Section I. The Trinity in Unity

The problem of the world often weighs heavy on our spirits, and for different reasons at different times. One while it is that life is weary and difficult. All about it seems long and tiresome, as if it never would end, and we could never ho.d on till tie last. The pressure of duties, instead of being lightened by habit, is aggravated by continuance, while the powers of endurance are worn out or weakened. The result of it all is disgust with our daily duties, want of devotion in our spiritual exercises, and the loss of sweetness and obligingness in our intercourse with each other. Another while our trial is that life is dark and without prospects. Just as a summer day sometimes closes in, and the sky is obscured by a coating of grey clouds, which have grown together with out warning, and form a silent, motionless, impenetrable mass; so is our sky overcant and oppressive. Everything looks wrong. We cannot work because we are languid; 22 (263)

and we cannot rest because we are anxious and irritable. We do not know where to find fault, though we know that fault there is, and that it is in ourselves.

Another time when we have been quietly occupying our minds with devotional things, and living in a tranquil course of prayer, thoughts of another order begin to drift upon us, and at last gather in such numbers and with such force as to master and possess our minds. They are not exactly temptations against the faith, but they are akin to them. The Church seems to lose in our own minds the dignity it possessed. We are inclined to criti cise. Things which lately impressed us now make us peevish. The world's side of the question grows upon us. We do not quite see, though it was so extremely clear but a while ago, how modern movements of polity, civilization, and science, fit in with the position and actual operations of the Church. We do not think theologians do the world justice; and the conversation of pious men on the subject sounds to us flippant, self-sufficient, and wanting both in a wide knowledge of facts and a larger temper to weigh them and to appreciate them: while Catholic writers appear to fall short of the intellectual standard of their adversaries. Then there are great vexatious questions which rise up suddenly in our minds, often considered before, and which we imagined we had dealt with and laid to rest satisfactorily; but now they swell to prodigious dimensions, and seem imperiously to require answers, and we cast about in vain for such as shall satisfy us in our present mood. It dawns upon us that the world is very good, and the people of the world very good, and yet that all this goodness is mostly without grace. Or on the other hand it comes to us that the world is enormously evil, and the very enormity of it makes us terrified to give the Christian answers to the questions which straightway arise: and so we come to look quietly on heresy and schism, as if there might easily be evils more terrific than those. Besides this, the world is so loud and positive on its own side; and in ppite of ourselves this positive decided air and tone car ries us along with it. We begin to give the world a more respectful hearing, because we think we have done it an injustice heretofore. If in this crisis we happen to fall in with good people who have never been so disturbed, and who treat these difficulties lightly, and meet them with some common-place solutions, or who regard them merely as symptoms of moral disease, woe be unto us; for we grow angry with truth when it is represented to us as these good people represent it, as at once superficial and unjust, arbitrary and yet shallow. How shall a man who does not see a difficulty be able to answer it, simply because another puts it before him?

Then our difficulties change. We seem to lose our equilibrium. We have reckoned upon grace and ourselves for certain duties, and have in consequence involved ourselves in certain responsibilities; and we are out in our reckonings. Either we have mistaken ourselves, or we have not calculated our own defects sufficiently, and their bearing on our work; or old habita have lost their power and died out, or for some hidden reason grace lies inoperative in us. What is the matter? Are we passing into a different spiritual condition? Are we going to cease to be religious men at all? Are time, and life, and the necessity of persevering, about to treat us as we read of their treating others, and to be too much for us? We are in the position of astronomers who have drawn up tables to go by, and are all thrown out because they have omitted to allow for certain inequalities, and surrender themselves to an ill-humoured despair because they have not vigour enough to sit down and make their calculations over again.

It does not remove the difficulties to say that all these are temptations, as they really are. To give them their true name does not remove their difficulty. They are part of the restlessness and impatience of the imperfec tions of our understanding, as well as of the vanity, self-love, and morbid sensitiveness of our moral nature. Be sides which they are effects which we might have reckoned on beforehand from the power of the world and the bright light of its empire, its wisdom, and its civilization. It would be contrary to all laws if we could move in our orbits without any eccentricities, in the presence of so monstrous and so attractive a mass as the world and the world's belongings form. Nay, the more we observe what is going on around us, the more we strive to keep pace with a state of things which it is our duty to impress, and which we never can impress while we are be hind it; in a word, the more thoughtful we are, the more at times must the disturbance of this mass be upon us. Long thought will set it right, if with long thought we join humble prayer, and a cheerful promptitude in our relations with others. The keen suffering, sometimes the intolerable anguish, of these trials are necessary, both for our own good, and for the power of doing good to others. That they are, not universally, but generally, accompanied by faults on our side is clear. But we must be careful not to exaggerate this. On the whole it does not appear the wisest course either wholly to entertain such tempta tions or wholly to repulse them. Both the efforts are bad, and do the temptations in question too much honour. Diversion and distraction seem to be at once the most reasonable, the most easy, and in the end the most successful methods of recovering our lost peace and working back into the old sunshine again.

Of these distractions none is more powerful or tran quillizing than devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. Many a time when a man is wild with the questions, the doubts, the despairs, the uncertainties, the fears, with which a view of life has surrounded him, and which are barking and baying at him, like so many dogs, he goes by an instinct of grace to the Blessed Sacrament, and in a moment, without effort on his part, all these shrill voices are silent. His Lord is with him, the waves are still, the storm is abated, and, not after further voyage but straight way, he is at the haven where he would be. One look at the face of Jesus, and the clouds fall away, and there is light. The light of the tabernacle illuminates the Church, and the illumination deepens the darkness of all that is outside. Not flesh and blood, but the Eternal Father has revealed to us His Divinity, as He did to Peter of old, and though in ourselves we are ready through weakness to deny Him, yet by His grace we are ready to die for Him. No one conies to Jesus, except the Father draw Him, and then Jesus shows us the Father, and it suffices us. Thus the Blessed Sacrament is everything to us. We have our dearest Lord with us, what care we for aught else? Darkness is only pleasant shade, when He is nigh. Disquietudes are worth their pains, for the extreme sweetness of having His gentle hand to smooth 22* them down. Difficulties were desirable to go through, if it were only to see Him come forth, the sun of truth, and illuminate all things with so sudden and so radiant a beauty. And the repose of it all is so wonderful! For it is there, at the door of the tabernacle, that we find our true place in creation, that our pride is tamed while our wounds are being dressed and healed, and our restlessness is made ashamed while it is rebuked by that voice less love. What we guessed at and doubted heretofore, now we feel, we touch, we taste, we know. Our own littleness, the world's grandeur and its mischief, the glory and the justice of God, the manifold meanings of Jesus, and the joy of being in His Church, all lie before us in their proper places and in their true proportions, clear, beautiful, and harmonious. In a word, to have God so given up to us, to be with us and to be ours, as He is in the Blessed Sacrament, is our all in all.

