By Henry Aloysius Barry
The presence of the Third Person enfolds the councils of the Church.—" It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, to lay no further burden upon you than these necessary things." (Acts xv, 28.)
With enlightened faith, with solid dogmatic assurance, let our hearts, our lips, our life, repeat it, in a deep breath, sucking in its meaning as the sunbeam sinks in the dew. "I believe in the Holy Ghost!" And now, once again, let us pause for breath, in our ascent of Sion, in a new endeavor to attain to the complete knowledge of God, upon Whose summit the altar of God's Son is erected, whereupon we hope to lay our whole being, not merely our possessions, nor what we have, nor what we own, nor what we claim, but our very selves as love-consumed victims on the bloody slab. "By degrees in the practice of virtue, one is to ascend the mountain of virtue," says St. Ambrose.
Before advancing further, then, let us be convinced that the Holy Ghost is the "Vivifier of all things," as St. Jerome observes. Of the world, forsooth, but, of my soul in particular it is the vivificant and cleansing force by justification. St. Tharasius says: "Praise be to the Lord, with the Father and the most holy and vivific Spirit." (Brev. 12th Dec.) Inhaling the breath divine I drink in the very life; abandoning it, the sap runs out from the tree, and the soul stands as yonder fig tree, a barren, fruitless, useless, dead thing, a mass of rotten timber, encumbering the earth, a curse. — " There fell a mist and darkness upon him." "By the Word of the Lord, the heavens were established, and all the power of them, by the Spirit of His mouth," (Ps. xxxii, 6), without Whose salutary, vivific beams all motion, both animal, vital, and natural, aye, supernatural, "would cease, speedily." (Ray, Creation, P. 1.)
Repeat it, O soul, "God loved me and gave Himself up for me." (Gal. ii, 20.) "The Word was made flesh." His gift to me is " the Spirit of His mouth,"—the assimilating saliva. "The word of the Lord inflamed him." (Ps. civ, 20.) The Third Person warms me with His breath, as with a flaming furnace, and, yet, I expire. I exhale Him again, and, like the breathless body, my soul grows rigid, cold, lifeless. Come, Holy Spirit, enliven what is dead, invigorate and stimulate what is languid and dreamy! Our Lord has placed us in the Spirit's keeping. In fear and trembling at the wickedness of the corrupted marl, ah, how fervently and much I should cultivate the Spirit's voice, rebuking me in sin, warning me in peril, encouraging me in struggle, invariably uplifting me from beneath the sordid weight of material things and purely worldly concerns, ever pleading the cause of Life against the counsels of Death. Ah, dear God, pity, pity, — " Take not thy Holy Spirit from me." Saul pleaded not so: he was worldly, unspiritual, ungrateful; he forgot; he forfeited the Spirit's care, therefore, and lost the crown; power had turned his head. Judas, too, was crushed beneath the steps that should have been the instruments of his ascent to God. Money became his master, instead of his slave; his sceptre, instead of his staff. His standards were not spiritual. Business affairs engrossed him, money became his end, no longer the means which, were they but rightly and prudently handled, should have promoted his sanctification.
St. Ambrose has said: "Those who condemn worldly things will merit the eternal; no one, however, can enter the kingdom of heaven, who is overwhelmed beneath a weight of worldly desires without the faculty of setting one's self free therefrom." (Lib. 5 in Luc. cap. 3.) There must be one in the mastery, — the spirit or the world, by which latter dominance is meant all that is not conducive to the heavenly interests of the soul, all that does not make it well with us, ultimately, in the sight of God. There can be no mutual understanding or compromise; one or the other must be the slave. It is life or death, as the soul rules or is ruled. Judas tried to evade this law of one being in the mastery; the unfortunate man had given the upper hand to his enemy by the adoption of such tactics. The traitor had not the faculty that St. Ambrose referred to, the faculty of spiritual liberty, the faculty of a complete dominance of the mind, a regal supremacy of the heart and body and a subserviency of all sublunar things to the sceptre of the Spirit. He did not cultivate the Holy Ghost, sedulously, fearlessly and daily in his life, as David had done, as Susan had done, as all saints had done in the Old Law and the New. Of course he neglected his meditation and prayer. Results prove this. Ut videam ! Ut videam ! this was not his cry daily, and, we are not surprised, therefore, that his vision grew dark and ever darker as the days multiplied upon him. The lamp of his soul burned low and ever lower in him as his cupidity grew, daily gaining in ascendency, until at last the Spirit's flame went out altogether, and, his darkened soul offered alluring ground and a fair field for the hatching of the dark, historic conspiracy against the Son of Man. We need a good, clear light to tread the narrow path, and an unclouded sight; that is, excellent spiritual eyes. Light is life to the soul, fiat lux —come Holy Spirit !
In the course of one's daily life, if one should obey the Spirit's voice and not that of mere reason, one might, I doubt not, be poorly off in the sight of men. I dare say we should be dubbed, in such event, as fools, as dreamers, perhaps as impractical men, but we will avoid the blunders and shame of Saul and Judas, and, as St. Ambrose says, "withdrawn from lust, we shall avoid the penalties of blindness." Let the pagan follow his reason, let the christian follow the Holy Ghost; earth is the former's goal and glory; heaven, the latter's. Not to do so is an untruth. Christ descends from the mountain," to heal our wounds," says St. Ambrose, "to make us, by the application and ampleness of His nature, partakers with Himself in the kingdom of heaven." (Loc. lie.)—to uplift and spiritualize us.
Says St. Paul "There are bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial, but one is the glory of the celestial, and another of the terrestrial." (I Cor., xv, 40.) With us christians, it is as it is with the King's daughter, "all of whose glory is within." Compare at this hour Dives with his keen knowledge of stocks and bonds, or Judas with his money bags that he had an eye for, before the spiritual interests of life, with Lazarus or St. John. The latter, were he alive today, should, I doubt not, be occupied with confessions, preaching or hunting up a lost sheep, whilst Judas was absorbed with counting the filthy lucre. When the spiritual duties had been perfectly accomplished, St. John loaned his thoughts to temporalities with a secondary yet orderly zeal, and then immediately went and washed his hands and his heart to escape the poisonous germ of avarice. It is a triumph of grace and speaks volumes for the sturdy holiness of the other apostles that the money grubber's example did not contaminate them.
