Epistle.
I Corinthians i. 4-8.
Brethren:
I give thanks to my God always for you, for the grace of God that is given you in Christ Jesus, that in all things you are made rich in him, in every word, and in all knowledge: as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you: so that nothing is wanting to you in any grace, waiting for the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who also will confirm you unto the end without crime, in the day of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Gospel.
St. Matthew ix. 1-8.
At that time:
Jesus entering into a boat, passed over the water and came into his own city. And behold they brought to him a man sick, of the palsy lying on a bed. And Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the man sick of the palsy: Son, be of good heart, thy sins are forgiven thee. And behold some of the Scribes said within themselves: This man blasphemeth. And Jesus seeing their thoughts, said: Why do you think evil in your hearts? Which is easier, to say, Thy sins are forgiven thee; or to say, Rise up and walk? But that you may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the man sick of the palsy), Rise up: take thy bed and go into thy house. And he rose up, and went into his house. And the multitude seeing it, feared, and glorified God who had given such power to men.
Sermon CXXXII.
Presumption Of God's Mercy.
Unless you have believed in vain.
1 Corinthians xv. 2.
Dear Brethren: The Apostle appears to be of a different mind from some of us, who seem to think that there is no such thing as believing in vain. Do not sinners rest quite secure in their wickedness just because they believe in the true religion? Do they not feel sure of salvation because they know how to be saved? Is not the blessed privilege of the holy faith the secret reason of many a person's delay of repentance? It is against all such that St. Paul stands when he speaks of a vain faith; and our Blessed Lord himself when he says that pagan Tyre and Sidon shall rise up in witness against those who had the true religion and used it only to puff them selves up with spiritual pride.
To be guilty of an unused faith is the high-road to eternal loss among Catholics. Some poor souls will be lost because, though born in error, they have refused to follow the light of reason into the church. But we shall be lost, if at all, because we have believed in vain. Some outside of the church shall be lost because they have sinned even against the simplest precepts of nature's law. But we shall be condemned for believing all that our Lord revealed and making it vain by our wicked deeds. A vain faith is like the background of a picture: the eye catches and dwells on the objects in the foreground, but these could not be seen clearly but for the tints in the background against which they are drawn. So what we do will one day be contrasted with what we know; the strong light of faith will only cause the black, filthy sins of our life to be more fully revealed to the Judge.
Have you never seen a blind man whose eyes seemed perfectly good, clear, and bright, and yet utterly blind? There is such a kind of blindness; some men really have eyes and see not, because the nerve is dead, and the nerve is like the soul of the eye. So with our faith: God gave it to us to see by and walk by and live by; to know his law and live up to it, to know our sins and to confess them with true sorrow—in a word, to practise what we know that we ought to practise. But some become like the idols of the nations you read of in one of the Vesper psalms: "They have eyes, and see not; they have ears, and hear not." Wicked Catholics perceive the right way; they hear of the dangers of the wrong way, and go right along with this knowledge, and neglect prayer and Mass, blaspheme and fight, get drunk and debauch, and steal, yet having all the time full assurance that somehow or other their faith will save them. Brethren, their faith is vain; their hope of eternal life is not reasonable or well founded; the beauty of the truth they possess is like the cold beauty of a corpse, which makes one shudder only the more from its incongruity with the putrid decay so surely approaching.
Yet how rich a treasure is the true faith! What a comfort to know the truths of religion! What a privilege to know our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and to be in communion with him, his Blessed Mother, his glorious saints, his holy church! What a perversity, then, to use all this as a burglar uses his rope-ladder: a means of making a criminal life more secure. But it cannot be. It is a delusion. There is no means of making a criminal life secure, except by turning quickly away from it, detesting it, confessing it, and, by the light of faith and the strength of charity, leading a good life.
Sermon CXXXIII.
Drunkenness.
Take heed to yourselves,
lest perhaps your hearts be over charged
with surfeiting and drunkenness,
and the cares of this life.
—Luke xxi. 34.
These words of our Lord recorded by St. Luke contain a very direct admonition against intemperance and its associate vices. Gluttony and drunkenness are closely allied, inasmuch as the former is generally associated with excessive eating, and the latter is used to denote excess in intoxicating drink. Not only from a religious standpoint, but from medical science, St. Luke knew and could teach the injurious effects on the human system produced by the unrestrained gratification of the appetites. His knowledge in these matters was evidently recognized by those associated with him in preaching the Gospel, for St. Paul speaks of him as "the beloved physician" (Colossians iv. 14).
There are many passages of Holy Scripture that show forth the dangers of drunkenness. In the Old Testament we read that Noe and Lot were both taught by sad experience the shame and degradation arising from the loss of self-control through the excessive use of intoxicating drinks. No sanction can, be found in the Bible for the opinion that intemperance is a pardonable weakness. It is a very long time ago, indeed, since this vice of drunkenness was first condemned by the authorized teachers of religion. Among the vices it is properly classified with gluttony, which is one of the seven deadly sins.
The Apostles sent forth by our Lord to teach all nations strenuously inculcated the duty of sobriety and watchfulness on each individual Christian. St. Peter and St. Paul especially insist on this personal vigilance as being of the utmost importance. "Being sober, hope perfectly for that grace which is offered you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Be sober and watch, because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion goeth about, seeking whom he may devour" (First Epistle of St. Peter v. 8-13).
