Chapter IV. The Spirit in which we serve God

Theory is not much without practice; yet without a good theory practice for the most part is not itself worth much, for it is neither fruitful nor enduring. If this is true in most things, it is especially so in the spiritual life. Now God is to us very much what we are to Him. With the innocent Thou shalt be innocent, and with the perverse Thou shalt be perverted. Having then observed in ourselves certain signs of progress, been put upon our guard against certain pretended signs, and seen what we can do to cultivate the promise we have observed, it is desirable that we should clearly understand in what spirit it is that we commit ourselves to God, and pledge ourselves to serve Him. A clear idea is a great help to us, and consistency is no slight part of perseverance. Let us then thoroughly understand what we are about, what we are promising, what sort of a life it will lead to, and what God may reasonably expect of us after our own voluntary professions.

What I have to show then in this chapter is that without liberty of spirit we can never be perfect, that there is no true or safe liberty of spirit which does not follow as a consequence from the spirit in which we serve God, and hence that the only right spirit in which to serve Him is one of self-sacrifice and generosity. When we have mastered this chapter and turned it into practice, 5* we are already miles beyond where we were before. People never go far enough, unless they start with a clear view of how far they ought to go.

I will begin with the spirit in which most men serve God.

There are many difficulties in life. Some men have more, some less. But the most fearful of all no one can get rid of, namely, that of having to deal with God. To have to deal with God is a necessity as awful as it is in dubitable and unavoidable. Contrast His reality with oui untruth, His power with our weakness, His law with oui disobedience. Enumerate His known perfections, remem bering that there is no great or small with Him becauso of His immensity and completeness. Analyze His tremendous sanctity, and meditate separately on every element of it, its awful minuteness, its unbearable purity, its unspeakable sensitiveness, its terrific jealousy. On our side there is a multitudinous fertility, day and night, of thought, word, work, omission and intention: on His side, the noting of all this, the stern requisition of an invariably pure intention, the strict account, the severity of the punishment, the eternity of the doom, and the infallible inevitableness of it all.

His court in heaven we could not see and live, because of its radiant purity. The strong angels tremble and are shaken; our Lady is all abased; and the Sacred Heart of our Lord Himself is flooded with reverential fear.

Along the line of Sacred History there gleam like lights the dreadful chastisements which God has inflicted on venial sins. Moses, and David, the man of God whom the lion slew and Oza who upheld the swaying Ars —

THE SPIRIT IN WHICH WE SERVE GOD. • ft3 these examples are overwhelming disclosures of the sanctity of God; and the notable thing is7 that what seems to anger God in these faults is the want of wholeness of heart with Him. Let us look at our past lives by this light, and have we not cause to tremble; or even at our present practice, and have we a right to be without fear '/ What a thought for us that He knows at this moment how we are to stand to all eternity, what pains we are to endure, or what bliss we shall enjoy. It is enough to take away our breath to know that this is known, even chough we still are free. Surely nothing can be conceived more awful than having to deal with God.

What then follows from this? Undoubtedly nothing less than these five simple truths.

1. That His service is our most important, if not our sole, work. This is so obvious that it requires only to be stated. Time and words would alike be wasted in he attempt to prove it. Yet alas! even spiritual persons need to be reminded of this elementary truth. Let us subject ourselves to a brief examination upon it. Aro we thoroughly convinced it is true? Has our past life shown proof of it? Is our present life modelled upon it? Are we taking pains that our future life shall be so? What is the result when we compare our worldly promptitude and industry with our preference of the service of God over all other things? Are we in any way on the look-out for His greater glory or our own greater union with Him? Is it plain at first sight that we have no object or pursuit so engrossing and so decidedly paramount as the service of God?

2. That the Spirit in which ws serve Him should be entirely without reserve. Need I prove this? What if to be reserved? Can there be reserves with God? Cau His sovereignty be limited, or our love of Him ever reach the measure of enough? But have we no reserve with Him now? Is there really no corner of our heart over which He is not absolute Lord? Does He ask of us freely what He wills, and do we do our best to give Him all He asks? Have we no implicit bargain or condition with Him that He is only to go so far with us and no further? Is our outward life utterly and unconditionally dependent on Him? And if it is, is the kingdom of our inward intentions reposing peaceably beneath His unquestioned sceptre?

3. That our ruling passion should be horror of sin, even venial sin, and unworthy imperfections. Now do we so much as know what this feeling means? When we read of it in spiritual books, does it not sound to u? like an unreal exaggeration? Have we even heartily prayed for an increased hatred of sin? Are there not many evils which afflict us far more keenly? Are we attracted to Gethsemane, and to the mysterious vision of our Master crushed, like the grapes in a wine-press, beneath the mental horror of the world's sins? Until we know something of this horror of sin, supernatural principles can hardly be said to have taken possession of our minds.

