God The Holy Ghost part 58.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

CHAPTER XII. PROCESSION OF THE HOLY GHOST.

The formal and characteristic designation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is the 'Word'—"The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us." (John i, 14.) This revealed designation supplies us with a key which lets us into the character of his procession, namely by way of the "intellect". It is material in entering into the particular study of the Holy Ghost to know just how the Holy Ghost, the Third Person, proceeds. St. Thomas gives us the cue to it when he says, "every act of the will has its root in love." (Contra Gent, iv, c. 19.) Now the Holy Scriptures, as they are expounded by the Fathers of the Church, show us that the Holy Ghost proceeds via the "will," for, revelation gives us internal views of the personal character of the Blessed Trinity by what is termed, 'appropriations'. In other words, they assign, by a certain law, such of the divine works "ad-extra" to such or such divine person according as such works have a peculiar resemblance to such or such a one's personal character. In showing, therefore, that the Holy Ghost is peculiarly Love, the Holy Scriptures unveil to us the personal character, and point out to us the relational origin, of the Third Person, in other words, the mode of his procession —by act of love or "via voluntatis."

The work of the Incarnation even, peculiarly as exquisitely the work of divine charity inasmuch as it is the very source and fountain-head of all the grace and holiness in us, is attributed to the Holy Ghost. The union of humanity with the 'Word' and, consequently, the substantial sanctification of that same humanity, likewise the unction of the most sacred humanity by created grace are assigned to the Holy Ghost. (Luke i, 35; Matt xvii, 20; Acts x, 38; Luke iv, 18)—(Franzlein De Deo Trino et uno, p. 399.) — Getting down, farther, to the members of Christ, it is the Holy Ghost, we find, that pours charity into the hearts of the faithful—"The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, Who is given to us." (Rom. v, 15.) We find in another instance where uncreated charity is made peculiar to the Holy Ghost —"I beseech you by the charity of the Holy Ghost." (Rom. xv, 30.) The Holy Ghost is the author of all holiness, of all piety, of all sweetness—"The virtue of the Spirit is charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency and chastity." (Gal. v, 22,3.)

The Holy Ghost parcels out the various chrisms—"The word of Wisdom and to another the word of Knowledge." (Cor. xii.) In the Holy Ghost we are made members of the Christian body, melted as it were into Christ, that is, reborn and regenerated—"He upon Whom thou shalt see the Spirit descend and remain upon, He it is Who baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." (John i, 33.) "Amen, Amen, I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God." (Ill, 5, 8.) "We are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the spirit of the Lord." (I. Cor. iii, 18.) By the Holy Ghost it is we claim the adoption of sons, whereby we cry, Abba —Father— (Rom. viii, 18.) The Holy Ghost dwells in His sanctified a sin a temple, as St. Paul tells the Corinthians and—"God hath sealed us and given the pledge of the Spirit in our hearts." (II. Cor. i, 21, 22.) "Whosoever are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons of God." (Rom. viii, 14.) Deaf and dumb of soul, paralytics, captives of the perverse spirit, sin-swept are we and it is the Spirit that asketh in our behalf with unspeakable groanings.

God The Holy Ghost part 57.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

Ultimate impenitence brings to a close the list of sins against the Holy Ghost. When this is committed hope vanishes forever, it seals despair. They are guilty of it, who go on in their wickedness to the, end of their days and resist at the last moment, at the parting gasp, the Holy Ghost, Who softly whispers confidence, mercy, pardon, peace, filling the fancy the while with softening recollections of our Lord and His Immaculate Mother, of His Saints and of pious parents gone to their eternal reward, wooing the heart to the last instant with a divine lover's ardor. But, no! life-long obduracy has done its work too well; it has utterly depraved the mind and petrified the heart. St. John has said, "There is a sin unto death; for that I say, not that any man ask." (i, 16.) Tears, sighs and scourges, heaven and earth's commingled prayers are vain to aid when a soul shall have gone before the Judgment without his credentials from the Church, the seal of a Redeemer's tender love engraven upon a heart made like the soft wax by the flames of holy repentance. It makes »ne shudder to think that a soul on the threshold of eternal life could scorn the Redeemer's love and disbelieve His promises.

The Apostle James' words remind us, however, that it does happen, and St. Paul is not wasting words when he says, "Take heed, brethren, lest perhaps there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, to depart from the living God, but exhort one another whilst it is called to-day, that none of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin, for we are made partakers of Christ, yet so if we hold the beginning of His substance firm unto the end." (Heb. iii, 12, 14.) Lifelong virtue counts for nothing if one should die impenitent; lifelong impenitence on the other hand does not count against one who is finally converted to God—so far as being saved is concerned. It is in all likelihood that a devout man, whose footsteps have been ever guided by the Holy Ghost will respond to the old familiar voice; though a slip occur ere the cup of penance and sweetness touches the lips. It is, of course, unfortunately, more likely that the man, whose heart all through the years passionately loved some creature, will not respond, so promptly, to the repentant call. The surest and shortest path, therefore, to final perseverance, is to live always in the grace of God, obedient to the Spirit's voice. St. Augustine says, —"When Christ said, 'He that shall have sinned against the Holy Ghost or spoken a word against the Holy Ghost,' He did not mean every sinful word and deed against the Holy Ghost, but a certain peculiar one. This sin consists in hardness of heart lasting up to the end of this life whereby a man declines to accept, in the unity of the body of Christ, which the Holy Ghost vivifies, the remission of his sins. For, when the Lord said to His Disciples, (John xx, 22, 23,) 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost,' He immediately subjoined, 'whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them, whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.'

Whosoever, therefore, shall have resisted the gift of God's grace and repelled the same or shall have been in any way a stranger to it to the end of this temporal life, he shall not be forgiven, neither in this life nor in the life to come. This is the great sin, the epitome, namely, of all sins which it is not sure that one has committed until one shall have withdrawn from the body. So long, however, as one lives, as the apostle assures us (Rom. ii, 4,) the patience of God is for leading to repentance. But if one, as the apostle adds, by the most perverse wickedness, by a heart hardened and unrepentant, treasures up to himself wrath in the day of anger and revelation of the just judgment of God, it will not be forgiven him, neither in the present life nor in the life to come. Let us not despair in our conduct towards them whilst they yet tarry in the flesh, but let them not seek the Holy Ghost, except in the body of Christ." (Ep. 50, ad. Bonnifacium Comitem.) It is clear from these words of St. Augustine that resistance to the repentant grace is an offense against the Holy Ghost and that the power to forgive sins on the part of God's minister is the communication of the same Holy Spirit. If at the last moment the sight of our past wickedness dejects us, let us implore the Holy Ghost to illumine and invigorate us, for, it counts for much, if in spite of our miserable life, we still have and confess our "Faith in the Holy Ghost," and the infinite mercy of Our Blessed Redeemer.

God The Holy Ghost part 56.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

O man, whosoever among you looks upon such a great multitude of sins, wherefore do you not also turn your attention to the omnipotence of the heavenly physician? For, inasmuch as God has a mind to show mercy because He is good and can show mercy, because He is all-powerful, you, on the contrary, shut against your own faces the gates of divine mercy if you believe that God either has no wish to show mercy or no power to do so, and are distrustful of His goodness or omnipotence. Let no one, therefore, despair of the divine mercy after a hundred sins, nay, a thousand sins." (Ser. 58, De Temp.) St. John Chrysostom takes up the refrain,—"O high mercy of God! for, when the whole world lay sin shackled, the creator of the universe comes forward and invades the strongholds of the sinful so that no one ever after should despair of salvation. Are you wicked, look at the publican; are you unclean, see the harlot; are you a man-slayer, look at the robber; are you bad, reflect on the blasphemer. Consider the apostle Paul, some time persecutor, afterward herald; some time slayer, afterward dispenser; before, cockle, afterwards grain; at one time a wolf, afterwards a shepherd; at one time lead, afterwards gold; at one time pirate, afterwards pilot; once a scatterer of the sheep, afterwards a steward of the church, and at first an uprooter, afterwards an upbuilder. You have seen a many-sided wickedness, but cast your eyes upon mercy unspeakable. You have seen the servant's pride, consider the Lord's benevolence; don't say to me, I am a blasphemer, and, don't say, I am a persecutor, I am unclean; you have seen examples of all this. Go whither you will, to the Old or the New Testament; in the Old, you have David, in the New, Paul. Don't offer me excuses, I don't want you to pretend ignorance to me. You have sinned— repent! A thousand times you have sinned—a thousand times do penance. This is the course which I strenuously advise, and I would do away with all fears, for, I am aware of the sufferings of conscience, I know how very much despair means. The devil stands by whetting his sword, and his speech runs after this fashion: You have abused your whole youth, you have wasted your whole life, you used to patronize the theatre with your friends; you resorted to the circus with your associates and to dens of shame with harlots; then again you used to steal, you cultivated avarice, you have been a swearer and a blasphemer; fie! fie!—what hope of salvation is there for the like of you? You are lost! You are lost! Go on, therefore, and take all possible advantage of the pleasures the world has to offer you; let your heart go out to its joys.

