Manifestations of Christ

Rev. Fulton J. Sheen, Ph. D., D. D., LL. D., Agrege en

Philosophic, University of Louvain, Belgium,

Thirteen addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour,

sponsored by the National Council of Catholic

Men with the co-operation of the National

Broadcasting Company and its Asso-

ciated Stations.

(On Sundays from December 27 to March 27, 1932)

I. Mother and Babe.

II. The Thrill of Monotony.

III. The Right of Sanctuary.

IV. The Only Thing That Matters.

V. The Freedom of Authority.

VI. The World’s Greatest Need.

VII. The Divine Sense of Humor.

VIII. The Curse of Broadmindedness.

IX. Religion Without Dogma.

X. Pilate and Patriotism.

XI. The Church and the Times.

XII. The Crucifixion.

XIII. The Eternity of Easter.

by

Catholic University of America.

National Council of Catholic Men

Sponsor of the Catholic Hour

1314 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor
Huntington, Indiana



Imprimatur:

* JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.

Bishop of Fort Wayne

Feast of the Annunciation, 1932



AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

These sermons originally delivered over the Catholic Hour

sought to illumine souls concerning Christ and His Church.

Now they are set down in printed form in order that they
may continue that same apostolic mission. The ear has
heard, and now the eye can see. .It remains for the heart
and soul to embrace.

The author will not feel that his work has enjoyed any

success, even though its reception be great or its praise high,

unless at least a single soul who may have chanced to read
it, is lifted up to a better living of that life which is Divine,

a better understanding of that Truth which is the Word, and

a deeper love of that Love which is the Spirit of God. In a

world that is constantly looking for new faiths, new religions,
and new creeds, there can be nothing more new or novel than
to begin to practise and live the Truths of Christianity.

FULTON J. SHEEN.



DEDICATED TO THE

Cherished Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus,

Holy Gateway through which God came to men,

In Prayerful supplication and petition that

Loving souls seeking Love may find thee: the
Door through which men pass back again to God.



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 5

MOTHER AND BABE
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, December 27, 1931.)

This is Christmas, the season when eyes and

hearts are drawn in memory and in love to a Babe

who was born in a cave under the floor of the world,

and who, by that act, shook the world to its very

foundations. It is the season of the stupendous mys-

tery of Omnipotence wrapped in swaddling bands

and laid in a manger. Divinity is always where you

would least expect to find it. No one in the world

would ever have thought of looking for God in the

form of a babe. No one in the world would ever

have suspected that He who threw the great fiery

ball of the sun in the heavens, would one day be

warmed by the breath of oxen. No one in the world

would ever have suspected that hands which could

tumble planets and worlds into space, would be one

day smaller than the huge heads of cattle. No one

in the world would ever have suspected that He who

could make the stars as His canopy would one day

be covered by the roof of a stable. And yet such are

the ways of God. In order to confound the power of

the world He comes in the weakness of a child and

in order to set at naught its pride makes His bed in

straw. The world He made as His home and yet the

world received Him not, and thus Christmas is the
story of a God who was homeless at home.

But while we pay this primary act of adoration to
the God who brought heaven to earth, there is dan-

ger that some of us may forget just how the Child
came into the world

;
in fact, certain modern forms

of Christianity speak of the Babe, but never a word



6 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

about the Mother of the Babe. The Babe of Bethle-

hem did not fall from the heavens into a bed of

straw, but came into this world through the great

portals of the flesh. Sons are inseparable from

mothers, and mothers inseparable from sons. You

cannot go to a statue of a mother holding a babe,

and cut away the mother, leaving the babe suspend-

ed in mid-air, neither can you cleave away the

Mother from the Babe of Bethlehem. He is not sus-

pended mid-air in history, but like all other babes,

came into the world by and through His Mother.

While we adore the Child, then, should we not vene-

rate His Mother, and while we kneel to Jesus, should

we not at least clasp the hand of Mary for giving us

such a Saviour? There is a grave danger that, lest

in celebrating a Christmas without the Mother, we

may soon reach a point where we will celebrate

Christmas without the Babe. And what an absurdity

that would be, for just as there can never be a

Christmas without a Christ, so there can never be a

Christ without a Mary.

May I, therefore, ask you to go with me and pull

aside the curtains of the past, and under the light of

Revelation discover the role and interpret the part

that Mary played in the great Drama of Redemp-

tion?

Almighty God never launches a great work with-

out exceeding preparation. The two greatest works

of God are the Creation of the first man, Adam, and

the Incarnation of the Son of God, the new Adam,

Jesus Christ. But neither of these was accomplished

without characteristic, divine preparation.

God did not make the masterpiece of creation,

which was man, on the very first day, but deferred

it until He had labored for six days 'in ornamenting



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 7

the universe. From no material thing, but only by

the fiat of His Will, Omnipotence moved and said to

Nothingness, “Be” and lo and behold, spheres fell

into their orbits, passing one another in beautiful

harmony without ever a hitch or a halt. Then came

the living things : the herbs bearing fruit as uncon-

scious tribute to their Maker; the trees, with their

leafy arms outstretched all day in prayer, and the

flowers opening the chalice of their perfumes to

their Creator. With the labor that was never ex-

hausting, God then made the sensitive creatures to

roam about, either in the watery palaces of the

depths, or on wings, to fly through trackless space,

or else as unwinged to roam the fields in search of

their repast and natural happiness. But all of this

beauty, which has inspired the song of poets and

the tracings of artists, was not in the Divine Mind

sufficiently beautiful for the creature whom God

would make to be the lord and master of the uni-

verse. He would do one thing more: He would set

apart, as a choice garden, a small portion of His crea-

tion, beautify it with four rivers flowing through

lands rich with gold and onyx, permit to roam in it

the beasts of the field as domestics of that garden

in order to make it a paradise of the most intense

happiness and pleasure that was possible on earth.

When finally that Eden was made beautiful, as only

God knows how to make things beautiful, He launch-

ed the masterpiece of His creation: the first man,

and in that paradise of pleasure was celebrated the

first nuptials of humanity—the union of flesh and
flesh of the first man and woman : Adam and Eve.

Now if God so prepared for His first great work,
which was man, by making the paradise of Creation,

it was even more fitting that before sending His Son



8 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

to redeem the world, He should prepare for Him a

paradise of the Incarnation. And for four thousand

years He prepared it by symbols and prophecies. In

the language of types He prepared human minds for

some understanding 6f what this new paradise

would be. The burning bush of Moses inundated

with the glory of God, and conserving, in the midst

of its flames, the freshness of its verdure and the

perfume of its flowers, was a symbol of a new para-

dise conserving in the honor of its maternity the

very perfume of virginity. The rod of Aaron flour-

ishing in the solitude of the Temple, while isolated

from the world by silence and retreat, was a symbol

of that paradise which in a place of retirement and

isolation from the world would engender the very

flower of the human race. The arch of alliance

where the Tables of the Law were conserved was a

symbol of the new paradise in which the Law in the

Person of Christ would take up His very residence.

That paradise was prepared for, not only by sym-

bols, but also by prophecies. Even in that dread day

when an angel with a flaming sword was stationed

in the first garden in creation, a prophecy was made

that the serpent would not eventually conquer, but

that a woman would crush its head. Later on Isaias

and Jeremias hailed that holy paradise as one which

should encircle a Man.

But prophets and symbols were a too distant pre-

paration. God would labor still more on His Para-

dise. He would make a Paradise not overrun with

weeds and thistles, but blooming with every flower

of virtue
;
a Paradise at whose portals sin had never

knocked, nor against whose gates infidelity would

never dare to storm; a Paradise from which would

flow not four rivers through lands rich with gold



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 9

and onyx, but four oceans of grace to the four cor-

ners of the world ; a Paradise destined to bring forth

the Tree of Life, and therefore full of life and grace

itself; a Paradise in which was to be tabernacled

Purity itself, and therefore one immaculately pure

;

a Paradise so beautiful and sublime that the Heaven-

ly Father would not have to blush in sending His

Son into it, and that Paradise of the Incarnation to

be gardenered by the Adam new, that flesh-girt

Paradise in which there was to be celebrated the

nuptials, not of man and woman, but of humanity

and divinity, is our own Beloved Mary, Mother of

Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

And thus, as we gather about the crib of Bethle-

hem, we somehow feel that we are in the presence of

a new Paradise of Beauty and Love and Innocence,

and that the name of that Paradise is Mary. God

labored for six days and produced Eden for the first

Adam
;
now He labored anew, and produced the new

Eden, Mary, for the new Adam, Christ. And if we

could have been there in that stable on the first

Christmas night, we might have seen that Paradise

of the Incarnation, but we should not be able to

recollect whether her face was beautiful or not, nor

should we be able to recall any of her features, for

what would have impressed us, and made us forget

all else, would have been the lovely sinless soul that

shone through her eyes like two celestial suns, that

spoke in her mouth which only breathed in prayer,

and that was heard in her voice, which was likp the

hushed song of the angels. If we could have stood at
the gates to that Paradise we should have less peered
at it, than 'into it, for what would have impressed us,

would not have been any external qualities, though

these would have been ravishing, but rather the



10 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

qualities of her soul—her simplicity, innocence, hu-
mility, and above all, her purity—and so completely
would all these have taken possession of our soul, as

so much divine music, that our first thought would

have been, “Oh! so beautiful,” and our second

thought would have been, “Oh! what hateful crea-

tures we are.”

Tell me why should not that Paradise of the In-

carnation be spotless and pure? Why should she

not be immaculate and stainless? Just suppose that

you could have pre-existed your own mother, in

much the same way that an artist pre-exists his

painting. Furthermore, suppose that you had an in-

finite power to make your mother anything that you

pleased, just as a great artist like Raphael has the

power of realizing his artistic ideals. Supposing

you had this double power, what kind of mother

would you have made for yourself?

Would you have made her of such a type that

would make you blush because of her unwomanly

and unmotherlike actions? Would you have in any

way stained and soiled her with the selfishness that

would make her unattractive not only to you, but to

your fellow man? Would you have made her exter-

iorly and interiorly of such a character as to make

you ashamed of her, or would you have made her, so

far as human beauty goes, the most beautiful wo-

man in the world
;
and so far as beauty of soul goes,

one who would radiate every virtue, every manner

of kindness and charity and loveliness
;
one who by

the purity of her life and her mind and her heart

would be an inspiration not only to you, but even to

your fellow man, so that all would look up to her as

the very incarnation of what is best in motherhood ?

Now, if you who are an imperfect being an<J who



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 11

have not the delicate conception of all that is fine in

life, would have made the lovliest of mothers, do you

think that Our Blessed Lord who not only pre-

existed His own Mother, but who had an infinite

power to make her just what He chose, would, in

virtue of all the infinite delicacy of His Spirit, make

her any less pure and loving and beautiful than you

would have made your own mother ? If you who hate

selfishness, would have made her selfless, and who

hate ugliness would have made her beautiful, do you

not think that the Son of God who hates sin would

make His own Mother sinless, and who hates moral

ugliness, would have made her immaculately beauti-

ful?

I plead, therefore, for a Christmas in which the

Babe is not an Orphan, but a Child of Mary
;
I plead

for a religion which breathes respect for mother-

hood, and vibrates with a love for that Mother,

above all mothers, who brought Our Saviour into

the world. If there is any man or woman looking

for a test as to what constitutes the divine religion

on this earth, let him apply the same test he would

to the judgment of a man. If you ever want to know

the real qualities of a man, judge him not by his

attitude to the world of commerce, his outlook on

business, his kindness and his genteel manners, but

judge him rather by his attitude to his own mother.

If you want to know the quality of a religion, judge

it exactly the same way, that is, not by the way it
seeks to please men, but rather by the attitude that

it has to the Mother of Our Blessed Lord. If you
find a religion which never speaks of that Woman
who gave us Our Redeemer

;
which, in its liturgy and

its devotions, is silent about the most beautiful of

women; which, in its history has even broken her



i2 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

images and statues, then there certainly must be

something wanting to the truth of that religion, and

let me say, even to its humanity.

Our Blessed Lord could hardly be expected to look

with favor on those who forgot His Mother, who

nourished Him as a Babe, carried Him into Egypt,

caressed Him as a Child, and stood at the bedside

of the cross when, with almost His last breath, He

tenderly called her “Mother”. Really, one of the

great inconsistencies of the modern world is its sen-

timental and almost commercial attachment to

“Mother’s Day,” and its complete forgetfulness of

the Mother of Mothers, the Mother of our Lord, and

the Mother of men, without whom all motherhood is

without a Christian ideal. I can understand why a

man should love his mother, but I cannot understand

why a man who calls himself a Christian and a fol-

lower of Christ should not have a very deep and in-

tense love for Christ’s Mother. I repeat, therefore,

that a quick test for the divinity of any religion is

its outlook on the Mother of Christ. And if you

want to know just how intense and deep and loyal

our love is to that sweet Mother, then place your

hands over our hearts.

Christmas takes on a new meaning when the

Mother is seen with the Babe. In fact, the heavens

and the earth seem almost to exchange places. Years

and years ago, aye, centuries ago, we used to think

of heaven as “way up there.” Then one day the God

of the heavens came to this earth, and that hour

when she held the Babe in her arms, it became true

to say that with her we now “look down” to heaven.

In these days when Mother is separated from

Child, which is birth control, and a husband is sep-



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 13

arated from his wife, which 'is divorce, we plead for

the return of the Ideal Mother and we address her

:

With our forlorn and cheerless condition, Sweet

Queen, we pray thee, give us patience and endur-

ance. When our spirit is exalted or depressed,

when it loses its balance, when it is restless or

wayward, when it is sick of what it has and

hankers after what it has not, when our mortal

frame trembles under the shadow of the tempter,

we shall call on thee, and ask thee to bring us

back to ourselves, for thou art the cool breath of

the immaculate, the fragrance of the rose of

Sharon—thou art the Paradise of the Incarnation
—thou art the Mother of Our Saviour—thou art
Our Queen—Our Mother—Our Immaculate Moth-
er—and we love thee

!



14 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

THE THRILL OF MONOTONY
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, January 3, 1932.)

As another New Year rolls round in the cycle of

time, one wonders how many are depressed with the

monotony of years. It is an undeniable fact that the

world hates the mere fact of repetition just as much

as it loves the shock of the new. The modern man

hates the monotony of the same wife, and to escape

it seeks refuge in divorce. He dislikes exceedingly

living according to the morality of the Ten Com-

mandments, and to escape its monotony he develops

new morals and prefaces to morals. He dislikes also

the monotony of a life that is consecrated to a single

purpose, and a final end, and to escape it, often with

his own hands, shuffles off his mortal coil. This

positive distaste of repetition so characteristic of our

day alone explains the constant demand for new

thrills, new excitements, new psychologies, new re-

ligions, new morals, new gods, new everything to

arouse the already jaded sensibilities, and the soul

weighed down with the world ennui.

If one asks just why monotony is so distasteful to

our age, one is met with this answer: “Everything

that is full of life loves change, for the characteristic

of life is movement toward a new goal, and urges

toward new pleasures. Being essentially directed to

novelty, life can never rest in the tediousness of

repetition.”

This argument has never appealed to thinking

men as thoroughly sound. I believe that just the

contrary is true, and instead of saying that those

who are full of life hate monotony we should say



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 15

that those who are full of life find a positive thrill

in monotony. To prove this point one can appeal to

those who are essentially full of life and who, there-

fore, enjoy the thrill of monotony, namely, a child,

God, and His Incarnate Son: Our Blessed Saviour.

First of all, the child. If you place a child upon

your knees and bounce it up and down three or four

times, the child, full of the passion of life, will cry

out, “Do it again.” If you tell a child a delightful

fairy story, the child will never say, “Oh, that is an

old one. I heard Uncle Ray tell that last week,” but

he will say, “Tell me again.” If you are very clever

and can blow smoke through your eyes, or even

through your ears, the child is never content with

just the one trick of magic, but will say, “Do it

again.” You may build houses of cards, and then

tear them down, and feel that you have exhausted

your repertoire when you have done it once, but the

child is not so easily depressed with repetition, and

with joyous appeal will sing out, “Do it again.”

Simply because the child is full of life, he wants to

see things unchanged and to be repeated over and

over again, for to his brimming enthusiasm there is

inseparably linked the wondrous thrill of monotony.

And what is true of the child is true of God, or bet-

ter perhaps, what is true first of God is true of the

child and God—both love repetition.
When on that first great day of creation God saw

the first rose unfold its red petaled chalice in tribute

to Him, He did not feel that it would be a dull, drab

world if roses went on producing roses till the crack

of doom, so He did not ask that a rose should be

turned into a stone. When He saw the first tree be-
fore Him with its great arms outstretched to the
heavens as if in supplication, He did not feel that it



16 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

would be a monotonous world if trees went on repro-

ducing trees until Gabriel sounded his golden trum-

pet, and so He commanded that every tree and

every plant should reproduce itself according to its

kind
;
for repetition is the sign of glowing and throb-

bing life. When He heard the first shrill notes of

the canary, He did not think that the world would

be dull and tiresome if canaries went on reproducing

canaries and their song even to our own sad days,

so He did not ask that a canary be changed into a

buttercup.

Because God is full of life, He enjoys the thrill

that comes with sameness, and so I can imagine Al-

mighty God with something of the joy and exuber-

ance that belongs to a child, saying every morning

to the sun, “Do it again,” and every evening saying to

the moon and stars, “Do it again,” and every spring-

time saying to the daisies, “Do it again,” and every

winter saying to the snowflakes chiseled by some

great heavenly smith, “Do it again,” and every min-

ute saying to the mountain streams, as great silver

ribbons, “Do it again,” and every time a child is born

into the world, to the eternal confusion of Birth Con-

trol, giving a divine curtain call and asking for a

Divine Encore in order that the heart of a God might

once more ring out in the heart of a babe.

It was only natural, then, that when God sent His

Beloved Son onto this earth that He should teach the

lesson that God taught at creation, namely, the gos-

pel of the thrill of monotony. There was ever a beau-

tiful monotony in the story of His life ; thirty years

obeying—not one year; three years teaching—not
one year; three hours redeeming—not one hour.
And as He lived He taught, and all His garnered

wisdom could be summed up in the words, “Do it



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 17

again.” There was the monotony of sacrifice

—

“Take up your cross daily, and follow Me the mon-

otony of kindness
—

“If one strike thee on thy right

cheek, turn to him also the other the monotony of

mercy
—“How often should we forgive? Till seven

times? Aye, till seventy times seven times;”

the monotony of birth
—

“Nicodemus, unless a man

be born again, ... he can not enter into the king-

dom of God ;” the monotony of sacrificial thoughtful-

ness
—
“Do this in commemoration of Me ;” the mono-

tony of prayer
—
“And He prayed the third time;”

the monotony of miracles, for St. John tells us that

if he recorded all the miracles Our Blessed Lord had

worked, the world would not be large enough to con-

tain the books thereof. There was only one time in

His life that He ever cursed a thing, and that was

the day He saw the barren fig tree which was not

producing its fruit in due season, and therefore was

not enjoying the thrill of the monotonous.

