Part 9

Once more, our Lord bids us fear not the apparent annihilation of death. "I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth in Me, though he be dead, shall live. And every one that liveth, and believeth in Me, shall not die for ever." [Footnote 56]

[Footnote 56: St. John xi., 25, 26.]

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How clear, how consistent is every word! As we contemplate the truth of the Incarnation in the light of the revealed Trinity, our faith must grow stronger, and the hopes and aspirations of our hearts be confirmed, and our love wax the deeper; for this brighter view of God must draw us nearer to Him by sight and by love. We, too, burn to answer our Lord as did Martha, when He asked her if she believed His words: "Yea, Lord, I have believed that Thou art Christ the Son of the Living God, who art come into this world." [Footnote 57]

[Footnote 57: St. John xi. 27.]

We set out, my dear brethren, to look at the reasons which Christian philosophy is able to show us of the reasonableness of the mysterious doctrine, of which we make acts of profession oftener, perhaps, than of any other, for we do it every time we make the sign of the Cross; and in honor of which we are to-day keeping solemn festival. We have been talking and thinking like philosophers on this deep mystery, and to us might be very properly addressed that pertinent remark of Thomas à Kempis: "What doth it avail thee to discourse profoundly of the Trinity, if thou be wanting in humility, and, consequently, displeasing to the Trinity? If thou didst know the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would it all profit thee, without the love of God and His grace?" [Footnote 58]

[Footnote 58: __Imit. Christi__, book i. ch. I.]

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Truly, a question of no little import to us all. Today the Church brings us, as it were, face to face with the awful Majesty of the Ever-Blessed Trinity, the Living God. It is a fearful thought to be in that Presence, for it must compel us to ask ourselves--Are we indeed the image and likeness of the Living God? And not only that, but are we, as we should be, __living images of Him?__ Are our souls living in His Divine grace, or are they standing before Him to-day dead in sin? To be wise in the knowledge of the Blessed Trinity is well, but to love Him is better. To be ignorant of the Blessed Trinity is a misfortune; but to sin against Him in whom we live, and move, and have our being is a crime against the Life of God. Wonder not that to lose God is to lose eternal life, and fall into hell, the eternal death. To sin is, in the language of St. Paul, to "trample under foot the Son of God, and offer an affront to the Spirit of Grace." [Footnote 59] Filled with horror at the thought of this crime against the Holy Trinity, he exclaims: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God." [Footnote 60]

[Footnote 59: Heb. x. 29.]

[Footnote 60: Heb. x. 31.]

Therefore, brethren, let us adore with profound humility the Ever-Blessed Trinity, full of gratitude that He has vouchsafed this revelation of His mysterious Being to us, and thus enlightened our minds that we may know Him, and love Him, and serve Him better. {157} But let us so live, as children of the Heavenly Father, as brethren of Jesus Christ our Lord, and as sanctified temples of the Holy Ghost, that, when the veil of this life be rent in twain, and we shall stand face to face in eternity before the glorious majesty of God, and in presence of the glittering hosts of angels who surround His throne, we may be able to present the record of a life which has truly been an image and likeness of the Life of the Living God--the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; to whom be glory now and for ever throughout eternal ages. Amen.

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Sermon X

The Real Presence.

(For The Feast Of Corpus Christi.)

St. Matt. i. 23.

"__They shall call His name Emmanuel, which, being interpreted, is God with us__."

We conclude the seasons of Easter and Pentecost with the Feast of the Blessed Trinity, following in thought our ascended Jesus up to the right hand of His eternal Father. From Christmas to Ascension we commemorate the mission (as it is called) of the Second Person of the Trinity: how the Father sent the Son to become Incarnate, to accomplish our redemption, and found the Church. At Pentecost we celebrate the mission of the Third Person: how the Father and the Son together sent the Holy Ghost, to become incorporate in the Church, and abide with and in it through all time. Then, on Trinity Sunday, the Church, in her turn, bids us remember that, although the Son and the Holy Ghost were sent down to earth, yet they never left heaven; where they had dwelt from eternity, and will dwell to eternity, consubstantial and coequal with the Father.

