Sermon VI. Strength in Weakness
" We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency may be of the power of God, and not of us." II Cor., iv, 7-
In the lives of the servants of God two things are especially wonderful, their personal weakness and the vastness of their works.
We see this in the founders of the religious orders; as, for example, in St. Benedict, who fled in early yoiith from the tainting atmosphere of Rome, then in the. later stages of corruption, and in a cave of the Apen nines, " habitabat secum,"* dwelt alone, nurturing his soul in communion with God; and so became the patriarch of a great spiritual family, which has given civilization and Christianity to many nations, a line of Pontiffs to the Holy See, and to the Church a multitude of souls. Again, St. Dominic seemed to be raised up all alone in an age when the intellect of Christian nations had become perverse, to give to Faith its scientific form, and to build up the wondrous intellectual structure of Theology, which received its ful ness and symmetry in the Angel of the Schools; and * St. Greg. M. in vita S. Bened.
once more, a young Spanish soldier, wounded and cast aside, whose energetic will kindled in secret, creates in due time the body which has taking up the living thread of sacred science, wrought before by Benedic tines and Dominicans, and placed itself in the front of the conflict with the world. The Society of Jesus stands as a conductor of storms, on which the first bursts of sedition and of heresy invariably fall.
How feeble the instruments of these great achieve ments 1 how vast their works! The same is true also of the apostles of nations in the later agesof the Church, of St. Wilfred, St. Augustine, St.Sigfrid, St. Adelbert, and many men, who, through the dimness of history, are seen to shine with the luminous army of Evangelisis: in themselves how weak, solitary, and isolated; yet in their deeds how enduring, fruitful, and glorious!
And if we ascend higher to the outset of the Church, we discover the samelawof supernatural grace. When God would set up His kingdom on the Earth, we should have expected that some mightier weapons would have been arrayed against the world. For four thousand years the power of natural society had consolidated itself. It had grown by successive increase and perpetual expansion into the imperial sway of Rome, which summed up all the powers upon Earth, and ruled the world. It was bound together by all the bonds of paganism, by religious sympathies, by super stitions, and by the intellectual traditions and philosophies of all ages. To clear the Earth of such an antagonist, and to sweep the site for the foundation of the kingdom of God, we might have looked for twelve legions of angels to purge the Earth with their presence, and to cleanse it so as by fire: or, at least, that supernatural messengers or evangelists from Heaven should have proclaimed the kingdom of God, and that the air should have been charged with voices and visions from on high. But not so. Twelve poor men, some from the sea, and some from the shade of the fig-tree; some from their boats and nets, and some from the receipt of custom these were the ministers of God s kingdom, and by them He overcame the world. The vessel was of earth, but the treasure from above. And throughout the history of the Church the same phenomenon is ever reproduced. It is ever weaker than the world, yet ever overcoming the world; and the support of the Church seems ever failing, yet always surviving; the See of Peter, the long single line of Pontiffs, always at the point of death, yet never extinct. From age to age the will of one man, without weapons or worldly power, subdued the world. What is the secret of this all- conquering weakness but what the apostle has said: "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency may be of the power of God and not of us?"
In the chapter going before he explains what is this treasure, namely, the ministration of the Spirit.*
In these words we have a parallel between the ministration of death and the ministration of the Spirit: the ministration of condemnation and the ministration of justice: the ministration which was transient and the ministration which is abiding: that is, the ministration of the law before the Incarnation of the Son of God, and the ministration of the Spirit after the descent of the Holy Ghost. The apostle, in this place as in others, contrasts the Pentecost on Mount Sinai with the Pentecost on Mount Sion: the giving of the Law and the outpouring of the Spirit of God.
We have here, then, the secret of the mighty strength of the servants of God. They were partakers of this ministration of the Spirit and the vessels of an Heavenly treasure. " Therefore seeing we have received this ministration... we faint not." They were the messengers and ministers of the Spirit of God: their mission and message were alike from God, divine and unerring. Therefore, they fainted not: no shade of doubt could overcast their clear insight of the truth: no fears disquiet their heart: no slackness undo the energy of their1 will. They were penetrated through and through with a consciousness that God had sent them to His own work, and that no man could stand before Him, and prevail.
And therefore also their work was supernatural in vastness, fruitfulness, and imperishableness, because the excellency was of the power of God and not of themselves.