"This is the language of the devil; this is what he advises, but the advice I would give you runs just in the opposite direction. If you have fallen you can rise again; you are lost, but you can be saved, you have been a fornicator, but you can be continent in the future; you have sinned, but you can be delivered; you have gone to the play, but you can retrace your steps; you have consorted with bad men, but, withdraw from them and keep good company; you are free to choose either course. Make some effort at least to begin your conversion, to have some mite of repentance. Let your eyes send forth tears, stir up your conscience, look into yourself, bring the Judgment Day before your eyes, consider the delights of Paradise, prepared for the holy ones. You have committed murder—repent! If you have sinned, confess your sins! You have fallen away, get on your feet again. You have been wounded, make use of the cure whilst you have life, whilst you have breath, aye, whilst you are lying on your very bed, aye, if I may say so, breathing your last breath, that ere you make your exit you may be set free from your chains. Repent, the shortness of time is no barrier to the mercy of God! What is it compared to the mercy of God? a dry chip driven before the wind. If God wills it so, let no man gainsay. Ah, beloved, I speak in this strain to you, not, indeed, to make you any the more neglectful, but, rather, to lead you on to a trust in the bright future. Never despair of yourselves; confide in the mercy of God. Despair rather of him who shall have despaired of himself, who does not wish to retrace his steps, who despises and condemns the Precepts of God and has not the faintest idea that he is ever going to die." (In Ps. L, hom. 2.)

God The Holy Ghost part 55.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

The hardened man, therefore, lives unconverted in the one case because he despairs of the forgiveness of his sins, and in the other because he so trusts in the mercy of God that he remains in his perverse ways to the very end of the present life. Wherefore, loving God's mercies and fearing His justices, let us neither despair of the forgiveness of our sins nor remain in our sins. Let us not forget that the equity of the most just Judge will exact from all men the debts which the mercies of the most clement Redeemer shall not have remitted, for, as the mercy of God takes back unto herself and absolves the converted, so also shall justice repudiate and punish the obdurate, for, these are the ones who, sinning against the Holy Ghost, will, neither in this life or the life to come, receive the remission of their sins." (De fide, ad Petrum diac.)

Despair comes next in the catalogue of sins against the Holy Ghost. It is a crime against the Holy Scripture, maligning as it does the goodness of God revealed therein and the very essence of the Redeemer's life and design. Wisdom says: "Thou hast mercy upon all, because Thou canst do all things, and overlooketh the sins of men, for the sake of repentance. For Thou lovest all things that are and hatest none of the things which thou hast made, for Thou didst not appoint nor make anything hating it." (xi, 24, 25.) St. Paul speaks of our Lord "Who will have all men to be saved— Who gave Himself a redemption for all." (I. Timothy ii, 4, 6) St. John repeats the truth — "He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ourselves only but for the whole world." (I. John ii, 2.) It is a fearsome blunder to suppose that our Lord would hold out false hopes or make promises of mercy and peace, which the Father should fail to ratify,—"the words that I speak to you, I speak not of Myself, but the Father Who abideth in Me, He doth the works." (John xiv, 10.) Despair is a sin against the foundation of salvation,—the mercy of God, and arises from one or the other of two false assumptions, namely, that God is unable or unwilling to forgive or that our sins, on the other hand, shall have reached a proportion that puts forgiveness out of consideration. Repentance only is required for forgiveness of any number of sins, but there is no hope of this, of course, so long as one rejects the idea of God's "infinite" mercy, that is to say, mercy without any bounds whatever. In order to prevail over this fatal illusion one should reflect on the conduct of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. His whole system is mercy, unfailing mercy. He sat soul-thirsty by the well to meet the Samaritan woman; He broke bread with the publican; He undertook the defence of the adulterous woman, only exacting from her the mere repentance of her evil life; in charming parables He set forth His own heart, His infinite love and divine mercy. The Good Shepherd, rushing in all haste through the brambles and thickets, wading knee-deep in the slough, scudding across valleys and hills to overtake the lost sheep— what is this but a picturesque view of the Incarnation— and Redemption? for, indeed, our Lord lost His life in the pursuit. The Prodigal Son is but another description, in altered figure, of this same divine work. Despair is distinctly anti-christian; it is pre-eminently the sin of the Gentiles,— "Having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through their ignorance, that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts, who despairing, have given themselves up to uncleanness." (Eph. iv, 18,19.) The apostle appeals to us to put off this despondency, built upon misconception, and with pathos pleads with us to "grieve not the holy spirit of God." (iv, 30.) "Do not, therefore," says St. Paul, "lose your confidence." Let us now listen to the words of St. Augustine,—"It is not the man who has sinned that is odious and abominable, but the man who perseveres in his sins; for, in order that no man should lack confidence, the Lord, like a most tender father, consoles us through the prophets. (Ezch. xxxiii, 12.) 'I desire not the death of the wicked,'... 'the wickedness of the wicked shall not hurt him in whatsoever day he shall turn from his wickedness.' But, mayhap, some one might give shelter to the idea that because he has sinned so outrageously he cannot merit, any longer, the mercies of God. Far be such a thought from the minds of all sinners. 

God The Holy Ghost part 54.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

In private practice even the common faithful may be offensive in their devotional partisanship. One may have his drawing toward this saint or that saint, this or that branch of church ministration, but in all these things one ought to question occasionally and purify his motives, and, whilst one is sincerely drawn in a particular direction or toward a particular institute, one ought, at the same time, not fail in realizing that the axis of all is Jesus Christ, the motive in all is God; and, hence, one should be well-balanced, temperate, well-ordered in his profession and never offensive to other holy ministers and men called by Almighty God to work in their own way along their own God-appointed lines, and in their own vocations, which are recognized and blessed, all of them, by Holy Mother Church. If social snobbery is odious in the eyes of the well-bred, the same offense translated into things religious becomes only a deeper subject of blame. The true and humble religious man is Catholic-minded, generous, and preeminently fraternal; his sympathies are earnest and world-wide. Moses was not hurt when the Lord said to him of the seventy men of the ancients, "I will take of thy spirit and give to them." (Num. xi, 17.) Joshua was an offensive partisan, a "little christian" so to speak. When others beside his Master showed the gift of prophecy, he said, "Mighty Lord Moses, forbid them." Moses replied, "O that all the people might prophecy, and that the Lord would give them His spirit." (v. 29.) Presumption is the next sin against the Holy Ghost. They are guilty of it, first of all, who lay the corner-stone of their strength in themselves, vainly relying on their own efforts to work out their salvation. Our Lord says distinctly, "Without Me you can do nothing." (John, xv, 5.) Sampson with his extensive range of mental endowments and Peter with his devoted attachment to the Lord should read a lesson to all such as are self-reliant. If in the past we have stood and not fallen, like so many others, the grace of the Holy Ghost is to be thanked. If we are to persevere in our vocations —and no man living knows what may be in store for him on the morrow—that same grace shall, nay, must, accomplish it. In the next place, they sin by presumption, who go on in their evil ways, audaciously figuring out that they can take their own time in the matter and that God will never refuse them pardon. The poisonous element of such a disposition is clear. It insults God for the very reason that He is good and merciful. The Holy Ghost says, "Be not without fear about sin forgiven, and add not sin to sin, and say not, the mercies of the Lord are great, He will have mercy on the multitude of my sins.

