The Catholic bulletin. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1911-1995, 1914-08-01
THE TEARS OF JESUS CHRIST.


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Christ is God; but He is also man,
and by His humanity He was able to
weep and suffer for us. Consider
Him weeping over Jerusalem. The
pure sentiment of patriotism, says
the Able Poulin in Towards
Eternity" is here so strong as to
provoke tears. He weeps over His
country, at the vision of that veil of
blood which is brooding over and
descending upon it-but beyond the
impenitence of the Jews, He sees
alas! our own, Jerusalem is to Him
the image of another city, equally I'M
faithful too; nevertheless, one which
He has chosen. This Sion of souls,
blind, criminal, and threatened with
the Divine wrath, was just as much as
Jerusalem the cause of His loving
tears. The same thought that little
later, added to the bitterness of His
Agony, and on Calvary, made Him pro-
claim His thirst, thirst for souls,
was troubling and disturbing Him at
this moment. He foresaw that the re-
demption, great and universal though
it was, would not be profitable to all;
that a great number of those who
were called would not be chosen; that
many would have eyes and would not
see, ears and would not hear.
Men do not reach the dreadful state
of blindness and hardness of heart
at one bound there is long road be-
tween our first negligence and final
impenitence. We grow too attached
to our work, our earthly aims, our
play. The world is full of distraction,
of excitement, of worry. One of the
features of the present time is just
this constant agitation, which day by
day allows less and less time for God.
We allow ourselves to become in
Yolved in this giddy whirl, and so we
cannot live without hustle and distrac-
ton. We live only on the surface of
things and thus we find it very hard
to enter into that inner sanctuary of
our souls in which the voice of God.
may be heard This sanctuary has
become to us cold desert, foreign
to face our own conscience. Thus we
become forgetful of God and of our
selves. We gradually neglect prayer,
we pray badly, till finally we give up
prayer altogether. Then comes NOR
tai sin, the formation of bad habits
which extend their roots down deep
till they grip firmly the very fibres of
our being and cannot be torn out
without the pain of much penance
and modification. But the heart
which has allowed itself to harden,
and, as it were, freezes in sin, is with
great difficulty melted to virtue and
love. 1t loses shame for dishonor and
degradation, it forgets the terrible
: nearness of eternity, -judspaant, OF
He'll. The false maXims of the world
lull it to a fatal and final torpor,
and great is the danger that from that
torpor the only Weakening will come
too late.
The vision of that progress of blind
ness and hardness of heart down to
the dread awakening before the
tribunal of God, and then the final
plunge into eternal woe, caused that
strange, mysterious spectacle of
God in tears. Shall we too refuse to
listen to the whispering of divine
grace? Shall we go on praying badly
if we pray at all? Are we going to
harden in vice, putting off our CONVEX
sion till the last moment, when our
feebleness will be far more helpless
than now, when we shall have reason
to fear that He Whom we forsook in
the days of our strength may not see
fit to work for us the miracle of grace
which our state of blindness and Of
insensibility to all that is spiritual
and supernatural will demand? No!
please God we shall know the time
of our visitation, the time when Christ
draws nigh and speaks to our souls
in the good thoughts He inspires, in
the warning of conscience that keeps
us from slipping down into the dark
waters of sin, in the sermon, in the
word of advice, in the good example
of our friends and neighbors, true
apostles of Christ. Every day He
speaks, and in many ways; and if you
would have no share in the tragedy
that caused the tears of Jesus, today
if you hear His voice harden not your
hearts.