THE SIXTH DOLOR
THE TAKING DOWN FROM THE CROSS
THE darkness of the eclipse had passed away,
and the true shades of evening were beginning to fall. The Cross stood
bare on Calvary against the light which the setting sun had left behind
it in the west. The spectacle of the day was over, and the multitudes
of the city were all gone, and the current of their thoughts diverted
elsewhere. A few persons moved about on the top of the mount, who had
been concerned with the taking down of Jesus from the Cross, or were
bringing spices from the city to embalm Him. Mary sat at the foot of
the Cross, with the dead Body of her Son lying across her lap. Is
Bethlehem come back to thee, my Mother, and the days of the beautiful
Childhood?
There are many varieties of human sorrow. It is difficult to compare
them one with another; because each has its peculiarity, and each
peculiarity has an eminence of suffering belonging to it, in which no
other sorrow shares. Thus it may easily happen that a sorrow which in
itself looks less than another may in reality be greater, because of
the time at which it comes, or the circumstances under which it occurs,
or the position which it occupies in a series of other griefs. This is
the case with the sixth dolor, the Taking down from the Cross. It is
the grief of an accomplished sorrow, and in this respect differs at
once from the strain of a distressing anticipation, or the active
struggle of a present misery actually accomplishing itself. This
difference cannot be unknown to us in our own experience. When we are
in the act of suffering we are not fully conscious of the efforts we
are making. Our whole nature rises to meet what we have to endure.
Capabilities of pain, of which we had hitherto no suspicion, disclose
themselves. Perhaps also we have a greater amount of supernatural
assistance than afterward. But when the pressure is lightened, when the
strife is over, then we become conscious of the drain which grief has
made upon our strength. The weariness of sorrow, like bodily fatigue,
comes when all is over. We stiffen, as it were, and our heart begins to
ache more sensibly, in the seeming tranquility which follows the
misfortune. The reaction makes itself felt in a peculiar depression,
which is almost more hard to bear than actual suffering, not so much
because it is intrinsically greater than actual suffering, but because
it comes after it, and, being itself the exhaustion of our powers of
endurance, it has nothing under it to support it.
It happens also for the most part that, by a merciful cruelty of
Providence, our ordinary duties, or even sometimes new duties to which
our sorrow has given birth, present themselves before us, and require
our energy and attention. But, while this often hinders the reaction of
sorrow from going too far, it is also in itself hard to bear. We are
seldom in greater want of grace than in this moment of resuming the
duties of our station after an interruption of more than common sorrow.
It is like beginning life again at a disadvantage. We have perhaps more
to do, when we are less able to do it. We have used up our power of
bearing grief, and, just when the rawness of our misery is passing off,
new duties come which, either by contrast or by association, open the
old wounds afresh, and how are we to endure it? Moreover, excessive
grief, even when it lasts but for a short time, seems to have a
peculiar power to destroy habits. Things, even hard things, are easy to
us, because we are accustomed to them. But after violent sorrow
everything appears new and strange. We have lost our old facility.
Things have changed places in our minds. Easy things are now hard,
because of this very novelty. Yet life is inexorable. It must go on,
and under the old laws, like a ruthless machine which cannot feel, and
therefore cannot make allowances. Now perhaps is a greater trial of our
worth than when we were enduring the blows which misfortune was dealing
upon us. This is the account of the sixth dolor; this is the place it
occupies in the sorrows of our dearest Mother. Think of the
Crucifixion, and all that it involved, and is not the reaction after
that likely to be something which it is quite beyond our power
adequately to conceive? Immense as is the holiness of her Immaculate
Heart, sorrow can still find work to do, and can build the edifice
higher, as well as embellish what is built already.
The Soul of Jesus passed into the earth at the foot of the Cross, and
descended to the limbus of the fathers. Mary was still at the foot of
the Cross. She comprehended in its completeness the vast mystery of the
separation of that Body and Soul, the death of the Son of God. The Soul
has left her, but she has the Body still. In the next dolor that will
go also, and then the Mother will be indeed alone. For the most part it
is not God's way to withdraw Himself all at once. He spares the
weakness of the soul, and passes from it almost insensibly, after
special favors and more intimate union, as the perfume gradually
exhales out of a jar where it has been kept. The two thieves are still
in their agony close to the dead Body of Jesus. To one of them it is
like the soothing presence of the Blessed Sacrament, which we 'all of
us in trouble know so well, because it is unlike any other feeling. To
the other there is no consolation now. There is time for him still.
Mary still prays, for she never ceases while the fondest hope has any
foothold left to which it can cling. The living Jesus is not so far off
but He can hear him if he cries. But he has made his choice, and keeps
to it. The life that remains in him is every moment desecrating
Calvary.
Crucifixion is a slow death, and includes many sorts of pain. Among
these is to be reckoned the breaking of the legs of the sufferers,
either to add to the torture already inflicted, now that its duration
has become wearisome and without interest to the ministers of
vindictive justice, or, by a sort of fierce mercy, to hasten its
termination. The executioners, therefore, approach the top of Calvary
thus to consummate the punishment of the three whom they had crucified,
armed with a strong hammer or heavy bar of iron, of such weight as
speedily to fracture the limbs when they are struck. It was a fearful
sound for Mary to hear; the dull crashing of the flesh and bone, and
the agonizing cries of the miserable sufferers, one of them, too, the
son of her second motherhood, the firstborn of her prayers. But the
words will not tell the anguish with which she saw them approach the
Body of Jesus. Earth held nothing one-half so sacred. Dead as it was,
it was joined to the Divinity, and therefore was entitled to the
fullest honors of Divine worship. One rude touch of it were an
appalling sacrilege; but to crush the limbs, to break the bones, was a
profaneness too horrible even for thought to dwell upon. The thought
was an intense grief to her religion. But her love, was not it also
concerned? It is true, life was gone but was the lifeless Form less an
object of her love than when beautiful life had filled it? Let the
hearts of those who have mourned their dead reply. Never does love pour
itself out in more soft sadness over eyes bright with life than over
those that are closed in death. To the eye of love the pale face has
become doubly beautiful. The graces of old years have passed upon it.
The intensity of its unmeaning quiet has a charm of its own. The
compressed lips speak with a dumb eloquence which belongs to them. The
cold body has to satisfy two claims of love,---its own claim, and the
soul's; and it satisfies them well. We will call it "him," not "it," because to fond love it is so
really the person, the self, whom we are loving. So mothers have wept
over sons, from whose caresses the dignity of great manhood has
separated them for years; but now the old times have come back, and the
familiarities of childhood, with more than its passive helplessness
have come back, and perhaps the old childish look as well, and grief
feeds itself sweetly out of the marble beauty of its dead. Who does not
know this? But if we common mourners, whose grief is so soon
distracted, can feel all this with such intensity, what must have been
the unspeakable love of Mary for the Body of her Son,---her Son, Who
was God as well! She spoke not. Her voice broke not the silence,
mingled not with the moans of the dying thieves; but the silence of her
prayer was loud in Heaven. The rude men saw that Jesus was dead, and
desisted from their purpose. "These things were done, that the
Scripture might be fulfilled, You shall not break a bone of Him."
But there was another Scripture also to be fulfilled, "They shall look
on Him whom they pierced." Mary's prayer shall cause the first
Scripture to be fulfilled, but not that any sorrow may spare the
Mother's Heart. It shall accomplish the word of God: but it shall not
spare the sacrilege. Truly this second Scripture shall be one of
Simeon's swords. Whether it were from doubt of our Lord's being really
dead, or whether it were in the mere wantonness of authority little
used to give account of itself in such times and places, one of the
soldiers drew near, and drove his spear into our Lord's right side,
across His Body, and through His Sacred Heart, and immediately there
issued forth from the sacrilegious wound both Blood and Water, some of
which, it is said, sprang upon the limbs of the penitent thief as if it
were an outward baptism or a visible absolution where inward grace had
already accomplished its heavenly work. It were long to tell of how
much pathetic love this wound in our Saviour's Heart was the figure and
the symbol. It has been the sweet contemplation of countless saints.
The spear has opened a home, a refuge, a hermitage, in that Wounded
Heart in which souls in all ages, in these latter days especially, have
nestled in all their sorrows and trials, have renewed themselves in the
weariness of their exile, and have hidden themselves from the strife of
tongues and from an evil world. It is the very glory of devotion to the
Precious Blood that this wound of the Sacred Heart proves that our
dearest Lord shed every drop of His Blood for us. To us, therefore, for
these and many other reasons, the piercing of His Heart is one of our
greatest spiritual consolations. But we have to regard it here as one
of Mary's chiefest sorrows.
There is something in the thought of our Blessed Lord's dead Body which
overshadows the mind, and bends the soul down in profoundest reverence.
It hung there upon the Cross, in the light of the March afternoon,
white, with seams of dark blood all over it, and disfigured with almost
countless wounds. There was no object on earth so sacred as itself. It
was worshipful with the divinest worship. Throngs of invisible angels
were adoring all round. Yet, while it was adorable, it was helpless
also. It was as if the Blessed Sacrament had been left upon a
mountain-top over which there was a thoroughfare for men.
This object of Divine worship was the property of the rulers, who had
just consummated the unutterable sin of the Crucifixion. Practically
speaking, it was in the power of base executioners to do what they
would with it, certain that no ignominy which they could work upon it
would be reproved. There was something very dreadful in a thing which
was so sacred being left in such insecurity, in such vicinity of evil,
to such probability of appalling outrage. The Mother was there, her
heart full of worship, but helpless as the Body itself. Were she to
plead, her pleading would but suggest sacrilege. It would but
stimulate the ruffian nature of those with whom she had to deal. But
there it hung upon the Cross,---anybody's right, anybody's property,
rather than hers, out of whose sweet blood the Holy Ghost had made it.
