By the grace of God, my dear brethren, we will not incur that condemnation. We are true and faithful members of that Holy Catholic Church which was founded on the day of Pentecost. Although remote in the distance of space from the See of Peter, the Holy Roman Church, we acknowledge with pride and joy that the Mother and Mistress of Churches is the Mother and Mistress of the Church of this Western world. {140} We are the loyal and devoted children of our Holy Father, Pius IX. His rights we will sustain while life shall last. Our prayers shall never cease to ascend to heaven for his success and triumph; our generous contributions to his temporal necessities shall never fail him. We rely on the unfailing word and almighty power of our Lord Jesus Christ to give victory and triumph to the cause of His crowned and anointed Vicar and of His Holy Church; and we will, therefore, do our duty zealously and faithfully to promote that victory, that we may share in its glory and reward. --------------------- {141} The Sermon IX. The Living God. (For Trinity Sunday.) Jer. x. 10. "__The Lord is the true God: He is the living God__." To-day the Church makes a solemn profession of faith in the mystery of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. It is true this is a profound, inscrutable mystery, which we could never have discovered, and which, even now that it is revealed, we cannot fully grasp with our reason; but it is not so absolutely impenetrable that we may not reason about it in so far as to see a fitness in it, and to recognize its truth and conclude its necessity from its perfect harmony with the other mysteries of the Christian faith. We can see how the whole system of religion, which shows us God as the Creator of the universe, and the Redeemer and glorifier of the human race, finds its fittest sanction and most reasonable explanation in its truth; while the rejection of it would leave the mind oppressed and bewildered with a thousand difficulties impossible of solution, and of such a nature as to lead us to abandon the belief in God as a living personal Being, and seek for their explanation in some theory of Pantheism or Polytheism, the first of which denies the personality, and the second the unity, of God. {142} If I needed an apology for endeavoring to show the reasonableness of this doctrine, it would be that in our day it is famentably true that the great body of so-called Christians, who have cast off the primary authority of revealed truth, and set up the destructive theory of private judgment in its stead, are fast losing their faith in this necessary truth of Christianity, and falling away into Rationalism and Infidelity. It becomes the Christian preacher, therefore, to raise his voice in defence of this fundamental doctrine of Christianity. Christianity is true only because the Trinity is true. Abandon that, and belief in Christ the incarnate Son of God is impossible.