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 THE 
 
 CREATOR AND THE CREATURE, 
 
 OB, 
 
 THE WONDERS OF DIVINE LOVE. 
 
 FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, D.D., 
 
 PRIEST OF THE ORATORY OF ST. PHILIP NERI. 
 
 Oi ya.% ?&eL*y»i ia vottirBxt too Qiit. 
 
 PYTHAGORAS. 
 
 FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 LONDON: 
 THOMAS RICHARDSON AND SON, 
 
 DUBLIK ANO DERBY.
 
 26 I 
 
 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.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 It appears necessary to trespass on the reader's 
 patience for awhile by giving him the history of 
 the composition of this Treatise. Books, reviews, 
 conversation, personal experience, and the phe- 
 nomena forced upon our notice in dealing with 
 souls, seem to concur in showing that it is almost 
 a characteristic feature of the present age, at least 
 in this country, to have harsh, unkindly, jealous, 
 suspicious, and distrustful thoughts of God. It is 
 not so much that men do not believe in Him, as in 
 past times, or that they are irreverently inquisitive, 
 as they have been in other days. Infidelity and 
 intellectual impiety are unfortunately common 
 enough; but they are not, as compared with other 
 times, the characteristic sins of the day with us. 
 We find in their place abundant admissions of the 
 existence, and even of the excellence, of God; but 
 joined with this, a reluctance, which hardly likes 
 to put itself into words, to acknowledge His sove- 
 reignty. There is a desire to strip Him of His 
 majesty, to qualify His rights and to abate His
 
 V1U PREFACE. 
 
 prerogatives, to lower Him so as to bring Him 
 somewhat nearer to ourselves, to insist on His 
 obeying our own notions of the laws of morality, 
 and confining Himself within such limits of justice 
 and equity as are binding on creatures rather than 
 on the Creator. There is a tendency to turn religion 
 into a contract between parties, very unequal cer- 
 tainly, but not infinitely unequal, to object to what- 
 ever in God's Providence betokens a higher rule 
 than the rule of our duties towards each other, and 
 to revolt from any appearance of exclusiveness, 
 supreme will, and unaccountable irresponsibility, 
 which there may be in His conduct towards us. 
 This appears to be the attitude of the day towards 
 God. The acknowledgment of Him is conditional 
 on His submitting to be praised and admired, as 
 other than the God whose own will is His sole 
 law, whose own glory is His necessary end, and 
 who by virtue of His own perfections can have no 
 other end, rest, or sufficiency, than His own ever- 
 blessed Self. 
 
 If this were simply a mitigated form of infi- 
 delity belonging to the nineteenth century, and 
 affecting those only who are immersed in world- 
 liness, the present Treatise would not have been 
 written, inasmuch as it is purely practical, and 
 addressed only to believers. But the epidemics of 
 the world are never altogether unfelt within the 
 Church. The air is corrupted, and in some much 
 milder form the souls of believers are affected by 
 the pestilence which reigns without. So is it in 
 the present case. In the difficulties through which
 
 PHEFACE. IX 
 
 men Lave to force their way, by the help of grace, 
 into the One True Fold, in the obstacles which 
 hinder others from advancing in the ways of 
 holiness, in the temptations which tease, if they 
 do not endanger faith, in the treatment of religious 
 controversies, in the sides men take in ecclesiastical 
 politics, in the tendencies of their theological views, 
 and even in the common exercises of daily devo- 
 tion, we find indubitable traces of an attitude 
 towards God, caught from the fashion of the day, 
 and which seems to betoken some obliquity in the 
 mind, logically working itself out in the worship 
 and obedience of our souls. It is not that believers 
 believe wrongly about God, but either that they do 
 not understand, or that they do not realize, what 
 they most rightly believe. ' 
 
 It has thus come to pass, from various circum- 
 stances which need not be detailed, that the com- 
 position of this Treatise has been a work of charity 
 towards souls, almost forced upon the writer in 
 consequence of the position which he occupied, 
 and the work into which such a sphere as London 
 introduced him. The result of much thought on 
 the subject led to the conclusion, that it is possible 
 for the intellectual inconsistencies of men to realize 
 that they have a Creator without realizing, what is 
 already involved, that they themselves are crea- 
 tures, or what is actually implied in being a crea- 
 ture ; and further, it seemed that this very incon- 
 sistency explained and accounted for the phenomena 
 in question. 
 
 The Treatise therefore, will bo found naturally
 
 X PREFACE. 
 
 to divide itself into three parts. The First Boole, 
 consisting of three chapters, is the statement of 
 the case, and contains a description of the phe- 
 nomena around us, a detailed account of what it is 
 to have a Creator, and of what follows from our 
 being His creatures. The result of this inquiry 
 is to find, that creation is simply an act of divino 
 love, and cannot be accounted for on any other 
 supposition than that of an immense and eternal 
 love. The Second Book, consisting of five chapters, 
 occupies itself with the difficulties and depths of 
 this creative love, which have been classified as 
 answers to the following questions, Why does God 
 wish us to love Him, Why does He Himself lovo 
 us, How can we love Him, How do we actually 
 love Him, and how does He repay our love. Here, 
 in other times, or in another country perhaps, the 
 Treatise might have concluded. But the course of 
 the investigation has started some grave objec- 
 tions, which the Third Book, consisting of four 
 chapters, is occupied in answering. If this account 
 of creative love be true, if God redeemed us 
 because He persisted in desiring, even after our 
 fall, to have us with Him as participators in His 
 own eternal beatitude, salvation ought to be easy, 
 evei? to fallen nature. If it is easy, then it might 
 appear to some to follow that at least the majority 
 of believers would be saved. If these two ques- 
 tions are answered in the affirmative, then a fresh 
 difficulty rises to view. How are we to account for 
 what is an undoubted fact, that these relations of 
 tho Creator and the creature are not practically
 
 PREFACE. XI 
 
 acknowledged by creatures ? Tlio answer to this 
 objection is found in the nature, the power, and 
 the prevalence of worldliness, The flesh and the 
 devil will not adequately account for the way in 
 which men behave towards God, and the attitude 
 in which they put themselves before Him. World- 
 liness is the principal explanation of it. But then 
 the conclusions, which may be drawn from an in- 
 spection of worldliness, seem to dishonour, if not to 
 destroy, the previous conclusions about the easiness 
 of salvation and the multitude of the elect. How is 
 it that so many can escape, how is it that they do 
 escape ? By personal love of the Creator, by a 
 religion which is simply a service of love, by a love 
 which brings them within the suck of that gulf of 
 the Divine Beauty, which is our holiness here, as it 
 is our happiness hereafter. And thus the creature 
 secures that enjoyment and possession of the Creator 
 which was His primary intention in creation; and 
 so the Treatise ends. 
 
 Although it seems occupied with very simpl© 
 truths, and might almost be regarded as a com- 
 mentary on the catechism, the composition of it 
 has been a work both of time and labour. It 
 stands to the Author's other works in the relation 
 of source and origin. It has been this view of 
 God, pondered for years, that has given rise to 
 the theological bias, visible in the other books, as 
 well as the opinions expressed on the spiritual 
 life. Difficulties which may have been found in 
 the other books, respecting the Sacred Humanity, 
 the Blessed Sacrament, our Lady, Purgatory,
 
 XU PREFACE,, 
 
 Indulgences, and tbe like, will for the most part 
 find their explanation here; for this treatise ex- 
 plains in detail the point of view from which the 
 Author hahitually looks at all religious questions, 
 of practice as well as of speculation. 
 
 It should also he home in mind that the Treatise 
 is a whole, and keeps sedulously to its one subject. 
 Hence, unless the hook were loaded with repeti- 
 tions, a cursory reader may easily meet with state- 
 ments, against which grave objections may seem to 
 lie, whereas those very objections have been met 
 or provided against in some other portion of the 
 work. The Author trusts it is no want of humility 
 to say, that, after the careful thought and deep 
 reading of years, he should refuse to trouble him- 
 self with criticisms, which shall not bear upon them 
 the impress of a careful study of his book, at least 
 proportionate to the care he has expended upon its 
 composition. 
 
 The Author cannot allow his Treatise to go 
 forth to the public, without acknowledging the 
 obligations he is under to the Rev. Father Gloag, 
 the librarian of the London Oratory, who has 
 spared no pains in verifying quotations, in seeking 
 for passages in voluminous works to which other 
 writers had given incorrect references or made 
 vague allusions, and also in bringing under the 
 notice of the Author some important passages of 
 which he was not aware himself, especially with 
 reference to the Baian Propositions. As the work 
 has been written for the most part in ill-health,.
 
 PREFACE. Xlll 
 
 and under the pressure of other duties from which 
 lie could not be dispensed, the Author is the moro 
 anxious to acknowledge thus gratefully a coopera- 
 tion, which circumstances rendered peculiarly valu- 
 able, and which, tedious and troublesome as it 
 was, baa been proffered, "with such a graceful kind- 
 ness, as to make the sense of obligation a pleasure 
 rather than a burden. 
 
 In truth though all appears so plain and smooth, 
 the composition of the Treatise has in reality led 
 the Writer along a very thorny and broken path. 
 The ground of creation, of the natural order and of 
 the supernatural order, is, as theologians well 
 know, strewn all over, as if a broken precipice had 
 overwhelmed it, with Condemned Propositions, the 
 theology of which is full of fine distinctions and 
 insidious subtleties, and, not unfrequently, of ap- 
 parent contradictions. Nowhere does the malice 
 of error more painfully succeed in harassing the 
 student, than in this matter of Condemned Propo- 
 sitions. The utmost pains however have been 
 taken to secure accuracy. The best theologians 
 have been collated, even to weariness; and if the 
 book had been allowed to exhibit in notes or ap- 
 pendices the labour which it has entailed, it would 
 have swollen to an inconvenient bulk. It has 
 moreover, been submitted to two careful and minute 
 revisions by others, in whose ability and theological 
 attainments there was good reason to confide. But 
 the author cannot now entrust it to the thoughtful 
 charity and kindly interpretations of his readers,
 
 Xl? PREFACE. 
 
 Without also submitting it in all respects, and with- 
 out the slightest reserve, to the judgment of the 
 Church, retracting and disavowing beforehand any 
 statement which may be at variance with her autho- 
 rized teaching, who is the sole, as well as the infal- 
 lible, preceptress of the nations in the ways of eter- 
 nal truth. 
 
 Sydenham Sill, 
 Feast of the Dedication 
 Of the Basilica of St. Peter au<3 SU PauL 
 1856.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 THE CASE STATED BETWEEN THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE!. 
 CHAP. PAGE. 
 
 I. — A new fashion of an old sin, 21 
 
 II. — What it i9 to be a Creature, .. ... .,. 43 
 
 III. — What it is to have a Creator, *. 81 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 THE DIFFICULTIES OF CREATIVE LOVE. 
 
 I. — Why God wishes us to love Him, 129 
 
 II. — Why God loves us, 159 
 
 III. — Our means of loving God, , 193 
 
 IV. — Our actual love of God, 239 
 
 V.— In what way God repays our love, 26*4 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 
 
 I. — The easiness of salvation, 299 
 
 II. — The great mass of believers, ... 337 
 
 III.— The world, 394 
 
 IV. — Our own Gud, , 429
 
 THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE: 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE WONDERS OF DIVINE LOYE.
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 THE CASE STATED BETWEEN THE 
 
 CREATOR AND THE CREATURE.
 
 THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 THE CASE STATED BETWEEN THE CREATOR AND THE 
 
 CREATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 "Quid ad me si quia non intelligat? Gaudeat et ipse dicens: Quid est 
 hoc? Gaudeat etiam sic, et arnet, non inveniendo in venire potius Te, 
 quam inveniendo non invenire Te."--<S. Auguslin. 
 
 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 serve Him better. There are many a^ain 
 who when they read or hear of the spiritual life, or 
 come across the ordinary maxims of Christian perfec- 
 tion, 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
 
 22 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 are far-fetched and unreal. They stand off from per- 
 sons who profess to teach such doctrines, or to livo 
 by them, as if they had some contagious disease which 
 they might catch themselves. Yet they are often very 
 little tainted by worldliness ; 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 true that any one solution of the prob- 
 lem will meet or explain all the difficulties of this dis- 
 tresfcing 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 mystery. 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 true 
 to say, even of multitudes of the faithful, that they 
 have no adequate or indeed distinct notion of the rela- 
 tion in which they stand to God, of His rights, or of 
 their obligations: and when trial comes, their inade< 
 qunte idea betrays them into conduct quite at variance 
 with their antecedents.
 
 A. NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 23 
 
 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 hypothesis 
 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 
 Bin of angels, the 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 forget 
 fulness on our part that we are creatures. Men may 
 realize that they are creatures, imperfect, finite, and 
 dependent. This truth may be 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 sp^ak of creation, inves- 
 tigate 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 theory, or any atheistical principle, that 
 God is thus passed over. Uq is unseen, and hence is 
 
 V 

 
 21 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 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, some- 
 times 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 
 honourably, 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 respect- 
 ability, especially in the eyes of our inferiors. And 
 yet this 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 canoni- 
 zation of an immense power, of distant majesty, and of 
 unimaginable mystery ; a something like the beauty of 
 midnight skies, or the niaguificent pageant of the storm, 
 elevating the thoughts, quelling and tranquillizing little- 
 ness, 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 reali- 
 ties 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
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 25 
 
 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 modern literature, to 
 keep our inferiors in check, to add gravity to our rebukes, 
 to foster our own self-respect, and, in a word, to " point 
 a moral or adorn a tale.'' This God is rather our crea- 
 ture than our Creator ; He is the creature of moral re- 
 spectability, the necessity of a dissatisfied conscience, the 
 convenience of a social police, the consolation of an un- 
 supernatural 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 tho 
 change, and do not see it still. This is another com- 
 mon 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 
 sneaking, 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 upou 
 them. Nevertheless they remembered they were crea-
 
 26 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 tures; only, because they had lost the true idea of the 
 Creator, they made the weaknesses of the creature an 
 apology for his sin, and so went desperately astray. 
 
 But if we mistake not, the characteristic malice o£ 
 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 contem- 
 plation of themselves. Theories of progress and per- 
 fectibility 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 organ- 
 ized priestcraft, which was not alwajs simply an evil : 
 but which has now outlived any rractical 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 witli themselves. Humanity marches onwards with 
 grand strides to the magnificent goal of social perfec-
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 27 
 
 tibility. Each generation is a glorious section of the 
 procession of progress. Liberty, independence, speed, 
 association, and self-praise, these compose the spirit ol 
 the modern 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 con- 
 sequences: it entangles us in no supernatural relations. 
 It simply means that we are not eternal, the remem- 
 l ranee of which is salutary, in that it quickens our dili- 
 gence in the pursuit of material prosperity. 
 
 All phases of civilization have a monomania of their 
 own. Certain favourite ideas come uppermost, and are 
 regarded with so much favour 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 oi 
 the world iniallibly 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 theso alternations 
 j;ress. Now we generally find that each of these 
 monomanias, with its cant words, its fixed ideas, and 
 its onesided exaggerations, transfers its temper and 
 characteristics to the view which it takes of God. The 
 ideas of liberty, progress, independence, social contracts, 
 rej resentative government, and the like, colour 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
 
 28 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 catholic theology can rescue us from falling into soma 
 such error ourselves.* 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.f 
 
 In whatever direction we turn we shall gain fresh 
 proof of the want of this true view of God, and fresh 
 evidence that the peculiar forgetfulness of God in these 
 
 « The gibe of Voltaire is after all full of bitter truths ; depuis que Dieu a 
 i'ait l'uomme a sou image, l'homme le lui a bieu rendu. 
 
 t There are two views of God in theology, the Scotist and the Thomist. 
 The Scotist seems to bring God nearer to us, to muke 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 nee 
 etiain 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 anthropomor- 
 phism, perhaps of pantheism. Thus the Thomist view is safer. " You ought 
 to know," says Malebranche, (Huitieme Entretien sur la Metaphysique, 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. Suinmnm Magnum, ex defec- 
 tions aemuli solitudinem quandara de singula; itate praestantiae suae 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 contsadictions, 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 aU 
 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.
 
 A NEW FASHION OP A\ T OLD SIN. 29 
 
 times consists in the forgetfulness on our own part that 
 we are creatures. For, think in what this forgetfulness 
 consists. It is the new fashion of an old sin. Nothing 
 offends our taste more than disproportion, or unseemli- 
 ness. "We like things to be in keeping, and when pro- 
 prieties are violated, we have a sense of being wounded. 
 If a servant puts on the manners 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 own family, are unbecoming in a guest ; 
 and the demeanour and address of a stranger differ from 
 those of an acquaintance. Our taste is annoyed when 
 these things 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. 
 Tne propriety of man as man, his moral and religious 
 j ropriety, consists in his constantly remembering that 
 lie is a creature, and demeaning himself accordingly. 
 The bad taste and vulgarity (to use words which may 
 make the meaning clearer) of his not doing so are in 
 reality sin and irreligion, because the contempt, pre- 
 sumption, 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 everywhere? How little has religion to do 
 with 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 were no 
 God of Hosts. We do not ask ourselves the question 
 whether it is God's will that there should be such a 
 war. The whole action of diplomacy is as if there were 
 no special providence, and as if God having retired from,
 
 80 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 the management of the world, we must take up the 
 reins which He has let fall from His wearied 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 would 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 irreligion than would 
 have seemed possible beforehand, there is an incalcula- 
 ble 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 degen- 
 erating? 
 
 The same tone is observable in our poetry and elegant 
 literature. Everywhere man is his own end, and the 
 master of his own destiny. Subordination and a subject 
 spirit are not virtues, neither in works of fiction do the 
 meek inherit the earth.* 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 ruin about him. The natural stands off, clear and 
 self-helpful, from the supernatural. Accountableness 
 
 * E. O. see Kinggley's Two Years Ago, a work by an Anglican clergyman, 
 propounding what the Saturday Review satirically termed a " mu*oulnv 
 Christianity •"
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 31 
 
 is not a necessary part of selfgovernment. 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, things 
 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 utimately be resolvable, how the cycles of the 
 heavenly bodies first began, the unspeakable intricacy 
 of their checks and counterchecks, the secular aberra- 
 tions and secular corrections of the same, the secret 
 of life, the immateriality of the soul, where physical 
 science ends, — all these questions 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 liMit on the word God, or to come across some allu- 
 sion 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 them- 
 selves to be creatures and to have a Creator, if they 
 Tere 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 aro 
 closeted with matter to-day. So many secondary 
 causes are waiting 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 tho 
 
 •
 
 32 A NEW FASHION OP AN OLD SIN. 
 
 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.. It 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 modern discovery, psy- 
 chological 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 wor- 
 thy of modern enlightenment. With such persons the 
 dignity of man is a matter of prime consideration, while, 
 in their view, his assent to the doctrines and practices 
 of the Church is as degrading to his intellectual nobility, 
 (is his obedience to them is superstitious and debasing. 
 The pope and theology, the Blessed Virgin and the 
 Saints, grace and the sacraments, penance and purga- 
 tory, 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 honour. It 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 ot, 
 moral greatness, according to their view of greatness..
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 33 
 
 Nothing granJ, lasting, or spreading will come of it. 
 But let us put out of view for the moment the un- 
 doubted agents in the formation of this character, the 
 pope and theology, the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, 
 graco and the sacraments, penance and purgatory, rosa- 
 ries and scapulars, asceticism and mysticism. Let us 
 take the character as we find it, without enquiring into 
 the process of its formation. Granting that there is a 
 God, eternal and all-holy, granting that we are H13 
 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 behaviour, the demeanour, 
 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 sanc- 
 tity with inimitable gracefulness express to the life the 
 modest, truthful, prevailing sense that we are creatures, 
 standing before the eve and living in the hand of our 
 everlasting Creator ? And are not the selfsufficiency, 
 the daring, the vainglory, the speed, the unhesitating- 
 ness, 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 flj or a monkey to ape the man- 
 ners of a man ? It is not true 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 
 v/iicl) they form are simply the most perfect, the most 
 3 f
 
 34 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 Graceful, the most sensible ami 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 win- 
 ningly natural. If Christianity were not true, the con- 
 duct of a wise man, who acted consistently as a creature 
 who had a Creator, would strangely resemble the 
 behaviour 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 pre- 
 vails 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 
 fire 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 i\i 
 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 " reason- 
 able service" to neglect one for the other. God and 
 -the world are coordinate powers, coordinate fountains 
 of moral duty and obligation. He is the really religious
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 85 
 
 mnn who gives neither of them reason to complain. 
 We must let our common sense hinder us from becom- 
 ing 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-humour of conscience in consequence of the out- 
 ward respect they pay, in due season and fitting place, 
 to the ceremonies of religion. 
 
 Hitherto we have spoken of classes of persons in whom 
 tfe take no interest, further than the sorrow which all 
 who love God must feel at seeing Him defrauded of 
 His honour, and all who love their fellowmen 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 
 which they enter. We are all of us more affected by 
 the errors which prevail around us than we really 
 6uppose. Almost every popular fallacy has its repre- 
 sentative 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 con- 
 scious ; and we often injure ourselves in our best and 
 highest interest by views- and practices, to which wo 
 cling with fatal obstinacy, little suspecting the relation- 
 ship in which they stand to widely spread evils, which
 
 S$ A NEW. FAS HION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 we behold in their naked deformity in other sections 
 of society, and hold up to constant reprobation. Tho 
 forgetfulness that we are creatures, which produces tie 
 various consequences already mentioned, is au error 
 which is less obviously hateful than a direct forgetful- 
 ness 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 
 boohs, and become familiarized with certain fashionablo 
 principles of conduct ; and it is impossible for their 
 minds and hearts not to become imbued with tho 
 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 
 bis 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 un- 
 etartling 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
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 87 
 
 dre such things 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 
 thiDgs for His honour, 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 verga 
 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. Theresa 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 au- 
 thority 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 avoid-
 
 88 A NEW FASHION OP AN OLD SIN. 
 
 ing of mortal 8iD, 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 any one 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 con- 
 sciously 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 truths, quite irre- 
 spective 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 w T ith modestv and self-distrust 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, of poetical and fanciful, 
 or peculiar and eccentric. 
 
 Now ifc must be beyond a doubt to any catholic 
 scholar that such persons are completely out of har- 
 mony 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 per- 
 haps 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 them-
 
 A NEW FASHION' OF AX OLD SIN. 03 
 
 selves. God forbid ! but this is what it comes to ia 
 effect. 
 
 Ia speaking of unbelievers, we pointed out that tho 
 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 volun- 
 tary mortification, and ail the shapes of love of suffer- 
 ing, for these are ideas peculiar to the kingdom of the 
 Incarnation, or to such false religions as retain in dis- 
 torted shapes great portions of the primitive tradition 
 which prophesied ot the expiation of sin by the vicarious 
 sufferings of a Redeemer. So now we would call the 
 ntion of the good people, of whom we are at present 
 Bpeaking, 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 theo- 
 logy, 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 volun- 
 tary penance or of acquired contemplation, though not 
 of obligation, at least rise naturally and easily out of the. 
 r"lations in which we every one of us stand to God as ou? 
 Creator. There is nothing in the whole range of ascetic 
 cism, which does not turn out at last, to be a natural 
 and logical result of our position in the world as the crea* 
 tures of a Creator: and henco there is nothing in such 
 practices fanciful, eccentric, or intritisiouUv indiscreet: 

 
 40 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 though wrong time, wrong place, wrong measure, can 
 make anything iudiscreet. 
 
 From this fact we draw two 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 colour to the un- 
 belief 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 what comes of it in the way of practical religion. 
 It lias 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 re- 
 main so to the last. Thus they have come as it wena 
 by instinct to rise up in arms against a claim which is 
 urged in behalf of God. Next they have jealously 
 examined His claims, in a commercial spirit, and with 
 a bias towards themselves. Then they h ive put limits 
 to His service, made a compromise with Him, reduced 
 Him from a Creator to a Being, who is to tax and to 
 tythe, and no more, for He is a constitutional monarch 
 and not despotic, and they have come to regard notions 
 of perfection with disfavour 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
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 41 
 
 60me such sort of equality between God and myself, 
 as that I am entitled to come to terms with Him." 
 Moreover the spirit in which all this is done is equally 
 incompatible with the modest position of a creature. 
 It is as if they were the judges, as if they possessed 
 some inalienable, indefeasible rights of their own. 
 There is no diffidence, no self-distrust. They sea 
 their way more clearly, and assert their supposed 
 liberty more positively, than they would do in matters 
 which concerned the claims and interests of their fellow- 
 citizens. It would make a great change, we will not 
 say how great^ in them, if they realized and clearly 
 comprehended the relation in which a creature necessa- 
 rily as a creature, stands to his Creator. 
 
 My second inference is, that, as the doctrines and 
 practices of spirituality rest mainly on our position aa 
 creatures, and entirely on our position as redeemed 
 creatures, the common evasion that they belong to tho 
 cloister, and are peculiar to monks and nuns, will not; 
 hold good and cannot be maintained. A monk is nob 
 more a creature than a soldier or a sailor, a billiard- 
 marker or a jockey, and no more comes out of hid 
 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 bo 
 served. Monks and nuns have given up their liberty 
 by the heroism of vows. They are obliged to the prac- 
 tices of perfection, or to apply themselves to the acqui- 
 sition of them. Theirs is a glorious captivity in which 
 supernatural charity has bound them hand and foot, 
 and handed them over to the arma of their Creator. 
 They havo used the original liberty He gave them in 
 the grandest of ways, by voluntarily surrendering it.
 
 42 A NEW FASHION OP AN OLD SIN. 
 
 All then that distinguishes the Christian in his family 
 from the monk in his community is his liberty. If he 
 is to serve God at all it mu9t 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 necessary 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 practised in the world, many which 
 it would be unwise for most persons to attempt to 
 practise in the world, and some which it would be 
 actually impossible to practise there. But whatever 
 differences there may be in the amount done for God, 
 or the manner of doing it, or the obligations undei 
 which it is done, there can be no difference in the 
 principle on which 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 
 who starts professedly on the principle that he will do 
 no more than avoid mortal sin, and that God shall 
 have no more out of him, will infallibly not succeed 
 in his 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 ruin. He will fail in his object, because he 
 made it exclusively his object. Love is the sole prin- 
 ciple 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 between the creature and the
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD Bltf. 43 
 
 Creator, it is either true that monks are more God's 
 creatures than we 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 write a book on perfection. Very 
 far from it. But we believe that the ruling spirit of 
 the a^e is rather a forojetfulness that we are creatures, 
 than a forgetfulness of the Creator, that many more 
 persons are infected with this evil than have any sus- 
 picion of it, that it lies at the bottom ', of all the objec- 
 tions men make to the doctrines of spirituality, and 
 furthermore that many more persons would try 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, a3 
 creature and Creator. Hence we are undertaking what 
 may seem a childish, or at least an unnecessary, work. 
 We wish to explain, or to state rather than to explain, 
 the first elements of all practical religion, the ABC 
 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 every one thinks he knows already, and what ho 
 will say he knew before as soon as he reads it. Never- 
 theless these common-places are not so well known as. 
 they should be. Their very commonness leads men 
 to overlook them; and we trust that not a few readers, 
 if they will follow 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 reli- 
 
 • Since the publication of the first Edition of this work the follrwirig 
 notice has appeared in the Cronaca Cuntcn-.poianea of the Civile Cattolica
 
 44 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 
 
 gion is based on the sense that we are creatures. Oar 
 responsibilities mean that we are creatures. The fool- 
 ishness of this simple truth will bring to nought the 
 pride of the wise world. It will be as the plain stone 
 of the common brook against the might and bravery 
 of the giant of modern 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 3 
 fevir obvious matters of fact about our heavenly Father, 
 and then leave it to grace and our own hearts what 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 doe3 
 He repay our love of Him ? — Is it easy to be saved? — 
 And what becomes of the great multitude of believers? 
 What, if when we put our answers together, some- 
 thing new and striking comes of it all? What if it 
 warms our hearts, and moistens our eyes ? Anyhow it 
 
 for October 17th, 1S57, 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 proclaim- 
 ing the dogma of Creation; and that, while many and new errors arose to 
 combat the divine revelation every heresy was in fact contained in Gnosti- 
 cism, which, nato d'orgoglio &c. ..had in these days assumed its latest form. 
 Pantheism, Whence he inferred that as Gnosticism nacque dallo sconoscere 
 il vero della Creazione, cosi ancora per combattere i moderni increduli 
 razionalistici panteisti si dee dagli scrittori cattolici fare ogni sforzo per 
 inuttere in sodo cotesto domma importantissimo in vece di perdersi in ques- 
 tioni seconJarie. It was naturally a great pleasure to me to find the views of 
 this chapter expressed by an authority ao much higher and more competent 
 l-ua my uwu.
 
 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 45 
 
 is very sweet to talk of God. There is no holyday 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 
 beginnings
 
 46 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 Si homo miile annts serviret Deo etiam ferventissime. non riereretttf 
 ex condigno dimidiam diem esse in regno coelorum.— S. Anselm. 
 
 Let us sib down upon the top of this fair hill. TI13 
 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- 
 .eteepled 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 drink- 
 ing 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 paiuted
 
 WHAT IT IS TO EL A CBfcATUBE. 47 
 
 surcoats or gilded panoply, while the blue dome above 
 Beems both taller and bluer than common, and is 
 lir^inn- with the loud peals of the unseen larks, as the 
 steeples of the city ring for the nation's victory. Fat 
 off from the ri?er 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 anl 
 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 diversi- 
 fied, so calm, opening out such fountains of deep reflec- 
 tion, 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, reason- 
 ing 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 smoke- wreaths of 
 the cannon and the surges of the bells, are the crea- 
 tures of the One True God, lights and shades in this 
 creature- picture, kith and kin to all the things around 
 \i3, in n<\ar 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 Bun 
 shines upon is real; and we are real too. Are we to 
 be the beauty of a moment, part of earth's gilding, to 
 rarm ourselves in the sun for awhile and glitter, and 

 
 43 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 add to tlio 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 tilings. 
 
 But we roust 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 
 eo 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 with- 
 out sanctifying grace, without infused virtues, and with- 
 out 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 his 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 know- 
 ledge 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 controul our passions,
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 49 
 
 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. Neverthe- 
 less 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 of 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 iden- 
 tical 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 con- 
 demned because it asserts that this integrity was clue 
 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 vigour 
 by which this glorious dominion of the soul is completed 
 and sustained, while the tree of life, it is supposed, 
 would have preserved the material part of our nature 
 4 t 

 
 50 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 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 sancti- 
 fy hi S grace. 
 
 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 super- 
 natural 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 his descendants in a state of inno- 
 cence, 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 aggre- 
 gate of gifts and habits which compose it ; and what 
 constituted man in this state was the one simple quality 
 of sanctifying 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 Baius and Jansenius 
 
 * 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. Praearnbula ad tract, de gratia: and Viva de Gratia 
 Adamica in his Trutina thesium Quesnelliarurum. See also Ripalda's Dispu- 
 tation on the Baian Propositions, which Dr. Ward Of St. Eumund'a College 
 has published in a separate form.
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CBEATUBE. 51 
 
 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.* This state of innocence, or 
 original justice, was that in which, 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 very 
 beautiful and touching analogy. Just as tho separate 
 orders of nature and grace were by the sweet love of 
 God started in the same act, so the promise of the 
 Saviour and the actual operation of saving grace fol- 
 lowed at once upon the fall, and fallen nature was 
 6tniightway placed upon the road of reparation and 
 redemption. Tims 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 ten- 
 dency to keep outstripping itself and outdoing itself; 
 and in all these ways is it evermore overrunning all 
 creation, beautifying and glorifying it with its owa 
 eternal splendours. 
 
 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 the Condemned Pro- 
 positions. At the same time we shall speak of God 
 
 • The zist and 14th Propositions of Buius. 
 
 LIBRARY TT.mrttt
 
 52 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 throughout as at once the author of both these order?, 
 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 obli- 
 gations which greatly influence the relations of tho 
 creature to his Creator. Creation was itself a gratuitous 
 gift. But, granting creation, nothing was due to tho 
 natures either of angels or men but what those natures 
 respectively could claim on grounds intrinsic to them- 
 selves. It was to have been expected beforehand that 
 
 * 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 distinc- 
 tion 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 tho 
 subject by Gregory XIII. and may therefore be supposed to have known tha 
 pope's mind,) as saying that some of the propositions of Baius were only con- 
 demned because of the bitter language used of the opposite opinion. Billuart 
 and others are very vehement against this. On the xxxivth proposition in, 
 particular Vasquez and De Lugo take one side, and Suarez, Viva, liipalda, 
 and the Thomists generally the other. See Vasq. i. 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 
 •Jo do with the question whether in order to a true act of love we must ex- 
 plicitly 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, quoies the following passage of St. Thomas from his 
 commentary on the first Epistle to the Corinthians. Amor est qurcdam vis 
 unitiva, et omnis amor in unione quadam consistit. Unde secundum diversas 
 uniones diversaa species amicitiae distinguantur. Nos autem habemus dupli- 
 cem coi junctionem cum Deo. Una est quantum ad bona natuire, alia quan- 
 tum ad beatitudinem. Secundum primam communicationem ad Dcum, est 
 amicitia naturalis. Secundum vero communicationem secundam est amor 
 Cliaritatis, Ad 1 aid Corinth, xiii. 4.
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 53 
 
 God would have created them in a state of perfect 
 nature. It is a surprise that it was not so. Ou the 
 very threshold of theology we are arrested by this 
 mysterious fact, that rational creatures ctmie 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. It 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, 
 colouring it all down to its lowest definition, and mar- 
 vellously 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. O surely to be a creature is a joyous tiling ; and 
 even our very nothingness is dear to us, as we think of 
 God ; for it seems to be almost a grandeur, instead^f an 
 abasement, to have been thus called out of nothing by 
 such an One as He. 
 
 "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 exis- 
 tence to-day, 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 time 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 to-day, not only with a reason, but with a character 
 of our own, and fulfilling 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 toll us
 
 C± WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 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 addi- 
 tional 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 Ids Creator is pleased to reveal it to him super- 
 naturally. 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. Pie 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 his 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 born was a tremendous act. Yet it wa9 
 not his own. It has entangled him in quantities of dif- 
 ficult 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 misery; though he is free to choose between
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE, 55 
 
 the two. Annihilation he is not free to choose, Reach 
 out into the on-coming eternity as far as the fancy can 
 there still will this man be, simply because he has been 
 already born. The consequences of his birth are not 
 only unspeakable in their magnitude, they are simply 
 eternal. Yet lie was not consulted about his own birth, 
 lie 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 dis- 
 qualifying 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
 
 56 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATUPwE. 
 
 a creature, every moment that his created life is con- 
 tinued to him. This is in fact his true 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 contrary 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 perform on earth. Every- 
 thing to him depends on his 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. It 
 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 throw- 
 ing 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 hit
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATUEE. 57 
 
 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 
 60, 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 volun- 
 tarily 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 crea- 
 ture. 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 cannot 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 pre- 
 sences which are more intimate to him than any presence 
 of external thiug9, nay, in one Presence which is more 
 intimate to him than he is to his 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, 
 net a resting on a clay pillow from the wearyful 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 lilted by the wind, wave ever^and anon into his face,
 
 58 WHAT IT IS TO EE A CREATURE. 
 
 and cling to it like a mask,' and he sees through, or 
 thinks he sees. This is the last tiling we have to note 
 ot this man, as he sits upon the hill-top, in the sunshine, 
 part and parcel of the creatures round about him. lie 
 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 his 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 his. 
 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. 
 