4. That we should avoid, as if it were sacrilege, any slovenliness in our dealings with God. Surely the terror of His majesty, as well as the immensity of His love, should make this one of our fundamental axioms. There is a personal contempt about slovenliness which makes it perfectly horrible to couple even the idea of it with God. It is far more truly a practical atheism, than many gross

Bins into which the vehemence cf our guilty passions may betray us. Yet how do matters stand with our meditation, vocal prayer, mass, confession, and communion? And if it be so with our directly spiritual duties, what shall be said of those occupations of our calling out of which we are to work our salvation, and which can only be sanctified by extreme purity of intention?

5. That the only one fact of any especial importance to us is whether we are honestly serving God or not. Shall we be saved or not! The whole of life's solemnity and seriousness resolves itself into that one overwhelming doubt. We should have nothing so much at heart as this. Nay rather we should have nothing at heart but this. How dead to self we should soon become under the shadow of this universal, life-long question! Yet how does the case really stand? A little wrong, a trifling injustice, an insulting word, a piquing of our self-love and personal vanity, stirs us more effectually and interests us more really than the chances of being lost or saved. And yet we are aiming at a devout life! And yet we dream that we are serving God!

It is plain, without speaking of high thing: or of fervent devotions, that merely to carry out in the service of God these five self-evident truths, we must serve Him in a spirit of generosity and self-sacrifice. But the spirit of generosity may be looked at in two ways; as it exists in our own hearts, and as it actually inspires our conduct We are thinking of it just now in the first point of view. Its victory over our external actions is a work of time and combat. It will not only be long before it is achieved, but in point of fact it never will be achieved to the extent which we ourselves see to be possible. What I want to impress upon you is that even as a theory it is of immense utility. Unless we see clearly what it is to be generous with God, and have steadfastly determined to be so, there is no likelihood that the slightest degree of generosity will actuate our external conduct. What we want in our present position is that we shall not consciously at least have any reserves with God, that we shall set no definable bounds either to our love of Him or to our sacrifice for Him, that we shall not fix our eye on any imaginary point of future perfection and say that when we are arrived at that we shall be content, that as we read or hear of the states and stages of the spiritual life and the practices of courageous mortification, we shall never feel of any of them that it will never be a practical matter to us. You see I am putting it all in the negative. I am not saying you shall positively determine at some future time to do this or to suffer that. I should not wish it. I am only saying you must not exclude as impossible or impracticable any amount of perfection. You must have no reserve. You have nothing to do with the future. You have to follow the present grace, and then the grace which shall present itself next, and then the grace after that, and so on, till God draws you to a nearness to Himself which it would frighten you now even to picture to yourself. You must abandon yourself to grace and follow its lead. But unless you see the reasonableness of this, and make up your mind to it steadily beforehand, you are quite sure not to do it. This is what I mean by having a good theory of generosity. If you have not the theory now, you will never have the practice hereafter.

Undeniable as the common sense of this may be, corrupt nature will often plead eloquently against it. Consequently this theory must not be merely a loving instinct in the heart or an habitual resolution in the will. You must verify it as an intellectual conviction. You must have persuaded yourself of it. If not, when temptation comes, you will tremble from head to foot with indecision, and end by fainting. It is well, therefore, to make it a frequent subject of meditation. You must accustom yourself to true views about the Gospel. You must see that, all through, it is a religion of suffering, of mortification, of self-sacrifice, of consuming love, of self-forgetting zeal, of self-crucifying unio^, in a word, it is the religion of the Cross and the Crwcified. You must get well into you the truth so unpalatable to nature that self-denial is of its essence, and that it must be daily self-denial, not only that we may be perfect, but even that we may be our dear Lord's disciples.

In truth, Jesus is our model, of whom the Holy Ghost bade the apostle say that He pleased not Himself. Fix your eyes on this Divine Exemplar; familiarize yourself with the mysteries of His Sacred Humanity, until the spirit of them passes into you. Learn the secret of His Infancy, of His eighteen years Hidden Life, of His three years Ministry, of His week's Passion, of His forty days of Risen Life. Where is there any self? Is it not all sacrifice in detail? Is not all unreserved generosity for the glory of His Father, and the perishing souls of men? This unreservedness is the grand characteristic of the Incarnation. Look at His Passion. Take His Divinity for the first point of your meditation on it. How did He use it? He restrained it from consoling Him; He let it itrengthen Him that He might suffer more, even beyond the ordinary limits of human endurance; it was all the while actually giving physical strength and vigour to His executioners to torment Him with, and its concurrence was the weight and the force of the burning lash. Then look at His soul. In it He foresaw His passion all His life long, so that it was a fear and a suffering of three-and-thirty years. Gethsemane was, as it were, the crucifixion of His Soul, as Calvary was of His Body; and all through the Passion His Soul was pierced by woes and humiliations which have never been surpassed or equalled for continuity, variety, and keenness. Then cast an eye upon His Sacred Body. Nothing is held back. Heart, Hands, Feet, Eyes, Mouth, Back, Heart, all have their own torture, all contribute their own peculiar agony to the grand Redeeming Sacrifice. His Blood is shed quite wastefully, over the olive roots of Gethsemane, on the pavement of Jerusalem, into the braided thongs and toe knotted lashes, all along the way of the Cross, up Calvary, and on the holy wood of the Cross, and it is sbed until the emptied Heart has not another drop to give. Wow compare all this with our own mean reserve and half-heartedness! Towards God what scanty prayers, what careless examens, what heartless confessions, what cold communions, what human respect, what grievous sins! Towards our neighbours, how selfish in action, how unkind in word, how censorious in thought! Towards ourselves, how indulgent, how conceited, what pampering of our body, what worship of our will!

