122. On the Attributes of God

Synopsis — Preliminary observations on Christ expelling the traffickers from the temple — True faith not always the sign of a truly faithful soul — Sign of a living faith: when one's inner knowledge is brighter than one's outward profession possibly can be — A perfect Christian's heart is a chronicle of God's truth in words of love — The prayer of faith.

SECOND SERMON FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEDICATION OF A CHURCH.

My bouse shall be called the house o f prayer. — Matt, xxi, 13.

Our Lord would show us how it may be brought about that our interior soul shall be made a house of prayer, for man is essentially God's holy temple. But first of all the traffickers must be driven out; this means the alien forms and pictures of our imagination, as well as enjoyment of created things, and self-will. To this is added the cleansing of the soul, which must be washed with the tears of penance in God's love. Then is the temple clean. Now, temples are not holy because they are houses made of fine material and beautiful design, here, there or in Rome or elsewhere, for they are made holy by God. And of all temples, that of our soul is God's favorite temple, for there God dwells in all truth, if room only be given Him, and if whatsoever is incompatible with His presence is removed.

But what sort of dwelling for God shall that soul be, which, ere it gives one thought to God often gives forty thoughts to other things? And this indicates who are the traffickers in God's house, and how they happen to be there. Whosoever wilfully lives in the enjoyment of creatures, the same is a trafficker in the house of God. There can be no manner of doubt, therefore, that any man who would have God dwell in Him and work His divine work in him, must put away all that stands between him and God; he must drive out of his soul all pleasure in created things that God is not the cause of. If any one would say that ten hurtful human friendships are not worse than a single one, he would talk foolishly; any child would know better. Therefore, the fewer hindrances to God we have to expel the easier our task will be. But yet mark this: Ten imperfections that a man knows and acknowledges to be such, are less dangerous than a single one that he will not own to be a fault, and that he obstinately cleaves to. Therefore, cultivate humble fear about your hidden faults. For when thou liest prostrate before the merciful God in all lowliness of spirit, owning frankly to thy imperfections, tben art thou well advised. A man who is full of excuses can never be rightly guided. Avoid that spirit as you would eternal death. Thou mayst come across the holiest man in the world, and likely enough thou wilt find him weeping bitterly for his sins; and if thou askest him if he has not wept enough during so many years of penance, he will answer thee that it is not a thousandth part of the tears that are due to God for his wickedness, and that he is now only beginning to weep. If this be the mind of wise and holy men, shouldst not thou look carefully to thyself? You may ask me if I mean to teach that one should weep all the time. I answer yes and no, according to God's guidance of different souls. Only this I maintain — no man should imagine at any time that he has completely done all the penance that is due to God for his sins.

But when thou hast driven the traffickers out, when thou art come so far as not to permit joy in creatures to abide in thy soul, what then? Why this: Thou must keep a strict guard on thyself. For these vile traffickers soon will try to creep back again, once more to begin their huckstering; and then they must be driven out a second time. But observe that if they linger within thee — these earthly tendencies— and if that be straight against thy will, they cannot harm thee. But whether their intrusion be long or short, out at last nuisi they go through the same door they came in. Yet more: All the foul and evil things that they may have left behind them — thoughts, feelings, weaknesses — if they be the accumulation of even twenty years, all must be cast out along with what caused them.

"My house shall be called the house of prayer." Now. to prayer belongs devotion, a word which means devoted to God or vowed to God, an interior binding to God joined to a great longing for eternity. When thou art thus bound, thus vowed to God, thou hast devotion wheresoever thou art, whatsoever may he thy good work. It needs not alwavs to be celebrating jubilees to have devotion : or to feel great spiritual sweetness. All this is but incidental ; for the essence of devotion is in totally giving oneself to God interiorly, or being united to Him, or bound to Him. That brings one very close to Him. Devotion thus understood is like a battering ram; it hammers down the walls of God's kingdom and opens a wide passage for the soul to enter in.

