Mgr. Louis de Ségur: Plain Talk about the Protestantism of Today [1868]

[Stone]

PART SECOND.


IV. The Church eminently possesses the Divine Proof.

— Miracles are the mark which excels all others with the evidence of its light. Our Lord appealed to this mark alone to prove to his apostles and disciples, and then to his adversaries, the mysteries of his Divinity; for he said to them, "If you do not believe my words, then believe my miracles; the miracles I perform give testimony of me."

The enemies of Jesus admitted the reality of those wonders, and were enraged at the impression they made. This man, they said, performs so many miracles, and the whole world goes after him! The great miracle of the Resurrection, well ascertained by the evidence of the senses of seeing and touching, alone convinced the obstinate incredulity of the apostles, and especially of St. Thomas, who threw himself at the feet of the triumphant Christ only after having put his fingers into the wounds of his hands and feet, and his hand into the ever open wound of his Sacred Heart.

A miracle, the act superhuman and essentially divine, is, then, the greatest proof of Jesus Christ. It is also the great proof of his Church.

Nor does the Church incessantly perform miracles by the virtue of Christ living in his saints, but she is, moreover, a living miracle, public and never ceasing, such an one as to surpass all scientific demonstrations. It is a miracle equally intelligible to the poor and the ignorant as to the learned and the philosopher. St. Augustine, from the very early ages of faith, proclaimed loudly, that "the establishment of Christianity in the world without great miracles would be in itself the greatest and most wonderful of all miracles."

The apostles and their disciples for three or four centuries raised the dead to life, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and the use of their limbs to the palsied. With only the sign of the cross they caused the idols to fall, and the temples of the gods to crumble into heaps of ruin. In spite of those ages of butchery, in spite of that fury of man which even miracles could not subdue, the Church, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman, came forth from the catacombs, after having triumphed over human opposition.

She was then herself a great miracle, which means a work evidently superhuman attesting the almighty power of God. And thus she has progressed through all ages, carrying on her brow the divine testimony, asserting her rights even as Christ asserted his, and having no need whatsoever of further proof for herself.

The divine fact of her existence, and especially of her sovereign pontificate, assumes in every age more gigantic proportions. St. Irenaeus, even at the close of the second century, quoted this durability of the Roman Church, in the midst of contradictions, as an irrefragable proof of her divine origin; but what would he say, were he to live in the nineteenth?

The Church is then a living miracle, and her very existence is, I repeat it, the great proof of her divinity. Let poor Protestant ministers write and fret as much as they please in the face of this divine fact. Like the scribes of old, in the presence of Jesus giving life to Lazarus, they are crushed by the superhuman power of this Catholic fact.