Devotion to the Pope
By
Frederick William Faber, D.D.
Priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri
“Peter was kept in prison: but prayer
was made without ceasing by the Church unto God for him.” – Acts xii.
London: Thomas Richardson and Son, 147,
Strand: 9 Capel Street, Dublin; and Derby. MDCCCLX. [The Right of translation
is reserved by the Author.]
To the Very Reverend Edward Hearn, D.D.
Vicar General of the Diocese of Westminster, this tract is dedicated by the
author in grateful recognition of many kindnesses, and as a token of respect
and affection.
The London
Oratory. Feast of the Epiphany. 1860.
The following pages are the substance of
a Sermon preached in the Church of the London Oratory on the occasion of the
Solemn Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament for the Intention of the Pope, on
the first day of the New Year, 1860.
Devotion to the Pope
The New Year begins with a Feast of
Jesus; and the Feast commemorates the first shedding of His Blood. This is a
sort of type of the whole Christian life. Christ lives in us, and we live His
life over again. The life of the redeemed is so intertwined with the grace and
action of the Redeemer that we are not able to conceive of it apart from Him.
He is mixed up with all we do, with all we are, with all we suffer. We have not
a joy or sorrow which are not as much His as they are ours. They are His
because they are ours. He is the end, the force, and the significance of all
holy life. He makes all things His own, even those which seem to belong least
to His interests. His jurisdiction is at once universal and minute. It is part
of His love that our little interests are great interests to Him. The Old Year
ends with His birth, as if to take all sadness out of the laps of time by so
sweet an admonition of eternity. The New Year begins with His sorrow, as if to
sober all flightiness of joy and to temper all impetuosity of action. It is the
very description of our life that Jesus is everywhere and in everything. As we
grow older His attractions absorb our lives more powerfully and more
exclusively. As He was God’s master-thought from all eternity, so the thought
of Him should at all times master all other thoughts in us. We live only to
worship Him. We were only predestinated because He was predestinated first. He
was the first-born of all creatures. We were made after His image, and for His
sake. We have each of us some particular work to do for Him, some special
office to fill in His court, some peculiar vocation out of which He is to have
some peculiar glory. This is the meaning of us. We are nothing without Him. But
to Him we are both dear an important. He makes much of us; and it is our
wisdom, as it is our happiness, to make Him all in all to us.
It is not only true that Jesus is our
life. It is also true that His life is our life; and this is true in numberless
ways, from the august reality of the Blessed Sacrament down to the influence
which any of our Lord’s mysteries exercises upon our prayers and upon our
character. In all God’s creation, outside the world of angels, there is nothing
so wonderful as a human life. There have been millions of such lives, each of
them wonderful with its own individual wonder. There will be countless millions
more of these diversified creations. But one Life is the true life of all these
lives, a Life more wonderful that any angelic life can be. It is the life of
Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, God and Man. He lived Three-and-Thirty Years
upon earth. His life was one unbroken series of mysteries. His infinite merits
and His infinite satisfactions are the treasures which have enriched the
poverty of the world. That Human Life of His supplied the means of our
atonement, while it also furnished, in its examples, the pattern of all human
holiness. Our lives are to be modelled upon that the life of His. The love of
Jesus and the likeness of Jesus – it is these things which make up the whole of
sanctity. All the real history of the world, all of it which savingly concerns
ourselves, is gathered together in the narrative of the Four Gospels, in the
records of the Three-and-Thirty Years. But this is only part of the truth. Our
Lord’s life is not merely an external example. It is a power, a grace, an
efficacy, whose undying energy is transmitted to remotest ages, both in the
operations of the Sacraments, and also in the graces of contemplation. In other
words, the Thirty-three Years are not over, and never will be over. They go on
in the Church till the end of time.
But we must not longer now, much as we
are tempted to do so, on the sweet truths and unspeakable consolations, with
which this fact supplies us. It is sufficient for us to bear in mind that all
holiness consists in our living out the years of Jesus in our own years,
finding in His life at once our model and the hidden power enabling us to
conform to that model. The Church teaches us this in her ecclesiastical year.