But why, it may be asked, is there a thrill in

monotony? There is necessarily bound to be a thrill

in working toward any goal or fixed purpose, and

therein is the final reason for the romance of repeti-

tion. There, too, is the line of division between gen-

uine Christianity and modern paganism. The Chris-

tian finds a thrill in repetition because he has a fixed

goal
;
the modern pagan finds repetition monotonous

because he has never decided for himself the purpose

of living. Instead of passing the test, the modern

mind changes the test, instead of working toward an

ideal, it changes the ideal
;
instead of tending repeti-

tiously toward a fixed point, the modern mind

changes its point of view, and calls it progress. It is

no wonder life is dull, when one has not decided the

purpose of life; it is no marvel that existence is



18 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

drab, if one has never discussed the reason for exist-

ence. How dull, for example, golf would be if there

were never a green; how monotonous a theatre, if

there were never a last curtain; how monotonous

would be a sea voyage, if there were never a port, or

a journey, if there were never a destination. How

insipid poems would be if there were never a last

line, and heaven only knows how tiresome sermons

would be, if there were never a last word ; and so it

is with life. Since the modern mind has never de-

cided the goal of life, nor the purpose of living, nor

the reason of existing, but like a weather-cock

changes with every wind of doctrine and suggestion,

it is necessarily bound to find life dull, drab and

monotonous.

Contrast this goalless existence with the Christian

point of view in which a man has an ultimate end

and purpose in life. Do you think, for example, that

Dubois, who labored for seven years to make the

cast for the statue of Jeanne d’Arc, found his artistic

life dull and monotonous? Each day’s work, repeti-

tious though it was, brought to him the thrill of

seeing the goal of the finished masterpiece come

closer and closer. Do you think that the musicians

or the scholars who practice and study for days upon

days find their work monotonous? To them each

repeated moment is just a preparation or a step

toward the goal of either a thrilling recital, or a

great intellectual discourse. Once admit a purpose

in life, and each and every act which tends toward

that point, bears the unmistakable stamp of joyful-

ness and cheer. The Christian has his fixed goal,

namely, to make his life more and more Christ-like.

His own nature is like a block of marble, and his will

is the chisel. He looks out upon his model, Christ,



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 19

and, with the sharp points of his mortifying chisel,

cuts away from his nature huge chunks of cold

selfishness, and then by finer and more delicate

touches makes the great model appear forthwith,

until finally only the brush of a hand is needed to

give it its polished finish. There is no man living

who has this Christian ideal who believes that re-

peated acts of faith, hope and charity, prudence, jus-

tice, fortitude and love, are tainted with what the

modern mind would call monotony. Each new con-

quest of self is a new thrill, for each repeated act

brings closer and closer that love we fall just short

of in all love, eternal union with Our Lord and

Saviour.

Sometimes, of course, it is not easy to see just how

much progress we are making toward our goal, but

though we never see the progress, we never lose

sight of the goal. Then we are very much like the

tapestry workers, who work not from the front of

the tapestry, but from the rear, keeping ever before

their eyes the little model to be realized. They go on

drawing thread after thread in a monotonous but

thrilling way, never destined to see their completed

work until the last thread has been drawn, and the

tapestry is turned about to show them how well and

how truly they have labored.

My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I may but choose the colors,

He worketh skillfully.

Full oft He chooses sorrow,

And I, in foolish pride,

Forget He sees the upper,

And I the under, side.



20 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

The Christian, therefore, is always bound to have

a great advantage over the modern pagan, simply

because he knows where he is going, whereas the

modern pagan knows not. The pagan must always

be a pessimist, for he must always feel that this life

'is too short to give a man a chance, and the Christian

will always be the optimist, for he knows that this

life is long enough to give a man a chance for eter-

nity. That is why the Christian can be joyful. That’s

why the pagan is sad and depressed.

Picture a child with a ball, and suppose that he is

told that it is the only ball he will ever have to play

with. The natural psychological reaction of the

child will be to be fearful of playing too much with

it, or bouncing it too often, or even pricking it full

of pin holes, because he will never have another ball.

But suppose that the child is told that perhaps next

month, perhaps next week, perhaps even in five

minutes, he will be given another ball, which will

never wear out, which will always give joy, and with

which he will never tire of playing. The natural re-

action of the child will be to take the first ball a little

less seriously, and to begin playing with it joyously

and happily, not even caring if someone does prick

it full of pin holes, because he is very soon going to

have another ball which will endure forever.

The child with one ball is the modern pagan who

has only one ball in the sense that he has one sphere,

one world, one life, one earth. He cannot enjoy the

earth as much as he would like because he must al-

ways be fearful of the earth being taken away from

him. He can never even tolerate that any suffering

or pain should ever come to his little ball, the earth,

for it is the only ball that he will ever have to play

with. The Christian, on the other hand, is the one



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 21

who believes that some day, perhaps even tomorrow,

he will have another ball, another world, another

sphere, another life. And so he can play with this

earth, enjoy its monotony apd even be resigned to its

pin-pricks, for he knows that very soon he is going

to have the other ball, which is the other life that

shall never wear out nor become tiresome, because

its life is the life of the Eternal God, the beginning

and the end of all that is.

When, therefore, seized and suffused through and

through with the Christian ideal of making Christ

shine out in your life, and when in the routine of

Christian living you have begun your morning with

a prayer and asked the' Father’s blessing on all your

goings and comings
;
and when you have broken your

fast with the Eucharistic Lord at the altar, and knelt

in adoration before the uplifted Host and the glow-

ing chalice, and when you have sanctified the day by

offering each deed in union with the Master, and

sanctified each trial by linking it with the cross, and

repressed unkind words and unjust criticisms out

of love for Him who prayed for His enemies on the

cross, and, when the day is done, you again kneel in

thanksgiving and in humble gratitude to the Father

of Light, and when after having done this day after

day, week after week, and year after year in a con-

stant effort to make your life more Christ-like, and

you wonder just what other thing needs to be done

to bring you just a step closer to the goal of everlast-

ing peace and happiness, then remember the lesson

of the thrill of monotony: “Do it a^ain.”



22 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

THE RIGHT OF SANCTUARY
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, January 10, 1932.)

In these days it is almost impossible to call our

souls our own, for the psycho-analytic mood has

seized us like a pestilential fever. Every sin and

failure of a soul, every crime and secret passion of

a heart, every unholy falling from a holy purpose

is broadcast to a world only too ready to find a jus-

tification of its own wrongs in hearing the wrongs

of others.

In the face of this condition, the world needs

an institution something like that which flourished

in the Middle Ages, namely, the Right of Sanctuary.

This right was based upon the inviolability attached

to sacred things. A fugitive guilty of felony was
considered immune from prosecution by law, pro-

vided he entered the sanctuary of a church. The

principle behind this right was that any criminal

who entered the sanctuary had equivalently cast his

lot with God, and therefore was immune, for a cer-

tain period of time, from the searchings of men.

The world today needs just some such haven of

rest where we might be alone with ourselves and our

God, and not have our sins published to the world

;

some place of shelter from the curious eyes of those

who would not bind up our wounds, but delight in

our anguish; some solitary harbor where we might

escape those who ask us to reveal, but who never

stop to heal; some sanctuary where our sins would

not be told to the world, nor allowed to fester unseen

within our heart. And the world has such a sanc-

tuary which respects the inviolability of the human



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 23

person, wherein a soul may cast its lot not upon in-

quiring men but upon a forgiving God, and that is

the Sacrament of Penance, which, by figure of

speech, is referred to familiarly as Confession.

What does confession demand ? It demands two

things: a confessor and a penitent, and only God

could find both. First of all, it demands a confes-

sor; a man who will look kindly on the denying

Peters, speak words of forgiveness to penitent Mag-

dalenes, breathe words of comradeship to betray-

ing Judases; a man with intensity of love for his

work, and with universality of love for his peni-

tents; a man signed with the sign and sealed with

the seal of Christ; one who has a heart of fire for

charity and a heart of bronze for chastity ;aman with

discretion, that is, with a mind strange to curiosity,

vanity and fear
;
and finally, a man with a heart like

an immense well into which sins, like stones, may

be dropped, but a well so deep that no sound comes

back from those depths to an ear which might be

bent to hear.

But immediately I hear it said: “But why

should I confess my sins to a man
;
for the priest is

a man? Why should I not tell them directly to God?
Why should a confessor stand between my God and
me?”

Is it asking too much that you confess yourself

to someone who has been constituted a delegate of
divine justice and divine mercy? Is it asking too

much that God should send out ambassadors to deal
with those who have broken off relations with
Him? At the present time, for example, diplomatic
relations are broken off between Russia and Ameri-

ca. America, therefore, never deals through direct

diplomatic channels with the Soviet Government.



24 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

If she has any dealings with the Soviets, it is through

a third party. Is it not just, therefore, that since

man by sin has broken off diplomatic relations with

God, that he, therefore, should deal with God through

the intermediary of His ambassadors? Why should

we admit this to be just in one case, in the case of

human government, and deny it to be just” in the

case of divine government? And, as a matter

of fact, does not God deal with our fellow men

through ambassadors in other walks of life? The

source of all law is God, and the presidents and

kings and parliaments throughout the world, in the

administration of law, are really acting in His name.

God has even given to heads of governments the

power of taking away life. If, therefore, some men

share God’s justice by punishing, why should not

others share God’s mercy by forgiveness? It is

the very order of life that we should have the doc-

tor for our body, the teacher for our mind, the presi-

dent for our government—why, then, should we not
have confessors for our souls?

Confession demands not only a confessor, but

also a penitent, and here too the wisdom of God is

supremely revealed. The penitent must be created

by God as the confessor was created by God. Mak-

ing a penitent means taking a man in his pride,

and the icy silence which envelops the avenues of his

soul, and saying to him : “You shall come, and kneel

at the feet of a man who, in his human estate, may

be no better than you are, but who is nevertheless

an ambassador of Christ, and to that man you shall

reveal that which you hide from your friends and

relatives, that which makes you blush when alone,

that which you lock in the storehouse of your mem-

ory; and, as you confess these secrets on bended



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 25

knees, you shall say to that man: ‘Father, forgive

me, for I have sinned/
”

Hard though it is, this narration of sins by a

penitent answers a need of the human heart. How

often history reveals that a guilty man, pressed by

conscience alone, and driven on by some mysterious

influence stronger even than conservation of life,

will make him refuse the immunity which silence

promises, and force him to avow the very sin which

will bring the punishment he sought to avoid. In

moments when man has feared neither witnesses

nor tortures, he has cried out: “Yes, it is I ! I did it.”

There is something even in the most hardened crim-

inal at times which makes him give himself up to

justice, by an avowal of his guilt in order that he

might have peace of mind.

Just as a foreign substance like a piece of glass

which is taken into the body is gradually thrown off

by the body; and just as a poison taken into the

stomach irritates it until the stomach finally throws

it off, so, too, the heart of man, irritated and weary

by the poison of sin, seeks the catharsis of spirit by

which it too may pour its wrong and the poison of

its sins into the ear of a friend.

And even those who have no great crimes upon

their souls, but are weighted down by a heart which

seems not right with God, crave some confidant to

whom they can unpack their hearts with words. In
joy and in sorrow, every heart needs some one who
will suspend his own preoccupations to listen to its
own, and who will drop all his cares to take in the
burden of its own. The most unfortunate mortals are

those who shed their tears in silence because there
is no one to wipe them away. How many men and
women there are in the world who, through sin, have



26 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

felt themselves alone, cast off from everyone, and

who in their inmost heart have felt the need of some

sanctuary into which they might retire for consola-

tion and dirction! Our cities are full of souls who

are constantly crying out, “What can I do?” and to

these and the millions who are yearning for some

one who will understand and pardon as Christ un-

derstood and pardoned the Penitent Thief, the con-

fessional is the answer.

If the world had never known the Sacrament

of Penance, and some one proposed instituting it,

there would be a universal cry go up from all men

saying that “humanity is too proud” and hence there

will never be penitents. “Humanity is too indis-

creet” and hence there will never be confessors.

But the fact—here I speak as a priest—that the
world comes to our feet, children of seven years and

their elders of seventy, hearts of sixteen years,

hearts of sixty years
;
the fact that there comes the

mother with her daughter, the father with his son,

the precious desires of youth with the chagrins of old

age, the innocent souls who never lost baptismal

grace, and the great prodigals who lost it and found

again the fountains of mercy, and the fact that all

these tell us that which the ear of a spouse does not

hear, nor the ear of a brother know, nor the ear of

a friend suspect, proves and proclaims to the world

that there are penitents because there are confessors,

and there are confessors because there are peni-

tents, and there are both because Jesus Christ is

God.

There is no institution in the world so effect-

ively working for social reform as the Church

through the confessional, and this for the double

reason that the confessional gets at the intention



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 27

which inspires the act, and reforms the group by

reforming the individual which makes it up.

The Church, in the confessional, after the man-

ner of her Divine Founder, proceeds on the principle

that if it is wrong to do a certain thing, it is wrong

to think about that thing. She does not wait until

the desire or the intention passes into act; rather

she goes into the very confines of a conscience and

lays her finger on the desire to sin and brands it as

a sin, even though the desire is never realized.

Mindful of the words of Our Blessed Lord she does

not wait until a man actually commits adultery, but

she holds that any man commits adultery even if

he lusteth after a woman in his own heart. She

demands that the defaulting cashier confess his

intention to steal money, even though he finds it

impossible to do so. She holds, as against modern

morality, that it is too late to legislate when the act

has been done
;
it is too late to pass a law when you

have to call a policeman
;
it is too late to really heal

when you have to establish fact-finding commis-

sions. The facts of crime, drunkenness, and social

evils are merely the putting into action of base

thoughts, intentions and desires, and the Church in

insisting that every illicit motive and every evil de-

sire be confessed, is getting at the hidden springs

and roots of action, and in keeping them clean she

keeps actions clean; by making man pure on the

inside, she makes man pure on the outside, and by

making him right with God, she makes him right

with his fellow man.

The Church in the confessional is, furthermore,

the only institution in the world today that reforms

society by reforming the individual who makes it

up. Modern social reform begins with the group and



28 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

ends with the individual
;
the Church in the confes-

sional begins with the individual and ends with the

group. Modern morality talks about crime, which

is a group problem; the Church in the confessional

talks to the criminal, who is the individual problem.

Modern morality talks in the abstract about the

problem of drunkenness; the Church in the confes-

sional talks in the concrete to the drunkard and asks

him not to psycho-analyze his mental state for subli-

mation, but to reveal his moral state for purgation.

And of these two methods, the confessional is the

only really effective one, for just as the only way to

make a family good and happy is to make each in-

dividual in the family happy, so, too, the only way

to make society peaceful is to make each individual

citizen peaceful, and this cannot be done except by

making each conscience right with its God. Modern

morality is in a tower shouting to rebellious soldiers

below
;
the Church, through her officers, is mingling

with the soldiers individually, bidding each one to

submit to law which is, in the last analysis, the or-

dinance of God. Thus it is that by making individual

adjustments, and by treating each conscience singly,

and judging it not by the way it makes for worldly

success, but by the way it is ordered to God, the

confessional purifies each individual stream and

river that runs into the great social ocean, and if

that ocean today does not seem clean and bright, it

is only because there are some streams that have not

been made clean at their source by the distilling and

refining pardon of God’s great Sacrament of Mercy.

If, therefore, our Government and our social

reformers are really sincere about the betterment

of society, they must begin to recognize the impor-

tance of intention and the importance of the indi-



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 29

vidual
;
they must more and more see that we can-

not allow citizens to think badly and expect them to

act rightly, nor can we expect a commission to legis-

late morality for a nation, without, in some way,

seeing that each individual in the nation is him-

self moral and righteous with his God. We will not

be made a moral nation by permitting our educators

to tell us there is no such thing as sin, nor shall we

be made a righteous nation by permitting reformers

to emphasize sin to the point of morbidity. There

is only one way to have the fact of sin, and not to

have the fact of its overemphasis which is morbidity,

and that is through the confessional which tells a

man that he is a sinner, but also tells him that he

can, by God’s pardon and grace, become a saint.

There is a fable about a man being locked in a

little box, and when the box was opened it was found

that he had the heart of a giant. That box is the

confessional box, and the heart of the priest is the

heart of a giant, and from the heart of that giant

there come the consoling words of Christ: “Come

to me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I

will refresh you.” And the penitents who hear those

words then begin to understand the tremendous par-

adox of God’s pardon—if we had never sinned, we
never could call Christ “Saviour.”



30 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, January 17, 1932.)

The utterly disillusioned man, uprooted from the

past and disinherited by tradition, is wandering

about the modern Babylon, and like a man who

knows not where he is going, pictures to himself a

thousand destinations.. He seeks refuge in a human-

istic outlook, and takes pride in the progress of

civilization, and yet down in his heart knows that he

is confusing comfort with civilization, and change

with progress. He needs an infusion of new blood

;

he needs the cross, fertilization with eternity, and

to help him discover himself, we here set down the

Catholic philosophy of life in which are indicated

the stepping-stones to those great peaks. The steps

are threefold, one following the other in logical

fashion: first, silence; secondly, reflection; and

thirdly, primacy of the spiritual.

Silence:

One of the really great needs of our own day is

silence. Modern life seems to thrive on a fondness

for noise, and by noise I mean not only the staccato

barbarism of jazz, or the bleating and moaning of

saxophone orchestras, but also, and principally, the

desire for that which distracts : love of amusements,

constant goings and comings, excitements, and

thrills, and movement for the mere sake of move-

ment. What is the reason of this fondness for noise ?

It is not due to any inherent love of that which is

loud, for people generally prefer that which is soft

and refined. Rather the reason is to be found in the

great desire on the part of human beings to do the



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 31

impossible, namely to escape from themselves. They

do not like to be with themselves, because they are

not pleased with themselves; they do not like to be

alone with their conscience, because their conscience

reproves and carries on an unbearable repartee.

They do not like to be quiet, because the footsteps

of the Hound of Heaven can be heard in silence, but

cannot be heard in the din of excitement; they do

not like to be silent, because God’s voice is like a

whisper and it cannot be heard in the tumult of the

city streets. These are some of the reasons why the

modern world loves noise, and they are all resolvable

to this : they drown God’s voice and stupefy con-

science. The result is that very few people ever

know themselves. In fact, they know everyone else

better than they know themselves. That is why so

few ever see their own faults.

In order to remedy this condition, what is needed

is less amusing and more musing; a silence; a going

apart into the desert of our souls to rest a while ; a

solitariness from men and an aloneness with God
;
a

quiet which permits the soul to be sensitive to the

whispers of God
;
a requiem or a rest from modern

maxims and the excuse of new philosophies and the

excitements which appeal to the body and disturb

the soul
;
a privacy inspired by the example of Him

Who, least of all mankind, needed a preparation of

silence for a life of activity and yet had the greatest

of them all
;
a tranquillity inspired by Him Who in

the midst of a busy life spent whole nights on moun-

tain tops in prayer.

In order to attain this requiem and silence it is

not necessary to travel to the quiet of the oriental

skies, for silence is not dependent upon a place, but

upon a state of mind. It is not based on where we



32 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

are but what we are thinking about. It is being

alone, so far as the world is concerned, even though

one is in the very midst of it—an activity by which
every faculty of the heart and mind and soul is bent

inward, awaiting the voice of God.

Reflection

:

Silence constitutes the environment of the second

effect of entering into ourselves, namely, reflection.

