Chapter V. The Infant God
There is no poem in the world like a man's life, the life of any man, however little it may be marked with what we call adventure. For real life, even the most commonplace, is strong-featured, if we look at it attentively. No poet would so dare to mingle sweetness and strangeness, simplicity and peculiarity, sublimity and pathos, as real life mingles them together. The characters of the poet either stand out from the common lot of men as exceptional cases, or else lose distinguishable individuality altogether. But a man's real life is at once a bolder and a simpler thing than the creation of the poet. It is like a grand heavenly recitative, which providence itself pronounces as the years go on with a sort of eloquent dramatic silence, from one point of view inventive as the impro visa tore, from another merely interpreting the waywardness of a man's own will.
True however it is, that the very barrenest life of man that ever was lived is, if we take the inward and the outward together, a truly divine poem, to which he who listens becomes wise. Each single human life in the world amounts to nothing less than a private revelation of God, a revelation which would be enough for the whole world, if an inspired pen recorded it. But, when a man is living in a state of grace, and is giving himself up to God and leading an interior life, then his secret biographv Locomcs still more wonderful, because it is more consciously supernatural Most inward-living men have some special attraction of grace, some divine mould in which their spiritual lives are cast, a mould which God uses, not for classes, but for individuals. Each man stands in a relation to God which is peculiar to himself. He shares it with no other man. He has had more graces or fewer, larger or smaller, of a different character, and blending differently with the varying circumstances of his outward life. These external circumstances are never the same to any two men, as far as we can see. The alternations of bright and dark are differently distributed to each, so that each outward life forms a different amalgamation with grace from any other outward life. The very geography of a man's life changes his grace. If God allows the angels to behold the multiform lives of men in a clear light from His point of view, the world must be to them almost like a second beatific vision; such a glorious and bold revelation must it be to them of the inaccessible character of the Creator.
A spiritual man may be defined to be one who has received a second life from God, a life which lie lives privately with God, and which is itself a kind of divine law to his outward life, standing in the relation of supremacy to it, and at the same time leaving free play to circumstances. This second life is heavenly. Its vitality is from heaven. Its powers are heavenly. It is conversant with heavenly things, and deals with earthly things only to transmute them into heavenly things by the alchemy of grace. In nothing is this individual attraction of grace more observable than in a man's devotions; and, because of the relation in which devotion stands to virtue, in nothing is it more important. With some men it is the same all through life; with others it changes with the seasons and circumstances of life. Sometimes a man sees it plainly himself; at other times others can see it, while it remains invisible to himself; sometimes it is hidden altogether, yet not necessarily absent because it is hidden. In some souls it is so strong that it moulds their entire life; with others it is so weak that their devotion seems to have no rule beyond that seemingly external rule, which is more mysterious and excellent than men believe, the calendar of the Church.
Some men, for instance, have a sovereign attraction to the mysteries of the Incarnation, but without a special drawing to any one of them. Some are drawn to portions of oui Lord's life, as the Infancy, the Passion, or the Ministry, while others fix upon some one of the subordinate mysteries, contained in one of those portions, as St. Charles Borromeo fixed upon the Agony in the Garden, and worked that one mystery out in the grandeur of his heroic life. The spiritual life of some is more at home in the mysteries of the Incarnation as expressed in ^lary, than in the same mysteries as expressed by Jesus, or rather it is their bent to find Jesus in Mary, where more or less all must find Him who love our Lord's own ways and follow His divine leading. The devotion of some is to the Sacraments, and thereby they reach an amazing, and very distinctive, fc\inctity. Some have their spiritual hearing so haunted, that all life long they hear the souls in purgatory for ever bleating in their ears, like the strayed lambs crying aloud far up among the stony mountains. The devotion of some is fed by the pageants and functions of the Church, while other souls fare better in a quiet catacomb, with St. Philip, or on the hill-top, with St. John of the Cross, or under the nightly canopy of stars, with St. Ignatius.
But there is one devotion in particular, with which we are at present concerned, devotion to the Attributes of God. All believers worship God, and therefore all believers worship those divine perfections which we conceive to exist in Him in some supereminent way. But a special devotion to the Divine Perfections is sometliing in addition to this worship. All Christians worship our Blessed Lord as God and Man; yet some have a special devotion to Him in the Blessed Sacrament, some in His Infancy, others in His Passion, while the devotion of others is to the Incarnation in general Thus it is with devotion to the Attributes of God. Some are altogether without this devotion, the absence of which in no way impairs their worship of God. But just as some devout souls live in the Passion, without any more special attraction towards the Infancy than is implied by holding the faith, so some souls live among the Attributes of God by a sort of daring predilection, and this dwelling-place of their devotion is to them what Calvary, or Bethlehem, or the Tabernacle, are to others. Some also have a special attraction to one Attribute rather than to the rest. Sister Benigne Gojos was drawn especially to honour the divine Justice, Father Condren the divine Sanctity, and Lancisius mentions a Spanish lady whose peculiar devotion was to the divine Patience. We know that there can in reality be no such things as separate Attributes in God, because He is a Simple Act, and is therefore His own Attributes. But these perfections are the ways in which He invites us to regard Him.1 They are different sides of His character, different
THE INFANT GOD. i3l aspects of His majesty, and therefore appeal differently to our souls, and appear to work different works of grace within us. Hence it is that they become the subjects of a special devotion, or of several special devotions.
But this devotion to the Attributes of God stands in a very particular relation to devotions to the Incarnation. If we were to suppose that devotion to the Incarnation was one kind of devotion to God, and devotion to the Divine Attributes another, and that we were free to pass the one by, and to adopt the other, we should fall into the most deadly error which could beset the spiritual life. Our Lord is the appointed way to God. The Incarnation lies all round Him, and faith has no access to the Throne except over that region, whether they who traverse it have explicit knowledge of its true significance or not. Neither again is devotion to the Incarnation a stage through which we can pass, and then have done with it. It is no scaffolding whereby we mount to the higher devotions to the Divine Attributes or the Holy Trinity, which may be dispensed with when the contemplative soul has climbed those fortunate heights. For our Incarnate Lord is the life as well as the way. We cannot dispense with His Sacred Humanity either in time or in eternity. It is our abiding life. Neither, last of all, can we separate devotion to the Divine Attributes from devotion to the Incarnation; for our Lord, once more, is the truth as well as the way and the life; and the truth is one and indivisible. "We cannot sunder what God has joined. It is just those souls, who have laid the strongest hold upon the mysteries of the Incarnation, that are most likely to be distinguished for special devotion to the Attributes of God. When the Blessed Paul of the Cross fixed the Passion and the Attributes of God as the two subjects of meditation for his order of nuns, he implied that there was in mystical theology an occult connection between the two devotiona
So in like manner our reading of the lives of the saints must often have brought before us the fact that souls, immersed in the spirit of the Sacred Infancy, seem to imbibe a special fitness for an eagle-like contemplation of the fastnesses of the Divine Nature. The infantine simplicity of soul, which comes from Bethlehem, claims kindred with that heavenly sublimity of spirit, which hovers almost unalarmed around the mountain-tops of God. Thus, to express shortly what seems to contain the chief truth of the matter, there are some souls whose chief devotion to the Incarnation consists in a devotion to our Lord's Divinity in each and all of His mysteries, or in some particular favourite mysteries. It is thus through the Incarnation that they approach the Divine Perfections, and in the Divine Perfections that they most realise the inexpressible sweetness of the Incarnation.
Any special drawing in devotion is a great gift from God. It is one of the most powerful of all the secret influences of the spiritual life. It is therefore of great importance to a man not to mistake or overlook such a heavenly attraction. Such a mistake is like a man's missing his vocation. Every man doubtless has a vocation, so every spiritual man has a devotional attraction, or a succession of them. For a spiritual man is one who dwells inwardly in the supernatural world, amid God's mysteries and revealed grandeurs. He is not a mere tourist who is struck by the sublime or the picturesque of theology, and admires the scenery as a whole, and has not such a familiarity with it as to enable him to break it up into separate landscapes, nor time to brood tranquilly over any of them so as to have a rational predilection for them. He dwells in the world of theology. He is like one whose fixed abode is in grand scenery. He sees it in the morning light and in the sunset's glow. He knows how it looks when the misty calm of summer noon is wafting fragrance over wood and water. He is familiar with it in the vicissitudes of storm aud calm. WTien the distant mountains are hidden by summer's impenetrable rampart of green leaves before his window, he feels that they are there, and that winter's leafless woods will let them in upon his sight. He knows how the faces of the mountains change, according as the light strikes them in the front or from behind, and how a stranger, who has seen them in the morning, would in the evening, spite of all landmarks, be doubtful of their identity. He cannot help having preferences. Predilections are almost a necessity to him. Or at least he must honour, like a true poet, each coming season with an admiration which seems, if it only seems, to do injustice to the season that is past, like the souls who in devotion follow the Calendar of the Church, and honour most the feast under whose shadow they are sitting. So it must be to those to whom the supernatural world is a genuine home. Their life is a life of loves, and therefore of predilections also.
