Chapter I. A New Fashion of an Old Sin

"Quid ad me si quis non intelligat? Gaudeat et ipse dicens: Quid est hoc? Gaudeat etiam sic, et aniet, non inveniendo invenire potiue Te, quam iuveniendo non invenire Te." — S. Augustin.

Life is short, and it is wearing fast away. "We lose a great deal of time, and we want short roads to heaven, though the right road is in truth far shorter than we believe. It is true of most men that their light is greater than their heat, which is only saying that we practice less than we profess. Yet there are many souls, good, noble, and affectionate, who seem rather to want light than heat. They want to know'more of God, more of themselves, and more of the relation in which they stand to God, and then they would love and serve Him better. There are many again who, when they read or hear of the spiritual life, or come across the ordinary maxims of Christian perfection, do not understand what is put before them. It is as if some one spoke to them in a foreign language. Either the words are without meaning, or the ideas are far-fetched and unreal. They stand off from persons who profess to teach such doctrines, or to live by them, as if they had some contagious disease which they might catch themselves. Yet they are often very little tainted by worldliness; often they are men who have made sacrifices for God, and who would lay down their lives for His Church. Their instincts are good; yet they seem to want something; and whatever it is that they lack, the absence of it appears to put them under a most mournful disability, in the way of attaining holiness. In other words, there are multitudes of men so good, that it seems inevitable that they must be much more good than they really are, and the difficulty is how so much goodness can continue to exist without more goodness.

This is a phenomenon which has at once attracted the attention and excited the sorrow of all who love the souls for which Jesus shed His Precious Blood. It may not be true that any one solution of the problem will meet or explain all the difficulties of this distressing experience. Much lies deep in the manifold corruption of our hearts. But there is one fact which goes far towards an adequate explanation of the matter, and which is at the same time, rightly considered, a profound mystery. It is that men, even pious men, do not continually bear in mind that they are creatures, and have never taken the pains to get a clear idea of what is involved in being a creature. Hence it is true to say, even of multitudes of the faithful, that they have no adequate or indeed distinct notion oPthe relation in which they stand to God, of His rights, or of their obligations: and, when trial comes, their inadequate idea betrays them into conduct quite at variance with their antecedents.

Forgetfulness of God has been in all ages the grand evil cf the world: a forgetfulness so contrary to reason, and so opposed also to the daily evidence of the senses, that it can be accounted for on no other hypothesis than that of original sin and the mystery of the fall. This forgetfulness of God has been far more common than open revolt against Him. The last is rather the sin of angels, the first the sin of men. Yet every age of the world has it own prevailing type and fashion of iniquity; and in these latter times it appears as if the forgetfulness of God had taken the shape of forgetfulness on our part that we are creatures. Men may realize that they are creatures, imperfect, finite, and dependent. This truth may be continually coming uppermost in books of morals, in systems of philosophy, and in the general tone of society. And yet, with all this, God may be set aside and passed over, almost as if He did not exist. The world simply does not advert to Him. Who that has read certain philosophical and scientific books of the last century does not know how men could write of creation without their thoughts so much as touching or coming in contact with the idea of the Creator? To such writers creation seems the end of and answer to all things, just as the Most Holy Trinity is to a believer. They speak of creation, investigate creation, draw inferences from creation, without so much as brushing against a personal or living Creator even in their imagination. Creator is to them simply a masculine form of the neuter noun creation, and they have a kind of instinct against using it, which they have probably never perceived, or never taken the trouble to explain even to themselves. It is not on any theory, or any atheistical principle, that God is thus past over. He is unseen, and hence is practically considered as absent; and what is absent is easily forgotten. He is out of mind because He is out of sight. There is no objection to giving God His place, only he is not thought of. This is one phase of the world's forgetfulness of God.

