Chapter 3. The Virtue of Faith
Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of Chrttt,
We have defined grace to be fi gift of God, infused by the Holy Ghost into the soul; supernatural, that is, not due to us, nor contained within the limits of our natural perfection, but superadded by the free sovereignty and love of God, through the merits of Jesus Christ. The rational soul of man is the dwelling-place of grace We are thereby sanctified, united with God, and by perseverance made perfect. Such is the nature of grace. It is the spiritual work of the Holy Ghost present in us Now, the first of all the gifts or operations of grace in us is faith. I purpose therefore to take this first in order, and hereafter we will go on to hope, which springs from faith, and to charity, which springs from faith and hope; then to our justification — that is, our union with God and His indwelling in the soul; and afterwards to the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost
Saint Paul says to the Eomans that u Faith cometh oy hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ." * In order to understand the meaning of these words, turn
*Rom.x. 17. (•0)
to the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. He begins in the opening of that chapter by saying: " Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that are not seen as yet," — that is to say, the things which are future and out of sight are the subject-matter of faith: and faith is that inward act of the soul whereby we realize the things which we hope 'or, and anticipate the things which we do not see. He then draws out in that eleventh chapter the catalogue of the saints of God, and shows how it was by faith that the servants of God in the Old Testament pleased God. " Without faith," he declares, " it is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and is a rewarder to them that seek Him." He then goes on to say Abel offered a better sacrifice to God than Cain, through faith. Henoch walked with God through faith. Noe for one hundred and twenty years built the ark in faith. Abraham went out from his own country in faith. And so through the whole roll and lineage of the saints and martyrs from the beginning, faith in God and in the world to come was the law of their life and of their salvation. They served God not by sight, nor by the light of nature, but by the light of God, by the gift of the Holy Ghost. By faith, then, we must know and serve Him, for " Without faith it is impossible to please God."1
From the beginning, the Holy Spirit of God, as we have already seen, has dwelt in every created soul and wrought in every man born into this world. No souJ will be cast out of the peace of God into eternal darkness which might not, if it had only put forth the will have dwelt with God forever. God casts no one away. He deprives no soul whom He has made of the grace of salvation. Even throughout the heathen world the Spirit of God is present working in the hearts of men. If they fail of eternal life, the failure is in their own will, and not in the will of God.
From the beginning of the world, the Spirit of God has been leading men on towards faith and the knowledge of God, therefore towards eternal life. Since the coming of the Son of God by incarnation into the world He has been drawing men towards the full revelation of the kingdom of God, of justification, and of incorporation with Himself in His mystical Body. To the question, Quid est fides—" What is faith?" — Saint Thomas answers, Credere quod non vides — " To believe what you do not see." We will take this as our definition of faith, under limitations which 1 will show hereafter.
Now, there are three things which are essential to divine faith. First, it is a gift of God, by the grace of the Holy Ghost. Secondly, the matter or material object of faith is the truth revealed by God. Thirdly, the reason why we believe it, or the formal object of faith, is the authority of God Himself. These are the three elements which constitute divine faith.
