Bellarmine

“ Bellarmine, as a theological writer, was one of the most distinguished members of his Order, and no man ever defended the cause of the true Church, or of its visible Head, the supreme Vicar of Christ, with more success. The eminent writers of the Protestant sect, who dogmatised in his time, paid him a high compliment, as, during the space of forty or fifty years, there was scarcely one who did not make him a target for the artillery of error. ”

“ Do you intend to affront me before this
gentleman?" "D--n me, affront the lady," says Bellarmine, cocking his
hat, and strutting up to Horatio: "does any man dare affront this lady
before me, d--n me?" "Hark'ee, sir," says Horatio, "I would advise you
to lay aside that fierce air; for I am mightily deceived if this lady
has not a violent desire to get your worship a good drubbing." ”

“ Pope Agatho understood the letter of Honorius better than the Greeks assembled in the Council. If you ask why, then, didn't the legates of Agatho resist the condemnation, Bellarmine answers that this was diplomatic. They acquiesced to avert a greater evil; namely, continuance of false doctrine. Thus, according to Bellarmine, to secure the condemnation of the Monothelite heresy, the legates sanctioned the condemnation of a Pope for heresy—apparently on the principle of two evils prefer the less—with consequences, however, which Bellarmine does not seem to have thought out. ”

“ Bellarmine denied that Constance was an Ecumenical Council. For, he said, it included only a third of the Church, one obedience out of three. He denied also that its election of Martin V. was thereby invalidated. An assembly may have power to elect, but not to define in matters of faith. Constance possessed exceptional power in an exceptional time. For a doubtful Pope is no Pope at all. ”

“ We are next to follow the criticisms of theological schools within the Roman Communion upon the facts. Bellarmine, the Jesuit theologian, was a Cardinal in 1600. While claiming for the Pope a supremacy and Infallibility, in the most uncompromising terms, and with a fulness and clearness hitherto unexampled, he was naturally challenged to harmonise his theories with the facts of the Councils of the fifteenth century. ”

“ BELLARMIN'S MONSTROUS PARADOX.
(Vol. iv., p. 45.)
The defence of Cardinal Bellarmin set up by your correspondent J. W. CT. is not new, and is exceedingly plausible at first sight. Allow me, however, to direct the attention of your readers to the following reply to a similar defence, which I take from the Sequel to Letters to M. Gondon, by Dr. Wordsworth, Canon of Westminster, pp. 10. 11.:
"I would first beg leave to observe that my three reviewers, in their zeal to speak for Cardinal Bellarmine, have not allowed him to speak for himself. ”

“ Being thus fully convinced, that the Pope’s so much boasted Supremacy was a bold and ungodly usurpation, I could not help censuring with myself the men of learning, who had countenanced such a pretension, especially the two great champions of the Papal power Bellarmine and Baronius. Did they not see what every man, who but dips into the primitive writers, must see; what is obvious to common sense? ”

“ He prefers their charity, and commends our zeal, yet suspects that for blindness, and this but humour. He sees rather what to fly than to follow, and wishes there were no sides that he might take one. He will sometimes propend to us upon the reading a good writer, and at Bellarmine recoils as far back again; and the fathers justle him from one side to another. His conscience interposes itself betwixt two duellers, and whilst it would part both, is by both wounded. ”

“ The Infallibility of the Church is collective, not individual; not to be sought in the isolated utterances of the one, but in the concurrent testimony of the entire Episcopate. Bellarmine, the leading advocate of the opposite school, is implicated by his theory, according to Maret, in insoluble difficulties. For he admits that, for an utterance to become infallible, there are certain conditions to be fulfilled, such as serious and prolonged reflection and consultation with the Pope's advisers. ”

“ Brethren, there is no more salutary exercise than just to kneel a while beside the crib, with its attendant figures, and suffer the tongue to utter whatever thoughts arise. In that tiny Babe we see with the eye of faith the divine and the human blended into one — reunited, as it were, and yet united as they had never been before. ”

