Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother,S. Matt. XII, 50.
Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother,S. Matt. XII, 50.
Grant, we beseech thee, almighty God, that we may keep with an immaculate heart the sacrament which we have received in honour of the blessed virgin mother Mary; so that we who celebrate her feast now, may be found worthy when we have left this life to pass into her company. Through &c.
SARUM MISSAL.
Our Blessed Lord had begun his ministry of preaching. The mark of the early days of that preaching was success. Crowds came about Him wherever He taught. The fact that there were frequent miracles of healing no doubt added to the popularity that He achieved. It was largely the popularity of a new and strange movement, of a preaching cutting across the normal roads of instruction to which the Jewish people were accustomed. There was a fascination about its form, its picturesque way of conveying its meaning, its use of the parable drawn from the everyday circumstances of life. There was nothing of hesitation in the words of the new Preacher, but the ring of a dogmatic certainty. "He taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes." He pushed aside the rulings of the traditional teaching with His, "Ye have heard it said ... but I say." "Verily, verily, I say unto you." And yet there are people who tell us that there was nothing dogmatic about our Lord and His teaching! One would infer from much that is written upon the subject of our Lord's teaching that He was a very mild giver of good advice but evidently the Scribes and Pharisees did not think so. They saw in Him a man who was setting himself to undermine their whole authority.
This popularity was at a high point when an interesting event happened of which we have an account in the first of the Gospels. "His mother and His brethren stood without, desiring to speak with Him." One gathers from the whole tone of the narrative that they were anxious about Him, that they looked with doubt upon this career of popular teacher that He was launched upon and felt that He was going too far. He needed advice and restraint, perhaps; it may be that there were already reports of possible interference by the national authorities. The fact that His "brethren" were present suggests the well meant interference of the older members of the family, who must always have thought Jesus rather strange. That they had induced His mother to come with them makes us think that they were counting on the influence naturally hers, an influence which must always have been apparent in their family relations. So we reconstruct the incident.
No doubt S. Mary herself was anxious. She must always have been anxious as to what would be the next step in the development of her mysterious Child. And while there was one side of her relation to Jesus which would always have run out into mystery, the mystery of the as yet unrevealed will of God; on the other side she was no doubt a very real normal human mother, with all a mother's anxiety and need of constant intervention in the life of her Child. I do not suppose that S. Mary, any more than any other mother, ever understood that her Son had grown up and could be trusted to conduct the ordinary affairs of the day without her help. She was no doubt as much concerned as any mother with the fact that His feet might be wet, or that He might not have had any lunch, or that he might have got run over by a passing chariot, or have been taken mysteriously ill. It was, we may think, this mother-attitude which brought her along with the brethren to give some advice as to how to carry on the preaching mission and avoid getting into trouble with the religious authorities. "One said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my mother, and my sister, and my brother."
Our Lord had a way of turning the passing incidents of the moment to account in His preaching, making them the texts of moral and spiritual teaching. One gathers that more than one of the parables and parabolic sayings was suggested by something that was before the eyes of His hearers. He was quick to seize any spoken word, any question, any exclamation, and to turn it to immediate account. It was so now. The report that His mother and His brethren were seeking Him, He made the occasion of a statement of vast import. When we try to think it out, it was not in the least, as it has been perversely understood, an impatient rebuff of an untimely interference, an indication that He did not care for their intervention in a work that they did not understand. There is really nothing of all that, but a seizing of a passing incident as the medium of an universal truth. It is the skill of one who knows that the human attention is caught by a matter, however trifling, which is vividly present. The scene is sharply defined for us: our Lord interrupted in His talk; the report of the mother and the brethren seeking Him; the obvious interest of the people as to how He will take their intervention; and then the rapid seizing of this interest to make His declaration: "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my mother, and my sister, and my brother."
And what are we to understand Him to mean? Surely He is declaring that through the revelation of God that He is, there is a new stage in God's work for man being entered upon, and that this new stage will be characterised by the emergence of a new set of relations, relations so important that they throw into the background the ordinary relations of life. He is proclaiming to them the advent of the Kingdom of God; and in that Kingdom, the service of God will be put first, before all human relations. It will not be antagonistic to human relations; indeed, it will hallow them and raise them to a higher level; but in case they, as not infrequently they will, decline to adjust themselves to the work of the Kingdom, or set themselves in opposition to it, then will they be brushed aside, no matter what they be. If we can consecrate our human relations and bring them into God, then will they be ours still with a vast enrichment and a rare spiritual beauty; but if they remain selfish, insist on absorbing all attention and energy, then they must be broken. The love of father and mother and children is an holy thing wherever we find it, but it is capable of becoming a selfish and perverse thing, insistent upon its own ends and declining wider responsibilities. In that case it must be regarded from the standpoint of a higher good: if it stand in the path of the Kingdom it must be swept aside. So our Lord declared in one of the most searching of His utterances; one of the utterances which we feel could come only from the lips of God: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be those of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."
