This Morning: "Christ, A Quickening Spirit" and the Church

As promised, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show with Anna Mitchell at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central to talk about St. John Henry Newman's PPS (Parochial and Plain Sermon) for Easter Sunday 1831, "Christ, A Quickening Spirit".

Please listen live here; the podcast will be archived here.

The quotation that Newman cited as the inspiration for this sermon is "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen." Luke xxiv. 5, 6.

In the conclusion to this sermon, Newman urges his congregation to take action. As he has reminded them of how Jesus has left them the Blessed Sacrament as a continuing Presence after His Ascension, so Newman also reminds them that Jesus left them His Church, founded upon the Rock of St. Peter ("Simon Peter the favoured Apostle, on whom the Church is built"):

He has appeared to His Holy Church first of all, and in the Church He dispenses blessings, such as the world knows not of. Blessed are they if they knew their blessedness, who are allowed, as we are, week after week, and Festival after Festival, to seek and find in that Holy Church the Saviour of their souls! Blessed are they beyond language or thought, to whom it is vouchsafed to receive those tokens of His love, which cannot otherwise be gained by man, the pledges and means of His special presence, in the Sacrament of His Supper; who are allowed to eat and drink the food of immortality, and receive life from the bleeding side of the Son of God! 

As usual, Newman reminds them that there are Christians, those who consider themselves followers of Jesus, who yet reject His Church:

Alas! by what strange coldness of heart, or perverse superstition is it, that any one called Christian keeps away from that heavenly ordinance? Is it not very grievous that there should be any one who fears to share in the greatest conceivable blessing which could come upon sinful men? What in truth is that fear, but unbelief, a slavish sin-loving obstinacy, if it leads a man to go year after year without the spiritual sustenance which God has provided for him? Is it wonderful that, as time goes on, he should learn deliberately to doubt of the grace therein given? that he should no longer look upon the Lord's Supper as a heavenly feast, or the Lord's Minister who consecrates it as a chosen vessel, or that Holy Church in which he ministers as a Divine Ordinance, to be cherished as the parting legacy of Christ to a sinful world? Is it wonderful that seeing he sees not, and hearing he hears not; and that, lightly regarding all the gifts of Christ, he feels no reverence for the treasure-house wherein they are stored?

So he concludes with a final exhortation for his congregation that morning in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin to remain faithful to God's will and His Church in spite of any trial or trouble, mockery or rebuke, and to persevere.

St. John Henry Newman had been born and raised in a Church of England family; he was seeking the True Church that Jesus had founded and as part of the Tractarian movement that began just a couple of years after he preached this Easter Sunday sermon, he had sought a way to see that Church of England as a branch of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church". When he began to see that the Via Media he and Pusey and Keble were trying to establish only worked on paper and did not exist in the Church of England at all, he again had to search until he found the One True Church: the Catholic Church. And as he wrote in the Apologia pro Vita Sua, after becoming a Catholic he did not need to contend by himself to find the Truth and convince himself of it; he had heard the living, quickening oracle of God in the Church Jesus founded:

FROM the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no variations to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment; I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of Revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption. . . .

People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. . . .

St. John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit: Altobello Melone – The Road to Emmaus, c. 1516-17