Two wretched criminals were writhing in their last agonies on either
side. The city was keeping feast below, and preparing to commence its
Sabbath-rest. That Victim-Body had begun its Sabbath already. Its pain
had ceased, and it was resting. The executioners are returning. The
Roman soldiers ride up and down the mount. The relics of the execution
must be cleared away before the Sabbath begins. That Body does not
belong to the Cross. It belongs to an unimaginable supernal throne, at
the Right Hand of the Eternal Father. No one is here who knows it but
the silent Mother; and she is silent, because she has no right to
speak, and because her speaking would do harm. Oh, how often in the
world does God frighten us by this seeming abandonment of Himself and
of all He holds most dear! And it appears as if it were the very
strength of our love which made our faith so weak. We fear most
timorously for that which we love most tenderly.
The love of God brings many new instincts into the heart. Heavenly and
noble as they are, they bear no resemblance to what men would call the
finer and more heroic developments of character. A spiritual
discernment is necessary to their right appreciation. They are so
unlike the growths of earth, that they must expect to meet on earth
with only suspicion, misunderstanding, and dislike. It is not easy to
defend them from a controversial point of view; for our controversy is
obliged to begin by begging the question, or else it would be unable so
much as to state its case. The axioms of the world pass current in the
world, the axioms of the gospel do not. Hence the world has its own
way. It talks us down. It tries us before tribunals where our
condemnation is secured beforehand. It appeals to principles which are
fundamental with most men but are heresies with us. Hence its audience
takes part with it against us. We are foreigners, and must pay the
penalty of being so. If we are misunderstood, we had no right to reckon
on any thing else, being, as we are, out of our own country. We are
made to be laughed at. We shall be understood in Heaven. Woe to those
easy-going Christians whom the world can understand, and will tolerate,
because it sees they have a mind to compromise!
The love of souls is one of these instincts which the love of Jesus
brings into our hearts. To the world it is proselytism, the mere wish
to add to a faction, one of the selfish developments of party spirit.
One while the stain of lax morality is affixed to it, another while the
reproach of pharisaic strictness! For what the world seems to suspect
least of all in religion is consistency. But the love of souls, however
apostolic, is always subordinate to love of Jesus. We love souls
because of Jesus, not Jesus because of souls. Thus there are times and
places when we pass from this instinct of Divine love to another, from
the love of souls to the hatred of heresy. This last is peculiarly
offensive to the world. So especially opposed is it to the spirit of
the world, that, even in good, believing hearts, every remnant of
worldliness rises in arms against this hatred of heresy, embittering
the very gentlest of characters, and spoiling many a glorious work of
grace. Many a convert, in whose soul God would have done grand things,
goes to his grave a spiritual failure, because he would not hate
heresy. The heart whIch feels the slightest suspicion against the
hatred of heresy is not yet converted. God is far from reigning over it
yet with an undivided sovereignty. The paths of higher sanctity are
absolutely barred against it. In the judgment of the world, and of
worldly Christians, this hatred of heresy is exaggerated, bitter,
contrary to moderation, indiscreet, unreasonable, aiming at too much,
bigoted, intolerant, narrow, stupid, and immoral. What can we say to
defend it? Nothing which they can understand. We had, therefore, better
hold our peace. If we understand God, and He understands us, it is not
so very hard to go through life suspected, misunderstood, and
unpopular. The mild self- opinionatedness of the gentle, undiscerning
good will also take the world's view and condemn us; for there is a
meek-looking positiveness about timid goodness which is far from God,
and the instincts of whose charity is more toward those who are less
for God, while its timidity is daring enough for a harsh judgment.
There are conversions where three-quarters of the heart stop outside
the Church and only a quarter enters, and heresy can only be hated by
an undivided heart. But if it is hard, it has to be borne. A man can
hardly have the full use of his senses who is bent on proving to the
world, God's enemy, that a thoroughgoing catholic hatred of heresy is a
right frame of mind. We might as well force a blind man to judge on a
question of color. Divine love inspheres us in a different circle of
life, motive, and principle, which is not only not that of the world,
but in direct enmity with it. From a worldly point of view, the craters
in the moon are more explicable things than we Christians. with our
supernatural instincts. From the hatred of heresy we get to another of
these instincts, the horror of sacrilege. The distress caused by
profane words seems to the world but an exaggerated sentimentality. The
penitential spirit of reparation which pervades the whole Church is, on
its view, either a superstition or an unreality. The perfect misery
which an unhallowed touch of the Blessed Sacrament causes to the
servants of God provokes either the world's anger or its derision. Men
consider it either altogether absurd in itself, or at any rate out of
all proportion; and, if otherwise they have proofs of our common sense,
they are inclined to put down our unhappiness to sheer hypocrisy. The
very fact that they do not believe as we believe removes us still
further beyond the reach even of their charitable comprehension. If
they do not believe in the very existence of our sacred things, how
shall they judge the excesses of a soul to which those sacred things
are far dearer than itself?
Now, it is important to bear all this in mind while we are considering
the sixth dolor. Mary's heart was furnished, as never heart of saint
was yet, with these three instincts regarding souls, heresy, and
sacrilege. They were in her heart three grand abysses of grace, out of
which arose perpetually new capabilities of suffering. Ordinarily
speaking, the Passion tires us. It is a fatiguing devotion. It is
necessarily so because of the strain of soul which it causes, as well
by its horrors as by the profound adoration which it is every moment
eliciting. So when our Lord dies a feeling of repose comes over us. For
a moment we are tempted to think that our Lady's dolors ought to have
ended there, and that the sixth dolor and the seventh are almost of our
own creation, and that we tax our imagination in order to fill up the
picture with the requisite dark shading of sorrow. But this is only one
of the ways in which devotion to the dolors heightens and deepens our
devotion to the Passion. It is not our imagination that we tax, but our
spiritual discernment. In these two last dolors we are led into greater
refinements of woe, into the more abstruse delicacies of grief, because
we have got to deal with a soul rendered even more wonderful than it
was before by the elevations of the sorrows which have gone before.
Thus, the piercing of our Lord with the spear was to our Blessed Lady
by far the most awful sacrilege which it was then in man's power to
perpetrate upon
the earth. To break violently into the Holy of Holies in the temple,
and pollute its dread sanctity with all manner of heathen defilement,
would have been as nothing compared to the outrage on the adorable Body
of God. It is in vain that we try to lift ourselves to a true
appreciation of this horror in Mary's heart. Our love of God is wanting
in keenness, our perceptions of Divine things in fineness. We cannot do
more than make approaches, and they are terrible enough.
We have spoken already of mothers watching the deathbeds of their sons.
It is the form of human woe which comes most naturally to us when we
are with Mary upon Calvary. When the long struggle is at last over, and
the breaking heart has acknowledged at least a kind of relief in the
fact that the object of her love has no more to suffer, when that same
heart has taken quiet possession of the beautiful dead form before it,
as if it were a sanctuary, almost a refuge from grief itself, would not
the least roughness, the least inconsiderateness, the most trivial
dishonor to the dead body, be a new and fearful sorrow to the mother?
Is there a mother on earth who could bear to see with her own eyes even
the kindly hand of science, which she has herself invoked endeavoring
to discover in what recess it was that the mysterious ailment lodged
itself which has now made her childless? Would it not be as if she saw
a hallowed object desecrated before her eyes? In the dire necessities
of the pestilence, with its swift burial and rough ministers and
horrible dead-cart and quicklime pit, how much more terrible would the
outrage be! She still fills the lifeless figure with the life of her
own love, and before she has drunk her fill of love by gazing on it,
before the red blood has had time to curdle or the limbs to grow cold,
it is torn from her, as if it was not hers, by some stern officers,---
not the tenderest of their kind, for their office is the rudest, rude
even in the wise mercy it fulfills,---and is flung upon the dead-cart,
with a heap of other pest-stricken victims, and so borne onward to a
dishonorable grave, a promiscuous charnel-house. And fresh grief is so
tender, so raw, can so little bear handling! Is it not fearful to think
of? Yet it is as nothing to our Lady's agony when the Body of Jesus was
outraged by the spear. It is an immeasurably less sorrow in itself, and
falls upon a heart which, however sweet and meek and loving, is
immeasurably less capable of suffering than Mary's was. But it is an
approach to Mary's sorrow, and a shadow of it.
Let us rise higher still. A Saint is at the altar, overwhelmed with the
dread action which he is performing. His heart is fit to break for love
of God, of that Incarnate God who lies before him on the corporal. Wild
and sinful men break in upon him, whether in popular tumult or from
other cause. He is driven off in his sacred vestments with violence,
while he is clinging to the altar as an animal clings to its young when
they are being torn from it. He sees the Blessed Sacrament flung upon
the ground, the Precious Blood streaming over the altar-steps, and both
the Body and the Blood trodden with scorn and blasphemy beneath the
feet of the ruffian invaders. Because he is a Saint, the sight would
kill him, did not God miraculously support him. But the accumulated
sorrows of a long life are nothing to this. The vision of that hour has
been burned in upon his soul as by a fiery brand. Nothing of it will
ever be forgotten. No excesses of penance will be sufficient to satisfy
his yearning appetite for reparation. Years after, he will shudder in
his prayer, and the tears course swiftly down his cheeks, as he calls
to mind the boundless horror of that appalling sin. It is a sort of
grief beyond common griefs, a grief in a shrine, of which holy and
chosen souls only may participate. Yet what is it to Mary's sorrow when
she saw the spear touch the dead side, and the lifelike movement the
Body made as the Heart was pierced, and the pulse-like throbbing with
which the Blood and Water followed the lance as it withdrew? As far as
the saint is below Mary in sanctity, so far is his grief inferior to
hers. An Angel told St. Bridget that so tremendous was the shock to
her, that she would have died instantly, but for a miracle. A sword in
her own heart would have been a thousand times less dreadful.