- Now, first of all, faith, as Saint Paul tells the Ephesians,* is a gift of God; and this he says lest any shall ascribe his salvation to himself; lest he should conceive that his knowledge of God comes from the light of his own intellect, or that his moral superiority over *Eph.U. a the heathen comes from culture and not from grace The Apostle says, " By grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves — it is the gift, of God, lest any man glory: " that is to say, though faith is the most rational and the most strictly intellectual act, though it is the highest intellectual act of which the reason is capable, it is not an act of its own power alone Reason goes before faith, and accompanies it and pervades it always. The prelude or preamble of faith is a process of reason. But the last act of reason must be full and complete before the first act of faith can be made. By the last act of reason I mean this: the evidence of Christianity convinces me that it is a divine revelation. And the first act of faith is to say: therefore I believe it. The act of belief contains in it a light of the Holy Spirit of God, illuminating the reason, moving the will, and kindling in the heart a love of the truth. This grace, which God gave in measure throughout tho whole world before the Incarnation, He gives now in fullness to every regenerate child. It is given in Baptism by the infusion of grace into the soul. Faith, hope, and charity are infused into the soul of every baptized infant. As by nature every human soul has reason and memory and will, which three faculties are implanted in the soul by its creation, so faith, hope, and charity are infused into the soul in regeneration by supernatural grace. They thenceforward reside in the soul; and aa we call an infant a rational being because by nature it possesses reason, so we count a baptized infant one of the faithful because it possesses the infused virtue of faith. And this grace of faith, which is in us from our regeneration, is developed by exercise, just as the reason
Tvhieh we have from our birth is developed by culture And as the whole power of numbers lies potentially in the reason of a child, as fire lies in a flint, needing only to be elicited, so in the soul of a regenerate child there is the power of faith, which needs only instruction and exercise to unfold it. Saint Paul speaks of another kind of faith which is a fruit of the Hcly Ghost.* But this is not the theological virtue or power of belief which is infused into all the regenerate; it is a mature habit and pious facility of belief, an habitual consciousness of the presence of God, of the unseen world, of the relation of God to our own soul and our responsibility to Him, of eternity, of judgment, of reward, and of punishment to come. Such, then, is the first element of the virtue of faith — it is a supernatural grace infused into the soul whereby we have the light and the will to believe.
- Secondly, the matter that we believe is the word of God. " Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ." If we believe the word of mau. it is a mere human faith. If we believe the word cf historians, it is still no more than a human faith. We believe because we trust the evidence, or because we trust in historical criticism. Call this evidence, or criticism, or what you will, but faith it is not. Faith springs from a divine grace, and rests upon the word of God. Just as the eye is so formed and fitted that it needs the objects of the visible world to terminate apon, and as light is the condition of sight, so is it with this grace of faith. The unseen world, which containg the objects of faith, is necessary to the exercise of faith, •Gal. v. 23.
and we know them only from the light of the revelation of God. Saint Paul says, in this eleventh chapter of the Hebrews,2 that without faith we should not have known how to please God. The light of reason by itself, indeed, suffices to demonstrate the existence of God as an intellectual problem; but over and above that demonstration comes the light of faith, which lighteth every man that cometh into this world. By this we know that God is, and that He is a Eewarder of men. The creation we might indeed metaphysically reason out; but God has revealed the fact that He made the heaven and the earth. We might indeed, from our moral nature, conceive that we should one day be judged either for punishment or reward, but God has revealed the fact of judgment to come. We should not indeed have known that after death the body would rise again if God had not revealed the fact. From the nature of the human soul and an expectation of the future we might have believed its immortality, but God has revealed that the soul shall never die. We thereby know it by faith. Therefore these great truths and phenomena of the natural order are also part of the revelation of God. But this is not the power, or faculty, or virtue, which we intend when we speak of divine faith. The object of this is not the natural world, but the revelation which God made through Jesus Christ. We speak of the divine truths and di vine facts which have been revealed to us by the coining of the Holy Ghost. We speak of the manifestation of God in the flesh, and of the new creation into which we are elevated by being born again of the -Spirit
Here is the subject-matter of faith, and it is partly written and partly unwritten. We have the record of parts of it in the Holy Scriptures. But the whole world has become the scripture of this word of God. Saint Paul, therefore, in this same place, <?ays: u Whosoever shall call upon the name of tho Lord shall be saved; but how shall they call upon Him in Whom they have not believed, or how shall they believe Him of Whom they have not heard, and how shall they hear without a preacher?" * Wheresoever the Church spread, there the word of God was made known to the nations of the world, and the whole Church throughout the world, from east to west, became as it were one wide scripture of God written on the hearts and in the minds of men. Saint Irenaeus says that many nations ha*d never seen the written Scriptures, but yet had believed the revelation of Jesus Christ, because it was written on their hearts by the Spirit dwelling in them. Therefore the subject-matter of faith is the word, that is, the revealed truth of God. 3. Now there are two things necessary to a doctrine of faith or to an act of Catholic faith. One is, that God shall have revealed unto His Apostles the truth that we believe; and the other is, that His Church should teach it. This, shortly, is the reason why we believe. Every Catholic child is taught to say day by day an act of faith such as this: " O my God, I believe all that Thou hast revealed," for these two reasons, " because Thou art the truth, and canst neither deceive nor be deceived;" or, as Saint Augustine says, " We believe because God is the truth — Deus est veritaa d • Rom. x. 13, 14, 18.