Then again there have been times and literary schools, in whic,li God was continually referred to, and His Namo used in an impressive manner, sometimes reverently and sometimes irreverently. lie has been a fashionable figure of speech, or an adornment of eloquence, or the culminating point of an oratorical climax. Or there has been a decency in naming Him honorably, as if it were burning a kind of incense before Ilim. It soothes the conscience; it gives an air of religion to us, and it enhances our own respectability, especially in the eyes of our inferiors. And yet this word God has not in reality meant the Three Divine Persons, as the Gospel reveals Them to us. It has been an imaginary embodiment or a vague canonization of an immense power, of distant majesty, and of unimaginable m}'stery: a something like the beauty of midnight skies, or the magnificent pageant of the storm, elevating the mind, quelling and tranquillizing littleness, and ministering to that poetry in our nature which is so often mistaken for real worship and actual religion. The ideas of duty, of precept, of sacrifice, of obedience, have been very indistinctly in the mind, if they have been there at all. It is the notion of a grand God, rather than a living God. The multitude of His rights over us, the dread exorbitance of His sovereignty, the realities of His minute vigilance, of His jealous expectations, of His rigid judgments, of His particular providence, of His hourly interference, these things have not been denied, but they have not been part of the idea wakened in the mind by the word God. The close embrace and tingling pressure of His omnipresence, as theology discloses it to us, would have made the men of whom we are speaking start away in alarm or in disgu.st. The God who demands an account of every idle word, and measures His penalties to each unbridled thought, and before whom all men are simply and peremptorily equal, is a different Being from the poetical sovereign who reigns over the Olympus of modern literature, to keep our inferiors in-check, to add gravity to our rebukes, to foster our own self-respect, and. in a word, to " paint a moral or adorn a tale." This God is rather our creature than our Creator; lie is the creature of moral respectability, the necessity of a dissatisfied conscience, the convenience of a social police, the consolation of an unsupernatural sorrow, and the imagery of a chaste and elegant literature. Yet the atheism of this is not explicit: it is only implied. No revolt is intended. A false God has slipped into the place of the true one; and because their faith had failed, men did not see the change, and do not see it still. This is another common form of forgetfulness of God; but it does not seem to have the peculiar characteristics or particular malice of the form which we suppose to belong eminently to our own days. For in the form, of which we have been speaking, the name of God was a necessity just because men did not forget that they were creatures. Nay, it was respectable and moral to speak slightingly of human nature, its weaknesses, and its vagaries, and to say great things of the far-off God. Men's notions of God wanted correcting and purifying, enlarging and heightening; above all, they wanted to be made real, and brought home to them, and laid as a yoke upon them. Nevertheless they remembered they were creatures; only, because they had lost the true idea of the Creator, they made the weaknesses of the creature an apology for his sin, and so went desperately astray.

But if we mistake not, the characteristic malice of these times takes a somewhat different direction. God is certainly ignored; but He is rather passively than actively ignored, rather indirectly than directly. Men do not look at His side of the question at all. They do not pass Him over, even contemptuously. Still less do they look at Him, and then put Him away. They are otherwise engaged. They are absorbed in the contemplation of themselves. Theories of progress and perfectibility throw so much dust in their eyes, that they do not sec that they arc creatures. They do not know what it is to be a creature, nor what comes of it. Hence the idea of God grows out of their minds: it is thrust out of them, extruded as it were, by the press of matter, without any direct process or conscious recognition on their parts. Their minds are purely atheist by the force of terms. They are the proprietors of the world, not tenants in it, and tenants at will. They hardly suspect that there are any claims on them. God was a fine thought of the Middle Ages, and religion an organized priestcraft, which was not always simply an evil, but which has now outlived any practical utilities it may ever have had. God is subjective: He is an idea: He is the creature of man's mind. If there be any real truth in religion, it must be looked for in the direction of pantheism. But the world is too busy to think much even of that. This is practically their view, or would be, if they took the trouble to have a view at all. What it comes to is this. Men are masters. They begin and end with themselves. Humanity marches onwards with great strides to the magnificent goal of social perfectibility. Each generation is a glorious section of the procession of progress. Liberty, independence, speed, association, and self-praise, these compose the spirit of the modern world. The word creature is a name, an affair of classification, like the title of a genus or a species in natural history. But it has no religious consequences: it entangles us in no supernatural relations. It simply means that we are not eternal, the remembrance of which is salutary, in that it quickens our diligence in the pursuit }f material prosperity.

