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Show Zbc Cbutcb and 7ts fflessage to tbc Lepm Sunday, Aug. 21, at St. Mary's cathedral, Cheyenne, Chey-enne, Wyo., Rev. Charles O'Connor delivered the following sermon on the Gospel of the day: "And as he entered into a certain town, there met him ten men that were lepers.'' (Luke svii. 11-l'j.) 11-l'j.) None, perhaps, of the innumerable ills that afflict the human body is more loathsome then leprosy. Death is a climax in the dissolution of the physical organism. It marks a certain stage, but not the end of physical waste, for it is generally after death those symptoms set in, which "denote transformation transforma-tion of substance. But all ihe hideous, repulsive peculiarities of decay, de-cay, that time generates in the inanimate body; those appearances, forms, emanations and even life productions, that tax, offend and at times overpower, the senses, take hold of and torture the poor leper even during life, making of him a living corpse, effacing those shades of grace and beauty, in whose possession small minds centre life's charm and worth. The 1 eprous eye, once beautiful and bright, is now dim and unattractive, transformed into ugliness ugli-ness itself by contemplation of misery: the at one time gauging, penetrating, deductive mind is circumscribed cir-cumscribed in its activity to meditation upon the unstableness of things, life's uncertainty and the genuine beauty of death for the hours and moments of agony when God's will is done and His ways run by men are not, indeed, a bridge of sighs, but an arch of triumph and glory, too precious, too r 1 : ' i I .... , ., - . ,':'K. i','; &xl ll'-r ' KEV. CHARLES O'CONNOR. grand, too sublime to be called life's twilight with its accompaniment of staidness, thought and apprehension, ap-prehension, but the joy-going down of eternity. More than any other, life which so much promises prom-ises and gives so'little, betrays the leper and leaves him alone with his miseries aud his blasted hopes. Life fades from his eyes, hojic in the present withers in his dried heart, ambition - is frustrated, love proves selfish, friendship plays false, all is lost; yes, all is lost, save, perhaps, God; aud happy is that child of ill fortune if in his sea of trouble he turns to God and gays with Job: "The Lord gave, the Lord took away; blessed be the name of the Lord." In our limited acquaintance with the nature and history of this much-to-be-dreaded malady we are pleasingly impressed with its rapid disappearance. But the dismal cloud hangs still over some lands, the illness poisons the breezes of certain valleys, and unlike the priest of the gospel witnessing to its cure, the Catholic priest today, as in the past, bears testimony to its existence, and ministers to its wants. Today we scce another Damien beating his way across the burning plains of Columbia, beggiifg alms from door to door, springing the miseries of Agua de Dios and San Martin upon wondering audiences audi-ences and pleading the cause of the most aflicted members of the great brotherhood of humanity. But the monk and the sister who, year after year, bid good-bye to Sunny Italy and betake themselves to ihe Columbian valley of death, to till the place of their fallen brethren, perform even more meritorious meritor-ious and heroic deeds. Day and night in turn do they watch over the leper with death emanating from his every pore; they minister to his wants, they dress his body which is one sore; when overcome at last by fatigue and vigil it. is not rare to see them rest their weary head upon his pallet; they comfort him; they -win his undivided affections by patience and kindness; they brave him against his misery by nice words about God, all beautiful, all good, and his home of many mansions; fhey depict in such glowing colors his own mansion iivthat home with ceiling of gold and walls of jasper that th poor leper forgets himself and his hideous scabs, thinks ojily of , God and providence provi-dence and longs to be with Jesus and the angels They cultivate resignation and hope and teach him to die Christian-like by prayer and exhortation and in a few years by the example of their own sainted death. Time and time again one's patience is put to a lest by the example of ' Catholics, who more charlatan than Catholic, discourse for ever and a day upon the merits of other creeds and institution. institu-tion. No good Catholic deplores their existence or usefulness. The world cannot dispense with any organization, whoso beneficence is as broad as charity and as unprejudiced as that of God, whose sun sliincs for all. But Catholics who lavish