say respectively: " It is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they be freed from their sins," and "faith without works is dead;" and Our Lord's words: " This is My body," were by the Calvinists either changed so as to read: "This signifies My body," or else altogether rejected and expunged. Thus do they wrest the Scriptures to their own destruction, for, says St. Ambrose, " their punishment is that while they are erasing the words of truth from the Book of God, God is erasing their names from the Book of Life."
Brethren, ten days after the Ascension of Our Lord the Holy Ghost, as Christ had promised, descended on the Apostles. At the creation, the Spirit of God brooded over the waters and brought order out of chaos. During the intervening centuries, He, by virtue of His divinity, had filled with His presence the whole world. He had even vouchsafed at various times special manifestations of Himself, as when He appeared to the wandering Israelites as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, or hovered as a dove over Christ in the Jordan, or passed like a breath from Christ to His Apostles, or in mortal guise chanted a psalm before Eliseus, or instructed the centurion Cornelius, or in silence overshadowed the Virgin. But on that first Pentecost Day, His coming meant more than all these — He came then to renew in very truth the face of the earth, and to remain with men all days to the end of time. Since the Ascension the Apostles had been hiding in Jerusalem through fear of the Jews, and being all together,
