Uplifting of the Soul

Tur EXISTENCE OF GoD.

From all eternity God is; God is perfect; God is happy; God is one. The ungodly ask, Wherefore should God be? I answer, Why should God not be? Is it because He is perfect? is perfection an obstacle to being? What extravagance of error! On the contrary, perfection is the very principle and argument of being. Wherefore should the imperfect be, and the perfect not be? In other words, © why should that exist which partakes most of nothingness, and that which has none of it not be? What do we understand by a perfect being? One in which is no deficiency. What by an imperfect being? One in which there is defect. Why should not the being in which there is nothing wanting exist, rather than the being in which there is deficiency? Whence comes it that any thing is, and that what is nothing cannot make itself exist, but because being is more excellent that the negation of being, and the thing that has no being cannot prevail over that which has being, nor prevent it from being? But, by the same reasoning, the imperfect cannot prevail over the perfect, nor have being in preference to it, nor hinder it from being. Why, then, should the mad dogma which the fool saith in his heart (Ps. xiii. 1) shut out God’s absolute existence P

In this strange blindness we wander darkling. The ungodly man denies the being of God, and cares not to inquire the meaning of his own existence. My soul,— reasoning but feebly reasoning soul,—whence and by what strain of argument dost thou infer, while satisfied of thine own existence, that God is not? Alas! art thou better than God? Soul, feeble, ignorant, wandering, full of error and uncertainty, full of weakness of will, corrupt and prone to evil, on what ground of argument and fair inference are we to believe that thou art, and that certainty, perfect intelligence, full comprehension of truth, and immutable love of holiness and rectitude cannot be?*

Gop’s LOVE FOR THE JUST.

God is to us a father, a mother, a nurse. Can a woman forget her child whom she has borne in her womb? and if she should forget, yet I will not forget thee (Isa. xlix. 15), says the Lord. The Lord thy God hath carried thee in His arms as a little child (Deut. i. 81). As the eagle enticing her young to fly and hovering over them, so He spreads His wings and takes you and carries you. He guards you as the apple of His eye (Deut. xxxii. 10-11). He not only feeds and nourishes, but He at the same time soothes and caresses you, as a tender mother feeds and caresses her little child. This is His Divine promise, continually fulfilled to us: As one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you (Isa. xvi. 18).

More than all that, He is a passionate lover, a tender husband to the faithful soul. The language which the Prophet Ezechiel tells us was addressed by Almighty God to Jerusalem is, in truth, addressed to us. The Prophet represents the soul of man under the figure of a miserable child, abandoned at the moment of its birth, cared for by none, an object of contempt and loathing to every

• We have omitted Bossuet’s Cartesian teaching on the origin and priority of our idea of the infinite, as his teaching on that point does not commend itself to Catholic philosophers.

passer-by, as it lies grovelling in the dust, disfigured and defiled by the stain of original sin. Upon this poor little outcast, on whom no one takes pity and whom death claims for its own, the Lord looks with His divine compassion and says: Live; sin-stained and loathsome as thou art, I will wash thee and make thee clean, robing thee in a garment whiter than snow (Ezech. xvi). So it is indeed that Almighty God speaks to every soul washed in the waters of Baptism.

But His tender cares do not stop there. The Prophet tells us that the child thus rescued and made clean and fair grows up into a maiden, ready to be adorned with all the graces of youth, but encompassed at the same time with all the temptations from without and from within which beset the soul as it approaches maturity. Then the Lord speaks again, reminding that soul of what He has already done for her. I bid thee live, He says; I have made thee pure and lovely; I have betrothed thee to Myself, none other shall possess thee, nz earthly desires shall enthrall thee. I have anointed thee with holy oil, ~ the abundance of My graces; I have clothed thee in fine linen, which is the justification of the saints (Apoc. xix.); thou art Mine to all eternity.

