Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER II.

OF FAITH.

AND what were the virtues so highly recommended by the sages of Greece? Fortitude, temperance, and prudence. None but Jesus Christ could teach the world that faith, hope and charity, are virtues alike adapted to the ignorance and the wretchedness of man.

It was undoubtedly a stupendous wisdom that pointed out faith to us as the source of all the virtues. There is no power but in conviction. If a train of reasoning is strong, a poem divine, a picture beautiful, it is because the understanding or the eye, to whose judgment they are submitted, is convinced of a certain truth hidden in this reasoning, this poem, this picture. What wonders a small band of troops persuaded of the abilities of their leader is capable of achieving! Thirty-five thousand Greeks follow Alexander to the conquest of the world; Lacedæmon commits her destiny to the hands of Lycurgus, and Lacedæmon becomes the wisest of cities; Babylon believes that she is formed for greatness, and greatness crowns her confidence; an oracle gives the empire of the universe to the Romans, and the Romans obtain the empire of the universe; Columbus alone, among all his contemporaries, persists in believing the existence of a new world, and a new world rises from the bosom of the deep. Friendship, patriotism, love, every noble sentiment, is likewise a species of faith. Because they had faith, a Codrus, a Pylades, a Regulus, an Arria, performed prodigies. For the same reason, they who believe nothing, who treat all the convictions of the soul as illusions, who consider every noble action as insanity, and look with pity upon the warm imagination and tender sensibility of genius for the same reason such hearts will never achieve any thing great or generous: they have faith only in matter and in death, and they are already insensible as the one, and cold and icy as the other.

[ocr errors]

In the language of ancient chivalry, to pledge one's faith was synonymous with all the prodigies of honor. Roland, Duguesclin, Bayard, were faithful knights; and the fields of Roncevaux, of Auray, of Bresse, the descendants of the Moors, of the English, and of the Lombards, still tell what men they were who plighted their faith and homage to their God, their lady, and their country. Shall we mention the martyrs, "who," to use the words of St. Ambrose," without armies, without legions, vanquished tyrants, assuaged the fury of lions, took from the fire its vehemence and from the sword its edge"? Considered in this point of view, faith is so formidable a power, that if it were applied to evil purposes it would convulse the world. There is nothing that a man who is under the influence of a profound conviction, and who submits his reason implicitly to the direction of another, is not capable of performing. This proves that the most eminent virtues, when separated from God and taken in their merely moral relations, border on the greatest vices. Had philosophers made this observation, they would not have taken so much pains to fix the limits between good and evil. There was no necessity for the Christian lawgiver, like Aristotle, to contrive a scale for the purpose of ingeniously placing a virtue between two vices; he has completely removed the difficulty, by inculcating that virtues are not virtues unless they flow back toward their source that is to say, toward the Deity.

Of this truth we shall be thoroughly convinced, if we consider faith in reference to human affairs, but a faith which is the offspring of religion. From faith proceed all the virtues of society, since it is true, according to the unanimous acknowledgment of wise men, that the doctrine which commands the belief in a God who will reward and punish is the main pillar both of morals and of civil government.

Finally, if we employ faith for its higher and specific objects,if we direct it entirely toward the Creator,-if we make it the intellectual eye, by which to discover the wonders of the holy city and the empire of real existence, if it serve for wings to our soul, to raise us above the calamities of life, we will admit that the Scriptures have not too highly extolled this virtue, when

1 Ambros., de Off., c. 35.

they speak of the prodigies which may be performed by its means. Faith, celestial comforter, thou dost more than remove mountains: thou takest away the heavy burdens by which the heart of man is grievously oppressed!1

CHAPTER III.

OF HOPE AND CHARITY.

HOPE, the second theological virtue, is almost as powerful as faith. Desire is the parent of power; whoever strongly desires is sure to obtain. "Seek," says Jesus Christ, "and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." In the same sense Pythagoras observed that "Power dwelleth with necessity;" for necessity implies privation, and privation is accompanied with desire. Desire or hope is genius. It possesses that energy which produces, and that thirst which is never appeased. Is a man disappointed in his plans? it is because he did not desire with ardor; because he was not animated with that love which sooner or later grasps the object to which it aspires; that love which in the Deity embraces all things and enjoys all, by means of a boundless hope, ever gratified and ever reviving.

