Our Lady Saint Mary Part 17

It is much to know that we are immortal: it is much more to know that this immortality is a human immortality. One feels in studying the pre-Christian beliefs in immortality that they had very little effectiveness, and that the reason was that there was no real link connecting life in this world with life in the next. Death was a fearful catastrophe that man in some sense survived, but in a sense that separated his two modes of existence by a great gulf. Man survived, but his interests did not survive, and therefore he looked to the future with indifference or fear. This life seemed to him much preferable to the life which was on the other side of the grave. So far as the Old Testament writings touch on the future world, they touch upon it without enthusiasm. There is an immense difference between the att.i.tude of the Old Testament saint toward death and that, for instance, of the early Christian martyr. And the difference is that the martyr does not feel that death will put an end to all he knows and loves and set him, alive it may be, but alive in a strange country. He feels that he is about to pa.s.s into a state of being in which he will find his finer interests not lost but intensified. At the center of his religious expression is a personal love of Jesus and a martyr's death would mean immediate admission to the presence and love of His Master. He would--of this he had no shadow of doubt--he would see Jesus, not the spirit of Jesus, but the Jesus Who is G.o.d Incarnate, whose earthly life he had gone over so many times, Whom he felt that he should recognise at once. Death was not the breaking off of all in which he was interested but was rather the fulfilment of all that he had dreamed. And this must be true always where our interests are truly Christian interests. It is no doubt true that we find in Christian congregations a large number of individuals whose att.i.tude toward death and the future is purely heathen. They believe in survival, but they have no vital interest in it. I fancy that there are a good many people who would experience relief to be persuaded that death is the end of conscious existence, that they do not have to look forward to a continuous life under other conditions. And this not at all, as no doubt it would in some cases be, because it was the lifting of the weighty burden of responsibility for the sort of life one leads, because it was relief from the thought of a judgment to be one day faced, but because the world to come, as they have grasped its meaning, is a world in which they have no sort of interest. Our Lord in His Presentation of the future does actually point us to the natural human interest by which our affection will follow that which we do in fact value. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." But the cla.s.s of whom I am thinking have no treasures. Notwithstanding some sort of conformity to the Christian Religion, conceived most likely under the aspect of a compulsory moral code, there is nothing in their experience that one can call a love of our Lord, no actually felt personal affection for Him that makes them long to see Him. There were those with whom they had intimately lived and whom they had loved and who have pa.s.sed through the experience of death, but in the years that have pa.s.sed they have become used to living without them and there is no pa.s.sionate longing to be with them again. There are no interests in their lives which when they think of them they feel that they can carry with them to the world beyond. Whatever they have succeeded in acc.u.mulating in life is hardly to be regarded as heavenly treasure!

There then is the vital centre of the Christian doctrine of the world to come,--that it is a life continuous with this life, not in bare existence, but in the persistence of relations and interests upon which we have entered here. At the center of that world as it is revealed to us, is Jesus Christ, G.o.d in our nature, and about Him ever the saints of His Kingdom, who are still human with human interests, and who look on to the time when the fulness of humanity will be restored to them by the resurrection of the body. The interests that are vital here are also the interests that are vital there, the interests of the Kingdom of G.o.d. As the Christian thinks of the life of the world to come he thinks of it as the sphere in which his ambitions can be and will be realised, where the ends of which he has so long and so earnestly striven will be attained.

His life has been a life given to the service of our Lord and to his Kingdom, and it had, no doubt, often seemed to small purpose; it has often seemed that the Kingdom was not prospering and the work of G.o.d coming to naught. And then he looks on to the future and sees that the work that he knows is an insignificant fragment of the whole work; and he thinks with longing of the time when he shall see revealed all that has been accomplished. He feels like a colonist who in some outlying province of an empire is striving to promote the interests of his Homeland. His work is to build up peace and order and to civilise barbarous tribes. And there are days when the work seems very long and very hopeless; and then he comforts himself with the thought that this is but a corner of the empire and that one day he will be relieved and called home. There at the centre he will be able to see the whole fact, will be able to understand what this colony means, and will rejoice in the slight contribution to its upbuilding that it has been his mission to make. The heart of the Christian is really in the Homeland and he feels acutely that here he is on the Pilgrim Way. But he feels too that his present vocation is here and that he is here contributing the part that G.o.d has appointed him for the upbuilding of the Kingdom, and that the more he loves our Lord and the more he longs for Him the more faithfully and exactly will he strive to accomplish his appointed work.

