I.
Every doctrine which has become a fact, every fact which has won for itself a place in history, may be looked at in three ways: first, with regard to its extent in material space; secondly, as to its duration in time; thirdly, as to the depth to which it has reached in human nature. This division is no invention of mine; it is the same pointed out by the Apostle St. Paul when he wrote to the Ephesians, and endeavored to explain to them the length and breadth, the depth and divinity, of the Christian faith: Ut possitis comprehendere cum omnibus sanctis quæ sit latitudo et longitudo, et sublimitas et profundum (Eph. iii. 18).
Now, as to its extent in material space, or, in other words, its territorial sway:
Open the map of the world, and scan the globe with attentive eye: a strange phenomenon will strike you. You will hardly discover one corner of earth where Christianity—and I use the word in this instance in its widest acceptation, excluding neither heresy nor schism, which, though unhappily rebellious, are nevertheless, in a certain sense, real members of the Christian household—where Christianity, therefore, has not penetrated, either in undisputed and irrevocable sway, as in Europe and America, or as a peaceful conqueror, sealing its hardly-won victories not in the blood of its enemies, but in its own. Following closely in the wake of new discoveries, it is for ever landing on new shores, making a home for itself among new populations, and winning new worshippers to bend beneath the ancient sway of the never-aging cross.
You might rise in contradiction to my statement, and remind me that the hour has not yet struck that will allow us, the soldiers of Jesus Christ, to intone the triumphant hosanna of final victory, since to this day there are many lands, many island-studded archipelagoes, many vast and populous continents, beyond the pale of our peaceful conquest, and since, after all, the standard of the cross is not yet securely reared in every clime.
I admit it; but what does this prove? That our task is not yet done? But who denies that? It is not done because time—which is our only limit—is likewise unended, nay, is perhaps only just beginning! For time is the array of all ages, and God alone, who created them, has reckoned their mysterious number. Yes, we confess it, our work is not done, and therefore we are ceaselessly and everywhere laboring; and therefore I myself, a humble but zealous worker, am laboring here at this moment. Those alone who will see the end of time will see the task completed. That which we have done during the twenty centuries that lie behind us is only an earnest of what we will do in future ages, God’s holy grace concurring.
What, my brethren! When we had no ships but frail canoes, and no compass but our untutored eyes; when we had no roads but eternal snows, virgin forests, and trackless deserts, vying with the wild beasts of the wilderness in barring our further progress; when we had no support but barefooted poverty and a pilgrim’s staff; no provision save precarious charity, and no guide save faith, hope undying, and—God; even then we succeeded in crossing rivers and seas, deserts and forests, mountain gorges and Alpine snows, that we might carry to the very confines of the world our living faith and the Word of our God. This ineffable Word has reached further than Alexander, who stopped at the Indus; further than Crassus, whom the Euphrates arrested; further even than Varus, who was stayed by the mighty Rhine—further than all conquerors, and further than all conquests. And can we believe that we have now set our foot on the fated threshold where the angel of evil would be permitted to say to the angel of virtue, as erst the latter was commanded to say it to his fallen brother, to Attila and the barbarian hordes, at the very gates of the Eternal City: “Usque huc venies, sed non ultra”—“Thus far shalt thou come, and no further”? Do not believe it, my brethren; for, on the contrary, it is but now that God’s reign is beginning, and as I believe, so I prophesy to you, with an irresistible and invincible conviction.
Forward, then, O human enterprise! Cleave the mountains, cut through the isthmuses, drain the morasses, and fill up the lakes; cast bridges over the waters, carry roads over the trackless country, build you mighty vessels, throw electric wires in the air, and gird the world with an iron girdle! Let your treaties of commerce and navigation be signed, and embassies sent to nations and kings whose names till yesterday were unknown in the civilized tongues of Europe! Know you what you are doing in thus knitting humanity together, and in connecting, with an energy unexampled in the whole history of the past, the orient and the occident, the pole and the equator? In one mighty embrace their hands are clasped, and they offer to each other, if we may so word it, that gigantic kiss of peace which, day by day, re-echoes more loudly in both hemispheres.
In all this, you are doing under the hand of God that which the war-steed does under the hand that guides him and the spur that urges him on. For, like unto the steed, who hardly knows whence he came, far less where his rapid steps are leading him and what is the burden that he bears—like unto him, thou Christ-blaspheming or God-forgetting age, thou boundest forward with maddening strength, carrying on thy broad shoulders with proud recklessness the rider whom thou scarcely knowest to the goal thou wottest not of. Every invention, every development of thy industry, far from cursing it, I bless it from the depths of my heart! Go forward and prosper! In a hundred years, thanks to thee, Truth will be sovereign of the world!
