Chapter V. The Sacrament of Penance the Sacrament of Perseverance

OUR Divine Lord has said, " He that shall persevere unto the end he shall be saved,"¹ which is also to say, and no other shall. Twice He declared this truth in words, which thrill and awe us to read them. " No man putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God"t — and again, " Remember Lot's wife."t God has revealed to us the history of His elect, running down from the creation through the ages of grace: but all along the line, and beside it, as a parallel, runs the history of those that have fallen. Every state and order of His servants has the witness of instability in itself. Of the²

Holy Angels created in the nearest likeness of their Maker, and placed upon the steps of the throne of God, multitudes fell into eternal death. Of his elect people, the Apostle writes, " I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and all in Moses were baptized in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink (and they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ). But with the most of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the desert."³ Prophets also have fallen. Balaam, in the midst of the Divine visitations, perished among the enemies of God. Seers likewise fell, as Solomon, wisest of men; and Apostles, as Judas; and Christians in the first grace of their regeneration, as Ananias and Sapphira. The annals of the Church are full of such warnings. The line of heresiarchs is a long history of the forfeiture of grace. And in

•the lives of the Saints the same examples of perseverance and of falling are found side by side. In the Franciscan Chronicles, to give one instance for many, we read of a Brother Justin who renounced the world, high honours, and great employments, to become a religious. His progress in the life of perfection was so great, that he was visited with raptures in prayer and many supernatural favours. His brethren counted him a saint. He went to Home in the time of Eugenius IV., who received him with great veneration, would not let him kiss his feet, but embraced him, made him sit at his side, and bestowed many privileges upon him. All this awakened pride, and turned his head. When he went back to his convent St. John Capistrano said to him: " You went an angel, you are come back a devil." Soon after this he fell into great private sins and open breaches of the public law. He died in prison. These examples teach one truth: all depends on perseverance. Without this nothing avails. The grace, and perfection, and splendour of the angels could not save them. The election of Israel, the miracles in Egypt, the manna in the wilderness, were all in vain. The converse with God, the resistance of an angel, availed nothing for Balaam. The illumination which laid open the natural and supernatural worlds to Solomon, did not profit him. The daily fellowship with Jesus, His doctrines and miracles, and three years of His presence, did not save Judas. The gift of regeneration and of the Sacraments of grace were all in vain to Ananias and Sapphira. All alike lacked one thing, and that one thing lacking lost them all things. They had not perseverance, and though they had everything else, nothing without this was of any avail.

It remains therefore to show what perseverance is, and how the Sacrament of Penance infuses and sustains it. First, as to the nature of perseverance. Theologians distinguish it into the active and the passive perseverance. The active is a virtue on our part, the passive a gift on the part of God.

The active perseverance consists, first, in our fidelity to the grace God has bestowed upon us, that is, in corresponding with the light of faith in the intellect, with the impulses of charity in the heart, and the inspirations of the Holy Ghost in the will, in surrendering ourselves with a filial and watchful promptness to the operations and calls of God in the soul; secondly, it consists in fervour, which is not so much any ardent affection, or vehement emotion of the heart, as a constant devotion of the will. Fervour is made up of three things, first, regularity in all duties in the order and habit of the interior life; secondly, in punctuality in doing all things in season, at the right time or in the right way; and lastly, exactness in doing all things as perfectly as we can, remembering for whom we do them; and that the greatest actions, if done ill, and without this motive, are as nothing, and that the least actions are great if done perfectly and for God. *

And, thirdly, perseverance springs from delicacy of conscience, which consists in the vividness and sensitiveness of the heart, and in the promptness and activity of the will under the operations of grace. The Fathers say, " Res delicata Spiritus Sarictus," because his purity, love, and patience, are grieved even with things of which our dulness makes little account. So I may say a pure conscience has delicate sense derived from the Holy Spirit Himself, and in harmony with all His operations; so that as soon as He moves the conscience answers, as kindred notes vibrate, or as the leaves incline before the motion of the air, and the sea undulates under the presence of the lightest wind.

