"

"knowing that the good which is in them comes not from their own power but is wrought by the Lord, they magnify the Lord Who worketh in them": Operantem in se Dominum magnificant," saying with the Prophet, Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give the glory 1. Again he adds, "the Apostle Paul attributed nothing of the success of his preaching to himself, but said: By the grace of God I am what I am 2, and elsewhere: He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord 3. "

You will say: Are not our works our own? Certainly they are, since it is we who act; but these works are good only if we accomplish them, moved by grace, in the faith and love of Christ. We are the branches, Christ is the root. Is it the root that bears fruit? No, it is the branch, it is we ourselves; but it is the branch, inasmuch as it is united by the trunk to the root and draws its sap from the root; it is we, inasmuch as we are united to Christ Jesus and draw grace from Him. If, at the sight of a branch covered with beautiful fruits, we believe they are produced by the branch, abstraction made of its union with the root, we are in error; the branch only produces fruits by drawing from the root the sap necessary for their formation. So it is with us; never let us forget this; the branch separated from the trunk, from the root, is a dead branch: such is our lot unless we remain united to Christ by grace.

This union comprises moreover an indefinite number of degrees; the intenser and stronger it is, that is to say the fewer obstacles we oppose to grace, and the deeper our faith and love, the more numerous will be the fruits that we

shall bear.

It is, then, very important to direct our mind and heart towards God, with faith and love, before beginning anything whatsoever it may be our mind, in order to have no other end before us but the glory of our Heavenly Father; our heart in order to have no other will save His: a two-fold result which is the realisation of the " very earnest prayer required by St. Benedict. This prayer which ought to be oft repeated throughout the course of the day, need not be long being most often reduced to a simple turning towards God, to a spiritual spark rising up to Him, it rather resembles in form what in these latter days we call ejaculatory prayer. What gives it price and value is the rectitude of intention, the purity of our faith and the intensity of love. All this teaching wonderfully harmonises with our Holy Father's asser- .

1. Prologue of the Rule; Ps. cxIII.-2. I Cor. xv, 10.— -3. II Cor. x, 17.

tion that a soul's progress towards perfection goes together with progress in faith. Faith increases love; love as it becomes greater, surrenders the soul more and more to the action of Christ Who works in us by His Spirit, and this action of Christ becomes more and more powerful and more fruitful in the measure that vices are uprooted, that the soul becomes more detached from creatures and that every human mainspring of action vanishes.

The great Patriarch strives in his Rule to open widely the avenues of our souls so that the grace of the Gospel may abundantly penetrate therein and produce all its effects of holiness: OPErantem in se Dominum magnificant. He has no other end in organising the workshop of the spiritual craft and in giving us entry into it, than to ensure all freedom for the Divine action within us. He wishes us to seek God by our good works, but at the same time to rely solely upon His Divine Son Christ Jesus.

Once being thoroughly and practically convinced that all good comes from God, we are for ever guaranteed against discouragement. Indeed if, without union with Christ by faith and love, we can do nothing, with this union we can do everything that God expects of us. Our oneness with Christ accords very well, not with sin—above all deliberate or habitual sin, even venial but with our weaknesses, our miseries, and the short-comings inherent upon our fragility. Our Lord knows that " the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh weak1. Let not our faults then cast us down nor temptations discourage us. The last instrument that our Holy Father marks out is " never to despair of the mercy of God": Et de Dei misericordia nunquam desperare. Even though we only know how to handle the other instruments imperfectly, let this one at least never be out of our grasp, nunquam. The devil delights, throughout the course of our spiritual life, in urging us to sadness, to discouragement, because he well knows that when the soul is sad it is led to abandon the exercise of good works, and that to its great detriment. When therefore a like sadness arises in our heart, we may be assured that it comes from the devil or from our own pride, and that, if we give way to it, we shall be listening to the devil who is so clever at playing upon our pride. Could a movement of distrust, of despair, come from God? Never, nunquam. Were we to fall into great faults, were we to have the unhappiness of living a long time in unfaithfulness,

1. Matth. XXVI, 41.

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the Holy Spirit would doubtless urge us to penitence, to expiation, to immolation: St. Benedict exhorts us to weep for our past sins and to amend them 1, but he would also stir us up to hope, to confidence in God "rich in mercy 2. 72. To distrust? To discouragement? To despair? Never. As long as we are here below we must never lose confidence: because the satisfactions and merits of Christ Jesus are infinite, because the Eternal Father has willed to place in Him all the treasures of grace and holiness that He destines for souls, and these treasures are inexhaustible; because Jesus prays and pleads for us with His Father: Semper vivens ad interpellandum pro nobis 3. Our strength is in Him, not in ourselves: Omnia possum in eo qui me confortat.

"O Lord, let the action of Thy mercy direct our hearts, for without Thee we are not able to please Thee": Dirigat corda nostra quaesumus, Domine, tuae miserationis operatio: quia tibi sine te placere non possumus1 !

V.

Praiseworthy though it be ardently to seek God by good works and especially by works of the Rule, we must yet be forearmed against a certain erroneous conception of perfection, which is sometimes to be met with in not very enlightened souls. It may happen that these place the whole of perfection in the merely outward and material observance. Although the word I am going to use is severe, I do not hesitate to pronounce it: the abovesaid prejudice would border upon pharisaism or would risk leading to it and that would be a great danger.