My love goes farther. It is not enough that thou shouldst be fair and pure, robed in thy bridal whiteness; I will have thee also rich and splendid, adorned with jewels of price. I have put My bracelets upon thine arms, and a chain about thy neck; and I have put a jewel on thy forehead, and ear-rings in thine ears, and a beautiful crown wpon thy head (Ezech. xvi.). I have nourished thee with the most delicious food, containing in itself all sweetness. The whole world is dazzled by thy beauty, by that beauty which I alone have bestowed upon thee— I the Lord God, Who am in Myself all beauty and all goodness and the author of all beauty and goodness in My creatures.

See, Christian soul, what a Lover, what a Bridegroom is yours! He found you hideous and repulsive, He has made you fair and lovely; He is continually adding new charms to your beauty; He lavishes all His gifts, all His wealth upon you; He has placed you on His throne, He has made you a queen. All ranks of His holy angels pay court to you as the bride of the King of kings, the sharer in His eternal joy. O Christian soul, thus decked with His glory, thus satiated with immortal pleasures, is there anything wanting to fill up the measure of your Bridegroom’s goodness and love? *

Gop’s Love For PENITENT SINNERS.

If a husband leaves his wife, and she, being thus forsaken, marries another man, we say by common consent that her first husband would assuredly never take her back again, polluted and dishonoured creature as she would be (Jer. iii. 1). Well, sinful soul, you are, if possible, in still worse case. You have given yourself up to all your levers. It is not I Who have left you; no, I am a faithful Spouse; it is you, faithless soul, who have abandoned Me, and followed not one lover only but a thousand seducers: nevertheless return to Me, saith the Lord, and I will receive you (Jer. iii. 1). You have indeed done evil and boasted of it; the very stones in the streets, the very trees of the forest, proclaim your shame; yet still return to Me, at least from now say to Me: Thou art my Father, my Spouse, and the Guide of my virginity. Every idle pleasure has deceived you and

• The French historian Michelet and others are very onesided in their criticisms of the employment of erotic imagery to describe the love between the human soul and God. There is, of course, Biblical warrant for such symbolism; and in making use of it Bossuet only followed the example of St. Bernard, than whom (to quote an eminent Nonconformist writer, the Rev. Professor David Smith) ‘‘ none ever loved Jesus more passionately or worshipped Him more reverently.” Cf. St. Bernard, On the Love of God, edited by E. G. Gardner, Litt.D., pp. 14-21; also Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, pt. i., chap. vi., ii.

Ied you farther and farther astray. Yet still there is time; return to Me and be converted.

Return, prodigal son, to your Father’s house. There the robe of your innocence will be restored to you; there a banquet will be spread to celebrate your return, there the whole household will rejoice; there your Father, moved by a special tenderness towards you, will say to the just who have never left Him, in the language of one Who almost excuses His conduct: You are always with Me; but I must rejoice because your brother was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found. Rejoice with Me, and with all the angels in Heaven, whose joy is greater over one sinner doing penance than over ninety-nine just who need not penance (Luke xv.).

Yes, this appeal to the sinner is the continual, the ever-renewed cry of the Father to His disobedient children, of the Heavenly Bridegroom to His faithless spouse. Be converted, do penance; put far from you your sins of deceit and disobedience; be of a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, when I Whom you — have offended would have you live? Return, return to Me, saith the Lord God. It is I, even I, Who blot out your iniquities for My own sake, and I will not remember your sins. Return, return to Me, sinners, for I have redeemed you. I will blot out like a cloud your iniquities; I will scatter to the four winds your sins, as the sun disperses the mist.

Gop’s Love DESPISED AND IMPLACABLE.

Because thou didst not serve the Lord thy God with joy and gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things, thou shalt serve thine enemy, whom the Lord will send upon thee, in hunger and thirst and nakedness and in want of all things, and He shall put wpon thy neck an iron yoke till He consume thee (Deut. xxviii. 47). And as the Lord rejoiced upon you before, doing good to you and multiplying you; so He shall rejoice destroying you and bringing you to nought (Deut. xxviii. 68). Ponder and weigh those words. Love despised will be the measure of your torments.

