Section V. God's Ways with Minds and Wills

If we turn from the material to the mental world, we shall find God manifesting Himself in the same hidden way. It is upon the faculties of the mind that the Di vine image and likeness is especially impressed. Yet the operations of those faculties, which seem to the pupils of Christian metaphysics so plainly to testify of God, could find their places with no little apparent show of reason in the systems of Locke and Hume, cf the French Condillac and of the German Hegel. God's evidence of Himself in the mind of man is not so peremptory, but that moral perversity may deceive itself on the subject. To go more into detail on this subject would involve us in a host of controverted questions, which it is not desirable to open, and the consideration of which would be out of place here. The doctrines of the various meta physical schools not only furnish us with abundant illus trations of the peculiarity of God's manifestations of Himself; but if we add to them the influence of grace apon the use of our understanding, the analogies will be still more striking. Both habitual and actual grace influence our mental faculties in many mysterious ways, just as the practice of moral virtue does; yet it is very difficult to detect either the kind or degree of influence which they exercise. The effect of the gratuitous gifts of grace, as they are called in theology, is still more hidden. The u word of wisdom" which the apostle speaks of to the Corinthians is defined in the schools to be a supernatural gift of inferring from the principles of faith conclusions respecting divine things; and the tl word of science" is a similar gift, respecting human things: while the gratuitous gift of faith, as distinguished from the theological habit and virtue of faith, is a supernatural facility and lucidness in expounding the mysteries of the faith to others, and in our own minds an intelligent and unerring facility to assent to revealed mysteries. Now, when we hear a man preach, or when we read a spiritual book, who can detect the presence of this hidden co-operation of God with the natural abilities of His creature? Very often its presence is not even suspected by the preacher or the author himself; and this may arise just as much from the greatness of his humility as from the want of it. For while pride would lead him to imagine that his success was owing wholly to his natural abilities, lowliness would make him slow to believe that God had visited him with any supernatural gift. And what adds to the concealment is that these gratuitous gifts, even when they come to miracles, are no certain index of real sanctity in the person on whom God confers them for the sake of others. Thus, in metaphysics, as well as in physics, God reveals Himself to us by putting Himself into the shade.

The moral world presents us with similar phenomena. Conscience is as it were the oracle of God within us. It is His judgment-seat set up already in our hearts, and giving sentence upon our actions. A voice from heaven could not more forcibly convince us of the existence of God than the whisper that will scarcely be silenced within us. Yet, oracle as it is, it is not easy in many cases to know what is the will of God. Men seem to have a fearful power over their own consciences, both as nations

III.] A PICTURE OF GOD. ' 3L3 and as individuals. Public opinion, which is almost in variably corrupted and ungodly, forms consciences on its own principles and on a grand scale. Thus the Chinese deduce all morality from filial piety, and not from the love of God; and hence, with certain apparent good, comes a system of national morality the most grossly terrestrial that can be conceived. Others, on the contrary, like the people in Herodotus, used to put their fathers to death when the burden of age became distressing to them. Some nations considered it a moral excellence, indeed an imperative duty, to marry their mothers when they were left widows; ai d nations can be conceived, in the full light of Christian philosophy and civilization, with almost a worship for conventional honour, and a most frightful heedlessness of many grievous sins, such as unchastity. Thus conscience, which is God's witness, may be made to tell against Him in the bosoms of a whole people. In like manner, with individuals, evil habits and long perversity exercise a tyrannical power over the divine revelations of conscience, until it becomes, as Scripture calls it, seared. Nay, the repetition of supernatural acts may produce a natural habit, which seems identical with the supernatural, and yet in truth is with out grace or merit, so that we may depart from the love of God and hardly know it.¹ But even with good per sons the revelations of conscience are both limited and uncertain. The whole of casuistry is occupied, not so much with what it is better, more perfect, more accept, able to God for a man to do, but with what it is lawful for him to do, what he may probably do without offending God; and what is the domain of casuistry, that most needful of human sciences, but a land in which moral duty lies in overclouded light and shade? Scruples bear witness to the same characteristics of conscience.

