Page 16 - FLIPBOOK - Life of Saint Gerard Majella - Vassall-Phillips

O. R. VASSALL-PHILLIPS

guide. Already he had healed Eneas and raised Tabitha from the
dead. The sick had been cured even by his passing shadow, as
afterwards they were healed through “the handkerchiefs and aprons
brought from the body” of his brother-Apostle, the great St. Paul,
who himself tells us that he was rapt in ecstasy and “caught up to the
third Heaven; whether in the body or out of the body” he knew not.
God alone knew the mystery.
Visions, ecstasies, the gift of tongues, the reading of hearts, the
raising of the dead to life, miracles of all kinds we find in abundance
in the Apostolic Church. Nor did they cease with the days of the
Apostles. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and for ever, and
as is the Bridegroom, so is His Bride, the Holy Church, clothed with
His Mantle as with a raiment of beauty, endowed with gifts from on
high. Men may know her in every age not merely by her likeness to
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the divine original but by her oneness with Him. All things else may
change. The Church of the Immutable changeth not. The spiritual
children of the Apostles knew that they were heirs to the Apostolic
gifts.
St. Irenseus, in the second century, declared that there were then
in the Church those who foresaw the future unfolded before their
gaze. Origen proclaimed as a matter of personal knowledge, to the
truth of which he called God to witness, that many Pagans had
become Christians in consequence of the visions that they had
received. This great man tells us that the Holy Ghost completely
changed the hearts and minds of those early converts to the Faith, so
that — at once instructed and fortified by the Divine
communications, which had been bestowed upon them, sometimes
in sleep, sometimes during their waking hours — they were ready to
die for a doctrine which until then they had held in abhorrence.
But it was especially amongst the anchorites of the third century,
that we find this Mystic Life most highly developed. In the lives of
the Fathers of the Desert we see man by dint of contemplation and
continual penance regaining his long-lost sovereignty, and wielding

6 It is the teaching of Our Lord that husband and wife are one with a most real
unity. But we know from St. Paul, that the union effected on earth by the holy
Sacrament of Matrimony is but a figure of the mystic union between the Word
Incarnate and the Church, His spotless spouse.

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