A STRANGE time this may seem to some of you, my brethren, and a strange place, to commence an enterprise such as that, which relying on God’s mercy, we are undertaking this day 1. In this huge city, amid a population of human beings, so vast that each is solitary, so various that each is independent, which, like the ocean, yields before and closes over every attempt made to influence and impress it,—in this mere aggregate of individuals, which admits of neither change nor reform, because it has no internal order, or disposition of parts, or mutual dependence, because it has nothing to change from and nothing to change to, where no one knows his next-door neighbour, where in every place are found a thousand worlds, each pursuing its own functions unimpeded by the rest—how can we, how can a handful of men, do any service worthy of the Lord who has called us, and the objects to which our lives are dedicated? “Cry aloud, spare not!” says the prophet; well may he say it! no room for sparing; what cry is loud enough, except the last trumpet of God, to pierce the omnipresent din of turmoil and of effort, which rises, like an exhalation from the very earth, along the public thoroughfares, and to reach the dense multitudes on each side of them in the maze of lanes and alleys known only to those who live in them? It is but a fool’s work to essay the impossible; keep to your own place, and you are respectable; tend your sheep in the wilderness, and you are intelligible; build upon the old foundations, and you are safe; but begin nothing new, make no experiments, quicken not the action, nor strain the powers, nor complicate the responsibilities of your Mother, lest in her old age you bring her to shame, and the idlers laugh at her who once bare many children, but now is waxed feeble.
And here is another thing, the time; the time of your coming hither! Now, when you rest on no immovable centre, as of old, when you are not what you were lately, when your life is in jeopardy, your future in suspense, your Master in exile; look at home, you have enough to do at home. Look to the rock whence ye were hewn, and to the quarry whence ye were dug out! Where is Peter now? Magni nominis umbra, as the heathen author says: an antiquated cause, noble in its time, but of a past day; nay, true and Divine in its time, as far as anything can be such, but false now, and of the earth now, because it is feeble now, bent with the weight of eighteen hundred years, tottering to its fall; for with Englishmen, you should know, success is the measure of principle, and power is the exponent of right. Do you not understand our rule of action? we take up men and lay them down, we praise or we blame, we feel respect or contempt, according as they succeed or are defeated. You are wrong, because you are in misfortune; power is truth. Wealth is power, intellect is power, good name is power, knowledge is power; we venerate wealth, intellect, name, knowledge. Intellect we know, and wealth we know, but who are ye? what have we to do with the ghosts of an old world, and the types of a former organisation?
It is true, my brethren, this is a strange time, a strange place, for beginning our work. A strange place for Saints and Angels to pitch their tabernacles in, this metropolis; strange—I will not say for thee, my Mother Mary, to be found in; for no part of the Catholic inheritance is foreign to thee, and thou art everywhere, where the Church is found, Porta manes et Stella maris, the constant object of her devotion, and the universal advocate of her children,—not strange to thee, but strange enough to him, my own Saint and Master, Philip Neri. Yes, dear Father, it is strange for thee, to pass from the bright, calm cities of the South to this scene of godless toil and self-trusting adventure; strange for thee to be seen hurrying to and fro across our crowded streets, in thy grave, black cassock, and thy white collar, instead of moving at thy own pace amid the open ways or vacant spaces of the great City, in which, according to God’s guidance of thee in thy youth, thou didst for life and death fix thy habitation. Yes, it is all very strange to the world; but no new thing to her, the Bride of the Lamb, whose very being and primary gifts are stranger in the eyes of unbelief, than any details, as to place of abode and method of proceeding, in which they are manifested. It is no new thing in her, who came in the beginning as a wanderer upon earth, whose condition is a perpetual warfare, and whose empire is an incessant conquest.
In such a time as this did the prince of the Apostles, the first Pope, advance towards the heathen city, where, under a Divine guidance, he was to fix his seat. He toiled along the stately road which led him straight onwards to the capital of the world. He met throngs of the idle and the busy, of strangers and natives, who peopled the interminable suburb. He passed under the high gate, and wandered on amid marble palaces and columned temples; he met processions of heathen priests and ministers in honour of their idols; he met the wealthy lady, borne on her litter by her slaves; he met the stern legionaries who had been the “massive iron hammers” of the whole earth; he met the anxious politician with his ready man of business at his side to prompt him on his canvass for popularity; he met the orator returning home from a successful pleading, with his young admirers and his grateful and hopeful clients. He saw about him nothing but tokens of a vigorous power, grown up into a definite establishment, formed and matured in its religion, its laws, its civil traditions, its imperial extension, through the history of many centuries; and what was he but a poor, feeble, aged stranger, in nothing different from the multitude of men—an Egyptian or a Chaldean, or perhaps a Jew, some Eastern or other—as passers-by would guess according to their knowledge of human kind, carelessly looking at him (as we might turn our eyes upon Hindoo or gipsy, as they met us), without the shadow of a thought that such a one was destined then to commence an age of religious sovereignty, in which they might spend their own heathen times twice over, and not see its end!