 It is not our present business to explain or comment 
 on all this, we are only concerned to state facts. Thi3 
 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 ques- 
 tion, 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 knowledge 
 about him and understand hirn better. AVe shall 
 know his meaning and his destiny, and can then in- 
 fer from them his condition, his duties, and his respon- 
 sibilities.
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 59 
 
 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 ac- 
 quaintances. The great tilings 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 ani 
 e:\ messes, and strangers intermeddle not with either. 
 His light and his darkness are both his own. 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 notice- 
 able in any other way. Yet the beginning of his his- 
 tory is a long way off. Far in the eternal mind of God, 
 farther than you can look, he is there. He has had 
 his place there from eternity ; and before ever the world 
 was, he lay there with the light of God's goodness 
 around him, and the clearness of God's intentions upon 
 him, and wai 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 s-iy 
 it? He was part of God's glory, of God's bliss, 
 through all the unrevoking ages of a past eternity. 
 The hanging up in heaven of those multitudes of bril- 
 liant worlds, the composition, the adornment, and the 
 equipoise of their ponderous masses, all the marvels of 
 inanimate material creation, all the inexplicable chem- 
 istry which is the world's life, were as nothing com- 
 pared to the intense brooding of heavenly love, the 
 compassionate fulness of divine predestination, over that 
 single soul. Tiiink of that, as he sits among the trees 
 and shrubs, with the insects and the birds about him !
 
 60 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 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. O 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 of the In- 
 carnation of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. 
 He belongs to Jesus and was created for Jesus. He 
 is part of his Saviour'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 predestina- 
 tion flowed out froni, and is inclosed in, the predesti- 
 nation 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 olory of his soul and the possibilities of his human 
 heart entered as items into that huge sum of attractions 
 which drew the Eternal Word to seek His delight* 
 amona 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 com- 
 pletely 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 thu3 
 ardently. You see that He counted that creature's sins
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. Gl 
 
 over loir* and long ago. He saw them, as we blinl 
 men can never see them, singly and separately in all 
 their unutterable horror and surpassing malice. Then 
 lie viewed them as a whole, perhaps thousands in num- 
 ber, and aggravated by almost every variety of circum- 
 stance of which human actions are capable. And never- 
 theless 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 
 6ee what a history his has been, what a stir he has 
 made in the world by having to do with the Incarna- 
 tion, 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 
 eee good points in others, how much harder must it be 
 fur God to see good points in us, and yet how He loves 
 us all 1 
 
 But to return to our man, whoever he may be. Ifc 
 is of course true 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 our- 
 selves. 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 Gcd
 
 02 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 that service and glory and no other. As he did nofc 
 make himself, so neither can he give himself his own 
 vocation. He does not know what special function it 
 has fallen to him to perform in the immense scheme 
 and gigantic world of his Creator; but it is not the less 
 true that he has such a special function. Life as ifc 
 unfolds will bring it to him. Years will lay his duly 
 and his destiny at his door in parts successively. Per- 
 haps on this side of the grave he may never see his 
 work as an intelligible whole. Ifc may be part of his 
 work to be tried by this very obscurity. But with what 
 a dignity ifc invests the man, to know of him that, as 
 God chose his particular soul at the moment of its crea- 
 tion 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 ifc 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 infi- 
 nitely blessed, God is, is nofc this special destiny of each 
 man a touching mystery? How close ifc 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, ifc 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 afc any 
 moment as easily as when it pleased God in fact to call ifc. 
 But it pleased God to call ifc when He did, because that 
 time, and no other time, suited the special end for whicli 
 that man was to live. He was born, just when he was,
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. G3 
 
 for the sake of that particular purpose. He would have 
 been too 60on, had he been born earlier; too late, if he 
 had not been born as early. And in like manner will 
 he die. An hour, a place, a manner of death are all 
 fixed for Mm ; yet so as not in the least to interfere 
 with 1 1I3 freedom. Everything is arranged 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 manner, and the pain of his death 
 will in ordinary cases be better for that man than any 
 other time, place, manner, or pain would be. The most 
 cruel-seeming 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 splendour 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 in- 
 heritance 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 lore which it seems as if the 
 simple cheer of the sunshino were drawing out ot his
 
 64 WHAT IT IS TO £E A CREATURE. 
 
 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 his inheritance. 
 His eternity is dependent on his 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 pros- 
 perity, or the laws, or the police of his country. His 
 light is probably too dim to be visible even to his neigh« 
 bourhood. 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 irom 
 the hour when it pleased God to create his particular 
 soul. And how many things there are in it to wonder 
 at ! How great is the dignity, how incalculable the 
 destinies of man ! All these things belong to him, not 
 certainly in right of his being a creature, but at least 
 because he is a creature. Creation explains all other 
 mysteries, 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 com- 
 pany. 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 ; 
 tout the first is the greater wonder. Redemption does 
 not follow from creation as a matter of- course : but
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. C5 
 
 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 lie 
 holds His creature in His hand for ever! How all 
 things, dark as well as bright, are simply purposes of 
 unutterable goodness and compassion 1 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 ! 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 com- 
 plete dependence upon Him, to lean our whole weight 
 upon Ilim, not only for the delight of feeling that He is 
 so strong, but also that we are so weak, and therefore so 
 need Ilim always and everywhere ! What liberty is 
 like the sense of being encompassed with nis sove- 
 reignty ! 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 Ids real life ; but we have gob 
 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 
 ve must crave the reader's indulgence for it. 
 
 The first feature to be noticed in the condition of this 
 
 5 t
 
 CS WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 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 
 cannot lift great weights of it, nor dig deep into it 
 Even with the help of the most ingenious machinery 
 and the united labour 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 ruining 
 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 oi 
 man has inhabited the world, it is surprising how little 
 controul 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 extremely limited, and is liable to the 
 most humiliating errors and the most unexpected mis- 
 takes. 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 com- 
 binations 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 cir- 
 cumscribed 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 otir man if we look at him 
 in his solitary dignity as lord of the creation. Bufc 
 even this is too favourable a representation oil him.
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. C7 
 
 His solitary dignity is a mere imagination, Oa 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 an 1 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 chemistry 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 
 multitu le 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 his grave, which fed kirn in 
 Lis life, now feeds on him in turn. 
 
 In like manner 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
 
 6& VTIIAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 irresistible, that they could sweep every living thing 
 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 annoy- 
 ance yearly threaten to thrust us ofT 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 gentlo 
 and philanthropic nature of that monster thai 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 infinitesi- 
 mally 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 
 discoloured 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
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 69 
 
 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-coloured 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 crea- 
 tures. All the adaptations, of which different sciences 
 speak, turn out upon examination to be so many depen. 
 dencies of man on things which are beneath him. la 
 material respects man is often inferior to his inferiors. 
 But there is one feature in his lependency, which dees 
 not concern his fellow-creatures, and on which 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 labour and his labour's 
 reward God has to intervene. When he lays his plans, 
 he docs nothing more than prepare favourable circuni-
 
 70 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATINE. 
 
 stances for the end which he desires. In war, in 
 
 government, in education, in commerce, when he has 
 
 done all, he lias insured 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 controul. 
 
 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 
 
 cannot 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 common-place. Everybody knows 
 it, has always known it, and never doubted it. True: 
 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 abject- 
 ness 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?
 
 TTfTAT IT IS TO BE A OBEATUBE; 71 
 
 What we are always to feel, and never to forgot, is that 
 we are finite, dependent, imperfect, that it is our nature 
 to look up to some one higher, to lean on some one 
 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 firei 
 Dignity we have, and super-abundantly, and we ought 
 never to forget it. But then we must remember also 
 that the creature man has no dignity except in the 
 love of Him who made him. 
 
 But our real history adds a great deal to our condi- 
 tion, 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 every 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 
 within 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 accom- 
 panied with peculiarly disabling circumstances of guilt. 
 Then the unwearied compassion of the Creator has 
 come forth with another sacrament to repair this per- 
 sonal wilful 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
 
 72 WHAT TT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 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 his condition 
 as a creature. A man born under civil disabilities has 
 no guilt in the eye of his country's laws, yet he does 
 not take rank with a true citizen. A pardoned crimi- 
 nal to his last day will not cast the inferiority which 
 he has brought upon himself. No pardon, no honours, 
 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 every 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 demeanour ; 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 Jo.wera us.
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 73 
 
 The abundance and frequency of mercy humbles us, 
 The goodness of God gives a new life to the sense of our 
 own misery and hatefulness. It quickens our know- 
 ledge of our own inferiority into a positive feeling of 
 self-contempt. It is true that the first fall, and ous 
 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 develop- 
 ments 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 know- 
 ledge 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 hum- 
 bled peace of the forgiven sinner. 
 
 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 hi*
 
 
 74 WHAT IT IS TO EE A CREATURE. 
 
 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 irreligion 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 three 
 fold consciousness that he is a creature, he cannot con- 
 ceive of himself without it, nor what he would l>e 
 like if he was without it, and therefore those who are 
 without it are beyond his 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 " crea- 
 ture?' is his name, his history, and his condition, he 
 must obviously have the conduct and the virtues befit- 
 ting 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
 
 TVI1AT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 75 
 
 filiines by night and the sun by day, as birds have wings 
 and trees have leaves, so must man, as a creature, con- 
 duct himself as such, and do those virtuous actions, 
 which are chit fly virtues because they are becoming to 
 him and adapted to his condition. The demeanour, the 
 behaviour, the excellences of a creature must bear upon 
 them the stamp of his created nature and condition. 
 This is too obvious to need enforcing ; obvious when 
 stated, vet most strangely forgotten by most men during 
 the greater part of their lives. 
 
 Our second conclusion about this man is that, what- 
 ever may be Ids attainments or Ids 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 everything from God. He be- 
 longs to Ilim. He is surrounded by Him. His fate 
 ia 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 misery. His own 
 beinor implies God's being ; and he exists, not for him- 
 self, 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 lie 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 depths 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
 
 76 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 one half so curious, one half so attractive, one half so 
 exciting, as the adorable self-subsisting Essence of the 
 Most High God ? O 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 13 
 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 sub- 
 ject of the man's intellectual occupations, God must be 
 equally the object of his 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 neigh- 
 bours 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 the loving observance 
 of his Creator's law. We do not see what being a crea- 
 iture means, if it does not mean this; though we know 
 [that there are creatures who have irrevocably deter- 
 mined 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 ?
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 77 
 
 These three conclusions are inevitable results of that 
 man's being a creature. If lie 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 worm- 
 wood ? What right has he to be lighting the fires of 
 hell in his own heart at the beams of that grand loving 
 6un ? 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 fervours 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 accomplish- 
 ment, of the creature. 
 
 If we take all the peculiarities of the creature and 
 throw them into one, if we sum them all up and ex- 
 press them in the ordinary language of Christian doc- 
 trine, 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 his own 
 position as a creature whenever he swerves from this 
 his sole true end. Every one 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 his whole life, to revolu- 
 tionize his entire conduct. When he sees his aim dis- 
 tinctly before him, he uses his sagacity in planning to 
 attain it, Lis courage in removing the obstacles which 
 intervene, and his prudence in the selection of the 
 means by which he is eventually to succeed. Moro or 
 less consistently, and more <or less incessantly, the man's
 
 73 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 
 
 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 bis 
 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. It seeks a centre, it travels to an end, irresis- 
 tibly, impetuously. This is its law of life. Hence it is 
 that the end gives the colour to the creature's life, de- 
 scribes it, defines it, animates it, rules it. This is true 
 of pleasure, of knowledge, of wealth, of power, of popu- 
 larity, when they are sought as ends. They lay pas- 
 sionate 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 more 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 remember, 
 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 in- 
 stead of an end, a purveyor instead of a judge, if they 
 make any use of Ilim 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 disciples did not under- 
 stand. How few can turn round upon themselves at 
 any given moment of life, when they do nob happen 
 to be engaged in spiritual exercises, and can say, " God 
 is my end ! At this moment when I unexpectedly look
 
 
 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 79 
 
 in upon myself, while I was acting almost unconsciously, 
 I finil that I was doing, what a creature shoull always 
 be doing, — seeking Go. I. 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 lie is called, and a clock to go 
 when it is wound up, and in like manner God, when lie 
 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 any- 
 thing which is not common-place 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 blip into the saint. The natural temper and 
 disposition proper to us because of our created origin 
 seems to put on the hue and likeness of supernatural 
 grace and contemplation, and the common-place insen- 
 sibly to glide into the heroic. There must be some mis- 
 take. Where is it? Our conscience tells us that wo 
 have been honourably 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 conclu- 
 sion without a premiss 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 noi think we have told
 
 
 60 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE, 
 
 ■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 every one is obliged 
 to be what is technically called a saint, or what theology 
 stjles perfect, simply because he is a creature? We 
 cannot say Yes, and yet we hardly dare say No. What 
 if it be true that perfection is only the result of corres- 
 ponding 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 
 referecce to perfection, nay without reference to redemp- 
 tion, creation, of and by itself, does bind the creature to 
 serve the Creator out of love ; and we confess that this 
 conclusion is as pregnant of consequences as it is inevita- 
 ble in its truth. 
 
 In the last chapter we said that a heathen, who with- 
 out 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 catho- 
 lic 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 ia
 
 WHAT IT IS TO C3 A 0BBA.TUBB, SI 
 
 based upon a man's behaving himself becomingly as a 
 creature. It is the humility and modesty tliat coma 
 cut of that thought which give to his actions all their 
 gracefulness and beauty, and commute them into worship 
 end 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 mys- 
 m discover the axioms out of which they draw un- 
 erringly that vast series of amazing truths which theo- 
 logy 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, 
 TVe shall see that what lay at the root of them was a 
 forge tmlness that they were creatures, or a perverse 
 determination to be something more. Whether the 
 augels 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 exultation of Ci-.rist's human 
 nature above their o.vn, in both cases they forgot them- 
 selves as creatures, and demanded what it was not be- 
 coming in a creature to demand. You shall be as gods, 
 was the very motive which the tempter urged in order 
 to push man to his 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, 
 « t
 
 82 WHAT IT IS TO EE A CREATURE. 
 
 it was not merely that the angels and man refused to 
 obey their Creator ; they wanted themselvcR 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 I we may go still higher. "We say of our 
 Blessed Lord that He is our example as well as our 
 mediator. Yet lie was God as well as rmm. 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 Incarna- 
 tion was that the Creator Himself might show the crea- 
 ture how he should behave as a creature. What interest 
 does not this throw upon the minutest incidents and 
 most rapid graphic allusions of the Fuur Gospels J The 
 mysteries of Jesus are man's studies of t' e beauty of 
 holiness* His soul drinks beauty out of them, and so 
 is imperceptibly transformed 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 work 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 s; ecial stress is 
 laid upon those things which are eminently characte- 
 ristic of a created nature as create 1. S eaking of His 
 intercession the apostle says that* 1 in the da j s of His flesh 
 He was heard because He feared," and again no speaks 
 of the crucifixion in the same way, " He v>as obedient 
 unto death, even the death of the Cr^ss." It is as if
 
 "WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 83 
 
 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 
 cognizible thing, that it gives birth to a whole set ol 
 duties, obligations, responsibilities, virtues, and proprie- 
 ties, 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 obliga- 
 tion 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 
 mystery of creation, so we may say to the catholic that 
 be would be more like a saint, if he only understood 
 with his mind and felt in his heart, what it was to be a 
 creature.
 
 81 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 "WHAT IT IS TO HA.VE A CREATOR. 
 
 Bebenms intelligere ut amemus, non vero amare ut inteiligamug. 
 
 S. 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, 
 end the vast sidereal spaces above us, are all teeming 
 with created things. 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 rela- 
 tions 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
 
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CBEATOB. 85 
 
 our hearts and know us thoroughly, so that he may 
 guide us better with his affectionate and surpassing 
 fckill ? 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 bcj T ond 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 satu- 
 rated with creatures, that we think even of our Creator 
 under created symbols ; and God's merciful condescen- 
 sions 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 form 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 gar- 
 ment of marvellous 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 
 c:nnot for one moment be disentangled from them, ex- 
 cept 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
 
 86 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 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 colourless 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, self-sufficing, its own glory, 
 its own knowledge, its own magnificence, its own in- 
 tense blessedness, its own silent, vast, unthrilling love. 
 Surely to think of such a Life is to worship it. But It 
 — it is not It — there were no things then — it is He, our 
 God and our Creator 1 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 
 cot in us the objects of omniscience. But the Life 
 loved us, and therefore out of the Life we came, and 
 from its glorious sun-bright fountains have we filled the 
 tiny vases of our created lives. O how the sublimity of 
 this faith at once nourishes our souls like food and re- 
 creates 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 colour, 
 impart a meaning, and impress a character upon our own 
 lives, which 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 des- 
 pise, and how and what to love and esteem. To put the 
 thought into easier words, we cannot fully know whatiu 
 is to be a creature, until we know as fully as we can 
 what it is to have a Creator. 
 It is the peculiar, beauty of the Old Testament that
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CBEATOR. 87 
 
 it brings out this truth to U9 in the most forcible ami 
 attractive manner. This is probably the^secret of tho 
 hold which it Lays of the minds of those who 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, every 
 oue feels that it has, almost as completely as the New 
 Testament, one spirit, one tone, one colour, one scope. 
 Whether it 13 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 skits of Mesopotamia, or amid the brick fields 
 of the Nile, or the silent glens of stern 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 beneatli 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 mani- 
 fold devices of mercy, what He meant human life to be, 
 and how men were to use both each other and the 
 earth which 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
 
 
 88 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 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 true humble pathetic genius of a creature come3 
 into our souls, and masters them. The knowledge of 
 God becomes almost a personal familiarity with Him, 
 and the thought of Him grows 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 sanctification 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 words the exact 
 result of the knowledge of God which the Bible infuses 
 into us. It is hard to fasten and confine in terms the 
 idea of a Creator. When we try to do so, something 
 seems to escape, to evaporate, to refuse to go into 
 words; and it is just that something, as we are con- 
 scious, 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 any one 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 knit-
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 89 
 
 ted; thrilling endearments have heen exchanged; there 
 are memories of forgivenesses full of tenderness, and 
 memories of punishments even yet more full of sweet- 
 ness and of love; there have been words said, which 
 could never mean to others what 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 count- 
 less 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 neighbours, 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 
 va<nie 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 our- 
 selves and other creatures. It is not a question of 
 iee; it is one of kind also. It stands by itself, and 
 ve can compare it with nothing else. We cannot even 
 understand it in its fulness. Do we know what the act 
 of creating a soul out of nothing implies? Do we com- 
 prehend the difference between being nothing and pos- 
 sessing 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 em- 
 ployed about u.s? 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
 
 SO WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 unlike anything else, without parallel and beyond com- 
 parison, 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 IIi3 right hand. Tho act of our 
 creation is not done once for all, and then ceases. Pre- 
 servation is but the continuance of creation, the non- 
 interruption 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 Him- 
 self otherwise than infinitely desirable to His creature. 
 He is in Himself so surpassingly beautiful, so attrac- 
 tively good, so unspeakably compassionate, that He 
 must of necessity draw us towards Him. Even those, 
 who of their own will are lost, struggle towards Ilim, 
 in spite of their reluctant aversion, with all the might 
 uf their nature and with the burning thirst of an inces- 
 ant desire. Whatever then is sweet, whatever is de- 
 lightful, whatever is satisfying, inhuman 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.
 
 WHIT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOH. 91 
 
 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 depen- 
 dence upon his Maker, and drawing him into still closer 
 union with Him, we may even say that the tie is con 
 tinually 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 always a 
 fresh surprise and a fresh delight. It 13 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 trust 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 
 us the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are 
 One. 
 
 If we endeavour to take to pieces the idea of a Crea- 
 tor, it may seem as if we were raising idle questions. 
 and satisfying a barren curiosity rather than minister- 
 ing 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
 
 92 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 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 implicit- 
 ly 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 pecu- 
 liar 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 further. For the difference 
 between 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 dif- 
 terence. And thus when we call Him Father or King,
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 93 
 
 Shepherd or Friend, our language implies only a privi- 
 lege which He allows to us, not any duties to which 
 He is bound or rights to which we are entitled. We 
 have no compact with God, except the unmerited enjoy- 
 ment of His merciful indulgence. As our Creator Hia 
 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 liberali- 
 ties of His unshackled love. Yet God is neither a 
 slavemaster nor a despot, not only because of His infi- 
 nite goodness and unutterable sweetness, but because 
 His rights are not limited like theirs. No creature cau 
 feel towards his fellow-creature as we feel towards Him, 
 in the grasp of whose 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 our- 
 selves in his hands as we are in the hands of God. 
 Though we are unable to imagine the risk we would 
 not trust to Mary, our most dear and heavenly Mother, 
 or to conceive anything which should weaken our con- 
 fidence 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 wis- 
 dom of God, or His power, or ills love. Our confi- 
 dence in the worth of men is in a great measure pro- 
 portioned to the degree in which wo consider them
 
 94 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CUEATOR. 
 
 pledged to us, whether by duty, by gratitude, by rela- 
 tionship, by honour, 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 iff 
 boundless also. We have our doubts about holy per- 
 sons: we criticize the saints: we take views about the 
 angels. There is nothing in creation which 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 where lie 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 Ho 
 gave them, and that no reasons could enhance our cer- 
 tainty that His orders are the perfection of what is just 
 and holy, compassionate and good. Our fellow-men 
 must bo reasonable, if they w ■mil govern us and use us 
 for their purposes. But Go i's will is to us above all 
 reason, more convincing than all argument, more per- 
 suasive; than any reward, because of the very infmite- 
 ness of His superiority over us. We take Go 1 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 like- 
 ness in goodness, injustice, in fidelity, or in love. 
 
 Thus looking at our Creator as it were outside of 
 ourselves, we form an idea of Him, and of our relations 
 to Him, which can be accounted for only by His un- 
 speakable eminence in power, in wisdom, and in good-
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 95 
 
 nesg. The nothingness to which He lias given life, and 
 being, and His own image, has a secret bond to Ilim, 
 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 vet more singular, more 
 isolated, more special, and more intimate. For we are 
 never really outside of God nor He outside of us.* 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 Ilim 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 theolo- 
 gians 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. It is hard to see 
 how levity even is not sacrilege. Everything is pene- 
 trated with God, while His inexpressible purity is all 
 untainted, and His adorable simplicity unmingled with 
 that which He so intimately pervades, enlightens, ani- 
 mates, and sustains. Our commonest actions, out 
 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 ail*, as in the bosom 
 of the omnipresent God. 
 
 • Some writers, In avoiding pantheism, seem to deny one-while oinnl- 
 preseuce. and anuthcr-wliile providence.
 
 96 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 Thus when we use the words " dependence," M sub- 
 mission,'* "helplessness,'' "confidence," about our rela- 
 tion 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 inade- 
 quate to express our position towards our Creator. 
 We have no one word which can fully convey to the 
 mind the utterness of that honourable 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 marvellous 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 sen- 
 sibly detect the manner of its intimate existence within 
 us, or the delicacy of its manifold and incessant opera- 
 tions when stirred by the impulses of actual grace 
 within our souls. " God,'' says Thauler,* " has created 
 us for so high a degree of honour, 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." 
 The fact that God created angels and men at first in a 
 State of grace and not merely in a state of nature, and 
 
 • Iustitut. cap. viii.
 
 WHAT IT IS TO IIAYE A CREATOR. 97 
 
 then further that lie heaps upon us now such an abun- 
 dance 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 
 6hare His blessedness, nay, and His nature too. More- 
 over 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 acknow- 
 ledge 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 i3 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 which 
 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 Hia 
 embrace. This is something which no creature, nor all 
 creation together, can share. It is the sole prerogative. 
 of God, and one which gives out a whole class of affec- 
 tions proper to itself. Nothing in life has any meaning, 
 except as it draw.s 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 store* 
 7 i
 
 98 WHAT IT IS TO EAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 house 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 home- 
 ward, 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 
 Beason of cruel misunderstandings, as if reason were 
 wantoning in its maturity, and by suspicions and cir- 
 cumventions 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 confi- 
 dence of our fellow-labourers ; there is a point beyond 
 which we must not trespass on the forbearance of our 
 neighbours. 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-labourer w'io did our work 
 for us as well as His own, and the Neighbour who 
 thought He bad never done enough for us, the sole
 
 TYIUT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. S9 
 
 Superior who was neither rude nor inconsiderate, tha 
 one Love, that unlike all created loves, was never cruel, 
 exacting, precipitate, or overbearing. He lias had 
 ience 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 true. On this account alono 
 He is to us what neither kinsman, friend, or fellow- 
 labourer can be. 
 
 The more deeply we enter into these plain truths 
 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 tho 
 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 
 which follows after sin, and is a part of Christian re- 
 pentance. It is not like that fresh burst of love to God, 
 which follows when He has inflicted some just punish- 
 ment 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 for- 
 getting of ourselves because of the keenness of our re- 
 membrance 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 un worthiness, like 
 the pleasure of a contrite confession, a grateful wonder 
 that God should treat us so differently from what we 
 deserve, 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*
 
 100 "WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CKEATOR. 
 
 In a word, self-abasement 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 mis- 
 understands 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 knowledgo 
 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 eternally to love.* There 
 is no need of concealment with Him, who sees through 
 us, who regards the acknowledgment of our manifold 
 
 * It has always seemed to me as if a whole revelation of God were in those 
 words of the Book of Wisdom (xii. 18.) Cum magna reverentia disponis nos. 
 Most of the modern Douays render it, With great favour Thou disposesc 
 of us, thereby missing both the beauty and the meaning. The old Douay, 
 •which has seldom been altered for the better by modern hands, translates the 
 verse, But Thou, Dominatour of power, judgest with tranquilitie, and with 
 great reverence disposest of us; for it is in Thy power, when Thou wilt, 
 to be able. The Greek of the Septuagint is /jlito. jrsMitf qulous huxiis \u.dc. 
 JThe passago is a perfect fountain of meditation.
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 101 
 
 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. 
 
 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 Ha 
 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 faith- 
 fulness is as much a joy as it is a necessity, to love 
 wliom is to despise ourselves, and yet with whom we 
 are on terms of mysterious intimacy far transcending 
 the closest equalities and most unreproved freedoms ct 
 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.* 
 
 • Thus the delighted admission of the very absoluteness of God's sover- 
 eignty over us seems to bring us to a more manifest equality, a more privi- 
 leged intimacy with Him, than that view of God which represents the rela- 
 Of Creator and creature as a beautifully just discharge of mutual 
 oMifrations, wherein He respects the charter He has Riven us. and we obey 
 His laws as well as His knowledge of our weakness gives Ilim a right to 
 expect. I have not a word to itj of condemnation of that system of theology 
 l b endeavours to cie.tr the relationship of Creator and creature of all 
 uitfkulty, and justifies God to man by representing Uim as exercising over a*
 
 102 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 To analyze our idea of a Creator is the first step 
 towards answering the question we proposed to our- 
 selves, 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 Ilia 
 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 
 
 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 
 lam quite unable to receive such a system of belief into myself. A contro- 
 versialist 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 be 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 
 tiJoak of overbearing power, and an exhibition of justice unlike the fairness of 
 hitman 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 neighbour, 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 under-estimates their 
 force; and as the facts on man's side are too obvious to be glossed over, the 
 temptation is almost irresistitde 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 cha- 
 racter of being divine, by making such a claim. Religion, as such, cannot 
 be attractive, unless it is also true; and when we are sure of the truth, we 
 must not mind its looking unattractive, but trust it, as from God, and there- 
 fore, as His, possessed of a secret of success which will carry it securely to 
 iu cud.
 
 WHAT IT 18 TO IIAYE A CREATOR. 103 
 
 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 true dignity. The rank and pageantry ot 
 the world cannot clothe us with real dignity. To serve 
 God is the only honour, which it is worth our while to 
 6trive 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 
 Ids greatest happiness. We do not value as wo 
 ought our inestimable privilege of being allowed to 
 worship God. We do not prize our heavenly pre- 
 rogative of being permitted to keep His command- 
 ments. 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 lighthearted 
 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 service 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 tho 
 6toutest mind, and to beat down the most romantic 
 affections. All things give way to interest. The 
 days of chivalry are past ; and perhaps when they 
 were present, interest was as much the crowned king
 
 104 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 of society as it is now. Yet if the best interest 
 is that which is first of all most secure, and thea 
 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 favour and fidelity ? We talk 
 of wisdom also. These are days of wisdom. Know- 
 ledge 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 furthest 
 and clearest, which embraces the greatest number of 
 truths, and the highest kind of truths, which contem- 
 plates them .with the most complete and accurate 
 certainty, and which is of practical use to all eternity, 
 then what earthly wisdom will compare with the wisdom 
 of servin» God ? How is it that we are so fascinated 
 
 o 
 
 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 with weariness from the old-fashioned 
 traditions of the Christian Church ? Surely it is be- 
 cause we have no love of God, because we do not keep 
 up our relations with Him as our Creator. Were it 
 not so, we should find our modern sciences uninteresting 
 in their details and sterile in results, unless we our- 
 selves 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
 
 WHAT IT IS TO IUVE A CREATOR. 105 
 
 mighty missionaries of the Gospel too. Yet is r\ 
 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 his own criminal pursuits, or 
 the victim of his own self-love, with what kind of liberty 
 is lie free? If he is chained down to earth, then lie 
 is disabled for the liberty of heaven. If he has prac- 
 tically sold himself to the evil angels, who 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 truest and 
 the sweetest, but the widest also. for the uncon- 
 strained spirit of the saints, who 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 
 Saviour 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. Eiches, says the Holy Ghost, make 
 to themselves Avings 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 vigour seems to go when we need ifc 
 most. There is a noiseless unrivetincr of our strength 
 by the lapse of years, which comes before old age, and 
 is more prostrating than any sickness. But the service 
 of God improves upon acquaintance, gives more than it
 
 106 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 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 tilings 
 the truest, greatest, highest, wisest, best, widest, and 
 most enduring dignity, happiness, interest, wisdom., 
 liberty, and reality ; but the service 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 pre- 
 tenders ; and he who seeks any other will 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 
 works for Hereafter, he will gain Here as well. More- 
 over the service 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 
 will flow from its neglect. In a word, unless we serve 
 God, the world is a dismal, unmeaning heart-breaking 
 wilderness, and life no more than an insoluble and un- 
 profitable 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, 
 running a race after impossible ends, impoverishing 
 heart and mind with 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, who would live a life of which those 
 are the incessant alternations? The wilful sinner is but 
 a man who, in order to get rid of God, explores, to his 
 own cost, every species of disappointment, and nowhere 
 finds contentment or repose.
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 107 
 
 What is it that we have said ? The service of the 
 Creator is the creature's last end, his true dignity, his 
 greatest happiness, his best interest, his highest wisdom, 
 his widest liberty, and his most enduring reality: the 
 service 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 oppositcs of dig- 
 nity, 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 
 eimple things, and to take up your time with reading a 
 string of propositions which no one in his senses would 
 dream of controverting, It is like printing the merest 
 rudiments of Christian doctrine under a more preten- 
 tious 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 Hi3 
 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 completest 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 unhappi* 
 ness, because as they advance in holiness and know Him 
 better, it seems to them less and less possible not to
 
 103 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 love Him with the most ardent, enthusiastic, and exclu- 
 sive 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 acknow- 
 ledge the sovereignty of God. The world has many 
 trades and many tasks for its many sons; but there is 
 one daily labour which it seems to add to all of them, 
 the effort to put away from its children the remem- 
 brance 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 thing 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 wo 
 should serve our Creator ; for any service short of this, 
 or short of a real effort to make it this, would be dis- 
 loyalty 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 wor- 
 ship which we pay to Him must be 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 dishonour
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 109 
 
 to Ilis goodness to suppose He has made the way to 
 His favour difficult, or that lie docs not efficaciously 
 desire to save countless, countless multitudes of His 
 fallen creatures. It would be an un filial irreverence to 
 our most dear and loving Creator to imagine that His 
 service would not be easy and delightful. 
 
 But it must not only he 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 ser- 
 vices. 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 blithe- 
 ness and in promptitude and in beautiful decorum ; and 
 it must also be such a worship, as while it gladdens tho 
 tenderness of God and glorifies His paternal fondness, 
 shall also fill cur 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 service also which calls out and occu- 
 pies 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 service 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 very distractions must be worslup,
 
 110 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 and we must have some land of worship which wi'ii 
 enable them so to be. Thus it must be an obvious 
 service, one which at the very first sight shall strike a 
 creature as reasonable and fitting; and in order to bo 
 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 service 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 services, 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 com- 
 prehend God, and embrace the Incomprehensible. It 
 must honour all His perfections, and all of them at 
 once, even while it sees God, rather as Himself univer- 
 sal 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 panioning. And it must settle all these difficulties 
 in a practical way, the wisdom of which will be acknow- 
 ledged as soon as it is stated, and which will not per- 
 plex 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
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. Ill 
 
 service or worship, as it is union, must last, and out- 
 live, and take up into itself, and develop, and magnify, 
 all other graces. Moreover it must be something mora 
 than they are, something 1 ides, 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. 
 *\Ve 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 foun- 
 dation 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 
 mercenary, 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 ia God. Fear, when exclu-
 
 312 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 sive, 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 
 a ttributes 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, out- 
 living, taking up into itself, developing, and magnifying 
 all other graces, consummating at least 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 humilia- 
 tions, nor of 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 judg- 
 ment, nor of holy virginity, nor of evangelical poverty, 
 nor of the supernatural mysteries of the interior life, 
 of the arduous and perilous paths of mystical contem- 
 plation. 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, happi- 
 ness, 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
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 113 
 
 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 neg- 
 lected 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 im- 
 pulses, 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 crea- 
 tures, and that we have a Creator ? 
 
 In concluding this chapter, even at the peril of re- 
 peating, 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 prac- 
 tical 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 adorn- 
 ing 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 Ho had conquered us rather 
 than created us. Hence our submission is the submis- 
 sion of the conquered. We do not dispute His right cf 
 8 t
 
 114 WHAT IT'IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 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 in- 
 terest 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 per- 
 son loses his taste for worldly amusements and blame- 
 less 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
 
 WHAT IT IS TO IIAVE A CREATOR. 115 
 
 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 H 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 
 raiher 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 
 tot 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 pro- 
 fession ? 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 I These are Dr. Johnson's three defini- 
 tions. They will not suit you. Do you mean then by 
 enthusiasm, doiDg 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, i$ almsgiving 
 wrong, are spiritual books wrong, i3 visiting the poor 
 wrong, is prayer wrong ? Or will you say it is doing 
 them instead of other thiDgs, which are not sinful?
 
