spiritual vocation. They are to be beforehand with time; they are to be, though in a silent, hidden way, the spiritual heralds of the future, the harbingers of God’s coming spring, the pioneers of prayer. They are the human messengers that are to prepare his way before him, in those never-ceasing conquests which multiply in proportion as our hearts are ready to receive him. They are to live, as all the great saints have done, in advance of their age. St. Francis was centuries before his time in the refinements of his exquisitely spiritualized nature; St. Vincent of Paul was the same in the creations of his charity; and St. Francis of Sales like St. Philip Neri in the blending of deep piety with the exigencies of modern life. The nearer we approach to the consummation, the more numerous will become the watchers of the night, the souls that are looking out for a new dawn, and who meanwhile are leading an inner life in advance of the present. God alone can know them, and those on whom he has bestowed the gift, though but partially, of the discernment of spirits. To others they will appear as men walking in a dream, visionary and unpractical. It matters not to them. Even here they have in a measure their great reward, for they can say, with their divine Master, “I have meat to eat which you know not.”
We are often tempted to complain that we have fallen upon evil times. The past seems to us to have been more full of heroism, the future we believe will be richer in knowledge. We have slid into a period of prosaic piety mingled with many doubts. Without pausing to argue how much of this is false, we would remark that the
present is an epoch which may yield a larger amount of merit to those who know how to profit by it than perhaps any other—we may make a rich harvest of faith and hope. And we must bear in mind that both these are virtues that will ultimately be swallowed up in the greater and crowning virtue of perfect charity. When we see, there will be an end of faith; when we know, hope will expire in certainty. “There remain now faith, hope, and charity; but the greatest of these is charity.” In proportion to the extension of our knowledge, the area of our blind faith is diminished. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” There is a special grace attending these twilight days, when a larger demand is made upon our faith. The light will gradually increase unto the perfect day—not only the real absolute perfect day of heaven, but in a measure here upon earth. The merit of faith will be less, when the angels are obviously carrying out their mission upon earth, than it is now, when the good lies so hidden, and the evil is so rampant and open. We are foolish not more truly to value the advantages of our own time, and to rejoice that we are called upon to have a greater and a stronger faith than may be possible in those who will, as it were, put their hand into the wounded side where beats the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Whatever has an appearance of discouragement about it is in fact a fresh demand from God upon our larger faith and deeper trust. It is as if he said to us, “You are my friends, and therefore I can count upon you.” We should make haste to lay up a larger harvest of meritorious faith from every
doubt that falls across our path and every cloud that veils the sunshine, and by this very act we shall hasten the dawn and bring on the joyous fruition of our prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—for surely this prayer is intended to be granted in a far greater degree than anything the world has ever seen from the creation to the present hour. Remember who taught us that prayer; and remember the centuries that it has been breathed by all the church of God from infancy to age. It is not a poetic phrase. It is not a hyperbole. It is God’s word, expressive of God’s will and God’s intention; and, therefore, has he made it the universal petition of all his children. It is the epitome of all he demands in every separate soul, until the many units have become a large multitude of the faithful, greater than any man can number.
It is the strenuousness of our faith which will give a greater distinctness, a more delineated and chiselled clearness, to our convictions, and even to our opinions. At present they hang loose on too many of us, and flap about in the high wind of the world’s contempt and impudent indifference, blinding our sight and hindering our steps. A firmer, steadier faith will gather tight across our bosom all our outstanding notions and ideas, bringing them into subjection to the faith which teaches us to see all things as God sees them—that is, according to our degree, but in the same light that he sees them, which is the light of eternity and of his own being. He has bidden us open our mouth wide that he may fill it. Can, we, then hope too largely or too earnestly? Can we assign any limits to the grace of sanctification in its continuous
progression, or to the advance of love in the ever-enduring reign of the Holy Ghost? The God towards whom we are being so sweetly drawn is infinite, and though each individual must reach his own appointed measure and degree, yet who can dare put a limit even in thought to the plenitude of that future? But for our great and exceeding hope, how barren would our present life appear! Like Rachel, the church cries incessantly to her Lord, “Give me children, or I die.” Let us repeat the prayer, and re-echo in every act of our lives the passionate desire for the spread of truth and the increase of light; for it is hardly less difficult to guess at the beautiful and glorious future which God reserves for his cherished creations—the garment that he has woven for his only-begotten Son—than it is to form an opinion of the possible glorious future of some souls as compared with others. And is this all? Have we by any unguarded expression left on our reader’s mind a notion that we are anticipating the perfectibility of mankind upon earth, the absence of evil, and a sort of pious utopia, as the sum and substance of our expectations—a deifying of the system of nature, a glorification in some distant future of all the natural laws, as ultimate and final, and which, because of the beauty of creation, are to content us and be in some form or other our higher destiny? Not so. The end is not in that, neither is it here. Were Satan bound now, as one day he will be, we still should as now carry about with us the concupiscence which has tainted the nature of every human being, save only the Mother of God. Alas! we need no devil to prompt us to sin, for we carry an enemy
within us. Even mortal sin can be committed without his assistance; and we are but too apt to paint him blacker by thrusting upon him a responsibility which is too often all our own. We believe in no absolutely sinless existence this side the gates of death, except that of the God-man and his immaculate Mother. But this we do believe, that “wisdom is justified by her children,”[157] and we venture to anticipate that all that is holy, beautiful, and fitting in nature will shine with a renewed glory upon earth as the dawn grows to the perfect day, before the temporal gives place to the eternal, and the Son of Man shall have delivered up the kingdom to the Father. “And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then the Son also himself shall be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”[158] We have borne the image of the earthly, we must also bear the image of the heavenly—when God shall be all in all, when we shall have ascended by the ladder of the sacred humanity to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, when we shall look on the Triune God and be satisfied. Before the immensity of that thought there falls a veil of light more impenetrable than the thickest darkness. We cease to think. Our whole being becomes as it were detached from our human consciousness, and for one moment, one awful, never-to-be-forgotten moment, we hang over the abyss which is the eternity and the
infinity of God. Towards that we yearn, for it is our last end. Even the immaculate heart of Mary; even the unutterable endearments of the sacred humanity; even that which in its mystery and its hiddenness is the nearest approach to the undivided thought of God—the Blessed Eucharist—become to us but parts of a whole which must be ours, if we are to be content. The cosmos rolls away from our sight like a scorched parchment before that living heat. The history of Bethlehem and Calvary are manifestations limited in themselves, and indicative of more. The Blessed Paraclete, whose personality we perhaps sometimes find it hard to individualize (though we do not say with the Ephesian disciples that “we have not so much as heard whether there be a Holy Ghost”), becomes in our thoughts a more intense and absolute idea, less vague than in the past, and how inscrutably attractive! We have reached the thought of the Holy Ghost through Jesus. And now we seem to sink into the bosom of the Father through the Holy Ghost; and, in a way too deep for words, to be conscious of ourselves only through our perception of the great God, and to have lost everything save the immensity and the unity, the eternal being and the eternal love, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—the three Persons we have dimly known on earth; and the one God, whom we shall only fully know in heaven, when we shall have entered on the eternal years.
THE END.
[153] By this is meant the first Mass celebrated by a mere man.