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Page 38
II. Once again, then, let us turn to the event in our own lives that
closes them; that death which, united to Christ's, is our entrance into
liberty and, disunited, the supreme horror of existence.
(1) For without Christ death is a violent interruption to life,
introducing us to a new existence of which we know nothing, or to no
existence at all. Without Christ, however great our hopes, it is abrupt,
appalling, stunning, and shattering. It is this at the best, and, at the
worst, it is peaceful only as the death of a beast is peaceful.
(2) Yet, with Christ, it is harmonious and continuous with all that has
gone before, since it is the final movement of a life that is already
_dead with Christ_, the last stage of a process of mortality, and the
stage that ends its pain. It is just one more passing phase, by which is
changed the key of that music that every holy life makes always before
God.
There is, then, the choice. We may, if we will, die fighting to the end
a force that must conquer us however we may fight, resisting the
irresistible. Or we may die, in lethargic resignation, as dogs die,
without hopes or regrets, since the past, without Christ, is as
meaningless as the future. Or we may die, like Christ, and with Him,
yielding up a spirit that came from the Father back again into His
Fatherly hands, content that He Who brought us into the world should
receive us when we go out again, confident that, as the thread of His
purpose is plain in earthly life, it shall shine yet more plainly in the
life beyond.
One last look, then, at Jesus shows us the lines smoothed from His face
and the agony washed from His eyes. May our souls and the souls of all
the faithful departed, through His Mercy, rest in Him!
XI
LIFE AND DEATH
_As dying, and behold we live_.--II COR. VI. 9.
We have considered, so far, a number of paradoxical phenomena exhibited
in the life of Catholicism and have attempted to find their
reconciliation in the fact that the Catholic Church is at once Human and
Divine. In her striving, for example, after a Divine and supernatural
Peace, of which she alone possesses the secret, she _resists even unto
blood_ all human attempts to supplant this by another. As a human
society, again, she avails herself freely of human opportunities and
aids, of earthly and created beauty, for the setting forth of her
message; yet she can survive, as can no human society, when she is
deprived of her human rights and her acquired wealth. As human she
numbers the great multitude of the world's sinners among her children,
yet as Divine she has produced the saints. As Divine she bases all her
gospel on a Revelation which can be apprehended only by Faith, yet as
human she employs the keenest and most profound intellects for its
analysis and its propagation. In these and in many other similar points
it has been attempted to show why she offers now one aspect and now
another to human criticism, and how it is that the very charges made
against her become, when viewed in the light of her double claim, actual
credentials and arguments on behalf of that claim. Finally, in the
meditations upon the _Seven Words_ of Christ, we considered very briefly
how, in the hours of the deepest humiliation of His Humanity, He
revealed again and again the characteristics of His Divinity.
It now remains to consider that point in which she most manifests that
double nature of hers and, simultaneously therefore, presents, as in a
kind of climax, her identity, under human terms, with Him Who, Himself
the Lord of Life, conquered death by submitting to it and, by His
Resurrection from the dead, showed Himself _the Son of God with power_.
I. Death, the world tells us, is the final end of all things, and is the
one universal law of which evasion is impossible; and this is true, not
of the individual only, but of society, of nations, of civilization, and
even, it would seem, ultimately of physical life itself. Every vital
energy therefore that we possess can be directed not to the abolition,
but only to the postponement of this final full close to which the most
ecstatic created harmony must come at last.
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