“ Oh, all ye that pass by the way, come and see if there is, or ever was, woe like to my woe." But a damned soul may answer me from hell: "Alas! multiply your miseries ten thousand times and even then they will fall infinitely short of mine. Could I change places with you, your condition would be heaven for me after the horrors of my present abode. I am buried body and soul, not in the cool earth with a rich and padded casket around me, but in a sea of fire which penetrates my very vitals. ”

“ His mind gives way under the strain; he moans and shrieks by turns as though suffering a foretaste of hell. He struggles with those that hold him as though they were demons. His eyes roll wildly, his mouth foams, he frequently buries his face and teeth in the pillow, and his hands clutch convulsively, making those that hold them feel what a fearful thing it is to hold the hand of a dying man and feel the soul within him struggling for liberty. ”

“ The difficulty of distinguishing things that are of faith, from mere pious opinions, is a more subtle one. From the confusion caused by it, the Church seems pledged to all sorts of grotesque stories of saints, and accounts of the place and aspect of heaven, of hell and purgatory, and to be logically bound to stand and fall by these. Thus Sir James Stephen happened once in the course of his reading to light on an opinion of Bellarmine's, and certain arguments by which he supported it, as to the place of purgatory. It is quite true that to us Bellarmine's opinion 292seems sufficiently ludicrous ”

“ He is hurried down into a cold, dismal dungeon in the midst of which stands a column three feet high with a ring at the top like a hitching-post, and, being stripped of His garments, He is bound thereto in a stooping position, and scourged. One by one each brawny savage grasps the leather thong, with its leaded ends, as it falls from the hand of his exhausted predecessor, and rains blows on the tender back and quivering sides and heaving breast of our poor Saviour. ”

“ Man born of woman to-day," says holy Job, "liveth a short time and then fleeth away like a shadow — like a bird flying through the air, or a ship sailing through the water, he passeth away and leaveth not a trace behind." What! when I die shall I cease to exist? Is there nothing in me more lasting than this clay body of mine? An ungodly science answers, " No; there is nothing." " I have dissected many a man," says a learned surgeon, " but I have never found a soul." ”

“ Now Nature does not do things in vain. If there was no such thing as sound, she would not have given me ears to hear; if there was no light or color, she would not have given me eyes to see; if there was no such thing as truth in the world, why should she have given me a mind to know the truth; and if there was no everlasting life for my soul, why should she give my soul a natural longing for it? Yes; unless my soul is immortal, Nature is a liar. Nay, in that case, even Nature's God Himself would be false, for God has promised to render to every man according to his works ”

“ Hence it was that to atone for man's sins the Word of God Himself was, if I may say so, obliged to come down from heaven and become man and suffer and die — as man, because man had sinned, and as God, because God only could cancel an infinite offence. Every drop of His bloody sweat in Gethsemani declares the malice of mortal sin — every stroke of the scourge, every thorn of His crown, every fall on Calvary's slope, the five nails that held Him on the cross. The frantic grief of Magdalen, Mary's heartbroken sobs and the moans of the dying Saviour, all proclaim the malice of mortal sin. ”

“ Oh, Sin! what a monster thou art! to dare to enter into even God's own heaven; to blight the fairest work of His hands; to rob Him of His beloved angels; to populate with them the miserable hell you and you alone have created.
Brethren, turn you now to God's second creation. Baffled in His first merciful design to make creatures happy in the enjoyment of Himself, He determines on another trial, and so He creates the earth and man. To His own image and likeness He makes him; a little less than the angels He created him. ”

“ Into the dark aisles of the Temple and abroad through all the land until, lo! the zenith is reached and the world is amazed and men say, one to another, " never did man speak as this man." Such was Christ's manifestation of Himself — such His progress in wisdom and grace. And just as men, like roots under the sun, were beginning to rise heavenward, there came the dark hours of the Passion and death — the sun declined and sank and the mists settled down again ”

