and the turn it now takes, Catholic
faith buries itself in and penetrates down to the very depths of
the sensitive and tried souls which it has preserved from foreign
influences; for it supplies to this chosen flock the aliment it most
needs and which it loves the best. Below the metaphysical, abstract
Trinity, of which two of the three persons are out of reach of the
imagination, she has set up an historical Trinity whose personages are
all perceptible to the senses, Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The Virgin, since
the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, has risen to an extraordinary
height; her spouse accompanies her in her exaltation;[5352] between them
stands their son, child or man, which forms the Holy Family.[5353] No
worship is more natural and more engaging to chaste celibates in whose
brain a pure, vague vision is always present, the reverie of a family
constituted without the intervention of sex. No system of worship
furnishes so many precise objects for adoration, all the acts and
occurrences, the emotions and thoughts of three adorable lives from
birth to death and in the beyond, down to the present day. Most of
the religious institutions founded within the past eighty years devote
themselves to meditation on one of these lives considered at some one
point of incident or of character, either purity, charity, compassion
or justice, conception, nativity or infancy, presence in the Temple,
at Nazareth, at Bethany, or on Calvary, the passion, the agony, the
assumption or apparition under this or that circumstance or place, and
the rest. There are now in France, under the name and patronage of Saint
Joseph alone, one hundred and seventeen congregations and communities
of women. Among so many appellations, consisting of special watchwords
designating and summing up the particular preferences of a devout
group, one name is significant there are seventy-nine congregations or
communities of women which have devoted themselves to the heart of Mary
or of Jesus or to both together.[5354] In this way, besides the narrow
devotion which is attached to the corporeal emblem, a tender piety
pursues and attains its supreme end, the mute converse of the soul, not
with the dim Infinite, the indifferent Almighty who acts through general
laws, but with a person, a divine person clothed with the vesture of
humanity and who has not discarded it, who has lived, suffered and
loved, who still loves, who, in glory above, welcomes there the
ef