 116 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 Weill but is not this tyranny? A man might answer, 
 If an opera would be to me the most tiresome of pen- 
 ances, 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 
 I to 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 stand- 
 ards of what is moderate, sober, rational, and reflective. 
 Enthusiasm, in common parlance, has no other meaning. 
 Whoever uses the word is simply making public confes- 
 sion of his own tepidity. Thus the whole popular 
 standard of practical religion is wrong and unfair, be- 
 cause 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 pro- 
 portion 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 dulness of our 
 spiritual sense, until it is quickened and sharpened with 
 heavenly light. And thus, when we are low in grace, 
 and unpractised in devotion, the simple truth that God
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 117 
 
 is our Creator, and that a Creator necessarily implies 
 what nyc 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 neighbour of enthusiasm, which is a prac- 
 tical endeavour to lower the standard of his religious prac- 
 tice, if he saw that his practice already fell short of what 
 phin 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 ex- 
 tremes 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 circum- 
 
 ' DO 
 
 stances, 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 contem- 
 plation. 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 
 common-place truth, which would seem tame and trivia] 
 in our meditations, is enough to a saint for long hours 
 of extatic 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
 
 118 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 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 con- 
 sidering 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 elemen- 
 tary truths of Christian doctrine that the highest con- 
 templatives 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. It seems a less wonderful thing 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 abjss of nothingness, vanity and miseries !" 
 Father Le Blanc tells us that chosen souls make much 
 of this truth, and lay great stress on the meditation of 
 it. The B. 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 nothing- 
 ness." Our Lord has Himself revealed His compla- 
 cency in this practice of the saints. He said to St. 
 Catherine of Siena, '.' Knowest thou, My daughter, who 
 J am and who thou art? Thou wilt attain blessed-
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 119 
 
 Bess 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 a3 
 
 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 salva- 
 tion 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 w r here 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 rela- 
 tives 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 con- 
 vents 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
 
 120 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 decision in the way the church indicates. If He has, 
 then there is no more to be said. In either case, all 
 those views ah out 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 
 ilefinite 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 abso- 
 lute right to His creature, and from not clearly perceiv- 
 ing that His will is the one only thing to be considered. 
 The same may be observed of the popular notions of 
 priestcraft. 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 interruption in the 
 relations between the Creator and the creature. Every
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOE. 121 
 
 fraction of divine truth is worth more than all the world 
 besides, and every rightful exercise of spiritual juris- 
 diction 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 modern times has 
 stolen more converts from the church than any other 
 cause. While it has deadened the zeal of the mis- 
 sionary, it has fortified the misbeliever in his darkness 
 and untruth, 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 contem- 
 plated them as their own future conquest, the raw 
 material out of wLich 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 mon- 
 sters 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 truth, 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
 
 122 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 patience and sweetness, the elder Christians looted on 
 hereby 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 
 worshipped Diana of the Ephesians. We have no diffi- 
 culty in recognizing the difference between the two 
 cases, and in understanding the grave charity of the 
 apostle of love. The whole truth, even when preached 
 ungently and with frowardness, is a more converting 
 thing than half the truth preached winningly, or an 
 error condescended to out of the anxiety of mistaken 
 love. 
 
 We trust 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 truth, no 
 self-will, no obstinate, perverse adherence to the prin- 
 ciples 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 
 euch a state of things exists on the surface of the earth
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 123 
 
 agwe 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 up, 
 as an old heathen did, who believed that Christians mot 
 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 has 
 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 wa3 
 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 ahove all things desire to have their sins for- 
 given, 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 cor- 
 ruption 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 
 6ad must be the desolation, how wide the ruin, how 
 incurable the wound, of spurious charity, which satisfies
 
 121 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 its own worthless good-nature at the expense of God's 
 truth and its neighbour's soul ? 
 
 By far the greater number of objections which are 
 urged against the catholic doctrines have their root in 
 this oblivion of the respective positions of creature and 
 Creator. And this is equally true 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 misconceptions 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 his? And as to sin, it must of neces- 
 sity be either a forgetfulness of what it is to have a 
 Creator or a revolt against Him. 
 
 But — w r e 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 £,ood and thoughtful men, and the speculations of 
 modern philosophy have perhaps now increased the 
 nun.ber, to take inadequate views of God's love. 
 Nothing is more fatal to the soul, nor more dis- 
 honourable to God. The world, with the sun extin- 
 guished, 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
 
 WHAT IT IS TO HATE A CREATOR. 125 
 
 G oil's love of man too low. Take what views wo 
 will of grace, it must come to this, that the immen- 
 sity of God's love is cur only security.* Because 
 He is our Creator, He must love us; His love must 
 be immense; He must compassionately desire the sal- 
 vation 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.f Nay, 
 tm 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 
 6in that second love came out of the first love where- 
 with He created us out of nothing. True 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 
 
 • Dieu aime autant chaque hornme que tout le genre humain. Le poids et 
 le nombre ne rent rien & ses yeux. Eterne), infinl, il n'a que des amoura 
 kn menses.— Joubert, i. 103. 
 
 t Sicut enim gloria prlncipis saecularis fiicitur consistere potisMmum in 
 gplendore et multitudine aulicorurn, ita externa gloria Dei objectiva a couslstil 
 foliuimum in spiendore et multituiine aulicorurn ceelestium — Lwsius.
 
 126 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 
 
 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 daylight 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 IL 
 THE DIFFICULTIES OF CREATIVE LOVE.
 
 THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 THE DIFFICULTIES OF CREATIVE LOVE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM, . 
 
 Quid ergo tibi accessit ad bonum quod tu tibi es, etiamsi ista, vel om» 
 Dino nulla essent, vel informia remanerent, quae non. ex indigentia feci&tl, 
 sed plenitudine bouitatis tua ?— St. Auguttin, 
 
 A child's first sight of the ocean is an era in his 
 life. It 19 a new world without him, and it awakens a 
 new world within him. There is no other novelty to bo 
 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
 
 13Q WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 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 thing 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 trust 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 
 tranquillizing 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 diffi- 
 culties. How the broad waters flow and shine, and 
 now the many-headed waves leap up to the sun and 
 sparkle, and then sink down into the depths again, ycfc 
 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 better 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 conies 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
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HI!!. 131 
 
 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 Bee down into the crystal depths of this creative 
 love and its wide waters will be the breadtli and 
 measure of our joy, and its glancing splendour will be 
 the light of our eternal life, and its soft thunder will be 
 the endless, solemn, thrilling music of our beatitude, O 
 
 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 muse 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 compre- 
 hend its Giver and its Author. 
 
 We have endeavoured 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 tilings. 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 the relation between the Creator and 
 the creature, and which will occupy this and the next;
 
 4 
 
 132 WH7 GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 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 chap- 
 ters. After which nothing will be left but to close the 
 work and leave it to the blessing of God and St. Mat- 
 thew, 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 refuse to give up the 
 secrets which they contain. 
 
 We have therefore now to enquire 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 common-place 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 
 the 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 imperfec- 
 tion; 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
 
 WnY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 133 
 
 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, 
 Bimply 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-bLssed perfections, and it requires strong faith and 
 stronger love to look at this consequence, and not draw 
 back before its seeming audacity. 
 
 If lie 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 muko
 
 134 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 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 
 cannot be His end : His end must be Himself, and 
 nothing can exist except for His glory. If He detains 
 U9 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 yearn- 
 ings, and refused Him the love He vouchsafed so incom- 
 prehensibly to covet. 
 
 But this is not all. He seems to forget that He is 
 GoJ, 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 con- 
 viction 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 
 rigour 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 com- 
 mitted 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 borne 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?
 
 WHY GOD WI63BS US TO LOVE HIM. 135 
 
 There is a further difficulty in the unintelligible value 
 which lie 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 is 
 was worth it, we bring a charge against His wis lora, 
 as if the Incarnation and the Passion were gratuitous 
 and exaggerated. And it is no answer to say that it 
 was all fur our sakes, and rather a proof of His love for 
 us, than of His desire for our love. For we must con- 
 tinually bear in mind what sound theology teaches us, 
 that God alone can be His own end, and not we crea- 
 tures. 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 
 ill ir 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 
 j lay 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,
 
 4 
 
 136 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE EM. 
 
 but God alone is the end of man. Physical philoso- 
 phers can love strata of rock, or the distribution of 
 plants, or a peculiar faum, 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 a hospital. But God cannot do so. All His 
 own material creation is worthless to Him in compa- 
 rison with one peasant's heart, or witli one child's first 
 serious prayer. He has given away with the indiffer- 
 ence 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 1 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 diversify the 
 throng of joys which one human heart can experience. 
 Yet no two hearts are exactly alike ; so that the multi- 
 tudinous joys of the heart are to be multiplied by the 
 myriads and myriads of hearts, dead, alive, or yefc
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HOI. 137 
 
 unborn. Now every one of these joys has its repre- 
 sentative in the simple plenitude of the joy of God. 
 Bat 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 sha- 
 dows, lowest, dimmest, faintest, poorest shadows of the 
 joy of God. And who is sufficient to compute these 
 tnings? And what if the joys of the Immaculate 
 Heart of the Divine Mother are to Le reckoned also, 
 an 1 those of that Sicred Heart which the Person of the 
 Word deluged with its oil of gladness, and yet left it 
 human still ? Yet when w T e have got so far, we can 
 har<ily 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 H >\j Ghost in His everlasting and incessant Pro- 
 cession 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 illimit- 
 able Limit of the illimitable GoJ. 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 extasy 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 sileuce of eternity to create,
 
 138 THIY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE EDI. 
 
 ■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! Wh&t a glory to hsve a 
 Creator ! 
 
 What is to be done with all these difficulties ? One 
 thing is plain. We nee J 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 
 mvstery ? Can we diminish the difficulties which we 
 confessedly are unable to answer ? This must be our 
 next endeavour; 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 she Divine 
 Nature, or even to make an imaginary picture of it, is
 
 WH1 GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 109 
 
 ;« 
 
 its extreme and adorable simplicity. Properly speak 
 ing, 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 im- 
 perfect 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, still we can, from 
 what He has been pleased to tell us of Himself, con- 
 ceive 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. Wa 
 call them His Infinity, His Immensity, His Immuta- 
 bility, 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 in- 
 dependent of any creation whatever. They furnish us
 
 140 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 with no reason at all why God should desire our love. 
 On the contrary they are so magnificently self-sufficing, 
 so adorably complete, that they are rather so many 
 arguments against the existence of any such unfathom- 
 able 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 coloured 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 any- 
 thing 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 doea 
 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 arbitrary act of 
 our hna^inatior, conceive God to be without creatures,
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HDL 141 
 
 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, minis- 
 tered to Ills glory, or gave exercise to His mercy op 
 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 future, but only one active unsuc- 
 cessive present, wa3 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 
 jet also that they make us feel how astonishingly inti- 
 mate 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, 
 yet no solution of the enigma. 
 
 We have nothing to do here with theological dis- 
 putes 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 thaS
 
 1-12 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 of dignity and eminence. But what a fountain of 
 affectionate thoughts, thoughts honourable 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 Him- 
 self, 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 I how can we believe it without a very miracle 
 of grace and infused faith? Men talk as if it was theit 
 liberty which suffered in the act of predestination. 
 Kay, rather it is the liberty of God. Wayward men! 
 as if we were to be always suspecting God, always 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 life, 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 Ilia eternal predestination. 
 But it was as if a necessity were upon Him. Give me 
 children or I die, said the impetuous Rachel, longing to 
 be a mother. So, at all costs, God must have creatures 
 to love Him, sons to honour 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, com- 
 placency, and joy. 
 Hence who does not see that He created all men,
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 143 
 
 together with all angels, to be saved ; and yet by that 
 act He loft their freedom unimpaired ? Uefore — ■wo 
 are speaking as words compel us — before He had fore- 
 seen aught else, and moved only bj the excess of His 
 own unspeakable goodness, He decreed to create the 
 natures of ang^s 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, lie would have all men, and all angJ>, saved, 
 and was ready to give, to each and all, the necessary 
 graces. Hence also came that marvellous determina- 
 tion 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 wilful 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 tie 
 result is, that of all the multitudes of those who are 
 lost, not one can attribute his ruin to any predeter- 
 mining 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 pre- 
 destination of his Maker. And what is all this but 
 another set of evidences to prove the greatness of Uod'a
 
 144 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 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 ifc 
 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 dis- 
 charging 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 reluctance with the simple 
 power of living. All our natural gifts also are so con- 
 structed 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 in- 
 tegrity or in the vigour 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 open 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 winea in the vineyards of the earth : and has
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HI3J. 145 
 
 cot 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 pro- 
 fusion, by unnecessary beauty. Everything almost 
 lias 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 lustre of her physical beauty, she is ever 
 doing more than she promises, and enhances her gifts 
 by the fondness of her ministrations. There is some- 
 thing 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 opera- 
 tions, 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 
 
 ere 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 ot a Saviour. 
 10 t
 
 146 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 Then comes centuries of mysterious strife, like Jacob 
 ■wrestling with God by the tinkling waters of the mid- 
 night stream. No sin seems to weary Him. No way- 
 wardness is a match for the perseverance of His love. 
 Merciful and miraculous interventions are never want- 
 ing. 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 vine- 
 yards of Engaddi, by the headlong floods of harsh 
 Babylon, it is always the same. God cannot do with- 
 out 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 win 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 ti'the 
 of His creation, and then as it were 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 diffi-
 
 WIIY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HI31. 147 
 
 culty. Tiie kingdom of grace, if it is not founded on 
 the permission of evil, seems at least to imply it ; anil 
 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 this terrific 
 mystery. 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 whose 
 foreknowledge made all tilings present to Him. Every 
 possible, as well as every actual, consequence of that 
 permission was vividly before Him, and yet He per- 
 sisted. It was worth while. It was for His glory, and 
 His glory is our inestimable good. If evil was not per- 
 mitted, 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 necessary 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 what 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 intelli- 
 gence of Michael. Yet onward He drove right through 
 
 * A world of reasonable beings, either with nngrowing merits, like those of 
 the Sacred Humanity, or confirmed in grace from the first, like our Blessed 
 Lady, is a thing of which we have no experience, and which is opposed to 
 the divine laws as exhibited in the two 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 Lc-eu ainplj gratuitous, without any moral reasons in the character of 
 God.
 
 148 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOYE HIM. 
 
 it, in the plenitude of that greater and more over- 
 whelming goodness wherewith He yearned for His 
 creature's love. O what clearness of demonstration is 
 there here in the pitchy darkness of that intolerable 
 6ecret! 
 
 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 marvellous 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 exult- 
 ing moment when at His dear will their grand spirits 
 sprung 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
 
 TOT GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 149 
 
 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, aa if God 
 vould 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 crea- 
 tures, 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 
 eame almost inevitable calamities. Can we give any 
 reason for this, or say more, than that there is a reason 
 vhich God has hidden in the greatness of Hia own 
 goodness? 
 
 The Incarnation, that mystery of the divine magni- 
 ficence, 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 borne 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, sur- 
 passing even those of the paschal forty days, what can 
 we say but that it would have been a proof of His 
 desire for His creature's 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 ua, 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
 
 150 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 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 diviae, He would take the advan- 
 tage 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 Incar- 
 nation 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 lore ourselves, because in His 
 strangely persevering goodness He would not lose our 
 love? 
 
 So again what Is the Church but His way of ren- 
 dering 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
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE Hill. 151 
 
 fountain of supernatural and meritorious love ? What 
 is Extreme Unction, but an expression of affectionate 
 nervousness, if we may so speak, of our clearest Lord, 
 lest we should fail Him just at the last, when so many 
 risks are run ? What is the sacrament of Order, but 
 systematising and ensuring a succession of daily mira- 
 cles, 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 taber- 
 nacle 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, which 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 confirm 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 priest- 
 hood which is for ever according to the order of Mel- 
 chisedech. 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
 
 152 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 
 
 secure this marvellously 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 permissioo 
 of evil, which seem to interfere with our perception of 
 God's love, with its impartiality as well as its com- 
 pleteness. 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 which we shall 
 examine. Can any one of us say that we have not 
 received numberless graces to which we have not cor- 
 responded ? Have we ever sinned, not only without 
 its being wilfully done, but also without a distinct re- 
 sistance 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 GodP 
 Have there not been many times when our petulanee 
 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 injus- 
 tice. He alone has not His rights. He lets His mercy
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 153 
 
 do strange things with Hi9 liberty. We have merited 
 Iiell 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 predesti- 
 nation. 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 ^ood? 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 
 8tande8t 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 bo deep : they 
 weary our thankfulness because they are so numerous: 
 they make us disbelieve because they are so gratuitous, 
 80 common, so enduring. We should more readily have 
 acknowledged what Thou hast done for us, if Thou hadst 
 only done much less! 
 
 Are we tired of this evidence, especially when \t 
 leaves still unexplained the mystery it so amply proves? 
 This is not the place to discus3 the joys of the Beatific 
 Vision, although there is hardly a more tempting pro- 
 vince of theology. Nevertheless we can hardly close 
 our case without some consideration of the kingdom of 
 glory, considered in reference to our present enquiry. 
 In the case of a parent or a teacher we judge of the 
 value set upon a particular line of conduct, by the
 
 154 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIST. 
 
 greatness of the reward promised and actually con- 
 ferred. 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 immor- 
 tality with contentment and delight, but an abiding 
 Vision, a glory and a gladness, a marvellous rapture of 
 the will, and an extasy of vast intelligence, for ever- 
 more. 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 sucli 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 im- 
 mediately 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 for evermore. He multi- 
 plies 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 things, 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
 
 WnY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. Ij5 
 
 forth, the whole of His beauty softly glows ; so that, 
 although the divinity is one in itself, it is in a marvel- 
 lous 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 elec- 
 tion 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 considera- 
 tions. O for some corner, 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 Cruci- 
 fied ! 
 
 But, if what God paid was so great, the littleness 
 of what earns it on our part is a mystery almost as 
 wonderful. A Magdahn'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
 
 ICG 
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE EliT. 
 
 of our Saviour'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 thero 
 not something paiuful 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 fervour 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 obviou3 
 reflection, yet perhaps we do not dwell upon it suffi- 
 ciently, that nOw, in our fallen state, it is not'innocence 
 which earns the 'sight of God, but love, humble, re- 
 pentant, penance- doing ldve. Nay, even in an unfallen 
 or angelic world, it would only be innocence in the 
 shape of love, which* could earn the heavenly recom- 
 pense. Thus also in our journey heavenwards, it is love 
 which takes evCry 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 labour, which 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. Martyrdom without love 
 is unprofitable before God. He has Ho longing for any- 
 thing but love. He puts no price on other things. His 
 taste is exclusive. His covetousness is confined to that 
 one thing. if we could be as simple and as single ia 
 our desires as God ! He only wants our love, and more 
 of it, and more, and more. Why should not we also
 
 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 157 
 
 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 
 6hould soon be like the saints. 
 
 We conclude from all these considerations, that of the 
 /act 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 enquiry 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 enquiry. 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 opera- 
 tions 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 co dead in heart, so blighted iu mind and aspiia-
 
 158 Vv'iry god y/ishes us to love him. 
 
 tioD, as to be able to look all this divine love in the 
 face, and not be won by it to better things ? Blessed, 
 blessed Godl Wonderful Father! Compassionate 
 Creator I 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 woul.i 
 not be a mere impertinence after this desire of Gocl. 
 Oar hearts are full. We have no room for more. This 
 desire of God solves all the problems of our inner 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 true, 
 infallibly true. God, Thou art my God because my 
 goods are nothing unto Thee ! What shall I do? If I 
 may not doubt this mystery, what can I do but die of 
 love? Oh 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.
 
 ICO 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 Nem'<f amatorurn carnalium, etiamsi sit in hoc ultra modnm in?aiiens, 
 sft ejcaljfcScere potest in amorem dilectse sax, eicut Deus effuudaur in 
 amorem auimaruni aostranun. — 8. 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. Never- 
 theless we must proceed to the discussion of it. Enquiry 
 is more solid and more fruitful in divine things, than, 
 the most complete and satisfactory 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 
 things 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 pre- 
 served. Love is the reading of all the riddles of 
 nature, grace, and glory; and reprobation is practically 
 the pu>itive 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 marvellous inter- 
 pretation of God. Light is not so universal as love, 
 for love ia in darkness as well as light. Life is less 
 strong than love; for love is the victory over death.,
 
 160 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 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 
 Btrewn 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 de- 
 stroying 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 
 Egypt's Artesian wells, and to the fishing-birds of the 
 caverns of Laybach and Carniola. Earth's green ves- 
 ture would be unrolled, and the fair orb would revolve 
 in space an ugly mass of dull, discoloured matter. Yet 
 this picture of ruin 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 lovo 
 with which He covers all creation. For the destruc- 
 tion of the sir 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,
 
 WnY GOD LOVES US. 161 
 
 indescribable holiness, but to us the power, the wisdom, 
 and the holiness come simply in the shape of love. Ilia 
 justice is one of His most ravishing beauties, but it 
 ravishes us by being such a glorious illumination of III! 
 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 lo7e, we at the 
 same time proved undoubtedly His love of us. Reason 
 r.nd revelation, science and theology, nature, grace, and 
 glory, alike establish the infallible truth that God loves 
 His own creatures, and loves them as only God can 
 love. The question is, why He loves us ; and our first 
 Btep towards an answer must be to examine the charac- 
 ter 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. Wo 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 
 
 fiuit, or in the character of its growth and outline. So 
 
 also of an animal, or even of a possible world. Whether 
 
 ve are unable to imagine any possible thing, which shall 
 
 be more than a combination of certain actual things, 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, became He ha? 
 11 f
 
 1G2 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 surrounded us with a countless variety of creatures; 
 and we can judge of imaginary things in poetry, paint- 
 ing, or sculpture, according to the standard of nature. 
 But we hare no such help in understanding God's love 
 of His creatures. It is without parallel, without simili- 
 tude. 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 truths about the divine love; but they nofc 
 only express them in a very imperfect way; they also 
 fall infinitely short of the real truth, of the whole truth. 
 If we throw together all the mutual love of the angels, 
 of which doubtless 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 neighbours, 
 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 
 ef eternity. If we multiply the same total by all the 
 figures we can think «f 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 fervour with 
 which God loves us. And then if we contrived to com- 
 prehend the degree, where should we be in our reckon-
 
 WIIY GOD LOVES US. 1G3 
 
 ing? 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. O 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 truth and 
 inexhaustible delights! 
 
 This is our third feature of it, that not even a glori- 
 fied 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 
 Ye 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 geolo- 
 gical 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, can- 
 not comprehend His love, what manner of love must it 
 necessarily be? And yet it is ours, our own posses- 
 sion; 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 arch-
 
 364 TOY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 angels, 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, sus- 
 ceptible mercy, must be risked by the permission of 
 evil ; and the very risk is but a more beautiful mani- 
 festation 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 favourite. Love appears — Oh these 
 poor human words I — 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 resem- 
 blance to the thing to be returned, either in kind or in 
 degree. The mutual love of God and man is truly a 
 friendship, of which 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 exaggera- 
 tions of His creative goodness, the whole magnificent 
 machinery of a thousand worlds was a cheap price to 
 pay for this.
 
 TVHY GOD LOVES US. 1C5 
 
 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. AYe 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 Pas- 
 sion, 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 
 s'umbling-block to proud or ill-established faith, or to 
 enquiry which has not yet reached the strength of faith. 
 The Blessed Sacrament is a difficulty, only because ifc 
 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 incomprehensible secrets, the doc- 
 trine 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 pro- 
 positions, 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 incompre- 
 hensible dealings of its infinite Creator. how often 
 in the fluent course of prayer does not this simple fact 
 that God is loving us, turn round and face us, and scat- 
 ter all our thoughts, and strike us into 'k deep silence* 
 and repeat itself out loud to us, and the soul answers,
 
 1C6 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 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 marvellously 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 indi- 
 vidually. He loved us with all those distinctions and 
 individualities which make us ourselves, and prevent 
 our being any but ourselves. As the Eternal Genera- 
 tion of the Son and the Eternal Procession of the Holy 
 Ghost were in God what are called in theology neces- 
 sary acts ; because without them God would not be Ono 
 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 unbe- 
 ginninglove? Ever since He was God, and He was 
 always God, He has been caressing us in the compla- 
 cency 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?
 
 TCHY GOD LOVES US. 1CT 
 
 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 born, — that I, such as I am, 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 
 lovel Thy doiDgs 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, ail the result of His combined perfections. 
 It wou!d 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
 
 168 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 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 em- 
 brace 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? 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 begin- 
 ning 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 mar- 
 vels required in the consecration of the Blessed Sacra- 
 ment ? 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 pro- 
 found 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 in any way an imperfect love?
 
 WHY QOD LOVES U3. 1G3 
 
 "Where does it fail? What j-urpose 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 provi- 
 dence of God, and makes His absolute dominion over 
 us our most perfect freedom ? And finally, is it nob 
 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 beau- 
 tiful 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, coequal, coeternal, 
 consubstantial with Himself. The love of the Father 
 and the Son produces also a divine Person, coequal, 
 coeternal, consubstantial with the Other Two, from 
 whom, as from a single principle, He everlastingly 
 proceeds. Now see how, with awful distinctness, crea- 
 tion 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
 
 170 WHY GOD LOVES US, 
 
 God, a manifestation of Him given forth by Himself, 
 and which, when complete, He viewed with divine com- 
 placency. 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 ever- 
 lastingly 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 glory, 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, 
 go is Creation His outward and created love. Creation 
 fs 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 
 eweetly attaining its end through His love of His crea- 
 tures and their love of Him. Perhaps all the works of 
 God have this mark of His Triune Majesty upon them, 
 this perpetual forthshadowing 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 Sacra- 
 ment, and the Beatific Vision, may thus perhaps all be
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 171 
 
 imprinted with tin's mark of God, the emblem, the de- 
 vice, the monogram, of the Trinity in Unity. And 
 thus, when the 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, i\ 
 is mysteriously written by the apostle, that our Loro 
 6hall deliver up the kingdom to God and the Father, 
 and the Son also Himself shall be subject in His human 
 nature unto Ilioi 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 accom- 
 plished, 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 things. Creation and pre- 
 servation are not two different actions. They can be 
 separated only in idea. The one is th? going on of the 
 other. It is an opinion which has found favour 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 treat- 
 ing of this question theologians necessarily came to 
 examine the real character of the act of Creation. 
 Durandus expressly says, u As it is always true in 
 divine things to say that the Son is ever being begotten 
 of the Father, so is it truo to say of the creature, as
 
 
 172 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 Ions: as if; Exists, that it has been created and is beinjj 
 created by God ; for the creation of things is the same 
 act as the preservation of them." Scotus says, " A 
 thing 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 S. 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 crea- 
 tion out of nothing." Molina says, "By the same 
 influx of an indivisible action by which God first con- 
 ferred 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 
 thin» is nothing else than an assiduous creation and 
 actual production of its being:" and Scotus again mar- 
 vellously 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, anci 
 the incessant Procession of the Holy Ghost.* 
 
 » This very interesting question of preservation is discossed by Lessins in 
 his third book De Summo Bono ; and then at greater length in his tenta 
 book De Perfectionibus Divinis. In the opinion given in the text that crea« 
 tures 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 exem- 
 plar and epitome of creation ; and the following passage from F. Binet's 
 Chef-d'-02uvre de Dieu illustrates the view I have put forward in the text. 
 Speaking of our Lady's soul, he says, N'est-ellepas veritablement le miroir da 
 la M;ijeste' de Dieu, representant naivement ce qui se passe dans les splendeurs 
 de l'e'ternit--, ou par une generation eternelle est engendre le Fils dans lo 
 eein de son Pere, ou, par une emanation ineffable, le Saint-Esprit procede, 
 du Pere et du Fils? Partie xere. cap. 5. sect. 11.— See also the conclusion 
 of S. Thomas in the 45th question, vii. article of the P. Prima. In ratio- 
 n;libus creaturis est imago Trinitatis; ia caetmis vero creaturis est vesti-
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 170 
 
 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 every 
 way worthy of God Himself, and the result of His com- 
 bined 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. O what 
 then are all things else to me? 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. 
 
 Hut 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 
 fcoth. Let us examine our own side first. 
 
 The first thing which strikes us is that man is in 
 liimself nothingness. His bodv 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 considera- 
 tion 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 tho 
 
 ginm Trinitatis; in quantum in eis inveniuntur aliqua, quru redacuntur in 
 Pertonu Divinas. Since writing the passage in the text I have found the 
 same view in some hitherto unedited works of Rnysbrok, published by 
 Arnswaldt at Hanover, 1848. The treatise is entitled fyieyel du Stligkcit.
 
 174 WET GOD LOVES US. 
 
 disgrace of our origin. There ia 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 
 ve individually? What is our importance in our 
 country, or even our neighbourhood? What is our 
 moral or our intellectual 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 
 ; :hall 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 enor- 
 mous 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 orb3 
 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 
 
 * The hypothesis hazarded here, and at page 333 of the Blessed Sacrament, 
 tli at the creations of angels and of men were possibly the beginnings of crea- 
 tions, 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
 
 WHY GOD LOVES U3. 173 
 
 there are the angels, and who shall tell their number? 
 For we know that raultitudinousness 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 born from Adam to the day of doom. What have 
 we to present to the eye of our Creator but an almost 
 indescribable insignificance ? 
 
 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 deliber- 
 ately 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 nega- 
 tive. Conscience has proclaimed the rights of duty, and 
 without so much as taking the trouble to deny the asser- 
 tion, we have refused obedience to the mandate. We 
 have looked calmly at eternal punishment, we hava 
 clearly perceived that nothing short of an omnipotence 
 
 learned that in Germany H. Steffern has suggested the same idea in his 
 Christl. 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, Dorner, Martcnsen, and Lange, and denied by Thomasius, and 
 Julius Muiler, 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 
 remarkable that the revival of this view in German protestant theology 
 6hou:d be contemporary with a moro enlarged aud systematic study of 
 nature. 
 
 J
 
 176 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 of anger has been required for the creation of tliosa 
 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 misera- 
 ble prerogatives with us. It is true, and yet it is not 
 true 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 splendours 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 intolera- 
 ble debt of fire, which we had wilfully 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 took back our rights ; we re-entered upon 
 the exercise of our unhappy prerogatives ; and trampling 
 mercy underfoot now, in addition to the other divine
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 177 
 
 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. 
 Anil perhaps this 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 a: 
 never had the opportunity given him of such new choice 
 of evil. Here is the first time in which we come in siorht 
 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. 
 
 Eut 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 docs not 
 possess already, and possess to an infinite extent and 
 with an infinite enjoyment? Is there 0:1 e of His per- 
 fections to which we could put a heightening touch, an 
 additional beauty ? Could we by any possible contribu- 
 tion 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 govern- 
 ment of the world. If He condescended to make use of 
 our ministrations we should only add to the weight on 
 (he 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 wo may use the word, he is rather a 
 12 f
 
 17S WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 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 undi- 
 minished plenitude of God. When God lets His crea- 
 tures 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 honour- 
 ing of the creature, the clearest proof of God's exceeding 
 love for us. Thus though St. Michael's brightness daz- 
 zles us, while we look at it, until we gaze upon it 
 through the many- coloured 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 pinners, 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 occupa- 
 tion. He lived for us. We were His end. Words 
 cannot 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 
 lias given and is hourly giving to us. His life will be 
 prolonged, not for His own sake, but for ours, some 
 jnore centuries, in order that He may go on and com- 
 plete the &um of His prodigious benefactions. It is not
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 179 
 
 easy to tell what lie 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 wa 
 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 goodnatured 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 splf-seeking, so unjust, that, 
 although charity hopes all things and believes all things, 
 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 favourable 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 incompa- 
 rably greater tenderness, and His absolutely eternal 
 love ! is it not humiliating to think of these things ? 
 But we have not yet drunk our vileness to its dregs. 
 'While we are thus abusing the loDg-sufferiDg of God by
 
 180 WHY GOD LOVES US» 
 
 our ungraceful slackness, by our injurious coldness, ancr 
 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 which we pride ourselves. And 
 all this to God, remembering who God is ! And all 
 this after all He has done for us, 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 princi- 
 ples our very service of God is almost insulting, our 
 very reparations a new affront. If they be not so, to 
 what is it owinsj 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 bo 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 truth of the matter is. We are the contra- 
 dictory of God in almost every respect. To say nothing 
 of the fluiteness 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 
 w special aids of grace. Nay, when He has summed
 
 wur GOD LOVES US. 181 
 
 Up all that shall entitle us to the forgiveness or our sins, 
 all that shall win for us the very kindness and favour 
 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 corrupt 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 sin3 
 have so sickened God that He has repented, immutable 
 though lie 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 fruit in this climate never. 
 Is that the heavenly tree? "Who would know it in 
 such woful plight? Of a truth 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 which 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 
 run over, and deluge the universe with light and loveli- 
 ness; and that eight 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 divino 
 anger reposes, and sleeps sweetly, and wakes not to 
 remember its errand of vindictive purity. 
 
 There is one characteristic of man which especially
 
 182 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 precludes our finding in him the reasons of God's amaz- 
 ing 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 humour, have all got the same 
 crack in them, this flaw of meanness. With ourselves, 
 what is self-deceit but meanness, what is slavery to 
 bodily comforts, what greediness at meals, what rude- 
 ness 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, syste- 
 matized meanness ? In our relations with God, what 
 are lukewarmness, and hypocrisy, and self-righteous- 
 ness, 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 our- 
 selves 5 and we, so intolerably hateful, so u^ly, so
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 183 
 
 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 doubt- 
 less by tliis time lost sight of all claims to love, which 
 we might lave 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. Certainly 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 60 
 peculiarly unloveable. 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 
 tha*-, 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
 
 184 WI1Y GOD LOVES US. 
 
 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 breath- 
 ing 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-sound- 
 ing 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 
 enquiry 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
 
 TVIIY GOD LOVES us. 183 
 
 {he 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, which alone and of 
 itself could fill us with gladness and wonder for a wholo 
 eternity. His promises are the children of His justice, 
 and His fidelity to them is His exercise of that most 
 royal attribute. It 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 tho 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 
 i to the efforts of our misery ; for what He receives 
 from us is much more His own than ours. And is 
 there a sicjht more exalting or more affecting amid all 
 the wonders of theology, than to see the beautiful, the 
 faultless rigour of divine justice satisfied to its utmost 
 demand, its enormous and most holy requirements p^i .1 
 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 Saviour Jesus Christ, God and Man? He has 
 hardly begun to know God who has not addicted him- 
 self, 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 
 >f His love? Was our creation a debt of justice due 
 to our original justice? Has our use of tho 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 rigour
 
 186 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 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 ? Lord, if Thou shalt be extreme to mark what 
 is done amiss, Lord ! who shall abide it ? Of a truth 
 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 honour 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 loveable; and as all 
 holiness consists in the love of God, so God's holiness 
 consists in the love of Himself. Tims, and what an 
 adorable mystery it is! the infinite purity of God is 
 simply His self-love. We know not if a creature can
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 1ST 
 
 gain a higher idea of God than is given out by this stu- 
 pendous truth. 
 
 But let us suppose that we are ever so holy, how 
 will this created holiness stand by the side of that of 
 God ? lie 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 tho 
 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 im- 
 possibilities of our finite nature. The holiness of God 
 is substantial, His own very substance ; ours is but a 
 quality and an accessary, 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 tho 
 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 unintelligi- 
 ble 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
 
 183 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 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 edifi- 
 cation 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 sanc- 
 tity bade love create us out of nothing, because it was 
 so enamoured of what it foresaw we should become? 
 The holiness of God has no necessary respect to crea- 
 tures, as His mercy has; and yet, strange to sayl it 
 is this seemingly most inimitable of all His attri- 
 butes, which is expressly put before us as the object 
 of our imitation. "We are to be holy because God is 
 holy, and perfe-jt even as our heavenly Father is 
 perfect. Do we then so represent and reflect this 
 sanctity of Gocl, as to become the object of such exu- 
 berant 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 aver- 
 sion? What did David mean when ho said in the 
 eighty.fifth psalm, first of all, Incline Thine ear, 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 manner of men are we ? 
 Yet, while he was pleading his own holiness,* it was 
 tot to the holiness of God he was appealing ; for he adds, 
 
 * Many commentators suppose luni to allude to his consecration as king>
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 189 
 
 For Thou, Lord, art sweet and mild, and plenteous 
 m mercy to all that call upon Thee. 
 
