Chapter VI. Soul and Body

The fountain of creation is the mind of God. Hence there is a light and odour of eternity even about the most perishable of creatures, or the most evanescent of material phenomena. They reveal God. They are emanations of His wisdom and disclosures of His beauty. They are His works of art, His peculiar thoughts. His music and His poems. There is nothing in creation which does not bring something of His along with it, nothing which a student of God would not recognise for His by the fashion of it, independent of his knowledge that all things are from God. A single tree is a divine poem. It is unimaginable to any creature, to whom the model has not been shown. It is a many-sided wonder, having a deep science in it as well as a deep fountain of beauty. Yet no two trees, even of the same kind, are alike in the interlacing of their branches, the arrangement of their foliage, or their position with regard to the light of the sun, whose beams play silent music on its rising or depressed boughs and amidst its quivering leaves, as fingers play upon the keys.

Yet trees are but one class, an inferior and subordinate class, among the countless poems which form the harmonious unity of creation. When we rise therefore through the rational world into the world of grace, still more complete and awe-inspiring are the creatures of God, regarded as manifestations of His invisible beauty and the literally infinite variety of His simple unity. But it is the lowest creatures which bring most home to us that all creature* have a real dignity, and a significance which entitles then to reverence, simply as being the creatures of God, as having His mark upon them, and savouring of His fragrance, which is as well known to our spiritual senses, as the odour of that flower on earth which we may happen most of all to love. It is but one proof of the consistency of the Scotist theology that the same school, which gives so dignified a place to creation in its philosophy, should also differ from other schools in treating the beauty of God, as a separate divine Attribute in itself. A beauty-haunted mind, such as the minds of poets are, sees the wisdom and the power, the justice and the mercy of God all the more clearly in creation, because it sees them all in the light of God's beauty. For beauty is something more than either wisdom or power, it is something additional to them, the lustre which makes them plain, as the sun makes plain the separate crags of the distant mountain, which in the shade appear to be one smooth and purple mass. A thing might conceivably be wise yet not beautiful, teeming with evidences of power yet repulsive because disproportionate or inharmonious. But all things in nature and grace are beautiful as well as wise, beautiful as well as powerful; and they are beautiful because the beauty of God clings to them in virtue of their origin, and to the very last there is something worshipful in the least of them, because that clinging beauty never altogether leaves them.

From these considerations we gain a view of creation, which in these days it is of great importance to keep before us. The battle-fields of the world change with the history of nations. So is it in the history of intellect. It can hardly be doubted that the battle-field of faith and unbelief is moving from the Incarnation to the mystery of Creation, from the Divinity of our Lord to the Attributes of God. It is true that faith and unbelief are always fighting at all their points of contact; but the thick of the battle now is amidst the facts and difficulties of creation. Hence a true view of creatures and their significance is of the greatest consequence, as well that we may avoid unintelligently defending what we are not bound to defend and what may turn out at last to have all along been indefensible, as that we may know better how to defend what otherwise our ignorance might betray. No erudite theologian will refuse to admit that his science owes more to Aristotle, and even to Plato, than it has suffered from them, though he will not be backward to acknowledge that the influence of those two mighty heathen has not been an unmixed benefit. So in the present circumstances of the world, and looking at theology as the science upon which the practical conversion of souls is based, it seems as if the physical sciences were the natural allies of theology, and a profound study of them an essential part of a theological education.

They are of far greater importance now than metaphysics or psychology, and have connected themselves with a greater number of fundamental questions, while they are also in a state of forwardness and system which renders them much more capable of being used by the theologian. Perhaps it would not be rash even to prophecy that the fresh start and new development of the mental sciences, to which we must all be anxiously looking forward, are waiting for the further advance of certain of the physical sciences, in whose future discoveries mental science will find another starting-point.

Hence there are two Christian views of creatures, one belonging to theological speculation, the other, not without an accurate theological account of itself, to practical asceticism.

Both views are so true, and at the same time so indispensable, that no devout believer can hold the one to the exclusion of the other without damaging his devotion, as well as making his faith less intelligent; for both views are necessary to holiness, and both are necessary to a just appreciation of doctrine. If we look at creatures in comparison with God Himself, we are so struck with their vileness, their nothingness, and their transitoriness, that, for the moment, we can see nothing else about them; and all else which is predicted of them seems untrue.

In such a comparison as this creatures are simply passive. But it will happen not frequently, through our fault rather than through theirs, that they appear to us as obscuring God and eclipsing Him; and we are then led to regard them with something like an indignant contempt. Or again we look at God fuU of love, and we bum as love will bum, with a desire to make sacrifices for Him, and so prove our love, and then creatures present themselves to us as victims, as materials for sacrifice, and for sacrifices in which we ourselves are the sufferers rather than the creatures which we offer, and it is by this process that we gain our entrance into the wide fields of voluntary mortification. Another while our piety takes the shape of self-distrust, and we forbear to use creatures even where we may lawfully use them, because our experience of ourselves teaches us that such a use unmans us, or in our particular case is likely to run into indulgence. Out of a combination of these views proceeds asceticism. It is therefore founded, not so much in a disesteem of creatures as in a homage to their attractiveness, a homage prompted by the generosity of our love of God, or wrung from us by an exceeding fear of ourselves, or Btimulated by the generous spirit of uncommanded sacrifice. What more honourable office can creatures fill than to supply us with a means of serving God by a voluntary or prudential abstinence from the pleasures which they put before us 1

This ascetical view of creatures is practical to us every day of our lives, and therefore is the most ordinary and common point of view for us. Yet, if we make it too exclusive, we shall some day wake up to a sense of unreality in it, an unreality which is not properly in the view itself but in our exclusive way of holding it; and the consequence of this will be that we shall recoil too far the other way. Experience unfortunately presents us with many instances of this. Men, whose fervour began with an immoderate, indiscriminate, and exaggerated view of the evil of creatures have actually become worldly, self-indulgent, and comfort-loving, as soon as they have perceived that their own excessive opinions were untheological and unintellectuaL Yet they still use their old language, even when their practice has changed. A man, who talks loudly against worldliness and yet is wedded to his little personal comforts, is harder to convert to a real inward life than the vilest and most habit-ridden sinner among the sons of men. So seldom is fierceness in earnest, even when it believes itself to be most so: for, if true earnestness is not sharp with self only, it is so at least with self first of all and most of all.

From the other point of view, which is equally true, creatures seem full of dignity and greatness, because they are the creatures of God. They are manifestations of His inward life. They are, each and all of them, masterpieces. They have had no patterns outside of God Himself. They copied no pre-existing models. They are, as was said above, unimaginable by angels or mea All things are unimaginable which have neither predecessors nor analogies. The meanest creature upon earth is mantled with the refulgence of God's beauty, and betokens what we can only call an unspeakable inventiveness, though that is too mean a word to use of creative wisdom. Thus it is that creatures teach us so much of God, and lead us to Him by the very pleadings of their loveliness. They can be even elevated, as in the case of the Sacraments, into physical communications of God, and celestial agents in the kingdom of grace. The blessing of the church can surcharge matter with the most wonderful powers, and endow it with a sort of supernatural life stretching even beyond the energy of angels. There are no portals like the Sacraments for introducing us into the actual realities of human life; but they also open directly into the mysterious movements of the life-giving life of God.

Creatures are the materials of our duties, the objects of our sciences, the divine ideas of our arts, the discipline of our affections, and the ministers of pure and intellectual and blameless enjoyment Who then can think lightly or speak disparagingly of them? Even to God Himself, we would dare to say, that creatures are of importance; else why should He create them t Can anything God does be unimportant, or not be founded in deepest reasons, the least of which are of more consequence than the wars and revolutions of earth 1 Creation was not a necessity with the Creator, but also it was no mere accidental overflow, no irrepressible surplus of wisdom and power, no simple incident in the eternity of God. It is an action deeply rooted in Him, and separable from Him only by a mental violence, which is practically an untruth. Above all things it must be remembered that creation was more for His own sake than for ours, as it is the blissful perfection of His Nature to seek Himself in all things. It is because self-seeking is the rule of the divine sanctity, that it is the negation of all sanctity in a creature. Such a primary seeking of self is in us the practical impiety of trying to change places with God, while a certain orderly love of self is the foundation of our duty, and a dim shadowing in our finite natures of the magnificent and adorable self-seeking of God. Hence we venture to say that creatures are, in some inexplicable sense, of importance even to the unbeginning majesty of God.

Creation can add nothing to the essential glory of God. We are the creatures of comparisons, because we are finite. We can only leam values or estimate truths by comparing them with others. We honour one thing by despising another. We can hardly do justice to a thing without first doing an injustice to something else. Hence it comes to pass that God's accidental glory seems a very slight thing to us compared with the immeasurable ocean and indefinable splendour of His essential glory. Yet God's accidental glory, and indeed the slightest measure of it, is a greater thing than we can reach even by our conceptions. It is the result of the total of creation, and is its final cause as well. Yet, as we saw just now, it is irreverent to suppose creation to be otherwise than of great moment even to God Himself. His accidental glory is of moment to Him; for He cannot pursue what is of no moment. It is indeed infinitely below His essential glory; but it is at the same time infinitely above our powers of measurement. It is something very intimate to Him, although it is not intrinsic. In truth the whole idea of sanctity would be lowered, if we lightly esteemed God's accidental glory; for what is all sanctity, even the sanctity of our Blessed Lord's Human Nature, and indeed the whole scheme of redemption, but a contribution to the accidental glory of the Most High 1 Thus there is a very important sense in which it is true that the worth of creatures to God is greater than their worth to us. His possession of them is great riches, even to Him. Everything about God is unfathomable; and it is far beyond the stretch of our minds to conceive what glory, and what gladness, and what manifold unutterable complacency He may have in His property of creation. The single fact that we ourselves are part of that complacency is a lifelong contentment to our souls.

Now, looked at from this point of view, all creation is as it were in each separate creature. Each creature is a distinct, unresembled, and unequalled disclosure of the divine beauty, and at the same time has such a relation to the whole, most often invisible to us, that it cannot be separated from it, and thus it enters into the rights of the whole, so far as it is God's, even though it may be very low in the graduated scale upon which the hierarchies of creatures are constituted. The bearings of theology, regarded as a whole, are sure to be misapprehended, if this view of creatures is not borne in mind; and there are not a few separate and most important problems in theology to which this view of creatures is the only key. To him, who for his own good or that of others would speculate upon God, this view of creatures must be as familiar, as the other view must be to him in his daily ascetical relations with God Himself. Yet it has been not an uncommon thing for men to miss this truth, and then to wonder at the confusion and want of coherence which they detect in their own speculations. Many systems of theology are ragged and ungainly for want of a philosophical view of creatures and creation.