In moments of silence, men begin to seek God. The

soul begins to part company with animal desires, and

begins at least a blundering search for the hiding

place of that haunting presence which seems to

speak to them from every burning bush. The em-

bryonic instinct for heaven now cries out for its

object, and as the vague sense of unexplained powers

conditions it, reflection begins, and reflection means

asking oneself the question, “Why am I here?” and

finding the answer in the words of the penny cate-

chism: “to know, love and serve God on this earth,

and be happy with Him forever in the next.”

Suppose I stopped a clerk, a banker, a merchant,

a messenger-boy, on the way to work tomorrow

morning, and suppose I put to each the question,

“Whither are you going?” He would answer, “To

my labor.” “But, why do you labor?” “I labor to

earn a reward.” “But suppose I told you that a very

wealthy man had died and left an immense fortune

to all who labor
;
would you be interested in knowing

the conditions upon which that fortune might be

yours?”

There is not one who would refuse. And yet, Al-

mighty God has Himself promised a heavenly re-

ward to all men who labor. Why are they not inter-
ested in learning something of its conditions? Why
are they not concerned in discovering the ways and



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 33

means to its possession? If we are concerned with

an earthly reward, why should we not be concerned

with a heavenly reward? If we are concerned with

a temporal livelihood, why should we not be concern-

ed with an Eternal Life? What, after all, is the use

of amassing wealth, if God is going to require our

soul? Our shrouds will have no pockets. Was not

this the point in the parable of the man who filled

his barns? He added store to store, building to

building, and in our own language, dollar to dollar,

and then said to his soul, “Soul, thou hast much

goods laid up for many years,* take thy rest; eat,

drink, make good cheer.” But God said to him,

“Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of

thee: and whose shall those things be which thou

hast provided?” “So is he that layeth up treasure

for himself, and is not rich towards God.” Reflection

on such a parable convinces the soul that the great

idea, after all, is not the question which is so often

asked by the modern world on the occasion of a

death, “What did he leave behind?” but rather,

“What did he take with him?” For it is only good

works that follow.

The answer to the question of destiny is that I

have been made to know, love and serve God for all

eternity. Just as there are heavenly bodies which

can complete their orbits only after the lapse of ages,

and which then reappear with unfailing precision

at the point from which they started, as if to present

themselves once more to Him who sent them on

their way, so, too, each soul that is sent into this

world from that great white throne of God, to run

its course over a brief span of years, is destined to

reappear once again before Him who sent it on its
way, freighted with virtues and loaded with the



34 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

precious cargo of merits to receive the crown He

made for us the day of our birth.

Primacy of the Spiritual:

After silence, and the reflection that God is the

end of all and the only peace and rest for souls, there

comes the sudden and certain recognition of the

primacy of the spiritual, which is the essence of the

true Christian life. The primacy of the spiritual

means that there is nothing in the world that really

matters except the salvation of our soul, and that in

its salvation the spiritual must reign over the tem-

poral, the soul over the body, grace over nature, and

God over the world. Religion means this or it means

nothing. This was the great emphasis of Our Lord

Himself, and it therefore cannot be any less the em-

phasis of anything Christian. Had we been on the

mountainside of Capharnaum some twenty centuries

ago, mingled with the shepherd and fisherman audi-

ence of Galilee; had we felt the upland breath of

that autumn evening on whose wings the great

Teacher’s accents rose and died away
;
had we mark-

ed the eyes of Jesus, invited by the note of a bird’s

whirling overhead, or caught by the beauty of a dis-

tant lily floating in the Lake of Galilee, or as He

pointed to the pastures brilliant with gold amaryllis,

and heard the praise of the flowers that toil not
;
had

we seen Him point to the green grass which carpets

the mountainside, and heard Him draw from all the

other beauties of nature lessons that Heaven tells,

we should have learned that the very stars above our

heads were less mysteries than the creatures below,

and we should have been ashamed of our want of

trust and providence in Him who made us.

One great and tremendous thought would dis-

engage itself from His sermon on that occasion,



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 35

namely, the supremacy of the world of the spirit:

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth : where

the rust and moth consume, and where thieves break

through, and steal. But lay up to yourselves treas-

ures in heaven. . . Behold the birds of the air, . . .

consider the ravens. . . . for they neither sow, nor

do they reap, nor gather into barns : and your heav-

enly Father feedeth them. Are not you of much more

value than they? And which of you, by taking

thought, can add to his stature, one cubit? .... If

then ye be not able to do so much as the least thing,

why are you solicitous for the rest?. . . And for rai-

ment why are you solicitous? Consider the lilies of

the field, how they grow : they labor not, neither do

they spin. But I say to you, that not even Solomon

in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. And if

the grass of the field which is today and tomorrow

is cast into the oven, God doth so clothe : how much

more you, Oh, ye of little faith! Be not solicitous

therefore, saying: ‘What shall we eat, and what

shall we drink, or wherewith shall we be clothed V

.... And be not lifted up on high. . . For after all

these things do the heathens seek. For your Father

knoweth that you have need of all these things. But

seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His justice, and

all these things shall be added unto you.”

The Church is the only institution in the world

today which is emphasizing the spiritual above all

things else. That is why she scandalizes the world.

That is why the pagans hate her. And despite the
hate she reasserts that nothing matters in life but

the salvation of a soul. That is why she builds her
schools in order that children may never grow up
without hearing the name of God, and bowing their
knees to their Lord and Saviour. That is why she



36 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

has marriage laws and insists that the faith of the

Catholic party and the children born of the marriage

be safeguarded
;
that is why she holds that if a state

would command a violation of the law of God, the

individual must die rather than disobey His Creator.

Consonant with this ideal, the Church holds that a

tiny child who knows the existence of God and be-

lieves in the Trinity, knows far more, and is better

entitled to a University degree, than professors scat-

tered throughout the length and breadth of this land

who do not know that beyond time is the Timeless,

and beyond space is the Spaceless, the Infinite Lord

and Master of the Universe.

The Church believes, furthermore, that a holy

hour spent before the Blessed Sacrament does more

good for the well-being of the world than whole days

spent in talking about progress to the utter oblivion

of the fact that the only true progress consists in

the diminution of the traces of original sin; she

believes that a penitent returning to God is of far

more consequence than the cancellation of war

debts
;
that an increase of sanctifying grace in a soul

is of far more value than the increase of interna-

tional credit; that a group of cloistered nuns in

prayer are more effective in preserving world peace

than a group of world politicians discussing peace to

the forgetfulness of the Prince of Peace; that all

the beauties of nature do not compare in the small-

est degree with the beauty of a soul in the state of

grace
;
that the profoundest of scientific discoveries

is as naught compared with the superior intellectual

intuitions of a child at its first Communion
;
that the

success of world policy based on Christian principles

of justice would be a great force for the salvation of

millions of men
;
that it really does not matter very



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 37

much whether children ever confuse Aristides with

Aristotle, but it does matter if they confuse Buddha

with Christ; that the fact that millions listen to a

preacher over the radio is of no importance what-

ever compared with the visit of one soul to hear the

sweet whisperings of Jesus from the tabernacle; that

poverty is not the greatest curse; that physical in-

firmity is not the greatest ill
;
that the loss of a mem-

ber of a family is not so serious as the loss of faith

:

that all the kingdoms of earth are as the least grain

in the balance compared to a kingdom of a human

heart where Mary is Queen and Christ is King.

Is this excessive? Is this a loss of a sense of pro-

portion? Is this foolishness? If it is, it is the foolish-

ness of Our Lord : ‘‘What doth it profit a man if he
gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own

soul.”

Every devotion to a heavenly ideal must seem

foolish to a world whose ideals are of the earth

earthly. To some minds it must have seemed foolish

for Our Lord on the Mount of Temptation to have

repulsed Satan, when Satan, in a wild orgy of tri-

umphant pride revealed in all their fugitive splendor

the great procession of the kingdoms of earth, and

promised them to the Lord if only falling down He
would adore him.

The foolishness of the Divine Founder has been

the foolishness of the Divine Church. She, too, is

set high on the mountain top of the world. To that
mountain, as to the Mount of Temptation, the
spectres of False Progress, New Freedom and
Worldly Success come to her, and in vision remind
her of all the sects which would join her communion,

all the individuals which would join her ranks, and
of all the opposition, and persecution of the world



38 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

that would cease if only falling down she would

adore worldly success, be a little less interested in

the spiritual education of the young, a little less

emphatic about the sanctity of marriage, and a little

less concerned with the salvation of souls.

With the quickness of a lightning flash the Church,

conscious of fellowship with her Divine Master,

echoes back the words of her Master, the charter

cry of spiritual freedom : “Seek ye first the kingdom

of God and His Justice.”

And as the spectre of Error and Worldly Success

makes its way down the mountain top, it finds at its

base all the little kingdoms of passing theories and

ephemeral faiths prostrate in sickening adoration

before it, and in contrast to the great kingdom set

high upon the mountain, the spectre of Worldly Suc-

cess, like the spectre of Satan, begins to realize and

understand that the greatness of the world never

tempts the great—but only the small!



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 39

THE FREEDOM OF AUTHORITY

(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the
Cath-

olic Hour, January 24, 1932.)

Stevenson once said that not on bread alone doth

man live, but principally on catchwords. High-

sounding phrases often go rattling by like express

trains, carrying the burden of those who are unable

to think for themselves. Among these phrases or

catchwords there is none in the field of religion

which has greater modern appeal than the one:

“The modern man wants a religion of the spirit,

and not a religion of authority.” Years ago its pop-

ular expression was that “we must be free from

the slavery of Rome.” Today it is more direct:

“No Catholic can be free because he is bound down

by law and authority.”

In order to clarify the teachings of the Church

concerning authority, law and freedom, we shal}

here develop the two following propositions : First,

obedience to highest law and authority constitute

freedom; second, the obedience to the law and au-

thority of the Church is thrilling and romantic.

Our Blessed Lord once said that the Truth would

make us free. By this He meant that only by obed-

ience to the highest law and authority do we become

free. To take an example from the realm of arts.

If an artist in a fever of broad-mindedness and a

desire to be free, chooses to paint a giraffe with a

short neck, he will soon discover that he will not be

free to paint a giraffe at all. If in a feverish love

for the new art of self-expression which obeys no

law, he decides to paint a zebra without stripes, and

a leopard without spots, and a triangle with four



40 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

sides, he will soon discover that he is not free at all

to paint even zebras, leopards or triangles. It is

only obedience to law and authority and the in-

herent nature of things that we ever become free.

Another example in the field of science : Imagine

a railroad steam engine endowed with conscious-

ness, so that it is able to read, to think, to speak.

And supposing that one day it picked up with its

pilot one of the modern books on the morality of

self-expression, such as one of Mr. Bertrand Rus-

sell’s, in which he rebels against obedience to tra-

ditional moral laws, and the authority of Christian

teaching. And suppose, with its great single Cy-

clops eye, it reads the pages of this liberal thinker,

and becomes so impressed with his fine sophistic

idioms that it whistles to itself: “Mr. Russell is

right. What do the engineers who designed me,

and imposed their laws upon me know about my in-

ner impulses ? Why should I even obey the authori-

ty of an engineer who is constantly limiting my

steam pressure to one hundred pounds a square

inch, when I have the vital Freudian urge to make it

one hundred and fifty pounds? And, furthermore,

why should I submit myself to the authority of rail-

road officials who, fifty years ago, laid the tracks

upon which I should run? Why should I take this
curve, that straightaway, this bridge, simply be-

cause they decided over two score years ago that I

should ? Why should I not be permitted to choose
my own directions, and to make my own tracks?
From now on, I am going to be self-expressive !”

Well, suppose the steam engine did become self-ex-

pressive. It would soon learn two things : first, in re-

fusing to obey the laws concerning steam pressure, it

would discover it was no longer free to be a steam



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 41

engine, because in asserting its pressure beyond

the normal, it would burst its entrails ; secondly, by

refusing to keep on the track it would no longer be

free to run. And if the steam engine did jump the

track, and burst its boilers, it would not hurt the

engineer who designed the track; it would hurt

only the engine itself. And so, too, if a man dis-

obeys God's laws, and dashes his head against them,

as against an eternal rock, the rock does not suffer

—it is only the head of the man that suffers.
Finally, it is only by obedience to the laws of

Christ and His Church that we ever become free. If

there is any vision or mental picture to be had at all

of the condition of the world a few centuries ago and

now, it might be the vision of a great rocky island

in the very center of a stormy and raging sea. Pre-

viously to the break-up of Christian unity three cen-

turies ago, this island may be represented as sur-

rounded by a great stone wall against which the

waves spent their fury, but never broke it down.

Inside the wall were thousands and thousands of the

children of God playing games, singing songs, and

enjoying life, to the utter oblivion of the great de-

vouring sea outside. With the dawning of the day

of False Freedom, there came to the island a group

of men who argued with the children in some such

language as this: “Why have you permitted the

Church of Rome to surround you with all her laws

and dogmas? Can you not see that she has sur-

rounded you all about, and has not permitted you

to think for yourself or to be free and captains of

your own fate? Tear down the walls, break down

the barriers, throw off the obstacles, and begin to

live your own life, and learn to be free." And so
the children tore down the walls; and one day I



42 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

went back and I saw all the children huddled togeth-

er in the center of the island, afraid to move, afraid

to play, afraid to sing, afraid to dance, afraid to be

gay, afraid of falling into the sea.

We who, by the Grace of God, have been blessed
with the protection of the Church’s law and au-

thority, can never quite understand why anyone

can ever think that obedience to that law and au-

thority is enslaving. On the contrary, to us it is

positively romantic. It is easy to fall into the ex-

cesses of the modern world, to talk about progress,

new thought, new religion, just as it easy to fall off

a log.

It is easy to be an atheist, and to say the world

does not require a God, just as it is easy to be a

pantheist, and say that the world is God; but it is

thrilling to walk between those two abysses and hold

that God is in the world, but not of it—and such
is the Incarnation. It would be extremely easy to

fall into the extreme of the Stoics, and say that

pain is the law of life, or to fall into the equally

stupid extreme of saying pleasure is the law of life,

but it is romantic to escape the pitfalls and hold

that pain is the prelude to life—and such is the
lesson of Easter.

It would be easy to say with Gandhi that life

should be a fast, just as it would be easy to say with

the pagan that it should be a feast, but it is thril-

ling to avoid both extremes, and hold that the fast

should precede the feast. Every heresy in the his-

tory of the Church has been either a truth exag^

gerated to an excess, or diminished to a defect. It

is easy to fall into any of these extremes, and to

lose one’s intellectual balance. The thrill is in keep-

ing it.



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 43

In other words, the Church is not so much to be

compared with Niagara Falls, as it is to be compared

with a great and tremendous rock weighing ten

thousand tons, which is poised on another rock by

the delicate balance of no more than six inches of a

base. Niagara is a falls simply because it cannot

help falling
;
it is the easiest thing to do ; it is simply

letting things go. But that great rock which is

pitched at an angle no bigger than one’s hand has a

thousand angles at which it will fall, but there is

only one on which it will stand, and it is that which

makes it a far more serious thing than the falling

and churning of all of Niagara’s waters. And so

with the Church. All through her history she has

been like that great rock, poised on the very brink

of an abyss, and it is that which has made her ro-

mantic
;
for danger is the root and foundation of all

romance in drama.

Why do children like to play robber, walk picket
fences, tramp into thick woods, play along banks of

deep rivers, throw stones at vicious dogs, listen to

blood-curdling ghost stories, walk on roofs ? Is it not

because each and every chlid has deep-rooted in his

heart as the foundation for his manhood, and as the

very condition for his enjoying life, the love of dan-

ger and the thrill of being near it, and yet never

falling completely into it?

Why has every person an instinctive desire to
witness a storm at sea, providing he could be sure

of reaching port? Is it not because there is romance

in escaping danger? We who ride in Peter’s bark
witness such a storm, and know we will reach port.
For twenty centuries the bark of Peter has been rid-

ing the seas, and for twenty centuries we who have



44 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

been on board know the romance of the seas and its

dangers, but also the romance of a port. Sometimes

that bark has come within a hair’s breadth of

dashing against the rock of saying that Christ was

nian and not God, and then again it has suddenly had

to swerve to avoid crashing into the opposite rock

and saying that Christ is God but not man. At

other moments in her voyage, Peter’s bark has come

within a razor’s edge of being stranded on the

sands of humanism and saying that man does every-

thing, and God does nothing. And then, by an

equally dexterous move, she saves herself from the

sandbars of declaring with the oriental mystics that

God does everything and man does nothing. It would

have been extremely easy for Peter and his succes-

sors to have sunk their ship in the depths of deter-

minism in the last century, just as it would have

been easy for it to have capsized in the shallow

waters of sentimentalism in the Twentieth Century.

But is is wonderfully thrilling to have avoided both.

It would have been very easy for the bark of Peter

to have been lost in the fogs of modernism in our

own day, just as it would have been easy for it to

have lost its course in the mists of Freudian sex-

ology. But to have avoided both of these snares, not

by mere chance, but by intelligent direction, is

thrilling. If one small blunder concerning the doc-

trine of original sin were made in her twenty cen-

turies of charting the course of men to God, huge

blunders would have been made in human happi-

ness. A mistranslation of a single word one thous-
and years ago, might have smashed all the statues

of Europe. A false move in the Council of the Va-
tican might have impoverished reason. By one

single slip, the Church might have stopped all the



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 45

dances, withered all the Christmas trees, and broken,

all the Easter eggs.

But the Church has avoided all these pitfalls

and all these errors, and as the bark of Peter, with

sails flying high, cuts the waters of the sea, she

looks before and aft. Behind her she can see the

shrivelled hulks of a thousand heresies and mental

fashions that were dashed to pieces against the

rocks of time
;
she can see ten thousand shallow ba-

sins into which she might have plunged, and ten

thousand rivers of sentimentalism in which she

might have been drowned. Now the bark of Peter

is in the open, with the sea calm and clear, but there

are shouts about her ears. Every now and then she

stops to gather up shipwrecked children from the

sinking rafts of sinking faiths, then onward she

speeds, and the future will be just as thrilling as

the past. Always in danger, always escaping it;

always threatened, always conquering; always en-

joying the romance of avoiding extremes, the bark

is destined to go on through all the storms and tem-

pests of the world, until one day it checks pace at

the hid battlements of eternity, and there as the

children disembark from the ship of Peter, they

will understand why it avoided the snares and pit-
falls—because as Peter stood at the helm of his bark,
there rested on his hands the invisible, eternal hands

of Christ, who steers the sun and moon and stars i'l
their courses.



46 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

THE WORLD’S GREATEST NEED
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, January 31, 1932.)