All spiritual souls are thus haunted souls. They see sights which others do not see, and hear sounds which others do not hear. This haunting is to them their own secret prophecy of heaven. It would be sad to miss so choice a grace by inattention, sadder still to follow a fantastic delusion of earth instead of the heavenly reality. The soul cannot hear God unless it listens for Him, and listening is the devoutest attitude of a wise and loving soul. Yet they who listen hear many sounds which others do not hear, many sounds for which they themselves are never listening. There are false sounds on earth, which have a trick of heaven in them. They are like the phantom- bells that ring for vespers, as from viewless convents, in the wilderness of Zin. Yet the Bedouin deems that, with his practised ear, he cbb discern their thin toiling from the real sounds of the sandy solitude. The avoiding of delusion is not the whole of safety in the spiritual life. "When a man turns his entire life into a cautious self-defence against imposture, he is leading perhaps the falsest life a man can lead. There is more danger in missing a grace from God, than in mistaking an earthly beckoning for a divine. For in the last case purity of intention soon rectifies the error, while in the other the loss is for the most part irretrievable. Even in the natural life, and in the spiritual life much more, they are the most unfortunate of men, who linger behind their lot. They are like those who loiter behind the desert caravan. Straightway, as Marco Polo tells us, a shadowy voice calls them by their name, and allures them to one side of the route. They follow, and still it calls, and when they have wandered from the path, a mocking silence follows, more terrible than the deceiving voice. The wind of evening has lifted the light sands, and quietly effaced the marks of feet and camel-hoofs upon the wilderness, as the breeze ruffles out the wakes of ships on the yielding deep, and smooths the water by its ruffling. They have missed their vocation. It is no use their living now. They might as well lie down and die. Such are they, who in the spiritual life linger behind their grace. They of all men are the most haunted by delusions, and have the least discernment by which to tell them from realities. A soul that has let grace outstrip it, will never see its caravan again. It may die with God; for God is in the wilderness; but faint indeed is the chance of its not dying in the wilderness. Let each man look well to see if he has not within himself a leading from God; and if he has, let him know that it is his one saving thing to follow it. In the kingdom of grace, the law, which has the fewest exceptions, is the one which rules that supernatural things shall graft themselves on natural stocks. Hence it is that a man's devotional attraction is for the most part congenial to his natural turn of mind. Now it is with spiritual men as it ifl with poets. Some delight in quiet, modest scenes in
THE INFANT GOD. 23c woodland bowers, in tinkling brooks, in rivers that lapse so quietly with their brims on the level of the meadows that the sedge scarce twinkles in the stream, in cottages jasmine-mantled, in kine knee-deep in the cool shallow, in village spires scarce over-topping a coronal of ancient elms, in the fragrance of the bee-laden limes, and in all those evening sights and sounds which tell of weary labour set free and wending to its home, which is an allegory that bears a thousand gentle interpretations. Others delight in the misty plain, in the forest solitude, in the distant horizon of the steppe, in the solemnity of the overclouded fen, in vast outspread scenes of moonlit sea, or in the silence of deserted cities and neglected ruins. These are the images which recur in their works again and again, as if those aspects of nature were the entire expressions of their minds. There are some whose imagery is all from the tangled lives of men, and the many-sided aspects of human actions, poets who have no still life within their souls, except when they reach the intensest depths of passions, which at such depths are gestureless and mute. They can clothe in marvellous beauty the objects whose daily commonness most dishonours them. The streets of the city become beautiful in their word-pictures, and the trampling of a multitude makes music in their verse, while the familiar thoughts and things of their own day impart a livingness to their souls, full of nerve and of significance, yet dignified and beautified by the excellence of their art.
There are others who like to live in echoing thunderstorms, among the rifted crags of the hollow mountains, who go far out of the sound of suffering humanity, and are dwellers with the eagles. The stun of the thundering avalanche, the black, mountainous, and shipless seas bursting on the ironbound coast, the cloud-pageantry of magnificently appalling storms, the sobbing and moaning of the winds in purple unsunny glens, the overwhelming silence of the central desert, the creaking of the huge cordillera as the earthquake stretches its stiff limbs upon the rack, the unwitnessed volcanoes that wave their red torches over the silent ghastly whiteness of the creatureless south pole, as if they were earth's fiery banners hung out in space as she races onward, the terrific regions of tumultuous mountain tops with misty breaks between the ridges where humble sequestered vales might be, shapeless waving forms and throbbing silences shadows in the gigantic gloom of unsunny caves, immense precipices that sleep for ever in shadows of their own even when the brightest sun is shining, — these are images, expressed or unexpressed, which overcast the works of such miuds, and are their genius, their inspiration, their native grandeur. It is in a world of these dread forms that their minds breathe most freely, or rather they breathe freely nowhere else but there. It is to these last that we may compare the souls, whose attraction in the spiritual life is to the Divine Perfections. Majestic deserts as they are to the bounded intelligence of man, yet some souls find better nurture there than in the verdant pastures lower down. The eagle chooses his dwelling with as faultless an instinct as the nightingale deep hidden in its bush, or the robin trilling its winter song upon the window-sill. "We must not call such souls ambitious. They have been lured thither by wiles of grace as gentle and as gradual, as those who have been drawn to the crib of Bethlehem. They are humble, and therefore they are not deluded. Is it not the men of the loftiest conceptions w^ho for the most part have the humblest minds 1
It is to such souls that this chapter is specially, though by no means exclusively, addressed.2 The deepest and most profitable devotion to the Incarnation is that which never loses sight for a single moment of our Blessed Lord's Divinity; and the richest as well as the safest devotion to the Divine Perfections is that which contemplates them in connection with the mysteries of the Incarnation. Our present object therefore is to furnish the materials for such devotion in especial connection with the mysteries of the Sacred Infancy, though for a while we must seem to be going away far from them.
There are almost as many points of view from which we may contemplate the Attributes of God, as there are individual souls in the Church. Yet there is a similarity of method even amongst these differences. Some fix their attentions and affection on the Attributes which assert all possible positive perfection, beauty, and goodness of the Most High; and it is plain that* the height of this devotion will depend very much upon the height of our own conceptions, although the practice of it will infallibly elevate and ennoble those conceptions in the end. Others on the contrary magnify God by their negations. In other words, they fix their loving and admiring look on those Attributes, which deny of Him all such imperfection, limitati(m, partial possession, and mixed sovereignty, as seem to us essential to everything else in the world but God. On the whole, there is more truth to be attained, a nearer approach to a worthy idea of God by this negative method than by the positive; for it leaves us what the positive runs the risk of not leaving us, that vague and indefinite magnificence which must cling to our idea of God when we have done our utmost to comprehend Him. There are others again who use these negations as if they were rather affirmations, that is, as affirming of God an excellence, not in the limited degree or imperfect kind in which possible creatures may possess it, but in a supereminent, supers ubstantial, supcressential manner, to use their own style of speaking. But this method will be found in reality to be nothing more than a union of the other two. At one time devotion will fix itself on God as He is visible in His w^orks. Some souls will remain all their lives long chiefly conversant with those Attributes which shine forth most manifestly in the mysteries of Creation and Redemption; and other souls will remain for weeks, months, or even years in this contemplation. There are some again whose love allures them rather to lose themselves in the glad thoughts of that inward life which God is leading, and ever has been leading, in His own Blessed and sufficient Self. To some the Divine Attributes lie always in the light of the Most Holy Trinity, and they can read God best by the splendour cast upon Him by the Eternal Generation of the Son or the Unbeginning Procession of the Spirit. To others again the treasures of the Godhead are unlocked by a series of shocks or sweet surprises, as is the case when we allow the mystery of the Incarnation to unfold for us the hidden recesses^bf the Godhead.
Thus the littleness of the Babe of Bethlehem, touched in our hearts by the faith in His Divinity, sends us by a kind of impulse far into the understanding of His infinity. The shame of Calvary lets us deeper down into His essential glory, than we should else have had the momentum to penetrate; for the abysses of God are waters in which it is hard for nature to sink. Of itself it only floats like driftwood on the surface. The thirst and fatigue of Jesus at the well of Jacob throw a light around Him as Creator, which has a startling clearness, and compels an instantaneous worship of speechless tears. This is the characteristic of devotion to the Divine Perfections through the Incarnation, that it impels us by these shocks deeper into the hiding-places of the Immense Majesty than we should otherwise have been able to go. It is then of this last sort of devotion to the
Attributes of God that we shall have chiefly to speak in this Chapter. We must however bear in mind that the more excellent our devotion to these Attributes becomes, also the more vague, indefinite, obscure and shadowy becomes our view of God's sublimity.
It is not with this devotion as with some others. Here we always purchase clearness at the expense of height and depth and breadth. We contract the dimensions of God and diminish Him, nay not seldom we must also reverse His image, in order to see Him clearly. Hence therefore this devotion, to become a devotion of predilection, implies in the soul abundant gifts of faith and of tranquillity, two graces so congenial that they seldom lie far apart. We must have a great gift of faith, because then we feel the less painfully poor nature's hungry gnawings to see and to understand. We must also possess tranquillity of spirit, dove-like brooding souls, else the vast outspread magnificence will only wink before us like lightning, showing nothing when it lightens, but only dazzling us with its after-darknesses. We shall discern nothing in it. We shall never accustom ourselves to it as a light to read by. We shall see it double, or divided, or restless, or coloured, by straining at it unquietly.