That is the teaching of the incident before us. Our Lord's primary mission is to declare the will of God, and to make known the mind of the Father to all who will heed. Their acceptance of this will of the Father will bring them into a new relation to Him more important than, and transcending, all relations of flesh and blood. But--and this is important to mark--it does not exclude relations of flesh and blood; but it demands that they shall be put on a new basis and be assimilated to the higher relation. In our Lord's case they were in fact so assimilated. The blessed Mother and the brethren did not resist God's will when they came to understand it. They were, we know, glad of the higher relation, the new privilege. There is no ground at all for the suggestion of any breach between them. They are of the inner circle always in the Kingdom of the regenerate.
This fundamental truth of Christ's teaching, that through Him a new and closer relation to the Father becomes possible, and that the Kingdom is its embodiment, is one of the truths which have received constant lip-service, but have never been really assimilated in the working life of the Church. That the Church is the Body of Christ and we His members, and that by virtue of this membership in Him we are also members one of another; that we are, at our entrance into the Kingdom, made, as the Catechism puts it, members of Christ, children of God, and heirs of the kingdom of Heaven are truths of most marvellous reach and of splendid social implications. But can we say that they have very wide or real acknowledgment?
In face of a divided Christendom it seems almost farcical to talk of a Christian Brotherhood. The baptismal membership of the Church of God has fallen into group organisations whose mutual antagonism is of the bitterest kind. The so-called "religious press" is perhaps the saddest picture of modern Christian life. One could name a half dozen journals off hand, organs of this or that group, every one a sufficient refutation of the claim of the Christian Religion to be a Brotherhood of the Redeemed. There is no possible excuse for the tone of such publications.
No doubt it is an inevitable result of the state of a divided Christendom that there should be disputes and controversies. We shall never reach any expression of the Brotherhood that is the Church by saying, Peace, Peace, where there is no Peace. The unity we look to must be reached through painful sacrifice and through conflict; and we know that the wisdom that is from above is "first pure, and then peaceable," But it is quite possible while holding with all firmness to the truth, to hold it in the fear and love of God.
So long as Christendom is thus divided into hostile camps the ideal of brotherhood is impossible of realisation. I do not want however to discuss this matter from the point of view of Church unity. I want to point out that within the groups themselves there is small vision of the meaning of the oneness of Christ. For brotherhood is the expression of a spiritual reality. It looked for a moment in the early days of the Church as though the ideal would be realised. The description of the Church was that "all that believed were together, and had all things in common: and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." That was, no doubt, a passing phase of the life of the Church in Jerusalem, but we have evidence that elsewhere all distinctions based upon social considerations were for the moment swept away. There is "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Our glimpses of the congregations of the early Church are of men and women of all classes held together by the bond of a common membership in Christ, so strongly felt as to enable them to forget all worldly distinctions. Their sense of redemption was strong. They thrilled with the joy of deliverance from the old life "after the flesh." They knew that they were regenerate, new creations, and that this was the distinction of the brother who knelt beside them at their communions. It mattered not at all what he was in the world, whether he were Greek or Barbarian, whether he were patrician or freedman, whether he were of the slaves of Rome or of Caesar's household. The man who knelt to receive his communion might be a great nobleman, the priest who communicated him might be a slave: that did not matter; the significant thing was that they were both one in Jesus Christ.
That did not last. I suppose that it could not be expected to last in an unconverted or half converted world. It could only last on condition of the fairly complete isolation of the Christian group from the rest of society, pending the conversion of society as a whole. But it proved impossible to secure the isolation. The only real isolation was in monastic groups which naturally could contain only such men and women as God called to a special sort of life: the whole of society could not be so organised. As the Church grew and took in the various social constituents included in the Empire, it took them in differentiated as they were. There seems to have been no real effort to break down race distinctions or class distinctions. There were no doubt protests, but the protests were as ineffective then as now. "You cannot change human nature," men say; but that in fact is precisely what Christianity claims to do. Unless it can change human nature it is a failure.
