Chapter II. What It Is to Be a Creature

Si homo millc annis scrviret Deo etiam ferventissime, non mcreretor «x tondigno dimidiam diem esse in regno coelorum.— & Anselm.

Let us sit down upon the top of this fair hill. The clear sunshine and the bright air flow into us in streams of life and gladness, while our thoughts are lifted up to God, and our hearts quietly expand to love. Beneath us is that beautiful rolling plain, with its dark masses of summer foliage sleeping in the sun for miles and miles away, in the varying shades of blue and green, according to the distance or the clouds. There at our feet is the gigantic city, gleaming with an ivory whiteness beneath its uplifted but perpetual canopy of smoke. The villa-spotted hills beyond it, its almost countless spires, its one huge many-steepled palace, and its solemn presiding dome, its old bleached tower, and its squares of crowded shipping — it all lies below us in the peculiar sunshine of its own misty magnificence. There, in every variety of joy and misery, of elevation and depression, three million souls are working out their complicated destinies. Close around us the air is filled with the songs of rejoicing birds, or the pleased hum of the insects that are drinking the sunbeams, and blowing their tiny trumpets as they weave and unweave their mazy dance. The flowers breathe sweetly, and the leaves of the glossy shrubs are spotted with bright creatures in painted surcoat or gilded panoply, while the blue dome above seems both taller and bluer than common, and is ringing with the loud d2 peals of the unseen larks, as the steeples of the city ring for the nation's victory. Far off from the river-flat conies the booming of the cannon, and here, all unstartled, round and round the pond, a fleet of young perch are sailing in the sun, slowly and undisturbedly as if they had a very grave enjoyment of their little lives. What a mingled scene it is of God and man! And all so bright, so beautiful, so diversified, so calm, opening out such fountains of deep reflection, and of simple-hearted gratitude to our Heavenly Father.

What is our uppermost thought? It is that we live, and that our life is gladness. Our physical nature unfolds itself to the sun, while our mind and heart seem no less to bask in the bright influences of the thought of God. Animate and inanimate, reasoning and unreasoning, organic and inorganic, material and spiritual — what are these but the names and orders of so many mysteries, of so many sciences, which are all represented in this sunny scene? We, like the beetles and the perch, like the larks and the clouds, like the leaves and the flowers, like the smoke-wreaths of the cannon and the surges of the bells, are the creatures of the One True God, lights and shades in this creature-picture, kith and kin to all the things around us, in near or in remote degree. How did we come to live? Why do we live? How do we live? What is our life? Where did it come from? Whither is it going? What was it meant for? All that the sun shines upon is real; and we are real too. Are we to be the beauty of a moment, part of earth's gilding, to warm ourselves in the sun for a while, and glitter, and add to the hum of life on the planet, and then go away, and go nowhere? The beautiful day makes us happy with a childish happiness, and it sends our thoughts to first principles, to our alphabet, to the beginnings of things.

But we must begin with a little theology, before we can fall back upon the simple truths of the catechism. We are

WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 4o not on safe ground, although it is such simple ground. Baius, Jansenius, and Quesnel have contrived so to obscure and confound and divorce the orders of nature and grace, that we cannot treat at any length of the subject of creation, unless we start with some sort of profession of faith. Theologians, in order to get a clear view of the matter, consider human nature as either possible or actual in five different states. The first is a state of pure nature. In this, man would have been created, of course without sin, but also without sanctifying grace, without infused virtues, and without the helps of a supernatural order. None of these things would have been due to his nature regarded in itself. lie would have been obnoxious to hunger and thirst, to toil, diseases, and death, because his nature is compound and material, and contains the principles of these inconveniences within itself. He would have been subject also to ignorance and to concupiscence, and his happiness would have consisted in his knowledge and love of God as the author of nature, whose precepts he would have observed by means of what is called natural grace. This natural grace requires a word of explanation. What is due to nature we do not call grace; in a certain sense God is bound to give it to us. But lie is not bound so to combine secondary causes that the right thoughts and motives requisite for us to govern ourselves and control our passions should rise in our minds at the right time, or even if such assistance were due to nature in the mass, it would not perhaps be due to it in the individual. Nevertheless we suppose such an assistance to be essential to a state of pure nature, and as it is over and above what our nature can claim of itself, we call it grace, but grace of the natural, not of the supernatural order. In the time of St. Thomas some theologians held that Adam was created in this state, and remained in it for a time, until he was subsequently endowed with sanctifying grace, and raised to a supernatural end. This is now however universally rejected. Both angels and men were created in a state of grace. The orders of nature and grace, though perfectly distinct and on no account to be confused, did as a matter of fact start together in the one act of creation, without any interval of time between. This state therefore was possible, but never actual.

The second condition of human nature is the state of integrity. Baianism and Jansenism regard this as identical with the state of pure nature; but catholic theology considers it as endowed with a certain special perfection, over and above the perfections due to it for its own sake: and the twenty-sixth proposition of Baius is condemned because it asserts that this integrity was due to nature, and its natural condition. It consists in the perfect subjection of the body to the soul, and of the sensitive appetite to the reason, and thus confers upon man a perfect immunity from ignorance, concupiscence, and death. It inserts in our nature a peculiar vigor by which this glorious dominion of the soul is completed and sustained, while the tree of life, it is supposed, would have preserved the material part of our nature from the corroding influence of age.¹ Of this state also we may say that it was possible but never actual; because, while it is true of Adam as far as it goes, he never was, as a matter of fact, left to the possession of his integrity without the supernatural addition of sanctifying grace.

The third condition of human nature is the state of innocence. By this Adam in the first instant of his creation, or as some say immediately afterwards, had the theological and moral virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, infused into him, inasmuch as he was created in a state of grace, and elevated to the supernatural end of participating in the beatitude of God by the Beatific Vision. He was likewise endowed with such a perfect science both of natural and supernatural things, as became the preceptor and ruler and head of the human race; and a similar science would have been easily acquired by his descendants in a state of innocence, though as they would not have been the heads of the race, it would probably not have been infused into them from the first. This innocence is what we call original justice, to express by one word the aggregate of gifts and habits which compose it; and what constituted man in this state was the one simple quality of sanctifying grace, by which the soul was perfectly subject to God, not only as its natural, but also as its supernatural author. This is the teaching of the Church; whereas the heresies of Baius and Jansenius hold that the grace of Adam produced only human merits, and was a natural sequel of creation, and due to nature on its own account.² This state of innocence, or original justice, was that in which, as a matter of fact, Adam was created.