But there is another thing to be observed. Not only is the Blessed Sacrament a sure, and not unfrequently an instantaneous, remedy for all those mental perplexities which are so intimately connected with moral culpability in ourselves; but somehow or other almost all the diffi culties in life are attracted towards the Blessed Sacrament and explained by it. Difficulties in science, in morals, in theology, in history, in the Church, in God, all seem to come and group themselves around the Blessed Sacrament, as though it were to sun themselves and place themselves in the warm, invigorating light. Thus nearly all the problems, which tease and vex us in these days, are more or less solved, or shown to be solvable, by the Blessed Sacrament. This is an ominous beginning; for it sounds like the opening of a controversial discussion.

But it will not really be so, as you will see presently. Devotion is iny object, not controversy: and I shall show this in the outset by quietly taking for granted as true, and without proof, the whole of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, as taught by the Council of Trent. My object in this third Book is as follows. To know God and to understand His ways is the great end of life, and to walk in His presence is all sanctity. Now God is the great difficulty of the present day. Where He is, how much He does, how much He claims, why He does it and by what right He claims it, what claims, if any, He allows to other things, all these are questions which form intellectual difficulties, in physical science, in politics, in metaphysics, in law, in theology, in all the relations be tween the Church and the world: and on all these diffi culties an extraordinary bright and soft light is thrown by the phenomena of the Blessed Sacrament. But the seeking after God and finding Him is not only, or principally, an intellectual satisfaction. It is also, and much more, an act of devotion, of worship, of delight, of love. It is an enjoyment of God, and as such a foretaste of heaven. Hence the prosecution of such a search is eminently devotional; and it is in that spirit that I invitft you to undertake it. You are weary of controversy. No wonder. God be praised! Controversy is indeed a cross, a penance, an austerity, worse than fasting, watching, or the harassing hair-shirt. But if I were writing for controversial end, I should begin by proving the Catholic doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament, instead of which I begin by assuming it: and, assuming it, I wish to show you that it is the exemplar and the type of all God's operations, the model of all the ways in which the Creator vouchsafes to be, to work, to hide Himself, and to manifest Himself, in His own Creation.

There is nothing in life one-half so sweet as to think of God. The hand feels after Him in the dark, grasps a, thousand things and relinquishes them instantly, for they are not what it seeks: they are not God. The eye wanders over the multitude of objects restless and dissatisfied; but when it lights on God, it has found its peace and the vision of its joy. God is the home both of the mind and heart; and when His will has, of a truth, in act as well as in desire, become the home of the will, then it is heaven already. But in seeking after God we must bear this reverently in mind, that we can never tell how He would condescend to act in any particular case, except by knowing how He has actually deigned to behave in other particular cases, clearly ascer tained either by knowledge or by faith. We know God only by what He has done to His own creation, or by what He has told to His own creation; for it is only in these two ways that we know anything of His Divine Perfections. What I mean is this, that from our know ledge, which through revelation is immense, of God's Perfections and His Life in Himself, that is, His Trinity in Unity, we cannot proceed to a calculation of how He would act externally to Himself, though we might know in some measure how He would not act. We can only know how He would act from the ways in which He has been pleased to act already. We have no faculties which could lead us to infer beforehand the act of creation from the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. We cannot conjecture that God being what He is must act in such or such a way. It would be infinitely unsafe, and hardly reverent, to make such conjectures. None of God's operations outside Himself are necessary. All His ope rations within Himself are necessary. The Eternal Generation of the Son is necessary. The Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost is necessary. But everything outside Himself is free. Thus we could not say that be cause God is the Perfect Being we know Him to be, therefore it was necessary there should be a creation to manifest those perfections. Neither will ye say, as Malebranche seems to say in his system of optimism, that if God created at all He was bound to create in the best possible way; for to God there can be no such thing as a best possible way.¹ Nevertheless it is perfectly true to gay that all God's external operations represent eternai ideas in the Divine Mind; and consequently that an observation of them increases our knowledge of God: and it is true, further, that whatever increases our knowledge of God increases our love of Him.

It is plain therefore that, although we cannot argue from God to the works of God, but only from His works to His works, or from His works to Himself, it is nevertheless of great importance before we proceed to an examination of His works that we should have such an idea as He has been pleased Himself to give us of what He is in Himself, of His life, His glory, His perfections. We shall thus get better hold of our subject, and also start with such profound reverence in our minds, that when we shall come to use more common language about Him, it shall not be coupled with common associations. I must try then to give you a sketch of the Catholic doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity. God is and lives and reigns independently of us. He was when we were not. He needed us not. We contribute nothing to Him, but what is purely accidental. But we are because Pie is; and we are what we are because He is what He is. Hence the interest to us of knowing what God is like in Himself.