The ideal of Christianity is not the abolition of inequality (only a certain sort of social theorists are insane enough to expect that). All men are born unequal in a variety of ways, physical, intellectual, moral; and under any form of society that so far has been invented they are born in social classes which remain very hard realities in spite of our theories. What Christianity aims at accomplishing is to transcend these inequalities, natural and artificial, by raising men to a state of spiritual equality, a state which ensures true and full enjoyment of all the privileges of the child of God. In this state there is open to all the gift of sanctifying grace which is the possession of God now, and in the future will unfold into the capacity of the complete participation of the life of heaven. This belongs to, is within the grasp of, any child, any ignorant peasant, any toiler, as much as it is within the grasp of bishop or priest or Religious. And this much--and how much it is!--the Church has succeeded in accomplishing. It may be slow in offering the riches of the Gospel to the unconverted world, but where it has presented the Gospel, it presents it to all men as a Gospel of salvation and sanctification. When tempted to discouragement let us remember that whatever the shortcoming of the Church, it is yet true that every man, woman and child in these United States of America can through its instrumentality, become a saint whenever he desires. But, naturally, to become a saint, effort is necessary.
Where the Church has failed is not in the offer of salvation and sanctity, but in removing some of of the obvious obstacles to its attainment by many to whom it appeals, to whom its divine mission is. It has not succeeded in convincing us that we are members one of another, that is, it has not succeeded in persuading us to act upon what we profess in any broad way. The Church is not a fellowship in any comprehensive sense. The divisions which run through secular society and divide group from group run through it also. The parish which should be the exemplification of the Christian brotherhood in action is not so. Too often a parish is known as the parish of a certain social group. There are parishes to which people go to get "into society." Very likely they do not succeed, but that is the sort of impression that the parish membership has made upon them. Then there are parishes to which people "in society" would not be transferred. There are churches in which no poor person would set foot, not that they would be unwelcome, but that they would feel out of place. So long as such things are true, our practice of brotherhood has not much to commend of it.
And when we go about setting things right I am not sure that we do not mostly make them worse. I do not believe that it is the business of the Church to set about the abolition of inequalities and the getting rid of the distinctions between man and man. Apart from the waste of time due to attempting the impossible, what would be gained? Pending the arrival of the social millenium we need to do something; and that something, it seems to me a mistake to assume must be social. "We must bring people together": but what is gained by bringing people together when they do not want to be together, and will not actually get together when you force them into proximity. There is nothing more expressive of the failure of well-meant activity than a church gathering where people at once group themselves along the familiar lines and decline to mix, notwithstanding the utmost endeavours of clergy and zealous ladies to bring them together. The thing is an object lesson of wrong method.
Is there a right method? There must be, though no one seems to have found it yet. There is in any case a right point of departure in our common membership in Jesus Christ. Suppose we drop the supposition that we make, I presume because we think it pious, that if they are both Christians a dock labourer ought to be quite at home at a millionaire's dinner party, or a scrub-woman in a box at the Metropolitan opera house. Suppose we drop the attempt to force people together on lines which will be impossible till after the social revolution has buried us all in a common grave, and fasten attention on the one fact that, from our present point of view, counts, the fact that we are Christians. Suppose one learns to meet all men and all women simply on the basis of their religion; when that forms the bond that unites us when we come together, we have at once common grounds of interest in the life and activities of the Body of Christ. Suppose the millionaire going down town in his motor sees his clerk walking and stops and picks him up, and instead of talking constrainedly about the weather or about business, he begins naturally to talk to him about spiritual matters. Why could they not talk about the Mission that has just been held, or the Quiet Day that is in prospect? One great trouble, is it not? is that we fight shy of talking to our fellow-Christians of the interests that we really have in common and try to put intercourse on some other ground where we have little or nothing in common. The things that should, and probably do, vitally interest us, we decline to talk about at all. We are so stiff and formal and restrained in all matter of personal religious experience that we are unable to express the fact of Christian Brotherhood. The fact that you smile at the presentment of the case, that you cannot even imagine yourself talking about your spiritual experience with your clerk or your employer, shows how far you are from a truly Christian conception of Brotherhood.
Our Lord's words that we are making our subject indicate the paramount importance that He laid upon the acceptance of God's will as the ultimate rule of life. "Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is my mother, and my sister, and my brother." "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you." That is the common ground on which we are all invited to stand, the ground of a common loyalty to God, of intense zeal for the cause of God. Our Lord gave His whole life to that cause. As His disciples watched Him on an occasion, they remembered that it was written: "The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up." Zeal is not a very popular quality because it is always disturbing the equanimity and self-complacency of lukewarm people. And then, we dislike to be thought fanatics. But I fancy that there will always be a touch of the fanatic about any very zealous Christian, and it is not worth while to suppress our zeal for fear of the world's judgment upon it. What we have to avoid is the misdirection of zeal. There is, no doubt, a zeal which is "not according to knowledge." We need to be sure, in other words, that our zeal is a zeal for God, and not a zeal for party or person or cause. It is no doubt quite easy to imagine that we are seeking to do God's will when we are merely seeking to impose on our own will. Self-seeking is quite destructive of the friendship and service of God. The Kingdom whose interests we are attempting to forward may turn out to be a Kingdom in which we expect to sit on the right hand or the left of the throne because of the brilliance of the service rendered.
