Volume 7 — The Roman Gathering. [Footnote 46] By W. G. Dix.

A man of many years, without vast temporal resources, despoiled of a part of his possessions, having many and vigorous enemies about him, and regarded by many even of those who profess the Christian faith as about to fall from his high place in Christendom, such a man invites his brethren of the apostolical ministry throughout the world to honor by their personal presence at Rome the anniversary of the martyrdom, eighteen hundred years ago, of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and to join with him in the exaltation of martyrs who, like them, though in far distant lands, were "faithful unto death." They respond with eager joy and haste to the call, and those who cannot go send on the wings of the wind their words of loving veneration.

To say not a word of the spiritual claims of the man who sent forth the invitation, so eagerly and widely accepted, there is in the fact just stated a glowing evidence that, even in these days of triumphant and insolent materialism, moral power has not entirely lost ascendency. Though millions of knees are bent in honor of the Dagon of materialism, in some one or other of its myriad forms of degrading idolatry, yet millions of hearts also recognize the gift of God as present evermore in his holy church. Never before has the Catholic Church beheld so great a multitude, from so distant places, assembled at her call at the central city of the faith.

The enemies of catholicity have again and again referred to the great inventions of modern times as sure destroyers of the claims of the Catholic Church and of her hold upon her millions of members; but lo! these very inventions are brought into the service of the church. The printing-press, which was going to annihilate the Catholic Church, has proved one of her most effectual bulwarks; millions of printed pages inspire the devotion of her children, and make known her claims to reading men, until many who were even her enemies and revilers, from ignorance and prejudice, acknowledge their error, and make haste to go to "their father's house." Steam, in the view of many, was about so to change the structure of society that the old and decrepid Church of Rome, the great obstacle on the railroad of materialism, was about to be run over and cast to the roadside, a weak and useless wreck; but lo! the power of steam enables hundreds and thousands more to go up to the sacred city, as the tribes of Israel were wont to visit Jerusalem, than could otherwise attend the festivals of the faith in St. Peter's Church. Of the manifold uses of steam, a large proportion is in the service of catholic truth. And then the telegraph; that, surely, was to show an advanced state of civilization which could not tolerate the slow and ancient ways of catholicity; but lo! here, again, the event has contradicted the prophecy; for, by means of the telegraph, the assemblage of the vast host at Rome was known throughout the world on the very day of its occurrence; and almost literally, in all parts of Christendom, thousands of devout worshippers could turn their faces reverently toward the altar of God in Rome at the very instant when those in its immediate presence were bending before it, and could join in the same prayers and anthems, as though the world itself were one vast St. Peter's Church, and the strains of penitence and hymns of joy could reverberate across oceans and mountains, among distant nations and islands of the sea, as among the corridors and arches of one great temple sacred to the triune God.

As in these instances, so in many others, the church has extended her sway and deepened her power by the very forces which many supposed would work her ruin. The history of the church has shown in the domain of natural science, so often applied in the service of infidelity and disorder, as in the field of human passion, that God will make the wrath of man to praise him, and turn weapons designed to attack his holy Church into her consecrated armor of defence. The grace of God so overrules the inventions of man and the powers of nature, that even the terrible lightning becomes the vivid messenger to convey to the ends of the earth the benediction of the Vicar of Christ.

What is the chief lesson of the recent gathering at Rome? It is this, that the church of God, so often, in the view of her enemies, destroyed, will not stay destroyed; that after every "destruction" she renews her invincible youth, and rises to pursue her career of conquest over sin, prejudice, and wrong; that, though she may bend awhile to the storm that beats upon her sacred head, she has never been wholly overcome; that, notwithstanding all that mortal enmity, defection, outrage, have done or can do, she yet lifts her forehead to the sky to be anew baptized with light from the sun of truth above; and, strong in the faith and promise of the Eternal God, she falters not in her endeavors, patient and persistent, to subdue the world to Christ.

The history of the Catholic Church abounds with instances like the Roman gathering in June, which prove that her hours of affliction are those very ones when her faithful children gather to her side, to assure her of their prayers and support, and to discern upon her saintly face those "smiles through tears," which, in times of trial, are the warmest and most touching acknowledgments of filial veneration.