For mercy and wrath come from Him, and His wrath looketh on sinners." (Eccl. v, 5, 6, 7.) It is heresy to doubt that God pardons any repentant man; at the same time, when one makes so light of this indulgence on the part of God, and abuses it right along, there is a serious danger lest one will be flecked off the scene without the opportunity of fixing up one's conscience or, again, the quality of one's repentance may constitute a subject of misgiving— "Be not without fear about sin forgiven." The soundest hope of the future is the promise of the life we shall have lived—" He that soweth in the spirit of the spirit shall reap life everlasting." (Gal. v, 8.) "Be not deceived, God is not mocked." (v, 7.) Let us listen to what St. Fulgentius so interestingly says on this point: "At whatever stage of life a man shall have been repentant, truly, of his sins and under the rays of Godly luminance shall have corrected his life, he will not be denied the boon of forgiveness, because God, as the prophets assure us, has no wish for the death of the sinner, even the dying sinner; on the contrary, He desires that he shall renounce his wicked ways and that his soul shall live. (Ezech. xx, 11.) At the same time, no man ought to remain any longer in his sins prompted sheerly out of hope in the mercy of God, for even in the body itself no man prolongeth his illness in the hope of getting cured by and by"—such delay induces a chronic condition and complications. "Such as neglect to renounce their evil ways and guarantee themselves indulgence on the part of God are sometimes so brought up by a sudden squall of divine fury that they find no time for conversion or the boon of absolution. Hence the Holy Scripture, in charity, warns each one of us beforehand when it says, "Delay not to be converted to the Lord, and defer it not from day to day. For His wrath shall come on the sudden, and in the time of vengeance He will destroy thee.' (Eccl. v, 8, 9.) The blessed David also says, (Ps. xciv, 8.) "To-day, if you shall hear, harden not your hearts." With whose words those of the blessed Paul chime in— (Heb. iii, 12, 13): 'Take heed, brethren, lest perhaps there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief to depart from the living God. But exhort one another every day, whilst it is called to-day, that none of you be hardened, through the deceit of sin!' 

God The Holy Ghost part 53.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

The third in the group of sins against the Holy Ghost is a grudging feeling against others who are more favored in the way of virtues and graces than we ourselves. This sin reaches its highest development in the disposition of the fallen angels. The devils are wroth to see the human species, so nobly designed, chosen to fill the places which they had lost through rebellion and mutiny against the Almighty. Their fury involves a malignant attitude toward God on account of His goodness and against the objects of His beneficence, namely mankind. Their frenzy bursts forth in reckless efforts to defeat this end and increases in violence and hellish force as they behold certain men, who happen to be more than others generously endowed with graces and privileges. The lives of the saints illustrate this, wherein we find that these select vessels have been subjected to every imaginable species of bodily ill-usage and soul-taunts. Sanctification is the special work of the Holy Ghost, and, not to yearn for its broader extension, or, for a greater reason, to strive to prevent it, would be a special affront to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. And is it indeed possible that such a jealous frame could be found in men? We find it in the Jews; they were chagrined at the spiritual insight of St. Stephen. The action of the Holy Ghost in the saint aroused their bitterest ire, and, we find from the Holy Record that they went so far as to suborn false witnesses in order to compass his death. By a sort of spiritual "trust" —spiritual exclusiveness—the Jewish converts would have found fault with St. Peter because he preached to the Gentiles, "Whereby the Holy Ghost fell upon them." (Acts ii, 15.) The proper spirit on such an occasion should have been that of Barnabas, "Who when he was come and had seen the grace of God, rejoiced,"—"for he was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost." (v. 23, 24.) God died for all men. In the affair of sanctification there should be no national-spiritual trust; this would imply both arrogance and un christlikeness. We should pray and strive in every other way to bring all nations, to win over all peoples, to the divine brotherhood of grace. We, who for example, are a nation of Catholics must guard against promulgating the idea that we have a special and a quasi-exclusive claim upon the grace of faith. Our sympathies must be Catholic; by word and practice, by public and private policy, let us point to the open door of the Church, of faith, of love, of brotherhood, of hope,—the great world-family in the grace of the Holy Ghost. Sectarian partisans are, all, more or less, touched with this envious disposition in presence of the spiritual wonders of the True Church. Invective is on the daily menu. Every splendid feature of sanctity forms a point of antagonism— celibacy, fasting, ritual and the rest. This spirit, in its own way, may affect those within the pale. Those chosen to the higher walks of holiness,— for example, evangelical perfection,— may occasion the greenish sentiment in those not so selected, and, instead of a holy emulation we may sometimes find a bitter dis edifying and odious rivalry. Again the lax of life may cherish a bitter sentiment against those who are more sturdy in their christian conduct. This envious feeling may indeed invade the inner sanctuary of predilection and show its viperous self in a too offensive partisanship. A member of one body may indulge too human a sentiment towards the members of another institute, when in truth saints are not to be compared. 

God The Holy Ghost part 52.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

St. Gregory says, "The very remedy of grace is turned into increase of culpability—and in so far as man does not care to renounce evil so that he may live injustice, so far does he augment it with the consequences of his death." This penalty of obstinacy is strange and terrible. Before this dreadsome point is reached in the sinner's course God prompts the sinner to appreciate His wonders and warnings.

Now God withdraws at last and leaves him, as it were, to his own resources. The result is the sinner's utter lack of appreciation whilst the favors still flow on till the cup is full, — then vengeance! The lesson of all this is that we should fear God and tremble lest we should dishonor His grace or grow audaciously familiar with His mercy. Our daily study, especially before slumber, should be to reckon our conduct during the day, our correspondence with the mercy reached out to us and our poor miserable return. Phthisis may be a hereditary disease, but, a bad cold neglected or a series of colds may bring it about. In the same way a stubborn sinner who errs, for the most part, through weakness, may turn out a blasphemer. Men and women high up in holiness, by negligence in checking little faults—sat as it were in a draught, got wet feet habitually—have entered upon a decline that has had its ending in a fatal consumption of the soul. Some of these people were converted; many were not. Holy Writ is sufficiently clear to the effect that God becomes very much incensed against a stubborn sinner and deals with him in a manner particularly rigorous. It is worthy of a high place in our memory— the thought that if one is faithful in the minor things of life and makes the most of the little graces, one is then in no danger of obstinacy or practically of any heavy sin. Preservation and cure in this class of evils is found in the Holy Ghost,—"I will give a new heart and put a new spirit within you and I will take away the stony heart out of your breast, and I will give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit in the midst of you, and I will cause you to walk in My commandment, and to keep My judgments and to do them." (Ezech. xxxvi, 26, 27.)

God The Holy Ghost part 51.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

The second in the group of sins against the Holy Ghost is obstinacy in wickedness. This enormity consists in cultivating a taste for evil. The world refers inelegantly to such a disposition as pure "cussedness." It is a deliberate looking for evil with no other impellent in the world for so acting except that it is evil. In this we do not refer to the man who may be prone to, and do, evil out of weakness or lack of reflection, but rather to such a one as is maliciously fond of wickedness, the undiluted essence of evil. 

