First Motive

Pages 90-91 are missing from our scan of the first printing; they are taken from the publisher's second edition of the same year (London: Burns and Lambert, 1863).

From St. Louis de Montfort, A Treatise on the True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, tr. F. W. Faber (London: Burns and Lambert, 1863). Wording reflects its time. Public domain; the text is given word for word as printed.

First Motive, which shows us the excellence of this consecration of ourselves by the hands of Mary. If we can conceive on earth no employment more lofty than the service of God,—if the least servant of God is richer, more powerful, and more noble, than all the kings and emperors of earth, unless they also are the servants of God,—what must be the riches, the power, and the dignity, of the faithful and perfect servant of God, who is devoted to His service entirely and without reserve, to the utmost extent that is possible! Such is the faithful and loving slave of Jesus in Mary, who has given himself up utterly to the service of that King of kings, by the hands of His holy Mother, and has reserved nothing for himself. Not all the gold of earth, nor all the beauties of the heavens, can repay him.

The other congregations, associations, and confraternities, erected in honour of our Lord and His holy Mother, and which do such immense good in Christendom, do not make us give every thing without reserve. They only prescribe to their members certain practices and actions to satisfy their obligations. They leave them free for all the other actions and times of their lives. But this devotion makes us give to Jesus and Mary, without reserve, all our thoughts, words, actions, and sufferings, all the times of our life, in such sort that whether we wake or sleep, whether we eat or drink, whether we do great actions or very little ones, it is always true to say that whatever we do, even without thinking of it, is, by virtue of our offering, at least if it has not been expressly retracted, done for Jesus and Mary. What a consolation is this!

Moreover, as I have already said, there is no other practice equal to this for enabling us to get rid with facility of a certain proprietorship, which imperceptibly insinuates itself into our best actions. Our good Jesus gives us this great grace in recompense for the heroic and disinterested action of making a cession to Him, by the hands of His holy Mother, of all the value of our good works. If He gives a hundredfold even in this world to those who for His love quit outward and temporal and perishable goods, what will that hundredfold be which He will give to the man who sacrifices for Him even his inward and spiritual goods!

Jesus, our great friend, has given Himself to us without reserve, body and soul, virtues, graces, and merits. Se toto totum me comparavit, said St. Bernard,—"He has bought the whole of me by the whole of Himself." Is it not, then, a simple matter of justice and of gratitude that we should give Him all that we can give Him? He has been the first to be liberal towards us; let us, at least, be the second; and then, in life and death, and throughout all eternity, we shall find Him still more liberal. Cum liberali liberalis erit.

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