But to the end that this great benefit and advantage should not be confined only to those who saw him with their eyes, and heard him with their ears, in the days of his flesh, God was pleased to find out a way to render present to us both the incarnate person of his Son, in a spiritual manner, with all the mysteries of his life and death, and likewise his divine instructions: his person and adorable body (spiritually set forth) in the sacrament of the eucharist; his life and his words in the sacrament of the holy Gospels, if I may be permitted to use that expression. And why may I not use it, taking the word sacrament, in general, for the sign and conveyance of some sacred thing; since nothing is more sacred, and more conducive to salvation, than that which God has deposited and concealed under the visible sign of the evangelical word; and since the holy fathers have made no difficulty to compare these two celestial gifts, which God has bestowed upon his church,

one with the other?

The incomparable author of the book of the "Imitation of Jesus Christ," a person so well versed in the knowledge of salvation, cannot forbear openly declaring the holy passion of his heart toward these two objects. "I perceive," says that holy person, "that there are two things so absolutely necessary for me, that without them this miserable life would be altogether insupportable to me. Shut up as I am in the prison of this body, I cannot but stand in need of food and light. Thou givest me, Lord, thy sacred flesh for the nourishment of my soul; and thy word, to be a lantern unto my feet and a light unto my paths. Should these two things be wanting, I could not possibly live: for thy word is the light of my soul; and thy sacrament, the bread of life."

We shall find no difficulty to fall in with the sentiments of this excellent master of Christian piety, if we consider, that the gospel contains the knowledge of our blessed Saviour and of salvation. But since neither the one nor the other can be fully known, unless we first have some knowledge concerning the corrupt man, and his corruption by means of sin, it may justly be said, that the gospel is a lively representation of those two men, in whom all mankind are included, according to the doctrine of St. Augustine: "All mankind are reducible to two men, the first and the second. All those who are descended from the first, are a part of the first; and all those who are regenerated in the second, belong to the second." "In the case of these two men, the whole Christian faith is

properly comprehended," says the same saint in another place; "of these two men, by one of whom we were sold to be slaves to sin, and by the other of whom we are redeemed from the slavery thereof. By the one we were precipitated into death, by the other we are delivered and made partakers of life; for the former destroyed us in himself, by doing his own will, not that of Him who created him; but the latter has saved us in himself by doing not his own, but the will of Him who sent him.”

These two men then are those whom we ought to study in the gospel: the God-man, who humbled himself for our sakes, the grand object of our faith, our trust, and our love; and the sinful man, whom we carry within ourselves, and who ought to be the subject of our shame, our fear, and our hatred, as being the heir of the iniquity and the pride of Adam.

We cannot open the gospel without casting our eyes upon the delineation of this man of sin, who is the source of all those acts of disobedience which we commit against the law of God. We therein behold two sorts of representations of him, both very lively and visible: the one enigmatical and figurative, the other plain and natural. And since a child of Adam, who intends to dedicate himself to God, ought to begin by knowing himself to be such, and by seriously considering all the vices and all the inclinations to sin which have defaced the image of God in him; he cannot better attain to this knowledge than by contemplating himself in these two different representations.

The first of these, which is figurative, we have in those many different diseases and infirmities, over which Christ vouchsafed to exercise his mercy and his power, in curing those who were afflicted with them. For the holy fathers inform us, that our blessed Saviour conferred his benefits in such a manner upon the sick whom he healed, upon the dead whom he raised, and upon the possessed whom he set free from the devil, that at the same time that by those wonderful effects of his sovereign power he gave evident proofs of his divinity, he likewise plainly showed sinners the different wounds their souls had received by the sin of Adam; the death both of the body and the soul, which is the punishment of that sin, and the deplorable bondage in which we are all born under the dominion of Satan. The power which our blessed Saviour exercised over the bodies of men, was no more than a preceding figure of that power which he was come

to exercise over our souls, by delivering them from the death of sin, and from the tyranny of the devil.

Whoever, therefore, in reading the gospel, is desirous to consider and know what it is we call the old man, man corrupted, a child of Adam, a sinner fallen from that happy state in which he was created; or in other words, whoever is desirous to know himself, he will find his own character in the differently diseased persons mentioned in the gospel. He will behold in the man born blind, and in all those other blind persons there recorded, the blindness and ignorance, with respect to God and our duties, in which we are born; in the paralytic, that inability as to all good into which sin has cast us; in the burning fever of St. Peter's wife's mother, the heat of concu-` piscence which inflames our hearts; in the woman with the bloody issue, the habit of carnal vices; in the deaf and dumb person, the deafness of the heart toward God, and its utter incapacity to confess its own miseries, and to praise its Creator; in the dropsical person, avarice and the eager desire of false riches, the abundance of which does but increase the thirst after them, and cause that swelling of the heart which is the vice of the rich; and so of the rest.

