UPON THE PASTORAL CHARGE.
On one occasion I was complaining to him of the difficulties which I met with in the discharge; of my episcopal duties. He replied that on entering the service of God we must prepare ourselves for temptation, since no one could follow Jesus Christ or be of the number of His true disciples except by bearing His Cross, nor could anyone enter Heaven except by the path and through the gate of suffering. "Remember," he said, "that our first father even in the state of innocence was put into the earthly Paradise to work in it and to keep it. Do you imagine that he was banished from it in order to do nothing? Consider how God condemned him and all his posterity to labour, and to till an ungrateful earth which produced of itself nothing but thorns and thistles. There is much more toil and difficulty in weeding and cultivating souls than any earthly soil, rough, stony, and barren though it may be. The art of arts is the direction of souls, it is of no use to undertake it unless we have made up our minds to innumerable labours and disappointments.
"The Son of God being a sign of contradiction, can we wonder if His work is exposed to the same; and if He had so much difficulty in winning souls, is it likely that his coadjutors and those who labour with Him will have less?"
Then fearing to depress me by the enumeration of so many difficulties, he went on to cheer me with the example of the Prince of Pastors, the Bishop of our souls, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who preferred shame and toil to joy, that He might further the work of oar salvation.
He added that of the Apostles, and other Pastors of the Church, reminding me that if we think much of the honour of being their successors we must, with the inheritance, accept its burdens, nor shelter ourselves by, in legal phrase, disclaiming liability for debts beyond the assets inherited. Otherwise, he said, we should be like that kinsman of Ruth who wished to have the inheritance of the first husband, but not to marry the widow and raise up to him an heir.
He generally wound up his remarks with some reminder of that love which makes all that is bitter to be sweet: sometimes quoting to me those words of St. Augustine, "Where we love, there is no labour, or if there is any we love the labour itself, for he who labours in loving, loves to labour for the beloved object."