Eucharistic Conferences

by John A. Elbert, S.M.

1. The Holy Eucharist, the Center of Catholic Worship
2. The Blessed Sacrament: Remedy for All Evils
3. First Reason for Institution of the Blessed Sacrament
4. Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, Our Mediator
5. The Holy Eucharist, Pledge of Final Perseverance

1. THE HOLY EUCHARIST, THE CENTER OF CATHOLIC WORSHIP

Amid the details of a Christian life we are perhaps in danger of losing sight of the essential points of Catholic doctrine; amid many and novel practices of devotion we may sometimes forget and neglect the source and center of all devotion, Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. "In the whole universe," says Bossuet, "there is nothing greater than Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ there is nothing greater than His Sacrifice." In the Holy Eucharist we have both Jesus Christ Himself and His Sacrifice; we have the Son of God and the Son of Man. Faith proclaims that upon every Catholic altar there is present the True Body and True Blood of Jesus Christ, His Soul and Divinity.

But can such a Presence of God ever be a merely passive thing? What potentialities are concealed beneath the fragile forms of that Bread? All the riches and power of the Godhead! The very blood of Christ is present upon the altar, any single drop of which, united as it is to the Divinity, outweighs in value all the marvelous treasures of earth, all the products and achievements of the human race, all the knowledge and love and power of the Angels and Saints.

Can we conceive that the Divine Power, though contracted within the span of a wheaten garment, should ever remain inactive? the creative power of God, the redeeming power of Jesus Christ, the sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost?

We know that, during His mortal life, wherever Jesus was present, there was the very heart and center of spiritual power and activity. His presence in the womb of the most Blessed Mother made her the greatest of God's creatures; his thirty-three years' sojourn amid the plains of Judea and the hills of Galilee made of that spot on earth a sanctified ground for all times, the one Holy Land of all the world.

At the touch of His body, men were healed of sin and disease, the dead were restored to life. Even the touch of His garment freed the sick from their infirmities, while His sufferings and death on the Cross were a superabundant atonement for the sins of the world.

And we have no less upon our altars than this same Jesus Christ, who dwelt in the holy house of Nazareth, who walked the highways of Judea and Galilee, who drained the chalice of suffering and who trod the slope of Calvary, dying upon its summit. What an untapped mine of riches does the Church and every individual possess in the Holy Eucharist, what an unsounded depth of heavenly power and activity!

It is, then, to the Holy Eucharist that we must look for the manifestation of God's work both for the life of the Church and for the supernatural life of the individual. For "through Him and with Him and in Him" God does all things; and if we would behold the power of God on earth we must repair to the silent tabernacle where the Son of God dwells amid His own, unrecognized by those who are not of God.

Guides of Catholic Devotion

In his well known work, The Life of Christ, Papini makes the following statement: "The Sermon on the Mount is the greatest proof of the right of man to exist in the infinite universe. It is our sufficient justification, the patent of our soul's worthiness, the pledge that we can lift ourselves above ourselves to be more than men" (p. 85).

There is a false note in this magnificent proclamation of "man's right to exist in the infinite universe," a twisting of effect into cause, an inversion of right order, a laying hold of details to the neglect of essentials. There is, in fact, an incompleteness in Papini's view which stamps it as a fundamentally Protestant conception. Whatever "right" man has to be an harmonious part of the great universe comes from the fact that the Son of God has become a member of the human family, and in so doing has restored man to the friendship of the Creator. He repaired the disorder which sin introduced into the world, by his Incarnation and Redemption, not by his Sermon on the Mount, nor by any other words spoken by Him and recorded in the sacred texts.

And so the only sufficient reason why we "can lift ourselves above ourselves and become more than men", is the Redemption of Christ on the Cross, which has given us our adoption into the family of God, by which we become brothers of Jesus Christ, He the first-born among many brethren and we sons and co-heirs with Him, whereby we can also cry, "Abba, Father".

Starting thus from an inadequate conception of Catholic teaching the great Italian writer necessarily falls short in his conclusion. "If an angel," he says, "come down to us from the world above, should ask us what our most precious possession is, the master-work of the Spirit at the height of its power, we would not show him the great wonderful, oiled machines of which we foolishly boast, although they are but matter in the service of material and superfluous needs; but we would offer him the Sermon on the Mount, and afterward, only afterward, a few hundred pages taken from the poets of all the peoples. But the sermon would always be the one refulgent diamond dimming with the clear splendor of its pure light the colored poverty of emeralds and sapphires."

Again, this ringing eulogy of the Sermon on the Mount rings true only if we limit arbitrarily the marvelous works of Jesus Christ to the three years of His teaching, a teaching which we possess only incompletely, indeed we may even say, in the merest fragments of His supernatural doctrines. Such has never been the attitude of the Catholic Church on the matter of Christian dogma, practice and devotion; in fact it is on this viewpoint that she stands unshakably opposed to every form of Protestantism. A teaching, however sublime, is not, and cannot be, the greatest achievement in human history.

Here we may ask: What can be greater than the very words of the Son of God spoken on the Mount of the Beatitudes for our salvation? We have already suggested the answer. He who spoke these words, He, in the first moment of His Incarnation, when as yet unborn He dwelt among us in the womb of His Virgin Mother, before ever He uttered a word for human ears to hear and human pen to record, He, when He hung upon the wood of the Cross for our redemption, finally He, the selfsame, as He dwells, silent and alone, in the tabernacle, watching through that prison of love the mad rush and swirl of humanity, tossed about between the enigma of birth and the greater enigma of death, all through the centuries. For the Incarnation and Redemption, though single events in human history and therefore subject to the limitations of time and space, are yet ever with us, being completed and perfected (evolved, if you will) in the Eucharist. And so, if an angel, come down from the world above, should ask us what our most precious possession is, our answer would come clearly and unmistakably: The Holy Eucharist, which is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Let us now turn to other guides. In order to hold to the right path of true devotion we have received an infallible guide. To Peter and his successors alone has been given the commission to "feed my lambs, feed my sheep". And more specifically to the same Apostle: "confirm thy brethren". This has ever been the function of the divinely-appointed teachers in the Catholic Church. Without these our faith and practices of devotion would be tossed about by every wind of human opinion, as is the faith of non-Catholics; ours is attached to and firmly established on the Rock. Nor does this attitude derogate from the dignity and greatness of Christ–His function was to die for us, He is primarily the Savior and Redeemer: to His Apostles He confided the mission of teaching and preaching.

All other guides are more or less fallible. This is true particularly of those who, having spent a great part of their lives in error, far from the fold of Peter, are brought back mercifully to see the light by the power of God's grace. Such converts are often "converted in the wrong way," in a way perhaps sufficient for them individually, but not establishing thereby a general rule for others to follow, still less marking out a path for believers. Such men have often but a partial view of Catholic belief and practice and cannot, therefore, be considered on the same level as those who have never gone astray. Still less should we ever quote them in the same breath as the inspired utterances of the legitimately established successors of the Apostles and rulers of the Church.

Pope Leo XIII in his great Encyclical On the Condition of the Working Classes, speaking of the effect of the doctrine of Christ on the human race, strikes the sure and steady Catholic note when he says: "When the human race by the light of the gospel message came to know the grand mystery of the Incarnation of the Word and the Redemption of man, at once the life of Jesus Christ God and Man pervaded every race and nation and penetrated them with His faith, His precepts and His laws."

It is, therefore, not this or that particular teaching of Christ which represents the glory and salvation of mankind, but the fact of the Incarnation itself and the fact of the Redemption. But these facts, stupendous as they are, make their appeal in the first place to the mind, and they suppose for their comprehension, so far as this is given to man, a mind endowed and gifted with superior talents. For who can ever suspect the marvel of a God-made-man, or of the Son of God dying on the Cross to expiate the sins of an ungrateful people? Who could even begin to understand the mere outward meaning of the sublime doctrine taught by Christ on the Mount of the Beatitudes, much less fathom its hidden spiritual depth and power, save by the grace of Him who redeemed us and raised us to the level of Himself, so that we become by adoption and grace what He is by nature?

Even with the grace obtained for us on Calvary we most often remain blind to the wonder and power of Christ's doctrine, either for lack of the prerequisite intelligence or often for lack of reflection on the mysteries of His holy teaching.

Has God, then, left the majority of men in ignorance of the beneficent influence of Christ on the human race? How does the life of Jesus Christ in the words of Pope Leo XIII "pervade every race and nation and impenetrate them with Himself"? That which in the domain of devotion parallels the Incarnation, that which to the mind of every believer is the greatest achievement of human history is another fact: the presence of Christ among us throughout all ages–not only the doctrine and words of Christ but His very flesh and blood commingling with the men and women of all ages and transforming them lovingly yet mightily into Himself–there we have the greatest achievement of the greatest of the children of men, an achievement which has not been and which cannot be surpassed.

What, therefore, the Incarnation is for the mind, that the Blessed Sacrament is for the heart; and just as the Incarnation is the key that unlocks the sealed mysteries of the Christian teaching and solves the difficulties that beset the restless, wandering minds of men, so the Blessed Sacrament calms the tempests of the heart and sheds the beneficent rays of its love throughout the domain of practical religion and devotion. In brief, we say it is the center of Catholic worship, just as the Incarnation is the cornerstone of Catholic dogma.

Here again we can appeal not to the opinions of self-constituted prophets, but to another of that line of supreme teachers to whom the God-man has confined His own office and power of imparting light and counsel. When the saintly Pontiff Pius X, looking round upon a world gone astray from the teachings of Christ, would bring men back to the purity of His doctrine and to the nobility of His example, when, in short, he would "restore all things in Christ", what remedy did he propose for such a gigantic task? Not the learning of the Schools, not the multiplication of even the sacred text or a part of it, but the very Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion, to be given to men and women in every state of life, yea, to the little children whom the Master would have come to His embrace. Again Leo XIII, great intellectual though he was, likewise points unerringly to the source whence salvation flows both for the Church at large and for every one of her members. The great Pontiff says: "The present afflictions of the Church are greater and the persecutions more dangerous than those of previous times. Our Lord came to the aid of each great tribulation with a special devotion. The devotion which God now sends to succor his Church is devotion to the most Holy Eucharist. It is the highest of all devotions."

Following humbly in the path traced out for us by the supreme Pontiffs and guided by the Angel of the Schools, the great St. Thomas Aquinas, we may enter upon a few considerations touching the presence of our Lord in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

The Place of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church

Three great mysteries are at the basis of all religion: a mystery of love in creation, a mystery of iniquity in the fall, and a mystery of reparation and redemption, which is at the same time the beginning of glory and triumph. God has strewn the visible and invisible world with the marvels of his power and wisdom. But of them all He has made an abridgement and a remembrance. In the exultant words of the Psalmist: "memoriam fecit mirabilium suorum . . . escam dedit timentibus se" (He has made a memorial of his marvelous works. . . He has given a food to them that fear Him). And the words of the Royal Seer find their fulfillment in the stupendous utterance of Jesus Christ: "I am the living bread which came down from heaven".

