Sermon X. The Glory of the Church Always Progressive

At the opening of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, Manchester, Thursday Sept. 26, 1872.

THE GLOKY OF THE CHUKCH ALWAYS PKOGRESSIVE.

Thy Throne, O God, is for ever and ever. PSALM xlv. £9

These are the words of the Eternal Father, investing His Incarnate Son with the royalties of His kingdom. They speak not of the eternal kingdom which He had with the Father before He was made man, but of that same kingdom which the Archangel, in the salutation of His Immaculate Mother, foretold, saying that the Lord should give unto Him the throne of David His father, that He should reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and that of His kingdom there should be no end. It is the kingdom of which in the Creed we make profession of our faith, ' Cujus regni non erit finis;' the kingdom of Jesus Christ, the King of kings, Lord of lords, deriving its authority from eternity, but here present in this world. It was of this kingdom that Jesus spoke when He said to His Apostles, 'All power in heaven and in earth is given unto Me; go ye therefore;' 'I dispose to you, as My Father has disposed to Me, a kingdom.' The royalties of that kingdom He committed to Peter when He said, ' Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will huild My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.'

The Appian way hy which Peter entered Rome has on either side the sepulchres of kings, consuls, and patricians, the memorials of a kingdom, of a republic, and of an empire. And as the Apostle, lone and weak, passed between these shadows of departed greatness to found in Rome the Throne of God, which shall be for ever and ever,. he foreshadowed the course of the Church through the path of time. Empires, kingdoms, and commonwealths lie on either side its road, and the shadows of departed greatness, and of majesty that is here no longer, hover, as it were, about the path of the Church. The ever - living Kingdom of God moves steadily on to the amplitude of its dominion, and to the accomplishment of its purpose, undying, imperishable, and divine, fulfilling the promise of the Eternal Father: ' I have set my King upon My holy hill of Zion;' ' Sit Thou at My right hand until I make Thy enemies Thy footstool.'

I have chosen these words to-day because we are in a time in which the world, and the powers and the tongues of the world, multitudinous and innumerable, are for ever exulting over the clouding of the light of the Church of God, and the unfolding splendour of the majesty of man. It is good, therefore, that we should meet these empty and confident vaunts by a bold and fearless declaration that the Church of God, its royalties and its prerogatives, its lights and its powers, are not only what they were in the beginning, but that they are expanding in their maturity, unfolding to their fulness, and that the Church of God is culminating, from age to age, to the amplest manifestation of its splendour. There are men who tell us every day that the Church had indeed a golden age of unity and authority, to which they appeal in the past, seeking the living amongst the dead. There are others who tell us that the Church, in its greatness and its unity, is a Church of the future, seeking the Church that is among the things that are not. We affirm the Church to be here now, living, mighty, energetic, the Throne of God in the midst of the world, extending its circumference, accumulating its powers, and rising perpetually towards its perfection. This, then, is the one thought which I desire somewhat to unfold; and I think it is a thought full of courage, and that the time is opportune to dwell on it. In this nineteenth century the intelligence of men, and the tongues of men, and the pens that write what the intelligence conceives and the tongue utters, so as to spread it to the ends of the world — all these agencies of human antagonism to the one Faith and the one Church, are in perpetual activity. They fill the atmosphere on every side; we cannot draw hreath without inspiring their influence; they hover ahout our dwellings, we cannot pass our threshold without meeting them. No man can go through a day but his ears and eyes are filled with triumphant proclamations of the expiring power of Pope Pius the Ninth, the dethronement of the Sovereign Pontiff, the routed hosts of the Church, the majesty of new empires, and I know not what boastings of this world and what anticipations of the downfall of all that God has founded. In answer to this I will affirm, that at no time in the history of the Church have its notes been so resplendent or so manifest as in this nineteenth century. At no time has the note of its universality so nearly approached its fulness. At no time has its unity, both within and without, been so complete. And as the consequence of these things, our confidence of faith ought to turn the balance of these bold vauntings, and to restore our courage, if in any it has failed. Nations and men may conspire together, but the foundation of God is imperishable, and the throne which rests upon it cannot fall.