Life is simplified very much when the will of God thus becomes its guiding principle, and all other relations of life are subordinated to our relation to our heavenly Father. Then have we brought life to that complete simplicity which is near akin to peace. When we have learned in deciding any line of action not to think what our neighbours and friends will feel, or what the world will think, but only what God will think, we have little difficulty in making up our minds. Suppose that a boy has to make up his mind whether he will study for the priesthood, the vital thing on which to concentrate his thought and prayer is whether God is calling him to that life, and if he is convinced that he is being called the whole question should be settled. In fact in most cases it is far from being settled because this simplicity has not been attained. There is a whole social circle to be dealt with, who urge the hardness of the life, the scant reward, the greater advantages of a business career, and so on; all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the question to be decided. It is so all through life. In most questions of life's decisions, no doubt, there is no sense of any vocation at all, of a determining will of God; but is not that because we assume that God has no will in such matters, and leaves us free to follow our own devices? Such an assumption is hardly justified in the case of One to Whom the fall of a sparrow is a matter of interest. It is our weakness, or the sign of our spiritual incompetence, that we have unconsciously removed the greater part of life from the jurisdiction of the divine will. We do not habitually think of God as interested in the facts of daily experience; we do not take Him with us into offices and factories. Perhaps we think that they are hardly fit places for God, and I have no doubt that He has many things to suffer there. But He is there, and will suffer, until we recognise His right there, and insist upon His there being supreme.
Let us go back for a moment to Our Lady standing outside the place where Jesus was preaching, perplexed and worried at the course He was taking. I suppose that it is always easier to surrender ourselves unreservedly into God's hands than it is to so surrender some one we love. I suppose that S. Mary so trusted in God that she never thought with anxiety of what His providence was preparing for her; but she would not quite take that attitude about her Son; or rather, while she did intellectually, no doubt, take that attitude, her feelings never went the whole distance that her mind went. But surrender to the will of God means complete surrender of ourself and ours. It means absolute confidence in God, it means lying quiet in his arms, as the child lies still in the arms of his mother. It means that we trust God.
Rose-Mary, Sum of virtue virginal,Fresh Flower on whom the dew of heaven downfell;O Gem, conjoined in joy angelical,In whom rejoiced the Saviour was to dwell:Of refuge Ark, of mercy Spring and Well,Of Ladies first, as is of letters A,Empress of heaven, of paradise and hell--Mother of Christ, O Mary, hail, alway.O Star, that blindest Phoebus' beams so bright,With course above the empyrean crystalline;Above the sphere of Saturn's highest height,Surmounting all the angelic orders nine;O Lamp, that shin'st before the throne divine,Where sounds hosanna in cherubic lay,With drum and organ, harp and cymbeline--Mother, of Christ, O Mary, hail, alway,O Cloister chaste of pure virginity,That Christ hath closed 'gainst crime for evermo';Triumphant Temple of the Trinity,That didst the eternal Tartarus o'erthrow;Princess of peace, imperial Palm, I trow,From thee our Samson sprang invict in fray;Who, with one buffet, Belial hath laid low--Mother of Christ, O Mary, hail, alway,Thy blessed sides the mighty Champion bore,Who hath, with many a bleeding wound in fight,Victoriously o'erthrown the dragon hoarThat ready was his flock to slay and smite;Nor all the gates of hell him succour might,Since he that robber's rampart brake away,While all the demons trembled at the sight--Mother of Christ, O Mary, hail, alway,O Maiden meek, chief Mediatrix for man,And Mother mild, full of humility,Pray to thy Son, with wounds that sanguine ran,Whereby for all our trespass slain was he.And since he bled his blood upon a tree,'Gainst Lucifer, our foe, to be our stay,That we in heaven may sing upon our knee--Mother of Christ, O Mary, hail, alway,Hail, Pearl made pure; hail, Port of paradise;Hail, Ruby, redolent of rays to us;Hail, Crystal clear, Empress and Queen, hail thrice;Mother of God, hail, Maid exalted thus;O Gratia plena, tecum Dominus;With Gabriel that we may sing and say,Benedicta tu in mulieribus--Mother of Christ, O Mary, hail, alway.William Dunbar,XV-XVI. Cents.
Then all the disciples forsook him and fled.S. Matt. XXVI, 56.
Then all the disciples forsook him and fled.S. Matt. XXVI, 56.
