Sermon VIII. Truth before Peace

in the reign of peace and justice, in the days of Ezechias.

But this was no more than a type and a promise of things to come hereafter — of desolations more profound, and of consolations more enduring, than the transient afflictions and restoration of any earthly city. It foretold the day when the Church of Israel, the shadow of a substance yet to come, should be elevated by the advent of the Kedeemer, and should pass into the true and only Church of the living God, the mystical Body of His Incarnate Son. ' And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold, the tabernacle of God with men. And they shall be His people: and God Himself with them shall be their God.... And he took me up in spirit to a great and high mountain: and he showed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God; and the light thereof was like to a precious stone, as it were to a jasper-stone, as crystal. And it had a wall great and high, having twelve gates; and in the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel. On the east, three gates; and on the north, three gates; and on the south, three gates; and on the west, three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the twelve names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb. And he that spoke with me, had a measure of a golden reed, to measure the city and the gates thereof, and the wall. And the city is situate four-square, and the length thereof is as great as the hreadth.'2

Such is the true fulfilment of the words of Isaias —the holy Catholic Church, built upon the Kock, in all the splendour and beauty of its heavenly perfections, four-square, imperishable in its life, immutable in its illumination, indissoluble in its unity, infallible in its voice. And because it is replenished by the influx of light from its divine Head, and guided by the perpetual assistance of His Holy Spirit, the Church is first taught of God, and is then the organ of His voice to men. Its children therefore are all taught of God, and their peace is the peace of God in the divine unity of truth. No weapon formed against it has ever prospered. Ten long persecutions have but blunted and broken the weapons of the world. No tongue has ever gainsayed the Church of God but it has been condemned. False apostles 2 Apoc. xxi. 2, 3, 10-16.

have come in a long succession; but they have been confounded, and have gone their way. The accusers of the Church have been found liars. The reformers of its divine purity have betrayed their own corruption; and the false witnesses who have slandered it before the world, by their manifold contradictions have confounded and put each other to shame.

In this way the Church has always been verifying this prophecy of desolation and consolation, always tossed by tempest, and then comforted; in alternate storms and peace; but the peace always greater than all its afflictions; for the affliction is only for a time, but the peace abides for ever.

And this law has also been already verified, and will again be verified, in England. The desolations which are upon it were not always, nor will be for ever. Your forefathers are example. There was a time when northern England was the home of Saints. There was a light and a beauty upon its hills and its wolds, its valleys and its coasts. Whitby and Wear-mouth, Lindisfarne and Hexham, and Finchal and Durham, are dear to you, because the names of St. Aidan, St. Hilda, St. Caedmon, St. Cuthbert, and St. Godric, are written upon them. The world was tumultuous, indeed, from without, in those days; but the heavenly city rested on the face of Northumbria, and great was the peace of its children. The kingdoms of Saxon England were often in conflict, war-ring upon each other; but the Church reigned, in its illumination and power, over the souls of men. It is from a Saint of your own that we have the light to see the face of the Anglo-Saxon people. In the darkness of history, St. Bede shines as a silver star — bright, but all alone — shedding a radiance upon this country. In his light we see a people dwelling in unity, because they were one in faith. There were no fragmentary Christianities in those days, no mutilations of the perfect outline and disk of faith. The illumination of the day of Pentecost was upon the dwellings of the people of God. They were of one mind, in the one indivisible truth. In those days Jesus was upon every altar, in the rude cathedral, the silent monastery, the humble church by the river and by the sea. The presence of the Incarnate Word, and the radiance which goes out from Him, penetrated into the homes and the hearts of men. With Jesus was also His Immaculate Mother. Her image and her name were dear to all; the old and the young called her Mother, and saluted her in the angel's words. The Church had much to suffer from without; but in those days of early faith there were no contentions of Christians banded into sects, and, in the name of religion, rending asunder the unity of truth and peace.

There was, therefore, no spiritual destitution; that is, no sheep without a shepherd, no flock scattered to and fro, without fold and pasture. All then knew their pastor's voice, and the faith which leads to eternal life. Such was northern England in those days, when the holy Catholic and Koman Church spread itself, in light and peace, upon its kingdoms. The world was rude and dark enough, but Jesus reigned in the unity of truth. They were simple and saintly hearts in those ages of childlike faith. All then worshipped at one altar, and gave to each other the kiss of peace in the holy Mass, as children of one heavenly Father and of the Immaculate Mother of God.

