Most often perhaps we Christians picture Christ in glory, at the heart of the Trinity, surrounded by a multitude of the blessed. Yet His earthly life was of the utmost loneliness. The self-emptying of the Godhead, involved in the Incarnation, found its extreme in the desertion by God of His soul at that hour when it most desperately needed support. Alone He lived, and in the isolation and the horror of self-consciousness of the damned, voluntary victim of the pain of loss as of sense, He died.

His mystical body sometimes travels on its pilgrimage with more hardship than His physical body during the hidden years. But from the first we have had Him, and although reciprocally we too are His, yet while we have all to gain from Him, He has nothing from us. He has sought one to console Him and has not found any, since He could not. For the heroism of Jesus lies in the unicity of His act. It was not He who reclined His head on the breast of John.

Since we cannot repay Him, we Christians have become accustomed, with a cynical logic, to insult His divine heart by our cool, proprietary attitude to the love wherewith He continually engulfs us in the Eucharist. So for years on end of Church history we are content to misapprehend and grossly to underestimate the contemporary moment of the Redemption. God, all-knowing of what the act involved, decided the Incarnation, but not by some toss-coin, arbitrary choice of autocratic freedom, not to manifest His glory, as though the creation did not shriek and whisper that.