The devil is the perfect type of this. He is the sworn foe of good, and his taste is only for what is wicked. There is, of course, a taint of this devilry in man's raw nature, not precisely that he yearns for a thing because it is evil, but rather because it is forbidden him; it acts reflectively upon his tendencies. There is a disparity here. In the former case the evil is directed toward God, in the latter case it is more identified with one's weakness. In the devil, besides, it is malice prepense, whilst with man it is mostly the germ of weakness and feebleness, which is a foundational means of virtue. It is not easy to imagine that man can be so like the devil in a formal resistance to good, in a satanic dislike of it, and, yet, it is a fact. St. Stephen called the attention of the Jews to the fact that through such a diabolic disposition their fathers slew the prophets—because they foretold "the coming of the Just One, of Whom you have been now the betrayers and murderers." (Acts xii, 52.) "You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. You also resist the Holy Ghost as your fathers did, so do you also." (v. 51.) The Jews, whom the saint warned, instead of heeding and repenting, "were cut to the heart and they gnashed with their teeth, against Him." (v. 54.) Pharaoh is a type of this malignant obstinacy. He was bent on evil and all his susceptibilities were dead. No remonstrance could rouse him from his moral coma. The hand of God was clear in protest, but the tyrant was determined upon evil and be would do it. Let us repeat it: the weak man despises his folly, he sighs and groans and sadly succumbs to evil; even in its enactment there is a lingering would-not. Pharaoh and his kind exult in it; they have no regrets in the matter. "What is a hard heart?" asks St. Bernard. "It is one that is not torn with compunction, not softened by pity, not elevated by prayers nor yielding under threats, one hardened by scourges; it is one ungrateful for benefits, having no faith in advice, cruel in judgments, in low things without sense of shame, one without fear in the midst of perils, one inhuman toward the human, one bold in divine things, without memory of the past, with neglect for the present, without any eyes for the future, everything of the past goes by the board save wrongs, the present is slain, it has no future except the prospect of preparation for vengeance. To sum it all up in one word, a hardened heart is one that has no fear of God or reverence for man." (De consid. lib. i, c. 2.) St. Bernard cites Pharaoh as a living definition or embodiment of this blasphemous obstinacy and says that its active principle is lack of fear. "Do not look around you to find it," the saint goes on (namely, a hard heart). "If you have no fears you have the complaint." (Loco, cit.) Cold, heartless disdain of the existent forces of goodness and mercy, aye, a mocking sneer for the means of salvation is characteristic of blasphemous obstinacy. It is said of a French infidel who had lost the pearl of faith after a youth spent in immoral rectitude that he expressed his regrets for the years he had spent on the cultivation of virtue in those early days, bathed in the soft fragrance of purity and innocence, as lost opportunities for the pleasures of life. He died unrepentant. As Proverbs says: "The man who despises with a stubborn head the one who corrects him, shall fall by a single blow, by a mortal fall, and he shall never be cured." St. Paul says: "Knowest thou not that the benignity of God leadeth to penance? But according to thy hardness and impenitent heart, thou treasurest up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the just judgment of God." (Rom. ii, 45.) The shadow of doom lies stretched across the path of the obstinate sinner. The prophet, Ezechiel, (iii, 20) is quoted by St. Gregory: "If the just man shall turn away from his justices, and shall commit iniquities, I shall lay a stumbling block before him." The saint tells us that by a just judgment God will desert them, because they refused to repent when repentance was held out to them. St. Gregory tells us that God of course does not urge them on to sin, but, rather, declines to deliver them. In this way the saint also interprets Exodus, where God says of Pharaoh, "I shall harden his heart." (iv, 21.) The peculiar punishment of this obstinacy is found in chapter seven, verse three. These wonders and graces which should recall Pharaoh to his senses, are still poured out as such so that they will demand corresponding retribution for their being contemned. Pope Leo speaks of the punishment of those who repudiate the truths of Christianity— "Not infrequently, too, God, in order to chastise their pride, does not permit them to see the truth, and thus they are punished in the things wherein they have sinned. This is why we often see men of great intellectual power and erudition making the greatest blunders even in science." (Encycle the Holy Year, 1900.)

God The Holy Ghost part 50.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

Next in order is the voluptuous class of resistants, who find the moral discipline of the gospel too irksome and heavy. This state of things would excite our compassion, but when one takes occasion from his state to antagonize and question the principles that pretend to bind him, looking for flaws in the christian title, misinterpreting texts to palliate, if not justify, his course, the merely weak man has outgrown his weakness, passed on in development and reached the stage of the blasphemer. So soon as a person of this class is disposed to correct his passion, his heart will promptly speak out and in a clear strong voice proclaim the truth. Sometimes one hears surprise expressed that some Catholic, persons,who are clasped in immoral ways, should still go on fulfilling the public exercises of religion, for example, assisting at Mass. These men are weak, but they still give evidence of their belief in the truth; they do not deny the moral teachings of the Church or the efficaciousness of her sacraments; they admire, confess and love them, though they find themselves unable to fulfil them. So their conduct is not blasphemous; neither is it hypocritical. We know that the Church is the pillar and ground of truth; to antagonize her is, of course, to resist the truth and to err against the Holy Ghost. One of the favorite methods of committing such offence is to wage a war of criticism against the weaker members of the ministerial body. The ministers of Holy Mother are slanderously called ambitious, insincere and in other cases indulgent and avaricious. Surveyed by eyes color-blind from prejudice, is it any wonder that the works of the priests of God—the medium of truth—are shorn of their pure and noble character and made to part with their silent, eloquent tongue—the sonorous voice of action, in the apostolate of truth. Resistance has been offered to their hearts, and to complete the mischief resistance is offered to their deeds. The claims of the Church to miracles, to infallibility, in fact to all that our Lord claimed of power are denied to her. The Sacred Scriptures are attacked from all sides; and, yet, these same antagonists pretend to love the truth and to be engaged in this nefarious persecution in the interests of our Lord, whereas in the depths of their silent hearts they know that this is not so.—"Ever learning but never attaining to the knowledge of the truth."—A very pat epitaph for modern, paganistic universities. (II. Timothy, iii, 7.) How essential is it to not, indeed, counteract such repugnance to truth in any of its branches but chiefly in its root. The cultivation of a positive love for the truth will accomplish this end and run the vicious evil aground. The particular danger one has to meet in the pursuit of so excellent a combat will be found in circumstances where abstract or personal truth is painful to us or inconvenient. Truth is often bitter as aloes. We find this particularly so when the truth of our faults is brought home to us. No one of any experience denies that christian courage is much needed at such times; but, if by fear of its bitterness, we repel the truth and through a lack of courage fail to stand erect and face its demands and contrary to all truth and prudence challenge its reality, we deprive the spirit of rectitude, we put our moral judgment out of gear, by degrees we blunt and deaden the moral perception and in this way reduce the spiritual sensitiveness so that in the end the conscience becomes seared, hard and irresponsive alike to inspiration and warning. Let us take a mother who is attached to a daughter. The truth dawns upon her that her child is called to serve God and work out her salvation in the religious state of life. The truth in the case entails sacrifice. If the mother is generous and brave in the cause of truth she will submit to the fact. If she is overpowered by the thought of separation and refuses to believe the truth "and later on repels it she resists the Holy Ghost. The truth of evangelic perfection was flashed from the lips of our Lord upon the affluent youth—go sell all thou hast —he became sad, turned away from the truth and went his way. In our own lives, perfect obedience to truth under all circumstances imparts to the christian character a certain majestic stableness and weaves about us an Abraham-like atmosphere of imposing grandeur. The opposite disposition, namely to falter and show weakness before the exactions of truth, provokes pity from others whereas stern, unflinching adherence to duty, devotion and obedience to the demands of truth, compels the swift awe and admiration which is in all cases a heritage of heroism. If a friend—and such indeed one is, under the circumstances—calls our attention to a flaw in our character, to a little mud-spot on the mantle of our conduct, we feel pain, we are deeply chagrined. If we succumb to the truth in spite of this distress, we of course will mend our ways and stop decay right on the spot. Some would resent this personal truth; they will persuade themselves not to believe it simply because it is humiliating. Others go further in their resistance to truth and as a matter of fact and principle develop those very faults to show as it were their independence and contempt of conventionalities. The end of it all is constitutional disorder and hard repentance, "Good my Lord. —But when we in our viciousness grow hard, #the wise gods seal our eyes. In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us adore our errors." (Antony and Cleopatra). The chastisement of such as resist the known truth will be keener than that of others in the future life. This fact is alluded to by the Prophet, "Let death come upon them and let them go down alive into hell." (Ps. liv. 16.) Other souls will be in hell, —dead as it were; their sufferings will not be so nervous, so acute, so living, so to speak, and their pangs will be of the duller sort, less sensible. In the case of those who shall have known the truth, grief and anguish will rage in a degree of fine appreciation, of terrible realization such as will greatly swell the bitterness of their awful doom. It will increase the poignancy of gnawing regrets when the soul comes to look backwards upon its particularly brilliant opportunities only to see them now taunting the lost soul as with innumerable tongues, let loose in a whirlwind of reproach.