I. First, then, there never was a time in the history of the Church in which its universality was advancing so near to the full circumference of the human race. I shall be told: ' Your Christianity is the religion of a fragment, after all.' I answer: ' The Church, in its action upon the races of mankind, is not to be estimated by mathematical dimensions.' Who can say that the prophecy of the universality of the Church signifies that it should ever be simultaneously and mathematically universal? The Gospel of the Kingdom is to be preached to all nations before the end comes. Its witness shall have been universal. Let us look at the facts. There was a time when the universal Church was contained in a guest-chamber; nevertheless it was potentially universal even then. In a little while it spread to Samaria, then to Antioch; then it passed to the Hellenistic dispersion, from them to Kome, then to the Gentile nations of the world. It became the Church of the nations of which Borne was the centre. Then the great Koman empire disappeared from the earth, and a new Christian world arose, spreading beyond the boundaries of the old civilisation of Rome. When the

East apostatised, the nations of the West were given to the Catholic unity. When Saxony and England fell from the unity of the Church, a new world was opened in the West; and now that the old Christendom of Europe seems to he sapped by unbelief, and poisoned by animosity against the Church, God has opened a new world in the Southern seas. At this moment the universality of the Church occupies, I may say, five continents of the world. Europe, and America in all its length is Christian; Africa is unfolding its gates, our Evangelists are there; Asia is being penetrated on every side; at this time Japan, the mother of martyrs, is beginning to open its boundaries; and Australia, the cradle of ~an empire, it may be, greater than the world has ever seen, is now added to the unity of the Church. It never showed the note of universality so luminously as now. But the other day, round the throne of the Vicar of Christ there were seven hundred Bishops, representing some thirty or forty nations, races, and tongues — a number never assembled before; and gathered too from an extent of the earth's surface never before represented in any Council. Though England be out of unity, some hundred and fifty were English-speaking Bishops. Of these between eighty and a hundred were sons of St. Patrick. If St. Augustine of Canterbury has been shorn of his glory, St. Patrick has inherited it. I therefore say, as my first answer to the vaunts of the world, the Church is not pent up within your four seas or limited to a nation; nor is its heart feeble; but the pulsations of that mighty and undying life are ever sending out the light and the grace with which the Sacred Heart of Jesus inspires it even to the ends of the earth. It is accomplishing its mission, always and to this day, fulfilling to the letter the commandment of its Divine Head to ' Go ye into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature.'4

II. But once more it is certain that there never was an age in which the unity of the Church both within and without — I mean both its external unity of organisation and its internal union or unanimity — were so resplendent as now. The Church has had to pass through times of dissension, periods of internal intellectual conflicts of every kind. During the great Arian heresy, not only were there separations and external disunion, but there were the evils of internal and intellectual confusion. So also the Nestorian heresy sowed broadcast the germs of intellectual errors which disturbed the Church within. So in the whole line of speculative subtilties with which ' St. Mark xvi. 15.

the Oriental mind, fruitful of heresy, perplexed the faithful. These were periods in which the Church was tormented from within, until, hy the vigour of its life and by the action of its unerring authority, it cast out everything contrary to the divine, inviolable faith. Next came the period of the Christian world; and no sooner was the world Christian than secularity began to taint the members of the Church. Byzantine emperors, German kaisers, Franks, Swabians, Saxons, Bavarians, tainted the Church by their patronage, oppressed it by their protection, and strove with it in the audacity of their pride. There was never a period, down to the vanishing away of the last of those great empires, each in its turn, in which they did not wrestle foot to foot with the Vicar of Jesus Christ. After this came the period of nationalities, when the unity of the Church was torn asunder into what, with a keen irony, were called obediences. Even the very Conclave was divided by it. Three doubtful elections for the Head of the Church reduced the faithful to doubt as to who had claim on their fidelity. This again passed away into a perfect unity, which from that day to this has never been broken. Then came the time of royal supremacies and national separations, and, what is worse, of nationality absorbed into the unity of churches, throwing out Gallicanism and Josephism, and endless domestic and national evils.