And what, in one word, is this but to say, that they were members of a body which is divine, and messen gers of a Teacher who is in fallible? And these divine endowments, what are they but the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit under whose ministration we now are?
We will therefore trace the power of the servants of God up to its Heavenly fountain, and dwell awhile upon this last dispensation of grace, the ministry of the Holy Ghost.
In what then does it consist? In two great and divine facts. First, in the Presence of the Holy Spirit, and secondly, in the offices which on the day of Pentecost He assumed in the world.
Now faith in the Holy Trinity, in whose Name we are baptized, contains in itself, and demands of us, a right faith in the office of the Holy Spirit.
And from a right faith in the office of the Holy Spirit, one direct and inseparable consequence is faith in the infallibility of the Church.
So that they who deny, or in any way disbelieve the infallibility of the Church, whether they will or no, whether they know it or no, inevitably deny or disbelieve in whole or in part the office of the Holy Spirit.
And they who fail in their faith in the office of the Holy Spirit, inevitably forfeit the divine freedom which our Lord has purchased for the human intelligence through His most precious Blood: and forfeit ing this divine freedom, they fall under the authority and into a bondage of human teachers.
The truth of this we may clearly see by considering one or two of the most obvious principles of the dispensation of grace.
- As first, that the office which was assumed by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost is perpetual. He took to Himself a royal office in the kingdom of God, of which the power and prerogatives in all its parts and functions are indefeasible, and continue in their freshness to this hour.
To doubt the perpetuity of this office is to disbelieve the ministration of the Spirit. To imagine that He is shorn of His prerogatives, and that His powers are suspended, is to fall back into the imperfect and transitory dispensations of the ages before the Spirit of God descended among men, or the Son of God was as yet incarnate.
The perpetuity of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit is shadowed forth in the mystery of the Holy Trinity. There are reasons in the analogy of faith, which, if express proof in words were wanting, would suffice.
Within the abyss of the Eternal Godhead the Holy Ghost is "the Term," "the Unity," "the Fellowship,"2 " the Indissoluble Bond,"f and " Final Rest" of the Father and the Son. The mystery of the Divine Trinity has its perfection in itself in the third and last Person of the ever blessed Three. So also in the outward operations of God. A Saint to whom the Church, for his profound intuition into the mysteries of the Godhead, has given the title of Theologus, Gregory of Nazianzum, describes the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity as " the First Cause, the Creator, and the Perfecter."
We see this in creation. When the Father willed to create, it was by the Son that He made the world "i and "the Spirit of God moved over the waters," to order, dispose, perfect, quicken, and give perpetuity to all things.
When the fulness of time was come that the world should be redeemed, the Father sent the Son into the world; the Son assumed our manhood, the Holy Ghost
$ St. John, i, 3. Beb., i, 2. Gen., i, 2.
overshadowed the Mother of the Eternal. He " was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary."
When the time was come that the Incarnate Son should return to the Father, the work He had begun on Earth was bequeathed to the Spirit of the Father and the Son. What the Second Person began, the Third Person continued. The earthly ministration of the Son terminated at the Ascension: the earthly ministration of the Spirit began from the day of Pentecost. The Son departed, the Spirit came. " It is expedient to you that I should go: for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come." How could the Spirit of God, who already in the beginning moved upon the waters, come into the world? And if already in the world, how could He come any more? But was not the Son already in the world, for by Him even the world was made, and yet did He not, after four thousand years, come into the world? He came in a new manner: and for a new purpose: He came by incarnation: He came in the natural body of our manhood. It was a true advent, even though in other ways he was already here. So also the Spirit of God, after the Incarnate Son ascended, came into the world. He came in a new manner: He came for a new purpose: He came3 in a mystical body: as personally and as visibly as the
Son: though after another manner and in another form. The Holy Spirit is in the world now manifest in the Church, as the Eternal Son was in Jerusalem then manifest in the flesh. He is come to take up and to carry on to the end of the world the dispensation of grace. The Perfecter is now in the world to finish the work of the kingdom of God.
And of this perpetual office we have the express promise of our Lord. " I will ask the Father, and He shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you for ever."4 Another when I am gone: not like me to go away but to abide for ever. If I stay, He will not come. If I go, He will be with you and for ever.
