Blood of Christ, Consolation in Our Tears, Have Mercy on Us

There are saints in heaven. They are the heights of the Church of Christ. There are newly-converted sinners upon earth. These are the lowest depths in the happy land of redeeming grace.

There are sufferers in purgatory, dwelling in a mysterious region of pain and quietude, of patience and of love. They live beneath the earth yet are upon their road to heaven.

Their land is vast and populous. It is a territory won from hell by the Precious Blood, and its pains made un-eternal. It is a detention, not an exile, a detention which is a marvelous artifice of mercy, one of the many compassionate devices of the Precious Blood.

There are sufferings on earth. These earthly sufferings also the Precious Blood alleviates, illuminates, sanctifies, crowns, glorifies, and knows how to render so delectable that they who have drunk deep of the Precious Blood get a strange new nature, and thirst for more suffering still.

Thus, both these extremities of suffering, beneath the earth and on it, belong to the empire of the Precious Blood. If we look outside ourselves, we see everywhere the empire of the Precious Blood stretching away in interminable vista.