I shall there be happy for ever; but if I be lost and enter inter into the house of woe, I shall be miserable for ever. If therefore I would be saved, I must keep eternity always before my eyes. He who frequently meditates upon eternity does not become attached to the goods of this world, and thus secures his salvation. I will endeavour, therefore, so to regulate all my actions that they may be so many steps towards a happy eternity. O God, I believe in life eternal. Henceforth I will live only for thee; hitherto I have lived for myself and have lost thee, my sovereign good. I will never more lose thee; but will for ever serve and love thee. Assist me, O Jesus, and do not abandon me. Mary, my mother, protect me.
Meditation Forty-third.
On Jesus, as the Man of Sorrows.
I. THE prophet Isaias calls our Blessed Redeemer a man of sorrows; and such he was, for his whole life was a life of sorrows. He took upon his own shoulders all our debts. It is true that as he was man and God, a single prayer from him would "have been sufficient to make satisfaction for the sins of the whole world; but our Saviour would rigorously satisfy divine justice, and hence he chose for himself a life of contempt and suffering, being content for the love of man to be treated as the last and the vilest of men, as the prophet Isaias had foreseen him: We have seen him ... despised and the most abject of men. O my despised Jesus, by the contempt which thou didst endure thou hast made satisfaction for the contempt with which I have treated thee. Oh! that I had died and had never offended thee.
