Epistle.
Romans xi. 33-36.

O the depth of the riches, of the wisdom, and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments, and how unsearchable his ways! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and recompense shall be made to him? For of him, and by him, and in him, are all things. To him be glory for ever. Amen.

Gospel.
St. Matthew xxviii. 18-20.

At that time:
Jesus said to his disciples: All power is given to me in heaven and on earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.

Last Gospel.
St. Luke vi. 36-42.

At that time:
Jesus said to his disciples: Be ye merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven. Give, and it shall be given to you: good measure and pressed down, and shaken together and running over, shall they give into your bosom. For with the same measure that you shall measure it shall be measured to you again. And he spoke also to them a similitude: Can the blind lead the blind? do they not both fall into the ditch? The disciple is not above his master; but every one shall be perfect, if he be as his master. And why seest thou the mote in thy brother's eye, but the beam that is in thy own eye thou considerest not? or how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull the mote out of thy eye, when thou thyself seest not the beam in thy own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast first the beam out of thy own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to take out the mote from thy brother's eye.

Sermon LXXXII.

Teach all nations:
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
—St. Matthew xxviii. 19.

The mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity is one of those wonderful truths of our holy faith which form the foundation of the Christian religion. He who does not believe in the Trinity cannot call himself a Christian; neither can any one be a Christian unless he is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. We are taught to make acts of profession of this mystery oftener than of any other. We do so every time we make the sign of the cross; and there are very few Catholics who do not make that sign more than once every day. Every one should know what is meant by the Trinity.

There is but one God, who is the infinite, eternal, almighty, all-wise, all-good, and all-just Being who created all things that exist.

But God, who is one in his Divine Being, is a Trinity in person. That is, he is three persons. These persons are named Father, Son, Holy Ghost. God is, then, Father, and he is Son, and he is Holy Ghost. These three persons are the same God. So, if there were three men praying to God, one praying to the Father, a second to the Son, and the third to the Holy Ghost, they would all be praying to the same God. How there can be more than one person in one being is a mystery to us, because we have no knowledge of any other being but God who has more than one person. But now this truth is revealed to us, we know, by our faith, which is divine knowledge, that there are three persons in God, and are sure also that God must, as a Divine Being, have three persons, because God cannot be other than he is. Let us help our minds to understand this by a comparison. Suppose a tower built in such a shape that it has three sides. Now, there are three distinct sides and only one tower; and whichever side we look at we see a distinct side which is not either of the other two sides, but we always can say, I see the tower. So, no matter which person of God we regard, it is always the same God.

Our holy faith teaches us that God the Father is the Divine Person who created all things, as we say in the Creed: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth." It furthermore teaches us that God the Son is the Divine Person who redeemed us by becoming man and dying on the cross, as the words of the Creed declare; and again it teaches us that God the Holy Ghost is the Divine Person who sanctifies us and is the source and giver of all grace. These truths are revealed to us, and we believe them, as we do all mysteries, for the reason we give when we make an act of faith: "O my God! I believe all things taught by the holy Catholic Church, because thou, who canst neither deceive nor be deceived, hast revealed them to her."

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.

We all believe it; we must believe it if we would be saved. But no one of us can perfectly understand it. St. Patrick, you know, is said to have illustrated it to his converts by showing them the shamrock with its three leaves on one stem; but, of course, he never pretended that this was a perfect explanation of it. No perfect explanation of it can be given to us.

And why not? Is it because it really has no explanation? No, but because we are not able to understand the one which might be given. Explain the solar system to a child of five years: will he understand you? It is something the same with us and this greater mystery of God.

Some people, especially at the present day, who consider themselves very wise, say to themselves and to others: "Oh! this doctrine of the Trinity cannot be true." Ask them why not, and they will say: "Because we cannot understand it; it seems to us to be nonsense."

Well, what does their argument amount to? Just to this: "If the doctrine were true we should understand it; but we don't understand it, therefore it is not true."

"If it were true," they say, "we should understand it." And why? "Why, of course, because we are so wise that we can understand everything. It is well enough for stupid people, like those benighted Romanists, to believe what they don't understand, but such a proceeding would be quite below our dignity and intelligence. It is quite absurd to suppose that there is any mystery so deep that we cannot see to the bottom of it."

Now, I do not want to accuse these worthy people of any one of the seven capital sins; they are, no doubt, as good as they are wise. But there is something in what they say that looks just a little bit like one of those sins; like the first and most deadly of them all: that is, the sin of pride. And there is not much doubt that pride has in some form or other had something to do with all heresies; so I am afraid that those who deny the Holy Trinity are not quite free from it.

You think so, my brethren, I have no doubt. But, after all, are you not perhaps guilty of a little of the same sin yourselves? You believe in the Holy Trinity, it is true, but are there not some other things which you do not fully believe, though you ought to, and for very much the same reason?

