual direction wanted than now, when least of it was
to be had. Say our suffering was illness. How much did pain

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dispense us from, and what pain was great enough to dispense
us from anything? There were more trials, more demands upon
us, because of our suffering, and apparently less means of grace
to keep up the interior supply. A great many things which had
seemed fair and strong in health were now tried in us, stretched
and let go again, and proved in a variety of ways. Not a few of
them broke down altogether. It was a hard time. Sorrows always
rush upon a sorrowful man, like cowardly beasts who dare not
attack their prey till it is wounded. So we had more to bear then,
when we had less strength to bear it. It was a vexatious lesson,
learned in dread and insecurity, fruitful of annoyance and tears.
But for the time it was learned; and, if the remembrance now is
all blotted and blurred by the tiresome venial sins which dis­
figure it all over, nevertheless self-distrust was deepened; we got
nearer to God; we had grown in the inner man; we were more
real, because we were more interior; and we were conscious of
additional power, because grace was more at home in us.
Our Lady’s conduct in this dolor teaches us the additional
lesson that we must aim most at compassion for others, when we
are suffering most ourselves. This is the way to gain the peculiar
graces of suffering. Grace and nature are almost always at cross­
purposes. Because Moses had the hastiest of tempers, he became
the meekest of men. So sorrow naturally shuts us up in ourselves,
and concentrates us upon itself, while grace forces us to become
more considerate because we are suffering, and to go out of our­
selves, and to pour out upon others, as a libation before God,
all that tenderness and pity which nature would make us lavish
upon ourselves. There is something in diverting ourselves from
ourselves when we are in grief, which has a peculiar effect of
enlarging the heart, and swelling the dimensions of the whole
character, and something also so particularly pleasing to God,
that, when it is done from a supernatural motive and in imita­
tion of our Lord, He seems to recompense it instantly by the
most magnificent graces. To sit by the bedside of a poor invalid,
when we are ourselves inwardly prostrated by illness, and our
pulses are throbbing, and our head beats all over, and through

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pain our words a little wander, as if we were inattentive,—or
again to listen by the hour to the little complaints of a heart ill
at ease, while we ourselves are secretly groaning under a still
heavier load,—or to throw out joy and light by tone, by look,
by manner, by smile, over a circle dependent upon us, when
uneasy cares are secretly gnawing at our hearts, and comfortless
expectations, and perturbing foresights, and suspicions are haunt­
ing us like ghosts,—these are the grand ventures in the commerce
of grace. These bring the galleons from the heavenly Indies safe
into port with untold wealth and foreign rarities. One hour of
such work as that is often worth a month of prayer; and who
does not know the enormous value of a month of prayer? More­
over, it is the want of this forcible unselfishness which makes
sorrow generally so much less sanctifying than Christian princi­
ples would lead us to expect. We almost look upon suffering as
a sort of dispensation from charity. We deem it to be a time
when we may lawfully love ourselves. By the very touch of
affliction God draws us, as we suppose, for a while out of the calls
upon our brotherly affection which surround us on every side.
We are to receive now, rather than to give. But in reality there
is no time when we may lawfully love ourselves; for, as St. Paul
says, “Christ pleased not Himself.” If there be a moment in
which it might be lawful to feel no love for others, it would be
the act of dying, because in that moment all our love is due to
God. Self has no place anywhere in love. When love touches
self, it either becomes a duty, or is an unworthiness. It is true
also that sorrow draws us into solitude, but not an uncharitable,
selfish solitude. It guides us gently away from the world as a
theatre of worldliness, but not from die world as a field of mu­
tual and self-sacrificing love. When the saints keep their sorrows
secret, it is no doubt mainly because love is fond of secrets, which
none but its object and itself shall know, and divine love is the
shyest, the most secret-loving, of all loves. The saints fear lest
God should not prize what others know, because of His dear
jealousy, and lest the sympathy of others should take off that
heavenly bloom which a sorrow keeps only so long as it is untold.

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But, besides this, we may be sure that unselfishness was another
reason for their secrecy. They would not spread sorrow in the
world. There was too much of it already. They would not swell
the contagion. If suffering was harder to bear untold than told,
were they not ambitious to love suffering? Anyhow, if they could
help it, their particular griefs should never unwreathe a single
smile from any face on earth. The tired pedestrian sighs when
he sees a steep and rugged hill to climb, and he is already fit to
faint from weariness: so is it with the poor mourner, bent be­
neath his burden, when he is shown Jesus and Mary in their
woes, and is told that as they sorrowed, so must he. But how
else can it be? Our sorrow must be measured by our sympathy
with others. Our active, cheerful, quiet, unobtrusive ministries
to others must be the invariable index of the keenness of our
martyrdom.
We learn also from the Flight into Egypt that we must not
question the ways of God, either in our own sufferings, or in the
griefs of those we love. God might have spared Mary in many
ways. Almost every circumstance of this dolor seems unnecessarily
aggravated. Even without miracle how many alleviations might
have been contrived. But, beyond that, would it have surprised
us if Omnipotence had stepped in to work miracles in such a
case as this? There is something not uncommon about religious
people which it is very difficult to define, but which looks like
irreverence. Of course, it is not so. But persons who have habits
of prayer, and do not with sufficient exactness and recollection
extend those habits into die actions of the rest of the day, and
so saturate them with the spirit of prayer, unintentionally acquire
a sort of familiarity with God which is not altogether respectful
to Him. They think that if they pray more to God than others
they must necessarily know more of God than others. This, how­
ever, is by no means the case. Prayer is not the whole of spiritu­
ality, neither is it in itself the most solid part of devotion. It
wants ulterior processes to make it solid. There are some good
men in whom prayer is really the least solid part of their spir­
ituality. There are exercises more interior than prayer, in which

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the soul learns more of God, and learns it faster. Not that these
things can exist without prayer, or will survive its discontinuance.
Only they are not prayer. Then these men, whose almost exclu­
sive spiritual practice is prayer, put themselves upon intimate
terms with God, and, especially if their prayer is the prayer of
sentiment, acquire a habit of thinking of God and themselves,
not of God alone,—of God in them, rather than of God in Him­
self. The results of this betray themselves in times of sorrow,
and particularly of interior trials. The submission of such men
is not instantaneous. They would fain talk to God about it, and,
if they cannot persuade Him, at least let Him persuade them.
To this extent He must flatter them. They will accept the cross
directly God and they conjointly agree to put it on self; but not
if it is His act, done without consulting them. Or at least they
will satisfy nature, by dignifiedly complaining to God of what
He has done, and insisting somewhat freely and untimorously
on the additional graces by which He is to compensate them for
this new burden. In fact, they question the ways of God, and so
lose the childlike spirit of sanctity. Men may not assail God, even
with the impetuosity of their prayers: their business is to adore.
Otherwise, the gracefulness of submission is gone. The right to
more intimate union with God is forfeited. The waters of grace
in their soul become shallow, and their spirit of prayer thin,
peevish, vexed, and wailing. All this is because, in their prayer,
they have had the habit of being something before God, instead
of being nothing. It is melancholy to see how apt spiritual per­
sons are to be impertinent to God. Perhaps the fewness of the
saints is attributable to this.
But there is comfort even here. God knows our weakness.
We think no one can enter into it as we do. But He knows it
infinitely better. He practises the most incredible forbearance
toward us. He makes the most unimaginable allowances. Woe
unto us if we should venture to make excuses for ourselves, if it
were but the thousandth part of the excuses He makes for us!
But we have yet another lesson to learn. We spend the most
of our lives in the Holy Land, in quietness and at home. Either

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we arc in the Holy City, with the courts of the temple con
veniently at hand, or in the unworldly sequestration of Nazareth,
or by the blue water flapping on the shore of the calm Gennesareth. But sometimes we have to go down into Egypt to buy
the wholesome corn of tribulation, the best sustenance of our
souls. Sometimes we have to fly thither from before the face of
men or the machinations of the devils. Now, the lesson is that,
whatever and wherever we are, we always have Jesus with us.
No time is inconvenient for Him, no place unlikely. There is
no darkness but He is the light, no light but its best light is He.
Alas that a truth so sweet to be remembered should so easily be
forgotten I Yet who does not forget it? Who is not always for­
getting it? Could Mary forget Him when she bore Him in her
arms? Why should we? Why distract ourselves from such a com­
panion? How be so near Him, yet so seldom advert to Him?
There are many heavy weights which the thought of Him would
make lighter. There is a self-willed liberty, which displeases self
and leaves dejection after it, which would be sweetly taken cap­
tive if His arms were felt twining round our necks. There are
chills in the heart, which we should not feel if He were nestling
warmly against it. There is a loneliness which beckons tempta­
tion to come and people its wilderness, which the company of
Jesus would turn into blameless talk, and song, and gladness. It
is easy to leave Jesus, if we let Him run by our side over the sands,
and forget His presence; but if we carry Him in our arms, as
love and Mary do, it requires much evil courage to lay our
Burden down upon the sand and wilfully walk away. He is ever
with us; and He is with us ever as a Child: partly that the burden
may be lighter, partly that love may come more easily, partly
because His littleness better suits our own. There is but one true
symbol of the Christian soul. We must never paint it otherwise
before our mind's eye. In the dark and in the bright, by dear
Jordan or by dark Nile, it is truly, and forever, a Madonna and
Child.
Such is the second dolor, the Flight into Egypt. Who has not
been devoted to it from his childhood upward? With how many

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early pious imaginings lias it not been interwoven! It has been
a type of life to us. It was a poetry with prayer in it,—a prayer
whose reality was enhanced by its poetry. Ah! it wakes old years,
and old tears as well; for it seems to wake those who have long
been dead. Childish memories,—early beginnings of which God
has taken care,—flowers, that have borne fruits in grace,—a
divine love, sometimes obscured but never lost, and distinct steps
taken in the knowledge of Jesus,—all these things, with the soft
light of an unremorseful childhood over them, come sweetly out
of this beautiful mystery of Jesus and Mary. Times come back
when it looks, in the distance, as if He and we had been but one
then, and His Mother and our own blend indistinctly into one
shape, and speak with one kind of voice. And there is the sunset
in the wilderness, the great orb flashing on the rim of the desert­
horizon, its light reflected in Joseph’s eyes; and then there is
Jesus sleeping on His Mother’s lap, and the round moon above,
and the glittering well, and the whispering palm, and night
breathing heavily over the yellow sands. But the dead do not
come back again. There were figures in the picture once which
are missing now. The years rob us as they pass. One by one, men
and things are missing. God alone is never missing.

Chapter IV

THE THIRD DOLOR
THE THREE DAYS* LOSS

The Mother without the Child! This is indeed a change to
pass upon our Lady’s sorrows. Bethlehem had its sorrows, and
Nazareth had still more, and on Calvary the tide rose highest.
But in all these places the Mother was with her Child. There was
light, therefore, even in the darkness. In this third dolor, the
Three Days' Loss, it was not so. When we wish to depict our
Blessed Mother with reference to her own graces, such as the
Immaculate Conception, we paint her without her Child, look­
ing heavenward, as if to show that she was a creature upon whom
heaven was falling in fast showers of grace from the Creator.
When we wish to see her as she stands to us, as the Mother through
whose hands the Son pleases to make His graces pass, we repre­
sent her also without her Child, her eyes cast downward toward the
earth, and her hands dropping light and freshness on the world.
But there arc two childless pictures of her in Scripture, which
have nothing to do with either of these. The one is her third
dolor, when in sorrowful amazement she is searching Jerusalem
to discover Jesus; and the other is her seventh dolor, when she
is returning at nightfall from the garden-tomb to the great city,
leaving her buried Love behind in His chamber of the rock. Thus
are the likenesses of the Passion more and more mingling with
the Infancy. They mingle especially in this third dolor, which,
both on the side of Jesus and of Mary, is one of the greatest
mysteries of the Three-and-Thirty Years. We, however, are
merely concerned with it as it regards Mary’s sorrow.
The quiet life of Nazareth was only interrupted by the duties
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of religion, which brought back fresh blessings to the Holy House
and augmented its tranquility. According to the law. the Jews
were obliged to go up to Jerusalem to worship God, three times
in a year, unless they were legitimately hindered. The first time
was at the Pasch, or feast of unleavened bread, instituted in re­
membrance of the Exodus from Egypt, and corresponding to our
Easter. This was the greatest of them all. The second time was
the feast of weeks, which was Pentecost or our Whitsuntide. The
third was the feast of tabernacles, the feast of lightheartedness
and gratitude, to be observed when “they had gathered in the
fruits of the barnfloor and the wine-press.” To all these feasts
Joseph went up yearly. The women were not bound by this law.
and some contemplatives have said that, while Joseph went up
to Jerusalem three times a year, Mary went up with Jesus once
a year, at the Pasch, or feast of unleavened bread. Five years had
now passed since the return from Egypt, and Jesus was twelve
years old. In that year, as the Gospel narrative tells us, He went
up to Jerusalem at the Pasch, with Mary and Joseph, and, accord­
ing to the tradition, He went on foot. In the minds of all three
there could be but one thought. It is probable that St. Joseph
knew of the mysteries of the Passion, as well as our Blessed Lady:
and Jane Mary of the Cross tells us that it was revealed to her,
that, before he died, he was allowed to feel all the pains of the
Passion in such measure as was fitting, just as we read of other
saints, some of whom have been permitted to participate in some
one mystery of it, and some of them to go through all. Thus, as
His last Pasch was always before our Lord, so was it never for­
gotten either by Mary or by Joseph. It would be especially and
vividly before them as they went up yearly to Jerusalem. As
they journeyed upon their way, over the hills or through the
glens, upon the wide road that lay like a thread over the green
uplands, Calvary with its three Crosses rose ever against the sky
as the real goal to which they were tending. But all things were
not always clear to our Lady. As our Lord at seasons veiled the
operations of His Sacred Heart from her sight, so sometimes the
future was not present to her, nor the whole mystery of the pres­

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ent understood. She hung upon Jesus for every thing; and it
washer joy that every thing was His, and nothing was her own.
For what is the creature but the emptiness which the Creator
fills? So, according to His will, our Blessed Mother little deemed
that, while His Calvary was still years off, hers was close at hand.
How her love for Jesus grew in that journey to Jerusalem!
The thought of His bitter Passion in her heart united itself with
the sight of the Boy of twelve before her outward eyes, and love
rose in a flood. Each moment He seemed to her so infinitely
more precious than He had done the moment before, that she
thought she was only just beginning to love Him rightly, and
yet the next moment distanced that love also. She knew well,
she had known it all along, that she never could love Him as
He deserved to be loved. A thousand Marys, which seems to our
minds like something more than all possible creations, could not
have loved Him worthily. There was something also in the
Creator being a Boy which was more than the Creator being a
child. The speechlessness, the helplessness, of infancy, the visible
palpable contradiction between that state and His eternal per­
fections, stamped it more completely as a mystery. The Human
Nature was tranquil, was passive, and the Divine Nature hidden
under it. The actions which were seen were the mere mechanical
actions of human life. They were its spontaneous vegetation.
The operations of the perfect reason, perfect with all its un­
growing and unutterable perfections from the first moment of
Conception, were invisible. It was plain it was a mystery, and
somehow things are less mysterious when they openly announce
themselves as mysteries. But in the Boyhood there was more of
the human will apparent. There were perhaps disclosures of a
particular human character. The mind gave a cognizable ex­
pression to the countenance. There was a gait in walking, a way
of using the hands, and many other things which make boyhood
more definite, more individual, than childhood. By a mother's
heart none of these things are either unnoticed or unvalued.
They are the ailments of maternal love, just when the incipient
independence of boyhood is a trial after the sweet dependences

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of infancy. But we must remember what all these things were in
Jesus, in order to estimate fairly what they were to our Lady.
Who can doubt that there was a spiritual beauty shining in all
He did, a celestial gracefulness breathing over every thing, which
would take captive every hour by new surprises the Mother s
heart? But, above all, these things brought out wonderfully the
Divine Nature. It seems a contradiction to say so; but, if we re­
flect, we must see that the more the human will was manifested,
the more development, the more action, there was about the
lower nature, the more also by virtue of the Hypostatic Union
must the glory of the Divine Person have disclosed itself. When
the mystery lay still, in the hush of childhood, it was worshipped
as in a sanctuary; but when it moved, and spoke, and worked,
and willed, in the countless daily acts and movements of life, it
came forth as it were from its sanctuary, and exhibited itself to
men. It flashed out of His eyes; it spoke from His lips; its music
escaped through His tone; it betrayed itself in His walk; it made
His fingers drop "with the choicest myrrh;” His whole outward
life was light and fragrance, as His childhood passed away, and
the day of His boyhood broke, and the shadows retired. All day
long He was acting, and His actions had on them the stamp, or
the scent, of the human will of a Divine Person, and therefore
they flowed “like the fountain of gardens, the well of living
waters, which run with a strong stream from Libanus.” Would
it be wonderful, then, if Mary reached the gates of Jerusalem in
that twelfth year, less able than ever to do without Jesus, feeling
that it was more and more impossible that her heart should live
away from His?
They reached Jerusalem before the beginning of the seven
days of unleavened bread; and during that time they made their
devotions in the temple, visited the poor and the sick, and per
formed the other customary works of mercy. It would be im­
possible to reckon up the supernatural wonders which arose before
the throne of the Most Holy Trinity from those earthly Three
during the week of unleavened bread. Who would venture to
compare any saint with St. Joseph? In what amazing union with

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God, in what flames of heroic love, in what Mary-like depths of
sell-abasement, did not that shadow of the Eternal Father dwell,
ever honoring by the shadow that he cast that stupendous majesty
and awful adorable Person whose representative he was! Genera­
tions of Hebrew saints had ascended those temple-steps, and had
made sweeter offerings of prayer and praise than all the aromatical
spices that for centuries had been burned before Him. Yet what
was their collective worship to one of Mary’s prayers, to one of
her hymns of praise, to one recital of her Magnificat? But when
Mary and Joseph knelt together in the temple, all created sanc­
tity, such as had shone in angels and saints, was left behind, out­
stripped, and gone out of sight. Many a good old man in those
times would think of David’s days, and of the tide of worship that
flowed and never ebbed in his glorious Psalms, and he would
almost weep to think how degenerate were modern times com­
pared with those, and modern worshippers by the side of those
grand prophets and singers of ancient Israel. They little dreamed
of the incomparable glory of those hearts of Joseph and Mary.
But how the mystery deepens when between Joseph and Mary
kneels down the Everlasting God, He with the unspeakable Name,
now just twelve years old, human years counted by circling
seasons and the filling and emptying of moons! Would the songs
go on in heaven when the Incarnate Word prayed on earth?
Would not all the angels fold their wings around them, timor­
ously hushed, while the prayer of the Coequal God rose up before
the Throne, casting far away into invisible shades the poor per­
missions of creature's worship? And Mary and Joseph ceased to
pray to the Throne in heaven, or to the presence behind the
Veil, but in prostrate ecstasy they adored the Eternal who was
between them, and confessed in mute thanksgiving the dread
Divinity of the Boy whose words were almost stealing their souls
out of their earthly tabernacles. Was ever temple consecrated
with such a consecration? Was it not strange that earth should
go on rolling through space the same as ever, and the sun rise
and shine and say nothing, and the moon get up behind the hills,
and silver the whole landscape, and float down again to the

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opposite horizon, without so much as a smile of consciousness?
Was it not more strange that Jerusalem went about its work, and
did not instinctively feel that something had happened to it more
wonderful than David's triumphs or the dazzling court of Solo­
mon? A Son of David, “greater than Solomon," older than the
day of Abraham, was among the crowds, one who could destroy
the temple and build it up again in three days, a Boy of twelve,
fair to look upon, but to Jerusalem only as one of many boys whom
many mothers had brought to the feast within its ancient walls
and in its historic sanctuary.
But the week of unleavened bread came to a close. Multi­
tudes, as usual, had thronged the Holy City, like a modem Roman
Easter. Every tribe had sent its worshippers. They had come
who dwelt in the southernmost villages of Simeon, or in the lot
of Reuben beyond the mountains of Abarim, or from Manasses
beyond the river, or from the shores of Aser, or from where
Lebanon looks down on Naphthali. According to custom, the
multitudes were told off in separate throngs, leaving Jerusalem
at different times, the men together and the women together.
They left in the afternoon, the men by one gate, the women by
another, to reunite at the halting-place of the first night. By this
means confusion was avoided. The city was emptied without
scenes which would hardly be appropriate to so solemn a season
and would be especially undesirable after the religious occupa­
tions of the past week. The roads, also, would not be crowded
all at once, but that huge multitude would thaw quietly away in
order and tranquility. Thus it was that Mary and Joseph were
separated during the first day’s journey, which was in reality but
the journey of an afternoon. An opportunity was also thus pre­
sented to our Blessed Lord to separate from them unperceived.
So when the women to whose caravan Mary belonged were mus­
tered at their proper gate, Jesus was not there. But children
might go either with the father or the mother. He was, therefore,
doubtless with Joseph. Mary missed Him; but it was sweet to
think how He was all the while filling Joseph’s heart with tides
of joy and love. She must learn to be unselfish with Him be­

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times; for the day would come when He would be taken from
her. Alas! it was come, another day that she had not suspected,
and He was gone. She went upon her journey; and, as the revela­
tions of the saints tell us, what, indeed, God's ordinary ways
would lead us to expect, the Holy Ghost flooded her soul with
unusual sweetness, the common preliminary to unusual trial.
Her thoughts were gently diverted from the absence of Jesus.
She was absorbed in God, and trod the ground, and kept the path,
and answered questions only mechanically. Her sold was being
annealed again in the furnace of divine love, to enable her to
pass through the ordeal that was coming.
The shades of evening had fallen on the earth before the two
bands of men and women met at the accustomed halting-place.
Joseph was waiting for Mary, but Jesus was not with him. Mary's
heart sank within her before she spoke. Joseph knew nothing.
His unworthiness would have felt surprise if Jesus had accom­
panied Him rather than His Mother. He had supposed He was
with Mary', and had not been disquieted. The bustle of the halt,
the cries of the crowd, the preparations for the evening meal, the
unloading and watering of the beasts of burden, all died out of
their ears. They were suddenly alone, alone amidst the multi­
tude, more lonely than two hearts had ever been since the sun set
on Adam and Eve, flushing the mountains of paradise, which to
them were as cloisters they might cross no more. Joseph was
crushed to the very earth. The light went out in Mary's soul,
and a more terrific spiritual desolation followed than any of the
saints have ever known. What could it mean? Jesus was gone.
It was a harder idea for her to realize than the mystery of the
Incarnation had been. IE the rolling universe had stopped, it
would have been less of a surprise. If the trumpets of doom had
blown, her heart would not have quailed as now. They would
ask among their kinsfolk and acquaintance if He was with them;
as many of them loved the Boy exceedingly, with yearnings of
heart which they who felt them could not comprehend. They
would ask, but Mary knew it would be all in vain. She knew Him
too well not to be certain that if He had been in the company

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He would long since have joined her. No such ordinary occur
rence would have been allowed to break the union between her
heart and His. She felt that the depth of her misery was not
going to be so shallow as this. An abyss had opened, and a cold
wind was rushing out of it which froze every sanctuary within
her soul. They made their search. It was only to receive one
negative after another, varied by the different amounts of sym­
pathy which accompanied each. Their inquiry ended, and deep
night had come. The sun had set on one side of the globe and
had risen on the other, but the thousands of leagues of darkness
did not hide, nor the thousands of leagues of light reveal, two
hearts in such consummate misery as Joseph's and her own.
There were many sorrows on earth that night, but there were
none like hers. There have been many nights since then, with
their beautiful raven darkness braided with stars, and many in­
credible sorrows, with nothing like a star set in their dismal
blackness; but there have been no sorrows like hers. The stars
would not have shone if they had had hearts within them. The
darkness should have wept blood instead of dew to be in keeping
with the forlorn anguish of that memorable night. When all
Egypt rang suddenly at midnight with the terrible wail for the
first-born, and the troubled river hurried away from the intoler­
able sickening sounds of human woe, the countless cries that wove
themselves into one amazing voice, as if the great earth itself had
spoken in pain, from the Cataracts to the Delta, were not freighted
with such a load of misery as lay that hour on Mary’s single heart.
In the darkness—alone, silent—Mary and Joseph were tread­
ing the road again to the Holy City. Their feet were sore
and weary. What matter? Their hearts were sorer and more
weary. The darkness in Mary’s spirit was deeper than the
darkness on the hills. Even if the paschal moon were not shining
they would see the white glimmer of the road; but no road out
of this sorrow glimmered in her heart. Had it all been, not a
dream certainly, but a transitory thing? Was she to see Jesus no
more? Had He withdrawn His wonted illumination from her
heart forever,—forever veiled now that beautiful Heart of His,

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where, for the last twelve years, the curtains had been looped up,
and she had seen all its mysteries, read all its secrets, lived almost
perpetually in its life? Was she unworthy of Him? She knew
she was. Had He, therefore, left her? It was not like Him. But
she did not see things as before, and it might be so. Had He
gone back to His Father, leaving unredeemed the world which
did not want Him? No! that was impossible. He had not paid
the price of her Immaculate Conception yet. Tyrants seldom
slumber. Had Archelaus watched his opportunity, and seized
Him? Herod might have left his son that charge as a legacy of
statecraft. Had she perhaps mistaken the date of Calvary, and
was it to come now? Was the Boy hanging on a cross that mo­
ment, in the darkness, on some mount outside the gates? Oh,
the bewildering agony of this unusual darknessl She has seen
all the Passion before in her spirit. How did it go? Was she not
there? She cannot remember. She can recover nothing. Within,
there is nothing but darkness, covering every thing. Is He actu­
ally dead without her, His Blood shed, and she not there? Agony!
Has He gone to death, purposely without telling her, out of
kindness? Oh, no! so cruel a kindness would have been contrary
to the union of their hearts. But this, this very separation, with­
out a word, and then this interior darkness, in which He has
wrapped her soul, how do these comport with that union of their
hearts? Ah! then there is not certainty to go upon, except the
certainty that He is God. This very sorrow shows her that she is
not to argue from what has gone before. The past, it seems, did
not necessarily prophesy the future. Not to understand it, that
is such suffering. Sudden darkness after excessive light is like a
blow. Her soul wants to see. But it is hooded. A baffling blind­
ness has come on. She has nothing left her now, but that which
never was dislodged from the depths of her soul, the gift of peace.
Oh, how the waters of bitterness rose silently out of the endless
caverns of that peace, the subterranean bitterness which—who
Perhaps He had gone into the wilderness to join that marvel
does not know that has once felt it!—leaves its taste for life!
of eremitical sanctity, the boy John, the son of Zacharias, here­

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after to be called the baptist. He was making his novitiate of
years, in that tender age, among the wild beasts, lonely, hungersmitten, the prey of heat and cold, of wind and wet, preparing
for his mission, which was to forerun the preaching of Jesus.
Has her Boy gone to join him, gone to share in that novitiate?
She would have known it was not so if she could have seen as
usual. But it was the misery of her inward darkness that she no
longer seemed to understand Jesus. It was the only light she
wanted. All the world beside might have been dark to her, and
she could have borne the burden lightly. But not to understand
Jesus was a variety of martyrdom she had never dreamed of. Yet
do not most mothers taste it somewhat as their children, now in
new trials and unproved spheres, and so needing most the old
unity with the mother's heart, outgrow their childlike confidence,
and live down in their own hearts, and have mysteries written
on their brows? There are hearts to whom this is sharp. But
they are far off from the woe of Mary when the Boy of Nazareth
first began to look unlike the Babe of Bethlehem. Perhaps He
had gone to Bethlehem. Perhaps He had gone to Bethlehem, on
a visit to His own sanctuary. But could He have any work there,
connected with the redemption of the world? And if He had only
gone because He loved to go, was that like Him? Mary was per
plexed. A while since she would have answered, No! with the
utmost confidence. Now she was not so sure; and ex en her hu­
mility made her less sure than her darkness by itself would have
done. All this was so unlike Him! He might do any thing now.
Whatever He did would of course, be holy. But He might do
any thing, so far as her understanding Him went. But if He had
gone only out of devout pleasure, His pleasure would have been
so much greater if they had been with Him. Besides that, would
He have gone for pleasure without telling them, when He knew
how awful the pain of missing Him would be to them? Mary
could not be sure He would not; for why did He do what He
had done? Why give this pain at all? Has He emancipated Him­
self? But He is only twelvel Again: if He had done so, would
He not have spoken? She cannot tell. She can tell nothing. She

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knows nothing. Only He is God. Her bruised heart must kneel
and bleed, and bleed and kneel. She is crucified in the darkness,
as He will one day be. He has abandoned her, as His Father will,
one day, abandon Him. Go on, weary, forlorn, forsaken Mother!
the daybreak is catching the towers of Zion: thither drag this
inexplicable load of grief, thou wonderful daughter of the Most
High!
Meanwhile where is our Blessed Lord? In Jerusalem. Of
what He has been doing we know somewhat. Scripture tells us
the strangest part; the revelations of the saints disclose what
we might have divined as likely. He prayed long prayers in the
temple. He has gone to the meetings of the doctors and elders;
and there He finds how they strive to face the oracles of ancient
prophecy, and make out a glorious, warlike, triumphant states­
man Messias, who shall effect a political deliverance for His
oppressed people. Here He beholds the grand obstacle to the
reception of His doctrine and to the mystery of the Incarna­
tion. This must be removed. Those at least who have ears to
hear must be allowed to hear the truth. It is His heavenly
Father’s work. So He modestly puts Himself forward, as if to ask
questions. His sweetness wins all hearts. The gravest doctors
hang upon His words. He puts His objections gently, suggests
wonderful meanings to deep prophecies, leads them to see that
their own view is not tenable, and elicits from them the spiritual
truth as if it was the lesson He Himself was receiving, not a new
wisdom He was Himself infusing into them. How many hearts
did He thus prepare for Himself, of how many apostolic voca­
tions may He not have indirectly laid the foundations then! When
Peter converted thousands at a sermon, when he offered a thousand
souls to each of the Three Divine Persons, the first time he
preached, how much of the work may have been done already
by the doctrine which had flowed from questions of the Boy of
Nazareth! During these three days, as we learn from some of the
saints, our Lord had begged His bread from door to door, so that
He might practise even greater poverty than that which straitened
Him at Nazareth. Out of this He had given alms to the poor. He

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had also visited the rich, performed menial offices for them, spoken
kind words to them, and drawn them to God. At night He had
slept on the bare ground under the walls of the houses. Earth
at least could hardly refuse Him a bed who had called it out of
nothing. Thus the Creator of all things, left for the time without
His Mother’s care, shifted for Himself in His own world as a
beggar-boy at the age of twelve. Oh, upon how many shades of
life did not our Blessed Master scatter the consecration of His
own endurance!
We cannot doubt but that Mary and Joseph, when they en­
tered Jerusalem in the morning, went first to the temple to seek
God’s blessing on that load of sorrow which weighed them to
the ground. Nor were they without hope of finding Jesus there.
Throughout the day they threaded the streets of Jerusalem
wearily. Mary scanned the passers-by as she had never done before;
but Jesus was nowhere to be seen. Everywhere they made in­
quiries. Some listened patiently but coldly; others peevishly and
as if it were a trouble; others again were kind and feeling, but
they had no consolation to give. One woman asked her to de­
scribe her Boy, and how faithfully did Mary do it! But no! the
woman had seen a boy, but no such boy as that. She could never
have forgotten such a one, if she had ever had the good luck
to see Him. Others too raised hopes, which were as soon to
sink again. On the top of Mary’s sorrow came now a world of
good advice, which made the load no lighter. Why did she not
seek Him here? Why did she not seek Him there? Kind souls!
she had sought Him everywhere. She had sought Him as mothers
will seek missing children; and many spots are not overlooked in
such a search as that. Then some one had given an alms to a boy,
who was not unlike the description, and whose loveliness and
manner had left an impression behind. But she could say nothing
further. However, it was a gleam of light to Mary. There were
clearly not two boys in the world who would answer to her de­
scription. Then another woman, when she opened her house
in the morning, had seen a boy lying on the ground under the
eaves. She only saw Him for a moment, but He was fair-haired

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and beautiful. Another had seen a boy, not unlike the description,
breaking a loaf between two beggars in the street; but he had not
watched which way He went. He had then been in Jerusalem
yesterday, if He was not there to-day. But another had seen Him
that morning by the side of a sick person. Here was more light.
Mary could be shown where the sick person lived. She saw her
and spoke with her. She heard the poor sufferer describe the
winning ways of the boy-nurse, His voice, His eyes, His holy
words which had brought the tears into her eyes, and the strange
presence of God which He had left behind Him in her soul.
Mary’s heart burned. She drank in every word. It was Jesus. It
could be none else. But where had He come from? whither was
He gone? The invalid could not say. She knew nothing. He had
come and gone. While He was with her, she was so engrossed
with Him, she had not thought of asking Him any questions.
And the sun sloped westward and went down, and the shades fell,
and the quiet of night came upon busy Jerusalem; but Jesus
was not found. It had been a weary day. Neither Mary nor
Joseph had broken their fast all day. They were hunger-smitten
lor the Child. A broken heart wants sleep and food less than
others. The night outside was dark, but the night of Mary’s
soul was darker.
Whether it was after three full days, during which Mary was
left as it were entombed in this hideous darkness, or whether
it was on the third morning, so it was that Mary and Joseph
went up to the temple to lay their sorrows again before the Lord.
They went in by the eastern gate. Now, close to this gate there
was a spacious room, a sort of Academy, in which the interpreters
of the law sat, and answered questions, and resolved doubts, and
moderated in disputations. St. Paul speaks of this place in his
defence before Felix, when he says that he was not found disputing
in the temple. It was there also, at Gamaliel’s feet, that the great
Apostle of the Gentiles learned the traditions of the law. By the
opening into this Academy Joseph and Mary had to pass. It was
not a likely place for them to enter. But the Mother's ear has
caught a sound, in which it was impossible that she should be

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16!»

mistaken. It is the voice of Jesus. They enter. The doctors
are looking on Him with a mixture of awe and pleasure. There
has never been such a doctor in that Academy before. Joseph
and Mary also wondered. She had never heard quite that tone of
voice before. She had never seen that light in His eye before
Her soul worshipped in His presence. But she had rights over
that Boy, who was astonishing the wise elders of the nation. She
would fain have knelt before Him, but she knew that was not the
place, nor the time. But she came forward, and said to Him.
Son, why hast Thou done so to us? Behold, Thy father and I
have sought Thee, sorrowing. He could see that, without her
saying it. He could see the ravages which grief had made in her
countenance. He could hear it in her voice weak and trembling.
He could see it in the feebleness which was letting the flush of
joy almost overpower her. But He had no need so to see and hear
it. He had never been away from her. He had been lying in
her heart the whole while. He had been meting out to her just
those supplies both of physical strength and of heavenly grace,
which were needed to enable her to endure. His own heart had
been crucified with hers. But the mystery was not over. He said
io them, How is it that you sought Me? Did you not know that
I must be about My Father's business? He has taken out Simeon s
sword, and thrust in His own. Why had Mary sought Him?
Oh, think of Bethlehem, the wilderness, Egypt, and Nazareth'
Why had she sought Him? Poor Mother! could she have done
otherwise than seek Him? How could she have lived without
Him? There were a thousand reasons why she should have sought
Him. Does He deny her rights? Is He about to take them from
her, and just, too, in the joy of finding Him? Rights! They were
His own gift. He could take them back if He pleased. But His
Flesh, His blood. His beating Heart, were not these in some
sense hers? No! rather hers were His. But the right to love Him,
can even the Creator take that away from the creature? No!
that right is inalienable. Creation must be uncreated before that
right can be forfeited. If He is going to part with her now at
that very eastern gate of the temple, which was a type of her

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self, nevertheless she will love Him as before, and not only as
before, but a thousand times more. That look, that tone, when
He was among the doctors,—they have gone deep into her soul.
To her, they were absolute revelations of God.
Is the darkness gone? Far from itl For the moment He has
thickened it by His words. "They understood not the word that
He had spoken unto them." But He is not going to leave her.
He has been about His heavenly Father’s business in Jerusalem.
Now, the same business takes Him back to Nazareth. And He,
so much more lovely; and she, so much more holy; and Joseph,
nigher to God than ever, and more like the shadow of the
Eternal Father since the late eclipse, went back upon their way
to Nazareth, where, for eighteen unbroken years,—with the an­
nual visits to Jerusalem,—Mary shall enjoy His sanctifying pres­
ence; and by His toil in the shop it shall appear that His heavenly
Father’s and His earthly father’s business were but one. Those
broad eighteen years: to Mary it was like seeing the beautiful,
free ocean after climbing the dark mountains. "And He went
down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them;
and His Mother kept all these words in her heart."
In describing the mystery of this third dolor, much has been
already said of its peculiarities. Nevertheless, we must now dwell
upon its characteristics at greater length. In the first place, it was
the greatest of all her dolors. This arose partly from its involving
a separation from Jesus, and partly from a union of other circum­
stances to be considered presently. We read in the life of the
Blessed Benvenuta of Bojano, a Dominicaness, that, while she
was suffering from the illness which for many years would not
allow her to lie down, but forced her to remain sitting in a
chair, she began to contemplate the grief of our Lady during the
Three Days’ Loss. She desired to participate in that affliction,
inasmuch as she had herself been accustomed to sorrow all her
life, and had sought for it, and desired ill-health, and fled from
every joy. She prayed earnestly, therefore, both to our Lord
and His Mother, to grant her the grace to feel in herself our
Lady’s sorrow. And, beholdl a holy and venerable Lady appeared

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to her, with a beautiful and graceful Child, who began to walk
about the room, keeping close to His Mother. His aspect and
conversation inspired her with sublime happiness. But when
she sought to touch Him he withdrew from her, and both He
and His Mother suddenly disappeared. On this a vehement
sorrow took possession of her soul, which continually increased,
and afflicted her so deeply that she found no consolation in any
thing, and it appeared as if her soul and body would be torn
asunder. She was compelled, therefore, to call on our Lady to
help her; for she could no longer endure it. At the end of
Three Days, our Lady appeared to her, with her Son in her arms,
and said, You asked for a taste of that sorrow which I suffered
in the loss of Jesus; and it is but a taste which you have had. But
do not ask such things again, because your weakness could not
live under such an agony of grief!* The seventh dolor, the Burial
of Jesus, alone approaches to this third dolor in severity. But for
many reasons it was much less severe. Both of them involved
separation from Jesus; but in the case of the Burial she knew that
He could suffer no more. She understood the mystery. She
triumphed in the accomplishment of the great work of the
world's redemption. She could count the hours to the moment
of the Resurrection. In this third dolor she had lost Jesus, and
she knew not why, nor where He was, nor what He might be
suffering. She was plunged into a dense spiritual darkness, and
God seemed altogether to have abandoned her. Hence, the torture
of her heart never rose to a more intolerable height than during
these Three Days, not even amidst the horrors of the Passion.
The loss of Jesus would have been, under any circumstances,
a most fearful sorrow; and one which it is impossible for us.
with our little grace and less love, to appreciate at all adequately.
We must have Mary’s heart to feel Mary's grief. But the peculiar
circumstance of the Three Days’ Loss, which rendered the loss
of Jesus so dreadful, was the darkness in which her sou! was
cast as into a pit. She, who heretofore had been all light, was
now all darkness. She did not know what God was doing with her.
Marchese, Diario, Ottobre 30.

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She had load, and could not understand the circumstances under
which she was acting. It was not only the contrast with the past
which made the present so hard to hear. The night that had come
down upon her was in itself intolerable anguish. She had evei
leaned on Jesus. She never kfiew till now how much she had
leaned upon Him. And He had withdrawn Himself. She did not
see into the future; the past was all blurred together, and gave no
light; the present was full of perplexity, accompanied by intense
anguish of heart and bitterness of spirit. Sister Mary of Agreda
says that the very angels withheld their colloquies from her, lest
they should give her light about the loss of Jesus. There can.
of course, be no doubt that this darkness of Mary was a divine
operation. We must look for parallels to it in those indescribable
interior trials which some of the greatest saints have passed
through, always remembering, that if they were sent to the saints
as cleansings of the spirit, to her Immaculate Heart this trial
could only be, as it were, another marvellous sanctification super­
added to those which had gone before. For in her spirit there
was nothing to cleanse. The work, the parallel to which in the
saints took long years to do, might be accomplished in our Lady’s
soul in three days, not only because of her perfections which
would enable grace to work more rapidly and without the shadow
of an obstacle, but also because the divine operations in the
soul seem scarcely to need the lapse of time. Who does not know
how in dreams, in accidents, in moments of great suffering, time
appears almost miraculously compressed? Long years of previous
life pass in distinct, orderly, and cognizable array before the soul,
which seems intelligently to comment on each of them; and
yet the whole process has occupied only the space of a lightning­
flash. In the same way, we have apparitions of souls from purga­
tory, complaining of the long years in which their friends have
left them in the flames without mass or suffrage, when the sun of
the day on which they died is not yet set. We are taught to believe
that the particular judgment, which awaits us at the end of life,
will occupy but a moment of time. Again: one action will some­
times appear to do the work of years, even in respect of the forma

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tion of habits. This is especially the case with heroic actions, such
as Abraham's sacrifice. The same thing may occur in the profes­
sion of a religious. There may be something akin to it in the
special grace of the different sacraments. Are there any of us who
do not remember experiencing some marvellously swift processes
of grace, which seemed hardly to require succession of time,
so instantaneous were they, and yet a veritable procession and
sequence of different steps? So in the perfect soul of Mary, al­
ready elevated by grace and union to so sublime a height, this
divine darkness of three days may have wrought the most astonish­
ing effects, which we cannot describe, seeing that her height,
even before that, was far above out of our sight. This darkness
is a peculiarity of the third dolor in which no other of our Blessed
Lady’s sufferings shares in the slightest degree.
It is not possible for us to say with any certainty when this
darkness ceased. But we should be inclined not to refer to it the
fact that Mary did not understand the words of Jesus in the
academy of the temple. This we should regard as rather a sepa­
rate peculiarity of this third dolor, referable to other causes,
and an evidence of the hold svhich this sorrow had taken upon her
nature. The darkness may indeed have passed off gradually, be­
ginning with the first sight of Jesus. We would venture, however,
to conjecture that it passed away entirely the moment she had
found Him, while some of its consequences remained. It may be
also that the weakness and weariness which had been hardly felt,
because the darkness and the sorrow absorbed all feeling now
told upon her, and would even be brought out by this sudden
revulsion from grief to joy, just as we read of some of the saints
when long ecstasies have passed away. Various reasons have been
assigned by theologians for our Lady's not understanding the
words of Jesus. Rupert thinks she did understand them, but out
of humility acted and looked as if she did not. But this is not
satisfactory, from the difficulty of harmonizing it with the direct
words of the Gospel. Our own Stapleton attributes it to the ex­
cess of her joy at finding Jesus, which so acted upon her mind
that she could not understand His words, just as from an opposite

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cause, namely, the excess of sorrow, the apostles later on could
not understand what our Lord said about His own death. But
there is hardly a parity between our Blessed Mother and the
apostles; and it would be a hard inference to receive, except
upon authority, inasmuch as it would represent our Lady’s tran­
quility as shaken, and her self-possessed use of reason for a while
perturbed, and perturbed too when He was speaking whose voice
could lay the winds and calm die seas. Denys the Carthusian
limits her ignorance. He says she knew that Jesus spoke not of
Joseph but of His Eternal Father, that He alluded to the work
for which He had come into the world, and that, according to the
human nature He had assumed, He must ever be intent upon
that one work, but that die circumstances of time, place, and man­
ner had not yet been revealed to her. This supposition, while it is
more honorable to our Blessed Lady than that of Stapleton, pro­
ceeds upon the notion that the Thirty-Three Years, and the
Passion, dawned upon her gradually in successive revelations.
We have throughout assumed that she knew all, or almost all,
from the beginning, which last hypothesis is more consonant with
the visions and revelations of the contemplative saints.
Suarez makes two suggestions. He holds that Mary under­
stood Jesus to speak of His heavenly Father, but that she did
not know exactly what the particular things were, relating to the
divine science, on account of which He had left Joseph and her­
self. Or again, she was not quite sure whether our Lord meant
to imply that He intended to hasten the time of His manifestation
to the world, which otherwise would not be before His thirtieth
year. So that, he adds, there was no “privative ignorance” in her,
but only the absence of knowledge of some particulars not neces­
sary to the perfection of her science. But, were this the case, we
should be more inclined to refer it to the continuance of that
divine darkness, with which God had visited her. St. Aelred,
with others, insists upon the words being taken by the figure
synecdoche, and so applying only to St. Joseph, and not to our
Lady, just as the Evangelist says both the thieves blasphemed
upon the ctoss, whereas in reality, according to some commenta-

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tors, only one did so. Thus, according to St. Aelred, our Lady
understood the words, and laid them up in her heart that she
might teach them to the apostles afterward. But it may be
replied that it is not certain only one of the thieves blasphemed.
On the contrary, it is the more common opinion that they both
did. Moreover, St. Aelred’s interpretation seems to be taking a
liberty with the words of the Gospel, which would hardly be
warrantable without much more authority from tradition. Others
think the words "they understood not” apply to the audience
in the academy, and not at all to our Lady and St. Joseph. But
this does not recommend itself. The sense of the faithful has
always found both difficulty and mystery in the passage, which it
would not have done if that interpretation had been obvious or
natural. Novatus thinks that, by a special permission of God,
Mary did not understand at once the words which Jesus had
spoken, but that she came to the understanding of them by
pondering them in her heart. He finds this interpretation most
suitable to the words in the Gospel, and he discovers a parallel
to the process in her mind, in the way in which the saints, who
have had the gift of prophecy, often foresaw the future, not by
direct prophetic light, but by comparing one light with another,
and so drawing fresh inferences from the comparison. Yet it
does not exactly appear what end is gained by this supposition.
No one would deny that our Lady had all the gifts which the
saints have had; but why should we gratuitously suppose that any
of the imperfections, which accompanied the exercise of these
gifts in the saints, should have adhered to her, beyond those which
belonged to her of necessity as a creature?
Let us venture to add another to the number of conjectures
which theologians have made upon the subject. It may be sup­
posed that every increase of sanctity in our Blessed Lady was
accompanied by a proportionate increase in her science. In a per­
fect and unfallen nature like hers it is not easy to conceive of
the two processes being separate. In the case of one who has
sinned, hardness of heart may be removed in degrees quite disproportioned with the removal of darkness of mind. Light and

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love, though always correlatives, are not such in sinners in the
perfect way in which they are so to the innocent. Thus we pre­
sume that the mystical darkness, which God sent as a spiritual
trial to overspread Mary’s soul, gave rise to such heroic acts of
love and union, that it raised her to enormous heights of holiness
above those lofty mountain tops on which she had stood before.
We presume that there was more difference of a supernatural
kind between the Mary who left the temple-gate at the end of
the week of unleavened bread and the Mary who entered it the
morning she found Jesus, than there ever was between a saint
in his saintly youth and the same saint in his far more saintly old
age. There could be no revolutions in Mary, because there was
nothing to destroy, nothing to overturn. All that could be done
was to superadd. But the superadditions might be so immense,
or so swiftly accumulated, or so instantaneously conferred, as
to produce a change which in any case but hers we should call a
revolution. This is surely what theologians mean, when they speak
of her first sanctification, her second sanctification, her third
sanctification, and so on. They do not mean to deny that she was
always meriting and thus always growing in grace; but that the
Immaculate Conception, the Incarnation, the Descent of the
Holy Ghost, or her Death, were, so to speak, creative epochs in
her sanctification, which did not follow the laws of common
growth. We would regard the interior darkness of the Three
Days’ Loss as an epoch of this description.
But how does this bear upon her not understanding the words
of Jesus? We must mount for a while to the highest regions of
mystical theology. There is a science so high that it confines upon
ignorance. It is where the human borders on the divine. It is at
an unspeakable height, only not unapproachable because some few
saints, and the seraphim, have reached it. Our Lady perhaps
reached a higher height. There are limits to the possibilities of
creatures. Our Lady reached the uttermost of those limits, and
looked out on the Divine Abyss which lay beyond. There the
darkness is excess of light, and the science ignorance, not only
because language has no vessels to hold its definitions, thought

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no moulds to contain its ideas, but also because the eyes of the
soul are closed and God is reached. What the spirit sees is, that
it does not know, that it cannot know, that it is submerged, that
its light is a marvellous indistinct distinctness, that knowledge
has lost itself in love, and love is living hiddenly in fruition. The
same words will convey different ideas to different minds. If
we say the moon goes round the earth, the countryman under
stands us, but the scientific man understands it differently, be­
cause he understands it more widely. An angel might understand
it differently still. So the words which our Blessed Lord spake
in the temple were not understood by the doctors, because they
did not know who His father was, or what his business, or why
His father should not seek Him because He had stayed away to do
His father’s work. St. Joseph did not understand them, because,
though he doubtless knew that Jesus spoke of His Eternal Father,
and of the redemption of the world which was His Father's
business, he did not know what part of that work Jesus meant,
nor why it was a reason He should have left them without notice.
Mary did not understand them, because each word rose to her
from some unimaginable abyss of divine wisdom, carrying the
work of the Incarnation far into the everlasting counsels of the
Divine Mind, immensely enlarging her range of view, yet without
giving her any distinct images, drawing her more closely within
the folds of the Divine Wisdom, till she almost touched what she
saw, and so ceased to see, and elevating her to that uttermost
point of knowledge where a divine ignorance is the consummation
of the creature's science. It was the very words themselves which
hindered her understanding, because they carried her into a
region where understanding has died out into something better,
in consequence of the vicinity of God. It was the preceding dark
ness which had carried up the life of her soul to the point where
this divine ignorance was possible. Such, with all submission,
is the conjecture we would venture to make in explanation of
this difficulty. Our Blessed Mother knows how much ignorance
and foolishness it may contain: but she will not disdain a guess,
whose motive is love and whose end is her greater honor.