Alas! how hard it is to tell even what the Church has told to us. In truth the mystery of the Holy Trinity should be spoken of with tears rather than with words. We believe, yet we cannot describe. We adore, yet we can never comprehend. Multiply our under standings beyond all human calculations, and our affec tions beyond all that we can imagine of angelic love, and changed as we should be, the great mystery still remains as far from being comprehended as ever. Nay, it is just all this which makes the Most Holy Trinity a mystery of such indescribable tenderness. At once and in the face of this august mystery we are children, happy, hushed, and awe-stricken. The very Church amazes us by the child-like character of her offices on the feast of this mystery, by her constant, simple cry all day long of 0 Beata Trinitas! 0 Beata Trinitas! A

Of all mysteries it is the most ancient. In approaching it there is no such thing as antiquity: antiquity is novelty, where it is concerned. We mount up, not only through the history of the Church and the fortunes of the synagogue, not only through the times of the patri archs and the long lives of the antediluvian fathers, not only through the creation of man, but also through the countless cycles of organic matter and irrational life, and beyond that, of inorganic matter, for how many million* of secular ages who shall tell? \Ve pass beyond the grand creation of intellectual light in the various king doms of the angels, and rise to the silence that was be fore creation, when God was and only God, and God infinite in glory and in joy, and in the plenitude of His own self-sufficient and mysterious life: and then we are only come to the threshold of a whole eternity, of an eternity, unbeginning, unflowing, unmaturing, unrevoiving, an effect without a cause, while it is at the same time the cause of causes, a life and an interior fount of life, immovable, bodiless, and passionless, not a time or a place or a motion or a sound, but a simple act, one Nature and more than one Person, distinct yet one, equal and undivided, sharing alike in one eternity and in one essence, in order but without subordination, in procession but without precedence, Three Persons, Two Persons breathing, yet One Principle, and, together with the Person breathed forth, One substance, One Nature, One only God! These are words, but they represent eternity.

But the Holy Trinity is not only the most ancient, it is also the queen of all mysteries. It is enthroned over all. It rules and presides over the destinies of all. It embraces all within itself. It gives out all from itself. It lends to all their beauty, their force, their fitness, and their divinity. It is full of depths, of mysteries that we know and mysteries that to us are unknown. Especially does it contain twice three abysses of external operations, into which angels and men desire to look, and yet turn giddy as they gaze, as much because they arc sweetly in ebriated with the excesses of divine goodness, as because their understanding swims and at last gives way to extasy in the glories of the divine power. These six abysses are Predestination, Creation, Incarnation, Justification, Transubstantiation, and Glorification. These, with the mother-mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, form the various sciences which compose that prime glory of the human mind, the marvellous edifice of Catholic theology. Yet the Holy Trinity is not only the most ancient and most queenly, it is also the last of all mysteries. The mysterious decrees of the Divine Predestination will obtain their accomplishment with a fulness and perfection which infinite love could alone confer upon them. Different creations may possibly be worked out, leaving their results with God, and new creations follow in their room. For anything we know, Creation may pass on from orb to orb through millions of worlds, as the Divine Fingers may choose to press the bright keys of His stupendous instrument. The world whereon the Word was incarnate may be the spiritual centre of unnumbered systems of worlds. The Incarnation will have gathered its glorified family round about its Head. Justification will have become a reminiscence of terrestrial history • and Glorification simply an inadequate expression of a present life. Transubstantiation will be a miracle no longer wrought,² or we at least shall be beholding Jesus in His proper heavenly species. But when all mysteries have come to some sort of an end, are resting in some centres, and are satisfied in some adequate fulfilments, there will still remain the broad, the untraversed and untraversable mystery of the Holy Trinity, and we ourselves shall be in rapture in its lap through all eternity. Surely then the Holy Trinity is the sura and substance of human knowledge, the mark of human hopes, the single object of human adoration, and the sole sufficient joy of human love.

Let us come nearer: let us look over the brink. By what figure shall we present the vision that lies before us? Shall we call it a boundless ocean, with the in tolerably glancing radiance of the sun upon the unity of its manifold waters? No! for then we should fail of ex pressing its most attractive feature, its unutterable tranquillity. Even the beautiful sea tires the eye at last; for on the changeful shore we soon come to long for the repose of the wood, the mountain, and the lake. Shall we compare it to a city on the steeps by the water side lighted up from within, and reflecting its countless lights on the depths below? Here we should miss its unity. A mountain range would not give the sweetness of its outspread radiance, nor a region of glorious forest the amazing variety of its fertile power. No! we can liken God only to God Himself. But let us look over the brink: let us ask the Church to name for us some of the magnificent details which we behold. Again twice three abysses lie before us, which lips, that the coal of the seraphim has not touched, may not do more than indicate. All of them are inexhaustible objects of joyous extatic contemplation; and at this moment, many that we love, whose day, 0 happy they! is done, are gazing with the delights of beatific awe into those very depths, now in thrilling silence, now in loud raptures of unearthly long.

The First Abyss is the Unity in Trinity, the Unity of 23

Essence, and the Trinity of Persons. This "is the dis. tiuctive peculiarity of the Christian object of faith, which neither human reason nor angelical intelligence could have ever reached. The Unity is three-fold, a Unity of Es sence, and again of Majesty, and again of Simplicity. Yet in this triple Unity, the utterest unity conceivable, the Three Persons are distinct. They have their own properties, and they stand in different relations to Each Other \ and yet They are but one God: and, as theology even to human reason can indicate, God would not be God if in the Godhead there were more than Three Persons, or less then Three.³

The Second Abyss holds the Relations of the Three Divine Persons to each other. In theological language a Personal Relation joined to the Essence makes a Person. Thus, there is the relation of Paternity, which constitutes the Person of the Unbegotten Father, the relation of Filiation, which constitutes the Person of the Eternally Be gotten Son, and the relation of Passive Spiration which constitutes the Person of the Eternally Proceeding Spirit; while the fourth relation of Active Spiration differs from the other three and does not constitute a Person, as be longing already to Two Persons, but reflects back from the Holy Spirit, the Limit of the Godhead, to His One Principle of Two Persons, the Father and the Son; and thus is made up the Trinity of Persons by these Four Rela tions, and each of the Three Persons is as it were the centre and the terminus of the Others.

