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Lastly, it also diminishes our readiness to keep peace with others. Our inner state itself being peaceless, any attack or insult on the part of others—be it even a merely putative one—will easily provoke us to a heated reaction and thus lure us into discord and conflict.

Nor can we, in such a condition, conduct a struggle for the kingdom of God except in a mode of rancorous irritability unworthy of the cause. For this great task in particular, so difficult to pursue without increasing the amount of strife in the world, inward peace constitutes a strict formal condition.

Therewith we return to our starting point. For our ability to preserve the spirit of peace and our love for peace in the midst of that struggle for the kingdom of God which in statu viae we have to wage as a warrior of Christ, there is (apart from the virtue of patience) no precondition equal in importance to’ this one: that we ourselves possess true inward peace and keep it intact throughout the struggle.

Inner peace is possible only for those who have given themselves unconditionally to Christ

To be sure, the significance of true inward peace is not limited to its being a condition for outward peace. It constitutes a high good in itself. Indeed, it is so intimately linked to our transformation in Christ that it cannot, in the midst of all the threats to it, fully and sustainedly unfold except in such as have given over their souls to Christ.

This can be affirmed in reference to each single aspect of inward peace as analyzed in the foregoing pages. In him alone who really and truly prefers nothing to Christ; whose life is shaped and remodelled by a total surrender to Christ; who follows Christ relictis omnibus (“leaving everything behind”); who is undivided and unhampered by any inward resistance in belonging with all his soul and will to God (whose property, to be sure, we all are in metaphysical fact)—in him alone who is thus turned towards God and incorporated in Christ may the inexpressible sweetness of the peace of Christ, which in St. Paul’s words “surpasseth all understanding” (Phil. 4:7), spread out in all its wealth, undisturbed by any accidental agents of disorder.

He alone who has established in his heart the words of the Lord, “Seek first the kingdom of God” and who no longer hungers and thirsts for anything but justice (that is, ultimately, Christ), possesses that supreme freedom which permeates his soul with true inward peace.

True peace only blossoms out of a life entirely rooted in Christ and illumined by the lumen Christi; of the experience of having tasted the untellable sweetness of Him whom the holy Church thus glorifies in her chant—

Jesu dulcis memoria

dans vera cordis gaudia,

sed super mel et omnia

ejus dulcis præsentia.

Jesus, the very thought of Thee

With sweetness fills the breast;

But sweeter far Thy face to see,

And in Thy presence rest.

Of that supernatural inward harmony, which nothing can destroy any more, he alone partakes whose heart has been wounded by Jesus and molten in His love; who is drunk with the sweetness of His love, and able to sing with the Church—

Nil canitur suavius,

nil auditur jucundius,

nil cogitatur dulcius

quam Jesus, Dei Filius.

No voice can sing, no heart can frame,

Nor can the memory find,

A sweeter sound than Jesus’ Name,

The Savior of mankind.

It is the Holy Spirit—“rest for the weary, refreshment for the pining, solace in the midst of woe” (Pentecost Sequence)—who imparts to the soul an imperturbable poise and a serene calm, the character of habitare secum, the soaring lightness of a full inner freedom.

He, whom the Church calls “light of the heart, sweet guest of the soul,” fills us with that supernatural light which takes away the poison of enmity, dispels the gloom of depression, and dissolves the spasm of agitation. The consummate peace of the “redeemed,” the peace of those whom the blood of the Lamb has reconciled to God, is borne up by the consciousness that He “in whom we live and