The Holy Eucharist is, then, a remembrance and a resume of the entire Divine plan. It continues and completes the mystery of love in transubstantiation; as the Sacrifice of the New Law it carries on the work of reparation for the mystery of sin and iniquity; it is the herald of the final triumph: "He that eateth this bread shall live forever."

What Christ and His Sacrifice were to the human race during thirty-three years, that the Church and the Eucharist will continue to be to the end of time. The Church without the Eucharist is, therefore, inconceivable to a true Christian: it would be the same as the life of Christ without Calvary.

Every Christian is another Christ: "Christianus alter Christus". The life of Jesus Christ must be reproduced in Him just as it is in the life of the Church; and from the Eucharistic Sacrifice, as once from the Cross, must flow into the individual soul the grace of eternal salvation. "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you shall not have life in you."

The Eucharist and the Redemption

St. Bonaventure tells us that Christ would have remained upon the Cross for our salvation until the end of the world if such had been the will of the Father. Not indeed that the life and death of the Redeemer were insufficient, though accomplished within a short space of time and restricted to a particular place, but that we, individually, might be witnesses of His love and sacrifice.

But the wisdom of Jesus found a means of attaining the same end in a manner which would draw our love just as efficaciously to Himself and be, at once, a sufficient test of our faith in Him. And for this purpose He instituted the Holy Eucharist, as the perpetual Sacrifice of the New Law in which Christ is immolated anew, without ceasing, for all times and in all places. There He is able to intercede for us unto the end of the world as powerfully as when He hung upon the Cross. There He can apply to every individual soul the merits of His Sacrifice and give to each one the same opportunity to declare His faith, as He gave to those who stood on the summit of Calvary. For not all generations could gather round the sacred hill of the Bloody Sacrifice, yet every man who would be saved might have an equal faith which will confess the Savior before men amid His shame, lowliness and complete abasement, even as did the good thief, the Roman centurion and the remnants of the Master's scattered flock. Every man must drink the chalice which He has drunk.

So is the work of Christ continued in the Eucharist, not indeed that He may merit more, but that we may individually receive of His merits. In the words of M. de Condren: "The Sacrifice of the Cross merits everything but applies nothing, and the Sacrifice of the Mass merits nothing but applies everything."We say, therefore, that the Mass is the Sacrifice of the Cross put within the reach of every soul throughout all times and in every place. It is a reproduction and completion of the mysteries of the life and death of Christ; not a mere portrayal of past events, but a real and actual repetition and extension of the wondrous events begun more than 1900 years ago.

The Gospel, which is the word of Jesus Christ, is read and announced in the Mass, but the Gospel is only a part of the Mass, just as the preaching of Jesus was only a part of His life on earth and not the greater nor the most important part. This consideration shows us the reason for the truly Catholic attitude on the important doctrine of the Holy Eucharist and, in particular, her teaching with regard to the Sacrifice of the Mass.

The question why the "application" of the merits of the Cross was not made once and for all, is a question of fact and has been the subject of one of the fundamental differences between Catholic and Protestant belief. If the will of God is such, then there is no arguing the matter; controversy is not the aim of the present treatise. We can, however, see some of the far-reaching conclusions which result from our belief and note, in particular, the individual stamp which it puts upon the work of salvation in the Catholic Church. That work on the part of Christ is divine but we are human, and we are saved in a human manner, that is to say, in a manner conformable to and adapted to our own nature. We are saved, not, as it were, in a lump, but individually, all through the centuries, just as if Christ died anew for every soul and paid the full price of His Precious Blood for every human being that is born into the world.

From such a point of view the Holy Eucharist takes on a new and startling importance both in the life of the Church and in the life of every Christian. For though other Sacraments are channels of grace and means of salvation, in this Holy Sacrament we have the Author of them all, the source and fountain-head of grace and the gate of eternal life.

We may go further and assert with St. Hilary that there can be no true Christianity without faith in the Holy Eucharist and, moreover, a faith which goes to a Real Presence. Only those deny the Eucharist, who deny the Divinity of Christ. Some there are who still pretend to hold to the Divinity of Jesus Christ without a belief in his Real Presence on our altars; but the hard, inescapable facts of history are more and more conclusively proving day by day the uselessness of such an empty claim. Those who would ruthlessly cut away this most consoling of the Church's doctrines have a false conception of the Incarnation itself; they do not hold it in its full meaning. By the Incarnation the Son of God united Himself to human nature; by the Eucharist, in the Holy Communion, He unites Himself to each individual recipient and makes him a partaker of the benefits bestowed by the Incarnation, Redemption, and Divine Adoption. In other words, the Holy Eucharist is the Incarnation individualized in every one who eats the flesh of the Son of Man and drinks His blood; for He is the Vine, we are the branches.

The Eucharist, the Reproduction and Completion of the "Mystery Which Is Christ"

The Eucharist is, therefore, the completion of the divine mysteries, the final chapter in the relations which God has with man on earth. As such it renews and makes abiding the entire life of Jesus Christ from His Incarnation to His Death on the Cross.

This fact constitutes the greatness of the Sacrifice of the Mass and of everything connected with it. "How great is the dignity of a priest," says St. Augustine, "in whose hands Christ again becomes man." Nor do the revered doctors of the Church consider the Eucharist, whether in its form of Sacrifice or as Holy Communion, as exercising the power of God in a lesser degree than the greatest mysteries of our holy faith. Thus St. Bonaventure speaking on this subject says: "God appears to do no less a thing when He deigns daily to descend from heaven upon our altars than He did when He came down from heaven and took upon himself our human nature." Bold words indeed, but they express perfectly the unvarying belief of the Church. And St. Jerome voices the same sentiment when he assures us that "the priest calls Christ into being by his consecrated lips". Everywhere and for all times the nativity of Christ is renewed unto each generation. He comes unto His own, poor and lowly; He is received by the simple and humble of heart and rejected by the great ones of His own world. As of old, the heavenly choirs herald His advent, even though only the voice of God's representative bitters in subdued tone the "Gloria in excelsis".

The outstanding character of our Lord's human life was a profound humility. This, too, we find reproduced and perfected in His Eucharistic life. The Apostle could say of Him in amazement: "He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant . . ." and thereupon adds: " Wherefore God hath exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name."

How much more profoundly does Jesus humble Himself in the Holy Eucharist! Stripped of even His human form, He becomes Bread for the spiritual nourishment of His creatures. St. Bernard expresses this in his usual pithy manner when he exclaims: "usque ad carnem, usque ad crucem, usque ad panem" (even to flesh, to the cross, to bread). And then drawing the same conclusion as St. Paul we can add: "wherefore God hath exalted Him"; but who can measure the exaltation commensurate with such an abasement? The Incarnation, the Redemption and the Eucharist, the Crib, the Cross and the Altar, these wondrous stages in the humiliation of the Son of God have been mercifully revealed to us; we need an eternity to witness the stages in His glory and ultimate triumph.

Perhaps more than His Incarnation and life on earth, the Holy Eucharist is the renewal of Christ's death. "For as often as you shall eat this bread, you shall show the death of the Lord until He come." This aspect of the Sacrament of the Altar has never been lost sight of in the Church. Thus we read in the Secret Prayer of the ninth Sunday after Pentecost: "As often as the remembrance of this victim is celebrated, so often is the work of our redemption carried on." In the mind of the Church this is an ever-recurring work. When we were yet unborn He died for us; when we could not yet suffer He suffered in our stead. But now in every Sacrifice of the Mass, to each and every believer, the same question is put as of old to the Apostles: "can you drink the chalice which I shall drink?" And when we eat His flesh and drink His blood we unite ourselves to His death on the cross. When our sufferings could not yet merit, He merited by His sufferings . . . now, united to Him in the Holy Communion our slight sufferings fill up the measure of Christ's sufferings in our behalf.

Thus does the Eucharist become for the Church and for every one of her children the great memorial of Jesus Christ, recalling every part of His life on earth, but a memorial withal, which really reproduces and continues unto the end of time the work of our salvation, applying in the individual what was once accomplished in the race.

2. THE BLESSED SACRAMENT: REMEDY FOR ALL EVILS

The Blessed Sacrament holds a central and exalted position in the spiritual life of the Church and of each of its members. The position has been given to it by Christ Himself who, in so acting, was carrying out the will of His Father. Now the spiritual life of the Church is a reproduction of the very life of Christ on earth, she being His Mystical Body, the extension of His Sacred Personality thrown across the centuries of the Christian era. Hence, just as the immolation of the Body and Blood of Christ on the cross is the central and essential fact of His life on earth, so too is the Holy Eucharist the central fact in the life of the Church and of the individual soul.

This unequivocal position which the Blessed Sacrament holds by the command and institution of Christ has been reaffirmed at all times by his representatives on earth, the supreme rulers of the Catholic Church. Moreover the greatest lights of the Church, her saints and doctors, have all with one accord impressed the learning of their minds and the love of their hearts into the service of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. For our particular spiritual consolation God raised up in His Church a mighty mind, St. Thomas Aquinas, endowed with all the wisdom of Christian and pagan antiquity, who turned the treasures of his great intellect to the work of stating in the clearest and simplest language all the beliefs, hopes and love of the Christian world with regard to the real presence of Christ in His Sacrament of Love."With a mind singularly honest, calm and profound, the Angelic Doctor brought to the defense of this truth, a beautiful soul, purified from earthly passions and a fit instrument for the operation of God's Holy Spirit."¹ Living in an age when men breathed and walked in an atmosphere of faith, this great saint views all things in God and sets only God's omnipotence as the limits of the wonders which faith beholds in the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar. From him we have "the boldest, the simplest, the most intelligible idea of the great doctrine."²

It is not, however, in the intellectual aspect that we wish to follow this great Doctor of the Holy Eucharist, but rather in the devotional outpourings of the heart of a saint. It is not for us to soar aloft in the transcendent flights of his unclouded genius, but in the humble scrutiny of the intuitions of the poet-lover when he composed his devotional treatise on the Eucharist and sang, for the first time, the matchless strains of the now well-known Eucharistic hymns. In those two sources we find the masterful welding of true doctrine, with the consuming fire of heartfelt devotion. From those two sources we can draw light and warmth to enkindle in our hearts something of the flame which burned in the heart of this great lover of the Holy Eucharist. Under the guidance of such an ardent lover of the great mystery of faith, we may consider with confidence this masterpiece of God's love for men and endeavor to understand something of its efficacy and power, in order to draw thence the remedy for all the ills with which we are burdened. For Christ in the Holy Sacrament not only hears us, He also cures us. We can, therefore, in the words of the Book of Proverbs, "treat our cause with a friend and discover not the secret to a stranger"; and we can heed the loving invitation that comes to us out of the stillness of the tabernacle: "Come eat my bread and drink the wine which I have mingled for you " (Prov. 25:9).

