Feast of Monica, Mother of Augustine of Hippo, 387 Concluding a short series on the Bible: Christ is read more

Feast of Monica, Mother of Augustine of Hippo, 387 Concluding a short series on the Bible: Christ is the master; the Scriptures are only the servant.

[Continued from yesterday] 4. When the church finds its members falling into gross and scandalous sins, then it is read more

[Continued from yesterday] 4. When the church finds its members falling into gross and scandalous sins, then it is time for the church to awake and cry to God for a Revival of Religion. When such things are taking place as give enemies of religion an occasion for reproach, it is time for the church to ask God, "What will become of Thy great name?" 5. When there is a spirit of controversy in the church or in the land, a revival is needful. The spirit of religion is not the spirit of controversy. There can be no prosperity in religion, where the spirit of controversy prevails. 6. When the wicked triumph over the church, and revile them, it is time to seek for a Revival of Religion. 7. When sinners are careless and stupid, and sinking into hell unconcerned, it is time the church should bestir themselves. It is as much the duty of the church to awake, as it is for the firemen to awake when a fire breaks out in the night in a great city. The church ought to put out the fires of hell which are laying hold of the wicked. Sleep! Should the firemen sleep, and let the whole city burn down, what would be thought of such firemen? And yet their guilt would not compare with the guilt of Christians who sleep while sinners around them are sinking stupid into the fires of hell.

Feast of Dominic, Priest, Founder of the Order of Preachers, 1221 Continuing a short series of verse on Christ: If read more

Feast of Dominic, Priest, Founder of the Order of Preachers, 1221 Continuing a short series of verse on Christ: If it be all for naught, for nothingness At last, why does God make the world so fair? Why spill this golden splendor out across The western hills, and light the silver lamp Of eve? Why give me eyes to see, and soul To love so strong and deep? Then, with a pang This brightness stabs me through, and wakes within Rebellious voice to cry against all death? Why set this hunger for eternity To gnaw my heartstrings through, if death ends all? If death ends all, then evil must be good, Wrong must be right, and beauty ugliness. God is a Judas who betrays His Son, And with a kiss, damns all the world to hell, -- If Christ rose not again. ... Unknown soldier, killed in World War I August 9, 2002 Feast of Mary Sumner, Founder of the Mothers' Union, 1921 Concluding a short series of verse on Christ: With this ambiguous earth his dealings have been told us. These abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, The lesson, and the young Man crucified. But not a star of all the innumerable host of stars has heard How he administered this terrestrial ball. Our race has kept their Lord's entrusted Word. Of his earth-visiting feet none knows the secret, cherished, perilous, The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet, Heart-shattering secret of his way with us. No planet knows that this, our wayside planet, carrying land and wave, Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss, Bears, as its chief treasure, one forsaken grave. Nor, in our little day, may his devices with the heavens be guessed, His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way Or his bestowal there be manifest. But in the eternities, doubtless we shall compare Together, hear a million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, and the Bear. O, be prepared, my soul! To read the inconceivable, to scan The million forms of God those stars unroll When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Feast of Justin, Martyr at Rome, c.165 Commemoration of Angela de'Merici, Founder of the Institute of St. Ursula, 1540 read more

Feast of Justin, Martyr at Rome, c.165 Commemoration of Angela de'Merici, Founder of the Institute of St. Ursula, 1540 The attitude of Jesus to the Jewish law was singularly free and unembarrassed. He made full use of it as an impressive statement of high ethical ideals; even its ritual practices He treated with perfect tolerance where they did not conflict with fundamental moral obligations. From Pharisaic formalism He appealed to the relative simplicity of the venerable written Law. But again from the written Law itself He appealed to the basic rights and duties of humanity: the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; the Law might permit the dissolution of marriage, but there was something more deeply rooted in the nature of things which forbade it; the [law of retaliation], the central principle of legal justice, must go overboard in the interest of the holy impulse to love your neighbor, not merely as yourself, but as God has loved you. Such freehanded dealing meant that the whole notion of morality as a code of rules, with sanctions of rewards and punishments, was abandoned. But the average Christian was slow to see this implication. For instance, Jesus had taken fasting out of the class of meritorious acts, and given it a place only as the fitting and spontaneous expression of certain spiritual states. This is what an early authoritative catechism of the Church made of His teaching: "Let not your fast be made with the hypocrites, for they fast on Monday and Thursday; ye therefore shall fast on Wednesday and Friday." It sounds ludicrous, but we may ask, Was it not on some very similar principle that the Church did actually carry through its reconstruction of "religious observance"? And a Church which so perverted Christ's treatment of the ritual law proved itself almost equally incapable of understanding His drastic revision of the moral law.