The fourth condition of man is the state of fallen, while the fifth is that of redeemed nature, to which may be added the state of glorified nature, and the state of lost nature, in which ultimately the other states must issue. Our present purpose does not require us to enter upon these. We will only stop to point out a very beautiful and touching analogy. Just as the separate orders of nature and grace were by the sweet love of God started in the same act, so the promise of the Saviour and the actual operation of saving grace followed at once upon the fall, and fallen nature was straightway placed upon the road of reparation and redemption. Thus is it always in the love of God. There is a pathetic semblance of impatience about it, an eagerness to anticipate, a quickness to interfere, an unnecessary profusion in remedying, a perpetual tendency to keep outstripping itself and outdoing itself: and in all these ways is it evermore overrunning all creation, beautifying and glorifying it with its own eternal splendors.

What, then, we must bear in mind throughout, is this, that the orders of nature and grace are in reality quite distinct; that God must be regarded as the author of both; and that we must continually bear in mind this distinction, if we would avoid the entanglement of errors which have been noted in the Condemned Propositions. At the same time, we shall speak of God, throughout, as at once the author of both these orders, and of creation as representing both; because, as a matter of fact, they both started in creation, in the case both of angels and of men.³ Out of this significant fact, that God created neither angels nor men in a state of mere nature, our view of God materially proceeds. It is a fact which reveals volumes about Him. It stamps a peculiar character upon creation, and originates obligations which greatly influence the relations of the creature to his Creator. Creation was itself a gratuitous gift. But, granting creation, nothing was due to the natures either of angels or men, but what those natures respectively could claim on grounds intrinsic to themselves. It was to have been expected beforehand, that God would have created them in a state of perfect nature. It is a surprise that it was not so. On the very thresho-ld of theology, we are arrested by this mysterious fact, that rational creatures came from their Creator's hands in a supernatural state; and that, in His first act, the natural never stood alone, but it leaned, all perfect as it was, upon the supernatural. It was as if God did not like to let nature go, lest haply He should lose what He so dearly loved. This one fact seems to us the great fact of the whole of theology, coloring it all down to its lowest definition, and marvellously illuminating, from beneath, the character and beauty of our Creator. It is a hidden sunshine in our minds, better than this outer sunshine that is round us now. 0, surely, to be a creature is a joyous thing! and even our very nothingness is dear to us, as we think of God; for it seems to be almost a grandeur, instead of an abasement, to have been thus called out of nothing by such an One as He.

We are creatures. What is it to be a creature? Before the sun sets in the red west, let us try to have an answer to our question. We find ourselves in existence to-day, amid this beautiful scene, with multitudes of our fellowguantur. Nos autem habemus duplicem conjunctionem cum Deo. Una est quantum ad bona naturae, alia quant um ad bcatitudinem. Secundum primaui communicationem ad Duum, est amicitia naturalis. Secundum vero coininunicationem fecund am est amor charitatis. Ad 1 ad Corinth xiii. 4.

creaturta round about us. We have been alive and on the earth so many years, so many months, so many weeks, so many days, so many hours. At such and such a time we came to the use of reason; but at such an age and in such a way, that we clearly did not confer our reason upon ourselves. But here we are to-day, not only with a reason, but with a character of our own, and fulfilling a destiny in some appointed station in life. We know nothing of what has gone before us, except some little of the exterior of the past, which history or tradition or family records have told us of. We do not doubt that the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars, the blue skies and the four winds, the wide green seas and the fruitful earth, were before our time; indeed, before the time of man at all. Science unriddles mysterious things about them; but all additional light seems only to darken and to deepen our real ignorance.

So is it with the creature man. He finds himself in existence — an existence which he did not give to himself. He knows next to nothing of what has gone before; and absolutely nothing of what is to come, except so far as his Creator is pleased to reveal it to him supernaturally. And thus it comes to pass, that he knows better what will happen to him in the world to come, than what will be his fortune here. He knows nothing of what is to happen to himself on earth. Whether his future years will be happy or sorrowful, whether he will rise or fall, whether he will be well or ailing, he knows not. It is not in his own hands, neither is it before his eyes. If you ask him the particular and special end which he is to fulfil in his life; what the peculiar gift or good which he was called into being to confer upon his fellow-men; what the exact place and position which he was to fill in the great social whole; he cannot tell you. It has not been told to him. The chances arc, with him as with most men, that he will

WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 4(J die and jet not know it. And why? Because he is a creature.

His being born was a tremendous act. Yet it was not his own. It has entangled him in quantities of difficult problems, and implicated him in numberless important responsibilities. In fact, he has in him an absolute inevitable necessity either of endless joy or of endless misery; though he is free to choose between the two. Annihilation he is not free to choose. Reach out into the on-coming eternity as far as the fancy can, there still will this man be, simply because he has been already born. The consequences of his birth are not only unspeakable in their magnitude, they are simply eternal. Yet he was not consulted about his own birth. He was not offered the choice of being or not being. Mercy required that he should not be offered it; justice did not require that he should. We are not concerned now to defend God. We are only stating facts, and taking the facts as we find them. It is a fact, that he was not consulted about his own birth; and it is truer and higher than all facts, that God can do nothing but what is blessedly, beautifully right. A creature has no right to be consulted about his own creation; and for this reason simply, that he is a creature.

He has no notion why it was that his particular soul rather than any other soul, was called into being, and put into his place. Not only can he conceive a soul far more noble and devout than his, but he sees, as he thinks, peculiar deficiencies in himself, in some measure disqualifying him for the actual position in which God has placed him. And how can he account for this? Yet God must be right. And his own liberty, too, must be very broad, and strong, and responsible. He clearly has a work to do, and came here simply to do it; and it is equally clear, that if God will not work with him against his own will, he also cannot work without God. Every step which a creature 4 fi lakes, when he has once been created, increases his dependence upon his Creator. He belonged utterly to God by creation: if words would enable us to say it, he belongs still more utterly to God by preservation. In a word, the creature becomes more completely, more thoroughly, more significantly a creature, every moment that his created life is continued. to him. This is, in fact, his true blessedness — to be ever more and more enclosed in the hand of God who made him. The Creator's hand is the creature's home.

