The Catholic Church is the voice of God to us, and when we hear her we hear God. She lives, and speaks, and acts by the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ, our Saviour, her Divine Head. The reason some very wise people, very learned in different kinds of science, do not believe in the Trinity and other mysteries of religion as we do is because they do not hear the voice of God in the Catholic Church. It is not by science that we know the Trinity to be true, but by divine faith.
This divine faith is a gift of God, which we are bound to nourish in our souls with profound gratitude and humility, for it is a sad truth that this faith may be lost.
Catholics lose their faith by their sins, and chiefly by the sin of pride. All heretics and apostates show this in their conduct and in their words. They adhere to their own opinions and refuse to submit to the divine teaching of the church. O dear brethren! let us fear this sin of pride more than all other sin—a temptation, too, that is very apt to come up when we are ridiculed by unbelievers for our faith. Then is the time to confess the truth boldly, for if we deny our Lord before men he will deny us before the face of his Father in heaven.
Let us keep our faith by purity of life and humility of heart; for, as says the Imitation of Christ: "What doth it avail thee to discourse profoundly of the Trinity, if thou be wanting in humility, and consequently displeasing to the Trinity? If thou didst know the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would it profit thee without the love of God and his grace?"
Sermon LXXXIII.
In the name of the Father,
and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost.
—St. Matthew xxviii. 19.
To-day, my dear brethren, the church celebrates the greatest of all the mysteries of our religion: the mystery of the Holy Trinity; of the one God in three Divine Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.