[Footnote 61: Ps. xvii. 12.]
[USCCB: Ps. xviii. 12.]
[Footnote 62: Job xi. 7.]
[Footnote 63: Is. xlv. 15.]
As far, then, as the hiddenness of the Real Presence goes, it ought rather to commend our doctrine than otherwise, and create a presumption in its favor.
But the radical difficulty with the stranger to the truth lies in his not understanding the Incarnation and its object. It is nothing to him, I may say. He professes belief in it, indeed, but has utterly "lost its meaning" (as dear Father Faber says). Let him once begin to realize the Incarnation, and he will find he is taking the road to Rome: he will find that there is such a thing as a visible Church, and such a person as the Mother of God. To the Catholic, on the contrary, the Incarnation is everything. It is the fount of the whole system to which he glories in adhering. The Church exists for nothing else. The world exists for nothing else. The world for the Church, the Church for Christ, and Christ for God.
Now, the object of the Incarnation was briefly this: The establishment of a visible kingdom, in which the Creator should receive an adequate worship from the creature, and the creature be raised to the highest possible union with the Creator. We say, then, that the Church is this visible kingdom—to wit, an organic body, of which we are made members by Baptism (an outward and visible rite); and that the twofold end of worship and union is accomplished by the perpetual presence of the Incarnation here on earth, as at once a sacrifice and a sacrament. A sacrifice in which the creature offers to God a divine victim—the only adequate worship He can receive, God being offered to God—and in a created nature. A sacrament, in which the assumed humanity in Christ, hypostatically united with the divinity, is made to blend with our humanity in a union so close as to render us, in turn, "partakers of the divine nature." [Footnote 64] Moreover, we say that the form of food, in which our Lord chose to impart to us His deified and deifying humanity, was (so to speak) the most natural form He could have chosen: since food becomes one substance with its recipient—the difference between ordinary food and this divine food being that the latter, instead of being changed into us, transforms us into itself.
[Footnote 64: 2 St. Peter i. 4.]
Therefore, to us, who, by the grace of faith, understand the Incarnation and its object, the doctrine of the Real Presence is simply the supplement to the doctrine of the Incarnation. The one is the consequence of the other. We behold in the Church, with the Blessed Sacrament on her altars, the mystical Mary with the Divine Babe on her lap: and when we kneel to her, that she may give Him to us, or bless us with Him, we have no more feeling of unreality than the Shepherds and the Magi had in the cave at Bethlehem.
The feast of Corpus Christi, then, my brethren, is one of a blessed reality: a reality which ought to make us thank God every day of our lives that we are Catholics. For can anything be more dismal, more barren, more pointless, than a Christianity in which the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin have no place?
But, secondly, it is a feast of peculiar consolation. It is this which most endears the Blessed Sacrament to us. For as long as we are in exile from our true fatherland—the "patria" of the O Salutaris—we shall always be wanting consolation, and prize it as a foretaste of our rest. This consolation, then, this foretaste, is abundantly vouchsafed to us in the Blessed Sacrament. And, first, as regards our Lord Himself. It is impossible to love Him without sorrowing for all He once suffered; without grieving at the thought of the world's sins, and our own share of them, which drenched His soul with anguish, and steeped His heart in woe. And what pains us most is the melancholy fact that His love was thrown away on the majority of mankind, and is so at this hour. It is, therefore, indeed a consolation that now He dwells on earth without the condition of suffering—impassible for evermore; that, at last, He "comes unto His own, and His own do receive Him"; that He is enthroned King of His elect in the kingdom He so dearly purchased; that He can now take unmixed "delight" in "being with the children of men"; that if His Sacramental Presence is still to the heretic "a stumbling-block," and to the sceptic "foolishness," yet to millions upon millions, who believe and love, it is "the power of God and the wisdom of God"; and, further, that whatever degeneracy may come upon Christ's kingdom, however widely the "love of many may wax cold," yet, even in the worst times, "those whom the Father hath given Him" will unfailingly confess Him their "Emmanuel."