VII. If there be any virtue, if there be any praise of discipline. The presence and influence of the Holy Ghost in the Church has infused into her members a spirit whose manifest workings have made the world stand in awe. It is Christian fortitude. This has enabled the martyr to smile in the midst of torture, and changed the dungeon into an ante-chamber of heaven. This has nerved the missionary to bid an eternal farewell to home, friends, and kindred, and carried him with a fearless heart into the haunt of the savage, to the shore of the cannibal, and to the land of the relentless and cruel pagan who gloats over the horrible death he makes a Christian die. This it is that gives strength to timid, weak woman to put on the habit of sacrifice, and enter the pestilential wards of the hospital with a cheerful step, and watch through the long and weary night by the bedside of the dying stranger, whose contagious disease carries death to her own brave heart. This gives her courage to face the cannon's mouth, and stand amid shot and shell ready to bind up the bleeding wounds of the soldier, or to waste and wear her life away in seeking out, teaching, and reforming the vilest outcasts upon the streets. This it is that covers the Little Sister of the Poor with a panoply of heroism as she goes from door to door begging for the superannuated and bedridden wretches whom she has picked up out of the gutters, or from the purlieus and filthy alleys of the city, degraded, friendless, and miserable from want or disease; and it wreathes her head with a halo of glory as she sits down with a merry laugh to eat the scraps of food which they have left, or puts on the thin and ragged dress which is not warm enough or good enough for her dear old poor.
This Christian fortitude, this heavenly virtue, this divine power of discipline and mastery over souls, is seen in the earnestness and the fearlessness of all the deeds of charity and mercy, of all the admonitions and exhortations, and even of the threats and warnings of God's Holy Church to the nations of the earth. She is able to teach her children to carry out the lesson of the Lord: "Fear not them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do." [Footnote 116]
[Footnote 116: St. Luke xii. 4.]
Oh! let us think a little upon this virtue, this discipline worthy of all praise, and it will lead us to be more trusting and loyal to the Church, and also to obey her commands the more readily who, like her Divine Founder, "speaks as one having authority." A thought for the Holy Advent time: for at the bottom of it all lies the grand reason of the Church's existence and work. She prepares men for the coming of the Lord. She is looking for the establishment and triumph of the kingdom of our Lord on the earth. The principle of her actions, which she learned at the foot of her Master's cross and with which she inspires her children, is this: Sacrifice for love; suffering for justice's sake.
She wins a blessing for it. It is the last: "Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice's sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." I have not brought the beatitudes to mind in connection with these Advent thoughts without reason. St. Paul has a promise of beatitude to those who think on these things—a comprehensive beatitude, the sum of all happiness: "And the God of peace shall be with you" [Footnote 117]—a blessing, my dear brethren, which I hope we may all enjoy when the coming Christmas shall bring the angelic salutation to our ears: "Pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis!"
[Footnote 117: Phil. iv. 9.]