The Third Abyss contains the Particularities of Each of the Three Divine Persons. These flow m mysterious

III.] A PICTURE OF GOD. Wl ways from their Relations; and it would require a treatise to speak of them at any length. In the Father we perceive His Innascibility, and His Fountain-Head of Divinity, as two virgin yet prolific wells, giving forth immeasurable grandeurs, and wonders without name; and yet most wonderful of all, pre-eminence is not among them. lu the Son His Equality of the Father, and Image of Him, are the ever-flowing fountains of His own magnificence, and of all that vast variety of worshipful perfection which the Church understands by that one thrilling name she gives Him, disclosed it may be by Mary to the Evangelist, — the Word! In the Holy Spirit we behold the Link of the Father and the Son, the Limit of the Godhead, the Jubilee of the Father and the Son, nearest to Creation as human words count nearness, and out of these three Particularities, as out of copious salutary deeps, we draw evermore fresh motives for a peculiar love for this Third Divine Person.⁴

The Fourth Abyss holds and hides the perfect Equality of the Three. Where shall we look for equality, and

3U8S. ill.

not find it here? Can lines and numbers, measures and proportions, likenesses and differences, by any processes known in human science, exhibit equalities which shall be more than faithless shadows of the unblemished equality of the Holy Trinity? If we look at the perfection of the Substance, it is absolutely identical in All the Three. If we regard the grandeur of Their Attributes, it is un speakably equal in All the Three. Their Relations do not disturb it; nor do Their Particularities, by change or compensation, re-distribute it. The title to the prostrate homage and adoration of Their creatures is even and equal and co-eternal in the Three. Thus, while there is no distinctness so complete as the distinction of the Three Persons, no Relations more solid, no Particularities more decided, nevertheless this adorable beauty and variety of the Distinct Persons leaves unruffled their inexpresssible equality. The equality expresses for Each of the Three what the Unity expresses for all. And "who is sufficient for these things?"

The Fifth Abyss is their Mutual Life in each other, their Perichoresis or Circuminsession, as it is called in the Fathers and in the Schools. This is the Interior Life of the Godhead, as if Each Person dwelt in Each and sat in the lap of Each. It is with each of the Three Divine Persons an intimate, total, and mutual residence of all Their one Substance in Each Other, together with an incessant thought and delighted contemplation of Each Other. We can do no more than expand the words which the Church has given us. It is easy and joyous to hang over the marge of this abyss in prayer, while the heart is being nurtured with love out of its mystic deeps. Yet there is nothing out of which we can hew conceptions, or which we can shape into definite thoughts, or utter in intelligible words. All that we can see to express in that abyss are seven operations of eternal and infinite love in exquisite combinations. There is first the Father's love of the Son, and secondly the Father's love of the Holy Ghost, and thirdly the Son's love of the Father, and fourthly the Son's love of the Holy Ghost, and fifthly the Holy Ghost's love of the Father, and sixthly the Holy Ghost's love of the Son, and seventhly the love of the Father and the Son producing the Holy Ghost, who yet, though produced, is co-eternal with Them Both. Now if we think of created love, angelic love and human love and think that all such love, and all the possible love producible from ten million worlds ten million times more perfect than this, and more populous and more long-lived, with Mary multiplied ten million times, could not amount to more than the feeblest approximation to a figure of one of these seven loves: if we think of the various kinds of love, paternal, filial, fraternal, conjugal, and the com binations of which they are capable, if we add omnipotence to their bewildering human intensity, and imperturbable calm to this omnipotence, and then add together all this seven-fold, — we may get some such distant idea, as befits our darkness and nothingness, of the profound jubilee of the Interior Life of God.

The Sixth Abyss embraces the Mission of the Divine Persons, and brings us to the edge of the gracious ex ternal operations of the Most Holy Trinity. God does not stop in Himself. This is the mystery of Creation. Mission is like the Exterior Life of God; and it is not only the communication of His love, the imparting of

His perfections, so far as they can be imparted to crea- 23* tares, but the doing of this by the Mission of a Divine Person. And the Mission of the Divine Persons is a different thing from Their mere omnipotence or goodness. We shall gain a clearer idea of Mission if we contrast it with Creation; for though the Missions of the Divine Persons are efficacious works; yet Their efficacious works are not necessarily Missions. It must therefore be distinguished from Creation. I)e Lugo says with consummate subtil ty that the relation of the Creator with His creatures is of such a kind, subsisting so really and decisively in the crea tures themselves, that if by impossible supposition there were two Gods, one in One Person, and One in Three, and both had creations depending upon them, the crea tures of the Triune God would be intrinsically different from the creatures of God in one sole Person, and that the difference, whatever it was, would have reference precisely to the fact of His being a Triune God.⁵ Mission must not be confounded with any such impress of creative power and love. Mission implies creation as already ex isting. There must be creatures to whom the Divine Per sons may be sent and given. Mission implies the Eternal

Procession of the Persons sent; yet, as St. Thomas says, the Procession does not constitute the Mission, which is temporal and not eternal. According to the angelical doctor, the invisible Mission of the Second and Third Persons, together with the indwelling of the First, haa been from the creation of the world, and was simultaneous with creation; because creation was effected in a state of grace, and invisible Mission has no other end than sanc tifying grace, which is "at once both given and sent;" and all who are in a state of grace enjoy the Mission of the Divine Persons. Moreover, wherever there is the in visible Mission of the Holy Ghost, there also is the in visible Mission of the Son; and while the Mission of the One differs from the Mission of the Other, in that Their origin is different, it being in one case the Generation and in the other the Procession, nevertheless the two Missions are common in the production of grace in the soul, though from our point of view the Mission of the Son is eminently to the understanding, while the Mission of the Holy Ghost is eminently to the will. Thus as in the Most Holy Trinity the Father is always the fountain of the God head, the Son always being begotten, and the Spirit always proceeding, so in our souls as we grow in grace, day by day, the Holy Ghost is ever being sent to us by the Father and the Son, and the Son is also ever being sent to us by the Father, and the Father unsent is ever dwelling in us j so that, when we are in a state of grace, we are a mysterious image of the Divine Processes, and a living temple of the Holy Trinity with the three great powers of our soul, will, understanding, and memory, appropriated, according to human conceptions, to the three ever-blessed

Persons.⁶ Yet though Mission is different from creation, and is a further condescension, it equally with creation falls under the theological axiom, that whatever God ope rates outside Himself is an operation of the whole, Trinity. f There are two kinds of Mission, visible and invisible, both full of various interest and holy speculation. Visible Mission is manifested by some outward sign disclosing the advent or presence of the Person sent, as the Incarnation manifests the Mission of the Word, and the tongues of fire the Mission of the Holy Ghost. Invisible Mission is accompanied by some spiritual and invisible effect in the soul, as is the case in the justification of a sinner. Theologians say that in visible Mission one Person may be sent and manifested without Another, whereas in all invisible Mission both the Persons proceeding are sent, and although the Father is not sent, He gives Himself to the soul with the Others. In a word, in invisible Mission, the Divine Persons are so substantially present to the soul, that if, by impossibility They were not present to it by Their immensity, They would be so by reason of the gift of sanctifying grace. It is difficult to put into words the sublime and gracious intimacy with God which this mystery implies. Each Mis-⁷ eion is thus a real gifi ot the Persoo sent, not a simple communication ot grace or outpouring of spiritual gifts: and as the Father sends the Son, and the Father and the Son send the Holy Ghost, and the Father Himself remain? unsent, the Diviie Missions are exactly a reflection of the Generation and Procession within the Holy Trinity, to gether with the adorable Innascibility of the Father. Theologians also distinguish the ends of Mission as being also threefold. The Divine Persons are given to us by Mission, first as a principle of meritorious action, other wise impossible, secondly as an object of knowledge and love, and thirdly as the Sovereign Good;⁸ and it is the consummation of our joy in the Beatific Vision that there the Uusent Father gives to us Himself in such a manner as He has not given Himself before. We have the Father and then, as the apostle St. Philip says, it suffices us.f