And does it not stand to reason in itself? The Spirit of Jesus is here to accomplish a perpetual work; to carry on a dispensation of grace which must last until the end of the world, until the whole number of God s elect gathered out from the successive generations of mankind be full. He came, not to gather in from the first ages only, and then to depart, but to abide, moving over the waters, in all ages of time, from the Ascension to the second coming of the Son. A perpetual work demands a perpetual office and a perpetual operation. And a perpetual work demands also a perpetuity in the means of its accomplishment. But what are the means whereby He fulfils " the perfecting of the Saints, the work of the ministry, the edifying of the body of Christ?" The same are needed in all ages, and at this hour as in the beginning. " He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatever I shall have said unto you."5 " When He, the Apostle of Truth, is come, He will teach you all truth. For He shall not speak of Him self: but what things soever He shall hear He shall speak: and the things that are to come He shall show you."| " He shall receive of mine and shall share it unto you." What are the means whereby the Elect of God are made perfect but grace and truth? and the work of sanctifying and illuminating is as perpetual as the chain of the Elect, which, through the succession of time, runs down from the beginning until now, and shall be found unbroken at the consummation of the world.
The whole office, therefore, of the Holy Spirit is as perpetual and indispensable as His presence. All the power and prerogatives wherewith He was in vested on the day of Pentecost, are in vigour, energy, and operation until this hour. He has abdicated none.
He can be deprived of nothing. From the hour when, in the upper chamber, the Holy Spirit came down upon the Church, the treasure abides in its fulness in the earthen vessel. And as the preservation of the world is the work of creation by the same omnipotence perpetually produced, so the illumination of the Church is the perpetual fulness of His inspiration, which descended on it on the day of Pentecost.
- The office, then, of the Holy Ghost in the Church being perpetual in all the fulness of its prerogatives, let us next see how it is discharged. That all who are illuminated and sanctified, received their illumination and sanctification, one by one, from the Spirit of God, all who believe in the Holy Trinity confess, Moreover, all alike believe that the efficacy of the office of the Holy Spirit in individuals, that is, their illumination and sanctification, ultimately depends upon the cooperation of the individual will, and is therefore conditional.
The chief likeness of God in the soul of man is in the will, by which both the intelligence and the affections find their expression. And the will in man, being a divine gift, is so cherished and respected by the Giver that He never forces it. Freedom of will is the law of the Nature and of the Kingdom of God. And there are two springs from which all voluntary action flows: the uncreated will of God, which is the principle and source of all divine operations, and the created will in man, which is the principle and source of all human volitions.
The fellowship of God and man is by the free union of the will; and the operations of grace are the influ ences and aids of the Spirit of God elevating and perfecting the will of man.
St. Augustine therefore distinguishes the working of grace into those graces which " God works in us but without us: and those which He works in us but with us." Those which God works in us but without us, are the first gifts of preventing grace, without which we are physically unable to serve God unto life eternal. The gift of regeneration in children and in adults, the first lights which fall on the intelligence, the first drops of charity upon the heart, the first mo tions of impulse on the will, all these are wrought of God s sovereign grace in us but without us. We offer no cooperation, it may be, we have even no consciousness, until the divine action is accomplished.
When this is wrought, then begins the operation of those other graces which are wrought in us but with us. When the will, already elevated to a supernatural state, unites itself with the grace received, and acts in union with it, there come down into the soul larger effusions of grace to work with us; and the acts which flow from this cooperation are both the gifts of God and the works of man. Our freedom of will is perfected by its elevation.
This then is the office of the Holy Spirit in indivi duals, to work in, and by, and through their freedom: so that they are able either to consent or dissent from His operations, to use or not to use His grace.
And by this test they shall be tried. This is the touchstone of our probation. If we are willing we may be illuminated and sanctified; if we are not willing, we may freely choose to be darkened and reprobate. If AVC consent to His invitations and attractions, He will enter in and dwell with us, and unite us to Himself. If we will not cooperate with Him, He will depart, and leave us in the desolation and death which we have freely chosen. He imposes on us no necessity, no compulsion. The individual will is free, and the benefits of the Holy Spirit in the soul are conditional. If we will, we may make them to be our own; if we will not, they will be withdrawn.
Such is the office of the Holy Spirit towards indivi duals: not so towards the Church. The union of the Holy Ghost with the Church of Christ is not conditional, but absolute. It depends not upon any created will, but upon the Divine will alone. It is an union not contingent upon the assent or dissent, the use or abuse of grace on the part of man, but upon the Divine economy of redemption through the Incarnation of the Son of God. The Church is not an individual, but a body a mystical body, of which Christ is head; and amoral person in which the head and the body are eternally united. The union of the Holy Spirit with the i./^urch depends no more on any human will than the union of the Godhead and man hood in the person of Jesus Christ. The hypostatic union is a divine and eternal fact: so is the union of the Holy Spirit with the Church.