All phases of civilization have a monomania of their own. Certain favorite ideas come uppermost, and are regarded with so much favor that an undue importance is given to them, until at last the relative magnitudes of truths and duties are lost sight of, and the ethics of the- day are full of a confusion that only rights itself in the failure and disappointment, in which each age of the world infallibly issues at the last. Then comes a reaction, and a new phase of civilization, and a fresh monomania; and either because the circle looks like a straight line, because we see so little of it at a time, or because the living world, like the material one, really advances while it revolves, we call these alternations progress. Now we generally find that each of these monomanias, with its cant words, its fixed ideas, and its onesided exaggerations, transfers its temper and characteristics to the view which it takes of God. The ideas of liberty, progress, independence, social contracts, representative government, and the like, color our views of God, and influence our philosophy. No one can read much without seeing how the prevailing ideas of the day make men fall into a sort of unconscious anthropomorphism about God. Indeed nothing but the magnificent certainties and unworldly wisdom of catholic theology can rescue us from falling into some such error ourselves.¹ At the present day particularly we should be careful and jealous in the view we take of God; careful that it should be well ascertained, and jealous that it should be according to the pattern showed us in catholic theology.f²

In Avhatever direction wo turn we shall gain fresh proof of the want of this true view of God, and fresh evidence that the peculiar forgetfulness of God in these times consists in the forgetfulness on our own part that we are creatures. For, think in what this forgetfulness consists. It is the new fashion of an old sin. Nothing offends our taste more than disproportion, or unseemliness. We like things to be in keeping, and when proprieties arc violated, Ave have a sense of being Avoundcd. If a servant puts on the manners and takes the liberties of a son, we are angry With him because he forgets himself, and a whole string of moral faults is involved in this forgetfulness. The manners, Avhich befit the member of our OAvn family, are unbecoming in a guest; and the demeanor and address of a stranger differ from those of an acquaintance. Our taste is annoyed Avhen these things are confused, and the annoyance of our taste is only the symptom of something far deeper in our moral nature. So is it in the matter we are discussing. The propriety of man as man, his moral and religious propriety, consists in his constantly remembering phism, perhaps of pantheism. Thus the Thomist view is safer. "You ought to know," says Malcbranche, (Iluitiemc Entretien sur la Mctaphysique. sec. 7.) "that to judge worthily of God we must attrihute to Him no attrihutes, hut those which are incomprehensible. This is evident, for God is the infiniti: in every sense, so that nothing finite is congruous to Him, and that which is infinite in every sense is in every way incomprehensible to the human mind/' So also Tertullian adv Marcion, 5. 4. Summum Magnum, ex defection* scmuli, solitudinem quamdam do singularitate procstantiae sum possidens, unicum est. So it has been well observed by Simon in his beautiful but insidious work on natural religion, (Religion Naturellc, 4S,) that wc almost all of us start from the Christian idea of God as author of the world, and land at the pagan idea of God like ourselves. All beings, except God, are in a system. It is their nature and condition. He alone is outside of and above all system; and thus by applying to Ilim our principles, we run into contradictions, and by attributing to Ilim our faculties, wc became entangled in impossibilities. Thus a clear and intelligent view of God is one of the first requisites for all of us at this day; and it is just this view which the catholic cathechism give*, and which all the wise men of the world seem so uuaccountally to miss.

that he is a creature, raid deme ring himself accordingly. The bad taste and vulgarity (to use words which may make the meaning clearer) of his not doing so are in reality sin and irreligion, because the contempt, presumption, and affectation, fall upon the majesty of the Most High God. Yet is not this forgetfulness quite a characteristic of the times in which we live?

Look at politics; and may we not read evidences of this spirit everywhere? How little has religion to do with questions of peace and war? We go to war to avenge an offence, or to push an interest, or to secure a gain, or to cripple a hostile power, as if there was no God of Hosts. We do not ask ourselves the question whether it is God's will that there should be such a war. The whole action of diplomacy is as if there were no special providence, and as if God having retired from the management of the world, we must take up the reins which He has let fall from His wearied grasp. Since the balance of power was substituted for the central unity of the Holy See, we have come more and more to act as if the world belonged to us, and we had the management of it, and were accountable to none. On the most solemn subjects, even those of education, and religion, and the interests of the poor, how little of the tone and feeling of creatures is exhibited in debates in parliament, or in the leading articles of a newspaper. It would seem as if there were nothing we had not the right to do, because nothing we had not the power to do. With far less of intentional irreligion than would have seemed possible beforehand, there is an incalculable amount of forgetfulness that we are creatures. What else is our exaggerated lust of liberty? What else are even the vauntings of our patriotism? What else is the spirit of puerile self-laudation into which our national character seems in the hands of an anonymous press to have already degenerated, or to be fast degenerating?

