Summary of the Morrow's Meditation
We will meditate tomorrow upon zeal for the salvation of souls, and we shall see: 1st, how God loves souls; 2nd, how this love of God for souls obliges us to have zeal in order to gain them. We will then make the resolution: 1st, to use all the means in our power to bring back to God our relatives, friends, or acquaintances who have abandoned religious practices; 2nd, to labor at this holy work by means of our prayers, of our words, of our good examples, above all by the example of a good disposition, which is so well calculated to make religion loved. We will retain as our spiritual nosegay the words which the Acts of the Apostles make use of in regard to St. Paul: "His spirit was stirred within him, seeing the city wholly given to idolatry" (Acts xvii. 16).
Meditation for the Morning
Let us adore Jesus Christ as a model of the zeal with which we ought ourselves to burn in order to gain souls for God. Let us listen to Him, crying to us from His cross that He thirsts for souls, that we may thereby understand the great desire He has to save them. Let us admire Him living and dying for so noble an aim, and let us ask Him to permit us to share in His zeal.
FIRST POINT
How God Loves Souls.
A soul, says the Holy Scripture, is to God as a sigh of His heart, a breath of His own life (Gen. ii. 7). It is His image, because in creating it He impressed upon it the figure of His substance and marked it with His seal. It is the end of all His works in time, for it was for it that He did everything on the earth and in the heavens. It is in His decrees the companion of His eternity, for He desires to live eternally with it; to take in it His everlasting delight, to pour forth into it His immense glory; and He has such a desire for its society that on a certain day, the soul having separated itself from Him and sold itself to the devil, He did not hesitate to send His eternal Son here below to redeem it, not with all the riches of heaven and all the treasures of the earth, which would have been in His eyes an insufficient ransom, but with the very blood of His adorable Son, shed to the very last drop. The soul thus redeemed He makes His abode of delight, the member of the mystical body of His Son, the temple of His Holy Spirit. Then, foreseeing that spite of so much devotedness to it, this soul would be still unfaithful to Him, He wills that His Son should remain on the earth throughout all ages, to redeem for Him at the price of His blood, by the ministry of priests, all the souls which after having quitted Him desire to return to Him. At the same time He gave His Holy Spirit the mission to watch over these souls, to recall them when they had wandered away, and to pursue them until their return. What miracles in this love of God for souls! What a world of mysteries, and how our hearts ought to bless our infinitely good God who works them!
SECOND POINT
How this Love of God for Souls Obliges us to have Zeal to Gain them for Him.
When we see a friend filled with an ardent desire to obtain something that is good, and we are able to obtain it for him, friendship obliges us to do everything in our power to put him in possession of it. If, then, we truly love God, we cannot refuse Him the whole of our zeal to gain for Him souls, by which He so greatly desires to be loved. What! we flatter ourselves that we love God, and yet we neglect the souls which are as a sigh of His heart, that is to say, the object of His tenderest love! We flatter ourselves that we love God, and we leave His living image in the dirt, without giving ourselves the trouble of lifting it up out of it! We flatter ourselves that we love God, and we will not labor to gain for Him souls of which a single one is dearer to Him than all imaginable worldsâsouls for which He has made everything, the universe, its laws and its miracles; souls destined to praise Him eternally, to be the object of His delight in heaven, the abode of His glory; souls, lastly, which He desires to have as friends, in searching for which He has worked so many miracles, which He has bought at so great a price! We flatter ourselves that we love God, and we look coldly upon a soul dyed in the blood of Jesus Christ drowned in the pit of vice, a member of His mystical body become the member of a prostitute, the temple of the Holy Ghost occupied by the idol of Dagon, without our taking any means to remedy this terrible state of things! We flatter ourselves that we love God, and we are indifferent to the salvation or the loss of souls for which Jesus Christ remains on earth exposed to so many outrages, for which He immolates Himself every day upon all the altars; which He pursues by so many exterior and interior graces; to which, lastly, He holds out unceasingly His arms, in order to press them, on their return, to the bosom of His mercy! Should we look upon as a friend a man who, seeing us hastening in search of some good thing, were to refuse the services by means of which he might obtain it for us? Now, would it be possible for God to content Himself with a love with which men would not be contented? No, doubtless; and so have thought all the saints who devoted themselves with so much zeal to the salvation of souls; laymen and priests, all ought to labor therein. Ecclesiastical history shows us a simple slave converting the whole nation of the Iberians. Let us enter into ourselvesâdo we find that we have this zeal for the salvation of souls, this ardent thirst to save our perishing brothers?
Resolutions and spiritual nosegay as above.