There is a famine abroad on the earth, a famine

not of bread, for we have had too much of that and

our luxury has made us forget God
;
a famine not of

gold, for the glitter of so much of that has blinded

us to the meaning of the twinkle of the stars
;
but a

famine of a more serious kind, and one which threat-

ens nearly every country in the world—the famine
of really great men. In other words, the world today

is suffering from a terrible nemesis of mediocrity.,

We are dying of ordinariness; we are perishing from
our pettiness. The world’s greatest need is great

men, some one who will understand that there is no

greater conquest than victory over oneself
;
some one

who will realize that real worth is achieved, not so

much by activity, as by silence; some one who will

seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice, and

put into actual practice the law that it is only by

dying to the life of the body that we ever live to the

life of the spirit
;
some one who will brave the taunts

of a Good Friday to win the joy of an Easter Sun-

day; who will, like a lightning-flash, burn away the

bonds of feeble interest which tie down our energies

to the world; who, with a fearless voice, like John

the Baptist, will arouse our enfeebled nature out of

the sleek dream of unheroic repose; who will gain

victories, not by stepping down from the Cross and

compromising with the world, but who will suffer in

order to conquer the world. In a word, what we need

are saints, for saints are the truly great men.

Now, we cannot all become saints, in the strict-



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 47

est sense of the term, but we can all become saints

to a certain degree, and I am going to try to explain

in simple psychological terms how saints are made.

I assume without further ado that the grace of God

is the one thing necessary, and that God will give

that grace to those who do His will. I am concerned

merely with the natural elements of sanctity, or the

psychological steps which lead to the state of saint-

hood, and these are three: a sense of emptiness, a

knowledge, and an exchange.

First of all, I say that they are made by an ex-

perience of the emptiness of the world, and its abso-

lute incapacity to give peace and happiness to the

human heart. Consult your own experience. When

you were children you looked forward to Christmas

Day, and in anticipation you imagined all the joys

that would be yours with the possession of your toys,

the sight of the lighted tree, and the unlimited taste

of fruits and candies. When finally Christmas Day

did come, and you had played with the toys (and it

was not long until you were “played out”), and you

had tasted the sweet meats and blown out the last

candle on the tree, you then crept into your bed, and

said in your own little heart of hearts that somehow

or other, it did not come up to your expectations. It

did not, for nothing does. That experience of child-

hood has been repeated a thousand times since. Men

look forward to the possession of power
;
they finally

get it, and still they are unhappy. Men crave wealth,

they have a hundred times more than they need, and

still they want more; and their wanting it makes

them unhappy. Even the loss of the least of it robs

them of joy, as the plucking of a single hair from a

head that is full of it, gives pain. Nothing ever

comes up to our expectations

!



48 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

Well, why is it? The reason is that in looking

forward to the things of this world, we use our im-

agination, which, as a faculty of the soul is spiritual,

and therefore capable of imagining infinite things.

I can imagine, for example, a mountain of gold, but

I have never seen one. I can imagine a castle on the

Hudson that has a thousand times a thousand rooms,

each wall blazing with diamonds and emeralds, but

I have never seen that castle, and perhaps never

shall.

Now, the pleasure of the future, the joys which

I hope to obtain, the power which I desire to wield,

the wealth which I desire to possess,—all of these,
as long as they are not actually in my possession, be-

come endowed with the infinity which belongs to the

imagination. They, in a certain sense, become spirit-

ualized and idealized, and hence take on something

of the blessedness and infinity of my imagination.

But when finally these imaginings or expectations

are realized, they are material, they are local, de-

finite, concrete, finite, cribbed, confined. In the mind

they were ideal, and hence almost unbounded; in

reality, they are concrete, and therefore very limit-

ed. Hence there arises a tremendous disparity be-

tween the infinite imagination I had of these things

and the finite realization. When the things actually

do come, they come with a sense of loss. We feel
that in their becoming actual or real, they lose some-

thing of the beauty with which we had imaginative-

ly endowed them. A sense of emptiness or void then
comes over the soul. We feel that we have been
cheated out of something, for the realization of our

imagination is like trying to fill a valley with a pea

;

a terrible sense of emptiness creeps over the soul,

and this sense of void is really a call from God. In



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 49

very simple terms, it means that we cannot expect

happiness here below. It means that we are made

for an infinite happiness, otherwise we never could

have imagined it. But it also means that we can

never obtain it here below, for otherwise we should

never have this terrible feeling of loss, and disap-

pointment, and emptiness.

Two escapes are possible from this feeling of

emptiness and dissatisfaction of the world, or better

still, from the voice of God. One is to drown the call

of God by seeking new pleasures, new stimuli, new

excitements. Some souls use the remedy and go on

chasing butterflies and golden pots at the end of the

rainbow, and throw themselves into pleasures that

satisfy a very small part of themselves, and never

their whole being. Others let loose the reins of duty

upon the flanks of the steeds of passion, and gallop

on down the avenues of pleasures, always being made

more hungry by that which satisfies, until at last

despair drives them to suicide and double death.

Saintly souls, on the other hand, when they feel

this sense of uneasiness in their soul, conclude that

happiness is not to be found on this earth, that they

were made for God, and that the only unhappiness in

life is the unhappiness that comes from a failure to

tend towards Him. At this point begins the second

stage of the development of great men, namely, a

knowledge (and by knowledge I mean an under-

standing) of Our Lord and Saviour. Let me here

again appeal to your personal experience. You may

have heard a great deal about a certain person, about

his mannerisms, his severity, his rigorous life. You

only know about him, but you do not know him. With

this meager knowledge, you frankly avow that you

do not care for him. After spending five minutes in



50 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

his company, your whole feeling has completely

changed. Knowledge changed your whole outlook on

him, and converted hate into the beginning of love.

In much the same way that the prejudice of

Nathaniel against Our Blessed Lord was changed by

just two sentences from Our Lord’s lips, which

swept away prejudice, so it is with the soul of a

great man before Our Lord. At a distance, He seems

to be a crowned King, and the crown is not gold but

thorns; He seems to be wearing the garment of a

fool, and therefore He is to be spurned
;
he seems to

be holding a reed in His hand, and therefore is only

a mock King. But it is only seems, for the more we

get to know Him, the less we find we can get along

without Him. On closer view, we see that He is a

King, but not of this world
;
that the scars are not

relics of defeat, but the scars of love in the battle of

Calvary. That which we mistook for hardness was

devotion to truth ; that which we believed to be sev-

erity we see was devotion to love,—and so the pro-
cess goes on, until we find that in comparison to His

beauty, all other beauty is pain, and in comparison

to His love, all earthly love is but tawdry and vain.

At this point begins the third stage of saint-

hood, namely, exchange. There is a wrong impres-

sion abroad in the world to the effect that following

Our Lord means giving up the world, abandoning

friends, surrendering wealth, and losing all that life

holds dear. If we fear that in having Him we must

have naught else besides, we have not begun to un-

derstand Christ.

Such is not really the case. Sanctity is not a

question of relinquishing or abandoning or giving

up something for Christ : it is question of exchange.



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 51

Our Lord never said it was wrong to love the world

;

He said only that it was a loss, for “what exchange

shall a man give for his soul ?” Exchange is founded

on the fact that there are two classes of goods : first,

things that we can get along without; secondly,

things we cannot get along without. I can very well

get along without a dime, but I cannot get along

without the bread which it will buy, and so I ex-

change one for the other. So, too, in the spiritual

world, I soon learn that there are many things that

I can get along without, and as I grow in acquaint-

ance with Christ, I find that I can get along without

sin, but I cannot get along without His peace of con-

science, and so I exchange one for the other. Later

on, as I get to know Him better, I find that I can get

along without an innocent pleasure, but I cannot get

along without the pleasure of daily communion with

Him, and so I exchange the one for the other. I find

by a still deeper acquaintance that I can get along

without the world's goods, but not without the

wealth of Christ’s grace, and so I exchange one for

the other, and that is the vow of poverty. I find that

I can get along very well without the pleasures of the

flesh, but I cannot get along without the pleasures of

Christ’s spirit, and I exchange the one for the other,

and that is the vow of chastity. I find that I can get

along very well without my own will, but I cannot
get along without His, and so I exchange the one for

the other, and that is the vow of obedience. Thus the

saint goes on exchanging one thing for another. And

thus it is that in making himself poor, he becomes

rich, and in making himself a slave, he becomes free.

The gravitation of the earth grows weaker, and the

gravitation of the stars grows stronger, until finally,

when there is nothing left to exchange, like Paul he



52 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

cries out : “For to me. . . to die is gain,” for by that

last exchange his gain is Christ in everlasting life.

Sanctity, then, is not giving up the world. It is

exchanging the world. It is a continuation of that

sublime transaction of the Incarnation in which

Christ said to man: “You give me your humanity,

I will give you My Divinity. You give Me your time,
I will give you My Eternity. You give Me your

bonds, I will give you My freedom. You give Me

your death, I will give you My life. You give Me

your nothingness, I will give you My all.” And the

consoling thought throughout this whole transform-

ing process is that it does not require much time to

make us saints : it requires only much love.

And now, in exchange for telling you how saints

are made, kindly give me your prayers, that I may

practice what I preach.



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 53

THE DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, February 7, 1932.)

A remark not to be taken too lightly is one to

the effect that the modern world is taking itself too

seriously. Whether there be only five senses or fifty-

seven senses, one of the most precious of them all is

the one the modern world is rapidly losing, namely,

the sense of humor. There are many evidences to jus-

tify the statement that the world is losing its sense

of humor. Note, first of all, the changed attitude to-

ward laughter. It was not so long ago that laughter

was as free as the air, and as spontaneous as a

sneeze, being the natural product of human fellow-

ship, and the joyous effervescence of friend meeting

friend. Now it is put on a commercial basis, and
the business of making people laugh has become one

of the serious enterprises of our country
;
in fact, so

serious has it become that we are now obliged to pay

about two dollars for an evening of it in a theatre.

Gold, too, is taken so seriously today that some

men pursue it as if it were the “be all and the end

all here” and as if shrouds had pockets and coffins

had coffers. If it is lost, some feel that life is no

longer worth living, as if life consisted in what we
had rather than in who we are. Another evidence is

the seriousness with which the modern world em-

braces every new fad and fancy in the intellectual

order, simply because it is new. The only real ex-

planation for the craze over every new psychology

that lost its soul, then its consciousness, and now has
lost its mind, and the only real explanation for the

equally absurd theory that everything wrong in life



54 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

is traceable to a sex libido, is that the modern world

has lost its sense of humor. If these absurd theories

about God being a creature of Space-Time, and reli-

gion being, as one philosopher puts it, “a projection

into the roaring loom of time of a unified complex of

psychical values,” were advanced fifty years ago,

people would have laughed them out of existence.

The only reason the modern world holds them is that

it has lost its appreciation of what is funny, it has

lost its sense of humor.

It might be interesting to inquire into the his-

tory of the sense of humor, and this is best studied

in relationship to this visible world of ours. In or-

der that we might more clearly grasp its history, we

ask ourselves three questions : When did humor come

into the world? When did the world lose its sense

of humor? How did it regain it?

The Origin of the Divine Sense of Humor.

There never was a brush touched to canvas, nor

a chisel to marble, nor a dome thrown against the

vault of heaven's blue, but that a great idea preceded

it, for all art is the expression of the ideal through

the real. The architect, for example, who conceived

the Cathedral of Notre Dame, had an idea of that

Cathedral in his mind before a single stone of it was

put upon stone. Had he lived to see his work com-

pleted, he would have seen in that stone tribute to

the Blessed Mother, the realization, the consecration,

or the petrification of his idea.

Now Creation is an art—the Divine Art of the
Divine Artist. Everything that exists in this world,

every stone, every diamond, every plant, every tree,

every animal, every bird, every man, every child was

made according to a divine idea existing in the mind



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 55

of God from all eternity. God, too, had His “models”

or “patterns” and these were the “archetypal ideas”

or things which were identical with His very Being.

When, therefore, the Divine Fiat spoke to nothing-

ness, and planets and worlds tumbled from God's

finger-tips, and the great procession of life moved

on, everything which existed either in the most dis-

tant planet, or on our tiny earth, was a realization,

or a materialization, or an incarnation of His ideas.

Almighty God willed that just as any great

painting should make us think of the artist, and

every great monument should remind us of the

architect who designed it, and every painting recall

the painter and every machine the inventor, so, too,

everything in this world should, in some way, re-

mind us of Him. In other words, God made the

world with a Divine Sense of Humor.

But what has this to do with a Divine Sense of

Humor? Do we not say that a person has a sense of

humor if he can “see through things,” and do we not

say that a person lacks a sense of humor if he cannot

“see through things?” But God made the world ac-

cording to such a plan that we were constantly to be

“seeing through things” to Him, the Power, the Wis-

dom, the Beauty and the Source of all that is. In

other words, the material was to be a revelation of

the spiritual, the human the revelation of the divine,

the fleeting and the passing the revelation of the

Eternal. The universe, according to His original

plan, was transparent, like a window pane, and in

those days a mountain was not just a mountain; a

mountain was the revelation of the power of God
;
a

sunset was not just a sunset; a sunset was the reve-

lation of the beauty of God; a snow-flake was not

just a snow-flake; a snow-flake was the revelation



56 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

of the purity of God. Everything* told us something

about God, for by the visible things of the world is

the power and wisdom of the invisible God made

manifest. According to this plan, every man was a

poet, for a poet is one who is endowed with this sense

of the invisible, the power of seeing God through

things, and such is the essence of humor.

The Loss of the Sense of Humor.

Such was God’s plan of Creation, or rather its

great drama, perfect in detail without flaw or blem-

ish. But the drama, with each line exquisitely

sketched by God, was given to man to act and to play,

and man made a botch of the masterpiece. That one

thing which destroyed man’s plan in Creation,

though not God’s plan, was sin, and sin is serious-

ness. Sin is an act by which man refuses to use

creatures as a stepping-stone to God, or as a means

to an end, and insists on using them as ends in them-

selves. As a man loses his sense of humor when he

cannot see through a point, so, too, he loses his sense

of humor in its entirety when he ceases to see things

in revelations, or symbols, or reminders of God, and

begins to regard them seriously as ends in them-

selves. The day sin came into the world, the world

lost its transparency, and became opaque, like a cur-

tain. A veil was drawn between the Artist and His
artistry, between the Architect and the architecture,

between the Creator and the creation. The sense of

the invisible was lost. In his mental short-sighted-

ness, man lost the power “to see God through

things:” then a mountain was just a mountain; a

sunset was just a sunset; a snow-flake was just a

snow-flake. Poetry passed out of the world, and

prose came in—prose, which is a matter-of-fact-ness



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 57

of style—and men settled down to that terrible ser-
iousness in life which must always characterize

those who cannot see beyond the veil.

Rebirth of the Sense of Humor.

This seriousness pervaded the world for full

forty centuries. Then one night there rang out over

the stillness of an evening breeze the cry of the heart

of a God in the voice of a child. And when the Babe

grew in grace and wisdom, He went into the public

lanes and market places, and began to teach a new

doctrine to men—the doctrine of the Divine Sense of
Humor. Everything He said, everything He did

could be summed up in these words : Nothing in this

world is to be taken seriously, nothing—except the
salvation of a soul. “For what doth it profit a man

if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his

own soul.” The world, and the things that are in it,

will one day, like an Arab’s tent, be folded away.

There is nothing that endures but God.

And so, as He went about preaching, He taught

the lesson of the Divine Sense of Humor and never

took anything seriously except His soul. He saw the

fishermen gathering in their nets, but He did not

take them seriously. To Him they were fishers of

men. The pearl was not to be taken seriously, for

thanks to the Divine Sense of Humor, the pearl was

the worth of faith and grace. The quickness of the

lightning-flash from east to west was not just a phys-

ical phenomenon to be taken seriously. To Him it

was the revelation of the quickness of judgment. A
wedding garment was not to be taken seriously—

though June brides do take it seriously—a wedding
garment was a revelation of charity. And so on, all

through His life. Every material thing He viewed



58 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

as a tell-tale of some great eternal lesson. Every

trivial incident was a symbol of God’s working

among men. The fishes of the sea, the birds of the

air that reap not nor sow, the lilies of the field ar-

rayed in garments more glorious than Solomon’s,

camels and eyes of needles, gardens and husband-

men, thorns and thistles, bread and serpents, sheep

and goats, wheat and chaff, hen and chickens, and

all other parables of His ministry—all these seem-
ingly insignificant things of ordinary life were to

Him as transparent as the very air, and each and

everyone of them contained within itself a wonder-

ful lesson about the goodness of God, but only those

who had a Divine Sense of Humor and who could

see through things as He did, could read the lesson.

The serious can never speak in parables, but only

those with a sense of the invisible.

Such is the history of the Divine Sense of Hu-

mor, and now that we know what it is, we may ask

who are they who understand and possess it, and

here the answer must be that those who possess it in

its fulness are saints.

I do not mean canonized saints, but rather that

great army of staunch and solid Christians to whom

everything and every incident speaks a story of

God’s love. A saint can be defined as one who has a
Divine Sense of Humor, for a saint never takes this

world seriously as the lasting city. To him the world

is like a scaffolding up through which souls climb to

the Kingdom of Heaven, and when the last soul shall

have climbed up through it, then it shall be torn

down and burned with a fervent fire, not because it

is base, but simply because it has done its work—it
has brought souls back again to God. A saint is one
who looks out upon this world as a nursery to the



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 59

Father’s heavenly mansion and a stepping-stone to

the Kingdom of Heaven. A saint is one to whom
everything in the world is a sacrament. In the strict

sense of the term, there are only seven sacraments,

but in the broad sense of the term everything in the

world is a sacrament, for everything in the world

can be used as a means of special sanctification. A
saint is one who never complains about the particu-

lar duty of his state in life, for he knows full well

that '‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and

women merely players.” Why, then, should he who

plays the part of a king glory in his tinsel crown and

tin sword, and believe that he is better than some

one else who plays the part of a peasant ? For when

the curtain goes down they are all men. So, too, why

should anyone, who in this world happens to enjoy

either the accident of honor or wealth, believe he is

better than some one else who may possess neither

gold nor worldly learning? Why should he glory in
his tinseled crown and tin sword, and believe that

he is better than some one else who plays a less im-

portant role in the great drama of life? For when

the curtain goes down on the last day, and we re-

spond to the curtain call of judgment, we shall not

be asked what part we played, but how well we play-

ed the part that was assigned to us.

A saint, then, is one who has learned to spirit-
ualize and sacramentalize and ennoble everything in

the world, and make of it a prayer. No occupation is
too base for such spiritualization, nor is any suffer-

ing too hard for such ennobling. It is only those who
have not this highly developed sense that let the op-

portunities of daily life pass by without either mak-

ing of them a prayer, or taking from them a divine

lesson. Centuries ago in the streets of Florence there



60 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

stood a beautiful piece of Carrara marble that had

been cut and hacked and ruined by some cheap art-

ist. Other mediocre artists passed it by, and be-

moaned that it should have been so ruined. One day,

(so a story runs), Michael Angelo passed it by,

asked that it be brought to his studio, there applied

his chisel, his genius and his inspiration, and drew

out of it the immortal statue of David. The lesson

contained herein is that there is nothing so base or

low that it cannot be reconquered, that there is no

duty, however menial, that cannot be retrieved for

sanctity, and that there is nothing that is cast down

that cannot be lifted up.

