Lamentation, Andrea Di Bartolo

FROM The Foot of the Cross (Tan Books, page 292-293) by Frederick William Faber, D.D.:

The love of God brings many new instincts into the heart. Heavenly and noble as they are, they bear no resemblance to what men would call the finer and more heroic developments of character. A spiritual discernment is necessary to their right appreciation. They are so unlike the growths of earth that they must expect to meet on earth with only suspicion, misunderstanding, and dislike. It is not easy to defend them from a controversial point of view; for our controversy is obliged to begin by begging the question, or else it would be unable so much as to state its case. The axioms of the world pass current in the world, the axioms of the Gospel do not. Hence the world has its own way. It talks us down. It tries us before tribunals where our condemnation is secured beforehand. It appeals to principles which are fundamental with most men, but are heresies with us. Hence its audience takes part with it against us. We are foreigners, and must pay the penalty of being so. If we are misunderstood, we had no right to reckon on anything else, being as we are out of our own country. We are made to be laughed at. We shall be understood in heaven. Woe to those easy-going Christians, whom the world can understand, and will tolerate, because it sees they have a mind to compromise!

The love of souls is one of these instincts, which the love of Jesus brings into our hearts. To the world it is proselytism, the mere wish to add to a faction, one of the selfish developments of party-spirit. One while the stain of lax morality is affixed to it, another while the reproach of pharisaic strictness! For what the world seems to suspect least of all in religion is consistency. But the love of souls, however apostolic, is always subordinate to love of Jesus. We love souls because of Jesus, not Jesus because of souls. Thus there are times and places when we pass from this instinct of divine love to another, from the love of souls to the hatred of heresy. This last is peculiarly offensive to the world. So especially opposed is it to the spirit of the world, that even in good, believing hearts every remnant of worldliness rises in arms against this hatred of heresy, embittering the very gentlest of characters, and spoiling many a glorious work of grace. Many a convert, in whose soul God would have done grand things, goes to his grave a spiritual failure, because he would not hate heresy. The heart, which feels the slightest suspicion against the hatred of heresy, is not yet converted. God is far from reigning over it yet with an undivided sovereignty. The paths of higher sanctity are absolutely barred against it. In the judgment of the world, and of worldly Christians, this hatred of heresy is exaggerated, bitter, contrary to moderation, indiscreet, unreasonable, aiming at too much, bigoted, intolerant, narrow, stupid, and immoral. What can we say to defend it? Nothing which they can understand. If we understand God and He understands us, it is not so very hard to go though life suspected, misunderstood, and unpopular. The mild self-opinionatedness of the gentle undiscerning good will also take the world’s view and condemn us: for there is a meek-looking positiveness about timid goodness which is far from God, and the instincts of whose charity is more towards those who are less for God, while its timidity is daring enough for a harsh judgment. There are conversions where three quarters of the heart stop outside the Church, and only a quarter enters, and heresy can only be hated by an undivided heart. But if it is hard, it has to be borne. A man can hardly have the full use of his senses, who is bent on proving to the world, God’s enemy, that a thoroughgoing catholic hatred of heresy is a right frame of mind. We might as well force a blind man to judge on a question of color. Divine love inspheres us in a different circle of life, motive, and principle, which is not only not that of the world, but in direct enmity with it. From a worldly point of view the craters in the moon are more explicable things than we Christians with our supernatural instincts. From the hatred of heresy we get to another of these instincts, the horror of sacrilege. The distress caused by profane words seems to the world but an exaggerated sentimentality. The penitential spirit of reparation, which pervades the whole Church, is on its view either a superstition or an unreality.

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