But now are the times of our desolation. The Church is reduced to a remnant in the midst of the land. Christianity outside the Catholic Church is morselled into fragments; the presence of Jesus is no longer upon the altar; the old sanctuaries of the Saints are ruined and trodden down. Mary is dethroned from her dignity as mother and as queen, and her name is seldom heard, except to be cast out with coldness, perhaps with worse. Contentions are on every side, multiplying upon every article of the faith, from the grace of Sacraments to the Godhead of Jesus, the inspiration of Scripture, the fact of revelation, the existence of God. And, as a consequence of all this, inevitable and just, a spiritual destitution spreading over the face of the people; millions of the poor of Christ, the heirs of the kingdom, without pastor, or sacraments, or Christian faith, living and dying ' without Christ, and without God in this world.'

And now shall I ask, why was all this? Who brought it to pass, and how? If I were, I should have to re-open old wounds, and rekindle old fires now dying out, if not extinct. Why should we call up our forefathers to answer to us for that of which they have already given an account before the eternal Judge? And why add to our divisions now, by contending about who was guilty of the divisions then? Is it not better to ask how may all this be healed? Let us, if we can, forget the past, and heal the present and the future. And certainly there are at this time to be seen the harbingers of a better day. There is a craving for unity spreading on every side; a painful sense that division is the source of our desolations; a desire to heal them by a return to the peace of those days when men were of one faith and heart. I take this as the augury of happier times to come; as the first white lights which steal up the sky, and promise the brightness and warmth of noon. The barriers which divide men seem to be melting away; and though there are sharp conflicts and ringing blows still to be heard, a better wisdom is pleading with men.

The way to unity is peace; but there can be no peace in a constrained or artificial unity, by tying together discordant minds with external bonds, the living with the dead. Peace, indeed, must come first, and unity is its fruit. But before peace must come truth. ' All thy children shall be taught of God,' and therefore ' great shall be the peace of thy children.' It is truth that generates peace. Peace is a benediction, but truth is vital. He that seeks peace before truth, falls into heresy. Peace without truth is infidelity or indifference, and brings down the doom which our Lord pronounced on the Church in Laodicea: ' Thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot: but because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will cast thee out of My mouth.'3

But peace in truth can never be attained till we have found the truth; and truth we cannot find till we have submitted ourselves to a teacher who cannot err. But He must be God Himself. This, then,

3 Apoc. iii. 15, 16.

ought to be our first and chief work in life: not to waste our years in wounding one another by senseless controversies, in trying to wrest the weapons from each other's hands in contentions and strife, but to lay them at the feet which were pierced for us on Calvary, by surrendering reason and will to His divine voice, teaching through His only Church. We must be taught of God before we can be at peace one with another.

My thoughts were forcibly turned the other day upon this truth, which may be called an axiom in the faith, by words which fell from one of those voices which assume to direct the public opinion of England. It was said that ' England prides itself on its piety and its freedom;' that * earnest men will always be inquiring;' that ' the Apostles urged inquiry into natural religion, into the visible creation, into Scripture;' that they ' appealed to the burning curiosity and yearning after something better, which was the chief feature of their age;' that 'this is the age of inquiry; that inquiry is the rule;' and that ' the source of inquiry is doubt.' It would seem, therefore, that every man must begin in doubt, and if he be earnest, be always inquiring to the end. If this be meant of the world without faith, it is true enough. If it be meant of the Christian world, that is of the world illuminated by the faith and Church of Jesus Christ, it is self-evidently false. They who have not the truth whole and perfect, must he always inquiring, always doubting. Not so they who are ' taught of God.' Tertullian4 tells us that the heretics of his day were perpetually repeating, ' Quserite, et invenietis; Seek, and ye shall find.' He answered: Why seek what we have already? We have the truth; what should we seek for? It is our inheritance; it is the gift of God; it comes to us unsought; it precedes all inquiry. We know it without finding it, for we have it from our baptism. But, in addressing these that are out of its unity, indeed, the Church appeals to inquiry, and uses the same words as our divine Lord. ' Search the Scriptures; for you think in them to have life everlasting; and the same are they that give testimony of Me.'6 It does not there-

4 Tertul. de Prescript, adv. Hareticos, cap. ix. « There is, then, one certain truth established by Christ, which all nations ought to believe, and therefore to seek, that when they have found it, they may believe it. But the inquiry after this one and certain truth cannot go on for ever. You must seek until you find, and believe when you have found it. And then nothing remains to be done, but to hold fast that which you have believed; forasmuch as you believe, moreover, that nothing else is to be believed. And therefore nothing else is to be sought after, when you have found and believed that which has been established by Him.' ' No man seeks save he that has not, or has lost that which he had.' Cap. xi.

