Lecture II. St. Philip the Representative Saint of Modern Times
I tried to shew, in my Lecture last night, that the true idea of St Philip was, that God had given him to the Church as a portrait of Jesus; not in the same sense in which all Saints are likenesses of their Lord and Master, but in a more intimate and significant way, which Catholic generations had already recognised and revered in St. Francis. I said also that he was given in a special way, and with a special mission, to Modern Times. Yesterday, we were simply engaged in drawing out St Philip's supernaturalness, and his likeness to Jesus; to-day we must look at him as the Representative Saint of Modern Times.
- In the first place, then, let us ask ourselves what we mean by the expression "Modern Times," and whether we intend anything more than the fact, that the sixteenth and following centuries come chronologically after the twelfth and following centuries. Now, we are naturally speaking here of the Church, not of the world. It is of course true, that in her essentials the Church never changes; her constitution is divine, and is not therefore subject to the action of time and vicissitude, as merely human communities must be, and as religious sects and triumphant heresies so eminently are. Yet, no one will deny that her lineaments, and her outward physiognomy, change most strikingly; nay more, her interior life as well; and froin the very fact that her mission is to interfere with the world, to mould it or to thwart it, it must necessarily be that she should present herself to us under very different appearances. Let a man try to construct in his mind a complete idea of the Church of the Catacombs, and the daily life of its members, and then ask himself whether the Church of Constantine, which was essentially the same Church, was not a very different-looking thing from the Church of the Catacombs. When he has well studied the Byzantine Church, and its relations to the civilisation to which it belonged, let him look at the Church of Innocent III., the Church of the Mediaeval Papacy, and is not the difference still more striking? Again, let him turn his gaze from the varied magnificence of the Mediaeval Church to the Tridentine Church, which is before the eyes of the inhabitants of the earth at this day; is the discrepancy at all less remarkable? So that, although in one sense the Church remains always the same, because her divine life is continuous, in another sense she differs from her own past appearances very materially. Here is a clumsy simile, but one which perhaps will make my meaning more clear, for it is what every one has noticed for himself, and so will find no diflSculty in the interpretation. Let us suppose a perfectly cloudless sky; and we behold climbing above the horizon a white bank of cloud; it mounts up into the blue heavens, distinct and solitary; there is no other cloud that it can be mistaken for; it assumes the shape of one of the Andes, then it builds itself up into a castle, then it takes the figure of a dragon, next it collapses into a shapeless mass of luminous whiteness, then it opens out and is formed into a ship and sails along, last of all it lies like a, fiat shoal upon the level of the current Just as the wind tells upon it, so does it assume these various shapes, and persons who see it at one part of its career as a castle, think the ship-like cloud which they behold after an interval a different one; but he who saw it rise on one side, and dip down beneath the horizon on the other can testify to its being one and the same cloud. This is an imperfect representation of the History of the Church: there are the manifold changes, the unbroken identity, and the reason, too, why people do not see what to us Catholics is more than obvious, and so requires no demonstration.
It is plain that these different phases of the Church are the dispositions of God, and that they exercise a most material influence upon the Christian life of her members.;The very essence of heresy and schism is constantly found in the disobedient and antiquarian worship of some pet past ages of the Church, in contradistinction to the present age, in which a man's duties lie, and wherein the spirit and vigour of the living Church are in active and majestic energy. The Church of a heretic or schismatic is in books and on paper: it may be the Apostolic age, or the Nicene age, or the Eighth century, or the Thirteenth, or the Fifteenth, or among the Paulicians on the banks of the Danube, or the Albigenses of fair Thoulouse. A Catholic, on the contrary, belongs to the divine, living, acting, speaking, controlling Church, and recognises nothing in past ages beyond an edifying and instructive record of a dispensation, very beautiful and fit for its day, but under which God has not cast his lot, and which, therefore, he has no business to meddle with or to endeavour to recall. One age may evoke his sympathies, or harmonize with his taste, more than another. Yet he sees beauty in all and fitness in all, because his faith discerns Providence in all. It is his characteristic as a Catholic, that, while he may have antiquarian edification, he can have no antiquarian worships, no narrow and heretical idolatry of the past; I say heretical, for such, in the end, by the force of its own principles, it must evolve itself. Events prove it; antiquarianism is at this day one of the most plausible objections to submission to the Church. This is no new thing; it is an old note of heresy. Hence men who have an instinctive dislike of the papacy, by the same instinct fall back on the patriarchal system of the fourth century. Those whose anti-hierarchical antipathies are stronger, go back to primitive episcopacy and the right of election in the people, if they bring themselves to admit the sacerdotal principle in Christianity at all! They whose unimaginative minds cannot appreciate the broad and various creation of modern rubrics and devotions, that marvellous and surpassingly beautiful Cosmos of the Catholic Church, yearn for the dim and affecting solemnity of the Disciplina Arcani in old times, as if old darkness were better than modern light, and progress simply an anti-Christian barbarism. All such persons, as, of course, they themselves acknowledge, nay, are forward to boast of it, are more or less out of tune with the living Church of their own day, and so find their so-called Catholic sympathies impeded, and their sensibilities mortified, and their religious life dwarfed and damaged. To enthrone a past age in our affections above the one whicji
God has given us in His Church is, implicitly at least, to adopt the formula of heresy and schism. To do so explicitly is incompatible with an orthodox belief, as well as with a true Catholic obedience. The past has a thousand uses to us; it loses everyone of them as soon as we begin to idolize it Such an idolatry drives us upon ends we never aimed at; but we do not fairly see them till our course is beyond our own control. Both the admirable and the imitable are to be found in sufficient abundance in the past What is admirable we admire for what it was, and look at it as it actually took place. What is imitable is subject to the categories of time, place and circumstances, and requires adaptation; the spirit of the past, and so its beauty, are lost in the stupid servility of a dull unimaginative copy. Hence it is that all mere revivalisms, as contrary to the nature of a living and immaculate Church, are either, when accidents favour them, the galvanic life of a heresy or a schism, or, when imbecility, or good though mistaken intention accompany them, an innocuous ineptitude and blunder. A cheerful, reverent, submissive, admiring loyalty to the present epoch of the Church, and to the Rome of to-day, — this is the health, and sinew, and heat of the real Catholic life.