The Stimc tone is observable in our poetry and elegant literature. Everywhere man is his own end, and the master of his own destiny. Subordination and a subject spirit are not virtues, neither in works of fiction do the meek inherit the earth. * Still more strongly does this come out in systems of philosophy. Humanity is a person with a unique destination and perfectibility. Man is complete in himself. There is neither wreck nor ruin about him. The natural stands off, clear and self-helpful, from the supernatural. Accountableness is not a necessary part of self-government. There is no need to call in the idea of God in order to explain the situation of man. His duties begin and end with other men or with himself. Philosophically speaking, things can be managed at Berlin without God.

But of all things the most amazing is the innocent, childlike, simple-hearted atheism of physical science. The beginning of matter, the elements into which it may ultimately be resolvable, how the cycles of the heavenly bodies first began, the unspeakable intricacy of their checks and counterchecks, the secular aberrations and secular corrections of the same, the secret of life, the immateriality of the soul, where physical science ends, — all these questions are discussed in a thousand books in a spirit and tone betokening the most utter forgetfulness that we are little creatures, who got here, God help us! not by our own means, and are going, God help us! where He chooses and when. We read sentence after sentence, expecting every moment to light on * the word God, or to come across some allusion to the Creator. And the writers would not omit Him, but would speak good words of Him, if it came to them to do so. But it does not. They are not unbelievers. Nay, they would³ loudly profess themselves to be creatures and to have a Creator, if they were asked. They would be lunatics if they did not. But the double sense of His creation and of their createdness (to coin a word) is not in all their thoughts, and has not mastered the current of their intellectual activity. They left God at church yesterday, and are closeted with matter to-day. So many secondary causes are waiting for an audience that their time is fully occupied. Besides, is there not one day in the week fixed for the reception of the First Cause, and the acknowledgment of His claims? But, to be serious, no one we think will say that modern science, at least in England, is profane and irreligious. Ileally it is most creditably the contrary. It is ourselves whom we forget: we forget that we are creatures. Our error about God comes from a mistake about ourselves.

There are many persons in these days who do not say they are not Christians; yet who write and speak as it were from without, as if they were at once Christians, and not Christians. They have not taken the pains to formulizo a positive disbelief; but they do not see how progress, and perfectibility, and modern discovery, psychological or otherwise, comport with that collection of ancient dogmas which make up the Christian religion, and their instinct would be to give up the dogmas rather than the discoveries, and that with a promptitude worthy of modern enlightenment. With such persons the dignity of man is a matter of prime consideration, while, in their view, his assent to the doctrines and practices of the Church is as degrading to his intellectual nobility, as his obedience to them is superstitious and debasing. The pope and theology, the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, grace and the sacraments, penance and purgatory, scapulars and rosaries, asceticism and mysticism, combine to form a perfectly distinct and cognizable character. They give a tone to the mind and a fashion to the conduct, which is indubitable, and which it is difficult to mistake. In the Church such a character is held in honor. It is the catholic type of spiritual beauty. But the men, of whom we are speaking, are far from holding it in esteem. To them it appears mean, weak, tame, contemptible, cowardly, narrow, pusillanimous. It wants the breadth and daring of moral greatness, according to their view of greatness. Nothing grand, lasting, or spreading will come of it. But let us put out of view for the moment the undoubted agents in the formation of this character, the pope and theology, the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, grace and the sacrament8,penanceand purgatory, rosaries and scapulars, asceticism and mysticism. Let us take the character as we find it, without enquiring into the process of its formation. Granting that there is a God, eternal and all-holy, granting that we are His creatures, created simply for His glory, dependent upon Him for all things, and without any possibility of happiness apart from Him, granting His perfections and our imperfections, is not the behaviour, the demeanor, of a catholic saint, precisely what would come of a wise and reflective apprehension of the fact that he is a creature and has a Creator? Does not Christian sanctity with inimitable gracefulness express to the life the modest, truthful, prevailing sense that we are creatures, standing before the eye and living in the hand of our everlasting Creator? And are not the selfsufficiency, the daring, the vainglory, the speed, the unhesitatingness, the reckless manners, which many esteem to be moral and intellectual bravery, just so many evidences of forgetfulness that we are creatures? Are they not vagaries and improprieties, which, to put out of sight their falsehood and their criminality, are as if a worm would fain attempt to fly or a monkey to ape the manners of a man? It is not true that the practices and devotions and sacramental appliances of the Church introduce something which is incongruous and out of keeping, something to be added to our human life, but still an addition easily discernible, and not dovetailing into our natural position. On the contrary the manners which they form are simply the most perfect, the most graceful, the most sensible and self-consistent exhibition of our indubitable condition, that of finite and dependent creatures. The supernatural grace, of which these practices are the channels, at once completes and restores our nature, and makes us eminently and winningly natural If Christianity were not true, the conduct of a wise man, who acted consistently as a creature who had a Creator, would strangely resemble the behavior of a catholic saint. The lineaments of the catholic type would be discernible upon him, though his gifts would not be the same.