5 St. John v. 39.

by put its own divine certainty and its own divine authority at stake; but being conscious that the Scriptures testify of itself, as they testify of Jesus, of the Body as well as of the Head, it challenges the examination of its charter and its commission, without ceding or suspending for a moment the exercise of its divine authority. It requires faith in that divine authority. This is the first condition of its teaching. It offers the amplest explanation of its doctrines to those who believe in its divine commission. But it is vain to explain the truths of revelation to those who do not believe them to be revealed. Therefore the Church first requires faith, and then descends into the detail of its message to mankind. But this none can do save only a teacher sent from God, and so taught by God, that its voice is identified with His, and that the words of Jesus are verified, ' He that heareth you, heareth Me.'

1. Such, then, is the attitude of the Church in the presence of the world. It affirms its message as a witness; it bears its testimony with as absolute a certainty in the nineteenth century as in the first; it does not wait for the acceptance of men; it needs no countersign to confirm its declaration. Our Lord said: ' You are witnesses of these things.'6

6 St. Luke xxiv. 48.

B

' You shall be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth.'7 St. Peter therefore writes: 'We have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ; but having been made eye-witnesses of His majesty.'8 The Apostles were eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of what they declared. For what they testified they had a certainty both natural and supernatural, both of sense and of faith. This testimony they delivered to the nations of the earth. Their witness did not lose a particle of its certainty by being diffused throughout the world. The finding of a jury of twelve men loses none of its certainty by passing into the common knowledge, the public notoriety, the living consciousness of a people, nor by being transcribed into the records and traditions of the realm. These become corroborations of the facts, contemporaneous attestations, and all but eye-witness and ear-witness of the events. So the Incarnation, Eesurrection, and Ascension of Jesus, the personality, descent, perpetual presence, and office of the Holy Ghost, passed with the certainty of eye-witness and ear-witness into the universal consciousness of the Christian world. The spring be- ' Acts i. 8. 8 2 St. Peter i. 16.

came a river, and the river became a sea. And, with undiminished certainty, the witness of the Apostles has descended, ever expanding in its course, through century after century, to this day. Therefore St. Augustin said, that among other motives which held him to the unity of the Church, was ' the witness and consent of nations.' * The Apostles saw Christ present, but the Church, diffused throughout the world, they did not see... They saw the Head, and believed concerning the Body: we see the Body, and believe concerning the Head.'9 And this body has a lineal identity, and is a moral person; and its continuous and universal witness is the same which was delivered in the beginning. It is the same in every century — in the nineteenth as in the first. Time does not

9 St. August. Senn. ccxlii. in Diebus Pasch. 13, torn. v. 1012. The following parallel passage is too beautiful to be omitted: ' Let no one put off his fables upon you. Do not heed what the madness of heretics' (Donatists) ' clamours about this corner of the world. The Church is diffused throughout the whole earth. All nations possess the Church. Let no man deceive you. This is the true Church; this is the Catholic. Christ we do not see, this we do see: concerning Him let us believe. The Apostles, on the other hand, saw Him, and believed concerning it. One thing they saw, another they believed; and we, on the other hand, see one thing, and let us believe the other. They saw Christ; they believed the Church, which they saw not: and we see the Church; let us believe in Christ, whom we see not. And holding fast to what we see, we shall attain to Him, whom as yet we do not see.' St. Aug. Serm. ccxxxviii. in Diebus Paschal. 11, Opp. torn. v. 997.

lessen its evidence; rather it adds the accumulated testimony of ages and of races, the most remote and the most discordant in all other things, save only in the one consentient, universal witness to the Incarnation of God, and the presence of a divine Teacher.

