THE PRIESTLY LIFE

A Retreat by Ronald Knox



CONTENTS

Chapter	

1. Energy and Repose
2. Creation and the Priest
3. The Ambassadors of Christ
4. Sins of the Priest
5. St. Paul, a Profile
6. Murmuring
7. Accidie
8. On Fearing God
9. Abandonment
10. Obedience
11. Perseverance
12. Conference on Prayer
13. Our Lady
14. Father and Mother
15. Death as a Friend
16. To-day



CHAPTER 1. ENERGY AND REPOSE

It was St. Augustine, I think, who first coined that fine phrase about the 
nature of Almighty God which tells us that he is "semper agens, semper 
quietus," always active, yet always at rest. Always active--we can read the 
assurance of that all around us. The trembling of a leaf, the downward 
plunge of a waterfall, the flicker of flames on the hearth; all that motion 
is not self-originated. Look at a fly zigzagging endlessly between the 
floor and the ceiling; all that capacity for motion is not merely implanted 
in it but imparted to it from moment to moment from without. And we too, 
with all our freedom of choice, are not sufficient explanation of the life 
that beats in us. All the activity in the Universe, even if it is mediated 
by angelic or human creatures, is originated by Almighty God. And all that, 
even, is only a by-product, a faint echo, as it were, of an eternal 
pulsation. Before suns or worlds were created, the Three Persons of the 
Blessed Trinity exercised, in their mutual relations, the everlasting 
activity of the divine life.

And yet, "semper quietus," always at rest. As the bush that Moses saw on 
Mount Horeb burned continually yet was not consumed, so in God, who is pure 
Act, there is no change of state, no diminution of force, no recovering of 
wasted energies. When we are told that he rested the seventh day after the 
work of creation, that is only a metaphor, only an analogy. While he 
created the whole hierarchy of the angels, the whole system of the heavens, 
that activity could never alter for a moment his eternal, inviolable 
repose.

The divine perfections are mirrored for us, as completely as the conditions 
of humanity allow, in the human nature and mortal life of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. That, after all, is one of the great reasons for the Incarnation; 
by reason of it we can read the mysteries of the Divine Nature translated, 
so to say, into human language. And here too you will find that the two 
qualities I have mentioned existed simultaneously, though they could not be 
exhibited simultaneously. All through his ministry he is cramped for time; 
he is in such a hurry to complete the work his Father has given him to do 
that he has no leisure even to eat, as he preaches to the thronging 
multitudes, and when he would pray, he must withdraw to a mountain and 
spend in prayer the hours while the rest of the world is asleep.

We are accustomed to divide that Life, and quite rightly, into two 
sections--the hidden life of thirty years, when he dwelt at Nazareth and 
was obedient to Our Lady and to his foster-father St. Joseph, and the 
public life of less than three years' duration, when he went about doing 
good. But we should do wrong if we thought of those thirty years as years 
of mere quiescence, or of those three years as years of restless activity. 
During his hidden life he was at work in the carpenter's shop, he knew the 
pinch of poverty and the necessity of daily toil. Monotony of occupation, a 
life of drudgery, does not as a rule make for recollection and repose; if 
it did, I suppose many of us would be in a fair way to becoming saints. Yet 
during all those years in Our Lord's hidden life there was no stroke of the 
hammer, no screech of the saw, which was not accompanied by a perfect 
interior act of oblation. And in his public life, though the multitude 
thronged about him, and his feet tired on the roads and at night he had not 
where to lay his head, always he was consciously in the presence of his 
Heavenly Father, always he was enjoying that presence in a manner which the 
most highly privileged among his saints never dreamed of.

For the theologians teach us that Our Lord, as Man, was "simul viator et 
comprehensor:" he lived in our world, and at the same time he enjoyed, even 
as man, that full and open vision of God which is to be man's reward in 
heaven. We cannot begin to understand such a conception; but it is 
theologically certain that while he lay in the manger at Bethlehem, 
stretching out his hands in helpless infancy to his Virgin Mother, while he 
hung upon the Cross, every muscle wearied out with the strain of his agony 
and every joint racked with suffering, he was even then enjoying in that 
secret fastness the open vision of God. Our Lord was, all his life, at one 
with the Church Militant and simultaneously at one with the Church 
Triumphant. "Semper agens"--there was no incident of mortality, sin only 
excepted, that he would not experience. "Semper quietus"--he achieved that 
experience without ceasing to enjoy, even in his human nature, the rest 
which is the supreme recompense for all human endeavor.

And if we expect to find the Life of God mirrored in the human Nature of 
Our Lord, so we expect to find his human Nature mirrored in the Blessed 
Sacrament. Here, too, he is always active, yet always at rest. Always 
active; from day to day, through the hands of his priests, he offers 
himself upon a million altars for the world's salvation. Not, indeed, that 
he can labor or suffer or sorrow any more; that is all over; only once the 
Agony and the scourging, only once the nails and the lance and the Crown of 
Thorn. But the force which was generated, if we may so crudely describe it, 
by the Sacrifice made once for all on Calvary still pulsates and energizes 
in the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar. The Divine Victim is still at work, 
fresh graces to be won, fresh needs to be met, fresh sins to be atoned for. 
Think of a piece of music, that is finished, you might say, once for all 
when the composer's hand makes the last scratch upon the paper. In a sense, 
yes, but in a sense it has only just begun; the same piece of music will be 
played again and again all the world over; the echoes of the original 
composition will not die, it may be, as long as mankind lasts. So it is 
with our Lord's sacrifice; in a sense the stab of the lance put the final 
stroke to it, yet in a sense it has never ceased and never can cease while 
the world stands. Christ still lives among us, his fellow-men, and because 
he so lives, he is still at work. We go up to the altar with our hearts 
full of desires and longings which our conscious thoughts can hardly 
express; and all these desires and longings of ours are caught up and 
whirled away from us by the continuous stream of intercession which goes up 
from the Sacred Heart. It is a great furnace, this Sacrament of the altar, 
a great work-shop of prayer; never idle for a moment, while there are human 
needs to be met, and human tears to be wiped away.

Ever active; and yet, ever at rest--if we throw ourselves down, even for a 
moment, before the Tabernacle, how deep is the peace that steals over us; 
how the unruly motions of our hearts are stilled; how we can take refuge, 
as in a sudden harbor, from the buffetings of worldly circumstance! The 
flame that burns in the sanctuary lamp is, we know, a succession of flames, 
just as much as the ignition of a motor-car; and yet how stilly it burns! 
So that Presence, which the sanctuary lamp heralds and honors, is a center 
of ceaseless activity, and yet the influence that breathes from it is, for 
us, an influence of repose.

Sweet Sacrament of Rest--if you want to know what that means, you should go 
to a place like Tyburn Convent in London, where they have perpetual 
Adoration within a stone's throw of the Marble Arch. In summer, especially, 
when the windows are open; you can hear the whirring and grinding and 
hooting of the cars, the tramp of ceaseless passers-by along the pavement, 
the distant echoes of the Park Orators, preaching a dozen rival creeds to 
indifferent London. All that you hear, but you hear it as if it was the 
noise of a different world; for where you kneel there is nothing but 
stillness--the stillness of the two nuns at their post of adoration, the 
undying, unflickering flame of the candles, and beyond that the monstrance 
with its tremendous Burden of living Silence. Always at rest--hidden beyond 
the reach of eye or sense, he who reigns so tranquilly in heaven reigns 
tranquilly here; no motion, no breath betrays the presence of a God. 
"Semper agens"--in the holy Mass he is still busy with his work of 
reparation and intercession. "Semper quietus"--in the Tabernacle he enfolds 
his worshippers with the sense of eternal peace.

The earthly Life of our Blessed Lord is mirrored again, though less 
perfectly, less unmistakably, in the Life of his Church. The Church is his 
mystical Body, animated by his own Spirit; we expect, then, to find in her 
life some echo, some reflection of his. And the Church too, in her own way, 
is "semper agens, semper quieta." Always active--her missionaries going out 
to spread the Gospel in lands which have barely heard of her Master's Name; 
her theologians still agitated with controversy, her preachers calling upon 
men to repent; her priests shepherding their flocks and ushering them into 
eternal life from the cradle to the grave. More than that, she has a part 
to play in the world; political events affect her position, political 
movements call for her condemnation or approval; she must ever be on the 
alert, she must always live at high pressure. Her enemies are ready to call 
her a busybody and bid her mind her own affairs; but she is wiser than 
they--and knows that religion cannot be divorced from life; that political 
movements and currents of philosophical thought must affect, in their 
degree, the eternal welfare of men's souls. She is always at work, and if 
you once ask yourself the question, Which of the world's rulers is the 
busiest? Which of them works the longest hours, and takes the least 
holiday? you will not take long to find the answer. It is the man in a 
white cassock who rules without an army, almost without a territory, in the 
Vatican Palace at Rome.

And yet for all this bustle of hers, there is a sense in which the Church 
is "semper quieta," always at rest. For if you would know her true self, if 
you would approach near to the innermost secret of her life, you must go, 
not to the palaces of Pope or bishop, not to the courts of ecclesiastical 
tribunals, or the lecture rooms of learned theologians. You must go to the 
cells of Carthusians and Carmelites, of Trappists and Poor Clares, if you 
want to know what the Church really is. Shut off from the noise of the 
world and its dusty disputes, sheltered by their protecting walls from 
public inquisitiveness and from the blare of advertisement, these 
cloistered souls find an interior peace which is, if we would but realize 
it, the breath of the Church's Life, the source of her triumphs, the solace 
of her despairs. Look at a man or a horse racing; and then remember that 
behind all that tremendous display of outward activity there is one tiny 
valve which beats all unseen, all unheard, within the breast; and if that 
beating were to cease, all the external activities would cease with it. 
Something of the same importance belongs to those homes of silence and 
recollectedness where men and women serve God in holy religion: there lies 
the heart of the Church. Their restfulness is her secret life; the 
power-house from which all her restless activity must spring. Go elsewhere, 
and you will see the rippling of her muscles; it is in the hours of 
contemplation that you will hear the beating of her heart.


II

"Semper agens, semper quietus"--such is the Life of Almighty God, the 
direct Agent in all change, all motion, all becoming, yet himself 
unchanged, unmoved, uninfluenced. "Semper agens, semper quietus"--such was 
the Incarnate Life of Jesus Christ, when he went about as Man, toiling and 
suffering for our sakes, yet never losing for a moment the interior peace 
which they enjoy who see God face to face. "Semper agens, semper quietus"--
such is the Life of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament; offering himself 
day by day as a spotless oblation, atoning for our fresh sins and winning 
us fresh graces, yet, in the Tabernacle, the Type and the Source of rest. 
"Semper agens, semper quieta"--such, in its degree, is the life of Holy 
Church, always restlessly at work over her business of world-conquest, yet 
ever finding repose in the hidden lives of her contemplative children. And 
now, what of your life and mine?

Is it too much to say that our lives ought to be modeled on the same 
pattern, ought to bear the same hallmark, ought to have this double 
character of energy and repose? If we are really to understand our 
Christian vocation, that semper agens, semper quietus ought to be our motto 
too. Always active; we cannot afford to stand still. Apart from the press 
of our secular business, our home duties, our duty to the nation in a time 
of peril, the need of making a livelihood, and so on, we have to work out 
our own salvation, we are told-- the devil is only too ready to take 
advantage of us if he sees us trying to mark time. And yet, always at rest. 
Why else does the epistle to the Hebrews imply that we have already entered 
into rest by becoming Christians? Why does the Sacred Heart say "Come unto 
me, and I will give you rest"? There is a rest, even here, for the people 
of God; there is, for every soul which has really learned to love our 
Blessed Lord and to abide in his love, a fortress of interior peace which 
no assault from the world can enter, no echoes of the world's anxieties 
disturb. The soul which has learned to practice the presence of Christ, and 
to be happy alone with him, has found something more than peace in heaven; 
it has found peace on earth. That is how the Saints lived; that is how they 
contrived to undertake such vast labors, such heroic mortifications. "You 
are dead" St. Paul writes, "and your life is hidden with Christ in God". If 
we only believed that, if we only understood that! Then indeed we should be 
able to face the worst life has in store for us with careless eyes. You are 
a good active Christian? Thank God. And now, since he has given you the 
grace to be active in his service, ask one more grace of him; ask that you 
may learn of him, learn of the Sacred Heart, how to rest quietly in his 
love.

You see, we're so accustomed to divide our life into alternations of 
activity and quiescence; we work and then we rest and then we work and then 
we rest; what other arrangement is possible? And I suppose that most of us, 
when we think of our retreat, think of it by a sort of pious metaphor as a 
spiritual holiday; at other times of the year we are too busy to think as 
much about God as we would like to; now we are at leisure to be, for once, 
our true selves.

Perhaps it is simplest to put it in this way; that we ought to try and 
expunge one phrase from our vocabulary as far as possible; I mean the 
phrase "going out of retreat". We oughtn't, if you will excuse my saying 
it, to go into retreat with the feeling that later on we are going out of 
it, like a man doing a treatment at a spa in the hope that afterwards he 
will find it has done him some good. We ought to be more like invalids who 
are just preparing to get up, and are having a course of massage for their 
legs so that when they do get up they will be able to walk. We are trying 
to gain, in this week, a poise of the soul which will, please God, remain 
ours. And we shall have succeeded, in proportion as his grace enables us, 
when we have "come out of retreat", to live in greater recollection than 
before; always active, because even our times of recreation will be filled 
with a desire of living in his glory; always at rest, because the most ex-
hausting labors will never be able to distract our attention, entirely, 
from him.