They are right, those who are continually reproaching Christians with having a centre of interest outside this world; but we do not mind the reproach because we are quite sure that only those will have an intelligent interest in this world who feel that it does not stand by itself as a final and complete fact, but is a single stage of the many stages of G.o.d's working. We no more think it a disgrace to be thinking of a future world and to have our centre of interest there than we think it a disgrace for the college lad to be looking forward to the career that lies beyond the college boundaries and for which his college is supposed to be preparing him. We do not consider that boy ideal whose whole time and energy is given to the present interests of a college, its athletics, its societies, and in the end is found to have paid so little attention to the intellectual work that he is sent there to perform that he fails to pa.s.s his examinations. Christians are interested in this world because it is a province of the Kingdom of G.o.d and that they are set here to work out certain problems, and that they are quite sure that the successful solution of these problems is the best and highest contribution that they can make to the development of life in this world. They do not believe that as a social contribution to the betterment of human life a saint is less valuable than an agnostic professor of sociology or an atheistic socialistic leader; nor does the Christian believe that strict attention to the affairs of the Kingdom of G.o.d renders him less valuable as a citizen than strict attention to a brewery or a bank. A whole-hearted Christian life which has in view all the relations of the Kingdom of G.o.d in this or in any other world, which loves G.o.d and loves its neighbour in G.o.d, is quite the best contribution that a human being can make to the cause of social progress. If it were possible to put in evidence anywhere a wholly Christian community I am quite convinced that we should see that our social problems were there solved. I think then we shall be right to insist that what is needed is not less otherworldliness but more: that more otherworldliness would work a social revolution of a beneficent character. The result might be that we should spend less of our national income on preparations for war and more in making the conditions of life tolerable for the poor; that we should begin to pay something of the same sort of care for the training of children that we now bestow on the nurture of pigs and calves. We might possibly look on those whom we curiously call the "inferior races" as less objects of commercial exploitation and more as objects of moral and spiritual interest.

We shall no doubt do this when we have more fully grasped what the resurrection of Christ has done and made possible. It is no account of that resurrection to think of it as a demonstration of immortality. It only touches the fringes of its importance when we think of it as setting the seal of divine approval upon the teaching of Jesus. We get to the heart of the matter when we think of the risen humanity of our Lord as having become for us a source of energy. The truth of our Lord's life is not that He gave us an example of how we ought to live, but that He provided the power that enables us to live as He lived. Also He gave us the point of view from which to estimate life. The writer of the Epistles to the Hebrews uses a striking phrase when he speaks of "the power of an endless life." Is not that an illuminating phrase when we think of our relation to our Lord? His revelation of the meaning of human life has brought to us the vision of what that life may become and the power to attain that end. The fact of our endlessness at once puts a certain order into life. Things, interests, occupations fall into their right places. There are so many things which seem not worth while because of the revelation of the importance of our work. Other things there are which we should not have dared to undertake if we had but this life in which to accomplish them. But he who understands that he is building for eternity can build with all the care and all the deliberation that is needed for so vast a work. There is no haste if we select those things which have eternal value. We can undertake the development of the Christian qualities of character with entire hopefulness. The very conception of the beauty and perfectness of the fruits of the Spirit might discourage us if our time were limited. But if we feel that the work we have done on them, however elementary and fragmentary, as long as it is honest and heartfelt, will not be lost when death comes, then we can go securely on. We can go on in any spiritual work we have undertaken without that sense of feverish haste lest death overtake us and put an end to our labour which so affects men in purely secular things. To us death is not an interruption. Death does not destroy our human personality, nor does it destroy our interest in anything that like us is permanent. We feel perfectly secure when we have identified ourselves with the business of the Kingdom of G.o.d. Then we almost feel the throb of our immortality; the power of an endless life is now ours. We have not to wait for death and resurrection to endue us with that power because it is the gift of G.o.d to us here, that gift of enternal life which our Lord came to bestow upon us. Only the gift which we realise imperfectly or not at all at its bestowal we come to understand in something of its real power; and henceforth we live in the possession and fruition of it, growing up "into Him in all things, which is the Head, even Christ."