St. Thomas in his treatise on the Blessed Sacrament finds three outstanding reasons for the institution of this great Sacrament. These three reasons have their source in the triple character of this marvelous sacrament. For the Holy Eucharist is, in the first place, the great memorial of Christ "Do this in commemoration of Me," He says at the Last Supper, the night before He died. He wants to be remembered among the children of men. But the Holy Eucharist is also the Sacrifice of the New Law–"This is my body which shall be delivered for you . . . this is my blood of the New Testament, which shall be shed for the remission of sins."Finally, it is likewise the food of our souls–"Take and eat" and, "Drink ye all of this". . . He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood bath everlasting life and I will raise him up in the last day" . . . "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you shall not have life in you."

From this we can see that the Blessed Sacrament is the divine remedy for the three great evils that have ever afflicted mankind from the time of its fall and which have clung to the human race like a blight, up the time of the coming of Christ. Forgetfulness of God, concupiscence, and death, these are the scourges that sin has brought into the world. They afflict man in his mind, his heart and his body; they are those perennial sources of new sin and corruption, the consequences of which make him hateful even in his own eyes. But against all of these evils we now have a sovereign remedy, nothing less than the Body and Blood of Christ in its triple form as a permanent Sacrament ever with us, as the Sacrifice of the Mass offered for our transgressions, and as the Holy Communion, serving for the food and medicine of our souls.

The first evil, therefore, against which the Blessed Sacrament is directed is forgetfulness of God. Of the three, it is the one that apparently makes the least impression on our minds, though it is the greatest of them all, grievous in itself and most grievous in its consequences. It is spiritual suicide, the cutting oneself off deliberately from the source whence alone hope of salvation can reach us. Forgetfulness of God, being the worst of all evils, comes as the punishment for the worst of all sins; for the beginning of the pride of man is to fall off from God, the Wise Man tells us; and the whole history of the world before the time of Christ is a sad but convincing comment on that text. We need not look to the pagan peoples for its confirmation: the story of the Old Testament, the history of the Chosen Nation, shows us how unbelievably forgetful of God, man can become, when left to his own resources. Although God walked in the midst of His people directing them, watching over them and confounding their enemies by His miraculous power, yet were His benefits forgotten within a generation. The Law of the Most High was inscribed on tables of imperishable stone, yet this Law was almost immediately lost sight of and they fell down before dumb idols in full view of the Mountain of God. Good men were inspired with fear at the sight of such forgetfulness and King David speaks for them, as he cries aloud: "Save me, O Lord, for there is now no saint: Truths are decayed from among the children of men."

But since the time of Christ the remembrance of God has never entirely perished from the earth. Has, therefore, human nature changed since the days of Jewish infidelity and crass forgetfulness? No! we have the same fallen and corrupt nature inherited from our first parents. Or are we, perhaps, individually better than those who have lived under the Old Dispensation? We cannot truthfully make such an assertion; for there is within us that same perverse tendency to forgetfulness of God and forgetfulness of His benefits and graces. Our own experience teaches us this unmistakably and we have too the witness of great saints to the same effect. Thus St. Augustine assures us that no sin has been committed by another of which we ourselves may not become guilty. And the gentle Philip of Neri was accustomed to address our Lord thus at the beginning of each day: "Beware, O Lord, lest today Philip betray Thee".

If neither by nature nor by our own individual superiority we surpass the people of the Old Law in grateful remembrance, why then has the face of the earth been renewed, so that the remembrance of the true God remains constantly with the human race, in spite even of the very efforts of perverted minds to blot it out of human life and history? The reason is not far to seek. We have a sovereign remedy for this greatest of all evils. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has left us a remembrance of Himself, a gift which keeps His memory and the knowledge of the Father which He has brought, constantly alive among all nations and in the hearts of individuals. For not only did He give to His Apostles His Flesh to eat and His Blood to drink, but He instituted a permanent sacrament, by which He could abide with us forever. Hence His life on earth was not merely a transient visit but the beginning of His continued abiding among us. "And the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us". These words find their extension and completion in that equally clear utterance at the Last Supper: "Do this in commemoration of Me."

The first reason, then, for the institution of the adorable Sacrament of the Altar is, that it keeps alive in our hearts the thought and the remembrance of God . . . it is our Emmanuel, God with us, not by an occasional intermittent visit, as was the case under the Old Dispensation, but by a constant, abiding and continuous presence of God in our midst, lest we forget Him. Moreover, this constant remembrance of God will remain with us forever, so that never again can the human race be in utter loneliness, nor ever again in complete forgetfulness of God.

Such is, therefore, the first reason for the institution of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. But the wayward heart of man is heir to another great evil. Though we cannot satisfactorily explain it, there is yet within him a strange, mysterious hankering after forbidden fruit; sometimes its only attraction would seem to be the very fact that it is forbidden; but in any case the attraction is such as to draw him almost irresistibly, as it did our first parents in the garden of Eden. "And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat and fair to the eye and delightful to behold." God had asked only that single sacrifice of them, the complete renunciation of their will on one single commandment. They were unable to resist the attraction. He demanded a holocaust and they, by eating of the forbidden fruit, committed sin in the sight of that God who hates robbery in a holocaust. And this strange perversity of the heart of man, which we call concupiscence, has been transmitted to all succeeding generations and, coupled with forgetfulness of God, has been the cause of all the terrible chastisements that have come upon the human race since the beginning. The Royal Prophet had already warned his own generation against its dangerous ravages: "If we have forgotten the name of our God and we have stretched forth our hands after a strange god, shall not God require this of us?" What these chastisements of concupiscence were, we know only too well from the pages of Holy Writ. All those who stretched forth their hands after strange gods, all those who delayed to fulfill their vows to the true God, all those who in any way served the creature and refused homage to the Creator, were cast off, being delivered to shameful captivity or to the more shameful and degrading desires of their corrupt hearts. They fell down before dumb idols, sacrificing to them the choicest fruits of the human mind, heart, and body. And this has ever been the inevitable consequence of giving way to concupiscence, the worship of the creature to the neglect of the Creator of all things, a consequence as inevitable in the twentieth century and among civilized peoples, as it was in the days of heathen captivity.

Moreover, the warning of the Royal Prophet applies equally not only to all times and places, but likewise to every class of persons. And this is true even of those who have professed to sacrifice all to God by so complete a donation of themselves as the religious life demands. They too, still feel that longing desire to take up what they have once irrevocably laid down; in other words, to perpetrate robbery in their holocaust, if not always in word and deed, then, perhaps, in thought and desire. And shall not God "require this of them"? Surely He does "require" it. Those who have been unfaithful in a lesser degree, whose hearts have gone out with only half-suppressed regret toward forbidden fruit, like the desire of the moth for the flame, God chastens by the terrific ordeal of incessant temptation and the emptiness and hollowness of unrequited affection. They are the restless, weary spirits, constantly seeking peace but driving it ever before them, fortunate indeed if at length they recognize their failings and seek their rest in the great Heart of their Redeemer. Though the hand of God chastises them, yet He has pity on them remembering His own saying: "Man is but flesh;" for they fail chiefly through weakness, there where man is most weak. But there are those who turn completely from God and, following the fitful flame of concupiscence, forget that they have vowed all the affection of their heart to the Master. They "stretch forth their hands after strange gods," preferring the love of a weak, frail, creature to the strong and all-embracing love of God. Of these the Lord "requires" such unfaithfulness by the complete loss of their exalted vocation. They have been raised to the surpassing dignity of a spouse of the Eternal Word, but have broken in thought and in deed the marriage vow which united them to the Lamb of God and He now rejects them from the company of His elect, from the chosen number of those who are privileged to follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth, singing the canticle of the pure of heart. Terrible punishment, but exactly proportioned to the offence and to the culpable neglect of the precious remedy provided expressly against such a tragic calamity. For such a fate need never overtake even the weakest soul, since she has a source of strength outside herself sufficient not only to resist the seductive power of concupiscence, but also capable of paralyzing its movements in their inception. The Body and Blood of the Lamb of God that was slain are given to the soul to be the powerful antidote of concupiscence, the sweet medicine of all its inherited and acquired ills. And so it is safe to say that there cannot be any loss of faith so long as the soul is strengthened by the worthy reception of Holy Communion. Persons experienced in the spiritual life go further and, envisaging this matter from an opposite point of view, maintain that practically every culpable loss of religious calling or of Christian faith is preceded by repeated sacrilegious reception of Holy Communion. Be that as it may, we know that the worthy reception of the Blessed Sacrament is the most powerful preventive against such a loss, because it is the sovereign remedy against an inordinate concupiscence, which most often accounts for unfaithfulness against these greatest of all graces.

The Holy Eucharist produces such powerful effects because in addition to its remedial character, it is at the same time the infinite satisfaction for all transgressions arising from our human weakness and even for those arising from sheer human malice. For in this most holy Sacrament we have the Son of God made Man not merely as the guest of the human race, dwelling among us, but we have there likewise the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the perfect satisfaction to the infinite justice of God for all the sins that have ever been, or will ever be, committed. Therein we behold the Lamb of God who was sacrificed for us–the Body of Christ which He has delivered for us, once, on the tree of the Cross and which is still daily delivered for us as a complete and irrevocable holocaust. "This is my body which shall be delivered for you. . . Do this in commemoration of me." So that in the Blessed Sacrament we have not only the remedy but also the infinite satisfaction for the second great source of sin and for our many failings rising from it. In the completeness and perfection of this sacrifice we have the proper corrective for that perversity of concupiscence which so often allures us with its false sweetness and light, like the will-o'-the-wisp that rises out of the miasm of the marshy lowlands and draws us on almost unbeknown to temporal and eternal destruction.

Moreover since resistance to concupiscence and sin can practically be reduced to the single word "renunciation," Christ gives us also in the Blessed Sacrament the perpetual example of the most complete renunciation. Shorn of His divinity, His humanity and of every thing which could proclaim His infinite power and majesty, the Son of God abides in silent renunciation, in a world which He has created and which He continues to govern by His will. He remains not only as the remedy and satisfaction for our failings, but also to furnish us with the powerful incentive of His own example; for in all things Jesus began first to do, thereafter, to preach. How can we resist His preaching when it is supplemented by His life on earth and by His still longer life in the Blessed Sacrament?

Forgetfulness of God and a yearning after forbidden fruit bring in their wake the third great evil that afflicts man in this world, namely, corruption, death and loss of immortality. "In what day soever thou shalt eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt die." "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God. . . They are become corrupt and abominable in their ways . . . There is none that doth good, no not one." Thus spoke the Psalmist of the men of his day and such has been the history of individuals and of nations from the beginning down to our times. Corruption of mind and heart is the lot of those who forget the name of the Lord their God and who stretch out their hands after strange gods. Forgetfulness of God and the hankering after unlawful pleasures are grievous sins and when completed beget death of soul and body.