If, then, it were only a human and historical evidence, the witness of the Catholic Church would be the maximum of certainty to be obtained for the events and truths of Christianity. No other fact in history comes to us with such an evidence as the Christian revelation and the advent of Jesus Christ. If this be not sufficiently established by the united witnesses of Christendom, then no fact of history is to be believed as certain. Christendom is the fact in itself, present, perpetual, self-evidencing.

But the Church is not only a human and historical witness of revelation; it is also a supernatural and divine. Its divine Head witnesses through it. The Spirit of God sustains and directs its testimony. The Incarnate Word is present with it, and by it speaks to us. And we, by our intelligence, are in contact with the revelation of Pentecost, because its illumination is perpetual, and we are replenished by its light. But for the perpetual and supernatural witness of the Church, how should we know, with divine certainty, the revelation given to man eighteen hundred years ago? The spring which rises on the mountain-side pours its waters upon the plain; and they are lost if there be no channel to receive them, no aqueduct to carry them to distant cities, to slake the thirst of men. But if in the aqueduct so much as one arch be broken, all its abundance is in vain. God has provided that the waters which came forth when the Kock was struck on Calvary should flow in a channel of divine construction, in which no arch is wanting, and none can ever be ruined by the hand of man. The whole revelation flows down to us from a divine fountain, through a channel which is also divinely constructed and sustained; so that at this hour the Church bears its witness with the same full assurance as they who heard from the Apostles their eye-witness and ear-witness of the revelation of their divine Lord. It uses their very words: ' That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have diligently looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of Life: for the life was manifested; and we have seen, and do bear witness That which we have seen and have heard, we declare unto you.'10

2. And therefore it teaches also as one having authority. In the midst of the voices which torment 10 1 St. John i. 1, 2, 3.

the minds of men by disputation and contradiction, by doubt and by controversy, there is one voice, calm, clear, articulate, unchanging, which pierces through all, is heard above all, and commands attention even from those who hate it. God sent His Son into the world, divided and distracted as it was by contentious teachers, that He might abolish all human usurpation over the reason of mankind, and redeem it into a divine liberty of truth. * Where is the wise, where is the scribe, where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?'11 The Church knows what it teaches, with a divine certainty. The illumination of Pentecost penetrates throughout the whole Catholic unity on earth, with a light and consciousness of truth. It cannot err in believing; for God is its teacher. The radiance which fills it falls from the divine Person of the Spirit of Truth, always present with it. This is its passive infallibility, whereby the whole is pervaded, as the sea is pervaded by the light of the noon-day sun. The Bishop on his throne, the Doctor in the schools, the peasant in the fields, the little child at its mother's knee, all alike are illuminated and sustained by the passive infallibility which replenishes the whole mystical Body. » 1 Cor. i. 20.

To this divine certainty, which hahitually and passively pervades the intelligence of the faithful, there is added the divine assistance which guides the Church in its teaching; that is, the gift of active infallibility which sustains the whole body of its pastors, whether spread throughout the world, or congregated in council; and also in an eminent way the person of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. St. Gregory says: ' The doctors of the faithful are the disciples of the Church.' They are first taught by a divine Teacher before they teach others, and so all alike are ' taught of the Lord.' The dogma of faith is infused into them by the light of the Church before they speak in its name; and the faithful, by their mouths, hear not the voice of an individual, but of the universal Church of all ages and of all lands. Though they are not infallible, one by one, in their pastoral office, the Church which guides them is. They must be unfaithful to it before they can err; and even then ' the ears of the faithful' would be, as of old, purer than the ' lips of the priest.' The instincts of a Catholic child would detect the novelties of human error.

Through these eighteen hundred years, some eighteen General Councils, and some two hundred and fifty Pontiffs, with divine certainty and divine assistance, have infallibly witnessed and taught. They have taught, therefore, with authority, that is, as 'having power:' hut that power is truth; for he that has the truth has power, and none other but he. The authority of the Church and of the Pontiffs does not primarily signify an act of the will, but of the intelligence. The authority of the Church was first the authority of evidence, before it became the authority of command. The Church binds men to believe, because it is divinely guided to teach them what they are bound to believe. The will can be bound only through the intelligence. God infuses faith into our reason by holy Baptism, before He lays His law upon us. So with the Church of God; because it knows the truth, therefore it binds us to believe it. The light of the Spirit of God illuminates it; therefore it says now, as in the beginning: ' It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us.'12 It commands us in the name of God, because it speaks with the voice of God; and it speaks with the voice of God, because it has the mind, that is, the truth of God. 'For what man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man that is in him? So the things, also, that are of God no man knoweth, but the Spirit of God. Now » Acts xv. 28.