St. Paul teaches the same lesson of personal vigilance in these words: "Let us watch and be sober, having on the breastplate of faith and charity, and for a helmet the hope of salvation" (1 Thessalonians v. 6-8). "For the grace of God our Saviour hath appeared to all men, instructing us that, renouncing impiety and worldly desires, we should live soberly, and justly, and piously in this world" (Titus ii. 3).
A great doctor of the church, St. Augustine, in the fourth century declared that there were at that time drunkards, plenty of them, and that people had grown accustomed to speak of drunkenness, not only without horror, but even with levity. This condition of things was brought about by the vicious teaching of the pagans, who sanctioned every form of sensual gratification. In one of his sermons St. Augustine uses these words: "The heart of the drunkard has lost all feeling. When a member has no feeling it may be considered dead and cut off from the body. Yet we sometimes are lenient, and can only employ words. We are loath to excommunicate and cast out of the church; for we fear lest he who is chastised should be made worse by the chastisement. And though such are already dead in soul, yet, since our Physician is Almighty, we must not despair of them."
Again in a letter to a bishop, written in the year 393, St. Augustine refers to the intemperance then prevalent in the city of Carthage. "The pestilence," he says, "is of such a magnitude that it seems to me it cannot be cured except by the authority of a council. Or, at least, if one church must begin, it should be that of Carthage. It would seem like audacity to try to change what Carthage retains." Then he proceeds to urge that the movement against intemperance be conducted in the spirit of meekness, saying: "I think that these abuses must be removed, not imperiously, nor harshly; by instruction rather than by command, by persuasion rather than by threats. It is thus one must act in a multitude: we may be severe towards the sins of a few."
From the words just quoted we see that St. Augustine was justly opposed to the indiscriminate condemnation of a multitude for the sins of a few. And it is very necessary to bear this in mind while dealing with the vice of intemperance, which is so widely prevalent at the present time. The crimes of drunkards are frequently exposed to view in the columns of newspapers, yet the unvarnished truth is seldom stated concerning those who co-operate with them in the nine ways of being accessory to another's sin; and this means especially those who, in cities infected with intemperance, keep saloons, and those who invite men to drink whom they have reason to fear will abuse it. We know that there are leaders in the ways of vice as well as in the ways of virtue. Special severity is needed with those who deliberately persist in doing wrong with malice aforethought. Men who strive to make laws to defend iniquity, who teach and foster vice for their own personal profit, may properly be called blind leaders of the blind, whose fate has already been predicted by our Lord, the Supreme Judge of the world.
Sermon CXXXIV.
The Dignity And Happiness Of Obedience.
Children, obey your parents in all things;
for this is pleasing to the Lord.
—Colossians iii. 20.
Brethren, there are many new things found out nowadays; but there are also some old ones and good ones being forgotten. Among other things we are apt to forget the happiness of obedience. Of course I do not mean obedience to the church; perhaps there never was an age when Catholics rested so content in the gentle restraint of our holy mother the Church. But I refer to the practice of obedience one to another, done after the pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ. The loveliness of this virtue is best seen in the bosom of the Christian family. Affection, indeed, is the bond of the family, but the fruit of affection is obedience. There is nothing more pleasing to God than the son who is always at the service of his father and mother. Few families are without at least one such son. He is often the one of whom at first the least was expected; of poor natural talents, of delicate health, of irascible temper, or one whose earlier years were wayward. But all the time he was observant, though no one, not even himself, gave him credit for it. Year by year the spectacle of father's and mother's affection and sacrifice penetrated him, till he became deeply attached to them. How much this reverent love for his parents had to do with his religious state as a boy and a young man! It may be true that scarcely any boy ever grows up to be a man and is never a liar to his father and mother, or a pilferer of cake and fruit and pennies about the house. But the good boy drops all this at First Communion or when he goes to learn a trade, and he becomes honest and truthful in little things as well as great. One of the happiest days for him between the cradle and the grave is when he runs and puts the first dollar he has earned into his mother's hands. That good son lets all his brothers go away from home to seek their fortunes; he stays with the old folks, comforts their old age, closes their eyes in death, and with much love and many tears follows them with his prayers beyond the grave. The others were, perhaps, good children, but he is the hero of the family.
Then there is the good daughter, who in childhood is the sunshine of the family, and in maturer years everybody's other self. How many parents, too poor to hire a servant, have living riches in an industrious daughter! How often do parents find one at least of the girls who from very infancy is the joy of the whole family; who seems to have received in baptism such a fulness of the Holy Spirit that charity, joy, peace, patience, long suffering, kindness, and piety are the common qualities of her character! The faith also finds an apostle in such women. An intelligent woman, though perhaps unable to argue skilfully, can establish the truths of religion by methods all her own. A friendly jest, good-natured silence, a patient return of loving services for ill-treatment, the spectacle of her good life, not an hour of which lacks a virtue—all this in one instinct with religion is an unanswerable argument and often irresistible. How did it happen, people sometimes ask concerning this or that person, that she did not marry? She had good enough looks, excellent sense, a bright mind, affectionate disposition, and saw plenty of company. Why did she not marry? My brethren, the day of judgment will tell us that it was because God had set her apart that she might be for her widowed mother or her shiftless, unhappy brothers and sisters the pot of meal that should not waste and the cruse of oil that should not diminish. Brethren, I know of no order of nuns more pleasing in God's sight than the devout women who live a dependent, obscure, hard life in the world, and are old maids for the love of God.
Finally, you may say that such sons and daughters are hard to find. I answer that there are multitudes who approach the standard we have been considering, and more, perhaps, than you fancy who actually attain to it.
