What are the warnings that the final storm approaches? Fr H.J. Coleridge SJ, 1894

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What are the warnings that the final storm approaches? Fr H.J. Coleridge SJ, 1894
Fr Coleridge sets out the signs of the approaching end of the world. His warnings about the aims, ideas and even the slogans used to engender a falling away from the faith are alarmingly prescient.



Image: Pillement, Shipwreck in a Storm – Wiki Commons CC

Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ/WM Review | Nov 20, 2022

Editors’ Notes
Fr Henry James Coleridge wrote prolifically about the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

This extract, from his book about the end of the world, shows how accurate his warnings were about the aims, ideas and even the slogans used to engender a falling away from the faith.

This is the first of three extracts from Fr Coleridge we will be publishing on the end of the world.

The Decay of Faith

What elements of heathenism might or might not return

We need not exaggerate the miseries of our own time; nor draw in darker colours than St. Paul, the evil features of the last great apostasy.

The Son of God, as another Apostle tells us, was “manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil”;[1] and I do not find, in any of the prophetic descriptions of the restored paganism of modern days, that the system of the worship of false gods is to revive, with its abominable rites of blood and its mysteries of licentiousness.

Wherever the Cross has been once firmly planted, we may surely hope that the world has seen the last of the public worship of Satan.

[Instead,] in St. Paul’s description of the latter days, I find the blasphemy of the true God substituted for the worship of devils.

But, my brethren, the Son of God was not manifested altogether to destroy the works of man. He came to raise man, change him, regenerate him, sanctify him, by uniting him to Himself.

He did not come to take away man’s free-will, or to tear out of his nature those seeds of possible evil which produced all the human part of the paganism on which we have been reflecting. The empire of Satan has been overthrown, but alas! Man is still his own great enemy, and though our Lord has armed him against himself, He has still left him the power to mar the work of God in his own soul; and this power, which each one of us possesses in his own case, is always fearfully active in the corruption of the Christian society, the character of which is the result and the reflection of that of the parts of which it is made up.


The revival of heathenism in our times

And now, my brethren, what need have we of any subtlety of inquiry or refinement of speculation to tell us that this modern heathenism of which the prophecies speak is around us on every side?

Mankind are in many senses far mightier, and the resources and enjoyments at their command are far ampler, than in the days of old. We are in possession of the glorious but intoxicating fruits of that advanced civilization and extended knowledge which has sprung up from the seeds which the Church of God has, as it were, dropped on her way through the world. Society has been elevated and refined, but on that very account it has become capable of a more penetrating degradation, of a more elegant and a more poisonous corruption.

Knowledge has been increased, but on the increase of knowledge has followed the increase of pride. Science has unravelled the laws of nature and the hidden treasures of the material universe, and they place fresh combinations of power and new revelations of enjoyment in the hands of men who have not seen in the discovery increased reasons for self-restraint or for reverence for the Giver of all good gifts.

The world, the home of the human race, has been opened to civilized man in all its distant recesses, and he has taken, or is taking, possession of its full inheritance; but his onward path is the path of avarice and greed, of lust and cruelty, and he seizes on each new land as he reaches it in the spirit of the merchant or the conqueror, not in that of the harbinger of peace, the bearer of the good tidings of God.


Charity growing cold

At home, in Christendom itself, we hear, as our Lord said, of wars and rumours of wars, nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. In the Apostles’ time, it was an unheard of thing that the majestic peace and unity of the Roman Empire should not absorb and keep in harmony a hundred rival nationalities. In our time it is not to be thought of that the supernatural bond of the Christian Church should be able to keep nations which are brethren in the faith from devouring one another.

Or, again, my brethren, let us turn from public to private life. Look at social life, look at domestic manners; consider the men and women of the present day in their amusements, their costumes, the amount of restraint they put upon the impulses of nature; compare them at their theatres and their recreations, compare them as to their treatment of the poor and the afflicted classes; compare them, again, as to the style of art which they affect, or the literature in which they delight, with the old heathen of the days of St. Paul.

I do not say – God forbid! – that there is not a wide and impassable gulf between the two, for that would be to say that so many centuries of Christendom had been utterly wasted, and that the Gospel law has not penetrated to the foundations of society, so that it is not true that our Lord rules, as the Psalmist says, “in the midst of His enemies,”[2] even over the world which would fain emancipate itself from His sway.