Hail, thou brightest Star of Ocean; Hail, thou Mother of our G.o.d; Hail, thou Ever-sinless Virgin, Gateway of the blest abode.

Ave; 'tis an angel's greeting-- Thou didst hear his music sound, Changing thus the name of Eva-- Shed the gifts of peace around.

Burst the sinner's bonds in sunder; Pour the day on darkling eyes; Chase our ills; invoke upon us All the blessings of the skies.

Show thyself a watchful Mother; And may He our pleadings hear, Who for us a helpless Infant Owned thee for His mother dear.

Maid, above all maids excelling, Maid, above all maidens mild, Freed from sin, oh, make our bosoms Sweetly meek and undefiled.

Keep our lives all pure and stainless, Guide us on our heavenly way, 'Till we see the face of Jesus, And exult in endless day.

Glory to the Eternal Father; Glory to the Eternal Son; Glory to the Eternal Spirit: Blest for ever, Three in One.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XXI

THE FORTY DAYS

To whom also he showed himself alive after his pa.s.sion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of G.o.d.

Acts I, 3.

Open unto us the door of thy loving kindness, O blessed Mother of G.o.d; we have set our hope on thee, may we not be disappointed, but through thee may we be delivered from adversity, for thou art the saving help of all Christian people.

O Mother of G.o.d, thou who art a deep well of infinite mercy, bestow upon us thy compa.s.sion; look upon thy people who have sinned, and continue to make manifest thy power. For thee do we trust, and to thee do we cry, Hail! even as of old did Gabriel, the chief of the angelic hosts.

RUSSIAN.

These Forty Days that intervened between our Lord's resurrection and ascension must have been utterly bewildering in the experience of the Apostles. Our Lord was once more with them; He had come back from the grave; that would have been the central experience. But in His intercourse with them He was so changed, the same and yet with a vast difference. We think of the perplexed group of the disciples gathered in the familiar place, going over the recent facts and trying to adjust themselves to them. Just what is the difference that death and resurrection have made, we hear them discussing. Is it that He appears and disappears so strangely, not coming any longer to be with them in the old way, with the old familiar intercourse? There is obviously no failure in Himself, no decline in love; but there is a decline in intimacy. They themselves feel a strange awe in His presence such as they had not been accustomed to feel in the past. They feel too that this restrained intercourse is but temporary, that at any moment it may end. The instructions He is giving them are so obviously final instructions, fitting them for a future in which He will not be with them.

Amid all this perplexity we try to see Our Lady and to get at her mind.

She was no doubt in the small group eagerly waiting our Lord's coming, dreading each time He left them that He would return no more. One thinks of her as less bewildered than the others because her interest was more concentrated. She had no problems to work out, no perplexities to absorb her; she had simply to love. Life to her was just love--love of the Son Whom she had brought forth and Whom she had followed so far.

She lived in His appearings; and between them she lived in remembrance of them. One does not think of her as dwelling very much on what He says, but as dwelling upon Him. The thought of Him absorbs her. She has pa.s.sed into that relation to our Lord that in the years to come many souls will strive to acquire--the state of absorbed contemplation, the state in which all things else for the time recede and one is alone with G.o.d. G.o.d so fills the soul that there is room there for nothing else.