Not only has she separate feasts to commemorate our Blessed Lord’s separate
mysteries; but she contrives to make us live His Three-and-Thirty Years over
again in each of our single years. We pass through the beautiful twelve years
of His Infancy in the weeks from Christmas and Lent. Lent keeps us with Him in
the wilderness, and purifies us for the detailed version of His Passion, which
Holy Week brings so overwhelmingly before us. Paschal tide is His Risen Life,
and the feast of His Ascension is incomplete without the festival of the
Blessed Sacrament, the triumphal holyday of Corpus Christi. Thence to Advent we
feed for months on the Sermons, the Parables, and the Incidents of His three
year’' Ministry. Meanwhile beneath this annual life of Jesus lies also an
annual life of Mary, which is a life of Jesus also. Her Immaculate Conception
is almost mingled with her maternal Expectation. We celebrate her Purification,
but a little while before we celebrate our Lord’s Temptation in the wilderness.
The commemoration of her Dolours lies close to the commemoration of His
Passion. The Assumption is to the Feasts of Mary what the Ascension is to the
Feasts of Jesus. In all this arrangement we perceive the one constant and
abiding sense of the Church that the life of Jesus is our life, the example of
our life, and also its supernatural energy. Everything is summed up in the
simple but inexhaustible truth, that Christians are Christs.
Thus it is a common form of our love of
our dearest Lord to wish, that, with our present knowledge and our present
faith, we had been with Him, during His Thirty-three Years on earth. We think
how lovingly we should have served Him. We imagine a thousand incidents in
which our love would ingeniously have vented itself in artifices of reverence
and of endearment. Our thoughts expiate on the continual reparations which we
should have made to His honour, how we should have divined His wishes better
than those who were actually round about Him, how our assiduities would have
come near to the enthusiastic devotion of the Apostles, and how, like the
comforting angel at Gethsemane, we should for ever have been alleviating with
our love the sufferings of His life. To wish these things is part of our
Christian instincts. But here we come in sight of the great wonder of a
Christian life. This is not a mere wish, a romantic dream, an unreal device of
love. The Thirty-three Years are not over. Jesus is with us still. Now and here,
as in Judea of old, real personal ministries to Jesus are the actions by which
we are to sanctify ourselves. They are to be at once the kindling and the
satisfying of our love. For this end He has come back to us in the Blessed
Sacrament. He dwells amongst us in the shy magnificence of the Tabernacle. He
shews the skirts of His white garments to our eyes. He puts Himself in our
hands. He entrusts His helplessness to our keeping. He rests upon our tongues
and goes down into our hearts in all the surpassing realities of the mighty
Sacrament. He is more accessible to us now than he could have been in the
actual Three-and-Thirty Years. He gives each of us more time and more
attention. We can have Him completely to ourselves. We can enjoy Him more at
ease, and more in private. Hence it is that the Blessed Sacrament is the very
centre of our lives. We can hardly conceive how we should live without it, or
far removed from its neighbourhood. Dearest Lord! how well He knew the manner
in which we should yearn to love Him, and how incredibly has He satisfied the
yearning!
It is the end of the Blessed Sacrament
to make Jesus present to us, and miraculously to multiply His presence. The
Sacraments, as theology calls them, are the actions of Christ: the Blessed
Sacrament is the living Christ Himself. Thus are the Thirty-three Years
continued upon earth, and continued in thousands of places at once, so that
millions of souls are drawn within their actual sphere, and live supernatural
lives upon the heat and light with which the ever-present Human Life of their
Saviour surrounds them. How could heaven interfere more strikingly to the show
that personal love of Jesus was the essence of religion, and that the presence
of Jesus was the necessity of its life and power?