Of what avail are all these cries and lamentations? these frantic struggles to loosen the hold which is crushing you? Your wound is incurable; there is no ointment to cleanse and heal it, for I have wounded you with the wound of an enemy (Jer. xxx. 12), with a cruel chastisement, not to correct you, but to satisfy an inexorable justice. Your sins are hardened; that is because you have persevered in doing evil. And I too, saith the Lord, am hardened towards you; I will forget that I am a Father.

Gop THE Son.

Why should God not have a son? Why should this blessed nature be wanting in that perfect fruitfulness which It bestows on all Its creatures? Is the name of father so degrading and so unworthy of the Supreme Being that it cannot in its natural sense belong to Him? Shall not I, Who make others to bring forth children, Myself bring forth? (Isa. Ixvi. 9). And if it is an admirable thing to make for oneself children by adoption, is it not still more admirable to beget them?

I know well that an immortal nature has no need, like our frail mortal nature, to renew and perpetuate itself by substituting, as we do, children to fill our place in the world when we must quit it. But, independently of this necessary substitution, is there not in itself something admirable in producing another self out of one’s own abundance, out of one’s plenitude, by the effect of an inexhaustible power of communication, by the fecundity and wealth of a happy and perfect nature?

It is by participation in this happy fecundity that man is fruitful. Had he remained immortal according to the original plan of his creation, we are always given to understand that it would also then have been for him an admirable thing to be fruitful, to beget of one’s self and of one’s own substance another self. And in that state of original justice and purity, human fecundity would have been regarded as rich and perfect; and whence would that perfection have come, save from that of God Who is always fertile in Himself and always a Father?

God the Father has no need to associate Himself with any other than Himself in order to be fruitful and a Father; He does not produce this other self from outside of Himself, for nothing that is outside of God is God. God, then, conceives in Himself; He carries in Himself His fruit, which is co-eternal with Himself. Although He is only a father, and the name of mother which is attached to a self-imperfect and degenerate sex does not belong to Him, yet He has nevertheless as maternal a bosom in which He bears His Son. He says: From the womb, before the day-star, have I begotten Thee (Ps. cix. 8). And the Son calls Himself the only-begotten Son Who is in the bosom of the Father (John i. 18),— a description solely appertaining to the Son of God. For what son is there, save only this Divine Son, who is always in the bosom of his father and never leaves it? This Divine Son’s conception is not a thing apart from His birth; the fruit which the Father bears is perfect as soon as it is conceived, and never leaves the womb which bears it. He Who is carried in a limitless womb is at once vast and immense as that place of His conception, and can never quit it. God begets Him, God receives Him into His bosom, God conceives Him, God bears Him, God gives birth to Him; and the Eternal Wisdom, Who is none other than the Son of God, speaks (Prov. viii. 24) of His own conception and His own birth as one and the same thing.

God will never have any Son but this; for this Son is perfect, and God could not have two such. In so perfect a nature, one single, one only act of bringing forth, of giving birth, exhausts all its fruitfulness, and attracts all its love. That is why the Son of God calls Himself the only-begotten Son (John i. 18); thereby He at the same time shows us that He is a Son, not by grace and adoption, but by nature. And the Father, confirming from on high this declaration of the Son, spoke these words from Heaven: This is My beloved Son in Whom - Tam well pleased; this is My Son, I have none but Him; and to Him from all eternity I have given, and to Him for ever I will give, all My love.

THE Son 18s Gop.