But, all these — where are they now? During our own lifetime we have seen three manifestations of the unity of the Church which have effaced the last traces of them all. The definition of the Immaculate Conception, against which the world has never ceased to rave, was received with an acclamation of faith from sunrise to sunset, which revealed and confirmed the supernatural unanimity of the Mystical Body of Christ. A few years after, the Church was in full conflict with the powers of the world and with the subtilty of the revolution. The Temporal Power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ was the ball at the foot of statesmen, and journalists, and mockers, and Liberal Catholics, and half-hearted men, who sought to serve both God and Mammon. The Bishops of the Church met once more around the throne of the Vicar of our Lord, and with one voice proclaimed that God in His providence had so ordered the world that, as long as it was Christian, His Vicar could never be the subject of any human authority; but¹ confident assertions even of men Catholic in name, lias been united in the defence of this truth. The Catholic people of the world know that they have in this declaration a sure guide for Catholic thought, which, though it did not create a dogma of their faith, traced for them a law and a principle of certainty even in matters of the political order where the Church comes in contact with the world. But, lastly, the other day we had a still more luminous and wonderful manifestation of this unity without and this unanimity within the Church. In the midst of scorn and mockery, of reviling and accusation, of hostility and intrigue, the great Vatican Council assembled. You know what men have said and written against it, against its freedom, its independence, its wisdom. You know that there is not a stone which could be gathered from the mire which has not been hurled against it, not an imputation which could sting the hearts of honourable men that has not been launched against it. It was said that the Bishops of the Church were divided, that a majestic minority was about to check the extreme pretensions of the Vicar of Christ, and to curb the encroachments of Home. What was the result? With a unanimity which included even those who, exercising their freedom in perfect liberty, believed that the time was not come to define the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, the definition was promulgated. After its promulgation the whole Episcopate received it. In all the world, even to the last unit of the number, with true Catholic hearts they adhered one by one to what the Church of God had defined. Through them the whole priesthood of the Church, and the whole Catholic people, pastors and flock, at this hour recognise in the article of their baptismal creed, ' I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church,' the doctrine that the successor of Peter and the Vicar of Jesus Christ, when, in the plentitude of his authority, speaking from the chair of Peter, and teaching the universal Church, he defines anything in matter of faith and morals, has the assistance of the Holy Ghost promised to Peter, and in Peter to all his successors, and therefore can never err.

For these reasons, then, I affirm that there never was a time when the external unity and the internal unanimity of the whole Catholic Church upon earth were more complete. The world knows it, and frets at it; it is chafed by it; it cannot endure the spectacle of unity in the midst of its contradictions. Heretical men see in it the ruin of their hopes. They thought to raise a bulwark against the spread of the one imperishable faith, to construct a battlement from which to hurl stones and arrows against its unity. But never in past time was the whole Episcopate of the Church so inseparably united to its Head. Pius IX. sees around him his brethren in the Episcopate, bound to him by faith, by love, and by fidelity, with an intimate closeness such as no Pontiff ever knew. As a consequence of this there never was a moment when the whole flock upon earth was so closely united to its pastors. And further, no more splendid example of that unity is to be found than in Ireland, England, Scotland, America, and the Colonies of the British Empire; that is, amongst the freest peoples of the earth, where thought, and will, and act, have their most perfect liberty. There was never an age in history when the whole laity of the Church — men, women, and children — were in so close a bond of fidelity and charity with the pastors who are immediately over them, and with the Vicar of Christ, who is the common Father of us all. In truth, the flock is united to its parish-priest, the clergy is united to its Bishops in the measure and in the proportion in which the parish-priest is obedient to his Bishop, and his Bishop to the Head of the Church. The busy pens that day by day are so fast in criticisms never venture to deny the entire fidelity which binds you to your clergy, and the enduring bond of fidelity and trust which binds the clergy to their Bishops, and the Bishops to the Successor of Peter.

III. But once more: never was there a period in the Church's history when the whole Catholic faith was so explicit, so luminous, so clearly defined. If you recite your baptismal creed, and take the pages of Christian history, you will see that every article of our baptismal faith, from the first to the last, has been disputed by some sect, beginning with the heresy of the Gnostics, and coming down to the heresy of scientific historians in our day. Every article has been successively attacked, and has been successively defined. There is not a single article of the baptismal creed which has not been made a subject of.explicit definition to expel or to exclude some heresy. And now an event has come to pass in our time which puts the keystone into that explicit declaration of faith. As every particular doctrine has had its definition, the liberty of error has been narrowed, and the field of truth expanded; and now the infallible authority of the Church speaking by its Head, and the infallible authority of its Head in virtue of the assistance specially promised to him who sits in the Chair of Peter, has been defined. This last definition hastied together in indissoluble unity the whole structure of faith. As the keystone of that arch put in the other day completed the solidity of this sanctuary, so is it with our Creed. That which the Council of Constance prepared, and the Council of Florence implicitly defined, and the Council of Trent would have defined explicitly if national jealousies had not intervened, the Council of the Vatican, in the fulness of its divine authority, has formally declared. The definition of the infallibility of the Head of the Church is now incorporated in the faith of the Catholic world, and can never pass away. IV. The effect of this has been to cut to the root the principle of heresy. Without the gift of prophecy, I may say that we shall never have again a Christian heresy. We shall have a multitude of antichristian errors; but a Christian heresy — that is, a fragmentary Christianity — is a thing which belongs to the past. Where are the old heresies now? Where is the dominant Arianism which tormented the Church for centuries? Where now is the heresy of Nestorius? Where that of Eutyches? Travellers and antiquarians may find a few relics of them; but there are no other proofs of their ever having been. Where are the heresies that tormented the Church in its youth? Where are the heresies of the Middle Ages? You do not know them by name. What has become of the fragmentary Christianities of three hundred years ago? They do not exist as a form of intellectual thought; as a precise form of erroneous doctrine they have no existence. They have mouldered and fallen piecemeal; they have run to seed, and followed the law of their own creation; they were formed upon the principle of destruction, and they have destroyed themselves. I will not now speak of England or of Scotland; but I will recite the words of an adversary of the Catholic Church, and above all of the Vatican Council, who three years ago, writing from Berlin, declared — unconscious of what he was doing, and that we could read and make use of his words — that in Germany three-fourths of educated men believe no Christianity which either Luther or Home would acknowledge to be such. This was denied at the time by men who desired to refute it; but even they showed that these words are substantially true. The testimony of an impartial and disinterested person, writing from Dresden, gave these facts. He said that he was present at a meeting of ministers of religion in that country, when they unanimously affirmed two things — his own being the only dissentient voice — first, that Arius was as good a Christian as Athanasius; secondly, that the Lord's Prayer was creed enough for Christendom. And again, at an assembly of ministers of religion it was publicly declared that 'the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ was a superstition of the Middle Ages.'0