As he was not consulted about his coming into the world, too neither is he consulted about his going out of it. He does not believe he is going to remain always on earth. He is satisfied that the contrary will be the case. He knows that he will come to an end of this life, without ceasing to live. He is aware that he will end this life with more or less of pain, pain without a parallel, pain like nc other pain, and most likely very terrible pain. For though the act of dying is itself probably painless, yet it has for the most part to be reached through pain. Death will throw open to him the gates of another world, and will be the beginning to him of far more solemn and more wonderful actions than it has been his lot to perform on earth. Everything to him depends on his dying at the right time and in the right way. Yet he is not consulted about it. He is entitled to no kind of warning. No sort of choice is left him either of time or place or manner. It is true he may take his own life. But he had better not. His liberty is indeed very great, since this is left free to him. Yet suicide would not help him out of his difficulties. It only makes certain to him the worst that could be. He is only cutting off his own chances; and by taking his life into his own hands he is rashly throwing himself out of his own hands in the most fatal way conceivable. One whose business it is to come when he is called, and to depart when he is bidden, and to have no reason given him either for his call or his dismissal, except such as he can gather from the character of his master, — such is man upon earth; and he is so, because he is a creature.

Is it childish to say all this? We fear we must say something more childish still. We must not omit to notice of this creature, this man, that he did not make the world he finds around him. He could not have done so, for lack of wisdom and of power. But it is not this we would dwell on. As a matter of fact he did not do so; and therefore, as he did not make the world, it is not his world, but somebody else's. He can have no rights in it, but such as the proprietor may voluntarily make over to him in the way of gift. He can have no sovereignty over it, or any part of it, unless by a royal grace the true Sovereign has invested him with delegated powers. In himself#hcrefore he is without dominion. Dominion does not belong to him as a creature. Dominion is a different idea, and comes from another quarter.

Furthermore — and we do not care whether it be from faith or reason, or from what proportion of both — this creature cannot resist the certainties that there is an unseen world in which he is very much concerned. He is quite sure, nervously sure, that there are persons and things close to him, though unseen, which are of far greater import than what he sees. He believes in presences which are more intimate to him than any presence of external things, nay, in one Presence which is more intimate to him than he is to his own self. Death is a flight away from earth, not a lying down a few feet beneath its sods; it is a vigorous outburst of a new life, not a resting on a clay pillow from the wearyful toil of this. All things in him and around him are felt to be beginnings, and the curtains of the unseen world, as if lifted by the wind, wave ever and anon into his face, and cling to it like a mask, and he sees through, or thinks he sees. This is the last thing we have to note of this man, as he sits upon the hill-top, in the sunshine, part and parcel of the creatures round about him. He finds himself in existence by the act of another. He knows nothing of what has gone before him, nothing of what is to happen to himself, and next to nothing of what is to come, and that little only by revelation. He was not consulted about his own birth, nor will he be about his death. He has to die out, and has nothing to do with the when or the how. He did not make the world he finds around him, and therefore it is not his. Neither can he resist the conviction that this world is for him only the porch of another and more magnificent temple of the Creator's majesty, wherein he will enter still further into the Creator's power, and learn that to be in the Creator's power is the creature's happiness.

It is not our present business to explain or comment on all this, we are only concerned to state facts. This is the position of each one of us as men and creatures, the position wherein we find ourselves at any given moment in which we may choose to advert to ourselves and our circumstances: and the fact that such is our position is no small help towards an answer to our question, What is it to be a creature? But let us now advance a step further. Let us pass from the position of this creature to what we know to be his real history. Let us look at him on the hilltop, not merely in the sunshine of nature, but in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now we shall gain fresh * knowledge about him, and understand him better. We shall know his meaning and his destiny, and can then infer from them his condition, his duties, and his responsibilities.

He may occupy a very private position in the world. He may not be known beyond the sanctuary of his own family, or the limits of a moderate circle of acquaintances. The great things of the world have no reference to him, and public men do not consult him. He has his little world of hopes and fears, of joys and sadnesses, and strangers intermeddle not with either. His light and his darkness are both his own. But he is a person of no consequence. The earth, the nation, the shire, the village, go on without his interference. He is a man like the crowd of men, and is not noticeable in any other way. Yet the beginning of his history is a long way off. Far in the eternal mind of God, further than you can look, he is there. He has had his place there from eternity; and before ever the world was, he lay there with the light of God's goodness around him, and the clearness of God's intentions upon him, and was the object of a distinct, transcending, and unfathomable love. There was more of power, of wisdom, and of goodness in the love which God bore through eternity to that insignificant man, than we can conceive of, though we raise our imaginations to the greatest height of which they are capable. May we say it? He was part of God's glory, of God's bliss, through all the unrevolving ages of a past eternity. The hanging up in heaven of those multitudes of brilliant worlds, the composition, the adornment, and the equipoise of their ponderous masses, all the marvels of inanimate material creation, all the unexplicable chemistry which is the world's life, were as nothing compared to the intense brooding of heavenly love, the compassionate fulness of divine predestination, over that single soul. Think of that, as he sits among the trees and shrubs, with the insects and the birds about him! So long as tu^re has been a God, so long has that soul been the object of His knowledge and His love. Ever since the uncreated abyss of almighty love has been spread forth, there lav that scul gleaming on its bright waters. 0 no wonder God is so patient with sinners, no wonder Jesus died for souls I But this is not the whole of his real history. There i?

more about him still. We do not know what the secrets of his conscience may be, nor whether he is in a state of grace, nor what might be God's judgment of him if lie called him away at this moment. But whatever comes of these questions, it is a simple matter of fact that that man was part of the reason of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. He belongs to Jesus and was created for Jesus. He is part of his Saviour's property, and meant to adorn His kingdom. His body and his soul are both of them fashioned, in their degree, after the model of the Body and the Soul of the "Word made flesh. His predestination flowed out from, and is enclosed in, the predestination of Jesus. He is the brother of his God, and has a divine right to call her mother who calls the Creator Son. He was foreseen in the decree of the Incarnation. The glory of his soul and the possibilities of his human heart entered as items into that huge sum of attractions which drew the Eternal Word to seek His delights among the sons of men, by assuming their created nature to His uncreated Person. His sins were partly the cause why the Precious Blood was shed; and Jesus suffered, died, rose again, and ascended for him, as completely as if he were the only one of his race that ever fell. There must be something very attractive in him for our Lord to have loved him thus steadily and thus ardently. You see that He counted that creature's sins over long and long ago. He saw them, as we blind men can never see them, singly and separately in all their unutterable horror and surpassing malice. Then He viewed them as a whole, perhaps thousands in number, and aggravated by almost every variety of circumstance of which human actions are capable. And nevertheless there was something in that man which so drew upon the love of the unspeakably holy God, that He determined to die for him, to satisfy, and over satisfy for all his sins, to merit for him a perfect sea of untold graces, and to beguile him by the most self-sacrificing generosity to the happiness ot His divine embraces. All this was because that man was His creature. So you see what a history his has been, what a stir he has made in the world by having to do with the Incarnation, how he has been mixed up with eternal plans, and has helped to bring a seeming change over the ever-blessed and unchanging God! Alas! if it is hard to see good points in others, how much harder must it be for God to see good points in us, and yet how lie loves us all!

