Chapter III. Dogma the Source of Devotion

You adore that which you know not. We adore that which we know. S. JOHN iv. 22.

Jesus is the Book of Life, and in Him ' are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,' of Him alone all the mysteries of the Kingdom of God may be learnt; not only because He is the Divine Teacher, but because they are all contained in the knowledge of Himself. When He said, 'I am the Way, tli£ Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father but by Me,' He declared that all truth was contained in Himself; and when the Apostle said that he judged himself to * know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified,'1 he meant the same thing, namely, that he who knows Jesus Christ aright knows the whole Revelation of God. As the radiance which flows from the sun is inseparable from the sun, so is the Revelation of God the radiance which flows from the Person of Jesus Christ. I have said

1 1 Cor. ii. 2.

that the Sacred Heart is the key or interpretation of the Incarnation of the Eternal Word. Any one who desires to know the mystery of the Incarnation — and in that mystery of the Incarnation to know, I will say, the whole Science of God — may learn it by reading the Sacred Heart of our Divine Kedeemer. And they who know that Science of God know also what I may call the science of man — that is, of our human nature — in Him and in ourselves; and they know likewise the relations between God and man and between us men, each to the other. And in these things are summed up the whole revelation of God. They who know these three things fully will know all that God has revealed for our salvation.

Now our Divine Lord, speaking to the woman of Samaria, said, ' You adore that which you know not;' because they were an idolatrous people, of mixed race, partly of Israel, partly of the nations.brought and planted in a portion of the Promised Land. They had intermarried with the people of Israel, they had received the books of the Pentateuch, and they had a sort of fragmentary knowledge of the old revelation; but they did not rightly know the True God; and so much as they did know of the True God, they did not know truly. Therefore they could not worship Him ' in spirit and in truth.' For this cause our Divine Lord said, ' You worship that which you know not;' and He then further said, ' We adore that which we know, for salvation is of the Jews.' The full and pure light of revelation is in Jerusalem. The true knowledge of the True God is with us; and yet the time is coming when ' they that adore shall adore neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but everywhere in spirit and in truth.'

From these words I draw one conclusion, namely, that knowledge is the first and vital condition of all true worship. You will remember how S. Paul at Athens found an altar ' to the unknown God,' and how he commended the people for their intentions of piety, but reproved them for their ignorance. He said, ' Him whom you ignorantly worship, Him I declare unto you.' Without knowledge there can be no adoration ' in spirit and in truth;' and just in the measure of our knowledge will our adoration be more or less perfect, that is, intelligent and spiritual. If our knowledge be full and perfect, so will our adoration be. From this let us draw two consequences, and then pass on.

The first is this. How great is the superstition of those who for centuries have pleased themselves by accusing the Catholic Church of teaching that 'ignorance is the mother of devotion.' The other consequence is: that the mother of all true knowledge relating to God, and therefore the mother of all true worship, is the Holy Catholic Church alone. Is it not a masterpiece of craft that the father of lies should have so darkened the understandings of our adversaries as to lead them into the profound superstition of believing that we keep people in ignorance in order to make them devout? My purpose, then, will he to trace out the connection between what the world scornfully calls dogma and devotion, or the worship of God ' in spirit and in truth.'

1. Now, first of all, let us see what is dogma. In the mouth of the world it means some positive, imperious, and overhearing assertion of a human authority, or of a self-confident mind. But what does it mean in the mouth of the Church? It means the precise enunciation of a divine truth, of a divine fact, or of a divine reality fully known, so far as it is the will of God to reveal it, adequately defined in words chosen and sanctioned by a divine authority.

