Section VII. The Works and Ways, the Weights and Measures, the Failure and Success, of God

We have now cast a rapid glance over the realms of matter, mind, morals, grace, theology, and the Church, and in all of them we have seen that the Most High vouchsafes to disclose Himself after an uniform manner, and in a peculiarly unlikely hidden way. But there are two other points of view from which we may reverently venture to look at God influencing His own creation, and which are so remarkable that before summing up the valuable results we have obtained by this research, we must say a few words on each of them. God condescends to represent Himself in Scripture as making HitnseU* different to different persons, as treating a man as the man treats Him, just as Origen says of our Blessed Lord on earth that He was in the habit of appearing in different guise to different men, according to their dec ree of moral. purity. Scripture sometimes speaks as if it was 5u every one's power to have God as he would like to have Him, as if men could make their own G<»d arid give Him what spirit they chose. These are very bold words; but weigh the expressions in the seventeenth Psalm and the Second Book of Kings. It was just before David's death, and Bummed up his manifold experience of God. "With the holy man Thou wilt be holy; and with the innocent man Thou wilt be innocent, or with the valiant perfect; and with the elect Thou wilt be elect, and with the perverse Thou wilt be perverted." And then as if he felt the magnitude of the mystery he had just been disclosing, he adds, " God — His way is immaculate j the words of the Lord are fire-tried." Now if God, in His inscrutable wisdom, deigns thus to follow the lead of men, and to appear to them according to the imaginations of their own hearts, it is plain, that however He may please to limit this method of operation, it is one which must necessarily make His ways hidden. Thus His dealings with His friends, His enemies, particular nations, and different ages, must be considered as exemplifying this divine peculiarity.

What can be more hidden than the way in which God deals with His friends, those to whom, because of their little holiness, He shows Himself in His immense holiness? The doctrine and experience of prayer are full of this concealment. When God subtracts from us sensible sweetness, it is either a loving honour or a loving chastise-incut. When He raises us from one degree of prayer to another, it is often suddenly and without apparent cause, and frequently without our being in the least aware of it. The different states of prayer so lose themselves in each other, that they can hardly ever be definitely and separately recognised, but are rather conceived separately for the convenience of mystical theology. The whole matter of the answers to pr.iyer is fall of various disguises and con cealments; and when we are raised in the scale of contemplation, the test of our elevation is in the increasing indistinctness of our views of God; we approach the dark-bright cloud of St. Denys, and the clear-obscure light of St, John of the Cross. The operation of the Sacraments, simply as a matter of mystical experience, is equally mysterious. Sometimes with fervent communions no ground Beems to be gained \ at other times with dry communions we seem to leap into fresh regions of spiritual life, without passing through the intervening space. The effect of cor poral penances on the soul is perpetually bringing this way of God before us. When our vocations, or great crises of our spiritual life, are presided over by spiritual direction, how often do secondary causes seem to exercise an undue influence over the decision, and how hard it is to be as sure as we fancy we ought to be that the decision of our director is of a truth the voice of God. Want of talent, of temper, of deliberation, of an interior spirit! how often is God behind those screens, and hard to recognise until the moment He disappears! Even when He grants us supernatural favours, we can hardly tell whether they are not rather delusions of His enemy; or whether in our own case it is not better to put them away, and to pray against them; and how strange and unworldly and unlike our own selves is that extreme desire to keep them secret and not to tell them, which 'in variably accompanies them, seeming to contradict our Lord's word that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. Then there is all the hidden love which is impli<xl in the friends of

God being chastised more than other men, and so their sanctity, not only fearfully tried, but laid open to doubt and to rebuke. And last of all, intimacy with God seems specially to result in a secret spirit. The instinct of holiness is to burrow, to get out of sight, and hide in con vents, in hermitages, in solitude, in secret prayer. A de gree of charity to others, which is sufficient to overcome many grievous defects, is sometimes quite inadequate to counterpoise this propensity to hide itself, with which the familiarity of God seems so uniformly to infect the soul. It seems almost more to us to keep our secret than to convert a sinner.

God's dealings with His enemies are of the same cha* racter. The uninterrupted prosperity, which makes men bless them, is to a spiritual discernment a disclosure of God which makes a religious heart tremble; and while it seems to a man only the legitimate consequence of hia own ability and industry, it is often the carefully-measured and accurately-proportioned reward of his natural virtues, amiable qualities, human kindliness, and moral worth. God has no more fearful disguise than this penal prosperity. What is in truth the sentence of reprobation, but those words, Thou hast had thy good things, Mercedem accepisti? Lord! said St. Philip, let me not have my reward in this life! Yet when we see these men, succeeding in all they undertake, heedless of religion, and as it were without a thought of God, how many calls are they hearing from Him, which no one knows of but themselves, how many secret graces are knocking at their hearts, with temporary softenings and partial successes, for all which they must give account! But there aro many graces of which even they themselves are unaware, 33* Z and which to all eternity will lessen the severity of theii punishment. For there is hardly a day passes but God hinders them from sins, from which nothing but the special provisions of His compassionate providence pre serves them. Alas, there are unconscious graces also, the unknown neglect of which must enhance their ever lasting doom. Such are the opportunities thrown in their way of learning the true faith, of returning to the sacraments, of doing penance for their evil deeds. Chance sermons, promiscuous conversation in public places, the accidental opening of a book, examples suddenly set before them with a strong light upon them, — till the day of judgment DO man knows how copiously his path has been strewn with graces such as these. And all this is God, and how hidden, how unexpected, how impenetrable!