The commemorative assemblage at the capital of Christendom, signifies that the church of God is indestructible by any forces that earth or hell, singly or united, can bring against her. She may be at times like the bird in the snare of the fowler; but she is sure of being released at length, and then she plumes her wings afresh, and soars heavenward, filling the air with the divine, exultant music of her voice. The powerful of the earth have sometimes loaded the church with fetters; but by the strength of Christ that dwells evermore in her, she has broken the bonds asunder, or, by his transforming grace, they have become the wreaths and garlands of new victory, even as the cross of humiliation has become, by the sacrifice of our Lord, the emblem of unfading glory.

The church of Christ, bearing on her brow his holy seal, and in her hands his gifts of power, knelt in sorrow at his grave; but she hailed his resurrection with joy, and was endowed anew with treasures of immortal life. Afterward, the might of heathendom arose against her, and she descended from the wrath of man into the catacombs; but she reascended, to wear upon her brow the diadem of a spiritual empire that shall never fall until the elements shall melt with fervent heat; and even then, true to all her history in deriving new glory from every apparent defeat, she will rise again from the great grave of nature to enjoy for ever the vision of God. Kings of the earth have denied her right to invest the pastors of her children with their due prerogatives, and have even dared her to mortal combat; but though distressed and thwarted, she has never relinquished her inherent rights, and she never will. As many times as the head of the church on earth has been driven from Rome by armed, ungrateful violence, so many times exactly has he been welcomed back with tears of penitence and shouts of rapture.

Despoiled of treasures committed to her care by faithful stewards of God's bounty, she has labored with her own hands to feed her needy children. At one time, persecuted in the wilderness, she has found a refuge and a welcome in the courts of princes; at another, driven from the courts of princes, because she would not deny her Lord or her divine commission, she has found a humble sanctuary in the wilderness, and knelt upon the bare earth to adore the Lord of life and light, once the child in the manger, and to invoke all the saints in glory to plead her cause in the ear of infinite justice and goodness.

She has spurned the anointed king from the temple of God, until he repented of his crime; and on the head of the lowly monk who was spending his days in labor and prayer, she has placed the triple crown. With one hand she has bathed with "baptismal dew" the brow of the day-laborer's child, while the other she has raised in defiance of imperial might, which dared to assail her holy altar.

One of the most violent objections to the Catholic Church has been urged for the very reason that she has so faithfully held the balance between the contending forces of society. She has been accused of favoring the claims of absolutism or popular demands, as the triumph of either at the time would favor her own ends, irrespective of right. The charge is unjust, is urged by many who know better, yet it springs from an honest misapprehension in many minds. It would have been utterly impossible for an institution, designed to enlighten and guide mankind in its higher relations, not to touch human interests of every kind, and human institutions generally in many ways; yet the challenge may safely be given to any thoughtful student of history, to acknowledge with candor, whatever may be his ecclesiastical position, that the Catholic Church, having often been chosen to be, and having an inherent right to be, the umpire between the rights of authority and the rights of individuals, has faithfully labored to sustain lawful authority when assailed by the wild fury of misguided multitudes, and that she has interposed her powerful shield, often with the most triumphant success, to protect men whose rights as men were assailed by authority changed by ambition into arrogant and exacting tyranny. What inconsistency and insincerity have been charged against the Catholic Church for this remarkable and noble fact in her history! In this respect the Catholic Church has followed strictly in the steps of her Divine Author, who, when on earth, invariably upheld the rights of authority, while vehemently denouncing those who unjustly exercised it; and while going about doing good, the friend of the friendless and the helper of the helpless, pleading with divine eloquence, and laboring with divine power for the outcast and the poor, never and nowhere sanctioned the spirit of insurrection, but enjoined obedience as one of the main duties of life. Hence, it has come about, by one of those sublime mysteries, which prove the divine origin of Christianity, that the greatest revolution which has ever taken place in religious belief and in civil society in all their bearings, has been effected by the teachings, by the life and death of one who by no word or deed ever assailed authority itself or incited resistance to it.