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There is another peculiarity of this dolor, which is in perfect
keeping with the mysterious features of it already mentioned.
The first dolor was inflicted on her by Simeon, and the second bv
Joseph, this one by Jesus Himself, without any intervention of
creatures at all. It is very important to remember this· in meditat­
ing on the third dolor. From one point of view this made it easier
to bear, but horn another point of view it was harder. There was
more to reconcile her to the endurance, while there was also
more to suffer in the pain itself. What God condescends to do
Himself is not only better done than the creature can do it, but
it is done very differently. It is not only more efficacious in pro­
ducing its results, but its results are of another kind, and bear a
different impress on them. Even His words, when He speaks
them to the soul Himself, are substantial, and creative, and effect
what they utter, and effect it by the simple utterance. Thus there
is something extremely awful in the immediate action of the
Creator on the creature’s soul. It is a divine touch, pressing on us
without any medium, not even sheathing itself in the very flesh
belonging to the soul it touches; it is a keen, spiritual operation,
like no other. Hence the direct action of God on the souls of the
saints is ineffably more sanctifying than the persecutions of
creatures, or the pain of austerities, or the pressure of God’s own
external providence. It has also the same characteristic which
belongs to the highest class of miracles, in being instantaneous
in its effects. When, therefore, the intention of God’s immediate
action is to cause suffering, it must attain its end in a manner
which we tremble to think of. It is fearful to contemplate a
created thing which has been called out of nothingness by omnip­
otence for no other end than to inflict torture. Such is the fire
of hell, and the mysterious action of that fire on disembodied
souls both in hell and purgatory. Who can think of it without
shuddering? No beneficent office does it fill. There are no in­
direct results into which its being wanders, and, as it were, rests.
It was created to torture. It is no element turned to another
end. It has an end. It keeps to it. Through eternity it will
never flag. Multiply, deepen, broaden, condense the mass it has

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to act upon, and it is ready to work upon that mass, undiverted,
unstretclicd, unweakened. It knows what it has to do, and it does
it with terrific truth, with unblamable success. Yet this fire is but
a secondary cause. What must the touch of God Himself be. a
touch too, which is lovingly bent on inflicting pain? Oh, there
were many martyrdoms in one in the Three Days' Loes! We are
not worthy to tell or to conceive them. Let creatures stand aside,
or rather let them lie prostrate near, while God does what He wills
with His Mother’s soul. Yet creation has something to do with
it; for the natural Mother was crucified in her own. heart by the
Son whom she had borne. Both His Natures had fastened on her
to make her suffer. The fairness of His Face, the light in His
Eyes, the attractions of His Human Heart, racked her with
anguish as she thought upon her loss; while, as God. He was
visiting her with those appalling interior trials which we have
seen formed the chief part of the third dolor. It is useless to
talk of seas of suffering here; infinites would better express our
inability to speak of them at all.
When Mary grows into her right place in our minds, there are
many things which have a different meaning in her from what
they would have in one of the saints. The idea of Mary which
the Gospels, as interpreted by catholic theology, convey to our
minds, is not merely an intellectual view. Although it is in one
sense a theological conclusion, yet it is something much more
than that. It is a product of faith and of love, worn in by habits
of prayer. Thus, over and above the knowledge of the Gospel
mysteries, there is in the soul of the pious believer an appreci­
ation, an apprehension, an instinctive, almost intuitive, realiza­
tion of Jesus and Mary, which has its own certainties, its own
associations, its own perceptions, its own analogies. It is true
that the individual mind gives some color and consistence to
these things: yet when, in the popularity of various writings, in
the spirits of devotions, in the contemplations of the saints, and
in other ways, such ideas attain a kind of universality, they be­
come the sense of the faithful, and express the true catholic idea.
The cultivation of right instincts about our Blessed Lord and

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His Mother is obviously a matter of great importance, because
of its necessary connection with sanctity, and of the influence
which it exercises over our worship of the Blessed Sacrament,
over various other devotions, and over the spirit in which we
observe the great feasts of the Church. Now, when we have a
clear and consistent idea of Mary in our minds, certain things
we hear or read will startle us and strike us as unlikely. If they
do not rest upon the authority of the faith, but are simply the
view of some preacher, or the teaching of a book, or the con­
templation of some single saint, we put them away as unsuitable,
because we have more confidence, and rightly, in that view of
our Lady which has become part of our spiritual life, than in the
preacher, the book, or the single saint. We do not condemn
them, perhaps do not even like to differ from them; we simply
put them away. But if what startles us comes to us on the
authority of the Church, then either we must reform the idea in
our minds, or we must expect to find some deep and unusual
significance in that which surprises us. Now, there are one or
two such things in this third dolor; and these must be enumerated
among its peculiarities.
First of all, it strikes us as unlike our Blessed Lady that she
should have allowed her sorrow to wring from her any outward
demonstrations of grief. She not only showed her sorrow in her
outward deportment, but she told Jesus that Joseph and herself
had sought Him sorrowing. She told it Him almost reproach­
fully. Now die saints have borne the greatest sorrows in com­
plete, heroic, and supernatural silence. It has always been their
characteristic to do so. They have wished none but God to know
their sorrows. Was our Lady inferior to any of the saints in this
gift of silence? On the contrary, her silence was one of the most
remarkable of her graces. Tradition says that the three hardly
ever spoke in the Holy House at Nazareth. The sweet, heavenly
colloquies which we should have pictured to ourselves as a main
part of the life of the Holy Family are in our own imagination.
They did not exist. A deeper silence than that of a Carmelite
desert reigned there, or a Carthusian house where the Alpine

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winds moan in the corridors and shake the casements, and all
else is silent as the tomb. The words of Jesus were very few. That
was the reason Mary laid them up in her heart, because, like
treasures, they were rare as well as precious. When we reflect
we shall sec it could hardly be otherwise. God is very silent. So
far as Mary is concerned the Gospel narrative fully bears out the
tradition. It is amazing how few words of hers are recorded there.
Moving or still, she appears there like a beautiful statue, whose
beauty is its only language. So striking is this, that some con­
templatives have supposed that in her humility she commanded
the Evangelists to suppress every thing about her which was not
absolutely necessary to the doctrine about our Blessed Lord. St.
John, who was most with her, says next to nothing about her;
and St. Mark does not mention her but once, and then indirectly
only. We can have no doubt that no saint ever practised silence
as she did. Her silence to St. Joseph is a wonderful proof of this.
But how should she be otherwise than silent? A creature, who
had lived so long with the Creator, would not speak much. Her
heart would be full. Her soul would be hushed. She had been
with Him for twelve long years,—long years so far as the forma­
tion of habits is concerned, though they had passed to her like a
saint’s ecstasy, full of painful love. She had borne Him in her
arms. She had watched Him sleep. She had given Him food. She
had looked into His eyes. He had perpetually unveiled His
Heart to her. Thus she had learned His ways. AH manner of
divine similitudes had been transferred to her soul. We know
how silent God is. Between the Creator and the creature, in such
relations as He and Mary were in to each other, silence would
be more of a language than words. What could words do? What
could they say? They could not carry the weight of the Mother’s
thoughts, much less the Son’s. It must have been an effort to
speak, a condescension, a coming down from the mountain, on
her part as well as His. And why come down? St. Joseph did not
need it. He, too, dwelt high up among those mountains of
silence, too high for any voice to reach, almost too high for earth’s
faintest echoes to sound there. He did not need teaching as the

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multitude did, from the green mound, or on the plain, or by the
shore of the inland sea. Even in the days of His Ministry, which
was the "time to speak,” as the Hidden Life was the ‘'time to
keep silence," our Lord was very silent. How remarkably this is
hinted at the close of St. John's Gospel, the disciple of the Sacred
Heart! The text itself sounds as if it would be less of an exag­
geration if it spoke of words instead of works. "But there arc also
many other things which Jesus did; which, if they were written
every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain
the books that should be written." Was he speaking of the ThirtyThree Years? or was he ending his Gospel, as he had begun it,
with the eternal doings of the Word?
But is it not then all the more surprising that our Lady should
have indulged in this outward, almost reproachful demonstration
of her grief? It is indeed most mysterious. We know, from the
book of Job, in what boldness of complaint, in what seeming
petulance of familiarity and love, God allows His creatures. He
seems even to take a pleasure, and to find a worship, in the truth­
ful utterance which comes up from the very depths of the nature
He Himself has fashioned. This is the mourner’s consolation,
when he thinks of God. But nothing of all this will apply to
Mary. Was it a heroic act of humility, by which she expressed
Joseph’s sorrow, and coupled herself with him? It may have been.
It would be like her. But there is such an intense truthfulness
in the Gospel words diat we do not like to relax the strictness of
their meaning by such interpretations as this, unless compelled
by obvious necessity. We have but few of her words. We would
rather those few should have meanings in them about herself.
Was it meant to convey to us the exquisite suffering of this dolor
without implying any need or satisfaction of her own in making
the complaint? The Gospel sometimes does so; and once, when
our Lord prayed and a Voice came from heaven, He said to His
disciples that it was for their sakes that He had prayed His
Father to glorify Him. But this interpretation labors under the
same difficulty as the last. There was indeed humility in our
Lady’s words. But it was in coupling the great but far inferior

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sorrow of Joseph with her own. The words do indeed reveal to
us the severity of lier affliction, but it is by their own truthful­
ness, and in their literal acceptation. It was the excess of her
anguish which wrung from her, not in the excitement of a sud­
den revulsion of feeling, but with all tranquility and unbroken
self-possession, those marvellous words. Neither was there any
imperfection in this. The idea of imperfection only comes in
with the idea of disproportion. We complain because of our
weakness. Our sorrow is out of proportion with our strength,
and so without shadow of blame we utter a complaint, and our
complaint is a faultless imperfection. The saints suffer and do
not complain, because their inward strength is proportioned to
their sorrow, and their silence is a perfection. But there is a step
beyond this. Speech, in the creature's extremity, is its necessary
resort to the Creator. Complaint to creatures is complaint; but
complaint to God is adoration. The sorrows of the saints have
never been coextensive with the possibilities of their natures. We
presume Mary’s suffering in this dolor to have been so. It went
not only beyond the power, but beyond the right, of silence. It
drove her nature to its outermost limit of endurance, magnificent
and worshipful as that nature was. It exacted of her that which
was proportioned to it, the ultimate resort of the creature, the
perfect unbosoming of itself to the Creator. Our Lord's perfec­
tion in His Human Nature culminated in a word. His silence
was indeed a most adorable perfection; but it was a higher height,
when He broke out into that cry, ‘‘My God, My God, why hast
Thou forsaken me?” Then it was that His Passion had reached
to the whole breadth of His Humanity, and had covered it. Thus
it was that our dearest Mother had her Passion at the end of the
Infancy; and her Compassion, together with His Passion, at the
end of the Ministry. The darkness of this third dolor was the
Gethsemane; the loss of Jesus was the crucifixion of her soul;
her complaint was her cry upon the Cross, just when the torment
of the Cross was ending. It was with her now as it was to be with
Him hereafter.
There is yet another thing which strikes us as unlike our

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Lady in this third dolor. It is her venturing to question our
Blessed Lord as to the reasons of His conduct. In the midst of
her love of Jesus. the thought always uppermost in her mind, the
memory that never went to sleep, the faith which was her life,
the fact which was her worship, was His Divinity. Indeed, the
greatness of her love arose from this very thing. It seems most
probable that our Lord had actually shown her His Divine
Nature. But at all events she saw it always by faith. It was the
prominent thing which she saw in Him incessantly. Hence it
would seem impossible for her to question Him. Her humility
and her intelligence would alike forbid it. She had asked a ques­
tion for one moment, just before consenting to the Incarnation.
But it was of an angel, not of God; and, moreover, those days
were passed. How is it then that she thus seems to call upon Him,
and in public also, to explain and justify Himself for what He
had done? In all the Gospels her words are without any parallel.
They stand out by themselves, inviting notice, and yet full of
mystery. Her spirit was not troubled by the interior darkness of
her soul. It never had been troubled by it. Trouble is not the
word. Besides, the darkness had gone at the first sight of Jesus.
It was not in the flush of joy, which at that instant was crowding
in at all the inlets of her soul, that she spoke, not knowing what
she said, like Peter upon Tabor when he talked of building three
tabernacles. Neither joy nor sorrow ever made the balance of
her tranquility even to quiver. There was never any conflict in
her. Struggle would have desecrated her Immaculate Heart. It
was not exactly that she wanted to know. Her science was so vast,
that it was absolutely without desire of increase, so far at least
as it was merely science, and not the beatifying accompaniment
of an ever-augmenting love. Her science was such as was be­
fitting her altitude as the Mother of God. She knew, not only all
that was due to her, not only all that was convenient for her, but
all which could perfect her perfections within the limits of a
neature. Every thing in her had its limits. Every thing was vast,
but it was also limited. Her beauty was in her limitations. She
remained a creature. Hence her science was perfect, having

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nothing imperfect about it but the inevitable imperfection of
whatsoever is created. God only is illimitable, God only om­
niscient, God only perfect with absolute, independent, intrinsical
perfection. Why then did she question Jesus thus? We must
reverently venture upon a conjecture. It was by an impulse of
the Holy Spirit, by an attraction from Jesus Himself, by a will
of His which she read in His Sacred Heart. She had just been
raised to a fresh height of sanctity. She had been drawn closer to
God. The time of boldness follows great graces, just as the time
of great graces follows great trials. Heavenliness of mind takes
the form of an adoring familiarity, when it is in actual contact
with God. We see this in the saints. But what will the corres­
ponding phenomenon be in the sanctity of Mary? Jesus invited
her to claim Him, to assert her rights over Him. to exercise her
authority upon Him. And all this publicly before the doctors.
Thus would He make solemn proclamation of her being His
Mother, and do her honor before all, while they who heard little
knew the import of diat royal proclamation. Just as it required
vast grace in St. Joseph to enable His humility to govern and
command His God, so now did it require immense grace in Mary
thus to assert her rights over Jesus. But she did it in the same
calm simplicity with which she had consented to the Incarnation;
and that moment she stood once more on another mountain,
higher than that which a moment since had been the pedestal of
her wonderful grace. The glory of obedience, the triumph of
humility, the magnificence of worship, all these were in the bold
question of the Blessed Mother.
It should be mentioned also as a peculiarity of this dolor,
that it was one of the chief sufferings of our Blessed Lord. Per­
haps more than the chief. In the seventeenth century there was
a nun of the order of the Visitation at Turin, who lived in a state
of the most unusual union with our Blessed Lord. Her name was
Jeanne-Bénigne Gojos. She had a special devotion to the Sacred
Humanity, and tire peculiar form of her spirituality was the
offering up of all her actions to the Eternal Father in union with
those of Jesus. It had been revealed to her that this was the par

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titular devotion of Mary and Joseph on earth, an “amorous in­
vention," (so she called it,) by which they themselves had gained
enormous graces. In passing over in her mind the various mys­
teries of our Lord's Thirty-Three Years, she felt herself super­
natural)}' attracted to unite her soul with Him in the mystery
of the Three Days’ Loss. This became her interior occupation,
until at last it pleased our Lord to reveal to her some of the secrets
of His Sacred Heart about it. He told her that it had cost Him
more suffering than all the other pains of His life. For then in
His Mother’s grief, caused by the separation, He beheld all that
grief included, which was to be her martyrdom on Calvary, and
that as there her body and soul would have been sundered by an
agony of grief unless He had kept them together by His omnip­
otence, so during the Three Days’ Loss His almighty love had
kept both Mary and Joseph united to Him, and that the cruelty
of the pain was so great that without this secret assistance they
could neither of them have survived. He added moreover that
their sorrow was simply incomprehensible, and that none could
understand it but Himself.* Let us meditate on this, without
daring to add to it.
The heights of mystical theology, into which this dolor has
led us, must not, however, make us omit some other considera­
tions, which come more nearly to our own level. There is no
need to seek for a climax in divine things. Little things are not
dwarfed by the side of great ones, when the presence of God is
seen in both. We may therefore remark this peculiarity of the
Three Days’ Loss. If we may say so, it enabled Mary better to
understand the wretchedness of those who are in sin. She was
to be the mother of mercy and the refuge of sinners. She was to
love them as never mother loved faultless child. She was to be
a sanctuary so fortified by love, that hardly omnipotence itself
should tear from it the victims due to justice. It was not then
enough for her to have a marvellous vision of sin. She must know
how they felt who unhappily had sinned. But how was this to
be? What had sin to do with her? It had at once to make her
Vie, p. 453.

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childless, and to give her multitudes of children. Its shadow had
fallen from the first upon the joy of her heart, the living joy
outside her that moved about the house of Nazareth, and the joy
within her which was her life. Otherwise, within her, sin had
nothing to do. It never passed there. The decree in which it
was foreseen did not concern her. She was decreed before. She
can see the malice of sin well enough, when she looks on Jesus,
and knows that it will slay Him. But how is she to divine the
feelings of poor sinners, and still keep her own soul inviolate?
It is by means of this third dolor. Sin is the loss of Jesus. She
knows now the misery of that. Sin is the loss of Jesus when we
have once possessed Him. She knows that also; for there was the
sting. The uncertainty to which she was a prey, while the super­
natural darkness rested on her soul, and which made her doubt
if her own unworthiness had repelled Jesus from her, gave her an
approach at least to the dismay of one who has forfeited grace,
and lost our Lord by his own fault. At least it enabled her to
know the kind of pain. But to lose Jesus after having once pos­
sessed Him, and not to feel the loss, nay, to be positively indif­
ferent to it, to acknowledge it, and yet not care for it,—this, after
what she had felt, most piteously disclosed to her the worst un­
happiness, the direst need of the luckless sinner! Henceforth, if
she measures sin by Calvary, she will measure her love of sinners
by the dolor of the Three Days' Loss; and have we not said
already that it was the greatest of them all?
But there was still another peculiarity in this dolor. It did
what beforehand could never have been expected. It brought
forth in Mary’s heart a new love of Jesus, the love of what we
have lost and mourned, and then got back again. Affection has
no greater consecration than this. It is a flower which grows very
commonly on human sorrows, but it is surpassingly beautiful in
all its varieties. Mothers have bent over the beds of their dying
children, as though their hearts would burst. They would not
stay God’s hand, even if they could. Their will is with His. But
their hearts! Oh, this very conformity of their will sends all the
sorrow rushing to the heart. The flower withers. They see it

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withering before their eyes hour by hour. Human skill has certi­
fied now’ to the absence of hope. It should have said rather to the
absence of trust in itself. It is useless to speak of no hope to a
mother. It is a language she does not understand. The bitterness
of death is in her soul: but she hopes. She has made her sacrifice
to God: but still she hopes. Nobody else hopes, but she hopes.
Hope holds her heart together, but only just holds it. But a
change comes over the face of her child. It seems to be sinking.
She would almost recall her sacrifice; but she does not. She is
God’s daughter, as well as her child’s mother. She sees it sink
back, and its eyes close, and its little weight indents the pillow
somewhat deeper. Is it death? In the mother's heart it was; and
hope went, and the world gave way under her feet, and it was
not the floor of earth that held her up, but the arm of her heavenly
Father. But to the child it is not death. It is sleep. It is hope.
A few days, and weak, silent, very white, the child is lying in her
lap, smiling feebly into her eyes: it could speak, but it is not
allowed. The silence of that smile is such music to the mother's
heart. But does she love her child as she did before? Oh, nol it
is a new love. She is twice its mother now, because her heavenly
Father has given it to her twice. Some of us have been children
twice over to our mothers, and Mary has now to be twice a mother
to us, for the earthly one is gone. Poor earthly motherl What
art thou compared with Mary? What is thy child compared with
Jesus? We then have no experience by which to reach the new
love of that Blessed Mother for the Son, whom the Eternal Father
had now given twice unto her. We have put up our little ladders,
the comparisons of our sweetest loves, but we cannot mount to
the top. Truly, if Mary had many crosses in this dolor, she also
came out of it will) many crowns, and a new way of loving Jesus
was the best of all.
Such were the peculiarities of the Three Days’ Loss. May our
dearest Mother pardon our attempt to fathom the depths of that
sorrow, which our Lord Himself has pronounced to be unfathom­
able! She promised that they who "elucidate her shall possess
eternal life." The loving endeavor will not therefore be alto­

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gether without reward. But we must turn now from the peculi
arities of the mystery to the dispositions in which she suffered.
'Die grand disposition, which lasted throughout the dolor, was
a mixture of yearning with detachment, which it is not possible
for us to understand. It could only happen once in creation, and
to one creature, the elected Mother of God. She yearned for
Jesus, because she was His Mother. She yearned for His sensible
presence, for His visible beauty. She yearned for them the more
intensely, because her thoughts were not habituated to separate
the Eternal from the Child. Why should she stay her devotion,
or unsimplify her worship, by disuniting in thought what God
had united, and united by such rivets as those of the Hypostatic
Union? But while she yearned with such ardor, she did so with
perfect conformity to the will of God. She practised the hard
virtue of detachment in the most heroic degree ever known; and
she was detached broken-heartedly, not coldly. But for God
Himself, for the Divine Nature of Jesus, she yearned without any
detachment whatever. Detachment is from creatures, and detach­
ment from the created gifts of God is a higher virtue still. But
detachment from God is a horror, belonging only to impenitence
and hell. Next to Mary and Joseph, perhaps also we should name
the Baptist, St. Peter probably loved our Blessed Lord more than
any other creature, even the burning seraphim, and next to him
St. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. But there was something
in the love of the apostles, deep, ardent, glorious as it was, which
was not altogether perfect. Some dross of earth adhered to it. It
was "expedient that He should go away." It was necessary for
their complete sanctification that His dear sensible presence
should be subtracted from them. Now the operations of grace
cleanse away imperfections, not merely by expelling them from
the soul, but by filling up their room with some great gift or
peculiar presence of God. This gift which they leave, and by
which they effect a cleansing of the soul, is quite separable from
the cleansing operation; even though, as a matter of fact, they
always go together in the saints. Our Lady had nothing to cleanse.
She had no merely natural tenderness for Jesus, which was nm

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already absorbed in the supernatural, and canonized by it.
Nothing earthly, nothing unworthy, clung to her love of Him.
But the subtraction of His sensible presence might give her the
same gift it gave the apostles, without the cleansing virtue which
she did not need; and it might give it to her in an eminent degree
above their gift because in proportion to her eminence. Thus,
as in the third dolor she had found a new love of Jesus, the grace
of it might be to raise her whole love of our Lord immensely
higher, more nearly equal to His worth, to which at best it must
remain infinitely unequal. But so it is with many of our Lady's
graces. They strike across the trackless desert of the infinite.
They can never reach the other side; for it has none. Yet some­
how they gain a nearer vicinity to God.
We have already noticed another of her dispositions, namely,
her extreme humility in the temple. Indeed, every moment of
the Three Days was drawing forth from her the most astonishing
acts of humility. Her tranquility in the midst of that perturbing
darkness which came down like deep night upon her soul, and
yet perturbed her not, was the effect of her intense humility. The
doubt as to whether Jesus had not left her because of her un­
worthiness was also the offspring of that lowliness which, by
thinking exaggerated evil of itself, comes nigh to divine truthful­
ness. But above all was her humility tried and triumphant in
the public assertion of her rights over Jesus, whom she was long­
ing to fall down and worship as the Second Person of the Most
Holy Trinity, an act which Mary of Agreda tells us she did do
as soon as she had got outside the gates of Jerusalem and beyond
the sight of men. Her silence, also, when His answer came,—
which was in reality no answer to her question, but sounded like
reproof, the more strange from the mouth of a Boy of twelve,—
was the continuance of the same marvellous humility. All this is
like our dearest Mother. All this is what we expect and recognize.
The picture grows familiar again. We breathe more freely than
when a while ago we were straining up those high hills, which
were not meant for such as we are. Mary still astonishes us.
There are sweet surprises in her commonest graces, because their

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beauty is at once so heroic and so gentle. It is far beyond us, but
it does not look so. It tempts us on. It seems attainable. At least
it draws us toward itself, and it is the best road for us to be on.
How strange it is that finding God always humbles, even while
it ravishes, even while it elevatesl Humility is the perfume of
God. It is the fragrance which He leaves behind, who cannot
be humble Himself, because He is God. It is the odor, the stain,
the token the Creator leaves upon the creature when He has
pressed upon it for a moment. It must be a law of the world of
grace, because we find it in Mary, in the saints, and in the faintest,
most nearly indistinguishable way in ourselves. Perhaps it is
something inseparable from God. We trace the Most High, the
Incommunicable, by it in the Old Testament. We trace Jesus
by it in the New. The glory of humility is in the Human Nature
of our Lord, on which the mysterious pressure of the Divine
Nature rested for evermore. It is this inevitable perfume that
God leaves behind Him which hinders His altogether hiding His
traces from us. It is “the myrrh, and stacte, and cassia from His
ivory houses." Mary has found Him now, and she has lain down
to rest in the lowliest, most flowery valley of humility, and the
fragrance of God has perfumed her garments, her “gilded cloth­
ing, surrounded with variety.”
Another of our Blessed Lady’s dispositions in this dolor was
the resignation by which she simplified, as it were, with one en­
durance such multiform and manifold sorrows as were involved
in it. Altogether, there is no disposition of the soul, no gift, no
grace, for bearing misfortune, which is at all to be compared with
simplicity. It brings along with it singleness of heart and eye.
It is not amazed. It is not precipitate. It does not distract itself
with many things. It has a sort of unconscious discretion about
it which is very serviceable in times of grief. Self-oblivion is at
once the hardest and the most needful lesson which we have to
learn in trouble, and simplicity is half-way to it already. More­
over, it strengthens our faith, by keeping our eye with a gentle,
hardly constrained fixedness on God. It is in its own nature too
self-possessed to be taken unawares by those subtle temptations

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which assail ns in sorrow, and which, under the pretext of pru­
dence, or of greater good, lead us artfully away from God to rest
on Creatures. Simplicity makes a ring of light round about it,
even in darkness, like the moon shining through a mist. If there
be not enough light to walk by, there is at least enough to guar­
antee us against surprises. Such was our dear Mother's simplicity.
Il had a fearful complication of sorrows to cope with. There was
first of all the intense suffering, which is itself a bewildering
distraction. It seems to divide our nature into many pieces, and
to live and ache in each one of them. Then there was added to
this the bodily pain arising from inward grief, and also from
fatigue, hunger, and want of rest. To sit down and die would
have been easy, had it been right. But she had to work, to think,
to plan, to consider, to be stirring: and activity was almost in­
supportable in such a conjuncture as this. But God chose that
very moment to overwhelm her supernaturally with interior
trials. She was in darkness. A sudden change seemed to have
come over the life of her soul. She was battling, not with one
evil, but with many, not with an evil which she knew where to
find or how to confront, but with uncertainties, surmises, sus­
picions, torturing suspense, unaccustomed nescience, and a baf­
fling darkness which met her thoughts whenever they went forth,
and turned them back again. All this was on her at one and the
same time. Yet, throughout, her will was calmer than a summer
lake. It lay in the lap of God’s will as the lake lies in the bosom
of its green valley. It never stirred. Not a first movement, not
an indeliberate breath from self, rippled ever so indistinctly the
silver level of the waters. This came of her simplicity. It wrought
many wonders in her Three-and-Sixty Years. But, except at the
moment of the Incarnation, it never wrought a wonder like to
the loving stillness of her heart during the Three Days’ Loss. It
looked,—of course it could be but a look,—as if the loss of the
Son had made her sink down more deeply in the Bosom of the
Father.
Although this dolor for the most part keeps up among the
high hills, which do not belong to us, it is nevertheless so full

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of lessons for ourselves, that it is difficult to select from them. It
teaches us, first of all, that the loss of Jesus, however brief, is the
greatest of all evils. It was this which was almost unbearable
even to our Lady, and Jesus is not more needful to us than to her,
because to all creatures He is absolutely needful; only to us He
is a more pressing necessity, because of our weakness and our sin.
The greatness of Mary's sorrow is to us a visible measure of the
magnitude of the evil. Yet alas! how little we feel it! How happy
can men be, who yet have lost Jesus, often unconscious almost
of their loss, more often indifferent to it when they know itl We
should have thought the loss of Jesus was in itself so fearful an
evil, that nothing could have aggravated it; and yet our want of
perception of the greatness of our loss is a token of still deeper
misery. It is sad indeed when the voice of the world is more
musical in our ears than the voice of our Lord. It is just the very
wretchedness, the very hatefulness of the world, that it has no
Jesus. He does not belong to it. He refused to pray for it. He
pronounced its friendship to be on our part a simple declaration
of war upon Himself. It makes our hearts sink to look out upon
the world, and to know that it has no part in Him. It is like
gazing upon a cheerless and disconsolate view of barren moors
or dreary swamp. No sunshine can gild it. It is dismal on the
brightest day. Nay, it is ugliest when the sun shines upon it. So
it is with the world, because it has no Jesus. So does it become
with us in proportion as we are friends with the world, or even
at peace with the world. He and it are incompatible. Are we
not afraid? Pleasure, gayety, fashion, expense,—dare we, even in
our thoughts, put these things into the Heart of Jesus? Would
He smile when worldly things were said? Would He wish to
please people round Him, who are taking no pains whatever to
please His Father? Would He seek to be popular in society, to
stand well with those who have not at heart the only one interest
which He has at His, to keep out of sight His principles, not
simply through silence and reserve, but lest they should ruffle
others and interfere with that smoothness of social intercourse
which takes the place of charity? Alas! sin is bad; excess of

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

pleasure is bad; giving God the second place is bad; worshipping
the rich is bad; hardening our Christian feelings to become ac­
customed to worldly frivolities and very slightly uncharitable
conversation is bad. But these at least are evils which wear no
masks. We know what we are about. We give up Jesus with the
full understanding of the sacrifice we are making. We are taking
our side, choosing our lot, and we know it. But wishing to
please!—this is the danger to a spiritual person. Total separa­
tion from Christ is already implied in the very idea. What is it
we wish to please? The world, which is the enemy of Jesus.
Whom do we wish to please? Those who are not caring to please
God, and in whom Jesus takes no pleasure. Wherein do we wish
to please? In things, conversations, and pursuits, which have no
reference to God, no savor of Christ, no tendency toward religion.
When do we wish to please? At times when we are doing least
for Christ, when prayer and faith and hope and love and abiding
sorrow for sin would be the most unseasonable. Where do we
wish to please? In haunts where there is less evidence of God
than elsewhere, where every circumstance, every appurtenance,
Hashes the world’s image back upon us as from a lustre. Yet we
see no evil. We want smoothness, polish, inoffensiveness, discreet
keeping back of God. He said that He and Mammon would not
dwell together. But to some extent we will force Him so to
dwell. He shall at least keep the peace with the world, and learn
to revolve alongside of it in His own sphere, without encroaching,
without jarring. Dreadfull Is there not hell already in the mere
attempt? Yet how little men suspect itl It is like something
noxious getting into the air, and not at first affecting the lungs.
But the lights burn dim, then one by one they go out, and we are
left in the darkness, unable to escape, because lethargy and suf­
focation have already begun within ourselves. In other words,
high principles gently lower themselves, or are kept for state
occasions, such as Lent, or a priest's company. Then we begin
to be keenly alive to the annoyance which comes to us from the
conversation of uncompromising Christians, and we pronounce
them indiscreet, and by that ceremony they are disposed of to our

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great comfort, and we praise them more than ever, because by
that reserve we have got rid of what fidgeted us in them, and we
lull to rest the remaining uneasiness of conscience by this greater
promptitude of a praise which we have first made valueless by
counterweighting it. Then it dawns upon us that it is a duty to
keep well with the world even for God’s sake. Then keeping
well edges on to being friends with the world. Then there begin
to be symptoms of two distinct lives going to be lived by us; but
we do not see these symptoms ourselves. Then uncomfortable
feelings rise in us, taking away our relish for certain persons,
certain things, certain books, certain conversations. We rouse
ourselves, and take a view, an intellectual view of the rightness
of being smooth, and not offending, and getting on well with the
world. The view comforts us, and we are all right again. Then
God’s blessings, His spiritual blessings, very gradually and almost
imperceptibly, begin to evaporate from us, from ourselves, our
children, our homes, our hearts, and every thing round us. But
the sun of prosperity shines so clearly that we do not see the mist
of the evaporation rising up from the earth and withdrawing
itself into heaven. Perhaps we shall never awake to the truth
again. Trying to please is a slumberous thing. So we drift on,
never suspecting how far the current is carrying us away from
God. We may die without knowing it. We shall know it after
that, the instant afterward.
Thus we may lose Jesus in three ways. We may abruptly
break from Him by sin. We may quietly and gracefully withdraw
from Him, confessing the attractions of the world to be greater
than His. We may retire from Him slowly and by imperceptible
degrees, always with our face toward Him, as we withdraw from
royalty, and all because He is not a fixed principle with us, and
the desire to please’ is so. But if we have lost Him in any one
of these three ways,—sin, worldliness, and the love of pleasing,—
and He rouses us by His grace, what are we to do? This third
dolor teaches us. It must be a dolor to us. We must search for
Him whom we have lost. He may not allow us to find Him all at
once. He probably will not. But we must put off every thing

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else, in order to prosecute our search. Other things must he
subordinate to it. They must wait, or they must give way. But
we must not be precipitate in our search. We must not run; we
must walk. We shall miss Him if we run. We must not do violent
things, not even to ourselves, although we richly deserve them.
It is not a time for taking up new penances. The loss of Jesus is
penance enough, now that we have found it out. We must be
gentle, and sorrow will give us gentleness. Hence, our search
must be also a sorrowful one, as Mary's was. We must seek Jesus
with tears,—with tears, but not with cries,—with a broken heart,
but a quiet heart also. We must seek Him, also, in the right
place,—in Jerusalem, in the temple; that is, in the Church, and
in sacraments, and in prayer. He is never among our kinsfolk;
He never hides in the blameless softness of a kind home. This
is a hard saying; but this dolor says it. All these are the condi­
tions of a successful search. It was so Mary sought Him; it was
so she found Him. We must be of good cheer. Every thing has
its remedy. Even worldliness is curable, and it is by far the
nearest to incurable of any of our diseases. If our whole life has
been but a desire to please, if every thought, word, action, look,
and omission has got that poison at the bottom of it, we must
not be cast down. To change the habit is too difficult. We will
change the object. It shall be Jesus instead of the world. Who
ever knew people more thoroughly all for God than some who
were once notably all for the world? nay, it would seem the more
notably for the world, the more thoroughly for Him.
We must, however,—so also this dolor teaches us,—be on our
guard against a temptation which is likely to assail us in our
search. We soon lose the feeling of guilt in the feeling of be­
ginning to be good again. It is part of the shallowness of our
nature. We shall not have gone far on our road in search of
Jesus before we shall be drawn to attribute the loss of Him, not
so much to our own fault as to some mysterious supernatural trial
which God is sending us, and the coming of which is itself an
index of our goodness. We feel our hearts sorrowfully burning
after our Lord. They cannot surely be the same hearts which we

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thought but a while ago were living contentedly without Him.
The change of feeling has not been sudden or marked, therefore
it cannot be new. So we argue. Alas! the truth is, our own change­
ableness is so great that it is incredible even to ourselves, except
at the moment of the turn, when we see it with our eyes. Let us
not take any grand views of supernatural chastisements. They are
rare, and they are not for such as we are. Simply we have sinned,
and we are being punished for it. It is our punishment to have
to search for Him, who once dwelt with us, and only left us
reluctantly. Let us be sure that every thing about us is very
commonplace. We have lost Jesus, not in a mystical darkness of
soul, but in the weakness of a worldly heart; we shall find Him,
not in a vision or in any masterful interior operation of grace,
but in the resumption of our old prayers, in the fréquentation
of the old sacraments. It is here the Evil One deludes many. They
look out for a more striking appearance of our Lord than they
had before. So they come up to Him, do not know Him, and go
past Him. It is not often men turn back upon a search. But if
these souls do not do so, cannot every one see that they have a
wilderness before them, in which they may die, but which they
will assuredly never cross? Mary might have thought her loss of
Jesus a supernatural trial, and she would have thought truly. But
she thought it was her own fault, and so she reached a far higher
truthfulness.
It is true, there is a loss of Jesus which is not altogether our
fault, which is half trial, as well as half punishment. It is not
so much a loss of Him as a veiling of His Face. We only think
we have lost Him because we do not see Him. This happens to
us again and again in our spiritual life; and, if we watch atten­
tively, we shall be sure to detect the action of some law in these
disappearances. We shall come to know the circumstances under
which they happen, which regulate their duration, and which
accompany His reappearance. For He does nothing, except in
order, weight, and measure,—more so, if it were possible, in the
world of souls than in the world of matter. God has His own
way with each one of us, and it is of consequence we should know

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His way with ourselves. But, with all, His way is a system. Jt
has its laws and its periods, and is just as regular in its deflections,
and as punctual in its catastrophes, as it is in its peace, its
sequence, its uniformity. There is, perhaps, no infallible way of
knowing when this disappearance of Jesus is our own fault. Per­
haps it is always, in some measure, our own fault. If it were only
a trial, it would cease to be a very efficacious one, were we sure
it was but a trial, and no fault of ours. Even then we must not
be passive,—even then we must sorrow,—even then we must
search. We must not wait for Him to come back to us; we must
go and find out where He is. But, till we find Him, do not let
us seek for consolation either from our guides or from ourselves,
least of all from the sympathy of creatures or the comforts ol
earth: He is our only true consolation. It would be the saddest
of things if we were consoled by any thing but the finding ol
Himl All this the third dolor teaches us; for it mirrors on its
surface, without being disturbed by the deep things under it, all
the relations of the soul with its Saviour and its Lord.
There is something almost selfish in the feelings which wc
turn away from the deathbed when the grim work is over. There
is a sense of calm and of repose, which, for the moment, seems
as if it were an enjoyment of our own. But it is not so, or not
more so than to our nature is unavoidable. It was anguish to
see one we loved suffer so terribly; to watch him struggling with
the dark enemy, and to be unable to assist him except by prayers
we were too distracted to pray, only that the mourner’s unselfish
will is itself prayer with God. So much hung upon the struggle;
such interests were on the balance; we were sick to think ol
them, but sicker still to see them,—now uppermost, and now
undermost,—in that tremendous hour. Now all is over; as far
as we can. see, well over, happily over, eternally right. His body
is harmless; his soul is accepted. There is nothing to annoy our
love of him, because there is nothing to afflict and harass him.
It is a beautiful change to him, a soothing change to us. Our
hearts are full to overflowing with that expansion which belongs
to nue repose. Such is our feeling, as we watch Jesus and Mary.

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195

on the threshold of the house of Nazareth, together again, the
two hearts like one, on the shore of that broad and tranquil sea
of eighteen years, during which they shall separate no mor»
Mary’s heart is still broken. It must be broken always. But it
beats inside another Heart, which will not leave her again for
years and years; and there is a quiet, pensive, evening brightness
about her sorrow, most unlike the darkness, and the wandering,
and the weariness of the Three Days’ Loss. She has got Jesus
back again. It is peace to us as well as to her. Truly she is to be
envied now for her joys even amidst the number of her sorrows.

Chapter V

THE FOURTH DOLOR
MEETING JESUS WITH THE CROSS

We have passed into a new world since the last dolor. Bethle­
hem and Nazareth are left behind. Wc have bidden farewell to
the scenes of the Sacred Infancy, the Boyhood, and the Hidden
Life. The Three Years' Ministry has passed. It is twenty-one
years since the Three Days' Loss. The Immaculate Heart of
Mary has traversed a world of mysteries since then, always in
supernatural joy, but always with her lifelong sorrow lying on
her soul. Henceforth we remain in Jerusalem, which is the scene
of her four last dolors, as it has been also of two or three preced­
ing. We have come to the morning of Good Friday, to her meet­
ing Jesus with the Cross, which is reckoned as her fourth dolor.
But, in order to understand the mystery rightly, we must
make a retrospect of die last twenty-one years. Mary is continually
changing, though it is only in one direction. Her life is an end­
less heavenward ascension. She is always increasing in holiness,
because she is always increasing in love. She is always increasing
in love, because Jesus is always increasing in beauty. Thus each
dolor found her at once less prepared and better prepared: less
prepared, because she loved Jesus more, and it was in Him that
she suffered; more prepared, because stronger sanctity can carry
heavier crosses. We saw before how the augmentations of her
love, from the Return from Egypt to her entry into the gates of
Jerusalem when they went up to our Lord’s twelfth pasch, had
increased her capabilities of suffering. So now the marvel of
sanctity, whom we left with her recovered Jesus in the house of
Nazareth, is very different from drat heart which we are now to
196

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197

accompany along the Way of the Cross. This fourth dolor was
not in itself equal to the third, but it fell upon greater capabilities
of suffering.
The beauty of the earthly paradise which God planted with
His own hand, and whither He came at the hour of the evening
breeze to converse with His unfallen creatures, was a poor shadow
of the loveliness of the Holy House during the eighteen years of
the Hidden Life. We cannot guess at all the mysteries which
were enacted within that celestial cloister. The words were few,
yet in eighteen years they were what we, our human way, should
call countless. The very silence even was a fountain of grace.
There were tens of thousands of beautiful actions, each one of
which had such infinite worth that it might have redeemed the
world. During those eighteen years an immeasurable universe
was glorifying God all day and night. The beauty of the trackless
heavens, swayed by their majestic laws, vast unpeopled orbs with
their processes of inanimate matter or their seemingly intermi­
nable epochs of irrational life, earth with all its inhabitants, the
worshippers of the true God, amid whatever darkness, in all its
regions, the chosen flowers of the bygone generations in Abra­
ham’s bosom in the limbus of the fathers, the little children, a
multitudinous throng of spirits, in their own receptacle beneath
the surface of the earth, the souls worshipping amid the fires of
purgatory,—all were swelling as in one concourse of creation the
glory of the Most High. The wide creation of angels, above all,
peopling the immeasurable capacities of space, sent up to God
evermore, the God whom they beheld clearly with the eyes of their
intelligence, a worship of the most exquisite perfection. But the
entire creation was as nothing to the Holy House of Nazareth.
One hour of that life outweighed ages of all the rest, and not
only outweighed it on a comparison, but outweighed it by a
simple infinity. There was the centre of all creation, spiritual or
material, in nearly the most sequestered village of that obscure
Galilee. Why should the centre be there? Who does not see that
God’s centres in all things baffle the calculation of the sciences
of men?

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THE

foot of the cross

There was a sense, too, in which Mary seemed to be the centre
of this central point of all creation. For, if Jesus was the centre
to Joseph and herself and the countless ranks of wondering and
adoring angels round, it appeared as if she was the centre of
Jesus, which was higher still. He had come to redeem a whole
world, and had allotted Himself but Three-and-Thirty Years for
the gigantic work. Twelve had been given to Mary. Some shep­
herds had knelt before Him, three Eastern kings had kissed His
leet, Simeon had held Him in his arms, Anne had blessed Him,
some Egyptian infidels had wondered at Him, the townsfolk of
Nazareth thought Him no common Child. Otherwise the world
knew nothing of Him. He was one among many Galilean chil­
dren. He had given Himself to Mary. The twelve years ran out,
and ended in the strangest mystery of grief. It seemed as if it
were a sort of initiation for Mary into some1 exalted regions of
nameless sanctity. From that mystery there starts a period of
eighteen years, during which our Blessed Lord appears to devote
Himself exclusively to Mar}' and Joseph. It is as if He were her
novice-master, and she in a long novitiate, to be professed on
Calvary. It could not be waste of time. It could not be out of
proportion with the work of His Public Ministry, or with the
suffering of His Passion. It was in harmony with His wisdom,
which was infinite. Just as the Three Years’ Ministry was the
Jews’ time, and the Passion our time, the Eighteen Years were
Mary’s time.
Would it not be a hopeless task to make any calculations for
the sake of approaching to that sum of love which these years
produced in Mary's heart? The spiritual beauty of the Human
Soul of Jesus, the contagion of His heavenly example, the attrac­
tion of all His actions, the efficacy of His superhuman words,
the sight of His unveiled Heart, the visions granted from time to
lime of His Divine Nature and of the Person of the Word, were
all so many fountains of substantial grace flowing at all hours into
Mary’s soul. Without special assistance she could not have lived
in such vicinity to Him. She could not have survived such a
supcrangelic process of sanctification. Her life could not have

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lived with her love. If there was any thing like a respite, if we
may so speak, in the eagle-flight of her soul, ever on and on,
and upward and upward, it was when she saw Jesus hanging His
love on Joseph, and arraying with new and incomparable graces
that soul which already in its grandeur surpassed all the saints.
Eighteen years with God, knowing Him to be God, eighteen years
of hearing, seeing, touching, being touched by, and governing,
the Creator of the universe! Is it possible for languish to unveil
the mysteries of such an epoch? Which is the most imitable of
God’s attributes by us His creatures? Strange to say, it is His
holiness. So our Lord Himself declares. We art to be perfect as
God is perfect. The product, then, of all these eighteen years
in Mary's soul was sanctity, and, if sanctity, therefore love. But
by what means, in what ways, by the infusion of what gifts, at
what rate of speed, by what accelerated flights, what mortal can
so much as dream but they themselves, Mary and Joseph, on
whose souls God lay thus as it were upon a resting-place? If love
belonged only to angels and to men, we should have to give it
some other name when it reached the height it did in Mary. But
God Himself is love. So we have an infinity to move about in.
and can call Mary's sanctity by the name of love, without fear of
uncrowning it of any of its highest elevations. But if our Blessed
Mother could ill part with Jesus at the gate of Jerusalem eighteen
years ago, how will this new universe of ten thousand different
kinds of love of Him, which she holds in her heart, allow her to
part with Him now? This is the one sense in which each dolor
outstrips its predecessor, that it has more love to torture, and
therefore more power of inflicting pain. So much power it has,
that omnipotence must stand by to hold the life in that dear heart,
which is dearer to Him than all the world beside.
The Eighteen Years come to an end, and the Three Years'
Ministry begins. It is not clear to what extent our Blessed Lady
was with Jesus during His Public Ministry. Most probably she
was never long separated from Him. But Scripture affords us no
decisive testimony on the point, and contemplative saints have
differed upon the subject. It seems most likely it was not an

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

actual separation from Him. If she was allowed to follow Him
through His Passion, we can hardly suppose she was ever far
removed from Him during His ministry. He began His miracles
at her intercession at Cana in Galilee, and when, on one occasion
in the Gospel, she comes to seek Him, as it were, with a Mother’s
rights, the tone of the narrative would lead us to suppose that, on
the one hand, she was not continually with Him, and on the
other that, although it was no common thing her joining Him
at times, she did so on occasions. Under any circumstances,
whether in spirit or through the revelations of the angels, or by
some human channel, we cannot but suppose that she was aware
of all His sayings and doings during those three years. The words
of her Son can hardly be the common and accessible property of
all of us and not have been her portion also and a means of her
further sanctification.
To Mary the Three Years’ Ministry was like a new revelation
of Jesus. She saw Him from many points of view from which she
had never seen Him before. Every variety in Him, however ap­
parently trivial, could not be really trivial, and was full of wonder,
full of beauty, full of grace. It was fresh food for love. It rung
changes on the love which it drew from the Mother’s heart. In
the Infancy she had seen Him, as it were, in still life, giving out
heavenly mysteries, as the fountain throbs out water, with a seem­
ing passiveness, though not unconsciously. In the Boyhood, the
wonders of His activity had developed themselves. Her heart was
taken captive afresh by His gracefulness. But He was with those
He knew, to whom He trusted Himself, whom He loved unspeak­
ably. He was at once the subject and the superior in the Holy
House. But His Ministry was almost a greater change upon His
Hidden Life than His Hidden Life had been upon His childhood.
He had now to act out in the world, to be God, yet not to seem
singular, to adapt Himself to numberless new positions, to address
Himself to various classes of hearers. At one while He was gently
maturing the vocations of His apostles, at another He was sway­
ing multitudes, at another soothing sorrow, at another rebuking
sin. Now He was unfolding the Scriptures, and unrolling the

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hidden folds of His deep parables to the chosen few; now He
was quietly and with easy wisdom eluding the snares of His ene­
mies, who had endeavored to entangle Him in His talk. Every
day brought its changes, its attitudes, its positions, its varieties.
Every side of His Human Nature was brought out. Endless
graces were elicited. It was like three years of heavenly music,
rising and falling, changing and interweaving, hushing and raising,
winding and unwinding its beautiful sounds for evermore. It
was an indescribable combination of sweetness and power, of
wisdom and simplicity, of accommodation and sanctity, of human
and divine. There was not, there could not be, a trait, a tone,
a gesture, a look, in the behavior of the Incarnate Creator, which
was not in itself at once a revelation to Mary, and, in a lower
degree, to the angels also, and at the same time an unfathomable
depth which His own eye alone could sound. It was more beau­
tiful than the Infancy; it was more wonderful than the Hidden
Life. Its effect upon Mary must have been astonishing.
We shall never approach to a true view of her if we do not
give the Three Years’ Ministry its due place in the stupendous
process of her sanctification. The epochs of her sanctification were
more wonderful than the days of creation, and they are as
distinctly marked. The Immaculate Conception, with its fifteen
years of growing merits, was the first day. The Incarnation, with
the twelve years of the Childhood, occupied the second. The
Three Days’ Loss, with the eighteen years of the Hidden Life,
filled the third. The Three Years’ Ministry occupied the fourth.
The Passion was the fifth. The Forty Days of the Risen Life,
with the descent of the Holy Ghost, engrossed the sixth. Then
came the seventh, our Lord’s Sabbath, when He had ascended
into heaven, and sat down at His Father’s Right Hand, leaving
the great world of Mary’s sanctity to go on for fifteen years, but,
as in the case of the material world, not without His ceaseless
interference, and watchful providence, and real presence, yet
without His Hands working at it as they did before. Then comes
its end, her glorious death, her sweet doom, her blissful resur­
rection, and His second Advent with His angels to assume her

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

into heaven. We can never estimate the graces of our Blessed
Mother if we break up and disjoin these seven days of her
spiritual Genesis.
We must therefore consider the Three Years’ Ministry as a
most peculiar time, during which, under the influence of the
adorable changes of Jesus, her love was growing, perhaps as it
had never grown before. It seems unreal to talk of new breadth
and depth and height, to that which was beyond all, even angelic,
measurements long ago. Years since, her love had gone up so
near to God, that the strong splendor of His vicinity confused its
outlines and proportions to our ineffectual eyes. Nevertheless,
we must speak so, hardly knowing what we mean. Mary reached
Bethany on the Thursday in Holy Week, loving Jesus with a
love which far surpassed the love she had for Him when the
eighteen years of the Hidden Life had come to a conclusion.
St. Joseph was gone, and although her love of him, ardent as it
was, was no diversion from her love of Jesus, but rather a variety
of it, and an addition to it, yet in some way, as all changes were
with her, His death increased her love of our Blessed Lord. The
aposdes had come into Joseph’s place. She knew all the secret
designs of grace which our Lord had upon each of them. She
saw His way with them all through, in the variety of their voca­
tions and their gifts and their characters. It was a model to
her, who was one day to be the queen of those apostles. Her love
of them also in some way multiplied her love of Jesus. As in her
other periods, so in this, every thing which Jesus did was a fresh
fountain of love within her heart. His sermons, His parables,
His secret teaching, His austerities, His prayers, His tears. His
miracles, His journeys, His weariness, His hunger, His thirst, His
contradictions,—each one of them was an inexhaustible depth of
love. So it was up to the eve of the Passion. All this incalculable
augmentation of love was, from our point of view, a correspond­
ingly increased capability of suffering. So the end of the Ministry
arrives, and the possibilities of her heart are more wonderful
than ever.
We seem to have wandered away from the dolor before us;

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but it is not really so. The seven dolors are not seven separate
mysteries, neither can we understand them if we look at them in
that way. They have a unity of their own, and, if we detach them
from that unity, we miss their significance. They carry the whole
of the Three-and-Thirty Years along with them. Each of them
depends for its truth, for its depth, for its intensity, for its peculiar
character, on a certain portion of those years, inseparable from it.
Jesus grows more beautiful. Grace rises proportionately in Mary s
soul. The growth of grace is the growth of love. It reaches a
certain point, known to God, fixed by Him, capable of bearing
a certain weight, of undergoing a given amount of elevating and
sanctifying sorrow; and at that point, as by the operation of a law,
one of the dolors comes, takes up the grace and love of the
preceding times, of years as in the childhood, of days as in the
swift Passion, compresses them into the most solid and sublime
holiness, flies away with the Mother's soul as if it had the strength
of all the angels, and places her upon some new height, far away
from where she was before. Thus each dolor is a distinct sanctifi­
cation to her, a renewal, a transfiguration, another degree of divine
union. Then the process begins again. Grace and love accumulate
once more, with an acceleration and a magnitude in proportion
to her new height, until once more, in the counsels of God, they
reach the point where another dolor comes to do its magnificent
work. Thus also we have two principles of comparison, by which
we can contrast the dolors one with another. First of all, they
differ in themselves. Each has its peculiar excess, like our Lord’s
sufferings in the Passion; and so each has its own perfection and
its own pre-eminence. They are all equally perfect, but it is
with a different and an appropriate perfection. The kind of
excess in one may be more afflictive than the kind of excess in
another. Thus it is that we call the third dolor the greatest. In
this sense they do not rise by degrees, each exceeding its predeces­
sor, and so culminating in a point. But there is a second sense
in which they do. Each dolor, as it comes, falls upon greater
love, and also upon love that has suffered more, and therefore
upon a great capability of suffering. In this way each is worse

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than its predecessor; and they go on rising and rising in the
terrible power of causing anguish, till the very last, till the
Burial of Jesus, till the possibilities of woe seem to be exhausted,
till the abysses of sanctifying sorrow contained in the huge world
of the Incarnation have been dried up by the absorption of the
single immaculate heart of the Mother of the Incarnate Word.
This is the unity of the dolors; and each dolor really means, not
what it looks like by itself, but what it is in the setting and order
of the Three-and-Thirty Years.
The Passion may be said to begin on the Thursday in Holy
Week in the house of Lazarus at Bethany. Mary, as might have
been expected, opened the long avenue of sorrows, great epochs
in substance, though brief in time. Jesus had entered Jerusalem
on Palm Sunday in the modesty of His well-known triumph. He
had spent that day teaching in the temple, as well as the following
Monday and Tuesday, returning however to Bethany at nights,
as no one in Jerusalem had the courage to offer Him hospitality,
as the rulers were incensed with Him because of the recent resur­
rection of Lazarus, and none of those who had cried Hosanna on
Sunday had the courage to put themselves forward individually
and so draw the resentful notice of the chief priests upon them.
The Wednesday He is supposed to have spent in prayer on the
Mount of Olives, and to have seen the elect of all ages of the
world pass before Him in procession, while He prayed severally
for each. Judas meanwhile was arranging his treachery with the
rulers. It is supposed also that our Blessed Saviour spent the
Wednesday night out of doors praying in the recesses of the hill.
On the Thursday morning He went to Bethany to bid His Mother
farewell, and to obtain her consent to His Passion, as He had
before done to His Incarnation. Not that it was necessary in the
first case as it was in the last, but it was fitting and convenient
to the perfection of His filial obedience. Sister Mary of Agreda
in her revelations describes the affecting scene, how Jesus knelt
to His Mother, and begged her blessing, how she refused to bless
her God, and fell upon her knees and worshipped Him as her
Creator, how He persisted, how they both remained upon their

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knees, and how at last she blessed Him, and He blessed her. Who
can doubt but that He also enriched with a special blessing His
beloved Magdalen, the first and most favored of all the daughters
of Mary? He then went to Jerusalem, whither His Mother fol­
lowed Him, together with Magdalen, in order that she might
receive the Blessed Sacrament. The last Supper, the First Mass,
took place that night, our Lord’s first unbloody Sacrifice, to be
followed on the morrow by that dreadful one of blood.
By a miraculous grace she assists, in spirit, at the Agony in
the Garden, sees our Lord's Heart unveiled throughout, and feels
in herself, and according to her measure, a corresponding agony.
She sees the treachery of Judas consummated, in spite of her
intense prayers for that unhappy soul. Then the curtain falls;
the vision grows dim; she is left for a while to the anguish of
uncertainty. With the brave, gentle Magdalen, she goes forth into
the streets. She tries to gain admittance both to the houses of
Annas and Caiaphas, but is repulsed, as she was at Bethlehem
three-and-thirty years ago. She hears the voice of Jesus; she hears
also the blow given to her Beloved. Jesus is put in prison for
the night; and St. John comes forth, and leads our Blessed Mother
home to the house in which the last Supper had been eaten. At
all the horrors of the morning she is present. She hears the sound
of the scourging, and sees Him at the pillar, and the people around
Him sprinkled with His Blood. She hears the gentle murmurs,
the almost inaudible bleatings, of her spotless Lamb; she hears
them, and Omnipotence commands her still to live. In spirit—
if not in bodily presence—she has seen the guards of Herod mock
the Everlasting. She has beheld the ruffians in the guard-room
celebrate the cruel coronation of the Almighty King. She has
seen the eyes of the All-Seeing bandaged, and the offscouring of
the people daring to bend the knee in derision before Him who
is one day to pronounce their endless doom. She has looked up
to the steps of Pilate’s hall, and has beheld—beautiful in His dis­
figurement—Him who was a worm and no man, so had they
trodden Him under foot, and mangled Him, and turned Him
almost out of human shape by their atrocities. She heard Pilate

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say, Behold the Man;" and verily there was need that some one
should testify that He was man, who, if He had been only Man
could never have survived the crushing of the winepress which
the threefold pressure—of His Father, of demons, and of men—
had inflicted upon Him. Then rose over the crowded piazza that
wild yell of blasphemous rejection by His own people, which
still rings in our ears, still echoes in history, still dwells even in
that calm heaven above, in the Mother’s ear who heard it in all
the savage frightfulness of its reality. Now the Magdalen leads
her home, whither John is to come with news of the sentence
when it is passed.
Quietly, almost coldly, we seem to say these things. Alas!
many words are not needed. Besides, what words could they be?
To Mary’s heart, to Mary's holiness, to Mary’s dolor, each minute
of those hours was longer than sheaves of centuries bound together
in some one secular revolution of the system of the world. Each
separate mystery, each blow of the scourging, each fragment of
action or suffering which we can detach from the mass, was far.
far away of more value, import, size, reality, than if at each
moment a new universe, with all its immeasurable starriness,
had been called out of nothing, and peopled with beings more
beautiful than angels. It is as if the course of all nature were
quickened, and time accelerated, and all things bidden to take the
speed of thought, and flash onward to the end which God ap­
pointed. Like the fearfulness of some gigantic machinery to a
child, so to our eyes is the vision of our Lady’s holiness, cleaving
its way, like some colossal orb in terrific velocity, through the
darkness, and the blasphemy, and the blood. Can her soul be the
same which left Bethany only yesterday afternoon? The saint in
his beaming glory, and the white-faced, querulous sick man on
his dying bed, are not further apart than the Mother of yesterday
and the Mother of today, apart, yet cognizably the same. She
has reached the point of the fourth dolor. She is ready now to
meet Jesus with the Cross.
St. John, at length, returns to the house with the news of the
sentence, and other information. Our dearest Mother, broken

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hearted, yet beaming as with divine light in her tranquility, pre
pares to leave the house with Magdalen and the apostle. The
latter, by his knowledge of the city, will lead her to the end of a
street, where she can meet Jesus on His road to Calvary. But has
she strength for such a meeting? Not of her own; but she has as
much strength to meet Him as He has to travel by that road. For
she has Himself within her, the unconsumed species of the Blessed
Sacrament. It is only with Jesus that we can any of us meet Jesus.
It was so with her. We take Him in Viaticum, and then go to
meet Him as our Judge. She took Him, in a strange sense, in
Viaticum, and went to meet Him as condemned, and on His
way to death. It was that unconsumed Blessed Sacrament, which
had carried her through the superhuman broken-heartedness of
the last twelve or fifteen hours. If that marvellous conjecture be
true, as we think it is not, that it was at the moment when the
species of the Blessed Sacrament were consumed in Himself, that
our Lord cried out, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken
Me? we can estimate the strength that sweet Sacrament was to
her now.
Everywhere the streets are thronged with multitudes setting
in one tide to Calvary. Heralds at the corners of the streets blow
their harsh trumpets, and proclaim the sentence to the people.
Mary draws her veil around her. John and the Magdalen lean
their broken hearts on hers, for they are faint and sick. What a
journey for a Mother! She hardly takes note of the streets, but
with their shadows they fling into her soul dim memories of the
Pasch twenty-one years ago, and the three bitter days that fol­
lowed it. She has taken her place, silent and still. She does not
even tremble. Some tears flow as if spontaneously from her eyes.
But her cheeks arc red? Yes,—her tears were blood. The proces­
sion comes in sight; the tall horse of the centurion shows first,
and leads the way. The trumpet sounds with a wailing clangor.
The women look from the lattices above. She sees the thieves,
the crosses, every thing,—and yet only one thing, Himself. As
He draws nigh, the peace of her heart grows deeper. It could
not help it: God was approaching, and peace went before Him

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Never had maternal love sat on such a throne as that one in
Mary's heart. The anguish was unutterable. God, who knows the
number of the sands of the sea, knows it. Now Jesus has come
up to her. He halts for a moment. He lifts the one hand that is
free, and clears the blood from His eyes. Is it to see her? Rather,
that she may see Him, His look of sadness, His look of love. She
approaches to embrace Him. The soldiers thrust her rudely back.
Oh, misery! and she is His Mother too! For a moment she reeled
with the push, and then again was still, her eyes fixed on His,
His eyes fixed on hers; such a link, such an embrace, such an
outpouring of love, such an overflow of sorrow! Has he less
strength than she? See! He staggers, is overweighed by the bur­
den of the ponderous Cross, and falls with a dull dead sound
upon the street, like the clank of falling wood. She sees it. The
God of heaven and earth is down. Men surround Him, like
butchers round a fallen beast; they kick Him, beat Him, swear
horrible oaths at Him, drag Him up again with cruel ferocity.
It is His third fall. She sees it. He is her Babe of Bethlehem.
She is helpless. She cannot get near. Omnipotence held her heart
fast. In a peace far beyond man’s understanding, she followed
slowly on to Calvary, Magdalen and John beside themselves with
grief, but feeling as if grace went out from her blue mantle
enabling them also to live with broken hearts. The fourth dolor
is accomplished; but alas! we only see the outside of things.
Although this dolor seems to be but one step in the Passion,
it has nevertheless strongly-marked peculiarities of its own. The
fact of its having been selected by the Church as one of the seven
sorrows of Mary implies that it has a significancy belonging to
itself. To our Blessed Lady it was the actual advent of a longdreaded evil. It was the fulfilment of a vision which had been
before her, sleeping and waking, for years. It is the first of her
dolors which stands clear of the mysteries of the Infancy, and
belongs to the second constellation of her griefs, those of the
Passion. There is a peculiar suffering of its own in the coming
of a misfortune which we have long been expecting. There is
such a thing as the unpreparedness of extreme preparation. We

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have imagined everything beforehand. We have tried to feel the
very place where we were sure the blow would fall, and to harden
it beforehand. We have placed the circumstances all round about
the sorrow just in the order and position which is our liking.
We have thought over and over again what we would think,
what we would say, what we would do. We have practised the
attitude in which we intend to receive the blow. We have left
nothing unthought of, nothing unprovided for. We have made
up our minds to it. It is before us like a picture, and, though
there has been no little suffering in the anticipation, familiarity
has almost taken the sting out of our sorrow before it comes. And
then it comes. Oh, the cruel waywardness of the evil! It has
not observed a single one of our many rubrics. It has come by
the wrong road, at the wrong hour, with the wrong weapon,
struck us in the wrong place, and borne no similarity, not even a
distant family resemblance, to the romance of woe for which we
had prepared ourselves. It has taken us unawares. It has discon­
certed us utterly. We feel almost more wronged by this, than by
the evil in itself.
Moreover, the tension of mind and body, to which we have
strung ourselves up for endurance, renders us peculiarly sus­
ceptible of pain, and disables us from bearing it one-half so
heroically as we had resolved. There are many men, who can
meet punishment and death bravely, if it comes at the appointed
hour; but if it is deferred, the powers of the soul, which had knit
themselves up for the occasion, fall away, and disperse, and often
become soft with almost an effeminate softness. And yet to us
ordinary mortals, as the poet has justly said, “all things are less
dreadful than they seem;*’ whereas in the case of our Blessed
Lady's sorrows the realities far outstripped the most ample ex­
pectations. They fulfilled to the uttermost the cruel pains which
were foreseen, and brought many with them likewise, as if tokens
of their presence, for which no allowance could have been made
even in the clearest prevision granted to her. The sorrow, that
had been queening it over all other sorrows for three-and-thirty
years, had now met her at last, in the streets of Jerusalem. It

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came to do its work for God, and it did it, as God's instruments
always do, superabundantly.
Even with our Blessed Lady there is a great difference between
sight and foresight, between reality and imagination. There is
a vividness which could never be foreseen. There is the unex­
pectedness of the way in which the circumstances are grouped.
There is a withdrawal of that medium of time and unfulfilment,
which before existed between the soul and its sorrow, and which
made it less harsh and galling in its pressure. Besides which,
there is a life, an announcement, an individuality in the actual
contact of the misfortune, which belongs to each misfortune by
itself, is inseparable from it, and is unshared by any other sorrow
whatsoever. It may be called the personality of the sorrow. Alasl
we all know it well enough, in our degree. Many a time it has
driven us to extremities. It is always the unbearable part of what
we have to bear. It needs not to have lived a long life to be
able to say from our own experience that there is no sameness
in sorrow; likenesses there are, but not identities. We have never
had two griefs alike. Each had its own character, and it was with
its character that it hurts us most. So it was with our dearest
Mother. Her sorrows, when they lay unborn in her mind, were
hard to bear; but when they sprang to life, and leaped from her
mind, and with Simeon's sword clove her heart asunder, they
were different things, as different as waking is from sleeping,
or life from death.
There was another aggravation of her grief in this dolor in
the knowledge that the sight of her increased our Lord’s suffer­
ings. In the preceding dolor He had been, as it were, her execu­
tioner; now she was His. Which was the hardest to bear? Is
there any loving mother who would not rather receive pain
from her son, than cause it to him? What must this feeling have
been in Mary, who transcended all maternal excellence in the
fondness and devotedness of her deep love? What must it have
been to her whose Son was God? Each outrage which had been
offered to Him, each stripe which had fallen upon His Sacred
Flesh, had been torture to her beyond compare. She had been

