Discourse by the Rev. Père Hyacinthe.
[Footnote 65]
[Footnote 65: Delivered on the occasion of a profession of Catholic faith and the first communion of an American Protestant lady, in the chapel of the convent of "Les Dames de l'Assomption," at Paris, July 14th, 1868]
"Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo," "I will sing eternally the mercies of the Lord." —Psalms.
Madam and my sister in Jesus Christ:
It is you who have given me the text and the subject of this exhortation. It is you who, overflowing with gratitude toward him who has called you from darkness to his admirable light, have asked me to forget this audience and to think only of you and of God, and to speak only of his loving-kindness which has been manifested in every event of your life. I will obey you; and, taking this life in its three divisions which mark time, I will endeavor to speak in simple truth, and the pious confidence of an overflowing heart, of the mercies of God over your past, your present, and your future career.
The history of Christian souls is the most marvellous and yet the most hidden of all histories. The more exterior events which agitate society find only in these interior histories their true sense and their highest reason; and when we shall read these entire in the book of life, and by the light of eternity, we will find therein the unanswerable justification of the providence of God over human affairs, and the true titles of the nobility of mankind in the blood and by the grace of Christ. "We will sing eternally the mercies of the Lord!"
I.
And first, madam, what were these mercies of your past life? Or, to be better understood, what were you? What have you been until now? I acknowledge some embarrassment in giving an answer to my own question. Although born in the bosom of heresy, you were not a heretic. No, by the grace of God you were not a heretic; and nothing shall force me to give you this cruel name—justly cruel—against which cries out all the knowledge I have of your past. One of the doctors—the most exact and the most severe—of Christian antiquity, Saint Augustine, refuses in several of his writings to class among heretics those who, born outside the visible communion of the Catholic Church, have kept in their hearts the sincere love of truth, and are disposed to follow it in all its manifestations and in all its requirements. [Footnote 66]
[Footnote 66: See particularly the letter xliii. of the edition of the Benedictines of Saint-Maur: "Qui sententiam suam, quamvis falsam atque perversam, nulla pertinaci animositate defendunt, praesertim quam non audacia praesumptionis suae pepererunt, sed a seductis atque in errorem lapsis parentibus acceperunt, quaerunt autem cauta sollicitudine veritatem, corrigi parati, cum invenerint; nequaquam sunt inter haereticos deputandi.">[
That which makes heresy is the spirit of pride, of revolt, and of schism, which burst forth in heaven when Satan, separating the angels of light, attempted to remodel, according to his liking, the theology of eternity, and reform the work of God in the world; it is that breath blown from the nostrils of the archangel in wrath to stir up about him his propagandists throughout time. Gentle and humble of heart, you have never breathed that breath. You are not, then, a heretic.
But then, what were you? One day I interrogated one of your most distinguished fellow-countrymen, Protestant by birth, now a Catholic and a priest, and in the outburst of that pious curiosity which is awakened by the history of souls I asked him this same question: "What were you?"
He answered me thus: "I did not belong to any Protestant communion; I had been baptized in the church of my parents, but I had never professed their faith." "You were, then, a rationalist?" said I. "No," responded he smilingly; "we of the United States know nothing of that mental malady of the Europeans." I blushed and was silent an instant, then pressed him to explain further, when he gave me this noble reply: "I was a natural man, seeking the truth with my whole intelligence and heart."
Well, madam, you were like that: you also—a noble, womanly nature—seeking the truth in love, and love in truth. But you were more: you were a Christian; ay, a Catholic.
This is a fundamental distinction without which it becomes impossible to be just toward communions separated from the Catholic Church, and toward the souls which compose them. All religious schisms contain within their bosom two elements entirely contrary: the negative element, which makes it a schism and often a heresy; and the positive element, which preserves for it a portion more or less great of its ancient heritage of Christianity. Not only distinct, but hostile, these two elements are nevertheless brought together in constant combat; the darkness and the light—life and death—meet without mingling, or without either being vanquished; and then results what I shall call the profound mystery of the life of error. As for myself, I do not give to error that undeserved honor to suppose that it can live of its own life, breathe of its own breath, or nourish of its own substance souls who are not without virtue, and peoples who are not without greatness.