Beauty and order being the same thing, and religious truth being the beauty of holiness, Christ, who was truth in person, must have made his church the friend and upholder of all beauty and order; and so it has proved for eighteen hundred years. The church has been the celestial crucible in which whatever of human art or invention had within it the essential attributes of higher and spiritual goodness has been purified and adapted to the service of religion. Has poetry sought to please the imaginations of men? the church of Christ unfolded before her the annals of Christianity, with her grand central sacrifice of infinite love, and all her demonstrations of heroic suffering and courageous faith; and poetry drew holier inspiration from the view, and incited men by higher motives to a higher life. Have painting and sculpture sought to represent objects of refining grace and sublimity? the church of Christ persuaded them to look into the records of the Christian past, and there they found treasures of beauty and splendor, devotion and martyrdom, whose wealth of illustration as examples; incentives, and memorials, art has not exhausted for centuries, and will never exhaust. Christian history is the inexhaustible quarry of whatever is most noble and heroic in man, purified by the grace of God. Has architecture sought to invest stone with the attributes of spiritual and intellectual grace? the church of God has so portrayed before her the sublimities of the Christian faith, that she knelt at her feet in veneration, and thenceforth consecrated herself to build enduring structures, which, the more they show of human power and skill, the more they persuade men to the worship of God. Has eloquence sought to nerve men for the grand conflicts of life? the church of Christ has touched the lips of eloquence with living fire from her altar, until have sprung forth words that flamed with love to man and love to God. Has music sought to weave her entrancing spells around the ear and heart and soul? the church of Christ has breathed into music her own divine being, until the music of the church seems like beatific worship, and worship on earth like beatific music.

As in these respects, so in others, the church has made a holy conquest of whatever is noblest among the endowments of men. In speaking of Catholic history, even from the secular point of view, it may be justly said, that nowhere else has there been such wonderful discernment of the various capacities of the human mind, and of their various adaptations. Tenacious of the truth and of all its prerogatives, the Catholic Church has, nevertheless, allowed a wide liberty of thought. That the Catholic Church has narrowed the understandings of men, is a singular charge to make in the face of the schools of Catholic philosophy, in which men of varying mental structure, training, or habits of thought, have had full, free play of their faculties. And where else have there been so many free and varying activities as in the Catholic Church? The false charge that the church fetters the minds and movements of men, may be traced to the fact that all Catholic diversities of thought have converged, like different rays of light, in the elucidation of truth, and that varying modes of Catholic action have had one object—the advancement of truth.

Here is the intended force of all these illustrations, for they have had a logical purpose. The world will never outgrow the church. All the boasted improvements in science, in art, in civilization, so far from impeding the church of Christ, and making her existence no longer needed, will, at the same time, advance her power, and make her more needed than ever. If in the middle ages, when society was in the process of transition from the old to the new, the church was pre-eminently needed to keep what was just and right and true in the older forms of civilization, and gradually to adapt to them what was just and right and true in the newer developments of society, most truly is the church needed now, when there exists a perfect chaos of opinions, and when a part of the civilized world is in another transition, from the aimless, rudderless vagaries of Protestantism to the solid rock of Catholicity. If ever the voice of authority was needed, like the voice of the angel of God, heard amid and above the howlings of the storm, it is needed now.

Much false reasoning has been uttered about the "unchangeable church," as though, because "unchangeable," it was not adapted to a changing and striving world, when, in truth, for the very reason that the church of Christ is unchangeably true, she is required and adapted for all the changes and emergencies of time. Who ever heard a sailor complain of the mariner's compass, because, on account of its unchangeable obstinacy, it would not conform to his private judgments and caprices about the right course? No one. It is for the very reason that the mariner's compass is unchangeably true to the eternal law of magnetic attraction, under all circumstances and in all places, that it is the unerring guide among the whirlwinds and heavings of the great deep. Catholicity is the mariner's compass upon a greater deep—even that of the wild and rolling, beating ocean of humanity, pointing, amid sunny calms, or gentle winds, or raging gales, unerringly to the cross of Jesus Christ, as the needle of the mariner's compass points to the north—guiding, age after age, the precious freights of immortal souls to the harbor of infinite and unending joy.