But in nothing is God's disclosure of Himself in the icoral world more remarkably illustrated than in the origin and existence of evil. It seems as if evil shrouded His very Being and Attributes with a black impenetrable veil. It suggests at the very least an antagonism to His will, and that a successful one; so far as sight can tell, it would appear a rivalry on more than equal terms. How disproportioned to what we actually see in the world around us are God's lofty and exclusive claims as put for ward in His revealed Word! Yet what are the chief, the most wonderful and the most touching manifestations of God, but those which He has made in consequence of this very permitted existence of evil? The beautiful ingenuities of Divine Love by which He has enabled us to repair the fall, the abundance of sin conquered by the superabundance of grace, the manifold interferences of the justice and the mercy, the wisdom and the power of God which are involved in the whole scheme of redemption, — these are in one sense the results of the existence of evil, and yet they are the very things by which we know God best, and for which we love Him most. What hides Him most utterly from those who will not see Him reveals Him most distinctly and most luminously to those whose hearts are seeking Him. The whole doctrine of sin is at once a concealment and a revelation of the relations between God and man. Look at the multitudinous outflow of human actions, prolific and continuous, over the whole earth; and how few suspect that to the individual no action is indifferent, and that all these millions of them are momentarily assuming a peculiar and a durable character, according as they have been invisibly referred to God or not, that men's actions are tying and untying themselves to and from God at every moment. Sin which covers God's glory with shame, witnesses also to His existence, His Law, and His rights. The notion of God is involved in the notion of sin. Moral goodness is often pusillanimous. It wants generosity and bravery. Whereas badness is often so grafted upon natural virtues, and coexists with such magnificent natural gifts, that it seems quite beautiful and captivating. It extorts applause, while it is casting into the shade moral attainments, the littleness of Christian im perfections, or the feebleness of Christian beginnings, or the inconsistencies of Christian strife, which in the sight of God are far more precious and acceptable. And again it is by no means an uncommon thing to see a great amount of real moral goodness, with an almost fascinating loveliness of character, avowedly independent of God or of any belief in Him or reference to Him. And what ever may be the Christian explication of these phenomena, they are surely proofs that while God is so clearly mani fest in the moral world that His servants wonder, as the poor Catholic wonders about the Blessed Sacrament, how men can miss seeing Him, nevertheless He is so concealed that multitudes do actually miss seeing Him through th disguises, contradictions, and vestiges of past catastrophes with which the world abounds. The time and the dispensation are not yet come for the Creator to force Him self irresistibly upon the notice and conviction of His creatures.

But God has not left the worlds either of matter, mind, or morals to themselves. He has mercifully interfered, and has flooded them all with another world of grace. How does He disclose Himself here? Here, obviously we should say, it must be in the way of unmixed reve lation. Anything like secresy would, we might suppose beforehand, destroy the very object for winch grace has been poured into creation. Nature may hide God, be cause nature has departed from God; and thus the intellectual world has been clouded and the moral world disordered, and in the material world God has consequently withdrawn Himself further out of view. But grace is God's weapon to get back all these worlds to Himself. It is light visibly interfering to reconquer the domain which darkness wrested from it. Grace is especially a divine interference; and to succeed as an interference, it must be visible, or else how shall it be acknowledged to be divine? This we might say beforehand. But let us consider the world of grace.

