Part 5

The boy, his eldest boy, that was to be sent to college, was sent up last week to prison for shoplifting; and the girl--where is she gone? Answer me, dram-shop, where is the girl gone? And now I have more to ask of you, O mouth of hell! Where is the house and lot gone to? {82} Where is the furniture gone to? Where now are the good husband, the happy father, the thrifty wife, the faithful mother, the innocent children, the food on the table, the fire on the hearth, the comfort and joy and good name and trust and neighborly confidence, and the good Christians, the pious Catholics, that used to be at Mass every Sunday morning in their places? Answer me. Do you not hear a righteous God, your judge, demanding in tones of wrath, "Dram-shop, where are my children? You--you have robbed me of my beautiful flock!" O cruel dram-seller! O dram-shop! scandal of our times, look upon the ruin you have wrought! See the black cloud which hangs over your dwelling. It is a threatening mass of darkness and woe, made up of heavy curses, of sighs from broken hearts, the gloom of grievous bitterness of spirit; and that cloud is pregnant with hidden lightnings and thunders of the wrath of God descending upon you. "Woe to him that giveth drink to his friend, and presenteth his gall, and maketh him drunk, that he may behold him stripped and naked. Thou art filled with shame instead of glory; drink thou also, and fall fast asleep; the cup of the right hand of the Lord shall compass thee, and shameful vomiting shall be on thy glory." [Footnote 15]

[Footnote 15: Habac. ii. 15, 16.]

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Your sin is the sin of Ephraim, whom the prophet reproved. You make to yourself an idol of gain. "And Ephraim said, But yet I am become rich. I have found me an idol: all my labors shall not find me the iniquity that I have committed." [Footnote 16] To that idol you have sacrificed men, women, and children, and brought upon many a wretched soul temporal and eternal ruin--robbing heaven of saints, and filling up the caverns of hell.

[Footnote 16: Osec xii. 8.] [USCCB: Hosea xii. 9.]

Hear what God answers to Ephraim: "I will meet them as a bear that is robbed of her whelps; I will rend the inner parts of their bodies, and I will devour them as a lion; the beast of the field shall tear them." [Footnote 17]

[Footnote 17: Osec xiii. 8.] [USCCB: Hosea xiii. 8.]

Your very daily walks must be misery to you, one would suppose. For how can you put on those fine clothes, and see your children clad in warm coats and caps and shoes, and your wife parading that beautiful new silk dress and expensive jewelry, when you know that they were bought with money that ought to have been used to clothe a family that goes about our streets in destitution and nakedness so pitiable that it makes the heart ache? How can you sit down and ask God's blessing upon your plentifully supplied table, if you ever do it now, when the hand that gave you the money to purchase all these luxuries snatched the piece of bread from the mouths of his starving, hungry children? {84} How can you dare go to sleep in your soft, warm bed, listening to that cutting winter's blast as it goes howling past your windows down the street, and forces its way in the open crevices of the drunkard's shanty, freezing the half-clad forms of his neglected little ones, huddled in the corner upon a filthy wisp of straw? Have you a human heart yet left beating in your bosom? Do you know anything of a husband's affection or of a father's love? Oh! then you must be a miserable man. How do your neighbors speak of you? "Oh! he's a rum-seller." And the tone in which it is spoken is a plain index of the contempt they attach to the name. Your wife is designated as "a rum-seller's wife," and of your children it is remarked, "Their father sells liquor." And it is a common reply of many of the most degraded drunkards, that "although they have drunk pretty hard, they thank God __they__ never sold liquor."

Can I ask you to quit it? Yes, I can demand of you to quit it. You admit, and the common sense of the entire community admits, that those low groggeries, in which drunken bacchanalian orgies are of daily and nightly occurrence, ought to be stopped, and that no man who keeps such a place is fit for absolution--that is, none such can claim the right to the sacraments of the Church, living or dying; in a word, cannot save his soul if he be not ready to abandon it. {85} But you tell me that your establishment is not of such a character; you keep a decent house. I would like you to bring me one single liquor-seller who does not say the very same. The business is notoriously vicious and hurtful, and success in it is dependent upon an increase of sin and misery among the people. It is a stumbling-block in the way of the salvation of men addicted to drink, and woe be to that man who dares assume the responsibility for the loss of a soul!

