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REVEALED doctrine on death, judgment, hell, purgatory,
and heaven, shows us what the next life is, manifests
to us the depth of the human soul, which God alone can
fill. The power which brings us to heaven, our
destination, is sanctifying grace, the seed of eternal
life, the source of the infused virtues, especially of
faith, hope, and charity, with the seven gifts of the
Holy Spirit.
Let us note as we approach conclusion, that these great
theological virtues are today often completely
disfigured. Faith in God, hope in God, love of God and
souls, have been replaced in many thousands of moderns
by faith and hope in humanity, by the love of humanity.
Subjective smartness has taken the place of sacred
doctrine. Everything is irremediably false.
In certain Masonic lodges, in the first hall, we read
upon the walls: "Faith, Hope, Charity." Chesterton has
written on this subject under the heading: "Grand Ideas
Gone Mad."
Properly speaking, persons are astray, not ideas. Under
physiological and psychical disturbance men become
fools. And the higher their intelligence, the more this
folly grows, its proportions corresponding to their
faculties and their culture. Religious folly is the
most difficult folly to cure, because there is no
appeal to a more elevated motive. Intelligence has gone
astray in its highest reaches, deceives itself
habitually, particularly in its ideas on God, God's
infinite justice, and God's mercy.
Grand ideas gone mad: religious ideas without center
and equilibrium. This results when men substitute for
faith in God faith in humanity, so full of aberrations.
Faith, illumined by the Holy Spirit, by the gifts of
intelligence and wisdom, becomes the principle of
mystical contemplation. But faith, where it
degenerates, becomes the principle of a false
mysticism, whose devotees are impassioned for the
progress of humanity, as if this progress were never to
suffer reverse, rather as if this progress were God
Himself, who becomes Himself in us. Renan was asked the
question: Does God exist? His answer was: Not yet. He
did not see that this answer was a blasphemy.
Classic antiquity was not afflicted with such complete
lack of equilibrium. After antiquity came Christianity,
came the supernatural elevation of the Gospel. Then,
when men abandoned Christian truth, their fall was
accelerated by the height from which they fell.
This departure begins with Luther, who denied the
Sacrifice of the Mass, the validity of sacramental
absolution and confession, the necessity of observing
the commands of God in order to be saved. Descent was
hastened by the Encyclopaedists and the philosophers of
the eighteenth century, by the corrupted Christianity
of J. J. Rousseau, who robs the Gospel of its
supernatural character and reduces religion to a
natural sentiment which can be found, more or less
altered, in all religions. These ideas were propagated
everywhere by the French Revolution. Further, Kant
maintained that speculative reason cannot prove the
existence of God. There followed Fichte and Hegel, who
teach that God does not exist outside and above
humanity, but that He becomes God in us and by us, that
God is nothing but the progress of humanity, just as if
this progress were not accompanied from time to time by
a terrible recoil into barbarism.
Between Christianity and these monstrous errors arose
the system called liberalism, a halfway station, which
concludes nothing, gives no sufficient motives for
action. Liberalism is replaced by radicalism, then by
socialism, finally by materialistic and atheistic
communism. [692] The negation of God and religion, of
family, of property, of the fatherland; all follow
close on hand. Communism ends in universal servitude
beneath the most terrible of dictatorships.
Acceleration holds good in mental procedures as it does
in corporeal.
Let us turn back and re-climb the mountain of holiness.
Holiness, as St. Thomas [693] shows, has two essential
characteristics, the absence of all stain of soilure
and sin, and a firm union with God.
Holiness is perfect in heaven, but it begins on earth.
It manifests itself concretely in three fashions, upon
which we would here insist. We have three great duties
toward God: we must know Him, we must love Him, and we
must serve Him. Thus we obtain eternal life. Now there
are souls which have especially the mission of loving
God and of making Him loved. These are souls of strong
will, who receive from God the grace of a burning love.
There are others whose mission is to make God known. In
such souls the intellect is manifestly the dominating
character, and these souls receive above all the graces
of enlightenment. And there are souls whose chief
mission is to serve God by fidelity in daily duty. This
class contains the majority of good Christians. These
three forms of sanctity seem to be represented in the
three privileged apostles, Peter, John, and James.
Those of the first class, wherein will is dominant,
receive graces of ardent love. They ask themselves:
What can I do for God? What work shall I undertake for
His glory? They thirst for suffering, for
mortification, in order to prove to God their love and
to repair offenses of which He is the object. They
desire to save sinners. Only secondarily do they apply
themselves to the task of making God better known.
To this group belong the following: Elias, so
remarkable for his zeal, St. Peter, so profoundly
devoted to our Lord that he wills to be crucified head-
downwards; then the great martyrs, St. Ignatius of
Antioch, St. Lawrence. Nearer to our own times we find
St. Francis of Assisi, St. Clare, the daughters of St.
Clare. Later still we find St. Charles Borromeo; St.
Vincent de Paul, overflowing with charity for neighbor;
St. Margaret Mary, St. Benedict Joseph Labre, and the
holy Cure of Ars.