While then believing love humbly dares to congratulate God upon any one of His intrinsic perfections, it may also congratulate Him upon His absolute possession of creatures, as upon something altogether worthy of His own blessed Self. God is indeed rich in His creation. How wonderful are the revelations of science! Yet they have hardly got below the surface of things. Rather it is with the surface of things that they mainly deal. Geology unveils to us but the surface of time, astronomy the surface of space. It has but just opened to us " the delicious sense of indeterminate size." More will come of it. The microscope rather enables us to suspect the delicacy of creation than actually makes it visible to us. Chemistry makes us wonder at the character of matter rather than explains its nature. The doctrine of probabilities is but a murmur of laws speeding on their courses in cycles more vast than we can comprehend. Our whole science is but a faint outline of what science will be to the generations which come after us, and the science of the future, what will it be in comparison with the realities of creation as God knows them t What are the kingdoms of matter to the kingdom of men, and what the kingdom of men to the gorgeous empire of the many-kinded angels ^

We must learn to look at creatures from God's point of view; and we have seen that His own perfections involve the importance of creatures in His sight. If we lay this view aside, our theology will detach itself more and more from the mind and movement of the living generations, and so will abdicate that sovereignty over other sciences, which is not only its lawful heritage, but is now more than ever within its grasp. Better times are coming; yet these times also are very good. All things considered, the times are miraculously good. Their very darkness is in favour of divine things, and the light of all times is already both the produce and the property of that which is divine amongst us. As theology is the science of all others which takes its stand upon the past, so there is no science which has so many duties to the future. It is a living science, not a lifeless standard. It is a life of itself, not a mere measure of other lives; a limit certainly, yet a limit enlarging all other limitations. The vast circuit and wide expansion of scientific discovery is an augury of a yet more magnificent theology, one which will enable us to envy less those scholastic glories in whose sunset we are living. The world of mind may have glacial periods analogous to the geological one; but in this respect they differ, that they are mostly short, and look darker at a distance than they were when they were present.

There are nights in the world's history; but they are more like eclipses than nights, because they are so brief; and moreover there is light enough in their darkness to see with. To a man who lies wakeful, unless he be ill also, the morning always comes suddenly, and earlier than it seemed due. So will it be with that better future of the Church and world, for which we are all looking somewhat wearily, but quite undoubtingly. Even now does not the future at times dart into our very present with a kind of frightening consolation, and break upon our ears in silent hours of inward listening like a song of joy, and of such joy as is not the joy of our own day, but a joy surprised with its own exceeding joyfulnessl We hear evermore the tread of the future, like the footsteps of a benefactor coming to us in our hour of need. The times are good, and on no account to be complained of; but in a wicked world all good times are always better for what they promise, than for what they give. They are times singular and apart, and visibly burdened with a mission, as all good times seem to be to those who live in them, and think. We cannot think without hoping. Thought in God's world is hope, because the world is God's. It is a bright gift, for others' good as well for our own, when we can understand and welcome the future, while it is yet only pushing its fibres under the present, and so to unloving minds seems rather like a disturbance than a quiet blessing.

But let us return from this digression. We may think for long of the riches of God in the possession of creatures before we exhaust the thought; and when we have thought it out as far as we can, it will lift us so high that we shall be able to take a more worthy view of His essential glory and His own intrinsic plenitude, a view more worthy than we ever dreamed was possible. A high view of creation does for our idea of God, what the true doctrine of our Blessed Lady does. For every measurable height to which it raises her, it raises our appreciation of Him immeasurably. We find God everywhere, in our low thoughts as well as in our high. But it is the inevitable result of mean views of creation to give us poor views of God. Yet mean views are tempting because they are easy, and because they dispense our minds from embracing so wide a circle of intelligence.

God possesses wonderful creatures in this creation, of which we know something. In other distant outlying creations He may possess creatures yet more wonderful But nowhere does He possess any creature which is to compare with the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, the type and cause of all creation. It is this Sacred Humanity, the Soul and Body of the Incarnate Word, which we are to consider in the present Chapter, and the remarks which have paved the way to it will be found not to have been irrelevant to the purpose. All parts of creation influence all other parts. The most distant star tells in some way upon the most lowly wild-flower on our insignificant planet. But no part of creation is so vastly influential as the Sacred Humanity of our Blessed Lord, the Humanity which is above the angels, and adored by them. Take away the Church, which is built upon it, abrogate the Sacraments, which are His own personal residence and agency amongst us, remove Him from His mediatorial throne in heaven, abolish the Four Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, take out of language, literature, and thought all the ideas which are growths or prophecies of the Incarnation, extract out of false religions all the semblances and counterfeits of the Incarnation, take away from sorrow, and gladness, and strife, even the mere material pictures of Jesus and His Mother, and would not the extinguishing of the light of the sun be radically a less change, in effect a milder revolution 1 The Sacred Humanity is a creature the uprooting of which would be the unbinding of all creation.

Let us attentively consider the influence of the Sacred Humanity at this very hour, at any given hour, while we write or while we read. The vast heaven, where the Vision of God is unveiled, is all thrilling with its influence. The huge circumferences of heaven's various spheres are trembling with the life and pulses of the Sacred Humanity. It has unveiled that Vision, unveiled it even to the angels. At this moment it is peopling heaven with continual fresh multitudes, even of infants, earth's infants, who enter there through it magnificent, wise, full-grown, Christ-like men, who through the marvellous waters of baptism have pierced the earth, grown, budded, bloomed, borne fruit, and garnered themselves in heaven in less than an hour perhaps of time. Redeemed penitents are entering there, with long inward histories all full of the mysterious action of the Sacred Humanity. Perfect love has leaped at once a minute ago, this minute also, and the next minute will do so, and all minutes, from earth straight to heaven; but it had hold cf the hand of Jesus while it leaped. Long sojourners in purgatory have just arrived upon the bright shores to begin their eternal youth, miracles of salvation, hard-won trophies of the Precious Blood, whose drops made those fires medicinal even w^hile it allayed them. Look at the unwearied angels, upright spirits, beaming in their magnificence! They are the subjects of the Sacred Humanity. That Human Nature is the cause of their being in heaven, the fountain as well as the occasion of all their graces, the means as well as the sustaining of their prolific glory. There is not an angel in those burning rings, but Man made him what he was, enabled him to do what he did, and placed him royally and securely there.

The Sacred Humanity is the actual light of the heavenly Jerusalem, whatever that may mean, and it doubtless means a thousand things. It is both sun and moon, and other sun and moon are needed not because of it It is the light in which the Vision is seen. The manifold functions of light to terrestrial life are but so many faint foreshadowings of what the light of the Lamb is to that grand, deep, broad life above. How fair in that light, meek, distinct, yet in a jewelled blaze of spiritual splendour, a very unspeakable starry heaven of itself, rises Mary's throne! Yet she was placed there by the Sacred Humanity. The Sacred Humanity is the whole account of her, of whom the highest theology on earth can give no account that may content us. Throughout all those vast courts of blessedness living that dread life before the unaverted Face of the Most Holy Trinity, a life of overwhelming, blissful fire, there is no adequate worship of the Blessed Trinity, except by the Sacred Humanity. The souls of men make lowly music there. The spirits of angels tune louder lyres with a more daring inspiration. The being of Mary throws up soft ocean waves to the foot of the throne, which come so near, yet fall short so infinitely. The Sacred Heart alone worships the Threefold Majesty in adorable perfection, by virtue of its union with the Word. Heaven therefore is not imaginable without that Human Nature enthroned and worshipped there.

H we look at earth, we find the action of the Sacred Humanity no less potent, no less universal, no less indispensable. Can the grace, which there is upon the earth this day, be measured by any one but God? In how many

T millions of souls, whether in the Church or slowly drawing towards it, is not grace at work, manifold and multiform, wedding itself to all manner of, opposite occasions, steering all manner of diverging circumstances, adapting itself to how many varieties of fortune and position! Here with a sort of feeble beauty it is preluding in a heathen soul, or hiddenly sweetening the bitterness of misbelief. Here it is faintly prophecying over the soul, softly as a cloud-shadow rests upon the lea, of some supernatural vocation which is gathering to a head all day, like the stately preparations of a summer storm. There it is fighting with sin, clamouring in the soul, yet inaudible, striking hard but in the fury of battle all unfelt. There again it is keeping at high-tide the calm fulness of grace in some holy practised soul. Elsewhere it is coming in various sevenfold array to those Sacraments, which are streaming, and rushing, and glancing, and resounding all day and night in the Church, like the mountain cataract in the woods. Elsewhere again its name is legion, and it is trooping to the death-beds of men. In darkness and in light, upon bad and good, in the safe ark of the Church or amidst those drowning in the outer deluge, grace is at work, even beyond the suspicion of those of us who deem of it most liberally; and the single sufficient fountain of all this grace is the Sacred Humanity, whether the grace scatter itself ubiquitous over the outlying world, or be almost irresistibly concentrated in the Church and Sacraments.

Neither are the effects of this singular and pre-eminent Human Nature less wonderful, although they are less important, on the mind of earth. The Incarnation has been built up into the whole fabric of our present literature, even in its most irreligious parts. The commonest notions of what is divine have taken their shape from it. The sickly eulogies of a misty, progressive, unindividualised humanity have caught from it whatever in them is not mere sound or insane affectation. Every tenth stone at least in the palace of literature is an idea of the Incarnation. It is the novelty and freshness of all that the modern world has thought, and sung, and said. Without it unbelief would not know how to make itself attractive for an hour. Art lives by it, and without it would descend into a pagan copyist to-morrow. Take away the Incarnation, and we may doubt whether art would ever recover itself from the abyss of unhelpful antiquarianism into which it would fall. Systems of philosophy either embody the Incarnation as an element in what they affirm, or they take their shape and consistence from their antagonism to it. In no way and by no manner of device can they clear themselves of it, and exist and utter themselver calmly and loftily as if it had never been. Politics borrow from it even while they are limiting its action; and diplomacy, just in proportion as it is inwardly hostile, grows outwardly respectful. That enthroned Human Nature is the keystone of every arch which sustains modem civilisation. Any sort of glory the world could attain to without it now would be but the glory of a ruin. Is there any province of the human mind, in which we could now do without it and the congenial ideas to which it has given birth? No present is possible, which the past has not begotten, and the present is the only road to the future. Hence the Sacred Humanity has become simply indispensable and inevitable to every possible development and most unthought of revolution of the world's life, even in spheres the most remote from trutli and from religion.