This is the essence of perseverance on our part, and from this internal state come the acts of obedience, penance, mortification, expiation, reparation, constancy, fortitude, self-sacrifice, and endurance to the end, which constitutes what we call final perseverance.

But it is certain that without the passive perseverance, which is a gift on God's part, no one will so persevere to the end. The

Holy Council of Trent teaches that no man without a special privilege of grace will avoid all sin.⁴ Not that it is physically impossible, but only morally certain. It is physically possible, that of a thousand arrows shot at a mark every one may strike; but it is morally certain that many will fall short, pass beyond, or swerve aside. There is abstractedly no intrinsic impossibility in this, but it is certain that the wandering of the eye, or the unsteadiness of the hand, or the motions of the air, or the wavering of the will, or some other cause, will hinder the flight and the aim of many in every thousand shafts. So it is in our co-operation with grace. Lights, visitations, inspirations, come down upon us like showers, but it is only a few among many with which we correspond; or if we correspond, it is in an inadequate proportion. We receive grace as a hundred, and we correspond as twenty, or we receive as twenty, and correspond as one. The waste of nature, which is always sowing the world broad-cast, on sea and land, on mountain and rock, with seeds, every one of which has life and fruitfulness in it, is a true analogy to the waste of grace which inundates us, and passes unheeded away.

If, then, there were not another special grace of perseverance by which God, in His free sovereign mercy sustains us, no soul should be saved. And, yet, that grace cannot be merited by us. God has not promised to bestow it on anything we do. There is no proportion, or link established by His promise between our perseverance and this surpassing gift. It is to the end His free and sovereign grace. The first grace and the last, the Alpha and the Omega of our salvation are in His hand alone. No man can merit regeneration, which is the first grace in our salvation: nor the last, without which regeneration is all in vain. God holds the first link and the last of the golden chain of grace in His own hand, and bestows it on whom He will. We may pray for it but we cannot merit it; we may dispose ourselves to receive it, but we can never claim it at His hand. It is bestowed upon us out of pure love and grace, through the prayers and merits of His Saints, out of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who has purchased it for us in His most Precious Blood.

It is easy then to see how both the virtue and the gift of perseverance is to be lost. One mortal sin destroys it utterly. The Prophet Ezechiel warns even the just of their danger of falling: "If the just man turn himself away from his justice, and do iniquity — shall he live? all his justices which he hath done shall not be remembered, in the prevarication by which he hath prevaricated, and in his sin, which he hath committed, in them he shall die."⁵ All that he has been, or has done, or has suffered, in one moment is lost. And for such a fall we generally prepare ourselves by a multitude of lesser faults. Satan seldom tempts the just to a mortal sin all at once. The shock of the temptation itself would arouse them to watchfulness. " He that

H contemneth small things shall fall by little and little."⁶ It is by little ruining temptations, which wear and fret away the integrity and firmness of the will, that he begins his assault. He leads men into the occasions of lesser faults, and so by degrees deadens the hatred and the very fear of sin, and inspires a boldness to venture where before they would not have dared to go. Then come strong attractions, facinations, and entanglements, and last of all the Tempter's hour is come.