This forgetfulness that we are creatures, which prevails in that energetically bad portion of the world which is scripturally called the world, affects multitudes of persons, who are either less able to divest themselves of the influences of old traditions and early lessons, or are happily less possessed with the base spirit of the world. It leads them to form a sort of religion for themselves which singularly falls in with all the most corrupt propensities of our hearts: a religion which in effect teaches that we can live two lives and serve two masters. Such persons consider that religion has its own sphere, and worldly interests their sphere also, and that the one must not interfere with the other. Thus their tendency is to concentrate all the religion of the week into Sunday, and to conceive that they have thereby purchased a right to a large conscience for the rest of the week. The world, they say, has its claims and God has His claims. Both must be satisfied; God first, and most scrupulously; then the world, not less exactly, though it be indeed secondary. But it is not a " reasonable service" to neglect one for the other. God and the world are coordinate powers, coordinate fountains of moral duty and obligation. He is the really religious man who gives neither of them reason to complain. We must let our common sense hinder us from becoming over-righteous. Men who hold this doctrine, a doctrine admirably adapted for a commercial country, have a great advantage over the bolder men of whom we spoke before. For they enjoy all the practical laxity of unbelievers, without the trouble or responsibility of disbelieving; and besides that, they enjoy a certain good-humour of conscience in consequence of the outward respect they pay, in due season and fitting place, to the ceremonies of religion.

Hitherto we have spoken of classes of persons in whom we take no interest, further than the sorrow which all who love God must feel at seeing Him defrauded of His honor, and all who love their fellow-men in seeing so much amiability, so much goodness, with a millstone round its neck which must inevitably sink it in the everlasting deeps. Let us come now to those with whom we are very much concerned; and for whom we have ventured to compose this little treatise. Errors filter from one class of men into another, and appear in different forms according to the new combinations into which they enter. We are all of us more affected by the errors which prevail around us than we really suppose. Almost every popular fallacy has its representative even among the children of faith; and as when a pestilence is raging, many are feeble and languid though they have no plague-spot, so is it in matters of religion. The contagion of the world does us a mischief in many ways of which we are hardly conscious; and we often injure ourselves in our best and highest interests by views and practices, to which we cling with fatal obstinacy, little suspecting the relationship in which they stand to widely spread evils, which we behold in their naked deformity in other sections of society, and hold up to constant reprobation. The forgetfulness that we are creatures, which produces the various consequences already m?ntioned, is au

