Rev. Fr. Frederick Faber - The Precious Blood

The
Precious Blood

or

The Price of
our Salvation

Frederick William
Faber, D.D.

Nihil Obstat:	JOSEPH A. M. QUIGLEY
Censor Librorum
Imprimatur:	J. C ARD O'H ARA , C.S.C. Archiepiscopus Philadelphiensis

Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1959

Originally published by the John Murphy Co., Baltimore Maryland. This edition originally published in 1959 by The Peter Reilly Co., Philadelphia.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-66300

TAN Books

Charlotte, North Carolina

www.TANBooks.com

2012

CONTENTS

TO THE MEMBERS OF THE CONFRATERNITY OF THE MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD

IN THE CHURCH OF THE LONDON ORATORY.

M Y D EAR F RIENDS :

I have written this little book for you, and now dedicate it to you with feelings of the warmest affection. It is ten years next August since the Holy Father set up our Confraternity. Since then we have enrolled upwards of thirty-eight thousand members, and a hundred and four Religious Communities. Besides this, several other Confraternities of the Precious Blood have been set up and affiliated with ours; and their members are also very numerous. Some others have been erected in imitation of ours, and independently of it, and are successfully propagating our favorite devotion.

The meetings at the Oratory on Sunday nights testify to the abundant blessing which our Lord has given to this apostolate of prayer. Letters are arriving daily, and from the remotest quarters of the world, either asking our prayers, or returning thanks for unexpected answers to prayer, or recounting signal conversions, obtained through the intercession of the Confraternity. Of late these divine favors have greatly increased; and, while this is a fresh motive for the love of God and for confidence in prayer, it also deepens our feeling of our own unworthiness, and greatly humbles us. The Confraternity is now so extended that the correspondence includes letters from Ireland and Scotland, from France and Germany, from Canada and Newfoundland, from the United States and Central America, from California and Brazil, from Australia and New Zealand, from the East Indies and the Chinese Missions, from the Cape of Good Hope and other British Dependencies. When we think of all this, we must prize more and more the privileges of this grand union of intercessory prayer. The success of the Confraternity is naturally an object of lively interest both to you and me. To you, because it is connected now with so many secret joys and sorrows of your lives, and so many hidden mercies and sweet answers to prayer, which are known only to yourselves: to me, because it is the realizing of my hopes beyond what I ever could have dreamed: and to both of us, because it is an humble increase of the glory of our dearest Lord.

I have watched the growth of the Confraternity with a pleased surprise; and the tokens of God's blessing upon it have overwhelmed me with gratitude and confusion: and I have thought what I could do. Though many of you are present at the London Oratory every Sunday evening by your letters, comparatively few of you can be there in person. Yet I have felt that we belong to each other, and that I should satisfy my own feelings, while I should be gratifying yours, if I could make some affectionate offering to the whole of my dear Confraternity.

Therefore I have written this little book. I have tried to tell you all I know about the Precious Blood, all that many years of hard study and much thought have enabled me to learn; and I have tried to tell it you as easily and as simply as I could. I thought I could not please you better than by this. I thought I could not show my gratitude to our Blessed Redeemer better than by striving to increase a devotion which he himself, by his blessing on the Confraternity, has shown to be so pleasing to him. I believed we could not repay the paternal kindness of the Sovereign Pontiff, our Father and Founder, who has enriched us with Indulgences, in a manner more welcome to himself than by an effort to propagate the devotion to the Precious Blood, in whose honor he has established a new feast in the Church of God. I know that I could not please myself better, than by magnifying the Precious Blood, which of all the glorious objects of Catholic devotion has been for years the dearest to my heart.

Accept, then, this little but loving gift. Let it stand as a memorial of my love of you, of your love of Jesus, of the filial devotion of both of us to the Holy Father, and of our united thanksgiving to our Blessed Savior for his goodness to our Confraternity, and for our salvation through his Blood.

Your affectionate Servant and Father, FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, Priest of the Oratory . The London Orator. Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, 1860.

CHAPTER I

THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD

CHAPTER I

THE MYSTERY OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD

S ALVATION ! What music is there in that word music that never tires but is always new, that always rouses yet always rests us! It holds in itself all that our hearts would say. It is sweet vigor to us in the morning, and in the evening it is contented peace. It is a song that is always singing itself deep down in the delighted soul. Angelic ears are ravished by it up in heaven; and our Eternal Father himself listens to it with adorable complacency. It is sweet even to him out of whose mind is the music of a thousand worlds. To be saved! What is it to be saved? Who can tell? Eye has not seen, nor ear heard. It is a rescue, and from such a shipwreck. It is a rest, and in such an unimaginable home. It is to lie down forever in the bosom of God in an endless rapture of insatiable contentment.

"Thou shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins." Who else but Jesus can do this, and what else even from him do we require but this? for in this lie all things which we can desire. Of all miseries the bondage of sin is the most miserable. It is worse than sorrow, worse than pain. It is such a ruin that no other ruin is like unto it. It troubles all the peace of life. It turns sunshine into darkness. It embitters all pleasant fountains, and poisons the very blessings of God which should have been for our healing. It doubles the burdens of life, which are heavy enough already. It makes death a terror and a torture, and the eternity beyond the grave an infinite and intolerable blackness. Alas! we have felt the weightiness of sin, and know that there is nothing like it. Life has brought many sorrows to us, and many fears. Our hearts have ached a thousand times. Tears have flowed. Sleep has fled. Food has been nauseous to us, even when our weakness craved for it. But never have we felt any thing like the dead weight of a mortal sin. What then must a life of such sins be? What must be a death in sin? What the irrevocable eternity of unretracted sin?

From all this horror whither shall we look for deliverance? Not to ourselves; for we know the practical infinity of our weakness, and the incorrigible vitality of our corruption. Not to any earthly power; for it has no jurisdiction here. Not to philosophy, literature, or science; for in this case they are but sorry and unhelpful matters. Not to any saint, however holy, nor to any angel, however mighty; for the least sin is a bigger mountain than they have faculties to move. Not to the crowned queen of God's creation, the glorious and the sinless Mary; for even her holiness cannot satisfy for sin, nor the whiteness of her purity take out its deadly stain. Neither may we look for deliverance direct from the patience and compassion of God himself; for in the abysses of his wisdom it has been decreed, that without shedding of blood there shall be no remission of sin. It is from the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ alone that our salvation comes. Out of the immensity of its merits, out of the inexhaustible treasures of its satisfactions, because of the resistless power of its beauty over the justice and the wrath of God, because of that dear combination of its priceless worth and its benignant prodigality, we miserable sinners are raised out of the depths of our wretchedness, and restored to the peace and favor of our Heavenly Father.

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