And so, to the spiritual evils of a barren mind, which misses the first principle of its origin and the last end of its existence, and to the unsatisfied longing of an empty heart, which attempts to slake the torturing thirst of its unfulfilled love at cisterns that have no water, to these greatest of all evils are added corruption of the flesh and separation of the soul and body, a separation that pierces to the inmost marrow of our being. It is only in the Holy Eucharist that we again find the remedy against such wretchedness. "Take and eat," Christ tells us, and He offers us food which preserves against corruption and which is a guarantee of immortality. We have then in the same Sacrament the remedy against the third great evil, which comes as a consequence of the first two, and which fills up by its dreadful completeness the measure of man's misery on earth and opens the gateway to a greater misery beyond.

For death is the terror that haunts the waking hours of men and even pursues them into their very dreams. But the separation of the flesh and spirit and the consequent corruption of the body though real evils are but faint images of the corruption of the soul through sin and its eternal separation from God, its first origin and last end. For Christ has not delivered us from temporal dissolution and corruption, though by His own death on the Cross, He has taken the principal sting from this punishment. His power and His merits are primarily directed toward the restoration of the soul to eternal life, a restoration which has its beginnings here on earth and its completion in the world to come. Like all other graces this wondrous gift is the fruit of the Precious Blood poured out in prodigal profusion on Calvary; but the stamp and the infallible guarantee of that justification are given to every individual soul through the worthy reception of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

And so our Lord is present on the Altar, not only to be the Victim of expiation for our daily faults and transgressions, but also to make Himself the very food and medicine of our souls. For if He has willed to be present among us in the Sacrament of His love, it is for the ultimate purpose of being united to us in Holy Communion. Sacramental Communion is, therefore, the fruit of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the most sure means of remaining united to Jesus here on earth, and in turn is but the beginning and guarantee of an everlasting union with Him in eternity. "It is therefore not only that we may adore Him, and offer Him to His Father as infinite satisfaction, that Christ renders Himself present on our altars, it is not only to visit us that He comes, but it is that we may eat Him as the food of our souls, and that, eating Him, we may have life, the life of grace here below, the life of glory hereafter."³

It is in this manner that the Blessed Sacrament, in the form of Holy Communion, becomes the providential remedy for the third great evil which menaces the happiness of man here and hereafter. "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life and I will raise him up in the last day," says our Lord. The worthy communicant therefore has "everlasting life." He must indeed pass through the portals of death; but death shall not have dominion over him, for the Prince of Life shall by the power of His own Body and Blood raise him up from death, so that the new life which is begun in him here on earth will continue without interruption and be confirmed and immovably established in eternity. And why this? Because he has within him a life which is none other than the immortal life of Jesus Christ, the identical life which the Son of God has from the Father, who is the source of all life. "As the living Father hath sent Me and I live by the Father, so he that eateth Me the same also shall live by Me." That indeed is the object of our Lord's coming on earth: "I am come that they may have life and may have it more abundantly." Now we receive this directly from the "living bread which came down from heaven". Hence it is that the priest in giving the Holy Communion to each one says: "May the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve thy soul to life everlasting." Moreover, this is the only source of life to man, for Christ Himself cuts off, as it were, all other means and puts to silence every possible objection when He tells us: "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you shall not have life in you . . . for my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed."

But is it, then, sufficient to eat of this Bread to be assured of everlasting life? On this point we have the express words of our Lord and, in addition, the formal teaching of the Church. According to the Council of Trent the Holy Eucharist is a divine antidote which delivers us from daily faults and preserves us from mortal sin. Now, mortal sin is the only thing which can destroy the divine life in us and the frequent worthy reception of Holy Communion renders mortal sin impossible. We have, then, the sovereign remedy against the loss of immortality. Our Lord has overlooked nothing of our weakness or misery, but has provided generously against every evil to which our fallen nature is heir and He has done this by the one, all embracing gift of Himself. Not only has the Word become flesh, He has become bread for love of us: "I am the bread of life."

So powerful is this divine remedy that it affects even our corruptible body, becoming also for it the pledge of resurrection. "It is true," says Dom Marmion, "that Christ unites Himself immediately to the soul; it is to the soul that He comes first of all, to assure and confirm its deification. But the union of soul and body is so close that, in increasing the life of the soul, in powerfully drawing it toward heavenly delights, the Eucharist tempers the heat of the passions and brings peace to all our being."The Venerable Father Eymard, having in mind the same effect, puts to himself this question: "Whence comes it that the Church so piously venerates the relics of the saints, unless because they have received Jesus Christ, because their members were incorporated with Jesus Christ, because they were his members." 4 We have, therefore, for both body and soul, a medicinal nourishment which counteracts the poison with which original sin has inoculated us; it is our security against sin and concupiscence, against corruption and death, the promise of the purity and immortality of soul and body. The words of Christ are clear and unmistakable: "He that eateth .my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life and I will raise him up in the last day."

3. FIRST REASON FOR INSTITUTION OF THE BLESSED SACRAMENT

"Do this in commemoration of Me."

The Holy Eucharist a Remembrance of Christ

In speaking of the Holy Eucharist as a memorial of Christ we mean to express its purpose, not its nature. We know very well what the Catholic doctrine on this point is, namely: that the Holy Eucharist is the true Body and Blood of Jesus Christ under the appearances of bread and wine. Christ came that we may have life. "I am come in order that they may have life and have it more abundantly." "Now this is eternal life, that they may know Thee the One True God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." To know is to remember. Knowledge without remembrance is sterile, useless. Our principal duty, then, is to have a constant, loving remembrance of Jesus Christ and, through Him, of the Father. And the better to compass this end He has left us a lasting memorial of Himself, His own Body and Blood under the appearances of bread and wine. "Do this in commemoration of Me" – such is His express command which gives to men at one and the same time a divine power and a divine gift, the means and the end, life, and conscious remembrance, and thus stamps the Blessed Sacrament with its first and outstanding characteristic as the great Memorial.

Such a power as that vested in the priesthood has never been known on earth; never has the mind of man dared to aspire to anything like it.

Still the very power of the priesthood is but the means to an end: to perpetuate His presence among men. For none knew better than Christ the fickleness of the heart of man. He knew that neither the sublimity of His doctrine nor the story of His wondrous deeds was a sufficient guarantee for a continued remembrance of Himself. Those of His day had said: "Never did man speak as this man"; yet that very generation, perhaps even those very individuals, cried out in the hatefulness of their blind rage and forgetfulness: "Crucify Him, crucify Him". They passed before the Cross whereon the Redeemer of the world hung in agony and mocked the power which but a short time before had raised the very dead to life. The world needed a stronger motive for remembrance than His words–stronger even than His marvelous works–yea, stronger that His very Passion and Death. And so before departing out of this world to go to the Father, He left us that remembrance of Himself by which He abides with us in his living presence forever. So that if to-day, after twenty centuries, men can and still admire the spiritual depth and sublimity of the Sermon on the Mount, that fact can be adequately explained only in view of the living sacramental presence of Christ among us. Moreover, such an admiration, if it is to be something more than a mere poetic rapture, is confined to those who seek in the Catholic Church the fountainhead of all truth and accept her teaching on this sublime "mystery of faith" which we possess in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

For if Christ were merely an historical personage, with just a dead record of His life, teachings and death on the Cross, what would be the attitude of the world toward Him after twenty centuries of history? We can judge of this attitude from the condition of those who have no Blessed Sacrament. These no longer have the true devotion of Christ, not even the belief in His divinity. What fragments still remain to them of true Christian teaching they have from the parent stem whence they separated themselves four hundred years ago. Give them another four hundred years of time and who will be able to discover in them any vestiges of Christianity? For a dead remembrance cannot stimulate to love and action. We show a certain reverence for the memory of great men, benefactors of mankind or national heroes. What does that mean? A few pages in the text books of history, perhaps a recalling of their deeds once a year, and beyond that the oblivion of the tomb. They lie outside the current of the world's actual life; they are without power to influence our daily conduct. Such is not the memory which we accord to Jesus Christ. He is not for us primarily a historical figure. Rather do we remember Him as Teacher and Guide to follow His precepts; as a Friend who shares our daily joys and griefs; as the Lover, the goal beyond all earthly loves, in whom all true love meets and finds its fruition and perfection; as God who accompanies us in the way as He did the disciples on the way to Emmaus, whom now we know only by faith but whom we recognize when the shades of night begin to fall and faith pales before vision.

All this, Christ is to us in virtue of His presence in the most holy Sacrament, even though all human history should conspire to blot His Name and work from its pages and pass over His coming into the world by an absolute silence. Man cannot by any conspiracy of history or any twist of historical evidence shut out the Christ from the world He has redeemed, for He is a living Person ever present in that Sacrament which He has left as the memorial of Himself. For this wonderful remembrance is not a mere record written in the pages of dead books but in the minds of men enlightened by a faith that penetrates the veil of mysterious, imperturbable silence, which envelopes the Sacramental Presence, and enshrined in the living hearts of men, hearts transformed by the flesh and blood of Christ to a participation in the divine heart of the God-Man Himself, and beating in unison with His own to the love of the Eternal Father, and beating in unison with each other as the Communion of Saints on earth, brothers all, fed on the same spiritual bread and wine, which is the body and blood of Christ, whose blood flows through their veins.

But why should Christ be remembered in a manner different from all other persons who have lived in the past? Why should His memory be ever fresh and green among the children of men, and that not merely in song and story, but as an actually existing person and a living force throughout the world? For His is not the fate of one who has passed out of human affairs, but of one who shares our life in the twentieth century as He has done since His first sojourn on earth and in every century since that time. It is a powerful stimulant to our love, to note how Jesus Christ in his Eucharistic life has ever conformed Himself to our human modes of life: the loving familiarity with which He dwelt in the very homes of the faithful of the first centuries, received into their outstretched hands and carried about in their bosoms. How He dwelt in the deserts of Egypt and Asia, to be the strength and nourishment of those rugged saints of the Orient; then amid the squalor and neglect of the semi-barbarous and primitive civilization of Europe and now amid the new-paganism of the present, a paganism matched by a marvelous material progress. Everywhere He shares human ills and human triumphs, even the filth or cleanliness that marks the different stages in the history of peoples or of individuals, even their material prosperity. We find Him carried about on foot or on horseback, in gilded chariot or in luxurious automobile, but always near the hearts of men who love Him and surrounded throughout all the centuries by an undimmed faith that rises to heights of heroism.

There are three principal reasons why a special remembrance is due to Jesus Christ. For He has done and still does for us, what no other can do. In the first place, He has forgiven us our sins. Then, too, He presently intercedes for us without ceasing before the face of His Father. Finally we hold Him in grateful remembrance in order that His mercy may continue to the end; in other words, He is the pledge of our final perseverance.

Each of these sublime functions merits separate treatment.

The First Reason for a Grateful Remembrance of Christ: He Has Forgiven Us Our Sins

"I am He that blot out thy iniquities for my own sake and I will not remember thy sins." Isaias 43:25.