I have a right, then, in the name of the general well-being of the community, in the name of Christian charity, by virtue of the warning of our Lord Jesus Christ, that it were "better for a man to have a mill-stone hanged about his neck, and he be cast into the depth of the sea, rather than scandalize one of the children of God," [Footnote 18] to demand of every man who aids, abets, or by his own act takes part in this abominable scandal, to quit it on peril of damnation.

[Footnote 18: St. Matt, xviii. 6.]

I tell you, moreover, that the holy Catholic Church, which some of you pretend to belong to and to obey, has solemnly declared, in the twenty-second canon of the Third Council of Lateran, that all priests are absolutely forbidden to give absolution to those who remain in any employment, profession, or business which they cannot pursue without sin, because they remain in the occasions of sin. {86} But you insist that such is your business, bad as it is, and you have been brought up to that. Yes, I know it is a bad business, and will be your destruction. And I wish to know if a man must remain a thief because he has been brought up a thief, and never learned an honest trade?

"But the loss, father; I cannot afford it." Do you not hear the words of Jesus Christ thundering in your ears: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off. For it were better for thee to enter lame and blind into life everlasting, than, having two hands or two eyes, to be cast into hell-fire"? [Footnote 19] Where is your Christian faith and trust in God? "Seek first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things will be added unto you." [Footnote 20]

[Footnote 19: St. Matt. v. 29.]

[Footnote 20: St. Matt. vi. 33.]

No, no, there is not a single excuse which will avail you. I wish I could find one. Many and many a time I have wished I could frame an excuse for it, when the fact has been thrown into my face that so many of our people are engaged in this diabolical, unchristian traffic, and, as a consequence, have propagated amongst us the vice and miseries of drunkenness.

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Do you love your good name as a citizen? Have you any manly pride left? Do you love your religion? Would you shrink from being the instrument of damnation to your neighbor's soul, or of tying the hands of the priest and preventing the spread of the true faith in our country? Do you love your own immortal soul? Do you hope for heaven? Would you like to hear the approval of your Divine Lord and Master on the Last Great Day of Account? Oh! rise up to the dignity of the Christian vocation to which you are called. Stir up within your hearts that fire of generosity which is never totally extinguished in the Catholic breast, and learn to sacrifice something for the love of God and for the salvation of your neighbor's soul.

Believe me, brethren, I have drawn no exaggerated picture of this evil, nor deduced any unwarrantable conclusions. So lamentably true is it all, that, were I to preach this sermon in almost any town or city in the country, there would be found among my hearers some who might imagine I was describing the character and life of their own brother or father, near relation or intimate acquaintance.

I appeal to you, therefore, loyal Catholics, to set your faces against the traffic; to aid the priesthood, in company with all who love God and have the social advancement of our people at heart, in denouncing and laboring to extirpate this scandal from our midst.

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To you who have hitherto been engaged in it, from whatsoever motive, I appeal; and beseech of you, with all the fatherly affection of a Christian priest, and with the supplicating tears and sighs of many a broken heart, for God's sake, for the Church's sake, for your soul's sake, to resolve now, and make that resolution good, that hence forth no man shall point the finger of scorn at you and say: "Woe to him that giveth drink to his friend, and presenteth his gall, and maketh him drunk."

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Sermon VI.

Communion With Jesus.

(For Holy Thursday.)

St. John vi. 57. [USCCB: John vi. 56.]

"__He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood abideth in Me, and I in him.__"

It is right, my dear brethren, that, on this Holy Night we should meditate upon and speak of the solemn and wonderful scene which is commemorated by the Holy Church, the sad farewell which our dear suffering Master took of his disciples before giving Himself up to be crucified, and the institution of the sacred memorial Sacrifice, through which He intended to remain with us always, to be an ever-present Lover and Friend, the Divine Victim for our altars, and the Supreme Offering of thanksgiving for the whole world. Kind Lord, I would I had the tongue of angels to tell the story of all Thou didst on this night for me and all who truly believe in Thee, for human speech is feeble where Thou, my God and my Saviour, art the theme. Help me by Thy grace. {90} Help these Thy people, whose hearts are yearning to hear what Thou hast done; help them, that they may know and understand it better than I can tell them!

