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It is in His Sacred Passion that our Blessed Saviour specially desires to be remembered by us.

It is as memorial of His Death and Passion that the Blessed Eucharist is bequeathed to us. So was it revealed to St. Paul: For as often as you shall eat this Bread and drink this Chalice you shall show the Death of the Lord until He come (1 Cor. xi...

Why, then, is our Blessed Lord so desirous that we should remernber Him in His Sacred Passion ?

First for His own sake. A mother who loves cannot help wishing to live in the thoughts and in the heart of her child: and our Lord has many times impressed upon us that His Sacred Heart goes far beyond all the tenderness of mothers and fathers in the strength of His love for us. Thus when Sion said of old, The Lord hath forsaken me and the Lord hath forgotten me, His prompt and most earnest reply was: Can a woman forget her infant so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? And if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee in My hands, thy walls are always before My eyes (Isaias xlix.). So, too, when urging us to confidence in prayer, He presents to us parental love as a picture; and as we gaze upon it He says, Sursum corda, bid your heart soar higher, far higher, to understand what My Heart feels; for from it descends all paternity (Ephes. iii.), and all motherly devotedness and self-sacrifice. Which of you, He says to us, if he ask his father bread, will he give him a stone? or a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask anegg, will he reach him a scorpion? If you then being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father from Heaven givethegood Spirit to them that ask Him? (St. Luke xi.).

A legitimate, therefore, and authorised and safe way of arriving at some faint idea of the charity and love of our Lord's Sacred Heart, is to watch and note all the best and highest instances of strong and devoted love which we meet with in mothers and fathers and true friends here on earth, and when our hearts are consoled and cheered and brightened by meeting with such good things in this our prison, then to bid our souls rise upwards high and higher still, above the beauty of these created things, and hear the Holy Spirit whispering within us those words of Wisdom: By the greatness of the beauty, and of the creature, the Creator of them may be seen, so as to be known thereby. If men

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are delighted with their beauty, let them know how much the Lord of them is more beautiful than they; for the first author of beauty made all those things (Wisdom xiii.). It is our Lord, our God, Who is Charity (1 St. John iv.) and the God of peace and love (2 Cor. xiii. 11), Who casts into the hearts of fathers and mothers and true friends some sparks of that fire which burns everlastingly in His own Heart, and which He so much desires to see enkindled in us (St. Luke

xii. 49)

If, then, a good mother, a good father, a true friend, cannot help desiring to be remembered by those whom they love, we may believe most undoubtingly that the Heart of our Lord for His own sake, and because He loves us with an everlasting love, desires much to live in our thoughts and reign in our hearts, and to be set as a seal on our hearts, as a seal on our hands (Cant. viii.).

True love must always be so far selfish as to wish for its own sake to have a return of love. This is legitimate selfishness. I am, I am He, our Lord says, that will blot out thy iniquities for My own sake (Isaias xliii.). For His own sake, because He is the fondest of Fathers and loves His children unspeakably, He forgives us; for His own sake He desires to be remembered by us.

St. Paul tells us that our Saviour having joy set before Him endured the Cross (Hebrews xii. 2). That is to sayso some commentators understand the words—the Angel who comforted Him during His Agony in the Garden set before His mind the joyful fruits that would be produced by His redemption. Now one surely of these consoling fruits was that men would remember Him.

As He was so soon to rise from the tomb, He did not in reality need the myrrh and aloes which they brought to embalm His Wounds, but He greatly needs and much desires, for His own sake, that every one of His Wounds be embalmed and kept fresh in our souls by devout and affectionate remembrance. Only remember Me when things go well with thee; and also when things go ill with thee, remember Me.

But, alas! it is with us as with the chief butler, who when things prospered with him forgot his interpreter who had given him so much comfort. For when things go well with us we too are apt to forget our Surety Who hath given His life for us. When we are prospering, we enjoy the good things around us and forget the Giver, and Him also Who when all was lost bought back with His life-Blood the good things for us.

A sinner attributeth to himself the goods of his surety; and he that is of an unthankful mind will leave him that delivered him (Ecclus. xxix. 21).

We forget our Surety when things are going well with us, and, what is still more strange, we do not even remember Him when things go ill with us. Trouble ought by rights to draw us near to Christ Jesus. It certainly draws Him near to us, as He tells us in the goth Psalm, I am with him in tribulation. Since the Death of our Lord every Christian who suffers is like the good thief, sharing Calvary with Christ Jesus, and is by Him regarded with a special sympathy and fellow-feeling. But the father of lies, well knowing that the time of suffering is a time of special privilege, busily whispers into the ear of the sufferer that God is against him, and is chastising him with a heavy hand, rigorously and without pity. Whereas the truth all the while may be that the suffering sent is no chastisement at all, but a signal grace; and even if a chastisement, one inflicted not in anger but in mercy, and with much compassion : For not from His heart hath He afflicted or cast off the sons of men (Lament. iii.).