God has given you the gift of faith; and you are willing to believe what you know to be of faith, even if it be beyond your reason, especially if it be something, like the Holy Trinity, beyond the reason of any one else. But are you not sometimes rather unwilling to believe other matters of religion, for which there is good authority, just because you, with your present lights, do not quite see through them? That is just the trouble with the heretics of whom I have spoken; is it not so with you, too, perhaps?

Do you not say even about some of these matters: "Oh! I do not think the same about that as the priests do; they are welcome to their opinion but I claim the right to mine"? It may be some question of morals; then you say: "The priest say so-and-so is not right; but I don't see any harm in it. I have got a conscience of my own."

Did it ever occur to you that as God knows more, and has told more to his church about himself than you could have found out, so he may have enlightened it rather more about some other matters in its own sphere than he has enlightened you, even though they are not of faith? And even setting that aside, is it not possible that those who have studied a subject know more about it than those who have not?

I think there is only one answer to these questions. Try, then, to have the same humility which you have about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in other things too. You believe that the officers of a ship know a little more about her position and proper course than you do; make the same presumption in favor of those who are in charge of the bark of St. Peter. It is only reasonable to think so; only showing a little of the same common sense which you show in other things.

Sermon LXXXIV.

Why seest thou the mote in thy brother's eye,
but the beam that is in thy own eye
thou considerest not?
—St. Luke vi. 41.

These words, my dear brethren, are taken from the Gospel of the first Sunday after Pentecost, which is always read at the end of Mass on this day. Of all those which our Divine Lord spoke during his ministry on earth, there are none more practical, none which have a more immediate bearing on our daily lives.

There is nothing which shows the perversity of our fallen nature more clearly than the common habit, in which even many persons who are pious in their way continually indulge, of criticising and commenting on the actions and character of others.

Some people, indeed, seem to think that there is no harm in talking about the character and conduct of their neighbors, as long as they do not say anything which is not true. This is a great mistake; one hardly needs to stop and reflect for a moment to see that it is a grievous injustice to speak of a sin which another person has actually committed, if it be not known, or at least certain soon to be known in some other way, by the one to whom we speak. So there are many who have sense enough not to make this mistake and who do hold their tongues about the secret sins of others. But there are comparatively few who seem to realize that it is against charity, though not against justice, to speak even of well-known and evident faults of one's neighbors, when there is no good object to be gained by so doing; and, in fact, even to think of them and turn them over in one's mind, for which there can never be any good object.

It is to such as these—and there are hosts of them—that our Lord's words are addressed. He does not himself answer the question which he asks in the text; but there is not much difficulty in our answering it ourselves.

"Why," then, "seest thou the mote in thy brother's eye, but the beam in thy own eye thou considerest not?" The two always go together. You will always find that just in proportion to a person's watchfulness about others' faults is his carelessness about his own. Why, I say, do you do so? Let us try to find out.

Are you so sensitive about your neighbor's faults because they offend God? No, I do not believe that is the reason. If it were you would be a great deal more troubled about your own than you are. If you really cared for God's honor in the matter you would go to work on your own sins, which you really can amend, and not on those of your neighbors, which you only carp at but do not even try to correct. Do not pretend, then, that your habit of finding fault with others comes from a desire that God may be better served. Such a pretence would be only hypocrisy. It is especially to such pretenders that our Saviour says: "Hypocrite, cast first the beam out of thy own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to take out the mote from thy brother's eye."

Are you so sensitive about your neighbor's faults, then, because they offend yourself? No, I do not think that can be the reason either—or, at least, not the whole reason; for you are nearly as apt to speak of them when they do not concern you at all. You even take trouble to find out about those which do not come under your own observation. I know that we all have a weakness for noticing unpleasant things when they occur, and passing over those which are agreeable as a matter of course; we complain of the weather when it is bad, and give no thanks when it is fine; we grumble when we have a bad dinner, and say nothing about a good one. But this does not explain the matter entirely, for most of the faults which you notice in others do not hurt you in any way.

No; the fact is, it is simply a vice in yourselves which makes your neighbor's faults so glaring in your eyes. And that vice is the great vice of pride. You are trying to exalt yourselves, at least in your own mind, above others, and the easiest way to do it is to try to push them down. This is at the bottom of all this uncharitableness which is the staple of so many people's thoughts and conversation.

There is, therefore, only one real remedy for it, only one which strikes at the root of the whole thing: that is to cultivate the virtue which is the opposite of pride, the great virtue of humility.

I said just now that as a person is watchful about his neighbor's faults, so is he careless about his own. Well, the rule works both ways. If you will be careful about your own you will not notice those of other people. For you will acquire this virtue of humility. You will appear so bad in your own sight that others will appear good in comparison. And then, when you have cast out this beam of pride from the eye of your own soul, you will indeed be fit to correct others, and not till then.