Sometimes great mercies look wonderful
when we compare them with lesser ones; but more often the lesser ones look
especially wonderful when we contrast them with greater ones. In other words,
God’s mercy is most striking in little things, particularly when those little
things seem the repetitions and superfluities of great ones. Jesus had
satisfied His own immense love, and had given our love room to become immense,
by returning to us in His Human Nature through the Blessed Sacrament. No more
amazing continuation of His Thirty-three Years can be imagined. Indeed no
created intelligence could have imagined one so amazing. But His love covers
the whole ground of creation; and He felt that this invisible dwelling with us
was not enough. All ministries to the Blessed Sacrament must of necessity be
adorations; and man’s power of actual worship is intermitting. Our poor hearts
wish to be always adoring the Blessed Sacrament; but the strain would be
excessive. Moreover our service of the Blessed Sacrament represents either those
great public actions of homage, in which all the faithful meet solemnly to
join, and which are therefore few in number, and occurring at such intervals as
the business of life requires, or it represents our inward, hidden lives of
communion with God. Our secret sorrows are breathed forth at the Tabernacle
door. We bring our joys there to be blessed, to be refined, and to be secured.
We complain there of our temptations. There, with timid intrusion, we venture
to carry the forward familiarities of love, secure that only the indulgent ear
of our loving Lord shall hear them. There we argue with Him unashamed, like Job
of old, and, even while we tremble at His majesty, make bold to assail Him with
the petulances of our only half-believing prayer. But our love needs more than
this. Our souls have other cravings which must be satisfied. Our life is very
much a life of matter, sense, and outward things. In the Blessed Sacrament
Jesus is invisible. So far therefore we are not so well of as they were of old
that conversed with Him in Judea. They saw their love. They knew their love by
sight. They read the dear mysteries of the Sacred Heart by the dear aspects of
His beautiful Face. The light of His Eyes was a language to them. The sound of
His Voice was a revelation to them. His outward beauty was a help to their
inward love. The Blessed Sacrament is better in many ways. To use Our Lord’s
own word, His invisible presence was “more expedient.” But the visible Jesus
was in some ways sweeter, in some ways dearer. We cannot help but feel this;
yet we should be surprised how Jesus has made the loss up to us, were it not
that such repeated experience of His love has made us cease to be surprised at
anything He does.
Shall a soul know of a way in which it
can love Jesus, and not burn to love Him in it? Shall a soul know of a way in
which it can love Jesus, and yet find that Jesus has made no provision for it
to love Him in that way? He knew that, when once the love of Him had taken
possession of our hearts and had gained delightful mastery there, we should
long to minister to Him by our outward lives, to accumulate upon Him endless
tokens of our affection, to wreak upon Him those contrivances of endearment of
which the heart can be so fertile when it pleases. His infinite wisdom is
always the handmaid of His infinite compassion. He looked upon His creation to
find a fitting representative of His own blessed Self. He searched the earth
with His unerring love to choose a fitting monument on which, as on the pillar
of a trophy, He could hang His own insignia, and bid it do duty for Himself. It
must be so like Him, that all men shall readily acknowledge the resemblance. It
must have such a likeness to Him, as will best provoke enthusiastic and
enduring love. It must be a visible compendium of the Three-and-Thirty Years.
As all Bethlehem, and all Nazareth and all Galilee, and all Calvary, are
invisibly in the Blessed Sacrament, so now in this new visible presence of
Jesus all Bethlehem, all Nazareth, and all Galilee, and all Calvary must be
plain and visible, real and pathetic. O characteristic choice of Him who chose
all things from eternity! The Creator chose the Poor. When He was about to come
on earth, He chose poverty for His own lot, for the condition of His own
private life. Now, when He has hidden His Face from us in the clouds of heaven,
He chooses the Poor to represent Him, and to carry on for our sakes all those
occasions of worship and opportunities of sanctity, which belonged to the
Three-and-Thirty Years. Hence it is that the Church has always clung to the
Poor, as Mary clung in the cold and the dark and the wet to the Babe of
Bethlehem. Hence it is that generous outgoings to the Poor are the infallible
measures of our inward love of Jesus, and that spirituality is hindered from
deceiving itself and by being able always to test its own reality by the
abundance of its alms. What a revelation of Jesus is this His choice of the
Poor! We feel that we know much more of Him, since we had this new disclosure
of Him. He reveals His character by the very peculiarity of His selection,
while His leaving this visible second Self behind Him manifests to us still
more strikingly that His Thirty-three Years are not to cease, and that personal
ministry to Him is the single shape of our sanctification.