Christianity is the greatest geographical and territorial fact under the sun. It is so beyond all controversary, and if this fact, which I simply call a miracle, seems to you natural and easy of accomplishment, I only ask you this: try to spread and propagate over the universe, not a whole complicated system of metaphysics, but one single doctrine, whose mortal opponents, in the first instance, shall number every human passion which repulses it as treason against nature, and every heathen government which denounces it as treason against authority. But I will not ask even so much. Endeavor to persuade, not even one single nation, one city, one family, but one man, of the truth of a doctrine at once repulsive to his passions and hostile to his interests. I speak to you as a man whose life is devoted to this sublime and laborious mission of persuasion. And knowing as I do its wonderful consolations as well as the superhuman and apparently fruitless labor it often imposes, I tell you, my brethren, what you yourselves will tell me when the school of reality shall have taught it to you, that Christianity as it exists, spread over the whole earth by the godlike contagion of faith, is simply a fact so overwhelming that the language of men holds but one word fit to express its being—that one word, miracle.
There is, however, one thing more marvellous yet than mere propagation: it is duration, and a duration ever true to itself.
Condense the mystery of life into one short formula, capable at once of holding and adequately expressing it, and you will find none more comprehensive than this—motion and change. From the mass of inanimate being which, in the bowels of the earth and in the bosom of eternal night, is causing, by its agglomerations, its cohesions, and its fusions, a species of constant internal agitation, of blind and feverish restlessness as old as creation itself, up to the most dazzling pinnacles of life, where man figures under every name and in every relation conceivable among mortals, there exists the same law, there reigns the same spirit. In its name, by its authority, we see in private life one day swallowed up by the next, dethroned by its breathless and equally ephemeral successor, doomed beforehand to annihilation, while on the stage of public life events crowd each other out of time and of the memory of man, empires fall, dynasties grow up under the double shield of God’s grace and man’s enthusiasm, frontiers are widened and narrowed, whole nations migrate and spread, and even language itself, though but an outward sign of immaterial substances and metaphysical proportions in no way themselves subject to change, puts on divers forms, as if carried away by an irresistible impulse in the whirl of this universal frenzy. Yes, my brethren, motion is everywhere, and, in order that even death should not be permitted to fling its defiance permanently to life, this law penetrates even to the night and silence of the tomb, pierces the coffin, and installs between its four wooden walls the same unceasing restlessness which torments the great world. Worms, created to prey on man, riot with breathless agitation over the human corpse, and proclaim, by their ghastly activity in the abode of final destruction and in the very bosom of the crowning dread of earth, that life triumphs yet over death, and that the universal law of motion reigns in undisputed sway over that kingdom of darkness that owns no other created sovereignty.
And what is the result of this ceaseless motion? Nothing less than ceaseless change. Motion is a change of relations with the world and with one’s self. There is no motion but causes change, no change but presupposes motion. These terms are convertible, and so it is that I justify what I told you a few moments ago—that the concise formula of life is motion and change. It follows from this demonstration that nothing is so difficult of attainment as duration, and duration true to itself, which is to the sovereign law of motion and change a permanent defiance and a marvellous contradiction.
Let us seek in the vast sepulchre of Time, where during so many ages countless men and things, countless doctrines and institutions, have lost themselves, and in which even the shattered wrecks of once noble ruins, spectres of the past and often unconscious prophets of the future, have been swallowed up—let us seek one man or one created thing that has not succumbed to this pitiless law. Let us seek diligently in the manuscripts of old, in the caverns of forgotten magic, in the tombs of buried sages! Or stay, my brethren, and seek not! For, like unto the alchemist of mediæval ages, we should seek and not find, for that which we seek is not.
But if you would see this tremendous miracle of a duration as invulnerable as it is abiding, lifting up its solitary existence in the midst of universal change and motion, do not gaze afar, but turn your eyes to that tabernacle crowned with the cross, the standard and badge of Catholic Christianity. This, and this alone, abides where all else has been swept away by the ruthless and untiring breath which devours all that is, and ravenously awaits all that, as yet, is not. Christianity, and it alone, has lived true to itself, while all else around it was changing. Like unto God, the impassible and unchangeable, Christianity stands unmoved amidst the countless ruins with which you—men—strew the world. Christianity, with its old principles and its youthful aspect, leans on the rock of its own eternity, and gives the lie to the universal law with unassailable and ineffable calm. Yes, it defies you! It sees you pass, as the shore looks on the lapsing river, as the cliff looks on the ocean, as heaven looks upon earth, and as God looks on man.
It is strange, is it not? It takes our breath away. But this is not all: it is scarcely the beginning. Listen! To bespread over the whole earth is much; to live where all decays is more; to abide ever true to one’s self when all things change is more still. My opponents, however—I will not say my enemies, for, thank God, I know of none—are perhaps saying to themselves at this moment: “But are there not other forms of religion bearing much the same marks, at least in a certain degree? Islamism holds a considerable territorial sway. The Buddhism of India has surely been in a certain sense true to itself from time immemorial.” I do not deny it, for truth needs no dissimulation. And it is precisely on this account, and because error has been permitted to bear in some respects a certain likeness to truth, that it was imperative, for the sake of those men of good-will whom this likeness might have deceived, that truth should possess, besides those notes which she shares with error, other marks so utterly inimitable that on their appearance there could not be but instant recognition of that truth whose counterfeits are as legion, but whose equal does not exist.