God The Holy Ghost part 49.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

Resistance to the truth constitutes what we might call the first of these sins. This is committed in a variety of degrees, but, on general principles, by one who hates the truth is maliciously opposed to it, forcibly withdraws his soul from obeisance to it, malignantly throws barriers in its way, stifles all protests of the internal monitor, pours cold water on the natural or faith-enlarged flame of conscience.

The Holy Ghost is the spirit of truth, and, in this way, to antagonize conscience and faith, reason and revelation is to strictly oppose the Third Person. The basic principle of this repugnance is a pure aversion for the truth, which, in the depths of one's heart, one knows to be truth. Most guilty, however, in this matter is the man who, in spite of this internal conviction of the truth, proceeds to "teach" the contrary. "But there were also false prophets among the people even as there shall be among you, lying teachers who shall bring in sects of perdition and deny the Lord, Who bought them, bringing on themselves swift destruction." (II. Peter, i, 1.) "As James and Mambres resisted Moses so these also resist the truth, men corrupt in mind, reprobate concerning the faith." How offensive and how dreadful must such a person be to the Holy Ghost, Whose work of enlightenment the professor in the propaganda of evil is paid, and labors, to defeat. To have in one's moral system a fatal disease is at any time lamentable enough, but for one so afflicted to rush out and scamper in the midst of one's fellow-men with the design of having them contiract the disease, enormously augments the former disorder or disease if kept as it were in quarantine.—"Some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and doctrines of devils." (I. Timothy, iv, 1.) St. Paul calls such men "heretics, condemned by their judgment." ( Tit. iii, 10, 11.)

Second only to this positive "teaching" of error is that antagonism to the known truth which consists in one's standing in the way of its progress, contracting or negativing its action and heaping reproach and ridicule upon it, doing what one unfortunately may to dissuade another from embracing it. We find this sin committed by Elymas when he strove to deter Sergius Paulus from embracing the faith. Thus "Saul, otherwise Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost, looking upon him said, "O full of all guile and all of deceit, son of the devil, enemy of all justice, thou ceasest not to pervert the right ways of the Lord." (Acts, xiii, 9, 10.)

To be prompted by any sort of hatred toward virtue, denying the virtues of another and, for a greater reason, speaking ill of another's virtues comes within the circle of this degree, for virtues are the fruits of truth. Instances of this sort of thing are not wanting in any age.

Heretical pulpiteers, for example, and a press anti-catholic in tone set invariably against us— except where it injects a superficial item to hoodwink us, thus hypocritically to pretend a breadth of spirit which it really lacks— studiously refrain from saying anything that would call attention or be conducive, to the unveiling of the beauties of our faith and the glorious results of it in the lives of its heroes. Where these glories cannot be denied because of their glaring existence the "Church" as a cause is disembowelled, and, in this way effects are admitted whilst the real cause is evaded. An example of this —the influence of the Catholic religion on Art, that is to say, the love which it teaches and inspires in men being the motive power of Art is really admitted to come from Christianity and to be impressed by her upon artists and, yet, men admitting this at the same time take pains to disavow that this inspiration of Art comes through the patronage of "churches," "orders" or "communities "—mark the poisonous distinction! Any calumny whispered against our priesthood, our monks and nuns, is seized upon with such avidity that the "child of the devil" is visibly portrayed in the impishness of resultant glee.

God The Holy Ghost part 48.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

CHAPTER XI

SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST.

Our Lord has said: —"Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him, but he who shall speak a word against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come." (Matt, xii, 31.) These words are altogether compatible with the fact that the Church has the power to absolve from any sin or number of sins whatever, given true repentance, that is to say, where there is found the Prophet David's: ''Contrite and humbled heart." (Ps. iv, 19.) The Master's words are not to be taken, then, in such an absolutely literal sense a* to restrict in any way the tribunal of penance. This would be tending to dwarf the figure of Christ. Our Lord's words should be taken in the sense that the sin against the Holy Ghost is, as a matter of fact, rarely forgiven. In other words, such a sinner, less frequently, comes to have regret, repentance and contrition for his guilt. What the nature is of this particular sin, that drew from our Lord's lips a solitary instance of pessimism, is matter of dispute. The earlier Fathers have variously explained it.

Some have said it was the particular sin of blasphemy, which consisted in attributing to the devil with malice presence, such works of the divine goodness as were peculiarly the property of the Holy Ghost. The Pharisees had committed such an offense in the case of our Lord. They called the Son of Man a gourmand and drinker of wine, an associate of publicans. As yet, however, they had committed a sin against our Lord only, but, when afterwards they ascribed His works to Beelzebub, the prince of demons, they entailed the particular offense that makes the door of heaven so heavy to open. So Sts. Athanasius, Hilary, Chrysostom, Jerome and Ambrose have interpreted our Lord's words.

Others say that the sin against the Holy Ghost consists in ultimate impenitence. St. Augustine takes the lead in this view of the case. Others, still, have said that it means any crime perpetrated in cold-blooded malice, because such a procedure is, in a glaring way, found to be in direct opposition to the divine goodness inasmuch as it implies a gross, contemptuous setting aside of the proffered gifts of a merciful God, placed in the sinner's path for the purpose of diverting him from a choice of evil. St. Gregory says — "we must know that sin is committed in three ways, for, one is led into it by ignorance, by weakness or design. It is more grievous to sin by infirmity than ignorance, but, it is far more criminal to sin by design than weakness. St. Paul had sinned through ignorance, as he avows." (I. Timothy, i, 13.) "Who before was but a blasphemer, a persecutor, and contumelious, but I obtained the mercy of God because I did it ignorantly and in unbelief." Peter, however, sinned out of weakness, when one word from a handmaiden shook in him all the strength of the faith which he had sworn to the Lord, and led him to deny with his lips that God to Whom his heart still clung. But as the sin of weakness or ignorance is the more easily blotted out, inasmuch as it is not perpetrated out of pure design, Paul, who was simply ignorant, was cured by knowledge, and Peter became strong again by watering with his tears the living but, as it were, arid faith that had been spurned but not uprooted in him. By pure design, however, sinned they of whom the Master said,—"If I had not done among them works that no other man hath done, they would not have sinned, but now they have both sinned and hated Me and My Father." (John xv, 24.) St. Gregory says:—"It is one thing to leave good undone; it is another thing to bear hatred toward the teacher of good; just as it is one thing to sin by precipitation—when beside one's self as it were,—and another thing to sin with pure deliberation because, often times, one commits, by precipitation or thoughtlessly as it were, a sin, which, upon counsel and reflection, one would be swift to repudiate. They err by weakness, generally speaking, who have a liking for what is good but are unable to live up to it. They sin by deliberation and design, who decline to do what is good and have positively no love for it. As, therefore, it is always a more grievous thing to love sin than to commit it, so is it more heinous to hate justice, than simply not to have done it."There is a specific sin against the Holy Ghost, as we have already observed; at the same time there is a group of sins which have in their characteristic traits the elements of this specific sin and are accordingly classified as sins against the Holy Ghost. One might say, by way of prelude to their detailed treatment, that their dominant feature is a sort of structural, radical depravity and a stubborn resistance to the Spirit's voice. Not only is the "flesh weak," but the "spirit is not willing." The persons involved have no love whatever for goodness, which is the particular, though not exclusive, attribute of the Holy Ghost. Mind and heart join hands in a formal contempt of His gifts. The study of this group of sins is deserving of the most serious attention in view of their particularly malodorous character and the most dreadsome consequences thereof in the shape of a most difficult repentance. 

God The Holy Ghost part 47.

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.

God The Holy Ghost part 46.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

CHAPTER X.

PARTING GLIMPSES OF THE DIVINITY OF THE HOLY GHOST.