A soul truly versed in this devotion to the Divine Perfections is one who has learned to see in divine darkness, in a holy night, better than in terrestrial day, and to whom the indefinite has become more defined than the definite. Distance is necessary to vision. A man, whose spiritual life is in this glorious devotion, is one who, like many men physically, sees things far ofi" better than things which are near, and who has removed God further off from him by the magnificence of his conceptions of Ilim, rather than brought Him nearer by the familiarity of His contemplation, and who now sees Him better in the imweusity of that distance, and in the confusion of that light, in which to unpractised eyes He is simply invisible altogether. He, who looks with quiet patience into any unoccupied spot of blue in the midnight heavens, will soon people it for himself with stars. So are they who look for God.
Now it is a characteristic of devotion to the Divine Perfections through the Incarnation, that the Incarnation supplies us with a number of legitimate and not delusive images, and even with measures of distance, which as it were bring the infinite within our compass by breaking it up into many infinities. Yet it is at the same time characteristic of such a devotion, that these images and measures of distance, being themselves divine things, do not in any way impair that vagueness, indefiniteness, and obscurity, which are absolutely essential to true ideas about God. This is another of its recommendations. We have seen already how by its shocks and surprises it enables us to penetrate further into each of the Divine Attributes, than we should otherwise have done. We now see also that it brings this sublime devotion to God's Perfections within the reach of many more souls, than could otherwise have practised it, inasmuch as they could not have existed without the nutriment of images, or without the resting-places of those measures of distance, which the union of our Lord's Human Nature with His Divine supplies to us in every mystery, and back to which we can always retreat without in reality losing any ground we may have gained. The entire world of devotion to the Incarnation has perhaps never yet been explored. Almost every age of the Church develops some new treasures in it, discovers gold in unsuspected places, and even widens the horizon so as to enlarge the view. Perhaps the least of divine mysteries must of necessity be unfathomable, simply because it is divine. This much at any rate may be said, that no one has gained even a comparative perfection in his devotion to the Incarnation, who has not applied it to the purposes of discovery in God, of observations on His Attributes, of anticipations of that Blissful Vision in which eternal life consists.
But, while out of the seven methods * of devotion to the Divine Attributes, enumerated above, we cou})le the last with the Incarnation in a special manner, we must not suppose that the other six are in reality independent of that life-giving and God-revealing mystery, or can be detached from it. All that can be said is that it is less prominent in them. Let us then begin by occupying ourselves with a method of using all these six methods either separately or collectively, which will be found exceedingly congenial to the mystery of the Incarnation, and, if original in form, guilty, we may hope, of no other originality. It is this. God is especially Life. The Life of God is His blessedness. It is Himself. To have life in Himself is the unshared prerogative of God. The Son drew it eternally from the Father's fountain. The Holy Ghost rejoiced in the eternal possession of it from the one fountain of the father and the Son. Not 80 much as a shadow of this excellence rests upon any created thing or person. It is a height in God too high to cast any shade over creation which lies in its littleness close under His feet. From the more or less unconscious feeling of this characteristic of Life in God's incommunicable grandeur it has come to pass, that it is not an uncommon form for devotion to the Incarnation to adopt,3 that of throwing itself upon the various lives which oui Lord is supposed to have lived.
When we cast the mysteries of the Incarnation together into great groups and masses, we make His Life threefold, Joyful, Suffering, and Glorious. The most complete form is that which distinguishes eight lives in Him, His Unborn Life, Infant Life, Hidden Life, Public Life, Suffering Life, Risen Life, Ascended Life, and Sacramental Life. Into these moulds devotion to the Incarnation pours itself, and comes out in forms and shapes of the most surpassing beauty. Some of us get so used to these life-moulds, that we transfer them to our devotion to the Attributes of God, and, besides their facility from habit, we find many unexpected conveniences and congruities in them of exceeding value, whilst they not only help to keep the Incarnation continually before us, but lead us to find our actual devotion to the Divine Perfections in the depths of the Incarnation, thus landing us, though starting from different points, at the seventh method of devotion to the Divine Attributes of which we have already spoken. It is difficult to make this clear to any one who has not practised it, while to one who has, it has already made itself so plain that it does not need an explanation.
There are two peculiar advantages of this method of devotion to the Perfections of God. The first is, that it does not confine us in any single contemplation to the use of only one of the seven methods enumerated above. We can use them aU separately or collectively. We may pass from one to the other with the rapidity of thought, playing upon them as musicians play upon the keys, or we may glance at them in their unity and completeness. We may weave, unweave, interweave, our thoughts of them as we please, at once gaining variety for our contemplation without any damage to its simplicity, and also emancipating ourselves from the trammels of too much formality and legislation, which are less applicable to this devotion than to any other, and which most men have already outlived when they have reached this stage in the cycle of prayer, outlived at least so far as the amount of it is concerned which once was needful, and so far as the minute subjection to it is concerned, which, at the outset of prayer, is often the best part of the prayer itself as well as of the systematic legislation.
The other advantage is that its forms singularly fall in with and minister to correct theology, in a manner which turns out to be of no slight consequence as we advance in devotion to the Divine Attributes. We look at God as living so many different lives, though there is neither time, space, succession, or mutation in Him. When we are thinking of one of His lives, or, to describe the process more accurately, gazing at it, we put aside altogether the other countless lives which He is at that eternally present moment contemporaneously living. It is not that we forget them; for they are always lying half consciously in the back- ground, and influencing us by keeping us indefinite, which is what we require. But we purposely put them aside, and look at that life of God as if it was His whole life, that is, as if it were God Himself. Thus by degrees we get well into ourselves as our standing idea of God that He is what He is, that He is the infinite things which He is, that His Perfections are not perfections of His, but are Himself. To say of God that "He has" is to be thinking of creation and outward things: to say of God that " He is " is to be thinking of Himself. Thus the Simplicity of God comes to be the foundation of all our devotions to His Attributes from the beginning, and not merely the ultimate idea reached, and often uneasily as well as imperfectly reached, after many trials and failures, imperfectly, that is, even with reference to our capabilities of reaching so sovereign an idea.
When we are contemplating our Blessed Lord's Public Life, we do not advert to His Infant Life. The one idea would interfere with the other, unless we were purposely passing from one to the other in order to bring out contrasts or similitudes. When we are with Him on Calvary, we know that Easter lies in front of us ready to dawn, but we shut ourselves up purposely lest some streak of that dawn should surprise us, and we gaze upon our Lord in His depths of agony, as if they were His whole mission, as if He had always been there and always would be there, as if all His mysteries were states and permanences, which in a very high sense they are. Our prayer would be speculation or controversy, rather than meditation, if we dealt otherwise with it. So do we deal with these lives of God, which we put before ourselves as the objects of our contemplation. Moreover that which lies at the bottom of all the eight lives of Jesus, not only giving them their unity, but also the vitality, significance, and tenderness by which they elicit and exercise our devotion, is our faith in His Divinity, which is always working indistinctly in the mysteries of the Incarnation, even when we perceive it least, or are even wilfully prescinding from it. His Divinity, the Divinity of the Word, occupies the •ame position with regard to all these eight various lives, which the Simplicity of the Divine Nature occupies with regard to the perhaps eighteen lives in which our prayer may be used to look at God. So that, from the point of view of this peculiar method, here advocated, the analogies between the devotion to the Divine Attributes and the devotion to the Incarnation are most singular and most important.
Finally, we connect these lives of God with the Incarnation in a most direct and obvious manner, by which also we gain for all the first six methods of devotion to the Attributes what seemed at first sitrht the peculiar privilege of the seventh, namely, those sweet shocks of surprise which carry us so deeply into God. In other words, we reduce our first six methods into our seventh, without deducting from any one of them that which is most special and characteristic about themselves. For when we have contemplated these lives of God, or any number of them, we fall back in a sort of repose of spirit upon the Babe in His manger, or the Carpenter- Boy at Nazareth, or the Man upon the Cross, and behold Him at that moment awfully and worshipfully living all those lives in the fleshly recesses of a Sacred Human Heart, or in another way, the Sacred Human Heart living them in God.
When a finite mind occupies itself upon an object, which is vast and simply infinite, as God is, its observations will almost present the appearance of its having itself created the object in the contemplation of which it has been engaged. The variety of men's views of God will equal the variety of minds which take views of Him at all. We seem to make our own God, because we see but a part of Him. The character of our own mind imprints itself so strongly on our conceptions of Him, that it really looks as if we had but projected Him from our own thoughts, and then called Him God. Everything is true of God which may be honourably said of Him. Apparent contradictories will be found true of one who is infinite. But in truth all this appearance of unreality thrown over our conceptions of God is but the tribute of our ignorance and blindness to His unimaginable infinity. Thus the life of God will divide itself differently to difi'erent minds. Things in God, which appear to one mind to lie apart from each other, to another mind will seem identical All that is absolutely necessary is that all divisions, whatever they may be, should be understood to be faulty divisions. If they were not acknowledgedly such, they would lead to falsehood and not to truth. They must all contain each other, repeat each other, and be at once complete and incomplete, each of them in itsell We must be aware that this is the case throughout, just as much as we must be aware of our Lord's Divinity while we are musing on the mysteries of His Humanity. God stands so full in His own light, that, when we look at Him in front, He is invisible. We must throw His own light upon Himself by changing our position, first here and then there. He does not move. He is in omnipresent repose for ever. But we catch glimpses of Him by the aid of our own mutabilities.