But to return to our man, whoever he may be. It is of course true that God had a general purpose in the whole of creation, or to speak more truly, many general purposes. But it is also true that He had a special purpose in this man whom we are picturing to ourselves. The man came into the world to do something particular for God, to carry out some definite plan, to fulfil some one appointed end, which belongs to him in such a way that it does not belong to other men. There is a peculiar service, a distinct glory, which God desires to have from that man, different from the service and the glory of any other man in the world; and the man's dignity and happiness will result from his giving God that service and glory, and no other. As he did not make himself, so neither can he give himself his own vocation. He does not know what special function it has fallen to him to perform in the immense scheme and gigantic world of his Creator; but it is not the less true that he has such a special function. Life as it unfolds will bring it to him. Years will lay his duty and his destiny at his door in parts successively. Perhaps on this side of the grave he may never see his work as an intelligible whole. It may be part of his work to be tried by this very obscurity. But with what a dignity it invests the man, to know of him that, as God chose his particular soul at the moment of its creation rather than countless other possible and

DQ WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE.

nobler souls, so does He vouchsafe to be dependent on this single man for a glory and a love, which, if this man refuses it to Him, He will not get from any other man nor from all men put together! God has an interest at stake, which depends exclusively on that single man: and it is in the man's power to frustrate this end, and millions do so When we consider who, and how infinitely blessed, God is, is not this special destiny of each man a touching mystery? How close it seems to bring the Creator and the creature! And where is the dignity of the creature save in the love of the Creator?

Furthermore, this man, it would appear, might have been born at any hour of the day or night these last five thousand years and more. He might have been before Christ or after Him, and of any nation, rank or religion. His soul could have been called out of nothing at any moment as easily as when it pleased God in fact to call it. But it pleased God to call it when He did, because that time, and no other time, suited the special end for which that man was to live. He was born, just when he was, for the sake of that particular purpose. He would have been too soon, had he been born earlier; too late, if he had not been born as early. And in like manner will he die. An hour, a place, a manner of death are all fixed for him; yet so as not in the least to interfere with his freedom. Everything is arranged with such a superabundance of mercy and indulgence, that he will not only die just when it fits in with the special work.he has to do for God, and the special glory God is to have from him, but he will die at the one hour when it is safest and best for himself to die. The time, the place, the manner, and the pain of his death will be better for that man than any other time, place, manner, or prtin would be. The most cruel-seeming death, if we could only see it, is a mercy which saves us from something worse, a boon of such magnitude as befits the liberality even of the Most High God.

Once again: a particular eternity is laid out for that man, to be won by his own free correspondence to the exuberant grace of his Creator. There is a brightness which may be his for ever, a distinct splendor and characteristic loveliness by which he may be one day known, admired, and loved amid the populous throngs of the great heaven. His own place is ready for him in the unutterable rest of everlasting joys. That man, who is gazing on the landscape at his feet, has an inheritance before him, to which the united wealth of kings is poverty and vileness. A light, a beauty, a power, a wisdom, are laid up for him, to which all the wonders of the material creation are worse than tame, lower than uninteresting. He is earning them at this moment, by the acts of love which it seems as if the simple cheer of the sunshine were drawing out of his soul. They have a strange disproportionate proportion to his modest and obscure works on earth. God, and angels, and saints, are all busy with solicitous loving wisdom, to see that he does not miss his inheritance. His eternity is dependent on his answering the special end of his creation. Doubtless at this moment he has no clear idea of what his special work is; doubtless it is one of such unimportance, according to human measures, that it will never lay any weight on the prosperity, or the laws, or the police of his county. His light is probably too dim to be visible even to his neighbourhood. Yet with it and because of it, he is one day to shine like ten thousand suns, far withdrawn within the peace of his satisfied and delighted God!

Such is the man's real history, traced onward from the hour when it pleased God to create his particular soul. And how many things there are in it to wonder at! How great is the dignity, how incalculable the destinies of man! All these things belong to him, not certainly in right of his being a creature, but at least because he is a creature. Creation explains all other n^-stcrics. No wonder God should become man, in order to be with him, or should die for him, in order to save him. No wonder he should abide with him in mute reality in the tabernacle, to feed his soul, and to sustain him and keep alive His creature's love by His own silent company. No wonder the angels should cling about a man so fondly, nor that the one master-passion of the saints should be the love of souls. The wonder is that God should have created man; not that, having created him, He should love him so tenderly. Both are wonders; but the first is the greater wonder. Redemption does not follow from creation as a matter of course: but creation has so surprised us, that we are less surprised at new disclosures of the Creator's love. In truth man's dignity, wonderful as it is, is less a wonder than the creating love of God. How He holds His creature in his hand for ever! How all things, dark as well as bright, are simply purposes of unutterable goodness and compassion! How difficulties and problems are only places where love is so much deeper than common, that the eye cannot pierce it, nor the lines of our wisdom fathom it! 0 of a truth God is indescribably good, and we feel that He is so whenever we remember that He made us! What a joy it is to be altogether His, to belong to him, to feel our complete dependence upon Him, to lean our whole weight upon him, not only for the delight of feeling that He is so strong, but also that we are so weak, and therefore so need Him always and everywhere! What liberty is like the sense of being encompassed with His sovereignty! What a gladness that He is immense, so that we cannot escape from Him, omniscient so that we are laid open and without a secret before Him, eternal so that we are in His sight but nothingness, nothingness that lives because He loves it!

Something more is still required in order to complete our picture of the creature. We have represented his position, and have traced his real life; but we have got to consider the condition in which he is as a creature. We shall have to plead guilty to a little repetition. The nature of our subject renders it unavoidable, and we must crave the reader's indulgence for it!