It is strange how close to great sins great graces will often lie.
Longinus had sinned in ignorance of that which peculiarly aggravated
the horror of his act. Nevertheless, it was a cruel action, and the
more cruel if he knew that the mother was standing by. Wantonness too
was the less excusable in him, upon whom, if tradition speaks truly,
the hand of God was laid not lightly. He is said to have been suffering
from some disease of the eyes, which threatened total blindness; and it
may have been that his imperfect sight did not allow him to be certain
of the death of Jesus, and that on that account he went beyond his
commission, and pierced the body with his lance. Some drops of the
Blood fell upon his face, and tradition tells that not only was the
disease in his eyes instantaneously cured and the full use of his sight
restored to him, but also, a still more wonderful miracle, the vision
of his soul was made bright and clear, and he at once confessed the
Divinity of Him whose Body he had thus dared to insult at the risk of
becoming in his own person the murderer of our Blessed Lord. For, if he
doubted of His death, he ran no less a risk than that of slaying Him
himself. No one will wonder when Mary of Agreda tells them that, as
with the penitent thief, so with Longinus, the grace of conversion was
the answer to Mary's prayer. The very fact of his having been an
instrument to increase her sorrows would give him a special claim upon
her prayers.
Another small body of men is now approaching the summit of Calvary, and
from their fixed looks it is plain that Jesus is the object of their
coming. Is it some fresh outrage, some new sorrow for Mary? It is a new
sorrow for Mary, but no fresh outrage. It is Joseph of Arimathea and
Nicodemus, together with their servants. Both of them were disciples of
our Blessed Lord, but secretly; for they were timid men. Joseph was "a
counselor, a good and just man," who had not "consented to the counsel
and doings" of the others, because he "himself looked for the kingdom
of God." Nicodemus was a man learned in the Scriptures, the same who
had come to Jesus by night for fear of the Jews, and had learned from
Him the doctrine of regeneration. Joseph had gone in to Pilate, o whom
he probably had access in his capacity as counselor, and had begged the
Body of Jesus, which had been granted to him. He had then, as St.
Matthew tells us, got "a clean linen cloth" to wrap it in, and had
called on Nicodemus to accompany him to Calvary. Nicodemus, as St. John
tells us, brought with him "a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an
hundred pound weight." They also brought their servants with them to
assist. They approached our Blessed Lady with the profoundest reverence
and sympathy, told her what they had done, and asked her permission to
take the Body down from the Cross. With hearts full of the tenderest
devotion to the dolors of the Immaculate Mother, they drew nigh to the
Cross, and made their preparations. They fixed the ladder against the
Cross. Joseph mounted first, and Nicodemus after him. Mary, with John
and Magdalen, remained immediately beneath them. It seemed as if some
supernatural grace issued forth from the Adorable Body, and encircled
them round, softening and subduing all their thoughts, making their
hearts burn with divine love, and hushing them in the deepest and most
thrilling adoration. Old times came back upon the Mother's heart, and
the remembrance of the other Joseph, who had been so often privileged
to handle the limbs and touch the Sacred Flesh of the Incarnate Word.
It would have been his office to have taken Jesus down from the Cross.
But he was gone to his rest, and one that bore his name supplied his
place, and it was both sweet and grievous to Mary that it should be so.
One Joseph had given Him his arms to lie in, the other should give Him
his own new monument to rest in; and both should pass Him from their
own arms to those of Mary. It is strange, too, how often the timid are
unexpectedly bold. These two disciples, who had been afraid to confess
their Master openly when He lived, are now braving publicity when even
apostles remain within the shelter of their hiding-place. Happy two!
with what sweet familiarities and precious nearness to Himself is not
Jesus recompensing their pious service at this hour in Heaven!
With gentle hand, tremblingly bold, as if his natural timidity had
developed into supernatural reverence, Joseph touches the crown of
thorns, and delicately loosens it from the head on which it was fixed,
disentangles it from the matted hair, and, without daring to kiss it,
passes it to Nicodemus, who reaches it to John, from whom Mary, sinking
on her knees, receives it with such devotion as no heart but hers could
hold. Every blood-stained spike seemed instinct with life, and went
into her heart, tipped as it were with the Blood of her Son,
inoculating her more and more deeply with the spirit of His Passion.
Who can describe with what reverential touch, while the cold Body was a
furnace of heavenly love burning against his heart, Joseph loosened the
nails, so as not to crush or mutilate the blessed Hands and Feet which
they had pierced? It was so hard a task that we are fain to believe
angels helped him in it. Each nail was silently passed down to Mary.
They were strange graces, these which were now flowing to her through
the hands of her new son; yet, after all, not so unlike the gifts which
Jesus had Himself been giving her these three-and-thirty years. Never
yet had earth seen such a worship of sorrow as that with which the
Mother bent over those mute relics, as they came down to her from the
Cross, crusted too as they were, perhaps wet, with that Precious Blood,
which she adored in its unbroken union with the Person of the Eternal
Word. But with what agony was all this worship accompanied, what fresh
wounds did not all these instruments of the Passion make in her heart,
what old ones did they not reopen!
But a greater grief was yet to come. The Body was detached from the
Cross. More and more thickly the angels gathered round, while thrills
of love pierced with ecstatic bliss their grand intelligences. Mary is
kneeling on the ground. Her fingers are stained with Blood. She
stretches the clean linen cloth over her arms and holds them out to
receive her Son, her Prodigal come back to her again, and come back
thus! And was He not a Prodigal? Had He not willfully gone out from her
quiet home into the wildest and rudest of worlds, leagues and leagues
distant from the purity and love of her spotless heart? Had He not
spent all His substance on companions, worthless and despicable? Was it
not a riotous spending, a riot of some eighteen hours' duration? Had He
not been prodigal of His Precious Blood, of His beauty, His innocence,
His life, His grace, His very Divinity? And now He was coming back to
her thus! Can such a sorrow, such an accumulation of concentering
sorrows, have any name? Can she bear the weight? Which weight? The
sorrow or the Body? It matters not. She can bear them both. From above,
the Body is slowly descending. She remembers the midnight-hour when the
Holy Ghost overshadowed her at Nazareth. Now it is the Eternal Son who
is so strangely overshadowing His kneeling Mother. Joseph trembled
under the weight, even while Nicodemus helped him. Perhaps also it was
not the weight only which made him tremble. Wonderfully must grace have
held him up to do what he did. Now it is low enough for John to touch
the sacred Head, and receive it in his arms, that it might not droop in
that helpless rigid way; and Magdalen is holding up the Feet. It is her
old post. It is her post in Heaven now highest of penitents, most
beautiful of pardoned spirits! For one moment Mary prostrates herself
in an agony of speechless adoration, and the next instant she has
received the Body on her extended arms. The babe of Bethlehem is back
again in His Mother's lap. What a meeting! What a restoration! For a
while she remains kneeling, while John and Magdalen, Joseph and
Nicodemus, and the devout women, adore. Then she passes from the
attitude of the priest to the attitude of the mother. She rises from
her knees, still bearing the burden as lightly as when she fled with
Him into Egypt, and sits down upon the grass, with Jesus extended on
her lap.
With minutest fondness she smoothes His hair. She does not wash the
Blood from off His Body. It is too precious; and soon He will want it
all, as well as that which is on men's shoes, and the payment of
Jerusalem, and the olive roots of Gethsemane. But she closes every
wound, every mark of the lash, every puncture of the thorns, with a
mixture of myrrh and aloes, which Nicodemus has brought. There was not
a feature of His blessed Countenance, not a mark upon His Sacred Flesh,
which was not at once a sorrow to her, and a very volume of profoundest
meditations. Her soul went through the Passions upon His Body, as men
trace their travels on a map. The very quietness of her occupation, the
very concentration of her undistracted thoughts seemed to enable her to
go deeper and deeper down into His sufferings, and to compassionate
them with a more interior bitterness than before. In none of the
earlier stages of her sorrow had there been more demand upon her to
control the common gestures and outbursts of grief, than when she sat
in the light of that spring evening with her Son's dead Body on her
lap, smoothing, anointing, and composing the countless prints of shame
and suffering which had been worn so deeply into it. In vain for her
were the birds trilling their even-song, the weight of the eclipse
being taken off their blithe little hearts. In vain for her were the
perfumes of the tender fig-leaves rising up in the cool air, and the
buds bursting greenly, and the tender shoots full of vernal beauty. Her
grief was past nature's soothing. For her Flower had been cruelly
gathered, and lay withered there upon her knee.
She performed her task as an act of religion, with grave assiduity, not
delaying over it to satisfy the grief of which her heart was full. The
dead Body seemed as obedient to her as ever the Babe had been in
Bethlehem, obedient in all things but one. She told St. Bridget that
the extended arms could not be closed, and laid by His side, or crossed
upon His breast. We ought rather to say they would not, than they could
not, be closed. He will not relinquish those outstretched arms, which
seem to invite the whole world into the utmost width of their embrace.
There was room for all within them, a harbor large enough for all
creation. If the lifting up of His Hands upon the Cross was an "evening
sacrifice" to the Eternal Father, the outstretching of them was as it
were a sacramental sign to men that none were excluded from His
invitation and His welcome. He would carry with Him to the tomb the
form and figure of one crucified; and Mary understood why the arms were
rigid, and forbore the gentle violence she was about to use. He must be
swathed in the winding-sheet in that shape as well as may be, preaching
large, wide, welcoming love even to the end. Mary must now take her
last look of that dead Face. Mothers live lives in their last looks.