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penetrated with horror as she thought of the cruelty and the
sacrilege of which all, priests, judges, soldiers, executioners, people,
had been guilty who had taken part in these atrocities. And
behold! she herself was one of the number. She was adding to
His load. She was more than doubling the weight of that heavy
cross He was carrying. The sight of her face at the comer of
that street had been worse a thousand times than the terrible
scourging at the pillar. It was her face which had thrown Him
down upon the ground in that third fall. What name can we
give to a sorrow such as this? The records of human woe furnish
us with no parallel to it which would not dishonor the subject.
Some have spoken of the meeting between Sir Thomas More and
his daughter in the streets of London. But what is the result
of the allusion? Only to take the beauty and the pathos out of
that touching English scene, without reaching the level of the
sorrow we are speaking of, or reaching it only to degrade it.
It was part of the necessity which was laid on Mary. She was
to be her Son’s executioner, and, in the pain she inflicted, the
cruellest of them all. This fourth dolor was the first exercise
of her dreadful office. It was new to her; for she had never
given Him pain before. But it was the AVill of God, that Will
which is always sweet in its extremest bitterness, always amiable
when flesh and blood and mind are shrinking aghast from the
embrace it is throwing round them. It was that Will which
headed the procession to Calvary, that Will which was waiting
on Calvary like a luminous cloud, that Will which was a crown
of thorns round the brow of Jesus, and a Cross upon His shoulders,
and a sword in His Mother’s heart, and His Mother’s heart a
sword in His. Had ever saint such a Divine AVill to conform to
as Mary had? Had ever saint such conformity to any Divine
Will he ever encountered? She is going up to Calvary, in brave
tranquility, to help to slay the Babe of Bethlehem.
There was another grief also in this dolor, which was new
to her, and caused in her heart in an incomparable degree the
acute pain which the sight of sacrilege causes to the saints. She
saw Him in the hands of others who could touch Him and come

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near Him. while she was kept far off. How she longed to wipe
the blood from His face with her veil, to part His tangled hair,
to remove with lightest touch that cruel crown, to lift the Cross
off His shoulders and see whether her broken heart would not
give her superhuman strength to carry it for Him! Oh, there
were countless ministries in which a mother’s hand was needed
by that dear Victim of our sinsl And think of the plenitude of
the rights she had over Him, more than any mother over any son
since the world beganl He had acknowledged them Himself. He
had made her assert them openly in the temple. But these men
knew no more of the Mother of God than poor heretics do.
Moreover, they who had trampled her Son under foot would
have made but little scruple of her rights. In the times of Beth­
lehem and Egypt it had been her joy to touch Him, in the per­
formance of her maternal office. Her love had risen so high,
that it could find no vent except in breathless reverence, and it
was the touch of His Sacred Body which hushed her soul with
that thrill of reverence. Saints at the altar have exulted with the
Blessed Sacrament in their hands, till they rose up from the
predella in the light air, and swayed to and fro, like a bough in
summer, with the palpitations of their ecstasy. How many times
must we multiply that joy to reach Mary’s! She had only not
grudged Joseph the embraces of her Child, because she loved
him with the holiest transports of conjugal affection, and best
satisfied her love by giving him his turn with Jesus. The novelty
had never worn off. The joy had never become thinner from use.
The reverence only grew more reverent from custom. The thought
of it came back to her now, and the waves of grief beat up against
her heart as if they would have washed it away. She had seen
the filthy hands of the public executioner grasping His neck and
shoulder. She had seen the miry foot of some sinful soldier spurn­
ing His bruised flesh. She had seen them brutally knock the
wooden cross against His blessed head, and drive the spikes of
the thorns still farther in. St. Catherine of Genoa had to be
supported by God, lest she should die when He showed her in
vision the real malice of a venial sin. What if, with her eyes

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thus spiritually couched, she had beheld the malice which can
trample the Blessed Sacrament under foot in the sewers of the
street? The love of a whole Christian land will rise with one
emotion to make reparation for a sacrilege against the Blessed
Sacrament. They who have been but too indifferent to their own
sins will then afflict themselves with fasting, and impair their own
comforts by abundant alms. It is the instinct of faith s loyalty,
and of the love which lies in reality, however appearances may
be against it, at the bottom of every believing heart. In truth,
the feeling of sacrilege is like bodily pain. It is as if we were being
cruelly handled ourselves. Holy people, both religious and secu­
lars, have offered their lives to God in reparation of a sacrilege,
and have rejoiced when He deigned to accept the offering. To
die for the Blessed Sacrament,—that would be a sweet end,
glorious also, but more sweet than glorious, because it would
so satisfy our lovel But the sacrilege that day in the streets of
Jerusalem! Mary’s woe is simply unimaginable. She would have
died a thousand deaths to have made reparation. Ah, but, dearest
Mother! thou must live, which to thee is worse far than death,
and thy life must be thy reparation! All the evils which others
find in death thou findest in life, and many more beside. To
thee it would be as great a joy, as all thy seven dolors all together
were a sorrow, if thou mightst not outlive three o'clock that
Friday afternoon. But there is a bar between thee and death,—a
whole omnipotence. So thou must be contented, as thou ever
art, and envy the accepted thief, and for our sakes consent to live!
There was also in this dolor a return of one of the worst suf­
ferings of the Flight into Egypt, only now it was in a higher
degree than then. It was terror. We always look at Mary as some­
thing very near to God, even though infinitely far off, as the
nearest creature needs must be. It is a good habit, because it is
the truth. But we must not forget that her heart was always emi­
nently feminine. Fancy the sea of wild faces into which she
looked in those crowded streets. Wild beasts in the desert would
have been less dreadful. Every passion was glaring out of those
ferocious eyes, rendered more horrible by their human intelli­

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CROSS

gence mingled with the inhuman fiery stare of diabolical pos­
session. A multitude, with the women, possibly the children, all
athirst for blood, raving alter it, yelling for it as only a maddened
populace can yell. It was a very vent of hell, that voice of theirs,
a concourse of the most appalling sounds, of rage, and hate, and
murder, and blasphemy, and imprecation, and of that torturing
fire in their own hearts which those passions had fiercely lighted
up. The sights and sounds thrilled through her with agonies of
[ear. She was alone, unsheltered, uncompanioned. For she was
the companion to John and Magdalen; they were not companions
to her. Oh for the loneliness of the desert, and its invisible panic,
so much better to bear than this surging multitude of possessed
men! They touch her, they speak to her, they jostle her. Visible
by her blue mantle, she floats about on the billows of that tossing
crowd, like a piece of wreck on the dark weltering waters of a
storm. And she is apart from Jesus. He is perishing in the waves
of that turbulent people. He is engulfed. She can stretch out
no hand to save Him. The Mother of the Maccabees looked
bravely on the fearful pomps and cruel pageants of the legal
injustice which was to make her childless, and her name justly
lives, embalmed in sacred history, and, still more, in Christian
hearts. But those faces and those cries,—earth never saw, never
heard, any thing so terrible; the demon-maddened creatures howl­
ing over their conquered God! And to Mary it had such reality,
such significance, as it could have to no one else. Surely the
suffering of fear was never more intensely felt by any creature
than it was by her on that Friday; and the many bitter chalices
she had drunk during the preceding night and all that morning
rendered her, in the ordinary course of things, less able to bear
up against this violent assault of terror. Her fear was not so
much for herself; it was for Him. Her fear, as well as her love,
was in His Heart rather than in her own. The knowledge that
He was God only deepened her terror. It was just that very thing
which made the horror of the scene unsurpassed by any other the
world had ever known, or ever could know again. The day
of doom will be less terrible than Good Friday was. Nay, it is

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215

I lie fearfulness of Good Friday which will make the pomp of
the last judgment so endurable, so calm, so full of reverent sweet
ness. O Mother! that day will pay thee back the terror of today;
for thou wilt sec thy Son in all the placid grandeur of His human
glory, with those beaming Wounds illuminating the whole circle
of the astonished earth, and thou wilt return from the valley
of Josaphat with a family of other sons, that can be counted only
by millions of millions, to be thine eternal possession in heaven,
won for thee only by the dread mysteries of this great Friday!
As we have said before, it belonged to the perfection of Mary's
heart that one ingredient of her sorrow did not absorb or neutral­
ize another. She felt each of them as completely as if it were
simply the whole sorrow. It possessed her with an undistracted
possession. Each feature was as if it were the entire countenance,
the full face, of each dolor, and it looked into her heart as if it.
and it alone, expressed the fulness of the mystery. Thus her
terror did not kill any other of the afflicting circumstances of this
fourth dolor. As it did not perturb her peace, so neither did it
confuse her feelings or blunt her susceptibilities. This is always
one of the peculiarities of Mary's griefs which puts them beyond
the reach of parallels. Thus it was an additional sorrow to her
on the present occasion that, except St. John, the apostles were
not following their Master to His end. The graces of each one
of them came upon her mind. She revolved the peculiarities of
the vocation of each, and all the minute tenderness and generous
forbearance on the part of Jesus to which it testified. She saw
the words of eternal wisdom pouring for those three years into
their souls, in the communication of the sublimest truths, in the
pathetic kindness of affectionate admonitions. She saw how omnip­
otence had placed itself in their hands in the gift of miracles.
They, like her, only for fewer years, had fed upon the beautiful
grace of Jesus. They knew the marvellous expressions of His
venerable face. The tones of His voice were familiar to them.
The touch of His hands, the look of His eye, the very significance
of His loving silence, all was known to them. They had been
drawn within the ring of its attractions. It had been to them a

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new birth, a new life, an anticipated heaven. To use our Lord’s
phrase, they had gone into their mother’s womb again, and had
been born anew of Mary, brothers of Jesus, resemblances of Jesus.
She knew that, next to the dignity of being the Mother of God,
the world could have no vocation so high as that of being apostles
of the Word. Eternal Wisdom had come to earth, and of all its
millions He was to choose but twelve, who should know His
secrets, who should reflect Him, perpetuate Him, hold His powers
in vessels of flesh, and accomplish the work He had begun. They
were more than angels; for no angels ever bore such messages
to mankind, except the secret annunciation of Gabriel to the
Divine Mother. They were kings as none ever were before;
for they were not only to conquer the entire earth, but their
thrones of judgment are set up round His in heaven. No blood
of martyrs was more precious in their Master’s sight than theirs.
No doctors have ever attained to their science. No virgins have
equalled their purity, whether it were the purity of innocence
or the purity of penance. No confessors have ever confessed as
much, or confessed it more bravely. No bishops have used the
keys more liberally, more discreetly, more blamelessly than they.
No sovereign pontiff will let himself be called by Peter’s name,
because none else has worn the world's tiara so gloriously or so
meekly as he. And these other Christs, gleaming with gifts, en­
riched with graces, the wide world’s special souls, the new paradise
which God had planted,—where were they now? Peter was in his
lurking-place on Olivet, weeping bitterly over his fall. He went
to Calvary only in his Master’s heart and in Mary’s. His love was
not like hers. He could not bear to see the sufferings of Him
whom he loved far more than the others loved Him. The very
penitent shame of his fall made him less able to bear so great a
sorrow. The rest were hidden. They had fled from Gethsemane,
and were dispersed, the prey of grief, uncertainty, and pity, the
strength of love dubiously contending with the timidities of
despair. They have left Jesus to tread the winepress alone. When
He is risen, He will meet them with the old love, with more
than the old love, and they will hear no word of reproach from

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His sweet voice, and they will see no look of reproach in the
deserted Mother's eye. Only John is there, drawn by His Saviour $
love of him rather than urged by his own love of Jesus.
The absence of the apostles was a keen aggravation of Mary's
sorrow. It was a triple wound to her. It wounded her in her
love of Jesus. She knew how deep the wound was which it made
in His Sacred Heart. She saw how, far beyond the cruel scourging
and the barbarous coronation, Her beloved was tormented by
this cruel abandonment of Him by those whom He had loved
beyond the rest of men. She could go near to fathoming the
anguish which this was causing Him. Moreover, her own love
of Him underwent a cruel martryrdom in seeing Him thus de­
serted, and by those whose very office should have taken them to
Calvary, who should have been witnesses of His Crucifixion as
well as of His Resurrection. There was something unexpected
in it, although it was foreknown. So it always is with ingratitude.
It is a knife with so sharp an edge, that we cannot help but start
when it cuts us, however long and bitterly it has been anticipated.
We excuse much to men who think, even though it be mistakenly,
that they have been the victims of ingratitude; and thus we
acknowledge the agony of the smart. But it wounded her also in
herself. Her own love of the apostles made her value their love
of her. It was true love, it was intense love. She knew it. Then
why was John only with her in that encounter with her cross­
laden Son, in that melancholy pilgrimage to Calvary? A broken
heart like hers could spare no love which rightly belonged to it;
and when the love of Jesus toward her was working bitterness
in her soul rather than consolation, she could the less afford to
do without such love as would simply be a joy, a rest, a consola­
tion. But she must not expect it. It is her place to console, not
to be consoled. Her Son came to minister, not to be ministered
to. She must participate in the same sublime office. She must
empty her own heart of consolation, and pour it all out upon the
rest, keeping for herself what is not only specially her own. but
what none else are able to receive,—the untold weight of her
exceeding sorrow. It would have been somewhat easier to have

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I HE GROSS

gone up to Calvary with the apostles round her. And yet for their
sakes she was content to have John alone, content the others
should be spared what it would so overwhelm them to behold.
But their absence inflicted yet a third wound upon her heart,
in the love which she herself bore to the apostles. Their weakness
was a cruel sorrow to her love, and yet it strove with the sorrow
that they should be suffering so much as that very weakness im
plied. She grieved, also, because one day it would so grieve them
that they had not been with Jesus to the last. She mourned, like­
wise, because they lost so much in after-thought by not having
witnessed those appalling mysteries. There was not a varying
sorrow in the heart of any one of them which she did not take
into her own. For they had come to her in the place of Joseph,
and she poured out on them the love she had poured out on him.
He had been with her in her three first dolors; why were they
absent from her fourth? And a gush of marvellous, unavailing
love to her departed spouse broke from the fountains of her heart
as she asked herself the question. Oh, how wonderful are the
ingenuities of suffering which love causes in the heart!
But Judas was almost a dolor by himself. We learn, from
the revelations of the saints, how she had striven in prayer for
that wretched soul. She had lavished all manner of kindness on
him, as if he had been more to her than either Peter or John.
She had watched with unspeakable horror the gradual steps by
which he had been led on to the consummation of his treachery.
She had seen how sensitively the Heart of Jesus shrank from
this cruel sin, and how many scourgings would have gone to
make up the sum of pain which the traitor’s single kiss had burned
in upon His blessed lips. For a while it appeared as if Judas
had been even more to her than Jesus, so had she occupied herself
at that awful season to rescue the falling apostle, and to hinder
that tremendous sin. Moreover, none could know so truly as
herself the immensity of that sin, and the whole region of God’s
fair glory which it desolated. She saw it in the Heart of Jesus.
It was as if she had been an eyewitness of the fall of Lucifer
from the heights of heaven to the inconceivable lowness of that

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219

abyss which is now his miserable and accursed home. Terrible
as was the thought that an apostle could betray her Son, it seemed
even yet more injurious to His honor that, although Judas should
have stained himself with so black a crime, he should yet despair
of mercy and doubt the infinity of his Master's love. She had
lost a soul. She had lost one of her little company. Jesus was
not the first son she was to lose. That grand apostolic soul,
decked with gifts like a whole angelic kingdom, crowned with
the splendors of earth’s most beautiful vocation, canonized by
the especial choice and outpoured love of Jesus, was gone, gone
down in the most frightful hopeless wreck. Even Mary had some
things to learn. This was her first lesson in the loss of souls.
If we were more like saints, we should know something of what
it meant. The Passion began by losing an apostles soul, and
ended by saving the soul of a poor outcast thief. Such are the
ways in which God takes His compensations.
But we have to add physical horrors now to the agonies of
mind and heart. They begin in this dolor, and are among its
most marked peculiarities. There are few persons who have ever
read a book on the Passion, from which they would not wish
something to be left out. This is not from the weakness of their
faith, but from the fastidiousness of a natural taste, which has
not yet been fully refined by the supernatural love, whose one
object St. Paul so significantly divides into two, Jesus Christ nnd
Him Crucified. Truly penitent love would not shrink from the
contemplation of those dread realities which the Son of God
condescended to undergo for us, and into the horrors of which
our own sins drove Him. When adoration cannot swallow up
sentimentality, or invest it with a new character, it is a sign
that we are wanting in a true sense of sin as well as a true love
of our Blessed Lord. It is not well with a soul when it averts
its inward eye from the crucifixion, and fixes it on the secret
mental agony of Gethsemane, because the three hours of the
one are free from the frightful atrocities of the three hours of
the other. Reverence will not allow us to deal thus either with
our Saviour’s Passion or with our Lady's dolors. Her broken

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

heart was surfeited with physical horrors. It was part of her
sanctification. She pressed her way through them all that day,
steeling her shrinking nature. She would not have missed one
of them for all the world.
It was a dreadful thing for a mother to walk the streets over
her own son's blood. It was fearful to have her own feet reddened
by the Precious Blood, and the loss of Judas fresh in her afflicted
soul. She saw the crimson track which Jesus had left behind.
The multitude were mixing it up svith the mud, which it tinged
with a dull hue. It teas on their shoes, and upon their garments.
It went up the steps of their doorways. It splashed up the legs
of the centurion's horse. No one cared for it. No heart was
touched. None suspected the heavenly mystery, at which angels
were gazing in silent stupor. Mary too must tread upon it. It
was sorrow almost literally trampling its own heart under foot.
She must tread on that which she was worshipping. That which
colored the street mud, which blotched the paving-stones, which
clung, half wet and half dry, to the garments of the multitude,
was hypostatically united to the Godhead. It merited the pleni­
tude of divine worship. Mary was adoring it at every step. There
was not a spot tinged with that dull red, not a garment laid by
that night in a clothes press with those spots upon it, over which
crowds of angels were not stooping, and would remain to guard
it till the moment of the Resurrection. Surely this is unutterable
woe, over which the heart should spread itself in silence only.
In this dolor also we must notice particularly, what has been
observed before, the union in Mary of horror of sin with intense
anguish because of the misfortune of sinners. She saw some svho
were handling our Lord or shouting after Him, in completest
ignorance, without so much as a suspicion of the dreadful work
in which they were engaged. They were obdurate sinners, hard­
ened by ungodliness, who sinned almost as they would breathe
the air or move their limbs. All ignorance of God was pain to
her, nw especially that souls were beginning to belong to her.
But the ignorance of a seared conscience was a grief too deep
for tears, a phenomenon she would have longed should not exist

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221

upon the face of God’s weary earth. How dark it was! how hope­
less! Even now Eternal Truth was looking it in the face, and,
alas! only blinding it! Then there were others whose malice was
more intelligent, who were consciously satisfying some evil passion,
hatred of purity perhaps, or the spite of untruthfulness against
truth, or the envy which meekness always excites when it is very
heavenly and heroic, or political vengeance, or the long-treasured
anger against one who had reproved them, or the mere love of
cruelty, and the excitement of human fury which the smell of
blood causes in men as in beasts. All this she saw. She trembled
at the horror of the vision. She was heart-stricken by the thought
of Him, the gentle blameless One, against whom all this was con­
centrated. She was pierced also by the sharpest anguish from
the love of the very sinners themselves. She would not have called
fire down from heaven, as James and John were fain to do upon
the Samaritan village. She craved not for judgments. She would
have deprecated with all the might of her holiest impétrations the
advent of a destroying angel. She must have those souls. She
has lost Judas. She claims consolation. Into those dark minds the
light of faith shall be poured. Over those blood-stained souls
more Blood, more of the same Blood, shall flow, but it shall be
in gentlest fertilizing absolutions. On those blaspheming tongues
the Blessed Sacrament shall lie. She will travail in pain with
them till they are born again in Christ. So she too goes up to
Calvary with a work to do. Look well at her heart! She will ac­
complish it. There are few things the sanctity of human sorrow
cannot do. God seems to treat it as a power almost coequal with
Himself. But here in our Blessed Mother, what sanctity! what
sorrow!
Then, as if the very contrast had called it forth, there rose up
before her the most vivid vision of the beautiful Infancy. It was
true that from the very first her life had been dismantled by an
enduring sorrow. Nevertheless how peaceful and how sweet
seemed the old days at Nazareth, and even the cool evening airs
on the brink of the distant Nile, compared with the violence and
noise and bloodshed of this fearful Passion! Then, when her

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THE FOO!' OF ΙΉΕ CROSS

arms were round Him, she had pressed at once her sorrow and
her love to her bosom. She had held quiet colloquies with Him.
He belonged only to her, for Joseph was most truly a second self.
Now she had given Him away, not in thought only, not in the
tranquility of a heroic intention, but in reality. He was not only
in the hands of others, but He was taken from hers. Any one
could come near Him, except herself. She alone had lost her
rights. Every action of the Holy Childhood came before her, and
found its bitter contrast in the scene that was then enacting in
the streets of Jerusalem. She thought how she had washed Him.
clothed Him, given Him food, nursed Him to sleep, and knelt
down and worshipped Him when He was asleep, though she
knew well He could see her even then. Every one of those things
found their opposites with dreadful accuracy in the Way of the
Cross. Earth, and blood, and shameful spittings defiled His face
and hands and feet. His hair, from which handfuls had been
pulled, was clotted, entangled, and deranged. His tunic clung
painfully to the half-congealed blood of His wounds. Alas for
those baths of His childhood and the reverent ministries of His
loving Mother! We shall come to them again in the sixth dolor,
and then how changed the circumstances! They have once torn
His garments from the wounds, and made them bleed afresh.
They will do so again at the top of Calvary. It was not thus she
had undressed Him in the quiet sanctuary of Nazareth. He had
had no food but the sins of men, and a very feast of ignominy,
since the evening before. He was worn with want of sleep, but
will never sleep again now. She thought of tears which ran
silently down His cheeks in the days of His Childhood. Why
should they not have redeemed the world, and washed all sin
away, seeing their worth was infinite? Oh, how busy memory was
in that hour with its comparisons and its contrasts! and there was
not one which did not heighten the misery of the present. Could
she be a mere mortal to go up to Calvary with a will nestling so
tranquilly alongside of the will of God, with a heart broken to
pieces, yet out of whose rents not one breath of her peacefulness
had been allowed to escape? Yes! she was mortal, but she was

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223

also the Mother of the Eternal, and loving hearts alone know how
those two things contradict each other, and yet are true together.
Such was the fourth dolor. Let us now examine the disposi­
tions in which she endured it. First of all, there was the unre­
tracted generosity of the oblation she had made. Amid the multi
tude of thoughts, which in all her sorrows passed through her
mind, her will lay still. So completely was she clothed in holiness
from head to foot, that it never so much as occurred to her to
think that the load might be lightened, or the pangs mitigated,
or the circumstances be more tolerably disposed. When we have
committed ourselves to God, we have committed ourselves to
more than we know. John had not reckoned on the long years of
weary waiting in the exile of life, when he said he could drink
his Master’s cup. So is it with all of us. We find that what God
really exacts from us is more than we seemed to be promising.
The more He loves us, the more exacting does He become. He
treats us as if we were more royal-hearted than we are, and by
His grace He makes us so. Our Lady knew more of the length
and breadth and depth of her oblation than any one else had
ever done. It was this which made her lifelong sorrow so much
more real and intense than the mere foresight of a prophet or a
saint. Nevertheless, even she probably, though she knew all, did
not realize all. Probably she could not compress into a vision, no
matter how piercingly clear, that slow pressure which the lapse
of time lays upon a sorrowing heart. Thus in its totality, in the
disposition of its circumstances, in the combination of its peculi
arities, in their united pressure, and in the long years of their
endurance, as well as the actual impressions of the senses, her
sorrow was not more than she meant to promise, because she
meant to promise all, she meant herself to be a holocaust, a whole
burnt-offering to the Lord, but it might be more than she realized
at the moment that she promised. She was a creature. We need
to be reminded of that, because the magnificence of her sanctity
so often makes us almost forget it. St. Denys said he should hardly
have known her to be a mere creature, if he had not been told.
Now, this consideration renders still more wonderful the

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

unretracted generosity of lier offering. If she was not taken by
surprise in any of her sufferings, she felt new things coming upon
her. She was sinking into depths deeper than had been revealed
to her. The actual horror of the present shut out some of the
light, which had lighted her down the abysses, when she had
explored them in mental anguish only. Yet she went on in tran­
quility. God was welcome to it all, welcome to more if His
omnipotence should see fit to anneal her heart to bear a stronger
heat. She had cried out once. It was an awful moment. It was
in the great temple of the nation, before the doctors of her people.
But her Creator Himself had wrung it from her, partly because
He yearned to load her with another world of graces, and partly
because He loved to hear it, seeing that it worshipped Him so
wonderfully. Job sanctified himself by the patience of his com­
plaining. Low as we are, how imitable the virtue of Job seems
by the side of Mary’s generous endurance! Even great saints have
begun to sink, when called, like Peter, to walk upon the waters.
As to ourselves, even in our little sorrows, how hard it is to keep
to God, and not to turn aside, and lie down, and rest our heads
on the lap of creatures, and bid them whisper consolations in our
ear, as a respite to us for a while from the oppression of God's
vicinity! What does our perseverance look like at best but a
running fight between grace and time, the one to win which
chances, for it seems a chance, to have struck the last blow when
the death-bell sounds? But are not those saints the most indulgent
to others who have been the most austere to themselves? Is it
not ever the unmortified who are the critical? Do not they always
stoop lowest who have to stoop from the greatest heights? So
will Mary be all the better mother for us in the dust in which
we creep, frightened, shrinking, and despairing, because of the
sublimities of that generosity of hers, which is always above the
clouds, always with the eternal sunshine on its brow.
We must observe also the firm hand which our Blessed Lady
kept upon her grief. Amid the jostling of the crowd, she seemed
as if she were impassible. There was not a gesture or a move­
ment which betrayed the slightest interior emotion. When they

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repulsed her from Jesus, and barbarously interposed between
the embrace of the Mother and the Son, there was no impatience
in her manner, no resentment on her countenance, no expostula­
tion on her lips. She possessed her soul perfectly. The move­
ments of the Blessed in the visible presence of God in heaven
could not be more regulated than were hers. St. Ambrose has
dwelt at length upon this excellence of hers. Yet we must not
conceive of our Blessed Mother, as of a coldly graceful statue,
never descending from her pedestal because she was heavenly
marble, and not flesh and blood. Statues have not broken hearts.
This calm imperturbability of her demeanor arose from the
sublimity of her holiness, which itself arose in no slight degree
from the intensity of her sorrow. The excesses of her suffering
were commuted into excesses of tranquility, which looked super­
human only because what is completely and perfectly and exclu­
sively human is seen nowhere but in her. This is the picture we
must always draw of our Blessed Lady. She is woman, true
woman, but not mere woman. We shall sadly degrade her in
our own minds, if for the sake of facility or effect we venture to
exaggerate the feminine element beyond what we find it in the
Gospels. It is easy to distort the image of Jesus. When men
speak of His compassion to sinners, they often throw a senti­
mentality over the narrative, which is far removed from the
calm gentleness of Scripture. They think they bring Him nearer
to us by making Him as like ourselves as doctrine will allow
them, and all the while they are excavating an impassable gulf
between Him and us, and casting Him leagues and leagues away
from us. Unfortunately this lowering process is yet more easy
with Mary, for she has no divinity to save her in the long run.
A merely feminine Mary is not the Mary of the Bible. Neither
again is she a simple shadow of our Lord, or her mysteries a repeti­
tion of His. If we endeavor to establish any parity, even a pro­
portionate one, between her and our Lord, we only meddle with
Him without really elevating her. She had not two Natures; her
Person was not divine; she was not the Redeemer of the world;
she was not clothed in our sins; the anger of the Father never

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directly rested upon her; her innocence was not His sinlessness;
her Compassion was not His Passion; her Assumption was not
His Ascension. She stands by herself. She has her own meaning,
her appropriate significancy. She is a distinct vastness in God's
creation. She is without a parallel. Jesus is not a parallel to her,
nor she to Him. She fills up the room of a huge world in the
universe of God, but the room she fills is not the room of the
Sacred Humanity of Jesus, nor even like to it. She is Mary. She
is the Mother of God. She is herself. Near to God yet every whit
a creature, sinless yet wholly human, human in person, and not
divine,—in nature human only, and not divine also. They who
represent her as a pale shadowy counterpart of our Blessed Lord,
changing the sex and lowering the realities, miss the real gran­
deur of Mary as much as they miss the peculiar magnificence of
the Incarnation. Thus it comes to pass that if, in order to paint
her sorrows in more striking colors, we exaggerate what is femi­
nine about her, we obtain the same result with those who insist
in finding in her all manner of unequal equalities with her Son,
namely, an unworthy view of her as well as an untrue one. She
is more like the invisible God than like the Incarnate God.
She is more accurately to be paralleled with what is purely divine
than with what is human and divine together. She is a creature
clothed with the eternal sun, as St. John saw her in the Apocalypse,
the most perfect created transcript of the Creator. As the Hypo­
static Union links Creator and creature literally together, so Mary,
the divinely perfect, pure creature, is the neck which joins on the
whole body of creatures to their Divine Incarnate Head. She has
her own place in the system of creation, and her own meaning.
She is like no one. No one is like her. What she is most like is
the Incomprehensible Creator. Thus, of the three elements into
which the idea of Mary resolves itself in our minds, the feminine
element, the element of the Hypostatic Union, and the divine
element, it is this last which seems to control the rest, while all
three are so inextricably commingled that we can detach none
of them without injury to truth.
We must also not omit to mention here the union of Mary's

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sorrows with our Lord's. We have spoken of it before; but a new
and very significant feature in this disposition of hers comes to
view in the fourth dolor. There is such a gracious unity vouch­
safed to us between our Blessed Lord and ourselves,—between
the Redeemer and the Redeemed,—that we may, not in mere
imagination or as an intellectual process of faith, unite our suf­
ferings to His, and so make them meritorious of eternal life.
It is chiefly the more excellent attainment of this union which
distinguishes the saints from ourselves. Theologians have said
that the great difference between the service of the Blessed in
heaven and the service of the elect on earth is, that on earth
the soul unites itself to God by the exercise of a variety of virtues,
whereas in heaven Jesus Christ is the one virtue of the Blessed,
the link which joins them to the Father. Some saints have been
allowed, in a certain measure and by a very peculiar gift, to antici­
pate on earth this heavenly particularity, and to be clothed in
an unusual way with the very spirit of Jesus. Cardinal de Berulle
was even said to have the gift of communicating this spirit in a
subordinate degree to the souls which he directed. Of course no
saint, nor all the saints put together, ever possessed the spirit of
Jesus so nearly to identity as His Blessed Mother. Hence in all
her dolors she suffered in the most unspeakable union with Him.
But in this one the invisible realities of the spiritual life seem
to come up to the surface, and pass into outward facts, into the
actualities of external sensible life. Her sorrows and His became
almost indistinguishably one,—in fact as well as feeling, in reality
as well as faith, in endurance as well as love. It was His suffer­
ing which made her suffer. The way in which He suffered she
suffered. His dispositions were her dispositions. Nay, it was
rather in Him than in herself that she suffered. His very suffer­
ings were her very sufferings. It was only as His that they were
hers. And her sufferings made Him suffer; they were His worst
sufferings. He suffered in her. as she in Him. They were ex­
changing hearts, or living in each other's hearts, all the while in
that journey to Calvary. She seemed to have put off her person­
ality, and to have become to Jesus a second multiplied capacity

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of suffering. Never was union more complete; never were the
inner mystical life of the soul and the outward present life of
tangible facts so identical before. We have no terms to express
the union, which would not at the same time confound the Mother
in the Son, and so be undoctrinal, unfaithful, and untrue.
In speaking of the peculiarities of this dolor, we have already
seen how horror at the sight and sound of sin was united in our
Lady’s soul with the most inexpressible tenderness for sinners.
But in our meditations we must remember to assign it its proper
place among her dispositions. It has only been for the con­
venience of meditation that we have, throughout, treated sep­
arately two things which in reality are never disunited, the
peculiarities of each dolor, and our Lady’s dispositions under it.
They both grow on the same stalk, and are often the same
blossoms with different names.
There was yet another disposition of our Blessed Mother in
this dolor, which was an effect of her eminent sanctity. In the
breadth of the sorrow which lay heavily upon her, filled in, as
we might have supposed it would have been, with a multitude
of figures, she saw nothing in the point of her soul but God only.
In that light, all secondary causes vanished. They were sub­
merged in her single view of the First Cause. There was no
Pilate, no Herod, no Annas, no Caiaphas; but only God, with
His irresistibly sweet will streaming out of Him, and filling up
every nook and corner where else perhaps some human agency
might have been visible. If the secondary causes were there at
all, they were far in the background, with the soft golden haze
of God's merciful intentions upon them, or else behind the mist
which His light and heat always raise when they beat full upon
the earth. It is this grand singleness of vision after which the
saints are perpetually striving, and to which they hardly attain,
even amid the many wonders of their holiness, at the end of a
long life of ascetic straining and supernatural trial. It was a
grace which Mary started with, and had always exercised; and,
in this fourth dolor, it underwent an especial trial, because the
sorrow had so much more of an external life, and was produced

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by such a far greater crowd of outward agents and circumstances
than any of her others had been. If all exercises of all virtues
were heroic in her, there were many times in which they went
beyond heroic, and were godlike. So now, in this single version
of God only, there was a shadow of His blessed and eternal
occupation with Himself, which belongs to Him who can have
no end but His own adorable Self. What wonder so much sweet­
ness, so much gentleness, so much patience, so much conformity,
so much tender love of sinners, so much inexplicable outpouring
of love upon Jesus, came from a grace which had its root so deep
down and so high up in the mountain of God Himself!
This fourth dolor gives us also many lessons for ourselves.
All the dolors have led us through strange realities; for it is the
way of sorrow, above all other things in human life, even more
than love, to make the things which lie around it peculiarly solid.
But in this dolor our realities grow more real. They gain a new
reality from being integral parts of that last tremendous drama
in which the salvation of the world was accomplished at an in­
calculable cost of pain, and shame, and agony. The three foun­
tains of the Sacred Humanity were drawn dry by the exactions
of most merciful justice for the sins of men. In His Body the
abyss of pain was emptied, in His Mind all the possibilities of
shame, in His Soul the depths of intellectual and moral agony.
We have seen Mary’s sufferings almost pass into His, and His
revert to her. Have we no participation in this reality? Yest
one, out of which the hot springs of devotion ought to be flowing
always. We ourselves were part of our Mother’s dolors, because
we were an actual part of our Saviour's Passion. Thus they cease
to be mere matters of history to us. They are not simple devo­
tions, which attract us because they are so touching. They are not
only a beautiful scriptural pathos, enhancing at every turn the
lovely mysteries of the Incarnation, and clothing with fresh in­
terest that which already kindles our faith and fascinates our love.
We ourselves are part of them. We made ourselves felt in them.
We were agents then, not simply spectators now. There is guilt
attaching to us; and the sorrow which comes of guilt and shame

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is another thing from that which comes of gratuitous pity or
affectionate compassion. It tells differently on our intercourse
with our Blessed Mother. It changes our position. It makes our
devotion part of our penance, instead of a free sentiment of our
own religious choice or pious fancy. There are some devotions
into which taste may lead us while we worship; but this is one
in which justice is concerned, and into which duties flow. For­
given love knows what it has to do. The dear Magdalen stands
up forever in the Church to tell us that we must love much to
whom much has been forgiven. We were cruel to our Mother;
and, when we had wounded her, and the weapon was yet in our
hands, she pressed us to her bosom. Unmelted, we wreaked
wrong after wrong upon her, and she paid us back love—fresh
love, always love—for every unkindly wrong. Seven times we went
into her heart to hurt her. Seven times we took part in her chief
mysteries of grief. Seven times we turned against her, when she
was loving us as never mother loved before. But seventy times
seven would not nearly express the sum of graces which she has
obtained for our barren and thankless souls. Ah! if we have been
realities to her in those days of her dolors, is it not the least
we can do to let her dolors now be realities to us?
Every morning of life we begin anew. We go forth from
our doors to encounter a new day on its passage to eternity. It
has much to say to us, and we to it; and it carries its tale to God
at sunset, and its word is believed, and its message remembered
till the doom. Would it not be an unproductive day in which
we did not meet our Lord? For is not that the very meaning of
our lives? If the day is meant for the sun to shine, it is but half
a day, or rather it is night, if only the material sun shall shine,
and the Sun of justice also rise not on us with health upon His
wings. We go out to meet Jesus in every action of the day; but
we require this fourth dolor to admonish us that we must rarely
expect to meet Him except with a Cross, and that a new one.
When we are in sorrow, He Himself “draws near and goes with"
us, as He did with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. That is
the privilege of sorrow. It is an attraction to our dearest Lord

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which He can seldom resist. Provided we seek not other comfort,
He is sure to draw near and comfort us Himself. Oh, if unwary
souls did but know the graces which they miss by telling their
griefs and letting their fellow-creatures console them, how saints
would multiply in the Church of God! We read the lives of holy
persons, and wonder how ever they can have attained to such a
pitch of union with God, little suspecting all the while that we
have had sorrow enough to carry us further still than that, only
we would not wait for Jesus; and, if we will not let Him have
the first word, He may perchance send His angels to fulfil our
consolation, but He will not come Himself. But when we take
the initiative, when we ourselves go out to meet Him, and we
do so by our promises in prayer, by our open profession of piety,
by our ecclesiastical vocation, by our religious profession, by the
works of mercy to which we have now by usage committed our­
selves, then it is always with the Cross that we encounter Him.
Why, then, are we so amazed when crosses come? When it has
happened thus so often, do we not see that it is a law, a law of
the kingdom of grace, and that not to perceive it is to lose half
its blessing, by missing the promptitude of obedience? We lay
ourselves in the arms of our heavenly Father, knowing not what
is to come, only that much is to come, more than without Him
we could by possibility bear; let us lie still now that we are there,
and not be surprised into retracting the offerings we once have
made. What cross we shall meet today we know not: sometimes
we cannot guess. But we know that if we meet Jesus we shall
meet a cross, and evening will find us with the burden on our
backs. Only let us remember this invariable peculiarity of these
divine encounters, and then, if we are reverently wary in making
promises, we shall also be reverently firm in keeping our reso­
lutions.
Some men meet Him, and turn away. Some see Him far off,
and turn down another road. Some come close up, and leap down
the precipice at the side, as if He were a destroying angel block­
ing up the way. Some pass by, pretending they do not know Him.
He has been walking cross-laden in thousands of earth’s roads

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today; but He has had a few honest greetings. Faith and love
have made sonic men too timid to pass Him or avoid Him, but
they have expostulated with Him about the cross, and have wept
out loud when He persisted. Some follow in the sullcnncss of
servile obedience, and drag their cross, and it jolts upon the stones,
and hurts them all the more, and they fall, but their falls are not
in union with those three of His upon the old Way of the Cross.
Few kneel down with the alacrity of a glad surprise, and kiss
His feet, and take the cross off His back, and shoulder it almost
playfully, and walk by His side, singing psalms with Him, and
smiling when they totter beneath the load. But oh I the beauty
of that day's sunset to such as these! They "constrain Him, saying,
Stay with us, because it is toward evening and the day is now
far spent. And He goes in with them." This is what we should do.
Can we do itl Nol but we can try, and then He will do it in us.
But He meets us with the Cross. This implies much. It implies
that we must turn back from our own road, and that all the
way we went till we met Him was but waste of strength and
fruitless travelling. We can only carry our crosses one way, and
that is heavenward. They keep our faces in that direction. They
push us up hill; down hill they would prostrate us, and fall
heavily upon us, and kill us. All the faces of cross-carriers are
turned one way. The end, which is meant to go into the earth,
points to the earth: the cross of the cross looks over our shoulders
into heaven, and rights itself there, however unsteady we may be,
like the needle always trembling in reverent fidelity toward the
Pole. So let us not miss our opportunity, but take up our cross
at once, and turn round and follow Him; for so only shall we
fall into the Procession of the Predestinate.
But this dolor tells us more still. It teaches us that long rest
is the ground in front of great crosses. Unusual crosses follow un­
usual quiet. The greater the peace now, the greater the cross
presently. This is one of those lessons which every one knows
and no one remembers. Out of three-and-thirty years, twenty-one
ran out between the last dolor and the Passion. How often does
the same thing happen to ourselvesl Partly it is that God gives us

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a breathing-time that we may make the most of our past graces,
and so gain new strength and collect ourselves for higher achieve­
ments. Partly it is that the past graces, in which lie prophecies
and preparations of grace yet to come, require time to develop
themselves and become established in the soul. Partly also the
cross comes at the end of these quiet times in order to consolidate
their graces, to acquire a permanent possession of them for the
soul, and to crown them with the cross, which is the only reward
on this side the grave. A grace uncompressed, unfixed, unmatured
by sorrow seems hardly yet our own, but a transitory thing which
may or may not be realized. At best it is but income and not
capital. The refinement of sorrow is the last process of grace.
After that it becomes glory by the mere keeping. He who forgets
that the cross is coming wastes his quiet. He misses the ends
for which the calm was sent him, and renders himself less able
to bear the cross when it comes than he would have been if he
had prepared for it. It is in these long seasons of quiet that most
of those serious mistakes in the spiritual life are made which
have consequences almost irreparable. Sometimes we think we
have attained the level of our intended grace, and therefore we
persist in keeping upon it in spite of inspirations to higher things,
resisting these as if they were temptations to evil, not attractions
to good. We may thus mar the whole scheme of our sanctifica­
tion. Sometimes we imagine our tranquility to arise from dullness,
weariness, and want of fervor. We overlook the operations of
grace which are going on in our souls beneath the surface of
the apparent calm, and extricate ourselves by a fatal effort from
the groove in which we were intended to run, and adopt a spir­
itual life after a type and fashion of our own. It is less unsafe to
be without spiritual direction in times of growth, and trouble,
and change, than in these long seasons of comparatively untempted
peace. There could be no lukewarmness, no self-trust, no falling
back, no idle loitering, if only we remembered that the seeming
quiet was merely the hush before the coming of a greater cross.
It would then be to us at once a period of rest in God, and yet
of ardent, tremulous, active preparation for a new and different

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manifestation of Him, which we know will break upon us like
a storm, and be a serious trial of our worth.
This dolor also prepares us for another trial, which is by no
means infrequent in the experience of the cross. We never seem
to need our Blessed Lord’s consoling presence and kind words
more than when He has just loaded us with another cross. Nature
groans under the burden, and becomes faint. If at the same
moment our supernatural life becomes a cross to us also, how
shall we bear it? Yet there are few of us who have not experi­
enced this collision of an outward with an inward cross. We
meet Jesus. He gives us our new cross without a word, even,
so it seems, without a blessing. Often the expression of His Face
says nothing. We are like servants with a master. We have simply
to do His will, without any further directions than a sign. No
confidence is imparted to us. No cheerful words of encourage­
ment are uttered. There is no token that He is pleased or dis­
pleased with us, no token that we are doing Him a service in
accepting this new cross, no token that He is other than indif­
ferent whether we carry it or not. We have simply the material
obedience to perform. He could not treat us otherwise if we
were mere machines. Then, when this cold dry ceremony of
imposing the new cross upon us is performed, sometimes He
walks by our sides without looking at us or speaking a single
word, as if we were slaves carrying His burden for Him and
beneath His notice. Either He is occupied with His own thoughts,
or He considers that any thing like communicativeness will inflate
us, and make us forget ourselves. But sometimes the trial is worse
than this. He makes over His load to us, and then, like an un­
burdened man, walks on lightly with a quicker step than we
can follow, laden as we are. We cannot keep up with Him.
We do not know if He meant us to try to do so. Perhaps He
intended us to fall behind, into our proper place as inferiors.
Perhaps He would consider it a liberty if we endeavored to
overtake Him. On the other hand, He may think us wanting
both in diligence and respect if we lag too far behind. Then he
goes out of sight, and has not told us which road to take; and

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we come to a cross-road, and are in perplexity. Moreover, like a
practised superior, He does all this so naturally, and with so much
apparent unconcern, that we cannot divine whether it is meant
to try us, or whether it is indifference, displeasure, or disdain.
It comes at the very moment too when He has given us more work
to do, and heavier weights to carry. Thus Mary met Him; the
meeting was in silence; He passed on out of sight; they met
again on Calvary. There is not a step in this journey which we
have not sometimes to take. It is a peculiar trial, for which there
is no possible preparation but love. The more we love Jesus,
the more confidence shall we feel in His love of us; and while
our humility will not be surprised by any show of indifference,
when something far worse than that is merited by our vileness,
our love will enable us to go on with a quiet suffering cheerful­
ness, convinced that the love of His Heart and the look of His
face are telling different tales.
We must also be prepared to find that one cross leads to
another, and little crosses to great ones. For the most part crosses
do not come single. They meet each other in our souls, as if it
were at a given moment and on some previous understanding.
Sometimes, especially after seasons of long tranquility and the
apparent inaction of grace, we suddenly pass into a region of
crosses, just as the earth traverses a region of shooting stars at
certain periods of the year. Then crosses follow each other in
rapid succession, now one at a time, now two together, now
two or three at once, so that we can hardly stand upright. Some­
times there is a storm of crosses driving right in our faces like
vehement slanting hail, pelting so pitilessly that we can hardly
make any way at all, or at least we have all the miserable feeling
of making none. Sometimes they come upon us from behind,
and if we are walking carelessly we stumble and fall; and, alasl
who does not know that a fall with a cross on our shoulders,
though it seems so much more pardonable, always hurts us far
more grievously than a fall without one? It is the crudest law of
the spiritual life.
Some men have one lifelong cross to carry, and other crosses

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do not appear to be added to it. But even then it is much the
same as if there were new crosses; for the burden is not equable.
Sometimes the road is rougher; sometimes the day is hotter;
sometimes we are ourselves unwell, and timorous, and weak;
sometimes also the cross, by a sort of miracle, causelessly so far
as we can judge, grows far heavier, and galls us as it never did
before, and, the reason being hidden, the remedy is hidden also.
This lifelong cross, even when most equable, and unaccompanied
by other crosses, is the hardest of all trials to bear. There is so
much mutability in our nature, that even a change of punish­
ment from sharp to sharper is in effect a relaxation. The satisfac­
tion of the change is a greater good to our humanity than the
increased severity of the pain is an evil. The dreadful thing to
nature is to be tied down to a persevering uniformity. It is in
this that the secret heroism of vows resides. Who has not felt
relief in illness, when the pain has changed from one limb to
another? So is it, and still more, with the sufferings of the soul.
He who carries one cross for years, and carries it to his grave,
must either be one of God’s hidden saints, or must lie in low
attainments as near to lukewarmness as is compatible with the
salvation of his soul.
But sometimes the one lifelong cross remains always upon
our shoulders, only as the abiding foundation of a very edifice
of crosses, which God is forever building up, and pulling down,
and building up again, upon the old enduring cross, without ever
shifting that. There are some souls God seems always to be ex­
perimenting upon, and only experimenting, and experimenting
to the last; but it is real work. This unites the two sufferings of
monotony and change together. All the epochs of life are variously
represented by the transitory heaps of crosses, while the abiding
cross is the deep undertone of the whole of life. Such men walk
the world, not merely as memorials to be wondered at, but as
living fountains of devotion to all who see them. They are men
of power; for it is to the secret intercessions of such souls that
all spiritual renewals on the earth are owing. Not infrequently
they carry for a while the whole Church upon the top of their

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cross. They are monuments of God’s love; for in them we see in
fullest revelation the grand truth, which is true also in its measure
of the very lowest of ourselves, that the cross is never only a chas­
tisement, but always a reward as well, and the plentifulness of
God’s love to each created soul is measured by the abundance
of its crosses.
There is one more lesson yet to be learned from this dolor.
Jesus and Mary are both going one way: could it be any other
way than the road to heaven? Yet the road they were travelling
led over Calvary. Hence we infer that no one’s face is toward
heaven when it is not toward Calvary. In life, whether we know
it or not, we are always travelling to a sorrow. At the next turn
of the road stands an unforeseen death of some one whom we
love, or the breaking up of a circle in which it seems as if our
very existence were bound up, or some disgrace which we never
reckoned on. We look on to something next summer, and it is
a joy to us to think of the good and happy work we then shall do.
and there is a bed of sickness lurking in the way, and the sum­
mer’s sun will only shine upon our useless and querulous con­
valescence. The long nights of winter are to find us at an occu­
pation which we only regret we have delayed so long, because it
is so good, so full of God’s glory, so full of our own sanctification.
But before the shortest day has come, all life has shifted. Cir­
cumstances are changed. The good would be good no longer,
or the means of doing it have slipped from our hands. The loss
of the opportunity is an unhappiness to us; the delay by which
we lost it is greater still. A good which can be done now can
never be done afterward. If it will be good tomorrow, then be
sure it is not good today. God changes things when He changes
times. This is the reason why unpunctual, procrastinating men
are never holy, seldom affectionate, always selfish. So life slips
by, and we manufacture our own sorrows by the want of prompti­
tude. Devotion only means one thing in theology, and that one
thing is promptitude.
Sometimes, however, we do see the sorrow toward which we
are travelling. Perhaps this is the most common case of the two.

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We know that an illness is almost sure to return at a particular
season of the year. Or we have an inevitable work to do, and the
experience of the past assures us that the suffering, which will
come of it, is as inevitable as the work itself. Or we arc bending
over a sister or a child, in whom insidious consumption is wearily
eating its fatal way. Λ loss we cannot bear to think of is thus
continually impending. It may be next spring, or it may be next
spring year. Or it may be when the leaf falls this year, or when
it falls two years hence. Or a sharp frost may nip the flower this
winter, or the bloodvessel may break in sleep tonight. Λ son
perhaps has wound his whole manliness around an aged widowed
mother; or a daughter so clings to a failing father, that she has
never in her whole life been able to undoinesticate herself from
the hearth of her childhood, and to the last has remained more
daughter than wife, more daughter than mother. In both cases
the son and the daughter have before them an inevitable sorrow,
inevitable if they live themselves, inevitable in the course of
nature. It is only a work of time, and of no long time. In the
majority of instances these foreseen sorrows are more sanctifying
than the unforeseen. Life grows softer under the shadow, hcavenlier during the eclipse of earth. It suits better with the common
laws of grace, and is a less perilous process than the terrible sur­
prises which make saints, as money is minted, by one desperate
blow, one sharp pressure when hot from the fire. Oh, happy are
they, did they but know it, who have a visible sorrow always wait­
ing them a little farther on the road! So has the path been
garnished of by far the greatest number of the predestinate.
Thus the fourth dolor contains within itself the whole science
and mystery of cross-bearing. This is the wisdom we learn from
the picture while we gaze on Mary in the streets of the cruel
Jerusalem. The eye of her soul sees the fair-haired Boy in the
temple, whom she sought more than twenty years ago, while her
bodily eye is fixed on the pale and bleeding and earth-stained
Man, going with sound of trumpet and the chorus of earth’s
curses to His doom. And shall we, who gave Him that heavy
cross to bear, and kept weighting it after we had given it, as

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if our cruelty were not satisfied, refuse to bear the sweet grace­
giving crosses which He binds on us, so little too as, when we have
borne them for a while, we are forced to confess they are? Oh,
no! let us do now as Mary did then,—look at Him who is on the
road before us, and see how the beauty of the Sacred Heart sits
with meek majesty and attractive love on the woe-worn disfigured
Countenance.

Chapter VI

THE FIFTH DOLOR
THE CRUCIFIXION

The world is a mystery. Life, time, death, doubt, good and
evil, and the uncertainty which hangs about our eternal lot, are
all mysteries. They lie burning on the heart at times. But the
Crucifix is the meaning of them, the solution of them all. It puts
the question, and answers it as well. It is the reading of all
riddles, the certainty of all doubts, and the centre of all faiths,
the fountain of all hopes, the symbol of all loves. It reveals man
to himself, and God to man. It holds a light to time that it
may look into eternity and be reassured. It is a sweet sight to
look upon in our times of joy; for it makes the joy tender without
reproving it, and elevates without straining it. In sorrow there
is no sight like it. It draws forth our tears, and makes them fall
faster, and so softly that they become sweeter than very smiles.
It gives light in the darkness, and the silence of its preaching
is always eloquent, and death is life in the face of that grave
earnest of eternal life. The Crucifix is always the same, yet ever
varying its expression so as to be to us in all our moods just
what we most want and it is best for us to have. No wonder
saints have hung over their Crucifixes in such trances of con­
tented love. But Mary is a part of the reality of this symbol. The
Mother and the Apostle stand, as it were, through all ages at the
foot of the Crucifix, symbols themselves of the great mystery, of
the sole true religion, of what God has done for the world which
He created. As we cannot think of the Child at Bethlehem with­
out His Mother, so neither will the Gospel let us picture to
ourselves the Man on Calvary without His Mother also. Jesus
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241

and Mary were always one; but there was a peculiar union
between them on Calvary. It is to this union we now come,
Mary’s fifth dolor, the Crucifixion.
The Way of the Cross was ended, and the summit of the
mount has been attained a little before the hour of noon. If
tradition speaks truly, it was a memorial place even then, fit to
be a world's sanctuary; for it was said to be the site of Adam's
grave, the spot where he rested when the mercy of God accepted
and closed his nine hundred years of heroic penance. Close by
was the city of David, which was rather the city of God, the
centre of so much wonderful history, the object of so much
pathetic divine love. The scene which was now to be enacted
there would uncrown the queenly city; but only to crown, with
a far more glorious crown of light, and hope, and truth, and
beauty, every city of the world where Christ Crucified should be
preached and the Blessed Sacrament should dwell. It was but
a little while, an hour perhaps, since the last dolor; so that
only four hours have elapsed between the fourth dolor and the
consummation of the fifth. Yet in sorrow and in sanctification
it is a longer epoch than the eighteen years of Nazareth. In
nothing is it more true, than in our sanctification, that with
God a thousand years are but one day. These hours were filled
with mysteries so divine, with realities so thrilling, that the lapse
of time is hardly an element in the agony of Mary’s soul. She
comes to the Crucifixion a greater marvel of grace, a greater
miracle of suffering, than when an hour ago she had met the
cross-laden Jesus at the corner of the street.
They have stripped Him of His vestments, from the shame
of which stripping His Human Nature shrank inexpressibly. To
His Mother the indignity was a torture in itself, and the un­
veiled sight of Her Son’s Heart the while was a horror and a woe
words cannot tell. They have laid Him on the Cross, a harder
bed than the Crib of Bethlehem in which He first was laid. He
gives Himself into their hands with as much docility as a weary
child whom his mother is gently preparing for his rest. It seems,
and it really was so, as if it was His own will, rather than theirs.