Therefore St. Augustine says: " What the soul is to the body of a man, the Holy Spirit is to the body of Christ, which is the Church. And what the soul fulfils in all the members of one body, the same the Holy Spirit fulfils in the whole Church."* And St Irenseus, using the figure used by St. Paul, says, speaking of the gift of faith, that it is a gift from the Spirit of God, as a precious deposit in a good vessel, always new, and always renewing the vessel itself in which it exists. And this gift is entrusted to the Church, as the breath of life was inspired into the first man made of the earth, that all the members might be quickened with life; and in this deposit is given to us * S. Aug. Serm. 2, feria 2, Pentecost.
the communication of Christ, which is the Holy Ghost, the earnest of incorruption, the confirmation of our faith, and the ladder of ascent to God. "For in the Church," he (St. Paul) says, " God hath set Apostles, Prophets, Doctors, andall other operationsof the Spirit, of which they are not partakers who come not to the Church; defrauding themselves of life by an evil mind and a worse practice. For where the Church is, there also is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace: but the Spirit is Truth."6 This is the treasure in an earthen vessel the Spirit of God in the Church on Earth. And the end for which this union and in-dwelling was ordained is to bestow light and grace upon the world. It is the light of the world the u city seated on a mountain which cannot be hid." As the solar system was created to give light upon the Earth, and the firmament stands changeless, fulfilling a perpetual office to mankind, so the Church is the organ by which the Holy Spirit speaks on Earth, and the vessel in which the Heavenly light always burns in undiminished splendour. It is as the light of the sun, which never fails nor changes: though all men were blind, it would pour forth its undiminished flood of light. And as the ever blessed Sacrament upon the altar is divine, though in the midst of the unbelieving and unworthy, so the Church of God, which is the mystical body of His Son and the orgun of the Holy Spirit, stands changeless from age to age, as full, luminous, and changeless as on the day of Pentecost. It was created to give light upon the Earth. It is the greater light in which the lesser lights of nature conspire and blend; the true light which falls upon the Earth from Him, " which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world."
The Church, then, is not like an individual upon probation, as if the endowments and prerogatives of the Holy Spirit depended upon the will of man. It is itself the instrument of probation to individuals. It is through the Church that God confers His grace and truth upon mankind; and by the bestowal of grace and truth that He tries us one by one. Like as the visit of a prophet or an apostle was the time of probation to Jerusalem or to Corinth, or as the presence of our Lord Himself was the probation of those who heard Him, so now, in all the world, the one and universal Church speaks as a Teacher sent from God, laying the soul under the penalty of sin to believe in the divine message. To every successive age, from the day of Pentecost until now, the Spirit of God has7 spoken, through the Church, as the organ of His voice.
Such, then, being the office of the Holy Spirit towards individuals and towards the Church, it follows by inevitable consequence that they who deny the infallibility of the Church, deny also the guidance of the Holy Spirit; and therefore either in part or in whole deny the office of the Third Person of the ever blessed Trinity. I say in whole or in part, be cause there are two common forms of this error.
Some who ai e more consistent in their error, but therefore farther from the truth, deny altogether the infallibility of the Church, and claim for individuals t the guidance which they deny to the body. And yet they dare not claim for individuals the gift of infallibility, which, however, is inseparable from the guidance of the Spirit, if by guidance be meant anything beyond the universal aid given to all by the illumination of grace. This, then, is a full and direct denial of the office of the Holy Spirit as the Life of the mystical body, to use the words of St. Augustine, of that part of His office which is not conditional in its efficacy, but absolute, and depends not on the will of man, but on the will of God alone. It denies the union and in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Church as a divine organ of grace and truth: it denies the moral personality of the Church, and reduces it to a multitude of individuals isolated and detached each from the other. It denies also the divine institution of the Church to be a medium and channel of grace and truth to individuals: and inverts the whole order and analogy of nature and of grace, as if life ascended from the members to the body, instead of descending from the body to the members. It is, in truth, a simple unbelief in the ministration of the Spirit as it is distinguished, since the Incarnation of the Son of God and the descent of the Holy Ghost, from the opera tions of the Holy Spirit under the law. It overthrows the contrast of St. Paul between the ministration of the letter and the ministration of the Spirit, and re duces the office of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity to the measure of the days when as yet man knew not " whether there were a Holy Ghost."