we have received not the spirit of this world, but the spirit that is of God, that we may know the things that are given us from God.'13

It is truth, then, that generates authority — not authority that generates truth. There must he truth first, and authority afterwards; for authority is truth convincing the intelligence with its light, and hinding the will by those convictions, and by the authority of God which pervades them. It is this that the men of the world, and chiefly in our day, cannot understand. They denounce the authority of the Church as a tyranny and a bondage. It would be as unreasonable to talk of the tyranny of science and the bondage of numbers. Truth is immutable and divine; and the Church which has the truth of God has also the power and authority of God.

3. And once more: as the Church with divine certainty witnesses and teaches, so it judges. It is the sole fountain of all judgments as to the faith; and the last appeal, after which there is only the judgment of the last day. It alone in the world knows the revelation of God, its contents and its limits; and therefore it alone can judge what truths are contained in it, what is accordant, what is discordant with it. If it were not for the Church, we 13 1 Cor. ii. 11, 12.

should not have known that a revelation had ever been given. They who pretend to know what that revelation is, apart from its authority, or to interpret it against its teaching, simply convict themselves of incoherence and of unhelief. They receive the Scriptures from the Church, and yet disbelieve the Church which delivers the Scriptures to them. For it is the Church alone that testified to us the existence of holy Scripture. We should not have known with divine certainty that sacred books had ever been written, much less their inspiration; or what inspiration is; or the number and names of the books — that is, the canon; or the reading and sense of the text — but for the supernatural witness and discernment of the Church.

And as no other can judge what books are Scripture, so no other can judge of the interpretation of the sacred books. The Church alone knows the whole revelation, of which the Scriptures record a part, and knew it before they were written; and itself is, in its unity, universality, and authority, in its faith, sacraments, and action upon the world, not only the interpreter, but the interpretation.

And farther, for the same reason, the Church alone can judge what is primitive, what was believed always, everywhere, and by all. For who knows what is antiquity but that living Church, to whom antiquity is a part of its own consciousness? Antiquity is its own past; but, by its identity, antiquity is present to the Church at this hour. Antiquity to the Church of Jesus Christ is to-day. The words, ' Behold, I am with you all days, even unto the consummation of the world,' are the pledge of its personal identity, its unbroken continuity, its perpetual self-knowledge, by which it knows itself, not only in the nineteenth century, but in every age upward, to the hour when it saw the lights of Pentecost, and spoke face to face with the Incarnate Word.

And therefore, with all the plenitude of illumination, by which it sustains and enunciates in every age the whole revelation with all its contents, the Church alone can judge of the controversies which arise within it or against it. And it judges within the circle of its own sovereignty; permitting no mind or voice of man to intrude upon the sanctuary of its supernatural discernment. Not only philosophers and disputers, sophists and heresiarchs, but the most majestic powers of the world are excluded from its tribunals. Kings and emperors, human legislators and the supreme judges among men, to the Church are as shadows and as nothing. It weighs and adjudicates; it pronounces and promulgates; it admits of no appeal to the populace, or to the princes of the earth. It will not suffer one jot or one tittle of its judgments to be revised, or to he carried to any tribunal hut its own. All its causes of faith and morals begin and end within the circle of its own unity, and are terminated by the voice of its own supernatural authority; for its judgments, by the will and by the assistance of God, are infallible and therefore final.

Can anybody imagine a controversy about an article of the faith, as, for instance, whether the Sacrament of holy Baptism does or does not always confer regeneration upon the infant rightly baptised; or whether in the Sacrament of the Altar there be or be not the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ — can anybody, I ask, imagine such a question to be carried by appeal from the highest spiritual judge to the crown, even in Turin, tormented as it is by a spirit of schism and insubordination to the Vicar of Jesus Christ? Can anybody for a moment conceive that the Catholic and Koman Church, in any land under heaven, weak as it may be, and however mighty the civil power, would for a moment hesitate to accept persecution, exile, martyrdom, rather than such a denial of its supreme and divine authority in faith?