It is the precise enunciation of a divine truth or of a divine reality; for instance, the nature and the personality of God, the Incarnation, the coming of the Holy Ghost, and suchlike truths and realities of the mind of God, precisely known, intellectually conceived, as God has revealed or accomplished them. Every divine truth or reality, so far as God has been pleased to reveal it to us, casts its perfect outline and image upon the human intelligence. His own mind, in which dwells all truth in all fulness and in all perfection, so far as He has revealed of His truth, is cast upon the surface of our mind, in the same way as the sun casts its own image upon the surface of the water, and the disc of the sun is perfectly reflected from its surface. So, in the intelligence of the Apostles, when, by the illumination of the Holy Ghost on the Day of Pentecost, the revelation of God was cast upon the surface of their intellect, every divine truth had its perfect outline and image, not confused, nor in a fragmentary shape, but with a perfect and complete impression. For instance, that God is One in nature; that in God there are Three Persons, and one only Person in Jesus Christ. Next, it is not enough that a truth should be definitely conceived; for if a teacher know the truth, and is not able to communicate it with accuracy, the learner will be but little the wiser. And therefore God, who gave His truth, has given also a perpetual assistance, whereby the Apostles first, and His Church from that day to this, precisely and without erring declare to mankind the truth which was revealed in the beginning; and in declaring that truth the Church clothes it in words, in what we call a terminology: and in the choice of those terms the Church is also guided. There is an assistance, by which the Church does not err in selecting the very language in which to express divine truth. For who does not see that, if the Church were to err in the selection of the words, the declaration of truth must be obscured? We are conscious every day that we know with perfect certainty what we desire to say, but, from the difficulty of finding or choosing our words, we cannot convey our meaning to another. The Church is not a stammerer as we are. The Church of God has a divine assistance perpetually guiding it, to clothe in language, that is, in adequate expression, the divine truth which God has committed to her trust. Therefore a dogma signifies a correct verbal expression of the truth correctly conceived and known. But, lastly, it is not sufficient that it be clearly understood in the intellect and accurately expressed in words, unless the authority by which it is declared shall be divine; because without a divine authority we cannot have a divine certainty; without a divine authority we can have no such assurance that the doctrine which we hear may not be erroneous. The Apostles were such a divine authority, for they spoke in the Name of their Master. Their successor to this day is the Church, which, taken as a whole, has been, by the assistance of the Holy Ghost, promised by our Divine Lord and never absent from it, perpetually sustained in the path of truth, and preserved from all error in the declaration of that truth. Therefore 'He that heareth you heareth Me' is true to this day. He that hears the voice of the Church hears the voice of its Divine Head, and its authority is therefore divine. This, then, is a dogma: a divine truth clearly understood in the intellect, precisely expressed in words and by a divine authority. There are many things which follow from this. First, it proves that the Church of God must be dogmatic: and that any body which is not dogmatic is not the Church of God. Any body or communion that disclaims a divine, and therefore infallible, authority cannot be dogmatic, because-it is conscious that it may err. And therefore the-Catholic Church alone, the Church which is one and undivided throughout the world, united with its centre in the Holy See, — this, and this alone, is a dogmatic Church (as the world reproachfully reminds, us), and on that I build my proof that it alone is the Church of God. A teaching authority which is dogmatic and not infallible is a tyranny and a

G nuisance: a tyranny, because it binds the consciences of men by human authority, liable to err; and a nuisance, because as it may err, in the long-run it certainly will, and ' if the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into the ditch?' We see, then, what dogma means. The Holy Catholic Church always has been and always must be dogmatic. In this, and in no other sense, is it dogmatic; for it delivers nothing to us to be believed except upon divine authority, and that which it so delivers was jevealed by God.

2. Let us next go on to see what is devotion. Devotion, or worship, or adoration is the love and veneration with which we regard God and His Divine Truth. There can be no Divine Truth which ought not to be an object of love and of veneration. Every truth that God has revealed is the word of God; it is the mind of Jesus Christ — it comes to us from a divine voice. How is it possible that we can do otherwise than love and venerate every such divine declaration? If, when a divine truth is declared to us, our hearts do not turn to it, as the eye turns to the light; if there be not in us an instinctive yearning, which makes us promptly turn to the sound of the divine voice, the fault is in our hearts; for just in proportion as we know the truth we shall be drawn towards it. Devotion, therefore, signifies the worship and love which by faith we offer first to God, to the Ever-blessed Trinity, and to the Three Persons one by one. When the Persons are known to us, our relations to those Persons become likewise known, and every relation carries with it duties and prompts us to affections. We shall see hereafter the application of these truths. For the present it is enough to say that, in the measure in which we know the truth, in that measure we shall have the motives of loving and of venerating it.

