Chapter I. Why God Wishes Us to Love Him

Quid ergo tibi acessit ad bonum quod tu tibi es, etiamsi ista, Tel omnino nulla essent, vel informia remanerent, qua) non ex indigent!* fecisti, sed plenitudine boLilatis tua)? — St. Augustin.

A child's first sight of the ocean is an era in his life. It is a new world without him, and it awakens a new world within him. There is no other novelty to be compared with it, and after life will bring nothing at all like it. A rapid multitude of questions rush upon the mind; yet the child is silent, as if he needed not an answer to any of them. They are beyond answering; and he feels that the sight itself satisfies him better than any answer. Those great bright outspread waters! the idea of God is the only echo to them in his mind; and now henceforth he is a different child, because he has seen the sea.

So is it with us when we sit by the ocean of creative love. Questions throng upon us; problems start up on all sides; mysteries intersect each other. Yet so long as we are children, are childlike in heart and spirit, the questions are not difficulties. Either they answer themselves, or they do not need an answer, like questions which are exclamations only; or we would rather not have an answer, lest peradventure some high thing should be lowered or some holy thing be made common. To gaze — to gaze is all we desire. The fact, that so much is mystery to us, is no trouble. It is love. That is enough. We trust it. We would almost rather it was not made plainer. It might be darker if it were. Whereas now, though it is indistinct, it is tranquillizing also, like the beauty of a summer night. We have thoughts which cannot be put into words, but it seems to us as if they more than answered all difficulties. How the broad waters flow and shine, and how the many-headed waves leap up to the sun and sparkle, and then sink down into the depths again, yet not to rest; and, placid as the azure expanse appears, how evermore it thunders on the hard white sand, and fringes the coast with a bewitching silver mist! Why should we ever stir from where we are? To look on the sea seems better than to learn the science of its storms, the grandeur of its steadfastness, or the many moods of its beautiful mutabilities. The heathen called the sea-spirit father. There was much in the thought. But when we cease to be children and to be childlike, there is no more this simple enjoyment. We ask questions, not because we doubt, but because, when love is not all in all to us, we must have knowledge, or we chafe and pine. Then a cloud comes between the sun and the sea, and that expanse of love, which was an undefined beauty, a confused magnificence, now becomes black and ruffled, and breaks up into dark wheeling currents of predestination, or mountainous waves of divine anger and judicial vengeance; and the white surf tells us of many a sunken reef, where we had seen nothing but a smooth and glossy azure plain, rocking gently to and fro, as unruffled as a silken banner.

We shall be children once again, and on the same shore, and we shall then never leave it more, and we shall see down into the crystal depths of this creative love, and its wide waters will be the breadth and measure of our joy, and its glancing splendor will be the light of our eternal life, and its soft thunder will be the endless, solemn, thrilling music of our beatitude. 0 happy we! but we must be changed first of all, and perchance by fire!

But we must not altogether cease to be childlike, when we begin to ask and answer questions. Pride can understand nothing about God. We may question, then, but it must be in faith and trust and love, content with half an answer when more cannot be given, and to be left without answer at all, when the heights of God's goodness soar beyond all vision but that of faith, whose prerogative it is, in come sense, to equal and to comprehend its Giver and its Author.

We have endeavored, so far, to get some idea of what it is to be a creature, and of what it is to have a Creator; and it seems to have taken many words to explain those simple things. Our next step must be to ask and answer, as well as we can, five questions which concern so many wonders of Divine Love; and we shall then be in a condition to examine certain phenomena in the actual life of the world, which seem at variance with our doctrines. Thus, speaking generally, the present treatise may be said to have three parts. The first, which stated the case, and which was concluded in the last chapter: the second, which is concerned with the five mysteries of the relation between the Creator and the creature, and which will occupy this and the next four chapters: and the third, which deals with certain objections from the state of things in the world, and which will occupy the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters. After which, nothing will be left but to close the work, and leave it to the blessing of God and St. Matthew, under whose invocation we have ventured to place it, and to the judgment and reflection of the reader. The five questions now to be asked, are as follows: 1. Why God should wish us to love Him; 2. Why He Himself should love us; 3. What sort of love we have for Him; 4. In what way we repay His love for us; and, 5. In what way He repays our love of Him. They are all abysses of creative love, and wonders which make us wiser even when they refuse to give up the secrets which they contain.

We have, therefore, now to inquire why it is that God wishes us to love Him. At first sight, it seems one of those facts which arc so very obvious that we never think of asking the reason of them. But, on reflection, this old and commonplace fact unfolds so much that is strange and wonderful, that we almost unconsciously ask ourselves, if we are quite clear of the fact, if it is really so completely beyond all doubt that God wishes us to love Him.