Who shall tell what Mary's was like? Who would have been surprised if
the eyes of the Dead had opened, and His lips parted, under the
kindling and the quickening of that look? With heroic effort she has
bound the napkin around His Head, and has folded the winding-sheet over
the sweet Face. And now there is darkness indeed around her. The very
dead Body had been a light and a support. She has put out the light
herself. Her own hands have quenched the lamp, and she stands facing
the thick night. Oh, brave woman! Hours of ecstatic contemplation over
that silent-speaking Countenance would have passed like moments. But it
was a time for religion, not for the indulgence of her tenderness; and
she pierced her own heart through and through with the same hand with
which she hid His Face. But, O Mary! thou seest that Face now, and art
drinking thy fill of its beauty, and thou wilt do so for ever more, and
never be satisfied, even when always satisfied, happy, blessed Mother!
When we pass from the narrative of the sixth dolor to treat of its
peculiarities, we are struck at the outset by a characteristic which
runs all through it. It surrounds us perpetually with images of the
Sacred Infancy and of the Blessed Sacrament. The Passion seems to sink
out of view, as if it were a foundation only; the superstructure is
carved all over with symbols of Bethlehem and the Altar. There is
scarcely an action or attitude of Mary in all the dolor, which does not
bring to mind at once either the old days of the Mother and the Child,
or the coming days of the Priest and the Host. When she kneels to
receive the Body, and remains kneeling with it in her arms for the
others to adore, when she ministers to it and with tender reverence
manipulates it, when care and responsibility for the Lord's Body is the
anxiety of her heart, and her grief comes from the fear of sacrilege,
we cannot avoid having the Blessed Sacrament continually before us. Her
outward demeanor appears as if it were the model, from which the Church
had drawn its rubrics for Mass, benediction, or procession. Her inward
temper seems the ideal of those interior dispositions which should
belong to all good priests in virtue of their being custodians of the
Blessed Sacrament. In its measure, the same prophetical foreshadowing
of the worship of the Blessed Sacrament is visible in the actions and
gestures of Joseph and Nicodemus, of John and Magdalen. Thus an
entirely new set of ideas comes in with this dolor. While it looks as
if it were but the complement of the Crucifixion, and divisible from it
only by an imaginary line, we find its inward spirit, its examples,
allusions, doctrine, and figures, to belong to an entirely different
region from that of the Passion. This reveals to us the real
distinction there is between this dolor and the two which have preceded
it. The mystical connection of the Blessed Sacrament with the Sacred
Infancy has been dwelt upon at length elsewhere. [The author's second
book on the Blessed Sacrament.] The Blessed Sacrament is as it
were the real perpetuation of His Infancy in memory of His Passion.
Thus, in the sixth dolor, it appears as if our Lord had no sooner
consummated the work of His Passion than He at once began to shadow
forth that state in which it was His sweet will to abide with His
Church forever in the Sacrament of the Altar. From that instant, the
old images of Bethlehem rose up again, as if they had been kept down by
force for a while, and they return more determinately and plainly in
the shape of forebodings of the Blessed Sacrament. This is not so much
a separate peculiarity of this dolor, as its very soul and
significance, running through every feature of it, tincturing Mary's
dispositions under it, and giving a special character to the lessons
which it conveys to ourselves.
There is a peculiarity of this dolor, which it is impossible for us
fully to understand, but which must be borne in mind throughout,
because it indicates the greatest depth of sorrow which this mystery
reached in the soul of our Blessed Mother. It was the withdrawal of the
life of Jesus. She herself, perhaps did not know till now how much it
had supported her, nor how many offices it had fulfilled toward her.
For three-and-thirty years she had lived upon His life. It had been her
atmosphere. There had been a kind of unity of life between them. Her
heart had beaten in His Heart. She had seen with His eyes, and had
heard with His ears, and had almost spoken with His lips and thought
with His thoughts, as she had done when she composed and sang the
Magnificat. Mother and son had never before been so fused into each
other. Two lives had never seemed so inseparably one life as these two
had done. And how shall one of them, and that the weaker and inferior,
now stand alone? The sundering of body and soul looks a less effectual
separation than the dividing of the life of Mary from the life of
Jesus. Perhaps it was on this account, to supply this mysterious want
of the Human Life of Jesus, that the species of the Blessed Sacrament
remained incorrupt within her during the remainder of her life, from
one communion to another. We have sometimes seen mothers and sons
approximate to this unity of life, especially when the son has been an
only child, and the mother a widow. It has been also in these cases, as
with our Lady, that it is the mother's life which is drawn into the
son's, not the son's into the mother's. The sight of such a mother and
son is one of the most pathetic which earth can show; pathetic, because
its roots have always been, not in the palpable sunshine of overflowing
happiness, but in the unwitnessed depth of domestic sorrow. The
grandeur of its beauty has been in proportion to the fiery heat of that
furnace of agony in which the two lives had been melted into one. But,
when we looked, we have trembled to think how the inevitable separation
of death would ever be endured. Yet how faint a shadow of Jesus and
Mary are these filial and maternal unities
on earth!
In order, then, to understand the intolerable suffering which the
withdrawal of the life of Jesus caused in the heart of Mary, we must
know what His life had been to hers throughout. But this is not within
the reach of our comprehension. We can but guess at it, and calculate
it, and then be sure that the reality has far outrun our boldest
calculations. Yet, here, also, the annals of human sorrow help us by
comparison. Who has not known instances of that perfection of conjugal
love when husband and wife have so lived into each other that the life
of one is apparently imbedded in the life of the other? Each has borne
the other's cares. Heart has leaned on heart, and they have throbbed
together in one pulse. They have used even each other's senses with
such an affectionately borrowed use, that we have sometimes been fain
to smile at such simplicity and dependency of love. Voice, expression,
gesture, gait, manner, and a thousand little nameless ways, have been
only the outward disclosure of the intense unity of love within. Long
years have formed habits which it would seem downright death to break.
The checkered experiences of life, with their dark and bright. their
tears and smiles, their losses and their compensations. have still more
effectually moulded those two hearts into one. The two personalities
are confused; God alone sees them clear and distinct, each in its own
sphere of praise and blame, of merit and demerit, in His account. Death
comes. There is not a power in nature but inexorable death which would
dare to rend asunder so exquisitely delicate a union. And what has been
the consequence? It has become plain that there was almost a physical
reality in this oneness of two loving lives. For, now that one is left
alone, the stream can hardly flow. It shrinks and runs dry, like a
fountain in the summer. It is not self-sufficing. It cannot feed
itself. The one spring cannot do the work of the two. The survivor is
unable to face life. His mind succumbs distracted under the least
burden. It is not merely that one-half of his strength is gone. It is
something more than that. He is truly as feeble and faint as a man
bleeding to death; but he is incomplete also. He has no front to
present to the common tide of daily life, and breast it as it comes. No
matter how calmly life may flow, it is too much for him. He droops, and
pines, and dies in as many months as physical decay may require; and
his death is not so much a death in itself as a part and completion of
that other death. The lives were one, the deaths are one also. Who has
not seen this? But we do not mourn over it. It is best and completest
as it is. Here, also, we have but a partial shadow of the union of
Jesus and Mary; yet it helps us to see what an overwhelming sorrow to
her sensitive heart must have been the cessation of the life of Jesus.
It was the deepest depth to which the sixth dolor reached.
Another peculiarity of this dolor is the reappearance of
responsibility, which formed so weighty a part of the third, but had
not come to view at all during the fourth or fifth. It is Mary's
feeling of responsibility about His Sacred Body, now that it had
reverted to more than the original helplessness of childhood. No one
understands the adorableness of that Body as she does. Who is to care
for it but herself? And she also is helpless. It is the same feeling
which pervades the whole Church with regard to the Blessed Sacrament.
In the Church, if it is a feeling of anxiety, it is also a feeling of
amazing joy. But with Mary it was a manifold sorrow. In the midst of
sorrow responsibility is itself a new sorrow. Yet it is one of the
providential laws of grief that it almost always brings new
responsibilities to view, and just when we seem least capable of
rightly discharging them. Grief is one of those things which
concentrate, yet do not simplify, as most concentrations do. It is a
perplexity rather than a light. It gives us more to do rather than less
to do. A man in great grief has less leisure than any other man on
earth. Nothing thickens life so much as sorrow. Nothing precipitates
the great ,york of experience as it does. Nothing, endows our nature
with more magnificent accessions of power. A life of joy is, for the
most part, thin and shallow. Few heroisms can be manufactured out of
gladness, though it also has its sunny depths which are full of God.
But sorrow is the making of Saints, the very process of the
transmutation of drossy earth into purest heaven. This is why God seems
to bear so hard upon us in sorrow. His wisdom makes His love cruel.
