Part 3

Another positive precept at this time is, of course, the fast, as prescribed by the rules of the diocese. This we must keep as well as we can, not considering that we are exempted from it merely because it is difficult; but only allowing such reasons against it as make a strict observance really imprudent--remembering, of course, the exemptions given in the regulations, but trusting to the judgment of a confessor or physician, rather than our own, if there be any doubt about the matter. {47} And let us not make the sacrifice unwillingly, merely because we are obliged to, but as cheerfully as we can, so that we may please God, as well as avoid offending Him. In this way we may gain more merit, perhaps, than by anything else we can do in the course of the year, on account of the difficulty of the work, and because at other times we should hardly be justified in imposing such a penance on ourselves. Besides, obedience is better than sacrifice; and fasting in Lent is an act of obedience. So, if we cannot fast, we lose the opportunity of doing something a little difficult, and which we know will please God; which should make us sorry rather than glad.

Now, to come to things not absolutely required, but which nevertheless ought to be attended to in Lent, and which must be done, if we wish really to pass it well. They may be classed under the three eminent good works, as they are called; namely--fasting, prayer, and alms.

It may seem as if the subject of fasting had been already disposed of. And so it has, perhaps, in the usual sense of the word; we are not required, nor would it probably be advisable, to keep a more rigorous fast than the Church prescribes, at least in point of quantity; but we may give up some things in the way of food, which are not forbidden, practising some voluntary mortification or self-denial, as far as the strength of our souls and bodies will allow. {48} It rarely does us much harm to deny our taste something; to give up or limit ourselves in something which we like particularly, if we do not really need it, and there be plenty besides. And though abstaining from the sin of drunkenness is not probably a mortification, but a most severe obligation at all times, yet, as in this penitential season this vice seems to acquire new malignity, still greater precautions ought to be taken in those occasions which might lead to it.

But the word fasting really means more than abstaining from food and drink. It implies self-denial in other ways; and there are a great many ways in which we can deny ourselves besides eating and drinking. The tongue, for example, can be restrained in speaking, as well as in its sense of taste. We can talk a good deal less than we might without sin, as well as eat less, and yet be none the worse for it. Then we can restrain our curiosity for news, both public and private; we can refuse to gratify our sight, hearing, and other senses--in short, there are plenty of ways for one who has the will. {49} But if we have no will for such voluntary mortification, we can at least take patiently what we have to suffer from cold, fatigue, or any pain of body or mind; and not complain of those grievances which come to us from the neglect or carelessness, or even from the bad will, of others, and of which it might seem that we have, in some sense, a right to complain. We may well consider that we have forfeited our rights by sin, and that though sometimes we are bound to claim them, yet often it will be better to give them up. But what are the motives for all this self-denial? There are many. One is to make up, in some degree, for having gone beyond what was allowable by now stopping somewhat short of it; that is, to atone for our sins. But besides this, it makes us love ourselves less, and God and our neighbor more; and it makes us a great deal more free really than if we were all the time having our own way, for it takes away a thousand cares and anxieties which are all the time distracting us, and keeping us from attaining the end for which we were created. Nor can we be happy without self-denial, strange as it may seem; for we cannot be happy unless we are contented; and the only way to become contented is to cease to care about the many things which we are always desiring but often cannot have; and the only way to do this thoroughly is sometimes to give them up when we can have them. Besides this, God is pleased and gives us grace when we deny our selves; for it shows our love for Him. {50} And at this time He seems specially to ask these sacrifices from us. "Now is the acceptable time"; and if we do not make them now, there is not much chance that we will at any other season of the year.

Then we must make more prayer now than usual, employing in this way the time that we cut off from other things. Try to come to early Mass on week-days; of course, nothing can be better than to assist at this, the greatest act of Christian worship. Also, come to Vespers on Sunday, and say the beads at home, in common if possible, and as many other prayers as there is time for, especially such as are indulgenced, for these are, of course, more powerful in satisfying for sin. And in this time of special trial for the Church and the Holy Father, we will not forget to pray that the triumph of our Faith, which is sure to come sooner or later, may be speedy; that the plans of the persecutors of the Holy See may be utterly defeated; and that they may return as obedient children to their Mother and ours, the Holy Catholic and Roman Church.

