Section II. The Creator in His own Creation

Now supposing we were in some way in possession of this Catholic doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and knew nothing more, it will, I think, be obvious that we never could from that knowledge divine in what way God would be pleased to operate externally, if He did so at all. We could only infer negatives, namely, that such and such things He would not do. If we contemplated Him in the glory, bliss and self-sufficiency of His unbeginning eternity, we could not have gathered that He would have created worlds at all, or produced aay external creatures, or GVCT proceeded out of Himself, or that there would have been any divine operations beyond those two neces* sary operations, the Generation of the Son and the Procession of the Holy Spirit, which are co-eternal with the Godheau. On the contrary we should perhaps hare inferred the very opposite. Then if His intention to create had been disclosed to us, we could not have advanced one single step further than the disclosure itself. From a view of His inherent perfections we could not have con ceived what manner of production His creation would be, whether spiritual, material, or mixed, or any of theso three, or all the three together, or none of the three, but some inconceivable other things, or what any of the three mean, or would be like, or by what process they would be produced. Perhaps we should not even have perceived of ourselves that if the Three Divine Persons act externally at all, They will do so altogether; the whole Trinity will act. The numerical unity of the Godhead is not a self-evident inference from the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The whole history of doctrine shows it. Neither when creation had actually taken place, could we have conjectured that God would vouchsafe some day to take part and place in His own creation. Possibly we should have supposed not. But if that gracious design had been revealed to us, still we could have deduced nothing more from it. We must have stopped with the revelation. We could not by any stretch of reason have conceived any intelligible plan by which He would execute this His loving purpose. The probability is that the feeling of lowliness which belongs to us as creatures would have led us to conjecture, that He would have, as it were, in terfered with His creatures from without, in an occasional, corrective, and legislative way, here and there, as mighi be wanted, with more or less clearness, and meddling to the least possible degree with the freedom of will which He originally gave us. I sa} we should probably have conjectured in some such way, because this occasional, 25 corrective, and legislative interference is pretty nearly tho whole idea of God which multitudes of men have, and they are irritable when more is attempted to be forced upon thorn. Thus we should, I think, have been surprised and perplexed at finding angels and men created, not in a state of nature, but in a state of grace. From that we might have deduced much. It would have given us the clue to many things. Then if we had been told further, that God would graciously interfere in a public visible way, we might have got some idea of Sinai and the Law, but we never should have dreamed of an Incarnation. Again, the Incarnation given, we should have expected some such Messiah as was the day-dream of the Jews, triumphant and conquering, visibly restoring the balance of right and wrong, impressing the minds of luen, as they are so well calculated to be impressed, by pomps and pageants, worthy of His power, His justice and His magnificence. And in all these things we should have been wrong.

• What I want to show is, that we cannot argue from God to His works; but only from His works to Himself; at most, from what He has done once to what He may be graciously pleased to do again: and it is important to bear this distinction in mind. The so-called philosophical literature of the day, subjecting God to the genius and spirit of some of its favorite sciences, without intending to do so or seeing that it actually does so, is full of argu ments and trains of thought of this kind. They speak as if God were under some sort of necessity to do this or that, and to act in such or such a way, as if He had an orbit in which He must revolve, a groove out of which He must uot run. Moreover, a very considerable pro* portion of the objections which men make to the Catholic religion are based on arguments of this kind, without a suspicion on the part of those who use them how essentially irreverent they are, and how they are as fatal to their own heresies as to our faith. Not content with forming an inductive science from the observations which the world, the Bible, and the Church afford them of the divine dealings, they would fain make deductions from ihe intrinsic perfections, such as the power or the good-oess, of the Three Divine Persons, just as men make the whole sciences of geometry and arithmetic from the three ideas of space, time, and number.