The Father, Son and Holy Ghost comport themselves always in concert. The divine nature is one and indivisive with all its perfections; its action is one and indivisible, in the three Persons, in every point that lies outside the inner circle of the hypostatic relations of the three to one another, that is, their individualistic being. In other words in the irradiant relationship called technically works ad extra, there is one and indivisive action on the part of God— unity of workmanship, so to speak. Now the Holy Ghost does the same things and puts into operation the same powers as the Father— which means, of course, that the Holy Ghost is in nature and essence God. Because the Father and the Holy Ghost do the same things, in view of the fact, as we have said, that there is, and can be, but one action in God, the Holy Ghost thus acting in concert with the Father must be imbedded or ingrained in the divine unity. To make good His title to divine sonship and at the same time clear Himself of the charge of blasphemy, which was drawn up against Him, our Lord formulated the aforesaid reasoning in these words:—"If I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not, but if I do, though you will not believe Me, believe the works that you know, and believe the Father is in Me and I in the Father." (John x, 37, 8.) The same principle applies in the ease of the Holy Ghost —"Believe the works." Now what about the premise of fact? Does the Holy Ghost perform the works of the Father and thereby make good the divinity of His essence? Let us reverently go in the Scriptural forest. Here we find, right off, our Lord's words to the effect that the Father sanctified Him—"Do you say of Him Whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world," (John x, 36) and, close by,we come upon the same thing which the Master predicates of the Holy Ghost—"The spirit of the Lord is upon Me. Wherefore He hath anointed Me—He hath sent Mo." (Luke iv, 18,19.) The Holy Ghost operates the "sanctification" and "sending" as well as the Father. The two texts are clear; their fore-echo can be distinctly caught upon the lips of Isaias—"The Lord God hath sent me and His spirit." (Is. xlviii, 10.) Then, again, in conjunction, the Father and the Holy Ghost wrought the "Incarnation" of the Lord. St. John says, "God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh." (Rom. viii, 3)—So much for the Father. "For that which is conceived in her, is of the Holy Ghost," quoth the angel. (Matt, i, 20.) Unity of action in such a purely divine achieve merit plainly demonstrates that the Holy Ghost is divine in nature. In the miracles with which our Lord startles mankind we can trace the hands, so to speak, of the Father and the Holy Ghost clasped in unity of action —"But the Father Who abideth in me, He doth the works." (John xiv, 10.) Yet we find our Lord saj's again "I by the spirit of God cast out devils." (Matt, xii, 28.) We find the Father and Holy Ghost, hand in hand again, so to speak, in the world's tragedy in the oblation of the Son of Man. St. Paul says, "He that spared not even His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." (Rom. viii, 32.) Of the Holy Ghost the apostle says,

"How much more shall the blood of Christ, Who by the Holy Ghost offered Himself up unspotted to God." (Heb. ix, 14.) The vine, the tendril and the crushed grape— Father, Son and Holy Ghost! The Father and the Holy Ghost are the counter gravity, drawing forth the deceased Messiah from His death-lodging and the enfolding mortuary drapery to the skies and life in joyous unity contemning alike earth's gravitation and the stratagems of malignant counter activity and vigilance decided upon imprisoning him beyond hope in a dungeon of stone and clay. "Being exalted therefore by the right hand of God and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost." (Acts ii, 33.) At the same time the "resurrection" and "postmortem life" of the Messiah is imputed to the Third Person,—"The spirit of Him that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead dwell in you." (Rom. viii, 2.)

These texts have a marked, indisputable Trinitarian flavor. They unveil the inner and mutual attraction of the Third Person in the unity of Godhead. Altogether, then, from such a conclave of luminant and star-like textual evidence we can remain no longer free to dispute unity of action in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The practical conclusion forces itself into the foreground that the Holy Ghost is on a level with the Father and, therefore, coequal, co-living and co-true, co-wonderful, co worshipful, co-lovable and co-worthy of world-praise. Yet, alas, this august personage is in a sense, not indeed in theory, I grant, but for all that, on point of practical realization, a sort of shunted and neglected individualism showing in our lives as a dimly discerned presence, as a figure veiled in thick haze, a mummy-like factor, existent but not a living, vascular, pulsating power, impressing its personality upon the thoughts and actions; the Holy Ghost is a sort of closeted dogma—of course it is confessed in theory every day, yes, many times a day, as, for example, in the Sign of the Cross and the Gloria Patri, but, it is, for all that, to a certain extent, as far as being a living force, an unused one; yet the grace of God, by which the soul lives, is his very breath; the incentive to good stirring and quickening the soul to spiritual action is the effect of His indwelling in us or His seeking to dwell in us. He is the very atmosphere of the souL that lives. The action of His grace is, however, noiseless as the snowflake falling on the earth or the undulations of a light-wave. Encased in the invisible mist He treads our lives, and, yet, He is a tremendous personalism, a great heritage, a living ontological organism, a necessity to our souls seen by those who have eyes to see, heard by those who have ears to hear. As a matter of fact the divinity of the Holy Ghost has not been merely demonstrated but positively emphasized. Brought into comparison with our Lord's humanity, the Holy Ghost takes precedence in dignity. It, of course, must be clear to any one that no creature, who is such and nothing more, could, without grave blasphemy, claim for himself superiority over even the humanity of our Lord. The revealed fact, therefore, that, when gauged from the standpoint of His mere humanity, the Holy Ghost is superior to our Lord proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Holy Ghost is not a creature merely, but, on the contrary, a really and truly divine being, the Saviour's equal, when viewed in His divine nature. All this is made clear from the fact that it is a more grievous sin to err against the Holy Ghost than against Christ as man,— "Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven them, but he that shall speak against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in the world to come." (Matt, xii, 32.)

God The Holy Ghost part 45.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

The Council of Trent calls the hierarchy of the Church, "an army set in battle array." Obedience is its law. It has its commander-in-chief, its generals, its captains, its lieutenants and its soldiers of the rank and file. What a wonderful army! It keeps the field against the world; it has its deserters, of course, through mixed marriages—for which our weak women are responsible—and leakage from other causes, but, it also has its recruits, that often more than counterbalance the defections. Popes pass away, bishops die, priests vanish from the scene of life, the faithful live out their day; the places of all are taken by others— the Holy Spirit abides with her "all days" unto the end. This is the conquering army that will enter the gates of heaven and seize the throne of God. It is the army organized by Jesus Christ and inspired with a heavenly patriotism by the Holy Ghost. The battle-song of the Church is the Veni Creator] "He that will be proud and refuse to obey the commandment of the priest.... that man shall die and thou shalt take away the evil from Israel." (Deut. xvii, 12.)

The Emperor Basil addressed the Fathers assembled at the Eighth General Council to this effect: "As regards us lay people, whether we be titled dignitaries or not, all I have to say is that we have no right whatever to mix ourselves in church affaire or to resist the whole Church or set ourselves up in opposition to the General Council, inasmuch as the examination of such questions belongs to the pontiffs and priests who have the care and governance of the Church, who have received the power to sanctify, bind and unbind, and who hold in their hands the keys of the Church and heaven, and not to us whose condition demands that we should be governed, sanctified, bound and unbound by them. Howsoever pious and wise a layman may be, were he endowed with all manner of virtues, so long as he is only a layman he ceaseth not to be a sheep; on the other hand, no matter how wanting in religious or personal piety a bishop may be, how void he may be of every manner of virtue, so long as he is a bishop and preaches the word of God with exactness he does not part with his pastoral qualities nor with the privileges of his dignity. What right then can we, the poor sheep of the fold, have to oppose our quibbles to the teaching of our pastors and to seek after what is above us out of sheer ambition? We should, consequently, gather in their words with a sincere faith and respect and show our veneration for them as minister's of the all-powerful God and depositaries of so great a power, and right here we should stop and claim for ourselves nothing beyond this. In place of doing so we find to-day a good many laymen letting themselves be carried away by their perversity to such a degree of folly that, forgetting their positions and paying no attention to the fact that it does not belong to the feet or nether members to direct the eyes of the head, they go in an opposite direction to the fitness of things and, whilst displaying an extreme negligence in the matter of correcting themselves on the point of vice, with which they might very well reproach themselves, they show an extreme ardor in drawing up accusations against those who are above them. I warn and pray all who are of such character to set aside all envy and malice and instead of making themselves judges, aye, judges, to amend their own ways by taking for their rule the will of God. But if they refuse to do so they cannot escape from judgment on high or the anger of heaven or the just vengeance which the Sovereign Judge will exercise toward them." Sound advice! God and Caesar, the tiara and the crown—there must be no conflict here. "For matters earthly I have my sword," said Napoleon, "this is enough of power for me. For the things of heaven we have Rome, and, Rome will pass judgment upon such things without consulting me, and she will be within her rights in so doing; this is part of her rights." (Rome 1848, 9, 10.)