The Gospel tells us that our Lord made an appointment with His disciples to meet them, and to eat the Paschal Supper alone with them. "And when the hour was come, He sat down, and the twelve disciples with Him." They met in a large upper chamber, far from tumult and noise. Look in, my dear brethren, upon that group. Jesus you cannot fail to choose from among them all. There is a strange beauty about that face, a beauty which at once attracts and awes the beholder, and, what is more, the countenance tells of the hidden beauty of his soul. There is revealed at one glance the beauty of Holiness itself, the most spotless of all innocent lives, the supreme perfection of all virtue, the mirror of all truth. What kindness beams from out [of] those gentle eyes! What a sweet expression plays about the half-parted lips, as a harbinger of some holy words soon to be spoken! What a calm majesty rests upon that broad, pale forehead, needing no crown of gold to tell its royalty!

Nor would any one mistake who is Master here. One is the object upon whose word, look, or movements the eyes of all the others wait. They call Him Master. Well they may. He is truly Master of all hearts. They call Him Teacher. Well they may. {91} He is the source of all Truth, the Eternal Wisdom, the Word of God. They call Him Lord. Well they may. He is Lord of lords, and King of heaven and earth. It is Jesus. Seated there, only a few know Him yet as He is. But the world will soon know Him, and curse its ignorance and blindness on that day. Around Him are a few disciples, of whom living men, in ignorance of their worth, despise, but when they are dead their tombs will govern the world.

No sooner are they assembled than they know that Jesus has brought them together to bid them farewell. "With desire I have desired to eat this pasch with you before I suffer." Yes, on the morrow He was to be betrayed into the hands of wicked men, and to die in expiation of the sins of the world.

But why this desire? The events will show. It was the time of the great feast of the Passover, which the Jews kept every year to commemorate the miracle which took place when that whole nation was in bondage in Egypt--a miracle which brought about their deliverance. Their Egyptian masters refused to set them free, in spite of many warning plagues which God sent upon them; and at last, one terrible night, the angel of God passed through that doomed land, and in the morning the first-born in every Egyptian house lay dead. {92} The Israelites had been commanded by Almighty God, through Moses, to prepare for this, and what they did became, as God intended, a ceremony typical of the greatest mystery the world has ever known--the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross, the deliverance of the world from the slavery of sin and hell by that death, and the institution of a sacrifice which, should be an ever-present, continual, and lively memorial of that act. This is what they did: They killed a lamb without spot or blemish; ate it with unleavened bread; and sprinkled the door-posts of their houses with its blood. "I am the Lord. The blood shall be unto you for a sign in the houses where you shall be, and I shall see the blood, and shall pass over you, and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I shall strike the land of Egypt." [Footnote 21]

[Footnote 21: Exod. xii. 13.]

The performance of this solemn commemorative ceremony was obligatory upon every Jewish family, and this was the occasion which brought our Lord and His disciples together, and you see how exactly the sacrificial death of the Paschal Lamb, the sprinkling of its blood on the door posts, typified the death of Jesus, the Immaculate Lamb of God, whose blood was sprinkled on the wood of the cross. But there is something else for us to note. A part of the lamb was to be eaten, and with unleavened bread. {93} What was that a type of? Was Jesus, the Lamb of God, slain for our sins, to be eaten, and with unleavened bread? Listen to what He said some time before this night: "I am the living bread, which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world." [Footnote 22]

[Footnote 22: St. John vi. 52.] [USCCB: St. John vi. 51.]

Now, after the Paschal Supper was finished, Jesus took the unleavened bread, and gave thanks, and brake, and gave to them, saying--"This is My body which is given for you. Do this for a commemoration of Me. In like manner the chalice, saying, This is the chalice, the New Testament in My blood, which shall be shed for you." Here then, is a perfect fulfilment of the Old Testament. Here is the real Paschal Sacrifice of the New Testament. The supper-table becomes an altar; Jesus becomes, under the forms of unleavened bread and wine, the victim, and He is at the same time the priest. What He did Himself, he tells His disciples to do. "Do this for a commemoration of Me." Then and there He ordains and consecrates them to be priests, and gives them the awful power of sacrificing His body and blood under the forms of bread and wine.

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From that supper-room they go forth to do His words, and to receive the fulfilment of His promise: "I dispose to you, as My Father hath disposed to Me, a kingdom: that you may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom: and may sit upon thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." [Footnote 23]

[Footnote 23: St. Luke xxii. 29, 30.]

