Chapter I. The Bosom of the Eternal Father

Jesus Christ yesterday, and to-day, and the same for ever I These words of the Apostle express at once the noblest and the most delightful occupation of our lives. To think, to speak, to write perpetually of the grandeurs of Jesus, — what joy on earth is like it, when we think of what we owe to Him, and of the relation in which we stand to Him? Who can weary of it 1 The subject is continually growing before our eyes. It draws us on. It is a science the fascination of which increases the more deeply we penetrate into its depths. That which is to be our occupation in eternity usurps more and more with sweet encroachments the length and breadth of time. Earth grows into heaven, as we come to live and breathe in the atmosphere of the Incarnation. Jesus makes heaven, wherever He is, whether it be in the tabernacle, or in the heart of the communicant, just as He took the Beatific Vision with Him into limbus when He died, and turned the pensive shadows of the patriarchs' home into the full glow of heaven.

But the contemplation of His grandeurs is not merely a joy. It is something beyond an ennobling occupation. It does an actual work in our souls, and a work which the grace of perseverance can make immortal. Rigoleuc has well said, " It is sufficient to look on Jesus, and to contemplate His perfections and His virtues. The very view is of itself capable of producing marvellous effects upon the soul, just as a simple look at the brazen serpent, which Moses reared in the wilderness, was enough to heal the bite of the serpents. For everything in Jesus is not only saintly, but sanctifying also, and imprints itself on the souls which apply themselves to the consideration of it, if they do so with good dispositions. His humility makes us humble; His purity purifies us; His poverty, His patience. His sweetness and His other virtues imprint themselves on those who contemplate them. This may take place without our reflecting at all upon ourselves, but simply by our viewing these virtues in Jesus with esteem, admiration, respect, love, and complacency." * Let it be with this hope that we now draw nigh to Bethlehem to study the mysteries of His Sacred Infancy. Love labours under the sweet impossibility of ever comprehending the majesty of our dearest Saviour. We shall see more at Bethlehem than we can understand; and even what we cannot understand will fill us full of love, and it is love which makes us wise unto salvation.

There are two ways in which we can look at the mys-teries of the Thirty-Three Years. We can either examine each mystery by itself, as it is revealed to us in the Gospels, or we can arrange the mysteries in classes, representing certain divisions of our Lord's life. Thus Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Calvary, and Gennesareth will stand for His Infancy, His Hidden Life, His Public Ministry, His Passion, and His Risen Life; and each of them will represent many events under one head. Bethlehem will comprise the actions aud sufferings of twelve years, and contain within itself the Desert, Egypt, a sojourn at Nazareth, and * Rigoleuc, L'Homme d'Oraison, p. 35.

mysteries, the scene of which was in Jerusalem. So Nazareth represents eighteen years, and Galilee three, while Calvary occupies barely three days, and Gennesareth forty. At the same time the groups of mysteries represented by these names have each of them a unity of their own. Hence it comes to pass that we may also contemplate them in two ways. For instance, we may either study the Passion by taking its several mysteries in succession, and feeding our souls on each of them by itself, or we may regard the Passion as in effect one mystery, complete in itself, and in a certain sense indivisible, and its different actions and sufferings as various disclosures of its unity.

It is in this last way that I propose to consider our Lord's Sacred Infancy. We may regard the first twelve years as forming one mystery, with a character and spirit of its own, quite distinguishable from the character and spirit of the Hidden Life or of the Public ^Ministry. The different subordinate mysteries, which it contains, have all the same stamp upon them, and are congenial to each other. There is no need to compare these two methods of handling our Lord's mysteries. I have not chosen one rather than the other, because it was better than the other. They are quite distinct. Perhaps the method I have selected mingles more doctrine with our devotion, and so has unconsciously attracted me. It is less common than the other method, and so leads us into less repetition. Bethlehem is a most beautiful and inviting subject, well worthy of the exclusive contemplation of a long life. We have to penetrate into the Bosom of the Eternal Father, and shading our eyes as we best can, to behold the everlasting generation of the Word. The Bosom of Mary has to be to us, as it was to Him, an " ivory Palace " of unspeakable delights. The cave at Bethlehem and the courts of Sion, the sands of the wilderness and the green Nile-bank, the bazaars of Helio-polis and the sequestered fields of Nazareth, angels singing in mid-air, shepherds watching, the three kings journeying by the star, the piteous cries of the innocents and the wailing of their inconsolable mothers, Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, the rustics of Nazareth and the doctors of Jerusalem, — these have to occupy us in turn, as the scenes or the actors in ravishing mysteries, which light up for us the deep places in the character of God, and most intimately concern ourselves and our own salvation.

The Sacred Infancy is a world of its own. It is not indeed a creation apart, for none of God's creations are creations apart. They are parts of a whole. Yet there is this peculiarity in the world of the Sacred Infancy, that the fountain of all creation rises there. It is the home of the predestination of Jesus, the land of His eternal beginnings in the mind of God. It does not commence with the angelic salutation at Nazareth. It runs up into eternity. It begins with the beginnings of Jesus, and runs down to the twelfth year after His temporal generation. The Babe of Bethlehem lies in the Bosom of the Father on high, and is the cause there of all creation, and its model as well as its cause. We cannot detach His earthly childhood from these heavenly beginnings; for without them it would be unintelligible. It is a beautiful land to traverse, more wonderful than the regions childhood dreams of in its inarticulate poetry, as lying somewhere beyond the gates of the golden sunset. The reasons of the Creator for having a creation, the preparations of the Creator for His entry into His own creation, the unexpected method of His coming, the beauty, spiritual, intellectual, and artistical, of His mysterious demeanour, the Immutable mutably adapting Himself to the condition of a weak, mute, mortal childhood, — these are the wonders that throng our path through that divine land which we are now venturing to explore. We shall learn most of them by being

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. t simple with them; and we must be patient and attentive with the difficulties; for some difficulties there must be. At the least we shall love God a degree better at the end of our task, and one fresh degree of love for Him is worth many martyrdoms; and with this hope and this conviction we will begin.

Whom shall we ask to go with us in our journey? Who shall be to us the doctor of the Sacred Infancy 1 Surely St. Joseph, 80 near to the Infant Jesus, so dear to His sinless Mother! If ever Saint was penetrated with the spirit of Bethlehem, doubtless it was he. Before the toil of the Public Ministry began, before the shadows of the Passion had begun to thicken palpably on the horizon, St. Joseph had finished his vocation. He belonged to Bethlehem and Nazareth; and God took him when Nazareth was ending. Ho lay in the contented tranquillity of Abraham's bosom, while Jesus was drinking His cup of sorrow, and Mary was bearing her broken heart about with her through the crowded mysteries of those three eventful years. The spirit of the Sacred Infancy is, as it were, his whole sanctification. No one can tell us more than he can of the young Mother's heart, and of the Heart of the Divine Child. So we must entreat him to go with us, and to help our prayers for light, and to surround us with the atmosphere of his own meek and meditative spirit; and we too must remember his presence, even when we do not mention him, so that our very thoughts and words may unawares be impregnated with the odour of his fragrant soul.

When the lark mounts up to heaven to sing its morning hymn, the sounds of labour and the cries of earth, the lowing of the cattle, the rushing of the waters, and the rustling of the leaves, grow fainter and fainter as the bird rises in the air. The wind waves the branches of the trees, but to the bird they wave noiselessly. The morning breeze benda the silvery side of the uncut grass, where its nest lies hid, til! the whole field rises and falls in green and white waves, like the shallows of the sea; but it is all a silent show. No sound reaches the secluded bird in that region of still sunshine, where he is pouring out those glorious hymns, of which we catch only either the prelude as he soars or the last precipitate fragments as he falls to earth from out his shrine of light. So is it with us in prayer, when we rise above our own wants or the outcries of our temptations, and soar in self-forgetting adoration towards the throne of God hidden in light inaccessible. The sounds of earth go first of all Then the waving soundless show seems fixed, and still and motionless, and diminished. Next it melts into a confused faint-coloured vision, and soon it lies below in a blue mist, like land uncertainly descried at sea. Then, last of all, the very attraction of earth seems gone, and our soul shoots upward, as if, like fire, its centre was above and not below. Thus must it be with us now: for we have to rise to the Bosom of the Eternal Father,

St. Joseph is kneeling by the Child in the cave of Bethlehem. Let us draw near, and kneel there with him, and follow his thoughts afar off. It is but an hour since that Babe was bom into the world, and gladdened Mary's eyes with the divine consolations of His Face. It is but nine months since He was incarnate in the inner room at Nazareth. Yet neither Nazareth nor Bethlehem were His beginnings. He was eternal years old the moment He was born. Time, which had already lived through such long cycles, and had perhaps endured through huge secular epochs before the creation of man, was younger by infinite ages than the Babe of Bethlehem. The creation of the angels, with the beauty and exultation of their first graces, the orderly worship of their hierarchies, their mysterious trial, the dreadful fall of one third of their number, and Michael's battle with the rebels, lie dim and remote beyond the furthest mists of human history. Yet the Babe of Bethlehem is older far than that. Indeed it was around Him that all angelic history was grouped. He was at once their Creator and the pattern after which they were created, the fall of those who fell, and the perseverance of those who stood. Hereafter He will spend a three years' Ministry in Galilee and among the towns of Judah and Benjamin; yet, in truth, all the history of man's world, from the times of paradise to the hour of the Immaculate Conception, had been His Ministry. He preached before the flood. He gave His benediction to the tents of the patriarchs. He imparted grace, and saved souls, and wrought miracles, in Jewry and in heathendom for some thousands of years. But now by the sand-glasses of men He is one hour old.