We may therefore understand the relation between dogma and devotion to be simply in this, that without knowledge we cannot have either a love or a veneration for truth. Our Lord said, ' You adore that which you know not;' and because they knew it not they could not ' adore in spirit and in truth.' S. Paul found some of the disciples who did not so much as know whether there were any Holy Ghost.2 Could they have had any love and veneration for the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, of whose coming, nay, of whose existence, they never heard? We may, indeed, love a person whom we have never seen; because S. Peter says of our Divine Lord, * Whom not having seen you love;'3 but we

2 Acts xix. 2. s 1 S. Peter i. 8.

cannot love anybody of whom we do not know. We may know by hearsay and we may know by faith, and we may love those whom we know by faith and by hearsay; but we cannot love those of whom we never heard. Therefore it is a law of our nature that we can will nothing and can love nothing unless we first know it. The intellect is said in philosophy to carry a light before the will. What is called dogma, or divine truth, must go before all devotion; and in the proportion in which we have the light to know the objects of faith, in that proportion, if we be faithful, devotion will spring up in our hearts. Take this for an example. Our Divine Lord was in the midst of His disciples before He suffered; they knew Him to be ' a Teacher sent from God/ and they venerated and loved Him according to the knowledge which they had of Him and of the perfections of His Person. Peter, by an infused light from God, knew Him to be the ' Christ, the Son of the Living God;' but as yet they none of them knew Him in the fulness of His Godhead. After His Kesurrection they began to know Him as God and as the Redeemer of the world; after His Ascension and the Day of Pentecost they knew Him as the King Eternal, and as their Saviour and Lord, who had redeemed them in His Precious Blood. In the measure in which their knowledge grew, grew also their love and their worship. So that, as a rule, we may say, wherever there is perfect knowledge there will be perfect worship; and wherever the knowledge varies more or less, in that proportion will vary love and veneration. Perfect worship, therefore, is only in the Kingdom of God, where, in the science of the blessed, God and all things are perfectly known, so far as God has willed and the light of glory enables the blessed to understand. But here in this world, in proportion as our faith is perfect, in proportion as we are illuminated with the knowledge of faith, in that proportion we shall love and adore the One God, the Ever-blessed Trinity, Jesus the Incarnate Word, His Blessed Mother, and all His Saints, and all the operations and works of His divine Kingdom upon earth. In the measure of our knowledge all these things will be the objects of devotion.

Let us sum up what I have said in this way. You all know, at least by name, the great book which, next after the Holy Scriptures, the Church has always held in veneration, the Sum of Theology, by the Angelic Doctor S. Thomas Aquinas. And I daresay many of you possess a small book of devotion, beautiful almost beyond compare, called the Paradise of the Christian Soul. Take and set that book by the side of the theology of S. Thomas, and you will find it to be dogma kindled into devotion, the commentary of love and worship upon the science of God and His Saints, beginning with the Ever-blessed Trinity, passing on to the Incarnation, from the Incarnation to the Communion of Saints, and to the presence of our Divine Lord in the Holy Eucharist. All the dogmas of faith are in that book of prayer and praise made one by one an object of devotion. Here, then, is the relation between devotion and dogma. You see, therefore, why it is that the Catholic Church, from the beginning, has been inflexibly firm in maintaining every jot and tittle of its dogma. It is because God has revealed it, and because God has committed it to its custody; because if one jot or one tittle were lost, then the Church of God would lose some object of its devotion. The whole revelation of God, — of the Ever-blessed Trinity, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, of the Maker and the Kedeemer and the Sanctifier; the mysteries of the one uncreated nature and of the three consubstantial, co-equal, coeternal Persons; of the glory of God, of the mutual knowledge and love of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, — this is the first great and divine reality, the object of our divine worship. To know and to adore the Ever-blessed Trinity is to adore God ' in spirit and in truth.' Next, the Incarnation of the Son of God: the two whole and perfect natures of Godhead and Manhood united in one only Divine Person, the Godhead assuming our humanity, the humanity deified by assumption into God — our manhood become the Manhood of God; the Precious Blood, the Blood of God, which redeemed the world; the Sacred Heart, the Heart of God, which loves us with an infinite love, because it is divine: all this is to be worshipped with the divine adoration due to the Eternal Word. Here is a manifold dogma, from which the Catholic Church has never suffered the diminution of an iota. All through the first centuries of its history heretics assailed the Ever-blessed Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son. The Church stood in its majestic immobility, like the light that never wavers, casting off to the right and to the left the erroneous conceptions and the false doctrines of men. Again, because the Son of God is man, and because the Infant born in Bethlehem was a Divine Person, the Immaculate Mary was declared to be the Mother of God: infinitely below God, because she is a creature;