What is it, in its own nature, the habit of recollection? It doesn't mean 
merely pulling yourself up and thinking seriously about your state of life, 
your duties, your sins, your temptations, your ambitions, and the rest of 
it. Recollection doesn't mean thinking about "your" anything; it means 
thinking about you. Put it in this way--you and I are breathing all day, 
but unless we are asthmatic we are not conscious of our breathing; we go on 
doing it without thinking about it. Now direct your attention to the fact 
that you are breathing, and you become conscious of it at once. You can 
feel, you can hear yourself breathing. In the same way, we spend most of 
our lives thinking without thinking about it; the attention of our minds is 
directed outwards towards the objects of our thought, not inwards towards 
ourselves thinking. Now direct your attention to the fact that you are 
thinking; you become conscious at once of your own immortal soul. This 
thing which is thinking all the time, which is thinking at this moment 
about itself, is an immortal substance specially created by God, and 
destined to survive to all eternity. It is nearer to us than anything else 
can be. But you were not thinking about it until I suggested it to you just 
now.

In the solitude in which we find ourselves we find God. Turn your eyes 
outwards, towards the stars or the ocean or the sunset, and you will be 
able to argue God's existence, but you will not attain to his presence. He 
is present everywhere; but whenever you think of him as present, there will 
always be some space, some distance, intervening between you and him, 
unless.... Unless you turn back upon yourself, and look into your own soul. 
There you will find him, with no barrier of space to cut him off, even in 
imagination, from you. He is present in every operation of your soul; its 
thoughts, it memories, its desires, all its activities, exist only through 
the powers of motion which he lends to it. That, even in the natural order; 
and in the supernatural order the motions of his grace are playing over 
your soul all the time like sunshine over a pool. When you look for the 
presence of God, do not worry about here and there; wherever you are, you 
have only to look into yourself, and you will find him.

I wonder if we make a practice of doing that as much as we ought to, even 
those of us who are living lives of serious purpose, and of regular 
observance? Yet it is such an easy thing to do; not necessarily in our 
times of prayer--though it is the best possible preface to our times of 
prayer--but at odd moments during the day. You have to wait two or three 
minutes for an engagement or a 'bus or a train; and your eyes wander at 
once towards the people who are passing by, or even to the advertisements 
on the hoardings--what advertisements! Those two or three minutes pass in 
idle speculation; if you kept your eyes still, and suddenly turned back 
your thoughts upon yourself, you will find yourself, just for those two or 
three minutes, in the presence of God. Or you may use even a shorter 
interval of time; when you are just switching over from one occupation to 
another, you can pause just for that fraction of time, and look into your 
own soul, and greet for a moment, as a soldier salutes his senior officer, 
the presence of God there. The busiest day can be sanctified, if its 
moments are thus punctuated by the recollection of God in the soul.

Let us be clear about it--no state of life, whatever opportunities of 
prayer it gives us, however rigid be the framework of observance within 
which it moves, will guarantee for us, of itself, the habit of 
recollection. There will always be interests, attachments, ambitions ready 
to distract our thoughts, and so draw us away from ourselves. There will 
always be excuses for neglecting ourselves, for hiding ourselves away from 
God's presence upon the pretext of serving him by our activities. Martha 
can always put up a good defense against Mary. And, in proportion as we 
allow that to happen, we are spoiling not only the temper of our spiritual 
lives but, very often, the effectiveness of our work as well. We shall 
become fussy, and impatient, and irritable, and despondent, and jealous, 
and critical and sentimental, and generally unbalanced, and all that will 
tell--will take away something from our efficiency, will hamper the value 
of our actions, quite apart from spoiling the purity of our intentions. Our 
influence on other people will be the less and the poorer, if we have no 
roots of recollection in ourselves. "Semper agens, semper quietus," that is 
the character which will tell. If you miss that, you will be "semper 
agitans, semper agitatus;" you will live in an atmosphere of tension which 
you will communicate to others, and so make life less happy and work less 
fruitful both for them and for you.

So let us ask Almighty God if he will not deepen in us, in the course of 
this retreat, the spirit of recollection.



CHAPTER 2. CREATION AND THE PRIEST

If a man should set out to go through the Bible, pausing and making a 
meditation wherever he found material, he would be a dull fellow if his 
attention was not caught by the second verse of it. "The earth was void and 
empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God 
moved over the waters." Creation still in the melting-pot; so that we have 
nothing for our composition of place except a formless sea of 
undifferentiated matter, dark, not by some effect of shadow, but with that 
primal darkness that reigned before light was made. And over this inert 
mass, like the mist that steals up from a pool at evening, moved, already, 
the Spirit of God. Already it was God's plan to educe from this chaos the 
cosmos he had resolved to make, passing up through its gradual stages till 
it culminated in the creation of Man.

Deep in your nature and in mine, as we sit here, lies just such a chaos of 
undifferentiated matter, of undeveloped potentialities. Psychologists call 
it, the unconscious. It is a great lumber room, stocked from our past 
history. Habits and propensities are there, for good and for evil; 
memories, some easily recaptured, some tucked away in the background; 
unreasoning fears and antipathies; illogical associations, which link this 
past experience with that; primitive impulses, which shun the light, and 
seek to disguise themselves by a smoke-screen of reasoning; inherited 
aptitudes, sometimes quite unsuspected. Out of this welter of conditions 
and tendencies the life of action is built up, your life and mine. And 
still, as at the dawn of creation, the Holy Spirit moves over those 
troubled waters, waiting to educe from them, with the co-operation of our 
wills, the entire life of the Christian.

With us, he has set about that business in a special way. He has made us 
priests; and there is a curious analogy, I think, between the process by 
which God made man, and the institution of the priesthood. I hope you will 
bear with me if I draw out that parallel rather in detail.

When did God make man? Why, at the very end of his creation, and (if we may 
so say without irreverence) by a kind of afterthought. Already he had made, 
on the sixth day, the beasts of the field; you quite expect to hear, after 
that, "And there was morning and evening, a sixth day". But no, all was not 
over yet. God said, "Let us make man, after our own image"--almost as if it 
were a kind of sudden inspiration, like that of a child inventing a new 
game: "Let us make man". That puts us in our place rather, doesn't it? To 
think that God might have been content to make a world in which the plants 
grew with no human hand to weed or to tend them, a world in which the 
animals survived or perished according to the law of their nature, with no 
human master to kill them, or to tame them to his purposes. But at the last 
moment, God said, "Let us make man".

When did our Lord institute the priesthood? Well, in a sense on Maundy 
Thursday, on the last evening of his mortal life. But he did not make his 
intention clear until he met his apostles again on Easter Day in the 
Cenacle; when he breathed on them and said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost". 
Once more, you see, it is a kind of afterthought; the work of our 
Redemption is finished, death has been vanquished, and hell harrowed, and 
the holy patriarchs have gone to their reward, and the reign of grace has 
begun--and our Lord did all that without any priests to help him. He trod 
the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with him. And he 
could have achieved your sanctification and mine, could have spread his 
gospel through the world and given mankind faith to justify them, charity 
to sanctify them, without any priests to help him, if he had decreed to do 
so. But no, at the last moment, a thought seems to strike him, "Let us make 
priests".

Why did God make man? Partly, no doubt, because he wanted, from his 
creation, a conscious response of gratitude. When he made sun and moon and 
stars, and the earth with all its delicate beauty, its intricate 
workmanship, he pronounced it very good, and the sons of God shouted for 
joy, we are told, at this new thing that had come to be. But within the 
material universe itself there was no answering cry of recognition. True, 
the stars in their courses, the orderly process of the seasons, showed 
forth the glory of God; true, the living animals could enjoy some confused 
pleasures of memory and hope, and in doing so rendered a kind of mute 
homage to their Creator. But amid all that wealth of multitudinous life no 
conscious response was given, until he made man, to be, as we say, the 
priest of creation; to praise God on behalf of those dumb, material things, 
with a mind that could reason and a voice to express their thankfulness. 
The priest of creation; the instrument through which the chorus of its 
praise should thrill and become vocal at last.

But there was more than that; Almighty God wanted his creation to be taken 
in hand for him. Why, we do not know; but the want is clearly expressed in 
the account which scripture gives us, "There was not a man to till the 
ground". God did not make man to be a kind of toy, a final piece of 
craftsmanship more subtle, more delicate than all the rest. He made him to 
bear rule over the birds and the beasts and the fishes; to be the viceroy 
of his new dominion. He was to impose God's will on this planet; he was to 
be a kind of tool by which God's action would express itself, through the 
long centuries during which the visible order was to persist.

Why did our Lord institute the priesthood? Partly because he wanted to have 
a special set of men who would have the freedom and the leisure to make a 
whole-time job of his service. The rest of us would be so busy, earning our 
daily bread and looking after our families and fulfilling our various 
duties as citizens, that we should not be able to attend on him as 
continually as we should have wished, to think about him as uninterruptedly 
as we should have wished. Partly that, but partly also because he wanted 
this new supernatural creation of his, the Christian Church, to be taken in 
hand for him. As he would have man to look after the dumb beasts, to fold 
them and guide them and feed them, so he would have priests to look after 
the faithful, to fold them and guide them and feed them in the ways of the 
supernatural life. He could have done without us, but he preferred to have, 
once more, a kind of tool through which his action should express itself. 
Tools in his hand, that is what we priests were to be.

How did God make man? Doubtless you have to make some allowance for the use 
of figurative speech; we do not go to the book of Genesis for exact 
chemical formulae. But when we are told that the Lord God formed man out of 
the slime of the earth, it surely must mean this, whatever else it means--
that man on his physical side is one with the material creation which 
surrounds him. We may strut and give ourselves airs, and tell one another 
that we have conquered practically the whole of nature and it is only a 
matter of time before we conquer the rest of it; but the fact remains, we 
were made of the slime of the earth; dust thou art, as the priest says to 
us on Ash Wednesday, dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. If we 
are anything more than dust, it is only because God saw fit, of his free 
bounty, to do something else. "God breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
life, and man became a living soul." That lifeless thing, a mere toy of 
dumb clay, which lies there on the ground--it is only God's inspiration 
that has turned it into this wonderful creature we know and are, Man.

How did our Lord institute the priesthood? "When he had said this, he 
breathed on them, and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you 
remit, they are remitted unto them, and whose sins you retain, they are 
retained." With one breath, God created the whole human family; with one 
breath, our Lord instituted the whole Christian priesthood. As man is a 
beast among the beasts, so the priest is a man amongst men; he shares their 
passions, their weaknesses, their disabilities. And yet, when God breathes 
into the face of a priest, a new thing, in a sense, comes into being, just 
as when God breathed into the face of that clay image he had fashioned. It 
was a kind of second creation, when our Lord spoke those words in the 
Cenacle. It brought into the world a new set of powers, infinitely 
exceeding all that man had ever experienced, all that man could ever 
expect. It was a fresh dawn of life--supernatural life. Man could no more 
have evolved into a priest than a beast could have evolved into a man; it 
was a special creation, this time too.

What is the meaning of all that? It would have been possible, it might even 
have seemed natural, that our Lord, having won our redemption for us, 
should apply the fruits of that redemption to our souls without any kind of 
priestly ministry to aid his purpose. Many who value the name of Christian 
still find it reasonable to believe that he did just that; the priesthood, 
they will tell you, belonged to the Jewish covenant, to the old Law; when 
the mercy of God shone out to us in the face of Jesus Christ, the need for 
all ceremonies and sacraments was done away. But it is not so that the 
courtesy of our Lord Jesus Christ treats us. When he turned water into wine 
at Cana of Galilee, he used no word, no touch, no gesture, to claim the 
miracle as his own. "Fill the water-pots with water.... Draw out now, and 
bear to the governor of the feast"--the miraculous transformation should 
take its effect between the hands of the servants who were waiting on the 
guests; they should have the apparent credit for it. And so it was when he 
multiplied the loaves in the wilderness. He gave the loaves and fishes to 
the disciples to distribute; it was in their hands, it seems, that the 
multiplication took place. It is part of his courtesy, you see, that he 
will thus associate human agents with himself, just when he gives us the 
most startling proofs of his miraculous power.

And so it is with the Christian priesthood. Not only when he gives us, 
under the forms of bread and wine, his own Body and Blood to be our food; 
in all the Sacraments he is the true author, the true fountain of grace, 
yet he will suffer a human ministry to intervene. "Receive ye the Holy 
Ghost; whose sins ye shall remit, they are remitted unto them, and whose 
sins ye retain, they are retained." But most, and most characteristically, 
in the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist. When a priest baptizes or absolves, he 
stands there, sits there, only to unseal the fountains of grace to the 
faith, to the penitence, which knock to receive them. But when he stands at 
the altar, the priest does something more; he takes upon himself the Person 
of Christ, re-enacting in his name the ceremony which he performed on the 
night of his Passion. A priest clad in the sacred vestments (says the 
author of the Imitation) is the vice-gerent of Christ himself. He uses our 
Lord's own words, identifies himself with the offering which our Lord 
continually makes before the Father, of his own Body and Blood. How is it 
that men can be found with the assurance, with the presumption, to do that?