 Is it the divine beauty which is so in love with us 
 miserable creatures? Yefc how shall we search the 
 unsearchable loveliness of God ? One momentary ilasli 
 of His beauty would separate body and soul by the 
 vehemence of the extasy which it would eaus-3. Wo 
 shall need to be fortified with the mysterious strength 
 of the light of glory, before in the robust freshness of 
 cur 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 incomprehensi- 
 bility, 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 con- 
 taining them in the most eminent and unutterable 
 manner, and not only so, but containing them, O 
 breathless exhibition of most ravishing supernal beauty! 
 in the unity of most transcending and majestic sim- 
 plicity ; 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 ! how we ourselves turn 
 to dust and ashes, nay to loathsome death and corrup- 
 tion, 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 impercep- 
 tible, that His was within, ours borrowed from without, 
 ihat His could neither grow nor fade, while ours is a 
 fague, uncertain, fluctuating shadow : but is it not moio
 
 190 \VHY GOD LOVES US* 
 
 true to say that we have no beauty whatsoever? my 
 heart I 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 know- 
 ledge of us in Himself. He does not look out upon us, 
 and contemplate us, like an infinitely intelligent spec- 
 tator, 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. Mary 
 Magdalen of Pazzi examined her conscience out loud 
 in an extasy, 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 exhaust- 
 ing 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 tor- 
 ments 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
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 191 
 
 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 
 60 well, because He knows us so thoroughly? 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 dis- 
 appointed? 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 honourable 
 conception of it. What a boundless field of wild specu- 
 lation 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 almost 
 iufiuite, 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 realiz- 
 ing what we mean. We have no picture of it in our 
 minds. Now* if to such tcnific power, there could.
 
 192 1 WHY GOD LOVES USi 
 
 "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 ven- 
 tured 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, on- 
 ward 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. Truth is the character of God's 
 mind, and the perfection of His goodness. All truth 
 in creatures is a derivation from the truth of God. 
 Everything in the divine ideas has a peculiar fitness 
 and congruity which makes it worthy of Him, because 
 it makes it truthful. God is truth, not only in Him- 
 self, absolute unapproachable truth, 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 rule and pattern, or> as philosophers call 
 it, their exemplary cause. The whole truth of creatioi? 
 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 excel- 
 lencies which more broadly distinguish the Creator from 
 the creature than this of truth, none with which it is 
 ignore important for us to communicate, and none whose 
 .communication is more thoroughly supernatural, or in
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 193 
 
 which perseverance is more difficult. Moreover so 
 necessary to creation 13 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 like- 
 ness to Clod, 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 
 truth abhor that which is so untrue, as we know our- 
 selves to be ? Is it not the case that many a time ia 
 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 hypocrisy, con- 
 ceit, pretence, vainglory, intentional falsehood, half 
 deliberate diplomacy, circuitous insincerity, and unin- 
 tended unavoidable concealments, which yet make us 
 be all the while acting a part, and seeming to be what 
 we are not ? 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 dishonourable dis- 
 guises, 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, 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 
 
 cieature like the Creator, it seems to us as if when He 
 13 f
 
 194 WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 practised if, it made the Creator like the creature. For 
 it has about it an appearance of sadness and of sym- 
 pathy, a pit j, a self-sacrifice, a pathos, which belong 
 to the nobility of a created nature. It 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 dis- 
 tresses 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 moon- 
 light, 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
 
 WHY GOD LOVES US. 105 
 
 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 graca 
 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. It 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. It might be asked to fur- 
 nish 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 tan- 
 tamount 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, honours, 
 elevates, equalizes with itself. The idea of predilection 
 do<>8 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. Ani
 
 . 19 G WHY GOD LOVES US. 
 
 jet if mercy is not Hie reason of God's love, where elso 
 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 ho 
 has added rebellion, and in no way can he add anything 
 to God. Even on human principles his very service of 
 God is almost insulting. He is the contradictory of 
 God in all things, and if he is characterized by any one 
 thing rather than another, it is by pusillanimity and 
 meanness. 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 were seek- 
 ing. Infinite justice would lead Him to punish us. 
 Infinite sanctity would turn away from us in displea- 
 sure. 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 ic 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?
 
 WHY GOD LOTES U3. 197 
 
 God loves U9 because He lias created u9. "What sort 
 of a feeling is it which the peculiarity of having created 
 some one 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 manner, and further 
 than that, with an adorable simplicity which belongs 
 only to the Divine Nature. Bat when we have imagined 
 all this, we seo 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 nothing, 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 oar hearts 
 on fire.
 
 193 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 Mapn* r£8 amor. Nam cum amat Deua, non aliud vult qnam amari: 
 quippe qui ob aliud non amat, nisi ut ametur, sciens ipsos amore beatos 
 qui se amaverint. suavitatem ! O gratiam ! O amoris vim ! 
 
 8. Bernard. 
 
 It has often been the benevolent amusement of sages 
 and philanthropists to draw pictures of imaginary re- 
 publics. Sometimes they have placed their ideal citi- 
 zens in positions unusually favourable for the exercise 
 of the highest virtues; at other times they have repre- 
 sented 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 pre- 
 serve their original integrity, and neither fall partially, 
 as the angels did, nor the whole race, as was the un- 
 happy fortune of man. They would of course be the
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVINQ GOD. 199 
 
 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 miud and will might involve varieties of moral obli- 
 gation 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 our- 
 selves this possible world, we might curiously descend 
 into every conceivable ramification of that new planetary 
 life, and see what the behaviour 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 profes- 
 sions, 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 
 ns. When we had completed our picture, this possible 
 world would have some kind of likeness to our own, 
 although it would le 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
 
 200 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 precept of the love of God were fully kept by all the 
 inhabitants of the world. Let us try now to put a 
 picture of this before ourselves. It need not be alto- 
 gether 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. Chris- 
 tian or Jew, Mahometan or idolator, 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 yel; 
 supernatural love. Neither has He left us in uncer- 
 tainty with respect to the extent of the precept. Hear, 
 Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Thou shalfc 
 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 shalt 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. 
 Thus God is solemnly declared to be the object of our 
 love, which love is to be distinguished by two charac- 
 teristics. 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
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 201 
 
 heroic manifestations of love as are either the orna- 
 ments of a devout piety or the counsels of a high perfec- 
 tion, what is every 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 a» 
 he knows it : and he is bound, at least in general inten- 
 tion, to direct all his actions to the glory of God. In 
 his heart nothing can be allowed to come into competi- 
 tion 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 service 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 northern- 
 most dwelling of America to where its extreme head- 
 lands 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
 
 202 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 thia 
 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 crea- 
 tion, of this fair moonlit 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 
 lor 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 every corner 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
 
 OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 203 
 
 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 
 enare from which our prudence is fain to fly. Tlure 
 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 purgatory than 
 anything else. For the love of God would not hinder 
 6ufferinor. 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 
 business-like religion. Common sense would be en- 
 grossed with religious duties. Each man would be 
 uuimpassionately possessed with religion, as if it were 
 his ruling 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. R member — we are not speaking of 
 what is possible, so much as of what is conceivable. 
 
 What a change would come over the political world 1 
 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 boun- 
 daries, the rights of intervention — what a new charac- 
 ter 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 raimeui
 
 204 OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 news- 
 paper, such as we are acquainted with, would be a 
 blissful impossibility. We fear that antiquarian ques- 
 tions 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 disap- 
 pear 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 for this apparent dulness, which might 
 affect some of the things on which our activity at pre- 
 sent fastens by morbid predilection, the world would 
 gcin 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 thousand 
 fold. The products of the human mind would be incal- 
 culably 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.
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 205 
 
 "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 intelligence 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 come, when they were called to 
 minister to the sanctuary of God, and not to the mere 
 material indulgences of menl The amount of private 
 happiness would be likewise augmented beyond all cal- 
 culation. 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 
 t;,is moment with the most inevitable universality and 
 the most stringent obligation! Surely we must see to 
 this. 
 
 Hitherto we have been engaged in two very elemen- 
 tary enquiries: Why does God wish us to love Him, 
 and why does He love us. If God desires us to lov© 
 Him, there must be some sort of love with which it is
 
 203 OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 injury, by laying upon us 
 the absolute and essential precept of loviDg 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 fulfilment 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 
 lovin" God, and then the various kinds of love with 
 which it is happily in our power to love our most mer- 
 ciful Creator. 
 
 We must observe, first of all, that the love which is 
 required of us by the precept, is a personal love. Nono 
 else will satisfy. It is not the love of the approbation 
 of conscience, or of the self-rewarding sense of duty, op 
 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 dis- 
 tinguished from the love of a thing or of a place. It is 
 ithe love of a Being, of Three Divine Persons, of God, 
 He reveals Himself to us in various affectionate rela. 
 tionships, 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.
 
 OUB MEANS OP LOVING 60D. 207 
 
 But -when we return the love of another, it very 
 much coDcerns U3 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 love 
 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 crea- 
 tures, 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, sim 
 plify Him, and all His condescensions, and His gifts, 
 and His justice, and His anger, to pure and eimpb 
 love ! 
 
 Let us follow the teaching of theology a little further. 
 The Divine Nature is a plenitude of perfection, a ful- 
 ness and a " super-fulness," 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, the magnificent, and the good. Fulness 
 leads to communicativeness. Comniun&atireness is tha
 
 208 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD* 
 
 consequence of abundance. Tt 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 breakB 
 its bound and does communicate itself. This is the case 
 with human love, human kindness, human knowledge. 
 Exuberance is an inseparable accompaniment of perfec- 
 tion. So this " super-fulness'' of God, this exceeding 
 plenitude of the Divine Nature, must needs communi- 
 cate itself, and be eternally communicating itself. This 
 communication may be of two kinds, the one natural or 
 necessary, which must be and which must always be ; 
 the other free, which God may withhold, which is a gift, 
 which is not necessary, but which, 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 
 skort of Benignity, Dominion, Providence, Mercy, Jus- 
 tice, 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.* 
 
 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 myste- 
 rious and adorable characteristic, that it must communi- 
 cate itself without multiplying itself; for how can that 
 ■which is infinite be multiplied ? Hence comes the fecun*. 
 
 « Lessius de Perfect Divin. lib. is. Also S. Thomas i. q. sill, art. 7.
 
 OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 209 
 
 t!ity of the Divine Nature, considering that Nature in 
 Three Persons, the Father as the Fountain of the God- 
 head, the Son as the Eternal Knowledge of itself, and the 
 Holy Ghost as its eternal Love of self, as one Essence 
 in Three Equal Divine Persons. From the communi- 
 cativeness, or fecundity of the Divine Nature, it must 
 necessarily be that the Father ever generates, the S m 
 is ever generated, the Father and the Son ever breathe 
 forth their love as one, and the Holy Spirit is over 
 being breathed forth. And because of the infinite 
 plemtude of the Divine Nature there can, in this neces- 
 sary and natural communication of itself, be no sort of 
 inequality, no precedence, no priority, no diminution, 
 no inferiority, no subordination.* These are not mere 
 wcrds. They are God's eternal life. They will be our 
 eternal life as well. 
 
 Besides this ncc:ssary 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 communi- • 
 cation of the Divine Nature its fecuudity, so we call 
 the free communication of it, its benignity, both being 
 in fact consequences of God's natural goodness, only 
 the one necessary, 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 uf angels, the 
 other in the creation of men. But there might be as 
 
 *The reader must distinguish between the Divine Essence communicating 
 itself, and the Divine Essence generating itself, which last is furbidJen by , 
 the Laterau Council to be said, 
 14 f
 
 210 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 many divers 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 
 whom 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, bufc 
 this thought comes to my mind like a belief. There 
 may be rational creatures lower than man, though ifc 
 certainly is very difficult to conceive of them. Buft 
 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 " produces" 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. AVliat a view of crea- 
 tion does not this open out before us ! How is it we can 
 ever think of anything but God ? O how more than 
 royal is the origin of our immortal souls, and in what 
 vast destinies does Divine love intend that they should
 
 OTJB MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 211 
 
 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 draws us nearer to 
 God, earth, in spite of all its affectionate memori 
 becomes only a peopled planet, and nothing more : but 
 alas] why is it we let slow time do the work which 
 Bwift grace would so much better do ? 
 
 But this account of God's love of creatures does by 
 ro 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 pro- 
 duce each other, like the fruitful generations of men, 
 each angel must be a species himself. Others consider, 
 lor 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 speci- 
 fically. 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 
 cf the angels are more simple than those of earth, they 
 would he all the more striking because of their simpli- 
 city. Yet in spite of the superiority of the angdic 
 world, and because perhaps we are less acquainted with 
 its peculiar prerogatives, men seem to have many indu- 
 bitable pre-eminences above the angels. The angels 
 imitate the virginity of the Most Holy Trinity without 
 its fruitfulness. Man shares in the fruiifulaess of God ;
 
 21 & OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 and Mnry, a pure daughter of man and whose nature ig 
 merely human, shares at once the fruitfulness and the 
 # virginity of God, and, as His Mother, rules 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 infir- 
 mities. 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 con- 
 tent 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 born, but higher than that lowest step in
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 213 
 
 the sc.de of intellectual creations, whereon the Incarnate 
 "Word lias 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 doiniuioo. 
 pertaining to the Unity of God. 
 
 Such is the only picture that we, a f ter trial, have 
 been able theologically to make to ourselves of the love 
 of God for man. It is this enormous love which it is 
 our duty to return. It is not a matter of choice, or of 
 i.erfection. It is a question of precept and obligation. 
 It is a commandment, which we shall be los: eternally 
 if we do not endeavour to fulfil. Our next step there- 
 fore mu>t 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 run, 
 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 supernaturally 
 strengthened to endure. But in our case, whosa 
 account is mercifully not yet closed, it is simply true 
 that every relation 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 ruined, annihilated, if we were not in His cire 
 and keeping. Obedience to Him is safer and happi *r 
 for us khan any liberty of whijh w-e could dream, liw;
 
 214 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 wiing from Him by repeated treasons, and when they 
 come they are so disguised in mercy, that on this 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 for- 
 gotten sins, without even our acknowledgment of guilt. 
 Often He seems to forgive before the offence is com- 
 plete. We sin, half knowing we shall be forgiven. As 
 to the consequences of our sins to others, it is compara- 
 tively seldom that He lays on us the responsibility of 
 attending to them. He charges His own administration 
 with that burthen, which of a truth 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 fore- 
 seen. 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 which 
 give vigour 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
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOr. 21 J 
 
 Lira. In the exercise of Hia 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. Ho 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 annals 
 of history give us many beautiful examples of the 
 attachment, which a noble-minded servant can have for 
 his 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 his considerateness. And who is so considerate as 
 God? 0!i wonderful mystery 1 see how Gad always 
 shows by His manner to us His remembrance of our 
 little services, a forgetfulness of our slovenly short- 
 comings, an affectionate exaggerated satisfac:ion with 
 what we do, and at the worst a look only of wondering 
 wounded feeling, when disgrace, reproof, or chastise- 
 ment would better have fitted our misdeeds ! lie 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
 
 216 OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 
 wng'^s, 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 munificence 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 mav have the Creator for his own ? 
 
 God is our Friend. It requires an act of faith, and 
 not a little act, to say so. But so it is; the Influite, 
 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 confi ling 
 trust. Nay, friendship shows itself in a morbid readi- 
 ness to take offence, in petty diplomacies to find out if 
 injurious suspicions are true, iu 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 man- 
 kind. There have hardly been a dozen friendships since 
 &~e time of Jonathan and David, which could bear the
 
 OUB MEANS OF LOT-ING GOD. 217 
 
 weight of an awkward* looking cirmmstnnre, or a 
 decently attested report. And friendship at its heigh*, 
 m the fervour of its fever-fit, what is it but a tyranny? 
 Our friends thiok themselves gods, not men, and us their 
 instruments, the profitable implements of their pleasure, 
 their ambition, and their will. Friendship is not con- 
 secrated by a sacrament a9 marriage i3. Nevertheless 
 we must have a friend. We shrink from imbefriended 
 6 litude. Yet there is no real friend but God. He is 
 in His own world almost the solitnry example of the 
 beauty of fidelity. See what a friend He isl 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 magni- 
 ficence and exceeding price outstrip t.e fondest expec- 
 tation, 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 1 >v •. AV. en ever we will we can be friends with God, 
 anl lie 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 Hi-n was ours. 
 
 God is our Father also, and we are the children of 
 His predilection. Truants and proligils, 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-born, 
 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 generousiy untaxed, and uutythed,
 
 213 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 ex- 
 culpate 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 soirow that he showed and by the increased kind- 
 ness of his manner, 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 favour with which He 
 follows it? 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, anl 
 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
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 219 
 
 there with infinite complacency. He prepared a for- 
 tune 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 
 ns with a vocation, and destined for us a particular 
 crown and place in heaven. We cannot name the thing 
 which is bright and good within us, nor the thing which 
 is attractive and delectable without us, but it comes 
 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 
 Eucli a love as His? 
 
 Cut 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 ?nd guilt. He did not exag- 
 gerate our shame, but He knew it as not all men and 
 angels together could have known it. He penetrated 
 its unbearalle corruption. He laid its loathsomeness 
 all bare before His eyes. It was incredible. Such 
 graces slighted, such inspirations neglected, such sacra- 
 ments 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 
 Bhould 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
 
 220 OUR MEANS OF LOVINO GOD. 
 
 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 sacra- 
 ments. By His first election He chose us out of 
 nothing to have 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 ia 
 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 fervour and fidelity of life-long love. For where- 
 fore 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? Yea! 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 consum- 
 mation 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 inumate 
 union consists? When the saints are betrothed to 
 God, it is by operations of grace so magnificent, by 
 supernatural mysteries so transcendent, that the lan- 
 guage in which they are related seems unreal and 
 inflated ; and if such be the Espousals on earth, what 
 will the Marriage be in heaven ? 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 slk.ll dare 
 to fasten in ungainly human words the sort of inex-
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 221 
 
 preteible equality with God which the soul enjoys, or 
 her unspeakable community of goods with Him ? And 
 wherefore does lie 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 lore 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 conquer< r 
 over the fond mother's idolatiy for her first-born. Yet 
 all this is the faintest of shadows, the feeblest of figures, 
 to set forth the union of the soul with God I How 
 shall we love Him as we ought? Rather the question 
 should be, Can we love Him at all with anything wor- 
 thy 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 
 sbalt 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 marvellous dreams, and to 
 conceive the most impossible combinations. Can it 
 picture to itself, can it however dimly and remoUly 
 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 carrying us off to 
 heaven by force, and then doing fresh violence to our 
 nature and making it endure and rejoice in the Vision
 
 222 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 marvellous 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 
 olJ, nay from the very first hour of your regeneration : 
 there is His preservation of you, which is simply the 
 mnbroken continuity of your creation, requiring every 
 moment of day and night, of time and of an eternity 
 to follow, as much iuflux 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, 
 i»ud the fresh arrangements of divine tenderness, which
 
 OUF. MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 223 
 
 are waiting ready for the hour when you shall come to 
 die: there is the indwelling of the Third Person of the 
 Holy Tiinity 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 sim, ly 
 GoJ who is the end of man, but God Possessed, God by 
 an in*, liable communication of Himself become our own 
 cur { roperty, and our enjoyment. 
 
 In this catalogue of the demonstrations of love there 
 ere 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 
 clream of an Incarnation in humility and shame, in 
 poverty and hiddenness, unless we had been told it, 
 Eut 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 addi- 
 tional tenderness it 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 
 Hi-5 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 
 mi r ht a;k Him lor dispensations when we needed them,
 
 22-4 OUR 31 CASS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 that we might have intricate cases of conscience solved 
 by His ur, questionable authority, that we might have 
 formal permission from Him to carry out our favourite 
 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 nrght hear from His infallible lip3 the 
 truth 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 
 lust this, which Pie has provided for us in the Papacy. 
 He has g'von 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 infj ior 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 inconceiv- 
 able, 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 suffer- 
 ings, its fierce deluge of intolerable ignominies, the 
 various atrocity of its pains, the pleading eloquence of its 
 spendthrift bloodshedding, 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
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 225 
 
 not have seemed at all a stretch of jurisdiction, if our 
 Lord had commanded veryloDg fasts, frequent self-flag- 
 ellations, voluntary austerities, sleeping on the ground, 
 or painful vigils. We could neither have been sur- 
 prised nor discontented, if in return for what He had 
 done for us, and in likeness and honour 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 bo 
 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 
 bevond 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 13 
 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 marvellous 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 
 
 15 -f
 
 22G OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 power, when He says so pathetically in Isaias, ye 
 inhabitants of Jerusalem, and ye men of Juda, judge 
 between Me and My vineyard. What is there that 
 T ought to do more to My vineyard, that I have not 
 done to it ? 
 
 It is this love outstripping all imagination, which 
 <ve 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 tics 
 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 6ouls of men ; and a9 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 fulfilment of the precept of 
 love is what concerns us most, both in this world and 
 ia tho world to come, the knowledge of these seven
 
 CUB MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 227 
 
 varieties of love must be of the greatest importance to 
 our happiness. 
 
 The love of benevolence is one which has been com- 
 monly practised by the saints, and often has seemed 
 childish, or at best mere poetry, 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 exaggera- 
 tions. Moreover this habit of wishing God impos- 
 sible perfections, is not only the result of a more 
 worthy and true appreciation of His perfection and 
 His majesty, but it tends also to produce it, to sus- 
 tain it, and to increase it. It is at once the cause 
 and the effect of honourable thoughts of God. Another 
 while the love of benevolence takes the form of ven- 
 turesome congratulations. We wish God all the im- 
 mense joy of His unimaginable perfections, We know 
 that lie 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
 
 228 OUR MEAKS OF NOTING GOD. 
 
 own blissful self. Or, another while, by the eamo 
 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 par- 
 ticular 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, anil 
 makes the cause of God to prosper in the world. Some- 
 times we earnestly desire that He may have accidental 
 glory which He does not receive. We wish that pur- 
 gatory 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 ono 
 day or night there might be no mortal sin in all oui* 
 huge metropolis. All this, which the saints have 
 reduced to as many practices as there have been saints 
 to practise 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 mind, suits other characters, or 
 meets the changeful dispositions of the soul, which no^7 
 needs one class of sentiments and now another. Com- 
 placence fixes its eye upon what it knows of God, wiih 
 intense delight and with intense tranquillity. It re- 
 joices 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 repeti- 
 tion, 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
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 229 
 
 music steals out from its inmost soul. It rejoices that 
 none else is like to GoJ. 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, vaunt- 
 ing iu 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 seem9 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 re- 
 joicings, that He is not only what He is, but always 
 has been, always will be what He is, that He is oi a 
 truth, and shall be, .and must be, and alone can be, 
 eternally and victoriously God. These are the delight- 
 ful 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 
 iusuk them with its intelligent contempt. It compares 
 God with all other things, 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 passe* un- 
 resistingly 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 appre- 
 ciates Him incomparably above all other things. It 
 began by terms of coirpaiison, and ends by seeing that
 
 230 OUR MEAKS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 nothing can compare with Him, and that all compari- 
 son is fooli8h, 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 true acceptations ; importance attaching to 
 the wrong things ; darkness unaccountably held to bo 
 light; everything 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 esteem- 
 ing 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 tins. 
 It locks upon God as wronged, and outraged, and ia 
 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 honour. Its 
 eyes are opened to see what common men cannot see. 
 It beholds God concerned and implicated, where others 
 cannot perceive so much as a vestige of religion being
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 231 
 
 in question. It sees God everywhere, as if His omni- 
 presence 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 dis- 
 cretion 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 dolours; 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 sinner*, 
 as it is depicted in the divine Dialogue of S. Catherine 
 of Siena, is the food of its soul. The Sacred Heart is 
 the object of its predilection. It is ever telling God 
 how sorry it is for sin. It has a grand gift of abiding 
 contrition for its own sins, and takes a holy pleasure in 
 self-revenge. It lends God its eyes to weep rivers day 
 and night for sins that are not its own. The seven 
 dolours 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 emi jently filial. 
 The atmosphere of its heart is a spirit of reparation ;
 
 232 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 noviciates 
 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, true 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 con- 
 templative Mary delights in that love of condolence, 
 which is such a favourite love with cloistered souls, 
 the love of gratitude better suits the external diligence 
 of the active Martha. The love of gratitude is pre- 
 eminently 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 large lv into the composition 
 >f 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; 
 mi hid abiding sorrow for sin is a sort of affectionate
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 233 
 
 and self- reproachful reaction from his wonder at the 
 abundant loving-kindness of God. The huieousness of 
 sin is all the more brought out, when the 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 i.4 
 service. It is constantly on the look out for opportu- 
 nities, and makes them when it cannot find them, 
 to testify its allegiance to God ; not as if it was doing 
 any great thing, or as if it was laying God under any 
 obligation, but as if it was making pavment, part 
 payment and tardy payment, by little instalments, 
 for the immensity of His love. It 13 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 things of God. Happy the man, whose 
 lite 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
 
 23 L OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 celes- 
 tial 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 ardour of His extatic 
 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 honourable 
 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 de- 
 grees of intensity and purity. It is this love which is 
 heightened and made more exquisite by the treraulous- 
 ness of holy fear.* glorious constraints of this 
 
 * Beatus vir qui timet Dominum. Qua ratione beatus? Quia in mandatis 
 ejus cupit nimis. S. Ambrose. A similar statement, made by the author 
 fiome years ago in All for Jesus, was animadverted on as inaccurate. It had 
 not however been made without both thought and reading. The expression 
 of St. Paul, desideri.um. hahens dissolvi et.esse cum^Christo, is an act of the 
 love of desire, I from the force of terms, 3 on the ancient authority of St. Basil 
 de reg. fus. disput. cap. 2, 3 on the modern authority of Bolgeni. Amor di 
 Dio, p. i. c, ii, iii. and that such a love so expressed is an heroic love is 
 asserted on the authority of S. Thomas, 2. 2. qu. xxiv. art. 8. 9. This was 
 the authority 00 which the statement in All for Jesus was made, and in con
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 235 
 
 heavenly concupiscence! It is a love which makes us 
 not only desire God, but desire Him supremely above 
 all things. It makes us desire Ilim only, Ilim always, 
 and Him intensely ; and it allures us with untyrannical 
 cxclusiveness to seek Him in all tilings here, and to long 
 for Him as being Himself our sole, sufficient, and mag- 
 nificent 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 things 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 
 eubordinately to Ilim, and far below our longing ''or His 
 unspeakable recompense, which is Himself? There is 
 nothing to satisfy us but Go J alone. All things weary 
 us, and fade. He alone is ever fresh, and His love is 
 daily like a new discovery to our souls. sweet thirst 
 for God! Fair love of supernatural desire! Thon 
 canst wean us better far from earth, and teach us better 
 the nothingness of human things, than the cold, slow 
 experience of wise old age, or the swift sharp science of 
 suffering, loss, and painl 
 
 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. It is a love too quiet for benevolence, too 
 deep for complacency, too passive for condolence, too 
 contemplative for gratitude ; but which has grown up 
 cut of the loves of preference and desire, and is, besides, 
 the perfection of all the other loves. It is too much 
 
 sequence of the ciiticism on that passage, the references have been verified, 
 tne statement reconaidereJ, and the duc.rine of it here re-assertcd in its 
 natural place.
 
 236 OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 
 
 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 cogni- 
 zance 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. It v is oblivious of itself, as being 
 one with God. Its life is wonder, silence, extasy. 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 
 this love of adoration, all silently suffused, and flushed, 
 and mastered by a most exquisite repose, which can 
 come alone from that Beatific Vision which 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
 
 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 237 
 
 human heart. Truly it is little we can do for God, and 
 ret how immeasurably more than we have done for 
 Him as yet. A treatise mi^ht be written to reduce 
 these loves to practice,* and to illustrate them copi- 
 ously with the examples of the saints. But that is not 
 our object now. Has earth any pleasure, of an intellec- 
 tual, moral, or material sort, to compare with the frui- 
 tion 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 un- 
 wieldly 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 hea- 
 vens, and deluded the earth with slanting columns of 
 whirling rain. It 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 para- 
 bles, of which we might make so much? Ours is a 
 pilgrimage, a pilgrimage by night, beneath the gentle 
 moon, fiom west to east, from the sunset to the sunrise; 
 it is not like our natural life from east to west, from 
 
 * The reader must not confound these different kinds of love, wlrh the dif- 
 
 fereat ftaus of Jove expounded in mystical theology.
 
 233 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 
 
 youth to ago, from our rising to our setting; and we 
 shall best beguile the way, and let the storms go un- 
 heeded over, if we make God's " justifications our songs 
 in the house of our pilgrimage,'' and relieve our weari- 
 ness 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 loveli- 
 ness 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 J 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 givo 
 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 ?
 
 239 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 Causa diligemli Deura, Deus est: modus, sine raodo diligere. Est ce 
 hoc satis ? i'oitassis utique, sed sapieuti. S. 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 odour 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-embrac- 
 ing 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 Jerusa- 
 lem, like labourers 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
 
 210 CUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 on the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, and their placid obe- 
 dience 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 weari- 
 ness 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 truth no one act of that angelic worship is altogether 
 worthy of the Most High. The whole concourse of 
 marvellous 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 Plis 
 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 count- 
 less 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
 
 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OP GOD. 211 
 
 rest awhile his tired and shamefaced heart upon this 
 aDgelic 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 an 1 the love of God. Each 
 one of those seven loves which we considered in the 
 list chapter, is capable of almost as many changes and 
 as many dis:inct peculiarities, as there are souls on earth. 
 Take away the hours spent in sleep, the years before 
 the use of reason, the dotago 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 concur- 
 rence, 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 thou- 
 sands collected in the great manufacturing cities of tho 
 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- 
 teopled islands of the broad ocean, and those who dwell 
 near the arctic snows. If we bring before ourselves hill 
 and vale, the river side and wood, the sea shore and tha 
 pastoral plain, and remember how vast and various are 
 tho experiences of human joy and sorrow which aro 
 going on in almost every one of the numberless inequali- 
 ties of the earth's surface, we shall be overwhelmed by 
 the calculation of the human actions which are ever 
 being performed, 
 16 T
 
 212 OUr. ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 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 imper- 
 fect only, but hardly a benefit. While the tie, which 
 binds us to God as being our Last End, is at once the 
 cause of creation and its effect, the crown and consum- 
 mation of the whole work of God* We may be almost 
 said to belong more entirely to God by this last rela- 
 tionship 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 determinate intention the 
 fourfold glory of God as our Creator, Preserver, Re- 
 deemer, 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 
 irhen our spirits are all freshly bathed in the cold foun-
 
 OUH ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 213 
 
 tains cf holy fear, we look up to God with cliild-like 
 
 and well-pleased awe, as our all-holy judge and omni- 
 potent 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 obJ2ctions. 
 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 
 which 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 
 6top until we come to God. He is not one of our 
 ends, but the end of ends, our only end. There 1" none 
 other end but He. All thicga else are means. It is 
 this truth which simplifies our lives, and which simpli- 
 fied 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 
 everywhere 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 
 irest where alone we can lie down without fear and sleep 
 sweetly. He in His inaccessible splendour is the beau- 
 tiful night wherein no man works, but when the weary 
 labourer reposes from his toil in everlasting bliss* He
 
 244 otm ACTUAL LOVE of god. 
 
 is the cool and fragrant evening, in whose endless sunsefc 
 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 extatic 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 mul- 
 titude of such actions on the earth, the pains endured, 
 the sorrows borne, the anxieties combated, the tempta- 
 tions resisted, the words spoken, the thoughts thought, 
 the actions done, all of which the heart of man can 
 multiply and vary and complicate well nigh a hundred 
 times a minute? All these things 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 super- 
 natural holiness impressed upon them, according to the 
 four different titles under which we may refer them to 
 God as our Creator, Preserver, Kedeemer, and Last End. 
 But alasl 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, capablo 
 of cultivation, where corn and wine and oil might como 
 abundantly from the bosom of the earth, and flowers 
 bloom, and tall forests grow, and cattle feed, but which 
 now is little else. k 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
 
 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD, 245 
 
 feebleness of our own worthless endeavours, we turn to 
 the world of angelic actions, and feed ourselves upon 
 its fragrant and refreshing fulness, we uot only soon 
 come to feel how far below the majesty of God is even 
 that trauseendent worship, but we rest at last on human 
 acts as after all the sole exclusive adequate worship ot 
 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 Incompre- 
 hensible 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 re- 
 peated, in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We would 
 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 service of the Sacred Heart turns out to be in fact 
 His own ? O no ! rather let us bless Him again and 
 again that He is euch a God that none can worship 
 Him as He deserves, that all which is good is at last 
 discovered to be either Himself or at least Ilis owq > 
 that all beautiful things come out of His goodness,
 
 245 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OP GOD. 
 
 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 sanc- 
 tuary. 
 
 But we must strive to enter more minutely into the 
 labyrinth of our own manifold un worthiness. 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 enquiry was but a preface 
 to this 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 this world of human 
 actions what sort of proportion does He receive, and 
 with what dispositions is the tax paid ? Let us try 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 manner 
 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, com- 
 prising 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 thing which strikes us about the saints is the 
 extraordinary fewness of them. Those who are canon- 
 ized bear no sort of proportion in any one generation to
 
 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 217 
 
 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 extraordinary sanctity 
 hidden in the silent cells of the Carthusians, or in other 
 lives, cloistered or not, of singular abasement and abjec- 
 tion, 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 death-bed 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 overwhelm- 
 ingly 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 fervour 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 cf their number which. 
 we must consider. We must think also of the immen- 
 sity 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
 
 213 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OP GOD. 
 
 are deluged. Now all this is God's own outlay. It is 
 what He spends in order to obtain saints ; and if we 
 measure extraordinary heights of sanctity by the great- 
 ness 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 miracu- 
 lously healed. So we may almost define a saint to ba 
 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 ia 
 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 served. 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 fulness, 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 gener-
 
 OrB ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 219 
 
 osity of selfsacrifice, are the pas'.ures in which Ilis glory 
 is to feed. Yet even here how poor, how 6canty, how 
 irregular is the return of the creature to the All-merciful 
 Creator ! He has all the work to do Himself which lie 
 pays them for doing ; and when they have somewhat 
 marred the beauty of His design, lie accepts their woik 
 as if on the one hand lie did not perceive its imperfec- 
 tion, 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 re- 
 deemed ! 
 
 If we turn from the 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, univer- 
 sal, incredible? Could the livep 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 them- 
 selves ? 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 com- 
 pletely overlook Him as to forget His existence, and to 
 live a9 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 honour to be at the
 
 250 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 pains to deny His existence ; and others only advert to 
 His perfections to dishonour 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 manifesta- 
 tion of His sovereignty, or even some beautiful dis- 
 closure of His tenderness, they are like possessed per- 
 sons. They are so exasperated as to forget themselves, 
 until their passion hurries them on to transgress, not 
 only the propiieties of language, but even the decorum 
 of outward behaviour. 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 over- 
 bearing 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 i3 
 safest to distrust Him. Discretion must be aware of
 
 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOJ>> 251 
 
 Him. Moderation must not be excited by TTim. Wo 
 must not let Him throw us out of our wise sobriety, 
 He has come to bargain with up, and we must be 
 vigilant, or we do not know to what we may be in- 
 duced to commit ourselves. "With such men their 
 first thought of God is to dishonour Him ; for how shall 
 a son doubt his father without doing him dishonour ? 
 