In like manner does He deal with different nations. Each nation, each national character, has its own grace, and a certain corresponding work to do for God in the history of humanity. The natural virtues of each nation have their reward, as Roman justice and truth were crowned with inordinate length of empire: neither is it impossible that the huge empire of the Anglo-Saxon blood and tongue may have some similar interpretation There may once have been some natural good in us, whose benediction we have not yet quite outlived. The history of each nation tells of divine chastisements, in which however at the time the hand of God was barely recognised. Each nation has had its own witnesses sent to it, such as suited it and appealed to it in the most congenial way. Each has had the Gospel come to its shores after the fashion it liked best. Each has had, as and when it needed them, its saints, its doctors, its holy kings, its war, its peace, its plenty and its dearth; and all these things doled out with wisdom, with love, with peculiar significancy, with choice, with preference, and with intention. Yet it was hidden at the time. On looking hack, and studying the chronicle of our country, we can each of us see that it is in its way a repetition of the Old Testament, a series of providential interposi tions, a guiding hand directing its vicissitudes and con trolling its reactions and invigorating its progress, God manifest everywhere. But our ancestors, if they saw it at all, saw it only indistinctly at the time.

And as it has been with the different nations of the earth, so has it been with the different ages of the world. Each age has its own character impressed upon it, its own work entrusted to it, and its own method of doing it sug gested to it. Blind time seems as if a reason were in fused into it. Each feels the rod of its own chastisement; and each, freshened by punishment, is crowned with its own peculiar success. Each age has its own man given to it, often an unknown man at the time, al though the whole age shall be an exhalation of his genius; and finally each age has its own dramatic place, like the acts in a play, between the age that went before and the age that follows after. And as with the nations, so with the ages, they put their own light and colour about God, and His wake over the sea of time is invisible just wher man and his rudder are making the water foam, but it is seen, silvery clear, behind, and far into the distance.¹

The other remark I wished to make before summing up, was that in all these departments which we have been considering, it seems as if failure were.a characteristic of the divine works; seeming failure, failure according to men's judgment, failure so far as God has per-"1 mitted us to know His ends and objects. The physical world is a ruin, the moral world a wreck, the spiritual world a disappointment. What does all this mean? The marvellousness of God's ways magnifies itself visibly before us the longer we look at it. The creation of the angels was a failure; one-third fell, and the hostile empire which they at once set up against God makes netf conquests daily and enlarges its fiery limits. Paraaise was a failure: it ended in the fall, gentle as was the precept and light the dispensation. Both angels »nd man were created in a state of grace, so that nature by itself has never yet been tried. The patriarchal system failed, or at least it only kept the true tradition in one line of one family. The law was a failure; idolatry came in spite of it; its wisest man himself became an idolater; and when our Lord appeared, what was left of the spiritual Israel, but Simeon, Anna and the like? Look at the world now, and say, if, in men's way of speaking, the Gospel has not been a failure also? Is the world religious, is it Christian? So in the Church particular pressive of the just goodness of God. Dieu a e"gard aux sieclesII pardonne aux uns leurs grossie"retes, aux autres leurs raffinements. Mai connu par ceux-la, me"connu par ceux-ci, il met a notre decharge, dans ses balances equitables, les superstitions et les incredulity's des epoques ou nous vivons. Nous vivons dans un temps malade: il le voit. Notre intelligence est blesse"e: il nous pardonnera, si nous lui donnons tout entier ce qui peut nous rester de sain. PensSea, i. p. 105.

Churches die out, as in Africa, or fall away, as in Greece, or are inundated by heresy as in some of the petty Ger man states, or are devastated by unbelief as France in the eighteenth century. Religious orders rise, are fervent, flourish, decay, are reformed, decline, and die. God will have things one way, man another. God will have the government of Israel theocratic; the people will have it regal, and they prevail. God will have the holy ordinance of matrimony hallowed; but the hardness of men's hearts causes Him to let Moses legislate for un hallowed divorce. Men's unbelief could hinder our Saviour's miracles. All this is an appalling mystery. In the happy plenitude of our blessed faith, which knows no doubt and is crossed by no shade, we know that the Most High is the Lord of Hosts, the God of victories. Each day, each hour, each moment, He is winning some glorious battle, and the angels keep festive triumph round His throne. He is always leading captivity captive, and in all creation He is a mighty warrior, irresistible, magnificent, supreme, " faithful and true, and with justice He judgeth and fighteth. His eyes are as a flame of fire, and on His head are many diadems, and His garment is sprinkled with blood, and His Name is the Word, and on His thigh is written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords."² Yet all this is not after men's measures nor according to their standard. The appearance of things is as if everywhere the Flight into Egypt were being enacted, and God was a fugitive before the face of His own pursuing creatures. It is as if He took up post after post in His own creation, and fortified Himself there as if He should abide; and He is besieged and His fort taken, and He retires to another; and again the same mysterious drama follows. Thus, God seems perpetually falling back and falling back, further and further, in His own kingdom, while we, His creatures, usurp His crown, and hold His territory against His will, as if we were an army of occupation, gradually turning our conquest into a peaceful right. This is the aspect under which God vouchsafes to let things appear. It is man's obvious way of reading history. Apparent defeat, the semblance of frustration, lies like an intense mist over the ground of God's holiest operations. Were it not for simple, joyous, child-like faith, the clearest eye might quail, the stoutest heart tremble, before this astounding spectacle of a defeated God. All nature and all grace, all angels and all men, all creation and all redemption, gathered into one point and so disclosed to men, and loj that one point is a skull-strewn Calvary with the Dead Christ upon the Cross! Ah! we sometimes boast of human freedom, and want men to weigh their words more sparingly when they speak of the Sovereignty of God; but with this view before us, let us look over the wide weltering sea of human liberty, and are we not afraid to behold it so stormy, and to know it to be so free? And what wilt thou do, poor human beart, thus frightened? Take the sweet thought of the dear sovereignty of God, and make a nest therein, and never leave it all life long. 0 sweetly shalt thou rest, and safely too, head, heart, and hand, and all, while the tempest? howl and the billows foam, if only thou art cradled it all simplicity on the sovereignty of the God of Vic tories! *

