The CREATOR and the CREATURE
By Fr. Frederick William Faber

TO

ST. MATTHEW,
THE APOSTLE AND EVANGELIST OF THE INCARNATE WORD,
THE PATTERN OF OBEDIENCE TO DIVINE VOCATIONS,
THE MODEL OF PROMPT SUBMISSION TO HOLY INSPIRATIONS,
THE TEACHER AND THE EXAMPLE OF CORRESPONDENCE TO GRACE,

WHO LEFT ALL FOR GOD,
SELF AND THE WORLD AND WEALTH,

AT GOD’S ONE WORD,
WITHOUT QUESTION, WITHOUT RESERVE. WITHOUT DELAY,

TO BE FOR EVER IN THE CHURCH

THE DOCTOR, THE PROPHET, AND THE PATRON,
THE COMFORT AND THE JUSTIFICATION,

OF THOSE WHO FOLLOW HEAVENLY CALLS IN THE WORLD’S DESPITE.
AND WHO GIVE THEMSELVES IN LOVE.
AS HE GAVE HIMSELF.

WITHOUT LIMIT OR CONDITION,

AS CREATURES TO THEIR CREATOR

CONTENTS
PREFACE BY RONALD CHAPMAN
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

BOOK I

THE CASE STATED BETWEEN THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE
CHAPTER
I. A new fashion of an old sin
II. What it is to be a Creature
III. What it is to have a Creator

BOOK II
THE DIFFICULTIES OF CREATIVE LOVE
CHAPTER
I. Why God wishes us to love Him
II. Why God loves Us
III. Our means of loving God
IV. Our actual love of God
V. In what ways God repays our Love

BOOK III
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED

CHAPTER
I. The easiness of Salvation
II. The great mass of believers
III. The World
IV. Our own God

PREFACE

“LET US sit down upon the top of this fair hill. The clear sunshine and the bright air flow into us in streams of life
and gladness, while our thoughts are lifted up to God, and our hearts quietly expand to love. Beneath us is that

beautiful rolling plain with its dark masses of summer foliage sleeping in the sun for miles and miles away, in the
varying shades of blue and green, according to the distance or the clouds. There at our feet, on the other side, is the
gigantic city, gleaming with an ivory whiteness beneath its uplifted but perpetual canopy of smoke. The villa-spotted
hills beyond it, its almost countless spires, its one huge many-steepled palace . . . and its squares of crowded

shipping—it all lies below us in the peculiar sunshine of its own misty magnificence. There, in every variety of joy
and misery, of elevation and depression, three million souls are working out their complicated destinies. Close

around us the air is filled with the songs of rejoicing birds, or the pleased hum of the insects that are drinking the

sunbeams, and blowing their tiny trumpets as they weave and unweave their mazy dance. The flowers breathe
sweetly, and the leaves of the glossy shrubs are spotted with bright creatures in painted surcoats or gilded panoply,

while the blue dome above seems both taller and bluer than common, and is ringing with the loud peals of the
unseen larks, as the steeples of the city ring for the nation’s victory. Far off from the river flat comes the booming of
the cannon, and here, all unstartled, round and round the pond, a fleet of young perch are sailing in the sun, slowly

and undistuibedly as if they had a very' grave enjoyment of their little lives. What a mingled scene it is of God and

man! And all so bright, so beautiful, so diversified, so calm, opening out such fountains of deep reflection, and
simple-hearted gratitude to our Heavenly Father.”
Such was the background—“the mingled scene” of God, man, and nature—against winch Faber loved to
write.
The Creator and the Creature, published in 1858—the victory referred to in the previous passage was the

end of the Crimean war—“stands to the Author’s other works.” Faber wrote, “in the relation of source and origin.”

If it cannot be said to be an epitome of Faber’s work it does contain all that was most characteristic in his attitude to
life and religion. It is also the best expression of this attitude. The argument is briefly stated. Creation is an act of
divine love. Each soul is created because God loves it. Having created it God pursues it with love. “God is bent on
saving us.” as Faber puts it. The soul has only to respond to that love by an act of love on its part to be saved.
Salvation is therefore easy, at any rate to the believer. The fact that it does not appear to be so is because our picture

of life is distorted by worldliness. Worldliness is a wrong attitude of the soul towards God. The soul has failed to see
that it is a creature—even when it acknowledges God as Creator. The spiritual task of the soul is therefore to realize
its creatureliness. If this is accomplished the way is open to an appreciation of God’s love for it which inevitably
will engender a true love of God. This love brings us “within the suck of that gulf of the Divine Beauty, which is our

holiness here, as it is our happiness hereafter.” It is useful to keep the scheme of the book in one’s head because
Faber’s mind was not particularly logical and it is easy as one reads to feel that one has lost the thread.

It is clear, then, that the book is not difficult to understand. There are, however, other difficulties of another

order. Put bluntly there seems to be something lacking in Faber’s attitude. The dark side of the question, the doubt,
the despair, the unintelligibility of God’s will, which to many people is the reality of the religious life, is just not
there. Faber’s picture is a canvas without shadows, almost, to those who feel it (not every one does), a picture
without perspective. In moments of exasperation it is tempting to suppose that he deliberately disregarded what he

knew to be true, that he consciously suppressed the darkness in favor of the light. But to say so would be to commit
a psychological blunder. Faber’s outlook for good or ill was such that darkness had little meaning to him. “What is
our uppermost thought?” he asks. “It is that we live,” he replies, “and that our life is gladness. Our physical nature
unfolds itself to the sun while our mind and heart seem no less to bask in the bright influences of the thought of

God.” This is not the typical attitude of an ordinary man nor is it the typical attitude of a religious man. It is
particularly atypical today. It seems almost incredible to us that anyone who suffered so acutely as Faber suffered
could have written in this way. But then optimism has ceased to be a respectable attitude to life—and hence to
religion.
It may be that a more pessimistic, a darker religious attitude is more profound. Nevertheless the man of

religion today is in danger of denying the lighter side which undeniably exists. We find it easy to condemn a man
who will not face unpleasant facts but are we not in danger of refusing to face the pleasant ones? We are so
habituated to thinking of nature red in tooth and claw that it comes as a shock when Faber writes: “The joys of the
animal creation, their joy in health and strength, in light and air, in cold and heat, in wet and dry, in their sweet

songs or their loud wars, in their speed of flight or their spring of muscle, in tending their young or tearing their
prey, all are shadows, lowest, dimmest, faintest, poorest shadows of the joy of God.” It is at least arguable that Faber

is right and that we are wrong when we start back at “tearing their prey" as something emanating from the divine
mind. But Faber, after all, is not so far from Blake's: “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.” It may be difficult
for us to feel what he says to be true but it might be worth while to make the effort at a notional assent.
It is fatally easy to underestimate breezy extroverted Faber, to imagine that he was quite unable to see
himself as we in our superior (and darker) wisdom see him. But this was hardly the case. In fact he discusses the

light and the dark attitudes to life—what he typically calls the bright and the gloomy view of the world, typified in
his mind by St Francis de Sales and St Bernard. It is true he finds it hard not to caricature the dark view. “A funeral
on a wet day in a disconsolate churchyard” is how he describes it. And the bright view reads very much like almost
any other page in his books. “At every turn there are radiant fountains of joy leaping up to meet us. Each day, like
the cystus. has a thousand new blossoms to show; it lays them down when evening comes, and the next morning it
has as gay a show of flowers as ever.” “The strange thing is,” Faber comments, “that no one seems to be able to take
in impartially the whole view of the world, the tme view, the bright and dark together.” He finds that the view of St
Francis de Sales “enchants us more with God” and he rationalizes his preference by saying that his vocation is to

people living in the world. These people “are not miserable and they cannot see why they should be,” he says
provocatively. But he admits “no mind leaves things uncolored. It is our necessity. We cannot help ourselves.” Faber
could not help himself. It was his necessity to see life as he did.
But the mode of Faber’s optimism—was it not far too emotional, too Italianate. even faintly unhealthy?
Perhaps. But desperate situations demand desperate remedies. Faber’s world was the world of Jeremy Bentham, of

Utilitarianism, of Blake’s Satanic mills. It was the grim world of Dickens. When Faber lit his tapers in King William

Street, Strand, processed about with his Neapolitan Madonna, preached fervently at suffocating Benedictions, he
also lit candles in tire darkened hearts of men. Let it be said quite plainly. Men needed to be less manly. Kingsley’s

prescription of muscular Christianity was exactly what was not needed. Men had to turn inwards, turn again to that
pattern of the soul at prayer, our Lady. Faber instinctively saw that the religion which went with dynamic
Utilitarianism was a dreadful blasphemy for it made God into a creature—the creation of a materialistic philosophy.
He was clear-sighted enough to see the danger of making “religion too much a matter of mere devotions, an affair of
sentiments and feelings”; but he had the courage to ask if there was not a greater danger of making religion into little

more than a mere matter of duty.
Nevertheless if it was salutary, even necessary, for the Victorian stockbroker, who at church breathed into
his top hat instead of kneeling, to be jolted out of his complacency—what relevance has Faber for us? That is the
crux of the matter. We are affronted by Faber’s Italianate extravagance. And it must be conceded that Faber, like

every revolutionary, was unwise, sometimes silly. He did and said things he should never have done or said. But
when this is honestly admitted, if we search our hearts has not Faber still something to say? Are we really so very

unlike the Victorian Pharisees Faber wrote for that his message has become meaningless? Surely not. Religion is an
opening of the heart to God, a realization that we are dependent, helpless creatures. Man, as Faber put it, is “one
whose business is to come when he is called and to depart when he is bidden and to have no reason given him either

for his call or his dismissal except such as he can gather from the character of his Master. Such is man upon earth;
and he is so because he is a creature.” Are we not much of a muchness with our Victorian ancestors whom Faber
described as follows: “Their minds are purely atheist by the force of terms. They are proprietors of the world, not
tenants in it, and tenants at will.” Tenants at will, the inventors of the planetary rocket! Are we really nearer God
than those Victorians who made God “an idea”, “the creature of men’s minds”? It is at least arguable that we too

like to dismiss religion as something for the religious. But, as Faber said, “A monk is not more a creature than a
soldier or a sailor, a billiard marker or a jockey.”
Italian devotions, the ways of medieval Italian peasants—are these things really part and parcel of our
religion? But, then, are statues, flowers, and Benedictions the essentials of Faber’s message? Are they not rather
exemplifications of attitudes of mind he admired? There is now no daring in candles and copes, no liberation of
spirit in processions. We are moved by other things. But the attitude of mind Faber preached is as valid now as it

was valid in lus own day. In this book we see not the exemplification of his beliefs but their source and origin”—the

theological basis on which all the rest was built. It is possible to reject the example without rejecting the precept.
For, after all, Faber's precept is as tme as religion itself. Our relationship to God is essentially feminine and must
always be so. ft cannot be anything else. It is a corruption when religion tends towards masculinity and legalism—as
it did in Faber’s day, and does today. If the mind is bent on correctness and duty an iron barrier of calculation and
coldness will be erected between conduct and the wells of the religious life. Is it not this that we find in ourselves?

We call our ancestors religious hypocrites and Pharisees. What do we call ourselves—divided personalities that we

are? As Faber saw, religion should spring from the heart of a man, from we know not where, deep in the recesses of
his being, irrigating all his thoughts and activities as the rivers watered the garden of Paradise. This can never

happen until he turns to God as a creature to his Creator. “The close embrace and tingling pressure of His
omnipotence” cannot be curtailed into a philosophical or ethical system. Love is the important, indeed the only
thing. “He created us because He loved us, and He created us in order that we might love Him.” That is the begin­

ning and end of it.

But there is more to Faber than relevance to his own age or to ours. He is not a mere exponent of optimism
in religion. Such an optimism can, after all, be plausibly attributed to glandular or economic causes. Whatever else
Faber was he was also a mystic. The word mystic has become at once so generalized outside the Church and so

specialized within it that it is difficult to know how to use it. But there is no other term. Faber was not a writer about
mysticism, a man interested in religion, a Bremond, a person with religious sensibilities. He was a man who had
tasted the living God. Temperament may explain his general attitude, it does not explain the edge, the atmosphere of
vibrant personal experience which every now and then brings an otherwise dull passage to life. “We saw no vision:
only God touched us and we shrank and now we are marvelously fatigued.” A writer about religion would never

have used the word "shrank" nor could have thought up the idea of being “fatigued” by God’s presence. But Faber
wrote from out of religion itself, from the heart of it.
For Faber the universe was sunny because it was bathed in the sunlight of God’s love. “The whole creation

floats, as it were, in the Ocean of God’s almighty love.” Darkness is simply blotted out by the eternal sunlight. Faber
speaks again and again like a man who has been suddenly converted in the Protestant meaning of the term. And the
conviction that he spoke more like a Methodist at a camp meeting than as a Catholic has often been held against
him. In fact Faber had not been suddenly converted—the process of his turning unreservedly to God had been

gradual. The similarity, however, between his attitude and that of an early Methodist is not seriously to be

questioned. Wesley’s “an assurance was given me that He had taken my sins, even mine” is not stronger than
Faber’s: “It is the grand crisis in everybody’s life, an era to date from, when the knowledge that his Creator loves

him passes into a sensible conviction." Faber indeed calls this realization “a perfect revolution. ... He is a new man.
It is a kind of conversion.” But should it be held against him? It is a question of religious psychology and not of
religion. The similarity neither impugns Faber nor Wesley unless conversion in itself is somehow held suspect. The

Methodist inferred from his conversion that he was saved once and for all. Faber did not infer this. He felt the peace,
the certainty, the reality of religious things which the Methodist also feels. But to the one it meant one thing, to the
other something different.

It is, of course, possible not to like the type of person who is liable to be converted. Faber’s fluency,
exuberance, and singleness of mind can jar on less certain people. Faber jarred on Newman's nerves and he can be
irritating as a writer. But men of Faber's type must not be taken for what they are but for what they have seen. There
would be nothing absurd in wanting to find out what an explorer had to say, however much his mannerisms in

relating his adventures might annoy. His adventures, his experience—that is the thing. And Faber’s life was one
long religious adventure. It cannot, of course, be said of Faber as it could be of the converted Methodist that reality
and not conceptual truth is the touchstone by which his work should be judged. But it is nearly so. Faber has often

been accused of unreality and there is certainly something about his fluent optimism which makes one feel it to be

true. In fact it is the other way about. Beneath the glare of his writing there is a hard surface of personal experience

to which he returns again and again.
It is true to each one of us beyond our neighbors, as it was true to the Israelites beyond other nations, Who
is so great a God as our God, who hath God so near?

He appeals to us with a sort of humility which has no parallel in human love.
We cannot look at him as simply external to ourselves. Things have passed between us; secret relationships
are established, fond ties are knitted; thrilling endearments have been exchanged, there are memories of
forgivenesses full of tenderness.

God loves me—God desires my love. He has asked for it; He covets it. He prizes it more than I do myself!
I would fain tell the poor trees and the little birds that are roosting and the patient beasts slumbering in the
dewy grass and the bright waters and the wanton winds and the clouds as they sail above me. and that white
moon and those flickering far-off stars, that God desires my love, mine, even mine! And it is true, infallibly
true.
Perhaps we shift uncomfortably and feel it to be far-fetched. The adjectives may be banal, the scene conventional.
But does it ring tree? Is it contrived? And the answer is that it is not. It is not a rhetorical outburst for the sake of

rhetoric: it is a pæan of praise, inexpertly expressed if you will, at the experienced assurance of God’s love. High-

flown it may be, but then Faber was a man in love. “And it is true, infallibly true”—what does he mean? He means
that he knows it experimentally and not theoretically to be true. It is not notionally, rationally, probably true, but
real. It is the assurance of the Methodist in Catholic terms.

— Ronald Chapman

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER was bom in Iris grandfather’s vicarage at Calverley, Yorkshire, in 1814. Educated
at Harrow, he gained a scholarship at University College. Oxford. Good looking, eloquent, a bom leader, ardently
religious at a time when Oxford was never more religious, he quickly made his mark. Faber had been brought up
with Evangelical leanings and at heart he remained an Evangelical to the end. But on Septuagesima Sunday, 1836,
he heard Pusey preach on Baptism. This caused a sudden change of opinion and he fell under Newman’s spell. A

single-minded Yorkshireman, it was not long before he found himself on the Rome-ward fringe of the Oxford

Movement. He won the Newdigate prize in 1836 and was elected to a fellowship at his college in 1837. But he was
never at home in Oxford. An Evangelical by temperament and a Tractarian by principle, he upheld both sides of his
religion with tremendous poetic exaggeration—to the disgust of both parties. He was far happier at Ambleside

talking Tractarianism with Wordsworth, writing long nature poems, or travelling abroad scrutinizing continental

religion.

At this time of his life Faber almost decided to make a career as a poet. He would not have succeeded in
becoming anything but a dilettante. Nevertheless it needed a great effort to tear himself away from the enjoyable if
purposeless life he was leading. In 1842 he accepted the college living of Elton, Hunts, but after reading himself in
immediately set out on a continental tour. He was within an ace of becoming a Catholic in Rome and returned to
Elton in October 1843 much shaken in his loyalty to the Church of England. For the next two years he lived and

acted as nearly as possible as if he were a Catholic priest living in a Catholic country. He wished to work the parish
“in the spirit of St Philip and St Alphonso.” It was a strange experiment and perhaps no one but Faber would have

succeeded as well as he did in the attempt.
A few weeks after Newman’s conversion in 1845 he was received into the Church. He quickly formed a
small community from Iris former parishioners and other converts called "Brothers of the Will of God." In 1846

Lord Shrewsbmy handed over Cotton Hall, near Cheadle, to the new community and Faber was ordained in April
1847. But on December of the same year, to the consternation of the other Brothers, Faber suddenly felt called to

join Newman as an Oratorian. Such was the man’s personality that the whole community followed suit and offered

themselves as Oratorians.
In 1849 he was sent by Newman from Birmingham to London to establish a new Oratory'. This yvas at first
in King William Street, Strand, and was then moved in 1854 to its present site in Brampton. Faber was not a strong

man and had always overtaxed Iris strength. From this time till his death he was more or less an invalid, burnt out by
his immense labors. He died after a long and painful illness in 1863, aged only forty -nine.
— R. C.

BOOK I
THE CASE STATED BETWEEN THE CREA TOR AND THE CREATURE

The First Chapter
A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN

Quid ad me si quis non intelligat? Gaudeat et ipse dicens: Quid est hoc? Gaudeat etiam sic, et amet, non inveniendo
invenire potius Te, quam inveniendo non invenire Te.—St Augustine.

LIFE is short, and it is wearing fast away. We lose a great deal of time, and we want short roads to heaven, though
the right road is in truth far shorter than we believe. It is true of most men that their light is greater than their heat,

which is only saying that we practice less than we profess. Yet there are many souls, good, noble, and affectionate,
who seem rather to want light than heat. They want to know more of God, more of themselves, and more of the
relation in which they stand to God. and then they would love and sen e Him better. There are many again who,

when they read or hear of the spiritual life, or come across the ordinaiy maxims of Christian perfection, do not
understand what is put before them. It is as if some one spoke to them in a foreign language. Either the words are
without meaning, or the ideas are far-fetched and unreal. They stand off from persons who profess to teach such

doctrines, or to live by them, as if they had some contagious disease which they might catch themselves. Yet they
are often very little tainted by worldlmess; often they are men who have made sacrifices for God, and who would lay
down their lives for His Church. Their instincts are good; yet they seem to want something; and whatever it is that

they lack, the absence of it appears to put them under a most mournful disability in the way of attaining holiness. In

other words, there are multitudes of men so good that it seems inevitable that they must be much more good than
they really are, and the difficulty' is how so much goodness can continue to exist without more goodness.
This is a phenomenon which has at once attracted the attention and excited the sorrow of all who love the

souls for which Jesus shed His Precious Blood. It may not be tme that any one solution of the problem will meet or
explain all the difficulties of this distressing experience. Much lies deep in the manifold corruption of our hearts. But
there is one fact which goes far towards an adequate explanation of the matter, and which is at the same time, rightly

considered, a profound mysteiy. It is that men. even pious men, do not continually bear in mind that they are
creatures, and have never taken the pains to get a clear idea of what is involved in being a creature. Hence it is tme
to say, even of multitudes of the faithful, that they have no adequate or indeed distinct notion of the relation in which

they stand to God. of His rights, or of their obligations: and when trial comes, their inadequate idea betrays them
into conduct quite at variance with their antecedents.
Forgetfulness of God has been in all ages the grand evil of the world: a forgetfulness so contrary to reason,

and so opposed also to the daily evidence of the senses, that it can be accounted for on no other hy pothesis than that
of original sin and the mystery' of the fall. This forgetfulness of God has been far more common than open revolt

against Him. The last is rather the sin of angels, tire first the sin of men.
Yet every age of the world has its own prevailing type and fashion of iniquity; and in these latter times it
appears as if the forgetfulness of God had taken the shape of forgetfulness on our part that we are creatures. Men
may realize that they are creatures, imperfect, finite, and dependent. This truth maybe continually coming uppermost

in books of morals, in systems of philosophy. and in the general tone of society. And yet, with all this. God may be
set aside and passed over, almost as if He did not exist. The world simply does not advert to Him. Who that has read

certain philosophical and scientific books of the last century does not know how men could write of creation without
their thoughts so much as touching or coming in contact with the idea of the Creator? To such writers creation seems
the end of and answer to all things, just as the Most Holy Trinity is to a believer. They speak of creation, investigate
creation, draw inferences from creation, without so much as brushing against a personal or living Creator even in

their imagination. Creator is to them simply a masculine form of the neuter noun creation, and they have a kind of
instinct against using it. which they have probably never perceived, or never taken the trouble to explain even to

themselves. It is not on any theoiy, or any atheistical principle that God is thus passed over. He is unseen, and hence

is practically considered as absent; and what is absent is easily forgotten. He is out of mind because He is out of
sight. There is no objection to giving God His place, only He is not thought of. This is one phase of the world’s
forgetfulness of God.

Then again there have been times and literary schools in which God was continually referred to, and His
name used in an impressive manner, sometimes reverently and sometimes irreverently. He has been a fashionable
figure of speech, or an adornment of eloquence, or the culminating point of an oratorical climax. Or there has been a
decency in naming Him honorably, as if it were burning a kind of incense before Him. It soothes the conscience; it
gives an air of religion to us, and it enhances our own respectability, especially in the eyes of our inferiors. And yet

tins word God has not in reality meant the three divine Persons, as the Gospel reveals them to us. It has been an
imaginary embodiment or a vague canonization of an immense power, of distant majesty, and of unimaginable mys­
tery; a something like the beauty of midnight skies, or the magnificent pageant of the storm, elevating the thoughts,
quelling and tranquilizing littleness, and ministering to that poetry in our nature which is so often mistaken for real
worship and actual religion. The ideas of duty, of precept, of sacrifice, of obedience, have been very indistinctly in
the mind, if they have been there at all. It is the notion of a grand God, rather than a living God. The multitude of

His rights over us, the dread exorbitance of His sovereignty, the realities of His minute vigilance, of His jealous

expectations, of His rigid judgments, of His particular providence, of His hourly interference, these things have not
been denied, but they have not been part of the idea wakened in the mind by the word God. The close embrace and

tingling pressure of His omnipresence, as theology discloses it to us, would have made the men, of whom we are
speaking, start away in alarm or in disgust.
The God who demands an account of every idle word, and measures His penalties to each unbridled
thought, and before whom all men are simply and peremptorily equal, is a different Being from the poetical

sovereign who reigns over the Olympus of modem literature, to keep our inferiors in check, to add gravity to our re­
bukes, to foster our own self-respect, and, in a word, to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” This God is rather our
creature than our Creator; He is the creature of moral respectability, the necessity of a dissatisfied conscience, the

convenience of a social police, the consolation of an unsupematural sorrow, and the imagery of a chaste and elegant
literature. Yet the atheism of this is not explicit: it is only implied. No revolt is intended. A false God has slipped
into the place of the true one; and because their faith had failed, men did not see the change, and do not see it still.
This is another common form of forgetfulness of God; but it does not seem to have the peculiar characteristics or
particular malice of the form which we suppose to belong eminently to our own days. For in the form, of which we

have been speaking, the name of God was a necessity just because men did not forget that they were creatures. Nay,

it was respectable and moral to speak slightingly of human nature, its weaknesses, and its vagaries, and to say great
things of the far-off God. Men’s notions of God wanted correcting and purifying, enlarging and heightening; above
all, they wanted to be made real, and brought home to them, and laid as a yoke upon them. Nevertheless they re­
membered they were creatures; only, because they had lost the tme idea of the Creator, they made the weaknesses of
the creature an apology for Iris sin, and so went desperately astray.

But if we mistake not. the characteristic malice of these times takes a somewhat different direction. God is
certainly ignored; but he is rather passively than actively ignored, rather indirectly than directly. Men do not look at
His side of the question at all. They do not pass Him over, even contemptuously. Still less do they look at Him, and

then put Him away. They are otherwise engaged. They are absorbed in the contemplation of themselves. Theories of
progress and perfectibility throw so much dust in their eyes that they do not see that they are creatures. They do not

know what it is to be a creature, nor what comes of it. Hence the idea of God grows out of their minds: it is thrust
out of them, extruded, as it were, by the press of matter, without any direct process or conscious recognition on their

parts. Their minds are purely atheist by the force of terms. They are the proprietors of the world, not tenants in it,
and tenants at will. They hardly suspect that there are any claims on them.
God was a fine thought of the Middle Ages, and religion an organized priestcraft, which was not always
simply an evil: but which has now outlived any practical utilities it may ever have had. God is subjective: He is an
idea. He is the creature of man’s mind. If there be any real truth in religion, it must be looked for in the direction of
Pantheism. But the world is too busy to think much even of that. This is practically their view, or would be. if they
took the trouble to have a view at all. What it comes to is this. Men are masters. They begin and end with

themselves. Humanity marches onwards with grand strides to the magnificent goal of social perfectibility. Each
generation is a glorious section of the procession of progress. Liberty, independence, speed, association, and selfpraise, these compose the spirit of the modem world. The word "creature” is a name, an affair of classification, like

the title of a genus or a species in natural history. But it has no religious consequences: it entangles us in no
supernatural relations. It simply means that we are not eternal, the remembrance of which is salutary, in that it
quickens our diligence in the pursuit of material prosperity.
All phases of civilization hai e a monomania of their own. Certain favorite ideas come uppermost, and are
regarded with so much favor that an undue importance is given to them, until at last the relative magnitudes of truths
and duties are lost sight of, and the ethics of the day are full of a confusion that only rights itself in the failure and
disappointment, in which each age of the world infallibly issues at the last. Then comes a reaction, and a new phase
of civilization, and a fresh monomania: and either because the circle looks like a straight line, because we see so
little of it at a time, or because the living world, like the material one. really advances while it revolves, we call these

alternations progress. Now we generally find that each of these monomanias, with its cant words, its fixed ideas, and
its one-sided exaggerations, transfers its temper and characteristics to the view which it takes of God. The ideas of

liberty, progress, independence, social contracts, representative government, and the like, color our views of God,

and influence our philosophy. No one can read much without seeing how the prevailing ideas of the day make men
fall into a sort of unconscious Anthropomorphism about God. Indeed nothing but the magnificent certainties and
unworldly wisdom of Catholic theology can rescue us from falling into some such error ourselves, [footnote: The

gibe of Voltaire is after all full of bitter truths: Depuis que Dieu a fait l’homme à son image, l’homme le lui a bien
rendu.] At the present day particularly we should be careful and jealous in the view we take of God, careful that it

should be well ascertained, and jealous that it should be according to the pattern showed us in Catholic theology.
[footnote: There are two views of God in theology, the Scotist and the Thomist. The Scotist seems to bring God
nearer to us, to make our conceptions of Him more real, to represent Him as more accessible to our understandings,
even while He remains incomprehensible. St Thomas carefully observes the mean: Nullum nomen univoce de Deo et
creaturis praedicatur: sed nec etiam pure equivoce, ut aliqui dixerunt: and again, Aliqua dicuntur de Deo et
creaturis, analogice, et non equivoce pure, neque pure univoce, i, q. xiii. 5 and 6. The Thomist view, by driving us
away from many of the analogies on which the other view rests, or by regarding these analogies as more equivocal,
seems to put God further from us, and to thicken the darkness which is round His throne. But. if the Scotist view
seems more directly to lead to love, it is exposed to much greater philosophical dangers than the Thomist, and may
more easily be pressed into the service of Anthropomorphism, perhaps of Pantheism. Thus the Thomist view is
safer. “You ought to know,” says Malebranche (Huitième Encretien sur la Métaphysique, sec. 7), “that to judge
worthily of God, we must attribute to Him no attributes but those which are incomprehensible. This is evident, for
God is the infinite in every sense, so that nothing finite is congruous to Him, and that which is infinite in every sense
is in every way incomprehensible to the human mind.” So also Tertullian, adv. Marcion, i, 4. Summum Magnum, ex
defectione cernuli solitudinem quondam de singularitate prœstantiœ suœ possidens, unicum est. So it has been well
observed by Simon in his beautiful but insidious work on natural religion (Religion Naturelle, 48), that we almost all
of us start from the Christian idea of God, as author of the world, and land at the pagan idea of God like ourselves.

All beings, except God, are in a system. It is their nature and condition. He alone is outside of and above all system;
and thus by applying to Him our principles, we run into contradictions, and by attributing to Him our faculties, we
become entangled in impossibilities. Thus a clear and intelligent view of God is one of the first requisites for all of
us at this day; and it is just this view which the Catholic catechism gives, and which all the wise men of the world
seem so unaccountably to miss.]

In w hatever direction we turn w e shall gain fresh proof of the want of this true view of God, and fresh
evidence that the peculiar forgetfulness of God in these times consists in the forgetfulness on our own part that we
are creatures. For, think in w hat this forgetfulness consists. It is the new fashion of an old sin. Nothing offends our
taste more than disproportion, or unseemliness. We like tilings to be in keeping, and when proprieties are violated,
we have a sense of being wounded. If a servant puts on the maimers and takes the liberties of a son. we are angry

with him because he forgets himself, and a whole string of moral faults is involved in this forgetfulness. The
manners, which befit the members of our ow n family, are unbecoming in a guest; and the demeanor and address of a
stranger differ from those of an acquaintance. Our taste is annoyed when these tilings are confused, and the
annoyance of our taste is only the symptom of something far deeper in our moral nature. So is it in the matter we are

discussing. The propriety of man as man. liis moral and religious propriety, consists in liis constantly remembering
that he is a creature, and demeaning himself accordingly. The bad taste and vulgarity (to use words which may make
the meaning clearer) of liis not doing so are in reality sin and irreligion, because the contempt, presumption, and

affectation fall upon the majesty of the Most High God. Yet is not this forgetfulness quite a characteristic of the
times in which we live?

Look at politics; and may we not read evidences of this spirit eveiywhere? How little has religion to do
w ith questions of peace and war? We go to war to avenge an offence, or to push an interest, or to secure a gain, or to
cripple a hostile power, as if there w ere no God of Hosts. We do not ask ourselves the question w hether it is God's
will that there should be such a w ar. The whole action of diplomacy is as if there were no special providence, and as

if God having retired from the management of the world, we must take up the reins which He has let fall from His
w earied grasp. Since the balance of power was substituted for the central unity of the Holy See, we have come more

and more to act as if the world belonged to us, and we had the management of it. and were accountable to none. On
the most solemn subjects, even those of education, and religion, and the interests of the poor, how little of the tone
and feeling of creatures is exhibited in debates in Parliament, or in the leading articles of a newspaper. It w ould
seem as if there were nothing we had not the right to do, because nothing we had not the power to do. With far less

of intentional irréligion than would have seemed possible beforehand, there is an incalculable amount of
forgetfulness that we are creatures. What else is our exaggerated lust of liberty? What else are even the vauntings of
our patriotism? What else is the spirit of puerile self-laudation into which our national character seems in the hands

of an anonymous press to have already degenerated, or to be fast degenerating?
The same tone is observable in our poetry and elegant literature. Everywhere man is his own end, and the
master of liis own destiny. Subordination and a subject spirit are not virtues, neither in works of fiction do the meek

inherit the earth, [footnote: E.g., see Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, a work by an Anglican clergyman, propounding
what the Saturday Review satirically termed a "muscular Christianity!”] Still more strongly does this come out in
systems of philosophy. Humanity is a person with a unique destination and perfectibility. Man is complete in
himself. There is neither wreck nor min about him. The natural stands off. clear and self-helpful, from the
supernatural. Accountableness is not a necessary' part of self-government. There is no need to call in the idea of God
in order to explain the situation of man. His duties begin and end with other men or with himself. Philosophically

speaking, tilings can be managed at Berlin without God.
But of all things the most amazing is the innocent, childlike, simple-hearted atheism of physical science.

The beginning of matter, the elements into which it may ultimately be resolvable, how the cycles of the heavenly
bodies first began, the unspeakable intricacy of their checks and counterchecks, the secular aberrations and secular
corrections of the same, the secret of life, the immateriality of the soul, where physical science ends—all these ques­

tions are discussed in a thousand books in a spirit and tone betokening the most utter forgetfulness that we are little
creatures, who got here, God help us! not by our own means, and are going, God help us! where He chooses and
when. We read sentence after sentence, expecting every moment to light on the word God, or to come across some
allusion to the Creator. And the writers would not omit Him, but would speak good words of Him, if it came to them

to do so. But it does not. They are not unbelievers. Nay. they would loudly profess themselves to be creatures and to
have a Creator, if they were asked. They would be lunatics if they did not. But the double sense of His creation and

of their createdness (to coin a word) is not in all their thoughts, and has not mastered the current of their intellectual
activity. They left God at church yesterday, and are closeted with matter today. So many secondary causes are wait­

ing for an audience that their time is fully occupied. Besides, is there not one day in the week fixed for the reception
of the First Cause, and the acknowledgment of His claims? But, to be serious, no one we think will say that modem
science, at least in England, is profane and irreligious. Really it is most creditably the contrary, ft is ourselves whom
we forget: we forget that we are creatures. Our error about God comes from a mistake about ourselves.
There are many persons in these days who do not say they are not Christians; yet who write and speak as it

were from without, as if they were at once Christians, and not Christians. They have not taken the pains to formulize
a positive disbelief; but they do not see how progress, and perfectibility, and modem discovery, psychological or
otherwise, comport with that collection of ancient dogmas which make up the Christian religion, and their instinct
would be to give up the dogmas rather than the discoveries, and that with a promptitude worthy of modem

enlightenment. With such persons the dignity of man is a matter of prime consideration, while, in their view. Iris
assent to the doctrines and practices of the Church is as degrading to his intellectual nobility, as his obedience to
them is superstitious and debasing. The Pope and theology, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, grace and the
sacraments, penance and purgatory, scapulars and rosaries, asceticism and mysticism, combine to form a perfectly
distinct and cognizable character. They give a tone to the mind and a fashion to the conduct, which is indubitable,
and which it is difficult to mistake. In the Church such a character is held in honor, ft is the Catholic type of spiritual

beauty. But the men, of whom we are speaking, are far from holding it in esteem. To them it appears mean, weak,
tame, contemptible, cowardly, narrow, pusillanimous. It wants the breadth and daring of moral greatness, according
to their view of greatness. Nothing grand, lasting, or spreading will come of it.
But let us put out of view for the moment the undoubted agents in the formation of this character, the Pope

and theology, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, grace and the sacraments, penance and purgatory, rosaries and
scapulars, asceticism and mysticism. Let us take the character as we find it, without inquiring into the process of its
formation. Granting that there is a God, eternal and all-holy; granting that we are His creatures, created simply for
His glory, dependent upon Him for all things, and without any possibility of happiness apart from Him; granting His
perfections and our imperfections, is not the behavior, the demeanor, of a Catholic saint precisely what would come

of a wise and reflective apprehension of the fact that he is a creature and has a Creator? Does not Christian sanctity
with inimitable gracefulness express to the life the modest, truthful, prevailing sense that we are creatures, standing
before the eye and living in the hand of our everlasting Creator? And are not the self-sufficiency, the daring, the
vainglory, the speed, the hesitatingness, the reckless manners, which many esteem to be moral and intellectual

bravery, just so many evidences of forgetfulness that we are creatures? Are they not vagaries and improprieties,
which, to put out of sight their falsehood and their criminality, are as if a worm would fain attempt to fly or a

monkey to ape the manners of a man? It is not tme that the practices and devotions and sacramental appliances of
the Church introduce something which is incongruous and out of keeping, something to be added to our human life,

but still an addition easily discernible, and not dovetailing into our natural position. On the contrary, the manners
which they form are simply the most perfect, the most graceful, the most sensible and self-consistent exhibition of
our indubitable condition, that of finite and dependent creatures. The supernatural grace, of which these practices are
the channels, at once completes and restores our nature, and makes us eminently and winningly natural. If Chris­
tianity were not true, the conduct of a wise man, who acted consistently as a creature who had a Creator, would

strangely resemble the behavior of a Catholic saint. The lineaments of the Catholic type would be discernible upon

him, though his gifts would not be the same.
This forgetfulness that we are creatures, which prevails in that energetically bad portion of the world which

is scripturally called the world, affects multitudes of persons, who are either less able to divest themselves of the
influences of old traditions and early lessons, or are happily less possessed with the base spirit of the world. It leads
them to form a sort of religion for themselves which singularly falls in with all the most corrupt propensities of our
hearts: a religion which in effect teaches that we can live two lives and serve two masters. Such persons consider
that religion has its own sphere, and worldly interests their sphere also, and that the one must not interfere with the
other. Thus their tendency is to concentrate all the religion of the week into Sunday, and to conceive that they have

thereby purchased a right to a large conscience for the rest of the week. The world, say they, has its claims and God

has His claims. Both must be satisfied; God first, and most scrupulously; then the world, not less exactly, though it
be indeed secondary. But it is not a “reasonable service’' to neglect one for the other. God and the world are co­
ordinate powers, co-ordinate fountains of moral duty and obligation. He is the really religious man who gives neither
of them reason to complain. We must let our common sense hinder us from becoming over-righteous. Men who hold
this doctrine, a doctrine admirably adapted for a commercial country, have a great advantage over the bolder men of

whom we spoke before. For they enjoy all the practical laxity of unbelievers, without the trouble or responsibility of
disbelieving; and besides that, they enjoy a certain good-humor of conscience in consequence of the outward respect
they pay, in due season and fitting place, to the ceremonies of religion.
Hitherto we have spoken of classes of persons in whom we take no interest, further than the sorrow which

all who love God must feel at seeing Him defrauded of His honor, and all who love their fellow-men in seeing so
much amiability, so much goodness, with a millstone round its neck which must inevitably sink it in the everlasting
deeps.

Let us come now to those with whom we are very much concerned; and for whom we have ventured to
compose this little treatise. Errors filter from one class of men into another, and appear in different forms according
to the new combinations into winch they enter. We are all of us more affected by the errors which prevail around us

than we really suppose. Almost even popular fallacy has its representative even among the children of faith; and as
when a pestilence is raging, many are feeble and languid though they have no plague-spot, so is it in matters of
religion. The contagion of the world does us a mischief in many ways of which we are hardly conscious; and we
often injure ourselves in our best and highest interest by views and practices, to which we cling with fatal obstinacy,
little suspecting the relationship in which they stand to widely-spread evils, which we behold in their naked

deformity in other sections of society, and hold up to constant reprobation. The forgetfulness that we are creatures,

which produces the various consequences already mentioned, is an error which is less obviously hateful than a direct
forgetfulness of God. and consequently it wins its way into holy places where the other would find no admittance, or
scant hospitality.
Good Christians hear conversation around them, catch the prevailing tone of society , read books, and
become familiarized with certain fashionable principles of conduct; and it is impossible for their minds and hearts
not to become imbued with the genius of all this. It is irksome to be always on our guard, and from being off our
guard we soon grow to be unsuspicious. When a Catholic enters into intimate dealings with Protestants, he must not

forget to place his sentries, and to act as if he was in an enemy’s country; and this is unkindly work, and as
miserable as it is unkindly. Yet so it is. When newspapers tell us that Catholicism is always more reasonable and
less superstitious when it is in the immediate presence of Protestantism, they indicate something which they have

observed, namely, a change. Now if our religion be changed by Protestantism, we can have little difficulty in
deciding whether it has changed for the better or the worse. All this illustrates what we mean. The prevailing errors

of our time and country' find their way down to us. and corrupt our faith, and lower our practice, and divide us
among ourselves. This unstartling error of forgetting that we are creatures is thus not without grave influence upon
conscientious Catholics; and it is to this point that we are asking your attention.

It is beyond all question among Christians that there are such tilings in religion as the counsels of

perfection, and that the true way of serving God is to do so out of love. No one doubts but that a saint is a man who
loves God ardently and tenderly, who attempts great things for His honor, and makes painful sacrifices to promote
His glory. No one imagines a saint to be one who does no more than he is obliged to, and who, having just avoided
mortal sin, is careless about venial faults, and takes his ease and liberty outside the verge of strict and certain
precepts.
The Church possesses a whole literature which is occupied with nothing else than teaching these principles of

Christian perfection, as they are called. Many of these books, such as the Imitation of Christ, are in such repute that
it would be rash and presumptuous to question what they teach; and there are others of the very highest spirituality,

such as the works of St Teresa and St John of the Cross, to which the Church has given her most solemn approval.
Persons accustomed to the perusal of these books regard the axioms on which their teaching is based as almost selfevident. They know on the authority of the Church that there ought not to be two opinions on the matter; but even

independently of that, they cannot conceive as a matter of common sense how there can possibly be two opinions
about it. Even if men might go wrong on such a question, how could they do so in point of fact?
Nevertheless, there are numbers of Catholics, who, strange to say, see the question in a different light. The

teaching of spiritual books and the doctrines of perfection, as laid down by the most approved writers, do not
recommend themselves to them. They consider that, unless they are under the vows of some monastic order, they
should aim at nothing more than the avoiding of mortal sin, and giving edification to those around them. They are
good people. They go to Mass; they aid or start missions; they countenance the clergy; they are kind to the poor;

they say the rosary; they frequent the sacraments. Yet when anyone talks to them of serving God out of personal
love to Him, of trying to be daily more and more closely united to Him, of cultivating the spirit of prayer, of

constantly looking out to see what more they can do for God, of mortifying their own will in things allowable, of
disliking the spirit of the world even in manifestations of it which are short of sin, and of living more consciously in
the presence of God. they feel as if they were listening to an unknown language. They have a jealousy, almost a
dislike, of such tmths, quite irrespective of any attempt being made to force such a line of conduct upon themselves.

If they are humble they are puzzled: if they are self-opinionated, they are angry, critical, or contemptuous, as the
case may be. There are many others to whom such views are simply new, and who with modesty and self-distmst
are shaken by them, and to some extent receive them. Still upon the whole such doctrines have a sound in their ears

of being ultra and extravagant, poetical and fanciful, or peculiar and eccentric.
Now it must be beyond a doubt to any Catholic scholar that such persons are completely out of harmony
with a considerable and important part of the Catholic system, that they think differently from the saints and holy

men, and that a great deal of what the Church has approved is new, startling, and perhaps displeasing to them. This
is a very strong way of putting it; but we do not see that it goes beyond the truth. They do not view it in this light

themselves. God forbid! but this is what it comes to in effect.

In speaking of unbelievers, we pointed out that the character formed by the peculiar doctrines, devotions.

and practices of the Catholic Church was not something monstrous, or exotic, or unnatural, as they are too often in
the habit of considering it. We maintained that it rested on the undeniable common-sense view that we are creatures,
the creatures of an Almighty Creator, and that a man who acted consistently (if unassisted nature could do so) as a

creature, would not be unlike a Catholic saint: always excepting the practice of voluntary mortification, and all the
shapes of love of suffering, for these are ideas peculiar to the kingdom of the Incarnation, or to such false religions
as retain in distorted shapes great portions of the primitive tradition which prophesied of the expiation of sin by the
vicarious sufferings of a Redeemer.
So now we would call the attention of the good people, of whom we are at present speaking, to a similar
fact. The doctrines of Christian perfection and the teaching of approved spiritual books do not rest upon any
peculiarity of any school of theology, or upon any special spirit of a religious order, or on the idiosyncrasy of any
particular saint, or upon any unusual and miraculous vocation, but simply on the fact of our being creatures. Even

the practices of voluntary penance or of acquired contemplation, though not of obligation, at least rise naturally and
easily out of the relations in which we every one of us stand to God as our Creator. There is nothing in the whole
range of asceticism, which does not turn out, at last, to be a natural and logical result of our position in the world as
the creatures of a Creator: and hence there is nothing in such practices fanciful, eccentric, or intrinsically indiscreet:
though wrong time, w rong place, wrong measure, can make anything indiscreet.

From this fact we draw tw o inferences. The first is that the strangeness of the doctrines of spirituality to
these excellent persons is attributable, without their knowing it, to the prevailing forgetfulness that we are creatures.
They are unsuspectingly influenced by the very evil which gives its tone and color to the unbelief and worldliness of
the times. They have no distinct conception of the relation in which their being creatures places them with regard to
the Creator, nor of w hat comes of it in the way of practical religion, ft has probably never occurred to them that it

was a subject which needed study. Hence, unprovided with antidotes to the poison they were compelled daily to
imbibe, an imperceptible change has passed upon them, or the poison of the error has been beforehand with the
truth, or, in the case of converts, it has troubled the processes of conversion, and stopped them short of their
legitimate completion: for almost all enter the Church only half converted and several remain so to the last. Thus
they have come, as it w ere, by instinct to rise up in arms against a claim wliich is urged in behalf of God. Next, they

have jealously examined His claims in a commercial spirit, and w ith a bias towards themselves. Then they have put

limits to His service, made a compromise with Him, reduced Him from a Creator to a Being, w ho is to tax and to
tithe, and no more, for He is a constitutional monarch and not despotic, and they have come to regard notions of
perfection with disfavor as an unconstitutional aggression on the part of God or His executive. Now every one of

these six processes says as loudly and plainly as it can. "I am not a creature. There is some such sort of equality
between God and myself, as that lam entitled to come to terms with Him." Moreover the spirit in which all this is
done is equally incompatible w ith the modest position of a creature. It is as if they were the judges, as if they

possessed some inalienable, indefeasible rights of their ow n. There is no diffidence, no self-distrust. They see their
way more clearly, and assert their supposed liberty more positively, than they would do in matters wliich concerned
the claims and interests of their fellow-citizens. It would make a great change, w e w ill not say how great, in them, if
they realized and clearly comprehended the relation in w liich a creature, necessarily as a creature, stands to his
Creator.
My second inference is that, as the doctrines and practices of spirituality rest mainly on our position as

creatures, and entirely on our position as redeemed creatures, the common evasion that they belong to the cloister,
and are peculiar to monks and nuns, w ill not hold good and cannot be maintained. A monk is not more a creature

than a soldier or a sailor, a billiard-marker or a jockey, and no more comes out of his relation to the Creator than out

of theirs. There may be questions of degree in the amount different men may do for God; there surely can be none as

to the principles on which and the spirit in which He is to be served. Monks and nuns have given up their liberty' by
the heroism of vows. They are obliged to the practices of perfection, or to apply themselves to the acquisition of
them. Theirs is a glorious captivity in which supernatural charity has bound them hand and foot, and handed them

over to the arms of their Creator. They have used the original liberty' He gave them in the grandest of yvays, by
voluntarily surrendering it. All then that distinguishes the Christian in his family from the monk in Iris community is
his liberty. If he is to serve God at all it must be on the same principle as the monk. There are not two spiritualities,
one for the world and one for the cloister. God is one; God's character is one; our necessaiy relation to Him is one.
There are many distinct things in spirituality to which people in the world are not bound, many which can with

difficulty be practiced in the yvorld. many which it would be umvise for most persons to attempt to practice in the

yy orld, and some which it yvould be actually impossible to practice there.
But yvhatever differences there may be in the amount done for God, or the manner of doing it, or the
obligations under yvliich it is done, there can be no difference in the principle on yvhich it is done. God must be

served out of love. This is the first and great commandment. No one is condemned except for mortal sin; but any
man yvho starts professedly on the principle that he yy ill do no more than avoid mortal sin, and that God shall have
no more out of him. will infallibly not succeed in bis single object; that is to say. he will not avoid mortal sin.
Though he is not bound to do more than this in order to secure his salvation, yet because he has gone on a wrong
principle, it will. just because it is a principle and not merely a mistake or a negligence, carry him far further than he

intended, and end by being his min. He will fail in his object, because he made it exclusively his object. Love is the
sole principle of the creature's service of his Creator, however remiss that love may be. Thus then, if it be true that
the doctrines and practices of Christian perfection are simply based on God's love of us and our love of Him, that is.
the relation betrveen the creature and the Creator, it is either true that monks are more God’s creatures than yy e are,

or that, in our measure and degree, the principles of perfection are as applicable to ourselves as to them.
We are not going to yvrite a book on perfection. Very far from it. But yy e believe that the mling spirit of the

age is rather a forgetfulness that yve are creatures, than a forgetfulness of the Creator, that many more persons are

infected yvith this evil than have any suspicion of it, that it lies at the bottom of all the objections men make to the
doctrines of spirituality, and furthermore that many more persons yvould tty to serve God, would frequent the
sacraments, avoid sin and be ordinarily good Catholics, if they had a clear view of the relations between themselves

and God, as creature and Creator.
Hence we are undertaking yvhat may seem a childish, or at least an unnecessary' yy ork. We wish to explain,
or to state rather than to explain, the first elements of all practical religion, the A B C of devotion. We want to write
a primer of piety; and to do so in the plainest, easiest, and most unadorned style. The experience of the priesthood
has led us to think that we shall serve souls by putting forward what everyone thinks he knows already, and what he

will say he knew before as soon as he reads it. Nevertheless, these commonplaces are not so well knorvn as they

should be. Their very commonness leads men to overlook them; and we trust that not a few readers, if they will
folloyv us patiently, will find that both head and heart will have learned not a little in the study.

All our duties to God, and to ourselves no less, are founded on the fact that we are creatures.* All religion
is based on the sense that we are creatures. Our responsibilities mean that we are creatures. The foolishness of this
simple tmth will bring to nought the pride of the wise yvorld. It will be as the plain stone of the common brook

against the might and bravery' of the giant of modem misbelief. We speak to simple-hearted believers. We put no
high things before them, but rather the lessons of a village dame. We draw no conclusions, and urge no definite
duties. We only ask our dear readers to try to put together with us a few obvious matters of fact about our Heavenly

Father, and then leave it to grace and our own hearts yvhat is to come of it all. We will therefore ask each other some

such questions as these—What is it, as children express themselves, what is it to be a creature?—What is it to have a

Creator?—Why does God wish us to love Him?—Why does He love us?—How can we love Him?—How do we
repay His love of us?—How does He repay our love of Him?—Is it easy to be saved?—And what becomes of the

great multitude of believers?

[footnote: Since the publication of the first edition of this work the following notice has appeared in the “Cronaca
Contemparanea" of the Civiltà Cattolica for October 17th. 1857, p. 240, No. clxxxii. Mgr (now Cardinal) Pietro de
Silvestri, Dean of the S. Rota, maintained an erudite argument before the Accademia di Religione Cattolica, intorno
alia domma di Creazione. He shewed how. at the introduction of Christianity, the Apostles’ Creed began by
proclaiming the dogma of Creation; and that, while many and new errors arose to combat the divine revelation,
every heresy was in fact contained in Gnosticism, which, nato d’orgoglio, etc. . . . had in these days assumed its
latest fonn, Pantheism. Whence he inferred that as Gnosticism nacque dallo sconoscere il vero della Creaziane, cosi
ancora per combattere i moderni increduli razionalistici panteisti si dee dagli scrittori cattolici fare ogni sforzo per
mettere in sodo cotesto domma importantissimo in vece di perdersi in questioni secondarie. It was naturally a great
pleasure to me to find the views of this chapter expressed by an authority so much higher and more competent than
my own.]
What if, when we put our answers together, something new and striking comes of it all? What if it warms our
hearts, and moistens our eyes? Anyhow it is very' sweet to talk of God. There is no holy-day in the world like it. So,
dear readers, take this weary and disagreeable chapter as a preface to something better, something easier, simpler,
heartier, and more loving; and let us begin, as little children, at the very beginning.

The Second Chapter
WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE

Si homo mille annis seniret Deo etiam ferventissime, non mereretur ex condigno dimidiam diem esse in regno
coelorum.—St Anselm.

LET us sit down upon the top of this fair hill. The clear sunshine and the bright air flow into us in streams of life and
gladness, while our thoughts are lifted up to God, and our hearts quietly expand to love. Beneath us is that beautiful
rolling plain, with its dark masses of summer foliage sleeping in the sun for miles and miles away, in the varying
shades of blue and green, according to the distance or the clouds. There at our feet, on the other side, is the gigantic
city, gleaming with an ivory whiteness beneath its uplifted but perpetual canopy of smoke. The villa-spotted hills
beyond it. its almost countless spires, its one huge many-steepled palace, and its solemn presiding dome, its old
bleached tower, and its squares of crowded shipping—it all lies below us in the peculiar sunshine of its own misty
magnificence. There, in every variety of joy and misery, of elevation and depression, three million souls are working
out their complicated destinies. Close around us the air is filled with the songs of rejoicing birds, or the pleased hum
of the insects that are drinking the sunbeams, and blowing their tiny trumpets as they weave and unweave their mazy

dance. The flowers breathe sweetly, and the leaves of the glossy shrubs are spotted with bright creatures in painted
surcoats or gilded panoply, while the blue dome above seems both taller and bluer than common, and is ringing with
the loud peals of the unseen larks, as the steeples of the city ring for the nation’s victory. Far off from the river flat

comes the booming of the camion, and here, all unstartled, round and round the pond, a fleet of young perch are
sailing in the sun. slowly and undisturbedly as if they had a very grave enjoyment of their little lives. What a
mingled scene it is of God and man! And all so bright, so beautiful, so diversified, so calm, opening out such

fountains of deep reflection, and of simple-hearted gratitude to our Heavenly Father.

What is our uppermost thought? It is that we live, and that our life is gladness. Our physical nature unfolds
itself to the sun, while our mind and heart seem no less to bask in the bright influences of the thought of God.

Animate and inanimate, reasoning and unreasoning, organic and inorganic, material and spiritual—what are these
but the names and orders of so many mysteries, of so many sciences, which are all represented in this sunny scene?

We, like the beetles and the perch, like the larks and the clouds, like the leaves and the flowers, like the smokewreaths of the camion and the surges of the bells, are the creatures of the One True God. lights and shades in this
creature-picture, kith and kin to all the things around us, in near or in remote degree. How did we come to live? Why

do we live? How do we live? What is our life? Where did it come from? Whither is it going? What was it meant for?
All that the sun shines upon is real; and we are real too. Are we to be the beauty of a moment, part of earth’s gilding,
to warm ourselves in the sun for awhile and glitter, and add to the hum of life on the planet, and then go away, and

go nowhere? The beautiful day makes us happy, with a childish happiness, and it sends our thoughts to first
principles, to our alphabet, to the beginnings of things.
But we must commence with a little theology', before we can fall back upon the simple truths of the

catechism. We are not on safe ground, although it is such simple ground. Baius, Jansenius, and Quesnel have
contrived so to obscure and confound and divorce the orders of nature and grace, that we cannot treat at any length
of the subject of creation, unless we start with some sort of profession of faith. Theologians, in order to get a clear

view of the matter, consider human nature as either possible or actual in five different states. The first is a state of
pure nature. In this, man would have been created, of course without sin, but also without sanctifying grace, without
infused virtues, and without the helps of a supernatural order. None of these things would have been due to his

nature regarded in itself. He would have been obnoxious to hunger and thirst, to toil, diseases and death, because Iris
nature is compound and material, and contains the principles of these inconveniences within itself. He would have
been subject also to ignorance and to concupiscence, and his happiness would have consisted in his knowledge and
love of God as the author of nature, whose precepts he would have observed by means of what is called natural

grace. This natural grace requires a word of explanation. What is due to nature we do not call grace; in a certain
sense God is bound to give it to us. But He is not bound so to combine secondary causes that the right thoughts and
motives, requisite for us to govern ourselves and control our passions, should rise in our minds at the right time, or
even if such assistance were due to nature in the mass, it would not perhaps be due to it in the individual.
Nevertheless we suppose such an assistance to be essential to a state of pure nature, and as it is over and above what
our nature can claim itself, we call it grace, but grace of the natural, not of the supernatural order. In the time of St

Thomas some theologians held that Adam was created in this state, and remained in it for a time, until he was
subsequently endowed with sanctifying grace, and raised to a supernatural end. This is now, however, universally
rejected. Both angels and men were created in a state of grace. The orders of nature and grace, though perfectly

distinct and on no account to be confused, did as a matter of fact start together in the one act of creation, without any
interval of time between. This state therefore was possible, but never actual.
The second condition of human nature is the state of integrity. Baianism and Jansenism regard this as
identical with the state of pure nature; but Catholic theology considers it as endowed with a certain special
perfection, over and above the perfections due to it for its own sake; and the twenty-sixth proposition of Baius is

condemned because it asserts that this integrity was due to nature, and its natural condition. It consists in the perfect

subjection of the body to the soul, and of the sensitive appetite to the reason, and thus confers upon man a perfect
immunity from ignorance, concupiscence, and death. It inserts in our nature a peculiar vigor by which this glorious

dominion of the soul is completed and sustained, while the tree of life, it is supposed, would have preserved the ma­
terial part of our nature from the corroding influence of age.* Of this state also we may say that it was possible but

never actual; because, while it is true of Adam as far as it goes, he never was, as a matter of fact, left to the
possession of his integrity without the supernatural addition of sanctifying grace.
[footnote: Here theologians differ. Some include the immunity from disease and death in the state of integrity: as
Billuart. Others refer it to the state of innocence; as Viva. The difference is not of consequence to our present
Purpose. See Billuart, Prœambula ad tract, de gratia, and Viva, “de Gratia Adamica” in his Trutina thesium
Quesneilianarum. See also Ripalda’s Disputation on the Baian Propositions, which Dr Ward of St Edmund’s
College has Published in a separate form.]

The third condition of human nature is the state of innocence. By this, Adam, in the first instant of

his creation, or as some say immediately afterwards, had the theological and moral virtues, and the gifts of the Holy
Ghost, infused into him. inasmuch as he was created in a state of grace, and elevated to the supernatural end of
participating in the beatitude of God by the Beatific Vision. He was likewise endowed with such a perfect science

both of natural and supernatural things, as became the preceptor and ruler and head of the human race; and a similar
science would have been easily acquired by Iris descendants in a state of innocence, though as they would not have
been the heads of the race, it would probably not have been infused into them from the first. This innocence is what

we call original justice, to express by one word the aggregate of gifts and habits which compose it; and what

constituted man in this state was the one simple quality' of sanctity ing grace, by which the soul was perfectly subject
to God, not only as its natural, but also as its supernatural author. This is the teaching of the Church; whereas the
heresies of Bains and Jansenius hold that the grace of Adam produced only human merits, and was a natural sequel

of creation, and due to nature on its own account, [footnote: The 21st and 14th Propositions of Bains.] This state of
innocence, or original justice, was that in winch, as a matter of fact, Adam was created.
The fourth condition of man is the state of fallen, while the fifth is that of redeemed nature, to which may
be added the state of glorified nature, and the state of lost nature, in which ultimately the other states must issue. Our
present purpose does not require us to enter upon these. We will only stop to point out a veiy beautiful and touching

analogy. Just as the separate orders of nature and grace were by the sweet love of God started in the same act, so the

promise of the Savior and the actual operation of saving grace followed at once upon the fall, and fallen nature was
straightway placed upon the road of reparation and redemption. Thus is it always in the love of God. There is a
pathetic semblance of impatience about it, an eagerness to anticipate, a quickness to interfere, an unnecessary

profusion in remedying, a perpetual tendency to keep outstripping itself and outdoing itself; and in all these ways is
it evermore overrunning all creation, beautifying and glorifying it with its own eternal splendors.

What then we must bear in mind throughout is this, that the orders of nature and grace are in reality' quite
distinct, that God must be regarded as the author of both, and that we must continually bear in mind this distinction,
if we would avoid the entanglement of errors, which have been noted in tire Condemned Propositions. At the same

time we shall speak of God throughout as at once the author of both these orders, and of creation as representing
both, because as a matter of fact they both started in creation, in the case both of angels and of men.* Out of this
significant fact, that God created neither angels nor men in a state of mere nature, our view of God materially

proceeds. It is a fact which reveals volumes about Him. It stamps a peculiar character upon creation, and originates
obligations which greatly influence the relations of the creature to his Creator. Creation was itself a gratuitous gift.
But, granting creation, nothing was due to the natures either of angels or men but what those natures respectively
could claim on grounds intrinsic to themselves. It was to have been expected beforehand that God would have
created them in a state of perfect nature. It is a surprise that it was not so. On the very threshold of theology' we are

arrested by this mysterious fact, that rational creatures came from their Creator’s hands in a supernatural state, and
that in His first act the natural never stood alone, but it leaned, all perfect as it was, upon the supernatural, ft was as

if God did not like to let nature go, lest haply He should lose what He so dearly loved. This one fact seems to us the
great fact of the whole of theology, coloring it all down to its lowest definition, and marvelously illuminating, from

beneath, the character and beauty of our Creator. It is a hidden sunshine in our minds, better than this outer sunshine
that is round us now. Oh surely to be a creature is a joyous thing; and even our very nothingness is dear to us, as we
think of God; for it seems to be almost a grandeur, instead of an abasement, to have been thus called out of nothing
by such an one as He.
[footnote: See Propositions xxxiv of Quesnel and i of Baius. also xxxv of Quesnel and xxi of Bains. It will be
observed that we carefully avoid the controversy about the condemnation of the xxxivth proposition of Baius, on the
distinction of the double love of God, as author of nature and author of beatitude. Suarez and Vasquez quote
Cardinal Toledo (who was sent to Louvain on the subject by Grcgoiy XLII and may therefore be supposed to have
known the Pope’s mind) as saying that some of the propositions of Baius were only condemned because of the bitter
language used of the opposite opinion. Billuart and others are veiy vehement against this. On the xxxivth
proposition in particular Vasquez and De Lugo take one side, and Suarez. Viva, Ripalda, and the Thomists generally
the other. See Vasquez. 1. 2, p. Disp. 195, cap. 2; De Lugo, de Fide, disp. 9, n. 11-13. The controversy does not
concern us. because we are regarding the two orders of nature and grace throughout as starting simultaneously in
creation, distinct yet contemporary', and are also studiously regarding God as the author of both. We have therefore
nothing to do with the question whether in order to a true act of love we must explicitly regard God as the author of
the supernatural order. In order to avoid multiplying notes, the reader is requested not to lose sight of this fact
throughout the whole treatise. Van Ranst. in Commenting (page 29) on the proposition of Baius, quotes the
following passage of St Thomas from his Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians: Amor est quœdam vis
unitiva, et omnis amor in unione quadam cansistit. Unde secundum diversas uniones diversce species amicitice
distinguantur. Nos autem habemus duplicem conjunctionem cum Deo. Una est quantum ad bona natures, alia
quantum ad beatitudinem. Secundum primam communicationem ad Deum, est amicitia naturalis. Secundum vera
communicationem secundam est amor charitatis. Ad ad Corinth., xiii. 4.]

We are creatures. What is it to be a creature? Before the sun sets in the red west, let us try to have an

answer to our question. We find ourselves in existence today, amid this beautiful scene, with multitudes of our
fellow-creatures round about us. We have been alive and on the earth so many years, so many months, so many
weeks, so many days, so many hours. At such and such a tune we came to the use of reason; but at such an age and

in such a way that we clearly did not confer our reason upon ourselves. But here we are today, not only with a
reason, but with a character of our own, and fulfdling a destiny in some appointed station in life. We know nothing
of what has gone before us. except some little of the exterior of the past, which history or tradition or family records
have told us of. We do not doubt that the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars, the blue skies and the four
winds, the wide green seas and the fruitful earth, were before our time; indeed before the time of man at all. Science
unriddles mysterious things about them; but all additional light seems only to darken and to deepen our real

ignorance.
So is it with the creature man. He finds himself in existence, an existence which he did not give to himself.
He knows next to nothing of what has gone before; and absolutely nothing of what is to come, except so far as his
Creator is pleased to reveal it to him supernaturally. And thus it comes to pass that he knows better what will happen
to him in the world to come than what will be his fortune here. He knows nothing of what is to happen to himself on

earth.
Whether his future years will be happy or sorrowful, whether he will rise or fall, whether he will be well or
ailing, he knows not. It is not in his own hands, neither is it before Iris eyes. If you ask him the particular and special

end which he is to fulfil in his life, what the peculiar gift or good which he was called into being to confer upon his
fellow-men, what the exact place and position which he was to fill in the great social whole, he cannot tell you. It
has not been told to him. The chances are. with him as with most men, that he will die. and yet not know it. And

why? Because he is a creature.
His being bom was a tremendous act. Yet it was not his own. It has entangled him in quantities of difficult
problems, and implicated him in numberless important responsibilities. In fact he has in him an absolute inevitable
necessity either of endless joy or of endless misers': though he is free to choose between the two. Annihilation he is
not free to choose. Reach out into the oncoming eternity as far as the fancy can, there still will this man be, simply
because he has been already bom. The consequences of his birth are not only unspeakable in their magnitude, they

are simply eternal. Yet he was not consulted about own birth. He was not offered the choice of being or not being.
Mercy required that he should not be offered it; justice did not require that he should. We are not concerned now to
defend God. We are only stating facts, and taking the facts as we find them. It is a fact that he was not consulted
about his own birth; and it is truer and higher than all facts, that God can do nothing but what is blessedly,
beautifully right. A creature has no right to be consulted about his own creation: and for this reason simply—that he

is a creature.
He has no notion why it was that his particular soul rather than any other soul was called into being, and
put into his place. Not only can he conceive a soul far more noble and devout than his, but he sees, as he thinks,
peculiar deficiencies in himself, in some measure disqualifying him for the actual position in which God has placed
him. And how can he account for this? Yet God must be right. And his own liberty too must be very broad, and
strong, and responsible. He clearly has a work to do, and came here simply to do it; and it is equally clear that if God
will not work with him against his own will, he also cannot work without God. Every step which a creature takes,

when he has once been created, increases his dependence upon his Creator. He belongs utterly to God by creation: if
words would enable us to say it, he belongs still more utterly to God by preservation. In a word, the creature
becomes more completely, more thoroughly, more significantly a creature, every moment that his created life is
continued to him. This is in fact his tree blessedness, to be ever more and more enclosed in the hand of God who

made him. The Creator’s hand is the creature’s home.
As he was not consulted about his coming into the world, so neither is he consulted about his going out of

it. He does not believe he is going to remain always on earth. He is satisfied that the contraiy will be the case. He
knows that he will come to an end of this life, without ceasing to live. He is aware that he will end this life with
more or less of pain, pain without a parallel, pain like no other pain, and most likely very' terrible pain. For though
the act of dying is itself probably painless, yet it has for the most part to be reached through pain. Death will throw
open to him the gates of another world, and will be the beginning to him of far more solemn and more wonderful

actions than it has been his lot to perforai on earth. Every thing to him depends on Iris dying at the right time and in
the right way. Yet he is not consulted about it. He is entitled to no kind of warning. No sort of choice is left him
either of time or place or manner, ft is true he may take his own life. But he had better not. His liberty is indeed very

great, since this is left free to him. Yet suicide would not help him out of his difficulties. It only makes certain to
him the worst that could be. He is only cutting off his own chances; and by taking his life into his own hands he is
rashly throwing himself out of his own hands in the most fatal way conceivable. One whose business it is to come
when he is called, and to depart when he is bidden, and to have no reason given him either for his call or his

dismissal, except such as he can gather from the character of his master—such is man upon earth; and he is so.
because he is a creature.
Is it childish to say all this? We fear we must say something more childish still. We must not omit to notice

of this creature, this man, that he did not make the world he finds around him. He could not have done so, for lack of
wisdom and of power. But it is not this we would dwell on. As a matter of fact he did not do so; and therefore, as he

did not make the world, it is not his world, but somebody else’s. He can have no rights in it, but such as the
proprietor may voluntarily make over to him in the way of gift. He can have no sovereignty over it, or any part of it,

unless by a royal grace the true sovereign has invested him with delegated powers. In himself therefore he is without
dominion. Dominion does not belong to him as a creature. Dominion is a different idea, and comes from another
quarter.
Furthermore—and we do not care whether it be from faith or reason, or from what proportion of both—this
creature caimot resist the certainties that there is an unseen world in which he is very much concerned. He is quite

sure, nervously sure, that there are persons and things close to him, though unseen, which are of far greater import
than what he sees. He believes in presences which are more intimate to him than any presence of external things,
nay, in one Presence which is more intimate to him than he is to liis own self. Death is a flight away from earth, not
a lying down a few feet beneath its sods; it is a vigorous outburst of a new life, not a resting on a clay pillow from

the weaiyful toil of this life. All things in him and around him are felt to be beginnings, and the curtains of the
unseen world, as if lifted by the wind, wave ever and anon into his face, and cling to it like a mask, and he sees

through, or thinks he sees. This is the last thing we have to note of this man, as he sits upon the hill-top in the

sunshine, part and parcel of the creatures round about him. He finds himself in existence by the act of another. He
knows nothing of what has gone before him, nothing of what is to happen to himself, and next to nothing of what is

to come, and that little only by revelation. He was not consulted about liis own birth, nor will he be about his death.
He has to die out, and has nothing to do with the when or the how. He did not make the world he finds around him,
and therefore it is not liis. Neither can he resist the conviction that this world is for him only the porch of another

and more magnificent temple of the Creator’s majesty, wherein he will enter still further into the Creator’s power,
and learn that to be in the Creator’s power is the creature’s happiness.
ft is not our present business to explain or comment on all this, we are only concerned to state facts. This is
the position of each one of us as men and creatures, the position wherein we find ourselves at any given moment in
which we may choose to advert to ourselves and our circumstances: and the fact that such is our position is no small
help towards an answer to our question, What is it to be a creature? But let us now advance a step further. Let us
pass from the position of this creature to what we know to be his real history. Let us look at him on the hill-top, not

merely in the sunshine of nature, but in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now we shall gain fresh know ledge
about him and understand him better. We shall know his meaning and his destiny, and can then infer from them liis
condition, his duties, and his responsibilities.
He may occupy a very private position in the world. He may not be known beyond the sanctuary of his own
family, or the limits of a moderate circle of acquaintances. The great things of the world have no reference to him,

and public men do not consult him. He has his little world of hopes and fears, of joys and sadnesses, and strangers
intermeddle not with either. His light and his darkness are both liis ow n. But he is a person of no consequence. The
earth, the nation, the shire, the village, go on without his interference. He is a man like the crowd of men, and is not
noticeable in any other way.

Yet the beginning of his histoiy is a long w ay off. Far in the eternal mind of God. further than you can look,
he is there. He has had his place there from eternity'; and before ever the w orld w as, he lay there with the light of

God’s goodness around him, and the clearness of God’s intentions upon him, and was the object of a distinct,
transcending, and unfathomable love. There was more of power, of wisdom, and of goodness in the love which God
bore through eternity to that insignificant man, than we can conceive of. though we raise our imaginations to the
greatest height of which they are capable. May we say it? He was part of God’s glory, of God’s bliss, through all the
unrevolving ages of a past eternity. The hanging up in heaven of those multitudes of brilliant worlds, the
composition, the adornment, and the equipoise of their ponderous masses, all the marvels of inanimate material

creation, all the inexplicable chemistry which is the world’s life, were as nothing compared to the intense brooding

of heavenly love, the compassionate fullness of divine predestination, over that single soul. Think of that, as he sits

among the trees and shrubs, with the insects and the birds about him! So long as there has been a God, so long has
that soul been the object of His knowledge and His love. Ever since the uncreated abyss of almighty love has been
spread forth, there lay that soul gleaming on its bright waters. Oh no wonder God is so patient with sinners, no

wonder Jesus died for souls!
But this is not the whole of his real history. There is more about him still. We do not know what the secrets

of his conscience may be, nor whether he is in a state of grace, nor what might be God’s judgment of him if He
called him away at this moment. But whatever comes of these questions, it is a simple matter of fact that that man
was part of the reason for the incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. He belongs to Jesus, and

was created for Jesus. He is part of his Savior’s property, and meant to adorn His kingdom. His body and his soul
are both of them fashioned, in their degree, after the model of the Body and the Soul of the Word made flesh. His
predestination flowed out from, and is enclosed in, the predestination of Jesus. He is the brother of his God, and has

a divine right to call her mother who calls the Creator Son. He was foreseen in the decree of the Incarnation. The
glory of his soul and tire possibilities of his human heart entered as items into that huge sum of attractions which
drew the Eternal Word to seek His delights among the sons of men, by assuming their created nature to His
uncreated Person. His sins were partly the cause why the Precious Blood was shed; and Jesus suffered, died, rose

again, and ascended for him, as completely as if he were the only one of his race that ever fell. There must be
something very attractive in him for our Lord to have loved him thus steadily and thus ardently. You see that He
counted that creature’s sins over long and long ago. He saw them, as we blind men can never see them, singly and

separately in all their unutterable horror and surpassing malice. Then He viewed them as a whole, perhaps thousands
in number, and aggravated by almost every variety of circumstance of which human actions are capable. And

nevertheless there was something in that man which so drew upon the love of the unspeakably holy God, that He
determined to die for him, to satisfy, and over-satisfy for all his sins, to merit for him a perfect sea of untold graces,
and to beguile him by the most self-sacrificing generosity to the happiness of His divine embraces. All this was
because that man was His creature. So you see what a history his has been, what a stir he has made in the world by

having to do with the Incarnation, how he has been mixed up with eternal plans, and has helped to bring a seeming
change over the ever-blessed and unchanging God! Alas! if it is hard to see good points in others, how much harder
must it be for God to see good points in us, and yet how He loves us all!

But to return to our man, whoever he may be. It is of course tme that God had a general purpose in the
whole of creation, or to speak more truly, many general purposes. But it is also true that He had a special purpose in

this man whom we are picturing to ourselves. The man came into the world to do something particular for God, to

carry out some definite plan, to fulfil some one appointed end, which belongs to him in such a way that it does not
belong to other men. There is a peculiar service, a distinct glory, which God desires to have from that man, different

from the service and the glory of any other man in the world; and the man’s dignity and happiness will result from
his giving God that service and glory and no other. As he did not make himself, so neither can he give himself Iris
own vocation. He does not know what special function it has fallen to him to perfonn in the immense scheme and
gigantic world of his Creator; but it is not the less tme that he has such a special function. Life as it unfolds will
bring it to him. Years will lay his duty and his destiny at his door in parts successively. Perhaps on this side of the
grave he may never see his work as an intelligible whole. It may be part of Iris work to be tried by this veiy

obscurity.
But with what a dignity' it invests the man. to know of him that, as God chose his particular soul at the
moment of its creation rather than countless other possible and nobler souls, so does He vouchsafe to be dependent
on this single man for a glory and a love, which, if this man refuses it to Him, He will not get from any other man

nor from all men put together! God has an interest at stake, which depends exclusively on that single man: and it is

in the man’s power to frustrate this end, and millions do so. When we consider who and how infinitely blessed God
is. is not this special destiny of each man a touching mysteiy? How close it seems to bring the Creator and the

creature! And where is the dignity of the creature save in the love of the Creator?
Furthermore, this man, it would appear, might have been born at any hour of the day or night these last five
thousand years and more. He might have been before Christ or after Him, and of any nation, rank, or religion. His

soul could have been called out of nothing at any moment as easily as when it pleased God in fact to call it. But it
pleased God to call it when He did, because that time, and no other time, suited the special end for which that man

was to live. He was bom, just when he was, for the sake of that particular purpose. He would have been too soon,

had he been bom earlier; too late, if he had not been bom as early. And in like manner will he die. An hour, a place,
a manner of death are all fixed for him; yet so as not in the least to interfere with his freedom. Everything is ar­
ranged with such a superabundance of mercy and indulgence, that he will not only die just when it fits in with the

special work he has to do for God, and the special glory God is to have from him, but he will most probably die at
the one hour when it is safest and best for himself to die. The time, the place, the maimer, and the pain of his death
will in ordinary cases be better for that man than any other time, place, maimer, or pain would be. The most cmelseeming death, if we could only see it, is a mercy which saves us from something worse, a boon of such magnitude

as befits the liberality even of the Most High God.
Once again: a particular eternity' is laid out for that man, to be won by his own free correspondence to the
exuberant grace of his Creator. There is a brightness which may be his for ever, a distinct splendor and characteristic
loveliness by which he may be one day known, admired, and loved amid the populous throngs of the great heaven.
His own place is ready for him in the unutterable rest of everlasting joys. That man. who is gazing on the landscape

at his feet, has an inheritance before him. to which the united wealth of kings is poverty and vileness. A light, a
beauty', a power, a wisdom, are laid up for him, to which all the wonders of the material creation are worse than
tame, lower than uninteresting. He is earning them at this moment, by the acts of love which it seems as if the simple
cheer of the sunshine were drawing out of Iris soul. They have a strange disproportionate proportion to his modest

and obscure works on earth. God, and angels, and saints, are all busy with solicitous loving wisdom, to see that he
does not miss Iris inheritance. His eternity' is dependent on Iris answering the special end of his creation. Doubtless at
this moment he has no clear idea of what his special work is; doubtless it is one of such unimportance, according to

human measures, that it will never lay any weight on the prosperity. or the laws, or the policy of his country. His
light is probably too dim to be visible even to his neighborhood. Yet with it. and because of it, he is one day to shine
like ten thousand suns, far withdrawn within the peace of his satisfied and delighted God!
Such is the man’s real history, traced onward from the hour when it pleased God to create his particular
soul. And how many tilings there are in it to wonder at! How great is the dignity, how incalculable the destinies of

man! All these tilings belong to him. not certainly in right of his being a creature, but at least because he is a crea­

ture. Creation explains all other my steries, or is a step towards explaining them. No wonder God should become
man, in order to be with him, or should die for him, in order to save him. No wonder He should abide with him in
mute reality in the tabernacle, to feed his soul, and to sustain him and keep alive His creature’s love by His own

silent company. No wonder the angels should cling about a man so fondly, nor that the one master-passion of the
saints should be the love of souls. The wonder is that God should have created man; not that having created him, He

should love him so tenderly. Both are wonders; but the first is the greater wonder. Redemption does not follow from
creation as a matter of course: but creation has so surprised us, that we are less surprised at new disclosures of the
Creator’s love. In a series of surprises the first surprise is. in some sense, the greatest, because it is the first, while, in
another sense, further surprises are greater, precisely because they are further ones. In truth, man’s dignity,
wonderful as it is, is less a wonder than the creating love of God. How He holds His creature in His hand for ever!