Down in the gutter of a city street was a drop

of water, soiled, dirty and stagnant. Away up in the

heavens a gentle sunbeam saw it, leaped out of its

azure sky down to the drop, kissed it, thrilled it

through and through with new strange life and hope,

and lifted it up higher and higher and higher, be-

yond the clouds, and one day left it as a flake of im-

maculate snow on a mountain top. And so our own

lives—humdrum, routine, tiresome lives of a worka-
day world—can be ennobled, spiritualized and sacra-
mentalized, providing we bring to them the inspira-

tion of Someone who saw apostolic zeal in salt
;
pro-

vided we infuse their carbon blackness with the elec-

tric flame of love which will make them glow with

the brilliance of a diamond; provided we bring to

them the inspiration of the great Captain, who car-

ried five wounds in the forefront of battle and thrills

them with the fixed flash of that instant and intoler-

able enlightenment, the lightning made eternal as

the Light.

And when we have done this, then perhaps we

shall understand why He who came to this earth to



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 61

teach us the Divine Sense of Humor showed us

everything that was lovely and beautiful in His char-

acter—except one thing. He showed us His power;
He showed us His wisdom

;
He showed us His melt-

ing kindness
;
He showed us His sorrow

;
He showed

us His tears; He showed us His forgiveness; He

showed us His power over nature; He showed us

His knowledge of human hearts; but there was one

thing that He did not show
;
there was one thing He

saved for those who do not take this world too ser-

iously
;
there was one thing He saved for Paradise

;

there was one thing He saved for those who, like

poets and saints, have a Divine Sense of Humor
;

there was one thing He saved for heaven that will

make heaven heaven, and that was—His smile

!



62 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

THE CURSE OF BROADMINDEDNESS
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, February 14, 1932.)

“The Catholic Church is intolerant !” That simple

thought, like a yellow-fever sign, is supposed to be

the,one solid reason to frighten away anyone who

might be contemplating knocking at the portals for

entrance, begging a crumb of the Bread of Life.

When proof for this statement is asked, it is retorted

that the Church is intolerant because of its self-com-

placency and smug satisfaction as the unique inter-

preter of the thoughts of Christ. Its narrow-mind-

edness is revealed in its unwillingness to cooperate

effectively with other Christian bodies which are

working for the union of churches. Within the last

ten years, two great world conferences on religion

have been held, in which every great religion except

the Catholic participated. The Catholic Church was

invited to attend to discuss the two important sub-

jects of doctrine and ministry, but she refused.

That is not all! Even in our own country she

has refused to lend a helping hand in the federating

of churches, a federation which decided that it was

better to throw dogmatic differences into the back-

ground in order to serve better the religious needs

of America. The other churches will give her a royal

welcome, but she will not come. She will not coop-

erate ! She will not conform ! And she will not con-

form because she is too narrow-minded and intoler-

ant. Christ would not have acted that way

!

Such is, practically everyone will admit, a fair

statement of the attitude the modern world bears

toward the Church. The charge of intolerance is



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

not new. It was once directed against Our Blessed

Lord Himself.

Immediately after His betrayal, Our Blessed

Lord was summoned before a religious body for the

first Church conference of Christian times, held, not

in the city of Lausanne or Stockholm, but in Jeru-

salem. The meeting was presided over by Annas,

primate and head of one of the most aggressive

families of the patriarchate, a man wise with the de-

luding wisdom of three score and ten years, a man

wise in a country where age and wisdom were sy-

nonymous. Five of his sons in succession wore the

sacred ephod of blue and purple and scarlet, symbols

of family power. As head of his own house, Annas

had charge of family revenues, and from a non-bib-

lical source we learn that part of the family fortune

was invested in trades connected with the Temple.

The stalls for the sale of bird and beast and material

for sacrifice were known as the booths of the sons

of Annas. One expects a high tone when a priest

goes into business; but Annas was a Sadducee, and

since he did not believe in a future life, he made the

most of life while he had it. There was always one

incident he remembered about his Temple business,

and that was the day Our Lord flung tables down its

front steps, as if they were lumber, and with cords

banished the money-handlers like rubbish before the

wind.

That incident flashed before his mind now, when

he saw standing before him the Wood-worker of

Nazareth. The eyes of Jesus and Annas met, and

the first world conference on religion opened. Annas,

ironically feigning surprise at the sight of the Pri-

soner whom multitudes followed the week before,

opened the meeting by asking Jesus to make plain



64 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

two important religious matters, the two that were

discussed later on in Lausanne and Geneva and

Stockholm, namely, the question of His doctrine and

the question of His ministry. Our Lord was asked

by a religious man, a religious leader, a religious

authority, a representative of the common faith of

a nation, to enter into discussion, to sit down to a

conference on the all-important questions of religion,

ministry and discipline, and He refused. And the

world’s first church conference was a failure

!

He refused in words which left no doubt in the

mind of Annas that the doctrine which He preached

was the one which He would now uphold in religious

conference, namely, His Divinity. With words cut

like the facets of a diamond, with sentences as un-

compromising as a two-edged sword, He answered

Annas : “I have spoken openly to the world. . . and

in secret I have spoken nothing. Why askest thou
Me? Ask them who have heard what I spoke unto

them: behold they know what things I have said.”

In so many words Jesus said to Annas : “You im-

ply by your questioning that I am not divine
;
that 1

am just the same as the other rabbis going up and

down the countryside; that I am another one of

Israel’s prophets, and at the most, only a man. I

know that you would welcome Me to your heart if I

would say that I am only human. But no ! I have

spoken openly to the world. I have declared My div-
inity. I say unto you, I have exercised the right of

divinity, for I have forgiven sins
;

I have left My
body and blood for posterity, and rather then deny

its reality, I have lost those who followed Me, who

were scandalized at My words. It was only last night
that I told Philip that the Father and I were One,

and that I will ask My Father to send the Spirit of



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 65

Truth to the Church I have founded on Peter, a

Church which shall endure to the end of time.

“Ask those who have heard Me ; they will tell you

what things I have said. I have no other doctrine

than that which I declared when I drove your dove-

hucksters out of the Temple, and declared it to be

My Father’s House; that which I have preached,

that which angels declared at My birth, that which

I revealed on Thabor, that which I now declare be-

fore you, namely, My divinity. And if this is your

first principle, namely, I am not divine, I am just

human like yourself, then there is nothing in

common between us. So, ‘Why askest thou Me to

discuss doctrine and ministry with you T ”

Some brute standing nearby, feeling himself the

humiliation of the high priest at such an uncompro-

mising response, struck Our Blessed Lord across the

face with a mailed fist, drawing out of Him two

things : blood, and a soft answer : “If I have spoken

evil, give testimony of the evil; but if well, why

smitest thou Me?” That soldier of the court of

Annas has gone down in history as the representa-

tive of that group who feel an intense hatred against

Divinity, but who never clothe it in intellectual lan-

guage, but in violence alone.

All that happens in the life of Christ happens in

the life of the Church. Here in the courtroom of

Annas I find the reason for the Catholic Church’s at-

titude in refusing to take part in movements for

federation such as those inspired by present world

conferences on religion. Happy the Church is that

there should be a desire for the union of Christen-

dom, but she cannot take part in any such confer-

ence. In so many words the Church says to those
who invite her : “Why askest thou me about my doc-



66 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

trine and my ministry? Ask them that have heard

me. I have spoken openly through the centuries, de-

claring myself the Spouse of Christ, founded on the

Rock of Peter. Ask those who have heard me. Cen-

turies before prophets of modern religions arose, I

spoke my divinity at Nicea and Constantinople. I

spoke it in the Cathedrals of the Middle Ages; I

speak it today in every pulpit and church throughout

the world. I know that you will welcome me to your

conferences if I say that I am not divine; I know

ritualists throughout the world feel the need of my

ceremonials, and would grasp my hand if I would

but relinquish my claim to be divine. I know a re-

cent writer has argued that the great organization

of the Church could be the framework for the union

of all Christendom, if I would give up my claims to

be the Truth
;
I know the church doors of the world

would rejoice to see me pass in. I know your wel-

come would be sincere. I know you desire the union

of Christendom—but I cannot! Why do you ask
me? If your first principle is that I am not divine,

but just a human organization like your own, that I

am a human institution like all other human insti-

tutions founded by erring men and erring women;

if your first principle is that I am human, not divine,

then there is no common ground for conference. I

must refuse.”

Call this intolerance, yes ! That is just what it is

—the intolerance of Divinity. It is the claim to uni-
queness that brought the blow of the soldier; it is

the claim to uniqueness that brings the blow of the

world’s disapproval. It is well to remember that

there was one thing in the life of Christ that brought

His death, and that was the intolerance of His claim

to be divine. He was tolerant about where He slept



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 67

and what He ate ; He was tolerant about shortcom-

ings in His fish-smelling Apostles ; He was tolerant

of those who nailed Him to the Cross ; but He was

absolutely intolerant about His statement that those

who believe not in Him shall be condemned. There

was not much tolerance about His statement that

anyone who would prefer his own father or mother

to Him was not worthy of being His disciple. There

was not much tolerance of the world’s opinion in

giving His blessing to those whom the world would

hate and revile. Tolerance to His mind was not al-

ways good, nor was intolerance always evil.

There is no other subject on which the average

mind is so much confused as the subject of tolerance

and intolerance. Tolerance is always supposed to be

desirable because taken to be synonymous with

broadmindedness. Intolerance is always supposed to

be undesirable, because taken to be synonymous with

narrow-mindedness. This is not true, for tolerance

and intolerance apply to two different things. Intol-

erance applies only to principles, never to persons.

Tolerance applies only to persons, never to prin-

ciples. We must be tolerant to persons because they
are human

;
we must be intolerant about principles

because they are divine. We must be tolerant to the
erring, because ignorance may have led them astray

;

but we must be intolerant to the error, because truth

is not our making but God’s. Hence, the Church in

her history, due to reparation made, has always wel-

comed the heretic back into the treasury of her souls,

but never his heresy into the treasury of her wisdom.

The Church, like Our Blessed Lord, advocates

charity to all persons who disagree with her by word

or by violence. Even those who, in the strictest sense

of the term, are bigots, are to be treated with the



68 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

utmost kindness. They really do not hate the Church

;

they hate only what they mistakenly believe to be

the Church. If I believed all the lies that are told

about the Church, if I gave credence to all the foul

stories told about her priesthood and the Papacy, if

I had been brought up on lies about her teachings

and her sacraments, I should probably hate the

Church a thousand times more than they do.

Keeping the distinction well in mind between

persons and principles, cast a hurried glance over

the general religious conditions of our country.

America, it is commonly said, is suifering from in-

tolerance. While there is much want of charity to

our fellow citizens, I believe it is truer to say that

America is not suifering so much from intolerance

as it is suffering from a false kind of tolerance : the

tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue

and vice, Christ and chaos ! The man, in our country,

who can make up his mind and hold to certain truths

with all the fervor of his soul, is called narrow-mind-

ed, whereas the man who cannot make up his mind

is called broad-minded. And now this false broad-

mindedness, or tolerance of truth and error, has

carried many minds so far that they say one religion

is just as good as another, or that because one con-

tradicts another, therefore, there is no such thing as

religion. This is just like concluding that because,

in the days of Columbus, some said the world was

round, and others said it was flat, therefore there

is no world at all. Open-mindedness is all right to a

certain extent, but if the mind is open all around. . .

Well?

Certainly it should be reasonably expected that

religion should have its authoritative spokesmen,

just as well as science. If you had wounded the palm



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 69

of your hand, you would not call in a florist ; if you

broke the spring of your watch, you would not ask

an artisian well expert to repair it ; if your child had

swallowed a nickel, you would not call in a collector

of internal revenue ; if you wished to determine the

authenticity of an alleged Rembrandt, you would not

summon a house painter. If you insist that only a

plumber should mend your pipes, and not an organ

tuner; if you demand a doctor shall take care of

your body, and not a musician, then why should not

we demand that a man who tells about God and reli-

gion at least should say his prayers?

The remedy for this broadmindedness is intoler-

ance, not intolerance of persons, for of them we

must be tolerant regardless of the views they may

hold, but intolerance of principles. A bridge builder

of the enemy, and he who is broad-minded on the

bridge; the gardener must be intolerant about the

weeds of his garden; the property owner must be

intolerant about his claims to property; the soldier

must be intolerant about his country, as against that

of the enemy, and he who is broadminded on the

battlefield is a coward and a traitor. The doctor must

be intolerant about disease in his patients, as the

professor must be intolerant about error in his pu-

pils. So, too, the Church, founded on the Intolerance

of Divinity, must be equally intolerant about the

truths commissioned to her. There are to be no one

fisted battles, no half-drawn swords, no divided

loves, no equalizing Christ and Buddha in a broad

sweep of sophomoric tolerance or broadmindedness,

for as Our Blessed Lord has put it : “He that is not

with Me, is against Me.”

There is only one answer to the problem of the

constituents of water, namely, two atoms of hydro-



70 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

gen and one of oxygen. There is only one answer to

the question of what is the capital of the United

States. There is only one true answer to the problem

of two times two. Suppose that certain mathemati-

cians in various parts of this country taught diverse

kinds of multiplication tables. One taught that two

times two equaled five, another two times two equal-

ed six, another two times two equaled seven and one

fourth, another two times two equaled nine and four-

fifths. Then suppose that some one decided it would

be better to be broad-minded, and to work together

and sacrifice their particular solutions for the sake

of harmony. The result would be a Federation of

Mathematicians, compromising, possibly, on the

pooled solution that two times two equaled five and

seven-eights. Outside this federation is another

group which holds that two times two equals four.

They refuse to enter the federation unless the mathe-

maticians agree to accept this as the true and unique

solution. The broadminded group in conference

taunt them, saying: “You are too intolerant and

narrow-minded. You smack of the dead past. They

believed that in the Dark Ages.”

Now this is precisely the attitude of the Church

on the subject of the world conference on religion.

She holds that just as truth is one in geography, in

chemistry and in mathematics, so too, there is one

truth in religion, and if we are intolerant about the

truth that two times two equals four, then we should

be intolerant also about those principles on which

are hinged the only really important thing in the

world, namely, the salvation of our immortal soul.

If the assumption is that there is no Divinity, no

oneness of truth, but only opinion, probability and

compromise, then the Church must refrain from



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 71

participation. Any conference on religion, therefore,

which starts from the assumption that there is no

such thing as truth, and that contrary and contradic-

tory sects may be united in a federation of broad

mindedness, must never expect the Church to join

or cooperate.

As we grew from childhood to adolescence, the

one thing that probably did most to wreck our faith

in Santa Claus—I know it did mine—was to find a
Santa Claus in every department store window. If

there were only one Santa Claus, and he was at the

North Pole, how could there be one in every shop

window and at every street corner ? That same men-

tality which led us to seek truth in unity should lead

us to identically the same conclusion in religious

matters.

The world may charge the Church with intoler-

ance, for the world is right ! The Church is intoler-

ant, intolerant about truth, intolerant about prin-

ciples, intolerant about divinity, just as Our Blessed

Lord was intolerant about His Divinity. The other

religions may change their principles, and they do
change them, because their principles are man-made.

Religion is not a sum of beliefs that we would like,
but the sum of beliefs God has given. The world
may disagree with the Church, but the world knows
very definitely with what it is disagreeing. In the

future, as in the past, the Church will be intolerant

about the sanctity of marriage, for what God has

joined together no man shall put asunder; she will
be intolerant about her creed, and ready to die for

it, for she fears not those who kill the body, but
rather those who have the power of casting both
body and soul into hell. She will be intolerant about
her infalliblity, for, “Behold/’ says Christ, “I am



72 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

with you all days, even to the consummation of the

world.” And while she is intolerant even to blood in

adhering to the truths given her by her Divine

Founder, she will be tolerant to those who say she

is intolerant, for the same Divine Founder has

taught her to say: “Father, forgive them, for they

know not what they do.”

There are only two positions to take concerning

truth, and both of them had their hearing centuries

ago in the courtroom of Solomon, where two women

claimed a babe. A babe is like truth : it is one
;
it is

organic; it cannot be divided. The real mother of

the babe would accept no compromise. She was in-

tolerant about her claim. She must have the whole

babe, or nothing. . . . the intolerance of mother-

hood. But the false mother was tolerant. She was

willing to compromise. She was willing to divide

the babe,—and the babe would have died of broad-
mindedness !



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 73

RELIGION WITHOUT DOGMAS
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, February 21, 1932.)

The modern man wants a religion without

dogmas. Religion, he says, must be free from dog-

mas which have fettered and hampered thinking

for centuries. Religious experience, individual

needs, mystic imagination—all these must take the
place of outworn creeds. The Catholic Church, in

developing dogmas and piling belief on belief, has

made itself too complex, has departed from the

beautiful simplicity of the Sermon on the Mount.

Our Blessed Lord, it is further argued, never intend-

ed that there should be any iron-clad dogmas, nor

that His religion should become overgrown with

them.

The only way to determine whether Our Blessed

Lord intended that His religion should have dogmas,

or that it should be a matter of vague religious ex-

perience, is to go back to His very life, and particu-

larly to the end of it, when He was on trial in a cer-

tain courtroom the night before His death. The pre-

siding official in that court was Caiphas, a low type

in a high place, the type that finds in religion not a

conviction, but a career. At the central point of the

inner circumference of a semi-circle he sat—presi-
dent of the court; at right and left were seated his

colleagues. At each end was a clerk, the one to re-

cord votes for his acquittal, the other to record votes

for his conviction. Some of the members that night

were sure to have been only half awake, but Caiphas

was thoroughly alert.

No charge of condemnation could be brought



74 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

against Our Lord as long as contradictory state-

ments were made. As soon as one said anything

against Him, Sacred Scripture tells us, another con-

tradicted, and a great tumult broke out. One can

imagine the charges : one said, “He calls Himself a

King/’ and another contradicted, “No, He does not

say that
;
He only allows others to call Him a King.”

Another shouted out, “No, as soon as they wanted to

proclaim Him a King, He fled away.” Some said that

He had cured them, but others testified that disease

broke out after the cure, and therefore His cure was

done by magic. Some said that Jesus and His Apos-

tles did not offer sacrifice in the Temple, while others

replied that it was not so. Some tried to prove that

Christ and His followers did not celebrate the Pass-

over, but witnesses who were in the Cenacle and had

helped to prepare it the day before denied this. One

of the Evangelists records in detail the charge: “This

Man said, T will destroy this Temple made with

hands, and within three days I will make another

not made with hands.’ ” But another contradicted

him, saying: “No, He did not say that: He said that

He would build a new Temple.” And so the disputes

went on. The contradictions caused great commo-

tion. Nothing that was said could give any color of

justice to the sentence of death. When order was

restored, Caiphas, infuriated by the way matters

were going, rose up from the divan and came for-

ward to the very edge of the dais. If witnesses had

failed to condemn, Christ Himself must furnish the

grounds for condemnation. So, turning to the Pris-

oner, the false-hearted judge addressed Him:

“Answerest Thou nothing to the things which these

witness against Thee?” But Jesus held His peace.

These silences of Jesus were weighty with mag-



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 75

netic eloquence. He did not speak, but looked about

Him, with His great calm eyes, at the troubled and

convulsed faces of His assassins, and for all eternity

judged those phantom judges. In a flash every one

of them was weighed and condemned by that look

which went straight to their souls. The cheeks of

the old man became red with anger at the silence.

“Well, if He will not speak, then He must be

forced to speak and voice His own destruction.”