St. Hilary names three means of gaining entrance into God's interior kingdom. The first is true faith; the second an intelligent knowledge of God; the third, interior, devout prayer. And now what is faith? I make bold to say that not all the Christian people are faithful Christians. You know that the churchyard is full of the dead and the church building full of the living; so in holy Church there are many that seem to be alive, but are really dead, for their faith is not a living faith. And what is a living faith? Nothing else but a living taste for God and for all that savors of God. A man may hear and read things that belong to our holy faith, as about our Lord's divinity or humanity, or the blessed Trinity. But he has a living faith within him, if interiorly he knows that God is, and when that is interiorly more plain to him than all his teachers can say; and this because he lives and dwells in the interior kingdom. There does this life of faith pour forth its living waters from its own fountain head.

Another kind of Christians — and, alas, they are not few — hang on indeed to the life of faith; but its light is easily obscured in their souls. If sunlight were a living creature and a cloud were another, then the latter could destrov the life of the former. So mav the life of faith, already weak enough, be devoured by the cloud of sinfulness in a Christian's soul. But when one is strong in the faith with the living strength of knowledge and love of God, then if clouds of sin happen to overhang that soul — for all men are liable to sin — soon the sunshine of Divine life breaks through those sin-threatening clouds and disperses them : the soul quickly recovers its former sense of living faith. The life within such men has struck deep roots, its fruit soon reappears: in plain words the soul quickly flies from siu. Meanwhile the others, those of weaker faith, lie where they fall. If they enter into themselves they find themselves a dead dog, dead and reeking with corruption. Drag that dead carcass of a soul away out of our sight — we might say: it is lifeless and coid, it is empty of God and of all that belongs to God. Whatever means God is heavy and dull to that soul. Or there may be a faint spark of life left ; the sinner may feebly cling to Christian faith. In that case the soul shall be finally saved if it will but enter into real and living faith by true repentance. But it may easily happen that such a man shall fall away totally and finally. By and of himself he has no ways or means of returning to God, for he lives in outward things alone; spiritual things are vain and tasteless to him and his own interior condition strange and unknown.

Those souls who abide in the life that is within, know well of the interior movements of God and of His truth. As to what befalls them in the outer life, that also makes for God, ever newly awakening their inner life, now with holy purposes, now with deeper love, again with praise and thanksgiving to God. This life is within them and none other. They live in a divine interior kingdom. They savor God in everything — a state of soul that must remain hidden from all who have not been granted its privileges.

St. Hilary's second road into the interior kingdom of God is an intelligent knowledge of God. That is found in a man of living faith — he has not far to seek for it, for it manifests itself to him. Entering, as he does, by the right door, the light of this knowledge beams full upon him — he does not intrude himself by any forbidden passage, and therefore it must be said to him : "Lo, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke xvii, 21). He finds the truth in a degree of brightness unknown to all who are not familiarly at home in this interior dwelling. He finds a knowledge here above all thought and reason and understanding, as St. Dionysius writes: "It is light in light, the soul's light in uncreated light." The great teachers of the University of Paris read great books, and turn over the leaves with much joy. That is very good; but those devout men we have been speaking of read in a true living book in which every word is a living force. They turn over earth and heaven as a man turns over the leaves of a book, and therein they read the wonderful works of God. They advance to the knowledge of the different orders of the blessed angels of heaven. They penetrate into the eternal life of the blessed Trinity, how the Father eternally begets the Son our Lord Jesus Christ, how the Son everlastingly rejoices in the bosom of the Father, how the Holy Ghost proceeds from both the Father and the Son, how the holy Trinity pours itself forth into all blessed spirits, and how these all return into their origin and fountain head. This is the beatitude of which our Lord spoke: "Now this is eternal life: That they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent" (John xvii. 3). Such is the life in God's living temple, the noble and glorious entertainment of all God's chosen friends. Here dwells the Divine High Priest in His own palace, for here is the true presence of God, in which all good is centred and where all pain vanishes away. Whosoever has experienced this, knows it well and knows nothing else. It is a knowledge unknown to all the masters of worldly science. 'Whatsoever man best acquires it in this life and goes deepest into its secrets is found closest to God, and shall be made the happiest.