But, besides these devotions, which we can practise at any time, there are also others peculiar to this season: those in the church on Wednesday and Friday nights, which will be the same as in previous years, and which will, no doubt, be attended as well as or even better than they have been heretofore. {51} There will be a sermon every Wednesday, and the Stations on Friday. Next to repenting of sin and confessing it, one can hardly do anything more pleasing to God in the time of Lent than to assist at the Stations, and help to commemorate His bitter sufferings and those of His Blessed Mother. "He was wounded for our iniquities, He was bruised for our sins; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His bruises we are healed." Surely, the least we can do at this season, when the Church presents His Passion to our minds, is to come and go with Him over the way of sufferings by which we were redeemed. You will notice, also, by looking at the table of festivals at the door, that the Church commemorates, on every Friday during Lent, some one of the mysteries of the Passion. These mysteries we will do well to think of specially. Try to come every Wednesday and Friday, and not miss a single evening from this to Good Friday; and also persuade others to come who are not here to-night, or who have not been in the habit of coming; and come not for amusement, or even principally for instruction, but for the honor and glory of God and the good of your souls.

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Much hardly needs to be said about alms, the last of the eminent good works. It is evident enough how pleasing it is to God, and what a rich reward it secures for us. In the office of next Sunday the Church reminds us specially of this, saying, in the words of Holy Scripture, "Break thy bread for the hungry, and bring the needy and wandering into thy house; then shall thy light shine forth as the morning, and thy justice shall go before thy face." And, during the following week, she repeats: "Give alms to the poor, and it shall pray for thee to the Lord; for as water quenches fire, so do alms extinguish sin." That is, if we have repented of our sins, almsgiving will satisfy for them; and if we have not, almsgiving will help us to have contrition to repent, and will move God to give us abundant grace; He will be obliged, as it were, by gratitude, to give it to us; for He has said, "As long as you did it to one of these My least brethren, you did it to Me." Almsgiving will not save us without repentance, but it will help us very much to have repentance; and, to impress us with its importance, our Lord seems, in His own description of the last judgment, to make our salvation depend upon the charitable works which we have done in this life. And if, by His grace, we have repented of sin and confessed it, almsgiving will give us a degree of merit and amount of reward which we may, in one sense, call unjust and excessive, so great is the mercy of God.

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Fasting, prayer, and alms; self-denial, devotion, and charity; these are the principal good works at this and every time; but they are more urgent and necessary now than usual, if we wish to obtain the special fruit of this holy season. And, besides these, we must not put away the spirit of humiliation and penance expressed in receiving the ashes this morning. These are not for Ash-Wednesday alone, but for the whole of Lent. We must abandon, in spirit at least, the vain distinctions by which we are trying to raise ourselves above others, and follow, at a great distance, the example of our God and Saviour, who, being our Creator and absolute Master, became the servant of servants for our sake. And we have an immense number of sins which are not yet fully expiated; for these we must do penance sometime or other, before death or after it, in this world or in purgatory. We can do it better now than at any other time; first, because we are obliged to do some difficult things, which can be made to pay this temporal debt if they are done with the right spirit and intention; and, also, because penance is the spirit of the season, and we can come to the church oftener, and do of our own accord other things which are a little inconvenient and put us to some trouble, without any danger of attracting attention or of getting proud about it; for others will be doing the same.

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Finally, my brethren, in the words of the Apostle, "We exhort you that you receive not the grace of God in vain." This may be our last Lent; it certainly will be for some of us; but, at any rate, we shall not feel sorry to have spent it as if it were so. God's love for us is immense; He is continually giving us fresh graces, which we are trampling under our feet; but there will come a time when I will not say His patience will be exhausted, but when, in the course of His providence, we must be taken from this world, and grace for us will be no more. Then, when we lie on our death-bed, we shall look back--if, indeed, we are able to collect our thoughts--upon the gifts of God which we have thrown away, and wish most earnestly for a day, or even an hour, of the time that we have wasted. Then, if we have spent this Lent badly, we shall remember it and the others that we have neglected, and bitterly repent our neglect when it is too late. Then we shall fear and tremble at the thought of the awful judgment of God, before whose face we are so soon to appear; or, if we have confidence that by His mercy the guilt of our sins has been taken away, we shall still feel how unfit we are, after a sinful life, to remain in His sight, and shall see the flames of purgatory prepared to expiate those offences for which this Lent and the others we have wasted might have atoned. Perhaps years of suffering will await us there instead of the few days of penance which we have refused in this life. {55} And, even if we have spent this time well, we shall then see clearly how we might have spent it better; and every good work which we could properly have done, which we had the grace and opportunity for, and yet did not do, will give us more sorrow than its omission gave relief.