For the Apostles these were days of immense importance as days in which they were compelled to reconstruct their whole view of the meeting of our Lord's mission and of their relation to it. They came to these days with their settled notion about the renewed Kingdom of Israel and of our Lord's reign on earth which His teaching hitherto had not been able to expel; but now they are compelled to see that the Kingdom of G.o.d of which they are to be the missionaries is a Kingdom in another sense than they had so far conceived it. It differs vastly from their dream of an Israelite empire. It is no doubt true that this mental revolution is of slow operation, and that even when certain truths are grasped it will still take time to grasp them in all their implications. For long their Judaism will impede their full understanding of the meaning of the Kingdom of G.o.d. It will be years before they can see that it is a non-Jewish fact and that other nations will stand on an equality with them. But they will by the end of the Forty Days have grasped the fact that they are not engaged in a secular revolution and are not entering on a career of worldly power. They will be ready for their active ministry after Pentecost, a ministry of spiritual initiation into the Kingdom of G.o.d. When in response to their preaching men asked the question: "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" They were ready with their answer: "Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost."

So the Forty Days were filled with new meanings emerging from the old teaching, of suddenly grasped significance in some saying of our Lord that they had a.s.sumed that they understood but in reality had attributed little meaning to. It is one of the striking things about our relation to spiritual truth that we can go on for long thinking that we are attaching a meaning to something which in fact, it turns out, has meant almost nothing to us. Some day a phrase which we have often read or repeated suddenly is lighted up with a significance we had never dreamed of. We have long been looking some truth in the face, but in fact it has never laid hold of us; we have made no inferences from it, deduced no necessity of action, till on a day the significance of it emerges and we are overwhelmed by the revelation of our blunder, of our stupidity.

The fact is that we a.s.sume that our conduct is quite right, and we interpret truth in the light of our conduct rather than interpret conduct in the light of truth. It is the explanation, I suppose, of the fact that so many people read their Bible regularly without, so far as one can see, the reading having any effect upon their conduct. The conduct is a settled affair and they are finding it reflected in the pages of the Gospel. Their minds are already definitely made up to the effect that they know what the Gospel means, and that is the meaning that they put into the Bible. One does not know otherwise how to account for the fact that it is precisely those who think themselves "Bible Christians" who are farthest from accepting the explicit teaching of the Bible. If there is anything plain in the New Testament it is that the whole teaching of our Lord is sacramental. If anything is taught there one would think it was the nature and obligation of baptism, the Presence of our Lord in the Sacrament of the Altar, the gift of Confirmation, the meaning of absolution. Yet it is to "Bible Christians"

that sacraments appear to have no value, are things which can be dispensed with as mere ornaments of the Christian Religion.

I wonder if we have wholly got beyond that point of view? I wonder if we have got a religious practice which is settled or one that is continually expanding? I wonder if we force our meaning on the Bible or if we are trying to find therein new stimulus to action? That in truth is the reason for reading the Holy Scriptures at all--to find therein stimulus, stimulus for life; that we may see how little or how much our conduct conforms to the ideal set out there. We do not read to learn a religion, but to learn to practice the religion that we already have.

Now to take just one point in ill.u.s.tration. The commission of our Lord to His Church in the person of the Apostles was a commission to forgive sins. "He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained." As to how in detail, this commission is to be exercised is a matter for the Church to order as the circ.u.mstances of its life require. As I read my Bible certain facts emerge: I am a sinner; Christ died for my sins; He left power in His Church for the forgiveness of sin--of my sin. And then the question arises: What is the bearing of all that on my personal practice? Have I settled a practice for myself to which I am subjecting the teaching of the Bible and the Church? Or am I alert to see a contrast or a contradiction between my practice and the teaching of the Bible and the Church, if such exist? Now there are many people in the Church who make no use of the sacrament of penance, and there are many others who make use of it very sparingly. It is clear that either they must be right, or the Bible and the Church must be right. It is clear that such persons, to press it no farther, are imposing the interpretation of their own conduct on the teaching of the Christian Religion and a.s.serting by their constant practice that that interpretation is quite inadequate, notwithstanding the contrary practice of the entire Catholic world.

That, to put it mildly, is a very peculiar intellectual and spiritual att.i.tude.

We can most of us, I have no doubt, find by searching somewhere in our religious practice parallel att.i.tudes toward truth. We have settled many questions in a sense that is agreeable to us. We cannot tell just how we got them settled, but settled they are. Take a very familiar matter which greatly concerns us in this parish dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the question of the honour and reverence due to our Blessed Mother. We had got settled in our practice that certain things were right and certain wrong. I doubt if a very intelligent account of this--why they were right or wrong--could, in many cases have been given. But the settled opinion and practice was there.

