HUMILITY THE EFFECT OF LOVE.
I assure you, you are very dear to me. I rejoice very much in the progress of your soul. When I speak of progress, it is in descending, not in mounting. As when we charge a vessel, the more ballast we put in, the lower it sinks, so the more love we have in the soul, the lower we are abased in self. The side of the scales which is elevated, is empty; so the soul is elated only when it is void of love. "Love is our weight," says St. Augustine. Let us so charge ourselves with the weight of love, as to bring down self to its just level. Let its depths be manifested by our readiness to bear the cross, the humiliations, the sufferings, which are necessary to the purification of the soul. Our humiliation is our exaltation. "Whosoever is least among you shall be the greatest," says our Lord.
I love you, my dear child, in the love of the Divine Master, who so abased himself by love! Oh! what a weight is love, since it caused so astonishing a fall, from heaven to earth,—from God to man! There is a beautiful passage in the Imitation of Christ, "Love to be unknown." Let us die to all but God.
DIVINE COMMUNICATIONS.
God communicates himself to pure souls, and blesses, through them, other souls, who are in a state of receptivity. All these little rills, which water others, little compared with the fountain from which they flow, have no determinate choice of their own, but are governed by the will of their Lord and Master. The nature of God is communicative. God would cease to be God if he should cease to communicate himself, by love, to the pure soul. As the air rushes to a vacuum, so God fills the soul emptied of self.
The seven blessed spirits around the throne, are those angels who approach nearest to God, and to whom he communicates himself the most abundantly. St. John, perhaps, was better prepared than any of the apostles to receive the Word, incarnate, dwelling in the soul.
On the bosom of Jesus,—in close affinity with him,—John learned the heights and depths of divine love. It was on this account our Lord said to his mother, "seeing the disciple stand by whom he loved, Woman behold thy Son." He knew the loving heart of John would give her a place in his own home.
God communicates himself to us in proportion as we are prepared to receive him. And in proportion as he diffuses himself in us, we are transformed in him, and bear his image. O, the astonishing depths of God's love! giving himself to souls disappropriated of self, becoming their end, and their final principle, their fulness, and their all.