Let us pass in review before ourselves the ancient patriarchs and their deep awe of God; how they trembled with holy fear when God was nigh, and looked upon all things as unspeakably hallowed over which He had so much as cast His shadow.
Jacob, who was so familiar with Him that he wrestled with Him, and would not let Him go till He had blessed him, stands eminent among the Saints of God for the gift and grace of fear. The very ritual of the old synagogue was steeped in fear and reverence. David, the man after God's own heart, was ever praying for an increase of holy fear. Our Blessed Lord himself, says the Apostle, in the days of His flesh was heard because He feared. Mary and the Apostles were filled, as none others ever were, with the beauty, the tenderness, and the excess of this heavenly fear.
Hundreds of dying Saints, around whose flesh and souls still clung the fair white robe of their unforfeited baptismal whiteness,- trembled in every limb as they pondered the possible judgments of Infinite Purity, beneath whose judicial eye they were about to stand.
If they needed this degree of fear, what degree need we?
Why do frustrate vocations so abound? Whence come the multitude of unfinished saints, that lie all around us like the broken models of a sculptor's studio?
Whence so little perseverance in the devout life, and such wearying and untying even of the vows and promises whereby men have bound themselves to God?
Whence but from the lack of fear!
Father Faber (Orat.)
On the Blessed Sacrament.
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