If the whole history of the world, and even the developement of physical discovery, is the disposition of a particular Providence, much more abundant and indubitable are the signs of that special Providence in the chronicles of the Church, which is the elect portion of the world. Thus we are by no means surprised to find the different successive phases of the Church having their own special Saints, who are like guardian-angels to them. These Saints symbolize their age to those who come after; but they do more than this; they are, often unconsciously, inspired to guide the age, like another Moses, to the new land which God is about to bestow upon it; its spirit starts with them, it may be with one Saint or with many; and it animates their own contemporaries, and perhaps several succeeding generations. These are the heroes of the Christian Church, the supernatural creations of grace, the likenesses of the Incarnate Word. They come at particular seasons, as the Hebrew Prophets did; and the world at first thinks meanly of them and silences them, and learns afterwards, for the world is ever a slow learner, that it has been more beholden to them than words can telL This to a certain extent explains the mutability which there seems to be in the cultus of the Saints. Persons who have a great love for the early ages of Christianity, are surprised to find the feasts of great Saints of those names only honoured in the present Church with a semidouble rite. But it should be remembered that the cultus of the Saints is by no means necessarily proportioned to their heavenly glory. It is for our sakes, not their own, that they are worshipped. Just as God wills to work miracles for fifty years at the tomb of a certain Saint, and then the fountain of supernatural favours seems to dry up; so it may please Him to inspire the popular mind of the Church with an enthusiastic devotion for particular Saints at particular times, for reasons hidden to us, but which have to do with the sanctity of the Body Mystical The extraordinary devotion to St. Philumena, in modern Italy, is a remarkable case in point. There can be little doubt but that in the holy city itself the devotion to St. Philip has interfered with the previous devotion to St. Antony of Padua. The devotion of the north of Italy to St. Thomas of Canterbury is also another remarkable instance of a local cultus, the more unaccountable, as it has its seat in the old Ghibelline strongholds. Thus, when we come to examine any particular times of the Church, we are led naturally, as well as by experience, to fix our attention upon the Saints, who are expressions and representations of those times.
It is of course in every instance impossible to fix the precise date at which a new epoch begins, and a former one comes to an end. Like a footpath over the grassy mountains, we can only discern its fainter green clearly when we are at a distance from it Moral chronology is not so hard or sharply defined a thing j an epoch comes to an end; it weans the world from itself by degrees, gives it into the arms of its new nurse, then takes it back again for a while to hush its cries, until at last the generation gets reconciled to the lineaments and voice of the stranger, and the old times go their way, no one knows exactly when or where, for they went through no form of bidding good-bye. It will, however, be sufficiently accurate, if we say that the holy Council of Trent represents to us a new epoch of the Church, a period which may very truly be designated as our Modern Times.
Our object, you will remember, is to shew that St Philip was the type or representative of these times; but how can we do tins without at least touching upon a very vast and extremely interesting subject, the genius and characteristics of Modern Times? In contrasting, then, Modern Times with the Middle Ages, which I am about to do, it is not by way of setting one up against the o'ther, a process which I have already designated as a mere shallow puerility; but in order. to get a clear idea of Modern Times by contrast with times, which, as further off from us, are more clear and unmistakeable to our eye. He can have read but little history, or read it blindfold, who has no discernment of the beauty and magnificence of Mediaeval Times. Nothing of disparagement then is intended in the contrast, nor in the clearly expressed preference for Modern Times.
The heresies which were more or less the produce of the thirteenth and three following centuries, have naturally rendered greater fulness and distinctness of dogmatic teaching necessary on the part of the Church. Whether we look at the definitions of Trent, or those involved in the qualification of the various sets of condemned propositions by Alexander VII., Innocent XI., Alexander VIII., and Clement XL, it is plain that we are in possession of a great many more doctrinal definitions than we were; the limits of theological certainty are immensely extended. Just as verified observations have extended the domain of the physical sciences, so the number of truths which a believer cannot, without impiety, or in some cases formal heresy, reject, has added to the domain of theology. Surely every one is thrilling now with the joyous expectation of the new splendour which will accrue to the science of theology, should the Head of the Church define the doctrine of our Blessed Lady's Immaculate Conception. Now this greater body of certain dogmatic teaching must necessarily influence the whole multitude of believers. It tells upon literature; it tells upon popular devotions; it tells upon practice, witness the teaching of St. Bonaventure on contrition, which would now be something like heresy; and lastly, it tells upon* ecclesiastical art It is quite a characteristic of Modern Times as compared with the Middle Ages. Look, by way of illustration, on the different position which the teaching of St Thomas in the Middle Ages, on Justification and the Eucharist, occupies in the Church since the Council of Trent from what it did before: while at the same time it exemplifies the continuity and identity of the Church.
There are also other, and not less important, consequences, which follow from this greater fulness of dogmatic teaching. Whatever increases our knowledge of God, or gives us a greater certainty on any portions of divine truth, naturally gives a new impulse to the spirit of love. To know God is to love Him; He only requires to be known that He may be loved; an increase of knowledge is, a state of grace being supposed, an increase of love. The more full and certain, also, our knowledge of a doctrine becomes, the more are we pained and distressed by heresy about it; and so, in this way too, love is quickened and spurred on to multiply its affectionate acts of such poor reparation as it can offer to the offended Majesty of God, and the blasphemy of His truth: the modern devotions to, and rubrics concerning, the Blessed ISacrament are a case in point; as are also the modern devotions to our most dear Lady, springing out of, as well as re-acting upon, a tender love of Jesus, so intense that it knows not how to satisfy itself, nor in what ways to breathe out its hidden fires. Neither, in speaking of Modern Times, must we omit to notice the natural connection there is between an increased knowledge of dogma, and the spirit of reverent familiarity in devotion, which has been so prominent a feature in the later Saints. The more extended the vision of faith becomes, the more familiar a man necessarily grows with the sacred objects of which that faith so infallibly assures him. Thus, a certain awkward kind of false reverence, with its homage of unclear, cloudy words, its self-complacent renunciation of definitions, and its graceless and untoward behaviour in public service, has often been, with its conceited pretence and unamiable mannerism, an adequate test and badge of heresy; as, for instance, the quakerlike stiffness of heretics in England, or the self-complacent sacred etiquettes of Jansenism abroad. They simply prove the absence of grasp and clearness in faith, and so of child-like naturalness in love. The more a man knows of the mystery of the Incarnation, and the more deep and tender his joyous self-abasing devotion to the Person of the Eternal Word, the less need has he to fence his expressions about the Sacred Heart, or to dilute the language of his enthusiasm about our Blessed Lady. It would take me long to tell in how many ways, and in what opposite directions, all this has influenced the Catholic life of the multitudes of the faithful, and how materially it has aided in giving to Modern Times the genius which is so unmistakeably theirs.