Before we go further, let us pause for a moment, and consider into what an atmosphere all these considerations have been leading us. It is as if we had crossed the barrier of another kingdom unawares. The old coins have no currency. Here are new weights and different measures, fresh skies, changed manners, other stars in the heavens, and the sound of another language. We have passed out of human ways of thinking into God's ways. We btgin to see with God's eyes and to judge with His judgments, as in His merciful condescension He would have us do. We have to unlearn nearly every one of our old principles of action, and to abandon our former canons of criticism, our earthly distributions of praise and blame. We cannot go far with God at once. Like the dwellers in a plain, who sink with fatigue as they ascend and descend alternately the ram parts of a mountain ridge, because they are using mus cles that have grown soft through long inaction, so is it with us among these hilly paths of God. We are soon tired: and something worldly would rest our spirit, and³ we should sleep more soundly down below where the air is less keen. Yes! the thought of God is rest, but the company of God is labour and fatigue. 0 blessed are they who can sustain themselves, or rather blessed they whom God sustains, in the high region of supernatural thoughts and things, until they can come down with an aspect so refulgent that they must needs go veiled among their fellow-men; and still more blessed they, and to the world, which their prayers uphold, a far more charitable blessing, whom God keeps in the mountain with Himself their whole lives long. Would that grace, which is daily making impossibilities practicable, might enable us to achieve that holiness St. Philip puts before us, Never in thought or act to need or seek recreation out of Jesus! At least, as divers practise their craft by painfully remain ing under water longer and longer every day, so let us keep up with God, lengthening our strain upon nature day by day, bearing the glorious pain bravely, never looking down lest the various view of the sweet vales tempt us, and thus practising for His "high and holy place" hereafter.

It is now time to gather up the results we have thus obtained. I have briefly and rapidly touched on many points, each one of which might well take a volume to itself; and we have surely gained some such view as this. By contemplating the object of faith, the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, we could never have conjectured whether God would have created a world, or if He did, what manner of world it would be, or whether he would live, would work, would hide, or would reveal Himself in His own Creation, or if He did, in what way, beyond sustaining it by His omnipresence, He would vouchsafe to do so. Still, upon the whole, we should conceive of all God's apparitions, that they would be accompanied by light, glory, magnificence, amazement of the creature and instantaneous efficacy, though the manner of them would always be unexpected, from our inability to form any definite expectations at all. From the surTey, however, which we have taken of the divine interpositions in creation, we now perceive that God has a peculiar and uniform way of His own, representing some idea in tho Divine Mind, recognizable when once we have learnt "it, and of a kind peculiarly adapted at once to give the full est play to the free will of His creatures and yet to elevate them to the most submissive and intelligent worship of Himself. This method is not only unexpected as all His methods must have been necessarily unexpected, but it also systematically contradicts at every point such conjectures of what was likely, worthy, and fitting, as we might have ventured to have made from the knowledge of His infinite perfections. If we travel over the worlds of matter, mind, morals, and spirit, if we question his tory and theology, and if we take to pieces and examine the mysteries of creation, the incarnation, justification, glorification, and transubstantiation, we find everywhere, in nature as in grace, in grace as in nature, that this unexpectedness of the Divine operations resolves itself into five characteristic features, out of which it follows as a result or an inference, from a double necessity of God's perfections and our imperfections, that He discloses Him self to us by hiding Himself.