But I do say, that if a Christian of the first ages were to rise from the dead, and examine our society, point by point, on the heads which I have intimated, and compare it, on the one hand, with the polished refined heathen whom he may have known at the Courts of Nero or Domitian; and, on the other, with the pure strict holiness of his own brethren in the faith, who worshipped with him in the catacombs, he might find it difficult indeed to say that what he would see around him in London or Paris was derived by legitimate inheritance rather from the traditions of the martyr Church than from the customs of the persecuting heathen.

He would miss the violence, the cruelty, the riotous and ruffianly lust, the extraordinary disrespect for humanity and human life which distinguished the later Roman civilization; but he would find much of its corruption, much of its licentiousness, much of its hardness of heart.

The unregenerate instincts of human nature are surging up like a great sea all around us, society is fast losing all respect for those checks upon the innate heathenism of man which have been thrown over the surface of the world by the Church. It is becoming an acknowledged law that whatever is natural is right, and by nature is meant nature corrupted by sin, nature not illuminated by faith and unassisted by grace — that is, the lower appetites of man in revolt against conscience, looking for no home but earth and no satisfaction but in the present, “having no hope of the promise, and without God in this world.”[3]


The final struggle will destroy all sects, leaving the Church against the world

All these dangers with which we are beset, which have their roots in human nature, and whose growth is fostered by the condition of the world, have been met by our Lord Jesus Christ, and are provided for in the Church. We are apt to marvel at what we deem the superfluous richness and profusion of that which may be called the armament of the Church, the variety of the means of grace, the multiplied channels by which heavenly strength is conveyed to fainting and wounded souls.

And yet not one of all these is needless; the whole strength and all the weapons of the Church will be strained to the utmost in her final struggle.

The whole might of unregenerate nature, in its undying repugnance to submit to the restraints of the law of God, is bearing down upon the Christian bulwarks of society with a weight as immense, and as relentless in its pressure on every part, as the tide of a whole ocean, which is swung in its daily flow against the rocks and cliffs of a far-stretching continent. What can resist it?

One force alone, the force of God, who sets bounds to the sea, and can check the raging passions of a whole race.

We hear little, in the latter days, of heresies and schisms, of isolated communities and partial forms of Christianity. These things will have had their day and have done much evil in it, but they are too frail and miserable in themselves to live on the surges of that last tempest of humanity — the Church alone can ride out the storm.

But again, my brethren, how does the Church deal with such assaults as those we are contemplating?

She works, no doubt, by the sacraments and the other means of grace, by the Word of God preached and taught in the sanctuary, and the like. But the strongholds of the Church are in the family and the school.

Her battlefields are those on which such questions as that of the sanctity of marriage and that of the purity of Christian education are fought out.

Give her the forming of her children, and she will train up the Christian youth and maiden, she will join them in a holy bond to form the family, of Christian families she will compose Christian communities, Christian nations, and out of Christian nations she will build up Christendom, a Christian world.

She can cure nature, and nothing else can.

Give her free scope, and you will hear little of that long list of heathen vices of which you have heard to-day; little of men being covetous, contentious, slaves of avarice and licentiousness, there will be no complaints of the decay of mercy, or of natural affection, of human kindness, honesty, faithfulness.


Barbarians at the Gate

So then, in these our days, can we too often remind ourselves of the points of attack chosen by the enemies of faith and of society? Can we forget with what a wearisome sameness of policy the war is waged year after year, first in one place and then in another; how certain it is that, as soon as we hear that some nation hitherto guided by Catholic instincts has become a convert to the enlightened ideas of our times, the next day will bring the further tidings that in that nation marriage is no longer to be treated as a sacrament, and that education is to be withdrawn from the care of the Church and her ministers?

And, indeed, my brethren, we know not how soon we ourselves may be engaged in a deadly conflict, on one at least of these points.

Up to this time we, in England, have been able to train our children for ourselves. And, to give honour where honour is due, we have owed our liberty in great measure to the high value which certain communities outside the Church set upon distinctively Christian and doctrinal instruction. But we know not how soon the tide of war may come to our homes.

We hear a cry in the air — it says that the child belongs to the State, and that it is the duty of the State to take his education to itself.

The cry is false; the child belongs to the parent, belongs to the Church, belongs to God.

In that cry speaks the reviving paganism of our day. Surely it should teach us, if nothing else can, the paramount importance of Christian education. If we give in to that cry we are lost.


What should we do?

Train up your children, my brethren, in the holy discipline and pure doctrine of the Church, and they are formed thereby to be soldiers of Jesus Christ in the coming conflict against the powers of evil.