And then came the demand for a review; that we look our practice squarely in the face and ask, "What is the ground of this? Does it correspond with the teaching of Scripture and of the Catholic Church?

And if it does not, what am I going to do about it? Have I only a collection of prejudices there where I supposed that I had a collection of settled truths? Do I see that it is quite possible that I may be wholly wrong, and that I am hindered by pride from reversing my att.i.tude?" For there is a certain pride which operates in these matters of belief and practice as well as elsewhere. We are quite apt to pride ourselves on our consistency and think it an unworthy thing to change our minds. That is rather a foolish att.i.tude; changing one's mind is commonly not a mark of fickleness but of intellectual advance. It means oftentimes the abandonment of prejudice or the giving up of an opinion which we have discovered to have no foundation. This is rather a large universe in which we live, and it is improbable that any man's thought of it at any time should be adequate. Intellectual progress means the a.s.similation of new truths. The Christian Religion is a large and complex phenomenon, and any individual's thought of it at any time must be, in the nature of things, an inadequate thought. Progress in religion means the constant a.s.similation of new truths--new, that is, to us.

Surely it is a very peculiar att.i.tude to be proud of never learning anything, making it a virtue to have precisely the same opinions this year as last! I should be very much ashamed of myself if a year were to pa.s.s in which I had learned nothing, had changed my mind about nothing.

In religion, one knows that the articles of the Faith are expressed in the dogmatic definitions of the Church; but one will never know, seek as one will, all that these mean in detail, all that they demand in practice. And our only tolerable att.i.tude is that of learners constantly seeking to fill up the _lacunae_ in our beliefs and practice.

In fact, any living Christian experience is always in process of adjustment. Those who conceive a dogmatic religion as an immovable religion, as a collection of cut and dried formulae which each generation is expected to learn and repeat and to which it has no other relation, are quite right in condemning that conception, only that is not, in fact, what the Christian Religion is. The content of the Christian dogmas is so full and so complex that there is never any danger of intellectual sterility in those who are called to deal with them; and their application to life is so rich and so manifold that there is not the least danger that those who set out to apply them to the problems of daily existence will become mere formalists. The attempt to live a truly Christian life is a never-ending, inexhaustible adventure. Only those can miss this fact who have utterly misconceived Christianity as a barren set of prohibitions, warning its devotees off the field of great sections of human experience. There are those who appear to imagine that the primary business of Christianity is to deal with sin, and that in order to keep itself occupied it has to invent a large number of unreal sins. Unfortunately sin, as the deliberate rejection of the known will of G.o.d, exists; and, fortunately, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ Who came into the world to save sinners also exists. We can be unendingly thankful for that. But it is also true that the action of Christianity is not exhausted in the negative work of dealing with sin. Christianity is primarily a positive action for the bringing about and development of the relation of the soul with G.o.d in the state of union. We may say that Christianity has to turn aside from this its proper business of developing the spiritual life to the preliminary work of dealing with sin which kills spirituality and hinders its development. But it is not necessary to make the blunder of a.s.suming that this dealing with sin is the essential work of Christianity because it has so continually to be at it, any more than it is necessary to a.s.sume that the essential work of a farmer is the digging up of weeds. Surely it would be no adequate treatise on agriculture which would confine itself to description of the nature of weeds and of methods of dealing with them. There is a branch of theology which deals with sin, the methods of its treatment and its cure; but there are also other branches of theology: and the direction of the Holy Scripture is not to get rid of sin and stop; but having done that, to go on to perfection.

Christian experience is a constant process of adjustment, a constantly growing experience. By the study of the Christian revelation it is always finding new meanings in old truths, new modes of application of familiar practices. This simply means that the Christian is alive and not a fossil. It means that his relation to our Lord is such that it opens to him inexhaustible depths of experience. It is easy to see this in the concrete by taking up the life of almost any saint. It is easy to trace the growth of S. John from the young fisherman, fiery, impatient, who wished to call down fire from heaven upon his adversaries as Elijah did, and gained the rebuke: "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of," to the mature and supremely calm and simple experience which is reflected in the Gospel and Epistles. It is easy to trace the development of the impulsive, zealous Pharisee that Paul of Tarsus was, through all the stages of spiritual growth that are reflected in his Letters, till he is Paul the aged waiting to depart and be with Christ "which is far better." You can study it in the confessions of S.