In the first place God's operations are for the most part accompanied by secrecy. He does not call witnesses, nor display Himself on the theatre of the open world. 34

Secondly, littleness is another of their characteristics. They are often what the foolishness of our wisdom would have pronounced unworthy of the heavenly Majesty. Their propensity is to lowliness, to fix themselves on what creatures value least, and consider least delectable. Thirdly, almost always the first act of omnipotence is to reduce itself to an apparent helplessness. The Most High seems anxious to forego what we may call the ad vantages of His divinity, and to appear as if He were only taking His chance with a crowd of other agents and forces in creation. It is as if He disdained to govern by the strong attractions of power, and preferred to put on the disguise of the sweetest and most piteous per suasion. Fourthly, the Divine Manifestations are almost always surrounded by ignominy. They do not of them« selves strike respect and reverence into the world's heart. On the contrary, they are peculiarly liable to be mistaken and misunderstood; and there is a something about them which inspires fallen man with a suspicion and dislike which a steady contemplation of their apparent helplessness fixes at last into contempt. Fifthly and lastly, they have, with hardly any exceptions, the further characteristic of seeming to put the Creator completely in the power of His creatures. Our dearest Lord in the power of Herod and his brutal soldiery, a butt for rude military buffoonery in the courtyard of the tyrant's palace, is truly an awful picture of God in His own creation. He has given men His creation to use and abuse at will. He left them to do what they pleased with His law. He sent them His Son, as He had sent prophets before time, and they wreaked upon Him every kind of contumely and hate. His Written Word, His Holy

Church, — His marvellous Sacraments, — they are completely surrendered to men, either to their reverence or their sacrilege, their acceptance or their rejection, their patronage or their persecution. Thus secrecy, littlene>s, helplessness, ignominy, and being at the mercy of crea tures, are the five laws of the Divine Interference in the world; and assisted by grace, we can almost get a habit of seeing God everywhere by the application of these laws. They form partly a theological and partly a spiritual instinct. What it concerns us particularly now to remark is, that these five laws include nearly all the infidel and heretical objections to the Blessed Sacrament, that the Blessed Sacrament does not stand alone in being open to them, that the Blessed Sacrament is exactly the same kind of manifestation of God, and the same sort of Presence, as He vouchsafes in matter, mind, morals, theology, history, and the Church, and finally that the Blessed Sacrament exhibits these laws in the most vivid and peculiar manner, and thus concentrates upon itself all the light, and divine beauty, and heavenly secrecy that is auywhere in the world, and that it is the exemplar and most finished and intensely godlike height, of Creation and Redemption, of Nature and of Grace. It is the culminating point and divine coronation of Creative Power, of Providential Wisdom, and of Redeeming Love. Thus we look through the history of the world, and keep close to the footsteps of God as He moves among the nations and the ages, hiding Himself among them, and by contrary ways leading them softly and firmly to His ends, we shall track His presence everywhere by outward appearances of humiliation and seeming weakness. When His saints arise to serve Him, they are instantly and on that account a butt for ridicule and ill* treatment; their likeness to the Creator makes them to be regarded as the offscourings of creation; and they serve in their lives and in their deaths as the victims tor the worst passions of cruel men, which they conquer only by succumbing to them. Wherever God is in his tory, there we see Him abandoned by His creatures. As if there were some repulsion, some centrifugal force in Him who is the centre of minds and souls and lives. He makes a solitude before Him as He goes. He can not get Himself known, or loved, or believed in. Every where and always a theatre is more than a match for a Church, a gay city for a dull convent, the civil power for the ecclesiastical. Men would rather be enslaved by the state than owe their emancipation to the Church. God is on one side, the world on the other; and blood, rank, money, talent, influence, on the whole are not with Him. Nay, ever and anon He must come into actual contact with His creatures, and then He has nothing to do but suffer bold ill-treatment; and for the most part the greater the scale wickedness is on, the more successful it is.

In these conjunctures nothing is more striking than the little faith of those who have any faith at all. The best men seem little better than traitors. Heroes are rare; they come to be heroes slowly; and when they have reached the point, they pass into the secret world of God, and are lost to earth. What are called good men are little better than traitors, always wishing to concede, to compromise, to meet the world half way. They make free with nobody's interests but God's. They are bold with nobody's rights but His. And Him they are throwing overboard like a Jonas to the world's whale, for ever and for ever. It is their occupation and calling. This has been the history of the " good party," that is, of averagely good men, on earth from the beginning. Yet still, under this bold ill-treatment and this heartsickening treachery, God holds His peace. He is silent under out rage, as Jesus was before the tribunals. His government, when most provoked, is characterized by nothing so mnch as an absence of visible judgments, which we finite crea tures so often think would be so useful and so salutary. Our very love of Him chafes under this, and He has been obliged to write it in His Word as a divine axiom, that the wrath of man worketh not the justice of God. Whether He be abandoned or whether He be outraged, He keeps Himself equally encompassed with hiddenness and secrecy. As we have already seen, His manifesta tions are in fact His most secret acts. When was God so hidden in the world's history as He was when He lived upon it bodily in Palestine? Were there ever such secrets before as Bethlehem, Nazareth, Gethseraane and Calvary? Moreover in all this history of God in His own world, there seems never to be any harmony, any peace, any mutual understanding between the Creator and His Creation. It is always strife, always war; and, which deepens the mystery, the world appears all along to have the best of it. Even when it is defeated, it does not recognise the Hand that vanquished it. Its very checks are said to be fate, accident, or laws; not the Personal will of the Three Divine Persons, One God. This is surely a fair view of God as He has vouchsafed to be contemporaneous with the nations and ages of the world.