Madam, Protestantism, as Protestantism, is that negative element which you have repudiated, and which with the Catholic Church you have condemned and abjured. But the spirit of Protestantism has not been alone in your religious life: by the side of its negations there were its affirmations, and, like savory fruit confined within its bitter husk, you were in possession of Christianity from your infancy.
Before coming to us, you were a Christian by baptism, validly received, and when the hand of your minister poured the water upon your forehead with the words of eternal life, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," it was Jesus Christ himself that baptized you. "Of little importance is the hand," writes Saint Augustine, "whether it be that of Peter or that of Paul: it is Christ that baptizes."
It was Christ who affianced you, who received your plighted faith and pledged you his. The depths of your moral being—that sacred part which in noble souls feels instinctively a repugnance to error—the Word consecrated to himself, and like a chaste virgin he reserved it for the skies! "Virginem castam exhibere Christo." [Footnote 67]
[Footnote 67: 2 Corinthians xi. 2.]
Christian by baptism, you were also one by the gospel. The Bible was the book of your infancy; and therein you have lisped at once the secrets of this divine faith, which is of all time because it comes from eternity, and the accents of that Anglo-Saxon tongue which is of all lands because it prevails over the globe in civilizing it. Without doubt the principle of private judgment, so-called—the principle under which you have formerly lived—is the source of numberless errors; but again, let us render thanks to God, besides the Protestant principle, with the Protestants themselves there is the Christian principle. Besides private judgment, there is the action of that supernatural grace received in baptism, and the mysterious sense, of which Saint Paul speaks, "We have the mind of Christ," [Footnote 68] and of which Saint John said, "Ye have unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things." [Footnote 69] When we have read together that Scripture which has separated our ancestors, I was agreeably surprised to find that we understood its every page in the same sense, and consequently in reading it alone, and out of the Church, you have not read it without the spirit of the Church.
[Footnote 68: "Nos autem sensum Christi habemus." (i Cor. ii. 16.)]
[Footnote 69: "Sed vos unctionem habetis a Sancto, et nostis omnia. … Et non necesse habetis ut aliquis doceat vos: sed sicut unctio ejus docet vos de omnibus, et verum est, et non est mendacium." (i John ii. 20, 27.)]
Again, my child: with Baptism and the Holy Scriptures, with the sacrament and the book, you had prayer; that interior, invisible, ineffable, and withal common property; that language pre-eminently of the soul to God, and of God to the soul; that personal and direct communion of the humblest Christian with his Father in heaven.
In what, then, were you wanting? I remember what you once said to me when you were still a Protestant: "You, monk as you are, and I, Puritan that I am, are, nevertheless, of the same blood royal." You spoke truly, not because you were Puritan, but because you were Christian: we were of the same blood, both royal and divine. You were a child of the family like myself; but your cradle was carried away in a night of storm by imprudent hands from the paternal mansion—that mansion of which your eyes could no longer retain the image, of which your lips knew not the name, but which you reclaimed by your tears, by your cries, and by all the emotions of your soul. What you needed, my daughter, was to find it again, to weep upon its threshold, to embrace its old walls, and to dwell therein for ever.
You found it at Rome, in the temple of Saint Peter, the vastest and the most splendid which man has ever built to his God; but vast and splendid above all to the eyes of faith, because it is to them the image of the universal brotherhood of the children of God upon the earth. "To gather together in one the children of God that were dispersed." [Footnote 70] Coming from the great dispersion of souls, which is the work of man in Protestantism, you contemplated at last their supreme unity, which is the work of God in Catholicity. Deeply impressed and suddenly moved, you looked about you—it is your own touching account that I repeat here—you looked about you for a priest of your own tongue; not to confess to, for you did not then believe in its necessity, but to whom you could unburden your soul, and to whom you could tell your joy at having found at last a hearthstone for the heart, a home!—word so dear and sacred to your race and more necessary in the religious than in the domestic life. "This is my rest for ever and ever: here will I dwell, for I have chosen it." [Footnote 71]
[Footnote 70: "Ut filios Dei, qui erant dispersi, congregaret in unum." (John xi. 52.)]
[Footnote 71: Psalm cxxxi. 14.]
II.