The difficulties, which make us begin almost to doubt the fact, are some such as these. That God should wish us to love Him, appears to imply some sort of want in Him. A desire is a kind of confession of imperfection; and, according to the strength of the desire, so is the appearance of imperfection and incompleteness. Yet we know, that, to attribute any sort of want to the Creator would be simple blasphemy. Thou art my God, says the psalmist, because Thou desirest none of my goods. But our love is our greatest good, the affections of our heart are the noblest of our possessions, and God, we are told, earnestly desires to have them. Besides, if we once grant this fact, we are led into a further difficulty. For, immediately, this fact assumes such an importance, that it becomes the interpretation of all God's doings. Almost all we know of Him has at once to be resolved into this desire. A hundred other difficulties come up, and claim to be explained in the same way. We cannot conceive of God except as our

Creator, nor of our Creator except as our Father; for creation is unintelligible, unless it is defined to be a Free Act of Eternal Love, and then everything He does is the act of a Father, and is to be understood by the fact of our being His sons. We see that God cannot, simply because He is God, be moderately good to us. If we grant that He cares for us at all, then forthwith we see, that He must care for us so very much, that the vision of it tries our faith. So God cannot desire our love with a weak and indifferent desire. If He desires it at all, He must desire it with all the might of His ever-blessed perfections, and it requires strong faith and stronger love to look at this consequence, and not draw back before its seeming audacity.

If He reveals Himself to us at all, it is because lie wants us to serve Him; and as we saw in the last chapter, He being what He is and we being what we are, the creature cannot serve the Creator with any other than a service of love. This is what the Church means when she tells us, that without some love in our repentance, we are incapable of absolution. If He gives us positive precepts or an acceptable ceremonial, it is as a way to Him, because He would fain secure our love. If He sends His Son to save sinners, it is because He vouchsafes to appear as if He cannot make up His mind to lose the love of men. If He takes us to Himself in heaven, it is that He may have us with Him, and feed His glory on our love. For we creatures cannot be His end: His end must be Himself, and nothing can exist except for His glory. If He detains us in purgatory, it is to multiply earth's harvest of love, and to make a greater profit on imperfect souls. If, dread thought! He lays us in the hopeless dismal deep of fire, it is because we have frustrated His yearnings, and refused Him the love He vouchsafed so incomprehensibly to covet.

But this is not all. He seems to forget that He is Gcd.

L because of the greatness of this desire. His ever-blessed Majesty will forgive us words of this sort, by which alone we can force upon our dull hearts the conviction of the immensity of His love. He appears to deny His own nature and greatness in order to obtain our love. Is the facility of pardon consistent with the rigor of His vindictive justice, or with the spotlessness of His overwhelming sanctity? Is it easy to see how He should require the unspeakable sufferings of our dearest Lord, and should take them as an expiation for the sins of others, and for sins that were not to be committed till hundreds of years had come and gone? Is it easy to see why baptised infants should be admitted to enjoy the Beatific Vision, or to reconcile with our notions of right that he who came to toil only at the eleventh hour should receive the same wages with him who had borne the burden and heat of the day? Docs God seem to legislate so much for His justice, or His sanctity, or His dignity, as for procuring the greatest number of souls to love Ilim, and for rendering the harvest of redemption as enormous as the perversity of our free-will allows?

There is a further difficulty in the unintelligible value which He seems to set upon our love. Think of what our love is like, and of what good it can possibly be to God, and then conceive its being worth the price He paid for it on Calvary! Yet if we do not suppose it was worth it, we bring a charge against His wisdom, as if the Incarnation and the Passion were gratuitous and exaggerated. And it is no answer to say that it was all for our sakes, and rather a proof of His love for us, than of His desire for our love. For we must continually bear in mind what sound theology teaches us, that God alone can be His own end, and not we creatures. He can only bless us for His own glory. It is His perfection, that He must needs seek Himself in all things. He would not be God, if it were not so. We can hardly conceive of God creating, if He did not set a value upon His own creation. Yet we could not bring ourselves to believe that God set any value upon a few millions of round orbs, or on their velocity, or on their fidelity to their orbits, or to their eccentricities, or to the mere vastness of sidereal space, or to the various structure of matter, or to the threads of metal in the bowels of the mountains, or to the vivifying force of the solar ray, or to the gigantic play of the ubiquitous electricity, or to fine trees, or to clear lakes, or to sylvan dells, or to the outlines of a sea coast, or to the gorgeousness of sunsets, or to the pomp of storms, or to anything whatever of that sort. Even we creatures should feel that we were lowering Him in our own estimation, if we thought that He set a value upon, or took pains with, or had an interest in, such things as these. Yet we are told that He does distinctly set a value on the spirits of angels and the hearts of men. Man is the end of the material world, but God alone is the end of man. Physical philosophers can love strata of rock, or the distribution of plants, or a peculiar fauna, or the habits of earthquakes, or the occultations of stars, or the physical geography of the sea, or the delicacies of chemistry, more than they love the hearts of men, the slaves of the south, or the inmates of a hospital. But God cannot do so. All His own material creation is worthless to Him in comparison with one peasant's heart, or with one child's first serious prayer. He has given away, with the indifference of interminable wealth, all the rest of His creation; but hearts He has kept for Himself, and will not even share them, much less surrender them. Yet where is their value? What is finite love to an Infinite Beatitude? Really it is not easy to see. Yet can we doubt that it is something, and something very precious in His eyes to whom all things else are nothing worth?