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But the Church is the kingdom of the Incarnation; and the Incarnation is God made visible. Therefore, as a true spouse, living only for her Beloved, she does not leave us contemplating the invisible God, but quickly sets before us the Incarnation again--the end of her yearly song no less than its beginning. For the feast of Corpus Christi is to Christmas as the end to the beginning of a chain of mysteries which centre in the Incarnation. It is, indeed, a sort of second Christmas--the sacramental life of our Lord bearing striking resemblance to His helpless infancy. Again, lest we should forget that our ascended Lord left behind Him the very body He carried into heaven, the Church does not let us stand gazing up after Him with the group on Olivet, but invites us to turn and rejoice with her in the mystery of His perpetual presence here below--a presence not the less real because supersensible, nor the less consoling because veiled.

I shall speak, then, of the Blessed Sacrament, first, as a reality; and, secondly, as a consolation.

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First, as a reality. You are aware, my dear brethren, that no article of our faith excites so much the wonder of those who are not Catholics as the doctrine of the Real Presence. They are forced to acknowledge, too, that we actually do believe in it, and take it as a matter of course. Their wonderment is natural enough: for they judge of it only by the senses; and certainly we cannot conceive of any mode in which it would have more apparent __un__reality. If, however, they believe that the Christ who was born in a stable, lived in obscurity for thirty years, was rejected by the Jews as "the carpenter's son," and, at last, died a felon's death, was God, they must allow that the Godhead in Him had very much apparent unreality, and that its surprising concealment can only be accounted for by design. Again, if they are familiar with the Bible, they know that in several passages a certain adorable secrecy and shyness are ascribed to God as characteristic of Him. As, for instance, in the Psalms we are told that He "makes darkness His hiding-place." [Footnote 61] In Job it is asked, "Peradventure thou wilt comprehend the steps of God, and find out the Almighty perfectly? He is higher than heaven, and what wilt thou do? He is deeper than hell, and how wilt thou know?" [Footnote 62] while Isaias breaks out with the exclamation: "Truly Thou art a hidden God, Thou God of Israel, the Saviour!" [Footnote 63]

[Footnote 61: Ps. xvii. 12.] [USCCB: Ps. xviii. 12.]

[Footnote 62: Job xi. 7.]

[Footnote 63: Is. xlv. 15.]

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As far, then, as the hiddenness of the Real Presence goes, it ought rather to commend our doctrine than otherwise, and create a presumption in its favor.

But the radical difficulty with the stranger to the truth lies in his not understanding the Incarnation and its object. It is nothing to him, I may say. He professes belief in it, indeed, but has utterly "lost its meaning" (as dear Father Faber says). Let him once begin to realize the Incarnation, and he will find he is taking the road to Rome: he will find that there is such a thing as a visible Church, and such a person as the Mother of God. To the Catholic, on the contrary, the Incarnation is everything. It is the fount of the whole system to which he glories in adhering. The Church exists for nothing else. The world exists for nothing else. The world for the Church, the Church for Christ, and Christ for God.

Now, the object of the Incarnation was briefly this: The establishment of a visible kingdom, in which the Creator should receive an adequate worship from the creature, and the creature be raised to the highest possible union with the Creator. We say, then, that the Church is this visible kingdom--to wit, an organic body, of which we are made members by Baptism (an outward and visible rite); and that the twofold end of worship and union is accomplished by the perpetual presence of the Incarnation here on earth, as at once a sacrifice and a sacrament. {162} A sacrifice in which the creature offers to God a divine victim--the only adequate worship He can receive, God being offered to God--and in a created nature. A sacrament, in which the assumed humanity in Christ, hypostatically united with the divinity, is made to blend with our humanity in a union so close as to render us, in turn, "partakers of the divine nature." [Footnote 64] Moreover, we say that the form of food, in which our Lord chose to impart to us His deified and deifying humanity, was (so to speak) the most natural form He could have chosen: since food becomes one substance with its recipient--the difference between ordinary food and this divine food being that the latter, instead of being changed into us, transforms us into itself.