The difficulty is solved for us by one golden phrase of St. John 
Chrysostom's; we all know it. "When you see a priest offering the 
Sacrifice," he says, "do not think of it as if it were he that is doing 
this; it is the hand of Christ, invisibly stretched forth". The hand of 
Christ invisibly stretched forth--that is the picture we should conjure up 
to our minds if we are to think of the Mass as it really is. Aristotle, in 
defining the position of a slave, uses the words, "A slave is a living 
tool". And that is what the priest is, a living tool of Jesus Christ. He 
lends his hands, to be Christ's hands, his voice, to be Christ's voice, his 
thoughts, to be Christ's thoughts; there is, there should be, nothing of 
himself in it from first to last, except where the Church allows him, 
during two brief intervals of silence, to remember his own intentions 
before God. Non-Catholics who come to our churches complain sometimes, 
don't they, that the ceremonies of the Mass seem so lifeless, so 
mechanical. But you see, they ought to be mechanical. What the visitor is 
watching, so uncomprehendingly, is not a man, it is a living tool; it turns 
this way and that, bends, straightens itself, kneels, gesticulates, all in 
obedience to the orders given it-- Christ's orders, not ours. We do not 
expect eccentricities from a tool, the tool of Christ.

In an ordination ceremony, the future priest is stretched out at full 
length, face downwards, like a corpse, like a dummy, while the solemn chant 
of the litany rolls over his head. He is waiting there like a dead thing, 
for the Holy Spirit to come and quicken him into a new form of life; as 
Adam's body waited, slime of the earth, for the informing touch of the 
Creator's hand to turn it into a living soul. He is yielding his body to 
Christ to be his instrument, as if he had no life, no will of his own. And 
even when he has risen from the ground, his hands must be tied together 
with a purificator, in token that he is the captive of Jesus Christ; his 
slave, to drive and control at will. "I live, now not I, but Christ liveth 
in me"--that is the protestation which these ceremonies make on behalf of 
the newly-ordained priest. No life of his own, no liberty of his own; 
henceforth he is Christ's.

This slavery to which the priest commits himself does not begin and end 
when he is saying Mass, when he is performing ceremonies. Ah, if only it 
did! No, it is a life-time of service; a life-time during which the priest 
must consecrate himself, must keep on consecrating himself afresh, to his 
Master, if only for the sake of the flock which his Master has entrusted to 
him. The merely mechanical part of a priest's life, the ceremonies he has 
to perform, the sacred words he has to utter--these come easier to him with 
use as time goes on. It is not so with the consecration of the heart. That 
is in danger of growing more formal, more faint, as the love between 
husband and wife is in danger of growing more formal, more faint, when the 
bloom has rubbed off their romance. The priest, as the years pass, will be 
tempted to settle down into a rut, to be satisfied with formal pieties and 
think he is doing well enough. There will be disappointments, too, and 
discouragements, to make him cynical and disillusioned. God forgive us, how 
many of us become crooked tools in the hand of Christ!

Don't let's forget that man was created to live in a Paradise, and lost it 
through a kind of claustrophobia. Even there. he could wish for wider 
horizons. Do you remember the description of how Adam and Eve met their 
Creator after the Fall? We are told that the Lord God walked in the 
Paradise at the afternoon air, and called to them, "Adam, where art thou?" 
And they? They had hid themselves away in the trees of the garden. Do not 
let us waste time over discussing, in what sense he who is everywhere 
present could be said to walk, at a particular time, in his Paradise; how 
he, whose scrutiny is infallible, could need to search for his truant 
creatures. The picture given us in the book of Genesis is at least amply 
borne out by our own experience. Do not we know what it is to have offended 
God, to be sought out by God, and to endeavor, by futile efforts, to hide 
ourselves away from that Divine pursuit?

It is what the economists would call, I think, a vicious spiral. The more 
we consent to sin, the more we neglect our prayers, because it would make 
us uncomfortable to meet God like that; we should feel ashamed of 
ourselves-- and besides, we should have to promise amendment. So we neglect 
our prayers, and through the neglect of prayer comes fresh sin. I am not 
thinking now of mortal sins, I am not thinking of people who give up prayer 
altogether. But how easy it is, when we are being careless about deliberate 
venial sin, or about the remote occasions of mortal sin, to funk meeting 
God! To take refuge in the love of creatures, or even--heaven help us, what 
strange beings we are!--to take refuge in our work, so long as it is quite 
external to ourselves, just like Adam and Eve hiding among the trees of the 
garden, so as to make certain that we are never left alone with God. And we 
become blunt tools, rusted tools, in the hand of Jesus Christ.

He is looking for you, the tool that once glittered so bright with the oil 
of consecration. He is looking for you, the lost shepherd. "I never seem to 
come across him now" you may picture our Lord as saying; "I must see if I 
can find him at the retreat". At some familiar turn of the walks, 
consecrated for you, perhaps, by memories of youth, he is waiting for you. 
In the cool of the afternoon air, when the busy jarring of your daily 
interests, anxieties, grievances has died down, and there is peace in your 
heart, he is waiting for you. In some passage of a book you have taken out 
of the library, a book you have often read before without being specially 
arrested by that passage, he is waiting for you. There will be a moment of 
embarrassment, but it need not be more than a moment. You have only to cast 
yourself down, with Peter, at his knees, and say, with Peter, "Depart from 
me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord". He will not take you at your word.



CHAPTER 3 .THE AMBASSADORS OF CHRIST

The epistle for the first Sunday in Lent (2 Cor. vi, 1-10), try as we may 
to make it sound as if it referred to the congregation, refers really to 
ourselves. It is so plainly St. Paul's conception of what his ideal priest 
ought to be like.

The Liturgy makes the whole passage somewhat mystifying by leaving out the 
verses immediately before, which set the key for the whole. "We are 
Christ's ambassadors, and God speaks to you through us; we entreat you in 
Christ's name, make your peace with God." St. Paul's metaphor, then, is 
that of an ambassador, and an ambassador delivering, on behalf of his 
Sovereign, an ultimatum, a direct threat of war. The priest, at the 
beginning of Lent, has to entreat his congregation not to offer the grace 
of God an ineffectual welcome. So many graces missed already, and now the 
acceptable time has come, the day of salvation; treat this Lent, brethren, 
as if it was your last chance! Lent, you see, is a kind of sacramental 
expression of the span of life that still lies before us, the time granted 
us for repentance, for making our peace with God. If we do not make our 
peace with God, then, at the expiration of the time fixed, of the days of 
grace he has offered us, we find ourselves in a state of war with God, his 
enemies, and eternally. It is an ultimatum we deliver; now or never, make 
your peace!

So far, the moral has been for the congregation; the rest of the epistle is 
a moral, entirely, for the priest himself. We are careful not to give 
offense to anybody, lest we should bring discredit on our ministry; Christ 
wants for his ambassadors, not just any sort of ambassadors, but 
ambassadors trained in a school of Divine diplomacy. Not mere town-criers, 
shouting out "Oyez, oyez!" so as to say, afterwards, that everybody in the 
street has had fair warning; men entrusted with plenipotentiary powers, to 
secure the renewed loyalty of the rebellious subjects, if there is any form 
of persuasion that can do it. It is for the ambassador to ingratiate 
himself with the people of the country he is sent to; make people love and 
respect him, so that they may love and respect the master he represents.

To be the ambassador of Christ after a fashion, makes no great demands on 
the priest. All he has to do is to get up every Sunday morning, read out 
the Credo, and say "If you don't believe that, my dear brethren, you will 
go to hell"; get up every Sunday evening, read out the Ten Commandments, 
and say, "If you don't keep those, my dear brethren, you will go to hell". 
The ultimatum has been delivered-- yes. But have we really been 
ambassadors? John Wesley, when one of his sermons hadn't made much 
impression, used to note the fact in his journal, and add, "I am clear of 
these men's blood". He was a great man, John Wesley, but I don't like him 
when he uses that phrase. Don't let us ever get into the habit of thinking 
that after having given our congregation twenty minutes on the danger of 
mixed marriages, and twenty minutes more on the importance of being in time 
with the bench rents, we are "clear of their blood". Something more is 
demanded of an ambassador; what? St. Paul goes on to tell us; not very 
tidily, because he hadn't a very tidy mind; but perhaps more tidily than 
usual.

Patience, a great deal of patience--that, he tells us, is the first thing 
we need. And he goes on to give nine samples of the kind of things we have 
to put up with, divided into three threes. "In times of affliction, of 
need, of difficulty-those are the mental discomforts brought on us by the 
vicissitudes of our work; "under the lash, in prison, in the midst of 
tumult"--those are the bodily discomforts inflicted on us by our fellow-
men; "when we are tired out, sleepless, and fasting"--those are the bodily 
discomforts inflicted on us by circumstance. The picture seems to us 
highly-colored; do not let us forget that priests in many parts of the 
world are having, now, to work under those conditions; times may change, 
and we may have to ourselves. Meanwhile, patience is not less demanded of 
us because the provocations to which we are accustomed are, by comparison, 
pin-pricks. How difficult it can be when the faithful will try to 
buttonhole us after Mass on Sunday; when we are tired out after the 
confessional yesterday, sleepless after mutton-chops at half-past nine and 
a long evening with the notices, fasting until after the last Mass is sung; 
in affliction, need, and difficulty because we are already trying to 
buttonhole so many people ourselves, trying to remember what it is we have 
so importantly got to say to them; the last moment when we want to be under 
the lash of the parish grouser, imprisoned by the parish bore, in the midst 
of tumult, with the altar-boys kicking up a shindy all around us--and this 
is the moment when, most of all, the parish sees us, and ought to see us at 
our best!

You don't need to tell me that it is the fault of the laity. Only last 
Sunday I preached to fifty school girls imploring them not to grow up into 
the kind of people who buttonhole priests after Mass. But it is a splendid 
opportunity, you know, for realizing our ambassadorship. It's very odd to 
reflect what a lot of the good marks some of us will get at our last 
account will be for keeping our tempers, just, with great difficulty, 
keeping our tempers, at moments when nobody imagined we were in any danger 
of losing them.

And then you have a list, I think, of four qualities which the perfect 
ambassador ought to have. St. Paul always pitches his standard high. I 
don't know how you are to translate that word "hagnotes." "Chastity", yes; 
but the word has a merely negative sound. "Hagnotes" is a quality so pure 
as to be terrible; it dazzles you, no embattled array so awes men's hearts. 
A convoy passing through a country town, that endless stream of fortified 
motion, how it takes your breath away with the realization of the terrific 
thing modern war is! Something like that ought to be the purity of the 
priest. Not just the insensitiveness of the bachelor, who finds women a 
nuisance, not the furtive horror which tries to forget that sex exists, but 
something unapproachable, blinding, on a different plane from thoughts of 
evil. What a waste of God's gifts, when the life that is pledged to 
celibacy is not a life irradiated by purity! When brooding regrets, or 
cheap familiarities, tarnish the surface of that mirror which ought to 
reflect Christ!

"Knowledge"--how curiously St. Paul compiles his lists! Only this is not 
the kind of knowledge in which you can take doctorates. Always, I think, 
the idea in St. Paul's mind when he uses this word is that of familiarity 
with the things of the supernatural world, a familiarity which only comes 
from prayer. "He was in the world . . . and the world knew him not"--it is 
the opposite of that attitude which St. Paul means by knowledge; a 
recognition which has grown into familiarity. The soil on which an embassy 
is built belongs, by diplomatic usage, to the country which that embassy 
represents. And the ground on which the priest's feet tread should be, as 
it were, part of the soil of heaven transplanted to earth. The language of 
heaven should be talked in the presbytery, as the English language is 
talked in the British Embassy at Moscow. The layman who is in a difficulty 
ought to say to himself, "I'll go and talk to the priest about it, he'll be 
able to tell me; he knows God". The laity at large have the impression, and 
rightly, I think, that we priests know our job. I sometimes wonder whether 
they have the same confidence that we know our Employer.

"Long-suffering"--the difference between that and the patience we were 
speaking of just now leaps to the eye. You can be patient about things; an 
illness or a sleepless night; you are long-suffering only about persons. 
More, you are patient with people when they bore you or badger you without 
meaning any harm; you are long-suffering only where there is a sense of 
injury. And this quality, in one of Christ's ambassadors, is evidently of 
the first importance. We carry his ultimatum in our pockets; that puts us 
in a very delicate position. On the one hand, we have to portray him to the 
faithful as infinitely forgiving; we shall not do that if we are 
unforgiving people ourselves. On the other hand, it will sometimes be our 
duty to tell a fellow-mortal, "No, if you go on like that, if you persist 
in doing that, there is no forgiveness for you, in this world or in the 
world to come". Essential that the man who speaks like that should not be 
thought to be putting any personal animus into the declaration; the sinful 
soul must never be allowed to think "He is saying that because he has a 
down on me". And that is what people are very apt to say; cast your mind 
back to school days, and remember how when you were punished it was always 
because that professor had a down on you. The priest, then, must be known 
as one who personally harbors no grudges, who forgets an injury. When the 
sinner is told by such a man as that that there is no forgiveness, he will 
begin to take notice. Do let us beware of using phrases, even in fun, which 
will send round the parish the impression that we are unforgiving people.