How all things, dark as well as bright, are simply purposes of unutterable goodness and compassion! How
difficulties and problems are only places where love is so much deeper than common, that the eye cannot pierce it,
nor the lines of our wisdom fathom it! Oh of a truth God is indescribably good, and we feel that He is so whenever

we remember that He made us! What a joy it is to be altogether His. to belong to Him, to feel our complete
dependence upon Him. to lean our whole weight upon Him. not only for the delight of feeling that He is so strong,

but also that we are so weak, and therefore so need Him always and every where! What liberty is like the sense of
being encompassed with His sovereignty ! What a gladness that He is immense, so that we cannot escape from Him;
omniscient, so that we are laid open and without a secret before Him; eternal, so that we are in His sight but

nothingness, nothingness that lives because He loves it!

Something more is still required in order to complete our picture of the creature. We have represented his
position, and have traced Iris real life: but we have got to consider the condition in which he is as a creature. We
shall have to plead guilty to a little repetition. The nature of our subject renders it unavoidable, and we must crave
the reader’s indulgence for it.
The first feature to be noticed in the condition of this creature man is his want of power. Not only is his
health uncertain, but at his best estate his strength is very small. Brute matter resists him passively. He caimot lift

great weights of it, nor dig deep into it. Even with the help of the most ingenious machineiy, and the united labor of
multitudes, he can do little but scratch the surface of the planet, without being able to alter the expression of one of
its lineaments. Fire and water are both his masters. His prosperity is at the mercy of the weather. Matter is baffling

and mining him somewhere on the earth at all hours of day and night. He has to struggle continually to maintain his
position, and then maintains it with exceeding difficulty.

Considering how many thousands of years the race of man has inhabited the world, it is surprising how
little control he has acquired over diseases, how little he knows of them, how much less he can do to alleviate them.
Even in his arts and sciences there are strangely few things which he can reduce to certainty. His knowledge is ex­

tremely limited, and is liable to the most humiliating errors and the most unexpected mistakes. He is in comparative
ignorance of himself, of his thinking principle, of the processes of his immaterial soul, of the laws of its various
faculties, or of the combinations of mind and matter. Metaphysics, which should rank next to religion in the scale of
sciences, are a proverb for confusion and obscurity. Infinite longings perpetually checked by a sense of feebleness,

and circumscribed within the limits of a narrow prison—this is a description of the highest and most aspiring moods
of man.
Such is the condition of our man if we look at him in his solitary dignity as lord of the creation. But even

this is too favorable a representation of him. His solitary dignity is a mere imagination On the contrary, he is
completely mixed up with the crowd of inferior creatures, and in numberless ways dependent upon them. If left to
himself the ponderous earth is simply useless to him. Its maternal bosom contains supplies of minerals and gases,

which are meant for the daily sustaining of human life. Without them this man would die in torture in a few days;
and yet by no chemistiy can he get hold of them himself and make them into food. He is simply dependent upon

plants. They alone can make the earth nutritious to him, whether directly as food themselves, or indirectly by their
support of animal life. And they do this by a multitude of hidden processes, many of which, perhaps the majority,
are beyond the explanation of human chemistry. Thus he is at the mercy of the vegetable world. The grass that tops
Ins grave, which fed him in his life, now feeds on him in turn.

In like maimer is he dependent upon the inferior animals. Some give him strength to work with, some warm
materials to clothe himself with, some their flesh to eat or their milk to drink. A vast proportion of mankind have to
spend their time, their skill, their wealth, in waiting upon horses and cows and camels, as if they were their servants,

building houses for them, supplying them with food, making their beds, washing and tending them as if they were

children, and studying their comforts. More than half the men in the world are perhaps engrossed in this occupation
at the present moment. Human families would break up. if the domestic animals ceased to be members of them.
Then, as to the insect world, it gives us a sort of nervous trepidation to contemplate it. The numbers of insects, and
their powers, are so terrific, so absolutely irresistible, that they could sweep even living tiling from the earth and
devour us all within a week, as if they were the fiery breath of a destroying angel. We can hardly tell what holds the

lightning-like speed of their prolific generations in check. Birds of prey, intestine war, man s active hostility—these,

calculated at their highest, seem inadequate to keep down the insect population, whose numbers and powers of
annoyance yearly threaten to thrust us off our own planet. It is God Himself who puts an invisible bridle upon these
countless and irresistible legions, which otherwise would lick us up like thirsty fire.

What should we do without the sea? Earth and air would be useless, would be uninhabitable without it.
There is not a year but the great deep is giving up to the investigations of our science unthought-of secrets of its
utility, and of our dependence upon it. Men are only beginning to learn the kind and gentle and philanthropic nature

of that monster that seems so lawless and so wild. Our dependence on the air is no less complete. It makes our
blood, and is the warmth of our human lives. Nay, would it be less bright or beautiful, if it allowed to escape from it.
let us say, one gas, the carbonic acid, which forms but an infinitesimally small proportion of it, the gas on which all
vegetation lives? It exists in the air in quantities so trifling as to be with difficulty discernible, yet if it were breathed
away, or if the sea drank it all in, or would not give back again what it drinks, in a few short hours the flowers would

be lying withered and discolored on the ground, the mighty forests would curl up their myriad leaves, show their
white sides, and then let them wither and fall. There would not be a blade of grass upon the earth. The animals
would moan and faint, and famished men would rise upon each other, like the maddened victims of a shipwreck, in

the fury of their ungovernable hunger. Within one short week the planet would roll on bright in its glorious sunshine,

and its mineral-colored plains speckled with the shadows of its beautiful clouds, but all in the grim silence of
universal death. On what trembling balances of powers, on what delicate and almost imperceptible chemistries, does
man’s tenure of earth seem to rest! Yes! but beneath those gauzelike veils is the strong arm of the compassionate
Eternal!
It would require a whole volume to trace the various ways in which man is dependent upon the inferior

creatures. All the adaptations, of which different sciences speak, turn out upon examination to be so many

dependencies of man on things which are beneath him. In material respects man is often inferior to his inferiors. But
there is one feature in his dependency, which does not concern his fellow-creatures, and on wliich it is of

consequence to dwell. There is a peculiar kind of incompleteness about all he does, which disables him from
concluding anything of himself, or unassisted. It is as if his arm was never quite long enough to reach his object, and
God came in between him and his end to enable him to realize it. Man is ever falling, God ever saving: the creature

always on the point of being defeated, the Creator always coming to the rescue opportunely. Thus man plants the

tree and waters it, but he cannot make it grow. He prepares his ground and enriches it, he sows his seeds and weeds
it; but he cannot govern the weather, or the insects, on which his harvest depends. Between his labor and his labor’s
reward God has to intervene. When he lays his plans, he does nothing more than prepare favorable circumstances for
the end which he desires. In war, in government, in education, in commerce, when he has done all, he has ensured
nothing. An element has to come in and to be waited for, without which he can have no results, and over which he

has no control. Sometimes men call it fate, or fortune, sometimes chance or accident. It is the final thing, it is what
completes the circle, or fires the train, or makes the parts into a whole. It is the interference of God. the action of His
will. In every department of human life we discover this peculiarity, that of himself, that is with means left at his

own disposal, man can approach his end, but not attain it: he can get near it, but he caimot reach it. He is always too
short by a little; and the supplement of that littleness is as invariably the gratuitous Providence of God. Nothing

throws more light than this on the question, What is it to be a creature?
All this is very commonplace. Everybody knows it, has always known it, and never doubted it. Tme: yet

see, if when all these things are strung together and presented to your mind, there does not rise up an almost
unconscious feeling of exaggeration, nay, an almost outspoken charge of it, against the statement of the case. This
will be a test to you, that you have not realized the case, that you have not taken it in, and consequently that you
have something still to learn from facts which seem so undignifiedly familiar. For both the value of the lesson and

its significance depend upon its strength. We cannot exaggerate the abjectness of the creature in itself, looked at as if
it were apart from God, which happily it can never be, though it will be something like it when it is reprobate; and
then, what more unspeakably abject than a lost soul? What we are always to feel, and never to forget, is that we are
finite, dependent, imperfect, that it is our nature to look up to someone higher, to lean on someone stronger, and that
it is as unnatural for man to try to go alone and trust himself, as for a fish to live on the land or a bird of the air in the

flames of the fire. Dignity we have, and superabundantly, and we ought never to forget it. But then we must re­
member also that the creature man has no dignity in the love of Him who made him.
But our real history adds a great deal to our condition, which is full of important consequences. Man is not

as he came forth at first from the hand of his Creator. He has fallen; and his fall is not merely an external disability,
consequent on an historical fact so many thousand years old. He bears the marks of it in himself. He feels its effects
in even' moral act, in every intellectual process. He is the prey of an intestine warfare. Two conflicting laws

alternate within him. He has lost his balance, and finds it hard to keep the road. Notwithstanding the magnificent
spiritual renewal which the mercy of his Creator has worked w ithin him by the supernatural grace of a sacrament,
each man has added to the common fall a special revolt of his own. Nay, most men have repeated, imitated,

aggravated the act of their first father. They have fallen themselves, and their sin has been accompanied with
peculiarly disabling circumstances of guilt. Then the unwearied compassion of the Creator has come forth with an­
other sacrament to repair this personal willful revolt of the poor fallen creature. With its grace fresh upon him, he
has revolted again, and then again. He has diversified his falls. He has multiplied his treasons by varying their kind.

He has broken, not one. but numerous laws, as if to show that it was not the hardness of any particular precept, so
much as the simple fact of being under God’s yoke at all, which he found so unbearable. And again and again and

again has the merciful sacrament repaired and absolved him. and grace goes on with a brave patient kindness of its
own, fighting against seemingly incorrigible habits of sin; and even at the hour of death how reluctantly does mercy
seem to capitulate to justice! Now see how all this affects lus condition as a creature. A man bom under civil
disabilities has no guilt in the eye of his country ’s laws, yet he does not take rank with a tme citizen. A pardoned
criminal to his last day will not cast the inferiority' which he has brought upon himself. No pardon, no honors, can
ever cover the fact either from others or himself. Nay, so far as he himself is concerned, they will only keep the fact

bright and burnished in his mind.
The man who has been tried and cast for nearly every crime in almost even' court in the land, and who is at
large by a simple and amazing act of royal clemency, must feel that he has made a condition for himself which he
never can forget, and out of which he draws every hour peculiar motives of conduct and demeanor; and the better
man he becomes, the less likely is he ever to forget his past. So surely it is with us men. If looked at without
advertence to the original fall, or to our own fall, or to our renewed falls after grace given, what are we but finite,

dependent, imperfect: but when those three additional facts of our real history are added to our condition, how much

more narrow, and little, dependent, and inferior do we appear to become. The least word seems too big to express
our littleness.
But we can go lower still. Pardon lowers us. The abundance and frequency of mercy humble us. Tire

goodness of God gives a new life to the sense of our own misery and hatefulness. It quickens our knowledge of our

own inferiority into a positive feeling of self-contempt. It is true that the first fall, and our own fall, and our repeated
falls, all flow, voluntary though they be, out of our necessary imperfections as creatures: yet nevertheless they add

something to the consciousness that we are creatures, just as all developments seem to add to their germ, even
though, like sin, they are not inevitable but free developments. And then God’s pardoning mercy adds again to our
consciousness that we are creatures. It appears to sink us lower and lower in our own nothingness, to envelop us
more and more in the sense of our createdness. For in our sin God has condescended to make a covenant with us.

and He is hourly fulfilling His share of it. On his part the covenant seems an abandonment of His own rights, a
waiving of His own dignity, a service gratuitously given, or for a nominal payment which makes it less dignified

than if it were gratuitous, a lowering of Himself towards our level, a series of apparent changes in Him who in His
essence and knowledge and will is gloriously and majestically immutable. All this makes us feel more and more
intensely what it is to be a creature. The consciousness that clung to the beautiful soul of the unfallen Adam
becomes a deeper consciousness to the fallen sinner, and that deeper becomes deepest in the chastened joy and

humbled peace of the forgiven simrer.
Thus each of us finds himself in his place, his own allotted place, in nature and in grace, with this threefold
consciousness upon him. Beneath the weight of this happy and salutary consciousness he has to work out his

destiny. Criticism of his position is not only useless: so long as he remembers himself, it is impossible. Not only
does he know in the abstract that all must be right; he knows by his feeling of being a creature that all is right. To
him criticism is not only loss of time; it is irréligion also. He does not know how to sit in judgment upon his Creator.

He cannot comprehend even the mental process by which others do it. much less the moral temper. For, while he has
this threefold consciousness that he is a creature, he camrot conceive of himself without it. nor what he would be like
if he was without it, and therefore those who are without it are beyond Iris comprehension for the time, both in what

they say and do.
There are not two sides to the question of life, God’s side and man’s side. God’s side is all in all. Not only
is there nothing to be said on the other, there is no other. To think that man has a side is to forget that he is a

creature, or at least not realize what it is to be a creature. Encompass man’s littleness with the grand irresponsible
sovereignty of God, and then is he glorious indeed, his liberty large beyond compare, and his likeness to God more
like an equality with Him than we can dare to put in words.
Now let us go back to the man we left sitting on the hill-top in the brightness of the summer sun. We have
to draw some conclusions about him from what has been already said; and the first is this. As “creature” is Iris name,

his history, and his condition, he must obviously have the conduct and the virtues befitting a creature. He must
behave as what he is. His propriety consists in his doing so. He must be made up of fear, of obedience, of
submission, of humility, of prayer, of repentance, of responsibility, and above all, of love. As fire warms and frost

chills, as the moon shines by night and the sun by day, as birds have wings and trees have leaves, so must man, as a

creature, conduct himself as such, and do those virtuous actions, which are chiefly virtues because they are
becoming to him and adapted to lus condition. The demeanor, the behavior, the excellences of a creature must bear
upon them the stamp of Iris created nature and condition. This is too obvious to need enforcing; obvious when stated,

yet most strangely forgotten by most men during the greater part of their lives.
Our second conclusion about this man is that, whatever may be his attainments or his inclinations, the only

knowledge worth much of his time and trouble, the only science which will last with him and stand him in good

stead, consists in his study of the character of God. He received eveiything from God. He belongs to Him. He is
surrounded by Him. His fate is in God’s hands. His eternity is to be with God, in a companionship of unspeakable

delights. Or if it is to be in exile from Him. it is the absence of God which will be the intolerableness of his miseiy.
His own being implies God’s being; and he exists, not for himself, but for God. Of what unspeakable importance

then is it for him to find out who God is, what sort of Being He is, what He likes and what He dislikes, how He deals
with His creatures and how He expects His creatures to deal with Him. Can his understanding be employed upon

anything more exalted? Is there any novelty equal to his daily fresh discoveries in the rich depth of the divine
perfections? Is there any person in the world whose ways and works are of such thrilling interest to him as those of
the Three Uncreated Persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Is there any existing or possible thing to be
conceived or named one half so curious, one half so attractive, one half so exciting, as the adorable self-subsisting
Essence of the Most High God? Oh no! Obviously, whatever that man may be thinking of now, he ought to be
thinking of God. As long as he sits beneath the fragrant shadow of that pious thought, that he is a creature, so long
will he feel that his one wise and delightful task, while he is a lodger among the mutable homes of this swift-footed

planet, must be the study of his Creator’s character.
Our third conclusion is that, if God is to be the subject of the man s intellectual occupations, God must be
equally the object of liis moral conduct. God must have his whole heart as well as his whole mind. We have no

doubt that that man’s soul is a perfect mine of practical energies, which the longest and most active life will not half
work out. The muscle of the heart acts seventy times a minute for perhaps seventy years, and is not tired; yet what is
this to the activity of the soul? He has far more energy in him than his neighbors are aware of, more than he suspects

himself. He can do wonders with these energies if he concentrates them on any object, whether it be pleasure,
wealth, or power. Our conclusion implies that, while he may use his energies on any or all of those three things, he
must concentrate them on God only, on tire loving observance of his Creator’s law. We do not see what being a

creature means, if it does not mean this; though we know that there are creatures who have irrevocably determined
not to do it. and their name is devil, a species they have created for themselves in order to escape as far as they can

to the outskirts of the creation of eternal power and love. Why be like them? Why go after them? Why not leave
them to themselves, at the dreadful, dismal pole of our Father’s empire?
These three conclusions are inevitable results of that man's being a creature. If he does not intend to make
them the law of his life, he has no business to be in the sunshine. If he wants to be a god. let him make a world for

himself. Ours is meant for creatures. Why is he turning all our bright and beautiful tilings to curse and darkness, all
our sweet gifts to gall and wormwood? What right has he to be lighting the fires of hell in his own heart at the beams
of that grand loving sun? A creature means "All for God.” Holiness is an unselfing of ourselves. To be a creature is

to have a special intensified sonship, whose life and breath and being are nothing but the fervors of his filial love
taking fire on his Father’s bosom in the pressure of his Father's arms. The sacred humanity of the Eternal Son,
beaming in the very central heart of the ever-blessed Trinity—that is the type, the meaning, the accomplishment, of
the creature.
If we take all the peculiarities of the creature and throw them into one. if we sum them all up and express

them in the ordinary language of Christian doctrine, we should say that they came to this—that as man was not his
own beginning, so also he is not his own end. His end is God; and man belies Iris own position as a creature when­
ever he swerves from this his sole tme end. Everyone knows what it is to have an end and how much depends upon

it. To change a man s end in life is to change Iris whole life, to revolutionize his entire conduct. When he sees his
aim distinctly before him, he uses his sagacity in planning to attain it, his courage in removing the obstacles which
intervene, and his pmdence in the selection of the means by which he is eventually to succeed. More or less
consistently, and more or less incessantly, the man’s mind and heart are occupied about his end. It forms his

character, it possesses his imagination, it stimulates his intellect, it engrosses his affections, it absorbs his faults, it is
his measure of failure and success, it is ever tending to be his very standard of right and wrong. A creature, in that it

is a creature, is like a falling stone, ft seeks a center, it travels to an end, irresistibly, impetuously. This is its law of
life. Hence it is that the end gives the color to the creature’s life, describes it, defines it, animates it, rules it. This is

tme of pleasure, of knowledge, of wealth, of power, of popularity, when they are sought as ends. They lay
passionate hold upon a man. and make him their slave, and brand their mark all over him, and the whole world
knows him to be theirs.

But all this is still true when man makes God, what God has already made Himself, his single and
magnificent end. And how glorious are the results in his capacious soul! To make God always our end is always to
remember that we are creatures; and to be a saint is always to make God our end. Hence to be a saint is always to re­
member, and to act on the remembrance, that we are creatures. Yet, horrible as it sounds when it is put into words, it
is the common way of men to make God a means instead of an end, a purveyor instead of a judge, f they make any

use of Him at all. He has to forecast for their comforts, to supply their necessities, to pay for their luxuries. All men
seek their own, murmured the indignant apostle. To seek the things of Christ was his romance, which worldly dis­
ciples did not understand. How few can turn round upon themselves at any given moment of life, when they do not
happen to be engaged in spiritual exercises, and can say, “God is my end! At this moment when I unexpectedly look

in upon myself, while I was acting almost unconsciously, I find that I was doing, what a creature should always be
doing—seeking God. My worldly duties and social occupations were understood to be means only, and were treated
accordingly. There was nothing in my mind and heart which partook of the dignity of an end, except God.” Yet is it

not our simple business? We expect even a dog to come when he is called, and a clock to go when it is wound up,
and in like manner God, when He creates us, expects us to seek Him as our only end and sovereign good.
We are almost frightened at what we have written. We covenanted not to speak of high things, nor entangle

you in discourses of spiritual perfection: and we honestly do not intend to wile you to commit yourselves to anything
which is not commonplace and necessary. Yet when we simply say what it is to be a creature, we seem to be
demanding the highest sanctity. The creature seems to slip into the saint. The natural temper and disposition proper

to us because of our created origin seem to put on the hue and likeness of supernatural grace and contemplation, and
the commonplace insensibly to glide into the heroic. There must be some mistake. Where is it? Our conscience tells
us that we have been honorably checking ourselves a score of times in the last score pages, from saying what was
burning in our heart to come out. It is not we that have broken faith with you, gentle reader. Have we then overstated
the case of the creature? Have we drawn any conclusion without a premise to warrant it? Have we invented what

does not exist, or falsely embellished what does? The more we consider the case, the less we seem to have done so.
We may have wearied you with telling you what was so old and trite; we do not think we have told you anything
new, or that there is any part of our statement from which you dissent. How then have we come to this pass? Is it
true that everyone is obliged to be what is technically called a saint, or what theology styles perfect, simply because
he is a creature? We caimot say Yes, and yet we hardly dare say No. What if it be tme that perfection is only the
result of corresponding to grace as it is given, and thus that all good people are in the road to perfection always; so
that perfection is not one thing, and common holiness another; but that common holiness is perfection in its

childhood, and perfection is common holiness in its maturity? We will not say that this is so. But we will say thus
much, that the simple statement of our position and condition as creatures brings us to this—that to serve God out of
love is not the peculiar characteristic of what is termed high spirituality, but that, without reference to perfection,
nay without reference to redemption, creation, of and by itself, does bind the creature to sen e the Creator out of
love; and we confess that this conclusion is as pregnant of consequences as it is inevitable in its trnth.
In the last chapter we said that a heathen, who without revelation should act consistently (if he could) with
the constant remembrance that he was a creature, would, bating certain gifts and graces, be a portrait of a Catholic
saint. Now that we have examined more in detail the characteristics proper to a creature, and so the duties which
become him, the same truth comes out still more clearly. What on a superficial view seems the peculiar excellence

of high spirituality, namely, that in it God is served out of love, turns out to be a universal obligation undeniably

founded on the simple fact of creation. Thus all practical religion is based upon a man’s behaving himself be­
comingly as a creature. It is the humility and modesty that come out of that thought which give to his actions all
their gracefulness and beauty, and commute them into worship and adoration. When we seek for the first principles

of holiness, we find them where the heathen finds the roots of his moral duties, and where asceticism and mysticism
discover the axioms out of which they draw unerringly that vast series of amazing truths which theology records and
classifies. These axioms are all implied in the fact of our creation. They are the religious intuitions proper to a

creature. Bind yourself to no more than on reflection you will acknowledge yourself to be bound to by the simple
fact that God created you, and then you will become holy. It needs no more than that.

If we examine the falls both of angels and men, we shall see that what lay at the root of them was a
forgetfulness that they were creatures, or a perverse determination to be something more. Whether the angels
contemplated their own beauty and rested with an unhallowed complacency in themselves as their end, or whether
they would not bow to the divine counsel of the Incarnation and exaltation of Christ’s human nature above their
own, in both cases they forgot themselves as creatures, and demanded what it was not becoming in a creature to
demand. You shall be as gods, was the very motive which the tempter urged in order to push man to liis ruin. Man

insisted upon sharing something which it had pleased God for the time to reserve to Himself. The knowledge of God
was the object of Adam’s envy; and so unsuitable was it for him as a creature, that, when he got it. it ceased to be
science, and turned into guilty shame. In both cases, it was not merely that the angels and man refused to obey their
Creator; they wanted themselves to be more than creatures. They would not acquiesce in their created position. Can

anything show more plainly the importance of keeping always before us the fact that we are creatures?
Yes! we may go still higher. We say of our Blessed Lord that He is our example as well as our mediator.
Yet He was God as well as man. What is this then but saying that of such consequence was it to the happiness of

man that he should know how to behave himself as a creature, that it was necessary the Creator should take a created
nature, and come Himself to show him how to wear it? Thus one of the many known reasons of the sublime mystery

of the Incarnation was that the Creator Himself might show the creature how he should behave as a creature. What

interest does not this throw upon the minutest incidents and most rapid graphic allusions of the four Gospels! The
mysteries of Jesus are man’s studies of the beauty of holiness. His soul drinks beauty out of them, and so is
imperceptibly transfonned into the likeness of God made man. He takes the form and the hue of the Incarnate Word.

If we turn from our Lord’s example to His w ork for us as our mediator, the same truth meets us in another
shape. Not only was His created nature necessary for this office in the counsels of God, but special stress is laid

upon those things which are eminently characteristic of a created nature as created. Speaking of His intercession the
Apostle says that “in the days of His flesh He was heard because He feared,” and again he speaks of the crucifixion
in the same way, “He was obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.” It is as if Jesus redeemed the world

especially by acknowledging in an infinitely meritorious manner through His created nature the sovereignty and
dominion of the Creator.
To sum up briefly the results of this chapter, it appears, that to be a creature is a very peculiar and

cognizable thing, that it gives birth to a whole set of duties, obligations, responsibilities, virtues, and proprieties, that
it implies a certain history past and future, and a certain present condition, that on it are founded all our relations to
God, and therefore all our practical religion, and that it involves in its own self, without reference to any additional

mercies, the precise obligation of loving our Creator supremely as our sole end, and of serving Him from the motive

of love. Thus, as we may say to the misbeliever that he would be a Catholic if he only had an intelligent
apprehension of the mysteiy of creation, so we may say to the Catholic that he would be more like a saint, if he only

understood with his mind and felt in his heart, what it w as to be a creature.

The Third Chapter
WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR

Debemus intelligere ut amemus, non vero amare ut intelligamus.—St Anselm.
As creatures we are ourselves surrounded with creatures in the world. Above us and beneath us and around us there
are creatures, of manifold sorts and of varying degrees of beauty. The earth beneath our feet, and the vast sidereal

spaces above us, are all teeming with created tilings. When we come to reflect upon them, we are almost bewildered
with their number and diversity, on the earth, in the water, and in the air, visible and invisible, known to science or

unknown. Then theology teaches us that we are lying in the mighty bosom of another world of spiritual creatures,

whom we do not see, and yet with whom we are in hourly relations of brotherhood and love. The realms of spirit
encompass us with their unimaginable distances, and interpenetrate in all directions our material worlds. Creation is
populous with angels. They are the living laws of the material world, the wise and potent movers of the wheeling
spheres. All night and day they bear us company. They hold us by the hand and lead us on our way. They hear our

words, and witness our most hidden acts. The secrets of our hearts are hardly ours: for we let them transpire
perpetually by external signs before the keen vision of the angels. Nay. have we not asked God to let our own angel
see down into our hearts and know us thoroughly, so that he may guide us better with his affectionate and surpassing
skill? Because we are creatures, creatures exercise a peculiar influence over us. Love is stronger than the grave.

Blood and family and country rule us with an almost resistless sway. We can so attach ourselves to an unreasoning
animal as to love it beyond all bounds, and to weep when its bright little life is taken from us. The very trees and
fields of our village, and the blue dreamy outline of our native hills, can so possess our souls as to sway them
through a long life of travel or of money-making or of ambition.

Alas! we are so saturated with creatures, that we think even of our Creator under created symbols; and
God’s mercilul condescensions seem to show that a material creature could hardly worship with a spiritual worship,
until the Creator had kindly put on a created nature. Thus every report of the senses, every process of the mind,

every' fomr and figure in the soul’s secret chambers of imagery, every' action that goes out from us. every pulse of
our natural life, the atoms of matter that circulate through us in swift and endless streams, clothing the soul with its
garment of marvelous texture which is being woven and unwoven every hour, as swiftly as the changes on a dove’s

bright neck—all of them imply creatures, are kindled by them, fed by them, lean upon them, and cannot for one
moment be disentangled from them, except by some most rare process of supernatural grace. Our life seems
inextricably mixed up with creatures, and, to use a metaphysical term, is unthinkable without them.
How difficult then is it to conceive of a Life without creatures, a Life which was from everlasting without
them, which needs them not. which mixes them not up with itself, to which they can add nothing, and from which
they can take nothing! We have to banish from our minds, or to attempt it, the ideas of time and space, of body and

of motion; and even then the unimaginable void, which is not space, or the colorless light which is not body, is still a
created image built up of created notions. There is something unutterably appalling in a Life eternally by itself, selfsufficing, its own glory', its own knowledge, its own magnificence, its own intense blessedness, its own silent, vast,
unthrilling love. Surely to think of such a Life is to worship it. But ft—it is not It—there were no things then—it is
He, our God and our Creator! Out of that Life we came, when the Life had spent an eternity without us. The Life

needed us not, was none the happier because of us, ruled not over a wider empire through us, multiplied not in us the

objects of omniscience. But the Life loved us, and therefore out of the Life we came, and from its glorious sunbright fountains have we filled the tiny vases of our created lives. Oh how the sublimity of this faith at once
nourishes our souls like food and recreates the mind like rest! Of how many illusions ought it not in its magnificent

simplicity to disabuse us! The very' idea of the Life of God before ever the worlds were made must of necessity give
a tone and a color, impart a meaning, and impress a character upon our own lives, w hich they would not otherwise
have had. It furnishes us with a measure of the true magnitudes of things which teaches us how and what to hate and

despise, and how and what to love and esteem. To put the thought into easier words, we cannot fully know' w hat it is
to be a creature, until we know as frilly as we can what it is to have a Creator.
It is the peculiar beauty of the Old Testament that it brings out this truth to us in the most forcible and

attractive manner. This is probably the secret of the hold which it lays of the minds of those w ho have become
familiar with it in early youth, and of the deep basis of religious feeling which it seems to plant in them. Though it is

made up of various books, differing in date, and scene, and style, though psalm and prophecy and moral strains
mingle with history and biography, everyone feels that it has, almost as completely as the New Testament, one
spirit, one tone, one color, one scope. Whether it is when Adam and Eve are doing penance in Asia, and Cain is
wandering out on the great homeless earth, or whether it is in the patriarch’s tent beneath the starry skies of

Mesopotamia, or amid the brick-fields of the Nile, or the silent glens of stem Sinai, or during the rough chivalric
days of the Judges, or in the palaces of Jerusalem, or by the waters of the captivity, whether it be when Debbora is
chanting beneath her palm, or the king of Israel is singing to his harp, or amid the allegorical actions of some

wailing prophet, or the conversations of the wise men of the Stony Arabia, we are ever learning what it is to be a
creature, and what it is to have a Creator. We are being taught the character of the God of Abraham and of Isaac and
of Jacob, the God that was not like the gods of the heathen. We either see or hear what He desires of us, how He will
treat us, the ways, so unlike human ways, in which He loves us and will show His love, His style of punishment, His
manifold devices of mercy, what He meant human life to be, and how men were to use both each other and the earth
w hich He had given them to farm. We do not know why it is that a tale, the like of which in common history would
barely interest us, should fascinate us in the words of inspiration, why ordinary things should seem sacred because
they are related there, and why simple expressions should have a latent spell within them enabling them to fix

themselves deep in our souls to be the germs of a strong and dutiful devotion through a long life, and then be a
helpful power to us in death. It can only be because it is all so possessed with God. The tree humble pathetic genius
of a creature comes into our souls, and masters them. The knowledge of God becomes almost a personal familiarity
with Him, and the thought of Him grow s into the sight of Him. Look at the fathers of the desert and the elder saints

of the Catholic Church, and see what giants of holiness they were, whose daily food was in the mysterious simplicity
of the Sacred Scriptures! The Holy Book lies like a bunch of myrrh in the bosom of the Church, a power of sanc­
tification like to which, in kind or in degree, there is no other, except the sacraments of the Precious Blood.

It would not be easy to throw into w ords the exact result of the know ledge of God which the Bible infuses
into us. It is hard to fasten and confine in tenns the idea of a Creator. When we try to do so, something seems to
escape, to evaporate, to retuse to go into words; and it is just that something, as we are conscious, wherein most of

the power and beauty of the idea reside. Just as we may find it hard to describe the character of our earthly mother,
to refine upon her peculiarities, to select her prominent and distinguishing traits, and yet we have an idea of her so

distinct that we see her more plainly, and know her more thoroughly than anyone else we love, so is it with our
knowledge and love of God. We cannot look at Him as simply external to ourselves. Things have passed between
us; secret relationships are established; fond ties are knitted; thrilling endearments have been exchanged; there are
memories of forgiveness full of tenderness, and memories of punishment even yet more full of sw eetness and of

love; there have been words said, which could never mean to others w hat they meant to us; there have been looks

which needed not words and were more than words; there have been pressures of the hand years ago, but which
tingle yet; there are countless silent covenants between us, and with it all, such a conviction of His fidelity! So that it

is true to each one of us beyond our neighbors, as it was true to the Israelites beyond other nations. Who is so great a
God as our God, and who hath God so near?
We can therefore but try' to express in cold and vague words the idea which a loving Christian heart has of
the Creator. It is plain that our Creator is one who stands in a relation to us which has no parallel whatever among
the relations which exist between ourselves and other creatures. It is not a question of degree; it is one of kind also.
It stands by itself, and we can compare it with nothing else. We caimot even understand it in its fullness. Do we

know what the act of creating a soul out of nothing implies? Do we comprehend the difference between being

nothing and possessing an immortal life? Do we fathom what it is to be loved eternally? Do we quite take in what it
is to interest God in our happiness, and to have Him employed about us? Do we understand what it is that there

should be the infinite and everlasting God, and also, beside Him, something which is not Himself? Yet unless we
know all these things, we could not know what the relationship of creature and Creator involves. But we can easily
perceive so much as this. Not only is the relationship between our Creator and ourselves unlike anything else,

without parallel and beyond comparison, but it is far closer than any other tie of love by which the human soul can
possibly be bound. He is obviously nearer to us than father or mother. We come more directly from Him than from
them. We are more bound up with Him. and owe Him more. We cannot come of age with God. nor alter our position

with Him. We cannot grow out of our dependence upon Him. nor leave the home of His right hand. The act of our

creation is not done once for all. and then ceases. Preservation is but the continuance of creation, the non­
intermption of the first act of divine power and love. The strong spirit of the highest angel needs the active
concurrence of God every' moment, lest it should fall back into its original nothingness.

But not only is our relation to our Creator the closest of all relations, it is also the tenderest and the dearest.
Nay, its sweetness may almost be said to follow from its closeness; for the closer the union, the more perfect should
be the love. It is not within the power of God’s omnipotence, if we may speak so boldly, to make Himself otherwise

than infinitely desirable to His creature. He is in Himself so surpassingly beautiful, so attractively good, so
unspeakably compassionate, that He must of necessity' draw us towards Him. Even those, who of their own will arc
lost, struggle towards Him, in spite of their reluctant aversion, with all the might of their nature and with the burning
thirst of an incessant desire. Whatever then is sweet, whatever is delightful, whatever is satisfying, in human love,
parental or filial, conjugal or fraternal, is but a poor shadow of the love which enters into the tie between the Creator

and the creature. Hence we are not surprised to find that this tie is so durable that it can never be broken. The child

in heaven owes no allegiance to its earthly father, and like the saints, may be in glory far above him. In heaven there
is no marrying nor giving in marriage. The resurrection has emancipated all from every earthly bond. Whatever of
earthly ties may survive in heaven, it survives not as a bond. But it is not so with the relation between the creature

and the Creator. Everywhere and always that remains the same. Nay. as the lapse of time is ever adding to the
creature’s debt, swelling the huge sum of his obligations for benefits received, opening out new reasons for
dependence upon his Maker, and drawing him into still closer union with Him, we may even say that the tie is
continually acquiring new strength, and is being drawn tighter instead of being relaxed. It is God’s unbounded love,
rather than His immense magnificence, which makes Him ever new to us. and His beauty alway s a fresh surprise

and a fresh delight. It is not only, to use the distinction of the psalm, the greatness of His mercy, but it is the
multitude of His mercies, which make our tmst and confidence in Him so inexpressibly consoling, and our union
with Him so far more intimate than any other tie of which we can conceive. We are one with Him, as our Lord
prayed we might be, even as the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are One.

If we endeavor to take to pieces the idea of a Creator, it may seem as if we were raising idle questions and

satisfying a barren curiosity rather than ministering to solid edification. Yet it will not be found so in reality; and
there is no other way by which we can get the idea clearly into our minds. If then we reflect attentively on the trains
of pious thought excited in us, when we meditate on God’s glorious and fatherly title of Creator, we shall find that
there are at least nine different considerations involved in it, none of which we could spare without injuring the idea.
When we meditate on our Blessed Lord’s Passion, there is something lying unexpressed and only implicitly

perceived under all our thoughts, and which gives to the different mysteries their peculiar attraction and solemnity. It

is our faith in His divinity. However exclusively we may seem to be occupied with His sacred humanity, we never in
reality for a moment forget that He is God. So in like manner when we think of God as a Father or a Spouse,
however much we appear to ourselves to be engrossed with the peculiar and special relationship in which He has

been pleased to reveal Himself to us, our whole mind is in fact pervaded by the invisible thought that He is of a
different nature from ourselves, that He is in truth God, and all that is implied in that blessed name; and it is just this
which makes us thrill all over with joy and surprise as we venture to call Him by names which we could not have
used without His permission, and which are only applicable to Him in a certain transcendental sense, which is rather
to be felt than either spoken or conceived. The difference of nature between Him and us, which faith never loses

sight of, is the first element of the idea of a Creator, and one which pervades all the others. The divine nature is the
grand thought which is the fruitful mother of all our thoughts; and by the memory of it are all our memories
magnified.

But this leads us still farther. For the difference betw een His nature and ours is not like that which separates
the angels from men, or men from the various tribes of animals below' them. It is an infinite difference. And thus
w hen we call Him Father or King, Shepherd or Friend, our language implies only a privilege which he allows to us.
not any duties to which He is bound or rights to which we are entitled. We have no compact w ith God. except the

unmerited enjoyment of His merciful indulgence. As our Creator His rights are simply unfathomable. He has no
duties to us, nothing which can rigorously be called duties. He has made promises to us and because He is God, He
is faithful. But, as creatures we have no claims. We are bound to Him, and bound by obligations of duty, and under
penalties of tremendous severity. He on His part overwhelms us with the magnificent liberalities of His unshackled
love. Yet God is neither a slavemaster nor a despot, not only because of His infinite goodness and unutterable
sweetness, but because His rights are not limited like theirs. No creature can feel towards his fellow -creature as we

feel towards Him. in the grasp of w hose omnipotence we are at once so helpless and so contented. Though the blaze
of St Michael’s beauty and power were able to put us to death, if we saw it in the flesh, we could never feel
ourselves in his hands as we are in the hands of God. Though we are unable to imagine the risk we would not trust to
Maty', our most dear and heavenly Mother, or to conceive anything which should weaken our confidence in her one
atom, yet it is not in our power, it is not a possibility of our nature, provided we know what we are about, to trust her

as we trust God, simply because His perfections in Himself, and therefore His rights over us, are illimitable.
Hence also we never think of questioning the wisdom of God. or His power, or His love. Our confidence in
the worth of men is in a great measure proportioned to the degree in wliich we consider them pledged to us. whether
by duty, by gratitude, by relationship, by honor, or by necessity. Whereas it is just the reverse with our trust in God.

Our confidence in Him is boundless, because His sovereignty over us is boundless also. We have our doubts about
holy persons: we criticize the saints: we take views about the angels. There is nothing in creation wliich we do not
seem to have some sort of right to question. But with God it is not so. Here we are simple belief, implicit reliance,

unhesitating dependence. We should be mad to have any other thoughts w here He is concerned.
Then, as we cannot question Him, we must take Him on faith. It does not perplex our dealings with Him.
that we do not understand Him. His height above us does not obscure our perception of His sovereignty. We can

trust Him without knowing Him. We listen and obey, even when He gives no reasons; for we know that we should

possibly not appreciate His reasons if He gave them, and that no reasons could enhance our certainty that His orders
are the perfection of what is just and holy, compassionate and good. Our fellowmen must be reasonable, if they
would govern us and use us for their purposes. But God’s will is to us above all reason, more convincing than all
argument, more persuasive than any reward, because of the very infiniteness of His superiority over us. We take
God on faith, because He is God; and we take nothing else on faith except so far as we account it to represent God,

either as His instrument, or His representative, or His likeness in goodness, injustice, in fidelity, or in love.
Thus looking at our Creator as it were outside of ourselves, we fonn an idea of Him, and of our relations to
Him, which can be accounted for only by His unspeakable eminence in power, in wisdom, and in goodness. The
nothingness to which He has given life, and being, and His own image, has a secret bond to Him, which has more to

do with its worship of Him than even His superlative excellence and unimaginable glory. But the idea of a Creator is
yet more singular, more isolated, more special, and more intimate. For we are never really outside of God nor He
outside of us. [footnote: Some writers, in avoiding pantheism, seem to deny one while omnipresence, and another
while providence.] He is more with us than we are with ourselves. The soul is less intimately in the body, than He is
both in our bodies and our souls. He as it were flows into us, or we are in Him as the fish in the sea. We use God, if

we may dare to say so, whenever we make an act of our will, and when we proceed to execute a purpose. He has not
merely given us clearness of head, tenderness of heart, and strength of limb, as gifts which we may use
independently of Him when once He has conferred them upon us. But He distinctly permits and actually concurs
with every exercise of them in thinking, loving, or acting.
This influx and concourse of God. as theologians style it, ought to give to us all our lives long the sensation
of being in an awful sanctuary, where every sight and sound is one of worship. It gives a peculiar and terrific
character to acts of sin. ft is hard to see how levity even is not sacrilege. Everything is penetrated with God, while

His inexpressible purity is all untainted, and His adorable simplicity unmingled with that which He so intimately
pervades, enlightens, animates, and sustains. Our commonest actions, our lightest recreations, the freedoms in which

we most unbend—all these things take place and are transacted, not so much on the earth and in the air, as in the
bosom of the omnipresent God.

Thus when we use the words “dependence”, “submission”, “helplessness”, “confidence”, about our relation

to God, we are using words which, inasmuch as they express also certain relations in which we may possibly stand
to our fellow-creatures, are really inadequate to express our position towards our Creator. We have no one word
which can fully convey to the mind the uttemess of that honorable abjection in which we lie before Him who made
us. But this is not all. The liberality of God is not satisfied with pouring out upon us in such profusion the wonderful
gifts of a reasonable nature, He enriches us still more nobly, He unites Himself to us still more intimately, by the yet
more marvelous gifts of grace. Sanctifying grace is nothing less than a participation of the divine nature. If we try to
think of this, we shall soon perceive that even imagination cannot master the greatness and the depth of this

stupendous gift, any more than it can sensibly detect the manner of its intimate existence within us, or the delicacy
of its manifold and incessant operations when stirred by the impulses of actual grace within our souls.

“God,” says Tauler,* “has created us for so high a degree of honor, that no creature could ever have dared
to imagine that God would have chosen it for so great a glory; and we ourselves are now unable to conceive how He
could raise us higher than He has done. For, as He could not make us gods by nature, a prerogative which can
belong to Him alone. He has made us gods by grace, in enabling us to possess with Him, in the union of an eternal

love, one same beatitude, one same joy, one same kingdom.” [footnote: Institut, cap. viii.] The fact that God created
angels and men at first in a state of grace and not merely in a state of nature, and then ftirther that He heaps upon us

now such an abundance of grace and makes us members of Himself by the Incarnation, causes us to feel that He did

not create us to be simply His subjects and outside of Himself, but to be drawn up to Himself, to live with Him. to

share His blessedness, nay. and His nature too. Moreover, our continual dependence upon grace, upon gifts which
are by no means due to us as creatures, but which are simply supernatural, compels us to acknowledge that we
cannot even do the good we intensely desire to do, except by a sort of miraculous communion with Him; and this

gives to our dependence upon God another of its peculiar characteristics.
But He is not only our first cause and fountain, not only our constant living preservation, not only the
source of supernatural gifts and graces over and above the ornaments of our nature, not only Himself the original of

which He vouchsafed to make us copies, but He is also our last end. And He is so in two senses. He is our last end,
because He is the reason of our existing at all, because it is for Him, for His own glory, that we live, and not in any
way for our own sakes: and He is also our last end, because we go to Him, and rest nowhere but in Himself, not in
any gifts wliich He gives us, but simply in His own living and ever-blessed Self. Our eternity reposes on Him, and is
in Him, and with Him, and is the sight of Him, and His embrace. This is something which no creature, nor all crea­

tion together, can share. It is the sole prerogative of God. and one which gives out a whole class of affections proper
to itself. Nothing in life has any meaning, except as it draws us further into God and presses us more closely to Him.
The world is no better than a complication of awkward riddles, or a gloomy storehouse of disquieting mysteries,

unless we look at it by the light of this simple truth, that the eternal God is blessedly the last and only end of every
soul of man. Life as it runs out is daily letting us down into His Bosom; and thus each day and hour is a step
homeward, a danger over, a good secured.

Hence it is. because God alone is our last end. that He alone never fails us. All else fails us but He. Alas!
how often is life but a succession of worn-out friendships! Youth passes, with its romance, and crowds whom we
loved have drifted away from us. They have not been unfaithful to us. nor we to them. We have both but obeyed a
law of life, and have exemplified a world-wide experience. The pressure of life has parted us. Then comes middle
life, the grand season of cmel misunderstandings, as if reason were wantoning in its maturity, and by suspicions and
circumventions and constructions were putting to death our affections. All we love and lean upon fails us. We pass

through a succession of acquaintanceships; we tire out numberless friendships; we use up the kindness of kindred;
we drain to the dregs the confidence of our fellow-laborers; there is a point beyond which we must not trespass on
the forbearance of our neighbors.
And so we drift on into the solitary havens of old age, to weary by our numberless wants the fidelity which

deems it a religion to minister to our decay. And there we see that God has outlived and outlasted all: the Friend who
was never doubtful, the Partner who never suspected, the Acquaintance who loved us better, at least it seemed so.
the more evil He knew of us, the Fellow-laborer who did our work for us as well as His own, and the Neighbor who

thought He had never done enough for us, the sole Superior who was neither rude nor inconsiderate, the one Love,
that unlike all created loves, was never cmel, exacting, precipitate, or ox erbearing. He has had patience with us, has

believed in us, and has stood by us. What should we have done if we had not had Him? All men have been liars;

even those who seemed saints broke down, when our imperfections leaned on them, and they wounded us, and the
wound was poisoned; but He has been faithful and tme. On this account alone He is to us what neither kinsman,
friend, or fellow-laborer can be.
The more deeply we enter into these plain tmths and the more assiduously we meditate upon them, the
more we find growing over us a certain humility, which consists not so much in prostrating ourselves before the
majesty of God, as in a kind of hatred of ourselves, which increases together with our increase in the love of God. It
is not the contempt of our own vileness wliich follows after sin, and is a part of Christian repentance. It is not like
that fresh burst of love to God, which follows when He has inflicted some just punishment upon us for our sins, and

which turns our hearts with such exceeding tenderness towards Him. It is a sort of ignoring of our own claims and
interest, a forgetting of ourselves because of the keemiess of our remembrance of God, and an abandonment of our

own cause for His: and all this with a sort of dislike of ourselves, of patient impatience with our own meanness, a
pleasure in acknowledging our own unworthiness, like the pleasure of a contrite confession, a grateful wonder that
God should treat us so differently from what we desen e, and ultimately a desire to remind Him of our own self-

abasement, of that intolerable demerit of ours, which He seems in His mercy so entirely to forget. In a word, selfabasement is the genius of a creature as a creature; it is his most reasonable frame of mind; it is that which is true
about him when all else is false.
Yet in apparent contradiction to this self-hatred, the idea of our Creator is accompanied with a familiarity,
for which it is difficult to account, but which seems an essential part of our filial piety towards our Heavenly Father.
We can say to Him what we cannot say to our fellow-creatures. We can take liberties with Him, which in nowise
impair our reverence. We are more at ease when only His eye is full upon us than when the gaze of men is fixed
upon our actions. He misunderstands nothing. He takes no umbrage. He makes us at home with Him. Childlike

simplicity is the only ceremonial of our most secret intercourse with Him. His presence does not oppress our
privacy. His knowledge of our nature, or rather our knowledge that He created it. gives us a kind of familiarity with
Him, for it is a question of kind rather than of degree, such as we can never have with the great ones of the earth, nor

even with those nearest and dearest to us. We could not bear to let our fellow-creatures always see us. But nothing
makes us common to God. He never—may we say it?—loses His reverence for those whom He has deigned eter­
nally to love.* There is no need of concealment with Him, who sees through us, who regards the acknowledgment of
our manifold weakness almost as acceptable worship of His Majesty, and to whom our infirmities are His own laws,
and our indignities but the timely exhibition of our needs.

[footnote: It has always seemed to me as if a whole revelation of God were in those words of the Book of Wisdom
(12:18): Cum magna reverentia disponis nos. Most of the modem Douays render it “With great favor Thou disposes!
of us,” thereby missing both the beauty and the meaning. The old Douay. which has seldom been altered for the
better by modem hands, translates the verse. "But Thou, Dominatour of power, judgest with tranquilitie, and with
great reverence disposes! of us; for it is in Thy power, when Thou wilt, to be able." The Greek of the Septuagint is
μετά πολλής φειδους διοικείς ημάς. The passage is a perfect fountain of meditation.]

Such are the considerations which make up our idea of a Creator in our minds. They lie there implicitly.
Sometimes we realize them, sometimes not. Now one of them starts to view, and for a while occupies our thoughts,

and now another. But on the whole this is what the idea comes to when it is analyzed. We think of Him as one who
is not like our parents, because He is not of the same nature with us. of one whose rights are illimitable and rest on

no compact, of one whose wisdom, power, and love we may not question, and whom therefore we must take on
faith, and trust, simply because of the infiniteness of His superiority; of one who penetrates us with the influx of His
omnipresence, and concurs with all our movements, who enlightens nature with grace, and as our last end
recompenses grace with glory; to trust in whose never-failing faithfulness is as much a joy as it is a necessity, to
love whom is to despise ourselves, and yet with whom we are on terms of mysterious intimacy far transcending the
closest qualities and most unreproved freedoms of any human tie. This is our idea of a Creator; all these things seem
to follow from our knowledge of that eternal Love, who saw us from the first, and when the time came called us out
of nothing.
[footnote: Thus the delighted admission of the very absoluteness of God’s sovereignty over us seems to bring us
to a more manifest equality, a more privileged intimacy with Him, than that view of God which represents the
relation of Creator and creature as a beautifully just discharge of mutual obligations, wherein He respects the charter
He has given us, and we obey His laws as well as His knowledge of our weakness gives Him a right to expect. I
have not a word to say of condemnation of that system of theology which endeavors to clear the relationship of
Creator and creature of all difficulty, and justifies God to man by representing Him as exercising over us a sort of

limited sovereignty which fully satisfies our ideas of perfect equity, such equity as subsists between a powerful
monarch and his subjects. But I am quite unable to receive such a system of belief into myself. A controversialist
who makes out that there are no difficulties in revelation seems to me to prove too much: for to say that a disclosure
from an Infinite Mind to finite minds is all easy and straightforward, is almost to say that there is no such disclosure,
or that the one claiming to so received is not divine. So in like manner, when we consider what it is to be a creature,
and what it is to have a Creator, we cannot but suspect a theological system which represents our relations with our
Creator as beset with no difficulties, and makes all our dealings with Him as smooth and intelligible as if they were
between man and man. It makes me suspicious, because it proves so much, and this quite irrespectively of any of its
arguments in detail. There must be at the least a look of overbearing power, and an exhibition of justice unlike the
fairness of human justice, or I shall not easily be persuaded that the case between God and man has been stated
candidly or even quite reverently. It is indeed an act of love of God, as well as of our neighbor, to make religious
difficulties plain; but he is a bold controversialist who in an age of general intelligence denies the existence of
difficulties altogether, or even underestimates their force; and as the facts on man’s side are too obvious to be
glossed over, the temptation is almost irresistible to make free with God, and to strive to render Him more
intelligible by lowering Him to human notions. In the long run this method of controversy must lead to unbelief.
Most men are more satisfied by an honest admission of their difficulty than by an answer to it; few answers are
complete, and common sense will never receive a religion which is represented as having no difficulties. It forfeits
its character of being divine, by making such a claim. Religion, as such, cannot be attractive, unless it is also tme;
and when we are sure of the tmth, we must not mind its looking unattractive, but trust it, as from God. and therefore,
as His, possessed of a secret of success which will carry it securely to its end.]
To analyze our idea of a Creator is the first step towards answering the question we proposed to ourselves,
What it is to have a Creator. We have now to take a further step. If our Creator is such as we have described, if the
fact of His having condescended to create us puts Him in such a position towards us. what must the service of Him

necessarily be to us His creatures? The service of the Creator must obviously be the end and purpose of the creature.
God is His own end; and He is ours also. Everything short of God is to the creature a means, not an end, something
transitory, and not permanent, something in which at best we can have but a fitful joy, not a contented and blessed
rest. The value of everything in life depends on its power to lead us to God by the shortest road. But as the service of

God is the creature’s real work, so also is it his tme dignity. The rank and pageantry of the world cannot clothe us
with real dignity. To serve God is the only honor, which it is worth our while to strive after. The order of holiness is

to the eyes of the enlightened angels the only authentic precedence in the world. So what is man’s true dignity is
also his greatest happiness. We do not value as we ought our inestimable privilege of being allowed to worship God.
We do not prize our heavenly prerogative of being permitted to keep His commandments. We look at that as a
struggle which is in truth a crown. We look at that as an obligation which is more properly a boon. We call it duty

when its lawful name is right, the right of best-beloved sons.
Have not millions tried to be happy in something which was not the service of their Creator, and how many
of them have succeeded? And did ever one creature seek his happiness in God, and not find unspeakably more than
he had ventured to conceive? Why, the very austerity of the saint is more light-hearted than the gaiety of the
worldling. So many men die in a minute the world over, and what is the last lesson of every one of them, but that the
sendee of God is the highest happiness of man?
But we talk of interest. Interest leads the world. It is self-love’s god. It is strong enough to warp the stoutest

mind, and to beat down the most romantic affections. All tilings give way to interest. The days of chivalry are past;

and perhaps when they were present, interest was as much the crowned king of society as it is now. Yet if the best
interest is that which is first of all most secure, and then most abundant, and after that most lasting, and finally to be
gained with the least outlay, what interest can compare with our interest in serving God, and speculating only on His

favor and fidelity? We talk of wisdom also. These are days of wisdom. Knowledge covers the earth as the waters
cover the sea. Yet the prophecy is not fulfilled, for it is hardly the knowledge of God which abounds amongst us.
But if that be the highest wisdom which sees farthest and clearest, which embraces the greatest number of tmths, and

the highest kind of truths, which contemplates them with the most complete and accurate certainty, and which is of
practical use to all eternity, then what earthly w isdom will compare with the w isdom of serving God? How is it that

we are so fascinated by the various sciences of mind and matter, and yet find theology' so tame and dull? Why is it

that we are so excited by a new book on geology or chemistry, and turn away w ith weariness from the old-fashioned
traditions of the Christian Church? Surely it is because we have no love of God, because we do not keep up our
relations w ith Him as our Creator. Were it not so, w e should find our modem sciences uninteresting in their details

and sterile in results, unless we ourselves make a theological commentary upon them as we read.
Liberty is another idol of the sons of men, and one whose worship is of all false worships the least
blameworthy, although the greatest of crimes have been perpetrated in its name. Yet what does our liberty amount
to? Freedom of action, of speech, and of pen, are indeed noble achievements of civilization and mighty' missionaries
of the Gospel too. Yet is a man really free who is not free from self? If he is a slave to base passions, or the tool of

his own spite and malice, or the pander to lus ow n criminal pursuits, or the victim of his own sell-love, with w hat
kind of liberty is he free? If he is chained down to earth, then he is disabled for the liberty of heaven. If he has
practically sold himself to the evil angels, w ho is more a bondsman than he? From Satan, world, and self there is no

liberty, but in the service of our Creator: and His service is liberty indeed, not only the tmest and the sw eetest, but
the widest also, Oh for the unconstrained spirit of the saints, w ho have cut off all ties and snapped all bonds asunder,
that they might fly away and be with Christ!

The service of the Creator is also the creature’s most enduring reality. The unreality of the world is an old
story. It was told in Athens, before ever our Savior preached in Palestine. It is a miserable thing to build on sand, or
to give our money for that which is not bread. Yet it is what we are all of us doing all our lives long, except when we
are loving God. Human love is a treachery and a delusion. It soon wears threadbare and we die of cold. Place and

office slip from us, when our hands get old and numb, and cannot grasp them tight. Riches, says the Holy Ghost,
make to themselves w ings and fly away. Good health is certainly a boundless enjoyment; but it is always giving way
beneath us, and our years of strength are after all but few, and our vigor seems to go when we need it most. There is

a noiseless unriveting of our strength by the lapse of years, w hich comes before old age, and is more prostrating than
any sickness. But the service of God improves upon acquaintance, gives more than it promises, and after a little
effort is nothing but rewards, and rewards which endure for evermore.

But this is not all. Not only are all these things the truest, greatest, highest, wisest, best, widest, and most
enduring dignity, happiness, interest, wisdom, liberty, and reality'; but the sendee of the Creator is the creature’s sole
end, dignity. happiness, interest, wisdom, liberty, and reality. He has no other, none that have a right to the name,

none that are not pretenders; and he who seeks any other w ill never find them. However deliberate his evil choice,
he will not gain earth by forfeiting heaven. If he works for Here, he will lose Here as well as Hereafter. Whereas if
he w'orks for Hereafter, he will gain Here as well. Moreover the sendee of the Creator is not only the creature’s

solitary end, dignity. happiness, interest, wisdom, liberty, and reality ; but the opposite evils of all these things w ill
flow from its neglect. In a word, unless we sen e God, the world is a dismal, unmeaning, heart-breaking wilderness,

and life no more than an insoluble and unprofitable problem. Look how cruel life is to the wicked man! Take him at
his best estate, reckon up the pains he takes, the efforts he makes, the activity he expends, how he is burnt up with
the fever of insatiable desires, miming a race after impossible ends, impoverishing heart and mind w ith excitements
which are their own punishment; what a tyranny the slow lapse of time is to him, what a bitter stepmother the world

he has so adored! The flood-tide of irritation and then the ebb of helpless languor, w ho would live a life of which
those are the incessant alternations? The willful sinner is but a man who, in order to get rid of God, explores, to his
ow n cost, every species of disappointment, and now here finds contentment or repose.
What is it that we have said? The service of the Creator is the creature’s last end, his tme dignity, his

greatest happiness, his best interest, his highest wisdom, his widest liberty, and his most enduring reality: the sendee
of the Creator is, furthermore, the one solitary thing which answers truly to any of the above names: and lastly, from

its neglect, the very' opposites of dignity, happiness, interest, wisdom, liberty, and reality follow to the creature, and
the end of all is everlasting perdition. We are almost ashamed to write down such simple things, and to take up your
time with reading a string of propositions which no one in Iris senses would dream of controverting. It is like

printing the merest rudiments of Christian doctrine under a more pretentious title than that of a catechism. Yet, when

we look at our past lives, perhaps our present lives, in the light of these elementary' truths, it would seem as if they
could never be stated too often, and as if there was no one, learned or simple, saint or sinner, to whom the statement
of them was ever an unseasonable admonition or an unnecessary repetition.
God has established His right to our service by so many other titles than that of creation, that self-love is
able, almost unconsciously, to think more of those titles, the acknowledgment of which implies more faith and more

generosity in us, and to dwell less on that which is at once the most self-evident, involves the completes!
submission, and will not admit of more than one opinion. No one can exaggerate the extent to which God is ignored
in His own world. It is a miserable fact which is always a discovery', and is always new, because we see more of it

every day of our lives. To the friends of God it is a growing unhappiness, because as they advance in holiness and
know Him better, it seems to them less and less possible not to love Him with the most ardent, enthusiastic, and ex­
clusive love, and yet at the same time experience is forcing upon them the unwelcome conviction that they know not

one-tenth part of the wickedness of bad men, or of the criminal inadvertence of those who profess to acknowledge
the sovereignty of God. The world has many trades and many tasks for its many sons: but there is one daily labor
which it seems to add to all of them, the effort to put away from its children the remembrance that they are creatures,

in order that they may the more undoubtingly forget that they have a Creator. Blessed be the goodness of God. for
giving us the grace to remember Him; for out of that grace will all others come; and thrice blessed be His infinite
compassion for the further grace of loving Him. and of yearning to make others love Him more!
It follows from what has been said that there cannot be much question as to the extent of our service of
God, or the degree in which we are to serve Him. If He is our last end, then His service is that one tiling needful of
which our Lord spoke in the Gospel. With all our heart, with all our mind, with all our soul, and with all our
strength—it must be thus, and only thus, that we should sen e our Creator; for any service short of this, or short of a

real effort to make it this, would be disloyalty to His infinite majesty and goodness. But in what way, or in what
spirit, are we to serve God? This question also appears to be settled, without any further argument or appeal, by our

own idea of what it is to have a Creator. It is plain that the kind of worship which we pay to Him must he something

of the following description. It must be an easy service, as well because of His immense compassion as because of
our unhappy weakness. It would be doing a dishonor to His goodness to suppose He has made the way to His favor
difficult, or that He does not efficaciously desire to save countless, countless multitudes of His fallen creatures. It

would be an unfilial irreverence to our most dear and loving Creator to imagine that His service would not be easy
and delightful.
But it must not only be the easiest of services, it must be the noblest also. We must not offer to God except

of our best, It must be the noblest, as for Him who is noble beyond word or thought, and it must be the noblest as
ennobling us who serve Him, and making us more like Himself. It must be the happiest of services. For what is God

but infinite beatitude and eternal joy? His life is joy. All that is bright and happy comes from Him. Were it not for
Him, there would be no gladness, either in heaven or on earth. There can be nothing melancholy, nothing gloomy,
nothing harsh nothing unwilling, in our service of such a Father and Creator. Our worship must be happy in itself,
happy in look and in expression, happy in blitheness and in promptitude and in beautiful decomm; and it must also

be such a worship as. while it gladdens the tenderness of God and glorifies His paternal fondness, shall also fill our
souls with that abounding happiness in Him. which is our main strength in all well-doing and in all holy suffering.
It must be a sendee also winch calls out and occupies the whole of man. There must not be a sense of our
bodies, nor a faculty of our minds, nor an affection of our hearts, not a thing that we can do. nor a thing that we can
suffer, but this sen ice must be able to absorb it and transform it into itself. We must not only worship God always,

but the whole of us must worship God. Our veiy distractions must be worship, and we must have some kind of
worship which will enable them so to be. Thus it must be an obvious service, one which at the ven first sight shall
strike a creature as reasonable and fitting; and in order to be so, it must be such a service as a creature would wish to

have rendered to himself. It must have that in it which alone makes any sen ice graceful or acceptable. But as our

wants are many, our feelings manifold, and our duties multiplied, our service of the Creator must be one which
includes all possible sendees, expresses all our numerous relations with Him. satisfies all His claims upon us, at
least in some degree, and has power to impetrate for us the many and various supplies of our diversified necessities.

It must be a service also, which in a sense shall comprehend God, and embrace the Incomprehensible. It
must honor all His perfections, and all of them at once, even while it sees God, rather as Himself universal
perfection, than as having any distinct perfections. It must not worship His mercy to the detriment of His justice, or
His simplicity' to the injury' of’ His beauty; it must not lose sight of His jealousy in His liberality, nor lightly esteem
His sanctity' because of His facility in pardoning. And it must settle all these difficulties in a practical way, the

wisdom of which will be acknowledged as soon as it is stated, and which will not perplex our simple communion

with God by subtleties and distinctions. It must be a service whose direct effect must be union. It must have such a
special power over the human soul, and at the same time so peculiarly prevail with God. as to join God and the soul
together in the most mysterious and indissoluble union. For the creature tends to close union with the Creator, and

union alone is the perfection of all true worship. Finally this service or worship, as it is union, must last, and outlive,
and take up into itself, and develop, and magnify, all other graces. Moreover it must be something more than they
are. something besides, which words cannot tell, but which will be an inconceivable and eternal gladness,
brightening in our souls for evermore.
Any service, either short of this or different from this, would plainly be unsuitable as an offering from the
creature to the Creator. It is implied in the very notion of creation; for we cannot understand creation otherwise than

as an act of eternal love. Our own idea of a Creator has already settled the question for us. We do not anticipate the
least objection to any of the requirements specified above; and numerous as they are, and differing in so many ways,
there is one spirit, one worship, one temper, one act, one habit, one word, which at once satisfies all of them in the

completest way possible to a finite creature. That one word is love. The creature cannot serve the Creator except
with a service of love. Love is the soul of worship, the foundation of reverence, the life of good works, the remission
of sins, the increase of holiness, and the security of final perseverance. Love meets the first of our requirements; for
of all services it is the easiest. Its facility has passed into a proverb. It is also the noblest and the happiest of services,
the noblest because it is the least mercenaiy, the happiest because it is the most voluntary. It is the only one which
calls out and occupies the whole man; and it is naturally a creature’s obvious service; for it is the only service which

he would care to have rendered to himself. Love alone fulfils all the commandments at once, and is the perfection of
all our duties. It is the only one which does not deny, or at least pretermit, something in God. Fear, when exclusive,
denies mercy, and familiarity weakens reverence, when the familiarity is not profoundly based on love; whereas
love settles the equalities and rights of all the attributes of God, enthrones them all, adores them all, and is nourished
in exceeding gladness by them all. Love also, and alone, accomplishes union; and while faith dawns into sight, and
hope ends in everlasting contentment, love alone abides, as we said before, outliving, taking up into itself,

developing, and magnifying all other graces, consummating at last that mystical oneness with God which the saints
have named divine espousals.
Once more you must remember that we are not speaking of perfection, nor describing the heroism of the
saints. We are saying nothing of voluntary austerities, nor of the love of suffering, nor of the thirst for humiliations
nor of the martyrdoms of charity, nor of silence under unjust accusations, nor of a positive distaste for worldly

things, nor of an impatience to be dissolved and be with Christ, nor of the hidden life, nor of the surrender of our
own will by vows, nor of mortification of the judgment, nor of holy virgi nity. nor of evangelical poverty, nor of the
supernatural mysteries of the interior life, of the arduous and perilous paths of mystical contemplation. We are
speaking only of what God has a right to, simply because He has created us. of what we cannot with decency refuse,

of what common sense alone convinces us, and of what we must be practical atheists if we venture to withhold. And
yet it amounts to our making the service of God our sole end, dignity, happiness, wisdom, interest, liberty, and
reality; and to our devoting ourselves to it out of love as the most obvious as well as the only sufficient worship of
our Creator. Simple as the statement seems, and unanswerable as it is in all its details, it comes to far more than men
will ordinarily allow; and yet if it proves itself as soon as it is propounded, what can we conclude except that men

will not think of God, and that they have so long neglected to think of Him. that they never for one moment suspect

either how little they know of Him or how utterly they neglect Him? Alas! who has not seen many men and many
women, gliding quietly down the waters of life, full of noble sentiments and generous impulses, kind and self­

forgetting. brave and chivalrous, without one flaw of meanness in their character, ardent, delicate, faithful,
forgiving, and considerate, and yet—almost without God in the world; though we are sure they would be just the
persons to adorn His faith and name, if only it occurred to them to advert to either of the two sides of that childish
truth, that we are creatures, and that we have a Creator?

In concluding this chapter, even at the peril of repeating, we must once more allude to the evils which
follow from not realizing what it is to have a Creator. In the first place it introduces wrong notions into practical
religion. It gives an erroneous view of the mutual relations between God and ourselves, and substitutes lower
motives, where higher ones would be not only more religious, but more easy also. It destroys the paternal character
of God, and makes His sanctity obscure His tenderness instead of illustrating and adorning it. It leads us to look

upon God as an independent power who has, as it were, come down upon us from without, and stands aloof from us,
even while He governs us, and not as if we were from Him, and through Him, and in Him. It is as if He had
conquered us rather than created us. Hence our submission is the submission of the conquered. We do not dispute

His right of conquest, for our subjection is evidently complete, but we make the best terms we can with Him, and

hold Him to the conditions on which we surrendered. It is as if His service were simply a sacrifice of ourselves to
Him, an immolation of ourselves to His surpassing glory, and as if His interests were not really the same as ours, His
end, which is Himself, the same as ours, and our happiness wrapped up in His beatitude. It would be less
unreasonable to look upon ourselves, if we could, as external to ourselves, as a foreign power with whom we were
on a kind of armed neutrality, as an adverse interest to be suspected and watched, than to look upon God, as we must

inevitably look upon Him, if we put out of view that He created us out of nothing. Dryness, weariness, reluctance,
instability, and scantiness, in practical religion, are in a great measure the results of this forgetfulness that we have a
Creator.
Then again has real piety a greater or a deadlier enemy than the popular ideas of enthusiasm? If a person
loses liis taste for worldly amusements and blameless dissipations, if he prefers the church to the theatre, early mass
to lying in bed, almsgiving to fine dress, spiritual books to novels, visiting the poor to driving in the park, prayer to

parties, he is forthwith set down as an enthusiast; and though people do not exactly know what enthusiasm is, yet
they know that it is something inconceivably bad; for it is something young people should be especially warned

against, and above all pious people, as most needing such admonition. The mere word enthusiasm is a power in
itself; for it accuses, tries, condemns, and punishes a man all at once. Nothing can be more complete.
Yet, in the first place, dear reader, look over your numerous acquaintance; and tell us—whatever may be
your notion of religious enthusiasm, did you ever know any one injured by it? You have heard that it makes people
mad: did you ever have one of your own friends driven mad by it? And while you condemned their enthusiasm, did

you ever yourself get quite rid of a feeling, that, however unfit it was for life, it would be far from an undesirable
state to die in? In the next place, what is enthusiasm? Dr Johnson tells us that it is a “vain belief of private
revelations”: did any of’ your devout friends dream that they had had private revelations? It is “a heat of
imagination”: did not your friends seem to grow cold rather than hot? Were they not often tempted to go your way
because it was pleasanter? Did they not find it hard to persevere in spiritual practices, and did they not embrace
them, not at all from any imagination hot or cold, but simply because they thought it right, and because grace had

begun to change their tastes? It is “an exaltation of ideas”: now were not the ideas of your friends, in any true sense
of the word, rather depressed than exalted? Were they not more humble, more submissive, more obliging; or, at
least, whenever they were not so, did you not distinctly feel that they were acting inconsistently with their religious
profession? Were any of their ideas in any sense exalted, even of those which had most to do with their pious
practices? Were not even those ideas rather subdued than exalted?
These are Dr Johnson’s three definitions. They will not suit you. Do you mean then by enthusiasm, doing

too much for God? You would not like to say so. Do you mean doing it in the wrong way? But is daily Mass wrong,

is almsgiving wrong, are spiritual books wrong, is visiting the poor wrong, is prayer wrong? Or will you say it is
doing them instead of other things, which are not sinful? Well! but is not this tyranny? A man might answer, If an
opera would be to me the most tiresome of penances, or a ball the most unendurable of wearinesses, why am I

obliged to go? Or if I simply prefer prayer to the opera, or spiritual reading to the ball, why am Ito have less liberty
in gratifying my tastes than you in gratifying yours? Do you mean that God spoils everything He touches, and is a

mar-pleasure wherever He interferes? The truth is that by enthusiasm men mean the being more religious than

themselves. And this is an unpardonable offence; for they are the standards of what is moderate, sober, rational, and
reflective. Enthusiasm, in common parlance, has no other meaning. Whoever uses the word is simply making public
confession of his own tepidity.

Thus the whole popular standard of practical religion is wrong and unfair, because it is fixed with reference
to a false calculation; and it is this which leads to the popular fallacy about enthusiasm. If men realized more truly
and more habitually what it is to have a Creator, and how much follows from that elementary truth as to the nature
and amount of the service we owe Him, there can be no doubt they would assent to a far higher standard on the

unsuspicious evidence of natural reason and common sense, than they will now concede to the arguments of
spiritual books which are founded on higher motives, and appeal to a greater variety of considerations. The fact is
that we only appreciate God’s goodness, in proportion as by His grace we become good ourselves; and His goodness
is so great and high and deep and broad, that it makes little impression upon the dullness of our spiritual sense, until

it is quickened and sharpened with heavenly light. And thus, when we are low in grace, and unpracticed in devotion,
the simple truth that God is our Creator, and that a Creator necessarily implies what we have seen it implies, will
come home to us with greater force, and make a more decided impression, than the complex consideration of the

further and higher mercies which God has so multiplied upon us that they almost seem to hide one another’s
brightness. No man would accuse his neighbor of enthusiasm, which is a practical endeavor to lower the standard of
his religious practice, if he saw that his practice already fell short of what plain common sense and decency require

from a creature.
But it is remarkable that it is not only the great multitude of men who would find their account, and in truth

a thorough reform, in dwelling more habitually on what it is to be a creature and what it is to have a Creator. This is
one of the points in which the extremes of holiness meet, its rawest beginnings with its highest perfection.
The tendency of the spiritual life, especially in its more advanced stages, is to simplify the operations of the
soul. The variety of considerations, the crowd of reasons, the number of heightening circumstances, the reduplicated
motives, which characterize the arduous work of meditation, give place to a more austere unity, and a more simple

method, and a more fixed sentiment in the loftier practice of divine contemplation. The multiplicity of lights, which

filled us with a very trouble of sweetness at the first, grow pale before the one fixed ray of heavenly light which
beams upon us as we approach the goal. Hence we find that one commonplace truth, which would seem tame and
trivial in our meditations, is enough to a saint for long hours of ecstatic contemplation. This is the reason why we are
so often surprised at the apparently exaggerated esteem in which the saints have held certain spiritual treatises, that
we in our lower and duller state have condemned as spiritless, or prosy, or uninteresting. The book is but one half
the work. The interior spirit of the reader is the other and the better half. And it is this last in which we fail. Thus the

very truths which we are considering in this treatise, what it is to be a creature and what it is to have a Creator, have
no varied interest or exciting novelty, and yet it is just to these two elementary truths of Christian doctrine that the

highest contemplatives return, with all the power of lifelong habits, and of intense prayer, with their intelligence

purified by austerities which make us tremble, and with the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, those mighty' engines of
spiritual enterprise. Look at St Francis Borgia, the saint of humility, ft seems a less wonderful tiling to raise the
dead, than to spend, as he did, three hours daily in the absorbing and undistracted contemplation of his own

nothingness. Is it easy to conceive how the three times sixty minutes were spent in the embrace of this single and so
homely a truth?
One ascetical author tells us that it was when St Francis of Assisi was at the very culminating point of his

contemplation that he cried out. “Who art Thou, Lord! and who am I? Thou art an abyss of essence, truth, and glory,
and I am an abyss of nothingness, vanity, and miseries!’" Father Le Blanc tells us that chosen souls make much of
tliis truth, and lay great stress on the meditation of it. Blessed Angela of Foligno cried out in a loud voice, “O

unknown Nothingness! O unknown Nothingness! I tell you with an entire certainty that the soul can have no better
science than that of its own nothingness.” Our Lord has Himself revealed His complacency in tliis practice of the
saints. He said to St Catherine of Siena. "Knowest thou. My daughter, who lam and who thou art? Thou wilt attain

blessedness by this knowledge. I am that I am. and thou art that which is not.” St Gertrude thought that of all God’s
miracles, the greatest was the fact that the earth continued to endure such undeserving nothingness as hers.
The common misapprehensions, which exist with regard to the doctrines of religious vocation, religious
orders, and generally what is called priestcraft, may be enumerated also among the mischiefs resulting from the
popular oblivion of what it is to have a Creator. It would be difficult to exaggerate the fearfulness of hindering a true
vocation, especially when we consider how often, not the perfection only, but the actual salvation of the soul is

compromised by its disobedience to the call. The doctrine of vocation rests upon the fact that we are creatures. God
has an absolute right to us. It is our business to be where He wants us. and occupied in the work He specifies, and
we have no right to be anywhere else, or otherwise engaged. He has ways of making this special will and purpose
known to us. which are examined and approved by His Church. Now relatives and others often talk and act as if the
question were to be decided by their narrow views and individual tastes. They say too many people are going into

convents in these days, and that domestic circles are being drained of all their piety'. There are not enough secular
priests; therefore for the present we must have no more monks. Active orders are suited to the genius of the day;
therefore contemplative vocations are to be discouraged. They not only overlook the question of the person’s own
salvation, but they forget that the whole matter turns on a fact. Has God, or has He not, called that particular person

to that particular order? If He has not, then we must come to that negative decision in the way the church indicates.

If He has, then there is no more to be said. In either case, all those views about orders, and the wants of the present
day, are very dangerously beside the purpose. They may at last come to this; nay, they often have come to this:—

God wants your brother or your sister in one definite place: you want them in another; and. taking advantage of the

natural indecision of their free will, you have got your way, and beaten God. A bitter victory! If forcing vocations is
wanton work, and if touting for vocations is the malediction of religious orders, there is hardly any account a man
had not better take to his Creator’s judgment-seat, than one which is laden with the spoiling or the thwarting of a

vocation. All this comes from not recognizing the Creator’s absolute right to His creature, and from not clearly
perceiving that His will is the one only thing to be considered. The same may be observed of the popular notions of
priest-craft. It is enough to say of them, that they are never found apart from a dislike of the supernatural altogether,
and an uneasiness and impatience of any interference on the part of God, or of any reference being made to Him.
To the same forgetfulness of what it is to have a Creator may be attributed the wrong principles now so
much in vogue, by which we regulate our intercourse with misbelievers. We look at them rather than at God, at their

side of the question rather than His; or it would be more true to say that we in reality do our best to betray their
interests, because we do not look first at His. Those who realize what it is to be a creature and what it is to have a
Creator, will never make light of any disturbance or intermption in the relations between the Creator and the

creature. Every fraction of divine tmth is worth more than all the world besides, and every rightful exercise of
spiritual jurisdiction is of nobler and more lasting import than all the physical sciences will be when they have

pushed their discoveries to the uttermost limits of their material empire. The spurious charity of modem times has

stolen more converts from the Church than any other cause. While it has deadened the zeal of the missionary, it has
fortified the misbeliever in Iris darkness and untmth, and stunted or retarded in the convert that lively appreciation of
the value of the gift of faith, upon which it would appear that his spiritual advancement exclusively depends.

