Chapter II. Why God Loves Us

Nemo amatorum camalium, ctiamsi sit in hoc ultra modum insaniens, •ic cxardcsccre potest in amorem dih'ctae sua?, sicut Dous uffunditur in *inon;in animaruni nostrarum. — S. Chrysostom.

If the answer to our first question, why God wishes us to aOvc Him, only resulted in a mystery, we may be sure the answer to this second question, why God loves us, will only bring out a still greater mystery. Nevertheless, we must proceed to the discussion of it. Enquiry is more solid and more fruitful in divine things, than the most complete and satisfactory results in human sciences.

The whole creation floats, as it were, in the ocean of God's almighty love. His love is the cause of all things, and of all the conditions of all things, and it is their end and rest as well. Had it not been fur His love, they never would have existed, and, were it not for His love now, they would not be one hour preserved. Love is the reading of all the riddles of nature, grace, and glory; and reprobation is practically the positive refusal on the part of the free creature to partake of the Creator's love. Love is the light of all dark mysteries, the sublime consummation of all hopes, desires, and wisdoms, and the marvellous interpretation of God. Light is not so universal as love, for love is in darkness as well as light. Life is less strong than love; for love is the victory over death, and is itself an immortal life. If it pleased God at this moment to destroy the air, the planet would have wheeled but a few leagues eastward before it would have become the home of universal death and desolation. Myriad myriads of warm and joyous lives would have been extinguished in one inarticulate gasp of choking agony. Not only would the streets and fields have been strewed with the suffocated dead, but the birds on the wing would have fallen lifeless to the ground; the deep blue waters of the sea would not have screened their multitudinous tribes from the energy of the destroying edict. The subterranean creatures would have been found out and stifled in the crevices of the rocks, the black waters, or the winding ways beneath the ground. Earth's green vesture would be unrolled, and the fair orb would revolve in space an ugly mass of dull, discolored matter. Yet this picture of ruin is but a faint image of what would happen if God withdrew into His own self-sufficient glory, and called off that immensity of gratuitous love with which lie covers all creation. For the destruction of the air would be but a material desolation. It would not invade the vast kingdoms of moral beauty, of spiritual life, of natural goodness, of infused holiness, of angelical intelligence, or of the beatitude of human souls. As far as creation is concerned, God, as it were, concentrates all His attributes into one, becomes only one perfection, and that one perfection is to us the whole of God: and it is love. God is love, says St. John briefly; and after that, nothing more was needed to be said. He has infinite power, boundless wisdom, indescribable holiness; but to us the power, the wisdom, and the holiness come simply in the shape of love. To us creatures His infinity, His immensity, His immutability, His eternity, are simply love, infinite, immense, immutable, eternal love. When we proved God's desire of our love, we at the same time proved undoubtedly His love of us. Reason and revelation, science and theology, nature, grace, and glory, alike establish the infallible truth that God loves His own creatures, and loves them as only God can love. The question 10 N is whj He loves us; and our first step towards an answer must be to examine the character and degree of this love. The nature of a thing is often the best explanation both of its existence and its end. Let us see what God's love of us is like.

In the first place, it passes all example. We have nothing to measure it by, nothing to compare it with. The creatures which God has created, furnish us with ideas by which we can imagine creatures which He has not created. We could not have conceived of a tree, if God had not made one. But now we can imagine a tree which shall be different from any actual tree, either in size, or in foliage, or in flower, or in fruit, or in the character of its growth and outline. So also of an animal, or even of a possible world. Whether we are unable to imagine any possible thing, which shall be more than a combination of certain actual things, or a variety of them, or an excess of them, i-< a question which we do not touch. God gives us something to build our imaginary creatures upon, because He has surrounded us with a countless variety of creatures; and we can judge of imaginary things in poetry, painting, or sculpture, according to the standard of nature. But we have no such help in understanding God's love of His creatures. It is without parallel, without similitude. It is based upon His own eternal goodness, which we do not understand.