It seems a very obvious thing to say that the more equable distribution of knowledge and education among all classes is another distinctive feature of Modern Times, as contrasted with the Middle Ages. Yet it makes a vast difference in religion; for this reason, if for no other, that it enables us to reach the multitude by such different impulses. Public worship, and especially art, must necessarily feel this most intimately; and the Church has not been slow to acknowledge it, and provide for it But the chief feature of all is the fading away of nationalism fjom men's minds. Nationality, in its bad sense, is the great bar of civilisation; and minds of all nations and all schools of opinion, philosophical or so called religious, are seeking after the breaking down of all partition walls, and the fusing of mankind into one vast brotherhood of love. Increased facilities of c6mmunieation, and the electrical diffusion of literary sympathies, are all helping towards that same end. Now, these philosophies can never realize this dream, as we know fall well; it is in the Catholic unity of the Church alone that they are divinely fulfilled. The favourite political centralization of the day is represented in its more noble aspect in the drawing of men's heart towards Holy Rome. Railways, and electric telegraphs, and steam-ships to the tropics, are the hand-maids of the Modern Papacy. When local rites, and diocesan breviaries, as lately in the French Synods, come and burn themselves as incense to the sovereign magnificence of the Roman ritual, when the jealous crown of the proud empire restores to an exiled and helpless Pontiff the rights it had usurped — these are the breaking down of the partition walls which intersect the great family of mankind. Ultramontanism is the magnanimous element of Modern Times; it is the heavenly excellence of our day; and by the strength of God's blessing, as it has lovingly conquered to itself the Church of France, that object of the present Pope's warm and affectionate devotion, so is it more or less victorious all the world over, and everywhere, in proportion to the amount of real holiness and untiring earriestness. It is significant, that so plain is this fact becoming to the Anti-Catholic party, that one of their lecturers * in a Parisian college raises a cry of undissembled terror, and would now fain rebuild the ramparts of nationalism, which he and his friends aided in levelling,to the ground, but1 which a very reasonable panic has now re-consecrated in his eyes.
In order to get anything like a clear view of the Modern Church, we must add to this extent of dogma and devotion to the Holy See, the wonderful increase of the Catholic Episcopate and the prodigious number of baptized souls. I suppose that in no previous age has the Episcopate been so widely spread, or so healthily and systematically animated by life from St Peter's Chair, as it is at this day; and, as far as we have the means of judging, the present number of baptized souls in the different continents of the world has never had anything approaching to a parallel to it before. The Visible Church of to-day is indeed a vision we may long to dwell on — its increased number of heavenly intercessors, with all their vast powers of impetrating graces for us — its varied patterns of holiness and perfection in these same saints — its multiplied religious orders — its striking liberality and benignant facility of indulgences, and other signs of the joyous character of Modern Times. But it must not be now; we must hasten on.
I must mention one more point, and then I have done with this enumeration of the characteristics of Modern Times. I am reluctantly compelled to compress into less room than I could wish, mere suggestive heads of thought, on which I would fain have enlarged; it is because I desire, within the compass of this Triduo, to do my best to convey to you my idea of St. Philip. We must not omit then to name the increase and greater universality of mental prayer, the more generally adopted systematic methods of self-examination, the more common practice of spiritual reading, the ways of hearing mass, the obligation of meditation made the condition in most cases of p gaining the indulgences of the Rosary, and other things which are all so many marks of what is called now-adays the increased t€ subjectivity" of the Modern Mind. Any one who should try to act on the multitudes, without taking this into account, and think that he could accomplish a thorough or permanent work with the leverage of the Middle Ages, would find himself miserably out in his reckoning. He might as well try to square the circle, as convert England so. The experiment would correct itsel£
Now, put all these things together, and, drily and hurriedly as I have enumerated them, see if something like a picture of Modern Times does not rise up before you; a portrait that you may know them by, as you look upon a picture, and go away, remembering what it is like.
II. At last, then, we have worked our way to St Philip again. We took the Council of Trent as the sign, or constellation, of what we called Modern Times; and I said that St Philip was the representative Saint of these tridentine Ages of Love, just as St Francis had been of the romantic Ages of Faith. We may use the term " Ages of Love," for the Tridentine Times of the Church, so as not to deprive the Middle Ages of the title of " Ages of Faith," to which they have now a kind of right by prescription; else, of course, ashas been said before, it is the very extension of faith's sure vision which has led to the greater extension of deep love, and so of tender familiarity, in Modern Times.
Men, to have any right to the title of men of an age, must exhibit in themselves the double action of the Church, which at once, as by a law of its inward life, goes along with the spirit of an age, and yet thwarts it too. They must have an aptness for putting themselves at the head of what is capable of and meant for a Christian developement, and, at the same time, of turning aside whatever ought not to invade the sanc-. tuary of the Church. And so it was in St Philip.
He came at his appointed time. He was ordained priest when the Council of Trent was yet sitting. He started a movement in the very capital of Christendom itself, which was so singular and yet so permanent, that he received the unusual title of the Apostle of Rome. In that central city he came across people of all nations. In 1576, which was before he founded the Oratory, we read of his being consulted from all parts, from the re-moter provinces of Italy, from France, from Spain. He had dealings with Poles, with Englishmen, with influential strangers from the Oriental Churches. One person, writing contemporaneously, calls him a spiritual oracle, and compares him to well-known men of other times. The avidity with which his relics were sought for in distant lands, when he died, proves his European reputation. And yet he wrote no books, started no system, headed no popular movement in any outward way. Strangers asked his disciples, nay, made interest through the Pope, to get an interview with this supernatural teacher, just as those who came up to the feast sought, through the Apostles, for an introduction to our Blessed Lord. In a word, an influence escaped through the windows of Philip's room, and all Christendom was affected by it It is the way schools rise and opinions spread, moral atmospheres are formed, and an age becomes impregnated with a new genius. Just as the chivalry, the poetry, the romance, the faith of the Middle Ages was gathered up and personified in St. Francis, so was the spirit of Modern Times in St Philip. When men went to see him as a Saint, they were scandalized at first by his practical common-placeness. He looked like other men. He followed the lead in conversation, or when he took it, it was uiiassumingly. He was emphatically a modern gentleman, of scrupulous courtesy, sportive gaiety, acquainted with what was going on in the world, taking a real interest in it, giving and getting information, very neatly dressed, with a shrewd common sense always alive about him, in a modern room with modern furniture, plain, it is true, but with no marks of poverty about it; in a word, with all the ease, the gracefulness, the polish, of a modern gentleman of good birth, considerable accomplishments, and a very various information. Yet all Rome was at his feet, from the Pope on his throne to the beggar on the steps of the Basilica. Not a work was done there, but he was in it: not a religious order, but it owed him continual reinforcements of novices; not a new institute, but, as with St Ignatius, he was a busy helper. " His eye," says his biographer, was early " cast on the northern parts of Europe." The Annals of Baronius were his work — the fruit of the keen feelings which the calumnies of the Magdeburg Centuriators had left upon his mind. Then the way in which, no one knew how, he bound his followers to him — the like of it had never been seen since the days of our Blessed Lord or of St. Francis. There was a spell about him. Men could not unriddle the enigma of his influence. It was a way, a spirit, a breath, a contagion, a vapour, an electricity, a something in the air; no one knew what it was. He came to Rome at one of the most solemn crises of the Church; the capital was full of Saints, and full of corruption too. He was the quietest man at his hard work that ever was seen; yet he magnetized the whole city; and when he died he left it quite a different city from what it was, nay, with the impress of his spirit and genius so deep upon it, that it was called his city, and he the apostle of it, second only to St Peter. It was no man clothed in camel's hair, with the attractive paraphernalia of supernatural austerities upon him, no St Francis, with his Chapter of Mats all round the Porziuncula, that the city and its foreign visitants went so anxiously to see; it was simply an agreeable gentleman, in a comfortable little room, apparently doing and saying just what any one else might do or say as well. He had come at his right time; he suited his age; men were attracted; he fulfilled his mission; he put himself at the head of the governing city of Christendom, and, through it, of spiritual Christendom itself; and posterity tells what his work was, for it calls him Apostolo di Roma.
