SERMON V.

THE DECAY OF CHARITY.

Quia abundavit iniquitas, refrigescet caritas multorum.

Because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. (Words taken from the 12th verse of the 24th chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel.)

I.

IN the last sermon, dear brethren in our Lord, I spoke to you about a characteristic of the last days, as they are foreshadowed to us in our Lord's great prophecy, which will distinguish the generation on which the Day of Judgment will actually come as a snare, or as a thief in the night. That characteristic was the hardness and indifference to the many wonderful signs which are to go before the second Advent, which will prevent the men of that generation from recognizing those signs as what they are meant, in the good providence of God, to be. But that hardness and that indifference will be produced in the hearts of those men by the dominion of a false creed, a creed which will make it impossible for them to understand that the Son of God is coming to judge the world which He has made, and which He has redeemed, and to pass sentence on the souls of all men, a sentence founded on their

deserts, good or evil, which will settle, once for all, their lot throughout all eternity. In their case, then, the fact of their dulness and blindness will be the result of their incredulity, or rather, of their firm faith in a delusion and a lie. But now, in the text which I have chosen to-day, we have another characteristic of the latter times, on which I cannot but think it must have been most painful to our Lord to dwell. He speaks very sparingly of it, and seems to pass it over as a thing of which He is glad to speak sparingly. He gives, as it were, a reason and an excuse for it: "Because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold."

Now this, my brethren, is a feature of the last days which does not belong to the world outside the Church. Let worldlings invent creeds for themselves if they so choose, and thus steel their hearts against that last appeal, which God, in His mercy, will make to them before He finally closes, by an act of His power, the history of the world. The incredulity of worldlings is bad enough, but charity is the characteristic of the Christian Kingdom and of the Catholic Church. No need to say that the charity of the world is cold, or grows cold-the world outside the Church knows not the glow and brightness of that heavenly flame. It is the fire which our Lord came to set upon the earth, and He was straitened until it was kindled. It is this fire which it is the work of the Holy Ghost to kindle and to keep alive, Who came down on the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost in the shape of tongues of fire. It is the life and light of the

Catholic Church, because in the Church the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, Who is given to us. What is it, then, for our Lord to say that the charity of many shall grow cold? What is it but to say that the hearts of many of His own redeemed, of large numbers of His own children and friends, are to be overpowered by the lawlessness and iniquity all around them, and that the light and fire of the Holy Ghost are to be at least partially quenched in the very Kingdom of God itself? Oh, my brethren, here is something, then, far worse than the miserable proud incredulity of the world. Here is an evil feature which must belong to ourselves. Here is a plague which will make havoc of the very Church of God. Here is a triumph of evil, which will almost reach to the banishment of the Eternal Spirit of God from the hearts which He has made. Surely no greater pain to our Lord's Sacred Heart can be imagined, no nearer approach to the victory of His enemies. We still have His promise, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against the Church, and His words cannot pass away. But He does not promise that the Church shall not be in sore affliction and trial in those last times. And certainly, of all afflictions and of all trials that can befall her, there can be none more grievous than even a partial extinction of the charity of her children.

My brethren, I am speaking of these features of the last days mainly for the practical purpose of pointing out to you that we can find so many things, in our own time and among the men of our

own generation, which correspond to the predictions of the end of the world, that it is true to say that the features of our own time have only to be deepened and intensified, in order to produce that state of things on which the last fearful Judgment will fall. I have shown you already, that this is true with regard to what is called the rising creed of science outside the Christian pale, and now I have to point out to you the features in the present condition of the Christian community which may be said to correspond to these mournful words of our Lord about the cooling of Christian charity. And here, at the very outset of our consideration of this matter, I am met by an objection which many will make, and with which it is necessary for us to deal.

For you will say to me, perhaps, that we live in a time rather of revival than of declension, that we live in a time of great Christian activity, if of much occasional loss and affliction; that, looking back a hundred years, we shall see Europe and the Church on the verge of that disastrous overthrowing and upheaval which we call the Great Revolution, and that, in our own days, if the evil fruits of that period have spread on every side, at least the Church has been purified and invigorated by her sufferings, she has begun to reconquer something of what she had lost, she has taken possession of countries where before she was almost unknown, she has spread the network of her hierarchial organization over parts of the globe where before she was unable to plant it, nd she has also gathered her Bishops in Council,

and she has raised her voice in the definition of dogma, and in all her outward decadence she has shown renewed signs of her eternal youth and her indefectible majesty. And surely it would ill become us in this country, it may be said, where we have entered so largely into the labours of our forefathers, to cast the reproach of coldness and tepidity on the Church of the present time. All this is true, and yet I think it is true also, that to the eye of faith the time already wears the marks of that special lawlessness and coldness of which our Lord spoke when He said, "Because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold."

II.

In the first place, dear brethren, let us remember that the words which we are considering came forth from the Sacred Heart of our Lord Himself, and therefore they bear that meaning which belongs to them in His own Divine thoughts. We must measure the charity of which He speaks, not by our own cold standard, but by the standard of the Sacred Heart. Again, we may be quite certain, my brethren, that whenever the day comes for the prophecy to be fulfilled, the fulfilment thereof will not be recognized as such by the men to whom it applies. A generation which has lost its fervour will not think that it has lost it. On the other hand, a generation that is all on fire with Divine love will be more much likely to accuse itself, even bitterly, for not having enough of it, than think that it is liable to no complaint in this regard. If the