The force of this illustration is all the stronger that the mariner's compass is a human adaptation of an immutable law of nature to navigation, while the church of the living God is divine alike in origin and application, and has existed from the beginning, unchangeable, like God himself, yet adapting herself to the wants of every age. The church of God is like his own infinite providence, in which unchangeable truth meets in the harmony of mercy the innumerable changes of human need.

Much has been written and more said about "the church of the future," as though it were to be some millennial manifestation altogether different from the historic church; but the church of the future, which is not also the church of the past and of the present, can be no church; for a true church must reach to the ages back as well as to those before. If the continuity is broken, truth is broken, and cannot be restored. As for eighteen centuries there have been no forms of civil society, no calms or tempests in the moral, political, social, or religious world, in which the Catholic Church has not been true to the organic principles of her divine life, even the enemy of catholicity should admit—that fact being granted—that the presumption is on her side that she will be equally true to those principles during the centuries that are to come. He may deny that the church has been true, and, consequently, that she will be true, but he will not admit one proposition and deny the other; he will admit both or deny both. In other words, he will admit, equally with the friend of catholicity, the identity of the church, past, present, and to come. Now, it will be impossible for a friend or enemy of the Catholic Church, from her beginning to this very day, to point to an hour when she was not a living church; it is, then, probable, that she will continue to be a living church. But where, since the promulgation of Christianity to this time, has existed a body of Christian believers, which, for the quality of continual existence, has so good a right to be called the church of Christ as the Catholic Church? Considering her numbers, extent, and duration, that church has been preeminently the church of the past; considering numbers, extent, and duration, that church is pre-eminently the church of the present; considering all analogies and probabilities, then the Catholic Church will be preeminently the church of the future. In truth, the vindictive anger of the enemies of the Catholic Church, in whatever form of opposition it may be shown, proceeds from the fact, not that she is the dead church of the past, as she is sometimes called, for there would be no reason to war with the dead, but because she is, as she has been and will be, the living church. The Catholic Church is hated not for being too dead, but for being too living. She has seen the birth and death of countless "improvements" of her principles, and she has received with gladness into her fold many an eager and conscientious inquirer for the "new church," who has at length reached an end of his wanderings and a solution of his doubts in finding, with tears of rapturous submission, that the new church, for which he was seeking, is the same church which has stood for ages, ever old, yet ever new, because representing Him who is alike the Living God and the Ancient of Days.

The Catholic Church, so frequently and unjustly denounced as ever behind the age, or even as facing the past, has been foremost in all parts of the world. She has sent her faithful soldiers of the cross where the spirit of commerce dared not go; she was the first in the east and the first in the West; it was her lamp of divine light which dispelled the gloomy terrors of the barbarous north of Europe; it was her sceptre of celestial beauty, which, under the guidance of Heaven, transformed the political and social wreck of southern Europe into order. In what part of the world which man could reach has she not planted the cross? Where on the face of the earth is the mountain whose craggy sides have not, at one time or another, sent back into the sounding air the echoes of Catholic worship?

Daniel Webster gave a vivid picture of the extent of the power of England, in what I think to be the grandest sentence which America has contributed to the common treasure of English literature. He said: "The morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one unbroken strain of the martial airs of England." That grand figure of speech may be applied to the extent of the Catholic Church. Yet it is not by martial airs, but by hymns of praise and penitential orisons and the continuous sacrifice that the Catholic Church daily celebrates, "from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same," the triumphant march of the Prince of Peace. How like "the sound of many waters" rolls hourly heavenward the anthems of catholic worship throughout the world! Not only is every moment of every day consecrated by catholic hymns sung somewhere on earth; but how majestically roll down through eighteen hundred years the unbroken anthems of catholic devotion! Minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, night after night, month after month, year after year, century after century, the holy strains go on unending. To the mind's ear seem blended in one almost overpowering flood of holy harmony the unnumbered voices which have sounded from the very hour when the shepherds of Bethlehem heard the angelic song to this very moment, when, somewhere, catholic voices are chanting praise to the Lord and Saviour of men.

