Reason brings us to God as His creatures, and makes Him known to us as Providence. Faith brings us to God as His children, and leads us to cry to Him with the inmost affections of our hearts, "Abba, Father!" Reason, by science, art, and philosophy, leads the mind to the contemplation of God as the great First Cause and the Archetype of all beauty. But faith makes us participators in the Divine nature, "heirs of God," and, when perfected by the light of glory, enables the soul to gaze on the Divine Essence, fills it with torrents of delight, and bathes it in the sea of God's own beatitude. Is not everything else as nothing compared with the Divine light of faith! O inestimable faith! the crown and glory of human reason! the best of God's gifts to man!
Having learned that faith is inestimable on account of its inherent qualities, now let us test its value by what men have done and suffered to keep so great a possession.
Look upon the crucifix above the altar, that tells you what the God-Man suffered to bestow this gift upon man. His wounds, His blood, His life, is the price He paid in our stead for it. If a thing can be estimated by what men pay to suffer or do for it, look at Calvary, at what God has paid and suffered for it, and tell us what is comparable with faith. The Apostles, before they obtained it, were weak and timid; but when they had received it, they suffered and gloried therein. They lived, labored, suffered, and in turn laid down their lives in testimony of the priceless value of that gift of all gifts.
And when the faith was preached in pagan Rome and throughout its Empire, honors, riches, and all earthly joys and ties were, by all classes of men, renounced for its sake, so highly did they prize it. For it Stephen, Ignatius, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, and the millions of martyrs, "full of faith," poured out their blood like water, and cheerfully laid down their lives.
It was the wish to communicate this rare gift to others that stimulated the zeal of the apostles of the nations—a St. Patrick in Ireland, a St. Augustine in England, a St. Boniface in Germany, a St. Francis Xavier in the Indies, and led the saintly Father Jogues to our land, who was martyred by the Indians on the banks of the Mohawk. Columbus prized so highly the gift of faith, that, to bring its light to the benighted savages whom he supposed existed on this hemisphere, he encountered unknown dangers, and sustained heroic sufferings, in the enterprise of its discovery.
Most of you, my dear brethren, are from the old country, and have come to this strange land—and why? Did your native hills lose their charms for you? Did the ruins of your land and the graves of your ancestors awaken in your bosoms no longer any feelings of attachment and veneration? Have you no affection left for those parents, those brothers and sisters and kindred, left in the old home? Have you forgotten the glories of your history, and think it nothing to lose your nationality, and see your children after you grow up the sons and daughters of another soil?
Why, then, have you renounced all that men hold so dear? It is because you loved your faith above every consideration in life. You counted all else as nothing compared with it, and so that you might keep it, you were ready to endure suffering, poverty, and persecutions, and abandon all that men hold dear. This is why you are here to-day and not in Ireland. Had your forefathers, or you, chosen to apostatize from your Catholic faith, and deny the truth of Christ, you could be this moment prosperous and smiling under the favor of kings and princes in your native country.
Look, again, at the throng of converts who have cast aside position, wealth, and fame for that holy faith, and in turn become the heralds of truth to the world. A Prince Gallitzin chose banishment and the sacrifice of a princely fortune in becoming a Catholic; and when a priest, hiding even his rank and name, lived and toiled like an apostle in the wilds of the Alleghany Mountains.