THE VIRTUE OF FAITH. I CC ^7 oerax;" He is the true God, truth Himself, and- He. is veracious and Re cannot deceive us. It is therefore necessary that our faith should terminate upon the authority of God, and if our faith terminates upon the authority of God, it is impossible that we can err. We have an infallible reason for believing, because it is the authority of God Himself Who teaches us what to believe.
And now let us see, in passing, what is the consequence of rejecting this principle. How can they make acts of faith who misinterpret the revelation of God; who criticise it by their own opinions; who twist and turn and torture His revealed word into their own sense? These are not divine acts, but human.; they are acts rather of unbelief than of faith. The word ol God is the word of God only in the sense in which God spoke it. The word of God turned and tortured and twisted by the criticism of the individual mind becomes the word of man — it ceases to be the word of God. How, then, can they make acts of faith who, taking the revelation of God apart from the authority of the Church of God, interpret it for themselves and against the teaching of that authority? The material object of faith ceases to exist. Scripture misinterpreted ceases to be the Scripture. The greatest of modern impostures, and I will say the master error of modem hereiies, is what is paraded as scientific history and scientific criti3ism in the matter of revelation. In what does it consist? I, an uninspired, unaided critic, take these human documents — which in the first place art not inspired, and, next, for the authenticity of which there is no certain guarantee, inasmuch as they have been handed down in various languages and in various lands^ without any responsible custody or witness of their genuine text — nevertheless, I take them in hand, and I interpret them without rule except my own, without a judge except myself, and without a guide except the light of my own understanding; I subject them absolutely to my own criticism; and then, out of an arbitrary and subjective process such as this, I tell the world that the Council of the Yatican erred from the truth, and I tell the whole Church on earth that it has departed from the revelation it received from God. Surely this is a form of insanity. It is a fatuity which has inflated the "men of culture," as they love to be called. It is Gnosticism risen again from the dead. To do this a man ought to be the twelve Apostles or at least the Vicar of Jesus Christ. But this barefaced form of human vain-glory is too manifest to be dangerous to many. A few professors and a handful who worship them are all whom it has led astray.
But there are much more subtile forms and shades of this illusion. I sincerely respect zealous and earnest men who, knowing the Bible to be the word of God and finding it full of light and sweetness, think that it is enough for them to take that divine word alone, and to read it for themselves. They are nearer to the Fountain. There have been doubtless in every age multitudes of humble and pious men who, having been born out of the light of the Catholic faith, and knowing no better, have taken the Bible as their sole rule of life, so far as they could understand it. I sincerely respect all such, and for this reason: they submit themselves with all their heart to every word that thevr can understand in that divine Scripture, and if the);ould know it better and understand it more fully, they would obey it with all their sincerity and all their soul. But wo must not forget the falseness of the principle in the goodness of these people. The principle is visibly erroneous. The endless contradictions and the steady diminution of truth among those who go by that principle would be sufficient to show that it is not God's way of faith. Unless the divine Scripture be read with the light of the day of Pentecost upon its page, there is no divine and unerring interpretation. For there is no channel through which that light descends to us but only the one Church of God. From no other interpreter can we learn the true meaning of Holy Scripture. Through no channel but the Church alone can we receive the perfect material object of faith — that is, the whole revelation of Jesus Christ. A fragmentary Christianity may be put together by texts of Scriptun truly understood; but the whole revelation of Pentecost can be known only in and through the Church A correct interpretation of many parts of Holy Scripture may be attained without the guidance of the Church, but a divine certainty that such interpretations are correct cannot be attained without it. The Church received the interpretations of the Book before the Book was written; for it had the whole revelation in custody before the Scriptures were committed to its charge. It is the sole witness and guardian both of the meaning and of the Book, and it is itself both the interpreter and the interpretation;' present, visible, and perpetual.