Caiphas again rose from the seat at the head of the

assembly, and with all the authority that could be

crowded into words, asked a question that really

mattered; a question that did not center about hu-

man affairs; a question that called for an answer,

as no other question ever asked since the beginning

of time called for an answer; a question that re-

quired not one of those vacuous, meaningless ans-

wers of timid politicians, but an answer clear-cut

like chiseled marble, and the question rang out

through the assembly: “I adjure Thee by the living

God, that Thou tell us if Thou be the Christ, the Son

of God.” Priests and rabbis, Scribes and Pharisees,

learned men of Israel, knew what the question

meant. “Art Thou the God foretold by prophets,

who should come to this world as God, the Saviour ?”

Everyone sprang to his feet, clawing fingers

stretching out towards Him.

Jesus hesitated a moment before dazzling those
bleared eyes with the splendor of His formidable

secret. A terrible, ominous silence settled over the
hall that was made the more intense by its contrast
with the sound of the distant crowing of a cock.

Then came the answer: “Thou hast said it: I am.

Nevertheless I say to you hereafter you shall see the



76 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the power

of God, and coming in the clouds of heaven/’

He had given a categorical, straight-forward

answer about His Divinity ; He defined Himself ; He

enunciated a truth, a cold truth, an authoritative

principle. He enunciated a dogma!

A gleam of satisfaction lighted up the face of

Caiphas. He almost sighed a sigh of relief. At last

!

At last, he had triumphed. His breast was heaving

high with the joy of victory. In the shrill voice of

an old man, he shouted out: “He hath blasphemed;

what further need have we of witnesses?” Drawing

out a small knife from under his girdle, and pretend-

ing a shocked horror which he did not feel, he rent

his priestly garments, tore them top to bottom, let-

ting the torn pieces hang like glorious symbols of

a victorious battle. Then member after member of

the Sanhedrin rent their garments, and the cloaked

ghosts felt themselves relieved of an immense

weight. “Behold, now you have heard the blas-

phemy, what think you?” And all the noisy kennel

bayed out their answer: “He is guilty of death.”

Guilty of death? Yes! He was too dogmatic.

Now let us suppose that, in answer to that ques-

tion of Caiphas about His Divinity and His divine

Sonship, Our Blessed Lord had said: “Far be it

from Me, Caiphas, to impose any dogmas concern-

ing my Divinity either upon you or upon posterity.

I do not wish to cramp your spiritual freedom by

harnessing you with the dogma that I am the Son of

God. Religion must be free from dogmas, and the

religious experience of each individual must decide

whether I am God, or just a mere man.” If, I say, He
had made such a statement, do you think He would

have been condemned by Caiphas? If He had been



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 77

what the modern world calls broad-minded, do you

think Caiphas would ever have delivered Him over

to Pilate? If He had been less dogmatic, do you

think He ever would have been condemned? If He

had not been so dogmatic about His Divinity, He

never would have seen the Cross.

Before the unbelieving world rends its gar-

ments in holy horror of dogmas, let it pause for a

moment to hear the reasoned answer of the Church

to the charge of dogmatism. First of all, in direct

contradiction of many a modern preachment, the

Church holds that it is impossible to have a religion

without dogmas. To say that one must have a reli-

gion without dogmas is to assert a dogma, and a

dogma that needs tremendously more justification

than any dogma of the Church. What is a dogma?

A dogma is an idea, and in this sense a man without
dogmas may be said to be a man without an idea.
Dogmas there must be as long as there is sound

thinking.

History, mathematics, geography, and science

all have their dogmas, their abstract principles/and

their ideas. That 'the World War ended on Armis-
tice Day, 1918, is a dogma of history; that Albany

is the capital of the State of New York is a dogma
of geography; that the sum of the angles of a tri-
angle is equal to two right-angles is a dogma of geo-
metry

;
that water is made up of two atoms of hydro-

gen and one of oxygen is a dogma of science. These
are luminous truths, sound ideas in various fields of

knowledge. Now truths like these in the religious
field are called dogmas in the strict sense of the
term. That there are three Persons in One God,
that Christ is the Son of God, that faith is a gift]
that grace is a participation in the Nature of God,



78 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

that the Church is the continuation of the Incarna-

tion—these are dogmas of religion.

Now to ask that religion be free from dogmas

is like asking a body to be freed from its backbone,

or art to be freed from shapes and proportions, or

literature to be freed from grammar. I know there

are thousands of minds weak enough to succumb to

the succulent abstraction of the sweet catchword, “I

believe in religion, but not in theology/’ but it is only

a catchword. Such a mind might just as well say,

“I believe in chemicals, but not in chemistry,” or,

“I believe in health, but not in all the medical dog-

mas about digestion, vitamins, and assimilation.” It

is all as vain and as senseless as saying : “I want to

be really scientific, but let us do away with labora-

tories and technique.”

The only difference between the dogmas of re-

ligion and the dogmas of science is that the latter

are grounded upon the authority of fallible men,

while the dogmas of the Church are grounded upon

the authority ofGod revealing. The religious problem

is not whether religion shall be free from dogmas

or not, because by the mere fact that a man thinks

he creates dogmas. The real problem is which dog-

mas are we going to accept, those of hearsay, pri-

vate wish, and the latest catchword of the day, or

the funded intelligence of an august line of philoso-

phers, saints and mystics. For the life of me, I can-

not see why anyone should accept the authority of

the Book of Darwin, and not accept the authority of

the Book of Isaiah, nor how anyone can accept the

authority of the latest sex theory emanating from

Vienna, and not accept the authority of twenty cen-

turies of Christian tradition; nor how anyone can



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 79

accept the authority of H. G. Wells and not accept

the authority of Jesus Christ.

The modern man must decide for himself

whether he is going to have a religion with thought,

or a religion without it. He already knows that

thoughtless politics lead to the ruin of society, and

he may begin to suspect that thoughtless religion

ends in confusion worse confounded. The problem

is simple. The modern man has two maps before

him : one the map of sentimental religion, the other

the map of dogmatic religion. The first is very

simple. It has been constructed only in the last few

years by a topographer who has just gone into the

business of map-making, and is extremely adverse

to explicit directions. He believes that each man

should find his own way and not have his liberty

taken away by dogmatic directions. The other map

is much more complicated, and full of dogmatic de-

tail. It has been made by topographers that have

been over every inch of the road for centuries, and

know each detour and each pitfall. It has explicit

directions and dogmas such as, “Do not take this

road; it is rocky,” or, “Follow this road; although

rough and rocky at first, it leads to a smooth road

on a mountain top.” The simple map is very easy

to read, but those who are guided by it are generally

lost in a swamp of mushy sentimentalism. The other

map takes a little more scrutiny, but it is more sim-

ple in the end, for it takes you up through the rocky

road of the world’s scorn to the everlasting hills,

where is seated the Original Map-Maker, the Only

One who ever has associated rest with learning:

“Learn of Me, and find rest for your souls.”

It is the very nature of man to generate chil-

dren of his brain in the shape of thoughts, and as



80 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

he piles up thought on thought, truth on truth, doc-

trine on doctrine, conviction on conviction, and

dogma on dogma, in a very coherent and orderly

fashion, so as to produce a system complex as a body,

and yet one and harmonious, he becomes more and

more human; he becomes more and more man.

When, however, in response to false cries for pro-

gress, he lops off dogmas, breaks with the memory

of his forefathers, denies intellectual parentage,

pleads for a religion without dogmas, substitutes

mistiness for mystery, mistakes sentiment for sedi-

ment, he is sinking back slowly, surely and inevit-

ably into the senselessness of stones and into the ir-

responsible unconsciousness of weeds. Grass is

broad-minded. Cabbages have heads, but they have

no dogmas.



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 81

PILATE AND PATRIOTISM
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, February 28, 1932.)

One issue which will always hold interest is the

conflict between Church and State. If one were to

set down in some order the objections against the

Church on the part of the modern State, they might

resolve themselves into these three : first, the Church

is perverting the nation by its parochial school

system, which embodies a different educational pol-

icy than the public school, and by her marriage

legislation which admits of no divorce—now the
generally accepted thing in society; secondly, the

Church refuses to give tribute to America, inasmuch

as her heart is across the sea, recognizing the Vicar

of Christ supreme in matters spiritual, and also

because her heart is too much interested in the next

world, and not sufficiently devoted to this one;

thirdly, the Church looks upon herself as a sort of

king in the sense that she claims to be the unique

Church of Christ, and refuses absolutely to accept

the democratic principle that one religion is just as

good as another. Such are, I believe, the three prin-

cipal complaints and charges against the Church

today, and to those who urge them I would remind
that they are exactly the same charges that were

directed against Our Blessed Lord Himself in His
trial before Pilate.

Since the year 26, Pontius Pilate had been pro-
curator in the name of Tiberius Caesar. Little was
known of him before that time. He had been in
Judea only a few years, but long enough to draw
upon himself the bitterest hate of those over whom



82 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

he ruled. Some time before the trial, Pilate had

come from Caesarea to Jerusalem to take up winter

quarters, bringing with him not only effigies of Cae-

sar on the army banners, but even images of Roman

eagles, which he introduced in the temple, without

the knowledge of the Jewish people, when the city

was asleep. They asked Pilate to remove them, but

he would not for fear of injuring Caesar. For five

days and nights they stormed about him, and on the

sixth day he erected a judgment seat in the open

city behind which he concealed his soldiers. The

moment they repeated their request Pilate told them

they would all be killed if they did not leave off dis-

turbing him. But they threw themselves on the

ground and laid their necks bare and said they

would rather taste death than transgress the wisdom

of their fathers. Pilate, deeply affected, ordered the

images removed.

The Jews hated Pilate. They did not forget this

incident, nor the time when he introduced votive

tablets to the Emperor in Herod’s palace in Jerusa-

lem, nor when he confiscated the money of the temple

to provide luxurious baths such as he had in Rome,

and put down a revolt against his authority with

naked swords and enjoyed his ablutions and Jewish

money in comparative peace.

That Friday, at dawn, Pontius Pilate, wrapped in

toga, still sleepy and yawning, was waiting for a
mob in Herod’s palace, very ill disposed towards the
trouble-makers who forced him to rise at
such an early hour. The crowd of accusers
and the rough populace finally came to the
front of his palace, but they stopped outside. Why?
Because before Pilate’s judgment seat, on the paved



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 83

stones of the Lithostratos, was painted a long white

line, marking the boundaries beyond which no Jew

could pass without becoming defiled. If they entered

the house of a pagan, they were contaminated, and

could not eat the Passover. So Caiphas, Annas and

the other accusers stopped at the line. The hypo-

crites ! They were not afraid of innocent blood, but

they were afraid of a white line.

Pilate went to that line and asked abruptly : “What

accusation bring you against this Man?” The Jews

knew very well they could not win Pilate’s favor if

they charged the Christ with attacks upon the re-

ligion of their fathers. They were, therefore, ready

to lie. Those who are bent upon evil look upon an

accessory infamy as of little consequence. Pilate,

they knew, could be conquered only by appealing to

his loyalty to Rome and to the Emperor. They
would give a political coloring to the accusation. If

they told him what they told Annas and Caiphas,
that Christ was a false Messiah, Pilate would smile,

yea, sneer; but if they said He was a seditious
inciter of revolt, that He was stirring up the people
against the government, that He was unpatriotic,
that He was inimical to the best interests of their
country, Pilate could do no less than put Him to
death. In other words, the charge of blasphemy is
abandoned as soon as they enter the praetorium, and
the charge of sedition is taken up. The judgment
against Our Lord shifts now from religious grounds,
where it had been laid before Annas and Caiphas,
to patriotic grounds before Pilate. Note the irony
of it all

!

These same people who had risen against Pilate’s
authority, who hated him as a Roman, as a symbol



84 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

of foreign domination and their own slavery, who

hated him still more as Pontius Pilate, as plotter

against their religion, and thief of their money

—

these very people now drown their hate, protest

their loyalty to Caesar, their affection for his securi-

ty, their readiness to accept no Caesar but him be-

cause they had found a new hate, a new enemy,

—

Christ Jesus Our Lord.

And up against the marble balustrade of Pilate’s

judgment seat, the charges rolled, and they were

three

:

We have found this man perverting our nation,

He has forbidden us to give tribute to Caesar,

He says He is Christ, the King. (Luke, 23-2)

The same charges brought against the Church

today ! Every word was a lie ! He was not perverting

the nation
;
He was bringing balm to wounded hearts

and healing to palsied limbs; He was making of

that unhappy and degraded people a blessed kingdom

of saints. “I am come that you may have life, and

may have it more abundantly.”. . . “Come to Me, all

you that labor, and are burdened, and I will refresh

you.” He was not refusing to give tribute to Caesar.

Had not the Scribes and the Pharisees already been

convinced this was not true when they asked : “Is it

lawful to give tribute to Caesar?” and heard in

answer the divine reply: “Render to Caesar the

things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that

are God’s.” He was not attempting to make Him-

self King, for one day when the people would have

taken Him by force and made Him King, He fled

away into the mountain alone.

In this trial before Pilate there is unfolded the

whole history of the Church in relation to the world.



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 85

The charges brought against Our Lord—all false

—

are the same charges brought against the Church

today. And what is particularly striking about them

all is that patriotism is made the cloak for them all.

There is nothing so sublime that can not be prosti-

tuted, and even the noble virtue of patriotism may

have its prostitutors. Old Samuel Johnson once

truly said that “patriotism is the last refuge of a

scoundrel and how true, for just as many sins are

committed in its name as in the name of liberty.

As the accusers of Our Blessed Lord covered

themselves with the assumed virtue of patriotism,

so do the enemies of the Church, and their charges

are just as untrue and unwarranted as the charges

directed against Our Blessed Lord Himself. First,

the Church is not perverting the nation. If our na-

tion has any ideal at all, it certainly has the ideal of

stability
,
which means that it must resolve to survive

and to march steadily onward in the vanguard of

civilization. Now I ask you, what forces are best
suited to give to our government this very desirable

stability? Will the forces of birth-control, which

limits the number of our citizens by refusing to

bring into the world the very units of democratic

social life, make for its stability? Will the loose
divorce laws of our country, which break up families,

the very core of national life, make for its endur-
ance? Will the loose morality, which believes that

anything is right, providing one is not caught, make
for a strong and disciplined and stable nation?
These are the forces which are decaying and break-
ing down our national life. But the only single force
in America today which opposes these destructive
elements is the spiritual force of the Church. By



86 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

what logic, then, can the Church be said to be per-

verting the nation? If in centuries to come there

are eyes to look upon the flag and there are lungs to

breathe the air of freedom and there are hearts to

respond to America’s anthem, it will be because

there is a divine power operating in American life,

teaching that marriage is a sacred thing and that

the children of today are the citizens of tomorrow.

Break up husband and wife, and you break the fam-

ily
;
break the family, you break the children ; break

them, and you wreck a nation. That is just what

the Church is trying to avert, and in doing so, in-

stead of perverting the nation, the Church is mak-

ing it stable enough to endure, that in centuries to

come it may draw down upon itself the blessings

of a pleased and Almighty Father.

Secondly, the Church is not refusing to give full

tribute to America, and because her spiritual head

is in Rome it no more follows that he loves his coun-

try less than does any citizen of this land whose

mother is in the green isle of Ireland. The Church

and the State belong to two distinct spheres, and

there may be, therefore, a true and loyal allegiance

to both, for we are to “render to Caesar the things

that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are

God’s.” As a matter of fact, only those who love

the spiritual can ever love the natural. Full and lov-

ing service of the Church of Christ no more con-

flicts with the love of nation than the love of the

soul is at variance with the love of the body. The

loves, paradoxical though they may seem, merge into

unity, thanks to the charity of our Sovereign Head

who loved his own country even to the point of

weeping over its capital city, and shedding the salt



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 87

tears of the first Christian patriot. He who reserved

the first fruits of His message for the lost sheep of

Israel was the same One whose flame of charity em-

braced the whole world, and whose life was surren-

dered on the gibbet of a cross for the redemption

of all peoples, for all climes and all times.

St. Francis of Assisi loved his own country to the

passionate degree that on dying, he asked to be

carried to a hill to see and bless for the last time his

beloved countryside; and yet, that love of national-

ism no way prevented that soul of his from embrac-

ing not only man, but the beasts and birds, not only

the fires and the forests, but above all, the spiritual

father of Christendom, who gave him the right to

found an order which today lights the torches of its

charity at the fiery heart of that same poor man of

Assisi. St. Paul, too, loved his own country, was

proud of being of the race of Abraham, a Hebrew

and a son of a Hebrew, but the love for his own

people in no way conflicted with those wider inter-

ests where there are no distinctions between Jew

and Greek, barbarian and freeman, but only the

consuming love to be dissolved and to be with Christ.

And what is true of Francis and Paul is true of
each loyal son of the Church. We Catholics will
give way to no one in the depth of our allegiance

to America, and in oqr allegiance to America we
will give way to no one in our allegiance to Christ.

Finally, it is not true that the Church is calling

herself a King, and is flying in the face of the

democratic principle of equality. What is the
foundation of equality? Do those doctrines which

hold that one-fifth of the population of this coun-

try, the Catholic population, is unpatriotic, make



88 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

for true patriotism of equality? Will the jingoism

of the superiority of the Nordic over the Latin

make for true equality? Will the mere lip worship

of the brotherhood of man or the singing of a com-

mon anthem reduce men to unity? The fact is,

men do not naturally love men. Beauty is a

stronger attraction than the mere cry of equality

and fraternity. Where find, then, the real force

behind equality? There is only one foundation for

equality, and that is the Catholic doctrine that all

men have been redeemed by the precious blood of

Jesus Christ, that all men have been called to share

His life, and that President and citizen, poor and

rich, the mighty and the lowly, have been thought

so much worth while that Christ would have died

for the least of them; that the beggar in the Bow-

ery and the man in the gilded apartment are equal

in the eyes of God. And in order to impress this

unity on her people, the Church preaches the doc-

trine of the Eucharist, in which every communicant

partakes of the same bread in order that they

might have the same Life, for eating the one

Bread, they are the one Body. The Church thus

gives to humanity a new beauty and a new reason

for loving all men. There is no power in the world

making for equality amongst men, so capable of

drawing them together into holy bonds of peace

and love, so destined to melt all differences of race

and blood as the Communion rail of the Catholic

Church, for there equality is based upon common

purity of heart in Christ Jesus Our Lord.

The three charges have found popular expres-

sion in words uttered not so long ago by the so

called philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who said

that a grave danger faces America, for in one hun-



89MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

dred and fifty years it will be Catholic. I am not

so sure that in one hundred and fifty years Ame-

rica will be Catholic, but if it is to be Catholic, it

will have to do two more things than it is doing

now
;
it will have to begin to think, and it will have

to begin to pray.

Just suppose that that prophecy of Bertrand

Russell's did come true. Suppose that everyone in

America were Catholic. Suppose that every citizen

tomorrow morning knelt down and said his prayers

to God. Suppose that as each citizen went to work

—the doctor to his patient, the judge to his bench,
the lawyer to his court, the clerk to his office, the

employee to his employer,—each and everyone of
them was convinced that some day they would have

to render an account for even the least actions of

their daily life, although unseen by men. Suppose

that all the children went to a school where they

heard the name of God, and drank in sweet stories

about His Mother and the Saints. Suppose that

the students who went to universities learned not

vague theories about sex, but the beauty of chas-

tity, bringing the reward of the vision of God.