This one of the heavenly bodies, which we tenant, was created to be as it were the garden, the Eden, of His Incarnation; and He adorned it in His love, before Adam, the first copy of Him, lived among its Asiatic shades. Perhaps it lay for ages in the glad sunshine, solitary, silent, in beautiful desolation, and He took complacence in the adorning of it. He loved perchance to see its beauty ripen, rather than to rise up at once complete. Continents sank slowly at His will, and new oceans rolled above their mountain tops, or elevated steppes. New lands rose out of the bosom of the deep. Floras of marvellous foliage waved in the sun, and the wisdom and the joy of the Babe of Bethlehem was in them. Faunas, strange, gigantic, terrible, possessed the waters and the land, of His fashioning, and for the delight of His glory. The central fires wrought beautifully and delicately the metals and the gems, which were for the altars of the Babe of Bethlehem, for the tiara of His Vicar, or the chasubles of His priests. The rocks and marbles ripened on the planet, as the fruits ripen on a tree j and the Babe, the

Wisdom of the Father, disported Himself in the vast operation, the pacific uniformity, and the magnificent slowness of His own laws. The grandeur of those huge-leaved trees, the unwieldy life of those extinct monsters, the loveliness of now sunken lands, were all for Him who has just now been bom in Bethlehem, and were not only for Him, but were also His own doing.

Bethlehem then was not His first home. "We must seek Him in an eternal home if indeed He be older than the angels, the eldest-born of creatures. The dark cave within and the moonlit slope without are not like the scenery of His everlasting home. He is the Eternal Word. He is the first Word ever spoken, and He was spoken by God, and He is in all things equal to Him by whom He was spoken. He was uttered from eternity, uttered without place to utter Him in, without sound accompanying the utterance, and the Father who uttered Him, or rather who is for ever uttering Him, is not prior to the Word He utters. His home has no scenery, no walls, no shape, no form, no colour, no spot which can be loved with a local love. It is not in space, nor in imaginary space, nor within the world, nor at the world's edge, nor beyond it. It is the Bosom of the Father It is amid the unlocalised fires of the Godhead. There, in the white light, inaccessible through the brilliance of its whiteness, we confusedly discern the magnificence of a Divine Person. He is unbegotten. He is not a word whom any one could utter; for there is no one to utter Him, and He is besides adorably unutterable. He is not a Breath breathed forth of divine love; for there were none whose mutual love could breathe Him forth, and He is besides adorably unproceeding. The Word expresses Him, not because He utters Him, but because He is uttered by Him. The Holy Spirit is His fiery Breath, the Breath of the Father and the Son, coequal with Them both, but with no

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. c, procession from His blessed Self. This Divine Person, whom we confusedly discern, is like a Fountain, a fountain of golden light flowing with uncreated waters. Yet the Fountain is not a fountain without its waters, and the waters are coeval with the fountain. Out of Him flows the Son; from Him and from His "Word proceeds the Holy Ghost, all coequal, coeternal, consubstantiaL Yet He is the First Person, and gloriously without superiority or precedence. He is the sole Fountain of Godhead, yet it is the very glory of the Fountain that its double streams are coequal with itself. He in His adorable sublimity is the unsent inseparable Companion of the Two Divine Persons who are sent and who send Themselves. Him, without figure, we picture to ourselves amid those unlocalised fires. Him, without images, we discern in the breathlessness of our far-seeing faith. Him, without light, we behold in the darkness of His blinding majesty. Him, in His outstretched immensity, we compass in the fondness of our adoring love. Him, in His nameless incomprehensibility, we sweetly understand in the knowledge that we are His sons. His Bosom, an abyss of unfathomable beauty, the shrine of unruffled peace, the furnace of the divine beatitude, is the home of the Babe of Bethlehem, His only native place.

Unbeginning is the life in that paternal Bosom. Yet what do we mean by unbeginning 1 It is a thought we cannot think, too real a reality to be other than a mere word to finite creatures like ourselves. It is good to try to stretch ourselves to its height and breadth; for there is no resi equal to the weariness that comes of striving to embrace the thought of God. In that Bosom the Divine Person, who is the Babe of Bethlehem, was bom, who yet never began to be bom, and has never done being born. Never was the Unbegotten Father with the unborn Son. Unbegotten and eternally begotten! what but faith shaU distinguish between the two?— faith, or the vision which is faith's crown hereafter 1 As there never was a time when the Son was yet unborn, so can there never be a time when He will cease being born. It is in eternity, and not in time, that His inexplicable Generation finds room. He proceeds from the Father by way of generation. He proceeds from the understanding of the Father. He is the Father's understanding of Himself, or rather He is produced by it. He is the expression of all the Father's perfections. He is not merely the similitude of the Father, because He is something more. He is con substantial with Him. Yet He is not identical with the Father, because He is a distinct Person from Him. The Father knows Himself, and by His knowledge of Himself the Son is born amid the splendours of uncreated holiness, amid the inconceivable jubilations of the divine perfections. Thus the Generation of the Son is not a mystery done and over. It was not an event at some remote point before ever time was. That which is eternal must always be going on. That which can end must have begun. We must be careful therefore always to bear in mind that the coequal, coeternal Son is ever being begotten in the Bosom of the Father, at this moment as well as from forever. There was no moment when He was not begotten, no moment when He is not being begotten, no place through all the amplitudes of omnipresence in which His eternal Generation is not for ever going on, close to us, or far away from us, outside us in outward space, inside us in the noiseless centre of our souls. Yet nowhere is the silence broken by that stupendous utterance of the Father. The omnipresent Word does not so much as vibrate on the air, when He rushes forth with the irresistible might of the Godhead. The clangour of His omnipotence is unheard. His all-embracing light coruscates through the quiet night, and the darkness remains calm and still, like the plumage of a sleeping bird. Oh how can we ever find a home where we

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. il are out of sight and hearing of that Utterance of the Father 1 See how the spirits of angels and the blessed souls of men throng in, all day and night, to witness that eternal utterance, to bathe in its beatific light, and to be enchanted with its spiritual sound! This is the true birth of that Babe of Bethlehem, for ever older than the hill on which Bethlehem is built, for ever younger than the blossom of the wild thyme which opened its pink eye this morning on the green sward, where the sheep were lying when the angels sang in heaven. Unutterably blessed is the life within that Bosom of the Father. For while the Father is for ever uttering His eternal Word, He and the Word are for ever breathing forth the Holy Ghost, the uncreated fire of Their mutual love and boundless jubilee, a Person distinct from Themselves, yet as it were the bond of the Two, coequal, coeternal with Them, the Term of God, the Limit of the Illimitable, so that God, penetrating His whole creation, is not commingled nor confused with things. Such are the immutable necessities of the Divine Life, the inevitable uncreated productions of its understanding and its will, the twofold pulse of Generation And Procession, the beating Heart of that exhaustless sea of Being, with Persons more distinct than any distinctions among creatures, and yet with a Unity which transcends all the identities of earth. Who can think of such a sanctuary, and yet not tremble with excess of love? Who can fix his eye of prayer upon it, and yet not tremble with excess of fear, lest haply he should miss of its unending vision? It was in that deep recess of an incalculable eternity that the Babe of Bethlehem dwelt, before He vouchsafed to take visible possession of the Cave of Bethlehem. It is there that we must seek His beginnings, which began not: it is thence we must date the pedigree of the Eternal, who has no ancestry: it is in the light of that darkness that we must search Bethlehem and Nazareth, Egypt and the Wilderness, to learn the mysteries of that mortal Childhood of the Eternal Word. Deep in our souls can we not see that Bosom of the Father 1 Yet it is beautiful beyond thought, adorable beyond the stretch of created spirit. Created things give us no parallels: they furnish us with no images: the poetry of earth is but a distraction: the definitions of the faith only catch us as we fall. Yet somehow we see that Bosom of the Father deep within ourselves, and it is familiar to us as a household sanctuary. We know that with all its immeasurable capacity of the divine life it is actually within ourselves, and we hold our breath, and seem to faint away upon it in sweetest trance of helpless love.