"Sweetness" will not quite do in English, though "suavitas" might do in 
Latin, for "chrestotes." "Chrestos" is a word St. Paul is fond of applying 
to Almighty God himself; "kindness" would do, but I think "graciousness" 
does better. Here you have the positive side of the picture; our Lord's 
ambassadors must represent him as being, not only forgiving to the sinner, 
but gracious to all his suppliants. And if we are to represent our Lord to 
the people in that light, we shall do it best by having a graciousness of 
our own which represents his. There is a kind of universal benevolence 
which sometimes makes itself felt, even in a very shy man, even in a very 
reserved man, which does win souls. Everybody calls the priest "dear old" 
Father So-and-so, if not actually "poor old" Father So-and-so; there are no 
organizations in the parish and the accounts are in a frightful mess, but 
somehow people go to church. It is "chrestotes" that has done it.

The pure-minded priest, the priest who is familiar with God, who is 
forgiving, who is gracious--having asked all that of us, St. Paul goes on 
to give us four resources we have to rely on, if we are going to face this 
tremendous task. The Holy Spirit; I wonder if we think enough about all 
that? I mean, we are apt, some of us, to be rather like the minister who 
said "If I'm called upon to speak suddenly like this, I just say what the 
Holy Spirit puts into my mind, but if you'll give me an hour or two for 
preparation, I can do much better". We get into the pulpit without any 
sermon prepared, because we have been prevented, by sick calls or some 
other unexpected interruption, from giving it the time we meant to. And no 
doubt the Holy Spirit does give us special assistance then, but isn't it 
giving him a rather secondary role if we only expect him to help us out on 
occasions like that? Surely we ought to pray to him more, try and make 
ourselves more supple to his influence, than we do. After all, most of us 
have known, in the confessional perhaps, what it is to say something which 
we aren't in the least expecting to say, can't quite make out afterwards 
why we did say it; isn't that perhaps meant to make us see that we have 
more help at hand than we mostly realize? Isn't it meant to make us trust, 
rather more, the occasional impulse we get to say something--only we're too 
shy; to write a letter to somebody--only we're too slack? Don't let us be 
neglectful in our devotion to the Holy Spirit; the ambassador has got to 
keep in touch with Headquarters.

Then there is unaffected love, love unfeigned. It may be the business of 
the ordinary ambassador to feign love; to pretend great friendliness 
towards the country in which he is stationed, when in fact he feels no such 
friendliness, and knows that his countrymen don't either. We are in a 
better position than that; we are bound to our congregations by a real tie 
of Christian fellowship, of pastoral good-will, which will triumph, if we 
will let it, over many difficulties.

And then "the word of truth": or as we should say, "the truth of our 
message". The ordinary ambassador is fairly often under an obligation--what 
shall we say? Sir William Temple observed that an ambassador is one who 
goes and lies abroad for his country. Let us say anyhow that he is often in 
a position where he has to let the foreign statesmen he is conversing with 
deceive themselves--about his own country's resources, his own country's 
intentions. The ambassador of Christ suffers from no such embarrassment as 
that; he is simply speaking the truth that is in his heart.

And finally, the power of God--we must not expect God to do miracles for 
us; but he has waiting for us, if we will trust him, unexpected 
providences; an important conversion, a big check, you never know what. So, 
when its ambassador is not being listened to, a country will sometimes 
reinforce his authority by making a demonstration, mobilizing its troops, 
or something of that sort. Heaven does back up its ambassadors.

At this point St. Paul, whose thought plays about like lightning, 
disconcerts us a little by apparently beginning to say the exact opposite 
of what he has been saying before. He has been telling us how important it 
is that the ambassadors of Christ should make a good impression, and then 
quite suddenly he adds: "After all, what does it matter what people think 
of us? Makes no difference at all". The reason is, I think, that (as you 
will find at the beginning of the letter) people at Corinth have been 
saying nasty things about St. Paul. They said he was a man you couldn't 
trust, and he didn't like that. But he reminds himself now that what people 
think of us doesn't in the least matter. Well, it isn't really the opposite 
of what has gone before. I think if he had expressed himself rather more 
coherently, he would have said, "It is the business of Christ's ambassador 
to make the most favorable impression he can. Having done that, he must not 
be in the least surprised if in spite of it people think ill of him; they 
always will". And we, while (as I've been trying to point out) we have an 
urgent duty to make people think well of us, must be quite unmoved, in 
ourselves, by their approval or disapproval. It all means nothing.

We are to be armed on the right as well as on the left; your ancient 
soldier carried his shield on his left arm, and fought that side first. But 
it isn't really satisfactory only to have a pad on the leg that is facing 
the bowling. No, we must be armed right and left with justice, by which I 
think St. Paul here means innocence. It doesn't very much matter, because 
he has got his metaphor mixed up; what he is trying to say is that we 
should be equally steeled against undue blame and undue praise. "By honor 
and dishonor, by evil report and good report". The best-looking girl in the 
parish goes and marries a Protestant, when you've moved heaven and earth to 
prevent it; and then you hear the Protestants are saying that you 
deliberately threw her in the poor boy's way, so as to try and pervert him. 
Don't mind; it won't do any harm. On the other hand, don't be too ready to 
believe all the good you hear about yourself. The intense woman who says, 
"Father, that marvelous sermon of yours"; the enthusiastic parishioner who 
says, "Ah, sure, Almighty God sent us a good priest when he sent you, 
Father"--write it off; that kind of thing won't save you any Purgatory.

Then the rest of the epistle merely carries a list of the unkind things 
people say about God's ambassadors; the instances chosen are very much of 
St. Paul's own day, and I fancy very much concerned with St. Paul's own 
experience. He had critics at Corinth, and they had been saying that he was 
a liar; that he was unacknowledged (that is, the other apostles didn't 
recognize him as an apostle); that it didn't matter what his teaching was, 
because he was probably dead in any case; or if not dead, so badly mauled 
by the mob at Ephesus that he would be no use again; that he was always 
writing tearful letters, and making people feel uncomfortable; that he was 
always begging for money; that he had no rich friends, and couldn't expect 
to make a success of preaching the gospel.

All that we probably shan't hear about ourselves. But we shall hear very 
much that sort of thing said about the Church we love more than life. That 
our claims are built on falsehood; that we are an insignificant force in 
the world to-day; that we are dying out, or at least have lost so much 
prestige that we shall never recover from it; that we are kill-joys, 
preaching a medieval morality to a world which has grown out of it; that we 
are always on the make, always in alliance with the rich against the poor, 
with the Have's against the Have-not's; or, contrary-wise, that we are a 
very provincial, middle-class set of people, we Catholics, what we do isn't 
worth reporting, what we say isn't worth repeating. All that we shall hear 
said, or read it in books and newspaper articles by people who don't like 
us. But none of it matters; none of it matters a bit, as long as we haven't 
been responsible, for giving a bad impression of the ministry we exercise; 
as long as we, Christ's ambassadors, have done our best to do what nobody 
can ever really do--represent him.



CHAPTER 4. SINS OF THE PRIEST

There are few more splendidly menacing phrases in the whole of Hebrew 
prophecy than the words with which Amos, the first prophet whose message 
has come down to us in writing, turns suddenly on the people of Israel in 
one of its rare intervals of prosperity. He has announced God's impending 
judgments on certain neighboring tribes, on Syria, Ammon, Moab, and so on; 
and then, turning to the Israelites, he represents God as saying, "You only 
have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will visit upon 
you all your iniquities".

It is difficult to imagine anything which could have come as more of a 
shock to the complacent theologians of his day. Israel was God's chosen 
people, brought out of Egypt, led through the desert, enabled to dispossess 
seven nations in Chanaan and occupy their fertile territory. Was it not 
clear that a people so signally favored would continue to enjoy his 
protection? True, there were backslidings and scandals; the Israelites 
would adopt the worship of some heathen god side by side with their own 
inherited traditions; there would be oppression of the poor, there would be 
grasping covetousness or open debauchery among the priests, and so on. But 
who could doubt, that if for a short while God's protection was forfeited 
by these infidelities, it would be restored to his people for the asking, 
after a decent show of contrition and amendment. As God's favorites, his 
people could afford to take liberties with him, to treat him as an 
indulgent Father; it was not likely that he would be hard on them 
considering all the promises which committed him to maintain their cause 
among the peoples. Them only God had known among all the families of the 
earth; surely he would be tolerant towards their occasional lapses!

To which Amos replies, in words of thunder, "You only have I known among 
all the families of the earth, THEREFORE will I visit upon you all your 
iniquities". Because they had been given more chances; because a law had 
been issued to them on mount Sinai purer than any other code the world 
knew; because a long line of patriots and reformers had been sent to recall 
them, when they needed it, to a sense of religion, THEREFORE the sins they 
committed were the less excusable, therefore their punishment would be all 
the more certain, and all the heavier.

I suppose there is always a danger that we Catholics shall be guilty of the 
same miscalculation. Looking round us on a world which seems to have lost, 
in such great part, its grasp of moral principle, a world in which we may 
read in our newspaper how some spokesman of religion has been calling the 
attention of our fellow-countrymen to the very existence of the Ten 
Commandments, we are tempted sometimes to a vague feeling of self-
congratulation--after all, somebody's got to go to heaven. But what I want 
to suggest at the moment is that we priests run special risks of our own in 
this matter. Ordination has made us, in a special way, friends of Jesus 
Christ; we are always in and out of church, always running God's errands; 
he commissions us to speak in his name; our very faults arise so much out 
of the nature of the work we do for him, through being in a hurry, through 
being tired, through being lonely; all our life is so bound up with 
religion, it is all such a family affair--surely, unless we go very far 
wrong, he will not let us down? But I fancy if the prophet Amos heard us 
thinking like that, he would say to us too, "You only have I known of all 
the families of the earth, therefore will I visit upon you all your 
iniquities".

Always, I think, though in different ways, the fact of being a priest 
increases the malice of our sin. If we were really honest with ourselves, 
I'm not sure we shouldn't tack that on to all the items of our confessions; 
"I've been proud, and I'm a priest. I've been grasping with money, and I'm 
a priest. I have offended against modesty, and I'm a priest. I have lost my 
temper, and I'm a priest. I've been self-indulgent, and I'm a priest. I 
have envied others, and I'm a priest. I've been idle; I, a priest, have 
been idle. And all the other sins, which I cannot now remember, are the 
sins of a priest".

May we just go through them, in an old-fashioned way, those seven capital 
sins, fountain-heads of our sinning, ingredients which form the basis of 
all those subtle flavors which our sins bring with them?

Pride first; pride will come first, even on such a list as this. Pride, in 
its pure form, is seldom recognizable; but when it appears as ambition, as 
vanity, as obstinacy, as touchiness, as self-sufficiency, as the love of 
interference, it is common enough; not unknown among priests. You find So-
and-so a bore; look into your heart, and ask whether it was not because he 
held the floor when you wanted to be talking. Your advice is not asked, or 
is taken and not followed; you sulk. You are asked to undertake some job; 
you excuse yourself-- nominally from humility, because you say you are no 
good at that sort of thing, really because you can't bear the thought of 
doing something badly, and looking a fool. In all that, you are coming 
short of the priestly character. For the priesthood dates from the last 
Supper; and the charter of its foundation is, "He that is greatest among 
you all, let him be the servant of all; I am among you as he that serveth". 
When those words were spoken, a servant meant a slave. To-day, slavery has 
been abolished, and at the moment even domestic service seems to be 
becoming a thing of the past. But always it will be the priest's primary 
duty to serve; and a fault in humility cuts at the very roots of the 
priestly character. It identifies you with the attitude of that first rebel 
who said, "Non serviam."

Avarice, of all the capital sins, can be the most tragic, because it does 
not die down with old age; sometimes old age brings it on. Personal avarice 
is rare in priests, just because we are not in much of a position either to 
indulge it, or to benefit by it. But it is possible for a man to become 
avaricious when he is administering, quite conscientiously, funds committed 
to his charge; and the delicate position in which our mission funds stand, 
having to provide for the maintenance of the clergy as well as the 
maintenance of the parish, gives a kind of edge to the eagerness with which 
the acquisitive rector hunts pennies. Sometimes, too, with the feeling that 
a good object justifies shady methods--a doctrine which we do not preach, 
and have to spend a large part of our time explaining to Protestants that 
we do not preach it; sometimes, with that idea vaguely in mind, a priest 
will be guilty of graft or evasion which he would scorn to indulge in, if 
it were for the sake of his own pocket. But avarice is avarice still, and 
graft is graft and evasion is evasion still, however laudable the object 
for which we are working.