[But] train them up in indifference to religion and Christian doctrine, and if they are not at once renegades from their faith, then at least they will be far too weak and faint-hearted in their devotion to the Church, to range themselves courageously among her champions in her terrible battle against the last apostacy.

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How will the Church appear at the end of the world? Fr H.J. Coleridge SJ, 1894
“Their instincts are more keen and more certain than those of the eagles.”



Image: Demir’s Lightning. Wiki Commons CC

Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ/WM Review | Nov 20, 2022


Editors’ Notes

Fr Henry James Coleridge wrote prolifically about the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In this extract, he considers how the Church may appear in the final days.

The Church in the Last Days – Part I: How will we see her?

The state of the world in the last days, compared with today

We have been endeavouring to consider one by one, my brethren in our Lord, a series of these features of the last time which are more or less constant and permanent in the world, because they are the natural results of elements and principles which are almost always at work among men.

We have considered the mischief that will be produced, that has been already produced, in our time and in times earlier than our own, by the decay of faith and the increase of false creeds and false doctrines, by the waning and growing cold of Christian charity, by the immense development of the national spirit, by the encroachments of the civil power on the rights of the Church, and by the corresponding undermining of the civil power through the spirit of lawlessness — a sure effect of civil encroachments upon the spiritual sphere, by the increase of luxury, the engrossment of mankind in the enjoyment of temporal and sensual pleasures, and by the immense corruption and blindness and hardness of heart which must naturally ensue from these causes.

Lastly, we have considered that in the latter days – as has been the case, at least partially, in our own – the spiritual enemies of God and man will be allowed a large measure of licence, for the delusion and perversion of mankind.

All these are great elements and powers of evil. Each one of them by itself is a great danger, and when they all combine in a larger extent of development and influence than before, in any one generation, there is at least reason for thinking that such a generation is not unlike that on which the end of the world will come.

And finally, we have considered how the prophecies tell us that all the evil principles and elements in society are to be summed up, and, as it were, personified in the appearance of one great champion; the hero of his day, as men will account him; the arch-enemy of God, as the Church will know him to be; who is already named in the New Testament as the Antichrist, the opponent and rival of our Blessed Lord.


Where will the Church be?

Now it is certainly natural for us to ask: what, in the face of all this collection and combination of the powers and influences of evil in the world, will have become of the Church of God?

We know, from the words of our Lord, that the gates of Hell are not to prevail against her. We know far more than that, for we know that she is furnished and equipped with Divine power, and that she has within the range of her resources even more than is required for the perfect “healing of the nations,” if the nations of the world would be healed.

How is it then to be with her in the midst of all these tempests and woes, these birth-pangs of the new creation? What will be her lot and her conduct, what will be the strength of her children, how will they bear themselves in these last struggles, and how especially will it be with the provisions which she supplies for the weak and the timid and the helpless – on whom, if we are to judge from the history of her first conflicts in the world, the battle will fall as well as on the strong and well-trained soldiers of Jesus Christ?

For an answer to these natural questionings, we may go back once more to the great prophecy of the last days in which the words of the text are contained. We have had to refer to it over and over again, and this is not wonderful, for the words of our Lord on any great subject of Christian thought must be the great storehouse of our information on that subject.

Our Lord is speaking to His Apostles on Mount Olivet, at a very short interval of time before His Passion. The key-note of His whole discourse is given in the words with which it opens according to the account recorded for us by St. Matthew: “Take heed that no man seduce you.”[1] The prophecy relates to two questions which had been asked, one as to the destruction of Jerusalem, the other as to the end of the world; and, as you know, these two events are in our Lord’s mind as the answers.

I need not go through that Divine discourse. You will remember how earnestly He speaks of the danger of seduction. Many are to come in His Name, teachers of heresies, authors of schisms, declaring that they come from Him and speak His truth, and they are to seduce many. There are to be wars and rumours of wars, the latter perhaps not less disquieting than the former. There are to be national strifes, there are to be earthquakes and famines and pestilence.

They are themselves to be persecuted — even hated of all nations, for the sake of His Name. There are to be scandals, and false brethren, betraying one another, hating one another. Iniquity is to abound, and charity is to grow cold. The Gospel is to be preached in all the world, and then the end will come.

Then, after a passage about the sign of the destruction of Jerusalem, our Lord returns to the general picture. The Apostles, or Christians through them, are warned not to believe people who say to them, “Lo, here is Christ, lo there.”

The false Christs and prophets shall even show great signs and wonders. “If they shall say to you, Behold, He is in the desert, go ye not out; behold, He is in the closets, believe it not.” And then He gives two ways in which the presence of the Son of Man is to be known. “For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even unto the west, so shall also the coming” – or the presence – “of the Son of Man be.”