Again, there are others nearer the truth, because they deny less, and yet less consistent than those who deny more. They say that for six hundred years the Church was guided by the Holy Spirit; and therefore, for those six hundred years the Church was infallible; that so long as it was united it could not err; but that by division its infallibility is suspended; and until its divisions be healed, will not be restored.8
And yet, what is this but to deny the true office of the Holy Spirit towards the Church, and to affirm that the Church is upon probation, and that the pro perties and endowments of the Church, that is, the power and prerogatives of the Holy Spirit, depend upon the conditions of the will of man? In truth, this is to give with one hand and to take away with the other: to seem to believe in the office of the Spirit, to admit the Church as a moral person, divinely con stituted and guided, but all the while to believe only in the conditional operations of the Spirit to individuals. If the office of the Holy Spirit be in all its prerogatives and powers perpetual until now, how can any of its functions be suspended by the sin of man? The sin of man may deprive himself, one by one, of the benefits of illuminating and sanctifying grace: as each one may close or blind his own eyes; but nothing can dissolve the union between the Holy Spirit and the Church, except the Divine will alone: as none but He, who made the lights of the firmament, can quench their brightness. Either once infallible, always infallible; or once fallible, always fallible from the beginning. It does not save this theory, to cast the blame upon the sins of men: for, be the cause what it may, the perpetuity of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church is thereby equally denied. And from this what must follow but the reentrance of human authority and human bondage, from which Christ died to set us free. God made the intelligence in man for Himself, and when He saw it in bondage to falsehood and to the usurped authority of man, He redeemed it by the precious blood of His Son. The human reason is dear to God as a high participation of His own likeness, and He claims it for His own, that being taught by Him alone, the truth might make it free. Everywhere and always from the beginning of the world, except only when Patriarchs, Prophets, and Seers, illuminated with Divine Truth, brought men under the teaching and authority of God, mankind has been in bondage to human teachers.
Such then is the divine certainty and the divine freedom bestowed on those who are of the one only Church of God. But I may not now further pursue those thoughts. Another topic remains to illustrate the words of the apostle.
We have before us to-day a great example of this divine power in human infirmity in the great Saint and Apostle of Ireland. Little thought he, that poor stripling, over whose head sixteen summers had hardly passed, when he was carried away into the land of his captivity, that to him and to his spiritual seed it should all be given for an inheritance, while as yet he had not so much as to set the sole of his foot on. Little he thought, on the waste shores and by the dark woods of Ireland, as he tended the herds of a heathen master, that he was the vessel, earthen indeed, but chosen of God to bear the Heavenly treasure to a whole people and to their posterity. And yet the visitations of grace were upon him in the land of his bondage. And, all weak and lone as he was, visions of Heaven began to stir within him. There arose before his spiritual sense myriads of little ones, with hands uplifted as in prayer, imploring his assistance. And this spectacle hung before him, and hovered about him as a part of his very consciousness, till it awakened a longing desire, which shaped itself into a purpose and became a changeless resolution. Twice captive and twice set free, yet nothing could restrain him from returning of his own free will into the land of his bondage. Neither love of kindred, nor the mourning of friends, nor the tears of hearts, dear as life, nor the opposition of those who blamed him, nor the reproaches of those who cast his faults upon his head; no, nor the consciousness of his own un worthiness could withstand the resistless love of souls. He bid a sore and long farewell to all for his Master s sake, and chose to live as a wanderer in a strange land for love of the Heavenly kingdom. What was it then that made him so mighty in the work of God? It was not intellectual powers, or refined culture, or natural gifts: but, as any will see who read The Confessions of Patrick the Sinner, it was that he was a saint, a citizen, and a messenger of the supernatural order, and through the gift of the Holy Ghost a man of God in will and in deed. It was that his soul was all on fire with the Spirit of God; that the deepest love of his heart was for the Cross of Jesus, for its sharpness and for its shame; that he thirsted for humility, and desired humiliation as the way to it. His own infirmities were absorbed in a divine thought. And as he went to and fro preaching the kingdom of God, all gave way before him; the power and virtue of the ministry of the Spirit went with him. The face of the island changed under his advance, and became the kingdom of God and of His Church. And now from his Master s throne what a history has he seen unrolled in the fortunes and sufferings of Ireland.