One difficulty more. What is the meaning of that surpassing joy which human love causes in God! Surely this is a profound mystery. The life of God is joy, joy illimitable, joy ineffable, joy unimaginable, joy eternal. The whole bewildering immensity of angelical and human joy is but a tiny drop out of the boundless ocean of the joy of God. What a variety of joys there arc in each human heart. No two of these joys are exactly the same. They differ as one note differs from another note in music. They make new joys by new combinations. Different scenes, different phases of life, different ages, all diversify tho throng of joys which one human heart can experience. Yet no two hearts are exactly alike; so that the multitudinous joys of the heart are to be multiplied by the myriads and myriads of hearts, dead, alive, or yet unborn. Now every one of these joys has its representative in the simple plenitude of the joy of God. But what are human joys to joys angelical? Yet they too are all but a manifold umbrage of the one joy of God. The joys of the animal creation, their joy in health and strength, in light and air, in cold and heat, in wet and dry, in their sweet songs or their loud wars, in their speed of flight or their spring of muscle, in tending their young or tearing their prey, all are shadows, lowest, dimmest, faintest, poorest shadows of the joy of God. And who is sufficient to compute these things? And what if the joys of the Immaculate Heart of the Divine Mother are to be reckoned also, and those of that Sacred Heart which the Person of the Word deluged with its oil of gladness, and yet left it human still? Yet when we have got so far, we can hardly be said to have * begun. Who can tell the joy of the Father in His Innascibility, or the joy of the Son in His eternal and perpetual Generation, or the joy of the Holy Ghost in His everlasting and incessant Procession from the Father and the Son? The Jubilee of the Father and the Son is Himself; not a thing or a perception, but an eternal Person, Himself tho illimitable Limit of the illimitable God. Who will dare to picture to himself the awful and majestic jubilation of the August Trinity in the Threefoldness of Persons and the Unity of Essence? God's joy in His own Oneness, — who can look at it except either he be stricken with an ecstasy of rapture, or be dissolved in tears of believing love? And is all this not enough? Is God seeking joy, more joy, joy elsewhere? And is it joy in creatures, created joy? Can His own joy hold more, can it grow, can it receive, can it want? If not, why break the silence of eternity to create, why this hunting after human love, why this ardent patient pursuit after sinful hearts, why this joy over returning sinners, why this preciousness in His sight of the death of His saints? We may indeed ask, why: but can we give an answer? 0 heaven and earth! 0 angels and men! What a Being God is! What a joy it is to be a creature! What a glory to have a Creator!

What is to be done with all these difficulties? One thing is plain. We need not try to answer them. St. Thomas himself, if he rose from the dead, could not answer them. But there is one thing to be observed about them, and it is this. While they are such difficulties as make us doubt whether God really does desire our love, they are at the same time irrefragable proofs of the fact that He does desire it, and that He desires it with a most mysterious intensity. They prove the fact, if they do not account for it; and they prove it in such a way as that we need not have it accounted for, in order to receive it. For we can have no doubt about the fact. But can we approximate to a solution of the problem? Can we throw any kind of light upon the mystery? Can we diminish the difficulties which we confessedly are unable to answer? This must be our next endeavour; and whether we succeed or not, we shall at least gain a great amount of additional evidence to the fact that God does desire our love. We have our misgivingn whether we shall do more than this. l2

Let us look first of all at the kingdom of nature, whether Divine, angelical, or human, and see if it does not disclose to us reasons why God should so yearn for the affection of human hearts. One reason why it is impossible for us to comprehend the Divine Nature, or even to make an imaginary picture of it, is its extreme and adorable simplicity. Properly speaking God has no perfections. He is Himself His own one sole perfection, the perfection of perfections. What we call the divine perfections are only our imperfect ways of approaching towards a true idea of Him. Nevertheless we are capable of considering Him as not our Creator, and then again as our Creator. We know that although God is immutable, still there was a time when He had not created us, and again a time when He had created us. Or if we consider that He had always created us in His own mind, still we can, from what He lias been pleased to tell us of Himself, conceive of Him as being without any creatures at all. As a world is the largest thing we know of, a cosmos, an order, a beauty, all on the vastest scale, so wo may dreo.m of the great God as fourteen worlds in Himself, of surpassing beauty and variety, yet all without limit and circumscription, and one, absolutely one in their own simplicity, although fourteen in our conceptions.

Four of these worlds seem — remember how utterly short of the mark, and beside it, human words are in the matter — to contain the inmost life of God. We call them His Infinity, His Immensity, His Immutability, and His Eternity. They are at once conditions of His Essence, and of all the perfections which we can attribute to His Essence. Around them stand four other worlds, of ravishing loveliness enough to separate body and soul if we might see them uncloudedly. They are Omnipotence, Wisdom, Perfection, which is the natural goodness of God, and Sanctity, which we may call His moral goodness. Now in these eight worlds there is not necessarily any respect to creatures. They belong to the eternal Self-sufficiency of God independent of any creation whatever. They furnish us with no reason at all why God should desire our love. On the contrary they are so magnificently self-sufficing, so adorably complete, that they are rather so many arguments against the existence of any such unfathomable desire.

