Page:Complete ascetical works of St Alphonsus v6.djvu/26

24 says that it is also fulfilled in heaven, where all the blessed are partakers of the victim of the Sacrifice that Jesus Christ continues to offer to God while offering himself.

These two reflections, made by the author to explain the two last conditions of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, are wise and ingenious; but for myself I think that the two conditions of which there is question, namely, the consumption and Communion, are manifestly fulfilled in the Sacrifice of the Altar, which, as has been declared by the Council of Trent, is the same as that of the Cross. In fact, the Sacrifice of the Mass, instituted by our Lord before his death, is a continuation of the Sacrifice of the Cross. Jesus Christ wished that the price of his blood, shed for the salvation of men, should be applied to us by the Sacrifice of the Altar; in which the victim offered is the same, though it is there offered differently from what it is on the Cross, that is, without the shedding of blood. These are the words of the Council of Trent: "Although Christ our Lord was to offer himself once to his Eternal Father on the altar of the Cross by actually dying to obtain for us eternal redemption, yet as his priesthood was not to become extinct by his death, in order to leave his Church a visible sacrifice suited to the present condition of men, a sacrifice which might at the same time represent to us the bloody sacrifice consummated on the Cross, preserve the memory of it to the end of the world, and apply the salutary fruits of it for the remission of the sins which we daily commit; at his last supper, on the very night on which he was betrayed, giving proof that he was established a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech, he offered to God the Father his body and blood, under the appearances of bread and wine, and, under the same symbols, gave them to the apostles, whom he constituted at the same time priests of the New Law. By these words,