To take matters in your own hands, as so many Catholics do on this point, and call little what she calls great, and slight an order that she is so anxious about, is to be a heathen, or, at any rate, a Protestant; it is to set your private judgment above her authority; it is to despise God, who commands through her. If you would only take this view of it—and this is the true view to take—you would think more than once before you would say: "O pshaw! any other time will do. Once a year? All right; I find it more convenient to go at Christmas." No, any other time will not do; once a year will not do, unless it be just now at this time. Christmas is a glorious feast, and Christmas-tide a joyful season, but it is not the season prescribed by the church for your annual communion; and, heathen that you are, your convenience is not the main point to be considered. The question is: has the church power from God to command me, and what does the church command?
Oh! then, my brethren, let not the penances, the prayers, the instructions, the special graces of this holy season go to naught and be of no avail; but rather let them lead you up to the end for which they are intended—that is, to bring you to repentance for past sins, amendment for the future, to restore you to the friendship of your God, and strengthen you, for further battling in life, with the bread of heaven, his most precious Body and Blood.
Sermon XLIX.
He saith: I will return into my house
whence I came out.
—St. Luke xi. 24.
The warning which our Lord gives us in this Gospel is certainly a most terrible one, my brethren, but it may not seem plain to whom it is addressed; who they are who, now and at all times, are in danger of having the devil come back to them in this way of which he speaks. For nowadays, thank God! it is not very often that we find people who are really possessed by the devil, in the proper sense of the word.
But, in a more general sense of it, there are plenty of people who are possessed by the devil. They are those who are in a state of mortal sin. In them Satan has regained the possession from which he was driven out in holy baptism—that is, the soul which was his at least by original, if not by actual, sin. And he is in them as a dumb devil, like the one which the Gospel tells us that our Lord cast out; that is, he makes the people dumb whom he possesses, by keeping them from telling their sins and getting rid of them by confession.
But the dumb devil is often cast out, particularly at times of special grace and help from God, like this holy season of Lent through which we are now passing, or at the time of a mission or of a jubilee. At such times you will always find people, who have been away from the sacraments for years, coming back to them and making an effort to amend their lives and save their souls.