It would do us all good to dwell on this
matter: but we must pass on. Of a truth our dearest Lord has done much to
satisfy our appetite of love. But there are many who have not the power of
ministering to Him in corporal works of mercy; and by far the greatest number
of even spiritual works of mercy to the Poor depend on alms. Also the Poor
themselves must have a second self of Jesus, whom they can invest with the
solicitudes of their believing love. Moreover there are still yearnings and loves
in human hearts, which would fain be raised to the supernatural dignity of love
of Jesus, and which are not satisfied in devotion to the Poor. Jesus therefore
chose another visible Self, in order that He might cover all the ground which
human hearts could cover. It was a dear invention of love, similar to that
which made marriage into a Sacrament. He chose Children. He took the little
ones, who fill our dwellings, who play about our streets, who crowd the benches
of our schools. He first of all frightened us into reverence by telling us of
the vindictiveness of the grand angels, who have charge of children’s souls,
and of their power to punish us, because of that awful Sight of God which they
always see; and then He tells us that all acts of religious kindness to the
least of these weak little ones are acts of kindness to Himself. From this
choice also has come the instinct of His Church for the interests of little
children. For their souls she fights with the governments of the world; she
lays herself open to attacks; she perils her peace; she forfeits the patronage
of the great; she refuses the sanction of her obedience to iniquitous laws; she
is contented to look unintelligibly fanatical or pretentiously false, to those
who cannot believe in the sincerity of such a purely supernatural zeal.
Doubtless it was our dear Lord’s love of us, which impelled Him to make
Children another visible Self. Yet I venture sometimes to think that it was as
much to gratify His own love as to satisfy ours. Somehow, Bethlehem clung more to our Blessed Lord than Calvary.
There are more of Bethlehem at Calvary, than of Calvary at Bethlehem. The
Blessed Sacrament is the memorial of His Passion: yet who will not own that is
more full of lights from Bethlehem than of shadows from Calvary? There was
something in His Sacred Heart which betokened an eternal Childhood; and His
human character clung with especial love to children. There was more freedom in
His choice of the Poor. There was less need of another visible Self. This
further choice was more gratuitous. Therefore I think that it was especially
for His own sake that He made it. Still the same great principle comes out, -
the continuance of the Thirty-three Years, and the ensuring of personal
ministries to Himself. His making the Poor and the Children as it were second
Selves was an emanation of the same wisdom and the same benignity, out of whose
abysses came the overwhelming mystery of the Blessed Sacrament.
O glorious capacity of human hearts to
love! Even all this was not enough. When we serve our dearest Lord in the
persons of the Poor and of the Children, we are, as it were, His superiors. We
are ministering to Him of our superfluities. He comes before us in pitiable
plight, and we are full of pity, and we run to His pity, and we run to His
rescue, and succour Him. Sweet task indeed, and a most wonderful relief to our
swelling love, which is ever growing so great as to be a burden to itself! Yet
there are other kinds of love, to which we reach as we grow in grace, higher kinds
bespeaking higher graces, more robust as being more proper to the fullness of
our manhood in Christ. We want to obey. We want to receive commands, to hearken
to teaching, to practice submission. We have wills of our own, and we want to
give them up for the will of Him we love. We cling to our own opinions, and we
set a high price upon our own judgements; and we wish to abandon them for His sake.
We want to conquer the selfseeking of our understandings, in order that our
hearts may grow larger and we may be able to love more vehemently and more
exclusively. We want more immolation of self in our service of Jesus, than the
tending of the Poor and the Children can supply. Besides, we want Jesus in all
ways. We want Him as our Master. It was the name His disciples on earth
delighted to give Him. Somehow they contrived to put into it an affectionate
sound, above what in His case any other name possesses. They listened to His
sermons on the mount and on the plain. They hung upon the words which fell like
pearls of price from His beautiful lips. In delighted silence they nourished
their souls on His teaching, which was to them the very bread of eternal life.