Can a God come forth from a God? Can a God share the being of any other than Himself? Yes, if that God is a Son. It is repugnant to a God to come forth from another, as from a creator drawing Him out of nothingness; but it is not repugnant to a God to come forth from another, as from a Father Who begets Him of His own Divine substance. The more perfect a son is, or (if we may so speak) the more a son is a son, the more is he of the same substance as his father, the more he is one with him; and if he could be of the same nature and of the same individual substance, the more would he be a perfect son. But what nature could be rich enough, infinite enough, immense enough for that, excepting only that which alone is absolutely infinite and limitless, the Divine nature? Thus it has been revealed to us that God is a Father, that God is a Son, and that the Father and the Son are one only God, because the Son begotten of the substance of His Father, Who can suffer no division and can have no parts, can be nothing less than one God.- and one and the same God with His Father; for he who says the substance of God, says all of that substance, and consequently says God in His entirety.

He Who proceeds from God in this manner, that is to say, from His whole substance, possesses at the same time His eternity whole and entire; in the words of the Prophet, His going forth is from the beginning, from the days of eternity (Mich. v. 2), because eternity is of the substance of God, and whoever has come forth from God and from His substance, comes forth from there of necessity with the same eternity, the same life, the same majesty. For if an ordinary father transmits to his son all his nobility, how much more does not the eternal Father communicate to His Son all His nobility together with all the perfection and the eternity of His being? Thus of necessity the Son of God is co-eternal with His Father, for there cannot possibly be anything new or temporal in the bosom of God. Time and change, which essentially belong to nature, never draw near to that august bosom, and the very plenitude of being, the very perfection which excludes from it nothingness, also excludes from it all of changing nature. In God all is permanent, all is immutable, nothing in His being passes away, nothing new enters into it; what He is at one moment (if indeed we may speak of a moment in such connection with God), that He is always.: In the beginning was the Word (John i. J). Go back to the creation of the world, the Word was. Go back still further if you can, and put as many years as you please in endless succession, He was. Like God, He is He Who is. St. John says in the Apocalypse: Grace be unto you, and peace from Him that is, and that was, and that is to come (Apoc. i. 4). This is God. And a little later it is Jesus Christ of Whom St. John says: Behold, He cometh in the clouds (Apoc. i. 7). And it is our Lord Who, speaking by the lips of the Apostle, says: I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, saith the Lord God, Who is, and Who is to come (Apoc. i. 8). Jesus Christ, then, is like His eternal Father; Jesus it is Who is and Who was; He it is Whose immensity embraces the beginning and the end of all things; and, as the Son, and being of the same nature and substance as His Father, He is also of the same being, of the same duration, of the same eternity.

IMAGES, IN INANIMATE NATURE, OF THE DIVINE GENERATION.

See this delicate vapour which the ocean, softly touched by the sun and as it were impregnated with its heat, sends up day and night as of itself towards heaven, but without any diminution, any exhaustion of the mighty flood which fills the bosom of the deep. Nevertheless this vapour is the purest part of the ocean’s substance, and shares something of its nature, although it is not of the same material as the waters which the vast ocean reserves for itself. Thus, says Solomon, Wisdom is a vapour of the power of God and a certain emanation of the glory of the almighty God (Wis. vii. 25).

Consider the brilliancy, the splendour, the dazzling effulgence of the light which is the production and, as it were, the offspring of the sun. It comes forth from the great luminary, in a soft yet burning ray, without ever diminishing the brightness of its glorious parent, without separating itself from him, without waiting for the progress of time. Instantly, as soon as the sun was formed, its splendour was born with it, and with it shed itself abroad so that the whole perfect beauty of the magnificent orb could be seen at once. Thus, says Soiomon, did Wisdom come forth from the bosom of God as a delicate vapour, a most pure emanation of His power, the vivid reflection, the splendour of His eternal light (Wis. vii. 25): or, in the words of St. Paul, the Son is the brightness of the glory of God, and the figure of His substance (Heb. i. 8). As soon as the light is, it shines forth; if the brightness and splendour of the sun are not eternal, it is because the light of the sun is itself pot eternal; and, by contrary reasoning, if the light were eternal, its brightness and splendour would be so also. Now, God is a light in which there is no darkness, an uncreated Light, which therefore exists of itself and by itself eternally, which knows neither rising nor setting. Thus its bright effulgence, which is the only-begotten Son, is eternal as the Light itself, and is never separated from its substance. All the rays of the sun form an integral part of the great luminary, its brightness and splendour never detach themselves from it. Thus too the Son of God, without ever detaching Himself from His Father, comes forth from Him eternally; and to put God upon His throne without His Son would be to put the orb of day in the heavens without one single beam of light, without one ray of its glorious life-giving splendour