But I will go a step further. Not only are we unable to proceed of ourselves to anything like true or reasonable conjectures of any of God's future and unexampled ope rations, but what God does is so unlike what we should have expected Him to do, and full of a significancy so completely at variance with the genius of our finite minds or our natural principles of conduct, that we are apparently unable to grasp them and to fuse them into our understandings. Multitudes of men believe the Incarnation, who disbelieve Transubstantiation: yet out of twenty arguments they will use against the last, the chances are that nineteen would lie equally against the first. Nevertheless, they do not perceive it. They have not caught the spirit of the Incarnation, or mastered the supernatural principles it so abundantly involves; and while they think they would die for the Incarnation, they are rejecting the doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament, for a reason probably which would equally constrain us to pronounce the Incarnation contrary to reason, unparalleled in the past; unworthy of God; and opposed to the fitness of things. So again, many pure theists reject the Incarnation for reasons which are exactly as cogent against Creation, in which they believe and from which they draw their whole system of God, His attributes and our duties to Him. They miss seeing the supernatural character of Creation, and that it has a sort of headship over the mysteries which receive light from it and reflect enormous light upon it. If they, with their principles, contem plated G-od's eternity before Creation, it would not be surprising if the eternity of matter and the ever self-producing cycle of creatures seemed to them at last the most consistent scheme, and open to the fewest objections. In other words, they might become atheists: for a deist is only an illogical atheist, and an atheist a logical deist. The outburst of protestant indignation at the report of our Lady's apparition at La Salette illustrates very neatly what I am intending. Pious members of the protestant Establishment urged and published such objections as these. If blasphemy and the desecration of Sunday in France were the causes of her apparition, why should she have delayed it so long? Nothing, however, can be more futile than the objection alleged. The writer forgot that Christ came because of sin, and left the world four thousand years while he was tarrying. Again, it was said, Why appear to a poor lad and a simple girl? She should have gone to the bishop, or to the prefet, or at least to the sous-prefet! Who can help thinking of Jesus and the Cave of Bethlehem and the rude shepherds to whom He showed Himself? In like manner, during the curious national frenzy which took place in consequence of the establishment of the Catholic Hierarchy in Eng land, an infidel journal observing, upon the fact of protestants chalking over the walls, No Wafer Gods, said that it seemed to reasoning men who held themselves sublimely aloof from both parties, an absurd inconsistency for those to make any serious objection to the Catholic who looks at the Host and says it is God, who themselves require you to look into the face of a new-born Babe and to believe it is the Eternal and Immutable God.

From all this I conclude as follows: — That we have DO sort of reason for conjecturing beforehand how God will condescend to appear, to be, to hide Himself, or to manifest Himself, in His own creation: That the ways in which He has actually appeared, lived, hidden, and manifested Himself, are quite different from what we should have expected: That in all probability if we had conjectured at all, we should have conjectured just the reverse of what really happened: That therefore in speaking of God and His ways we must, unless we have express authority for the contrary in each case, abandon all lines of argument which are simply and exclusively based on our own notions of what is becoming or unbecoming so infinite a majesty: That from God's past dealings with His creatures, we see that there can be no great or small with Him; for where the difference is infinite, degrees are imperceptible: and finally that as unexpectedness ia no argument against a supposed condescension, if we have other good reasons for believing it, so the analogy of many similar and congenial condescensions is an additional proof of the truth of each of them, and fixes or enlarges our ideas of God.

