“Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God ? ” — 1.St. John v. 5.

The first lesson which we learned, my dear brethren, from the life of our Blessed Lord on Easter Day was a lesson of peace. Today we are concerned with another lesson. It is the lesson of Faith, and to them that learn well this lesson our Lord promises His special blessing.

What, then, is faith? “Now, faith is the substance of things to be hoped for ; the evidence of things that appear not.” It is an evidence; a certitude higher than any evidence or certitude of the senses. St. Louis of France so well appreciated this that, when someone constrained him to see a miraculous appearance of our Lord in the Blessed Eucharist to confirm his faith, he said that his faith was stronger without the miracle than with it, and he refused to see the miracle.

Faith, then, gives to the man that has it a certitude of all things higher than any other certitude we can have in this life. Human reason assures us of certain facts, of certain existences, but divine faith leads us on above human reason to the author of the facts, to the Creator and Preserver and Lawgiver of those existences. So that the man who has the gift of divine faith knows more certainly facts and existences than he who has it not, because by this gift he refers them all to the Absolute, they being all only relative.

The gift of faith, as every Catholic knows, is given in baptism. Now, what is there in the gift of baptism which constitutes the baptized man a new creature in the sight of God, considering that the natural man is one who is wounded by original sin in his intellect, will, and affections ? Considering this, I say, we ask how can this soul, born into the world under this sad condition, be recreated? Christ, speaking to Nicodemus, gives us the answer : “Except man be born again, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” To-day it will concern us to consider only one of these gifts, the gift of the intellect.

By baptism man is given, as we said, the gift of faith. Now, faith is the act of the recreated intel lect, and only of the recreated intellect. It is a divinely inspired gift by which the baptized man is enabled to apprehend the acts of God and believe them as true. It is a divinely inspired gift by which not only can he penetrate the unseen, by which the visible things of this world become clearer and more visible, because we begin to see them in the light in which God sees them. Therefore, wisely does the Church sing every Sunday in the Mass, ” I believe in all things, visible and invisible.”

So, then, the gift of faith puts into the soul of every baptized man a capacity for receiving the truth and nothing but the truth. Such is the advantage the Christian has over the unbaptized man. He has a quality which enables him to reach the grand end for which God in the beginning created him. By means of the gift of faith, then, man passes to union with God. By use of the divine gift man becomes, as it were, filled with God and sharer of the divine beatitude. It is a gift which, used rightly, makes him apprehend truth in matters of faith and morals, so that it needs but the special action of the Holy Spirit in the case of the Pope to make him the infallible exponent of the Church in these matters.

Every baptized person has the capacity, but not all do, will, or can use it. The most that many a man can do is to recognize the truth when he hears it as truth, but not to find it out. This, then, is a gift, or, if you will, a divine inspiration, left to the sons and daughters of the Church for their own special heritage. It divides them from those without by a chasm as wide as that between Dives and Lazarus, and which nothing but the very gift itself can cause to cross the gulf.

Such is the reason why men who wander in error so often come at last to the end, and become good Catholics. Because they have perceived that to the mind of the baptized, good and devout Catholic, there is a certainty in all things, both visible and invisible, which science, false philosophy, and the world never could attain to. Guard, then, and keep alive and burning the gift of faith, and the earnest and constant use of the Sacraments, that it may be said of you at the last : “Blessed is he because, though he saw not, yet he believed.”

Five-minute Sermons for Low Masses on All Sundays of the Year
By the Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul, 1893

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