Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

If we look at the formularies and articles of faith in use among the greater proportion of what are popularly termed "Orthodox Protestants," we are struck at perceiving the completeness with which some of the chief points of Christian doctrine seem to be preserved amongst them. The great truth of the Incarnation, for instance, is laid down in the articles of the "Church of England" in terms as express as any Catholic could desire; whilst the Athanasian Creed is itself appointed to be frequently recited in her public Liturgy. Yet it is a certain fact that, in spite of this, very few, comparatively, of those belonging to the Established Church have any notion at all of the faith to which that Communion (in words at least) stands pledged. Could the real belief of the vast majority be stated in positive terms, we should find every form of heresy prevailing in regard to the Person and Natures of our Blessed Lord; and, besides these, a mass of vague indefinite ignorance on the subject, which can less be termed misbelief than no belief at all. We do not say this out of any spirit of mere hostility to the Established Church; but how often have we been startled at hearing this subject discussed among good and well-meaning persons, and finding one unable to realise that Christ was God when He was a little baby; another receiving for the first time the idea that He took His human nature with Him into Heaven, and that it is there now, never more to be separated from His Divinity, and not feeling sure if such a thought be any thing more than a dreamy fancy; others, again, reluctant to dwell much upon the humiliations of His Passion, because He was God, and so deeming it uncertain how much He felt them: whilst at the very same time, in

spite of their almost exclusive acknowledgment of Him as God, they will shrink with a kind of horror from giving the title of "Mother of God" to His Blessed Mother ;all, in short, with their minds confused and uninformed on points which a Catholic child realises, I had almost said, with the precision of a theologian. Now what is the reason of this difference? If Catholics and Protestants do really on some subjects hold the same doctrine, so far as paper-statements go, why is their living faith on those very points so widely different?

There are probably many reasons; some of a profounder character than it would be fitting to examine here. But there is one I will endeavour to illustrate in this Tract, and of which I am reminded by a beautiful festival now close at hand,-the Festival of the Sacred Heart.

The Catholic Church has many modes of teaching. So indeed have all teachers who understand their business. Very ill will it fare with him who sets to work to learn a foreign language from grammars and dictionaries alone. He cannot do without them; but he will speak but a strange and unknown tongue, though his grammar be the best, if he do not mix with those who speak it, and hear them talk, and catch the accent from their lips. It is the same with all sciences. Books do much, but they cannot teach us all. We can learn a great deal about botany from Withering and Linnæus; but to be perfect, we must go out into the fields, and make familiar acquaintance with the wild flowers in the hedges.

Now these two kinds of teaching are exactly what the Catholic Church, and she alone, possesses. Her creeds and formularies are precise and definite beyond all others; yet she does not trust to them only, for filling the hearts of her people with a living faith. In aid of them she brings into play a vast and varied body of popular devotions, whose object-or rather, to speak more correctly, whose effect is to make one or other of these theological truths familiar and dear to her children. These reach those thousands of people who never look at creeds and articles. The great mass of Catholics never read St. Thomas, and know nothing about the Tridentine decrees; yet,

thanks to Processions and Expositions of the Blessed Sacrament, and the frequent use of the Rosary, and Confraternities of the Immaculate Conception, and the Precious Blood, and the Sacred Heart, and many more, they have it all in their souls as distinctly as the greatest doctor of them all. But Protestants are content with binding up their Thirty-nine Articles in the Book of Common Prayer, and have no devotions for the people beyond those daily forms which-in the very few places where they chance to be used-run their dull monotonous round through the whole circle of the year; and the result is, that, even when their written faith is orthodox, they have no means of keeping it alive among the members of their communion. It would truly be a labour of love to take each of those devotions of which we have spoken, one by one, and show something of the sweet and easy ways by which the Church of God teaches high and sublime truths to the little ones of her fold, even when not engaged in the formal act of instructing them, but accidentally, as it were, and by means of the expressive language of her worship. To-day we must be content with a very few words on one of them.