God is present in His own Creation. If His presence were withdrawn, it would all, and instantaneously, sub-lide into nothingness. Without His presence, therefore, nothing lives, acts, or is real. But at the same time Ho has not appeared in His own creation in the way in which we should beforehand have expected. He exists in nature as a hidden God. Our reason finds Him out as a hidden God. Revelation discloses Him as a hidden God. We are told that the heavens declare Him and tell His handiwork, and that the invisible things of God are known by those that are seen. And nothing is more true. Yet it is true also, and it is His peculiarity, that He makes Him self known by hiding Himself. It is the glory of God to conceal the word, says Solomon, and the glory of kings to search out the speech. And if we interpret the Word to be our Lord, and kings as representing the royal people, or Christians, we shall come very near to that peculiar presence of God which is the subject of our treatise Thus, it is true to say, that when we look abroad to relieve our eyes by open and broad manifestations of the splen dour and sovereignty of God, we find at our first glance that the aspect of the visible world renders Him invisible, nay, that it positively contradicts Him, and that what claims most to be His own, namely, religion, does in the hands and lives of its professors represent Him least worthily of all. This is not only true of His presence in the moral and spiritual world, but in a certain sense of that common omnipresence whereby He upholds and sus tains all created things. What can be more quiet and gentle, more shy or unobtrusive, if I may venture on such terms, than the way in which He invigorates His own creation? A triple cord of His presence is bound round all things, and penetrates through their substance; for He is with all things by essence, by presence, and by power. By essence, because His substance embraces all extremities and penetrates all parts. By presence, because He sees, hears, knows, and understands all things. By power, because He concurs immediately to all actions, and His hands hold all things, and the hand even that does evil, and the eye that sees unlawfully, and the brain that plans iniquity, all profanely use the concurrence of their Creator to the material act, while the evil is all their own. How little men realize even so much as this!

Now, I will ask you to put these two things steadily before you: first of all, the vision of God and of His Intrinsic Perfections; and secondly, our own incompetence to conjecture beforehand the way in which God would be, would act, would hide, and would disclose Himself in Alis own Creation. Let us picture to ourselves the Majesty of the Undivided Trinity as it was before Creation l»egan, and pass at once from that to the Blessed Sacraraent on a Catholic altar. My business is devotion, not controversy; I have, not to prove, but simply to state. What is the revelation which the Christian dogma of the Blessed Sacrament makes to us? This is the question we have to ask ourselves, and in answering it we must bear in mind throughout that axiom of theology, Whatever God does outside Himself, is done by the whole Trinity.

The doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament, full of a clear faith in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, teaches that the Second Person, the Eternal Word, who has been from the beginning in the Bosom of the Father, and is coequa and consubstantial with Him, did with the Father and the Holy Ghost decree, that He would take part and place in His own Creation. He predestinated for Himself a spotless and immaculate Mother, of true flesh and blood and mere human nature, a veritable descendant of Eve.

He fitted her by unparalleled communications of gra?e to be His true Mother; and after a mysterious delay of four thousand years, the reasons of which are beyond our investigation, and can be reached only by pious conjectures,1 He was actually conceived in her by the operation of the Holy Ghost; and in due time was born. From the first moment, He was in full possession and use of His reason j but nevertheless He surrounded Himself with all the ac cidents of Human Infancy, and all its concomitant indig nities and infirmities. When men beheld Him, when they scanned the dimensions of His limbs, and watched them lengthen, thicken, and strengthen, when they noted His tears and cries and the inarticulate plaints of childhood, it must have seemed irresistibly plain to them that He was a human person. Yet this was not BO. He had assumed human nature. His nature as Man was as truly human as their own. But by the most marvellous of miracles it had no human person to depend on, no human subsistence to uphold it. So that it was true to say that He was a man, if by that expression we imply a human personality.¹ How then did His human Nature subsist? By another miracle of the most portentous kind, and of which there was not, either to human sense or reason, the very slightest hint or vestige. It rested on His Divine Person. His Divine Person was to it instead of a human person. But He did not on that account forego His Divine Nature. ' That also remained, and rested on the same one Divine

Person unconfused with His Human Nature. He was one Person, with two uncoinmingled Natures. But of this there was not then, nor is there now, to His creatures, any proof whatever but His own authority and the testimony of His own works. Reason suspected nothing of it, before it was told, and could see nothing of it when it was told; and as to the senses, the mystery seemed to give them a direct contradiction. But furthermore, these two Natures which co-existed in one Person were perfectly distinct; and as it would be blasphemy to assert that the two Natures prove two Persons, so would it be blasphemy to maintain that the one Person implies the confusion, blending, and commingling of the two natures. The Per son, moreover, acted upon the Human Nature in confer ring upon all its operations an infinite worth, because of the Union of the two, while the Human Nature could in no wise react back upon the immutable Divine Person. Can anything go beyond the mysteriousness of this mystery?

