Devotion to the ChurchDivine words need no emphasis. They are the words of the Eternal. There is nothing emphatic in eternity. Yet who has not felt, when he has been studying the pages of the Gospel, the condescension to his own sluggish or inattentive soul which is implied by our Lord's occasional asseveration of the truth of His own words? Amen, Amen, I say to you. There is a gentle positiveness about His characteristic phrase, a loving anxiety to provoke attention, which fill us with devotion. His words need no emphasis. It is needed by our dullness to spiritual things; they that speak to the deaf must speak, not loudly, but articulately. Thus it is for our sakes that our gracious Lord vouchsafes sometimes to articulate His saving words.But there are cases in which He still further, and in a more peculiar way, rouses our attention. This happens when His teaching is singular, when it stands apart from the rest of His teaching, and, to our want of spiritual discernment, is unlike it. There are some words in the Gospel, which seem to come from another rather than from Him, as if they belonged to some other dispensation. They startle us by their singularity and the sort of defiance they give to our expectations. They are so unlike Him that we feel they must be more than usually characteristic of Him, more than commonly expressive of Him. They lead us down into deeper depths of His Sacred Heart. They enable us to master more of His Divine Spirit. We never get used to them. The freshness of their novelty never wears off. This is because they are divine, because they are His. One of these words we are now to consider, to consider it not in a disputatious, but rather a suggestive way, for our guidance and our warning. It is a word which we need not press to all its conclusions. It is better not. But our Lord said it. Let us hear Him say it, and let us pray the Divine Person, whose Feast of Pentecost we are this day celebrating, to let it lodge in our hearts such grave suggestions, such saving admonitions, as may be practical to the salvation of our souls.There was a day on earth when the Incarnate Word lifted up His voice, and uttered these tremendous words, (Matt. 12:32), "Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but he that shall speak against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in the world to come."