FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 39, 14 October 1925, Page 51

FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

(By the Right Reverend Monsignor Power, V.F., for the N.Z. Tablet.)

In this and the following chapter we shall see that, in sending the Apostles, Our Lord formed a Society of which they were the germ, and through which the souls of men should be brought into union with Himself. Two courses were open; He could take each individual soul and deal, with it directly without the ministry of men, or He could gather all believers into one visible society, through which Me would ordinarily convey to them His graces. That He chose the second method is the teaching of the Church. Christ did not ignore the fact that man was a social being, destined to pass his earthly span of life in the society of his fellow men, and as a social being He made provision for him, provision that was in harmony with his constitution. While we insist upon the Visible Church as the covenanted means of union and the ordinary channel‘of God’s grace, we must be careful to boar in mind that each individual human soul has also its direct approach to God and its thousand direct ways of obtaining His favor. But this again, provided His own established Kingdom of grace, the Church, is not culpably repudiated. It is sometimes said by thoughtless - critics of Catholicity that the Church, by insisting on the ministry of a Visible Kingdom, destroys individuality in her children. Such critics have never read the lives of the . i .saints, and have never suspected their intimate relations with Christ, the dear Lover of their souls. It is really because of their secure position in the Kingdom that the saints were enabled to give free scope to their originality. Indeed, in every, generation of Christian time the saints of the Church, from Agnes and Cecilia to the Little Flower of Jesus just canonised, have exhibited to the world such arresting individuality as has never, and can never, be found outside. Can I not go direct to Jesus? Of course you can, but you are not likely to win His favor if you reject the ordinary means of grace set up by Him for the sanctification of “every creature.” So much said, let us now see how and why Our Lord set up His Visible Kingdom of God, which we call the Church. Ecclesiastical writers draw out the analogy between the office of Adam the first father of the race, and that of Christ, Who came as a second Adam to redeem it and restore the original-gift of divine sonship. Will the reconstructive process be analogous to the destructive? Will the social predispositions of man be still, taken into account by Christ, or will they now be changed for the purpose of his redemption It was as a. social being that man received the gift of Original Justice. Will Christ now reverse the process ; ; in the work of reconstruction, ignore man’s V‘Social instinct, and treat him merely as an y individual alone and apart? Let us consider in greater detail how the original gift was made to Adam, and how it was to be passed on through him to all mankind. Having decreed to make man to

15—-THE CHURCH A SOCIETY.