But let us hope better things. There is no reason why this Lent should not be for us all that God meant it to be. That it may be so, the first thing to do, and the most agreeable of all, is to get into the grace and friendship of God, if we are now in sin; and then we have only to go on and do what we can, not in a grudging or weary spirit, but cheerfully and with our whole heart, to please our good God, who loves us each as much as if we were His only creature, and has done infinitely more for us already than we can ever do for Him. His Blessed Mother and the saints, especially St. Joseph, under whose patronage the greater part of Lent almost always comes, will help us, and we shall have joy enough in our souls to fully make up for all that is unpleasant or tiresome. And all the while we shall, by penance, be shortening the road that lies between us and our true home in heaven, where our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, is waiting to have us come and be happy with Him for all eternity.

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Sermon IV.

Pretended And Real Christians.

(At Special Lenten Service.)

2 Cor. vi. 1.

"__And we do exhort you that you receive not the grace of God in vain__."

What is the reason, my dear brethren, that you are all here to-night? I know very well what it is. There are very few who have not one and the same reason. You came because you wish, when you are removed out of this world, to reach the kingdom of heaven. You came because you would secure yourselves from the punishments denounced by God against the sinner. You came here to-night because you feel a strong interest in the salvation of your souls. It is the grace of God which stirs within your hearts and impels you to come. Now you are here, I say to you, with St. Paul, "Let not this grace of God be in vain." It is not enough to come within the church-walls and hear the voice of the preacher, unless you arc also willing and anxious to follow out his instructions.

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I want to tell you what it is to be rightly and truly called a Christian, and to have a well-grounded hope of salvation. A vast number of absurd notions are afloat in the minds of many as to what it is to be a Christian. Where they came from, I cannot tell. It is not from the Church, for she never has taught them, and never can teach them. It is not from good sense and right reason, for they teach exactly the contrary. It must be from the devil, for he is said, in Scripture, to be a liar and the father of lies, and these lies are the very ones which are the most destructive of the soul. One of these lying notions is that outward communion with the Church of God renders a man a true Christian, and makes him sure of his salvation. The Pharisees had this idea. "Are we not children of Abraham?" they said. But what did St. John the Baptist say? "Say not to yourselves, We have Abraham for our father; for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. Bring forth, therefore, fruit worthy of penance." [Footnote 8]

[Footnote 8: St. Matthew iii. 9.]

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And our Saviour said unto them, "If you be the children of Abraham, do the works of Abraham." If there are any Catholics foolish enough to build their hopes of salvation on the mere fact of being Catholics, without having the spirit and the works of the Catholic religion, let them consider the fearful denunciation of our Lord against them. Take the parable of the wheat and the tares. The kingdom of heaven is like to a man who sowed wheat in his field, and by-and-by, when it came up, a quantity of weeds, or tares, came up with it. The servants asked their lord, "Shall we not go out and pull up the tares?" "No," he replied; "lest, pulling out the tares, ye pull out the wheat with them. Suffer them to grow together until the harvest, and then the wheat shall be gathered into my barn, and the tares shall be bound up into bundles to be burned in the fire." The question is not--Am I growing in the field of the Church? but--Am I the wheat? or the tares, fit only for the burning? Our Lord never seems to grow tired of denouncing this doctrine. Listen to His description of the last judgment: "And when the master of the house shall be gone in, and shall shut the door, you shall begin to stand without, and knock at the door, saying: Lord, open to us; and he answering, shall say to you: I know not whence you are. Then you shall begin to say: We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. And he shall say to you: I know not whence you are; depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity." [Footnote 9]

[Footnote 9: St. Luke xiii. 25-27.]

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You see, then, the plea of being familiar in the house of God, of eating and drinking in His presence, is of no avail. Others, who are not in the outward Church of God, though in it in heart and soul, may enter the kingdom of God, but all the wicked in the Church shall be thrust out.

"There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. When you shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you shall be cast out. And they shall come from the east and from the west, and from the north and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God." It is no doubt of immense and incalculable benefit to be within the pale of the Church, and within reach of the Sacraments, but if you presume on this alone, instead of getting any benefit, you will only make them the occasion of your damnation. You have received this great grace, but remember that you are thereby rendered responsible for the right use of it. "Brethren, beware lest you receive this grace of God in vain."

Now, there is another false idea of what it is to be a Christian, and I am convinced that this prevails much more extensively, for, after all, few are foolish enough to build their hopes of salvation exclusively in the mere fact of being outward members of the Church of God.

