far as
mortal life can unite, those two souls who loved Him and one another so
well. These two, since they knew Him so perfectly, knew each the other
too as perfectly as knowledge and sympathy can unite souls in this
life. But now the whole is to be raised a stage higher. They had already
been united on the living breast of Jesus; now, over His dead body, they
were to be made yet more one.

It is marvellous that, after so long, our imaginations should still be
so tormented and oppressed by the thought of death; that we should still
be so _without understanding_ that we think it morbid to be in love with
death, for it is far more morbid to be in fear of it. It is not that our
reason or our faith are at fault; it is only that that most active and
untamable faculty of ours, which we call imagination, has not yet
assimilated the truth, accepted by both our faith and our reason, that
for those who are in the friendship of God death is simply not that at
all which it is to others. It does not, as has been said, end our lives
or our interests: on the contrary it liberates and fulfils them.

And all this it does because Jesus Christ has Himself plunged into the
heart of Death and put out his fires. Henceforth we are one family in
Him if we do His will--_his brother and sister and mother_; and Mary is
our Mother, not by nature, which is accidental, but by supernature,
which is essential. Mary is my Mother and John is my brother, since, if
I have died with Christ, it is _no longer I that live, but Christ that
liveth in me_. In a word, it is the Communion of Saints which He
inaugurates by this utterance and seals by His dying.

THE FOURTH WORD

_My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?_

Our Blessed Lord in the revelation He makes from the Cross passes
gradually inwards to Himself Who is its centre. He begins in the
outermost circle of all, with the ignorant sinners. He next deals with
the one sinner who ceased to be ignorant, and next with those who were
always nearest to Himself, and now at last He reveals the deepest secret
of all. This is the central Word of the Seven in every sense. There is
no need to draw attention to the Paradox it expresses.

I. First, then, let us remind ourselves of the revealed dogma that Jesus
Christ was the Eternal Son of the Father; that He dwelt always in the
Bosom of that Father; that when He left heaven He _did not leave the
Father's side_; that at Bethlehem and Nazareth and Gali