When I began I intended to say something of the good boys and girls; while we have been engaged with father and mother the children have passed by. Perhaps we shall overtake them next Sunday.
_Use your endeavor to walk honestly towards them that are without._ 1 Thessalonians iv. 11.
The holiness of the church, my dear brethren, is for us who belong to her a thing so evident and clear that we can no more think it necessary to prove it than we can think it necessary to prove that the sun shines in the heavens. The practical and imperative way in which the church enforces holiness of life on each and every one of us is something with which we are so familiar that no shadow of doubt can enter into our minds as to its necessity. The means of grace which she offers to us, and of which she even requires us to make use, the sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord himself which she gives us, the penances she imposes upon us by way of fasting and abstinence, the warnings which she is ever giving us of the condemnation which will fall upon impenitent sinners, these and ten thousand other things make the sanctity of the church so well known that it is not so much an article of faith as a thing which we see with our own eyes and which falls under our own experience.
But there are those who are without these advantages. There are many around us, our near neighbors and friends, who are outside the church, not through their own fault, but by birth and education. These are not in possession of those means of knowing the church and her sanctity of which we are possessed; and in order to have this knowledge they depend to a very large extent upon ourselves. { 106} I wish this morning to call your attention to the responsibility which rests upon us on this account, and to one or two practical ways in which we are accountable to God for what that responsibility involves.
Now, that we lie under this responsibility is a truth not very hard to see. For, as I have said, those outside the church are ignorant of the doctrine and practices of the church. From their earliest years they have had utterly false and erroneous information given them about the church, an information so false and erroneous that they do not think it necessary or even right to make inquiries. How, then, are they to have the truth brought home to them? What way is there of spreading the light? Almost the only way, and certainly a way so necessary that without it all others are futile and vain, is that those who are called Catholics should lead such lives as the church requires of them. Now, if we do not do this we are of course responsible to God, as every man, be he Catholic or be he Protestant, is responsible to God for his whole life and every action in it. But more than that, a special responsibility in this time and in this country lies at the door of every Catholic man and every Catholic woman. Every Catholic man and woman who does not lead a good life is a stumbling-block and a rock of offence standing in the way and preventing many poor souls from seeing and embracing that truth which is necessary for their salvation; and those Catholics whose way of living forms such a stumbling-block will have to give a strict account to God not merely for their own sins and for themselves, but also for the souls of others whom they have ruined.