Thus the Creator appeared and took part and place in His own Creation, in a most divine and unexpected way. When the Babe of flesh and Blood lay sleeping on His Mother's lap, would reason or sense have supposed that even in sleep He was in full and energetic possession and active use of an intellect to which all the intelligent reasoning power of ancient Greece and modern Europe combined could not attain, that He who began yesterday was of a truth eternal and unbeginning, that He was, in that moment of sleep, omnipotent, and was ruling the world and holding up all the ponderous creation in the hollow of His tiny hand, and that He was enjoying amid the starts and sighs and uneasinesses of infantine slumber the full blaze of the Beatific Vision? His behaviour was of a piece with the mystery of His advent. He did not seem to court notice. On the contrary He shrank from it. His very first instinct was an impulse to hide Himself, and even to fly when He was sought; aod the whole of the Three and Thirty Years gives us the impressica, speaking in a merely human way, as if He never over came this propensity, did violence to Himself whenever He acted otherwise, and afterwards settled back to the Hidden Life as if it were a centre of gravity to His character. HG came for the express purpose of manifesting Himself, and He did nothing but hide Himself. The one thing about Him which it imported His creatures to know was that He was God; and this one thing He took all possible pains to conceal, and seemed sometimes in the strangest manner directly to contradict. It appeared, if I may say so, that He would almost rather equivocate than make a direct and open confession of His Divinity. And when Peter made it first of all men, our Lord at once showed the immense worth of it by making him the un failing rock of His Church, while at the same time He intimated that it was not flesh and blood, and so not even His Human Nature, but the Eternal Father, who by the interference of an express revelation, had disclosed the mystery to him.

By His own appointment He had but Thirty-Three short years to remain on earth, and no less a work than a new religion to teach, a new empire to found, and the supernatural redemption, of a fallen race to accomplish. Yet He would not anticipate any one of the gradual steps Df Infancy. His Infancy hid Him, and therefore He slung to it. He would seem to learn to speak as others did, to walk steadily as others did, and to be weaned from the breast as others were, to grow as others grew, to prac tise His fingers and become expert, as others did. And so twelve years went on. Nothing was done. We hear no more of the shepherds, and the kings were far away in their own land. Mary, Joseph and the angels, the aged Simeon and obscure Anna, nothing had transpired beyond that little circle yet. Then it seemed, I say seemed, for what our Lord vouchsafed to do necessarily gives us a view of Him, but it is our view, not necessarily His sole or principal or full design, — it seemed as if this hidden life was to come to an end. He must, must was His own word, betake Himself to His Father's business. He did BO; He left His Mother secretly, and went to the temple to teach. Yet even then, as if by the operation of the same instinct, He began teaching by seeming to ask ques tions and to learn. The separation however gives His Mother pain; and though He has mysteriously said He must be about His Father's work, He seems to catch at her sorrow and make an opportunity of it to get back again into the hidden life. Then follow eighteen years of seeming inaction. He sanctified Mary, He prepared Joseph for death, He was subject to them both. The more we think of these eighteen years the more inexplicable, on our notions and principles, will their mystery become; and at the same time the more clearly shall we perceive their harmony with the rest of the Incarnation. Thus three years only are left for His public life; and yet how strange even then the method of His publicity. He courts notice even less than the Baptist did before. Persons gather round Him in quiet mysterious ways, by a sort of silent attraction, and for hidden reasons, like Na-

