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Updated: June 29, 2025
These immense edifices were crowded with people of all classes and of every age. Nor in this did the Romans stand alone. Prayers and communions were offered up in every diocese of the world, supplicating Heaven for a continuation of the years which had been already so auspiciously granted to the venerable Pontiff. More than a thousand congratulatory messages were flashed along the telegraph lines.
Christianity recognises the existence of the higher classes of Intelligences under the general name of Angels, and teaches that they are "ministering spirits, sent forth to minister;" but what is their ministry, what the nature of their work, what their relationship to human beings, all that was part of the instruction given in the Lesser Mysteries, as the actual communication with them was enjoyed in the Greater, but in modern days these truths have sunk into the background, except the little that is taught in the Greek and Roman communions.
Strangely enough, as it may seem at first sight, they were the Separatists of the most intense and schismatic type then known, the least conciliatory in their relations to other churches and communions.
What it is to have pardon by deed, Mr. Greatheart, I suppose you know; wherefore, if you please, let us hear your discourse thereof." "So then, to speak to the question," said Greatheart. You have all heard about the "question-day" at Highland communions.
Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait, and eyes that do not wander, shyness of personalities, except in certain intimate communions, to be light in hand in conversation, to have ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without them, to belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself, to have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot afford to spoil it and get another like it, yet to preserve the harmonies throughout your person and dwelling: I should say that this was a fair capital of manners to begin with.
And it should be remembered that these two people could have no object in becoming Catholics, unless they received the benefits of the Sacraments of the Catholic Church; and as Catholics, they would believe that their confessions would be sacrileges, their absolutions invalid, and their communions the "eating and drinking their own damnation," unless they confessed their immoralities among their other sins, with a firm purpose never to commit them again.
Your nature runs to social communions, to visible movements, to outwardness, in short, more than to the central depths within.
In the very rare Mystics of non-Catholic communions, full ecstacy is scarcely, if at all, known or even recognised; an overpowering sense of the divine Presence is experienced, but it is a Presence outside the worshipper; it is accompanied with a deliberate surrender of the will to God, and a feeling on the part of the man that he becomes an instrument of the divine Will; this he carries with him into outer life, and, undirected by love and the illuminated reason, it often lands the half-developed Mystic into fanaticism and cruelty; no one who has read Oliver Cromwell's letters can deny that he was a Mystic, half-developed, and it is on him that Lord Rosebery founded his dictum of the formidable nature of the "practical Mystic"; the ever present sense of a divine Power behind himself gives such a man a power that ordinary men cannot successfully oppose; but this sense affords no moral basis, as, witness the massacre of Drogheda.
We must make our own communion as inclusive as we believe the Church to be, or we are not attempting to organize the Church of Christ, but to create some exclusive club or sect of Christians of a particular variety. We must study sympathetically the ways of other communions, and be prepared to borrow freely from them whatever approves itself as inspiring to Christian character and work.
The same crimes attach to every Church, and Rome's black list is only longer because her power is greater. Let us glance at Protestant communions. In Hungary, Giska, the Hussite, massacred and bruised the Beghards.
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