What manner of life was it which the Word led in the Bosom of the Father? It was a creatureless life. There were no creatures, except in the purposes and decrees' of the divine mind, and in the inexhaustible storehouses of the divine wisdom. God had always determined to create, because He was always love, and love craved more room, if we may dare so to speak of Him who is infinitely self-sufficient, for the exuberant generosity of His justice as well as for the incredible fertility of His wisdom. It is the justice of creation, which makes it so loving a mystery. Time is an old creation, the most ancient of all creations. We look upon the myriads of many-circled ages, as on a vast ocean, which stretches out of sight, and is lost in the haze on the horizon when the angels came into being, together with the elements of the material creation. Yet the furthest age spends its biUows on the shore of time, infinitely short of the creatureless life of the Word in the Bosom of the Father. The Ages seemed like a help to the comprehension of the Unbeginning; but they play us false, and only puzzle us the more. How can a life be otherwise than indescribable to us creatures who live on matter and know by images, when it was a life without world, without time, without place, without motion, without fixedness, without parallels, without comparisons, without similitudes, almost without shadows. Only in each vast department of creation, in each huge epoch of time, part of the shadow of that divine life lies for our tracing; yet, like a village at the mountain-foot, all creation lies in the shadow, but the shadow of the peak overshoots it, and is cast far beyond. Its bliss was in its unity: but, unlike created unities, it was free from the imperfection of solitude. It was the simplicity of one boundless life in the pacific jubilant companionship of Three distinct Persons. There was no hierarchy among the Persons; so that the imperfection of superiority did not attach to the Father any more than the infirmity of subordination to the Holy Ghost or to the Son. The distinctness of the Persons only enhanced the unity of the Godhead, because the Persons were unspeakably coequal

It was a life of infinite complacency. God rested in Himself. In Himself His infinity was satisfied. The immensity of His own perfections lay before Him, and He traversed them, so to speak, with His blessed understanding. To know Himself infinite by His infinite knowledge was to be infinitely blissful. The imperfection of our human words is such, that we cannot speak of God without seeming to divide Him. "We must therefore bear the adorable simplicity of God in mind, while we thus discourse of the abysses of His divine life. It cannot be too often repeated that God has not many several attributes, nor even one: but He is simply God. He is not different from His perfections, nor are His perfections, strictly speaking, difi'erent from each other. He is Himself infinite perfection in manifold simplicity. He is what He is, a simple act, God. But we may conceive of Him as thus reposing in unutterable tranquillity upon His knowledge of Himsell We may imagine all His perfections to which theology has given cognisable names. Each one of them would give out to us multiplied, or rather immeasurable wisdom, many sciences, many divine theologies, many rapturous contemplations. There were oceans of His own being in whose deeps He could become divinely entranced. The very comprehension of Himself, which no possible creature could share, was in itself unutterable bliss. There are also doubtless many perfections in Him, for which our created natures furnish no analogies, and for which therefore we have no name; and each of these was a fresh infinity for the embrace of His jubilant self- com prehension. The simplicity of act, which characterised this illimitable self-comprehension, was most of all a delight beyond our imaginations. Here we must worship, for we must cease to reason or to pourtray. Even thought here is silent and formless. The confused thought of God must fill our vacant minds. There is more light in the indistinctness of that thought than in the clearest vlemonstrations of human science.

The life in the Bosom of the Father was also a life of love, but of such love as passes our limited comprehension. Even created love is a very world of delights, and in one or other of its many departments it is the sunshine of life. It can bear the pressure of time, and not give way. It caE outlive wrong. It is mightier than death. It can change darkness to light. But, if love has all these prerogatives among men, where it is so debased by its alliance with matter, how grand must be its empire among the pure and intellectual angels! With what spotless fires must it not burn in their magnificent intelligences! How many nameless species of transcending love must not those various species of glorious spirits know! We can hardly picture to ourselves angelic love, except as something fabulously bright and inexpressibly wonderful. We can think of the love of

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. i$ a Seraph as all fire, the love of a Cherub as resplendent light, or the love of a Throne as deepest living peace, stability and force combined: for it is to the choir of Thrones that God has given the most special communication of His attribute of eternity. But what can we think of the angelic life of a thousand loves, so various because of their numbers and their kinds, so simple because of the uncomplicated excellence of their keen intelligence 1 Yet all this is nothing to the love in the life of God. It is an emanation from it, but infinitely diluted, a shadow of it, yet not only faint and faithless, but fragmentary and partial also.

Who can ever dream of the love of the Father and the Son? Who can see in the depth of his mind, even far down among the thoughts which lie too deep for words, how that Love proceeds from Them both for evermore 1 It is a procession of Uncreated Fire, the out-rolling of an Uncreated Ocean, out-rolled beyond Themselves, yet within the Bosom of the Godhead. It is a jubilee with none to hear, the soundless thunder of eternal bliss beating on an immaterial shore. It is, or rather He is, a Divine Person, coequal with the Father and the Son, a person of unimaginable beauty, of incomprehensible sanctity, and of incomparable cognisable distinctness from the Other Two, who cease not, and by necessity cannot cease, from actively breathing Him forth for evermore. What companionship also is there in that love! Wliat exultation in the completion of the Godhead, which never was incomplete, never without its complement in that Third Person, never unlimited, but always illimitably what it is! Then, while the Holy Ghost is produced by the love of the Father and the Son, there are the loves of all the Three Divine Persons for each other, those twice three loves which are the six pulses of the unity of God. Each Person has two loves, in i6 THE BOSOM OP THE ETERNAL FATHER.

His love for the other Two; and each of the two loves of each of the Three Persons is simply a boundless world of life, of wisdom, and of jubilation. What then must the one love be, the single simple divine love, which is the union of all these? Could anything less adorably profound, less unimaginably capacious than an illimitable Trinity of Persons contain the vast waters of such an uncreated sea of love, or anything less omnipotently simple than the Divine Unity hold without breaking the everlasting pacific tempests of such tremendous and impetuous love?

What words we have heaped together! Yet we may hope it has not been altogether without ideas. It is one of the thoughts, beneath whose broad shadow all the nations of the earth may gather and sit musing, that, while the sun is shining, or the moon silvering the woods, or the noontide being lulled to sleep by its own fragrances, or the river lapsing down to the sea through tuneful groves and over cattle-spotted plains, this wonderful divine life is going on everywhere, close to us and far-off, in our own country and in other lands, far above the empyrean heaven and down in our own souls. It is a thought to make us very grave, that this life of God holds us like a hand, penetrates us like a sword, and knows nothing of the space which gives us room or of the time which is flowing above our heads. As it has been from all eternity, so is it now. It has found no new place. Creation has not in any way displaced it. It has undergone no modification. It has acquired nothing, experienced nothing. Its ungrowing magnificence is ever fresh as the dawn, ever new as the first creation. It is always the same, yet never monotonous. inimitably outspread beyond all imaginary space, it is full, complete, intense, in every point of space, at every point of time. A paradise of intellectual delights, a boundless fire of uncreated loves, an ocean of glad, wise, resistless being, it is glorious in its liberty and glorious in the grandeur of its necessities. It is a silence of amazing colloquies, a sanctuary of restful joys, a life of omnipotent and omnipresent simplicity, a unity of Three distinct adorable Persons. Surely all creation is not as a feather in comparison of this. How little, by the side of this awful majestic life, are all the schemes of men, how paltry their interests I How tame and tiresome seem the political revolutions of earth, the greatest discoveries of science, the most golden epochs of literature, when we think of this omnipresent life of God! All human joys appear but like the bursting of the foam-bells on the crest of the wave, and all human sorrows but as the sighing of the night- wind in the distant wood; and yst this vast life of God compasses both the sorrows and the joys with tranquillest, watchfullest, minutest love. But to us they should seem even smaller than they seem to God, because the thought of the Infinite dwarfs aU things in our sight, and ourselves also in our own estimation.

What a wonderful permission to us is the permission to love God! What then shall we say, when we consider that we ourselves are to be admitted to the sight and enjoyment of this life of God 1 It is the very end for which we were created. Nay more, we ourselves have been in some sense, as we shall see presently, part of that divine life. We have been known and loved, up in those regions of eternity, in those boundless tracts of uncreated being, before the birth of time; and it is our very destination to enter into the joy of that exulting life, to see God as He is, and to live in endless companionship with Him. It is our incredible bliss to be allowed to add one spark more to the glory, the outward glory, of that blessed majesty. We can be one flash of lightning more round the immensity of His throne, one additional coruscation in the intolerable radiance of the merciful crown which he vouchsafes to wear. Infinitely iS THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

little as we are, we are, and it is our joy of joys to be so, a fresh exercise to Him of His irresponsible sovereignty. We are large enough to catch the light of His justice, and be another place for it to shine upon. His mercy can beautifully reflect itself even in the shallows of our tiny souls. We can lie upon the shore of that exulting life, and shine and glow and murmur while its bright waters wash over us for ever. Oh beautiful destiny of men! how happy is our present, our future how much happier! How happy is our worship, how happy even the very fear with which we work out a salvation so magnificent and so divine!