SOO THE BLESSED SACRAMENT [BOOK thaniel under the fig-tree. He avoids crowds, on the whoh shuns cities, does not approach the great, and rather lets men take the initiative with Him. He goes to desert places, and keeps hiding Himself from time to time, as if by instinct, in the gorges of the mountains. When He teaches, He hides His meaning under figures, parables, and deep apophthegms: and He makes it quite a special privilege of His own chosen few that they should be taught without parables. Yet they only come to understand Him very gradually. They hardly realized Him to themselves even to the end. When He worked miracles, for the most part He begged for those in whose favour He had worked them not to divulge them. When captious per sons asked Him questions, He either answered by another question, or replied to their state of mind and according to their moral dispositions rather than to their words, and thus dismissed them foiled and silenced, 'yet as much perplexed as ever. When He cast devils out of the possessed, He commanded them to be silent and not to make Him known. And repeatedly when He was attracting notice, as at Capharnaum and at the Pool of Bethsaida, He glided away through the crowd unseen, using perhaps the gift He has so often conferred upon His saints of making themselves invisible. And all this was confined to one obscure province of the Roman Empire, and in that most jealously and exclusively to the one people to whom He was sent. Others He repulsed, called them dogs, and even when they took it kindly and touched Him by their humility, He said nevertheless that He was not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He died having hardly made any converts, leaving the glory and the noise and the visible pomp of conversion to the aposties. He shrank from it as displeasing to Himself, or as unbecoming, as it drew Him out of the close shade of the hidden life. Yet we call this, by comparison we are obliged truly to call it, His Public Life. Surely we may say to Him with His prophet Isaias of old, Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, a hidden God, the God of Israel, the Saviour!

But this came to an end. It ended in a hiding-place the densest, the darkest, the most obscure and ignominious of all, the shadows of His ever-blessed and adorable Passion. If sense and reason would have pronounced judgment against the Hypostatic Union, when they gazed upon the Babe of Bethlehem, the Passion must have seemed to them proof direct and incontestable against His Divinity. For the more completely He fell into the hands of His creatures, the more closely He drew the curtains of concealment around His Godhead. As the Passion went on, it traversed every part and searched every corner of His Humanity. Every interior anguish of man was experienced in unaccompanied lonelines and in unexampled bitterness. Every exterior pain, and shame, and insult, and degradation, fell upon Him with the violence of a hail-storm. And in every step, the less He looked like God. The more men buffeted Him and spat upon Him and rained the burning blows of the heavy scourge upon Him, and bruised His limbs, and drew His blood, and lacerated His head, and deformed and disfigured His human comeliness, the more He seemed to withdraw His Divinity inwards and coil it up secretly within Himself. He used it only that He might live to suffer more and so look less like God, or that He might keep His angels away that they might not break 26 in upon the hideous drama with the vindictive brightness of their power. Nay, even what He permitted thickened His concealment; for He let Judas -betray Him, Peter deny Him, and the rest run timidly away from Him; and would they who had a right to know Him best have done this, had they fully realized that He was God? Will the scourges mark His flesh? Will the thorns penetrate His brow? Will the nails enter His hands, and feet, and the hammer drive them through, according to common laws? Yes! all will be as humanly natural, as were the processes of the Sacred Infancy. And the paler He grew, and the whiter, and the fainter, and the weaker, the more His drooping eye was full of patient weariness, and His colourless lips parched with thirst, and His helpless frame parched with the long continuance and desperate cruelty of corporal agony, the less all the while He looked like God. But the decisive test will come. Death! Can God die? Can the Eternal end? Can the Sinless suffer the punishment expressly invented for the sinful? Yes! death draws nigh, and He bows His head, assenting to the blow, and God is dead three hours after noon upon a hill nigh to an ancient oriental city! Was, ever anything more unspeakably hidden than, all this? Its very awfulness is partly in its being so hidden. Look up into the face of the Holy Trinity; see the vivid coruscations of His intolerable glory, before creation was: measure His majesty; fathom His wisdom; calculate the possible condescensions of His love, and look at Calvary!