 There are others who are not by any means to be reck- 
 oned 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 6hape of uneasiness, per- 
 plexity, and doubt. They entertain suspicions against 
 the perfections of God's justice or the universality of 
 His compassion. When they hear of certain things, 
 j-alousy of God starts up as it were unbidden iu their 
 hearts. It is not so much that they have definite 
 intellectual difficulties in matters of faith. But they 
 J ave 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 in- 
 vigorating 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 thh. 
 nearest of any fact to a deep-sea sounding of our cor 
 ruption? 
 
 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
 
 252 OCR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 numerous, less onerous, than those under which wa 
 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 con- 
 dition 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 Saviour, our Judge, 
 upon whom we depend for everything, whose will is 
 the only one important tiling to us, whose Bosom is the 
 one only possible home for us, and He to be regarded as 
 6imply 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
 
 OL'R ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 253 
 
 quite sore thnt it is less dishonourable to God than 
 positive aversion ? 
 
 These are melancholy result?. Yet somehow they 
 ppur us on to try to do more for God ourselves, and tfc 
 1 >ve Him with a purer and more disinterested love. 
 Alas! if the saints are few in number, those who are 
 cither ignorant of God, or indifferent to Him, or have 
 an aversion to Him, are countless multitudes. Many 
 far regions of this beautiful world are peopled by 
 idolaters. The sacred places of scriptural Asia are 
 tenanted by the followers of Mahomet. Heresy and 
 Bchism usurp whole countries, which boast of the name 
 of Ci.ristian ; and even in Catholic lands, it is depress- 
 ing 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 fervour 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 prac- 
 tical, 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 endeavouring to 
 become. We distinctly aim at making religion the 
 great object of our lives. We are conscious to our- 
 selves of a real and strong desire to love God, and as 
 we grow older the desire grows stronger, and, to 6ay 
 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
 
 254 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 terror. We fear sin greatly, and we sometimes think 
 we almost hate it for its own sake, because it is ail 
 offence against so good a God. We have times and 
 methods of prayer. We examine our consciences. Wo 
 hear mass often. We visit the Blessed Sacrament. 
 We are devout to our Lady. We frequent the Sacra- 
 ments. 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 thou- 
 sands in the Church who are thus serving God. But 
 let us look a little more cl6sely 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 wq 
 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 spend- 
 ing 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 
 service 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 Sacra- 
 ment, 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 ? Further- 
 more, we kaow that it is essential to our love of God,
 
 OUH ACTUAL LOVE OF GOB. 255 
 
 that we should appreciate Hira above all things. Does 
 our practice show that this is anything but a form ot 
 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 splendour, 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 multi- 
 tudinous. If we reckon both the outward and the 
 inward ones, they are almost as numerous as the beat- 
 ings 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 vigour 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 mora- 
 ine 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 
 cur daily lives to be ? To use our national word, aro 
 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
 
 256 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD, 
 
 He gets He has to fight for. What is true of the world 
 at large, is true 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 mas- 
 tery over our affections. The preferences of our corrupt 
 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 wilfully, 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 docs God carry 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 free- 
 dom 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 fore- 
 thought, 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 exami- 
 nation be altogether what we should desire ? 
 
 All these are childish and elementary questions to 
 ask ourselves. Yet the results are far more melan- 
 choly than when we contemplated the ignorance, aver-
 
 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OP GOD. 257 
 
 cioo, 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 splendours of heavenly truth, and our hearts led 
 sweetly captive by the winning mysteries of the In- 
 carnation. Our lives are charmed by great sacra- 
 ments, and we are each of us the centre 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 
 Ilim above all things, or as to the proportion of our 
 numberless actions which is for Him, or as to our pre- 
 ference 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. O 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 incom- 
 parable tenderness, and seemingly exaggerated com- 
 passions 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 alle- 
 giance 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 spiiitual life a cruel delusion? 
 And are we not after all the enemies, and not the friends, 
 of God? no) faith comes to our rescue. All is 
 
 17 r
 
 258 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 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 for- 
 bearance, 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 true 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. la 
 the last respect it cannot do so, because God is so infi- 
 nitely beautiful and good that anything like exaggera- 
 tion 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
 
 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 259 
 
 ODe or more of its special characteristics and depart- 
 ments. 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 lie 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. 
 Oar whole demeanour 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 intermit i ingly, though perseverance is what He 
 60 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 any tiling better >han 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 unmis- 
 takeably 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 vain-glory and self-
 
 SCO OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD, 
 
 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. 
 It 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 unblem- 
 ished love! 
 
 Then again we exaggerate our own services, in 
 thought if not in words; and this shows itself in our 
 demeanour. True love never thinks it has done 
 enough. Its restlessness comes from the very uneasi- 
 ness 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 the temp- 
 tations 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 the 
 Creator's point of view the creature's only point of
 
 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 261 
 
 view, and that he would not be a creature were it 
 otherwise. Another unsatisfactory 6ign is, that, ordi- 
 narily 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 coexist with an un- missionary 
 spirit.* 
 
 But we all of us have times when we love God more 
 
 than usual, times of fervour, 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 corner of our hearts where some 
 
 favourite weakness lurks in the shade, and which 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 unlover-like 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 rela- 
 
 • Yet see the doctrine of Richard of St. Victor and Da Ponta quoted ia 
 Growth in Holiness, chap. vi.p. 94, StconJ Edition,
 
 262 OUR ACTUAL LOYE OF GOD. 
 
 tions to God are full of them. Our coldness and His 
 love, Hi? forbearance and our petulance, — we hardly 
 know which is the most strange, the most inexplicable. 
 If we cor.iider 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 
 dishonour to His beautiful creation? Or will He turn 
 from our proffered service with anger, or at least with 
 a contemptuous indifference? We cannot easily un- 
 derstand 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 recompenses 
 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 gener- 
 osity; 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
 
 OUR ACTUAL iajVE OP GOD. 2G3 
 
 has eternally predestinated, and then called out of 
 nothing, the objects of His choice and predilection. 
 Vet God does not seem to feel our coldness and per- 
 versity. Rather He appears to prize what we give 
 JHim, 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 chil- 
 dren, league together to make it up to Him ? Angels of 
 heaven ! why is your worship of that Blessed Majesty 
 aught else but tears ?
 
 264 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVEt 
 
 Signore, volete dare per quello, che facciamo per voi, plu di quello che 
 potete fare; e non potendo voi fare voi medesimo, restate solamente 
 soddisfatto con dare voi medesimo: stnpendo caso! che il Creatore non 
 ritrovi in tutta la sua onnipotenza, cosa, che possa fare in aggradimento 
 dl qualsivoglia cosa, che fa un giusto per suo amore, Nuremberg, 
 
 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 accept- 
 able 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 the mountain top, in the still forest or 
 the crowded city, there are many who in the retirement 
 of their cell, or before the Blessed Sacrament, are sigh- 
 ing 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 horror of the sins which are daily 
 committed against His holy law. Some are saddened
 
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 265 
 
 because those who by their faith know God so well, 
 love Him with such carelessness and pusillanimity. 
 Some, who are wont to make His resplendent attributes 
 the objects of their daily contemplation, murmur be- 
 cause 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 manifes- 
 tations 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 thanksgiv- 
 ing 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 con- 
 tented, 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 
 6 imulates 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 low* st 
 offering of the creature's love, so it is, that His magnifi- 
 cence repay 8 our love with rewards of the most over-
 
 266 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 whelming 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 in- 
 gratitude 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 beau- 
 tiful 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 for- 
 gotten 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 unwor- 
 thy 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 rajs of light are full of dust and dimness, and do 
 not approach to the real beauty of the Creator. Thug 
 it is that we cannot take a step in this land of divine 
 love, but 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 cor- 
 respondence to the grace we had before. We are con- 
 tinually drinking fresh draughts of immortal life in 
 the Sacraments, which we are allowed to repeat and 
 lenew day after day. But we are so accustomed to all
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 2G7 
 
 I 
 this, that we can scnrcely realize the miracles of com- 
 passion 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 stimulat- 
 ing us to higher things. 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 ser- 
 vices. For the recompense full often comes before the 
 deed, and as our good works are not sufficiently numer- 
 ous 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 mystery of a 
 Contented God, with His blessed wrath appeased and 
 His all-holy justice satisfied, can only be explained by 
 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 explained ? 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 compas- 
 sions, 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 perfec- 
 tions 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 lovii g 
 heart finds heaven even while on earth ! It is a day to
 
 263 IN WHAT WAY GOO REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 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 posses- 
 sion 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 u8 
 enquire when He repays us, with what He repays us, 
 and in what manner He repays us. We shall find fresh 
 motives of love at every step in the enquiry. 
 
 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 tha 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 
 endeavours and less precious in the possession, than one 
 single particle of sanctifying grace. Yet, let us suppose 
 that a momentary temptation has assailed us, and we 
 have resisted it, or that we have lifted up our hearts for 
 an instant in faith 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 invisibly, 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
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 269 
 
 additional degree of sanctifying grace represents and 
 ■ecnrefl 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 marvellous and mysterious disclosure of the 
 divine magnificence and liberality. It is assuredly 
 most probable, if it is not certain,* that each addi-. 
 tional 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 glory. But each addi- 
 tional degree of sanctifying grace is not a mere enrich- 
 ing 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 are 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 myste- 
 rious 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 
 
 * Cf Suarez de Beatitudine, Dlsp. vi. Sect. I. n. 13. Also Dc Gratia, lib. ix. 
 
 cap iii. 23. Dico ergo gradu-* omnes gratiaa, quos Justus per actus remissos 
 
 charitatis meretur, statim sine ulla dilatione. nullave spectata dLspositione, 
 
 illi conferri, ac provide justura non solum per omnes hos actus mcreri, 6ed 
 
 fctium statim consequi t>use gratire augmenturu. Lut it is a question.
 
 270 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 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 Tliem some contact with the soul more per- 
 sonal, more intimate, more real, than that which ex- 
 isted 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. 
 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 justifica- 
 tion. 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, this celestial mansion in our 
 souls, this new and ever new mission of the Divine 
 Persons, which we cannot 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 seek- 
 ing in our actions the glory and the will of God.* Nay, 
 
 * Billuai t de Tiinitat, vi. 4.
 
 IN WHAT TV AY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 271 
 
 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. * 
 
 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 antici- 
 pating 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 
 
 * 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 indivisi- 
 ble. There is a beauty, which we can only half see, about these relations, 
 which, to judge from the explanations of theologians, baffles words, or a3 
 soon as it is put into words seems dangerous to dogma. See Schwetz. Theol. 
 Dogmat. i. 361. The following passage from S. Cyril of Alexandria, is the. 
 more remarkable as coming from a post-nicene father: 
 
 Kx! itrn (a\v xxd' uTotrrxinv Ihxfo trcXvruXuos o ■xxtt.o, oftotu; Ss xx) o vlor, 
 xx) to -xviZu-x- xXk' it ivbf tuv dttotx.xtr/x.ivcuv l^iou^yixh 6ikr,<ris, i<f 'otu th$ x* 
 XiyoiTO yivio-Qxi tu^ov ivi^ytiux pzv xutoZ, x\r,v hx xxo-v; kz irc " T ^> 
 Oioty.tos, xx) ryt v*l{ xt'io-iv Itrriv oltrlxs xroTiXio-px, xonov p\v ucrrl^ r., 
 :r?.r.v xx) IXlxSl \xxotoi Wftffirm Vfixov, u; ttx r$iuv vTOfTxirioiv kt^toi x* 
 xx) ihxSf txxffrr), xoXuriXiiaii l^oucvxxO' ixur/jv. ivi'pyu Teiyx°oZv i vxrr,*, 
 a.\Xx 2/ vloZ iv rviCfjLXTi, Ut^yCi xx) b vios- iXX us SZuxpi; roZ ffWTgSf, t$ 
 auroZ ri xxi Iv xutu tooufx.no; xx6' Oraf^lt Yoix'rx tvi'yn xxt to xhvux, 
 wnZfMi yxf IfTi tou Txrfb;, xU) t«u ni'ey, to xoXvTo-j'yiy.ov. — o. Cjl'lUi 
 Alexandr. de S. Trinit. dialog, si*
 
 272 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE., 
 
 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 as 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 world over at the same moment. Our very life is 
 joy, if we 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 
 unhappincss. It is seldom he would even give up his 
 own 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 marvellously God multiplies His graces 
 upon us in our joy, opening our hearts to love Him more 
 g nerously, enlightening our minds to see Him more 
 clearly, quickening our gratitude, giving us a surpris- 
 ing 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 wo -
 
 IK WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 273 
 
 full often receive a double portion of that dear grace, 
 which is well-nigh all our salvation, the grace of true 
 condition; for there is no contrition, which, for strength, 
 vhidness, and endurance, is like the contrition of a joy- 
 ous man. 
 
 Sorrow, too, when borne 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 way in which lie calculates our weakness, and then 
 measures out our sorrows, and then rains vehement 
 6torms of grace upon our fainting wills! But we only 
 see this now and then, and in dusky indistinct perspec- 
 tive. In eternity we shall behold our past life in God, 
 and what 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 
 tli an 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 bick upon chap- 
 ters of our past life about which we distinctly feel that 
 with our present grace we could not live them over 
 again, that the fruits of sorrow have always been ten- 
 fold brighter in the issue than the darkness was ever 
 deepened in the process, and finally that in the retro- 
 spect 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 
 19 depicted there, the winning look of blameless purity, 
 the impassioned intensity of their celestial love. With
 
 274 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 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 jewelled 
 crowns upon their heads, sorrow, keen and deep and 
 long, that unveiled for them the ever-beaming counte- 
 nance of God! 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 terri- 
 ble 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 Immacu- 
 late 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 bub 
 little of the sights and sounds, the tastes and touches, 
 of that last dark passage. There is a shroud of seem- 
 ing dishonour as well as mystery thrown around thafe 
 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 
 any one can die calmly ; the interests at stake are so 
 I rrific the moment so decisive, the horrors so thickly
 
 IN V>HAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 275 
 
 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 alleluias 
 6urprise 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 
 Lard 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 o[ ligation of dying persons to love God 
 Bupremely, and to repent of their sins with true con- 
 trition 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 
 reeded, few indeed died well ; and a cloud came over 
 tier 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*
 
 276 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OTJR LOVE. 
 
 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.* Let 
 us then tell each other this sweet doctrine, that our 
 hearts may burn more and more with love of so com- 
 passionate 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. Every one's mercies are so great that 
 they are, to him at least, rightly viewed, strange, won- 
 derful, and unexpected. God tries our faith, and seems 
 to delight in trying it, by the very reduplication of Hia 
 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 may be so sure of His paternal love, that they 
 may remember that eternity can be no long way off, anil 
 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 bkssings 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 
 arc simple expressions of the vastness of the Creator's 
 *■ Ap. Pennequin. Isagoge ad Aiaorem Divinum, p. 43.
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 277 
 
 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 har- 
 vest 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 pro- 
 vinces or separate worlds, which are full of the most 
 exquisite enjoyment to the creature; and we speak only 
 of enjojTiients, which, if through our frailty they are 
 dangerous as stealing our hearts from God, are yet alto- 
 gether 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 
 vigour, 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 is 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 scenery, the grandeur of the 
 mountains, the sublimity of the sea, the variety of fer- 
 tile landscape, the rain, the wind, the sunshine, an 1 the 
 storm. Every sense is an avenue of perpetual pleasure, 
 which, if we will, can raise the mind to God, and in- 
 flame our hearts with love. If we except the irregulari- 
 ties 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. 
 
 Bat the pleasures of the intellectual world are jet
 
 278 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 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 inter- 
 weaving of our thoughts, are full of boundless enjoy- 
 ment, leading us through realms and realms of truth 
 and beauty, and charming us at every turn with some 
 enchanting discovery. Through some minds the pure 
 delight of poetry thrills with feelings of the most inde- 
 scribable nature. \Vuh 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 colour, painting, statuary, and 
 architecture, are like copious fountains of power and 
 enjoyment streaming into them abundantly for ever. 
 "With many the labour of composition is. only a pain be- 
 cause of the very excess of the pleasure, which is more 
 than they can bear. The investigation of truth 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 marvellous 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 compli- 
 cated 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.
 
 W WHAT WAT GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 279 
 
 Indeed the joy of lovo 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 pas- 
 sion. There is no abyss sufficiently capacious to hold 
 the torrents of love, which one heart is able to out- 
 pour, except that se3 without horizon, bed, or shore, 
 the ever-blessed Being of God Himself, 1 The Holy 
 Ghost, the eternally proceeding Spirit, is the jubilee of 
 the Father and the Son ; and His shadow lies for ever- 
 more upon the moral world, 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 Godhead, the third Per- 
 son 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 which these worlds 
 furnish in their separate capacities. Why then do we 
 not worship more constantly and more intelligently ia 
 common daily things the wisdom of God, thus lending 
 itself to the strong will of His goodness in every depart- 
 ment of creation? Every orb in the immeasurable 
 fields of indistinguishable star-dust lies in the light of 
 God's outpoured and eveiflowing joy. Every created 
 intelligence drinks its fill of the fountains of His glad- 
 ness. Every instinct of animals beats with a pulsation
 
 280 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 of divine enjoyment. Every tree uplifts its head and 
 flings out its branches, every flower blooms and sheds 
 sweet odour, every 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 bless- 
 edness lies over the whole world, serenely shining, like 
 the waters of a spiritual sea beneath whose transparent 
 depths all creation with beautiful distinctness lie9. Thu9 
 in God's wide world there is no room for sin, no provi- 
 sion for sorrow, not a corner 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 in- 
 troduced it into the bright and happy world, we, who 
 by the freedom of our wills, which 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 which 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. It 
 is lost in the splendour of the kingdom of grace. Awhile 
 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,
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 231 
 
 habitually, powerfully, superabundantly, pouring into 
 us marvellous 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 uni* 
 verse. 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 which make such utterly new creatures 
 of us that the process can only be described as a being 
 positively born 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 splendours and unearthly powers, in which lie 
 hid the possibilities of the very highest sanctity. Tims 
 our souls are made as it were a musical instrument, 
 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 oi 
 Jesus is ravishing them this hour. Neither is this in- 
 strument 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
 
 282 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 spacious, fabric than he had built before. Most won- 
 derful too is it to behold how all this grace elicits and 
 magnifies the freedom of the will, and, while it sup- 
 ports 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 wonder- 
 ful as its nature. We live in an ocean of grace, as fishes 
 live in the deep sea. It is above, beneath, around us, 
 everywhere and overwhelmingly. It comes in floods, 
 which though they have sudden rises at times, are 
 always floods, and know no ebb or intermission. Its 
 coniinuity is another marvel which we must add to its 
 abundance. The want of duly reflecting upon this is 
 one cause of the pusillanimity which 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 unsuper- 
 natural apprehension some heavenly interference. This 
 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 possibili- 
 ties. It cannot he 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 which 
 it can combine with so much that is false and evil, and 
 its godlike importunity, the very thought of which is a
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 2S3 
 
 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 for- 
 gotten. If the saints have graces which we hardly 
 know how to name and classify, if no one man's grace 
 is like another's, what must we think of the wide- 
 spreading realms of angelical existence, and the seem- 
 ingly 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 out- 
 ward 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 wilfully im- 
 bibed, and after that pertinaciously refused the antidote, 
 which can destroy his soul, and even then with difficulty. 
 A man must struggle 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 king- 
 dom, 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 measur- 
 ed 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
 
 284 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 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 his 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 indistinct- 
 ly guess the exquisite delights of the glorified senses of 
 the risen body, or which is perhaps more true, under- 
 stand how their delicacy and charm must be beyond our 
 power of guessing. 
 
 Yet the heavenly joys of the illuminated understand- 
 ing 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 splendours through them to our minds, 
 cannot be thought of without our perceiving that the 
 keen pleasures and deep sensibilities of the intellectual
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAY 3 OUR LOVB. 285 
 
 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 pic- 
 ture to ourselves. To be rescued from all narrowness, 
 and for ever ; to possess at all times a perfect con- 
 sciousness of our whole undying selves, and to possess 
 and retain that self-consciousness in the bright lk'ht 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 
 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 iz all this compared with one hour, one 
 of earth's short hours, of the magnificences of celestial 
 love? O to turn our whole souls upon God, and souls 
 thus expanded and thus glorified ; to have our affec- 
 tions multiplied and magnified a thousand fold, 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 raptor-
 
 286 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 ously, 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 aud 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 dar- 
 ing vigour of our yearning adoration reach bejond the 
 sight of our most venturous imagining; — what is all 
 this but for our souls to live a life of the most intelli- 
 gent entrancing extasy, and yet not be shivered by 
 the fiery heat? There have been times on earth when 
 we have caught our own hearts loving Go 1, and there 
 was a flash of light, and then a tear, and after tint we 
 lay down to rest. O 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 manner of thing 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 splendours ; to be- 
 hold 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
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUH LOYE. 287 
 
 Son, and to participate ourselves in that jubilee of 
 jubilees, and drink in with greedy minds the wonders 
 of that procession, and the marvellous distinctness of 
 its beauty from the Generation of the Son ; to feel 
 ourselves with extatic awe and yet with seraphic inti- 
 macy 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 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, ocean9 
 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:— 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 true 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 
 6aint3. Ho 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
 
 2S3 IN WHAT WAI GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. . 
 
 we cannot fathom the depth of our own nothingness, 
 the horror of our own baseness, the inconceivable per-, 
 tinacity 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 obligation 
 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 mag- 
 nificence of the rewards of God. Only let us remem- 
 ber, 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 Divina . 
 Beauty. 
 
 While I stand in the presence of these mighty recom- 
 penses of our Creator, I am abashed by their exceed-, 
 ing 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 demeanour towards us, 
 His manner, His address, His courtesy, if I may for 
 the moment use such words. At first sight it is alto- 
 gether 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 
 lime its being right and suitable does not in the least;
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 289 
 
 detract from its gratuitous condescension. Nay, it 
 rather enhances it. In truth God's goodness is unliko 
 any other subject of human contemplation; for tho 
 more reasonable it appears to us, the more surprising 
 does it grow, as if, even now and here, it partook some- 
 what of the eternal freshness of the Beatific VisioD. 
 
 When the Creator of the world entered it in order 
 to redeem it, in the obscure midnight, in a gloomy 
 cavern, as the Bube of Bethlehem, it was an advent; 
 such as took the natural speculations of men by sur- 
 prise, and was even a hindrance to their belief. So 
 is it with God's demeanour 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 our? 
 escape His divine yet just exaggerations. In cur past 
 life there are thousands of forgotten prayers, thousands 
 }f resisted temptations ; but God has forgotten none 
 of them, ne repays them with a mindfulness which, 
 unless it also awakens love, can hardly fail to try our 
 faith. He must indeed desire our love, who tempts us 
 
 with an eternal reward for a cup of cold water givers 
 19 f
 
 290 IN "WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OTJH LOYE. 
 
 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 pro- 
 ceeding, 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 manner 
 more attractive, of an affection more winning, of a 
 solicitude more delightful, of a gratitude more touch- 
 ing, of an unselfishness more sweetly reproachful, of a 
 generosity more overwhelming, of a magnificence more 
 delicate, than this demeanour of the Creator towards 
 His creatures? And it is none other than the Creator, 
 the Boundless Ocean of Being, the abyss of unfathom- 
 able 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
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 291 
 
 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 hither- 
 to we have never done any good at all, but in which 
 we seriously, though with alarming self-distrust, intend, 
 if we survive, to begin to do good. And considering 
 the greatness of God and the vastness of our obliga- 
 tions 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 
 Bee 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 th^ 
 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 in-o triumph, because a half-converted sin- 
 ner 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 cf Hia creation into the
 
 202 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 ^hade, — 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. lie cannot demean Him- 
 self. Abasement is impossible to Him. Nothing can 
 sully His incomparable purity. Nothing can He do 
 which is not infinitely worthy of Him, worthy of Hi9 
 power, His wisdom, and His goodness. And therefore 
 this ^triumph, this feast of angels, over one sinner that 
 does penance, is altogether worthy of the adorable 
 majesty of the eternally blessed God ! 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 any thing 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. Mary 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, another 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 full 
 of various pleasures, and thought not of His goodness 
 out of which they come., Many times the. divine law
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. £93 
 
 came across that man's path, and when it did, he 
 6traightway, and with little reflection, transgressed it. 
 He loved luxury, denied himself nothing, and was not 
 over-bountiful to the poor. lie 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 his fellows. He had all that his 
 indolent ambition cared to have; and best of all, 
 he was blessed with almost unbroken health. There 
 ^as at last almost the weariness of satiety about his 
 nndeviatingly prosperous fortune. Disease came, and his 
 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, count- 
 ing 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 for- 
 getful 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 lie 
 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
 
 294 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 
 
 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 !* 
 
 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 Him- 
 self 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-Saviour, 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. Heavenly 
 
 * This imaginary case, put forward here as a mere theological possi. 
 bility, 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 Hosignoli'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 Ndvissimis. 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 endeavour 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 un- 
 toward 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, wheB 
 lying on their bed of death, witli the priest by their sides.
 
 IN WHAT WAY GOD BEPAY8 OUR LOVE. 295 
 
 Father! it is the greatness of Thy goodness which 
 hewilders our humility by mocking our knowledge of 
 ourselves; and that is the only difficulty we find in 
 Thee. May it grow still more difficult, still more beyond 
 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 reve- 
 lation of Himself. Thirdly, He so puts our interests 
 into His, that it is hard to look at His interests only, 
 i ithout 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 mystery. 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 learn all that is 
 in it; — God is love!
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.
 
 THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE. 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 L'estat fie la redemption vaut cent fois mieux que celuy de I'innocence. 
 
 S. Francis of Sales. 
 
 The result of the preceding enquiry has been at the 
 very least to satisfy us as to the fact that God lores us, 
 and as to the nature and character of His love. We 
 have seen that Divine love is at once creative, redeem- 
 ing, sanctifying, uncreated, and without respect of per- 
 sons. 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 them- 
 selves as slaves to evil. As sanctifying, it is incessant 
 in its visitations of grace, and marvellous in the heights 
 of sanctity to which it can raise those whom sin had 
 sunk so low. As uncreated, it is especially astonishing
 
 800 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 and adorable, and naturally includes, and while it in- 
 cludes surpasses, all created ties and all diversities 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 eter- 
 nity. 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 for ever, will nob 
 lightly withdraw His love. He will not easily sur- 
 render to His enemies a creature whom He has borne 
 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 6uch a retinue of graces, 
 such an attendance of angels, such an apparatus of sacra- 
 ments, that the self-will must be strong indeed which 
 can break away from God and lose itself. 
 
 He apparently consults our interests rather than Hi9 
 own, by making in reality the last identical with the 
 first. His first thought for sinners is to make repen-
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION*. 801 
 
 tance easy and light, and strange indeed are the thing9 
 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 fur the conve- 
 nience 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 6ide 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 enquired 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 s : ght at creation, and 
 we saw that our position as creatures made it important 
 to us to have these questions answered. But it may be 
 objected, All this is so much special pleading for God. 
 It does not state man's case fairly, because it does not 
 fitate it completely. There are certain phenomena 
 which are practical objections to thi3 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 rigiitly 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
 
 302 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 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 des- 
 pot, in possession of the most legitimate claims upon our 
 obedience, but bound by the rectitude of his own cha- 
 racter, as well as by our rights, to the exercise of com- 
 mutative 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 gain- 
 ing 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 ques- 
 tions about the origin of evil, or the existence of hell, or 
 the permission of idolatry, or the eternal destiny of 
 those outside the Church. We are speaking to the 
 children of the Church, and however dark such ques- 
 tions may be to them, or however worthy of their most 
 vigorous intellectual research, they have no right to be 
 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,
 
 TEE EASINESS OF SALVATION. o03 
 
 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 in- 
 directly 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 worldliness ; and these will occupy this and 
 the two following chapters. 
 
 It is objected that all that has been said of the crea- 
 tive 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 sal- 
 vation 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 con- 
 trary 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 penetrate even by guesses, because it has no 
 practical bearing upon our own service 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
 
 304 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION 
 
 favour of his salvation. This may not be true of him 
 at any given moment, as when he has just relapsed iuto 
 sin, or when he is enfeebled by a long wilful 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 favour 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 labour, 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 
 liaht.* 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 born of God over- 
 cometh the world ; and this is the victory which over- 
 cometh the world, our faith ?f 
 
 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 truth is continually exert- 
 ing 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 
 3£ not the fear of hell which draws men to aim at per- 
 
 * St. Matt. xi. 1 1. St. John v.
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 305 
 
 fection, 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 enquiry 
 will give us sweet and hopeful views of sir.ners, ic will 
 also humble, edify, and stimulate ourselves, if we are 
 trying to advance in the ways of God. 
 
 Let us tli en trace from the first the process by which 
 God vouchsafes to save a soul. Not many clays elar ; 2 
 after a child of catholic parents is born, 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 regen- 
 erated. Nothing can be more easy, or more instanta- 
 neous. 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 
 r-iture. He is the child of God. The Divine Nature 
 Las been communicated to him by sanctifying grave. 
 Extraordinary possibilities "of spiritual developments . 
 and earnests of everlasting life have been implanted in 
 him by certain mysteriously infused habits of the theo- 
 Icgical virtues, faith, hope, and charity, perhaps of the 
 other virtues also.* Seven other supernatural habits, 
 
 * Benedict XIV. (de Canonizat. 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 
 wheUier any moral virtues are given to us by infusion, and he answeri it 
 iffinsfttirely, lecause it is necessary tlmt effects should correspond propor- 
 20 -j.
 
 06 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 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 occa- 
 sions of his life, for his 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 his own, implies such a deter- 
 mined 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 char- 
 acter of divine impatience and facility. 
 
 The baptized child, when he comes to the use of 
 reason, finds himself under a code of laws, the object of 
 which is to secure his salvation by prescribing the con- 
 ditions 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 observ- 
 ance, at least easy under ordinary circumstances ; and 
 en the occasions when they are difficult, quite marvel- 
 lous assistances of supernatural grace are prepared and 
 
 tionately to their causes and principles. (Cf. Snlmanticenses 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. unic. art. 3.) A gloss on the decree of Clement 
 V. in the council of Vienne, gives these opposite opinions, and the questioa 
 |Of the connection between the habits of the theological and moral virtuesi3 
 (left open, because of the authority of those doctors who do not admit tin 
 infusion of the moral virtues in infant baptism. See also tao author's Easay 
 on Canonization, pp. 48, 43.
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALTATION. 307 
 
 Leaped 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 Bin, 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 ?eni d sins can make a 
 mortal sin, and that no habits of venial sin, however in- 
 veterate, 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 condition of the 
 creature seems to be untruthfulness. Every thing is 
 false arouud 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 siu. No number of lies 
 however wilful, 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 the faith than tho 
 mysteries either ot the Holy Trinity or the Eucharist. 
 Thus the remission of vcniul tin, one of the most into-
 
 308 TEE EASINESS OF SALVATION, 
 
 resting 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 
 'rom an autumnal tree. And what hosts of venial sins, 
 forgotten and unrepented of, may not a man possibly 
 take with him into the next world, as matter for the 
 fires of purgatory, and which can only delay, and not 
 prohibit, his entrance into glory 1 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 this leniency and make these singular allow- 
 ances 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 observa- 
 tion 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 
 idso of the doctrine of intention. What duty could 
 seem more simple on the part of a creature than a per- 
 petual application of mind and heart to his 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 every 
 one's prime occupation to, make his intentions actual. 
 All other, virtues will come along with this. Surprising
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 309 
 
 treasures of grace will be unlocked to us if we attempt 
 it. This one practice will turn darkness into light all 
 over our souls, and no sinful habit, however inveterate, 
 can exist in the atmosphere of this most glorious of all 
 spiritual exercises. Yet does anj one 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 Ids 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 ques- 
 tion of mortal sin. It is a fearful thing for the crea- 
 ture to turn away wholly from the Creator, and we can 
 well understand how it should at once destroy the life 
 cf 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, eo 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? This seems 
 inevitable, and yet it is not eo. Notwithstanding the
 
 810 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 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 superna- 
 tural habit, -which gives the soul the buoyancy and 
 elasticity requisite to its conversion. Now is it quito 
 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 for- 
 feited 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 may be 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 to-day, 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? O 
 Buch 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 land- 
 scape, such sweet remorses, sharp, but very, very 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
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 811 
 
 of preacher?, Bach solemn eloquence of the deaths of 
 those we love, such a nameless sensible thraldom of 
 God and grace and heavenly presences, which we never 
 can shake off: — all these, now with a very clamour of 
 assaulting armies, now with low, soft, and songlike 
 pleadings, are the forces of actual grace, wldch have 
 never been drawn off from before the gates of the heart, 
 however long they may have been obstinately barred 
 rgunst 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 per- 
 petual, unlimited iteration of the sacrament of pen- 
 ance. That there should be such a sacrament at all, 
 after the completeness and magnificence of Baptism, 
 i* 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 everflowing, 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 
 o^n 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 the course of a Ions: life? Yet this is not an extra- 
 vacant or fabulous case. Then again think of the com- 
 pleteness 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 ab 
 the same time it wakens to vigorous life again merits 
 that have been killed a hundred times by sin. How
 
 312 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 special, how ingenious, how peculiar, how unlike any 
 taing 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 always instanta- 
 neous. The word is spoken, and the work is done. 
 Bu f what is still more marvellous is the little which ia 
 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 pur- 
 pose of amendment akin to the heroism of martyr- 
 dom? 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 truth this enquiry 
 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 trou- 
 blesome 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 diffi- 
 culties 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
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 313 
 
 where the confessor exacts from the penitent more 
 convincing evidence of liis 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 He 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 fer- 
 tile 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 
 6in 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 multi- 
 plied, 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 purga- 
 tory are lighted up with the flames of vindictive love. 
 Thus a huge amount of imperfect charity shall bring 
 forth its thousands and its tens of thousands for heaven. 
 Redemption sl.all cover the whole earth, and be plenti-
 
 814 THE EASINESS OF SALTATION. 
 
 ful indeed, and the very unworthinesses and short-com- 
 ings of the creature shall only still more provoke the 
 prodigality of the Blood of the Creator. O 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. O 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 inter- 
 cessions; 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 impa- 
 tiently shortening the appointed time of those suffering 
 souls, and heaven and earth astir, as if some great 
 catastrophe had happened, because God Himself seemed
 
 TIIE EASINESS OF SALVATION. C15 
 
 M if He wished to cut short by swifter mercies that 
 last grand consummate invention of His creative love, 
 the quiet, unreluctant, beautifying pain3 of that cleans- 
 ing fire! 
 