immensely above all creatures, because she is the Mother of God; her dignity exceeding that of all the creatures that God has ever made; her union with Him the closest that can be conceived, save only the union of Godhead and Manhood in the one Person of her Divine Son; her sanctity surpassing that of all the creatures of His hands: immaculate in her conception, and sanctified with an immensity of grace. Here is a dogma, and from this the Catholic Church has never suffered one hair's-breadth of deviation. Again, the Communion of Saints, the mystical Body of Christ, the Head and the members; the intercommunion between earth and heaven, between the Church that is visible here in warfare and the Church that is triumphant beyond the grave; the intercession of the Saints on high, the invocation of their prayers by us on earth, — these again are dogmas; they are the outlines of divine realities. Once more, the institution of the mystery of the Ever-blessed Eucharist, the Keal Presence of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar, the true and proper and propitiatory Sacrifice of the Holy Mass, — all these things, again, are dogmas; they are divine facts, divine realities, and therefore objects of our love.

And, lastly, the divine order of the Holy Catholic Church, of which the Incarnate Son is Head at the right hand of His Father, and His Vicar, or His visible representative, is Head on earth; one, as He is one, numerically and absolutely; undivided and incapable of division, as the living body of a man, quickened by one life, from which if any member be cut off that member dies, but the body still lives on; that one Church of God, imperishable to the end of time, because the Head in heaven is Eternal Life, and the Holy Ghost is the Lord and Life-giver: infallible, both in knowledge and in utterance, because He dwells in it, and because the Spirit of Truth for ever guides it; because the illumination of the Day of Pentecost has never been overcast; for the noontide light of the revelation of God has stood still in all its splendour, without change or shadow, from that hour to this — all this is dogma, radiating from the one revealed truth of God, expressed in words chosen by divine assistance. You confess all this in the Apostles' Creed, which you repeat day by day. We say it in the Nicene Creed in the Holy Mass, and in the Athanasian Creed, which we love more and more in these last days, because the world has risen up against it, and men of faint heart are for letting it go. All these things are dogmas. They are the truths and realities of God's Kingdom, for which the Church has contended all along the line of its history in one ceaseless conflict. The war began with the Ever-blessed Trinity, and is carried on every day now against the infallibility of the Head of the Church. And between these two extremes there never has been a moment when one or more, sometimes all, the doctrines of the Holy Catholic Faith have not been in controversy. They are the cause of conflict between the world and the Church of God; but the Church has stood firm and immovable, never making any compromise; never, for the sake of gaining even a nation, departing from a single jot or tittle of the truth. If it could gain the conversion of a whole people by the cession of an iota of truth, it would refuse to cede it. Why is it so inflexible? or, as the world says, why is it so extreme? Because on the dogma of truth depends all divine worship and all devotion of the heart. What is the adoration of the Ever-blessed Trinity but the nearest approach which we here can make to the vision of God? We see and adore Him by faith. What is the adoration of the Incarnate Word in the tabernacle but the worship we shall give when we see Him as He is? You bow down at the Holy Mass, because you know

He is there. You adore Him in the Holy Sacrifice, because you know that the Oblation which He offered upon Calvary is there continued and applied to you. When the Blessed Sacrament is upon the altar you bow down before It, because you know It is the Presence of Jesus Himself; and when It is lifted up in Benediction you kneel for His blessing, as if He lifted up His hands upon His disciples. When you receive Him in Holy Communion, and go back in silence to your place, giving thanks that He has come into your soul, — these are divine realities. Speak them, and they are dogmas. Dogmas are truths, and truths are divine; for they are the mind and actions of God Himself. The world scornfully calls these things dogmas, because it does not believe in a Divine Teacher or a Divine Presence. But we know these things to be realities of the Kingdom of God; and therefore we say, 'You adore that which you know not; we adore that which we know.'