Now look at another thing about him, which I think very remarkable. He was a great student of history, and made much of it, as we see in the exercises of the Oratory; and he was well read in the Lives of the Saints. The whole history of the Composition of Baronius' Annals, and the way in which the Saint urged him forward, evince quite a special drawing towards the study of history, as a means of influence, on the part of the Saint And from that time the studious genius of his Institute has mainly gone that way, rather than to dogma, or to polemics. Yet, strange to say, there seems to have been in his mind almost (I say almost, for there were two trifling exceptions) an entire pretention of the Middle Ages and all their undoubted Christian glories. They were not to his taste. His mind was of another build altogether. He went up to the early ages; his sympathies were all with the first Christians, with quite Apostolic times; his pattern that he was ever gazing on p 2 was primitive Christianity. His intense devotion to it came out in everything; he did not wish to make a mere revival of a past age; but he saw patterns in Apostolic times which he saw in no other times. Hence the style of preaching he wished to have in the Oratory, hence the absence of vows in his Congregation, hence the peculiar simple sweetness of the form of community life which he enjoined, hence the character of his spiritual exercises, hence his devotion for the relics of the early martyrs. Nay, so obvious was this, that it was what struck every one about him and his work. Baronius, when he describes St. Philip's exercises in his history, says, " Things being disposed in this manner, and approved by the Pope's authority, it seemed as if the old and beautiful Apostolical method of Christian congregations was renewed." Giovanni Derossi, in a book which he wrote at the time, speaks of St Philip and his Oratory as the chief attraction to foreigners in Rome, in 1568: and in 1576, Giovenale Ancina, writing to his brother from Rome, where he was on a visit, mentions St. Philip as the great sight and wonder at Rome, speaks of the Lives of St. Francis and his companions as at that time occupying the attention of the Oratory, and praises Philip especially " for his astonishing prudence and dexterity in inventing and promoting spiritual exercises." It was the primitive simplicity which struck both these writers. You see, then, that Philip's long years in the catacombs had done their work. The vision of the early Church had been with him there, and it was from Apostolic sources that he borrowed the powers wherewith he moulded the spirit of his age. His tastes were all there; his hankerings were not after the gorgeous cathedrals of the baron-bishop, but with the papal chapels and hiding-places of the church of the catacombs. Hence he was modern all at once; for the more immediate past which was yet visibly lingering on the earth, had never been anything to him, either for wonder, or for joy, or for a pattern; and therefore he needed no weaning from it
Now, I really think it is impossible to exaggerate the significance of this fact It is God's way, if I may reverently use such a word, to meet the evils which rise up in the world, the enemy's tares nightly sown, not only by powers in His Church, which gallantly beat them down, but also by what Locke, in the phraseology of his school, calls satisfactions — in other words, lawful channels, in which the newly awakened tastes and energies, thus running with frantic determination upon evil, may have vent and full career. Every Catholic is familiar with this, in the lives of the Saints whom God gave to His Church at the time of the apostasy of the sixteenth century: St Ignatius in the science of interior discipline and of education, St Theresa in the hidden wisdom of prayer, and the chastened common-sense of " religious experiences," and St Philip in the satisfaction of the appetite for preaching, for vernacular devotions, for hymn-singing, and for an interior system of religion of the highest kind,, thoroughly unmonastic, even to the very life of his black-habited and monk-like children, — a system suited for the palace, the gay metropolis, the rural villa, the wrangling college, the hunting-box, the long vacation, the voyage of scientific discovery, the absorbing counting-house, the idolized studio, the mess-room or the officers' cabin, of modern, brilliant, much-knowing, many-interested, world-engrossed society. Now think of the idea wherewith the Reformation started, and the direction which it struck out into; think of the continuous unchanging idea of Puritanism, think of the tendency to revere primitive antiquity, which is part of the English mind and of the English religion: it was a devotion to apostolic times, a falling in love in the grotesquest possible ways with the primitive ages, producing heresies almost as numerous as individualities in the land, from the earnest and amiable gentility of Oxford men, to the foolishness of Irvingism and the Agapemone: and can you not see a great significance, the token of a greater mercy, in God thus guiding in those hoary vaults and unsunny catacombs the spirit of a Saint, of whom with mindful reverence it might be said that his name was love, past peer and paladin, past tower and abbey, past tournament and pilgrimage, and all crusading romance, past every gorgeous trophy of a faith just fresh from its conquest over a new barbaric world, to the days of dread simplicity and awful suffering, which succeeded the inspired generation, when the hope of martyrdom was the joy of life, and the expectation of martyrdom the very air men breathed? So took he the type of the simplest age, and went out to do battle with the most complex era that either world or Church had ever seen.
The Middle Ages were beautiful times, and their art, too, was uncommonly, touchingly beautiful. His must be an unkindly genius, which has not glowed at times over the records of those days, or at the vision of that beauty. I suppose we may say it was the beauty of fear, the grace of reverence, the philosophy of awe, with much affecting sweetness of humility which it expressed. But Philip's spirit was, I had almost said exclusively, a spirit of love, a spirit of openness, and of a pure inward life. He would have admired a dark cathedral; no one more so: he could have lectured you on its significance and beauty; but I think, in the long run, it would have made him unhappy. If it had been his own, he would have made some very peculiar alterations; I should not wonder if he would have pulled it down, and built himself another, more to his heart's content His very way of doing his work shewed the impulse of this spirit of light-hearted freedom and reverently presuming love. His first great engine was the frequentation of the Sacraments; he simply started a new era in the Church in this respect. Then that buoyant, child-like joyousness which he put into religion was his own, and, as far as we can see, a novelty of his. His Christ-like love of youth, as the subjects of his influence, and the hope of the future, was part of the same spirit. So also was his familiar way of talking about sacred things, which came natural to him, both as a relief for his intense feeling about them, and as a cloak of his easily inflamed tenderness, as well as the truthful expression of a faith which was to him more clear and definite than sight. It had no parallel, except in the conversations of St. Francis, and the old Franciscan songs of the Blessed Jacopone of TodL
Consider him again in his bearing towards the world. If you read St Bernard, you will see that he seems to consider even salvation difficult, but perfection a dream, out of the cloister. This is the common language of the spiritual writers of the Middle Ages: the cloister means perfection; the world is not to be leavened, or attempted to be leavened; it is to be given up as an impracticable hopeless business. If you love God, you must take to yourself the wings of a vocation, and fly away into the wilderness or the monastery. The Church and the world were almost sphered visibly apart in those times. Look how different St Philip is! Perfection for all classes, in all states of life, under every possible variety of circumstances — this was the great lesson he was commissioned to teach. Stay at home, keep as you are, mind your spinning, marry and settle, — these were household phrases with him; for all he loved the religious orders so much. Look at the heights of perfection to which he led people, and yet how mild, it might be called lax, was the moral and ascetical theology he taught! All has the indelible impress of the modern genius upon it There was a boldness about him in it which bespoke a man conscious of a mission. Look at his free manners! He used to make his meditation sitting on a bench, and rocking to and fro, or lying on his bed; he used to hear confessions in bed; he set boys to play at fives in the court-yard when they were waiting to go to confession; and all this was in sober earnest, and meant something. Is this like a picture of a Mediaeval Saint?