[Footnote 64: 2 St. Peter i. 4.]

Therefore, to us, who, by the grace of faith, understand the Incarnation and its object, the doctrine of the Real Presence is simply the supplement to the doctrine of the Incarnation. The one is the consequence of the other. We behold in the Church, with the Blessed Sacrament on her altars, the mystical Mary with the Divine Babe on her lap: and when we kneel to her, that she may give Him to us, or bless us with Him, we have no more feeling of unreality than the Shepherds and the Magi had in the cave at Bethlehem.

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The feast of Corpus Christi, then, my brethren, is one of a blessed __reality__: a reality which ought to make us thank God every day of our lives that we are Catholics. For can anything be more dismal, more barren, more pointless, than a Christianity in which the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin have no place?

But, secondly, it is a feast of peculiar consolation. It is this which most endears the Blessed Sacrament to us. For as long as we are in exile from our true fatherland--the "patria" of the __O Salutaris__--we shall always be wanting consolation, and prize it as a foretaste of our rest. This consolation, then, this foretaste, is abundantly vouchsafed to us in the Blessed Sacrament. And, first, as regards our Lord Himself. It is impossible to love Him without sorrowing for all He once suffered; without grieving at the thought of the world's sins, and our own share of them, which drenched His soul with anguish, and steeped His heart in woe. And what pains us most is the melancholy fact that His love was thrown away on the majority of mankind, and is so at this hour. It is, therefore, indeed a consolation that now He dwells on earth without the condition of suffering--impassible for evermore; that, at last, He "comes unto His own, and His own __do__ receive Him"; that He is enthroned King of His elect in the kingdom He so dearly purchased; that He can now take unmixed "delight" in "being with the children of men"; that if His Sacramental Presence is still to the heretic "a stumbling-block," and to the sceptic "foolishness," yet to millions upon millions, who believe and love, it is "the power of God and the wisdom of God"; and, further, that whatever degeneracy may come upon Christ's kingdom, however widely the "love of many may wax cold," yet, even in the worst times, "those whom the Father hath given Him" will unfailingly confess Him their "Emmanuel."

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Again, the Blessed Sacrament is full of consolation as regards ourselves. In the first place, because it is our Emmanuel--God tabernacled with men; and because the veiled Presence here is an earnest of the unveiled hereafter. Also, because it is an abiding "propitiation for our sins," and the perpetual oblation of infinite merit to obtain us all good things. Again, it is the food in the strength of which we travel, like Elias, through the wilderness of this world "unto the mount of God": [Footnote 65] the medicine of our spiritual diseases, the balm of our sorrows, and, sweetest thought of all, perhaps, our viaticum in death.

[Footnote 65: 3 Kings xix. 8.] [USCCB: 1 Kings xix. 8.]

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If God could thus address His people of old, how much more meaning have His words for __us__: "Fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name: thou art mine. When thou shalt pass through the waters, I will be with thee, and the rivers shall not cover thee; ... for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour." [Footnote 66]

[Footnote 66: Is. xliii. 1-3]

But especially ought we to take comfort in the Blessed Sacrament in times of trial for the Church, such as that which is on us now. You remember how the ship of Peter was tossed one day on the lake of Galilee, and the disciples got terrified and awoke their Master, who was asleep on a pillow. [Footnote 67]

[Footnote 67: St. Mark iv. 36-38.]

And He rebuked them for their want of faith; because, let wind and sea rage as they might, could that vessel have perished with the Lord of the elements on board, though He __was__ "asleep on a pillow"? Now, that ship is a striking figure of the Church, with the Blessed Sacrament reposing on her altars. She has ridden out many a heavy gale as yet, and no matter how many more are in store for her, weather them she __must__ while she carries the Almighty Saviour. Instead of losing heart, then, our aspiration should be that of the sacred poet:

"Amid the howling wintry sea, We are in port if we have Thee."

