By Henry Aloysius Barry
Under such a heavy fire from the Gospel batteries, is it not amazing how unbelievers in the divinity of the Holy Ghost will not bring themselves to capitulate but rather fatuously resist "faith in the Holy Ghost." The concrete reality! well, they simply will not have it. With all their superbly trained faculties, unsparing energies and tireless researches in the byways of erudition, thick-webbed attics and musty storehouses of knowledge—history, science, philosophy and the rest—one sees the gratuitous labor of a voluntarily selected circuitous route in making the acquaintance of truth, which, by some singular phenomenon, seems alarmingly distasteful to un-Catholics and which if men were more congruously set up, less devilishly recalcitrant and more docile, would be more comprehensible by the easy and short route of a simple faith in an infallible, truth-teaching church:—"Go teach all nations." "Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world." Confession of the truth has to be dragged and beaten out of their mouths, and what is more, they seem to covet error just as the life-long miser fastens his bony fingers around his bags of jingling ducats. To us, who justly bask in the glint of the shepherd's glance, the cry rises up from the dunes and deans, from the valleys, the gorges and hillcrest's of inspired leaves, calling us to pay our dues of adoration, of respect, of love, of obedience to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, to admit and realize His identity and to slight Him no longer; for, of all possible manners of acting endowed with power to wound the feelings, indifference cuts the deepest. It remains, therefore, that we shall in the future not be deaf and dumb to the Holy Ghost, but with jubilant ardor, on the contrary, reinforce the value and beauty of our daily lives with the faithful discharge of our special devoirs toward the August Third Person.
Under such a heavy fire from the Gospel batteries, is it not amazing how unbelievers in the divinity of the Holy Ghost will not bring themselves to capitulate but rather fatuously resist "faith in the Holy Ghost." The concrete reality! well, they simply will not have it. With all their superbly trained faculties, unsparing energies and tireless researches in the byways of erudition, thick-webbed attics and musty storehouses of knowledge—history, science, philosophy and the rest—one sees the gratuitous labor of a voluntarily selected circuitous route in making the acquaintance of truth, which, by some singular phenomenon, seems alarmingly distasteful to un-Catholics and which if men were more congruously set up, less devilishly recalcitrant and more docile, would be more comprehensible by the easy and short route of a simple faith in an infallible, truth-teaching church:—"Go teach all nations." "Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world." Confession of the truth has to be dragged and beaten out of their mouths, and what is more, they seem to covet error just as the life-long miser fastens his bony fingers around his bags of jingling ducats. To us, who justly bask in the glint of the shepherd's glance, the cry rises up from the dunes and deans, from the valleys, the gorges and hillcrest's of inspired leaves, calling us to pay our dues of adoration, of respect, of love, of obedience to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, to admit and realize His identity and to slight Him no longer; for, of all possible manners of acting endowed with power to wound the feelings, indifference cuts the deepest. It remains, therefore, that we shall in the future not be deaf and dumb to the Holy Ghost, but with jubilant ardor, on the contrary, reinforce the value and beauty of our daily lives with the faithful discharge of our special devoirs toward the August Third Person.