The ancient fathers of the Church seemed to have looked in different ways at the two bodies of men which
then lay outside the fold, the heathen and the heretics. They regarded the heathen with horror indeed, yet still rather
with compassion than dislike. They contemplated them as their own future conquest, the raw material out of which
by the preaching of the Gospel they were to build up an empire for their Lord. They were to them monsters of
ignorance rather than monsters of perversity; and with kindliness and yearning, they found no difficulty in detesting

the falsehood while they clung tenderly to those who were astray. But they looked on heretics in a very different

way. It was less easy to separate their errors from themselves. They had received the tmth, and had corrupted it, and
a direct, schismatical, and personal hostility to the Church actuated them. They had mixed the doctrine of devils with
the pure Gospel. They had been guilty of personal treason to Jesus. As Judas was more odious than Pilate, so were

heretics more hateful than the heathen. Hence, amidst all their charity and patience and sweetness, the elder
Christians looked on heresy with a sternness of spirit which did not actuate them towards the heathen. St John would

not enter the building where Cerinthus was: we find no such thing recorded of him in his intercourse with those who
worship Diana of the Ephesians. We have no difficulty in recognizing the difference between the two cases, and in
understanding the grave charity of the apostle of love. The whole tmth, even when preached ungently and with

frowardness, is a more converting thing than half the tmth preached winningly, or an error condescended to out of
the anxiety of mistaken love.

We tmst it will not seem a paradox to say, that the great mass and multitude of the English people are to be
regarded rather as heathen than as heretics, and are therefore entitled to the more kindly view which the ancient

fathers took of those without the fold. So far they are in better case than the heathen, because they possess, at the
least implicitly, a belief in so many of the principal doctrines of the Christian faith. The present generation, we speak

of them in the mass, have no determinate choice of error rather than tmth, no self-will, no obstinate, perverse
adherence to the principles of a sect. They have no personal hostility to the church; and the national war-cry of No

Popery is no real proof to the contrary. Their religious errors are the traditions of their forefathers, and they know no
others. They know nothing of the Catholic Church. Their ideal church is very like it, though it falls below the reality.

But the actual Church they have been taught to believe is the enemy of God. and Jesus Christ, and the souls of men.
They have no more notion that such a state of things exists on the surface of the earth as we know the inside of the
Catholic Church to be, than they know how the angels spend their time, or what the glory of the third heaven is like.
They look on us, as an old heathen did. who believed that Christians met early in the morning to slay infants and to

eat their flesh; and of such sort is their honest conviction. Furthermore, the consequences of their misbelief have
been a total misconception of God, a misconception really rather than an ignoring of Him. They have the word
“God”, and an idea attached to the word, and a sense which goes along with the idea; but, if we may so speak, He is

as much a different God from ours, as the old Christian’s Father of our Lord Jesus Christ was from the Jupiter
Tonans of the poor heathen, or the Primal Cause of the proud philosopher.
Hence, while we can neither compromise nor conceal the truth, we may look with the kindest compassion

on our fellow-countrymen, as our future conquest, as the raw materials for an ardent host of Christians, as poor
wanderers in darkness who want to be taught rather than controverted, and who above all things desire to have their
sins forgiven, if they only knew the way. But one word, one look, which goes to show that being in the Church and
being out of the Church are not as fearfully far asunder as light from darkness, as Christ from Belial, will rob God of
more souls than a priest’s life of preaching or a saint's life of prayer has won. It is an old proverb, that the worst of

all corruptions and counterfeits is the corruption and counterfeit of that which is most excellent. If charity then, both
in heaven and on earth, both for time and for eternity, is the most excellent of gifts, how sad must be the desolation,
how wide the min, how incurable the wound, of spurious charity , which satisfies its own worthless good-nature at

the expense of God's truth and its neighbor’s soul!

By far the greater number of objections which are urged against the Catholic doctrines have their root in
tliis oblivion of the respective positions of creature and Creator. And this is equally tree of difficulties which
sometimes haunt and harass Catholics themselves, and of difficulties which seem to prevent others from receiving

the teaching of the Church at all. If we remove from the objections urged against the Incarnation, or against the
Blessed Sacrament, or against the doctrine of grace, all those which are founded in an inadequate view of God. or

are derogatory' to His perfections as reason represents them, or to His rights as implied in the very fact of His being
our Creator, very little indeed will be left to answer. Neither would it be difficult to show that most of the mis­
conceptions about Catholic devotions and practices have their rise from the same copious fountain. All worldliness
comes from it. Who would be worldly if he always remembered the world was God’s world, not Iris? And as to sin,

it must of necessity be either a forgetfulness of what it is to have a Creator or a revolt against Him.
But—we speak now to more loving souls—there is another mischief which comes from the same error. In

all ages of the world it has been a temptation to good and thoughtful men, and the speculations of modem
philosophy have perhaps now increased the number, to take inadequate views of God's love. Nothing is more fatal
to the soul, nor more dishonorable to God. The world, with the sun extinguished, and the hideous black moon
whirling round our benighted planet, is but a feeble picture of what life becomes to a susceptible conscience which

puts God’s love of man too low. Take what views we will of grace, it must come to this, that the immensity' of God’s
love is our only security, [footnote: “Dieu aime autant chaque homme que tout le genre humain. Le poids et le
nombre ne sont rien à ses yeux. Eternel, infini, il n ’a que des amours immenses. "—Joubert, 1. 103.] Because He is
our Creator, He must love us; His love must be immense; He must compassionately desire the salvation of every one
of His rational creatures; He must grudge every single soul that maliciously eludes the embrace of His merciful

longing, and escapes from Him into outer darkness; He must do all but offer violence to our free will in order to save
us; His own glory must, because of His magnificence, be in the multitude who are saved, and, because of His

liberality, it must also be in the completeness of their salvation, [footnote: "Sicut enim gloria principis sæcularis
dicitur consistere potissimum in splendore et multitudine aulicorum, ita externa gloria Dei objectiva consistit
potissimum in splendore et multitudine aulicorum coelestium. ”—Lessius.] Nay, on our view as Scotists, He was

incarnate because He was our Creator, and He is with us in the Blessed Sacrament because He is our Creator. Even
if we take the Thomist view, that the Incarnation and the Blessed Sacrament were a second love, and because of sin,
that second love came out of the first love wherewith He created us out of nothing.

Tme it is, that we have no name for the feeling with which one must regard a being whom we have called
out of nothing; we may call it paternal love, or by the name of any other angelic or human love; and yet we know
that it must be a feeling far transcending, in height, and depth, and comprehensiveness, in kind, endurance, and
degree, all loving ties which we can conceive. Surely when reason tells us all was meant in love, and that He who
meant that love was God, we may well trust Him for details which we cannot understand, or for apparent
contradictions which should not make a son s heart fail or his head doubt. Oh uncertain and distrustful soul! God be

with you in those not disloyal misgivings, which ailment of body or turn of mind seem to make in your case
inevitable! The mystery of Creation is the fountain of your pains. As it has been your poison, so take it as your

remedy. Meditate long, meditate humbly, on what it is to have a Creator, and comfort will come at last. If broad day­
light should never be yours on this side the grave, He will hold your feet in the twilight that they shall not stumble,
and at last, with all the more love, and all the more speed as well, He will fold you to His bosom who is Himself the
light eternal.

BOOK II
THE DIFFICULTIES OF CREATIVE LOVE

The First Chapter
WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM

Quid ergo tibi accessit ad bonum quod tu tibi es, etiamsi ista, vel omnino nulla essent, vel informia remanerent, quce
non ex indigentia fecisci, sed plenitudine bonitatis tuœ?—St Augustine.

A CHILD’S first sight of the ocean is an era in his life. It is a new world without him, and it awakens a new world
within him. There is no other novelty to be compared with it, and after-life will bring nothing at all like it. A rapid
multitude of questions rush upon the mind; yet the child is silent, as if he needed not an answer to any of them. They

are beyond answering; and he feels that the sight itself satisfies him better than any answer. Those great bright
outspread waters! the idea of God is the only echo to them in his mind: and now henceforth he is a different child
because he has seen the sea.
So is it with us when we sit by the ocean of creative love. Questions throng upon us; problems start up on

all sides; mysteries intersect each other. Yet so long as we are children, are childlike in heart and spirit, the questions

are not difficulties. Either they answer themselves, or they do not need an answer, like questions which are
exclamations only, or we would rather not have an answer, lest peradventure some high thing should be lowered or

some holy tiling be made common. To gaze—to gaze is all we desire. The fact that so much is mystery’ to us is no
trouble. It is love. That is enough. We trnst it. We would almost rather it was not made plainer. It might be darker if
it were. Whereas now. though it is indistinct, it is tranquilizing also, like the beauty of a summer night. We have

thoughts which cannot be put into words, but it seems to us as if they more than answered all difficulties. How the
broad waters flow and shine, and how the many-headed waves leap up to the sun and sparkle, and then sink down
into the depths again, yet not to rest; and placid as the azure expanse appears, how evermore it thunders on the hard
white sand, and fringes the coast with a bewitching silver mist! Why should we ever stir from where we are? To

look on the sea seems belter than to learn the science of its storms, the grandeur of its steadfastness, or the many
moods of its beautiful mutabilities. The heathen called the sea-spirit father. There was much in the thought.
But when we cease to be children and to be childlike, there is no more this simple enjoyment. We ask
questions, not because we doubt, but because when love is not all in all to us, we must have knowledge, or we chafe
and pine. Then a cloud comes between the sun and the sea, and that expanse of love, which was an undefined

beauty. a confused magnificence, now becomes black and ruffled, and breaks up into dark wheeling currents of
predestination, or mountainous waves of divine anger and judicial vengeance, and the white surf tells us of many a
sunken reef, where we had seen nothing but a smooth and glossy azure plain, rocking gently to and fro, as unruffled

as a silken banner.
We shall be children once again, and on the same shore, and we shall then never leave it more, and we shall
see down into the crystal depths of this creative love, and its wide waters will be the breadth and measure of our joy,
and its glancing splendor will be the light of our eternal life, and its soft thunder will be the endless, solemn, thrilling

music of our beatitude. Oh happy we! but we must be changed first of all, and perchance by fire!
But we must not altogether cease to be childlike, when we begin to ask and answer questions. Pride can

understand nothing about God. We may question then, but it must be in faith and trust and love, content with half an
answer when more cannot be given, and to be left without answer at all, when the heights of God’s goodness soar
beyond all vision but that of faith, whose prerogative it is in some sense to equal and to comprehend its Giver and its
Author.
We have endeavored so far to get some idea of what it is to be a creature and of what it is to have a Creator;
and it seems to have taken many words to explain those simple things. Our next step must be to ask and answer, as

well as we can. five questions which concern so many wonders of divine Love; and we shall then be in a condition
to examine certain phenomena in the actual life of the world, which seem at variance with our doctrines. Thus,
speaking generally, the present treatise may be said to have three parts. The first which stated the case, and which

was concluded in the last chapter: the second, which is concerned with the five mysteries of tire relation between the
Creator and the creature, and which will occupy this and the next four chapters: and the third, which deals with
certain objections from the state of things in the world, and which will occupy the ninth, tenth, and eleventh

chapters. After which nothing will be left to close the work and leave it to the blessing of God and St Matthew,

under whose invocation we have ventured to place it, and to the judgment and reflection of the reader. The five
questions now to be asked are as follows: (1) Why God should wish us to love Him; (2) Why He Himself should

love us; (3) What sort of love we have for Him; (4) In what way we repay His love for us; and (5) In what way He
repays our love of Him. They are all abysses of creative love, and wonders which make us wiser even when they
retuse to give up the secrets which they contain.
We have therefore now to inquire why it is that God wishes us to love Him. At first sight it seems one of
those facts which are so very' obvious that we never think of asking the reason of them. But on reflection this old and

commonplace fact unfolds so much that is strange and wonderful, that we almost unconsciously ask ourselves if we
are quite clear of the fact, if it is really so completely beyond all doubt that God wishes us to love Him.

The difficulties, which make us begin almost to doubt tire fact, are some such as these. That God should
wish us to love Him appears to imply some sort of want in Him. A desire is a kind of confession of imperfection;
and according to the strength of the desire so is the appearance of imperfection and incompleteness. Yet we know
that to attribute any sort of want to the Creator would be simple blasphemy. Thou art my God, says the Psalmist,

because Thou desirest none of my goods. But our love is our greatest good, the affections of our heart are the
noblest of our possessions, and God, we are told, earnestly desires to have them. Besides, if we once grant this fact,
we are led into a further difficulty. For immediately this fact assumes such an importance that it becomes the
interpretation of all God’s doings. Almost all we know of Him has at once to be resolved into this desire. A hundred
other difficulties come up and claim to be explained in the same way. We cannot conceive of God except as our
Creator, nor of our Creator except as our Father, for creation is unintelligible unless it is defined to be a free act of

eternal love, and then everything He does is the act of a Father, and is to be understood by the fact of our being His
sons. We see that God cannot, simply because He is God, be moderately good to us. If we grant that He cares for us
at all, then forthwith we see that He must care for us so very much, that the vision of it tries our faith. So God cannot
desire our love with a weak and indifferent desire. If He desires it at all, He must desire it with all the might of His

ever-blessed perfections, and it requires strong faith and stronger love to look at this consequence, and not draw
back before its seeming audacity.

If He reveals Himself to us at all, it is because He wants us to serve Him, and as we saw in the last chapter,
He being what He is and we being what we are, the creature cannot serve the Creator with any other than a service

of love. This is what the Church means when she tells us, that without some love in our repentance, we are incapable
of absolution. If He gives us positive precepts or an acceptable ceremonial, it is as a way to Him, because He would
fain secure our love. If He sends His Son to save sinners, it is because He vouchsafes to appear as if He cannot make
up His mind to lose the love of men. If He takes us to Himself in heaven, it is that He may have us with Him. and
feed His glory on our love. For we creatures caimot be His end: His end must be Himself, and nothing can exist
except for His glory. If He detains us in purgatory, it is to multiply earth’s harvest of love, and to make a greater

profit on imperfect souls. If, dread thought! He lays us in the hopeless dismal deep of fire, it is because we have
frustrated His yearnings, and refused Him the love He vouchsafed so incomprehensibly to covet.
But this is not all. He seems to forget that He is God, because of the greatness of this desire. His ever-

blessed Majesty will forgive us words of this sort, by which alone we can force upon our dull hearts the conviction

of the immensity of His love. He appears to deny His own nature and greatness in order to obtain our love. Is the
facility of pardon consistent with the rigor of His vindictive justice, or with the spotlessness of His overwhelming
sanctity? Is it easy to see how He should require the unspeakable sufferings of our dearest Lord, and should take
them as an expiation for the sins of others, and for sins that were not to be committed till hundreds of years had
come and gone? Is it easy to see why baptized infants should be admitted to enjoy the Beatific Vision, or to
reconcile with our notions of right that he who came to toil only at the eleventh hour should receive the same wages

with him who had bome the burden and heat of the day? Does God seem to legislate so much for His justice, or His
sanctity, or His dignity, as for procuring the greatest number of souls to love Him, and for rendering the harvest of

redemption as enormous as the perversity of our free-will allows?
There is a further difficulty in the unintelligible value which He seems to set upon our love. Think of what
our love is like, and of what good it can possibly be to God, and then conceive its being worth the price He paid for
it on Calvary! Yet if we do not suppose it was worth it. we bring a charge against His wisdom, as if the Incarnation

and the Passion were gratuitous and exaggerated. And it is no answer to say that it was all for our sakes, and rather a

proof of His love for us. than of His desire for our love.

For we must continually bear in mind what sound theology teaches us, that God alone can be His own end,
and not we creatures. He can only bless us for His own glory. It is His perfection, that He must needs seek Himself
in all things. He would not be God if it were not so. We can hardly conceive of God creating, if He did not set a
value upon His own creation. Yet we could not bring ourselves to believe that God set any great value upon a few

millions of round orbs, or on their velocity, or on their fidelity to their orbits, or to their eccentricities, or to the mere

vastness of sidereal space, or to the various structure of matter, or to the threads of metal in the bowels of the
mountains, or to the vivifying force of the solar ray. or to the gigantic play of the ubiquitous electricity, or to fine
trees, or to clear lakes, or to sylvan dells, or to the outlines of a sea coast, or to the gorgeousness of sunsets, or to the
pomp of storms, or to anything whatever of that sort. Even we creatures should feel that we were lowering Him in
our own estimation, if we thought that He set a value upon, or took pains with, or had an interest in, such things as
these. Yet we are told that He does distinctly set a value on the spirits of angels and the hearts of men. Man is the

end of the material world, but God alone is the end of man. Physical philosophers can love strata of rock, or the
distribution of plants, or a peculiar fauna, or the habits of earthquakes, or the occultations of stars, or the physical
geography of the sea, or the delicacies of chemistry, more than they love the hearts of men, the slaves of the south,

or the inmates of an hospital. But God cannot do so. All His own material creation is worthless to Him in
comparison with one peasant’s heart, or with one child’s first serious prayer. He has given away, with the
indifference of interminable wealth, all the rest of His creation; but hearts He has kept for Himself, and will not even
share them, much less surrender them. Yet where is their value? What is finite love to an infinite beatitude? Really it
is not easy to see. Yet can we doubt that it is something, and something very precious in His eyes to whom all things

else are nothing worth?
One difficulty more. What is the meaning of that surpassing joy which human love causes in God? Surely
this is a profound mystery. The life of God is joy, joy illimitable, joy ineffable, joy unimaginable, joy eternal. The

whole bewildering immensity of angelical and human joy is but a tiny drop out of the boundless ocean of the joy of
God. What a variety of joys there are in each human heart! No two of these joys are exactly the same. They differ as
one note differs from another note in music. They make new joys by new combinations. Different scenes, different
phases of life, different ages, all diversity the throng of joys which one human heart can experience. Yet no two
hearts are exactly alike; so that the multitudinous joys of the heart are to be multiplied by the myriads and myriads
of hearts, dead, alive, or y et unborn. Now every one of these joys has its representative in the simple plenitude of the
joy of God. But what are human joys to joys angelical? Yet they too are all but a manifold umbrage of the one joy of

God. The joys of the animal creation, their joy in health and strength, in light and air, in cold and heat, in wet and
dry, in their sweet songs or their loud wars, in their speed of flight or their spring of muscle, in tending their young

or tearing their prey, all are shadows, lowest, dimmest, faintest, poorest shadows of the joy of God. And who is
sufficient to compute these things? And what if the joys of the Immaculate Heart of the divine Mother are to be
reckoned also, and those of that Sacred Heart which the Person of the Word deluged with its oil of gladness, and yet

left it human still? Yet when we have gone so far, we can hardly be said to have begun.
Who can tell the joy of the Father in His innascibility, or the joy of the Son in His eternal and perpetual
generation, or the joy of the Holy Ghost in His everlasting and incessant procession from the Father and the Son?

The Jubilee of the Father and the Son is Himself, not a thing or a perception, but an eternal Person, Himself the

illimitable Limit of the illimitable God. Who will dare to picture to himself the awful and majestic jubilation of the
august Trinity in the threefoldness of Persons and the unity of Essence? God’s joy in His own Oneness—who can
look at it except either he be stricken with an ecstasy of rapture or be dissolved in tears of believing love? And is all
this not enough? Is God seeking joy, more joy, joy elsewhere? And is it joy in creatures, created joy? Can His own

joy hold more, can it grow, can it receive, can it want? If not. why break the silence of eternity to create, why this
hunting after human love, why this ardent patient pursuit after sinful hearts, why this joy over returning sinners, why

this preciousness in His sight of the death of His saints? We may indeed ask, why: but can we give an answer? O
heaven and earth! O angels and men! What a being God is! What a joy it is to be a creature! What a glory to have a
Creator!

What is to be done with all these difficulties? One thing is plain. We need not try to answer them. St
Thomas himself, if he rose from the dead, could not answer them. But there is one thing to be observed about them,
and it is this. While they are such difficulties as make us doubt whether God really does desire our love, they are at
the same time irrefragable proofs of the fact of His desiring it, and of His desiring it with a most mysterious

intensity. They prove the fact, if they do not account for it; and they prove it in such a way as that we need not have
it accounted for, in order to receive it. For we can have no doubt about the fact. But can we approximate to a
solution of the problem? Can we throw any kind of light upon the mystery? Can we diminish the difficulties which

we confessedly are unable to answer? This must be our next endeavor; and whether we succeed or not, we shall at
least gain a great amount of additional evidence to the fact that God does desire our love. We have our misgivings
whether we shall do more than this.

Let us look, first of all, at the kingdom of nature, whether divine, angelical, or human, and see if it does not
disclose to us reasons why God should so yearn for the affection of human hearts. One reason why it is impossible

for us to comprehend the divine nature, or even to make an imaginary picture of it, is its extreme and adorable sim­
plicity. Properly speaking, God has no perfections. He is Himself His own one sole perfection, the perfection of
perfections. What we call the divine perfections are only our imperfect ways of approaching towards a true idea of
Him.
Nevertheless we are capable of considering Him as not our Creator, and then again as our Creator. We
know that although God is immutable, still there was a time when He had not created us, and again a time when He

had created us. Or if we consider that He had always created us in His own mind, sti 11 we can, from what He has

been pleased to tell us of Himself, conceive of Him as being without any creatures at all. As a world is the largest
thing we know of, a cosmos, an order, a beauty, all on the vastest scale, so we may dream of the great God as

fourteen worlds in Himself, of surpassing beauty and variety, yet all without limit and circumscription, and one,
absolutely one, in their own simplicity, although fourteen in our conceptions.
Four of these worlds seem—remember how utterly short of the mark, and beside it, human words are in the

matter—to contain the inmost life of God. We call them His Infinity. His Immensity, His Immutability, and His
Eternity. They are at once conditions of His Essence, and of all the perfections which we can attribute to His
Essence. Around them stand four other worlds, of ravishing loveliness enough to separate body and soul if we might
see them uncloudedly. They are Omnipotence, Wisdom. Perfection, which is the natural goodness of God, and
Sanctity, which we may call His moral goodness. Now in these eight worlds there is not necessarily any respect to
creatures. They belong to the eternal self-sufficiency of God independent of any creation whatever. They furnish us
with no reason at all why God should desire our love. On the contraiy, they are so magnificently self-sufficing, so

adorably complete, that they are rather so many arguments against the existence of any such unfathomable desire.
Around these eight worlds are six other worlds, to be mentioned only with the wondering humility of filial

and more than filial love, worlds which concern ourselves and are colored by our destinies, worlds in which we
ourselves also dwell from eternity, and which are at this hour, and will be evermore, our only country and our only
home. They are the divine Benignity, Dominion, Providence, Mercy, Justice, and that perfection of God which we
call His being the Last End of all things. If God were to be conceived without creatures, nothing can be added to the
first eight worlds and nothing taken from them, without His ceasing to be God. If He be conceived as with creatures,

as He is actually, then the addition of anything to the whole fourteen worlds, or the subtraction of anything from
them, would inevitably alter our idea of God. We may use many other great words of Him, but the meaning of them,
the excellence intended by them, is already implied and included in one of these fourteen worlds.

Now the very existence of those six worlds in God of itself will furnish us with most overwhelming proofs
of His desire that we should love Him. Yet it does not appear that it in any way accounts for the existence of that
desire. And the fact that this desire is founded in the very nature of God, and the very' immensity of His perfection, is
the more overwhelming when we reflect that although we can. by an aibitrary act of our imagination, conceive God
to be without creatures, yet in point of fact He never was so, as He had created the world in His own mind from the

beginning: and thus the idea of Creator, and consequently of all that it implies, is inseparable from Him.

The eternity' of God before creation is a collection of mysteries, which it is vain for us to sound. In what
way His decrees, enclosed in His own mind, ministered to His glory', or gave exercise to His mercy or His justice or
His providence, why the primal creation of the angels took place as soon as it did. or why it did not take place

sooner, why He—not broke, not interrupted, not disturbed, all that is impossible—but why He superadded to the
tranquil self-sufficiency of that eternity', not the effort, not the toil, but the fulfilling of His will, in the act of

creation, whether the absence of a heaven full of rational and beatified worshippers could in any sense at all add

anything to the uncreated solitude of the three divine Persons, whether their foreseen worship in His mind, to whom
there is no past or friture, but only one active unsuccessive present, was precisely the same to Him as its actual
existence external to Himself, how it was that this worship did not in any way illustrate or beautify God's perfection
in His own esteem—what can we say of all these things than that they' are beyond us: and yet also that they make us
feel how astonishingly intimate to God is His desire of His creature’s love? Surely in this wide field of colossal

miracles, here is fresh proof of the desire, fresh example of its intensity, y et no solution of the enigma.
We have nothing to do here with theological disputes regarding the order of the divine decrees. We know
that none could have any precedence or priority in respect of time. Their order could be only that of dignity and

eminence. But what a fountain of affectionate thoughts, thoughts honorable to God in the highest degree, is opened
up in the dark depths of His mysterious predestination. We know that God is free, and that nothing can impair the
spotlessness of His transcendent liberty. Yet how can we conceive otherwise of predestination than as God binding

Himself, putting conditions, like fetters, on His own royal and everlasting liberty; and for our sakes, out of love of

us. in order to have our love? Inconceivable mystery ! how can we believe it without a very miracle of grace and
infused faith?
Men talk as if it was their liberty which suffered in the act of predestination. Nay. rather it is the liberty' of

God. Wayward men! as if we were to be always suspecting God, alway s on our guard against Him, as if He could be
infringing our liberty, who has already given us His glory' to make as free with almost as we please! How can that
act injure our liberty, when without it we should not even have had life? We owe our liberty to our hfe, and our life
to God’s predestination. We are free as air, only too free, all things considered. But it has puzzled the wisest
understandings of mankind to see how the magnificent liberty' of God rests unimpaired by the prodigal compassions

of His eternal predestination. But it was as if a necessity' were upon Him. Give me children or I die. said the im­
petuous Rachel, longing to be a mother. So, at all costs. God must have creatures to love Him. sons to honor and to
serve him, and to keep Him immortal company. At any cost He must have created love, over which to outpour
Himself with a stupendous communication of uncreated love, complacency, and joy.

Hence who does not see that He created all men. together with all angels, to be saved; and yet by that act
He left their freedom unimpaired? Before—we are speaking as words compel us—before He had foreseen aught
else, and moved only by the excess of His own unspeakable goodness. He decreed to create the natures of angels

and men, simply that He might raise them to the vision of Himself and to participate in His beatitude. He chose no

certain number, so as to exclude others. In the adorably real sincerity of His own will, He would have all men, and
all angels, saved, and was ready to give, to each and all, the necessary graces. Hence also came that marvelous

determination of superabundant love to create both angels and men in a state of grace, that they might the more
readily attain to their supernatural end, by beginning with grace instead of having to wait for it.
Creation in a state of grace is the wonder of creation doubled. Then when He foresaw the free and willful
demerits of some, and the free loyal correspondence to grace in others, there was no energy in that prevision to

secure the condemnation of the first, while His mercy rejoiced already to adorn and set aside the crowns for the
second. Nor was it, as we suppose, until after this prevision that there was any absolute election or reprobation. And

thus man’s liberty was secured throughout: and the result is, that of all the multitudes of those who are lost, not one

can attribute his min to any predetermining act of God. but simply to their own efforts to free themselves from the
solicitudes of His grace, while of all the countless souls and spirits of the blessed, there is not one who does not owe
his joy to the eternal predestination of his Maker. And what is all this but another set of evidences to prove the
greatness of God’s desire to have our love, while it still leaves deep down in the abyss of His goodness the reason of
this desire?
If we consider the arrangements of creation and natural preservation, we shall see that they in like manner
testify to the Creator’s desire to excite our love. It is impossible to make too much of the fact that both angels and
men were created in a state of grace. The more we think of it, the more we see that it is a complete revelation in

itself. Then again there is a sort of superabundance in our natural gifts. We have so many more than seem absolutely

necessary to our discharging the duties for which we came into the world. Life is itself an intense pleasure: so much
so that men prize it above all other things. The most miserable of men will hardly part without resistance with the
simple power of living. All our natural gifts also are so constmcted as to be avenues of enjoyment and delight. There

is not a sense, in whose exercise there is not a keenness and a peculiarity of satisfaction, of which those who lack
that sense can form no adequate conception. It requires a soul, either in the strength of its first integrity or in the
vigor of supernatural grace, to hold us back from being swept away by the might of sensual pleasure.

The exercise of the various faculties of the mind also opens out new sources of the strangest delight and the
most thrilling happiness. We can think of and count up a score of different pleasurable feelings consequent on the

use of our minds, not one of which we can adequately describe in words. What then shall we say of the romance and
nobility of the affections of our hearts, those very hearts God so much covets? Almost as many loves grow in the
soil of the heart as there are wines in the vineyards of the earth: and has not the whole world many a time gone wild
with their intoxication?
So also in the adaptation of material nature to our dominion, everything is characterized by excessive
prolusion, by unnecessary beauty. Everything almost has a sweetness beyond and beside its own proper function.

The heathen talked of Mother Earth; and truly God has filled her teeming bosom with the milk of more than a

mother’s kindness. Whether she feeds, or heals, or soothes, or inspires, or simply wins us by the luster of her
physical beauty, she is ever doing more than she promises, and enhances her gifts by the fondness of her
ministrations. There is something to make us tremble to see with what fineness of balance, with what nicety of
restraint, our Creator tames the huge elements in our behalf, and makes us live at ease amid the bewildering vastness
of their operations, and close by the uneasy laboratories of their titanic power. Everywhere, and for our sakes. He
governs, not through the catastrophes of violent power, but through the meekness of a patient and a pleasant

uniformity. Here is fresh demonstration that He craves our love, and no reason given but the blessed one of His free
benignant will.
Once more, before we leave the kingdom of nature, let us look at the way in which the Bible discloses Him
to us in successive dispensations. He plants an Eden for His new-made creatures, and then comes to them Himself

and the evenings of the young world are consecrated by familiar colloquies between the creatures and their Creator.
He tests their love by the lightest of precepts; and when they have broken it, clear above the accents of a strangely
moderate / anger are heard the merciful promises of a Savior. Then come centuries of mysterious strife, like Jacob
wrestling with God by the tinkling waters of the midnight stream. No sin seems to weary Him. No waywardness is a
match for the perseverance of His love. Merciful and miraculous interventions are never wanting. No gifts are

thought too much or too good, if the creatures will but condescend to take them. On the Mesopotamian sheep-walks,

in the Egyptian brick-fields, in the palm-spotted wilderness, among the vineyards of Engaddi, by the headlong
floods of harsh Babylon, it is always the same. God cannot do without us. He cannot afford to lose our love. He
clings to us; He pleads with us; He punishes only to get love, and stays His hand in the midst; He melts our hearts
with beautiful complainings; He mourns like a rejected lover or a suspected friend; He appeals to us with a sort of
humility which has no parallel in human love.

What a character of God we should draw' from the Bible only! and what would it all come to, but that to
w in the love of His creatures was the ruling passion of the Creator? Oh! horrible beyond all horrors must the heart
be that will not love God. that particular God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ! God desiring, and man withholding, and then God getting, as it were by stealth or by caress, less

than a tithe of His due from less than a tithe of His creation, and then as it w ere spreading Himself out in a kind of
joyous triumph at His success—is not this a truthful compendium of the Bible history?
If from nature we turn to grace, we shall find that the whole resolves itself into a loving pursuit of souls on
the part of God. We shall meet there the same evidence of the fact with as little solution of the difficulty. The
kingdom of grace, if it is not founded on the permission of evil, seems at least to imply it; and the permission of evil

is nothing less than the intense desire of the Creator for the free love of His creatures. Surely that is what lies at the

bottom of tliis terrific mysteiy. At what a price must He estimate the love of angels and of men, if He would run so
fearful a risk to gain it? Nay, it could be no risk to Him w hose foreknowledge made all things present to Him. Every
possible, as well as every actual, consequence of that permission was vividly before Him. and yet He persisted. It
w as w orth while. It was for His glory', and His gloty is our inestimable good.
If evil was not pennitted. angels and men would not. according to the present dispensation, be free. If they
were not free, they could not serve Him with a service of love; for freedom is necessaiy to love. They, whom the
sight of Him now' confirms in holiness for evermore, would not have won their crowns; and therefore a heaven of
saints ready made from the beginning would not in fact have been, in the same sense that it is now, a service of free

allegiance and voluntary love.* Yet what a fearful venture, rather w hat an appalling certainty, was that permission of

evil! The All-merciful saw before Him the burning abyss, so sadly populous. It was to Him a vision of more
unutterable horror than it could be even to the capacious soul of Mary' or the keen intelligence of Michael. Yet on­

ward He drove right through it, in the plenitude of that greater and more overwhelming goodness wherewith He
yearned for His creature’s love. O what clearness of demonstration is there here in the pitchy darkness of that
intolerable secret!
[footnote: A world of reasonable beings, either with ungrowing merits, like those of the sacred Humanity, or
confirmed in grace from the first, like our Blessed Lady, is a thing of w hich we have no experience, and which is
opposed to the divine laws as exhibited in the tw o creations of which we know, and from which alone we can argue,
and not from the exceptional cases of the sacred Humanity or our Lady. We can hardly conceive the permission of
evil to have been simply gratuitous, without any moral reasons in the character of God.]

Then that grave permission came to His eldest sons, to that primeval world of angels. For one moment they
looked at Him in all the beauty of His kind dominion, and then they looked at self with its enticing liberty, and

forthwith one whole multitude, a third of that wide empire, ten million times ten million spirits, a very universe of
loveliness and gifts and graces, made their irremediable choice, and in the madness of their liberty leaped into the
stunning war of the fiery whirlpool, far away from the meek paternal majesty of God. Their irremediable choice!

what a thought is that for us! The angels could not complain. They had had a marvelous abundance of love. The gifts
of their nature were something beyond our power of imagining. They were so bright and vast and sure as to be

almost a security in themselves against a fall. They had also been created in a state of grace, and doubtless of the
most exquisite and resplendent grace. Moreover they had all perhaps merited immensely by the first act of love with
which they greeted their Creator in the exulting moment when at His dear will their grand spirits spmng from

nothingness. Yet one chance, one only! Our different experience of God makes us tremble at the thought. When we

broke our light precept, and forfeited our original integrity, He would not lose us so. He only redoubled His mercies,
and multiplied our means of salvation; so that it has become almost a doubt in theology whether we are not better off
now that we have fallen, than we should have been had we preserved the innocence and rectitude of paradise. When

we consider the various dispensations which followed the fall, the antediluvian times, the Patriarchal dispensation,
the Levitical, the Christian, as if God would still leave us free, yet for all that, and in spite of fearful losses, would

not be baffled in His yearning for our love, we might almost venture to compare His infinite Majesty to one of His
own insignificant creatures, to the spider who with the same quiet assiduity of toil is ever repairing its often broken
web, still trusting the same treacherous site, still braving the same almost inevitable calamities. Can we give any
reason for this, or say more, than that there is a reason which God has hidden in the greatness of His own goodness?
The Incarnation, that mystery of the divine magnificence, in which all the intelligible perfections of God
pass in array before us as in beautiful procession, teaches us the same lesson. If God would have come to his
unfallen creatures, and been bome within the womb of a human Mother, and have shared our nature, and have lived
among us, and for three-and-thirty years have unfolded countless mysteries of glory, surpassing even those of the
paschal forty days, what can we say but that it would have been a proof of His desire for His creatures’ love, which

we could only have adored in silent thankfulness? A creature the Creator cannot be; but He will have a created
nature, and make it unspeakably one with His divine Person, so that He may be more like one of us, and heighten
our reverence by the trembling freedoms of our familiarity, if only He may so enjoy vast augmentations of human
love. If because we fell, He changed the manner of His coming, if rather than abandon His coming He plunged His

Mother and Himself in a very ocean of sorrows, if, without humbling us by telling us of the change, He contentedly
took shame for glory, suffering for joy, slavery for a kingdom, the cross instead of the crown, what did it all show
but that He would still have our love, and that with ingenious compassion, which could only be divine, He would
take the advantage of our miseries to exalt us all the more, and so win more abundant love? If He came only because
we had fallen, if He condescended to be but a remedy for an evil, if He stooped to fight our battle in person, and in

human flesh, with our triumphant enemy, if the Incarnation was an interference to prevent His own world from
being stolen from Him, if it was a fresh invention out of the boundless resources of the divine pity, then still what
does it mean but that He would not let us go, He would not let us lose ourselves, because in His strangely
persevering goodness He would not lose our love?

So again what is the Church but His way of rendering the blessings of His Incarnation omnipresent and
everlasting? What is the Baptism of infants but a securing prematurely, and as it were against all reason, the eternal

love of their unconscious souls? What is Confession, but mercy made common, justice almost eluded, the most
made out of the least? These are human words, but they express something true. What is the sacrament of
Confirmation but an act of jealousy, lest the world should steal from God what He had already got? What is the

sacrament of Matrimony, but a taking of the stuff and substance of human life, its common sorrows and joys, its
daily smiles and tears, the wear and tear of its rough and smooth, and elevating it all by a sort of heavenly

transfiguration into a ceaseless fountain of supernatural and meritorious love? What is Extreme Unction, but an

expression of affectionate nervousness, if we may so speak, of our dearest Lord, lest we should fail him just at the
last, when so many risks are run? What is the sacrament of Orders, but systematizing and ensuring a succession of
daily miracles, such as consecrations, absolutions, exorcisms, and benedictions, each one of which is to create, and
then to fertilize, and then to beautify, a little world of love for Him? Ask the divine Solitary of the tabernacle why

He lives His hermit life amongst us, and what could His answer be but this—I wait, to show Love and to receive it?
But wide as He has made the ample bosom of His Church, and though He has multiplied with a commonness. which
almost injures reverence, the potent sacraments, this is not enough. None must slip through, if He can but help it.

None must be lost except in His despite. There must be something still left, wliich needs no priest, something as
wide as air and as free, which men may have when they cannot have, or at the needful moment cannot find, the
sacraments of His own loving institution.
One thing there is, and one only, and we are not surely now surprised to find that one thing—love. If need

be, love can baptize without water, can confinn without chrism, can absolve without ordination, can almost
communicate without a Host. For, great as are the sacraments, love is a higher emanation of that priesthood wliich is

for ever according to the order of Melchisedech. How shall we read these riddles, if they may not mean that God so
desires our love, that He almost tires our attention and outstrips our imagination by the novelty and profusion of His
merciful desires to secure this marvelously priceless treasure, the puny love of finite hearts?
There are many difficulties in the doctrine of grace, as well as in those of predestination and the permission

of evil, wliich seem to interfere with our perception of God’s love, with its impartiality as well as its completeness.
But if we. each of us, remove the cause from the theological schools to the court in our own hearts, these difficulties
will be greatly diminished, if not entirely dispelled.

Let our own hearts therefore be the last part of the kingdom of grace wliich we shall examine. Can any one
of us say that we have not received numberless graces to which we have not corresponded? Have we ever sinned,

not only without its being willfully done, but also without a distinct resistance to conscience, grace, or contrary
inspirations? If we were to die and be lost at this moment, is it not as clear as the sun at noon that we have no one to
blame for it but ourselves? Has not our whole life been one series of merciful interferences on the part of God? Have
there not been many times when our petulance and waywardness have reached such a point, that we in like case

should have given up our dearest friends, our closest kindred, as past the possibility of amendment, or not worth the
trouble of reproof? And yet God has not given us up. His tenderness, His liberality, His assiduity, His patience, His
hopefulness, and if we may use the word, His extraordinary unprovokedness, have been beyond all words. And how
do we stand at this hour? We have merited hell. Perhaps we have merited it a thousand times over. We ought to be
there now, if justice had all its rights. But it is an unjust world, and God is the grand victim of its injustice. He alone

has not His rights. He lets His mercy do strange things with His liberty. We have merited hell purely of our own free
will: nay, we have had to stifle inward reproaches and to make considerable efforts in order to accomplish our own
perdition. That we are not yet in hell, that we have actually a good chance of heaven, is simply because God cannot

find in His heart to abandon the possibility of our love. In a word, look at yourself, for self is the only thing which
concerns you in these difficulties of grace and predestination. Has God ever done you anything but good? Has He
not done you an overwhelming amount of good? Has He not simply been so good to you, that you yourself cannot
conceive of anything, except the divine nature, being so good? Either in kind, or in degree, in manner, or in matter,
can you so much as conceive of any created goodness being anything like so good! O merciful God! Thou art too
good to us. Thou standest in Thine own light. Thy mercies hide in one another; they go out of sight because they are

so tall: they pass unnoticed because they are so deep: they weary our thankfulness because they are so numerous:

they make us disbelieve because they are so gratuitous, so common, so enduring. We should more readily have
acknowledged what Thou hast done forus, if Thou hadst only done much less!
Are we tired of this evidence, especially when it leaves still unexplained the mystery' it so amply proves?
This is not the place to discuss the joys of the Beatific Vision, although there is hardly a more tempting province of
theology. Nevertheless we can hardly close our case without some consideration of the kingdom of glory,

considered in reference to our present inquiry. In the case of a parent or a teacher we judge of the value set upon a

particular line of conduct, by the greatness of the reward promised and actually conferred. Now if we love God, the

reward promised us is nothing less than the sight of God Himself face to face, not transiently, not as a glorious flash

of light renewed once in ten thousand years to feed our immortality with contentment and delight, but an abiding
vision, a glory and a gladness, a marvelous rapture of the will, and an ecstasy of vast intelligence, for evermore.
Think how such a reward transcends all the expectations, all the possibilities even, of our nature! How God must
love us, and how too He must love our love, to have prepared for us such joys as these, which eye has not seen, nor
ear heard, nor man's heart conceived!
We must consider also that although our beatitude, quite rigorously speaking, does not consist so much or
so directly in love, as in the actual vision of God by our understandings, nevertheless love is that which immediately
follows from it, and which is directly con-natural to it. So that it comes to this: our reward is for having loved God;
it is no less a reward than God Himself, not any of His gifts; and it is an ability to love Him infinitely better than we

have ever done before, and also eternally. He takes us to Himself. He makes us His own companions forevermore.

He multiplies Himself in us. and reflects Himself in our beatified souls, as if it were in so many images of Himself.
“In other created things." says Lessius, “as in the fabric of the world, and the various degrees of tilings,

certain thin rays of His divinity shine forth, from which we can, as it were by a conjecture, learn His power, His
wisdom, and His goodness. But in our minds elevated by the light of glory and united to Him in the Beatific Vision,
the whole plenitude of the divinity shines forth, the whole of His beauty softly glows; so that, although the divinity

is one in itself, it is in a marvelous manner multiplied, so that there seem to be as many divinities as there are

beatified minds.” Love is the reason of the reward, love is the consequence of the reward, love is the conduct
rewarded, and the reward itself is love. If we knew nothing more of God than this, need more be known?
We must not forget also the huge price which this reward has cost our Creator. When we had forfeited it, it

required as it were an effort of all His conjoined perfections to recover it for us once again. A God made man, the
shame of a God. the sufferings of a God. the Blood of a God, the death of a God! Such was the price of what we

shall one day enjoy' in heaven. What can we do but weep silently? How do all complaints about the permission of
evil and the mystery of election die away, when we think of things like these! How ungraceful, ungraceful rather
than ungrateful, do they seem! The incarnation of a God, the shame of a God, the sufferings of a God, the Blood of a
God. the death of a God! That was what I cost! It is now my daily bread, my daily light, my daily life. I confess that
faith is almost overwhelmed with these considerations. O for some comer, the least, the lowest, and the last in the
world to come, where we may spend an untired eternity in giving silent thanks to Jesus Crucified!
But, if what God paid was so great, the littleness of what earns it on our part is a mystery almost as
wonderful. A Magdalene's love was but a paltry price to pay for a reward so vast. But think of the dying thief! One
act of love, one act of contrition, the brief tardy graces of a death-bed—what must be the might of our Savior’s

Blood when it can concentrate the whole merit of eternal life in such little momentary things as these? If we died at
this moment, it is our firm hope that we should be saved; and yet can our hope rest on what we ourselves have done?
Is there not something painful in confronting the magnitude of our recompense, with the trifling service we have

given God but grudgingly, out of hearts only half weaned from the world, and scarcely weaned at all from self?
Surely God must desire our love with an amazing fervor of desire, when He gives so much to have so little in return!

There is one thing more to remark about the Beatific Vision, before we close our case. It is a very obvious
reflection, yet perhaps we do not dwell upon it sufficiently, that now, in our fallen state, it is not innocence which

earns the sight of God, but love, humble, repentant, penance-doing love. Nay, even in an unfallen or angelic world,

it would only be innocence in the shape of love, which could earn the heavenly recompense. Thus also in our
journey heaven-wards, it is love which takes even step, and love alone. It is not the sharpness of the austerity which
merits, but the love. It is not the patience in sickness, or the silence under calumny, or the perseverance in prayer, or
the zeal of apostolic labor, wliich win the crown, but just the love, and the love only that is in the patience and the
silence and the prayer and the zeal. Marty rdom without love is unprofitable before God. He has no longing for

anything but love. He puts no price on other tilings. His taste is exclusive. His covetousness is confined to that one
thing. O if we could be as simple and as single in our desires as God! He only wants our love, and more of it. and
more, and more. Why should not we also want one thing only, to love Him. and to love Him more, and more, and

more? Surely if we prayed only for that after which He longs so earnestly, our prayer would not wait for its answer
long; and then in His eyes, and who would wish to be so in other eyes? we should soon be like the saints.
We conclude from all these considerations, that of the fact that God condescends intensely to desire our
love, there can be no possible doubt; and we think it is more true to say that this fact, that He desires our love, is the
foundation of all practical religion, than the equally certain fact that He loves us. We mean that our duties and our
love flow more obviously from the one than from the other. The one comes nearer to us than the other. But as to the
reason which we are to assign for this desire on the part of our beneficent Creator, we can only say that often in

religion the answer to one mystery' is another mystery greater than the first. We can find no better answer than this,
He wishes us to love Him, because He so loves us. Upon which we are obliged forthwith to ask ourselves the further

question, Why does God love us? And this must be the inquiry for the next chapter.
Meanwhile we are not at all disconcerted with the vagueness of our answer, nor with the apparently small
result of our inquiiy. The fact is, that religious truth is always fruitful and enchanting; and God is our truest

enjoyment even already upon earth; and as we shall enjoy Him in heaven, yet never comprehend Him, so it is life’s

greatest joy on earth to watch the operations of God and to muse upon His wonders, though their meaning is either
only partially disclosed to us, or perhaps even hidden from us altogether. Oh is any one so dead in heart, so blighted

in mind and aspiration, as to be able to look all this divine love in the face, and not to be won by it to better things?
Blessed, blessed God! Wonderful father! Compassionate Creator! This mystery of His desiring our poor
love should of itself be a lifelong joy to us in our time of pilgrimage. It puts a new face upon the world. All things

glow with another light. A feeling of security comes upon us, like a gift from heaven, and wraps us round; and the
cold chill goes from our heart, and its dark spots are illuminated; and we want nothing more now, nothing. Earth has
nothing to give, which would not be a mere impertinence after this desire of God. Our hearts are full. We have no

room for more. This desire of God solves all the problems of our imrer life; for it at once calms us in our present
lowness, and spurs us on to higher things, and the name of that double state, the calm and the spur—what is it but
perfection? God loves me—God desires my love. He has asked for it, He covets it, He prizes it more than I do
myself! I would fain tell the poor trees, and the little birds that are roosting, and the patient beasts slumbering in the
dewy grass, and the bright waters, and the wanton winds, and the clouds as they sail above me, and that white moon,
and those flickering far-off stars, that God desires my love, mine, even mine! And it is tree, infallibly true. O God,
Thou ait my God because my goods are nothing unto Thee! What shall I do? If I may not doubt this mystery, w hat

can I do but die of love? O Thou, who in the world above givest us the light of glory that we may bear to see Thy
beauty , give us now the strength of faith to endure these revelations of Thy love.

The Second Chapter
WHY GOD LOVES US

Nemo amatorum carnalium, etiamsi sit in hoc ultra modum insaniens, sic exardescere potest in amorem dilectœ
suœ, sicut Deus effunditur in amorem animarum nostrarum.—St John Chrysostom.
IF the answer to our first question, why God wishes us to love Him, only resulted in a mystery, we may be sure the

answer to this second question, why God loves us, will only bring out a still greater mystery. Nevertheless we must
proceed to the discussion of it. Inquiry is more solid and more fruitful in divine things, than the most complete and
satisfactoiy results in human sciences.
The whole creation floats, as it were, in the ocean of God’s almighty love. His love is the cause of all tilings
and of all the conditions of all things, and it is their end and rest as well. Had it not been for His love, they never
would have existed, and were it not for His love now they would not be one hour preserved. Love is the reading of

all the riddles of nature, grace, and glory; and reprobation is practically the positive refusal on the part of the free
creature to partake of the Creator’s love. Love is the light of all dark mysteries, the sublime consummation of all
hopes, desires, and wisdoms, and. the marvelous interpretation of God. Light is not so universal as love, for love is

in darkness as well as light. Life is less strong than love; for love is the victory over death, and is itself an immortal
life. If it pleased God at this moment to destroy the air, the planet would have wheeled but a few leagues eastward
before it would have become the home of universal death and desolation Myriad myriads of warm and joyous lives
would have been extinguished in one inarticulate gasp of choking agony. Not only would the streets and fields have
been strewn with the suffocated dead, but the birds on the wing would have fallen lifeless to the ground. The deep

blue waters of the sea would not have screened their multitudinous tribes from the energy of the destroying edict.

The subterranean creatures would have been found out and stifled in the crevices of the rocks, the black waters, or
the winding ways beneath the ground. Swift death would have penetrated through the breathing-holes of the earth to
the strange fish of Egy pt’s artesian wells, and to the fishing-birds of the caverns of Laybach and Camiola. Earth’s
green vesture would be unrolled, and the fair orb would revolve in space an ugly mass of dull, discolored matter.
Yet this picture of min is but a faint image of what would happen if God withdrew into His own self-

sufficient glory, and called off that immensity of gratuitous love with which He covers all creation. For the

destruction of the air would be but a material desolation. It would not invade the vast kingdoms of moral beauty, of
spiritual life, of natural goodness, of infused holiness, of angelical intelligence, or of the beatitude of human souls.
As far as creation is concerned, God, as it were, concentrates all His attributes into one, becomes only one

perfection, and that one perfection is to us the whole of God: and it is love. God is love, says St John briefly; and

after that, nothing more was needed to be said. He has infinite power, boundless wisdom, indescribable holiness, but
to us the power, the wisdom, and the holiness come simply in the shape of love. His justice is one of His most
ravishing beauties, but it ravishes us by being such a glorious illumination of His love. What looks like justice far
off is but a higher kind of love when we come near. To us creatures His infinity , His immensity, His immutability,
His eternity are simply love, infinite, immense, immutable, eternal love.
When we proved God’s desire of our love, we at the same time proved undoubtedly His love of us. Reason
and revelation, science and theology, nature, grace, and gloiy, alike establish the infallible tmth that God loves His

own creatures, and loves them as only God can love. The question is, why He loves us; and our first step towards an

answer must be to examine the character and degree of this love. The nature of a thing is often the best explanation
both of its existence and its end. Let us see what God’s love of us is like.
In the first place, it passes all example. We have nothing to measure it by, nothing to compare it with. The

creatures, which God has created, furnish us with ideas by which we can imagine creatures which He has not
created. We could not have conceived of a tree, if God had not made one. But now we can imagine a tree which
shall be different from any actual tree, either in size, or in foliage, or in flower, or in fruit, or in the character of its

growth and outline. So also of an animal, or even of a possible world. Whether we are unable to imagine any
possible thing, which shall be more than a combination of certain actual tilings, or a variety of them, or an excess of
them, is a question which we do not touch. God gives us something to build our imaginary creatures upon, because
He has surrounded us with a countless variety of creatures; and we can judge of imaginary tilings in poetry, painting,
or sculpture, according to the standard of nature. But we have no such help in understanding God’s love of His
creatures. It is without parallel, without similitude. It is based upon His own eternal goodness which we do not
understand.
This leads us to its next feature, that it does not resemble human love, either in kind or in degree. It does

not answer to the description of a creature’s love. It manifests itself in different ways. It cannot be judged by the

same principles. We cannot rise to the idea of it by successive steps of greater or less human love. The ties of
paternal, fraternal, conjugal affection all express tmths about the divine love ; but they not only express them in a
very imperfect way; they also fall infinitely short of the real tmth. of the whole tmth. If we throw together all the
mutual love of the angels, of which doubt: less among the various choirs there are many nameless varieties, if we
cast into one heap all the passionate fidelity and heroic loyalty and burning sentiment of all the husbands and wives,

parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, that ever were, ever will be, or in the vast expanse

of omnipotence ever can be. our total will be something inconceivably more short of the reality of God’s love for us.
than the drop is short of the ocean, and the minute of eternity. If we multiply the same total by all the figures we can
think of without losing our heads in the labyrinths of millions and billions, we shall not mend matters. When we

have come to an end we have not got the shadow of an idea of the degree of fervor with which God loves us. And
then if we contrived to comprehend the degree, where should we be in our reckoning? There remains the fact that

God’s love of us is a different kind of love from any for which we have got a name. Oh how it gladdens our souls to
think that when we shall have been a million of years in the bosom of our Heavenly Father, we shall still be sinking
down, deeper and deeper, in that unknown sea of love, and be no nearer the bottom of its unfathomable tmth and
inexhaustible delights!

This is our third feature of it, that not even a glorified soul can ever understand it. The immaculate Mother
of God at this hour is almost as ignorant of it as we are. Almost as ignorant, for there can scarcely be degrees in a
matter which is infinite. The gigantic intelligence of St Michael has been fathoming the depths of divine love
through countless cycles of revolving ages, longer far than even those seemingly interminable geological epochs
which men of science claim, and he has reported no soundings yet. And still these endless calculations are the happy
science of the Blest. Still the saints on earth, in ardent contemplation, work this problem which they know

beforehand they shall never solve. And we, who creep upon the ground, what better can we do than bewilder
ourselves in these mazes of celestial love? For we shall still be learning to love God more, still learning to wonder

more at what He has done for us. and to wonder most of all at the nothing which we do for Him. If even they who
see God. cannot comprehend His love, what manner of love must it necessarily be? And yet it is ours, our own
possession; and God’s one desire is. by hourly influxes of grace, to increase that which is already incalculable, to
enrich us with an apparently unspeakable abundance of that whose least degree is beyond the science of archangels,
beyond the glory-strengthened eye of the Mother of God herself!

It is another feature of this love, that it seems so to possess God as to make Him insensible to reduplicated
wrongs, and to set one attribute against another. At all costs love must be satisfied. There is nothing like God’s love
except God’s unity. It is the whole of God. Mercy, the most exquisite, tender, delicate, susceptible mercy, must be
risked by the permission of evil; and the very risk is but a more beautiful manifestation of it. That choice perfection
of the Most High, His intolerably shining, unspotted, simple sanctity, must be exposed to inevitable outrage by the

freedom of created wills. Only, love must be satisfied. The most stupendous schemes of redemption shall seem to
tax the infinity of wisdom, so as to satisfy justice, provided only that the satisfaction be not made at the expense of

love. Love is the favorite. Love appears—oh these poor human words!—to stand out from the equality of the divine

perfections. Yet even love, for love’s own sake, will come down from the eminence of its dignity. It will take man’s

love as a return for itself. It will consider itself paid, by a kind of affectionate fiction. It will count that for a return,
which bears no resemblance to the thing to be returned, either in kind or in degree. The mutual love of God and man
is truly a friendship, of winch the reciprocity is all on one side. Compared to the least fraction of God’s enormous

love of us, what is all the collective love He receives from angels and from men, but as less than the least drop to the
boundless sea? And yet. in the divine exaggerations of His creative goodness, the whole magnificent machinery of a

thousand worlds was a cheap price to pay for this.
Hence we may well reckon as a fifth feature of this love, that its grandeur is a trial even to the faith which
finds no difficulty in the Blessed Sacrament, nor even in the mystery of the Undivided Trinity. If we have had to

work for God as priests, have we not found more men puzzled and tempted by the love of God than by any other
article of the faith? Indeed most of the temptations against the faith, when properly analyzed, resolve themselves
into temptations arising from the seeming excesses of divine love. We might dare to say that God Himself, in spite

of our daily prayer, leads us into temptation by His incredible goodness. It is the excessive love of the Incarnation
and the Passion, which makes men find it hard to believe those mysteries. It is the very inundation of love with
which Mary is covered, which really makes her a stumbling-block to proud or ill-established faith, or to inquiry
which has not yet reached the strength of faith. The Blessed Sacrament is a difficulty, only because it is such an

exceedingly beautiful romance of love. If God’s love had not as it were constrained Him to tell us so many of His in­
comprehensible secrets, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity would have been less fertile of objections.
We confess it seems to us that he who, on reflection, can receive and embrace those two propositions, that

God loves us, and that God desires our love, can find nothing difficult hereafter in the wonders of theology. They
exhaust and absorb all the possible objections a finite intellect can make to the incomprehensible dealings of its

infinite Creator. O how often in the fluent course of prayer does not this simple fact, that God is loving us, turn

round and face us, and scatter all our thoughts, and strike us into a deep silence, and repeat itself out loud to us, and
the soul answers not, and is not asleep and yet is not awake, and then the truth passes on, and we are left weak in
every limb, and sweetly weary, as if we had been hard at work for hours upon some deep study or toilsome deed of
charity! We saw no vision: only God touched us, and we shrank, and now are marvelously fatigued.
Another feature of this love is that it is eternal, which is in itself an inexplicable mystery'. As there never

was a moment when God was not, in all the plenitude of His self-sufficient majesty, so there was never a moment
when He did not love us. He loved us not only in the gross, as His creatures, not only as atoms in a mass, as units in
a multitude, all grouped together and not taken singly. But He loved us individually. He loved us with all those
distinctions and individualities which make us ourselves, and prevent our being any but ourselves.

As the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Holy Ghost were in God what are
called in theology necessary acts; because without them God would not be One God in Three Persons; so His eternal
love of us was God’s first free act. It was the glorious liberty of God spreading beyond Himself in the form of
creative love. What is predestination but the determining of this sweet liberty’ by almighty love? What is our election

but the eternal embrace of our Creator’s unbeginning love? Ever since He was God and He was always God, He has
been caressing us in the complacency of His delighted foresight. We were with Him before ever the planets or the
stars were made, before angelic spirit had yet streamed out of nothing, or the hollow void been bidden to build up
millions of round worlds of ponderous material substance. What must a love be like which has been eternal and
immutable? And is it simply to be believed that I, a speck in the world, a point in time, a breath of being, fainting

back into my original nothingness every moment, only that an act of God’s will and influx keeps me in life by

force—that I, most intellectually conscious to myself that I have never of myself done or said one worthy, one
unselfish thing, one thing that was not vile and mean ever since I was bom—that I, such as lam, or even such as I
may hope to be, have really been loved by God with an everlasting love? Why what mean all those controversies

about the counsels of perfection? Is it possible that God’s children can be talking together, to see how much they are
obliged to do for God, and how little is enough to save them? Yes! yes! eternal love allows even this, brooks even

this, and to all appearance is content! If we will not give, God will bargain with us, and buy. O inexplicable love!
Thy doings are almost a scandal to be put into words!
Once more. The seventh feature of this love which God bears us; is that it is in every way worthy of
Himself, and the result of His combined perfections. It would be of course an intolerable impiety to suppose the

contrary. Nay rather, it is the most perfect of His perfections, His attribute of predilection, if we might dare so to
speak. If it be a finite love, where is its limit? If it went to the Crucifixion, if it comes daily to the Tabernacle, who
can say where it will not go, if need should be? Jesus has more than once told His saints that He would willingly be

crucified over again for each separate soul of man. Where can such Love stop? If it be a love short of immense, who
has ever exhausted it? Who ever will exhaust it? Look at it in heaven at this moment—oh that we too were there!—it

is rolling like boundless silver oceans into countless spirits and unnumbered souls. How Mary’s sinless heart drinks
in the shining and abounding waters! How the Sacred Heart of Jesus seems to embrace and appropriate the whole
gracious inundation in itself! A few years, and you will be there yourself, and still the same vast flood of love. Ages
will pass uncounted, and still the fresh tides will roll. Is not this an immensity of love? O beautiful gateway of death!
thou art a very triumphal arch for the souls whom Jesus has redeemed.
If His love be mutable, when did it change? Is a whole past eternity no warrant for its perseverance? Is not

fidelity its badge and token, a fidelity which is like no created thing, although we call it by a human name? If it be
not eternal, when did it begin, and when will it end? The day of judgment, which will be the end of so many things,
will only be the beginning of a fresh abundance of this love. If it were a love less than omnipotent, could it have
created worlds, could it have assumed a created nature to an uncreated Person, could it have accomplished that
series of marvels required in the consecration of the Blessed Sacrament? Could it have been unhurt by the coldness
of men, or unimpaired by their rebellion? Is it not a wise love? Shall we dare to say, even of its excesses, that they
are inconsistent with faultless wisdom? Had its wisdom been at all less than inexhaustible, could it have
accomplished the redemption of mankind as it has done, could it have distributed grace with such profound and
unerring decision, could it have made the complicated arrangements of a vast universe testify so uniformly of itself,

could it judge the world when the time shall come? Is it any way an imperfect love? Where does it fail? What

purpose does it not fulfil? To whom does it not extend? For what need is it not sufficient? Is it an unholy love? The
very' thought were blasphemy. On the contrary', it is the very' highest expression of God’s ineffable holiness. Is it not

also a benignant love? a merciful love? a just love? Is it not a love which directs the whole providence of God, and

makes His absolute dominion over us our most perfect freedom? And finally , is it not its very characteristic that it
should be itself our end. our reward, our consummate joy in God? Thus it is the result of His combined perfections,
a sort of beautiful external parable of His incommunicable unity.
But not only is love the preacher of God’s unity; it expounds the Trinity as well. Let us confine ourselves to

the single act of creation. The eternal generation of the Son is produced by God’s knowledge of Himself. The eternal
procession of the Holy Spirit is produced by His love of Himself. The Father’s knowledge of Himself produces a
divine Person, co-equal, co-etemal, consubstantial with Himself. The love of the Father and the Son produces also a

divine Person, co-equal, consubstantial with the other Two. from whom, as from a single principle, He everlastingly
proceeds. Now see how, with awful distinctness, creation shadows forth and adumbrates this adorable and
surpassing mystery', how the free acts of God outside Himself are shadows cast by the necessary acts within

Himself! Creation is in a sort a son of God. a mighty family of sons, expressing more or less partially His image,
representing His various perfections, and all with sufficient clearness to enable the apostle to say that we are without
excuse if we do not perceive the Invisible by the things that are seen. Creation is a knowledge of God, a mani­

festation of Him given forth by Himself, and which, when complete, He viewed with divine complacency. But
creation is especially a knowledge and manifestation of God's love; it is His love to us, and our love to Him. He
created us because He loved us, and He created us in order that we might love Him. Creation was itself the external
jubilee of that immense perfection, of which the inward jubilee was the everlastingly proceeding Spirit. As the
image of God’s perfections, creation was the faint shadow of that most gladdening mystery. the eternal generation of

the Son: and Scripture lays stress on the fact that God produced the worlds by His Son. As the communication of

His love, and the love of His own gloiy. creation also dimly pictured that unspeakable necessity of the divine life,
the eternal procession of the Spirit.
We have already seen that creation was only and altogether love. As the Son is produced by the inward
uncreated knowledge which God has of Himself, so is creation the outward and created knowledge of Himself; and
as the Holy Spirit is produced by the inward uncreated love of God, so is creation His outward and created love.
Creation is a mirror of His perfections to Himself, as well as to His creatures; this must be always borne in mind;

and as He is His own end, and seeks necessarily His own glory’, creation is His love of Himself strongly and sweetly
attaining its end through His love of His creatures and their love of Him. Perhaps all the works of God have this
mark of His Triune Majesty upon them, this perpetual forth-shadowing of the Generation of the Son and the

procession of the Spirit, which have been, and are. the life of God from all eternity. Nature, grace, and glory, the
Incarnation, the Blessed Sacrament, and the Beatific Vision, may thus perhaps all be imprinted with this mark of

God, the emblem, the device, the monogram, of the Trinity in Unity. And thus, when Hie Word has enlightened

every man that comes into the world, and the Spirit has brought all willing hearts to loving obedience and accepted
sanctity, through the grace of the sacred humanity of Jesus, it is mysteriously written by the apostle, that our Lord
shall deliver up the kingdom to God and the Father, and the Son also Himself shall be subject in His human nature
unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all. The Father has created us, the Son redeemed us,
and the Holy Ghost sanctified us; and when the Son and the Holy Spirit have brought us from our wanderings, the
Father shall give Himself to us. and then, as the apostle said to Jesus, It suffices us. Then will His love be perfected,
His most dear will accomplished, and His creation crowned.
The likeness of creation to the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Ghost is still more

striking, when we come to consider the real nature of that perpetual and intimate conservation by which God

sustains and preserves all tilings. Creation and preservation are not two different actions. They can be separated only
in idea. The one is the going on of the other. It is an opinion which has found favor in the schools, and which is
peculiarly in harmony with the language of the ancient fathers, that no less an influx of God is required to preserve a
thing in being than to call it at first out of its original nothingness. In treating of this question theologians necessarily
came to examine the real character of the act of creation. Durandus expressly says, “As it is always tme in divine

things to say that the Son is ever being begotten of the Father, so is it tme to say of the creature, as long as it exists,

that it has been created and is being created by God; for the creation of things is the same act as the preservation of
them.”

Scotus says, “A tiring may be always said to be being created, as long as it abides, because it is always
receiving its being from God,” and he quotes St Augustine as saying that “with respect to God a creature is never
ultimately made, but is always being made.” Vasquez declares that “the continuous preservation of things by God is
a true creation out of nothing.” Molina says, “By the same influx of an indivisible action by which God first

conferred being upon an angel, He also now preserves him, and confers the same being upon him throughout the
whole course of time.” Suarez in his metaphysics teaches the same doctrine. Lessius says, “A created thing is

nothing else than an assiduous creation and actual production of its being:” and Scotus again marvelously says,

“Created essence of any kind is nothing else than a dependence upon God.” It is needless to point out how this
indivisible continuity of Creation adumbrates the perpetual Generation of the Son. and the incessant procession of
the Holy Ghost.
[footnote: This very interesting question of preservation is discussed by Lessius in his third book, De Summo
Bono; and then at greater length in his tenth book, De Perfectionibus Divinis. In the opinion given in the text that
creatures bear on them the mark, not only of a Creator, but of a Triune Creator. I have ventured to differ from De
Lugo. The whole subject is one of great interest; but I cannot do more than advert to it here. It is common with
theologians to regard our Blessed Lady as a world by herself, a sort of exemplar and epitome of creation; and the
following passage from F. Binet’s Chef-d'oeuvre de Dieu illustrates the view that I have put forward in the text.
Speaking of our Lady’s soul, he says. “N'est-elle pas véritablement le miroir de la Majesté de Dieu, représentant
naïvement ce qui se passe dans les splendeurs de l'éternité, où par une génération éternelle est engendré le Fils
dans le sein de son Père, où, par une émanation ineffable, le Saint-Esprit procède, du Père et du Fils? ” (Partie 1ère,
cap. 5, sec. 11 ).—See also the conclusion of St Thomas in the 45th question. 7th article of the P. Prima: "In
rationalibus creaturis est imago Trinitatis: in cceteris vero creaturis est vestigium Trinitatis; in quantum in eis
inveniuntur aliqua, quce reducuntur in Personas Divinas. " Since writing the passage in the text I have found the
same view in some hitherto unedited works of Ruysbroeck. published by Amswaldt at Hanover, 1848. The treatise
is entitled Spiegel der Seligkeit.}
Such is the love of God; such its character and its degree. This is the love He is loving us with at this very

moment: a love passing all example, a love rising above all created loves, a love which even a glorified spirit cannot
understand, a love which seems to govern God, a love that tries our faith from its sheer immensity, a love which is
eternal, and a love which is in eveiy way worthy of God Himself, and the result of His combined perfections. Let us
pause to think. At this very moment God is loving me with all that love. Lord! I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.
Oh what then are all things else tome? Pain or ease, sorrow or joy. failure or success, the wrongs of my fellow­

creatures or their praise—what should they all be to me but matters of indifference? God loves me: now is the time
to die.

But we have next to seek for the reasons of this love. They must be either on our side, or on God’s side, or
on both. Let us examine our own side first.
The first thing which strikes us is that man is in himself nothingness. His body has been formed of the dust
of the earth, and his soul has been directly created out of nothing by God Himself. Consequently we can have

nothing original in us to attract this love of our Creator. Nay, the very act of our creation showed that His love for us

existed before we did ourselves. Our very being was because of His love. This consideration alone would seem to
settle the question of man’s independent possession of any title to the love of God. We have simply nothing of our
own, nothing but the disgrace of our origin. There is not a gift of our nature but. if God loves it. He is only loving

what is His own, and which in the first instance came to us from His love. There can be nothing therefore in our own
being to love us for, when that very being is nothing more than the effect of a pre-existing love.

Moreover, when God had once called us into life, our extreme littleness seems a bar against any claim to
His love, founded on what we are in ourselves. We are only a speck even amidst rational creatures. What are we
individually? What is our importance in our country, or even our neighborhood? What is our moral or our in­
tellectual greatness? We are almost lost in the number of men who are now living on the earth. Our leaving it, which
must happen one day, will hardly be perceived. We shall leave no gap behind us. We shall hardly want a successor;

for what will there be to succeed to? And if we are mere atoms in the huge mass of men now living, what are we
compared to all the multitudes of men who have ever lived, or the enormous hosts who are yet to live before the
judgment-day? And after the judgment-day, if God goes on filling the immensity of space, and the numberless oibs

of the nightly heavens, with new rational creations, new subjects of the sacred humanity of Jesus, more angels, or
more men, or beings that shall be neither angels nor men, we shall become imperceptible motes in the great beams
of creative love.* And even now there are the angels, and who shall tell their number? For we know that
multitudinousness is one peculiar magnificence of their glorious choirs. It is even said by some, that the lowest

choir, which is the least in number, far outnumbers all the men that shall have been bom from Adam to the day of
doom. What have we to present to the eye of our Creator but an almost indescribable insignificance?
[footnote: The hypothesis hazarded here, and at page 333 of the Blessed Sacrament, that the creations of angels
and of men were possibly the beginnings of creations, and that other planets and fixed stars may be hereafter the
seats of new creations of reasonable beings, eludes some difficulties arising to the doctrine of Christ’s Grace of
Headship from previous or contemporary worlds of such beings. Yet such an hypothesis is in nowise necessary to
the coexistence of that doctrine with any such actual worlds. I have since learned that in Germany H. Steffem has
suggested the same idea in his Christi. Religions-Philosophie, and Hegel seems to say something very like it. The
reader will understand at once, how intimately this hypothesis is connected with the Scotist view of the Incarnation.
Hence that view has also come up again among German Protestants. Kurz maintained it in the earlier editions of his
Exposition of the Biblical Cosmology, but rejected it in his third edition, evidently from a total misconception of it. It
is upheld by Liebner, Domer, Martensen, and Lange, and denied by Thomasius. and Julius Muller. I venture to think
that the more philosophical a man’s idea of creation becomes, the more he will incline to the Scotist view. It is re­
markable that the revival of this view in German Protestant theology should he contemporary with a more enlarged
and systematic study of nature.]

If there is anything positive about us at all, it is our badness. To our nothingness we have contrived to add
rebellion. That really is something of our own. We have thoroughly mastered with our understandings the difference
between right and wrong, and have deliberately chosen the last and rejected the first. We have looked God’s
commandments in the face, and then broken them. Grace has come to us with quite a sensible heat and force, and we

have summoned up our power of will, and resisted it. The Holy Ghost has spoken, and we have listened, and then

returned an answer in the negative. Conscience has proclaimed the rights of duty, and without so much as taking the
trouble to deny the assertion, we have refused obedience to the mandate. We have looked calmly at eternal
punishment, we have clearly perceived that nothing short of an omnipotence of anger has been required for the

creation of those unutterable tortures, and then for an hour of sin we have braved it all. Time after time we have put
God in one scale, and some creature in the other, and then of our own will have pressed down the scale, and made
the creature outweigh the Creator. We have neglected God and outraged Him also. We have at once disobeyed Him

and forgotten Him. We have both ignored Him and yet have insulted Him as well. All this is our own. There is no
one to share it with us. Truly we are wonderful creatures, to have done so much in so short a time, to be able indeed

to do such things at all. Yet are we making out a very promising case for a title to eternal love?
We have said, there was no one to share these miserable prerogatives with us. It is tme, and yet it is not tme
either. For think awhile. Has not Jesus at least offered to share them? There have been times when their real nature,
their awful wretchedness, came home to us, and a world would have been a cheap payment to get rid of the guilty

past. To be a door-keeper in the house of God seemed then an infinitely better lot than a thousand years amid the

splendors of ungodliness. And Jesus came to us in one of those times. He offered to take all this horrible
accumulation of rebellion and self-will, and to make it His own, and to give His sufferings for it, and to pay His

Blood to ransom us from the intolerable debt of fire, which we had willfully and scornfully incurred. And we were
too glad to accept an offer of such almost fabulous love. And then in a little while, leaving all that old debt on Him,
we left His service also. We lookback our rights: we re-entered upon the exercise of our unhappy prerogatives; and
trampling mercy underfoot now. in addition to the other divine perfections we had outraged before, we once more
earned for ourselves an endless death, and preferred to the holy love of God the blackness of everlasting fire. And

perhaps tliis process has been repeated a score of times, in our short lives, or a score of scores of times. And

certainly such conduct is all our own. An angel never had the opportunity given him of such new choice of evil.
Here is the first time in which we come in sight of anything which belongs undoubtedly to ourselves as men; and it
were strange indeed if such excess of guilt should be the blissful cause of such exceeding love.

But if. instead of being such quite incredible sinners, we were equal both in our faculties and our innocence
to the highest angels, should we be much better able to establish our right and title to the inestimable love of God?
What can we do for God? What can we add to Him? What can we give Him, which He does not possess already, and

possess to an infinite extent and with an infinite enjoyment? Is there one of His perfections to which we could put a
heightening touch, an additional beauty? Could we by any possible contribution of ours swell the overflowing ocean
of His essential glory? Is there a little joy, however little, which we can give Him, and which is not His already? We
could not even be of any real help to Him in the government of the world. If He condescended to make use of our
ministrations we should only add to the weight on the shoulder of His omnipotence, not take anything from it. For

He would have to concur to every act we did, to every movement we made. He would have actively to fill our
nothingness with life, to fortify our feebleness with strength, to illuminate our darkness with His light. The most
magnificent of the angels is no help to God. On the contrary, if we may use the word, he is rather a drain upon Him.

For the creature thirsts for the influx of the Creator, and the more capacious his nature the more vast are his needs, to
be supplied from the undiminished plenitude of God. When God lets His creatures work for Him, it is rather that
they make more work for Him to do, as children do when they pretend to help their father. It is a condescension, an

honoring of the creature, the clearest proof of God’s exceeding love for us. Thus though St Michael’s brightness
dazzles us, while we look at it. until we gaze upon it through the many-colored veil of a creature’s necessary
imperfections, we can see even in him no right or title to his Creator’s love, except the gifts which that love placed
there first of all. But we are not St Michael. We are not magnificent angels. We are but the most miserable of men,
relapsed sinners, even now perhaps only half repentant, with a most cowardly repentance.
If then we must judge of ourselves by human rather than angelic principles, let us apply these human

measures to our actual service of our Maker. What is our service of God like? What is its worth, what its true

character? Let us for a moment put aside from God the consideration that He is God. He is our Father, our Master,
our Benefactor, our fondly loving Friend. In His immense longevity He has been busy doing us good. It seems to
have been His one occupation. He lived for us. We were His end. Words caimot tell the amount of self-sacrifice He

has made for us. He slew an only Son to keep us out of harm. Figures could not put down the number of graces He
has given and is hourly giving to us. His life will be prolonged, not for His own sake, but for ours, some more
centuries, in order that He may go on and complete the sum of His prodigious benefactions. It is not easy to tell what

He has been to us. We feel that we do not half know it ourselves. Suffice it to say, that this ancient earth has never
seen a Father like this Father, or a Master half so kind or half so like an equal, or a Benefactor more prodigal or
more self-forgetting, or a Friend more ardently romantic in his attachment. And we have all this love to return. And
how do we return it? A certain amount of pious feeling, a scant obedience of a few easy commandments, a respect

for His expressed wishes when they do not too much clash with our own interests, a fluctuating quantity of prayer
and of thanksgiving, but which engrosses us so little that we are generally thinking of something else all the time.
This is what we do for Him in a very' irregular and perfunctory kind of way. And if we ourselves were good-natured

human fathers, should we be satisfied if our sons did as much for us as we do for God, and no more? If a friend of
seven years’ standing repaid thus our love and loyalty, should we not think his friendship and his service almost
insulting? Should we not think it so cold, so fitful, so self-seeking, so unjust that, although charity hopes all things

and believes all tilings, we should consider ourselves justified in saying that it would be utterly impossible, however
disposed we might be to waive our rights and to stretch a point, to put a favorable construction upon the conduct of
our friend?