Around these eight worlds are six other worlds, to be mentioned only with the wondering humility of filial and more than filial love, worlds which concern ourselves and are colored by our destinies, worlds in which we ourselves also dwell from eternity, and which are at this hour, and will be evermore, our only country and our only home. They are the Divine Benignity, Dominion, Providence, Mercy, Justice, and that perfection of God which we call His being the Last End of all things. If God were to be conceived without creatures, nothing can be added to the first eight worlds, and nothing taken from them, without His ceasing to be God. If He be conceived as with creatures, as He is actually, then the addition of anything to the whole fourteen worlds, or the subtraction of anything from them, would inevitably alter our idea of God. We may use many other great words of Him, but the meaning of them, the excellence intended by them, is already implied and included in one of the fourteen worlds.

Now the very existence of these six worlds in God of itself will furnish us with most overwhelming proofs of His desire that we should love Him. Yet it does not appear that it in any way accounts for the existence of that desire. And the fact that this desire is founded in the very nature of God, and the very immensity of His perfection, is the more overwhelming when we reflect that, although we can by an arbitrary act of our imagination, conceive God to bo without creaturos, yet that in point of fact He never was so, as He had created the world in His own mind from the beginning; and thus the idea of Creator, and consequently of all that it implies, is inseparable from Him.

The eternity of God before creation is a collection of mysteries, which it is vain for us to sound. In what waj His decrees, enclosed in His own mind, ministered to His glory, or gave exercise to His mercy or His justice or His providence, why the primal creation of the angels took place as soon as it did, or*why it did not take place sooner, why He, — not broke, not interrupted, not disturbed, all that is impossible — but why He superadded to, the tranquil self-sufficiency of that eternity, not the effort, not the toil, but the fulfilling of His will, in the act of creation, whether the absence of a heaven full of rational and beatified worshippers could in any sense at all add anything to the uncreated solitude of the Three Divine Persons, whether their foreseen worship in His mind, to whom there is no past or future, but only one active unsuccessive present, was precisely the same to Him as its actual existence external to Himself, how it was that this worship did not in any way illustrate or beautify God's perfection in His own esteem, — what can we say of all these things than that they are beyond us: and yet also that they make us feel how astonishingly intimate to God is His desire of His creature's love? Surely in this wide field of colossal miracles, here is fresh proof of the desire, fresh example of its intensity, yet no solution of the enigma.

We have nothing to do here with theological disputes regarding the order of the Divine Decrees. We know that none could have any precedence or priority in respect of time. Their order could be only that of dignity and eminence. But what a fountain of affectionate thoughts, thoughts honorable to God in the highest degree, is opened up in the dark depths of His mysterious predestination. We know that God is free, and that nothing can impair the spotlessness of His transcendent liberty. Yet how can wo conceive otherwise of predestination than as God binding Himself, putting conditions, like fetters, on His own royal and everlasting liberty; and for our sakes, out of love of us, in order to have our love? Inconceivable mystery! how can we believe it without a very miracle of grace and infused faith? Men talk as if it was their liberty which suffered in the act of predestination. Nay, rather it is the liberty of God. Wayward men! as if we were to be always suspecting God, always on our guard against Him, as if He could be claiming our liberty, who has already given us His glory to make as free with almost as we please! How can that act injure our liberty, when without it, we should not even have had life? We owe our liberty to our life, and our life to God's predestination. We are free as air, only too free, all things considered. But it has puzzled the wisest understandings of mankind to see how the magnificent liberty of God rests unimpaired by the prodigal compassions of His eternal predestination. But it was as if a necessity were upon Him. Give me children or I die, said the impetuous Rachel, longing to be a mother. So, at all costs, God must have creatures to love Him, sons to honor and to serve Him and to keep Him immortal company. At any cost He must have created love, over which to outpour Himself with a stupendous communication of uncreated love, complacency, and joy.

Hence, who does not see that he predestined all men, together with all angels, to be saved; and yet, by that decree, He left their freedom unimpaired? Before — we are speaking as words compel us — before He had foreseen aught else, and moved only by the excess of his own unspeakable goodness, He decreed to create the natures of angels and men, simply that He might raise them to the vision of Himself, and to participate in His beatitude. He chose no certain number, so as to exclude others. In the adorably real sincerity of His own will, He would have ull 9 loO WnY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM.

men, and all angels, saved, and was ready to give, to each and all, the necessary graces. Hence, also, came that marvellous determination of superabundant love, to create both angels and men in a state of grace, that they might the more readily attain to their supernatural end. Then, when He foresaw the free and wilful demerits of some, and the free loyal correspondence to grace in others, there was no energy in that prevision to secure the condemnation of the first, while His mercy rejoiced already to adorn and set aside the crowns for the second. Nor was it, as we suppose, until after this prevision, that there was any absolute election or reprobation. And thus man's liberty was secured throughout; and the result is, that of all the multitudes of those who are lost, not one can attribute his ruin to any predetermining act of God, but simply to their own etforts to free themselves from the solicitudes of His grace; while, of all the countless souls and spirits of the blessed, there is not one who does not owe his joy to the eternal predestination of His Maker. And what is all this, but another set of evidences to prove the greatness of God's desire to have our love, while it still leaves deep down in the abyss of His goodness the reason of this desire?

