The proof of Christ's love for us
From a "devout author" quoted by St Alphonsus Liguori in his meditations on the Incarnation:
"If Jesus Christ had permitted us to ask him to give us the greatest proof of his love, who would have ventured to ask of him that he should become a child like unto us, that he should clothe himself with all our miseries, and make himself of all men the most poor, the most despised and the most ill-treated, even to being put to death by the hands of executioners, and in the greatest torments upon an infamous gibbet, cursed and forsaken by all, even by his own Father, who abandoned his Son that he might not abandon us in our ruin? But that which we should not have had the boldness even to think of, the Son of God has thought of and accomplished."
"If Jesus Christ had permitted us to ask him to give us the greatest proof of his love, who would have ventured to ask of him that he should become a child like unto us, that he should clothe himself with all our miseries, and make himself of all men the most poor, the most despised and the most ill-treated, even to being put to death by the hands of executioners, and in the greatest torments upon an infamous gibbet, cursed and forsaken by all, even by his own Father, who abandoned his Son that he might not abandon us in our ruin? But that which we should not have had the boldness even to think of, the Son of God has thought of and accomplished."