But all the while it is God, not merely a friend and benefactor, but God whom we are thus treating, with His
ten thousand other ties upon us. and His incomparably greater tenderness, and His absolutely eternal love! Oh. is it
not humiliating to think of these tilings? But we have not yet drunk our vileness to its dregs. While we are thus

abusing the long-suffering of God by our ungraceful slackness, by our injurious coldness, and by our insulting
scantiness of service, we have the effrontery to persuade ourselves that we are doing some great thing for Him, that
we are almost laying Him under an obligation to us, and that any one who urges upon us a higher perfection is a
troublesome dreamer, who is far from doing justice to the reasonable and moderate profession of piety on wliich we
pride ourselves. And all this to God, remembering who God is! And all this after all He has done forus, and is doing

now! And all this, when we have so much of the criminal past to undo, so much lost time to make up, so much of
actual rebellion to repair and expiate! Surely it was not too much to say that even on human principles our very
service of God is almost insulting, our very reparations a new affront. If they be not so. to what is it owing but to the

unlimited forbearance of Him upon whose paternal love experience teaches us we can with so much security
presume?
But if God is His own end, and by a sort of necessity cannot but seek His own glory in all things, it would

seem as if to be like God would be a legitimate title to His love. He will look with complacency upon that which
reflects Himself. Still if even on this account God loved men. it would be a reason rather on His side than on our
own. Nevertheless let us see what the real tmth of the matter is. We are the contradictory of God in almost every

respect. To say nothing of the finiteness and feebleness belonging to us as creatures, our moral qualities present a
more fearful dissimilarity from His holiness and perfection. We are deficient in the very virtues which we are able to
acquire, and for the acquisition of which He has given us special aids of grace. Nay. when He has summed up all

that shall entitle us to the forgiveness of our sins, all that shall win for us the veiy kindness and favor which we seek
from Him. into one simple precept, and told us to forgive if we would be forgiven, and to do to others as we would
He. as well as they, should do to us, our cormpt nature finds the simple lesson an infinite hardship in practice.
Times have been, alas! who will say those times are not now? when the world’s sins have so sickened God

that He has repented, immutable though He be, that He ever created man. And now what in all the world does He
behold like Himself? Nothing but the grace He has planted there, like an ailing exotic in an uncongenial soil, stunted
in growth, with a few pale leaves scarcely hanging on to its boughs, flowering hardly ever, and only under great

forcing heat, and bearing fmit in tliis climate never. Is that the heavenly tree? Who would know it in such woeful
plight? Of a tmth God has much to bear not to be downright offended with the grace He sees on earth, to say little of

the nature there, and still less of the prolific sin. We know our own hearts far too well: and can we believe that God
can look down from heaven, and see Himself reflected there? Earth has but one consolation. Truly there is
something on man’s side, something wliich is man's own, on which God's eye can rest, and love not only what it

sees, but be so ravished thereby, that it will pour itself out in floods, and rnn over, and deluge the universe with light

and loveliness; and that sight which is man's own. though it is not in man, is the Blessed Sacrament, where the

patience of God securely rests its foot, and the divine anger reposes, and sleeps sweetly, and wakes not to remember

its errand of vindictive purity.
There is one characteristic of man which especially precludes our finding in him the reasons of God’s
amazing love. It is not exactly sin. It is not precisely any one of the imperfections to which as a finite being he is
subject. It is rather the combined result of all his imperfections. He is characterized by meanness. When we do really
great things, we fail in some little point of them. There is a flaw of meanness running across our generosity, and
debasing every one of its products. Our love and hatred, our praise and blame, our anger and our good humor, have
all got the same crack in them, this flaw of meanness.
With ourselves, what is self-deceit but meanness, what is slaveiy to bodily comforts, what greediness at

meals, what rudeness in manners, what personal vanity, what a hundred idle extravagances of self-praise in which
we daily indulge, what the inexhaustible pettiness of wounded feeling, but meanness, downright meanness?

In our intercourse with others, what is lying but meanness, what are pretence, selfishness, irritability, and
more than half the world’s conventions, but meanness, systematized meanness?
In our relations with God, what are lukewarmness, and hypocrisy, and self-righteousness, but meanness;
what is venial sin but miserable meanness? Many a man, who has found it hard to hate himself, when he looked only
at his sins, has found the task much easier when he had the courage to hold close to his eyes for a good long while
the faithful picture of his incredible meanness. What a piercing, penetrating vision it is, running all through us with a

cold sharpness, when grace lets us see how low and vile, how base and loathsome, how little and how sneaking—

forgive the word, we cannot find another—we are in everything. Everybody seems so good, except ourselves; and
we, oh so intolerably hateful, so ugly, so repulsive, such a burden to ourselves! And if this can be made plain to our

dull, gross sight, what must it be to the clear penetration of the all-holy Majesty of God?
But surely it is useless going on. We have doubtless by this time lost sight of all claims to love, which we
might have fancied we had when we started. It is plain that the reasons for God’s love of man are not at all to be

found on our side, and therefore they must be on the side of God. If any truth in the world is established, this is. Cer­
tainly the extremity of our lowness may be the measure of the height of God’s love, but it cannot furnish us with the
reason of it. We are often tempted, when reflecting on these matters, to say shortly that God loves us because we are
so peculiarly unlovable. This may do well enough for a paradox in the pulpit to strike sleepy auditors; but we must

go deeper down than this when we read or meditate.
Now every one of the reasons for God’s loving us being on His side, not on ours, is it not remarkable that

in our service of God we should feel as if it were a bargain between two more or less equal parties, and that, if we
did our share, the other would be held to do his? We do not at all realize the spiritual life as an intercourse where all
the duty is on one side, and all the liberality on the other. Yet surely it must be so.
If certain things are due to us as creatures, when once we have been created, so that God would not be God,
if He did not give them, yet that we were created at all was an immense gratuitous love, If He condescends to make
a covenant with us, yet it is of His own free love that He stoops to bind Himself; and again love, eternal love, must

first have created us, before we could exist to be parties to a covenant. So that all is love. The analysis of creation
resolves itself simply into love. Moreover, what would become of us. if God gave us nothing but our due. or if He
kept His munificence within the limits of His strict covenant? Is not His love breathing out everywhere, and
breaking down our pride into humility, as the summer rain beats down the fragile flower, while we are weighing
with minutest scales each ounce, and drachm, and scruple, of the miserable alloy with which we are paying Him
under the sweet-sounding name of love?

So far then is clear, that all the reasons for God’s love of us are to be found exclusively on His side. No

reasons whatever exist on ours. It is still a further inquiry what these reasons are; and one to which we must now

betake ourselves. Alas! with our puny minds it is a hopeless inquisition to search through the vast recesses of the
divine nature to find the reasons of God’s love. God Himself is love, simple love; and we may well suppose that if

we might question each one of His perfections, the answer from them all would still be love. We are so sure of this
that we do not anticipate any difficulty. Yet when we come to make the trial, the results are not altogether according
to our expectations.

There are few of God’s attributes more beautiful or more adorable than His justice. There is no justice like

His, for it is founded on His own divine nature, not on any obligations by which He is bound. Some of the saints
have had a special devotion to His justice, and have made it in a peculiar manner the subject of their contemplations.
An intelligent creature would rather be in the hands of God’s justice, than at the mercy of the most loving of his

fellow-creatures. The apostle tells us that the acceptance of our contrition and the forgiveness of our sins depends
upon God’s justice. His distribution of the gifts of nature, grace, and glory, is the masterpiece of His justice, wliich
alone and of itself could fill us with gladness and wonder for a whole eternity. His promises are the children of His

justice, and His fidelity to them is His exercise of that most royal attribute, ft is because His love is so great a love,
that His justice is so perfect and so pure. His punishments even are at once magnificent to look at, yet most dreadful

to endure, because of the extremity of their unalterable and comprehensive and truthful justice.

Even the vengeance of our God is a subject which love trembles to contemplate, but from which it will not
turn away. His justice moreover, even in the acceptance of our works, is a justice due to His own perfections rather
than to the efforts of our misery; for what He receives from us is much more His own than ours. And is there a sight
more exalting or more affecting amid all the wonders of theology, than to see the beautiful, the faultless rigor of
divine justice satisfied to its utmost demand, its enormous and most holy requirements paid in full, and its dread
loveliness and majestic sternness worshipped with an equal worship, by the Precious Blood and the mysterious
Passion of our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, God and Man? He has hardly begun to know God who has not

addicted himself, with humility and fear, his mind hushed and his heart in his hand, to the study of God’s
tremendous justice. But is it there that we can look for the reason of His love? Was our creation a debt of justice due

to our original justice? Has our use of the gifts of nature, or our correspondence to the calls of grace, been such, that
we dare to call on God to come and note it with all His justice, and pay it according to the rigor of its merits? Listen
to the sweet lamentation that issues evermore from the souls of purgatory through the breathing-places of the Church
on earth—is it not more true? O Lord, if Thou shaft be extreme to mark what is done amiss, Lord ! who shall abide
it? Of a tmth we must be well clothed with the grace and justice of Jesus, before we shall dare to say with Job of old,

Let Him weigh me in the balance of His justice. Surely if justice alone were to be concerned, we should look for
punishment rather than for love.
In the seventeenth century a succession of holy men were raised up in France, who were drawn by the Holy

Spirit to honor with a peculiar intensity and devotion the sanctity of God, and by the same unerring instincts of grace
they were led to couple with this devotion a special attraction to the spirit of the priesthood of Jesus. Let us approach
this attribute of sanctity, and see if we can find there the reason for God’s exceeding love of creatures. God is

infinite holiness, because He is essential purity. Who can stand before the blaze of such a blinding light? He is holy,
because the divine Essence is the root and fountain of all holiness. He is holy, because He is the rule, the model, the
exemplar of all holiness. He is holy, because He is the object of all holiness, which can be nothing else than love of

God and union with Him. He is holy, because He is the principle of all holiness, inasmuch as He infuses it into
angels and men, and as He is the last end to which all their holiness is inevitably directed. He is infinitely holy,
because He is infinitely lovable; and as all holiness consists in the love of God, so God’s holiness consists in the
love of Himself. Thus, and what an adorable mystery it is! the infinite purity of God is simply His self-love. We

know not if a creature can gain a higher idea of God than is given out by this stupendous tmth.

But let us suppose that we are ever so holy, how will this created holiness stand by the side of that of God?
He is holy in Himself, and of Himself, holy in essence, which it is impossible for a creature to be. To no creature,

says theology, can it be natural to be the son of God, to be impeccable, to have the Holy Ghost, and to see the divine
nature. Our holiness consists in gifts gratuitously superadded to the feebleness and impossibilities of our finite
nature. The holiness of God is substantial, His own very substance; ours is but a quality and an accessory, an
illumination of mind and impulse of will imparted to us by Himself.
God is holy infinitely, both in intensity and in extent. Whereas we have, alas! no words low enough to

express the extreme littleness, the deplorable languor, the soon exhausted capacity, of our brightest and most
burning holiness. The holiness of God can neither grow nor be diminished. It cannot grow, because it is already

infinite. It cannot be diminished, because it is His Essence. Ours is but a speck, whose very' nature, hope, and effort
it is to grow. The holiness of Mary might grow for centuries, with tenfold the rapidity' that her vast merits grew on
earth, and at the end she would be as little near the holiness of God as she is now. God’s sanctity is eternal, ours but

of a year or two; perhaps it began quite late in life. God’s sanctity is unintelligible from its excess of purity and its
depths of unspotted light; ours, alas! a fellow-creature could see through and appreciate in less than half an hour.
The holiness of God is ineffably fruitful; for it is the cause which originates, preserves, sets the example, and gives
the aim to all created holiness whatsoever. Ours is fruitful too for holiness, as such, must be fruitful: but how little
have we done, how many souls have we taught to know God and to love Him? If the scandal and edification we

have given were put into the scales, which would weigh down the other?
All this is on the supposition that we are as holy as we might be. But we are not so. We are hardly holy at
all. And knowing ourselves to be what we are, is it possible for us to conceive that infinite sanctity bade love create

us out of nothing, because it was so enamored of what it foresaw we should become? The holiness of God has no
necessary respect to creatures, as His mercy has; and yet, strange to say it is this seemingly most inimitable of all
His attributes, which is expressly put before us as the object of our imitation. We are to be holy because God is holy,
and perfect even as our Heavenly Father is perfect. Do we then so represent and reflect this sanctity of God, as to
become the object of such exuberant affection? If it were only to God’s holiness that we might appeal, should we
expect to find there the reason of His love? Nay, if we had not truer views of God’s equality, could we not more

easily fancy omnipotent love required to hinder infinite holiness from turning away from us in displeasure and

aversion? What did David mean when he said in the eighty-fifth psalm, first of all, Incline thine ear, O Lord, and
hear me. for I am needy and poor; and then, Preserve my soul, for I am holy? He was a man after God’s heart: but

what maimer of men are we? Yet. while he was pleading his own holiness * it was not to the holiness of God he was
appealing; for he adds, For Thou. O Lord, art sweet and mild, and plenteous in mercy to all that call upon Thee,
[footnote: Many commentators suppose him to allude to his consecration as king.]
Is it the divine beauty which is so in love with us miserable creatures? Yet how shall we search the

unsearchable loveliness of God? One momentary flash of His beaut} would separate body and soul by the
vehemence of the ecstasy which it would cause. We shall need to be fortified with the mysterious strength of the
light of glory, before in the robust freshness of our immortality we can lie and look upon that beauty, tranquil and
unscathed. We shall see before us in living radiance, in the light of its own incomprehensibility, in the shapeliness of
its own immensity, infinite light and infinite power, infinite wisdom with infinite sweetness, infinite joy and infinite
glory, infinite majesty with infinite holiness, infinite riches with an infinite sea of being; we shall behold it not only
containing all real and all imaginary and all possible goods, but containing them in the most eminent and unutterable
maimer, and not only so, but containing them, oh breathless exhibition of most ravishing supernal beauty! in the

unity of most transcending and majestic simplicity; and this illimitable vision is in its totality the beauty of the

divine nature; and what we see, though we say it, is not a thing, but Him. a Being, Him our Creator, Three Persons.

One God. This Beauty is God, the beautiful God! Oh how we ourselves turn to dust and ashes, nay, to loathsome
death and corruption, when we think thereon! We are going to say that God has His beauty from Himself, we ours

from Him, that His was illimitable, ours almost imperceptible, that His was within, ours borrowed from without, that
His could neither grow nor fade, while ours is a vague, uncertain, fluctuating shadow: but is it not more true to say
that we have no beauty whatsoever? O my heart! my heart! how loudly art thou telling me to stop; for, as for infinite

beauty, unless it might be infinitely deceived, it could only be repelled by thy guilt and wretchedness!
Infinite wisdom must strangely have forgotten itself, if it can be in love with us for our own sakes. The
most fearful thing about the divine wisdom, and that which makes it so adorable, is that it is God’s knowledge of us
in Himself. He does not look out upon us. and contemplate us, like an infinitely intelligent spectator, from without.

But He looks into Himself, and sees us there, and knows us, as He knows all things, in the highest, deepest, and
most ultimate causes, and judges of us with a truth, the light and infallibility of which are overwhelming and
irresistible.
St Maiy Magdalene of Pazzi examined her conscience out loud in an ecstasy, and we look upon it as a
supernatural monument of delicate self-knowledge. But what is the self-knowledge of an examination of conscience,
by the side of God’s instantaneous, penetrating, and exhausting knowledge of us in Himself? That wisdom also is

the capacious abyss in which all the manifold beauties of possible creatures, and the magnificent worship of possible
worlds, revolve in order, light and number amidst the divine ideas. And what are we by the side of visions such as
these? As the flood of the noontide sun poured cruelly upon wounded eyes, so is the regard of God’s knowledge
fixed sternly on the sinner s soul. Oh the excruciating agony it must be, added to the torments of the lost, to feel how
nakedly and transparently they lie in the light of God’s intolerable wisdom!
Must not we too have some faint shadow of that feeling? If the sacred humanity of Jesus did not cover our

cold and nakedness, and shivering poverty, as with a sacred mantle, or if we fell out from beneath it into the broad
day of God’s unsparing wisdom, we should surely faint away with fear and terror in the sense of our abject created

vileness.

Can we dream then that God loves us so well, because He knows us so thoroughly? O no! like little
children must we hide our faces in the lap of our dearest Lord, and cry with half-stifled voice, Turn away Thy face

from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities! Infinite wisdom has almost taxed itself with ingenious desires to save
our souls and to win our love; and what, in spite of all its curious array of graces and inventions, have we become:
and how can that wisdom look upon us and be otherwise than disappointed? And what must disappointment be like

in God?
That which is most like a limit to omnipotence is the free-will of man: and that which looks most like a
failure in unfailing power is the scantiness of the love which God obtains from man. We have no words to tell the
power of God. We have no ideas by the help of which we can so much as approach to an honorable conception of it.
What a boundless field of wild speculation possible creatures and possible worlds open out to view! Yet all this does
not aid us to imagine God’s unimaginable power. Possibility seems to us ahnost infinite, so widely does it reach, so

much does it imply, so stupendous is the variety of operations within its grasp. But a Being who is not bound by
impossibility, to whom the impossible is no limit whatever, to whom nothing is impossible, what can He be like?
We may heap up words for years, and we get no nearer to realizing what we mean. We have no picture of it in our
minds. Now, if to such terrific power, there could be great or small, should not we be so small as to be contemptible

in its sight, and so it would pass us over? But if we have restrained this grand omnipotence, if we have dared to
brave its might, if we have ventured to try our strength with its strength, if we have dared to throw our wills as an
obstacle beneath the rushing of its impetuous wheels, should we not expect, if God were only and simply power, that
it would tread us out of life, trample us back into our darksome nothingness, and then onward, onward, onward still,

upon its swift resplendent way through exhaustless miracles, uncounted worlds, and nameless fields of unimaginable
glory?
God is truth, all truth, the only truth. Truth is the beauty of God. and His beauty is the plenitude of truth.

Everything is what it is in the sight of God, and it is nothing else. Tmth is the character of God's mind, and the
perfection of His goodness. All truth in creatures is a derivation from the tmth of God. Even tiling in the divine
ideas has a peculiar fitness and congruity which makes it worthy of Him, because it makes it truthful. God is tmth,

not only in Himself absolute, unapproachable troth, but He is especially truth as He is the exemplar of creatures.
Whatever is true in them is so, because it is in accordance with Him as their role and pattern, or, as philosophers call
it, their exemplary cause. The whole troth of creation is therefore in its conformity to God; and whatever is not
conformed to Him is a distortion, a horror, and a lie. Yet there is perhaps none of the divine excellences which more
broadly distinguish the Creator from the creature than this of truth, none with which it is more important for us to

communicate, and none whose communication is more thoroughly supernatural, or in which perseverance is more
difficult. Moreover, so necessary' to creation is this divine perfection in the Creator, that all creatures might say, by
instinct as well as by inspiration, Let God be true and every man a liar. But now if truth, the only created truth, is
likeness to God, conformity to God, a direct aiming at God, how far is there any truth in us? How far do we differ

from our original, how do we vary from our pattern, how do we swerve from the straight line, and are awkward in
the hands of Him who builds the heavenly Jerusalem after the model of His truth? Must not troth abhor that which is
so untrue, as we know ourselves to be? Is it not the case that many a time in life the Holy Ghost has wakened us up

to a sense of our exceeding untruthfulness, so that we see our whole reality fading away in the darkness of hypo­
crisy, conceit, pretence, vainglory, intentional falsehood, half-deliberate diplomacy, circuitous insincerity and
unintended, unavoidable concealments, which yet make us be all the while acting a part, and seeming to be what we
are not? Oh we feel all miserable and shameful with the uncleanness of untruth, and love to think, in the agony of
our self-hatred, that at least the eye of God sees through and through our dishonorable disguises, and pierces with
His rays of light abysses we ourselves only suspect and do not know, of the most undignified and monstrous self­

deceit! Does God love us then because we are so truthful?
Let us ask our question of one more attribute, and then we will conclude our search. But how shall we

speak of thee, O beautiful mercy of God? It is mercy which seems above all things to make us understand God.
While the practice of it in reality makes the creature like the Creator, it seems to us as if, when He practiced it, it
made the Creator like the creature. For it has about it an appearance of sadness and of sympathy, a pity, a self­

sacrifice, a pathos, which belong to the nobility of a created nature, ft makes God to be so fatherly, as if truly He
sorrowed for His sons, and spoke kind words, and did gentle things out of the exuberant affection of the pain He
feels for our distress and our needs.
How shall we define this golden attribute of mercy? Is it not the one perfection which we creatures give, or

seem to give, to our Creator? How could He have mercy, were it not for us? He has no sorrows that want soothing,
no necessities that need supplying; for He is the ocean of interminable being. Mercy is the tranquillity of His
omnipotence and the sweetness of His omnipresence, the fruit of His eternity and the companion of His immensity,
the chief satisfaction of His justice, the triumph of His wisdom, and the patient perseverance of His love. Wherever
we go there is mercy, the peaceful, active, broad, deep, endless mercy of our heavenly Father. If we work by day, we

work in mercy’s light; and we sleep at night in the lap of our Father’s mercy. The courts of heaven gleam with its
outpoured prolific beauty. Earth is covered with it, as the waters cover the bed of the stormy sea. Purgatory' is as it
were its own separate creation, and is lighted by its gentle moonlight, gleaming there soft and silvery through night

and day. Even the realm of hopeless exile is less palpably dark than it would be, did not some excesses of mercy’s
light enter even there.

What but mercy could have divined the misery of non-existence, and then have called in omnipotence and
love to build a universe, and fill it full of life? This was its first essay. Yet, as if in the very instant of peopling
nothingness with angelic and with human life it outstripped itself, and was not content with its mighty work, it raised

its creation to a state of grace simultaneously with its state of nature. Then when the human race perversely fell from
this supernatural order, and drifted away from God. to deluge the world with grace was not enough for mercy, ft
brought down from heaven the Person of the Eternal Word and united it to human nature, that so it might redeem the
world with the marvels, almost incredible marvels, of a truly divine redemption.

Anything, therefore, might be asked of mercy, ft might be asked to furnish the reasons of the Creator’s

love. Yet, if we may say so, mercy seems to be but one method of His love. His love is somehow wider than His
mercy, although His mercy is simply infinite. Mercy is one of His perfections, while love is the harmony of all.
Mercy does not tire of us, does not despair of us, does not give over its pursuit of us, takes no offence, repays evil
with good, and is the ubiquitous minister of the Precious Blood of Jesus. But love seems more than this. Love fixes

upon each of us, individualizes us, is something personal. Love is just and equitable no less than kind, is wise as
well as powerful, Love is tantamount to the whole of God, and is co-extensive with Him. Mercy is something by
itself. Love is the perfection of the uncreated in Himself. Mercy is the character of the Creator. Mercy pities, spares,

makes allowances, condescends. But love rewards, honors, elevates, equalizes with itself. The idea of predilection
does not enter into mercy, whereas it is the secret life of love. We do not know: but it does not seem as if mercy

quite answered the question we are asking. And yet if mercy is not the reason of God’s love, where else shall we

find it in His infinity?
But it is time to close. We have seen with what a love it is that God loves us, and we have asked why it is
He loves us. It must be for reasons to be found either on man s side, or on God’s side. Not on man’s side; for he in
himself is nothingness; he is but a speck even amid rational creations. To his nothingness he has added rebellion,
and in no way can he add anything to God. Even on human principles Iris very service of God is almost insulting. He

is the contradictory of God in all tilings, and if he is characterized by any one tiling rather than another, it is by
pusillanimity and meamiess. We have therefore had to look for the reason on God’s side; and looking at His chief
perfections, one after another, we have hardly found what we are seeking. Infinite justice would lead Him to punish

us. Infinite sanctity would turn away from us in displeasure. Infinite beauty would be repelled, and infinite wisdom
be disappointed. Infinite power would regard us as contemptible and pass us over. Infinite truth would contemplate
us as an hypocrisy and a lie. Finally, mercy all but infinite would tire of us. and it is just the infinity of mercy which

does not tire. But love is something more than not being tired.
Why, then, does God love us? We must answer, Because He created us. This then would make mercy the
reason of His love. But why did He create us? Because He loved us. We are entangled in this circle, and do not see

how to escape from it. But it is a fair prison. We can rest in it, while we are on earth; and if we are never to know

anything more, then we will make our home in it for eternity. Who would tire of such captivity?
God loves us because He has created us. What sort of a feeling is it which the peculiarity of having created
someone out of nothing would give us? Who can tell? We suppose it to be a feeling which contains in itself all the

grounds of all earthly loves, such as paternal, fraternal, conjugal, and filial; and of all angelic loves besides, of which
we know nothing. We suppose it to contain them all, not only in an infinite degree, but also in the most
inconceivably eminent maimer, and further than that, with an adorable simplicity which belongs only to the divine
nature. But when we have imagined all this, we see that something remains over and above in a Creator’s love,
which we cannot explain; but which we must suppose to be a feeling arising out of His having created us out of no­
thing, and which is what it is, because He is what He is, the infinitely blessed God. This then is our answer. He loves

us because He has created us. Certainly the mystery' does not fill our minds with light; at least not with such light as

we can communicate; but, which is far more, it sets our hearts on fire.

The Third Chapter
OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD

Magna res amor. Nam cum amat Deus, non aliud vult quam amaris quippe qui ob aliud non amat, nisi Ut ametur,
sciens ipsos amore beatos qui se amaverint. O suavitatem! O gratiam! O amoris vim!—St Bernard.
IT has often been the benevolent amusement of sages and philanthropists to draw pictures of imaginary republics.

Sometimes they have placed their ideal citizens in positions unusually favorable for the exercise of the highest
virtues; at other times they have represented the whole duty and happiness of men to consist in some one virtue, as
patriotism or simplicity; or again these legislators have delivered their imaginary people from all the restraints and

conventions of civilization, in order that the development of their liberty might take its own direction and have the
fullest play. So we also might amuse ourselves by conceiving some possible imaginary world. We might suppose

that, when the day of doom is over. God’s creative love will move to some other planet of our system, and people it
with rational creatures, to serve Him and to glorify His name. We might picture to ourselves these creatures as
neither angels nor men; but of some different species, such as God knows how to fashion. They might preserve their
original integrity, and neither fall partially, as the angels did, nor the whole race, as was the unhappy fortune of man.

They would of course be the subjects of Jesus, because He is the head and first-born of all creatures. But their way
of worshipping Him might be quite different from ours. They might also be under different material laws; and
different powers of mind and will might involve varieties of moral obligation very different from those which
belong to us. They might thus be another variety in the magnificence of Christ’s Church. They might be higher than
angels, or lower than men, or between the two. They would be least likely to be lower than men. because then our

Blessed Lord would not have carried His condescension to the uttermost.
When we have fully pictured to ourselves this possible world, we might curiously descend into every
conceivable ramification of that new planetary life, and see what the behavior of these creatures would be like. We

might watch them in the arrangements of their social system, in the complications of their public life, or in the
minute habits of their domestic privacy. We might picture to ourselves their trades and professions, their standards
of the beautiful, their arts and sciences, their philosophy and literature, their rules of criticism, their measures of
praise or blame. We might imagine war to be an impossibility of their nature, their political revolutions to be without

sin. their sufferings not to be penalties of a past fault, or solitude to be to them the same sort of normal state which
society is to us. When we had completed our picture, this possible world would have some kind of likeness to our

own, although it would be so very different, partly because God would be its Creator, and partly because we could

not paint the picture without copying in some degree from ourselves.
This imaginary world would probably, however, differ less from ours, than ours would differ from itself, if
the precept of the love of God were fully kept by all the inhabitants of the world. Let us tiy now to put a picture of

this before ourselves. It need not be altogether imaginary, and it may actually help to realize itself. Every man and
woman in the world, and every child as soon as it comes to the use of reason, is bound by the golden chains of that

delightful precept. Christian or Jew, Mahometan or idolater, all souls in all their degrees of darkness and of light, are
under the bright shadow of that universal commandment. Nothing can be more reasonable. Every creature was

created by God for God's own sake. Hence he has nothing to do but God’s work, nothing to seek but God’s glory;
and that work and that glory God has been pleased to repose in love, in the easy service of a rational and yet

supernatural love. Neither has He left us in uncertainty with respect to the extent of the precept. Hear, O Israel, the
Lord our God is one Lord. Thou shall love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with
thy whole strength. St Matthew tells us that a doctor of the law said to Jesus, Master, which is the great

commandment in the law? Jesus said to him, Thou shall love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy
whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. Where Moses says, with thy
whole strength. St Matthew says, with thy whole mind. Tims God is solemnly declared to be the object of our love,
which love is to be distinguished by two characteristics. It is to be universal: heart, soul, mind, and strength are to go

to it. It is to be undivided: for it claims the whole heart, the whole soul, the whole mind, the whole strength.
Putting it then at the lowest, and setting aside such heroic manifestations of love as are either the ornaments

of a devout piety or the counsels of a high perfection, what is even one bound to by this precept, as soon as he
attains the use of reason? He is bound to love God better than anything else: he is bound to put a higher value upon
God than anything else: he is bound to obey all the will of God about him as far as he knows it: and he is bound, at
least in general intention, to direct all Iris actions to the gloiy of God. In Iris heart nothing can be allowed to come

into competition with God. His soul must be engrossed by nothing short of God. His mind must esteem nothing at
all in comparison with God; and all his strength must be at God's sendee in a way in which it is not at the service of

anything else. Whatever he falls short of all this from the first day of reason's dawn to the closing hour of life, he
must repair with a loving sorrow based on God’s eternal goodness. This is of simple obligation to the whole world,
through the populous breadth of Asia, in the crowded coasts and vast cities of Europe, across Africa from one ocean
to the other, from the northernmost dwelling of America to where its extreme headlands face the antarctic ice, and in
every' island of the sea and palm-crowned coral reef, both great and small. It is as much of obligation, more so if it
could be more, as to do no murder. Not a creature of God ever has entered or ever will enter into His eternal joy,
who has not kept this precept, or by sorrow won his forgiveness for the breach, except the baptized infants of the
Catholic church.
Many considerations may be more startling than this: but we know of none which are more profoundly

serious. For we must bear in mind that we are speaking not of counsel but of commandment, not of perfection but of
obligation, not of possibilities but of necessities. It is the very alphabet of our religion, the starting point of our
catechism, the first principle of salvation; and reason claims to join with revelation in imposing this universal
precept on the souls of men.

Does the world keep it? Let us see what it would be like if it did keep it. We are to suppose that all the men,
women, and children over seven throughout the earth loved God always, God supremely, and God with an

undivided heart. The earth might then be called a world of undivided hearts. It would be the peculiarity of this
planet, of this portion of God’s creation, of this fair moonlight garden third in order from the sun: it would be its
peculiarity that it was a living world of loving human hearts, over which God reigned supreme with an empire of
undivided love. This, we must use human words, is what God intended, what God expected, the paradise and court
He had prepared for His incarnate Son. And if it were so, would it be less unlike the real world than that imaginary'
possible world which we were picturing to ourselves just now?
If all classes in their places, and all minds in their measure and degree, were loving God according to the
precept, wonderful results would follow. To realize them we should have to penetrate into eveiy comer of the world,
into every secret sanctuary of life, and watch the revolution which divine love would bring about. No one thing
would be the same. The world would not be like a world of saints, because we are not supposing heroic, austere,

self-sacrificing love, but only the love of the common precept. Voluntary suffering is part of the idea of the

Incarnation, or flows from it: for Christian austerity is a form of love, which has little in common with the proud
expiating penance of the Hindoo, except the look. It would not be like an immense monastery; for all men would be

in the world, not leaving the world; and the world would be a means of loving God, not a hindrance which our
courage must vanquish, or a snare from which our prudence is fain to fly. There would be no wickedness to make a
hell on earth: yet earth could not be heaven, because there would be no vision of God. It would be more like pur­
gatory than anything else. For the love of God would not hinder suffering, though it would almost abolish sorrow.
But it would make all men pine very eagerly and very patiently to love God more, and to see Him whom they
already love so much. The whole earth would be one scene of religion, not of religious enthusiasm or the romance of

sanctity, but of active, practical, exclusive businesslike religion. Common sense would be engrossed with religious
duties. Each man would be unimpassionately possessed with religion, as if it were his mling passion, working
powerfully under control. Yet all this would be within the bounds of the common precept, not like the sublime
preternatural lives of the canonized saints. Remember—we are not speaking of what is possible, so much as of what

is conceivable.
What a change would come over the political world! The love of God would be the honest and obvious and
exclusive end of all states and nations. Diplomacy would fade away into mutual counsel for God’s glory, and having

lost all its mystery, it would lose all its falsehood too. Commercial treaties, questions of boundaries, the rights of
intervention—what a new character the love of God would infuse into as many of these things as it still allowed to
live! The mercantile world, how calm and indifferent it would become! No one would make haste to be rich. Except
food and raiment and ordinary comforts, we say comforts because, on the hypothesis, men would not be saints, all
else of life would be prayer and praise and works of mercy, with confession perhaps for venial sins. The literature of

these men would give forth nothing but what was chaste and true, ennobling and full of faith. A daily newspaper,
such as we are acquainted with, would be a blissful impossibility. We fear that antiquarian questions might be
pursued with somewhat less of zest than now, and possibly fewer sacrifices of life be made to advance the interests
of science. A most vigorous reality would enter into and animate everything. Many professions would change their
characters: many more would cease to exist. Systems of education would be greatly modified; and prisons and
police would disappear from the land. Sessions of parliament would be very short, and little would be said, and very

much be done. The tone of conversation would be changed, and a sort of strange tranquillity would come over the
race of men, with which energy would not be necessarily incompatible, but under which our energy would be so
different from what it is now, that we cannot at all adequately represent it to ourselves.
But in return from this apparent dullness, which might affect some of the things on which our activity at

present fastens by morbid predilection, the world would gain much in other ways. How magnificent would be the
controversies of such a world! The peace and light of the love of God would elevate the intellect a thousandfold. The
products of the human mind would be incalculably more profound and beautiful than now, and the amount of

intellectual activity would be immeasurably increased, while a larger proportion of it also would be employed on the
higher branches of mental philosophy. What elevation too, and gigantic progress, would the physical sciences

probably receive, as well from the greater cultivation of mental philosophy, as from the reach and grasp of intelli­
gence which more abundant grace would restore to us! Who can believe we should not know much more of nature,
and of its mysterious properties, if we knew more of Him who originated them all? And love would teach us more of

Him. The sciences of beauty too, how much more beautiful and abundant would they become, when they were
called to minister to the sanctuary of God, and not to the mere material indulgences of men! The amount of private
happiness would be likewise augmented beyond all calculation. All other loves would be as it were glorified by the
love of God. and would be poured out of each human heart with an intensity and an abundance to which sin is now a

complete impediment. The moral perfections of our nature would bring forth exquisite and generous fruits, of which

we have at present but rare instances at distant intervals. But above and beyond all this, there would be a world of
supernatural actions, flowing in incessant streams from every heart, uniting us to God, purifying our commonest

intentions, and transforming us day by day into an excellence far beyond ourselves. What must the precept be whose
common observance would do so much as this? And yet this precept actually lies upon each one of us at this
moment with the most inevitable universality and the most stringent obligation! Surely we must see to tliis.
Hitherto we have been engaged in two very elementary inquiries: Why does God wish us to love Him, and

why does He love us. If God desires us to love Him there must be some sort of love with which it is possible and
right to love Him. This is obvious. Yet in the course of our investigations we have come across so much in ourselves
that is little and vile and mean, that we may be tempted to think that we cannot love God with any real or acceptable
love. It is just here that God meets our self-abjection, guards it from excess, and hinders its doing us any injmy, by
laying upon us the absolute and essential precept of loving Him with our whole heart and soul and mind and

strength. He enables us to fulfil this commandment by disclosing to us a beautiful variety of grounds or motives for
our love, and He makes the fulfillment easy by the many kinds of love, of which He has made our souls capable, and
which suit the different temperaments of men. So what we have to do now is to examine our grounds for loving
God, and then the various kinds of love with which it is happily in our power to love our most merciful Creator.

We must observe, first of all, that the love which is required of us by the precept is a personal love. None
else will satisfy. It is not the love of the approbation of conscience, or of the self-rewarding sense of duty, or of the
loveliness of virtue, or of the immensity of our recompense, or of the attraction which a well-ordered mind has to

rectitude and propriety. It is a personal love, and must be characterized by the warmth, the generosity', the intimacy,
the dominion, and all the peculiar life which belongs to a personal love as distinguished from the love of a thing or

of a place. It is the love of a Being, of three divine Persons, of God. He reveals Himself to us in various affectionate
relationships, so as to make our love more intensely personal, more like a loyalty and a devotion, and at the same
time to adapt it better to our human nature.
But when we return the love of another, it very much concerns us to know what kind and amount of love it

is which we have to return. At the risk of repetition we must therefore briefly sum up the love of God to man, as
theology puts it before us. God's of His creatures is not the fruit of His mercy, or of any of the divine perfections by
themselves. His love of us is part of His natural goodness; and His natural goodness is simply the excellence of His
divine nature considered in itself. God’s goodness, we are taught in the Catholic schools, is threefold. He is good by
reason of the perfection of His nature, and this is His natural goodness. He is good also by reason of His sanctity,

and this is His moral goodness. He is good also by reason of His beneficence, which is called His benignity. But in
reality this last goodness is simply a part of the first, a necessary consequence of the perfection of His nature, of His
natural goodness; so that love of creatures, or the divine benignity, is part of the perfection of the divine nature. How

unspeakable, therefore, is the value of the love of God, how transcending the dignity with which it invests the poor
helpless creature, and how completely does the origin of His Love of us, deep down in the primal fountains of the
Godhead, simplify Him, and all His condescensions, and His gifts, and His justice, and His anger, to pure and simple
love!

Let us follow the teaching of theology a little further. The divine nature is a plenitude of perfection, a
fullness and a "super-fullness." as St Denys calls it. Not that God is too full, or can ever cease being filled, but He is
eternally filled to overflowing with the true, the beautiful, tire magnificent, and the good. Fullness leads to

communicativeness. Communicativeness is the consequence of abundance. It is the necessity of an overflowing
abundance. It seems a law even among creatures, a shadow of a higher law, that in proportion as a thing is perfect, it

is full of perfection in its own kind, and longs to communicate itself, and at last breaks its bound and does
communicate itself. Tliis is the case with human love, human kindness, human knowledge. Exuberance is an

inseparable accompaniment of perfection. So this “super-fullness” of God, this exceeding plenitude of the divine
nature, must needs communicate itself, and be eternally communicating itself. This communication may be of two
kinds, the one natural or necessary, wliich must be and which must always be; the other free, which God may with­

hold. which is a gift, wliich is not necessary, but wliich, when God has once been pleased to make it, cannot easily
be separated from Him even in idea. We can conceive that there could have been such a being as an uncreating God.

But we cannot conceive what He would have been like. He would not have resembled our own present God. He
would not have been our Heavenly Father merely short of Benignity, Dominion, Providence, Mercy, Justice, and of
that perfection which makes Him the End of all things. His natural goodness would have been different, not less
infinitely perfect, but inconceivably otherwise than it is now', [footnote: Lessius, de Perfecta Divin., lib. ix. Also St
Thomas, i, q. xiii, art. 7.]

As the perfection of the divine nature is infinite, so the communication of it which is natural and necessary

must be infinite as well: and it must have this mysterious and adorable characteristic, that it must communicate itself
w ithout multiplying itself; for how can that winch is infinite be multiplied? Hence comes the fecundity of the divine
nature, considering that nature in three Persons, the Father as the Fountain of the Godhead, the Son as the eternal

Know ledge of itself and the Holy Ghost as its eternal Love of self, as one Essence in three equal divine Persons.
From the communicativeness, or fecundity of the divine nature, it must necessarily be that the Father ever generates,
the Son is ever generated, the Father and the Son ever breathe forth their love as one, and the Holy Spirit is ever

being breathed forth. And because of the infinite plenitude of the divine nature there can, in this necessary and

natural communication of itself, be no sort of inequality, no precedence, no priority, no diminution, no inferiority, no
subordination, [footnote: The reader must distinguish between the divine Essence communicating itself, and the
divine Essence generating itself, which last is forbidden by the Lateran Council to be said.] These are not mere
words. They are God’s eternal life. They will be our eternal life as well.
Besides this necessary communication of the divine nature which is natural to it, and inevitable, there is
also a free communication of it, an overflow which is a gift, a magnificence deeply appertaining to God’s natural

goodness, and yet which He could withhold, and still be God. As we call the necessary communication of the divine
nature its fecundity, so we call the free communication of it its benignity, both being in fact consequences of God’s

natural goodness, only the one necessaiy, the other free. There is no limit to the number of ways in which the divine
nature may freely communicate itself to intelligent beings; and each of these ways will represent a different and
peculiar rational creation. We only know of two such ways, which have resulted, one in the creation of angels, the
other in the creation of men. But there might be as many diverse rational creations as there are millions of starry

worlds, or all the stars multiplied a million times. We cannot venture to suppose that the creations of angels and men
have exhausted the possible modes by which the divine nature may freely communicate itself to created intellects
and to created wills.
Creation, if we may say so, is perhaps only in its infancy; and as God seems to have an inconceivable love
of order, and He. to w hom there is no succession, appears to delight in doing things successively in realms of time

and space, so when the doom has closed the probation of the family of man, other creatures may succeed, other
natures people material worlds, or immaterial homes of spiritual beauty; and so God may go on in His fertile
benignity for evermore. I cannot look at the starry' skies, but this thought comes to my mind like a belief. There may
be rational creatures lower than man, though it certainly is veiy difficult to conceive of them. But even our limited

capacities can imagine a perpetual efflux of rational creations higher than man in almost numberless degrees. Thus
creation is God doing freely, what in the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Ghost He does
necessarily. The natural goodness of God. which is defined to be the excellence of the divine nature, is the single
explanation of all His operations, whether within Himself or without. So that the same love which evermore “pro-

duces” in God, as theologians speak, the Holy Trinity, made of its own free will both men and angels, and cherishes
them with an eternal compassion. What a view of creation does not this open out before us! How is it we can ever
think of anything but God? Oh how more than royal is the origin of our immortal souls, and in what vast destinies
does divine love intend that they should expatiate for evermore! Earth grows more and more like a speck as our
thoughts ascend: our affections detach themselves from it more and more. As life goes on, and life and grace

together draw us nearer to God; earth, in spite of all its affectionate memorials, becomes only a peopled planet, and

nothing more: but alas! why is it we let slow time do the work which swift grace would so much better do?
But this account of God’s love of creatures does by no means include all that is to be said of His love of
man. The creation of angels is incomparably more magnificent than the creation of men. Men are all of one species.

The diversities of the angels are no doubt specific. Some have thought that as angels do not produce each other like
the fruitful generations of men, each angel must be a species himself. Others consider, for reasons this is not the
place to enter into, that each choir consists of three species, which in the nine choirs of the three hierarchies would
make twenty-seven species. None would doubt but that the hierarchies and even the choirs must differ from each
other specifically. Nay, to us we confess it seems unlikely that earth with its infinite variety of beasts and birds, of
insects and fishes, should outdo the great angelic world in this peculiar kind of magnificence, namely, the multitude

of species; and if the specific differences of the angels are more simple than those of earth, they would be all the
more striking because of their simplicity. Yet in spite of the superiority of the angelic world, and because perhaps
we are less acquainted with its peculiar prerogatives, men seem to have many indubitable pre-eminences above the
angels. The angels imitate the virginity of the Most Holy Trinity without its fruitfulness. Man shares in the
fruitfulness of God; and Mary, a pure daughter of man, and whose nature is merely human, shares at once the
fruitfulness and tire virginity of God, and, as His Mother, mles the angels with queenly supremacy in heaven. This
chosen planet was the scene of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion of the Son of God. He took man’s nature upon
Him, not that of angels. He had a human mother, a human soul, a human body. He spoke human language, and had

human thoughts. He had human ways about Him, human habits, gestures, peculiarities, and even infirmities.
Furthermore, when the angels fell, He held out no hand to check them as they went down the frightful abyss. Man
He forgives, not once, or twice, or seventy times seven times, but many times a day, and all day long. He stands in a
different relation to man, and man to Him.
His love of man comes out of the same natural goodness, which gives forth His love of the angels. But His
love of us is a different sort of love. His love of us seems to contain more than His love of them. At least it has

certain peculiarities proper to itself, a fondness, a clinging to us, a patience with us, a pursuit of us, an attraction to
us. which the pardon of the Fall and the mystery of the Incarnation do nothing but exemplify. Whence this
predilection for the human race? Whence this preference, on the part of the divine nature, of human nature over the

angelic? Is it because we are so little and so low? Is it because the divine nature, in yearning to communicate itself,
yearned to do so to the uttermost, was not content short of the lowest point of the rational creation, and that the
depth of its abasement was the measure of its gladness and its love? If so. new creations will be higher than man, not
lower: lower than the angels, God’s eldest bom, but higher than that lowest step in the scale of intellectual creations,

whereon the incarnate Word has taken His stand that He may embrace all creations beneath His Headship, and
cement all of them together, the highest with the lowest, as one dominion pertaining to the Unity of God.
Such is the only picture that we, after trial, have been able theologically to make to ourselves of the love of
God for man. ft is this enormous love which it is our duty to return. It is not a matter of choice, or of perfection, ft is
a question of precept and obligation, ft is a commandment, which we shall be lost eternally if we do not endeavor to
fulfil. Our next step therefore must be to inquire upon what feelings of our human nature God has engrafted the

possibility of our loving Him, in what channels He has bidden that love to ran, what motives are to actuate it, on

what relationships to Him it is to establish itself. For it will be found that God is so essentially good that whatever
position He takes up with regard to us is a new right and title to our love. We do not say that those who are lost will
love Him, but even in their case His mercy has a right to love, both because punishment was so long delayed, and
because it is now inflicted with so much less severity than they have both merited and could be supematurally
strengthened to endure. But in our case, whose account is mercifully not yet closed, it is simply tme that even re­

lation in which God stands to us furnishes us with new and constraining motives to love Him with a fresh and daily

beginning love.
First of all. we are God’s subjects. There are none of us who desire to question His dominion. We should be
simply mined, annihilated, if we were not in His care and keeping. Obedience to Him is safer and happier for us

than any liberty of wliich we could dream. He is our king, and never monarch had so many claims to enthusiastic
popularity as He. His rule over us is the gentlest we can conceive. It hardly makes itself felt at all. His omnipresence

is like the pressure of the air. needful to health and life, yet imperceptible. His government is one of love. His very
penalties we have to wring from Him by repeated treasons, and when they come they are so disguised in mercy, that
on tliis side the grave it is hard to discern between chastisement and love. His facility' in pardoning is something

beyond compare. He seems to compromise His own regal dignity by the profuse liberality with which He uses His
prerogative of mercy. He pardons not only after the nervousness of trial and the ignominy of conviction, but He
pardons us without mentioning it. without boasting of it. without warning us, without getting the credit of pardoning,

often as in Baptism, and with forgotten sins, without even our acknowledgment of guilt. Often He seems to forgive
before the offence is complete. We sin, half knowing we shall be forgiven.
As to die consequences of our sins to others, it is comparatively seldom that He lays on us the

responsibility of attending to them. He charges His own administration with that burden, which of a tmth requires a

love, a wisdom, and a power which He alone possesses. No earthly king was ever like Him in His providence over
His subjects. No angelic monarch could come near Him in this beautiful perfection. Every want is foreseen. The vast

complications both of nature and of grace fit close to the individual life, shield it from every danger, penetrate it
with a balm and sweetness wliich give vigor and delight, and make each man feel as if the world were made for him
alone, and as if he were rather the last end of God, than God the last end to him. In the exercise of His royalty, all is
equable, timely, harmonious, pliant; nothing harsh, sudden, abrupt, disconcerting, or domineering. Surely then,

simply as His subjects, we are bound to a loyalty and love as warm, and generous, and faithful, as it is easy,
ennobling, and delightful.
But we are His servants also. He is our master as well as our king. All servitude is full of motives of

humility'. Servants, when they forget that they are servants, cease that moment to be good servants. Yet, if we
thought and felt aright, presumption would be more likely than abjection to grow upon the thought that we are in the

service of our Maker. The aimais of history give us many beautiful examples of the attachment which a nobleminded servant can have for lus earthly master: and the memorials of private life are full of them all the year round.
But what is it which makes a master so justly dear to a good servant? It is Iris considerateness. And who is so

considerate as God? Oh wonderful mystery! see how God always shows by His manner to us His remembrance of
our little services, a forgetfulness of our slovenly shortcomings, an affectionate exaggerated satisfaction with what
we do, and at the worst a look only of wondering wounded feeling, when disgrace, reproof, or chastisement would

better have fitted our misdeeds! He never lets us be oppressed with work. He never disregards our fatigue. He cheers
us under failure. It is, if we must say it, almost the fault of His easy kindness that we are apt to forget ourselves, to
play the master, and to wonder when He does not wait on us and serve, though of a truth He seldom fails to change
places with us when we want it. His forbearance is one incessant miracle. We should not keep a servant a month
who treated us as we treat Him. Awkward, ungracious, reluctant, it is thus we always meet the courtesies of His

abundant love, which vouchsafes to treat us on equal terms, lest even the look of condescension should wound the
silly susceptibilities of our childish pride. As to wages, both those He has bound Himself to give, and those which
come in the shape of frequent gifts, and perquisites unspecified, the bounty of an earthly master is to His muni­

ficence as the poverty of the creature is to the wealth of the Creator. Who would not rather be the servant of such a
Master, than to have a whole world left to himself and to the liberty of his disposal? Who would care to have
creation for his property, when he may have the Creator for his own?

God is our friend, ft requires an act of faith, and not a little act, to say so. But so it is; the Infinite, the
Omnipotent, the All-holy is our bosom friend. We doubt if any human friendship ever really lasted the whole of two

mutual lives. Few men are habitually sincere, even with the few whom they love extremely. Fewer still trust their

friends with a perfectly confiding trust. Nay, friendship shows itself in a morbid readiness to take offence, in petty
diplomacies to find out if injurious suspicions are true, in proud silences which will not ask for explanations, or in
childish breaches made for the childish excitement of reconciliations. The truth is, friendship is a romance, that has
been written and spoken a thousand times among men, but seldom acted, unless in a dramatic way. Thus we pray
proverbially to be saved from our friends, and we say that a man who has many acquaintances, and few friends, is at

once the happiest and the safest of mankind. There have hardly been a dozen friendships since the time of Jonathan
and David, which could bear the weight of an awkward-looking circumstance, or a decently attested report. And
friendship at its height, in the fervor of its fever-fit, what is it but a tyranny? Our friends think themselves gods, not
men, and us their instruments, the profitable implements of their pleasure, their ambition, and their will. Friendship

is not consecrated by a sacrament as marriage is. Nevertheless we must have a friend. We shrink from unbefriended
solitude. Yet there is no real friend but God. He is in His own world almost the solitary example of the beauty of
fidelity. See what a friend He is! He acts as if He thinks better of us than we think even of ourselves. He can suspect
nothing; for He is God. He forgives offences as fast as we commit them, and appears to forget as soon as He has
forgiven. His love is always as fresh to us as it was at the beginning. He keeps plighting His friendship with us by

presents, whose exuberant variety never tires, while their magnificence and exceeding price outstrip the fondest
expectation, and the grace with which they are conferred removes from the sense of obligation all the feeling of
oppression, and conduces rather to the equal familiarity of love. Whenever we will we can be friends with God, and
He gives Himself up to His friends with such a romantic exclusiveness, that we feel as if He belonged to us alone,
and that all of Him was ours.
God is our Father also, and we are the children of His predilection. Truants and prodigals, no longer worthy

to be called His sons, and yet still His heirs, still the objects of His most lavish paternal tenderness. Did ever mother

yearn over the cradle of her first-bom, as He has yearned over us? Did ever father make his children’s sorrows more
his own than God has done, or yet leave to them so generously untaxed and untithed the treasures that were theirs?
Did ever parental love remain true love, and yet punish so infrequently as He, or when it punished, did it with so

light a hand or with a sorrow more reluctant? Can divine Love quite exculpate itself from the charge of having
spoiled us by its indulgence? Did ever father so consistently or with such grave affection win his children to

repentance by the sorrow that he showed and by the increased kindness of his maimer, as God has melted our hard
hearts and drawn us, humbled yet doubly loving, to His knees for pardon? Does not each chastisement seem worth
far more than the pain it gives, by the increase of love and the new inventions of His favor with which He follows it?
Oh who is such a Father as God is! The Eternal Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Father of His creatures,
the Father from whom all fatherhood is named in heaven and on earth! When we think of Him we forget the love of
our earthly fathers; for they hardly look like fathers by the side of Him.

He is our Creator also, and we are His creatures, the least and lowest of those who can glorify Him with a
reasonable worship, and yet whom He has loved above the angels, and chosen to be nigher to Himself. Here we have

no earthly term of comparison whereby to judge of His surpassing love. He has chosen us; and choice is the highest
act of love. He chose us when as yet we lay in the bosom of the great void, distinguishable only to the piercing eye

of His preference and love. He chose us rather than others. He had a special love for something we by grace might
be, and which others could not be or would not be. It was His first choice of us. It was eternal. Our likeness lived in
the divine mind from everlasting, and was cherished there with infinite complacency. He prepared a future for us,

marked out a life, measured our sorrows to us with wise love, and tempered our joys so that they might not be an
injury. He gave us a work, clothed us with a vocation, and destined for us a particular crown and place in heaven.
We cannot name the tiling which is bright and good within us, nor the tiling which is attractive and delectable

without us. but it conies from our creation. We have to do with it, as being the creatures of the infinitely benignant
God. All we are or have is His, together with all we are capable of being and having. That we are not imprisoned in
perdition at this moment is simply an interference of His goodness. Our creation is our share of the infinite goodness

of God. What should we be without it? Can any love of ours be otherwise than a poor return for such a love as His?
But we are not only God’s creatures; we are His elect as well. He made as it were a second choice of us in
Jesus Christ. He foresaw our fall. He beheld not only what Adam’s fall entailed upon us. but He saw our own actual

sins and guilt. He did not exaggerate our shame, but He knew it as not all men and angels together could have

known it. He penetrated its unbearable corruption. He laid its loathsomeness all bare before His eyes. It was
incredible. Such graces slighted, such inspirations neglected, such sacraments profaned, and with a perversity, a
frequency, an ingenuity of aggravating circumstances, so great that perhaps, if we saw the hideous vision all in one.
we should fall back and die. Nevertheless it was not enough to repel His electing love. He chose us to be bathed in
the Precious Blood of His incarnate Son. He elected us to a magnificent inheritance of grace, and to the royalties of
His holy Church. By virtue of this election He gave us the gift of faith, and threw open to us the golden gates of the
overflowing and joyous sacraments. By His first election He chose us out of nothing to Iwe life: by His second out
of darkness to have light. Here again His benignity outstrips all the comparisons of earthly love. When we think who

it is that elected us, who we are that He elected, what He gives us through this election, the way in which He gives

it. and the end for which He has elected us. we shall acknowledge that His election of us is a tie to be repaid (and
even then what payment is it?) with all the fervor and fidelity of lifelong love. For wherefore was it that He chose
us? He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and unspotted in His sight, in

love!

Can more be said? Yes! there is still another tie which binds us fast to God. It is the end of that whereof
creation was the beginning; it is the consummation of God's eternal choice. It is the marriage of our souls with Him.
We are His spouses, as well as His creatures and His elect. Indeed we are His spouses, because we are His creatures
and His elect. But how can we tell wherein the peculiarity of that intimate union consists? When the saints are
betrothed to God, it is by operations of grace so magnificent, by supernatural mysteries so transcendent, that the

language in which they are related seems unreal and inflated; and if such be the espousals on earth, what will the
marriage be in heaven? Oh who shall dare to picture the interior caresses which the soul receives from Him who
loved it eternally, and chose it out of nothing in a rapture of creative love. Who shall dare to fasten in ungainly

human words the sort of inexpressible equality with God which the soul enjoys, or her unspeakable community of
goods with Him? And wherefore does He use the word spouse, but to express this glorious unity? Marriage was
made a figure of the unity of God, and a shadow of Christ's union with His Church. Its love was to supersede all
other ties. It was to obliterate the father’s and the mother's home from the young wife’s heart. It was to ride
conqueror over the fond mother’s idolatry for her firstborn. Yet all this is the faintest of shadows, the feeblest of
figures, to set forth the union of the soul with God! How shall we love Him as we ought? Rather the question should
be, Can we love Him at all with anything worthy of the name of love? May we even try to love Him who has loved

us with such an overwhelming love? Must not our only love be speechless fear? No! for it is the law of all creation,
the beautiful, benignant law, the unexpected, the incredible commandment—Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
thy whole soul, with thy whole heart, with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength!

Man's imagination can fly far, and picture the wildest pictures to itself. But now let it loose to ride upon the
winds of heaven, to search the heights and the depths, to dream the most marvelous dreams, and to conceive the

most impossible combinations. Can it picture to itself, can it, however dimly and remotely, divine a greater, a more
wonderful, a more various, a more perfect love, consistent with the liberty of the creature, than the love which God
has shown and is daily showing to the sons of men? Short of His laying violent hands upon our freedom, and

earn ing us off to heaven by force, and then doing fresh violence to our nature and making it endure and rejoice in
the vision of God, which without holiness would be intolerable to us—short of this, which would be power rather
than love, can we imagine any salvation more complete or more abundant than that with which God has rescued
man?

Count up all that God has done for yourself. There is your eternal predestination and the creative love
which called you out of nothing; there is your rational and immortal soul with its beautiful dower of gifts: there is
your marvelous body with its senses, which is one day to be transformed into surpassing loveliness, while every

sense with its glorified capacities will pour into the soul such floods of thrilling and exquisite delights, as it will
require the strength of immortality to bear: there is the whole material world made for your intellectual or physical
enjoyment and support, so vast and glorious that a little knowledge of one of its least departments, its minerals, for

example, or its plants, makes a man famous among his fellows: there is the guardianship of bright and holy angels:
there is your election in Christ by which you now enjoy the faith and sacraments: there is the giving up by God of
His only Son to take your nature upon Him, to suffer, and to die, to redeem you from your sins: there is the gift of
His Precious Blood and of His renewed forgiveness conferred upon you ten thousand times ten thousand times,
since you were seven years old, nay from the very first hour of your regeneration: there is His preservation of you,
which is simply the unbroken continuity of your creation, requiring every moment of day and night, of time and of

an eternity to follow, as much influx from the Most High, as was needed to call your soul out of nothing at the first:
there are all the special helps, the wisely adapted graces, and the fresh arrangements of divine tenderness, which are

waiting ready for the hour when you shall come to die: there is the indwelling of the Third Person of the Holy
Trinity by grace within your soul: and, finally, there is your immeasurable reward, which is no gift of God, no
immense collection of created pleasures, no multiplication by millions of the highest human and angelic joys, but
God. the living God Himself. So that, strictly speaking, as a theologian says, it is not simply God who is the end of

man, but God Possessed. God by an ineffable communication of Himself become our own, our property, and our
enjoyment.

In this catalogue of the demonstrations of love there are many things so great and so utterly divine that the
unassisted intelligence of the highest angel would never have suspected them. Yet when once the Incarnation was
revealed, many imaginations might have been based thereon. We do not know if we could have ventured to dream of
an Incarnation in humility and shame, in poverty1 and hiddenness, unless we had been told it. But if our dearest Lord
had lived on earth His three and thirty years, and then gone away, we think we might have conceived some possible
extensions of His love. We might have thought it would have been an additional tenderness if He had remained on
earth personally until the day of judgment, that we might minister to Him, and share the privileges of Mary and
Joseph, the apostles and the devout women in Judea, and have Him near us sensibly, and thus worship Him as it
were at His own feet. But could we ever have dreamed of the superabundant way in which He has effected this by
the astounding mystery of the Blessed Sacrament?
We might also have conceived that it would be a great consolation to have Him still on earth that we might

ask Him for dispensations when we needed them, that we might have intricate cases of conscience solved bv His
unquestionable authority, that we might have formal permission from Him to cany out our favorite schemes for His
greater glory, that we might receive absolution from our most heinous sins, that we might ask Him what difficult

passages in Scripture meant, and that we might hear from His infallible lips the troth or falsehood of uncertain
doctrines. All this would have been an immense consolation to us, as it were a fresh dispensation of His love

growing out of the exuberant mystery' of the Incarnation. But it is just this, which He has provided for us in the
Papacy. He has given, out of His dominion, the plenitude of His valid jurisdiction to the Holy Father, that we might
have it in our necessities, dispensed with a wisdom which He guides, with a liberality like His own, and a valid
jurisdiction no whit inferior to His, because it is in fact His own. These two congenial mysteries of the Blessed

Sacrament and the Papacy seem to extend the loving-ness of the Incarnation, as far as our imaginations can
conceive.

But there is a negative which is almost as inconceivable a consequence which we should have expected to
follow from the Incarnation, which has not followed. Surely, if. when the Incarnation had been first told us, with all
its prodigal tenderness, its unnecessary sufferings, its fierce deluge of intolerable ignominies, the various atrocity of
its pains, the pleading eloquence of its spendthrift blood-shedding, we had measured its length and breadth, its
height and depth, to the best of our ability, we should have expected that henceforth, under the Christian law,
perfection would be an obligation, that a precept would have been laid upon us all to love like the saints, and to live

lives like theirs. It would not have seemed at all a stretch of jurisdiction, if our Lord had commanded very long fasts,

frequent self-flagellations, voluntary austerities, sleeping on the ground, or painful vigils. We could neither have
been surprised nor discontented, if in return for what He had done for us, and in likeness and honor of His suffering
life, He had forbidden under pain of mortal sin all or most of the amusements and recreations of the world. But we

think it is most surprising, in fact it would be incredible to us if the faith did not assure us of it. that the Incarnation
and Crucifixion have not added one jot or tittle to the original precept of the love of God. that they have actually
diminished instead of multiplied our obligations, that the more incalculably beyond our power of repayment divine

love has become, it should in fact be easier to repay it, and that less on our parts will save us, now that so much
more has been done on His part for our salvation. We are never weary of wondering at this result of the Incarnation,
which is to us at once so unexpected, and at the same time so full of overwhelming love.

The conclusion we draw is this. Theology, with all its numberless and marvelous deductions, enables us to
imagine possible things with an almost unlimited power of imagination. Now we have combined all the extremes we
could, and conceived the most impossible conjunctures; and we cannot, do what we will, leave man his liberty, and

conceive one additional instance of His love which God could give to the human race. We cannot heighten or
embellish what is actual, nor can we dream of anything possible to add. The love of God for man exhausts the
possibilities of our imagination. Did God mean more than this, did He mean that it had exhausted the possibilities of
His wisdom and His power, when He says so pathetically, in Isaias. O ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, and ye men of
Juda, judge between Me and My vineyard. What is there that I ought to do more to My vineyard, that I have not
done to it?

It is this love outstripping all imagination, which we have to return: and how? There are doubtless
numberless ways in which God can communicate Himself to created intellects and wills, and each way will produce

a different rational creation, and each rational creation be capable of loving God in a great variety of ways. Thus
among the angels there may be thousands of different loves of God. for which we have neither name nor idea; and
all of them are doubtless extremely beautiful, and highly spiritual. We are so entangled with matter and material ties
that our love is debased in kind, as well as kept down in degree. Whereas the angels, having no connection with

matter during their probation, doubtless loved God in their lowest degree with a purity and a fixity of contemplation

which the highest saints hardly attain amongst ourselves; though the merits of many saints may have exceeded those
of many angels. Leaving then the capacious spirits of angels as an unknown land, we come to the souls of men; and

as far as we can divide one sort of love from another, where in reality each more or less involves the other, it seems
we can love God with seven different kinds of love, the loves, namely, of benevolence, of complacence, of
preference, of condolence, of gratitude, of desire, and of simple adoration. These are as it were so many capabilities

of the human soul; and if the fulfillment of the precept of love is what concerns us most, both in this world and in
the world to come, the knowledge of these seven varieties of loves must be of the greatest importance to our
happiness.

The love of benevolence is one which has been commonly practiced by the saints, and often has seemed
childish, or at best mere poetiy, to those who love God less fervently. There is a strange pleasure in it, from our
putting ourselves in an impossible position towards God, in order to confer it on Him. We make ourselves as it were
His benefactors, instead of His being ours. We put ourselves on an equality with Him, or even above Him. So it

seems. Yet in reality this love of benevolence is the fruit of a holy humility too deep for words, almost too deep for
tears. By the love of benevolence we, first of all, wish God to be more perfect, if it were possible, than He really is.

Yet what a wild impossibility! But if God’s love of His creatures is itself so exaggerated, He must let us love Him
with the simplicity of these fervid exaggerations. Moreover this habit of wishing God impossible perfections, is not
only the result of a more worthy and tme appreciation of His perfection and His majesty, but it tends also to produce
it, to sustain it, and to increase it. It is at once the cause and the effect of honorable thoughts of God. Another while
the love of benevolence takes the form of venturesome congratulations. We wish God all the immense joy of His
unimaginable perfections. We know that He possesses it without our wishing it. We know that our wishes cannot

swell by one drop the mighty sea of His interior jubilation. But it is an expression of our love, not in words only but

in inward sentiment, which in His sight is an act, and a meritorious act. We bid Him rejoice. We wish Him countless
happy returns of that eternal festival which He has in His own blissful self. Or, another while, by the same love of
benevolence, we wish Him all increase of His accidental glory; and our wish is efficacious prayer, and obtains for
Him a real augmentation of that particular glory. The very wish of itself adds to it, and adds immensely when it
comes out of a pure heart and a fervent spirit. It also obtains grace for others, and makes the cause of God to prosper

in the world. Sometimes we earnestly desire that He may have accidental glory which He does not receive. We wish
that purgatory were emptied into heaven, or that there were no hell, or that all the heathen were converted, or that all
wanderers might return to the fold, or that some one day or night there might be no mortal sin in all our huge

metropolis. All this, which the saints have reduced to as many practices as there have been saints to practice it, is the
love of benevolence.
The love of complacence is of a different disposition. It is content with God. It not only wants nothing
more, but it only wants Him as He is. It is adapted to different moods of minds, suits other characters, or meets the

changeful dispositions of the soul, which now needs one class of sentiments and now another. Complacence fixes its
eye upon what it knows of God, with intense delight and within-tense tranquillity. It rejoices that He is what He is. It

tells Him so. It tells it Him over and over again. Whole hours of prayer pass, and it has done nothing else but tell
Him this. O sublime childishness of love! O most dear repetition, how far unlike the vain repetitions of the heathen,
which our Lord reproved! Then it broods over its own joy. It slumbers over its own heart, a sweet and mystical

repose, and wakes to renew its oft-told tale. Then a change comes over its spirit. A new strain of music steals out

from its inmost soul, It rejoices that none else is like to God. It rejoices with Him in His unity, one of His own
deepest and most secret joys. It exults that none can come near it. It asks all the hierarchies of creation with a
boastful certainty, vaunting in its triumph, Who is like unto the Lord our God? There is none other God but He. But
its eloquence has so touched its own heart, that it becomes silent once again. It leans on God, and at last seems lost

in Him, absorbed in quiet gladness and a rapture of holy thought. Thence once more it wakes, and seeing there is
none like unto God, simply because He is God, and for no other cause, it bursts forth into passionate rejoicings, that
He is not only what He is, but always has been, always will be what He is, that He is of a truth, and shall be, and

must be, and alone can be, eternally and victoriously God. These are the delightfill occupations of complacent love.
The love of preference, or of esteem, hardly aims so high. It is more mixed up with thoughts of creatures.
But it thinks of them only to despise them, and to insult them with its intelligent contempt. It compares God with all
other tilings, as if it had tried them, convicted them of falsehood, and grown weary of their vanity. It tramples them

underfoot, and makes steps of their ruins whereby it may rise to God. Their nothingness grows upon it. It becomes
disabused. Earthly ties no longer hold it down from heaven. Detachment is its characteristic grace. It passes

unresistingly over the world, as a swallow skims the green meadow, and seems to have no need of resting. Hence it
comes to appreciate God rightly, because it appreciates Him incomparably above all other things. It began by terms

of comparison, and ends by seeing that nothing can compare with Him, and that all comparison is foolish, because
He is infinite, eternal, and all-holy. It gives God His right place in the world, which the multitude of men do not give
Him. What is practical religion but giving God His right place in our heart and in our life? The misery of the world

is that God’s rights are disallowed. This it is which makes it such a desolate and weary land. It is the confusion of
the world which tires a loving heart and a quiet spirit. It is all a kind of base anarchy. Words and things not passing
current for their right values and their tme acceptations; importance attaching to the wrong things; darkness

unaccountably held to be light; every thing just sufficiently out of its right place to make a tumult all around it, and
yet so nearly right that we chafe because we cannot right it—it is all this which the love of preference remedies, by
esteeming God, not as He deserves to be esteemed in Himself, but as He deserves to be esteemed in competition

with creatures. This love expresses itself by the energetic abundance of its good works, by its active zeal, by a most
intense hatred of sin, by a neglect of comforts, by sacrifice, and by austerity. These are its natural vents, and they at
once depict its character. It is a love, which, while it worships all the attributes of God, delights above all things to
extol His sovereignty.

The love of condolence differs widely again from this. It looks upon God as wronged, and outraged, and in
sorrow, as if He needed help, and were asking for an ally. Its tendency is to wed His interests, and to become
strangely susceptible about His honor. Its eyes are opened to see what common men cannot see. It beholds God con­

cerned and implicated, where others cannot perceive so much as a vestige of religion being in question. It sees God
everywhere, as if His omnipresence had been made visible to it, like the whiteness of the light or the blueness of the
sky. It is a jealous love, and considerately inconsiderate, so that men are apt to take umbrage at it. It is very discreet,

but not with a discretion which the world approves. Its discretion leads it to keep awake itself, and to awaken others,
lest God should pass by unseen, and men should not uncover as He passed. It mingles its own cause with God’s, and
speaks of the two in the same breath and in the same way, as David does in the psalms. It seeks God rather than

looks at Him, and follows Him, delighted with the humblest servitudes. It has one life-long grief, like Mary ’s dolors;
and that grief is in the abundance and effrontery of sin. Sin is a sharp pain to it. It does not make it angry, but it
makes it weep. Its heart sickens with the goings on of men, and it tries to shroud God in the light of its own
affectionate compassion. It has no anger with sinners. On the contrary, it has quite a devotion to them.

Our Lord’s passionate, piteous, complaining love of sinners, as it is depicted in the divine Dialogue of St
Catherine of Siena, is the food of its soul. The Sacred Heart is the object of its predilection. It is ever telling God
how sony’ it is for sin. It has a grand gift of abiding contrition for its own sins, and takes a holy pleasure m selfrevenge. It lends God its eyes to weep rivers day and night for sins that are not its own. The seven dolors of Mary
are as seven lives of sweet sorrow which by grace it may lead, to soothe God for the transgressions of His children.

The gift of piety, that peculiar gift of the Holy Ghost, moulds its spiritual life, and its attitude towards God is

eminently filial. The atmosphere of its heart is a spirit of reparation; and it lets its life, secretly yet usefully and
beautifully, waste away, like sweetest aromatic gums, in sighs and tears before the offended Majesty of God. O

happy they who love with such a love! for they have reached that height of virtue which the philosopher saw only as
an ideal before him. to feel pleasure and pain, when and where we ought! O sweetest of all novitiates for heaven! to
have their hearts on fire on earth, burning the sweet perfumes of human love before the throne of the Incarnate

Word! To them, tme dovelike souls, especially belongs that tender benediction, Blessed are they that mourn; for
they shall be comforted.
It is to be observed of the four kinds of love already described, that their characteristic is disinterestedness.
It is not that self is expressly excluded, as a false spirituality would teach, but that it is undeveloped. It is not

rejected, but it is passed over. In the next two kinds of love it occupies, and without reproof, a much more prominent
position
If the quiet eye and the profound heart of the contemplative Mary delight in that love of condolence, which

is such a favorite love with cloistered souls, the love of gratitude better suits the external diligence of the active
Martha. The love of gratitude is preeminently a mindful love. It ponders things and lays them up in its heart, as our
Blessed Lady did. It meditates fondly on the past, as Jacob did. It sings of old mercies, and makes much of them,

like David in the psalms. It enters largely into the composition of the Missal and Breviary of the Church. Where
another has the memory of his sins continually before him, a soul possessed with the love of gratitude is perpetually
haunted by a remembrance of past benefits; and Iris abiding sorrow for sin is a sort of affectionate and self­

reproachful reaction from Iris wonder at the abundant loving-kindness of God. The hideousness of sin is all the more
brought out, when tire light of God's love is thrown so strongly on it. Hence it comes to pass that a very grateful man

is also a deeply penitent man; and as the excess of benefits tends to lower us in our own esteem, so we are humble in

proportion to our gratitude. But this love does not rest in the luxurious sentiment of gratitude. It breaks out into
actual and ardent thanksgiving; and its thankfulness is not confined to words. Promptitude of obedience, heroic
effort, and gay perseverance, these are all tokens of the love of gratitude. It is loyal to God. Loyalty is the
distinguishing feature of its service. It is constantly on the look out for opportunities, and makes them when it cannot
find them, to testify its allegiance to God; not as if it was doing any great tiling, or as if it was laying God under any
obligation, but as if it was making payment, part payment and tardy payment, by little installments, for the

immensity of His love. It is an exuberant, active, bright-faced love, very attractive and therefore apostolic, winning
souls, preaching God unconsciously, and though certainly busied about many things, yet all of them the tilings of

God. Happy the man, whose life is one long Te Deum! He will save his soul, but he will not save it alone, but many
others also. Joy is not a solitary thing, and he will come at last to his Master’s feet, bringing many others rejoicing
with him, the resplendent trophies of his grateful love.
But the love which has most to do with self is the love of desire. It is this desire which gives its value to

what theologians call the love of concupiscence. Saints and sinners, the perfect and the imperfect, the young and old,
the penitent and the innocent, the cloistered and the uncloistered, all must meet in the sanctuary of this love, and
draw waters with gladness from its celestial fountains. What rational creature but must desire God, and desire Him
with an infinite and irresistible desire? What created understanding but longs to be flooded with His sweet light?
What created will but languishes to be set on fire by the ardor of His ecstatic love?
Daniel is called in Scripture the man of desires. Most beautiful of appellations! as if he yearned so eagerly

for God, that he should pass into an honorable proverb to the end of time! How beautiful the sight if we could see
with the eyes of some sublime intelligence, how this desire of God is the whole beauty and the whole order of His

vast creation, drawing onwards to Himself across the spiritual realms of angelic holiness, or over the land and sea,
the mountains and the vales, of earth, numberless created intellects and wills, and by as many various paths as there

are intellects and wills to draw! The tide of all creation sets in with resistless currents to the throne of the Creator. It
is this desire which saves and justifies, which crowns and glorifies. It is in the sacraments, and out of them, in

various degrees of intensity and purity. It is this love which is heightened and made more exquisite by the

tremulousness of holy fear.* O glorious constraints of this heavenly concupiscence! It is a love which makes us not
only desire God, but desire Him supremely above all things. It makes us desire Him only, Him always, and Him
intensely; and it allures us with untyrannical exclusiveness to seek Him in all tilings here, and to long for Him as
being Himself our sole, sufficient, and magnificent Hereafter. By this love both high and low are saved; and without
some element of it was none ever saved that was saved. A saint, if such an one could be, fit to be canonized for all

tilings else, for the want of this love would be lost eternally; and the death-bed penitent who has never known a

higher love will be saved by this alone. And do we really desire aught else but God? Or at least can we desire aught
but subordinately to Him. and far below our longing for His unspeakable recompense, which is Himself? There is
nothing to satisfy us but God alone. All tilings weary us, and fade. He alone is ever fresh, and His love is daily like a

new discovery' to our souls. O sweet thirst for God! Fair love of supernatural desire! Thou canst wean us better far
from earth, and teach us better the nothingness of human tilings, than the cold, slow experience of wise old age, or

the swift sharp science of suffering, loss, and pain!
[footnote: "Beatus vir qui timet Dominum. Qua ratione beatus? Quia in mandatis ejus Cupit nimis. ”—St
Ambrose. A similar statement, made by the author some years ago in All for Jesus, was animadverted on as
inaccurate, ft had not. however, been made without both thought and reading. The expression of St Paul,
‘‘desiderium habens dissolvi et esse cum Christo, ” is an act of the love of desire (1) from the force of tenus, (2) on
the ancient authority of St Basil, de reg. fus. disput., cap. 2, (3) on the modem authority of Bolgeni, Amor di Dio, p.
1, c. ii, iii, and that such a love so expressed is an heroic love is asserted on the authority of St Thomas, 2, 2, qu.
xxiv, art. 8. 9. Tliis was the authority on which the statement in . !// for Jesus was made, and in consequence of the
criticism on that passage, the references have been verified, the statement reconsidered, and the doctrine of it here
reasserted in its natural place.]

There is still another love. We hardly know whether to call it a child of heaven or of earth. It is the love of
adoration, ft is a love too quiet for benevolence, too deep for complacency, too passive for condolence, too
contemplative for gratitude; but which has grown up out of the loves of preference and desire, and is, besides, the

perfection of all the other loves. It is too much possessed with God to be accurately conscious of the nature of its
own operations. It finds no satisfaction except in worship. It comes so near to the vastness of God that it beholds

Him only obscurely, and instead of definite perfections in God, sees only a bright darkness, which floods its whole
being and transforms it into itself. It is passive; God gives it when He wills. We cannot earn it. Efforts would rather
backen it, if it was near, than bring it on or win it into the soul. It waits rather than seeks. God is as if He were all
will to it. His power. His wisdom. His sanctity, they all melt into His will; and all that comes to this love is His will,
and except of that will, it can take no distinct cognizance of anything either in heaven or on earth. Self goes out of it,
and enters into that will, and is only contemplated in it. although it is eternally separate and essentially distinct, ft is

oblivious of itself as being one with God. Its life is wonder, silence, ecstasy. The operations of grace are simplified

into one, and the power of grace which is concentrated in that one is above words; and that single action is the
production of an unspeakable self-abasement. It cannot be told. But such was the humility of the Sacred Heart, and

such the strange loveliness of the sinless Mother, who so mightily attracted God and drew Him down into her
bosom. As the morning sky is all suffused with pearly hues from the unrisen sun. so is the mind, though still on
earth, in tliis love of adoration, all silently suffused, and flushed, and mastered by a most exquisite repose, which can
come alone from that Beatific Vision w hich has not risen yet upon the soul.

These are the seven loves whereby the creature man can love his beneficent Creator. These are the seven

liturgies, ancient, authentic, universal liturgies of the human heart. Truly it is little we can do for God. and yet how

immeasurably more than we have done for Him as yet. A treatise might be written to reduce these loves to practice,

[footnote: The reader must not confound these different kinds of love with the different states of love expounded in
mystical theology] and to illustrate them copiously with the examples of the saints. But that is not our object now.
Has earth any pleasure, of an intellectual, moral, or material sort, to compare with the fruition of a repentant life
passed in the occupations of these various loves?