Through the intercession of the Holy Mother of God, accept, O Lord, our prayers and save us.May the Holy Mother of God and all the saints be our intercessors with the Heavenly Father, that He may deign to be merciful to us, and in pity save His creatures. Lord God all-powerful! save us and have mercy upon us.Through the intercession of the Holy Mother of God, the Immaculate Mother of Thine only Son, and through the prayers of all the saints, receive, O Lord, our supplications; hear us, O Lord, and have mercy upon us; pardon us, bear with us, and blot out our sins, and make us worthy to glorify Thee, together with Thy Son and the Holy Ghost, now and ever, world without end. Amen.
Armenian.
e try to see our Lord's passion through the eyes of His Blessed Mother. We feel that all through Holy Week she must have been in direct touch with the experiences of our Lord. Her outlook would have been that of the Apostolic circle the record of which we get in the Gospels. Our Lord's ministry had showed a period of popularity during which it must have seemed to those closest to Him that they were moving rapidly to success; and then, after the day at Caeserea Phillipi, when His Messianic claims had been acknowledged, they would have been filled with enthusiasm for the mission the meaning of which was now defined. Then came a period of disappointment. Our Lord declined to become a popular leader, and by the nature of His preaching, the demands that He made upon those who were inclined to support Him lost popularity till it was a question to be considered whether the very Apostles would not desert Him. Then came the flash of renewed enthusiasm which is evidenced by the Palm Sunday entry, bringing, no doubt, renewed hopes to those nearest our Lord who seem to have been utterly unable to accept the view of His failure and death that He kept before them. But the hope vanished as quickly as it was roused. In less than a week the rejoicing group of Sunday followed Him from the Upper Chamber to the shades of Gethsemane. The betrayal, the trial, the end, come quickly on.
This to S. Mary was the piercing of the sword through the very heart. These were the days when the meaning of close association with Incarnate God, with God Who was pursuing a mission of rescue, came out. The mission of the Son for the Redemption of man meant submitting to the extremity of insult and torture, and it meant that those who were closest associated with Him should be caught into the circle of His pain. As our Lord was displaying the best of which humanity is capable, so was He calling out the worst of which it is capable. These last days of the life of Jesus show where man can be led when he surrenders himself to the dominion of the Power of Evil and becomes the servant of sin. The triumph of demoniac malice through its instruments, the Roman governor, the Jewish authorities, of necessity swept over all who were related to our Lord. The storm scattered the Apostolic group and left the Christ to face His trial alone. Yet not alone: He himself tells us the truth. "Behold the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me." It was what the Prophet had foreseen: "All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered."
We do not know where S. Mary was during these days, but we are sure that she was as near our Lord as it was possible for her to be. We know that her own thought would be of the possibility of ministering to Him. We know that she would not have fled with the Apostles in their momentary panic. She was at the Cross, and she was at the grave, and she would have been as near Him in the agony and the trial as it was possible for her to be. And she too was in agony. Every pang of our Lord found echo in her. Every blow that fell upon His bleeding back, she too felt. Every insult that the soldiers inflicted, hurt her. Our Lord in the consciousness of His mission is constantly sustained by the thought that His Passion and Death is an offering to the will of the Father,--an offering even for these miserable men who are brutally treating a man whom they know to be innocent. Her sorrow is the utter desolation of seeing the One Whom she loves above all else suffer, while she can bear Him no alleviation in His suffering, cannot so much as wipe the blood from off His wounded brow, cannot even touch His hand, and look her love into His eyes. She follows from place to place while our Lord is being hustled from Caiaphas to Pilate and from Pilate to Herod and back again; from time to time hearing from some one who has succeeded in getting nearer, how the trial is going on, what the accusation is, how Jesus is bearing Himself, what answers He has made, what the authorities have said. Once and again, it may be, catching a distant glimpse of Him as He is led about by the guards, seeing Him always more worn and weary, always nearer the point of collapse. Herself, too, nearer collapse; yet going on still with that strength that love gives to mothers, determined at the cost of any suffering to be near Him, as near as she can be, till the very end. So we see her on that day in the streets of Jerusalem, and think of the distance travelled since the morning when Gabriel said to her, wondering: "Hail thou that art highly favoured.... Blessed art thou among women."
We, too, follow. We have so often followed, with the Gospel in our hands, and wondered at the method of God. We have tried hour after hour to penetrate the meaning of the Passion, to find what personal message it brings, to discover what light it throws on our own lives. We have gone out into Gethsemane and placed ourselves with the three chosen Apostles while our Lord went on to pray by Himself; and we have discovered in ourselves the same weariness, the same tendency to sleep, in the presence of what we tell ourselves is the most important of all interests. We call up the scene under the olives, and find that we wander and are inattentive and idle when we most want to be attentive and alert. We place ourselves in the group that surrounds our Lord when the soldiers, led by Judas, come, and ask ourselves shall I too run away? And our memory flashes the answer: You have run away again and again: you have in the face, not of grave dangers, but of insignificant trifles--how insignificant they look now--for fear of criticism, for fear of being thought odd, for fear of the opinion of worldly companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again you have run away. The things that seemed important when they were present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect.
