Gerard Serafin
posted a quote yesterday from Venerable John Henry Newman's last sermon as an Anglican, The Parting of Friends . While the paragraphs quoted are both beautiful and sad , I always found the final paragraph the most moving.
"And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may know God's will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfil it."
It took the speaker two more years of anguish, during which he prayed, fasted, and eventually wrote himself out of his theological difficulties in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, before he found spiritual peace in the Catholic Church. And his life as a Catholic, while utterly satisfying from a spiritual perspective, was to be filled with difficulties and frustrations, many of them caused not by those outside the Catholic Church, but, alas, some within her fold-including some whom he himself had helped to lead home.
posted a quote yesterday from Venerable John Henry Newman's last sermon as an Anglican, The Parting of Friends . While the paragraphs quoted are both beautiful and sad , I always found the final paragraph the most moving.
"And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may know God's will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfil it."
It took the speaker two more years of anguish, during which he prayed, fasted, and eventually wrote himself out of his theological difficulties in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, before he found spiritual peace in the Catholic Church. And his life as a Catholic, while utterly satisfying from a spiritual perspective, was to be filled with difficulties and frustrations, many of them caused not by those outside the Catholic Church, but, alas, some within her fold-including some whom he himself had helped to lead home.
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