The penitent seeks peace, and the end of all love is peace, peace and languishing desire, peace in the
assured hope of the soul, and pining for the ever-coming, still delaying Face of Jesus in the eastern clouds: that east
from which He will one day come. Before the dawn of day a huge toppling mass of unwieldy clouds came up from
the west horizon. With incredible swiftness and the loud roaring of sudden wind, it covered like a pall the brilliant
moonlit heavens, and deluged the earth with slanting columns of whirling rain, ft passed on. A star came out, and

then another, and at last the moon; and then the storm drove onward to the east, towards the sea, murky and purple,
and all at once a lunar rainbow spanned the black arch of heaven; and it seemed as if Jesus should have come,
beneath that bow, and through that purple cloud that was barring the gates of the sunrise; but the wind was lulled,
and all was still, by the time the moon had built that bow upon the clouds. And what is all this but a figure of our
lives, one of nature’s daily parables, of which we might make so much? Ours is a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage by night,
beneath the gentle moon, from west to east, from the sunset to the sunrise; it is not like our natural life from east to

west, from youth to age, from our rising to our setting; and we shall best beguile the way, and let the storms go
unheeded over, if we make God’s “justifications our songs in the house of our pilgrimage,” and relieve our
weariness by the various magnificence of these seven canonical services of our supernatural love.

These are the loves we were made for. They are our means of loving God. If we think too much of their
magnificence, we may forget the exceeding loveliness of God. Look at a saint who has loved heroically with these
seven loves, for even the love of desire may be heroic, and see how little with all of them he has done for God. He

has not paid one of the least among the commonest of God's countless benefits. This is a sad thought, and for us.
who are not saints, a grave consideration. For remember how few saints there are, and also how far off from their
love is ours! Oh the majesty of God! how it is left desolate, and unrequited! Yet think again of the mysteriously
huge price which God puts upon even our little love, and upon the least of our little love! How can it be? What can it
mean? When once we go deep into this subject of divine love, mysteries thicken more and more. God alone can give
an account of His own love, and of how His unerring wisdom comes to mistake the real price of ours. O beautiful
Goodness of God! why are we not really beside ourselves with love of Thee?

The Fourth Chapter
OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD

Causa diligendi Deum, Deus est: modus, sine modo diligere. Estne hoc satis? Fortassis utique, sed sapienti.—St
Bernard.

A VOLUNTARY thought and a deliberate desire are not less actions in the sight of God than the words of our
mouths or the operations of our hands. How wonderful, therefore, is it to reflect on the countless multitudes of
strong and vigorous acts which are rising up before the majesty of God from the unsleeping world of angels! Their

active intellects with incredible swiftness vary their love and praise, their wonder and admiration, almost
incessantly. They sweep all regions of creation with instantaneous flight, and bring back on their wings the odor of

God's glory and His goodness, to present as worship before His face: though in their boldest flights they have come
nigh no limits of His all-embracing presence. Another while, they plunge deep down and out of sight in some one of
His mysterious and profound perfections, and rise again and scatter gladness round them, while their thoughts are as

showers of light falling beautifully before His throne. Or again they return through the gates of the heavenly

Jerusalem, like laborers wending homeward in the evening, bringing with them troops of human souls, dug out of
the fires of purgatory, or disentangled from the briars of earth. In every one of their bright actions there flashes forth,

as an additional beauty, their joyous dependence on the sacred humanity of Jesus, and their placid obedience to His

human Mother. There is harmony too in the immense diversities of their unnumbered acts, and they all make one
vast unutterable concord of spiritual music in the ear of God. And all is sinless there. No taint, no spot, no venial
fault, in all that universe of abundant energy and of lightning-like activity. Its exuberance of sanctity is unflagging
and everlasting. God be praised for his goodness in securing at least thus much worship for Himself!

A heart that loves God is often fain, for very weariness and sorrow, to rest upon the thought of that angelic
world and to talk of it in secret colloquies with its own affectionate and faithful guardian angel. Yet the heart cannot
rest there long; it cannot rest there finally. For in tmth no one act of that angelic worship is altogether worthy of the
Most High. The whole concourse of marvelous adoration, taken as one grand act, falls short of the exceeding
majesty of God, and simply falls short infinitely. God is very good to rejoice in it with that abounding complacency.
But it is only another of His condescensions. It is only another proof that He is in some mysterious manner wisely
beside Himself with love of His finite and imperfect creatures. If they have been proclaiming His praise in their
transcendent hymns for millions and millions of ages, they have not yet paid Him, they never will have paid Him,

for the single creation of any one, the humblest, of their countless hosts. And what they give Him, is it not all His
own already? Did He not evoke them out of nothing, beautiful and radiant as they are? Is He not pouring bright
streams of being into their deep, wide natures, with assiduous munificence, each moment of a never-ending

immortality? Yet man, poor man, may well rest awhile his fired and shamefaced heart upon this angelic world of
beautiful obedience, and the ravishing tranquillity of its energetic love.
The world of human actions is much more limited; especially if we regard only the inhabitants of earth.
Nevertheless to our apprehension it possesses immense capabilities for the worship and the love of God. Each one of
those seven loves, which we considered in the last chapter, is capable of almost as many changes and as many
distinct peculiarities, as there are souls on earth. Take away the hours spent in sleep, the years before the use of

reason, the dotage of extreme old age, and the amount of insanity in the world, and still what a vast number of
human actions call for God’s concurrence, and are performed in His sight in the four-and-twenty hours! Yet none of

these actions need be indifferent in the individual case. All of them can glorify God, and the least of them attain
successfully a supernatural end. There are the hundreds of thousands collected in the great manufacturing cities of
the European nations, with all the sleepless activity of mind and heart which characterize them. There are the
wandering hordes of the desert and the steppe. The crowded cities of the East, the masses of Africa, the swiftly

growing populations of the new world, the well-peopled islands of the broad ocean, and those who dwell near the
arctic snows. If we bring before ourselves hill and vale, the riverside and wood, the seashore and the pastoral plain,
and remember how vast and various are the experiences of human joy and sorrow which are going on in almost
eveiy one of the numberless inequalities of the earth’s surface, we shall be overwhelmed by the calculation of the
human actions which are ever being performed.
Now each one of these actions belongs to God by four different titles, and may be referred to Him by as
many different sentiments of gratitude and love. His dominion over us is founded on His having created us, on His

continuing to preserve us. on His redeeming us, and on His being our last end, our final cause. These are not so
much four separate actions, four distinct mercies, the one separable from the other, as the prolongation and
perfection of one divine action, namely, our creation out of nothing. Preservation, as we have already seen, is

indivisibly one act with creation. Redemption is the preservation of our supernatural life, without which the
preservation of our being would seem, not imperfect only, but hardly a benefit. While the tie, wliich binds us to God

as being our Last End, is at once the cause of creation and its effect, the crown and consummation of the whole work

of God. We may be almost said to belong more entirely to God by this last relationship than by any other. But all the
four ought to enter more or less into every' human action. We have no right to eat, or drink, or recreate ourselves
without seeking with more or less detenninate intention the fourfold glory of God as our Creator. Preserver,
Redeemer, and Last End: and a mere mental reference to Him by a loving heart is sufficient thus to ennoble our
most trivial doings, and to fasten it firmly to the throne of God.

Perhaps we have not as much devotion as we ought to have to that relation in which God stands to us as our

Last End. We think of Him as our Creator and our Father, and these titles so abound in sweetness that they flood our
souls with delight, and we cannot tear ourselves away from such heavenly contemplations. Or when our spirits are
all freshly bathed in the cold fountains of holy fear, we look up to God with child-like and well-pleased awe. as our

all-holy judge and omnipotent irresponsible king. It is less common with us to meditate upon Him and to worship
Him as our Last End. and it seems as if our spiritual life sometimes suffered from the omission. For this relation of

Last End brings God before us in a manner peculiarly divine, and to which no earthly or heavenly relationship can
furnish either parallel or similitude. It puts the whole of practical religion in a clear and undoubted light. It explains
all difficulties and answers all objections. There is no satisfaction short of God. no completeness out of God, no

support but in God, no rest but upon God, no breathing-time or halting-place except on the bosom of our Heavenly
Father. He is the end to wliich we are travelling. Like a stone falling on the earth, so are we evermore falling upon
God. Creation is not solid ground. It lets us through, and we do not stop until we come to God. He is not one of our

ends, but the end of ends, our only end. There is none other end but He. All tilings else are means. It is this tmth
which simplifies our lives, and which simplified the lives of the saints until they were pictures and reflections of His
own simplicity.

So also if God be our Last End. He is our only home. We are strangers every where else but in God. All

things are foreign to us except God; and thus all our love of home and country, of kith and kin, melts away into the
single love of God. He is the home where our welcome is certain, and surpasses all our expectations. He is our rest
where alone we can lie down without fear and sleep sweetly. He in His inaccessible splendor is the beautiful night

wherein no man works, but when the weary laborer reposes from his toil in everlasting bliss. He is the cool and
fragrant evening, in whose endless sunset creation clothes itself with its final beauty, and reposes in its golden
beams, and all sounds of work and all sighs of care are suspended, and all cravings satisfied, and all created spirits

filled with an ecstatic life, so full. so glorious, so far-reaching, that the most untiring energies of earth are but as
dreary indolence compared with its magnificent tranquillity.
But we must return to the world of human actions. Who could number, at any one given moment, the

multitude of such actions on the earth, the pains endured, the sorrows bome. the anxieties combated, the temptations
resisted, the words spoken, the thoughts thought, the actions done, all of wliich the heart of man can multiply and
vary and complicate well nigh a hundred times a minute? All these tilings are the raw material of our love of God,

and all can enter into those seven kinds of loving worship which we considered in the last chapter, and all can have a
different character of supernatural holiness impressed upon them, according to the four different titles under which
we may refer them to God as our Creator, Preserver, Redeemer, and Last End. But alas! is not this beautiful human
worship like a fair dream of some possible creation, which may be, but has not been yet? How much of these

treasures of our hearts does our Heavenly Father actually receive? Truly the tribes of men are like a wilderness,
capable of cultivation, where com and wine and oil might come abundantly from the bosom of the earth, and flowers

bloom, and tall forests grow, and cattle feed, but which now is little else than sand, and stony plain, and low bushes,
wearying the eye by the very expanse of its cheerless monotony.
Yet when in our love of God. and fretted with the feebleness of our own worthless endeavors, we turn to
the world of angelic actions, and feed ourselves upon its fragrant and refreshing fullness, we not only soon come to

feel how far below the majesty of God is even that transcendent worship, but we rest at last on human acts as after
all the sole exclusive adequate worship of the adorable Trinity. Our eye lingers on the fertile heart of the Virgin
Mother, but there is no rest for it even there; and what we seek for God, in our sympathy and affection for His

slighted goodness, we find only in the human actions of the incarnate Word, in the countless known and unknown
momentary' mysteries of the three and thirty years, and in the multiplied lives, the daily births, and daily
crucifixions, of the altar and the tabernacle. There we behold the incomprehensible Majesty- of the Most High
compassed with a worship equal to Himself, as deep and broad and lofty and bountiful as His own blessed Self.
There we see His infinity worshipped infinitely, with an infinite worship almost infinitely multiplied, and infinitely
repeated, in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We should almost rather be men than angels, because these are human

actions, and that is a human Heart. Jesus is man, and not an angel. But then He is God Himself; and so it is after all
to Himself, and not to His creation, that He owes this beautiful sufficient worship. Shall we sorrow then, and cry

Alas! because nowhere is God rightly loved and adequately worshipped, and because the sendee of the Sacred
Heart turns out to be in fact His own? Oh no! rather let us bless Him again and again that He is such a God that none
can worship Him as He desen es, that all wliich is good is at last discovered to be either Himself or at least His own,
that all beautiful tilings come out of His goodness, and go into it again, and are inseparably mixed up with it, and

that we only lose ourselves more and more inextricably in the labyrinth of His sovereign goodness the deeper we
penetrate into that dear and awful sanctuary.

But we must strive to enter more minutely into the labyrinth of our own manifold unworthiness. We have
seen in the last chapter in what ways and to what extent it is in our power, with the aid of His grace, to love
Almighty God. That inquiiy was but a preface to tliis further one. As a matter of fact, how do we actually love Him?
What is the positive amount of our love of God? From all tliis world of human actions what sort of proportion does

He receive, and with what dispositions is the tax paid? Let us tiy to make ourselves masters of the statistics of the
kingdom of God. Even if it be little in amount which we pay to God, yet much depends on the spirit in which it is

paid. Little things are enhanced by the maimer in which they are done, and the intention out of which they spring.

Let us see then how our generosity ennobles the meanness and enriches the poverty of our love.
If we look at mankind with reference to their service of God we may divide them into three classes,
comprising two extremes and a mean. The one extreme is occupied by the saints, the second by the great mass of

men, and the mean by ordinary believers, such as we ourselves may be. By studying each of these three divisions,
we shall obtain something like a clear view of the actual love of creatures for their Creator.

The first tiling wliich strikes us about the saints is the extraordinary fewness of them. Those who are
canonized bear no sort of proportion in any one generation to the numbers of the baptized; and if we multiply their
number a hundred times, so as to include the hidden saints whom it is not God’s will that the Church should raise

upon her altars, still the grievous disproportion will scarcely be perceptibly diminished. Let us grant the largest
probable allowance for extraordinaiy sanctity hidden in the silent cells of the Carthusians, or in other lives,
cloistered or not. of singular abasement and abjection, nevertheless we may suppose the number of saints in any age

to fall far below the number of baptized infants who die before the use of reason, and perhaps not to equal the
number of deathbed conversions. If we love God really and truly, surely this consideration cannot be otherwise than

a painful one. And yet it seems so easy to be a saint! Graces are so overwhelmingly abundant, and God Himself so
unspeakably attractive, that it appears harder to be ungenerous with Him than to be generous; and where perfection
is made to consist simply in the fervor and the purity of our love, there is almost an intellectual difficulty in
comprehending why it is that the saints should be so few.
But it is not only the fewness of their number which we must consider. We must think also of the
immensity of the graces which they receive. We often get a sight in times of recollection and prayer of the fearful
way in which our own practice falls short of the graces we receive. Nothing makes us feel our own baseness more
keenly or more lastingly than this. Perhaps the disproportion between the practice of the saints and the graces which

they actually receive may be almost as large as it is in our own case. At any rate we cannot read their lives without

being struck with the unused and unemployed profusion of grace by which their souls are deluged. Now all this is
God’s own outlay. It is what He spends in order to obtain saints; and if we measure extraordinaiy heights of sanctity
by the greatness and variety of the graces given, we shall see that even the holiness of an apostle will seem to be but

a poor return for so prodigal an expenditure of grace. Our Lord once spoke of virtue going out of Him, when a poor
woman touched Him that she might be miraculously healed. So we may almost define a saint to be one who drains

God’s abundance more than others do, and costs God more. He is but crowning His own gifts when He vouchsafes
to crown His saints. So is it always when we come to look into the interests and affairs of God’s glory. It is at His
own expense that He is sewed. He furnishes the banquet to which He is invited. Like earthly fathers, He must give
to His children the riches out of which they may make their offerings to Him. His liberality supplies the means,
while His condescension stoops graciously to receive back again what was His own in its first fullness, but which
has wasted and faded not a little in the transfer through our hands.

But even at the best, if we make the most of the generous and heroic love of the saints, it is absolutely vile
as compared either with Its object or with their grace. It is not enough that the little which they give is already rather
His than theirs; but it is also in itself unworthy of His transcending greatness and surpassing goodness. Even the
saints are unprofitable servants. The chosen apostles of the Incarnate Word were taught so to look upon themselves.
Yet these saints are the good extreme among men. From them, if from any, may God look for a plentiful harvest of
glory. Their purity of intention, their intensity of love, their generosity of self-sacrifice, are the pastures in which His
glory is to feed. Yet even here how poor, how scanty, how irregular is the return of the creature to the All-merciful

Creator! He has all the work to do Himself which He pays them for doing; and when they have somewhat marred
the beauty of His design. He accepts their work as if on the one hand He did not perceive its imperfection, and on
the other did not recognize that all the goodness and the beauty of it were His own. How then must our Heavenly

Father condescend to value the worship and the loyalty of a free created will! And how true it is that even the
magnificence of the saints is after all but meanness, in respect of the boundless majesty and overwhelming holiness

of Him upon whose grace they live, and by whose Blood they are redeemed!
If we turn from tire saints to the other extreme, the mass of men, the vision which we are constrained to
look upon is truly of the darkest and most disheartening description. By the side of the multitude, the heroism of the
saints does indeed appear falsely magnified into the most gigantic dimensions. Can anything be said of men’s
ignorance of God. but that it is boundless, universal, incredible? Could the lives of men be what they are, if they had
so much as the commonest elements of the knowledge of God? Do not millions act and speak and think, as if God
was of a lower nature than themselves? Do they not attribute to Him an indifference to right and wrong, which they
would consider revolting in a fellow-creature? Or again, do they not so completely overlook Him as to forget His
existence, and to live as if there were no one to consult but themselves, no will to satisfy except their own? With
many it would almost be doing God too great an honor to be at the pains to deny His existence; and others only

advert to His perfections to dishonor them by their unmanly superstitions. Indeed in such complete ignorance of God

do crowds of men live, that we could not have credited the possibility of it. if our own observation had not presented
it to us as a fact which no reasonable man could doubt.

Moreover it by no means appears that, with the appalling corruption of our nature, the knowledge of God is
sufficient to secure for Him even our esteem. Horrible to relate, aversion to God is far from being uncommon among
His creatures. There are many bold and impenitent sinners who are devils before their time, to whom the name of

God or His perfections are not so much terrible as they are odious. When they come in sight of His commandments,
or of some manifestation of His sovereignty, or even some beautiful disclosure of His tenderness, they are like

possessed persons. They are so exasperated as to forget themselves, until their passion hurries them on to transgress,
not only the proprieties of language, but even the decomm of outward behavior. There seems to be something
preternaturally irritating to them in the very mention of God, quite irrespective of the absolute dominion which He
claims over them as their Creator. There are others, whose habitual state of mind, when they approach religious

subjects, is to be on their guard against God, as if there were some dangerous subtlety in the greatness of His
wisdom, or some artful overbearing tyranny in the condescensions of His majesty, or some dishonest concealed
purpose in the invitations of His mercy. With these men the probabilities are against God. He is not likely to mean
well. It is safest to distrust Him. Discretion must be aware of Him. Moderation must not be excited by Him. We

must not let Him throw us out of our wise sobriety. He has come to bargain with us, and we must be vigilant, or we
do not know to what we may be induced to commit ourselves. With such men their first thought of God is to
dishonor Him; for how shall a son doubt his father without doing him dishonor?
There are others who are not by any means to be reckoned among the mass of men, and who serve Him
truly with a holy fear, but who seem not to have escaped altogether the contagion of this aversion to God. With them

it shows itself in the shape of uneasiness, perplexity, and doubt. They entertain suspicions against the perfections of

God’s justice orthe universality of His compassion. When they hear of certain tilings, jealousy of God starts up as it
were unbidden in their hearts. It is not so much that they have definite intellectual difficulties in matters of faith. But
they have not that instantaneous and unclouded certainty, that all is right, and best, and exquisitely tender, where
God is concerned, which is the pure sunshine and invigorating air of the atmosphere of faith. Nay, have we not all of
us moods in which an allusion to God makes us impatient; and is not this fact alone the nearest of any fact to a deepsea sounding of our cormption?
It is hard to see what God has done to deserve all this. It seems most unkind, most cruelly disloyal to the
immensity of His goodness, and to the unalterable bounty of His compassionate dominion. Truly He is our King as
well as our Father, our Master as well as our Friend. But are the relations incompatible? It is the very necessity of

our case as creatures, that we must be under a law; and could we be under laws less numerous, less onerous, than
those under which we are laid by the unchangeable perfections of God Easy laws, few laws, and laws which it is our

own interest to keep—these are the characteristics of the dominion of God. Why then are we restless and uneasy,
and not the rather happily lost in amazement at the goodness of our great Creator? It seems wonderful that He who is
so great should also be so good; and it is the joyous lesson which the sands of life teach us as they run yearly out,
that His very greatness is the only blessed measure of His goodness.

But ignorance of God and aversion to God are not of themselves a sufficient description of the religious
condition of the great mass of men. There are multitudes also who are simply indifferent to God. It sounds

incredible. The mere knowledge that there is a God should be enough to shape, control, revolutionize, and govern
the whole world. And this, quite independent of the minute, infallible, and touching knowledge of Him which
revelation gives us. But when that is added, surely it should be enough to strike indifference out of the list of

possible things. Surely every human heart should be awake, and alert, to hear the sound of God’s voice, or discern
His footprints on the earth. Our Creator, our Last End. our Savior, our Judge, upon whom we depend for everything,

whose will is the only one important thing to us, whose bosom is the one only possible home for us, and He to be
regarded as simply the most uninteresting object in His own world! Is this really credible? Alas! we have only to

look around and see. Does a day pass which does not prove it to us? Nay. very often, to our shame be it spoken, is it
not a considerable exertion, even to us, to interest ourselves in God? And this indifference, can we be quite sure that
it is less dishonorable to God than positive aversion?
These are melancholy results. Yet somehow they spur us on to try to do more for God ourselves, and to
love Him with a purer and more disinterested love. Alas! if the saints are few in number, those who are either
ignorant of God, or indifferent to Him, or have an aversion to Him. are countless multitudes. Many fair regions of
His beautiful world are peopled by idolaters. The sacred places of scriptural Asia are tenanted by the followers of

Mahomet. Heresy and schism usurp whole countries, which boast of tire name of Christian: and even in Catholic
lands, it is depressing to think how many thousands there are, who must be classed with those who are not on the
side of God. These are very practical considerations; for if there is the least honesty in our professions of loving

God, they must greatly influence both the fervor of our devotion and the amount of our mortification. They bring
home to us that suffering and expiatory character, which, by a law of the Incarnation, belongs to all Christian
holiness.

But we shall find considerations even yet more practical, if we turn from these two extremes to the mean,
that is, to ordinary pious Catholics, such as we humbly hope we either are ourselves, or are endeavoring to become.
We distinctly aim at making religion the great object of our lives. We are conscious to ourselves of a real and strong

desire to love God. and as we grow older the desire grows stronger, and. to say the least of it, it bids fair to swallow
up all our other desires, and become the one single object of our lives. The four last things. Death and Judgment,
Hell and Heaven, are often before us. and fill us with a holy terror. We fear sin greatly, and we sometimes think we

almost hate it for its own sake, because it is an offence against so good a God. We have times and methods of
prayer. We examine our consciences. We hear Mass often. We visit the Blessed Sacrament. We are devout to our
Lady. We frequent the Sacraments. Who can doubt but that all this is the way of salvation? We are happy in the

grace which enables us to do all this. We shall be happy indeed in the grace which will enable us to persevere. We
are happy also in the thought that there are thousands and thousands in the Church who are thus sen ing God. But let

us look a little more closely into this, and examine our lives first as to the amount of love of God which they exhibit,
and secondly as to the manner in which we show our love.
There are twenty-four hours in the day. so many days in the week, and so many weeks in the year. We have

various occupations, and manifold ways of spending our time; and the most careless amongst us must have some
confused and general notion of the way in which his time is distributed. Now we know that the sendee of God is the
grand thing, or rather that it is the only tiling about us which is great at all. What amount of our time then is spent
upon it? How many hours of the day are passed in prayer, and spiritual reading, in hearing Mass, or visiting the

Blessed Sacrament, or in other direct spiritual exercises? Of the time necessarily expended upon our worldly
avocations, or the claims of society, how much is spent with any recollection of Him, or with any actual intention to

do our common actions for His glory? Can we return a satisfactory answer to these questions? Furthermore, we
know that it is essential to our love of God that we should appreciate Him above all things. Does our practice show
that this is anything but a form of words with us? Would strangers, who looked critically at our daily lives, be
obliged to say that, whatever faults we had, it was plain that we put no such price on anything as on God? When we

ourselves look into the interests and affections of our busy, crowded hearts, is it plain that, if the love of God does
not reign there in solitary, unmingled splendor, at least it takes easy, obvious, and acknowledged precedence of all
our other loves? This is not asking much: but can we answer as we should wish? Again, our actions are perfectly

multitudinous. If we reckon both the outward and the inward ones, they are almost as numerous as the beatings of

our pulse. How many of them are for God? I do not say how many are directly religious, but how many are at all and
in any sense for God? How many in the hundred? Even if we are quite clear that a virtual intention has really got
vigor and vitality enough to carry us over the breadth of a whole day, and to push its way through the crowd of

things we have to think, to say, to do, and to suffer—and this is a very large assumption—is this virtual intention in
the morning to absolve us from the necessity of any further advertence to God, and must it not also have been made

in the morning with a very considerable degree of intensity, in order to propel it for so long as twenty-four hours
through such a resisting medium as we know our daily lives to be? To use our national word, are we quite
comfortable about this? Are we sure of our view about virtual intention, and without misgivings, and have we found
our theory work well in times gone by?
God does not have His own way in the world. What He gets He has to fight for. What is true of the world at
large, is tme also of our own hearts and lives. Though we love God, and most sincerely, He has to struggle for our
love. He has to contend for the mastery over our affections. The preferences of our cormpt nature are not for Him, or

for His concerns. Thus it happens almost daily that His claims clash with those of self or of the world. We have to
choose between the two, and give the preference to the one over the other. We are for ever having Christ and
Barabbas offered to the freedom of our election. Now do we always give the preference to God? Or if not always,
because of surprises, impulses, impetuosities, or sudden weaknesses, at least do we never willfully, deliberately, and
with advertence, prefer anything else to God, and give Him the second place? And of the innumerable times in

which this conflict occurs, in what proportion of times does God cany off the victory? And when He does, is it an
easy victory? Or has He to lay long siege to our hearts, and bring up reinforcement after reinforcement of fresh and
untired grace, until at last it looks as if He were almost going to throw Himself on His omnipotence, and overwhelm
the freedom of our will? Or again, let us look at the degree of application which we bestow on what we really do for

God. Let us confront the carefulness, and forethought, and energy, and perseverance, which we bestow upon our
temporal interests or the earthly objects of our love, with those which characterize our spiritual exercises. And will
the result of the examination be altogether what we should desire?

All these are childish and elementary questions to ask ourselves. Yet the results are far more melancholy
than when we contemplated the ignorance, aversion, and indifference of the great mass of men. More melancholy,
because we profess to be God’s champions; it is as it were our place to be on His side. We live encircled by His

grace, which flows around us like the plentiful bright air. Our minds are illuminated by the splendors of heavenly
truth, and our hearts led sweetly captive by the winning mysteries of the Incarnation. Our lives are charmed by great

sacraments, and we are each of us the center of a very world of invisible grandeurs and spiritual miracles. And in

spite of all this, I will not say it is sad, it is really hardly credible, that our love of God should amount to so little as it
does, whether we regard it as to the time spent upon it, or as to the appreciation of Him above all things, or as to the

proportion of our numberless actions which is for Him, or as to our preference of Him when His claims clash with

others, or as to the degree of application which we bestow on what we really do for Him.
Oh look at all this by the moonlight of Gethsemane, or measure it with the Way of the Cross, or confront it
with the abandonment of Calvary! Turn upon it the light of the great love of Creation, whose prodigal munificence

and incomparable tenderness, and seemingly exaggerated compassions we have already contemplated! Can it be that
this is the creature’s return to his Creator, when the creature is holy and faithful and good, and that such is to be

God’s strong point in the world, the paradise of His delights, the portion of His empire where allegiance still is paid
Him? Merciful heaven! can we be safe, if we go on thus? Are we really in a state of grace? Is not the whole spiritual
life a cruel delusion? And are we not after all the enemies, and not the friends, of God? Oh no! faith comes to our
rescue. All is right though truly all is wrong. We are certainly in the way of salvation. Then we say once more, as we

find ourselves saying many times a day, what a God is ours, what incredible patience, what unbounded forbearance.

what unintelligible contentment! Why is it that very shame does not sting us to do more for God, and to love Him
with a love a little less infinitely unlike the love, with which, do what we can, we cannot hinder Him from loving us?
So much for the amount of our love of God. It is little; so little that it would be disheartening were it not

always in our own power, through the abundance of His grace, to make that little more. Let us now at any rate
console ourselves by looking at the manner and spirit in which we pay to God this little love. Love, like other things,

has certain rules and measures of its own. It has certain habits and characteristics. It proceeds upon known principles
which belong to its nature. It acts differently from justice, because it is love and not justice. It does not obey the
same laws as fear, simply because it is not fear but love. Everyone knows the marks of tme love. They are readiness,

eagerness, generosity, swiftness, unselfishness, vigilance, exclusiveness, perseverance, exaggeration. In all these
respects, except the last, our divine love must at once resemble and surpass our human love. In the last respect it
cannot do so. because God is so infinitely beautiful and good that anything like exaggeration or excess in the love of

Him is impossible. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the model of divine Love. The Immaculate Heart of Mary ascertains
for us the amazing heights of love at which a simple creature can arrive by correspondence to the grace of God. The
saints are all so many samples of divine love in some one or more of its special characteristics and departments. We
know then precisely the manner and spirit in which we are to love God. Let us see how far our practice squares with
our theory'.
Is the following an unkind picture of ourselves? We serve God grudgingly, as if He were exacting. We are

slow to do what we know He most desires, because it is an effort to ourselves. We cling to our own liberty. and we
feel the service of God more or less of a captivity'. Our whole demeanor and posture in religion is not as if we felt
God was asking too little, or as if we were most anxious to do more than He required. We serve Him intermittingly,
though perseverance is what He so specially desires. We have fits and starts; pious weeks or devout months, and
then times of remissness; of effort, of coldness: then a fresh awakening, a new start; and then a slackening again. It
is as if loving God went against the grain, as if we had to constrain ourselves to love Him, as if it was an exertion

which could not be kept up continuously, as if human holiness could never be anything better than endless
beginnings, and trials which are always falling short of the mark. Thus we also love God rarely , under pressure, on
great occasions, at startling times, or when we have sensible need of Him. All this looks as if we did not love Him
for His own sake, but for ourselves, or for fear, or because it is prudent and our duty. There is unmistakably a want

of heart in the whole matter.
Have we ever done any one action which we are quite confident was done solely and purely for the love of
God? If we have, it has not been often repeated. We are conscious to ourselves that there is a great admixture of
earthly motives in our service of God. It is astonishing what an amount of vainglory' and self-seeking there is in our
love of Him. We are also perfectly and habitually aware of this; and yet. which is even more astonishing, we are

quiet and unmoved, ft breeds in us no holy desperation, nor does it inspire us to any vehement and determined
struggles to get rid of the desecrating presence of this unholy enemy. Nay, it almost appears as if we should never
have dreamed of loving God, if He Himself had not been pleased to command us to do so; and therefore we do it
just in the way in which men always do a thing because they are told, and which they would not have done if they

had not been told. Many of us perhaps have already given the best of our lives to the world, and now it is the
leavings only which go to God. Alas! how often is He asked to drink the dregs of a cup which not the world only,

but the devil also, have well-nigh drained before Him; and with what adorable condescension does He put His lips to
it, and dwell with complacency upon the draught, as if it were the new wine of some archangel’s first unblemished
love
Then again we exaggerate our own services, in thought if not in words; and this shows itself in our

demeanor. Tme love never thinks it has done enough. Its restlessness comes from the very uneasiness of this

impression. Now this is not at all our feeling about God. We do not look at things from His point of view. It is only
by a painfully acquired habit of mind that we come to do so. Half tire temptations against the faith, from which men
suffer, arise from the want of this habit, from not discerning that really the creature has no side, no right to a point of

view, but that God’s side is the only side, and tire Creator’s point of view the creature’s only point of view, and that
he would not be a creature were it otherwise. Another unsatisfactory sign is, that, ordinarily speaking, we have so

little missionary feeling about us, and are so unconcerned whether sinners are converted, or whether men love God

or not. Surely it is hard for true love to co-exist with an un-missionary spirit, [footnote: Yet see the doctrine of
Richard of St Victor and Da Ponte quoted in Growth in Holiness, chap. vi.]
But we all of us have times when we love God more than usual, times of fervor, of closer union with Him,

of momentary love of suffering, transitory flashes of things which are like the phenomena of the saints. They neither
last long enough nor come often enough to form our normal state. They are simply our best times. Now we need not
dwell either upon their rarity or their brevity; but we would fain ask if even then we love God altogether without
reserves. Is nothing kept back from Him? Is our renunciation of self ample and faultless? Have we no secret comer
of our hearts where some favorite weakness lurks in the shade, and w hich the strong light of heavenly love has not
blinded to its own interests? I am afraid to go on with the picture, lest I should have to ask myself at last, what is left

of the Christian life? But we have seen enough to confess of our love of God, that not only is what we give very
little, but that even that little is given in the most ungraceful and unloverlike of ways. Surely this is a confession not
to be made by words, which are not equal to the task, but only by silent tears, while we lie prostrate before the
Throne of Him, whom, strange to say ! we really do love most tenderly even while we slight Him!
On all sides of us there are mysteries. Our relations to God are full of them. Our coldness and His love, His

forbearance and our petulance—we hardly know which is the most strange, the most inexplicable. If we consider
attentively how little we love God, and in what way we show it, honesty will compel us to acknowledge that we men
should not accept such service at each other’s hands. We should reject it with scorn. We should regard it as an injury

rather than as a service. A father would disinherit his son; a friend would put away from him the friend of his

bosom, if his love were requited as we requite the love of our heavenly Father. Yet it is the ever-blessed God, who is
what He is, to whom we, being what we are, dare to offer this mockery of worship. Will He open heaven, and cast
His fiery bolts upon us, and annihilate us for ever, that we may be no longer a dishonor to His beautiful creation? Or

will He turn from our proffered service with anger, or at least with a contemptuous indifference? We cannot easily
understand how it is that He does not. Yet on the contrary He vouchsafes to accept and reward our pitiful affection.
But His very rewards and blessings lead us astray; for we begin to put a price upon our merits according to
the greatness of His recompense, not according to the reality of their lowness; and we think we have treated Him
with great generosity, and that His reward is to us only the proof of our generosity; while on the contrary we

consider Him to be asking very much of us; and our minds do not see His rights, and our hearts do not feel them.
God sees all this, and He makes no sign. It is not so much as if He seemed insensible to our ingratitude; it is rather as
if He did not say that it was ingratitude at all. No love can be conceived more sensitive than that of Him who has
eternally predestinated, and then called out of nothing, the objects of His choice and predilection. Yet God does not

seem to feel our coldness and perversity. Rather He appears to prize what we give Him, and to rejoice in its
possession. He wished it otherwise. He made very different terms at the outset. He asked for far more than He has
got. But He makes no complaint; and not being able to have His terms allowed, He takes us on our own.

Is it possible that it can be God of whom we are daring thus to speak? Why do not all we, His children,
league together to make it up to Him? Angels of heaven! why is your worship of that Blessed Majesty aught else but

tears?

The Fifth Chapter
IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE

Signore, volete dare per quello, che facciamo per voi, più di quello che potete fare; e non potendo voi fare voi
medesimo, restate solamente soddisfatto con dare voi medesimo: stupendo caso! che il Creatore non ritrovi in tutta
la sua onnipotenza, cosa, che possa fare in aggradimento di qualsivoglia cosa, che fa un giusto per suo amore. —
Nieremberg.
WHEN angels offer the prayers of men with incense in their golden thuribles, there are none which rise up before
the throne of God with a sweeter or more acceptable fragrance than the murmurs and complaints of loving souls,
because God is not loved sufficiently. Everywhere on earth, where the true love of God is to be found, there also is

this peaceful and blessed unhappiness along with it. In many a cloister, by the sea shore, or on tire mountaintop, in

the still forest or the crowded city, there are many who in the retirement of their cell, or before the Blessed
Sacrament, are sighing with the sweet grief of love, because men love God so coldly and so unworthily. There are

many amid the distractions of the world, and who appear to be walking only in its ways, who have no heavier weight
upon their hearts than the neglect, abandonment, and unrequited love of God. Through the long cold night, or during
the noisy day, incessantly as from a tranquil holy purgatory, the sounds of this plaintive sorrow, this blessedly
unhappy love, rise up into the ear of God. Some tremble with honor of the sins which are daily committed against
His holy law. Some are saddened because those who by their faith know God so well, love Him with such careless­
ness and pusillanimity. Some, who are wont to make His resplendent attributes the objects of their daily
contemplation, murmur because they see nowhere on the earth, not even among the saints, anything worthy to be

called love of so great and infinite a goodness. Others with meek petulance expostulate with God. because He hides
Himself, and does not constrain souls to love Him by open manifestations of His surpassing beauty: while others
mourn over their own cold hearts, and pine to love God better than they do. There are even innocent children who

weep because they feel, what as yet they can hardly know, that men are leaving so cruelly unrequited the burning
love of God. All these sighs and tears, all these complaints and expostulations, all this heavy -hearted silence and
wounded bleeding love—all is rising up hourly to the Majesty on high. not unmingled with the sharper sounds of

active penance and expiatory mortifications. It is at once intercession and thanksgiving and petition and satisfaction,
and our Heavenly Father loves the sweet violence which this beautiful sorrow is doing to Him.
Meanwhile God Himself vouchsafes to appear contented, and even more than contented with the poverty of
our love. He seems to be satisfied with that in us. which is very far from satisfying ourselves. Whether it is that His
clear view of our exceeding nothingness stimulates His compassion to make allowances for us which we have no

right to make for ourselves, or whether to the incomprehensible affection of a Creator there is some inestimable

value in the least and lowest offering of the creature’s love, so it is, that His magnificence repays our love with
rewards of the most overwhelming grandeur, while at the same time His justice and wisdom contrive that these
immense rewards should be in exact and varying proportion with our merits. He alone seems to be above the feeling
of that which His servants feel so deeply, their own coldness and ingratitude to Him. Yet we know that none can
measure so unerringly the hatefulness of our iniquity; none can estimate so truly the glorious abundance of strong
celestial grace which is hourly conferred upon us: none can know Him as He knows Himself, and therefore none can

abhor sin as He abhors it. or comprehend, as He comprehends it, the insult of our lukewarm love. Does it not even

come to ourselves sometimes in prayer, when we have been dwelling long upon some one beautiful attribute of the
divine nature, to ask ourselves in amazement, how it is that God can possibly forgive sin, and forgiving it, can look
so completely as if He had forgotten it as well, and even seem to esteem us more when we rise from a shameful fall
than if we had stood upright in His grace and our integrity all the while?
Yet our best notions of God are unspeakably unworthy of Him. When we get views of His perfections

which thrill through us like a new life, and throw open to our minds grand vast worlds of truth and wonder, these
rays of light are full of dust and dimness, and do not approach to the real beauty of the Creator. Thus it is that we
cannot take a step in this land of divine love, hut mysteries start up around us far more hard to solve than the deepest

difficulties of scholastic theology. We are getting new graces every day, crowning our correspondence to the grace
we had before. We are continually drinking fresh draughts of immortal life in the Sacraments, which we are allowed
to repeat and renew day after day. But we are so accustomed to all this, that we can scarcely realize the miracles of

compassion and love, of which we are incessantly the objects. All this continuance of grace is a manifestation to us
of God’s contentment with us. Not that He would not have us better than we are, and is not always stimulating us to
higher tilings. But He takes gladly what we let Him have; and, with loving eagerness, not only furnishes us with
instant means to serve Him better, but almost anticipates with His rewards our little services. For the recompense

full often comes before the deed, and as our good works are not sufficiently numerous to gratify His liberality. He is
crowning all day long a thousand good intentions which He knows will never issue in results. And why? Because it
is not so much works, as love, for which He craves. O the mystery of the divine recompenses! how is it to be
unriddled except by the satisfaction of the Precious Blood of Jesus?
And then how is that adorable blood-shedding itself to be unriddled? If the mysteiy of a contented God,

with His blessed wrath appeased and His all-holy justice satisfied, can only be explained bv the Cross of the
Incarnate Word, it is only removing the difficulty one step backward; for then by what is the Cross itself to be ex­
plained? Are we not for ever obliged to take refuge in creation as the grand primal act of love, the fountain-head of

all the divine passions, and to acknowledge that the classes of mysteries, which of all others are the most
unfathomable, are those which concern the nature, the degree, and the perfections of creative Love? O beautiful
abysses, in which it is so sweet to lose ourselves, so blissful to go on sounding them to all eternity and never learn
the depths, and in musing upon whose precipitous shores a loving heart finds heaven even while on earth! It is a day

to date from, when we first come to see. that the very fact of God having created us is in itself a whole magnificent
revelation of eternal love, more safe to lean upon than what we behold, more worthy of our trust than what we
know, more utterly our own than any other possession we can have.
But let us study in detail the way in which God repays that poor and fitful and ungenerous love of which we
ourselves are more than half ashamed. Let us inquire when He repays us, with what He repays us, and in what
manner He repays us. We shall find fresh motives of love at eveiy step in the inquiiy.

First of all, when does He repay us? He does not keep us waiting for our recompenses. We know well that
one additional degree of sanctifying grace is of more price than all the magnificence of the universe. The objects
upon which we often fasten our affections or employ our ambition, during long years of concentrated vigilance and
persevering toil, are less worthy of our endeavors and less precious in the possession, than one single particle of

sanctifying grace. Yet. let us suppose that a momentaiy temptation has assailed us, and we have resisted it. or that
we have lifted up our hearts for an instant in failli and love to God, or that for the sake of Christ we have done some
trifling unselfish thing, scarcely has the action escaped us before then and instantly the heavens have opened in­
visibly, and the force of heaven, the participation of the divine nature, the beauty, power, and marvel of sanctifying
grace, has passed in viewless flight and with insensible ingress into our soul. There is not the delay of one instant.

Moreover, these ingresses of grace are beyond number, and yet. if we correspond and persevere, the influence and

result of each one of them is simply eternal. Each additional degree of sanctifying grace represents and secures an
additional degree of glory in heaven, if only we correspond thereto, and persevere unto the end. At the moment in

which we receive each additional degree of sanctifying grace our soul is clothed before God in a new and glorious
beauty which a moment ago it did not possess.
The communication of sanctifying grace to the soul is itself a marvelous and mysterious disclosure of the
divine magnificence and liberality. It is assuredly most probable, if il is not certain,* that each additional degree of
sanctifying grace is given the very instant it is merited by our actions, and is not reserved as an accumulated reward
to be bestowed upon us when we enter into gloiy. But each additional degree of sanctifying grace is not a mere
enriching of us with the created gifts of God, but it is a real and new mission to our souls of the Second and Third
Persons of the Most Holy Trinity, together with the unsent coming to us and dwelling with us of the Father Himself.
It is not only that the Three divine Persons arc always in us by essence, presence, and power; but by sanctifying

grace They are in us in a new and special and most real, though deeply mysterious way, and in the case of the
particular graces of the sacraments. They are with us for particular ends, effects, and purposes. By an invisible
mission this real indwelling of the divine Persons assumes a new mode of existence at every one of the
multitudinous additions and degrees of sanctifying grace, a new mode of existence which it is hardly possible to
explain in words, as on the one hand it implies no manner of change or motion in Them, while on the other there is
from Them some contact with the soul more personal, more intimate, more real, than that which existed but a

moment before. If we are to allow some theologians to say that where the gifts of grace more concern the intellect,
there is a mission of the Son, and, where they more concern the will, a mission of the Holy Ghost, yet we cannot
hold any mission of the Son which is not also a mission of the Holy Ghost, nor any mission of the Holy Ghost which
is not also a mission of the Son. nor any mission of the Two, apart and separate from the coming and indwelling of
the Father. If it is hard to understand this, it is also extremely beautiful, and ought to fill us with fresh love of God,
and a more loving wonder at His bounty towards His creatures.

[footnote: Cf Suarez, de Beatitudine, Disp. vi, Sec. i. n. 13. Also De Gratia, lib. ix, cap. iii, 23. “Dico ergo
gradus omnes gratiœ, quos justus per actus remissos charitatis meretur, statim sine ulla dilatione, nullave spectata
dispositione, illi conferri, ac provide justum non solum per omnes hos actus mereri, sed etiam statim consequi suce
gratiœ augmentum. ” But it is a question.]
This doctrine of divine mission with each degree of sanctifying grace shows us how sanctifying grace is a
substantial and real anticipation of heaven, that even now it is Himself, and not His created gifts only, that God gives

to us, and that He is our own God, our own possession, from the very first moment of our justification. Moreover,
there is something to overawe us with the sense of the divine intimacy with us. and to make us glow with love even
in our awe. to reflect that this inexplicable operation, tliis celestial mansion in our souls, this new and ever new

mission of the divine Persons, which we caimot explain and can only dimly apprehend, is actually being reflected in
us. many, many times a day, while we are in a state of grace, and seeking in our actions the glory and the will of
God. [footnote: Billuart, de Trinitate, vi, 4.] Nay, so substantially are the divine Persons present to the soul by Their
invisible mission, that if by impossibility They were not present to us by Their immensity, They would be so by
reason of sanctifying grace.

[footnote: There is no province of theology where language proves itself less adequate to the task of expressing
doctrine, than that which concerns the relation of the divine Persons to created things. For on the one hand theology
is clear as to the reality of such relations, and on the other hand it is equally clear as to the axiom that the external
works of the Holy Trinity are indivisible. There is a beauty, which we can only half see, about these relations,
which, to judge from the explanations of theologians, baffles words, or as soon as it is put into words seems
dangerous to dogma. See Schwetz. Theol. Dogmat., i, 361. The following passage from St Cyril of Alexandria is the

more remarkable as coming from a post-Nicene father: Και εστι μεν καθ’ υποστασιν ι δίκην πολυτελειος ο πατήρ,
ομοιος δε και ο υιός, και το πνεύμα, αλλ’ η ενός των ωνομασμενων δημιουργική θελησις, εφ’ οτωι περ αν λεγοιτο
γενεσθαι τυχόν ενέργημα μεν αυτου, πλην δια πασης ερχεται της θεοτατητος, και της υπέρ κτισιν εστιν ουσίας
αποτέλεσμα, κοινον μεν ώσπερ τι, πλην και ιδικως εκαστωι προσωπωι πρεπον, ως δια τριών υποστάσεων πρεποι αν
και ιδικως έκαστη, πολυτελειως εχουσηι καθ’ εαυτην. ενεργεί τοιγαρουν ο πατήρ, αλλα δι’ υιου εν πνευματι,
ενεργεί και ο υιός, αλλ’ ως δυναμις του πατρος, εξ αυτου τε και εν αυτωι νοούμενος καθ' υπαρξιν ιδικην. ενεργεί
και το πνεύμα, πνεύμα γαρ εστι του πατρος, και του υιου, το πλουτουργικον.—De S. Trinit., dialog, vi.]

Moreover, all through life our mere preservation of the gift of faith entitles us always to have the grace of
God at hand when it is wanted, preventing and anticipating the rapid and subtle movements of our spiritual enemies:
and even when it is not especially wanted, because we are not under the pressure of circumstances or in critical
occasions, it is most likely that we are always insensibly receiving grace, except when we sleep; so that we live in a
world of grace, and breathe its atmosphere unconsciously, thinking as little of it as of the air we breathe in order to
support our natural life. The Creator is as it were bound to assist His puny creatures: but He is not bound, unless by
the excess of His own goodness, to be always near us. in the Christian sense of His being nigh unto all them who

call upon Him. This nearness is His present and instantaneous reward for our unworthy service of Him. Joy and
sorrow have, each of them, their own wants and trials and peculiar laws: and who has not experienced the ready
goodness of God in both of them? Life and earth and the world abound with joy. even to running over. Happiness

sweeps the whole earth with its gay illuminations, just us the strong swift sunshine throws its unimpeded mantle
over hill and dale, and land and sea. We are too happy. Our happiness runs away with us. Its superabundance will
hardly let us sober ourselves, or steady our views of this transitory' world. Joys are thousandfold: we cannot count

them; their name is legion: we can hardly class them by their kinds. They run out from beneath the throne of God,
and electrify millions of souls the w orld over at the same moment. Our very life is joy, if w e will only be honest

enough to acknowledge it to God and to ourselves. The unhappiest man on earth has from sunrise to sunset more
satisfaction than unhappiness. It is seldom he w ould even give up liis ow n self and take another, still less forfeit the
pleasure of living altogether.
What a Creator must ours be, in whose world merely to live is a stronger joy than any temporal misery,
however unparalleled, which can befall us! And how marvelously God multiplies His graces upon us in our joy,
opening our hearts to love Him more generously, enlightening our minds to see Him more clearly, quickening our

gratitude, giving us a surprising elasticity in our spiritual exercises, and taking away the dangerous alluring beauty

of earth’s idols by the very strength of the gladsome, disenchanting light which He throws upon them. But, above
all, in joy we full often receive a double portion of that dear grace, which is well-nigh all our salvation, the grace of
true contrition; for there is no contrition, which, for strength, vividness, and endurance, is like the contrition of a
joyous man.
Sorrow, too, when bome even with ordinary patience, has its own rewards from God at once, rewards both

of nature and of grace. What can be more beautiful than the w ay in which He calculates our w eakness, and then
measures out our sorrows, and then rains vehement storms of grace upon our fainting w ills? But we only see this
now and then, and in dusky indistinct perspective. In eternity we shall behold our past life in God, and w hat a

thrilling revelation it will be! But is not this undeniably true of ourselves, so far as we have gone in life, that we have
had far less sorrow and pain than we are quite conscious we could bear, that our powers of bearing have been
sensibly augmented while the cross was on us, that we can look back upon chapters of our past life, about w hich we
distinctly feel that with our present grace we could not live them over again, that the fruits of sorrow have always

been tenfold brighter in the issue than the darkness was ever deepened in the process, and finally that in the
retrospect the very sorrows themselves have been full of joys, exotic joys whose large leaves and waxen blossoms

and long-lasting perfumes show that they were grown in heaven and not on earth? Yet these are only the present
rewards of grief, the earthly blessings of those who mourn! But look into the wonderful faces of those rings of saints
who encompass the throne on high; feed your soul on the grave intellectual beauty which is depicted there, the

winning look of blameless purity, the impassioned intensity of their celestial love. With most of them it was sorrow
that chastened them into that transcendent loveliness, sorrow that piloted them to that happy shore, sorrow that put

those jeweled crowns upon their heads, sorrow, keen and deep and long, that unveiled for them the ever-beaming
countenance of God! O magnificent Creator! where hast Thou left room for our disinterested love, when everywhere
it seems as though Thou hadst made our interests take precedence of Thine own?
Look at death, which is a simple punishment! Can a created intelligence conceive of anything more terrible

than to fall into the hands of God for the single solitary purpose of being punished? And we might have thought that
death would be like this, being the firstborn child of sin, from which not even the Immaculate Mother might be
exempt. Yet how should we have miscalculated the love of God! The deaths of His servants are among the most
valued jewels of His crown. They are among the best possessions which He holds in right of His creative love. We
know but little of the sights and sounds, the tastes and touches, of that last dark passage. There is a shroud of
seeming dishonor as well as mystery thrown around that dread event. But we know that in it men live whole lives in

one short hour, and accumulate experiences which pass our understanding both for number, rapidity, and truth. We
know that grand act has peculiar needs, peculiar distresses, and that the invisible and visible world forget their

boundaries at the deathbed, and war together in dread conflict, of which for the most part the dying eye is the sole
spectator. If we think long on death, we shall come to wonder how it is that anyone can die calmly; the interests at
stake are so terrific, the moment so decisive, the horrors so thickly strewn, the natural helplessness so complete. A
whole world is sensibly sinking and giving way under us, and there is nothing but blackness, space, and the arms of

God. Who can dare to fall through without a shudder? Yet when are God’s graces and indulgences more numerous,
more triumphant, more accessible, than in that dreadful hour? Grace makes a very sunset of what to nature is the
most impenetrable darkness, and the plaintive strains of the Miserere merge in spite of our humility into songs of

triumph; for the walls between the dying soul and the heavenly Jerusalem are so nearly fretted through, that the loud
allelujas surprise and distract the contrite love whose eyes are closing on the Crucifix. The creature’s change is very
dear to the Creator. Precious in the sight of the Lord are the deaths of His saints.

Listen to this beautiful story from the revelations of St Gertrude. She heard the preacher in a sermon urge
most strongly the absolute obligation of dying persons to love God supremely, and to repent of their sins with true
contrition founded on the motive of love. She thought it a hard saying, and exaggeratedly stated, and she murmured
within herself that if so pure a love were needed, few indeed died well; and a cloud came over her mind as she
thought of this.
But God Himself vouchsafed to speak to her, and dispel her trouble. He said that in that last conflict, if the
dying were persons who had ever tried to please Him and to live good lives, He disclosed Himself to them as so
infinitely beautiful and desirable, that love of Him penetrated into the innermost recesses of their souls, so that they

made acts of true contrition from the very force of their love of Him: which propension of Mine, He vouchsafed to
add, thus to visit them in that moment of death, I wish My elect to know, and I desire it to be preached and
proclaimed, that among My other mercies this also may have a special place in men’s remembrance, [footnote: Ap.
Penneguin, “Isagoge ad Amorem Divinum,” p. 43.] Let us then tell each other this sweet doctrine, that our hearts

may bum more and more with love of so compassionate a God.
Now all these are present rewards, ways in which God repays on earth our love of Him. They are but
samples of what is incessant, abundant, superfluous, all through life. Everyone’s mercies are so great that they are,

to him at least, rightly viewed, strange, wonderful, and unexpected. God tries our faith, and seems to delight in

trying it, by the very reduplication of His benefits. But after all, this life is not the time of His recompenses. He does
not profess to give us our wages here. He warns us not to expect them. Is it then that His love is so great, that He
cannot help Himself, and that His nature is under the blessed necessity of loving and of giving? Or is it that these

mercies are only the casual drops which are spilled from the overflowing cup prepared for us in heaven? Oh even
the most desolate of men maybe so sure of His paternal love, that they may remember that eternity can be no long
way off, and will repay the waiting!
But if the promptitude of His payment is in itself a proof of the greatness of God’s love, still more strongly
is that consoling fact brought out when we consider with what He pays us. The blessings of nature, the gifts of

grace, the rewards of glory—who is sufficient to declare the number, the beauty, the greatness, and the wonder of

these things? There are three vast kingdoms, three magnificent creations, for so they might be called, which are
simple expressions of vastness of the Creator’s love. They cannot enrich Him. They are not needed to His bliss.
They add nothing to what He possesses already. His mercy contrives to reap some little harvest of accidental glory

from them, but it is at the expense of endless outrage, not only of His justice, but even of His compassion. They are
the product of His love of the creature, our property rather than His, almost more our dominion than His own.
In the kingdom of nature there are three vast provinces or separate worlds, which are full of the most
exquisite enjoyment to the creature; and we speak only of enjoyments, which, if through our frailty they are
dangerous as stealing our hearts from God, are yet altogether without reproach of sin. The physical world is full of

God’s rewards. Life is itself a joy. But what shall we say of the abounding sense of health and vigor, which they
who enjoy it the most abundantly can hardly value at its legitimate price? Yet to one, whose head is always aching,
whose limbs have always in them some lurking pain, and whose languor and feebleness are all day long playing the
traitor to the activity of his mind or the energy of his will, the sense of health, when it comes, is almost like a
miracle. There is the surpassing beauty of sceneiy, the grandeur of the mountains, the sublimity of the sea. the
variety of fertile landscape, the rain, the wind, the sunshine, and the storm. Every sense is an avenue of perpetual

pleasure, which, if we will, can raise the mind to God, and inflame our hearts with love. If we except the irregu­
larities which sin has introduced into the physical world, and which manifestly form no part of the system, the whole
of it is simple pleasure and enjoyment, an emanation from the everlasting and inexhaustible gladness of the Most
High.
But the pleasures of the intellectual world are yet more wonderful. Can any pleasure be more exquisite than
the sensible exercise of our mental faculties? The variety, the multitude, the depth, the rapidity, the interweaving of

our thoughts, are full of boundless enjoyment, leading us through realms and realms of truth and beauty, and
chaining us at every turn with some enchanting discovery. Through some minds the pure delight of poetry thrills

with feelings of the most indescribable nature. With others the sweet skilful strains of music wind into the uttermost
recesses of their souls, with a beauty which is sometimes so gifted as almost to win back the reason that has already
deserted its throne. To others form and color, painting, statuary, and architecture are like copious fountains of power
and enjoyment streaming into them abundantly for ever. With many the labor of composition is only a pain because

of the very excess of the pleasure, which is more than they can bear. The investigation of tmth is only at times weary'
and irksome, because our tyrant minds are demanding of the body what it cannot give. No more can be said of the
pleasures of the intellectual world than that they are marvelous shadows of the incomprehensible joys of God
Himself.
If the moral world seems to afford a less variety of enjoyment than the intellectual, it far transcends it in the
vividness and power of its enjoyments. The will is an inexhaustible mine of joys, which our nature seems to prize

beyond all others. Our affections are complicated instruments of the most amazing and unexpected and diversified
pleasures, which possess our whole nature and fulfil it with satisfaction in a way which no other pleasures do.

Human love sits upon a throne above all other human joys, and there is no one who ever dreams of questioning its
rights or of abating its prerogatives. Indeed the joy of love is too great for life. It breaks its bounds, runs riot, and
makes wild work even with the strong framework of society and the destiny of kingdoms. It fills every depth in our

nature and then runs over, deluging mind and will, duty and even passion. There is no abyss sufficiently capacious
to hold the torrents of love, which one heart is able to outpour, except that sea without horizon, bed, or shore, the
ever-blessed Being of God Himself. The Holy Ghost, the eternally proceeding Spirit, is the jubilee of the Father and
the Son; and His shadow lies for evermore upon the moral world, and the vast reflecting waters of the human will.
As the physical world with its joys of substance and being appears to be a transcript of the Person of the Eternal

Father, and the intellectual world with its light and laws to be an illuminated shadow of the Person of the Word, so
does the moral world, the fiery thrilling world of love and will, represent Him who is the coequal limit of the God­
head, the Third Person of the ever-blessed Trinity.

Yet these three worlds, the physical, the intellectual, and the moral, are one world; and in their unions,

blendings, borrowings, comparisons, and intersections, we have so many fresh sources of the most delightful
enjoyment, above and beyond those wliich these worlds furnish in their separate capacities. Why then do we not
worship more constantly and more intelligently in common daily things the wisdom of God, thus lending itself to the

strong will of His goodness in every department of creation? Even' orb in the immeasurable fields of
indistinguishable star-dust lies in the light of God’s outpoured and ever flowing joy. Every created intelligence
drinks its fill of the fountains of His gladness. Every instinct of animals beats with a pulsation of divine enjoyment.

Even' tree uplifts its head and flings out its branches, every flower blooms and sheds sweet odor, even mineral
glances and sparkles, just as the clouds sail, and the waters flow, and the planet turns, in the excess of the happiness
of God. His blessedness lies over the whole world, serenely shining, like the waters of a spiritual sea beneath whose
transparent depths all creation with beautiful distinctness lies. Thus in God’s wide world there is no room for sin, no
provision for sorrow, not a comer for unhappiness. Sin is a stranger, an intruder, an enemy, as little at home on earth

as it would be in heaven. It is we who have introduced it into the bright and happy world, we who, by the freedom
our wills, wliich were left at large that we might love God the more magnificently, have broken down the cloister of
His paradise.

It is not altogether man’s ingratitude wliich makes him forgetful of the benefits of God. He Himself,

blessed be His holy name! throws His own mercies into the shade, as well by multiplying them beyond our powers
of counting, as by surpassing and excelling them by others. Thus it is with the kingdom of nature, ft is lost in the

splendor of the kingdom of grace. A while ago it looked so bright and beautiful, with all its features so smiling and
its outlines so soft and ethereal, and now. like a mountain-side which the sunbeams have deserted, it looks cold and
bare, rugged and uninviting. We have already seen how, in the kingdom of grace, God rewards our efforts
instantaneously by fresh supplies of greater grace. Let us look for a moment at grace itself. The gulf between God

and ourselves seems infinite and impassable; yet grace bridges it over, and passes it with a rapidity to which the
speed of the electric spark is weary slowness. By sanctifying grace He is incessantly, habitually, powerfully,

superabundantly, pouring into us marvelous communications of His divine nature. Each undulation of it, as it
reaches and informs our souls, is a greater miracle than the creation of the universe. One touch, and we pass from
darkness to light; one touch, and all our eternity is changed. He endows our souls, even before reason dawns, with
mysterious infused habits wliich make such utterly new creatures of us that the process can only be described as a
being positively bom again.
Besides this, He plants even in the unconscious infant at the font seven wonderful gifts of the Holy Ghost,

seven distinct heavens of the most beautiful splendors and unearthly powers, in wliich He hid the possibilities of the

ven highest sanctity. Thus our souls are made as it were a musical instrament, worthy that the hands of God should

play upon it, and out of which he can evoke such melodies of holiness, such strains of the exquisite music of
perfection, as could ravish the angels of heaven, even as the human soul of Jesus is ravishing them this hour. Neither

is tliis instrument to remain unused. The impulses of the divine will, the pressure of actual grace, is ever varying the

music which they draw forth, as the rapid touch of the Creator’s hand flies over the many keys of the complex heart
of man; and all the while one grace is leading to another in wonderful progression, one the prophecy of what is yet
to come, and another the crown of what has gone before, with such a vista of graces in the prospect that no man ever
reaches to the term. The day will never dawn when he must not aspire to more and more; there is no term which is
the limit of the grace which God intended him to reach; and, however long it may be delayed, death will find him
full of beginnings, laying the foundations of a new and better, a more lofty and spacious, fabric than he had built

before. Most wonderful too is it to behold how all this grace elicits and magnifies the freedom of the will, and, while
it supports and strengthens and almost constrains it, makes it all the while more undeniably, because more spiritually

free.
The abundance of grace, again, is almost as wonderful as its nature. We live in an ocean of grace, as fishes
in the deep sea. It is above, beneath, around us, everywhere and overwhelmingly. It comes in floods wliich though
they have sudden rises at times, are always floods, and know no ebb or intermission. Its continuity is another marvel
which we must add to its abundance. The want of duty reflecting upon tliis is one cause of the pusillanimity wliich is
so common in the spiritual life. Men too often think practically that grace is like the theatrical god of the heathen

poet, and does not interfere until it is wanted, and wanted with such obvious urgency as to justify even to an

unsupematural apprehension some heavenly interference. Tliis inadequate conception of the incessant action of
grace at once diminishes their confidence in God, unnerves them in temptations, deters them from attempting
generous enterprises, and makes them estimate far too cheaply their responsibilities, privileges, and possibilities. It
cannot be too often repeated that the wakeful reason breathes grace, and lives in its light, and leans on its support, as
much as we breathe the air and see by the daylight and have the hard safe crust of the planet beneath our feet. The
extent and universality of grace, in the sacraments and out of them, in the Church and in order to the Church, the

way in wliich it can combine with so much that is false and evil, and its godlike importunity, the very thought of
which is a kind of prevision of our final perseverance—all these characteristics of grace would fill volumes, were

they treated of at length. Its variety too must not be forgotten. If the saints have graces which we hardly know how

to name and classily, if no one man’s grace is like another’s, what must we think of the widespreading realms of
angelical existence, and the seemingly fabulous arithmetic of graces which we must believe there is among those

clear far-reaching spirits? Surely if it is not hard for a man to live in the pure bright air of heaven, and some shock of
disease or outward accident must supervene, to cut short the thread of his existence, so it cannot be hard in this
fresh, buoyant, bracing atmosphere of grace for a man to save his soul, and it must be some danger which he himself

has sought, or some poison which he has willfully imbibed, and after that pertinaciously refused the antidote, which
can destroy his soul, and even then with difficulty. A man must stmggle to be out of grace, when grace is so around
him. We believe that in all things man’s will is free, but that in nothing is he less free than to be lost eternally.
But all these blessings of nature and of grace are only in an imperfect and improper sense the rewards of
the Creator. The kingdom of glory is the theatre of His recompense. It is in order to extend that kingdom, that the

grace given us is so ineffably beyond what is due to our nature. But how shall we hope to measure the kingdom of

glory, when it is to be measured only by the divine magnificence? Both a prophet and an apostle join in teaching us
that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor man’s heart conceived, what God has prepared for them that love Him.
When the bodies of the just rise at the general resurrection, with their senses spiritualized and rendered capable of

pleasures which do not fall within their province now, and with perhaps many new senses developed in the immortal
body which were unknown in its mortal days, the pure pleasures of these glorified senses must be something quite

beyond the power of our imagination to picture to itself. He who knows the blameless exultation of liis soul when
the eye has conveyed to it a landscape of surpassing beauty, or whose ear has thrilled with some inspiriting or

subduing strain of music, or who, when he heard a passage of magnificent poetry, felt as if an immediate and
extraordinary accession of bold intellectual power was given to him as he listened, may at least indistinctly guess the
exquisite delights of the glorified senses of the risen body, or which is perhaps more tme, understand how their
delicacy and charm must be beyond our power of guessing
Yet the heavenly joys of the illuminated understanding far transcend the thrills of the glorified senses. The
contemplation of heavenly beauty and of heavenly truth must indeed be beyond all our earthly standards of

comparison. The clearness and instantaneousness of all the mental processes, the complete exclusion of error, the
unbroken serenity of the vision, the facility of embracing whole worlds and systems in one calm, searching,

exhausting glance, the divine character and utter holiness of all the truths presented to the view—these are broken
words which serve at least to show what we may even now indistinctly covet in that bright abode of everlasting
bliss. Intelligent intercourse with the angelic choirs, and the incessant transmission of the divine splendors through
them to our minds, cannot be thought of without our perceiving that the keen pleasures and deep sensibilities of the

intellectual world on earth are but poor, thin, unsubstantial shadows of the exulting immortal life of our glorified
minds above.

The very expansion of the faculties of the soul, and the probable disclosure in it of many new faculties
which have no object of exercise in this land of exile, are in themselves pleasures which we can hardly picture to
ourselves. To be rescued from all narrowness, and for ever; to possess at all times a perfect consciousness of our
whole undying selves, and to possess and retain that self-consciousness in the bright light of God; to feel the

supernatural corroborations of the light of glory, securing to us powers of contemplation such as the highest mystical
theology can only faintly and feebly imitate; to expatiate in God. delivered from the monotony of human things; to
be securely poised in the highest flights of our immense capacities, without any sense of weariness, or any chance of
a reaction; who can think out for himself the realities of a life like this?

Yet what is all this compared with one hour, one of earth’s short hours, of the magnificence of celestial
love? Oh to him our whole souls upon God, and souls thus expanded and thus glorified; to have our affections

multiplied and magnified a thousandfold, and then girded up and strengthened by immortality to bear the beauty of
God to be unveiled before us; and even so strengthened, to be rapt by it into a sublime amazement which has no
similitude on earth; to be carried away by the inebriating torrents of love, and yet be firm in the most steadfast
adoration; to have passionate desire, yet without tumult or disturbance; to have the most bewildering intensity along
with an unearthly calmness; to lose ourselves in God, and then find ourselves there more our own than ever; to love

rapturously and to be loved again still more rapturously, and then for our love to grow more rapturous still, and

again the return of our love to be still outstripping what we gave, and then for us to love even yet more and more and
more rapturously, and again, and again, and again to have it so returned, and still the great waters of God’s love to
flow over us and overwhelm us until the vehemence of our impassioned peace and the daring vigor of our yearning

adoration reach beyond the sight of our most venturous imagining—what is all this but for our souls to live a life of
the most intelligent entrancing ecstasy, and yet not to be shivered by the fiery heat? There have been times on earth
when we have caught our own hearts loving God, and there was a flash of light, and then a tear, and after that we lay

down to rest. Oh happy that we were! Worlds could not purchase from us even the memory of those moments. And
yet when we think of heaven, we may own that we know not yet what maimer of tiling it is to love the Lord our God.
Meanwhile it is difficult to conceive how the pure pleasures of the glorified senses, or the delights of our

illuminated understandings, or the expansion of our souls dilated with immortality, or the magnificences of celestial

love, can be of any price at all in our eyes, seeing that they are but the outside fringes of heaven, the merest

accessories of our true beatitude. To see God face to face, as He is; to gaze undazzled on the Three divine Persons,
cognizable and distinct in the burning fires of their inaccessible splendors; to behold that long coveted sight, the

endless generation of the all-holy Son, and our hearts to hold the joy, and not die; to watch with spirits all
outstretched in adoration the ever-radiant and ineffably beautiful procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and
the Son, and to participate ourselves in that jubilee of jubilees, and drink in with greedy minds the wonders of that

procession, and the marvelous distinctness of its beauty from the generation of the Son; to feel ourselves with
ecstatic awe and yet with seraphic intimacy overshadowed by the Person of the Unbegotten Father, the Father to
whom and of whom we have said so much on earth, the Fountain of the Godhead, who is truly our Father while He

is also the Father of the eternal Son; to explore, with exulting license and with unutterable glad fear, attribute after

attribute, oceans opening into oceans of divinest beauty; to lie astonished in unspeakable contentment before the
vision of God’s surpassing Unity, so long the joyous mystery of our predilection, while the Vision through all

eternity seems to grow more fresh and bright and new—O my poor soul! what canst thou know of this, or of these

beautiful necessities of thy exceeding love, which shall only satisfy itself in endless alternations, now of silence and
now of song?
These are the rewards of God, these the ways in which He repays our love. To hear them or to read of them
is not enough. Years of continual meditation will not even give us an adequate conception of them. To estimate them
rightly we must have a tme and profound knowledge of God, and be able to think worthily of His greatness. Without

this we can never know the abyss of condescension to which He stoops in order to confer a grace upon the loftiest of
His saints. He has as it were to humble Himself even to receive the burning worship of the purest seraphim. To what
a lowness does He bend Himself in order to accept the love of the Immaculate heart of Mary ! Without repeated

meditation on the divine perfections we cannot fathom the depth of our own nothingness, the horror of our own
baseness, the inconceivable pertinacity' of our sin; neither can we realize, not only the littleness of our love which is
so little that the poorest words give an exaggerated impression of it, but also to what extent God is free from

obligations to us. and to how little, little at least compared with the immensity of His actual mercies, our nature can

lay claim as its due because it is a creature. Yet an accurate spiritual apprehension of all these things is needful
before, we can appreciate the mysterious magnificence of the rewards of God. Only let us remember, for life is short
and there is much to do. that right down through the abyss of our own nothingness lies the shortest road to the

contemplation of the divine Beauty.
While I stand in the presence of these mighty recompenses of our Creator, I am abashed by their exceeding
magnitude, and all things else which I otherwise should love become insignificant and go almost out of sight. I feel

that I have no words to tell these great things, no thoughts to think them; and yet it seems to me as if the way in
which God repays our love was something even more wonderful than the rewards He gives. To see God face to face
is the crowning joy of heaven; to be sensibly near Him is the greatest joy of earth; and He never seems so near as in
the way in which He deals with us, His demeanor towards us, His manner, His address, His courtesy, if I may for the
moment use such words. At first sight it is altogether so unlike what we should have expected; and yet on second

thoughts so right, so suitable, both to His greatness and to our littleness, while at the same time its being right and
suitable does not in the least detract from its gratuitous condescension. Nay, it rather enhances it. In truth, God’s
goodness is unlike any other subject of human contemplation; for the more reasonable it appears to us, the more
surprising does it grow, as if, even now and here, it partook somewhat of the eternal freshness of the Beatific Vision.
When the Creator of the world entered it in order to redeem it, in the obscure midnight, in a gloomy cavem,
as the Babe of Bethlehem, it was an advent such as took the natural speculations of men by surprise, and was even a

hindrance to their belief. So is it with God’s demeanor towards us in the world, He is not like a great king. He is

unlike one both in the frequency of His visits, or rather in His abiding presence, and also in the absence of pomp and

notice when He comes. There is no attitude of command, no obvious graciousness of condescension. Blessed be His
Majesty! His manner is not that of a master, nor even of an equal; it is rather that of an inferior mingled with the
sweetness and fidelity of an earthly mother. When He blesses us. assists us, gives us graces, soothes our sorrows, or

dries our tears, He does it all with an amazing tenderness, almost with a sort of bashful humility, like one whom we
are laying under an obligation by accepting his services at all. The attentions of His love are also so minute, that no
service, or half-service, or transitory intentions of ours, escape His divine yet just exaggerations. In our past life

there are thousands of forgotten prayers, thousands of resisted temptations; but God has forgotten none of them. He
repays them with a mindfulness which, unless it also awakens love, can hardly fail to by our faith. He must indeed

desire our love, who tempts us with an eternal reward for a cup of cold water given in His name. He repays us also
variously and with a view to our tastes and desires, so as to enhance to each of us the value of our own particular
reward. He repays us superabundantly. At first sight it seems as if there was an absence of all similitude between the

service and the reward, both in degree and kind. Nevertheless there is to His wisdom an exact and unerring

proportion in His recompense, which, while the manner of it is a mystery to us, is at the same time an
encouragement to us to love Him more, as if He had affectionately and condescendingly put it in our own power to
have as much of heaven and of Him as we please. Last of all, throughout the whole proceeding, it is in reality love,

and not services, which He repays, not the acts we do, so much as the spirit in which we do them. Can we conceive
of a maimer more attractive, of an affection more winning, of a solicitude more delightful, of a gratitude more
touching, of an unselfishness more sweetly reproachful, of a generosity' more overwhelming, of a magnificence

more delicate, than this demeanor of the Creator towards His creatures? And it is none other than the Creator, the
Boundless Ocean of Being, the abyss of unfathomable perfections, who to the gigantic stretch of His omnipotence
can wed these ineffable delicacies of minutest love! And it is to us that all this is done, to us who had no rights to
begin with, and who have again and again forfeited all rights we could imagine might be ours, to us who in our
secret hearts know ourselves to be what we are, more unspeakably wicked than any one of our fellow creatures
suspects that we can be ! And the love which is thus repaid, alas ! what a mockery of love it is !

Let us think once more of heaven. How cheerfully the thought of that bright home can humble us! What
can be more wonderful than the contrast between man paying God on earth, and God paying man in heaven? We
have looked at man’s side in the last chapter. We have seen the misery and unworthiness, the scantiness and the

meanness, the coldness, the reluctance, the distraction, and the ungracious delays of the Creature with the Creator.
And then comes death! A good death is one in which we feel that hitherto we have never done any good at all, but in
which we seriously, though with alanning self-distmst, intend, if we survive, to begin to do good. And considering
the greatness of God and the vastness of our obligations to Him, this is by no means a fiction even to the saints. We
die, and in dying we fall into the hands of His justice, and there, fresh wonder of creative love! we find far more

than mercy. Our guardian angel could scarcely let us into heaven if he wished, were he the judge. The Mother of

mercy would have to borrow the Sacred Heart of Jesus, before she could see things as He sees them, and award a
crown to us. If there could be shame in heaven, how should we be overwhelmed with confusion appearing there with
the miserable tribute of our interested love and of our wisely selfish fear!

But how does the Creator, the King of kings, receive His tribute? He bursts forth all divinely into triumph,
because a half-converted sinner has condescended to accept His grace. He bids the angels rejoice, and holds high
feast through all the empyrean heaven, not because He has evolved some new and wonder-stirring system out of

nothing, not because He has called into being some million-worlded nebula, and cast upon it such an effulgence of
His beauty as throws all the rest of His creation into the shade—but because one wretched, unworthy, offensive man
has, after an immense amount of divine eloquence and pleading, consented to take the first step towards not being

damned—because one outcast of human society, who has drunk his fill of every vice, has graciously condescended

for fear of hell to accept heaven! These are the Creator’s triumphs, these the ovations of everlasting and of all-wise
mercy. And God can do nought unworthy of Himself. He cannot demean Himself. Abasement is impossible to Him.
Nothing can sully His incomparable purity. Nothing can He do which is not infinitely worthy of Him, worthy of His

power. His wisdom, and His goodness. And therefore tins triumph, this feast of angels, over one sinner that does
penance, is altogether worthy of the adorable majesty of the eternally blessed God! Oh who would not weep over the
wonders of creative love, mystery’ after mystery, at every turn giving out fresh treasures of tenderness, compassion,

and magnificence?
Watch that soul which is now just entering heaven. Can anything be more amazing than the caresses which

God is lavishing upon it? Heaven itself has almost grown brighter by its entrance, and the anthems of the redeemed
have sounded forth with a more full sonorous melody. Maiy on her throne has been filled with joy, while an exulting
thrill of sympathy ran through all the angelic multitudes. And why do they rejoice? Because there is a new joy for
God, an-other glory for His complacency to rest on. It is the salvation of that soul which has just entered heaven.

Some fifty years of the full use of reason it lived on earth. The world was its delight, wealth almost its idol. It drank
its fill of various pleasures, and thought not of His goodness out of which they come. Many times the divine law
came across that man’s path, and when it did. he straightway, and with little reflection, transgressed it. He loved

luxury, denied himself nothing, and was not over-bountiful to the poor. He was surrounded by comforts, as a city is
compassed by its walls. He had sorrows and troubles, who has not? But they were light and infrequent. The world

smiled upon its votary'. He was popular with Iris fellows. He had all that his indolent ambition cared to have; and

best of all. he was blessed with almost unbroken health. There was at last almost the weariness of satiety about his
undeviatingly prosperous fortune. Disease came, and Iris old joys ceased to be joys at all. He had nothing then to
tempt him from God. but everything to draw him nearer to Him. Fear also, with the belief of hell, wrought strongly
upon him; and by the help of priest and sacrament, together with the grace of a sorrow easily within reach of his
faith and fear, he put together in some ten days the dregs of half a century spent in the service of the devil and the
world; and he has now gone through a very circuitous path in purgatory to heaven to offer God this refuse of his
probation.
And heaven keeps feast for this ! And the great Creator takes almost with avidity the leavings of the world,

counting for chivalry’ the querulous helplessness of a sin-enfeebled soul. There is not one word of reproach, one look
of discontent. Coupled with His extraordinary mindfulness of minutest services, God is seemingly forgetful how all
good is but His own grace. Moreover. He is as it were blind to the fact that the man was after all doing what was
best for himself, and when he could hardly help himself, and even then with amazingly little of self-indignation or of
righteous zeal. See! His arms are round that deathbed penitent. He is telling him the secrets of His love. He is
sealing for him with a Father’s kiss the eternity of his beatitude. That man will lie for ever bathed in the beautiful

light of the Godhead!
[footnote: This imaginary case, put forward here as a mere theological possibility, is given as actual fact in some
of the revelations of the saints. I will cite two, one a case of contrition and the other of attrition, which are exact
parallels, and easy of access. The first is the case of Lord Stourton, given in Rosignoli’s Maraviglie di Dio nell’
Anime del Purgatorio, parte I, Maraviglia v. The second is the famous revelation of the “Least in Heaven” made to
St Mechtildis, Libro della Spiritual Grazia, lib. i, cap. 51. This last has before now played its part in controversy.
See Siuri. Theologia Positiva-Dogmatica de Novissimis, Tractatus v, cap. 4, Sect. 55, where, however, the reference
to St Mechtildis is given wrongly. From certain observations I incline to believe that contrition is a commoner
deathbed grace than attrition. If this be so. it is another example of the way in which the excesses of God’s mercy
further the interests of His exceeding sanctity. When attrition is given as a deathbed grace it is most likely the result
of an earnest endeavor after contrition. I cannot fancy a dying sinner, roused to a sense of sin, trying only for
attrition. Still less can I believe that he would succeed in obtaining it. The very idea seems to me incongruous with
real earnestness, almost an evidence of an unchanged heart with no honest wish to be changed. A large proportion of

deathbed conversions are cases of men who from untoward outward circumstances and inadequate instruction have
their souls for the first time really roused to a sense of sin and a right view of God, when lying on their bed of death,
with the priest by their sides.]