Once more: I must call your attention to another remarkable fact, and that is Philip's keen appreciation of the growing subjectivity of the Modern Mini Look at him in his capacity of spiritual director. What a very little part do outward observances play in his school of perfection! What cautions about excess of vocal prayer! What a studious inculcation of mental prayer, and of habitual ejaculatory prayer! How strikingly subordinate in him is the position of exterior mortifications to what it used to be in older times, and with what dexterity and skill does he train people by interior mortifications! What a new gift he seems to have of leading people to the very summits of perfection, without any visible change in the daily fashionable life of Roman ladies and gentlemen! Nay, he makes his penitents keep to their fine clothes, when they would fain go about the streets in serge! To what an extent does he carry his
ON MODERN TIMES.
principle of concealing all marks of seriousness, and covering them with a varnish of common-place and worldly-looking levity! The austerities which he enforces or recommends are just those most suitable to Modern Times, the absence of comforts and teasing persevering plainness. Perseverance is his watchword: with him continuance, in a little, no matter how little, is the beginning, middle and end of sanctity. He started a new element in spiritual direction, the heroism of common sense. True there is no romance here; but there is a most wise reality. It has been well said of St. Ignatius, who was himself a striking personification of modern common sense, that he always looked out, not for what was fine, but for what would wear; it is equally true of St Philip. Nay, there was less romance about St. Philip than there was about the chivalrous Ignatius. How is it then that he so drew people to him, and that the characteristic of his children all over the globe is an intense living fire of enthusiastic personal love for him, which tears, not words, alone express? I can but answer: his mysterious similitude to Him whom Peter and James and John and Andrew clung to with a loyalty surpassing human love.
I cannot of course repeat what I have said of the characteristics of Modern Times; but I beg of you to recall it to your minds, and to fit to it what I have here said of my dear Father, and see if I had not a right to say that he was the representative Saint of Modern Times, and if that is not the true idea of him, and of his place in the world's history. O what a step it would be on the road towards a more perfect Catholic life, what a vigorous heart it would give you in hard work for the souls of the unshepherded multitudes around you, if you could come to see clearly, and to love heartily, the Modern Times in which we live. The living Church! In that one name is all theology, and all exercises, the most heroic, of faith, and hope and charity. Our times have their own beauty, and their own magnificence, enough to thrill through the coldest heart among us; and to us they bring, what no past ages at their best can do, that which is the most beautiful and magnificent and real of things on God's earth, living duty. We can believe in God in the past, but it is a faith which can have no direct works; we can energetically love God and Jesus Christ in the present times alone. See to it! This love of the Uving Church, it alone is genuine Catholicism, such as will work and wear; leave the restless and uneasy spirit of heresy to stifle its uncomfortable yearnings by its old game of playing at antiquarianisms. Modern Times are best, if not absolutely, because perhaps no times are absolutely best, at least best for you and me; and Philip is their godfather and their Saint
III. I should, however, be leaving the picture very incomplete, if I concluded this Lecture without bringing St Francis and St Philip together again. You see I have so far been contrasting them all along, and doing all I can to make a distinction between them; yet in my first Lecture I put them together, as no other two Saints in the Church can be coupled. To bring out my picture of St. Philip, I must not then leave unanswered this question. How do these Saints come to be like? It is not in anything which St Francis had from his romantic times, but it was in that which they both had independent of their times, their mutual similitude to Jesus. There is a remarkable affinity between the Oratory and the Franciscan Order, though in externals they are so very opposite. The kind of character, the peculiar fashion of holiness, which the two Institutes produce in favourable
Subjects, is very similar. St. Philip himself had a great devotion to St. Francis, and quite a passion for the Capuchins. Their prayers were his staff. Their St Felix was his brother. I have read somewhere, if I remember rightly, in the Chronicles of the Oratory, that there is an Oratory in Italy whose Fathers and Brothers go out of town once a year to a woody mountain to spend a holyday with the Capuchins. It is said of the Ven. Fabrizio dall' Aste, that he was wont to recreate his spirit by reading the Chronicles of the Friars Minor. There are certainly Franciscan elements in the Oratory, and St Philip's study of the poetry of the Blessed Jacopone was clearly not without its influence on the vernacular hymns of his spiritual exercises. I shall not be happy then, if I do not bring these two Saints together again, before I cbnclude to-night, It is necessary for my purpose.
Inasmuch as St. Francis expressed and embodied the genius of the Middle Ages, and St Philip the genius of Modern Times, the points of contrast between them must have been numerous and striking; and several of them have been touched upon in this lecture. But inasmuch, also, as St Francis and St Philip were both copies of Jesus, in a higher, or at least a more special sense than that in which other Saints are, and given as such by God to the Church, for particular purposes, we may naturally expect to find the points of resemblance between them as numerous and striking as those of contrast Let us run briefly over the lives and works of the two holy Patriarchs. The young St Francis, in the chivalry of his first love of Holy Poverty, the enthusiasm of which never abated, stood before the Bishop of Assisi, and not content with the solemn renunciation of his paternal inheritance, he stripped himself of the very clothes that he wore, and, so far as lay in
G his power, cut the filial tie which bound him to his father; for there was that in him which not only sought God alone, but which made him feel all created things and earthly relationships, whatever subordinate sacredness they might possess, as so many barriers between himself and the inward possession of God in his soul. So St Philip, less interfered with in his religious peculiarities and retirement by his uncle, than St Francis had been by his father, with the same love of Christ-like poverty burning in his heart, his whole being consumed by the same insatiable longing for God alone, turns suddenly round upon his kind and hospitable relative, and renounces the patrimony which had been so affectionately destined for him. He breaks away from the harbour and tranquillity of home, and casts himself on the world to hunt after God, knowing not his destiny, only that his heart told him that in Rome he should find God, and learn the interpretation of his dreams. It was no boyish freak, for his biographer expressly tells us, it was done after " mature deliberation." Yet he held no communication with his natural advisers at home; as the writer very markedly says, "he departed for Rome without even letting his father know; though in all other matters he had never so much as deliberated about anything without his knowledge." He asked for no allowance; he desired no help; all he wanted was to be free from help. He sought for no introductions at Rome; he looked upon them as so many hindrances to him; he wanted to be alone, to be unknown, to be unhampered by kindness and by sympathy. He was to meet God in Rome — that was what the intolerable impulses of Divine Love were driving him to. St Francis roams the hills of Umbria, or the green level plains beneath Assisi, like a bewildered lover, crying out with love of his sweet spouse,
Holy Poverty, as he called her. He breathed her name upon the air; he bade the mountain echoes repeat it; he told it to the silent depths of the wood. The restlessness of love was on him. His romance was real. The Spouse in the Canticles alone could give him words. Now turn from those dark hills of Umbria to the modern corridors of Chiesa Nuova. Look at that old man, with his cassock open, his short white beard, his rosary around his wrist, leaning for very age upon his staff. Can the fires of a youthful love burn any longer in him? Listen! he is humming a tune; then he sings, and his song is but two words, " Humility, Detachment! " And then his face is red and pale by turns, and out of his miraculous heart breaks forth in painfully inflamed sighs the undiminished passion of his boyhood for that interior poverty, that detachment, that modern form of St. Francis's romance, which he had chosen for his spouse!