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which was being fulfilled. Beautiful in His disfigurement, ven­
erable in His shame, the Everlasting God lay upon the Cross,
with His eyes gently fixed on heaven. Never, Mary thought, had
He looked more worshipful, more manifestly God, than now
when He lay outstretched there, a powerless but willing victim;
and she worshipped Him with profoundest adoration. The execu­
tioners now lay His right arm and hand out upon the Cross.
They apply the rough nail to the palm of His Hand, the Hand
out of which the world’s graces flow, and the first dull knock
of the hammer is heard in the silence. The trembling of excessive
pain passes over His sacred limbs, but does not dislodge the
sweet expression from His eyes. Now blow follows blow, and is
echoed faintly from somewhere. The Magdalen and John hold
their ears; for the sound is unendurable; it is worse than if
the iron hammer were falling on their living hearts. Mary hears
it all. The hammer is falling upon her living heart; for her love
had long since been dead to self, and only lived in Him. She
looked upward to heaven. She could not speak. Words would
have said nothing. The Father alone understood the offering of
that heart, now broken so many times. To her the Nailing was
not one action. Each knock was a separate martyrdom. The
hammer played upon her heart as the hand of the musician
changefully presses the keys of his instrument.
The Right Hand is nailed to the Cross. The Left will not
reach. Either they have miscalculated in the hole they have
drilled to facilitate the passage of the nail, or else the Body has
contracted through agony. Fearful was the scene which now
ensued, as the saints describe it to us in their revelations. The
executioners pulled the left arm with all their force; still it would
not reach. They knelt against His ribs, which were distinctly
heard to crack, though not to break, beneath the violent pressure,
and, dislocating His arm, they succeeded in stretching the Hand
to the place. Not more than a gentle sigh could be wrung from
Jesus, and the sweet expression in His eyes dwelt there still. But
to Mary,—what imagination can reach the horror of that sight,
of that sound, to her? Oh, there was more grief in them than has

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gone to the making of all the saints that have ever yet been
canonized! Again the dull blows of the hammer commence,
changing their sounds according as it was flesh and muscle, or
the hard wood, through which the nail was driving its cruel way.
His legs are stretched out also by violence; one Foot is crossed
upon another, those Feet which have so often been sore and
weary with journeying after souls; and through the solid mass
of shrinking muscles the nail is driven, slowly and with unut­
terable agony, because of the unsteadiness of the Feet in that
position. It is useless to speak of the Mother; it is idle to com­
passionate her. Our compassion can reach no way, in comparison
of the terrible excess of her agony. But God held His creature up,
and she lived on.
Now the Cross is lifted off from the ground, with Jesus lying
on it, the same sweet expression in His eyes, and is carried near
to the hole which they have dug to receive the foot. They then
fasten ropes to it, and, edging it to the brink of the hole, they
begin to rear it perpendicularly by means of the ropes. When
it is raised almost straight up, they work the foot of it gradually
over the edge of the cavity until it jumps into its socket with a
vehement bound, which dislocates every bone, and nearly tears
the Body from the nails. Indeed, some contemplatives mention
a rope fastened round His waist with such cruel tightness that it
was actually hidden in the flesh, to hinder His Body from detach­
ing itself from the Cross. So one horror outstrips another, search­
ing out with fiery thrills, like the vibrations of an earthquake,
all the supernatural capabilities of suffering, which lay like abysses
in the Mother’s ruined heart. Let us not compare her woe to any
other. It stands by itself. We may look at it and weep over it
in love, in love which is suffering as well. But we dare not make
any commentary on it. Sorrowful Mother! Blessed be the Most
Holy Trinity for the miracles of grace wrought in thee at that
tremendous hour!
Earth trembled to its very centre. Inanimate things shud­
dered as if they had intelligence. The rocks were split around,
precipices cloven all along the most distant shores of the Mediter­

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ranean, and the mystical veil of the temple rent in twain by the
agitation of the earth, as if a hand had done it. At that moment,—
so one revelation tells us—there rose up from the temple-courts
a long wailing blast of trumpets, to mark the offering of the
noonday sacrifice, and they that blew the trumpets knew not
how, that day, they rang in heaven as the noonday trumpets never
rang before. Darkness began to creep over the earth; for the
satellite of earth might well eclipse the material sun, when the
earth itself was thus eclipsing the Sun of justice, the Eternal Light
of the Father. The animals sought coverts where they might
hide. The songs of the birds were hushed in the gardens beneath.
Horror came over the souls of men, and the beginnings of grace,
like the first uncertain advances of the stealthy dawn, came into
many hearts out of that sympathetic darkness. A moment was an
age tvhen men were environed by such mysteries as these.
The first hour of the three begins,—the three hours that were
such parallels to the three days when she was seeking her lost
Boy. In the darkness she has come close up to the Cross; for
others fell away, as the panic simultaneously infected them. There
is a faith in the Jews, upon which this fear can readily graft itself.
But the executioners are hardened, and the Roman soldiers were
not wont to tremble in the darkness. Near to the Cross, by the
glimmering light, they are diceing for His garments. The coarse
words and rude jests pierced the Mother’s heart; for, as we have
said before, it belonged to her perfection that her grief absorbed
nothing. Every thing told upon her. Every thing made its own
wound, and occupied her, as if itself were the sole suffering, the
exclusively aggravating circumstance. She saw those garments—
those relics, which were beyond all price the world could give—in
the hands of miserable sinners, who would sacrilegiously clothe
themselves therewith. For thirty years they had grown with our
Lord’s growth, and had not been worn by use,—renewing that
miracle which Moses mentions in Deuteronomy, that, through all
the forty years of the desert, the garments of the Jews were not
“worn out, neither the shoes of their feet consumed with age.”
Now sinners were to wear them, and to carry them into unknown

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haunts of drunkenness and sin. Yet what was it but a type? The
whole of an unclean world was to clothe itself in the beautiful
justice of her Son. Sinners were to wear His virtues, to merit
by His merits, to satisfy in His satisfactions, and to draw, at will,
from the wells of His Precious Blood. As Jacob had been blessed
in Esau’s clothing, so should all mankind be blessed in the gar­
ments of their elder Brother.
Then there was the seamless tunic she herself had wrought
for Him. The unity of His Church was figured there. She saw
them cast lots for it. She marked to whom it had fallen. One of
her first loving duties to the Church will be to recover it for the
faithful as a relic. Then it was that the history of the Church
rose before her. Every schism, which ever should afflict the mys­
tical Body of her Son, was like a new rent in her suffering heart.
Every heresy, every quarrel, every unseemly sin against unity,
came to her with keenest anguish, there on Calvary, with the
living Sacrifice being actually offered, and the unity of His
Church being bought with so terrible a price. All this bitterness
filled her soul, without distracting her from Jesus for a single
moment. As holy pontiffs, with hearts broken by the wrongs and
distresses of the Church, have been all engrossed by them, yet
never for an instant lost their interior union with Jesus, so much
more was it with His Mother now. It was on Calvary she felt
all this with an especial feeling, as it is in Lent, and Passion­
tide, and in devotion to the Passion, that we learn to love the
Church with such sensitive loyalty.
Fresh fountains of grief were opened to her in the fixing of
the title to the Cross. It had come from Pilate, and a ladder was
set up against the Cross, and the title nailed above our Saviour's
Head. Every blow of the hammer was unutterable torture to
Him, torture which had a fearful echo also in the Mother’s heart.
Nor was the title itself without power to extend and rouse her
suffering. The sight of the Holy Name blazoned there in shame
to all the world,—the Name, which to her was sweeter than any
music, more fragrant than any perfume,—this was in itself a
sorrow. The name of Nazareth, also, how it brought back the

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past, surrounding the Cross, in that dim air, with beautiful asso­
ciations and marvellous contrasts. Everywhere in the Passion
Bethlehem and Nazareth were making themselves felt, and seen,
and heard, and always eliciting new sorrow from the inexhaustible
depths of the Mother’s heart. If He was a king, it was a strange
throne on which His people had placed Him. Why did they not
acknowledge Him to be their king? Why did they wait for a
Roman stranger to tell it them as if in scorn? Why did they not
let Him rule in their hearts? Ahl poor peoplel how much hap­
pier would it be for themselves, how many sins would be hin­
dered, how many souls saved, how much glory gained for God!
King of the jewsl would that it were so! Yet it was really so.
But a king rejected, disowned, deposed, put to death! What a
load lay upon her heart at that moment! It was the load of self
invoked curses, which was to press to the ground that poor
regicide people. She would have borne all her seven dolors
over again to abolish that curse, and reinstate them, as of old,
in the predilection of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It
was too late. They had had their day. They had filled up the
measure of their iniquity. It rose to the brim that very morning,
and the breaking of Mary’s heart was a portion of their iniquity.
But at least over her heart Jesus was acknowledged king, and
reigned supreme. So was it with the dear Magdalen and the ardent
John; and, as she thought of this, she looked upon them with a
very glory of exceeding love. Is it that Jesus breaks the hearts
over which He reigns, or that He comes of special choice to reign
in broken hearts? But as the sense passed over her of what it
was to have Jesus for a king,—of the undisputed reign which by
His own grace He exercised over her sinless heart,—of the vast­
ness of that heart, far exceeding by his own bounty the grand
empire of the angels or the multitudinous perfections of the
saints,—and of the endless reign which He would have in that
beautiful “ivory palace” of hers which made Him so glad,_ her
love burst out afresh upon Him, as if the dikes of ocean had given
away, and the continents were being flooded with its waters,

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and every gush of love was at the same time an exquisite gush
of pain.
She had enough of occupation in herself. But sorrow widens
great hearts, just as it contracts little ones. She had taken to her­
self the thieves for sons. She was greedy of children. She felt
the value of them then, in the same way in which we know the
value of a friend when we are losing him. His dead face looks it
into us, and means more than his living expression did. She
has wrestled in prayer for those two malefactors, and God has
given her to see the work of grace beginning in the heart of one
of them. Does this content her? Yes! with that peculiar content­
ment which comes of answered prayer, that is to say, she became
more covetous because of what she had not. She counted that
only for a beginning. She pleaded, she insisted. One would have
thought such prayer at such a time resistless. It is not Heaven
that resists. Graces descend from above like flights of angels to
the heart of the impenitent thief. They fluttered there. They
sang for entrance. They waited. They pecked at the heart of
flesh. They made it bleed with pain, with terror, with remorse.
But it was its own master. It would not open. So near Jesus,
and to be lost! It might well be incredible to Mary. Yet so it
was. The thief matched his hardness against her sweetness, and
prevailed. Mary may not be queen of any heart where Jesus is
not already king. But, oh, the unutterable anguish to her of
this impenitence! His face so near the Face of Jesus, the sighs
of the spotless victim dwelling in his ear as silence dwells in the
mountains, the very Breath of the Incarnate God reaching to him,
the Precious Blood strewn all around him. like an overflow of
waste water, as if there was more than men knew what to do
with, and in the midst of all this to be damned, to commute
the hot strangling throes of that crucifixion for everlasting fire, to
be detached by his own will from the very side of the Crucifix,
and the next moment to become a part of hopeless hell! Mary
saw his eternity before her as in a vista. She took in at a glance
the peculiar horror of his case. There came a sigh out of her

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heart at the loss of this poor wretched son, which had sorrow
enough in it to repair the outraged majesty of God, but not enough
to soften the sinner’s heart.
Such were the outward, or rather let us call them the official,
occupations of Mary during the first hour upon the Cross. Her
inmost occupation, and yet outward also, was that which was
above her, overshadowing her in the darkness, and felt more
vividly even than if it had been clearly seen,—Jesus hanging upon
the Cross! As our guardian angels are ever by our sides, engrossed
with a thousand invisible ministries of love, and yet all the while
see God, and in that one beatifying sight arc utterly immersed,
so was it with Mary upon Calvary. While she seemed an attentive
witness and listener of the men dividing our Lord’s garments
among them, and of the nailing of the title to the Cross, or
appeared to be occupied with the conversion of the thieves, she
did all those things, as the saints do things, in ecstasy, with perfect
attention and faultless accuracy, and yet far withdrawn into the
presence of God and hidden in His light. A whole hour went by.
Jesus was silent. His Blood was on fire with pain. His Body
began to depend from the Cross, as if the nails barely held it. The
Blood was trickling down the wood all the while. He was growing
whiter and whiter. Every moment of that agony was an act of
worship fully worthy of God Himself. He was holding ineffable
communion with the Father. Mysteries, exceeding all mysteries
that had ever been on earth, were going on in His Heart, which
was alternately contracted and dilated with agony too awful for
humanity to bear without miraculous support. It had divine
support; but divine consolation was carefully kept apart. The
interior of that Heart was clearly disclosed to the Mother's inward
eye, and her heart participated in its sufferings. She, too, needed
a miracle to prolong her life, and the miracle was worked. But
with the same peculiarity. From her, also, all consolation was
kept away. And so one hour passed, and grace had created many
worlds of sanctity, as the laden minutes went slowly by, one by
one, then slower and slower, like the pulses of a clock at midnight
when we are ill, beating sensibly slower to reproach us for our
impatient listening.

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The second hour began. The darkness deepened, and there
were fewer persons round the Cross. No diceing now, no disturb­
ance of nailing the title to the Cross. All was as silent as a sanc­
tuary. Then Jesus spoke. It seemed as if He had been holding
secret converse with the Father, and He had come to a point
when He could keep silence no longer. It sounded as if He had
been pleading for sinners, and the Father had said that the sin
of His Crucifixion was too great to be forgiven. To our human
cars the word has that significance. It certainly came out of some
depth, out of something which had been going on before, either
His own thoughts, or the intensity of His pain, or a colloquy with
the Father. "Father! forgive them; for they know not what they
do!” Beautiful, unending prayer, true of all sins and of all sin­
ners in every time! They know not what they do. No one knows
what he does when he sins. It is his very knowledge that the
malice of sin is past his comprehension which is a great part
of the malice of his sin. Beautiful prayer also, because it dis­
closes the characteristic devotion of our dearest Lord! When He
breaks the silence, it is not about His Mother, or the apostles,
or a word of comfort to that affectionate forlorn Magdalen, whom
He loved so fondly. It is for sinners, for the worst of them, for
His personal enemies, for those who crucified Him, for those
who had been yelling after Him in the streets, and loading Him
with the uttermost indignities. It is as if at Nazareth He might
seem to love His Mother more than all the world beside, but
that now on Calvary, when His agony had brought out the deepest
realities and the last disclosures of His Sacred Heart, it was
found that His chief devotion was to sinners. Was Mary hurt by
this appearance? Was it a fresh dolor that He had not thought
first of her? Oh, no! Mary had no self on Calvary. It could not
have lived there. Had her heart cried out at the same moment
with our Lord's, it would have uttered the same prayer, and in
like words would have unburdened itself of that of which it was
most full. But the word did draw forth new floods of sorrow.
The very sound of His voice above her in the obscure eclipse

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melted her heart within her. The marvel of His uncomplaining
silence was more pathetic now that He had spoken. Grief seemed
to have reached its limits; but it had not. That word threw down
the walls, laid a whole world of possible sorrow open to it, and
poured the waters over it in an irresistible flood. The wellremembered lone pierced her like a spear. The very beauty of
the word was anguish to her. Is it not often so that deathbed
words are harrowing because they are so beautiful, so incompre­
hensibly full of love? Mary's broken heart enlarged itself, and
took in the whole world, and bathed it in tears of love. To her
that word was like a creative word. It made the Mother of God
Mother of mercy also. Swifter than the passage of light, as that
word was uttered, the mercy of Mary had thrown round the globe
a mantle of light, beautifying its rough places, and giving lustre
in the dark, while incredible sorrow made itself coextensive with
her incalculable love.
The words of Jesus on the Cross might almost have been a
dolor by themselves. They were all of them more touching in
themselves than any words which ever have been spoken on the
earth. The incomparable beauty of our Lord’s Soul freights each
one of them with itself, and yet how differently! The sweetness
of His Divinity is hidden in them, and for ages on ages it has
ravished the contemplative souls who loved Him best. If even
to ourselves these words are continually giving out new beauties
in our meditations, what must they be to the saints, and then,
far beyond that, what were they to His Blessed Mother? To her,
each of them was a theology, a theology enrapturing the heart
while it illumined the understanding. She knew they would be
His last. Through life they had been but few, and now in less
than two hours He will utter seven, which the world will listen
to and wonder at until the end of time. To her they were not
isolated. They recalled other unforgotten words. There were
no forgotten ones. She interpreted them by others, and others
again by them, and so they gave out manifold new meanings.
Besides which, she saw the interior from which they came, and
therefore they were deeper to her. But the growing beauty of

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Jesus had been consistently a more and more copious fountain
of sorrow all through the Three-and-Thirty Years. It was not
likely that law would be abrogated upon Calvary. And was there
not something perfectly awful, even to Mary’s eye, in the way
in which His divine beauty was mastering every thing and begin­
ning to shine out in that eclipse? It seemed as if the Godhead
were going to lay Itself bare among the very ruins of the Sacred
Humanity, as His bones were showing themselves through His
flesh. It was unspeakable. Mary lifted up her whole soul to its
uttermost height to reach the point of adoration due to Him,
and tranquilly acknowledged that it was beyond her power. Her
adoration sank down into profusest love, and her love condensed
under the chill shadow into an intensity of sorrow, which felt its
pain intolerably everywhere as the low pulsations of His clear
gentle voice rang and undulated through her inmost soul.
The thought which was nearest to our Blessed Saviour s Heart,
if we may reverently venture to speak thus of Him, was the glory
of His Father. We can hardly doubt that after that, chief among
the affections of the created nature which He had condescended
to assume, stood the love of His Immaculate Mother. Among His
seven words there will be one, a word following His absolution
of the thief at Mary’s prayer, a double word, both to her and of
her. That also shall be like a creative word, creative for Mary,
still more creative for His Church. He spoke out of an unfath­
omable love, and yet in such mysterious guise as was fitted still
more to deepen His Mother’s grief. He styles her "Woman,” as
if He had already put off the filial character. He substitutes John
for Himself, and finally appears to transfer to John His own
right to call Mary Mother. How many things were there here
to overwhelm our Blessed Lady with fresh affliction! She well
knew the meaning of the mystery. She understood that by this
seeming transfer she had been solemnly installed in her office of
second Eve, the mother of all mankind. She was aware that now
Jesus had drawn her still more closely to Himself, had likened
her to Himself more than ever, and had made their union more
complete. The two relations of Mother and Son were two no

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longer; they had melted into one. She knew that never had He
loved her more than now, and never shown her a more palpable
proof of His love, of which, however, no proof was wanting. But
each fresh instance of His love was a new sorrow to her; for it
called up more love in her, and with more love, as usual, more
sorrow.
But what a strange Annunciation it was, this proclamation to
her of the Maternity of men, compared with the Annunciation
of her Divine Maternity! The midnight hour, the silent, room,
the ecstatic prayer, the lowly promptitude of the consent, the
swift marvel of the adorable mystery,—all these were now ex­
changed for the top of Calvary in the dun light of the eclipse,
with her Son hanging bleeding on the Cross. Oh, what surpassing
joy went with the first Motherhood, what intolerable anguish
with the second! Yet while God sent His angel to make the first
Annunciation, He Himself, with His sweet Human voice, con­
descended to make the second. But in Mary’s soul there was the
same tranquility, in her will the same alacrity of devout consent.
When we are in deep sorrow, every action, which we are con­
strained to do, seems to excite and multiply our grief. Even the
very movements of body disturb the stillness of the soul. An
interruption, an external noise, the scene that meets the uplifted
eye, these are sufficient to burst the bounds, and throw the mass
of bitter waters once more over the soul. So when Mary’s whole
nature rose to meet this word of Jesus, and threw itself into
the consent she gave, and turned her forcibly as it were from
Jesus to John, it was as if the whole anguish of the Crucifixion
gained a new life, a fresh activity, a more potent bitterness, a
more desolating power. The thought of Him, while it was the
most terrible of all her thoughts, was also the most endurable.
She felt most, when other thoughts usurped the place of that.
Who has not felt this in times of mourning? He whom we have
lost is our most terrible thought. Yet there is a softness, a repose,
in thinking of him. The thought sustains our grief. But to think
of other people, of other things, brings with it a rawness, a dis­
quietude, an irritable dissatisfaction, an inopportune diversion,

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which makes our grief intolerable. So now Jesus Himself brought
sinners uppermost in Mary's mind. He turned her thoughts from
Himself to the Church, to His enemies, His persecutors, His mur­
derers. He unsphered her, so to speak, from the sweet circle of
her Motherhood, and placed her in the new centre of her office
and official relation to mankind. For, even when He spoke to
her and of her, it was still rather sinners than herself, which
seemed to be uppermost in His affections. The suffering of all
this was immense, worse than any other woe which that prolific
morning had brought her yet. So the second hour upon the
Cross elapsed, an age of wonders which ages of angelical science
and seraphic contemplation cannot adequately fathom. Jesus
still lived; the Blood was still flowing; the Body still growing
whiter in the eclipse; the silence tingling all around, except when
His beautiful words trembled lightly on the air, deepening, as it
seemed, both the darkness and the silentness.
The third hour began, the third epoch in which this long
dolor was working at the grand world of Mary’s heart. His first
word in this last hour was worse than Simeon's sword to our
dearest Mother. He said, "I thirst.” Well might He thirst. Since
the blessed chalice of His own Blood the night before, nothing
had crossed His lips but the taste of wine and gall, the pressure
of the sponge with vinegar against His mouth, and His own
Blood which had trickled in. Meanwhile the nails were burning
like fires in His Hands and Feet; His limbs from head to foot
had been scorched with the thongs and prickles of the brutal
flagellation; endless thorns were sticking like spikes of flame
through His skull, until His brain throbbed with the intolerable
inflammation. Drop by drop His Blood had been drawn from
Him, with all the moisture of His Body, and the fountains in
the Heart were on the very point of failing. Surely we may well
believe that there was never thirst like His. No shipwrecked
sufferers have ever burned with a more agonizing thirst, or have
ever pined and died with tongue and lips and throat more dry
and parched, than His. Yet we know that single torture has been
enough with strong men to sweep reason from its throne, and that

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there are few deaths men can die more horrible than death from
thirst. We cannot doubt that our Blessed Lord suffered it be­
yond the point when without miracle death must have super­
vened. How fearful must have been the pressure of that physical
suffering, which caused that silence-loving Sufferer to exclaim!
If ever it was marvellous that in all her woe Mary had displayed
no signs of feminine weakness, no fainting, no sobbing, no outcry,
no wild gesture of uncontrollable misery, it was doubly marvellous
now. Not only was this exclamation of Jesus a most heart-rending
grief to her, but there came upon it that burden which human
grief can never bear, and a grief of mother least of all, the feeling
of impotence to allay the agony of those we love. She looked into
His dying Face with a face on which death was almost as deeply
imprinted as on His. She saw His parched, swollen, quivering
lips, white with that whiteness of the last mortal struggle, which
is like no other whiteness. But she could not reach, not even to
wipe with her veil the Blood that was curdled there. It was vain,
and she knew it, to appeal to the cruel men that were scattered
about the mount. For a cup of cold water to those lips, through
what new scenes of sorrow would she not be eager to pass! But
it might not be. She remembered how He had once looked down
into the cold sparkling water of Jacob's well, and longed in His
fatigue and thirst for one draught of that element which He
Himself had created, and then how He had forgotten both thirst
and weariness in His loving labor of converting that poor Samari­
tan woman. But now—and it was an overwhelming thought—
water was as far from the lips of the dying Saviour as it was
from those of Dives in the endless fires out of which he had
appealed if it were but for a single drop. No! Her dearest Son
must bear it. He has at last complained of His physical tortures.
But of what use was it except to break His Mother’s Heart again,
and to call forth the love and adoration of countless souls through
ages and ages of His Church? To Him it brought no relief. It
was for our sakes that He complained, that, even at the expense
of more agony to Mary, we might have one additional motive
to love our Crucified Brother.

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But this was not the only thirst that word was intended to
convey. His Soul thirsted as feverishly for souls as His Body did
for the water of the well. He brooded over all coming ages, and
yearned to multiply the multitudes of the redeemed. Alas! we
have approximations by which we can measure His torment of
physical thirst; but we have no shadow even by which we can
guess of the realities of that torment in His Soul. If the love,
which the Creator has for creatures, whom He had called out of
nothing, is unlike any other love either of angels or of men, if
its kind is without parallel, and its degree an excess out of the
reach of our conception, so also is the spiritual love of souls in
the Soul of the Saviour of the world. Saving love is without
similitude, as well as creative love. As all the loves of earth are
but sparks of creative love so all apostolic instincts, all missionary
zeal, all promptitude of martyrdom, all intercessory penance,
and all contemplative intercession, are but little sparks of that
saving love of which Calvary is at once the symbol and the
reality. The torment of this thirst was incomparably beyond
that of the other thirst. Mary saw it; and no sooner had she seen
it, than the very sight translated her, as it were, into a fresh,
unexplored world of sorrow. She saw that this thirst would be
almost as little satisfied as the other. She saw how Jesus at that
moment was beholding in His Soul the endless procession of men,
unbroken daily from dawn to dawn, bearing with them into hell
the character of baptism and the seal of His precious Blood. See!
even now, while the Saviour is dying of thirst, the impenitent
thief will not give Him even his one polluted soul to drink!
So was it going to be evermore. Mary saw it all. Why had He
ever left Nazareth? Why had He gone through all this world
of unnecessary suffering, only to succeed so inadequately at last?
Was God’s glory, after all, the end of Calvary, rather than the
salvation of men? Yes! and yet also No! Mary, like Jesus Him­
self, grudged not one pang, one lash, one least drop of Blood that
beaded His crowned brow. She too thirsted for souls, as He did,
and her heart sank when she saw that He was not to have His fill.
Oh, poor, miserable children that we are! how much of our

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souls have we not kept back, which would have somewhat cheered
both the Mother and the Son that dayl
But Jesus had to go down into an abyss of His Passion deeper
than any which He had sounded hitherto. Into that deep Mary
must go down also. Not merely for us was the word He was
now to utter. It is beyond us. It comes like a mysterious far-off
cry out of the depths of spiritual anguish, to which even mystical
theology can give no name. It is God abandoned of God,—the
creature rejected of the Creator, although united to Him by a
Hypostatic Union,—the Sacred Humanity abandoned by the
Divine Nature to which it is inseparably assumed,—a Human
Nature left Personless, because the Divine Person, who never
can withdraw Himself, has withdrawn,—the Second Person of
die Holy Trinity deserted by the Other Twol What wild words
are these? We know they cannot be, simply cannot. Yet when
we put the dereliction of Jesus into words, these are the impossible
expressions in which we become entangled. “My God! My Godl
why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Was there ever a more truly
created cry? Yet He who uttered it was Himself the Creator.
Not merely for us, then, could such a word be spoken. It was
wrung from Him by the very spirit of adoration in the extremity
of His torture. Some have conjectured that it was at that moment
that the hitherto unconsumed species of the Blessed Sacrament
was consumed, and so that mysterious union of Himself with
Himself withdrawn. But this does not recommend itself to us.
Why should He derive comfort and strength from His own
sacramental Flesh and Blood, when He was exposing both Flesh
and Blood to unheard-of torments? Why derive comfort at all,
when He was studiously making all things round Him, even His
Mother’s heart, fresh instruments of torture? Why should His
Divine Nature in the Blessed Sacrament be a sweetness and re­
storative to Him, the loss of which extracted such a cry, when
even in the Hypostatic Union, which was an incomparably closer
union than that of the Blessed Sacrament, He was cutting off
the supplies of His Divine Nature from His Human, excepting
the single communication of His Omnipotence to enable Him to

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live, in order that He might suffer more? The sense of the faith­
ful—that instinct which so seldom errs—points without hesita­
tion to the Eternal Father, as the cause of that suffering, and as
addressed in that word.
But is there cruelty in Godl No! Infinite justice is as far
removed from cruelty as infinite love can be. Yet it was the
Father, He who represents all kindness, all indulgence, all for­
bearance, all gentleness, all patience, all fatherliness in heaven
and earth, who chose that moment of intensest torture, when
the storm of created agonies was beginning to pelt less piteously,
because it was now well-nigh exhausted, to crucify afresh, with
a most appalling interior crucifixion, the Son of His own endless
complacency. With effort unutterably beyond all grace ever
given, except the grace of Jesus, Mary lifted up her heart to the
Father, joined her will to His in this dire extremity, and, in a
certain sense, as well as He, abandoned her Beloved. She gave
up the Son to the Father. She sacrificed the love of the Mother
to the duty of the Daughter. She acknowledged the Creator only
as the last end of the creature. She had done this at the outset
in her first dolor, the Presentation of Jesus, and it was consum­
mated now. O Mother! how far that exacting glory of God led
thy royal heart! She saw Jesus abandoned. She heard the outcry
of His freshly-crucified Soul, pierced to the quick by this new
invention of His Father's justice. And she did not wish it other­
wise. She would have Him abandoned, if it was the Father's will.
And it was His will. Therefore, with all her soul, with the most
unretracted, spontaneous consent, she would have Him aban­
doned. She would go down from the top of Calvary this moment
if the Father bade her. But her love rose up, as if it were des­
perate, to meet this uttermost exigency. No one would have
dreamed that a human soul could have held so much love as
she poured out upon Jesus at that moment. Was her heart in­
finite, inexhaustible? It really seemed so. For at that hour it
combined, multiplied, outstripped all the love of the Threeand-Thirty Years, and rushed into His soul as if it would fill
up with its own self the immense void which the dereliction of

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the Father had opened there. Every thing went out of her, but
the horrible bitterness of her martyrdom. Sorrow—pure, sheer,
sharp, fiery sorrow—was flesh, and blood, and bone, and soul,
and all to her. All else was gone into the Heart of Jesus, which
thereupon sent forth upon her an outpouring of love, which
deluged her with a fresh ocean of overwhelming woe. And by
one miracle they both lived still.
Now, Blessed Mother, that thou standest on such incredible
heights of detachment, the end may come! It was finished. All
was finished. Chiefly creation. It had found a home at the grave
of the First Adam under the Cross of the Second. The Father
had left Him. He must go to the Father. It is impossible They
should be disunited. Creatures had done what they could. They
had filled to the brim the Saviour’s cup of suffering, and He,
with pitiable love, had drained it to the dregs. But there was
one created punishment still left, created rather by the creature
than the Creator, created chiefly by a woman. It was the punish­
ment of death, the eldest-born child of the first Eve. But could
death hold sway over the living Life of eternity? Could Eve
punish God? Was He to inherit the bitter legacy of the sweet
Paradise? How could it be? How could He die? What could
death be like to Him? Mary's heart must be lifted to the height
of this dread hour. High as it is, it must be raised higher still,
to the level of this divinest mystery. The Three-and-Thirty Years
are ending. A new epoch in the world’s history is to open. The
most magnificent of all its epochs is closing. What will death
be like to Him? Ah! we may ask also, what will life be like to
her when He is dead? What will Mary herself be like without
Jesus? She was not looking up, but she knew His eye was now
resting on her. What strange power is there in the eyes of the
dying, that they often turn round the averted faces that are
there, and attract them to themselves, that love may see the last
of its love? His eye was resting on the same object on which it
rested the moment He was born, when He lay suddenly on a fold
of her robe upon the ground while she knelt in prayer, and when
He smiled, and lifted up His little hands to be taken up into

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her arms, and folded to her bosom. His arms were otherwise lifted
up now, inviting us to climb up into them, like fond children,
and see what the embrace of a Saviour's love is like. She felt
His eye, and she looked up into His face. Never did two such
faces look into each other, and speak such unutterable love as
this. The Father held Mary up in His arms, lest she should
perish under the load of love; and the loud cry went out from
the hilltop, hushing Mary’s soul into any agony of silence, and
the Head drooped toward her, and the eye closed, and the Soul
passed her, like a flash, and sank into the earth, and a wind
arose, and stirred the mantle of darkness, and the sun cleared
itself of the moon’s shadow, and the roofs of the city glimmered
white, and the birds began to sing, but only as if they were half
reassured, and Mary stood beneath the Cross a childless Mother.
The third hour was gone.
Such was the fifth dolor, with its creative periods of sanctity
and sorrow. She had stood through it all, notwithstanding the
agonizing yesterday, the sleepless night, the long morning crowded
with its terrible phenomena. In the strength of her unfailing
weariness she had stood through it all, and Scripture is careful to
mark the posture, as if this miracle of endurance was of itself a
revelation of the greatness of the Mother’s heart. It is, as it were,
a reward for her dolor, that we cannot preach Christ Crucified
unless Mary be in sight. It is something else we preach—not
that—unless she be standing there. And now she stands on
Calvary alone. It is three hours past noon of the most awful
day the world shall ever see.
Something still remains to be said of the peculiarities of this
dolor, notwithstanding that so much has been unavoidably antici­
pated in the narrative. Above all things, the Crucifixion has this
peculiarity, that it was the original fountain of all the other dolors,
except the third. That stands apart. It is Mary’s own Crucifixion,
her Gethsemane and her Calvary. But the two dolors which came
out of the Infancy, and the four which represent the Passion, have
the Crucifixion for their centre. The Three Days' Loss does not
belong to the Infancy, and the shadow of the Passion is no more

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thrown over it than it was over the whole life of Mary. It was
the act of Jesus Himself, which seemingly had an especial rela­
tion to His Mother. The third dolor, which prefaces the Eighteen
Years at Nazareth, was to her sorrows what the Eighteen Years
were to her life generally, something between Jesus and herself,
a mystery of a different sphere from those in which both He and
she were concerned in the fulfilment of the world's redemption.
But the sword in Simeon’s prophecy was the Crucifixion. The
Flight into Egypt was to hinder the cruelty of Herod from antici­
pating the moment of our Saviour's death. The Meeting with
the Cross was the road to Calvary. The Taking down from the
Cross, and the Burial, were sorrows which flowed naturally out
of the Crucifixion, and were in unbroken unity with it. The
Crucifixion was therefore the realization of her lifelong woe.
The fountain was reached. She had tracked it up to Calvary.
What remained was the waste water, or rather the water and
blood, which flowed down from the mount, and sank in at the
threshold of the Garden Tomb. Compared with the Crucifixion,
the other dolors, the third always excepted, were almost reliefs
and distractions stirring on the fixed depths of her unfathomable
woe. The Crucifixion was a sorrow by itself, without name or like­
ness. It was the centre of the system of her dolors, while the
independence of her third dolor betokens the existence of that
vast world which Mary is in her own self, a creation apart, brighter
than this world of ours, and more dear to Jesus. It is a mysterious
orb allowed to come in sight of this other system, where we are,—
a disclosure of all that world of phenomena which is hidden from
our eyes in the Eighteen Years, during which Jesus devoted
Himself to her. It ranks with the Immaculate Conception, the
Incarnation, and the Assumption, all which belong to Mary’s
world, and would have been even if sin had not been, though
they would have been different from what they were. But that
third dolor shows how the fallen world of sin and the necessity
of a passible Incarnation told on her world, as it did on His,
and passed upon the lineaments of the Maternity as well as upon
those of the Incarnation. There are certainly few mysteries in

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the gospel which we understand less than the Three Days’ Loss.
Another peculiarity of the Crucifixion is the length of time
during which the tide of suffering remained at its highest point
without any sign of ebbing. The mysteries, which filled the three
hours, seem too diversified for us to regard them, at least till we
come to the Dereliction, as rising from less to greater in any
graduated scale. They are rather separate elevations, of unequal
height, standing linked together like a mountain-chain. But the
lowest of them was so immensely high that it produced most im­
measurable agony in her soul. The anguish of death is momen­
tary. The length of some of the most terrific operations which
can rack the human frame seldom exceeds a quarter of an hour.
Pain pushed beyond a certain limit, as in medieval torture, is
instantaneous death. In human punishments which are not meant
to kill, the hand of science keeps watch on the pulse of the suf­
ferer. But to Mary the Crucifixion was three hours, three long
hours, of mortal agony, comprising hundreds of types and shapes
of torture, each one of them intolerable in itself, each pushed
beyond the limits of human endurance unless supported by
miracle, and each of them kept at that superhuman pitch for all
that length of time. When pain comes we wish to lie down,
unless madness and delirium come with it, or we are fain to run
about, to writhe, gesticulate, and groan. Mary stood upright on
her feet the whole weary while, leaning on no one, and not so
much as an audible sigh accompanied her silent tears. It is
difficult to take this thought in. We can only take it in by prayer,
not by hearing or reading.
It was also a peculiarity of the Crucifixion that it was a heroic
trial of her incomparable faith. Pretty nearly the faith of the
whole world was in her when she stood, with John and Magdalen,
at the foot of the Cross. There was hardly a particle of her belief
which was not tried to the uttermost in that amazing scene.
Naturally speaking, our Lord’s Divinity was never so obscured.
Supernaturally speaking, it never was so manifest. Could it be
possible that the Incarnate Word should be subject to the ex­
cesses of such unparalleled indignities? Was the light within Him

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never to gleam out once? Was the Wisdom of the Father to be
with blasphemous ridicule muffled in a white sack, and pulled
about in absurd, undignified helplessness by the buffooning guards
of an incestuous king? Was there not a point, or rather were
there not many points, in the Passion, when the limit of what
was venerable and fitting was overstepped? Even in the reserved
narrative of the Gospels, how many things there are which the
mind cannot dwell on without being shocked and repulsed, as
well as astonishedl Even at this distance of time do they not try
our faith by their very horror, make our blood run cold by their
murderous atrocity, and tempt our devotion to withdraw, sick
and fastidious, from the affectionate contemplation of the very
prodigies of disgraceful cruelty, by which our own secret sins and
shames were with such public shame most lovingly expiated? Is
not devotion to the Passion to this day the touchstone of feeble
faith, of lukewarm love, and of self-indulgent penance? And
Mary, more delicate and more fastidious far than we, drank all
these things with her eyes, and understood the horror of them in
her soul, as we can never understand it. Think what faith
was hers.
The Divine Perfections also suffered a strange eclipse in the
Passion. Sin was triumphant. Justice was condemned. Holiness
was abandoned even by the All-holy. Providence seemed to have
withdrawn, as if under constraint. God was trodden out, and
creatures had creation to themselves; nay, more than that, they
had the Creator in their power. There was no divine interference,
just when it appeared most needed and most natural. If men
could have their own way then, surely they could have it always.
One while God looked passive, another while cruel. Oh, it re­
quired angelic theology to reconcile the providence of that day
with the attributes of the Most Highl Then the angels themselves
might be a trial of her faith. Were there such things, such beings,
as angels? She had seen them so often she could not doubt it.
She had seen St. Michael but the night before, bending in
adoration by the side of Jesus in His agony, a glorious being,
fit for that strange exceptional mission of consoling the Son of

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God in His inconsolable distress. But where was their zeal for
the Incarnate Word, that grand grace by which they had all been
established in their final perseverance? Where were the double
edged cherubic swords that guarded the entrance into Eden from
all but Henoch and Elias? Ah! there were legions of them press­
ing forward, yet ever beaten back., like a storm-cloud striving to
plough its way up against the wind, eager and burning, yet with
difficult obedience bending backward before the meek, admon­
ishing eye of Jesus. Then, again, who could have believed, when
they saw the beauty of Jesus and fathomed the depth of His
prayer, as Mary only could see the one or fathom the other, that
divine grace really had power to convert human hearts? He
was the very beauty of holiness. During His Passion men them­
selves tore away every veil which humility and reserve could
hang about His sanctity. His humility, His sweetness, His pa­
tience, His modesty, all stood disclosed with the fullest light upon
them, exercised openly and heroically in the midst of the grossest
outrage. And yet men were not won to Him! There were the
guards who had fallen backward in the garden the night before.
There were those who had stood nearest to Him during the
scourging, those who had talked with Him as Pilate had, those
who had taken Him to Herod and brought Him back again.
There was the impenitent thief close by His side. Grace was
going out from Him every moment. His effectual prayer was in­
cessant. Mary’s intercession itself was busily engaged. Yet, when
the sun set on Friday, how little visible harvest had all that
grace gathered into its garners! Never did any one so walk by
faith, simple, naked faith, as Mary did that day. There was
faith enough to save a whole world in her single heart.
Another peculiarity of this fifth dolor is to be found in the
seven words which our Lord uttered from the Cross. They were
as seven sharp thrills in Mary’s heart, reaching depths of the
human soul to which our griefs never attain. It was not only the
well-known accents of her dying Son, with their association in­
conceivably heightened by the circumstances in which they broke
upon the stillness. It was not only the exceeding beauty of the

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words themselves, disclosing, as death sometimes does with
men. an unexpected interior beauty in the soul. It was not only
that, like the unuttered music of poetry in a kindred soul, they
waked up in her the remembrances of other words of His, and
gave light to many mysteries in her mind, and played skilfully
upon the many keys and with the various stops of her wonderful
affections, saying, as they did to her, what they do not say to
us, and what we cannot so much as guess. But they were the
words of God, such words as are spoken of in the Epistle to the
Hebrews,· "living and effectual, and more piercing than any
two-edged sword, reaching unto the division of the soul and the
spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and discerning the
thoughts and intents of the heart.” Such was their operation in
the heart of Mary, penetrating her as the blast of a trumpet seems
to penetrate the recesses of our hearing, and in their subtlety
and agile swiftness carrying grief into the crevices of her nature,
whither it could not else have reached. She was the broken cedar,
the divided flame of fire, the shaken desert of Cades, in the
twenty-eighth Psalm. "The Voice of the Lord is upon the waters;
the God of majesty hath thundered, the Lord upon many waters:
The Voice of the Lord in its omnipotence, the Voice of the Lord
in its magnificence. The Voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars;
yea, the Lord shall break the cedars of Libanus. The Voice of
the Lord divideth the flame of fire. The Voice of the Lord
shaketh the desert, and the Lord shall shake the desert of Cades.”
We have already spoken of the parallel between the Cruci­
fixion and the Annunciation, which is another peculiarity of
the fifth dolor. She became our Mother just when she lost Jesus.
It was, as it were, a ceremonial conclusion to the Thirty-Three
Years she had spent with Him in the most intimate communion,
and at the same time a solemn opening of that life of Mary in
the Church to which every baptized soul is a debtor for more
blessings than it suspects. In the third dolor He had spoken to
her with apparent roughness, as if her office of Mother was now
eclipsed by the mission which His Eternal Father had trusted
iv. 12.

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to Him. In this fifth dolor He, as it were, merges her Divine
Maternity in a new motherhood of men. Perhaps no two words
that he ever spoke to her were more full of mystery than that
in the temple, and now this one upon the Cross, or ever caused
deeper grief in her soul. They are parallel to each other. With
such a love of souls as Mary had, immensely heightened by the
events of that very day, the motherhood of sinners brought with
it an enormous accession of grief. The multitudes that were then
wandering shepherdless over the wide earth, the ever-increasing
multitudes of the prolific ages, all these she received into her
heart, with the most supernatural enlightenment as to the malice
of sin, the most keen perception of the pitiable case and helpless
misery of sinners, the clearest foresight of the successful resistance
which their free will would make to grace, and the most profound
appreciation of the horrors of their eternal exile amidst the
darkness and the flames of punishment. Our Lord's word effected
what it said. It made her the Mother of men, therefore, not
merely by an outward official proclamation, but in the reality of
her heart. He opened up there new fountains of inexhaustible
love. He caused her to love men as He loved them, as nearly as
her heart could come to His. He, as it were, multiplied Himself
in the souls of sinners millions of millions of times, and gave
her love enough for all. And such love! so constant, so burning,
so eloquent, so far above all earthly maternal love, both in hope­
fulness, tenderness, and perseverance! And what was this new
love but a new power of sorrow? We cannot rightly understand
Mary's sorrow at the Crucifixion under any circumstances, simply
because it is above us. But we shall altogether miss of those just
conceptions which we may attain to unless we bear in mind
that she became our Mother at the foot of the Cross, not merely
by a declaration of her appointment, but by a veritable creation
through the effectual word of God, which at the moment enlarged
her broken heart, and fitted it with new and ample affections,
causing thereby an immeasurable increase of her pains. It was
truly in labor that she travailed with us when we came to the

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birth. The bitterness of Eve’s curse environed her spotless soul
unutterably in that hour of our spiritual nativity.
We must not omit to reckon also among the peculiarities of
this dolor that which it shares with the fourth dolor, and in
which it stands in such striking contrast to the sixth,—her inability
to reach Jesus in order to exercise her maternal offices toward
Him. So changeful can sorrow be in the human heart that the
very thing which will minister sorrow to her by the fulness of
its presence in the Taking down horn the Cross is a sorrow to
her here by its absence. But they have mourned little, too little
for their own good, who have not long since learned to under­
stand this contradiction. It is hard for a mother to keep herself
quiet by the deathbed of her son. Grief must be doing some­
thing. The wants of the sufferer are the luxuries of the mourner.
The pillows must be smoothed again, the hair taken out of the
eyes, those beads of death wiped from the clammy brow, those
bloodless lips perpetually moistened, that white hand gently
chafed, that curtain put back to give more air, the weak eyes
shielded from the light, the bedclothes pressed out of the way
of his difficult breathing. Even when it is plain that the softest
touch, the very gentlest of these dear ministries, is fresh pain
to the sufferer, the mother’s hand can scarcely restrain itself; for
her heart is in every finger. To be quiet is desolation to her
soul. She thinks it is not the skill or the experience of the nurse
which dictates her directions, but her hard-heartedness, because
she is not that fair boy’s mother; and therefore she rebels in her
heart against her authority, even if the chances of being cruel
do in fact restrain her hands. Surely that foam must be gath­
ered from the mouth, surely that long lock of hair must tease
him hanging across his eye and dividing his sight, surely that
icy hand should have the blood gently, most gently, brought back
again. She forgets that the eye is glazed and sees no more, that
the blood has gone to the heart, and even the mother’s hand
cannot conjure it back again. And so she sits murmuring, her
sorrow all condensed in her compulsory stillness. Think, then,
what Mary suffered those three long hours beneath the Cross!

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Was ever deathbed so uneasy, so comfortless, as that rough-hewn
wood? Was ever posture more torturing than to hang by nails
in the hands, dragging, dragging down as the dead weight of
the Body exerted itself more and more? Where was the pillow
for His Head? If it strove to rest itself against the Title of the
Cross, the crown of thorns drove it back again; if it sank down
upon His Breast, it could not quite reach it, and its weight drew
the Body from the nails. Slow streams of Blood crept about His
wounded Body, making Him tremble under their touch with
the most painful excitement and uneasiness. His eyes were
teased with Blood, liquid or half congealed. His Mouth, quiv­
ering with thirst, was also caked with Blood, while His breath
seemed less and less to moisten. There was not a limb which
was not calling out for the Mother's tender hand, and it might
not reach so far. There were multitudes of pains which her
touch would have soothed. O mothers! have you a name by
which we may call that intolerable longing which Mary had,
to smooth that hair, to cleanse those eyes, to moisten those dear
lips which had just been speaking such beautiful words, to
pillow that blessed Head upon her arm, to ease those throbbing
hands and hold up for a while the soles of those crushed and
lacerated feet? It was not granted to her; and yet she stood there
in tranquility, motionless as a statue, not a statue of indiffer­
ence, nor yet of stupor and amazement, but in that attitude of
reverent adoring misery which was becoming to a broken-hearted
creature who felt the very arms of the Eternal Father round her.
holding her up to live, to love, to suffer, and to be still.
We must also remember that the abandonment of Jesus
by His Father was something to her which it cannot be to us.
In religious mysteries we are continually obliged to take words
for things. We speak of the Eternal Generation of the Son
and of the Eternal Procession of the Holy Spirit, but we cannot
embrace the wisdom, the brightness, the love, the tenderness,
the pathos, if we may venture on the word, which those acts of
the Divine Life imply. Consequently the words do not call
out in us an intelligent variety of feelings and sentiments and

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emotions: we meet them by a simple act of adoring love. Yet
they mean more to theologians than to uneducated Christians,
more to saints than to theologians, more to the blessed in heaven
than to the saints on earth. But according to our knowledge so
should be our love, and in heaven it is so. Thus, while the
dereliction of Jesus on the Cross fdls our minds with a sacred
horror, we only see into it confusedly. We rather see that it is a
mystery, than in what the mystery consists. It is often the very
indistinctness of divine things which enables us to endure them.
Who could live, if he realized what hell is, and that every
moment immortal souls are entering there upon their eternity
of most shocking and repulsive punishment? We smell a sweet
flower, and just then a soul has been condemned. We watch
with trembling love the elevation of the Host and Chalice, and
meanwhile the gates of that fiery dungeon have closed on many
souls. We lie down upon the grass, and look up at the white
clouds, dipping through the blue sky as if either had waves, and
catching the sun on their snowy shapes, and all the while hell is
underneath that grass, within the measurable diameter of the
earth, living, populous, unutterable, its roaring flames and count­
less sounds of agony muffled by the soil that covers the uneasilyriveted crust of the earth. What agony would this be, if our
minds were equal to it, or coextensive with its reality! Nay, if
we realized it, as sometimes for a moment we do realize it, we
could not survive many hours, even if we did not die upon
the spot. For, if the guilt of one venial sin shown to His saint
by God would have produced the immediate separation of body
and soul, unless He by miraculous interference had supported
her, what must the vision be of the countless enormities of hell,
with the additional hideousness of final impenitence and the
unspeakable horror of its punishments! So, with this dereliction
of our Blessed Lord, none understood it as Mary did. The whole
of the marvellous theology that was in it was perhaps clear to
her. At least she saw in it what no one else, not even an angel,
could see. Hence, while it called out in her a variety of the most
vivid emotions and most sensitive affections, it also plunged her

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into fresh sorrow, by transferring all at once the Passion of
Jesus into another and more terrific sphere.
The universality of her suffering is also another peculiarity
of the fifth dolor and in this it was a sort of shadow of the
Passion. Who can number the variety of the pains which those
three hours contained? What portion of her sinless nature was
not covered with its appropriate suffering? There was no spot
whereon a sorrow could be grafted where the hand of God had
not inserted one. She was as completely submerged in grief as
a fish is submerged in the great deep sea. The very omnipres­
ence of God round about her was to her an omnipresence of
suffering. As the fires that punish sin are so dreadfully effica­
cious, because God intended their nature to be penal, so the
supernatural sorrows of our Blessed Mother on Calvary were
fearfully efficacious, because they were intended to carry suf­
fering to the utmost limit which the creature could bear, that
so her holiness, her merits, and her exaltation might exceed
those of all other creatures put together, except the created nature
of her Son. There was not an inlet of any one of the senses
down which pain was not flowing masterfully, like clashing tides
in a narrow gulf. There was not a faculty of her mind which
was not illuminated, or rather scorched, by a light which hurt
nature and gave it pain. Her affections had been cruelly im­
molated at the foot of that altar on Calvary, one after another,
and the zealous Priest had not spared His victims. Her will
was strained up to the height of the most unheard-of consents,
which the devouring justice of God had demanded of her. Her
soul was crucified. Her body was the shrinking prey of her
mental agony. Her feet were weary with standing, her hands
wet with His Blood, her eyes filled with her own. How hath
the Lord covered with obscurity the daughter of Zion! Weeping,
she hath wept in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks.
There is none to comfort her among all of them that were
dear to her. From above He hath sent fire into my bones, and
hath chastised me; He hath spread a net for my feet; He hath
turned me back; He hath made me desolate, wasted with sorrow

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all the day long. The Lord hath taken all my mighty men out
of the midst of me. He hath proclaimed against me a time,
to destroy my chosen men. The Lord hath trodden the wine­
press for I he virgin daughter of Juda. Therefore do I weep,
and my eyes run down with water, because the Comforter, the
relief of my soul, is far from me. My children are desolate,
because the enemy hath prevailed. My heart is turned within
me, for I am full of bitterness. Abroad the sword destroyeth;
and at home there is death alike. O, all ye that pass by the wayl
attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow; for
He hath made a vintage of me, as the Lord spoke in the day of
His fierce anger!” ·
Last of all, there was her inability to die with Him. Many
a time, to die with the dead would be the only true consolation
of the bereaved. One heart has been the light of life, the un­
setting light of long years of various fortune, bright in the
blue sky of prosperity, brighter still in the black clouds of ad­
versity. Now that light is put out by death. Why should we
survive? Henceforth, what significance can there be to us in life?
That cold heart was the end of all our avenues. Every prospect
terminated there. We valued no past where that heart was not.
We saw no future in which it did not play its part. All our plans
ended there. The weight of our expectations was concentrated
on that one point, and now it has given way, and we are falling
through, we know not whither. Ah! this loss is truly the end
of life, more truly far than the mere physical dissolution of
soul and body. The apostles—especially the quick, affectionate
Thomas—wished to go and die with Lazarus, simply because
Jesus loved him so. Oh, surely we can all remember days which
were the world’s end to us,—days which it seemed impossible
should have a morrow! There was a bed—laden with a sad
weight, with a beautiful terror—which was to us the end of time,
the edge of the world, the threshold of eternity. It had been long
looked for, and yet words would not tell how cruelly unex­
pected it came at last. All our hopes, and fears, and loves were
• Lamentations, i.

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gathered up, as if the Judge were coming then to settle them.
Common things could not go on after that. Daily duties must
not recur. Habits were run out. It was an end, an end of so
much,—so much so cruelly ended. It was as fearful to have no
prospect as it is to have no hope; and therefore we longed to
lie down and die, on the same bed, and be buried in the same
grave, though it seemed strange that any one should remain
behind to bury us, so completely did it seem a universal end.
This is a wild extremity of human grief. Our Lady's dolor was
something else than this. The end of the Thirty-Three Years
was not like any other end. Her Son was God. It all lies in that.
Think, after that, of the unutterable misery of the Mother's life
protracted, when His was done. It will not bear explaining. It
cannot be explained. But we can feel it, below the world from
which words come; we can see it,—a light beyond the region
where thought can grasp things,—that actual sundering of Jesus
and Mary, the dissolution of that union which had been the
world's divine mystery for all those wonderful and wonderpeopled years! Which of us can tell what grief is like, when it
has gone beyond the point at which it would kill us, and we
only live by a miracle external to ourselves? Such grief was
our Mother’s when our Lord breathed out His Soul into His
Father’s hands.
But let us turn from the peculiarities of the fifth dolor to
the dispositions in which our Blessed Lady endured it. Yet the
task of describing these is impossible. We read the lives of the
saints, and see in each one of them a peculiar inward sanctity,
sometimes different from that of all others that we know,—
sometimes congenial to the spirit of another saint,—sometimes,
though not often, allowing itself to be grouped in numerous
classes. Many of the graces which we read of, have no names
in the nomenclature of the virtues of their kindred dispositions.
We wonder as we read. We are dazzled by the lights which
keep appearing in the beauties of holiness, in splendoribus sanc­
torum. Yet we know that what we see is as nothing to that which
we do not see. As the Queen of the South said of Solomon, not

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the half is told. All that comes to the surface is a mere indica­
tion of the depths which are below, hardly enough to let us
guess at the interior beauty which the eye of God beholds in
the saintly soul. But, if this is the case with the saints, how
much more so is it with our Blessed Lady! It is expressly said
of her that the beauty of the king's daughter is all within; and
when our Lord, in the Canticle, describes her loveliness, He adds
twice over, "besides that which lieth hid within.” It is, there­
fore, impossible to speak worthily of the interior beauty of Mary.
As we have considered each dolor it has become more difficult
to speak of her dispositions. We are obliged to use common
words for things which are singular and only akin to what is
common. The realities keep rising taller and taller above the
words, until these last almost mislead us, instead of elucidating
the subject, and we have to repeat the same words for disposi­
tions which have become different in the transition from one
sorrow to another, as well by the novelty of their exercise as by
the increased magnificence of their heroism. Thus the depth
and grandeur of our Blessed Mother’s inward life are sufficient
of themselves to hinder our doing it justice. Mary is one of
those divine visions which expands before expanding holiness,
and, even like the Blissful Vision itself, excites hunger in the
beholder, even while it is satisfying his soul unutterably.
But there is another reason also of this difficulty, which bears
especially upon her dolors. It is the comprehended reality of
the present. We must explain our meaning. It hardly ever
happens to us, either in sorrow or in joy, fully to take in the
present at once. We realize our sorrows and our joys piecemeal.
We are constantly finding new features in them, and coming
across peculiarities which did not strike us at the first. In every
thing which happens to us there is always far more implied than
is expressed. This is what we mean when we speak of a growing
sorrow. It is not the sorrow that grows: it is our own apprecia­
tion of it. It belongs to the imperfection of our minds that this
process should be gradual. All that years unfold, apply, bring
home to us, was in the transient act, whether death, misfortune,

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or disgrace, when it was present; only we were unable to em­
brace it. Hence it is that we often seem more heroic in sorrow
than we really are. We bear no more of our burden than what
we see, and we see but a portion of it. Our heavenly Father lets
it down gradually upon us, dividing the weight between His
own hand and our shoulders, till use enables us to bear the
full pressure without being crushed. We commit ourselves to
Him, engaging ourselves to what is implied, while our eyes are
fixed upon what is expressed. Our venture succeeds not so much
by our own courage as by His grace. It even sometimes happens
that we lose a friend, whose death affects us very moderately.
Somehow the light of life is not thrown on the chasm that he
has made in leaving. Years pass on, and circumstances change.
All at once, or by degrees, we miss him. We cannot do without
him. He is a want which, just at this particular moment, must
be supplied, and cannot be supplied. The loss is irreparable,
and is now fast becoming intolerable. It seems as if something
which had to be gone through cannot be gone through, simply
because he was the part of our life needful to the going through
with it, and now he is not here. A false, a cruel, a suspecting
friend we lose before he dies. But we never miss him. It never
comes out that he is wanted. He is found to have been always
in reality outside of our lives; and he is dismissed from our
minds with a sad sort of relief that we have done with him,
and the pious consolation that after all no love is ever wasted
which at any time, or for any object, has been mixed up with
God. But it is not so with a true friend. The loss of him is
never over; it is continually reappearing, and making our hearts
as strangely tender as if his spirit were touching them at the
moment. All this comes of the present being too much swollen
with realities, so that we cannot get into our souls at once. Thus
we are always behindhand with life, understanding ourselves and
others, and, most of all, God, when it is too late. We cannot
keep up with the present by intelligence or sentiment. We can
only keep up with it by a spiritual quickness which prompts us
to act, to suffer, and, above all, to compromise ourselves, at the

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bidding of the instincts of grace. Thus it is that sorrows are
mostly less hard to bear than they seem; for we are almost uncon­
sciously bearing them by degrees. Now, it was not so with our
Lady. She took in the present in its fulness; she embraced it in
the tranquility of her vast comprehension. A sorrow revealed
itself to her in its completeness, and thus pressed with all its
weight upon her soul at once. Thus her sorrows are greater than
they seem. They grow upon us, but they did not grow upon her.
This is very much to be remembered when we speak of her dis­
positions in her sufferings. Her endurance was of another kind
from ours, because of her complete realization of the present;
and hence her dispositions, while the poverty of language compels
us to call them by the same names, must be magnified and multi­
plied into something quite different from what they were before.
Having premised this, we must look first of all, as we have
had to do in the other dolors, at our Blessed Mother's tranquility.
If we pass in review the manifold horrors of the Crucifixion, and
see the various assaults of grief of which her soul was the centre,
it will seem as if tranquility was just that grace the exercise of
which would be impossible. If we did not know that God was
everlasting peace, there would appear something almost incon­
gruous and out of keeping with the scene, in a holiness which
was stayed in the deepest calm at such a time. With us depth
of feeling is for the most part accompanied by agitation, which
makes it difficult for us to conceive the union of the liveliest
sorrow and the most delicate sensitiveness with a tranquility
which looks as if it were impassible. Among men, calmness in
grief is but a token of insensibility. Our Lady’s peace is like that
of God, undisturbed amid the sounds of ten million worlds, un­
ruffled by the portentous revolt of sin, and self-possessed in the
very profusest outpouring of intense and burning love. Nothing
discloses to us more astonishingly her union with God than this
unbroken calm. Where God is there can be no trouble; and
there was not a recess in our Lady's nature where God was not,
and which He did not possess with the most undivided sovereignty.