Such was the creatureless life which the Eternal Word lived in the Bosom of the Father, creatureless yet not creatureless. The Babe of Bethlehem was that Eternal Person, and in some sense He was eternally the Babe of Bethlehem. From the first. His predestined Humanity entered into that divine life, or lay visibly upon its surface. In the Fountain of the Godhead, as in a most pellucid mirror, there was an eternal view of creatures, creatures which should one day be, creatures perhaps of endlessly successive creations, and creatures which were possible to infinite power and inexhaustible wisdom, which yet should never actually be. The knowledge of creatures, and especially the knowledge of His own Sacred Humanity, was part of that knowledge by which the Word was eternally produced. With this eternal view of creatures, it seems a mystery that the actual creation was so long delayed; and yet eternity is not time, and there was no delay. But creation is not eternal, and thus had the creation of the angels, and of matter, taken place millions of ages earlier than it did, in our manner of speaking, it would truly have been no earlier, or had it been only last year, it would truly have been no later.¹ In both cases there would simply have been an

Immeasurable and unsuccessive eternity before it. Some epeak as if God humbled Himself out of the sublimity of His divine life in order to create. Yet this can be but a figure of speech. There can be no humility in God. God could only touch lowliness through the assumption of a created nature. Rightly considered, it is more honourable even to the divine self-sufficing life of God to say, what is the truth, that creation was worthy of Him, both the act of creating and the actual creation. In God, what is free is lower than what is necessary; and creation was a free act outside Himself, not a necessary act inside Himself, like the Generation of the Son or the Procession of the Spirit. He was not by His own nature bound to create, nor, when He created, was He bound to do so after one fashion rather than another, or with one degree of perfection rather than another. Thus the glorious tracts of world-peopled space, and all the sun-illumined beauty of the little world which we inhabit, are nothing more than marvellous monuments of the liberty of God visibly outspread before our eyes. It is part of our own exultation in being creatures, that we are in ourselves such a mass of evidences of the wonderful and attractive things which there are in God.

What then was the first aspect of creation in the divine mind, if we may use the word " first " of that which was eternal? There may at least be a priority of order, even though there be no priority of time. There is precedence in decrees, even where there is not succession. The first aspect of creation, as it lay in the mind of God, was a created nature assumed to His own uncreated nature in a Divine Person. In other words, the first sight in creation was the Babe of Bethlehem. The first step outside of God, the first of the Church that spirit and matter were created simultaneously, that many theologians call it temerarious to teach the opposite doctrine since the Lateran Council (in capite Firmiter),

Btanding-point in creation, is the created nature ass'imed to a Divine Person. Through this, as it were, lay the passage from the Creator to creatures. This was the point of union, the junction between the finite and the infinite, the creature blending unconfusedly with the Creator. This firstborn creature, the Sacred Humanity, was not only the primal creature — but it was also the cause of all other creatures whatsoever. It was the central creature as well as the first. All others group themselves around it, and are in relations with it, and draw their significance from it, and moreover are modelled upon it. Its predestination is the fountain of all other predestinations. The whole meaning of creation, equally with the destinies of each individual creature, is bound up with this created Nature assumed to a Divine Person. It is the head of creations, angelic, human, or whatsoever other creation there may ever be. Its position is universal; for it couples all creations on to God.

But by which of the Three Divine Persons was this created Nature to be assumed? By the Second Person, the "Word, who had been living everlastingly in the Bosom of the Father the life we have been attempting to describe. There were doubtless many reasons why it should be the Second rather than the First or Third Persons, which are beyond our comprehension or suspicion. We probably get but a glance at any divine work, and there is radiance enough to blind us in the single glance; yet even so it is no measure of the resplendent light of uncreated wisdom which is in the least of the doings of the Most High. There are nevertheless certain conveniences, as theologians have named them, certain congruities and fitnesses, in the assumption of a created nature by the Son rather than by the Father or the Holy Ghost, which we may reverently consider, and which disclose to us somewhat more of the adorable life of God.

There is a special connection between the Word and creatures, independent of the fact of His having assumed a created nature, and which seems to be part of the reason why He, not the other Two Persons, should have been the One to assume it. As the Word, He is the utterance of the Father, the expression of Him, the image of Him. Creation is in a finite and created way what He is infinitely and uncreatedly. Creation is a divine word, an utterance, an expression, an image of God, faint, feeble, far-ofi", external, mutable, free; while the Word is the Image of God within God, consubstantial, eternal, immutable, and necessary. We venture to think it most probable that all creatures have some distinct relations to the different Persons of the Holy Trinity, and that the Trinity of God, as well as His Unity, is impressed on His creatioa Nevertheless, quite apart from this idea, there is a special connection between the Son and creatures, as between the inward and the outward Word of God. So that His assumption of a created nature was the congruous way in which creation expressed itself. It was the inward Word becoming outward. It was the eternal generation followed by the temporal generation. If we might dare to use such an expression, the assumption of a created nature by the Word, was the way in which the creatureless God vouchsafed to get at creation. He was as it were necessitated to speak one Word, and that Word, because necessary, could not be otherwise than coetemal and consubstantial with Himself. In His love He freely spoke a second Word, which was creation, and that Word, because free, was finite and temporary. It was by His first Word that He spoke His second Word. For creation is more than an echo of the eternal generation of the Son, in the reality of that created nature which the Son has stooped to wear. Thus there is a congruity in the Son's assumption of a created nature which there would not have been, at least in our indistinct vision of divine things, in a similar assumption by the Father or the Holy Ghost.

But there is a second congruity, which may be evolved out of the first. He is not the Word only; He is the Son also. In His relation of Son we discern another fitness for His assumption of a created nature. He is the Son of God by nature, and rational creatures were to be the sons of God by adoption, through their justification. It was the end of their creation that they were to be admitted to share in His filiation. The communication of His Sonship was to be their way into glory. As God appeared as if He entered into creation through the Person of the Son, so through the same Person does creation find its way to rest in God. Hence it was fitting that the Second Person should be the One to assume a created nature, in order that He might not only be the Son of God in His divine nature, but also the Son of God in His created nature. This second sonship* He obtained through His created nature, through which also He comes to be the Head of all God's adopted sons, the Sonship of His created nature being the model and the cause and the means of their adoption; though its own Sonship is natural and not adopted. This is a congruity founded upon His being the Son as well as the Word.

If we are right in thus imagining that we discern these two fitnesses in the Person of the Son for the assumption of a created nature, when, which neither man nor angel could

♦ Constat in Chriato esse triplicem filiationem, aliam, qna, ut homo, refertur ad Virginem, et est filius Yirginis: aliam sanctificationis naturalia divin», qua, ut homo, refertur ad Deum, ut commune toti Trinitati, quae est denominatio proveniens a natura et entitate divina: et tertiam, qoa, ut Deus, refertur ad Patrera priraam Personam Trinitatis, et qua Christus, ut homo, nequit referri, nee esse Filius. — Hurtado, xvii. diff. iii. But see Siuri. De Novissimis, tract, xxxvi. cap. iL Beet. 33; and Bernal's theory of a third kind of filiation, filiatio propria, qui modus filiationig medius est inter filiationem naturalemet adoptivam. — Btmal. Delncarn., diiD. Ixv. sect. 4. This is to escape Suarez' two orders of natural filiation.

have dreamed, it was to be that a Divine Person should assume a created nature, we may also venture to behold what looks like an incongruity in such an assumption taking place by the Father or the Holy Ghost. By virtue of the assumed nature, the Divine Person assuming it must become the Son of God.² God's movement towards creation is a movement of paternity; creation corresponds to that movement of God by a filial worship and obedience. If a Creator, who is not also the Father of His creatures, is conceivable, the dispensation it would betoken would be so entirely different from that under which the actual creation finds itself, that the hypothesis would displace all our ideas, and we could hardly arrange matters in an imaginary world of this sort without doing some dishonour to those perfections of God which the bare act of creation would imply. We take for granted, therefore, speaking of what we know and see, and according to the analogy of present things, that, in virtue of His assumed nature, the Person assuming would become in the most sublime manner the actual Son of God by nature rather than by adoption. Now there would be a manifest incongruity, to our weak eyes at least, in the Father becoming also the Son, even by means of a created nature. t A temporal generation does not seem suitable to that Divine Person, whose distinct perfection is His innascibility. There would appear a sort of violence in the Unbegotten Father being also the Babe of Bethlehem. So also in the case of the Holy Ghost, the assumption of a created nature and a

• Si humanitas Ohristi unita fuisset hypostatice Patri aut Spiritui Sancto, et non Filio, Christus ut homo esset eodem modo filiua naturalis Dei, quia eodem modo esset natura conjunctus Deo, et habeas jus ad vitam seternam. — Hurtado, De Incam., disp. xvii. diflf. iii.

temporal generation would not be in harmony with the method of His proceeding from the Father and the Son, which is not a Generation, but a Procession of another sort. It has not the similitude of a Sonship, even though the Person proceeding is consubstantial with Those from whom, as from one principle, He eternally proceeds. He is fruitful within the Godhead; for He is the Breath, the Fire, the Love, the Jubilee of the divine life. He is fruitful outside, for He is the Giver of gifts, and the Gift given, the unction and outpouring of the Holy Trinity upon creation. Marvel-lous both within and without the Godhead is His adorable fecundity: but it is of a different sort from that of the Father and the Son. He produces no Fourth Person in the Godhead. Now as there is something incongruous in the First Person, as the unbegotten Fountain of Godhead, from whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named, assuming a created nature and becoming the adopted Son of God, so also is there something unsuitable in the same assumption by the Third Person, who is unproducing, and who returns back upon the Father and the Son, the adorable Limit of the Godhead. It seems as if it would not be at the limit, but in the centre, that God would open on creation. At least all this is what seems to us now that we know things as they actually are. May God forgive us, if we have thought too boldly! It is such a delight to speak of Him, that we are sometimes beguiled onwards we hardly know how far.