And for such a fall he prepares by inspiring a presumption of our own strength. " Contritionem pracedit superbia." Pride goeth before destruction.! We confide in our own lights even those which are internal and supernatural, and in our own spiritual attainments as if they were our own. This is what is called the " storm in the harbour," the whirlwind which comes down upon the soul when it has escaped out of the sea into the calm water of the haven, the perdition which falls upon the soul after it has found peace with God, and is anchored to the eternal shore. That which chiefly brings on this great and subtle danger is a secret neglect of prayer, a weariness and aversion from speaking with God, and this again begins in a loss of fervour and punctuality in devotion, and this loss arises from some secret infidelity of the heart which brings films over it and shadows of fear, so that the light and warmth of the Divine Presence is at first slightly veiled as by a mist, and then is hid so that we lose the consciousness of it, and the holy fear which it inspires and keeps alive. The true cause of those preparatory and secret falls is some interior sin of the heart known only to God and to ourselves. The world has dim eyes and can only see external sins, and even of these only such as blot the life outwardly. But the external act does not constitute the sin. The sin is perfect already in the internal act of the heart by the knowledge of the understanding and the consent of the will. This is the essential malice of sin to which the external act adds only an accidental increase, and the sin of scandal. In this way men prepare themselves long before. It may be for years they stand to all appearance in flower and fruit; but like trees which have a decay at the heart, they go at last in a sudden wind, and all men wonder at their fall till it lays open their heart, and then men wonder that they stood so long and did not come down long ago.

And this shows further how our perseverance is to be sustained. First, and above all, by a habitual consciousness of the love of God, through the Sacred Heart of Jesus working upon our hearts, humbling, softening, and kindling them with love in return. This consciousness that we are objects of the love of God, this sense of a personal relation, and personal friendship with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is to the soul what the sun, with its ardour and splendour, is to the seeds and to the fruits of the earth. It quickens, vivifies, unfolds, ripens, perfects everything. To doubt of God's love brings winter into the soul; to feel it feebly and faintly is as the cloudy and churlish sky which hinders the ripening influence of the light. In darkness all things pale and die. If only we can live in an habitual sense of our perfect pardon and absolution, through the most Precious Blood of Jesus, of His friendship for us and our discipleship to Him, of His perpetual presence, love, and care, we shall have the root of perseverance firmly fixed in our will, and for this we need no great learning, no mystical, no dogmatical theology. A childlike heart is enough. Among the martyrs of Cochin China, in these last years, was a simple Catechumen. The heathen scorned him for his ignorance, and mocked him for his inability to answer their objections against the nature of God, and for his obstinacy in dying for a God about whom he could give no account. He answered: " In a family of many children some are grown to mature intelligence, some are growing to youth, some are infants, all love their Father, but all do not know Him equally. The elder can give an account of Him, of His character, and of the reasons why they love

Him, but the infants know neither His character nor His name. All that they know-is that He is their Father, and that He loves them, and this is their reason for loving Him in return, and trusting Him with all their heart." Such is the true childlike love of God, the basis and the crown of our perseverance.

The next support of our perseverance is a true knowledge of ourselves. There are few more thrilling words in Holy Scripture than these: " There are just men and wise men, and their works are in the hand of God, and yet man knoweth not whether he be worthy of love or hatred."⁷ That is, in the searching eyes of God we are so unlike what we are in the twilight of our own, that, whatsoever judgment we may have of ourselves, God may all the while judge of us far otherwise. This salutary fear of deceiving ourselves by too kind an opinion of our own state is the first condition of self-knowledge. Until we are willing to believe that we are probably far more sinful than we have ever known, or suspected, we shall make no great progress in self-knowledge. We have to learn not only our sins, but, as we have seen, our personal sirifulness, our un worth! ness, our unprofitableness, our littleness, and our weakness.

And this will bring us another support by a growing contrition, ripening into compunction; and this cancels our venial sins, reconciles the heart with God, brings down great grace, and unites the will with the will of Jesus. And from contrition springs the spirit of reparation, a generous desire to make atonement to the Sacred Heart which has loved men so much, and has been loved so little. A spirit of reparation draws great graces from the Sacred Heart, and engages all its generosity in our salvation. These four things, love, self-knowledge, contrition, and reparation, with a continual infusion of grace to repair the continual decays of every day, are all we need to sustain this active perseverance on our part. But these four graces are especially those which, as I have shown, the Sacrament of Penance infuses and perfects in us. It is therefore the Sacramerit of Perseverance, arid the means of preparing ourselves to receive of God the free grace of His Sovereign mercy, the gift of passive perseverance. Such is the outline of the subject I undertook to speak of, arid with a few words more I shall conclude. I will then only add four simple rules to obtain this great gift of God.