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Hence, while horror followed horror, there was no amazement
in her soul, no stupefaction, no bewilderment. As the mystery
unfolded strangest depths of suffering, even the counsels of God
did not seem to take his chosen creature by surprise. In what
an abiding presence of God must her soul have dwelt! How
trained must each faculty of the mind have been to fall in with
the ways of God as it met them, and with such unquestioning
promptitude, with such unstartled dignity! In what subordina­
tion must every affection have been to the instantaneous domin­
ion of grace, a subordination which would so increase their
freedom as to augment their powers of loving and of sorrow­
ing a thousandfold! There was no effort, no struggle, no pause,
no token that her inward life felt the pressure of outward cir­
cumstance. The creature kept step with the Creator, and the
angels marveled at the divine repose of her beautiful dependence.
Out of this calmness came her silent courage. We must re­
member that, although her surviving so great a sorrow was
miraculous, her endurance of the sorrow was not a miracle,
but a grace. Her life was kept in her by the hand of God; but
she received no such support in her endurance as for one moment
interfered with the perfection of its merit. It was fortitude such
as the most glorious spirit in the choir of Thrones could not
attain to. It was a courage the very silence of which showed
at once the severity of its trial and the earnestness of its gener­
osity. The silence itself was another proof of Mary's amazing
union with God. For they who are much with Him lose their
habits of speaking, and acquire in their stead habits of super­
natural listening. She spoke not, because she reposed in God.
She did not even gather herself up to bear, or prepare her
courage for the combat. She let the burden take her as it found
her. She neither quickened her pace nor slackened it. How
could a resolution so quiet be at the same time so strong?
This is the question which our limited notion of sanctity is
tempted to ask. The answer is easy: its strength was in its very
quietness. But, if we understand the words, do we comprehend

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the thing? Do we fathom the disposition of Mary’s soul in which
this grandeur of strength was wedded to this childlike simplicity
of unwondering quietness?
Out of her quietness we pass into her silent courage, out of
her silent courage into her generosity. They are like ample halls
within her soul, where we dare hardly speak above a whisper
lest we wake the echoes, and where we gaze, without questioning,
on the wonderful trophies which hang upon the walls. A creature
has but one will to give away to God, and when he has given
it irrevocably, what further oblation is left? All generosity then
is but a perseverance in the first grand generosity, and, if perse­
verance is a grander thing than the act or disposition in which
we persevere, it is so only in its completeness, and not in each
of its separate stages. Yet it seemed as if Mary had endless wills
to give to God, and as if they came as fast as He could call for
them. The Divine Will tried her everywhere, and everywhere it
found the most entire conformity. There was no failure, no
lagging behind, nothing unequable. There was a strain, certainly.
How shall the creature not strain who has to keep up with God,
especially when His awful justice was urging its chariot wheels
through the Red Sea of the Passion? But it was a strain of the
most heavenly peace, of the most graceful adoration. When God
went quicker, she went quicker. Her will actually entered
more promptly into His will, in proportion as it exacted more
from her. Her soul seemed to become more inexhaustible the
more it was exhausted, like the souls of the Blessed, endlessly
loving, endlessly adoring, as they sink deeper still and deeper
in the Vision of the Holy Trinity.
But the very thought of these impossibilities of Mary’s gen­
erosity turns us from her dispositions to the lessons which this
fifth dolor teaches to ourselves. The last dolor taught us how
to carry our crosses, this one how to stand by them. We must
not leave the Cross. We must not come down from Calvary until
we are crucified, and then the Cross and ourselves will have
become inseparable. But Calvary is a great place for impatience.
Many have the courage to march up the hill, shouldering their

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cross with decent manfulness. But when they get there, they
lay their cross on the ground, and go down again into the city
to keep the remainder of the feast with the people. Some are
stripped and then leave, refusing to be nailed. Some are nailed,
but unfasten themselves before the elevation. Some stand the
shock of the elevation, and then come down from the cross,
before the three hours are out, some in the first hour, some in
the second, some, alas! when even the third hour is drawing to
its close. Alas! the world is full of deserters from Calvary, so
full that politic or disdainful grace seems to take no trouble
to arrest them. For grace crucifies no one against his will. It
leaves that work to the world, and treacherously and tyrannically
does the world do it. Men appear to believe that to breathe the
fresh air on the top of Calvary for half a minute is to act upon
them like a charm. Crucifixion, like a plunge in the cold sea, the
briefer it is, will have the healthier glow and the more sensible
reaction. But unfortunately it is not so. Sorrow is a slow work­
man, and crucifixion a long business. A tree takes root in a new
ground quicker than the cross in a new heart. But all this is by
no means agreeable to rapid, impulsive nature. It will allow
sanctification to be like an operation, sharp but soon over. It
cannot wait if it comes in the shape of a gradual cure. Yet who
is there that has ever tried to kill self in any one of its least
departments, and has not almost despairingly wondered at its
amazing and provoking vitality? How many great minds are
there, who have travelled far along the road of sanctity, before
they are out of sight of personal feeling and wounded sensibilityl Oh, then, for the grace to remain our three full hours
on the top of Calvary! Can there be a sadder sight on earth than
that which tells how often and how easily great heights in heaven
are missed, those half-crucified souls we meet in all companies,
so strangely out of place, such mournful monuments of the im­
patience of nature and the jealousy of grace?
God is very exacting. They who love Him can say so without
loving Him less. Nay, to them the very thought is an additional
degree of love. He is not content with our remaining on Calvary

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our three full hours. When we are not nailed to our cross, we
must stand. There must be no sitting, no lying down, no leaning
on our cross, as if forsooth that was meant for our support which
is waiting there only to crucify. Indeed, and this is significant
enough, kneeling is not so good as standing. We go there to
suffer, not to worship. Our suffering will turn into worship.
We are not to adore our cross, or say fine words about it, or put
ourselves into sentimental attitudes before it. We are to do
the commonplace thing of standing by it, which is the posture
of men. Standing is what the ceremonial of Calvary prescribes.
Here again what sad sights we see! It is well if we do not play
a part in them ourselves. There are souls whose Way of the
Cross is full of promise, and yet who spoil every thing on the
top of Calvary. Perhaps if they had been crucified at once they
might have done well. But that was not God’s Will. Waiting has
unmanned them. Their courage has oozed out among the ugly
skulls that strew the faded herbage of the mount. They have sat
down, because the delay was long. Or they have knelt to pray
that the cross might pass from them. Foolish souls! that belongs
to Gethsemane, not to Calvary. We must not put our beginnings
where our end should be. Or the preparations frighten them,
the digging of the fosse, the measuring of the breadth from hand
to hand, done so carelessly as it seems to be, and yet a matter
in which the least carelessness may be infinite torture, the re­
pointing of those blunt nails, and then those cruel unnecessary
flourishes of the hammer. Some shrink from stripping in the
cold air, and have to be stripped almost by force. Some are
terrified by the eclipse, which hides friends’ faces and the con­
solations of creatures. Some cry out and jump up when the
cold iron touches the palm of the first hand. Most fail then.
Is it not better to go down from Calvary, in the honest confes­
sion of our cowardice, than to behave so weakly on the summit
of that sacred hill? Oh, no! it is better far to stay. Better a re­
luctant crucifixion than none at all. Let us stand, if we can; if
we cannot, let us be rolled about like logs, as if we had died of
fright, and be nailed by force or in unconsciousness. Only let

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us be crucified; gracefully, if it may be, but ungracefully rather
than not at all.
Why do so many fail? Because they are not silent. Endurance
depends much on silence. Power escapes with words. It is only
by the help of the grace of silence that the saints carry such
heavy crosses. A cross for which we have received sympathy is
far heavier than it was before, or it may be that the sympathy
has unnerved ourselves, so that the weight seems greater, and
the wound in our shoulder sorer. Silence is the proper atmos­
phere of the cross, and secrecy its native climate. The best crosses
are secret ones, and we may be silent under those that are not
secret. Indeed, silence creates a sort of secrecy even in public.
For at least we can hide how much we suffer, if we cannot hide
altogether the fact that we are suffering. We can conceal how
often we are almost at the point of sinking beneath our burden.
We can keep to ourselves those individual peculiarities of suffer­
ings which are far its sharpest points, and which feed the sympathy
of others more than greater things can do. In some way or other
human sympathy desecrates the operations of grace. It mingles a
debasing element with that which is divine. The Holy Spirit
withdraws from its company, because it is "of the earth, earthy."
The Comforter gives His best consolations only to the incon­
solable of earth. They who seek creatures first must be content
with creatures; for they will not find God afterward, let them
seek ever so much. They to whom God is not enough by Himself,
but must have comforting creatures mixed with Him, will never
find out their sad mistake; for to them God will never open
those treasures which will show them how different He is from
creatures. But all this is hard to nature. Nature never yet breathed
freely on the top of Calvary. Men do not take their ease on
mountain-heights. They hardly rest there, except to admire the
magnificence of the view, because the breathing is so difficult.
It is very hard to put away all consolation from ourselves. Sym­
pathy seems often to be just that which makes our pain endur­
able. Well, then, let us go down a step lower. Let us not put it
away; but do not let us ask it. Let it find us out without our

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seeking. As the world goes, we shall not greatly peril what is
divine in our sorrows by being simply passive about sympathy.
But even this passivencss is hard. How should it be anything
else but hard, when it is part of our crucifixion? It is Calvary's
hardest lesson. Let us take it to ourselves, although we fear it;
neither let us be cast down because we fear. Who ever did
anything well which he had not first feared to do? What is there
upon earth that is worth doing, which is not worth fearing also?
But there is a true consolation—deeply hidden, indeed, yet
near at hand—in this putting away of human consolation. It is
in the darkness of nature that we realize the vicinity of Jesus.
It is in the absence of creatures that we are held up in the
sensible embrace of the Creator. Creatures bring obscurity with
them, wherever they intrude. They are forever in our way, inter­
cepting graces, hiding God, defrauding us of spiritual consola­
tions, making us languid and irritable. They so fill our senses
that the inner senses of our souls are unable to act. We often
wish our lives were more divine. But they are, in fact, much
more divine than we believe. It is sorrow which reveals this to us.
It comes like a shroud around us. By degrees our horizon nar­
rows in, and our great world becomes a little world. Onward
still it creeps: first one object disappears, and then another.
We are growing less and less distracted. Our inward life is
more awake. Our soul gets strong. Now the line of darkness
has touched Jerusalem itself. Even the consolations of the spir­
itual city have disappeared. The helmets of the Roman soldiers
catch the light for a moment above the level of the cloud, as if
they were floating away on a dark current. The greenness of
the mount grows black. For a moment it blinds us; then, by
degrees, the white Figure of Jesus comes out in the dim ob­
scurity. We feel the warm Blood on our hands as we grasp the
Cross. It is no apparition: it is life. We are with God, with
our Creator, with our Saviour. He is all our own. The with­
drawal of creatures has made Him so. But He has not come.
He was always there,—always thus within our souls,_only He
was overpowered with the false brightness of creatures. He

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comes out in the dark like the stars. The white moon of noonday
does not allure us by its beauty; it enchants us only in the night:
so it is the darkness of a spiritual Calvary which covers our souls
with the soft shining of our beautiful Saviour.
But the couching of our spiritual sight is not the only
operation which the senses of our soul undergo on Calvary. All
souls arc hard of hearing with respect to the sounds of the in­
visible world. The inner ear is opened upon Calvary. The
sounds of Jerusalem travel up to us through the darkness, and
perhaps the sounds of labor in the gardens near. But they rise
up as admonitions rather than as distractions. They come to us
softly and indistinctly, and do not jar with the silence of our
endurance, or the low whisperings of prayer. Least of all do
they muffle the clearness of our Saviour's words when He vouch­
safes to speak. Down below, how the world deafened us by its
tumultuous noises, and jaded our spirits with its multiplicity of
sounds! We knew that Jesus was at our sides, and yet we could
not converse with Him. It was like trying to listen when the
loud wheels are rattling harshly along the streets, when listening
is no better than an unsuccessful strain, or a perplexed misun­
derstanding. The mere noise the world makes in its going so
amazes us that it hinders our feet upon the road to heaven.
It is only on Calvary that earth is subdued enough to make music
with heaven; for it is there only that God is heard distinctly,
while the low-laying world murmurs like a wind, a sound which
is discordant nowhere, because it is rather the accompaniment
of a sound than a sound itself.
We see but two things on Calvary, Jesus and Mary; and
from each we learn a lesson, one about our own deaths, and one
about the deaths of others. Jesus vouchsafes to teach us how
to die. If He in His great hour would have His Mother by
Him, how shall we dare to die without her? In all things must
we imitate Jesus, although it be in a sphere so infinitely below
Him. But most of all, it is of importance to us to imitate Him
in His death. If it had been well, He would have loved to spare
her that terrific scene, though she perhaps would have accounted

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her absence a cruel mercy. It was there, at that deathbed, that
she became our Mother. There is surely not one of us into whose
mouth faith does not many times a day put that universal prayer,
the prayer of the pope and the peasant, of the doctor and the
scholar, of the rich and the poor, of the religious and the secular,
that the Mother of God may assist us in the hour of death. But
we must imbed this petition into all our prayers. Let us leave
to God, without dictation or even wish, the time, and place, and
manner of our death, so only that it be not an unprovided death,
and above all things not unprovided with Mary. The hour of
death is a thirsty time, and exhausts great graces. Unsuspected
chasms open suddenly in the soul, and swallow up past years,
old habits, and a thousand other things we can ill spare then.
The devil reserves his worst weapons for the last. It is very
terrible not to be able to die twice, lest the novelty get the
better of us the first time,—and it is a tremendous stake. There
are great sacraments for that hour, but not greater than are needed.
Watch a dying man! See how absolutions sink swiftly into his
dry soul, like summer-rain into the gaping ground. And yet
the battle is still coming and going in his eyes. Let us have
Mary. Whether she be there visibly or invisibly, whether she
speak and work, or work without speaking, let it be an agree­
ment of long standing, a pledge not to be broken, that she
shall be present to conduct for us a ceremonial so difficult and
yet of such unutterable import. It is worth while to spend a
whole life in asking this, if only we gain the object of our peti­
tion at the last. What is a good life worth, if it be not crowned
by a good death? Yet a good life is the nearest approach in our
power to a good death. There have perhaps been comparatively
few good deaths which have not come at the end of good lives.
And those few, so all the believing world says, have been con­
trived by Mary. But a good life is the likeliest of all things to
bring her to our bedsides in that hour. A cross-bearing life is
forever meeting Mary. At crucifixions she is present as it were
officially. If Jesus would not die without her, she will love us

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all the more if we refuse to do so either. However long the
agony has been, however troubled in spirit the poor passing
soul, blessed above all the dead are those whose eyes Mary her­
self has closedl
Such is the lesson which Jesus teaches us about our own
deaths. We learn one from Mary about the deaths of others.
It is, that devotion for those in their last agony is a Mary-like
devotion, and most acceptable to her Immaculate Heart. There
is not a moment of day or night in which that dread pomp of
dying is not going on. There are persons like ourselves, or better
than ourselves, and whose friends have with reason loved them
more than ever ours have loved us, who are now straitened in
their agony, and whose eternal sight of God is trembling anxiously
in the balance. Can any appeal to our charity be more piteously
eloquent than this? When we think of all that Mary has done
for each of those souls, those who are ceaselessly, momentarily
fixing their eternity in death, when we call to mind the long
train of graces which she has brought to every one of them,
and consequently the yearning of her maternal heart for their
final perseverance and everlasting salvation, we may form some
idea of the gratefulness of this devotion to her. The deathbed
is one of her peculiar spheres. She seems to exercise quite a par­
ticular jurisdiction over it. It is there that she so visibly co­
operates with Jesus in the redemption of mankind. But she
seeks for us to co-operate with her also. She would fain draw
our hearts with hers, our prayers to hers. Is she not the one
Mother of us all? Are not the dying our brothers and our
sisters in the sweet motherhood of Mary? The family is con­
cerned. We must not coldly absent ourselves. We must assist in
spirit at every death that is died the whole world over, deaths
of heretics and heathens as well as Christians. For they, too,
are our brothers and sisters; they have souls; they have eternities
at stake; Mary has an interest in them. And their eternity is
in more than double danger. How much more must they need
prayers, who have no sacraments! How much darker must their

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closing scene be» where the full light of faith shines not! How
much more earnest must be the prayers, when not ordinary
grace, but a miracle of grace, must be impctrated for them!
Alas! they will have none of our other gifts; at least, and affec­
tionately in their own despite, they shall have our prayers.
We must remember also that we too have to die. We shall one
day lie in the same strait, and need unspeakably the same
charitable prayers. The measure which we mete to others shall
be measured to us again. This is the divine rule of retribution.
Nothing will prepare a smoother deathbed for ourselves than
a lifelong daily devotion to those who are daily dying. Mary
assisted her Son to die in many mysterious ways. By His will,
and in the satisfaction of her own maternal love, she has now
assisted at the deathbeds of many millions. She has great ex­
perience by this time, if we might so speak, and is wonderfully
skilled in the science of the last hour. By prayerful thoughts,
by pious practices, by frequent ejaculations, by the usages the
Church has indulgenced, let us win a bright and gentle end for
ourselves, by following Mary everywhere to the deathbeds she
attends.
Such are the lessons we learn from the fifth dolor. The Cruci­
fixion can never be rightly understood without Mary, because
without her it is not truthfully represented. What a picture it is,
the High Mass of the world's redemption, offered by Jesus to
the Eternal Father, while the countless angels are the audience
and the spectators! When the Host is elevated, the whole frame
of inanimate nature trembles with terror and adoration, and
earth darkens itself, which is to be a rubric it is to observe in
the presence of Jesus for all ages. But what is Mary’s part? Her
Immaculate Heart is the living Altar-stone on which the Sacrifice
is offered; it is the Server, the beatings of whose broken heart
are the responses of the liturgy; it is the Thurible, in which the
world’s faith, the world’s hope, the world’s love, the world’s
worship, are being burnt like incense before the slain Lamb that
taketh away the sins of the world; and, finally, the same Im­

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maculate Heart is the Choir, the more than angelic Choir, of
that tremendous Mass; for did not the silence of her beautiful
sufferings sing unutterable, voiceless songs into the ravished ear
of the Bleeding Host?

Chapter VII
THE SIXTH DOLOR
THE TAKING DOWN FROM THE CROSS

The darkness of the eclipse had passed away, and the true
shades of evening were beginning to fall. The Cross stood bare
on Calvary against the light which the setting sun had left behind
it in the west. The spectacle of the day was over, and the multi­
tudes of the city were all gone, and the current of their thoughts
diverted elsewhere. A few persons moved about on the top of
the mount, who had been concerned with the taking down
of Jesus from the Cross, or were bringing spices from the city
to embalm Him. Mary sat at the foot of the Cross, with the
dead Body of her Son lying across her lap. Is Bethlehem come
back to thee, my Mother, and the days of the beautiful Childhood?
There are many varieties of human sorrow. It is difficult
to compare them one with another; because each has its peculi­
arity, and each peculiarity has an eminence of suffering belonging
to it, in which no other sorrow shares. Thus it may easily happen
that a sorrow which in itself looks less than another may in
reality be greater, because of the time at which it comes, or the
circumstances under which it occurs, or the position which it
occupies in a series of other griefs. This is the case with the
sixth dolor, the Taking down from the Cross. It is the grief of
an accomplished sorrow, and in this respect differs at once from
the strain of a distressing anticipation, or the active struggle of
a present misery actually accomplishing itself. This difference
cannot be unknown to us in our own experience. When we
are in the act of suffering we are not fully conscious of the
efforts we are making. Our whole nature rises to meet what
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we have to endure. Capabilities of pain, of which we had hitherto
no suspicion, disclose themselves. Perhaps also we have a greater
amount of supernatural assistance than afterward. But when the
pressure is lightened, when the strife is over, then we become
conscious of the drain which grief has made upon our strength.
The weariness of sorrow, like bodily fatigue, comes when all is
over. We stiffen, as it were, and our heart begins to ache more
sensibly, in the seeming tranquility which follows the misfor­
tune. The reaction makes itself felt in a peculiar depression,
which is almost more hard to bear than actual suffering, not
so much because it is intrinsically greater than actual suffering,
but because it comes after it, and, being itself the exhaustion
of our powers of endurance, it has nothing under it to support it.
It happens also for the most part that, by a merciful cruelty
of Providence, our ordinary duties, or even sometimes new duties
to which our sorrow has given birth, present themselves before
us, and require our energy and attention. But, while this often
hinders the reaction of sorrow from going too far, it is also in
itself hard to bear. We are seldom in greater want of grace than
in this moment of resuming the duties of our station after an
interruption of more than common sorrow. It is like beginning
life again at a disadvantage. We have perhaps more to do, when
we are less able to do it. We have used up our power of bearing
grief, and, just when the rawness of our misery is passing off,
new duties come which, either by contrast or by association,
open the old wounds afresh, and how are we to endure it?
Moreover, excessive grief, even when it lasts but for a short
time, seems to have a peculiar power to destroy habits. Things,
even hard things, are easy to us, because we are accustomed
to them. But after violent sorrow everything appears new and
strange. We have lost our old facility. Things have changed
places in our minds. Easy things are now hard, because of this
very novelty. Yet life is inexorable. It must go on, and under
the old laws, like a ruthless machine which cannot feel, and
therefore cannot make allowances. Now perhaps is a greater trial
of our worth than when we were enduring the blows which mis­

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fortune was dealing upon us. This is the account of the sixth
dolor; this is the place it occupies in the sorrows of our dearest
Mother. Think of the Crucifixion, and all that it involved, and
is not the reaction after that likely to be something which it is
quite beyond our power adequately to conceive? Immense as is
the holiness of her Immaculate Heart, sorrow can still find work
to do, and can build the edifice higher, as well as embellish
what is built already.
The Soul of Jesus passed into the earth at the foot of the
Cross, and descended to the limbus of the fathers. Mary was still
at the foot of the Cross. She comprehended in its completeness
the vast mystery of the separation of that Body and Soul, the
death of the Son of God. The Soul has left her, but she has
the Body still. In the next dolor that will go also, and then
the Mother will be indeed alone. For the most part it is not
God’s way to withdraw Himself all at once. He spares the
weakness of the soul, and passes from it almost insensibly, after
special favors and more intimate union, as the perfume gradually
exhales out of a jar where it has been kept. The two thieves
are still in their agony close to the dead Body of Jesus. To one
of them it is like the soothing presence of the Blessed Sacrament,
which we all of us in trouble know so well, because it is unlike
any other feeling. To the other there is no consolation now.
There is time for him still. Mary still prays, for she never ceases
while the fondest hope has any foothold left to which it can cling.
The living Jesus is not so far off but He can hear him if he cries.
But he has made his choice, and keeps to it. The life that remains
in him is every moment desecrating Calvary.
Crucifixion is a slow death, and includes many sorts of pain.
Among these is to be reckoned the breaking of the legs of the
sufferers, either to add to the torture already inflicted, now that
its duration has become wearisome and without interest to the
ministers of vindictive justice, or, by a sort of fierce mercy, to
hasten its termination. The executioners, therefore, approach
the top of Calvary thus to consummate the punishment of the
three whom they had crucified, armed with a strong hammer or

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heavy bar of iron, of such weight as speedily to fracture the limbs
when they are struck. It. was a fearful sound for Mary to hear
the dull crashing of the flesh and bone, and the agonizing f ries
of the miserable sufferers, one of them, too, the son of her second
motherhood, the firstborn of her prayers. But the words will not
tell the anguish with which she saw them approach the Body of
Jesus. Earth held nothing one-half so sacred. Dead as it was, it
was joined to the Divinity, and therefore was entitled to the
fullest honors of divine worship. One rude touch of it were an
appalling sacrilege; but to crush the limbs, to break the bones,
was a profaneness too horrible even for thought to dwell upon.
The thought was an intense grief to her religion. But her love,
was not it also concerned? It is true, life was gone but was the
lifeless Form less an object of her love than when beautiful life
had filled it? Let the hearts of those who have mourned their
dead reply. Never does love pour itself out in more soft sadness
over eyes bright with life than over those that are closed in death.
To the eye of love the pale face has become doubly beautiful.
The graces of old years have passed upon it. The intensity of its
unmeaning quiet has a charm of its own. The compressed lips
speak with a dumb eloquence which belongs to them. The cold
body has to satisfy two claims of love,—its own claim, and the
soul's; and it satisfies them well. We will call it "him.” not "it,"
because to fond love it is so really the person, the self, whom we
are loving. So mothers have wept over sons, from whose caresses
the dignity of great manhood has separated them for years: but
now the old times have come back, and the familiarities of child
hood, with more than its passive helplessness have come back, and
perhaps the old childish look as well, and grief feeds itself sweetly
out of the marble beauty of its dead. Who does not know this?
But if we common mourners, whose grief is so soon distracted,
can feel all this with such intensity, what must have been the
unspeakable love of Mary for the Body of her Son,—her Son.
who was God as well! She spoke not. Her voice broke not the
silence, mingled not with the moans of the dying thieves; but
the silence of her prayer was loud in heaven. The rude men

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saw that Jesus was dead, and desisted from their purpose. "These
things were done, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, You
shall not break a bone of Him."
But there was another Scripture also to be fulfilled, "They
shall look on Him whom they pierced.” Mary's prayer shall
cause the first Scripture to be fulfilled, but not that any sorrow
may spare the Mother’s Heart. It shall accomplish the word of
God: but it shall not spare the sacrilege. Truly this second Scrip
ture shall be one of Simeon’s swords. Whether it were from doubt
of our Lord's being really dead, or whether it were in the mere
wantonness of authority little used to give account of itself in
such times and places, one of the soldiers drew near, and drove his
spear into our Lord’s right side, across His Body, and through His
Sacred Heart, and immediately there issued forth from the sacri­
legious wound both Blood and Water, some of which, it is said,
sprang upon the limbs of the penitent thief as if it were an out­
ward baptism or a visible absolution where inward grace had
already accomplished its heavenly work. It were long to tell of
how much pathetic love this wound in our Saviour’s Heart was
the figure and the symbol. It has been the sweet contemplation
of countless saints. The spear has opened a home, a refuge, a
hermitage, in that Wounded Heart in which souls in all ages, in
these latter days especially, have nestled in all their sorrows and
trials, have renewed themselves in the weariness of their exile,
and have hidden themselves from the strife of tongues and from
an evil world. It is the very glory of devotion to the Precious
Blood that this wound of the Sacred Heart proves that our dearest
Lord shed every drop of His Blood for us. To us, therefore, for
these and many other reasons, the piercing of His Heart is one
of our greatest spiritual consolations. But we have to regard it
here as one of Mary’s chiefest sorrows.
There is something in the thought of our Blessed Lord’s
dead Body which overshadows the mind, and bends the soul down
in profoundest reverence. It hung there upon the Cross, in the
light of the March afternoon, white, with seams of dark blood
all over it, and disfigured with almost countless wounds. There

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was no object on earth so sacred as itself. It was worshipful
with the divinest worship. Throngs of invisible angels were
adoring all round. Yet, while it was adorable, it was helpless
also. It was as if the Blessed Sacrament had been left upon a
mountain-top over which there was a thoroughfare for men.
This object of divine worship was the property of the rulers,
who had just consummated the unutterable sin of the Cruci­
fixion. Practically speaking, it was in the power of base execu­
tioners to do what they would with it, certain that no ignominy
which they could work upon it would be reproved. There was
something very dreadful in a thing which was so sacred being
left in such insecurity, in such vicinity of evil, to such probability
of appalling outrage. The Mother was there, her heart full of
worship, but helpless as the Body itself. Were she to plead, her
pleading would but suggest sacrilege. It would but stimulate the
ruffian nature of those with whom she had to deal. But there it
hung upon the Cross,—anybody’s right, anybody’s property,
rather than hers, out of whose sweet blood the Holy Ghost had
made it. Two wretched criminals were writhing in their last
agonies on either side. The city was keeping feast below, and
preparing to commence its Sabbath-rest. That Victim-Body had
begun its Sabbath already. Its pain had ceased, and it was resting.
The executioners are returning. The Roman soldiers ride up and
down the mount. The relics of the execution must be cleared
away before the Sabbath begins. That Body does not belong to
the Cross. It belongs to an unimaginable supernal throne, at the
Right Hand of the Eternal Father. No one is here who knows
it but the silent Mother; and she is silent, because she has no
right to speak, and because her speaking would do harm. Oh,
how often in the world does God frighten us by this seeming
abandonment of Himself and of all He holds most dearl And it
appears as if it were the very strength of our love which made
our faith so weak. We fear most timorously for that which we
love most tenderly.
The love of God brings many new instincts into the heart.
Heavenly and noble as they are, they bear no resemblance to

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Illi

GROSS

what men would call the finer and more heroic developments of
character. A spiritual discernment is necessary to their right
appreciation. They are so unlike the growths of earth, that they
must expect to meet on earth with only suspicion, misunderstand­
ing, and dislike. It is not easy to defend them horn a contro­
versial point of view; for our controversy is obliged to begin by
begging the question, or else it would be unable so much as to
state its case. The axioms of the world pass current in the world,
the axioms of the gospel do not. Hence the world has its own
way. It talks us down. It tries us before tribunals where our
condemnation is secured beforehand. It appeals to principles
which are fundamental with most men but are heresies with us.
Hence its audience takes part with it against us. We are for
cigners, and must pay the penalty of being so. If we are misun­
derstood, we had no right to reckon on any thing else, being,
as we are, out of our own country. We are made to be laughed
at. We shall be understood in heaven. Woe to those easy-going
Christians whom the world can understand, and will tolerate,
because it sees they have a mind to compromise!
The love of souls is one of these instincts which the love ol
Jesus brings into our hearts. To the world it is proselytism, the
mere wish to add to a faction, one of the selfish developments
of party spirit. One while the stain of lax morality is affixed to it,
another while the reproach of pharisaic strictness! For what the
world seems to suspect least of all in religion is consistency. But
the love of souls, however apostolic, is always subordinate to love
of Jesus. We love souls because of Jesus, not Jesus because of
souls. Thus there are times and places when we pass from this
instinct of divine love to another, from the love of souls to the
hatred of heresy. This last is peculiarly offensive to the world.
So especially opposed is it to the spirit of the world, that, even
in good, believing hearts, every remnant of worldliness rises in
arms against this hatred of heresy, embittering the very gentlest
of characters, and spoiling many a glorious work of grace. Many
a convert, in whose soul God would have done grand things, goes
to his grave a spiritual failure, because he would not hate heresy.

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The heart which feels the slightest suspicion against the hatred
of heresy is not yet converted. God is far from reigning over
it yet with an undivided sovereignty. The paths of higher sanctity
are absolutely barred against it. In the judgment of the world,
and of worldly Christians, this hatred of heresy is exaggerated,
bitter, contrary to moderation, indiscreet, unreasonable, aiming
at too much, bigoted, intolerant, narrow, stupid, and immoral.
What can we say to defend it? Nothing which they can under­
stand. We had, therefore, better hold our peace. If we understand
God, and He understands us, it is not so very hard to go through
life suspected, misunderstood, and unpopular. The mild selfopinionatedness of the gentle, undiscerning good will also take
the world’s view and condemn us; for there is a meek-looking
positiveness about timid goodness which is far from God, and
the instincts of whose charity is more toward those who are less
for God, while its timidity is daring enough for a harsh judgment.
There are conversions where three-quarters of the heart stop
outside the Church and only a quarter enters, and heresy can
only be hated by an undivided heart. But if it is hard, it has to
be borne. A man can hardly have the full use of his senses who
is bent on proving to the world, God's enemy, that a thorough­
going catholic hatred of heresy is a right frame of mind. We
might as well force a blind man to judge on a question of color.
Divine love inspheres us in a different circle of life, motive,
and principle, which is not only not that of the world, but in
direct enmity with it. From a worldly point of view, the craters
in the moon are more explicable things than we Christians with
our supernatural instincts. From the hatred of heresy we get to
another of these instincts, the horror of sacrilege. The distress
caused by profane words seems to the world but an exaggerated
sentimentality. The penitential spirit of reparation which per
vades the whole Church is, on its view, either a superstition oi
an unreality. The perfect misery which an unhallowed touch of
the Blessed Sacrament causes to the servants of God provokes
either the world s anger or its derision. Men consider it either
altogether absurd in itself, or at any rate out of all proportion

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and, if otherwise they have proofs of our common sense, they
arc inclined to put down our unhappiness to sheer hypocrisy.
The very fact that they do not believe as we believe removes us
still further beyond the reach even of their charitable comprehen­
sion. If they do not believe in the very existence of our sacred
things, how shall they judge the excesses of a soul to which those
sacred things are far dearer than itself?
Now, it is important to bear all this in mind while we are
considering the sixth dolor. Mary’s heart was furnished, as never
heart of saint was yet, with these three instincts regarding souls,
heresy, and sacrilege. They were in her heart three grand abysses
of grace, out of which arose perpetually new capabilities of suf­
fering. Ordinarily speaking, the Passion tires us. It is a fatiguing
devotion. It is necessarily so because of the strain of soul which
it causes, as well by its horrors as by the profound adoration which
it is every moment eliciting. So when our Lord dies a feeling of
repose comes over us. For a moment we are tempted to think
that our Lady’s dolors ought to have ended there, and that the
sixth dolor and the seventh are almost of our own creation, and
that we tax our imagination in order to fill up the picture with
the requisite dark shading of sorrow. But this is only one of the
ways in which devotion to the dolors heightens and deepens our
devotion to the Passion. It is not our imagination that we tax,
but our spiritual discernment. In these two last dolors we are led
into greater refinements of woe, into the more abstruse delicacies
of grief, because we have got to deal with a soul rendered even
more wonderful than it was before by the elevations of the sor­
rows which have gone before. Thus, the piercing of our Lord
with the spear was to our Blessed Lady by far the most awful
sacrilege which it was then in man’s power to perpetrate upon
the earth. To break violently into the Holy of Holies in the
temple, and pollute its dread sanctity with all manner of heathen
defilement, would have been as nothing compared to the outrage
on the adorable Body of God. It is in vain that we try to lift
ourselves to a true appreciation of this horror in Mary’s heart.
Our love of God is wanting in keenness, our perceptions of divine

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things in fineness. We cannot do more than make approaches,
and they are terrible enough.
We have spoken already of mothers watching the deathbeds
of their sons. It is the form of human woe which comes most
naturally to us when we are with Mary upon Calvary. When
the long struggle is at last over, and the breaking heart has
acknowledged at least a kind of relief in the fact that the object
of her love has no more to suffer, when that same heart has taken
quiet possession of the beautiful dead form before it, as if it
were a sanctuary, almost a refuge from grief itself, would not the
least roughness, the least inconsiderateness, the most trivial dis­
honor to the dead body, be a new and fearful sorrow to the
mother? Is there a mother on earth who could bear to see with
her own eyes even the kindly hand of science, which she has
herself invoked, endeavoring to discover in what recess it was
that the mysterious ailment lodged itself which has now made her
childless? Would it not be as if she saw a hallowed object dese­
crated before her eyes? In the dire necessities of the pestilence,
with its swift burial and rough ministers and horrible dead-cart
and quicklime-pit, how much more terrible would the outrage be!
She still fills the lifeless figure with the life of her own love,
and before she has drunk her fill of love by gazing on it, before
the red blood has had time to curdle or the limbs to grow cold,
it is torn from her, as if it was not hers, by some stern officers,—
not the tenderest of their kind, for their office is the rudest, rude
even in the wise mercy it fulfills,—and is flung upon the dead­
cart, with a heap of other pest-stricken victims, and so borne
onward to a dishonorable grave, a promiscuous charnel-house.
And fresh grief is so tender, so raw, can so little bear handling!
Is it not fearful to think of? Yet it is as nothing to our Lady’s
agony when the Body of Jesus was outraged by the spear. It is
an immeasurably less sorrow in itself, and falls upon a heart
which, however sweet and meek and loving, is immeasurably
less capable of suffering than Mary’s was. But it is an approach
to Mary’s sorrow, and a shadow of it.
Let us rise higher still. A saint is at the altar, overwhelmed

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with the dread action which he is performing. His heart is fit to
break for love of God, of that Incarnate God who lies before
him on the corporal. Wild and sinful men break in upon him,
whether in popular tumult or from other cause. He is driven
off in his sacred vestments with violence, while he is clinging
to the altar as an animal clings to its young when they are
being torn from it. He sees the Blessed Sacrament flung upon
the ground, the Precious Blood streaming over the altar-steps,
and both the Body and the Blood trodden with scorn and blas­
phemy beneath the feet of the ruffian invaders. Because he is a
saint, the sight would kill him, did not God miraculously support
him. But the accumulated sorrows of a long life are nothing to
this. The vision of that hour has been burned in upon his soul
as by a fiery brand. Nothing of it will ever be forgotten. No
excesses of penance will be sufficient to satisfy his yearning appe­
tite for reparation. Years after, he will shudder in his prayer,
and the tears course swiftly down his cheeks, as he calls to mind
the boundless horror of that appalling sin. It is a sort of grief
beyond common griefs, a grief in a shrine, of which holy and
chosen souls only may participate. Yet what is it to Mary's sor­
row when she saw the spear touch the dead side, and the lifelike
movement the Body made as the Heart was pierced, and the pulse­
like throbbing with which the Blood and Water followed the
lance as it withdrew? As far as the saint is below Mary in sanc­
tity, so far is his grief inferior to hers. An angel told St. Bridget
that so tremendous was the shock to her, that she would have died
instantly, but for a miracle. A sword in her own heart would
have been a thousand times less dreadful.
It is strange how close to great sins great graces will often lie.
Longinus had sinned in ignorance of that which peculiarly aggra­
vated the horror of his act. Nevertheless, it was a cruel action,
and the more cruel if he knew that the mother was standing by.
Wantonness too was the less excusable in him, upon whom, if
tradition speaks truly, the hand of God was laid not lightly. He
is said to have been suffering from some disease of the eyes, which
threatened total blindness: and it may have been that his imper-

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feet sight did not allow him to be certain of the death of Jesus,
and that on that account he went beyond his commission, and
pierced the body with his lance. Some drops of the Blood fell
upon his face, and tradition tells that not only was the disease in
his eyes instantaneously cured and the full use of his sight re­
stored to him, but also, a still more wonderful miracle, the vision
of his soul was made bright and clear, and he at once confessed
the Divinity of Him whose Body he had thus dared to insult at
the risk of becoming in his own person the murderer of our
Blessed Lord. For, if he doubted of His death, he ran no less
a risk than that of slaying Him himself. No one will wonder
when Mary of Agreda tells them that, as with the penitent thief,
so with Longinus, the grace of conversion was the answer to
Mary s prayer. The very fact of his having been an instrument
to increase her sorrows would give him a special claim upon
her prayers.
Another small body of men is now approaching the summit
of Calvary, and from their fixed looks it is plain that Jesus is
the object of their coming. Is it some fresh outrage, some new
sorrow for Mary? It is a new sorrow for Mary, but no fresh out­
rage. It is Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, together with
their servants. Both of them were disciples of our Blessed Lord,
but secretly; for they were timid men. Joseph was “a counsellor,
a good and just man,” who had not ‘consented to the counsel
and doings” of the others, because he ‘‘himself looked for the
kingdom of God.” Nicodemus was a man learned in the Scrip­
tures, the same who had come to Jesus by night for fear of the
Jews, and had learned from Him the doctrine of regeneration.
Joseph had gone in to Pilate, to whom he probably had access
in his capacity as counsellor, and had begged the Body of Jesus,
which had been granted to him. He had then, as St. Matthew
tells us, got “a clean linen cloth” to wrap it in. and had called
on Nicodemus to accompany him to Calvary. Nicodemus, as St.
John tells us, brought with him "a mixture of myrrh and aloes,
about an hundred pound weight.” They also brought their
servants with them to assist. They approached our Blessed I.adv

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with the profoundest reverence and sympathy, told her what
they had done, and asked her permission to take the Body
down from the Cross. With hearts full of the tenderest devo­
tion to the dolors of the Immaculate Mother, they drew nigh
to the Cross, and made their preparations. They fixed the
ladder against the Cross. Joseph mounted first, and Nicodemus
after him. Mary, with John and Magdalen, remained immedi­
ately beneath them. It seemed as if some supernatural grace
issued forth from the Adorable Body, and encircled them round,
softening and subduing all their thoughts, making their hearts
burn with divine love, and hushing them in the deepest and
most thrilling adoration. Old times came back upon the Mother’s
heart, and the remembrance of the other Joseph, who had been
so often privileged to handle the limbs and touch the Sacred
Flesh of the Incarnate Word. It would have been his office
to have taken Jesus down from the Cross. But he was gone to
his rest, and one that bore his name supplied his place, and
it was both sweet and grievous to Mary that it should be so.
One Joseph had given Him his arms to lie in, the other should
give Him his own new monument to rest in; and both should
pass Him from their own arms to those of Mary. It is strange,
too, how often the timid are unexpectedly bold. These two
disciples, who had been afraid to confess their Master openly
when He lived, are now braving publicity when even apostles
remain within the shelter of their hiding-place. Happy twol
with what sweet familiarities and precious nearness to Himself
is not Jesus recompensing their pious service at this hour in
heavenl
With gentle hand, tremblingly bold, as if his natural timidity
had developed into supernatural reverence, Joseph touches the
crown of thorns, and delicately loosens it from the head on
which it was fixed, disentangles it from the matted hair, and,
without daring to kiss it, passes it to Nicodemus, who reaches it
to John, from whom Mary, sinking on her knees, receives it
with such devotion as no heart but hers could hold. Every
blood-stained spike seemed instinct with life, and went into her

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heart, tipped as it were with the Blood of her Son, inoculating
her more and more deeply with the spirit of His Passion. Who
can describe with what reverential touch, while the cold Body
was a furnace of heavenly love burning against his heart. Joseph
loosened the nails, so as not to crush or mutilate the blessed
Hands and Feet which they had pierced? It was so hard a task that
we are fain to believe angels helped him in it. Each nail was silently
passed down to Mary. They were strange graces, these which were
now flowing to her through the hands of her new son; yet, after all,
not so unlike the gifts which Jesus had Himself been giving her
these three-and-thirty years. Never yet had earth seen such a wor­
ship of sorrow as that with which the Mother bent over those mute
Telics, as they came down to her from the Cross, crusted too as
they were, perhaps wet, with that Precious Blood, which she
adored in its unbroken union with the Person of the Eternal
Word. But with what agony was all this worship accompanied,
what fresh wounds did not all these instruments of the Passion
make in her heart, what old ones did they not reopen!
But a greater grief was yet to come. The Body was detached
from the Cross. More and more thickly the angels gathered
round, while thrills of love pierced with ecstatic bliss their grand
intelligences. Mary is kneeling on the ground. Her fingers are
stained with Blood. She stretches the clean linen cloth over her
arms and holds them out to receive her Son, her Prodigal come
back to her again, and come back thus! And was He not a
Prodigal? Had He not wilfully gone out from her quiet home
into the wildest and rudest of worlds, leagues and leagues distant
from the purity and love of her spotless heart? Had He not
spent all His substance on companions, worthless and despicable?
Was it not a riotous spending, a riot of some eighteen hours’
duration? Had He not been prodigal of His Precious Blood, of
His beauty, His innocence, His life, His grace, His very Divinity?
And now He was coming back to her thus! Can such a sorrow,
such an accumulation of concentring sorrows, have any name?
Can she bear the weight? Which weight? The sorrow or the
Body? It matters not. She can bear them both. From above, the

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Body is slowly descending. She remembers the midnight-hour
when the Holy Ghost overshadowed her at Nazareth. Now it is
the Eternal Son who is so strangely overshadowing His kneeling
Mother. Joseph trembled under the weight, even while Nico­
demus helped him. Perhaps also it was not the weight only
which made him tremble. Wonderfully must grace have held
him up to do what he did. Now it is low enough for John to
touch the sacred Head, and receive it in his arms, that it might
not droop in that helpless rigid way; and Magdalen is holding up
the Feet. It is her old post. It is her post in heaven now, highest
of penitents, most beautiful of pardoned spirits! For one moment
Maty prostrates herself in an agony of speechless adoration, and
the next instant she has received the Body on her extended arms.
The babe of Bethlehem is back again in His Mother’s lap. What
a meeting! What a restoration! For a while she remains kneel­
ing, while John and Magdalen, Joseph and Nicodemus, and the
devout women, adore. Then she passes from the attitude of the
priest to the attitude of the mother. She rises from her knees,
still bearing the burden as lightly as when she fled with Him into
Egypt, and sits down upon the grass, with Jesus extended on
her lap.
With minutest fondness she smooths His hair. She does not
wash the Blood from off His Body. It is too precious; and soon
He will Avant it all, as well as that which is on men’s shoes, and
the payment of Jerusalem, and the olive roots of Gethsemane.
But she closes every wound, every mark of the lash, every puncture
of the thorns, with a mixture of myrrh and aloes, which Nico­
demus has brought. There was not a feature of His blessed
Countenance, not a mark upon His Sacred Flesh, which was
not at once a sorrow to her, and a very volume of profoundest
meditations. Her soul went through the Passions upon His
Body, as men trace their travels on a map. The very quietness
of her occupation, the very concentration of her undistracted
thoughts seemed to enable her to go deeper and deeper down
into His sufferings, and to compassionate them with a more in­
terior bitterness than before. In none of the earlier stages of

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her sorrow had there been more demand upon her to control
the common gestures and outbursts of grief, than when she sat
in the light of that spring evening with her Son's dead Body
on her lap, smoothing, anointing, and composing the countless
prints of shame and suffering which had been worn so deeply
into it. In vain for her were the birds trilling their even song,
the weight of the eclipse being taken off their blithe little hearts
In vain for her were the perfumes of the tender fig leaves rising
up in the cool air, and the buds bursting greenly, and the tender
shoots full of vernal beauty. Her grief was past nature s soothing
For her Flower had been cruelly gathered, and lay withered there
upon her knee.
She performed her task as an act of religion, with grave
assiduity, not delaying over it to satisfy the grief of which her
heart was full. The dead Body seemed as obedient to her as
ever the Babe had been in Bethlehem, obedient in all things
but one. She told St. Bridget that the extended arms could not
be closed, and laid by His side, or crossed upon His breast. We
ought rather to say they would not, than they could not, be closed.
He will not relinquish those outstretched arms, which seem to
invite the whole world into the utmost width of their embrace.
There was room for all within them, a harbor large enough for
all creation. If the lifting up of His Hands upon the Cross was
an ‘‘evening sacrifice” to the Eternal Father, the outstretching
of them was as it were a sacramental sign to men that none were
excluded from His invitation and His welcome. He would carry
with Him to the tomb the form and figure of one crucified; and
Mary understood why the arms were rigid, and forbore the gentle
violence she was about to use. He must be swathed in the winding
sheet in that shape as well as may be, preaching large, wide, wel
coming love even to the end. Mary must now take her last look
of that dead Face. Mothers live lives in their last looks. Who
shall tell what Mary's was like? Who would have been surprised
if the eyes of the Dead had opened, and His lips parted, under
the kindling and the quickening of that look? With heroic effort
she has bound the napkin around His Head, and has folded the

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winding-sheet over the sweet Face. And now there is darkness
indeed around her. The very dead Body had been a light and
a support. She has put out the light herself. Her own hands
have quenched the lamp, and she stands facing the thick night.
Oh, brave woman! Hours of ecstatic contemplation over that
silent-speaking Countenance would have passed like moments.
But it was a time for religion, not for the indulgence of her tender­
ness; and she pierced her own heart through and through with
the same hand with which she hid His Face. But, O Mary! thou
seest that Face now, and art drinking thy fill of its beauty, and
thou wilt do so for evermore, and never be satisfied, even when
always satisfied, happy, blessed Mother!
When we pass from the narrative of the sixth dolor to treat
of its peculiarities, we are struck at the outset by a characteristic
which runs all through it. It surrounds us perpetually with
images of the Sacred Infancy and of the Blessed Sacrament. The
Passion seems to sink out of view, as if it were a foundation only;
the superstructure is carved all over with symbols of Bethlehem
and the Altar. There is scarcely an action or attitude of Mary
in all the dolor, which does not bring to mind at once either the
old days of the Mother and the Child, or the coming days of the
Priest and the Host. When she kneels to receive the Body, and
remains kneeling with it in her arms for the others to adore,
when she ministers to it and with tender reverence manipulates
it, when care and responsibility for the Lord’s Body is the anxiety
of her heart, and her grief comes from the fear of sacrilege, we
cannot avoid having the Blessed Sacrament continually before
us. Her outward demeanor appears as if it were the model from
which the Church had drawn its rubrics for mass, benediction,
or procession. Her inward temper seems the ideal of those in­
terior dispositions which should belong to all good priests in
virtue of their being custodians of the Blessed Sacrament. In its
measure, the same prophetical forthshadowing of the worship of
the Blessed Sacrament is visible in the actions and gestures of
Joseph and Nicodemus, of John and Magdalen. Thus an entirely
new set of ideas comes in with this dolor. While it looks as if it

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were but the complement of the Crucifixion, and divisible from
it only by an imaginary line, we find its inward spirit, its ex­
amples, allusions, doctrine, and figures, to belong to an entirely
different region from that of the Passion. This reveals to us the
real distinction there is between this dolor and the two which
have preceded it. The mystical connection of the Blessed Sacra­
ment with the Sacred Infancy has been dwelt upon at length
elsewhere.* The Blessed Sacrament is as it were the real per­
petuation of His Infancy in memory of His Passion. Thus, in
the sixth dolor, it appears as if our l.ord had no sooner consum­
mated the work of His Passion than He at once began to shadow
forth that state in which it was His sweet will to abide with His
Church forever in the Sacrament of the Altar. From that instant,
the old images of Bethlehem rose up again, as if they had been
kept down by force for a while, and they return more determinately and plainly in the shape of forebodings of the Blessed
Sacrament. This is not so much a separate peculiarity of this
dolor, as its very soul and significance, running through every
feature of it, tincturing Mary’s dispositions under it, and giving
a special character to the lessons which it conveys to ourselves.
There is a peculiarity of this dolor, which it is impossible for
us fully to understand, but which must be borne in mind through­
out, because it indicates the greatest depth of sorrow which this
mystery reached in the soul of our Blessed Mother. It was the
withdrawal of the life of Jesus. She herself, perhaps did not know
till now how much it had supported her, nor how many offices
it had fulfilled toward her. For three-and-thirty years she had
lived upon His life. It had been her atmosphere. There had
been a kind of unity of life between them. Her heart had beaten
in His Heart. She had seen with His eyes, and had heard with
His ears, and had almost spoken with His lips and thought with
His thoughts, as she had done when she composed and sang the
Magnificat. Mother and son had never before been so fused into
each other. Two lives had never seemed so inseparably one life
as these two had done. And how shall one of them, and that the
Blessed Sacrament, book second.

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weaker and inferior, now stand alone? The sundering of body
and soul looks a less effectual separation than the dividing of
the life of Mary from the life of Jesus. Perhaps it was on this
account, to supply this mysterious want of the Human Life of
Jesus, that the species of the Blessed Sacrament remained in­
corrupt within her during the remainder of her life, from one
communion to another. We have sometimes seen mothers and
sons approximate to this unity of life, especially when the son
has been an only child, and the mother a widow. It has been
also in these cases, as with our Lady, that it is the mother’s life
which is drawn into the son’s, not the son's into the mother’s.
The sight of such a mother and son is one of the most pathetic
which earth can show; pathetic, because its roots have always
been, not in the palpable sunshine of overflowing happiness, but
in the unwitnessed depth of domestic sorrow. The grandeur of
its beauty has been in proportion to the fiery heat of that furnace
of agony in which the two lives had been melted into one. But,
when we looked, we have trembled to think how the inevitable
separation of death would ever be endured. Yet how faint a
shadow of Jesus and Mary are these filial and maternal unities
on earth!
In order, then, to understand the intolerable suffering which
the withdrawal of the life of Jesus caused in the heart of Mary,
we must know what His life had been to hers throughout. But
this is not within the reach of our comprehension. We can but
guess at it, and calculate it, and then be sure that the reality has
far outrun our boldest calculations. Yet, here, also, the annals
of human sorrow help us by comparison. Who has not known
instances of that perfection of conjugal love when husband
and wife have so lived into each other that the life of one is
apparently imbedded in the life of the other? Each has borne
the other’s cares. Heart has leaned on heart, and they have
throbbed together in one pulse. They have used even each
other’s senses with such an affectionately borrowed use, that we
have sometimes been fain to smile at such simplicity and de­
pendency of love. Voice, expression, gesture, gait, manner, and

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a thousand little nameless ways, have been only the outward
disclosure of the intense unity of love within. Long years have
formed habits which it would seem downright death to break.
The checkered experiences of life, with their dark and bright,
their tears and smiles, their losses and their compensations,
have still more effectually moulded those two hearts into one.
The two personalities are confused; God alone sees them clear
and distinct, each in its own sphere of praise and blame, of
merit and demerit, in His account. Death comes. There is
not a power in nature but inexorable death which would dare
to rend asunder so exquisitely delicate a union. And what has
been the consequence? It has become plain that there was
almost a physical reality in this oneness of two loving lives.
For, now that one is left alone, the stream can hardly Row. It
shrinks and runs dry, like a fountain in the summer. It is not
self-sufficing. It cannot feed itself. The one spring cannot do
the work of the two. The survivor is unable to face life. His
mind succumbs distracted under the least burden. It is not
merely that one-half of his strength is gone. It is something
more than that. He is truly as feeble and faint as a man bleeding
to death; but he is incomplete also. He has no front to present
to the common tide of daily life, and breast it as it comes. No
matter how calmly life may flow, it is too much for him. He
droops, and pines, and dies in as many months as physical decay
may require; and his death is not so much a death in itself as
a part and completion of that other death. The lives were one,
the deaths are one also. Who has not seen this? But we do not
mourn over it. It is best and completest as it is. Here, also, we
have but a partial shadow of the union of Jesus and Mary; yet
it helps us to see what an overwhelming sorrow to her sensitive
heart must have been the cessation of the life of Jesus. It was
the deepest depth to which the sixth dolor reached.
Another peculiarity of this dolor is the reappearance of
responsibility, which formed so weighty a part of the third, but
had not come to view at all during the fourth or fifth. It is
Mary's feeling of responsibility about His Sacred Body, now

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that it had reverted to more than the original helplessness of
childhood. No one understands the adorableness of that Body
as she does. Who is to care for it but herself? And she also is
helpless. It is the same feeling which pervades the whole Church
with regard to the Blessed Sacrament. In the Church, if it is a
feeling of anxiety, it is also a feeling of amazing joy. But with
Mar)’ it was a manifold sorrow. In the midst of sorrow re­
sponsibility is itself a new sorrow. Yet it is one of the provi­
dential laws of grief that it almost always brings new responsi­
bilities to view, and just when we seem least capable of rightly
discharging them. Grief is one of those things which concen­
trate, yet do not simplify, as most concentrations do. It is a
perplexity rather than a light. It gives us more to do rather
than less to do. A man in great grief has less leisure than any
other man on earth. Nothing thickens life so much as sorrow.
Nothing precipitates the great work of experience as it does.
Nothing endows our nature with more magnificent accessions
of power. A life of joy is, for the most part, thin and shallow.
Few heroisms can be manufactured out of gladness, though it
also has its sunny depths which are full of God. But sorrow is
the making of saints, the very process of the transmutation of
drossy earth into purest heaven. This is why God seems to bear
so hard upon us in sorrow. His wisdom makes His love cruel.
These unendurable new responsibilities, whose apparently in­
opportune advent in seasons of grief is so depressing, are almost
His choicest gifts. There is a crisis of life, perhaps, in every
one of them. But our Lady's responsibility for our Lord’s Body
was also a grief to her because of the circumstances of the time
and place. Violence and cruelty reigned supreme. Savage execu­
tioners and ruffian soldiers were the kings of Calvary. The
chances of outrage and defilement were hardly chances. To
human calculation they were inevitable necessities. The break­
ing of the legs, the spear of Longinus, the hurry to get every
thing cleared away for the beginning of the Sabbath, the
malice of the Jews, the way in which Pilate had truckled to
them, the ordinary lot of the bodies of those whom justice had

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put to death, the very convenience of the Golgotha where the
crosses were erected, the fact that there were three bodies to
dispose of, and not one only,—all these things were so many
terrific risks which the inviolate safety of that adorable Deposit
which was in Mary’s care had now to run. Furthermore, her
responsibility was in a third way a grief, because of the sense
of utter helplessness which came along with it. What could
she do? How was it in her power to stave off, or even to divert
into another channel, any one of these numerous, ill-boding
consequences which were pressing upon her? And yet the con­
sequences of a failure were too appalling to contemplate. Even
to our thoughts in quiet meditation there is something almost
more shocking in the idea of the Dead Body of Jesus in the
polluted hands of those fierce men than the dear and living
Lord Himself. We shudder at the possibility. What, then, must
have been the agony of Mary’s adoring heart, to which these
horrors were visible and imminent, with the feeling that the
care was hers, and the knowledge that she was helpless as the
merest mother of an odious criminal could be,—nay, all things
considered, even more helpless, for her claims would have pro­
voked insult where those of the common mother would have
elicited compassion.
Out of this responsibility came again the misery of terror.
It was a new kind of terror, the dread of sacrilege. No observant
person—and love makes all of us observant—can avoid being
struck with the part which terror plays in the dolors of our
Blessed Mother. It comes out strongly as almost a universal
characteristic of them. In treating of the second dolor we have
seen what a huge aggravation of sorrow fear always is. Let us
try now to conjecture why it is that fear fulfills so prominent an
office in Mary's griefs. In the first place, it may have been as
an especial trial to that which was her especial grace, tranquility.
This tranquility, as we have already seen, is an essential element
in the true idea of Mary. It is not perhaps so much a distinct
grace, as the firmament, most rightly named a firmament, in
which her purity, humility, and generosity were set to shine.

