“As verily as God is our Bather, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed he in all, and especially in the sweet words where he said: I it am”. (Mother Julian, Revelations of Divine Love, c.59).

St. Thomas states (1,47,1; 111,23, 2 ad 3) that the things which are in time are meant to be but manifestations of those which are from eternity; i.e. of God himself, of the eternal self- subsistent life of the Blessed Trinity, the nature ofwhich was revealed to Moses when the Lord spoke to him out of the burning bush: “I AM WHO AM . . . Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS hath sent me to you” (Exodus, 3, 14). The Fulness of Being, the Plentitude of Life—such is God’s own description of himself; and when S. John, who had learnt the secrets of the divine life as he lay on the bosom of the Incarnate Word, declared that ‘God is Love’, he was only expressing the same truth from a different point of view. For love is only the ‘affluence’, the diffusion, the self-donation of being. So that Being at its source must also be love at its source (cf. Maritain, Introduction to Metaphysics, 4, 7-8).

“Of twisted scarlet, the work of an artist, with precious stones cut and set on gold ...” (Ecclesiasticus, XLV. 13). Nor this nor any text, inspired word of God, can be too high for these, his Saints, canonised or uncanonised, to whom He gave the great gift of martyrdom.

In early times, the Church rightly set her precious stones in the Mass, cut them out in the first Litanies, wove their scarlet threads of love and fame into and out of the histories of the first great basilicas, in Rome and elsewhere. We bless and revere the practice of the Church, then as now, and in all humility follow it, in speaking of our own later Martyrs, since there is no time with God . . . “Jesus Christ yesterday, and to-day and for ever.”

It is true that we in these islands would not have the Faith, humanly speaking, did not in God’s Providence some early missionary bring and preach it to our forefathers; but it is as least as true that we could never have kept the Faith were it not kept for us by those whom we have come to call the English Martyrs. This name is peculiar to that company of men and women who were put to death for their Faith, and for that only, between the years 1535 and 1689; that is, from the beginning of Henry VIII’s hist claim to be Head of the Church, to the Titus Oates Plot and the wave of anti-Catholic feeling in the reign of Charles II.

The glories of Divine goodness shown in this work of our Redemption.

These foundations having been laid, we will begin to explain how divine goodness shows forth in our Redemption. We said that it is the nature of goodness to communicate itself to all things; that is, with regard to men to make them good and happy. We said that the highest grade of goodness was to suffer in order to make others good, and the greater the suffering, the higher the grade of goodness. Therefore the Son of God, desirous of making us good and happy like himself, saw that there was no other means under heaven more effectual than that he should descend to earth, clad in human flesh, and suffer in it death and Passion for the sake of the inestimable fruits that would result for us, and the splendid example it would give us in all the virtues, besides the immense and precious graces it would gain for us. Seeing this, our Lord, overcome by the power of his love and desire, thought nothing of the heavy burden he was taking on him, but only of our remedy. This reveals how immense was the goodness in offering to undergo such severe trials and to give his life for that cause. For, as our Saviour said: “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” We can say that there is no stronger proof of goodness than that a man should die to make others good, especially when his death entails so many insults and torments.