In nations where the authority of the hierarchy and clergy is upheld, respected, carefully and sensitively obeyed by the faithful we find a deep catholicity, a pure faith and a solid holiness. I might cite Ireland and the Tyrol as shining instances of this hallowing and hallowed disposition. The direct fruitage of this disposition is the Holy Ghost's pouring Himself out in corresponding measure. Let us then always respect the divinity of religious supremacy like the noble Fenelon in France and the illustrious liberator and statesman O'Connell in the little Green Isle.

God The Holy Ghost part 44.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

Infirmities in the shape of spiritual rulers give ground for tears and sighs, for prayer and compassion with the founder of the Church, and yet our respect, love and obedience to our pastors should go on in unimpaired fidelity. This obedience of course does not imply that one may not, or should not, in an humble and prudential way, after sage advice, point out to the proper charge d'affaires a scandalous abuse. I am aware that from such a path an humble man shrinks with chilling dread, yet, after all, one ought not to have an unenlightened charity nor a false idea of duty. Anything, of course, that could resemble a deliberate espionage or officiousness would imply conceit. The abuse should thrust itself upon one. There are some whose theory is to praise dumbness —which means, let evil run its course—and rebuke those who, in the interests of religion, and only after wise reflection and advice, vouchsafe, from a sense of duty, an humble protest. Such a theory is built upon an exaggeration. St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Catherine of Sienna support the theory of respectful protest as examples from their lives clearly demonstrate. It remains, however, a fact that authority is sacred and that the Holy Ghost animates it in the Church. Whether or not Savonarola in his zeal for righteousness in rulers was affected in his personal obedience to authority is rather the providence of the critical historian. If this were the fact, he was not a wise person nor a really holy man. It can never be a matter of dispute that supremacy is holy. It has without exception the right to our respect, love and fealty. What circumstances have entered into the choice of rulers in the Church or what qualities the elect may or may not have does not change the internal relationship of power. It represents to us the selection of the Holy Ghost. This is enough for us to know. A ruler's personal life may be the antipodes of the Holy Ghost's ideal and yet we are bidden by our Lord to do as the Scribes and Pharisees say, as being in their several official capacities the lamps of God.

 To disobey an ex-Cathedra utterance of the Church is heresy; to disown the voice of superiors in discipline is mutiny and rebellion. The more a subject can confine and direct bis vision and intercourse within the realm of his superior's official person, the purer will be his docility, the more christian his life and the more fruitful, peaceful and suave will be his obedience.

God The Holy Ghost part 43.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

Pausing again in our ascent to the mountain of knowledge we might rest the heart for a little while and minister to it some food and drink or perhaps give it a little tonic. Let us, for the present, supply such practical thought as is ready to hand. Love, respect and obedience to lawful ecclesiastical authority is essential to a vigorous and healthy religious constitution. The blood channels of the human body are frail, delicate organisms and, yet, they are ordained to contain the very life-principle — the blood. The vesture of authority may be gauze-like in its human aspect. One chosen to control may have defects and yet at the same time one cannot have too much faith in the Holy Ghost Who is concerned in the matter. Lawful superiors are His appointed channels and the oracles of God's will. "Let every soul be subject to higher powers, for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation." (Rom. xiii, 1, 2.) 

The Bishopric, especially in its sovereign head, is the more direct work of the Holy Ghost; at the same time the clergy stand to God if not in the closer relation of the jugular vein at least in the relationship of a remote and tiny artery. The Holy Ghost certainly exhorts rulers, "not to be lifted up," but "to be among them as one of them." (Ec. xxxiii 1.) St. Peter enjoins humility of sway upon the ghostly sires of souls, and, the Fathers of the Church, for example St. Ambrose, St. Gregory, St. Bernard and St. Jerome inveigh against the spirit of "titled churchmen," (In. cap, 18. Ezech.) all of which is testimony that official arrogance and a service jarred, aye paralyzed, by the motive of lucre may be a trial for our obedience, respect and love. God permits these things, however, and, whilst the Lord censures such distortion of power and such deflection from pure motives in His minister, we are not justified in a course of disobedience, insubordination or censoriousness. The Holy Ghost is, none the less, resident in the Church and in authority, , so to speak. It is most sadly illogical for one to try to separate the Church in the abstract from the visible, human-clad, divine authority. Such discrimination seems to be the logic of the so-called reformers.

God The Holy Ghost part 42.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

If there are vast numbers who have not the true faith, this cannot be woven into an argument against the divinity of the Church or in favor of discrimination on the part of the Holy Ghost. It is on the other hand I should think a melancholy evidence, and a sad argument, of the world's indisposition.

Says St. Thomas:—"It is the function of divine Providence to provide each and every one with the requisites toward salvation, as long as no impediment on their part is made to stand in the way. If any one,—for example, a savage in the forest—obediently follows the leading of his natural reason in the matter of desiring what is good, and avoiding what is bad, we cannot but most certainly maintain that God, by internal inspiration, will reveal to him all that is necessary in point of believing or that He will send across his way some preacher of the faith, as He sent Peter to Cornelius." (St. Thomas de veritate,) "

Although one cannot on the strength of his own free will merit or acquire divine grace, one may nevertheless prevent himself from receiving it."—"Inasmuch as it is in the power of one's own free will to impede or not impede the reception of divine grace, one justly has the guilt laid up against him when he lays an obstacle in the way of receiving grace." (Idem Contra Gent. lib. 3, c. 159.) The apostle said, when addressing the clergy of Ephesus:—"Take heed to yourselves and the whole flock, wherein the Holy Ghost has placed you bishops to rule the Church of God." (Acts xx. 28.) To the Holy Ghost, therefore, the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church owes its marvellous force, its triumphs and indefectibility, that resistance to hell's portals, which was prophesied by Our Lord. Yes, "If it be of God you cannot overthrow it." The wondrous preservation of the Church then, through the ages, flashing the radiance of her chariot wheels on every generation and her triumphal onward sweep in the face of the furious gale of mortal passion and a thrice resented restriction on human liberty mark beyond the shadow of doubt her superhuman magnetism, force and character and emphasize the divinity of the Third Person, in Whose keeping her Founder has placed her. To meet all emergencies and changed conditions, the Holy Ghost inspires holy founders with a counter-spirit. These chosen souls raise regiments recruited from such persons as are adapted to the special work projected and are attracted individually by the Holy Ghost, by the spirit and purpose embodied in a particular religious rule.

The priesthood and religious life are under the dominance of the Holy Ghost both in their personnel and ministrative aspect. "Let no man take unto himself that honor, unless He be called as Aaron," that is drawn by the spirit. No one I fancy would be rash enough to obtrude himself upon the sanctuary or monastery without a conviction, ratified by the tribunal of penance, that the inward voice is the voice of the Holy Ghost calling Him.

There can be no doubt of the wisdom displayed in the vast ecclesiastic system, spiritual, moral, ethical, social, industrial massed in a solid economic unity and world-wide in its scope without peril of disrupting that same unity, like so many arteries in the physical body. It only needs the doing of his own part by each one before we should witness the conquest of the kingdom of God made, in a measure, complete. All the forces of the Church must be united and riveted together in a bond of the deepest, most fervid sympathy and effective cooperation. If the divine rhythm is at times somewhat blurred, this happens because an individual player does not follow his score as the Holy Ghost has written it on his conscience and in His institute or because through undisciplined zeal a player tampers with the score or thumps out a man-written note or in conceited virtuosity enlarges on his own part with the result of an inharmonious phrasing. If we but examine we shall find that thumping out a false note amounts to about the same as omitting a right one.