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In each of her sorrows—and lhe same remark is applicable to
her joys as well—there was always something peculiarly trying
to her tranquility, from the Annunciation to the Descent of the
Holy Ghost, something, which by its suddenness, or its vehe­
mence, or its horror, or its exultation, or its strain upon human
nature, was especially likely to disturb her inward peace, and
to ruffle and arrest for a moment the calm onward majesty of
her queenlike repose. But fear is, of all things, the most op­
posed to tranquility: and hence those varieties of terror, which
we have discovered in her dolors, sometimes looming in the
distance, sometimes frowning close at hand, now visible upon
the surface, now working underneath in the recesses of her
heart, may have been sent to try, and by trying to perfect and
enhance, her heavenly tranquility. In the second place, it was
necessary that such immense sanctity as that of our Blessed
Lady should be tested by trials in proportion to its grandeur.
Now several distinct worlds of the most grievous temptations
were impossible in her case, because of her gift of original
justice, while the consummate sensibilities of her beautiful and
delicate nature would make terror a most agonizing trial to her,
just as Jesus “began to fear and be heavy" when the Crucifixion
of His Soul was reaching its highest point in the garden of
Gethsemane. Thus, in her case, terror may have had to con­
dense within itself the energies, properties, and pains of in­
numerable temptations, and to accomplish in her the ends which
it was not permitted those other things to try, because of her
utter sinlessness. Such we may reverently conjecture might be
the reason of the amount of terror in our Lady’s sorrows; but
whatever becomes of the explanation, the fact is one of which
we must never lose sight, if we would form a true idea of what
she suffered.
But responsibility does not bring out fear only; it brings out
loneliness also. We may be alone in the world, without know­
ing how much we are alone. Our kindred may have failed us,
and the bond which unites us to those immediately around us
may be formed of far frailer materials than the blood of rela­

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tionship. But we arc well and strong. Life as yet is sparing
us its worst. We feel tolerably sufficient for ourselves. In a
beautiful place, on a fine day, in perfect health, the feeling of
solitude is little more than poetry. But sorrow comes,—not to
strip us of our domestic world,—that has lain long unpeopled,
a wistful, weary blank; but it comes to show us that we are
stripped, and makes us feel the dreariness of being alone. Alone
too, perhaps, without Cain’s consolation, of being able to wan­
der. Then, when new responsibilities supervene on recent sor­
row, the sentiment of our desolation is complete. We want
some one every moment. We wait, but they do not come. It is
a lolly to wait; they cannot come who ought to come. We know
it; nevertheless we wait. There are voices which ought to speak
to us now in counsel as of old, but they are mute. There were
arms we used to lean upon: and we feel for them in the dark­
ness, and they are not there. Every moment a fresh want knocks
at the grave of something which has long been buried, and the
heart sinks at the hollow echoes which the knocking wakes.
And all this is the worse to bear, because it is so deep down in
the unpeopled hollows of the soul. We are alone. The fact is
old and familiar; but the feeling is new and terrible. Thus
loneliness was part of this sixth dolor. It was not utter loneli­
ness yet. That point had to be reached in the seventh sorrow.
But it began in this. When the Soul of Jesus left her, die world
seemed a most awful solitude. Her feeling of responsibility
about His Body deepened this sense of loneliness until it ached.
Deeper down, and with more anguish, it penetrated together
with her sense of helplessness, and deeper still was it carried, as
by swift piercing shafts, by her terror lest some sacrilege should
be committed. She was fearfully alone, and yet had to diffuse
herself into those around her to be their comfort and support.
As the life of Jesus had been her life, so was hers now the life
of Magdalen and John. But she was not utterly alone. She had
the Body still. Dead as it was, it was marvellous companionship.
Dead as it was, it was like no other Body, for it was still united
to a living and eternal Person. It was not a relic, such as love

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clings to and weeps over. It was a sanctity for worship and
adoration. The loneliness therefore could not yet be desola­
tion. But, such as it was, it was a weight of grief which no soul
but Mary's could have borne.
It was also a peculiarity of the suffering of this dolor, that it
consisted in prostration rather than in agony. It followed im­
mediately upon the exhausting scene of the Passion. It came
upon a nature, which of itself was on the point of dying from
the excruciating severity of its martyrdom, and whose miracu­
lous support never allowed itself to be felt in the shape of
refreshment or sensible consolation. The Hand that held her
up was a hidden support, like that which the Divine Nature
ministered to the Human in our Blessed Lord during the Passion.
Thus, naturally, Mary felt every moment as if she had reached
the ultimate term of endurance. It had worn her soul through,
and the next pressure would be death. She felt in her soul the
unrestful aching which overfatigue produces in the body. Her
spirit was fatigued to death, not in a figure of speech, but in
literal truth. Life was become a sensible burden, as if it were
external to herself. She supported it; it did not support her.
This exhaustion was more harassing than pain, more distressing
than sharp suffering would have been. It was a collapse after
the rack, bringing no relief, because the cessation of pain is
not sensible when one is utterly crushed. We have got what is
like a new being, capable of suffering quite in a different way.
Yet this trial also her tranquility bore unshaken. It did not
become stupid, passive, inert, as the victims of cruelty sometimes
are under torture. It did not perform the duties which came
to it with the feverish energy and impatient precipitation com­
mon to fatigue. It was a broken-hearted peace, but also gentle,
collected, considerate, unselfish, full of majesty, and working
with the noiseless promptitude and slow assiduity which always
betokens the presence of God within the soul. As at the Cruci­
fixion she stood three hours beneath the Cross, so now she knelt
and held the heavy Burden on her outstretched arms, with the
same becoming and unforward bravery. Never was any soul so

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prostrate as Mary s in this sixth dolor, never was any so upright
in its prostration. But do we not stand cold and trembling on
the shores of such an icy sea of sorrow?
In such a state kindness was unkind, not in its intention,
but in its effect. Thus, when Joseph and Nicodemus, John and
Magdalen, gathered quietly round her, as she was composing
and embalming the Body, their very kindness somehow brought
out the loss of the compassion of Jesus. When she stood under
the Cross, she had not thought about herself. She was com­
passionating Him. She considered only the sorrow her sorrow
was to Him, not the compassion toward herself which it was
causing in His Soul. But she discovered now how great a sup­
port that compassion had been to her all the while. Like all
divine operations, she saw it more plainly notv that it was past;
and it rose up in gushing memories which were full as much
kindlings of sorrow as of joy. He was gone who alone could
understand her heart. He Himself had overwhelmed her with
grief by the implied comparison between Himself and John
when He had given her the apostle for her son in His stead.
And now the gentle sweetness, the graceful tenderness of loving
sorrow and filial compassion, which John was showing, while
it filled her heart with love of his virgin soul, awoke memories
against its will, and instituted comparisons, in spite of itself,
which filled her with sadness, and with that sorrowful feeling
which is regret in us, but which could not be so in her, because
there is something in the holiest regret which does not alto­
gether square with the will of God. Besides which, the past
reflected itself in all those kind faces round. John was in the
place of Jesus, and he was like Him, too, as true friends always
are to their friends. Jesus was mirrored in the eyes of the
sorrowful enthusiast Magdalen, and Mary saw Him there. None
could be so high in grace as that seraphic penitent, and not
resemble, even in their lineaments, the Bridegroom of their
souls. Joseph had come to life again in him of Arimathea, and
was standing where Joseph had so often stood, close by the lap
on which Jesus lay, looking, as Joseph looked, at Him. and not

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at her. Nicodemus, too, with his myrrh and aloes, had renewed
the offering of the Three Kings, no longer in prophecy, but
when the spices were needed for His burial. And, while Mary
herself anointed Him, she did not forget how Magdalen had
anointed His Feet already "against the day of His burial." And
in the midst of them was Jesus Dead. A very cloud of sorrowful
remembrances rose up from the group and enveloped the soul
of Mary in pathetic shadows.
Indeed, there was altogether a quiet intensity about this
dolor, which was suitable to a state of prostration, and which
contrasted visibly with the more active and changeful endurance
of many of the sorrows past. It was the first dolor, which had
been running in a subterranean channel under al) the others,
which was now coming to the surface again, with its lifelong
volume of sorrow, undistracted, unimpetuous, in self-collected
simplicity of suffering. This prostration is as if it were simply
that old, lifelong sorrow risen to its natural high-tide and paus­
ing for an instant before it ebbed. It had all the Three-andThirty Years in it. It joined the Infancy with the Passion, and
confused in beautiful, orderly confusion Bethlehem and Calvary
together, and the life Jesus lived on earth in His visible Flesh
with the life He leads there now in the invisible Flesh and Blood
of His adorable Sacrament. Nay, the Infancy and the Passion
are both actually present in that scene, visible to the eye, pal­
pable to the touch, bound together in the one divine mystery
of that Body lying over the Mother’s lap. There was the Passion
written, engraven, or rather deeply sculptured, on those limbs.
Every sin had fiercely inscribed its own reparation there. From
the Head to the Feet, from the Feet to the Head, the Way of
the Cross was winding up and down. Each Station had left its
mark, its dread memorial, its noticeable wound. Every mystery
was represented there. And Mary’s ardent contemplations fitted
every' mark with life, put a piteous voice into every wound, and
kindled over again in her scathed and bleeding heart those fires
of human cruelty which had burnt themselves out from very
violence even before death had withdrawn their Victim beyond

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their reach. But the Infancy was there as well. The Child was
on His Mother's knee. That other Joseph was standing by.
Those maternal ministries were all such as beseemed a child in
its uncomplaining helplessness. There was the old gracefulness
of the Mother’s ways, as she parted His hair, and smoothed His
limbs, and swathed Him again in His last swaddling-clothes
Her sorrow now was the counterpart of the old joys; nay, rather
it was the continuation and completion of the old sorrows. In
Bethlehem, in Egypt, at Nazareth, she had long foreseen this
hour. And now it was come. She was down in unfathomable
depths of woe, where the eye can hardly reach her; but it is
visibly the same Mother, indubitably the same Child. This is
her payment for the old nursing. Strange payment! but it is
God’s way, and she, if any one, understands it well. Alas! to
us the beauty of the sorrow almost distracts us from its bitterness!
Such were the peculiarities of the sixth dolor. Foremost
among the dispositions of Mary's soul in her endurance of it
we must reckon the calm clearness with which she saw and
followed the will of God through the darkness of her sorrow.
Grief indulged troubles the vision of faith. It is because we
give way to the tenderness of nature that we are so backward
in discerning the will of God, and so stupid in interpreting its
meaning. When a mourner calls God's way inscrutable in his
affliction, it is the result of a pardonable dimming of his faith s
lustre. Pardonable, because we are so weak, and none knows
our weakness so well as God. God’s ways are, for the most part,
inscrutable in joy; inscrutable above all to us, who know what
we are, and what we deserve. But they are seldom inscrutable
in sorrow. Sorrow is God's plainest time. Never are the clouds
which curtain His throne put so far back as they are then. Λ
grief quietly considered, is generally a revelation. But to the
most moderate self-knowledge how can it be a mystery? We are
always startled afresh with the wonders of the Passion, though
we have known them from our childhood. But Mary' found
nothing strange even in the tremendous realities present to her
and almost crushing the life out of her. Her eve was single

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It looked out only for God's will; and that will always came at
the right time and in the right place. It is faith's peculiar habit
to see what we may call the naturalness of God’s will. To faith
it always seems so fitting, we cannot conceive what else could
suitably have happened, except the very thing which has hap­
pened. It almost seems strange that we did not prophesy it
beforehand. We see all this wonderfully illustrated in the lives
of many of the saints, but never so wonderfully as in our Blessed
Lady. The most exacting, the most uncommon, the most ap­
parently unseasonable, will of God always finds her prepared,
just as if it was an orbit traced by a law which she knew before­
hand, so that she had nothing to do but to glide in it like a
star in its proper heaven. This was the reason why no time
was lost, no grace uncorresponded to, no grace to which the
correspondence was not generous and prompt. The will of God
was her sole mystical theology. It was her compendious way to
that perfection for which the abstrusest mystical theology can
find no name.
Another disposition, which was admirably exhibited in this
dolor, was her union of reverence with familiarity. There is no
truer index of union with God than this. It can only come out
of great holiness. No rules can be laid down for it, just as no
precise rules can be laid down for good manners. It is an in­
stinct, or what we call breeding, or an inborn delicacy, which
enables a man to comport himself faultlessly. So is it heavenly
breeding, an instinct of the Holy Ghost, a refinement of high
and unusual grace, which enables a man to unite familiarity and
reverence in His dealings with the Most High. It cannot be
learned. The utmost which can be taught is to avoid a famili­
arity to which in our low estate we have no right. We must be
long conversant with God's love and long conversant with our
own nothingness, before the first indications of this choice and
beautiful grace will be discerned upon the surface of our con­
duct. But what a model of it is our Blessed Mother embalming
the Body of her Sonl We can tell how dear to her is that Body,
even though she gives way to no outward gesture of endearment.

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We can tell how sacred it is, though there is no visible display
of worship. We could almost divine it was the Body of God
from the very undemonstrative self-collection of her demeanor,
so completely does it blend that familiarity and reverence which
belong only to an object of adoration. See her face, watch her
fingers, sound her heart; it is all one grace playing everywhere!
Yet there are few lessons in the world of the Incarnation deeper
than these,—that Mary knew that Jesus was God, and yet dared
to use the rights of maternal tenderness toward Him, and that
she lived with Him as her Son for Three-and-Thirty Years in
the most amazing intercourse of familiar love, and yet never for
one moment either forgot that He was God or forgot what was
due to Him as God. Out of these two truths alone must we
perforce build a pedestal for our Lady, whose top shall be far
above out of our sight; and where then shall she be who is to
be raised thereon?
We must note also her spirit of studious, minute, and special
reparation. Not the love of all possible worlds would be enough
to pay Jesus back for the least pain He suffered for us, or for
one single drop of the copious streams of Blood which He
vouchsafed to shed. As God, the least of His humiliations is
utterly beyond the reach of our compensations. The saints in
all ages have marvellously loved and adored His Passion, and by
supernatural penances and in mystical conformities have imi­
tated its dread mysteries. Yet all their love together came not
so nigh a just reparation to Him, as the worship of Mary while
she prepared Him for the grave. The near sight of what He
had really endured was something quite different from her
presence at the Passion, while its various mysteries were being
enacted at some distance from her. It took her down into the
depths of the Passion, close to our Lord Himself, and whither
no contemplative has ever penetrated. Her science and her
Mother’s heart combined to read and interpret those fearful
documents, which were written within and without His Body,
like Ezekiel's book, "lamentations, and canticles, and woes," as
neither angel nor saint could interpret them. Ever as her fingers

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moved with the embalming, acts ot worship and reparatory love
out of the interior magnificences of her soul went along with
them. She saw the number and the weight and the kind and
the aggravation of all those sins, which found there their proper
and distinct expiations; and for each and all she made the most
wonderful reparations. This spirit of reparation is one of the
instincts of divine love. While the angels by our sides perform
their ministries of vigilant affection, they never cease beholding
God. So in like manner the servants of God go forth into the
world in search of God’s outraged glory, to make reparation for
it, while in the mean time they never stir out of that abiding
sense of their own sinfulness, which is the atmosphere of true
humility. But Mary had no sense of sin, and her humility was
more deeply rooted than that of St. Michael himself, the most
zealous of the angels, because he was also the most humble. The
reparations of Mary therefore were in a sphere by themselves.
The saints are in a measure expiating their own sins, even while
they arc expiating the sins of others. But Mary’s reparations
were the worship of a sinless creature. As Christ satisfied for us,
because we could not satisfy for ourselves, so Mary worshipped
His Passion for us as well as for herself, because we are unable
to do it worthily ourselves, and she is our mother, and, by our
Lord's own gift, what is hers is in some most real sense ours
also. It was not time for reparation until now. Its natural place
is in the sixth dolor, when the work of cruelty has ceased, and
the huge world-sin has been consummated. Where complaint,
or virtuous indignation, or loud appeals to divine justice, would
have come in others, there came in Mary a busy, silent, tender
reparation. Oh, it is a joy to think that, if our sins were in the
lashes of the scourge and the spikes of the thorny crown, our
hands also were in our Mother’s hands, composing and embalm­
ing the Body of our Saviour, and filling in as if with posthumous
healing those deep-red hieroglyphics which sin had left thereon!
We have already spoken of the preseverance of our Lady's
tranquility through the varying phases of her martyrdom. But
we must not omit to enumerate it here among the heroic dis­

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positions in which she endured her sixth dolor. It is by far the
most wonderful thing about the interior life of her soul, so far
at least as we are allowed to see into it. There seems to be no
height of holiness which may not be predicated of such a mar
vêlions tranquility. It is a token, not so much of a process of
sanctification still going on, as of the deification of a human
soul completed. It comes nearest of all graces to the denial of
created imperfections. Inequality, surprise, mutability, incon­
sistency, hesitation, doubt, vacillation, failure, astonishment,
these are all what might be called in geological language the
faults in created sanctity. They are the imprints which human
infirmity has left upon the work before it was set and hardened.
They are the marks of catastrophe, which is itself a mark of
feebleness. From all these, so far as we can see, our Lady's in­
comparable tranquility preserved her. To her there seems to
have been communicated some portion of that peace of God
which Scripture says "surpasseth all understanding,” and whose
special office toward ourselves is "to keep our hearts and minds
in Christ Jesus." No one thing explains so much of our Blessed
Lady's grandeur as this heavenly calm. Apparent exaggerations
find their place, their meaning, and their connection, when they
are viewed in the light of this tranquility. Graces, which sound
impossible when stated by themselves, settle down in this tran­
quility, disclosed distinctly by its light, and at the same time
softened and made natural by its beauty. The Heart of Jesus
alone can read the riddle of Mary aright; but this dovelike
peace, this almost divinely pacific spirit, is the nearest reading
of the riddle of her immense holiness to which we can attain.
It is as if God had clothed her with His attribute of mercy for
our sakes, with His attribute of peace for her own.
We learn two lessons for ourselves in this sixth dolor. Our
Lady is at once a model to us of devotion to the Blessed Sacra­
ment, and a model also of behavior in time of grief. We have
already seen how allusions to the Blessed Sacrament Hit before
us continually in this dolor. From Mary's demeanor we may
now gather what our own devotion to that dread mystery ought

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to be. For the sixth dolor is as it were perpetuated in the Church
until the end of time. As our Blessed Lord is daily offered in
the Mass, and the selfsame sacrifice of Calvary continued and
renewed without intermission day and night around the world,
so are Mary’s ministries to His mute yet adorable Body going
on unceasingly upon thousands of Christian altars and by the
hands of thousands of Christian priests. Yet, as is ever the case
with diose things which we have from Jesus and Mary, what
was intense bitterness to her, to us is exultation, privilege, and
love. When she had gently laid aside the crown and nails, as
precious relics, with what profound reverence did she kneel to
receive the Body of her Son! It was not the attitude of a mother
toward a son, but rather of the creature toward the Creator.
She adored it with divine worship. She held it in her arms
until the rest had adored it also. Her rights as a Mother were
merged in her service as a creature. Yet the Blessed Sacrament
is the living Jesus, Soul as well as Body, Godhead as well as
Humanity. Worshipful as was His dead Body, because of its
unbroken union with the Person of the Eternal Word, the
Blessed Sacrament, if it were possible, demands of us a worship
more full and dread, more self-abasing, more profound. We
have no Mother's rights. We are not, like Joseph of Arimathea,
doing Jesus a service by ministering to His Body. The obliga­
tion is all on our side. He has come down again from heaven
to us. We are not gone up to the Cross to take Him down. With
what immense reverence, then, ought we not to worship this
divine Sacrament! Our preparation for Communion should be
full of the grand spirit of adoration. Our act of receiving should
be a silent act of holy eager fear and breathless worship. In
our thanksgiving we ought to be lost in the grandeurs of His
condescension, and not too soon begin to ask for graces, until
we have prostrated ourselves before that living Incarnate God
who at that moment has so wonderfully enshrined Himself
within us. We should behave at Mass as, with all our present
faith and knowledge, we should have behaved on Calvary. At
Benediction, and when praying before the Tabernacle, the

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Blessed Sacrament should breed in us continually a spirit of
unresting adoration, unresting as that incessant cry which the
astonished Seraphim and Cherubim are continually uttering at
the sight of the unimaginable holiness of God.
To this reverence we must add tranquility, or, rather, out
of this reverence will come tranquility. The spirit of worship
is a spirit of quietness. We must not disquiet ourselves in order
to deepen our reverence. We must not disturb ourselves by
making efforts. We must gently submit ourselves to be over­
ruled, constrained, and gradually calmed by the present majesty
of God. Neither must we look into our own souls to see if we
are worshipping, nor make any other reflex acts upon the proc­
esses which are going on within us. Under the pretence of
keeping up our attention, all this is but so much occupation
with self, and so much distraction from the presence of Jesus.
Hence it is that so many Communions bring forth so little fruit.
It is from the want of quietness. An unprepared Communion
can hardly ever be a quiet one. The very object of the prepara­
tion is to clear our hearts of the worldly images which possess
them, and which, if not expelled beforehand, will become im­
portunate distractions at the very moment when adoration should
rule within us tranquil and alone. Hence also it is that the best
preparation for the Blessed Sacrament consists by no means in
endeavoring to stimulate our affections by devout considerations,
in order to warm our cold hearts and raise our fervor to a proper
pitch. In truth, it is not in our power to do so. For the ardor,
or the seeming ardor, which we produce, is unnatural because
it is violent, and so it is not only short-lived, but it is followed
by a reaction proportioned to the efforts we have made. A feeble
fire is extinguished by the bellows, and even where it is blown
up into a noisy crackling flame, it bums black and dull for long
afterward, when the artificial blast has ceased to play. The best
preparation is that which is rather of a negative character, and
which consists in emptying ourselves of self, so far as may be,—
in banishing distractions, in realizing our own needs and poverty
and nothingness and malice, and so coming to Jesus in the same

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fooi

01 hie cross

temper that the humble sufferers came to Him in the Gospel to
be healed of their diseases. Whatsoever is empty and unoccupied
in our hearts He will fill when He enters there. Hence the more
room there is for Him the more grace will there be for us. A
quiet Communion with but little sensible fervor is a far deeper
thing than a Communion which thrills through us with a
pleasant agitation of great thoughts. Tranquility is thrilling also,
but it is so in a higher and more supernatural way. The prepara­
tion of peace is the best adornment of the heart in which we are
to hide the Blessed Sacrament; for the presence of Jesus is itself
peace, and works greater things where it finds peace already and
has not to lose time by making room for itself and expelling
intrusive images.
It is out of peace that love will come, such burning yet such
humble love as becomes the worship of the Blessed Sacrament.
Our reverence cannot have been right at the first if love does not
follow. When fear, and shrinking, and avoidance comes to souls
with regard to the Blessed Sacrament, it is not so much the want
of love to which we must look as the want of reverence. Rever­
ence infallibly provides for love. But the love of the Blessed
Sacrament must be a growth of inward peace and spiritual tran­
quility. Very often we love less than we should love if we made
less effort to love. Our faith tells us such overwhelming things
of this divine mystery, that it seems a shame, almost a sin, that
we are not burning with sensible love all the day long. Jesus
Himself so near, so accessible, so intimately uniting Himself to
us, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Calvary actually here, and we so cold,
so moderate, so commonplace! Surely we ought to be burnt up
as with the fires of the Seraphim. It is true. Yet for all that we
cannot force ourselves. It is better to turn our vexation into
self-hatred and self-contempt than to try to create an interior
vehemence, which, after all, is a different thing from divine love.
The love of the Blessed Sacrament is daily and lifelong. Surely
it is not likely that such a love should be always, or even most
often, sensible. Do we go to Mass on week-days at our own in
convenience? Are we punctual and reverential in our daily visit

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to the Blessed Sacrament? Do we hear Mass with devout atten­
tion? Are our preparations for Communion and our thanksgiv­
ing after it among those actions which we practically confess to
rank as the most important of our lives? Do we give up exercise,
pleasure, visiting, study, and the like, or at least interrupt them,
to go to Benediction when it is in our power? These are better
proofs of an acceptable love of the Blessed Sacrament than the
warmest transports or the most glowing heat in our hearts. Per­
severance is the real divine heat in our hearts.
But out of love must come familiarity. Yet, as the love itself
comes out of reverence, the familiarity must be of a peculiar and
noticeable kind. It must have nothing in it of forwardness, of
presumption, of carelessness, of indifference, or even of freedom.
It implies a spirit accustomed to the divine visitations, and, there­
fore, not taken unawares by them, nor flurried, nor excited, nor
discomposed, nor forgetful of proprieties. Some ecclesiastics are
well versed in the sweet science of the rubrics and ceremonial of the
Church, so that, if they are suddenly called upon to take part in
some great function, they are not confused or oblivious. They
know what to do. They fall into their places naturally. They are
parts of a whole, and do not cause disturbance on either side of
them by ignorance or precipitation. They are slow and yet ready,
calm and yet interested, dignified and yet bashful. Their greatest
praise is that they go through the ceremonial in such a natural
and unaffected way, that men for the most part do not notice
how well they have fulfilled their office, and how completely they
are at home in the rubrics of the function. This is an illustra­
tion of spiritual familiarity. It is at home with God, not in the
sense of ease and freedom, but in the sense of understanding its
part, of receiving Him with the proper honors, of calmly and
mindfully fulfilling all the ceremonial which His presence re­
quires, and so practically of forgetting self, because there is no
need to remember it, and of being occupied reverently, and lov­
ingly, and tranquilly with Him only. This is the true idea of
holy familiarity; and when we consider how frequent and how
common Mass, Communion. Benediction, and Visit are. we shall

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see at once how essential an element it is in our devotion to the
Blessed Sacrament. Mary was never but once at the deposition
from the Cross; and yet with what beautiful familiarity did all
her ministries to the Sacred Body take their place, as if they were
daily occurrences among the maternal offices of Bethlehem and
Nazareth!
Then, last ol all, a continual spirit of reparation must preside
overall our devotion, a reparation which is the immediate growth
of familiarity, or rather which is the loving familiarity itself, with
its eye resting on the reverence out of which all our devotion
springs. To the devout mind Jesus habitually presents Himself
as one who has not got His rights. He is injured and wronged
with every heightening circumstance of pathetic injustice. There
is no time when love pours itself out from the deepest and purest
fountains of the heart with more self-abandonment than when
the object of our love has been wronged. The very thought is
so pitiable that it creates new love, such love as we never felt
before, and the spirit of self-sacrifice beats in it like a heart. It
is no longer a mere private joy of our own, a luxury of sentiment,
a romance of feeling, which, while it enveloped the object of
our love, reflected also no little radiance back upon ourselves.
Self is more at home in love than in any other of the affections.
It is an humbling and unpoetical truth, but nevertheless a truth.
Now, the position of being wronged invests the object of our
love with a kind of sanctity. Affection assumes something of the
nature of worship, and then self can live there no longer, because
worship is the only real incompatibility with self. Hence it is
that the love of reparation is a pure, and unselfish, and dis­
interested love. But this is not all. Jesus not only habitually
presents Himself to us as one who is suffering, because He is
defrauded of His rights, but also of one who is in some mysteri­
ous way dependent upon our compassion to console Him, and
upon our reparation to make good His losses. This adds tenfold
more tenderness to our love, and self returns again, but only in
the shape of sacrifice, of generosity, of work, of sorrow, of aban­
donment. The spirit of reparation is a beautiful spirit, a spirit

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oE human beauty fit to wait on the Humanity of our dearest
Lord. It is the true Mary's lap within our souls, in which the
Blessed Sacrament should ever lie. the pure white corporal of
our most disinterested lovel
Such should be our devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, as
taught us by our Mother ministering to the Body of Jesus on the
top of Calvary. It should consist of reverence, tranquility, love,
familiarity, and reparation, rising out of each other in this order,
and connected with each other in the supernatural logic of a
devotional spirit.
But Mary is also our model of behavior in brief. Grief may
either be the solid foundation on which a vast supernatural edi­
fice of sanctity is to be raised, or it may be the very thinnest and
most diluted of all human affections, a mere clumsy ingenuity
of selfishness, the most self-seeking of all the kinds of love; for
there can be little doubt that sorrow is a kind of love. Thus the
very highest and at the same time the very lowest things may be
predicated of grief. The reason of the difference is to be found
in the way in which we bear it. Grief is a difficult thing to
manage. There is no time when our correspondence to grace
requires to be more active, more vigilant, or more self-denying
than in seasons of affliction. If we once begin to indulge our
grief, a great work of God is frustrated. Every thing which
happens in the world happens with reference to our own soul.
But sorrow is the tool with which God finishes the statue and
animates it with its beautiful expression. It is sad for us when
we take it into our own hands. If God condescends to resume
His work, and succeed us when we have done. He must disfigure
us with suffering again before we shall be once more in a condi­
tion for Him to commence His gracious work anew. Now, we
have all of us a great temptation—and the more tender-hearted
we are the greater our temptation—to indulge in grief as if it
were a luxury. To endure, to hold fast by God, to do our duty,
to supernaturalize our adversity, to carry our cross, to aspire
heavenwards,—all these things are fatiguing. They give us the
sensation of toiling up a steep. We have all the weariness of

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an ascent without the satisfaction of any visible elevation; for
we seem to make no way at all. Whereas to indulge our grief,
to give way unreservedly to the ready inundation of comfortable
tears, to complain,—especially if we bring in a vein of religion,
like a vein of poetry, into our complaining,—these things bring
with them the relieving sensation of going down hill. Of a truth
it is the most earthward process through which a heart can well
go. Thus, a tender-hearted man ought to be as much on his
guard against sorrow as an intemperate man should be against
wine. There is a fascination in it which may easily become his
ruin. What makes the temptation more dangerous is, that the
world applauds the indulgence as if it were a moral loveliness,
and looks shy at the restraint, as if it were hardness and insensi­
bility; and to be suspected of coldness and indifference is almost
more than a tender-hearted man can bear. There is no need to
do physical violence to ourselves to hinder tears. The effort will
make us ill, without bringing any profit either to body or soul.
God does not dislike to see His creatures weeping. We creatures
even like to see those we love weeping sometimes. All which our
Lady's example counsels is moderation. Let us relieve our hearts.
It will make us less selfish. But let us not foster, embrace, re­
kindle, and indulge our grief. For then our sorrow is a selfish
and luxurious fiction, a ground in which the Holy Spirit will not
dig; for He knows there is no gold underneath.
Neither is the indulgence of grief content to stop in the mere
luxury of sentiment. It goes on to do positive evil. It prompts
us to dispense ourselves from the duties which our hand finds to
do. It seems hard to work when we are grieving; but it is just
this hardness which renders the work so heavenly. We think
that sorrow makes us privileged persons, forgetting that our
privileges are only an increase of our responsibilities. They think
deepest and most truly of their responsibilities who most habitu­
ally regard them as privileges. The world's work is not to stop
for our sorrow. We are but units in a multitude. We must roll
round from west to east with our fellows; we must meet life as
life meets us; we must take joy and sorrow as they come; they

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mostly come both together; both are at work at once, both un­
resting, both unimportant; but both lie upon our road to the
only thing which is of importance, and that is God. Self-im­
portance is the canker-worm of Christian sorrow. We must not
make too much of ourselves; yet this is what the world's stupid
consolations try to do with those who are in grief. Dispensations
are always lowering, but there is nothing which they lower so
much as suffering and sorrow. Our grief is part of the world s
rolling, because it is part of our own way to God. It is a going
on, not a standing still, a quickening of life’s time, not a letting
the clock run down and stop. For the great clock goes while
ours stands, so that we gain nothing, but lose much. We pull
down the blinds, and strew the streets, and muffle the bells, and
go slowly, and tread lightly, when sickness is in the house; but
let us take care not to do so to sorrow in our own souls. For
sorrow is by no means a sickness of the soul; it is its health, and
strength, and vigor. Sins of omission may be more venial in times
of sorrow, but they none the less unjewel our crown, and inter
cept the generosity of God.
Sorrow is a sanctuary, so long as self is kept outside. Self is
the desecrating principle. If a time of sorrow is not the harvest­
time of grace, it is sure to be the harvest-time of self. Hence,
when we find people indulging in the sentimentality of their
sorrow, we are almost certain to find them inconsiderate toward
others. They are the centres round which every thing is to move.
Every thing is to be subordinate to their mourning. Thus they
pay no attention to hours. They disturb the arrangements of the
household. They make the servants carry part of the burden of
their wretchedness. They diffuse an atmosphere of gloom around
them. They accept the service of others ungracefully, sometimes
as if it was their right, because they are in grief, sometimes as
if the kindness were almost an intrusion, which politeness only
constrains them to endure. If this goes on, so rapid is the process
of corruption when self has tainted sorrow, childhood works up
again to the surface in middle life or age, and we have ill-temper,
peevishness, petulance, quick words, childish repartee, self-deplor

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THF. CROSS

ing foolishness, grandiloquent exaggerations, attitudes and ges.
Hires of despair: in short, the long-banished ghosts of the nursery
come back again, in proportion as sorrow with literal truth is
allowed to unman us. A Christian mourner notes the least acts
of thoughtfulness, and is full of gratitude for them. He feels
more than ever that he deserves nothing, and is surprised at the
kindness which he receives. He is lorever thinking of the others
in the house, and legislating for them, and contriving that the
weight of his cross shall be concentred upon himself. He smiles
through his tears, takes the sorrow carefully out of the tone of
his voice, and makes others almost gay while his own heart is
broken. A saint's sorrow is never in the way. To others it is a
softness, a sweetness, a gentleness, a beauty; it is a cross only to
himself.
We must be careful also not to demand sympathy from others,
and. if possible, not even to crave for it ourselves. What is it
worth, if it comes when we have demanded it? Surely the
preciousness of sympathy is in its being spontaneous. There is no
balm in it, when it is paid as a tax. Not that it is wrong to
hunger for sympathy when we are in sorrow. We are not speak
ing so much of right and wrong, as of fittest and best, of what God
loves most, of what makes our sorrow heavenliest. The more
consolation from creatures the less from God. This is the invari­
able rule. God is shy. He loves to come to lonely hearts, which
other loves do not fill. This is why bereaved hearts, outraged
hearts, hearts misunderstood, hearts that have broken with kith
and kin and native place and the grave of father and mother arc
the hearts of His predilection. Human sympathy is a dear bar­
gain, let it cost us ever so little. God waits outside till our com­
pany is gone. Perhaps He cannot wait so long, for visits to
mourners are apt to be very long, and He goes away, not angrily,
but sadly, and then how much we have missed!
Where self comes, unreality will also intrude. This unreality
is often shown in shrinking from painful sights and sounds, which
it is necessary or unavoidable for us to see and hear. Much in­
convenience is often occasioned to others by this, and the gen­

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erous discharge of their duties in the house of sorrow rendered
far more onerous and disagreeable than it need have been. It
is just those who are cherishing most the sight or the sound in
their morbid imaginations, who shrink with this unreal fastidious­
ness from the substance of that on which they are perversely
brooding. There is none of this unworthy effeminacy of sorrow
about those who are all for God. Such men neither seek nor
avoid such shadows of their grief as come across them. They
are supernaturally natural; and this is the perfection of mourning.
Neither must we fail to exhibit the utmost docility to the arrange­
ments of others. If this righteous unselfishness is hard to bear,
it is a legitimate part of the sacrifice which grief brings along
with it. Sorrow tends to eccentricity. The strain of endurance
makes men curiously fanciful. All this we must restrain, make
it part of our immolation, and offer it to God. If our sorrow
intrinsically weighs one ounce, a pound of self-sacrifice must go
along with it. We must bear harder upon ourselves than God
bears upon us. This is royal heartedness. The whole theology
of sorrow may be compressed into a kind of syllogism. Every thing
is given for sanctification, and sorrow above all other things; but
selfish sorrow is sorrow unsanctified: therefore unselfishness is
grace’s product out of sorrow.
To all these counsels we must add yet another. There must
be in our grief a total absence of realizing the unkindness or
neglect of human agents. Nobody is in fault but God, and God
cannot be in fault: therefore there is no fault at all; there is only
the divine will. Faith must see nothing else. It must ignore
secondary causes. It takes its crosses only from Jesus, and straight
from Him. It sees, hears, feels, recognizes no one but God. The
soul and its Father have the world to themselves. Oh, what a
herculean power of endurance there is in this sublime simplicity
of faith! But all these are hard lessons; and sorrow, if it is not
peculiarly teachable, is the most unteachable of all things. Yet
we could hardly expect Mary’s lessons to be easy ones, least of
all when she gives them from the top of Calvary.
Let us gaze at her once more, as she swathes the Body in the

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winding-sheet. How like a priest she seemsl How like a moth
And are not all mothers priests? For, rightly considered a||
maternities are priesthoods. Ah, Mary! thy maternity was such
priesthood as the world had never seen before!

Chapter VIII

THE SEVENTH DOLOR
THE BURIAL OF JESUS

The shades of evening fall fast and silently round that Mother,
sitting at the foot of the Cross with the covered Head of her dead
Son upon her lap. The very earth is weary with the weight of
that eventful day. The animals were fatigued after the panic of
the eclipse, whose darkness they had mistaken for the night, so
that the beasts slunk to their lairs, the birds to their roosts, and
the lizards went to rest in the crevices of the rocks. Men them­
selves were outworn with sin and the impetuous activity of their
own evil passions, while the scattered few who composed the
Church were weary with shame, and fear, and sorrow, and the
agitation of accumulated thoughts. The well-known sounds of
night begin to succeed to the sharper and more frequent noises
of the day. There is a divine light in the heart of Mary, more
golden than that last lingering rim of departed sunset, that sun
which seemed so glad to set after the burden of such a day, and
she is resting on it for a moment, before she girds up her whole
nature to meet her seventh sorrow and her last.
It was a strange station for a Mother to choose for her repose,
just at the foot of the cruel tree on which her Son had died, and
which was yet bedewed with His Precious Blood. Yet it is also
just the very spot where, with Mary-like instinct, the mourners
of eighteen centuries have come to rest, and have found peace
there, when there was no peace, at least for them, in any other
corner of the earth. It is a place of spells, since Jesus hung there
and since Mary sat there. Here tears have been dried which it
had seemed would never cease to flow. Here hearts have con329

MO

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FOOT or THE CROSS

sented to live which a while ago were fain to die. Here the
widow has found another and a heavenly Husband. The mother
has had her lost children restored to her. The orphans have gone
there in the dark, and, when they were done sobbing, they found
the arms of their new Mother Mary round them. Here thousands
of hearts have discovered how good a thing it was to have been
broken: for through the rent of their own hearts they saw God.
When Mary sat on that hilltop, and enthroned the Dead Christ
upon her knee, she left an inexhaustible legacy of blessings behind
her to all generations, with the condition of residence on the top
of Calvary attached to their enjoyment.
It was not therefore for herself, but for us, that she sat there,
and rested for a moment. But the time has now come, and she
signifies with calm self-collection to the disciples round to form
the procession to the tomb. There was Joseph of Arimathea and
Nicodemus. John and Magdalen, the devout women who had
come up to the Cross, some of the trusted servants of Joseph and
Nicodemus, and to these was now added the converted centurion,
who at the moment of our Lord's death had confessed that He
was the Son of God. Perhaps also some of the apostles and other
disciples may by this time, as some of the saints have conjectured,
have been gathered to the Cross. It seemed sad to break up so
fair a scene of beautiful sorrow; but it was time to fulfill the
Scripture. With calm heroism, yet not without the direst martyr­
dom, Mary gave up the treasure which lay across her lap. Who
had any right to touch Him but herself? Ah, Motherl thou know·
est we have all of us got those rights now. He has become the
property of the world, the inheritance of sinners, and thou
thyself too an the universal Mother. What the poor old heathen
called the earth, that art thou to us, and much more also. But
she had borne Him into Egypt. Should she not bear Him also
to the tomb? No, Mother! God hath given thee strength by
miracle, that thou mightest suffer; but He will not give thee
strength to do that which will be a consolation to thy woe! There
is that other Joseph, haunting thee with his sweet look of rever­
ence and love through these last two mysteries of thy sorrow.

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He and Nicodemus will bear the burden, while John and
Magdalen will go along with thee.
The rude world intruded not upon the silence of that won
derful procession. The multitude had long since flowed back,
like an ebb tide, from that sacred hill. The earthquake had
sobered many hearts which diabolical possession had maddened
in the morning. The crowded city had enough to think of for
itself. For there had been processions also in the streets of Jeru­
salem, strange processions, such as made men seek their homes,
and close their doors, and speak low, and think of God. A shadow
was over all hearts. The dead had walked. The earthquake had
burst the tombs open, and had awakened their inmates, and,
like those impatient prognostics which so often usher in a divine
work, there was a resurrection before the time. The old saints
of the land, the dead of other generations, had gone about the
city, and had been seen of many, with their beautiful threatening
faces speaking unutterable silent things. The memory of the
day hung like a cold stone around the souls of many. In others
it was burning like a hot restless fire, the harbinger of converting
grace. Many wept, many more were sad. and all were weary,
dulled by a shadow, oppressed by a divine terror. Hell had lighted
a volcano in the people during the morning. Now it was burnt
out, and human nature could hardly find its place again in many
of the hearts from which it had been so awfully displaced. There
was therefore no interruption from the city. The city was brood­
ing over itself, like a disconsolate bird over its robbed nest. The
very trumpets of Titus were almost in its ears, and might have
been heard by prophetic listening. Poor Jerusalem! God has
loved thee long, and loved thee with a mysterious fondness; but
today's disloyalty has filled up thy measure, and thy doom has re­
ceived its orders, and is now upon its way. From the top of that
hill, brown in the dusky twilight, they are carrying to His tomb
the Body of thy rejected King!
What awful shapes and shadows, of history, of prophecy, of
dim divine decrees, gather like waving banners in the darkness,
round that sacred procession! Has creation come to this, that a

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few faithful creatures are bearing the Dead Creator to a tomb
in the rock, and that a mortal Mother, who numbers less than
fifty years, is chief mourner there as the veritable Mother of the
Eternal! The songless angels are marshalled round in serried
phalanxes. Their science almost makes them afraid, so over­
whelming is the mystery. Now they have passed over the grave
of Adam, the First Man, in which the Cross had been set up.
The Soul of Jesus had already gone to Adam to give him the
Beatific \zision. Now his descendants were treading on his grave.
His daughter Mary, the second Eve, had been sitting there a while
ago with the second Adam on her lap. The bones and skulls of
malefactors, luckless tokens of the fall, strewed their path, half
bedded in the tufts of faded grass, or lying loose upon the smooth
herbage which the goats had cropped. They are descending now
into a garden, another Eden, to plant a tree there in the rock,
better incomparably than all the trees of that old Paradise, better
even than the tree of life, and which should bloom in three days
with an inconceivable blooming. It was a garden where the
vines grew and the olive-trees dropped fatness. But this tree
should give forth wine more gladdening to the heart of man than
any which ever bled in the winepress from the vine, were it
from the rarest clusters of Engaddi. It should yield oil, as no
olive ever yielded it, an oil to heal all wounds, and to be the
inexhaustible balsam of the world. There were no flowers on
earth like that withered one upon the bier, none to compare with
it for beauty or for fragrance, none that should have so vernal
a spring as He should have when but another sun was set. So
they went onward to the garden, a whole cloud of divinest
mysteries, accomplished types, fulfilled prophecies, historical
consummations, resting on them as they went; and over all was
poured the soft light of the paschal moon, hanging low in the
western heavens, as if it were the light escaped from Mary’s heart
which was making all the scene so deeply sad, so sadly beautiful!
Slowly they went, and in silence as soft as the foot of midnight
itself. If they had sung psalms, the restless city might have heard.
But in truth what psalms were there which they could sing? Not

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even the inspired harp of David could have shed sweet sounds
fit for a dirge for such a funeral. No one spoke in all that com­
pany. What should they say? What words could have expressed
their thoughts? “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth
speaketh.” But there are times when the heart is overfull, and
then it cannot speak. So was it with that procession. A deeper
shadow of sorrow had never fallen upon men, than the gloom
which fell on those who now were wending from the top of
Calvary to the garden-tomb. There was grief enough to have
darkened a whole world in Mary’s single heart. Human suffering
is not infinite; but it is near upon it, and she had come now to
its very uttermost extremity. There was only one sacrifice she
could make now, and she was in the very act of making it. She
was going to put away from herself and out of her own power,
to hide in a rocky tomb and let Roman soldiers come and keep
watch over it. that Body which though it was dead was more
than life to her. Then, indeed, she would stand upon the highest
pinnacle of evangelical poverty, to which God had promised
such mighty things. She would only keep for herself that which
she could not part with, and would not have parted with if she
could, a broken heart utterly submerged in such waters of bitter­
ness as had never flowed round any living creature heretofore.
There never would have been joy on this planet again, if her
accumulated woe had been divided into little parcels, and dis­
tributed to each child of Adam as he comes into the world. Men
look with eyes of admiring wonder at adventurous travellers and
the successful explorers of unknown lands. Look now at Mary,
as she closes the funeral procession. That woman is a creature
of the Most High more exalted than any angel in heaven. The
throne that awaits her is one of the marvels of the heavenly
court. She is as sinless as the sunbeam, and her empire is over
all creation. The Three Persons of the Undivided Trinity will
themselves perform her coronation. But she has explored now
all the vast realms of pain. She has sounded the depths of every
heart-ache man can know. She has traversed vast regions of
suffering which none ever traversed before her. and whither

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

none can follow her. She has been with the Incarnate Word in
abysses of His Passion which theology has never named, because
not even saints have ever imagined their existence. She has ex
hausted all the possibilities of mortal anguish. Her dolors have
outreached the tall science of the angels. They arc known to
none but Jesus and herself. At this present moment she is draw­
ing near to the term of that which is so nearly infinite. The
mystical border is close at hand. The outside of possible suffer
ing, like the end of space, is inconceivable. A few more footsteps,
and she will have reached that indescribable point of human life.
Who would have dreamed of such a possible suffering as the
Dead Body of the Living God? There is only one suffering
beyond it: it is the parting with that Body, and going back into
the world alone in such a solitude as never creature knew before.
But now the garden-tomb is reached, the new tomb of the
second Adam. It was hewn in the solid rock, and was new. Joseph
had meant it for himself. But no man had ever lain there yet.
All things were fitting, and full of all manner of meanings and
proprieties. The tomb of this new Joseph was to be to Him
what the arms of the other Joseph had often been before, His
resting-place a while, when Mary had to part with Him. But
in those days there had never been such partings as this was to
be. Mary enters the tomb with Joseph. It was his help she chose.
Her hands arranged every thing. How gently they lowered His
Head into the tomb! As to His arms, perhaps they now allowed
her to close them to the Body; or perhaps, if there was room,
He rested even in the grave with that wide crucified embrace,
ready to receive a whole world of sinners. We are not told. She
adjusts and composes the winding-sheet, and puts the feet to­
gether, which had been so painfully together those three hours
upon the Cross. The instruments of the Passion too she takes,
and kisses them, and deposits them in the tomb. There is no
unnecessary delay over each action, such as marks the weakness
of common grief. All was done in order, assiduity, and silence.
Then came perhaps the last look. Perhaps she lifted up the
cloth to see that the moving of the Body had not discomposed

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the venerable features. How pale it must have looked by the
wan torchlight inside that rocky tomb! The eyes were closed
whose single look had converted Peter. The lips were shut that
but a while ago uttered those seven marvellous words upon the
Cross, the sound of which had not yet died out of her listening
ears. Slowly the cloth was replaced; and on her knees she made
her last act of adoration of that lifeless Body. Never surely had
any anguish so awful, any woe so utterly superhuman, desolated
the soul of living creature. There have been many last looks in
the world. Many graves have closed on earth, shutting in worlds
of hope and love, and imprisoning often more of the survivor’s
life than death has robbed from the departed. Yet none has ever
come nigh this. It stands alone, a grief without a parallel; because
she who mourned and He whom she mourned were alike in­
comparable. Perhaps in none of her dolors was there any single
isolated moment that for accumulated and intense woe could be
reckoned along with this. She was widowed and orphaned as none
else were before. She sank down in depths of widowhood and
orphanhood which had never opened to any one else. But what
are father and mother and husband and child to an Incarnate
God? To be fatherless, motherless, husbandless, and childless,
how little measure of grief do these dismal words represent com­
pared with that for which there is no real word! For a soul to be
Christless is simply heathenism and hell. For Mary, His own
Mother, to be Christless, and on the night of such a day,—oh.
the sorrow lies out dark before us, like the sea at night, and we
know no more!
All who were present at the burial genuflected before the
Body, and adored profoundly, and then turned away, as though
they were tearing themselves from a strong attraction, and de­
parted in silence. Joseph, as St. Matthew tells us, rolled a great
stone to the door of the monument, and then went his way also.
Mary, with John and Magdalen, return slowly over the summit
of Calvary. She will need repose after the terrific agony of that
moment in the tomb. But repose is far away from that broken­
hearted Mother yet. Her soul, shattered by that last assault of

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suffering, has yet to pass through a fearful ordeal before she
reaches the house of John in Jerusalem. After that, there is to
be no respite to the anguish of her desolation for three days, three
scriptural days, from this Friday evening till the dawn of Sun­
day's sun, the aurora of the Resurrection.
The Cross lies in their path across Calvary. The fatal tree is
still discernible in the darkness, for the light of the low moon
creeps up over the earth and lights objects from below. But its
dimensions look larger and more swollen than before. Mary rests
awhile, and falls down upon her knees to adore the blood-stained
Cross. She kisses the wood, partly as if it were in sign of recon­
ciliation with it after its cruel yet blessed office of the day, and
partly as if it were the most precious object she could touch now
that the Body, which had hung on it, was laid in the tomb, and
partly also in sign of love and worship of the Precious Blood.
When she rose up, her lips were stained with it. Dreadful seal of
love which the Son has printed on His Mother’s mouth and
cheek, from those lips of His which were “as lilies dropping
choice myrrh!” O Mother! “thy cheeks are as the bark of a
pomegranate, besides what is hidden within thee!" O Blood­
stained mouth, giving voice to that heavenly soul, how much has
passed since thou didst sing that wonderful Magnificat! Thy
silence now is as eloquent before God as thy song was then!
She turns from the Cross. Below her lies the guilty city, mag­
nified and indistinct in the murky air, with a few restless lights
glancing here and there, and the irregular broken sounds of night
rising up into the air. There were no words of reproach upon
her lips, no look of reproach in her eyes. She took it all in, from
the stately temple to the outer gateways of the city. She saw the
host of Titus beleaguering its walls, and the mothers that slew
their little ones for food. She saw the old predilection of God
withdrawing from His ancient Zion, as a golden cloud follows
the sunset under the horizon. But she yearned over Jerusalem.
Not a week has passed since He whom she had just buried had
shed tears of vexed love and lingering fondness over that chosen
city of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Since then.

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how had it done penance? Alasl it had crucified Him who wept.
Him whom its little ones out of their pure hearts had greeted
with Hosannas. Poor Jerusalem! She knew that it was doomed.
But there was room in her broken heart for the guilty city as well
as for the slaughtered Son. A cloud of beautiful history rests over
its dreary sanctuaries to this day, even in its dishonor; and Mary's
entrance into it that night, next to the tears of Jesus, is one of
the most pathetic of its memorials. Half buried in its ruins, no
city upon earth is so dear to the believer's heart, a city he will
assuredly one day see, when he goes to meet His Saviour, whom
it slew, come to judge the tribes of men in the valley of Josaphat
hard by. Through the same gate, by which she had left the city
in the morning, she re-entered it that night. As men count time,
some ten hours or so had passed; but in the purposes of God, in
the annals of grace, in the chronicles of that broken heart, it was
a long secular epoch, longer than the years that had fled since
.Abraham's day. It was that Friday which we name The Good,
partly to veil the bad deed it held, and partly because out of that
injustice comes to us an infinity of mercy.
In order to understand the agony which our Blessed Mother
had now to suffer, we must take several circumstances into con­
sideration. There was too much of the satiety of bitterness in
her soul to allow her to feel sensibly the pain of hunger. She had
not done so during the Three Days' Loss. But her long fast told
grievously upon her strength. No food had crossed her lips since
the evening before. No sleep had visited her eyelids on the
Thursday night, and there was little hope of her sleeping now
while Jesus lay in the tomb. Moreover, the twenty-four hours
had been filled with the most astonishing events, gigantic mys­
teries following each other in almost indistinguishably rapid
succession. Her soul had been on the rack of extremes! torture
the whole while. Her mind, serene and capacious as it was. had
been stretched and fatigued incessantly by the very comprehen
sion of what was going on around her. Her nature had been
shaken to its centre by terror. She was worn out by the bodily
fatigue of standing so many hours. The very intensity of her

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sustained adoration had preyed upon the supplies of her life.
That indescribable moment in the tomb had been eclipse and
earthquake in her soul both at once. Now, fasting, thirsty, foot­
sore, her eyes tingling with sleeplessness, her limbs aching with
fatigue, her mind burning with terrible memories and still more
terrible understandings, her heart crushed and desolate within
her, a very wreck which the tempests of supernatural woe have
been unable to submerge, she enters at the gate of Jerusalem, on
another course of the most dire and heart-rending affliction.
She is retracing the morning’s pilgrimage, and making the
stations of the Cross from last to first, instead of from first to last.
Slowly she traversed the intolerable scenes of the morning. Not
a gesture had escaped from her retentive memory that evening,
just as none had escaped the vigilant anxiety of her eye before.
She heard His low soft sighs upon the nightwind. His beautiful
disfigured face looked at her through the darkness. Here He fell,
and her feet burned and trembled as she stood upon the spot.
She knew that she was treading on the pavement stained with
His Blood, though the night veiled the ruddy traces from her
eyes. There the Cyrenian had taken His Cross. There He had
spoken His gentle words, yet words of saddest doom, to the
daughters of Jerusalem, whose women’s hearts had melted in
them at the cruelty of which He was the victim. There He had
impressed His adorable lineaments on the cloth which Veronica
had brought Him. There was the corner of the street where
Mary herself had met Him. It seems ages ago. Those eyes were
on her still. That look was in her soul, burning with a fire of
love whose heat was torture to the weakness of mortality. There
was the guard-room where He was crowned, and there the pillar
of the scourging. She knew what lay around the foot of it; from
her mind’s eye, at least, the darkness could not veil it. There
were the steps of Pilate’s judgment-hall, where He had been
shown with derisive pity to the raging people. The silent air
seemed still to ring with their cries of Barabbas. Verily His
Blood was on them and on their children now. It was an awful
pilgrimage, and her heart bled within her as she made it. It is

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always a great trial to love to revisit scenes of deep sorrow Even
when time has closed the wound, it is a bitter pain to hear, bitter
although our love may drive us to seek it of ourselves. Eyes
weep then that have not wept for years. Strong men sob as if
they were weak women, and are rightly not ashamed of it. Hearts
are broken afresh which patient, dutiful endurance had pieced
together as well as might be. Fountains of bitterness from under­
neath, long closed and almost unsuspected now, break up, and
flow, and inundate the soul with gall. All this, too, takes place
when use has blunted the edge of grief, so that it cannot cut as
deeply or as fierily as it did before. But what is this compared
with Mary's backward way of the Cross, the second she had made
that day? The peculiar horror of the mysteries, the incomparable
sharpness of the anguish, the crushed and broken heart of the
sufferer, her intense bodily fatigue and fainting lassitude, and
the rawness of the recent Passion, bear her sorrow far beyond the
limits of all comparison.
In such unutterable woeful plight it was that the streets of
Jerusalem beheld their unknown queen that night wending her
weary way to the house of John. This was the home she had
received in exchange for the House of Nazareth. John is her
son now instead of Jesus. He is the man and she the woman.
But he must lean on her, not she on him. He who last night
pillowed his tired head on the Sacred Heart of Jesus must now.
in spirit at least, find his repose upon the Immaculate Heart of
the sorrowing Mother. The door closed upon her. She was now
at home. Home! surely the word was mockery. It was less of a
home to her than the chance cave is to the wounded wild beast.
How could she have a home except where Jesus was? Bethlehem
had been a home, and distant, foreign Heliopolis, and sequestered
Nazareth, and the open hilltop of Calvar}’, and the inside of
the garden-tomb. They were homes, because Jesus made a home
for her wherever He was. It was when she left the tomb that her
true homelessness began. The first step from that sad second
Eden was the beginning of her exile. And John s house, too,—
had it no dreadful associations which would weight heavily and

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haunt darkly a broken heart? Who does not know how, in the
extremity of sorrow, the eye and the mind busy themselves, not
in despite of us, but to our complete unconsciousness, with all
the minutest details of the place in which we are? The furniture,
the position in which it stands, the pictures on the wall, the
pattern of the carpet, the exact folds of the curtains, the lines
across the ceiling, the mouldings of the cornice, little things that
are crooked and awry or out of place, are all indelibly transferred
to our souls, never to be forgotten, and each detail, each outline,
can hereafter become a well of dark associations, replenishing
forever the fountains of our tears. So was it with Mary. In that
room, with her spirit at Gethsemane, she had spent the three
hours of the agony; and the look of the room brought it all back
to her, living, and real, and unbearable. From that room she
had gone forth with John and Magdalen to try to gain admittance
to the house of the high priest. To that room she had returned
when Jesus was thrown into the dungeon for the night. In that
room she had spent such a vigil as no other mother could have
spent without forfeiting either her reason or her life. And now
she had come back to it again the most bereaved, the most
desolate among all the countless creatures of our heavenly Father,
and all this because she was nearest to Him, and His best-beloved.
There, with the silent companionship of John and Magdalen
deepening the utter solitude, she abode for more than four-andtwenty hours. Her grief meanwhile remained preternaturally at
its height, because it was beyond the reach of use and time and
calm. One could assuage it but God; and His time was not come
yet. In fact, it rather grew than otherwise. Like all divine works,
its dimensions were in such exquisite proportion that it looked
less than it really was. Its vastness, which was hidden from the
eye, manifested itself to experience. The storm also grew and
thickened in her soul without flash or sound; yet a true and fear­
ful storm it was, lightening invisibly in the very centre of her
fixed tranquility, and imprisoned storm, but painful and desolate
exceedingly. It kept up the swiftness, energy, and vitality of her
sorrow, that it might penetrate the more piercingly into every

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part of her nature. It settled down into the depths of her soul,
filling up every void, commuting to itself, absorbing and trans­
forming, all other things which it found there. So that her faith
became an agony, her love an agony, and even her hope an
agony. Every faculty of her mind was on the rack. Her reason
was deep suffering. Her imagination brought with its exercise
acutest pain. Her memory thronged into the avenues of every
one of her senses, filling them up with fire and bitterness and
terror. Her will, weighted with all these mysterious dolors, hung
suspended as on a sort of rack, in the most agonizing tension,
yet calm and brave, uttering no cry, letting no sign of torture pass
on its features, but peaceably and passively abiding all for God.
It is not impossible also that the outward divine abandonment
in which she was might have its fearful inward counterpart, as
was the case during the Three Days’ Loss, of which this seventh
dolor is in many ways itself the counterpart. It was a complete
possession of sorrow, a miraculous transfiguration of a human life,
grander and broader than other human lives, into a living im­
personation of unutterable grief.
Such was the mystery of the seventh dolor, or rather of those
few outskirts of it which escape from the secrecy of Mary's heart
and come within the range of our limited vision. If it has been
hard to tell the story, it will be harder still to specify the peculiari­
ties. The greatest peculiarity of this dolor consisted in its being
the last. Very much is implied in this. No one can have failed to
perceive that our Lady’s dolors are a divine system, a world gov­
erned by laws of which we have but a very partial intelligence.
We have already classified them on different principles, and have
seemed to gain light by doing so. Nevertheless our view of them
is by no means complete. Perhaps it never can be. We feel, as if
by instinct or divination, that there is a unity in them which we
have been unable to grasp, and that they are one in the same
way that the Passion is one, though the method is beyond our
view. There are lights now and then, strong lights, in dark places.
But they only prove to us that we do not see the whole. Like a
landscape by moonlight, all is mottled and visionary, shadows

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and objects confused together, heights and distances falsified, a
view which is seen through an inadequate medium. All is real
and recognizable, but it is with a visionary reality. Her sorrows
were beyond all doubt a very special divine work. The Church
docs not leave us in any uncertainty as to that question. Now,
the end of a divine work must be worthy of its beginnings, and
in keeping with them, as it were a crown of grandeur to them.
Thus the seventh dolor, whatever may be the peculiar kind of
sorrow which it brought along with it, must have been an ade­
quate and congruous consummation of the rest. We have seen
what they were; what then must this have been!
From this it follows, further, that the sorrow of the seventh
dolor was a sorrow without a name, a grief which cannot he
classed as belonging to the family of any other known grief. It
is a class of its own. If we give it a name, it would be an arbitrary
one, because we have no similitudes or analogies to guide us in
imposing the name. The numerous resemblances which we can
trace between the seventh and the third dolor are enough to
satisfy us that this last sorrow must have been one of colossal
stature. We cannot tell what suffering is like when the heart has
got beyond life's possibility of suffering, and the victim is kept
alive by power external to himself, not power which mitigates the
pain or elevates the capability of endurance by alleviating and
consoling, but sheer power of miracle. We have seen this even
in her earlier sorrows. Now, here, in like manner, we cannot tell
what grief is when it has outrun all the actual experience of the
griefs of men, and attained the solitary term beyond which grief
cannot go. All possibilities are finite; the possibilities of grief,
therefore among the rest. He only is truly infinite who is not a
possibility, but an Eternal Simple Act. But what can we know
of the uttermost territories of possible sorrow? Only as a mysteri­
ous place where the Mother of God has been, and where she was
when she knelt to make her last adoration of the Body in the
tomb. We call it the seventh dolor, and we can call it nothing
else. So far as our intelligence goes, her third dolor was her
greatest. But her seventh dolor is beyond our intelligence, both

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M3

in kind and in degree, and therefore was her greatest in another
sense. The circumstances which formed the material of the sor
row were without parallel on earth. They have happened only
once, and the unassisted science of the wisest angel would never
have dreamed that such things could have happened at all in the
bosom of God's creation, rife as it is with unexpected wonders.
Mary’s heart also was an instrument unparalleled on earth, now
that the Sacred Heart was cold and motionless in the tomb. Even
when it lived and beat, its union with the Divine Person took it
out of the parallel. Mary’s state at the close of this vast system
of dolor, through which she had revolved, was also quite without
parallel, both in respect of holiness, of powers of suffering, and
of the miraculous holding together of her shattered life. Thus
every thing about this dolor is without parallel. We can but
shadow forth in our spirits some nameless immensity of grief,
and say it was the seventh which our Mother bore.
Another peculiarity of this dolor, and immediately connected
with what has been said, consisted in its being beyond the reach
of consolation. It was this which kept its bitter and tempestuous
waves unnaturally poised in the air during those four-and-twenty
hours in the house of John. It could not be assuaged. It had no
power of itself to ebb. It was beyond the laws of grief s common
tides. It had nothing to do with creatures, and therefore creatures
could not minister consolation to it. The cruelty of men and the
rage of devils reached to the death upon the Cross. In the fifth
dolor, therefore, they found their term. Human agency could
not reach the seventh dolor. It struggled feebly and faintly, or
at least comparatively so, in the sixth; it reflected itself, depicted
itself, there; it failed and died out before the seventh, and fell
short of that moment at the tomb. Like the third dolor, its
affliction was altogether divine. We may guess the proportions of
a sorrow coming express from God, and from Him to a creature
such as Mary, when compared with the sorrows men or devils
can inflict. But here, again, we do not know what it is to be beyond
the reach of human consolations. Men tell us, with the usual
flattery of comfort or the monitory commonplaces of edification.

