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Show i m Jlrch Trelandl T : . . . : . ! X ' Each Soul the Arbiter of Its Own Destiny. ; BY ARCHBISHOP IRELAND. "In the epistle of this Sunday, the . third after Easter, the apostle beseeches beseech-es us to refrain from sin and to do good. And so throughout the entire Scripture we are requested, entreajed, to practice righteousness, to save our souls. Is not this, we may ask, a mystery, mys-tery, that God the Almighty, and Hi ministers in His name, should conde- scend to ask us. to entreat us. to do what is right? What are we but frail creatures of a clay, and what is He but the Infinite, the Omnipotent! Vvhy does He not use His power. If He why does He not compel us to be righteous? Is it not, we may ask, beneath be-neath His dignity and grandeur to be requesting us, begging us to do our duty toward Him, toward our fellow beings, towards ourselves? There is here a mystery: there is here a most practical, significant lesson. It is a mystery that God has made us morally free. So free that we may, if we ma3". if we choose, set at defiance His own law, subvert His own counsels in our regard, be unrighteous when He comamnds us to be righteous, and lead our souls to perdition when it is IJis supreme will that all men ie saved. j "No wonder, we might say, that ; some, not guided by the teachings of j the Holy Church, have been led to so 1 exaggerate the power and the dignity of God as to leave, so to speak, no room to man himsels in the decision for his own salvation. There are creeds made by men which state that God in creating creat-ing us does of his own choice, independently inde-pendently of anything that we would have to say or do, elect so "many of us to eternal glory and sends so many others into perdition, asserting his own power and his own dignity whether in the election of some or the reprobation of others. GOD'S LOVE SUPREME. "The makers of such creeds forget the supreme love of God for men, and the supreme respect which God has for His own work in His own creatures. Through a mysterious dispensation, if you will, but as a fact, God created us free, and has made us the arbiters of our eternal destiny. We shall be judged one day by Him; and some will be'call-ed be'call-ed to Heaven, others will be rejected, but in either case God will be rendering as the apostle says, 'to every man ac- cording to his own works.' This the dignity of the human soul that it is free. And so when by its own choice it enters Heaven it can say 'this great reward is mine.' It ha3 Dassed over the battle ground; it is victorious; a crown belongs to it as a reward to its triumph. "No doubt the soul left to itself could not morally speaking, have overcome over-come all the perils with which it was confronted. It could not without God's elevating grace have reached up into the supernatural regions to which we are called through the merits of Christ. Divine grace is needed. Without grace we do not save our souls; but when grace is given we are allowed to reject it or to correspond with it. "There are two elements in Paul's moral triumph; God's grace and himself; him-self; and so it is with each and every one of us. On the last day it will be seen that two beings are at work, God and the individual soul. God, for His own mysterious purposes, distributes His gracesc here and there as He wills, giving, however, to all a sufficiency, for He wills all men to be saved. So that at the last day every soul will say if I am lost it is through my own fault. SOUL IS FREE. "But, whatever the measure of those graces, so much does God respect the individual will, the freedom of men that the soul may still say of it I will not serve. God having made the soul free, if the soul enters a positive protest pro-test what can God do, unless He destroy de-stroy His own work and enslave what he had declared to be free; but to retire, re-tire, as it were, and abandon the soul to pursue its own course? This is a mystery this freedom of the soul in presence of God's beseechings and God's own graces. But this much is evident, the grandeur of the soul, the dignity of the human being, the sweetness sweet-ness of the reward when It does come. Great as is the reward of the high heavens, the soul' crossing the threh-old threh-old of paradise can say, it is my own individual work; I have earned it; God's grace aiding me, God's grace worked with me and I worked with. God's grace. "This truth of the human freedom of the will and of the personal responsibility responsi-bility of the soul established, we understand under-stand how contrary to God's love and to God's justice are the statements of certain creeds, to which I have already alluded, that God elects of His own simple volition certain souls to glory and drives others back into perdition. There would be there no justice. Why should a soul be punished and punished during the eternity unless the cause of punishment came from itself, unless the fault was the soul's own? And what would mean a reward which had been decreed before any thought of what the soul would be or would do in the use of liberty? And where in such conditions would be that divine goodness, good-ness, that sweetness of mercy of which the Scriptures so frequently assures us, in virtue of which God searches for the erring soul and tenderly invites it back to embraces of His eternal bosom? Therewere no goodness, no greatness if we were to imagine an infinite in-finite God above us distributing rewards re-wards and punishments as it might satisfy His own glory, without any consideration of the individual merit of each and every soul. No wonder Is it that some who take such creeds as the creeds of the Christian church, as the teachings of Christ, would be repelled re-pelled from Christ's gospel. THE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBLE. "No, such creeds are not creeds of God's Holy Church, and they are not the teaching's of Christ's holy gospel The teachings of the gospel and the 1 creed of Christ's church are this: that man is a free agent, and that while God