But there is, again, a still more subtile form of thii dependence upon human authority and collective private judgment. Let me suppose a thing that has hitherto never been, a thing which it is every day more manifestly certain can never come to pass. Let us suppose that the Church of England — so called — were perfectly unanimous in the doctrines which it teaches. I would to God it were so. I lament over the steady disintegration, the rapid dissolution, the certain approaching disappearance off the face of England of that almost venerable fragment of our ancient Christianity. Suppose for a moment that there were in its teaching even of the truth, I will say of the Holy Trinity, or of the Incarnation, a perfect unanimity. Would any man living believe in its teaching because of its authority? Would he believe that a doctrine emanating from an even unanimous decision of that body was an infallible decision? No man would believe it. And for this reason: the Church of England has disclaimed infallibility. In putting forth its decisions it accompanies them with a commentary which disclaims all infallibility — nay, which denies the existence of any infallible teacher in the world. It opposes tie Holy Catholic Church for this very reason, because the Catholic and Eoman Church claims to be infallible. But faith needs a divine authority, and a divine authority must be infallible. It is only playing with terms and using words of no meaning if we speak of a divine authority which is not infallible. Any teacher, be it a man or corporate body, which disclaims infallibility cannot be a divine teacher.
Put these two texts in juxtaposition and judge to f ourselves: " Faith cometh by hearing, and bearing bj the word of Christ;" and " He that heareth you heareth Me." How does the word of Christ come to us? " He that heareth you heareth Me."* " Faith eometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ." And the word of Christ is the voice of the living Church of God in every age, spreading from the sunrise to the sunset, speaking not only as a human and historical witness which has filled the world for eighteen centuries, but speaking as a supernatural and divine witness, because the Head of it is the Incarnate Truth Himself at the right hand of His Father; and the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Christ, dwells in it and guides it, and speaks by it as the organ of His Yoice.
Surely this principle of divine faith is perfect in its simplicity and universal in its application. It is what the poor Catholic child says every day of its life at its mother's knee or in the school. It is what Saint Thomas Aquinas said before his Crucifix while he wrote his twenty volumes of theology. It is like the breath of life — the same in all. If there were anything further needed to prove the simplicity and universality of this principle of divine faith, it might be found in the philosophy of contrary facts. Set before your eyes two things: the Holy Catholic and Roman Church, one in faith, worship, and jurisdiction, perfectly united, not only in dogma of faith, but also in the principles and judgments which descend from faith, filling the whole world at this moment with a compact and solid unity, against which the world is storming in every language and conspiring in every place. And with what result? As tho hammer welds the iron into a closer inas «, so the * S. Luke x. 16.
indissoluble unity of the Catholic Church is, by pevse tuition, tested, confirmed, and revealed. For eighteen centuries the mystical vine has stood, a living tree rising in its stature, spreading in its reach, unfolding its leaves, multiplying its fruits, showing its imperishable vitality in every branch and in every spray. This is ou one side. Look on the other. Look at those who, three hundred years ago, rejected the principle of divine faith, and adopted in its stead the theories of criticism, of private judgment, of private interpretation. Look at Germany and Switzerland: look nearer home. What do we see at this day? The Christianity of these separated countries is like a tree that is dying. If the trunk stands, the branches are bare; or if there be leaves they are withered long ago. National religions are gradually drying up. The tree is returning to the dust, falling in upon its own roots. In a little while the place thereof shall know it no more. Because men refused to believe in the Divine Teacher, they have lost, first, the divine certainty of revelation; next, the fullness of truth; then the certain interpretation of Holy Scripture; and, lastly, the inspiration and canon of Scripture itself, together with the consciousness that faith is a grace infused into the soul, whereby we live in a supernatural order.