The two ways of finding Our Lord

That is the first way in which men may know where our Lord is to be found: His presence will be as manifest and as unmistakeable as the sheet of lightning, which darts in one single moment from one end of heaven to the other. Who can doubt where the lightning is? There is no part of the heavens in which it is not. It is not here or there, it is everywhere.

And then our Lord gives a second sign of His presence, which is altogether different from the former: “Wheresoever the body is, there also will the eagles be gathered together.”

Thus our Lord in this place does what He was so often wont to do in the parables, in which He set forth the secrets of His Kingdom. He uses one image to express one part of a truth, and then an entirely different image to express another part of the same truth.

First, He implies that His presence in the Church will be unmistakeable, because it is everywhere at once, and then He uses, as the image of the faculty of discerning His presence, the marvellous instinct which brings together the eagles over their prey.

For travellers tell us that the camel or other animal that dies of exhaustion in the midst of the desert, may fall to the ground on some spot from which, if you look all round the horizon, east and west, and north and south, you will not see a single bird of prey in sight, or any rock or eyrie where its nest may be.

And yet, before the poor quarry breathes its last breath, the eagles will be there from every point of the compass, ready to fasten on their helpless prey.

Need to tell the famished eagles where the reeking carcass lies!
It can draw them to itself from every corner of the skies.

They come, guided by instinct or nature which God has given them. And so it will be, and so it is, with our Lord. Those that are His know Him, and can find Him out in His Church. Their instincts are more keen and more certain than those of the eagles. There have been saints on earth who would enter a large church, and make their way without guide or note or mark to the altar where the Blessed Sacrament is kept.

These are special and personal gifts, the occasional reward of immense devotion and intense purity of soul, just as other saints have had the gift of discovering the foulness of sin in the souls of those who came to them by their air or their look.

But there is also a general power of perception as to our Lord’s presence in the Church, in confirmation of and as a supplement to her great external notes and marks, which are evident to all alike, and this instinctive knowledge of Him will be a further safeguard to those who love Him, in the dark days which shall go before His second Advent.


One way for all; one for his friends

Thus we have our Blessed Lord telling us, in the passage of which we are speaking, that there are two very different ways by which His presence may be known. I say His presence, because, even if we are to limit the direct meaning of the words before us to that which shall be at the time of His second coming, (for which limitation there seems no certain reason in the context,) still it would remain true that what is said by Him of that second coming, cannot but be true in its measure of His continual presence in the Catholic Church.

The one of these methods of His presence or coming is manifest and unmistakeable to all, the other is for the few – or at least, not for all. The one is for His friends and for His enemies alike, the other is only for His friends. That is, the one is like the shining of the lightning from one end of the heavens to the other, the other is like the secret attraction by which the eagles are drawn unerringly to their prey.

And we find our Lord using this last image, that of which the words of the text speak, in another place where He does not use the first. He is speaking of the last days, and saying how from the same field and the same bed one shall be taken and another left. That is, side by side with those who belong to our Lord, and are to be caught up to meet Him in the air, there will be those who do not belong to Him, and who will be left for destruction.

“I say to you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed, the one shall be taken and the other shall be left. Two women shall be grinding together, the one shall be taken and the other shall be left. Two men shall be in the field, the one shall be taken and the other shall be left.”

And the Evangelist goes on:

“[They] answering say to Him, Where, Lord? Who said to them, Wheresoever the body shall be, thither will the eagles also be gathered together.”[2]

Here there is question of some secret attraction or discernment, which is not common to all, like that indication of the presence of our Lord, which can be compared to the lightning, seen from one end of the sky to the other — all men see the lightning; the eagles alone can discern the body on which they are to be fed in.

So it is, at all events, my brethren, with the knowledge of our Lord in His holy Catholic Church.


How we know the Church

Ever since the time when she became the great feature in the world that she now is; ever since she came forth from the catacombs into which the fury of the persecution had driven her, she has been cognizable to the whole world by means of what we call her visible Notes.

These Notes, from the earliest times, have been enshrined in the Catholic Creeds; and never has there been but one body on earth to which they would truly and plainly apply. She is herself her own great witness, and her history, and her powers, and her institutions, and her adaptation to the needs of mankind, show her to be as Divine as she claims to be.

They show her to be this in two ways — first, positively, by the manner in which she has proved that she can cure all the ills of society, and has created a happiness and a beauty and a dignity in human life which did not exist before, whenever she is allowed her way and not hindered from the exercise of her beneficent influences.