1. First, use the Sacrament of Penance fully and generously. Pour out your hearts like water. They that so come oftenest to it are the most confirmed in perseverance, and they who are most confirmed in perseverance are they who oftenest come to it. According as we use it, so it will be to us. Happy are they who come month by month, happier they who come week by week. They who come seldom to confession, wonder what others can have to say who come so often. But they who come seldom have always least to say, because they have least self-knowledge. They who come often, as their self-knowledge increases, find a greater facility arid a greater desire to come oftener.

Many of the Saints, as St. Charles, confessed every day. We wonder what they could find to accuse themselves of. It was because they were Saints that they saw so much where we see so little. If we had more of the supernatural light of the Sacrament of Penance, we too should see as they did; but to obtain this spiritual discernment, habitual and frequent confession is necessary.

2. Next, be always beginning. Never think that you can relax, or that you have attained the end. St. Francis used to say continually to his brothers, " My brethren, let us begin to love God a little." He felt that he was only at the outset of the way of perfection, a mere beginner in the science of God. If we think ourselves to be more, it is because we are less. If we think ourselves more than beginners, it is a sign that we have hardly yet begun. There is no security for perseverance except in always advancing. To stand still is impossible. A boat, ascending a running stream, falls back as soon as it ceases to advance. To hold its place is impossible, unless it gain upon the stream. So in the spiritual life. The past is no guarantee for the future. All the justice of the just man is gone in the day in which he falls, and all his past obedience is no security against present transgression. Our Lord, therefore, warns us to " remember Lot's wife." She was saved by the visitation of Angels, drawn forth from destruction by the constraint of an Angel's hand. She was halfway to safety when she looked back, and was cut off by the just judgment of God. The past availed nothing. Only present fidelity from moment to moment is security for the future. Therefore, again, our Divine Lord said, "No man putting his hand to the plough and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God,"⁸ that is, the husbandman who turns in the furrow to look at his past work, and lingers over his toil, shall never reach the end of the field. What we have done as yet is little compared with what remains to do. We have to perfect our sanctification, which even in Saints is far off. We have to expiate the pains due to a world of sins, surpassing all memory, and as yet we have but little chastised ourselves. We have to complete the chain of graces by which we are bound to the eternal throne, and many links are still wanting. There is no time to lose. Let us hear how an Apostle speaks of perseverance: "Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended. But one thing I do: forgetting the things that are behind, and stretching forth myself to those that are before, I press towards the mark, to the prize of the supernal vocation of God in Christ Jesus."⁹

" Know you not that they that run in a race, all run indeed, but one receiveth the prize? So run that you may obtain. And every one that striveth for the mastery, refraineth himself from all things: and they indeed, that they may receive a corruptible crown: but we an incorruptible one. I therefore so run, not as at any uncertainty: I so fight, not as one beating the air: But I chastise my body and bring it into subjection: lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway."¹⁰

If St. Paul had need so to speak, how much more such as we? If all his supernatural grace, his miraculous conversion, and singular vocation, his perils by land and by sea, his labours and fasting, visions and revelations, if in these there was no security that he might not even become a reprobate, how much more cause have we to live and die in holy fear? This then is the second support of perseverance.

3. Thirdly, meditate every day upon the fall of those who begun well. Once perhaps they set out with as fair a hope of eternal life as we have. Their childhood and youth was it may be holier and nearer to God than ours. A bright sunshine and a fair morning gave promise of a noontide of ripeness and an evening of peace. Perhaps they persevered as long, or longer than we have yet, and that against many dangers and temptations. At last they fell. Their beginning:was like ours, and our end may be like theirs. An awful and thrilling truth. It is good to have it always before our eyes. For instance, the fall of the Angels may teach us that no gift, or perfection of grace will avail us if we lack stability. They were created in excellence of knowledge and strength, both natural and supernatural, but they sinned, and what was their sin but pride, of which we have been guilty a thousand times. They desired to be as God; not that they aspired to His immensity, or infinity, or eternity, for the angelic intelligence is too perfect and too luminous for such a folly; but they desired to be independent of God. They contemplated their own proper excellence till they became enamoured by self-love. They sought to be happy in themselves by their own proper and natural beatitude; to suffice to themselves, and to be blissful without God. This was their sin, and what is it but the pride which is the sin of the world, as St. John calls it, " the pride of life."¹¹

