SERMONS FROM THE LATINS.
First Sunday of Advent.
Spiritual Awakening.
" Brethren, know that it is now the hour to rise from sleep." — Rom. xiii. 11.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex.: Analysis of Epistle. I. Evil. II. Argument. III. Exhortation.
I. Evil : i. Busy throng. 2. Various comparisons. 3. Nature's reminders.
II. Argument: 1. Morning. 2. Salvation nearer. 3. Advent and Christmas.
III. Exhortation: Victim of 1. Many mortal sins. 2. One. mortal sin. 3. Venial sins. Per.: Prayer regarding Christ's immediate and final coming.
SERMON.
Brethren, the Epistle of to-day's Mass is an admirable little sermon preached by St. Paul to the Romans. After showing them the evil he wishes them to correct, he proceeds to convince them with argument, and finally persuades them by a practical exhortation. The crying evil of those days, he says, — and I may add, the crying evil of to-day — is a forgetfulness of the main issue. " Brethren," he says, "it is now the hour for us to rise from sleep." The sleep of the body is not nearer akin to bodily death than is the callous indifference of mankind about things spiritual, to the eternal death of their souls. As in natural sleep the eyes see not, and all our bodily members lie listless and dead — so in this spiritual sleep, this lethargy of the soul, the spiritual senses lie dormant; the eye of faith is closed and charity hath lost its strength, whereby we should be guided and moved to avoid evil and do good. And oh how true was then and how true is now the melancholy reflection of St. Paul when he sadly says: " and many there are who sleep." Many, indeed, not merely the souls shrouded in the night of Paganism; not merely those slumbering in the darkness of infidelity and heresy — but many Christians and Catholics, Catholics sunk in the deep sleep of mortal sin; Catholics given to the lighter slumbers of venial faults; in a word — Catholics, awake, alive to the duties of this world, but asleep, dead to the main issue, the salvation of their immortal souls. Sleeping Christians! dead Catholics! they are like the five foolish virgins in the Gospel, who, though faithful in starting out to meet the bridegroom, yet lacked the sustaining power of charity, and so slept and were late, and were driven away by their Lord in the words: "Amen, I know you not."
Some day when you are on Washington Street, stand and look at the crowd surging up and down. The world commends them as a very intelligent, industrious people. But what does God think of them? He says of them as He said of His chosen people of old: " they have gone astray because there is not one of them who thinks — thinks of the one thing worth thinking about." The great heart of God as vainly yearns after them now as it did after the Israelites when He said: "Oh, that they would be wise and understand and provide for their last end/' In all that throng is there one single thought of God or heaven, of religion or the soul? You hear every topic discussed but these, and if perchance you hear them mentioned at all, it is only one poor old beggar who begs an alms for God's sake and invokes the blessing of Heaven on the giver; or, more frequently, a blasphemer who asks Christ to damn his brother's soul for jostling him. Talk to them of death and judgment, heaven or hell, and, if they do you no bodily injury, be assured they will laugh at you as a fanatic and a madman. Tell them of the saints who gave up all to follow Christ; of the martyrs who were consistent enough to purchase, with their temporal lives, life eternal— and they will tell you that that doctrine was good enough for the Middle Ages— those thoughts suited to Sunday only; but that the week-day cares of this practical age are very different and vastly more important. There is a stringency in the money market, for example, and immediately the whole country is intensely interested; but the selfsame people look on with unruffled calmness at the daily spread of infidelity and the hourly ravages of immorality, A few shiploads of gold are sent abroad, and soon return in answer to a universal cry of protest, but though the gold of faith, the basis of religion, is fast dwindling away, scarce a single voice is raised in opposition. The lack of currency causes a widespread panic, but a falling off in the currency of good deeds — deeds of mercy and charity — though never more general or more direful, causes no concern to any but the starving poor. Men make wry faces at the files of bills that come in month after month and they strain every nerve to make ends meet, but they never reflect what would happen were God to hand down to each of us a monthly report, showing how much He paid out to us day by day and how little — the nothing — the worse than nothing — we did for Him in return! The debit and credit column of day-book and ledger are