From Sermons of the Cure of Ars (Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney), The Neumann Press, 1995 reprint of 1901 edition, excerpt from “First Sunday After Epiphany.”
“Man, who is a creature composed of a body and a soul, requires perceptible objects to represent to him the unseen, or, in other words, he needs sacred pictures. From the visible our human thoughts rise up to the invisible; by that which is visible we are reminded of that which is invisible; by the natural of the supernatural. That is why, from the very earliest ages, Christians made pictures of the Divine Saviour, of the Mother of God, and of the angels; in some instances they even made pictures of the doctrines of faiths, such as the doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament. These visible pictures were the ladder on which their mind and heart ascended to the invisible God and to the truths which He had revealed to them. After they had adorned their places of Divine worship with religious pictures of this kind, they did the same in their dwellings. To decorate the houses with religious pictures is a custom as old as Christianity itself, for the true Christian has always considered the home as nothing less than a Temple of God
“I know of a certain place, dear Christians, where, in the midst of fields and meadows, there stands on an eminence a newly built dwelling-house, which almost resembles a lordly manor. On this spot there stood formerly an old house, over the threshold of which was fastened a large crucifix. When the parents of the present owner died, and he got married, he had the old building torn down and built a new one. There were people who said to him: ‘You are surely not going to take that crucifix from the old house and put it up over the door of the new house-it wouldn’t look well at all.’
“What answer did the man make?
“‘Under the sign of this crucifix my parents lived and worked, and God blessed them, for they became well-to-do, and I shall do just the same with my family. We shall live and work under the sign of the Cross, so that the blessing of God, which we enjoyed in the old house, may also fall upon the new one.’
“And the blessing of God will flow down over every house where people live and work under the sign of the Cross. For all the members of the family know that when they look upon the crucifix in the right way, it teaches them to pray to God, to have confidence in God in times of trouble; preserves them from haughtiness in times of good fortune; teaches them, not only to care for temporal things, but also for those which are eternal; and the family which understands this language of the Cross, and which orders its life according to the language of the Cross, such a family converts its house into a church and is blessed by God.” (pp. 78-79)
