THE FOURTH DOLOR
MEETING JESUS WITH THE CROSS
WE have passed into a new world since the last
dolor. Bethlehem and Nazareth are left behind. We 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 preceding. We have come to the morning of Good Friday, to her
meeting 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 the last twenty-one years. Mary is continually changing,
though it is only in one direction. Her life is an endless 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 that heart which we are now to
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 m 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 interminable 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 Abraham'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 ever
more, 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 nor, 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? 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
shepherds had knelt before Him, three Eastern kings had kissed His
feet, 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 children. 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 some'
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 Mary 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 attraction of all His actions, the
efficacy of His superhuman words, the sight of His unveiled Heart, the
visions granted from time to time 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 superangelic process of sanctification. Her life could
not have 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 are 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 in 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 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 apparently 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 seeming 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 unspeakably.
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 swaying multitudes, at another soothing
sorrow, at another rebuking sin. Now He was unfolding the Scriptures,
and unrolling the hidden folds of His deep parables to the chosen few;
now He was quietly and with easy wisdom eluding the snares of His
enemies, 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 ever more. 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
beautiful 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 mote 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 resurrection, and His second Advent with His angels
to assume her 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 apostles 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
vocations 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 correspondingly 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; 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 sanctification 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 predecessor, 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 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
resurrection 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 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 followed 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 off-scouring 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 disfigurement---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 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 appointed. 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-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 marvelous 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 followed 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 are red?
Yes,---her tears were blood. The procession 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.
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 burden 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 long-dreaded evil. It was the
fulfillment 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
have imagined everything beforehand. We have tried to feel the very
place where we were sure the blow would fall, and to harden 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, ruck us in the wrong place, and borne no similarity, not
even a family resemblance, to the romance of woe for which we had
prepared ourselves. It has taken us unawares. It has disconnected 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 rung ourselves
up for endurance, renders us peculiarly susceptible 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 come soft with almost an effeminate softness. And
yet to us ordinary mortals, as the poet has justly said, "all things
are less readful than they seem;" whereas in the case of our Blessed
Lady's sorrows the realities far outstripped the most ample
expectations. 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 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 unexpectedness of the way
in which the circumstances are grouped. There is a withdrawal of that
medium of time and unfulfillment, 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. Alas! 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 sufferings. In the
preceding dolor He had been, as it were, her executioner; 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 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 corner 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 cruelest 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
Will 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 a
Saint such a Divine Will to conform to as Mary had? Had ever a 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 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 sins! And think of the plenitude of the rights she
had over Him, more than any mother over any son since the world began!
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 Bethlehem
and Egypt it had been her joy to touch Him, in the performance 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 spurning 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 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 seculars, 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
love! 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 sufferings
of the Flight into Egypt, only now it was in a higher degree than then.
It was terror. We always look at Mary as something 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 eminently 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
intelligence mingled with the inhuman fiery stare of diabolical
possession. A multitude, with the women, possibly the children, all
athirst for blood, raving after 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 fear. 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
bellows 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 tIle 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 howling 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 the fearfulness of Good Friday which will
make the pomp of the last judgment so endurable, so calm, so full of
reverent sweetness. O Mother! that day will pay thee back the terror of
today; for thou wilt see 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 neutralize 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 omnipotence 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
marvelous 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 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 equaled 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, enriched
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 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's 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 martyrdom in seeing Him thus deserted, 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
consolation. 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 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 implied. 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 anyone 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 marvelous, 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 we heights of heaven to
the inconceivable lowness of that 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 Apostle's
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 and 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
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 with the mud, which it tinged with a dull hue. It was 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 plenitude 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 who 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, hardened by ungodliness, who sinned almost as they
would breathe the air or move their limbs, All ignorance of God was
pain to her, now 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 upon the
face of God's weary earth. How dark it was! how hopeless! 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
concentrated. 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 impetrations 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 accomplish 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 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 ,vas 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. Anyone
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 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 dispositions in which
she endured it. First of all, there was the unretracted generosity of
the oblation she had made. Amid the multitude 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 anyone, 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 peculiarities, 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 unretracted
generosity of her 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 tranquility. 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 complaining. 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 movement which betrayed the
slightest interior emotion. When they 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 expostulation on her lips. She possessed her soul
perfectly. The movements 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 superhuman only because what is completely and perfectly
and exclusively 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 sentimentality 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 repetition of His. If we endeavor to establish any
parity, even a proportionate 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 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 grandeur 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 feminine 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 Hypostatic 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 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 vouchsafed 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 sufferings 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 anticipate 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
suffering 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 sufferings 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 exchanging hearts, or living in each
other's hearts, all the while in that journey to Calvary. She seemed to
have put off her personality, and to have become to Jesus a second
multiplied capacity 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 convenience of meditation that
we have, throughout, treated separately 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 submerged 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 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 sweetness, 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 incalculable cost of pain, and shame,
and agony. The three fountains 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? Yes! 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 devotions, 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 interest 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 is another thing
from that which comes of gratuitous pity of 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 devotion: into which taste may lead us while we worship;
but this is once in which justice is concerned, and into which duties
flow. For given love knows what it has to do. The dear Magdalen stand
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 were 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 time: seven
would not nearly express the sum of graces which she ha: obtained for
our barren and thankless souls. Ah! if we have beer realities to her in
those days of her dolors, is it not the leas! 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 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 however 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 fulfill 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 ourselves, 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
resolutions.
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 blocking up the way. Some
pass by, pretending they do not know Him. He has been walking
cross-laden in thousands of earth's roads today; but He has had a few
honest greetings. Faith and love have made some 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 sullenness
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! 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 it! No! 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
traveling. 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 unusual quiet.
The greater the peace now, the greater the cross presently. This is one
of those lessons which everyone 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 ourselves! Partly
it is that God gives us a breathing time that we may make the most of
our past graces, and so gain new strength and collect ourselves for
higher achievements. 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 mayor 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 sanctification. 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 spiritual 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 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 experienced 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 encouragement are uttered. There
is no token that He is pleased or displeased with us, no token that we
are doing Him a service in accepting this new cross, no token that He
is other than indifferent 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 unburdened 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 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
cheerfulness, 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, alas! 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 cruelest law of the spiritual life.
Some men have one lifelong cross to carry, and other crosses 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
punishment from sharp to sharper is in effect a relaxation. The
satisfaction 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 experimenting 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 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 chastisement, 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 traveling 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 traveling 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 summer's sun will only
shine upon our useless and querulous convalescence. The long nights of
winter are to find us at an occupation 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. Circumstances 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 promptitude. Devotion only means one thing in theology, and
that one thing is promptitude.
Sometimes, however, we do see the sorrow toward which we are traveling.
Perhaps this is the most common case of the two. 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 are bending over a sister or a child, in whom
insidious consumption is wearily eating its fatal way. A 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 blood vessel may break in sleep tonight. A
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 undomesticate 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, heavenlier during the eclipse of earth.  It
suits better with the common laws of grace, and is a less perilous
process than the terrible surprises 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 waiting 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 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.
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