Let us gaze once more upon the radiant Vision of the Ever-blessed Trinity. We ponder the mystery of Creation. We look upon the Three Divine Persons as our Creator, and we consider the relations which arise be tween us creatures and God considered especially as our Creator, while we adore that singleness and unity of action of the Three Persons in all external works. But while we gaze, with our minds thus occupied, the Vision seems to change, and to represent in Itself the great and merciful mystery we are considering. The Third Person becomes to our eyes an illimitable sea of uncreated grace, deeper than we can think, and more refulgent than that we can bear to look upon it. It seems — remember how human words are foolish stammering things in this matter — as if He moved and spread Himself out into bound less grace in order to be ready to create, as if grace were His creating attitude. Behold also! an apparent chinge comes over the Second Person, the Eternal Word of the Father; for He too seems outstretched in an abyss of boundless, fathomless, uncreated grace, and on the silent face of the crystal deeps is seen the communication of the Word to the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, which communication is itself uncreated grace, living and eternal, • — not the act of communication which is created, but the gift, the Word communicated. The Eternal Father also manifests Himself as an august and beautiful in finity of grace, a very incomprehensible universe of uncreated grace, which is itself the love wherewith He loved us from all eternity, and the magnificent decrees by which He resolved from all eternity, not to create only, but to create creatures in a state of grace, and confer upon them supernatural gifts, incomparably beyond either the due or the exigence of their natures. God is grace. All God is uncreated grace. In His Unity, in His Trinity, He is uncreated grace. And behold! that Uncreated Sea has flooded all creation! How this is, it is beyond our power to tell; only we know that the wills of men are separate and free, and that nature is not God. But theological created grace is a true, real, intimate creation of uncreated grace. It comes one while as an impulse of the Divine Will, various in its strength as in its beauty, but itself an actual thrilling, exciting, fortifying touch of heaven; and then we term it actual grace: or another while it comes as a permanent state, endowed with supernatural sanctifying habits, and rich in miraculous and instantaneously infused virtues, not declaring us only, but really making us, the friends of God, and in St. Peter's great words, giving us a participation of the Divine Nature; and then we term it habitual grace. And both these graces are supernatural gifts exceeding all the exigencies of our nature, far outstripping what is due to it, either physically or morally, and conducing to that, whither nature of itself can neither move nor stir, nor so much as point, the Beatific Vision of the Essence of God. Thus as the divine activity of creation is still going on every moment, even on this finished planet, in the continuous creation of new souls out of nothing, and as the active love and power of conservation is momentarily keeping in life and light the creation already made, so grace is in a higher and vaster sense, beyond either creation or conservation, a working of God, a supernatural creation and a supernatural conservation, going on at all hours the whole world over. It is God Himself in His most wonderful operations; and if we consider grace as preceding, accompanying, and following men at all times, exciting the will by the illustration of the mind perpetually, we get a view of it as if it were a peculiar and all-sufficient omnipresence of the single attribute of mercy. Yet to describe grace thus is to describe it as an almost impenetrable secret. If the workshops of creation and conservation, about which the physical sciences are occu pied, were shown to be hidden sanctuaries, how much more the laboratories of those delicate, incomparable, and supernatural operations of God, which are a veritable alchemy of nature, an undeceitful transmutation of evil into good, and which we express by the single significant term of grace!

The peculiarity of the operation of grace will set this secrecy in a still stronger light before us. A child is brought to the baptismal font, fair and beautiful, and with all the winning gracefulness of infantine infirmity about it. But fair as it is, it is hardly God's possession. It is the trophy of the conquest of His enemy. A curse is on its soul; around its spirit is the darkness, and on all its faculties the hideous stain, or disabling imputation, of original sin; as it is, it can never see God, nor be an heir of heaven. It can inherit nothing beyond natural beatitude.² The exorcisms are but a prelude to the momentary act of baptism; and then what has happened to the child? A new birth far better than its first. The curse is broken off; it has become a child of God, a living member of Jesus Christ. Even in the eyes of heaven it shines with grace and beauty. Its soul, with the dormant reason there, is filled with supernatural habits which consecrate it into a sanctuary, and with a multitude of infused virtues which are the germs of angelic holiness. Yet as it lies in its nurse's arms, what change is there in its look, its eye, its limbs? Perhaps it has sunk to sleep there, tired with the attentions of which it has been the object, as an unfledged bird sleeps in its nest or the white lamb in the sunny field: or perhaps with cries and tears it is expressing its petulent vexation with the physical annoyance of the very salutary waters which have made it from a slave of Satan to be a brother or sister of the angels. Can God be more hidden than iu this invisible regeneration?

A man who is kneeling next us in church rises and goes to the altar step; and he returns with God in him. The Babe of Bethlehem, the Boy of Nazareth, the Man of Calvary, He is within him. The very Body men nailed to the Cross, the very soul that enlightened Limbus, is within a few inches of us, working many wonders in our neighbour's soul and on his flesh, each of which is greater than the creation of the world. And yet what sign is there of it all? He comes back as he went: he settles himself to kneel as before. His thanksgiving ended, he passes out into the street. We watch him. All is as before. He has gone to his work, to his trade, to his home. There is not a look of mystery about the man, though such a thing has happened to him as angels would not have dared to dream, if it were not revealed to them.