But let us pass on to consider the other expression used by St. Paul. The Son of God, says the Apostle, is the figure and impress of the substance of His Father (Heb. i. 8). When a seal is pressed down upon wax, the wax, without detaching anything from the seal that imprints itself upon it, draws forth from the seal its whole and exact resemblance, and so incorporates itself with that~ resemblance that the wax and that which the seal represented can never again be separated from each other. Look well at the impression; not a line, not a tracery is wanting, and yet all remains exactly the same in the seal under the pressure of which the wax took its form. Thus has the Son of God taken all from the Father, yet without depriving Him of anything. He is the perfect image of the Father, the imprint, the entire expression, not of His form, for God has none; but, as St. Paul tells us, of His substance, or, according to the full force of the original text, of His person. He bears all the features of His eternal Father; that is why He says: He that seeth Me, seeth the Father also (John xiv. 9), and elsewhere: As the Father hath life in Himself, even so also He has given to the Son to have life in Himself. As the Father raiseth up the dead and giveth life, so also the Son giveth life to whom He will (John v.). And He does not express

His Father in the effects of His power only, He expresses Him also in all ways, in all His nature and personal characteristics; so that if it were possible to see the Son without at the same time seeing the Father, one would in His Son see the Father whole and entire.

But who can explain what are those traits and characteristics of the eternal Father which shine forth so transcendently in His adorable Son? They are not of this life, and all that we can say of them is, that, there being nothing accidental in God, all these characteristics of the Father which the Son bears impressed upon His own person, belong to the substance or to the person of the Father. The Son is this substantial impression which the Father produces out of all that He is; it is by effecting this impression that He begets His Son.

The Wise Man clothes this truth in far more subtle and delicate imagery. Wisdom, conceived from all eternity in the bosom of God, is, he says, the unspotted mirror of His majesty, and the image of His goodness (Wis. vil. 26). It is too coarse and common a thing, that impression of a seal, to take as a type or figure of the eternal Son of God. So too is it if for the same purpose we take the production of a likeness in marble or on canvas by the sculptor’s or the painter’s art. These similes are too mean for our transcendent subject. Nature, however, offers us something more delicate, better suited to our purpose. Here in the clear waters of a fountain or on the smooth surface of a mirror we find a new secret of painting a likeness and reproducing an image. Nothing has to be done, except to present an object to this wonder-worker; instantly the object depicts itself; and this admirable picture is inferior in no one part to the original, nay, it is in a manner the original itself. And yet nothing wastes, or is taken away, either from the original or from the polished surface on which it has reflected itself so entirely. And to complete the portrait neither the help of time nor of an imperfect

2A sketch is needed; one and the same moment begins and finishes it; and both the design and the perfecting are but the work of a single stroke.

IMAGE, IN THE RATIONAL CREATURE, OF THE DIVINE GENERATION.

But all those things are dead. The sun, its rays, its heat; a seal, its impression; a picture, carved or painted; a mirror, and the reflections produced on it by objects: all those are dead things. God has made a more vivid image of His pure and eternal generation; and that it might be the better known to us, it is in ourselves that He has formed it.

