He is the Spirit of joy and sweetness, filling us with the fear of God, urging us on in the love of God, guarding us from the loss of God's friendship by the winning sweetness of his consolations. How greatly, then, should we love and adore the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Blessed Trinity! We should often call upon him and pray to him. We do not invoke the Holy Ghost enough. We pray to the Father and to the Son, and so indirectly honor God, the Holy Spirit; but we should pray more frequently to him directly. We should call upon him to give us, if we have it not, the grace of God, and to increase in us the fire of divine love that we may realize in ourselves the promise of the abiding of God in us by keeping his laws.
What folly it is for us to imagine that God can have a dwelling-place in our sin-stained soul! How can the Holy Spirit find pleasure in one who by mortal sin has made himself God's enemy; who has been guilty of a deliberate act of rebellion against his Maker and been unfaithful to or left unheeded his own sweet drawing? Alas for us, if this Pentecost finds us in this awful state! Alas! if the voice of our conscience has been silenced; this day then brings no joy to us! The Holy Spirit has no abiding-place within our souls. We have not loved the Son because we have not kept his words: "He that loveth me not keepeth not my words." And because we have not loved him the Father and he will not come to us. The loving Holy Ghost is not master in our house; we have driven him out who was our best friend and thrown open the gate to our enemy. Will you remain thus, you who are in sin? Let not this day go by and to-morrow find you unrepentant. Grieve for your past offences, keep the law of God, and you shall have the fulness of the Holy Spirit.
Sermon LXXXI.
The Easter Duty.
In this great feast and its octave, my dear brethren, we commemorate the last of all the wonderful events which brought the Christian religion into the world. To-day our Divine Saviour, having ascended into heaven, fulfilled his promise in the descent of the Holy Ghost upon his Apostles; to-day the Catholic Church was fully established, and given power to convert the world; to-day the order of things was begun which is to last to the end of time.
And with this octave closes, therefore, that especially holy part or season of the year which centres round the resurrection of our Lord, and which has, for most obvious reasons, been appointed as the time in which every Christian is bound, under pain of mortal sin, to receive Holy Communion, or make, as we say, his Easter duty. Only one more week remains in which to attend to this most important of all the obligations of a Catholic, to fulfil this greatest precept of the positive Christian law.
Now, what is exactly this precept of the Easter duty? Strange to say, you will often find people who do not seem to have any clear idea about it at all, in spite of all that is said about it from the altar and in common catechisms and books of instruction. And yet it is very simple. It is just this: Every Catholic of sufficient age to receive Communion is bound to receive it on some day between the first Sunday of Lent and Trinity Sunday—that is, a week from to-day—inclusive; and it is very difficult for any one to have any excuse from complying with this law.
The Easter duty, then, is not merely an obligation to receive once a year. A person may receive a hundred times in the year, and yet not make his Easter duty; just as one may hear Mass every day in the week, and yet not fulfil the precept of hearing Mass if he stays away on Sunday. Now this seems quite easy to understand; but there are people, and plenty of them, too, who will make a mission shortly before Lent, and then say at this time: "Oh! I went to Communion not very long ago; there is no need to go so soon again." They might as well say on Sunday, if they had heard Mass on Saturday: "I need not go to church to-day; it was only yesterday that I was there." The law of hearing Mass is not to hear it once a week, but to hear it on Sundays and holydays of obligation; so the law of Communion is not to receive once or twice a year, but to receive at the time appointed. No other time will do.
But some may say: "I have not committed any mortal sin since my last confession; I am just as good as these people who are running to church all the time." Very good, perhaps you are; though it may be that Almighty God does not have so high an opinion of you as you seem to have of yourself. But it is not the question whether you are good or not; the law is not to confess mortal sin at Easter; far from it, one ought to have no mortal sin to confess, then or at any other time. No, the law is to go to Communion. One should get leave to do so, of course; but if you have no sin on your conscience, what is easier than to say so to the priest? You ought to be glad to be able to say it.