This leads us to its next feature, that it does not resemble human love, either in kind or in degree. It does not answer to the description of a creature's love. It manifests itself in different ways. It cannot be judged by the same principles. We cannot rise to the idea of it by successive steps of greater or less human love. The ties of paternal, fraternal, conjugal affection all express truths about the divine love; but they not only express them in a very imperfect way, they also fall infinitely short of the real truth, of the whole truth. If we throw together all the mutual love of the angels, of which doubtless among the various choirs there are many nameless varieties, if we cast into one all the passionate fidelity and heroic loyalty and burning sentiment of all the husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, that ever were, ever will be, or in the vast expanse of omnipotence ever can be, our total will be something inconceivably more short of the reality of God's love for us than the drop is short of the ocean, and the minute of eternity. If we multiply the same total by all the figures we can think of without losing our heads in the labyrinths of millions and billions, we shall not mend matters. When we have come to an end we have not got the shadow of an idea of the degree of fervor with which God loves us. And then if we contrived to comprehend the degree, where should we be in our reckoning? There remains the fact that God's love of us is a different kind of love from any for which we have got a name. 0 how it gladdens our souls to think that when we shall have been a million of years in the Bosom of our Heavenly Father, we shall still be sinking down deeper and deeper in that unknown sea of love, and be no nearer the bottom of its unfathomable truth and inexhaustible delights!

This is our third feature of it, that not even a glorified soul can ever understand it. The immaculate Mother of God at this hour is almost as ignorant of it as we are. Almost as ignorant, for there can scarcely be degrees in a matter which is infinite. The gigantic intelligence of St. Michael has been fathoming the depths of divine love through countless cycles of revolving ages, longer far than even those seemingly interminable geological epochs which men of science claim, and he has reported no soundings yet. And still, these endless calculations are the happy science of the Blest. Still, the saints on earth, in ardent contemplations, work this problem, -which they know beforehand they shall never solve. And we, who creep upon the ground, what better can we do than bewilder ourselves in these mazes of celestial love? For we shall still be learning to love God more, still learning to wonder more at what He has done for us, and to wonder, most of all, at the nothing which we do for Him. If even they who see God, cannot comprehend His love, what manner of love must it necessarily be? And yet it is ours, our own possession; and God's one desire is, by hourly influxes of grace, to increase that which is already incalculable, to enrich us with an apparently unspeakable abundance of that whose least degree is beyond the science of archangels, beyond the glory-strengthened eye of the Mother of God herself!

It is another feature of this love, that it seems so to possess God as to make Him insensible to reduplicated wrongs, and to set one attribute against another. At all costs love must be satisfied. There is nothing like God's love except God's unity. It is the whole of God. Mercy, the most exquisite, tender, delicate, susceptible mercy, must be risked by the permission of evil. That choice perfection of the Most High, His intolerably shining, unspotted, simple sanctity, must be exposed to inevitable outrage by the freedom of created wills. Only love must be satisfied. The most stupendous schemes of redemption shall seem to tax the infinity of wisdom so as to satisfy justice, provided only that the satisfaction be not made at the expense of love. Love is the favorite. Love appears — Oh these poor human * words! — to stand out from the equality of the divine perfections. Yet even love, for love's own sake, will come down from the eminence of its dignity. It will take man's love as a return for itself. It will consider itself paid by a kind of affectionate fiction. It will count that for a return which bears no resemblance to the thing to be returned, either in kind or in degree. The mutual love of God and

WHY GOD LOVES US. IJ9 man is truly a friendship, of which the reciprocity is all on one side. Compared to the least fraction of God's enormous love of us, what is all the collective love He receives from angels and from men, but as less than the least drop to the boundless sea! And yet, in the divine exaggerations of His creative goodness, the whole magnificent machinery of a thousand worlds was a cheap price to pay for this.