A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. S3 error which is less obviously hateful than a direct forgetfulness of God, and consequently it wins its way into holy places where the other would find no admittance, or scant hospitality. Good Christians hear conversation around them, catch the prevailing tone of society, read books, and become familiarized with certain fashionable principles of conduct; and it is impossible for their minds and hearts not to become imbued with the genius of all this. It is irksome to be always on our guard, and from being off our guard we soon grow to be unsuspicious. When a catholic enters into intimate dealings with protestants, he must not forget to place his sentries, and to act as if he was in an enemy's country; and this is unkindly work, and as miserable as it is unkindly. Yet so it is. When newspapers tell us that Catholicism is always more reasonable and less superstitious when it is in the immediate presence of protestantism, they indicate something which they have observed, namely, a change. Now if our religion be changed by protestantism, we can have little difficulty in deciding whether it has changed for the better or the worse. All this illustrates what we mean. The prevailing errors of our time and country find their way down to us, and corrupt our faith, and lower our practice, and divide us among ourselves. This unstartling error of forgetting that we are creatures is thus not without grave influence upon conscientious catholics; and it is to this point that we are asking your attention.

It is beyond all question among Christians that there are such things in religion as the counsels of perfection, and that the true way of serving God is to do so out of love. No one doubts but that a saint is a man who loves God ardently and tenderly, who attempts great things for His honor, and makes painful sacrifices to promote His glory. No one imagines a saint to be one who does no more than he is obliged to, and who, having just avoided mortal sin, is careless about venial faults, and takes bis ease and liberty outside the verge of strict and certain precepts. The Church possesses a whole literature which is occupied with nothing else than teaching these principles of Christian perfection, as they are called. Many of these books, such as the Imitation of Christ, are in such repute that it would be rash and presumptuous to question what they teach; and there are others of the very highest spirituality, such as the works of St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, to which the Church has given her most solemn approval. Persons accustomed to the perusal of these books regard the axioms on which their teaching is based as almost self evident. They know on the authority of the church that there ought not to be two opinions on the matter; but even independently of that, they cannot conceive as a matter of common sense how there can possibly be two opinions about it. Even if men might go wrong on such a question, how could they do so in point of fact?

Nevertheless thefe are numbers of catholics, who, strange to say! see the question in a different light. The teaching of spiritual books and the doctrines of perfection, as laid down by the most approved writers, do not recommend themselves to them. They consider that, unless they are under the vows of some monastic order, they should aim at nothing more than the avoiding of mortal sin, and giving edification to those around them. They are good people. They go to mass; they aid or start missions; they countenance the clergy; they are kind to the poor; they say the rosary; they frequent the sacraments. Yet when anyone talks to them of serving God out of personal love to Him, of trying to be daily more and more closely united to Him, of cultivating the spirit of prayer, of constantly looking out to see what more they can do for God, of mortifying their own will in tilings allowable, of disliking the spirit of the world even in manifestations of it which are short of sin, and of living more consciously in the presence of God, they feci as if they were listening to an unknown language. They have a jealousy, almost a dislike, of such truths, quite irrespective of any attempt being made to ft >rce such a line of conduct upon themselves. If they are humble they are puzzled: if they are self-opinionated, they are angry, critical, or contemptuous, as the case may be. There are many others to whom such views are simply new, and who with modesty and self-distrust are shaken by them, and to some extent receive them. Still upon the whole such doctrines have a sound in their ears of being ultra and extravagant, or poetical and fanciful, or peculiar and eccentric.

Now it must be beyond a doubt to any catholic scholar that such persons are completely out of harmony with a considerable and important part of the catholic system, that they think differently from the saints and holy men, and that a great deal of what the church has approved is new, startling, and perhaps displeasing to them. This is a very strong way of putting it; but we do not see that it goes beyond the truth. They do not view it in this light themselves. God forbid! but this is what it comes to in effect.