The first feature to be noticed in the condition of this creature man is his want of power. Not only is his health uncertain, but at his best estate his strength is very small. Brute matter resists him passively. He cannot lift great weights of.it, nor dig deep into it. Even with the help of the most ingenious machinery and the united labor of multitudes he can do little but scratch the surface of the planet, without being able to alter the expression of one of its lineaments. Fire and water are both his masters. His prosperity is at the mercy of the weather. Matter is baffling and ruining him somewhere on the earth at all hours of day and night. He has to struggle continually to maintain his position, and then maintains it with exceeding difficulty. Considering how many thousands of years the race of man has inhabited the world, it is surprising how little control he has acquired over diseases, how little he knows of them, how much less he can do to alleviate them. Even in his arts and sciences there are strangely few things which he can reduce to certainty. His knowledge is extremely limited, and is liable to the most humiliating errors and the most unexpected mistakes. He is in comparative ignorance of himself, of his thinking principle, of the processes of his immaterial soul, of the laws of its various faculties, or of the combinations of mind and matter. Metaphysics, which should rank next to religion in the scale of sciences, are a proverb for confusion and obscurity. Infinite longings perpetually checked by a sense of feebleness, and circumscribed within the limits of a narrow prison, — this is a description of the highest and most aspiring moods of man.

Such is the condition of our man if we look at him in his solitary dignity as lord of the creation. But even this is too favorable a representation of him. His solitary dignity is a mere imagination. On the contrary he is completely mixed up with the crowd of inferior creatures, and in numberless ways dependent upon them. If left to himself the ponderous earth is simply useless to him. Its maternal bosom contains supplies of minerals and gases, which are meant for the daily sustaining of human life. Without thern this man would die in torture in a few days; and yet by no chemistry can he get hold of them himself and make them into food. He is simply dependent upon plants. They alone can make the earth nutritious to him, whether directly as food themselves, or indirectly by their support of animal life. And they do this by a multitude of hidden processes, many of which, perhaps the majority, are beyond the explanation of human chemistry. Thus he is at the mercy of the vegetable world. The grass that tops his grave, which fed him in his life, now feeds on him in turn.

In like manner is he dependent upon the inferior animals. Some give him strength to work with, some warm materials to clothe himself with, some their flesh to eat or their milk to drink. A vast proportion of mankind have to spend their time, their skill, their wealth, in waiting upon horses and cows and camels, as if they were their servants, building houses for them, supplying them with food, making their beds, washing and tending them as if they were children, and studying their comforts. More than half the men in the world are perhaps engrossed in -his occupation at the present moment. Human families would break up, if the domestic animals ceased to be members of them. Then, as to the insect world, it gives us a eort of nervous trepidation to contemplate it. The numbers of insects, and their powers are so terrific, so absolutely irresistible, that they could sweep every living thing from the earth and devour us all within a week, as if they were the fiery breath of a destroying angel. We can hardly tell what holds the lightning-like speed of their prolific generations in check. Birds of prey, intestine war, man's active hostility, — these, calculated at their highest, seem inadequate to keep down the insect population, whose numbers and powers of annoyance yearly threaten to thrust us off our own planet. It is God Himself who puts an invisible bridle upon these countless and irresistible legions, which otherwise would lick us up like thirsty fire.

What should we do without the sea? Earth and air would be useless, would be uninhabitable without it. There is not a year but the great deep is giving up to the investigations of our science unthought of secrets of its utility, and of our dependence upon it. Men are only beginning to learn the kind and gentle and philanthropic nature of that monster that seems so lawless and so wild. Our dependence on the air is no less complete. It makes our blood, and is the warmth of our human lives. Nay, would it be less bright or beautiful, if it allowed to escape from it, let us say, one gas, the carbonic acid, which forms but an intinitesimally small proportion of it, the gas on which all vegetation lives? It exists in the air in quantities so trifling as to be with difficulty discernible; yet, if it were breathed away, or if the sea drank it all in, or would not give back again what it drinks, in a few short hours the flowers would be lying withered and discolored on the ground, the mighty forests would curl up their myriad leaves, show their white sides, and then let them wither and fall. There would not be a blade of grass upon the earth. The ani'mals would moan and faint, and famished men would rise upon each other, like the maddened victims of a shipwreck, in the fury

F

C2 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE.

of their ungovernable hunger. Within one short week tho planet would roll on, bright in its glorious sunshine, and its mineral-colored plains speckled with the shadows of its beautiful clouds, but all in the grim silence of universal death. On what trembling balances of powers, on what delicate and almost imperceptible chemistries, does man's tenure of earth seem to rest! Yes! but beneath those gauzelike veils is the strong arm of the compassionate Eternal!

It would require a whole volume to trace the various ways in which man is dependent upon the inferior creatures. All the adaptations, of which different sciences speak, turn out upon examination to be so many dependencies of man on things which are beneath him. In material respects man is often inferior to his inferiors. But there is one feature in his dependency which does not concern his fellow-creatures, and on which it is of consequence to dwell. There is a peculiar kind of incompleteness about all he does, which disables him from concluding anything of himself, or unassisted. It is as if his arm was never quite long enough to reach his object, and God came in between him and his end to enable him to realize it. Man is ever falling, God ever saving: the creature always on the point of being defeated, the Creator always coming to the rescue opportunely. Thus man plants the tree and waters it, but he cannot make it grow. He prepares his ground and enriches it, he sows his seed and weeds it; but he cannot govern the weather, or the insects, on which his harvest depends. Between his labor and his labor's reward, God has to intervene. When he lays his plans, he dees nothing more than prepare favorable circumstances for the end which he desires. In war, in government, in education, in commerce, when he has done all, he has insured nothing. An element has to come in and to be waited for, without which he can have no results, and over which he has no control. Sometimes men call it fate or fortune, sometimes chance or accident. It is the final thing; it is what completes the circle, or fires the train, or makes the parts into a whole. It is the interference of God, the action of His will? In every department of human life we discover this peculiarity, that of himself, that is, with means left at his own disposal, man can approach his end, but not attain it: he can get near it, but he cannot reach it. He is always too short by a little; and the supplement of that littleness is as invariably the gratuitous Providence of God. Nothing throws more light than this on the question, What is it to be a creature?