The Sacred Humanity is the king of earth, and is actually resident among us in countless palaces. It leads a hidden life, one most fruitful department of which consists of nothing else than a continual averting of judgments and calamities from the whole race, whose nature has been iionoTired by the Word's assumption of it. It holds the elements in control, and renders their might more benignant than their laws would have led us to anticipate. It bridles the earthquake, and tames the pestilence. It keeps men safe on an earth which is always quivering and dipping, turns the wild floods at their most perilous angles, guides into the soft unhurt earth thousands of thunderbolts which would have scathed life, or limb, or property. It beautifies the rough ways of death, even while it bids us tread them as a punishment from which there can be no dispensation. There is not perhaps one human heart from which it has not averted many unknown yet once imminent sorrows, and which it has not saved from pains of the flesh which would have been harder to bear than we like now to think. We do not know what we owe to Mass, and the Blessed Sacrament, of comfort, peace, and unharmed common life. Last of all, and this would fill a volume, this Sacred Humanity is itself the love of earth, and the magnet of all earth's holy love, causing life to be softer and more bearable, making all that is noble in us divine, ennobling what would else be mean, and just when hfe seems coming to a point when it must become uuendurable, opening a way and letting us down into some sudden bed of roses, which have no thorns, and are so far from enervating the soul that they fortify it as with some heavenly elixir.

Beneath the earth is that strange, almost unimaginable Church of the suffering souls, a work of divine art, a creation of love which is never at fault for means to secure its ends, yet not supplementary, as nothing in creation is, but part of the great merciful design for the discipline and success of man. Over that strange life of fiery sufi'ering and of assured love, blended in equal and equable intensities, are cast the spells of the Sacred Humanity. Nowhere is gloom so soft, nowhere are shadows so beautiful, as in the land of purgatory. There are few of the redeemed to whom the geography of that valley of expectation must not one day become familiar. But it is through the Sacred Humanity that we enter there. Jesus is our judge as Man, not as the Word; and it is at His bidding, almost anticipated by our own love of perfect purity; that we enter there. His sentence is the gateway by which we gain access to those fires of the predestinate, a happy gateway to a land of pain, because implying a sentence of immortal happiness.

We shall have seen the Sacred Humanity before we enter there. A momentary intellectual vision of it will have passed before us, momentary, yet so engraven on our souls that we can never forget it, even if our pathway of fire liea before us in perspective for centuries of earth's slow time, It is in our Blessed Lord's Sacred Humanity, as the Head of creation, that the communion of saints is consummated; Jind it is by that communion that any help can find its road to our souls while they are imprisoned there, the captives of patiently impatient hope. It is by the satisfactions which He made in His Human Nature, that all those holy souls are gradually relieved and finally released: for even our own satisfactions would have been no satisfactions if His had not gone before. It is His Human Blood, freshly outpoured in the daily Mass, which quenches the bitter flames. It is the second vision of His Sacred Humanity for which every soul in all that soft and soundless realm of tranquil martyrdom is craving at this very hour. Purgatory is a province of our Lord's Kingdom which seems privileged to stand in peculiarly close relations to His Humanity.

Even in hell that gentle Humanity is active and energetic. Hell itself is but the consequence of the rejection of the Incarnation. There are none there but those who with assiduous perversity have placed themselves there. There are none there whose going there it was not the intention and the wish of the Sacred Humanity to hinder. There are none there, who had not with unprofitable valour to gain a miserable conquest over Jesus in order to get there. His mere Name receives there endlessly a kind of horrified worship, the unwelcome tribute of a terror that is not beautified by hope. Lucifer became the mean king of hell, a baffled inglorious tyrant, because he would not keep his glorious throne in heaven as a vassal king to the Babe of Bethlehem. It was as Man that Jesus, over whose shadow the miserable angel had stumbled in heaven, conquered hell's king on earth, and disjointed the compactness of his kingdom beneath the earth. All the clocks, that strike the hours on earth, mark some new victory of the Sacred Humanity over the rebel spirit. Each grace given is a blow struck Each Sacrament administered is a fortress taken. Each mercy granted is a gain for heaven. Each intervention of deathbed absolution is an actually robbing hell of what seems by earthly justice to be its due. Nay, down in the pit itself the Sacred Humanity is sensibly felt, like a throbbing heart, in the intolerable darkness. The skirts of His love trail over the fires, while the outcasts curse it as it passes. All the sufi'erings there, faithfully, eloquently as in their immeasurable intensity they express the grandeur of the divine justice, are less terrible than they ought to be, because of the merits of that super-angelic Human Nature. For that Nature, ubiquitous in its benignant power, permitted master as it were of the resources of the Divinity, lengthens the slanting beams of the divine compassion, and prolongs them under the green earth even till they silver somewhat of that outer darkness.

May we be forgiven, if we say a word or two of other w^orlds of which we know nothing 1 Their possibilities at least will help to complete our idea of the empire of the Word's Humanity. The question of the inhabitation of the other planets, or of the distant central stars, by reasonable creatures, is one which it does not appear likely that science will ever settle, and on which revelation has not authentically spoken. Minds, which love analogy, find a difficulty in conceiving that all the orbs which night braids upon her forehead, and yet which are still invisibly looking down upon us through the white light of day, should be meant for nothing more than the lamps of a Chinese feast, or a colossal game of material laws, and a puzzle of interchanging attractions and repulsions. Gigantic wildernesses of matter, untenanted by moral agents, appear out of keeping with the analogies of creation. On the other hand, minds, to whom theological truth is almost the only attractive truth, and, rightly considered, is properly itself all truth, are met by inferences from the mystery of the Incarnation, which seem to them irresistible, and yet which will not fit in with the notion of this world, the scene of the Incarnation, being but one, and a very insignificant one, in a crowd of reasonable worlds.

But the man of science must be less bigoted, and leave more room for fresh analogies, such as perhaps he has never dreamed of yet: and the theologian must beware of narrowness, the disease to which he is most subject, and must eschew that miserable haste of little minds to close questions which legitimate authority has left wide open. A theologian above other men should be one who can take into his large heart with gonial sympathy, rather than with critical distrust, the whole of the century in which he lives. Surely it would be a downright grief to any thinking and heaven-hoping man to dream for one moment that any, the least, of God's mysteries had room enough in our widest systems, and was not a thousand times bigger truth than it seems to those whose intelligence magnifies it most. The doctrine of the Incarnation is in no peril from the inhabitants of a million other worlds. God's centres are different from ours, and the Sacred Humanity, assumed on earth, would remain the centre of all those numberless creations, just as it is now the Centre, Head, King, Type, and Cause of the angelical creation, which needs not a material home at all, much less has any necessary connection with the matter of this particular planet.

The dogma of the Incarnation is not then committed to any view upon the plurality of worlds; while at the same time the scriptural revelation of the existence of the angels, and their manifold relations to men, may breed in the theologian's mind a presumption that the silence of the Scripture upon beings, who, if they exist, must be with the angels and ourselves of the one family of Christ, is against the notion that other orbs are yet inhabited by reasonable beings. Nevertheless, as I have already suggested in another work, the modern discoveries of geology seem at once to permit the theologian to take the view to which he is perhaps most inclined, and also to meet the common objection on the other side of the unlikelihood of so many huge bright worlds being left untenanted. Many writers have argued, as if those who held the other planets to be unpeopled now must hold also that they would remain unpeopled; and hence much fallacy and confusion have arisen. To repeat what I have said elsewhere, we have no right to conclude as certain that the creation of rational beings took place all at one time. The corporeal and incorporeal creations were simultaneous; but not all corporeal or all incorporeal species. Indeed we know that the angels belonged to an elder creation than ourselves. Man's creation was subsequent to the creation of the very matter out of which God formed his body. So that the only instance, with which we are acquainted, would favour the supposition that God, in His adorable love of order, might begin creation in one spot, and go on to others, as He has done with angels and men, and with men in their various dispensations. After the angels He came to men and began with earth. There is no intrinsic unlikelihood of His beginning with our system, and with this particular planet in our system, which can be set for a moment against what we know at all events to be a fact, that God chose to take the particular nature of man, who is the inhabitant of this planet, and to choose this orb as the scene of His Incarnation, and the locality of His redeeming sacrifice. From this orb, and from this system. He may proceed to others, and so spread reasonable life and worship through starry space.

The old argument, that it is unlikely such bright worlds should not now be furnishing God's glory with reasonable worship, might just as much have been urged against the unpeopled earth through all those interminable epochs, during which geology thinks it can show it to us as with incredible slowness ripening for the habitation of men. We cannot talk much of analogies, when we know but one case. Yet the one case of earth, as interpreted by geology, discloses God to us as conducting His designs in creation by a circuitous series of preparations of such gigantic dimensions as almost to unsettle our belief in the sobriety of science.

But, whatever comes of these speculations, if the other worlds were or are inhabited by moral agents, the probability is as irresistible, as a probability can be, of their being under the Sacred Humanity of Jesus as their Head. They would belong to Him in an especial way as the Word, through the Word's relation to creatures; and it is surely unlikely and nnanalogous that He should be to some worlds as incarnate, and to some as not incarnate, particularly when we consider that He is Head of the Angels in His Human Nature, and that they among themselves are in reality not one family in their nature, in the same sense as men are, but an immense number of species, one possibly differing more from another, than a stellar creature would differ from us, or we from a supposed inhabitant of another planet.

Creatures in other worlds would probably be created in a state of grace, like the two creations of men and angels. It looks as if it were a part of God's magnificence that it should be so. But grace would hardly come from the Word in His one Nature now that He has two, when it did not do so, as we think the more probable opinion, when His Human Nature was only foreseen. If these worlds, thus created in a state of grace, are unfallen, they are probably standing upright by the grace of the Incarnate Word. If they are fallen, and not restored, whether the fall was partial as with the angels, or universal as with men by their descent, the Incarnation probably would mingle with the fall, as it did in the case of the angels. If they are fallen and restored, for the same reasons we should believe that they were restored by Him. The locality of His Bloodshedding on this particular planet would be no objection, as the angels, although not redeemed by Him, as either not needing or not being allowed ledemption, have nevertheless gained by His merits. They who meditate much on the Unity of God, and such meditation is the marked characteristic of those who have an especial devotion to the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, will almost daily see new probabilities that the family of the glorified would be one. Poles further apart than men and angels could hardly have to be brought together. Yet they are brought together under one Head, and it is in His Human Nature that the Word is Head of both. If then the marvellous work of the Hypostatic Union is adequate for this, why multiply Headships, and so lose the unity of the family, which is the grand shadow of the Unity of God?

We have hinted at these speculations, not as if they were of importance in themselves, but as showing that the idea of the Incarnation, as here brought forward, finds no difficulties in those problems which have been started by the scientific controversies of the day. Thus wherever we look, whether with upturned heart and eye we blind ourselves by looking into heaven, or range through the manifold kingdoms of earth, or explore the holy hospitals of purgatory, or venture to hang over the dread abyss of the condemned, or imagine theologies for worlds from which we are cut off by gulfs of impassable, unnavigable space, everywhere we see the Sacred Humanity to be the Primal Creature of God, to be what no other creature is or can be, and to contain and imply all other creatures in itself with a certain sovereign eminence, which belongs to it in right of its eternal predestination.