These unendurable new responsibilities, whose apparently inopportune
advent in seasons of grief is so depressing, are almost His choicest
gifts. There is a crisis of life, perhaps, in every one of them. But
our Lady's responsibility for our Lord's Body was also a grief to her
because of the circumstances of the time and place. Violence and
cruelty reigned supreme. Savage executioners and ruffian soldiers were
the kings of Calvary. The chances of outrage and defilement were hardly
chances. To human calculation they were inevitable necessities. The
breaking of the legs, the spear of Longinus, the hurry to get every
thing cleared away for the beginning of the Sabbath, the malice of the
Jews, the way in which Pilate had truckled to them, the ordinary Jot of
the bodies of those whom justice had put to death, the very convenience
of the Golgotha where the crosses were erected, the fact that there
were three bodies to dispose of, and not one only,---all these things
were so many terrific risks which the inviolate safety of that adorable
Deposit which was in Mary's care had now to run. Furthermore, her
responsibility was in a third way a grief, because of the sense of
utter helplessness which came along with it. What could she do? How was
it in her power to stave off, or even to divert into another channel,
anyone of these numerous, ill-boding consequences which were pressing
upon her? And yet the consequences of a failure were too appalling to
contemplate. Even to our thoughts in quiet meditation there is
something almost more shocking in the idea of the Dead Body of Jesus in
the polluted hands of those fierce men than the dear and living Lord
Himself. We shudder at the possibility. What, then, must have been the
agony of Mary's adoring heart, to which these horrors were visible and
imminent, with the feeling that the care was hers, and the knowledge
that she was helpless as the merest mother of an odious criminal could
be,---nay, all things considered, even more helpless, for her claims
would have provoked insult where those of the common mother would have
elicited compassion.
Out of this responsibility came again the misery of terror. It was a
new kind of terror, the dread of sacrilege. No observant person---and
love makes all of us observant---can avoid being struck with the part
which terror plays in the dolors of our Blessed Mother. It comes out
strongly as almost a universal characteristic of them. In treating of
the second dolor we have seen what a huge aggravation of sorrow fear
always is. Let us try now to conjecture why it is that fear fulfills so
prominent an office in Mary's griefs. In the first place, it may have
been as an especial trial to that which was her especial grace,
tranquility. This tranquility, as we have already seen, is an essential
element in the true idea of Mary. It is not perhaps so much a distinct
grace, as the firmament, most rightly named a firmament, in which her
purity, humility, and generosity were set to shine. In each of her
sorrows---and the same remark is applicable to her joys as well---there
was always something peculiarly trying to her tranquility, from the
Annunciation to the Descent of the Holy Ghost, something, which by its
suddenness, or its vehemence, or its horror, or its exultation, or its
strain upon human nature, was especially likely to disturb her inward
peace, and to ruffle and arrest for a moment the calm onward majesty of
her queenlike repose. But fear is, of all things, the most opposed to
tranquility; and hence those varieties of terror, which we have
discovered in her dolors, sometimes looming in the distance, sometimes
frowning close at. hand, now visible upon the surface, now working
underneath in the recesses of her heart, may have been sent to try, and
by trying to perfect and enhance, her heavenly tranquility. In the
second place, it was necessary that such immense sanctity as that of
our Blessed Lady should be tested by trials in proportion to its
grandeur. Now several distinct worlds of the most grievous temptations
were impossible in her case, because of her gift of original justice,
while the consummate sensibilities of her beautiful and delicate nature
would make terror a most agonizing trial to her, just as Jesus "began
to fear and be heavy" when the Crucifixion of His Soul was reaching its
highest point in the garden of Gethsemane. Thus, in her case, terror
may have had to condense within itself the energies, properties, and
pains of innumerable temptations, and to accomplish in her the ends
which it was not permitted those other things to try, because of her
utter sinlessness. Such we may reverently conjecture might be the
reason of the amount of terror in our Lady's sorrows; but whatever
becomes of the explanation, the fact is one of which we must never lose
sight, if we would form a true idea of what she suffered.
But responsibility does not bring out fear only; it brings out
loneliness also. We may be alone in the world, without knowing how much
we are alone. Our kindred may have failed us, and the bond which unites
us to those immediately around us may be formed of far frailer
materials than the blood of relationship. But we are well and strong.
Life as yet is sparing us its worst. We feel tolerably sufficient for
ourselves. In a beautiful place, on a fine day, in perfect health, the
feeling of solitude is little more than poetry. But sorrow comes,---not
to strip us of our domestic world,---that has lain long unpeopled, a
wistful, weary blank; but it comes to show us that we are stripped, and
makes us feel the dreariness of being alone. Alone too, perhaps,
without Cain's consolation, of being able to wander. Then, when new
responsibilities supervene on recent sorrow, the sentiment of our
desolation is complete. We want some one every moment. We wait, but
they do not come. It is a folly to wait; they cannot come who ought to
come. We know it; nevertheless we wait. There are voices which ought to
speak to us now in counsel as of old, but they are mute. There were
arms we used to lean upon; and we feel for them in the darkness, and
they are not there. Every moment a fresh want knocks at the grave of
something which has long been buried, and the heart sinks at the hollow
echoes which the knocking wakes. And all this is the worse to bear,
because it is so deep down in the unpeopled hollows of the soul. We are
alone. The fact is old and familiar; but the feeling is new and
terrible. Thus loneliness was part of this sixth dolor. It was not
utter loneliness yet. That point had to be reached in the seventh
sorrow. But it began in this. When the Soul of Jesus left her, the
world seemed a most awful solitude. Her feeling of responsibility about
His Body deepened this sense of loneliness until it ached. Deeper down,
and with more anguish, it penetrated together with her sense of
helplessness, and deeper still was it carried, as by swift piercing
shafts, by her terror lest some sacrilege should be committed. She was
fearfully alone, and yet had to diffuse herself into those around her
to be their comfort and support. As the life of Jesus had been her
life, so was hers now the life of Magdalen and John. But she was not
utterly alone. She had the Body still. Dead as it was, it was marvelous
companionship. Dead as it was, it was like no other Body, for it was
still united to a living and eternal Person. It was not a relic, such
as love clings to and weeps over. It was a sanctity for worship and
adoration. The loneliness therefore could not yet be desolation. But,
such as it was, it was a weight of grief which no soul but Mary's could
have borne.
It was also a peculiarity of the suffering of this dolor, that it
consisted in prostration rather than in agony. It followed immediately
upon the exhausting scene of the Passion. It came upon a nature, which
of itself was on the point of dying from the excruciating severity of
its martyrdom, and whose miraculous support never allowed itself to be
felt in the shape of refreshment or sensible consolation. The Hand that
held her up was a hidden support, like that which the Divine Nature
ministered to the Human in our Blessed Lord during the Passion. Thus,
naturally, Mary felt every moment as if she had reached the ultimate
term of endurance. It had worn her soul through, and the next pressure
would be death. She felt in her soul the unrestful aching which over
fatigue produces in the body. Her spirit was fatigued to death, not in
a figure of speech, but in literal truth. Life was become a sensible
burden, as if it were external to herself. She supported it; it did not
support her. This exhaustion was more harassing than pain, more
distressing than sharp suffering would have been. It was a collapse
after the rack, bringing no relief, because the cessation of pain is
not sensible when one is utterly crushed. We have got what is like a
new being, capable of suffering quite in a different way. Yet this
trial also her tranquility bore unshaken. It did not become stupid,
passive, inert, as the victims of cruelty sometimes are under torture.
It did not perform the duties which came to it with the feverish energy
and impatient precipitation common to fatigue. It was a broken-hearted
peace, but also gentle, collected, considerate, unselfish, full of
majesty, and working with the noiseless promptitude and slow assiduity
which always betokens the presence of God within the soul. As at the
Crucifixion she stood three hours beneath the Cross, so now she knelt
and held the heavy Burden on her outstretched arms, with the same
becoming and unforward bravery. Never was any soul so prostrate as
Mary's in this sixth dolor, never was any so upright in its
prostration. But do we not stand cold and trembling on the shores of
such an icy sea of sorrow?
In such a state kindness was unkind, not in its intention, but in its
effect. Thus, when Joseph and Nicodemus, John and Magdalen, gathered
quietly round her, as she was composing and embalming the Body, their
very kindness somehow brought out the loss of the compassion of Jesus.
When she stood under the Cross, she had not thought about herself. She
was compassionating Him. She considered only the sorrow her sorrow was
to Him, not the compassion toward herself which it was causing in His
Soul. But she discovered now how great a support that compassion had
been to her all the while. Like all divine operations, she saw it more
plainly now that it was past; and it rose up in gushing memories which
were full as much kindlings of sorrow as of joy. He was gone Who alone
could understand her heart. He Himself had overwhelmed her with grief
by the implied comparison between Himself and John when He had given
her the apostle for her son in His stead. And now the gentle sweetness,
the graceful tenderness of loving sorrow and filial compassion, which
John was showing, while it filled her heart with love of his virgin
soul, awoke memories against its will, and instituted comparisons, in
spite of itself, which filled her with sadness, and with that sorrowful
feeling which is regret in us, but which could not be so in her,
because there is something in the holiest regret which does not
altogether square with the will of God. Besides which, the past
reflected itself in all those kind faces round. John was in the place
of Jesus, and he was like Him, too, as true friends always are to their
friends. Jesus was mirrored in the eyes of the sorrowful enthusiast
Magdalen, and Mary saw Him there. None could be so high in grace as
that seraphic penitent, and not resemble, even in their lineaments, the
Bridegroom of their souls. Joseph had come to life again in him of
Arimathea, and was standing where Joseph had so often stood, close by
the lap on which Jesus lay, looking, as Joseph looked, at Him, and not
at her. Nicodemus, too, with his myrrh and aloes, had renewed the
offering of the Three Kings, no longer in prophecy, but when the spices
were needed for His burial. And, while Mary herself anointed Him, she
did not forget how Magdalen had anointed His Feet already "against the
day of His burial." And in the midst of them was Jesus Dead. A very
cloud of sorrowful remembrances rose up from the group and enveloped
the soul of Mary in pathetic shadows.