All this is very common-place. Everybody knows it, has always known it, and never doubted it. True: yet see if, when all these things are strung together and presented to your mind, there does not rise up an almost unconscious feeling of exaggeration, nay, an almost outspoken charge of it against the statement of the case. This will be a test to you that you have not realized the case, that you have not taken it in, and, consequently, that you have something still to learn from facts which seem so undignifiedly familiar. For both the value of the lesson and its significance depend upon its strength. We cannot exaggerate the abjectness of the creature in itself, looked at as if it wero apart from God, which happily it can never be, though it will be something like it when it is reprobate; and then what more unspeakably abject than a lost soul? What we are always to feel, and never to forget, is that we are finite, dependent, imperfect; that it is our nature to look up to some one higher, to lean on some one one stronger; and that it is as unnatural for man to try to go alone and trust himself, as for a fish to live on the land, or a bird of the air in the flames of the fire. Dignity we have, and superabundantly, and we ought never to forget it. But then wo must remember also that the creature man has no dignity except in the love of Him who made him.

Ot WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE.

But our real history adds ft great deal to our condition, which is full of important consequences. Man is not as he came forth at first from the hand of his Creator. He has fallen: and his fall is not merely an external disability, consequent on an historical fact so many thousand years old. He bears the marks of it in himself. He feels its effects in every moral act, in every intellectual process. lie is the prey of an intestine warfare. Two conflicting laws alternate within him. lie has lost his balance, and finds it hard to keep the road. Notwithstanding the magnificent spiritual renewal which the mercy of his Creator has worked within him by the supernatural grace of a sacrament, each man has added to the common fall a special revolt of his own. Nay, most men have repeated, imitated, aggravated the act of their first father. They have fallen themselves, and their sin has been accompanied with peculiarly disabling circumstances of guilt. Then the unwearied compassion of the Creator has come forth with another sacrament to repair this personal wilful revolt of the poor fallen creature. With its grace fresh upon him, he has revolted again, and then again. lie has diversified his falls. He has multiplied his treasons by varying their kind. He has broken, not one, but numerous laws, as if to show that it was not the hardness of any particular precept, so much as the simple fact of being under God's yoke at all, which he found so unbearable. And again, and again, and again has the merciful sacrament repaired and absolved him, and grace goes on, with a brave patient kindness of its own, fighting against seemingly incorrigible habits of sin; and, even at the hour of death, how reluctantly does mercy seem to capitulato to justice! Now see how all this affects his condition as a creature. A man born under civil disabilities has no guilt in the eye of his country's laws, yet he does not. take rank with a true citizen. A pardoned criminal to his last day-will not cast the inferiority which he has brought upon himself. No pardon, no honors can ever cover the fact from others or himself. Nay, so far as he himself is concerned, they will only keep the fact bright and burnished in his mind. The man who has been tried and cast for nearly every crime in almost every court in the land, and who is at large by a simple and amazing act of royal clemency, must feel that he has made a condition for himself which he never can forget, and out of which he draws every hour peculiar motives of conduct and demeanor; and the better man he is the less likely is he ever to forget his past. Bo surely it is with us men. If looked at without advertence to the original fall, or to our own fall, or to our renewed falls after grace given, what are we but finite, dependent, imperfect: but when those three additional facts of our real history are added to our condition, how much more narrow and little, dependent and inferior, do we appear to become! The least word seems too big to express our littleness.

But we can go lower still. Pardon lowers us. The abundance and frequency of mercy humbles us. The goodness of God gives a new life to the sense of our own misery and hatefulness. It quickens our knowledge of our •own inferiority into a positive feeling of self-contempt. It is true that the first fall, and our own fall, and our repeated falls, all flow, voluntary though they be, out of our necessary imperfections as creatures; yet nevertheless they add something to the consciousness that we are creatures, just as all developments seem to add to their germ, even though, like sin, they are not inevitable but free developments. And then God's pardoning mercy adds again to our consciousness that we are creatures. It appears to sink us lower and lower in our own nothingness, to envelope us more and more in the sense of our creaiedness. For in our sin God has condescended to make a covenant with us, and He is hourly fulfilling His share of it. On 5 f2

GG WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE.

His part the covenant seems an abandonment of His own rights, a waiving of His own dignity, a service gratuitously given, or for a nominal payment which makes it less dignified than if it were gratuitous, a lowering of Himself towards our level, a series of apparent changes in Ilin? who in His essence and knowledge and will is gloriously and majestically immutable. All this makes us feel moro and more intensely what it is to be a creature. The consciousness that clung to the beautiful soul of the unf'allcn Adam becomes a deeper consciousness to the fallen sinner, and that deeper becomes deepest in the chastened joy and humbled peace of the forgiven sinner.

Thus each of us finds himself in his place, his own al-lotted place, in nature and in grace, with this threefold consciousness upon him. Beneath the weight of this happy and salutary consciousness he has to work out his destiny. Criticism of his position is not only useless; so long as he remembers himself, it is impossible. Not only does he know in the abstract that all must be right; he knows by his feeling of being a creature that all is right. To him criticism is not only loss of time; it is irreligion also. He does not know how to sit in judgment upon his Creator. He cannot comprehend even the mental process by which others do it, much less the moral temper. For, while he has this threefold consciousness that he is a creature, he cannot conceive of himself without it nor what he would be like if he was without it, and therefore those who are without it are beyond his comprehension for the time, both in what they say and do. There are not two sides to the question of life, God's side and man's side. God's side is all in all. Not only is there nothing to be said on the other, there is no other. To think that man has a side is to forget that he is a creature, or at least not to realize what it is to be a creature. Encompass man's littleness with the grand irresponsible sovereignty of God, and then is ho glorious indeed, his liberty large beyond compare, and his likeness to God more like an equality with Ilim than we can dare to put in words.

Now let us go back to the man we left sitting on the hilltop in the brightness of the summer sun. We have to draw some conclusions about him from what has been already said; and the first is this. As "creature" is his name, his history, and his condition, he must obviously have the conduct and the virtues befitting a creature. He must behave as what he is. His propriety consists in his doing so. He must be made up of fear, of obedience, of submission, of humility, of prayer, of repentance, and above all, of love. As fire warms and frost chills, as the moon shines by night and the sun by day, as birds have wings and trees have leaves, so must man, as a creature, conduct himself as such, and do those virtuous actions, which are chiefly virtues because they are becoming to him and adapted to his condition. The demeanor, the behavior, the excellencies of a creature must bear upon them the stamp of his created nature and condition. This is too obvious to need enforcing; obvious when stated, yet most strangely forgotten by most men during the greater part of their lives.