- Two things only remain to be said. The first is, fcow precious and how vital is faith. We can please God only by faith, and " without faith it is impossible to please God."* A creature who has received the gift of reason, if deprived of the light of faith, is itanted Faith elevates the reason of man, illurnin » Heb. ri. 6.
ates, purifies, and perfects it. Reason is the highest gift in nature, tne closest likeness of God Himself; and upon the gift of the light of reason comes the gift of the light of faith, elevating reason and giving to it new instincts, new faculties, new intuitions, whereby to see that which is invisible to sense, and to realize that which is to come. And more than this, faith appreciates the things of faith; it knows them at their true worth; it lays hold of them, and grasps them, so as tc make them part of our own spiritual consciousness The realities of the kingdom of God pass into our very nature; they become the principles of our whole life, the motives of our action, the form of the soul, and; therefore they unite all our powers with God. And 1 for this reason faith is called a theological virtue; because it unites the soul with its Maker, it gives man fellowship with Him. So Saint John writes: "That J which we have seen and heard we declare unto you,... that our fellowship may be with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ; and this is the declaration which we have heard from Him and declare unto you: That God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness; and if we say we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth; but if we walk in the light, as He also is in the light, we have fellowship with one another."3
- The other truth is this: that faith, vital and precious as it is, may easily be lost. Being a gift of God, it may be justly forfeited and judicially withdrawn. Being a grace, it may be sinned away. It is with faith as with all other graces of the Spirit of God,
You have in you the gift of charity; but y\ u maj destroy it, if you have the will to be cruel or malicious. You have in you the gift of purity; but you may destroy it, if you taint it by deed, or word, or thought. You have the gift of piety; but you may sin it away, if by sins of the heart you drive the Holy Ghost from you. So it is with the gift of faith. The gift of faith must be cherished as you would cherish charity, purity, and piety. |And there are two things which destroy faith. The one is infidelity, which destroys faith as its proper opposite, like as water puts out fire; the other is immorality, which destroys faith by stupefying the soul. Infidelity means not only an intellectual denial of the truth: it means also the practical insensibility and indolent refusal to correspond with the light of the Holy Ghost. If men wantonly expose this precious gift of faith to the attacks and to the subtlety of unbelievers, or to the pestilence and infection of infidel books, or to the poisonous literature which at this day is written against Christianity in every tongue, and above all against Christianity full and perfect, which is the Catholic faith, they have no one to thank but themselves. We in England are living and breathing in an atmosphere which carries with it, and wafts to and fro on every side, contradictions and subtleties against the teaching of our Divine Master. And if to this, which is inevitable, you voluntarily add the invited temptations of either listening to those who contradict the revelation of Jesus Christ, or of studiously reading (which is a deliberate act, far more guilty before God) the falsehoods which are written against the truth which He has revealed, then you have no one to ttank but yourself if you lose your faith, as you we old have no one to thank but yourself if through running into danger you lost purity, or piety, or charity.
There is still another way in which faith may be lost, and that is by a contentious spirit. We see men on every side who are blinding themselves and are being darkened by a judicial blindness. There are terrible words in the Book of Psalms, " Supercecidit in eos ignis el non viderunt solem — The fire fell upon them, and they no longer saw the sun."4 For t e existence of God, which they deny, is as the sun in the heavens. And the existence of the Holy Catholic Church, which they deride, is as the light at noonday. The luminous universality of the Church is as the lightning, which shines from the east unto the west; and yet there are men who profess that they cannot see it. They deny that there was ever a Church founded by Jesus Chiist; they deny that He created us, or that God exists. How came they to this pass? Pride, indocility, and prejudice, the spirit of controversy, animosity, and perversity have fallen upon them. Their passions are heated and their wills are set on fire against the Church and the faith. In their contentions against the truth they have judicially blinded themselves. They have eyes and cannot see, ears and cannot hear, hearts and cannot understand. Their darkness is the forerunner of the outer darkness which awaits those who cannot, because they will not, believe.