Now let me draw a picture before you. Three hundred years ago, in every country in Europe, there were cathedrals, abbeys, minsters, churches, and sanctuaries consecrated to the worship of the Ever-blessed Trinity; and in those cathedrals and abbeys and minsters and churches there were altars of the

Blessed Sacrament and of the Blessed and Immaculate Mother of God, and altars of the Saints, setting forth to us visibly the dogmas we have been reciting. There was then no jangling or controversy about the articles of faith, for all men believed the same thing; all worshipped at one altar, as the children of a common family and sons of a common Father. They had one Lord, and they were disciples of one Divine Teacher. Days they were of sweetness and peace and unity, in which the old prepared themselves to die in the full confidence that the transit from this world to the world unseen was a gentle passage from mortality to life eternal, up the luminous path which faith laid open before them; when too the little children in our green hamlets and in the woodlands of England and in their lowly cottages had the beads of our Blessed Mother in their hands. They learned dogma from their infancy without knowing it, the dogma of the five joyful mysteries and of the five sorrowful and the five glorious mysteries of Mary, in which is contained the whole revelation of God Incarnate; they assembled, day by day and week by week, before the altar of the humble parish church, to pray together as one flock, in one fold, under one Shepherd. A sweet vision of peace, but how shattered and gone! Where is it now? Look to Germany, in which the riot and the rout began, in which the first false apostles arose: it had not then heen afflicted with the desolation of its Thirty Years' War; it was fertile and peaceful. And what came afterwards? Heresy, bloodshed, civil war, the betrayal of brother by brother, a multitude of sorrows; a reign of death, famine, pestilence, the utter wreck of nations, which stamped upon Ger-many deep and indelible scars, visible to this hour. From what did it all come? Because the unity of the faith had been destroyed, heresy began to make havoc of its people, unity of worship was broken down, and therefore unity of charity was shattered to pieces. Men began to rise against each other in contentious strife of tongues; they ended in bloodshed. What is it now? Look at that land in which the first apostle of the new Gospel arose. We are told that, in the chief city of that people, not two men in a hundred enter a place of worship. What belief in the dogmas of Christianity remains? The Christian Eevelation itself has been rejected! What belief remains in the Holy Scriptures as an inspired book? Here and there one may believe it. In that land, the first-born of the Reformation, which first broke the unity of faith and worship, dogma and devotion and Christianity itself are gone down into the outer darkness. At this day the special animosity of these men is directed against the Sacred Heart and all who adore it. I have no will to say anything which shall have even the sound of wounding any susceptibilities at home, in England. I have always said that the English people never rejected the Catholic faith: they were robbed of it. I repeat it now. The English people did they knew not what, under the pernicious guidance of bad men. But it has been almost as disastrous as if they had known what they did; for where is the unity of the faith in England now? where is unity of worship? How many sects and sub-sects and minor sects and sections over again do we not see, crumbling perpetually from the landslip which fell from the unity of the Church three hundred years ago. What a wasting away of Christian faith and Christian piety do we see round about us. Here we are, in a city of three millions. God only knows how many this day have set their foot in any place of Christian worship. All the places of worship in London would not contain more than a third of its population, nay, not a third of this teeming multitude. And where in this wilderness of sin do the other two millions wander up and down? How are they living? How will they die? This would not have been, had there not arisen in the midst of us proud bad men, who lifted up their heel against the divine authority of the Church of God; rejected its teaching, destroyed the unity of the faith, separated this island from the unity of Christendom, shut out the influx of the divine voice by which ' the truth as it is in Jesus' has been sustained from the Day of Pentecost until this hour; and by destroying faith they have made worship impossible.