She has shown the same negatively also, by a proof which is unfortunately still giving its character to the days in which we live, and which will probably continue to be more sadly exemplified as the years roll on — in the manner in which paganism, and barbarism, and materialism, and cruelty, and lust, and ambition become magnified as the great dominant influences in the world — and in a denial of the supremacy of conscience, of the spirituality of the soul, and of other such fundamental truths, which becomes rife and wide-spread the moment her salutary rule is thrown off and her teaching disregarded.

But these ways of knowing the Church are open to all, the last as well as the first, and there are now many intellectual men who, though not Christians, do not shrink from the candid acknowledgment that there is no alternative between the full Catholic creed and the denial of all theism itself.

[Stone]

How will we know the Church at the end of the world? Fr H.J. Coleridge SJ, 1894
“The fierce eagles do not give birth to the timid and cowering dove.”



Photo by Sylvain Mauroux on Unsplash

Editors’ Notes

Fr Henry James Coleridge wrote prolifically about the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In this extract, he considers how Catholics may know the Church in the final days – gathering around her like the eagles around the body, as Our Lord says.

Taken from:
The Return of the King – Discourses on the Latter Days
byFr Henry James Coleridge SJ
Burns and Oates, London, 1894
pp 219-233
Internet Archive

The Church in the Last Days – Part II: How will we know her?

Internal proofs

Now, my brethren, it is surely true to say that evidences [we have considered in the previous part], although they are most powerful and most convincing, and although they are the appointed proofs, in many respects, of the Divine mission of the Catholic Church, are still in the main external. They are evidences such as can be grasped by those outside the Church herself, and indeed we see it constantly to be the case, as I have just now said, that they are acknowledged to be most cogent even by those who are not converted by them.

It is not to depreciate these proofs of the Church that we say there are evidences of another kind which address themselves more to those who are inside the pale of Catholicism than to those who are outside. Such are the proofs on which devotion feeds, after conversion has taken place, which are the delight and the support of those who do not need external evidence.

It is very natural that we should find the Apostles speaking of the existence of such evidences to their converts, because in the beginnings of the Church, although there were not wanting proofs of her divinity, similar to those afforded by miracles, by the fulfilment of prophecy, and the like, still the evidences of the great Notes of the Church, by which we now prove her to be what she asserts that she is, could not, in the nature of things, be existing or be recognized in their fulness.

Surely, if we believe the Holy Spirit of God to be shed abroad in our hearts, it is natural to suppose also that He will make His presence felt in some secret but most convincing way. You remember what the men of that Samaritan city said to the woman who had first informed them about our Lord and His conversation with her — “We now believe, not for thy saying, for we ourselves have heard Him and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.”[1]


Not vital immanence, but confirmation of external witness

How can anyone live in the constant use of the holy sacraments, a life of prayer and intercourse with our Lord – how can anyone watch over the movements and breathings of his own conscience, and know what it is to have holy inspirations, and to walk in the continual presence of God – and not at the same time have an experimental knowledge of the actual truth of the claims of his religion and of the Church in which these blessings fall to his lot?

Faithfulness to grace, purity of intention, continual self-discipline and diligence in the practice of the Christian virtues — I do not say that the light and the peace and the joy which these things generate are infallible guides, without the external witness of the Church, much less against that witness; yet when they coincide with the evidence by which we know where the Catholic Church is, it is not possible but that they must add a security and a certainty to the soul – just as an impure or careless life tends, in great measure, to impair even the vividness of faith.

See how confidently St. John appeals to this kind of evidence in his Epistle to his own spiritual children, among whom there had been some seducers attempting their perversion:

“These things have I written to you concerning them that seduce you. And as for you, let the unction which you have received of Him abide in you. And you have no need that any man teach you, but as His unction teacheth you of all things, and is truth and no lie, and as it hath taught you, abide in Him.”[2]

This is the language of one who can trust those to whom he is speaking, because he can reckon on the work of the Holy Spirit of God in their souls. And it seems to me to be confirmed by the language of our Lord Himself in the passage from which the text is taken, where He tells us that there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and show great signs and wonders, “insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect.”

“If possible,” He says, and by that He implies that it is not possible for the elect to be deceived. The false signs and wonders will all be external evidences, by means of which the teachers of falsehood will be allowed, in that dark day, to parody the external evidences of the Catholic Church by what seem to be similar prodigies worked in favour of their own errors. But the elect of God, the faithful and true followers of the Church, will be guarded against the snare by a two-fold shield, besides the evidence of the great worldwide notes.