Is this credible? Should we dare to believe it, if it were not of faith? O wonderful, wonderful God! of whom
each hour is telling us something new, making premature perpetual heaven in our hearts! It is an old history, that

love makes the Creator seem to put Himself below His own creatures: it is an old history. yet it surprises us almost
to tears each morning as we wake. So here we come to a Servant-God, like the Incarnate Servant-Savior, Jesus

Christ. And yet there are men to whom God is a difficulty ! There are men who think hard thoughts of Him, whose
only trial of us is in the prodigious excesses of His love, which wearies and outstrips at times the slowness of our
faith. O Heavenly Father! it is the greatness of Thy goodness which bewilders our humility by mocking our know­
ledge of ourselves; and that is the only difficulty7 we find in Thee. May it grow still more difficult, still more bey ond
our grasp, for therein is our eternal life!

What then is the conclusion to which we come about this repaying of our love by God? It is simply this. In
the first place, He has made His glory coincide with our interests. Secondly. from a privilege He lowers love into a
precept, and this one act is a complete revelation of Himself. Thirdly, He so puts our interests into His, that it is hard
to look at His interests only, without falling into heresy. Do these conclusions solve the five questions we have been
asking? No! but they lead to the one answer of all the five; only that, ending as we began, the answer is itself a

mystery7. St John states it; no one can explain it; earth would be hell without it; purgatory is paradise because of it;
we shall live upon it in heaven, yet never leam all that is in it—God is love!

BOOK III
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED

The First Chapter
THE EASINESS OF SALVATION
L ’estat de la redemption vaut centfois mieux que celuy de l’innocence.—St Francis de Sales.

THE result of the preceding inquiry has been at the very least to satisfy us as to the fact that God loves us, and as to
the nature and character of His love. We have seen that divine love is at once creative, redeeming, sanctifying,

uncreated, and without respect of persons. As creative it was not content to call angels and men out of nothing, but it
constituted them at the outset in a state of grace, which was not connatural to them, and was in no way due to their
nature. As redeeming, it pursued men when they fell; and at no less an expense than the Incarnation of One of the
Divine Persons, and with every circumstance of attraction and prodigality, it bought them back again when they had

sold themselves as slaves to evil. As sanctifying, it is incessant in its visitations of grace, and marvelous in the
heights of sanctity to which it can raise those whom sin had sunk so low. As uncreated, it is especially astonishing

and adorable, and naturally includes, and while it includes surpasses, all created ties and all diversifies of human
love. As without respect of persons, it enables us to repose our trust, not only on the all-efficacious power of God,
but upon that beautiful justice and exquisite fidelity which are the true foundations of our love.

In this love of God we have already passed an eternity. In this love we have lived without beginning. He
has never seen His glorious Word, but He has seen us in Him, and the mutual love of Father and of Son from the
first has scattered its brightness on our foreseen lives. There is something awful in such enduring love, something
which overshadows the spirits of creatures so capricious and inconstant as ourselves. It frightens us that we should
have been loved eternally. At the same time what must be the necessary efficacy of an eternal love? Here is a very

mine of golden consolation. He who has not ceased to love us from forever, will not lightly withdraw His love. He
will not easily surrender to His enemies a creature whom He has bome in His bosom like a nurse from the
beginning. Into the least of His blessings He pours an endless love. There are no infirmities which He disdains, no

prayers which He disregards. He cannot love otherwise than with an overflowing love, rewarding the most trivial
actions, canonizing the most transitory wishes, and placing around every step of life such a retinue of graces, such
an attendance of angels, such an apparatus of sacraments, that the self-will must be strong indeed which can break

away from God and lose itself.
He apparently consults our interests rather than His own, by making in reality the last identical with the
first. His first thought for sinners is to make repentance easy and light, and strange indeed are the things to which
His wisdom can persuade His justice, or His goodness bend His sanctity. By His own order our liberty seems to take

precedence of His law, while the whole of creation is apparently disposed for the convenience of our salvation. The
increase of this love depends upon ourselves. On this side the grave we can have it when we will, and there is
always grace to enable us to ask it and to will it. The more we ask the more He will give, and reckon the obligation

to be on His side rather than on ours. All that is wanted of us is, to take God’s side, to love what He loves, to hate
what He hates, and, to sum up all in one word, to belong to Jesus Christ.
This is a summary of the results at which we have arrived, and it brings us to the conclusion of the second

division of our treatise. In the first we inquired what it was to be a creature and what it was to have a Creator, and
we saw that creation meant and only could mean love. Full of the knowledge we had thus acquired, we proceeded to
ask five questions, concerning the principal mysteries of this divine love, which from its eternal hiding-place in God
came into sight at creation, and we saw that our position as creatures made it important to us to have these questions
answered. But it may he objected. All this is so much special pleading for God. It does not state man’s case fairly,
because it does not state it completely. There are certain phenomena which are practical objections to this view, and

they have hardly been considered. This is what may be said. I do not own the justice of it, because, as I have said
before, if I understand rightly what it is to be a creature, and what it is to have a Creator, I do not see how the
creature can have any side at all. It appears that God’s side is also the creature’s side, and that he can have no other.

If we imagine for ourselves an immensely benevolent despot, in possession of the most legitimate claims upon our
obedience, but bound by the rectitude of his own character, as well as by our rights, to the exercise of commutative
justice, and call him the Creator, under such a being we should obviously have a side of our own, and a point of

view belonging to us. But that is no adequate description of God. It is only an uneasy intellectual creation of our
own. But, if there be a chance of gaining any more love for God from the hearts of His creatures, most willingly

should we engage in the task of meeting these objections, the more willingly because the soil to be turned up is so
rich, concerning, as it does, the Creator’s love of His creatures, that it will bloom with fresh and fresh blossoms
almost before the plough has furrowed up the surface.
Our object, however, is strictly a practical one. Hence we are not going to enter into any of the abstruse
questions about the origin of evil, or the existence of hell, or the permission of idolatty, or the eternal destiny of

those outside the Church. We are speaking to the children of the Church, and however dark such questions may be
to them, or however worthy of their most vigorous intellectual research, they have no right to he practical difficulties
to a Catholic in the pursuit of holiness. Strictly speaking we have no right to have any difficulties at all; for a
speculative difficulty can hardly become a practical one to men who take the teaching of the Church on faith; and
men who do not—how shall they dream of attaining holiness at all? Nevertheless there are some questions which, if

not without fault of ours, at least without grievous fault, tease and molest us, and become, not unfrequently,
sometimes the sources and at other times the hotbeds of temptation. Of these we may select three especially, because
in handling them we shall implicitly and indirectly answer many more. The first is the difficulty of salvation; the

second, the ultimate fate of the great multitude of the faithful; and the third, the perplexing question of woridliness;
and these will occupy this and the two following chapters.
It is objected that all that has been said of the creative love of God would lead to the conclusion that it is

easy to be saved, or that if it is not easy, the case has not been stated in its entireness. To this objection it does not
seem a sufficient answer to say, that God is not less good, but that the awful malice and corruption of man’s will are
too strong even for His will to save us. For, though it is true that God cannot both leave us free and constrain us to
be saved, yet His redeeming love might be expected to make such allowances for the unhappy degradation of man

by sin, as to make his salvation not a work of more than ordinary difficulty. Surely these allowances are implied in
the very notion of redemption. If heaven be not easy of access, neither its beauty nor the generosity with which it is

offered are such motives of love as they would be on the contrary supposition. The most perfectly satisfactory

answer to the objection, if it be true, is, that salvation is easy. We are speaking only to and of believers, and are not
concerning ourselves with a secret which God has reserved for Himself, and into which we do not attempt to pene­
trate even by guesses, because it has no practical bearing upon our own sendee of God. To a believer salvation is

easy, so easy in fact that to each individual soul in the Church the chances are greatly in favor of his salvation. This
may not be true of him at any given moment, as when he has just relapsed into sin, or when he is enfeebled by a long
willful captivity to sinful habits; but looking at his life as a whole, and considering things in the long run, it is true
that the chances are greatly in favor of his salvation; and I have my misgivings that I am even thus understating his
prospects of success. His life must be a life of efforts; but the efforts are easy, easy in themselves, easy in their

auxiliaries, easy in both the prospect of a future and the enjoyment of a present reward. What else is the meaning of
our Lord’s words: Come to Me, all you that labor, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up My yoke upon
you. and learn of Me, because I am meek, and humble of heart; and you shall find rest to your souls. For My yoke is

sweet, and My burden light, [footnote: St Matt, xi, 28-29.] Or again, what can be more distinct than the words of St
John: For this is the charity of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not heavy. For
whatsoever is bom of God overcometh the world; and this is the victory which overcometh the world, our faith?
[footnote: St John v, 3-4.]

The first point then for us to consider is the easiness of salvation in itself. Let no one be afraid, that if the
affirmative of this proposition be proved, it will make any of us sluggish and indifferent in the pursuit of Christian
perfection. Divine troth is continually exerting an influence and putting forth an attraction, which baffle and deride
the guesses and predictions of our human criticism. If the view be true, it will lead men to love God who do not love
Him now, and it will lead those who love Him already to love Him more. It is not the fear of hell which draws men
to aim at perfection, nor is it the ambition to be saints which buoys them up through mortification, weariness, and

prayer. It is the beauty of God, which has touched them and taken them captive; and whatever discloses more of that
beauty, will be but a stronger attraction enabling them to scale higher summits. So while our inquiry will give us
sweet and hopeful views of sinners, it will also humble, edify, and stimulate ourselves, if we are trying to advance in
the ways of God.

Let us then trace from the first the process by which God vouchsafes to save a soul. Not many days elapse
after a child of Catholic parents is bom. before he is carried to the baptismal font. There by the almost momentary
action of pouring water in the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, the child is regenerated. Nothing can
be more easy, or more instantaneous. Yet let us consider all that is involved in an infant’s baptism. Not only are the
eternal consequences of the fall to his particular soul in one instant destroyed, but the child becomes entitled to the
most stupendous privileges and inheritance, which would not have been due to him naturally, even if Adam had not

fallen. He is at once raised to a far higher state than one of pure nature. He is the child of God. The divine nature has
been communicated to him by sanctifying grace. Extraordinary possibilities of spiritual developments and earnests

of everlasting life have been implanted in him by certain mysteriously infused habits of the theological virtues, faith,
hope, and charity, perhaps of the other virtues also.* Seven other supernatural habits, standing in the same relation
to the actual impulses of the Holy Ghost as the other infused habits stand to actual grace, and which bear the name

of the Gifts of the Holy Ghost, are also infused into him, containing in themselves spiritual provisions for the greater
occasions of his life, for Iris more intimate intercourse with God. and. if so be. for the magnificent operations of
heroic sanctity'. Meanwhile, if he dies before the use of reason, there is secured to him the eternal vision of God,
with all the intellectual glories of an immortal spirit, whose intelligence had never been developed upon earth at all.

Now all this haste, if we may so speak, with which the divine mercy seizes the infant’s soul, refusing to wait for his
consent or till he can accept God's great gift by a rational act of lus own. implies such a determined and exuberant
love on the part of the Creator, that it is not easily to be conceived that the rest of the process of salvation shall not

partake of the same character of divine impatience and facility.

[footnote: Benedict XIV (de Canonisai., iii. 21) says it is as yet a disputed point whether there is at Baptism an
infusion of the moral virtues together with the theological. St Thomas (1. 2. qu. 63, art. 3) discusses the question
whether any moral virtues are given to us by infusion, and he answers it affirmatively, because it is necessary that
effects should correspond proportionately to their causes and principles. (Cf. Salmanticenses. in cursu, iii. tr. ii, disp.
3.) Scotus, on the other hand, denies the infusion of the moral virtues (in iii. sent., dist. xxxvi. qu. unie., art. 3). A
gloss on the decree of Clement V in the council of Vienne gives these opposite opinions, and the question of the
connection between the habits of the theological and moral virtues is left open, because of the authority of those
doctors who do not admit the infusion of the moral virtues in infant baptism. See also, the author’s Essay on
Canonization, pp. 48. 49.]
The baptized child, when he comes to tire use of reason, finds himself under a code of laws, the object of
which is to secure his salvation by prescribing the conditions on which it is to be obtained. These are the ten
commandments of God and the six precepts of the Church. They are few in number and easy of observance, at least
easy under ordinary circumstances; and on the occasions when they are difficult, quite marvelous assistances of

supernatural grace are prepared and heaped upon the soul. The man finds himself in a world of many pleasures, and,

of these, comparatively few are sinful; and if the world is full of dangers too. it is always to be remembered that the
fatal enemy of the soul, mortal sin. cannot lie in ambush for it or take it by surprise. Full deliberation and advertence
are necessary to the commission of a mortal sin. When we think who God is and ponder His eternal truth and

ineffable sanctity, it must be a wonder to us that any sin is venial, that no number of venial sins can make a mortal
sin. and that no habits of venial sin, however inveterate, unworthy, deliberate, or against special lights, can of

themselves destroy the soul. It is wonderful that a man can be graciously visited by the inspirations of the Holy
Spirit, can feel assured in his own mind that such and such practices or self-denials are really the desire of God in his
case, and yet be also sure that those inspirations are not intended as a law. and the resistance of them therefore not a
sin, though all want of generosity with God will ultimately and indirectly work its way to sin. Furthermore the con­

dition of the creature seems to be untruthfulness. Everything is false around us. full of excuse, pretence, and

insincerity. Yet falsehood is the very opposite of God. who is eternal truth, and it is equally the characteristic of the
evil one whom our Lord Himself has named the father of lies. Nevertheless lying is a venial sin. No number of lies,
however willful, so long as they are not sins against justice also, can of themselves destroy the soul. Surely this
doctrine is full of difficulty.
The whole subject of sin abounds with truths of this description, which are more trying to tire faith than the
mysteries either of the Holy Trinity' or the Eucharist. Thus the remission of venial sin, one of the most interesting
questions in the whole range of theology, appears to be so easy as to be almost unconscious, and to be quite as
incessant as its commission. Blessings, holy water, other sacramentals, the sign of the cross, the name of Jesus,

passing acts of sorrow, nay, some have said, any lifting up of the mind to God. and behold! the guilt of these sins

falls from us like a withered leaf from an autumnal tree. And what hosts of venial sins, forgotten and unrc periled of,
may not a man possibly take with him into the next world, as matter for the fires of purgatory. and wliich can only
delay, and not prohibit, his entrance into glory! All this does not look as if God were a taskmaster, or as if heaven

were only for the few. Indeed the way in which He can show all tliis leniency and make these singular allowances
for our infirmity, and at the same time secure purity of heart and real love of Himself, is the most astonishing
phenomenon which falls under the observation of those who have to minister to the consciences of men. How men

can be so very good at the same time that they are so very bad, it is not easy to explain, while experience leaves us in
no doubt whatever of the fact.

What is said of the doctrine of venial sin may be said also of the doctrine of intention. What duty could
seem more simple on the part of a creature than a perpetual application of mind and heart to liis Creator? We are not
our own, and we are not left to ourselves. We are working under our Father's eye. and it is for Him that we are

working, and at His appointed work. Hence the road to sanctity is by the way of actual intentions for the glory of
God. It should be eveiyone’s prime occupation to make liis intentions actual. All other virtues will come along with
this. Surprising treasures of grace will be unlocked to us if we attempt it. Tliis one practice will turn darkness into
light all over our souls, and no sinful habit, however inveterate, can exist in the atmosphere of tliis most glorious of

all spiritual exercises. Yet does anyone believe that an actual intention is absolutely necessary to the goodness of an
action? Does God get no glory from man’s free-will, except when man there and then intends it? It may be a
question how long a virtual intention lasts, to what extent it can inform and invigorate our actions, and insinuate a

supernatural character into them, or what amount of original intensity is required in the morning's intention to give it
momentum enough to push its way through the crowded actions of an entire solar day. All these may be questions.

But no one maintains that any such assiduous application to God as is a notable difficulty to our infirm and easily
distracted nature is at all necessary to salvation.
Such are the strange relations in which our baptized child finds himself to his Creator as he grows up. and
life broadens out before him. But there are graver matters still than venial sins, together with apparently countless

untruths, neglect of inspirations, or the paucity of actual intentions for God’s glory. There is the question of mortal
sin. It is a fearful thing for the creature to turn away wholly from the Creator, and we can well understand how it

should at once destroy the life of grace in the soul. Grace can live with any quantity of venial sin. So long as the
eclipse of God in the soul is not total, so long with amazing condescension and as it were a blind love of souls does
He continue to dwell within us. But when the eclipse is total, what can follow but total darkness also? Tliis seems

inevitable, and yet it is not so. Notwithstanding the horrible malice of mortal sin, as being fully perceived and

deliberately admitted, the grand gift of faith, that almost unfailing power of coming right again, survives the
commission of a mortal sin. The life of hope does not become extinct; nay, it requires a fresh, distinct, and most

difficult mortal sin to destroy that supernatural habit, which gives the soul the buoyancy and elasticity requisite to its
conversion. Now is it quite easy to see how two supernatural habits, two heavenly powers, two divine elements, not

natural to man, but gratuitously infused into him at Baptism, are not forfeited and expelled by the extinction of the
life of grace in the soul by mortal sin? God is eclipsed in the soul; hell has begun in it, hell's worst punishment, the
loss of God; and there are two celestial virtues preaching in the darkness still, conspiring against the reign of evil,

holding their fortresses with magnanimous patience, it maybe for long, long years of siege, and attracting to
themselves incessant crowds of volunteers in the shape of actual graces. Is not all this wonderful? Is it compatible
with the theory that salvation is difficult? Is not mortal sin itself, against its will, a new revelation of the pertinacious
love of God?
But more still. Of the thousands of souls in the world today, unhappily immersed in the gulfs of mortal sin,

is there one whom a whole multitude of beautiful actual graces is not soliciting to return to God? Oh such pathetic
invitations to come back to Him, such fair lights of God’s tender compassion riding over the dark soul like the white
sunbeams over a stormy landscape, such sweet remorses, sharp, but veiy. veiy sweet, such cold sobering thoughts of
future punishment, such wise artful alternations of crosses and consolations, such lifelike speakings of dead books,

such barbed words of preachers, such solemn eloquence of the deaths of those we love, such a nameless sensible
thraldom of God and grace and heavenly presences, wliich we never can shake off—all these, now with a veiy
clamor of assaulting armies, now with low. soft, and song-like pleadings, are the forces of actual grace, wliich have
never been drawn off from before the gates of the heart, however long they may have been obstinately barred
against God by a countless garrison of mortal sins.

But the most remarkable feature of the baptized soul’s position with regard to mortal sin is the perpetual,
unlimited iteration of the sacrament of Penance. That there should be such a sacrament at all, after the completeness
and magnificence of Baptism, is a miracle of divine love. But that the Precious Blood of the Incarnate Word should
be always at hand, like a public fountain at a road-side, open, gratuitous, and ever flowing, for the convenience of all
passers-by. could not be believed, if the Church did not assure us of it. Our sheer inability’ to comprehend a love so
great as God’s would make simple Novatians of us, if we had not the Church to inform the littleness of our own
conceptions by the magnificence of her dogmas. Is it easy to imagine the mercy which will absolve from different
mortal sins the same soul perhaps five hundred times in ten or twenty' years, and some thousands of times in tire
course of a long life? Yet this is not an extravagant or fabulous case. Then again think of the completeness of the

absolution. Each time it destroys the guilt of the sin completely, so that it can never rise again, never bring back,
even to the relapsed sinner, its consequences of everlasting punishment, while at the same time it wakens to
vigorous life again merits that have been killed a hundred times by sin. How special, how ingenious, how peculiar,

how unlike anything human is this process; and yet on reflection how naturally outflowing from the divine
Perfections!
No kind, no number, no duration of sins impede the facility of absolution. Its efficacy is alway s

instantaneous. The word is spoken, and the work is done. But what is still more marvelous is the little which is
required for absolution, the ordinary fidelity of the confession, the positive imperfection of the sorrow, the moderate
resoluteness of the purpose of amendment! Supernatural as all these must be, the confession, the sorrow, and the
purpose, and depending for their validity on certain theological requirements, yet are they not among the commonest
graces in the Church? Is attrition a romantic flight of generosity', or the purpose of amendment akin to the heroism of
marty rdom? Surely these requisites for absolution seem completely within the compass of our infirmity. And after

all it is God Himself who is supplying more than half of them Himself by grace. In tmth this inquiry into the

easiness of salvation is beginning to fill us with fear, because it is carrying us so far. But might it not have been
expected that as Penance is more troublesome than Baptism, so each time that the sacrament of Penance is repeated,
the requisites for absolution might have been increased, that the sinner should have bidden higher for pardon after

every fall, and that there should have been at least so much punishment for his relapses as consists in an increase of

his difficulties in winning God back to him again. Yet we know that this is not at all the case. The habitual sinner
and he who has once fallen, the sinner of a day and the sinner of half a century—to all, the simple requisites for

absolution remain the same. Nay even where the confessor exacts from the penitent more convincing evidence of his
repentance, it is only the confessor's inevitable infirmity as a creature, and as such unable to read the heart; God
leaves the light conditions of absolution just what they were before. If all this were not among God’s daily mercies,
how inscrutable would it not seem to us; but we are obliged without fault of ours to tread God’s common mercies

underfoot, because Vie has so profusely strewn the whole earth with them, that there is not room to move.
There still remains a debt due to God from remitted sin, a debt of temporal punishment. This men may be
content to bear, seeing that salvation has been made so easy to them, and the malice of their sins has been so great.

But God will not suffer this. Straight from the confessional the Church leads her son into the fertile and exuberant
region of Indulgences. There the Precious Blood is made to flow even over the temporal consequences of forgiven
sin. God would not stop at mere salvation. It is His way to overflow and to exceed. There shall not be a disability in
the sinner’s path, not a relic of his own foolish covenants with sin, which shall be left to molest him. Nay the relics
of sin shall have a strange sacrament to themselves in the Extreme Unction of the dying. But even this is not enough.

Souls must be saved, and the saved multiplied, and the heavenly banquet crowded, even if the constraints of fire be

needed to anneal the hastier works of grace. Therefore is it that the vast realms of purgatore are lighted up with the
flames of vindictive love. Thus a huge amount of imperfect charit} shall bring forth its thousands and its tens of

thousands for heaven. Redemption shall cover the whole earth, and be plentiful indeed, and the very unworthiness
and shortcomings of the creature shall only still more provoke the prodigality of the Blood of the Creator. Oh the
mercy of those cleansing fires! What could have devised them but a love that was almost beside itself for
expedients? Yet even these fires the sinner can avoid, if he please, and without the difficulties of heroic charity. For
they shall be made to cast their light even upon earth before their time, and the Precious Blood shall be turned upon
them by Indulgences, and they shall be quenched before their blistering tongues have touched the sinner s soul. Oh

talk of the difficulty of salvation after this!
And what was divine love doing when we last caught a glimpse of it at work? As at first, so at last, there is
the divine impatience, the divine facility, of a Creator who seems as if He could not do without His creature. We
saw love, and it was bending over purgatory, over the net which was almost breaking with the portentous draught of
unlikely souls which it had taken. Mary was moving on her throne; the saints were filling heaven with their
intercessions; angels were ascending and descending every moment: mass bells were ringing all over the earth, and
beads being told, and numberless indulgences sealed in thousands of communions, and alms flowing in to the poor,

and penances and pilgrimages being performed; for divine love called loudly on angels, saints, and souls of mortal
men, to do violence to it, while Jesus supplied the means in His daily adorable Sacrifice and the plentiful treasury of
His Precious Blood. Our last sight of love showed it to us impatiently shortening the appointed time of those
suffering souls, and heaven and earth astir, as if some great catastrophe had happened, because God Himself seemed
as if He wished to cut short by swifter mercies that last grand consummate invention of His creative love, the quiet,
unreluctant. beautifying pains of that cleansing fire!

When God came to His creatures visibly, He scandalized them. His three and thirty years were almost a
series of scandals, taken by cold hearts at what appeared the very extravagances of His condescension. What wonder

then that a scheme of salvation so easy, so pliant, so accommodating, so full of arrangement, and so exuberant,

should be a scandal both to heretics and unbelievers? ft is the same Jesus who ate with publicans and sinners, who
pleaded with the Samaritan woman, who rewarded the humble petulance of the Sy ro-Phoenician, who acquitted the
woman taken in adultery, who absolved the Magdalene, and who carried off with Him as His first trophy to an
instantaneous paradise the thief who hung upon the Cross. And shall we call that process hard, while our Mother the

Church is maligned all day long for representing it as so easy and so large?

Look at God’s side of the question, and what can fall upon us but utter confusion, perhaps, if it were not for

His grace, utter unbelief? Let us narrow our view to the mystery of our dearest Savior’s Passion. Count it all up,
measure it in its length and breadth, fathom its depth, handle it and see what it weighs: then pray and suffer for a
while, and count and measure and fathom and handle it all again, and see how it all has grown; then pray and suffer
more, and then repeat the process; and at the end of a saintly life you will have but a superficial estimation of that
astonishing life-giving mystery'. From the sacrilegious communion and treachery of Judas to the little garden of

Gethsemane, through the brook up the nigged steep to Jerusalem, through the halls of Annas, Caiphas and Pilate,
and the courtyard of Herod, at the pillar of the scourging, in the guard room of the thorny crowning, along the way

of the Cross, up Calvary', at the nailing and the elevation, to the last cry about the ninth hour—follow the Eternal
through this appalling drama, which was all for you, all one excess of His uncontrollable creative love to save your
soul: and then put by die side of it the requirements which are of obligation, our necessary amount of love and
worship of Him, the prescribed fréquentation of the sacraments, the extent of manly effort entailed upon us. and who
can say that salvation is not easy, easy indeed to us. however hard it was upon the shoulders of the Incarnate Word.

And then at last, the Beatific Vision! Was there ever such a history ? And yet. simple in her faith, and confiding in
the inborn beauty and celestial charm of truth to protect itself, this is the Gospel which the unwearied Church is now
boldly proclaiming to the corrupt populations of the nineteenth century. as if it were a Concordat between the
Creator and the creature.

Can we say more? Or if there is more to be said, do we need to have it said? Yes! New love, more love,
unexpected love of God—we always need to know it. because we always need to love Him more and more. We

thought of salvation as easy in itself, let us now look at it as easy because of its assistances. It appears already as if
the utmost allowance had been made by God for the weakness and corruption of our nature, so as to put salvation
within easy reach of us. But to secure it still more. He has fonned alliances for us with Himself and the invisible

world, and prepared a system of auxiliaries, both outward and inward, so ingenious and wonderful, as to be a
stumbling-block to those who are not of the fold.
First and foremost among these, and entering more or less into all of them, is Grace, a various,
supernatural, potent, and unintermitting gift, about which enough has been said for the present purpose in the last

chapter. There is not a characteristic either of it or of God’s way of giving it, which does not bear upon the question
of the easiness of salvation. Let us then keep this in mind, as well as what has just been said of the easiness of

salvation in itself, while we enumerate some of those incredible aids and consolations which God has devised to
make still easier what was already so easy in itself. What Catholic is there who does not know how the four great
wants, and duties, and worships which the creature owes to the Creator, the petition of his infirmity, the intercession

of his brotherly affection, the thanksgiving of his startled speechless gratitude, the intelligent joyous
acknowledgment of God’s absolute dominion, are supplied to him, with an infinite worthiness equivalent to the
worth of the Creator Himself, in the adorable sacrifice of the Mass? The perpetual Real Presence of Jesus with His
faithful, His perseverance in the obscure tabernacle, and His frequent Benedictions, which preside over the evenings

of our toilsome days, just as Mass so beautifully fills the morning with its tight and love, so that it is Jesus all day
long, courting our society, and mingling with us with an intimacy we get to understand less, and to prize more, the
longer it is vouchsafed—surely this is enough to supematuralize the whole world, to make hard things easy, and

dark things bright, and throw an invisible armor round us which will charm our lives against the w eapons and the
wiles of hell. But what shall we say of Communion? All ideas of familiarity w ith God, of intimacy with the invisible

world, of the spiritual union of heavenly love, fail us here. The creature, trembling, bashful, eager, backward,

frightened, delighted, is bidden to kneel down, and feed, not figuratively or by faith, but with an awful bodily reality,

upon his incarnate Creator. And this eating of the Creator by the creature is the highest act of worship which he can
perform! We need not stay to follow out the many-fountained grace of a good Communion, nor to see how it
branches out into every faculty of the soul, eveiy power of the mind, every' affection of the will, even delicate

sensibility of the conscience, carrying with it secret blessings multiform and manifold, and insinuating even into
flesh and blood and bone the seeds of a glorious resurrection. And this miraculous feast on our very Creator may be.

and He loves it to be, our daily bread! And this to us. who. if we rightly appreciate our vileness, should be
astonished every morning that our common food and clothing were continued to us still.
All helps must seem little after this; yet as they are all so made fresh disclosures of creative love, we must

not pass them over. Loneliness is one of the dangers which we have to fear, because of the inability of our mortal
nature to cope with the adverse forces of the invisible world; and. to meet this danger, the provident love of God has
given us our guardian angel. Ever at our sides there is a golden life being lived. A princely spirit is there, who sees
God and enjoys the bewildering splendors of His face even there, where he is. nearer to us than the limits of our
outstretched amis. An unseen warfare is raging round our steps: but that beautiful bright spirit lets not so much as
the sound of it vex our ears. He fights for us, and asks no thanks, but hides his silent victories, and continues to gaze
on God. His tenderness for us is above all words. His office will last beyond the grave, unhl at length it merges into

a still sweeter tie of something like heavenly equality, when on the morning of the resurrection we pledge each
other, in those first moments, to an endless blessed love. Till then we shall never know from how many dangers he
has delivered us, nor how much of our salvation is actually due to him. Meanwhile he merits nothing by the
solicitudes of his office. He is beyond the power of meriting, for he has attained the sight of God. His work is simply
a work of love, because his sweet presence at our side he knows to be a part of God’s eternal and creative love
towards our particular soul.

How great a joy and how real a support it is in sorrow, to have the prayers of a saintly man! We can hardly
exaggerate the value of the blessing. To seek it is a sign of predestination. But look up to heaven! What are good
men on earth to the giant spirits there, and how many thousands and thousands are praying to our good Creator that

we may not miss of the happy end of our creation. There are our patron saints whose names we bear, the saints
whom we especially love, the saints of our order, our vocation, or our country, the saints that yvere patrons of the

holy souls whom we have liberated from purgatory, those holy souls noyv saints as yy ell: all these are like so many

beadsmen for us before the throne of the Most High Glassed in Him, as in a pellucid mirror, they see the threads of
our lives weaving their variously patterned web. They understand the purposes of God upon us. They are amazed at
the diversity and suitableness of His loving artifices and delicately suited vocations. They see the dangers yvhich
threaten us, the temptations which penetrate furthest into us, the graces which are yveakest in us, the critical
moments of life which peril us; and as they see, so do they pray. If we could but remember in our struggles yvith sin,

how we are being backed before the throne of God, we should surely spurn the tempter from us in the exulting force

of our Christian joy and the superhuman energy of the communion of saints.
The Mother of God! In what surpassing heights is she sublimely throned! Yet not a day passes in yvhich she
does not interest herself for us. A thousand times and more has she mentioned our names to God in such a syveet
persuasive way. that the Heart of Jesus sought not to resist it, though the tiring she asked were very' great for such as
we are. She has been in the secret of all the good things which have ever happened to us in life. She has our

predestination at heart far more than we have ourselves. She is ever mindful of that second maternity which dates

from Calvary, and how we cost her in the travail of her dolors a price which has no fellow except the sacrifice of her
Son, our Brother and our God. What a light does it not shed on life, to think that the same love, the nameless love,
the inexhaustible love, wherewith the heart of Mary loved her Blessed Son, is for His sake and by His own

command being poured out over us this very hour! We are living now on earth, dear to heaven, because we are

suffused with its pathetic splendors. Angels envy us a love which in their case cannot be, as ours is. identical in kind
with that which the sinless Mother had for her adorable Son. But it is not the poetry of this thought on which we
need to dwell, bright revelation as it is once more of God’s creative love, but on the real help, the substantial
support, the immense solid advantages, the positive efficacy, of this love of Mary in the matter of our salvation.
Then we have the power of prayer ourselves. We dare not dwell much on this. But of how many theological

controversies is the grace of prayer the secret and the key! The universal grace of prayer is one of the sweetest, as
well as the fullest, expressions of the doctrine of the easiness of salvation. But can prayer mean that God will give
up His own will, and accommodate it to ours? Ask, and you shall have; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall

be opened unto you. The fervent prayer of a just man is of great avail. Intellectually speaking, it is very hard to

believe in prayer; but let us spend but one week in the real earnest service of God and the exercise of a spiritual life,
and the fact, and far more than we ever surmised to be the fact, will lie before us bright beyond the brilliance of any
human demonstrations. All experience concurs with God’s written word to tell us that the immutable is changed by

prayer. The saints turn aside the great universal laws of nature by the blow of an ejaculation. Even the unexpressed
will of a soul in union with God is a power with the omnipotent Creator, and looks like what it cannot be, a limit to
His liberty. And this is always in our reach, instant, lightning-like, peremptory, and efficacious; and on its way to

heaven it unites itself with the prayer of Jesus upon earth, with the intercessions of Mary, with the appeals of all the
saints, and the earnest outcries and entreaties of the wide militant Church on earth, and thus like a beautiful storm of

supplication, like a loud-voiced litany of all creation, it breaks round the throne of God with majestic power, and the
echo is heard in our hearts almost before the inward prayer is breathed, and the sounds of blustering temptation are
hushed within, and the big drops of the impetuous rain of grace are falling thick and fast upon us. ft will be one of

the joys of heaven to leam the secret of the power of prayer. But now it is a great abyss to the rocky edge of which

we climb and look over, and all is sonorous darkness, and turn giddy, and recover not our senses until we kneel
down and adore the one only supreme, infinitely lovely, and unspeakably adorable will of God.

Even dead things have a wizard life put into them, and help us on our road to heaven. Dumb tilings have a
voice, and inanimate things lay strong hands on us. and turn us round to God. The Spirit of God is hiding
everywhere, so that the world is an enchanted place, and all the enchantment is for God. Books, sermons, services,
scenery, and the examples of those around us, sorrows, joys, hopes, fears, winds and waves, heat and cold, animals

and plants—strange powers are touching them at unexpected moments, and they electrify us with thoughts of God,
nay often with keen contacts of His presence. All these tilings teach us one truth, and that one truth is in itself an
amazing help, that it is the will of God to each one of us that we should be saved eternally. And are not all the
chances blessedly in favor of the accomplishment of that dear will?

We have already considered the sacraments of Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharist. But there are other

sacraments which deserve special notice as auxiliaries to us in tire work of our salvation. Just when boyhood is
taking us out into the world, and when the first-fruits of our young independence are at once so dangerous and so
dear, the sacrament of Confinnation steps in, seals up the grace of our Baptism, fills us with the one grace which at

that season we need above all others, the gift of fortitude, tries to be beforehand with the world, and enrolls us in the
actual militia of God, so that, in addition to our former character of His sons, we have now the further character of
being His soldiers, and are placed in a peculiar way under the light, the guidance, and the love of the Third Person of
the Most Holy Trinity. Nothing can be more opportune or more complete than this sacrament of force.
There are few sources of grace in life more plentiful than marriage, both because of the abundance of its
joys, and also because of its innumerable retinue of trials. It makes or mars the happiness of the majority of men,

and it is one of the most active powers on earth in fostering or in frustrating the work of God within the soul. Now
that we are used to the thought, it seems more natural and fitting that our Lord should have exalted this domestic

contract to the exceeding dignity of a Christian sacrament. Yet, beforehand, who would have dreamed of such a
thing? Possibly the souls are countless whom this very sacrament has saved, and whom that state of life would have
been more likely to min than to save, had it not been for its sacramental grace. In no respect does religion so boldly
encroach upon the world as in making marriage a sacrament; it is almost the longest reach and the most determined
grasp of our sweet Savior’s arm, when He was bent to rescue His dear souls from the fiery ordeal of the world.

Death too, with its unknown necessities, must have a sacrament which it can call its own, as well to finish
the demolition of sin, as to anoint the failing warrior with a heavenly unguent for his last dire combat, and enable
him in defiance of earthly calculations to elude the hold which the unseen powers of evil lay upon him in that hour.

If we ever need help, will it not be in that dreadful agony; for neither love nor earthly power can help us then? With
many, doubtless, the battle has gone hard, though they who stood around neither heard nor saw the mortal wrestle,
and with many it was the secret strength of that holy oil, the hidden operation of that sacramental grace, which

turned the scale, and consigned to the Good Shepherd’s arm that sheep which is now His own for ever. Must not
God mean us to be saved, when there is not a conjuncture in our fortune, not a winding in the road of life, but at the
turn we find Him waiting with some strange beautiful invention of love, the very mechanism of which none but an
all-wise artist could have contrived?

The supernatural power, which God confers upon virtuous actions, is also a remarkable assistance to us in
the work of our salvation. It is like adding power a hundredfold to the machines and tools of the mechanic. Here
again God does not look to the importance or solemnity of the action, but to the purity of intention with which it is

performed. Each pious act, however trivial, has three supernatural forces bestowed upon it. There is, first of all, the
force of impétration by which, even while we are unconscious and forgetful of it, our prayers acquire a new vigor

and exercise a greater influence over the adorable will of God. When we consider how much we want from Him,
and how almost our whole life must needs be spent in the attitude of petition, even when we are not formally and
directly praying, when we reflect how our veiy vileness is an incessant supplication to the greatness of our Creator,
we shall see how this mysterious power of impétration, hung upon our lives, must aid us in attaining heaven. Of

ourselves it would seem as if we were the most unlikely creatures to be heard, relapsed rebels against the majesty of
God, and even when we return to our duty, surrendering only on jealous conditions, and with a hundred mean re­
serves. But this power of impétration makes us really worthy to be heard, and is a sort of invisible beauty glowing in
our lives on earth, anticipating that consummate loveliness which gives tire interceding saints such power in heaven.
Not less wonderful is the power of meriting which grace communicates to our good works, as though the

Heart of Jesus were supposed to animate each one of them, and the infinite worth of His Precious Blood were
secretly folded up within them. We have seen how magnificent the rewards of heaven are, and yet one obscure and
momentary good work, full of the love of God, and fair to look at because of the purity of its intention, has only to

settle but for one instant upon the cross of Christ and thence wing its way to heaven, where its merit has such
transcending power as to pass the guards and open the gates of the citadel of the King of kings. See then in what a
condition this places us as regards our salvation. Earth is strewn so thickly with the materials of meriting, that all

day long we have nothing to do but to gather them up in armfuls, as the poor gather firewood in the forest, and even
with less toil than theirs. Grace is superabundant and incessant and universal. We can hardly get out of the way of it,
if we are perverse enough to try. The process of touching our materials with tliis heavenly grace is so easy and

simple, that by use it becomes almost natural to us, and except for the warm feeling of love in our hearts, we should,

in the great multitude of our actions, be almost unconscious of the process. So that, from our waking in the morning
till our falling asleep at night, we are throwing up the merest dust and ashes of earth to heaven, and it is stronger
than the laws of its own material vileness, and rises thither, and is put into the divine treasury as the purest gold of
Christian merit.

But there is yet another mysterious power infused by grace into our actions, the power of satisfaction. Alas!
our sins are both tall and broad, and their malice deep and fearful, while the justice of God is sparkling intolerably
and flashing with angry splendor in the light of His jealous and exacting sanctity. We have need to be calling every

hour on the atoning Blood of Jesus; for nothing short of that can satisfy for the guilt of sins to which eternal death is
due. But through the merits of that same dear Savior our own humblest actions can appease the wrath of God, can

give Him real substantial satisfaction, can atone for the temporal punishments in store for our sinful past, and
constrain, O with such beautiful constraint! even His justice to give us orders on the treasury of His compassion. It
would have been indeed a huge mercy, and to our un-illumined sense a perfectly inexplicable one, had our Creator

been pleased to let our works of penance, our aching fasts, our cold vigils, our burning disciplines, satisfy in some
degree the claims of His high justice. But that we should be allowed to steep the slightest of our ordinary
inconveniences, the trouble of getting up in the morning, the coldness of the east wind, the heat of the summer sun,
or the insignificant self-denial of a kind action—that we should be allowed to steep these things in the Blood of the

Incarnate Word, and make them strong, vigorous, and heaven-reaching satisfactions for our sins, is marvelous
indeed. What then shall we say to the love which has made all our Christian actions, even those in which there is no

inconvenience at all, nay, still more, even those which are pleasures and privileges, such as Mass, and Benediction,

and giving alms, and making the sign of the cross, and reading the lives of the saints, into solemn, serious, and
efficacious satisfactions for our sins? Surely such a love as this, busy, inventive, ubiquitous, must be bent on saving
us, and on saving us as nearly against our wills, as can be with our wills still free?

But He does more. The power of impétration gives us influence over Him for others as well as for
ourselves. We can thus obtain gifts for them, which we could not give ourselves. The power of meriting is a personal
privilege. Our merits are our own; they cannot belong to another. The glory of heaven is inexhaustible, so that we
may go on multiplying our merits, like our Blessed Lady, and yet we shall not drain the rewards of heaven. But
strange to say ! we may do more than satisfy the justice of God for the temporal punishment of our own sins, whether

that punishment consists of the withdrawal of the graces of repentance, or of the sorrows and calamities of life, or of
the active fires of purgatory. We may have satisfactions to spare, satisfactions which may go into the treasury of the
Church and supply materials for future indulgences, satisfactions which we may at once transfer to others, and God
at once accepts the transfer, and bestows the grace, withholds the punishment, or alleviates the suffering, as the case

may be. Nay, if He will, He allows us to alienate the satisfactions which we really need ourselves, and bestow them
upon others, as an exercise of heroic charity towards our fellows, or of disinterested generosity towards His glory; so

that we may not only save ourselves, but help Him also in His grand labor of saving the world which He created
without any labor at all. He multiplies saviors, by making us saviors ourselves, at the very moment when He is also
multiplying for us the means by which we are the more easily to save ourselves.

But there is still a finishing stroke left to perfect this work of divinest art. There is what theologians call
satispassion. In other words, for Christ’s sake,* and because nothing about men can escape the universal contagion
of His redeeming grace, there is in mere suffering, in the simple pressure of pain, in the sheer tortures of mental
anguish, in the very weight of labor and weariness of endurance, a secret underground virtue which is not without its
own peculiar acceptableness to die justice of God. [footnote: It is not meant here that there is not satispassion in the
sufferings of those who are not in a state of grace, or indeed of the heathen. Yet even this may be in some way for
Christ’s sake, and because of the incarnation.] ft is not that He loves to see His creatures suffer, it is not that His

glory can feed itself on mere torments, which are but irregularities we have brought into His glad creation, and
formed no part in the primeval plan of Him who is Himself an uncreated ocean of joy. a glorious abyss of un­
utterable beatitudes. His love gives an inward dignity even to the most inevitable suffering of the creature. Who can
doubt that it is because of Christ, and the luminous shadow of His redeeming Passion which falls with a soft light on

every human woe and mortal pain, and so mellows them into that beautiful landscape of earth which God once
looked at and blessed for its exceeding loveliness? Thus He, who made Mary merit even while she slept, communi­

cates to us wretched sinners some faint similitude of that astonishing privilege. Even while we are concentrated in
our sufferings, while pain absorbs us in itself or else distracts us by its vehemence, some sort of dumb sacrifice to
the justice of our Creator is rising up from our clouded minds, as if our bed of pain were an altar to His purity, or our

broken heart gave out a faint odor of Christ, or our aching limb were as cinnamon burning in the fire.
Thus it is that divine love follows us everywhere with helps to our salvation. Thus it is that God’s blessed
will that we should all be saved bears down upon us with almost a tyranny of goodness, in order that we may not

escape His eternal company in heaven. Down to teaching us how to make virtues of our necessities, down to the

acceptance of the almost unreasonable sacrifice of satispassion. this will of God for our salvation persecutes us with
the prodigality' of its gifts. Why is it then that so many Christians go wrong and fail, so many more at least than

ought to fail, even granting that all who fail are but comparatively few? Is the difficulty of salvation the only answer
to this melancholy fact? Have we not seen with our own eyes that it is not difficult? Does not experience teach us
with children, and we are as children before God, nay, does it not teach us with wise grown-up men. that there are
easy things in which disobedience will not obey? The facility of a thing is sometimes a temptation to disobedience.
So it will occasionally come across us in our meditations that God does Himself an injmy by all this prodigality of
His love, that He makes Himself too common, that He does not sufficiently stand upon His dignity, that He may

miss of His end by the mere eagerness with which He pursues it, that He may hamper and embarrass generous souls
who would run more freely if they were less encumbered with help, that His exuberance may be on the one hand a
temptation to unbelief, and on the other an allurement to presumption. We know such thoughts are sins, if we
deliberately entertain them; and when we do not entertain them, then they are the broken foolish incoherent speech

of men intoxicated with the wine of God’s love, whose very babblings tell what is working in their souls, and how
the excesses of His goodness are perplexing them. He knows best; and we know Him sufficiently well to be assured
that not one artifice of His compassion could be spared without the sacrifice of a multitude of souls, who are saved
just by that one thing, that single special contrivance of creative love.
If there are Christians who will not meditate upon eternal things, nor use the same rules of patience and

discretion in the matter of salvation, which they use in temporal affairs, or if there are any who let evil habits master
them, or if by a special wile of Satan they will not let themselves be brought within the influence of a priest, it is not
because salvation is not easy, but because they will not comply with its indulgent requisitions. Some men speak as if
salvation could not be easy, unless it actually destroyed free-will, and carried them off to heaven by force. Yet in

reality the love of God goes as near to this as it can do consistently with free-will, so near that none but He could
have gone so near, and yet avoided the destruction of it. What is it we would have? Our benignant Creator has

bewildered us with the rapid, intricate, enormous machinery of His love. He has not only outstripped our
imagination, He has tried our faith. What more could we desire?
But salvation is not only easy in itself and because of its helps; it is easy also because it is our interest.

What interests us is by a law of our nature easy, and nothing interests us so much as a thing in which our own

welfare is manifestly and deeply involved. This will become evident to us if we compare the pleasures of sin with
the pleasures of a state of grace. The pleasures of sin are not lasting. The fires go out for want of fuel. They only

burnt brightly and swiftly at first because it was but dry weeds, thorns, and thistles, which supplied them. There is
also a want of continuity' in sinful pleasures. Sin is not pleasant to look back upon, as a good action is. It lives in
excitement and moral intoxication. Its very vehemence makes it subject to relapses.

Somehow also the pleasure of sin wastes and devastates the spirit; it blights our human affections; it
scorches places in our hearts where green tilings were wont to grow, and unlike Christian suffering, it does not

fertilize hereafter what it is burning now. It leaves behind it remorse which makes our whole life ache, and
weariness which turns the very sunshine into a burden, ft causes us to be peevish both with ourselves and others; and

to a peevish man Iris own company is more tedious than words can tell. At last bodily health fails, and our spirits

give way beneath us; for sin is the twin brother of sickness. Worldly misfortune not seldom supervenes: and the loss
of the respect of others is one of those losses which are almost inevitable to the sinful man. Most sinners also are
ambitious in their own line, and they are cramped even in their means of sinning; they cannot fulfil their own dreams

of profligacy, nor sin upon the grand scale which they intended. Pain and sickness, which are always hard to bear,
are desperately intolerable to a man who is not in a state of grace. They involve loss of time, waste of life, diminu­

tion of pleasures, when all is so fleeting, and sin so longs to catch each moment as it flies. Moreover, they are so
unmeaning, or what is worse, so purely penal to the wicked man. Then there is the slavish dread of death, or what is
hardly a less sickening misery', the wild forced unbelief of the eternity which is beyond. In a word, a downright
habitual sinner is in the long run neither loved nor loving; and if he does not lose the present world altogether, as
well as the world which is to come, it is because the justice of his Creator pays him here for such natural kindliness
and moral respectability' as he may have shown.
Now contrast all this with the delight of being in a state of grace. Is there any earthly joy like the sense of
pardon? How deep it goes down into our nature, unlocking such secret fountains of tears as were far beyond the
reach of ordinary hopes and fears! There is also a satisfyingness about it, which seldom accompanies other joys. A
void is filled up in our hearts, which had ached before. Peace comes where before there was a trouble of uncertain

fears, and love awakens with a keener, fresher appetite for its obedient work for God. in prosperity, in adversity, in
the love of others, in the enmity of others, in hard work, in old age, in sickness, and in death, the state of grace

seems just to add what was needed, to supply that very thing the absence of which was regretted, to throw light upon
the darkness, or to subdue the glare, to level the rocks or fill in the sunken places, to drain what was marshy or
irrigate what was dry. It has shed upon the whole of life repose, plenitude, satisfaction, contentment, ft has positively

given us this world, while it was in the act of transferring to us the other. And is not salvation easy, when it is our

own present interest, our immediate reward, and downright earthly happiness to boot?
I do not think that if we kept in view the perfections of God, we should venture to believe, unless the
Church taught us, that there was in creation such a place as hell. When it has been revealed to us we can perceive,

not only its reasonableness, but also how admirably it is in keeping with the various attributes of God, and, not least
of all, with the exquisiteness of His mercy. There is an awful beauty about that kingdom of eternal chastisement;
there is a shadow cast upon its fires, which we admire even while we tremble, the shadow of the gigantic
proportions of a justice which is omnipotent; there is an austere grandeur about the equity of God’s vindictive wrath,
which makes us nestle closer to Him in love, even while we shudder at the vision. But to us who live and strive, who

have grace given us and yet have the power of resisting it. who have room for penance but are liable to relapse, who
are right now but can at any time go wrong—who can doubt that hell is a pure mercy, a thrilling admonition, a
solemn passage in God’s pathetic eloquence, pleading with us to save our souls and to go to Him in heaven? There

is no class of Christians to whom hell is not an assistance. The conversion of a simrer is never complete without the

fear of hell. Otherwise the work camrot be depended on. It has a flaw in its origin, a seed of decay in its veiy root, ft
is unstable and insecure. It is short-lived and unpersevering, like the seed in our Savior's parable which fell upon a
rock, sprang up for a season, and then withered away. Hell teaches us God, when we are too gross to learn Him
otherwise, ft lights up the depths of sin’s malignity, that we may look down and tremble, and grow wise. Its fires
turn to water, and quench the fiery darts of the tempter. They rage around us, so that we dare not rise up from prayer.

They follow us, like the many-tongued pursuing flames of a burning prairie, and drive us swiftly on, and out of

breath, along the path of God’s commandments. O hell! thou desolate creation of eternal justice! who ever thought

of finding a friend in thee?
Even to those aiming at perfection the thought of hell is an immense assistance. The common things of the
faith are in reality far above all the high lights of the saints. There is no growing out of or beyond the ordinary
motives and old truths of the faith even for those who are most highly advanced, or are practicing the most dis­
interested love. There is no habitual state in which the spiritual life can rest and stay itself up in those thin

atmospheres. Besides wliich. there can be no bounds safely set to the self-distrust which the greatest saints should

have, and are the most likely to have, of themselves. Tliis being so, it is extremely desirable that even those who
walk by love and are aiming at perfection should bring frequently before their minds the judgments of God in the
terrific seventies of hell. There are times when we faint and are inclined to relax our upward straining, our climbing

of the steep mountain of God. Spiritual sweetness and periodical absences of temptation often unnerve us for fresh
attacks of the evil one. We come to do tilings in a slovenly and remiss way from long habit. While we grow in merits
we are getting hugely into debt to the greatness and multitude of God’s mercies, and this at times unsobers us.

Moreover, sanctity cannot grow, unless there be also a growing appreciation of the possible extremities of God’s
justice. Neither is it an uncommon delusion to think that we are beyond the fears and impressions of the senses,
though our softness in mortification ought to teach us better. Next to a vciy clear and penetrating contemplation of
the attributes of God. nothing enables us to get a true hatred of sin more than the horrible nature of its eternal
punishments. In all these conjunctures the frequent thought of hell is nothing less than an impulse heaven-wards.

The false delicacy of modem times in keeping back the scaring images of hell, while in the case of children it has
often marred a whole education, is a formidable danger to the sanctity as well as to the faith of men.
If the terrors of the Lord contribute largely to the easiness of salvation, the attractiveness of His rewards has
also saved its thousands and its tens of thousands. It is hard to disentangle the influence of the thought of heaven

from the purity of disinterested love, and it is most undesirable even to attempt it. We want something to put out the
beautiful light of earth, and to sully its fair shining. We need a disenchanting power in the midst of a creation so
lovely, winning, and specially alluring to our own particular selves, lest it should rob us of our hearts and leave us

nothing to give to God. We covet some unfading ideal so to possess our souls, that we may walk the world in the
pure cold chastity of perfect detachment, so that God may be our all. The comscations of His throne are sometimes
too blinding to our eyes. That lofty region of perpetual thunders will sometimes stun us, when littleness and
imperfection have unstrung our spiritual nen es. If we see God now through a glass darkly, sometimes it must be
through many earth-tinted glasses that our weak eyes must look at Him. Hence the need to us of familiarizing

ourselves with all that the schools teach us of the joys of heaven. Hence the power wliich a simple soul acquires
from reposing even on the undeveloped thought of the greatness of his Creator’s recompense. And what are all the
joys of heaven, but the accidents, the corollaries, the overflows, of the radiant Beatific Vision? So that pure love

mingles with our blameless thoughts of self, and heaven is already a power on earth drawing us with magnetic force
into the spheres of its own abounding light; and what is heaven but the locality we give to that dear gloiy of our
incomprehensible and omnipresent Father, in w hose embrace we long to hide ourselves for very love?
I conclude therefore that God is bent on saving us. that salvation is easy in itself, easy because of its helps,

easy because of the terrors of being lost, and easy because of the attractiveness of its own rewards. This is my
answer to those w ho object to the picture I have drawn of God's creative love, ft is founded upon common truths
wliich everybody knows, truths wliich strike us the more, the more by assiduous contemplation of His attributes we
come to know the God to whom we belong. It is drawn from the distinct statements of Scripture. It is in harmony
with the teaching of the saints. It is the doctrine most full of consolation for creatures. It is the belief most honorable
to the Creator.

The Second Chapter
THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS

O Israel! quam magna est domus Dei.—Baruch.

IT is sweet to think of the web of love which God is hourly weaving round every soul He has created on the earth. If
we bring the world before us with all its picturesque geography, the many indentations of its coasts, the long courses

of its fertile rivers, its outspread plains, its wide forests, its blue mountain chains, its aromatic islands, and its
verdant archipelagos, it enlarges the heart to think how round every soul of man God is weaving that web of love.
The busy European, the silent Oriental, the venturous American, the gross Hottentot, the bewildered Australian, the
dark-souled Malay—He comes to all. He has His own way with each; but with all it is a way of tenderness,
forbearance, and lavish generosity. The variety of their circumstances, and those are well-nigh numberless, are not

so many as the varieties of His sedulous affection. The biography of each of those souls is a miraculous history of

God's goodness. If we could read them, as probably the Blessed can, they would teach us almost a new science of
God, so wonderfully and inexhaustibly would they illuminate His different perfections. We should see Him winding
invisible threads of light and love even round the ferocious idolater. We should behold Him dealing with cases of
the most brutal wickedness, the most fanatical delusion, the most stolid insensibility, and, even for these, arranging
all things with the exquisite delicacy of creative love. But so astonishing, so overwhelming is the flood of divine

light, such and so vast the very ocean of eternal predilection, which He has poured upon His Church, that all outside

looks like utter darkness because of the dazzling excess of her magnificence. This blinds us so that we cannot see
how what looks so dark to us is after all a tme light, lightening every man that comes into the world.
Let us turn our thoughts then to the Church. What a comfort it is to think of the vastness of the Church, and

of her holiness! There is the incessant action of those mighty sacraments, and the whole planet transfigured with the
daily Mass. There is all heaven busy, as if time were too short for it, with a hundred occupations for each Christian
soul, set in motion at that soul’s request, or self-moved by gratuitous love and pity. Mary, angels, saints, and
suffering souls in purgatory, all are hard at work. God is employed, as if His Sabbath after creation were long since
past. There are sorrows to be soothed, temptations to be banished, sins to be forgiven, tears to be dried, pains to be

healed, good works to be assisted, deathbeds to be attended; and the bright throngs of heaven, like some religious
Order of Mercy, are busy at them all. Oh happy we! on whom all this dear diligence is thus perpetually expended!
What is the fruit of it all? If salvation is easy, and salvation is preached in the Church of Christ, then it

ought to follow that the great majority of Catholics are saved. We need speak only of Catholics. We will not advert,
however distantly, to those outside the Church. People tempt themselves about them, and play tricks with their gift
of faith, for which they ought to be thanking God their whole lives long. We have no business to concern ourselves

with God’s relations to others: however wistfully the ties of love may make us gaze upon that dark abyss. We are

Catholics. Let us be content with speculating about ourselves. We will suppose, therefore, the objection to be made,
that if salvation is easy, then practically we ought to find that most Catholics are saved, ft is not enough to say that
though salvation is easy, the corruption of man is so tremendous that little comes of it; for then it seems a question

of words to call salvation easy. Salvation is the saving of fallen man, and, therefore, to be really easy, it must far
more than counterbalance his cormption. The question is one of too momentous a character, of too thrilling an
interest, for us to be content with mere rhetoric. We repeat, if salvation is easy, most Catholics must be saved. Can

we venture to say that such is our belief?
Before answering so abrupt a question, we must be allowed a few words of prelude. You are asking us what

we think about one of God’s secrets, a secret which He has reserved to Himself. It is one of those questions into

which we may venture reverently to inquire in the hope of finding fresh traces of His omnipresent love: but for no
other reason than this. We may inquire that we may love; we may not inquire that we may know. It does not seem
that we anger Him by such an investigation, provided we are humble. But we must remember we can decide
nothing. After all our surmises, inferences, and guesses, the tmth remains, as it was before, hidden with God. We
have, however, in spite of much natural reluctance, a reason for entering into it, which seems to constrain us to it as

to a work of mercy. Outside the Church the dreadful error of the day, wliich is ravaging the hearts of men, is a
forgetfulness that they are creatures. They seem in a certain way to remember the Creator, but, as was said in the
first chapter, in politics, in science, in literature, in all the departments of the world’s greatness, they seem not to
realize that they are creatures.

Now this error reaches faintly and feebly into the hearts of true believers. There is always in the Church a
kind of evil echo of the noise which the world is making without. But it is not more than an echo. Hence the spiritual
physicians of the times come across an unusual amount of suffering, which good souls feel, from doubts about their
relations with God, questionings of His justice and His goodness which will hardly be silenced, and which it were
wild work, and almost ruin, to try to silence by main force. Such men find a difficult} in their most intimate
religious life, for which we can think of no name. It is not simply temptation against the faith. It is not a disgust with
the spiritual life. It does not seem to rest in the will at all, but in some perversity of the mind which is so humble that
it is a shame to call it by so hard a name as perversity. We believe it to bean habitual incapacity of realizing that they

are creatures, in the full truth and in all the bearings of that idea. This inability might be brought on in these days by
much and incautious reading of newspapers, or by an absorbing interest in the politics of the day. or by being mixed
up with the existing commercial system of the world, or by not having always been Catholics, or by having misused

the first graces of conversion, or from sheer want of generosity with God. But it isa shadow, or an echo, or a taint in
the believer’s heart, of the prevailing pestilence of modem society. Just as in the presence of a cognizable plague we
have frequently a mild form of some congenial disease, so does the sickness of the times infect even many of the
faithful with a languor of a somewhat similar description. It is because I have been called to so many cases of this

sort, that I have composed the present Treatise, happy if I may be allowed to console one afflicted brother, or to ease
one tempted soul, or to enlighten one bewildered mind—more happy than I can say if I can get from one of the
creatures, whom He loves so well, an additional degree of love for our compassionate Creator.

It may be said that the view contained in the preceding chapters is taking God’s side exclusively, and
putting forward only a one-sided statement. But this is not really true; however, we are not concerned to argue the

point. We look only to a practical result. But what in tmth is it wliich forms the chief part of the suffering to the
souls just now described? It is that they will obstinately look only at one side of the question, and the side which
concerns them least instead of that which concerns them most, as that which God puts before them; and that they
will pertinaciously extend the difficulty by bringing in a number of problems, in the solution of which they in­
dividually have no interest at all, and wliich they can hardly investigate, at least in their temper of mind, without
forgetting what is due to God. They seem to have no eye, except for dark possibilities. They have a morbid

hankering to climb giddy heights, to loiter on the edge of precipices, to balance themselves on the craters of
volcanoes. They who love danger shall perish in it. We had better let God’s thunderbolts alone, and not meddle with
them, were it even to feel the sharpness of their fiery points. We only ask these poor sufferers now to look at the

other side of the question; and not only to look at it. but to pray about it, and meditate on it. and familiarize
themselves with it. Mere reading is nothing. A religious inquiry’ without prayer is a mockery of God. We can define

nothing. We can unriddle none of God’s secrets. But these souls have fed on gloomy considerations until they are
almost poisoned. Now let us invite them to follow us patiently through the brighter considerations which commend
themselves to an opposite temper and disposition, and which, if not of greater weight than their own views, are at
least of equal authority with theirs, besides the additional recommendation of their sunshine.
It will not be too much to ask of our readers to pay an accurate attention to the language of a chapter on a
subject so capable of misunderstanding as the present. When we treat of each consideration separately, we seem to

be exaggerating, from the mere fact that we do not mention other, and perhaps opposite, considerations in the same
breath, which is obviously impossible. Let us bear in mind then that this inquiry is in no respect a matter of

theology. It teaches no doctrine of contrition. Its facts have no doctrinal bearing. It is a view of human conduct,
combined with a view of God’s dealings with men. which must necessarily bear upon it the impress of particular
personal experience, as well as of particular personal character and disposition. But above all tilings we must bear in

mind what has been abundantly manifest in the preceding chapter, namely, that salvation is easy, not because of any

of the requirements of God’s sanctity being abated, but because of the abundance and vigor of His grace. Thus when
we speak of deathbed graces, it is not that, because of the pitifulness of the pains of death. God consents to be
reconciled to us on easier terms than when we are strong and well, or that it is consistent with His perfections to
restore us to His favor without that inward vital change of the sin-loving or world-loving heart, that radical work in
the soul, implied in real interior repentance. But we judge from what we see that it frequently pleases Him in that
great hour so to reinforce the operations of grace as to counteibalance, and more than counterbalance, the physical

disadvantages under which the spiritual processes of the soul would otherwise have labored in the trial of such a
terrific moment.

So again, when we speak of the sacraments, we speak of them accurately, that is. as implying certain

earnest, vigorous, inward dispositions on our parts, no less than a peculiar gracious intervention on the part of God.
It is plain we cannot keep repeating all this in every sentence. We must therefore ask our readers to read the whole
chapter in the abiding thought, that along with every compassionate intervention of God there remains, heightened

rather than abated, the essential necessity of real, solid, inward repentance and actual transfonnation of heart, on the
part of those who may be favored with His extraordinary graces. Nay, the extraordinariness of a grace consists
precisely in the penitent having these dispositions at such a moment and under such circumstances. To a thoughtful
reader the result of the inquiry must be to deepen his sacred fear and to stimulate him to greater earnestness. All
exhibitions of the excesses of God’s love produce these results, else would the very blood-shedding upon Calvary be

an encouragement to men to sin. I believe no man would be less likely to trust to a deathbed conversion, than one

who had witnessed such a conversion. He would so tremble to see so much resting on so little, such a peculiar,

dubious, intricate, abnormal strife, such a terrible swinging of eternal interests on such an unsteady balance, such a
miraculous rescue of a soul hanging more than half over the edge of such abysses, that he would be the most likely
of all men to fulfil afterwards the apostle’s injunction of passing the tune of his sojourning here in fear. If any of us
therefore rise up from the inquiry now before us only more hopeful, and not also more strict. I believe the fault will
be in our own want of seriousness and honesty with God.
With this prefatory caution and admonition we may proceed therefore to answer the question before us
thus—We are inclined to believe, that most Catholics are ultimately saved. Of course we do not know it, and we do

not wish to know it. But as the objection is started, we look attentively at the Church as far as we have the power,
and the result of our observations is, that to the best of our belief the great majority of her children save their souls.
We will give our reasons, one by one, for this conclusion, begging the reader once more to remember that we are not
laying down the law, and that the necessities of many souls have beguiled us into an inquiry, upon which of
ourselves we should never have dreamed of entering.

[footnote: Lest it should be supposed that there was anything unusual in discussing this question in a practical and
popular book, I would venture to remind the reader that it has been the common practice of Catholic writers, both in
Italy, France, and England. Among preachers we have Massillon, Bourdaloue, Le Jeune, Lacordaire, Segneri, St
Leonard of Port Maurice, and indeed almost all Italian Quaresimali, treating of this alarming subject. In practical
and popular treatises, for reading, we have Drexelius, Bellarmine, Recupitus, DAigentan, Bossuet in his
Meditations, Bail, Da Ponte, and our own Chailoner, whose meditations have been translated into various languages.
In Catechisms we have Lipsin, Turlot, who is translated into various languages, and the excellent Dr Hay. Turlot
asks why preachers do not often teach, often explain, often inculcate this? And he remarks, ‘Qæstio hœc (de numero
salvandorum) non minus est utilis quam curiosa. ” Also the Tesori di confldenza in Dio, published at Rome by the
Propaganda press, in 1840, discusses the question at great length (Parte Seconds, p. 316). This last book, it is
important to add, is on the side of the question urged in this chapter; it is important, considering (1) the date of the
book, (2) the place of its publication, (3) the press from which it issues, (4) its scriptural character, and (5) its
popular style, and its being written in the vernacular.]
There seems to be a sort of dishonesty in putting forward the view which is to occupy this chapter, without

confessing that the authority of theologians, so far as there can be any authority in a question of this nature, is upon
the whole, though not greatly, on the other side, while the authority of Scripture seems to be with us.
Very many writers appear to hold that the number of the reprobate very far exceeds the number of the

saved, not only taking the heathen into account, but taking heretics into account also—and not only taking heretics

into account, but also the baptized infants of the faithful, whose deaths are said nearly to equal those of adult
Catholics, and also the infants of heretics who have received baptism; so that, in their view, the question is narrowed

to adult Catholics, and of these, perhaps most writers, though hardly those of the greatest weight, venture to say that
only a minority are saved. Recupitus, the Jesuit, in his treatise on the Number of the Predestinate, enumerates Lyra,
Denys the Carthusian, Maldonatus. Cajetan, Bellarmine, Fasolus, Alvarez, Ruiz, Smising, Drexelius, and perhaps
Molina, as holding this opinion, together with most of the Fathers of the Church, [footnote: Yet an eminent patristic

scholar informs me that this is by no means the case with the Fathers, especially as to the interpretation of the
contested passages of Scripture.] Sylvester, Carthagena, Granadus, Franciscus de Christo, are quoted on the other
side. Suarez, who on the whole seems to be on the milder side, in one place expressly includes the infants, and so
does Lorinus in liis commentary on the hundred and thirty-eighth psalm, [footnote: Recupitus de num. prœdes., cap.
ii, in.]
Cajetan, expounding the parable of the Virgins, teaches that even of those who live moderately well in the
Church, and take a certain amount of care of their consciences, one half are lost. Suarez stigmatizes this opinion as
“exceedingly rigorous.” He then says, “ft is a doubtful matter; but I think a distinction should be made. By the name

of Christian we may understand all those who glory in the name of Christ, and profess to believe in Him, although
many of them are heretics, apostates, and schismatics. Now speaking in this way it seems to me probable that the
greater part of them are reprobate, and it is in this general way that I understand the less mild opinion. Now, as

heretics and apostates have always been very numerous, if we add to them the number of the faithful who make bad
deaths, the two together will plainly exceed the number of those who die well. But if by Christians we understand
those only who die in the Catholic Church, it seems to me more likely, in the law of grace, that the greater number

of them are saved. The reason is, because, first of all, of those who die before they are adults, the great multitude die
baptized; and as to the adults, although the majority of men often sin mortally, yet they often rise again from sin, and
thus pass their lives rising and falling. Then again there are but few, who are not prepared for death by the
Sacraments, and grieve for their sins at least by attrition; and this is enough to justify them at that time, and after
their justification, the time left them is so short that they can easily persevere, and do so, without any fresh mortal
sin. Therefore, all things considered, it is probable that the majority of Christians in this stricter sense are saved.”

[footnote: Suarez, lib. 6, De Comparat, prœdest., cap. 3, n. 6.]
Vasquez considers it clear from Scripture that the number of the lost is greater than the number of the

saved; but he adds that there may be a doubt about the faithful, and that some piously think that the majority of them
are saved, and that the sacraments of the Church, as well as the parable of the wedding garment, look that way. He
himself, however, refuses to take either side, [footnote: Vasquez. in primam partem disp. 101. cap. 4.] Even Billuart
will not allow to the theologians quoted by Rccupitus any more certain foundations for their opinion than for that of

their adversaries, [footnote: Billuart. De certitud. prœdest., diss. 9, art. 7.] Cornelius Lapide argues at length against
the benignant conclusion of Suarez, and says that the greater number of living theologians at Rome in his day

thought the general laxity of morals in the world a strong proof that the sterner opinion was also the more correct,

[footnote: For the argument of the fewness of the saved taken from the Fathers, see a dismal work published at
Rome in 1752, entitled Fogginius de paucitate adultorum fidelium salvandorum.} St Leonard of Port Maurice
maintains, in his sermon for the third Sunday in Lent, that a great number of Christians are lost, because their
confessions are null through want of true sorrow, [footnote: Quaresimale, p. 195.] St Alphonso, on the contraiy,
says, in liis Istruzione ai predicatori, that he holds it for certain that of all those who come to the sermons at a

mission, whosoever should die within a year, would with difficulty be lost, [footnote: Difficilmente si danna, lettera
seconda.]
According to the rigid view, if the deceased baptized infants of the faithful, together with the deceased

baptized infants of heretics, added to the adult Catholics who are saved, do not make a majority, and if also the
statement be true* that the deaths of the children of Catholics nearly equal in number, as Ruiz says, the deaths of
adult Catholics, then must the number of adults who are saved be so small, that it follows that the Church of the
redeemed in heaven, the conquest of our Blessed Savior’s Precious Blood, is chiefly composed of children, of those
who on earth never merited, never loved, never used their reason at all. [footnote: “Le tiers des enfants meurt entre
la première et la septième année de sa naissance, plus de la moitié entre la première et la quatorzième année. ”—

Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes.} Is not this a conclusion so repugnant as to be inadmissible? I think this
consideration of very great weight.
Fr Lacordaire has treated the subject with his usual power, and also with great delicacy, in his discourse on
the results of the Divine Government, which forms part of his Conferences of 1851. He inclines to believe that a

majority of mankind are saved, and dwells especially on children, women, and the poor. His exposition of the
Scripture argument is veiy remarkable and ingenious, especially his view of the words “few are chosen,” from the
light shed upon them by the context in the two places in which that passage occurs. Bergier. speaking of the number

of the elect, says, “A solid and sufficiently instructed mind will not allow itself to be shaken by a problematical
opinion”; and again, after describing the disagreement of the Fathers and commentators on the subject, he adds, “If
the parables of the Gospel might be taken as proofs, we should rather conclude that the greater, not the less, number
would be saved. Jesus Christ compares the separation of the good and bad at the last judgment, to the division of the
good grain from the cockle. Now, in a field cultivated with care, the cockle is never more abundant than the wheat.

He compares it to the separation of the bad fish from the good; now to what fisher did it ever happen to take fewer
good fish than bad? Of ten virgins called to the marriage five are admitted to the company of the spouse. In the
parable of the talents two servants are recompensed, one only is punished; in that of the feast, only one of the guests
is rejected.” [footnote: Bergier. Dist. Theol. au mot Elus. Traité de la J raie Religion, t. 10, p. 355. Lacordaire,

Conférences, iv. 168.] Da Ponte, in his treatise on Christian Perfection, seems also to lean to the milder opinion; and
Lipsin. the Franciscan, in his catechism maintains that the opinion in favor of the majority of Catholics being saved

is the "more probable,” and more "consonant to the glory of God. the merits of Christ, and the hopes of men";* and
Lipsin says expressly that he is speaking only of adults, [footnote: Da Ponte, De Perfect. Christiana, tr. i; Lipsin,

Catech., Histor. Theolog. Dogmat., p. 446: De numero salvandorum.}
The interpretation given by Fr Lacordaire of the words, Many are called but few are chosen, rests entirely
on the two contexts in which the passage occurs. In the twentieth chapter of St Matthew the kingdom of heaven is

compared to a father of a family who hires laborers into his vineyard at successive hours of the day. and then, when
the evening comes, all are rewarded, and all receive the same reward, notwithstanding the inequalities of their time

of labor. Those who came early in the day complain, and the master answers that he has given them what he agreed
to give, that he has a right to do what he likes with his own. that the last shall be first, and the first last, and that
many are called but few chosen. Now it is clear that the difficulty of this parable does not consist in the small

number who are recompensed, for all are recompensed, but in the inequality of the recompense. The conclusion, that
there are but few who are saved, would have no connection whatever with the parable. It seems rather to mean that
many, who are called by a common grace, from being the first become the last, while a few, who are chosen by a

special grace, from being last become first.
In the twenty-second chapter of the same Gospel the kingdom of heaven is compared to a king who makes
a marriage feast for his son. The guests refuse to come. Whereupon the king sends his servants out into the highways

and byways to bring in a mixed multitude to the feast. Of all these only one is rejected; and that, because he has not

on a wedding garment. Cast him out, says the king, into the darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth,
for many are called but few are chosen. Now here again the difficulty of the parable cannot consist in the few who
are definitely admitted and remain to enjoy the feast; for, miscellaneous multitude as they are, there is but one
rejected. If in such circumstances as these, it is said that many are called, but few chosen, what can it mean but that
there are few who receive such a special grace as permits them to behave with more familiarity than others in divine

tilings, or to count on an unusual favor of God in their regard? It is the temptation of some, says the great
Dominican, who are called as it were by chance upon the highway of life to replace other guests who were invited
and have not come, to persuade themselves that they are the objects of God’s special predilection, and to neglect to

make their calling sure by an exact fidelity; and it is our Lord’s object in this parable to teach them, that if on the one
hand there are last who become first, on the other hand no man must dare to presume it of himself.

[footnote: Salmeron (t. vii, tr. and Cornelius Lapide (in Matt. xx) give similar interpretations. Cornelius Lapide
says many are called to ordinary grace and the observance of the commandments, and few to the observance of the
counsels. Bergier in his treatise de la Religion, quoted as a note in Migne’s edition of the same author’s dictionary,
says, “Parmi les commentateurs, point d’uniformité. Pour ne parler que des catholiques, Cajetan, Mariana, Postât,
Luc de Bruges, Maldonat, Corneille de la Pierre, Ménochius, le père de Picquigny, admettent l'une et l’autre
explication; entendent par élus ou les hommes sauvés, ou les fidèles. Jansenius de Gand pense que ce dernier sens
est le plus naturel; Stapleton le soutient contre Calvin; Sacy dans ses Commentaires, juge que c 'est le sens littéral;
dom Calmet semble lui donner la préférence. Euthymius n 'en donne point d’autre; il suivait S. Jean Chrysostome.
Le père Hardouin soutient que c 'est le seul sens qui s'accorde avec la suite du texte; le père Berruyer exclut aussi
tout autre sens; c ’est pour cela qu ’il a été condamné, mais la faculté de théologie n ’a certainement pas voulu
censurer les interprètes catholiques que nous venons de citer, et ils sont suivis par beaucoup d'autres. Quel dogme
peut-on fonder sur un passage susceptible de deux sens si différents?” And again he says. “Pour fixer un peu plus
cette discussion, nous disons qu,il y a trois opinions sur le nombre des catholiques prédestinés. Quelques docteurs
pensent qu ’il y aura plus de catholiques élus que de réprouvés; ils se fondent sur ce quil n ’v a eu qu 'un seul convive
exclu du banquet nuptial. D’autres croient qu ’il y aura autant de réprouvés que d’élus. Ils se fondent sur le parable
des Vierges, dont cinq étaient sages et cinq folles.—La plupart des théologiens enseignent qu,il y aura plus de
réprouvés que d’élus. Ils s’appuient ces ces paroles: Pauci vero electi. Il n’y a donc rien de certain à ce sujet. Le
savant Suarès regarde la première comme plus probable. "]

Here is a whole mass of conflicting opinions, not perhaps very clear. Let us now do the best we can to
collect the suffrages of theologians in this matter. The controversy seems to stand in some such attitude as this:

1.

Many writers hold that the majority of mankind will be lost, because heathen, and unbelievers, and heretics

make up a majority .
2. Some hold that a majority of all mankind, taking heathen, heretics, and Christians in one mass, will be
saved.
3.

