EPILOGUE

REVEALED doctrine on death, judgment, hell, purgatory, and heaven, shows us what the next life is, manifests to us the depth of the human soul, which God alone can fill. The power which brings us to heaven, our destination, is sanctifying grace, the seed of eternal life, the source of the infused virtues, especially of faith, hope, and charity, with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Let us note as we approach conclusion, that these great theological virtues are today often completely disfigured. Faith in God, hope in God, love of God and souls, have been replaced in many thousands of moderns by faith and hope in humanity, by the love of humanity. Subjective smartness has taken the place of sacred doctrine. Everything is irremediably false.

In certain Masonic lodges, in the first hall, we read upon the walls: "Faith, Hope, Charity." Chesterton has written on this subject under the heading: "Grand Ideas Gone Mad."

Properly speaking, persons are astray, not ideas. Under physiological and psychical disturbance men become fools. And the higher their intelligence, the more this folly grows, its proportions corresponding to their faculties and their culture. Religious folly is the most difficult folly to cure, because there is no appeal to a more elevated motive. Intelligence has gone astray in its highest reaches, deceives itself habitually, particularly in its ideas on God, God's infinite justice, and God's mercy.

Grand ideas gone mad: religious ideas without center and equilibrium. This results when men substitute for faith in God faith in humanity, so full of aberrations. Faith, illumined by the Holy Spirit, by the gifts of intelligence and wisdom, becomes the principle of mystical contemplation. But faith, where it degenerates, becomes the principle of a false mysticism, whose devotees are impassioned for the progress of humanity, as if this progress were never to suffer reverse, rather as if this progress were God Himself, who becomes Himself in us. Renan was asked the question: Does God exist? His answer was: Not yet. He did not see that this answer was a blasphemy.

Classic antiquity was not afflicted with such complete lack of equilibrium. After antiquity came Christianity, came the supernatural elevation of the Gospel. Then, when men abandoned Christian truth, their fall was accelerated by the height from which they fell.

This departure begins with Luther, who denied the Sacrifice of the Mass, the validity of sacramental absolution and confession, the necessity of observing the commands of God in order to be saved. Descent was hastened by the Encyclopaedists and the philosophers of the eighteenth century, by the corrupted Christianity of J. J. Rousseau, who robs the Gospel of its supernatural character and reduces religion to a natural sentiment which can be found, more or less altered, in all religions. These ideas were propagated everywhere by the French Revolution. Further, Kant maintained that speculative reason cannot prove the existence of God. There followed Fichte and Hegel, who teach that God does not exist outside and above humanity, but that He becomes God in us and by us, that God is nothing but the progress of humanity, just as if this progress were not accompanied from time to time by a terrible recoil into barbarism.

Between Christianity and these monstrous errors arose the system called liberalism, a halfway station, which concludes nothing, gives no sufficient motives for action. Liberalism is replaced by radicalism, then by socialism, finally by materialistic and atheistic communism. [692] The negation of God and religion, of family, of property, of the fatherland; all follow close on hand. Communism ends in universal servitude beneath the most terrible of dictatorships. Acceleration holds good in mental procedures as it does in corporeal.

Let us turn back and re-climb the mountain of holiness. Holiness, as St. Thomas [693] shows, has two essential characteristics, the absence of all stain of soilure and sin, and a firm union with God.

Holiness is perfect in heaven, but it begins on earth. It manifests itself concretely in three fashions, upon which we would here insist. We have three great duties toward God: we must know Him, we must love Him, and we must serve Him. Thus we obtain eternal life. Now there are souls which have especially the mission of loving God and of making Him loved. These are souls of strong will, who receive from God the grace of a burning love. There are others whose mission is to make God known. In such souls the intellect is manifestly the dominating character, and these souls receive above all the graces of enlightenment. And there are souls whose chief mission is to serve God by fidelity in daily duty. This class contains the majority of good Christians. These three forms of sanctity seem to be represented in the three privileged apostles, Peter, John, and James.

Those of the first class, wherein will is dominant, receive graces of ardent love. They ask themselves: What can I do for God? What work shall I undertake for His glory? They thirst for suffering, for mortification, in order to prove to God their love and to repair offenses of which He is the object. They desire to save sinners. Only secondarily do they apply themselves to the task of making God better known.

To this group belong the following: Elias, so remarkable for his zeal, St. Peter, so profoundly devoted to our Lord that he wills to be crucified head-downwards; then the great martyrs, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Lawrence. Nearer to our own times we find St. Francis of Assisi, St. Clare, the daughters of St. Clare. Later still we find St. Charles Borromeo; St. Vincent de Paul, overflowing with charity for neighbor; St. Margaret Mary, St. Benedict Joseph Labre, and the holy Cure of Ars.