St. Francis had his noviciate, his sojourn in the wilderness before the opening of his public ministry. It was on the hills and amid the wood-encircled caverns of his own preternatural Umbria, a land of wonder, of miracle, and mysterious influences, a sort of European Thebaid. There he communed with nature; there solitude taught him lessons; there, above all, God revealed Himself to His chosen servant; and the fire of Divine Love burned in him with more consuming vehemence than ever. St Philip too had his noviciate. The Spirit came upon him, sometimes by day, more often by night, and drove him even from the churches, beyond the walls, and plunged him into the dumb caves and earthy damps of the old catacombs. There God was his teacher. It was an awful school for a youthful heart to be sent to; it was rather on the confines of another world than within the cheerful domain of this world's sunshine. Nay, God did more than teach him. The Holy Ghost came into him miraculously, with such a Pentecostal vehemence that henceforth Philip's life was to be itself a miracle, and his heart a worshipful wonder in the Church to the end of time. Who could have divined that from out the tingling darkness and the warm chilliness of those vaults, where the persecuted Faith had first burrowed for itself a home, should come the lightest heart, the gayest spirit, the most Paul-like teacher, the freeest Saint, the pattern ecclesiastic, of the world's new civilization?
St. Francis, his biographer tells us, spent most of his life and did most of his work in towns, in spite of his love of the country and his intimate communion with the external creation. We should not have expected this. Just as little should we have discerned, in the boy who escaped from the domestic circle of San Germano to the yawning fissures and solitary grots of the Monte della Santissima Trinita, and, discontented even with the religious silence of the vacant basilicas, dived for the best part of ten years into the gloom of the catacombs, the active practical Saint, who was to be especially the Apostle of the large towns of Modern Times.
St. Francis heard a voice which, he thought, told him he was to repair with all becoming magnificence the waste church of San Damiano, the future home of St. Clare and the cradle of her Order. It seemed the wild* est of Quixotic schemes. But swiftly the well-born youth, nursed in the lap of all effeminate luxuries, was seen in the squalid livery of his spouse, Holy Poverty, commanding rather than asking alms through the streets of Assisi, for the desolate sanctuary of San Damiano. He is jeered, hissed, pelted, beaten; but the money comes. He carries stones in his lap and hods of lime on his shoulders, and, in spite of all gainsaying, San Damiano rises in spacious beauty and ornate completeness like an exhalation from the ground. St. Philip chooses for himself a poor contracted church, " small and ruinous " are the words by which his biographer describes it, hard by one of the homes of the poor Clares at Rome, which itself at last becomes incorporated with his own edifice. One morning, as if in whim, he orders the whole church to be thrown down. Another morning, he has taken up his chalice in the sacristy at San Girolamo, and is going into the church to say mass. Suddenly he turns to some one, and bids him go the VaUicella, and say to Matteo of Castello, the architect, who is standing among the rubbish-heaps of the old church, that he is not to mark out the limits of the new one till Philip has said mass and come to the ground himself. When the Saint arrives, the architect draws the line as far as he thinks the church ought to go. " Draw it further still," cries the Saint The architect obeys, and stops again. " Further still," repeats the Saint. A third time the architect draws the line, and stops. " Still further," says the Saint The architect draws the line; he says not a word; he wonders at the imprudent magnificence of Philip's dream; but he draws the line, and this time does not dare to stop. He is passing oyer a certain spot; there is nothing to mark it, but Philip sees a heavenly light upon it t€ Stop there, and dig," says the holy Father. They did so, and came upon an old foundation, out of whose abundant materials a great portion of the new fabric was raised. Philip had no money, and, strange to say, he would not ask for any; and he mortified severely those of his children who strove by ways of human prudence to raise a building fund. Men threw stones and shot with cross-bows at the workmen. Everything seemed against him. But the money came, and the persecution ceased; huge sums were lavished upon the new church; he was an old man, and so he " made a bargain," it was his own phrase, with the Madonna, that he should not die till the church was covered in. To this day it goes in Rome by the very descriptive name of The New Church.
His sojourn in the desert over, the next task of St, Francis is the call of his Apostles, whom in the characteristic spirit of his age he styled the Cavaliers of his Round Table, as though he were another king Arthur by the grassy shores of the Eden and the Eamont. He goes to stay in the house of his worldly friend Bernardo da Quintavalle. He sleeps in the same room with him. His host pretends to be asleep, that by the light of the lamp he may see what Francis does. The Saint, thinking himself unobserved, gets up and begins his prayer; it lasts till dawn, with many strange palpitations of his heart and liftings up of his body. His prayer is only, " Deus meus et Omnia — My God and my All," repeated the whole night through. It is Bernardo's call; he gets up, sells all, gives it to the poor, and follows St Francis. Pietro of Cataneo goes to the church; a missal is opened at random; the chance lights on the words, " Let him renounce himself, and take up his cross and follow Me." It is Pietro's vocation; he sells all for the poor, and follows Francis. Egidio of Assisi is interiorly called to follow St. Francis; but he knows not where he is, he knows not of his little cabin in the plain of Rivo Torto. He goes to hear mass at St. George's, and, leaving the city, he comes to a spot where three roads branch off:
Or MODERN TIMES.
