in the third place, the healing of one blind man, nay, the healing of a thousand such is, in itself, of only temporal concern, and of no moment when faced with the long eternity which is to come. But, on the other hand, this incident is great. Great I call it, because, in the first place, the wisdom of the Church selects it for our thought to-day; because, in the second place, it so wonderfully glorifies the great mercy of Jesus, which did not despise even the beggar of the road; because, in the third place, it brings home to my mind a plain lesson very appropriate for our present times. And that lesson, following herein the wise guidance of the Fathers of the Church, I proceed to put before you.

The blind beggar, then, is a type of those Christian men whose blindness is of the soul. Now of such there are many classes. There is, first of all, the class of those who, being in sin, defer their reform from day to day, with a hazy, shapeless resolve of repenting before the last night comes. And their blindness consists in this precisely, that they do not see how the night's coming may be sudden and unexpected; do not see that when their day is over and they make trial of repentance, strength may be wanting and the trial may be vain; do not see that, if they go on mocking the Lord, the Lord may chance to turn the tables on them, may mock at their destruction, and laugh when that comes which they fear.

And there is, secondly, the class of those who seek in pleasure of the sense of satisfaction for the long

ings of the soul, who expect that merriness of body will bring with it a corresponding merriness of mind. These are your men and women who look for heaven in a whiskey-shop; whose end is destruction, and whose God is their-Well! the Holy Ghost used the word long ago, but these are polite times, and to use the word now would be an impropriety. The people of whom I speak are pleasant people. They harm no one but themselves, as our wise men often tell us. There is a God in heaven and a Devil in hell— but they see neither with their dull and drunken eyes. They have immortal souls, we must suppose; are not quite brutes we must, somehow, acknowledge; but then, you never see a sign of soul in their faces, and you feel often inclined to suspect that, if they were ever really human at all, their humanity was drowned, dead, or burnt out of them by whiskey, long ago. And, still they live-after a sort; take their glasses of happiness and pints of comfort at every convenient opportunity, seeing not, poor, blind creatures! that they are quenching their thirst with waters of bitterness, that they are feeding themselves with the husks of swine, and that, even had they all the means of procuring pleasure which were possessed by Solomon, and that, even if they used these means as lavishly as Solomon used them, they would have to say in the end what Solomon said himself, that vanity of vanities and bitterness of spirit filled them all.

And there is, thirdly, the class of those whom God's finger has deigned to touch with some earthly suffer

ing, with poverty, or bereavement, or disappointment, or dishonour, and who, forgetting that God chastens whom He loves, shut themselves up in their sorrow, and refuse to think of the heaven behind the clouds. Their trust in God is gone; they are blinded by their own tears. After the Man of Sorrows God's elect are fashioned, and neither tribulation nor persecution, nor famine, nor the sword can separate God's lovers from God's great love. But they forget it all. They blind their hearts to Him whose heart is ever watching, and put themselves down as desolate while the hairs of their heads are numbered, and without God's will not even a sparrow dies.

But, a fourth class of blind men there is, to which just now, I direct special attention. It is a much larger class than any of the three already mentioned. It extends to all ranks and conditions of Christian men. On its lists are many who are, as the phrase goes, good Catholics, and exact enough in Catholic practices, who read many prayers, listen to many sermons, attend at many Masses, and, if they happen to be wealthy, give, now and then, generous sums in public and private charity. Now, their blindness, though very observable, is difficult to determine by a name. For my present purpose it will be enough if you think of it under any title which expresses a want of earnestness in the service of the Lord. And since I regard this same want of earnestness as the very worst description of spiritual blindness, and since I find it the characteristic disease of these times, it is of it alone that I shall speak to-day.

Looking out then on the Catholics of the present I find the lives of most sickening under this broad central taint, that they are not in earnest, have no living, throbbing fervour, no strong solemn seriousness in their religion. This life is or should be a warfare, but I cannot find that they do much fighting for God. The road to heaven is a narrow road and a stony, but they travel by a different kind of way. The kingdom of heaven is won by the violent alone, but if a languid and listless and sickly piety does not take it, for them it may stand uncaptured for ever. Look at them in their best when, of a Sunday, they assemble in the Lord's house for the express purpose of adoration! Look at them, I say, and behold what an adoration the Lord is getting! Some of the worshippers have a very visible tendency to forget that God's house is no house for sleeping: other some are wakeful enough, but it is only to their neighbours' dress and appearance; many have open prayer books in their hands and read them too-not that they care to pray, but because "the dull mechanic exercise" of spelling through the printed words is a capital method of killing time; while on the faces of all (or nearly all, for, thank God there some exceptions) is plainly written that their owners look upon the Mass as a thing to be, of course, got through patiently, but as, on the whole, a dreary, tiresome, disagreeable thing. Follow them from the place of worship and look upon their daily lives. The Saints gashed their bodies and bore, by preference, the hun

ger and the cold, but they, if they can, fare richly and are clad in the finest linen. Christ, the sinless, prayed with many groanings, led a perpetually broken and embittered life for three and thirty years, but they, the sinful, after all His warning, and all His love, forget, during the long day, that they are His creatures in His world, or, if they remember it, it is at best but to patter out a few words of prayer that probably had no meaning for their own minds, and certainly have small meaning for the mind of God!

Yet are they satisfied with this life of theirs, and God, they think, is satisfied with it too. They are doing a good deal in His service, very much more than He gets done elsewhere. They are not guilty

of

any of the grosser or meaner, or more notorious crimes, like the Publican of the Porch. They are not robbers, nor adulterers, nor defrauders of the poor. If they do happen to commit a sin it is of the serener and more secret sort; they glide into it quietly too, and give no scandal. When their guilty hour is over they make a most placid confession of it all, and if need be, read any number of psalms and litanies as penance for the past transgression. And then their accounts with God are squared. Thus do they go on from year to year; and from year to year the languor and the listlessness increase, settle and deepen down in heaviest layers about their souls, shutting these souls out surely from the influences of God. No strong fiery earnestness, no struggle to speak out from the heart-the only speech God wants or cares