SERMON

ON THE OCCASION OF THE PROFESSION OF CATHOLIC FAITH, AND THE FIRST COMMUNION, OF A CONVERTED PROTESTANT AMERICAN Lady.

I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever."-PSALM 1xxxix. 1.

MY SISTER IN JESUS CHRIST: It is from you that I have received the text and the subject of this exhortation. Overflowing with gratitude to Him who has called you out of darkness into his marvellous light, you have asked me to forget this audience, to think only of yourself and God, and to speak only of his loving-kindness which has been manifested in every event of your life. I consent to your request; and considering your life in the three divisions by which time is measured, in simple truth and the devout confidence of an overflowing heart, I will endeavor to speak of the designs of God in your past, your present, and your future. The history of Christian souls is the most wonderful and yet the most occult of all histories. The outward events which agitate society have their inner meaning and ultimate reason only in this; and when we shall come to read it in its completeness in the book of life, in the light of eternity, we shall find in it the irrefutable justification of the providence of God over human affairs, and the true title of the nobility of our race, in the blood and the mercy of Christ. "We shall sing of the mercies of the Lord forever."

I. And first, Madam, what are these mercies of your past life? And, that we may understand it better, what have you been, yourself, hitherto? I feel some embarrassment in answering my question. Born, as you were, in the midst of heresy, you were no heretic. No, thank God, you were no heretic, and nothing shall force me to apply to you that cruel-that justly cruel name, against which all my knowledge of your past makes protest. Saint Augustine, one of the most exact and rigid of the teachers of Christian antiquity, refuses, in more than one of his works, to include among heretics those who, born without the visible pale of the Catholic Church, have kept the sincere love of truth in their hearts, and are ready to follow it in all its manifestations and requirements.* What constitutes heresy is that spirit of pride, of revolt and schism which broke out in heaven when Satan, dividing the angels of light, tried to reconstruct, in his own fashion, the everlasting truth of God, and to remodel God's work in the world: it is the wrathful breath of this archangel's nostrils with which he would inspire those who, in like malignant spirit, should carry on his work from age to age. Meek and lowly of heart, you have never been inspired by that spirit. You were not, then, a heretic.

But what were you, then? I was talking one day with one of your most distinguished fellow-countrymen, a Protestant by birth, now a Catholic and a priest;† and under the impulse of that earnest inquisitiveness

*"Qui sententiam suam, quamvis falsam atque perversam, nulla pertinaci animositate defendunt, præsertim quam non audacia præsumptionis suæ pepererunt, sed a seductis atque in errorem lapsis parentibus acceperunt, quærunt autem cauta sollicitudine veritatem, corrigi parati, dum invenerint, nequaquam sunt inter hæreticos reputandi.”—Letter XLIII., Edition of the Benedictines of Saint Maur.

+ The Reverend Father Hecker, founder and Superior of the Congregation of Saint Paul.

which the history of souls always awakens in me, I asked him this same question, "What were you ?" "I did not belong to any Protestant communion,” he replied; "I was baptized in the church of my parents, but I never shared their faith." "Were you a Ration

alist, then?" I said. "No," he smilingly answered; "in the United States we know nothing of that mental malady of the Europeans." I blushed, and was silent a moment, and then begged for an explanation, when he made me this grand reply: "I was a natural man, seeking the truth with my whole mind and heart."

Now, Madam, this is just what you were: a noble womanly nature, seeking the truth in love, and love in the truth; more than that, you were a Christian-yes, a Catholic.

There is a fundamental distinction, without which it is not possible to deal justly by the communions separated from the Catholic Church and the members of those communions. Every religious system contains within itself two opposite elements: the negative element, which makes it a schism, and most commonly a heresy; and the positive element, which preseryes for it a greater or less share in the ancient heritage of Christianity. Not only distinct but hostile, they are very near to each other, even in their conflicts: darkness and light, life and death, mingle without being confounded, and there results from it all what I would call the deep and intricate mystery of the life of error. For my part, I do not render to error the undeserved honor of supposing it able to live of its own life, breathe by its own breath, and nourish with its own substance souls which are not without virtues, and nations not without greatness!

Protestantism, as such, is that negative element which

you have renounced, and to which, with the Catholic Church, you have said, Anathema. But Protestantism has not been the only thing in your past religious life: by the side of its negations have been its affirmations, and, like a savory fruit enclosed in a bitter husk, you have been in possession of Christianity from your cradle.

Before coming to us, you were a Christian by baptism validly received; and when the hand of the minister sprinkled the water on your brow with those words of eternal life, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," it was Jesus Christ himself who baptized you. "The hand is nothing," says Saint Augustine; "be it Peter's or Paul's, the hand is nothing—it is Christ that baptizes." It was Christ who betrothed you, who received your faith and pledged to you his own. The depth of your moral nature, that sacred part of noble souls which instinctively shrinks from error, the Word has consecrated to himself, that he "might present it to himself as a chaste virgin,"* reserving it for heaven.

You were a Christian, also, by the Gospel, as well as by baptism. The Bible was the book of your childhood, and you learned from it the secrets of this divine faith which belongs to every age, because it comes from eternity, with the accents of that Anglo-Saxon tongue which belongs to every land, because it prevails throughout the world by virtue of its civilizing force. The free exercise of private judgment, under the spirit of which you have grown up, is, doubtless, the source of numberless errors; but-thank God again for this--besides the Protestant principle, there is also the Christian principle among Protestants; besides private judgment,

* 2 Corinthians, xi. 2.

there is the action of the supernatural grace received in baptism, and of that mysterious influence of which. Saint Paul speaks when he says, "We have the mind of Christ," and of which Saint John said, "Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things."+ When we read over again together that Gospel which separated our ancestors, I was pleasantly surprised, at every page, to find that we understood it in the same sense, and that, consequently, when you read it outside of the Church, you did not read it without the spirit of the Church.

Finally, my child, besides Baptism and the Holy Scriptures, the sacrament and the book, you had Prayer; an inward thing, invisible, unspeakable, and yet real above all things besides; and pre-eminently the language of the soul to God, and of God to the soul, the direct and personal communion of the humblest Christian with his Father in heaven.

What was it, then, that you lacked? I remember what you once said to me, when you were still a Protestant: "You, a monk, and I, a Puritan, are yet of the same blood royal!" You spoke truly. Not because you were a Puritan, but because, although a Puritan, you were a Christian, were we two of the same divine and royal stock. You were, like me, a child of the family, but, one stormy night, imprudent hands had carried your cradle far away from your Father's home: that home, although its form had faded from your vision, and your lips had forgotten how to speak its name, you have nevertheless been yearning after with tears and cries, and with every impulse of your soul. What you needed, my daughter, was to find it again, to weep upon

* 2 Corinthians, xi. 2.

+ 1 John, ii. 20.