Ignorance along any other line is admitted reluctantly and only with a blush. This holds good of the soldier, the banker, the pedagogue, the citizen; but, ignorance of our holy faith and its workings is avowed, however, with appalling equanimity. Yet how inconsistent is all this! We say we are christians, followers of Christ, believers in His doctrine— what doctrine?
The Church tells us that the Holy Ghost will make us wise and happy, which, of course, implies A that without Him, we are mere fools and miserably off. And true it is, because we live for the world; our golden dream is to amass its perishable gifts, to pluck its quick-fading glories, to exchange a crown of eternity for one of straw that we shall wear only for a day. America is materialistic. She may offer advantages to us politically that are infinitely less, in the end, than the moral loss her grasping spirit and commercial ideals have occasioned in us, by scandal and contact. The "Dollar" dominates the nation and the individual. It is epidemic and its germs are in the dust of the streets, playing round the oaken floors of the counting-house, floating about in the air we breathe in every day, every moment; it is the burden of men's conversation, upon all days, and, upon all occasions its theme rises to the surface; it is the supreme, all-dominant art of how to be affluent. Yet, "What will it profit a man to gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?" All very true, but at the same time, how many there are who go in for a full meal of the world and relegate heaven to a sort of dessert; a bit of folly that, alas, has not the redeeming feature of a youth's decided preference of the dessert over all.
As a consequence, the millionaire, in his passing, stands a stranger before heaven's walls, and, in his death-shroud, he takes his place in the line of the foolish virgins, shut out, dumb, despairing, doomed. The poor, humble workman, with joints encased in the humblest garb, maybe tattered and frowsy, but with the Holy Ghost in his heart, will be no stranger in God's country. He already has learned its language from faith; he knows its habits and its inhabitants and will pass in and be at home for ever.
Ye business men, ye high-minded, ye socially proud, ye scientifically-proud, all ye who live first for earth, let your cry roll up from the depths of your darkened, icy souls, "Come, Holy Spirit! fill us with true knowledge and supernatural love." Ah, but one entertains no wishfulness toward an object, of which one knows nothing; so proclaimeth the proverb of our Latin forbears. Our love and interest in the Holy Ghost must, therefore, spring from our knowledge of the identity and personality of the Third Person. Upon this point, the world's ignorance is not mere nescience or the absence of unnecessary light, but ignorance of the positive type, of the criminal stamp. It is knowledge which, St. Paul says repeatedly, we ought to possess. The duty of diligent and adequate inquiry readily asserts itself. Inadequate measures to clear ourselves of this ignorance would still leave us in vincible and culpable ignorance. More reprehensible, of course, is the downright ignorance, which employs no endeavor whatsoever to dispel the darkness, which wraps our intelligence in its ebon folds. Most to be feared, however, is such ignorance as loves and cultivates the preclusion of light and studiously refrains from the pursuit of the proper christian enlightenment out of pure and simple predilection for the existing regime of one's life. Ah, yes, surcease of enlightenment would unveil new duties and a wider range of responsibilities, under the X-ray of the searching light of the Holy Ghost. Our fractured souls would appall the conscience with the portraiture of internal, moral disease, such as one's conscience cares not to have cured or, where it would fain be healed, it recoils from the painful operation essential to a restoration of the soul to complete health. The sheeted ghost of penance looms up before their eyes and freezes up their moral veins. The chains of existing duties burrow into their flesh, chafe and rankle;—it were enough! away with new links! Yet, when the laborer's hammer is heard no more in the trench, when the footfall of the banker is echoed no more from the marble ceiling of the exchange and the voice of the statesman is silent as the stone columns of the forum, when the roysterer's silvery laugh has melted into the silence of haunted castles,— aye, when all is done with this weary vale, what will it profit a man to have gained the world with its natural gifts, its human science, its dignities, its pleasures and riches, if, in the end, and that so near, one should have to suffer the loss of his own soul? O, witless, this night! Ah, no, come down Spirit of Light, immerse us in Thy majestic radiance, and in the lightning flashes of Thy sword and the thunder peal of Thy Voice banish hence the hostile, shrouding dragon-jungle darkness; touch, with Thy melting breath and Thy soft dews, our wintry lives; turn our hearts to gentler and more fragrant spring. Renew the air in and about our souls; waken our drowsy, ill-breeding minds and brutalized senses, bathe us in the antiseptic fluid of Thy grace. For my own part, from this very hour, I shall search to know Thee, O Holy Ghost, and knowing Thee, how can I fail to love Thee, and thus doing, I shall follow Thy Will in my life.
O, no, I am no sceptic on the pledge of the Church. The Church makes no false promises. Thou shalt make me "consummate in wisdom and supreme in happiness." O Thou Spirit of truth and love, Thou Kiss of Godhead, Thou Spirit of the Father and Son, O Thou loving God,—come, Holy Spirit!
