Page:Ninety-nine homilies of S. Thomas Aquinas upon the epistles and gospels for forty-nine Sundays of the Christian year (IA ninetyninehomili00thom).pdf/14

 is speaking in His Holy Sacraments, by the mouths of His Priests. Meet it is that the Eternal High Priest should speak in the Eternal Mysteries of His Church and Kingdom. "We need faith in these Mysteries, in order that we may hear His " Eternal Word."

2. Mental: Job iv. 12, "A thing [word, Vulg.] was secretly brought to me." Not that secret word which, as S. Gregory says, the heretics pretend to hear, who represent the Woman of Solomon saying ( Prov. ix. 17 ; Vulg. 7), " Stolen waters are sweeter, and bread eaten in secret is more pleasant." Not that secret word which would lift some above others, and which can only be obtained by secret means, but that communication of inward inspiration when the secret word is delivered to the minds of the Elect, of whom S. John says ( 1 S. John ii. 27 ), "His anointing teacheth you all things." This is that mental word which is received in the heart by the utterance of the Holy Ghost; secret, to be felt, not expressed in the noise of speech; it sounds secretly in the ear of the soul. Seek we to have our souls silent before God, freed from pleadings of all emotion, to catch the accents of the mental word. This mental word is the fruit of contemplation; and, by the chinks of such contemplation, God speaks to us, not in voice, but through mind; not fully developing Himself, yet revealing something of Himself to the mind of man. As we bore through the strata of earth to find that water which is silently circulating through its crust, so we, by contemplation, boring through the strata of the letter, find the ever-flowing grace which reveals itself as a mental word: the Saints hear this " by inspiration ( Ps. lxxxv. 8 ), ' I will hear what God the Lord will speak ' " (p. 18).

3. Vocal: S. Matt. iv. 4, " Man shall not live by bread