All this has no concern with the prevision of sin and the fall of man. Indeed it would be equally consistent with the assumption of an angelic nature by the Person assuming. For we have spoken hitherto of the assumption of a created nature by one of the Three Divine Persons in connection with the mystery of creation generally. The created nature, which He chose, remains for future consideration. But if, for the moment, we take for granted His choice of a human nature, and add to it the further consideration of the fall, we come in sight of a fresh congmity in the assumption of the created nature by the Second Person rather than the First or Third. Adam fell in the lawless search after science. His sin was a traitorous attempt to force the divine wisdom to give up the secrets which it chose to conceal. He endeavoured to force his way through the beautiful marvels of God's own creation into the counsels of God. He made a disloyal use of his science to increase that science in spite of God. He leagued with the mighty fallen intelligence of God's enemy, in order to learn what God had forbidden him to know. Now the Word is the substantial wisdom of the Father. It is by the Father's knowledge of Himself that the Word is produced. So, when in the prevision of sin the Incarnation took its remedial form, it was most suitable that He, who is the substantial wisdom of the Father, should be the Person to assume that nature, which now needed redeeming because it had fallen, and fallen in the unlawful and disobedient pursuit of divine knowledge.

But, although it was the Person of the Son, and not the Person of the Father or the Holy Spirit, which assumed a created nature, we must bear in mind that that assumption was the work of the whole Trinity. It was not more the work of the Person assuming, than it was of the Two Persons not assuming. Every work, which God does outside Himself, is the work of all the Three Persons equally, even when there is something special in the mission and operation of the different Persons. This is hard to understand, but to believe it is an undoubted necessity of the Catholic faith. It is equally of faith with the doctrine that it was the Son, and not the Father or the Holy Ghost, who assumed a created nature. It seems hard to say that the Incarnation is not more the work of the Second Person than it is of the First or the Third; yet we must cling most jealously to this faith, or we shall throw all divine truth into hopeless confusion. The Holy Trinity acts as One God, even when creatures may come into special relations with One of the Divine Persons. The doctrine of mission is not at variance with the unity and coequality in the Godhead. Neither must we listen to some of the older theologians, who held that the Father and the Holy Ghost are in the Sacred Humanity of the Word merely by essence, presence, and power, as They are in all creatures. On the contrary, the Other Divine Persons are very specially in the Sacred Humanity, by a most intimate connection and concomitance though not by the intrinsic force of the Incarnation, just as the Soul and Divinity of our Lord are in the Blessed Sacrament by concomitacce, and not by the force of the words of consecration. The very fact that the Divine Essence dwells in a peculiar way in the Sacred Humanity involves a peculiar indwelling of the Father and the Holy Ghost, because the Divine Essence is one. Nevertheless we may have special feelings, not feelings of comparison or of preference or of distinction, yet special feelings towards the One Person who was actually incarnate; and we may base our devotions on such feelings, without any fear of deflecting from the analogy of the faith. Piety must of necessity have its special feelings towards Each of the Three Divine Persons, which feelings flow from Their personal distinctions; and in the same way their missions to creatures, and the absence of all mission in the Father, are the ground for similar and still more special feelings. Still more shall we feel this, when we remember what has been already said, that the Second Person was incarnate precisely because He was the Second Person. This is difficult doctrine. It would even be dry, if doctrine could be dry. But we must bear with a few difficulties at first. They will make what follows easier, and they will illuminate many beauties, which except by their light we should either never see, or see only as a confused and dazzling indistinctness.

Thus the predestined created nature of the Word lay everlastingly in the vast Bosom of the Father. It was a human nature eternally chosen with a distinct and significant predilection. It was the first creature. It is He who in His assumed nature we call Jesus. All angels, men, animals, and matter, were made because of Him and for Him simply. He is the sole reason of the existence of every created thing, the sole interpretation of them all, the sole rule and measure of every external work of God. It is in the light of this predestination of Jesus that we must regard all life, all science, all history, all the grandeurs of angels, all the destinies of men, all the beautiful geography of this variegated planet-garden, all the problematical possibilities of world-crowded spaca Our own little tiny life, our own petty orbit, like the walk of an insect on a leaf, lies in the soft radiance of the predestination of Jesus, as in a beautifying sunset, and has a sweet meaning there, and is wellnigh infinitely dear to God, who clothes it with an importance to Himself which it is the hardest of all mysteries to understand, because it is the most incredible of loves.

Last of all, there was a time at which this eternal counsel of God was to take efi'ect, and to become actual, as we creatures speak, actual outside His own divine mind. Why the Babe of Bethlehem was to come, and came, when He did, and not before, why so early, and why so late, it is beyond our power to say. Many reverent and lawful guesses have been made; but we pass them all over as plainly below the majesty of the occasion, and the sublimity of the decree which they profess to explain. But God's love of His creatures so often condescends to wear the look of impatience, that we are not surprised when theologians tell us, after oui own human way of speaking, that the Word impatiently anticipated His time through the attraction of the purity of Mary. Oh how like God always, patient for so long, and then seemingly so impatient and sudden at the last! But is it not always so with grace? There is a kind of suddenness in its most deliberate operations, which recommends itself only to a spiritual discernment. It is thus conversions come. It is thus vocations ripen. God is always taking us unawares when He means love, while justice on the other hand gives long notice and makes noisy preparations, as if it magnified itself by its inseparable accompaniments of mercy.

The occupation of God has been from all eternity what it is now, and will ever be. His own blessed Self. He is bounded as it were by that blissful infinity. His life turns upon it. His magnificence consists in it. His necessary actions rise within it, and perpetuate themselves there for evermore. He dwells in Himself, and is His own eternity. But when we think of Him as from all eternity our Creator, in design even when not yet in fact, it comes to us. almost unconsciously to picture Him to ourselves, as greatly occupied in choosing. From this point of view, choice seems almost \ His principal occupation. He is electing, distinguishing, preferring.³ Even when in our own thoughts we give the amplest room to His foresight, we cannot obliterate the view of His choosing, electing, and preferring. We cannot even bring ourselves to think that He was bound to create the best kind of world, or to do the best with it when created. We cannot bring the shadow of necessity near God, when we look at Him at work outside Himself. His blissful necessities lie within the Most Holy Trinity. Outside of Himself all is uncontrollable freedom, the freedom of a boundless wisdom which is also boundless power, of an infinite justice which is indistinguishable from infinite love. In like manner, when we meditate on the life of the Word who was to assume a created nature, we conceive of Him as making choice of many things, as He lay in the Bosom of the Father. He lived a life of elections; and every one of His elections most nearly and affectionately concerns ourselves, while it is also based on nothing less than His own infinite perfections; and all these elections are eternal.

His first choice was of His nature. Countless possible rational natures lay before Him in the clear landscape of His wisdom. They must all have had attractions and congruities, inasmuch as they were the ideas of His own divine mind. He had to choose amongst them, and to found His choice on reasons of infinite beauty and unerring wisdom. We dare not attribute a causeless predilection to God, though His predilections may be unaccountable to us. Especially He had to compare, only that comparison implies too much of a process for infinite wisdom, the natures of angels and of men, and perhaps other existing rational natures also. How much depended upon this choice! The whole history of creation will simply flow out of it. The reasons seem on the side of His assuming an angelic nature. It is higher, and therefore nearer to Him. It is much more magnificent, and therefore more suitable to Him. It is purely spiritual, and we may conceive a Divine Person to abhor the contact of matter. The Church expressly thanks Him for not abhorring the virginal Bosom of His sinless Mother. If we look at His compassion, we shall remember that the angels had fallen no less than man, and that the human race could be stopped with Adam and Eve, whereas one third of the multitudinous angels had already fallen, or were actually falling, into the abyss, in the sure prevision of the Most High. The angels also love Him better than men. They seem to love Him more in fact, as well as to have greater powers of loving Him. Yet it is He, who in the flesh seemed to love John more than Peter, though Peter loved Him more than John. He chose human nature for His assumption, rather than angelical, and He chose it with the unerring choice of God. A thousand sciences lay deep within that choice; and it is only the knowledge of the character of God, which that choice has given us, that enables us to conjecture any ground for the choice, while in our estimation all the reasons would else have seemed against it. There was an extremity of condescension in His choice of a human nature, which better satisfies the divine perfections.* By the lowness of His descent He gained more of what He could not have as God; and it appears as if no additional degree of humiliation was of little consequence in His sight. He got deeper down into His own creation by this choice, and came nearer to the edge of that nothingness which is as it were the antipodes of God. If we could conceive of a moment in which that choice was not yet made, but in which it was at the very point of being made, how should we not feel our own destinies trembling in the balance! All that makes this life endurable to us, all that mellows the past or gilds the future, the whole vista of the endless life before us, — all this, and much more about us that we know not of, was involved in that eternal choice of the nature to be assumed by the Person of the Eternal Word. That choice is the rudder which is still at this moment steering both our time and our eternity. Happy are we, beyond all angels, to be of the family whose nature was chosen for Himself by the Eternal Word! This is one of those happinesses which make real unhappiness so impossible. * See B. Sacr»ment. Book L »«ct. x.

