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Page 15
Religion then cannot, if it is to be adequate to experience, be a
passionless thing. On the contrary it must be passionate, since human
nature is passionate too; and it must be a great deal more passionate.
It must not moderate grief, but deepen it; not banish joy, but exalt it.
It must weep--and bitterer tears than any that the world can shed--with
them that weep; and rejoice too--with _a joy which no man can take
away_--with them that rejoice. It must sink deeper and rise higher, it
must feel more acutely, it must agonize and triumph more abundantly, if
it truly comes from God and is to minister to men, since His thoughts
are higher than ours and His Love more burning.
For so did Christ live on earth. At one hour He _rejoiced greatly in
spirit_ so that those that watched Him were astonished; at another He
sweated blood for anguish. In one hour He is exalted high on the blazing
Mount of Transfiguration; in another He is plunged deeper than any human
heart can fathom in the low-lying garden of Gethsemane. _Behold and see
if there be any sorrow like to My Sorrow._
III. For, again, the Church, like her Lord, is both Divine and Human.
She is Divine and therefore she rejoices--so filled with the New Wine of
the Kingdom of her Father that men stare at her in contempt.
It is true enough that the world is unhappy; that hearts are broken;
that families, countries, and centuries are laid waste by sin. Yet since
the Church is Divine, she knows, not merely guesses or hopes or desires,
but _knows_, that _although all things come to an end, God's commandment
is exceeding broad_. Years ago, she knows--and therefore not all the
criticism in the world can shake her--that her Lord came down from
heaven, was born, died, rose, and ascended, and that He reigns in
unconquerable power. She knows that He will return again and take the
kingdom and reign; she knows, because she is Divine, that in every
tabernacle of hers on earth the Lord of joy lies hidden; that Mary
intercedes; that the saints are with God; that _the Blood of Jesus
Christ cleanseth from all sin_. Look round her earthly buildings, then,
and there are the symbols and images of these things. There is the merry
light before her altar; there are the saints stiff with gold and gems;
there is Mary, "Cause of our Joy," radiant, with her radiant Child in
her arms. If she were but human, she would dare but to shadow these
things forth--shadows of her own desires; she would whisper her creed;
murmur her prayers; darken her windows. But she is Divine and has
herself come down from heaven; so she does not guess, or think, or
hope--she knows.
But she is human too and dwells in the midst of a human race that does
not know and therefore will not wholly take her at her word, and the
very height of her exaltation must also be, then, the measure of her
despair. The fact that she knows so certainly intensifies a thousandfold
her human sorrow, as she, who has _come that they may have life_, sees
how _they will not come_ to her and find it, as she sees how long the
triumph which is certain is yet delayed through their faithlessness. "If
_thou hadst known_," she cries in the heart-broken words of Jesus
Himself over Jerusalem, "_if thou hadst but known the things that belong
to thy peace! Behold and see, then, if there be any sorrow like to
mine_, if there be any grief so profound and so piercing as mine, who
hold the Keys of Heaven and watch men turn away from the Door."
So, then, in church after church stand symbolic groups of statuary,
representing joy and tragedy, compared with which Venus and Adonis are
but childish and half-civilized images--Mary as triumphant Queen, with
the gold-crowned Child in her arms, and Mary the tormented Mother, with
her dead Son across her knees. For she who is both Divine and Human
alone understands what it is that Humanity has done to Divinity.
Is it any wonder, then, that the world thinks her extravagant in both
directions at once; that the world turns away on Good Friday from the
unutterable depths of her sorrow, and on Easter Day from the unscalable
heights of her joy, calling the one morbid and the other hysterical? For
what does the world know of such passions as these? What, after all, can
the sensualist know of joy, or the ruined financier of sorrow? And what
can the moderate, self-controlled, self-respecting man of the world know
of either?
Lastly, then, in the Paradox of Love, the Church holds both these
passions, at full blast, both at once. As human love turns joy into pain
and suffers in the midst of ecstasy, so Divine Love turns pain into joy
and exults and reigns upon the Cross. For the Church is more than the
Majesty of God reigning on earth, more than the passionless love of the
Eternal; she is the Very Sacred Heart of Christ Himself, the Eternal
united with Man, and both suffering and rejoicing through that union. It
is His bliss which she at once experiences and extends, in virtue of her
identity with Him; and in the midst of a fallen world it is the
supremest bliss of that Sacred Heart to suffer pain.
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