We may also meditate on the fall of Judas, whose example is nearer to us than we are wont to imagine. The greatness of his sin deceives many. We believe ourselves to be in no danger of such a guilt, and we forget that the sin of Judas had once a beginning as fair as the sin we may be committing at this hour: and in the end we may fall from God as deliberately as he did. It is a very awful and touching thought that Judas was once an innocent child like as we were; that he was the object of a mother's love, as tender as ever we have known; that perhaps in boyhood he may have lived in the holy fear of the God of Israel more watchfully than ever we lived in the light of the Holy Trinity; the days of his youth were as blameless perhaps as ours; morning and evening came and went, as to us, with their joys and their sorrows, their fears and their hopes of manhood, and the works of life. All that we know is, that he was called to be an Apostle — that he obeyed the call. So far, perhaps, he did more than we have done in corresponding with grace. In this grace he persevered, in the fellowship of Jesus, sharing in His toil and weariness, hunger and thirst, shame and contradiction. He heard His parables, and saw His mighty works of power. What could we have done more? "He having the purse, carried the things that were put therein;"¹² and the sin of covetousness sprang up in him. But the seeds of it are also in us. His office led him into the occasions of sin. He was tempted, and fell, and should we have stood firm? He was living in the midst of all that ought to have sanctified him, without being sanctified by it. All without was holy, and ministered grace to him; but within there was a heart-sin which resisted the Holy Ghost; and this spiritual contradiction gradually threw out the habit, and the design, and the daring, by which he fell. He had seen his Master again and again pass unhurt through His enemies. They could lay no hand on Him. He had seen Him do works of mighty power; how could he doubt that He could protect Himself from the Pharisees? What harm to make money where no ill could come? Jesus could protect Himself, and so he sold him for thirty pieces of silver, not doubting, perhaps, that the Priests and the Pharisees were deluding themselves. For we read that a Judas seeing that Jesus was condemned, repented himself."¹³ It was a new and unexpected result. He went and made restitution, "casting down the pieces of silver in the temple." He himself confessed that he had sinned in " betraying the innocent blood." Have we done as much in many a fall? And driven to despair at the unforeseen horror, '• he went and hanged himself." Judas is an example how a soul once innocent may be slowly changed into the worst sin, and even at last fall with little intention of committing the whole evil which follows from its act. But if the example of Judas be far off from many of us, the fall of Demas is near to us all. We read the pathetic words of St. Paul:

" Demas hath left me loving this world."¹⁴ He was weary of the apostolic life; of journeying by land and by water; of having no fixed dwelling-place, of perils among the heathens, and perils among false brethren, of labours, watchings, and fastings. Why should he be the companion of Apostles? It was a life of counsels; the life of the commandments was enough for such as he. How fair and reasonable all this appears; how like the reasoning and the lives of many at this day. But the Apostle saw deeper. The Holy Ghost reads the heart. Demas " loved this world;" therefore, and for no other reason, he forsook the servants of Jesus Christ, and departed to Thessalonica. Of his end who knows, who can know, till the day when all falls shall be revealed? We shall then know what the Apostle said with tears: " All seek the things that are their own; not the things that are Jesus Christ's."*

Let us then meditate often on these things, and remember that falls are not always by the grosser sins which the world takes count of, but by spiritual sins, subtle and secret, which leave no stain upon the outward life, yet are perhaps more deadly because more satanic, that is, more like the fall of angels.