There are fertile times when a man's thoughts float out from him, like the gushings of his life, becoming part of truth rather than expressing it, and making the mind a worshipper rather than a teacher. It is in such seasons that we see how all things are theology, and how in it all other sciences regain themselves rather than melt away. It is in such seasons that the chambers of space open out to us, their far-off walls dissolving into clearest ether, and we behold the vast empire of the Sacred Humanity running out with its glorious promontories into the infinite life of God, where we had never dared to dream. It is in such seasons that we hear the invisible, although we cannot see it; and thenceforth the next world haunts us here with a teasing like that i)i an unrecovered thought.

It is the vision of the Sacred Humanity which the sick world wants this hour. We want daring men, men made daring by depth of erudition as well as by breadth of sympathy. We need men who are audacious, because they are humble. We seek for men, or if so be a man, who shall wed all the sciences with theology, who shall reconcile faith and reason in one large lucid philosophy, and who shall teach the nations how the Church can dilate herself to the size of all the social questions which 80 vex humanity. O mistaken generation, that would worship power, not beholding that such a worship is but an insincere confession of our weakness, and therefore of all seeming heroisms the most unhelpful and imbecile! There are some men who are all light, not so much because they see so much more than other men, as because other men see so much more in them, and by their means see also so much beyond them. It is such men as these that God is waiting to give us, when we have grown wise enough to lose all hope in ourselves.

Full then of reverence for the Person of the Eternal Word, let us now come to adore His holy Flesh and His glorious Human Soul. Strict theology must attend us on our way; and while we search, we must adore; and while we adore, we must also search. In matters of doctrinal devotion false reverence is a common form of indevout impatience. We must be upon our guard against this. God gives us the Incarnation that we may exercise our thought and love upon it. It is hardly possible for us to be too minute in our devotions to the Sacred Humanity, so as to implant the reality of it most deeply in our souls. Our minuteness is authorised by the example of the Church, or rather the Church beckons us to follow her example in this respect. The feasts which she celebrates, such as those of the Sacred Heart, the Precious Blood, the Five Wounds?

the Agony in the Garden, the Crown of Thorns, and others, and then the devotions, which she not only permits, but indulgences, are patterns which she puts before us, not so much to limit our devotions to those, as to point the way to others.

There is an essential irreverence, and a tendency, which is at least implicitly heretical, to fastidiousness in this matter, which we shall have to consider also in the Treatise on the Passion. It is an irreverence similar to that false devotion which the prophet rebuked in Achaz, when he refused to ask a sign of God, though God through His prophet bade him do so; the irreverence of not investigating the signs which God gives us for the purpose of being investigated, as if we knew better than He, and were more delicate and circumspect in our operations. The mere fact of the Sacred Humanity is a revelation in its sole self. We cannot think now what we should have thought of God without it. He Himself would have seemed different to us, because we should not have had even the half-light we now have regarding the mystery of creation. We know that an uncreating God would have been equally adorable with a creating God; but the worshipfulness of the creatureless God would have been simply unimaginable, a possibility lighted only from His own side, inasmuch as none of His Glory would have been projected in the shape of creatures to light it from the other.

But it is not only new ideas of God which we receive from the Sacred Humanity; it is also a positive way to Him, an approach which may be trodden, which must indispensably be trodden, even by such souls as know not they are treading it, like the straggling pilgrims who reach God spent and wearied and surprised out of the countries of the heathen. Out of it, moreover, come new kinds of union between the soul and its Creator, unions such as occupy mystical theology, and many of them of such a sacramental character as to have been unknown even to the Hebrew saints. Hence there is no minuteness about Jesus, which does not concern us. For every conceivably varying contact with Him is the communication of some new grace. It is itself some new method of transformation into Him. His innumerable mysteries are compounds of many mysteries, and the far-reaching glass of love can resolve them into almost countless worlds of distinct beauty, separate power, and individual significance. Of each of them it is true that it is not merely a picture but a power, not a beauty only, but a grace also.

We must look upon the Sacred Humanity as a world by itself, the head of all worlds, their pattern and their cause. The stars fly upon their silent courses. Some law, or some complexity of laws, whether it be those already discovered, or something simpler and more universal the discovery of which awaits science further on, enables orbs of immense ponderousness to wheel through the slightly resisting space, as if it were in grooves of ice, while space is mercifully made soundless, lest all creatures should be killed by the roaring and clattering and booming of all these worlds in their tremendous velocity. All these worlds are sustained by God. All are supported by Him on the three pillars, which are but one pillar, of His essence, presence, and power. But the Sacred Humanity is differently sustained. It is immediately supported by One of the Three Divine Persons. It rests wholly on the Person of the Word in a way in which no other creature can rest on a Divine Person. It has not even the support of a human personality of its own. By a glorious privation it lacks this natural support of its nature, while by a miraculous union, transcending all unities whatsoever, except the Unity of God, it is united to the Person of the Word. It is this Ilumanity, this compound of a human soul and a human body, thus lying in unspeakable repose on the Person of the Word, which we are now to consider more closely and more in detail than we have done before.

But where shall we get nearest to it? From what point of view shall we be able most clearly to see those marvellous operations which it so studiously conceals? Yet, while it conceals them, is it not also inviting us to the research of its secret wonders? When we desired to contemplate the Divinity of the Babe of Bethlehem, we let Mary lay Him down upon the sands beneath the acacia of the wilderness: whither shall we go now to behold the operations of His Sacred Humanity? It is clear that we must look at it from more than one point of view. We must go and live with Him in the Holy House of Nazareth, a sanctuary so saturated with His long presence, so inefifaceably consecrated by His miraculous years of hidden holiness, that God has set it up, for the present on the Adriatic shore, as a wonder-working tabernacle, a living House of Grace, in the midst of the Church, His larger House of Grace, until the end of time. Through the months of the four seasons, through the days of the week with their varying occupations, through the hours of the day from the pearly dawn until the starry dusk, through the quiet watches of the nights of sleep and prayer, we must familiarise ourselves with our Lord's Hidden Years at Nazareth. His real growth of Body, perceptible to us from time to time, would seem a worshipful mystery, when we considered who He was. Here in autumn He is lifting weights, which in spring He could not have lifted. The light is changed in His eye, because the maturity of years is deepening it. The tone of His voice is graver, because the power of years is toning it. The voice of the Eternal Word broke, like the voices of other boys. His Mother's ways come up upon the surface of His bodily gestures, and surprise us into tears. His limbs are longer, thicker, broader. The colour of His hair becomes darker. With years the beard of manhood browns His chin. We cannot watch this common growth of His human Body without adoring; for all proofs of the reality of His Human Nature are always new, always penetrate into the deepest recesses of the soul, and always take our love and worship by surprise.

But the seeming growth of His Soul is yet more wonderful. He appears more holy than He was a month ago. Grace looks as if it had developed in Him. It does not seem merely as if circumstances had opened wider fields for His grace, or had conferred upon them more advantageous positions. But it seems as if He grew in grace. The very seeming of such a thing is adorable, the more adorable because we know it is but seeming. His grace never grew from the first moment of His Conception. But greater wisdom gives grace more liberty. Does He then seem more holy, simply because He has grown wiser 1 But He has not grown wiser. This also is but a mysterious semblance, as we shall see presently; but here again the semblance is of itself adorable. Nevertheless He makes acquisitions, and this is truly a growth, yet in Him hardly a growth. Rather, it is one of His loving condescensions. He gains no new knowledge. He does not grow in science. He only becomes master by acquisition of the same science of which He was master before in higher ways. He knows certain things, such things as life's experience is capable of teaching, in two ways, instead of knowing them in one way. He has now a double knowledge of them, an acquired knowledge in addition to the infused knowledge He had before. But this learning by experience is a marvellous mystery in Him.

Then in that life of Nazareth how much is there which we cannot see! Every moment, waking or sleeping, that Sacred Humanity is the scene of endless and most heavenly operations by virtue of its union with the Word At all hours the Divine Nature is sending forth a power which as it were oozes down into all the faculties of the Soul and all the senses of the Body, interpenetrating them all with singular virtue and with exceeding glory, now as it were giving free course to its love of the inferior nature, and now marvellously suspending such of its excellent effects as are incompatible with the suffering or humbled state in which our Lord at the time vouchsafed to be. The secret life of the simple union of the Two Natures in the Divine Person is a vast series of wonders, whose scene is the House of Nazareth, but whose grandeur outshines that of all creation beside.

At times too, as if the better to realise the deep lying marvels and shy magnificence of Nazareth, we must fly to the summit of Tabor, and anticipate the day of the Transfiguration. There we behold those things blooming, which at Nazareth were kept jealously closed in the modest-seeming sheaths of the most trivial actions. Yet in this respect there is more comparison than contrast between Nazareth and Tabor. The mountain-top was itself a privacy, and the refulgence a " holy house " of light which screened Him as effectually as the sacred walls of Nazareth. Even the manifestations of God are shrouded in secrecy. Yet the Transfiguration was especially a manifestation of the splendour of His Sacred Humanity. It was not a change which came over it, nor a gift which was then and there granted to it, nor a mere external ratification of its honour from heaven. It was the outward blooming of that which had always been within, and had been ready to unfold its astonishing blossoms at any hour in the privacy of Nazaretli, u

There could be no strife between the two Natures of oui Blessed Lord.

Nevertheless we can hardly bring home to ourselves under any other figure their relation to each other during the days of His humiliation. It was as if the Human Nature were resisting the communications of the Divine. It was as if the glories of the Divine Nature were being muffled in the imperfections of the Human. It was as if the one Nature were getting the upper hand of the other alternately. So we should express, with obvious inaccuracy, the appearance of several of the mysteries of the Three-and-Thirty Years. The Transfiguration, under this figure, would be a visible strife of the two Natures manifested to a chosen few* Except in the case of His miraculous works of mercy, and those need hardly be excepted, it was perhaps in all His years before the Resurrection the solitary victory of the Divine Nature over the Human, the single instance in which the veils of humiliation were burned away, and the Human Nature persuaded to display those gifts which belonged to it in virtue of its union with the Word. Habitually it kept its own proper glory suppressed, as if it were a slumbering volcano within Him; and now on the top of Tabor a momentary eruption of its splendour was permitted. Yet it was all in such secrecy that it almost seems, we may reverently say it, as if it were less for the sake of the few spectators, less to prepare with compassionate artifice the weakness of Peter and James and John for the Passion, than to ease the love which His Divine Nature had for the Human, and as it were bribe it to keep quiet during the derelictions of the Passion. We must gaze upon it now that we may remember what that natural state was to which the Child, and then the Boy, of Nazareth was always tending, and which in His love of suffering and of us He was always purposely suppressing.