Such, in the fixed language of the Church, is the doc trine of the Most Holy Trinity. I have drawn from it no conclusions; neither have I enlarged on the portions of it which are capable of, and have actually received, most holy and beautiful commentary from different schools ftaat atpvov pivot. Cutech. viii. If it is, in any sense, more to the Eternal Father to be Father than to be God, how much follows from thiy, in ascetical and mythical theology, for us who are members of His Son!⁹

of approved theological opinion. I have contented my self with putting before you, in its huge dimensions, this royal dogma of the faith: more would have led me away, perhaps from its fascinating interest far away, from iny present subject.

Such is the ever-blessed Object of our faith. Let us now endeavour to picture to ourselves the circumstances by which His gracious manifestation of Himself in heaven is surrounded. There is the sacred Humanity of Jesus, there also is our Blessed Lady, with the spirits of the angels and the souls of the saints. There are around Him the flower of the generations of men, an innumerable multitude, St. John calls it, of redeemed souls. Each saint is, as it were, a separate world, a distinct theatre of God's creative love, a very kingdom by himself of the most various and astonishing operations of grace. When we are most struck with the lives of the saints, not one-half, as the queen of the south said of Solomon's magnificence, has been told us. We see but the outside of the wonders, and yet that fills us with holy admiration, and sometimes almost tries our faith. Now heaven ia filled with multitudes of these, and in a far higher state of purity and beauty than they ever possessed on earth. The incomparable graces of the Apostles, the bravery of ' the martyrs, the beautifully varied patience of the con fessors, the magnificent intellect of the doctors, and the white brightness of the virgins, in a word, all the royalty of earth is gathered there; and what is its attitude before the Holy Trinity? One of the most utter abasement. These souls feel themselves less than nothing; the most surpassing graces are as impurity before the radiance of that immense majesty; the loftiest faculties of the human understanding are as the feeble ignorance of a beast by the side of that unfathomable wisdom. There is no sense of power, no victory of discovery, no joy of sufficiency, no clearness of perfect comprehension, in all that glorious multitude. Their understandings are grown beyond human dimensions, their affections sublimed into some thing we should beforehand have conceived unattainable, their men's minds are more like angels' spirits, and their glad souls are annealed in the fires of that strong Vision so that they shall never break to all eternity. Yet they tremble with joyous fear. Abjection, abasement, prostration, self-annihilation, these are the words by which we should at once describe their worship and their happiness, Dot their worship only, but their happiness as well.

It would be long to recount all the marvels which the ology teaches us of the holy angels, of the might of their power, the breadth of their intelligence, and the fervour of their love. They are our elder brothers, the earlier family of God. The various kingdoms of their hierarchies lie before us, in species inconceivably diversified. Their graces, their powers, their gifts, their operations, their work, all are different, the one class from the other. By them they are distinguished into hierarchies, and those again into choirs, and the choirs into species; and by them also they are grouped together in congenial multi tudes of similar beauty, power, and office. From what theology can tell us, it is plain that, if we could know it, the perfections of the angels would form a far vaster, more various, and more beautiful science than the natural history of the various kingdoms of this material world. Probably it would disclose to us many Divine Perfections of which we now do not suspect the existence, because we neither know the names of these perfections nor can conceive the ideas of them. So far surpassing mortal glory are these wonderful creatures, as we may conceive that early angelic creation would surpass this later and indeed modern creation of man. Daniel, the prophet, hardened, as it were, to visions from their number and their brilliance, and St. John, whose eagle eye was learning to see clear amid the dazzling splendours of the Apocalypse, boih alike when they beheld an angel, fell down and worshipped him, as if the light of God had suddenly broken out before them and had thrown them down in an instantaneous extasy of adoration, like the three hours extasy of Tobias when St. Raphael at parting had shown him for one instant the loveliness of his spiritual countenance. It is not easy then for us to ex aggerate the intellectual and spiritual elevation of the angels above ourselves. Yet how does Scripture represent their demeanour before the Vision of the Most Holy Trinity? They hide their faces with their wings! The Thrones quake and the Powers tremble! Their mighty and glorious nature is shaken to its very foundations; its depths are stirred and troubled; their life and strength and self-possession seem to be passing from them. Deeper and wider than the seas of earth, yet the waters of their being appear as if they would dry up before the eye of that glory; and the very simplicity of their nature, seems as if it could not endure the searching of that fire, and live.

But look at the queen of all these angelic kingdoms; at her whose empire is over land and sea, over the dim but fruitful provinces of purgatory, and over the glad realms of heaven itself. God has wound His bright glory round about her. He has crowned her with a crown of His own devising, and studded with gems of most mysterious splendour and hidden virtues. He has raised her on a lofty throne, and all over her He has hung His own perfections. He has put into her hands an orb of far-reaching mediation, and the very cross of Christ sur mounts the blessed ornament. He has trusted her hand to wield a sceptre which she wields with a second omnipotence, an omnipotence of maternal prayer. But how weak are all words to tell the queenly adorning of this Esther of the heavens! And what is the fashion of her regal bearing before the Most Holy Trinity? She is bowed down by profoundest humiliation. She abases herself to the lowest depths of spiritual homage and prostration. She is annihilated in the vivid sense of her own complete nothingness. She is only exalted and re strained upon her throne by the force of God's own power and love, which does sweet violence to her humility. She who sang the Magnificat, and has entranced the nations and the ages with its thrilling strains, now finds the breathless silence of her Immaculate Heart and her more than Angelic Mind, scarce a fitting worship of so great a majesty, of so incomparable a God. And so, like the burning bush, her whole being of unimaginable sanctity, science, and affections, is evermore consumed unconBuniingly, like the choice frankincense of the angelic and human creations combined, in fragrant worship and the perfumes of ravishing sweetness before the Throne of the Holy and Undivided Three.

