ls. As a victim He is daily and constantly, from the rising
to the setting of the sun, lifted up for us in the holy sacrifice of the
mass. The mass is the perpetuation of the sacrifice He offered long ago
for our redemption. All the altars throughout the world, on which He is
ever born and dies again in mystic repetition, are but an extension of the
one great altar of Calvary, where first He gave His life for our
salvation. And in this real and awful sacrifice, forever repeated in our
midst, He pleads again our cause with God, the eternal Father. Again in a
mystic manner He suffers for us, again He bleeds, again He is nailed to
the cross and raised on high, and in that same abandoned, pitiable state,
to which His love for His flock has reduced Him, ever and anon in our
behalf He pleads: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they
do!(15) Holy Father, Powerful God, stay Thy avenging hand! and save the
souls which Thou hast created for Thyself, and for which till the end of
time I die!" He lifts, as it were, before the great white throne, His
bruised and blood-stained hands, He shows those wounded feet, the scar of
the spear in His sacred side; He points again to the agony in the garden,
to the scourging at the pillar, to the cruel crown of thorns, to the weary
way of the cross, and exclaims to Him who sits upon the throne, "Behold,
my Father, and see the price of my sheep, the tears and sorrow and blood
they have cost me! and spare them and save them for the sake of Thy Son!"

Through the holy sacrifice of the mass, identical as it is with the
sacrifice of Calvary, all the merits of Christ's life and death are
applied to our souls. By His physical and bloody immolation on Calvary,
Christ purchased for us infinite treasures of grace, and it is His will
that these graces shall be dispensed to us, even till the end of the
world, through the august sacrament of the altar. Moreover, except for the
mass, we should not be blessed with the abiding actual presence of our
divine Shepherd among us--that is, we should not possess Him in that
special, intimate manner in which we now have Him in the Eucharist. For it
is only in the mass that the sacred species are consecrated; and
consequently it is through the mass alone that He takes up His sacramental
presence in our midst and becomes our food in holy communion. He could,
indeed, have ordained it otherwise, but such has been His blessed will,
and such the condition in which we