He made it when He said, Let Us make man (Gen. i. 26). He desired then to make something in which should be declared the operation of His Son, of another self, since He said, Let us make. He desired to make something which should be living, intelligent, holy, happy - as Himself; otherwise we should not know the meaning of these words: Let Us make man to Our image and likeness. To Our image, in the depth of his nature; to Our likeness, by the conformity of his operations to Our eternal and indivisible operation.

It is as the effect of these words, Let Us make man to Our image, that man thinks; and to think is to conceive: every thought is the conception and expression of something: every thought is the expression and therefore a conception of him who thinks, if he who thinks thinks of himself and -inderstands himself; and this conception and expression would be perfect, eternal, substantial, if the thinker were perfect, eternal, and if he were by his nature all substance, without having anything accidental in himself, nor anything which could be superadded to his pure and unchangeable substance.

God, then, Who thinks substantially, perfectly, eternally, and Who thinks and can think only of Himself, in thinking knows something substantial, perfect, and eternal as Himself; this is His giving birth, His eternal and perfect generation. For the Divine nature has in it nothing of imperfection, and in it conception cannot be separated from parturition. Thus it is, then, that God is a Father; thus it is that He gives birth to a Son Who is equal to Him; this is that eternal and perfect fruitfulness, the excellence of which fills us with awe and admiration as soon as, under the guidance of faith, we have ventured to bring our thoughts to dwell upon so Divine a mystery.

We can, then, now answer the question of Solomon: Tell us His name and the name of His Son, if thou knowest it (Prov. xxx. 4). We do know it, now that God _ has taught us it. His name is The Word (John i. 1), not a word, not a strange and accidental word; God knows nothing of such; but a Word which is in itself a person, subsistent, co-operative, concreative, preparing and arranging all these things with Him, as Solomon says (Prov. viii. 27-31); a person Who has no beginning, since He is God (John i. 1-2), and God is essentially one; a person Who is nevertheless distinct from God, since He is in God, with God, dwelling with God, apud Deum, His only-begotten Son Who is in the bosom of the Father (John i. 18), Whom He sends forth into the world, Whom He makes manifest in the flesh as the only Son of God. This is His name, the Word, the Word by which an eternal and perfect God Himself tells Himself all that He is, and conceives and begets and brings forth what He tells Himself; brings forth therefore a perfect, a co-eternal, a co-essential and consubstantial one. Tue Hoty Guost. God, then, is fruitful; God has a Son. But where, then, is the Holy Ghost? and where is that holy and perfect Trinity Whom we serve from the moment of our

Baptism? Does not God love this Son? and is not He Himself loved by this Son? This love is neither imperfect nor accidental in God, the love of God is as substantial as His thought; and the Holy Ghost Who proceeds from the Father and the Son, as their mutual love, is of the same substance as the Father and the Son, a third consubstantial Person, and forming with Them one and the same God.

But why, then, is He not a Son, seeing that by reason of His production He is of the same nature? God has not revealed that to us. He has indeed said that the Son is only-begotten (John i. 18), for He is perfect, and whatever is perfect is unique; thus the Son of God, the perfect Son of a perfect Father, must be only-begotten, and if there could have been two Sons the generation of the Son would be imperfect. All then that comes after Him will cease to be a Son and will not come by generation, although of the same nature. What, then, will this final production of God be? It is a procession without any special name: the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father (John xv. 26): the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son: the Holy Ghost receives of the Son (John xv. 14): and the Son sends Him (John xvi. 7), as does the Father. Be silent, human reasoning; God has condescended to explain to us that the procession of His Word was a real and perfect generation; what the procession of His Holy Spirit was He has not condescended to tell us, nor that there could ever be anything in nature capable of representing an action at once so substantial and so marvellous. That is a secret reserved for the Beatific Vision.

O God the Holy Ghost! Thou art not the Son, since Thou art the eternal and subsistent love of the Father and the Son; Thou as a necessary consequence supposest the Son to be begotten, and begotten as an only Son, because He is perfect. Thou too art perfect, and unique in Thy kind and order: Thou art not foreign to the

Father or to the Son, since Thou art Their love and Their eternal union. Thou dost of necessity proceed from both the Father and the Son, since Thou art Their mutual love; whoever would separate Thee from Them would separate Them from each other and would divide Their eternal reign.

