Filial love sustains heroic sacrifices with simplicity and without their costing anything.

The love of God makes saints rejoice in the midst of sufferings. Are these sacrifices, these sufferings of less value, because accompanied by happiness which makes them light? True, Our Lord does not suffer in the Sacrament, but He has voluntarily embraced this state of immolation. The merit was acquired at that first hour when Jesus, knowing the contempt, the outrages that He should have to endure from men, accepted all, instituted the Sacrament, and clothed Himself with the state of the victim. Certainly, this merit lasts, it is never exhausted. The will of Our Lord embraces all times and places, and He freely accepts everything. To prove His ever actual will to immolate Himself, He has ordered His Church to represent His immolation at the Holy Mass by the separation of the species of the wine from that of the bread, and by the division of the Host into three parts. At Communion, He loses in the person of the communicant His sacramental Being. Do you not see this constant immolation? We know no word for the mystery which unites in the Eucharist life and immolation, glory and humiliation. It is a mystery of which God alone possesses the key. In it, once more, He teaches the interior soul to make known its inmost sufferings to God alone. Oh! That men knew not our sufferings! They pity us, they praise us, and that destroys us! Behold your Model in the Blessed Sacrament! How few of those that pray and communicate recognize the annihilated action of Our Lord! They do not even suspect it. As to the exterior acts of the Christian life. Our Lord teaches us to hide then, also, and not to receive even well-merited praise. To imitate Him, we ought to allow only the inferior side of our good works to be seen, for then the side toward heaven will be all the more brilliant. We ought to act thus respecting the exterior form of our acts whenever we are free to do so; but when there is a question of works that we must perform in public, let us do them well for the sake of edification. It is the private good works that we should hide. We shall then be in Eucharistic grace. Whoever sees the virtues of Our Lord? To conclude, let us recall the annihilations of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Let us abase and lose ourselves as He abased Himself. He must increase, and we must decrease. May annihilation become, as it were, the character of your virtue and your life! Become like the species, which no longer have anything of their own, and which exist only by a miracle. Be no longer anything for self, do nothing for self, annihilate self.