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Inner Life of a Catholic

The Profession of Faith 

CHAPTER FOUR

Man's Life In Himself

3. Its Application

In these two, then, in love and sacrifice, all Christian perfection lies; by these two the perfect man is made according to the Christian ideal. And, with the grace of God to help him, who shall say that he is unable to attain it? "Of yourselves you can do nothing"; that is true, but "I can do all things in him who strengthens me." Is it so difficult to love One who is, and who has proved Himself to be, infinitely lovable, infinitely loving, infinitely worthy of my love, whose Person moreover, is perfectly in harmony with, kindred with, adapted to my own? One who has first loved me: "in this is charity: not as though we had loved God, but because He hath first loved us" (I John iv, 10); who "has so loved the world as to give his own Son"; who has so loved us as to make us His own sons:

Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called and should be the sons of God" (I John iii, 1)? Moreover, the love that He asks of me is no very extraordinary thing; it is the love which is most akin to my nature, which lifts up that nature to its highest point. It is the love of devotion, let us rather call it devotedness, to Him and His cause, the noblest service that man can give. It is the gift of myself to Him, that He may do with me what He will. "God wills it," used to be a battle cry; it remains the cry of the soldier of Christ in the battle of God, above all in the battle that must ever go on within him.

And in practice, in what does this love and this battle consist? For the Christian life is above all things practical. It cannot stop at theory, for many Christians there is no theory at all, so steeped is the soul in the life itself; they can only have pity for those who will for ever theorize, who will for ever ask questions, who, having no guide, no foundations, no authority, must for ever grope about, revolving round and round among themselves. Well, then, as a beginning, even to wish, or at least to will to love, that in itself is love, as St. Leo says: there is no desire where there is not love, to desire is itself to love. Again to keep the commandments of God, that is love; to come to the feet of God, in our nothingness, our weakness, our sinfulness, to look up to Him and to trust Him, to know that He looks on us with pity and trust in return, to ask His forgiveness when we have failed Him, to accept from His hand what we need, to abide by His loving decision, knowing very well that the Father, if the child asks for bread, will not give him a stone. To go away from His presence, and for His sake live the life He has appointed for me, that is truly to live; for it is to love, and to prove my love by living. To face the duty that lies before me to be done, whatever it may be, because He has given it to me, in the way that He would have me do it, because I believe that to do it is a thing that pleases Him, makes the smallest trifle great on that account, makes life itself, and any life, worth living. Nay more, going beyond the daily burdened, to take my rest and relaxation, to eat and drink and sleep, because again He has arranged it so and would have us enjoy these things, all that is no less to love; "Come apart into a quiet place and rest awhile," was a call of love which Jesus Christ once gave to the disciples whom He loved, and who loved Him. No, for most of us, as St. Paul said many times, once we know Him who is not hard to know, the life of love is not difficult. Indeed, with the grace of God to help us, once the vision has been seen, there is nothing easier, nothing more natural, if in a matter of this kind we may use the word, than to practice without ceasing this love of God, and by that means to grow in that perfection of our manhood which alone is worth the name.

It is true the added practice of sacrifice is harder; were it an easy thing, human nature would not call it sacrifice would admire it less, would not call him a hero who made it nobly. But God, and the Christian life for God, ask for sacrifice only as all human life asks for it. They do not ask that we should make of sacrifice a kind of object to be lived for, as if in itself it were good; they do not ask that we should seek it as the one source of perfection. "If I should distribute my goods to the poor, and should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity it profiteth me nothing" (I Cor. xiii, 3). Sacrifice has its value only from this, that it comes from love and leads to it. It is enough to love God and to seek that love; enough to realize that in this mortal life this cannot be done without many a surrender. There are many obstacles to love of any kind; he who would love aright must be determined to overcome them. Taken in this light, sacrifice is seen to be good; it is reasonable, it is tolerable; soon it becomes a thing to be desired, in the end even to be loved. That is the secret of the saints. "To suffer or to die," cried one of them; "not to die but to suffer," cried another, both, because they saw and realized the love behind the suffering that made it more than worth while. A mother who loves her child, if that child is grievously ill, will not hesitate to spend long hours by its bedside, counting nothing of fatigue, or service, or suffering, for indeed they are her only consolation; let her be assured that on her service the life of her child depends, and there will be no limit to the sacrifices she will make. And it is the same in all true living.