Augustine in its first stage and follow it through its later stages in his letters and other writings, and in many another saint beside. If you have any spiritual experience at all you can trace it in your own case: you have grown, not through dealing with sin, but through the pursuit of ideal perfection, that perfection which is set before you by the Christian Religion. You may not feel that you have gone very far: that is not the point at present; you know that you have found a method by which you may go on indefinitely; that there is no need that you should stop anywhere short of the Beatific Vision. You do know that your religion is not the deadening repet.i.tion of dogmas which the unbeliever conceives it to be, but is the never ceasing attempt to master the inexhaustible truth that is contained in your relation to our Lord. You do know that however far you have gone you feel that you are still but on the threshold and that the path before your feet runs out into infinity. Let us go back again to our examination of the experience of the Apostles. When we examine their training we find there, I think, two quite distinct elements both of which must have had a formative influence upon their ministry. In the first place there was the element of dogmatic teaching. There is a cla.s.s of persons who are accustomed to tell us that there is no dogma in the New Testament, by which they appear to mean that the particular dogmatic affirmations of the Creed are not formulated in the pages of the New Testament, but are of later production. That, no doubt, is true; but nevertheless it would be difficult to find a more dogmatic book than the New Testament, or a more dogmatic teacher than was our Lord. And our Lord taught the Apostles in a most definite way the expected acceptance of His teaching because He taught it. "He taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes," it was noted. The point about the teaching of the scribes was that it was traditional, wholly an interpretation of the meaning of the Old Testament. It made no claim to originality but rather based its claim on the fact it was not original. Our Lord, it was noticed, did not base His claim on tradition. In fact He often noticed the Jewish tradition for the purpose of marking the contrast between it and His own teaching. "Ye have heard that it hath been said of old time ... but I say unto you." He commonly refused to give an explanation of what He had said, but demanded acceptance on His authority. He brought disciples.h.i.+p to the test of hard sayings, and permitted the departure of those who could not accept them. He cut across popular prejudices and took small account of the "modern mind" as expressed by the Sadducees. He expected the same unhesitating submission from the Apostles whom He was training, though it was also a part of their training to be the future heralds of the Kingdom that they should have the "mysteries of the Kingdom"

explained to them. But from the time when Jesus began to preach, saying "the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," He preached and taught with the same unhesitating note of certainty, and with the same demand for intellectual submission on the part of those who heard Him.

And that continues to the end. During the Forty Days, the few sayings that have come to us have the same ring of authority, of dogmatic certainty. The result was that when the Apostles went out to teach they were equipped with a body of truth which they presented to the world in the same unhesitating way. Indeed, that is the only way in which the central truths of the Christian Faith can be presented. They are not the conclusions of argument, which may be taken up and argued over again to the end of the world,--they are the dicta of revelation. We either know them to be true because they have been revealed, or we do not know them to be true at all. They are mysteries, that is, truths beyond the possibility of human finding which have been made known to man by G.o.d Himself. They are the appropriate data of religion and what distinguishes it from philosophy. The presence of mystery in philosophy is annoying, and the aim is to get rid of it, but a religion without mystery is absurd. Religion deals with the fundamental relations between G.o.d and man and the light it brings us must be a supernatural light.

Such a religion in its presentation naturally cut across the preconceptions of the traditionalists in Jerusalem to whom nothing new could be true, as across the preconceptions of the sophists of Athens, to whom nothing that was not new was interesting.