The great lesson of the Crucifix is whole-heartedness with God, the spirit of joyous abandonment and generous sacrifice. We may get a clearer idea of it if we look at it from another point of view. We are quite oapabii* of ronceiving a man, a saint he could not be, exempt from ftll actual sin, and observing to the full all the commandments in the letter, and yet without generosity to God. Lt is. of course, a theological impossibility; but wc are capable of conceiving it This sinless man might, without breaking any commandment, be occasionally dullhearted with God, grudging Him heroic service and counsels which did not oblige. He might be sometimes inclined to bargain with God, and to think he had now done quite as much as was discreet. Now and then he might give way to the feeling that his obedient life was irksome, because of the unwearied and unremitting sacrifice which it entailed. At intervals he might even have tits of lukewarmness, in matters plainly short of sin. He might look on Jesus without any glow of enthusiasm, and his acts of love might up to a certain point be remiss. Hi this is possibly and imaginably consistent with entire smlessness. Yet what is the disposition of this unsinning monster, but the portrait of a devil, or something very like it? And why, except for the absence of all generosity with God? It is just this which stamps, not the unchristian, but the anti-christian character upon it.

Of a truth there has been a pure creature, who has b^en exempt from every shade of sin; and yet, if we may pay so, sinlessness is not her highest prerogative, even independent of the Divine Maternity. Cast an eye over her sixty-three years, and you will see what is meant by generosity towards God and unreservedness with Him. Her first act of love and use of reason at the very moment cf the Immaculate Conception was an entire and joyous surrender of herself to God, and it was never retracted for sa much as an instant through all those years. The 6 thought never crossed her of being aught else than all for God. So when she made her vow of virginity, as the most perfect offering to the infinite sanctity of God, she sacrificed apparently the one object which was nearest and dearest to every Jewish maiden's heart, even the hope of being the Mother of the Messias. Then again when she consented, in obedience to those who had a right to command her consent, to espouse St. Joseph, what an utter abandonment of self it was! Even her consent to the Incarnation, and her acceptance of the dignity of Mother of God, were acts of generosity, not only because of the unequalled suffering they involved, but also because of the violence she was called upon to do to her deep humility. Her presentation of Jesus in the temple, and her acceptance of Simeon's prophecy, were equally examples of her self-forgetting generosity with God. Amidst all the trials of the Sacred Infancy she called for no miracles to alleviate her cares. In the Holy House of Nazareth her life was nothing else than a perpetual oblation of Jesus and of herself to God. Her poverty was perfect; neither did she seek for spiritual consolations, but was contented with the almost unbroken silence of her Divine Son, when she longed for Him to speak. She parted with Him unselfishly when He went upon His three years' ministry, which, even when she followed Him, af least broke up and rendered desultory her intercourse with Him. She consented to His Passion, and co-operated with Him in all its steps. She spent fifteen years of resigned desolation upon earth, when He had ascended, and like a magnet had almost drawn her Immaculate Heart up to heaven with His own. She gave Him away to the Eternal Father in the Asceosioji, *fc<! without a

«urmur took John for Jesus. How wonderful must her detachment have been, who could detach herself even from the presence of our dearest Lord, and which had nothing, not even Himself, that it did not generously abandon to the will of God!