And this sin is especially to be blamed in the clergy, for two reasons. In 
the first place, there is nothing like avarice for shutting up the 
sympathies of the human heart. The man who is always thinking about money, 
whether in connection with football pools or in connection with the new 
sacristy, cannot have his heart open, as the priest should, to the 
troubles, the anxieties, the interests of others. And in the second place, 
nothing gives so much scandal, of a suppressed kind, as the perpetual 
suspicion that the clergy are on the make. One of the chief causes which 
has long held up, and still holds up, the conversion of England, is the 
fact that Protestants cannot go to our churches without submitting to a 
long harangue about money, in the notices, in the sermon, or in both, which 
nearly always takes the form of a scolding. Adrian Fortescue used to say it 
was a Providence that Protestants always accuse us of charging five 
shillings for hearing confessions, because as a matter of fact absolution 
was the one thing you could get for nothing in the Catholic Church. There 
is, at the moment, a distrust of organized religion such as has never 
existed in England before. Can we do nothing to dispel it, by keeping that 
clanking money-box out of sight?

Of sins against modesty I don't want to say much. God gives us this grace 
in dealing with them, that it is in our nature to be ashamed of them. It 
needs no proof that a priest who sins against modesty in such a way as to 
involve the least breath of scandal, is false to his priesthood. Every 
priest is a Joseph, set by our Lord over his household with a special view 
to watching over its purity; a sheep-dog which starts running sheep is less 
unprofitable to its master, than a scandal-giving priest is to his. That, I 
hope, is clear enough to all of us. But even the secret sins of a priest 
have a special danger for him. The effect of self-indulgence which sins 
against modesty is, we are told, to turn a man in upon himself, make him 
self-centered and selfish. Let us remind ourselves again that no priest can 
afford to encourage in himself that fatal tendency we all have to 
selfishness. Merely to get through our work, as work, without taking a 
vivid interest in the people we are working for--how terribly common that 
is, and how grievously it retards the reign of Christ!

And now, what shall we say about anger? May I say, quite bluntly, that we 
priests in England are apt, I think, to be too brusque, too hectoring, in 
our dealings with the faithful; there is too much of the drill-sergeant 
about us? Scolding in the confessional, I suppose, means six souls lost for 
one saved. But I am thinking more of our daily contacts. I admit that the 
laity don't always make it easy for us. A lot of misunderstanding would be 
saved if they would realize that the best time for buttonholing a priest 
and having a cozy chat is not just before he says his second Mass on a busy 
Sunday.

But those little outbursts of temper, even with the altar boys, even with 
the beggars, what a lot of harm they can do! I wonder how much of the 
leakage we often hear talked about is due to the plain fact that the people 
are afraid of their clergy? The sons of Heli "withdrew men from the 
sacrifice of the Lord"; what more terrible epitaph could there be on a 
priest than that?

Let me be still more bold, and say that I think the worst possible scene of 
clerical ill-temper is the pulpit. It's a very easy way of sounding rather 
effective in your sermons; there are grievances you have been nursing all 
the week--perhaps it is the stinginess of your congregation, or some 
members of it; perhaps it is a piece of parish gossip that has come to your 
ears, and made you genuinely indignant. You go up into the pulpit with 
nothing prepared, and all your grievances come out with a rush and a roar. 
There may be some Protestant husband who has been persuaded by his wife, 
with infinite difficulty, to come to Mass just this once, and see what it's 
like--he comes just this once, and he knows what it's like after that. 
There may be some bad Catholic, already half-lapsed, looking about for an 
excuse to call the Church hard names; what wonder, if after all that 
torrent of abuse he goes home declaring that he has finished with it now? 
The sacristan is delighted with you; when you get back to the sacristy, he 
says, "My word, Father, you gave it them straight this morning". I think it 
is a good rule, if the sacristan says "My word, Father, you gave it them 
straight this morning", to tear up the notes of that sermon at once, if 
there were any, and to ask God on your knees that he will never let you 
preach a sermon like that again.

I don't want to talk much about gluttony. I don't even want to improve the 
occasion by talking about the dangers of drinking to excess; unless for the 
benefit of the younger fathers present I may be allowed to repeat to you 
the advice I always gave to undergraduates when they were going to attend 
public dinners; "Wait till you find yourself saying, Just this glass can't 
do me any harm, and then, don't drink it". But I thought I would like to 
say a word about self-indulgence generally on the part of the clergy as 
that affects the question of scandal, and more than ever in these times. We 
have lived so far in an England which tolerated class distinctions; 
tolerated, therefore, sharp and obvious differences of income. The Catholic 
clergy did not fit into any particular class; it was right that they should 
not. Consequently, it was nobody's business to inquire whether the Catholic 
clergy did themselves well or not. I don't personally believe that England 
will soon have abolished class distinctions, or will soon have abolished 
sharp differences of income. But I do think there will be a lot of talk 
about these things, and there will be a large, discontented part of the 
population which will look round jealously to see who is rich, and to 
wonder why. In such a state of society, it will be a bad thing for the 
Catholic cause if our clergy seem to be doing themselves too well; if their 
cars look too new and they appear to be throwing their weight about when 
they go off for their summer holiday. Because the clergy are a separate 
caste, it is easier for people to generalize about their habits. And the 
sin of self-indulgence will be all the worse in the clergy, because it will 
bring the Church into disrepute.

The sin of envy (or, if we may use the wider term, of jealousy) is one 
which has devastating effects; effects, primarily, on the character of the 
man who is addicted to it, and on his conversation. May I shelter myself 
behind my own advancing years, and say that I think we older priests are 
the worst offenders? For this reason, I suppose, chiefly--that a man seldom 
reaches the age of fifty without beginning to feel a bit of a failure. And 
we take it out of our neighbors by crabbing their performances. So-and-so, 
who couldn't hold a candle to us at college, has gone ahead and become an 
important person; and we find it necessary to be catty about that. The 
religious next door get big congregations, make a lot of converts--but 
then, look at the way they go about it. And all the rest of it; I'm afraid 
our conversation isn't very enlivening, when the grievances begin to be 
trotted out. All the time, you see, we are really trying to apply balm to 
our injured self-esteem. I always liked the story of the American school-
master who was hauling one of his pupils over the coals for idleness, and 
said he supposed the boy had a pretty considerable veneration for the name 
of George Washington. And when the boy allowed he had, the schoolmaster 
said, "Then let me tell you that when he was your age, George Washington 
was head of his class." And the boy replied, "Yes, Sir, and when he was 
your age he was President of the United States." No, we're not Presidents 
of the United States; there are youthful ambitions that lie behind us, 
unfulfilled. Are we much to blame, if we sometimes attack what seem to us 
shallow reputations?

Let us be clear, at least, about this--the rector of a parish is 
responsible in God's sight, not only for his parish, but for his curates. 
The disgruntled, disillusioned rector can be a blight on young lives, can 
throw a cold douche on young ambitions, as no one else can, and the results 
may be appalling. "Try it if you like, my dear father, but you'll find you 
get no response from the people, absolutely none; I've lived in this parish 
twenty years, and I know them." How often that is the encouragement the 
young curate gets, when he is rash enough to propose trying experiments! 
And tell me, how much of that is due to the fear that another might succeed 
where you have failed? Oh, the terrible dead-weight of that elderly 
conservatism which is jealous of young men, because they are young; jealous 
on behalf of old methods, not because they succeeded, but because they were 
our methods, and no others must be allowed to succeed!

The last place on the list has a curious history. The medievals gave it to 
"Accidie," a word which has gone out of use, and perhaps can be most 
succinctly defined as getting bored with religion. That is a very real 
danger; I only don't consider it here, because I want to devote a whole 
meditation to it later on. To-day, we have substituted the word "sloth"; a 
failing from which we all suffer, and one which none of us ever admits. I 
think the best way of examining your conscience, if you want to discover 
whether you are an idle man, is to leave on one side all the things which 
interest you--and that, naturally, includes a great deal of your parish 
work-- and concentrate on some side-line of your daily habits which doesn't 
interest you; say, writing letters. Are you an energetic correspondent? The 
clergy very seldom are. Or that book, a bit on the heavy side, which you 
bought the other day, meaning to read it; how many of the pages are cut? 
Idleness, with most of us, doesn't mean Iying in bed and doing nothing; it 
means giving priority, always, to the things which interest us, and leaving 
our other duties to queue up and take their turn, if they ever get a turn. 
Watch idleness; it can become a sort of creeping paralysis, which can 
infect even your priestly duties in the end. And an idle parish priest puts 
out a light in God's Church.

He has not called us his servants, but his friends. That should be our 
inspiration; that, also, should be our warning; shall he be in a position 
to say to us, "It was thou, my own familiar friend, in whom I trusted"? If 
so, what wonder that he should add, "You only have I known among all the 
families of the earth, THEREFORE will I visit upon you all your 
iniquities"?



CHAPTER 5. ST. PAUL, A PROFILE

I want to give you a profile of St. Paul as a human being, the raw material 
which was towed into Damascus after that road accident; not so much a 
panegyric as a portrait from the life. There are various reasons, I think, 
why we should content ourselves with that treatment. Partly because the 
moment you begin preaching a panegyric, every saint becomes very much like 
any other saint. Partly because St. Paul had, I think, a great deal of 
character; there was more in his natural, if I may borrow a word from the 
French for which we have no word in English, than in that of many of the 
saints. I mean, I think he would have been a remarkable and an interesting 
man even if he had not been a saint, just as St. Francis of Sales and Dom 
Bosco, for instance, would have been remarkable and interesting men even if 
they had not been saints. Partly because the evidence is so full; I doubt 
if there is any other human being, before St. Francis of Assisi, anyhow, 
for whom we have so much material for constructing a biography; Cicero is 
the only person who can at all challenge him there, and Cicero to tell the 
truth was rather a dull person, which St. Paul was not. We have all these 
very intimate letters of his, we have a careful account of a considerable 
period of his life written by a great friend and disciple of his, who knew 
how to write. So let us try and get underneath the halo and see St. Paul as 
a living person. I think it will be possible, as we go along, to pick up 
one or two hints about our own priestly lives; about the right way to 
tackle ourselves and other people.

First of all, I think it is obvious that St. Paul had a quick nature; he 
was the sort of person who speaks first and thinks afterwards. Our Lord 
seems to have chosen people of that kind for the pioneer work of his 
Church; St. Peter obviously was one, and I think St. Stephen was another. 
He didn't choose only that kind of person; St. James, I should say, was 
very much the opposite, a man of caution--listen to him telling the other 
apostles the Gentiles ought certainly to be given the greatest possible 
freedom, always as long as they don't eat things which have been strangled. 
St. Paul was not that kind of man; he was the sort of man who rushed at 
things. Watch him at Athens; he has not gone there to preach, he is simply 
waiting till his friends join him, then he will go on to Corinth. But he 
cannot bear the sight of all these people pretending to be philosophers and 
at the same time worshipping gods of wood and stone; his heart was moved 
within him to find the city so much given over to idolatry; he stops 
everyone he meets and argues about it.

And because St. Paul's was an impulsive temperament, he says what he 
thinks, sometimes, with startling vividness. When he is writing to the 
Galatian Christians, for example, about the people who want to have them 
all circumcised; "I would rather they should lose their own manhood, these 
authors of your unrest". That is the kind of sentence which your modern 
editor of a saint's life would be apt to leave out; and write in a bit more 
about the spirit of patience which the holy man displayed towards his 
enemies. Of course, I have no doubt at all that it was justifiable moral 
indignation; but I refuse to believe St. Paul did not throw himself into 
it. All through the Galatians, he is writing at white heat, and you can see 
that he is riding himself on the curb; it's a wonderful specimen of a 
letter from an angry man which just manages to avoid being an angry letter.

And then, there is another side to the picture; this impulsive temperament, 
which makes St. Paul so indignant when a wrong is being done to the cause 
of Christ, makes him infinitely tender as soon as repentance is shown. You 
find that, for example, in his second epistle to the Corinthians. He had 
written them a letter--I think it is generally agreed that it was not our 
First Corinthians, but a letter now lost-- in which he called upon them to 
administer discipline to an offender, probably someone who had slighted his 
own authority. No sooner does he hear this has been done, than he writes 
off to them in a very different tone. "Even if I caused you pain by my 
letter, I am not sorry for it. Perhaps I was tempted to be sorry when I saw 
how my letter had caused you even momentary pain, but now I am glad, not 
glad of the pain, but glad of the repentance the pain brought with it . . . 
You have done everything to prove yourselves free from guilt in this matter 
. . . The punishment inflicted on him by so many of you is punishment 
enough for the man I speak of, and now you must rather think of showing him 
indulgence, and comforting him." St. Paul is almost embarrassed by the 
success of his own tactics; he never really expected the opposition to 
crumple up as it has.

Some of us are impulsive by nature, and inclined by nature to go off the 
deep end. Having a row with the parish, or a section of the parish, is 
sometimes necessary. There has been a row, perhaps unnecessarily 
precipitated by my shortness of temper, but anyhow, it seems to have done 
good; the parish has rallied round properly, and the air has cleared. Now 
is the time for me to score a double success, by taking my victory in the 
right way. Not crowing over it, not throwing my weight about; not (above 
all) victimizing any particular person or persons who are thought to have 
been at the root of the trouble. No, just the opposite; soothing injured 
feelings wherever I can by a deliberate effort of friendliness. And when 
you want to show a person friendliness, the best way is often asking him to 
do something for you.