And when I say these things I can never forget Ireland by our side — Ireland, poor, outcast, despised, down-trodden, hunted from field to field, from river to river, from mountain to mountain. But up in the mountain, and by the river-side, and on the lonely moss, the Holy Mass was offered; in the poor rude earth-hovels the beads of our Blessed Mother were said; out among the woods and the bogs the Sacraments of Penance and of Holy Communion were given; and dogma and devotion have lived on, fervent and imperishable.

Devotion thus preserves dogma, as dogma generates and quickens devotion. Let us come back to England. Is there, then, no perfect faith, no perfect worship among us? Yes; God be praised. Half a century ago it was, indeed, out of sight. For three hundred years the Holy Mass was said in the Catacombs. To-day it is visible and audible: it may be seen and it may be heard. It is in this place, it is throughout England, in all the churches and sanctuaries, where the whole dogma of faith which England received from S. Gregory the Great through its first Archbishop of Canterbury is still inviolate. The faith of the Apostle of England, undiminished in jot or tittle, has descended as our heirloom from century to century; and with it the whole Christian worship, and all its constellation of devotions to the Sacred Humanity, to the Five Sacred Wounds, to the Most Precious Blood, to the Sacred Heart, — all these have come down as a stream of light mingled with fire in the midst of England. Here, in the midst of all the confusions and conflicts which are perpetually surging round about; debates in the highest places of this land how divine worship is to be regulated; controversies between the chief pastors,— so the Law runs, — of the English people and those who ought to be their docile sons, as to what is to be worshipped, and how, — in the midst of all this, the altar of the true Tabernacle stands immovable, and the Lamb of God is ''flaily offered in the beauty and silence of Eternal Truth. I have no desire to dwell on these things. They are profoundly mournful: the just chastisement of a great revolt;

the humiliation of human error once set up in pride, now with its face upon the earth. Let me therefore sum up all that I have said.

The Sacred Heart is the key of the Incarnation; the Incarnation is the treasure-house in which are all the truths of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Incarnation casts off two rays of light: on the one side, the mystery of the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar; on the other, the devotion due to the Blessed Mother of God. Any one who knows the Sacred Heart aright will know, as I said in the beginning, the whole science of God and the whole science of man, and the relations between God and man and between man and man. These truths are the dogma of dogmas, the treasures hid in the Sacred Heart, the tabernacle of God.

Make yourselves, then, disciples of the Sacred Heart; learn to know it, and that knowledge will never pass away. Faith will pass into vision, but dogma is eternal; dogma is the truth impressed upon the intelligence by faith. The obscurity of faith will pass into the light of vision; but that impression of the truth upon the glorified intelligence will abide for ever when Truth Himself shall be seen face to face.

Love, then, the Sacred Heart, and that love will H pass into the Beatific Union; for charity is eternal, and the love of the Sacred Heart is the union of our faint weak charity with the fervent charity, divine and human, of Jesus Christ our Lord. Adore the Sacred Heart, and it will pass into the worship of the eternal throne, where there will he prayer no longer, and reparation no more; but praise for ever, and thanksgiving to all eternity.

Do not think that the science of the Sacred Heart is too deep for you. It is the science of the poor and the science of the little child; they, by an infused light and by an implicit knowledge, know the Sacred Heart even more perfectly and more precisely than the cultivated intellect which, in its cultivation, is cold. Therefore it is a science within the reach of all; and it comes more by love than by light, more by prayer than by study; most of all it comes by communion with the Precious Body and Blood of Jesus Himself.

Make yourselves, then, disciples of His Sacred Heart. Learn to love and to be like it; and in the measure in which you are like it you will know it; and in the measure in which you know it, you will love it; and it will be in you as rest and sweetness and light and strength. You will walk with Jesus in this world as the two disciples walked with Him to Emmaus, but your eyes will not be holden: and your heart will burn within you as He talks with you by the way; and when you see Him in eternity He will not vanish out of your sight, but you will ' see Him as He is,' and He will abide with you for ever.

IV.