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This idea is, that, if a man belongs to the Church and does some good and religious acts, he can indulge himself to some extent in mortal sin, and still be a Christian and expect heaven. I know very well there are many sinners who know better. When they sin, they are aware of what they are about: they know well that they lose heaven, and that they renounce all pretensions to be true Christians, and this salutary knowledge drives them back to repentance and their duty; but are there not some who persuade, or half persuade, themselves to the contrary? They drink in sin like water, and make themselves out to be pretty good Christians notwithstanding. Do they not go to Mass? Do they not appear occasionally in the tribunal of penance? Do they not cry, Lord, Lord, and beat their breasts, and call to mind that there is such a being as God, and that they must do something now and then to please Him, or else He will get angry with them? And then they go off and sin as hard as they can, until they come to Mass again, and beat their breasts once more, and cry out, Lord, Lord, again.

The Chinese do very much the same thing. They set up a huge, ugly idol in their temples, and now and then go and prostrate themselves before it, and burn incense, and make some offering. This is the sum and substance of religion with them, and I fear it is the idea some Catholics, in their ignorance of their holy religion and through their evil disposition, have formed to themselves, too. {61} Sin all the week, and try to appease the anger of the Almighty on the Sunday by some false and hypocritical acts of worship! Why, they must think God to be something like the idols of the heathen, instead of being, as He is, the God of in finite power, and wisdom, and goodness.

What is the story of such people in the confessional? Sin, mortal sin, is a matter of course with them. Have they undertaken to deny themselves anything they had a strong desire for, in order not to commit mortal sin? No indeed! They think it quite excuse enough that they were tempted. "I could not help it, I was tempted." "Are you determined not to commit this sin again?" "I do not know; I will not unless I am tempted." The power of God is held very cheap by such people. They stand ready to sell it for little or nothing at any time: for a filthy gratification, for a drunken debauch, for a dollar or two. Judas sold our Lord for thirty pieces of silver. They would sell Him for two or three. Such a person comes to confession after an interval of a year or so. What is his story? Guilty of frequent absence from Holy Mass without any excuse--guilty of repeated drunkenness--guilty of cursing, swearing, and indecent language--guilty of unchaste conduct. Such has been his life for many years past; and such, it is to be feared, will be his life until death closes it. {62} His purposes of amendment are only on his lips, and not in his heart. They are made, not to be fulfilled, but to be broken. And yet such men persuade themselves that this kind of religion is acceptable to God, and that it is going to bring them to heaven.

Of what value are your prayers it you lead such a life? The prophet Isaias tells you: "Offer sacrifice no more in vain: incense is an abomination to me. The new moons, and the Sabbaths, and the other festivals, I will not abide; your assemblies are wicked. My soul hateth your new moons, and your solemnities; they are become troublesome to me: I am weary of bearing them. And when you stretch forth your hands, I will turn away my eyes from you; and when you multiply prayer, I will not hear; for your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evil of your devices from my eyes; cease to do perversely, learn to do well." [Footnote 10]

[Footnote 10: Isaias i. 13-17.]

Now, I have placed before your eyes the picture of a false and hypocritical religion, on the one hand; I will hold up before you, on the other, the idea of a real, true, genuine Christianity, which will certainly lead the soul to heaven--the idea of our Lord Himself in the holy Gospels. {63} He invariably represents the true Christian as one thoroughly converted from the evil of his ways. He compares him to a tree-- "A good tree," He says, "cannot bring forth bad fruit; neither can a bad tree bring forth good fruit." Why not? Because there is good sap in the good tree, which goes alike into all the fruit of the tree, and makes it all of a good quality, whilst the harsh and sour sap of the bad tree affects all its fruit, and makes it all bad.

A real Christian has a thoroughly good disposition. He fears God, and keeps His commandments. This principle of his affects all his actions. The whole tenor and course of his life is good. He no longer brings forth evil actions. He may have been bad once, but he has turned once for all and finally from the evil of his ways, and has become good. Once he had a bad disposition; he committed sin, and gratified his unlawful passions, in spite of God and His commandments, and his fruit or actions were corrupted by his bad dispositions. They were all worthless for eternal life. But he turned to God with his whole heart; he was grafted into Christ, and it is the sap and nourishment of Christ that flows through his soul, rendering him a new man, and his actions meritorious of an everlasting reward. To be a Christian is represented also under this very figure. {64} St. Paul says: "But you have not so learned Christ, but you have been taught in Him to put off, according to the former conversation, the old man, who is corrupted according to the desire of error. And be renewed in the spirit of your mind: and put on the new man, who, according to God, is created in justice, and holiness of truth." [Footnote 11]

[Footnote 11: Eph. iv. 20-24.]