As promised, this morning Anna Mitchell and I will examine St. John Henry Newman's "Miracles No Remedy for Unbelief" from his Anglican Parochial and Plain Sermons on the Son Rise Morning Show at about 6:50 a.m. Central Daylight Savings Time / 7:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time.
Please listen live here; the podcast will be archived here.
In the last two paragraphs of this sermon, Newman exhorts us to look within, not without, for God's grace and our own will in cooperation with God's grace:
Let us then put aside vain excuses; and, instead of looking for outward events to change our course of life, be sure of this, that if our course of life is to be changed, it must be from within. God's grace moves us from within, so does our own will. External circumstances have no real power over us.
Those external circumstances, Newman could say, only have power over us if we let them.
If we do not love God, it is because we have not wished to love Him, tried to love Him, prayed to love Him. We have not borne the idea and the wish in our mind day by day, we have not had it before us in the little matters of the day, we have not lamented that we loved Him not, we have been too indolent, sluggish, carnal, to attempt to love Him in little things, and begin at the beginning; we have shrunk from the effort of moving from within; we have been like persons who cannot get themselves to rise in the morning; and we have desired and waited for a thing impossible,—to be changed once and for all, all at once, by some great excitement from without, or some great event, or some special season; something or other we go on expecting, which is to change us without our having the trouble to change ourselves.
I think there maybe a particular lesson for us during this Covid-19 crisis, when we can't attend Sunday or Daily Mass, receive Holy Communion, keep our Holy Hours in chapels of Perpetual Adoration, participate in parish Stations of the Cross, etc:
We covet some miraculous warning, or we complain that we are not in happier circumstances, that we have so many cares, or so few religious privileges; or we look forward for a time when religion will come easy to us as a matter of course.
The Church is giving us many religious privileges of her store of merit: conditions for special plenary indulgences were announced on the Solemnity of St. Joseph.
Newman stresses that the time for action is now:
Let us rouse ourselves, and act as reasonable men, before it is too late; let us understand, as a first truth in religion, that love of heaven is the only way to heaven. Sight will not move us; else why did Judas persist in covetousness in the very presence of Christ? . . . why did Satan fall, when he was a bright Archangel?
He alludes to three New Testament passages:
1 Corinthians 1:23:
Nor will reason subdue us; else why was the Gospel, in the beginning, "to the Greeks foolishness"?
Matthew 13:1-23:
Nor will excited feelings convert us; for there is one who "heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it;" yet "hath no root in himself," and "dureth" only "for a while."
Luke 12:16-20:
Nor will self-interest prevail with us; or the rich man would have been more prudent, whose "ground brought forth plentifully," and would have recollected that "that night his soul" might be "required of him."
And then he quotes the Collect for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity in the Book of Common Prayer:
Let us understand that nothing but the love of God can make us believe in Him or obey Him; and let us pray Him, who has "prepared for them that love Him, such good things as pass man's understanding, to pour into our hearts such love towards Him, that we, loving Him above all things, may obtain His promises, which exceed all that we can desire."
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