Meanwhile, let us notice one thing about St. Paul when he was having a row, 
or indeed whenever he was trying to get his own way--that is, Christ's way. 
He always preferred to lead from weakness, rather than from strength. 
There's very little doubt, I think, that when he speaks of "the power" 
which is given him as an apostle he means miraculous power, such as he 
exercised when he punished the magician Elymas with sudden blindness. And 
there is always this threat in the background; when the apostle comes on 
his next visit, he will know how to deal with people who obstinately oppose 
him. But before that happens, he is always desperately anxious to win as 
many people as possible to a better mind by appealing, not to his power, 
but to his weakness.

That is the meaning of all that long epistle about St. Paul's hardships and 
persecutions. He hated talking about himself; he always prefers the word 
"We" to the word "I"; but on an occasion like this he deliberately went all 
out to make the Corinthians feel sorry for him, so as to bring them up to 
time by sympathy, rather than by fear. And in a quite different connection, 
when he writes to Philemon asking him to be kind to his runaway slave 
Onesimus, he could have taken a high line about it; Philemon was his own 
convert, perhaps literally owed his life to St. Paul, but that is not the 
appeal that shall be put in the forefront. "Who is it that writes to thee? 
Paul, an old man now, and in these days the prisoner, too, of Jesus 
Christ." I don't think that St. Paul liked appealing for sympathy any more 
than most of us do. But he saw that if that motive would induce his 
converts to do the right thing, it was a good kind of motive for them to 
have; better than the fear of being struck blind on St. Paul's next visit.

Well, we are not in a position to strike our parishioners blind when they 
disagree with us. We priests in our parishes are not even in a position to 
threaten them with any severe spiritual penalties, beyond being turned out 
of the choir, or something of that kind. But we have a sort of undefined 
ascendancy in the parish, which is quite unlike anything that is enjoyed by 
the Anglican Vicar over the way; very few people, in a healthy parish, like 
to be on bad terms with the parish priest. And we are a little tempted, I 
think, to trade on that fact; to crush opposition by a hint that anybody 
who sees differently from the parish priest must be rather a rotten sort of 
Catholic. That line--or perhaps "line" is too definite a word; that sort of 
approach--is responsible, I am afraid, for a good many tragedies. That boy 
who has only just left school, so that we still think of him as a kind of 
fag, is earning four pounds a week now, and eager to assert his 
independence. I wonder whether sometimes, when we want to put a stop to 
what seems undesirable, or to have something done for us, we couldn't 
afford to take the line, rather more, of saying "Look here, I'm in a bit of 
a hole, I wonder whether you could help to get me out of it?" That, I 
think, is what St. Paul would like us to say. I think it went against the 
grain with him, but he did it.

In those ways, I think we are tempted to treat our parishioners rather too 
much as children. Meanwhile, do we really treat them as our children? St. 
Paul has an almost frightening phrase, you will remember, about that; "My 
little children; with whom I am in travail again until Christ be formed in 
you". It's a mixed metaphor, of course; St. Paul was never afraid of mixing 
his metaphors. He thinks of himself, both as the mother who has borne these 
children to Christ, and as the midwife who must see Christ born in them. 
But what a terrible responsibility it indicates! Each soul in my parish a 
soul in which Christ is to be born, and it is my job to see that that 
happens! It was said to me long ago, by an old priest, "I've been in this 
parish thirty years, and I've always paid my way". I don't quite know why I 
mention that; let it be enough to observe that I can't imagine St. Paul 
saying it. My little children, helpless, unformed as yet; capable of 
developing so far in the right direction or the wrong direction; and the 
responsibility, a great share of the responsibility, lies with me. And not 
just in a crowd, so as to make me responsible for the general tone of the 
parish, but each one individually. I am ready enough to call them "my 
child" in the confessional, with a slight emphasis on the word "child"; 
have I always thought of the emphasis there ought to be on the word "my"?

That is worth remembering, if I ever find myself wondering whether I don't 
show too much preference for the society of this or that person, this or 
that family, in my congregation. I am not talking now of intimacies that 
might bring danger with them, or even intimacies that might bring scandal 
with them; but we all have our favorites; it would be hardly human nature 
if we didn't. And I think there were certain people whose company was a 
real refreshment to St. Paul, one of the few refreshments he ever allowed 
himself in his busy, concentrated life. "There is one who never fails to 
comfort those who are brought low; God gave us comfort, as soon as Titus 
came." "I shall be sending Timothy to visit you before long; . . . I have 
no one else here who shares my thoughts as he does." "Greetings from my 
beloved Luke, the physician." Oh yes, St. Paul had his special friends. 
What did he do about it?

I think his advice to us would have been, "By all means have your special 
friends; only, be sure of one thing--be sure that everybody else in the 
parish is your special friend as well". That, I think, is the moral of the 
sixteenth chapter of the Romans. St. Paul had never been to Rome; yet he 
fills his sixteenth chapter with two dozen personal salutations, to the 
despair of the refectory reader. They had been refugees, presumably, at the 
time when Claudius published his edict banishing the Jews from Rome, and 
St. Paul had met them in the Levant. They did not suppose, I take it, that 
they had made any special impression on the great missionary; how suddenly 
splendid to hear their own names mentioned when the letter was read out, as 
I expect it was, in the Roman Church! One or two of them were marked out by 
terms of endearment, "Amplias whom I love so well in the Lord, my dear 
Stachys, my dear Persis". But what did that matter to the rest of them, so 
long as they were all there, Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, and all the 
others?

Let me not ask myself, "Do I see too much of So-and-so? Do I spend too much 
of my time with this particular family?" But ask rather, for a change, "Do 
I see enough of all the other people who aren't So-and-so? Do I spend 
enough of my time with other families, who don't amuse me quite as much as 
this one?" I think it is nonsense to pretend that for most of us it is 
possible to work fruitfully for the souls of our fellow-creatures without 
establishing human contacts all the time. Yet it is very easy for a priest 
who is not a good mixer to imagine that it is rather holy of him to pass 
his life without saying a word except to his fellow-clergy. In such a lot 
of our work we are, and are meant to be, holy machines, that it is easy to 
forget the duty of being anything else. You go out after breakfast to give 
some Sick Communions, and naturally you have your eyes on the ground, take 
no notice of anyone who passes you. Then, in the afternoon, you go out for 
a walk; there may be a temptation to go about even then looking as if you 
were saying your prayers, merely out of shyness, or merely because you are 
afraid of meeting bores. But what a difference it makes, when one goes out 
for a walk with some parish priest, and finds that he has to lift his hat 
to every second person he meets, stop and talk to every fifth or sixth! 
What a lot of good they do without knowing it, those priests! What a lot of 
harm can be done, sometimes, by a salute unreturned!

I mentioned just now my old friend who had paid his way for thirty years, 
and perhaps seemed to contrast his point of view with St. Paul's. But not, 
heaven knows, that St. Paul was not interested in the collections. There 
never was such a beggar as St. Paul. I suppose if you analyzed his epistles 
you would find that about one chapter in four is really talking about the 
Jerusalem distress fund. The reason why one doesn't notice it more is 
because St. Paul was a shy sort of beggar, an elusive sort of beggar. Look 
at the innocent way in which he tells the Romans that he may be having to 
go to Jerusalem to bring alms there: "Macedonia and Achaia have thought fit 
to give those saints in Jerusalem who are in need some share of their 
wealth . . . and indeed, they are in their debt. The Gentiles, if they have 
been allowed to share their spiritual gifts, are bound to contribute to 
their temporal needs in return". Wasn't he trying to make the Romans think 
a bit? But even when he is openly begging, how gently he insinuates his 
point; how tactfully he makes the Corinthians see that if they aren't 
careful Macedonia will head the list of subscribers, not Achaia!

Perhaps there is a sort of a tail-end of a lesson for some of us there. We 
are not all of us shy and elusive, when we get into the pulpit, about this 
particular subject. You hear, not seldom, of lay people who don't go to 
such and such a church because it's money, money, money week after week in 
the sermons there. St. Paul managed to wrap it up, somehow, better than we 
do. And also, he was very careful indeed not to give scandal by sounding 
for a moment as if he personally was interested in the result of the 
appeal. He would slave at tent-making rather than even have Pharisaical 
scandal going round about his motives. It is our privilege to live of the 
gospel; we must perhaps be a little extra careful, in these days, not to 
look too much as if we made a good thing out of it.

One other point; for all his quick temperament, St. Paul was splendidly 
free from jealousy. When he writes from his Roman prison to Philippi, he 
explains how other Christians at Rome, who don't approve of him, have 
started preaching the gospel all the harder, so as not to be outbidden. 
"What matter, so long as either way, for private ends or in all honesty, 
CHRIST is preached?" So it is everywhere; what does it matter whether Paul 
or Apollo is the apostle of Corinth? I planted, and Apollo watered, but it 
is God who gives the increase. Shall we remember, sometimes, those splendid 
words used by a rather sensitive man, a rather touchy man, about the very 
rivals who were being cried up as his superiors? Remember them, when the 
queue at somebody else's confessional is a bit longer than the queue at 
ours; when somebody else's sermons seem to draw a better congregation than 
ours?

I have only just begun talking about St. Paul. I promised a profile of him, 
and I've only given the skimpiest possible kind of vignette. But we can 
fill out the picture for ourselves well enough by reading between the lines 
of his epistles, "Be followers of me", he is not ashamed to say, "as I am 
of Christ". Do we find it difficult, sometimes, to make out what our Lord 
would have done if he had been faced with such and such problems of ours? 
Let us see if we cannot find out what St. Paul would have done, and do 
that; we shall not go very far wrong.



CHAPTER 6. MURMURING

There is a famous passage in his first epistle to the Corinthians, where 
St. Paul warns them against some of their leading faults, and reminds them 
that the same faults were found, and were severely punished, among the 
Israelites in the wilderness. Idolatry, for he is writing to a church of 
recent converts; fornication, since Corinth was notorious even in a 
generally corrupt age, for the looseness of its morals; "tempting God", 
that is to say, presuming on grace, because evidently there was a tendency 
abroad, a Calvinistic tendency you might say, which was exposing his 
converts to great spiritual dangers. And he adds a fourth warning, against 
murmuring. I think the point of that was, that there were factions at 
Corinth, parties which took their slogans from this leader or that; and it 
reminded St. Paul of those ill-fated revolutionaries who questioned, in the 
wilderness, the divinely appointed authority of Moses. "Neither be ye 
murmurers, as some of them murmured, and were destroyed by the destroyer.

The children of Israel murmured--what a familiar phrase that is, to anybody 
who knows his Old Testament! I shouldn't like to say how many times it 
occurs in the Mosaic writings. And at first sight it seems a very 
extraordinary thing, doesn't it? Here is a people to which God has showed 
special favor, visiting their oppressors in Egypt with ten plagues from 
which they themselves were immune; then delivering them from Egypt by a 
miracle, dividing the Red Sea for them and bringing the waters together 
again to drown their pursuers; leading them through the desert, watching 
over them, giving them bread from heaven and water out of the rock, 
promising them an end to their journey in a land that flowed with milk and 
honey. And those are the people who seem to spend the greater part of their 
forty years in the wilderness murmuring against God, or against the rulers 
he has set up over them. It seems extraordinary, doesn't it? And yet . . . 
I wonder.

Could God have done more than he does for us Christians, for us priests? He 
has called us out of the world to serve him; he feeds us with the bread of 
immortality; he opens to us the consolations of his Sacred Heart; and all 
that is not enough to keep us from complaining, some of us complaining 
almost continually, of the lines in which our lot is cast. Nor are we 
content to bear a grudge against life in general; commonly at least we put 
the blame on our fellowmen; on superiors who seem unsympathetic, on 
colleagues who are uncongenial, on parishioners who are difficult. Will you 
forgive me, Reverend Fathers, if I devote a whole meditation to this 
uncharitable habit of grumbling, which does so much to mar the perfect 
offering of our lives to God?

After all, you have got to remember, in excuse for the Israelites, that 
Moses did lead them out into a wilderness. Sometimes, if their march did 
not proceed according to schedule, their water supply was insufficient; 
their food, however plentiful, had some of that monotony which belongs to 
picnic fare. It was only natural for them to remember that in Egypt, for 
all their servitude, they had no difficulty in providing themselves with 
creature comforts: "We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt, and the 
leeks, and the cucumbers, and the melons"--fish and leeks and cucumbers and 
melons; watery sort of food, not much in the way of vitamins there. And yet 
it is possible to look back with regret to such delicacies when you are 
getting nothing to eat but manna and quails year in, year out. The life of 
the wilderness is a life of freedom, but the freedom is won at the cost of 
self-denial. And when you enter a seminary or a religious house, you are 
entering a life of freedom, in a sense; you are emancipating yourself from 
the clogging ties of worldly preoccupation. But in the outward scheme and 
structure of your life there must be a certain constraint. Rules cramp you; 
the average man is catered for, not the exception. It is not easy to live 
contentedly in a wilderness, or in a community.