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

that our griefs are beyond human consolation. But it is not
really so. Time consoles us inevitably, even though it may do
its work tardily. Kindness consoles us, even while it irritates us.
Life consoles us by the very importunity of its distractions. But
Mary was further removed even than this. She was beyond the
consolations, not only of common grace, but of that prodigious
grace which she herself brought down from the top of Calvary.
What is a creature like who is beyond the consolations both of
nature and of an unparalleled grace, and whom God Himself
can alone console by immediate union with Himself?
We think of those who lie on the bleak confines of creation,
in eternal exile from their Father. Oh, woe is their unutterable
and yet ineradicable lifel Yet there the mighty cloud of an un­
answerable justice casts something softening and tolerable over
their endless solitude of pain, by the very fact that it renders
it even to their blackened spirits so confessedly reasonable. But
Mary was beyond consolation, even when she was meriting more
divine sweetnesses than all the angels and the saints together.
So that she is not to be paralleled for woe of that kind, even with
the lost. Moreover, if we may so dare to speak, love is in some
sense a more energetic agent than justice. Thus there is a sense
in which an inconsolable desolation prepared by eternal love to
inflict suffering must be a more penetrative and overwhelming
thing than an inconsolable desolation prepared by eternal justice
for the punishment of sin. Nay, the Blood of Jesus somewhat
quells the fierceness of the flames of hell; whereas it was that
very' Blood which was kindling the flames in Mary’s soul and
heating the furnace of her heart sevenfold hotter than it was
before. So that even the desolation of the lost may not compare
itself in its excess with that mystical inconsolable affliction which
was God’s last trial of His Mother’s heart. Even He, so seemed it,
had no more proofs whereby unutterable sanctity might be
established.
But there are some lesser peculiarities, lying on the outside
of this seventh dolor, which we must not omit to notice. We
saw that the loneliness of the sixth dolor had not yet reached

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345

the point of desolation, because Mary still had the companion­
ship of the Body. It became desolation when the great stone was
rolled to the door of the monument and she went forth from
the garden of His sepulture. This has been a well-known
moment in the grief of all of us. All was not over when death
was over. We spoke of the lifeless frame in the masculine or
feminine, as if the body was the real self of the one we loved.
The house was not forlorn,—at least, not utterly forlorn.—though
it was darkened and silent. The dead furnished it, peopled it
with one exclusive growing life, and filled it with a mysterious
attraction. It made home more home. It was now a consecrated
home. It had but been a common home before. Oh, there was
such manifold companionship in the dead! Its white face was so
eloquent. It did not tell of pain just passed, and the gnawing
of hungry disease, and the blight of pestilence. But it spoke of old
times, of simple childish years. It was a very resurrection of
bygone looks, of almost forgotten expressions, of innocent youth­
ful pleasantness of countenance, blooming above death like the
snowdrops above the hoar-frost. The compressed lips smiled at
us. The closed eyes looked at us, without opening. The blueveined hands were full of meaning. It was a dark hour when the
coffin closed, but the spell was not gone yet. The moment of
desolation did not come when the blue spires of incense upcurled
themselves out of the damp grave, and the clods rattled on the
coffin-lid, and the hollow sound was like a frightening echo of
eternity. But it came when the mourner set his first step again
on the threshhold of his door, having left the partner of his life,
or the child of his hopes, or the mother of his boyhood, behind
him in the grave. Then the house was empty indeed, and his
heart was empty too, and desolate. If we substitute Mary for
ourselves, and Jesus for the love we lost, and make allowance for
those wide disparities, like grief was Mary's when she turned
away from the garden-tomb. This it is within our compass to
understand, and there are dark days in our own past to testify
to its reality.
It is another peculiarity of this dolor, which it shares with

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THE FOOT Ol

THE CROSS

the sixth, and which we have already alluded to repeatedly, that
Mary was surrounded in it by images of the Sacred Infancy. These
were a twofold fountain of sorrow, both in their contrasts and
their similitudes. His imprisonment in the tomb was an image
to her of the nine months He had spent in her blessed womb.
But she had borne Him then herself over the hill-country ol
Judea, with swiftest exultation, while each thought was a Mag
nificat within her soul. Joseph of Arimathea reminded her of
him who was chosen of all men by the Eternal Father to be the
foster-father of Jesus. But he had gone to sleep peaceably, with
his head on the bosom of Jesus; while Joseph of Arimathea was
just reversing the pleasant sadness of that older mystery. When
she laid Jesus in the tomb, and arranged the winding-sheet, she
remembered the crib of the manger, wherein she had laid Him
at Bethlehem. But between the crib and the tomb there was all
the vast interval which lies between the poles of Christian devo­
tion, Christmas and Passion-tide. The two mysteries were so
alike, and yet so differenti He was more helpless now than ever
He was then. What was loveliest obedience then is rigid passive
ness now. His silence was voluntary then; so is it now, but with a
different kind of will. He had noticed her then; He takes no
notice now. When He slept as a Babe, and His eyes were closed,
she knew that He was thinking, loving, worshipping, all the
while; and His sleep was in itself a beauty and a charm. But now
the Heart was cold and motionless; worshipful, because of its
union with the Godhead, but not beating with conscious love of
her. They had had one strange union since His death. It was
when she had knelt with Him extended on her arms, and they
two together had made the figure of one Crucifix, and it was
neither altogether Jesus who was crucified, nor altogether Mary,
but God’s one victim out of two lives. That was a figure with a
strong divine light upon it, never to be forgotten, though we
should soon sink out of our depth in its theology of love.
Yet the Passion was there as well as the Infancy. They met
upon that ground. That marble Body, many-streaked with
intertwisted red and livid blue, was no monument of Bethlehem.

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347

The whole Passion was elaborately written out upon His limbe;
nay, it is gorgeously illuminated on His Hands and Feet and Side
this hour in heaven. Those instruments of the Passion, too, those
precious relics which are deposited in the tomb, tell not of Beth
iehem and Nazareth, but of Jerusalem and Calvary, of the Prae
torium and of Golgotha. Others touching, handling, carrying
Him rather than herself,—this painful characteristic of the Pas­
sion, which had cut so deep into her soul in the fourth dolor,
was renewed in the sixth and seventh. It was a sort of token of
the presence of the Passion. But tokens were hardly needed, and.
if present, were scarcely perceptible in a mystery which breathed
the aromatic bitter of the Passion in all its bearings and in each
minutest incident. In the Sacred Infancy she had none to lean
their weight on her weariness and weakness; for she and Joseph
both leaned on Jesus, and rest, and peace, and joy are all one
abiding thing to those who lean on Him. But she had to carry
the Church in her heart at the Passion. When Jesus died, Peter,
the Rock, leaned his repentant faith and love on hers. She upheld
by her gentle bravery both John and Magdalen. Joseph and
Nicodemus would scarcely have had nerve to detach the Bod}
from the Cross if she had not been there to inspire them with
her own tender fortitude. Yet this leaning of others made her
heart ache. It was a fresh sorrow of itself. It multiplied the
number of dear hearts in which she had to suffer, while it was
also a strain upon her own. The Passion reached its height in
Mary, not when the Soul of Jesus sank through the greensward
at the foot of the Cross, but during that final moment at the
tomb.
Here also the Three Days’ Loss, that mystery which shines
apart, finds something like its fellow. The essence of the sorrow
is the same in both cases. It is the loss of Jesus. The time whic h
the loss endures is mysteriously the same. There is the same
absence of human agency and secondary causes. The occupations
of the absent Jesus are not alike in both cases. In the first He was
illuminating the doctors of His nation. In the second He was
giving beatific light in the limbus of the Fathers, the older doc­

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

tors of His people. There was a Joseph to sorrow with Mary at
the tomb, as there had been a Joseph to sorrow with her in the
temple; and both Josephs were the choice of God Himself. The
nature of the suffering was the same in both cases, because it
came from a divine abandonment. Desolation was equally the
form of sorrow then and now. She had lost Him both times in
the same place, just outside the gates of Jerusalem. There can be
little doubt that the Three Days’ Loss was a prophetical fore
shadowing of the present separation. But there was one notable
exception to all these similitudes. The darkness in the seventh
dolor arose from the impossibility of consolation. The darkness
in the third was a mysterious ordeal of supernatural ignorance.
Here she knew every thing. She had watched the Passion to its
close with heroic fidelity. She had embalmed Him herself. She
had helped to lay Him in the tomb. She knew where He was
and how He had been lost, and she knew of the Resurrection
that was to come on Easter morning. But as one deep calleth to
another in the ways of God, so doubtless, the third dolor calls
to the seventh, and the echoes answer to the call. The voices of
both agree in telling us that they both have abysses which we
cannot sound, and that beyond the deep places, in which we have
nearly lost ourselves, there are deeper places still, which we
suspect not.
But the seventh dolor has a prerogative of its own. The
Hypostatic Union had long been an object of blissful contempla­
tion to Mary, just as it was the work of God into which the de­
lighted science of the angels most desired to look. The union
of our Lord’s Body with His Soul, and the union of both Body
and Soul with His Divine Person as the Eternal Word, the Second
Person of the Most Holy Trinity, had been to her the type of all
unions, the monument of immutability in the mutable works
of the Creator. Like the mystery of the Holy Trinity itself, it had
seemed to her as that three-fold cord of which Scripture says, with
significant moderation, that it is not "easily broken.” There was
something like a break in it now, and the very thought of such
a thing is too terrible for words. What the Word once assumed,

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349

that He never put away. The Hypostatic Union could not by
possibility be broken. The Body, the Soul, the Blood on the
Cross, on the pavement, on men's sandals, and on Mary's gar­
ments, all, awaiting the Resurrection, were united to the Person
of the Eternal Word, all equally so, though all apart. But the
Flesh and Blood were sundered, both worshipful, but both
separate. The Blood, precious and divine, was outlying in all
directions, in the most unthought-of places, in the most degraded
mixtures, in the most complicated, inextricable confusion, as if
it was not in its generous, prodigal, world-saving nature to be
cooped up in one place, as the Body was, and be inactive in a
tomb. Its color should be its voice, and its mute red should
preach stirringly wheresoever it might be scattered. But this
separation of Flesh and Blood was a fearful invasion of the
sanctuary of that heavenly union. Yet more awful far was the
sundering of Body and of Soul, that old, dread mystery which
God had first invented as a punishment for sin. Here, too, which
is more terrible still, it had been done as a punishment, and as
a punishment for sin. In the first moments of the Incarnation
there had been no succession. The Soul was not an instant before
the Body, nor the Body before the Soul, nor either of them an
instant without the Divinity. But the Union which was effected
in the womb was broken in the grave, and Mary ministered to
both the mysteries. The grief which this appalling separation
caused in Mary's heart must have resembled in its pain the dis­
ruption which caused it, and it is one of those things which have
to stand alone, because God willed that they should be mysteries
without mates in His vast creation.
Thus it appears that this seventh dolor was a sort of centre,
or a harbor, in which all the various lines of mysteries of the
Thirty-Three Years converged. Bethlehem and Calvary, Nazareth
and Jerusalem, the Infancy and the Passion, the Boyhood and
the Ministry, were all represented here. The possibilities of
sorrow were exhausted. Simeon’s last sword is sheathed in the
Mother’s heart. If none can tell the sorrow that she bore, so
none can tell the holiness she reached. The frenzy of man s sin

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TUE J OO I OF THE GROSS

λπΚ I he pressure of divine justice had separated the Body and
Soul of Jesus. Both of them combined could do no more; and so
the Passion ended. Mary's woes have been mounting, various in
their cruelty, inventive in their ruthless tortures, and with her
loo separation is the last. She is separated from Jesus, from His
Soul first of all in the fifth dolor, and from His Body now. Her
last separation is from that which she herself gave Him, His
Sacred Flesh. Man’s sin and the ever-blessed cruelty of divine love
have forced the Mother and the Son asunder, though for three
and-thirty years their union had been second to none in creation,
save that of the Hypostatic Union. Jesus was without Mary, and
Mary was without Jesus, that darkest of all desolations which the
evil one and heresy can imagine in order to rob a poor perishing
world of the Precious Blood. Ah, venerable Simeon! thy last
sword is indeed sheathed in the Mother’s heart. Thou hast de
parted in peace, according to thy prayer. Thou art gladdening
thyself now in the light of Jesus. Yet thy peace beyond the grave
is not more glorious than that peace of hers, which for these so
many years thy prophecy has turned into inexpressible bitterness!
From these peculiarities of the seventh dolor we may turn
now to the dispositions in which our Blessed Mother suffered it.
It was the characteristic of our Lady’s holiness that it consisted
in a perfect correspondence to grace. All holiness is of course
simply a correspondence to grace; but with ordinary men, and
even with the saints, there is a great deal of failure, of fluctuation,
of falling and then rising again, and consequently of imperfect
correspondence to grace. Self-will diverts grace from its legitimate
channel, and impresses its own character even upon its divine
action. Sin also leaves its prints and vestiges even upon our holi­
ness. Temper and disposition too are clearly cognizable in the
structure when it is completed. Thus there is something human,
something special, something strongly savoring of their natural
bent and individual character, in the holiness of the saints. By
it we distinguish one saint from another. It is an attraction to
our devotion, a stimulus to excite us, a model to copy. This arises
from their sanctity not being merely a correspondence to grace.

THE SEVENTH DOLOR

35)

but a result of struggle, of temptations, revolutions, catastrophes
and even ruinous accidents. It is a divine work, but inextricably
mixed up with what is human. It is almost a beauty in our eyes
that it should be so. Our Lady's holiness was of quite a different
character. It was a simple, unmixed, unthwarted, perfectly at
complished transmutation of grace into holiness, without delay,
as the fresh grace came. Hence it is altogether a divine work,
sustained by a human will. Sin has left no trace there. There is
no vestige of catastrophe, but only the beautiful uniformity of
calm and equable law acting with resistless power upon the most
glorious theatre in unspeakable pacific majesty. There is no
alloy with the pure gold, and, as far as our dim eyes can see, but
little individual character. Not that she was without character
of her own, and doubtless a very marked one. But it is too near
God for us to see it. It is hidden in the vicinity of the intolerable
light, as a planet would be if it lay close to the shores of the sun.
It is this divine purity of her holiness which, when we reflect
maturely upon it, is far more wonderful than its colossal propor­
tions, and distinguishes her with a more nearly infinite distinction
from the saints.
A single grace from God is a marvellous thing. Theologians
have said that one communion is enough to make a saint. Even
in the very commonest graces experience sometimes enables us
to discover the most manifold capabilities, the most incredible
power of duration, the most extraordinary empire over the soul.
It seems occasionally as if a single grace was sometimes a fountain
ol spiritual miracles within us, or had power enough of itself to
turn the helm of our whole lives, and to contain ail heaven and
the width of eternity within its own compass. A saint perhaps
corresponds to a thousandth part of His grace, we to much less.
So far is our meanness, even when it strives, from matching the
free magnificence of God. But a grace corresponded to instantly
brings another grace, and that another, and so on through an
endless series rising in number, in multitude, in beauty, and in
efficacy. Thus the irresistible swiftness of the process of sanctifica­
tion dawns upon us almost as a thing to fear. The possibilities

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

of sanctity cannot be thought of without trembling. The holi­
ness of creatures dazzles us, while the holiness of the Creator
seems ever removing and removing further off from us, at the
very- time it is drawing us onward toward itself in breathless
adoration. But our imperfect correspondence frustrates the work,
We tie up the liberality of God. We squander, corrupt, dilute
His grace, even when we use it, and we delay as if we wished to
let it stand and evaporate and lose its peculiar celestial freshness
before we take heart to use it. Thus, if we may reverently say it,
God with His grace in men’s souls is like a man whose thoughts
are eloquent and beautiful, but who has not the gift of speech,
and cannot utter them, or only in a stammering way which both
hides and spoils them. He has not free scope with us. He can
but produce a very inferior work at best, because His materials
are wilfully incapable of a better. Grace was never so gloriously
unbound as it was in Mary’s soul, except in the Human Soul of
Jesus, which is out of all comparison. In her heart it expatiated
as if it were in heaven, and developed itself in all its unhindered
magnificence. She corresponded to every grace to the very utter
most. Her graces were gigantic, immeasurable, even when com­
pared with the graces of the apostles; and yet she corresponded
perfectly to their vastness. Thus every moment of life was bring­
ing down fresh inundations of grace, which were foliage, flower,
and fruit almost the moment they had touched the virgin soil
of her immaculate heart. Days went on adding themselves to days,
and years to years; and like some fabulous machinery, with over­
whelming force and with invisible speed, the process of cor­
respondence and sanctification went on, multiplying itself in one
short hour beyond the figures of all human sums. Her life moved
too amid tall mysteries, each of which was a universe of sanctifica­
tion in itself. The march of her soul was among Immaculate
Conceptions, adorable Incarnations, Hidden Lives of God, Pas­
sions of the Impassible, Defeats of the Omnipotent, Birth and
Growth and Death of the Immutable and Eternal, the Govern­
ment of a God, mysterious prodigies of Dolor, Descents of the
Holy Ghost, Queenships of Apostles, and the like. What oceans

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353

of grace might not such a life of supernatural heroism absorb,
and convert into a holiness which, soberly speaking, is unimag
inablc by angel or by saint! No wonder we always speak so
unworthily of Mary. It is one of those sad human infirmities
from which we never can escape; for all language is so inexpres­
sibly unworthy of her, that the most glowing praise and the
coldest commonplace sink down into one level from such a dis­
tance as the inaccessible mountains of her holiness. Love alone
can feel its way far on toward her; and happy is he whose love
for her is ever growing. He is enjoying in time one of the
choicest blisses of eternity.
This view of Mary's holiness, that it is a purely divine work,
because it is simply God’s own grace realized, and realized to the
utmost, by correspondence, not only gives us the true height of
her sanctity, and shows that its world-wide dimensions are not
magnified by any mists of affectionate exaggeration, and that all
that ever has been said of her by Bernard. Bernardine, and the
rest, is far below the level of her tremendous grandeur, but it
also explains to us the difficulty we have in getting any clear
conceptions of her interior dispositions. In the first place, we are
obliged to use the same words to express correspondence to
different graces. We speak of her conformity to the will of God,
or her generosity, or her fortitude, or her union, when the change
of circumstances and the varying refinements of grace have caused
the words really to mean different things at different times. We
have not keenness or subtlety of spiritual discernment to dis­
tinguish between these niceties of grace, these shadings of
heavenly beauty. Yet we know them to be so real, that one shade
of one of Mary's graces would produce a different kind of saint
from another shade of the same grace; and we know them also
to be so great and powerful, that each single shade of any one of
her graces could fill with color and splendor the souls of a multi­
tude of saints, or the spirits of a hierarchy of angels. But there is
such a thing as an eloquent stammering, when we are discoursing
on the things of God; and we must speak, even though what we
say is far below what we mean, and what we mean is but a waver

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

ing likeness of the reality which we see blindedly in the burning
fires of the majesty of God­
in the second place, if Mary’s holiness consists in tranquil,
adequate, congenial correspondence to grace, it is that corres­
pondence which must give the name and character to her disposi­
tions. But, if the graces are far out of our sight, if their abysses
are not registered in our theology, (and who can lay down sound­
ings for the unfathomable?) then must her correspondence also
be far out of our sight, and with it those conceivable dispositions
which form her interior loveliness and grandeur. We can do no
more than hazard guesses, and imagine shadows, which shall stand
for those invisible realities. We can but make calculations, and
then allow for errors from our knowledge of the superlative
excellence of the Mother of God, and then let the sum stand,
not as an accuracy, but as a mere help to getting an idea. Each
succeeding dolor the difficulty of speaking of her dispositions
has been greater; and yet we could not be silent, because her
dispositions were the graces of her sorrows in blossom, passing on
to the fruit of solid holiness. For Mary was no mere monument
of marvels, upon which God had hung external dignities, and
endless banners, and figurative emblems, and the external spoils
of a redeemed world. The bewildering glory outside—and truly
it was bewildering—was as nothing compared to that which was
within. Mary was a creature, a woman, a mother, a sufferer; and
by stupendous correspondence to them she had made God’s gifts
her own. They are at this moment not mere ornaments, or
privileges, or decorations, or offices conferred, or prerogatives
communicated, or even inalienable jewels; neither are they simple
attributes, or perfections referred to her, or glories separable
from her, or wonders predicated of her, or merits imputed to
her; in heaven they are Mary’s own self, her own human,
maternal, characteristic, loving, quiet self; a self which is in glory
what God made it twice over, in nature and in grace. Oh, it is
sweet to think that our Heavenly Father has such a daughter, to
be ever at His feet worshipping Him with the little greatness of
her love!

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355

Of all the interior dispositions of the saints, that which strikes
us as the most magnificent, more magnificent than the spirit of
martyrdom, is that of perseverance in a complete sacrifice. Per
severance is in itself the most uncreaturelike of graces. It is as if
the immutability of the Creator had dropped like a mantle upon
the creature, and became him well. There is something at once
more graceful in its movements and more heroic in its demeanor
than characterized the beautiful fervor in which the soul irrev­
ocably committed itself to the first generous sacrifice. There is
more of heaven in its stateliness, while there is also more of a
man’s own in the courage of the sustained effort. But the glory
of perseverance is greatly increased when it is in a complete sacri­
fice. There is a completeness and unity about the whole work,
which seems to render it an offering worthy of the divine com­
passion. Strange to say, while many souls fail under the effort
while the sacrifice is yet incomplete, there are not a few who
dishonor it in its completeness. Nature gives way and seeks re­
pose, when it has attained the summit that was before it; and it
seldom happens on earth that there is not something ignoble and
unworthy about repose. Others look back on what they have done
almost with cowardly regret; for it is rarely the case that any
sacrifice is strictly speaking complete in itself. A man has com­
mitted himself by it to something further, something higher. All
efforts in the spiritual life, properly speaking, have to be sus­
tained till the end. The difficulty, and therefore the costliness of
perseverance, consists in its tension never being relaxed. It is on
this account that perseverance is an uncreaturelike grace, a super­
natural similitude of God. Others again do not regret the efforts
expended or the sacrifices made; but they look at once for their
reward. They lower the nobility of what they have done by a
want of disinterestedness. We are not offended when little sen
ices look for their reward. But great sen-ices remind us of God.
and do not look so palpably unworthy of Him, and therefore
they offend us by the mention of their recompense. So it is, that
in one way or other there are few souls, who do not somewhat
disfigure and impair their sacrifice, and take the unearthly fresh

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ness from it. Thus when we see any one persisting in his com­
plete sacrifice with the same ardor and fortitude and magna­
nimity and patience, almost gracefully unconscious that he has
done or is doing any great thing, not that he does not understand
what he has done, but because when all his thoughts are fixed
on God there are none left for attention to himself, then do we
call it the most magnificent of all interior dispositions, a shadow
of the rest of the unfatigued Creator when His sabbath succeeded
to the making of the world. Such was Mary’s disposition in this
seventh dolor. It was the sabbath of her world of sorrows. But
when we think of the sacrifice which she had made, of the com­
pleteness with which she had made it, and then of her quiet
bravery in that desolate solitude of creatures which was all around
her uncompanioned soul, we may conceive how far it is beyond
our power to realize the intrinsic majesty of such a disposition,
and how much we should lower it, if we strove to compare it with
the corresponding disposition in the saints, to which in the
paucity of words we are fain to give the selfsame name. God
rested on Himself in the hollow of uncircumscribed eternity,
when His dread sabbath came. Can a creature share in such a
sabbath? Yet to what else shall we liken Mary in the repose of
her dolors finished?
Another disposition of her soul in this dolor was her detach­
ment from all spiritual consolations and the sweetness of divine
things. This is a height of love which he who practises it not on
earth loses the opportunity of practising forever; for there can be
no such love in heaven. We talk so often of the love of suffering,
urging it on others and on ourselves, that we almost forget how
high and rare a grace it is, and how rash the pursuit of it is to
common souls. There are few indeed to whom such a grace is a
reality, and fewer still with whom it is at home, or amidst whose
other graces it finds a place that fits it. Yet saints, who have loved
such suffering as creatures could inflict upon them, have shrunk
from those processes of suffering which God Himself immediately
imposes on the soul. Many, who have willingly parted with the
light of the earth, have drawn back trembling from the darkness

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157

of heaven, when it threatened to descend upon them, and have
averted it by the energy of their prayers. There have been saints,
who for the love of God would forego His spiritual sweetnesses
and consolations, who yet could not bear to have His blessed Self
laid upon them as a dread instrument of mysterious pain. The
cloudy solitudes of divine abandonment have been trodden by
very few, and they for the most part, when they had entered into
the obscurity, let us know how far they had advanced by the
cries of anguish which escaped from them, as from wounded
eagles, in their torture. Jesus Himself had cried aloud as He
sank down into that appalling death. Mary, in this dolor, was
allowed to try this perilous descent, and to share still further
than she had done beneath the Cross the dereliction of our
Blessed Lord. As this came upon Him at the end of His Passion,
as the crowning sorrow, just when it was least possible for nature
to endure it, so hers came on her at the end of her Compassion,
as the crowning dolor, when suffering had left nature but as a
wreck amid the abounding waters of divinest grace. The two
sorrows, His and hers, ended in the same mysterious divine afflic­
tion, whither we cannot reach, but where we know that out of
speechless woe there rose unutterable beautiful light from out
their souls, which worshipped God with the perfection of created
worship, carrying, as on some mighty resistless wave, the offering
of human love far beyond the highest point which the tide of
angelical intelligence was ever known to reach.
There are also two growths of heroic sorrow which we must
not forget to notice, and which we may assuredly reckon among
her dispositions in this dolor, the spirit of intercession and the
spirit of thanksgiving. The products of grace are not unfrequently the contradictories of nature, even while they are grafted
upon them. It would seem as if the natural result of sorrow
were to make us selfish, by forcibly occupying us with ourselves,
and concentrating our attention upon our sufferings Yet we
know that the proper grace of sorrow is unselfishness. It is as if
the very multitude of things we had to bear made large room
in our hearts, and caused a leisurely tranquility there, which

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enabled us to think of others, and to legislate with the most
minute and foreseeing consideration for their comfort. The spirit
of intercession is part of the unselfishness which comes from the
sanctification of sorrow. Our kindliness toward others takes
especially a religious and supernatural form, because we are bear­
ing our sorrow in the presence of God, and our whole being is
softened by it, and drawn into deeper and more heavenly rela­
tions with Him. The spirit of intercession belongs to hearts,
which are victims,—victims, voluntary or involuntary, of God’s
loving justice. Every Christian who is in sorrow is so far forth
a living copy of Christ Crucified, and the spirit of expiation is
an inevitable element in his grace. Moreover, human agents are
generally more or less concerned with our griefs, and, for the
most part, not innocently or unintentionally so; and our thoughts,
in being occupied with ourselves, are necessarily occupied with
them. Thus Jesus prayed for His murderers upon the Cross.
Thus the martyrs prayed for their tormentors. Thus, also, to
wrong a saint has generally been the royal road to his choicest
prayers. Who can doubt, therefore, and especially in those critical
circumstances of the world and out of the very abysses of the
mysteries of redeeming grace, that Mary’s soul, the more it was
overwhelmed with the waters of bitterness, with all the more
quiet intensity poured itself out on others? And inasmuch as her
prayers were her treasures, treasures that could enrich the world
far beyond its own suspicion or belief, it would necessarily be in
intercession that the largeness and exuberance of her love found
vent, especially when this spirit of intercession was, at the same
time, the most efficacious reparation to Jesus for the wrongs He
had sustained.
But, while sanctified sorrow melts the heart in kindliness
toward others, much more does it absolutely liquefy it, to use
the favorite word of mystical writers, in kindliness toward God;
and this, in the same spirit of contradiction to nature, takes the
form of thanksgiving. On natural principles, the times of sorrow
are the times when we have least to thank God for; but to an
enlightened and discerning faith they are the times into which

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blessings are miraculously compressed, miraculously both for
number and for greatness. Yet even here there is something also
which is deeply natural. When a friend has wounded us in any
way, his change of conduct somehow brings out his love for us
in our hearts, and the past is brightly magnified from behind the
present cloud. Thus in our relations with God, sorrow makes
us feel our own unworthiness more deeply, so that the contempla­
tion of past mercies fills us with an humble astonishment, whose
only voice is wondering praise and the thanksgiving of happy
tears. This is that glorifying of God in the fires, which is one of
the magnificences of tried souls. As we crush the aromatic leaves
of the cypress and the bay to extract their fragrance from them,
so God presses our hearts till they bleed, that they may worship
Him with the perfume of their gratitude, and draw Him closer
to themselves with the new delight and love with which they
inspire His compassion and His tenderness. Who can doubt that,
as Mary sank deeper down and deeper in those amazing gulfs of
her dolors, her Magnificat became evermore louder, and deeper,
and quicker, and more full of adoring significance in the enrap­
tured ear of God?
Last of all, the magnitude of her faith, in the dark hour of
that seventh dolor, did of itself worship the Holy Trinity most
incomparably. This is another of the many resemblances which
there are between the seventh dolor and the third, the immensity
and the repose of faith in unutterable darkness, faith without
the light of faith, the sense of faith, the enjoyment of faith, with­
out the ever-present self-reward as well as self-conviction which
faith ordinarily brings with it. Here also is the same spirit of
contradiction to unregenerate nature. We believe God the more
readily, the more firmly, the more lovingly, just the more in­
credible He vouchsafes to make Himself to us. He never seems
more good than when we ourselves have the least cause to think
Him good, never more just than when He looks as if He were
positively unjust. Faith is a gift which grows under demand, and
becomes the more inexhaustible when its waters are let loose.
It is in itself a worship of the truth of God, and in this perhaps

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resides the secret of its apparently unaccountable acceptableness
with Him. Hence the more clearly we see this eternal truth
in the midst of blinding darkness, so much the more firmly
do we adhere to it in spite of seeming evidence to the
contrary, and so much the less are we moved by difficulties; or,
rather, the less we apprehend them as difficulties, so much the
more worship does our faith contain. Though he slay me, yet
will I trust in Him, were the grand words of Job. Hence too it
follows that calmness enhances faith. It is a testimony to its
reality, and an evidence of its empire. Tranquil faith is sweetest
worship, because it seems to say that all is at peace because God
is concerned. There is no need of agitation, or of trouble, or of
any manner of unquietness; God is His own guarantee: all must
be right and best and most beautiful, because it is from Him.
His word is dearer to us than knowledge, easier to read than
proof, and nestles deeper in our hearts than a conviction. Yet
never was faith exercised under such circumstances as by Mary
in this dolor, never was faith greater, nor ever faith more tranquil.
The faith of the whole of the little scattered Church was in her;
and there is not more faith to-day in the whole of the huge world­
wide Church Militant than was in her single heart that night.
All this gives us but a faint idea of the inward beauty of our
Blessed Lady in the endurance of this seventh dolor. Unknown
graces were accompanied by unknown dispositions. The heights
which she had reached are inaccessible to our mystical theology.
God only can tell how beautiful she was within, and into what
new unions with Himself she had by this last sorrow been per­
mitted to enter. It is enough for us to know that, next to the
Body of Jesus, her immaculate heart was the most wonderful
thing on earth that night.
The seventh dolor contains also many lessons for ourselves,
which are quite within the scope of those who are endeavoring
to serve God in an ordinary way, while at the same time, like all
the other sorrows of our Blessed Mother, it calls us to serve Him
with a higher, more detached, and more disinterested love than
we have ever done before. We learn from the promptitude with

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.361

which she left the tomb to do her work, and to fulfil in her cheer­
less desolation the will of God, how we ourselves should put duty
before all other considerations, and, in comparison with it, esti­
mate as nothing the highest spiritual consolations. Now, as if
Providence arranged it so on purpose, duty seems often to lead
from the sensible enjoyment of Jesus. Even in common domestic
life the unselfishness of daily charity will lead us to sacrifice what
looks like a religious advantage, to forfeit what it is hard not to
persuade ourselves is a spiritual improvement, for an agreeable­
ness which others do not particularly value, and which appears to
be only a growth of acquired politeness or of natural kindliness,
and not at all an obedience to a supernatural bidding of grace.
It is hard at all times to persuade ourselves that there is no spir­
itual advantage to be compared to the giving up of our own will,
and that petty mortifications, which concern our own private
ways, and the use of our time, and habits even of devotion, are.
so long as they are painful to us. among the highest methods of
sanctification. It is necessary to add, so long as they are painful
to us, for, unlike other mortifications, when they cease to be
painful they cease to be mortifications, and become symptoms of
the world having got the better of us, and then unfortunately
there is no discretion left us but the apparently selfish rudeness
of those who have real cause to be afraid about their souls. If
the ordinary civilities of society may often claim our time and
attention at the seeming sacrifice of spiritual sweetness and com­
munion with our Lord, much more imperative is the jurisdiction
which charity may lawfully exercise over us in this respect. Un­
fortunately spirituality tends to be selfish. Our nature is so bad
that good things acquire evil propensities from their union with
us, and it is the best things which have the worst propensities.
So even the love of our Blessed Lord, when discretion does not
guide it, may interfere with our love of others, and so come at
last to be an untrue love of Him. Untrue, because merely senti­
mental; for there is no divine love which is not at the same time
self-denying. To have to give up our own ways to those of others,
to have our times of prayer at hours which we dislike, to accom

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modate our habits of piety to the habits of others, is certainly a
delicate and perilous process, one needing great discretion, safe
discretion, and an abiding fear of worldliness. Nevertheless, it
is often a most needful means of sanctification, especially to those
whose duties, health, or position do not allow them to lead
mortified and penitential lives. The use of time, whether we
consider the annoying weariness of punctuality and the super­
natural captivity of regular hours, or whether we look at the un­
welcome interruptions and somewhat excessive demands upon it
made by the inconsiderateness and importunity of others, is a
most copious source of vigorous and bracing mortification for
those who are trying to love God purely amid the inevitable
follies and multifarious distractions of the world. It is the especial
mortification of priests. But, if manners and charity may law­
fully draw us from the sensible enjoyment of Jesus, it would be
simply unlawful to deny the claims of duty to compel such an
act of self-denial. Yet it is a point in which pious people, espe­
cially beginners, almost invariably fail. There are few households
or neighborhoods in which the spiritual life has got an unjustly
bad name, where the mischief has not been caused by the in­
discretion of an ill-regulated piety in this respect, and, while it
is to be hoped that we look upon such households or neighbor­
hoods with an entirely unsympathetic coldness, it is not the less
sad that the evil should be there, because it is not the less true
that our Blessed Lord is the sufferer. Beginners cannot easily
persuade themselves that Jesus can be more really anywhere than
in the sensible enjoyments of intercourse with Him. The more
advanced souls know well that Jesus unfelt is a greater grace than
Jesus felt, in a multitude of instances; yet even with them prac­
tice falls below knowledge, because nature rebels to the very last
against whatever limits the prerogatives of sense.
If Mary sought for no consolation in the house of John, but
abandoned herself there to her desolation till Easter morning,
does it not seem as if there was some kind of justification for
those who cherish their grief and brood over it? We must dis­
tinguish. Grief in divine things so far differs from grief arising

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from earthly losses and bereavements, that we have no right to
put it away from ourselves or to seek consolation, until the im­
pulses of grace bid us do so. The suffering of divine sorrow is
so different a thing from that of common sorrow, that there is
no danger of sentimentality, or effeminacy, or selfishness arising
from it. The endurance of divine sorrow is not the indulgence
of it, but the continuation of a crucifixion; whereas the endur­
ance of common sorrow soon ceases to be sorrow, and becomes
an indulgence, an elegant and interesting self-importance, and
a dissipating softness of luxurious melancholy. Thus sorrow for
sin, sadness because of the sins of others, grief because of the
vicissitudes of the Church, grief because of our Lord's Passion,
or sorrowing sympathy with our Lady’s dolors, are not so much
events of human sadness which befall us as direct operations of
grace, and therefore aiming at different ends and working by
other laws. Such griefs should be cherished, their remembrances
kindled, and their shadows be, perhaps, with some slight degree
of violence, retained, when they seem as if they were departing.
All this is unlawful with ordinary sorrows. Yet even in the case
of divine sorrows it is to be remembered that any grace which
is out of the jurisdiction of discretion is a phenomenon utterly
unknown to the highest theology of the saints.
Since there are so many resemblances between the seventh
dolor and the third, it is not surprising that they should in some
respect teach the same lessons. We learn from this last sorrow
that there is no darkness like the darkness of a world without
Jesus, such as Mary's world was on that fearful night. It is darker
than the darkness of Calvary; for that is a darkness which cheers,
refreshes, and inspires. Jesus is there. He is the very heart of
that darkness. He is felt more plainly than if He were seen. He
is heard more distinctly because all is so dark about Him. and
other sounds are hushed by the gloom. It is like being in the
cloud with God, as tried souls often are. It is truly a darkness,
and brings with it the pain of darkness; yet there is hardly a
loving soul on earth to whom such darkness would not be more
welcome far than light. But the darkness of the absence of Jesus

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is. as it were, a participation in the most grievous pain of hell.
If it is by our own fault, then it is the greatest of sorrows. If it
is a trial from God, then it is the greatest of sufferings. In cither
case we must not let the light of the world tempt us out of the
darkness. In such a gloom it is indeed dreadful to abide; but the
consequences of leaving it by our own self-will arc more dreadful
still. It is not safe there to think of creatures. We must think of
God only. It is the sanctuary of "God Alone,” the motto of the
saints and of the saintly. We must deal only with the super­
natural. and leave Him who brought us there, whether for chas­
tisement or fervor, to take us out when it shall be His will.
Meanwhile we should unite ourselves to the dispositions in which
Mary endured her seventh dolor, and this will bring us into
closer union with God.
One more lesson still she teaches. She did her work in the
world, as it were, with all her heart; and yet her heart was not
there, but in the tomb with Jesus. This is the grand work which
sorrow does for all of us. It entombs us in the will of God. It
buries our love, together with our sorrow, in the Blessed Sacra­
ment. Sorrow is, as it were, the missionary of the Divine will. It
is the prince of the apostles. The Church is built upon it. The
gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Our Lord is with it
always to the end. It is sorrow that digs the grave of self, and
blesses it, and bums incense in it, and buries self therein, and
fills it up, and makes the flowers grow upon the tomb. The great
secret of holiness is never to have our hearts in our own breasts,
but living and beating in the Heart of Jesus; and this can rarely
be accomplished except through the operation of sanctified sor­
row. Happy, therefore, is he who has a sorrow at all hours to
sanctify!
We have now brought our Blessed Mother to the threshold
of those mysterious fifteen years which followed her dolors and
the Ascension of our Lord. She began with fifteen years without
Him, and so in like manner she ended with fifteen years without
Him. Only as in the first fifteen years the image of the Messias
was engraven upon her heart, and the shadow of His coming lay

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over all her growths in holiness, so in the last fifteen years he
dwelt bodily within her in the unconsumed Blessed Sacrament,
from Communion to Communion, and was the living fountain
of all those nameless and unimaginable growths in holiness which,
during that time, went on within her soul. The destiny of the
Mother of God was a destiny of unutterable sorrow, exhausting
at once the possibilities of woe and the capabilities of the creature.
This might be expected, since it was by sorrow, shame, and the
Passion that the Incarnate God came to save the world. The
dolors of our Blessed Lady, therefore, are inseparable from her
divine Maternity. They are not accidents of her life, one way
out of many ways in which God might have chosen to sanctify
her. They were inevitable to her as Mother of God. of God who
took flesh to suffer and to die. Thus, rightly considered, Mary’s
dolors are Mary's self. Her first fifteen years, commencing with
the Immaculate Conception, were a preparation for her dolors.
Her last fifteen years, commencing with the descent of the Holy
Ghost, were the maturity of her dolors. During them her sea
of sorrow settled till it became a clear, profound, translucent
depth of unmineled love, whose last act of taking the tranquil
plenitude of possession of its glorious victim was the dislodging
of her soul from her body, by the most marvellous and beautiful
death which creature could ever die. Such an edifice of sorrow
as the Divine Motherhood was to bring along with it could not
rest on foundations less broad and deep than the immeasurable
graces of her first fifteen years. What, then, must have been the
grandeur of the graces which came upon that edifice when it was
completed, and were its domes, and towers, and pinnacles? We
have often wondered what could be done to Mary, in the way
of sanctification, at the descent of the Holy Ghost. What was left
to do? In what direction was she to grow? The mere fact of the
delaying of the Assumption meant something; and what could it
have meant but increase of holiness and multiplication of grace?
If she was kept on earth to nurse the Infant Church, as she had
nursed the Infant Saviour, tn be herself a living Bethlehem, with
the Blessed Sacrament forever in her, and her queenship of the

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apostles and external ministry of Bethlehem to the childhood of
the Church, still, untold and incalculable augmentations of grace
and merit are implied in the very office, as well as in the fact that
it was God’s Mother who fulfilled the office. It was her dolors
which opened out in her soul fresh abysses for eager grace to fill.
It was the dolors which rendered her capable of that other new
creation of grace in the descent of the Holy Ghost. His graces
are absolutely inexhaustible: her capacities of grace are practically
inexhaustible, to our limited comprehension. The grace which
prepared her for the Divine Maternity prepared her also for her
singular and lifelong martyrdom. Her martyrdom prepared her
for those ineffable augmentations of grace and merit which were
compressed into her last fifteen years. Thus her dolors are, as it
were, the centre of her holiness. They reveal Mary to us as she
was in herself more than any other of her mysteries. Indeed, they
are hardly to be called mysteries; they are more than that: they
are her life, her self, her maternity. They enable us to under­
stand her holiness. They help us to see that what theologians
say of the momentary accumulation of her merits is not so in­
credible as it often seems to those who have not loved and medi­
tated their way into Mary’s greatness. There is nothing about
Mary which unites in itself so much of Mary’s part in the In­
carnation, of her own peculiar personal holiness, and of her
similitude to God, as the system of her dolors. They are at once
the plainest and the completest as well as the most tender and
pathetic revelation of the Mother of God. As her first fifteen
years were secret, so were her last fifteen; but over the marvellous
processes of grace which fill them both lies the shadow of her
dolors, the shadow of a coming time in the one case, the shadow
of a lofty mountainous past in the other. He who would learn
Mary must enter into her broken heart to do so. It is the “dolor­
ous Mother" who illuminates the Immaculate Conception on the
one side and the fair pomp of the Assumption on the other.
Look once more at the great Mother, as she leaves the garden
of the sepulchre. Eve going forth from Eden was not more
sorrow-laden, and bore with her into the unpeopled earth a heart

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less broken and less desolate. That woe-worn woman is the
strength of the Church, the queen of the apostles, the true mother
of all that outspread world, over which the blue mantle of dark­
ness is falling fast and silently. Sleep on, tired world! sleep on,
beneath the paschal moon and the stars that are brightening as
it sets; thy mother's heart watches and wakes for thee!

Chapter IX
THE COMPASSION OF MARY

At first we stood on the shore of Mary’s sorrows and gazed
upon them as one vast ocean. We then sounded, one after an­
other, the seven abysses of that ocean, which the Church selected
and presented to us. Now we look at her dolors again as one,
but pouring their waters through the strait of Calvary into the
mightier ocean of the Precious Blood. This peculiar point of
view is called the Compassion of Mary, the right understanding
of which involves several grave theological questions, and yet is
most necessary to make our devotion to the dolors real and pro­
found. There are, in fact, seven questions for us to consider: the
divine purpose of her Compassion, its nature and characteristics,
what it actually effected, the relation in which it stands to our
own compassion with her, a comparison of the Passion with Mary’s
Compassion, the seeming excess of the Compassion over the Pas­
sion. and, lastly, the measures and dimensions of her Compassion.

Section I
THE DIVINE PURPOSE OF MARY’S COMPASSION

First of all, then, we have to consider the divine purpose of
her Compassion. It is very questionable whether we might ever
say of anything in God’s works that it was merely ornamental.
There is something in the idea of mere ornament which seems at
variance with the actuality of God, with the magnificence of His
simplicity, with His adorable reality. To suppose our Lady’s
dolors to be so much ornamental pathos added to the Incarna368

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369

lion even for the holy end of exciting some additional degrees
of love, would involve still further questions regarding the char
acter and perfections of God, His tenderness toward His crea­
tures, and the merciful significance which there is in every pain
and sorrow through all creation. It is not easy to see how he
who should hold such a view of our Blessed Lady's sorrows could
be excused from the highest irreverence, or even from implicit
blasphemy. God certainly had a purpose in them. He has a
purpose in everything which He ordains. But His purpose in so
very marked a feature of the Incarnation as the unutterably
woeful destiny of the Mother of God must have been propor­
tioned to the magnitude of the mystery itself, and of that larger
mystery of which it is a part. It could not have been a simple
pathos. God could not have martyred one of His creatures only
to throw a poetical halo round the intense realities of Calvary.
Neither could it have been merely a lesson to us. For much of
her Compassion is not only inimitable by us, and so beyond our
reach, but also incomprehensible to us, and so beyond our under­
standing. It is true we learn lessons from it, because there is
teaching in all that God does. But this is a different thing from
God’s having no further intention in a mystery than that it should
be a lesson to us. Neither can it have been only for her sanctifi­
cation, though no doubt this was one great purpose in it. She
had become the Mother of God before her dolors commenced;
and they were a consequence of her divine maternity, not a
preparation for it. They did sanctify her. Indeed, they were in
an especial sense the sanctification of one who, being sinless,
could not be sanctified, as the saints have been, by struggle, evil
propensity, or inward temptation. But it is hard to contemplate
them at all studiously and believe that their purpose ended here.
We crave a deeper and diviner purpose, and one more closely
knit to the whole scheme of die Incarnation; and we may be sure
that such a one exists, even though it may be beyond our
discovery.
If, then, we reject all the views mentioned above, as unreal
and unwordiy, and clearly at variance with the phenomena to

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

be explained, are we, on the other hand, to suppose that our
Lady’s Compassion was part of the redemption of the world, that
the salvation of souls was merited by it, and that sin was expiated
by it? Many writers have used language which seems to imply
as much as this. Saints and doctors have united in calling our
Blessed Lady coredemptress of the world. There is no question
of the lawfulness of using such language, because there is such
overwhelming authority for it. The question is as to its mean­
ing. Is it merely the hyperbole of panegyric, the affectionate ex­
aggeration of devotion, the inevitable language of a true under­
standing of Mary, which finds common language inadequate to
convey the whole truth? Or is it literally true, with an acknowl­
edged and recognized theological accuracy attached to it? This
is a question which has presented itself to most minds in connec­
tion with devotion to our Blessed Mother, and there are few
questions to which more vague and unsatisfactory answers have
been made, than to this. On the one hand, it seems rash to assert
of language used both by saints and doctors, that it is only exag­
geration and hyperbole, flowery phraseology intended to startle,
but without any real meaning hidden beneath it. On the other
hand, who can doubt that our most Blessed Lord is the sole
Redeemer of the world, His Precious Blood the sole ransom from
sin, and that Mary herself, though in a different way, needed
redemption as much as we do, and received it in a more copious
manner and after a more magnificent kind in the mystery of the
Immaculate Conception? Thus, so far as the literal meaning of
the word is concerned, it would appear that the term co-redemptress is not theologically true, or, at least, does not express the
truth it certainly contains with theological accuracy. We are
distracted between the desire to magnify our Blessed Mother, the
authority of the saints and doctors, and the supremely sovereign
requirements of a sound theology. We certainly shrink from
asserting that the language of the saints has no meaning, or is
inadvisable; and, at the same time, we have no doubt that our
Blessed Lady is not the co redemptress of the world in the strict
sense of being redemptress, in the unshared sense in which our

THF. COMPASSION OF MARY

571

Lord is Redeemer of the world, but she is co-redemptress in the
accurate sense of that compound word. But these are not times
in which it is desirable to use words the real meaning of which
we have not distinctly ascertained. Hence, while it would be sad
indeed for any one to attempt to deprive Mary of a title which
saints and doctors have conferred upon her,—for we are living in
days when the growth of devotion to our Blessed Mother is our
surest augury of a better future,—at the same time it is of im­
portance, even in a devotional point of view, for us to know what
we mean by a title which certainly conveys a real truth and a
truth which could not very easily be otherwise expressed. The
following conclusions may perhaps be taken as true, finding truth
in the mean, and avoiding both the somewhat violent alternatives
of censuring the saints, or of infringing on the prerogatives of
our Blessed Lord:—
1. Our Blessed Lord is the sole Redeemer of the world in the
true and proper sense of the word, and in this sense no creature
whatsoever shares the honor with Him, neither can it be said of
Him without impiety that He is co-redeemer with Mary.
2. In a secondary dependent sense, and by participation, all
the elect co-operate with our Lord in the redemption of the
world.
3. In the same sense, but in a degree to which no others ap­
proach, our Blessed Lady co-operated with Him in the redemp­
tion of the world.
4. Besides this, and independent of her dolors, she co-operated
in it in a sense, and after a manner, in which no other creatures
did or could.
5. Furthermore, by her dolors, she co-operated in the redemp­
tion of the world in a separate and peculiar way. separate and
peculiar not only as regards the co-operation of the elect, but
also as regards her own other co-operation, independently of the
dolors.
These five propositions seem to place the whole question in
a tolerably clear light. It does not appear to be necessary to say
any thing about the first. It is of faith that our Blessed Lord

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

alone redeemed the world. The elect co-operate with Him in
this work as His members. They have become His members by
redeeming grace, that is, by the application to their souls of His
sole redemption. By His merits they have acquired die ability
of meriting. Their works can satisfy for sin, the sins of others as
well as their own, by their union with His. Thus, to use St.
Paul s language, by their sanctified sufferings or by their volun­
tary penances they “fill up in their bodies that which is lacking
of the sufferings of Christ, for His Body’s sake, which is the
Church." Thus by the communion of the saints in their Head,
Jesus Christ, the work of redemption is perpetually going on by
the accomplishment and application of the redemption effected
on the Cross by our Blessed Lord. It is not a figurative and sym­
bolical, but a real and substantial, co-operation of the elect with
our Blessed Redeemer. There is a true secondary sense in which
the elect merit the salvation of the souls of others, and in which
they expiate sin and avert its judgments. But it is by permission,
by divine adoption, by participation, and in subordination to the
one sole and complete redemption of Jesus Christ. But the holi­
ness of all the saints together does not even approximate to the
holiness of Mary. Her merits have a sort of infinity as compared
with theirs. Their martyrdoms and dolors are little more than
shadows when placed by the side of hers. Thus in their own
sense of co-operation she exceeds them in degree immeasurably,
so that her co-operation with our Lord almost throws theirs into
the shade. On this account she might be called co-redemptress
with a truth, which would be far less applicable to the saints.
But this is not all. She co-operated with our Lord in the
redemption of the world in quite a different sense, a sense which
can never be more than figuratively true of the saints. Her free
consent was necessary to the Incarnation, as necessary as free will
is to merit according to the counsels of God. She gave Him the
pure blood, out of which the Holy Ghost fashioned His flesh and
bone and blood. She bore Him in her womb for nine months,
feeding Him with her own substance. Of her was He born, and
to her He owed all those maternal offices which, according to

THE COMPASSION OF MARY

common laws, were necessary for the preservation of His in­
estimable life. She exercised over Him the plenitude of parental
jurisdiction. She consented to His Passion; and if she could not
in reality have withheld her consent, because it was already in­
volved in her original consent to the Incarnation, nevertheless
she did not in fact withhold it, and so He went to Calvary as her
free-will offering to the Father. Now, this is co-operation in a
different sense from the former, and if we compare it with the
co operation of the saints, their own co-operation, in which Mary
herself alone surpassed them all, we shall see that this other
peculiar co-operation of hers was indispensable to the redemption
of the world as effected on the Cross. Souls could be saved with­
out the co-operation of the saints. The soul of the penitent thief
was saved with no other co-operation than that of Mary, and, if
our Blessed Lord had so willed it, could have been saved without
even that. But the co-operation of the Divine Maternity was in­
dispensable. Without it our Lord would not have been born
when and as He was; He would not have had that Body to suffer
in; the whole series of the divine purposes would have been
turned aside, and either frustrated, or diverted into another
channel. It was through the free will and blissful consent of
Mary that they flowed as God would have them flow. Bethlehem,
and Nazareth, and Calvary, came out of her consent, a consent
which God did in no wise constrain. But not only is the co-opera­
tion of the saints not indispensable of itself, but no one saint by
himself is indispensable to that co-operation. Another apostle
might have fallen, half the martyrs might have sacrificed to idols,
the saints in each century might have been a third fewer in num­
ber than they were, and yet the co-operation of the saints would
not have been destroyed, though its magnificence would have
been impaired. Its existence depends on die body, not on the
separate individuals. No one saint who can be named, unless
perhaps it were in some sense St. Peter, was necessary to the work,
so necessary that without him the work could not have been
accomplished. But in this co-operation of Mary she herself was
indispensable. It depended upon her individually. Without her