There were men who have been honored by a grateful people with the glorious title of "saviors of their country". But there is only One who bears the title "Savior of the World," or briefly "The Savior". His claims rest not upon the liberation of man from the tyranny of a temporal despot, but upon His deliverance from the slavery of sin and Satan. "Whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin." What is slavery of the body as compared with this shackling of the spirit? Even before the Son of God became man, His character of

Savior was stressed by the Archangel. "Thou shalt call his name Jesus," i.e. Savior Mary freely consents to become the Mother of the God-Man, but His character of Savior is imposed upon her. Whether the Son of God would have become man even if our first parents had not sinned, is a question beyond the domain of fact, hence merely hypothetical in character. St. Thomas teaches that our Lord became man essentially and primarily to redeem. Wherefore, Savior is his essential characteristic. He came upon earth in order to redeem us from sin, a work beyond the power of man or angel. St. Paul says: "Christ became sin for us," identified, as it were, with sin, bearing the accumulated weight of all the individual sins of all times. The terrible effects of sin can be seen particularly in the sufferings of our Lord in the Garden. There he became the sinner and sin, in the eyes of His Father, so that He appeared to perpetrate every horrible crime and deed of shame that has ever been committed, with all its revolting details, so that the horror of it made the blood flow from every pore of His body.

Dragging out a weary life of guilt and facing a drearier prospect of a longer era of punishment, man continued to live, with only a glimmer of hope, in the promise of the Savior, to cheer him on. That Savior came after 4000 years of expectation, came to redeem and to forgive. He paid the price of our ransom to the heavenly Father and blotted out the handwriting of God that stood against us. He paid the price, and in return received the human race as His own portion. "Ask of me and I will give thee the gentiles for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession " Ps. 2:6-8. All power is His in heaven and on earth; and to what ends does He use this universal power over his own? To offer forgiveness of sin out of the abundant merits of His Passion and Death. What a power is this, passing the comprehension of men! for here we touch upon a mystery, the dreadful mystery of iniquity. Because the power of death, of sin and of Satan has been broken, we have become blind to this greatest of all evils; hence, too, blind to the power of Christ which can and does forgive sin. Like the spectators of Christ's miracle upon the paralytic, we look upon and discern physical evil, awaiting with bated breath a manifestation of the divine power in behalf of suffering humanity, whilst remaining visionless to the ruthless ravages of sin in the soul, the oppressive weight of spiritual misery that bears so heavily upon the crushed and helpless spirit. As in the days of His earthly pilgrimage, so now Christ looks into the heart; He speaks not in answer to the wonder-seeking multitude, but addresses his words directly to the stricken soul: "Be of good heart, son: thy sins are forgiven thee." And it is this power which He vindicates for Himself against the murmurs of His enemies. "That you may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sin–then saith he to the man sick of the palsy, –Arise, take up thy bed and go into thy house." Math. 9:6.

He has redeemed us. He still constantly forgives us and for such inestimable favors He pleads with us for a grateful remembrance. "Put me in remembrance," He tells us by the mouth of the Prophet Isaias, and then in mild reproach opens before our gaze the dreary prospect of our own helplessness: "Tell if thou halt anything to justify thyself." Isaias 43:26. With such loving words, the Savior who "blots out our iniquity" reminds us of our duty of remembrance, a duty which is in reality an absolute necessity for salvation. For, besides His own, there is no other Name under heaven whereby men may be saved. Without Him we can do nothing. And what a world of helplessness is contained in those words of the Prophet: "Tell if thou east anything to justify thyself." We have within us nothing that could justify us before God. Heirs of sinful man, we have received from the first Adam the germs of spiritual degradation, concupiscence and death. Only through the second Adam have we been restored to our rights as children of God and coheirs of Him who paid the price of our redemption with His Sacred Blood and sealed the memory of the Cross by his Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar. "Memoriam facit mirabiliuin suorum."

For the death of Christ on the Cross is the central mystery of His coming among us and the Cross must ever remain the measure of man's indebtedness to the Savior of the world and the object of our grateful remembrance. It is that which gives Him the right to say: "That you may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins". But the application of that power to the individual soul is made daily in the renewal of the Sacrifice of the Cross when Christ offers Himself, through the hands of the priest, and becomes again the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.

Between the Blessed Sacrament and the saving passion and death of Christ there is not merely an intimate union: there is, so far as its effects are concerned, a complete identity. It was, indeed, on Calvary that He suffered for us: there He acquired the right to forgive; but the actual conferring of that benefit He has distributed throughout all times and all places. And the death of Christ becomes efficacious in us, when, through a partaking of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, we show forth the death of the Lord: "for as often as you shall eat this bread and drink the chalice you shall show the death of the Lord until he come." I Cor. 2:26. Between Calvary and the Altar there is, consequently, merely a difference of external form: the effects are the same and the first effect is the remembrance of the forgiveness of sin; in "showing forth" His death we are reminded of the reason for that death.

The Eucharist is, therefore, the great memorial of Christ and it recalls Him to us as the One who has paid the price of sin. But it is also more than a simple remembrance. "The Eucharist is a sacrifice before it is a sacrament and in this sacrifice Jesus is a victim for sin before He becomes the nourishment of our souls". (Hugon, 14.) And why this? Because sin remains a sad fact in the life of every individual, therefore Christ has brought Calvary before us in every age and in every place, on every altar of the Catholic Church throughout the world; there we have the Eucharist as the efficacious extension and application of the Redemption."In the face of the terrific mystery of sin which continues without ceasing, we have upon our altars the infinite reparation of Calvary which, likewise, goes on without interruption." (Hugon, 14.)

St. Thomas teaches that because the Eucharist is the Sacrament of the Passion of Christ its effects are the same as those produced by His very Passion and Death. For since Jesus has not willed to remain with us in His sensible presence and thus communicate to us the fruits of His Passion, He wished to supply for that absence by the great miracle of the Eucharist. Hence the Blessed Sacrament in its form of Sacrifice does not merely represent the Sacrifice of the Cross, but it is the real renewal of that tremendous act and produces the same effects in the souls of those individuals who devoutly take part in it. Needless to say, we do not mean to imply that the Blessed Sacrament when received as Holy Communion forgives mortal sin; what we do say is, that the Eucharist as the constant renewal of the Sacrifice of the Cross is the daily satisfaction for the sins of the world; the application of this satisfaction to the individual soul is made in various ways chiefly through the worthy reception of the Sacrament of Penance; but we must remember that this Sacrament is not the source and origin of grace but merely a channel whereby the merits of the Passion and Death of Christ are applied to our souls. And that same source of infinite satisfaction we have equally in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is this power of the Eucharist, to apply to the individual soul the fruits of the Passion, which has been most often called into question by heretics of all times. Moreover, this firm belief remains a distinctive mark of the Catholic faith as opposed to all other creeds. Not a few of the sects see in the Holy Eucharist a simple memorial of His Passion and a remembrance of His forgiving us our sins; but no others see there the same power and the same effects which operated to take away the sins of the world on Mount Calvary. The Church has always recognized this efficacious character of the Blessed Sacrament and that in a threefold manner. Thus the Council of Trent teaches that the Holy Eucharist is a sacrifice of propitiation which renders God favorable to us and inclines Him toward us. Again it is a sacrifice of expiation, which cleanses the soul from the guilt of sin. Finally it is a sacrifice of satisfaction which remits the punishment due to sin, whether of the living or of the dead.

How, then, is it possible to forget the Lamb of God that takes away our sins and the sins of the entire world, when the Blessed Sacrament as the never-ending Sacrifice of the New Law is constantly with us?

4. CHRIST IN THE BLESSED SACRAMENT, OUR MEDIATOR

A. Christ's Life of Intercession in the Blessed Sacrament

The first and fundamental motive for a constant and loving remembrance Of Christ is His having taken away the sins of the world and His reiterated forgiveness of our personal transgressions. "Forget not the kindness of thy surety, for he hath given his life for thee."

There is a further motive for grateful remembrance, for He still presently looks to our interests. His work did not come to an end on Mount Calvary, since He yet constantly intercedes for us, or as the Apostle says: "He is always living to make intercession for us". He not only asks for a remembrance on our part, but would have us beseech the Father with Him and in His name.

For even though we turn aside from Him and forget the saving work of His redemption and His Presence among us, yet is He ever mindful of us and of our interests. Silently His immortal life goes on down the centuries, ever renewed through the ministry of the sublime priesthood which is made a sharer in the wonder of his power of mediation and intercession. From out the door of the tabernacle, He sees the world passing by, apparently in oblivious indifference to His abiding Presence. Still, is He ever alert for the coming of His faithful ones. He seems to sleep in His own world, but His heart watches, watches and responds to the love that owns His Presence behind the Eucharistic silence, under the sacramental veil.

Not only has Christ given His mortal life for us, that life which He received from His Virgin Mother, but He has known how to keep up that life and prolong and spend it in our behalf. And because He became the Victim of expiation on the cross, He remains forever our Mediator and Intercessor in heaven and in the Sacrament of His love. In heaven His glorified wounds plead for us; in the Sacrament He is the daily Victim always making intercession. In heaven His sacred humanity is confined to one place, but the Sacramental Presence with its uninterrupted power of mediation encircles the earth–everywhere there rises to God the voice of His pleading, offering to His Eternal Father "a clean oblation in every place, from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same", as the Prophet Malachy foretold (Mal. 1: 11).

B. Character of Christ's Mediation "Unto the End"

St. John prefaces the last supper with the significant words: "Jesus having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them unto the end"–unto the end indeed; for the wonderful sacrament which He instituted that night was the proof of a love:

(1) which includes all men in its embrace,

(2) which reaches unto the bounds of time and space,

(3 ) which goes to the utmost limits of the divine power.

A boundless ocean of love, reaching mightily from end to end, reconciling heaven and earth and disposing all things sweetly, such is the Blessed Sacrament, in which Christ is our Mediator with the Heavenly Father.

I The Mediation of Jesus, Universal In Its Scope, Embracing All Men

In order to become our Mediator with the Father, Christ had to descend to our level yet speak for us as the equal of God. "Who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal to God" (Phil. 2: 2). But He also humbled Himself exceedingly when He came first to mediate on behalf of fallen humanity. "He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of man and in habit found as a man". (Phil. 2: 7) . Like unto us in all things, save sin, in prayer, suffering, humiliation, death. And when He had rendered the last human gift of His mortal life in our behalf, His work of prayer and mediation did not cease. Whilst on earth in human shape, He frequently prayed for His Apostles. Before choosing the twelve the Master prayed throughout the night. He prayed in a particular manner for Peter that his faith might never fail, snatching him by His power of intercession from the very hands of Satan. "Behold Satan hath desired to sift thee as wheat, but I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not. . . ."All the Apostles were the object of His mediation when, as the great High Priest of the New Law, Jesus prayed for them the night before He died. Such a prayer of intercession had never before issued from the lips of man and ascended to the throne of God. There, immediately after the institution of the Holy Eucharist, He shows us what is the nature of His activity in this Most Holy Sacrament, an uninterrupted life of prayer and intercession. Not only for His Apostles did He pray on that occasion, but for the temporal and eternal welfare of all who, through their words, would believe in Him. Such was the beginning of His Eucharistic life of intercession, embracing all men in its scope but particularly those who, by the constant reception of His Sacred Body and Blood, should become His followers in faith and love, brothers all, in the family of the Son of God, because they ate at the same table and were nourished with the same Heavenly Food. "I pray . . . that they may be one as thou Father in me and I in thee; that they also may be one in us" ( John 17: 20).