gives him in profusion graces; tie soul decides for itself what shall be tie destinyone des-tinyone of glory or one of punishment i and darkrfess. There is always the I mystery that God from eternity knows ; what happens until the end of time, but ! in His provision the acts of the soul precede the decree of Justice. In this I mystery of God's omniscience, as the 1 divine glance passes down ages, it sees I the action of each soul, its co-operation I with divine grace or its repulsion of that grace, and then as a consequence of man's merits or demerits It sees the degree of predestination marking out the final destiny of each and every soul. Whatever the mystery of the divine di-vine prescence may be this truth remains, re-mains, that God's sentence follows man's personal actions, and whatever the mysteriousness of divine grace this ' truth remains that the ultimate respon- I sibility of correspondence or of refusal : of correspondence rests with the indi-vidua! indi-vidua! soul. ! "This formal freedom of man under- j stood, we see how evident is this other teaching of Christ's Church, that no i one, whatever his sphere of work on earth, whatever his ignorance or the grievousness of his temptations, no one Is lost except through his own fault, except through his disobedience to his own conscience. The problem is often put before us, what is to happen to such a man or to such another, to such a class of human beings or to such another class. It is not necessary that God reveal to us His detailed : I dealings with each and every soul. Iz j I Is enough that He proclaim His justic, i and His love towards all men. The soul will see on the last day the portals ( j Heaven closed to it without being ablu to say 'it is my own fault.' You and C know that salvation comes to u-i through Christ, and i in disobedience 1 to that heavenly light which God ha.s spread over our souls we refuse p. adore Christ os our God and Savior. w should be guilty of rebellion againsc God. DESTINY OF UNBAPTISED. "But there have been millions, to whom through one reason or another, knowledge of Christ was refused. Whan of them St. Paul says: "Those no-having no-having the law are a law to themselves, their consciences bearing witness to them." In other words, man is not responsible re-sponsible for his surroundings ovfi which he had no control. God i jusr. and gooel. No soul is there without-, some light, no heart is there which docs not throb to some measure of goodness, no human being is there without a con- science. Now the human being obeying conscience obeys God so far as he can obey God, and God is just and merc iful. i-ful. "You and I know that Christ established estab-lished his own Church that the Church coming forth from Christ, going down through the ages is the Holy Catholic Church, and if we close our eyes t . the truth of the divinity of that church we are in rebellion against God and against the knowledge which we have received from Him. But if there are those to whom the knowledge which i we have received from Him. But if there are those to whom the knowledge of Christ's Holy Church is impossible, they have their conscience, and if they are faithful to the light so far as given to thern God judges them according to their light and according to their correspondence cor-respondence with it. You and I know-that know-that baptism is the gate to the heaven of supernatural life. But if souls innocent inno-cent from the stains of actual sin die without baptism while they are refused entrance into that supernal region of ; special supernatural happiness which, is given by Christ to his own heirs, we need not believe that they are condemned con-demned to positive punishment. The Church does not teach such doctrine. i A natural happiness is their lot. Always Al-ways and everywhere God is just and ! all-merciful, and all-loving to His i crea tures. j "Salvation is a persona! matter for j each one of us. Two beings are con- 1 cerned when our salvation is men- tioned, God and the individual soul. j God created each soul to be the arbiter j of its own destiny. It will be judged j on its own individual record. Let u.s j not then say, if there are others out- f side of God's Church, if others practice j such manner of life, why cannot I be j as they? We need not condemn others; j we know not their conscience. There is but the Almighty God who can peer . into the conscience of any one and say j whether he is guilty or not. For us. let us leok into our own conscience, and askd what obligation does this con- j science impose upon us. Others I leave . ! to God. I busy myself with myself. I ! am not to sut one day in judgment . j upon all men, only the omniscient can be judge of all consciences; only God j will judge all men. i GOING TO PERDITION WITH f THE CROWD. "Even if others were to close their j eyes and go against their conscience, I , would the.re be much consolation for me to glide down to perdition with the j crowd? How foolish the arguments of men. They will say, I will go with the multitude. Thou wast not created to go with the crowd. This is the misfortune, I may say, of innumerable men. to do what others are doing, whether others are right er wrong. The soul forgets its own dig- nity. It forgets that it was placed by i Almighty God upon earth to do its j duty to Him because it is duty, and not to do merely what others do. i "Let each of us look into his own j conscience, and in the stillness of God's i presence reflect upon the solemn mean- ing of his personal responsibility. Oh. the responsibility of my srul! Just as I decide so shall I be for eternity. Not my relatives, not my friends, not my neighbors, not the whole nation, not ' i all humanity will be questioned on the last day as to whether I am to be with God in heaven or with his enemies in hell. Only one will speak, I myself. Oh, my God. Thou hast made me great when Thou didst put into my hands my 1 own destiny for eternity. But. my God. what fearful responsibility Thou didst lay upon me? I pray Thee, help me by Thy grace to understand this responsibility." |