But the second portraiture of the old man, namely, of the vices and corrupt inclinations, which, unless the grace of Christ prevent us very powerfully, do continually reign in our heart, is that which we see in the conduct of the Scribes and Pharisees, in whom the corruption of man's heart appears in its proper nature and in all its violence. We cannot avoid being filled with indignation against them, when we behold their pride, envy, jealousy, avarice, hypocrisy, and vanity; their implacable hatred against him who showed their vices to the world; their blindness and hardness of heart at the sight of our blessed Saviour's miracles; their fondness for superstition; their attempts to make the law of God of none effect; their inhumanity and rage against all those who opposed their designs; and, in a word, all the other vices, and all the corruption which those whited sepulchres concealed under an external show of religion, and an affected exactness in observing some certain customs of the law, and all the false traditions they had superadded to it. But while we abhor the manners of the Pharisees, let us take great care that we do not unreasonably flatter ourselves, as if we did not at all resemble them, at least in some respect. We have all within us the principle from which all these vices proceed. And if

they do not appear in our outward actions, it is perhaps because we have other vices, from which the Pharisees were altogether free. In short, if we have not their inclinations in the very same degree of malice and corruption, we have at least enough of them to endanger our salvation; and perhaps there is scarce any person in the world who is not a Pharisee in some respect, and who has not reason to apprehend that some degree of the leaven of those hypocrites lies latent in his heart. Wo, wo to us," says St. Jerome, "who inherit the vices of the Pharisees!" How hideous therefore soever the representation which the gospel gives us of them may appear, yet all persons may reap some advantage from it, and every one ought to take that admonition of our blessed Saviour as directed to himself: "Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.”

66

Now, as to the portraiture of the second man, Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, the head and pattern of Christians, it is that which all who are honoured with this glorious title ought to study with that care and application which are worthy of him, whose name they actually do, and whose image and resemblance they ought to bear. And in what place of the gospel will they not find him delineated; since the gospel is nothing else but Jesus Christ himself, still living and breathing in his word, still doing the works of his divine omnipotence, and suffering whatever human infirmity can suffer-still teaching on earth the truths of heaven, and forming for that blessed place the church of the elect which sojourns here on earth? Upon which account, St. Augustine scruples not to say, "That we ought to hear the gospel, as if it were our Lord himself still present; and not to say, 'Oh, how happy were they who saw him with their eyes here on earth!' For many of those that saw him, put him to death; and many of those who never saw him, have believed on him."

Nay, we even seem to have a very great advantage above the former. They saw indeed Jesus Christ; they were witnesses of the wonders which he wrought in all places, and of the good which he did to all persons; they heard the truths which proceeded out of his divine mouth, and which he delivered with that force and energy which is peculiar to God alone. But what a counterbalance to all this did they find in the infirmity of his flesh, in his common and ordinary way of life, in the ignominies and humiliations to which he subjected himself; the scandal whereof, followed by that of the cross, was not yet removed by the glory of his resurrection,

C

and by all the wonderful works which confirmed the truth of it in the succeeding ages! But we who now receive this gospel of Jesus Christ, sealed with the blood of Christ himself, confirmed by his resurrection and his glorious ascension, by the mission and visible operations of his Spirit, by the accomplishment of the prophecies and the promises, by the faith of all nations, and by the blood of all the martyrs, who in all parts of the world joyfully laid down their lives for the truth of this divine book: let us, I say, to whom the gospel has been given with all these advantageous circumstances, instead of vainly and unjustly repining at our not having heard it from the mouth of our blessed Saviour, offer up our praises unto him, for that through his favour we were born in an age, wherein it is as great and real a folly not to receive this gospel as the word of God, as it seemed to the eyes of the Gentiles and infidels to be folly to receive it as something divine and as the instrument of salvation.

Let us receive it, then, with reverence and gratitude; let us read it with affection and devotion; let us place our delight in it, and make all that pious use of it which we ought to make of a book written by Jesus Christ. For he it is, let us not make the least doubt of it, who is the true author thereof; and, therefore, let us be very far from entertaining the dangerous and visionary conceits of some certain writers, who have dared to advance this notion: That it is not necessary that an historical book, such as the gospel is, should have been inspired by the Holy Ghost, in order to make it divine and canonical. But let us rather say, with St. Augustine, That "when the apostles and disciples of our blessed Saviour committed to writing what he did and taught, we must by no means say that it was not he who wrote it; since they were his members who composed the whole, without inserting any thing but what their Head himself revealed and dictated to them. For whatever he intended we should read relating to his words and actions, he caused them to write it, as it were, with his own hands."

What comfort and consolation is it to our faith, to have so immovable a foundation as this! What joy to our hope, to be no less assured of the truth and certainty of the promises made in the gospel, than if the incarnate Truth himself delivered them to us now with his own mouth! What assistance is it to our charity, to be assured that we shall find in this adorable book the Mediator, without whom we cannot possibly