But it is important that we should lay firm hold on this 34* idea. Let us, then, put side by side with this historical view of God a figurative view also. The inspired writers frequently ascribe human passions and human emotions to the Almighty, in order that by this economy and condescension we may be instructed in the mind and will of Him from whom are all the issues of life and death. Our Blessed Lord also represents Himself dramatically in parables, as when He shows forth the successive failures of God's merciful intentions to sinners by the treatment which the different messengers, and finally the Son, of the Lord of the vineyard receive from the wicked tenants. We shall perhaps better grasp the mysterious truth we are considering, if we venture to describe God, as we discover Him in the world, by a series of figures. Always it is the Same whom we beheld in refulgent majesty and beauty inaccessible, worshipped by the hosts of heaven, the Ever-blessed and Undivided Trinity.

With our eyes full of light of that astonishing Vision, with our ears yet ringing with the songs of angels and the triumphant canticles of the numberless Redeemed, and, above all, with our souls hushed and shrunk into themselves with excessive awe and bashfulness, longing almost for some chastisement to make us feel our nothingness lest haply we forget it, let us turn and look into the busy fields of created action, the thronged and complicated departments of human society; and how is it that we there behold the unutterable Majesty of the Most Holy Trinity? We behold Him, first, as a Slighted Father, one who is possessed beyond speech or thought with excessive love of His children, " stretching out His arms" to them all the day long, yet they will not return: killing for them the fatted calf; and they take it as a right; using

Him and all that He lias for their own convenience, while their hearts never melt towards Him, and they coldly shun the embrace His burning love almost forces upon them. Would it be too bold to think of Lear's agony with his heartless daughters, as if in physical nature alone God might meet with some proportionate return; for the ele ments at least obey Him, and if they love Him not with reasonable love, at least He " taxes not them with unkindness," for He "never gave them kingdoms nor called them daughters?" He appears as an Unrequited Benefactor, from whom men are gracelessly taking gifts at every hour without one word of thanks or one attitude of thankfulness. They accept His bounteous and most gratuitous alms, not even as if they were receiving their rights, but as if they were being defrauded of them, as if the dole were stingy and beneath their due. They ask for more with careless gesture, in unpondered words, and with vulgar, not reverent, importunity. It is as if God were some machine, that when a spring was touched, and a wheel turned, should perform His functions, or be cast aside and broken up. He is an Unwelcome Visitor. u He comes to His own, and His own receive Him not." M<;n think that while He pretends to be a gojourner, He m««st needs be a spy. He disturbs them at their work, and interferes with the wild license of their free will. They say to Him as the devils said, " What have we to do with Thee, Thou Son of David?" Doubtless there is a life to come, say men; but why should not God let us alone now, why come " to torment us before the time?" His visits are never welcome; they are barely tolerated. Instead of being overcome with confusion as Peter wap, when he said, " Depart from me, 0 Lord! for I am a sinful man," and yet all the while he yearned to have his Master nearer still, men, even when He works wonders of mercy on them, beseech Him, like the dry and cravenhearted Gerasenes, to depart out of their coasts.

He is a Pauper in His own creation. All things from the highest to the lowest are His. Immensity is the limit of His absolute dominion. He needs no sacrifice, for His are "the cattle upon a thousand hills." Yet He is ever condescending to ask for the commonest things, for the vilest alms, for the waste and the refuse of the creatures whom He is hourly enriching. Yet not from one in a thousand does He receive what He pitifully im plores. Those who give, give grudgingly, and with vary ing circumstances of ungraceful demeanour and a niggardly spirit. How eloquently He tells His tale, yet how few believe Him! He sits like a beggar in the cold, the scorn of disdainful eyes and the receptacle of un kindly words, all through this wintry day of free man's probation, while, above, the incense of prayer magnificently clouds His throne, and the piercing songs of the beautiful spirits in circles of delicious sound make music at His feet. He appears to us as Broken-hearted, wounded in all His tenderest sensibilities, coarsely smit ten in His most delicate affections, laden with unmerited humiliations; and yet reproaching no one, not shutting Himself up within Himself, not laying Himself out any the less freely to new degradations, almost anxious we should not see how pained He is, lest we also should be pained ourselves, and wholly occupied in ministering to the pains of others, so slight, so transient, so skin-deep that they cannot bear comparison with His. He appears as a Benevolent Sage, old, venerable, kind, unselfish, and wise, who is ever putting Himself out of His way to warn, instruct, and guide us. What more attractive than His manner, what more genial, and less burdensome, less wearisome? His voice is full of music, His worda like the running of a cool stream under the fragrant boughs. Each one soothes a sore and heals a wound, animates the heart with joy, throws a whole new world open to the mind, and invigorates with fresh pulses of spiritual strength the lassitude of our way-worn time-tired souls. Yet while He prophesies to us happy things, we turn from Him with more disdain than Ilium from the melancholy, visionary lamentations of her ceaseless Cassandra. One while He is not listened to; another while He is rudely and indecently interrupted in His speech. Behold the two alternations in the treatment of this heavenly Sage! He appears to us again as a Complaining Friend, wronged and injured, entreating yet never reproaching, deprecating but never protesting. It is enough to break a heart, less hard than stone, to hear His lamentations in the prophets, to listen to the ineffable murmurs of His pleading. Yet no word of bitterness escapes. Nay, in His grief He finds excuse for those who have grieved Him; and if the prophet answers and takes up His strain and impeaches the sinner, the Plain tiff Himself becomes his advocate and lavishes His in finite wisdom upon his defence. When Job's comforters gloriously justified God at the expense of the uneasy sufferer, He cut them short with peremptory rebukes, silenced them, and bade Job offer sacrifice for them thaft the grandeur of their big words might be forgiven them. What is observable in these Seven Figures of God is that they are so touching; they put Him in such piteous 2A case; they make religion so full of tenderness, as if the* softened heart, the flowing tear, were its truest service They look like blessed merciful artifices to win to themselves men's love. They flow out of the great ocean of God's Paternity.