In speaking of unbelievers, we pointed out that the character formed by the peculiar doctrines, devotions, and practices of the catholic church, was not something monstrous, or exotic, or unnatural, as they are too often in tho habit of considering it. We maintained that it rested on the undeniable common-sense view that we are creatures, the creatures of an Almighty Creator, and that a man who acted consistently, (if unassisted nature could do so,) as a creature, would not be unlike a catholic saint: always excepting the practice of voluntary mortification, and all the shapes of love of suffering, for these are ideas peculiar to the kingdom of the Incarnation, or to such false religions as retain in distorted shapes great portions of the primitive-tradition which prophesied of the expiation of sin by the vicarious sufferings of a Redeemer. So now we would call the attention of the good people, of whom we are at present speaking, to a similar fact. The doctrines of Christian perfection and the teaching of approved spiritual books do not rest upon any peculiarity of any school of theology, or upon any special spirit of a religious order, or on the idiosyncrasy of any particular saint, or upon any unusual and miraculous vocation, but simply on the fact of our being creatures. Even the practices of voluntary penance or of acquired contemplation, though not of obligation, at least rise naturally and easily out of the relations in which we every one of us stand to God as our Creator. There is nothing in the whole range of asceticism which does not turn out at last to be, a natural and logical result of our position in the world as the creatures of a Creator: and hence there is nothing in such practices fanciful, eccentric, or intrinsically indiscreet: though wrong time, wrong place, wrong measure, can make anything indiscreet.

From this fact we draw two inferences. The first is that the strangeness of the doctrines of spirituality to these excellent persons is attributable, without their knowing it, to the prevailing forgetfulness that we are creatures. They are unsuspectingly influenced by the very evil which gives its tone and color to the unbelief and worldliness of the times. They have no distinct conception of the relation in which their being creatures places them with regard to the Creator, nor of what comes of it in the way of practical religion. It has probably never occurred to them that it was a subject which needed study. Hence, unprovided with antidotes to the poison they were compelled daily to imbibe, an imperceptible change has passed upon them, or the poison of the error has been beforehand with the truth, or, in the case of converts, it has troubled the processes of conversion, and stopped them short of their legitimate completion: for almost all come into the Church only half converted, and several remain so to the last. Thus they have come as it were by instinct to rise up in arms against a claim which is urged in behalf of God. Next they have jealously examined His claims, in a commercial spirit, and with a bias towards themselves. Then they have put limits to His service, made a compromise with Him, reduced Him from a Creator to a being, who is to tax and to tythe, and no more, for He is a constitutional monarch and not despotic, and they have come to regard notions of perfection with disfavor, as an unconstitutional aggression on the part of God or His executive. Now every one of these six processes says as loudly and plainly as it can, " I am not a creature. There is some such sort of equality between God and myself, as that I am entitled to come to terms with Him." Moreover the spirit in which all this is done is equally incompatible with the modest position of a creature. It is as if they were the judges, as if they possessed some inalienable, indefeasible rights of their own. There is no diffidence, no self-distrust. They see their way more clearly, and assert their supposed liberty more positively, than they would do in matters which concerned the claims and interests of their fellow-citizens. It would make a great change, we will not say how great, in them,* if they realized and clearly comprehended the relation in which a creature, necessarily as a creature, stands to his Creator.

My second inference is, that, as the doctrines and practices of spirituality rest mainly on our position as creatures, and simply on our position as redeemed creatures, the common evasion that they belong to the cloister, and are pecu-' liar to monks and nuns, will not hold good and cannot be maintained. A monk is no more a creature than a soldier or a sailor, a billiard-marker or a jockey, and no more comes out of his relation to the Creator than out of theirs.

D

There may be questions of degree in the.amount different men may do for God; there surely can be none as to the principles on which, and the spirit in which, lie is to bo served. Monks and nuns have given up their liberty by the heroism of vows. They are obliged to the practices of perfection, or to apply themselves to the acquisition of them. Theirs is a glorious captivity, in which supernatural charity has bound them baud and foot, and handed them over to the arms of their Creator. They have used the original liberty He gave them in the grandest of ways, by voluntarily surrendering it. All then that distinguishes the Christian in his family from the monk in his community is his liberty. If he is to serve God at all it must be on the same principle as the monk. There are not two spiritualities, one for the world and one for the cloister. God is one; God's character is one; our necessary relation to Him is one. There are many distinct things in spirituality to which people in the world are not bound, many which can with difficulty be practised in the world, many which it would be unwise for most persons to attempt to practise in the world, and some which it would be actually impossible to practise there. But whatever differences there may be in the amount done for God, or the manner of doing it, or the obligations under which it is done, there can be no difference in the principle on which it is done. God must be served out of love. This is the tirst and great commandment. No one is condemned except for mortal sin; but any man who starts professedly on the principle that he will do no more than avoid mortal sin, and that God shall have no more out of him, will infallibly not succeed in his single object, that is to say, ho will not avoid mortal sin. Though he is not bound to do more than this in order to secure his salvation, yet because he has gone on a wrong principle, it will, just because it is a principle and not merely a mistake or a negligence, carry him far further than he intended, and end by being his ruin. He •will fail in his object, because he made it exclusively his object. Love is the sole principle of the creature's service of his Creator, however remiss that love may be. Thus then, if it be true that the doctrines and practices of Christian perfection are simply based on God's love of us and our love of Him, that is, the relation between the creature and the Creator, it is either true that monks are more God's creatures than we are, or that, in our mea* sure, and degree, the principles of perfection are as applicable to ourselves as to them.

