Sermon VIII.
The Failure And Success Of The Gospel.
(Sexagesima.)
"Saying these things he cried out:
He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."
St. Luke VIII. 8.
There is one measure by which, if our Lord's work were tried, it might be pronounced a failure; and that is by the measure of great immediate, visible results. The thought might come into our mind, that it is strange our Lord was not more successful than He was. He was the Son of God, no one ever spake as He did. He conversed with a great number of men—in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Galilee. He was always going about from place to place. He died in the sight of a whole city. Yet what was the result of all? On the Day of Pentecost, His disciples were gathered together in the upper chamber, and they numbered, all told, one hundred and twenty. So it is, likewise, with the Church. After all, what has she done? Put her numbers at the highest. Say she has two hundred millions of souls in her communion. What are they to the eight hundred millions that inhabit the globe. [Footnote 52]
[Footnote 52: Recent estimates of the population of the globe vary from 840,000,000, to 1,300,000,000, and of the number of Catholics from 160,000,000 to 208,000,000. Other Christians are about 130,000,000.]
And how many of her members are there who can be called Catholics or Christians, only in a broad, external sense! Has Christianity, then, accomplished the results that might have been looked for? Is it not a failure?
I will attempt this morning to give some reasons showing that Christianity is not a failure, although it has accomplished only partial results. And the first remark I make is this: that partial results belong to every thing human. Although Christianity is a divine religion, by coming into the world it became subject in many respects to the laws that govern human things. To specify one, Christianity demands attention. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." Without attention, Christianity will never produce its impression on our conduct. Now, attention is a thing hard to get from men. It is one of the greatest wants in the world, the want of attention. "With desolation is all the land made desolate," says the Holy Scripture, "because there is none that considereth in the heart." [Footnote 53]
[Footnote 53: Jer. xii. 11.]
We see examples of this on every side. Take the instance of young men at college. After passing several years there, at a considerable expense to their parents, professedly for the sake of acquiring an education, a certain number of them know nothing but the names of the things they have been studying. This is the entire result of all they have heard or read, an acquisition of some of the terms made use of in science. Others have gained some confused and partial knowledge, which for practical purposes is all but useless; while those who have acquired precise, accurate, useful information, that is, who have gained any real science, are few indeed. It is the same in business. Every trade and profession is crowded with bunglers who do not know their own business, because they have been too lazy to learn it, and who grumble at the success of others who have not spared the pains necessary to become masters.