You know what our Divine Saviour, Who is very Truth and Goodness, said to His disciples: "Unless your justice abound more than that of... the Pharisees, you shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven 5. These words are truly those of Christ. He Who would not condemn the woman taken in adultery; Who vouchsafed to speak with the Samaritan woman and reveal heavenly mysteries to her in spite of her guilty life He Who consented to eat with the Publicans, socially disqualified as sinners; Who allowed Magdalen to wash His feet and wipe them with the hairs of her head; He Who was so meek and humble of heart 6, publicly hurled anathemas at the Pharisees : Woe to you... hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for yourselves do not enter in 7.

3. Hebr. vII, 25. 5. Matth. v, 20.

4. Collect for the - 6. Ibid. x1, 29. — 7.

THE INSTRUMENTS OF GOOD WORKS

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The Pharisees passed in the eyes of the multitude as holy personages. They esteemed themselves saints, and made all perfection consist in the exactitude of outward observances. You know too how their fidelity to the letter and this exactitude were so fastidious that the examples given of their formalism are sometimes ludicrous 1. Not content with thus scrupulously keeping the Law of Moses, which already constituted a heavy burden, they added thereto a whole catalogue of prescriptions of their own invention - what our Lord called "the tradition of men 2. All this was so well observed exteriorly that in this respect there was nothing with which to reproach them: impossible to find more correct disciples of Moses. Call to mind the Pharisee whom Christ depicts going up to the Temple to pray. What is his prayer? My God, I am a man altogether irreproachable; I fast, I give tithes : Thou canst not find me in fault on any point, Thou oughtest to be proud of me3. And in the literal sense, what he said was true: he did observe all these things. However, what judgment does Jesus pass upon him ? This man went out of the Temple without being justified, his heart empty of God's grace. Why this condemnation? Because the unhappy man glorified himself for his good actions and placed all his perfection in merely outward observance, without troubling himself about the inward dispositions of his heart. Therefore our Lord tells us that unless our justice is greater than that of the Pharisees we shall have no part in the Kingdom of Heaven.

"

Do we enter into the deep signification of these words? What is the Christian life? A list of observances ? In nowise. It is the life of Christ within us, and all that Christ has appointed to maintain this life in us; it is the Divine life overflowing from the bosom of the Father into Christ Jesus and, through Him, into our souls. There is the supernatural life in its foundation and at its fountainhead; and without this all the rest is nothing. Are we to understand by this that the exterior prescriptions of Christianity are to be disdained? Far from it. Their observance is at once the normal condition and the obligatory manifestation of the interior life. But the first is the more important, as the soul, in man, is more important than the body: the soul is spiritual, immortal, created to the image of God; the body, a little earthly clay; but the soul is only created at the moment of being united to the body, and the exercise of its

1. See Christ in His Mysteries, ch. XI. Some aspects of the Public Life. 2. Marc. vII, 8. 3. Cf. Luc. XVIII, 11-12.

faculties depends on the good constitution of the body. In the Church of Christ, there are also the soul and the body. Following the normal law, it is necessary to belong to the body, to the visible Church, and observe her commandments, in order to participate in her intimate life, the life of grace; but the Christian life must not be placed principally in the outward observance of material ordinances.

In the same way, the essence of the monastic life does not consist in the horarium of our daily life. It may happen that a monk succeeds by force of will and energy in keeping all the rules, and yet has no monastic spirit, no true inner life: there is the body, but not the soul. And in fact it is not so rare to find religious whose spiritual progress is very slow, although their outward exactitude lends itself to no reproach. It is because there is often only self-seeking and self-complacency in this exactitude, or because they look down on their brethren who do not appear to be so faithful; or else because they put their perfection in the exterior observance itself. Now, of themselves these observances are small matters: one is worth as much as another 1. As Christ Himself said, John the Baptist drank no wine, and he was blamed; the Son of man ate of what was set before Him, and the Pharisees still disapproved of Him, for they were a race of "hypocrites 2.

If it is then somewhat indifferent, in itself, what our exterior practices be, it does not the less remain that we have promised to keep them hence, this observance, when animated by love, is extremely pleasing to God. I say: animated by love. It is in the heart, that perfection lies; for love is the supreme law. Christ Jesus "searches hearts and He sees that one who says and believes he loves, but without proving it by deeds, does not love. But likewise one who exteriorly keeps Christ's words, and does not act from love, does not truly keep these words. We must join the doing of His word with His love, because His chief word and the abridgment of His doctrine is that we must love 3.

The observing of the Rule does not constitute holiness, but it constitutes a means of arriving at holiness. You may say: Must we not observe all that is prescribed? Certainly we must; for oftentimes an habitual and wilful infidelity upon such or such a point of the Rule prayer, charity, silence, work, suffices to shackle our progress in the path 1. See what we have said above p. 59 on the width of St. Benedict 's views on this matter. 2. Cf. Matth. x1, 18-19; Luc. VII, 33-34. 3. Bossuet, Meditations on the Gospel, The Last Supper, 93th day.