If we consider the arrangements of creation and natural preservation, we shall see that they, in like manner, testify to the Creator's desire to excite our love. It is impossible to make too much of the fact, that both angels and men were created in a state of grace. Then, again, there is a sort of superabundance in our natural gifts. We have so many more than seem absolutely necessary to our discharging the duties for which we came into the world. Life is itself an intense pleasure; so much so, that men prize it above all other things. The most miserable of men will hardly part without reluctance with the simple power of living. All our natural gifts, also, are so constructed as to be avenues of enjoyment and delight. There is not a sense, in whose exercise there is not a keenness and a peculiarity of satisfaction, of which those who lack that sense can form no adequate conception. It requires a soul, either in the strength of its first integrity or in the vigor of supernatural grace, to hold us back from being swept away by the might of sensual pleasure. The exercise of the various faculties of the mind, also open out new sources of the strangest delight and the most thrilling happiness. We can think of and count up a score of different pleasureable feelings consequent on the use of our minds, not one of which we can adequately describe in words. What, then, shall we say of the romance and nobility of the affections of our hearts, those very hearts God so much covets? Almost as many loves grow in the soil of the heart, as there are wines in the vineyards of the earth; and has not the whole world many a time gone wild with their intoxication?

So, also, in the adaptation of material nature to our dominion, everything is characterized by excessive profusion, by unnecessary beauty. Everything, almost, has a sweetness beyond and beside its own proper function. The heathen talked of Mother Earth; and truly God has filled her teeming bosom with the milk of more than a mother's kindness. Whether she feeds, or heals, or soothes, or inspires, or simply wins us by the lustre of her physical beauty, she is ever doing more than she promises, and enhances her gifts by the fondness of her ministrations. There is something to make us tremble to see with what fineness of balance, with what nicety of restraint, our Creator tames the huge elements in our behalf, and makes us live at ease amid the bewildering vastness of their operations, and close by the uneasy laboratories of their titanic power. Everywhere, and for our sakes, He governs, not through the catastrophies of violent power, but through the meekness of a patient and a pleasant uniformity.

Here is fresh demonstration that He craves our love, and no reason given but the blessed one of his free benignant will.

Once more, before we leave the kingdom of nature, let us look at the way in which the Bible discloses Him to us in successive dispensations. He plants an Eden for his new-made creatures, and then comes to them Himself; and the evenings of the young world are consecrated by familiar colloquies between the creatures and their Creator. He tests their love by the lightest of precepts; and. when they have broken it, clear above the accents of a strangely moderate anger, are heard the merciful promises of a Saviour. Then come centuries of mysterious strife, like Jacob wrestling with God by the tinkling waters of the midnight stream. No sin seems to weary Him. No waywardness is a match for the perseverance of His love. Merciful and miraculous interventions are never wanting. No gifts are thought too much or too good, if the creatures will but condescend to take them. On the Mesopotamian sheep-walks, in the Egyptian brick-fields, in the palm-spotted wilderness, among the vineyards of Engaddi, by the headlong floods of harsh Babylon, it is always the same. God cannot do without us. He cannot afford to lose our love. He clings to us; He pleads with us; He punishes only to get love, and stays His hand in the midst; Ho melts our hearts with beautiful complainings; He mourns like a rejected lover or a suspected friend; He appeals to us with a sort of humility which has no parallel in human love. What a character of God we should draw from the Bible only! and what would it all come to, but that to win the love of His creatures was the ruling passion of the Creator? Oh! horrible beyond all horrors must the heart be that will not love God, that particular God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! God desiring, and man withholding, and then God getting, as it were, by stealth or by caress, less than a tithe of His due from less than a tithe of Ilia creation, and then as it were spreading Himself out in a kind of joyous triumph at his success, — is not this a truthful compendium of the Bible history?

If from nature we turn to grace, we shall find that the whole resolves itself into a loving pursuit of souls on the part of God. We shall meet there the same evidence of the fact with as little solution of the difficulty. The kingdom of grace, if it is not founded on the permission of evil, seems at least to imply it; and the permission of evil is nothing less than the intense desire of the Creator for the love of His creatures. Surely that is the whole account of this terrific mystery. At what a price must He estimate the love of angels and of men, if He would run so fearful a risk to gain it? Nay, it could be no risk to Him whose foreknowledge made all things present to Ilim. Every possible, as well as every actual, consequence of that permission was vividly before Ilim, and yet He persisted. It was worth while. It was for His glory, and His glory is our inestimable good. If evil was not permitted, angels and men would not be free. If they were not free, they could not serve Him with a service of love; for freedom is necessary to love. They, whom the sight of Ilim now confirms in holiness for evermore, would not have won their crowns, and therefore a heaven of saints ready made from the beginning would not in fact have been a service of free allegiance and voluntary love. Yet what a fearful venture, rather what an appalling certainty, was that permission of evil. The All-merciful saw before Ilim the burning abyss, so sadly populous. It was to Him a vision of more unutterable horror than it could be even to the capacious soul of Mary or the keen intelligence of Michael. Yet onwards He drove right through it, in the plentitude of that greater and more overwhelming good-

M ness wherewith lie yearned for His creature's love. 0 what clearness of demonstration is there here in the pitchy darkness of that intolerable secret!