We advertise pleasure and indulgence, we seek comfort and abundance; but we honor and revere sacrifice, for a noble end, given in a noble way, as the one true proof of life. There is no word of Christ to which the whole world responds more easily than this: "Greater love than this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his friend."

No other than this is the Christian's attitude to sacrifice and suffering. He has the impulse of the love of God behind him, the desire to be loyal to that love above every other, and to prove it. He has the confidence, nay the certainty, that if he will but surrender what hinders him in the manifestation of that love, if he will but give to God, the object of his love, what He asks, then he will please Him, he will spread His glory, and at the same time—but this is a secondary end—by growth in that love he will ensure his own salvation, his satisfaction, his perfection. "He that shall lose his life for my sake shall find it." He knows all this because an authority he can trust has set it before him; he has it confirmed from his own experience; he sees it in noble lives about him and before him, above all in the life of the model of all men, the Man God. What did He not endure that the Father might be duly glorified, that souls might be saved, that He might give proof of the burning love for His Father and for men that consumed Him? And we, His disciples, incorporated in Him by Baptism, nourished with His Body and Blood, called to take our part with Him that we may "make up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ," can we hesitate to suffer along-side, in union with Him whom we claim to love, for love of Him since we would prove it, for His sake and for the sake of the same objects that led Him to suffer willingly. Furthermore, is it not true, even if we consider our own selves only, that suffering is by no means an unmixed evil? The man who has never suffered we pity, the man who shuns suffering at every turn we tend to despise, the man who has had much of it easily wins our love.

More than that, we know that in the school of suffering we learn what cannot be learnt elsewhere, by its means we are made proof against all manner of evil and falsehood.

"In the cross is safety, in the cross is life, in the cross is protection from our enemies, in the cross is the source of all satisfying sweetness," says the author of the Imitation of Christ (ii, 12, 2); or as St. Augustine puts it: "For hearts that love, no labor is too laborious; nay, it becomes a pleasure, even as men find pleasure in the hardships of the chase, in the weariness of buying and selling.... For when a soul loves it does not suffer, or, if it suffers, the suffering itself is loved" (<De bono viduitatis,> 81).

As an illustration of the Christian mind as described in this chapter let us give a prayer of that great English Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, whom some have dared to call the most typical Englishman that has ever lived. The doom had not yet come, but he foresaw that it was coming. His King had petulantly turned away from him, though but a year before he had seemed to love him with all his soul. More had resigned his place at Court; he had retired to his home at Chelsea, in the hope that for the rest of his days he might live in quiet among his own. At this time he wrote in the margin of his Book of Hours the following prayer, a human document if ever there was one: "Give me thy grace good God To sett the world at nought To sett my mynde faste uppon Thee and not to hange uppon the blaste of mennys mouthis To be content to be solitary Not to long for worldly company Little and little utterly to caste of the worlde To ridde my mynde of all bysyness there Not to long to here any worldly thingis But that the hering of worldly fantasyes may be to me displesant Gladly to be thinking of God Piteously to call for his helpe To lene on the comfort of God Bysyly to labor to love hym To know my own vilitie and wretchednesse To humble and weken myself under the mighty hand of God To bewayle my synnes passed For the purging of them patiently to suffer adversities Gladly to bere my purgatory here To be joyfull in tribulacions To walk the narrow path that leadeth to life To bare the crosse with Christe To have the last things in remembrance To have ever before myn yie my deth that ys ever at hand To make deth no stranger to me To forsee and consider the everlastyng fire of hell To pray for pardon before the judge to come To have contynually in mind the passyon Christe suffered for me For hys benefitys incessantly to give hym thankys To by the time agayn that I have loste To abstayn from vayne confabulacyons Of worldly substance, frendys, libertie, life, and all to set the losse at right nought for wynnynge of Christe To think my most enemys my beste frendys For the brethren of Joseph could never have done him so much good with their love and favor as they did hym with their malice and hatred. These myndes are more to be desired of every mann than all the tresore of all the princys and kyngs, christen and hethen, were it gathered and layed together all upon one hepe.

Note. The Book of Hours, in the margin of which this prayer is written, is in the possession of the Earl of Denbigh and is preserved at Newnham. The historical setting is given on the authority of the late Cardinal Gasquet.