In the first place they will have the shield of prophecy. For all these seductions are foretold by our Lord, and so they cannot harm those who know them beforehand and are prepared to expect them; and this, besides the notes of the Church, will be, so to say, the external shield of the elect.

And in the second place they will be protected by that interior unction of which St. John speaks, by the light and fire and fragrance and instinct of the Holy Ghost in their hearts, whereby they will be so united to our Lord as to be able to find Him out and cling to Him, even when the world is over clouded with the darkness of evil, and to endure all the contradictions of the last persecution, as St. Paul says of Moses, “seeing Him that is invisible.”[3]


The abiding primacy of the Church’s teaching over inspirations

My brethren, you may know that men have often been led astray by putting too much faith in their own interior feelings or convictions, and in what they deemed Divine inspirations guiding their individual conscience. For it is not the will of God that we should be guided in matters which belong to the teaching of the Church by anything but that Divine teaching. And so, if there were to be nothing but this interior unction at the last period of the world to secure the saints against deception, if they were taught to look to that exclusively, they would not be armed against the dangers of that time as God means them to be armed. This is a certain truth.

But it may be not the less true, that we need the two-fold guidance of which our Lord here speaks, and that even “the lightning” declaring to us the presence of our Lord in His Church might not be enough, because it might indeed show us where He is, but it might not give us the force and the courage to seek Him, in the face of all the manifold difficulties which will then beset His elect.

In those days men will [lack] love as well as knowledge; they will [lack] that desire and longing for our Lord which He describes under this image of the hunger of the eagles hastening to their prey, as well as the light which shows them where He ought to be sought.

How common is it even in the days in which we live, to find men who tell us that if anything in the way of religion is true, it is the Catholic Church, but who have not the strength to make themselves her children against the cravings of their passions, or the influences of worldly interest! As far as we can guess, the number of such men is on the increase, as it cannot but be on the increase, when the hollowness of all the rival claims of the sects and establishments, founded on national feeling or on policy, becomes more and more evident to thinking men; and when the pretended national Churches are gradually deprived of the support of the State and of their ancient endowments, which have ever been their strongest sources of influence.

What is this but to say that more and more we have need of the overmastering hunger of the eagles, as well as of the shining of the lightning from east to west?

The external evidences of the Catholic Church do not address themselves with any cogency to men who do not feel the need of any religion, and it is this state of mind and heart that will characterize the last period of the life of the human race. It is quite conceivable that then the Catholic Church may represent to the world the one solitary remaining religion, that she may be the only considerable body which even calls itself by the name of Jesus Christ, and that her difficulties in that time will not be in her struggle with a swarm of sects, but how to get men [even] to acknowledge that they have souls to save, a conscience to obey, and a God to Whom they are accountable.

What then, my brethren, can we wish and pray for more ardently, for ourselves and for others, than that God will make us all eagles in the sense in which that image is here used by our Blessed Lord – that our hearts may be consumed with hunger and thirst after justice; that the love of our Lord may so drive us on and on; that we may be unable to rest away from Him, as if we should indeed die if we found Him not?


Conclusion – our duties to our children and the next generation

Oh! Let us pray that the fruit of that blessed frequentation of the sacraments, and other means of grace, which is our present privilege – but which in the days of the last persecution may be denied us, as it was denied to our forefathers in the time of their persecution – may be a strength and ripeness and robustness of spirit, which may make us able to take long and lofty flights in the service of our Lord; that that interior vigour may be formed in us, which makes little account of the things of this world and even of exterior helps, when such cannot be had!

Keen of sight and strong of pinion, and dauntless in courage, and ever ready to die in defence of what is dear to them, dwellers on the lonely peaks with the stars and clouds, and far from the noisy world — such is the picture which we form from what we know concerning the characteristics of the eagles; and our Lord here adds the further trait, that nothing prevents them from finding out their prey or keeps them from it when it is found.

Such we may surely say must be the saints of the latter days; and if they must be such, such must be those from whom they come. The poet tells us that the fierce eagles do not give birth to the timid and cowering dove, and neither, we may say, will the timid and soft-hearted dove give birth to the warrior eagle.

And so again and again we come round to the same old truth — that the comforts and effeminacies and frivolities and childishnesses of modern life can never be looked to for the training of men who are to fight the last brave fight for God and for our Lord; and that, if there are to be eagles of spirit, then their breeding and their nurturing must begin now.