What was all that for? Why this sacrifice of the body and blood of Jesus Christ? Why should this be repeated all over the world? Listen once more: "He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood abideth in Me, and I in him." The reason was that his disciples and all others who should partake of that sacrifice might be united to Him in the closest manner possible--"should abide in Him, and He in them." We call that sacred act Communion--communion with Jesus. That is what it is, brethren. Our souls and bodies are united in a mysterious manner to the Divine Person of our dear Lord and Saviour, who became man and died on the cross for our salvation. He calls us to this communion, and gives Himself to us as the sweetest pledge of His Divine Love, as the most precious means of our sanctification, as a comforting food, as a holy offering by which we may praise and give thanks to God, as a feast of joy and the kiss of peace to the forgiven sinner.

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If the Cross be, as it is, the measure of sin by which we offend Jesus, Communion is the measure of the love with which Jesus loves us. Love is measured by sacrifice. One loves another only a little if he is content to give up only a little in the other's favor. His love is perfect if he willingly gives up all. This is what our Lord does in Holy Communion. He sacrifices all for us, because He sacrifices Himself. What do I mean by this sacrifice?

He makes Himself so utterly nothing for us, that He does not keep even His appearance. He hides His divinity, His blessed and beautiful Person, under the veils of bread and wine, and in that state He abandons Himself so utterly to our power that we can do what we will with Him. The life of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is a life of total self-abnegation. He does not even protect Himself from ill-treatment, from the contempt and scoffing sneer of the unbeliever, from the mockery of silly children, nor from the horrible sacrileges committed against Him by bad Catholics. He can suffer all that, and does so without a murmur, in order that He may approach us, and that we may receive Him in such a manner as shall be the best for our comfort, for our joy, for our soul's peace. We know by experience, I hope, what a good, happy communion is. {96} Is it not the moment of supreme happiness, and of such happiness that nothing else is like it in the world? Then we cry Lord, now that Thou art mine and I am Thine, I am all blessed. There is no chord in the heart that does not vibrate with thrills of love at the presence of Jesus. He makes us feel then, more than we can express, how much He loves us; and cold must be the heart that does not respond with some emotion to the sweetness of His loving embrace.

The love of our dear Saviour for men is more ardent, more constant, more, shall I say, anxious than __our__ love can ever be; and the reason is, because __His__ love is wholly unselfish. The life of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament proves it. He does nothing there apparently for Himself, nor takes any thought of Himself that we can divine. It is for us that He lives so. For our love He has given up all.

You may say that it was by dying for us that He proved His love the best, as He Himself said, "Greater love hath no man than that he should lay down his life for his friend." Yes; but do you not see that it is just in the Blessed Sacrament that He brings that proof home to us? It is a memorial of His passion and death. He has linked the two together, so that they make only one act. The sacrifice of the Mass, in which the bread and wine are consecrated into His body and blood, and the sacrifice of Calvary, are one essential act.

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It was in the night in which He was betrayed that He instituted it. On __this__ night. What did He say? "This is My body which is given for you. This is My blood which shall be shed for you. Do this for a commemoration of Me"--of Me, upon whom the shadows of death are already falling--of Me, who even now begin to be sorrowful and sad at heart, knowing that My hour is come--of Me, who to-morrow will be spit upon, and scourged, and crowned with thorns, and nailed to a cruel cross, and suffer the bitter agonies of a horrible death for you, My beloved--you for whom I came into the world--you for whom I live--you for whom I die. "A little while I leave you, and a little while I come unto you. Remember that, when we shall meet again. When I come to you in Holy Communion, then you will receive One who you know loved you to the end. I will come to you, and be the surest pledge of what I have done for you, and how much I have loved you."

Holy Communion is one of the most powerful means of sanctification granted to us. What shall the presence of the All-Holy be unable to do? What other light and grace could we desire both to detect and shun all evil, and to delight in what is pure and true? Oh! when Jesus comes to the willing heart, and finds a welcome there, all is easy. No tempest of passion or of doubt is to be feared when the Master is with us. {98} My dear brethren, this world is very foolish when it sneers at the sanctification of the soul, or bids us follow its guidance in getting rid of the power or shame of sin, and in our strivings after higher and better things. Little it knows about the true progress of the soul. Jesus, the Eternal Wisdom, is the sole teacher. A fervent communion with Him will do what the world cannot do. It will make us holy. It will make our souls sacred to God--more sacred to Him than the altar before which we bow, or the precious vessels upon it that hold His Body and Blood. If you would confirm that sanctity, come often to the source of sanctity. Come so often that He may be said to abide with you; then will you surely live and die a saint.