Shall we dare to speak of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, the beaming sun in whose borrowed brightness Mary's moon is so unutterably fair and beautiful? What 24 s can we venture to say of Him? Right in the heart and centre of that heavenly Vision, the radiant fires of the Godhead glowing round about it, and the flames of infinite perfections embracing, penetrating, enwreathing it, throned even there is Human Nature, while the harps and hymns of spirits and of souls are filling heaven with its praises. Purer than the sun's light and more transparent than crystal, a Sacred Heart of Human Flesh and filled with the sweetest of Human Blood, from which ten thousands of chalices on earth are daily drawing and yet they drain it not, beats as if it were the very Heart of the Holy Trinity. To that Humanity, clothed in robes of divinest light and crowned with uncreated splendours, the Eternal Father turns with love, and with delight in effable, yearning over it with unimaginable desire. To that Humanity, as to His peculiar handiwork, made out of Mary's flesh and blood, the Eternal Spirit turns, with jubilee and satisfaction, surrounding it with the many-voiced silver sea of His uncreated love. Who shall tell the embrace in which that Humanity lies, close folded in the arms of the Eternal Word, sustained, upheld, appro priated, assumed, in a blissful and unparalleled union with His Person? With what intimate exultation, with what divine complacency, with what clear out-pouring of boundless love, with what eagerness of tranquillest possession, with what joyous satisfaction of contented wisdom, does not the magnificent Word keep in His living union the Human nature which is His? And how is not the ology almost baffled to tell with what ingenuity of lavish generosity He communicates the riches of His divine things to this dear Nature? He has assumed it, and penetrates it through and through with the glory and the light that He had in the Father's Bosom before ever the worlds were! There at least, we may at length believe, there shall be the unruffled calmness, the untouched conscious dignity, of rightful familiarity, of worthiest intimacy, of the liberty of unshrinking love. Dwelling in the midst of the everlasting fires, cradled in the lap of that incommunicable light, drawn out of the closest vicinity unto the very majesty itself, can the Sacred Humanity of Jesus know fear in heaven? Can that Humanity, to which is given the uttermost parts of the earth for its possession, and to which all judgment and pomp of doom are solemnly committed, be possessed with fear, with dread, with reverence, with blissful awe? Yes! the faith teaches us that that immaculate Flesh is pierced with reverential fear, that in that beating Sacred Heart, and down those full veins, and along those nerves, and in that brain, and in all the realities of the Human Frame which He has stooped to assume, and in every sensitive faculty of that Human Soul, which has ceased not to be utterly human because, blessed be the infinitude of His compassions! it is now utterly His, runs the living reverential fear with which the presence of the Most Holy Trinity saturates the created nature. It runs there, it will run there for evermore, while the Precious Blood circulates, in joy and gladness and rapture, and yet withal a fire of deepest, holiest, chastest fear. Every moment, like the pulses of its life, the thrill darts through it, by which the created Nature, however glorified, recognizes, acknowledges, and does homage to the incommunicable majesty of the uncreated.

Ages roll over that kingdom above. Thousands of years come and go; but they change not the life, and touch not the felicity which is there. Countless suns rise and set, countless moons wax and wane, the planets and the stars and the huge systems of the midnight skies perform the journey of their enormous secular year, and start again. It is thus that men take account of timej but the least vibration of vicissitude is unfelt in the peace of that eternal harbour of Spirits and of Souls. And yet the Vision grows not common. Not the highest spirit, not the amplest soul, can learn familiarity with the unveiled and ever-new majesty of God. There is no such thing as becoming used to it, any more than it is possible to become satiated with it. Its fires cannot grow common: its aspect can lose nothing of its first overwhelming and immutable splendour. This is an indubitable truth, and yet one, from the laws under which we live, most difficult to realize. Every one has for ever the bewildering joy, the exulting freshness, of his first glance. It is always the same, yet it is ever new, always familiar and ever strange, always infinitely desirable and at the same time infinitely dreaded, ever an inexhaustible love and yet withal an undimiuished fear, for evermore a rapturous enjoyment and yet no less an everlasting worship. The Sacred Heart itself is filled brimful of the beautiful spirit of adoration. Thus, as it was at the first hour of each inhabitant there, as it was the moment the angels stood, and were confirmed in grace, and the veil fell off the Vision, and the eye of Michael, glowing still with his celestial conquest, lighted upon it and enjoyed it first, as it was the hour when Mary Assumed stood on heaven's threshold, and when each single soul, newly arrived from earth or purgatory, began its eternal life,— • so;s it still, so will it be evermore, with each and all of them. The sacred horror, as the ancients would have called it, the instinctive amazement, and childlike, or better call it creaturelike, worship, which the Vision generated in them at that first moment, neither ebbs nor flows, but stands at its original high-tide for ever. Deep awe floods like a sea the Spirits of angels and the Souls of men, and even the mighty mind of Mary is lost and loves to be lost in its depths; for the mystery before her is even to her eternally incomprehensible.

But there is something more about that Vision besides its never becoming common and familiar. Not one in that bright company but is secure of his place and crown for ever. None fears to fall. No thought, no fancy, of insecurity, breaks in upon the peace of his unalterable joy, of his indefectible possession. Yet there is no intrinsic impossibility of sinning, behind which they are inexpugnably entrenched. This the Sacred Humanity of Jesus alone can boast, by virtue of the Hypostatic Union. Mary herself is not intrinsically impeccable. Impeccable she is, like the whole multitude of the Glori fied, and with her own special prerogative of sinlessness; but it is God's fidelity outside of them, not any physical or spiritual necessity within them, which is their security. It is the Vision, the operation, the vehemence, the bene diction of the Vision, which makes it an impossibility that sin should ever come nigh them any more. The Vision is immovable; eternity is stationary j and so long as God is God, and because God is God, they can fall and sin no more. Grace has passed away, and with it the need of leaning upon it; but glory has to lean on God as utterly and sheerly as ever trial and probation leaned their whole weight on grace, and, even hardly so, 24* won their difficult way to heaven. How sweet is this law of continual dependence on God! How delightful to gratitude and to humility to find eternity as much in perpetual need of Him as ever was poor and doubtful time! How beautiful the exhibition of the sovereignty of God! 0 how it gladdens the heart to know, that while we have so many things out of which and beyond which to break our way, never will one link of our dear thraldom to God fall off us, never shall we do aught else, the higher we get, than fall into a more utter and complete dependence upon Him!