Not one of these lights is true, not one of them false. For practical purposes they are all true. They only become false, when they claim to be an adequate illumination of God. Some of these lights we gain by looking at God as an external immensity, which is the loosest and least accurate view of Him there is, yet the one commonest to most minds. Others, and of deeper import, we obtain by looking at God as enclosing us, as a tree sometimes encloses a stone, as if we were within God, as we might be inside a temple, or inside the ocean, yet uncommingled with it. Then we do not so much look at Him as an external immensity. We are in contact with Him. We only stand straight, because we are built up in Him, walled up on all sides against our own tendency to struggle and melt back into our original nothingness. This is more nearly our true position than the other. We are all built up in God, and can only act towards each other through Him and in Him. This is a terrifying view of life to those who do not love. Pantheists break down the partitions, and make us dissolve into the divine life, so that we ourselves are part of God, and, if a part of Him, then, God being God, in some sense the whole of Him. This is but the poetic form of atheism. But our best and deepest lights, the fewest in number because the observations are so hard to take, are gained from our looking at God as inside ourselves, with our littleness compassing His in.
finity, so that we are all likenesses of Mary during the nine months she carried Jesus in her bosom. These lights are very rare, but they are so much nearer the truth that they are worth almost any number of the rest
Venturing then to look at God's eternity, as we look at our Lord's Three-and-Thirty Years, it seems as if we might view Him leading eighteen different lives, different lives which are yet but one adorable life, that has neither past nor future, but an eternal present, — neither movement nor inequality, but an everlasting equable tranquillity. Much worship comes out of few thoughts, where God is concerned. His magnificence in our conceptions is not in the richness of detail, but in the vastness of solitary grandeurs set in immense spaces, like the constellations of the southern seas. Thus we may adore His secret life out of sight of all His creatures, hidden from the first, hidden now, for ever hidden. We may worship His secret life as it is disclosed to those who see the Vision in heaven, the object of our own yearnings and perpetual patient discontent with self. We may worship, it is the one business of our lives. His secret life as far as it is shown to faith. We may contemplate with perplexed wonder the life of God as it is affected both by the existence of His creatures, and their worship.
He has a life in the material world, a life in the moral world, a life in the intellectual world, a life in the spiritual world of grace, a life in the world of glory. God has also a public life in external government, which is his life as king. He has a life in punishing; for his vindictive justice is one of His incessant grandeurs. He has a life in rewarding, in which He manifests His inner treasures by the copious outpouring of them upon His creatures He has a different life in each of His different creations. He has a life in the fortunes of humanity, considering our whole race as one, BLd He has another life in each individual soul of man.
He has a life which is imitable, and which is disclosed to us in order to be imitated, and a life which is visible but perplexing to our finite views, and so not imitable, and finally an unimaginable life. These are the lives of God, with which our prayer may reverently and fruitfully employ itself. We know that He has many more lives than these, and that many more will strike other minds. We know that He is living all these lives at once, and that He cannot live any of them separately. We know that He is complete in each one of them, and self-suflScient, and infinitely adorable. We know that of Him in each of these lives we may predicate all conceivable positive perfection, and deny of Him all conceivable possible infirmity. We know also that the beautiful transitory darkness, which He sometimes deigns to throw over our breathless souls, is a better and a nearer thing to Him than all these lights of ours, better than words, for it is simply indescribable, — nearer than thought, for thought dies in worship then. But when he withholds that gift, which we must not ask, when He does not come down Himself, and proclaim silence in our souls, and press us to Him in the dark, then is it by these other, or like modes, of conceiving of our ever-blessed Maker and Father, that He Himself mercifully invites, nay even lovingly provokes, the daring littleness of our prayer to compete with His magnificence.
There are three imaginary epochs in all the lives of God, according to the view which the creatures of any of His creations take of Him, There is the eternity before creation at alL There is the time which is the duration of our own particular creation. There is the subsequent eternity, which, whether occupied with other creations or not, is only occupied with us as being our home attained and our beatitude fulfilled. From our point of view all these epochs have strongly marked characteristics of their own. The eternity before creation is distinguished by the blissful self-companioned solitude of the Most Holy Trinity. The act of Creation, and its prolonged continuity in the Preservation of creatures, appear to confer upon God Attributes, which He could not have had except as Creator, or at least to bring into action beautiful depths of His Nature, which, so in our ignorance it seems to us, could have had no functions in His own inward Life of Three Persons. The eternity after the Doom, whether occupied with fresh creations or not, to us represents God as joyously reposing upon the immense family of glorified creatures whom He has introduced into His own home. Now some of the lives of God, which we contemplate in our prayer, belong to one or other of these epochs, while others belong to two of them at once, and others abide unchanged during all the three. But we take no count of this in our contemplations. It is essential to us that each life of God should seem His whole life while we are gazing upon it. We are not musing on the history of God, but on God. We must have Him therefore before us as the eternally and immutably present God There are other times when we may venture to look at God's eternity, as if it were a successive biography; and deep thoughts of adoration will flow in upon us as we so regard it. But it does not belong to that peculiar method of devotion to the Divine Attributes, with which we are now concerned.
When we contemplate the secret life of God, which is out of sight, — space, which to our conceptions at least is practically boundless, for what will that thing be like, which confines upon us, yet lies outside its boundary? — space, although populous with possible creations, dwindles to a point, becomes too insignificant to be taken into account, and does not affect the life of God. His own life as God \B something vaster than His occupation as Creator, and ii is upon that invisible life that we fix our eyes, and worship. There is a joy so limitless that it fills the infinite nature of the Three Divine Persons, which in no way flows from creatures, nor is it in any degree influenced by them. In this indescribable, self-sufficing beatitude resides this secret life of God, which He is living at each point of space, in each point of time, and far away beyond all space, and unbeginningly and unendingly before and after all time. We gaze upon it, and see nothing, and are satisfied. The very shapeless thought of it is happiness to our love. We have no figures to express it by, no analogies by which we can bring it home to ourselves, no comparisons the use of which would not seem to us an irreverent license of the imagination. We know that such an adorable life exists, and the mere knowledge bathes our souls in joy. We are out upon it ourselves, and it is a deep sea, without features, landmarks, or constellations. There is no compass to point, to vary, or to dip; for it is itself, — that deep, horizonless, glad ocean, it is itself the ever-present home of the Eternal
Then again the boundless waters of that sea suddenly of themselves change the scene. They come nigh to a loving coast, studded beautifully with the spirits of angels and the souls of men, who gaze in silent or vocal rapture upon that many-featured deep, which rolls without resonance before them. One while it is a halcyon calm, such a calm as creatures do not know, and its peacefulness tingles through their spirits. There is a brooding beauty over the waves which would destroy life by the vehement ecstasy which it produces, were not the immortality of the fortunate elect immensely fortified by God Himself. Then again come storms of such exceeding grandeur as to turn their whole capacious lives of glory into pure music, loud, and swelling, jind glorious, sounding along the eternal shore. There are mornings there, dawning upon new sights seen far off in
God, like flashing things coming into view from inexhaustible eternities which lie far onward still, and out of which fresh splendours may be travelling towards the Blessed perpetually.4 There are noons also, hushed, deep, entrantv ing, which appear to make visible, or sensible, or intelligible, the stationariness of eternity. Then come evenings of such restful loveliness, that the spirit is drowned in the contentedness of their uncreated beauty, and loses itself in a trance of unutterable satisfaction on the bosom of God. It is these evenings which make eternity a home. There is no night there, but there is the gorgeous spirit of nocturnal beauty, at once brightly, softly, starrily shading the depths of the Incomprehensible, and by shading them enabling the eye to see far down into their glancing and mysterious caverns. But there is no succession of these visions. All are at once. One does not paint out the other. The storms do not break up the calms, nor the calms assuage the storms. It is dawn, and noon, and evening-light always on that exulting sea. It is the life of God disclosed in abiding vision to the loyal and the pure.
