Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/329

cles, curing the sick, consoling the afflicted, restoring the dead to life, authoritatively commanding the winds and waves, unveiling secret things, and predicting things to come, that the heavens and the earth, angels and men, were terrified and amazed. Nor was this the end of these miracles, for this humanity was seen by all, today dead, and after three days resuscitated and glorified, victorious over time and death; and they beheld him silently rising in the air and ascending to the highest heavens, like a divine aurora.

And this same glorious humanity was at the same time an example of the deepest abjection, for it was predestined by God, on account of the substitution, to suffer, without being sinful, the penalty of sin. This is the reason why he whose divine countenance the angels love to gaze upon, endures such a weight of grief in this world. This is why he in whom the heavens rejoice, is so sorrowful and dejected; this is why he who in heaven is adorned with a star-gemmed vestment, is naked upon earth; this is why he who is the holiest of the holy, walks among sinners here below, as if he, too, were a sinner―conversing with blasphemers, adulterers, and the avaricious. This is why he gives the kiss of peace to Judas, and offers the joys of paradise to the thief; and why, when he converses with sinners, he does so with so much love that his eyes are filled with tears.

This man must have deeply penetrated into the mysteries of suffering, when he thus condoles with the afflicted and compassionates their miseries. He must indeed comprehend sorrow, when he thus grieves with the sorrowing. Never was man so abandoned and condemned to such entire dereliction. An entire people overwhelm him with their maledictions; and among his