I have tried, madam, to tell what was your past, and how the mercy of God prepared you in it by his far-reaching hand for the marvels of the present. What is now this marvel? It is the mystic marriage with Jesus Christ, by the communion with his real body and with his real blood, in the sacrament of his true church. Affianced of God in baptism, you become his spouse in the Eucharist. "Oh! blessed are you to have been called to the marriage feast of the Lamb." [Footnote 72]
[Footnote 72: Apocalypse xix. 9.]
It is not without a touching motive that you have chosen the 14th of July to consummate this solemn act. This is the anniversary of your marriage—of that marriage sundered by death. You have made your entry into the Catholic Church the epoch of a great transformation in your spiritual life: you have chosen the day most appropriately, desiring that this date, so full of the remembrances of tenderness and grief, should mark your entire union with your crucified Lord, to be no more separated for ever.
How beautiful is he—in his blood, and through your tears—this Spouse of Calvary, and how lovely, and how truly is he made for you, my daughter! It is not
"Patience on a monument smiling at grief:"
it is love transported with sorrow and reposing in death.
I remember well the day when I met you for the first time in the parlor of my humble convent. The Catholic crucifix you already wore upon your breast, and from time to time your eyes were turned toward that other cross suspended against the wall, and which presided over our interview, full of light and full of tears, with an expression which revealed your whole soul—all that it still lacked—all that it already foresaw.
I would exaggerate nothing, and above all I would offend no one; but can I not say that the orbit wherein, ordinarily, Protestant piety moves is the divine, rather than God himself? It is conscience, with its steel-like temper, which is at the same time evangelic and personal. It is respect for truth—the instinctive taste for what is moral and religious. All these are what I call the divine: it is not God. It is the glorious ray of the sun, but it is not that resplendent disk. Where, then, is the elevation of the soul to the living God? "My soul has thirsted for the strong and living God; when shall I come, and appear before his face?" [Footnote 73]
[Footnote 73: Psalm xli. 3.]
Where is the habitual communion of the heart and its works with the Word made flesh? and the tears poured out like Magdalen at his feet? and the bowed head—like that of John—upon his breast? and all that which the book of the Imitation so well calls the familiar friendship of Jesus? Where, in a word, is that Real Presence which, from the holy sacrament, as from a hidden fountain, flows forth to the true Catholic, like a river of peace, all the day long, fructifying and gladdening his life? It was this Emmanuel—this God with us—who awaited you in our church, and in the sacrament which attracted you with so much power even when you but half-believed in it. As in the ancient synagogue, you found in your worship only symbols and shadows; they spoke to you of the reality but did not contain them, they awakened your thirst but did not quench it. Weak and empty elements which have no right to existence since the veil of the temple has been rent asunder and the eternal reality discovered. "Old things have passed away, and all things are become new." [Footnote 74] Oh! blessed are you to have been admitted into the nuptial chamber of the Lamb.
[Footnote 74: 2. Cor. v. 17.]
However, madam, if Christ has taken captive your heart, it is the language of the prophet: "Thou hast beguiled me, O Lord, and I am beguiled: thou hast been stronger than I, and thou hast prevailed." [Footnote 75] But he has respected all the rights of your reason and of your liberty. That which you have resolved, that which you are about to accomplish, you have weighed well and long in the balance of investigation, study, reflection, and prayer; and I owe you this justice to say that you have carried your reflection to the utmost scruple, and completion almost to delay—so much have you feared, in this great religious act, any other argument but of personal conscience; to such a degree have you persisted in rejecting the shadow of any human influence, or the shadow of the influence of imagination or sentiment.
[Footnote 75: Jer. xx. 7.]
It is thus, however, that Jesus Christ would have you to himself. Spouse of love, he is at the same time the Spouse of truth and liberty, and this is why, in drawing souls to him, he never deceives nor constrains them. He is the eternal Word, begotten of the reason of God the Father; born in the outpouring of infinite splendor, he remembers his origin, and when he comes to us it is not under cover of our gloom, but in the effulgence of his light. And because he is the truth he is also liberty. He bows with respect [Footnote 76] before the liberty of the soul, his image and daughter, and forgets the language of command that he may only employ that of prayer.
[Footnote 76: "Cum magna reverentia disponis nos." (Sap. xii. 18.)]
As in the sacred song, he says: "Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is full of dew, and my locks of the drops of the nights." [Footnote 77]
[Footnote 77: Canticle v. 2.]