There is, again, the secret life of God as it is shown to faith. It is no mere boundless presence to which we strain our imaginations, no mere exquisitely piercing essence which we vainly endeavour by the eloquent exaggerations of language to express. God bids faith unveil no little of His hidden life even to us distracted wanderers amidst the excessive occupations and uncongenial weariness of life. One while as the exulting Trinity of Persons, another while as the infinitely blissful Unity of Essence, God manifests Himself to us with immutable variety. Ever before us we behold the Unbegotten Father, out of whose pacific fountains all Godhead is rapturously flowing; evermore magnifying and adorning His own primacy by the coequality of the Spirit and the Son; evermore seated on His awful throne with a peace and a stability which it almost oppresses created spirit to contemplate; lone yet not alone, in a peculiar grandeur which is the more solitary because it is equally and rightfully shared with His Word and with His Love; a Person to whose supremacy there is no corresponding subordination; hidden in the blaze of the incomprehensible love wherewith the Spirit and the Son environ Him; the home of the Divinity where no mission reaches; the Person furthest in Name from creatures, yet with the most creaturelike relations of the Three; a Father in whom all sweet fatherhoods have been eternally combined, out of whom comes the indulgence of all justice, and the omnipotence of all forbearance; unspeakably compassionate yet unspeakably immutable, infinitely tender yet infinitely imperturbable; a Person so inaccessible and yet so incredibly familiar that it is hard to think of Him without tears of love. Ever before us we behold the Eternally Begotten Son, in His unbeginning beginnings, in His never-ending ends, issuing forth from the Father in blinding abysses of light; glowing from out the ineffably refulgent sanctuaries of uncreated life; always being begotten, always the very actual, instantaneous, coequal, coeternal image of the mighty Father, and whose Generation is a glory and a loveliness enough of its own self to fascinate numberless creations with its beauty and its splendour, and to overwhelm them in an intolerable excess of unending jubilation. Ever before us we behold the Eternally Proceeding Spirit, in His Procession at once beginning and yet being perfect for evermore; flashing before us like a sea of light from out the blazing ocean of the Father and the Son, in an unspeakable orderly tumult of uncreated gladness; jubilant exceedingly with speechless cries and silent music and all the unvocal clangour of unutterable triumph, whose beauty is as that of fire, with banners flying and golden chariots mutely rolling along its everiasting march, as if the vast Godhead were blissfully unfolding itself in its own unimaginable sunshine. Yet ever before us also we behold, likest of all things to the Vision of the Blest, the fixed, immutable, simple, self-sufficient, featureless Unity of Essence, upon whose formless lineaments is written unchangeable, unbeginning, unfinishing repose; one point of indefinite whiteness; a splendour which stirs not and does not flash; far- withdrawn yet everywhere, all-embracing yet separate as a sanctuary, whose adorable monotony, seen at one glance, yet brooking, unmoved and unscintillating, the searching gaze of all creations, is of its own sole Self light, and nourishment, and rest, and jubilee, and immortality to the believing souL
There is the life of God, again, as it is aff'ected by the existence of His creatures, and their worship. How could He be just, if He had no subjects to whom out of the plenitude of His power He had made concessions and given rights, or with whom in the condescensions of His familiarity He had made covenants and had entered into engagements 1 How could the Father be merciful to the Son, or the Father and the Son to the Holy Ghost? How can there be compassion for the Co-equal 1 Yet how sweetly God triumphs in His mercy, as if, dare we say it 1 He were proud of that most gorgeous Attribute! But in some sense is it not to us He owes the possession of this Attribute, over which He broods with such complacency t Oh in how many ways, ways we should never have dreamed of had He not revealed them, ways still unrevealed and so undreamed-of still, does He allow creatures to enter into His deep tranquil life, and as it were to make currents on its surface! What an endless field of contemplation there is here 1 We may not roam in its wide pastures now, or we shall lose sight of Bethlehem: but how adorable the while is that dread immutability, into which such changes are ever flowing, and ceasing to be changes when it has silently engulphed them 1
What are all sciences but sparkles of the life God leads in the world of nature and of matter? Every phenomenon is a transparency in the many-coloured mantle in which He has arrayed His immensity. Every law is but a fraction of His will, and therefore a partial revelation of Himself. Yet the sciences are many, and each science has many kingdoms, and each of those kingdoms many provinces, and each province its subdivisions and departments; and the mightiest intellect, in the activities of a long life, is unequal to the exhaustion of one of these departments Discovery advances with gigantic strides, and at each step rather destroys all limits to our conjectures of our ignorance, than widens the horizon of our knowledge; while at each step it is always adding to the bulk of those beautiful revelations of God, which are the treasures as well as the records of the sciences. The symmetry of each whole science is another kind of divine revelation, and the connection of the sciences another, and the unity of all collective sciences yet another and more magnificent. God has a life in the wayward uniformities of each wild-flower in the fields, in the inexplicable instinct of each variety of animal and insect, in the quivering orbits of rolling worlds, in the stately stepping of the clouds which march to the music of the upper winds, in every sight and sound and fragrance and taste of nature. AU comes, not merely came at the first but comes now, for ever comes out of the mind of God, and is a disclosure to us of His life, holding undisclosed in every atom more mysteries of that life than the countless ones which it discloses.
The material world is as when we look through the pellucid sea, and behold the many- coloured pebbles, catching the sunlight and glinting at the bottom, and the fairylike gardens of the ocean flora, and the radiant fauna feeding, or basking, or making beautiful war amidst those submarine groves and rosy shades, and the gauze-like medusae floating, like the bells out of which the musical sea-murmur is ever ringing as the restless water swings. But the moral world, the world of wills and crimes and virtues, is as when the sun is overcast, and the blue sky is an inky grey, and the rude wind ruffles the waves, and the subaqueous revelation is withdrawn. Yet even there too is an order, and a legitimate recurrence of phenomena, and a beautiful harmony of cycles, and an imposing majesty of law, all full of revelations of that stormy life of unattainted peace which God lives in the wills of men, a life sometimes awfully encrusted with human crime and worthlessness, like the life of unknown brightness which the diamond leads in its unviolated mine. This too is a life of God which we often ponder; and the past lives of every one of us must have written volumes of it in our thoughts, with hardly one sentence in them all which would not feed a hundred controversies, but which for us have done something better in feeding our devotion.
From the right point of view what is the whole of the intellectual world but one enormous realm of inspiration, a singular gifted creation of power and beauty, of eloquence and song, with the life of God deep hidden in its thought-mines, nay with millions of divine lives flung off in the shining spray of its cataracts of glorious words? In each felicity of the human understanding there is a life of God, in the glow of each discovery a thrill of His eternal jubilee. The philosopher's chains of cogent reasoning, the historian's just and faithful eye, and the benignity of his appreciation, the creations of the poet with his glory-nurtured mind and grandeur- haunted imagination, the articulate speaking of the artist's pencil, the chisel of the sculptor filling the dead marble with looks and voices which speak an intelligible eloquence for ages, an eloquence whose silence all nations listen to and understand, the almost creative breath of the Christian statesman's sympathetic science, who is all artists in himself, and whose divine occupation reflects a sort of divinity on his mind, the fanciful fabrics of fiction-writers that hang for a few moments across the sky like the gay arches of the rainbow, or like the transient prismatic belts round the waists of the fluent waterfalls, the new life which the fruitful formality of diligent induction is everywhere calling up, making the old new, and the barren to be the mother of many children,— what are all these but inspirations, pieces of divine life which lose their bloom in our hot hands, plastic things from heaven taking endless shapes, yet never altogether losing the ancestral look and air of their divinity t Wild world of intellect! even amidst its life of riotous beauty and degenerating truth God lives a life, solemn, holy, calm, and nigher to the surface than His life mostly lies.
In the world of grace the pulses of the divine life are almost visible. Each actual grace is an impulse of the divine will, proceeding out of the depths of an illimitable mercy, an exquisite justice, and an infinite intelligence: and who shall number each day's actual graces on the earth 1 Each additional degree of sanctifying grace is a still more wondrous mystery; for it is a distinct communication of the divine nature. Yet the drops of a rain-shower, which covered a square league, would scarce equal the number of these additions of grace which souls on earth receive in the course of one solar day. The extraordinary graces of the saints are all different revelations of God. Each saint is a gospel of himself, notably different from all other living gospels, yet harmonising almost to miracle with them all Each conversion, and there are thousands daily, is a divine work of art, standing by itself, each in its own way being a heavenly masterpiece. Every Christian deathbed is a world, a complete world, of graces, interferences, compensations, lights, struggles, victories, supernatural gestures, and the action of grand spiritual laws. Each deathbed, explained to us as God could explain it, would be in itself an entire science of God, a summa of the most delicate theology. The varieties of grace in the individual soul are so many infinities of the one infinite life of God. The world of grace is truly the theatre of His visible miracles. God is marvellous, says Scripture, in His saints.
In the world of glory, too, there is another life of God, There is one life of Him as He is seen in the Vision, and to that we have already alluded. But there is another life of Him as He lives in the glory and blessedness of those who are admitted to gaze upon that Vision. The varieties of grace seem to come the nearest of all created things we know of to being strictly innumerable. But we may well believe that the varieties of glory, which we hardly know at all, far outnumber those of grace. If God has a life in each wild-flower, what a beautiful immortal life must He not have in each discriminating shade of glory! Look over that huge empire of the angelic legions, and over the multitude of human souls, which the Holy Ghost Himself calls countless; sum up the variety of their powers and the serene capacity of their faculties and their almost fathomless affections, all filled full to overflowing with indescribable beatitude; and what a life of God, what a manifold tranquillity and work of all His blissful Attributes are there! That vast world is a lake which images the mountains of the Beatific Vision which surround it, and by imaging it, changes it, and makes it as it were a second created Beatific Vision, another life of the blessed God.
God has a life also in His government. Upon what strange principles, as we count them, does His Providence
B frequently proceed! His justice is not as our justice, noi His kindness as our kindness. He has other measures. Sometimes how swift His justice is, sometimes how slow; sometimes how proportionate His retributions look, and sometimes how disproportionate they seem! How swiftly He flies to His end, and then another while by what circuitous routes and stealthy feet as if they were shod with moss does He circumvent His end! Why does He claim here, and then concede there? What must the divine logic be like, when to finite apprehensions it is so often necessitated to look illogical? How He drives His creatures like sheep, and again how He caresses them, as if He were their nurse! He makes Himself poor that He may have the pleasure of begging from them, and then opens heaven and rains down incredible happiness upon them. On this side there is punishment almost preceding the ofience, and on the other a tortoise-footed vengeance pacing after a guilty nation for centuries and purposely failing to come up with it There are few things out of heaven, which teach us so much of God as His style of government.