If these things be so, what shall we say? If the brightness of the Vision be such that it cannot grow familiar, if its vehemence be such that it makes us of itself impeccable, what words can reach the awfulness of the glittering coruscations of the Eternal? Nay, the very height of the celestial joy is in the depth of its boundless awe. While we gaze upon the Vision in worshipful fear, we gaze with more than the security of a fondled child. It will not harm us. It is our life. It will enclose us and wrap us round; it will enfold us and transform us; and will sweetly and potently press us to itself, and imprint upon our created souls a kiss of immortal peace.

Such, once more, is the object of our Faith. Will you bear with me if I go out of my way and delay you on the road, to say something which is so much on my heart to say that I cannot forbear? It is not the place to interrupt a train of thought with practical reflections; but — if the heavenly worship of the Undivided Trinity be such, what must the earthly worship of Him be, but one of prostrate adoration and of tender tears? And if our devotion be free and easy, unhampered and disen cumbered, firm of tread and bold of eye, swift of speech and decided in petition, light in the choice of words and exuberant in the flow of thought, if it be not chiefly and essentially a devotion of fear, how little like is it to the devotion of the celestial spirits! 0 it is the mischief of all mischiefs, this loss of holy fear! For this fear is a special gift of the Holy Ghost, to be sought for by prayer and penance, by tears and cries, by patience and by impatience, and by the very yearnings of an earnest and familiar love. It has always seemed to me to be very and unexpectedly beautiful when in the special office of our holy Father St. Philip, knowing what manner of man he was and what peculiar spirit he was of, he says in the antiphon of the Magnificat, Come, my children, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord: for how else shall the saint teach us divinest love?

Let us pas« in review before ourselves the ancient patriarchs, and their deep awe of God, how they trem bled with holy fear when God was nigh, and looked upon all things as unspeakably hallowed over which He had so much as cast His shadow. Jacob, who was so familiar with Him that he wrestled with Him and would not let Him go till He had blessed him, stands eminent among the saints of God for the gift and grace of fear. The very ritual of the old synagogue was steeped in fear and reverence. David, the man after God's own heart, wa, ever praying for an increase of holy fear. Our Blessed Lord Himself, says the apostle, " in the days of His flesh was heard because He feared." Mary and the apostles were filled, as none others ever were, with the beauty, the tenderness, and the excess of this heavenly fear. Hundreds of dying saints, around whose flesh and souls still clung the fair white robe of their unforfeited baptismal whiteness, trembled in every limb as they pondered the possible judgments of Infinite Purity, be neath whose judicial eye they were about to stand. And if they needed this degree of fear, 0 what degree need we? Why do frustrate vocations so abound? Whence come the multitude of unfinished saints, that lie all round us like the broken models of a sculptor's studio? Whence so little perseverance in the devout life, and such wearying and untying even of the vows and pro mises whereby men have bound themselves to God? Whence but from the lack of fear! We criticize God's ways and works, and treat Him as if He were some artist who fell lawfully enough within the jurisdiction of our impertinence. We make light speeches about Him, which we could hardly make about the saints and go unblamed. Our very prayer, when we come to pray, shows more than aught else our lamentable want of fear; for what is it too often, when the pressure of sharp sorrow does not wring from us a natural cry whose very truthfulness makes it reverent, — what is it, but want of preparation first of all, ungracefulness of posture next, then petulance in our petitions, and straightway thankless oblivion of the resolutions with which we closed?

But how to mend all this? Much may be hinted in few words. Let us bring back again the old-fashioned respect for the very Name of God; for He has specially legislated for it in His commandments. Let us cultivate in ourselves a clear-sighted fear of His awful and uncertain judgments; and this will be specially done by discountenancing in ourselves any bold or trustful views of death, as if it were easy to die, or safe for us just now, or as if we had risen to any such heights as that we should dare to desire it for ourselves. We should ponder the last judgment, not as one of the terrors of the Lord which had its use in our conversion and is misplaced now, but as being infinitely terrible to us even in the best mood and highest grace we have ever yet enjoyed. We should avoid, as a pestilence of the soul, hasty wishes that we were in purgatory, or anything like a depreciation of the insufferable smart and keenness of its chastise ments. If the omnipotence, justice, and purity of God have combined to create a special fire for the purposes of pure suffering and unmitigated pain, and have given to it an unexampled vindictive power even over disembodied souls, how dare we think of ourselves under the atrocity of its biting scourges with other than a terrified submission and a heroic running for refuge to all means, how ever hard, of making satisfaction to the justice of God. Yet we speak sometimes as if it would be quite an easy change, quite a welcome comfort, to pass from mass and benediction, from the sweet rosary and the copious foun tain of indulgences, from the fatherly jurisdiction of Peter and the feasts and sodalities of Mary, from the little trouble and great harvest of earthly suffering, from the grand power of meriting and the oft-felt hand of Jesus on our heads in absolution, and to encounter in stead the whip* and scourge, the blister and the burn, the fiery wounds, and long, long punishments of purgatory. Did ever saint do this, but Henry Suso once, and forth with our Lord put off His gentleness, and rebuked him sharply for thus, not disdainfully, but somewhat lightly esteeming a rod which He had made? Light views of sin, such as are rebuked in those deep words of inspired wisdom, Be not without fear of a forgiven sin, and rash expressions of security of salvation, all are against the exercise of a holy fear. Even when we feel, and as it were cannot help but feel, an undoubting security of our salvation, it should be no boast or joy. It may be a symptom of something sadly amiss within; or at least something so unsafe for us and our attainments, that this very sense of security may be our most fatal insecurity of all. If we try to take humbler and more humbling views of all these things, and if with this we strive to do all our actions slowly, so as not to get into God's way, cross His path, or intercept Him, then by His mercy we shall be forming in ourselves most precious habits of holy and meritorious fear. All this I have said in an other shape before; and yet cannot forbear to say again. A volume would hardly contain the spiritual blessings of this fear, if they were named and commented on as fully as might be. But these fruits would at once follow even from the steady effort to acquire this grace. It would lead to reserve in speech, and so dry up an abundant source of sins. It would produce self-contempt, and thus make the prime law of charity easy. It would moderate and sober worldly joy, which otherwise makes us childish, vain, and giddy. As it consists in a deeper and more extensive knowledge of God, it would enable us the better to estimate His dignity and immensity, and the higher our esteem is of God, the more we desire Him, and the more we trust Him also; for reverence is the very ground of confidence; we cannot help but trust what we revere. Yet none of this mars the depth, the tenderness of our love; for love when deepest, as after

