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 move and are” (Acts 17:28) is eternal Love; that “He hath first loved us” (1 John 4:10). That peace is the fruit of a supernatural love for God.

For no earthly power can shatter his peace who, like the merchant in the Gospel who gave away everything he had for one costly pearl, no longer seeks anything but Christ. He knows “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).