But, brethren, I know not how I can fulfil the task to which you have invited me. Not that I do not do your bidding gladly, but that the most ardent words of a stranger must fall coldly upon the hearts of sons of Ire land. It is rather the duty of children, not of strangers, to staunch the wounds of a father, or to console a mother s grief. And yet, perhaps, even as a stranger I may better bear my witness to your fidelity, and may with less suspicion of bias, speak of the generous, loving, pure-hearted, enduring children of St. Patrick.
But why do I say a stranger, for in Christ Jesus9 there is neither u Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond, nor free." When Judaism passed away, national ism became a heresy within the kingdom of God. It is the mark of heresy to be national and local, as it is of the one universal kingdom to know of no distinction of nations. They are absorbed in the unity of the true kingdom. Where all are brethren, none are strangers. If history be not a fable, the Ireland of St. Malachi and St. Laurence was a home of faith. In times when in great part of other lands, now Christian, paganism and desolation reigned, Ireland had its saints ruling their flocks; its ordered hierarchy; its schools of Christian science. Armagh, Lismore, Clonard, and other seats of sacred study were known to Europe. And the teachers of Ireland were held inhonour in Paris, Pavia, and Bologna. St. Aidan, St. Kilian, St. Fursey, St. Fintan, St.Columba, and amultitudebeside, shed their light upon it. And the names of St. Gall, St. Donatus, St. Finian, St. Frigidian, are upon the mountains of Switzerland, upon the plains of Italy, and upon the cities of the north. When I read of your history in those times deep in the past; when the image of your fair island rises before me, rock-bound and lashed by the mighty waters of the west, green within with living verdure, with its blue mountains, its fruitful plains, and exhaustless rivers, I seem to see some old picture, such as is hung over the altars in our sanctuaries, in which the skill of the painter is even less than the sanctity of his idea. It is such as we often see, when in the background there is a gentle landscape, bounded by dark tranquil mountains, shaded by tall and spreading trees, in the midst a calm water and clear bright air; here is a company of Saints musing on Holy Writ, and there a multitude of upturned faces drinking in the words of an evangelist; on one side a crowd by a river s brink receiving the sacrament of regeneration; on the other, the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar is lifted up before the Eternal Father; beyond is a mystic ladder reaching up to Heaven, on which angels are ascending and descending, and communing with Saints in vision; and in the foreground, rising over all, is Jesus on His throne, and on His right hand Mary crowned with light.
But this was to pass away. A rude and ruthless age succeeded an age of overthrow and uprooting, of griefs and wrongs. The scourge which passed over England a hundred years before was to pass over
Ireland too. It had fallen upon us before it fell on you. The steel-clad heel had trodden down the Saxon Church and the Saxon serf before it trampled on the sons of Ireland. The Normans were everywhere the same, but between us and you there was this difference. The unity of the Church, which had reduced to harmony the conflicting kingdoms of the Heptarchy, fused also into one people the two races of conqueror and conquered. Not so in Ireland. The conflict of race against race was perpetuated even while the religion of both was the same. It was Catholic against Catholic when the sorrows of Ireland began, when its schools were closed, and the " merus Hibernus" was thrust out of sacred offices and trusts. Long, bitter, and widespread were its afflictions, but the vials of its chastisement were not all poured out. There were other drops of bitterness yet to fall upon it. To the conflict of race against race was to be added the war fare of religion against religion. What, brethren, shall I say of the last three hundred years of your history? I do not desire to speak words which can rekindle fires now wellnigh spent, or to renew a theme at which the heart grows sick. But history is the witness of truth, and the witness must speak in its season.
If Achitophel were called to counsel how best to afflict a people, I conceive he would give some such advice as this:
Begin by violating all that a people considers sacred to truth and to God. Dethrone their venerable pon tiffs; dishonour, banish, or slay their pastors; let the priestcatcher be a known name of office; break down their altars, desecrate their sanctuaries, take away their consecrated possessions, and give them over to teachers who revile the faith of the people, and teach what they count heresy; let the bell, which once called them morning by morning to the Holy Sacrifice, ring at least once in the week to invite them to a worship they turn from as mortal sin; set it up by law in their ancient sanctuaries; prohibit, under pain of fine, prison, or death, the celebration of the religion they believe and love. The religious instincts of a people are of all the most keen and vivid. Set there the first sting down to the quick.