And, in this view, how literally has been fulfilled that consoling prophecy, "Henceforth all generations shall call me blessed." Wherever the Divine Son has been duly honored, there also she, who was remembered with filial love even amid his dying agonies for a world's salvation, has been remembered and called blessed; called blessed from that lowly home and from that mount of sorrow in the distant east, in millions of lowly homes, and under the shadow of mountains to the farthest west; called blessed by millions of loving and imploring voices through all the ages since; called blessed in all the languages that have been spoken since that time in all the world; called blessed in the rudest forms of human speech and in the most ecstatic music of voice and skill; called blessed by the lips of the little child that can hardly speak the name of mother, and by the lips that tremble with age and sorrow; called blessed by the sailor on the deep, by the ploughman on the land, by the scholar at his books, by the soldier drawing his sword for right upon the battle-field; called blessed by the voices of peasant-girls singing in sunny vineyards, and by the voices of those from whose brows have flashed the gems of royal diadems; called blessed in cottages and palaces, at wayside shrines, and under the golden roofs of grand cathedrals; called blessed in the hour of joy and in the hour of anguish—in the strength and beauty of life, and at the gates of death. How long, how ardently, how faithfully has all this loving honor been paid for so many generations, and will continue to be paid for all generations to come, to that sorrowing yet benignant one, who bore him who bore our woe!

The recent gathering at Rome indicates that there is no demand which civilization can rightfully make of the Christian Church which she will not eagerly, fully, and faithfully meet. The largest assemblage of professed ministers of Christ which this age has known—leaving here out of view the claims of the Catholic Church to an apostolical priesthood—has been held in Rome by the church, so extensively proclaimed and derided as being behind the age. If there is life, deep, full, pervading life anywhere on earth, it is in the Catholic Church and in all her movements. She will continue to draw to herself all the qualities and capacities of life which are in harmony with her spirit; and this accumulated spiritual force will constantly weaken the barriers that divide her from the sympathies of a large part of Christendom, until at length she will be acknowledged by all as the only living and true church of Christ.

"The restoration of the unity of the church" has been the subject of many thoughts, of many words, of earnest and devout prayer, of much and noble effort, and, when understood as referring to the reconciliation of those who have left the Catholic Church, or who are now out of it because their fathers left it, the phrase may pass without objection; but the phrase is greatly objectionable, even to the extent of expressing an untruth, when it is used to convey the idea that the unity of the church has ever been broken. This has not been, and could not be. The church, intended to be one, and to endure until the end of time, could not, in its organic structure, be really broken at any period of its history, without destroying its title as the one church of Christ. Individuals, communities, even nations, as such, have been broken off from it; but the essential church herself has remained one and unbroken through all vicissitudes. The theory that the Church of Rome, the Greek Church, and the Church of England are equal and co-ordinate branches of the one church of Christ has no foundation as an historical fact, and is as destructive of all true ideas of the unity of the church as the wildest vagaries of Protestantism. Is there on earth an institution which schism, heresy, and political ambition have tried to destroy and have tried in vain? There is; it is the Catholic Church. Is there an institution on earth which, leaving out of regard all its claims, has had the quality of historical continuity for eighteen centuries? There is; it is the Catholic Church.

The charge, if not of bigotry, yet of most unreasonable arrogance, has been more or less directly made against the Catholic Church, because she has not received overtures of reconciliation from enthusiastic and earnest individuals claiming to represent national churches, as cordially as was expected. But how can she accept, or even consider, any such overtures, proceeding as they do from the assumption of equal position and authority, without disowning herself, without denying even those claims and prerogatives, the existence of which alone makes union with her desirable? If there is no institution on earth which has a valid title to be the continuous church of Christ, all efforts will be vain to supply the gap of centuries by an establishment now. A union of churches will not satisfy the design or promise of our Lord, when he founded the unity of his church. If the Christian church has really been broken into pieces, it will be in vain to gather up the fragments; for, on that supposition, the divine principle has long since departed, and the gates of hell have prevailed. Those men of strong Catholic predilections, who, nevertheless, have clung to the theory that the church of Christ has been really broken, and must be repaired by management, will yet thank God from their inmost souls for the immovable firmness with which that theory has been denied at Rome.