"Here am I." He says again in the Apocalypse, "I stand at the door, and knock: if any one shall hear my voice, and open to me the door, I will come in, and will sup with him, and he with me." [Footnote 78] He never forces an entrance into the heart; he enters it only when it is opened for him. How tender and beautiful those words that prove that with God as with man there is the same love and the same tenderness! True love respects as much as it loves, and disdains triumph at the expense of liberty!
[Footnote 78: Apocalypse iii. 20.]
Is this all, however? For his love is jealous and liberty is not enough; there must be the combat and the sacrifice. What were the desperate conflicts, free though you were, that rendered your decision so difficult and so painful? I may not speak of them. Family, friends, country: I have seen these sacred wounds too near to dare to touch them. I will only say that I was ignorant until now of what it costs even to the mind most perfectly convinced, and to the strongest will, to leave the religion of their mother and of their country!
Ah! why is it that on that noble soil of the United States our church is still, I do not say unknown, but despised, by so many souls? Would to God it were only unknown! A new apostle will invoke upon her shores the God whom Paul invoked before the Areopagus, ignoto Deo, the church which they love in the ideal, without knowing it in its reality; and, free from prejudices, the sober-minded Americans will receive it better than did the frivolous Athenians. But they think they know us, while they see us through such base report that even our name excites disgust and hatred. How much longer must these sectarian misapprehensions continue? and when will God at last command that the walls of division shall be thrown down? At all events, it depends upon us to prepare for that much desired day, by coming together, not with doctrinal concessions, which would be criminal if not chimerical, but by abandoning our respective prejudices before the better known reality, and by the formation of those kindly relations, while esteem and charity could yet unite those whom diversity of beliefs still separate. As for me, this is my most ardent prayer, and as far as I understand and appreciate the situation of religious affairs in this century, this feeling is invested with a quickened and more pressing character. And since, then, the time has come when judgment should begin at the house of God, [Footnote 79] let us Roman Catholics know how to give the example; let us arise resolutely and give a loyal hand to our separated but well-be-loved brethren.
[Footnote 79: "Quoniam tempus est ut incipiat judicium a domo Dei." (i Peter iv. 17.)]
But what do I say? Is it not you, madam, who have come to us first, surmounting obstacles which I cannot recount? You have overcome them not only with the sweat of your brow, but by the blood of your soul; for, as Saint Augustine so truly says, "there is a blood of the soul." And it is this which you have poured out; you have removed by your heroic hands the hewn rocks which shut you in. Like the daughter of Zion, you have made straight your way and have come. [Footnote 80]
[Footnote 80: "Conclusit vias meas lapidibus quadris, semitas meas subvertit." (Lam. iii. 9.)]
Ah! let me welcome you with these words of your own, in which you expressed the inspiration which was your strength: "My love, my beautiful, calls me: I know his voice, and though I am weak and trembling I will come to him."
III.
Let us finish this song of the loving-kindness of God in your soul. Affianced by baptism, even in the bosom of your involuntary errors, espoused by the Eucharist in the integrity of Catholic faith and charity, what remains for you to complete the cycle of divine love and to consummate your life therein, except to become a mother in the apostolate?
Our Lord was speaking one day to the multitude, when he was told that his mother and his brethren were without and had asked for him. Surveying the people with his look of inspiration, he asked, "Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?" Then stretching out his hand over the listening multitude, he said, "Behold my mother and my brethren. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my brother and my mother." [Footnote 81]
[Footnote 81: Matthew xii. 49, 50.]
The Pope Saint Gregory the Great, explaining, in one of his homilies, this teaching of the Master, found some difficulty in his saying, "This is my mother." "We are without doubt his brothers and his sisters, by the accomplishment of the will of the Father; but how could any being other than Mary be called his mother?" And the great pope remarks, as soon as a soul by a word, by example, by a spiritual influence, whatsoever it may be, produces or develops in another soul the Word, the God, the Truth, substantial and living, justice and charity, in fact, Jesus Christ—for Jesus Christ is all these—she becomes in a way superior to the reality of maternal conception, the mother of Jesus in that soul, and the mother of that soul in Jesus.