Here is one we love, one over whom we have mourned, for whom we have prayed; and now our prayer is answered. We watch him into the confessional. Years of sin are upon him, complications of wickedness, the despotism of evil habits, the tyranny of malignant spirits. He comes forth absolved. Yet no one saw it. He felt nothing himself. He did not hear the whispered words. None of our Lord's miracles was equal to this, not the raising of Lazarus to life. Yet all looks the same. The tone of voice is not altered. Nay, he falls presently into little imperfections. Grace has little or nothing to show for itself even in the forgiven penitent. Why should God hide Himself thus in His most beautiful operations? Surely all the workings of one fervent communion, all the effects of one good confession, if they were shown to men as visibly as the workings and effects of an ingenious ma chine, could not fail to convert the world.

The remission of venial sins is another instance of the continual secret operation of God. Mortal sin is sin with a double action. It turns away from God, as well as turns towards creatures. Venial sin, on the other hand, turns towards creatures without turning away from God. It is a remissness of our love of God, a growing cold of charity, an impeding of the free and vigorous action of grace j but all this short of turning away from God. Some theologians have taught that no repentance is re quired for the remission of venial sins, but that any good action, which pleases God more than the venial sin displeased Him, does virtually and of itself remit venial sins. Others, on the contrary, with Durandus, have held that formal repentance is necessary for their remission St. Thomas, with his school, occupies a middle ground. He teaches that mere habitual repentance is not sufficient, and that formal repentance is not indispensably necessary; but that virtual repentance is at once requisite and sufficient. By this virtual repentance St. Thomas does not mean every good movement which carries us towards God, but any good movement which connects itself with venial Bin, making us hate everything which cools our love of God, and causing us to grieve for everything of the sort which we have committed, though we do not at the time of our sorrow put each of such faults formally before us, as we do in repenting of mortal sins. He teaches, more over, that no new infusion of grace is necessary for the remission of venial sins, but that a movement of the grace of charity which we already possess is sufficient for that end: and that the imperfections of our movements of grace are in a very peculiar and mysterious way com pleted, fortified, and made efficacious by the benediction 31 of the Church, and by matter which such benedictions have rested upon and appropriated, such as are called sacramental* in theology, including the use of holy water, praying in a consecrated church, saying the Confiteor, and the like. These do not act themselves and with in dependent virtue, as the sacraments do, which require only the removal of obstacles to their operation; but they act by the work of the person using them, with an additional hidden efficacy derived from ecclesiastical use and benediction. Now consider the number of venial sins in the world, and remember that each one of them has got its own peculiar pain assigned to it in this world or in purgatory, and that each tells with a given force upon the soul of the sinner, and that the least of them is so contrary to God that not to empty hell and convert the heathen may we tell the slightest venial untruth; and then think what a wide-spreading, uninterrupted activity of grace is going on all over the world, compassionately un fastening these venial sins from off the souls of men. It is as if all earth and sea beneath our feet were but the covering of some immense, minute, and swift subterranean machinery, the velocity of whose revolutions baffled all calculation, and the trustworthiness of whose infallible action was so true that nothing could be truer. This is not the place to enter upon it; but the whole doctrine of venial sin and its remission is one of the most consummately beautiful provinces of theology. Enough has been adduced to illustrate the secresy of the divine operations in its incessant remission in unnumbered souls.