When we enumerate all these choices of the Word in the Father's Bosom, we do not forget that, as they were eternal, they were also unsuccessive. But as we must name them in some order, we arrange them as they would come according to our notions of things. His nature chosen, and that nature human. His next choice would be of His blessed SouL Perhaps no two souls of men are alike. The products of grace in each soul are as various as the productions of the different soils of earth. The variety of the saints is one of the most glorious varieties on earth. Thus countless beautiful souls radiant in their vast capabilities of supernatural holiness, exulting in the range and completeness of their natural powers, arrayed in spiritual beauty of the most enticing purity, hung before His eye, like shining orbs, in the dark abyss of nothingness. Of all possible souls He had His choice; and He had to choose one which could bear to dwell in the furnace of the Hypostatic Union, could light up all heaven, in lieu of sun and moon, by its created sanctity, and could hold an ocean of grace which was only not absolutely illimitable. With what joy must not such a choice have been accompanied! With what unspeakable complacency must He not have rested not only in the wisdom of His choice, but also in the precious object of it!

He chose likewise the Body in which He was to be incarnate. The pure Flesh and the precious Blood, which were to be assumed by a Divine Person, and then remain for ever in worshipful union with Him, were worthy objects of His eternal choice. He chose such a temperament of Body as should be able to endure the floods of glory He would pour into it. He chose one whose extreme sensitiveness might almost aid, rather than impede, the delicate operations of His magnificent SouL He chose one whose beautiful texture caused it to be hereafter such an instrument of suffering as has never existed elsewhere amid all the immense capabilities of created life. His future human lineaments were ol His own designing. It was a joy to Him from all eternity to read the loveliness of their varying expression. His bright eye was a new eloquence which spoke to Him even in that profound divine life of eternity. The accents of His voice were even then a perpetual soundless music in His ear. His likeness to His Mother was one of His eternal joys. Thus did the heavenly Artist pourtray from all eternity, upon the darkness of the uncreated waste, that beauty of form and feature, which was to ravish angels and men with an exceeding and unchanging love. Was He not Himself delighted with His work 1

He chose His Mother also. When we reflect upon the joy which it is to ourselves to think of Mary, to brood upon her supernatural loveliness, and to study the greatness of her gifts and the surpassing purity of her virtues, we shall get such faint idea, as lies within our compass, of the unspeakable gladness which it must have been to the Word to have chosen Mary, and to have created her through that very choice. He must choose a Mother who shall be worthy of being the Mother of God, a Mother suitable to that tremendous mystery of the Hypostatic Union, a Mother fitted to minister that marvellous Body out of her own heart's blood, and to be herself for months the tabernacle of that most heavenly SouL All God's works are in proportion. When He appoints to an office, His appointment is marked by extreme fitness. He elevates nature to the level of His own purposes. He enables it to compass the most supernatural destinies by fulfilling it with the most incredible graces. There was no accident about His choice of Mary. She was not merely the holiest of living women on earth at the time when He resolved to come. She was not a mere tool, an instrument for the passing necessity of the hour, to be used, and flung aside, and lie indistinguishable in the crowd when her use was gone. This is not God's way. He does not deal thus with the least of His elect. His whole revelation of Himself renders such a supposition as impossible as it would be profane. There is nothing accidental or of mere ornament in the works of the Most High. His operations have no excrescences, no extrinsic appendages. God does not use His creatures. They enter into His purposes, and are an integral part of them; and every part of a divine work is one of that work's perfections. This is a characteristic of divine working, that everything about it is a special perfection. Mary thus lies high up in the very fountainhead of creation. She was the choice of God Himself, and He chose her to be His Mother. She was the gate by which the Creator entered into His own creation. She ministered to Him in a way and for an end unlike those of any other creature whatsoever. What then must have been her beauty, what her holiness, what her privileges, what her exaltation! To depreciate them is to depreciate the wisdom and the goodness of God. When we have said that Mary was the Word's eternal choice, we have said that which already involves all the doctrine of the Church about her, and all the homage of Christians to her. When we consider the Word's desire to assume a created nature, when we ponder His choice of a human nature, when we reflect on His further choice of His Soul and Body, and add to all these considerations the remembrance of His immense love, we can see how His goodness would exult in the choice of His Mother, whom to love exceedingly was to become one of His chiefest graces, one of the greatest of all His human perfections. All possible creatures were before Him, out of which to choose the creature that was to come nearest Him, the creature that was to love Him, and to have a natural right to love Him, best of all, and the creature whom duty as well as preference was to bind Him to love with the c intensest love. Then, out of all, He chose Mary. Wliat more can be said? She fulfilled His idea, or rather she did not so much suit His idea, but she was herself His idea, and His idea of her was the cause of her creation. The whole theology of Mary lies in this eternal and efficacious choice of her in the Bosom of the Father.

The Word's next choice was of the place where He and His Mother were to dwell, that part of the material creation which was to be the scene of His assumption of a created nature, and of a nature itself partially material It does not seem as if our ignorance could obtain so much as a glimpse of any of the reasons which lay imbedded in His choice of earth. The advancement of science only dishonours old guesses, without apparently leading the way to new ones. The more unimportant and uncentral we learn ourselves to be physically in the huge creation round us, and the more lost we are in the fabulous probabilities of sidereal space, the less can we discern what it was which guided the Creator's predilection this way. We know not why He chose for man's abode our solar system rather than any other solar system, or why He chose a satellite instead of a central body, a planet rather than a sun, or why of the planets of this system He chose the third one, which is neither eminent in size or in position. There seems no physical propriety, no material symmetry in His choice. The reasons therefore must be of a sublimer kind, and lie deep in the wisdom of the Word unfathomable to us. God deals with His creatures in a very individual way. He tells us what concerns ourselves, as far as it concerns us, and when it becomes practical to us. He is at no pains to explain Himself, or to reveal systems. He speaks to us according to our real wants. He is a teacher of law rather than of science. He is a Father whom we must trust rather than a potentate with whom we must keep up a diplomatic understanding. Hii reasons for choosing earth as the theatre of the Incarnation lie at one side of our road to heaven, and off the road, and therefore are not told us. There was doubtless deep and blissful wisdom in the choice. We may lawfully love the particular world which is our home, seeing that He loved it so Himself, and crowned it with this eternal choice. Material proprieties are not the measures of divine decisions; and that is a thought which holds many thoughts in these days of ours.

But there was another choice of His which leads our ignorance into still more hopeless depths 'of helplessness. In the Bosom of the Father the Word chose His eternal companions, the elect among angels and men. We know that all angels and all men were created for Him, and to be His companions. We know that He desires the eternal companionship of them all. We shrink with righteous horror from supposing that the permission of evil was granted simply that He might take occasion by it to ruin everlastingly multitudes of creatures, whom it is of faith that He loved intensely. We cannot tell why the two creations of angels and of men should have been created in a sinless liberty which needed not this permission to its freedom. We are absolutely certain from what He has revealed of Himself that there were reasons in infinite goodness that it should be so, and that the freedom, by which angels and men merit and sin, was suitable to His eternal designs of creative love. We know also that the permission of evil was not necessary to the exhibition of His justice, because His justice is more wonderfully illustrated in the exaltation of Mary than in the condemnation of sinners. We know furthermore, that His choice of His elect in no wise interfered with the liberty of any one of them, and yet, incomprehensible mystery! that it was truly an efficacious choice. "Whom He foreknew, He also predestinated." This is the nearest approach which He Himself allows us to the solution of this mystery. It was not a choice only, it was a foreknowledge also; and it was not a foreknowledge only, it was a choice also. He Himself will not allow us to contemplate this mystery otherwise than in the sweet confidence which the theological virtue of hope imparts to us, that we ourselves were among the number of those- elect whose correspondence to His grace and participation in His glory gladdened His eye from all eternity. Meanwhile this is one of the darkest parts of that marvellous life of elections which He led before the beginnings of actual creation. We can trust Him for it. Ko one can be astonished at getting out of his depth in God. We shall not have a just idea of the life of the Word in the Bosom of the Father if we keep out of sight His wonderful jubilee in the choice of His elect, and we fearlessly adore a joy which we know must have rested on an absolutely boundless love; for the justice of an all-holy love is a justice which even those who suffer from it cannot reasonably gainsay.

