It is impossible for us to be slack in the exercise of any one virtue without the omission affecting the whole of our inner and spiritual life. If we allow our hopes to sink low it is certain to affect our faith; and if our faith, then also our love. Nor should we forget that it is “according to our faith that it shall be done unto us.” We are not seconding God’s precious intentions towards us so long as we are taking a desponding, narrow, and unaspiring view of what are likely to be his intentions as regards the future of his creation; and all despising of that creation, all holding cheap the law, the order, the beauty, and the uses of the material creation, arises from an inadequate sense of the mystery of the incarnation, of the Verbum caro factum est which is the one sole efficient reason of all we see and of all that exists. Once raise the inferior questions of nature, of science, and of art up to that level, and we shall find that it imparts a certain balance to all our thoughts, and diffuses a peaceful looking forward and a calm endurance of present ills which are morally what the even pulse and the vigorous strength are physically to the man in perfect health. He is as free from the excitability of fever as from the lassitude of debility; he is a sane man.
There is another point from which we can view the material progress of the world with hopefulness, as helping to work out the future in a sense favorable to the church; and this point comes under the head of what we have called God’s adaptive government of his creation. It is the fact that the progress of civilization develops the natural characteristics of the various races of mankind, and that the history of the church reveals how the providence of God makes use of the characteristics of race—as he does of everything else—for the building up and development of the church, and of truth by her. The life and death of our Lord having been accomplished in the chosen land, among the chosen people, the infant church was speedily transplanted from the shadow of Mount Calvary to the City on the Seven Hills. Judea was her cradle, but Rome was to witness her adolescence. The two leading characteristics of the Latin race were necessary to her growth; for the Latins were the conquerors and the lawgivers of the world, and the pioneers of the future. She was borne on the wings of the Roman eagles. She followed in the footsteps of the victorious legions, and as Rome and time went on with devouring steps, she caught the conqueror and the conquered both in her mystic net, and reigned among the Latin-Celtic races. Rome was the world’s lawgiver. The Latin genius is essentially legislative and authoritative. Subtlety, accuracy, and lucidity were the necessary human elements for the outward expression of the divine truth which the church carried in her bosom; for Catholic theology is a certain science, admitting of fuller developments as “things new and old” are brought forth from
her treasured store, but never making one step too far in advance of another throughout her rhythmical progress. These human elements resided essentially in the Latin mind; and in the Latin tongue, which has ever been the language of the church, and which, the church having consecrated it to her own purposes, became what we popularly call a dead language so far as concerns the shifting scenes and fluid states of man’s mortal life; she laid her hand upon it, and it sublimated beneath her touch, and was consecrated to her use, beyond all changing fashion or wavering sense. The dying Roman Empire involuntarily bequeathed it to her; and the language of the great lawgivers of the world became that of the church, and only on her lips is a living language to this hour. The Latin people were the fountain of law; their code to the present day forms the common law, or the base of the common law, of all Christian nations except where the retrogradations of the Napoleonic code have been flung in the face of humanity and the church as an insult to both. The principle of law, the love of law, lay in them as an hereditary gift. Thus were they as a race specially adapted to become the framers of the church’s canon law, of her discipline, and of her glorious ritual, each phrase of which is the crystallization of a theological truth, a fragment from the Rock of Peter, but perfect in itself and concomitant with all the rest.
Thus also she wrote in letters of red and gold her marvellous ritual, the least part of which embodies a symbolic act relating to the things that are eternal. There is not a touch that is not significative, there is not a line that does not seem caught from the traditions of the
nine choirs of angelic ministers. As full of mystery as of practicality, beautiful, graceful, and complete, it runs through all the life of the church like the veins through the living body, and carries order and harmony through every low Mass in the village church, through high pontifical ceremonials and within the silent gates of cloistered orders where men and women daily and hourly enact and represent the drama of the church.
The same genus runs through all the component parts; and that genus belonged to the race to whom was consigned the laying of the church’s foundations, and the raising of the edifice. And thus there exists, besides the divine integrity of the whole, a certain human consistency which, humanly speaking, is the consequence of the work having been put into the hands of the race that was naturally adapted to effect it. Now, as the ways of God are necessarily always consequent—that is, consistent with each other, moving in harmony and working through law—it is not a vain presumption to imagine that as he has constituted different races with different characteristics, so it is his intention to make use of each and all in the fuller developments of his church.
“Other sheep I have that are not of this fold; them also must I bring.” The words were spoken in Jerusalem while the Latin race was lying in the blind pride of paganism, and the Celtic races were only recently being hewn out of the darkness of their far-off life by the swords of the conquering nation. Surely it is one of those words the fulfilment of which is not complete. There are other races waiting to bring into the vineyard the tools that their native genius
has put into their hands. As the church through the Latin race has formed her external, congregational, hierarchical, and authoritative condition, and has crowned the whole in the last Vatican Council by the dogma of the infallibility, laying thereby the keystone that locks the perfect arch, so now the Teutonic Saxon races, the people of individuality, of complete inner life, combined with vast exterior activity and resistless energy, will be brought forth in God’s providence to carry out the law of liberty which is the correlative of the law of individuality.
God speaks to the individual soul through his organ the church, through her sacraments, down to her least ceremony, and through her authority. Nor have we any absolute test and security that it is his voice we hear and no delusion of our own, except as we are in harmony with her authority. All may be a mistake save what is in accordance with the one infallible voice. But nevertheless it is to the individual soul that God speaks, and not to the masses as such. God leads each soul separately, and individually apart, and there is no real religion that is not the secret intercourse, the hidden communion, of the solitary soul, alone with God. Every human soul has its secret with God, a secret of love, or a secret of hatred, or of avoidance. God penetrates our souls through the sacraments of the church; but past the sacraments, and as the result of the sacraments, there must grow up the continued, sustained, and ever more and more habitual presence of God in the soul, before we arrive at that state for which the church and the sacraments are but the means to an end—though a divine means. “We will come
to him and make our abode with him.”[86]