praise upon other religious bodies and forget their own church, shirk a duty and do not understand men. The followers of other creeds know their own church better than we, and will not overlook self-praise self-praise when occasion offers, for men arc moulded rather much after the type of a Salvation Army officer who recently said of himself: "Well, if I am not a saint, there ain't one in heaven' Who constantly lauds other creeds with which he comes much in contact and speaks disparagingly of his own; knows neither ihe church lie belongs to, nor the one he blindly admires. A venerable institution, whose duration bespeaks divine origin; victorious over all that is a power for evil; triumphant in moments when ihe Very air resounded with voices crying for her destruction as loudly as the Jewish rabble clamoured for the death of Jesus Christ, her head and support; an institution, institu-tion, the destroyer, the mother and the regulator of empires, who sat in the Grecian schools to learn and assimilate and improve upon the wise maxims of philosophers; is there in such an-institution nothing laudable, nothing admirable I An institution that has beheld armies go, see and conquer, that has built and rests upon the ruins of nations, the emblem of power; an institution, whose history is the work of the spirit renovating the. world's face; the venerable mother who can sit today 'midst the rlcbtrjs of tim'e and-, speak to her ' . 'children, of prc-Girigtlan customs and teachings with the authority of an eye witness and narrate her own work in -effecting the deepest changes ever wrought in the religious iraaxims of men tor no more radical sectarian lives in history than Jesus Christ, the central figure in all religion and all sectarianism sec-tarianism an institution that has had to deaWith the wandering savage from Greenland to Sandy Point, from the land of the orange blossoms to those shores, which bathe in the cool waters of the Yellow-sea; Yellow-sea; an institution, whose children read by every kind of light from the torch to the incandescent, taught the forest toiler to improve upon the ratt and the arrow and stand today behind the Mausser and man the ironclad; is there in such an institution institu-tion nothing laudable, nothing admirable? The work of the Catholic church today for 1 he lepers of Mandalay, Moloki and Columbia is uli-important, uli-important, as illustrating her universally beneficent j character; as showing that the church is Catholic not only in regard to time, race and dogma, but especially in regard to the needs of men. The good priest, who during the bubonic epidemic epi-demic in Portugal-a few years ago, took" upon Ins shoulders the body of a plague-stricken man abandoned aban-doned by his plague-scared wife and children, and gave it Christian burial, his charity costing him his life; the bishop in Chicago last winter who rushed into the roaring flames of the Iroquois to comfort his dying co-religionists; the priest, who. overcome by foul odor, was conveyed four times in succession from ihe bed of a dying leper, whose confession he was receiving; the Catholic priest, who knowingly and willingly enters the homes of contagion and death to console the dying, with every probability that his action means certain death for himselt, are imperceptible links in an unbroken chain of Catholic charities; minor illustrations of the charitable spirit, universal as disease and want and trouble ijpd helplessness infused into the church by ihe Man of Sorrows, who healed 'the lepers, fed the hungry, comforted the anTicted and died, victim of sin, upon the gibbet of infamy for love of men. Christ is charity itself,, hence the Catholic church more than any other may call Him her own aud herself Christ's spouse. Charity is the essence of Providence: it begot creation and redemption and it nourishes God's infinite patience towards men. Charity begot the man Christ and so high above the ordinary stands his life in point of charity and so alone that it would seem rather a dream than a reality of the most sublime philanthropy. The idea may seem narrow, yet acquaintance with the lives of "those who best represent the spirit of other creeds, reveals absence in them of certain virtues, or better, degrees of virtue, certain power, and qualifications indispensable in who would be a saint of our fold. Though 'another church might perhaps be able, none has produced men Christlike Christ-like as the least of our saints. Since men today value any religious institution by the extent to which it is a power in beneficent deeds, I shall still dwell upon the' charitable character char-acter of the