O most amiable and adorable Heart of Jesus! centre of all hearts, glowing with charity, and inflamed with zeal for the interest of thy Father and the salvation of mankind; O Heart, ever sensible of our misery, and ever ready to redress our evils; the real victim of love in the holy Eucharist, and a propitiatory sacrifice for sin on the altar of the cross! seeing that the generality of Christians make no other return for these thy mercies, than contempt for thy favours, forgetfulness of their own obligations, and ingratitude to the best of benefactors; is it not just that we thy servants, penetrated with the deepest sense of such indignities, should, as far as in our power, make a due and satisfactory reparation of honour to thy most sacred Majesty? Prostrate, therefore, in body, and humbled in mind, before heaven and earth, we solemnly declare our utter detestation and abhorrence of such conduct. Inexpressible, we know, was the bitterness which the multitude of our sins brought on thy tender heart; insufferable the weight of our iniquities, which pressed thy face to the earth in the garden of Olives; and insurmountable thy anguish, when expiring with love, grief, and agony, on Mount Calvary, in thy last breath thou wouldst reclaim sinners to their duty and repentance. This we know, O dear Redeemer! and would most willingly redress these thy sufferings by our own, or share with thee in thine! {263} O merciful Jesus! ever present on our altars, and with a heart open to receive all who labour and are burdened! O adorable heart of Jesus, source of true contrition, impart to our hearts the true spirit of penance, and to our eyes a fountain of tears, that we may bewail our sins, and the sins of the world. Pardon, divine Jesus! all the injuries and outrages done to thee in the course of thy holy life and bitter passion. Pardon all the impieties, irreverences, and sacrileges, which have been committed against thee in the holy sacrament of the Eucharist, since its first institution:--graciously receive the small tribute of our sincere repentance, as an agreeable offering in thy sight, and in requital for the benefits we daily receive from thy altar, where thou art a living and continual sacrifice, and in union with that bloody holocaust thou didst present to thy eternal Father, on Mount Calvary.