Our second conclusion about this man is that, whatever may be his attainments or his inclinations, the only knowledge worth much of his time and trouble, the only science which will last with him and stand him in good stead, consists in his study of the character of God. lie received everything from God. He belongs to Ilim. He is surrounded by Ilim. His fate is in God's hands. His eternity is to be with God, in a companionship of unspeakable delights. Or if it is to be in exile from Him, it is the absence of God which will be the intolerableness of his misery. His own being implies God's being; and he exists, not for himself, but for God. Of what unspeakable importance then is it for him to find out who God is, what sort of Being He is, what He likes and what He dislikes, how He deals with His creatures and how He expects His creatures to deal with Him. Can his understanding be employed upon anything more exalted? Is there any novelty equal to his daily fresh discoveries in the rich depths of the Divine Perfections? Is there any person in the world whose ways and works are of such thrilling interest to him as those of the Three Uncreated Persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Is there any existing or possible things to be conceived or named one half so curious, one half so attractive, one half so exciting, as the adorable self-subsisting Essence of the Most High God? 0 no! Obviously whatever that man may be thinking of now, he ought to be thinking of God. As long as he sits beneath the fragrant shadow of that pious thought, that he is a creature, so long will he feel that his one wise and delightful task, while he is a lodger among the mutable homes of this swift-footed planet, must be the study of his Creator's character.

Our third conclusion is that, if God is to be the subject of the man's intellectual occupations, God must be equally the object of his moral conduct. God must have his whole heart as well as his whole mind. We have no doubt that man's soul is a perfect mine of practical energies, which the longest and most active life will not half work out. The muscle of the heart acts seventy times a minute for perhaps seventy years, and is not tired; yet what is this to the activity of the soul? He has far more energy in him than his neighbours are aware of, more than he suspects himself. He can do wonders with these energies if he concentrates them on any object, whether it be pleasure, wealth, or power. Our conclusion implies that, while he may use his energies on any or all of those three things, he must i-c^cntratc them on God only, on the loving observance of

WHAT IT IS TO RE A CREATURE. GO his Creator's law. We do not see what being a creature means, if it does not mean this; though we know that there are creatures who have irrevocably determined not to do it. and their name is devil, a species they have created for themselves in order to escape as far as they can to the outskirts of the creation of eternal power and love. Why be like them? Why go after them? Why not leave them to themselves, at the dreadful dismal pole of our Father's empire?

These three conclusions are inevitable results of that man's being a creature. If he does not intend to make them the law of his life, he has no business to be in the sunshine. If he wants to be a god, let him make a world for himself. Ours is meant for creatures. Why is he turning all our bright and beautiful things to curse and darkness, all our sweet gifts to gall and wormwood? What right has he to be lighting the fires of hell in his own heart at the beams of that grand loving sun? A creature means "All for God." Holiness is an unselfing ourselves. To be a creature is to have a special intensified sonship, whose life and breath and being are nothing but the fervors of his filial love taking fire on his Father's bosom in the pressure of his Father's arms. The Sacred Humanity of the Eternal Son, beaming in the very central heart of the Ever-blessed -Trinity, — that is the type, the meaning, the accomplishment, of the creature.

If we take all the peculiarities of the creature and throw them into one, if we sum them all up and express them in the ordinary language of Christian doctrine, we should say that they came to this, — that as man was not his own beginning, so also he is not his own end. His end is God; and man belies his own position as a creature whenever he swerves from this his sole true end. Every one knows what it is to have an end, and how much depends upon it. To change a man's end in life is to change his whole life, to revolutionize his entire conduct. When he sees his aim distinctly before him, he uses his sagacity in planning to attain it, his courage in removing the obstacles which intervene, and his prudence in the selection of the means by which he is eventually to succeed. More or less consistently, and more or less incessantly, the man's mind and heart are occupied about his end. It forms his character, it possesses his imagination, it stimulates his intellect, it engrosses his affections, it absorbs his faults, it is his measure of failure and success, it is ever tending to be his very standard of right and wrong. A creature, in that it is a creature, is like a falling stone. It seeks a centre, it travels to an end, irresistibly, impetuously. It is its law of life. Hence it is that the end gives the color to the creature's life, describes it, defines it, animates it, rules it. This is true of pleasure, of knowledge, of wealth, of power, of popularity, when they are sought as ends. They lay passionate hold upon a man, and make him their slave, and brand their mark all over him, and the whole world knows him to be theirs. But all this is still more true when man makes God, what God has already made Himself, his single and magnificent end. And how glorious are the results in his capacious soul! To make God always our end is always to remember that we are creatures; and to be a saint is always to make God our end. Hence to be a saint is always to remember and to act on the remembrance, that we are creatures. Yet, horrible as it sounds when it is put into words, it is the common way of men to make God a means instead of an end, a purveyor instead of a judge, if they make any use of Him at all. He has to forecast for their comforts, to supply their necessities, to pay for their luxuries. All men seek their own, murmured the indignant apostle. To seek the things of Christ was his romance, which worldly disciples did not understand. How few can turn round upon themselves at any given moment of life, when they do not happen to be engaged in spiritual exercises, and can say, " God is my end. At this moment, when I unexpectedly look in upon myself, while I was acting almost unconsciously, I find that I was doing, what a creature should always be doing, — seeking God. My worldly duties and social occupations were understood to be means only, and were treated accordingly. There was nothing in my mind and heart which partook of the dignity of an end except God." Yet is it not our simple business? We expect even a dog to come when he is called, and a clock to go when it is wound up; and in like manner God, when He creates us, expects us to seek Him as our only end and sovereign good.

We are almost frightened at what we have written. We covenanted not to speak of high things, nor entangle you in discourses of spiritual perfection: and we honestly do not intend to while you to commit yourselves to anything which is not common-place and necessary. Yet when we simply say what it is to be a creature, we seem to be demanding the highest sanctity. The creature seems to slip into the saint. The natural temper and disposition proper to us because of our created origin seems to put on the hue and likeness of supernatural grace and contemplation, and the common-place insensibly to glide into the heroic. There must be some mistake. Where is it? Our conscience tells us that we have been honorably checking ourselves a score of times in the last score pages, from saying what was burning in our heart to come out. It is not we that have broken faith with you, gentle reader. Have we then overstated the case of the creature? Have we drawn any conclusion without a premiss to warrant it? Have we invented what does not exist, or falsely embellished what does? The more we consider the case, the less we seem to have done so. We may have wearied }^ou with telling you what was so old and trite — we do not think we have told you anything new, or that there is any part of our statement from which you dissent. How then have we come to this pass? Is it true that every one is obliged to be what is technically called a saint, or what theology styles perfect, simply because he is a creature? we cannot say Yes, and yet we hardly dare say No. What if it be true that perfection is only the result of corresponding to grace as it is given, and thus that all good people are in the road to perfection always; so that perfection is not one thing, and common holiness another; but that common holiness is perfection in its childhood, and perfection is common holiness in its maturity. "We will not say that this is so. But we will say thus much, that the simple statement of our position and condition as creatures brings us to this — that to serve God out of love is not the peculiar characteristic of what is termed high spirituality, but that, without reference to perfection, nay without reference to redemption, creation of and by itself does bind the creature to serve the Creator out of love; and we confess that this conclusion is as pregnant of consequences as it is inevitable in its truth.