4. And lastly, let no sun go down without praying for the gift of perseverance.

Ask it every day of the ever-Blessed Trinity: ask it of the Eternal Father, of whom our Divine Lord had said, " No one can snatch them out of the hand of My Father."¹⁵ Ask it of the Eternal Son incarnate, who has said, u All that the Tather giveth to me shall come to Me, and him that cometh to Me I will not cast out."f Ask it also of the Eternal Spirit, the Holy Ghost, for our Lord has also said, " No man can come to me except the Father who hath sent Me draw him."t It is by the Holy Ghost which proceedeth from the Father and the Son that Jesus fulfils His promise. " And I, if I be lifted up from¹⁶ the earth, will draw all things to myself."¹⁷ This is the gift of perseverance, the manifold grace of the ever-Blessed Trinity encompassing us without and penetrating and sustaining us within, and upholding us above our dangers, and ourselves. Ask it through the prayers of our Blessed Mother, the Mother of God, whose immaculate hands are lifted up day and night before the Sacred Heart of her Son to obtain our salvation; and finally, ask it through the prayers of our guardian Angel, who has kept us from our baptism, in spite of all our infidelities and all the griefs and disappointments we have heaped upon him.

And then onwards and upwards. Onwards against the resistance, both within and without, which hinders our advance in the life of God. Onwards without fear, or doubt, or wavering. And upwards, aiming as high as we can, for we have to ascend the mountains of the Lord's House, which are exalted very high. We have three mountains to scale before we see the Vision of

Peace. The first is Mount Calvary, by the way of the Cross, in penance, mortification, and self-denial, sharp indeed, but sweet when we remember our sins and the love of Jesus. For this end I have endeavoured to speak of the Sacrament of Penance as an object of love, that souls may be drawn to it as their true rest, refreshment, and consolation. The second is Mount Thabor, the mountain of the Beatitudes, in which Jesus reveals Himself to hearts purified on Calvary, that is, in the Sacrament of the Altar, in which Jesus stands surrounded by the meek, the merciful, the clean of heart, the persecuted for justice sake, blessing and changing them into His own likeness. And the last mountain is Mount Sion, upon which is the Holy City and the vision of God. To this we are called. Jesus is ever saying, " Come up hither,"¹⁸ ever promising to us a crown of perseverance. A few short years, and a little sorrow, and a few conflicts, and perhaps some falls and a generous repentance, with a loving reparation, then comes the end, eternal rest and the vision of Beauty and of Peace. " He that shall overcome shall thus be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name out of the Book of Life, and I will confess his name before My Father and before His Angels."¹⁹ He that shall overcome, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God: and he shall go out no more, and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem which cometh down out of Heaven from my God, and my new name."t " To him that shall overcome, I will give to sit with Me in My throne, as I also have overcome, and am set down with My Father in His throne."J

Footnotes

1. St. Matt. x. 22. t St. Luke, ix. 62, ↩

2. St. Luke, xvii. 32. ↩

3. 1 Cor. x. 1, 5. ↩

4. Cone. Trid. Sess. vi. Can. 23. ↩

5. Ezechiel, xviii. 24. ↩

6. Ecclus. xix. 1. t Prov. xvi. 18. ↩

7. Eccles. ix. 1. ↩

8. St. Luke, ix. 62. ↩

9. Phil. iii. 13, 14. ↩

10. 1 Cor. ix. 24, 7. ↩

11. 1 St. John, ii. 16. ↩

12. St. John, xii. 6. ↩

13. St. Matt, xxvii. 3, 4, 5. ↩

14. 2 Tim. iv. 9. t Phil. ii. 21. ↩

15. St. John, x. 29. t Ib. vi. 37. ↩

16. Ib. vi. 44. ↩

17. Ib. xii. 32. ↩

18. Apoc. iv. 1. ↩

19. Apoc. iii. 5. t Ib. iii. 12. f Ib. iii. 21. ↩