CHAPTER 1. "I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST." (Ap. Cr. Council Nice.)
Enlightenment on the Holy Ghost is most necessary from a view-point of practical salvation. Burning with the Spirit's supernal glow, St. Paul insisted upon this requirement at Ephesus: —"Have you received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?" The interrogation is straightforward, keen and practical and eliminates the subject from the batch of unliving theories or purely speculative truths. It was a realistic method of catechism, touching the structural, and reaching down to the roots, aye, to the very vital principles of the christian life. St. Paul is a physician on this occasion, with lancet in hand to open up the ignorance of the throng, to afford free action to their vital forces, full play or larger register to their congested lungs and cramped heart. There had been, of course, something symptomatic of this ignorance. With the unerring perception of the seer, he had read the signs well, for, the multitude, in replying to the apostle's query, owned, with painfully refreshing sincerity and lamentably ingenuous candor, that they "had not so much as heard whether there be a Holy Ghost." (Acts xix, v 2.) Imagine St. Paul's tone and picture to yourself the apostle's attitude of surprise: "In what, therefore, were you baptized?" (Acts xix, 3.) To give the thing a touch of local coloring:—Good gracious; don't know what it is that makes you christians! "Give me understanding and I will search thy law." So had prayed David in his own behalf. The prophet forewarned us against a sterile, indolent, ignorant faith, that should suffer us, the flock of Christ, whilst set in the midst of a rich pasturage, to perish like the calf that will not chew the cud. He deprecates an unintelligent faith, one that is emaciated and hollow in its fruitage, the increment of uncultivated acreage. We must toil, delve, seek, expand, grow,—this is the inexorable law of life. Faith is soul-work, and the soul grows and prospers, first, on understanding, completing afterward its full growth, by the magnetism of light upon the will:—"I will give thee understanding," says the Lord; "Do not become like the horse and the mule that have no understanding," says the prophet. This is a solemn charge to us. The machinery of justification and hallowing is the Holy Ghost, yet, the world at large has only a hazy idea of its entity, a distinct ignorance, rather, of its operativeness. The results are all too sadly apparent up and down the earth: "My sores are putrefied and corrupted because of my foolishness." (Psalm xxxvii.) Darkness and weakness are prevalent on all sides. Tis a vast world's Jeremiad, for, the multitude have the machinery of sanctification and know not how to put it to use, because they are too indolent to acquire the holy art. The Church deduces from St. Paul's words that a distinct knowledge of this article, namely, the Holy Ghost, is most necessary to salvation. Pope Leo deplores the principle of ignorance: "It is rather 'ignorance' than ill-will," says the Holy Father, "which keeps multitudes away from Jesus Christ. There are many who study humanity and the natural world; few who study the Son of God. The first step, then, is to substitute 'knowledge' for 'ignorance' so that He may be no longer despised nor rejected because. He is 'unknown.' We conjure all christians A throughout the world, to strive all they can to. 'know' their Redeemer as He really is." That is to say, the living Lord, the reality and not the barren name, the interior of the Rabbi, the heart-pulse, the gurgling spring, the communication of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Father has very strongly put this to the bishops and clergy of the whole world, under the words, "True Knowledge." "You must look upon it as your chief duty," the Holy Father goes on, "to engrave upon the minds of your people the 'true knowledge' of their likeness to Jesus Christ; to illustrate His charity, His mercy, His teachings, by your writings, your words in schools and universities, from the pulpit, wherever opportunity is offered." Who knows not the Holy Ghost, however, knows not Jesus Christ truly and really and less than in name. The new art of producing a likeness to God in one's life is effectively the work of the Holy Ghost. Lamentable is, indeed, such ignorance in our lives as obscures the path to heaven and leaves us halting on our heavenward journey, with lamps in our hands but an empty faith— no oil in the lamps.
It is this delinquency or failure on our part, individually, to make our practical lives be consistent with the promptings of faith that offers a seeming occasion for the slur of the iconoclast and the philistine, to the effect that the day of ceremonial and dogma is past.—"I will instruct thee in the way in which thou shalt go." (Psalm xxxi.) "Wilt thou show wonders to the dead?" "Shall thy wonders be known in the dark, and thy justice in the land of forgetfulness?" (Psalm lxxxvii.) Come out from the shadows of your ignorance, ye benighted of the world. —"Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."
