Dudleian Lecture

Rt. Rev. Bishop John J. Keane, rector of the Catholic University of America at Washington, lectured in Appleton Chapel last evening on the subject of the revelation of God through Jesus Christ and His Apostles. He took for his theme "God has Spoken to Us."

In all history man has been asking himself and the universe the vital usetions "What am I? " "Where am I to go after death?" Man is not so constituted that he cannot in any wise answer these questiens, but God has ordained that he shall be able to answer them only by divine revelation.

In Semitic and Gentile traditions there are periods of low aspirations and moral degeneracy, in which we usually find men arising who are reformers of, and superior to, the masses around them. They were eloquent teachers but in all of them we see mere gropers after the divine, until the greatest Prophet of all comes, Jesus Christ. The wise reformers who came before him proclaimed the nearer and nearer approach of the Great Light. At last it came, and the blackness of death was illuminated. Buddha taught a brotherhood and equality but only in misery; Christ teaches an equality in the inheritance of Divine Love. Into His life Christ condensed the Light which was to guide mortals forever; from the Cross he gave the Light which brings the complete victory over death which Plato and Socrates in their wildest dreams had never conceived of. Then He sends His Apostles to carry His gift to the world. They go first to Asia, then to Egypt, then to Greece, and lastly to Rome. The colossus that Pagan teachers had labored so long to build was thrown down at the first attack of barbarian invasion. The debris was scattered over the world and on it the seeds of the new religion were strewn, took root and flourished. In fine, all history is a puzzle of which Christ is the Great Solution. He alone was able to give true civilization. He alone can maintain it.