The Catholic Church has never condemned a heresy more false or destructive than the proposition that she is herself but one of the divisions of the Christian church, having no authority to speak or to rule in the name of her Lord. To deny that the one church of Christ is now existing, and that she has existed for ages, is to deny not merely a fact in history, but it is to deny the word of our Lord; and to do that, is to deny alike his holiness and his divinity. How can the Catholic Church treat with those who wish to make terms before submitting to her authority, on the basis of a positive untruth? Catholicity is not an inheritance, to be decided among many claimants, no one of whom has any right to be or to be regarded as the sole heir of the homestead; but it is an estate left by the divine Lord of the manor, in charge of the Prince of the Apostles and his successors, on the express injunction that it is to be kept one and undivided, in trust for the benefit of the faithful for all time. The estate has been kept one and undivided, according to the title-deed; the injunction has never been broken; notwithstanding all defections from the household, the homestead of the Christian world remains in the hands of the same faithful succession to which it was committed by our Lord himself. May God grant that all the younger sons who have gone astray, may return with penitential alacrity to their Father's house!

The Catholic Church will not stop in her progress, until she has converted the world to Christ; but she has not denied, and will not deny, her sacred trust and prerogative of catholicity for the sake even of adding whole nations to her fold. Whoever enters her fold must admit by that act her claim to be the one, undivided, indivisible Church of Christ. There can be no "branches of the Catholic Church" which are not directly joined to the root and trunk of catholicity. A severed branch is no branch.

It is not the fault of the Catholic Church that multitudes "who profess and call themselves Christians" are not members of her communion. She affords the very largest liberty for individual or associated action that can be yielded without denying her faith or her commission. The highest poetry and the severest logic may kneel in brotherly harmony at her altar. Gifts and talents the most diverse have been consecrated to her service. The Catholic Church advancing, century after century, under the banner of the cross and dove, to the spiritual conquest of the world! how far more sublime a spectacle it is than that of some parts of Christendom, which are broken into little independent bands of sectarian skirmishers, keeping up a kind of guerrilla warfare against "the world, the flesh, and the devil," and each other.

There are inspiring tokens which show the depth and breadth of the conviction, that the great schism of three centuries ago has proved a terrible mistake. Multitudes outside of the Catholic Church are inquiring with earnest solicitude about the meaning of catholic unity. The main course of intellectual inquiry is, in both hemispheres, respecting the claims of the Catholic Church. There are evident signs that the chaos of Protestantism is about to be broken up, and the wild, and dreary waste to bloom and glow with Catholic beauty and order. God grant that it may be so, and that not only thousands of individuals may know how precious a prize it is to kneel devoutly and sincerely before, the altar of God; but that even, mighty nations may be convinced, what priceless gifts they have forfeited by three centuries of separation from the source of all they have that has been or is worth keeping.

In view of the fact that the revival of catholic feeling enkindles also the enmity of those who scan it, the gathering at Rome is not only an assurance before the world that the Catholic Church will continue to be the guide of life and the empire of civilization, but it is also a sublime challenge against all the agencies of every kind that have been, or may be tried, to eliminate Catholicity from the age. The Catholic Church has a work to do, and she will do it. She can no more forego it, than she can die by her own will. She has never flinched yet; she never will. It is the very necessity as well as the reason of her being that she shall fulfil her charge without wavering or diminution; and this she will do. If the "gates of hell" cannot prevail against the church of God, she may safely defy all mortal might. The sun might more easily have refused to come forth at the bidding of the Creator, than the church can refuse to do his will in conquering the world for Christ. God speed the day when the divisions of Christendom shall end; when all who profess to be the disciples of Jesus Christ shall seek and find consolation in his one, true, enduring fold; and when the sceptre of God, manifest in the church, shall be extended in benignant power over an obedient and rejoicing world.