church, to say at once that as no other church claiming Christ as her head, has so effectively effect-ively made Jesus live, move, speak and operate in her members; so in like manner no other church has come so close to practical charity .of Him, whose kind deeds alone prompted his triumphant reception at the gates of Jerusalem. The Catholic church has ever identified hcrsek with all movements conducive to an increase of human happiness; she went forth to meet the wild inhabitant of the woods, she made herself all things to him, she got to love him more than herself and communicated to him the advantages and blessings of more enlightened humanity with sweetness and patience like that of the Master instructing they fishermen of Galilee. . . And were men's wants trebled, the church would treble her energies to meet them. In her. Catholicity, Catholi-city, inclusiveness, expaiisivcness, she will continue hoi- mission to heathendom, her .work for God's kingdom and the welfare of humanity. And if in the degeneracy of tho races any other evil more loathsome than leprosy 'shall come to afflict men, the church will be there in her members to labor and to die for the comfort and salvation of the unhappy un-happy victims. ; Time 'and talent failing mo to do full justice to this feature of our church's life, 1 would close remarking re-marking that her Catholic critics are at times but little, big men. ' n ' Youth and sometimes young Heads on old shoulders indulge, in profanity, because to them it seems smart, although that pleasure of fools is purchased at the expense of God Almighty. Wishing to arrive prematurely to manhood, they sow during youth the seed of vices, which need but time to assume gigantic proportions. What these do is to proclaim from the turrets and the hilltops their own lack of sense, for profanity is not greatness, great-ness, but indicates a mean, paltry disposition, and vicious manhood is largely fraudful and always despicable. Of the same type he is, who exaggerates the shortcomings of his church, backbites and slanders his mother, in the presence of non-Catholics, to whom lack of manhood makes him cater. How lit'.ie he has in common with those beautiful beauti-ful characters, who, though perhaps none too practically practi-cally religious, yet realizing that enough arc the offenses of human frailty without adding the wanton sins of wilflul malice, will even expose their body to defend the fair name of their church and priesthood. Her members being human, the church is not perfect; ay, one of tho worst palpable evidences of her divinity lies in the fact that being governed by men, she has not, long, ago. landed in destruction. He realizes this; who . realizes that he is yet a Catholic in spite of himself. No, she is not. perfect; when she attains perfection perfec-tion her mission may cease. But the ablest minds are today engaged in entering her fold; ministers of the gospel, who renounce re-nounce comfort and ease for the truth, people of every age, every sex and every rank, who in the purity of their lives abandon an easier code "of morals to accept the Caiholic, compensate abund-antlv abund-antlv for a few desertions no one regrets. When the number and importance of our acquisitions acquisi-tions arouse an interest in the church which often ends in conversion, shall we her children" only sec and speak of her. faults. ' Had a Newman and a Manning and a Brownson and a Ripon and all that noble host of glorious acquisitions stopped to observe only her shortcomings ami her mistakes, they never would have cast in their lot with us. Oh, what would the infidel -Proudhon think of those Catholic critics when he wrote: "Do you believe in God? ' If you do, theu you arc a Christian, a Catholic. If you do not, dare to avow it; for then it will not only be to the church that you declare war, but to the faith of the whole human' race. Between these two alternatives there is room for nothing except ignorance and insincerity." insin-cerity." . "I shc.ild never have dispuled the authority of tho church did I admit the supernatural; I should have bowed down before a creed -so antique, the product of the most learned and prolonged elaboration, elabora-tion, of which the human; mind has given us an example." ex-ample." "Oh! Christianity is sublime sublime in the majesty of its dogma and the chain of its inductions. induc-tions. A more elevated idea, a vaster system,was never organized amongst men, and I here solemn vow that if. the church succeeds in overthrowing the system of argument (anti-Theistical) which I oppose to her, I will abjure my philosophy and die . in her bosom." : ' . |