It is hard enough, even with the best will in the world, to be just. It is hard, under the read more

It is hard enough, even with the best will in the world, to be just. It is hard, under the pressure of haste, uneasiness, ill-temper, self-complacency, and conceit, to continue intending justice. Power corrupts; the "insolence of office" will creep in. We see it so clearly in our superiors; is it unlikely that our inferiors see it in us? How many of those who have been over us did not sometimes (perhaps often) need our forgiveness? Be sure that we likewise need the forgiveness of those that are under us.

The now wherein God made the first man, and the now wherein the last man disappears, and the now I read more

The now wherein God made the first man, and the now wherein the last man disappears, and the now I am speaking in, all are the same in God, where this is but the now.

Commemoration of Martin Luther, Teacher, Reformer, 1546 Let every man recognize what he is, and be certain that we read more

Commemoration of Martin Luther, Teacher, Reformer, 1546 Let every man recognize what he is, and be certain that we are all equally priests, that is, we have the same power in the word and in any sacrament whatever.

If you will study the history of Christ's ministry from Baptism to Ascension, you will discover that it is mostly read more

If you will study the history of Christ's ministry from Baptism to Ascension, you will discover that it is mostly made up of little words, little deeds, little prayers, little sympathies, adding themselves together in unwearied succession. The Gospel is full of divine attempts to help and heal, in the body, mind and heart, individual men. The completed beauty of Christ's life is only the added beauty of little inconspicuous acts of beauty -- talking with the woman at the well; going far up into the North country to talk with the Syrophenician woman; showing the young ruler the stealthy ambition laid away in his heart, that kept him out of the kingdom of Heaven; shedding a tear at the grave of Lazarus; teaching a little knot of followers how to pray; preaching the Gospel one Sunday afternoon to two disciples going out to Emmaus; kindling a fire and broiling fish, that His disciples might have a breakfast waiting for them when they came ashore after a night of fishing, cold, tired, discouraged. All of these things, you see, let us in so easily into the real quality and tone of God's interests, so specific, so narrowed down, so enlisted in what is small, so engrossed in what is minute.

Commemoration of Thomas Bray, Priest, Founder of SPCK, 1730 The indwelling of Christ's Spirit means not only moral discernment read more

Commemoration of Thomas Bray, Priest, Founder of SPCK, 1730 The indwelling of Christ's Spirit means not only moral discernment but moral power. Paul's count against the Law is that it was impotent through the flesh. Against this impotence Paul sets the ethical competence of the Spirit. "I can do anything in Him who makes me strong," (Phil. 4:13) he exclaims. For his friends in Asia he prays "that God may grant you, according to the wealth of His splendour, to be made strong with power through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through your trust in Him." (Eph. 3:16-17) This is the antithesis of the dismal picture presented in Romans 7, and it comes, just as evidently as that, out of experience. Indeed, we may say that the thing above all which distinguished the early Christian community from its environment was the moral competence of its members. In order to maintain this we need not idealize unduly the early Christians. There were sins and scandals at Corinth and Ephesus, but it was impossible to miss the note of genuine power of renewal and recuperation -- the power of the simple person progressively to approximate to his moral ideals in spite of failures. The very fact that the term "Spirit" is used points to a sense of something essentially "supernatural" in such ethical attainments. For the primitive Christians the Spirit was manifested in what they regarded as miraculous. Paul does not whittle away the miraculous sense when he transfers it to the moral sphere. He concentrates attention on the moral miracle as something more wonderful far than any "speaking with tongues." So fully convinced is he of the new and miraculous nature of this moral power that he can regard the Christian as a "new creation." (II Cor. 5:17) This is not the old person at all: it is a "new man," "created in Christ Jesus for good deeds." (Eph. 2:10) (Continued tomorrow).