Suppose that all the divorce courts of our land

closed, and that about once every month every

man, woman and child would kneel at the

Communion rail and receive into his very soul the

very God who died on the Cross for them. Do

you think that would be a menace to American

life? If that is a menace, then peace is a menace,

then justice is a menace, then charity is a menace,

then Christ is a curse!

May all such un-Christian sentiments and every
inhuman sentiment pass from our midst, and as

days roll into weeks, and weeks into years, may



90 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

one lesson more and more become deeply embedded

in the consciousness of our national life, and that

lesson is the message of this discourse: that Cath-

olics will never love America because she is great,

but America will be great because Catholics love

her.



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 91

THE CHURCH AND THE TIMES
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, March 6, 1932.)

One of the catchwords which keeps unthinking

minds from Truth and Life is the phrase: “The

Church is behind the times.” The “acids of modern-

ity” are supposed to have eaten away traditional

morality, and yet the Church clings on to the same

beliefs and practices held centuries ago. Not only

that, but if we are to believe her critics, the Church

never does the worldly thing. The worldly thing to

do today, according to the modern mind, is to ac-

cept divorce and birth-control as progressive and

forward looking practices, and yet the Church re-

fuses to compromise, even in the slightest, her

centuries-old teaching, that she might harmonize the

better with the demands of the twentieth century.

Thousands of people, it is said, would join the

Church tomorrow if she would only relax her moral

discipline, or readjust her idea of God to suit the

new astro-physics, or recognize divorce as the Chris-

tion sects have done. But the Church remains ada-

mant: the world asks for one thing, the Church

gives it another. “If she will not change, then she

shall die,” is the pronouncement of modern prophets.

As modern as this charge is, let us turn back the

scroll of history to see just how ancient it is, and we

shall discover that Herod condemned Our Blessed

Lord on exactly the same ground that the world to-

day condemns the Church.

Herod was that type which might be character-

ized as a splendid animal. Descended as he was from

Herod the Great, who murdered his own wife and



92 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

slaughtered the children of Bethlehem, the younger

Herod combined gross sensuality with an artistic

temperament, which manifested itself in his fine

taste for buildings. These he was always careful to

dedicate to the Emperor. As Governor of Galilee,

living at Tiberias on the shore of the sea, he often

came up to Jerusalem for the great feasts of the

Jews, stopping at the house of his half-brother,

Phillip. There he seduced his brother's wife, Herod-

ias, and her young daughter, Salome, and drove his

own wife, daughter of Aretas, King of Arabia, from

his own house.

Sinful life always palls, after its brief hour, and

Herod was obliged to seek new thrills for his al-

ready jaded life. News came to him that down along

the banks of the Jordan, amid the tamarisks and

green trees lining its banks, there was a strange and

eloquent man who lived on wild locusts, who was

clothed in camel's skin, and whose name was John

the Baptist.

Not because he was interested in John’s doctrine,

but because, as for so many in our day, religion was

interesting only as an emotional outlet, Herod sum-

moned the saint, and bade him come unto him. John

accepted. The court was delighted. They were

eager to hear his rugged eloquence, and just for a

moment to feel their wearied and wasted systems

awakened to new life by the strange and novel sen-

sation of a sermon in the house of Gold.

At the appointed hour, the man whom Our Lord

had called “the greatest man of woman born”

stepped into the temporary pulpit erected for him

in the courtroom. From the worldly point of view,

the proper thing for John to have done on such an

occasion, would have been to flatter the vices and the



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 93

excesses of the king. The unworldly and impolitic

thing would have been to condemn the adulterous

life of Herod. John, keen on pleasing God rather

than man, stretched out his hand to the throne, point-

ed directly to the one sitting there, and thundered

:

“It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.”

That was not the worldly thing to do. Before he was

aware, chains were about his wrists and iron bars

before his eyes. How differently many a modern

preacher would have acted!

The birthday of Herodias soon approached, and

lest silence, should throw Herod back on his con-

science and perhaps on salvation, he planned a

mighty banquet. Everything that could satisfy a

tongue was served. Bronzed slaves ministered to the

appetite with all the delicacies of the fishery, the

fields and the vineyards. The tetrarch Herod became

full of wine. He gave a signal and great purple cur-

tains at the end of the banquet hall parted, disclosing

the sparingly clad form of Salome, daughter of

Herodias and Phillip, her lawful husband. Accom-

panied by slow, voluptuous music, the girl danced

with the wild abandon of her passionate theme.

Herod, his eyes sealed upon her, became maddened

more with the dance than with the wine. Before the

curtain had time to drop, the tetrarch, giddy with

extreme pleasure, sent for the girl, bidding her tell

him what love-token she would have, swearing to

her that if it be half his kingdom, it should be hers.

The child, well-schooled by her mother, answered:

“Give me here in a dish the head of John the Bap-

tist.”

Before the music had completely ceased, a

guardsman was seen crossing the threshold, bearing

aloft on a silver charger the head of John.



94 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

The vision of that decapitated head haunted

Herod. One day he heard talk of the miracles of Our

Blessed Lord, and he remarked to one of his cour-

tiers: “This is John the Baptist; he has risen from

the dead.
,,

From that time on, he kept close watch

over Our Lord. One day a Pharisee came to Our

Lord and said to Him : “Depart, and get thee hence,

for Herod hath a mind to kill thee.” Our Lord ans-

wered by calling Herod a “fox”. Weeks and months

passed, and in Jerusalem, before the murderer of

John and the son of the murderer of the Babes of

Bethlehem, stood the One Whom John had an-

nounced, the grown Babe of Bethlehem, now the

Man of Nazareth. And Herod was glad. Glad at

such a moment? Yes ! St. Luke, describing the scene,

tells us that he was “very glad” for he hoped to see

some miracle done by Him.

Herod greeted Our Lord as he would have accost-

ed a performer who might enter his court to while

away the tedium of an hour. He received the Son

of God as a sensational wonder-man, who might

amuse a jaded, profligate court by a startling trick

of magic, or a marvel of jugglery. He wanted the

sensational and the new to gratify his curiosity. It

was his nerves, not his soul, that wanted a thrill.

After all, according to Herod, was not the world

given for enjoyment of every fleeting moment, was

not the human being born into the world to have a

good time, to rob monotony of its victory?

Herod questioned Our Lord, and we can well im-

agine what his questions were : “How did you escape

the massacre instituted by my father at Bethlehem?
and why did you call me a fox? and what was the

meaning of your triumphal entry into Jerusalem last

Sunday?”



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 95

To all the questions Our Lord gave only the

answer of His withering silence. He who spoke to

sinful Magdalene, to the woman taken in adultery,

to little children, to deceitful Annas, to mean Cai-

phas, to weak Pilate, now refused to utter a single

word to the one man who could save Him from

crucifixion.

From a worldly point of view, Our Lord did the

foolish thing, just as John before Him did the fool-

ish thing. What would you think of a man in court

who might clear himself of the charges against him

by a word, a show of power, and yet who refused

to do so? Here is Our Lord going to the Cross and

to death, simply because He will not do the worldly

thing. Herod wanted one thing
;
Christ gave him an-

other. Herod wanted a trick, something to relieve

the intolerable monotony of his sensuous life. He

wanted fireworks, and He Who claimed to be the
Light of the World offered him Light instead, the

white flame without flicker of a Divine Personality

in the lantern of His Sacred Humanity. That was

foolishness! The folly of Omnipotence! And so
Herod robed Him in the garment of a fool

!

And from that day to this, the Church has been
robed in the garment of a fool because she never

does the worldly thing. Her saints are fools because
they plunge after poverty while other men dig after
gold; her saints crucify their bodies, as other men
pamper them, they dare “to swing the earth a trin-
ket at their wrist,” while others prostrate them-

selves before it. Her devout nuns are fools who leave
the lights and glamours of the world for the shades
and shadows of the Cross, where saints are made.
Her priests are fools, because they practice celibacy
in a world which has gone mad about sex. The Vicar



96 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

and Pontiff is a fool for refusing to relax the doc-

trine of Christ concerning the sanctity of marriage,

when every Christian sect under the sun has relaxed

it. Yes, the Church is a fool, and all her faithful

members are fools, but they are fools only from the

world’s point of view, not from God’s point of view.

For with the foolish things of the world hath God

chosen to confound the wise, and with the weak

things of the world, to confound the strong.

The Church must always bear the taunt of being

unmodern and unworldly, as Our Lord had to bear

it before Herod. And the Divine Master warned us

that it would be the mark of the Divinity of the

Church. “I have taken you out of the world, ....

therefore the world will hate you. ... If I had left

you in the world, the world would love its own. . . .

Remember, it hath hated Me before you.” In other

words, if you ever want to discover Divine religion

on the face of the earth, look for the Church that

does not get along with the world. The religion that

gets on with the world and is accepted by the world

is worldly
;
the religion that does not get on with the

world is other-worldly, which is another way of say-

ing that it is Divine.

But because the Church is other-worldly, and

seeks first the Kingdom of God and His justice, it

must not be thought that it is out of touch with the

world. The Church is not behind the times; it is

beyond the times. It is not modern; it is ultra

modern. It is not a slave to the fashions of the

twentieth century, for it must keep its head to serve

the thirtieth century. The Church is very modern if

modern means serving the times in which we live,

but it is not modern if it means believing that what-

ever is modern is true. The Church is modern if



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 97

modern means that her members should change their

hats with the seasons, and even with the styles, but

it is not modern if it means that every time a man

changes his hat, he should also change his head, or

in an applied sense, that the Church should change

its idea of God every time psychology puts on a new

shirt, or physics a new coat.

It is modern if modern means incorporating the

new found wisdom of the present into the patrimony

of the centuries, but it is not modern if it means

sneering at the past as one might sneer at a lady's

age. It is modern if modern means a passionate de-

sire to know the truth, but it is not modern if it

means that truth changes with the calendar, and

that what is true on Friday is false on Saturday.

The Church is modern if modern means progress to-

ward a fixed ideal, but she is not modern if it means

changing the ideal instead of attaining it.

The Church is like an old school-master; the

schoolmaster of the centuries, and as such it has

seen so many students pass before it, cultivate the

same poses and fall into the same errors, that it

merely smiles at those who believe that they have

discovered a new truth, for in the Church's superior

wisdom and experience, it knows that many a so-
called new truth is but the new label for an old error.

Experience has taught it that the modernism of 1932

is not the modernism of 1942, and that what one

generation believes to be true, the next will believe

to be false
;
and that the surest way to be a widow in

the next age is to marry the spirit of this one. Today

the Church is accused of being behind the times, be-

cause it does not go mad about Freud. I dare say
that in fifty years from now if one of the teachers
in any of our great universities mounted his rostrum



98 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

and talked Freud, he would be considered just as

antiquated and behind the times as a politician who

today might mount a soap-box at the corner of

Forty-second and Broadway, and open a campaign

for William McKinley as President.

It is about time that the modern world gave up

expecting the Church to die, because she is “behind

the times.
,,

Really, she is behind the scenes, and

knows just when the curtain will fall on each new

fad and fancy. If an announcement had been made a

thousand times about a death, and the funeral never

took place, men would soon begin to take the funeral

as a joke. And so it is with the Church. She is al-

ways supposed to be behind the times, and yet it is

she who lives beyond the times. At least a hundred

men in every century since her birth, have tolled

the bells for her funeral, but the corpse has never

appeared. They are always buying coffins for her,

and use the coffins themselves. They are always as-

sisting at her apparently last breath, and yet she

moves amid their dust. They are always digging her

grave, and it is a grave into which the diggers fall.

The taunt that she is behind the times and out of

touch with the world will never bother her, for she

knows that it is easy to be in the swim, in the sense

of being up to the times, for even a dead body can

float down stream. It takes a live body to resist the

current. It is easy to say we should change our

morality to suit the so-called new ideas about sex,

just as it was easy to say a few centuries ago that

one should be a Calvinist. It is always easy to let

the world have its way; the difficult thing and the

noble thing is to keep God’s way. It is easy to fall

;

there are a thousand angles at which a thing will

fall, but there is only one at which it will stand, and



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 99

that is the angle at which the Church is poised be-

tween heaven and earth, and from the angle she has

sung a requiem over all the prophets of the past who

ever said she was dying, and she will continue to

chant requiems over all the prophets of the future,

for the story of her life is the story of John in the

courtroom of Herod.

Salome danced, and as she danced she kept pace

with the time, to be the earthly symbol of all those

who change to keep up with the times. As she

danced, two men lost their heads, Herod lost his

head figuratively, for he believed that a man should

change with the times, and that it was lawful to live

with another man's wife. John lost his head liter-

ally, for he believed that a man should not change
with the times, and that it was not lawful to live

with the wife of another. The Church believes that

John was right, and Herod wrong, and being a saint,

which is the foolishness which purchases eternity,

means losing one's head John’s way rather than
Herod’s.



100 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

THE CRUCIFIXION
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, March 13, 1932.)

Four judges sat in judgment against the Lord

and Saviour of the world, and they condemned Him

to death on contradictory charges. He was accused

of being too dogmatic before Caiphas, because He

enunciated the doctrine of His Divinity; He was

accused of being too undogmatic before Annas, be-

cause He refused to make any additional pronounce-

ments concerning His doctrine and His ministry;

He was accused of being too worldly before Pilate

because He was perverting the nation
;
He was ac-

cused of being too unworldly before Herod, because

He refused to do the worldly thing, and perform a

trick of magic to gain His release. Too dogmatic, too

undogmatic ! Too worldly, too unworldly ! Men could

not agree on why He should die, but they did agree

that He should die. Where find a fitting punishment

for one condemned on contradictory charges? The

only fitting death for one condemned on contradic-

tory charges is not scourging, nor stoning, but the

crucifixion, for on the Cross one bar is at variance or

contradiction with another.

And so the King went to His death—for a bed, a
Cross

;
for a pillow, a crown of thorns ; and lest His

hands and feet should slip out, they tucked them in

with nails. A King is hanging from a peg,—aye,
more than a King—Truth, Justice, Mercy, God.
And the three great civilizations of the world saw

Him hang, and suffer, and die, for He was crucified

in the language of Hebrew, Latin and Greek, in the

civilizations of Jerusalem, Rome and Athens, in the



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 101

name of religion, law and morality, in the name of

the good, the true and the beautiful. Jerusalem was

the city of religion, and it condemned the One who

brought it religion ; Latin Rome was the city of law,

and it condemned the Lawmaker; Athens was the

city of morality, and it condemned the Sinless. Rep-

resentatives of each of these civilizations passed be-

neath the banner of the Cross, and hurled the chal-

lenge each in their own language : “Come down from

the Cross and we will believe.” What happened in

those terrible moments of hate was not something

that would pass into history, like the battle of Mara-

thon
;
what was happening was the first scene in an

abiding drama, the curtain of which will not ring

down until the crack of doom. It is now the Mystic

Christ, or the Church, which is hanging on the

Cross, and today just as twenty centuries ago, she

is being crucified in the modern civilization of Jeru-

salem, Rome, and Athens, in the name of modern

religion, modern law, and modern morality.

Modern irreligion marches beneath the Cross,

looks up to the Church crucified thereon by an un-

believing world, and who is there who has not heard

it say at least a thousand times : “Come down from

your belief in infallibility. Come down from your

belief in the primacy of Peter. Come down from

your attachment to the Divinity of Christ. Come

down from your devotion to the Virgin Mary and

the Saints. Come down from your belief that you

are the one, true, unique spouse, the Church of

Christ. Can you not see that there are other crosses

on Calvary besides your own? Come down and we

will believe
!”

And next, modern law, modern in the sense that

it has broken with Christian tradition, takes its



102 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

stand beneath the Cross, and who is there who is

not already familiar with its taunts and pleadings

:

“Come down from your belief in the law of eternal

justice. Come down from your belief in hell. Come

down from your belief that the laws of Christ are

more sound than the laws of the State. Come down

from your belief in the law of mortification, for who

is there in the pagan world who wants your penance

and your suffering? Look to the sorry end it has

brought you now. Come down from your Cross, and

we will believe
!”

And finally, the third of the enduring civilizations,

the teachers of modern morality, advances beneath

the same Cross, and who is there living in this great

era of carnality who has not heard its taunts a

thousand times as it sneers at the Church: “Come

down from your belief in the sanctity of marriage.

Come down from your belief in virginity and celi-

bacy. Come down from your age-long opposition to

divorce. Come down from your opposition to sex,

when all the world is agog with sex. Come down

from your opposition to birth-control. Can you not

see that the acids of modernity have eaten away

your age-old morality? Come down from the Cross,

and we believe
!”

But the Church does not come down, though ten

thousand times ten thousand tongues are loud in

their pleading, and it does not come down, because

Christ did not come down. It is easy to step down

from great heights when the world scorns, but it is

the sign of a martyr to die for an ideal. It is easy

to come down and follow the world, but it is nobler

to remain suspended and draw the world to oneself.

It is human to come down, but it is divine to hang

there.



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 103

But will there never be a reconciliation between

the world and the Church ? Must the one always be

hanging on the Cross in apparent defeat, and the

other walking the earth in apparent victory? Ah,

there is the possibility of a reconciliation, and it re-

sides in the words of forgiveness pronounced the

first time by Our Blessed Lord on the Cross, and

now repeated for the thousandth time by the Church

on its Cross.

And what were those words? They were words

of a prayer—words that fell in a voice calm and low,
heard above the shaking of dice, the moans of dying

thieves, the sobs of a Magdalene, and the sighs of a

Mary—a prayer heard in heaven and earth—a pray-
er that went out from Calvary’s hills and reechoes

to our own ears today: “Father, forgive them, for

they know not what they do.”

Forgive whom ? Forgive those who crucify in the

name of modern religion, modern law and modern

morality, in the language of Hebrew and Latin and

Greek? Forgive them? Why? Because they know

what they do? No, because they know not what they

do! It is only the ignorance of what is involved in

their great crime which brings them within the pale

of the mercy of the One on the Cross, and the for-

giveness of the heavenly Father. It is solely and uni-

quely because they know not what they do that there

is a possibility of forgiveness. There is not redemp-

tion for the fallen angels, simply because they knew

what they were doing. But we do not always know

what we are doing. If we did, and still did it, we

would never be saved. It is not wisdom that saves

!

It is ignorance

!

Will Annas be forgiven because he knew the Tal-

mud from beginning to end? Will Caiphas be for-



104 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

given because he knew the details of the law of the

Sanhedrin? Will Pilate be forgiven because he knew

Roman law? Will Herod be forgiven because he

knew how to be a tetrach? Will the followers of

modern religion, modern law and modern morality,

be forgiven because of what they know ? They know

something about Einstein’s theory and the necessity

of a cosmical religion
;
they know the latest book of

the month, and the new morals which have supplant-

ed Christianity; they know all the spurious argu-

ments in favor of birth-control
;
they know the new

psychological theory emanating from Vienna in

which the soul is reduced to sex; they know the

movement of world politics; they know the world,

its ways, its sin, its crime, its fiction;—they know
all these things and they are proud of what they

know, and yet not a single one of them will be saved

because of what he knows. They will come within

the fold of Divine forgiveness only on condition that

they learn to know that they do not know every-

thing. If their learning is going to make them proud

of rejecting Christ and the moral laws; if it is going

to make them dispense with redemption as a pagan

myth, conscience as an illusion, God as an idea;

—

then they will never be happy, then they will never

be saved. Why, they would be damned if it were not

for their ignorance of the terrible thing they are

doing when they leave God and Christ out of their

lives. It is not wisdom that saves—it is ignorance

!