Even sinners are the beneficiaries of this all-embracing Eucharistic intercession, as were the very executioners of Christ on Calvary, for of them, He too, can say: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do". And though one approached the Holy Sacrament stained with the guilt of mortal sin, the mediation of Jesus in his behalf does not fail. The infinite power of God, which is here present in the Holy Sacrament, is indeed in presence of an awful powerlessness in the presence of such perfidy, like the waters of an irresistible mountain torrent congealed midway in its fall by the glacial grip of northern winter. Yet there remains the moving gentleness of the Friend, the Mediator between the wrath of God and the treachery of man, which could speak in pleading accents soft and warm: "Friend, whereto are thou come? dolt thou betray the Son of Man. . . "

II The Mediation of Jesus Universal in Time and Space

The office of Mediator between God and fallen man which Christ holds in His person, was the first purpose of His becoming man. Calvary shows us how He accomplished that work of reconciliation; the Blessed Sacrament shows its continuance and perfection. Calvary is just one place on earth, and the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ just one event in history. The one is circumscribed, the other passing. But the intercessory power of Christ's sacred blood extends throughout the world and to all times. Every Catholic altar is another Calvary and every priest is another Christ. The Blessed Sacrament as the Sacrifice of the Mass gives this literal, living and real universality to the mediation of Christ. Hence the universal character of Christ's intercession for us before the throne of God, is not mere symbol or ceremony, which recalls the event on Calvary. He is actually living and making intercession for us, as the Apostle says, here in the very midst of the world which He has created and redeemed.

Moreover, it is Jesus Himself who is our Mediator now in the twentieth century, just as He was when the cities of Palestine knew His presence hundreds of years ago. Priests are indeed mediators, but only by a participation in the office of Christ. They are the instruments which bridge the helplessness of the Sacramental Christ, and give Him His contact with the body of the faithful and with the world at large. Through them His presence is constantly renewed over all the world, but the power and efficacy of His sacrifice and of His prayer proceed from Him alone. During His mortal life Jesus prayed–oftentimes throughout the night, more particularly in that awful night when the stream of His life's blood ran in red agony to the ground, whilst heaven and earth seemed deaf. Now from every spot on earth that shelters the Blessed Sacrament, His vigils and prayers are prolonged without ceasing night and day, throughout all ages, to the end of time, for all mankind, but particularly for those who labor, like the first Apostles, in His holy service.

Jesus has become through the Blessed Sacrament the great contemplative of our race. And by this powerful example He seems to teach us the surpassing importance of prayer and intercession. Only three years He spent in the active ministry of souls, centuries in prayer and intercession, in the ceaseless pleading of His precious Blood, which washes away the sins of the world. Though the foul deeds of men rise uninterruptedly like a noisome odor to the throne of the Most High, crying vengeance and wrath on guilty man, yet the sweet incense of Jesus' prayer ascending from all the tabernacles of earth, moves the heart of God to mercy and compassion.

There in the Blessed Sacrament we have the source whence all true spiritual activity flows. From there we should set out on our missions and thither return after apparent success or failure. Each time that we visit Him, uniting our prayer with His, we share in the office of our living Mediator; the Holy Hour is a larger participation in this great privilege and the Forty Hour's Devotion is the brave effort of believing souls to furnish a purely human counterpart to the God-man's endless, earthly vigil. They have understood and answered the inspired words of the Prophet speaking out of the mouth of the Messias: "Come, let us plead together".

III The Eucharistic Mediation of Christ, Boundless as the Attributes of God

1. God's Knowledge.–Again, the Most Blessed Sacrament takes us to the limits of the power and love of the God-man. All the resources of the divine attributes are pressed into the service of this great miracle. Here we have the infinite knowledge of God. Christ had said during His life on earth: "I know my sheep and mine know me". In the Holy Sacrament He continues to know His own, individually to the end of time and not only by name; He knows their step when they come into His Presence; He knows their voices as these rise in songs of prayer or praise. And the faithful ones of His flock know Him. They recognize Him beneath the sacramental veil, owning His divinity and humanity. Across the chasm of twenty centuries they hear that Voice which says: "This is my body . . . this is my blood". And they know that voice as the voice of the Shepherd of their souls and they hearken to Him.

Through the swirl and roar of the ages, that voice penetrates their hearts, bringing faith and conviction with it, though every other sense deny His Presence; "visus, tactus, gustus in to fallitur, sed auditu solo tuto creditur."

When His "sayings" become hard, they answer with the Apostle Peter: "Lord, to whom shall we go, thou hast the words of eternal life". His sheepfold is wider now as He rules from the tabernacle, than in the days of His mortal life; it embraces not only a single Chosen Nation, but the entire world. And as once He came to seek the lost sheep of the House of Israel, so now He pursues the lost sheep of all the nations without ever leaving the tabernacle, "always living (there) to make intercession" and drawing to Himself even those whose feet have wandered astray, drawing them by the power of His love and the charm of His sacramental presence.

2. God's Power.–Not only have we here the knowledge of the God-Man, but His divine power as well. Whilst on earth He went about doing good: He healed the sick, raised the dead, forgave sins in His own name. That same power is in the Holy Eucharist. Sins are indeed forgiven in the sacrament of Penance, but weaknesses of soul, gaping wounds, fierce and unbridled passions, strong resistless habits of sin, burning concupiscence, all these remain even after sin has been forgiven. There is power, a divine power, in the Body and Blood of Christ to heal these disorders of the wounded spirit; virtue, force, goes out from Him to restore the stricken soul; His Precious Blood, poured like oil and wine into the festering wounds, brings back the consciousness of that divine life which He alone can kindle in the human heart and which His power alone can restore when it has been lost. Though one be dead and corrupted in habits of sin, yet at His voice they will arise and as of old, so now, He commands that they be given to eat. And what does He offer to these weak souls? Nothing less than His Own Body and Blood, the bread of the strong. This is the power of God indeed! And if such be His power in the heart where sin has reigned, what fruits of sweetness and comfort may we not expect there where He ever holds sway? In the words of the Royal Psalmist: "They shall want nothing–he hath set them in a place of pasture, and though they should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, they will fear no evils, for he is with them. His rod and his staff have comforted them; he has prepared a table before them against those that afflict them". (Ps. 22.)

IV The Eucharistic Mediation of Christ Reaches the Limits of His Human Qualities

1. His Love.–Shorn of the marks of His Divinity and even of His Humanity, and when the power of God seems to halt, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament manifests toward us the qualities of a loving friend: sympathy, gentleness, disinterestedness, fidelity, qualities which make of this sacrament, above all else, the Sacrament of Friendship.

When on the night before His bitter Passion and Death, His enemies would apprehend Him, Jesus permitted His divine power to appear during an instant, for at His simple declaration " I am he", they fell down, crushed to earth by the majesty of the Son of God. Yet were these enemies of Christ not deterred by this proof of His Divinity from laying violent hands upon His Sacred Person. No manifestation of power, no miracle of nature or of grace, is sufficient to supply for want of faith and love. None know the human heart as does the Son of Man, and so He allows no ray of power to appear in the Blessed Sacrament, knowing full well that His faithful ones will recognize Him, even under the humble appearances of bread. Here all is faith and love: "the mystery of faith" for us, the love of the Son of God made bread. But these suffice, faith supplying for the want of every sensible evidence in our regard and love, His unparalleled love of the human race, doing all that His divine power accomplished whilst He was on earth in mortal flesh. And because in the Blessed Sacrament He subtracts, as it were, from Himself the glorious attributes of His power, He seems to increase by so much the marks of His loving friendship, so that we behold here the ultimate fulfillment of His own words: "greater love than this no man hath".

2. His Confidence.–The greatest mark of love is confidence. That he might deliver us from sin, Jesus once surrendered His Sacred Body into the hands of the executioners on Calvary. To perpetuate that forgiveness, He puts His Body and Blood at the service of all men and of all ages. The confidence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist in His creatures staggers our imagination. We are stunned to see the Son of God come down from heaven, lodge in the womb of the Immaculate Virgin, nursed at her breast and committed entirely and helplessly to her care and protection. But yet she was His own Mother and the one spotless daughter of the human race. How different to our minds, and how far removed from such a surrender of Himself, is His action in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar! Here He puts himself not into the hands of the purest of Virgins, but entrusts the care of His Sacred Body and Blood to every priest, regardless of personal qualifications or the endowments of nature and grace, with equal, loving confidence. He is received upon the tongue and dwells within the heart of every one who approaches the holy Table, no matter how malicious that tongue may be, or how corrupt the heart. He resides constantly in a world of rapacious men, who arc often inspired with enmity and hatred against Him. And being the Son of God He foresaw the crimes that this very loving confidence of His would make possible to human perfidy and baseness. He foresaw indeed, but "having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them unto the end".

Deepest love and staggering confidence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament are supplemented by the sweet gentleness of our Friend. From behind the door of the tabernacle He watches not only the progress of the Church in general, but of each of us individually; for this is the will of His Father, which He always performs, that of those whom the heavenly Father has given to Him not one should be lost. And so His gentle watching continues without interruption, ever waiting for the return of the lost or wandering sheep. If He could receive the treacherous Judas, oh so mildly! how much more gently will He receive the poor, weak, erring sheep.

But just as Jesus' life on earth was marked by His gentle preference for little children, the tender lambs of His flock, so too is His Eucharistic life, His long life of intercession, distinguished by a particular love for the little ones, whom He would have His apostles lead to Him in the innocence of their years. How well the saintly Pontiff Pius X understood the gentleness of the heart of our Eucharistic Friend.

3. His Union with Us.–Finally Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament fills up the measure of His friendship, loving His own unto the end, by His own nearness to us and by bringing near to us, God and our heavenly home. Because the Word-made-Flesh under the appearances of bread, dwells in the midst of our human want and sorrows, yea! in our very heart, He knows best, all the incompleteness of our lives, all the unfulfilled desires and longings of our restless weary souls. Thus His Eucharistic prayer and intercession are always directed toward our deepest wants and our highest strivings, to the rounding-out of our faiths and hopes and loves, forming and fashioning us to the likeness of Himself.