 When God came to nis creatures visibly, He scanda- 
 lized 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 ? It is the same Jesus who ate with pub- 
 licans and sinners, who pleaded with the Samaritan 
 woman, who rewarded the humble petulance of the 
 Syro-Phcenician, who acquitted the woman taken in 
 adultery, who absolved the Magdalen, 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 
 60 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 Saviour'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 mea- 
 sure 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 astonish- 
 ing life-giving mystery. From the sacrilegious com- 
 munion and treachery of Judas to the little garden of
 
 316 TfeE EASINESS OP SALVATION. 
 
 Gethsemane, through the brook up the rugged steep to 
 Jerusalem, through the halls of Annas, Caiphas and 
 Pilate, and the court-yard 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 uncontroll- 
 able creative love to save your soul : and then put by 
 the side of it the requirements which are of obligation, 
 our necessary amount of love and worship of Him, tho 
 prescribed frequentation 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 popula- 
 tions 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 formed alliances for us with 
 Himself and the invisible world, and prepared a system 
 of auxiliaries, both outward and inward, so ingenious
 
 TEE BUSINESS OF SALTATION. S17 
 
 and wonderful, as to be a stumblingblock 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, super- 
 natural, 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 
 pome 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 bro- 
 therly affection, the thanksgiving of his startled speech- 
 less 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 light and love, so. that it is Jesus 
 all day long, courting our society, and mingling with 
 lis with an intimacy we get to understand less, and to 
 prize more, the longer it is vouchsafed, — surely this is 
 enough to supernaturalize the whole world, to make 
 lard things easy, and dark things bright, and throw 
 an invisible armour round us which will charm our 
 lives against the weapons and the wiles of hell. Bat
 
 o 
 
 13 TEE EASINESS OF SALTATION. 
 
 what shall we say of Communion? All ideas of famili- 
 arity with 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 wor- 
 ship which he can perform ! We need not stay to 
 follow out the many-1'ountained grace of a good Com- 
 munion, nor to see how it branches out into every 
 faculty of the soul, every power of the mind, every 
 affection of the will, every 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 many 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 sses God and enjoys the bewil- 
 dering splendours of His Face even there, where he is, 
 nearer to us than the limits of our outstretched arms. 
 An unseen warfare is raging round our steps: but that 
 beautiful bright spirit lets not so much as the sound
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 819 
 
 cf it vex our ears. He fights for us, and asks no 
 thanks, lut hides his silent victories, and continues to 
 gaze on God. His tenderness for us is above all 
 words. His cffice will last beyond the grave, until 
 at length it merges into a still sweeter tie of some- 
 thing 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 
 cf 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 were patrons 
 of the holy souls whom we have liberated from pur- 
 gatory, those holy souls now saints as well: 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
 
 820 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 and suitableness of His loving artifices and delicately 
 suited vocations. They see the dangers which threaten 
 us, the temptations which penetrate furthest into us, 
 the graces which are weakest 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 with 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 
 which she does not interest herself for us. A thousand 
 times and more has she mentioned our names to God 
 in such a sweet persuasive way, that the Heart of Jesus 
 sought not to resist it, though the things she asked were- 
 very great for such as we are. She has been in the 
 ercret 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 dolours 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 splendours. Angels envy 
 us a love which in their case cannot be, as ours is, iden- 
 tical in kind with that which the sinless Mother had for 
 her adorable Son. But it is not the poetry of this 
 thought on wliich we need to dwell, bright revelation as
 
 1EE EASINESS OF SALVATION'. 021 
 
 it is once more of God's creative love, but on the real 
 help, the substantial support, the immense solid advan- 
 tages, the positive efficacy, of this love of Mary in the 
 matter of our salvation. 
 
 Then we have the power of prayer ourselves. We 
 care not dwell much on this. But of how many theo- 
 logical controversies is the grace of prayer the secret 
 and the key 1 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 accom- 
 modate 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. In- 
 tellectually 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 
 lite, 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 experi- 
 ence 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
 
 322 THE EASINESS OP SALVATION. 
 
 power, and the echo is heard in our hearts almost before 
 the inward prayer is breathed, and the sounds of bluster- 
 ing temptation are hushed within, and the big drops oi 
 the impetuous rain of grace are falling thick and fast 
 upon us. It will be one of the joys of heaven to learn 
 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 un- 
 speakably 'adorable will of God. 
 
 Even dead things have a wizard life put into them, 
 and help us on our road to heaven. Dumb things have 
 a voice, and inanimate things lay strong hands on us, 
 and turn us round to Cod. 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 things 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 favour of the accomplishment of that dear 
 Will ? 
 
 We have already considered the sacraments of bap- 
 tism, penance, and the eucharist. But there are other 
 sacraments which deserve special notice as auxiliaries 
 to us in the work of our salvation. Just when boy- 
 hood is taking us out into the world, and when the 
 first-fruits of our young independence are at once so
 
 THE EASINESS OP SALVATION. 323 
 
 clangorous and so dear, the sacrament of confirmation 
 steps in, teals 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 Tiinity. 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 most 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 ruin 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 sacra- 
 ment ; it is almost the longest reach and the most de- 
 terminod grasp of our sweet Saviour's arm, when He 
 was bent to rescue His dear souls from the fiery ordeal 
 cf 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
 
 324 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION, 
 
 heavenly unguent for his last dire combat, and enalla 
 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 earthly 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 turn- 
 ed 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 con- 
 juncture 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 con- 
 trived? 
 
 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 
 hundred-fold 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 impetration by which, 
 even while we are unconscious and forgetful of it, our 
 prayers acqviire a new vigour and exercise a greater in- 
 fluence over the adorable will of God. When we con- 
 sider 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 very vileness is an
 
 TIIE EASINESS OF SALTATION. 325 
 
 incessant supplication to the greatness of our Creator, 
 we shall see how this mysterious power of impetration, 
 hung upon our lives, must aid us in attaining heaven. 
 Of ourselves it would seem as if we were the most un- 
 likely 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 reserves. But this power of impetration 
 makes us really worthy to be heard, and is a sort of in- 
 visible beauty glowing in our lives on earth, anticipating 
 that consummate loveliness which gives the 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 in- 
 cessant and universal. We can hardly get out of the 
 way of it, if we are perverse enough to try. The pro- 
 cess of touching our materials with this heavenly grace 
 is so easy and simple, that by use it becomes almost
 
 326 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 natural to us, and except for the warm feeling of lova 
 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 intolera- 
 bly and flashing with angry splendour 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 Saviour 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 unillu mined 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 6hould be 
 allowed to steep the slightest of our ordinary inconve- 
 niences, the trouble of getting up in the morning, the 
 celdness of the east wind, the heat of the summer sun, 
 or the insignificant self-denial of d kind action. — that 
 we should be allowed to steep these things in the Blood
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 327 
 
 of the Incarnate Word, and make them strong, vigor- 
 ous, and heaven- reaching satisfactions for our sins, is 
 marvellous 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 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 impetration gives 
 us influence over Him for others as well as for our- 
 selves. 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 in- 
 exhaustible, 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 consist 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 satis- 
 factions 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 alle- 
 viates the suffering, as the case may be. Nay, if Ho 
 will, He allows us to alienate the satisfactions which wo 
 really need ourselves, and bestow them upon oihers, as
 
 823 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION . 
 
 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 labour of saving the world which He created 
 without any labour at all. He multiplies saviours, by 
 making us saviours 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 suf- 
 fering, in the simple pressure of pain, in the sheer tor- 
 tures of mental anguish, in the very weight of lal our 
 and weariness of endurance, a secret underground vir- 
 tue which is not without its own peculiar acceptable- 
 ness to the justice of God. It 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 irregulari- 
 ties 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 unutterable 
 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 
 eoft 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 
 
 • It is not meant hero that there is not satispassion in the sufferings of 
 ^iose who are not in a state of prace, or indeed of the heathen. Yet evea 
 this may be In some way foi Christ's iake, anJ b.-cause of the Incarnation.
 
 THE EASINESS OP SALVATION. 329 
 
 while she slept, communicates 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 odour 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 bless- 
 ed 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 salva- 
 tion 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 
 lis 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 tempta- 
 tion to disobedience. So it will occasionally come across 
 us in our meditations that God does Himself an injury 
 by all this prodigality of His love, that He makes Him- 
 self 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
 
 830 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 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 tempta- 
 tion to unbelief, and on the other an allurement to pre- 
 sumption. We know such thoughts are sins, if we 
 deliberately entertain them; and when we do not enter- 
 tain 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 be- 
 cause they will not comply with its indulgent requisi- 
 tions. 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 
 lias 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?
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 031 
 
 But salvation is not only easv 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, 
 find nothing interests us so much as a thin^ in which 
 our own welfare is manifestly and deeply involved. 
 Tiiis will become evident to us if we compare the plea- 
 sures 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 conti- 
 nuity 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 
 fubject 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 
 things were wont to grow, and unlike Christian suffer- 
 ing, 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. It causes us to be peevish both 
 with ourselves and others ; and to a peevish man liis 
 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
 
 832 THE EASINESS OP SALVATION. 
 
 man who is not in a state of grace. They involve loss 
 of time, waste of life, diminution 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 unhelief 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 alto, 
 gether, as well as the world which is to come, it i 
 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 accom- 
 panies 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. It 
 has positively given us this world, while it was in the
 
 TEE EASINESS OF SALTATION. 833 
 
 act of transferrins to us the other. And is not salva- 
 tion 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 perfec- 
 tions 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 gran- 
 deur 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 sinner is never complete v.i'hout the fear of hell. 
 Oiherwise the work cannot be depended on. It has a 
 flaw in its origin, a seed of decay in its very root. 16 
 is unstable and insecure. It is shortlived and unper- 
 severing, like the seed in our Saviour's parable which 
 fell upon a rock, sprung up for a season, and t!:en 
 withered away. Hell teaches us God, when we are
 
 334 TEE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 too gross to learn Him otherwise. It lights up tho 
 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 practising 
 the most disinterested love. There is no habitual state 
 in which the spiritual life can rest and stay itself up 
 in those thin atmospheres. Besides which, there can be 
 no bounds safely set to the self-distrust which the great- 
 est saints should have, and are the most likely to have, 
 of themselves. This 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 severities of hell. 
 There are times when we faint and are inclined to relax 
 our upward straining, our climbing of the steep moun- 
 tain of God. Spiritual sweetnesses and periodical 
 absences of temptation often unnerve us for fresh 
 attacks of the Evil One. We come to do thing9 in a 
 slovenly and remiss way from long habit. While we 
 grow in merits we are getting hugely into debt to the 
 greatness and the multitude of God's mercies, and thi3 
 At times uaeobers us. Moreover sanctity cannot grow,
 
 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 335 
 
 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 U3 better. 
 Next to a very 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 im- 
 pulse heavenwards. The false delicacy of modern times 
 in keeping back the scaring images of hell, while in 
 the case of children it has often marred a whole educa- 
 tion, 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 some- 
 thing 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 coruscations 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 
 nerves. If we see God now through a glass darkly,
 
 336 TEE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 
 
 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 
 which a simple soul acquires from reposing even on the 
 undeveloped thought ot 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 eartli drawing us with magneti'3 
 force into the spheres of its own abounding light; and 
 what is heaven but the locality we give to that dear 
 glory of our Incomprehensible and Omnipresent Father, 
 in whose embrace we long to hide ourselves for very 
 love ? 
 
 I conclude therefore that God is bent on saving ns, 
 that salvation is easy in itself, easy because of its helps, 
 easy because of the terrors of being lost, and easy be- 
 cause of the attractiveness of its own rewards. This 
 is my answer to those who object to the picture I have 
 drawn of God's creative love. It is founded upon 
 common truths which everybody knows, truths which 
 strike us the more, the more by assiduous contempla- 
 tion of His attributes we come to know the God to 
 whom we belong. It is drawn from the distinct state- 
 ments 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 honourable to tha 
 Creator.
 
 337 
 
 CHAPTER IT. 
 
 THZ GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 Israel! quam magna est domus Dei.— Baruch. 
 
 It is sweet to think of the web of love which God 13 
 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 en- 
 larges 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 circum- 
 stances, and those are well nigh numberless, are not so 
 many as the varieties of His sedulous affection. Tha 
 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 
 6cience 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, 
 iho most fanatical delusion, the most stolid insensibility, 
 
 22 !*
 
 338 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 
 
 and, even for these, arranging all tilings with the exqui- 
 site 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 liko 
 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 true 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 trans- 
 figured with the daily Mass. There is all heaven busy, 
 as if time were too short for it, with a hundred occupa- 
 tions 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 i£ 
 His Sabbath after creation were long since past. Thera 
 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, death-beds to be attended ; 
 and the bright throngs in heaven, like some religious 
 Order of Mercy, are busy at them all. O happy we J 
 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 catho- 
 lics. We will not advert, however distantly, to those 
 outside the Church. People tempt themselves about 
 them, and play tricks with their gift of faith, fox
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 839 
 
 which they ought to bo thanking God their whole 
 lives long. We have no business to concern ourselves 
 with God's relations to others: however wistfully the 
 t s 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 objec- 
 tion to be made, that if salvation is easy, then practi- 
 cally we ought to find that most catholics are saved. 
 It is not enough to say that though salvation is easv, 
 the corruption of man is so tremendous that little 
 conies 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 corruption. The ques- 
 tion is one of too momentous a character, of too thrill- 
 ing an interest, for us to be content with mere rhetoric. 
 Wo 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 questioD, we must be 
 allovred o 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 en- 
 quire, in the hope of finding fresh traces of His omni- 
 present love : but for no other reason than this. We 
 may enquire that we may love; we may net enquire 
 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 truth* 
 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 ifi
 
 $40 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVEIIS. 
 
 as to a work of mercy. Outside the Church the dread- 
 ful error of the day, which is ravaging the hearts of 
 men, is a forgetfuiness that they are creatures. They 
 eeem 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 crea- 
 tures. 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. Bub 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 difficulty 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 
 60 humble that it is a shame to call it by so hard a name 
 as perversity. We believe it to be an habitual inca- 
 pacity 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 incau- 
 tious reading of newspapers, or by an absorbing interest 
 in the politics of the day, or by being mixed up witii 
 the existing commercial system of the world, or by not 
 having always been catholics, or by having misused the 
 £rst graces of conversion, or from sheer want of gener- 
 osity with God. But it is a shadow, or an echo, or a 
 ■taint in the believer's heart, of the prevailing pestilence
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 341 
 
 of modern society. Just as in the presence of a cog- 
 nizable plague we have frequently a mild form of some 
 congenial disease, so does the sickness of the times in- 
 fect 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 com- 
 posed 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 
 cur compassionate Creator. 
 
 It may be said that the view contained in the pre- 
 ceding 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 truth is it which forms the chief part of 
 the suffering to the souls just now described? It is 
 that they will obstinately look orly 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 per- 
 tinaciously extend the difficulty by bringing in a num- 
 ber of problems, in the solution of which they indivi- 
 dually have no interest at all, and which 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 sharp-
 
 842 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 ness 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 ua 
 patiently through the brighter considerations which 
 commend themselves to an opposite temper and dispo- 
 sition, 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, wo 
 seem to be exaggerating, from the mere fact that we 
 do not mention other, and perhaps opposite, considera- 
 tions 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 things 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 vigour of His grace. Thus when 
 *we speak of deathbed graces, it is not that, because of
 
 THE GIIEAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 345 
 
 the pitifulness of the pains of death, God consents to bo 
 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 favour without that inward vital 
 change of the sin-loving or world-loving heart, that 
 radical work in the soul, implied in real interior repent- 
 ance. But we judge from what we see that it frequently 
 pleases Him in that great hour so to reinforce the opera- 
 tions of grace as to counterbalance, and more than 
 counterbalance, the physical disadvantages under whieh 
 the spiritual processes of the soul would otherwise have 
 laboured 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 
 transformation of heart, on the part of those who may 
 be favoured 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 enquiry must be to deepen his sacred fear 
 and to stimulate him to greater earnestness. All exhi- 
 bitions of the excesses of God's love produce these 
 results, else would the very Bloodshedding upon Calvary 
 be an encouragement to men to sin. I believe no man. 
 would be less likely to trust to a death-bed conversion, 
 than one who had witnessed such a conversion. lie
 
 344 THE GBEAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 would so tremble to see so much resting on so little, 
 Buch a peculiar, dubious, intricate, abnormal strife, such 
 a terrible swinging of eternal interests on such an un- 
 steady balance, such a miraculous rescue of a soul hang- 
 ing more than half over the edge of such abysses, that 
 he would be the most likely of all men to fulfil after- 
 wards the apostle's injunction of passing the time of 
 his sojourning here in fear. If any of us therefore rise 
 up from the enquiry 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 remem- 
 ber that we are not laying down the law, and that the 
 necessities of many souls have beguiled us into an 
 enquiry, upon which of ourselves we should never have 
 dreamed of entering.* 
 
 * 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 baveMassillon, Bourdaloue, 
 Le Jeune, Lacordaire, Segneri, the Blessed Leonard of Port Maurice, and 
 indeed almost all Italian Quaresimali, treating of this alarming subject. la 
 practical and popular treatises, for reading, we have Drexelius, Bellarmine, 
 llecupitus, D'Argentan, Bossuet in his Meditations, Bail, Da Ponte, and our 
 own Clialloner, whose meditations have been translated into various lan- 
 guages. 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,
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 315 
 
 There seems to bo a sort of dishonesty in putting 
 forward the view which is to occupy this chapter, with- 
 out 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 t into account also — and not only 
 taking heretics into account, but also the baptized in- 
 fants 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, Raiz, Smising, Drexelius, and perhaps Molina, 
 as holding this opinion, together with most of the 
 Fathers of the Church.* Sylvester, Carthagena, Grana- 
 dus, Franciscus de Christo, are quoted on the other side. 
 Suarez, who on the whole seems to bo on the milder 
 
 Qusestio lisec (de numero salvandorum) non minus est utilis quam cnriosa. 
 Also the Tesori di confidenza in Dio, published at Rome by the Propa- 
 ganda press, in 1840, discusses the question at great length. Parte 
 Seconda. 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. tho data 
 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, 
 
 • Yet an eminent patristic scholar informs me that this is by no means 
 the case with the Fathers, especially as to tho interpretation of tho con- 
 tested passages of Scripture.
 
 846 THE GEEAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 side, in one place expressly includes the infants, and so 
 does Lorinus, in his commentary on the hundred and 
 thirty-eighth psalm.* 
 
 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, " Ifc 
 is a doubtful matter ; but I think a distinction should 
 be made. By the name of Christian we may under- 
 stand 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 num- 
 ber of those who die well. But if by Christians we 
 understand those only who die in the Catholic Church, 
 ifc 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 jus- 
 tification, the time left them is so short that they can 
 easily persevere, and do so, without any fresh mortal 
 
 * Recupitns de num. pisedes. cap. ii. Hi.
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 3-17 
 
 sin. Therefore, all things considered, it is probable 
 that the majority of Christians in this stricter sense are 
 saved.''* 
 
 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.f Even Billuart will not allow to the 
 Theologians quoted by Recupitus any more certain 
 foundations for their opinion than for that of their adver- 
 saries. J Cornelius a 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. § 
 The Blessed 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. || St. Alphonso 
 on the contrary says, in his Istruzione ai predicatori, 
 that be 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.1T 
 
 According to the rigid view, if the deceased baptized 
 
 * Suarez lib. 6. De Comparat. praedest. cap. 3. n. C. 
 
 t Vasq. in primam partem disp. 101. cap. 4. 
 
 % Billuart, De certitud. praedest. diss. 9. art. 7. 
 
 § For the argument of the fewness of the saved taken from the Fathers, 
 see a dismal work published at Rorne in 1752, entitled Fugginius de paucitate 
 adulturuin fidelium salvaudorum. 
 
 || Quaresimale p. 195. 
 
 Biflii-ilmente si duitna, letteia scconda.
 
 848 TIIE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS, 
 
 infants of the faithful, together with the deceased bap- 
 tized 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 Saviour's Precious Blood, is chiefly composed of 
 children, of those who on earth never merited, never 
 loved, never used their reason at all. Is not this a 
 conclusion so repugnant as to be inadmissible? I think 
 this consideration of very great weight. 
 
 F. 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 very 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 com- 
 mentators 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 
 
 * Le tiers des en fans meurt entre la premiere et la septieme anne*e de sa 
 n ilssance, plus de la moine" entre u premiere et la quatorziemo anne*e.— 
 Ann uaire du Bureau des Longitudes.
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 319 
 
 good and bad at the last judgment, to the division of 
 the good grain from the cockle. Now, in a field culti- 
 vated 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." * 
 Da Ponte, in his treatise on Christian Perfection, seems 
 also to lean to the mihler opinion ; and Lipsin, the 
 Franciscan, in his catechism maintains that the opinion 
 in favour 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;"f and 
 Lipsin says expressly that he is speaking only of adults. 
 The interpretation given by F. Lacordaire of the 
 words, Many are called, but few are chosen, rests en- 
 tirely 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 
 labourers 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 labour. 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 
 
 • Bergier. Dist. Theol. au mot. E'us. TraitiS de la Vroie Religion, t. 10, 
 p. 355. Lacordaire Conferences iv. 168. 
 
 T Da Ponte, Do Perfect. Christiana, tr. I. Lipsin. Catech, Uistor. Tlieolog. 
 Logout, p. 446. De numcro sulvandoruoi.
 
 
 50 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 called, but few chosen. Now it is clear that the diffi- 
 culty of this parable does not consist in the small num- 
 ber 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 byeways to bring in a mixed multi- 
 tude 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, miscella- 
 neous 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 things, or to count on an unusual favour 
 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 them- 
 selves that they are the objects of God's special predi- 
 lection, and to neglect to make their calling sure by an 
 exact fidelity ; and it is our Lord's object in this para-
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 351 
 
 We 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.* 
 
 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 
 6aved. 
 
 * Salmeron (t. vil. tr. 33) and Cornelius a Lapide (on Matt, xx ) give simi- 
 lar interpretations. Cornelius a Lapids 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 commenta- 
 teurs, point d'uniformite'. Pour ne parler que des catholiques. Cajetan, 
 Mariana, Tostat, Luc de Bruges, -Maldonat, Corneille de la Pierre, Me"nochius, 
 le pere de Picquigny, admettent l'une et I'aufre explication ; entendent par 
 tlut ou les hommes sauve's, ou les fideles, Jansemus de Gand pense que ca 
 dernier sens est le plus naturel: Stapleton le soutient contre Calvin ; Sacy 
 dans ses Commen taires, juge que c'est le sens litteral; domj Calmet semble 
 lui donner la preference. Eutbymius n' en donne point d'autre ; il suivait 
 S. Jean Chrysostome. Le pere Hardouin soutient que c'est le seul sens qui 
 b'accorde avec la suite du texte; le pere Berruyer exclut aussi tout autre 
 ■eat; c'est pour cela qn'il a e"te condamne', mais la faculte' do theologie n'a 
 certainement pas voulu censurer les interpretes catholiques que nous venons 
 de citer, et ils sont suivis par beaucoup d'autres. Quel dogme peut on fonder 
 eur un passage susceptible de deux sens si diffe'rents? And again he says, 
 Pour fixer un peu plus cette discnssion, nous disons qu'il y'a trois opinions 
 6ur le nombre des catholiques pre'destine's. Quelques docteurs pensent qu'il 
 y'aura plus de catholiques eMus que de rcprouves ; ils se fondent sur ce qu'il 
 n'y a eu qn'un seul convive exclu du banquet nuptial. D'autres croient 
 qu'il y aara autant de reprouve's que d'elus. Ils se fondent sur le parable 
 des Vicrges, dont cinq etaient sages et cinq folles.— La plupart des theologieus 
 enseignent qu'il y aura plus de re'prouve's que d'elus. lis s'appuient sur ces 
 jtamles : Pauci vero elecii. II n'y a done rieu de certain a cc lujct. Le savant 
 Suares regarde la premiere comma plus probable."
 
 852 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 
 
 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. None of these views regard Catholics exclusively. 
 
 6. 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 over- 
 whelming 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 
 Bide than the milder view. 
 
 14. But if we subtract moral, ascetical, and hortatory 
 authors, who write to rouse and to impress their readers,
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 353 
 
 and retain only pure theologians in the stricter sense, I 
 think the authorities on the two sides will be not far 
 from evenly balanced, the excess being however in favour 
 of the rigorous views, so far as numbers are concerned, 
 and in favour of the milder views, so far as weight ia 
 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 now-a-days would 
 hesitate to disclaim. 
 
 16. Some of the authorities on the milder side are oi 
 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 this 
 
 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 ia 
 
 any way to lead to a disesteem of strictness, I should 
 
 eagerly avoid entering upon it. It seems however aa 
 
 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 
 
 hack from a cordial surrender of themselves to God, and 
 23 t
 
 854 TEE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 
 
 which even when they are true, become untrue t>y 
 claiming to be exclusive. Begging then of God to bless 
 this enquiry 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-havshly. It is part of the evil that is in us to put 
 the worst construction upon what we see, and to make 
 no allowance for the hidden good. Moreover we, unwit- 
 tingly 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. W r e 
 consider evil a decisive test, while good is only allowed 
 to establish a possibility. This is our rule for others : 
 we reverse it for ourselves. We also find that our judg- 
 ments 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 fre- 
 quenting the sacraments, or in any way professing to be 
 religious, will be scandalized by the least look of world- 
 liness in a priest or a religious. They will detect with 
 the most amazing sensitiveness the slightest inconsis- 
 tency in the practice of an openly devout person. Thus 
 we may lay it down as a rule, 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 enquiry. 
 There is something in the adorable compassion of God 
 which looks like voluntary blindness. He seems either 
 Hot to eee, or not to appreciate, the utter unworthiness
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 355 
 
 of men; at least lie goes on His way with men as 
 thougV 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 Ilim is, the more shall we catch some- 
 thing of a similar spirit, which will destroy the natural 
 keenness of our detection of evil, and control more ma- 
 terially 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 authen- 
 tic 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 num- 
 bers are converted, and go to the sacraments, and per- 
 severe in their new life ; and then they are less promi- 
 nent. 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 good- 
 ness 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 siate, 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
 
 356 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 age withdraws its thousands of actors from the stage of 
 6in, 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 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 forbearance 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 mira- 
 cles 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
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS'. 357 
 
 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 con- 
 fessing, a purpose of amendment which has no tempta- 
 tion then to be insincere, a sorrow which is within easy 
 reach of any one who is in earnest, with huge allow- 
 ances made for the clouded weariness and distracting 
 unsettlements of pain, which interfere with the sensible 
 fervour of prayer, but not with the grace of true interior 
 repentance, — and the soul that has spent close upon a 
 century of sin is saved, saved because God puts the 
 requibites 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 ordi- 
 nance faith survived grace for all those years, saved 
 because the Precious Blood of Jesus is such a supera- 
 bundant 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 men 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 find- 
 ing out good, and it will even be some time before it is 
 perceived that habits of swearing, or lying, or intem- 
 perance are gone, or that violence of temper has passed 
 away. Moreover the convert has relapses, and some- 
 how these are always very much seen and noticed, and 
 they conceal completely the gradual formation of a 
 virtuous habit ; and besides this, a great deil which 
 i9 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 siQ 
 which makes men so unbearable to others. It is more 
 often selfishness, and temper, and churlishness, and
 
 358 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 ferocity, and coarseness, and such like, which may all 
 he far short of mortal sin, or, perhaps in the cases of 
 rude persons, of any sin at all. There is also much in 
 the demeanour of a converted sinner which is very puz- 
 zling. He has had certain habits of sin ; and though 
 he no longer falls into the mortal sins in question, he 
 has wavs 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 pre- 
 vented 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 invi- 
 sible 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. It imitates His way6 of secrecy 
 and concealment, and is impregnated with His Spirit 
 of unostentatious tranquillity and self-sufficient con- 
 tentment The infuriated mob that burns 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 
 fchan a single regiment in scarlet marching down upon
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 859 
 
 its fellow Christians. Even in the individual this in- 
 visible 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 habi-s 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 revela- 
 tion 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 wo 
 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 re* 
 speot, if only we continue to love them. If, as Words- 
 worth says, all things are less dreadful than they seem, 
 bo is it true 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 ubiqui- 
 tous : his tyranny universal, overwhelming, and suc- 
 cessful. Of a truth 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
 
 SGO THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 creating. One while he is persecuting the good, even 
 in the cloister. Another while he is bent on ruininor 
 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 dis- 
 credit on God's servants, and dishonour 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 honour in it instead of God's glory. 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 dis- 
 quiet 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 vigour, and the ver- 
 satility of the maguiticeiit spiritual work which He is
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 361 
 
 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 centre 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 vigour of God abides with such intensity in 
 every particle of the inanimate world, everywhere wed- 
 ding strength to beauty, so that the union might capti- 
 vate 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 allwise providence, 
 whose majestic operations have all of them the one 
 single scope and end of love for their blissful accom- 
 plishment ! We have already seen enough of the doc- 
 trine of grace to be aware to what an almost incredi- 
 ble 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 eman- 
 ates. 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 neroe as ever, he has now found the length of his
 
 362 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 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 unbro- 
 ken exorcism to the baffled prince of darkness. Her 
 benedictions keep extruding him from one corner of crea- 
 tion after another. Her exorcisms 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 savins of Adam 
 and of Eve by a more copious salvation, the superabun- 
 dance 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 servant of the 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 an- 
 swered, Fear not : for there are more with us than with 
 them. And Eliseus prayed, and said, Lord, open his-
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 3G3 
 
 eves 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.* 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 rule 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 honour 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 ita 
 glorious attractions? There is no word to express His. 
 prodigal expenditure in our redemption, except mag- 
 nificence ; can we conceive, in a divine work, of a 
 magnificence in the design which shall not be equalled 
 by magnificence in the execution ? No one doubts that 
 hell will be unspeakably more dreadful than we ex- 
 pected ; because no one doubts but that our little views 
 will be found foolishly narrow when compared with the 
 * See the note from Lessius at page 125.
 
 864 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 
 
 transcendant 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 in- 
 completeness in the opposite opinion. No one surely 
 can think steadily and continuously on the matter 
 without coming to this conclusion. 33ut of necessity, 
 because He is Himself, God will go far out of sight of 
 our beliefs in the actual splendour of His accomplish- 
 ments. So that, from what we know of God, we should 
 aus;ur that very few catholics, comparatively speaking, 
 would be lost. The salvation of almost all of them 
 seems to be claimed by the very 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 Ho 
 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 honour of the Precious Blood would imply and re- 
 quire 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 
 u^on their brows. It has absolved them again and
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 365 
 
 Dgain. It has run through them with thrills of fervour 
 and fortitude in confirmation. Its red living pulses have 
 beaten with their human life within the heart at com- 
 munion. 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 honour of our dearest Lord ? One drop is 
 more than enough to redeem all the possible sins of all 
 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 
 ehows us the extent of our ignorance than furnishes us 
 with anything like a complete science. We may fol- 
 low, first the school which teaches that the operation of 
 the sacraments is moral, then the school which teache9 
 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 abstrusest 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
 
 366 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 miles ahead, and is working 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 sucli 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 inexhaus- 
 tible variety, their positive contradictoriness, their un- 
 likely combinations, the intricate wide-spreading possi- 
 bilities 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 num- 
 berless 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 ? be sure you are estimating far too low the 
 glorious efficacy of the divine interventions, the success- 
 ful majesty of creative love ! 
 
 Our ignorance of the last inward processes of death- 
 beds leaves one of the most spacious portions of our 
 
 * As it is the tendency of the modern 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 wonderworking 
 powers and peculiar privileges of the Sacraments would be a most suspi- 
 cious 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 favour of their validity; and, if they were valid, then the ri<;ht 
 Inward dispositions went along with them. For the sacraments do not take 
 •he place of a real inward change of heart, or do instead of it. It is their 
 office to produce it by their marvellous reinforcements of grace.
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 3G7 
 
 lives inaccessible to our notice. Life is not counted 
 only bj 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 
 redoubles 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 cen- 
 tury of falsehood. Heaven draws near to it, to help as 
 well as to behold. It is God's last chance with Ilia 
 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 eternity, 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 addi- 
 tion to those peculiar bodily sufferings from which the 
 disease has derived its name, may be in a state of tenor 
 from the supposed .presence of frightful objects— which 
 
 • radiological Enquiries, p. 130.
 
 368 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 are presented to hira as realities, even to the last. But 
 these and some other instances which I might adduce 
 axe 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 labour under no actual disease. It is not very 
 common for any one to die merely of old age ;— 
 
 * Like ripe fruit to drop 
 Into his mother's lap.* 
 
 But I have known this to happen ; and a happy conclu- 
 sion it has seemed to be of worldly cares and jojs. It 
 was like falling to sleep, never tp awake again in this 
 state of existence. Some die retaining all their facul- 
 ties, 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 sensibi- 
 lity ; 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." 
 
 In the„ life of Condren there is a very remarkable 
 passage urging on us the duty of thanksgiving to God
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. CC9 
 
 for the graces He bestows on the dying, inasmuch as 
 11 His compassion for them is inexplicable, and He 
 seems to distribute His favours to them all the more 
 ■willingly, because they are hardly now in danger of 
 profaning them. * Beautiful thought ! 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, be- 
 cause 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 which the dying 
 child of Jesus has fallen asleep upon its Father s 
 bosom.* 
 
 * I would earnestly beg of tbe reader to turn back here, and read again 
 our Blessed Lord's own revelation to S. Gertrude about deathbed mercies, 
 page 275, In the consideration of this matter there are two things to be 
 observed, and also to be kept studiously apart: — opinions based on theo- 
 logical teaching, and opinions gathered from the observation of mankind 
 and the experience of life. The last chapter, on the Easiness of Salvation, 
 was theology, the present chapter on the number of the saved rests ma. niy 
 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 oa 
 our own personal observation of mankind. From onr ignorance, neither 
 will give us certain results. But, on the one hand, the inferences drawn 
 from the revealed character of God are decidodly in favour 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 
 rciults, and is by UO means so decidedly on tho rigorous side as the re-
 
 370 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 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 thing we cannot possibly presume upon for our- 
 selves, because a suspicion destroys it: but we may put 
 much 1o its account in our neighbour's favour. 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 
 
 vealed 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 prova 
 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 this feature of struggle. 
 Now this is a most important feature. Combattasi pure, che qui sta il tut to, 
 says Scupoli. (But read all his 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 life-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 possi- 
 bility, and an occasional mercy. But such are not the deathbed graces which. 
 I speak of as being common. Still, those other marvellous deathbed conver- 
 sions, 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. Tims even of sinners, as well as of martyrs, does God's love at times 
 m ike thtrse words true, true it may be even to the passing over of Purga- 
 tory, 
 
 Mortis saerse compt.ndio 
 
 Vitara beatani possideut.
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 071 
 
 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, aud we cannot argue 
 from it to his 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 
 tliem are not ultimately saved. 
 
 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 
 
 * Lacordaire says beautifully of the sinner as be is in the sight of God,— 
 Dicu y reconu&it encore 6a main. Comrr.e une statue mutile'e 9ort de li 
 t*rre oil les *iec!es l'avaient enfouie, ainsi lame de^radp'o par le pe"clw'> appa- 
 rait aux regards de son pere; e'est un marbre deshonore, maw oil re 
 encore la vie, et auqud l'artiste supreme peut rendre sa premiere beautg. 
 11 y travaille avee ardeur ; il aime cu de"bris ; il y frappc des coups qui tfrn- 
 euvent ion espe'rance et attendrissent ses regrets. Ce n'est qua la mort qua 
 le mal perscveYant prend une consistanee a I'epreuve de I'amour divin, et 
 que Dieu le voit comme un impardonnablo ennenii. Jusqueiu, il appartieat 
 encore a l'arcliitecture du bien; il est une pierre espeYable de la sainte cite', 
 et peut-ttra y untrera-t-il en un lien magrufiqae, qui otuunera 1'iunoceiica 
 sans ia (Mcourager. L'j/iferencet de 1851 .
 