< c Lord, if this is my vocation," he prays, "lead me by the right way." He meets St Francis, who says to him, " Brother! take off thy cloak, and give it to that poor woman in the road!" Without a word Egidio does so: he has given up all; that cloak was to him the unmended nets of the Apostles; he has followed St Francis. Such was the style of the vocations of the first Franciscans. St Philip too had his Apostles to call. Tarugi comes to Confession to him to gain the indulgence of Paul IVth's Jubilee. He was a man of uncommon genius, and of high connections, a relative of two Popes. St Philip hears his confession, then leads him to his room, and makes him spend an hour of prayer with him. Tarugi tries to find a vocation to the Capuchins; he returns to St Philip, who dissipates all his objections by his one favourite phrase, " Do not be afraid" — and Tarugi is so utterly his, that at the age of eighty-three, and a cardinal of the Church, he still called himself "Philip's novice." So he left all, and it was much that he left, and followed St Philip. On the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, the Saint went with some of his penitents to the basilica of the Apostle outside the walls. They kneel down to pray; suddenly Costanzo Tassone gets up, and, seizing Baronius by the hand, tells him it is God's will he should follow St Philip. Baronius had wished to be a religious, but at the word he obeys, and becomes a disciple of the Saint. Tommaso Bozio of Gubbio comes to Rome to study; he gets to know St. Philip; he is called; he sells his library for the poor, cuts himself off from his angry father, and makes himself a son of Philip. Antonio Gallonio is walking through the streets of Rome; suddenly he comes upon a priest with a crowd of young men at his heels. Antonio, himself a youth, stops, and stands on one side to look at this strange man and his retinue; St Philip smiles upon him, calls him to his side, and Antonio is numbered among his Apostles. Pietro Consolini of Monte Leone assisted at the exercises of the Oratory at San Giovanni dei Fiorentini. He afterwards got an introduction to St Philip; no sooner had the holy Father set eyes upon him than he said, with a smile of affectionate welcome, "Now then, my son, you must become one of us." Pietro hesitated. Philip " suddenly," I am quoting the words of Consolini's Life, st and without giving Pietro any notice of his intention, had him proposed and accepted by the Fathers as a member of the Congregation of the Oratory." Astonishment was Pietro's first feeling; a strange joy his second. He consented, and asked leave to go home and bid his relatives good-bye. But, no! he too was to let the dead bury their dead; and so he stayed by St Philip's side. Giuliano Maccaluffi of Forli had got leave from his confessor to join the Capuchins, and their provincial had already accepted him. He made bold to go to St Philip to get his blessing. The Saint fixed his eyes upon him, and said, " Take off your fariola, and serve God in the Congregation." The young man's heart was instantaneously changed, and he became an Oratorian lay-brother. There was a young noble, named Flaminio Ricci; he was in the household of a Cardinal at Rome. Twice, while he was at prayer, he thought he heard a voice say to him, "Veni, sequere Me — Come, follow thou Me." One day he was taking his usual ride through the streets of Rome, when he met Philip, whom he did not even know by sight "The man of God," writes the author of Flaminio's Life, " fixed his eyes upon Flaminio, and, with a voice of inspiration, said to him, 'Come, follow thou Me.' At the sound of these thrilling words the youth was completely won, and without a moment's hesitation he offered himself to follow the Saint." — Do we not tremble when we think of Whom and of what call this was so startling an imitation? Such was the style of the vocations of the first Oratoriansj
Si Francis was a poet; so was St Philip. The way in which animals knew, and loved and obeyed St Francis was renewed in St Philip. Dogs detached themselves from their masters and followed him. Little birds fluttered round his face, and sang in his ear, and went and came at his bidding. St Francis, soon after his return from Damietta, set about mortifying himself and his disciples, by dressing himself up " in a tunic of the finest texture, with a hood behind fashionably reaching to his middle, and a broad and rich frill in front, his head tossed up towards the sky, his voice loud and imperious, and his gait like that of a dancing-master." And all because Brother Elias had been more particular about the niceness of his habit, than became a poor Franciscan. To quote only one of a score of ready parallels, we read that St Philip wore the fur pelisse which Cardinal Alfonso Gesualdo had given him, for a whole month, and this from the mere love of mortifying himself: and "in order," says his biographer, " that every one might see that he wore a fur pelisse, he used to walk in it with a grave and stately pace, and looked round upon himself with an air of admiration, as if he had been a peacock; and all this, like another Simone Salo, for the mere purpose of being made game of by all who saw him."
St Francis enjoined a peculiar style of preaching on his disciples, and made much of it: so did St Philip, and his style had all the Franciscan peculiarity. The Franciscan movement has often, and for obvious reasons, been called the Methodist movement of the Middle Ages; its reality, energy, straightforwardness, simplicity, popular manners, and, above all, determined earnestness of heart-religion make good the parrallel, for we can well afford to give heresy its due. St Philip's Oratory, with its crowded prayer-meetings, its vernacular hymns, its freedom of popular devotions, its hot and fluent but ineloquent preaching, its fervour drawn from personal influence rather than gorgeous ritual, the perpetual missionary freshness of its exciting variety of spiritual exercises, has already suggested to men, what 'may most good-naturedly be adopted by ourselves, the likeness of infectious Methodism, (though Methodism is only the representative of a fact, the Oratory of a principle); and this even though Orartorians be not, like the Franciscans, confined by rule to wooden candlesticks and the bare whitewash of unadorned churches. The distinctive quietness and simplicity of the Institutes of St. Francis or St. Philip are something Catholic, marking off Catholics as such, from the impetuous sons of heresy or schism. In this respect there can of course be no parallel between the spirit of St. Philip and that of Wesley or Whitfield. Art is said to have risen round the Porziuncula of St. Francis, and made itself a special school: so Philip's room was the haunt of painters and musicians of Borne. Music was the soul of the Oratory, and Palestrina was Philip's penitent, and died in his embrace. He too had his views of art, and he farthered them, in his quiet way. St. Francis is a Confessor in the Church, so is St. Philip; and yet both had done their best for the crown of martyrdom. St. Francis flew on the wings of exulting hope, to the battlefields of the Saracens, to shed his blood for Christ;
OP MODERN TIMES.
nay, he broke daringly into the camp of the Soldan in search of his hardy crown. But the will of God drove him back on the Europe that had so much need of him. So Philip longed for the Indies, that he might shed his blood beneath the tomahawk of a savage, or on a Japanese cross. He caused some of his penitents to be ordained priests, and all was ready for starting. It needed the appearance and voice from Heaven of him, who alone of the Apostles was but a martyr in desire, and of whom his dear Master had said, " What if I will have him to remain till I come," to certify to St. Philip that his Indies were within the circuit of the walls of Rome.