Some, to enhance their rigorous view, maintain that the children are to be taken into the account, and yet

even so a majority of mankind will be lost, or, in other words, that very few adults will be saved.
4. Some, to enhance their mild views, maintain that the children may be put out of the reckoning, and yet that
even so a majority of mankind will be saved.
5.
6.

None of these views regard Catholics exclusively.
Of those writers who regard Catholics exclusively, some maintain that, even taking the children into

account, the majority will be lost.
7. Others maintain that the majority will be saved, but the majority is only to be reached by reckoning in the

children: this is perhaps the most common view of all.
8. Others hold, that looking at adult Catholics only, as many will be lost as are saved: this opinion is founded
on the parable of the Virgins.
9. Others teach that the far greater majority of adult Catholics will be lost.

10. Others think that a small majority of adult Catholics will be saved.
11. Others finally, to whose opinion I strongly adhere myself, believe that the great majority of adult Catholics,
perhaps nearly all of them, will be saved.
12. In point of theologians, the rigorous opinions regarding the whole mass of mankind have an overwhelming
authority.
13. The rigorous opinions concerning the damnation of the majority of adult Catholics have, as far as my
reading has gone, numerically more theologians on their side than the milder view.

14. But if we subtract moral, ascetical, and hortatory authors, who write to rouse and to impress their readers,
and retain only pure theologians in the stricter sense, I think the authorities on the two sides will not be far from
evenly balanced, the excess being, however, in favor of the rigorous views, so far as numbers are concerned, and in
favor of the milder views, so far as weight is concerned.

15. The more recent theologians also exhibit a leaning to the milder view; and in many cases the rigorous
views are held in conjunction with opinions on the ultimate state of unbaptized infants, which probably no single
Catholic in the Church nowadays would hesitate to disclaim.

16. Some of the authorities on the milder side are of very great weight.
17. In the use of the Scripture argument the triumph is completely, and most remarkably, on the milder side.
Indeed the Scripture proof seems quite unmanageable in the hands of the rigorists.
Thus then it appears that the question is completely an open one, and that the view, which is to occupy tliis
chapter, is not only lawful, but pious. Nevertheless, if I could persuade myself that the discussion had but little
practical bearing on a holy life, or were likely in anyway to lead to a dis-esteem of strictness, I should eagerly avoid
entering upon it. It seems, however, as if the inquisitive infidelity of the day had so far touched the faith of many
good men, that questions have been started in their thoughts which mere contempt cannot now put to silence, and
that in order to restore to their diseased minds a more true view of the fatherly character of God. it is necessary to

bring before them distinct considerations, founded upon what we know of Him, in opposition to those darker
reflections which keep them back from a cordial surrender of themselves to God, and which even, when they are
true, become untrue by claiming to be exclusive. Begging then of God to bless this inquiiy concerning a secret,
which for our good as well as His own glory He has hidden from us, let us proceed reluctantly upon our way.

We know well that when men judge others, whether individuals or multitudes, they generally come to an
erroneous conclusion from the mere fact that they judge over-harshly. It is part of the evil that is in us to put the
worst constmction upon what we see, and to make no allowance for the hidden good. Moreover, we, unwittingly

almost, judge by the worst parts of our own disposition, not by the best. We believe our evil to be common to all,
and our good peculiar to ourselves. We consider evil a decisive test, while good is only allowed to establish a
possibility. This is our mle for others: we reverse it for ourselves. We also find that our judgments get milder in

proportion to the increase of our own strictness. The judgments of holy men sometimes astonish us by their laxity,
while men, not even frequenting the sacraments, or in any way professing to be religious, will be scandalized by the

least look of worldliness in a priest or a religious. They will detect, with the most amazing sensitiveness, the

slightest inconsistency in the practice of an openly devout person. Thus we may lay it down as a mle, that the
severity of our judgments of others, even where judgments are legitimate and unavoidable, is an infallible index of
the lowness of our own spiritual state. The more severe we are, the lower we are. We must, therefore, be on our

guard against this well-known infirmity in the present inquiry. There is something in the adorable compassion of
God which looks like voluntary blindness. He seems either not to see, or not to appreciate, the utter unworthiness of

men; at least He goes on His way with men as though He did not see it. The Bible is full of instances of this. Now
the more we are with God, and the closer our union with Him is, the more shall we catch something of a similar
spirit, which will destroy the natural keenness of our detection of evil, and control more materially our judgments of
our fellow-men.

We must be careful also to make a distinction which is often forgotten, and which bears directly upon the
present question. What we see around us among Catholics may be far from satisfactory. and the authentic statistics
which reach us from Catholic countries may contain much that is unhappy and disheartening. Yet we must

distinguish at any given moment between Catholics not living so as to be saved, and their not being ultimately saved
at last. In other words we cannot go altogether by what we see. Immense numbers are converted, and go to the
sacraments, and persevere in their new life; and then they are less prominent. We do not hear of them. The statistics

of Easters, jubilees, retreats, missions, and the like, come less under our notice than statistics of crime or misery. Sin
strikes us, and is startling, whereas ordinary goodness is a tame affair, and passes unobserved. Then there are
multitudes of men who have an exceedingly bad chapter in their lives, some ten or twenty years of wickedness, and

then change, as if the volcanic matter in them had burned out. This is what men lightly call sowing their wild oats.
As one set of these men passes into a better state, another is succeeding them, so that the appearance of things is an
incessant current of headstrong sin sweeping all before it. unredeemed by the hopeful features of the case, which the

succession of sinners hides effectually from our view. Moreover, old age withdraws its thousands of actors from the
stage of sin, and so they disappear from view. It is wretched enough to think of these conversions of old age, which
seem to have more of nature in them than of grace. A man's passions are worked out. He becomes a moral wreck.

The avenues of sensual pleasure are closed to him by the aches and pains and dull insensibilities of age. In a number
of cases the very powers of sinning are diminished. And so, what with the fear, what with disgust, and what with
making a virtue of necessity, the old man gives himself to God, such little of him as is left, and God accepts the gift,
because along with all these self-interested motives there is in the man’s heart, by His grace, a real inward
repentance for sin. and a saving faith in the atoning Blood of Christ. It is not for us to criticize this amazing for­

bearance of God; who knows if we may not one day stand in need of it ourselves? But so it is. It is God’s affair; and
in His infinite wisdom He is pleased to take the offering, and to save the soul. Multitudes again, even before old age,
fall into sickness in the prime of life and the middle of their sins, and they pass out of the outer world of men into

the inner world of the priest, that world half visible and half invisible, where daily miracles of grace are wrought,

and where the weary minister of God is for ever drawing those earthly consolations which are more to him than the

dearness of domestic affections, and support him sweetly in his incessant toils. God partly admits him to His secrets,
and takes him into the inner room of sickness, and shows him the machinery of salvation doing its finest and most
hidden work.

While we are gazing at this picture, we must not forget to realize, and it is no easy matter, what we have
seen in a former chapter, how little God actually requires as absolutely indispensable to salvation. One confession at
the hour of death, ordinary fidelity in confessing, a purpose of amendment which has no temptation then to be insin-

cere, a sorrow which is within easy reach of anyone who is in earnest, with huge allowances made for the clouded
weariness and distracting unsettlements of pain, which interfere with the sensible fervor of prayer, but not with the
grace of true interior repentance—and the soul that has spent close upon a centmy of sin is saved, saved because
God puts the requisites for absolution so low, saved because He gives the grand gift of repentance so gratuitously,
and changes hearts so swiftly, saved because by His merciful ordinance faith survived grace for all those years,

saved because the Precious Blood of Jesus is such a superabundant ransom, such a mighty conqueror of souls.
When a man is converted, he has to make little outward change, so far as the eyes of man are concerned, in
his ordinary life. Few will notice that he has begun to go to Mass. Few see him enter the confessional, or kneel at the
altar rail. Men are never very sedulous in finding out good, and it will even be some time before it is perceived that

habits of swearing, or lying, or intemperance are gone, or that violence of temper has passed away. Moreover the
convert has relapses, and somehow these are always very much seen and noticed, and they conceal completely the
gradual formation of a virtuous habit; and besides this, a great deal which is externally disagreeable and also morally
unworthy will remain, and almost hide a man’s conversion even from his wife and child. It is not generally mortal
sin which makes men so unbearable to others. It is more often selfishness, and temper, and churlishness, and

ferocity, and coarseness, and such like, which may all be far short of mortal sin, or, perhaps in the cases of rude

persons, of any sin at all. There is also much in the demeanor of a converted sinner which is very puzzling. He has
had certain habits of sin; mid though he no longer falls into the mortal sins in question, he has ways about him which
simulate the old habit of sin. He talks as if he was still under its dominion. He omits things which a man would

characteristically omit, if he had such a habit. He even falls into venial sins congenial to the old habit; and it may
often happen that it shall look as if outward circumstances alone prevented his positively committing the old mortal

sin. But it would be endless to enumerate all the things which baffle our judgment of the insincerity of a man’s
conversion. We may depend upon it that in a thousand spots, which look desert, waste, and fire-blackened, God’s
mercy is finding pasture for His glory.
It is very observable that evil is of its own nature much more visible than good, while goodness is invisible

like God. Evil, like the world, is loud, rude, anxious, hurried, and ever acting on the defensive; while goodness
partakes of the nature of Him who alone is truly good, ft imitates His ways of secrecy and concealment, and is
impregnated with His spirit of unostentatious tranquillity and self-sufficient contentment. The infuriated mob that

bums down a church, and tramples the Blessed Sacrament under foot, is a much more obvious and obtrusive
phenomenon than the dozen Carmelite nuns who have been doing the world’s hardest work for it before that

tabernacle door for years. The whole priesthood of the Church, busy at its work of mercy, catches the eye much less

than a single regiment in scarlet marching down upon its fellow-Christians. Even in the individual this invisible
character of goodness is perceptible, and that not merely in the shy spirit and instinctive bashfulness of great
sanctity, but even without a man’s intending it, or being aware of it, or taking any pains about it. When we know and
love a man, and are in habits of daily familiar intercourse with him, we know his faults almost in a week. We learn
where to distrust him, and where he is not unlikely to fail. But the revelation of his goodness is a very slow process.
He is continually taking us by surprise with disclosures of virtues which we never dreamed that he possessed. He
comes out on great occasions much better than we expected. In little things too, and the ordinary wear and tear of

life, it is only by degrees that we become conscious how much real humility, patience, sweetness, and unselfishness
there is about him. There are very few men whom we do not come by experience to respect, if only we continue to
Love them. if. as Wordsworth says, all tilings are less dreadful than they seem, so is it tme that all men are better

than they seem. We must allow very largely for this, when we look at the lives of Catholics, and pass a judgment on
the likelihood of their salvation.
The visible character of evil also brings strongly before us one of the most frightening features of the
world, and one which it is hard to dwell upon for any length of time without some amount of gloom passing on our
spirits. It is the ceaseless activity of Satan. His activity is appalling: his presence almost ubiquitous: his tyranny

universal, overwhelming, and successful. Of a tmth he needs no repose. To go and lie down upon his bed of fire

would be no rest to him. Thus the world seems to be always in a storm of his creating. One while he is persecuting
the good, even in the cloister. Another while he is bent on mining some man who is doing a notable work for God.
Now he is urging on the multitudes of a whole country, and making them drunk with the spirit of anarchy and

sacrilege. Now he is quietly weaving webs of unholy diplomacy, with a fair show of equity or patriotism, around the
Holy See, that he may cramp its energies for good, and demoralize whole nations. Here he is getting up an intricate
slander which shall throw discredit on God’s servants, and dishonor the cause of religion. There he is sapping the
foundations of a religious order by the insidious prudence of relaxation, or destroying the stability of some grand
work of mercy by leading the founders to seek their own reputation and honor in it instead of God s gloty. One

while he is inspiring the press, and hiding the poison that he spreads under the rhetoric of morality and right.

Another while he is artfully providing for coldness, dissension, and misunderstanding among those whose power for
God consisted in the cordiality of their union.

Even the chosen of the earth, the holy and the good, are running to and fro upon the earth, till they are
weary, doing Satan’s work and dreaming it is God’s. Who can look on such a scene without disquiet and dismay?
But then we must remember the prominent visible character of evil. Satan is active: can we suppose that God is not
ten thousand times more active, even though we see Him less? The very reason why we see Him so little is because

we do not follow Him. and search out His ways, and trace the footprints of His operations. If we did we should be
astonished at the immensity, the vigor, and the versatility of the magnificent spiritual work which He is doing all

over the world in every year. Just as science tells us that the earth’s surface is never still, but that some portion of it
somewhere all day and night is quaking and vibrating with the pulsations of the forces bound up within the center of
the planet, so to the observant and discerning eye of faith the whole natural world of created wills and ways is

tremulous and troubled by the forces of the supernatural world, now forcing their way to the surface, now engulfing
whole regions, now raising lofty' summits of new mountains out of deep valleys, and now altering the very features
of civilization by diverting the mighty currents of the mind and purpose of humanity.
If the vigor of God abides with such intensity in every particle of the inanimate world, everywhere wedding

strength to beauty', so that the union might captivate with its exquisite niceties the intelligence of angels, if in every'
mineral atom He abides intimately by His presence. His essence, and His power, how much more shall we believe
that He informs and controls the world of men by the energies of an all-wise providence, whose majestic operations

have all of them the one single scope and end of love for their blissful accomplishment! We have already seen
enough of the doctrine of grace to be aware to what an almost incredible extent it discloses the divine activity.

Temptation is feeble, languid, intermittent, and inert, compared with this. Satan grows weary, even though he cannot
rest, while the perseverance of grace is incomparable, like the freshness of that eternal mercy from which it
emanates. Moreover, we know that Satan is bound by the coming of our Lord. The little babe of Bethlehem
circumscribed his monstrous empire. If he is as wild and fierce as ever, he has now found the length of his chain

and beyond that his fury is unavailing. Even within his greatly lessened sphere, the Cross of Christ is a perpetual

torture, an endless defeat to his malicious wiles. The very presence of the Church is an unbroken exorcism to the
baffled prince of darkness. Her benedictions keep extrading him from one comer of creation after another. Her exor­
cisms dispossess him even of the hidden spiritual strongholds in which he craves to keep his court. Her holy

presences are tortures to him, worse, some of them at least, than the fires of that abyss which is the fallen creature’s
home. Up and down all lands St Raphael is for ever binding him in the upper uninhabitable parts of the spiritual
Egypt.
Who then can believe that in God’s own cloistered dwelling place, the sanctuary of His Church, Satan’s

activity will prevail against His. and that He will be defeated even where His choice most loves to dwell? Satan
broke into the first paradise of God when he was young, and before the Cross of Christ had bound Him, and what
followed? The saving of Adam and of Eve by a more copious salvation, the superabundance of redeeming grace, the
glorious reign of the Queen of the Immaculate Conception, and the total triumph of the Incarnate Word! Much more

will like consequences follow now. We must not tremble too much at Satan’s power. He is under our feet already.
We are stronger far than he. We must remember the story of the servant of Eliseus in the fourth book of Kings. The
semant of tire man of God, rising early, went out, and saw an army round about the city, and horses, and chariots;

and he told him, saying, Alas, alas, alas, my lord, what shall we do? But he answered. Fear not: for there are more
with us than with them. And Eliseus prayed, and said, Lord, open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the
eyes of the servant, and he saw, and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire, round about Eliseus.

The very inconceivable magnificence of God would lead us to suppose that the number of the saved, which

is one of the greatest glories of His creation, would be something far beyond our utmost expectations, [footnote: See
the note from Lessius on pages 108-9.] Has it not been so in every experience we have ever had of God? Has He not
always outdone His own promises, as well as outstripped our imaginations? Have not His gifts always come in an
embarrassing abundance? Have we ever formed an expectation of mercy or of grace, which has not been fulfilled far
beyond our hopes, as if not even our necessities, much less our merits, but His own liberality, were the rale of

answered prayer! Is it likely to be less so, or are we likely to find God changed all at once, in a matter, in which not
only our happiness, but the honor of His dear Son and the interests of His own wonderful glory, are so exceedingly
involved? There is something so uncongenial in the thought, that it surely cannot be received unless it be revealed.
There is no word which describes His love of us as our Creator so faithfully as magnificence, and will His love as
our Last End be less magnificent, less efficacious in the triumph of its glorious attractions? There is no word to
express His prodigal expenditure in our redemption, except magnificence: can we conceive, in a divine work, of a

magnificence in the design which shall not be equaled by magnificence in the execution? No one doubts that hell
will be unspeakably more dreadful than we expected: because no one doubts but that our little views will be found
foolishly narrow when compared with the transcendent realities of God. So will it be found with our notions of the
number of the saved. Yet. when we think of what the Catholic Church is and of all the privileges involved in being a

Catholic, it seems only reasonable to expect that on the whole far more of them would be saved than lost. There is
no magnificence in this idea. There would be a sense of failure and incompleteness in the opposite opinion. No one
surely can think steadily and continuously on the matter without coming to this conclusion. But of necessity,
because He is Himself. God will go far out of sight of our beliefs in the actual splendor of His accomplishments. So
that, from what we know of God, we should augur that very few Catholics, comparatively speaking, would be lost.

The salvation of almost all of them seems to be claimed by the veiy magnificence of God. He is a bold man, who,

without the Church to back him. believes that God's own gift of free-will, which He has mysteriously allowed to do
Him so much injury in time, shall have a final and complete victory over Him for eternity; and if God is love, which
is of faith, then hell will be no victory to Him.
The honor of the Precious Blood would imply and require all this as much as the magnificence of God. It is

a hard saying that the majority of those for whom it was shed, and on whose souls it has been actually sprinkled,
should be lost eternally. We are purposely turning our eyes away from all without the Church, saying nothing,

defining nothing, hinting nothing, guessing nothing. It is not our concern. But how hard will it be to say that of those
souls, who have been actually washed in it again and again, the majority are lost. It has cleansed them in Baptism,
and printed an ineffaceable character upon their brows. It has absolved them again and again. It has run through
them with thrills of fervor and fortitude in Confirmation. Its red living pulses have beaten with their human life

within the heart at Communion. Are we then to say, that of those, who of all mankind have most trusted the Blood of
Jesus, and have made most use of it, the majority are lost? What ground is there in dogmatic theology for an
assertion so little to the honor of our dearest Lord? One drop is more than enough to redeem all the possible sins of
all the possible worlds, and yet oceans of it do not succeed in redeeming the majority of the members of His Church!
Who would hesitate at anything which the Church taught him to believe, and who would believe this unless the
Church should teach it?

Then again, the action of the sacraments is probably much greater than we have any notion of. We learn a
great deal that is very surprising from theology, enough to set us gratefully wondering at the ingenious excesses of
our Creator’s love. But what we learn there rather shows us the extent of our ignorance than furnishes us with

anything like a complete science. We may follow, first the school which teaches that the operation of the sacraments
is moral, then the school which teaches that it is physical, and we are better and holier, because more loving, men for
our researches. But have they not left us at a point beyond which, though we could get no further, we saw that

sacramental grace was advancing far beyond us with an operation we could not comprehend, into recesses of which
mystical theologians speak in grandiloquent words and with abstmsest terms? When we discuss the deep of the soul,

or the point of the spirit, or whether the character of a sacrament is set as a signet on the soul or on the faculties of
the soul, we are at the end of our mind’s tether, and grace has shot miles ahead, and is woiking grandly out of sight.
All God’s works are greater when we get to look into them, than they seemed at first. Especially must it be so with

such supernatural works as His sacraments. It is conceivable that a clear view of the operation of the sacraments,
both in themselves, and also retrospectively in our own souls, may be a not insignificant item in our future
blessedness. One good Communion is enough, they say, to make a saint. Now think what goes to the making of a
saint, the numberless things, their inexhaustible variety, their positive contradictoriness, their unlikely combinations,
the intricate wide-spreading possibilities of their perseverance; and what can the axiom mean, except that, not only
the inward power of a sacrament, but its actual operation, goes farther and deeper than we can follow it?* Look then
at the numberless receptions of sacraments, which there are daily in the Church, and can you seriously believe that
the result of it all is, that the majority of Catholics are not saved? Oh be sure you are estimating far too low the
glorious efficacy of the divine interventions, the successful majesty' of creative love!

[footnote: As it is the tendency of the modem mind to eliminate the supernatural, believers must be on their guard
against an inevitable temptation, which will beset themselves to make little of the more supernatural agencies in the
Church. Any departure from the old language about the wonder-working powers and peculiar privileges of the
sacraments would he a most suspicious feature in any modem theology. Upon the universally admitted principle of
moral theology, Stat pro facto, the least that we can say about the sacraments is, that where they have been received,
the probability is always in favor of their validity; and if they were valid, then the right inward dispositions went
along with them. For the sacraments do not take the place of a real inward change of heart, or do instead of it. It is
their office to produce it by their marvelous reinforcements of grace.]
Our ignorance of the last inward processes of deathbeds leaves one of the most spacious portions of our
lives inaccessible to our notice. Life is not counted only by material time. The world, and all its sights and sounds,

too often leave little room for God in the hearts of men. But the hour of death is very spacious. It gives God room. It

turns minutes into years. It doubles and redoubles the swift processes of the mind just on the eve of its ejection from
the body. It is an hour of truth, and an hour of truth is longer than a century of falsehood. Heaven draws near to it, to
help as well as to behold, ft is God’s last chance with His creature, and divine wisdom must know well how to use

its chances. A man is freed from many laws, when time and space are visibly melting away in the white light of eter­
nity. or rather he himself is being brought under wider and larger laws. He can live many lives within the compass of
his agony. We know very little of what goes on then. The thick curtains of the glazed eye, of the expressionless or
only pain-furrowed face, and of the inarticulate voice, are drawn round the last earthly audience between the Creator
and the creature.
But observation and psychology combine to teach us that much does go on, and of a far more intelligent
character, than we should otherwise conceive. “Really, according to my observations, ” says Sir Benjamin Brodie,*

“the mere act of dying is seldom, in any sense of the word, a very painful process. It is true that some persons die in

a state of bodily torture, as in cases of tetanus: that the drunkard, dying of delirium tremens, is haunted by terrific
visions; and that the victim of that most horrible of all diseases, hydrophobia, in addition to those peculiar bodily
sufferings from which the disease has derived its name, may be in a state of terror from the supposed presence of

frightful objects—which are presented to him as realities, even to the last. But these and some other instances which
I might adduce are exceptions to the general rule, which is, that both mental and bodily sufferings terminate long
before the scene is finally closed. Then, as to the actual fear of death; it seems to me that the Author of our
existence, for the most part, gives it to us when it is intended that we should live, and takes it away from us when it

is intended that we should die. Those who have been long tormented by bodily pain are generally as anxious to die
as they ever were to live. So it often is with those whose life has been protracted to an extreme old age, beyond the

usual period of mortality, even when they labor under no actual disease, ft is not very common for any one to die
merely of old age:—
Like ripe fmit to drop
Into his mother’s lap.

But I have knownthis to happen; and a happy conclusion it has seemed to be of worldly cares and joys, ft was like
falling to sleep, never to awake again in this state of existence. Some die retaining all their faculties, and quite aware
that their dissolution is at hand. Others offer no signs of recognition of external objects, so that it is impossible for us

to form any positive opinion whether they do or do not retain their sensibility; and others again, as I have already
stated, who appear to be insensible and unconscious, when carefully watched, are found not to be so in reality; but
they die contentedly. I have myself never known but two instances in which, in the act of dying, there were manifest
indications of the fear of death.” [footnote: Psychological Enquiries, p. 130.]
In the life of Condren there is a very remarkable passage urging on us the duty of thanksgiving to God for
the graces He bestows on the dying, inasmuch as ‘His compassion for them is inexplicable, and He seems to
distribute His favors to them all the more willingly, because they are hardly now in danger of profaning them.”
Beautiful thought! O how much of the beauty of God’s love is gathered round the dying bed, how much more than

we can see, how much more than we believe! We grant that it is unknown ground; but because mercy is so much
needed then, because mercy has had so many antecedents with the soul, because it is God’s will it should be saved,
and finally because God is such a God as we know Him well to be, we boldly claim all that unknown land of
Catholic death-beds for the simple sovereignty of the divine compassion. That hour may explain many inexplicable

salvations. The gloomiest mind must admit, that it may have shrouded in it endless possibilities of salvation; and
with such a God at such an hour the possibilities grow miraculously into probabilities, and forthwith disappear in

those sweet sudden certainties with wliich the dying child of Jesus has fallen asleep upon its Father’s bosom.

[footnote: I would earnestly beg of the reader to turn hack here, and read again our Blessed Lord’s own revelation
to St Gertmde about deathbed mercies, page 202. In tire consideration of this matter there are two things to be ob­
served, and also to be kept studiously apart—opinions based on theological teaching, and opinions gathered from the
observation of mankind and the experience of life. The last chapter, “The Easiness of Salvation”, was theology, the
present chapter on the number of the saved rests mainly on inferences from the character of God, and on a hopeful
view of human conduct. All consistent views of God's dealings with His creatures must rest the fixed point of the
compass either on His revealed character or on our own personal observation of mankind. From our ignorance,
neither will give us certain results. But on the one hand, the inferences drawn from the revealed character of God are
decidedly in favor of the mild view of the number of the saved, while, on the other, personal observation of mankind
is a most uncertain affair, can only produce very precarious results, and is by no means so decidedly on the rigorous
side as the revealed character of God is on the milder side. We know more of God than we know of men, and what
we know of Him we know more surely than what we know of them. It is the very object of this chapter to prove that.
[With regard to the hopeful view of human conduct, my own observation in the priesthood, and that of others
eminent in age and of wide experience, whom I have consulted, is that the great majority of Catholics lead lives of
more or less struggle. It is too often little enough. Yet missions, general confessions, and the like, reveal for the most
part tliis feature of stmggle. Now tliis is a most important feature. “Combattasi pure, die qui sta il tutto, ” says
Scupoli. (But read all liis chapter 6.) The grace of a good deathbed, maintained in the text to be so common, is not
the ordinary conclusion of a probation spent in live-long neglect of God, or in obdurate sin. but the final giving of
the victory' by a great and decisive mercy to the side in a struggle, which hitherto had been dubious and
unsatisfactory. Meanwhile no one can deny that a good death as the end of a bad life is both a theological possibility,
and an occasional mercy. But such are not the deathbed graces wliich I speak of as being common. Still, those other
marvelous deathbed conversions, though they are rare phenomena, must necessarily be taken into the account, when
we are occupied in fathoming the incredible depths of God’s love. It has become proverbial that a principle is best
tested by an extreme case. Thus even of sinners, as well as of martyrs, does God’s love at times make these words
true, tme it may be even to the passing over of purgatoiy.
Mortis sacrce compendio
Vitam beatam possident.}
When we see a man sinning, we see his sin, but we can seldom see the excuses of his sin. This is a very
important consideration in the present discussion, and has already been partially adverted to. The depths of

invincible ignorance may underlie no inconsiderable region of a man's moral nature, and each individual character
has an invincible ignorance belonging to itself. It is a tiling we cannot possibly presume upon for ourselves, because
a suspicion destroys it; but we may put much to its account in our neighbor's favor. Again, the violence of the
temptation is invisible; and even if we saw it, we could not see the peculiar oppressiveness of it to another’s heart, or

its almost irresistible tyranny because of previous habits. Yet surely there are many cases in which the vehemence of
the temptation is a mitigating circumstance in punishment, even if it be not an actual plea of mercy. We must also
have a thorough acquaintance with a man's peculiar turn of mind, the bent of his disposition, the circumstances of

his past life. and. most of all, his early education, before we are at all in a condition to form an estimate of what his
guilt is in the sight of God.* Also men often fall, when they are in a good state, from a momentary self-trust, or a

sudden assault of Satan, God permitting it for their greater good and more entire humility; and then a man’s sin is an
exceptional case, and we cannot argue from it to liis habitual state. All these considerations, and many more which
might be adduced, very much detract from the value of our observations on the sins of Catholics, as proofs that by
far the greater number of them are not ultimately saved.

[footnote: Lacordaire says beautifully of the sinner as he is in the sight of God, “Dieu y reconnaît encore sa main.
Comme une statue mutilée sort de la terre où les siècles l'avaient enfouie, ainsi l’âme dégradée par le péché
apparaît aux regards de son père: c 'est un marbre déshonoré, mais où respire encore la vie, et auquel l'artiste
suprême peut rendre sa première beauté. Il y travaille avec ardeur; il aime ce débris; il v frappe des coups qui
émeuvent son espérance et attendrissent ses regrets. Ce n 'est qu, à la mort que le mal persévérant prend une
consistance à l’épreuve de l’amour divin, et que Dieu le voit comme un impardonnable ennemi. Jusque là, il
appartient encore à l’architecture du bien; il est une pierre espérable de la sainte cité, et peut-être y entrera-t-il en

un lieu magnifique, qui étonnera l’innocence sans la décourager. ”—Conférences de 1851.]
This leads us to a further consideration. It can hardly be denied that men’s actions are often worse than

their hearts, even when they proceed from the heart; and they have often less heart in them than they seem to have.

For instance, a man commits a sin in a sudden outburst of passion; that passion may have felt some peculiar sting in
the provocation which another would not feel, and it may have fallen upon him when he was physically agitated or
when his nerves were unstrung. For all this, the sin may remain a sin, and yet be no fair index of the sinner’s heart.
Or again, men are propelled into sin not unfrequently by false shame, by human respect, by bad company; and a
man’s heart may be far better all the while than its outward actions testify. Many a man looks to his neighbors a very

monster of depravity, while the priest, who heard his general confession, has been almost touched to tears by the

spots of green verdure, the almost feminine sensibilities, the refined kindnesses, but above all by the moral shyness,
the ground of so many virtues, which he found in that great rough nature. Are we not learning every day to be less
surprised at finding how so very much good can dwell with so very much evil? Then, again, many have so many odd
crossings in their minds which tell upon their motives, and hamper the free action of their moral sense; and thus it is
that cruelty in war, agrarian murders, and the like, are not on the whole such conclusive proofs of a depraved heart
as they are commonly taken to be. Much crime lies at the door of a warped mind; and how much of that crime is sin

can be known to God alone. The heart is the jewel which He covets for His crown, and if the heart which we do not
see is better than the actions that we see, God be praised! for then the world is a trifle less dismal than it seems.
It was perhaps these and similar considerations of human charity, almost infinitely magnified by His Sacred

Heart, which made Jesus, when on earth, such a lover of sinners. We know well that His predilection was for them.
He came to seek and to save what was lost, and the more lost a soul was, the more especially He came to seek it and

to save it. He seemed to prefer the society of sinners to any other; and all-holy as He was, it is wonderful how He
contrived at once to exhibit His holiness and also to put sinners into so interesting a light; and He, which is much to
be remembered, is the judge at last. Those sinners, who came near Him in the Gospel and had intercourse with Him,

seem to be almost His chosen souls. There is a poetry thrown around their memories, even in the case of the poor
young man who did not follow Him, which is nothing else but the luster of the Savior’s love.
So is it always with the saints of Jesus. They are characterized by a hopeful view of sinners. They have a
positive devotion to them, as our Lord had. The veiy power of the religious communities, which have to deal with
the reformation of sinners, consists at once in their tender love of them and their supernatural respect for them.
Without this last quality even the charity of the spouses of Christ will be but intermittent and lose the perfection of
its beauty, uniformity of its sweetness, and the power from God to accomplish and bring to a happy persevering

issue the glorious work of conversion in the soul. In the place of the steadiness of grace, their works of mercy will
have all the characteristics of capricious nature. Truly it is a Christlike thing to love sinners. But is not our love of

them a piteous horror rather than a true love, if our view of them is to be so depressing and overclouded, that we are
to believe that the greater number even of Catholics arc not to be saved? Does not this peculiar tenderness, this
almost devotion of our Blessed Lord, point to a far more cheering view? Pray, said the Carmelite prioress of Beaune
to Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament, pray for this soul, though I cannot hope for its conversion. O Mother, replied

Margaret, wherefore doubt the goodness of our God? Is not this to do Him a dishonor? Who has ever invoked the
Holy Child Jesus without being heard? Now let us go and implore of Him the grace which you desire, and three days
shall not pass before your wishes shall be gratified.

The saints look at sinners as saints themselves in possibility'. Their hopefulness is the secret of their charity.
Their humility also, which gives them a clear view of the excess of God’s grace over the amount of their own
correspondence, makes them slow to believe that others, even with less grace, will not surpass their attaimnents.

Great stress should be laid on the almost invariable characteristic of the saints, that they took a hopeful
view of human conduct; for the saints are precisely men whose dispositions approach to the dispositions of God.

Thus they come to believe, what the experience of those versed in the affairs of souls abundantly establishes, that

conversion is one of the most common phenomena of grace. It is the sort of thing to be expected of grace, the
ordinary occurrence which comes as a matter of course, just as the sun warms, or the frost chills, or the water wets
us, or the fire bums us. Now we have already seen the immense abundance of grace, with which heaven inundates
the earth, and if conversion is quite an ordinary occurrence with it, and sinners alone can strictly speaking be the
subjects of conversion, it follows that the great mass of apparently unworthy Catholics is the chosen theatre of one

of the strongest as well as the commonest of the operations of grace. Thus it is that apostolic zeal, with its
enlightened love, looks at sinners as the materials for the future triumphs of Jesus, as the harvest yet ungamered of
His Passion and His Cross. Bad Catholics, those who appear bad to us, are but a proportion of all Catholics, and if

redeeming grace has yet got to invade that proportion, and according to all its laws must triumphantly invade it, we
can hardly think otherwise than that the majority of Catholics will be saved. If we put all our data together,
conversion can hardly be common in the Church, unless salvation is common too.

There is another point, which has already been adverted to, but which must not be omitted in the present

enumeration. When men look at a country, or a neighborhood, or a town, and pass a judgment on its religious
condition, not only must they necessarily have insufficient data, but they are very liable to fall into an inaccuracy
which seriously affects the value of their observations. They do not distinguish between the sinfulness of sin and the

deformity of sin, which last spreads out and covers a greater extent of ground than the guilt, infecting the manners,
tainting the whole tone and atmosphere, and altogether making a much greater show than the real sin. Much that is

morally unlovely is not sin, certainly not mortal sin. And yet it catches the eye, and offends our moral sense, and is
extremely odious in the sight of religion. It is of a truth an evidence of the existence of sin. but by no means a
measure of its quantity. Very often a newly converted man is almost as disagreeable and repulsive as he was when in
his sins. His moral appearance is not improved all at once. The mellowing, softening, beautifying powers of grace
are long in their operation, and follow with slow steps the sharp decisive movements which effect conversion at the
first. As it is absurd for Protestants to measure the truth of the religions of two countries by the success of conquest,
the perfection of the monetary system, the extension of commerce, or scientific improvements in agriculture,* so is

it equally a mistake to decide on the religiousness of a population by the offensive prominences of national
character, or by the reigning foibles and unworthinesses of a population, or even by a low standard of moral integrity

in some one or other department, peculiar to the country, place, or time. In judging of individuals it is still more
important to distinguish between moral unloveliness and downright sin. Goodness tends to be graceful; but in this
life there are always to each man a thousand causes which hinder its development.
[footnote: Yet the more thoughtful Protestant writers are beginning to see now. what political geography might
have taught them before, that these developments of material grandeur are due to the amount of popular liberty
rather than to the dominance of any religious opinions.]
The extreme severity of the punishments of purgatory is another consideration which leads the mind to
contemplate the immense multitude of the saved, and of those saved with very imperfect dispositions, as the only
solution of these chastisements. Purgatory' goes as near to the unriddling the riddle of the world, as any one

ordinance of God which can be named. Difficulties are perpetually drifting that way to find their explanation; and
the saints of God have turned so full a light upon those fields of fire, that the geography of them seems almost as
familiar to us as the well-known features of the surface of the earth. The charitable practices of Catholic devotion

lead us to spend so much of our day amid the patience of that beautiful suffering, that it has become to us like the

wards of a favorite hospital with its familiar faces brightening at the welcome words of consolation. It is the same
fire as hell. That in itself is a terrible reflection. The revelations of the saints depict the tortures of it as fearful in the
extreme. There is a consent of them, as to the immense lengths of time which souls average under that punishment, a
consent fully bearing out the practice of the Church in anniversaries and foundations for Masses for ever. The very
slightest infidelities to grace seem to be visited there with the acutest sufferings. God Himself has bidden His saints

to honor with chaste fear and exceeding awe the rigors of His justice, and the requirements of His purity, in that land

of bitter long delay. Now does it come natural to us to look at all this system, tliis terrible eighth sacrament of fire,
which is the home of those souls whom the seven real sacraments of earth have not been allowed to purity'
completely, does it come natural to us to look at it all as simply a penal machinery invented for the saints and those
most like the saints, to cut away with its vindictive sharpness the little imperfections which come of human frailty ?
That it should fulfill this office is most intelligible, most accordant with God’s perfections, and most consolatory' to

souls themselves. But does not the view at once recommend itself to us that it was an invention of God to multiply
the fruit of our Savior’s Passion, that it was intended for the great multitudes who should die in charity with God,
but in imperfect charity, and dierefore that it is as it were the continuance of deathbed mercies beyond the grave, and

that, as such, it throws no uncertain light on the cheering supposition that most Catholics are saved, especially of the
poor who sorrow and suffer here?

Mention has been made in previous chapters of God’s unaccountable contentment with so little, as requisite
for salvation. Of course purgatory goes some way towards accounting for it, but very far from the whole way.
Purgatoiy seems too good for ungenerous souls, and yet they are crowding into it by thousands, and become
beautiful amid its flames. The merits and satisfactions of our dearest Lord seem our only refuge, when we see how
low it has pleased God to put the terms of our redemption. The charity of Jesus covers the multitude of the sins of
His people. God sees the world through Him, not simply by a fiction imputing to us the holiness that is our Lord’s,
but, for His sake and by the efficacy of His Blood, actually ennobling our unworthiness, and giving a real greatness

to our littleness, and a solid value to the merest intentions of our love. It is the daily delight of His justice to be

limited in the operations of its righteous anger by the adorable sacrifice of the Mass: and the gloiy of Jesus is the
grand fundamental law of all creation. Yet even so, God’s contentment with so little is an inscrutable mercy, one of
those bright lights that are dark because they are so bright, and which are rising up perpetually from the abysses of
creative love. Who shall tell the thousands of souls in heaven at this hour, whom, almost to their own surprise, that
marvelous contentment has exalted there?
Are any two angels exactly in the same degree of gloiy? Theologians say that the graces of each radiant

spirit are unlike. Perhaps then their glories are unequal also, and even where not unequal, at least unlike. If so. what
innumerable degrees of bliss there must be in the angelic hierarchies! The saints we know are ranged in countless
ranks. We are not told that those who are in the same rank have all an equal vision. It is of faith that the rewards of

heaven differ in degree. It is revealed to us in the parables of the talents and the cities. In my Father’s house are
many mansions, said our Lord. Star differeth from star in glory, is the doctrine of St Paul. Now there can be no
exaggeration in supposing that there are at least as many different degrees of happiness in heaven as there are

degrees of happiness on earth. We know that there are as many different degrees of gloiy hereafter, as there are
different degrees of grace here; and as far as we can read the phenomena of grace, it would really seem as if those

differences were as numerous as the individual hearts in which it dwells. This would admit of an immense variety of
scales of goodness upon earth, the very lowest of which should reach heaven. And would it not be in accordance
with what we know of the works of God, if heaven stooped almost down to earth and well-nigh blended with it.
only, which is truly difference enough, that the lowest there would have God’s clear light full upon him. and

therefore be bathed in joys which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart of man conceived? This view would

swiftly reach, and that by no circuitous route, the sweet conclusion for which we plead, that the great majority of
Catholics are saved.
Hell teaches the same comfortable doctrine as heaven, although in a rougher strain. Finite evil is almost

infinitely punished, limited sin almost inimitably tormented. One mortal sin is chastised eternally. There may be
many in hell who have committed a less amount of sin than many who are in heaven, only they would not lay hold

of the Cross of Christ, and do penance, and have easy absolution. There is no life of self-denying virtue, however

long and however laborious, but if it ends in impenitence and mortal sin, must be continued among the unending
pains of hell. One mortal sin, and straightway a death without contrition, and everlasting despair alone remains. Now
will evil be more punished than good is rewarded? Will they even be on equal terms? Theology teaches that the

chastisements of hell are for the sake of Christ far less than the wretched sufferers deserve. There is mercy even
there, whence hope has long since fled, compassion even there where its tenderness seems so wholly out of place,

and its forbearance thankless and unavailing. Hell is less than sin deserves. Then is there no comer of creation where
the divine justice enjoys all its rights? At least it is not in hell; for hell is less than sin deserves. O beautiful ubiquity
of mercy! The Gospel nowhere tells us that sinners shall be punished up to the plenitude of their demerits; but it

does tell us about the reward of virtue, that it shall be “good measure, and pressed down, and shaken together, and

running over.” You see it is in heaven only that justice shall enjoy its royalties! Shall not then God’s rewarding of
good be in all respects far beyond, in fullness and completeness, His punishment of evil?—Shall not a little good, a
very little good, be much rewarded? And is not the number who are rewarded a chief feature in the magnificence of
the reward? Surely not only will heaven be unspeakably beyond our deservings, but many will go there, whom only
the generosity of divine love and the determination of persisting grace could have made deserving. These are things

which we cannot know, and they are not put forward as amounting to arguments; but there seems something easy in
the process by which the very existence and extremity of hell leads to the conclusion that most Catholics are saved.
The providence of God in the lives of men is to each one in particular a private revelation of His love. The
biography of every one of us is to ourselves as luminously supernatural, as palpably full of divine interferences, as if

it were a page out of the Old Testament history. Moreover, all that is providential is also merciful. The interferences
are all on the side of love. Stem-looking accidents, when they turn their full face to us, beam with the look of love.

Even our very faults are so strangely overruled, that mercy can draw materials for its blessings even out of them. It
is tree we may easily delude ourselves. But the natural tendency to find a meaning in what happens to ourselves, and
to exaggerate its significance, cannot altogether, or even nearly, account for the providential aspect which our past
lives present to us, when we reflect upon them in the faith and fear of God.

Our merciful Creator seems to have led us very gently, as knowing how weak and ill we are; yet He has led
us plainly towards Himself. If it is not speaking of Him too familiarly, He seems to have done everything just at the
right time, and in the right place, to have put nothing before us till we were ready for it and could make the most of

it, to have timed His grace and apportioned it, so that we might have as little as possible the guilt of resisting grace,
to have weighed even our crosses before He laid them upon us, and to have awaited an auspicious moment each time
He would persuade us to something fresh. He has combined events with the most consummate skill, and brought out
the most wonderful results, and they have always been in our favor. There are difficulties and seeming exceptions to
the ordinary course of this genial providence. But it is only at first sight that they perplex us. These very exceptions
on closer investigation, or longer experience, turn out to be the most striking examples of the general mle of

benevolence and love. If we ask each man separately, this is what he will tell us. We have all of us had this private
revelation. But are not God’s works for the most part remarkable for their efficacy? Do not all these secret bio­

graphies of men, with their beautiful disclosures of His assiduous ministering love, bear upon this question of
salvation? Has He so waited upon each of us. that we might at any time have mistaken Him for our guardian angel,

instead of our God, and yet is not His solicitude in far the greater number of cases to have the one issue which His
glory so earnestly desires? God is infinitely just, and He executes His justice upon the sons of men. But Scripture

does not put His vindictive justice forward as coming in floods and inundations and unheard-of wonders, as His
mercy does, but rather as a reserve, an interference, an exceptional visitation, and as taking the room left for it in the
world by previously rejected mercy.

Let us dwell on one feature of His providence, the way in which He vouchsafes to time things. Think of the
hour of death, of its surpassing importance, of its thrilling risks, of all those inward processes of which we have
already spoken. Now may we not conclude, or at least with reasonable hope infer, that to most, if not to all, men, the
hour of their death is seasonably timed? They die when it is best for them to die. There are some dangers in advance
which they avoid by dying then. They die when they are in the best state for dying. Even the deaths of those who are
lost may be mercifully tuned. When men die young, it is perhaps because they would have lost themselves if they

had lived to be old. When men die late, it is perhaps to give them time to correspond to grace, to do penance for the
past, and especially that they may get rid of some evil habit which would else be their perdition, and which the mere
infirmity of age will help them to abandon. When men die just as they are coming into the possession of riches, or at
the outset of a smiling career of laudable ambition, it is perhaps because God sees in their natural character, or in

their personal circumstances, some seeds of future evil, and so He takes them while all that evil lies innocently
undeveloped in their souls. Who can think of what death is. and yet doubt that God's wisdom and His love are
brought to bear with inexpressible sweetness both on its manner and its time? If God were pleased to tell us, we
should probably be amazed at the numbers of convincing reasons that there are why each of us should die when, and
where, and how we do. The very sight of so much legislation and arrangement, on the part of God. about this one

final act of our probation is doubtless pouring into the souls of the Blessed at all hours delightful streams of
wondering adoration and ecstatic love. Is all this tme of each Christian deathbed, and are not then the great majority
of Christians saved?

But what is it which most obviously distinguishes Catholics from all other men? Surely, it is the gift of
faith. This, next to the Beatific Vision of Himself in heaven, is the greatest gift which God can give to His creatures;
for in some respects it may be said to be greater than sanctifying grace, because it is its indispensable foundation. It
is hard to realize the greatness of a gift which is so intimate to every operation of our lives. But we may gain some
idea of its importance when we remember that without faith no sacraments avail, and that with the loss of faith we
lose almost all the capabilities of setting ourselves right when we have sinned. It is a gift therefore which we should

not only guard most jealously, but which we should increase by exercise; for that it is capable of increase by our
own correspondence is one of those many really startling disclosures of divine love, at which nobody is startled
because they are so common. We see or hear of souls wandering in the darkness, reading, arguing, writing,
commenting, collating manuscripts, all in perplexity because they cannot perceive the divinity of our Blessed Lord,
while to every Catholic child that sweet converting truth is plainer than the sunshine on the trees. The little fellow
could not doubt it, if he would. He is so sure of it, that he would be beaten to death rather than say it was not tme. To

others the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity presents difficulties of the most insuperable kind, how God can be One
God yet Three Persons, how the Son can be evermore co-equally begotten of the Father, and the Holy Ghost be
evermore co-equally proceeding from the Father and the Son. The Catholic finds nothing hard in it. He cannot
explain it, even so far as theology arrives towards an explanation. But he knows it and sees it as distinctly as the

writing of a letter or the pages of a book. Bewilder him as you will, you cannot inject a doubt into his mind. He
cannot help himself: he is more certain of the Holy Trinity, than he is of your existence who are standing by him and
questioning him.

O glorious necessity of believing, which is hardly faith, but actual contact with a supernatural world, as if

the prerogative of heaven was only to see God, while earth’s privilege was to touch Him in the dark with fearless
venture and with thrilling love! Heaven must indeed be beautiful, if the saints can part there with their gift of faith,

and not pine to have it back again! Yet this gift every Catholic receives, not the faith of devils who believe and

tremble, but the supernatural gift of divine faith. It is faith by which so many, after years of sin, quietly and as it
were naturally, swing round to their anchors, and die well. By this gift the Catholic sees far up into the unbeginning
eternity of God, and beholds his own soul lying there in the lap of that eternal love. By faith he sees the unspeakable
operations of the Holy Trinity with its innascibility, generation, and procession. By faith he scans the numberless
perfections of God. By faith he sees Jesus, God and Man, in the Blessed Sacrament. By faith he beholds Mary on her
mediatorial throne. By faith the joys of heaven, the delays of purgatory. the pains of hell, are familiar to him as the
hills and streams and groves where his childhood played. By faith he sees tire lineaments of Jesus in His priests, and
beholds the Precious Blood dropping from the hand that is raised to give him absolution. This gift is common to all.

so common that it stays with us even when grace has left us. so persevering and so secure of itself that it will lodge
with sin and fear no evil; and is there one sign of predestination of which so much can be said as of this transcendent
gift, which of its sole self makes a creature of God into a Catholic, and writes upon Iris brow this plain inscription of

his Creator, It is My especial will that this creature should be saved, and live with Me for ever?

The Church militant on earth is the foreshadowing of the Church triumphant in heaven. The destinies of the
heavenly Church are glassed and mirrored on the earthly Church, and are in some sense anticipated there. The end of
the earthly Church is to be transplanted into the heavenly. Is it not a difficulty, unless authority should teach it. to
think that less than the great majority of the earthly plants will be worth transplanting? Seed is wasted in sowing; yet
the earthly husbandman gamers the produce of by far the greatest portion of what he sows, even when birds, and

blight, and lawless footpaths, and uncertain weather, and waste, and theft have done their worst. Shall the heavenly

Husbandman be worse off than they?
The Church may seem a failure; but is it likely to be so in reality? God has His little flock of saints, of
eminent souls whom we technically call saints. These He leads by extraordinary paths. He introduces them into a
mystical world. He furnishes them with peculiar graces, and endows them with miraculous powers. He inspires them
with unearthly tastes for suffering and abjection, deluges them with the most unparalleled afflictions and trials,

consigns them for years to the intimate assaults, not unfrequently to the bodily possession, of demons, constantly

suspends their common life by mysterious ecstasies, and then again plunges them into such pitchy darkness that they
hardly know if they are in a state of grace. He transfigures all their senses. He drives them to the most appalling

austerities. He animates them to the most heroic deeds of charitable daring for the good of others. He renews in them
supernatural likenesses to His Blessed Son. This is not the way of salvation, nor even the way of perfection. It is the
way of the saints. No one is introduced into it except by God Himself. He takes the initiative. Every one should
aspire to perfection; no one can lawfully aspire to what is technically the way of the saints, namely, the ecstatic.*
Now of this little flock some, as appears from the records of hagiology, fail and come to an evil end. But they are.
comparatively speaking, few in number, and chiefly notable, not so much because they are so rare, as because the
phenomenon is so terrific. He has two other little flocks, composed of religious, priests, laity and many simple souls,

who by love have worked themselves beyond the common way of precepts into that of counsels and of the inwardly
perfect observance of the precepts. These are two ways of perfection, often combining, often converging, the way of

counsels, and the way of perfect interior observance of precepts. Neither of them are like the way of the saints. We

know from the lives of good people, and especially the chronicles of religious orders, that many out of these little
flocks go wrong and frustrate the sweet purposes of God. Some fall back into the common way. and others find no
way of salvation because they refuse the way in which God has put them. But surely by far the greater number, as
far as we can judge from books, persevere, and not only save their souls, but avoid purgatory, or are high in heaven.

[footnote: Many mystical theologians, especially among the Germans, maintain that ecstasy is the natural state
of unfallen man, that Adam was in an ecstatic state until the fall, and by consequence our Blessed Lady all her life.
The passage in the text is not meant to express so much as this. I suppose that the ascetical life can produce what are
technically called saints, without the predominance of the mystical element. St Vincent of Paul looks like an
instance of this. But is there any example of a canonized saint, in whom there was not a considerable admixture of
the mystical life? Anyhow it is a doctrine of great importance in the theology of the spiritual life, that no man has
any right to aspire to he what is technically called a saint, still less that he has any obligation to do so, or that the
pursuit of perfection in any way involves it. I venture to think that the whole controversy about the obligation of
aiming at perfection would be put on a plainer footing, if the fourfold division of good people, given in the text,
were attended to: (1) the saints, who lead the ecstatic or mystical way; (2) those who aim at perfection through the
counsels; (3) those who aim at perfection through the perfect interior observance of the precepts; (4) ordinarily good
Catholics, saving themselves by the fréquentation of the sacraments, and by obedience.]
Then God has a fourth little flock, the great multitude of Catholics. It is a very little one compared with the
great mass of men on earth, and it is yet more divinely distinguished from them, than even the saints or the perfect

are from itself. A Catholic has more marks of special love multiplied upon him as compared with other men, than a
saint has as compared with an ordinary Catholic. Why may we not think of this fourth little flock, as we think of the

others, that the failures are few, and the successes overwhelmingly numerous, especially as we have more grounds

to go upon in this last case than in any of the others, both because the failure cannot be short of eternal misery, and
because an equal, if not a greater, amount of divine predilection has been shown? Of those who were compelled to
come to the banquet in the Gospel, there was only one who was without the wedding garment.
[footnote: Since the publication of the first edition of this work the venerated President of Ushaw has kindly
brought under my notice a Censura by the Franciscan, Dominic Lossada, prefixed to the Revelations of Brother
Joseph of St Benedict, a Spanish Benedictine of Monserrato. Brother Joseph asserted that the tmth of the great
majority of Catholics being saved (and he expresses his view almost in the terms of this chapter) was revealed to
him. and he declares that he is "divinely certain” of it. Part of Lossada’s Censure is occupied with a comment on
tliis. and I confess I was surprised at the array of proof and authority which he brings in favor of this view. I might
have spoken less guardedly, and with fewer restrictions, had I seen it before I wrote my book. I hoped to have added
that part of the Censura, either in a translation or in the original, as an Appendix, but it was found that it would add
to the price and thickness of the volume.]
It maybe urged that some of the considerations, which have been here adduced, apply also to persons who
are not Catholics. God be praised if it is so! The overflow of mercy is surely not an argument against its existence.

That were strange logic. Doubtless the mercy of God covers the whole earth as the waters cover the sea. It is one of
our best joys to know that its abundance is beyond our gaze, and above our comprehension. But again we turn to
those who are before us, to Catholics. If any of these considerations apply to those outside the Church, and if

moreover they are tme, then a fortiori, as logicians say, that is, with tenfold greater force, will they apply to
Catholics. And so whichever way we turn, the same benignant conclusion looks us always in the face.
No one can meditate without very solemn apprehensions upon Iris final judgment. Yet it is the deliberate
conviction of our best thoughts and most mature reflection, that we had rather leave our final doom in the hands of
the all-holy God than in those of the most merciful of sinful men. Our knowledge of God does not leave us room for
a moment’s hesitation. Strange to say! intimately as we know our own wretchedness, and appalled as we often are

by the vision of our own sins, our sense of security in the hands of God rises in great measure from the fact that He

knows us better than anyone else can know us. There are so many things by which God will not judge us, and by
which men would judge us, that it seems as if our deliverance from these was already half a verdict in our favor.
How often in life are we accused wrongly and mistakenly! How are motives imputed to us which we never had! We
lose our temper for a moment, and are judged by that fact for years to come. When we do wrong, we often struggle

manfully before we give way, but men put not these invisible struggles to our account. Full of want of simplicity as
we are. and far from perfect truth, we are on the whole always more sincere than we seem. We frequently have good
motives for imprudent and ill-looking actions. When we often appear careless and unkind, some secret sorrow is
oppressing us, or anxiety disturbing us, or responsibility harassing us. Now God sees all this rightly, and man
cannot. God does not judge us by any of these things; man must. Hence it is—a strange conclusion for sinners to

come to—that God loves us better than men do because He knows us better.

He judges us by our inward religious acts, which necessarily go for nothing with men. He judges us by the
fructifying of His own gifts within us, a very slight portion of which ever becomes visible to men, and even that

portion only partially visible. Moreover, He judges us as He sees us in His Son. He judges us by the love which
Mary, angels, and saints have for us. And finally, He judges us with all our good collectively before Him, while our
evil is interrupted by frequent absolutions, and our sins supematurally effaced by the Precious Blood, so that by the
laws of His own redeeming love He cannot see them in the same way that men see them. Thus we are most

reasonable in preferring rather to be judged by God than by men. The acutenesses of their criticism are far more to
be dreaded than the niceties of His justice, when omnipotent love sits by as its assessor. Now if we judge that the

great majority of Catholics will not be saved, it is a human judgment; and like all human judgments it is more
rigorous than the divine, because of the ignorance and the temper of the judge. Therefore we may modestly hope
that God’s judgment is otherwise, and that the great majority of Catholics are saved, ft is only applying to the case of
the multitude what we each of us find true in our own, that largeness and allowance in the Creator’s judgment,

winch it is hopeless to look for at the tribunal of the creature.
Let us conclude with the same protest with which we began. This is not theology; it is divination,
divination from what we know of God and from what experience has taught us to hope of men. This is what may be
said on the bright side of a question, which can have no demonstration either way on this side the grave. We do not
enunciate it as certainly tme, but we claim to say it as lawful to be said. Moreover, it must be especially observed

that the force of the proof, so far as it is a proof, is cumulative. The arguments are many, but it is not asserted that
any of them are sufficient by themselves to prove so much. The proof does not rest on any one, or any two or three
of them, but on the cumulus. Thus to pull the proof to pieces, and attack each consideration by itself, would be what

is called in logic the "fallacy of division.” The strength of the view is not in each separate member of the proof, but

in the huge improbability that so many considerations should converge upon one point, should combine in one
cumulus, and yet the conclusion from them be untrue. An adversaiy must meet it as a cumulative proof, or he will
not touch the question at all.
This then is what may be said on the bright side of this great mystery and difficulty. It is the bright side, not

only because it is the most cheerful, but because it most invites to holiness. Had I not thought so, I would not have
been at the pains to draw out the proof. I am deliberately convinced that this view will make men more con­

scientious. more austere, more strict, more spiritual, more lovingly exact with God. than the opposite view; and I
speak from experience, and not merely from speculation. The other view, as I have seen, repels men from common
attainments, disheartens them in even necessaiy struggles, and is almost fatal to all the higher kinds of mortification,

and so to the pursuit of perfection. The soul-destroying laxity of rigorism is a phenomenon as common as it is
melancholy. Next to heresy, there is nothing I should so much deplore as to give currency to any opinions which
should seem, however indirectly, to make light of strictness, penance, purity, and holiness of life. I have dwelt on the

view contained in this chapter, precisely because I regard such a view as the most efficacious protest against the
prevailing laxity.
We are speaking then of what we do not know. But it is at least allowable to put all these considerations in

opposition to those which, justly or not. give us hard and to our weakness dishonorable thoughts of God.* They are

not doctrines. They are not certainties. They are inferences, they are hopes, they are speculations, which are surely
more in harmony with what we know of our most righteous and most compassionate Creator, than the opposite
view. Even if we are wrong, which the last day alone will show, we shall be better men for having tried to think such

thoughts of God as get Him more honor among men, and more love from ourselves. God knows His own secret.
Blessed be His inscrutable judgment! Let the secret rest with Him. Doubt is even better for us than knowledge, when
He, who is pure love, has chosen to withhold it from us.

[footnote: "He [Père de Ravignan] then passed to a subject which was of peculiar interest to me, as touching the
sorest place of a parish priest. ‘Suarez.' said he, ‘has a discussion on the fewness of the saved, whether this is said
with reference to the world or the Church; and he applies it to the world, but not to the Church. I think he is right;
this is the result of a ministry of twenty years in which I have necessarily had large experience: it is the feeling also
of our fathers generally. You know that the Church teaches that attrition only, combined with the sacrament of
penitence, avails to salvation, attrition arising from motives of fear rather than of love. Contrition by itself, one act
of pure love by the soul, avails even without the Sacrament, if there be a firm purpose and desire to receive it. God
has no desire for the sinner’s death. Jansenism has done great harm to this subject, by inspiring a sort of despair
which is most dangerous.’ I observed that purgatory was the necessary complement of such a doctrine. 'It is so,’ said
he, ‘and though God is alone the judge of the sufficiency of those acts of the dying, yet we may hope that a great
number come within the terms of salvation, whatever purifying process they may afterwards require.’” Allies,
Journal in France, p. 279.]
We are speaking of Catholics. If our thoughts break their bounds, and run out beyond the Church, nothing

that has been said, has been said with any view to those without. I have no profession of faith to make about them,
except that God is infinitely merciful to even' soul, that no one ever has been, or ever can be. lost by surprise or
trapped in his ignorance; and. as to those who may be lost, I confidently believe that our Heavenly Father threw His
arms round each created spirit, and looked it full in the face with bright eyes of love, in the darkness of its mortal
life, and that of its own deliberate will it would not have Him.

The Third Chapter
THE WORLD

Linquenda tellus, et domus, et placens
Uxor: neque harum, quas colis, arborum
Te, praeter invisas cupressos,
Ulla brevem dominum sequetur.—Horaee.
THE question of worldliness is a very difficult one, and one which we would gladly have avoided, had it been in our
power to do so. But it is in too many ways connected with our subject, to allow of its being passed over in silence. In
the first place, a thoughtful objector will naturally say, if the relation between the Creator and the creature is such as

has been laid down in the first eight chapters, and furthermore if it is as manifest and undeniable as it is urged to be,
how comes it to pass that it is not more universally, or at least more readily, admitted than it is? Almost all the
phenomena of the world betray a totally opposite conviction, and reveal to us an almost unanimous belief in men,

that they are on quite a different footing with God from that one which is here proclaimed to be the only true and
tenable one. There must at least be some attempt to explain this discrepancy between what we see and what we are
taught. The explanation, we reply, is to be found in what Christians call worldliness. It is this which stands in the

way of God’s honor, this which defrauds Him of the tribute due to Him from His creatures, this which even blinds
their eyes to His undeniable rights and prerogatives. How God’s own world comes to stand between Himself and the
rational soul, how friendship with it is enmity with Him—indeed an account of the whole matter must be gone into,

in order to show, first, that the influence of the world does account for the non-reception of right views about God,
and. secondly, that the world is in no condition to be called as a witness, because of the essential falsehood of its
character. This identical falsehood about God is its very life, energy', significance, and condemnation. The right view

of God is not unreal because the world ignores it. On the contrary, it is because it is real that the unreal world
ignores it. and the world’s ignoring it is, so far forth, an argument in favor of the view.

But not only does this question of worldliness present itself to us in coimection with the whole teaching of
the first eight chapters: it is implicated in the two objections which have already been considered, namely, the
difficulty of salvation and the fewness of the saved. If it is easy to be saved, whence the grave semblance of its

difficulty? If the majority of adult Catholics are actually saved, because salvation is easy, why is it necessary to draw

so largely on the unknown regions of the deathbed, in order to make up our majority? Why should not salvation be
almost universal, if the pardon of sin is so easy, grace so abundant, and all that is wanted is a real earnestness about
the interests of our souls? If you acknowledge, as you do, that the look of men’s lives, even of the lives of believers,

is not as if they were going to be saved, and that they are going to be saved in reality in spite of appearances, what is
the explanation of these appearances, when the whole process is so plain and easy? To all this the answer is, that sin
is a partial explanation, and the devil is a partial explanation, but that the grand secret lies in worldliness. That is the

chief disturbing force, the prime counteracting power. It is this mainly which keeps down the number of the saved: it
is this which makes the matter seem so difficult which is intrinsically so easy; nay, it is this which is a real difficulty,
though not such an overwhelming one as to make salvation positively difficult as a whole. Plainly then the

phenomenon of worldliness must be considered here, else it will seem as if an evident objection, and truly the
weightiest of all objections, had not been taken into account, and thus an air of insecurity will be thrown, not only
over the answer to the two preceding objections, but also over the whole argument of the first eight chapters.
This inquiry into worldliness will, in the third place, truthfully and naturally prepare us for the great
conclusion of the whole inquiry, namely, the tmth that personal love of God is the only legitimate development of
our position as creatures, and at the same time the means by which salvation is rendered easy, and the multitude of

the saved augmented. For it will be found that the dangers of worldliness are at once so great and so peculiar, that
nothing but a personal love of our Creator will rescue us from them, enable us to break with the world, and to enter

into the actual possession of the liberty of the sons of God.
Oh it is a radiant land—this wide, outspread, many-colored mercy of our Creator! But we must be content

for awhile now to pass out of its kindling sunshine into another land of most ungenial darkness, in the hope that we
shall come back heavy-laden with booty for God’s glory, and knowing how to prize the sunshine more than ever.
There is a hell already upon earth; there is something which is excommunicated from God’s smile. It is not
altogether matter, nor yet altogether spirit. It is not man only, nor Satan only, nor is it exactly sin. It is an infection,

an inspiration, an atmosphere, a life, a coloring matter, a pageantry, a fashion, a taste, a witchery, an impersonal but
a very recognizable system. None of these names suit it, and all of them suit it. Scripture calls it, “the World.” God’s
mercy does not enter into it. All hope of its reconciliation with Him is absolutely and eternally precluded.
Repentance is incompatible with its existence. The sovereignty of God has laid the ban of the empire upon it; and a

holy horror ought to seize us when we think of it. Meanwhile its power over the human creation is terrific, its
presence ubiquitous, its deceitfulness incredible. It can find a home under every heart beneath the poles, and it

embraces with impartial affection both happiness and miseiy. It is wider than the Catholic Church, and is masterful,
lawless, and intrusive within it. It cannot be damned, because it is not a person, but it will perish in the general

conflagration, and so its tyranny be over, and its place know it no more. We are living in it, breathing it, acting under
its influences, being cheated by its appearances, and unwarily admitting its principles. Is it not of the last importance

to us that we should know something of this huge evil creature, this monstrous sea-bird of evil, which flaps its wings

from pole to pole, and frightens the nations into obedience by its discordant cries?
But we must not be deceived by this description. The transformations of the spirit of the world are among
its most wonderful characteristics. It has its gentle voice, its winning manners, its insinuating address, its aspect of
beauty and attraction; and the lighter its foot and the softer its voice, the more dreadfid its approach. It is by the
firesides of rich and poor, in happy homes where Jesus is named, in gay hearts which fain would never sin. In the
chastest domestic affections it can hide its poison. In the very sunshine of external nature, in the combinations of the
beautiful elements—it is somehow even there. The glory of the wind-swept forest and the virgin frost of the alpine
summits have a taint in them of the spirit of the world. It can be dignified as well. It can call to order sin which is not

respectable. It can propound wise maxims of public decency, and inspire wholesome regulations of police. It can
open the churches, and light the candles on the altar, and intone Te Deums to the Majesty on high. It is often
prominently and almost pedantically on the side of morality. Then again it has passed into the beauty of art. into the

splendor of dress, into the magnificence of furniture. Or again there it is, with high principles on its lips, discussing
the religious vocation of some youth, and praising God and sanctity, while it urges discreet delay, and less self-trust,
and more considerate submissiveness to those who love him and have natural rights to his obedience. It can sit on

the benches of senates and hide in the pages of good books. And yet all the while it is the same huge evil creature
which was described above. Have we not reason to fear it?
Let us try to learn more definitely what the world is. the world in the Scripture sense. A definition is too

short: a description is too vague. God never created it: how then does it come here? There is no land outside the
creation of God, which could have harbored the monster, who now usurps so much of this beautiful planet on which
Jesus was bom and died, and from which He and His sinless Mother rose to heaven. It seems to be a sort of spirit

which has risen up from a disobedient creation, as if the results and after-consequences of all the sins that ever were
rested in the atmosphere, and loaded it with some imperceptible but highly powerful miasma. It cannot be a person,
and yet it seems as if it possessed both a mind and a will, which on the whole are amazingly consistent, so as to
disclose what might appear to be a very perfect self-consciousness. It is painless in its operations, and unerring too;

and just as the sun bids the lily be white and the rose red, and they obey without an effort, standing side by side with
the same aspect and in the same soil, so this spirit of the world brings forth colors and shapes and sense in our
different actions without the process being cognizable to ourselves. The power of mesmerism on the reluctant will is

a good type of the power of this spirit of the world upon ourselves. It is like grace only that it is its contradictore.
But it has not always the same power. If the expression may be forgiven, there have been times when the
world was less worldly than usual; and this looks as if it were something which the existing generation of men
always gave out from itself, a kind of magnetism of varying strengths and different properties. As Satan is
sometimes bound, so it pleases God to bind the world sometimes. Or He thunders, and the atmosphere is cleared for
awhile, and the times are healthy, and the Church lifts her head and walks quicker. But on the whole its power
appears to be increasing with time. In other words the world is getting more worldly. Civilization develops it
immensely, and progress helps it on, and multiplies its capabilities. In the matter of worldliness, a highly civilized

time is to a comparatively ruder time what the days of machinery are to those of hand-labor. We are not speaking of
sin; that is another idea, and brings in fresh considerations: we are speaking only of worldliness. If the
characteristics of modem times go on developing with the extreme velocity and herculean strength which they

promise now, we may expect, just what prophecy would lead us to anticipate, that the end of the world and the reign
of anti-christ will be times of the most tyrannical worldliness.

Tliis spirit also has its characteristics of time and place. The worldliness of one century is different from
that of another. Now it runs towards ambition in the upper classes and discontent in the lower. Now to money-

making, luxury, and lavish expenditure. One while it sets towards grosser sins, and other while towards wickedness

of a more refined description; and another while it will tolerate nothing but educated sin. It also has periodical
epidemics and accessions of madness, though at what intervals, or whether by the operation of any law, must be left
to the philosophy of history to decide, as soon as statistics have had time to become more like a science. Certain it is,
that ages have manias, the source of which it is difficult to trace, but under which whole communities, and some­
times nations, exhibit symptoms of diabolical possession. Indeed, on looking back, it would appear that eveiy age.

as if an age were an individual and gifted with an individual life, had been subject to some vertigo of its own by
which it may be almost known in history. Very often the phenomena, such as those of the French Revolution, seem
to open out new depths in human nature, or to betoken the presence of some preternatural spiritual influences. Then,

again, ages have panics, as if some attribute of God came near to the world and cast a deep shadow over its spirit,
making men’s hearts quail for fear.
This spirit is further distinguished by the evidences which it presents of a fixed view and a settled purpose,

ft is capricious, but. for all that, there is nothing about it casual, accidental, fortuitous, ft is well instructed for its end.
inflexible in its logic, and making directly, no matter through what opposing medium, to its ultimate results. Indeed,
it is obviously informed with the wisdom and the subtlety of Satan, ft is his greatest capability of carrying on his war
against God. Like a parasite disease, it fixes on the weak places in men, pandering both to mind and flesh, but

chiefly to the fonner. ft is one of those three powers to whom such dark pre-eminence is given, the world, the flesh,
and the devil; and among these three it seems to have a kind of precedence accorded to it by the way in which our

Lord speaks of it in the Gospel, though the line of its diplomacy has been to have itself less thought of and less
dreaded than the other two; and. unhappily for the interests of God and the welfare of souls, it has succeeded,
[footnote: "Modi tentationurn varii sunt, communiter vero ad tria genera reducuntur, carne, mundo, et dœmone.'’—
Suarez, de Gratia, lib. i, c. xxiii, n. 3.] It is then pre-eminent among the enemies of God. Hence the place which it

occupies in Holy Scripture. It is the world which hated Christ, the world which cannot receive the Spirit, the world
that loves its own, the world that rejoices because Christ has gone away, the world which He overcame, the world

for which He would not pray, the world that by wisdom knew not God, the world whose spirit Christians were not to
receive, the world that was not worthy of the saints, the world whose friendship is enmity with God, the world that
passeth away with its lusts, the world which they who are bom of God overcome, or, as the Apocalypse calls it, the
world that goes wandering after the beast. Well then might St James come to his energetic conclusion. Whosoever

therefore will be a friend of this world, becometh an enemy of God. [footnote: St John vii. 7, xiv. 17, xv. 19, xvi. 20,
33, xvii. 9; 1 Cor. i. 21, ii. 12; Heb. xi. 38; St James iv. 4; 1 John ii. 17, v.4; Apoc. xiii. 3.] It is remarkable also that
St John, the chosen friend of the Incarnate Word, and the evangelist of His Divinity, should be the one of the

inspired writers who speaks most often and most emphatically about the world, as if the spirit of Jesus found
something especially revolting to it in the spirit of the world.
ft is this world which we have to fight against throughout the whole of our Christian course. Our salvation

depends upon our unforgiving enmity against it. ft is not so much that it is a sin. as that it is the capability of all sins,
the air sin breathes, the light by w hich it sees to do its work, the hot-bed which propagates and forces it, the instinct

which guides it, the power which animates it. For a Christian to look at, it is dishearteningly complete. It is a sort of

Catholic Church of the powers of darkness, ft has laws of its own, and tastes and principles of its own, literature of
its own. a missionary’ spirit, a compact system, and it is a consistent whole. It is a counterfeit of the Church of God,
and in the most implacable antagonism to it. The doctrines of the faith, the practices and devotions of pious persons,
the system of the interior life, the mystical and contemplative world of the saints, with all these it is at deadly war.

And so it must be. The view which the Church takes of the world is distinct and clear and far from flattering to its
pride. It considers the friendship of the world as enmity with God. It puts all the world’s affairs under its feet, either

as of no consequence, or at least of very secondary importance. It has great faults to find with the effeminacy of the
literary character, with the churlishness of the mercantile character, with the servility of the political character, and
even with the inordinateness of the domestic character. It provokes the world by looking on progress doubtingly. and
with what appears a very inadequate interest; and there is a quiet faith in its contempt for the world extremely

irritating to tliis latter power.
The world, on the contrary', thinks that it is going to last for ever. It almost assumes that there are no other
interests but its own. or that if there are. they are either of no consequence, or troublesome and in the way. It thinks
that there is nothing like itself anywhere, that religion was made for its convenience, merely to satisfy a want, and
must not forget itself, or if it claims more, must be put down as a rebel, or chased away as a grumbling beggar; and

finally it is of opinion, that of all contemptible tilings spirituality is the most contemptible, cowardly, and little. Thus
the Church and the world are incompatible, and must remain so to the end.
We cannot have a better instance of the uncongeniality of the world with the spirit of the Gospel, than their
difference in the estimate of prosperity'. All those my sterious woes, which our Lord denounced against wealth, have
their explanation in the dangers of worldliness. It is the peculiar aptitude of wealth, and pomp, and power, to harbor

the unholy spirit of the world, to combine with it. and transform themselves into it, which called forth the thrilling

malediction of our Lord. Prosperity may be a blessing from God, but it may easily become the triumph of the world.
For the most part the absence of chastisement is anything but a token of God’s love. When prosperity is a blessing, it
is generally a condescension to our weakness. Those are fearful words, Thou hast already received thy reward; yet
how many prosperous men there are. the rest of whose lives will keep reminding us of them; the tendency of

prosperity in itself is to wean the heart from God, and fix it on creatures. It gives us a most unsupematural habit of
esteeming others according to their success. As it increases, so anxiety to keep it increases also, and makes men
restless, selfish, and irreligious; and at length it superinduces a kind of effeminacy of character, which fits them for

the higher and more heroic virtues of the Christian character. Tliis is but a sample of the different way in which the
Church and the world reason.
Now it is this world which, far more than the devil, far more than the flesh, yet in union with both, makes
the difficulty we find in obeying God’s commandments, or following His counsels. It is this which makes earth such
a place of struggle and of exile. Proud, exclusive, anxious, hurried, fond of comforts, coveting popularity , with an

offensive ostentation of prudence, it is this worldliness which hardens the hearts of men, stops their ears, blinds their

eyes, vitiates their tastes, and ties their hands, so far as the things of God are concerned. Let it be true that salvation
be easy, and that by far the greater number of Catholics are saved, it is still unhappily tme that the relations of the
Creator and the creature, as put forward in this treatise, are not so universally or so practically acknowledged as they

ought to be. Why is this? Sin. as was said before, is a partial answer. The devil is another partial answer. But I
believe worldliness has got to answer for a great deal of sin. and for a great deal of devil, besides a whole deluge of
iniquity of its own, which is perpetually debasing good works, hindering perfection, preparing materials for sin,
assisting the devil in his assaults, and working with execrable assiduity against the sacraments and grace. The world
is for ever lowering the heavenly life of the Church. If there ever was an age in which this was true, it is the present.