But the Triduo with its almost intolerable mysteries was over. Our Lord had overcome death, and by His own power had broken the bands of the grave. He had animated His Body in the tomb; His Blood had been restored to His Heart. An incomparable glory clothed both His Soul and Body. It had become impassible, subtle, agile, and resplendent, the model on which the bodies of His servants shall be at the Resurrection. Here, at least, was a proof of His Divinity, positive and irrefragable. Here was an evidence of His mission to which the most stubborn unbelief must bow; and we might fairly expect that the publicity of His Resurrection should at least equal the openness and notoriety of His Passion and His Cross. Yet an exactly opposite rule was followed. While the shame had been in the light of day, on the bare hill-top, and in the sight of hostile multitudes, the Resurrection was accomplished in the grey of early dawn, without ministers or witnesses but a group of holy angek who needed neither proof nor evidence. Here is the same propensity to a Hidden Life, which our Lord vouchsafes to manifest everywhere. Pre parations are even made beforehand for the more complete concealment of this glorious mystery. Men are allowed to remember that He had predicted His Resurrection, and to suspect that His apostles will steal His Body away, and falsely assert that He has risen; and the guards who are set to watch are bribed to withhold such evidence as they could have given, and which they themselves could not have explained. Thus in the most natural way did our Lord contrive to hide the splendour of His Resurrection. But if, as might well be conceived, human eyes were unworthy to behold that surpassing mystery, we might expect that when risen He would manifest Him self in His strength as He had manifested Himself in His weakness. The Resurrection was the grand evidence of His religion. The primary object for which the college of the Apostles was instituted, and the vacancy of Judas filled up, was to bear testimony to the Resurrection in that they had seen and conversed with Jesus Risen. And behold what a mystery it was of which they had to give evidence! God had been in His own creation in that triduo, it would seein, more wonderfully and more unexpectedly than ever. His Soul had hidden itself under the earth, and was gaining subterranean victories both in Limbus and in Purgatory, and His separate Soul was to be adored as God, by virtue of its Hypostatic Union with the Person of the Eternal Word. In the garden tomb, hidden among vine plants, and pomegra nates, and the thin shadows of the olives, and the training tendrils of the gourds, was a white and cold Human Body, scarred and seamed with countless wounds and weals, helplessly wrapped round in fair perfumed cloths, the ministry of reverence and of love. Before that Body must all creation prostrate itself, for there is the living God, worshipful and adorable, by virtue of the same Hypostatic Union of the Word.² For the Resurrection was no new Incarnation. What our Lord had once assumed, He never put away. Quod semul assurapsit nunquam dimisit; this was the axiom St. John Damascene contributed to the science of theology. Death could not sever the Human Nature from the Divine Person. This is essential, as we know, to the Christian faith. But this is not all. On the roots of the olive-trees in the Garden of Gethsemane there is, still fresh, His Precious Blood; it is standing like dew on the stones of the pavement of Jerusalem; men touch it, tread on it, move it ' from place to place; it has forced its way amid the plaited braids of the scourges and thongs, which are lying just where the executioners flung them aside; it is thick upon the wood of the Cross like the unction of a king; the garments for which men threw the dice are full of it: none of it, save what was on Mary's hands, has been reverently provided for. Yet each one of those drops of Blood angels and men must worship with divine worship; for it is hypostatically united to the Person of the Word. And was ever God so, — not kneaded, not blended, not compounded — God forbid — but so thoroughly in His creation, and hidden in it, as He was then? Aud all this, together with the union of the Body and the Soul, the new beginning of the beatings of the Sacred Heart, and the collection of His Precious Blood into His veins, whether by His own simple will or by the ministry of the eager angels, is involved in the mystery of the Resurrection!