Indeed, there was altogether a quiet intensity about this dolor, which
was suitable to a state of prostration, and which contrasted visibly
with the more active and changeful endurance of many of the sorrows
past. It was the first dolor, which had been running in a subterranean
channel under all the others, which was now coming to the surface
again, with its lifelong volume of sorrow, undistracted, unimpetuous,
in self-collected simplicity of suffering. This prostration is as if it
were simply that old, lifelong sorrow risen to its natural high-tide
and pausing for an instant before it ebbed. It had all the
Three-and-Thirty Years in it. It joined the Infancy with the Passion,
and confused in beautiful, orderly confusion Bethlehem and Calvary
together, and the life Jesus lived on earth in His visible Flesh with
the life He leads there now in the invisible Flesh and Blood of His
adorable Sacrament. Nay, the Infancy and the Passion are both actually
present in that scene, visible to the eye, palpable to the touch, bound
together in the one Divine mystery of that Body lying over the Mother's
lap. There was the Passion written, engraven, or rather deeply
sculptured, on those limbs. Every sin had fiercely inscribed its own
reparation there. From the Head to the Feet, from the Feet to the Head,
the Way of the Cross was winding up and down. Each Station had left its
mark, its dread memorial, its noticeable wound. Every mystery was
represented there. And Mary's ardent contemplations fitted every mark
with life, put a piteous voice into every wound, and kindled over again
in her scathed and bleeding heart those fires of human cruelty which
had burnt themselves out from very violence even before death had
withdrawn their Victim beyond their reach. But the Infancy was there as
well. The Child was on His Mother's knee. That other Joseph was
standing by. Those maternal ministries were all such as beseemed a
child in its uncomplaining helplessness. There was the old gracefulness
of the Mother's ways, as she parted His hair, and smoothed His limbs,
and swathed Him again in His last swaddling-clothes. Her sorrow now was
the counterpart of the old joys; nay, rather it was the continuation
and completion of the old sorrows. In Bethlehem, in Egypt, at Nazareth,
she had long foreseen this hour. And now it was come. She ,vas down in
unfathomable depths of woe, where the eye can hardly teach her; but it
is visibly the same Mother, indubitably the same Child. This is her
payment for the old nursing. Strange payment! but it is God's way, and
she, if anyone, understands it well. Alas! to us the beauty of the
sorrow almost distracts us from its bitterness!
Such were the peculiarities of the sixth dolor. Foremost among the
dispositions of Mary's soul in her endurance of it we must reckon the
calm clearness with which she saw and followed the will of God through
the darkness of her sorrow. Grief indulged troubles the vision of
faith. It is because we give way to the tenderness of nature that we
are so backward in discerning the will of God, and so stupid in
interpreting its meaning". When a mourner calls God's way inscrutable
in his affliction, it is the result of a pardonable dimming of his
faith's lustre. Pardonable, because we are so weak, and none knows our
weakness so well as God. God's ways are, for the most part, inscrutable
in joy; inscrutable above all to us, who know what we are, and what we
deserve. But they are seldom inscrutable in sorrow. Sorrow is God's
plainest time. Never are the clouds which curtain His throne put so far
back as they are then. A grief quietly considered, is generally a
revelation. But to the most moderate self-knowledge how can it be a
mystery? We are always startled afresh with the wonders of the Passion,
though we have known them from our childhood. But Mary found nothing
strange even in the tremendous realities present to her and almost
crushing the life out of her. Her eye was single. It looked out only
for God's will; and that will always came at the right time and in the
right place. It is faith's peculiar habit to see what we may call the
naturalness of God's will. To faith it always seems so fitting, we
cannot conceive what else could suitably have happened, except the very
thing which has happened. It almost seems strange that we did not
prophesy it beforehand. We see all this wonderfully illustrated in the
lives of many of the saints, but never so wonderfully as in our Blessed
Lady. The most exacting, the most uncommon, the most apparently
unseasonable, will of God always finds her prepared, just as if it was
an orbit traced by a law which she knew beforehand, so that she had
nothing to do but to glide in it like a star in its proper heaven. This
was the reason why no time was lost, no grace uncorresponded to, no
grace to which the correspondence was not generous and prompt. The will
of God was her sole mystical theology. It was her compendious way to
that perfection for which the abstrusest mystical theology can find no
name.
Another disposition, which was admirably exhibited in this dolor, was
her union of reverence with familiarity. There is no truer index of
union with God than this. It can only come out of great holiness. No
rules can be laid down for it, just as no precise rules can be laid
down for good manners. It is an instinct, or what we call breeding, or
an inborn delicacy, which enables a man to comport himself faultlessly.
So is it heavenly breeding, an instinct of the Holy Ghost, a refinement
of high and unusual grace, which enables a man to unite familiarity and
reverence in His dealings with the Most High. It cannot be learned. The
utmost which can be taught is to avoid a familiarity to which in our
low estate we have no right. We must be long conversant with God's love
and long conversant with our own nothingness, before the first
indications of this choice and beautiful grace will be discerned upon
the surface of our conduct. But what a model of it is our Blessed
Mother embalming the Body of her Son! We can tell how dear to her is
that Body, even though she gives way to no outward gesture of
endearment. We can tell how sacred it is, though there is no visible
display of worship. We could almost divine it was the Body of God from
the very undemonstrative self-collection of her demeanor, so completely
does it blend that familiarity and reverence which belong only to an
object of adoration. See her face, "latch her fingers, sound her heart;
it is all one grace playing everywhere! Yet there are few lessons in
the world of the Incarnation deeper than these,---that Mary knew that
Jesus was God, and yet dared to use the rights of maternal tenderness
toward Him, and that she lived with Him as her Son for Three-and-Thirty
Years in the most amazing intercourse of familiar love, and yet never
for one moment either forgot that He was God or forgot what was due to
Him as God. Out of these two truths alone must we perforce build a
pedestal for our Lady, whose top shall be far above out of our sight;
and where then shall she be who is to be raised thereon?
We must note also her spirit of studious, minute, and special
reparation. Not the love of all possible worlds would be enough to pay
Jesus back for the least pain He suffered for us, or for one single
drop of the copious streams of Blood which He vouchsafed to shed. As
God, the least of His humiliations is utterly beyond the reach of our
compensations. The saints in all ages have marvelously loved and adored
His Passion, and by supernatural penances and in mystical conformities
have imitated its dread mysteries. Yet all their love together came not
so nigh a just reparation to Him, as the worship of Mary while she
prepared Him for the grave. The near sight of what He had really
endured was something quite different from her presence at the Passion,
while its various mysteries were being enacted at some distance from
her. It took her down into the depths of the Passion, close to our Lord
Himself, and whither no contemplative has ever penetrated. Her science
and her Mother's heart combined to read and interpret those fearful
documents, which were written within and without His Body, like
Ezekiel's book, "lamentations, and canticles, and woes," as neither
angel nor saint could interpret them. Ever as her fingers moved with
the embalming, acts of worship and reparatory love out of the interior
magnificences of her soul went along with them. She saw the number and
the weight and the kind and the aggravation of all those sins, which
found there their proper and distinct expiations; and for each and all
she made the most wonderful reparations. This spirit of reparation is
one of the instincts of Divine love. While the Angels by our sides
perform their ministries of vigilant affection, they never cease
beholding God. So in like manner the servants of God go forth into the
world in search of God's outraged glory, to make reparation for it,
while in the mean time they never stir out of that abiding sense of
their own sinfulness, which is the atmosphere of true humility. But
Mary had no sense of sin, and her humility was more deeply rooted than
that of St. Michael himself, the most zealous of the Angels, because he
was also the most humble. The reparations of Mary therefore were in a
sphere by themselves. The Saints are in a measure expiating their own
sins, even while they are expiating the sins of others. But Mary's
reparations were the worship of a sinless creature. As Christ satisfied
for us, because we could not satisfy for ourselves, so Mary worshipped
His Passion for us as well as for herself, because we are unable to do
it worthily ourselves, and she is our mother, and, by our Lord's own
gift, what is hers is in some most real sense ours also. It was not
time for reparation until now. Its natural place is in the sixth dolor,
when the work of cruelty has ceased, and the huge world-sin has been
consummated. Where complaint, or virtuous indignation, or loud appeals
to Divine justice, would have come in others, there came in Mary a
busy, silent, tender reparation. Oh, it is a joy to think that, if our
sins were in the lashes of the scourge and the spikes of the thorny
crown, our hands also were in our Mother's hands, composing and
embalming the Body of our Saviour, and filling in as if with posthumous
healing those deep-red hieroglyphics which sin had left thereon!
We have already spoken of the perseverance of our Lady's tranquility
through the varying phases of her martyrdom. But we must not omit to
enumerate it here among the heroic dispositions in which she endured
her sixth dolor. It is by far the most wonderful thing about the
interior life of her soul, so far at least as we are allowed to see
into it. There seems to be no height of holiness which may not be
predicated of such a marvelous tranquility. It is a token, not so much
of a process of sanctification still going on, as of the deification of
a human soul completed. It comes nearest of all graces to the denial of
created imperfections. Inequality, surprise, mutability, inconsistency,
hesitation, doubt, vacillation, failure, astonishment,--- these are all
what might be called in geological language the faults in created
sanctity. They are the imprints which human infirmity has left upon the
work before it was set and hardened. They are the marks of catastrophe,
which is itself a mark of feebleness. From all these, so far as we can
see, our Lady's incomparable tranquility preserved her. To her there
seems to have been communicated some portion of that peace of God which
Scripture says "surpasseth all understanding," and whose special office
toward ourselves is "to keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." No
one thing explains so much of our Blessed Lady's grandeur as this
heavenly calm. Apparent exaggerations find their place, their meaning,
and their connection, when they are viewed in the light of this
tranquility. Graces, which sound impossible when stated by themselves,
settle down in this tranquility, disclosed distinctly by its light, and
at the same time softened and made natural by its beauty. The Heart of
Jesus alone can read the riddle of Mary aright; but this dove like
peace, this almost divinely pacific spirit, is the nearest reading of
the riddle of her immense holiness to which we can attain. It is as if
God had clothed her with His attribute of mercy for our sakes, with His
attribute of peace for her own.