Moreover in the Holy Eucharist Christ not only comes near to us, He also draws us gently, sweetly toward the goal of all our striving, for such is primarily the purpose of a mediator and intercessor. The Eucharist is then our nearest approach to Heaven. Nor mountain height nor deep recess of secluded vale, teeming metropolis nor isolated hut, apex of civilization nor wilds of savagery, creates a chasm between heaven and earth. Where the Eucharist is, there are we separated from the glory of heaven only by the fragile species of bread. The stable of Bethlehem, the humble house of Nazareth, the Cross, lifting above the earth its mangled burden of suffering, these Alone can compare with the lowly dwelling of the tabernacle where Christ, God and Man, draws man to God, unites heaven and earth, dwelling in a silence which is a ceaseless voice of prayerful pleading, that rises and falls in measured beat of supplication, praise and thanks, the throbs of His Sacred Heart.

5. THE HOLY EUCHARIST, PLEDGE OF FINAL PERSEVERANCE

The Blessed Eucharist furnishes to every individual Christian a summary of the entire work of his salvation. It reaches from out the past as the remembrance of that saving sacrifice of Calvary by which he has been cleansed from sin. It continues in the present to be his living mediation and intercession through the silent Watcher in the Tabernacle. Finally, it stretches into the dim and distant future, even beyond the horizon of time, to be his only sure guarantee against the last and awful death–for "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life and I will raise him up in the last day."

We have seen that the Holy Eucharist brings faith in the forgiveness of sin from the Cross of Christ down to us, and that it kindles hope in the mediation of the unceasing prayer from the Prisoner of the Tabernacle. We will now proceed to examine how it is the consummation of love for the future, the last link between grace and glory, between earth and heaven; in a word, the pledge of our final perseverance. For the Blessed Sacrament in the form of Holy Communion is the most powerful assurance we have that God's mercy will continue unto the end, that is, that we may persevere in His grace and love.

Those who are in the friendship of God rightly look back over the past with feelings of deepest gratefulness, while the present is full of hopeful promises. But what harrowing doubts rise in even the best souls, when they think of that momentous issue which we call final perseverance! Even the great Apostle of the Gentiles could say that no man might know whether he were worthy of election or of reprobation. But the remembrance of the Eucharistic promise of Christ allays all such doubts and fears, for therein we see the path of perseverance and salvation to every one whose faith shall not stagger. "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life and I will raise him up in the last day". Again, "he that eateth me, the same shall live by me".

The Meaning of Perseverance

It is difficult to understand the precise character of the grace of final perseverance. What we do know is that our salvation, from first to last, is the work of God. He is the Beginning and the End as well as the Way; our dependence on Him is entire. His power and grace hedge us round and His sovereign will fulfills itself in us in a manner that accords with our rational nature. On the other hand it is no less certain that man is free and responsible. Grace is given to every individual in sufficient measure to save his soul and, consequently, the failure to attain that end is fully attributable to man himself.

The attempt at reconciling these two indubitable truths has filled the pages of the history of the Church with theological controversy. Various explanations have been given. These are accepted by some schools of thought and rejected with vehemence by others. We are not presently concerned with the theoretical phase of this question of grace in general, nor yet with that of the grace of perseverance in particular. There is an element of mystery here, whether it be seen at the beginning, or at the end, or even throughout the entire range of highly speculative explanations. But this element of mystery no more affects the practical side of the question than it does with regard to our belief in the other mysteries of our faith. All the saints and spiritual writers have summed up, empirically, their own solution of this mystery in the briefest possible formula: work as though salvation and perseverance depended entirely on your own efforts; pray as though all depended on the grace of God. The words of Cardinal Newman are very much in point here: "A thousand difficulties do not constitute a single doubt," and the faith of the individual does not rest on a theological opinion.

For our present practical purpose we may therefore consider perseverance as that free gift of the Divine Bounty by which we may be found in God's holy friendship when we come to die, so that death may be for us the summons to a blessed immortality. From a consideration of this explanation we can see how momentous a thing it is for every individual: it means a happy death, a favorable judgment, a blessed immortality, the final stamp of God's approval upon our earthly life, the act that seals us His forever, the triumph of right and reason in a rational creature.

Our Lord prayed for this grace in a particular manner when, as the great High Priest of the New Law, He interceded for His Apostles with the Heavenly Father: "Father, keep them in thy name". Election was not enough–He had chosen his twelve and yet one was a devil.

The Church in the Council of Trent describes it as a gift without which no one can be saved and which no one can merit. She does not attempt to settle the theological differences of the question, but her preoccupation with the practical issues involved is continuous. Throughout her sacred liturgy the constant and reiterated prayer of the Church is for final perseverance. Her solicitude on this matter covers all the stages of man's progress along the way of salvation–in life, in death, in the judgment, in heaven. Thus we read: "Grant, O merciful God, that we may continually advance in the work of eternal salvation". She prays that we may be preserved from "a sudden and unprovided death," that we may stand with confidence before the judgment seat of Christ. Through the intercession of all the saints, she asks that our "union with God here below may find its completion in everlasting joy" (Suffrage of the Saints); that God Himself would "lead us to the haven of eternal salvation" (Pst. Com., 14th Sunday after Pentecost); that He "would make us to be sharers in the rewards of heaven" (Collect, 10th Sunday after Pentecost).

Nor does the Church neglect to point out what is the ground of our hope for the attainment of this unspeakable gift of final perseverance. When the priest has received the Body and Blood of Christ, she puts into his mouth these words: "Grant, O Lord, that we may keep in a pure heart what we have received with our lips and that this temporal gift may become for us an eternal guarantee."

Finally, the Church does not fail to bring to our notice her aspirations after final perseverance for all her children, in the feasts of the ecclesiastical year. Her general attitude in this matter is sufficiently evident from the fact that she celebrates the feasts of the saints on the day of their death, when their perseverance is assured. We know how rare are the exceptions to this rule.

But there are particular feasts which symbolize perseverance and which serve as encouragement for us who still tread the hard way and seek the narrow gate to life eternal. Such is the feast of the Ascension of our Lord, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and most of all the feast of All Saints.

Christ indeed paid the price of our ransom on Calvary. We are therefore redeemed, but withal, an exiled race, journeying through a valley of tribulation toward our true home.

The individual soul is made a sharer in the Redemption of Christ through the cleansing waters of Baptism and though, even then, it fall by the wayside, the Savior is at hand to restore it to His grace and friendship.

Moreover He preserves that soul in spiritual health, having provided His own Body and Blood to be its medicine and nourishment. Through this sovereign remedy the believing soul is made constant in the performance of good works and the avoidance of sin throughout life. This same bread prepares her for the dreaded entrance into eternity and confers the seed of immortality which is the promise of a glorious resurrection. In that same body of Christ there is the pledge of the soul's salvation against an adverse judgment at the tribunal of God and the pledge of its glory in the kingdom of the Blessed.

I. The Eucharist Our Support in Life

You cannot guess, you cannot know Upon what wings of joy I go Who travel home with God.⁴

The Blessed Sacrament is not only a pledge of eternal life; it contains Him who is eternal life. Hence, when joined with Jesus Christ in Holy Communion we have not merely a promise of perseverance, salvation, heaven, but we are actually then in possession of all that the soul strives after, though we possess after the manner of wayfarers. In other words, Holy Communion binds us in closest intimacy with Him who is at once the Author and the Finisher of our salvation: "he that hath begun a good work in you will also perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus".

The Holy Eucharist is, then, in the first place, a source of strength and the secret of persevering constancy in the doing of good and the avoiding of evil. The regularity of the good palls upon us; the reiterated lure of evil attracts us.

The journey of life is long, heaven seems so far away. And though we tread the narrow path, we cannot always keep our eyes fixed on the distant goal. Mountains lift up their huge bulk and shut off the horizon and the sight of our true home. Dark clouds rise, cover us over and hide the view of God's blue heaven. The weight of the daily burden chafes the weary soul, bending low to earth that sky-born spirit. The sweat and dust of the battle of life, the tears of shame and defeat blind our eyes and blur the all too-distant scene. The distant scene, indeed! Mayhap we look too far and forget the promise of His constant presence among us. "Behold I am with you all days". And He is with us to be our daily support for body and soul, our first thought in the dawning of each day, our last prayer when the soft light of evening melts into gathering gloom; the first vision as faith and reason break on the infant mind, the last hope amid the enshrouding darkness of the tomb.

The journey of life is beset with other evils, too. More than the assault of devil, world and flesh, there steals into our existence the dry-rot of discouragement. Who has not felt the numbing .pain when the soul sees itself after years of dreary effort floundering amid the lowland bogs of a merely natural life, far from the seemingly inaccessible summits where the City of God, bathed in glorious light, shines forth a radiant cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night, guiding, beckoning us to its portals. We are weak from lack of nourishment, we have contracted disease amid the poisonous miasmas of low-lying marsh and deadly fen. We have hearkened to the beguiling words of the devil, luring us into the mazes of error, or turned aside from the safe path of salvation into a morass of human ignorance lured on by false lights which appear in the thickening gloom like the fugitive will-o-the-wisp, to draw the unwary to their destruction. Or we have hearkened to the siren voice that stirs our senses to flame and intoxicates mind and heart with its dulcet strains.

And, though reconciled to God, we have not the strength to walk, much less run along the way of salvation. We need food, medicine, guidance, joy of spirit and consolation of heart; and all of these are the proper effects of Holy Communion, the food of weary pilgrims. Jesus in the Eucharist is at once nourishment and remedy, enabling us to cast off disease, to live safely amid contagion and to ward off the attacks of enemies from within and without.

For the Sacrament of the Eucharist is the cause of salvation and glory, not only because it confers grace, which is the seed and the germ of eternal life, but because it likewise increases our spiritual powers, develops our energies, gives us a certain right to actual graces and helps which unable us to overcome obstacles and aid us to persevere in spite of all the trials of life. Hence it has been fitly symbolized by that bread which enabled the Prophet Elias to climb the Mountain of God and to walk in the strength of it for forty days without other nourishment. It takes the place of human love and companionship, instilling heavenly joy, for it is the bread from heaven, having all manner of sweetness; and it accompanies us throughout our exile, being with us all days from the dawn of reason till mind and senses break.

II. The Eucharist Our Hope in Death

No matter how long and how hard the journey of life may be, the threatened dissolution of the body and soul throws us into alarm. And if we have need of the Eucharistic grace and strength through life, how much greater is our need of it in the moment of death! The dread of that last hour casts its shadow across the life of the individual and haunts the memory of the race. It is one of the recurring themes in human song and story. From age to age there rises the lament of mortals because of their mortality. But the lamentation of the believer is softened down to nature's spontaneous plaint; for though he, too, descends into the darkness of the tomb, yet it is not an utter darkness, for he follows in a path traced out by One who in His own Person conquered death by His very dying, and rose triumphant from the tomb, dispersing its darkness by the radiance of His Body. And this One is to every Christian soul the beacon-light to guide his fragile bark aright and be his Pilot through the darkness of death's bitter waters to the haven of eternal light and rest.

