'The Wedding Garment' and supernatural charity
The wedding garment is not merely virtue in general, but that charity which unites man to God and his Church.
The wedding garment is not merely virtue in general, but that charity which unites man to God and his Church.
Editor’s Notes
How the soul must be inwardly clothed to enter the heavenly feast.
That no one with unrepented sin or in schism can wear the wedding garment.
Why charity alone binds together all the virtues and unmasks hidden faults.
He shows us that true union with Christ requires both interior grace and ecclesial fidelity.
For more context on this chapter, see Part I.
The Wedding of the King’s Son
Passiontide, Part I
Chapter VI
St. Matt. xxii. 1-14; Story of the Gospels, § 137.
Burns and Oates, London, 1886.
(Read at Holy Mass on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost)
Other meanings
If the Wedding Supper is considered as the Heavenly Banquet to which Christians hope to come after death, it is of course natural to ask what is meant by the wedding garment which, as we are here taught, is so indispensable.
On this point there may be numberless opinions. It is certain, however, that he who enters, or thinks of entering Heaven with one sin on his conscience unrepented, is thereby unfit for the presence of God. There are many things indeed which, as our faith teaches us, are essential qualifications for the enjoyment of that presence. ‘Without faith no man can please God. He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved.’
But it would be contrary to Scripture and the Church to think that a man might be saved by faith if he is a breaker of the law in one single point, unless he has duly repented of the sin according to that law. Alas! in how many thousand ways may that law be violated, and so men make themselves guilty of violating the whole! The trials and temptations of men are various, and just as various are the ways in which they may present themselves at the Judgment Day without the wedding garment here spoken of—some for rejecting articles of the faith, some for breaking Unity, some for offences against the natural law, some for breaches of the Commandments of the Church.
The malice of mortal sin may be found wherever there is a precept knowingly violated. There are sins of thought, sins of word, sins of deed, sins of omission, sins occasioned in others, or the sins of others participated in. Any one of these various classes may cause the stain on the soul which presents it to the eye of the Judge without its wedding garment. Nay, even where there is no mortal sin unrepented, there may be venial sins, or sins unexpiated, and the like, which must be atoned for in Purgatory, and till the soul is entirely freed from all these it cannot have on its wedding garment.
The ‘wedding garment’ not always the same
Again, it may fairly be supposed that the wedding garment would not always be the same, it might be of one kind and of one splendour in the case of the great courtiers or officials, and of another in that of private guests. But in all it would mean something that was quite in keeping with the occasion and the majesty of the Sovereign.
It would be in all cases something festive, joyous, gay, representing the ineffable happiness of a soul at peace with God, and on this account we might almost interpret it of Christian joyousness, which cannot co-exist in the soul which has any hidden sin, any discontent, any want of charity, and lack of filial love towards God, any gnawing anxiety, or gloom, or secret aversion from its circumstances or its surroundings.
Such a happy, joyous disposition in life is truly a grace by itself, and the result of a combination of graces and virtues, and the presence in the soul of any conscious fault, unretracted, would kill it. Such is notably the temper of the innocent, happy, pure souls who give themselves to the service of God in those austere religious orders which do so much for His glory and the good of the Church by silent lives of prayer and good works, and the opposite tempers of gloom and constraint, so unlike the ‘wedding garment,’ is often a sign that there is some mischief working, as St. Teresa said she was more afraid of a melancholy nun than of a hundred devils.
‘Putting on Christ’
Nor must we ever forget in our thoughts on this part of the parable how fond the writers of the New Testament are, and especially St. Paul, of the image of putting on our Lord, putting on the new man and putting off the old, and which is sometimes modified as when we are told to put on the whole armour, or panoply, of God, and which is carried out by St. Paul in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, in his famous passage about the building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in Heaven, with which we are to be ‘clothed upon’ hereafter, ‘that that which is mortal may be swallowed up by life.’1
The Apostles do not quote the actual words of our Lord in their Epistles, but their minds are full of the things He has spoken, and we can trace in their language and their thoughts the influence of the sayings which they remembered. Perhaps the ‘wedding garment’ may have been a favourite thought of theirs, for it would represent in a simple image the whole array of the graces in which Christians must be apparelled, as well as the perfect character of their Master, Whom they were to strive to imitate so perfectly that their lives might represent Him, and reproduce Him, as it were, before the eyes of those whom they were to teach.
The virtues that form the character of our Lord are so much linked one with the other, that it is not easy to imagine that one can exist perfectly in a soul without at least the rudiments and elements of others. And any one great and obstinate fault in the soul, consciously entertained and clung to, is enough to impair other virtues besides that one to which it is directly contrary.
Still, it is true that different men, from their character, their antecedents, and the circumstances and the position in which they find themselves, find it less easy to practice one virtue than another, and in this way there may come to be grave faults against one virtue, while at the same time the soul may be even conspicuous for some others. Sensuality is essentially cruel, yet sensual men are often capable of acts of kindness and generosity. Angry men may be mortified in various ways, and temperate men may be selfish in their demeanour to others.
The one virtue which is called the ‘bond of perfection’ by St. Paul, which seems to keep all the other virtues together, and to be inconsistent with any great fault, is charity.
Temper of schism
But by this must be meant the supernatural charity, the love of God and of man for His sake, not mere humanity, kindness, generosity, sympathy for suffering, and the like. It must be the charity of which St. Augustine speaks when he says, ‘No man can have the charity of God, who does not love the unity of the Church,’ for as the same Saint says elsewhere, ‘Men can have everything else outside the pale of unity, but they cannot have salvation.’
This is often the test which distinguishes false virtue from true. Some men appear to have every kind of grace, till a sour cloud almost of malignity comes over them, when they are reminded of the duty of unity, and the sin of schism. Certainly, there are thousands of schismatics who think themselves members of the one Church, the living, actual existence is as much an article of the Christian Creed as is the unity of God or the Divinity of our Lord, and there can be nothing sour or malignant about such souls while they remain in their ignorance.
But when anything touches a half-hidden fault of which the soul is not unconscious, the angry discomfort which it feels is meant by the mercy of God to arouse it to a sense of its position, to make it look around, and nerve itself up to the sacrifice which charity may entail on it, and in many such souls the words of the Apostle come true, ‘If in anything ye be otherwise minded, this also will God reveal unto you.’2
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2 Cor. v.
Philipp. iii, 15.
Thanks! Charity above all virtues. Blessings!