We shall not also understand Nazareth unless we compare the Sacred Humanity in the Holy House with the Sacred Humanity in its proper place in Heaven. In the hour of His Ascension heaven became a new place. It was not like what it had been before. There was the same Vision of the Most Holy in the quietude of its immutable magnificence. There were the same songs of the ancient kingdoms of the angels, swelled perhaps by the voices of the little human multitude that was newly come, and varied somewhat it might be in their doxologies by the presence of Mary's Son. Yet this could not change heaven. Nevertheless it was completely changed, changed by a greater change than creation was upon nothingness. This change was in the presence of the Sacred Humanity.

It may be expressed in a word, but it is a word lying far beyond the compass of our understanding. Here was God adoring God. Here was a finite nature out of which infinite worship was streaming. Here was a created life which was in a most awful way a double of the Holy Trinity. Here was a human Soul wrapped in the flames of the Divinity, and blazing there unharmed and inseparably one with the Divine Person. Here was an unveiled eminence of Soul with operations so transcendent as to inspire the highest angels with awe. Here was a dazzling effulgence of Body in such an inexpressible shining of material beauty as to light up the almost boundless world, wherein God has been pleased to locate the Beatific Vision of Himself. All this is summed up, and depths after depths far beyond it indicated, and to our blindness only momentarily illuminated, by the fact that here now for the first time in heaven was God worshipping God, the Go-equal adoring the Co-equal. I believe the glory of the Sacred Humanity in heaven to be simply incomprehensible even by the highest angels. Yet no change had come over it since Nazareth. The Resurrection was no transformation. The Ascension gave it nothing more than a local throne. Like the sensitive blossoms which close when but a hand's-breadth of cloud floats over the sun, so the Sacred Humanity concealed altogether this intrinsic glory in the Holy House of Nazareth, with its flower-leaves closed in upon themselves under the chill shade of humiliation; yet was it only so kept down by the might of a love which was vehement enough to redeem a world. Heaven has made no change in that marvellous blossom; but earth, before the dear glory left it, painted five red marks upon its snowy leaves.

But let us venture to look more minutely into this Sacred Humanity. We cannot picture to ourselves the likeness of a soul. The spiritual lineaments of our own immortal being are strictly unimaginable by us, much more so the lineaments of the Soul of Jesus. Yet theology teaches us no little about its operations and its eminence. As we have seen before, the beauty of God, that fountain in Him so little honoured in the present day, but in which the greatest minds of old were wont to feed their deep conceptions of His majesty, is as it were the abyss out of which the divine wisdom omnipotently evokes such devices as shall satisfy His insatiable goodness. It is thus we would express the relations of these Attributes to each other. There is a perfect facility in all the divine operations. He would not be God, if it were not so. Indeed facility is too difficult a word, inasmuch as it expresses the littleness of resistance, and therefore implies that there is some resistance; just as we speak of God choosing, though the word choice implies comparison, and at least a momentary hesitation, neither of which we can admit in God. This superfacility, to coin a word, of the divine operations, is something beyond the powers of oui language, and out of reach of comparisons drawn from created things. So that when we come to speculate upon any of God's greater works, most of all His singular works, such as the Soul and Body of Jesus, we almost unconsciously express to ourselves in the silence of our conception the magnitude of the divine work, by imagining the shadow of an effort even on the part of omnipotence. It is one of the necessary infirmities of our minds that we should do so.

Now if we conceive the almost infinity of space, the vast capabilities of the elements, the terrific ponderousness of matter, the huge orbs of millions of suns, the slinging and poising of these immense yet arrowy systems of worlds, and the complicated paths of all those rushing systems in their irresistible velocities, to have cost God no more effort than it costs the frosty air on a still autumnal morning to loosen a single golden leaf from off the tree, and let it waver down upon the silent stream below; and if we add to this, the unmeasured realms of spirit, populous with angelic species, each angel perhaps being worth as a divine work all the systems of the midnight sky, and still suppose them all to have flowed out of God's Hand without its stirring, as a thing falls from the hand of a man asleep; yet when we come to think of the creation of the Soul of Jesus, at once, to our imperfect ideas, the divine wisdom seems busy thinking, the divine goodness intently choosing, the divine beauty studiously reflecting itself, the divine power gathering itself up for the effort implied in the grandeur, the eminence, and the singularity of the work in which it is about to be engaged. This is our way of putting the matter to ourselves, untrue in itself, and yet helping us towards the truth. For this creation, the Soul of Jesus, is lovelier than the intelligences of the angels; it is vaster than sidereal

3IO SOUL AND BODY.

space; it is more various than material nature. Or it would be more true to say that it united in itself and unutterably surpassed all the actual magnificences of all other creations, whether Mary, angels, men, matter, or new creations yet to be. We can say almost all things of it. We can only not say of it that creative omnipotence so exhausted itself in it, that now it cannot equal or surpass it Perhaps in one sense no better soul was strictly possible, because no fitter one is possible. For the optimism of the divine works consists rather in the eminence of their fitness than in their absolute excellence.

Let us imagine this Soul to ourselves as a world of light, with its shores and waters, its woods and mountains, all fashioned of the purest glowing light, transparent throughout the whole of its immense orb, full of variety, full of softly flashing depths, unpartitioned yet unconfused, a translucent crystal world, seen through on every side, and on every side through its calm rich light God is seen, the beautiful Godhead, self-disclosed by excess of beauty and self-obliterated by excess of light. Without, it is piled high with intolerable sublimities of light whose pinnacles are hidden in the lightnings of the Eternal Throne. Within, it appears to withdraw itself in four abysses, now blending in one effulgence, now floating off from each other as if they were distinct, and now opening out one into another with such perspective that we cannot discern where one begins and the other ends, for, like light in unstable water, the divisions bend and gleam for ever. Then, though they seemed to be abysses, they are rather plenitudes, plenitudes of living brightness.

The first is the plenitude of nature. All nature seems to be there, and all the excellences of all natures. We perceive nature to be there in such wise as that this Soul is the Centre, the Cause, the Model, the Completion, and the Crown of all nature, whether angelical, human, or material, as we have already seen elsewhere. Such a beautiful perfection and glorious abundance of nature is in that Soul, as to include in it the rightful sovereignty over all natures, the root on which the grace of Headship is grafted, belonging to it rather in right of its Humanity than of its union with the Divinity; for the sovereignty of this last is of a different sort, resting on other grounds and due upon other counts. It has even a natural capacity, or rather a capacity in consequence of its nature, of receiving such a communication of the Divine Nature as no other creature, however sanctified, ever has received. God, it is said, communicates Himself to creation in four ways, by nature, by grace, by glory, and by the Hypostatic Union. But we better perceive the unity of creation as itself a transcript of the Divine Unity, if we say that God creates for the purpose of communicating Himself to things outside Himself, which are creatures, and that the way in which He does so is one, namely, by the Hypostatic Union. For, rightly considered, nature, grace, and glory are mere corol-laries of the Hypostatic Union. They flow out from it, being already virtually included in it. All natures outside God exist because of this assumed nature of the word. All grace is not only because of His grace, but from His grace and through His grace. All glory, angelic or human, is some sort of a transformation into the likeness of the Incarnate Son of God.

The second plenitude of our Lord's Human Soul is the fulness of its grace. We must but sketch in a few sentences, what it would require a whole treatise to evolve. Four depths are enclosed within this depth. He has, and none other has but He, the unshared grace of union, that irresistible penetrative unction of the Divinity which steeps, as in beatifying fire, the faculties of His Human Nature, and gives to its operations an illimitable worth. It is God's greatest work, done for this Soul alone; and it implies a union of the Father and the Holy Ghost with the Soul of a kind quite as unimaginable, as its union with the Person of the Word, though of a totally different character, another sort of indefinable intimacy with the Godhead. Then follows an abyss of sanctifying grace, which none can fathom, though we are told it comes within the possibility of being fathomed, because it is just short of infinite. Theologians not a few have absolutely pronounced it infinite.¹ If the least fraction of sanctifying grace literally outvalues all that nature has of dignity and worth, what must the grace of the Soul of Jesus be, to which the combined graces of men, angels, and Mary, multiplied in countless individuals, outspread over patient ages, hardly afford an approximation? Nay, if the opinion of some theologians be true, that all the graces of Christians were once numerically in our Blessed Lord, that all grace in us is only the presence by replication, as the schools speak, of some of the identical grace which was actually and physically in our Lord's Soul, and therefore that every grace is or has been actually and physically in Him before, then our graces are something more than approximations to His.t This doctrine presents us with a picture of His Soul, the fascinations of which can only be appreciated by long and loving meditation. It brings us into startling relations with Bethlehem, with Nazareth, and with Calvary. Yet there is another depth beyond, a serene capacious land filled to overflowing with the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. Not even excepting the higher angels, there are no spiritual creatures which we know of, of such² ravishing beauty as these peculiar created gifts of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. A slight lustre of them makes a man shine on the altars of the Church as a saint, and the nations see him afar off, and shout with joy as at a new creation of our Heavenly Father, and he does not wax dim through the thick ages, but is a steady light, giving light in the darkness of time, yet only like an unrisen sun, compared with the light, distinctive and distinguishable, which he will give throughout eternity. These gifts sparkled in the angels, and even apostles fell down to worship when they saw, mistaking so great a splendour for divine. They gleam in Mary with so full a ray that we are blinded to her true greatness, and only see her as we see shapes in the quivering shield of the sun. But they blaze their highest, unconfined and unconsuming, in the Soul of Jesus, in a breadth and depth and with a piercingness of which the most heroic saints would be incapable.

Beyond this again there is another depth, where, sweetly mastering all creations, meekly enthroning itself by the side of God, the grace of headship dwells. Behold! its unebbing tide leaves not one rim of shore, yet, out of it, all the graces of angels and of men have been drawn, and the deep feels it not. Through seven kingly arches, with no stint of magnificence in their vast design, but of giant stride, the grace is rushing at all hours in sacramental streams, or better say deluges, of love, over the outspread world. Countless other rents let out that sea of light in a thousand directions. The whole world outside of it streams like a cavern underground, and drips and shines for ever. Yet the inward ocean sinks not. All government, all right of judging, all dominion and all usufruct of creatures, all spiritual eminence, all infallible indefectible pontificates, all the prophetical sacerdotal, and regal prerogatives, of Jesus come from this grace of headship. It binds the two ends of time together, and carries them on with itself into an eternity, which, though it had a beginning, can never know an end. Look at the top of heaven, and see the sweet grandeur, tender for all it is so colossal, man-loving if ever there were love of man, of the glorious prince St. Michael; and remember that he was saved by the grace of this Human Soul equally with the relapsed sinner, whom the Precious Blood has saved by the peculiarly human method of redemption, and whom the single touch of a single Sacrament has just borne through a safe judgment into a secure eternity.