Can anybody imagine the reverend clergy who are here before me to be teaching contradictory doctrines as to the grace of sacraments, the existence of a priesthood, the nature, visibleness, or unity of the Church? Can any one imagine them for a moment to acquiesce, even by silence, in a system which has two kinds of doctrines, some of which are true, and others which, although not true, are legal? Would they for one moment, to save all dear to them in the world, or even life itself, hold communion in sacred things with any, however great or powerful, who denies so much as an iota of the faith of the infallible Church of God? And why is this, but because, being the Church of God, it is taught of God, and they are therefore penetrated and quickened by the spiritual consciousness that the holy Catholic and Eoman Church, divine and immutable in its light and voice, is the sole witness, teacher, and judge of the integrity and purity of the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Such, then, is the promise: ' Thy children shall all be taught of the Lord.' And so throughout the world, and in every age, God has taught His people, pastors and flock, Saints and doctors, learned and unlearned, old and young, man and woman and child, all alike, and all by one rule of faith, and by the voice of one and the same Teacher, audible by all, and intelligible to all. It is this unity of the divine voice which has generated the world -wide unity of the faith; and the unity of the faith has generated the unity of worship and of action, of communion and of peace, which binds the holy Church in one from the sunrise to the sunset. In the midst of all the tumults of men, and the persecution of these latter days, the promise is fulfilled to the letter, ' Great shall be the peace of thy children.' And after all its desolations from without, a divine hand lays again its stones in order, and builds up its walls with jasper, and keeps its bulwarks and its borders with a divine power and an unearthly peace.

But though the Church is ever in safety, it is ever in the storm; and the divine voice is always saying: ' 0 thou tost with tempest;' for in every age the ark upon the waters is violently carried to and fro. We live in a time marked with great events, and marked too with singular manifestations of the power of God. Fifty or sixty years ago, the Church seemed to be swept away before a triumphant infidelity. But the infidelity is swept away, and the Church in its majesty is here. Every tongue that has risen against it has been condemned. Three hundred years of proud and contemptuous controversy has ended in the confusion of Anglican Protestantism. For fifteen years men have been saying the time is come at last, and the temporal power of the Pope is fallen. The floods have risen even to the parapet of the wall; but in a moment they have swept by and are gone. The Holy See stands in the immutability of its supremacy; and the temporal power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ — that is, his independence of all civil authorities, and his supreme direction over all individuals and households, cities and nations, legislatures and kingdoms, in all matters of the divine faith and law — stands four-square and immovable upon the rock where the divine hand has built His Church. ' No weapon formed against it has prospered.' There it stands, the supreme witness, teacher, and judge of men, of their actions and their words, in all things pertaining to God.

And as in all the world, so here in England. We at this hour are witnesses of two great operations: the one, the fulfilment of the words of our divine Master, ' Every kingdom divided against itself shall be made desolate, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.'14 We see the great religious fabric reared by man three hundred years ago, upon the foundation where the Church 14 St. Matt. xii. 25.

once stood in this land, rent from top to bottom. The seat of the divine Teacher is empty, and His voice is heard no more. Its people are robbed of their inheritance. Their teachers and their guides are men. Human voices are clamouring in multitudinous discord; for the wills and the thoughts of man, cast loose from the influences of the divine Guide, by whom they were of old held in the path of unity and truth, have scattered themselves for centuries with a perpetual divergence and a growing repulsion. The beautiful fabric of Christian faith and peace, which St. Cuthbert and St. Aidan spread over the face of Northumbria, has been rudely broken and has melted away. The glow and the fragrance which was upon the sanctuaries and the homes of northern England has faded and is gone. The times of desolation are come back once more. But it will not be so for ever. There are already the tokens of the divine hand upon us, and the outlines of the ancient beauty are rising once more.