There is, however, an essential difference between faith and hope considered as a power. Faith has its focus out of ourselves; it arises from an external object. Hope, on the contrary, springs up within us, and operates externally. The former is instilled into us, the latter is produced by our own desire; the former is obedience, the latter is love. But as faith more readily produces the other virtues, as it flows immediately from God, and is therefore superior to hope, which is only a part of man, the Church necessarily assigned to it the highest rank.

The peculiar characteristic of hope is that which places it in relation with our sorrows. That religion which made a virtue of hope was most assuredly revealed by heaven. This nurse of the unfortunate, taking her station by man like a mother beside her

1 See note D.

suffering child, rocks him in her arms, presses him to her bosom, and refreshes him with a beverage which soothes all his woes. She watches by his solitary pillow; she lulls him to sleep with her magic strains. Is it not surprising to see hope, which is so delightful a companion and seems to be a natural emotion of the soul, transformed for the Christian into a virtue which is an essential part of his duty? Let him do what he will, he is obliged to drink copiously from this enchanted cup, at which thousands of poor creatures would esteem themselves happy to moisten their lips for a single moment. Nay, more, (and this is the most marvellous circumstance of all,) he will be rewarded for having hoped, or, in other words, for having made himself happy. The Christian, whose life is a continual warfare, is treated by religion in his defeat like those vanquished generals whom the Roman senate received in triumph, for this reason alone, that they had not despaired of the final safety of the commonwealth. But if the ancients ascribed something marvellous to the man who never despaired, what would they have thought of the Christian, who, in his astonishing language, talks not of entertaining hope, but of practising it?

What shall we now say of that charity which is the daughter of Jesus Christ? The proper signification of charity is grace and joy. Religion, aiming at the reformation of the human heart, and wishing to make its affections and feelings subservient

to virtue, has invented a new passion. In order to express it, she has not employed the word love, which is too common; or the word friendship, which ceases at the tomb; or the word pity, which is too much akin to pride: but she has found the term caritas, CHARITY, which embraces all the three, and which at the same time is allied to something celestial. By means of this, she purifies our inclinations and directs them toward the Creator; by this she inculcates that admirable truth, that men ought to love each other in God, who will thus spiritualize their love, divesting it of all earthly alloy and leaving it in its immortal purity. By this she inculcates the stupendous truth that mortals ought to love each other, if I may so express myself, through God, who spiritualizes their love, and separates from it whatever belongs not to its immortal essence.

But if charity is a Christian virtue, an immediate emanation

from the Almighty and his Word, it is also in close alliance with nature. It is in this continual harmony between heaven and earth, between God and man, that we discover the character of true religion. The moral and political institutions of antiquity are often in contradiction to the sentiments of the human soul. Christianity, on the contrary, ever in unison with the heart, enjoins not solitary and abstract virtues, but such as are derived from our wants and are useful to mankind. It has placed charity as an abundant fountain in the desert of life. "Charity," says the apostle, "is patient, is kind; charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."1

CHAPTER IV.

OF THE MORAL LAWS, OR THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

Ir is a reflection not a little mortifying to our pride, that all the maxims of human wisdom may be comprehended in a few pages: and even in those pages how many errors may be found! The laws of Minos and Lycurgus have remained standing after the fall of the nations for which they were designed, only as the pyramids of the desert, the immortal palaces of death.

Laws of the Second Zoroaster.

Time, boundless and uncreated, is the creator of all things. The word was his daughter, who gave birth to Orsmus, the good deity, and Arimhan, the god of evil.

Invoke the celestial bull, the father of grass and of man.

The most meritorious work that a man can perform is to cultivate his land with care.

Pray with purity of thought, word, and action."

[blocks in formation]
« PreviousContinue »