But to these seven, at His own bidding, we must add an eighth, such an one as we should not have dared to add ourselves. It is His own. We have ventured, in all love and fear, trusting not to offend His ever-blessed Majesty, to put Him before ourselves in all shapes that shall provoke affection and awaken piety. But He con descends to liken Himself to something evil. Even if we love Him not, still for our own necessities' sake He would fain have us pray to Him, and go on praying, that He may soften our hearts at last by the very accumulation of His mercies. Let us be drawn to Him anyhow, so long only as we be drawn to Him. Let there be be ginnings of piety, no matter how self-seeking at first they be. Anything shall be welcomed, for the sake of the hope of what will follow, and in great faith of the almost omnipotence of grace. And to show us all this, and more than this, more a great deal which we have in our hearts but which lies too deep for words, in the Gospel of St. Luke God stoops to compare Himself to the Un just Judge who " feared not God nor regarded man/' and whose selfish love of ease was vanquished only by the pertinacity of the importunate widow. " Now be cause this widow is troublesome to Me, I will avenge her, lest continually coming she weary Me." Such are the words which God, not only permits, but even sug gests to us as a picture of Himself. We dare not comment upon them lest we should seem to make free,

When God Himself suggests familiarity, then is it time for us to bo more stricken with awe than ever we were before.

Now put together these pictures of The Slighted Father, The Unrequited Benefartor, The Unwelcome Visitor, The Pauper in His Own Creation, The Brokenhearted Outcast, The Sage Ridiculed, The Complaining Friend, and the Unjust Judge. Do they not form of themselves a positive revelation of God, of God in the world? Try in the minuteness of careful and loving meditation whether they do not equally compose the eighteen hundred years' biography of the Blessed Sacrament in the churches of men. Draw them out and dwell upon them one by one, and you will see how much they will bring out that is beautiful, tender, touching, holy, and divine. Th.ey are enough of themselves to form a complete theology of the heart. But in truht if we scrutinize God to the utmost in His own world, if we put the Creator into every conceivable relation to His creatures which reverent analogy will allow, if we take the measure and transcribe the outlines of every one of His operations which He permits us to detect, we shall still find that we have all the while been discovering and multiplying similitudes and illustrations of the Blessed Sacrament. The Blessed Sacrament lies nt the bottom of Creation, impregnating it all with its own divine Idea, and it appears again at the top clasping all mysteries together in one radiant point of union, the last legacy of Jesus, the masterpiece of Redeeming Love, the pearl surmounting the Diadem of all Creation.

There is a vision given in the meditations of Sister Emmerich, which is, to say the least of it, most artistically beautiful. Jesus, to be least troublesome, has been sunk by His guards into a kind of well; and is sitting at the bottom with His hands tied behind Him. The sun of Good Friday rises above the hills, and mounts into the sky, and at length has attained sufficient altitude to pierce the well with one slanting ray. It lights on Jesus. That solitary beam of brightness illu minates Him in the depth of His dungeon, and He raises His drooping eyes to meet it. The creature is illuminating its Creator. His face is pale as death, disfigured with blood and earth and spittle, His hair drenched, matted, and disordered, His hands manacled and pinioned, His vesture disfigured and disarrayed: and there He is in the first light of that sun at whose setting the great mystery of woe will be complete and over. Secret, little, helpless, ignominious, and in the power of His own crea tures, that figure of Jesus Abandoned seems to image forth the invisible God Himself, hiding in a hole of His own creation. So He seems to me to have been in every nation and in every age, and in every department and province of the world. That is His way. That mystery is His portrait, with a strong light upon it. Jesus is a picture of God. The Incarnation is after the same fash ion as creation was. God is consistent with Himself in all His mysteries. So also that mystery is a picture of the Blessed Sacrament: for the Blessed Sacrament too, as is always the base with Jesus, is a portrait of God. What then can be more un thoughtful, or indicate a mind less used to the ways of God, than to fancy that the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation is a gratuitous addition to religion, an unnecessary fiction, a prodigious invention, a monstrous imagination, out of keeping with the rest of God's ways, a thing by itself, and out of barmouy with the style of His other works? It is part of an immense system, the conclusion of many divine pre mises. It is the keystone of creation's arch, and also the apex of that pyramid of creation which runs up and loses itself in the Divine Person of the Eternal Word, and so hangs all things on to God.

Surely a glimpse into this system of God must fill us with unusual reverence. What it comes to is that the whole beauty of creation is in the presence of the Crea tor, the lives, the hopes, the joys, the possibilities of men simply in the benediction of His compassionate presence. What would the world be but sheer hell, if it were reduced to the three bare necessities of His immensity, in essence, presence, and power? It will in crease our reverence to think of this. We shall value every faintest token of God's dear Presence more and more, when we see that the absence of it is no less a misery than hell. Yet how many men live without God in the world, and care not for it, and are happy, all be cause God is more gracious with them than they know of, and visits them with a sunny presence which they perceive not nor understand! So little is the pain of sense, intensely horrible as it may be, compared with the pain of loss, that hell may be shortly described as the one cavern of creation from which the inexorable majesty of God withdraws all presence, save and except the ne cessities of His immensity.