Si. Hilary's third road to the kingdom of living faith is prayer. It is the elevation of the soul to God. In a stricter sense, it is the tinning inward of the created spirit to union with the uncreated Spirit of God. By this means the spirit of a man shall be moved and guided by the essence of the Godhead. Such men are the true adorers, who "adore the Father in spirit and in truth" (John iv, 23). And our Savior adds: "For the Father also seeketh such to adore Him" (ibid.). What they seek in their prayers they find — they receive what they ask. And in this prayer there is finding and there is losing. How losing, and what is lost? Even the temple now is lost — the man's spirit and all the life of it that we have been describing are lost. What has become of it all? It has all flowed back into God and is now embraced by His being and absorbed in Him. The human soul is made one spirit with God, as our beloved St. Paul tells us: "He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit" (I. Cor. vi, 17). What all that is, and how all that is done, is more easily felt than told : all discourse about it is as unequal to its reality as a needle point is to the great heavens above us. May God grant us the grace one day to experience it — God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.

TWO USEFUL INSTRUCTIONS ABOUT CONFESSION.

Children, I counsel you, and I admonish and implore you, to learn how to confess all your sins interiorly to God, and to acknowledge yourselves guilty before Him with the utmost sincerity. Ponder over your sins very deliberately before His eyes and with much love; but do not make your outward confession to the priest too long, nor dwell too particularly upon the fine distinctions between different venial sins. There is little profit in such a practice, and it robs your father confessor of his valuable time, annoying and perhaps distressing him. Children, by such minuteness of confession your sins will not stop, and, as I have elsewhere taught you, your father confessor has no power over sins which you have not made up your mind to quit.

Turn into yourself; arouse your memory; work inside your soul. For the outward telling of your sins brings little fruit if not joined to interior repentance, especially when there is (as in this case) no question of mortal sins, but of venial sins. Such superfluous telling of sins is often the sign of a man all too careless in the work of interior confession. If the interior confession of venial faults be done rightly, these defects are so obliterated from one's conscience that he can scarcely recall or describe them with any particularity; but that presupposes that he has dealt with God about them with deep sincerity. And now you understand that all this has reference only to venial sins.

As to mortal sins, 0 may God preserve you from them. Children, it is every way necessary that a man should keep a strict watch over his interior life. He may be said to have many skins drawn over his soul, hiding its true state from him. We meet with men who, though they know many things, do not know themselves — there are thirty or forty interior disguises hiding some men's souls from their own knowledge, one disguise beneath the other, each of them as hard as the hide of an ox. And these self-deceptions hinder one's getting away from and keeping out of mortal sin : for they cannot be stripped off by confession alone, as you might suppose they could, but only by interior sorrow. And just what are they? Everything that thou hast in thee, or meanest, or enjoyest, whose true end and object is not God. These are all a man's false gods — evil images harbored in the mind, self-will, self-indulgence in the life of the senses. A man hides these from him-these as Eachel hid and sat upon her father's idols in her tent. To these are joined presumption, boastfulness, and spiritual sloth in Divine things. These are all interior disguises. I do not say that they are all matter for confession to a priest, but I do say that they must be seriously taken account of and humbly confessed to God. If a man will but prostrate himself at God's feet and acknowledge himself guilty of these things, all will be well; he will then begin to turn away from them to the best of his ability, and our Lord's help will not be wanting. Amen.

One may confess his venial sins to his father confessor with words such as these, according to each one's particular failings : I have been guilty of proud and useless thoughts in reciting my office and in my [uayers instead of giving careful attention. I have been negligent; I have broken silence without necessity at times and in places not permitted; I have spoken scoffingly, hastily and imprudently; I have been silly in my language, restless and uneasy in my conduct, unguarded in my manners ; thoughtless of God's will ; forgetful of the holy rule in and out of choir ; I have been disobedient and ungrateful ; I have not loved God and praised Him as I ought ; I have not attended to His interior admonitions; I have not given my brethren a good example; and I accuse myself in general of having not duly observed poverty, chastity, obedience, and the holy rule according to my vows, as well as of all other of my sins and imperfections.