Fifty years ago, a Bishop of the Church, in the time of its bondage and poverty, laid, with the power of a primitive faith, upon a bare hill overlooking the splendours of Durham, the first stone of a Catholic college. It was a great venture, almost a rashness, in such days of weakness and oppression. Nevertheless it was done, and the work prospered. A college rose in fair proportions; but its founder, with all the confidence of his faith, little thought what should be the expansion of the work which he then began in poverty and straitness. At this day, this slender beginning has ascended and unfolded itself into a vastness and a splendour of which no one ever dreamed. The single college of fifty years ago has multiplied itself into a cluster of halls and chapels, of cloisters and quadrangles, for stateliness and beauty surpassing almost any modern work in England. There it stands with its three hundred students, the spiritual mother of a multitude of priests. It renews before us the creations of the Church in other days, when it reigned over the English people in wealth and majesty, possessed of lands and baronies, of political power and ancient privileges in courts and Parliaments. Nor is this great work the only one which the Church has accomplished. In the last fifty or a hundred years, the Church in England has built and matured four noble colleges, at Ushaw, at Oscott, at St. Edmund's, and at Stoneyhurst. By the wisdom of their founders, they were placed in four distant centres, that their influence might bear upon England from four several points. But if they had all been congregated in some one place, some one town or city, in s the midst of England, with their stately buildings and their six hundred students, they would constitute the beginning of a university of noble and vast proportions.15 I doubt whether the Church, before the great desolation of Protestantism, while it was yet in possession of wealth and power, ever founded and perfected in a century four greater works than these. And by whom and in what days were they accomplished? By Catholics under penal laws, or only just emerging from them; diminished to a handful, in deepest poverty, and robbed of the patrimony which the charity and piety of their forefathers bequeathed for such works as these. I know nothing to which these creations may be ascribed, save the inexhaustible and prolific power of the Church of God, which, with a boundless fertility, reproduces always the same works with the same facility and the same perfection. No other cause for it can be found, but the supernatural power of God working for the Church in its greatest desolation, once more laying its stones in order, and renewing its beauty as at the first.

One last word of a more personal and local kind, and I have done. Near to the place where this church now stands was the house of a Catholic mother, who

15 This might be greatly strengthened by adding St. Beuno's, Downside, Ampleforth, and the like.

had fixed her home in Durham, that she might more carefully watch over her son, then a hoy in St. Cuthhert's College, at Ushaw. It was more than fifty years ago, when the spirit of the English people had not yet heen liberated from the possession of hatred to the Catholic faith and Church. The present generation can hardly remember what was the violence of those days. The next generation will hardly believe when they read it in history. It chanced that this Catholic boy, it may be of ten or twelve years old, was detained from college, under his mother's roof. It was the moment of a parliamentary election. The house opposite to their home was the principal inn in Durham. It is now the convent of the Sisters of Mercy. An election committee was there sitting, and an election mob was gathered about the door. The spirit of party was running high, and men's blood, as is usual, was heated, and there was uproar in the street. The boy was standing at the window to see the fray. The mob caught sight of him, and assailed him with hootings of contempt, and with names which, as they are now falling into forgetfulness, I will not repeat. The Catholic mother, terrified at the increasing uproar, and fearing for the safety of her son, drew him back into the room, and out of sight.

Again, there came a day, some fifty years afterwards, when that boy, grown to manhood, stood in the midst of a still greater tumult, which upheaved the whole of England, from its highest to its lowest, with storm and tempest against the Catholic and Koman Church. Once more he stood, but now surrounded by his brethren in the Episcopate, higher than all, fearless, and appealing in calm articulate voice to the common sense of the people of England as the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.

And with these two auguries of good for the Church in northern England, I will say no more. As Lindisfarne and Durham of old sent forth apostles and evangelists over the face of Northumbria, so now Hexham and Ushaw take their place. Some three hundred priests, humble and self-denying, have already gone forth hence over the north of England, sons and missionaries of peace, children of the only Church which, being taught of God, never falters in its voice, because it never wavers in its faith, but stands luminous always and changeless, ' yesterday, to-day, and the same for ever,' in the vision of truth seen by faith, the prelude of the vision of peace, which is the vision of God.

IX. OMNIA PEG CHBISTO:

At the solemn Requiem of Nicholas, Cardinal Archbishop of West-minster, in the Pro-Cathedral, Feb. 23, 1865.

The words prefixed to this Sermon are the well-known legend "borne by his Eminence.the late Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. They so truly express the unity of his life, and the consecration of all his thoughts, words, works, gifts, and sufferings to the service of his divine Master, that no others could form a fitter title to this slight outline of so great a career. In the following pages will be found a few passages which were omitted in delivery; and one fact inserted from the beautiful Lenten Pastoral of the Right Rev. the Bishop of Beverley.

H. E. MANNING.

Bayswater, Feb. 24, 1865.