We learn two lessons for ourselves in this sixth dolor. Our Lady is at
once a model to us of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and a model
also of behavior in time of grief. We have already seen how allusions
to the Blessed Sacrament flit before us continually in this dolor. From
Mary's demeanor we may now gather what our own devotion to that dread
mystery ought to be. For the sixth dolor is as it were perpetuated in
the Church until the end of time. As our Blessed Lord is daily offered
in the Mass, and the selfsame sacrifice of Calvary continued and
renewed without intermission day and night around the world, so are
Mary's ministries to His mute yet adorable Body going on unceasingly
upon thousands of Christian altars and by the hands of thousands of
Christian priests. Yet, as is ever the case with those things which we
have from Jesus and Mary, what was intense bitterness to her, to us is
exultation, privilege, and love. When she had gently laid aside the
crown and nails, as precious relics, with what profound reverence did
she kneel to receive the Body of her Son! It was not the attitude of a
mother toward a son, but rather of the creature toward the Creator. She
adored it with divine worship. She held it in her arms until the rest
had adored it also. Her rights as a Mother were merged in her service
as a creature. Yet the Blessed Sacrament is the living Jesus, Soul as
well as Body, Godhead as well as Humanity. Worshipful as was His dead
Body, because of its unbroken union with the Person of the Eternal
Word, the Blessed Sacrament, if it were possible, demands of us a
worship more full and dread, more self-abasing, more profound. We have
no Mother's rights. We are not, like Joseph of Arimathea, doing Jesus a
service by ministering to His Body. The obligation is all on our side.
He has come down again from heaven to us. We are not gone up to the
Cross to take Him down. With what immense reverence, then, ought we not
to worship this Divine Sacrament! Our preparation for Communion should
be full of the grand spirit of adoration. Our act of receiving should
be a silent act of holy eager fear and breathless worship. In our
thanksgiving we ought to be lost in the grandeurs of His condescension,
and not too soon begin to ask for graces, until we have prostrated
ourselves before that living Incarnate God who at that moment has so
wonderfully enshrined Himself within us. We should behave at Mass as,
with all our present faith and knowledge, we should have behaved on
Calvary. At Benediction, and when praying before the Tabernacle, the
Blessed Sacrament should breed in us continually a spirit of unresting
adoration, unresting as that incessant cry which the astonished
Seraphim and Cherubim are continually uttering at the sight of the
unimaginable holiness of God.
To this reverence we must add tranquility, or, rather, out of this
reverence will come tranquility. The spirit of worship is a spirit of
quietness. We must not disquiet ourselves in order to deepen our
reverence. We must not disturb ourselves by making efforts. We must
gently submit ourselves to be overruled, constrained, and gradually
calmed by the present majesty of God. Neither must we look into our own
souls to see if we are worshipping, nor make any other reflex acts upon
the processes which are going on within us. Under the pretence of
keeping up our attention, all this is but so much occupation with self,
and so much distraction from the presence of Jesus. Hence it is that so
many Communions bring forth so little fruit. It is from the want of
quietness. An unprepared Communion can hardly ever be a quiet one. The
very object of the preparation is to clear our hearts of the worldly
images which possess them, and which, if not expelled beforehand, will
become importunate distractions at the very moment when adoration
should rule within us tranquil and alone. Hence also it is that the
best preparation for the Blessed Sacrament consists by no means in
endeavoring to stimulate our affections by devout considerations, in
order to warm our cold hearts and raise our fervor to a proper pitch.
In truth, it is not in our power to do so. For the ardor, or the
seeming ardor, which we produce, is unnatural because it is violent,
and so it is not only short-lived, but it is followed by a reaction
proportioned to the efforts we have made. A feeble fire is extinguished
by the bellows, and even where it is blown up into a noisy crackling
flame, it burns black and dull for long afterward, when the artificial
blast has ceased to play. The best preparation is that which is rather
of a negative character, and which consists in emptying ourselves of
self, so far as may be,---in banishing distractions, in realizing our
own needs and poverty and nothingness and malice, and so coming to
Jesus in the same temper that the humble sufferers came to Him in the
Gospel to be healed of their diseases. Whatsoever is empty and
unoccupied in our hearts He will fill when He enters there. Hence the
more room there is for Him the more grace will there be for us. A quiet
Communion with but little sensible fervor is a far deeper thing than a
Communion which thrills through us with a pleasant agitation of great
thoughts. Tranquility is thrilling also,---but it is so in a higher and
more supernatural way. The preparation of peace is the best adornment
of the heart in which we are to hide the Blessed Sacrament; for the
presence of Jesus is itself peace, and works greater things where it
finds peace already and has not to lose time by making room for itself
and expelling intrusive images.
It is out of peace that love will come, such burning yet such humble
love as becomes the worship of the Blessed Sacrament. Our reverence
cannot have been right at the first if love does not follow. When fear,
and shrinking, and avoidance comes to souls with regard to the Blessed
Sacrament, it is not so much the want of love to which we must look as
the want of reverence. Reverence infallibly provides for love. But the
love of the Blessed Sacrament must be a growth of inward peace and
spiritual tranquility. Very often we love less than we should love if
we made less effort to love. Our faith tells us such overwhelming
things of this Divine mystery, that it seems a shame, almost a sin,
that we are not burning with sensible love all the day long. Jesus
Himself so near, so accessible, so intimately uniting Himself to us,
Bethlehem, Nazareth, Calvary actually here, and we so cold, so
moderate, so commonplace! Surely we ought to be burnt up as with the
fires of the Seraphim. It is true. Yet for all that we cannot force
ourselves. It is better to turn our vexation into self-hatred and
self-contempt than to try to create an interior vehemence, which, after
all, is a different thing from Divine love. The love of the Blessed
Sacrament is daily and lifelong. Surely it is not likely that such a
love should be always, or even most often, sensible. Do we go to Mass
on week days at our own inconvenience? Are we punctual and reverential
in our daily visit to the Blessed Sacrament? Do we hear Mass with
devout attention? Are our preparations for Communion and our
thanksgiving after it among those actions which we practically confess
to rank as the most important of our lives? Do we give up exercise,
pleasure, visiting, study, and the like, or at least interrupt them, to
go to Benediction when it is in our power? These are better proofs of
an acceptable love of the Blessed Sacrament than the warmest transports
or the most glowing heat in our hearts. Perseverance is the real Divine
heat in our hearts.
But out of love must come familiarity. Yet, as the love itself comes
out of reverence, the familiarity must be of a peculiar and noticeable
kind. It must have nothing in it of forwardness, of presumption, of
carelessness, of indifference, or even of freedom. It implies a spirit
accustomed to the divine visitations, and, therefore, not taken
unawares by them, nor flurried, nor excited, nor discomposed, nor
forgetful of proprieties. Some ecclesiastics are well versed in the
sweet science of the rubrics and ceremonial of the Church, so that, if
they are suddenly called upon to take part in some great function, they
are not confused or oblivious. They know what to do. They fall into
their places naturally. They are parts of a whole, and do not cause
disturbance on either side of them by ignorance or precipitation. They
are slow and yet ready, calm and yet interested, dignified and yet
bashful. Their greatest praise is that they go through the ceremonial
in such a natural and unaffected way, that men for the most part do not
notice how well they have fulfilled their office, and how completely
they are at home in the rubrics of the function. This is an
illustration of spiritual familiarity. It is at home with God, not in
the sense of ease and freedom, but in the sense of understanding its
part, of receiving Him with the proper honors, of calmly and mindfully
fulfilling all the ceremonial which His presence requires, and so
practically of forgetting self, because there is no need to remember
it, and of being occupied reverently, and lovingly, and tranquilly with
Him only. This is the true idea of holy familiarity; and when we
consider how frequent and how common Mass, Communion, Benediction, and
Visit are, we shall see at once how essential an element it is in our
devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. Mary was never but once at the
deposition from the Cross; and yet with what beautiful familiarity did
all her ministries to the Sacred Body take their place, as if they were
daily occurrences among the maternal offices of Bethlehem and Nazareth!
Then, last of all, a continual spirit of reparation must preside over
all our devotion, a reparation which is the immediate growth of
familiarity, or rather which is the loving familiarity itself, with its
eye resting on the reverence out of which all our devotion springs. To
the devout mind Jesus habitually presents Himself as one who has not
got His rights. He is injured and wronged with every heightening
circumstance of pathetic injustice. There is no time when love pours
itself out from the deepest and purest fountains of the heart with more
self-abandonment than when the object of our love has been wronged. The
very thought is so pitiable that it creates new love, such love as we
never felt before, and the spirit of self-sacrifice beats in it like a
heart. It is no longer a mere private joy of our own, a luxury of
sentiment, a romance of feeling, which, while it enveloped the object
of our love, reflected also no little radiance back upon ourselves.