The third plenitude of our Lord's Soul was the fulness of His science. It must be remembered that we are not si)eaking of His omniscience as the Word, but, quite strictly, of the science with which His Human Soul was supematurally gifted, or which it had naturally acquired. It lies before us in theology as two vast kingdoms, which we see, as from a mountain, in confused loveliness; but into whose recesses the eye cannot penetrate, and whose horizon we cannot explore. We cannot even descend from our point of view to examine the landscape more nearly. If we go lower down, it has disappeared altogether. It is like the view we may have often seen from a high hill-top, a banner of green and gold and blue unrolled under a flashing sun, with the silver rivers striping it, and the purple ocean fluttering in the distant haze as if it was a fringe. There is also a third kingdom, which is shadowy and thin, as if it were but some images of the other kingdoms painted by the light upon the clouds, and moving there with indistinct outlines, as though it were a pageant rather than a possession. It is thus we may dare to picture to ourselves the science of our Lord's Human Soul. There is first His beatific science, whereby, in every moment and from the first moment of His life. He beheld the Divine Essence more clearly than all the heavenly hosts, and went nearer towards comprehending God than the highest angels have done in their long ages of intuitive vision, or will have done in the remotest epochs of eternity which we can intelligibly picture to ourselves. His Soul did not comprehend God, simply because such a comprehension is not within the compass of any possible creature. He saw more deeply into God, and He saw more in God, and what He saw He saw more lucidly, than any other of the Blessed; and it is probable also that He saw it in a more perfect way as well as in a more eminent degree. In every one of His mysteries, whether of joy or sorrow or glory. He possessed this science and beheld this Vision; and, in treating of the Passion, we shall have to consider those strange operations, by which in certain depths of woe this science was mysteriously turned off from the inferior part of His Human Nature. Thus the whole width of heaven's best beatitude was with Him always. If it is true that eye cannot see, nor ear hear, nor heart conceive, the blessedness of the baptized infant deceased in its fresh sacramental innocence, how far must we be from anything like a just appreciation of the beatific science of the Soul of Jesus 1 We may add figure to figure, it is true: but we are only losing ourselves all the while in painted splendours, such as sunset writes upon the countenances of the passing clouds.

Of the next kingdom of His science we may know something more; but it is only as geographers know of lands they have not seen. Their brightest words are cold, and they hardly leave a picture on the soul. His infused science was His possession from the first. It was, as theologians say, infused into Him in the first moment, because there was no reason why it should be deferred, neither is there any other time which for any cause could seem more congruous. By this infused science He surpassed all theologies and philosophies, all modern sciences and discoveries, and new

^i6 SOUL AND BODY.

sciences not yet dreamed of, and read all the secrets of angela and men, and all the griefs and wants, the exultations and contentments of animals. Some theologians, and one of no mean fame, Hugh of St. Victor, have held that He knew things hy an uncreated as well as a created knowledge. From this opinion higher authorities and the reason of the thing persuade us to dissent. It even seems more probable that He did not know by the infused science of His Human Soul all possible things, though of course He knew them as the Word. This is the nearest approach to a limit which we dare to set to the infused science of His Soul. We hold that it was infused into Him in the highest manner of infusion. We hold with St. Thomas, that by this infused science, all presents, pasts, and futures lay clearly and unconfusedly and in infallible light before Him, without effort or investigation, whether they be of natural or supernatural objects. By this science He knew without images, and therefore needed not the use of His senses to it, and so it was not suspended in His sleep. He knew all that He knew simultaneously, without succession or development, because, as Vasquez acutely remarks, if it were not so, then ignorance might in some sense be imputed to Him at least at certain given moments. The species, to use the old scholastic word, by which He knew, were more universal, or, to speak modern language, His ideas were more real, and absolute,* than those of the angels, and accompanied by a more self-evidencing light; for His science was infused into Him in proportion to His grace rather than His nature, which is an important principle to bear in mind throughout the whole of this subject. He saw things, moreover, as they are in themselves, and consequently in a loftier, nearer, more real, and more divine

• See the most interesting chapter of Amicus on the perfection of our Lord's infused science as compared with that of the angels. — Be Incarna^ tione, disp. xx. sect. xiv.

manner. How beautiful therefore must all the physical sciences have been to His Soul, thus seeing things down in their real beings, unbewildered by the fallacies of phenomena, and unfatigued by the processes of induction. All knowledge was necessarily theology to Him from this truthful method of His science. Thus there passed no shadow of ignorance over His Soul, not the faintest or the most gauze-like veil of it, so far as it is an intellectual imperfection; and that, be it remembered, not because He saw all things as the Word, but by the perfection of the infused science of His Human Soul.

The third kingdom of His science comprises the knowledge He condescended to acquire; and of this we have spoken before. He knew nothing by acquisition which He had not already known by infusion. He stooped to learn in a lower way, what He knew before in a higher way without learning at all. His acquired science is rather a revelation of His character than an addition to His glorj\ He would be more like us. He would know things in our way, and come to know them as we do. As He let the rain beat upon His Face, and the wind play with His Hair, and the lightning blind His Eyes, and the thunder vibrate in His Ears, so He let experience beat upon Him; and what came of it was what we call His acquired science. He will allow Himself to receive the impressions of experience, not deceitfully, but silently, as fathers let their children tell them what they knew before, and out of love will not backen their forwardness by declaring their intelligence to be needless. They give pleasure by seeming to learn. It was in some such way that our Lord condescended to acquire knowledge by undergoing experience. It is not so much a matter of His Mind. It is rather one of those attitudes which reveal His Heart. He clings to all the imperfections of our nature to which He can decorously submit Himself, even although

3i8 SOUL AND BODY, they be not necessary to the grand work He has come to da Or rather it intimates to us how much more true a view oi the Incarnation we should take, if we could more habitually think of the Incarnation as itself His work, rather than of the work He did when He became incarnate, regarding this last but as a manifestation of the first. But in this matter of His acquired science we must never forget that theologians are agreed that He learned nothing directly either from angels or men. They regard such an idea to be inadmissible, because it is unbecoming to His dignity as Head, Master, Teacher, and Illuminator, both of angels and of men; and He filled these offices, not simply as the Word, but in the Human Nature which He had assumed.

The consideration of these plenitudes of His grace and of His science leaves us little to say of the fourth plenitude of His Soul, the fulness of glory. Indeed it is in its own self uuspeakabla We may contemplate the glory of His Soul either as it is in heaven now, or as it was in the years of His Childhood. Like His grace, because answering to Hia grace, it lies before us in four regions of astonishing splendour, lost in light yet cognisably dififering from each other. There is first of all His beatific glory, which answers to His sanctifying grace. It is the world of His sanctifying grace in the full bloom of its magnificence, and thus immensely surpassing in its radiance that grace which we have already seen to be marvellous. On no side is there any limit to be discovered to this country of beatitude. Its confines are lost beyond all the imaginable limits of which we have the power to dream. Its vast plains stretch onward and onward, until the soul is wounded with gazing upon such outspread immensities of light. All we know is that it has limits somewhere. In our manner of speaking it is close upon infinite, and yet it is truly finite, finite to the eye of God, practically infinite to the thought of creatures. We need not linger to enquire of what multitudinous bright things this light is made, nor how piercingly bright each element of it is even in itself. Thoughts become dreams and dazzle us, when we try to fix them on such a subject.

Beyond those distant confines, which our fancy has not reached, and yet also as if by some play of light represented inside the kingdom of His beatific glory, is His exemplary glory, which answers to the heroic grace of the gifts of the Holy Ghost. It is this glory by which He is the pattern and model of all the glory of all glorified creatures. There is not an angel, but hia glory, difi'ering characteristically from the glory of all other angels, is as it were a drop of resplendent spray flung from the mighty cataract of the glory of the Soul of Jesus. Each saint is an orb of himself, a star, as St. Paul calls him. He is known by the light he gives, and can be named from the coronal he wears, and there is no other coronal in heaven like his. Yet he is but a beauty borrowed from the glory of Jesus. Each saint, each of the redeemed, each boy in heaven who had had the use of his reason for a month or two, has a sanctity with a character of its own, and that character is substantially expressed in the features of his glory.

Perhaps each baptized infant may have one sort of natural character rather than another upon which his future grace would have been grafted: and the glory won for him by the waters of the font may be allowed to fulfil that undeveloped sanctity, and give him a beauty of his own in heaven. This seems the more likely when we consider that reasons are never alike, and that he will at least have the full use of reason, and of his own reason, in heaven. The gestures, the tempers, the play of unreasoning children form a prophetic mirror on which their future good and evil are frequently depicted with minute fidelity. It is but a step further for glory to anticipate sufficient of the developed character to give a fashion to the radiance of the soui. The pattern of our Lady's glory is taken from the glory of the Soul of Jesus. She perhaps may represent all His glory upon a lesser scale. At all events He is the glorified Soul, on the model of whom the glory of all spirits and souls has been moulded, and there is none comes so near to that magnificent exemplar as the soul of His own Mother Mary. In the countless darting splendours and innumerable refulgences of heaven, to which the little silver flashings of all the sunlit oceans are as nothing in their multitude, there is not one gleam, one play of light, which in its cause and pattern is not already visible from the throne of the Sacred Humanity.

A third region of glory opens on our sight. His sovereign glory, which answers to the grace of headship. This is the glory of His human royalty. It is in this glory that He rules the whole creation of God. The manifold attributes of His kingship over the angels belong to this. The sceptre with which He sways the empire of the redeemed is a ray of this brightness. The beautiful operations of His judicial power, exercised many times in a moment the whole world over, are illuminated and made worshipful by the shining of this glory. There is a moonlight even over purgatory caught from the luminous mountains of this land. We know Jesus chiefly as our Saviour now, and He is endless in His loveliness, continually disclosing Himself to us in new relations, and detaining our delighted love in new captivities. In heaven, without losing Him as our Saviour, we shall see more of Him as our King, and many an unsuspected grandeur and many an unimagined attraction will reveal themselves to us in His royalty. All this will be from the region of His sovereign glory. They who have an enthusiastic devotion to the Church are at once meriting 9- share of this glory, and anticij)ating it.