It was in the year 1684 that Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque, a holy nun of the Order of the Visitation, first received the Divine command to propagate the devotion of the Sacred Heart. One day, being before the Blessed Sacrament, she was deeply absorbed in the contemplation of the Divine love displayed in that adorable mystery. At this moment Jesus Christ Himself appeared to her, showing Himself under a sensible form. Then, for the first time, He discovered to her the inexplicable secrets of His Divine Heart, and the treasures of love with which It was consumed for men. "Behold My Heart," He said, "so burning with love for men that, unable to contain within Itself the flames of Its charity, It is compelled to spread them by thy means." This first vision was but the preJude to many others of a similar character: in all of these He appeared, as the representations of the Sacred Heart have ever since been wont to depict Him, with flames issuing from His adorable Breast, in the midst of which, as in a furnace, He displayed His Heart, desiring to com

municate Its love to the world. "It was in one of these visions," says Sister Margaret, in the simple and beautiful narration she herself gave in obedience to her superiors, "that He revealed the excess of that love which He felt for men, from whom He had received nothing but ingratitude. It is this,' He said, 'which I feel more than all I suffered in My Passion: if they returned My love, I should reckon all I had done as nothing; instead of which, I meet only with coldness and repulse. At least do thou atone for their ingratitude as far as thou art able.'” And, on another occasion, He was pleased to appoint the Friday within the octave of Corpus Christi to be set apart as a particular festival in honour of His Sacred Heart, as a reparation for those indignities which are daily offered to It, more especially in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.

The difficulties to be surmounted in obeying this command were very great, for Margaret Alacoque had no influence and no name; the Church was jealous of novelties, and the love of her children had waxed cold: nevertheless, it is a certain fact, that from that time, in spite of opposition on all sides, the devotion began to spread, confraternities were every where established to propagate it, and had no small share in supporting the influence of the Church during the perilous times of the eighteenth century. And now its boundaries are those of the Catholic Church.

What, then, is the spirit of this devotion? It is, indeed, briefly contained in the few words I have ventured to quote above from Sister Margaret Alacoque's narration: but in the following pages I will endeavour to explain it a little more fully; in other words, to show the particular truth which it expresses, and which, by this outward manifestation of it, it makes familiar to the minds of the people. For you must not imagine that the Church had any new doctrine to teach when she adopted this new devotion, any more than she had a new doctrine to teach about the Blessed Sacrament when she instituted the Festival of Corpus Christi: it is only that from time to time, according to the requirements of the day, and in obedience to the guidance of the Holy Spirit who is for ever dwelling within her, she takes out of her treasury the truth most

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needful to be remembered, and presses it upon her children's souls by something which associates it with their daily feelings; and so out of a theological truth she makes a familiar and household word.

In the early days of the Church there were some who believed that Christ was man, but denied that He was God; and Mary won her most glorious title in defence of the Divinity of her Son. In later times the Godhead was remembered, and it was the manhood which was forgotten. And in England now, though, indeed, there is Socinianism enough every where, secret and avowed, yet among the great body of what I have called "Orthodox Protestants," the prevailing notion of our Lord has had the same peculiarity of forgetting, and, as it were, overlooking, His Sacred Humanity. How often do we hear Catholic rites and devotions, or particular pictures and expressions, stigmatised as gross, sensual, human, and called by many other hard names, all of which show that the speakers have no true conception of that gospel of a single sentence "The Word was made flesh."

It is one special object of the devotion to the Sacred Heart to realise the belief embodied in those words. You know that the heart is, as it were, the centre of life and of our humanity, and the seat of our warmest emotions; and, by universal consent, the word is used to express these emotions themselves. Of course, besides this figure of speech, by which we refer certain operations of the soul to the organ by which they act, we also do pay a direct adoration to the actual Heart of Jesus; for, inasmuch as every part of His Sacred Body was intimately united to the Person of the Son of God, in worshipping each part we really worship Him; and therefore the adoration which we pay to each is one with that which we pay to Him. All that I have space for in these pages is, to suggest something of that devotional attitude of mind which it is an object of this devotion to encourage.

And first, in meditating on the sufferings of Christ, I think I am only asserting what thousands must understand, when I say that the simple contemplation of bodily suffering loses some of its power over our affections unless we