His life in punishment is wide enough to be a life of itself, apart from the other functions of His government; and the same also may be said of His life in rewarding. In both He is an unknown God, whom we never come to know, and yet practically always know. Both in punishing and rewarding He always takes us by surprise, because His processes are always unexpected. What act of God is more like a law of natural development, than that which consigns the finally impenitent soul to its hopeless doom? Yet can we believe that ever soul yet has heard that sentence at His judgment-seat, but it has been horribly taken by surprise? Must it not also require a special concurrence of Omnipotence to hinder the glad soul from breaking, and so spilling its immortal life, during the first moment which follows the judicial decree of its everlasting bliss 1 There is science enough to he inferred from hell, to construct a very faithful and adorable image of God. As He rewards so He punishes, yet with differences. Aa He punishes, so He rewards, yet with differences also. The punishments of purgatory, are th«y not a Bible in themselves 1 The punishments of earth! if we think of them, what are our thoughts but either adoration or unbelief?
How differently God has dealt with His creation of men, from what He did with His creation of angels; yet the two were one family of Jesus! So God may have, may have them now or may have them in time to come, millions of creations; and it is plain that His life in every one of them will be different. As these differences of creations, though not beyond the possibility of being conceived, are in fact beyond our conceptions, so also must the differences be of those mysterious, half-hidden and half-disclosed, lives which God may lead in them.
Again, it is manifest that humanity, the whole human race of all times and climes, is a unit, and has a progressive history and a very significant destiny of its own, apart from the separate fortunes of the individuals who compose it, the living atoms so dear to God as we each of us know ourselves to be. IS^ow God must have some life of glory in this humanity as a whole. For heaven transfers to itself none of the history of earth, but only earth's biographies. Empires cast no shadow over the population of the courts above, neither do nationalities erect partitions there. The discoveries of the scientific few are obliterated there by the instantaneous superior intuition of the baptized child. The mightiest revolutions of earth, the grand streams of its ethnography, the fertile consequences of its physical geography, the stupendous developments of its civilisation
36o THE INFANT GOD.
the immense catastrophes of its historical ruins, are no further represented in heaven than as they told for or against the salvation of this or that particular soul, who now, because of them or in spite of them, is safely housed in its Father's home.
Yet humanity has its significance, as a unit, and finds it in some mysterious life of most hidden glory which God lives beneath its vicissitudes and its destiny. The life of God in the individual soul is still more intimate and intelligible. Who does not know how true this is? The moment our past becomes plain to us, we see that it has been full of God. There is nothing of which we are more sure than that we have never been left to ourselves, never left to live this life of ours alone. In everything we have been two, not one. Hence it is that there is no such thing as unhappiness in life, except when through a mistake we feel or fancy ourselves alone. Moreover, what a life of wonders our life has been, such a scriptural thing, when we come to consider it, so like the lives of the patriarchs of old, God with us and we not afraid, the commonest events being under another aspect divine interpositions, all our sorrows judgments, all our joys the comings of angels, as if each of us were Isaac or Jacob, Samuel or David! When our outward life has all been uneventful smoothness, our inward life has often been a romance of almost thrilling interest, full of situations too bold for a dramatist's invention. Surely God cannot have been to others as He has been to us; they cannot have had such boyhoods, such minute, secret buildings up of mind and soul; we have a feeling that about our own lives there has all along been a marked purpose, a divine specialty. Yet in truth how many millions of such tender and equally special biographies is the most dear and blessed God living in men's souls throughout all years and all generations! We are not singular among men; it is God's love which is singula! in each of us.
God also lives a visible life which is imitable, and which is intended to be imitated. We cannot conceive of any creation which should not, even unconsciously, copy its Creator. All created life must in its measure imitate the Uncreated Life out of which it sprung. The very habits of animals, and the blind evolutions of matter, are in some sense imitations of God. The fern, that is for ever trembling in the breath of the waterfall, in its growing follows some pattern in the mind of God, Much more then is it so in the moral world. The character of God is the one foundation of all morality. The principles of morality are immutable, because He is immutable, the beauty of whose holiness they faithfully though faintly represent. God is our model. The Incarnation even has not given us another standard. It has but made visible, with an application to creatures, the ways and fashions, the characteristics and propensities, if we may venture on such terms, of the Invisible God. To watch God, and do as He does, startling as it sounds, is the rule of holiness. We are to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, not as perfect as He is, but perfect with the same kind of perfection.
But God has also another life, which is visible, but not imitable. We feel, that, while He is our rule in some things, in others He is simply the object of our timid worship. This life of His is not merely admirable, as being above us, but it is perplexing, as being apparently contrary to His own character. Eternal punishment is no model for unforgivingness. The adorable look of waywardness, which there is in God sometimes, is one of His inscrutable terrors, before which we cower and weep silent tears; it is not a justification for any unequability of ours. The courtesy of a sovereign is a difi'erent thing from that of a suliject. The immensity of
God's sovereignty is visible upon His lineaments in the most familiar condescensions of His love. Even His forgiveness is sometimes rough, because of the sublimity of His justice.
Then, last of all, there is a life of God which is simply unimaginable, and this brings us back almost to the first life of Him we mentioned, His secret life out of sight. It would be natural, in speaking of God, to end where we began. But this unimaginable life is something more than hidden. It is the infinite residue of all that is unknown about God. It is the life in which His nameless Attributes, those unrevealed perfections of which theology can take no cognizance, come into play. It is all the possible life of God, beyond what is known, beyond what is conjectured, beyond what is probable. It is the divine life in its deepest depths, self-poised, self-centered, self-glorifying, unrevealable to any possible creature, uncomprehended even by the Human Soul of the Incarnate Word. We can make no picture of it to ourselves, because it is based on no ideas. If we think of it a mist falls on us through which loom forms without outlines, proportions without shape, splendours without colour. Only to know that there is such a life as that, is a new kneeling-place for our worship, a new home for the soul. As we see on earth by the light of the unrisen day, so our souls see fresh worship, fresh fear, fresh love, in the light of this dawn which is not only now unbroken, but which shall never break at all on any possible created mountain-top.
We have but glanced at these various lives of God, in order to illustrate the kind of materials which they furnish for contemplation. The division of them is perfectly arbitrary. They might be divided differently, and yet with equal truth; or they might be multiplied almost indefinitely. We find in all of them the Attributes of God under somewhat varying aspects; so that if our devotion is resting at the time on any one particular Attribute rather than the othersi we may fix our gaze upon it as it is manifested in any of these lives. Above all we must discern in every one of them an undistracted love of ourselves, a love not averted, suspended, weakened, or less minute for one moment, but as if it were the exclusive and full occupation which engrosses the vast being of God. In certain wide perplexing fields of view it occasionally seems to us as if some of the many threads of government might be falling out of God's hand, or as if some pressing business of the world might have to wait until other more pressing business had been attended to; and even the appearance of this, for all we know it tc be impossible, will make us tremble. Nay, we sometimes unsuspectingly act on what we intellectually know to be an unworthy thought of God.
It is therefore of great importance to us, unless when we are under strong impulses in prayer, to remember God's remembrance of ourselves; for whatever excites our confidence in Him, at the same time quickens our own sense of responsibility towards Him. Lastly, we may apply all these lives to any of the mysteries of the Incarnation, and especially, because of the obvious contrasts they furnish, to the mysteries of the Sacred Infancy. In whatever situation the gospel narrative, the necessity of the case, or our own tender imagination, may place the Holy Cliild — at Bethlehem, in Egypt, or at Nazareth, He was at that moment leading all these lives. Not one of them was obscured in Him for an instant. There was not one of them which He was not always embracing with the fulness of divine self-consciousness. Moreover, the affinity between some of these lives and some of those mysteries will give rise to many most touching meditations, which will show us new truths, or old truths in a new light, and at the same time inflame our hearts with new love and therefore with more abounding reverence.
But in all devotions to the Incarnation it is necesiiary, together with our love and worship of our Blessed Lord's Divinity, to join also a love and worship of His Peison. It is not enough to remember that He is God. We must remember also that He is the "Word, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. The Babe of Bethlehem in His Mother's lap is living all those divine lives as God, yet not as the Unbegotten Father or the Proceeding Spirit, but as the Eternally-begotten Son. It is the Word, who is incarnate, because there is a fittingness in Him for such a mystery. It is the Second Person who is a Babe at Bethlehem, and to whom therefore the Father and the Holy Ghost stand now in new and peculiar relations. It is the Second Person Incarnate who is one of the earthly Trinity, and therefore gives the character of the Father and the Holy Ghost to be borne by Joseph and Mary. It is the eternally, invisibly, silently spoken Word of the Father, who is now in time visibly and audibly outspoken to men. It is by One Person of the Three, rather than by the other Two, that creation is brought into such transcendent union with its Creator. The particularities, which theology instructs us to ascribe to the Son, are deeply marked upon the Incarnation. By virtue of them the Incarnation of the Son is a different mystery from what the Incarnation of the Father or the Holy Spirit would have been.
It would not perhaps be affirming too much to say, that there is not a single mystery of the Three-and-Thirty Years which does not owe some of its features to our Blessed Lord's Person, that is, to the fact of His having been not the First or the Third Person, but the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Thus in all our devotions to the Incarnation, as we must never separate His Human Nature from His Divine, so also w« must not separate His Divine Nature from His Divine Person. Four elements compose all the mysteries of Jesus, His Body, His Soul, His Divine Nature^ and His Divine Person. The different position of these four elements, or rather the different lights cast upon them by the events of His human life, are the causes of the differences in the mysteries. Distinct meditation therefore on our Lord's Person, and a distinct adoration of it, cannot be too strongly urged on those who wish to profit to the uttermost by the rich food which the Incarnation ministers to the soul in prayer. On the whole the distinction is often not sufficiently kept in mind. Hence arise vague ideas of our Lord's Divinity, as if it was even hardly so definite a thing as a nature, much less in a Divine Person; and the consequences are a confused generality in devotion, which often hinders the development of reverence, and also a missing altogether of the delicacies and refinements and spiritual subtleties in the Incarnation, which are of themselves such marvellous disclosures of the divine magnificence.