Let us put aside the curtain of vindictive fire, and see what this pain of loss is like; I say, what it is like, for it fortunately surpasses human imagination to conceive its dire reality. Suppose that we could see the planets and the ponderous stars whirling their terrific masses with awful, and if it might be so, clamorous velocity, and thundering through the fields of unresisting space with furious gigantic momentum, such as the mighty avalanche most feebly figures, and thus describ ing, with chafing eccentricities and frightful deflections, their mighty centre-seeking and centre-flying circles, we should behold in the nakedness of its tremendous ope rations the divine law of gravitation. Thus in like manner should we see the true relations between God and ourselves, the true meaning and worth of His beneficent presence, if we could behold a lost soul at the moment of its final and judicial reprobation, a few moments after its separation from the body and in all the strength of its disembodied vigour and the fierceness of its penal immortality. No beast of the jungle, no chimera of heathen imagination, could be so appalling. No sooner is the impassable bar placed between God and itself than what theologians call the creature's radical love of the Creator breaks out in a perfect tempest of undying efforts. It seeks its centre and it cannot reach it. It bounds up towards God, and is dashed down again. It thrusts and beats against the granite walls of its prison with such incredible force, that the planet must be strong indeed whose equilibrium is not disturbed by the weight of that spiritual violence. Yet the great law of gravitation is stronger still, and the planet swings smoothly through its beautiful ether. Nothing can madden the reason of the disembodied soul, else the view of the desirableness of God and the inefficacious attractions of the glorious Divinity would do so.

Up and down its burning cage the many-facultied and mightily-intelligenced spirit wastes its excruciating immortality in varying and ever-varying still, always begin ning and monotonously completing, like a caged beast upon its iron tether, a threefold movement, which is not three movements successively, but one triple movement all at once. In rage it would fain get at God to seize Him, dethrone Him, murder Him, and destroy Him; in agony it would fain suffocate its own interior thirst for God, which parches and burns it with all the frantic hor rors of a perfectly self-possessed frenzy: and in fury it would fain break its tight fetters of gnawing fire which pin down its radical love of the beautiful Sovereign Good, and drag it ever back with cruel wrench from its desperate propension to its Uncreated Centre. In the ming ling of these three efforts it lives its life of endless hor rors. Portentous as is the vehemence with which it shoots forth its imprecations against God, they fall faint and harmless, far short of His tranquil, song-surrounded Throne.

Four views of its own hideous state revolve around it, like the pictures of some gastly show. One while it sees the million times ten millions genera and species of pains of sense which meet aud form a loathsome union with this vast central pain of loss. Another while all the multitude of graces, the countless kind providences, which it has wasted pass before it, and generate that uniying worm of remorse of which our Saviour speaks. Then comes a keen but joyless view, a calculation, but only a bankrupt's calculation, of the possibility of gains for ever forfeited, of all the grandeur and ocean-like vastness of the bliss which it has lost. And last of all comes before it the immensity of God, to it so unconsoling and

Bo unprofitable; it is not a picture, it is only a formless shadow, yet it knows instinctively that it is God. With a cry that should be heard creation through, it rushes upon Him, and it knocks itself, spirit as it is, against material terrors. It clasps the shadow of God, and lo! it embraces keen flames. It runs up to Him, but it has encountered only fearful demons. It leaps the length of its chain after Him, but it has only dashed into an affrighting crowd of lost and cursed souls. Thus is it ever writhing under the sense of being its own executioner. Thus there is not an hour of our summer sun shine, not a moment of our sweet starlight, not a vibration of our moonlit groves, not an undulation of odorous air from our flowerbeds, not a pulse of delicious sound from music or song to us, but that hapless unpitiable soul is ever falling sick afresh of the overwelming sense that all around it is eternal.

And all this is but the absence of God's sweet presence in His own Creation! And the Blessed Sacrament is in a most special sense His Real Presence! Hence the Blessed Sacrament is the very opposite of hell. It is no less than heaven on earth. See how we meet its wonders at every turn, and are continually coming upon some of its blissful functions. God has thrown Himself, His grace, His joy, His presence into it as the last citadel of His love. Let us build our tents beneath its walls, and abide there evermore: for those portals are the happy end of all human pilgrimage. 0 thou waste land of endless torment and malediction! one sunbeam of God's beautiful presence falling athwart the outer darkness of thine everlasting curse, and it would be lit up into a home of joy and a paradise of peace. 0 Hidden

Presence! Uncreated Beauty! show Thyself now in this Thy sweetest sacramental hiding-place, show Thyself ever so little to our poor unworthy hearts, and we shall leap forward with longing love and unite ourselves eternally with Thee!