Again, the true education and sphere of man is the social and political order. It is in contact and conflict with public movements and courts, in sharing the weal and woe of society, in weighing the rights and wrongs of his fellows, in the open and arduous career of honourable ambition, and the generous service of their country, that men are formed, elevated, and ennobled. If then you would enfeeble and undermine the vigour of a people, close against them the paths of public duty. Let the gifts of heart and soul stagnate in obscurity; and the energy of will, and high aspiring of genius, rust in secret as a weapon cast aside: let the moral and intellectual power of a people be exiled from the paths and the sphere in which the providence of God ordains their exercise and perfection; and then do not wonder if every form of intense and energetic indignation should burn in the hearts of men, above all, in those who, being, by the gifts of God, worthiest to serve the society of their fellows, are therefore most wronged by banishment to such an unnatural obscurity. And yet this is not all. If public life be thus turned to bitterness, private life yet might be secure. Suppose its inmost fountains to be tainted. Let the son be tempted to thrust the father from his lands by forswearing his faith; and the younger brother supplant the first-born, and take away his birth-right; and the wife to obtain by constraint of law a large dowry by renouncing the religion of her husband. Sow division among kindred, and society is breached at its very base.
But this is not all that a people may endure. The laws of the Maker and Giver of all good gifts have so disposed that the social order should have its rise in the soil beneath our feet. Society springs from the furrow. The mother earth, on which man is born, is not only his grave, but his inheritance and his home.
It was not without deep insight into truth that the heathens of old placed among their divine benefactors those who first taught men to cast wheat inta the fallow. It is the toiling plough and hand of the sower which makes the earth fruitful, and enriches the home of the hushandman: and from the fruitful field springs up the village, with the charities of a hundred homes: from the village the town: from agriculture the arts of life: the market, the artizan, the trader, and the merchant, with their wealth: the gradations of culture, intelligence, and social order: their laws, mutual rights, common trusts, public tribunals, and justice with its even scales. Such are the laws of God written on the face of the earth, and administered by His silent and ceaseless providence. Outlaw a people from their operation, and the Author of those unwritten sanctions will avenge it. The direst of social scourges, endless and hopeless disorder, by intrinsic necessity of the thing will avenge the violation. Society is of God: and they that invert its principles, and thwart its expansion, fight against Him. What wonder if the gifts of the earth and sky be neglected, if for centuries the soil lie unbroken, and theundrained waters stagnate, and sources of inexhaustible wealth turn to poverty, ruin, indolence, apathy, discontent? And if any people were so under the edges of afSietion, would it be possible to make the edges sharper, and the wounds more keen? Perhaps there remains but one thine; behind. The earthen vessel is bruised
<~^s indeed, but it has a heavenly treasure yet within. In the time of its deepest poverty, when famine and pestilence are upon its children, tempt them, through the cravings of nature, through the pangs of hunger, and the fever of thirst, and the shivering palsy of nakedness, the cries of its children, wives, and mothers, to sell its faith. This one gift it still has of its own. Tempt father, mother, child, by bread and clothing, to forsake God. Buy up its poor.
Disclaim all tampering with the consciences: and without breathing the word, give food, raiment, money, favour to those who will put themselves under influences contrary to their faith. The work may be done without seeming to do it; and tacit understandings leave no evidences of the barter.
Do I then fear the protestantising of Ireland? No, not a whit. We are told, indeed, by an arrogant public voice, that u if this new Protestant Reformation and the stream of emigrants hold on, the Celtic race will be as forgotten in Ireland as the Phoenician in Cornwall, and the religion of Rome as the worship of Astarte." But I have no fear of this vaunting prophecy. Fear indeed I have of the sins of hypocrisy, falsehood, dissimulation, to which a people wasted with poverty may be tempted. I fear the sins of Simon Magus in many souls; but the protestantising of Ireland I fear no more than the restoration of the Phoenician rites in Cornwall. And why? Simply because from the hour that civil powers cease to establish protestantism, protestantism has ceased to spread. Without the civil power it has never converted a nation. Catholic nations have been overrun by infidelity, as in France, and have become Catholic again: but of a Catholic nation becoming protestant on free conviction there is no example. In the last three hundred years, as protestant historians tell us, " whatever has been lost to Catholicism has been lost to Christianity, and whatever has been regained by Christianity has been regained by Catholicism."
