External Religion PDF Download

Father Tyrrell has an admirable way of lighting up those avenues into the spiritual life which are, as a rule, overshadowed by traditional and popular misconceptions not only of the facts of Christianity, but also of the methods by which we are to arrive at truth. In the present volume, which comprises a series of lectures originally delivered to the Catholic undergraduates at Oxford during the Lent Term of 1899, we are led to view the Incarnation as God's design to restore faith through sense, the invisible through the visible, the spirit through the flesh, thus turning that in which manhood had suffered injury into an antidote. In the next place we are shown how God's design to restore faith developed and extended in Catholicity, which in its outward and inward aspect reflects and reproduces the Incarnation. The author then takes up the two aspects, shows how either of them may be exaggerated and misapprehended, thus causing a twofold error, namely, that of persons who, despising the external part of Christianity, hold that the internal is all-sufficient; and again the error of those who are too satisfied with external religion; "who forget that outward dogmas, rites, and practices are but means to interior life, which is the principal end." Going at this point into greater detail, the author points out how an exaggerated view of the importance of external religion shows itself in the misuse of those outward helps "which are designed not to save us any labor we are capable of, but to get more labor out of us." In like manner he shows how the help by which God secures indefectibility to the visible Church might in certain cases be misused as an excuse for listless apathy. And by means of these external helps, which are intended to be instrumental merely for the awakening and fostering of the inner life of faith in the individual, the soul reaches God and understands Him and acts in harmony with His designs. Father Tyrrell's method of demonstration is devoid of all that suggests polemics or even argument. It is simply exposition, and the illustrations are so apt, so beautiful that we are easily drawn into the way of seeing the Truth. Wisdom says: "Venite filii, audite me, timorem Domini docebo vos." So, too, in fact says our author. The knowledge of God's Truth and of His will in our regard is not so much the result of arguing, reasoning, or criticizing, as rather that of a simple action of the will determining the attitude of the soul in the way of harmony with God. That attitude spontaneously invites attraction so that God's action mingles with ours, and we get to know Him intimately and experimentally, and to talk with Him as a friend to a friend. --American Ecclesiastical Review, Volume 21