Serious and deep-thinking churchmen are nonplussed to find the explanation of how ignorance upon so necessary a point of salvation should so contumaciously perpetuate itself. Are the unpractical not duly taught, or are they taught but listen not,— which? One can condone the nescience of Belles Lettres and put forward a defence of an unacquaintance with polite learning in such persons as have a decided dearth of palate for such culture or in such again as, having a relish for such delights, find themselves without funds for such luxuries or leisure for such pursuits; but a knowledge, pronounced by the orthodox authority to be necessary for salvation, is no longer a matter of taste or of personal election. It enters into the domain of divinely-imposed duties, a territory wherein we are, nowise, arbiters.
No kind of environment or of vocation or of social status howsoever impoverished arms us with a dispensation that will make us secure in our ignorance on this salient point of religions cult and practical revelation. The requisites for eternal health were cast and promulgated in full view of the whole range of human conditions, and, were such required knowledge not reconcilable with the wide world's variant character or quality of pursuits, they had not, forsooth, been made canons of appointed and universal conduct by the Son of Man. Not to have and to hold such knowledge, despite all temptations, all illusions and false pretences, struck off in defence of religious ignorance, is not due, as a matter of fact, to the difficulty of attainment nor to the dimensions of the knowledge required, but rather to fatal apathy and sheer reluctance on the part of those, who fail seriously to make inquiry into the revelations of the Son of Man; in other words, the small taste for the kingdom of heaven, so abominably, inconsistently displayed by the ignorant and vulgar, is largely due to their intellectual and spiritual sloth. Inactive growth and life may be less unsuitable to a lower order of being, but, such a thing is a reproach and an anomaly to the very idea of a moral being. Spiritual life demands toil and strenuous unremitting endeavor. There is a zone of indispensable knowledge, that ought to be known and cultivated in detail; there are truths of faith, that are, in reality, the very bread of life, and not, indeed, what the rash and indolent discernment would insist are no more than luxuries and meant only for theologians and such dilettanti as may choose to go into the matter beyond the rind.
Within the pale of the Church, we stand in a garden of delights, with bloom and blossom and fruit of revelation, delicious, life-giving, pendant from a million boughs; yet these linger, in so far as most christian men are concerned, unplucked, untasted on their stems. Hence, many of us languish in bone, in muscle and tissue; the religious organism suffers from atrophy in the midst of plenty: "The earth is filled with thy riches." (Psalm ciii, 24.) As a matter of stern fact, the goal of the major part, if not all, of our strenuous endeavor and study is our own present, immediate, lower interests, involving, and practically ending with such plans and ambitions as terminate in self-glory, worldly and human. I say, practically, for we may not care to admit this in our own particular case; at the same time, self seeking of the omnivorous, all-exclusive type, is a world-disease, nothing short of a plague, disguised in myriad fashions, with masque and powder, employed with a
deft touch, but always insidious, self-deluding, hypocritical, always a wicked, malignant disease. Ignorance of the life and light of the soul—the Holy Ghost—accounts for this moral epidemic, for, "from a knowledge of the Holy Ghost we derive this special fruit—considering attentively, that whatever we possess, we do so by the bounty and beneficence of the Holy Ghost, we learn to think more modestly and humbly of ourselves, and to place all our hopes in the protection of God which is the first step towards consummate wisdom and supreme happiness." (Catech. Trent.)
The Holy Ghost vivifies; He is the eternal personal Savitar, the creator of,—not indeed the sun, which as the Brahmanic Savitar is supplicated impersonally, morning and evening, by the Brahmanic Savitri, or extracts of the Rig-Veda: "Let us meditate on that surpassing glory of the divine vivifier, may He bring light unto our understanding." The world is devitalizing to the soul. Devotion smoulders in us; we don't stir up the fires and eschew the clinkers of obnoxious and unasimilating elements. Failing to penetrate the truths with which we have a bare bowing acquaintance and, in no sense, intimate relations, we doubly err in not feeding the fires of the soul. We throw on a chip or shaving, that quickly perishes, but we do not supply to the furnace of the heart and mind those splendid, massive logs or bituminous chunks that seize and retain flame —the solid truths of faith, that grow larger and larger with more penetrant meditation and throw up to the sky those glorious conflagrations of the soul that make the scroll of canonized saintship, effulgent, luminant, ineffaceable, undimmed by any passage of centuries.