One of the most frightening features of our condition is, that we are so little frightened of the world. The world itself

has brought this about. Even spiritual books are chiefly occupied with the devil and the flesh; and certain of the
capital sins, such as envy and sloth, no longer hold the prominent places which they held in the systems of the elder
ascetics; and yet they are just those vices which contain most of the ungodly spirit of the world. The very essence of
worldliness seems to consist in its making us forget that we are creatures; and the more this view is reflected upon,

the more correct will it appear.
When our Blessed Lord describes the days before the Flood, and again those which shall precede the end of
the world, He portrays them rather as times of worldliness than open sin. Men were eating and drinking, marrying

and giving in marriage: and He says no more. Now none of these things are wrong in themselves. We can eat and
drink, as the apostle teaches us, to the glory of God, and marriage was a divine institution at the time of the Flood,
and is now a Christian sacrament. In the same way when He describes the life of the only person whom the Gospel
narrative follows into the abode of the lost. He sums it up as the being clothed in purple and fine linen, and feasting
sumptuously even day. Here again there is nothing directly sinful in the actions which He names. It surely cannot
be a mortal sin to have fine linen, nor will a man lose a state of grace because he feasts sumptuously every day,
provided that no other sins follow in the train of this soft life. The malice of it all is in its worldliness, in the fact that
this was all or nearly all the lives of those before the Flood, of those before the days of anti-christ, and of the

unhappy Dives. Life began and ended in worldliness. There was nothing for God. It was comprised in the pleasures

of the world, it rested in them, it was satisfied by them. Its characteristic was sins of omission.
Worldliness might almost be defined to be a state of habitual sins of omission. The devil urges men on to
great positive breaches of the divine commandments. The passions of the flesh impel sinners to give way to their
passions by such dreadful sins, as catch the eyes of men and startle them by their iniquity. Worldliness only leads to
these tilings occasionally, and by accident. It neither scandalizes others, nor frightens the sinner himself. Tliis is the
very' feature of it. wliich. rightly considered, ought to be so terrifying. The reaction of a great sin, or the shame
wliich follows it. are often the pioneers of grace. They give self-love such a serious shock, that under the influence
of it men return to God. Worldliness hides from the soul its real malice, and thus keeps at arm's length from it some

of the most persuasive motives to repentance. Thus the Pharisees are depicted in the Gospel as being eminently
worldly. It is worldliness, not immorality, wliich is put before us. There is even much of moral decency, much of
respectable observance, much religious profession; and yet when our Blessed Savior went among them, they were
further from grace than the publicans and sinners. They had implicit hatred of God in their hearts already, wliich
became explicit as soon as they saw Him. The Magdalene, the Samaritan, the woman taken in adultery—it was these
who gathered round Jesus, attracted by His sweetness, and touched by the grace which went out from Him. The
Pharisees only grew more cold, more haughty. more self-opinionated, until they ended by the greatest of all sins, the

crucifixion of our Lord. For worldliness. when its selfish necessities drive it at last into open sin, for the most part
sins more awfully and more impenitently than even the unbridled passions of our nature.
So again there was the y oung man who had great possessions, and who loved Jesus when he saw Him. and

wished to follow Him. He was a religious man, and with humble scrupulosity observed the commandments of God;
but when our Lord told him to sell all and give the price to the poor, and to follow Him, he turned away sorrowful,
and was found unequal to such a blessed vocation. Now liis refusing to sell his property was surely not a mortal sin.
It does not appear that our Lord considered him to have sinned by his refusal. It was the operation of worldliness.
We do not know what the y oung man’s future was; but a sad cloud of misgivings must hang over the memory of

him whom Jesus invited to follow Him, and who turned away. Is he looking now in heaven upon that face, from
whose mild beauty he so sadly turned away on earth?
Thus the outward aspect of worldliness is not sin. Its character is negative. It abounds in omissions. Yet

throughout the Gospels our Savior seems purposely to point to it rather than to open sin. When the young man
turned away, His remark was, How hard it is for those who have riches to enter into the kingdom of heaven!
But the very fact of our Lord’s thus branding worldliness with His especial reprobation is enough to show
that it is in reality deeply sinful, hatefully sinful. It is a life without God in the world. It is a continual ignoring of

God, a continual quiet contempt of His rights, an insolent abatement in the service which He claims from His créa-

tures. Self is set up instead of God. The canons of human respect are more looked up to than the divine

commandments. God is ven little adverted to. He is passed over. The very thought of Him soon ceases to make the
worldly man uncomfortable. Indeed all Iris chief objections to religion, if he thought much about the matter, would
be found to repose on his apprehension of it as restless and uncomfortable. But all this surely must represent an
immensity of interior mortal sin. Can a man habitually forget God and be in a state of habitual grace? Can he

habitually prefer purple garments and sumptuous fare to the service of his Creator, and be free of mortal sin? Can he

make up a life for himself even of the world’s sinless enjoyments, such as eating, drinking, and marrying, and will
not the mere omission of God from it be enough to constitute him in a state of deadly sin? At that rate a moral

atheist is more acceptable to God than a poor sinner honestly but feebly fighting with some habit of vice, to which
his nature and his past offences set so strongly, that he can hardly lift himself up. At that rate the Pharisees in the
Gospel would be the patterns for our imitation, rather than the publicans and sinners; or at least they would be as
safe to follow. Or shall we say that faith is enough to save us without charity? If a man only believes rightly, let him

eat and drink and be gaily clothed, and let him care for nothing else, and at least that exclusive love of creatures, that
omission of the Creator, provided only it issues in no other outward acts than his fine dinners and his expensive
clothes, shall never keep his soul from heaven. His purple and his sumptuous feasting shall be his beatific vision
here, and then his outward morality shall by God’s mercy hand him on to his second Beatific Vision, the Vision of
the beauty of God, and the eternal ravishment of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity! Canthis be true?

Yet, on the other hand, we may not make into sins what God has not made sins. How is this? O it is the
awful world of inward sin which is the horror of all this worldliness! ft is possession, worse far than diabolical
possession, because at once more hideous and more complete. It is the interior irreligiousness, the cold pride, the

hardened heart, the depraved sense, the real unbelief, the more than implicit hatred of God, which makes the soul of
the worldly man an actual moral and intellectual hell on earth, hidden by an outward show of faultless proprieties,
which only make it more revolting to the Eye that penetrates the insulting disguise. The secret sins, moreover, of the

worldly are a very sea of iniquity. Their name is legion; they cannot be counted. Almost evety thought is sin,
because of the inordinate worship of self that is in it. Almost every step is sin, because it is treading under foot some
ordinance of God. It is a life without prayer, a life without desire of heaven, a life without fear of hell, a life without

love of God, a life without any supernatural habits at all. Is not hell the most natural transition from such a life as

this? Heaven is not a sensual paradise. God is the joy, and the beauty, and the contentment there: all is for God, all
from God, all to God, all in God, all round God as the beautiful central fire about which His happy creatures cluster
in amazement and delight. Whereas in worldliness God is the discomfort of the whole thing, an intrusion, an

unseasonable thought, an inharmonious presence, like a disagreeable uninvited guest, irritating and fatiguing us by
the simple demand His presence makes on our sufferance and our courtesy. Surely such a man has sin in his veins
instead of blood!

Worldliness, then, is a life of secret sins. It is such an irresistible tendency to sin, such a successful
encouragement of it, such a genial climate, such a collection of favorable circumstances, such an amazing capability

of sin, that it breeds actual sins, regularly formed and with all the theological requirements, by millions and millions.
If we read what the Catechism of the Council of Trent says of sins of thought, we shall see how marvelously prolific
sins can be. and what a pre-eminently devastating power sins of thought in particular exercise within the soul. In

numberless cases open and crying sins must come at last. Still we must remember that on the whole there are two
characteristics which always distinguish sins of worldliness from sins of the passions, or sins of direct diabolical
temptation. The respectability which worldliness affects leads it rather to satisfy itself in secret sins. Indeed, its
worship of self, its predilection for an easy life, would hinder its embarking in sins which take trouble, time, and

forethought, or which mn risks of disagreeable consequences, and therefore would keep it confined within a sphere

of secret sins. And. in the next place, its love of comfort makes it so habitually disinclined to listen to the reproaches
of conscience or the teasing solicitations of grace, that it passes into the state of a seared conscience, a deadened
moral sense, with a speed which is unknown even to cruelty or sensuality.
A seared conscience! This is a fearful possibility; and yet, to use the apostle’s expression, “the Spirit
manifestly saith” that there is such a thing. It is according to St Paul one of the marks of heresy. It belongs also
peculiarly to worldliness. To have gone on for such a length of time doing wrong that we have at last ceased to
advert to its being wrong; to sin, and for the monitor within to be silent; to forget God and not to remember that we
are forgetting Him—all this is surely far worse than to be a savage or an idolater. But this is to have a seared

conscience. This is the tendency of worldliness—a tendency which it can develop with incomparable swiftness. And

then where is the power of coming right again? We have drifted away from all the sweet facilities of repentance. We
have hardened ourselves against the ordinary impetus of grace. We have made ourselves so unlovely that grace
would shun us if it could. We have sold ourselves to the devil, and he has got us safe before the proper time. With

most men it is enough to say that if they erred, at least they had a good conscience about it. or that their conscience
told them it was wrong, and they are sorry they gave way. But if we have a seared conscience, neither of these things
avail. We have forgotten and pretennitted God! we did so contumeliously at first; but now our habitual contempt has

superinduced oblivion: it seems as if He were going to retaliate, to pay us back in our own coin, and for the present
at least to pretermit us. We no longer know when we are in danger. We have lost our chart. We can tell nothing of
our latitude and longitude. No land is insight; nothing but a waste of boundless waters. The sun is hidden, and we

can take no observations, and have taken none for ever so long a time. The night is so grim and murky, that not a
star will give us an indistinct notion where we are; and the needle is snapped, and we know neither north nor south,
nor east, nor west. What are our chances of safety now? There has come upon us the fatal woe of Isaias,* Woe to

you that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and
sweet for bitter, [footnote: Cap. v.]
There is nothing to compare with worldliness for vitiating the moral taste. There are some possibilities on

earth which we cannot bear to think of without shuddering. It is generally God’s merciful ordinance that we should
not know them in the individual cases, even when we see them. One of these is the possibility of a man s going
hopelessly out of his mind, when he is in a state of mortal sin. If he is to have no intennission of Iris madness, no

lucid interval before his death; if he was actually in mortal sin when the last step of his aberration was completed,
and reason had abdicated her throne entirely; then he is as it were damned already. He walks about the earth a living
part of hell. His fate is sealed while the sun still shines upon his head, and the flowers grow beneath his feet, and the

birds sing as he passes. He smiles, but he is lost. He sings, but he is the hopeless property of God’s great enemy.
Kindness touches Iris heart, but grace has ebbed from it forever. He belongs to the dismal center of the earth; it is

only by accident that he is walking on its radiant surface. This is one of earth’s fearful possibilities. And the seared
conscience of worldliness is a desperately near approach to this. Faith is still there, and reason also, and a miracle of
grace can rouse them both. But are worldly people the likely subjects of God’s miracles? The sweet miracle of
conversion haunts the company of publicans and sinners, not the undoubting self-sufficiency of this world’s

Pharisees. O poor worldling, maliciously and guiltily unsuspecting now of thy real state, that man who went mad in
mortal sin is thy shadow, thy brother, and thy type!
Now everyone of these phenomena of worldliness maybe resolved into a forgetfulness that we are

creatures. There is no look about the life of Dives that he remembered he was a creature. There might be mingled
with his characteristic good nature, which made him love his brothers so much, and give alms to Lazarus, some
confused notions of duty to a Creator; but any abiding sense of his being a creature there was none. He solved the

problem of the possibility of these two forgetfulnesses being separated, that of having a Creator and that of being a

creature. It is this forgetfulness which is the fountain of almost all sins of omission. A worldly man never looks like
a man who so lives as having to give an account of himself to a higher power. Anything which should evince a sense

of an invisible world would be incongruous in his ordinary conduct; and if from early associations or natural
timorousness of character he should betray any such sense, it would instantly take the form of superstition rather
than that of religion. When the devil tempts a man to a great sin of passion, such as murder, or sensuality at last

beguiles a man to relapse into his intemperance, in neither of these cases does he forget that he is a creature. Indeed
it is his advertence to the law of his Creator which gives the malice to his sin. But there is no struggle in worldliness.
It is a false faith, a false religion. It does not recognize the rights of the Creator, nor occupy itself with the duties of
the creature. It begins with self and ends with self; and if compelled to lodge an appeal outside itself, it appeals to
the judgment of human respect. Wherever there is worldliness, there is the forgetfulness that we are creatures; and
wherever there is this forgetfulness that we are creatures, there also is worldliness.
When a man’s sympathies are with a disloyal State rather than with tire Holy See, there is worldliness. The

world is preferred before the Church. When men object to the doctrine of religious vocation, and without other
reasons than a certain instinct try to hinder their children from entering religious orders, there is worldliness. The

one work of the creature to do the Creator’s will is overlooked or unacknowledged. When men are ashamed of their
religion before heretics, especially of its distinctive practices and unpopular doctrines, there is worldliness. The
creature forgets himself and makes himself the standard of truth. Wherever men. who are not to their own sensible

cost taking up the cross daily and following Christ, inveigh against religious enthusiasm or the want of moderation

in piety, there is worldliness. The creature wants to limit the service of the Creator. When men do not give alms, or
give them scantily, or give them in an eccentric and peculiar way, there is worldliness. The creature either claims as
his own what he only holds at the good pleasure of his Creator, or he claims to satisfy his own whim and caprice in
the way in which he pays it back to his Creator. Indeed all developments of worldliness exhibit some obliquity in a
man’s perception of the true relations between the Creator and the creature. Ought we not then seriously to ask

ourselves if we have any right to be so little afraid of worldliness as we are? If an evil is universal, if it is almost

imperceptible, if it is generally fatal, if we know it to be in the middle of us. and if the not suspecting that we have it
is. or may be. one of the worst symptoms of our having it, does not prudence suggest to us almost an excess in cau­
tion, almost a nervousness of fear, almost a fancilulness of apprehension? Is it well that we should be so calm and

cool? Is it certain that our calmness and our coolness are not actual proofs of the disease? Worldliness only requires
one condition for its success—that we should not fear it. He who fears God, must also fear the world, and he who
fears the world need never fear that he has lost the fear of God.
It is hard to live in a place and avoid the spirit of it. It is hard to live in the w orld and avoid worldliness. Yet
tliis is what we have to do. The world we cannot leave till God summons us: but worldliness, which is the spirit of
the world, should not be allowed to infect us. As the smell of fire had not passed upon the garments of the three
children in the burning fiery furnace, so must the odor of worldliness not pass upon our souls. But to the avoiding of
worldliness no help is more efficacious than having a right and fixed view of the world. There are two views of the
world which Christians may take—two views which are actually taken by those who are striving to sen e God and to

love Him purely. Which of the two views a man takes depends partly upon his early associations, partly upon his

natural character, and partly upon the circumstances of his vocation; and his spiritual life will be found to be
considerably modified by the particular view which he is led to take. Some take a very gloomy view of the world.

To them it seems altogether bad, wholly evil, irredeemably lost. Everything is danger; for there is sin everywhere.
All its roses have thorns under the leaves. There is a curse upon everything belonging to it. Its joys are only other
forms of melancholy. Its sunshine is a mockery: its beautiful scenery' a deceit: the soothingness of its domestic

affections a snare. Its life is an incessant death. We have no right to smile at anything. The world is so dark that it is

even a perpetual partial eclipse of God. If the present is miserable, let us delay upon it; for in misery we shall find
food for our souls. If it is joyous, let us rush from it into the forebodings of a future, when all this world and the

fashion of it will be burned up with fire. Let us speak low lest the devil hear us, and use Iris knowledge to our

destruction. Let us live as ancient monarchs lived, in daily fear of poison in every dish. A funeral on a wet day in a
disconsolate churchyard: this is the type of the minds who take this view.

The other view is the very opposite of all this. It is the bright view. Those who take it see all creation lying
before them with the luster of God’s benediction on it. It is the earth on which Jesus was bom, and where Maty
lived. They marvel at the number of exquisite pleasures with which it is strewn, so very few of which comparatively
are sins. The innocent attachments of earthly love are to such men helps to love God better. Natural beauty
supematuralizes their minds. The sunshine makes them better men. God's perfections are seen even where written in
hieroglyphics over the world. Kindness is so abundant, nobility of heart so plentiful, the joys of home so pure yet so

attractive, the successes of the Gospel so infinitely consoling—all things, in fact, so much better on trial than they
seemed—that the world appears a happy place, and missing but a little—so little, it is sad to think how little—of
being a holy place also, holy from the very' abundance of its pure happiness. At every turn there are radiant fountains

of joy leaping up to meet us. Each day. like the cystus, has a thousand new blossoms to show; it lays them down
when evening comes, and the next morning it has as gay a show of flowers as ever. Even adverse things are
wonderfully tempered in the present, while in the past they have such a pathetic golden light upon them, that the

memory of them is one of our best treasures, and we would not for worlds have missed the suffering of them; and as

to any evil in the future, there is such an inextinguishable light of joy within us. that we simply disbelieve it. The
clouds fly before us as we go. Music sounds about our path. And as to cares, they find themselves so little at home
with us, that when we come to the night, “they fold up their tents like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.

St Bernard may be called the prophet of the first view: St Francis de Sales of the second. The first seems
more safe for human presumption; the second more cheering to discouragement. One leads through holy fear to
love; the other through holy love to fear. The one disenchants more from the world; the other enchants us more with

God. The one subdues; the other gives elasticity. The one seems more admonitoiy to man; the other more honorable
to God. Both can make saints; but saints of different kinds. Both are tme: yet both are untme. Both are tme as far as
they go, and both are untme when they exclude the other. They are partial views; and one is more tme to a man than
the other, because it is more suitable for his character and temper to dwell upon what is prominently dark, or
prominently bright, as the case maybe. The great thing is. whichever view we take, to have it clearly before us. and

keep to it consistently, because of the irresistible influence which these views exercise upon the spiritual life. They
make men pray differently, and act differently in their secret relations with God. They foster different graces. They
give birth to different vocations. They supply different motives. The subjects for meditation, the subjects for

particular examination of conscience, have to do with the dark or bright view men habitually take of the world. The
question between an active or a contemplative life is often decided by them. They have each their own class of
temptations, and their own rocks on which they may strike and go down. They have each also their own graces, their

own beauties, their own attractions, their own blessings, and their own short roads to heaven. The strange thing is
that no one seems to be able to take in impartially the whole view of the world, the tme view, the bright and dark
together. Intellectually they may do so; but practically they must lean either to the dark or bright, exaggerate their

own view, and do the other view injustice. No mind leaves tilings uncolored. It is our necessity; we cannot help
ourselves. The grand thing is to turn it all to God, and to begin straightway to manufacture heavenly love both out of
our darkness and our light.
It is dangerous to talk of general mles in such subject matters. But as upon the whole we find the darker

view taken by cloistered saints, and the brighter view by secular saints, it may not be an error to suppose that the

brighter view of the world is the best for those who live in the world. The dark view may readily become gloomy,
and gloom leads to inaction, to concentration upon self, to the judging of others, to a discontentment with the state of

things around us; and the fruit of all this is pride, sourness, want of zeal, and self-righteousness.
Men with a frustrated vocation to religion, and living in the world, where they have no right to be, are
mostly uncharitable men. Reformers, good and bad, have for the most part emanated from the cloister. Luther was
an Augustinian: Savonarola a Dominican. A monk has beautiful examples of the highest virtue constantly before

him, which not only urge him on in his heroic love of God, but also counteract what there might be depressing or
unnerving in his melancholy view of the world. To him in his circumstances it is a powerful stimulus to sanctity. But

it would require very peculiar circumstances indeed to make it such to persons aiming at perfection in the world.
They are good; they love God; they frequent the sacraments; they make mental prayer; they practice voluntary'
mortifications; they live under spiritual direction; their interests and tastes are in spiritual tilings. Yet for all this they
enjoy the world. Many of its blameless pleasures are real pleasures to them. They love many persons, and many
persons love them. Their home circle is bright and tender; and if it does not lead to God, there is no appearance of its
leading away from Him. Now what will happen if we force them to believe that all is misery around them, and that

they ought to be miserable themselves, and that it is very imperfect of them not to be so? The fact is, they are not
miserable, and they cannot see why they should be so; and, moreover, they actually cannot be miserable, even if
they tty. Consequently if we persist in forcing upon them a view which does not suit them, and is against the grain,
they either become perplexed and scrupulous, seeing sin where there is no sin. and believing the detection of sin to

be the highest spiritual discernment, and so farewell to their serving God for love; or they start away from a devout
life altogether, in disgust and impatience, as an unreality, which is based upon a false theory. and so worth nothing
at all. or as an inflated pedantic imposture, which even those who talk big about it do not themselves believe.

Then, as a matter of fact, the number of things wliich are sinful is much less than this view would lead us to
suppose; and a man aiming at perfection in the world is much more exposed than others to occasions of sin. Indeed
this is one of his chief difficulties, the difficulty which in all ages has so blessedly filled the cloisters and recruited

the congregations of apostolic men. But this very fact makes any exaggeration of the matter extremely dangerous, as
both discouraging and unsettling; and everyone knows that in the world, where there are neither rules nor vows,
discouragement and unsettlement are the two most fatal enemies of the spiritual life. The bright view is doubtless a
better basis for perfection in the world. Meanwhile it must guard itself against laxity, and love of pleasure, and an
inadequate notion of sin, as much as the darker view must shun discouragement, self-exaltation, and

uncharitableness, to wliich of its own nature it is prone. The dark view must not be querulous with God. nor the
bright view make too free with His perfections.
Whatever view we take of the world, we must be upon our guard against its spirit. Of that spirit Christians

can have but one view. Inspiration has fixed it for ever; it is the enemy of God. No cloisters can hope to keep it out;
for it has the gift of subtlety. There is air enough in one heart for it to live and thrive amazingly. But much more are
those who live in the world exposed to its dangers, ft looks so moral, and sometimes, but not often, even generous,
in order to deceive us. ft can talk most reasonably and well. It can praise religion, and take its side, though there is
always an ulterior purpose in view. We see its influence in society. Faith deciphers it for us there. We behold a
system of proprieties with no self-denial in them, a number of axioms of doubtful morality gaining ground and

passing current, a humility which consists in our ruling ourselves by the opinions of others, and inventiveness of
amusements which bewilder our notions of right and wrong; and in all this we can prophesy evil and suspect
dangers, while it is hard for us to name the evil and to put our finger on the danger.

When we look at people outside the Church, we see how insinuatingly worldliness prevents their coming
into it. We can see clearly what the sufferers themselves cannot see at all. We can watch its influence on sinners;

how artfully it entices them into the deep places; how strongly it holds them down; how cleverly it throws suspicion
upon the advances and offers of grace; how variously it contrives delays, and, when it fails, how hypocritically it can

rejoice in a man s conversion, how successfully it can lay hold of his fresh vigor and high spirits; and how

mercilessly it can lead him backwards and blindfold into a relapse! But the sinner sees nothing of this himself. If it
were told him, it w ould sound in his ears as a romance.
We can trace the influence of worldliness upon pious people. Their fréquentation of the sacraments, their

churchgoing, their almsgiving, their interest in Catholic plans, contrast strangely with their anxiety to get into
society, with their hankering after great people, with their excitement about marriages, with the perpetual running of
their conversation on connections, wealth, influence, and the like, and their unconscious but almost gross respect for

those who are ven much richer than themselves, or veiy much higher than themselves. It would never do for them
to sit for a picture of Catholic devotion. Yet they do not see all this, and they are really full of God, always talking of
Him, always planning for Him, always fidgety about His glow. Sometimes a step further is taken, and we see a most
portentous union of piety and worldliness—really as if one person were two persons; one person in church, and
another person out of church; one person with priest and religious, and another person with w orldly company. These

people make the oddest compensations to themselves for their pious self-denials, and again with such grotesque

earnestness penance their worldliness in revenge for its inroads upon their piety, that they remind us of the stories
Protestants tell us of the Italian bravos, w ho, before they commit a murder, most devoutly recommend it to the
Madonna. Yet God and the world keep the peace so unbrokcnly in their hearts, that they have hardly a suspicion of
the incongruous appearance they present to others, still less of the horrible reality of their spiritual condition. Now if
we can see all this in others, is it at all likely that we are free from it ourselves? Depend upon it there is no freedom

but in excessive fear, no security but in a weary vigilance! ft is heavy work always to be keeping guard. But there is
no sleep in the enemy’s camp, and we are in a war which knows neither peace nor truce. The night is both cold and
long, and if divine love keeps us not awake, what else is there that will?
It may very naturally be now objected that the conclusion of this chapter tends to destroy the conclusion of
the last, that if worldliness accounts for the widely spread denial of those relations of Creator and creature w hich
have been shown to be true, so it will not allow us to suppose that the majority of Catholics are saved, when
worldliness is at once so universal, and so deadly to the soul. But this by no means follows. What has been said of

the obtrusiveness of evil and the hiddenness of good, and of the graces which visit old age. sickness, and death,
applies as well to worldliness as to sin. No! the conclusion, which might seem to follow from this doctrine of

worldliness, would be, that very far from a majority of the rich among Catholics would be saved. But the rich are a

mere handful compared to the multitudinous poor. So that, even allowing the stem conclusion to be drawn that very
few rich persons are saved, even among Catholics, the conclusion of the preceding chapter would remain unshaken.

Many writers have taken this startling view. Lacordaire, in making up his majority of the saved, lays the chief stress
on children, women, and the countless poor, [footnote: Conférences, Iv, 178. et seq. 2 Oeuvres, vii, 442.] Bossuet,
commenting on the words of the seventy-first psalm, “He shall judge the poor of the people, and he shall save the
children of the poor,” draws a picture similar to that of Lacordaire. [footnote: Migne, Cursus Sacrœ Scriptures, tom.

xxv, col. 682.] Fromond, in his Commentary on the Catholic Epistles, enters upon the question of the number of the
saved when he is explaining the thirteenth verse of the second chapter of St James, and one of the arguments which
he brings forward in support of the more gloomy view is. that “although perhaps the majority of the faithful do not

die without the sacrament of penance, yet very many worldly people (plerique mundani) do not receive the fruit of
the sacrament”; and the reason he gives for this opinion is, that their appreciation of riches, honors, pleasures, and
other earthly goods is too high and fixed for their sorrow for sin easily to rise to that appreciation of its malignity
which theology requires even in the adequate attrition for absolution. Palafox also, in his book on Devotion to St

Peter, teaches the same doctrine in his comparison of the prodigal son and the young man who went away sorrowful.
It was his appreciation of riches which hindered his appreciation of God, and it was the prodigal’s freedom from this
which on the other hand facilitated liis conversion [footnote: Palafox, Excellendas de San Pedro, lib. iii, cap. 9.]

There is no doubt that our Lord’s woes pronounced upon the rich are among the most painful and terrific
mysteries of the Gospel, and should drive rich men into that facile, prompt, various, unasked, abundant, and self­
denying almsgiving for the love of God, in which alone their safety consists. But, so far as the present question is
concerned, I express no opinion as to whether a very small minority of rich Catholics are saved; I do not know
enough of the world to form a judgment, and my little experience of the rich would go the other way: I only say that
even if this melancholy belief be true, it by no means destroys the previous conclusion that the numerical majority of

Catholics are saved.
But to conclude, there are certain things which it is important to note with regard to worldliness, and which

cannot be too often repeated. The first is. that even spiritual persons for the most part greatly underestimate its

danger. They have not a sufficiently intelligent belief in its universality, in its subtlety, in its power of combining
with good in the most imperceptible quantities, and then spoiling it, or in its peculiar aptness for fixing itself just

upon the very persons who consider themselves decidedly free from it. Spiritual discernment is a rare gift, and one
which belongs only to those whose hearts are all for God. ft is the great art of the world, to persuade men that it is
not so dangerous as it is described, and that with monks, it is a sort of pious fashion to abuse the world, while with

preachers it is simply an affair of rhetoric. This persuasion is its triumph. Nothing more is needed. When you have
underestimated its dangers, you are already its victim.
In the second place, as men are very apt not to know worldliness even when they see it, and as it is not an

easy matter always to be paying attention to the atmosphere we breathe, it is of great importance to have wellascertained principles, ft is astonishing how few men are in possession of such. An almost incredible amount of
excellent efforts comes to nothing great, because it is at random, and by fits and starts, and operating inconsistently
with its antecedents. The really powerful man in the world is the consistent man, the man of ascertained principles

and of adjusted views. The world, like a suspicious potentate, is always proposing concordats. We are asked first for
one compromise, then for another. We do not know when we have passed the line which involved a principle, and so
we discover that we have committed ourselves to something, in which it is impossible for us to keep our word

without surrendering our independence altogether. Now with ascertained principles we have settled all this at the
outset. Even when we get beyond the extent of our knowledge, or the sphere of our experience, we know what to
suspect and where to be upon our guard. Our instincts are right, and, what is practically of greater importance, they
are consistent also. Thus we do not fall into the world’s power, and are never taken unawares, and have not to give
offence by having to retrace our steps. Thus when we change our state of life, or enter upon a new department of

duty, or come to a crisis in life, our relations with the world are more or less altered; and if we have then to hesitate

and linger, settling our future mode of operations and mapping out the countiy before us, because we have no
ascertained principles, every step we take (and we cannot stand still, this is not a world for that work), we are putting
on record some precedent against ourselves. An inconsistent great man is an impotent creature in practical matters,

while a consistent moderate man does the work of a great one. Above all. a man should have ascertained principles
of practical religion, if religion is to be the business of his life. It is deplorable for the cause of God on earth, that
such men are so few.

In the third place, if ascertained principles are of such importance to us in this respect, and if the power of
our faith depends materially either on its simplicity or its intelligence, and if our faith is “the victoiy which
overcometh the world.’’ it is of great consequence that we should know and study our religion well. In these days

there is an immense amount of information, floating in society , regarding the controversies of the Church and the

world. They are now daily coming more into collision, in questions of politics, in systems of beneficence, in the
statistics of crime, in the doctrines of progress, in the discoveries of science, in the quarrels of the metaphysical
schools, and in the new shapes of old controversies between the Church and the dissident sects around her.

The world has a power and a purchase in the anti-church side of ill these questions: and it is so tempting to
be moderate, so pleasant in yield, so hard to prove, so weary to argue, so unnatural to confess our own ignorance,
that an educated modem Catholic who does not study the doctrines of his religion, as carefully as the subject-matter

of Iris profession, will hardly escape betraying God sometimes, and getting on the wrong side without intending it.
Even a study of theology, at least to some extent, is of considerable utility, in this particular light, as a safeguard
against worldliness. It is proverbial that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; but this is less true of theology than
it is of any other science, because the least acquaintance with it deepens our view of our own ignorance, and it
breathes such an odor of God that intellectual baslifiilness would seem to be its special gift, increasing as our studies

penetrate nearer and nearer to those divine abysses, into which knowledge may not descend until it has been
metamorphosed into love. A man, who has finished his education in these days without having acquired a profound
intellectual respect for his religion, is the most likely of all men to become the prey of an unbelieving and ungodly

world, and to betray his Lord without intending it, and then to grow angry, and turn away in proud dislike from Him

whom he has thus betrayed.
In the last place, it is honestly to be confessed, that all these tilings do but form an armor against the spirit

of the world. They are not a victory over it. Moreover, it is an armor which is by no means invulnerable. The weight
of the arms and the weariness of the fight have laid many a warrior low from whom no blood had flowed, but whose
very bones the heavy fall had cruelly broken. Many a spear, that could not penetrate the cunning joints of the suit of
mail, has unseated the rider, and left him lifeless beneath his charger’s feet. So all these helps which have been here

suggested, are not infallible; nay, they are but auxiliaries for a season, and for all their worth, the world may, and
most likely will, if we have no other resources, take us captive in the end. There is no redemption for the creature

but in the service of the Creator. There is no power to counteract the manifold spirit of evil but one, and that is the
desire of God. the craving to see His face, the yearning for His beauty. There is no specific against worldliness but
God.

The Fourth Chapter
OUR OWN GOD

Διο δη και εις αυτόν επεστραπται τα συμπαντα, ασχετωι τινι αρρητωι στοργηι προς τον αρχηγόν της ζωής και
χορηγον αποβλεποντα.—St Basil.
THE Creator is the creature’s home. Neither spirit of angel nor soul of man can rest short of God. They can anchor

nowhere save in the capacious harbor of His infinite perfections. All tilings teach us this beautiful tmth. All tilings
that find us wandering lead us home again, to the bosom of our Eternal Father. The three distinct orders of nature,
grace, and glory, if the two last may indeed be called distinct, all in their own respective ways, at once teach us this

comforting and saving truth, and help us also to practice what they teach. The natural joy of beautiful scenery, the

strong grace of Christian holiness, and the thrill of glory which passes through our souls from the unveiled face of
God. all. in degrees almost infinitely apart, draw us home to God, or keep us there. God is our Last End as well as

our First Cause. Oh that the day were come when we shall be securely at His feet for ever!

God is included in the idea of creation as our Last End as well as our First Cause. It is as our Creator that

He is both the one and the other. We have seen that creation was simply love, a love which called our natures out of
nothing, a love which gave them all that was due to them, a love which gave them grace which was not due for
them, a love which in matter of fact destined them to a glory which is far beyond our natural capacities. All the three
orders of nature, grace, and gloiy were represented in the act of creation, nature from the very necessity of the case,
grace because as a matter of fact God created both angels and men in a state of grace, [footnote: Throughout the
whole Treatise the opinion of St Bonaventure as to the creation of the angels has been assumed to be incorrect] glory
because it was for His glory that we were necessarily created, and, as a matter of fact, in the exuberant goodness of
His decrees, for the special, but not necessaiy, gloiy of the Beatific Vision.

The angels were created all at once, and because of their excellent perfections, and especially the perfect
knowledge which they had of themselves, they rapidly exercised their free-will, completed the course of their

probation, and entered into the rest and enjoyment of the Creator’s beauty. Men are created slowly and by suc­
cessive generations, and from the great inferiority of their rational nature to the vast intelligences of the angels, they
require the revolution of many centuries before their numbers are completed, their destinies fulfilled, and the whole

of the elect enter into the everlasting joy of God. The world of men is a world of slower rotation. Both these
creations of angels and men were created simply for God’s own glory; but His glory was the creature’s bliss,
because His glory was to have rational children who should be like Himself and be made participators of His
beatitude. But as we cannot be participators of His joy by any natural beatitude, however exquisite and satisfying,
and as His very first intention in creation was that we should participate in His own beatitude, it follows that His

very first intention in creation already involved both grace and glory: and this is the explanation of the beautiful and

touching mystery of our being created in a state of grace originally. So nature involved grace, not necessarily, but in
the designs of creative love, and grace looked on to glory, and prophesied of it to free-will, and more than
prophesied of it, for it was the capacity of glory and its beginning.
Because God is infinitely good and infinitely perfect, He is by His nature, so to speak, bent upon the
communication of Himself: and tliis communication of Himself is. as theologians tell us, twofold, a natural
communication, and a free communication. The natural one, as it is altogether necessary, is eternal. It is that by
which the Father communicates to the Son His whole essence, power, wisdom, goodness, and beatitude, and the
Father and the Son to the eternally proceeding Spirit. It takes place in the production of the Word through the

intellect, and of the Spirit through the will; and each of these processions is so perfect and full, that by it the whole
good, which is communicated, is as perfectly possessed by Him who receives as by Him who communicates it. The
free communication of God is temporal, and takes place in creation, and creation is in order to it, and it takes places

first, and foremost, and eminently, in the Hypostatic Union, and then in the gifts of grace and gloiy ; and God’s

communication of Himself, which in the act of creation was not supernatural, was with a view to what was
supernatural, and as a matter of fact, was not disjoined from it in act. To this, therefore, says Lessius, did God of
Himself incline, that is, of His own goodness, setting aside all merit and all necessity of the creature. This

communication begins in tliis life by the gifts of grace, especially faith, hope, and charity'; by which virtues we are
not only made like to God, but God also is united to us. It is perfected, however, in the next life by the gifts of glory,
namely, the light of glory, the vision of the Divinity, beatific love, and beatific joy. For by these we attain our

highest possible similitude to God. and become perfectly the sons of God, and deifonn. shining like the Divinity,
and exhibiting in ourselves the most excellent image of the Holy Trinity. For by the light of glory we are made like
the Father; by the vision of the divine Essence and divine Persons we become like the Son ; by beatific love we are

made like the Holy Ghost; by joy we become like the Godhead in beatitude, and the participation of the divine

beatitude is completed in us. [footnote: Lessius. de Perfect. Divin., lib. xiv.]
When we speak of God’s glory we may mean one or more of four tilings. First of all. His glory may be

either intrinsic or external; and then each of those may be of two kinds also. God's own excellence, His own beauty,
the infinity of His perfections in Himself, is as it were the objective glory of God, which is intrinsic to Himself;
whereas His own knowledge of Himself, His own love of Himself, and His own joy in Himself, which are also

intrinsic, are what theology terms His formal glory. The beauty of creation, the perfections of creatures, their
loveliness, their number, their adaptations, even their color and form, are the external glory of God, represented

objectively, whereas the knowledge of Him, the love of Him. and the joy in Hun. which His rational creatures have,

is His formal external glory. It is necessary to put these hard words together in order to understand the practical
conclusions to which we shall be coming presently.
Now we say that God is necessitated to do everything for His own glory, and that though the creation of the
world was perfectly free, yet, granting that it was to be created by God. it must of necessity be created for His glory.
This is almost venturing to say that He could not help Himself, at least as to the end for which He created. But oh!
what joy the creature will find at last in this very necessity, which God is under, of doing evety thing for His own

glory! That God has created the world is a fact. It is contradictory not to His wisdom only, but to every one of His

perfections, that He should have created it without an object at all. It is impossible to Him, as God. to have any other
end but Himself. It is contrary to the plenitude of His self-sufficiency, that He should have created it in order to gain

from it conveniences which He has not now. or joys which He does not already possess; for these are intrinsic to
Himself. But it is possible for Him to have a glory extrinsic to Himself, over and above that which is intrinsic. On
the other hand, it is impossible for Him to have anything else extrinsic to Himself, which creation could give Hirn,

except glory. Even then the glory is not necessary to Him, and does not make Him more blessed or more selfsufficient than He was; at best it is only congruous to His divine Majesty to have it. Thus it is that God is
necessitated to do all things for His own glory. He is limited to this by the very plenitude of His perfections. As
nothing exists in the world without the influx of His omnipresence, supporting it and keeping it above the abyss of

nothingness, into which of itself it is falling back evermore, so also nothing exists in the world which is not involved
in and depending upon God’s glory. Even the permissions of sin glorify Him. for without them according to the

present laws the wills of His creatures would not be free.
While God was thus under the necessity of creating all tilings for His glory, if He created at all. much more
is the creature under the necessity' of glorifying God in all tilings. But it was not necessary for God to raise the
creature to the special glory of the Beatific Vision. It was not due to his nature, not to the highest angelic nature. It
was beyond it; and it was beyond it. not in degree only, but in kind also. It belonged to another order than that of
nature. It was superadded to nature. Nature had to receive another order, that of grace, before it could be capable of

the third order, that of glory. Wonderful things had to be done to it. in order to habilitate it for such a possibility as
the sight of God.
But the remarkable thing is. that these tilings were done in the act of creation. The orders both of nature and

of grace started in that one act of divine benignity . It was sin only which separated what God had put together. The
rebellious angels sinned, and so lost their primal grace, and having no fresh trial given them, forfeited thereby for
ever the order of glory. Man sinned, and in him also the two orders became separated, and the whole magnificent
apparatus of redeeming love is God’s invention to unite them again, so that men may become capable of the order of
glory. Not that this is the sole reason or the whole explanation of the Incarnation, but only of Redemption. Thus it is
absolutely necessary, when we are thinking of creation, to bear in mind the fact that God created an-gels and men in

a state of grace, and not in a state of pure nature. We are not concerned with other possible creations, but only with
our own creations; and the creations of both those angelic and human families of rational creatures, united in the

Church under the single headship of Jesus, were accomplished in a state of grace: and they were so, because glory',
and the especial supernatural glory of a participation in His own beatitude, entered into God’s first intention and
original idea as Creator. We shall never understand creation, if we let this fact out of sight for a moment, [footnote:

“Charitas est ergo causa efficiens creatura rationalis, et participatio divina bonitatis est causa finalis. ”—
Harphius.]
The inanimate and irrational creations glorify God by the very' splendor of the beauty in wliich He has
clothed them. They glorify Him by their adaptation and subservience to man. Their abundance in their kinds, and
their many kinds which are over and above what are necessary to man, is another glory of their Creator by being in

some sort a picture of His copious magnificence. They glorify Him also by bearing on themselves the seal and signet

of His divinity, and even of His Trinity and Unity, and their degree of goodness depends on the degree in which they
adumbrate the divine perfections. But much more does the rational creation glorify its Creator. By its very existence
it represents God, as the inanimate and irrational creations do. But by its intelligence it knows God, and with its

knowledge loves Him; and by its will it loves Him, and with its love enjoys Him. Thus the knowledge, love, and joy
of the rational creatures, the three things by which they chiefly shadow forth the Holy Trinity, praise and admire and
worship the divine nature, all which is the rendering glory to Him. By these three things they as it were enter into

God and rest in Him, through the gifts of grace and glory. But let us hear Lessius. In these three acts resides God’s
chiefest glory, which He Himself intended in all His works; and so, Likewise, in the same acts reside the highest
good and formal beatitude of men and angels. By these acts the blessed spirits are elevated infinitely above

themselves, and, in their union with God, become deiform, by a most lofty and supereminent similitude with God, so
that the mind can conceive no greater similitude. Thus like very Gods, they shine to all eternity as the sons of glory

and the divine brightness.
By those same acts they expand themselves into immensity so as to be co-equal and co-extensive, as far as
may be, to so great a good, that they may take it in and comprehend it all. They will not linger outside, as it were

upon the surface of it, but they go down into its profound depths, and enter into the joy of their Lord: some more,
some less, according to the magnitude of the light of glory which is communicated to each. Immersed in this abyss,
they lose themselves and all created things; for all other goods and joys seem to them as nothing by the side of tliis
ocean of goods and joys. In this abyss there is to them no darkness, no obscurity, such as hangs about the Divinity to

us now: but all is light and immense serenity, although they are not able fully to comprehend it. There is their eternal
mansion, with a tranquil security that they shall never fail. There is the heaven of heavens, in comparison with
which all creation is but dross. There is the fulfilling of all their desires; there is the possession and fruition of all

things that are desirable. There nothing will remain to be longed for, or sought for more, for all will firmly possess
and exquisitely enjoy every good thing in God. There the whole occupation of the saints will be to contemplate the

infinite beauty of God, to love His infinite goodness, to enjoy His infinite sweetness, to be filled to overflowing with
the torrent of His pleasures, and to exult with an unspeakable delight in His infinite glory, and in all the goods which
He and they possess. Hence come perpetual praise, and benediction, and thanksgiving; and thus all the Blessed,

arrived at the consummation of their desires, and, knowing not what more to crave, rest in God as their Last End.

[footnote: Lessius, lib. xiv.]
Thus does creation come home, like a weary bird to its roost, to rest in its Creator. And then all movements
cease, all vicissitudes, changes, progresses, aspirations, discoveries; and all is rest within, without, around, the
kingdom of eternal peace. Then the Son gives up the kingdom to His Father, as the apostle speaks; [footnote: Cor.
xv.] and the subjection of His human nature, wliich had been as it were veiled in the government of the Church and

in the pomp of judgment, becomes more apparent; and then, as if this last act of unspeakable subjection on the part
of that created nature, which is the Head and First-bom of all creatures, were the crowning beauty of creation, God

the Creator becomes all in all, and the chronicles of this creation close. Beyond that, all is lost in the
indistinguishable radiance of eternity. Such is the history of creation, as theology ventures to conceive it lying in the
divine mind. It is a work of simple love, of gigantic dimensions, with the most beautiful proportion in all its parts,

and the most exquisite finish in every detail. Love is the life of it from first to last, and its result is an abiding,
immortal, created counterpart of the eternal, uncreated, and undivided Trinity.

If we have taken pains to master this somewhat difficult account of creation, we shall see that it is as it
were the frame within which all the relations of the Creator and the creature, w hich have occupied the preceding
chapters, are enclosed. It will make some things plain, which perhaps were not plain before; and it will itself be the
easier to understand from what has gone before. Even the horror of worldliness will now become more apparent, and
its danger more alarming. But what is the conclusion to which it all leads? That religion must necessarily be a
service of love, that the easiness of salvation comes of its being a personal love of God, and that the only security

from worldliness is also in a personal love of God. It is neither the wonderful character of its doctrines, nor the pure
simplicity of its precepts, nor the supernatural power of its assistances, which make religion what it is, but the fact of
its being the creature’s personal love of the Creator. This is an obvious thing to say; and yet such consequences flow
from it that it must be still more insisted on.

That all holiness should consist in a personal love of God flows out of the veiy tie of creation. Creation was
an act of love, forestalling or including all other loves whatever. The creature was at once put by the act of creation
into various personal relations to the Creator, all of which were of the very tenderest and most intimate description.

It flows also out of the knowledge which the creature has of the Creator, and the motives for his personal love of
Him increase with the amount of that knowledge. Each perfection pleads for love. Each puts a price on love, and on
nothing else but love. Love is the one want of all God’s attributes, if we may call it want, and the supplying of that
one want is the sole worship of the creature. The easiness of salvation showed that all religion must be a personal
love of God. It was easy just because this was all. The end of all its sacraments and graces was to infuse or to elicit

that love, and the more of it they infused and the more of it they elicited, the more did they contribute to the facility
of the triumph. Sin teaches us that all is nothing-worth but personal love of God, both because its forgiveness is the
sweetest preacher of divine love on earth, and because the horror of its punishment is the total loss of love in that
dark godless hell which is its end. The personality of the evil spirit drives us also into personal love of God, as our

security and refuge. The dangers of the world are to be met in no other way than by the personal love of God. It is
only the love of Him w hich can kill unworthy loves. It is only the desire of Him which can turn the soul away sick,

and dispirited, with the perishable goods of earth. It is only the light of His beaut} which can dim and dishonor the
flaunting, garish beauty of the world, or make us secretly and sweetly discontented with its lawful, natural, and
blameless loveliness.
But most of all does this necessity of a personal love of God flow out of the fact, that God Himself, and not

any of His created rewards, is our Last End. God Possessed, our own God. that is creation’s home, that is our last
end. there only is our rest. O that the winds of grace would blow that we might sail more swiftly over this broad sea

to our eternal home! Another day is gone, another week is passed, another year is told. Blessed be God then, we are

nearer to the end. It comes swiftly; yet it comes slowly too. Come it must, and then it will all be but a dream to look
back upon. But there are stem things to pass through; and to the getting well through them, there goes more than we
can say. One tiling wc know, that personal love of God is the only thing which reaches God at last. Other things—
they look wise, they begin well, they sound good—but they wander; they are on no path; they go aside, or they fall
behind, but home they never come. To love, the way is neither hard to find nor hard to tread; for so it is that love

never comes home tired, ft gets to God through the longest life more fresh, more eager, more venturous, more full of
youth, more brimming with expectation, than the day it started amid the excesses and inexperiences of its first

conversion.

No one denies this doctrine of the necessity of personal love of God. It could not be denied without heresy.
But there are two different schools of spirituality which treat it very differently; indeed whose difference consists in
their different treatment of it.* All are agreed that as the proof of love is the keeping of the commandments, so the
sense of duty, the brave determination to do always and only what is right, and because it is right, must go along

with and be a part of personal love of God.** Personal love of God without this would be a falsehood and a

mockeiy. They who dwell most strongly on the sense of duty do not omit personal love of God; and they who lay
the greatest stress on love both imply and secure the keen sense of rightfulness and duty'. But much depends on
which of the two we put foremost. It is possible by dwelling exclusively on love to make religion too much a matter

of mere devotions, an affair of sentiments and feelings, highly strung and therefore brittle, overstrained and so short­
lived. It is possible, on the other hand, that by laying all the stress on duty, especially with young persons or again
with sinners, the true motive of duty may not have fair play, and the peculiar character of the Gospel be overlooked

or inadequately remembered. We must pursue such and such a line of conduct because it is commanded, because it
is right, because it will win us respect, because it will enable us to form habits of virtue, because it will edify,
because we cannot otherwise go to Communion, because we shall be lost eternally if we do not pursue it. This is

quite intelligible, and it is all very' tme, but not particularly persuasive, especially to those whom youth makes ar­
dent, or those whom sin has made invalids. We must pursue such and such a line of conduct because it is the one
which God loves, and God loves us most tenderly and has loved us from all eternity, and God yearns that we should
love Him. and He catches at our love as if it were a prize, and repays it with a fondness which is beyond human
comprehension, and it grieves His love; and He makes it a personal matter, if we swerve from such conduct, while if
we only love, all will be easy. This also is intelligible, and very true, and also veiy persuasive, and has a wonderful
root of perseverance in it. But it comes to pass that, while both views are very tme, they nevertheless form quite
different characters. So that it is one of the most important practical questions of our whole lives, to settle whether
we will love God because it is right, or whether we will do right because God loves us and we love Him.

[first footnote: A whole string of consequences seems to follow in ascetical theology from the doctrine of
Vasquez, Naturam rationalem esse regulam honestatis. The common teaching, however, is against him. See
Vasquez, 1, 2. disp. 58, 2, and disp. 97, 5.]
[second footnote: To the doctrine that a good action is essentially and intrinsically good, Medina objects, “Si
quis velit amare Deum, et non ex motivo, quod hoc sit conforme legi divinœ id prœcipienti, adhuc ponit actum
honestum et bonum. ” Viva replies, “Qui amat Deum, et non ex motivo honestatis, ponit actum honestum sed non
ponit actum honestum honeste. ”—De Actibus Humanis, qu. ii.]

Strange to say. while both these views are true, they look, as we examine the working out of them, like two
different religions. The fact is, that for some reason or other it is veiy hard to persuade a man, or for him to persuade
himself, that God loves him. The moment that fact becomes a part of his own sensible convictions, a perfect
revolution has been worked in his soul. Eveiything appears different to him. He has new lights, and feels new
powers. Faculties in him which were well-nigh dormant, wake up and do great things. He is a new man. It is a kind
of conversion. However good he was before, however regular, however conscientious, however devotional, he feels
that the change which has passed over him is in some sense a veritable conversion. He is on a new line, and will

henceforth move differently. Many go to their graves without at all realizing practically the immense love which
God has for them. It has been a want in them all through their lives, and they would have been higher in heaven had

they known on earth what heaven has now taught them. A theologian says, that it is one of the weaknesses even of
the saints, that they cannot believe in the greatness of God’s love for them. It is related in the chronicles of the

Franciscans, that until her director with some difficulty undeceived her, St Elizabeth of Hungary thought that she
loved God more than He loved her. In truth the very immensity, the excesses, the apparent extravagances of God's
love stand in its own light, and hinder men from believing it as they should. They hardly dare to do so; for it seems
incredible that God should love us as He is said to do. It is the grand crisis in eveiybody's life, an era to date from,
when the knowledge that His Creator loves him passes into a sensible conviction.

If all the evil that is in the world arises from the want of a practical acknowledgment of tire true relations
between the Creator and the creature, it is equally true, that from the same want comes all that is deficient in our
spiritual lives; and furthermore, the true relations between the Creator and the creature are more readily appreciated,
more lovingly embraced, and more perseveringly acted out. on the system which puts love first and duty second,
which does right because God loves us. rather than loves God because it is right. Religion, no doubt, comes to
persons in different ways. Different parts of it attract different minds. Men begin in various places in religion. There

is not exactly any one normal beginning of being pious. We should never think, therefore, of condemning, or
throwing the slightest slur, on any method which succeeded in securing the continuous keeping of God’s command­
ments upon supernatural motives. This must be bome in mind, together with the full admission both of the safety
and soundness of the other principle, while we state the reasons for preferring that school of spirituality, which puts
forward most prominently the personal love of God. and dwells upon it to all persons and at every turn. It seems of
the two the most likely to advance the Creator’s glory', first by saving a great number of souls, and secondly by

swelling the ranks of those who generously aim at perfection.
Love sharpens our eyes and quickens all the senses of our souls. Now when we dwell very exclusively on
the sense of duty, and urge people to leam to do right just because it is right, we seem often to be wanting in the

delicacy and fineness of our spiritual discernment. We are not always on God's side, because we do not
instantaneously and instinctively apprehend on which side He is. We do not prophetically see the evil, which is as
yet invisible and implicit in some line of action. Our spiritual tastes are blunt, sometimes inclining to be gross. We

do not at once detect worldliness in its first insidious aggressions. Love has a specialty for all these things; and
conscientiousness often runs aground in shallow places, where love sails through, finding deep water with an almost
supernatural skill. The duty principle, if it is allowable so to name it shortly for convenience’ sake, is more apt to

grow weary than love. It is always against the grain of our corrupt nature, and consequently we are obliged to be
always making efforts, in order to keep ourselves up to the mark; and when times of dryness or seasons of
temptation come, these efforts are not easy to sustain. Love, on the contrary , is a stimulant. It has a patent for

making things easy. It invigorates us, and enables us to do hard things with a sensible sweetness and a religious
pleasure, when mere conscientiousness would fail through the infirmity of its own nature. Thus perseverance is
more congruous to the conduct which proceeds on the principle of love, than to that which looks prominently to
duty. Moreover, where there is effort, there is seldom abundance, while it is the characteristic of love to be prolific.

ft is necessary for us when we act entirely from a sense of duty' to go through many more intellectual
processes than when we act from love. We have to investigate the character of the action, to ascertain its bearings, to
inform ourselves of its circumstances, to guess its consequences. All this takes time and makes a man slow, and as

life runs rapidly, he is apt to be taken by surprise, and either be guilty of some omission, or act in a hurry at the last.
This is the reason why slow men are often so precipitate. Anyone who observes will see instances of this daily, in
the habitual impetuosities of timid men. The duty principle, also, only sails well in fine weather, ft does not do for

storms, ft wants elasticity and buoyancy, and so, when it has fallen into sin, it recovers itself with great difficulty,
and is awkward in its repentance, as if it were in a position for which it never was intended, ft soon despairs. Sin

seems a necessity, and a few serious relapses are enough to make it give up the spiritual life altogether. There are
cases of men who never could recover one mortal sin; and we should be inclined to suspect that they were mostly

cases of men who acted from conscience in preference to love, [footnote: Even conscience acts rather by love of the
beauty of virtue than by hatred of the malice of vice. Antoine says, “Voluntas adversari non potest objectum malum
propter solam ejus malitiam tamquam unicum motivum, quia odium malitia vitii necessario fundatur in amore
objectiva bonitatis virtutis opposita, illumque necessario supponit. Unde nemo odit malitiam alicujus vitii propter
Se, nisi amet, et quia amat, bonitatem et pulchritudinem virtutis opposita. ”—De Act. Hum., cap. Hi, art. /.]

It also has a propensity to concentrate us upon ourselves, and so to hinder charity. Self must come in, when

we are always looking at self and selfs behavior, and when even the object of faith presents itself habitually to us in
the light of self’s rule. In this way it not unfrequently hinders the more beautiful exercises of charity; for charity is

not the doing only our duty to our neighbor. That does not take us much beyond justice. The habit of mind of mere
conscientiousness seems different from the habit of mind of exuberant charity. It is not, moreover, genial to high
spiritual things, such as voluntary austerities, the love of suffering, the practice of the evangelical counsels, the

sorrow because God is so little loved and so much offended, and the willing renunciation of spiritual consolations
and sensible sweetnesses. A merely conscientious man may be intellectually convinced that he ought to aim at
perfection, but the chances are immensely against Iris succeeding; and for this reason, that he has not sufficient

momentum. His impulse dies out, and he stops short of the aim. Doing what is right because it is right is not a

sufficiently perfect or robust motive to cany? a man all the way to perfection. Love alone can do that. It sounds
almost like an absurdity to talk of observing the counsels from a sense of duty, or of aiming at a more perfect
interior observance of the precepts than it is our duty to aim at, because we have determined to make a duty of it.
This principle, too, although it is thoroughly Christian, and leans on Christ, appears to have but a weak
tendency to produce that nameless indescribable likeness to Christ, which is the characteristic of the saints. It has not

enough of self-oblivion in it, and is veiy deficient in its sympathies with the mystical operations of grace. Moreover,
it has not the same blessings as love; not that it is not an ordinance of God, and one which no one can with safety
forget or depreciate; but there is an air about it of the Old Testament rather than the New. It likewise keeps men back
by leading to scmples. It never lets conscience alone. It wastes in a fruitless post-mortem examination of its actions

the time that might have been spent in acts of heroic contrition or of disinterested love. Nay, it will even disinter
again and again those actions, which have already passed the ordeal of so many examinations, and it will dissect,

and meddle, until it has acquired an inveterate habit of stooping, and contracted a disease of the eyes. This is its
immoderation, the excess to which it tends, and to which it must tend with all the more determination the higher it
rises in the spiritual life, where common rules are less clear in their application, and the processes of grace more

intricate and unusual. Yet while it breeds scmples, this same principle also ministers to self-trust, because of its habit

of examining actions for itself, and then of going by what it sees. It is veiy rare to find a man, who habitually does
what is right only because it is right, who is not at the same time quietly self-opinionated, and dangerously free from
all distrust of his own decisions.
Then again there seems in such a principle of action no real rehearsal for heaven. The Blessed in heaven do
not act from a sense of duty. They contemplate and love. Surely there must have been some habit formed on earth,

to correspond to and anticipate that celestial habit of keeping the gaze fixed on the beautilul object of faith. A
conscientious seraph is a veiy difficult idea to realize. In tmth there is nothing supernatural about this principle,
except the amount of love which it contains. It borrows from love all about it that is worth much, and yet keeps love

in the lowest place, as if it were a dependant and inferior. Thus we are not surprised to find those who habitually act
upon it somewhat out of harmony with the lives of the saints, with new miracles, with popular devotions, with
apparitions, pilgrimages, taking vows, and other supernatural things. For the principle does not take kindly to the
supernatural, grasps it nervously, and so is perpetually letting it slip because it cannot hold it.
Neither is it an attractive principle to others. It deprives goodness of much of its missionary character and

of many of its converting influences. It does not draw people round it, or make sinners wonder enviously at the
sweetness of Christian sanctity. It is dry. It repels. It speaks shortly, and makes no allowances. It is unseasonable,
and is proud of disregarding circumstances. Time and place are out of time and place to it. It has a propensity to
preach, and dictate, and be tiresome. In all these respects it plays into tire hands of the natural foibles of those to
whose character this principle is most likely to commend itself. Then, which sounds a privilege but is in truth a

disability, it is a rarer gift than love. It is often a growth of natural character, whereas God pours love out on
evetyone. It thus embraces fewer souls: because fewer are capable of walking by it. It is love, it is walking by love,
that swells the grand multitude of the number who are saved. Conscientiousness could never fill heaven half so fast

as love. So that it neither manufactures the high saints, not yet throngs with happy crowds the outer courts of
heaven.
It is also less directly connected with the gift of final perseverance than love. As was said, it is a life of
efforts, and it is the nature of efforts to be complete in themselves, and not enchained one with another; and the
doctrine of habit is a poor thing to trust to in the supernatural affairs of grace. God Himself acts from love, that is,
from confonnity to Himself, and not from a sense of duty.* God's life is love; and thus love has the blessing of
exuberance, of fruitfulness, of speed, ft is venturesome, overflowing, divine.

[footnote: “In Deo operationes moraliter bonce, honestce, ac laudabiles dicuntur quœ sunt conformes fini ipsius
Dei, ut est amor suimet. ” And again: “Deus, quia non habet finem ultimum a Se distinctum, quando operatur
haneste, hoc est conformiter ad proprium finem, et juxta exigentiam, quam habet a propria natura, non obligatur
rigorose a regula honestatis, sed physice, imo et metaphysice, necessitatur a Seipso. ”—Viva, p. ii, disp, vii, q. i, de
prima regula morali talis.\
All that is good about the other principle is liable to constant error from a want of moderation; and in

pointing out the reasons for preferring the principle of love to the principle of duty, as an habitual motive power in
the spiritual life, it has been necessary to touch upon some of the exaggerations to which the exclusive principle of
duty may lead, but does not necessarily lead. This must not be misunderstood. The principle of duty is holy and
strong. The principle of love disjoined from the principle of duty is a thing which will save no man. Doing right
because it is right is a course which everyone ought to pursue, a habit which all should cultivate. All that we have

been maintaining is, that the spiritual man who looks at love primarily and prominently, and at duty secondarily and
subordinately, will sooner be a thoroughly converted man or a saint, or a higher kind of saint, than the spiritual man
who reverses the process, and looks at duty primarily and prominently, as the solid part of his devotion, and love
secondarily and subordinately, at the sweetening of his duty.
Personal love of God! this then is the conclusion of the whole. To love God because He desires our love, to
love Him because He first loved us, to love Him because He loves us with such a surpassing love, to love our

Creator because He redeemed us and our Redeemer because He created us, to love Him as our Creator in all the

orders of nature, grace, and glory, and finally to love Him for His own sake because of His infinite perfections,
because He is what He is—this, and this alone is religion; this is what flows from the ties between the Creator and
His redeemed creature; for what is redemption but the restoring, repairing, and ennobling of creation? To love our

Creator as our First Cause, as our Last End, and as our abiding possession—this is the whole matter. He in His
mercy has made the love of Him a precept, and therefore those who do right because it is right really love Him, and

go to Him at last, as well as those who only love Him or chiefly love Him out of love. But this last way is the most
easy for ourselves, and the most honorable for Him. This is why I said at the outset that the beginning of the whole
process was rather in God's touching and mysterious desire for our love than in His love of us. That desire of His

seems the handle by which loving souls take hold of their religion, and in which they find the key of their own

position of creatures, and to the rights and attractions of the Creator; and this desire of God for our love leads
straight to our desire for Him, our desire not so much for His love as for Himself, that gift of Himself, which, though
inseparable from His love, is yet much more than love, more precious and more tender.
What then is life, but the possession of God, and the beauty of God, drawing us ever more and more
powerfully to the fuller possession of Him. until at length in heaven we come to the fullness of our possession? Let

us emancipate ourselves for awhile from earthly thoughts, and look up to heaven, while the angels, who rejoice over

one sinner that does penance, are keeping the feast of All Saints. That day might be called the feast of the
Magnificence of Jesus; for the spirit of the feast is a spirit of magnificence; it is the feast of the heavenly court of the
great king of our salvation. Yet what is the sight which we behold there? Ah! if we look into heaven, we shall learn
much about creation! Let us put aside, not in forgetfulness, still less for lack of burning love, the empire of the
angels, our elder brothers, and look only at the human family which is there. Around the altar of the Lamb by

Mary’s maternal throne, there are various rings and choirs and glorious hierarchies of the saints. They lie bathed in
splendor, beautiful to look upon, but it is a splendor which is not their own. Each soul is beautified with an infinite
variety of graces, the particular combination of which is distinctive of that particular soul, and is a separate ornament

of heaven, so that not one saint could be spared without heaven missing a portion of its beauty. Yet those graces are
not their own. They were gifts to begin with, and they must remain gifts to the end. Their exceeding joy is such a
vision of delight that we could not see it now, and live. In truth there is not one of their gifts, not the least and lowest

of their rewards but they might well joy in it with a surpassing joy. But it is not so. Their joy is not in their own
beauty, or their own perfections, or their bright rewards. It is entirely in something which is not their own. It is the
beauty of Jesus which is their magnificence and joy. The eternity of their joy depends, not on any inward possibility
of their own to fall away, but on the ceaseless attraction of that unfading beauty. Oh look at the tranquillity of that

vast scene, outspread before our eyes! It is creation in its Father's house, creation in its home of glory. Its
wanderings are over, its problems solved, its consummation gloriously accomplished. Yet the completion and

elevation of its nature, the expansion and coronation of its graces, and no less also the actual exuberant and joyous
life of its eternal glory is not in itself, but in its possession of the Creator, ft has left itself, and taken up with
something else, and so it is perfect, complete, at home, at rest; for that something else is God. its all in all, its own

God.

But let us look back again to earth, into the ages past, and see the processes by which God made His saints,
by which He drew all these multitudinous rings and choirs and hierarchies of the saints, out of the thick of the world
into His bosom, where just now we saw them lying. The same beauty which, seen, is their eternal life, unseen and

believed in. drew them over earth to heaven. The ways were many, the ways were strange, the ways were unlike
each other, but this was the one invariable process. It was not a mere sense of duty nor a grand conscientiousness,
however bright and strong, which carried them heroically through opposing obstacles, right up to the highest seats in

heaven. It was a secret attraction, a drawing at their hearts, a current sucking them in, at first faint and feeble, slow
and uncertain, then steadier, and now swifter, and at last turbulent, and then suddenly they were drawn under and
engulfed for ever in the beautiful vision of their Creator. It is the characteristic of God’s greatest operations on earth

to be invisible. So is it for the most part with His process of making saints. When it does come to view, it is so un­
like what we should have expected that it scandalizes us by its strangeness. Can we point to the life of any one saint,
at whom people did not take scandal, while he was being sanctified? Why do we not remember more continually
this fact, and the lesson it teaches us? When men saw Jesus too near and too openly, they judged Him worthy of
death. So it is with ourselves. When His shadow crosses us in a saint, we judge him to be anything rather than a

saint, and worthy of condemnation.
The immense variety of ways in which the saints are drawn to God is greatly to be noted. Climate, rank,

date in the world’s history, sufferings, circumstances, education, vocation, national character, all these have had so
much to do with it, and yet so little. They account for much, yet not for all, and for the main tiring not in the least;

for the same things, which seems to be helping saints forward, are visibly keeping other souls back. There is plainly
a secret spell at work, a spell on the world, on life, on sorrow, on darkness, on trial, and even on sin. It is working in
them. It is strengthening itself in different souls by contradictory circumstances. But it is a spell, nothing else than a
spell. It is none other than the beauty of Jesus, which is the life and light of heaven. Heaven is heaven, because God

is so beautiful in light; and earth is the factory' of saints, because God is so beautiful in the darkness.
See how the spell acts, even against the huge, almost resistless, power of the world. Who are they whom it
affects? Ah! look at them, lying on God's breast, gleaming there, bright trophies of redeeming grace. They are
young, delicate, highborn virgins, in the fires, under the pincers, among the teeth of Hons, boy and girl martyrs, like
Venantius, Agatha, Agnes, Lucy, Catherine, and Cecilia. They are children, saints in childhood, whose reason was
anticipated that they might love Jesus; they were little things who tore their flesh with scourges, who prayed hours at

a time, who had ecstasies and worked miracles, who had mysterious sufferings, and lived in a mystical world, and
were incomprehensibly like Jesus. They were kings and queens, who put away their crowns, took up the cross, and

bared their feet, and went off after God. They were gallant soldiers, like St Ignatius, or lawyers like St Alphonso.

They were freshly converted sinners, with all their habits of sin still strong upon them. Or they were ordinarily good
men in the world who loved permitted liberty and blameless pleasure, but over whom by degrees a sort of dream

seemed to pass; and noiselessly they were led out of the crowd dreaming of the beautiful God; and there was a cold
touch of death; and they woke up and found it more than true.
These were the persons on whom the spell worked. Now see from what it drew them. There were first of all
the exquisite sinless pleasures of all the senses. The saints are so far from being insensible persons, that none can

rival them in the keen susceptibilities of pleasure, or in the refined vivacity of their sensitiveness. It is this which
enables them to suffer so acutely, as if they had first been flayed alive, and then bid to walk through the thorny

world. There was the external beauty of the earth, in which they could read more plainly than other men the sweet

enticing loveliness of God’s perfections. There were the ties of the most holy and tender love. Children deserted
their parents, who loved those parents with such a love as common children do not know. There were mothers walk­
ing into convents over the bodies of their sons. There were mothers watching their sons writhing in the excruciating
agonies of a ferocious martyrdom, and encouraging them with tearless eyes to suffer more and more. There were
fond husbands and doting wives parting of their own accord for all the term of life, and the cloister door closing
upon well-known faces as if it had been the hard cold slab of the very tomb. There were joys from which the saints

voluntarily turned in order that they might indulge in sorrow, and so catch just a little look of Christ. And under their
sorrows, when heaven rained crosses on their heads, and earth burned their feet as they walked—oh then was the
magic of the potent spell! with what elasticity they rose up under their load, and now they sang, like angels, as they
went! And it was liberty which they all gave up. the liberty out of which God gets all His creature’s love, the liberty
which, alas! refuses Him so much! They gave up their liberty for the sweet captivity of personal love of God; but it

was the free surrender of their liberty which made it beautiful to God’s eye, and sweetness to His taste, and music in
His ear. What a spell to have drawn such myriads of souls from such attractions, what power, what pleading, what
persuasiveness, what versatility, and yet withal tranquil as the beautiful God Himself!

All these wonders are done by the beauty of God acting on the soul. In heaven it is more intelligible; for
there the blessed Vision is eternal, unchanging, and in the full blaze of glory. But the strange and touching thing is,
that on earth it is the merest glimpses of God which work all these wonders. A chance text of Scripture falls upon
the ear, in church or out of it, and a touch of power comes with it, and with the power a flash of light, and a saint is

made. There are brief sweetnesses in prayer, which come now and then in life, like shooting moonbeams through

rents on close-packed cloudy nights. They lit up the cross upon the steeple and were gone. But the soul fed on them
for days. There are the first moments after Communion, an unearthly time, when we are like Man carrying the Lord

of heaven and earth within her, and we feel Him, and have so much to say that we do not speak at all, and the time
passes, and we seem to have missed an opportunity. But the work was done, and a supernatural health is dancing in
our blood, and straightway we climb a mountain on the road to heaven. Then there are sudden gushes of love, and
along with the love light also; and we know not why they come nor whence. Heaven is all quiet above us. and makes

no sign. Circumstances are going on around us in the old tame languid way. What can it be? Certainly it came from
within as if a depth of the soul had broken up and flooded the surface; and we remember that, within us, in one of

those depths, in which perhaps we have never been ourselves, and till eternity dawns never shall be, God deigns to
dwell, and now we understand the secret.
Then there are momentary unions with Him in times of sorrow, which were so swift that they looked like

possibilities rather than actual visitations. But they were tme embraces from our heavenly Fattier, and they have
healed us of diseases, and they have infused a new strength into us. and they were so close that we have been
tingling ever since, and feel the pressure at this moment still. Then there were flashes from the monstrance, which
showed us we know not what and told us we know not what. Only they made the darkness of the world veiy thick

and palpable, like lightning on a moon-less night. But they did a work; for we felt ourselves laid hold of in the solid
darkness which followed the sudden light, and hurried on over stocks and stones and up high places, and then we
were left, lonely, but, behold! so much nearer than we had ever seen it before, a pale streak, which was the dawning

of the heavenly day. Nay. one sight of God’s beauty at death, such a sight as the dying have sometimes, and which
we cannot explain, is enough in the way of sanctity to do all life’s work in one short hour. If God be all this in time,
what must eternity be like? O happy, happy saints! for awhile longer you shall be in His beautiful light, and we be
far. far away: for awhile—yet but for awhile, and then we also shall be with you. with the same glad light of that
divine face shining full upon our ransomed souls!
Meanwhile even upon earth God is our possession, and we are entering upon our inheritance by degrees.

Jesus is the Creator clad in the garments of redeeming love, and we have Him here on earth already all our own,
while we are sadly but sweetly striving to be all for Him. Already the attributes of the Creator are fountains of joy

and salvation to the creature. Why do we not gaze upon them more intently? There is no earthly science which can
compete in interest with the science of God. ft is a knowledge which quickly leads to love, and love is at once
conversion, perseverance, and salvation. The divine perfections support us by their contrast with what we see on
earth. They relieve our minds. They increase our trust. They actually out of their own abundance supply our

deficiencies. They feed our souls by their grandeur, and exercise an awful mysterious attraction upon us. drawing us
towards themselves, yea. into themselves. They affect our souls variously and medicinally. Justice gives us the gift

of fear, while mercy emboldens us to the grace of familiarity. Omnipotence is what our weakness wants, and
omnipresence what our discouragement requires. Our ignorance consoles itself in omniscience, and our fears lean
and rest themselves on providence. All our wants and all our weaknesses and all our wrongnesses carry their

manifold burdens to God’s fidelity, full certain that they will be lightened there. All these perfections are deeps, into
which we are ever descending now with most surpassing contentment both of mind and will, and in which we shall
be ever sinking delightfully deeper through all eternity. They satisfy us. and they delight by satisfying; and again

they do not satisfy, and by not satisfying, they delight still more, because of the delightful hunger which they leave
behind, and which is in itself a marvelous insatiable contentment. They are a rest, and out of them there is no rest;
they are a home, and short of them, all is wandering and banishment. They are our own. They belong to us. The
Creator has made them all over to us to be our possession and our joy, as if He kept them Himself only to bear the

weight of them, so that to us they might be nothing else but joys.* Even His eternity is ours; and though we are but

sons of time, yet, possessing God, we enjoy in Him eternity, and our religious minds even now. much more our
glorified spirits hereafter, ran forth up the backward ages and again down the countless ages yet untold, and ever
lose themselves, and ever find themselves, in that ocean of everlasting life. Surely there is no devotion like devotion
to the attributes of God. O blessed, O beautiful inheritance of the creature! They are eternal, and will never fail us,
immutable and will never change, immense and always leave us room. O space! thou must widen thy gigantic

shadowy limits, else wilt thou be a very prison for our immortal joys!
[footnote: Nieremberg in the eighth chapter of the seventh book of his Prodigy ofDivine Love, while dwelling on
the way in which God vouchsafes to put His attributes at our disposal, uses language which might seem nearly to fall
under the condemnation passed by Innocent XI in 1679. twenty-one years after Nieremberg’s death, on the theses de
omnipotentia donata. But it must be remembered that those propositions had nothing whatever to do with God’s
being the Last End and enjoyment of men. They concerned the concurrence of His omnipotence to our actions, and
our free use of that concurrence in sinning, and they implied the conclusion that God's dominion over His free
creatures was imperfect because of their freedom. These propositions were condemned as “at the least temerarious
and novel.” Viva has a short commentary on them. (Opera Omnia, tom. vii, p. 194. Ferrara edition, They are also
given by Philippus de Carboncano, the friend of Benedict XIV. in his treatise on condemned propositions, but he
does not name their author; nor does Denzinger in his Enchiridion: and Bemino does not give them at all among tire
propositions of Innocent XI, perhaps because they were not condemned as “heretical."]
If earth be such a heaven to believing souls, what sort of heaven must the real heaven be? What is that

incomparable beauty which the Blessed are gazing on tins very hour? We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think

it. What is it that that beauty is doing to their capacious, serene, and glory-strengthened souls? We have no words to
tell, no thoughts to titink it. What is that divine torrent of love which bursts forth from it, and threatens to submerge
and overwhelm their separate created lives? We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think it. Whither reaches that
white glistening eternity through which it will endure, and which seems to brighten in the far-off prospect rather
than to fade away—whither does it reach? We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think it.

Look how the splendors of the divine nature gleam far and wide, nay infinitely, while the trumpets of
heaven blow, and the loud acclaims of the untiring creatures greet with jubilant amazement the living Vision! See
how Eternity and Immensity entwine their arms in inexplicable embrace, the one filling all space, the other outliving

all time; tire one without quantity' or limit, the other without beginning, end, or duration. See how Mercy and Justice
mingle with and magnify each other, how they put on each other’s look, and fill each other’s offices. Behold the
divine Understanding and the Will, the one for ever lightening up with such meridian glory the profound abysses of

God’s uncircumscribed Truth and illimitable Wisdom, the other enfolding for ever in its unconsuming fires the in­
comprehensible Life of God, His infinite oceanlike expanse of being, and every creature of the countless worlds that
from His life draw their own. Look at the divine Immutability and Liberty, how they sit together like sisters, deep

enthroned in that marvelous Life, and how God is free because He is immutable, and immutable because He is so

free. See how the Son and the Holy Ghost know all the Father's knowledge, and yet He alone by His understanding
produces that co-etemal Word who is His Son. See how the Holy Ghost has all the love both of the Father and the
Son; and yet They alone by Their will produced that blessed Limit of Themselves, that uncreated Sigh, that sacred
Jubilee of Theirs, that everlasting Bond of union, who is the Holy Ghost. Thus is the loving Light of the divine
Understanding ever on fire with Love; and thus is the living Love of the divine Will ever gleaming with the

magnificence of uncreated Light.
All tins life, and all tins assemblage of perfections, and all this royal vision, and all this eternal intertwining
of uncreated beauties, is itself a simple act, and its simplicity and its actuality are the crowning beauties of it all. God
is. He possesses actually all the plenitude of being, without admixture of privation, without dilution of possibility;

for not only are all things possible in Him but all possibilities are actual to Him. He never yet has been able to be:

He never will be able to be: He never will be able not to be. He simply is. Beginning, end. succession, change—they
come not nigh Him. They breathe no breath upon Him. He is a Pure Act. As St Gregory Nazianzen says, He is all
things, and yet He is nothing, because He does not belong to tilings at all. He is, and He is eternally, and He is

necessarily, and He is of Himself. It is tliis Simplicity, this Actuality, which passes over the grand Vision with
incessant soft flashes from end to end and again from end to end, of that endless Nature, and which is to the Face of
God what expression is to the face of man, at once its chann and its identity, its beaut} and its truth. As we know

each other by our looks, so we know God by His Simplicity.
O happy souls of the Blessed, and what of you? ft is all written in the Holy Book; [footnote: Esther xv.] and
it needs no commenting. On the third day she laid away the garments she wore, and put on her glorious apparel. And

glittering in royal robes, after she had called upon God, the Ruler and Savior of all, she took two maids with her.
And upon one of them she leaned, as if, for delicateness and over-much tenderness, she were not able to bear up her
own body. And the other maid followed her lady, bearing up her train flowing on the ground. But she with a rosy

color in her face, and with gracious and bright eyes, hid a mind full of exceeding great fear. In going in she passed
through all the doors in order, and stood before the King, where He sat upon His royal throne, clothed with His royal
robes, and glittering with gold and precious stones, and He was terrible to behold. And when He had lifted up His
countenance, the queen sank down, and her color turned pale, and she rested her weary head upon her handmaid.
And the King’s spirit was changed into mildness, and all in haste He leaped from His throne, and holding her up in
His arms till she came to herself, caressed her with these words: “What is the matter, Esther? I am thy Brother, fear

not. Thou shall not die: for this law is not made for thee, but for all others. Come near then, and touch the scepter.
And as she held her peace, He took the golden scepter, and laid it upon her neck, and kissed her, and said, Why dost
thou not speak to Me? And she answered, I saw Thee, my Lord, as an angel of God, and my heart was troubled for
fear of Thy majesty. For Thou, my Lord, art very admirable, as Thy Face is full of graces! And while she was
speaking she fell down again, and was almost in a swoon. But the King was troubled, and all His servants comforted

her.

Such is the picture of the Creator and the creature. It is a history of the truest love that ever was: nay, of the
only love that was ever truly true. And what is the end of all? We are God’s own creatures, and God is our own God.
All else will fail us, but He never will. All is love with Him, love in light and love in darkness, love always and
everywhere. There are many difficulties left unexplained, many problems yet unsolved. Would it not be strange, if it
were not so. seeing that He is infinite and we finite, He is Creator and we but creatures? But the difficulties are only
difficulties of love. There is nothing cold in them, nothing frightening, nothing which goes one step towards
disproving that sweet proof that He is our own God. our very own. There is no difficulty in wondering why we are
not in heaven already. The wonder and the difficulty are, that such as we know ourselves to be should ever enter

there at all. This is the great difficulty, and it is a difficulty for tears. Yet when that difficulty looks up into the face

of God’s Fidelity, then that sweetest and most soothing of all our Creator's grandeurs wipes the tears from our eyes,
and hope comes out from behind her cloud, and shines softly, and the heart is still. Our own God? And so beautiful!
A theologian said that if one lost soul could reunite in itself all the rage and hatred of all the lost against God, and
that it could root, fortify, and confirm all this gigantic rage and hatred in itself for millions and millions of years,
until it had become a new, ineradicable, and preternatural nature to him, one little ray of God’s beauty falling gently

on him for a single moment would change his whole being that instant into such respectfid love and utter adoration,

that he would not feel the fires that burned him, because of the greater fires of liis transported love. But we are free,
and we are in earth’s fair sunshine, and our heart is full of a little but most true love of God, and a whole world of
God’s blessed love is resting on our single heart—and shall we doubt, shall we hesitate, shall we tremble, shall we
be chilled in the midst of all these fires of love? O my Creator, my eternal love! O my Father, my heavenly Father!

weary yet full of trust, worthless but truly loving Thee, on earth still and very far from heaven, my home and my rest
are still in Thy Fidelity! In te, Domine, speravi, non confundar in æternum!