Page:The Catholic prayer book.djvu/102

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for them. Grant the same also to my friends and relatives. Make us all thy faithful servants, that we may live holily, and die happily.

At the Elevation.

CONSIDERATION.

REPRESENT to yourself Jesus Christ fastened to the cross, to expiate the sins of all mankind. Consider in his passion, as in a faithful mirror, the enormity of sin; and let this spectacle excite your heart to sincere sorrow for your past sins, and firm resolution of amendment for the future.

O my soul! what is represented to us by the body and blood of Jesus Christ apparently separated, and the sacred host elevated by the hands 'of his minister, but his death on the cross. All that we behold here is a lively representation of the bloody scene once acted on Mount Calvary.

AFFECTIONS.

MY divine Saviour, after having adored thee as my God, permit me to ask what has reduced thee to this deplorable condition? It is sin; it is to expiate the disobedience of mankind that thou art obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, as also to satisfy by thy sufferings for those which our sins deserved.

O infinite goodness! to suffer so much for thy enemies, who were the cause of all thy torments! It was not so much Judas that betrayed thee, as my treacherous heart; it was not so much the soldiers who struck, reviled, and spit upon thee, as my passions. It was my sensuality that scourged thee, my gluttony that gave thee gall. It was my sins, in fine, that crucified thee, shed thy precious blood, and