DEEDS, NOT WORDS.

By their fruits you will know them. This is the touchstone of true piety and true love for God. Deeds, deeds, not words. We speak much of our faith, of our submission to the Church, of the rigor with which we fulfill its precepts, of the sacred fire that burns in our hearts, and if we consider our deeds and the fruits of that faith and love for God we boast of, we find nothing but misery and sterility.

We live, then, in a clumsy and disheartening delusion. A faith without works is a dead faith. Lips alone are not enough to profess the faith; a heart is needed to desire it and a will to practice it. Devotion that does not translate into works of love for God and of help and sacrifice for our neighbor is false devotion, or at least useless. Jesus Christ says it clearly and definitively: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Who will enter the heavenly mansions? Jesus himself gives the answer: “Those who do the will of God.” And let us not forget that the Lord’s will signifies the commandments of God and his Church and the works of mercy. Furthermore, we will fulfill God’s pleasing will by observing, receiving, and loving all that happens to us here below, whether it comes from human beings or from the order of nature, as emanating from the ineffable, yet always paternal, designs of divine Providence.

THE APOSTOLATE OF THE PRESS.

Year 1897