Self is more at home in love than in any other of the affections. It is
an humbling and unpoetical truth, but nevertheless a truth. Now, the
position of being wronged invests the object of our love with a kind of
sanctity. Affection assumes something of the nature of worship, and
then self can live there no longer, because worship is the only real
incompatibility with self. Hence it is that the love of reparation is a
pure, and unselfish, and disinterested love. But this is not all. Jesus
not only habitually presents Himself to us as one who is suffering,
because He is defrauded of His rights, but also of one who is in some
mysterious way dependent upon our compassion to console Him, and upon
our reparation to make good His losses. This adds tenfold more
tenderness to our love, and self returns again, but only in the shape
of sacrifice, of generosity, of work, of sorrow, of abandonment. The
spirit of reparation is a beautiful spirit, a spirit of human beauty
fit to wait on the Humanity of our dearest Lord. It is the true Mary's
lap within our souls, in which the Blessed Sacrament should ever lie,
the pure white corporal of our most disinterested love! Such should be
our devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, as taught us by our Mother
ministering to the Body of Jesus on the top of Calvary. It should
consist of reverence, tranquility, love, familiarity, and reparation,
rising out of each other in this order, and connected with each other
in the supernatural logic of a devotional spirit.
But Mary is also our model of behavior in brief. Grief may either be
the solid foundation on which a vast supernatural edifice of sanctity
is to be raised, or it may be the very thinnest and most diluted of all
human affections, a mere clumsy ingenuity of selfishness, the most
self-seeking of all the kinds of love; for there can be little doubt
that sorrow is a kind of love. Thus the very highest and at the same
time the very lowest things may be predicated of grief. The reason of
the difference is to be found in the way in which we bear it. Grief is
a difficult thing to manage. There is no time when our correspondence
to grace requires to be more active, more vigilant, or more
self-denying than in seasons of affliction. If we once begin to indulge
our grief, a great work of God is frustrated. Every thing which happens
in the world happens with reference to our own soul. But sorrow is the
tool with which God finishes the statue and animates it with its
beautiful expression. It is sad for us when we take it into our own
hands. If God condescends to resume His work, and succeed us when we
have done, He must disfigure us with suffering again before we shall be
once more in a condition for Him to commence His gracious work anew.
Now, we have all of us a great temptation---and the more tender-hearted
we are the greater our temptation---to indulge in grief as if it were a
luxury. To endure, to hold fast by God, to do our duty, to
supernaturalize our adversity, to carry our cross, to aspire
heavenwards,---all these things are fatiguing. They give us the
sensation of toiling up a steep. We have all the weariness of an ascent
without the satisfaction of any visible elevation; for we seem to make
no way at all. Whereas to indulge our grief to give way unreservedly to
the ready inundation of comfortable tears, to complain,---especially if
we bring in a vein of religion like a vein of poetry, into our
complaining,---these things bring with them the relieving sensation of
going down hill. Of a truth it is the most earthward process through
which a heart can well go. Thus, a tender-hearted man ought to be as
much on his guard against sorrow as an intemperate man should be
against wine. There is a fascination in it which may easily become his
ruin. What makes the temptation more dangerous is, that the world
applauds the indulgence as if it were a moral loveliness and looks shy
at the restraint, as if it were hardness and insensibility; and to be
suspected of coldness and indifference is almost more than a
tender-hearted man can bear. There is no need to do physical violence
to ourselves to hinder tears. The effort will make us ill, without
bringing any profit either to body or soul. God does not dislike to see
His creatures weeping. We creatures even like to see those we love
weeping sometimes. All which our Lady's example counsels is moderation.
Let us relieve our hearts. It will make us less selfish. But let us not
foster, embrace, rekindle, and indulge our grief. For then our sorrow
is a selfish and luxurious fiction, a ground in which the Holy Spirit
will not dig; for He knows there is no gold underneath.
Neither is the indulgence of grief content to stop in the mere luxury
of sentiment. It goes on to do positive evil. It prompts us to dispense
ourselves from the duties which our hand finds to do. It seems hard to
work when we are grieving; but it is just this hardness which renders
the work so heavenly. We think that sorrow makes us privileged persons,
forgetting that our privileges are only an increase of our
responsibilities. They think deepest and most truly of their
responsibilities who most habitually regard them as privileges. The
world's work is not to stop for our sorrow. We are but units in a
multitude. We must roll round from west to east with our fellows; we
must meet life as life meets us; we must take joy and sorrow as they
come; they mostly come both together; both are at work at once, both
unresting, both unimportant; but both lie upon our road to the only
thing which is of importance, and that is God. Self-importance is the
cankerworm of Christian sorrow. We must not make too much of ourselves;
yet this is what the world's stupid consolations try to do with those
who are in grief. Dispensations are always lowering, but there is
nothing which they lower so much as suffering and sorrow. Our grief is
part of the world's rolling, because it is part of our own way to God.
It is a going on, not a standing still, a quickening of life's time,
not a letting the clock run down and stop. For the great clock goes
while ours stands, so that we gain nothing, but lose much. We pull down
the blinds, and strew the streets, and muffle the bells, and go slowly,
and tread lightly, when sickness is in the house; but let us take care
not to do so to sorrow in our own souls. For sorrow is by no means a
sickness of the soul; it is its health, and strength, and vigor. Sins
of omission may be more venial in times of sorrow, but they none the
less unjewel our crown, and intercept the generosity of God.
Sorrow is a sanctuary, so long as self is kept outside. Self is the
desecrating principle. If a time of sorrow is not the harvest time of
grace, it is sure to be the harvest time of self. Hence, when we find
people indulging in the sentimentality of their sorrow, we are almost
certain to find them inconsiderate toward others. They are the centres
round which every thing is to move. Every thing is to be subordinate to
their mourning. Thus they pay no attention to hours. They disturb the
arrangements of the household. They make the servants carry part of the
burden of their wretchedness. They diffuse an atmosphere of gloom
around them. They accept the service of others ungracefully, sometimes
as if it was their right, because they are in grief, sometimes as if
the kindness were almost an intrusion, which politeness only constrains
them to endure. If this goes on, so rapid is the process of corruption
when self has tainted sorrow, childhood works up again to the surface
in middle life or age, and we have ill-temper; peevishness, petulance,
quick words, childish repartee, self-deploring foolishness,
grandiloquent exaggerations, attitudes and gestures of despair: in
short, the long-banished ghosts of the nursery come back again, in
proportion as sorrow with literal truth is allowed to unman us. A
Christian mourner notes the least acts of thoughtfulness, and is full
of gratitude for them. He feels more than ever that he deserves
nothing, and is surprised at the kindness which he receives. He is
forever thinking of the others in the house, and legislating for them,
and contriving that the weight of his cross shall be concentred upon
himself. He smiles through his tears, takes the sorrow carefully out of
the tone of his voice, and makes others almost gay while his own heart
is broken. A saint's sorrow is never in the way. To others it is a
softness, a sweetness, a gentleness, a beauty; it is a cross only to
himself.
We must be careful also not to demand sympathy from others, and, if
possible, not even to crave for it ourselves. What is it worth, if it
comes when we have demanded it? Surely the preciousness of sympathy is
in its being spontaneous. There is no balm in it, when it is paid as a
tax. Not that it is wrong to hunger for sympathy when we are in sorrow.
We are not speaking so much of right and wrong, as of fittest and best,
of what God loves most, of what makes our sorrow heavenliest. The more
consolation from creatures the less from God. This is the invariable
rule. God is shy. He loves to come to lonely hearts, which other loves
do not fill. This is why bereaved hearts, outraged hearts, hearts
misunderstood, hearts that have broken with kith and kin and native
place and the grave of father and mother are the hearts of His
predilection. Human sympathy is a dear bargain, let it cost us ever so
little. God waits outside till our company is gone. Perhaps He cannot
wait so long, for visits to mourners are apt to be very long, and He
goes away, not angrily, but sadly, and then how much we have missed!
Where self comes, unreality will also intrude. This unreality is often
shown in shrinking from painful sights and sounds, which it is
necessary or unavoidable for us to see and hear. Much in convenience is
often occasioned to others by this, and the generous discharge of their
duties in the house of sorrow rendered far more onerous and
disagreeable than it need have been. It is just those who are
cherishing most the sight or the sound in their morbid imaginations,
who shrink with this unreal fastidiousness from the substance of that
on which they are perversely brooding. There is none of this unworthy
effeminacy of sorrow about those who are all for God. Such men neither
seek nor avoid such shadows of their grief as come across them. They
are supernaturally natural; and this is the perfection of mourning.
Neither must we fail to exhibit the utmost docility to the arrangements
of others. If this righteous unselfishness is hard to bear, it is a
legitimate part of the sacrifice which grief brings along with it.
Sorrow tends to eccentricity. The strain of endurance makes men
curiously fanciful. All this we must restrain, make it part of our
immolation, and offer it to God. If our sorrow intrinsically weighs one
ounce, a pound of self-sacrifice must go along with it. We must bear
harder upon ourselves than God bears upon us. This is royal
heartedness. The whole theology of sorrow may be compressed into a kind
of syllogism. Every thing is given for sanctification, and sorrow above
all other things; but selfish sorrow is sorrow unsanctified: therefore
unselfishness is grace's product out of sorrow. To all these counsels
we must add yet another. There must be in our grief a total absence of
realizing the unkindness or neglect of human agents. Nobody is in fault
but God, and God cannot be in fault: therefore there is no fault at
all; there is only the Divine will. Faith must see nothing else. It
must ignore secondary causes. It takes its crosses only from Jesus, and
straight from Him. It sees, hears, feels, recognizes no one but God.
The soul and its Father have the world to themselves. Oh, what a
herculean power of endurance there is in this sublime simplicity of
faith! But all these are hard lessons; and sorrow, if it is not
peculiarly teachable, is the most unteachable of all things. Yet we
could hardly expect Mary's lessons to be easy ones, least of all when
she gives them from the top of Calvary.
Let us gaze at her once more, as she swathes the Body in the
winding-sheet. How like a priest she seems! How like a mother! And are
not all mothers priests? For, rightly considered, all maternities are
priesthoods. Ah, Mary! thy maternity was such a priesthood as the world
had never seen before!
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