We are not going to write a book on perfection. Very ■ far from it. But we believe that the ruling spirit of the age is rather a forgetfulness that we are creatures, than a forgetfulness of the Creator; that many more persons are infected with this evil than have any suspicion of it; that it lies at the bottom of all the objections men make to tho doctrines of spirituality; and, furthermore, that many more persons would try to serve God, would frequent the sacraments, avoid sin, and be ordinarily good catholics, if they had a clear view of the relations between themselves and God, as creature and Creator. Hence, we are undertaking what may seem a childish, or at least an unnecessary, work. We wish to explain, or to state rather than to explain, the first elements of all practical religion, the A B C of devotion. We want to write a primer of piety; and to do so in the plainest, easiest, most unadorned style. The experience of the priesthood has led us to think that we shall serve souls by putting forward what every one thinks he knows already, and what he will say he knew before as soon as ht» reads it. Nevertheless, these common-places are not s« well known as they should be. Their very commonness leads men to overlook them; and we trust that not a few readers, if they will follow us patiently, will find that both head and heart will have learned not a little in the study. All our duties to God, and to ourselves no less, are founded on the fact that we are creatures. All religion is based on the sense that we are creatures. The foolishness of this simple truth will bring to nought the pride of the wise world. It will be as the plain stone of the common brook against the might and bravery of the giant of modern misbelief. We speak to simple-hearted believers. We put no high things before them, but rather the lessons of a village dame. We draw no conclusions, and urge no definite duties. We only ask our dear readers to try to put together with us a few obvious matters of fact about our heavenly Father, and then leave it to grace and our own hearts what is to come of it all. We will therefore ask each other some such questions as these — What is it, as children express themselves, what is it to be a creature? — What is it to have a Creator? — Why does God wish us to love Him? — Why does He love us? — How can we love Ilira? — How do we repay His love of us? — How does He repay our love of Him? — Is it easy to be saved? — And what becomes of the great multitude of believers?

What if, when we put our answers together, something new and striking comes of it all? What if it warms our hearts, and moistens our eyes? Any how it is very sweet to talk of God. There is no holyday in the world like it. So, dear readers, take this weary and disagreeable chapter as a preface to something better, something easier, simpler, heartier, and more loving; and let us begin, as little chil drcn, at the very beginning.

Footnotes

1. The gibe of Voltaire is after all full of bitter truths; depuis que Dicu a fait rhomme a son image, l'homme le lui a bien rendu. ↩

2. There arc two views of God in theology, the Scotist and the Thomist. The Scotist seems to bring God nearer to us; to make our conceptions of Him more real, to represent Him as more accessible to our understandings, even while He remains incomprehensible. St. Thomas carefully observes the mean: Nullum nomen univoce deDco et creaturis praxlicatur; sed nee etiam pure equivoce, ut aliqui dixerunt: and again, Aliqua dicuntur de Deo et creaturis, analogiee, et non equivoce pure, neque pure univoce, I. q. xiii. 5 and 6. The Thomist view, by driving us away from many of the analogies on which the other view rests, or by regarding these analogies as more equivocal, seems to put God further from us, and to thicken the darkness which is round His throne. But, if the Scotist view seems more directly to lead to love, it is exposed to much greater philosophical dangers than the Thomist, and may more easily be preesed into tl g service of anthropomor. C ↩

3. E. G. sec Kingsley's Two Years Ago, a work by an Anglican clergyman, propounding what the Saturday Review satirically termed a "muscular Christianity." ↩