The danger for these souls lies in the energy of their will, which can degenerate into rigidity, tenacity, obstinacy. In those who are less fervent, such rigidity is their dominant fault. They have a zeal not sufficiently illumined, not sufficiently patient and amiable. Sometimes they give themselves too much to active work, neglecting prayer.

The trials which the Lord sends them tend especially to make them supple, to break their will when it has become too rigid, to make it perfectly docile to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Under these trials their burning zeal becomes more and more illumined, more patient and bending and sweet. Thus they climb the mountain to the summit of perfection.

The second class, that is, souls dominated by intellect, climb the mountain by another path. They receive graces of light, which carry them on to contemplation, to those immense and all-embracing views which are the reward of wisdom. Their loves grow by the road of intellective deduction. Compared with the preceding class, they have less need of activity or of reparation, but if they are faithful they come to a heroic love of the God who ravishes them.

To this group of souls belong the great doctors: St. Augustine, St. Thomas of Aquin, St. Francis de Sales. We may note that the latter often laments his slowness in following the lights he has received. And this is a common danger for these souls. They do not proceed to conform their conduct to the light God gives them. Their intelligence is highly illumined, but their will lacks zeal.

These souls may suffer particularly from error, from false directions which turn aside their intellect. These trials purify them and, if they meet them well, they too reach a great love of God. An enlightened soul, if it is faithful, will be more united to God than a soul that is ardent but unfaithful.

The third class of souls is dominated by memory and practical activity. Their chief mission is to serve God by fidelity to duty. Their memory brings before them particular facts. They are struck by a trait in the life of a saint, or a word of the liturgy. Divine inspiration renders them attentive to various forms of perfection. If they are faithful, they rise to the highest levels of sanctity.

To this class would belong, it seems, the apostle St. James, the great shepherds of the primitive Church, all devoted even to martyrdom to a right ruling of their dioceses. In this class, too, in modern times, we find St. Ignatius, attentive to the most practical means of sanctification, careful to consider men as they are and not only as they should be: St. Alphonsus Liguori, entirely preoccupied with morality, with the practical apostolate, so necessary in his time against Jansenism and infidelity.

The danger for these souls is that of attaching themselves to works which are good in themselves, but which lead only indirectly to God. Some find their entire perfection in austerities, others in devotion, others in their habitual labors, others in the recitation of interminable prayers. The danger here is that of falling into trifles and scruples, which retard their entrance into contemplation, which hinder them from the intimacy of union with God. The methods and means which served them for the moment become in time hindrances to loving and simple contemplation of God.

The trials for these souls are to be found chiefly in the practice of charity. They suffer much from the faults of their brethren. But if they are faithful in the midst of these difficulties, they too reach a very intimate union with our Lord.

Such are the three principal forms of holiness, corresponding to our three great duties toward God, to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him.

In Jesus Himself we may see the excellence of these three forms of sanctity. First, in His hidden life, in the solitude of Nazareth, in the house of the carpenter, He is the example of fidelity to daily duty: acts which are lowly and humble, but which become great by the love which inspires them.

In His apostolic life, secondly, Jesus was the light of the world. "He that followeth Me walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of life." [694] His teachings on eternal life, and the roads to arrive there, are not acts of faith on His part. They come from His vision of the divine essence. [695] He founds the Church and confides it to Peter. He says to His apostles: "You are the light of the world." [696] And He sends them to teach all nations, to bring them baptism, absolution, the Eucharist. [697] All this he confirms after His resurrection. [698]

In His life of suffering, thirdly, Jesus manifests the full zeal of His love for His Father and for us. This love leads Him to die for us on the cross, thus to make reparation to God and to save souls.

Jesus therefore possesses, in pre-eminent manner, these three forms of sanctity. And He likewise shows how to meet the dangers which other souls encounter. He had burning zeal without rigidity, without obstinacy. His love was never more burning than on the cross, and never did He manifest a more patient sweetness. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Enjoying contemplation, the most luminous and elevated, He is never lost in this contemplation. He is not abstracted from the world, not drawn out of the world like a saint in ecstasy. He is above ecstasy, without ceasing to contemplate. He speaks to His apostles on the least details of their apostolic life.

Finally, attentive to most minute details in the service of God, He ever keeps in view the more important questions. He sees everything in God, the things of time in the things of eternity.

Jesus is higher than any saint, as white light is superior to the colors of the rainbow. Proportionately, we may apply this truth to the pre-eminent sanctity of Mary, Mother of God, full of grace. These two are in a special sense our mediators, whom God has given to us by reason of our feebleness. Let us be guided by them. They will lead us infallibly to eternal life. The life of grace is everlasting life already begun.