The following pages contain in all abbreviated form sermons preached in Rome in the Church of St., Silvestro-in-Capite, during the year of 1911. Some of them were also preached in the Carmelite Church in Kensington in 1910; and all of them, With others, in the Church of our Lady of Lourdes, New York, in 1912. The author apologises for the the much compressed form in which they are printed here; but he has sought to suggest rather than to develop the thoughts of which he treats.Part 1 is Christ in the Interior Soul. It considers the Friendship of Christ, then the purgative and illuminative ways of the spiritual life. Then we move to Christ in the Exterior, which considers His holy presence in the Eucharist, the Church, the priest, the saint, the sinner, the average man and then the sufferer.“IT seems inconceivable at first sight that a relationship, which in any real manner can be called a friendship, should be possible between Christ and the soul. Adoration, dependence, obedience, service, and even imitation all these things are imaginable; but until we remember that Jesus Christ took a human soul like our own – a soul liable to joy and to sorrow, open to the assaults of passion and temptation, a soul that actually did experience heaviness as well as ecstasy - the pains of obscurity as well as the joys of clear vision - until this becomes to us, from a dogmatic fact apprehended by faith, a vital fact perceived by experience, a full realization of His friendship is out of the question.” Yes, Jesus is our Friend!“And, extremely often, the first sign that the Way of Purgation has been really entered, lies in a consciousness that there is beginning for her an experience which the world calls Disillusionment. It may come in a dozen different ways.” This may sound strange, but indeed there are trials in the spiritual life. “She may, for example, be brought face to face with some catastrophe in external matters. She may meet with an unworthy priest, a disunited congregation, some scandal in Christian life, in exactly that sphere where Christ seemed to her evidently supreme. She had thought that the Church must be perfect, because it was the Church of Christ, or the priesthood stainless because it was after the Order of Melchisedech; and she finds to her dismay that there is a human side even to those things that are most associated with Divinity on earth.” There are other things that can disillusion us, but Monsignor Benson helps us through these trials. “The next stage of Purgation lies in what may be called, in a sense, the Disillusionment with Divine things. The earthly side has failed her, or rather has fallen off from the reality; now it begins to seem to her as if the Divine side failed her too. A brilliant phrase of Faber well describes one element in this Disillusionment - the "monotony of Piety."”Let us not suffer the shipwreck here described: “The way of the spiritual path is strewn with thewrecks of souls that might have been friends of Christ. This one faltered, because Christ put off his ornaments; this one because Christ did not allow her to think that His graces were Himself; a third because wounded pride still writhed, and bade her be true to her own shame rather than to His glory. All these stages and processes are known; every spiritual writer that has ever lived has treated of them over and over again from this standpoint or from that. But the end and lesson of them all is the same - that Christ purges His friends of all that is not of Him; that He leaves them nothing of themselves, in order that He may be wholly theirs; for no soul can learn the strength and the love of God, until she has cast her whole weight upon Him.”
In "The King's Achievement," Benson tells the story of a fictitious family during the time of King Henry VIII's dissolution of English monasteries. The brothers of the Torridon family make their way in the world -- the eldest, Ralph, in service to Cromwell and the youngest, Christopher, in service to God and the Catholic church as a monk in the Priory at Lewes. Their paths carry them to completely different destinations and Ralph is instrumental in turning Christopher and his fellow monks out of their monastery. Christopher, however, manages to rise above his pride and anger and ministers to Ralph in his hour of need.
While studying for the priesthood in Rome in early 1904, Benson found several manuscripts which survived the exodus from England to Italy over three centuries earlier. He was drawn to one such manuscript and, being enthralled with the story, undertook its translation resulting in this often lyrical novel of English spiritual life prior to the Reformation. From Benson's introduction: "It is the story of the life of one of that large body of English hermits who flourished from about the beginning of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth; and was written, apparently for the sake of the villagers, by his parish-priest.
Excerpt: It has been believed by all Christians up to the present -- Christians, that is, in the historical sense of the word -- that the Personality of the Figure whom we know as Jesus Christ was the Personality of God; that God sent forth His Son to redeem and teach the world; that this was accomplished by His Life and Death and Resurrection; and that it should be the endeavor of all who call themselves His disciples to imitate the example which He set. Let us scrutinize that statement a little more closely.1. It is believed by Christians that this work of Redemption and Revelation was accomplished through Human Nature assumed into union with the Divine -- that God did not, so to speak, act merely in virtue of His Deity, but through Humanity as well -- that, first a nation, then a tribe, then a family, and then a person, were successively drawn from the world as a whole -- Israel, Judah, the line of David, and, finally, Mary -- and then, by an unique act of the power of the Holy Ghost, a created substance was produced so perfect and so pure as to be worthy, in a sense, of becoming the vehicle of the Deity; -- this is, in short, the entire summary of the Old Testament -- that this substance was then assumed into union with God, and used for His Divine purposes -- in short, that the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ, by which He lived and suffered and died as man, was the instrument of both Revelation and Redemption; that by a human voice He spoke, that human hands were raised to bless, that a human heart loved and agonized, and that these human hands, heart, and voice -- broken, pierced, and silenced as they were -- were the heart, hands and voice of Very God. Consider that claim carefully. Though the Person was the Person of God, the nature by which He was accessible and energetic was the nature of man. It is by union with that Humanity that Christians believe themselves redeemed. Thus in that last emphatic act of the life of His Humiliation He took Bread, and cried, not Here is my Essential Self, but “This is my Body which is given for you,” since that Body was the instrument of Redemption. And, if the Christian claim is to be believed, this act was but a continuation (though in another sense) of that first act known as the Incarnation. He who leaned over the Bread at that “last sad Supper with His own's had, in another but similar manner, leaned over Mary herself with similar words upon His lips. God, according to the Christian belief, used in both actions alike a material substance for His Divine Purpose.2. Up to this point practically all those known as “orthodox Christians” are more or less agreed, if they will but take the trouble to think out their religion to its roots. And it is at this point also that Catholic Christianity parts company from the rest. For, while Protestants find in the individual Life of Jesus Christ in the Gospels the record of the sum of all His dealings, and in His words “It is finished” a proof that Revelation is concluded and Redemption ended, Catholics believe that there is a sense in which that ending was but a beginning -- an inauguration rather than a climax.
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