This dogmatic equipment was but one side, however, of the Apostolic training for their future work, a training to which the finis.h.i.+ng touches, so to say, were put during the Forty Days. The other side of the training was the impression upon them of the Personality of our Lord, the effect of their close a.s.sociation with Him. This has an importance that dwarfs all other influences of the time; and we feel all through the Gospel that it was what our Lord himself counted upon in forming them for their mission. In the beginning "He chose twelve to be with Him," and their day by day a.s.sociation with Him was constantly changing their point of view and reforming their character. It was not the teaching, the explanation of parables, or the sight of the miracles; it was the silent effect of a personality that was in contact with them constantly and was constantly presenting to them an ideal of life, an ideal of absolute submission to the will of the Father and of utter consecration to the, mission that had been committed to Him.

We all know this silent pressure of life upon life. We have most of us, I suppose, experienced it either from our parents or from friends in later life; and we can through that experience of ours attempt the explanation of our Lord's influence on the Apostles. There were not only the hours of formal teaching--they, in a way, were perhaps the less important from our present point of view. We have more in mind the informal talks that would go on as they went from village to village in Galilee, or as they gathered about the door of some cottage in the evening or sat in the shelter of some grove during the noon-day heat. It was just talk arising naturally out of the incidents of the day, but it was always talk guided by Jesus--talk in which Jesus was constantly revealing Himself to them, impressing upon them His point of view, making plain his own judgment upon life. And when we turn to His formal teaching we realise how revolutionary was His point of view in regard to life, how He swept aside the customary conventions by which they were accustomed to guide life, and subst.i.tuted the radical principles that they have left on record in the Sermon on the Mount for the perplexity of a world yet far from understanding them. Evidently the Apostles would find their accustomed values tossed aside and a wholly new set of values presented to them.

I suppose we find it difficult to appreciate how utterly revolutionary the Gospel teaching continually is, not because we have become accustomed to follow it, but because we have got used to hearing it and evacuating it of most of its meaning by clever glossing. It was thus that the teaching cla.s.ses in Jerusalem avoided the pressure of Old Testament ideals by a facile system of interpretation which made "void the Word of G.o.d by their traditions." Human nature has not altered; and we succeed by the same method in making the Gospel of none effect. We are so well accustomed to do this that we lose the point and pungency of much of our Lord's teaching. But we know that the apostles did not. We know that they presented that teaching in all its sharpness to would-be disciples. It could not be otherwise with those who for three years had been in day by day intimacy with our Lord and had a.s.similated His point of view and his judgment on life.

One effect of their contact with our Lord in the days following the resurrection would be that whatever changes the pa.s.sage to a new level of existence had wrought in Him, it had not changed either the tone of His teaching or the beauty and attractiveness of His Personality. The concluding charges that were given them, the great commission of proclaiming the Kingdom with which they were now definitely endued, the powers which were committed to them in the great words: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world," would but confirm and strengthen all that had gone before in their experience of Him. The Jesus of the resurrection was no pale ghost returned from the grave, intermittently to appear to them to a.s.sure them of the fact of immortality. He was "the same Jesus" Whom they had known for three years, and whose return from the dead triumphant over the powers that had opposed Him, set quite plainly and definitely the seal of indisputable authority upon all the teaching and the example that had gone before. The period of their probation was over: The commission was theirs: It remained that they should abide in Jerusalem until they should be "endued with power from on high."

Proclaimed Queen and Mother of a G.o.d, The Light of earth, the Sovereign of saints, With pilgrim foot up tiring hills she trod, And heavenly stile with handmaids' toil acquaints; Her youth to age, her health to sick she lends; Her heart to G.o.d, to neighbor hand she bends.

A Prince she is, and mightier Prince doth bear, Yet pomp of princely train she would not have; But doubtless, heavenly choirs attendant were, Her Child from harm, herself from fall to save: Word to the voice, song to the tune she brings, The voice her word, the tune her ditty sings.

Eternal lights enclosed in her breast Shot out such piercing beams of burning love, That when her voice her cousin's ears possessed The force thereof did force her babe to move: With secret signs the children greet each other; But, open praise each leaveth to his mother.

Robert Southwell, S.J. 1560-1595.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XXII

THE ASCENSION

And it came to pa.s.s, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.

S. Luke XXIV, 51.

O Mother of G.o.d, since we have obtained confidence in thee, we shall not be put to shame, but we shall be saved.