Where, then, I ask, is the work of Luther? Where is the error which for a little while bore his name? Men have played out the comedy. They know that to reject a few doctrines and retain others is not worthy of intellectual men. They are now more thorough-going, more courageous, more consistent, more consecutive. They have rejected the whole fable. Holy Scripture, inspiration, books of the supernatural order: all these are swept away. They know that the real issue, and the only issue, is between faith and unbelief, between authority and license, between the teacher speaking in the name of God and the boundless freedom of each man to test for himself the revelation of God by his own intellectual measures. Men are coming to see, with a clearness which equals our own, that there is but one barrier against unbelief — the authority of the Holy Catholic and Roman Church; there is but one basis of faith — the divine tradition of the Church of God, founded upon a rock, indefectible in its life, and infallible in its voice.

As a farther proof of this, at this moment there

5 Religious Thought in Germany. Appendix A. Tineley, London, 1870.

is gathered together at Cologne a strange assembly of men. It is worth noting how they are watched here in England; what hopes are laid up in the future of their action; and how men believe that out of the meeting of what are called ' Old Catholics' there may come some new rays of light for those who will not obey the voice of the Catholic Church. Bear with me if I very shortly describe what is there taking place. The heads and leaders of that Congress be-gan with the simple rejection of the Nineteenth •Council of the Church. They professed to believe the other eighteen with all their hearts, and, above all, to believe in the Council of Trent, in all its dogmas, and in the infallibility of that Council, in virtue -of the infallibility of the Church. In the midst of them there was, indeed, already a virus of Rational- * ism, which was eating away the doctrines of the faith. Many from the first were for rejecting confession, invocation of Saints, and other revealed truths. They have now aggregated to themselves members of the Anglican body; and the first proposition made to them by these new friends was to reject the Creed of Pius IV. and the twelve chief definitions of the Council of Trent, together with the infallibility of that Council,;and therefore the infallibility of the Church itself. As if this were not enough, one of them invited their alle-glance to the Church of the future — a Church never yet seen, and therefore not founded by Jesus Christ — a something hanging in the atmosphere — a nebula that has not yet attained solidity or shape — an expression which is to come out of the unity of men's intellects; and when they have agreed to agree upon that which they do not yet know, then they will frame a doctrine, and from that doctrine will issue an authority. And, as if this did not suffice, they aggregated to themselves one who learnedly discoursed upon the Greek Church, and of the first seven General Councils, as the sole rule of faith, inviting them back to the Byzantine heresy. How these irreconcilable things are to illuminate the hopeful Protestantism of England, we, in our simplicity, cannot understand. It may well, then, be affirmed, that there never was a time when the right of private judgment and the principle of heresy were so discredited in the judgment of reasonable men as they are now; I may say, so completely effaced from intellectual and consistent minds.