We have seen that Jesus in Holy Communion is our only sure stay and support in the journey of life, since He is the food of weary pilgrims. O esca viatorum! But there is an even greater need of having Him near us and being united with Him when the "shadows of life lengthen" and the grave opens before our feet. Only the consoling remembrance of Christ's own death on the Cross can in a measure assuage the bitter anguish of that terrible separation which death implies, or sooth the sinking fear with which that step into the darkness of the unknown fills the souls of men.

And so when that inescapable moment comes, when there is none to stretch forth a saving hand to retain us from the gaping void of the open grave, Jesus comes to dwell once more in that body which is soon to become the prey of dissolution and decay. Only to Him can we raise our voice in humble supplication, saying with childlike hope and confidence: "Sweet Savior, bless us ere we go . . . through death's dark night, O gentle Jesus be our light."

The Church has not overlooked the fact that here, too, when life's dim candle sputters to a pitiable close, the Holy Eucharist responds to the most pressing need of man. And so she has surrounded the departure of every Christian soul out of this world, by the Real Presence of Christ in the form of the Sacred Viaticum, that with Him the soul may end its earthly pilgrimage and begin its life in eternity. She bids the Christian look upon that scene, when a Mother saw her Son dying the awful death of the Cross, and recalls that one degree beyond the cross is the crown, one moment beyond death is life, one step beyond earth is heaven: "Quando corpus morietur, fac ut animae donetur, paradisi gloria: When my body falls to dust, grant that my soul may pass to the glory of Paradise".

And this happy consummation the Church awaits through the worthy reception of the final Holy Communion. Yes, even the body is a sharer in the blessedness that comes from the Sacred Viaticum. That body, soon to be sown in corruption, shall rise in incorruption, for it is not sown alone but there is sown with it a Body, immortal in strength, radiant in glory, though hidden under sacramental veils. Consigned to earth, and "dunged with rotten death", our human bodies carry with them the living seed of Him who is the Wheat of the Elect, which having died once produces now fruit unto life everlasting, being "a full and holy cure for all our ills". From the darkness of the grave tinder the cold earth, to the brightness of an eternal dawning and the warmth of heavenly sunlight, our corruptible bodies will rise hallowed in every member, in the same splendor that shone from the glorified body of Christ, clothed in His radiance and immortality. For though the claim of death is irresistible upon all flesh fashioned from the earth and crushed beneath the penalty of original sin, yet does the promise of Jesus Christ to those who eat His Flesh and drink His Blood triumph in the body's loss when, sown in lament and weeping, it dies to itself to live only to Him who is its surety against the second death, and the hope of its eternal life. When only darkness seems its portion, when sin has wrought the extreme of its punishment upon fallen man, the Conqueror over sin and death, though His power and glory be sheathed under the mild form of bread, impregnates that corruptible body with its own glorified qualities, against the day of its final resurrection.

That final bond of love established by the Sacred Viaticum is such as to clasp the soul of the believer to the Person of Christ by ties more enduring than death, stronger than all the powers of hell, "a binding of love."

III. The Eucharist The Pledge of A Glorious Resurrection

In such hope the body is consigned to its last earthly resting place, accompanied by the precious seed of its promised immortality, the Sacred Viaticum. The species of bread has long since disappeared and with it the Eucharistic Presence of Christ. But the promise of His word which is attached to the worthy reception of His Body and Blood endures forever. Such is the faith of the Church, such is the hope of mankind, such the love of the Christ.

For by the reception of Holy Communion we receive not only food for our souls but living bread, and our soul lives with and shares in the life of Him who having died once lives now forever. "Whoso eateth me the same shall live by me." The body's share in this immortal life of Christ is attendant upon its transformation in death's harvest field, just as the soul may yet await the Savior's embrace amid cleansing flames. Love has wrought its work even though the last claims of justice must yet be fulfilled. Saint Cyril of Alexandria expresses this faith of the Church when he says: "Because Christ is in us in His Flesh, we shall rise again; life will not fail to vivify those in whom It has deposited the seed of immortality. For surely if by His word and touch He raised the dead to life, how much more will He raise up our vile bodies by reason of His life-giving flesh which has been housed within these same bodies."

In the life of a believer, death is not an end but a transition. Glory is the term toward which grace tends as an arrow to its mark. And in the Eucharist we have not merely grace but the fountain-head of all grace. If this grace be frustrated, then what hope of eternal salvation? It cannot be! Far from checking the passage of the Eucharistic grace to Eucharistic glory, death provides the harvest fields of heaven and digs the level between God and man. "Whosoever believeth in Me even though he be dead, shall live; and he that liveth and believeth in me shall not die forever." Thus we sing aloud the words of Jesus Christ, hurling the defiance of our faith into the open mouth of the grave, instilling the seed of comfort at the very moment when death seems triumphant and the world takes from us our most Cherished human gift.

Other sacraments also give grace which is the seed of glory; this Sacrament does more; it gives the right to a glorious resurrection, because of the union which is established between Christ and those who communicate worthily.

IV. The Eucharist Our Defence in the Day of Judgment

Death strikes terror into the hearts of unbelievers: judgment inspires even the saints with salutary dread. "Whether I eat or drink," says St. Jerome, "whatever I do, there is always ringing in my ears, like the shrilling of a trumpet, that voice of fear: Rise ye dead and come to judgment!"

It is indeed a fearful thing to know God only in His capacity of Judge. But we have known Him as Savior's and Redeemer; we have known Him as Friend and Fellow-Wayfarer. We have proclaimed our faith in him not only when He hung upon the cross of shame, but we have owned His Presence on our altars under the silence of the sacramental veils. Will He for get this in the day of judgment when He comes in power and majesty? So to think would be to wrong the heart of the Son of Man.

The Judgment can indeed inspire salutary fear in the hearts of believers, but only in those who have abused this marvelous Sacrament of supremest love, does it inspire the terror of despair. But these are already judged, already condemned; they have not to await the sentence of Jesus Christ, for, as the Apostle tells us: "he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord."

For just as the worthy reception of Holy Communion is the surest guarantee of final perseverance in God's grace and love, so unworthy Communion is an infallible mark of eternal damnation. Such miscreants have rejected Christ in His last and greatest gift to the human race. They have knowingly and wilfully crucified Him anew in their traitorous hearts, they have done more than blaspheme Him in His agony; they have spit upon His Sacred Face and driven the sevenfold sword through the heart of His Mother. The executioners on Calvary, a robber, a pagan soldier, a sinful woman, could find mercy in His sight, but what hope for those who have hardened their hearts to the pleading of His sacramental love and turned their backs upon the light that streams from the Tabernacle? In life they have choked up the avenues of sorrow and remorse; they have become deaf to the reproaches of conscience, deaf even to the reproach of that small still voice issuing from the depth of the Eucharistic Presence; they have spit upon that little, lone and lingering spark of hope, which alone could prevent utter darkness from taking possession of their souls before the eternal darkness finally overtakes them. In the fearful words of the Apostle, they have eaten and drunk judgment to themselves.

But what claims can that soul put forward which has been repeatedly nourished with the worthy reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ and which has been accompanied into eternity by the Holy Viaticum! What influence is here present to sway the decision of the Judge in favor of the soul now stripped of all the trappings of earth and clothed only in the weak remnants of its faith and the poor fragments of its works! Its claims upon the sovereign Judge are many and irresistible. We have but to consider the wonderful effects of frequent worthy Communion to become convinced of this. Most of these have already been considered, but there is one which makes a particular appeal to the human heart.

We know that the angels indeed form the suite of God and of His Christ, but the worthy communicant becomes, in the words of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, His "blood relation". And shall the blood relation of the Son of God perish eternally? Shall the "blood relation" of Jesus Christ hear from His lips that most dreadful of all curses: "Depart from Me"? Not merely a soul bought with a great price, swathed in the red garments of his Savior's agony, healed by the stripes of His scourging, cleansed in the bitter waters of His Crucifixion–but one nourished throughout life by His own Body and Blood? Shall it now be delivered over to become the spoil of the enemy of the Son of Man, after passing from Baptism to Viaticum through a Red Sea of His Sacred Blood?

V. The Eucharist, the Pledge of Glory

"Christ has wished that this sacrament be the pledge of our future glory and of our eternal felicity." This is the express teaching of the Church in the Council of Trent. The liturgy of the Eucharist brings home to us the same teachings at every moment: "O sacrum convivium . . . et futurae nobis gloriae pignus dater".

The opening strophe of the O Salutaris proclaims the same faith:

O saving Victim, opening wide
The gates of heaven
To mortals here below.

The Eucharist is indeed the food of pilgrims but it is a living bread, the very flesh and blood of Him who rose from the dead and lives in immortal glory, sitting at the right-hand of God. And the contact of our flesh with the glorified Body and Blood seals us His and prepares us immediately for the consummation of an everlasting union with Him in the Beatific Vision. So that when, after the worthy reception of the Holy Viaticum, death severs the bonds that hold us to this life, God's ministering angels recognize upon us the sign of the elect.

This faith and confidence in the Holy Eucharist are inspired by Christ Himself at the very time of the institution of this Adorable Sacrament. Before leaving the world Jesus renews the promises of a royal recompense to His faithful followers: "I dispose to you as my Father hath disposed to me, a kingdom"; and He seals that promise with His Blood poured out and His Blood given as drink, making us thereby coheirs with Himself by the drinking of the chalice of the testament. "This is the new testament in My blood," He says; a testament of supremest love, raising us to the dignity of heirs with Himself, with the right to His eternal inheritance, in the kingdom of the Heavenly Father.

Final perseverance, then, means heaven, to be united with Christ forever, to share His divine life with Him in eternity as we have done in time, to be one with Him in the possession of His kingdom.

Jesus is no less in the Eucharist than in heaven and no less with us here below than with the saints above. It is we who are not yet ripe for the final consummation. Meanwhile, He is changing us into Himself, molding our hearts and minds to His own image by the frequent union of His Flesh and Blood to ours. It is, therefore, only a matter of time until (submitting ourselves to Him) we attain to the full stature of Christ. Then shall faith pale before vision and hope be swallowed up in possession, while love, stronger that death, melts from grace to glory, merging in perseverance. We call it a grace, and rightly so, the crowning grace from Christ's own hand. But it is a grace that flings itself across the frontiers of time and earth into eternity and heaven, a grace that seals and makes everlasting what was true indeed, but transient until then. It is the last touch from the hand of the Divine Sculptor that completes our likeness to the Savior's and Lover of our souls, that makes the friendship of Jesus abiding.

Endnotes

1 Dalgairns, p. 22.

2 Ibid., p. 35.

3 Marmion, Christ the Life of the Soul, p. 281.

4 Walsh: Catholic Anthology, pp. 67-68; Translation from the Basque.

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