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And even if there should come a time, as many think, when "the daily sacrifice shall be taken away," when it shall be death to say Mass or to hear it, and the Church has to "fly into the wilderness"--if the final persecution thus exceed even those of the Cæsars, yet Mass __will__ be said and Communion __will__ be given; and still, at the words of the priest, "even as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth unto the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man" to His altar; and still, "wheresoever the Body shall be, there will the eagles be gathered together." [Footnote 68]

[Footnote 68: St. Matt. xxiv. 27, 28.]

In conclusion, my dear brethren, let me remind you how apt we are--we who are so favored with the faith--to neglect the Blessed Sacrament, to be irreverent in its presence, to show it ingratitude by receiving it too seldom, and to betray our forgetfulness of its presence by never coming to visit it. I would dwell a little on this last point. When we meet with misfortune or trouble of any kind, we often brood over it at home, and get impatient and fretful, and make mischief in consequence to others as well as to ourselves, instead of coming to tell the Sacred Heart all about it, and draw on an ever-ready help. So, again, we are constantly complaining how cold the world is, what a want there is of sympathy, how selfish and thankless people are. {167} And what are we but cold and unsympathizing, selfish and thankless, toward our best Friend? He is here "love's prisoner"--__our__ prisoner; and how few of us take any notice of Him as such! Were an earthly dear one in prison for our sake, we should move heaven and earth to get to him. But here is the Lover of all lovers, the infinite beauty, accessible all day long, and how many come to visit Him of those who are __not__ reasonably prevented? I wonder that more of us are not haunted by those words, "I was in prison, and ye visited Me not." [Footnote 69]

[Footnote 69: St. Matt. xxv. 43.]

Let us endeavor, then, my brethren, to realize more the treasure we possess in our Emmanuel, our __Gesù Sacramentato__ (Sacramented Jesus), our __Dios Sagramentado__ (Sacramented God), as the happy Italian and Spanish languages can word it. If we could only accustom ourselves to think a little more of the Blessed Sacrament, it would soon have a perceptible influence on our lives, on our domestic relations, on our intercourse with society, on our dealings with the world of business. And this influence would be anything but oppressive, as some of you may think. It would exercise a wholesome restraint, indeed, for which we should often be deeply thankful afterwards, but would give us a true cheerfulness and an abiding sense of calm. Oh! that all our words and actions might harmonize in one ceaseless chorus of praise--

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"Blessed and praised every moment Be the most holy and most divine Sacrament!"

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Sermon XI.

St. Paul, The Divine Orator.

(For The Patronal Festival.)

2 Cor. xii. 9.

"__Gladly, therefore, will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.__"

The Church and the world are agreed in the estimate formed of St. Paul as a preacher. By a common judgment, the name of this great apostle has been inscribed at the head of the illustrious list of teachers of doctrine. His renown increases as time goes on, and in our own day his personal character, life, and writings have been made the subject of an extraordinary amount of discussion, and have elicited newer and higher eulogiums.

There is this difference, however, in the judgments formed by the Church and the world of the prince of Christian preachers. The world's panegyric is illogical, being made in direct contradiction to its principles and the lessons which it has ever inculcated as necessary to an orator's success. {170} The Church alone, by the aid of the supernatural principles of faith, is able to explain the true secret of the wonderful power he wielded in life, and the miraculous influence of his words upon the nations of the earth during the many centuries which have elapsed since he ceased to speak face to face with men.

What, indeed, are these words of his, "I will glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me," but foolishness to human wisdom, or, at best, an enigma without solution! But it is precisely these infirmities of which he boasts that gave him the power he possessed, and laid the foundation of all his glory. "When I am weak," he says again, "then am I powerful." Nonsense to human reason, but divine wisdom to faith.