carefully told up and squared day by day and month by month and year by year, — but how hopelessly do the same men neglect their spiritual accounts — how recklessly do they rush into spiritual bankruptcy — and what a sorry tangle their accounts will present on the great reckoning day! Again, cholera or smallpox threatens the country and we move heaven and earth to keep it off; our children are sick, we send for the doctor and give medicine; a friend dies, we lift up our voice and weep; but the cholera of sin runs riot among us, and we let it pass quarantine, forgetting an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; we dose our children's souls with the poison of bad example, and when our nearest and dearest dies by mortal sin, we shed never a tear. We take care to have our property and lives safely insured, but when that great Spiritual Insurance Company — the Church — sends her agent to insure us for eternity, we either neglect or refuse, though the policy she offers is infinitely desirable, her reliability infallible, and the premium ridiculously small. There is something fairly ghastly in our indifference to the issue of the death and judgment that await us; as there is in the picture of a pleasure party on the St. Lawrence, carousing in their frail bark as it sweeps downward to the falls; or a criminal singing a ballad on his way to the gallows. If God were, in an instant, to petrify this age, and one man were left to go around and inspect the stony figures, how many, think you, would he find to have been engaged at the last moment in the service of the world, and how few in the service of God? The reason is because we are asleep to the main issue; we have forgotten the one thing to be remembered. And our folly is without excuse. For, as surely as the sun rises and sets, so sure are we that the evening of time is coming, and thereafter the dawn of eternity. The dreary rain prefigures the tears to be shed over us; the snow that mantles blighted Nature reminds us of the shroud that awaits us and the decay that is our common lot. When the thunder booms we seem to hear the angel's trumpet calling the dead to judgment, and in the lightning's flash, which cometh out of the east and appeareth even unto the west, we are reminded of the coming of the Son of man. In the midst of life there is death; the grave is dug by the cradle's side, and the mother's lullaby is but the prelude to the funeral dirge. And when life shall have merged into death, time into eternity, then, as the Scripture says: " The worldlings shall have slept their sleep and awakening shall find nothing in their hands." Then looking at those who, while here, were dead to the world but awake to God and the best interests of their souls, the worldlings shall say: " These are they whom we had sometime in derision and for a parable of reproach. We fools esteemed their life madness and their end without honor, and, behold, now they are numbered among the children of God."
Brethren, if the householder only knew when the thief would come, he would sit up and prevent his house being robbed. We know that the Lord will come like a thief in the night — surely come, but when, we know not; and blessed is that servant whom He shall find watching. Therefore, St. Paul's first reason for our spiritual awakening is, that being vigilant in time, we may provide for our last end, lest awakening only in eternity we find the folly of our lives irreparable. " Now is the hour for rising," he says, " now is the day of salvation." Our age, the Christian era, is as it were the morning of God's own day — midway between the night of infidelity that preceded it, and the full noontime of the beatific vision that is to come. " Before Christ," as Isaias says, " darkness covered the earth and a shadow over the people," so that they saw and knew little or nothing of God's transcendent glory. The blessed in heaven,, on the other hand, see God as He is in the full noonday of His splendor; while we, by the aurora of Christian truth, as St. Paul says, see God in part only but hereafter face to face. Our time, therefore, is the morning, the time to rise from sleep. For all of us the night is past, and for many or all the day is at hand. We should awake, therefore, spiritually, and even as the aurora develops into the brightness and warmth of the perfect day, so should we advance from one light of virtue to another, from fervor to fervor, until we arrive even at the everlasting day of God's heavenly presence. Worldly Christians and bad Catholics, on the contrary, go down from the twilight, from darkness to darkness, until they are finally swallowed up in the everlasting darkness of hell. "The path of the just," says Solomon, "is like a radiant dawn that advances and increases to a perfect day, but the way of the wicked is dark and its end unknown."