 872 THE GIIEAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 ■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 
 neighbours 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, agra- 
 rian murders, and the like, are not on the whole such 
 conclusive proofs of a depraved heart as they are com- 
 monly 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 lie 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 prefes
 
 The great mass of believers. 373 
 
 the society of sinners to any other ; and all-holy as Ho 
 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 Jiulgo at last. Thoso sinners, who camo 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 lu9tre of the Saviour's love. So 
 is it always with the saints of Jesus. They are charac- 
 terized by a hopeful view of sinners.* They have a 
 positive devotion to them, as our Lord had. The very 
 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 re- 
 spect for them. Without this last quality even tho 
 charity of the spouses of Christ will be but intermit- 
 tent, and lose the perfection of its beauty, the unifor- 
 mity 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 over- 
 clouded, that we are to believe that the greater number 
 even of catholics are not to be saved ? Does not this 
 peculiar tenderness, this almost devotion of our Blessed 
 
 • Great strew should be laid on the almost invariable characteristic of 
 tho saints, that they took a hopeful view of human conduct; tor tha 
 6\ints are precisely men whose dispositions approach to Uie dispositions 
 of Gud.
 
 .374 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 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. Mother, replied Margaret, 
 wherefore doubt the goodness of our God ? Is not this 
 to do Him a dishonour ? 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 attainments. 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 burns us. Now we have already seeni;he 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 mate- 
 rials for the future triumphs of Jesus, as the harvest 
 jet ungarnered of His passion and His Cross. Bad
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 07 J 
 
 catholic?, those who appear bad to us, are but a pro- 
 portion 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 
 Paved. 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 ad- 
 verted to, but which must not be omitted in the pre- 
 sent enumeration. "When men look at a country, or a 
 neighbourhood, 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 ap- 
 pearance is not improved all at once. The mellowing, 
 Eoftening, beautifying powers of grace are long in then 
 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,
 
 076 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 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 unworthinessea 
 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. 
 
 The extreme severity of the punishments of purgatory 
 is another consideration which leads the mind to con- 
 template 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 favourite 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 
 
 • Yet the more thoughtful protestant writers are beginning to see now, 
 what political geography might have taught them before, that these develop- 
 ments of material grandeur are due to the amount of popular liberty 
 rather than to the dominance of any religious opiuions.
 
 THE GREAT MAS9 OP BELIEVERS. 877 
 
 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 anniver- 
 saries and foundations for masses for ever. The very 
 slightest infidelities to grace seem to be visted there 
 with the acutest sufferings. God Himself has bidden 
 His saints to honour with chaste fear and exceeding 
 awe the rigours 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, 
 this terrible eighth sacrament of fire, which is the home 
 of those souls whom the seven real sacraments of earth 
 have not been allowed to purify 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 fulfil 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 Saviour's Passion, that it 
 was intended for the great multitudes who should die 
 in charity with God, but in imperfect charity, and 
 therefore 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 wLula
 
 378' THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 way. Purgatory 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 refuse, 
 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 little- 
 ness, 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 glory 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 marvellous contentment has exalted 
 there? 
 
 Are any two angels exactly in the same degree of 
 glory ? Theologians say that the graces of each radiant 
 spirit are unlike. Perhaps then their glories are un- 
 equal 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 decree. 
 It is revealed to us in the parables of the talents 
 and the cities. In my Father's house are many
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. C7i) 
 
 man?ions, 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 glory 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 
 wellnigh 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 in- 
 finitely punished, limited sin almost inimitably tor- 
 mented. 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 ever-
 
 380 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 
 
 lasting despair alone remains. Now will evil be mora 
 punished than good is rewarded? Will they even be 
 on equal terms ? Theology teaches that the chastise- 
 ments 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 corner 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 royal- 
 ties! Shall not then God's rewarding of good be in 
 all respects far beyond, in fulness 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 w;ll heaven be un- 
 speakably beyond our deservings, but many will go there, 
 whom only the generosity of divine love and the deter- 
 mination 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
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 381 
 
 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 iuterferences are all on the 6ide of love. Stern- 
 looking accidents, when they turn their full face to us, 
 beam with the look of love. Even our very faults are 
 so strangely over-ruled, that mercy can draw materials 
 for its blessings even out of them. It is true 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 ior the providential aspect which our 
 past lives present to us, when we reflect upon them in 
 the laith 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 lor 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, 
 f nd to have waited an auspicious moment each time He 
 would persuade us to something fresh. He has com- 
 bined events with the most consummate skill, and 
 brought out the most wonderful results, and they have 
 always been in our favour. 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 investiga- 
 tion, or longer experience, turn out to be the most strik- 
 ing examples of the general rule of benevolence and 
 love. If we ask each man separately, this is what he
 
 3S2 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 
 
 Trill tell us. We have all of us had this private revela- 
 tion. But are not God's works for the most part 
 remarkable for their efficacy? Do not all these secret 
 biographies 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 Guar- 
 dian 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, op 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 
 l>est state for dying. Even the deaths of those who are 
 lost may be mercifully timed. When men die young, 
 t is perhaps because they would have lost themselves if 
 Ihey 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 per-
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. B83 
 
 dition, 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 smiliug 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 unde- 
 veloped 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 doubt- 
 less pouring into the souls of the Blessed at all hours 
 delightful streams of wondering adoration and exratic 
 love. Is all this true of each Christian deathbed, aud 
 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 indispen- 
 sable foundation. It is hard to realize the greatness of 
 a gift which is so intimate to every operation of oup 
 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
 
 884 THE GEEAT MASS OP BELIEVERS, 
 
 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 convert- 
 ing truth is plainer than the sunshine on the trees. The 
 little fellow could not doubt it, if he would. lie is so 
 sure of it, that he would be beaten to death rather than 
 say it was not true. 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 coequally begotten of the 
 Father, and the Holy Ghost be evermore coequally pro- 
 ceeding 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 can- 
 not help himself; he is more certain of the Holy 
 Trinity, than he is of your existence who are standing 
 by him and questioning him. 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 re- 
 ceives, not the faith of devils who believe and tremble* 
 but the supernatural gift of divine faith. It is faith by
 
 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVER?. 3S5 
 
 which so many, after years of bid, quietly and as it were 
 naturally, swing round to their anchors, and die well. 
 By this gift the catholic sees far up into the unbegin- 
 ning 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 
 Bees 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 the 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 com-. 
 mon to all, 60 common that it stays with us even when 
 grace has left us, so persevering and so secure of itselt 
 that it will lodge with sin and fear no evil ; and is there 
 one sign of predestination of which 30 much can be said 
 as of this transcendent gift, which of its sole self makes . 
 a creature of God into a catholio, and writes upon his 
 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 6ense 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 majo- 
 rity of the earthly plants will not be worth transplant- 
 ing? Seed is wasted in sowing; yet the earthly, 
 
 ~p . T 
 
 /
 
 386 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS* 
 
 husbandman garners 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 mysti- 
 cal 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 
 extasies, 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 tech- 
 nically the way of the saints, namely, the extatic* 
 
 * Many mystical theologians, especially among the Germans, maintain that 
 extasy is the natural state of unfallen man, that Adam was in an extatic state 
 until the fall, and by consequence our Bles3cd La ly all her life. The passage 
 in the text is not meant to express so much as this. I suppose that the asce- 
 tical life can produce what are technically called saints, without the predo- 
 minance of the mystical element. S. 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 doctrina
 
 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 337 
 
 Nov 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 be- 
 cause 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 coun- 
 sels and of the inwardly perfect observance of the 
 precepts. These are two ways of perfection, often com- 
 bining, 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. 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 
 
 of great importance in the theology of the 9piritnal life, that no man has any 
 right to aspire to be what is technically called a saint, still less that be has 
 any obligation to do so, or that the pursuit of perfection in any way invokes 
 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 
 . od people, given in the text, were attended to: 1. the saints, who tread 
 tLe extatic or mystical way; 2. those who aim at perfection through the 
 counsels; 3. those who aim at perfection through the perfect interior observ- 
 ance of the precepts: 4. ordinarily good catholics, saving themselves by the 
 ffetiueutatiou of the sacrament*, and bj obedience.
 
 CO 
 
 3 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 
 
 with other men, than a saint has as compared with an 
 ordinary catholic. Why may we not think of this fourtli 
 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.* 
 
 It may be 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 sol 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 com- 
 prehension. 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 true, 
 then a fortiori, as logicians say, that is, with tenfold 
 greater force, will they apply to catholics. And so 
 
 * Since the publication of the .first edition of this work the venerated Presi- 
 dent of Ushaw has kindly brought under my notice a Censura by the Fran- 
 ciscan, Dominic Lossada, prefixed to the Revelations of Brother Joseph < f 
 St. Benedict, a Spanish Benedictine of Monserrato. Brother Joseph asserted 
 that the truth of the great majority of catholics being saved, (and he expresses 
 his view almost iu the terms of this chapter.) was revealed to him, and he de- 
 clares that he is "divinely certain" of it. Fart of Lossada's Censura is occu- 
 pied with a comment on this, and I confess I was surprised at the array of 
 proof and authority which he brings in favour of this view. I might have 
 epokeu less guardedly, and with fewer restrictions, had I seen it before I 
 wrote my book. I hoped to bare added that part of the Censura, either iu a 
 translation or in the original, as an Appendix, but it was found Uiat it would 
 add to the price aud thickness of the volume.
 
 THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 389 
 
 whichever way we turn, the same benignant conclusion 
 look9 us always in the face. 
 
 No one can meditate without very solemn apprehen- 
 sions upon his final judgment. Yet it is the deliberate 
 conviction of our best thoughts and most mature reflec- 
 tion, that we had rather leave our final do^m in the 
 hands of the all-holy God than in those of the most 
 merciful of sinful men. Our knowledge of God doe3 
 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 U9 better 
 than any one else can know us. There are 80 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 favour. 
 How often in life are we accused wrongly and mis- 
 takenly I 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 mo- 
 tives for imprudent and ill-looking actions. When we 
 often appear careless and unkind, some secret sorrow is 
 oppressing us, or anxiety disturbing us, or responsi- 
 bility harassing U9. 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.
 
 390 TEE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 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 ever collec- 
 tively before Him, while our evil is interrupted by fre- 
 quent absolutions, and our sins supernaturally effac- 
 ed 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 actuenesses of their criticism are far more 
 to be dreaded than the niceties of His justice, when 
 omnipotent love sits by a3 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. There- 
 fore we may modestly hope that God's judgment is 
 otherwise, and that the great majority of catholics are 
 saved. It 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, which 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, divina- 
 tion from what we know of God and from what expe- 
 rience 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 true, but we claim
 
 TI1E GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 391 
 
 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 adversary 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 holi- 
 ness. 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 specu- 
 lation. The other view, as I have seen, repels men from 
 common attainments, disheartens them in even necessary 
 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 ia 
 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, ;«nd In liness 
 of life. I have dwelt on the view containel ia this
 
 392 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
 
 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. Bub 
 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 dishonourable 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 honour 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. 
 
 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 
 
 * " He (Pere 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 pur- 
 pose and desire to receive it. God has no desire for the sinner's death. Jan- 
 senism has done great harm to this subject, by inspiring a sort of despair 
 which is most dangerous.' I observed that purgatory was the necessary com- 
 plement of such a doctrine. ' It is so,' said he. ' and though God is alone the 
 judije of the sufficiency of those acts of the dying, yet we may hope that a 
 grear number come within tho terms of salvation, whatever purifying process 
 they may afterward* require.'" Allies, Journal in France, i». 279.
 
 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 393 
 
 those without. I have no profession of faith to make 
 about them, except that God i9 infinitely merciful to 
 every 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. 

 
 S?4r 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE WORLD. 
 
 Mnquenda tellus, et domus, et placena. 
 Cxor : oeque harum, quas colis, arborum 
 Te, prefer invisas cupressos, 
 
 Ulla brevem dominum seauetur. 
 
 Horace. 
 
 The auestion of worldliness is a verv difficult on?, 
 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 honour, this which 
 defrauds Him of the tribute due to Him from His crea- 
 tures, this which even blinds their eyes to His undeni-
 
 THE WORLD. 395 
 
 able right! 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 ignor- 
 ing it is, so farforth, an argument in favour of the 
 view. 
 
 But not only does this question of worldliness present 
 itself to us in connection with the whole teaching of the 
 first eight chapters; it is implicated in the two objec- 
 tions 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 actu- 
 ally 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 
 fcliuuld not salvation be almost universal, if the pardon 
 of fcin 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 epite of appearances, what is 
 the explanation of these appearances, when the whole 
 I'iocess is so plain and easy ? To all this the answer is,
 
 89C THE WORLD. 
 
 that sin is a partial explanation, and the devil is a par- 
 tial explanation, but that the grand secret lies in world- 
 liness. That is the chief disturbing force, the prime 
 counteracting power. It is this mainly, which keeps 
 clown 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 phe- 
 nomenon 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 t&ken 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 'flnt eight 
 chapters. 
 
 This enquiry into wbrlcUinesa will, in the third place, 
 truthfully and naturally prepare us for the great con- 
 clusion of the whole enquiry, namely, the truth 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 ldve 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. 
 
 it is a radiant land, — this wide, dutspread, many- 
 coloured mercy of our Creator ! But we must be con- 
 tent 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
 
 TIIE WORLD. 337 
 
 moro 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 atmos- 
 phere, a life, a colouring matter, a pageantry, a fashion, 
 a taste, a witchery, an impersonal but a very recogniza- 
 ble 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 
 Tvith Him is absolutely and eternally precluded. Re- 
 pentance 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 incredi- 
 ble. It can find a home under every heart beneath the 
 poles, and it embraces with impartial affection both 
 happiness and misery. 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 infla- 
 ences, 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 characteristic*. It has its gentle 
 Toice, its winning manner?, its insinuating address, its
 
 398 THE WORLD. 
 
 aspect of beauty and attraction; and the lighter its foot 
 and the softer its voice, the more dreadful its ap- 
 proach. 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 entone 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 splendour of dress, into the mag- 
 nificence 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 
 furges discreet delay, and less self- trust, and more con- 
 siderate 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 harboured 
 the monster, who now Usurps so much of this beautiful
 
 THE WORLD. .399 
 
 planet on which Jesu9 was born an.l die J, and from 
 •which He and His sinless Mother rose to heaven. It 
 6eems to be a sort of spirit which has risen up from a 
 disobedient creation, as if the results and after-conse- 
 quences of all the sins that ever were rested in the 
 atmosphere, and loaded it with some imperceptible but 
 
 hlj 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 colours 
 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. Id 
 is like grace only that it is its contradictory. 
 
 But it has not always the same power. If the ex- 
 pression 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
 
 400 TEE WOULD. 
 
 worldliness, a highly civilized time is to a comparatively 
 ruder time what the days of machinery are to those of 
 hand-labour. 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 
 modern 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 an- 
 ticipate* that the end of the world and the reign of 
 antichrist will be times of the most tyrannical worldli- 
 ness. 
 
 This 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, another 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 sometimes nations, 
 exhibit symptoms of diabolical possession. Indeed, on 
 looking back, it would appear that every 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
 
 THE WORLD. 401 
 
 iaflaences. 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. 
 It is capricious, but, for all that, there is nothing about 
 it casual, accidental, fortuitous. It is well instructed 
 for its end, inflexible in its logic, and making directly, 
 no matter through what opposing medium, to its ulti- 
 mate results. Indeed, it is obviously informed with the 
 wisdom and the subtlety of Satan. It is his greatest 
 capability of carrying on his war against God. Like a 
 parasite disease, it fixes on the weak places in men, pan- 
 dering both to mind and flesh, but chiefly to the former. 
 It 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 suc- 
 ceeded. It is then pre-eminent among the enemies of 
 God. Hence the place which it occupies in Holy Scrip- 
 ture. 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 
 
 • Modi tentationum varii sunt, eommuniter vero ad tria genera reducing 
 tur came, mundo, et dfcinoue, &tnmt de gratia, lib. i. 0, xiui. u. 3, 
 M t
 
 402 THE WORLD. 
 
 not to receive, the world that was not worthy of tho 
 saints, the world whose friendship is enmity with God, 
 the world that passeth away with its lusts, the world 
 which they who are born of God overcome, or, as the 
 Apocalypse calls it, the world that goes wondering 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.* It 
 is remarkable also that St. John, the chosen friend of 
 the Incarnate Word, and the evangelist of His Divinity, 
 should be tho 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. 
 
 It is this world which wo have to fight against 
 throughout the whole of our Christian course. Our sal- 
 vation depends upon our unforgiving enmity against it. 
 It is not so much that it is a sin, as that it is the capa- 
 bility of all sins, the air sin breathes, the light by which 
 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 disheart- 
 eningly complete. It is a sort of catholic church of the 
 powers of darkness. It has laws of its own, and tastes 
 and principles of its own, literature of its own, a mis- 
 sionary 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 contem- 
 plative world of the Saints, with all these it is at deadly 
 
 * S. Jolin vii. 7; also xiv. 17; also xv. 19; also xvi. 20 ; also ivi. 33; also 
 xni. 9; also 1 Cor. i. 21 j also ii. 12; also Heb. xi. 38; also S. James iv. 4; 
 also l John ii. 17; also v. 4; also Apoc. xiii. 3,
 
 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 this 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 things spirituality is the most con- 
 temptible, cowardly, and little. Thus the Church and 
 the world are incompatible, and must remain so to the 
 cud. 
 
 We cannot have a better instance of the unconge- 
 niality of the world with the spirit of the Gospel, than 
 their difference in the estimate of prosperity. All those 
 mysterious woes which our Lord denounced against 
 wealth, have their explanation in the dangers of world* 
 liness. It is the peculiar aptitude of wealth, and pomp, 
 and power, to harbour the unholy spirit of the world, to
 
 404- THE WORLD. 
 
 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 ten- 
 dency of prosperity in itself is to wean the heart from 
 God, and fix it on creatures. It gives us a most unsu- 
 pernatural 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 unfits them for the higher and more 
 heroic virtues of the Christian character. This 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 taste, and ties their 
 hands, so far as the things of God are concerned. Let 
 it be true tjiat salvation be easy, and that by fur the 
 greater number of catholics are saved, it is still unhap- 
 pily true thac the relations of the Creator and the 
 creature, as put forward in this treatise, are not so
 
 TTTE WORLD* 405 
 
 universally or so practically acknowledged ns tliey ought 
 to be. AYhy is this? Sin, as was said before, is a 
 partial answer. The devil is another partial answer. 
 But I believe worldliness lias got to answer fur a great 
 deal of sin, and for a great deal of devil, besides a whole 
 deluge of iniquity of its own, which is perpetually de- 
 basing good works, hindering perfection, preparing ma- 
 terials 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 chieily 
 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 v/orldliness 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 world- 
 liness 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 Sacra- 
 un.ni. Iu the tame way when lie describes the lite oi
 
 406 THE WORLD. 
 
 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 every 
 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, pro- 
 vided 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 sin- 
 ners 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 things occa- 
 sionally, and by accident. It neither scandalizes others, 
 nor frightens the sinner himself. This is the very 
 feature of it, which, rightly considered, ought to be so 
 terrifying. The reaction of a great sin, or the shame 
 which follows it, are often the pioneers of grace. They 
 give self-love such a serious shock, that under the in- 
 fluence 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, which is put before us. There is even
 
 THE WOULD 407 
 
 much of moral decency, much of respectable observance, 
 much religious profession ; and yet when our Blessed 
 Saviour went among them, they were further from grace 
 than the publicans and sinners. They had implicit 
 hatred of God in their hearts already, which became 
 explicit as soon a9 they saw Him. The Magdalen, 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 
 Bins, 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 young 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 hum- 
 lie 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 his 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 young 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 Saviour seems pur-
 
 408 TEE WORLD. 
 
 posely to point to ib 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 worldlinesa with His especial reproba- 
 tion 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 creatures. 
 Self is set up instead of God. The canons of human 
 respect are more looked up to than the Divine Com- 
 mandments, God is very little adverted to. He is 
 passed over. The very thought of Him soon ceases 
 to make the worldly man uncomfortable. Indeed all 
 his 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 enjoy- 
 ments, such as eating, drinking, and marrying, and will 
 not the mere omission of God from it be enough to con- 
 stitute 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
 
 TIIE VS'OELD. 409 
 
 we say that faith is enough to save us without charity? 
 If a man only believe3 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, thr.t 
 omission of the Creator, provided only it issues in i.a 
 other outward acts than his fine dinners and his expen- 
 sive clothes, shall never keep his soul from heaven. 
 His purple and his sumptuous feasting shall be hia 
 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 ot God, and the eternal 
 ravishment of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity ! 
 Can this be true ? 
 
 Yet on the other hand, we may not make into sins 
 what God has not made sins. How is this ? it is 
 the awful world of inward sin which is the horror of 
 all this worldliness! It 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 out- 
 ward show of faultless proprieties, which only make it 
 more revolting to the Eye that penetrates the insult- 
 ing disguise. The secret sins moreover of the worldly 
 are a very sea of iniquity. Their name is legion ; they 
 cannot be counted. Almost every thought is sin, be- 
 cause of the inordinate worship of self that is in it. 
 Admost 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
 
 410 THE WORLD. 
 
 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 encour- 
 agement of it, such a genial climate, such a collection 
 of favourable 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 mar- 
 vellously prolific sins can be, and what a preeminently 
 devastating power sins of thought in particular exer- 
 cise within the soul. In numberless cases open and 
 crying sins must come at last. Still we must remem- 
 ber 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 wor- 
 ship of self, its predilection for an easy life, would 
 hinder its embarking in sins which take trouble, time, 
 and forethought, or which run risks of disagreeable con- 
 sequences, and therefore would keep it confined within 
 a sphere of secret sins. And in the next place its love
 
 THE WOULD. 41 X 
 
 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 con- 
 science, a deadened moral sense, with a speed which 
 vs unknown even to cruelty or sensuality. 
 
 A seared conscience I* This is a fearful possibility, 
 and yet to use the apostle's expression, " the Spirit 
 manifestly saith" that there is such a thing. It 13 
 according to St. Paul one of the marks of heresy. 1 5 
 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 idolator. 
 But this is to have a seared conscience. This is the 
 tendency of worldliness, a tendency which it can de- 
 velop with incomparable swiftness. And then where 
 is the power o£ 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 our- 
 selves 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 pretermitted God: we did so con- 
 tumeliously at first ; but now our habitual contempt 
 has superinduced oblivion : it seems as if lie were going 
 to retaliate, to pay us back in our own coin, and for the 
 
 • 1 Tim. ir.
 
 412 THE WORLD. 
 
 present at least to pretermit us. We no longer know 
 when we are in danger. We have lost our chart. W© 
 can tell nothing of our latitude and longitude. No land 
 is in sight : nothing but a waste of boundless water*. 
 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 in- 
 distinct notion where we are; and the needle is snapped 
 and we know neither north nor south, nor east, nor 
 west. "What are our chancer 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. 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 iridi* 
 vidual 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 intermission of his madness, no lucid interval 
 before his death, if he was actually in mortal sin when 
 the last step of his abberration 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*3 
 great enemy. Kindness touches his heart, but grace 
 has ebbed from it for ever. He belongs to the dismal 
 centre of the earth ; it is only by accident that he is 
 
 * Cap. 7.
 
 THE WORLD. 413 
 
 walking on its radiant surface. This is one of earth's 
 fearful possibilities. And the seared conscience of world- 
 liness 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 
 undoubiing 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 every one of these phenomena of worldliness 
 may be resolved into a forgetfulness that we are crea- 
 tures. 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 him- 
 self to a higher power. Anything, which should evince 
 a tense 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 
 euch sense, it would instantly take the form of super- 
 stition 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 theee cases does he forget
 
 414 THE WORLD. 
 
 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 judgments of human respect. Where- 
 ever there is worldliness, there is the forgetfulness 
 that we are creatures; and wherever there is this 
 forgetfulness that we are creatures, there also is world- 
 liness. 
 
 When a man's sympathies are with a disloyal State 
 rather than with the 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 here- 
 tics, 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 
 Lis own whim and caprice in the way in which he pays
 
 THE WORLD. 41 J 
 
 il back to hifl Creator. Indeed all developments of 
 worldliness exhibit some obliquity in a man's percep- 
 tion of the true relations between tho Creator and the 
 creature. Ought we not then seriously to ask our- 
 selves 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 symp- 
 toms of our having it, does not prudence suggest to us 
 almost an excess in caution, almost a nervousness of 
 fear, almost a fancifulness 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 
 tjio 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 ir. 
 11 is hard to live in the world and avoi 1 worldliness. 
 Yet this 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 odour of worldliness not pass upon our souls. 
 But to. the avoiding of worldliness no help is more 
 efficacious than having a right and fix^l view of the 
 world. There are two views of the world which Chris- 
 tians may take, two views which are actually taken I>v 
 those who are striving to serve God and to love Him 
 purely. Which of the two view3 a man takes depends 
 partly upon his early associations, partly upon his
 
 416 TEE WOULD. 
 
 natural character, and partly upon the circumstan- 
 ces of his vocation; and, his spiritual life will be 
 found to 1)3 considerably modified by the pariicular 
 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 every- 
 thing 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 affec- 
 tions 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 pre- 
 sent 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 his know- 
 ledge 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 lustre of God's benediction 
 on it. It is the earth on which Jesus was born, and 
 where Mary lived. They marvel at the number of ex- 
 quisite pleasures with which it is strewn, so very few of 
 which comparatively are sins. The innocent attach- 
 ments of earthly love are to such men helps to love 
 God better. Natural beauty supernaturalizes their 
 minds. The sunshine makes them better men. God's 
 perfections are seen everywhere written in hieroglyphics
 
 THE WOULD. 417 
 
 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 con- 
 doling, all things in fact so much better on trial than 
 they seemeJ, that the world appears a happy place, and 
 mi-sing 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 blos- 
 soms 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 li^ht 
 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 of 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 su>dues; the 
 other gives elasticity. The one seems more admoni- 
 tory to man ; the other more honourable to God. Both 
 
 can make 6aiats; but saints of different kinds LioLk 
 27 -J-
 
 418 THE WOULD. 
 
 are true ; yet both are untrue. Eoth are true as faj? 
 as they go, and both are untrue when they exclude the 
 other. They are partial views; and one is more true 
 to a man than the other, because it is more suitable for 
 his character and temper to dwell upon what is promi- 
 nently dark, or prominently bright, as the case may 
 be. 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 view3 
 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 differ, nt 
 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 thd 
 world. The question between an active or a contem- 
 plative 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 viefT 
 of the world, the true view, the bright and dark together. 
 Intellectually they may do so ; bub practically they 
 must lean either to the dark or bright, exaggerate their 
 own view, and do the other view injustice. No mind 
 leaves things uncoloured. It is our necessity ; we can- 
 not 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 rules in such sub- 
 ject matters. But as upon the whole we find the
 
 TEE WORLD. 410 
 
 darker view taken by cloistered saints, and the brighter 
 view by secular saints, it may not be an error to sup- 
 pose 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 em- 
 anated from the cloister. Luther was an Augustinian : 
 Savonarola a Dominican. A monk has beautiful ex- 
 amples 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 
 Lim in his circumstances it is a powerful stimulus to 
 sanctity. But it would require very peculiar circum- 
 stances indeed to make it such to persons aiming at 
 perfection in the world. They are good; they lovo 
 God ; they frequent the Sacraments ; they make mental 
 prayer; they practice voluntary mortifications; they 
 live under spiritual direction ; their interests and tastes 
 are in B] iritual things. Yet for all this they enjoy the 
 world. Many of its blameless pleasures are real plea- 
 sures to them. They love many persons, and many 
 persons love them. Their home-circle is bright and 
 tenler; and if it does not lead to God, there is no 
 appearance of its leading away from Ilim. Now what 
 will happen if we force them to believe that all i* 
 misery around them, and that they ought to be misera- 
 ble themselves, and that it is very imperfect of tlitm
 
 420 THE WORLD. 
 
 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 try. 
 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 im- 
 patience, 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 which 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 
 every one knows that in the world, where there are 
 neither rules nor vows, discouragement and unsettle- 
 ment 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 inade- 
 quate notion of sin, as much as the darker view musfc 
 Bhun discouragement, self-exaltation, and uncharitable- 
 ness, to which 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.
 
 THE WORLp. 421 
 
 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 amaziDgly. But much more are those who 
 live in the world exposed to its dangers. It looks 
 eo moral, and sometimes, but not often, even gene- 
 rous, in order to deceive us. It 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 deci- 
 phers it for us there. We behold a system of pro- 
 prieties with no self-denial in them, a number of 
 axioms of doubtful morality gaining ground and pass- 
 ing current, a humility which consists in our ruling 
 ourselves by the opinions of others, an inventiveness of 
 amusements which bewilder our notions of right and 
 wrong; and in all this we can prophecy evil an J sus- 
 pect 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. AVe can watch its influence on sinners, how art- 
 fully 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 hypocriti- 
 cally it can rejoice in a man's conversion, how success- 
 fully it can lay hold of his fresh vigour and high spirits, 
 and how mercilessly it can lead him backwards and 
 blindfold into a relapse I But the sinner sees nothing
 
 422 THE -WORLD. 
 
 of this himself. If if; were told him, it would sound in 
 his ears as a romance. 
 
 We can trace the influence of worldliness upon pious 
 people. Their frequentation of the sacraments, their 
 church-going, their alms-giving, 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 very much richer than 
 themselves, or very 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 fidgetty about 
 His glory. Sometimes a step further is taken, and wa 
 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 witli 
 worldly company. These people make the oddest com- 
 pensations 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, who, before they commit a murder, 
 most devoutly recommend it to the Madonna. Yet 
 God and the world keep the peace so unbrokenly ia 
 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
 
 TEffi WOULD. 423 
 
 there is no freedom but in excessive fear, no security 
 but in a weary vigilance ! It 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 con- 
 clusion 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 
 which have been shown to be true, so it will not allow 
 lis to suppose that the majority of Catholics are saved, 
 when worldliness is at once so universal, and so deadly 
 to the 60ul. But this by no means follows. What 
 Las been said of the obtrusiveness of evil and the hidden- 
 ness 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 
 6tern conclusion to be drawn that very few rich persona 
 are saved, even among catholics, the conclusion of the 
 preceding chapter would remain unshaken. Many 
 wi iters 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.* 
 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.f Fromond, in his com- 
 • Conferences, It. 178, et seqq. t (Euvres, vii. 443.
 
 424 TEE WOULD. 
 
 mentary on the catholic epistles, enters upon the ques- 
 tion 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 u 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, honours, 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 his conversion.f 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 
 
 * Migne, Cursus Sacrse Scripturae, Tom. xxv. col. 683. 
 t Pala/ox, Eiccllenciaa do Sail P«uiO, lib. ui. cap. 9.
 
 THE WORLD. 425 
 
 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 under-estimate 
 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 quan- 
 tities, 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. It 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 
 nnder-estimated its dangers, you are already its vic- 
 tim. 
 
 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 atmos- 
 phere we breathe, it is of great importance to have well- 
 ascertained principles. It is astonishing how few men 
 are in possession of such. An almost incredible amount 
 of excellent effort comes to nothing great, because it is 
 at random, and by fits and starts, and operating incon- 
 sistently with its antecedents. Tho really powerful 
 man in the world is the consistent man, tho man of 
 ascertained principles and of adjusted views. Tho 
 world, like a suspicious potentate, is always proposing 
 concordats. "\Vc are atked first for one compromise,
 
 426 THE WORLD 
 
 then for another. We do not know when we havo 
 passed the line which involved a principle, and so we 
 discover, that we have committed ourselves to some- 
 thing, in which it is impossible for us to keep our word 
 without surrendering our independence altogether. 
 Now with ascertained principles we have settled ail 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 map- 
 ping out the country before us, because we have no 
 ascertained princples, every step we take, (and we can- 
 not 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 victory 
 which overcometh the world," it is of great consequence
 
 THE WORLD. 427 
 
 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 pur- 
 chase in the anti-church side of all these questions ; and 
 it is so tempting to be moderate, so pleasant to yield, 
 eo hard to prove, so weary to argue, so unnatural to 
 confess our own ignorance, that an educated modern 
 catholic who does not study the doctrines of his religion, 
 as carefully as the subject-matter of his profession, wiii 
 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 odour of God that intellectual bashful- 
 Dess 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
 
 428 THE WORLD. 
 
 away in proud dislike from Him whom he has thus 
 betrayed. 
 
 In the last place, it is honestly to be confessed, that 
 all these things do but form an armour against the spirit 
 of the world. They are not a victory over it. More- 
 over it is an armour 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 G;d.
 
 42? 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 Aio S?j xx) tig etiirov t~-({TTea.TTxi ra, ffCf^rxvrK^ u.tr%iTa) rw irc$u xen 
 
 S. 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 harbour of 
 His infinite perfections. All things teach us this beau- 
 tiful truth* All things 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. 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
 
 430 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 destined them to a glory which is far beyond our natu- 
 ral capacities. All the three orders of nature, grace, 
 and glory 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,* 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 necessary, glory 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 
 successive 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 ful- 
 filled, and the whole of the elect enter into the everlast- 
 ing 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 inten- 
 tion in creation already involved both grace and glory j 
 and this is the explanation of the beautiful and touching 
 
 * Throughout the whole Treatise the opinion of St. Bonaventure as to the 
 creation of the angels has been assumed to he incorrect.
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 431 
 
 nivstery of our being created in a state of grace origin- 
 ally. So nature involved grace, not necessarily, but in 
 the designs of creative love, and grace looked on to 
 glory, and prophecied of it to free-will, and more than 
 prophecied 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 com- 
 munication of Himself; and this communication of 
 Himself is, as theologians tell us, twofold, a natural 
 communication, and a free communication. The natu- 
 ral 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 per- 
 fectly 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 place first, and foremost, and 
 eminently, in the Hypostatic Union, and then in the 
 gifts of grace and glory ; and God's communication of 
 Himself, which in the act of creation was not superna- 
 tural, 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 this 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 per-
 
 432 OUR OWN GOD, 
 
 fected 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 per- 
 fectly the sons of God, and deiform, 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 tho 
 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 ia 
 us.* 
 
 When we speak of God's glory we may mean one or 
 more of four things. 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 crea- 
 tures, their loveliness, their number, their adaptations, 
 even their colour and form, are the external glory of 
 God, represented objectively, whereas the knowledge of 
 Him, the love of Him, and the joy in Him, 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 through the creation of the 
 
 * Lessiua de Perfect. Divin. lib. xiv.
 
 OTJR OWN GOD. 433 
 
 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 I what joy the creature will find at last 
 ill this very necessity, which God is under, of doing 
 everything for His own glory ! That God has created 
 the world is a fact. It is contradictory not to His wis- 
 dom 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 Him, except glory. Even then the 
 glory is not necessary to Him, and does not make Him 
 more blessed or more self- sufficient 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, support- 
 ing 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 de- 
 pending 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 
 
 28 f
 
 434 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 all tilings for His glory, if He created at all, much more 
 is the creature under the necessity of glorifying God in 
 all things. 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 na- 
 ture. 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 things 
 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 re- 
 deeming 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 explana- 
 tion of the Incarnation, but only of Redemption. Thus 
 it is absolutely necessary, when we are thinking of crea- 
 tion, to bear in mind the fact that God created angels 
 and men in a state of grace, and not in a state of pure 
 nature. We are not concerned with other possible ere; 
 tions, but only with our own creation; 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 supernatu-
 
 OUR OWN GOD, 435 
 
 ral 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.* 
 
 The inanimate and irrational creations glorify God 
 by the very splendour of the beauty in which Tie 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 crea- 
 tions 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. Tims the know- 
 ledge, 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 
 ehiefest glory, which He Himself intended in all His 
 works j 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 
 
 * Charitas est ergo causa effi^em creators rationalis, et particmatio divii.a 
 bonitdtis est causa fiualis.— Harphius.
 