And there is another point to be remembered--going out into the wilderness 
and shutting ourselves off from the world does bring us perilously close 
together. While they were still in Egypt, the Israelites probably spent a 
large part of their time murmuring against their task-masters, and no great 
harm was done. While they were living in a strange land, their race-
consciousness, still so remarkable in our own day, fostered a spirit of 
loyalty among themselves. When they got out into the desert and there were 
no task-masters to murmur against, when they enjoyed no society except 
their own, they very quickly began to find out each other's weak points. So 
we, as long as we are living in the world, brushing up against a lot of 
strangers every day, moving in a lot of circles which do not intersect, 
find little temptation to spend our time in gossiping. But, once shut up a 
set of human beings within four walls, and, heavens, how the tongues begin 
to wag! No, living among your fellow-priests may safeguard you from every 
other kind of sin; it is not going to safeguard you against sins of the 
tongue unless you have a rule of perpetual silence.

Perhaps you will complain that I am really trying to treat two different 
failings of our nature as one; our tendency to grumble about the 
circumstances of life, and our tendency to criticize one another in an 
uncharitable way. Well, it's quite true that they are two different 
manifestations of an ungenerous temper; but I think it's also true that 
they are two manifestations of the same ungenerous temper. Your grumbler, 
as a rule, is also the man who can be trusted to pull a friend's character 
to pieces. And there's a further point; I think the grumbling I have in 
mind has usually a kind of personal tang about it; it is grumbling not 
merely about things, but about people. There is a tendency to identify, in 
a vague way, the faults you find in the system with the personalities of 
those who exercise authority over you. "The children of Israel murmured 
against Moses and Aaron"--not that Moses and Aaron were exempt from the 
privations which were felt by all; manna and quails figured as prominently 
in their diet as in anybody else's. But in order to voice a grievance 
properly you must have names to connect it with; Moses and Aaron had let 
them out into a wilderness, therefore they must be held responsible for any 
lack of amenities which the wilderness presented. I am speaking in 
parables, as St. Paul was; I don't know whether these parables will come 
home to you; they would have come home to us in the seminary from which my 
experience is drawn.

Now, I hope I shall not be understood as implying that there is no 
difference between criticizing your equals and criticizing your superiors. 
There is a different principle involved. But I want to consider the subject 
of murmuring generally; that is, of criticizing your neighbors, whether 
they are your superiors or your equals, merely by way of letting off steam; 
by way of indemnifying yourself for the discomforts of every-day life. As I 
say, it is a very difficult sin to avoid, when you are living in community, 
whether it be a large or a small community. But I do want to put it to you, 
for fear I might come short of my duty in giving this retreat, that 
murmuring is a nine-fold sin. It is a three-fold sin against God, a three-
fold sin against your neighbor, and a threefold sin against yourself.

Murmuring is a sin against God because it betrays a want of gratitude. 
After all, when you take a general view all round you, how pleasant other 
people are! How confiding they are, how good-natured, how considerate! How 
easily they win our sympathy, the moment we see them in a human light! 
Somebody who always got on your nerves, somebody you were always inclined 
to laugh at, suddenly has a bad accident, or suffers a family bereavement; 
and at once you begin to remember his good points, to make excuses for his 
failings--is that insincerity on your part? Why, no; but until he was in 
trouble you never really saw him as he was, never thought of him as your 
fellow-man. If only we were more simple, if only we didn't take things for 
granted so, we should see the whole of mankind, I think, as a gigantic 
conspiracy of kindness set on foot by Almighty God for our advantage; we 
should be overwhelmed with gratitude for the good offices done to us, with 
admiration at the fine qualities we see around us. Instead of which, we are 
always picking holes.

Murmuring is a sin against God because it betrays a want of confidence. 
When we criticize anybody, I am sure you must have noticed, it is not 
because we bear him any kind of ill-will, oh dear no, our personal feelings 
don't enter into the matter at all. No, we only mention it because it does 
seem a pity that a person like that should be in a position like that, with 
such possibilities for doing harm. It is wonderful how hot we grow in our 
altruistic indignation on such occasions as this; we feel the Church is 
being let down by being so unworthily represented in such and such a 
parish, in such and such a post of importance--that's what we mind. I say 
that this betrays a want of confidence in God. It was the spirit of the 
Israelites, when they asked Aaron to make a golden calf for them; "Arise, 
make us gods, that may go before us; for as for this Moses, we know not 
what is become of him". It's all very well, but what can you do with a man 
like that, who goes up to the top of a mountain, and leaves no word when he 
is to be expected back? . . . You know, it's the want of trust in God that 
makes us worry so much about the defects of his human agents. Believe me, 
if the Catholic Church had depended on human prudence for her survival, she 
would have gone into liquidation centuries ago. Every enterprise we 
undertake is in God's hands; those who direct its fortunes, do so under his 
overruling influence; to be so anxious about their qualifications is a poor 
kind of homage to him.

Murmuring is a sin against God because it betrays a want of detachment. 
There are very few of God's gifts which we use so lavishly, with so little 
regard to mortification, as the gift of speech. So much unnecessary talk; 
we surely ought to start cutting it down somewhere; and if we are going to 
have a cut somewhere, what more obvious place to begin at than our 
uncharitable conversations? Yet we don't seem to do it. How odd and how 
humiliating, that the one self-indulgence we find it impossible to deny 
ourselves should be this clatter-clatter of tongues over the shortcomings 
of other people!

And besides all this, in murmuring you are apt to inflict a three-fold 
injury on your neighbor. You injure the person you are talking about, the 
person you are talking to, and the person you are talking in front of. The 
person you are talking about, even if what you are saying is quite true, 
and even if the accusation is really quite a slight one, so that it does 
not take away his character. You are still belittling his stature in your 
own eyes and in the eyes of others by putting your thoughts about him into 
words. How often it happens that by summing up a person's character in an 
epigram, or finding a nickname to suit some oddity about him, you manage to 
pillory and perpetuate the memory of his shortcomings! And is there any 
gift God gives us which ought to be used with more earnest discretion than 
the gift of mimicry? You injure the person you are talking to; for this 
business of talking scandal is like a game of battledore and shuttlecock; 
either side feels bound to keep it up. You try it, next time somebody is 
ventilating his grievances to you; let him go on, don't agree with him, 
don't disagree with him; just retort with "Oh, really?" and "Is that so?", 
and you will be surprised to find how soon the conversation flags. And 
finally, if you air your discontentment in public, you do an injury to all 
your listeners by setting them, openly, a bad example. Most of our sins, 
you see, we are rather ashamed of; we feel fools, afterwards, if we have 
lost our temper in public; we don't like to be caught out telling a lie. 
But when we talk uncharitably we always imagine--too often, I'm afraid, 
with justice--that our company enjoys it. So much the worse if they do; you 
are lowering the standard of fraternal charity with every word you say; 
and, if you are talking in front of people younger than yourself or less 
important than yourself, you are setting them an example they will be only 
too ready to follow. Probably at your expense, you know, the moment you 
have left the room. How terrible it is to leave the room, when all the 
company has been exchanging uncharitable criticisms for the last hour or 
so!

And finally, by indulging this habit of murmuring you are spoiling in 
yourself the virtue of humility, the virtue of patience, and your own peace 
of mind.

The virtue of humility. What a fine fellow this self of ours is! How 
generous, how tactful, how considerate, what a man of the world! How 
efficiently, and yet how unostentatiously, he manages the work that is 
entrusted to him; how carefully he avoids infringing other people's rights; 
how edifying he manages to be, and at the same time how natural! And yet 
humility teaches us that we are not to regard this fine fellow as a finer 
fellow than his neighbors. Don't you see, then, that we ought to blind our 
eyes to the tactlessness, the incompetence, and all the other defects of 
those neighbors of ours? Otherwise the picture of this fine fellow will 
dominate our imagination too much. At all costs we must avoid comparisons; 
and how are we to avoid comparisons if half our conversation is devoted, 
day in day out, to the shortcomings of other people? That Pharisee in the 
temple would not have been guilty of the pride which sent him down to his 
house unjustified, if he hadn't caught sight, out of the corner of his eye, 
of that cringing publican beating his breast and making an exhibition of 
himself. No, we must turn our eyes away, resolutely, from other people's 
faults; it may give us time, you know, to observe that the fine fellow has 
some faults of his own.

The virtue of patience. Almighty God means us to suffer; it is good for us; 
and he means us to suffer not only from natural causes over which man has 
no control, but from our fellow-men; from the mistakes, the misjudgments, 
the misgovernment of our fellow-men. Most of us have some unlovable 
qualities which we can't help; most of us do and say the wrong thing, 
without meaning to; and besides that, there are our faults. Part of the 
reason why God put you into the world was to exercise the patience of 
others by your defects; think of that sometimes when you are going to bed. 
It is a salutary thought . . . Your bad temper, your excessive 
cheerfulness, your tiresomeness in conversation; he chose the right person, 
didn't he? Well, if other people are being so admirably exercised in 
patience by you, it seems a pity you shouldn't be exercised by them now and 
again in your turn; that's only fair. The offering of patience which you 
can make to God; the little things you have to put up with--and that 
offering is to be made in silence. How it spoils that offering if you make 
any comment on it, still more if you make any comment on it out loud, still 
more if you make any comment on it in the presence of other people! You 
must offer it to him like a casket of myrrh, not wasting the scent by 
opening the lid before it gets to him.

Your peace of mind. That's the one thing you can't afford to lose, next to 
your soul; even the Saints can't afford to lose that. Lose your peace of 
mind, and you lose your concentration of purpose, your capacity for 
recollection, your attentiveness to God's calls and inspirations. Now, a 
strong antipathy, like a strong attachment, does interrupt, if only for a 
short time, this peace of mind which is so precious to you; you cannot 
think calmly, you are swept away by gusts of resentment and self-pity, the 
grievance preys upon you, haunts you like a nightmare.

That is what happens, I mean, if you have really let murmuring get the 
upper hand in your life, and things are not going smoothly with you. Even 
worrying over trifles, how it can upset the poise and balance of the mind! 
Either those trifles concern you personally, or they don't. If they don't, 
then it is far better not to meddle in them at all; to tell yourself you 
are in danger of becoming a busybody, and leave them on one side. Or they 
do concern you personally, and you are tempted to criticize somebody from 
whose conduct you yourself have to suffer. Believe me, you only add to your 
grievance by taking it out for an airing. It is quite true that it may do 
good to discuss it calmly with your confessor. Or, very occasionally, it 
may be your duty to bring something to the notice of a person in higher 
authority. But to chatter and gossip over your grievances never yet did any 
good, never yet afforded any real relief; you only hypnotize yourself into 
imagining your resentment to be stronger than it really is. It is a 
conspiracy against your own peace of mind.

St. Thomas More, whose life was full of gracious customs, had a quaint way 
of dealing with uncharitable conversation. Whenever people began to indulge 
in it in his presence, he used to break in suddenly and loudly, as if 
talking to himself: "They may say what they will, but I say that this house 
is a good house, and the architect who built it is a clever fellow". I 
don't mean that this formula would be equally useful to all of us; there 
are presbyteries and religious houses which it would not be possible to 
describe in that way without being suspected of paradox. But I think the 
holy man's principle was absolutely sound--that if you want to put an end 
to these sins of the tongue, you must start talking suddenly about 
something quite different. Have some fresh topic of conversation up your 
sleeve, ready to be released when people start exchanging grievances in 
your presence. By such simple means, you may do more than you know to 
preserve charity among your brethren, and win that special title to God's 
sonship which is reserved for those who make peace.



CHAPTER 7. ACCIDIE

When the people of Israel invaded, under Josue, the territory of Chanaan, a 
Divine oracle gave them directions about the treatment of the cities they 
were destined to conquer. And those directions have, before now, been a 
puzzle to many of us. The inhabitants of these Chanaanitish cities must be 
put to the sword, apparently without any distinction of age or sex. How (we 
naturally ask) could the God of mercy whom we preach to-day issue, three 
thousand years ago, a command of savagery? How could he encourage his 
chosen people in taking such bitter measures against their enemies? Were 
the Chanaanites so desperately wicked, all of them, was their stock so 
hopelessly degenerate, that they had deserved nothing less in the way of 
retribution? It may be so. For myself, saving the better judgment of the 
Church, I have always been tempted to imagine that the regulation we are 
speaking of was a prohibition, rather than a precept. In those days, I take 
it, and among those fierce children of the desert, when you conquered a 
country and settled down in it you took one or other of two alternative 
courses. Either you mixed with the conquered people, intermarried with them 
and fused your national traditions with theirs; or you exterminated them 
altogether, not sparing the women, who would introduce tamer blood into 
your own virile stock, not sparing the children, who might grow up to 
avenge their fathers later on. Since God wanted, above all things, to 
preserve his people from the debased and idolatrous worship which the 
Chanaanites practiced, he forbade his people to adopt the milder 
alternative, and allowed their fiercer instincts to have free play. In the 
conditions of those barbarous times, he let rough justice take its course.

Whatever we think about the literal interpretation of these stories, their 
allegorical interpretation is surely plain and salutary. We Christians are 
engaged--that is the point-- in a war of extermination against all that 
keeps us away from God.