The depths and difficulties of the doctrine of merit warn us off from any prolonged consideration of it. But here also the same principle of concealment will be found to prevail. What, in truth, are our merits but God's own gifts? Not that they are imputed to us by any mere fiction of mercy, but that His grace is so substantially operative that in giving us His gifts He makes them really our merits. Still His gifts they are; but He hides His own credit under the veil of our deservings. By mortal sin our merits are killed. They can find no place in the divine acceptation, for they cannot cling to a soul which has lost charity. They drop off from it by a law, in the nature of things. Years may pass; and we at last repent, confess, and are absolved; and there is at once an instantaneous resurrection of all our lost merits. The touch of grace has raised the dead to life. Suarez would tell us that they revive in their full extent, how ever little fervour our repentance may possess. Bannez would tell us that they revive only in proportion to the merit of our present fervour, and will add only to our accidental recompense in heaven, not to our essential re compense. Ledesma would tell us that they revive only in proportion to the merit of our present fervour, but that, independently of it, they add to our essential, as well as our accidental recompense; and by essential re compense theologians mean the union of the soul with God, and by accidental recompense the joy which the glorified soul derives from the good works it has per formed.³ Now it matters not to the present question which of these views be true. It is the complete secresy of this undoubted work of grace, which is to our pur pose. It is altogether hidden. Even he in whose favour this miracle is worked has no feeling of it.

Hidden in like manner is that secret strength of grace, which, in spite of what analogy would seem to require, hinders past sins from reviving when men fall from a state of grace. Sin was so strong that it could strike our merits dead, yet not so irrevocably but that grace could call them to life again. Whereas, grace has killed past sin so utterly, that no fresh sins can call the old ones back to life. They lie powerless, save that from their tomb a dark shadow of ingratitude rises as from forgiven faults, and thickens the gloom of the new fall with this melancholy aggravation; yet not even so can forgiven sins give rise to any new special sin.⁴ And all these wonders God works beneath a veil.

It is hard to conceal that which is ubiquitous \ and inay we not almost predicate ubiquity of grace? Who is there whom grace does not visit? What hardened heart, which it does not try to soften? Theology teaches us that the ordinary power of God could not create a trition. 3. Opinion of Suarez and many others: That they revive with all their old essential reward due to them, no matter how little fervour may accompany the present recovery of grace. There is a fourth opinion quoted in the Wurzburg theology as held by some of the older Thomists, which teaches that the grace given on r0= pentance is given partly on the title of previous merits, and partly on the title of present contrition. But this opinion seems in reality, to be fatal to the reviviscence of merits at all.

creature which could harden itself against all grace, a creature which it should not be in the Creator's power to soften and convert. Look at the multitude of the bap tized. There is not one on whom sufficient grace is not conferred to hinder him from mortal sin even to the very last hour of his life. There is not an adult heathen on whom sufficient aids of grace are not conferred to justify him, at the least by spiritual baptism. There is not a child dies without baptism in its mother's womb, but it is others who are in fault, and not the benignity of God or the copiousness of our Lord's redemption. There ia not one soul lost which has not wilfully withdrawn itself from the blessed dominion of grace, and with whom grace has not struggled before it would let him go. Nay, even to the obdurate, grace is continually conveying itself, with daily opportunities, so as to confer on them a physical ability to rise and do well, even when the patient justice of God denies to them a moral sufficiency. And the whole of this is God's doing, His own gratuitous operation, to which man can in no way dispose himself, nor his works be either the physical or the moral cause of grace, nor can they merit it at first either of condignity or of congruity, nor even impetrate it with what strictly deserves the name of impetration. Thus, in the Church, besides the huge mass of habitual grace, the globes of dew on a clear autumnal morning are not so countless as the actual graces which are falling thick and fast every Instant over the wide spiritual patrimony of St. Peter. And if outside the Church the dew of grace is far less plentiful, and weaker, and only given for the Church's sake, yet the ground is not dry as it was round Gideon's fleece: though alas! we see how it barely lays the dust. 31*

Heaven rains grace on each soul outside the Church, at all moments, till the last of life, and the intended legitimate result of each grace is to lead them nearer to the one true Church, out of which there is no salvation, and to bring them under those Catholic sacraments to which it belongs to remit sin. Neither does grace fight with spirit only. Even matter may be most powerful weapons in its hands, as the Sacraments declare. That the ope rations of grace should be so universal makes it yet more wonderful that God could be so uniformly concealed be neath them, like Jesus beneath the sacramental veils.