We may now proceed to consider that other and simpler method of devotion to the Divine Attributes, which is so directly connected with the mysteries of our Lord, that it may almost rather be considered a branch of devotion to the Incarnation, seeing that no devotion to the Sacred Humanity is complete without it. It consists, as has been said, of the contrasts and surprises which arise from the Divine Perfections being brought into contact with any of the mysteries of the Three-and- Thirty Years, or of the Blessed Sacrament, which is the prolongation of the Three-and-Thirty Years up to the Doom, or beyond it, if there be any ground for the opinions in favour of an eternal reservation of the Blessed Sacrament in heaven. It furnishes us therefore with endless, yet very similar, meditations, founded on the model of whab we have already supposed was Mary's first act of worship in the midnight cave. The extreme similarity of the meditations is, however, accompanied by that invariable freshness and sensation of unworn novelty, which always ^ along with the great thought of the boundless Godhead.
Let us take an imaginary scene in which to contemplate the Divinity of the Babe of Bethlehem. Let us hasten into the wilderness where there are the fewest real images of creatures to distract us, and those of the most placid kind, and in themselves, as well as because of their fewness, full of thoughts which lead to God. Thither we can summon all the creatures of the universe to adorn and illustrate the glorious Attributes of the Infant God. Our Lady and St. Joseph are in the very heart of the desert on their flight into Egypt, weary yet less anxious now that Palestine is left so far behind. It is in itself an astonishing mystery, the Creator flying from His own creatures, and in such helpless guise. Two creatures only are with Him, to wait upon His created nature; and those two are of such exceeding holiness as to be the wonders of creation not only till the end of time, but for ever. We will suppose a pair of thin-foliaged acacia trees, islanded as it were in the desert scene, a well between them, with a marge of faint verdure, and some of the grey aromatic desert plants creeping over it, and all around nothing but a shining extent of tawny sand, outspread like an interminable lion's skin. Mary lays the Child gently on the dry sand under such shade as the acacia affords, near to the edge of the well, while the sun is sloping to its setting, so near that the risen moon is momentarily filling with distinctive light. Let us draw near in spirit to adore.
As we gaze upon Him, we are struck by His likeness to His Mother. That likeness is one of His veils; also, well considered, one of His disclosures too, disclosing the reality of His Mother's grandeur, disclosing also that Divinity which she resembles, in whose image man was originally created, and no man such an image of it as He, because aU others were but images of His created nature, images of God through Him. So that even the Human Face of Jesus was unspeakably divine.
What can be more weak and helpless than that little weary Child, in whose first months this hard pilgrimage to Egypt has to be endured? Yet both that weakness and that weariness are full of mysteries. In His weakness faith sees His omnipotence. That little One is boundless, boundless as an unimaginable sea, and what awful might does not such immensity suppose 1 We are obliged to call His power by the name of power, because we have no other word to express that sovereignty which our highest ideas of power dishonour rather than rightly estimate. It is something which can reach strange, nameless heights beyond the region of any intelligible miracles. It implies unthinkable depths and possibilities of facile, gigantic, indefinable energy, all lying as it were coiled up in that handful of human life, that tiny burden of swaddling-clothes upon the sand. He is weary because He has been carried all day, poor uncomplaining Babe, hunted by men as if He were some beautiful wild beast of the wilderness whom they were eager to slay for the loveliness of His spoils. He has been for hours helpless and cramped in the bandages that swathed Him, and His limbs ache with the monotonous posture.
Yet not the less, rather all the more, we recognise Him as the strong, unfatigued Creator, who built the mountains, anchored the seas, lighted the volcanoes, and is at that moment making the crust of the great and ever-quaking earth undulate, like a poplar in the wind, or an uncut hayfield in the breath of the sunrise. He it is who sent the swift stars on their rushing courses, and built the ponderous worlds out of an ever-fluent web of weightless elements, and is now undistractedly attending to all those things as He lies apon the sand. It is He, to take but one instance from nature's least important provinces, who is at that moment tlioughtfully, considerately, specially, proportionately ministering to every atom of phosphoric life in all the transitory, heaving, moon-sparkling hollows of the liquid sea.
Sleep comes over Him, as He lies upon the sand. What a wonder also is His sleep! He is the Unbeginning Eternal He was an eternity old before creation began, and has never known vicissitude. Yet to His creatures' eyes He has had a grand everlasting life of portentous changes, which yet stir not His adorable immutability. To Him what a mysterious mutation is the shadowy spell of sleep, which takes the light of His eyes captive so swiftly and so stealthily, His infantine weakness succumbing to its approach! He has shut His eyes to the sunset, and is in the dark. Yet there is no night to Him. "We know Him best as unapproachable light. "Were God, — do not look up to heaven, but on that little Slumberer beneath the acacia branches, — were God to close His eyes in sleep one instant, all created life would perish utterly. All matter and spirit would rush together, and cease to be, and time and space be buried in the instantaneous universal grave of things. Yet look how closely the eyelids are drawn down, how regularly the bosom lifts itself in little heavings, how more and more audible the deeper breathings are! God is really asleep.
He wakes and weeps. He wakes, the intermission of whose vigilance is impossible. He weeps who is illimitable, uncreated joy. All pleasures, that we can think or name, or think further than we can name, vast, deep, rich, unutterable, steadfast, ungrowing, are in Him, or rather He is a gladness beyond them all. In truth the very perfections of all conceivable joys would be imperfections in His joy, and detractions from His blessedness. Look at the little bird sipping from the huge sheet of an American lake, then back to its nest in the silver fir. So will countless angels and men be eternally drinking vast torrents oi joy on the merest brink of that Babe's being, and He be no more drained, and no more affected by it, nay, less so, because in reality not at all, than gigantic Lake Superior whence the little singing-bird took one sip, and flew away. Is it the bands which are around Him that hurt Him, and make Him stoop to the facile tears which are the law of childhood?
Infancy is truly a prisoner in the incommodious swaddling-clothes of those lands, but in that Prisoner on the sand we recognise and worship the Immense. It is He who is the everlasting freedom of the world. He, who is there circumscribed within a given number of inches, in reality is at that instant expatiating beyond the clouds and the sunsets and the great stars and the frightening vastness of the heavy circling systems, and finds no term, comes to no limit, overflowing all possibilities of space in the grandeur of His simplicity. When we have filled with Him all the worldless abysses that we can imagine, we are then no nearer to an external edge of that Babe's life than we were before. But are His tears always silent tears, or does He, like other children, utter cries, cries of piteous eloquence, inarticulate appeals to a mother's love which somehow finds the right interpretations for them 1 If it were so, how His puling cry would thrill through our inmost soul, a thousand times more than the archangel's trumpet in the night of doom! From out of the complaining treble of that cry faith would disembarrass the Voice of the Everlasting, the Voice which Scripture compares to the sound of many waters; yet, like the noises of the dumb. His cry is without language. He is without words who is the Father's Word. He seems to know no language, of some one sound of whose inward music all languages are but a fragmentary, yet what a ravishing revelation, ^ revelation which cannot now gather itself up or back into the oneness which it has forgotten! All language is but one strain, escaped to earth, from that silent jubilee of the creatureless majesty of God, in those old inconceivable epochs, which were not epochs, because there was no time.
Look at His poverty, whose every circumstance claims tenderest pity and devoutest tears. We see it in the faces and the garb of Mary and of Joseph, and in the barrenness of provision which is around, beneath the tent of the open sky. Yet in that Child of poverty we adore the majesty before whom the heavenly hierarchies are at that instant prostrate, and tremble, even though they comprehend it not in its fulness. His riches are inexhaustible and incalculable. He is the plenitude of creation, out of whom millions of new hungering and thirsting creations could draw their manifold gleaming wealtli, and make no impreS' sion on the fulness. His treasures are not only indescribable in their degree, but unimaginable in kind, with infinities which are not suited to our wants, or to any expenditure of creatures, but belong, if we may so speak, to the transcendental seeming needs of the illimitable intelligence and holiness of God, to those adorable necessities of the Divine Life out of which inevitably proceed the Eternal Generation of the Son and the Eternal Procession of the Spirit.
In the Child vouchsafing to be eager at His Mother's breast we adore, as the hymn of the Church suggests to us, the God who feeds the world, and all its creatures, with unforgetting providence. The beasts in their desert lairs, the birds of the untrodden woods, the fishes of the sea, the populous insects beneath the barks of trees or under the stones of the fields, all these, together with sinners in their palaces, and the homeless poor in the rich men's streets, are being fed by Him. He is catering for them even at that very hour, feeding Mary and Joseph themselves by that desert well, and managing, with all the strange varieties of climate and season, the provisioning of the million-peopled earth, with all its attendant arrangements of meteorology and chemistry. In those two sciences, infants now but promising some day to be giants, the Babe could have told us secrets which would startle the wisest scholars of the present generation, and revolutionise all the science of the world.