The touchstone by which to gauge the worth of any doctrine is neither this doctrine’s extent in space nor its duration in time, nor even its impassibility amid universal transmutations; that is much, but it is not all. What is of more importance than the limits of its influence or the length of its spiritual reign, is the work it has done. There is its secret proof, there its most personal revelation. It can give but what it has, and it can have but what it is; it can produce outwardly but what it inwardly possesses; if it be falsehood, then falsehood; if it be error, then error; if it be evil, then evil; if it be a half-truth, then half-truth; if it be human and natural virtue, then human and natural virtue; but if it be God, then God himself.
Christianity, considered from this point of view, to which we can give but a passing glance, will vindicate itself in our eyes as standing unrivalled on earth, even as God is unrivalled in heaven.
To make my meaning clear, let me present to your minds one preliminary observation.
Man often lives amid the wonders of creation without feeling the slightest curiosity in their regard, and this because a sublime spectacle, from being too constantly before his sight, becomes only a familiar part of the daily monotony of his life. We might almost say of him that, to the abiding miracle of the material universe, he opposes the miracle of abiding indifference. Now, the visible creation contains another, both visible and invisible, and which, though far more wonderful than the material one, yet draws from you, on account of its abidingness, only the careless notice of indifference. Inhabitants of a Christian land, members perhaps of a Christian family, citizens of a Christian community, children, in a word, of Christian civilization, you are living in the midst of a world of miracles which has lost the power to interest you because it fails to surprise you. It is my mission to-day to rouse you from this indifference, to dispel this mist, to show you things as they are.
Look at any Christian country, any Christian or civilized nation of to-day; the country which harbors us at present, if you will. Who were here eighteen, fifteen, fourteen centuries ago? Not even barbarians; savages! Who was it that came and saved you from yourselves? Who was it that drew you from the materialism in which you were plunged in the person of your forefathers, and in which numberless tribes are grovelling still to this day—nations whom Christ has not yet gathered in, and who horrify the sight of the boldest explorers? Who was it that drew you from your forests, built your cities, founded your families, traced your boundaries, inspired your laws, reared your churches, anointed your kings, and created those two centres of light around which for eighteen hundred years your history has grouped itself, and your private sympathies, your public enthusiasm, has revolved—the altar and the throne, fatherland and God? Who has reclaimed your fields, and made fruitful by the labor of the plough the glorious conquests of the sword? Who has preserved in the silence and solitude of the cloisters the scattered remnants of classical learning, and through the Scriptures and traditions has kept alive the plenitude of sacred lore? Who was it that created that incomparable marvel, of which I would fain speak with tears, rather than with words—the Christian Family?—the father, the patriarch, priest, and pontiff of home; the mother, the apostle of God; the Christian virgin, that holy wonder which earth proudly points out to heaven, as if defying even heaven’s angels to surpass it? Who is it that has created virtues without number within sacrifices without name, putting by the side of every woe the voluntary service which will minister to it, giving to every misfortune some heart that will beat for it, and to the most neglected grave a mourner to weep over it? Who is it that has freed the slaves of man to create the slaves of God—those slaves who can say with the humble exultation of a supernatural sacrifice, in the words of the Jew of Tarsus, now become the great Apostle St. Paul: “Ego vinctus pro Christo”—“I, the slave of Christ.” Who is it that has created the ideal of duty and honor which inspired the troubadour and the knight—the ideal of fidelity to the pledged word, of horror at injustice, of the sacred hatred of evil? Who is it that has given you all the goods man prizes, and which you enjoy in ungrateful forgetfulness, while cursing those who accumulated them for you during centuries of untold and weary toil, and even him who won them for your sake on the cross, in a sea of tears and of blood? Who gave you the great gift which this age counts as the kingliest boon of all—the gift whose magical name we fear, not because our lips were the first to pronounce and to honor it here below: freedom—the deliverer from sin and death, from the passions of hell, and from the hell of human passions? Who made you what you are, or what you ought to be—beings regenerated, civilized, free, glorious, sacred—in a word, Christians?
Who, my brethren? Jesus Christ, he who is there present in his tabernacle, he who listens to me, who sees you, and who will judge one day between my word and your souls, between me and you.
And henceforward, when a blasphemy against his Godhead seeks passage on your lips, be it in mockery or in malediction, remember the Caribbean savage and the Red Indian, think of what he is and of what you are, and do not forget that, were it not for Christ, you would be even as that poor savage. If your soul is not yet open to the fulness of faith, at least let it hold its peace if it respects itself.
Christianity in its breadth, its length, and its depth is the principal fact of the world. No sincere and deep intellect, when glancing at this comprehensive whole, can contemplate it without developing in itself a spontaneous doubt, without saying to itself, if it be unhappily far from belief, “Might this not be really the work of God?” But if the simple consideration of the effect, that is, of Christianity, can create this inevitable doubt, what shall we say of the cause which has produced it, and of the relations of the one to the other? What, indeed, save this, that, face to face with this cause, doubt is turned into certainty, and man is irresistibly impelled to cry out, in the full conviction of his soul, that Jesus Christ is God indeed.