Well, madam, if I mistake not, God reserves for you a part in his choice of this spiritual maternity. It is of those cherished ones of whom I cannot speak—respect and emotion forbid—but you will be their mother in Jesus, their mother in the integrity of their liberty as you have been his spouse in the plenitude of your own. Since there are other souls without number and without name, at least to our feeble minds, but who are counted and inscribed in the book of divine election, and who, by the mysterious power of your apostleship, shall be gathered from the four winds of heaven; for the Lord hath not spoken in vain: "And many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven." [Footnote 82] Yes, many, born like you in heresy without having been heretics, ignorant without being culpable, are hastening to the banquet of Catholic truth, to the joys of a refound unity; while, alas! some there are among us, zealous for the letter, but using it to smother the spirit, who will see themselves perhaps excluded from the kingdom of God, for which they do not bring forth fruit. [Footnote 83]
[Footnote 82: Matthew viii. 11.]
[Footnote 83: Matthew xxi. 43.]
Go, then, as a missionary of peace and of light to the land that awaits you, and of which by an especial design of Providence the moral future is almost entirely in the hands of women. You will not regret the public preaching which is forbidden your sex; you will speak in the modest and persuasive eloquence of conversation; you will speak by your person and your entire life, free yet submissive, humble yet proud, austere yet tolerant, carrying the love of God even to aspirations the most sublime, and the love of your fellow-beings to condescensions the most tender.
But I would define more clearly the special character of your apostolate. In recounting to me the history of your soul, with its loves and hates, you have said, "I have hated three things: slavery, the Catholic Church, and immorality." Of the three hates only one remains. Slavery is no more: God has effaced the sign of Cain from the brow of your people with a baptism of blood. As for the Catholic Church, when you came to know it your hate was turned to love, and you have espoused it to battle more efficiently with it against the last enemy; and it is in the firm foundation of her dogmas, replacing the slippery sand whereon your uncertain feet trod; it is in the fecundity of its sacraments, substituted for the sterility of your worship; it is under the guidance of its hierarchy, and in the force of its unity, that you will combat the double immorality which dishonors the Christian world—the immorality of mind, which we in Europe call Rationalism, which you in America call Infidelity; two wounds unlike I know, but two wounds equally mortal: and the immorality of the heart, that which corrupts the senses as the former does thought. These two immoralities are sisters; one attacks the virginity of faith, the other the virginity of love, and both have found in woman a special enemy. To the serpent which crawls on its belly and eats the dust of the earth, the Lord has said from the beginning, in pointing to woman, who is the ideal being springing from the heart of man: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." [Footnote 84]
[Footnote 84: Genesis iii. 15.]
But now, behold the woman above all women! Mary, the young wife, the young mother, going over the hills of Judea to visit her friend, advanced in years, and hopeless as it seemed in sterility. She carries in her womb the infinite weight of the Word, but her step is light like truth, like love. Under the charm of the chaste love of God she greets Elizabeth, who feels at her approach the germ of nature quicken within her breast. "From whence cometh this happiness that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" The children were yet mute, but their mothers prophesy, Elizabeth before John the Baptist, Mary before Jesus Christ. "Already," to speak with St. Ambrose, "already the day of the beginning of the salvation of man had begun," [Footnote 85] and because sin had commenced by woman, regeneration commenced by her.
[Footnote 85: "Serpunt enim jam tentamenta salutis humanae." In Luc.]
It seems to me I see now the Christian woman, espoused of Jesus and his mother, advancing toward this century, bowed down like Elizabeth in the sadness of sterility. The obstacles which have repelled us do not hinder her. She will imbibe in the inspirations of her charity, faith, and hope, which we have too often failed to show; rising like Mary upon the delectable heights, walking in the paths of the spring-time and of the dawn; she will cause to be heard in the ears of the men of this century this cry of the heart which recognizes the presence of Jesus: "Behold, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy." [Footnote 86]
[Footnote 86: Luke i. 44.]
Arise, daughter of Zion, unbind the cords about your neck, you who were captive: "Solve vincula colli tui, captiva filia Sion." [Footnote 87] How beautiful are the feet of those who stand upon the mountain-top, proclaiming peace and bringing the glad tidings of salvation, crying: "The Lord shall reign!"
[Footnote 87: Isaiah iii. 2.]