Then that grave permission came to His eldest sons, to that primeval world of angels. For one moment they looked at Him in all the beauty of His kind dominion, and then they looked at self with its enticing liberty, and forthwith one whole multitude, a third of that wide empire, ten million times ten million spirits, a very universe of loveliness and gifts and graces, made their irremediable choice, and in the madness of their liberty leaped into the stunning war of the fiery whirlpool, far away from the meek paternal majesty of God. Their irremediable choice! what a thought is that for us! The angels could not complain. They had had a marvellous abundance of love. The gifts of their nature were something beyond our power of imagining. They were so bright and vast and sure as to be almost a security against their fall. They had also been created in a state of grace, and doubtless of the most exquisite and resplendent grace. Moreover they had all perhaps merited immensely by the first act of love with which they greeted their Creator in the exulting moment when at His dear will their grand spirits sprung from nothingness. Yet one chance, one only! Our different experience of God makes us tremble at the thought. When we broke our light precept, and forfeited our original integrity, He would not lose us so. He only redoubled His mercies, and multiplied our means of salvation: so that it has become almost a doubt in theology whether we are not better off now that we have fallen, than we should have been had we preserved the innocence and rectitude of paradise. When we consider the various dispensations which followed the fall, the antediluvian times, the patriarchal dispensation, the Levitical, the Christian, as if God would still leave us free, yet for all that, and in spite of fearful losses, would not be baffled in His yearning for our love, we might almost venture to compare His infinite Majesty to one of His own insignificant creatures, to the spider who with the same quiet assiduity of toil is ever repairing its often broken web, still trusting the same treacherous site, still braving the same almost inevitable calamities. Can we give any reason for this, or say more, than that there is a reason, which God has hidden in the greatness of His own goodness?

The Incarnation, that mystery of the divine magnificence, in which all the intelligible perfections of God pass in array before us as in beautiful procession, teaches us the same lesson. If God would have come to His unfallen creature, and been borne within the womb of a human Mother, and have shared our nature, and have lived among us, and for three-and-thirty years have unfolded countless mysteries of glory, surpassing even those of the paschal forty days, what can we say but that it would have been a proof of His desire for His creature's love, which we could only have adored in silent thankfulness? A creature the Creator cannot be; but He will have a created Nature, and make it unspeakably one with His Divine Person, so that He may be more like one of us, and heighten our reverence by the trembling freedoms of our familiarity, if only He may so enjoy vast augmentations of human love. If because we fell, He changed the manner of His coming, if rather than abandon His coming He plunged His Mother and Himself in a very ocean of sorrows, if, without humbling us by telling us of the change, He contentedly took shame for glory, suffering for joy, slavery for a kingdom, the cross instead of the crown, what did it all show but that He would still have our love, and that with ingenious compassion, which could only be divine, He would take the advantage of our miseries to exalt us all the more, and so win more abundant love? If He came only because wo

136 why ood wishes us to love him.

had fallen, if He condescended to be but a remedy for an evil, if He stooped to fight our battle in person, and in human flesh, with our triumphant enemy, if the Incarnation was an interference to prevent His own world from being stolen from Him, if it was a fresh invention out of the boundless resources of the divine pity, then still what does it mean but that He would not let us go, He would not let us lose ourselves, because in His strangely persevering goodness He would not lose our love?

So again what is the Church but His way of rendering the blessings of His Incarnation omnipresent and everlasting? What is the Baptism of infants but a securing prematurely, and as it were against all reason, the eternal love of their unconscious souls? "What is Confession, but mercy made common, justice almost eluded, the most made out of the least? These are human words, but they express something true. What is the sacrament of Confirmation but an act of jealousy, lest the world should steal from God what He had already got? What is the sacrament of Matrimony, but a taking of the stuff and substance of human life, its common sorrows and joys, its daily smiles and tears, the wear and tear of its rough and smooth, and elevating it all by a sort of heavenly transfiguration into a ceaseless fountain of supernatural and meritorious love? What is Extreme Unction, but an expression of affectionate nervousness, if we may so speak, of our dearest Lord, lest wo should fail Him just at the last, when so many risks are run? What is the sacrament of Order, but systematizing and ensuring a succession of daily miracles, such as consecrations, absolutions, exorcisms, and benedictions, each one of which is to create, and then to fertilize, and then to beautify, a little world of love for Him? Ask the Divine Solitary of the tabernacle why lie lives His hermit life amongst us, and what could His answer be but this — I wait, to show love and to receive it? But wide as He has made the ample bosom of His Church, and though He has multiplied with a commonness, which almost injures reverence, the potent sacraments, this is not enough. None must slip through, if He can but help it. None must be lost except in His despite. There must be something still left, which needs no priest, something as wide as air and as free, which men may have when they cannot have, or at the needful moment cannot find, the sacraments of His own loving institution. One thing there is, and one only, and we are not surely now surprised to find that one thing — love. If need be, love can baptise without water, can confirm without chrism, can absolve without ordination, can almost communicate without a Host. For love is a higher emanation of that priesthood which is for ever according to the order of Melchisedech. How shall we read these riddles, if they may not mean that God so desires our love, that He almost tires our attention and outstrips our imagination by the novelty and profusion of His merciful desires to secure this marvellously priceless treasure, the puny love of finite hearts?