If such be the ways of God, what wonder His glory should rest in such a special manner on the Blessed Sacrament, what wonder it should be itself an endless fountain of fresh glory to His heavenly majesty? Every thing that ever was, is, or will be, is only for the glory of God. This is the true simple philosophy of all creation, the one infallible truth of all possible sciences. What is heaven but a pageant of His love, and hell but the chastity of His justice? What is purgatory but the condescension of His patient mercy? How many things are there, kingdoms in the world of nature, and of grace, which seem to exist only for His glory? Such are the inimitable wonders of the Saints, and the waste of beauty in the physical creation: such the mystery of suffering on earth, especially in babes and idiots, such the whole notion of probation, whether of angels or of men, such the public pomp of the universal judgment of those whose dooms are already fixed and their eternal careers begun: such the excessive prerogatives of Mary, and such the sweet human abysses of the Sacred Heart, enclosed as many a time it has been within our own worthless hearts in « the mystery of Communion. One half hour of one tabernacle's Sacramental life is more than the worship of all angels and Saints for ever; for it is Jesus the living God. The various acts of worship of the various angelic choirs, the various hearts and souls of saints, glorified and grace-sublimed, straining 35 through countless ages their intelligence and love, could not so worship God, as the new Host has worshipped Him before yet the priest has raised It for the worship of the faithful. Indeed, the worship He receives from the Blessed Sacrament is the only worship worthy of God in the whole of creation; and it is worthy of Him because it is, so far as worship can be, co-equal and coextensive with Him. It is a joy to think of it, a delight to fathom it, if only to know afresh what all along we knew, that it was unfathomable. The Blessed Sacrament is sweeter far than sin is hateful; and thus is ever making to the offended Majesty of God a continual, divine, human, and abounding reparation.

Meanwhile, it not only glorifies G<*fl of itself, but it is leading, teaching, and enabling UP to glorify Him also, imperfectly, yet still so as we could never else hav^ glori fied Him. The Blessed Saciament is to us the doctor of the unity of God. It teaches us His unity in Him self, His unity in Trinity. It illuminates for us the unity of all His works and ways. It manifests Him to us consistently, miraculously, as one and the same at work in matter and spirit, in nature and in grace. And if we have read the Old Testament aright, surely we may confess that above all things the Most High God glories in His unity. Further, the Blessed Sacrament is continually drawing creatures to love God more and more. There is not a function of the Blessed Sacrament, mass, communion, the visit, exposition, procession, benediction, viaticum, the holy sepulchre, but they are each and all powers, attractions, forces, of Divine Love, the varieties of which are a science by themselves. Nay, to bring God and man still more closely together, see! the Flesh of Jesus has drawn not only His Divine Person into a miraculous mystic state, but also the Father and the Holy Ghost by real and true concomitance. What celestial attraction! So that of God, as well as of angels and of men, are those great words true, that where tho Body is, there will the Eagles be gathered together 1 0 Littleness of my Sacramental Lord! what an ocean art Thou of Glory unto God! The feeblest accidents that matter could support, and yet the new residence of the Undivided Trinity, the extremes brought together, and at my priestly word; how plainly must the faith that holds this be a gift divine, how clearly must the love that conceived it be at once all-mighty and all-wise!

Yes! it comes to this, — that God vouchsafing to dwell in the Blessed Sacrament, it must needs be His greatest work of love. 0 what was Palestine to this! He dwells there as our Father among His children, as our Redeemer to complete His work, as our Sanctifier to continue it, as our Glorifier impatiently anticipating our endless union with Him, and as our Creator, perfecting, finishing, and outstripping in Transubstantiation the most delicate pro cesses of Creation, which without it would be unfinished. Look bravely now into the first dawn, the pearly aurora of Creation. We who have dared to look upon the Vision of the Holy Trinity, may be bold to look at this. See! out of viewless and impalpable Nothing that first instantaneous intellectual Creation, angels streaming forth in endless processions of -diversified intelligence; and then those material orbs, in countless kinds, some strewn like gold-dust over sidereal space in fair white galaxies, some hung like clearly swinging lamps along the streets and square? of the vast ethereal city! He who made them all, and could multiply the work again and again unnumbered times, He, the music of whose speechless voice evoked this splendour and this beauty and this intelligence, who brooded on the deeps of Chaos, who planted Eden, who fashioned Adam, and who in that day was young yet everlasting, is the Same, His whole undivided, ever-blessed Self who is now in the tabernacle, taken captive by His own insatiable love of the creatures whom Ilia mercy made I

THE BLESSED SACRAMENT A PICTURE OF JE8U8

Footnotes

1. Since writing the above passage I have met with the following in Joubert. It is perhaps what would be called too charitable / but to a certain extent it is as beautiful as it is true, so far as it is ex- ↩

2. Apoc. xix. ↩

3. This is of course a very different view of history from what modern eclecticism takes, with that propensity to optimism which the Alexandrian school and all its imitators have ever displayed. If I nm not mistaken, but I am quoting without book, M. Cousin somewhere calls creation a necessary act If so, his historical optimism is more intelligible. It would almost follow from his doctrine of creation. Yet, even so, the boldness of his conclusion is start ling. " Je regarde I'id6e de 1'optimSsme historique, 1'idge d'un plan g6n6ral do 1'histoire comme la plus haute id6e & laquelle la philosophic soit encore parvenue....Enfin on commence a comprendre et d amnititr fhiitoire d ton, te* point* de,« durtc." Cours de 1828. Lecon. viL ↩