If, therefore, I would praise St. Paul, as is befitting on this day, I must praise hid infirmities--weaknesses which the world calls misfortunes, and deficiencies upon which none but saints ever rest their hopes of success.

To judge after the manner of man, we would ordinarily expect to find in one who is an orator of great power certain personal qualifications which, in the very nature of things, would serve to impress and win his audience. We would seek for great polish in the style, and consummate art in the preparation and delivery of his discourses. {171} For one who aims at swaying not only a chance multitude who, for the moment, comes within the sound of his voice, but at conquering their souls, and winning them to the point of making most heroic sacrifices; who not only preaches to his hearers, but commands them with the air of one having authority, we would look for the favorable, popular verdict shown in honors and dignities showered upon him, in credit and influence, and his having reached that summit where men vie with one another in giving him place, and when even his enemies fear to gainsay or persecute him.

Such, indeed, are the orators whom the world crowns with its laurels. But in all these St. Paul was lacking; and yet, by the world's own confession, he has surpassed them all. To meditate upon this mystery of Divine Providence, which makes use of the weak things of this world to confound the strong, and the foolish to confound the wise, cannot fail to enlighten and edify us.

We who, like the world in general, have known the great Apostle chiefly from the sublime picture which his unparalleled success presents, have doubtless imagined him to be a person of tall and majestic stature, of pleasing address and magisterial deportment; being, as we say, a man of fine presence, whose appearance was alone sufficient to bring forth plaudits from his auditory, and enforce at once a respectful and submissive hearing. {172} Such are, indeed, the ideal portraits of him with which we please ourselves, and such have the masters in art represented him. But from various allusions he makes in his writings to himself, it is certain that he was frail in body, of a diffident and submissive bearing, and altogether wanting in that air of decision and self-assertion which naturally overawes the multitude.

When he, with his companion apostle, St. Barnabas, healed the cripple at Lystra, the people imagined them to be gods; but in calling St. Barnabas, rather than St. Paul, Jupiter, it is evident that other apostle far surpassed St. Paul in the dignity and majesty of his person. He can write boldly, he says, but "in presence is lowly"; [Footnote 70] and, again, he affirms the truth of what people said of him, that "his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible;" and the frequent contrasts he draws between his personal infirmities and his spiritual power and graces, leave the fact beyond doubt that he was by no means a man of dignified aspect or commanding mien.

[Footnote 70: 2 Cor. x. 1]

We might be tempted to think he would feel this infirmity most keenly as a serious drawback to his success as an orator, as we ourselves would judge it to be. But no. He will rather glory in his infirmities as the source of his power; and here at the outset we get an insight into the whole spirit of this champion of the Gospel. {173} From the instant of his miraculous conversion, he appears to be wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the sublime mystery of the voluntary abasement of God in concealing the awful majesty and splendor of his Divine Being in human nature, that what he, with apostolic hardihood, calls the "foolishness of God" and the "weakness of God," might subdue and atone for the sinful pride and vainglory of men. He rejoices, therefore, that he has nothing in himself which might cause the admiration of men and make void the humility of Jesus and His cross--a thought which so fills his soul that he says he knows nothing else besides. The less he has in himself to glory in, the greater is his consciousness of the power of the Gospel of the Crucified, which he only lives to preach. "Power is made perfect in infirmity," was the revelation made to him when caught up to the third heaven. "I will glory, therefore," he exclaims, "in my infirmities." I am glad that I am weak in bodily presence and contemptible in speech. Freed from this temptation of human vanity, which in turn would divert the souls of my hearers from the Gospel to the preacher of the Gospel, the power of Christ will dwell more fully in me. "When I am weak, then am I powerful." {174} When I, Paul the Apostle, am nothing, then will the victory of grace be complete in the souls who, through me, believe and are converted--when I have nothing in me to please and attract the sight, men will see only the Cross which I hold up to their gaze.