We follow out of the garden to the meeting-place of the Sanhedrin, to the Judgment seat of Pilate, to the palace of Herod. Any impulse to criticise S. Peter is speedily suppressed: we have denied so often under such trifling provocation. S. Peter was frightened from participation in the act of our Lord's sacrifice through mortal fear of his life. We have stayed away from the offering of the Holy Sacrifice, how often! from mere sloth, from disinclination to effort, from the fact that our participation would prevent us from joining in some act of worldly amusement. S. Peter, following to the high Priest's palace to see the end, looks heroic beside our frivolity. We follow through the details of the trial, we go to Herod's palace and see the brutal treatment of our Lord, and we remember of these men that their conduct was founded in ignorance. We do not for a moment believe that they would have spit upon our Lord and buffeted Him, and crowned Him with a crown of thorns, if they had believed that He was God. But we believe that He is God. Our desertion of Him when we sin, our contempt of His expressed ideals when we compromise with the world, our departure from His example when we excuse ourselves on the ground of very minor inconveniences from keeping some holy day or fasting day, are not founded in ignorance at all. They can hardly be said to be founded in weakness, so slight is the temptation that we do not resist. As we meditate on the Passion, as we keep Good Friday, very pitiful all our idleness and subterfuges appear to us. But we so easily shake off the effect! We emerge from our meditation almost convinced that the stinging sense of the truth of our conduct which we are experiencing is the equivalent of having reformed it. We go out with a glow of virtue and by night realise that we have sinned again!
It is no doubt well that we should not be permanently depressed about our spiritual state, but only because we have taken all the pains we can to heal the wounds of sin. There is no need that any one should abide in a state of sin because there has been in the Precious Blood a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, and by washing therein, though our souls were as scarlet, they shall become white as snow. We have the right to a certain optimism about ourselves if it be founded on actual spiritual activity which ceaselessly tries to reproduce the Christ-experience in us, even the experience of the Passion by the voluntary self-discipline to which we subject ourselves. A brilliant writer has spoken of those whose view of their lives is drawn from "that fountain of all optimism--sloth." That is a true saying: our optimism is often no more than an idle refusal to face facts; a quaint and good-natured assumption that nothing very much matters and that everything will be all right in the end!
This easy going optimism is commonly as far as possible from representing any spiritual fact. If we are seeking any serious and fruitful relation to the Passion of our Lord, we must seek it along the Way of the Cross. To follow His example means to follow His experience, to treat life as He treated it. The content of our lives is quite different, but the treatment of the given fact must be essentially the same. We need the same repulse of temptation, the same quiet disregard of the appeals of the world, whether it offer the alleviation of difficulty or the bestowal of pleasure as the reward of our allegiance. And we, sinners in so manifold ways, need what our Lord did not need, repulsion from our sins as the necessary preliminary to forgiveness.
My experience makes me feel very strongly that we are apt to be deficient in the first step in repentance--contrition. As we follow the Way of Sorrows we know that our Lord is sufferingfor us; and we feel that the starting point of our repentance must lie in our success in making that a personal matter. In our self examination, in our approach to the sacrament of penance, we are compelled to ask ourselves, Am I in fact sorry for my sins? It surely is not enough that we fear the results of sin, or that we are ashamed at our failure. This really is not repentance but a sort of pride. There must, I feel, be sorrow after a godly sort. That is, true contrition, true sorrow for sin, is the sort of sorrow which is born of the Vision of God; it has its origin in love. I have found in our Lord love giving itself to me, and I must find in myself love giving itself to Him. To my forgiveness it is not enough that God loves me. I know that He loves me and will love me to the end, whether I repent or not; but the possibility of forgiveness lies in my love of Him, whether it takes such hold on me as actually to stimulate me to forsake sin. I shall never really forsake sin through shame or fear; one gets used to those emotions after a little and disregards them. But one does not get used to love; it grows to be an increasing force in life, and so masters us as to draw us away from sin.
Contrition then will be the offspring of love. It will be born when we follow Christ Jesus out on the Sorrowful Way and understand that He is going out for us. Then we want to get as near Him as possible: we want to take His Hand and go by His side. We want to stand by Him in His trial and share His condemnation. We want constantly to tell Him how sorry we are that we have brought Him here. We shall not be content that He feel all the pain. We are convinced that we ought to share in the pain as we share in the results of the Passion. When we have achieved this point of view we shall feel that our approach to Him to ask His forgiveness needs, it may be, much more care than we have hitherto bestowed upon it. We have thought of penance as forgiveness; now we begin to see how much the attitude which precedes our entrance to the confessional counts, and that we must value the gift of God enough to have made sure that we are ready to receive it. We kneel down, therefore, and look at our crucifix, and say: "This hast Thou done for me," and make our act of love in which we join ourselves to the Cross of Jesus. We tell ourselves that love is the beginning and end of our relation to Him.