He chose also the glory which His Sacred Humanity was to enjoy. He chose that dignity and splendour of His Body which He should merit for it Himself in His Three-and-Thirty Years, from the first instant of His Conception to the moment of His Death; and He looked with complacency on the glory and blessedness which was thus to be enjoyed by that Flesh which He should take from Mary, and with which He should feed the generations of men in the realities of the Blessed Sacrament. We may conceive, that, when He foresaw His Passion, He felt an increased tenderness, to speak thus foolishly of eternal things, for that Body which was to be the instrument of those terrific sufferings whereby He should redeem the world. He chose also that exaltation of His Holy name, which He also merited Himself, and which represents the whole history of His Church, and the wonders of His Saints, and the supernatural chronicles of religious orders. He chose too, among the things which He Himself should merit, the magnificence of His judicial power by which He should judge the world in His Human Nature rather than His Divine, and by which He began from the first moment of His Conception to judge every soul of man that passed from this life to another. He exulted in the immensity of glory which His Sacred Humanity should give to the adorable justice of God by the exercise of this judicial power alone. He foresaw His judgment of His sinless Mother, and rejoiced unspeakably in the wise righteousness with which He apportioned to her merits their wonderful rewards. He foresaw His judgment of St. Joseph, whom but a moment before He had assisted to die with filial solicitude, and the thought was dear to him of the words which should confirm to His glorious foster-father the intensity of his peace in limbus for a while, and the admirable splendour of that throne in heaven, which he should enjoy. He looked over the gigantic ocean of human actions and merits, and His justice exulted royally in beholding not one trivial kindness, not one single cup of cold water forgotten, or unrewarded, or rewarded otherwise than with a divine munificence, in all that astonishing multitude of things which He should have to judge. It was the Sacred Humanity scattering the largesse of the divine justice profusely over all creation. His spotless holiness, too, found matter for true and solemn jubilation in those other awards of severity, awards slowly made yet without reluctance when the measure of slighted mercy is filled up, whereby the majesty of an offended God is vindicated with a rigour which only the unrequited love of a Creator can display.

He chose also to be indebted to His own merits for the mysterious reunion of His Body, Blood, and Soul in the glorious mystery of the Resurrection, the nearest approach

3o THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

which merit could make towards the Hypostatic Union, unless perchance He merited the extension of that Union to those fresh additions to His Body which age and growth and food added to it. He chose also the countless graces which He should merit for the children of men, and what He should merit also for the world of angels. How many sciences were opened to His view, how many abysses of rapturous contemplation outstretched before Him, in this one matter of His merits, His election of them, their kind, their number, their value, their beauty, their operation, both for Himself and others! One little section of this fair world of choices were enough to fill a created spirit with bliss for all eternity.

Yet all these glories, which His Sacred Humanity merited for itself, were as nothing to those which belonged to it in right of the Hypostatic Union, the unmerited fountain of all its surpassing splendours. The glories which His divine Filiation conferred upon His Humanity were the objects of an eternal choice, in which we may reverently conceive the "Word to have exulted with a still more marvellous delight. The glory of His Soul lay beyond the reach even of His far-stretching merits. Yasquez went so far as to teach that, even by the absolute power of God, He could not have merited the glory of His Soul, in which opinion we might venture to differ from him. Nevertheless most true it is that in the Bosom of the Father the Word chose the beatific glory of His Soul, the immensity of its infused science, the magnificence of its habitual grace, the grace of headship, His royalty. His priesthood, and the boundless supremacy of His spiritual power, as seven wide and deep and resplendent creations lying within the compass of His Human Soul, and lying outside the influence of His own amazing merits. All these glories He chose with ineffable exultation, and He exulted the more in choosing that they should flow from His

Divine Sonship, and not from 11 is merits. It was His choice that the Hypostatic Union should endow His Sacred Humanity, not merely with the capahilities of meriting immense glories, but directly and of itself with those splendours which should be its greatest and most wonderful magnificences. We have but got to think for a moment of the glory of His Soul, of its science, and its grace, in order to Bee what almost illimitable fields of jubilant contemplation lay before the Word in the Bosom of His Father, merely respecting the created nature which it was decreed He should assume. There was a heaven of divine joys in the multitude of manifold choices which lay before Him, and to which His own decrees with beautiful compulsion drew Him.

It is twice said of heaven, first by a prophet and then by an apostle, that its joys are absolutely inconceivable by the mind of man, and that these joys have been prepared by God for those who love Him, " prepared," as if God had taken pains about them and spent time over them, in order to make them a gift worthy of His magnificence. Yet, from what theology teaches us, how marvellous is the picture which we can make to ourselves of the joys of heaven, to what sublime heights faith elevates our imaginations, how grand are the conceptions which we can form of that glorious home even now in the darkness of our exile! Nevertheless, as Scripture tells us, the reality of its grandeur it has never entered into our minds to conceive! The joys of men on earth are almost as countless as their souls. The joys of the angels are above our comprehension, but they far outstrip those of men both in multitude and in magnificence. We can imagine hosts of delights arising from intellectual enjoyment, or again from our affections, or again from the supernatural tastes which our souls acquire through grace. We can multiply these into fabulous sums. We can magnify them into gigantic forms by the thought of God, His power,

His wisdom, and His love. We can conceive of them all as blessedly fixed in a secure eternity, and our own natures unspeakably widened and deepened for new capacities of joy. But beyond all this there lies a world of heavenly joys which we do not suspect, because it is not in our power to conceive theiT kinds or their methods of operation. Who can dream what will come of seeing God as He is? Now all this multitude of joys rose up at the choice of the Word in the Bosom of the Father. There was not one which He did not devise, and create, and stamp with the deepest impress of His love. He set them aside for each spirit of angel and soul of man, which should enter into His joy. He proportioned them with an exuberant liberality, which was also at the same time an unerring justice. He made them special to each spirit and soul that should enjoy them. He counted their infinity, weighed their ecstatic thrills, and measured to each spirit the measure of the light of glory which should strengthen him to bear such impetuous excess of joy; and the whole was to Him a work of the most unutterable gladness and divine complacency. He chose too that fresh outpoured sunshine over immortal souls in heaven, which should be cast by His Sacred Humanity in the pleasures of the glorified senses after the resurrection of the body. He saw heaven suddenly flushed with a new verdure, and its gardens blossoming with the translucent bodies of His elect, as if they were multiplied images of Himself, voiceless echoes of light to the light that streams from the Lamb Himself.

One choice more, and we will close our list of the thrice three choices of the Word. The vision of sin lay before Him. He saw it all, as we can never see it, in its intensely horrible nature, in the breadth of its empire, in its radical opposition to God, in the tremendously fearful doom wherewith the divine justice would ultimately suffocate it. It lay before Him, but His tranquillity was unmoved. Not a breatb of disturbance passed even over the surface of His blessedness. Not one of His decrees was turned aside. They all flowed on in their immutable channels of eternal love. But a new choice arose before Him. The sphere of His justice was widened, while the objects of His love were multiplied. He added to the choices He had already made of His Soul and Body. He cnose now the power of suffering, the capability of feeling sorrow, the vibrations of sensible fear, the infirmity of wonder, the emotions of human anger. He chose poverty, and shame, and death, and the Cross. Over the bright and glorious destiny of the Mother of the impossible Humanity, in which He would have come. He drew a mysterious cloud of impenetrable dolours, and the great queen of heaven was magnified beneath its shadows. He marked out for Himself a pathway of Blood to the hearts of His sinful creatures, those at least who bore the same nature which He Himself had elected to assume. The elder family of angels He passed over in their fall, but not in disregard. They fell into the gulf of His justice, and were drawn in and swallowed up for ever. Now Bethlehem and Calvary lay before the Word as objects of intense desire, and of what we have dared to call divine impatience. But there was no stir in the Bosom of the Father. The pulses of the Divine Life were not quickened for a moment. Nothing was precipitated. The decrees went on with irresistible slowness, like the huge glowing lava-streams down the flanks of Etna, only that these were creative, prolific, fertilising, streams of wisdom and of love. Still every moment was the Son eternally generated of the Father. Still every moment was the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son. Not a sound was heard. Not a sight was seen. There was no time to lapse by uncounted. There was no vacancy, no void, no hollow, which might one day be the room of spaca Thero was odIj the iiii£x;: v:; imicovaVle life, to which neither past nor fature:;a:l.. Tr.er^ wi^::.e Blessed God.

Su:- w:;:: V occnpeticHis of the Woid in the Bosom of the Tdiiiei, iii:J:i was the life of that Peiscai to whom oar Mpcaal attuitioii is drawn, because He w..i:: e Person who was t: ^?? vne a eraated nature. I: vs,??:,: a? that ai^:-;:::: was ooneemed, a life of ch.i.e?..v::i e:*:.. choice w.\i as ziach the choiee of the Father and the Holy Ghost, a.5 '.: V. 15 of the Word Himsrif. Such was His everlasting 1::e u. '.he Boeom of the Father creatoiekssi and jet not without ereatores^ only distingiushaUe to ns in its outermost edges where the decrees of creation shine upon its waters It was a creatnielesa hie, because creatures were not yet in actual ezistuiee. It was a fife with creatoress because they were in reality eternal in the Divine Mind. To ns it is as ii we we:^ gifted with preternatural sight, and oonld look u; in:: 55 visra, broad at its opening as the breadth of tir?.'^ ':::::.. 'le^ creation, and rising np in flights of:i.: f ■:? _ J v: s.eps onward and npward, narrowing &i: i.i:: " ::.: ir,:. with the decrees of God like n::.e f.o: les 5:1:':.::. speechless rows on either hand, ajii:i:e e:-?:: £ sy.:.;:::5 shining white on their colossal t 1:75:::e v,:. ei tv?^ into God, and the beaotifal

5 z:rL::::v of ini™ezse cr^o.::: lies visibly in the predestination ci JesQs, and flows oat from the central fountain of the Undivided Trinity, an emanation of the Divine life in infinite separation from it Then actual creation comes, and stOl God lies in His rteamal Sabbath, even while He works. Time and the world la^pse by, and fur off is the tranqniUi^ of God.