To play one's own part of life's score perfectly is all God requires of any one. If a musician has half his fancy occupied with the scoro and execution of another player he cannot avoid making mistakes. If we wish after these incidental remarks furthermore to emphasize the divinity of the Holy Ghost, we might summon attention to the fact that though every species of creature, human and angelic, has been invoked in Holy Scripture to sound forth the praise of God, the Holy Ghost is not to be found anywhere on the list. The canticle of the three youths in the book of Daniel covers all creation, 3 T et the only mention made of the word spirit is the one where David speaks of it in the sense of the "wind"—"Stormy winds". (Ps. cxlviii.) St. Paul in his first Epistle to the Colossians, and St. Peter also, enumerates the very highest creatures— "the angels and powers and virtues." (I. Peter iii, 22.) Now if the Holy Ghost were but a mere creature, as the heretical allege, He must needs have found mention in the Scriptural lists, which, as we have remarked, runs the scale, the whole gamut of creatures with its octaves, simple, double and triple.

God The Holy Ghost part 41.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

Every day eminent personages, like Cornelius the Centurion, of earlier date, and Newman, in more recent times, come over to Rome. How is the fact explained?

The Spirit said to Peter, "Behold three men seek thee... I have sent them." (Acts x.) The Holy Ghost draws these souls to the true Church; it is the Holy Ghost Who gives them the uplifted vision and the righteous heart craving together with the courageous boldness to breast the tirade of the scoffer and the bludgeon of the persecutor in the shape of social ostracism and preclusion from lucrative situations. Why does the Holy Ghost not draw the rest of men by that same grace? St. Paul answers this question —"because you rejected it; and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life." (Acts xiii, 46.) "While Peter was speaking these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all of them." The divine electricity is in the word of God, spoken and preached by the lawfully appointed teachers of Christianity, but to get into touch with the current there must be an absence of all obex or of all nonconductors. This means that one has to be properly disposed. Disposition effects the wire connection as the case of Cornelius effectively demonstrates. When the Holy Ghost came to him he was prepared and rightly disposed; his soul was open to the truth and docile toward it, and his spirit was even more than this, it was brave—he sought the truth, he had to have it and he dallied not over the consideration of what the truth might cost him— "Immediately, therefore, I sent to thee," said he to Peter: I have no will in this matter I await the voice of God, the pleasure of heaven, the will of my Maker. I stand expectant to know what my duty is and am set upon its speedy, effective execution—"all we are present in Thy sight, to hear all things, whatsoever are commanded of thee by the Lord." (x, 33.) Hearken to the word ye rebels "whatsoever are commanded of thee by the Lord." The secret of the Church's unflagging endeavors, of her power over mankind, ought to be clear on the point of a supernatural superhuman origin and appeal to the common sense of the world. Gamaliel pondered wisely whilst his fellow-countrymen, the Jews, were intent upon strangling the infant Church and engaged in dissipating the prodigies of the Holy Ghost—how well the Jew spoke and how profoundly:—"If it be of God, you cannot overthrow

it." (Acts v, 39.) The Holy Ghost is that electricity of infinite voltage, generated in the dynamo of the Church out of her sacramental machinery. She cannot be resisted—she is of God. When Christ ascended, His heavenward flight created a suction —'the Holy Ghost drawing and absorbing all manner of men, in all times, by His grace. The voice of the Church is the voice of God; the Holy Spirit proceeds from her. "And as they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Ghost said to them: 'Separate me Saul and Barnabas, for the work whereunto I have taken them.' So they being sent by the Holy Ghost, went to Selucia.—They preached the Word of God." (xiii, 2, 3, 4, 5.) The apostles never acted in council on their own judgment, but in prayer and fasts they sought out and fully trusted to the authoritative voice, the help and inspiration of the Holy Ghost; they followed the compass. This fact is very perceptible from the words, "It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost and us." (Acts xv, 28.) And again, "they were forbidden by the Holy Ghost to preach the word of God in Asia," and farther still from the words, "they attempted to go into Bythinia, and the spirit of Jesus Christ suffered them not." On the other hand, the Macedonians attracted the electrical bolt in the person of St. Paul. The apostle was vouchsafed a vision in the night. It was a certain man of Macedonia standing and beseeching him, and saying, "pass over to Macedonia and help us." (v. 9.) "Being assured," said St. Paul, "that God hath called us to preach the gospel to them." (Acts xvi, 6.) This apparent discrimination on the part of the Holy Ghost as between the Macedonians, Bythinians and Asiatics provides us with opportunity for a very important observation. The faith is given to those who have proven themselves disposed thereunto by doing what shall have lain in their power and come within circle of their light. God wishes sincerely, earnestly, as only a God of love can, to see all men saved, but, it must be understood that the human will is free.

God The Holy Ghost part 40.

By Henry Aloysius Barry

The dominant fact of the world is the perpetuity of the Church. Every other institution under the sun has undergone organic variation, if not utter extinction. But the Church has not compromised on the point of her deposit of faith. In the very teeth of kings and emperors, from Nero of Rome to Henry of England, —men who were impatient to give her a death blow,— she never faltered in confessing her faith. She has seen the rise and fall of many dynasties, she sees the tombs of heresy, and heretics, of false philosophies and philosophers, and as by dint of ambrosial liqueur, like a young giantess she confronts new generations, new systems, new conditions, new inventions, with a confidence whose origin it would be sagacious and profitable if the universal world would only bring itself to accept. The good such realization achieved would more than compensate for the violence thus wrought to their feelings. Herod sought her in her cradle with murderous design—"Herod, a king, stretched forth his hand, to afflict some of the Church." The life of the persecutor went down in a violent and bloody evening —"for with an angel of the Lord struck him, because he had not given the honor to God, and being eaten up by worms he gave up the ghost." (Acts xii, 23.) The revolting spectacle of a man whose very bowels fell out of him makes the name of Arius a reminder of that dread and secret power that guards the Church from error within as well as harm without—a power, O ye nations! it does not pay to antagonize. Tracked by human wolves the christian sheep and lambs have had to burrow into the earth like worms—a bloody heirloom, whose heritage has passed on to other places from Rome to Erin and Poland, to the lands of Patrick and Nepomucene whose turn has come to pay to the living God their worshipful duties, to be sealed with the tessera of spiritual vitality—to be branded as nations of Christ. But persecution has been to her as the kindly shower of April, irrigating her faith and insuring abundant harvest.—"The Word of the Lord increased and multiplied." When her children have emptied their veins, having bled to death, their very persecutors as Saul, their very executioners and the wives and children of their slayers have replenished the depleted ranks of the martyred dead. Where is the secret of this wonder of ages? There must be in the Church some principle that is not found elsewhere. Fanatics of the rustic type, under rabid tutelage and preaching— self-condemning, from its tone of envy and acidity, inasmuch as such qualities as are here displayed cannot have an origin in the meek and charitable Christ, cannot be prompted by the love of God—such fanatics, I repeat, in the wheat-fields of western America, in the hamlets of New England, in the suburbs of Edinboro, or in the shires of Old England, poisoned with bitterness toward their fellow christians, ascribe the secret power of the Church to Beelzebub. Statesmen impute it to her natural military system, to a naturally wise social system. A vast number of men impute the perpetuity of the Church to a superstitious turn, a sort of disposition to be duped. This contention is veiled somewhat by the term, eccentricity. These samples of reasoning, alas, avow insincerity and self-deception on the part of many outside the Church. It is the old story of the unfair man, who, when arguments do not serve his end, will not shrink from recourse to vilification. When the ranks of the Church are shown to be recruited out of the best brawn, highest culture and purest blood of every land, such reasoning is altogether pitiable. In what terms can we classify that disposition of vision which denies the perpetuity of the Church? It is not known to the vocabulary of reason. When the Holy Ghost descended at Pentecost wonders of speech excited comments— "what meaneth this?" says one, but others mocking said, "these men are full of new wine."