What I want to call your attention to is a curious exception which had to 
be made when Josue carried out the command (or the prohibition) that was 
given him. The Gabaonites (if I may refresh your memory with the facts) 
realized that resistance to the invader was useless; realized, too, that 
surrender would only mean massacre, since they belonged to the doomed 
population of Palestine. They sent ambassadors, therefore, who pretended to 
come from a distant country; in ragged clothes, with worn-out shoes, with 
the very bread moldering in their wallets, to create the impression of a 
long journey. And they succeeded in making a treaty with Josue, stipulating 
that their lives should be spared, since they were ready to surrender at 
discretion; before Josue found out who they really were, or where they 
really came from. When the fraud was discovered, he could not go back on 
his oath. He was directed to reduce the Gabaonites to the position of 
slaves; temple slaves probably. They were to be hewers of wood and drawers 
of water to the congregation of Israel; and so (adds the chronicler) they 
remain to this day.

It may seem a strange flight of the imagination when I find, in those 
Gabaonites who hewed wood and drew water for the service of the temple, a 
parallel, and in some sort an encouragement, for Christian people, and 
Christian people who are called to the splendid career of the priesthood. 
But bear with me for a moment while I explain my parable. I think it is an 
experience not altogether uncommon, commoner certainly than the polite 
conventions allow us to admit, for a priest to wonder whether he has not, 
after all, mistaken his vocation. Did God ever really mean him to be a 
priest? Or did he mistake motives of human prudence, the good opinion of 
his friends, some passing wave of enthusiasm, for the Divine call? There 
was, perhaps, a time during his seminary course at which he felt scruples 
about it all, and his confessor told him to disregard them, as scruples 
should be disregarded; were they scruples? Did we, after all, impose on the 
Bishop who ordained us, something as the Gabaonites imposed on Josue? Did 
we make him believe that we had left the world far behind us, when in truth 
it was still at our elbow? To be sure, if we deceived others, we managed to 
deceive ourselves equally; we did not act in conscious bad faith. But, 
while that may extenuate our guilt, it does not alter our mistake. We have 
become priests, when God never called us to the priesthood. Miserable false 
step; how are we to retrieve it?

Understand me, reverend fathers; I am not referring to those tragedies of 
the priestly life which sometimes arise from a strong assault of 
temptation. God help us all, it might happen to any of us, in our mortal 
weakness, that a passion suddenly conceived, or long indulged through 
carelessness, should force us into a false position; a position in which 
great grace is needed to avert a disastrous decision. But I am not 
thinking, now, of these major perils. I am thinking, now, of what is (I 
fancy) much commoner; the position of a priest who has been, and remains, 
faithful to his promises of celibacy and of ecclesiastical obedience; there 
is no sudden crisis to be feared, and yet all is not well with him. Years 
have gone by, ten or twenty years maybe, since his ordination, and the 
first fervors have died away. It isn't that he doesn't do his job. He says 
his prayers, makes a preparation and thanksgiving of sorts, a meditation of 
sorts; he does all that could be expected of him to look after the souls 
put in his charge; but he does it all lifelessly. The Divine Office becomes 
more and more what the Church, in her grim realism, calls it--the office, 
the thing that gets in your way. He is concerned, not to say it, but to get 
it said. The Mass itself brings with it no feelings of awe, of mystery, of 
content. The care of souls, which he used to find so interesting, is now 
hand-over-hand work; they all seem to him much alike, much on a level, and 
not a very high level at that. All the savor has gone out of his 
priesthood; he sometimes thinks, even out of his religion. Was he, perhaps, 
not meant to be a priest? There are so many useful and unselfish things he 
could be doing, in a sick world, if he weren't a priest. Is it possible 
that he has made a mistake?

Now, don't let's be in too much of a hurry to blame ourselves over all 
that. One thing is lucidly obvious about human nature, and that is that the 
thrill of novelty does wear off, and as you grow older you find less 
natural zest about things which were once full of excitement and romance. 
It happens, I suppose, to a more or less extent even in the most successful 
of marriages. And it seems to me a very extraordinary thing that nobody 
ever warns young priests about this; let me take this opportunity of 
warning those of you who are only a few years out from the seminary. A 
great deal of the thrill, a great deal of the interest which our priestly 
duties give us at first is not supernatural, though we often feel as if it 
was. A great deal of it is purely natural, purely human. The Mass and the 
office interest us because of the poetry in them, because of the mystery in 
them. We rather enjoy--if the cruel truth must be told--dressing up and 
going through ceremonies in front of a watchful congregation; if we are the 
kind of people who can do that sort of thing well. Work for souls is, of 
all work, the most interesting, just at first. And all that human 
satisfaction which we get out of our priestly duties is a thing which fades 
away with the years; it is inevitable. And this very obvious but seldom 
mentioned fact, which is useful as a warning to the young priest, may be 
useful as consolation to the priest who is getting on in years. When you 
complain that your priestly life seems mechanical and flat as compared with 
what it seemed ten years ago, remind yourself in the first place that what 
you have lost is, in great part, a merely human love of your job, and love 
of doing your job well, which was bound to disappear in any case.

Yes, you say, that's all very well, but it's not quite my trouble. What I 
mind about is not so much that I seem to get so little out of my religion, 
but that I seem to put so little into it. Or perhaps I should put it in 
this way, what I mind about is that I should mind so little. Just when I'm 
in retreat like this, I feel ashamed of having so little love for God, so 
little zeal for the faith and for the Church; but when I'm back at my work, 
I'm conscious of all that, and I don't seem to care. I'm content to go on 
in this mechanical way, and remind myself that lots of other priests are 
probably in the same position. It isn't merely that my religion does 
nothing to arouse my feelings; what are feelings, after all? The trouble is 
that it doesn't really command the loyalty of my will. I'm afraid I don't 
make my meditation; or if I do, it's only a token meditation now and again. 
I find myself going onto the altar without having taken the trouble to 
prepare myself, deferring my office till the last possible moment. When I 
come across a soul which is hardened, ever so slightly, against the 
influence of religion, I just shrug my shoulders and say, "Well, if he 
won't, he won't; I can't help him". It isn't simply that I have got no 
taste for my job; I haven't got my heart in my job. And that, surely, is a 
matter of the will.

I know. That is the state, of course, which the spiritual authors call 
tepidity. If you ask me to suggest a remedy for that, I should be inclined 
to answer in two words, and those two words are "spiritual reading". I am 
afraid that sounds a dull prescription. It recalls unprofitable half-hours 
when you sat, as a divine or a novice, with Scaramelli open on your lap. I 
don't think it is important, when we do spiritual reading, that it should 
be something dull. On the contrary, we ought to take some trouble, more 
trouble than we ordinarily do, about finding an author whose style and 
whose outlook appeals to us. But having found our spiritual author, we 
should give him his head. Don't skip, don't stray about, don't tell 
yourself, "I think perhaps this is rather stiff going for a person like 
me". Read steadily on, with an open heart, and God will find the right 
passages to awaken your conscience where it is needed and as it is needed. 
You can say office year after year, you can repeat any number of formal 
prayers day after day, you can meditate, even, on approved lines, and yet 
never hear God's voice talking suddenly to your soul. Your prayer has 
become mechanized, and your mind, from long use, is shut to the 
implications of it. But spiritual reading is a splendid trap to catch 
souls. You are reading on, quite calmly, and all of a sudden a sentence 
flashes out of the page, and you say to yourself, "By Jove, that's true", 
and the next moment you say to yourself, "By Jove, that's me".

Having said so much about remedies, may I go back to where I was before, 
and point out, what is almost certainly true, that this tepidity of which 
you accuse yourself does go side by side with, and is partly caused by, the 
phenomenon we were talking about; I mean, a slackening off, not altogether 
due to your own fault, of your interest in spiritual things. That 
slackening off, with some of us, is a matter of age; with some, a matter of 
temperament; with some, a matter of circumstances--we are set down to do a 
dull job, which is not really our job, and we lose heart and grow 
disillusioned about what a vocation to the priesthood means. Very likely 
you complain that the work you have to do isn't worth doing, or isn't your 
work anyhow. Don't be too certain that that is the trouble. A doctor once 
told me--I don't know if it's true, but he was a very famous doctor--that 
you never ought to say you caught cold through sitting in a draught, 
because you don't feel a draught until you've already got a cold. And I 
think when a priest complains, not of difficulties in his work, but of the 
dull, dead level of his congregation, that that SOMETIMES is just due to 
the dull, dead level of the priest. But it is true, I think, that parish 
work, and "a fortiori" work on the foreign missions, is calculated to keep 
us up to the mark. And if for no fault of his own the priest who aspired to 
serve God in that way finds himself turned into a professor, it isn't the 
same thing. He misses that interplay of life with life, of mind with mind, 
which is a grace God ordinarily gives us, to keep us fresh and supple. But 
if that is part of the trouble, it is not, you admit, the whole of the 
trouble. The fact is (you say) that things seem to have gone very flat with 
me; and I should think that if I go through the motions of serving God, 
it's about all I do.

Yes. Well, there's something to be said for going through the motions of 
serving God. What I'm wanting to suggest, if there is anybody here who 
feels like that about it, is something rather bold, something that might 
even sound unorthodox if you stated it too crudely. You may think it has a 
smack of Quietism about it. I can only say that it is the best light I 
have, but I don't want anybody to pay any attention to it except in so far 
as it seems to him a right and reasonable attitude that I am recommending.

At to whether God meant you to be a priest, stop worrying. He certainly 
means you to be a priest now; your priesthood is contained, if not in his 
antecedent will, at least in his consequent will. You may have crept in 
under false pretenses like the Gabaonites, but he is faithful to his word, 
and he promises us the graces we need for our state of life as long as we 
do our part. He wants you, now, to be a priest, and a good priest. But in 
the meanwhile the facts have got to be faced. There is this heavy tedium 
which you cannot shake off, that makes your whole priestly life feel dull 
and second-rate. You cannot, even under the search-light of a retreat like 
this, detect any grave fault which you can amend, any obvious sacrifice you 
can make to God, in the hope of improving the situation. You can only go 
on, doing your best to serve God, with the dispiriting consciousness that 
it is really only a second best, praying for greater fervor, for the 
rekindling of your love. In what spirit are you to undertake that difficult 
and ungrateful task?

That is where the Gabaonites come in. Tell Almighty God that he has, for 
whatever reason, made you, at least for the time being, a hewer of wood and 
a drawer of water in his service; it seems, for the moment, all you can 
aspire to; very well, you will perform this humble office, faithfully, to 
prove your love of him. You will go on doing that, if need be, all your 
life through; not complaining that he has appointed you to this destiny, as 
long as you can find no power in yourself to look higher. Make up as best 
you can, by your humility, and by a kind of dogged obedience, for all the 
priestly qualities he sees lacking in you.

You are preparing to go the altar. You feel certain that all will be as it 
was yesterday and the day before; there will be no conscious response in 
you to the sacred words of the liturgy, or even to the near approach of our 
blessed Lord as he comes to you in holy Communion. It will all be a 
mechanical routine, like filling in forms. Never mind; you are preparing to 
offer this lifeless performance to God, all the more hopefully because for 
you it is a thing without salt; you are doing it, not to please yourself 
but to please him. Jesus Christ, our high Priest, is going to offer himself 
in the Holy Mass, using you as his tool--his dull, uncomprehending tool; 
you will offer yourself, motionless, into his hands. You will be acting 
like a conscript soldier under orders, not buoyed up by any foretaste of 
victory, any consciousness of heroism, but simply doing what he is told. 
That shall be your sacrifice.

You take up the well-thumbed breviary, and arrange the tattered markers in 
it. You know well what your office is going to mean; a verse or two read 
with some sense of what the meaning is about, but alas, with no unction; 
then a long rumination on your own affairs, starting off at a wide tangent; 
then the bell that rings in your memory and recalls you to a sense of what 
you are doing; always the same. A parrot, you feel, would do it as well. To 
be sure, but at least you can take upon yourself the duties of God's 
parrot; the beasts, too, praise God. Tell him that all this mouthing of 
syllables is meant for his glory; you wish it could be something better, 
but ask him to accept that. You are making a meditation, or a visit to the 
Blessed Sacrament; why is it that your heart is dumb? You command an act of 
thanksgiving, or adoration, whatever it may be; nothing comes--there is no 
answer, in sensitive nature, to the call. You feel like a man trying to 
drive a mule, when the mule doesn't want to go. Well, there is that 
comforting verse in the Psalm, "I have become like a beast of burden in thy 
sight; I was reduced to mere nothingness, and was all ignorance". This 
nothingness, this ignorance, this blank which is all you have to offer in 
the way of prayer is something to offer; keep still before God in the 
consciousness and the confession of your own barrenness; reach out towards 
him, humbly, in the dark. You go out to visit some of your parishioners; 
what an opportunity for a priest with a real zeal for souls! With you, it 
will be a few courtesies of conversation, a shy hint about the abstract 
possibility of going to confession--nothing more. You, who ought to be a 
shepherd to these people, no better, it seems, than a finger-post! Still, 
you are a finger-post; the mere presence of a priest among them means 
something. It is for others to do great things for God; it is for you to 
offer to him the little good that is done by your ministry, asking him to 
make you useful somehow, perhaps without your knowing it, to the souls he 
wants to bring to himself through you.

God forgive me, if I have been encouraging any of you to acquiesce in low 
standards; that has not been my intention. All I mean is that during those 
intervals--please God, they are only intervals--in which our own want of 
progress whispers the temptation to despair, we should rather turn our own 
shortcomings into a motive for humility, and therefore into a means of 
grace. Prayer is essentially throwing yourself back upon God; and when you 
are goi