And thou mayst beg of God the granting of an indulgence as follows : Dear Lord, if it were possible for me to do so, I would seek to gain this indulgence by journeying through frost and snow, through rain and cold. But that is not in my power to do ; nor can I do more than humbly implore Thee to grant me this indulgence as Thy generous alms. I beg Thee to make me a sharer in all the holy devotions in Thy Church everywhere, giving me a plenary indulgence from all my sins, by the most precious blood flowing from Thy Divine wounds, the source and fountain head of all Thy graces. Dear children, say that prayer with sincere faith and deep confidence in God, and thou shalt be raised above all the miseries of this world.

OX THE ATTEIBUTES OF GOD.

Moses said to his people: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord" (Deut. vi, 4). So can we make much progress by meditating on the different attributes of God and His various names, as we apply them to His Divine being; but meanwhile we ought to sink down into our own nothingness. I have already explained, that after one has duly meditated on our dear Lord's birth, life, passion and death, he should then elevate his spirit above time and fix it upon the eternal ways and being of God.

In considering the Divine attributes, one may, as it were, mirror

God in his soul, and consider Him as a pure being and the essence of all beings, and yet He is nothing of all things as we understand them. But all that is, and all that is being and has being and is good, in all that God is. St. Augustine says: "Seest thou a good man, a good angel, the good heaven? Abstract man, angel, heaven; and that which remains, that is to say, the essence of good, that is God ; for He is all in all things, and yet far above all things. All creatures have indeed good in them, have indeed love; but they are not the good, they are not the love, but God alone is the essence of good, of love, and of all that one can name." Then let a man compare himself with this essential good, and exerting all the powers of his soul let him contemplate it and become absorbed in it, so that his own nothingness may be merged in God and renewed in His Divine essence, which is alone the being and the action and the life that is in all things.

Let a man contemplate the attribute of the simplicity, the absolute oneness of being, and he will see God as the final end of simplicity, in whom all multiplicity is made unity and simplified in unity of essence. Again, God's essence is His action. God's knowledge, love, justice, mercy, righteousness are all one. Enter therein, drawing with thee thy own incomprehensible multiplicity, which He will make simple in His own most simple essence.

Let a man contemplate God's unspeakable hiddenness. He is hidden in all things; as Isaias says: "Verily, Thou are a hidden God" (Isaias xlv, 15). To everything he is nearer than it is to itself. He is in the depths of the soul, hidden there from all sense and unknown. Penetrate there and enter into union with Him with all thy powers, transcending over all the thoughts of thy external existence; for thy external existence is as far from thy real self and from thy interior existence as is any beast, which lives only in its bodily senses, and knows and understands and feels nothing besides. Hide thyself away in this hiddenness of God, away from all creatines and all that is alien to essential being. But this does not take place by the way of images and forms in the mind ; no, nor by the use of the understanding, but in an essential way, all the soul's powers and aspirations being lifted above the life of sense into the way of perception.

Then let a man contemplate the solitude of God, in which never a word in the essence or in the essential way is spoken. All in God is silent, secret and solitary — nothing but simply God, and never has entered there anything alien to God, whether it be creature, or form.

or image. God meant this solitariness when He spoke by the prophet : •I will lead her into the wilderness; and I will speak to her heart" (Osee ii. 14). This wilderness is His silent, solitary Godhead, into which in time and eternity He leads all who will be attentive to His interior inspirations. Into this still Godhead introduce thy own vain and waste soul, which is a wilderness full of a rank growth of weeds and empty of useful fruit, a wilderness given up to the wild beasts that are thy senses and faculties.

Then contemplate the Divine darkness; for by reason of His unspeakable brilliancy, God is darkness to all created understanding, whether of men or angels, as the noonday sun is darkness to the unprotected eye that gazes straight upon it. The created light of the mind of man or angel compared to God's mind is as the eyes of a little bird compared to the sun in the sky. When any created spirit looks full upon God, it must instantly close its eyes and rest in blindness and, as it were, unknowingness. Into this brightness of Divine light introduce thy fathomless darkness, devoid as it is of all true light. Give over thy darkness to the abyss of the Divine darkness, which alone knows Itself, and in the degree it knows Itself is unknown to all else. But this abyss, this unknown and unnamed, is divinely blissful, and it ravishes the soul's love more than all that it can know else in the eternal beatitude of the Divine essence.