His second reason for our spiritual awakening, St. Paul takes from the nearness of the end: " For now," he says, " our salvation is nearer than when we believed." Before Christ's coming, belief in the future Messias was the key to salvation, but it was only hundreds and thousands of years after their death that heaven was opened to the patriarchal saints of God. Now, however, it is but a step from life through death into eternity, so that the world's salvation, now that it has seen Christ, is nearer than when men merely believed in His coming. And hence, just as the aerolite falls the faster the nearer it approaches its resting place on the earth; as the racer makes his supreme effort on the home stretch; as the eleven struggle all the more fiercely the nearer they come to their goal; so we, seeing the goal of our lives, our salvation, so much nearer and clearer, should be the more eager and vigilant in its attainment.
To these reasons of St. Paul for our spiritual awakening, I would venture to add a third. To-day is the first day — the dawn of the Ecclesiastical Year. To-day we begin to prepare for Christ's spiritual coming at Christmas. Now is the hour for us to rise from the sleep of sin, and relight the lamp of God's grace in our souls and lovingly keep vigil against the coming of Our Lord. As at His first coming the tidings of great joy were told only to the watching shepherds, and the star of hope shone only on the wakeful seers; so now none but those vigilant in the service of God can realize the full benefit of Christ's spiritual coming. Never was this call to awake more appropriate, or neglect of it more culpable, than now. As the brightness and heat of the sun grow less age by age, so does faith grow dim and charity lose its ardor, and our souls, like ice-bound explorers benumbed with cold, sink into the fatal sleep of death. Hence, we are inclined even more than the people of St. Paul's time, to forget God in our devotion to the world, the flesh, and the devil. And our folly is more guilty than theirs. For, in the beginning of time and of Christianity, men did not know the world as they know it now; they had not, like us, a past history from which to learn its hollowness, nor had they, as we, learned from bitter personal experience that it is all vanity of vanities, and gives naught to its votaries but vexation of spirit. In the beginning, man's animal passions were as a mighty fire just sprung and raging fiercely, but God subdued them by the waters of the Deluge and tempered them still more since by the waters of Baptism. The devil's powers, too, have been curtailed since the woman Mary crushed the serpent's head, and her divine Son placed at our disposal the means of repelling him. In fine, the way to heaven has been made so smooth by the feet of innumerable saints; so easily traced, deeply dyed as it is with the blood of Christ and the martyrs; and the end has been shown so clear to our view, that the wonder is how, how we can possibly stray from that path; how we can have a single thought but for God and the soul; a single aspiration but one — to " dwell all our days in the house of the Lord."
Brethren, know that it is now the hour for us to rise from the sleep of sin — now, next week, this Advent. And first, you poor soul given to many and serious habits of sin, in God's name cast off now the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Walk honestly, as in the day; thinking nothing, desiring nothing, saying or doing nothing you would be ashamed to exhibit to the world in broad daylight. Free your soul, for good and all, from those sins of drunkenness and impurity, contention and envy. Make it so pure against the coming of your Lord that it will not quail even before the search-light of God's omniscience. In short, in the words of St. Paul, strip yourselves of the old man with his deeds and put on the new; viz., the Lord Jesus Christ. Again, you who are given to the habit of only one mortal sin — oh, remember! that as it is not necessary to have all diseases to die, so neither must one be wholly bad to be condemned. One tag on an article will bring it to its destination, and sin is the label of the soul expressed to hell, — the label nothing can remove but the blood of Jesus Christ. And lastly, you who are given only to venial faults — oh beware! Like St. Peter you follow Christ — but afar off. Take care lest your next act be to deny your Lord. Because you are neither hot nor cold, the Lord will spit you out of His mouth as a loathsome thing, not to be taken back without an effort, without disgust. While the clouds of God's wrath are gathering above you, you, because of your one or two good qualities, send up the lightning-rod of self-conceit and feel perfectly secure. Your danger is greater than that of the out and out sinner; for often the very enormity of a sin will drive the sinner up to the highest virtue, while the mediocre remain in their mediocrity, thus verifying Our Lord's words " that the first shall be last and the last first."
Brethren, may we, one and all, spend the Advent so awake to our most important duties as to merit to receive Christ worthily at Christmas; and may we spend our lives so vigilant in God's service that, at His final coming, we may be among His blessed servants whom He shall find watching.