But this is not the only reason why we have no need to fear. Great are the ways of God, and He has taken the matter into His own hands.
About two centuries ago the Catholics of Ireland, reduced by warfare and every form of suffering, were driven before the sword into the province of Connaught. They were hemmed in as in a penal settlement. Perhaps they were half a million. The conquerors, it may be, were at least as many in number. In less than a hundred years they had outnumbered their rulers almost twofold. In another hundred years they were sevenfold. And now they are fivefold at least. Whence comes this wonderful expansion of a nation but from the hand of Him who multiplied His own people in Egypt? No other than God Himself has wrought for them. Thinned indeed they have been in these late years fresh in our memory; and they who hope for the protestantising of Ireland point to their diminished numbers. But where are they now? Ask the roof less cabins which by the road-side make the traveller s heart desolate; ask the green homestead where the voice of children a little while ago was heard; ask the cold hearth-stone round which father, mother, and child were gathered but the other day; ask of the fever, and ask of the famine, and they will tell you that the anointed dead are in the green grave, and their spirits are mighty intercessors before the throne of God. They are joining in perpetual prayer with their great Apostle for the benedictions of God upon the land of their love; for light and grace upon those whose hand has lain heavy upon Ireland. Some are in the world unseen, and the rest, where are they? They are throughout the world spreading abroad the true faith of Jesus. They have gone forth not only as emigrants, but as Crossbearers in every land. They are in the townships of Canada, in the cities of the United States, in the valley of the Mississippi, in the forests of the West, in the islands of the West and of the South, in the whole life and action of the new societies which people Australia. They are nearer home. In Scotland and in England, in the dense population of Glasgow, in the heart of Liverpool, and Manchester, and of London, in the very lifeblood of manufacturing and middle-class England. There is the remnant of Connaught, and there, too, is the treasure of the earthen vessel; the Faith and the Church of God. Where but yesterday there was a handful, to-day they are by tens of thousands; where, in the memory of man, a solitary pastor tended a few scattered souls, now there rules a Bishop on his spiritual throne, surrounded by the Priesthood of a Diocese. It is the will of God, and wonderful.
If you look in History for the glory of Ireland, you will not find it in the splendour of this world. In its annals I do not read that Ireland has founded empires, or planted colonies, or covered the sea with its commerce, or sent forth fleets and armies; but it has a glory all its own, and a splendour of the world of grace. Poor Ireland, rich in that treasure which is from Heaven, poor in all besides, out of its deep poverty in the last thirty years has built or rebuilt all its sanctuaries: churches, convents, schools, have arisen all over the face of the land: within the memory of the living, out of its faith it has produced three religious Sisterhoods for works of mercy: it has sent forth throughout the Empire of Great Britain a multitude of missionaries, greater in number, perhaps, than is to be found of any other race. For fidelity to its faith, for endurance of suffering, and for purity of life, what nation can be set before Ireland? This is its true glory a glory of the Kingdom of God, of which, it may be, its worldly afflictions have been the necessary condition. Had Ireland prospered in the natural order, like other races, it might have fallen from the order of grace. The earthen vessel has been bruised, that the excellency may be of the power of God and not of us.
From this then we may learn what is the true controversy of the Church against the world. It is not a battle of words nor a strife of intellect, much less a rivalry of political parties, but a deep inward unfolding of the supernatural life, which issues from the ministration of the Spirit of God.
We see too how all may serve the Kingdom of God. By inward fidelity of our whole mind and will to the Faith, the Order, the Authority of the Church: by a loyal and devoted fidelity to the See of Peter and to the Vicar of Jesus Christ. Fidelity to the Holy See has upheld Ireland unto this day. Fidelity to the Holy See would have saved Constantinople from the yoke of the infidel: it would have preserved England from the worldly pride which goes before a fall.
And with this fidelity let us join the power of a living example. Our will is not what we say or do, so much as what we are. Men read not our words, but us. We must be conformed to the will of the
Spirit, whose ministers and members we are. And the consciousness of a Divine message and of a Divine mission will be our strength. The least may share in this work of God, for it is of His power, not of us.
And happy they who can bear witness for the Spirit of Truth. Happy, who can sum up all their life in one act or one sacrifice of all things, in testimony to the Truth and Authority of Jesus. No matter how feeble we are in ourselves: since far mightier for
God, and for His will, is the least within the kingdom of Truth, than the greatest who are without.
Footnotes
Chapter 7 of 14