The following pages contain in all abbreviated form sermons
preached in Rome in the Church of St., Silvestro-in-Capite, during
the year of 1911. Some of them were also preached in the Carmelite
Church in Kensington in 1910; and all of them, With others, in the
Church of our Lady of Lourdes, New York, in 1912. The author
apologises for the the much compressed form in which they are
printed here; but he has sought to suggest rather than to develop
the thoughts of which he treats. Part 1 is Christ in the Interior
Soul. It considers the Friendship of Christ, then the purgative and
illuminative ways of the spiritual life. Then we move to Christ in
the Exterior, which considers His holy presence in the Eucharist,
the Church, the priest, the saint, the sinner, the average man and
then the sufferer. "IT seems inconceivable at first sight that a
relationship, which in any real manner can be called a friendship,
should be possible between Christ and the soul. Adoration,
dependence, obedience, service, and even imitation all these things
are imaginable; but until we remember that Jesus Christ took a
human soul like our own - a soul liable to joy and to sorrow, open
to the assaults of passion and temptation, a soul that actually did
experience heaviness as well as ecstasy - the pains of obscurity as
well as the joys of clear vision - until this becomes to us, from a
dogmatic fact apprehended by faith, a vital fact perceived by
experience, a full realization of His friendship is out of the
question." Yes, Jesus is our Friend "And, extremely often, the
first sign that the Way of Purgation has been really entered, lies
in a consciousness that there is beginning for her an experience
which the world calls Disillusionment. It may come in a dozen
different ways." This may sound strange, but indeed there are
trials in the spiritual life. "She may, for example, be brought
face to face with some catastrophe in external matters. She may
meet with an unworthy priest, a disunited congregation, some
scandal in Christian life, in exactly that sphere where Christ
seemed to her evidently supreme. She had thought that the Church
must be perfect, because it was the Church of Christ, or the
priesthood stainless because it was after the Order of
Melchisedech; and she finds to her dismay that there is a human
side even to those things that are most associated with Divinity on
earth." There are other things that can disillusion us, but
Monsignor Benson helps us through these trials. "The next stage of
Purgation lies in what may be called, in a sense, the
Disillusionment with Divine things. The earthly side has failed
her, or rather has fallen off from the reality; now it begins to
seem to her as if the Divine side failed her too. A brilliant
phrase of Faber well describes one element in this Disillusionment
- the "monotony of Piety."" Let us not suffer the shipwreck here
described: "The way of the spiritual path is strewn with the wrecks
of souls that might have been friends of Christ. This one faltered,
because Christ put off his ornaments; this one because Christ did
not allow her to think that His graces were Himself; a third
because wounded pride still writhed, and bade her be true to her
own shame rather than to His glory. All these stages and processes
are known; every spiritual writer that has ever lived has treated
of them over and over again from this standpoint or from that. But
the end and lesson of them all is the same - that Christ purges His
friends of all that is not of Him; that He leaves them nothing of
themselves, in order that He may be wholly theirs; for no soul can
learn the strength and the love of God, until she has cast her
whole weight upon Him."
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