But if it was so important that the evidence of this mystery should be established to the satisfaction of the whole world, if the salvation of countless souls depended upon it, if the apostles were appointed mainly or at least primarily because of it, the forty days of His Risen Life will at least be marked by some degree of additional publicity. Just the contrary. It is the most mysteriously hidden life of all. Bethlehem was notoriety and Nazareth an outward life compared with this. He certainly remained on earth for forty days; but where He was, and how He spent the time, we do not know. He kept appearing here and there, from time to time, now to one, now to another, one while to a few, another while to many. Some fourteen of these gracious apparitions are 26* recorded. Even as appearances they are filled with se-< cresy and concealment. When He appeared to the two disciples going to Emmaus, He only disclosed Himself as He was vanishing. When He showed Himfelf to Magdalene it was under the species of a gardener, not His own. When He appeared at the late, they did not know it was He, and then it flashed upon them, and they cried, It is the Lord! And at another apparition, while many believed, some doubted. What passed between His apostles and Himself respecting the kingdom of God, the constitution of the Church, the matter and form of the sacraments,³ and, the like, was not committed to the publicity of the Written Word but shrouded in the guise of apostolical tradition. What else He did, and whero He went, we cannot tell. In old times there was an idea that He had gone all over the earth, touching everywhere with His blessed Feet the spots where afterwards an altar should be erected and the mass offered, so consecrating the sites of all His churches beforehand. This was simply a pious and devotional thought, as it does not appear that any revelations are quoted in its be half. It was a beautiful expression of the days of poetic faith, of those times of pilgrimage, when the Holy Land seemed all in all to men, when they brought shiploads of its sacred earth to European countries, and were yearning to make every hallowed spot into a Palestine. In truth the Forty Days are hidden from us by our Lord Himself. All we can conjecture from analogy is that our Blessed Lady was in some way concerned with them, and that perhaps the greatest portion of His time was spent with her, in St. John's House, renewing and repeating the privacy of the House of Nazareth, or the Forty Days of Bethlehem before the Purification.

But the Forty Days came to an end j and the mystery of the Ascension came. He left the world almost ag secretly as He came into it. His Mother and a little band were the favoured few whom He admitted to witness the mystery; and so, three hours after midday, from sunny Olivet He rose up to heaven in the calmness of His own divine power, attended by a multitudinous retinue of angels keeping holyday, and encompassed with the first fruits of His triumph, the Souls of forty centuries liberated from Limbus and from Purgatory, and bearing up with Him those beautiful anticipations of the general resurrection,⁴ the bodies of the Saints that rose with Him and walked the streets of Jerusalem on Easter Day. A cloud received Him out of the sight of earth; and entering heaven, He placed His Human Nature in unimaginable exaltation at the Right Hand of the Father, where the heavens shall contain it in its proper species until the restitution of all things. Yet even then the unconquerable propensity, as we should call it if speaking of one of ourselves, or the divine charac« teristic, as religiously speaking we should term it, mani fests itself still more and more. He had Himself pre luded to it by words that He dropped as if by chance, and by assurances and predictions that sounded only like the soothing speeches of affectionate consolation. Whci hiddenness seemed at an end, then it began as it never had been before. When secresy to our limited ideas was impossible, then was it deepened and darkened more than ever; and by a series of divine operations it became a secresy the most fascinatingly beautiful and magnificently complete that can be conceived. From His public glory in heaven He descended at once the whole way to the sweetly imagined privacy of the Consecrated Host. For His worship of sight above He took the worship of faith below. And not once for all did He do this, but, with intense delight renewed each hour, He descends and is ever descending into the lowly bosom of those little common trivial creatures of Bread and Wine, or rather into the bosom of that nothingness where they have just vacated what they filled.

Thus did everything which it appeared would stay His fondness for the hidden life give Him as it were a fresh spring, a new impulse, to bury Himself deeper and deeper in His own creation. The Incarnation hid more than it disclosed. It added new mysteries instead of explaining old ones. His obligation to begin His Father's work glided into a reason for another delay of eighte^n years. His public life did but illuminate His love of privacy. His Passion, which should have drawn forth His Divinity, drove it in. The mystery of the Resurrection, by the publication of which the world was to be converted, was enveloped in profoundest secresy. The Ascension, which looked like a closing triumph of the war, only began His Sacramental Life, the most impenetrable mystery of all. Thus the heretical habit of mind is to rest on the Ascension as an end, a limit, a barrier, a completion. The Catholic habit of mind, which re gards our Lord, and the Church, and the Sacraments, as always living and energizing and going on, and not as historical facts or dramas that are past, does not rest upon the Ascension, but goes on to Corpus Christi, the Feast of Jesus Present. It can rest on nothing till it reaches Jesus Himself in heaven and on earth as well. It is a not uncommon illustration of this that persons brought up in heresy, when they betake themselves to the study of Catholic theology, are often disappointed at the little stress laid upon the Ascension, and are for the moment chilled by the doctrine of St. Thomas that it added nothing to our Lord, and conferred upon His Sacred Humanity nothing more than "decency of place."

