In the preceding meditations we have regarded the sufferings of the Heart of Jesus in His Hidden Life as resulting from His love of the Father and His sorrow on account of the wrongs done to Him. We there considered Him in His character of the Divine Atoner. We are now about to regard Him as suffering His inward passion in His character of Saviour of men.
The love of souls was for His Sacred Heart by no means a less inexhaustible source of sorrow than was His love of the Father from which it emanated. Here again we must remember how the infiniteness of His knowledge was, as it were, the fountain-head of His sorrow, from whence it flowed in pitiless waves into His Sacred Heart. 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.
If the clear light in which Jesus beheld the loss of souls, with all the sins that conducted to that loss, was a source of inexpressible anguish to His Sacred Heart, what shall be said of His burning love? His sorrows, as the Saviour of men, were in proportion to His boundless love for them. Although His love of souls was an integral part of His love of the Eternal Father, nevertheless, from one point of view the two kinds of love were antagonistic, and it was this antagonism which made His Heart a prey to such cruel agonies on our account.
There is one terrible thought, and yet we must not shrink from it, if we would form anything approaching to an adequate estimate of the secret sufferings of the Sacred Heart. It is the thought of that point where Mercy and Love must yield at last to Justice - when, grace after grace having been rejected, the final one is cast back contemptuously in the face of the Divine Giver, and the grand but awful privilege of free-will uses its liberty, but for the ruin of the soul, in choosing Satan before God. Even the soul that thus recklessly makes this terrible choice affecting its eternity, is the object of the burning love of the Heart of Jesus. He has striven for it in prayer, He has wept over it while He toiled at Nazareth, as afterwards He would weep over Jerusalem because it was determined to reject Him, and so pronounced the decree of its own destruction.
We may picture to ourselves, if we will, and if we venture it, the dearest object of our own heart's love precipitating itself into Hell, and so casting itself away from us for ever; but it is only faintly, even then, that we can conjecture the agony of the Heart of Jesus at the vision always lying before Him. No human love can be compared to that with which the Sacred Heart loved each one of those myriads of souls whom it beheld rushing on to the abyss of eternal misery, and for whom His love, His sufferings, and His bitter death, would all prove alike in vain.
And yet He was compelled to consent to their loss, in consequence of their obstinate rejection of the plentiful redemption He had come to bring them. He had "despised all His substance as nothing," in order to gain them. He had left His beautiful Paradise, and come down to live as an exile on this cheerless earth, and to suffer and toil as one of themselves that He might win them. He had thrown away His Heart upon them, and the very intensity of His love was consuming away His life. And yet He must consent to their final reprobation because they will rush on to their ruin in spite of Him - will break away from His arms though outstretched to save them. The Divine Justice exacted from Him that awful submission in all its terrible completeness and unreservedness - "If this chalice may not pass away, but I must drink it, Thy will be done, - this chalice, the dregs of which are the loss of souls whom I left Thy bosom but to save."
It not unfrequently occurs that the agony of the Sacred Heart is referred by us in our meditations exclusively, or very nearly so, to our Lord's anticipation of His own Passion and Death. We shall, however, form a defective estimate of the sufferings of His Hidden Life, if we lose sight of the inward struggle ever going on within His Heart between His love for souls and His love for His Heavenly Father. After the rejection of His mercy and love God claimed that justice should be done to His Sovereign Majesty, and Jesus must bow down beneath that most equitable exaction. It will help us to pray, and moreover to understand the sorrow of our Saviour's Heart, if we often think of Him as enduring this inward agony in the solitude of Nazareth. During the stillness of night, when Mary and Joseph were reposing, and no human eye beheld Him, may we not as legitimately picture the world's Saviour prostrate there in secret agony, as when afterwards we behold Him bending to the ground, beneath the olive trees on the night of His Passion? If we could penetrate to its fathomless depths the interior of His Sacred Heart, we should see that for Him Nazareth was a prolonged Gethsemane.
Our Divine Lord has taught us that the salvation of souls implies suffering. Therefore, if we would co-operate with Him in His Mission of love on earth, we must of necessity suffer, for the apostleship of prayer and suffering are inseparable, and in proportion to our love of souls will be our suffering for their sake. Let us ask the Heart of Jesus to communicate to us its burning love of souls, that so our supplications and our sacrifices in their behalf may become unceasing, and the thought of their salvation the spring of all our actions. If an apostolic love burns within our breasts, we shall never want occupation wherever we may be, neither will selfish interests possess all our attention or narrow our hearts. Those hearts, on the contrary, will embrace the whole world in their love, and thus we shall grow into the likeness of the Heart of Jesus, from the very vehemence of our desire to become saviours in union with Him. As we can do nothing of ourselves, let us earnestly ask the Sacred Heart to make us understand how much its love for us caused it to suffer, and how generous we also must be in suffering, if we would co-operate with it in the salvation of souls.
- text taken from the 1906 edition of The Heart of Jesus of Nazareth - Meditations on the Hidden Life; it has the Imprimatur if Bishop John Baptist Butt, Diocese of Southwark, England, 5 February 1890