 436 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 above themselves, and, in their union with God, become 
 deiform, by a mos.t lofty and super-eminent 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 immen- 
 sity so as to be coequal and coextensive, 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 this 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 ful- 
 filling of all their desires; there 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 sweet- 
 ness, 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 comes perpetual praise, and bene-
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 437 
 
 diction, 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 theii 
 Last End.* 
 
 Thus does creation come home, like a weary bird to 
 its roost, to rest in its Creator. And then all move- 
 ments cease, all vicissitudes, changes, progresses, aspi- 
 rations, 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;! and the subjection of His Human Nature, 
 which 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-born of all creatures, were the 
 crowning beauty of creation, God the Creator becomes 
 all in all, and the chronicles of this creation close. Be- 
 yond 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 undi- 
 vided Trinity. 
 
 If we have taken pain9 to master this somewhat 
 difficult account of creation, we shall see that it is as 
 it were the frame Avithin which all the relations of the 
 Creator and the creature, which have occupied the pre- 
 ceding chapters, are enclosed. It will make some things 
 plain, which perhaps were not plain before; and it will 
 
 • Lessiua lib. xiy. t * Cor. xv.
 
 438 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 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 lov e 
 of God, and that the only security from worldliness is 
 also in a personal love of God. It is neither the won- 
 derful character of its doctrines, nor the pure simplicity 
 of its precepts, nor the supernatural power of its assis- 
 tances, which make religion what it is, but the fact of its 
 being the creaiure'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 very 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 attri- 
 butes, 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
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 439 
 
 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 hor- 
 ror 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 ot God. It is only the love of Him which 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 beauty which can dim and dishonour 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 neces- 
 sity 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 loo. Come it must, and then it will all be but 
 a dream to look back upon. But there are stern things 
 to pass through; and to the getting well through them» 
 there goes more than we can say. One thing we 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 be- 
 hind, but home they never come. To love, the way is
 
 '44Q OttROWNGGp* 
 
 neither bard to find, nor hard to tread; for so it is 
 that love never comes home tired. It gets to God 
 through the longest life more fresh, more eager, more 
 venturous, more full of youth, more brimming with ex- 
 pectation, than the day it started amid the excesses 
 dnd inexperiences of its first conversion. 
 
 No one denies this doctrine of the necessity of per- 
 sonal love of God. It could not be denied without 
 heresy. But there are two different schools of spiri- 
 tuality 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.f Personal love of God with- 
 out this would be a falsehood and a mockery. 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 dwell- 
 ing exclusively on love to make religion too much a 
 matter of mere devotions, an affair of sentiments and 
 feelings, highly strung and therefore brittle, over- 
 strained and so shortlived. It is possible on the other 
 
 * A -whole string of consequences seem to follow in ascetical theology from 
 the doctrine of Vasquez, Naturam rationalem esse regulam honestatis. The 
 common teaching however is against him. See Vasq. i. 2. disp. 58. 2. and 
 disp. 97. 3. 
 
 t To the doctrine that a good action is essentially and intrinsically goofl, 
 Medina objects, Si quis velit amare Deum, et non ex motivo, quod hoc sit 
 conforme legi divinse id prsecipienti, adhuc ponit actum honestum et bonuni. 
 Viva replies, Qui amat Deum, et non ex motivo honestatis, ponit actum 
 honestum sed non ponit actum honestum honeste. De Actibus Humanis. 
 qu. ii.
 
 OUR OWN GDD. 441 
 
 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 pecu- 
 liar character of the Gospel be overlooked or inade- 
 quately 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 true, but not par- 
 ticularly persuasive, especially to those whom youth 
 makes ardent, or those whom sin has made invalids. 
 We must pursue such and such a line of conduct be- 
 cause it is the one which God loves, and God loves u* 
 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 very persuasive, and has a wonderful root of 
 perseverance in it. But it comes to pass that, while 
 both views are very true, they nevertheless form quite 
 different characters. So that it is one of the most im- 
 portant 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. 
 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 very hard to persuade a man, or for him to 
 persuade himself, that God loves him. The moment that
 
 442 
 
 OUR OWN GOD, 
 
 fact becomes a part of his own sensible convictions, a 
 perfect revolution has been worked in his soul. Every- 
 thing 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 con- 
 scientious, 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 weak- 
 nesses 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 direc- 
 tor witli 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 extravagancies 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 in- 
 credible that God should love us as He is said to do. 
 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. 
 
 If all the evil that is in the world arises from the 
 want of a practical acknowledgment of the true rela- 
 tions 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
 
 OTJU OWN GOD. 443 
 
 true relations between the Creator and the creature 
 ore more readily appreciated, more lovingly embraced, 
 and more perseveringly acted out, on the system which 
 puts love first and duty second, which dues right be- 
 cause 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. 
 VS e should never think therefore of condemning, or 
 throwing the slightest slur, on any method winch 
 succeeded in securing the continuous keeping of God's 
 commandments upon supernatural motives. This must 
 be borne 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 per- 
 fection. 
 
 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 learn to do 
 right just because it is right, we seem often to be want- 
 ing in the delicacy and fineness of our spiritual dis- 
 cernment. 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 world-
 
 444 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 liness 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 per- 
 severance is more congruous to the conduct which pro- 
 ceeds 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. 
 
 It 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 omis- 
 sion, or act in a hurry at the last. This is the reason 
 why slow men are often so precipitate. Any one 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. It does not do for
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 445 
 
 storms. It 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. It 
 soon despairs. Sin seems a necessity, and a few seri- 
 ous relapses are enough to make it give up the spiritual 
 life altogether. There are cases of men who nevei 
 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,* 
 
 It also has a propensity to concentrate us upon our- 
 selves, and so to hinder charity. Self must, come in, 
 when we are always looking at self and self's behaviour, 
 and when even the Object of faith presents itself habitu- 
 ally 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 
 neighbour. 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 prac- 
 tice 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 sweet- 
 nesses. A merely conscientious man may be intellec- 
 tually convinced that he ought, to aim at perfection, 
 but the chances are immensely against his succeeding; 
 
 • Even conscience acts rather by lore of the beauty of virtue than by 
 hatred of the malice of vice. Antoine says, Voluntas aversari non potest 
 objectum malum propter solam ejus malitiam tanquam unicum motivum, 
 quia odium malitise vitii necessario fundatur in amore objective boni'tatis 
 virtutis opposite?, illumque necessario supponit. Unde nemo odit malitiam 
 alicujus vitii propter se, nisi amet, et quia amat, bonitatem etjmlchritu- 
 dinem virtutis opposite. De Act. Hum. cap. iii. art. i.
 
 416 OUR OWN GOD, 
 
 and for this reason, that he has not sufficient momen- 
 tum. 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 carry 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 Chris- 
 tian, 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 very defi- 
 cient 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 
 scruples. 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 con- 
 trition or of disinterested love. Nay, it will even dis- 
 inter 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 tend.*, 
 and to which it must tend with all the more determina- 
 tion the higher it rises in the spiritual life, where com- 
 mon rules are less clear in their application, and the 
 processes of grace more intricate and unusual. Yet
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 447 
 
 while it breeds scruples, tins same principle also minis- 
 ters to self-trust, because of its habit of examining 
 actions for itself, and then of going by what it sees. 
 it is very rare to find a man, who habitually does what 
 is right only because it is right, who is not at the sime 
 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 beautiful object 
 of faith. A conscientious seraph is a very difficult idea 
 to realize. In truth there is nothing supernatural about 
 this principle, except the amount of love which it con- 
 tains. It borrows from love all about it that is worth 
 much, and yet keeps love in the lowest place, as if it 
 were a dependent and inferior. Thus we are not sur- 
 prised to find those who habitually act upon it, some- 
 what out of harmony with the lives of the saints, with 
 new miracles, with popular devotions, with apparitions, 
 pilgrimages, taking vows, and other supernatural things. 
 Foi the principle does not take kindly to the super- 
 natural, grasps it nervously, and so is perpetually letting 
 it slip because it cannot hold it. 
 
 Keither 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. Is is dry. It 
 repels. It speaks shortly, and makes no allowances. 
 It is unseasonable, and is proud of disregarding circum- 
 stances. Time and place are out of time and place to
 
 448 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 it. It has a propensity to preach, and dictate, and he 
 tiresome. In all these respects it plays into the 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 every one. 
 It thus embraces fewer souls: because fewer are capa- 
 ble 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, nor 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 (he doctrine of habit is a poor thing to trust to in 
 the supernatural affairs of grace. God Himself acts 
 from love, that is, from conformity 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. It is venturesome, overflowing, divine. 
 
 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- 
 
 * In Deo operationes moraliter bonse, honestse, ac laudabiles dicuntur 
 quas sunt conibraies fini ipsius Dei, ut est amor suimet. And again, Deus, 
 quia non habet finem ultimum a se distinetum, quando operatur honeate, 
 hoc est confbrmiter ad proprium finem, et juxta exigentiain, quam habet a 
 propria natura, non obligatur rigorose a regula honestatis, sed pliysiee, imo 
 et metaphysice, necessitatur a Seipso, Viva, p. ii, disp. vii. q. i. de prima 
 regula moralitatis.
 
 ©UR OWN GOD. ild 
 
 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 princi- 
 ple of love disjoined from the principle of duty is a 
 tiling which will save no man. Doing right because 
 it is right is a course which every one 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, as 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 be- 
 cause 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 
 slone is religion; this is what flows from the ties be- 
 tween the Creator and His redeemed creature; for what 
 is redemption but the restoring, repairing, and enno- 
 bling 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. 
 29 r
 
 450 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 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 honourable 
 for Him. This is why I said at the outset that the 
 beginning of the whole process was rather in God'3 
 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 Crea- 
 tor; 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 tha 
 beauty of God, drawing us ever more and more power- 
 fully to the fuller possession of Him, until at length in 
 heaven we come to the fulness of our possession? Let 
 us emancipate ourselves for awhile from earthly 
 thoughts, and look up to heaven, while the angels, who 
 jvjoice over one sinner that does penance, are keep- 
 ing 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
 
 cm own goo. <51 
 
 bathed in ppl^ndour, beautiful to look upon, but it is a 
 splendour which is not their own. Each soul is beau- 
 tified 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 unfad- 
 ing beauty. O 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 wan- 
 derings are over, its problems solved, its consummation 
 gloriously accomplished. Yet the completion and ele- 
 vation 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 pos- 
 session of the Creator. It 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 riuga
 
 452 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 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 beauti- 
 ful vision of their Creator. %t 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 unlike 
 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 teacnes us? 
 When men saw Jesus too near and too openly, th« j y 
 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 con- 
 demnation. 
 
 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, circum- 
 stances, education, vocation, national character, all 
 these have bad so much to do. with, it r and yet so little.
 
 OUT. OWN GOD. 453 
 
 They account for much, jet not for all, aud for the 
 main thing not in the least; for the same things, which 
 seem to be helping saints forward, are visibly keeping 
 other souls hack. 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 6ouls 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 the 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 tho pincers, among the teeth of lions, 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 extasies and worked miracles, who had mys- 
 terious 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 sin- 
 ners, with all their habits of sin still strong upon them. 
 Or they were ordinarily good men in the world who 
 lovod permitted liberty and blameless pleasure, but
 
 A.ZI OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 over whom by degrees a sort of dream seemed to pass ; 
 and noiselessly they were led out of the crowd dream- 
 ing 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 sensitive- 
 ness. 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 ex- 
 ternal beauty of the earth, in which they could read 
 more plainly than other men the sweet enticing love- 
 liness 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 
 walking into convents over the bodies of their sons. 
 There were mothers watching their sons writhing in 
 the excruciating rgonies 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, — then was the 
 magic of the potent spell 1 with what elasticity they 
 rose up under their load, and now they bang, like angeh,
 
 OUB OWN GOD. 45 J 
 
 as they went ! And it was liberty which they all gave 
 up, the liberty out of which God gets all His creature's 
 We, 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 persua- 
 siveness, 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, unchan<nucr and 
 
 * © ©' 
 
 in the full bkize 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 pow r er 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- 
 p.icked cloudy nights. They lit up the cross upon the 
 steeple and were gone. Bat the soul fed on them for 
 days. There are the first moments after communion, 
 an unearthly time, when we are like Mary 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 super- 
 natural health is dancing in our blood, and straight- 
 way we climb a mountain on the road to heaven. Then 
 there are sudden guohes of love, and along with the 
 love light alsoj and we know not why they come nor
 
 456 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 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 
 Jim in times of sorrow, which were so swift that they 
 looked like possibilities rather than actual visitations. 
 But they were true embraces from our Heavenly Father 
 and they have healed us of diseases, and they have in- 
 fused 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 very thick and palpable, like 
 lightning on a moonless 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 dawn- 
 ing of the heavenly day. Nay, one sight of God's 
 beauty at death, such a sight as the dying have some- 
 times, 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? 
 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
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 457 
 
 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 
 fccience of God. It i3 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 fami- 
 liarity. 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 nuw 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
 
 458. OUR OWN GOD, 
 
 satisfying, they delight still more* because of the de- 
 lightful hunger which they leave behind, and which is 
 in itself a marvellous, 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 banish- 
 ment. They are our own. They belong to us. The 
 Creator has made them all over to us to be our pos- 
 session and our joy, as if He kept them Himself only to 
 bear the weight of them, so that ta us they might be 
 nothing else but joys.* Even His eternity is our3; 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, run 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, beautiful inheritance of the crea- 
 ture ! They are eternal, and will never fail us, immu- 
 table and will never change, immense and always leave 
 us room. O space! thou must widen thy gigantic 
 
 * Nieremberg in the eighth chapter of the seventh book of his Prodigy oi 
 Divine 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 tkeses 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 ware 
 condemned as " at the least temerarious and novel." Viva has a short com- 
 mentary on them. (Opera Omnia : torn. vii. p. 194. Ferrara edition. 1757O 
 They are also given by Philippus de Carboneano.the friend of Benedict XIV., 
 in his treatise on condemned propositions, but he dee.* not nime tfieir ant&or; 
 nor does Denzinger in his Enchiridion; and Bernino does not give them at al) 
 among the propositions of Innocent XL, perhaps because the'* were not cen« 
 demned as " heretical."
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 459 
 
 stiadowy limits, else wilt thou be a very prison for our 
 immortal joys 1 
 
 If earth be such a heaven to believing souls, whafc 
 sort of heaven must the real heaven be? What is that 
 incomparable beauty which the Blessed are gazing on 
 this 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 think 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 glis- 
 tening 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 Splendours 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 filliug all 
 space, the other outliving all time ; the 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 Under- 
 standing and the Will, the one for ever lightening up with 
 such meridian glory the profound abysses of God's un- 
 circutnscribed Truth and illimitable Wisdom, the other 
 enfolding for ever in its unconsuming fires the incom- 
 prehensible Life of God, His infinite oceanlike expanse 
 of being, and every creature of the countless worlds that
 
 4G0 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 from His life draw their own. Look at the Divine Im- 
 mutability and Liberty, how they sit together like 
 sisters, deep enthroned in that marvellous 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 coeternal 
 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 this life, and all 
 this 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 pos- 
 sesses actually all the plenitude of being, without ad- 
 mixture of privation, without dilution of possibility ; for 
 not only are all things possible in Him but all possibili- 
 ties 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 things at all. He is, 
 and He is eternally, and He is necessarily, and He is of 
 Himself. It is this 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
 
 OUR OWN GOD. 4GX 
 
 endless Nature, and which is to the Face of God what 
 expression is to the face of man, at once its charm 
 and its identity, its beauty and its truth. As we know- 
 each other by our looks, so we know God by H13 Sim- 
 plicity. 
 
 happy souls of the Blessed, and what of you? 
 It is all written in the Holy Book;* and it needs no 
 commenting. On the third day she laid away the gar- 
 ments she wore, and put on her glorious apparel. And 
 glittering in royal robes, after she had called upon God, 
 the Ruler and Saviour of all, she took two maids with 
 her. And upon one of them she leaned, as if, for deli,- 
 cateness 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 colour 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 piecious stones, and He was 
 terrible to behold. And when He had lifted up His 
 countenance, the queen sank down, and her colour turned 
 pale, and she rested her weary head upon her hand- 
 rr.aid. And the King's spirit was changed into mildness, 
 and all in haste He leaped from His throne, and hold- 
 ing 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 shalt not die: fur this 
 law is not made for thee, but for all others. Come near 
 then, and touch the sceptre. And as she held her 
 peace, He took the golden sceptre, and laid it upon her 
 
 • Esther xt.
 
 462 OUR OWN GOD. 
 
 neck, and kissed her, and said, Why dost thou not speak 
 to Me? And she answered, I saw T.'iee, 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 ser- 
 vants 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 unsolv- 
 ed. 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 dis- 
 proving 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 diffi- 
 culty 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 gran- 
 deurs 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,
 
 our own god. 463 
 
 and that it could root, fortify, and confirm all tin's 
 gigantic rage and hatred in itself for millions and mil- 
 lions of years, until it had become a new, ineradicable, 
 £wd preternatural nature to him, one little ray of God's 
 beauty falling gently on him for a single moment would 
 change hi's whole being that instant into such respectful 
 ]ove and utter adoration, that he would not feel the 
 fires that burned him, because of the greater fires of his 
 
 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 ? mj 
 Creator, my Eternal Lovel my Father, my Heaven- 
 ly 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 I In te, 
 Doiuine ! speravi, non confundar in selenium ! 
 
 THE EXD#
 
 465 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Abjectness of the Creature 70 
 
 Absolution 311 
 
 Actions 239, 309— multiplicity of 241, 
 244— of the Incarnate Word 245 — 
 power of good 324 — outward, often 
 worse than the heart 371 
 
 Adam, created iu a state of grace 49, 
 96, 143, 431 
 
 Adoration, love of 235 
 
 Age, old 105 
 
 Air, the 160 
 
 Alphonso, St. 347, 453 
 
 Alvarez 345 
 
 Angela, B. of Foligno 118 
 
 Angels, the, sin of 23— created in a 
 state of grace 49, 52, 96, 148, 430 
 — watch over men 64— fall of 
 81, 148— guardian 84— diversities of 
 21 1— worship of 240 joy of, oyer 
 penitents 292— glory of 378 
 
 Animals, necessary to man 67 
 
 Annihilation 55 
 
 Armour, against the world 428 
 
 Asceticism 39 
 
 Atheism, in literature 25— in politics 
 29, 31— in physical science 31 
 
 Attrition 294, note 
 
 Augustine, St. 172 
 
 Austerity 103 
 
 Aversion to God 250 
 
 Baianism 49 
 Baius 48, 49, 50 
 Balance of power 30 
 Baptism of infants 150— What is in- 
 volved in 305 
 
 SO t 
 
 Beatitude 154— price of 155 — of the 
 
 glorified soul 285 
 Bellarmine345 
 BeneTolence, love of 227 
 Bergier 348 
 Bernard, St. 417 
 Bible, the 146 
 Billuart 347 
 Body, the glorified 284 
 Books, scientific 23— spiritual 117 
 Borgia, St. Francis tl8 
 Bossuet 423 
 Brodie, Sir Eenjamin 367 
 
 Cajctan 345 
 Carthagena 345 
 Catherine, St. of Siena 118 
 Catholics, aims of ordinary 253 — 
 
 great majority of, are saved 338 
 
 364— test of worldly 414 
 Cerinthus 122 
 Character, formed, by the Church 
 
 32— by the world 33 
 Charitableness 354 
 Charity, spurious 121, 123 
 Childlike 131 
 Christo, Franciscus de 3+ 
 Church, the 123— treasury 3^7— 
 
 graces of 338, 385— counterfeited 
 
 by the world 402 
 Civilization, monomanias of 27 — 
 
 work of 401 
 Communication of God 431 
 Communion 318 
 Compact with God 93 
 Complacence, love of 228
 
 466 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Condolence, love of 230 
 Condren 366 
 
 Considerateness of God 215 
 Conservation 171 
 Conscience, a seared 411 
 Conscientiousness 445, 448 
 Confession 150 
 Confirmation, sacrament of 150, 
 
 323 
 Contemplation 117 
 Controversies of the day 427 
 Conversions 310— deathbed 343 — 
 
 numerous 355, 374 
 Converts 40 
 
 Creation, mystery of 83, 126— defini- 
 tion of 13s— valued by God 135— 
 in a state of grace 143— a revela- 
 tion of God 170— possibilities of 
 other 210— glorifies God 435— 
 history of 437 
 Creator, the 23— purposes of the 61 
 — reveiatioh of, in the Old Testa- 
 ment 87— idea Of 91, 95, .101— 
 service of 105 
 Creatures, importance of remember- 
 ing that we are 22— evil effects of 
 forgetting that we are 34, 43— 
 what are 53— home of 56. 437— 
 true dignity of 62— condition of 65 
 — meaning of 77— bound to serve 
 the Creator out of love 80— in- 
 fluence of 85— relation of, to the 
 Creator 89— desire God 90— God 
 loves the 161— holiness of T87 — 
 happiness of 272 -sufferings ,of 
 ,328 
 Cross, the, mystery of 267 
 
 Da Ponte 349 
 
 Death, when it comes 63— a punish- 
 ment 274— a good 291— hour of 
 367 
 
 Decrees, the divine 141 
 
 Deformity of sin 375 
 
 Denys, the Carthusian 345 
 
 Dependency of man 69— on grace 
 97 
 
 Desire, love of 233 
 
 Detachment 229 
 
 Devotions, Catholic, source of obj c- 
 
 tions to 124 
 Devil, the 76 
 Difficulties 302— about the salvation 
 
 bf heretics 340 
 Dignity of man 32, 71, 103 
 Diplomacy, irreligious 29— religious 
 
 203 
 Discernment, sp T ritual 425 
 Disobedience 329 
 Dives 406, 413 
 Dolours, the seven 231 
 Dominion 57— Characteristics of 
 
 God's 252 
 Drexelius 345 
 Durandus 171 
 Duty and love 440, 447 
 
 Earth, mother 145 
 
 Election 143, 219 
 
 Eli.seus 362 
 
 Elizabeth, St., of Hungary 442 
 
 Embraces of God 45(5 
 
 End of man 54, 56, 62, 77, 98, 106, 
 
 107 
 England, state of, 122 
 Enthusiasm 114— definitions of 115 
 
 — what men mean by 116 
 Errors, dangers of popular 35 
 Espousals, the divine 112 
 Esteem, love of 229 
 Eternity 63 
 Extasy 386 
 
 Faith, the, temptations against 165, 
 260— gift of 271— outlives mortal 
 sin 3 10— greatness of the gift of 
 383— certainty of 384 
 
 Fallacies, popular, dangers of 37 
 
 Falsehood 307 
 
 Fall, the 71, 81— of the Angels 148 
 
 Fasolus 345 
 
 Fear, holy 234 
 
 Fervour, times of 2<5i 
 
 Fidelity of God 460 
 
 Forbearance of God 215
 
 INDEX. 
 
 467 
 
 Forgiveness, profusion of 214, 217. 
 
 222 
 Francis, St. 118 
 Francis of Sales, St. 417 
 Friendship 216 
 Fromond 423 
 
 Generation, the Eternal, of the Son 
 169 
 
 Gertrude, St. 119, 275 
 
 Gifts of the Holy Ghost J06 
 
 Glory, gifts of 432— light of 436 
 
 Gospel, the 316 
 
 God, forgetfulness of 23, 28— ignored 
 24, 107, 113, 340— requires a 
 special service from every man 61 
 — Providence of 70— object of 
 man's thoughts 76- end of man 
 77. 97. 242, 429— how men use 78 
 — life of 86— desired by creatures 
 90— rights of 93 — will of 94— con- 
 currence of 95 , 101, 177— never fails 
 us 98— absolute sovereignty of 101 
 His own end 1C2, 180— must be 
 served by the whole man 109 — 
 wrong notions about 113— inade- 
 quate views of the love of 124— 
 worth of the Creation in the sight 
 of 135— joys of 137— never without 
 creatures 141— successive revela- 
 tions of 145— patience of 153 — 
 longs for our love 156— love o£ 
 unimaginable 162— long suffering 
 of 179— holiness of 186— loves us, 
 why 196— object of our love 200 
 —government of 214— paternal 
 tenderness of 217— liberality of 248 
 — man's ignorance of 249— unre- 
 quited love of 262. 264— recom- 
 penses of 268, 276, 288— His judg- 
 ment of man 39b— glory of 432 
 
 Goodness of God 116, 152, 207, 289 
 —known by degrees 359 
 
 Grace, sanctifying 96, 270," 317— our 
 dependence oh 97— kingdom of 
 147— of the Saints 247— abundance 
 of 257, 2$8» 282-effects of 281— 
 universality of 282, 325— varieties 
 
 of, 283— struggles of, against sin 
 310, 361— state of 332— of the sa- 
 craments 365 — lost by angels and 
 men 434, 
 
 Granadus 345 
 
 Gratitude, love of 23s 
 
 Guardian Angel 318 
 
 Habits, supernatural 305 
 
 Hatred of God 250 
 
 Heart, the Sacred 372 
 
 Hearts, reserved for God 136 
 
 Heathen, picture of an honest 34, 8a 
 
 Heathens, how regarded by the 
 fathers 121 
 
 Heaven 283, 290— hierarchies of 378 
 
 Hell 333— the thought of 334— teach- 
 ing of 379 
 
 Helplessness of man 66 
 
 Here and hereafter 106 
 
 Heretics, how regarded by thefuthera 
 121 
 
 Holiness 77— first principles of «i — 
 order of 103— of God 186— of the 
 creature 187— wherein it consists 
 438 
 
 Humiliation of pardon 72- 
 
 Ideas peculiar *o the Church 39 
 
 Igoatius, St. 453 
 
 Ignorances of man 66— invincible 370 
 
 Imitation, the, of Christ 37 
 
 Impetration, power of 325 
 
 Incarnation, the decree of 60 — Thom- 
 ist account of 125— Scotist account 
 of 149, 175— results of 223 
 
 Indifference about God 252 
 
 Indulgences 313 
 
 Infants, baptized 134 
 
 Influx of God 95 
 
 Inheritance of man 63 
 
 Innocence, the state of 50 
 
 Insects 67 
 
 Intention 255 - doctrine of 308 
 
 Interest 103 
 
 Irreligion 30— common 3* 
 
 Isaias, woe of 412 
 
 Jansenius 48, 50
 
 468 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Jansenism 49 
 John, St. 122 
 John St. of the Cross 37 
 
 Johnson, Dr. 115 . 
 
 Joy, the service of God 109— of God 
 
 136— sources of a natural 279 
 Joylessness4i6' 
 Judgment, the final 389 
 Judgments, erroneous 354. 
 Justice, original 50— of God 184 
 
 Knowledge of God, envied by Adam 
 81 — not common i04~»results of 
 the loss of 249 
 
 Lacordalre 348, 423 
 
 Lapide, Cornelius a 347 
 
 Lazarus 413 
 
 Le Blanc, F. 118 
 
 Leonard, the B., of Port Maurice 347 
 
 Lessius 154, 173. 431. 435 
 
 Liberty 104 
 
 Lie3 307 
 
 Life, bound up with creatures 85 — 
 of God 86— waste of 106— a pil- 
 grimage 237 
 
 Lipsin349 
 
 Literature, irreligious 30 — of the 
 Church 37 
 
 Loneliness 318 
 
 Lorinus 346 
 
 Love, God must be served Jn 42. 80 
 — effect of God's 91— the service of 
 God in— difficulties of creative 
 129— why God seeks our 132— 
 place of, in repentance 133— sole 
 desire of God 156— explains mys- 
 teries 159— depths of divine 163, 
 167 — the first free act of God 166 
 —eternal, of God 168— precept of 
 200, 218— personal 206 — seven 
 kinds of 226— of the saints 248— 
 our 254, 258— marks of true 258— 
 never satisfied 260— creative 299— 
 of God, fills the earth 337— life of 
 creation w-vetiQiul, of God 439, 
 449 
 
 Loveliness, of God 189— of our Lady 
 
 236 
 Luther 419 
 Lyra 345 
 
 Maldonatus 345 
 
 Man, created in a state of grace 49, 
 52— fill of 51, 148— ignorance of 54. 
 58, 66— consequences of birth of 
 55— history of 58— predestination 
 of 60— God's love for 61 — mercies 
 snrround 63— helplessness of 66, 
 70— dependent on the lower ani- 
 mals 67— must not criticize his 
 position 74— sole pursuit of 75— 
 end of 77, 242— nothingness of 173 
 — guiltiness of 176— meanness of 
 182— littleneas of 174, 196— subject 
 of God 213— raised above the an- 
 gels 218— unworthiness of 246— 
 loved from all eternity 300— has 
 no rights 301 
 
 Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament 
 374 
 
 Marriage, the spiritual 220 
 
 Martha 232 
 
 Mary Magdalene, St. of Pazzi 190 
 
 Mary 314— intercession of 320 
 
 Matrimony, sacrament of 150, 333 
 
 Meanness 182 -"* 
 
 Meditation 117 
 
 Mercy, humbles 73— of God 164, 194 
 minister of the Precious Blood 
 195— overshadowed 280 
 
 Meriting, power of 325 
 
 Metaphysics 65 
 
 Middle life 98 
 
 Mission, divine 269 
 
 Molina 172, 345 
 
 Motives, earthly 259 
 
 Mysteries, five 131 
 
 Nativity, the 289 
 
 Nature and grace 48, 434— distinct' 
 
 5i 
 Nature, the divine 93, 207— kingdonx- 
 
 of 138, 277 
 No thingness J 18, 288
 
 INDEX., 
 
 4C9 
 
 Notions, false, among Catholics 37 
 
 Obedience 213 
 Obligations of man 201 
 Omnipresence of God 433 
 Order, sacrament of 151 
 
 Palafox 423 
 
 Papacy, the 224, 32S 
 
 Passion, the 315 
 
 Patience of God 263 
 
 Pei:ance, sacrament of 72— unlimited 
 
 iteration of 311 
 Perfection, maxims of, unintelligible 
 to some 21 — foundations of 43 — of 
 God 139— of the divine nature 2c8 
 Persons, the divine 271 
 Pharisees 406 
 Pleasures, sinful 331 
 Politics, irreligious 29 
 Power of God 191 
 Prayer, grace of 321 
 Predestination, of man 60— of God 
 
 143, 166— a sign cf 385 
 Presence, the Ileal 317 
 Preservation 90, 243 
 Priestcraft 119 
 Principles 425 
 
 Procession of the Holy Ghost 169 
 Progress, theories of 26 
 Propositions, condemned, of Baius 
 
 and Quesnel 53 
 Propriety of man 29. 74 
 Prosperity, dangers of 403 
 Providence of God 382 
 Purgatory, souls in 186— mercy in 
 194— tire of 313, 376— multiplies 
 the fruits of the Passion 377 
 
 Queen of the angels 313 
 
 Quesnel 48 
 
 Questions of children 129 
 
 Recupitus 345, 347 
 Redemption 362— denied to the an- 
 gels 434 
 Reformers 419 
 Relapses, one effect of 357 
 
 Religion, practical basis of 80-what 
 
 is it 230 
 
 Remission of venial sin 308 
 
 Repentance, a deathbed 293— made 
 easy by God 301 
 
 Rel-robate, number of the 345 
 
 Respectability of worldlineas 410 
 
 Responsibilities 44 
 
 Reverence of God for His creatures 
 100 
 
 Revelation, providence of God, a 
 private 380 
 
 Riches 408 
 
 Rich, the, difficulties about the sal- 
 vation of 423 
 
 Rights of God 93 
 Ruiz 345 
 
 r 
 
 Sacrament, the Blessed T65 
 
 Sacraments, the, graces of 365 
 Saint, what is a 37, 80, 246— prayer 
 of a 319— hopeful about sinners 
 373— how made 453 
 
 Salvation 303— easy 304, 336— condi- 
 tions of 306— means of 330 
 
 Sanctity 33— motives of 305 
 
 Satan, activity of 359 
 
 Satisfaction, power of 326 
 
 Satispassion 328 —sacrifice of 329 
 
 Science, influence of 33, 104 
 
 Savonarola 419 
 
 Saved, the, opinions about the num- 
 ber of 351 
 
 Scruples, one source of 446 
 
 Scotus 173 
 
 Secrecy of good works 358 
 
 Seculars must aim at perfection 42 
 
 Self-abasement 99 
 
 Self- concentration, whence it comes 
 
 445 
 Senses, the, power of 144 
 
 Servants 215 
 
 Service of God, our 178— the one 
 thing 254— a captivity 259 
 
 Silvestri, Card. Tietro de 44 
 
 Sin, forms of, change 23— danger of 
 trying to do no more than avoiding 
 mortal 43- forgiveness of 266—
 
 470 
 
 rNDESc 
 
 doctrine of 307— pleasures of 331— 
 eternal punishment of 335 — of 
 worldliness 407— interior 409 
 
 Sinners, succession of 355— the predi- 
 lection of Jesus for 37a 
 
 Smiaing 345 
 
 Society, dangers of 36 
 
 Sorrow 273 
 
 Souls, love of 64 
 
 Spirits, realms of 84 
 
 Spirituality, not peculiar to religious 
 41— why people object to 43 
 
 Suarez 173,345 
 
 Suffering, voluntary 202 
 
 Cuicide 56 
 
 Super-fulness of God 208 
 
 Sylvester 345 
 
 Systems, philosophical 30 
 
 Temptation 370 
 
 Teresa St. 37 
 
 Testament, the old 86— food of the 
 
 ancient saints 88— infuses a 
 
 'strange knowledge of God 88 
 Thauler 96 
 Theology, importance of 28— teach* 
 
 ings of 84— study of 427 
 Thief, the good J55 
 Thomas, St. 138 
 Thomists 28 
 Thought, sins of 410 
 Touting for vocations 120 
 Trent, catechism of the council of 
 
 410 
 Trinity, the Holy 170 
 Triumph of God 291 
 Truth, religious 157— the .beauty of 
 
 God 1 94 -investigation of 278 
 
 Unction, Extreme 150, J13, 323, 
 
 324 
 Union with God 110 
 Unseen, the 57 
 Untruth, 193, 307 
 
 Vasquez 173, 347 
 
 Views, rigid, do harm 391— gloomy 
 
 416— bright 417, 420 
 Virtues, infused 305, note 
 Vision, the beatific 153, 236. 286— 
 
 what earns 156— grandeur of 287, 
 
 336— eternal 455 
 Vocations 119 
 Vows 41 
 
 Wickedness of man 175 
 
 Will of God 94, 323 
 
 Wisdom of God 190 
 
 World, the, not man's 57-tlie only 
 account of 98— morality of 105— 
 an imaginary 198— the moral 278 
 —an influence 397— evil power of 
 398— the supernatural hated by 
 403 — spirit of 415, 421 
 
 Worldliaess 394, 399— peculiar evils 
 of 396— effects of 405— definition of 
 406— a life of 409— sears the con- 
 science 411— effect of ou good 
 
 v people 423— not sufficiently dread- 
 ed 425 
 
 Worlds, fourteen, in tne life of God 
 
 139 
 
 Worship Of God 108 
 
 Years, the three-aadthirty 315 
 
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