His parables sank into their hearts, and grew there into broad revelations of
the mysteries of God. We cannot forego all this. He must be our Master also,
not in a dead book, not by hearsay, but our real living Master, at whose feet we
can lay down our forwardness, and at the sound of whose voice we can be out of
love with our own judgements and conceits. Jesus left Mary to the infant
Church, as well as Peter. Was it not perhaps to supply this very craving of
primitive fervour, a craving which had fed itself so recently on His own dear
presence in the flesh? Even the sublimities of apostolic holiness could not
bear that both Jesus and Mary should be withdrawn at once. So in like manner
now He has left us the Pope. The Sovereign Pontiff is a third visible presence
of Jesus amongst us, of a higher order, of a deeper significance, of a more
immediate importance, of a more exacting nature, than His presence in the Poor
and in the Children. The Pope is the Vicar of Jesus on earth, and enjoys among
the monarchs of the world all the rights and sovereignties of the Sacred
Humanity of Jesus. No crown can be above his crown. By divine right he can be
subject to none. All subjection is a violence, and a persecution. He is a
monarch by the very force of his office; for of all kings he is the nighest to
the King of kings. He is the visible shadow cast by the Invisible Head of the Church
in the Blessed Sacrament. His office is an institution emanating from the same
depth of the Sacred Heart, out of which we have already seen the Blessed
Sacrament, and the elevation of the Poor and of Children, take their rise. It
is a manifestation of the same love, an exposition of the same principle. With
what carefulness then, with what reverence, with what exceeding loyalty, ought
we not to correspond to so magnificent a grace, to so marvellous a love, as
this which our dearest Saviour has shown us in His choice and institution of
His earthly Vicar! Peter lives always, because the Three-and-Thirty Years are
always going on. The two truths belong to each other. The Pope is to us in all
our conduct what the Blessed Sacrament is to us in all our adoration. The
mystery of His Vicariate is akin to the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament. The
two mysteries are intertwined.
The conclusion to be drawn from all this
is of the most momentous importance. It is no less than this: - that devotion
to the Pope is an essential part of all Christian piety. It is not a matter
which stands apart from the spiritual life, as if the Papacy were only the
politics of the Church, an institution belonging to her external life, a
divinely appointed convenience of ecclesiastical government. It is a doctrine
and a devotion. It is an integral part of our Blessed Lord’s own plan. He is in
the Pope in a still higher way than He is in the Poor or in Children. What is
done to the Pope, for him or against him, is done to Jesus Himself. All that is
kingly, all that is priestly, in our dearest Lord is gathered up in the person
of His Vicar, to receive our homage and our veneration. A man might as well try
to be a good Christian without devotion to our Lady, as without devotion to the
Pope; and for the same reason as in both cases. Both His Mother and His Vicar
are parts of our Lord’s Gospel.
I would ask you to lay this very much to
heart at this time. I am persuaded that great consequences would follow, for
the good of religion, from a clear perception that devotion to the Pope is an
essential part of Christian piety. It would correct many errors. It would clear
up many misapprehensions. It would prevent many calamities. I have always said,
that the one thing to make all difficulties clear is to look at things simply
and exclusively from our Blessed Lord’s point of view. Let all things seem to
us as they are in Him and for Him. There are many intricacies in these days,
many perplexing entanglements of the Church and the world; but, if we hold fast
by this principle, if with a childlike bravery we are all for Jesus, we shall
thread our way safely though all labyrinths, and never have the unhappiness of
finding ourselves, either through cowardice, or through the prudence of the
flesh, or through the want of a spiritual discernment, on the side where Jesus
is not.
If the Pope is the visible presence of
Jesus, uniting in himself all such spiritual and temporal jurisdiction as
belongs to the Sacred Humanity, and if devotion to the Pope is an indispensable
element in all Christian holiness, so that without it no piety is solid, it
very much concerns us to see how we feel towards the Vicar of Christ, and
whether our habitual sentiments regarding him are adequate to what our Blessed
Lord requires. I wish to speak of the matter from a devotional point of view;
because I consider this a very important point of view. It belongs to my office
and position, as well as to my tastes and instincts, to look at it in this way.