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

the work could not have been accomplished. Lastly, it was a
co-operation of a totally different kind from that of the saints
Theirs was but the continuation and application of a sufficient
redemption already accomplished, while hers was a condition
requisite to the accomplishment of that redemption. One was a
mere consequence of an event which the other actually secured,
and which only became an event by means of it. Hence it was
more real, more present, more intimate, more personal, and with
somewhat of the nature of a cause in it, which cannot in any
way be predicated of the co-operation of the saints. And all this
is true of the co-operation of Mary, without any reference to the
dolors at all.
But her dolors were of themselves another co-operation still
more peculiar. The Incarnation might have taken place without
its sorrowful mysteries. Indeed, if there had been no sin, it would
have taken place in glorious and impassible Flesh, and of the
same Mother with a different destiny, a destiny of joy as marvel­
lous and inexplicable as was in fact her destiny of sorrow. The
joys of Mary are like flashes from some other set of divine de­
crees, which was not wholly overlaid by the present dispensation.
This is their peculiarity. They are tokens of a mystery existing
in the mind of God, but which to us is no more than a possible
world, or rather a world which our sin would not allow to
realize itself. Thus it is impossible to separate the dolors of Mary
from her divine Maternity. They follow from it in the way of
consequence as necessarily as in the free divine counsels the
Incarnation of shame and suffering followed from the necessity
of expiating sin. Her sorrows were caused by and inextricably
commingled with His sorrows. They came from the same source;
they led into the same depths; they were connected with the same
circumstances. The two sorrows were but one sorrow afflicting
two hearts. Besides this, as we shall see afterward, there were
many peculiar points not only of striking resemblance, but of
actual union, between her dolors and His. Yet, though we can­
not separate her dolors from her Maternity in fact, her Maternity
is quite conceivable without her dolors, and its peculiar co­

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375

operation with our Lord in the redemption of the world depends
on other things than the dolors, things to which the dolors are
by no means indispensable. So in like manner, or rather as a
consequence, the co-operation of her dolors was a distinct co­
operation from that of her Maternity, and has a character of
its own.
Thus, Mary has three distinct rights to the title of co-redemptress. She has a right to it, first of all, because of her co-operation
with our Lord in the same sense as the saints, but in a singular
and superlative degree. She has a second right to it, which is
peculiar to herself, because of the indispensable co-operation of
her Maternity. She has a third right to it, because of her dolors,
for reasons we shall see presently. These last two rights are un­
shared by any other creature, or by all creatures collectively. They
belong to the incomparable magnificence of the Mother of God.
It has been our privilege, more than once during the course
of this inquiry into our Lady’s dolors, to ascend some fresh height
from which a new view of her grandeur has presented itself to us.
Like the great summits in the mountain-ranges of Alps. Andes,
or Himalaya, each new aspect of Mary’s glory looks grander than
the others. In truth, it is with her greatness as with the greatness
of sublime mountain-scenery: we cannot carry its magnitude
away with us in our minds. We see it, and appreciate it, while
we are actually gazing on it: but when we turn away, the image
of it in our minds is less than the reality. So, when we see the
mountain again, from whichever side we get the view, it looks
larger than it did before, because it is larger than our remem­
brance of it. So is it with our Blessed Lady. The moment we
cease to rest our eye upon her in deep meditation, our idea of
her is less than it ought to be. We never do her justice except
when we gaze upon her. Perhaps it is so with all God s greatest
works, as we know it is with God Himself. Hence it is that we
so often hear objections to statements about the glory of Mary,
coming even from pious believers. Their eye is not on her, and
therefore what is said is incredible to them. Nay, they are the
more convinced that the statements are exaggerated, because they

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

so far transcend the image of Mary which is impressed upon their
minds. They believe more of her, and they believe it more readily,
as her feasts come round, for then their eye is on her, and they
conceive more justly of her vastness. In nothing is she more like
God than in having to be thus learned in order to be understood,
and in having to be kept before us in vision, because our memory
is not wide enough to hold her vast proportions when she is out
of sight.
This co-operation of our Blessed Lady, is, therefore, another
summit from which we gain a fresh view of her magnificence. It
it the grandest privilege of the creature to be a fellow-laborer
with the Creator, just as it will be our home and blessedness to
enjoy His everlasting sabbath. But what is to be said of co-opera­
ting with Him in such a work as the redemption of the world,
and co-operating in it with such efficacy, intimacy, and reality,
nay, with a co-operation simply indispensable to its accomplish­
ment? What an idea does it convey to us of immeasurable holi­
ness! What gifts and graces does it not presuppose! What
marvelous union with God does it not imply! It is as if He
vouchsafed to select the very things about Him which are most in­
communicable, and, in a most mysteriously real way communicate
them to her. It is as if, in those things in which He stands alone
and solitary, He drew her so nearly to Himself, that to us it
should seem as if He was not solitary, because she was with him.
See how He had already mixed her up with the eternal designs of
creation making her almost a partial cause and partial model of
it. Yet this, while it accounts also for her share in the redemption,
does not make her co-operation less wonderful. Divine works
grow more wonderful in our eyes as we discern more of their
consistency and unity. No \vonder then the saints should have
sought to invent a word, a bold and startling word, which should
express such an indescribable grandeur in a creature as is involved
in this threefold co-operation of Mary in the redemption of the
world. Our Lord had taken a created nature, in order that by its
means He might accomplish that great work; so it seemed as if
the highest honor and the closest union of a sinless creature with

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377

Himself should be expressed in the title of (o-rcdemptrew. in
fact, there is no other single word in which the truth could he
expressed; and, far off from His sole and sufficient redemption
as Mary’s co-operation lies, her co-operation stands alone and
aloof from all the co-operation of the elect of God. This, like
some other prerogatives of our Blessed Lady, cannot have justice
done it by the mere mention of it. We must make it our own
by meditation before we can understand all that it involves. But
neither the Immaculate Conception nor the Assumption will give
us a higher idea of Mary’s exaltation than this title of co-redemptress, when we have theologically ascertained its significance. Mary
is vast on every side, and, as our knowledge and appreciation of
God grow, so also will grow our knowledge and appreciation of
her His chosen creature. No one thinks unworthily of Mary,
except because he thinks unworthily of God. Devotion to the
Attributes of God is the best school in which to learn the
theology of Mary; and the reward of our study of Mary lies in a
thousand new vistas that are opened to us in the Divine Perfec
tions, into which except from her heights we never could have
seen at all.
What then is the place which our Lady’s Compassion holds in
the purposes of God? This grandeur of co-operation in a great
measure answers the question. Her dolors were not necessary for
the redemption of the world, but in the counsels of God they
were inseparable from it. They belong to the integrity of the
divine plan; and they doubtless perform many functions in it
which we are unable to apprehend, and which perhaps we do not
so much as suspect. According to God’s ordinance, without shed­
ding of blood there is no remission for sin. One of our Lord's
infantine tears had enough in it of worth, of humiliation, of merit,
and of satisfaction, to redeem the sins of all possible worlds. Yet
as a matter of fact we were not redeemed by His tears, but only
by His blood. Hence Bethlehem was not necessary for our salva­
tion, nor the worship of the three kings, nor the presentation in
the temple, nor the flight into Egypt, nor the disputing with the
doctors. Nazareth was not necessary for our salvation, with all

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

the beautiful mysteries of those eighteen years of hidden life.
The public ministry, with its three years of miracles, parables,
sermons, conversions, and vocations of apostles, was not necessary
to our salvation. Indeed, our Lord might have suffered as a
Child, or He might have come full-grown like Adam, and simply
suffered death at once. His Blood was all that was absolutely
necessary. But Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee belonged
to the integrity of the divine plan. They were not only congruous,
and beautiful, and significant, and full of teaching; but there are
deeper mysteries in them, and a diviner reality, simply because
God planned it so. All His works partake in their degree of His
perfections: in what degree then must the mysteries of the ThirtyThree Years partake of His perfections? The creation of the
world was as nothing compared to the spiritual cosmogony of
those Thirty-Three Years, except that it was the root of them.
No one would dream of thinking lightly of the mysteries of our
Blessed Lord’s Sacred Infancy because we were not redeemed by
them. They are a part of a whole, a divine whole. We do not
know what would have happened, or what we should have lost,
and what eternal consequences might have come, if they had not
been there. So it is with our Lady's dolors. Her Maternity was
indispensable to the Passion. Her dolors do not appear to be so.
But they were an inevitable consequence of her Maternity under
the circumstances of the Fall. They take their place among the
Gospel mysteries. They rank with the mysteries of Bethlehem
and Nazareth, not perhaps in their intrinsic importance, but in
the relation in which they stand to the redemption of the world.
Indeed, we may be allowed to say that even in their intrinsic
importance they might be compared with some of our Lord’s
own mysteries. For is it quite clear that His mysteries and hers
can be divided off in this way? Are not her mysteries His, and His
mysteries hers? Is not the Immaculate Conception a glory of His
redeeming grace? Is not her Purification as much His mystery
as His own Presentation? And in the case of the dolors the union
of the Mother and Son is greater than any other mystery. He is
Himself her one dolor seven times repeated, seven times changed,

THE COMPASSION OF MARY

S79

seven times magnified. In our belief, the dolors of our Blessed
Lady rank very high indeed among the divine mysteries, and have
a more privileged precedence there than is commonly suspected.
But, at any rate, so far as their relation to the redemption of the
world is concerned, they are not further off from it than the
unbloody mysteries of Jesus, and perhaps nearer, because of the
immediateness of their connection. The truth appears to be,
that all the mysteries of Jesus and Mary were in God's design as
one mystery. We cannot break it up, and divide and parcel it out,
and classify the importance of its various glories. This is a task
beyond our science. Who can doubt that it is true to say that
many, who now are saved, would have been lost except for Mary's
dolors,—while yet her dolors do not bear the same relation to us
as the Passion of our Blessed Lord, even in their subordinate
degree? The whole of the Three-and-Thirty Years, and the Hearts
of Jesus and Mary in all the mysteries of those Years, are tinctured
with the Passion; yet outside the Passion itself, where are the
colors deeper, and the traits more lifelike, than in the Mother’s
dolors? Mary's Compassion was the Passion of Jesus as it was felt
and realized in His Mother's Heart.
Is this then the whole account of the matter, that the Passion
was necessary, and the Compassion unnecessary? Who would
venture to say so? Who would dare to say that the Hidden Life
of Nazareth was unnecessary? There is surely a very grave sense
in which all the component parts of a divine work are necessary,
for God is not such an artificer as man. If we are to rest simply
on the doctrine that it was precisely blood-shedding by which
our redemption was accomplished, then in the Passion itself
were there not many things which were by no means necessary?
There were the mental agonies, the public shame, the varieties
of corporal torture, the insults, the lassitude, the thirst. the fear,
the dereliction on the Cross. In that sense none of these things
were necessary' for our redemption. Even in the matter of Blood­
shedding one drop would have sufficed: why was it all shed? Why
the Sweat, the Scourging, the Crowning, the violent Llnvesting,
the Piercing after death? The profusion of the infinite was surely

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THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

unnecessary, in our sense of that word. Now, these arc precisely
the mysteries among which we ought to rank the dolors of Mary.
They belong to the class of what we call the Unnecessary Suffer­
ings of the Passion.· Indeed, thev were literally our Lord’s own
Unnecessary Sufferings; for were not her sorrows by far the most
cruel instruments of His Passion? Her co-operation with the Pas­
sion by means of her dolors is wanting certainly in that indis­
pensable necessity which characterizes the co-operation of her
Maternity. But it far more than compensates for that by the
heroic detailed endurance of such griefs, the ever-flowing fountain
of free will and promptitude, the unmingled and disinterested suf­
fering, and its immediate contact with the Cross of Christ, which
distinguishes it. In her Maternity she had joy as well as sorrow, and
an unexampled dignity. Her consent to it was given once for all;
and the co-operation of her Motherhood with the Passion was
rather material than formal. This second co-operation of her
dolors had more of herself in it and more similitude to her Son;
it cost her more, and the very absence of necessity for it made
the sacrifice the more generous and wonderful. Her Maternity
had to do with the Incarnation as the Incarnation: her dolors
with the Incarnation as it was redemption also.

Section II
THE NATURE OF HER COMPASSION

Having thus considered the divine purpose of Mary's Com­
passion, as far as it is in our power to do so, we may now pass to
our second question, the nature and characteristics of her Com­
passion. What do we mean by the word Compassion? All sorrow
for our Lord’s Passion is compassion with Him. The contempla­
tions of the saints, their painful ecstasies, the stigmata and thorny
crowns, the engraving of the emblems of the Passion on the flesh
• For an account of these sufferings see the Second Chapter of the author's
Treatise on the Passion.

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381

of their hearts, and the miraculous inward sympathies with the
Passion in their souls, are all but so many forms of Compassion,
in the theological sense of the word. In like manner, the tears
and prayers and devout meditations of common Christians, the
penances of Holy Week both among seculars and religious, the
frequency of making the Stations or joining in other devotions
to the Passion, are also Compassion, in the same strict sense.
Hence it would appear that all sorrow of which the Passion is
the cause, all sorrow which is the echo of the Passion in our
hearts, no matter whether this sorrow takes the form of prayer,
of penance, or of merciful deeds to others, is what we mean by
Compassion. It is a great part, and truly an indispensable part,
of the deep inward life of every believer. The more holy the
heart in which it exists, the closer is its union with the life-giving
Passion of our Lord. The intimacy and mystical beauty of this
union depend on the vigor of the operations of grace, on the
intensity of the will in identifying itself with the will of our
Saviour, on the absence of all sin and self-seeking to mar the
completeness of the union or retard the processes of grace, and
finally on the tenderness of heart and the self-oblivion of ecstatic
love which accompany it. Now, in all these respects our Lady's
Compassion is beyond all comparison with the Compassion of
the saints, so far beyond it that we may use the word Compassion
of her companionship in the Passion, and use other and com­
moner words for the union of the saints with the sufferings of
our Lord.
But, as in the matter of co-operation, our Ladv not only co­
operated with Jesus in the same sense as the saints, only in a
superlative degree, but also co-operated more intimately with
Him in ways the saints could not share, so is it with her Com­
passion. It was actually contemporaneous with the Passion, and
took place in the presence of the Passion. Indeed, it is remark­
able that all our Lady’s dolors are compressed within the ThirtyThree Years. None fell in the fifteen years before, none fell in
the fifteen years after. They came from the presence of Jesus.
They were the very contact of His Heart with hers. The actual

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presence of our Lady's Compassion at the time and place of the
Passion gives it a union therewith which no other sorrow for our
Lord can share. It was part of the living mystery itself. It was
not the gradual result of long meditation. It was not a sorrow
felt in the calm seclusion of the undistracted cloister, or a pious
emotion roused by the marvellous ceremonial of a believing
Church. It did not come from literature, or ritual, or history, or
private revelation, or mysticism, or art, or poetry, but from the
sights and sounds of the very Passion, in which it was immersed,
and of which it formed an integral portion. It was part of our
Blessed Mother's life. It was a series of events which happened
to herself, outward sorrows of her own making these inward
wounds. She had distinct rights, by which she was entitled to
share in the Passion. It needed not to be transferred to her by
grace, or love, or participation, or the power of faith. It was hers
already as a mother. She suffered it in all the rawness and dis­
honor of its existing reality. She was in the crowd; she was jostled
in it, and derided by it; she was distracted by the tumult; her
inward tranquility was assailed by the agitation and horror of
the senses. All this is true of her Compassion, and of hers only.
Moreover, her Compassion was part of the Passion in the
sense of having actually increased the Passion. With Judas, and
Annas, and Caiaphas, with Pilate and Herod, with the Roman
soldiers and the Jewish rabble, we must reckon Mary among
those who wrung our Saviour’s Heart with sorrow. Except the
dereliction of His Father, we may well suppose that there was
no pain in all His Passion equal to that which the vision of His
Mother’s broken heart supplied. Thus her Compassion was an
integral part of His sufferings. Beautiful as it was, and exceed­
ingly holy, a very worship in itself, and a very growth of heaven,
to Him it was simple anguish. Intensely as He loved each soul
of man, and therefore loved all souls collectively with an amount
of burning desire which bewilders our conjectures, the single soul
of His Mother was with Him an object of amazing love far be­
yond what He felt for all other creatures together. To see her,
therefore, tempest-tossed on a dark ocean of unutterable woe,

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383

was, of itself, a fearful torture to Him; but that woe was caused
by Himself; it was being poured out of His soul into hers each
separate moment, at each separate shame, pain, outrage, and
indignity. It was He who was stretching her on the rack,—He
who was turning the instruments of her torture perpetually
beyond the limits of human endurance,—He who was thickening
the inconsolable darkness round about her. It was He only who
was doing all this. Without Him she would have had no dolors.
It was her embrace of Him that was her agony. He was a fiery,
sharp-edged cross to the heart He loved best of all. Then all the
incalculable bitterness that He had poured out of Himself into
her, He took back into Himself without taking it away from
her. It re-entered His Sacred Heart as another separate Passion,
another great creation of sorrow by itself, and overwhelmed Him
with a very deluge of tempestuous grief. Thus her Compassion
came out of the Passion, and went into it again, so that there
was rather an identity between the two, than a union of them.
Her Compassion was the Passion taking a particular form. Her
words to St. Bridget express this:* "The sorrow of Christ was
my sorrow, because His Heart was my heart. For, as Adam and
Eve sold the world for one apple, my Son and I redeemed the
world with one heart.”
From the Compassion of Mary being contemporaneous with
the Passion, and indeed an integral part of it, there flowed into it
the character of sacrifice and expiation which belonged to the
Passion, and this in a degree and after a kind which does not
belong to the sorrows of the saints. As the Passion was the sacri­
fice which Christ made upon the Cross, so the Compassion was
the sacrifice of Mary beneath the Cross. It was her offering to
the Eternal Father. It was an offering made by a sinless creature
for the sins of her fellow-creatures. Their gain was her loss. The
lightening of their hearts was the burdening of hers. Her dark­
ness was their light. Their peace was her agony. Her Son was
their victim. Their life was her tremendous martyrdom. Her
offering rose to heaven together with the offering of Jesus. They
Revelations, Book I. Chapter 35.

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were as two grains of incense on the burning coals of one thurible.
With various fragrance they rose up to the throne in the same
thin circles of blue smoke, perceptibly different, yet utterly in­
separable. When the sound of the scourging went up to heaven,
the smothered sighs of Mary's bursting heart went up with it.
When the "Barabbas" of the multitude rang fiercely in the hol­
low vaulted sky, the agony of Mary went floating up, sweet music
mid the fierce clamor, to the Father's ear. With the dull knock­
ings of the hammer, the beatings of her heart went up and lay
down at the foot of the throne, and did not pass unheeded. Her
voiceless aspirations flew upward in equal flight with the seven
words which Jesus uttered on the Cross. His loud cry at the end
was heard twice in heaven, the second time as it echoed thither
out of Mary's heart. Thus, during those hours of the Passion,
each oblation was a double one; the offering of Jesus and the
offering of Mary were tied in one. They kept pace together;
they were made of the same materials; they were perfumed with
kindred fragrance; they were lighted with the same fire; they were
offered with kindred dispositions. Thus there is a sacrificial and
expiatory character in Mary’s Compassion which is peculiar to
itself. The world was redeemed by the Passion of our Lord. But
there never was, in the ordinance of God, such a thing as a
Passion of Jesus disjoined from the Compassion of Mary. The
two things were one simultaneous oblation, interwoven each
moment through the thickly-crowded mysteries of that dread time,
unto the Eternal Father, out of two sinless Hearts, that were the
Hearts of Son and Mother, for the sins of a guilty world which
fell on them contrary to their merits, but according to their own
free will. Never was any sanctified sorrow of creatures so con­
fused and commingled with the world-redeeming sorrow of Jesus
as was the Compassion of His Mother.
Furthermore, the Compassion of Mary was an example to
the whole Church. It is part of the teaching of the four Gospels.
It performs a function for all ages of the world. It is a continual
source of holiness in the midst of each generation of the faithful.
It is a living, grace-diffusing power among the children of God.

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385

It actually leads multitudes of souls to Jesus. It breaks the bonds
of sin and evil habits. It melts cold hearts, and stimulates the
lukewarm affections of the torpid and the worldly. It pours light
and tenderness, and a spirit of prayer, and a love of suffering, and
a thirst for penance, into countless souls, between the sunrise and
sunset of each day, and in the whole breadth of the world from
pole to pole. It models saints; it animates religious orders; it is
the type of a special spiritual life to individual souls. It rises up
to heaven like an endless angelic song. Everywhere in the Church
there is a sound of it. Out of seven deep places it echoes ever­
lastingly. Time and space have nothing to do with it. Simeon
still prophesies, and we hear it, and a lifelong sadness runs thence­
forth alongside of our perseverance in the ways of grace. Still
Mary flies with Jesus into Egypt, and dwells there, and the Nile
lapses by, and the shadows in our souls are the substances of grace.
Still for three days does the childless Mother wander with
darkened spirit, seeking for her Child, and finding Him, at last,
in the temple. Still is she meeting Him, again and again, with
the heavy Cross upon His shoulders, and we the while meeting
Him in her. Still is she at the foot of the Cross, alluring all her
children to her. Still is she at die Deposition from the Cross, and
at the Burial, acting over, again and again, those pathetic mys­
teries in the new hearts which die children of each generation
give her. Thus, her compassion is not merely her own. It authori­
tatively and authentically represented the whole Church on
Calvary. She was present at the Passion, as it were officially, and
in a double capacity, as co-operating with the Redeemer, and as
representing the redeemed.
The Compassion of our Lady may also be regarded in a two­
fold point of view, according as we consider our Lord as God or
as Man. As God, His Divine Nature was fearfully outraged by
the Passion. Not all the sins of the world put together so dread­
fully and sacrilegiously violated the glory of God as that par­
ticular sin out of which He worked the redemption of the world.
Never did the disloyalty of a rebellious creation make so deep an
impression upon the Divine honor, or seem so inexpressibly to

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endanger the sovereignty of God. This is a view of the Passion
which we must never lose sight of. It needed another Passion to
expiate itself. It needed a second Passion to make reparation to
God for the first. Mary’s Compassion occupies this place. The
sin produced a double Passion, one in Jesus and one in Mary;
but it produced it without double sin. So that her Compassion
needed no expiation, though, had it done so, there was expiation
enough in the Passion to satisfy for itself and for her Compassion.
But she stood at the foot of the Cross as the minister of God's
glory. Her sorrows, even while they are fresh sorrows to Him,
were also the nearest approach to a perfect reparation which
creatures could make. We have seen in the preceding chapters
that reparation is an essential element in all holiness. Now, if
the collective sanctity of all the apostles, martyrs, confessors, and
virgins through all time had dedicated itself on the earth, until
the day of judgment to the sole work of making reparation for
His Passion,—and, rightly considered, the whole action of His
Church is, in effect, reparation for the Passion,—it could not by
the end of the world have produced a reparation any thing like
so complete as the Compassion of Mary. It exceeded in efficacious
holiness all other reparation. It was offered to our Lord's Divine
Nature instantaneously, indeed simultaneously with the outrage,
and almost coextensively with its excess. It came from His own
Mother, which added to it an incomparable acceptableness. It
fitted His Passion in kind, fashion, method, and degree as nothing
else could fit it. Lastly, it drew its efficacy not merely or so much
from its own intrinsic worth as from its real and vital union with
its Passion. Mary's Compassion was the reparation she made to
her Son as God.
If Mary at the foot of the Cross was the minister of our Lord’s
glory as God, she was no less the minister of His Sacred Hu­
manity. In a merely human point of view, we might be surprised
at Mary's presence upon Calvary. It was not the fitting place for
a mother, the scaffold of her Son; and her Son we might have
expected would have spared her the agony. But she was the
minister of the Incarnation. She was His sole human parent. She

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represented in herself the human obedience under which the
Incarnate Word had lived, and which was, as the Apostle has
remarked, to characterize His death as perfectly as it had modelled
His life. He had waited for her consent before He took flesh of
her. When He had inflicted her worst sorrow on her by leaving
her at the age of twelve, He also in the same mystery especially
showed forth His obedience to her in returning to Nazareth for
eighteen years. He began His miracles at her suggestion. He had
her permission for His public ministry. He had vouchsafed to
ask Her leave and blessing for His Passion. Perhaps His Heart
may have silently asked her heart leave to die. From the first,
Jesus and Mary had never been separated. It seems to have been
a sort of law of the Incarnation that they should be together. Her
Assumption, Coronation, and Mediatorial Throne would be but
the final instances of the operation of this law. Now that God
has let us see the Thirty-Three Years in their perfection as a
whole, we perceive that the absence of Mary from Calvary would
have offended our Christian instincts as much as her absence
from Bethlehem or Nazareth. She was the minister of the In­
carnation: it all lies in that. She had no more right to come
down from Calvary than a priest would have to leave the altar
in the midst of the Sacrifice of the Mass. There would have been
an incongruity in it. On one twenty-fifth of March she had given
Him His Precious Blood; on another twenty-fifth of March she
must minister at the shedding of it. She must swathe the Man
as she had swathed the Child. She must lay Him in the tomb
who had already laid Him in the manger. She must preside at
the end as she had presided at the beginning. There must be an
overshadowing of the Holy Ghost at the last, as there had been
one at the first. As she had waited fifteen years for His coming,
she must wait fifteen years after His departure. Her priesthood
consisted in this continuity of ministry to Him. Her Maternity
was not to Him a mere means, occasion, instrument, or access,
but an enduring ministry under which His obedience was con
summated. Mary's Maternity was her Compassion at Bethlehem;
Mary’s Compassion was her Maternity at Calvary.

jgg

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Section III
THE ACTUAL EFFECTS OF HER COMPASSION

We are now in a condition to inquire, thirdly, into the actual
effects of Mary’s Compassion. These may be classed under three
heads, inasmuch as her Compassion was itself part of the Passion,
as it fitted her for her office in the Church, and as it regarded
her cooperation in the work of redemption. Yet, although
these three things may be conceived of as separate, they are, in
reality, so intertwined that, in classifying them apart, we run the
risk of falling into some repetition,—a risk, however, which, for
the sake of clearness, it is worth while to incur.
As it was a part of our Lord's Passion, Mary’s Compassion has
a share in the effects which the Passion produced, in the same
sense, though, of course, in a far lower degree, in which His
dereliction by the Father assisted in producing the results of the
Passion. This is but a material co-operation; yet, as it is a fact,
it serves to show the reality of the Compassion, and the existence
of a purpose in it as part of the divine plan. Its effects upon our
Blessed Lord were so terrible, that it seems probable the agony
it caused Him would have put an end to His life if His Divinity
had not miraculously sustained Him, in order that He might
suffer more. Our Lady revealed to St. Bridget that, when Jesus
saw the bitterness of her grief, He was so affected by it. Himself,
that He became comparatively insensible to the pain of all His
wounds, because of the much greater pain which the sight of her
sorrow caused Him.* St. Bernard calls His vision of her grief
“an inexplicable woe, an ineffable reciprocation of holy love.”
Thus her Compassion was not only an intrinsic part of the Pas­
sion, but among its chief and most efficacious elements. More­
over, her dolors alone approached, after the Father’s abandon­
ment, to satisfy that thirst of suffering which the immense love
of Jesus still felt, even while He was hanging on the Cross, and
this was in itself one of their most remarkable functions. All
Revelations, Book I, Chapter G.

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389

this is very obvious. Nevertheless, we hardly do our Lady’s dolors
justice, as divine mysteries, from our habit of regarding them
too exclusively as her sorrows, and not as His sorrows also, and
perhaps more His than hers. We have already expressed a doubt
whether we can, without peril of inaccuracy and misapprehen­
sion, divide our Lady’s mysteries from our Lord's. For the whole
spirit of the Gospel narrative, as well as the action of what is
apparently a great law of the Incarnation, seems to bring Jesus
and Mary together and make them inseparable. Now, if we de­
tach her mysteries from His, or look at her for a moment as
apart from Him, and possessing any thing independently of Him.
we run one of two risks: either we shrink from the language and
views of the great saints and doctors of the Church, because we
have already, in our own minds, made Mary into some kind of
gigantic saint, instead of the Divine Mother, the "Woman clothed
with the Sun” in the Apocalypse, and so, looking at her standing
by herself, we dare not use of her the almost godlike words which
are common with the saints; or the authority of the saints over
rules us to use their language, and to force ourselves into their
beliefs without understanding them, and so we may come to at­
tribute to our Lady by herself what only belongs to our Lord,
and thus we disturb the analogy of the faith, and bring devotion
to our Blessed Mother into discredit by what is manifestly an
exaggeration, as well as an infringing of the honor of our Lord.
In a certain sense, the saints may stand alone, with their own
individual characters. Mary cannot do so. She is too near God to
do so. If there be a peculiar kind of saint, with a marked char­
acter and a recognizable individuality of her own, whose name
is Mary, hidden under the Divine Maternity, lurking, as it were,
at the bottom of the mysteries of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Cal­
vary, it is at least indistinguishable to us, because of the excess
of that light of the Eternal Sun in which she is all arrayed. It is
not in our power to detach it from the Divine Maternity. It
never works its way to the surface. If it exists, it is known to
God only. If we are ever to know it, it must be by the light of
the Beatific Vision, and not here or now. To us. she must be

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simply the Mother of God; not more like John than she was like
Peter, not bearing a greater resemblance to St. Francis than to
St. Dominic, to St. Teresa than to St. Catherine of Siena, to
St. Philip than to St. Ignatius. We cannot look at her both as a
saint and as the Mother of God. If we attempt to do so, one or
other of the two characters will suffer. The inevitable result will
be a lowering of her from the heights upon which the great
doctors ol the Church were wont to contemplate her grandeur,—
a grandeur which is not only solitary, but incomparable and in­
communicable. They never looked at her as apart from Jesus.
To their eyes she was blended with Him; and what she possessed
she possessed in common with Him. She was filled with His light,
clothed with His magnificence, and, as it were, imbedded in the
mystery of the Incarnation. The very thing which startles us
about her, and which made St. Denys say he doubted for a
moment if she was not a God, is that similarity to God which she
appears to receive from the Divine Nature of her Son, in return
tor that Human Nature which she ministered to Him. This has
always been to me the most noticeable thing about her, her like­
ness to the Word as God, who is so like her as Man. It is this
very privilege of die Divine Maternity which seems at times to
raise her above the sphere of the Incarnation and place her in
such an unspeakable vicinity to the invisible God. The saints
appear to have looked at Mary as a created person and nature,
on which all the communicable splendor of God Himself was
laid which a mere creature could, within the limits of the divine
economy, be enabled to bear. Hence they looked at her so com­
pletely as she was in God, in the lap of His divine magnificence,
that they did not shrink from using language of her which can­
not fail to be misunderstood by those who contemplate her from
a different point of view. It is very important to bear this in
mind. For, at first sight, those who love our Lady feel a kind of
sorrow at the apparent denial to her of an individual character,
which should be distinctive and her own. It seems to put her at
a distance from them, and so to be unloving. But a little more
reflection will show them in what devotional as well as theological

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391

difficulties the other view cannot fail of ultimately entangling
them.
With regard to the dolors, however, there can be no question
of their being simply unintelligible, if we view Mary in them as
apart from Jesus. Whatever may be said of other mysteries, these
are undeniably His as much as they are hers. Neither shall we
ever attain to a right view of them, unless we regard them as
sorrows in His Heart, as well as sorrows in hers; and thereby as
helping to effect the Passion, and having in the Passion a very
prominent and peculiar place assigned to them. Mary’s Com­
passion was the way in which her Maternity was concerned with
the Passion.
Her Compassion had also the effect of fitting her for her
offices of Mother of Men, Queen of mercy, and Refuge of Sinners.
As we have said in the first chapter, she acquired what look like
rights by her dolors. They were voluntary heroic sacrifices, over
and above the absolutely indispensable sacrifices which the Divine
Maternity entailed upon her. Jesus was as it were indebted to
her for them. It was in them that the glorious empire over the
Sacred Heart which she exercises this day in heaven was char­
tered and took deepest root. It was in them that her almost
identity with Jesus attained its highest point and most indistin­
guishable union. Neither can we doubt that her endurance of
such fearful and at the same time such varied sorrow enlarged
her heart, and rendered her more capable than she would other­
wise have been of sympathizing with the sorrows of humanity.
The saints learn much from sin. Apostolic zeal and charity have
roots in the experience of sin as well as in the pure love of God.
From all such learning our Blessed Mother was absolutely pre­
cluded. Sorrow, therefore, had to teach her what sin was not
allowed to teach. No science of the malice of sin, or of the neces­
sity of grace, could make her feel that loss of Jesus, which is sin's
primest unhappiness, as the Three Days' Loss taught it to her.
Her intercession also derives an immense power of impétration,
as well as a more impressive reality, from her experience of
sorrow, and the union of her sorrows with those of Jesus. Even

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if we look at her dolors simply as enormous accumulations of
merit, they assume a considerable importance in reference to her
offices toward us. There can hardly be a shade of human sorrow
which is not familiar to her heart. The manifold inventions of
grief are known to her. The secrets of its alliance with grace, as
well as its tendencies to conspire with the unworthy weaknesses
of our nature, are no secrets to her. She, who is to be the
prophetess of a sorrowing race, is by her own experience the grand
doctress in the science of sorrow. Her Compassion also gives to
her yearning to increase the harvest of the Passion an intensity,
like to the blessed excesses of the Sacred Heart for souls, which
perhaps she could not have had without it. Indeed, her sorrows
upon Calvary were the very birth-throes in which all men were
bom as Mary’s children, and thus her Compassion was not merely
a fitness to be our Mother, but her very delivery of us as her
children. In like manner, as it was in her Compassion that we
were born to her, so in her Compassion do we reach that wide and
deep foundation on which our filial confidence may be built. Were
our dearest Mother only the bright, glad marvel she would be
with her Immaculate Conception, her Divine Maternity, and her
glorious Assumption, we should not trust her as we trust the
broken-hearted Mother beneath the Cross. She would seem
farther off from us. We should feel toward her with feelings akin
to those with which we regard the angels,—full of love and wor­
ship, of tenderness and reverence, of wonder and congratulations,
of holy envy and desire of union with them. We should not feel,
as we do now, that she belongs to us, is near to us, and is our
real Mother. It is the Compassion which throws this filial char­
acter over our devotion to the mighty Mother of God. But this
is not all. As it was in her Compassion that we were born to her,
as it is in her Compassion that we find our motives for filial con­
fidence in her during life, so it was in her Compassion that we
gained our right to die in her maternal arms. For it was then
that she herself received the right of the patronage of deathbeds,
because of her attendance at the deathbed of our Lord; and her
ministr)' to us, as to Him, in the hour of death is part of her

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office upon which the Church dwells most strongly by naming it
in the Ave Maria. Thus is her Compassion inseparably bound
up in the manifold offices of mercy which, by the ordinance of
God, Mary discharges to us.
The third effect of Mary's Compassion is her co-operation
with Jesus in the redemption of the world. We have already
spoken of this, but somewhat more yet remains to be said. The
co-operation of Mary has sundry characteristics of which we must
not lose sight in considering the question. It was the co-opera­
tion of a sinless creature with the Incarnate Creator in redeem­
ing the world from sin. She had no sin of her own, and yet she
suffered, and moreover suffered for sin. This at once distin­
guishes her co-operation from that of the saints, who had sinned,
and the angels, who could not suffer. It is peculiar to herself.
Besides this, her Compassion was, as we have said, one simul­
taneous and indeed identical sacrifice with His; so that one of
the older theologians has said, “The will of Christ and Mary was
altogether one, and their holocaust one; both offered alike to
God, He in the Blood of His Flesh, she in the blood of her
heart.” · Hence her satisfactions have a place with His in the
treasury of the Church, which does not belong to the satisfactions
of the saints. They are more Christlike, as well as more abundant
and more precious. When we offer our Blessed Lord to the
Father, sve are offering what is not in any proper sense ours to
offer. It is only ours by the artifices of grace and the ingenuities
of the communion of saints. They make it really ours in a Chris
tian sense, a supernatural sense. But Jesus belonged to Mary,
and was obedient to her, in quite a different sense. She had a
right to offer Him, in which we cannot share. While our spiritual
offerings cost us nothing, hers cost her a broken heart. She im­
poverished herself to enrich us. Moreover, by offering Jesus to
the Father, she did more than all creation put together could
do to make reparation to His ever-blessed majesty, which sin had
outraged. AH angels and all saints must fall no less short than
infinitely short of what she did; because her offering was infinite.
Arnold Carnot ap Novatum I. 380.

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Consequently it made ample reparation, a reparation worthy of
God and equal to God, because what she offered was the In­
carnate God, who was likewise her obedient and loving Son.
When Mary had made her offering, not a vestige of the outrage
of sin remained upon the glory of the Creator. All wound was
healed, all void filled up, all darkness illumined, if we may dare
to use human words of such a mystery, inadequate as they must
necessarily be. Nay, this was not all: by Mary’s offering, which
was her own, and which she had a right to make, a very world of
glory encompassed the throne of God, which He would not have
had, perhaps, if sin had never been. Sin became as it were an
immensity of new matter, out of which the sacrifice of Jesus and
the offering of Mary evoked a fresh world of glory, vaster than
all material worlds, for the Majesty of the Most High. Even this
is not enough. Mary went into the sacrifice yet deeper. She
became a living crucified part of it. Her dolors, next to the
dereliction of the Father, were the deepest, the bitterest, and the
most extensive part of our Saviour's Passion, and therefore co­
operated, with the Divine Abandonment and the sinful cruelty
of men, in enabling Jesus to offer to the Father that magnificent
and super-sufficient satisfaction which there was in the sacrifice
of the Cross. These were the marvellous effects of her Compas­
sion. We almost tremble to write of them, because we know so
well how, through spiritual blindness and want of a truer love
of our dearest Mother, we are stating them far below the splendor
of their reality.

Section IV
OUR COMPASSION WITH HER COMPASSION

We have now to speak of our compassion with Mary as an
imitation of her Compassion with Jesus, or, in other words, of
our compassion with her as itself a worship of Jesus and a true
compassion with Him. First of all, devotion to the dolors of

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our Blessed Lady is most acceptable to our Lord Himself. We
quoted in the first chapter His revelation to the Blessed Veronica
of Binasco, in which He told her that tears shed over His Mother s
sorrows were more precious in His sight than tears shed in mem­
ory of His own. We may perhaps venture to explain this as
teaching us, what appears to be certainly true in itself, that
devotion to the seven dolors brings with it by a kind of neces­
sity devotion to the Passion, whereas devotion to the Passion does
not seem so necessarily to include devotion to the dolors. Devo­
tion to the Passion, in which the right place and participation
are not assigned to Mary, is not a scriptural devotion; and in
many ways, which it would be out of place to enter upon here, it
betokens an imperfect and unworthy view of the Passion itself.
Yet it is not uncommon to meet with this partial devotion, and
it rather tends to keep devotion to the dolors at arms-length than
to lead to it. It is based upon that untheological mistake, which
some deceive themselves into thinking a theological nicety and
a controversial felicity, namely, a sort of jealous, ignorant ac­
curacy in keeping Jesus and Mary apart, and not letting one
intrude on the sphere of the other, as if to speak as slightingly
as they dare of the Mother of God would make truth more at­
tractive in the eyes of a misbelieving world, to which the in­
credible abasement of Jesus in His Sacrament is already a far
greater stumbling-block than the incredible exaltation of His
Mother. On the other hand, we see that devotion to the dolors
brings with it as its invariable practical result a deep, tender,
accurate, minute, and reverential devotion to the Passion. Again,
we may venture to read in our Lord's words a loving intent to
have reparation made to Mary for her Compassion, just as her
Compassion was the grand reparation of His Passion. By inspir­
ing saints and religious orders with this devotion, and sending
forth His mighty grace and efficacious blessing to accompany it,
He repays her for the beautiful reparation of her Compassion.
But whatever other meanings there may be in this revelation to
the Blessed Veronica, and although its force as a revelation was.
as in all private revelations, intended for herself, it proves at

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least as much as this, that the devotion to our Lady’s dolors is
one of peculiar acceptableness in the eyes of our Blessed Saviour.
This devotion has also a remarkable connection with great
interior holiness. This is proved by experience. Neither is it
to be wondered at. For it is a devotion which naturally makes
us unworldly, because we live and breathe in an atmosphere of
sorrow. It brings out the unreality of worldly joys. It sobers our
thoughts. It keeps them close to Jesus Christ, and to Him cruci­
fied. It communicates to our souls the spirit of the Cross; and
the enviable gift of love of suffering full often begins in a prayer­
ful familiarity with the sorrows of our Blessed Mother. More
than most devotions it tends to supernaturalize the mind, because
it keeps us in a sphere of heavenly beauty, whose look and odor
gradually pass upon ourselves. It is a sphere in which the most
wonderful divine operations mingle with the common woes and
sorrows of a suffering world, and so it expresses that union of
self-abasement and self-oblivion in which all the greater graces
of the spiritual life take root. Moreover, the prevailing ideas to
which it weds our minds are just those which are the most solid
and essential in any preserving endeavors after holiness. For it
unites us to an abiding sorrow for sin, sin which caused Mary's
sorrow, sin which caused the sorrow over which Mary sorrowed,
sin of our own which was actually present and influential in both
those sorrows, wronging at once the Mother and the Son. It
equally unites us to the perpetual sense of needing grace, of
absolute dependence upon grace, and of that ready abundance
of grace on which our filial confidence reposes. It is all stained
with the Precious Blood; and thus it puts us into the very depths
of our Saviour’s Sacred Heart. There is no soul which worldli­
ness finds it harder to attack than one which is entrenched within
the dolors of our Blessed Lady. There is nothing which the
world can graft itself upon in that devotion. There is nothing
congenial to the spirit and way of the world in it, nothing even
which the world can falsify for its own ends or fraudulently divert
for its own purposes. Moreover, it was in the dolors that the
grandeurs of Mary's sanctity were fabricated, and fabricated out

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of materials which in their degree are common to every one of
us her sons and daughters. It is hard to live in the bosom of
great examples and be uninfluenced by them. The lessons which
the dolors teach us are wanted at almost every turn of life, and
are most appropriate to the very seasons when grace is wont to
be most active in us; and they are imparted with such loving
tenderness, with such pathetic simplicity, and in the midst of
such countless similitudes between our sinless Mother and our
sinful selves, that it is difficult to conceive of a school in which
so much heavenly wisdom is taught so winningly as in the Com­
passion of Mary.
Furthermore, this devotion to the dolors of Mary is reckoned
by theologians among the signs of predestination. Certainly a
special attraction of grace is a sweet prophecy of our final per
severance; and it is by a special attention of grace that we addict
ourselves to this devotion. Perhaps our Lord’s revelation to St.
John the Evangelist, cited in the first chapter, of the four graces
which it was His blessed will to attach to this devotion, one of
which concerned the gift of perfect contrition before death, and
another our Lady’s protection in the hour of death, may have
led to its being included in the catalogue of signs of predestina­
tion. For sorrow for sin is well-nigh the queen of graces, en­
closing as it does within itself the grace and more than the grace
of sacraments. Contrition is nearest of kin to perseverance, and
the promise of our Lady’s assistance at the hour of death is not
far removed from an assurance of our salvation. Cartagena says,·
“A man may put before himself, as the most assured sign of pre­
destination, the fact that he has had compassion for this most
afflicted Mother; for the ancients tell us that it was conceded to
the Blessed Virgin by Christ the Lord, that whoever should
revolve in his mind her maternal dolors might be sure of impetrating any favor which concerned the salvation of his soul,
and especially the grace of true penance for his sins before
death.’’
Thus also devotion to the dolors is one of the best préparaΛρ Sinischatch. xvi.

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lions for death, not only because of the precise graces promised
to it in the hour of death, but also because it concerns our Lady’s
ministry to our Lord at the hour of His blessed death. Hence
there is a congru ity between this devotion and death. And, after
all, what should life be but a preparation for death? And what
graces should more attract our humility than those which promise
us their succor in that tremendous hour? Alas! it is not for such
as we are to look forward to death with triumph, or even with
impatience. We are not saints. Triumph therefore would be
unseemly in us, and impatience is surely premature. It is enough
for us, in our low attainments, to be content to die, and to fear
bravely that which we are contented to endure. Fine words are
easy, and love is very profuse of them, when we are not tempted,
and when God is flooding us with that inward sweetness which
gives us such a facility in prayer. But when we are tempted, we
grow silent: and when to our temptation is added spiritual dry­
ness, querulousness and peevishness are added to our silence. We
are soon prostrated; and we learn thereby the good lesson of our
own real inward misery and helplessness. But if dryness and
temptation bring such changes, what will death bring? It will
bring such an unutterable, speechless, terrified, agonizing neces­
sity of grace as it is appalling to think of when we bend our
thoughts seriously to it. What will a devotion be worth to us,
then, which has two special deathbed promises attached to it!
Gold and pearls could not reckon its price. But the devotion
must have been a lifetime devotion in order legally to inherit the
deathbed promises.
It is unnecessary to speak of the authority of the Church, of
the liberality of her indulgences, of the examples of the saints,
or of the records of numberless conversions, all attesting the
power and acceptableness of this devotion. They have already
occupied our attention in the first chapter. But we must not
forget that our Blessed Lady has a special claim upon our devo­
tion to her dolors. It is part of the duty of sons to their mother
to compassionate her in her trials and sorrows, of whatever na­
ture they may be, or from whatever cause they may spring. But

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this is very far short of our duty toward the sorrows of Mary.
We ourselves were part of them. We were the causes of her
suffering. It was not only for our good that she suffered, hut if
was by our evil that she suffered. Hence there is no devotion to
her to which we are so bound as to her dolors. There is no ex­
pression of our love more fitting, and indeed more imperative
upon us, than compassion with her Compassion. It is the most
inclusive of all devotions to her. It comprehends the greatest
number of her mysteries. It keeps closest to her when she is in
the closest union with Jesus. It goes deepest down into her im­
maculate heart. It throws the strongest light on the summits of
her Divine Maternity, and at the same time it is the special
devotion of her Motherhood of us. It best satisfies our obliga­
tions to her, while it is most vividly kindling our love. It at
once befits the necessities of our lowliness and the splendors of
her magnificence.
Let us add to its perfection as a devotion to Mary its perfec­
tion also as a devotion to Jesus, and the picture is complete.
The highest devotion to our Blessed Lord is to possess ourselves
of His spirit, to appreciate it, to welcome it, to feel in it, to act
in it, to suffer in it. The more we can do and suffer all things
in union with Him, the more excellently are we His disciples.
We have to become Christians. It is the business of grace to
multiply all over the world copies and likenesses of the Incarnate
Word. Union with Jesus is the shortest definition of holiness,
and one which is equally applicable to all its numberless varieties.
Now, Mary is our model of this. The special grace of all devo­
tions to Mary is union with Jesus. This is what they all teach.
They not only teach it as a lesson, but they are the vehicle by
which it is conveyed into our souls as a real predominant spirit,
a substantial transforming grace. She is inseparable from Jesus.
Her spirit is the greatest possible communication of His. He is
her meaning, her significance, her motive, her aim. her life. The
action of Jesus and Mary is as nearly one action as a twofold
action can be one. Jesus is our model; but we must copy Him
as Mary copied Him. It is her office to teach us this, to be our

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model of imitation. We must do all things in union with Mary,
and then shall we best do them all in union with Jesus. But
devotion to her dolors leads us most directly, most speedily, and
most universally, to do all things in union with her. For her
sorrows were lifelong; they were the most constant of all her
dispositions; they were the dispositions in which she was the most
closely united with Jesus, and followed Him with the most minute
and changeful fidelity through the mysteries of the Three-andThirty Years. Thus it comes to pass that devotion to her dolors
leads us most directly, most speedily, and most universally to do
all things in union with Jesus; and, therefore, it is the highest
devotion to Him, the perfection of devotion to Jesus, as well as
the perfection of devotion to Mary. Thus our compassion with
Mary partakes of the beauty, power, and blessing of her Com­
passion with Jesus, and is part of hers, as by hers it is won to
Jesus, and by hers closed in His loving embrace, with the tenderest union of which we are capable, with our unspeakably
tender and loving Lord.

Section V
THE PASSION AND COMPASSION COMPARED

Our fifth point was to compare the Compassion and the
Passion together. But a great deal of this has already been done
by implication in the course of the preceding inquiries. The first
point of similitude is in its interior character. The mental suf­
ferings of the Passion went far beyond its bodily tortures, not
merely because anguish of heart is worse to bear than pain of
body, but also because they were of a far more awful description,
and because they were of longer duration. The inward agony, by
which the shame and guilt of sin were expiated, was far more
terrific than the blows, and wounds, and diversified atrocities
which the cruelty of sinners could inflict upon the Body of Jesus.
His inward pains were more numerous, more various, more

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401

vehement, burned deeper, and lasted longer. The abandonment
of the Father and the weight of His angry justice were, of course,
the most intolerable sufferings of the Passion, and both those
were interior. Next to them we must rank the sorrows of Mary,
and they chiefly affected Him inwardly. Sin, the third of His
executioners, tortured His soul more than His Body. Thus,
though our attention is naturally most drawn to His outward
Passion, we shall never rightly conceive even of that, unless we
remember that by far the greater portion of His Passion was
interior. The visible Passion was but the tossing surface of an
invisible deep. Mary's Compassion also was interior, in her
heart as well as His. It was drawn, too, from the same afflictive
sources. It had passed through His Heart before it entered into
hers. At the same time, there is certainly a contrast, in this
respect, as well as a similitude. For she had no outward Passion
to correspond with His. Her interior agony was not. of course,
without aching exhaustion of the frame, bitterest smarting and
crushing of the fleshly heart, and intolerable burning of the
brain. Her body suffered as well as her soul. It had to hold fire,
and the fire burned it through and through. Nevertheless, there
was nothing at all to answer to the outward Passion of our
Blessed Lord. Her outward Passion was the fifteen years of
wearisome, suffering delay which was her lot when He had
ascended into heaven.
The Passion and the Compassion may also be compared
together, in that each was the cause of the other. Both were
causes, and both were effects. It was our Lord’s Passion which
filled our Lady's heart to the brim with bitterness: and it was
our Lady’s Compassion which was one of the main ingredients
in our Saviour’s Passion. Only our Lady’s Compassion was not
coextensive with the Passion as its cause, while it was coextensive
with it as an effect, because it took it all in, embraced it,
assimilated it to itself, and made it utterly its own. The contents
of our Lady’s heart could not fill our Lord’s, but hen could hold
the contents of His. The Mother crucified the Son, and the Son.
crucified as He was, went and placed Himself with all the impie

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ments of His Passion in His Mother s heart, making it largeenough by breaking it. It was not only that each pain of the
Passion was represented in her Compassion. It is most likely
that she really felt it all, just as it was, not in all its intolerable
reality, but in such dread reality at least as was according to
the measure of her immense capabilities of suffering. The saints
have felt it so, in their lesser measure, great in our eyes as that
lesser measure was. They have been invisibly stigmatized, and
they have been led in horrible inward unimaginable tortures
through all the mysteries of the Passion, miraculous power often
being needed to prevent the separation of body and soul. Can
we imagine that this inward real compassion was granted to them,
and that she was without it? It is also another similitude between
the Compassion and the Passion, that just as saints have been
allowed in mystical ways to feel the sufferings of our Blessed Lord,
so have they also been allowed mystically to participate in the
sorrows of Mary. Both the Compassion and the Passion have been
recognized fountains out of which have flowed some of the most
singular and at the same time the best-accredited phenomena of
mystical theology.

Section VI
THE SEEMING EXCESS OF THE COMPASSION

But there is another point in the resemblance between the
Passion of Jesus and the Compassion of Mary, which must not
be omitted. It is the seeming excess of her sorrows over His. We
call it seeming, because no one in his senses would dream of
saying that Mary’s sufferings equalled those of our Blessed Saviour.
But her Compassion, as we have seen, is a divine work, a divine
mystery, and, inasmuch as this semblance is an undeniable feature
of it, it must have been intentional. Every thing in a divine work
is notable, and we learn from it by the mere noting of it, even
where it is beyond our powers of explanation. It was in the joint

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403

mystery of the Compassion and Passion that the Mother and the
Son saddened each other. Now, in proportion as His beauty ex
ceded hers, His power to increase her sorrow exceeded her power
to augment His. It was a more terrible thing for the Mother to
see the Son expiring on the Cross, than for the Son to see his
mother broken-hearted at the foot of the Cross. But when we
remember that He was God, and that her whole love of Him
was what it was because He was God, still more disproportioned
will her suffering appear to His, and she too the weaker vessel,
the less capable of enduring such highly-wrought agony as that
on Calvary. We must bear in mind also that inward pain is
greater than outward pain, and that as she had no visible Passion
to compare with His, the sorrow, which each outward pain and
outrage of His caused in her, must have been inward also. His
bodily Passion produced a mental counterpart in her. She was
inwardly scourged, inwardly crowned with thorns, inwardly
stripped, inwardly nailed to the Cross, and she died inwardly. All
that was outward in Him was obliged to be inward in her. So
also, when the Passion ended, the Compassion had at least three
hours, perhaps six, of agony crowded with dreadful mysteries,
yet to run. The fear of His limbs being broken, the wound of
the lance, the taking down from the Cross, the embalming, the
burial, and the desolation, all these sorrows were crucifying
Mary’s woe-weary heart while He was flashing light and beauty
and glory through the caverns of Limbus and being worshipped
by the congratulations of all the patriarchs, kings, and prophets
of the olden time. Moreover, she was left behind to mourn for
fifteen years, and what was that delay but a prolongation of all
that was hardest to bear in each of her seven dolors through more
than twice seven years? The words are easily written, but what
hidden worlds of heroic endurance and desperate heart-worn
life do they not imply! And there was one thought through all
that scene on Calvary which she alone could have, and which
must have reigned supremely over her mind, inspiring her with
an incredible hatred of sin, and throwing a peculiar light upon
the Passion, which it is not easy for us to conceive. It was the

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knowledge that Jesus was at that moment paying the price of
her Immaculate Conception,—that His Passion was for her re­
demption, and so principally for hers,—that it was more for hers
than for that of the rest of the world together. Who then shall
say what the Passion looked like to Mary’s eye?

Section VII
THE MEASURES OF MARY’S COMPASSION

Lastly, we must say a few words of the measures and dimen­
sions of her Compassion. We have drawn such a picture of it as
we are able. It not only falls far below the truth, but it sensibly
falls far below the real image of it in our own minds. A thousand
unexpressed thoughts are teasing us at this moment, but the
difficulty is how to express them fitly. Words do not seem to be
measures for them. They are thoughts of love; and love does
not speak; it burns. Moreover, there must be limits to all things
except loving. There are no limits there. Love is an eternal
work. Love alone can measure the Compassion of Mary. Think
of the sufferings of Jesus. They open at our feet like a huge
abyss. Can we fathom their dreadful depths? Or do we not rather
shrink in conscious nothingness from a task so hopeless and so
rash? Yet Mary’s Compassion contains that world-wide abyss,
measures it, and holds it miraculously within its own dimensions.
If we speak of the beauty of Jesus, straightway the vision of a
shoreless sea, which no horizon bounds, over which the sun is
rising and setting at the same moment, the half disk sunken in
the west already rising in the east, and the waters rolling on and
on for evermore. Yet as are the waters of that beauty, so were
the waters of Mary’s bitterness. By an opposite miracle to that
of Moses, the wood of the Cross thrown into those waters of
beauty has converted them into bitterness. If we think of men’s
cruelty in the Passion, it is a mystery nearer to our understand­
ing; yet is not that nearness almost an infinite distance? Are we

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not obliged to call to our aid the theory of diabolical possession?
Even then the horrors of the Passion are almost incredible, be­
cause they are so nearly inconceivable. Yet these horrors were
but a part of Mary's Compassion; and truly, compared with the
wrath of the Father, and the beauty of Jesus, they were the very
least part of it. If we think of her deep love of Jesus, it is only
to delight in its interminable magnificence. It is beyond our
definitions, out of the sphere of our comprehension. We make
wild comparisons of all angels and of all saints, indulge in fanciful
arithmetic, repeat our superlatives, but we only do so to convince
ourselves more satisfactorily that it is all beyond us, just as a
man uses violence with himself to be sure he is awake. Yet the
dimensions of that love do not reach to the dimensions of her
Compassion, because there is another love yet, to which it mar­
vellously outstretches. It is the deep love of Jesus for her. Who
can tell it? Who can speak of it even figuratively? for where is
our figure to come from? Yet the breadth, and the depth, and
the height of that love of Jesus for His Mother are the only true
dimensions of her Compassion. Here are five abysses, five meas­
ures, five standards, His sufferings, His beauty, men's cruelty, her
deep love of Him, His deep love of her. We must do our poor
best with them all, and we shall reach a view of our Blessed
Mother’s Compassion which will be good for us and acceptable
to her, but it will be below the truth. A work which Jesus and
Mary made together, out of God’s wrath, and man's sin. and the
Hypostatic Union, and the sinlessness of a pure creature, must be
a marvel about which at best we can but stammer, and lovingly
go wrong; and such a work is Mary's Compassion. Our task is
ended, and love will give our poor thoughts a truth of its own
which will make them good for souls.
It is a beautiful and a dread sight to see all the sorrows of
fallen earth resumed in the broken heart of our own Mother.
Has it moved us? Then why not for the rest of life, in sober panic
at the world and worldliness, go and sit at our Mother’s feet and
meditate her griefs? Is there a fitter work for prodigals come
back to their Heavenly Father? Compassion with her is already

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compassion with Jesus; and we may say that compassion with the
Invisible Creator Himself is the devotional feeling out of which
we shall serve Him most generously, and realize Him most
tenderly as our Eternal Father,—eternal because He has been—
blessed be His Majesty!—from all eternity, and eternal because
we shall be—blessed be His compassion!—with Him, His happy
sons, His pardoned, sons to all eternity. Truly Mary lays us
evermore in the lap of God. Truly by some celestial logic of
their own, all Christian things, be they doctrines or devotions,
come out at last in that one compendious, melodious, alonesufficing word. Eternal Father!

THE END