Tenth Mediation

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He saw every sin that every soul ever had committed, or should commit until the end of time. He beheld them in all their malice, in all their foulness, in all their heartlessness, in all their terrible consequences for time and for eternity. The thought of them was ever present to His mind; the anguish which they caused Him was ever lying on His Heart. He knew them, not in general, as we know them, but each detail was revealed to Him, and aggravated His sufferings.

As He silently toiled in the House of Nazareth, His gaze traveled far beyond the horizon that bounded His outward view, and laid bare before Him all the crimes even at that moment being committed, and the countless souls rushing on to the abyss. He saw the hearts for which He thirsted growing cold and estranged from Him, and consequently forfeiting the special graces He had destined for them - the beautiful thrones He had already purchased by His toil and His sweat and His tears. He saw His own eternal love placed in the balance with that of some pitiful creature, nay, even the latter preferred and Himself rejected. How truly applicable then are the words of David to the Heart of Jesus when suffering in the solitude of Nazareth as Saviour of men: "My sorrow is always before Me."

And while our thoughts are engrossed by the most puerile interests, if not by something worse, how many of our fellow-men are rushing on to the precipice which must be their eternal ruin. Oh! how different our lives would be, how much more real, more earnest, more devoted and self-sacrificing, if the sources of the sorrow of the Sacred Heart were more familiar to us, if the thought recurred to us, not once in a way, but habitually:

At this moment souls are rejecting the last grace, a step which will lead to their eternal reprobation; while others are on the verge of committing the last sin destined to fill up the measure of their iniquity and bind them down to be the slaves of Satan for ever.

At this moment Heaven, salvation itself, all are being forfeited eternally, and I might perhaps co-operate in averting this eternal evil, this endless misery, by an earnest appeal to the Heart of Jesus, by a fervent aspiration, by some slight sacrifice made with a wholly unselfish view to the saving of souls.

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If the hearts of men were penetrated with the spirit of the Heart of Jesus, how different would be the lives of the greater number, and how changed the conduct even of those who are striving after virtue.

Looking on the self-humiliation of the Incarnate God, we should become ashamed of our pride, we should conceive a contempt for our own littleness, from whence spring up our petty ambitions, our self-complacency in either real or imaginary advantages, our secret craving for notice, esteem, honour of any kind.

Then would those whom reverse of fortune has removed from the sphere they formerly occupied, and placed in new and humiliating circuмstances, find their consolation in the thought that Jesus, the Son of the living God, was known in the village of Nazareth but as the "Son of the Carpenter."

Then would the Religious of high birth, or who had held a good social position, or had been heretofore esteemed for his intellectual endowments, rejoice if he were destined to pass his entire religious life in insignificant employments, unnoticed, passed by, depreciated, in a word, the lowest in the house of God.

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Sublime, indeed, is the figure of our Divine Lord as we contemplate Him toiling at Nazareth, as though for Him there were no other work on earth to do than to saw, and plane wood, and fashion rude implements of agriculture, but sublimer still the unruffled peace, the grand tranquility of His Sacred Heart, despite His full knowledge of the false doctrines, the errors, the follies that were being propagated around Him, the darkness in which as yet the whole world was lying, and which He alone could dissipate.

Despite His consuming zeal to make known His Father to men and to attract them to His love, notwithstanding His all-holy thirst to communicate to them that eternal life, which He had come down on earth to bring them - the knowledge, the true knowledge of "the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom He had sent," (John 17:3) - yet He remained in Joseph's workshop without a ruffle to stir the grand tranquility of His Holy Soul.

Beautiful in His calmness, majestic in His simplicity, we behold in Him the excellence, the perpetual order of the Father's will. Although all seemed to human reason going wrong, or, to say the least, at a standstill, so far as the evangelization of the world was concerned, yet Jesus was content.

While the long monotonous years succeeded each other at Nazareth, the same unruffled peace abode in His Sacred Heart, and offered its silent tribute of praise to His Father. His apparent inaction was an appointment of the Father's will - the realization of an eternal decree: by His ordinance each day went on in its appointed course, and Jesus knew that all things serve that will from whence they originally emanate, and this was enough.

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