I have still one more point; but it is rather a point of contrast than of resemblance, only that it is a contrast of such sort that.it does really heighten the simihtude. We have seen that it was no trifling part of St Philip's mission to preach perfection to all classes of society, and in all its varying circumstances. It is his most distinctive work, just as it was the great feature in our Blessed Lord's teaching. Now, from what we have said of the Middle Ages, and from the very nature of the case, it would seem as if this function of St. Philip could find no parallel whatever in the mission of St Francis. But this is in reality far from being the truth; the substance of the work presents the closest of all the parallels between the two Saints; the manner of doing it the most distinct of the contrasts. St Philip carried his hidden wisdom into all classes, cemented his vast and various confraternity of Christian perfection, formed a world-wide school of it, with no poetic badge or romantic singularity. It was a sort of holy freemasonry. This was in accordance with the modern spirit and modern ways of thinking. In 1221, his order founded, St. Francis saw that a far wider work of evangelization lay before them. It took the shape of the genius of his times. All the world was to be one universal Franciscan order. The chivalrous young noble, the poor artisan, the wandering troubadour, the seneschal at the castle, the serf in the field, the woodman in the forest, the fisherman on the sea, the sacristan of the parish church, the high-born maid, the pilgrim of the Holy Land, the soldier in the ranks, the greyhaired parents of all estates, the child at the cathedral school, the swineherd in the oak-woods, the aldermen of the towns, the professors in their chairs, the emperors and kings upon their thrones, and the cardinals whom Innocent III., the patron of St Francis, had just clothed in the bright hues of martyrdom — all were to be Franciscans, and to follow Franciscan perfection in the world. The Code of the Order of Penance was published; and the will of Francis was done. The whole of mediaeval society resolved itself into an uncloistered and unvowed company of Franciscans. A Protestant writer says of this Third Order *, " Rapid as may have been the corruption and decline of that estate, it would be mere prejudice or ignorance to deny that it sustained an important office in the general advancement of civilization and of truth. In the times of Francis himself and of his immediate successors, the Franciscan cord, the emblem of the restraint in which the soul of man is to hold the beast to which it is wedded, was to be seen on countless multitudes; in the market-place, in the universities, in the tribunals, and even on the throne." You see St Francis did what was St Philip's distinctive work; only he did it in the mediaeval way. In both it was the.spirit of love in2 its purest and most vehement workings. The society of St Francis was called the Seraphic Order; and with St. Philip, love was his distinguishing grace, his weapon with sin, his influence with the world; and in lieu of a body of written statutes, it was the acknowledged tradition of the Congregation which he founded, and its sole permanence and life.
An observation of some importance rises out of what has just been said* Influence is exercised in the world in different ways. Sometimes men gather their intentions and their power together, and incorporate them in a visible system; and then, by the grace of God, and the persistency of their own clear and definite wills, they animate the system, and make it tell, as a momentum from without, upon the world, with its will or against its will. This is mostly, though not always, the case with the founders of religious orders; as with St. Ignatius, and his wonderful Society, and so also with the great Benedictine scheme of monastic legislation. Then again there are men who do not gather their specialty up in any such cognizable way, men whose work is more general, whose spirit is more universal, and by its very penetrativeness blends with other influences, and is lost to sight, readily foregoing its claims to the praise or gratitude of men. Their work is more hidden, because their spirit is in all works. They do not get the credit of it, neither do they desire it, but so it is. Thus St Dominick's was a definite influence in the Middle Ages. It acted on the world, and most blessedly, from without, from a visible focus of power and heat It had its own ascertainable shape and features, and men knew it when they saw it. It was essentially local, however numerous its localities might be, and his Third Order,
H unlike that of St. Francis, partook of the same character of locality. St Francis, by means of his Third Order, exercised a more extensive as well as a different kind of influence. St. Dominick, when the two Saints met at Rome, would fain have had the two orders amalgamated; but St. Francis had the clearer vision then, and stedfastly declined. In like manner St. Ignatius asked St Philip to coalesce with him; but the holy Father would not His influence was to be of a different kind. He sent Ignatius his first Italian novices; he was a portion, and no mean portion, of the life of all the religious orders in Rome. His specialty was not tied up in a system. What he bequeathed to his own Congregation, which was itself but one of many things which emanated from him, was not so much a Rule, as a Spirit; so that when an Oratory loses its freshness, it must die out, as if by the common law of evaporation. Neither can it be a stereotyped impression of any past state of things; for, as a spirit, though distinctive, it takes its modification from the circumstances in which it finds itself. It is a soul without a body; circumstances are its body. This is its characteristic. Its power of work is in this.
No one can say, in St Philip's case, any more than St. Francis's, what his influence has been upon the Church, nor how far, nor in how many directions it has gone. In our reading it comes upon us unexpectedly over and over again. Ceylon belongs to him. Mexico is covered with his houses. South America has had no little of its religious life from his children. Portugal and its colonies have felt him. His name has been a talisman in the religious society of Spain, and the fervour of his children undecaying there. The cities of Italy and Sicily are still full of him. Poland was marked by singular devotion to him. If it be riot the fault of his worthless children, England will begin to know him. This is his direct influence. Take one specimen of Ms indirect influence. There is not a confessional in the length and breadth of God's Church, which is not more or less beneath the control of the kindly, forbearing and equitable theology of St. Alphonso. Yet no one can fail to see how completely that dear Saint was a pupil of the Oratory, He went to confession to Oratorians; he hung about the house of the Oratory, like one in love with it and charmed to it; he was a member of the Oratorium Parvum; he made a vow to become an Oratorian. It was not God's will. Indeed his vocation was plainly not Oratorian. Yet is it no dishonour to that blessed Saint to say, that he was part and parcel of St. Philip's influence.
I do not know, my Brethren, how you may feel about it; but to my mind there is an especial charm, a peculiar beauty in the Modern Times, which no other age of the Church can shew. The States, which for their good were tied to the Church, have drifted away from her, and meddle no longer with the singularity of her ecclesiastical majesty. The spiritual empire of Rome is a more visible thing in the world than before, and such is its intrinsic beauty, that the more visible it is, the more captivating does it become. The power of the* Church to punish heresy and restrain opinion by any other than spiritual pains has passed away; and she is free and disencumbered to enter into the arena of human opinions, and there make intellectual proof of the power of faith divine. No royal courtesies, no baronial patronages, wrap her round, or hide her from men's eyes with the graceless folds of their motley splendour. O look well upon her! the athlete of God in these turbulent and changeful days! Whose heart is not stirred, whose pulses are not quickened at the sight? And it is upon the eve of these her pure and unmistakeahly spiritual virtues that the loving choice of God has elected our lot The present, not the past, has the unutterable dearness to us of being God's appointment for us. He who knew us by His foresight, and loved us in His knowledge of us, has chosen for us. O worshippers of the past! think well of this, learn reverence from the thought, and recognise and love the choice which God has chosen for you. You are where you are — you have been born when you were born — because God saw it was, for you, the season wherein to save your souls, wherein to save your fellowmen, wherein to love and glorify Himself.
I must thank you for the patience with which you have listened to me all this while. I have now finished this portion of my task. I repeat — The true Idea of St. Philip is, that he was an especial likeness of Jesus granted to the Church, as a representative of the Modern Times; and that his match and brother in the Church was St. Francis. I hope that nothing I have said has been in any way displeasing to my holy Father St. Philip, nor to the great patriarch of Assisi, to whom I have owed so much, and whom I have loved so very tenderly for more years even than I have been a sheep of the one True Fold.
Footnotes
Chapter 2 of 3