As soon as the Word had taken possession of His earthly home, He began
to live His new life--a life in all its fulness of knowledge and of
grace and which will ever remain at its highest point, a life of
infinite worth, a life lived for others, a life abounding in merits and
satisfactions, a life of contemplation and yet of activity, a life to be
studied carefully by all who seek to live an interior life and
specially by those who for the love of their Incarnate God hide
themselves in the cloister.
This new life was before everything else a life of _oblation_. The first
act of the Word Incarnate was to offer Himself to His Father: Here I am;
I have come to do Thy Will and I have come to do it not for Myself but
for all creation; I offer Myself to do what it cannot do and to satisfy
Thy claims. He made Himself, then, from the first moment of His
existence a _Victim_--a Victim laid on the altar. This was His first
posture, and He will keep it not only during this first stage of His
life, but all through His life and all through His Sacramental life,
whether the Host is offered to God at the Holy Mass or is living Its
life of a Victim in the Tabernacle; and in Heaven He will still be "the
Lamb as it had been slain."
With the oblation of Himself, so acceptable to the Father, the Victim
offers all that concerns Him, all for which He has come to this earth,
all His designs for man's salvation. He submits all His plans for His
great building, the Holy Catholic Church, of which He offers Himself to
be the Chief Corner-stone, dwelling in it as its life throughout all
time. He offers Himself also to bear all the effects of His oblation and
to drink the chalice to the dregs. He offers Himself as a Surety for the
whole human race and for it He offers all His merits and satisfactions.
He keeps nothing back--the whole of the life just begun is offered for
the glory of God and the salvation of the world. It is a whole
burnt-offering, a holocaust offered at its very beginning to Him Who
"spared not even His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." (Rom.
VIII. 32).