Thou art equal to the Father and to the Son, since we are consecrated equally in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Matt. xxviii. 19), and since Thou hast with Them one and the same temple which is our soul, our body (1 Cor. iii. 16-17; vi. 19), all that we are. Nothing that is unequal, nothing that is foreign to the Father and to the Son, must be named with Them as on an equality: I will not be baptized and consecrated in the name of a fellow-servant, I will not be the temple of a creature; it would be idolatry to build a temple to a creature, and, still more, to be and to believe myself his temple.

THE CREATED TRINITY AN IMAGE OF THE UNCREATED TRINITY.

Let us return again to ourselves. We are, we know, we will. In the first place, as to our understanding and our willing. If these are something, they are not absol-

_utely the same thing; if they were not something, they would be nothing, and there would be neither cognition nor volition; but if they were absolutely the same thing, we should not distinguish one from the other; yet we do so distinguish them; for we know what we do not will, what we do not love, although we cannot love or will what we do not apprehend. God Himself knows and understands what He does not love, as (for instance) sin; and, in our own case, how many things do we not know which we hate, and which we are not willing either to do or to suffer, because we perceive that they would harm us? We understand what it is to throw ourselves down from the top of a high tower, we understand this action as well as we understand any other; but we nevertheless do not will it, because it would be injurious to us.

We are, then, something intelligent, something which understands itself and loves itself; something which only loves what it apprehends, but which can know and understand what it does not love: yet, while not loving it, we understand that we do not love it: and we even will to know it, and do not will to love it, because we know or believe that it is harmful to us; but, on the contrary, we will not to love it. Thus, to know and to love are distinct things, but inseparable inasmuch as there is no knowledge whatever without some amount of volition. And if man, like the angels, knew all that he is, his knowledge would be equal to his being; and, his love of himself being in proportion to his knowledge, his love would be equal to both his knowledge and his being. And if all this were well regulated, it would, in its union, make one and the same happiness of the same soul, and in fact would make the same soul happy, because, by the unswerving directness of its will in conformity to the truth of its knowledge, that soul would be righteous. Thus these three things well regulated— being, cognition, and love—make one single soul happy and just, which soul could not exist without being known, nor be known without being loved; nor could it alienate from itself any one of these things without losing itself entirely and with all its happiness. For, what would it be for a soul to exist without knowing itself? and what would it be to know itself without loving itself, in that manner in which it must love itself in order to be truly happy, that is to say, without loving itself in and through God, Who is the one and only foundation of all our happiness?

Thus, in our imperfect and defective way we represent an incomprehensible mystery. A created trinity, formed by God in our souls, represents to us the Uncreated Trinity which He alone could reveal to us; and in order to make us represent this mystery the better, He has mingled in our souls, which represent it, something of an incomprehensible nature.

We have seen that to understand and to will, to know and to love, are very distinct acts; but are they so distinct as to be entirely and substantially different things? That cannot be; intellection is nothing else than the substance of the soul affected in a certain manner, and volition is nothing else than the substance of the soul affected in another manner. When I change either in thought or in volition, can I entertain this thought or elicit this volition without my substance taking part in the change? Undoubtedly not. All this change is, in reality, nothing but that my substance is affected, diversified, modified in different ways, yet fundamentally remaining always the same. For in changing my thoughts I do not change my substance; that remains one and the same while my thoughts come and go and while my will goes on distinguishing itself from my soul, from which it is continually issuing. My intellect also in the same way goes on detaching itself from my being, from which it issues again and again. And while both my intellect and my will are thus separating themselves in so many various ways and attaching themselves to so many different objects, my substance is always the same in reality, since it enters wholly and entirely into all these so widely different states of being.*

THE SOUL’S BEATITUDE AN IMAGE OF GOD’s BEATITUDE.