In the last chapter we said that a heathen, who without revelation should act consistently (if he could) with the constant remembrance that he was a creature, would, bating certain gifts and graces, be a portrait of a catholic saint. Now that we have examined more in detail the characteristics proper to a creature, and so the duties which become him, the same truth comes out still more clearly. What on a superficial view seems the peculiar excellence of high spirituality, namely, that in it God is served out of love, turns out to be a universal obligation undeniably founded on the simple fact of creation. Thus all practical religion is based upon a man's behaving himself becomingly as a creature. It is the humility and modesty that come out of that thought which give to his actions all their gracefulness and beauty, and commute them into worship and udorati >n. "When we seek for the first principles of holiness, we find them where the heathen finds the roots of his moral duties, and where asceticism and mysticism discover the axioms out of which they draw unerringly that vast series of amazing truths which theology records and classifies. These axioms are all implied in the fact of our creation. They are the religious intuitions proper to a creature. Bind yourself to no more than on reflection you will acknowledge yourself to be bound to by the simple fact that God created you, and then you will become holy. It needs no more than that.

If we examine the falls both of angels and men, we shall see that what lay at the root of them was a forgetfulness that they were creatures, or a perverse determination to be something more. Whether the angels contemplated their own beauty and rested with an unhallowed complacency in themselves as their end, or whether they would not bow to the divine counsel of the Incarnation and the exaltation of Christ's human nature above their own, in both cases they forgot themselves as creatures, and demanded what it was not becoming in a creature to demand. You shall be as gods, was the very motive which the tempter urged in order to push man to his ruin. Man insisted upon sharing something which it had pleased God for the time to reserve to Himself. The knowledge of God was the object of Adam's envy; and so unsuitable was it for him as a creature, that, when he got it, it ceased to be science and turned into guilty shame. In both cases, it was not merely that the angels and man refused to obey their Creator; they wanted themselves to be more than creatures. They would not acquiesce in their created position. Can anything show more plainly the importance of keeping always before us the fact that we are creatures?

Yes! we may go still higher. We say of our Blessed o

Lord that He is our example as -well as our mediator. Yet lie was God as well as man. "What is this then but saying that of Bftoh consequence was it to the happiness of man that he should know how to behave himself as a creature, that it was necessary the Creator should take a created nature, and come Himself to show him how to wear it? Thus one of the many known reasons of the sublime mystery of the Incarnation was that the Creator Himself might show the creature how he should behave as a creature. What interest does not this throw upon the minutest incidents and most rapid graphic allusions of the Four Gospels? The mysteries of Jesus are man's studies of the beauty of holiness. His soul drinks beauty out of them, and so is imperceptibly transformed into the likeness of God made man. lie takes the form and the hue of the Incarnate Word.

If we turn from our Lord's example to His work for us as our mediator, the same truth meets us in another shape. Not only was His created nature necessary for this office in the counsels of God, but especial stress is laid upon those things which are eminently characteristic of a created nature as created. Speaking of His intercession the apostle says that " in the days of His flesh He was heard because He feared," and again He speaks of the Crucifixion in the same way, "lie was obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross." It is as if Jesus redeemed the world especially by acknowledging in an infinitely meritorious manner through His created nature the sovereignty and dominion of the Creator.

To sum up briefly the results of this chapter, it appears, that to be a creature is a very peculiar and cognizable thing, that it gives birth to a whole set of duties, obligations, virtues and proprieties, that it implies a certain history past and future, and a certain present condition, that on it are founded all our relations to God, and therefore all our practical religion, and that it involves in its own self, without reference to any additional mercies, the precise obligation of loving our Creator supremely as our sole end, and of serving Him from the motive of love. Thus, as we may say to the misbeliever that he would be a catholic if he only had an intelligent apprehension of the mystery of creation, so we may say to the catholic that he would be more like a saint, if he only understood with his ir,ma and felt in hi* heart, what it was to be a creature.

Footnotes

1. Here theologians differ. Some include the immunity from disease and death in the state of integrity; as Eilluart. Others refer it to the state of Innocence; as Viva. The difference is not of consequence to our present purpose. See Lilluart. rroeambula ad tract, dc gratia: and Viva de Gratia Adamica in his Trutiua thesium Quesnellianarum. See also Kipalda's Disputation on the Baton Propositions, which Mr. Ward of St. Edmund's College has published in a separate form. ↩

2. The 21st and 14th Propositions of Eaius. ↩

3. Sec Propositions xxxiv. of Quesnel and i. of Baius, also xxxv. of Quesnel and xxi. of Baius. It will be observed, that we carefully avoid the controversy about the condemnation of the xxxivth proposition of Baius, on the distinction of the double love of God, as author of nature and author of beatitude. Suarez and Vasquez quote Cardinal Toledo (who was sent to Louvain on the subject, by Gregory XIII., and may therefore be supposed to have known the Tope's mind), as saying that some of the propositions of Baius were only condemned because of the bitter language used of the opposite opinion. Billuart and others are very vehement against this. On the xxxivth proposition, in particular, Vasquez and De Lugo take one side, and Suarez, Viva, Bipalda, and the Thomists generally, the other. See Yasq. 1, 2, p. Blsp. 195, cap. 2. De Lugo de Fide disp. 9, n. 11-13. The controversy does not concern us, because we are regarding the two orders of nature and grace, throughout, as starting simultaneously in creation, distinct y»t contemporary, and are also studiously regarding God as the author of both. Wc have, therefore, nothing to do with the question, whether, in order to a true act of love, we must explicitly regard God as the author of the supernatural order. In order to avoid multiplying notes, the reader is requested not to lose sight of this fact throughout the whole treatise. Van Banst, in commenting (page 29) on the proposition of Baius, quotes the following passage of St. Thomas from his commentary on the first epistle to the Corinthians: Amor est quacdam vis unitiva, et omnis amor in unione quadam consiiitit. Unde secundum diversas uniones divcrsaj species amicitio? distin- ↩