As the breaths of wind pass momentarily over the evening waters, dimpling them with smiles of light, so the unaccountable smiles of childhood light themselves in the infant face, and pass away. The Babe on the sand also smiles; and His smile is the expression of His innumerable perfections in the marvellous unity of a human countenance. Smiles reveal character; so His reveals the character of the All-holy. It is the smile of Him who is perhaps at that moment judging a soul, and saving it by His mercy. It is the smile of Him who sees hell, and is keeping it in order, feeding its fires, and by His momentary judgments adding to its desolate population in the glory of His justice. It is a smile, in which we may catch, like the glow of sunset on tower or tree, the reflection of that grand worship in heaven, which He there beholds who is still there, having come on earth without ever leaving the Bosom of the Father, and which He not only beholds but is actually receiving. There is a wondering look too in His little eyes, when He smiles. Yet what wonder can He have 1 To Him belong the knowledge and the sight of all hearts. His glances illuminate all secrets. His eye without effort takes in at one gaze all the realms of space and all the kingdoms of spiritual intelligence. To it lie open at that moment all the hordes of thoughts of each angel or soul that ever was or will be, whether expressed in conversation, treasured up in books, or imbedded in the unuttered silentness of profoundest cogitation. Must not His look of wonder be part of the dissembling of His lowliness, when His consciousness is at that moment dwelling in the light of all possible science, counting every sand in the wide wilderness, and noting the movements and biography of every errant fish in the vast seas, down even to each light-flash that glances from their silver scales. He sees Calvary also, and the dread monotony of the changeful Passion, and us with our sins, and Himself, and the Father, and the Holy Ghost, and wonders not, though in His beautiful sincere deceit He wears that wondering look of human infancy.
What separate claims also to our worship has every feature of His Countenance! The lips which Mary with timid frequency will dare to kiss, they are the very lips which are one day to pronounce our last irrevocable doom. They will perhaps speak words in heaven, like the grave minute-bells of eternity, each of which will surpass the revelations of earth, and will feed our souls with tingling wisdom and divinely impassioned love. These lips are rosy now in the freshness of their childhood; but they have one day to be white, withered, parched, and blood-mottled on the Cross. But to speak, not of separate features, but of His whole beauty, it is not so much a disguise, as a tempering down, of His uncreated loveliness, a sheathing of His Godhead incomparably compassionate and wonderful It is like Himself, like His own love, nearest to a revelation of what He is. We all long to see the Father. Ages ago Philip the Apostle told His Master so in the name of all of us. Why is it that the Father so draws us, so pulls at the strings of our hearts, as if we must see Him, or be homeless and holily repining till we have seen Him 1 Look at the Child upon the sand. He is the veritable beauty of the Father, the beauty the Father sees in Himself, all of it, a complete as well as a faithful representation of it.
Moreover the Father's love of Him, that beautiful coequal Word, and the beautiful Word's love of Him, not return of love, but contemporary, unbeginning love, are, or is, which shall we say? the beautiful, jubilant, ever-proceeding Spirit. If we sin-maimed creatures, who have barely crawled out of our evil into the sunshine of God's compassion, can see all this in His childish beauty on the sands, what did Mary see?
But the sun is setting fast. Now the orb has sunk, sending a quivering effulgence of gold and crimson from its low level on the horizon over the unbroken smoothness of the stony sands. Mary and Joseph fall on their knees to pray, as if the pulses of light rang golden bells up in heaven to tell them it was compline tima It is not to the heaven above they look, nor to the ever-present Invisible, whose presence men acknowledge by shrouding their faces with their hands; but, like believers who steady themselves in prayer by fixing their eyes upon the tabernacle, they look and pray to that Almighty Child, whom Mary has laid for a moment on the sand.
Who can doubt the subject of their contemplations? Verbum caro factum est: the Word was made flesh! It is the joy of joys to the whole earth. It is the mystery within whose precincts other mysteries dwell in light. It is the making visible of the invisible queen of all mysteries, the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Of all other mysteries, but that, the Incarnation is itself the chief. Creation ranges itself beneath its banners. It was therefore the Divinity of the Word, which Mary and Joseph were adoring. The more that visible circumstances seemed to put forward emphatically and prominently our Lord's Humanity, the more did they provoke faith in His Divinity. But the Mother and the Foster-father did not approach that mystery OS we liave done. We have had to feel our way to it, to persuade ourselves of it by as it were touching it, and making sure of it palpably, by means of geography, scenery, and the measures of time and space which science gives us, limiting even while enlarging our conceptions. They saw it in a simpler way, by higher processes of the soul, as became the grandeur of their holiness, and the privilege of their vicinity to God. Still it was faith in His Divinity, which was the soul of their communing with Him. The actual practical faith, that our Lord is God, is something higher and sweeter than meditations on the mystery of the Incarnation, or on His Divine Perfections. It is our very life as llis redeemed and pardoned creatures. It is the basis of all devotion, as it is the ground of all holiness. Without this faith, and the holy fear and reverence which spring from it, devotions to the Sacred Humanity have little better than an artistic beauty. The deeper we go into this doctrine the more real seems the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament, the more lofty the majesty of Mary. But the Sacred Infancy is the especial field in which this faith should expatiate. Comparisons are seldom true in sacred things; else we might almost say that Bethlehem is more a devotion of our Lord's Divinity even than Calvary; and yet it is His Divinity which is the soul of each mystery of the Passion. The vision of the Holy Child to the Venerable Margaret of Beaune, with the words Verbum caro factum est written on the palm of His hand in letters of gold, is a kind of symbol of what our devotion to the Sacred Infancy ought to be. We should desire that our Lord would do for us spiritually, what He did for St. Mary Magdalen of Pazzi materially, on whose heart those same words were engraven. He Himself told St. Gertrude that every time a Christian bowed reverently when they were uttered, He offered for him to the Eternal Father aU the fruits of His sacred Humanity; and on one occasion, by divine suggestion if I remember rightly, Margaret of Beaune spent several hours simply repeating those potent words in order to impetrate from the Eternal Father mercy for blasphemers. With a like spirit the Church bids us sink upon our knees, as we daily pronounce these words in the last Gospel at the altar.
In these days we must take great heed to our faith in our Lord's Divinity. Heresy one while neglects our Blessed Lord's Humanity, and another while His Divinity. In our own times it is the fashion of men to develop, as they phrase it, the human features in Christ. They talk in the empty, pedantic grandiloquence of the day, of exhibiting and producing the human element of Jesus. Thus to an unbelieving people religion has neither facts nor doctrines in the strict sense of those words, but only symbols and views. In astronomy men delight in making the dubious nebula resolve itself into the lucid separateness of individual stars; but in theology they reverse this process. There they are fain to superinduce vagueness over what has once been clear, so as to make theology a shapeless nebular light, about which they can theorise and conjecture as they please, finding in its huge spiral convolutions or the lineaments of its ragged edges such fantastic likenesses as made the men of old give their names to the constellations. Now whence this love of vagueness in the matter of religion, joined with such a craving for definiteness in all other departments of human knowledge, but from a desire to evade the yoke of faith without the inconvenient boldness of publicly rejecting it? On our part, therefore, the spirit of reparation must be always on the watch to bring its tender succours to the rescue of our Lord's honour at the point of attack, wherever that may be. So now, while the faith keeps us in an equable and intelligent entireness about our belief, reparation will lovingly devote itself to a more than usually fervent worship of the Eternal Word.
But in the desert of Mary, Joseph, and the Babe, we almost need to be forgiven even this momentary glance at an evil world. The swift twilight passes. The night-wind sighs heavily over the wilderness. All but the wild-beasts and the houseless poor are in their homes. But to-night the Creator Himself is one of the houseless poor. He is without a home, the hollow of whose hand is all creation's home. He is without shelter, whose Heart is the one eternal shelter of all angelic spirits and of all human souls. He is homeless who is as it were Himself the home of that Eternal Father, whose Bosom is in return His own eternal home.
Footnotes
-
It is certain that the Divine Attributes are not really distinguished from the Divine Essence, nor among themselves. The Scotists teach that the Attributes are distinguished from the Essence and among themselves by a sort of distinction, diflBcult to define, but which ii midway between a real distinction and a simple distinction of reaaon. The Nominalists occupy the other extreme, and teach that there is not even a distinction of reason between them. The Thomists teach that they are distinguished, but merely by a distinction of reason. See Lexana, Dt AUributia Dei. Tract. 2. Disp. a. The theological student may be referred to the question in Theology, An distingui possint Attributa in Deo sine respectu ad creaturas. Amicus, Dt Essentia DH, Disp. iii. sect. vi,, and also the other question, Utrum Attributa dirina sint multitudine infinita, aut certo aliquo numero comprehenaa. Izquierdo. Dt Deo Uno, Tract i. Disp. 2. qusHst. 8. ↩
-
The same subject has been treated iu the last Chapter of my Treatiw OD " The Precious Blood.' ↩
-
They may be thug named, i. The Affirmative Method. 2. The Negative Method. 3. The combination of the two. 4. Through the medium of the phenomena of Creation and the Doctrines of Redemption. This fourth method might technically be divided into two, but never is so in fact. 5. Through Conceptions of the Inward Life of God. 6. Through a special devotion to the Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. 7. In connection with some Mystery or Set of Mysteries of the Incarnation. The Method, which is diffidently proposed in the text, may be considered a» an eighth. ↩
-
We must remember the axiom of theology about the Vision: Deui totus visus est, sed non totaliter. ↩
Chapter 6 of 10