But, once more, a fresh region of glory opens upon our sight. It is His glory of filiation, which answers to the grace of union. It is here His glory seems to lose itself in the abysses of divine light, and to merge in the lightnings of the Godhead. His Sonship is no mere adoption, like that of the highest saints and of all glorified creatures. We shun the very word adoption, when we speak of Him, lest we should seem to derogate from the immensity of His exaltation. Eternally the natural Son of God as the ever-begotten Word, He is also the natural, and not the merely adopted, Son of God as Man, because of the union of His Humanity with the Person of the Word. This is the topmost pinnacle of His glory. We have nothing to do here, but to be silent and adore.

If from the courts of heaven we turn to the Infant Soul in Bethlehem, the same glory is already there, not only in its causes and its roots, but in its substance and possession. It has not to be achieved. It is already won. It lies in His grace, and His grace was ungrowing from the first. The vastness of His merits and the marvellous series of the Three-and-Thirty Years may deck it with some external ornaments, which would not else have shone there. But upon its substance they made little or no impression. It belonged to His Soul, it was in His Soul, when He lay upon His Mother's lap. What are the triumphs of His Church, what is the outward exaltation of His Name, what even the multitude of glorified companions whom He won for Himself by His merits, compared with those interminable realms of glory which belonged to Him in His own right from the first?

We have multiplied words, not without the guidance of theology, in order that we might obtain some remotely worthy conception of our Lord's Human SouL Let us look at it for a moment from one other point of view. Every z creature has a worth of its own, with which its Creator ha« mercifully enriched it. Yet it is more to us to know what his Creator thinks of him, than to know what he is worth himself; and it is not so much his own worth, as God's love, which is the measure of the divine appreciation of him. Nevertheless God's esteem of creatures becomes the creature's real worth, because it raises him to His own height. Let us think then of the divine complacency in the Soul of Jesus, in order that we may thus understand its singular eminence in all creation. The Holy Trinity loved it more than all creatures put together. We could not doubt this for a moment without impiety. The Father has Himself declared it from heaven. He rejoices in it as giving Him room for the liberality of His gifts, and space in which to mirror His own perfections.

Everywhere else in creation, even in the vastness of sidereal space, His glory is cramped. The littleness of creation will not hold the grandeur He longs to pour into it. But the Soul of Jesus is a spiritual super-angelic heaven in which the sanctity of God can expatiate, and reproduce itself in a created form, not altogether unwortliy of His magnificence. There is enough in that Soul to form the joy of all creatures for ever; yet all that joy is from the love which God bears to it. The Holy Trinity broods over it in adorable delight. Yet each of the Divine Persons also has His own complacency therein. Its natural. Sonship makes it unspeakably dear to the Father. His Paternity is His own blessedness. So content is He with being the Father of the Son, that He never began begetting Him and never will desist, so dear to Him is that unutterable mystery. But here is a second filiation of the same Son accomplished in that miracle of the Incarnation, which contains and involves all His external glory, because it contains and involves all creation; and behold! as in return, the especial characteristic of the created sanctity of that dear Soul is intense devotion to the Father's glory. The Holy Spirit loves that Soul with a love peculiar to Himself. It is in some special manner His own appropriate creation. He lingers over it with a dove-like complacency. He is for ever drawn to it because of the abundance of His own gifts which it contains. To the Word who shall say how inexpressibly dear that Soul must be, to which He has united Himself with such an unparalleled union? We sink out of our depth the moment we enter upon the thought of the love between the Person of the Son and the glad Nature which He assumed. Hence it is that oui devotion to the Divine Person of our Lord is always the measure of our devotion to His Human Soul; and Mary is the pattern to us of both these two devotions, which the fire of love soon melts and mingles into one.

Such in the gorgeous creation of God is the Human Soul of Jesus. From His Soul let us turn to His Body. Let us consider it first of all in its relation to His SouL The body of man is a mystery which on this side of the grave we can never hope to comprehend. Admirable as are the things which philosophy or science can teach us of it now, they are as nothing to what the resurrection of the flesh will teach us hereafter. This is one of the reasons why the Resurrection of our Lord is a mystery so dear to our devotions. We dare to regard it as a portrait of ourselves. We feel our bodies here on earth more than we feel our souls, and we come to love them more; and almost unconsciously, even in spite of Christian mortification, we put them uppermost in our thoughts. We listen with awe to the accounts of the inward trials of the saints, not without sympathy but with less sympathy than awe; but our heart leaps up, as all hearts do, to the heroes who suffer corporal martyrdom. Jesus Risen is what we are to be, what we are travelling towards, our pattern, the earnest of our own transform ation into its likeness, nay, in itself containing the very living power by whose energy we shall be transformed. Our whole frame is sown with wonderful possibilities. Roots of glory are embedded in it everywhere. Every pore of it may be a new sense under other circumstances. It can put on immortality. It can clothe itself in more than solar light. It can compass worlds in its mature agility. It can rival spirit in its amazing subtlety. If all this is true of all the bodies of the just, what must be said of the Body of Jesus, the cause, the model, the sovereign, the very food of our bodies 1

Its relation to his Soul is not therefore to be lightly thought of. His Body was itself a beautiful creation, a world of wonders, a master-piece of God. It has been the greatest and most energetic power in the history of the world; it was the instrument of creating the world over again, and its sufferings have shaped the destinies of every man that has been born into the world. It was necessary to our Lord's Soul in order to complete His Human Nature. The Hypostatic Union could not have been accomplished without it. While the momentary separation of His Body and His Soul was an awful mystery, involving the very accomplishment of our redemption, their permanent separation would be an imperfection and a dishonour. Neither was our Lord's Body a clog to His Soul, as ours is, enfeebling its grasp, shortening its reach, obstructing its sight, and hindering its aspirations. It was to Him an additional power of sanctity, an additional breadth of life. The Soul loved it for many reasons, but perhaps for none so much as its being the special instrument of suffering, and so enabling the Soul to quench, if not wholly yet with fearful copiousness, the thirst for suffering with which it was inflamed, and which it declared at the last moment to be still unsatisfied upon the Cross.

Moreover His Body was that portion of His Nature for nrhich He put Himself directly in debt to Mary; and, while this was another source of the love wliicli He bore it, the immense exaltation of His Mother is also a measure, not only of His love of His Body, but of its place and dignity in the creation of God. His Body also heightens the mystery of His assumption of a created nature, because it brings Him lower down into creation, even among material things. This makes His condescension the more wonderful, and His embrace of the universe the more complete. There would be a sadness and a forlornness in the exile of matter from the Hypostatic Union, which it is now difficult for us to calculate, so entirely has the opposite and most consolatory fact grown into our minds and become part of ourselves. Infinitely loving as it would have seemed, how much less touching, benignant, pathetic, would the mystery have been, had the Word taken to Himself an angelical rather than a human nature 1 How diflferent would all our theology have been, and how unspeakably different our idea of God! Banished to the confines of His creation in what a region of cold and darkness should we have wandered, where the fires of His central throne would scarce have warmed us, whether left to the punishment of our sins, or contented with some poor natural beatitude, or, if saved by His grace, on such other terms of intimate love and glad familiarity from tliose on which we are now, when the dear angels seem strangers in heaven rather than ourselves.

By the Body, also, the Soul of Jesus has in some sense learned new things, and now enjoys peculiar pleasures through it, and gains especially the multiplied presence of the Blessed Sacrament. Moreover it has an independence of the Soul, which is a part of its relation to it. For it has its own immediate union with the Word. It has not been assumed through the Soul, but separately and in itself. So that when the Soul left the Body on the Cross, the Body was still united to the Person of the Word, and, dead as it was, claimed absolute worship and aU other divine honours. It is entitled to a separate worship of its own, and its divine union was in no wise impaired by the absence of the SouL

Surely then it must be with intense reverence that we draw near the Infant Body of our Lord to gaze upon it, not with a careless curiosity, but with adoring love, and a wonder which for His honour longs to become more and more intelligent He tells us His whole Heart at first sight; for He lies before us in all the littleness of an Infant. He is not full grown as Adam was. Though He was to be the second Adam, while He was in reality the first Adam, before Adam, the type of Adam, and not Adam His type, nevertheless He will be unlike Adam rather than forego any shade of humiliation which He can obtain by being but as one of Adam's children. He will have a Mother, like the rest of us. He will owe His Flesh and Blood to another, as we do. He will surrender the privilege of being fashioned immediately by God's own hand, as Adam was. He will be little, and helpless, and hampered by all the incommodities of infancy, because, although He is in that way less like Adam, He is more like us, and participates deeper down in our dishonours. Thus it is that everything He does tells us all about Him. Every shifting attitude in each of His mysteries is a breathing-place to relieve the immense love of His Sacred Heart. In this sweet choice of infant stature He reveals His character, and supplies us with a new motive of happy confidence.

We must consider also the exquisite delicacy of His Body. It was formed by the Holy Spirit, and bears upon its workmanship the marks of that Divine Person's peculiar complacency. It was formed out of Mary's purest blood, in which the pulses of sin had never beaten, upon which the kingdom of darkness had never had so much as the shadow of a claim, but which had stood from the first in the broad light of God's choicest grace. His Precious Blood was a beautiful emanation from a fountain already incomparably beautiful in itself, because of its exceeding purity. All the works of God are faultless in their fitness, whatever other imperfections it may be His good pleasure to leave, as if inevitably attaching to their created nature. Now the Body of Jesus was created a fit dwelling for His Soul; and we have seen already how great the dignity of that Soul was in the esteem of God. It was formed also to suffer exquisitely, in order to accomplish the great work of our redemption. Hence its sensibilities were quickened and refined, and all its capabilities of feeHng rendered delicate, and active, and rapid, and acute, with the power of communicating thrills of an intensity which we could hardly comprehend.

It was in these respects like no other human body that ever was. If we could have seen it as it really was in itself, we should have been both amazed and terrified to see a vessel of such heavenly fragility moving about among the coarse forms and in the jarring complexities of common earthly life. Neither must we forget that it was formed also to bear, without breaking, impetuous torrents of glory. That little infant frame, white as a snowdrop on the lap of winter, light almost as a snowflake on the cliill night-air, smooth as the cushioned drift of snow which the wind has lightly strewn outside the walls of Bethlehem, is at this moment holding within itself, as if it were of adamantine rock, the fires of the beatific light, the stupendous ocean of the mighty Vision, the gigantic play of eternal things that come and go and live within its SouL A Person, omnipotent and infinite, sits within those white walls of fleshly marble, and they do not even vibrate with the marvellous indwelling.