It is to be urged that every Christian should be utterly familiar with the life of our Lord, and should spend time regularly in meditation upon His life, and especially upon His Passion. Love is the constant counteractive of familiarity; and it is kept fresh in our souls by the contemplation of what our Lord has actually done for us. A general recalling of what He has done has not the same stimulating force as the vivid placing before us of the actual details of His work. To most of us visible aids to the realisation of our Lord's action for us are most helpful. A crucifix on the wall of one's room before which one can say one's prayers, and before which also we stop for a moment time and again in the course of the day, just to say a few words, to make an act of love, of contrition, or of union, keeps the thought of the Passion fresh. We gain in freshness and variety of prayer by the use of such devotions as the litany of the Passion or the Way of the Cross. A set of cards of the Stations help us to say them in our homes. It is much to be desired that we accustom ourselves to devotional helps of all sorts. We are quite too much inclined to think that there is something of spiritual superiority in the attempt to conduct our devotional life without any of the helps which centuries of Christian experience have provided. It is the same sort of feeling that makes other Christians assume that there is a superiority in spiritual attainment evidenced by their dispensing with "forms," especially with printed prayers. It is just as well to remember that we did not originate the Christian Religion, but inherited it; and that the practices of devotion that have been found helpful by generations of saints, and after full trial have retained the approval of the greater part of Christendom, can hardly be treated as valueless, much less as superstitious. The fact that saints have found them valuable and one has not, may possibly not be a criticism of the saints.
The meditation upon the Way of the Cross, the vision of Jesus scourged, spitted upon, crowned with thorns, may well give us some searchings of heart in regard to our own easy-going, luxurious life. Nothing seems to disturb the modern person so much as the suggestion that the chief business of the Christian Religion is not to look after their comfort. They hold, it would appear, to the pre-Christian notion that prosperity is an obvious mark of God's favour, and that by the accumulation of wealth they are giving indisputable evidence of piety. It is well to recall that there is no such dangerous path as that of continual success. I do not in the least mean to imply that success is sinful or indicates the existence of sin, but I do mean to insist very strongly that the successful man needs to be a very spiritually watchful man. He is quite apt to think that he may take all sorts of liberties with the laws of God. There are, no doubt, evident dangers to the unsuccessful man, but the Holy Scriptures have not thought it worth while to spend much time in denouncing him. It has a good deal to say of the danger, not so much of wealth, as of prosperity in general: "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease were in her." When we find ourselves in a satisfied and comfortable home life, so comfortable that we find it difficult to get up to a week-day Mass, and disinclined to go out to a service after dinner, we need watching.
And the best watchman is oneself; and the best method of self-examination is by the Cross. Is there any sense in which we can be said to be following our Lord on the Sorrowful Way? Have we taken up the Cross to go after Him, or are we assuming that we can just as well drift along with the crowd of those who only look on? We all need from time to time to consider the Catholic teaching as to mortification and self-discipline. I am quite aware that to insist on this is not the way of popularity, but nevertheless I learned a long time ago that about the only way that a priest can take if he wishes to be saved is the way of unpopularity. And therefore I am going to insist that the practice of rigorous self-discipline is essential to any healthy Christian life. We cannot dispense ourselves from this, for the mere fact that we are dispensing ourselves is the proof that we need that upon which we are turning our back. Briefly, what I mean is that the assumption of the Cross by a Christian means that he is taking into his life, voluntarily, personal acts of self-sacrifice which he offers to our Lord as the evidence and the means of his own Cross-bearing.
The unruliness of our nature can only be kept in order by continual acts of self-discipline. We, no doubt, recognise the need of the discipline of the passions, but our theory, so far as we can be said to have one, would seem to be that the discipline of the passions means resistence to special temptations as they arise. We may no doubt sin through the passions, and therefore we need a minimum of watchfulness to meet temptations which come our way. I submit that such a way of conducting life is quite sufficient to account for the vast amount of failure we witness or, perhaps, experience. When from time to time the country gets alarmed about its health, when it is threatened with some epidemic such as influenza, the papers are full of medical advice the sum of which is you cannot dodge all the disease germs that are in the air, but you can by a vigorous course of exercise and by careful diet, keep yourself in a state of such physical soundness that the chances are altogether favourable for your withstanding the assaults of disease. No doubt the vast majority of people prefer not to follow this advice. A considerable number of them resort to various magic cults, such as letting sudden drafts of cold air in upon the inoffensive bystander with a view to exorcising the germs. But it remains that the medical advice is sound: it amounts to saying, "Keep yourself in the best physical condition possible and you will run the minimum chance of being ill."