Y. I will add but one other proof of the visible progress of the Church towards its final victory. It is one of contrast. Look at the state of the Christian world. Was there ever a time since the world be-came Christian when it was so profoundly conscious of its own aberrations, of its own disorders, of its own impotence to govern and to sustain itself? If we look upon the Christian world, or rather on the world that was Christian till its rulers and its kings separated themselves from the Church of God, we shall see the fulfilment of the words of the prophet Isaias: ' As he that is hungry dreameth and eateth, but when he is awake his soul is empty; and as he that is thirsty dreameth and drinketh, and after he is awake is yet faint with thirst.... So shall be the multitude of the nations that have fought against Mount Zion.'G So shall it be with the nations once gathered into the unity of the Church by the mission of the Apostles, if they shall separate themselves again from that unity, and return into the divisions and the darkness of the natural order. All those who fight against the Church fight against Mount Zion and against Him who sits thereon, and they will receive their condemnation, passed by their own lips and executed by their own hands. Look at the political order of the world, and at the thrones overturned one after another. We could count them the other day; now they are innumerable. Look at the charters which have been written, re-written, and torn to shreds. Look at the revolutions which have 6 Isaias xxix. 8.

scourged every people. The revolutionary fever is in the blood of the nations; it may be intermittent, but it never ceases to run in their veins. And the rulers and the princes, and the legislators who talked the other day of civilisation and Christianity as if they were the creators of the Christian world, cannot hold together that Christian society which the Church created and they are destroying. Look at the religious teachers who, rejecting the Divine authority of the Church, and breaking up of the unity of the faith, have never continued for one generation identical in their belief. They have been in perpetual flux and change, varying from each other and from themselves, thereby incurring a twofold penalty, the loss of authority over their people, and the loss of those very people themselves, who, wandering to and fro in the darkness, have either found the path which leads into the perfect light, or are losing all faith in their Kedeemer. Look, again, at our philosophers. There was a time when they were Pantheists, believing God was everywhere and in all things; but that is too pious, too mediaeval, too superstitious, now. The philosophers of these days are Secularists, who believe in the world because they can trample upon it, and in created things because they can make them the subjects of their chemistry; but of anything beyond sense they deny the existence. There are next those whom men call Sceptics, doubtful of everything except their own self-sufficiency to judge, destroying the imposture of their own philosophy hy their certainty that nothing can he known. And to complete the circle of error, the Sophists of the old world are come again to teach us the philosophy of contradictories: that the highest truth is to affirm and to deny the same things under the same categories. To us the Secularist seems to he a pollard tree, whose stature is stunted, and its dignity defaced. Scepticism we are simple enough to "believe to be an intellectual palsy; and sophistry to be the aberration of an idiotic brain.

1 From all this we learn a great and solemn lesson. There was a time when reason revolted against the authority of the Church of God, destroying the unity of the faith. Now unbelief has risen up and avenged the wrongs of faith. It has destroyed the basis even of natural belief in the existence of God, the authority of conscience, the distinctions of right from wrong, the being of the soul, its spirituality, its immortality, and its future. These truths of the natural order our Secularists, our Sceptics, and our Sophists reject, because by their philosophy they cannot prove them. Their disciples are obliged to come back to the Church of God, to receive from its infallible voice a proof of these very truths of the natural order which their natural reason has lost, hecause their teachers have depraved it.

Let us, then, sum up the argument that I have used, and the facts I have asserted. There never was a time when the expanse of the Church's reign upon earth was so near its fulness; there never was a time when its unity without and its unanimity within were so luminous and undeniable; never a time when the holy Catholic faith stood so clear in the sunlight of revelation, as a mountain against the blue sky; never a time when the very principle of heresy was so discredited, or clear-headed men so ashamed of the folly of the human reason in erecting itself in judgment against the Divine authority of the Church of God. Eeject the truth of God altogether or believe it altogether; but to walk wavering between these paths of Christ and Antichrist is contrary to reason. Never was the world so conscious of this in its political and in its religious order. Never was it more unstable or more full of fear. The Church of God, then, is not in decrepitude. If not in its youth, it is in the vigour of its manhood. It is ever renewing its strength. Like its Divine Head, in the midst of this world it is visible to faith in the fulness of its prerogatives, in the splendour of its notes. The true progress of mankind is by faith. The Church is ever going onward. In the. midst of the sepulchres and tombs of departed human greatness, of thrones which have already fallen or will fall to-morrow, it stands solid and changeless, resting upon the basis God has laid, indefectible as is the light of the firmament, pure as the waters from the springs of the earth, imperishable as the Throne that is for ever and ever.

Footnotes

1. sovereign over all; the chief of sovereigns, the first of kings, according to the promise of the Father. From that hour to this the whole body of the faithful, harassed as it had been, and perplexed by the ^ ↩