In times of peace it is quite conceivable that Catholics may hardly realize as
they ought to do the necessity of devotion to the Pope as an essential of
Christian piety. They may practically come to think that their affair is to go
to Church, and to frequent the Sacraments, and to perform their private
spiritual exercises. It may appear to them that they are not concerned with
what they may call ecclesiastical politics. This is of course a sad mistake at
all times, and one from which at all times the soul must suffer, so far as
regards higher graces and the advances towards perfection. In every age it has
been an invariable feature of the saints that they have had a keen and
sensitive devotion towards the Holy See. But, if our lot is cast in times of
trouble for the Sovereign Pontiff, we shall speedily find that a decay of
practical piety follows rapidly and infallibly upon any wrong views of the Papacy,
or any cowardly conduct concerning the Pope. We shall be astonished at
discovering how close a connection there is between high-minded allegiance
towards him and all our generosity towards God, as well as God’s liberality
toward ourselves. We must enter, it must be part of our private devotion to
enter, warmly into the sympathies of the Church for her visible Head, or God
will not enter into sympathy with us. In all ages, as well as in all vocations,
grace is given on certain tacit conditions. In times, when God allows the
Church to be assailed in the person of her visible Head, sensitiveness about
the Holy See will be found to be an implied condition of all growth in grace.
What are the motives, then, upon which
our devotion to the Pope should be based? First and foremost on the fact of his
being the Vicar of our dearest Lord. His office is the chief way in which Jesus
has made Himself visible on earth. In his jurisdiction he is to us as if he
were our Blessed Lord Himself. Then, again, the fearfulness of the Pope’s
office is another source of our devotion to him. Can anyone look over so vast a
region of responsibility, and not tremble? Millions of consequences are
dependent upon him. Multitudes of appeals are awaiting his decision. The
interests with which he has to deal are of surpassing importance, because they
bear upon the eternal interests of souls. One day’s government of the Church is
pregnant with more consequences than a year’s government of the mightiest
earthly empire. With what a weight of the Sovereign Pontiff must have to lean
upon God all day long! What endless inspirations of the Holy Ghost must he not
anxiously expect in order to distinguish truth in the clamour of contradictions
or in the obscurity of distance! The Dove whispering at St. Gregory’s ear, -
what is it but a symbol of the Papacy? Amidst these gigantic toils, of all earthly
labours, perhaps the most thankless and the least appreciated, how touching is
the helplessness of the Sovereign Pontiff, so like the helpfulness of his
beloved Master. His power is patience. His majesty is endurance. He is the
victim of all the petulance and gracelessness of earth in high places. He is
verily the servant of the servants of God. Men may not load him with
indignities, as they spat into his Master’s Face. They may set him at nought
with their men of war, as Herod with his men of war set at nought the Saviour
of the world. They may sacrifice his rights to the momentary exigences of their
own meanness, as Pontius Pilate sacrificed Our Lord of old. There can be a meanness
in governments, to the depths of which no individual meanness can come near;
and it is especially from this meanness that the Vicar of Christ is made to
suffer. Men with the gold crowns envy him with the crown of thorns. They grudge
him the painful sovereignty, for which he must lay down his life, because it is
his Master’s trust, and not his own inheritance. In every successive generation
Jesus, in the person of His Vicar, is before fresh Pilates and new Herods. The
Vatican is for the most part a Calvary. Who can behold all the pathetic
grandeur of this helplessness, and understand it as Christian understands it,
and not be moved to tears?
When we are ill, it sometimes lies like
a sad thought upon our heats that our Blessed Lord never sanctified that cross
by His own endurance. But then He bore and blessed every species of bodily pain
in the numberless sufferings and ingenious cruelties of His Passion. But old
age He never suffered. The weight of years never gathered over His beautiful
features. The light of His eye never grew dim. The fresh manhood of His voice
never passed away. It could not be that even the honourable decays of age
should come nigh Him. But He condescends to be old in His Pontiffs. His Vicars
are for the most part bowed down with years. I see in this another instance of His love,
another provision for our diversity of love for Him. None in Judea could ever
honour Him with that peculiar love which good men glory in paying to old age.