There are many difficulties in the doctrine of grace, as well as in those of predestination and the permission of evil, which seem to interfere with our perception of God's love, with its impartiality as well as its completeness. But if we, each of us, remove the cause from the theological Bchools to the court in our rap heart, these difficulties will be greatly diminished, if not entirely dispelled. Let our own hearts therefore be the last part of the kingdom of grace which we shall examine. Can any one of us say that we have not received numberless graces to which we have not corresponded? Have we ever sinned, not only without its being wilfully done, but also without a distinct resistance to conscience, grace, or contrary inspirations? If we were to die and be lost at this moment, is it not as clear as the sun at noon that we have no one to blame for it but our-m2 solves? Has not our whole life been one series of merciful interferences on the part of God? Have there not been many times when our petulance and waywardness have reached such a point, that we in like case should have given up our dearest friends, our closest kindred, as past the possibility of amendment, or not worth the trouble of reproof? And yet God has not given us up. His tenderness, His liberality, His assiduity, His patience, His hopefulness, and if we may use the word, His extraordinary unprovokedness, have been beyond all words. And how do we stand at this hour? We have merited hell. Perhaps we havo merited it a thousand times over. "We ought to be there now, if justice had all its rights. But it is an unjust world, and God is the grand victim of its injustice. He alone has not His rights. He lets His mercy do strange things with His liberty. We have merited hell purely of our own free will: nay, we have had to stifle inward reproaches and to make considerable efforts in order to accomplish our own perdition. That we are not yet in hell, that we have actually a good chance of heaven, is simply because God cannot find in His heart to abandon the possibility of our love. In a word, look at yourself, for self is the only thing which concerns you in these difficulties of grace and predestination. Has God ever done you anything but good? Has He not done you an overwhelming amount of good? Has He net simply been so good to you, that you yourself cannot conceive of anything, except the Divine Nature, being so good? Either in kind, or in degree, in manner, or in matter, can you so much as conceive cf any created goodness being anything like so good? 0 merciful God! Thou art too good to us. Thou standest in Thine own light. Thy mercies hide in one another; they go out of sight because they are so tall: they pass unnoticed because they are so deep: they weary our thankfulness because they arc so numerous: they make us disbelieve because they are so gratuitous, so common, so enduring. We should more readily have acknowledged what Thou hast done for us, if Thou hadst only done much lessl

Are we tired of ail this evidence, especially when it leavet still unexplained the mystery it so amply proves? This ii not the place to discuss the joys of the Beatific Visiou although there is hardly a more tempting province oi theology. Nevertheless we can hardly close our case with out some consideration of the kingdom of glory, considered in reference to our present enquiry. In the case of a parent or a teacher we judge of the value set upon a particular line of conduct, by the greatness of the reward promised and actually conferred. Now, if wc love God, the reward promised us is nothing less than the sight of God Himself, face to Face, not transiently, not as a glorious flash of light renewed once in ten thousand years to feed our immortality with contentment and delight, but an abiding Vision, a glory and a gladness, a marvellous rapture of the will, and an ecstasy of vast intelligence, for evermore. Think how such a reward transcends all the expectations, all the possibilities even, of our nature! How God must love us, and how too He must love our love, to have prepared for us such joys as these, which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor man's heart conceived!

We must consider also that although our beatitude, quite rigorously speaking, does not consist so much or so directly in love, as in the actual vision of God by our understand ings, nevertheless love is that which immediately follow* from it, and which is directly connatural to it. So that it comes to this: our reward is for having loved God; it is no less a reward than God Himself, not any of His gifts; and it is an ability to love Him infinitely better than we have ever done before, and also eternally. He takes us to Himself, lie makes us His own companions for evermore. He multiplies himself in us, and reflects Himself in our beatifiod souls, as if it were in so many images of Himself. " In other created things," says Lcssius, "as in the fabric of the world, and the various degrees of things, certain thin rays of His divinity shine forth, from which we can, as it were by a conjecture, learn His power, His wisdom, and His goodness. But in our minds elevated by the light of glory and united to Him in the Beatific Vision, the whole plenitude of the divinity shines forth, the whole of His beauty softly glows; so that, although the divinity is one in itself, it is in a marvellous manner multiplied, so that there seem to be as many divinities as there are beatified minds." Love is the reason of the reward, love is the consequence of the reward, love is the conduct rewarded, and the reward itself is love. If we knew nothing more of God than this, need more be known?