But there is, besides, another reason why our Saviour is very anxious that we should remember Him in His Passion and His Death, and that is for our sakes. For He well knows that while we are remembering Him, and thinking of Him, and looking on Him, grace, and holiness, and salvation come out from Him to us.

Beneficent persons sometimes set up a fountain of pure and wholesome water in the centre of a village, that all the poor families may come to draw as often as they wish. Even so Christ crucified wishes to be set up in every Christian hamlet and every Christian home. Behold God is my Saviour. I will deal confidently and will not fear. He is become my salvation. You shall draw waters with joy out of the Saviour's fountains (Isaias xii.).

After He had passed, as St. Luke writes, the whole night in the prayer of God, and on the following morning selected from among His disciples His twelve Apostles, He went down into the plain, and was surrounded by the company of His disciples, and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the sea-coasts both of Tyre and Sidon; and all the multitude sought to touch Him, for virtue went out from Him and healed all (St. Luke vi.). We must take notice of the phrase, Virtue went out from Him. He used the same word Himself when the woman who had suffered so long from loss of blood came behind Him and touched Him, and was in an instant cured: Who is it that touched Me? And all denying, Peter and they that were with Him said, Master, the multitudes throng and

press Thee, and dost Thou say, Who touched Me? And Jesus said, Somebody hath touched Me, for I know that virtue is gone out from Me (St. Luke viii.).

Virtue is gone out from Me. It is by contagion that some diseases are spread; that is, the poison passes from the body of one contaminated into other bodies. Even so grace comes out from the Body and the Soul of our Blessed Lord into our hearts if we come near enough to Him.

St. John teaches us that in Heaven we shall be like to Him because we shall see Him as He is (1 St. John iii.). That is to say, as cold iron here on earth when brought near enough to fire becomes itself fire, so when all barriers are removed between our souls and our Lord, and we are brought near to Him, and, as it were, in contact with Him, we shall at once become bright with His light; burning with the fire that lives in His Heart; wise with His wisdom, and holy with His holiness.

This heavenly work we can begin here on earth. If I shall touch only His garment (St. Matt. ix.), the sick woman said, I shall be healed. We can no longer touch the hem of His garment, but that is not needed.

If it were necessary, the privilege would not be denied us, for He is the same Jesus to us as to those who then were sick or sinful. To us as well as them He says: Come to Me, all

you

who labour (St. Matt. xi.).

But it is not with our hands that we are to touch His garments, nor with our eyes are we to look on His sacred face, but our souls are to draw very near to Him and to look at Him earnestly and perseveringly, and to listen most attentively to His words. And while we do this, virtue comes out from Him to us; and we are unconsciously drinking the waters from the fountains of our Saviour.

All this was revealed under a figure in days long gone by, when the people of God murmured in the wilderness of To usa

Edom. For the Lord sent among them fiery serpents which
hit them and killed many of them. Upon this they came to
Moses, and said : We have sinned, pray that He may take
away these serpents from us. But when Moses prayed, the
Lord said to him: Make a brazen serpent and set it up for a
sign, whosoever being struck shall look on it, shall live
(Numbers xxi.). The fiery serpents, we notice, are not taken
away; but whoever looks at the brazen serpent is healed ; and
this is a sign. But of what? Is not the serpent the emblem
of Satan? If so, how can it be a saving sign? True, it is
the emblem of Satan, because Satan is the sinner, the
arch-sinner. But when Jesus Christ is crucified, the
Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaias liii.).
He is the representative of the sinful family.
St. Paul's language, He is for that day become sin,
Him that knew not sin, Him His Father hath made become
sin for us (2 Cor. v.). Therefore the brazen serpent was
a type of Jesus crucified, and upon Him we are to look if
we would be healed. Hence we read in the Book of
Wisdom (xvi. 7), He that turned to it (the brazen serpent)
was noi healed by that which he saw, but by Thee, the
Saviour of all.

We might shut ourselves up, as men addicted to philo. sophy have done, to study virtues, and vices, and try thus to find out a road to righteousness, and motives foi conquering our passions; bnt seeing that it would not be good for a man thus to fight alone, Come to Me, our Lord says, Come to Me; look at the brazen serpent, look at your Saviour become for you a sinner and bearing all the penalties of sin on Calvary, and while you gaze on Him virtue will come out from Him and heal your wounds and substitute holiness for vice in a way that philosophers never even dreamed of.

For His own sake, then, and for ours also, the Heart of our Blessed Saviour says to us: Remember Me ; forget not the kirdness of thy Surety, for He hath given His life for thee.

It was the fond boast, the dream, if I may so speak, of His Sacred Heart, that if I be lifted up I shall draw all things to Myself (St. John xii.); and we remember also the prophecy and promise which long before He uttered by the mouth of Zacharias : I will pour out upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace, and of prayers, and they shall look upon Me, Whom they have pierced :