What can ever eqnal in magnificence the first ontward bniBt of flie Omnipotent, when the angels broke forth out ti Bofting in fn^rifltiT of lights mora niDDneroiis than the

Bands of the sea, each of them huge worlds of fire, with the intellectual efifulgence of their majestic spirits beaming fax and wide in transcending loveliness. We are blinded by the very thought. The eyes of our mind ache, as with lightning, while we picture to ourselves this first thunderstorm, which broke forth at an instant from the feet of the inaccessible throne of God. At the selfsame moment, out of nothing rose the ponderous universe of matter, far outspread fields of the gauze-like breath of an immeasurable heat, and the scarce-visible tissue of simplest elements, perhaps of one element only, but of a myriad myriad forms, wheeling off and condensing into numberless huge worlds, all chained together by the filaments of an invisible attraction. There was a magnificence even in chaos which fed the glory of the Creator.

Then perhaps came the vast geological epochs, revolving cycles of ages unnumbered, because there was none but God to number them. Marvellous floras covered our own earth like a gorgeous tapestry. Wonderful faunas filled the seas with life, and took possession of the continents. All the while God was tranquil, and time and the world lapsed by. The days of Adam came and went, and the strangeness of antediluvian life. The flood came and did its stern work; and the pastoral plains of Mesopotamia were studded with the tents of the patriarchs, until God's love lit upon the hills and dells of Syria. The exodus of the chosen people from the typical Egypt, the wilderness, the kingdom, the captivity, the widespread heathendom, and the Immaculate Conception, succeeded one another, as we speak, but in truth lay all present at once to the eye of God, and His same tranquil life went on. The Incarnation was realised in Nazareth and made manifest in Bethlehem. The beautiful ages of the catholic church began, and came to an end in the Valley of Judgment. Each individual soul lay out before God clear and separate, in an orbit of its own, unti\ all met in conjunction in the same Valley of Judgment. Then — we shall speak thus hereafter, when all is past, and it is even now passing quietly — this family of creation was gathered home into the Bosom of the Father, by the Word who ever dwelt there, and by means of His Incarnation.

All this went by, and there was the same tranquil life of God, unchanged, unchangeable. Yet God was not inactive. Language cannot express to us in its reality the overfulness of God's concurrence with everything, or the thrilling omnipotence of His penetrative activity. The mystery is how He can so concur, so interpenetrate and underlie all matter and all spirit, and yet for ever be by Himself, in unutterable and adorable unconfusion with created things. Thus all this life in the Bosom of the Father, so far as it regarded outward things, was from eternity steadily advancing to the assumption of a created natare by an Uncreated Person. All that is outside of God therefore bears exclusively on this. There is no exception. Yet the tranquil eternal life within that Bosom went on as ever. And now, — we speak as we must one day speak, — the mighty populous heavens lie with their worshipping crowds at the very feet of God. The activity of heaven far transcends the feeble agitations of earth. Its power, with Jesus and Mary and the angels and the souls, is fearfully majestic to think upon. Its sciences are like the sciences of God. Its loves are like the procession of the Holy Ghost. The realities of its doings, and its energies, and its discoveries, and its contemplations, and its beauties, are simply unimaginable by us who know only the feverish intermittent indolence of mortal civilisation. Its very created infirmities are hidden, almost healed, by the near shadow of the Uncreated. Yet that tranquil life in the Bosom of the Father is unchanged. As it was in the creatureless eternity, so is it now. Every moment is the

Son eternally generated of the Father. Every moment is the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Father and the Son. Everywhere there is the Blessed God, tranquil and self-sufficing, unchanging and unchangeable: and we, it is the only change, happy we, are lying in the lap of His eternity! But between those two points, between the eternity before creation and the eternity after the judgment shall have fixed the endless lot of this family of the Incarnation, there is the point to each of us which is our present, and in which we are arduously working our way home to our Heavenly Father. Our past and our future are both in our to-day. How is our to-day by the side of the Bosom of the Eternal Father, and of the Divine Life going on therein 1 Let us revive our faith, and the world will at once drop down below us, and the chains of a thousand petty interests, fall from us. There is no liberty of spirit, except when we are breathing the air of God. Let us mount up on high, and look at the earth as it lies beneath us. There are creatures bom and dying every moment, the one have to be started on their destinies which are unending, the others to be seen through that last conflict in which all the threads of life are to be gathered up, and the doom to be, not merely according to the past life, but according to the dispositions of that dread To-day. There is all the turmoil of a resonant world rising up towards the throne of God. The thunders of the imprisoned fires of hell reach His ears. There are the high winds and storms of the enormous atmosphere, and below it the uneasiness of the throbbing feverish volcanoes, and the perpetual, tremulous, elastic shiverings of the crust of the earth. Above, there is the dazzling velocity of stupendous revolving orbs in mute unechoing space, the wild rushing of comets which law is spurring on at such headstrong speed, and here and there among the countless worlds the crash of some catastrophe, which is part of the uniformity of theii system. God has to be busy with all this. Then down in the forests of seaweed on the pavement of the ocean, under the bark and among the leaves of the forests of the land, amid the thick, viewless insect-life of the populous air, He is busy also, minutely occupied, incessantly occupied, personally occupied, with every individual form of life. Yet at this moment there is no stir over the pellucid abysses of His shoreless life. His Bosom is all tranquil as before. The Father, calm and dread and beautiful, whose freshness eternity cannot age, is in repose and majesty. The Son is still issuing forth in His Bosom, noiselessly begotten in the ravishing splendours of an eternal Generation. The Holy Spirit is still the actually proceeding Jubilee of Both, outflowing, distinct, eternal, the same One Life.

But at this hour, somewhere in creation, that Bosom is laid bare to spirits and to souls so that they can see It as It is. This is a change from the old uncreatured life, but the change is altogether outside the unchangeable. There is no time, no lapse, no succession, there. There are no measurable epochs in that unadvancing, stationary, self sufficing, indescribably blissful Life. Progress is the radical infirmity of creatures. Yet the creature-time has surrounded the Eternal and Uncreated with its sweet growths and secular harvests in rings of created beauty and supernatural holiness. He is showing them the Vision of Himself, localised somewhere. Eadiant fringes of saints and angels are stirring in His light, as if they were the edges of His royal robes, and prostrate multitudes lie like a golden pavement, thrilling with light, around His throne. But are we sure the change is all outside 1 The faith will not allow us to doubt of it. Then is it most true that faith is more than sight. For it looks as if there was a change inside. Far down, amid the central lightnings of the Godhead, those lightnings which feed instead of blighting the spirits and souls of creatures, it is as if there was a human Babe, not an adopted foundling whom His mercy has taken up in its necessity, but His own eternal idea, realised in time, the cause of all creation whatsoever, the cause of all that makes up our present life to-day, except the evil which may hang about us like a clinging mist. That Babe is the Causal-Idea of all things. The spirits and the souls see Him there, and worship Him with the thunders of ecstatic song. Yet still the Divine Life goes on with its unsuccessive, endless, unbeginning pulsations. Still is the Son being begotten, still is the Spirit proceeding, still is the Father the Unbegotten Fountain of the Godhead, Lonely, with leagues between, angels and souls far off, as earth counts farness, nearest to the Throne sits a Virgin-Mother, a creature who once was nothingness, and who would fall back into nothingness this hour, if God did not fulfil, sustain, uphold her with all His might and main, as it were, by His essence, presence, power, grace, and glory. The Babe in the Bosom of the Father is the likeness of that created Mother, and is ever looking out at her, as if her Bosom might tempt Him from that Bosom of the Father. She is ever looking at Him, as she taught St. John to look at Him, " in the Beginning," in the Bosom of the Father. This is Mary's fixed view of her Child. This is John's fixed view of his dear Master. He lay in that dread Bosom in idea from all eternity. He lies there at this hour with His Incarnation realised. It is the Babe of Bethlehem, Jesug Christ, yesterday, and to-day, and the same for ever!

Footnotes

1. TU© reader must bear in mi|id thftt it is so far the received doctri«# ↩

2. Durandus and some others taught that Christ as man is the adopted Son of God, but St. Thomas, with Vasquez, Suarez, and others, will not allow of this being taught. The reception of the Council of Frankfort aeems to put it beyond doubt. Indeed there is a consent of the great theologians against even saying that the Humanity was adopted bv G^^ ↩

3. Mary of Agreda says our Lord revealed to her that He never exer* cised the act of choice but once, and that was when He chose suffering. Perhaps He refrained His Human Nature from it, as from something belonging peculiarly to God. What a grand spiritual life might be based en this one thought 1 ↩