1. Introd.—If we get to heaven, the wonderful peace will be our great blessedness, the blessedness of the end having come. And not only the end, but the consummation, for not only will labour be over, but our reward will have come.
2. Today is the nearest approach we have to such a consummation. Describe ‘in one place,’ etc. 1 Today we celebrate the day when Almighty God exhausted His gifts upon us. They were long promised, but on this day they were all poured out. He emptied the fulness of His mercy on us this day.
3. Long have we been following the course, from Christmas to Easter, etc.; but now the end has come. We are called upon to be thankful for, and enjoy what we have been anticipating.
4. So was it at the first Pentecost, and more strikingly still. For ages had the Church been expecting this day, etc.
5. And again so different from their expectations. This happens to us. We pray, and we do not get our answer. Yet we do in a higher way. So the apostles. (1) They did not know their Lord was to suffer; (2) that He was to go. Yet He said, ‘If I go not away,’ etc. 2 Yet the fulness, when it came, did not disappoint them.
6. All our infirmities, sins, etc., are reversed in the coming of the Holy Ghost. Sin is gone, fear is gone, etc.
7. All that we have of good comes from this day. All the sacraments from this day. If baptism gives, etc., it is from the day of Pentecost. If confirmation, if penance, etc. If [the Holy] Eucharist. If faith, if hope, etc. If chastity.
8. It is life for death. If we are dry, if cold, if deified, if sickly, if wounded, etc. It is the sweet refreshing breath. If we are to overcome the foe, etc. If we have a refrigerium in purgatory. If at last we mount to heaven.
9. This day especially St. Philip’s feast. He preached for fallen Christendom. We too.
October 11 During Exposition for Troubles in India
1. When our Lord was on the Cross, He said, ‘Father, forgive them.’
2. Now we know well what the obvious lesson of that prayer is. It shows the love of the Creator in compassionating His children when they were sinning; nay, sinning with the most awful intensity of outrage, for they were wounding, torturing, putting to death that nature which He had assumed.
3. But there is a further reflection perhaps, not so obvious, to be deduced from it, and which is very much to our purpose to consider, in reference to the great calamities which have on this day been so solemnly brought before our consideration by our bishop, and in consequence by us before the throne of grace.
4. He Himself, though ineffably holy in His human nature, still had that very same nature which in them who assailed Him was capable of such sin. If they were of His nature, on the other hand, He was of theirs. If they had the guilt of being His brethren, He had the shame of being theirs. We know how ashamed men commonly are when any one connected with them does anything wrong. The bad deed of any one of our blood is in a certain sense our own bad deed, and is an humiliation. Now our Lord, in His own proper nature as God, is infinitely separate from all beings whatever, but He took on Him a created, a human, a frail nature, when He came on earth. He became a child of Adam. He took on Him that fallen nature which He had made perfect at the time that He created [it], but which had lost its perfection, and which anyhow was always [in] its own essence and by itself frail. If angelic natures have, separate from the grace of God, imperfection, much more has man’s nature. Our Lord took on Him a nature which in any other (except His mother) but Him would be sure to sin. He took on Himself a nature which nothing but the grace of God could save from running into sin, from that inherent imperfection which attaches to the creature. He [His human nature] could not sin, but the reason why it could not was not because it was intrinsically higher or better than the nature of any other son of fallen Adam, but because the presence of Himself in it, of Himself who was God, rendered it utterly removed from sin and incompatible with it. Still, His human nature was such that, had it not been His, it might have sinned. But it never was by itself, it never had been without Him. From the first moment of its existence He had taken it up into Himself; He had created it for Himself, and thus it was absolutely and eternally secured from all sin.
5. But still He would know and understand, infinitely more than we can, the shame of having a nature which was in itself peccable. And therefore the sins of all His brethren weighed on Him, and were in one sense His, because He partook their nature, had a share in a common possession which was a very shameful possession. In this sense, though most pure, He bore Him a body of death and the sins of the whole world.
6. At various times He shows this feeling: when He sighed and said ‘Ephpheta’; when He wept at Lazarus’s grave. These were the signs of the burden He was bearing, who, in partaking our nature, had in solidum the sins of that nature on Him. And so in the Garden, when He sweated drops of blood, it was the weight of that fallen nature which He had assumed which made Him weary even unto death.
7. And when He was on the cross, He had this additional woe, that the evil of human nature now showed itself in a new way, as rising up against Him who bore it. It was the climax of its depravity, that it turned against Him who for its sake had voluntarily put it on. And, while He felt its ingratitude, He felt perhaps equally its shame, as the father of a family is ashamed of his Sons’ acts against him, and though he feel them, dare not mention them, because they fall back upon himself.
8. And therefore, when He was lifted up upon the cross, He would not be angry with His torturers, lest it would seem as if it were His own act, for it was the act of that very nature in others which He bore Himself, and, as when we have a hand or a foot in pain, we are not angry with it, but feel a tenderness towards it, so He felt a tenderness to that fallen nature which was showing itself so awfully devilish in His persecutors, for it was His own.
9. My brethren, I do not know whether you see whither I am leading you by this train of thought. We are on this day engaged, in obedience to the call of our bishop, etc.
10. Now I suppose most of us have heard something or other of those indescribable horrors which have been perpetrated by the revolted Hindoos and Mahomedans in the instance of our dear countrymen and countrywomen in India.
11. (Go through them.)
12. We are not only horrified, but angry. Dost thou well to be angry? It is very horrible, but let us not ‘think it strange,’ 1 Peter iv.
13. Now I don’t doubt the right of the Ruler. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ ‘not the sword in vain.’ But Catholics, of all people, have nothing to do with rule or responsibility in India.
14. What I am impressing on you is that these enormities belong to our nature, and that we ought to consider that we are of one blood with [those who did them], have one nature, and that that nature is such as might cover it. There is not any one of us but might in other circumstances have committed the same. (Hazael 3, ‘Thou art the man,’ 2 Kings xii 4. I assure you, my brethren, I speak in earnest when I say that, much as you pity the persecuted, yet should [you] pity the persecutors more.)
15. Instances to show it in every age and country.
16. Therefore I say to any person who indulges in any bitter feeling about these dreadful transactions, that the question is whether that feeling is not the same in kind, though different in degree, with that which at this minute is making our soldiers in India, according to the confession of their officers, demons. How do we make matters better by sharing and propagating the savageness of human nature? ‘Thou art the man.’ Hazael.
17. I turn to a truer view. These sufferings, certainly of children, are martyrdoms [vide sermon, December 28, 1856]. And how many brought to repentance. The long suspense described by a lady in a letter from Cawnpore. Her little child restless and nervous, etc., etc. Priests and nuns have suffered.
18. May Our Blessed Lady, whose Maternity this day is, protect them.
19. Let us pray that it may all be overruled to our country’s good.