Such is the spirit in which, according to our measure and degree, we must resolve, by the help of His grace, to serve Almighty God; and among the many reasons why this should be so, I must notice one, because it belongs to our present reflections. We have heard much of liberty of spirit, and we have read that without it we can never reach perfection. Every one agrees in saying great things about liberty of spirit, and in desiring it for himself. But few have any clear notion of what they themselves mean by liberty of spirit: and for the most part, when they suppose they are exercising that liberty, they are in reality only making free with God and their religious duties in a way which will be sharply visited on them at last. Liberty of spirit does not then consist in being free from a rule of life, and not having set duties for set times, nor in changeableness with devotions, pious books and the like, nor in the absence of self-accusation when we neglect any of our exercises, nor in not making a scruple of what other good people make a scruple, nor in being off-hand and careless with the details of our actions on the ground that God looks at the heart, nor in addressing hot words to God, and courting His merciful caresses, when we are taking no sort of pains to mortify ourselves and keep our passions undsr. All this is slovenliness and impertinence, not Christian liberty of spirit. Yet how many do we see who by slightly and unconsciously degrading God in their own ideas, and then making themselves very much at home with His service, imagine that they are enjoying the breadth and room and invigorating air of liberty, when they are all the while debauching the very principles of reverence and religiousness in their own minds, and are drinking venial sin, as thirsty beasts drink water I

If, however, it is not easy always to recognize liberty of spirit, and to distinguish it from rudeness, irreverence, or an unscrupulous self trust, the difficulty is very much narrowed by reflecting that in most cases we can tell what is not liberty of spirit. For no one can by any possibility have a true liberty of spirit, who is not serving God in a spirit of generosity. Now it is easy for us to know whether we are doing or trying to do this or not; and ii the answer be in the negative, then we may be infallibly certain that anything about us which looks like liberty of spirit is in reality something else, and probably something highly undesirable. It is a help to us then to know so much as this, that if we have not generosity, we have not liberty.¹ The one answers to the other. Or at least without generosity there can be no liberty, though irom interior trials there may at particular seasons be generosity without liberty.

The spirit of Jesus is a spirit of liberty. Scripture has passed it into a Christian proverb, that where the spirit of God is, there is liberty. When first it came into the world, it was a spirit of liberty from the bondage of tear and dark superstition which had reigned over the heathen, from the narrowness and doubt and grovelling appetites of the Greek and Roman unbelievers, and from the slavery of ceremonial and positive precept which had schooled the

Jews for our Saviour's coming. It 13 a spirit of liberty Because it is a law of love, not because it is love only, but because it is a law also, and a law of love. It is liberty because of the munificent superabundance of the Great Sacrifice, and, above all other reasons, because Jesus is God.

Hence we might naturally infer that the same liberty would penetrate into our most intimate relations with our Lord, and give a character to every phase of the spiritual.ife. And such is in truth the case. For Christian liberty consists in freedom from sin, as degrading to our nature and destructive of self-respect, as in itself full of wretchedness, as the most grinding of tyrannies, and tbove all as an offence against an infinitely good God It consists in freedom from the penalties of sin, such as God's anger, hell, and an evil death But it is also freedom from worldliness, that is, from a heart set on the world, from a mind full of it, from low views, and from that series of successive disappointments which befall every man who finds comfort in the world. It is a freedom from slavery to other men; for it makes persecution nothing more to us than a means of meriting, and calumny x sweet likeness to Jesus, while it begins the work which is only to end with the last breath we draw, deliverance from human respect. But most of all, liberty of spirit is freedom from self; for how shall the freedman of Christ sink to be the slave of self? To be free from littleness, from self-love, from secret meanness, and from the haunting of our own shame, this is to be free indeed, and there is no other freedom which deserves the name.

in one word then, liberty of spirit consists not at arl in being more free with God or less anxious in the dis- 6* E charge of our spiritual duties, but in this single thing, detachment from creatures. Liberty and detachment are one and the same thing. He is free who is detached, and he only. And it is plain that no one can be detached, who is not generous also; for generosity consists in de« taching ourselves, always at cost and with pain, from creatures for the sake of the Creator.

Oh that we were all made free with this heavenly free« dom! For there is nothing to which the glory of a free soul can be compared but the worshipful magnificence of God Himself. The soul detached stands on a height and breathes the air of heaven. Creation lies far below it, like a speck in space. Angels and saints are its co".rt and purity its atmosphere. Jesus is its brother, its companion, and its likeness. Its will is always done, beoau.se it is always with the will of God; so that in this sense it is omnipotent as He is. Its wisdom is supernatural, and unintelligible to earthly minds. Its peace is endless, profound and above the reach of foes. Its joy is absolutely in the unspeakably joyous life of God, and in nothing short of it. 0 how wonderful is the dignity of those who have been ransomed by the Precious Blooa of Jesus, and so sweetly justified by His victorious Kesurrection! The heavens are not so high as is their liberty, nor the sea so deep, nor the plains of earth so wide Poverty cannot soil it, grief eannct f^dden it, death cannot end it. 0 beyond all words that an over-full heart can utter, blessed, thrice blessed be God, for the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free t

Footnotes

1. I am not speaking of liberty in the theological or metaphysical *enge; but of liberty of spirit, a characteristic of Christian piety. ↩