ITT.] A PICTURE OF GOD. '287 long separations, is silent, takes the hand it love?, and weeps most enviable tears.

Such is the Object of our Faith. There is not a movement in the whole Church, not a doctrine, or a rite, or a ceremonial, or an exercise of jurisdiction, not an energy of power and of benevolence, but, rightly interpreted, is an act of worship of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. There is not a Church opened, a Sacrament administered or received, a Sacrifice offered, or a devotion practised, the honour and the glory of which does not reach to the Holy Trinity, and rest there, and in the highest sense rest only there. There is not a day that rises on the earth, feast or ferial, that is not throughout the universal Church a celebration and commemoration of the Holy Trinity. So it is this very day;¹⁰ what strength in the thought, what consolation in the idea! so it is this very day. The pope in his palace, the episcopate in thousands of cathedrals, the monks and nuns in unnumbered cloisters, the faithful in their parishes, all that are doing good at all are doing this good, — confessing, praising, fearing, loving, adoring the Undivided Trinity. Old consecrated Asia, wise, enlightened, royal Europe, the giant regions of exuberant America, the sandy shores and strearaless deserts of mysterious Africa, the young fresh strength of distant Australia, all are sending up to heaven one only voice, not prayer exactly uor praise, but the cry of childlike wonder, 0 beata Trinitas! See! while we are looking up into the face of this resplendent mystery, we sink and sink in the depths of our own vileness. It seems too much that we are to see God, incredibly too much that we are to possess Him. Is it not an infinite blessing that He doea not simply pass us over and ignore us? Sometimes in the stillness of the night, in the hush of prayer, when the soul is suspended it knows not how or in what place, it nmy so seem as if we might come to die, and He forget us, miss us and take no note of our disappearance; and in the horror of that awful imagination how sweet the undoubting knowledge of that eternal truth, that we are encompassed, girded up, wound round, and clasped to Him, with His everlasting Presence, His universal know ledge, His illimitable Power! Sancta Trinitas, Unus Deus, miserere nobis!

Footnotes

1. See Book IV. R ↩

2. See Book IV. for some account of the opposite opinion, which holds that the Blessed Sacrament will be reserved in hearen. ↩

3. St. Thomas, P. i. q. xxx. art ii. ↩

4. Of the difference between the Generation of the Son and the Procession of the Holy Ghost, Bossuet has grandly said: Taissez vous, raisonnements humains: Dieu a voulu expliquer quo la procession de son Verbe e"toit une veritable et parfaite generation: ce que c'e"toit que la procession de son Saint-Esprit, il n'a pas voulu le dire, ni qu'il y cut rien dans la nature qui repre.«entat une action si substantielle, et tout ensemble si singulieTe. C'est un secret re'serve' a la vision bienheureuse. (E16vations sur les Myst^res, ii. Semaine, 5.) St. Augustin says, Distinguere inter illara Generationem et hanc Processionetn, nescio, non valeo, non sufficio. Contra Maxim, lib. 3. cap. 13. and again, De Trinitat. lib. 15. cap. 27. Difficilliuium est Qenerationera a Processione distinguere. See the question also discussed in Gonzalez, De Trinitat. can. ii. Do Processionibus. Di*- ↩

5. De Lugo De Mysterio Incarn. Disp. XX. sect. iii. n. 47, discussing the question whether Christ could see the mystery of the Holy Trinity in the Hypostatic Union as in a medium, says, In casu illo impossibili, si essent duo Dii, alter trinus, alter non trinus in personis, tune creatura pendens a Deotrino, haberet in se ordinem intrinse-cum ad ilium Deum ut talem, et qui comprehenderet illam, cognosceret illam differre ab alia creatura pendente a Deo non trino, quia nirnirum diceret ordinem ad talein Deum. Conf. also Suarez, De Incarn. xxvii. 5. See also Ripalda, de Ente Supernatural!; and also Francis de Lugo, the Cardinal's brother, de Charactere Sacramentali, under De Ente Supernatural!, in his Commentary on the first part of St. Thomas. ↩

6. S. Thomas, Summ. Pare, i. q. 43. See especially Article VIII. where St. Thomas explains and harmonizes the apparently varying language of the Fathers about the Persons sending. The opinion expressed in the text is the one which S. Thomas himself prefers. ↩

7. Thus, in Mystical Theology, the action of the Divine Persons is recognised in conjunction with the axiom in the text. Licet, says Harphius, opera Sanctae Trinitatis sint indiscreta, tamen unicuique Persona) in divinis appropriatur actio sua propria in tribus superior!, bus viribus animae. Theol. Myat. (corrected edition,} lib. ii. p. iv cap. 63. ↩

8. Or as Billuart somewhat differently expresses it: i. in prim* homiuis justifications; 2. in quolibet augmento gratiae; 3. in beatitudine in qua Deus novo et speciali modo, erifcin anima per unionem Buae essentiae in ratione speciei intelligibilis. De Trin. iv. ↩

9. In the hope of producing in the minds of some of my theological readers the same feelings of devotional delight which they cause in my own, towards the Person of the Eternal Father, I subjoin the words of St. Cyril of Jerusalem about the Paternity: rpd? ndvruvT&v aiwvuv rit narptfdv <i£i'a>/<a l%ct 6 irarjp, r6vry pa\ov 17 rotf AOJJTOIJ n£«(i- ↩

10. Written on Trinity Sunday. ↩