But, as I said, there is also another agent which wil) destroy faith, and that is immorality. Nothing so deadens the heart, nothing so darkens the reason w rice; and when, as I sometimes do, I near men saying with an imperial air, UI do not believe this — I do not believe that," they remind me of the poor creatures we see at the comers of the streets labeled on their breast, " stone-blind." There is, however, this difference: the poor sightless sufferers appeal to our pity, and ask our help; the unbelievers glory in their self-inflicted blindness, and despise us who can see.
We have entered into a period when these warnings are in season. Hitherto mankind has believed that the gift of intelligence and the knowledge of God through the light of reason, are the true dignity of man. If to possess an intelligence whereby he knows the Infinite and Eternal God, perfect in His attributes of love and mercy, of justice and power, elevates man, then to lack this knowledge is no elevation. Surely, if there be anything which ennobles man, it is to be lifted upwards and united with the Divine Original, by Whom he was made. What, then, I ask you, is the state of those who abuse that very reason, which is God's best gift; who misuse the intelligence He gave for the knowledge of Himself to deny His existence; who say that the world is the only reality of which we have any positive knowledge; that the sensible facts and the phenomena of the world, p;id the things that we can handle and taste, and test and analyze by chemistry — that these things are the only truths we can know, and that anything beyond these — such as right and wrong, and conscience and soul — are superstitions of theology or abstractions of metaphysics? Does such a philosophy dignify or degrade human nature? What is the difference between a man and the dumb creatures? Is it not the possession and the right use of reason? If that be so, then, as I have said before and say again, such philosophy is the brutal philosophy. It reduces man to the level of those who know not God. Nay, it teaches that we cannot know God. What more could be sajd of the orute natures? But that which degrades this philosophy more in ray eyes is this, that it is not content with abdicating the powers of reason for its own disciples. They who profess it are not satisfied with their own state of privation. They go about to rob other men of their dignity. They will not let other men know God, or have the use of reason to know God. And there are none so tyrannical, none so bigoted, none so intolerant, as those who do not believe in the existence of God. They are so sure that the reason of man cannot know God, that they confidently affirm that God does not exist He is the unknowable, because they do not know Him. And because they do not, we cannot. We have come at last to know that there is a fanaticism worse than that which they impute to us. These are truths very shameful and humbling to human nature. The men of the nineteenth century who profess to be the guides and lights of men, the creators and promoters of progress and modern civilization, are beyond all men intolerant, despotic, and tyrannous. They have found out that the highest thing on earth is not the Church of God, but the State; that the State is supreme; that liberty of conscience is a fiction; that obedience is due in all things and from all men to State laws, all revelation, all jurisdiction, all liberty, all rights of God and of His Church notwithstanding This clumsy and incoherent philosophy is the negat'oo of all faith: it is the deification of the hitman reasoti as the sole rule of life, and of the human will as the sole source of law. Out of this philosophy of the Unreasonable there has come an elaborate system cf politics, which has these two characteristics: first, a claim to interfere with the intellectual belief of other men; and, secondly, a claim to control parental rights. They preach liberty of speech and of the press until it refutes them; then they gag and suppress it. They will not let fathers and mothers educate their offspring in their own faith or in their own opinions. 'They banish all teachers who do not agree with them; they claim to interfere with the training and formation even of the priesthood. Intoxicated by temporal greatness and military success, they think to achieve that which no power of man has ever yet accomplished — the subjugation of the Church of God. Like Titans, they are attempting to do the impossible, and God is bearing with them for a while to open the eyes of the nations. They began by deifying the State, declaring it to be omnipotent, not only over taxes and customs, and coinage and commerce, and sewage and drainage (in which things we willingly endure their omnipotence), but omnipotent over the human conscience, over the soul of man, over the Church of God. Here they go blind and cannot see the sun; and here we tell them that they are impotent. This portentous aberration of the reason springs from a despotic atheism, and this again springs from the disorder and tumult which three hundred years of separation from Divine faith have inflicted on the world.