Our Lord's manner is as though it were a joy to Him to be back again on earth, so true are the words of Scripture that His delight is to be with the children of men. He renews His Incarnation over again in the Blessed Sacrament. The accidents of the Host, unsubstantiated, rest on Him, the figure of His Human Nature without a human person: and all the similitudes of the Blessed Sacrament and the Incarnation, which we treated of at length before, are illustrations of the same thing. But chiefly does He gather into this one sacramental hiddenness, all the hiddennesses He had ever concealed Him self in before: so that none of them should pass away, from Him or be lost to Him. The helplessness of His Sacred Infancy, the way in which He was in the hands of otherg, the apparent contradiction of the senses, all those things which hid Him in Bethlehem of old, now hide Him in the Host. The hiddenness of the. Holy House at Nazareth is renewed and surpassed by the hiddeuness of the tabernacle. The secresy of His public life, and the figurative manner of His teaching, find their antitypes in the Exposition and Benediction of the u

Blessed Sacrament, and in the ways in which He touches, teaches, and affects the soul in Communion. The hiddenness of His Passion finds its awful representation in sacrilege and blasphemy and in the wickedness of contempt, audacity, and neglect. Yet even there the frightful indignities of the Blessed Sacrament, which make even faith sometimes for a moment wish it were unbelief, have had their forerunners in the Passion and in the singular mysteries of the separate Body and the scattered Blood of (rood Friday and Holy Saturday. The hiddenness of His Risen Life is exactly analogous to the Blessed Sacrament, as in both He is impassible and glorified, and in both most hidden when it seems to our blind eyes as if the interests of souls most required Him to be disclosed. But a more minute consideration of these things belongs to another place.⁵

Such is the revelation of God which the Catholic doc trine of the Blessed Sacrament makes to us; and which it is necessary to put alongside of the doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity, in order that we may understand them both. Our dear Lord comes in the Blessed Sacrament, as dumb and meaner than a child, to live two • lives; one towards men, because He is God; one towards God, because He is man. It is this latter one which we are now considering. The Blessed Sacrament is the exponent of God. We can nowhere get a more, clear or more extensive knowledge of God than we can gather from the Blessed Sacrament. God is the model of it, the idea of it. It reveals His intimate and peculiar perfections more than anything else. Our truest notions of Him are derived from the operations of the Holy Eucharist. It is not only the sun of Christian theology; but it illuminates all the kingdoms of matter, mind, and grace, and glory, together with the moral mysteries of the world, and that long series of vicissitudes and romantic experiences which make up the history of the human race. The Blessed Sacrament resumes all the operations of God into one point, and there manifests them to us. A riddle itself, it unriddles the enigma of the universe; and it is the light of the world though it is itself but darkness visible. Short of the Beatific Vision, it is of itself the plainest, the surest, the glad dest, and the nearest sight of God, which His creatures can enjoy.

Footnotes

1. There is no indefinite article in Greek or Latin; and if by the English expression " a man" we only imply nature, then it is not un true or incorrect; but if the expression has the further force of im plying personality, then it is of course untrue; or if it is at all likely tio to be understood bv others, it is unsafe. ↩

2. Catechis. Concil. Trident, p. i. cap. v. quaest. viii. ↩

3. Gerbert. De eo quod est juris div. et eccles. in sacramentis. ↩

4. Different Fathers follow different traditions on this question. ↩

5. See Book IV. ↩