The danger for these souls lies in the energy of their
will, which can degenerate into rigidity, tenacity,
obstinacy. In those who are less fervent, such rigidity
is their dominant fault. They have a zeal not
sufficiently illumined, not sufficiently patient and
amiable. Sometimes they give themselves too much to
active work, neglecting prayer.
The trials which the Lord sends them tend especially to
make them supple, to break their will when it has
become too rigid, to make it perfectly docile to the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Under these trials
their burning zeal becomes more and more illumined,
more patient and bending and sweet. Thus they climb the
mountain to the summit of perfection.
The second class, that is, souls dominated by
intellect, climb the mountain by another path. They
receive graces of light, which carry them on to
contemplation, to those immense and all-embracing views
which are the reward of wisdom. Their loves grow by the
road of intellective deduction. Compared with the
preceding class, they have less need of activity or of
reparation, but if they are faithful they come to a
heroic love of the God who ravishes them.
To this group of souls belong the great doctors: St.
Augustine, St. Thomas of Aquin, St. Francis de Sales.
We may note that the latter often laments his slowness
in following the lights he has received. And this is a
common danger for these souls. They do not proceed to
conform their conduct to the light God gives them.
Their intelligence is highly illumined, but their will
lacks zeal.
These souls may suffer particularly from error, from
false directions which turn aside their intellect.
These trials purify them and, if they meet them well,
they too reach a great love of God. An enlightened
soul, if it is faithful, will be more united to God
than a soul that is ardent but unfaithful.
The third class of souls is dominated by memory and
practical activity. Their chief mission is to serve God
by fidelity to duty. Their memory brings before them
particular facts. They are struck by a trait in the
life of a saint, or a word of the liturgy. Divine
inspiration renders them attentive to various forms of
perfection. If they are faithful, they rise to the
highest levels of sanctity.
To this class would belong, it seems, the apostle St.
James, the great shepherds of the primitive Church, all
devoted even to martyrdom to a right ruling of their
dioceses. In this class, too, in modern times, we find
St. Ignatius, attentive to the most practical means of
sanctification, careful to consider men as they are and
not only as they should be: St. Alphonsus Liguori,
entirely preoccupied with morality, with the practical
apostolate, so necessary in his time against Jansenism
and infidelity.
The danger for these souls is that of attaching
themselves to works which are good in themselves, but
which lead only indirectly to God. Some find their
entire perfection in austerities, others in devotion,
others in their habitual labors, others in the
recitation of interminable prayers. The danger here is
that of falling into trifles and scruples, which retard
their entrance into contemplation, which hinder them
from the intimacy of union with God. The methods and
means which served them for the moment become in time
hindrances to loving and simple contemplation of God.
The trials for these souls are to be found chiefly in
the practice of charity. They suffer much from the
faults of their brethren. But if they are faithful in
the midst of these difficulties, they too reach a very
intimate union with our Lord.
Such are the three principal forms of holiness,
corresponding to our three great duties toward God, to
know Him, to love Him, to serve Him.
In Jesus Himself we may see the excellence of these
three forms of sanctity. First, in His hidden life, in
the solitude of Nazareth, in the house of the
carpenter, He is the example of fidelity to daily duty:
acts which are lowly and humble, but which become great
by the love which inspires them.
In His apostolic life, secondly, Jesus was the light of
the world. "He that followeth Me walketh not in
darkness, but shall have the light of life." [694] His
teachings on eternal life, and the roads to arrive
there, are not acts of faith on His part. They come
from His vision of the divine essence. [695] He founds
the Church and confides it to Peter. He says to His
apostles: "You are the light of the world." [696] And
He sends them to teach all nations, to bring them
baptism, absolution, the Eucharist. [697] All this he
confirms after His resurrection. [698]
In His life of suffering, thirdly, Jesus manifests the
full zeal of His love for His Father and for us. This
love leads Him to die for us on the cross, thus to make
reparation to God and to save souls.
Jesus therefore possesses, in pre-eminent manner, these
three forms of sanctity. And He likewise shows how to
meet the dangers which other souls encounter. He had
burning zeal without rigidity, without obstinacy. His
love was never more burning than on the cross, and
never did He manifest a more patient sweetness.
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Enjoying contemplation, the most luminous and elevated,
He is never lost in this contemplation. He is not
abstracted from the world, not drawn out of the world
like a saint in ecstasy. He is above ecstasy, without
ceasing to contemplate. He speaks to His apostles on
the least details of their apostolic life.
Finally, attentive to most minute details in the
service of God, He ever keeps in view the more
important questions. He sees everything in God, the
things of time in the things of eternity.
Jesus is higher than any saint, as white light is
superior to the colors of the rainbow. Proportionately,
we may apply this truth to the pre-eminent sanctity of
Mary, Mother of God, full of grace. These two are in a
special sense our mediators, whom God has given to us
by reason of our feebleness. Let us be guided by them.
They will lead us infallibly to eternal life. The life
of grace is everlasting life already begun.
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