But let us look at the cause of grace. I said that created grace came of that vast uncreated grace of which I spoke before. But how does it come to us? By what channel does it pass? Through what strait does it force its way into the limits of creation? There, where mys teries lie folded and doubled over each other, like the clouds of evening quenching the strong golden sun, there is the source, the cause, the fountain-head of grace. It is the Passion of our dearest Lord. The grace by which Adam wept, and the grace of Peter's tears, the grace of innocent Abel and the grace of the unknown sinner who has just repented somewhere while I have been writing these words, all alike have flowed from the Passion of our dearest Lord. But not to reckon the showers and streams, without name or course defined, that overspread the world from that Precious Blood, let us look at those definite powers into which this grace has principally been condensed. The seven sacraments grow out and branch forth from the Passion, as so many hiding-places of God. In that they are all sacraments, they are all alike; yet how different also, each from the rest! One while they march abreast, another while in pairs, another while in unequal bands, and not seldom one by one. They may be classed by their likenesses and by their unlikenesses. One is accomplished in the consecration of matter; others in the use of matter already consecrated. Some act on the soul dead in sin; some only or primarily on the soul alive in grace. Some confer a character; others do not. Some are necessary; some only desirable, or accidentally necessary. Some require an ordained minister, some do not. Some may be reiterated, some conferred only once. Some vary their operations, together with their matter and form, according to the intention of the Church and the administrator, still remaining the same sacrament, as the sacrament of order. Some are the conditions of others, without which others are invalid. In one, God is hidden under water and His own Name. For another, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost are concealed under the touch of chrism and the sign of salvation. In an other, God lies hidden under human actions, and those of a most humbling kind; in another, under the will of two contracting parties; in another, under an uplifted hand or the delivery of an ecclesiastical instrument. In another, the soul is reached, with all its remains of sin, and often the suffering body too, under the unction of holy oil. Another is God Himself inexplicably shrouded under veils so delicate the summer breeze could blow them aside, and so impenetrable that angel's ken cannot pierce them, nor the weight of a falling world force them open. Moreover, the Church, the mother of the sacraments, has not exhausted her teaching upon them. Strange to Bay, seeing the importance of the questions, there are numberless controversies allowed in the schools which most intimately concern these sacraments. What belongs to their essence, and what only to their integrity, at what precise moment the sacrament is complete and the grace conveyed, what is indispensable to the matter and what cannot be spared in the form — on all these things, differently in the case of different sacraments, we are free to think and teach many things. It is as if the deepei we descend into these coverts of God, the more He hid Himself in the umbrage, as in the foliage of paradise of old. And does not all this bear out St. Thomas's de scription, " The sacraments are things in which the divine virtue operates salvation secretly?"

If then, the interferences of God were hidden in the world of nature, are they less so in the world of grace, although it be nothing else itself but an immense system of pure interference on the part of God? The whole world of grace is eminently a concealment of God; and yet that very concealment is itself the most luminous disclosure of His character and perfections: and the sa craments are the masterpieces of grace, and yet the deepest hiding-places of all. Indeed, so various is their beauty, so unearthly their structure, so mysterious their method, so delicate their touches, so revolutionary, and yet withal, so imperceptible their influence, so peculiar their commingling of matter and spirit, so bashful and instantaneous their miracles, so complete and finished their self-adjusting movements, and so luminous are they each, with its bright cloud of heavenly ceremonial, that quite a Science of the Divine Operations might be con structed out of the theology of the Sacraments alone.

Footnotes

1. St. Francis of Sales, Amour de Dieu, b'v. iv- 3. 9. ↩

2. I do not wish to express any opinion on the views of Cardinal Sfondrato; but it must be remembered that, on this point, both In nocent XII. and Clement XI., as well as the French bishops, refused to condemn him. ↩

3. The theology of this question of the eseentiul and accidental reward is shortly as follows: — 1. Opinion of St. Thomas as inter preted by some, qu, 89, a. 5 ad 3: That the penitent receives only the accidental reward of his previous merits, i. e., the joy of them. 2. The opinion of S. Thomas as it is interpreted by Gregory of Va-.riitui and other moderns: That previous merits revive even as re gards their essential reward, but only in proportion to present con- ↩

4. So at least, St. Thomas expressly teaches: and so after him the Wurzburg Theology. Ingratitude sequentis peccati non est peccatum peculiare, sed circumstantia peculiaris, nisi adjungatur expressa intentio contemnendi beneficium, vol. vi. pars. 2, p. 68. ↩