“ If we are in sin, you or I, our whole personality — our lives, our deeds, are but a voice in the wilderness of this world, crying: " Prepare ye the way of the Demon, make straight his paths." It is sin that makes this world a desert — a vast, wooded wilderness, where, if you except the anchorites and hermits, few real men are found. Many lose their way in the pursuit of phantoms; tirelessly they search for the fountains of water, and find them bitter; they climb for the fruit of the topmost branch, and find it sour. Through this world roams the devil like a roaring lion ”

“ Brethren, such metal is human nature, prone of itself, as the sixty-eighth Psalm says, to stick fast in the mire of the deep, unable to do anything of itself, and able to construct a mansion for itself in heaven only when wielded by the Son of God. And in the words of the same Psalm, it cried: " Father, draw me out of the mire that I may not stick fast." And into the muddy stream of this world the Father cast the Saviour — the Wood of the root of Jesse — and lo! the original condition of human nature was restored. ”

“ Your faith was born of material signs and wonders, and without them it cannot endure; whence you shall be cast down again into the hell of unbelief. Ah, how true a prophecy was that! When Christ multiplied before their eyes the loaves and fishes they would fain have taken Him by force and made Him king; but when Christ ceased His miracles, when He had utterly surrendered Himself into the hands of His enemies, when Pilate brought Him forth scourged and thorn-crowned and said: " Behold the man, behold your King," many a Capharnaum tongue shouted back: "Away with Him; we have no king but Caesar." ”

“ He remembers he has a soul and he knows its value, but he puts it out of the way — he poisons it with alcohol — drowns it in the wine goblet, and buries it in the vile grave of his own filthy body. What shall I say of the impure? Ah! he is the worst of all, for he has forgotten not only that he has an immortal soul, but even that he has a human body — he has become a brute beast. His soul, that celestial spirit within him, faints at the abomination it beholds — an angel imprisoned in a hog-pen — an angel and a devil going through life bound neck and neck. ”

“ Their souls are imprisoned in their bodies, and so tightly locked in that when the prison-house of their body falls, prisoner and prison perish together; but my soul, though a prisoner in my body, is still unfettered, so that the destruction of my body brings to my soul, not death, but freedom. Hence it is that we hear St. Paul exclaim: " O God, I long for death that I may begin to live with Thee." The death of the body is only the beginning of the true life of the soul, for my soul is immortal — it can never die. For why do I fear death? ”

“ Ah! not sorrowful or repulsive is a death like hers, but all joy and peace and consolation. Surely precious in the sight of God and man is the death of God's saints.
Brethren, let us turn now to another death-bed; let us accompany the priest on his next sick call. A hurried call at midnight, a man dying, for God's sake hurry. And hasten he does, and as he goes along he asks for further particulars. The patient is a man of some consequence — one the world would by no means call a bad man or a bad Catholic, but whom the Church would by no means call a good one. ”

“ The light of the sun without its heat would be a positive curse, serving only, as it would, to reveal the horrors of a frozen world; and what heat, alone, would be without light may be judged from a concept of hell. St. Bernard, speaking of the coeducation of mind and heart, says: "To be brilliant is vain; to be ardent is little; but to be both brilliant and ardent is perfect." ”

“ It is at once a repository of history, art, science, and literature. The history, not of the rise and fall of this city or that — this nation or that, but of the building up and tearing down of the universe. Its preaching seeks to excite emotions more than human — divine. Philosophic speculation reaches to the highest stars, but the Scriptures lead us higher still, to the very throne of God. There we find, too, the sciences — medicine, dealing not merely with the ills of the body but with the wounds of the soul ”

“ Were Dives then every million years to miserably shed one tear over his loss, time would be when every lake, sea and ocean would be restored, and yet eternity and still an eternity beyond. Forever, never; never, forever.
Brethren, there is a hell, an eternal hell, a hell of inconceivable torments, prepared for the devil and his angels. How far away from, or how near to, the edge of that abyss stand we to-night? Heaven is never sure until you are safely there, but not so hell. Be assured that if to-night you find yourself in mortal sin ”