Why does God tolerate evil and heresy?
Why does God tolerate evil and heresy?
And why does the Church sometimes refrain from condemning such evils too? Fr Coleridge explains the Gospel for the end of Pentecostide and the 5th Sunday after Epiphanytide.
In this chapter, Fr Coleridge tells us…
Why God tolerates evil, and how he deals with it
How the existence of heresies can be good for the Church
How God, the Church and Society deal with heresy and heretics.
Most of all, he shows us…
This is the second half of Fr Coleridge’s commentary on this passage. Here is the first:
The Parable of the Cockle amid the Wheat
From
The Training of the Apostles Vol. III
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1884, Ch. IX, pp 159-69
St. Matt. xiii. 24–28, 36–53
Story of the Gospels, § 59-62
Sung at the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany and in one of the “spare” Sundays before Advent.
Why do you think the Church uses this event for this part of the liturgical year? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Evil and the Kingdom of God
The enemy of God and man will not be excluded from making his malignant attempts on the fair field of the Church, as he was not prevented from assailing the beautiful and innocent creation of God when man was first made.
The evil which sin has introduced into man remains in the Kingdom of God as long as the time of probation lasts, that is, the conflict of the flesh and the spirit is to go on even in regenerate man, although immense forces of grace have been supplied to him for his easy victory in the conflict. And so neither is the activity of the evil spirits fettered or put an end to, though men are wonderfully stronger for resistance against these deadly enemies than they were before the coming of our Lord.
As a consequence of these two truths, the field of the world in which the good seed has been sown is to be still what it always was, a field in which good and evil grow up side by side, nor is there to be any part of it in which the work of the evil one is not to be rewarded by a kind of miserable success of its own.
How will God deal with it?
But then, the question rises up—it must certainly have risen up in the minds of the angels as they watched the progress of the Gospel Kingdom—how will God deal with the evil shoots which have covered so large a space on this field which He has sown and is to be continually sowing?
When evil sprang up in Heaven, God did not tolerate it. The evil shoots were uprooted at once and cast away. Even in the history of His dealings with man, the principle of swift vengeance and extermination has not unfrequently been followed.
Once the whole race of man was destroyed, except eight persons, and there had been other instances of summary chastisements, only less signal than that.
What is to be the law of God’s action in the government of His Church, or of the world into which He has sent forth His Church?
The rest of this commentary is for members. Here is the first half again:
Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader:
Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel
His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible
He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages.
If more Catholics knew about works like Fr Coleridge’s, then other works based on dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.
But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.
Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.