Will the executioners be saved because they knew

what they did when they unfurled Our Blessed Lord

like a wounded eagle upon the banner of salvation?

Will the bigots who say all manner of evil things

against the Church, her priests, her doctrine, her

faithful
;
will the leaders of Bolshevism who attempt



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 105

to root out religion from the hearts of people as if

it were an opiate; will those who spread venomous

lies about the Vicar of Christ, our gloriously reign-

ing Pius XI,—will all those whose love for modern
religion, modern law and modern morality, which

can find no other expression or outlet except in cries

of hate and bitterness—will all those who persecute
the Church and thus nail Christ anew to the Cross

be saved because they know what they are doing?

It is only because they are ignorant of what the

Church really is, that they are brought within hear-

ing of the cry of the Cross. If Saul knew what he

was doing in persecuting the Church of Damascus,

when Christ called out to him from the heavens, he

would never have become Paul. So, too, if modern

Sauls knew what they were doing in persecuting the

Church, and knowing what they did, even with the

heavens rent and Christ telling them they were per-

secuting Him, they would be cast into hell. It is not

wisdom that saves—it is ignorance!
Every true follower of Christ knows he must be

hated by the world. “I have taken you out of the

world,” said Our Blessed Lord, “therefore, the world

will hate you. If I had left you in the world, the

world would have loved you. Remember it hath

hated Me before you; the servant is not above his
Master.” We must be hated even as Christ Himself
was hated. We must be abused as Christ Himself
was abused. We must be prepared to be told a thou-
sand times over that we are ignorant because we do

not know that modern psychology has disproven a

soul
;
that we are benighted fools because we do not

know that higher Biblical criticism has destroyed

the authenticity of Scripture; that we are narrow-

minded because we do not accept the unmoral inter-



106 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

pretations of God’s laws
;
that we are a race of dark-

ened minds because we do not know that evolution

has proven original sin to be a myth
;
that we are

ignorant because we do not know that science has

dispensed with Providence, with God, and with

Christ.

Yes, we are ignorant ! Ignorant of the false wis-

dom of the world; ignorant of the wisdom of the

age; ignorant of all that false wisdom which would

blind us to the lightening truths of the Eternal Sun

;

ignorant of modern pagan ways. Oh, Holy Father

in Heaven, we thank Thee we are ignorant—ignor-
ant of those things which keep us from Thee ! It is

not the wisdom of the world that saves—it is
ignorance

!

Hence, there is not a loyal Catholic heart in the

world, kneeling at the foot of the Cross, that is ig-

norant of the reason of all forgiveness, and from

such a heart comes the plaintive prayer

:

“Oh, Jesus, I do not want to know the

world
;
I do not want to know the pride of

the world which crowns Thy head with

thorns
;
I do not want to know how nails of

selfishness are driven, nor how the spear of

bitterness is launched; I do not want to

know how snowflakes are hammered, nor

who turns about theArcturus ;I do not want

to know the length of this great universe

and its expanse in light years; I do not

want to know the breadth of the earth as it

dances about the chariot of the sun; I do

not want to know the heights of the stars

as they glitter about the day’s dead sancti-

ties
;
I do not want to know the depth of the ]



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 107

sea, nor the secrets of its palace. I am

willing to be ignorant of all these things.

I want to know only one thing, and that is

—the breadth and length and depth and
height of Thy redeeming love on the Cross,

Sweet Saviour of Men. I want, dear Jesus,

to be ignorant of everything in this world

—everything—but You ! And then, by the
strangest of strange paradoxes, I shall be



108 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

THE ETERNITY OF EASTER
(Address delivered by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen in the Cath-

olic Hour, March 27, 1932.)

My Easter wish is that your soul may he

flooded with the peace and joy which comes

from the victory of the Risen Christ, who hears

now and forevermore not wounds, hut scars

as pledges of love and forgiveness .

The birth of Our Saviour was announced to a

Virgin, but in order that we poor sinners might

have hope, the Resurrection was first announced to

a sinner. On the first Easter morning, Mary Mag-

dalen went to the sepulchre expecting to find her

Master there. All things else might have been a

failure, but at least in His grave could be followed

the object of her love. Nothing else might have

been left for her : the voice, the manners, the living

presence, the strong tender words, the works of

charity—all these she thought were passed. But
there was one thing left and that was the mangled

form lying in a grave. This she would honor and

as once before she broke the alabaster box and

poured out ointment on His feet, so now she would

break her heart and pour it out in tears upon His

grave. She was not looking forward, but only to

the past. In the words of St. John: early in the

morning when it was yet dark, she came unto the

sepulchre and stood weeping, and as she looked into

the sepulchre she saw two Angels in white, sitting

one at the head and one at the foot where the body

of Christ had been laid. They sayeth to her: “Wo-



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 109

man, why weepest thou ?” She sayeth to them : “Be

cause they have taken away my Lord and I know

not where they have laid Him.”

When she had thus spoken she turned herself

back, and saw Jesus standing, and she knew not that

it was Jesus.

Jesus said to her: “Woman, why weepest thou?

whom seekest thou?” She, thinking it was the gar-

dener, sayeth to Him : “Sir, if thou hast taken Him

hence, tell me where thou hast laid Him, and I will

take Him away.” And Jesus said to her: “Mary.”

She turning, sayeth to Him: “Rabboni.” And as

she cast herself at His feet, she saw the two livid

marks of nails. But before they could be embraced,

Jesus said to her : “Do not touch Me for I am not yet

ascended to My Father. But go to My Brethren, and
say to them: I ascend to My Father and to your
Father, to My God and to your God.”

To Mary, the supreme object of faith could be

touched by fingers
;
she could only think of Rabboni

whose feet could be clasped; her soul was dominat-

ed by time; she was content with an unfinished

work
;
and the words of Our Blessed Saviour to her

revealed the truth that He was no longer to be seen

under the form of time and in the world of sensa-

tions, but only by the soul and in the world of eter-

nity. So the first lesson of Easter morn, the lesson

that Mary failed to comprehend, in the words of St.

Paul, was “if you be risen with Christ seek the

things that are above where Christ sitteth at the

right hand of God : mind the things that are above,

not the things that are upon the earth.”

This great truth needs to be stressed strongly on



110 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

this new Easter Day when men no longer speak of

eternity, but only of time ; when they are more con-

cerned about citizenship in the Kingdom of this

world than citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven;

when their interests center more around passing

questions of science, politics, economics, wealth and

power, instead of around the Risen Christ who sit-

teth eternally at the right hand of God. Some of our

modern minds have so departed from the Gospel of

the Resurrection and its emphasis on eternity as to

make the time element of physics the very fabric of

the universe. Sacred Scripture tells us that a

moment will come when there will be no more time.

The unsacred scripture of our day tells us that time

is the very essence of things.

In order that we might know that the real peace

and happiness is not in time but in eternity with

the Risen Christ and the glory of His Father and

the love of His Holy Spirit, I propose to show first

of all, that time stands in the way of real happi-

ness, and secondly, that only inasmuch as we suc-

ceed in rising above time in this world, do we ever

begin to be happy.

Time is the one thing that makes real pleasure

impossible. By its very nature it forbids us to

have many pleasures together under the penalty of

having none of them at all. By the mere fact that

I exist in time, it is impossible for me to combine

the pleasures of marching with the Old Guard of

Napoleon, and at the same time advancing under

the Flying Eagles of Caesar. By the mere fact that

I live in time, I cannot enjoy simultaneously the win-

ter sports of the Alps and the limpid waters of the

Riviera. Time makes it impossible for me to be



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 111

stirred by the oratory of a Demosthenes, and at the

same time to listen to the melodious accents of the

great Bossuet. Time does not permit me to combine

the prudence that comes with age, and the buoyancy

that belongs to youth. It is the one thing which

prevents me from gathering around the same fes-

tive table with Aristotle, Socrates, and Thomas

Aquinas in order to learn the secrets of the great

minds in solving the riddles of a universe. If it

were not for time, Dante and Shakespeare could

have sipped tea together, and Homer 'even now

might tell us his stories in English. It is all very

nice and lovely to enjoy the mechanical perfections

of this age of luxury, but there are moments when

I would like to enjoy the calm and peace of the

Middle Ages, but time will not permit it. If I live

in the twentieth century, I must sacrifice the pleas-

ures of the thirteenth century, and if I enjoy the

Athenian Age of Pericles, I must be denied the

Florentine Age of Dante.

All things are good, and yet none can be enjoyed

except in their season, and the enjoyment must al-

ways be tinged with the regret that time will demand

their surrender. Time gives me things, but it also

takes them away. When it does give, it gives but

singly, and thus life becomes but just one fool thing

after another.

This thought suggests the suspicion that if time

makes the combination of pleasures impossible, then

if I could ever transcend time, I might in some way

increase my happiness, and this I find to be true, for
every conscious desire to prolong a pleasure is a

desire to make it an enduring “now.” Like cats

before the fire, we want to prolong the pleasure in-



112 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

definitely
;
we want it to be permanent and not suc-

cessive.

Go back in the storehouse of your memory, and

you will find ample proof that it is always in those

moments when you are least conscious of the pas-

sing of time that you most thoroughly enjoy your-

self. How often it happens, for example, when lis-

tening to an absorbing conversation or the thrilling

experiences of a much travelled man, that the hours

pass by so quickly we are hardly conscious of them.

We say, “the time passes like every thing.” What

is true of a delightful conversation is also true of

aesthetic pleasures. I dare say that very few would

ever notice the passing of time while listening to an

orchestra translate the beauty of one of Beethoven’s

overtures. In just the proportion that it pleases and

thrills, it makes us unconscious of how long we were

absorbed by its melodies. The contrary fact illus-

trates the same truth. The more we notice time, the

less we are being interested. If our friends keep

looking at their watches while we tell a story, we can

be very sure that they are being bored by the story.

A man who keeps his eye on the clock is not the man
who is interested in his work. The more we notice

the passing of time, the less is our pleasure, and the

less we notice the passing of time, the greater is our

pleasure.

These psychological facts of experience testify

that not only is time the obstacle of enjoyment, but

escape from it is the essential of happiness. Sup-

pose we could enlarge upon our experience in such

a way as to imagine ourselves completely outside of

time and succession, in a world where there would

never be a “before” nor an “after” but only a “now.”



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 113

Suppose we could go out to another existence, where

the great pleasures of history would not be denied us

because of their historical incompatibility, but all

would be unified in a beautiful hierarchial order, like

a pyramid in that all would minister to the very un-

ity of our personality. Suppose I say that I could

reach a point of timelessness where all the enjoy-

ments and beauties and happiness of time could be

reduced to those three fundamental unities which

constitute the perfection of my being, namely, Life

and Truth and Love, for into these three all pleas-

ures can be resolved.

Suppose first of all, that I could reduce to a sin-

gle focal point all the pleasures of life, so that in

that “now” which never looks before or after, I

could enjoy the life that seems to be in the sea when

its restless bosom is dimpled with calm, as well as

the urge of life that seems to be in all the hill en-

circling brooks that loiter to the sea
;
the life which

provokes the dumb dead sod to tell its thoughts in

violets; the life which pulsates through a spring

time blossom as the swinging cradle for the fruit;

the life of the flowers as they open the chalice of

their perfume to the sun
; the life of the birds as the

great heralds of song and messengers of joy; the life

of all the children that run shouting to their moth-

ers’ arms
;
the life of all the parents who beget a life

like unto their own
;
the life of the mind that on the

wings of invisible thought strikes out to the battle-

ments of eternity, to the life whence all living comes.

Suppose that in addition to concentrating all the

life of the universe in a single point, I could also

concentrate in another focal point all the Truths of



114 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

the world, so that I could know the Truth the as-

tronomer seeks as he looks up through his telescope

;

and the Truth the biologist seeks as he looks down

through his microscopes ; the Truth about the heav-

ens, and who shut up the sea with doors when it did

burst forth as issuing out of a womb; the Truth

about the hiding place of darkness and the treasure

house of hail, and the cave of the winds; the truth

about the common things; why fire, like a spirit

mounts to the heavens heavenly, and why gold, like

clay, falls to earth earthly; the Truth the philoso-

pher seeks as he tears apart with his mind the very

wheels of the universe; the Truth the theologian

seeks as he uses Revelation to ravel the secrets of

God which far surpass those that John heard as he

leaned his head upon the breast of the Master.

Suppose that over and above all these pleasures

of life and truth, there can be unified in another

focal point all the pleasures and beauties of love,

that have contributed to the happiness of the uni-

verse: the love of the patriot for his country; the

love of the soldier for his cause; the love of the

scientist for his discovery
;
the love that seems to be

in the flowers as they open their petals to embrace

the sun
;
the love that seems to be in the trees as they

outstretch their leafy arms as if to contain the sky

;

the love of the earth at whose breast all creation

drinks the milk of life; the love of mothers, who

swing open the great portals of life that a child may

see the light of day; the love of friend for friend,

to whom one could unpack his heart with his trou-

bles; the love of spouse for spouse; the love of hus-

band and wife
;
and even the love of angel for angel,

and angel for God, with a fire and a heat sufficient



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 116

to enkindle the hearts of ten thousand times ten

thousand worlds.

Suppose that all the pleasures of the world could

be brought to these three focal points of life and

truth and love, just as the rays of the sun are

brought to unity in the sun ; and suppose that all the

successive pleasures of time could be enjoyed at one

and the same “now” ; and suppose that these points

of unity on which our hearts and minds and souls

would be directed, would not merely be three abstrac-

tions, but that the focal point in which all the pleas-

ures of life were concentrated would be a life per-

sonal enough to be a Father, and that that focal

point of Truth in which all the pleasures of truth

were concentrated would not merely be an abstract

truth, but a Truth personal enough to be a Word or

a Son, and that that focal point of love in which all

the pleasures of love were concentrated was not

merely an abstract love, but a love personal enough

to be a Holy Spirit; and suppose that once elevated

to that supreme height, happiness would be so freed

from limitations that it would include those three

as One, not in succession, but with a permanence,

not as in time, but as in the timeless—then we would
have eternity—then we would have God, then we
would have happiness, and that would be heaven.

But will the pleasures of that eternity with the

Risen Christ and that enjoyment of Life and Truth

and Love which is the Trinity, be in any way com-

parable to the pleasures of time? Is there any one

on this earth who will tell me about heaven? Cer-
tainly, there are three faculties to which one might

appeal, namely, to what one has seen, to what one

has heard, and to what one can imagine. Will heav-



116 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

en surpass all the pleasures of the eye, and the ear,

and the imagination ? First of all, will it be as beau-

tiful as some of the things that can be seen? I have

seen the Villa d’Este of Rome, with its long lanes of

ilox and laurel, and its great avenues of cypress

trees, all full of what might be called the vivacity of

quiet and living silence
;
I have seen a sunset on the

Mediterranean when two clouds came down like

pillars to form a brilliant red tabernacle for the sun,

glowing like a golden host ; I have seen the towers

and the minarets of Constantinople from the har-

bor pierce through the mist which hung over them

like a silken veil; I have seen the chateau country

of France and her Gothic Cathedrals aspiring heav-

enwards like prayers; I have seen the beauties of

the castles of the Rhine, and the combination of such

vision almost made me think of the door-keeper of

the Temple of Diana who used to cry out to those

who entered; “Take heed to your eye,” and so I

wonder if the things of eternity will be as beautiful

as the combined beauty of all the things which I

have seen.

I have not only seen the beauties of nature but I

have also heard of others that I have not seen; I

have heard of the beauties of the hanging gardens

of Babylon, of the pomp and dignity of the palaces

of the Doges, of the brilliance and glitter of the Ro-

man Forum as its foundations rocked with the tramp

of Rome's resistless legions; I have heard of the

splendor of the Temple of Jerusalem as it

shone like a jewel of the morning sun; I have

heard of the beauties of the garden of paradise,

where four-fold rivers flowed through lands rich

with gold and onyx, a garden made beautiful as only



MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST 117

God knows how to make a beautiful garden ; I have

heard of countless other beauties and joys of nature

which tongue cannot describe, nor touch of brush

convey, and I wonder if all the joys and pleasures of

heaven will be as great as the combined beauty of

all the things of which I have heard.

Beyond what I have heard and seen, there are

things which I can imagine: I can imagine a world

in which there never would be pain, nor disease, nor

death; I can imagine a world wherein every man

would live in a castle, and in that commonwealth of

castles there would be a due order of justice with-

out complaint or anxiety; I can imagine a world in

which the winter would never come, and in which

the flowers would never fade, and the sun would

never set; I can imagine a world in which there

would always be peace, a peace and a quiet without

idleness, a profound knowledge of things without

research, a constant enjoyment without satiety; I

can imagine a world which would eliminate all the

evils and diseases and worries of life, and combine

all its best joys and happiness, and I wonder if all

the happiness of heaven would be like the happiness

on earth which I can imagine.

Will eternity be anything like what I have seen,

or what I have heard, or what I can imagine? No,

eternity will be nothing like anything I have seen,

heard or imagined. Listen to the voice of God : “Eye

hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into

the heart of man to know those things which God

hath prepared for those who love Him.
,,

If the timeless so much surpasses time that there

can be found no parallel for it, then I begin to un-

derstand the great mystery of the shape of the hu-



118 MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRIST

man heart. The human heart is not shaped like a

valentine heart, perfect and regular in contour; it

is slightly irregular in shape as if a small piece of

it were missing out of its side. That missing part

may very well symbolize a piece that a spear tore

out of the universal heart of Humanity on the Cross,

but it probably symbolizes something more. It may

very well mean that when God created each human

heart, He kept a small sample of it in heaven, and

sent the rest of it into the world of time, where it

would each day learn the lesson that it could never

be really happy, that it could never be really wholly

in love, that it could never be really whole-hearted

until it rested with the Risen Christ in an eternal

Easter, until it went back again to the timeless to

recover the sample which God had kept for it for

all eternity.





CARDINAL HAYES STATES AIMS OF THE CATHOLIC
RADIO HOUR

(Extract from his address at the inaugural program in the

Studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New York

City, March 2, 1930).

Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the

National Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all

who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use

this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy

expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its

musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of

inquiries, must be met. That responsibility rests upon the

National Council of Catholic Men ....
This radio hour is for all the people of the United States.

To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to

express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For

this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly

will listen in interestedly, and even sympathetically, I am

sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its historic

background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and

with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora-

tion, foundation and growth of our glorious country. . . .

Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is

no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that

task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the
good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our

country-men. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country

who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material,

and a more spiritual standard among our people.

With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympa-

thy for all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue.

So may it be fulfilled. This work of dedication voices, there-

fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known,

to explain with the charity of Christ, our faith, which we

love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make

better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing
the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine

through Christ: pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating

our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only

justice but gladness and peace to our searching and ques-

tioning hearts.



V'-.V**



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