The beauty of His Body is beyond what art has ever dreamed; and it is a beauty only to be discovered by eyes which have been touched with the special euphrasy of heaven, in order that they may know God's beautiful things when they behold them. Its beauty is a joy in heaven at this hour; and what must beauty be which can gladden the Blessed there? The immaterial angels gaze upon it with astonishment and delight. The saints yearn after it until in some spiritual way they become shadowy likenesses of it themselves. Theology does injustice to art, and yet must be allowed to go unblamed for what it does. It cannot help itself. It is a necessity of the eyesight of its science. It turns from the loveliest divine Babes of Raphael, deeply wounded, almost angry, only dissipating its anger by clearing its heart with tears. So dishonourable, even unlovely we must say, are all pictures of the Holy Child compared with that colourless unoutlined vision of Him which theology sees always in her mind. But what have the lines and colours of earth to do with the beauty which is a magnet up in heaven?

Its likeness to Mary is something more than part of its exceeding beauty; and it is a characteristic of it which we must never fail to notice. Part of the mystery of her greatness is in that adorable similitude. At the first, God communicated His image to man; now woman communicates her image to God. Who does not tremble at the mention of such incomprehensible condescension 1 Whose heart does not burn with joy at the thought of what His Mother was allowed to do? Of how much spiritual nearness and of how many deeper similitudes is not this likeness the symbol and the suflBcient evidence? Oh wonderful to think of! the little white lily is blooming below the greater one, an offshoot of its stem, and a faithful copy, leaf for leaf, petal for petal, white for white, powdered with the same golden dust, meeting the morning with the same fragrance, which is like no other than their own 1 God copying His own creature, — creation has seldom had a sight so fair to see!

But the urn full of Blood, the urn of Flesh within that Body, is the most wonderful of all. Doubtless there were other hearts of new-born babes in Bethlehem that night, which, measure for measure, might be of the same dimensions as His own, and with the same curves of the common human heart as His; and the blood in them was dear to Him, and allied to His, because it was soon to be poured out for Him in cruel martyrdom. But there was no heart like to His, and there was no good in any heart which was not there because of the good that was in His. But that infant Heart which sent forth the tears He shed, which gave the tone and impulse to the sighs He uttered, which played upon His lips in smiles so full of meanings for Mary to interpret, which rose and fell during His wakeful sleep, — it was one of the greatest wonders in God's creation. Its adoration was worthy of God. It was a more gigantic choir of the divine praises than all the stupendous worlds of which God is master. The impetuosity of its littleness wrapped the majesty of God round about in the strong embraces of its worship. It sang more songs than all the angels, and sweeter songs, and they were more divinely sung. It kept more lamps burning before the Throne than there will be spirits and souls in heaven, when it shall be fullest.

Nay, they were fires rather than lamps, unquenchable watchfires round the Uncreated Fire, and not unseemly in their exceeding nearness to it It could offer oblations in some sense equal to God Himself, and matching His immensity. Its love was a very living shadow of the Holy Ghost. Itself unconsuming, it consumed all things else in honour of the Most High. It had more love of God in it than all the love that God gets elsewhere, outside Himself. It had more love of man in it than there \b elsewhere in the world, outside of God. It confused nothing, and forgot nobody. We were in it We had our own place in it at that very hour. It rested in us; yet it rested nowhere out of God. It reposed upon our little returns of love with a repose more real than our love, and yet which was unreal compared with the tranquillity with which it reposed in God. Its love of Mary was its nearest approach to rest in creatures. Its utter rest was only in the deep will of God.

The blood that went and came, that ebbed and flowed, in •that heart-shaped urn of flesh, what volumes might not be written of its grandeurs 1 By it alone is accomplished the whole spiritual chemistry of the regenerate earth. It washes away the foul taints of an unclean world, and defiles not its own rosy brightness in the washing. It dilutes and neutralises all the poison of creation, and absorbs no poisonous qualities itself. It transfigures what it touches. It glorifies where it falls. It deifies that which it rests upon. Its miracles are the most prodigious of all miracles. Their instantaneous conversions are almost incredible. It hides itself in Sacraments in a manner which the highest science is unable to detect. It acts upon the substance of the soul with the keenest and most spiritual transmutations. The more it sheds, the more it has to shed. It distils freely out of the glorious veins of heaven into thousands of chalices every day. Yet the veins bleed not, and no one sees it falL The Sacred Heart sends it at each pulsation to the uttermost ends of creation; and it returns momentarily as pure as when it left the Heart, but laden with booty for God's glory 80 plentiful that it seems to encumber heaven. It must communicate itself. This is the blessed necessity of its life, as it is also so adorably the case with the full life of God. We are always wet with this Blood. It is perpetually falling upon us. We leave the marks of it on everything we touch

There is the stain of Blood upon our whole Christian life. It is this which makes life so awful, because it is such an endless deifying of what is human. "We are so marked with it that our guilt in the Crucifixion is brought home to us beyond a doubt; and yet it is just these stains which are our acquittal. We weep because it has been shed, and we do well in weeping. Yet, if it had not been shed, we should all have wept eternally.

His Flesh is hardly a mother's arm-full. Yet by an astounding miracle it is the food of all other flesh in the grand Sacrament of the altar. It is our Lord's Body with which we have most to do on earth. It is His Body which is prominently worshipped, rather than His soul, in the Blessed Sacrament It is His Body pre-eminently which is trusted to our keeping, and which resides abidingly amongst us in tabernacles made with hands. It is His Body which we ourselves spiritually are; for His Church is truly His Body, and it is this which makes the condition of schism 80 blighted and forlorn. He touches us by His Body, feeds us by His Body, makes us one by His Body, yea makes us His Body. It is the Hand both of His Soul and of His Divinity, the Hand to baptise, the Hand to confirm, to absolve, to communicate, to anoint, to marry, to ordain, the Hand that touches and does the miracles, that takes hold and lifts up, that points the way and leads on, that strikes those who deal over-lightly with it, and that heals so often with the compassionate roughness of its blow. That Infant Body is shrouding its glory, as we gaze upon it: but that is no trial to our faith. We see the glory there, for all it makes itself invisible. But there is one thing wanting in the Infant Body, one thing which may make us slow to recognise it for the same as the body in heaven. It wants earth's seals. It lacks the Five Wounds, to which it clings 80 fondly as to retain them on its throne, not for oui reproach, but for our everlasting jubilee. The Infant Bodjf needs thus to be more earthly in order to be more manifestly heavenly.

We have done. The union of this Body and Soul is the Sacred Humanity of our Lord, a Nature with no personality of its own lying under it, and supplying it with a human self-consciousness. It lies upon the Person of the Word, not inertly as the whole helpless creation lies in the sustaining hand of its Almighty Maker, but united to the Divine Person, and instinct with richest life. Exuberant in its own nature, it is exuberant most of all in its Divine Union. Such is the Sacred Humanity. Its perfection is in the union of the Body and the Soul. We have seen that it is acknowledged and worshipped as their Head by the angels who are of a different and superior nature. The likeness to it in glory is the end to which all that is high and holy among men is tending. It is capacious enough to satisfy an eternal desire of the Eternal Word. It is the greatest world of all the worlds, the Central World of the Divine Decrees. By the separation of the Body and the Soul, and exclusively and precisely by that, the Passion was consummated and the atonement made; and by the reunion of them in the Resurrection, and exclusively and precisely by that, our justification was completed. He died for our sins, says the Apostle, and rose again for our justification. As the magnificence of God is in His Unity, so the grandeur of creation is in its unities, which shadow forth the Unbeginning Unity. Second among these unities is the union of our Lord's Soul and Body. There is no other such union in creation, except that greater union, belonging to them only, and belonging to each of them, by which they are both united to the Divine Person of the Word; and of this union the Holy Ghost was the principle. It was His fecundity outside of God, who had no fecundity within God; and thus did the fruitful Spirit carry on outside of God that free divine life whose necessary course was closed in His own infinite and eternal Procession.

From this dread thought comes one thought more. Inside the Most Holy Trinity it is equally divine, equally adorable, to produce, to be produced, or not to produce. Much more therefore to create or not to create were in God equally adorable. Thus we gaze with astonishment upon this world of the Sacred Humanity, the magnificence of the Hypostatic Union, the resplendency of our Lord's Human Soul, the energy and beauty of His Body, the sublimity of their union, and the natural impersonality of them both. We see with amazement how all these things are mixed up with God, and how God would be unknown and inconceivable without them, and how the whole of His external glory is implicated in them. Yet were they, and with them all creation which hangs like pendants from them, to wither away, and dissolve, and be effaced in its own original nothingness, and divinest oblivion to cover it all, the whole system might drop from God, as the ragged silver mists drop from the sunrise, and melt into nothing, and go nowhither, and Ilis grandeur would arise the same, and shine into itself, pouring into its own bosom all its splendour, and upon its bri^^^itness there would be no vestige of the vanished worlds, the lost creation. The ruin of things would be but a fresh flash of His magnificence. The loss could in no wise attaint His grandeur. The Threefold Solitude of the old eternity would come back again, and He would have been immutable all the while. 0 what must Thy grandeur be, 0 God! in whose light the greatness of the Sacred Humanity thus pales to nothingness!

But let us turn back, like frightened children, to that mystery of love. It is no show, no festal pageant, not a brightnesis followed by a darkness, not a glory that can pasg away. The Eternal has become a little Babe. That will now be true eternally. The Incomprehensible lies infantine, and smiling joyously, on the lap of an earthly Mother, who loves us more dearly than our own unselfish mothers ever loved us. She gazes on Him: so do we. It is Flesh. That light is out of an Infant's eyes. We, with her, privileged by faith as she by sight, watch the pulses rise and fall. We listen to the beatings of His Heart. It is all flesh and blood, beautiful exceedingly, mysterious exceedingly. We lean over; we stoop down; we feel His warm breath against our faces; we kiss His living lips. Mary would have it so; it was she who taught us to be venturesome and free; — and who, if not she, would know His will?

Verily it is all flesh and blood. Are we not disquieted to do great things for Him? It is the wonderful, the terrible, the all-knowing, the unbeginning God, who lies so little and so calm on Mary's knee. It is the infinite Creator, blessed a thousand times for His uncreated majesty, and now equally a thousand times for His created littleness and lowliness and loveliness. It must be the masculine efi'ort, the persevering strain of a life-long dependence upon grace, which alone can rightly honour the all-holy Babe, the almighty Little One, the eternal Child, as well for the mystery of His gentleness, as for the exulting faith, whereby, with our hearts upon our lips, we can say with the Church those few tremendous words, which make the angels and archangels to bow down, and the strong bright thrones of heaven to totter and to tremble in an adoration which blends fear and joy in one, — Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et Homo factus est 1 i 335; '

Footnotes

1. Penafiel, Hurtado, Bernal, Vega, and many of the later scholastics. ↩

2. This opinion was taught by some of the doctors of Salamanca; also by Cardenas De Injinita Oratia Deiparce, by Meratius, De Incarnatione, disp. 23, sect. 4, and by Nieremberg, Prezzo ddla Divina Oratia, lib. ill. cap. 12. ↩