And now, dear brethren, I will bring all this to a practical use. There are at this moment, and in:ur country, attempts in hand to interfere with the Christian education of your children. Suffer no children of yours to go to any school whatsoever where they will be exposed to the remotest danger of losing their faith. Their faith is more vital than life itself. If you voluntarily expose them to the danger of losing it, you will be guilty of mortal sin. The consequence of such an act you know.
God is infinite in His merpy to those who have never heard the words or the Name of Jesus Christ. " How can they call on Him in Whom they have not believed? how can they believe in Him of Whom they have not heard?"* He sent of old a prophet to Nineve, and He spared the city, "because there were more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who did not know how to distinguish between their right hand and their left, and many beasts."f Therefore he spared ^Tineve. He will have mercy on all those who could not know His truth. He will have mercy even upon the heathen, for there shall come many from the east and the west, and shall sit down in the kingdom with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, when some of us shall be cast out. Our Lord had compassion on the multitude in the wilderness, " because they had been with Him three days and had nothing to eat." He pitied them lest they should faint by the way. Therefore He wrought a miracle to feed them. If He so cared for the body, how much more for the soul 2 Assuredly He will take care of the races and nations who, through no rejection of His truth, have never known His nama * Rom. x. 14. f Jonat iv, 11
They will obtain in some way secret to us the benefit of His infinite mercy. But what shall be said of those who, having both reason and faith, have rejected the one and mutilated the other? What shall we say of the Christian world, which, having been born again of the Holy Ghost and illuminated by the light of faith, has apostatized from God and His Christ? Hear what our Lord says to such: ' Wo to thee, Corozain; wo to thee, Bethsaida. For if in Tyre and Sidon have been wrought the mighty works that have been wrought in you, they would long ago have done penance in sackcloth and ashes. But it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you." a Judgment will begin at the house of God."f It will begin with those who have been illuminated with the light of Christianity and through their own fault have lost it. Their judgment will be heavier sevenfold than the judgment of those who have never known the J^ame and the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ.
Therefore, dear brethren, let us cherish the gift of faith. Cherish it by piety and prayer; and these will inspire you with filial love to God, filial love to our Divine Master, filial obedience to His voice speaking through His Church. Prayer, by the constant daily union of intellect and heart and conscience and will with the Spirit of God, will elev. te the convictions of your reason into the consciousness of faith. Cleave, therefore, to the material object of faith: the whole revelation of God. Rest upon the formal object of faith: the veracity of God, which speaks to us by the living and divine voice of the Church. The truths of * S. Matt. xi. 21, 22. f 1 Peter ir. 17.
divine faith are the revelation of mind of Jesus Christ, The truths which He uttered have become doctrines to us. The doctrines which He taught have, through conflict with the falsehoods of men, become what men call dogma. The commandments which he left for the guidance of our lives, for the illumination of our hearts, are the will of Jesus. The Church is His Presence dwelling among us. The sacraments are the works of His hands. As the multiplication of the bread in tho wilderness and the cleansing of the lepers and the raising of the dead were miracles of mercy, so His sacraments now are miracles of grace. Love them, then, for His sake Who taught, ordained, and gave them; for He is the Son of God, our Lord and Master, our Brother, our Kinsman, our Friend. Love every jot and tittle, every ray and spark of His truth for His sake Who gave it. By these things He is testing our love to Him. " He that hath My words and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me."* We see Him now by the light of faith: hereafter the light of faith will change into the light of glory. Faith comes from Him; it manifests Him to us; it leads us into the fullness of His light. " Now we know in part." " Now we see through a glass darkly; then we shall see face to lace.'* We know that when He shall appear, we shall be like to Him, because we shall see Him as He is,'' and then " we sha 1 know even as we are known." •} • 8. John xiv. 21. f Cor. xiii. 12; 1 S. John if. 2.
Footnotes
Chapter 4 of 18