We must not forget also the huge price which this reward has cost our Creator. When we had forfeited it, it required as it were an effort of all His conjoined perfections to recover it for us once again. A God made Man, the shame of a God, the sufferings of a God, the Blood of a God, the death of a God! Such was the price of what we shall one day enjoy in heaven. What can we do but weep silently? How do all complaints about the permission of evil and the mystery of election die away, when we think of things like these! How ungraceful, ungraceful rather than ungrateful, do they seem. The Incarnation of a God, the shame of a God, the sufferings of a God, the Blood of a God, the death of a God! That was what I cost! It is now my daily bread, my daily light, my daily life! I confess that faith is almost overwhelmed with these considerations. 0 for some corner, the least, the lowest, and the last in the world to come, where we may spend an untired eternity in giving silent thanks to Jesus Crucified 1

But, if what God paid was so great, the littleness of what earns it on our part is a mystery almost as wonderful. A

Magdalen's love was but a paltry price to pay for a reward eo vast. But think of the dying thief! One act of love, one act of contrition, the brief tardy graces of a death-bed, — what must be the might of our Saviour's Blood when it can concentrate the whole merit of eternal life in such little momentary things as these? If we died at this moment, it is our firm hope that we should be saved; and yet can our hope rest on what we ourselves have done? Is there not something painful in confronting the magnitude of our recompense, with the trifling service we have given God but grudgingly, out of hearts only half weaned from tho world, and scarcely weaned at all from self? Surely God must desire our love with an amazing fervor of desire, when He gives so much, to have so little in return!

There is one thing more to remark about the Beatific Vision, before we close our case. It is a very obvious reflection, yet perhaps we do not dwell upon it sufficiently, that now, in our fallen state, it is not innocence which earns the sight of God, but love, humble, repentant, penance-doing love. Nay, even in an unfallen or angelic world, it would only be innocence in the shape of love, which could earn the heavenly recompense. Thus also in our journey heavenwards, it is love which takes every step, and love alone. It is not the sharpness of the austerity which merits, but the love. It is not the patience in sickness, or the silence under calumny, or the perseverance in prayer, or the zeal of apostolic labor, which win the crown, but just the love, and the love only, that is in the patience and the silence and the prayer and the zeal. Martyrdom without love is unprofitable before God. He has no longing for anything but love. He puts no price on other things. His taste is exclusive. His covetousness is confined to that one thing. O if we could be as simple and as single in our desires as God! He only wants our love, and more of it, and more, and more. Why should not we also want one thing only, to love Him, and to love Him more, and more, and more? Surely if we prayed only for that after which He longs so earnestly, our prayer would not wait for its answer long; and then in His eyes, and who would wish to be so in other eyes? we should boo* be like the saints.

We conclude from all these considerations, that ot' tne fad that God condescends intensely to desire ui. iovc, there can be no possible doubt; and we think IT A more true to say that this fact, that He desires our lo^, is the foundation of all practical religion, than the equally certain fact that He loves us. We mean that our duties and our love flow more obviously from the one than from the other. The one comes nearer to us than the other. But as to the reason which we are to assign for this desire on the part of our beneficent Creator, we can only say that often in religion the answer to one mystery is another mystery greater than the first. We can find no better answer than this, He wishes us to love Him, because He so loves us. Upon which we are obliged forthwith to ask ourselves the further question, Why does God love us? And this must be the enquiry for the next chapter.

Meanwhile we are not at all disconcerted with the vagueness of our answer, nor with the apparently small result of our enquiry. The fact is that religious truth is always fruitful and enchanting; and God is our truest enjoyment even already upon earth; and as we shall enjoy Him in heaven, yet never comprehend Him, so it is life's greatest joy on earth to watch the operations of God and to muse upon His wonders, though their meaning is cither only partially disclosed to us, or perhaps even hidden from us altogether. Oh! is any one so dead in heart, so blighted in mind and aspiration, as to be able to look all this divine love in the face, and not be won by it to better things? Blessed, blessed God! Wonderful Father! Compassionate Creator!

this mystery of His desiring our poor love should of itself be a lifelong joy to us in our time of pilgrimage. It puts a new face upon the world. All things glow with another light. A feeling of security comes upon us, like a gift from heaven, and wraps us round; and the cold chill goes from our heart, and the dark spots are illuminated; and we want nothing more now, nothing. Earth has nothing to give, which would not be a mere impertinence after this desire of God. Our hearts are full. "We have no room for more. This desire of God solves all the problems of our inner life; for it at once calms us in our present lowness, and spurs us on to higher things, and the name of that double state, the calm and the spur, — what is it but perfection? God loves me — God desires my love. He has asked for it; He covets it, lie prizes it more than I do myself! I would fain tell the poor trees, and the little birds that are roosting, and the patient beasts slumbering in the dewy grass, and the bright waters, and the wanton winds, and the clouds as they sail above me, and that white moon, and those flickering far-off stars, that God desires my love, mine, even mine! And it is true, infallibly true. 0 God, Thou art my God because my goods are nothing unto Thee! What shall I do? If I may not doubt this mystery, what can I do but die of love? Oh Thou, who in the world above gives us the light of glory that we may bear to see Thy beauty, give us now the strength of faith to endure these revelations of Thy love I

B9U8E OF PROVIDENCE, DUNDAS, ONT.