Homage to the old is one of the most beautiful generosities of youth; but the youth
in Judea could never enjoy its dear submissions in their ministries to Jesus.
But now, in the person of His Vicar, whose solicitudes are rendered a
thousandfold more touching and his indignities more pathetic because of his
age, we may draw near to Jesus with new ministries of love. A new kind of love
of Him is opened to the eagerness and keensightedness of our affection. In this
fact, in the conflict of an unarmed old man with the grandeurs and diplomacies
and false wisdoms of the proud young generations as they rise, there is surely another
fountain for our devotion to the Pope.
To the eye of faith nothing can be more
venerable than the way in which the Pope represents God. It is as if heaven
were always open over his head, and the light shone down upon him, and, like
Stephen, he saw Jesus standing at the Right Hand of the Father, while world is
gnashing its teeth upon him with a hatred, the unearthly excess of which must
often be a wonder to itself. But, to the unbelieving eye, the Papacy, like most
divine things, is a pitiable and abject sight, provoking only an irritated
scorn. For this scorn it is the object of our devotion to make constant
reparation. We must honour the Vicar of Jesus with a loving faith, and with a
trustful uncriticising reverence. We should not allow ourselves in one dishonouring
thought, in one cowardly suspicion, in one fainthearted uncertainty, about
anything which concerns either his spiritual or his temporal sovereignty; for
even his temporal Kingship is part of our religion. We must not permit to
ourselves the irreverent disloyalty of distinguishing in him and in his office
what we may consider human from what we may acknowledge as divine. We must
defend him with all the pertinacity, with all the vehemence, with all the
completeness, with all the comprehensiveness, with which only love knows how to
defend her holy things. We must minister to him in selfdenying prayer, with a
thorough, inward, heartfelt, delighted subjection, and, above all, in these
abominable days of rebuke and blasphemy, with a most open, chivalrous, and
unashamed allegiance. The interests of Jesus are at stake. We must neither be
backward in time, nor mistaken in our side.
There have been times in the experience
of the Church, when the bark of Peter has seemed to be foundering in the
midnight seas. There are pages of history, which makes us hold our breath as we
read them, and hush the palpitations of our hearts, even though we know full
well that the next page will record the fresh victory which came of the fresh
abasement. We are fallen upon one of those evil epochs now. It is hard to bear.
But our indignation works not the justice of God, and bitterness gives us no
power with Him. But there is a mighty power in the dejection of the Faithful.
It is a power the world might fear, if only it could discern it or understand
it. The silence of the Church makes the very angels look on with expectation.
We almost must wait in the patient tranquility of prayer. The blasphemy of the unbelieving
may rouse our faith. The faltering of the children of the Fold may wring our
hearts. But let our sorrow have no bitterness mingled with its sanctity. We must
fix our eyes on Jesus, and do the double duty which our love of Him now lays
upon us. I say, the double duty. For
it is a day when God looks for open professions of our faith, for unbashful proclamations
of our allegiance. It is a day also when the sense of our outward helplessness
casts us more than ever upon the duty of inward prayer. This is the other duty.
The open profession is of little worth
without the inward prayer; but I think the inward prayer is almost of less
worth without the outward profession. Many virtues grow in secret; but loyalty
can only thrive in the bare sunshine and upon the open hills.
How then are we going to inaugurate our
New Year? By the unspeakable permissions of His compassion, we are about to raise
upon His sacramental throne the Invisible Head of the Church, that so we may
come to the succour of our Visible Head, His most dear and sacred Vicar, our
most dear and venerable Father. I need not tell you what to pray for, nor how
to pray; but I have one thought, which I have often thought, and with that I
will conclude: - I have an irrepressible instinct, that it will be especially
well in heaven with those, who have especially loved on the earth the Pope who
defined the Immaculate Conception.
Richardson and
Son, Printers, Derby.