When God made me to His own image and likeness, He made me to be happy like Himself, as far as it is possible for a creature so to be; and that is why He makes me find in myself these three things: myself who

• Cf£, Michael Maher, S.J., Psychology, 6th edition, pp. 86-39.

am made to be happy, the idea of my happiness, and the love or the desire for this happiness,—three things which I find inseparable in myself, since I cannot be, and never am, without being a thing made to be happy and consequently containing in itself both the idea of its own happiness and the desire to enjoy it, which desire proceeds of necessity from that idea.

If I were asked which of these things I would the soonest lose, I should not know how to answer, For, in the first place, I do not wish to lose my being; still less do I wish to lose my happiness, since without happiness it would be better for me never to have been, as our Divine Lord said of His most unhappy disciple: It would have been better for that man if he had never been born (Matt. xxvi. 24). I do not therefore wish to lose my happiness any more than my being, nor to lose the idea and the love of my happiness any more than my happiness itself, since there is no happiness without this idea and this love.

If there is anything in me which has always been an — actual part of myself, it is the inclination to seek happiness; for I can never, since I came into existence, have ceased to avoid what would harm me, or to seek what would be to my advantage. In our very infancy the aptitude or disposition to pursue happiness begins to manifest itself; and since we bring it with us on our entrance into the world, we must have had it, though more latently, in our mother’s womb.*

To the confused idea which we have of happiness let us add the clear and distinct knowledge of the object in which true and perfect happiness consists, and at the same time let us change our confused desire for happiness into the actual possession of what constitutes happiness.

But in what can my happiness consist except in the

• In this paragraph we have slightly deviated from the terminology of the original, in order more absolutely to exclude the Cartesian theory of innate ideas.

most perfect thing I can know, if I can possess it? The most perfect thing that I know is God. It remains to ascertain whether I can possess Him. But to possess Him—what is that but to know Him? Is it not in knowing Himself that He possesses Himself? I am, then, capable of possessing Him, since I am capable of knowing Him; provided that in knowing Him I bring myself to love Him, for to know Him without loving Him is, in effect, not to know Him.

I know God (I admit) but very imperfectly; hence my love for Him is too feeble. I have, then, to desire to know God more adequately than I do; to know Him even as I am known (1 Cor. xiii. 12), to know Him unveiled, to see Him face to face, without shadow, without obscurity. May God grant me this; may He say to me, as to Moses: I will show to you all good (Exod. Xxxii. 19). But that is not of this life. When that happiness shall be come to us, we shall have nothing more to desire in the way of knowledge; but what about love? When we shall see God immediately, face to face, can we do otherwise than love Him, and love Him perfectly and everlastingly, with a love springing from a perfect knowledge of Him? Assuredly not. Then indeed we shall be reduced to perfect unity and simplicity. And in that simplicity we shall bear the perfect image of the Trinity, since God, united to our being, will produce in us the Beatific Vision, which will in a sense be God Himself, He being its object as well as its cause; and by this Beatific Vision He will produce in us an everlasting and insatiable love, which too, in a certain sense, will be nothing else than God Himself seen and possessed by us: God will be all in all (1 Cor. xv. 28).

Then shall be accomplished our perfect unity in ourselves, and with everything that with us will possess God. And what will make us all perfectly one is that we shall be and shall know and shall love; and all this shall be one and the same life in us all. And then shall be fulfilled the words of the Redeemer: As Thou, Father, in Me, and I in Thee, so shall they all be one in Us (John xxvii. 21); one in themselves, and one with all the members of the body of the Church which they compose.

Let us here below form in us the Blessed Trinity, by being united to God, by knowing God, and by loving God. And since our knowledge, which at present is imperfect and obscure, will pass away, and since love is the only thing in us that will remain and be never lost, let us love, love, love.