The Catholic treatment of life and its recommendation of discipline and mortification has precisely the same basis as the physical advice--an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. We are exposed to temptation constantly, and we need to recognise the fact and prepare ourselves to meet it; and the best preparation is the preparation of self-discipline for the purpose of keeping rebellious nature under control. Good farming does not consist in pulling up weeds; it consists in the choice and preparation of the ground in which the seed is to be sown; it looks primarily to the growth of the seed and not to the elimination of the weeds. Our nature is a field in which the Word of God is sown; its preparation and care is what we need to focus attention on, not the weeds.
Self-discipline is the preparation of nature, the discipline of the powers of the spiritual life with a view to what they have to do. And one of the important phases of our preparation is to teach our passions obedience, to subject them to the control of the enlightened will. If they are accustomed to obey they are not very likely to get out of hand in some time of crisis. If they are broken in to the dominion of spiritual motive, they will instinctively seek that motive whenever they are incited to act. Hence the immense spiritual value of the habitual denial to ourselves of indulgence in various innocent kinds of activity. I do not at all mean that we are never to have innocent indulgences: I do mean that the declining of them occasionally for the purpose of self-discipline is a most wholesome practice. How frequently it is desirable must be determined by the individual circumstances. It is utterly disastrous to permit a child to have everything it wants because there is sufficient money to spend, to permit it to run to soda fountains or go to the picture houses as it desires. Any sane person recognises that; but does the same person recognise the sane principle as applying in his own life? Does he feel the value of going without something for a day or two, or staying from places of amusement for a time, or of abandoning for a while this or that luxury?
The principle is of course the ascetic principle of self-mastery. It is best brought before us by the familiar practice of fasting, which is very mildly recommended to us in its lowest terms in the table in the Book of Common Prayer. Naturally, its value is not the value of going without this or that, but the value of self-mastery. The very fact that our appetites rebel at the notion shows their undisciplined character. The child at the table begins to ask, not for a sensible meal founded on sound reasons of hygiene, but for various things that are an immediate temptation to the appetite. The adult is not markedly different save that he preserves a certain order in indulgence. The principle of fasting is that he should from time to cut across the inclination of appetite, and either go without a meal altogether, or select such food as will maintain health without delighting appetite. So man gains the mastery over the animal side of his nature and shows himself the child of God.
The actual practice of the ascetic life really carries us much farther than these surface matters of a physical nature that have been cited. It applies in particular to the disposition of time and the ruling of daily actions. The introduction of a definite order into the day actually seems to increase the time at one's disposal. I know, I can hear you saying: "If you were the head of a family, and had children to look after, you would not talk that way. You would know something of the practical difficulties of life." But indeed I am quite familiar with the situation. And if I were so situated I am certain that I should feel all the more need of order. Families are disorderly because we let them be; because we do not face the initial trouble of making them orderly. A school or a factory would be still more disorderly than a family if it were permitted to be. Any piece of human mechanism will get out of order if you will let it. That is precisely the reason for the insistence on the ascetic principle--this tendency of life to get out of order; that is the meaning of all that I have been saying, of the whole Catholic insistence on discipline. Time can be controlled; and, notwithstanding American experience, children can be controlled; and control means the rescuing of the life from disorder and sin, and the lifting it to a level of order and sanity and possible sanctity.
We cannot hope to meet successfully the common temptations of life except we be prepared to meet them, except there be in our life an element of foresight. An undisciplined and untried strength is an unknown quantity. The man who expects to meet temptation when it occurs without any preparation is in fact preparing for failure. I do not believe that there is any other so great a source of spiritual weakness and disaster as the going out to meet life without preceding discipline, thus subjecting the powers of our nature to trials for which we have not fitted them. Self-control, self-discipline, ascetic practice, are indispensible to a successful Christian life.
O STAR of starrès, with thy streamès clear,Star of the Sea, to shipman Light or Guide,O lusty Living, most pleasant t'appear,Whose brightè beames the cloudès may not hide:O Way of Life to them that go or ride,Haven from tempest, surest up t'arrive,O me have mercy for thy Joyès five.O goodly Gladded, when that GabrielWith joy thee gret that may not be numb'rèd,Or half the bliss who couldè write or tell,When th' Holy Ghost to thee was obumbrèd,Wherethrough the fiendès were utterly encombrèd?O wemless Maid, embellished in his birth,That man and angel thereof hadden mirth.John Lydgate of Bury,XV Cent.From Chaucerian and OtherPoems, edited by W. W. Skeat,1894.