Page 15 - FLIPBOOK - Life of Saint Gerard Majella - Vassall-Phillips

LIFE OF SAINT GERARD MAJELLA

those who had gone to that land from which it is said that none shall
return to this. He had read the thoughts of men as one reads an open
book, and the future was ever present to His gaze.
This mysterious power over nature Our Lord did not take away
with Him altogether when He ascended to the Right Hand of God
His Father; He bequeathed it as a precious inheritance to the Holy
Church, which is His very Body. The Incarnation of the Word is a
still continuing, still energizing fact. Emmanuel, God with us, still
lives His Human Life in the Blessed Sacrament. In His last discourse,
before withdrawing His visible presence from our midst, He appealed
to His wonderful works in confirmation of His Divine Mission, and
declared that they should last in even more abundant measure after
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His departure hence. Thus upon those made one with Him by
sacramental union, does He from time to time bestow His gifts in
proportion to their capacity for receiving these supernatural
communications. To such Charismata the Apostle St. Paul refers in
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the first Epistle to the Corinthians. Some are purely esoteric, for the
sanctification of the individual; others are exoteric, for the edification
of his neighbour. With these last we are alone concerned at the
present moment. They have been with His Church from the
beginning, and shall never leave her, so long as the world may run its
course.
In vision the Prince of the Apostles learned that he should call
nothing common or unclean which God had cleansed. In vision the
Apostle of the Gentiles was converted to the Faith.” In vision the
Beloved Disciple witnessed “the Holy City Jerusalem coming down
out of Heaven from God,” and was permitted to behold the celestial
worship of the Eternal. In vision the first Martyr saw Jesus standing
at the Right Hand of God. In the New Testament we may read
already that which we shall find repeated in the lives of the Saints of
the after time. The Spirit of the Lord conveyed St. Philip the Deacon
mysteriously through the air to Azotus after he had baptized the
Ethiopian eunuch in the desert that is between Jerusalem and Gaza.
St. Peter was delivered miraculously by an Angel from Herod's prison
through the iron gate, which of itself opened to him and his heavenly

4 Vide St. John xiv. 12.

5 Cf. 1 Cor. xii. 10, and chapters xii. and xiv. passim.

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