Hence we may well reckon as a fifth feature of this love, that its grandeur is a trial even to the faith which finds no difficulty in the Blessed Sacrament nor even in the mystery of the Undivided Trinity. If we have had to work for God as priests, have we not found more men puzzled and tempted by the love of God than by any other article of the faith? Indeed most of the temptations against the faith, when properly analyzed, resolve themselves into temptations arising from the seeming excesses of divine love. We might dare to say that God Himself, in spite of our daily prayer, leads us into temptation by His incredible goodness. It is the excessive love of the Incarnation and the Passion, which make men find it hard to believe those mys-teries. It is the very inundation of love with which Mary is covered, which really makes her a stumbling block to proud or ill-established faith, or to enquiry which has not yet reached the strength of faith. The Blessed Sacrament is a difficulty, only because it is such an exceedingly beautiful romance of love. If God's love had not as it were constrained Him to tell us so many of His incomprehensible secrets, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity would have been less fertile of objections. We confess it seems to us that ho who, on reflection, can receive and embrace those two prepositions, that God loves us, and that God desires our love, can find nothing difficult hereafter in the wonders of theology. They exhaust and absorb all the possible objections a finite intellect can make to the incomprehensible dealings of its infinite Creator. 0 how often in the fluent course ot prayer does not this simple fact, that God is loving us, turn round and face us, and scatter all our thoughts, and strike us into a deep silence, and repeat itself out loud to us, and the soul answers not, and is not asleep and yet is not awake, and then the truth passes on, and we are left weak in every limb, and sweetly weary, as if we had been hard at work for hours upon some deep study or toilsome deed of charity! We saw no vision: only God touched us, and we shrunk, and now are marvellously fatigued.

Another feature of this love is that it is eternal, which is in itself an inexplicable mystery. As there never was a moment when God was not, in all the plenitude of His self-sufficient majesty, so there was never a moment when He did not love us. He loved us not only in the gross, as His creatures, not only as atoms in a mass, as units in a multitude, all grouped together and not taken singly. But He loved us individually. He loved us with all those distinctions and individualities which make us ourselv s, and prevent our being any but ourselves. As the Eternal Generation of the Son and the Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost were in God what are called in theology necessary acts; because without them God would not be One God in Three Persons; so His eternal love of us was God's first free act. It was the glorious liberty of God spreading beyond Himself in the form of creative love. What is predestination but the determining of this sweet liberty by almighty love? What is our election but the eternal embrace of our Creator's unbeginning love? Ever since He was God, and He was always God, He has been caressing us in the complacency of His delighted foresight. We were with Him before ever the planets or the stars were made, before angelic spirit had yet streamed out of nothing, or the hollow void been bidden to build up millions of round worlds of ponderous material substance. What must a love be like which has been eUrnal and immutable? And is it simply to be believed that I, a speck in the world, a point in time, a breath of being, fainting back into my original nothingness every moment, only that an act of God's will and influx keeps me in life by force, that I, most intellectually conscious to myself that I have never of myself done or said one worthy, one unselfish thing, one thing that was not vile and mean ever since I was born, that I, such as I am, or even such as I may hope to be, have really been loved by God with an everlasting love? Why, what mean all those controversies about the counsels of perfection? Is it possible that God's children can be talking together, to see how much they are obliged to do for God, and how little is enough to save them? Yes! yes! eternal love allows even this, brooks even this, and to all appearance is content! If we will not give, God will bargain with us, and buy. O inexplicable love! Thy doings are almost a scandal to be put into words!

Once more. The seventh feature of this love which God bears us, is that it is in every way worthy of Himself, and the result of His combined perfections. It would be of course an intolerable impiety to suppose the contrary. Nay rather, it is the most perfect of His perfections, His attribute of predilection, if we might dare so to speak. If it be a finite love, where is its limit? If it went to the Crucifixion, if it comes daily to the Tabernacle, who can say where it will not go, if need should be? Jesus has more than once told His saints that He would willingly be crucified over again for each separate soul of man. Where can such love stop? If it be a love short of immense, who has ever exhausted it? Who ever will eAhaust it? Look at it in heaven at this moment — oh that we too were there i — it is rolling like boundless silver oceans into countless spirits and unnumbered souls. How Mary's sinless heart drinks in the shining and abounding waters! How the Sacred Heart of Jesus seem to embrace and appropriate the whole gracious inundation in itself! A few years, and you will be there yourself, and still the same vast flood of love, Ages will pass uncounted, and still the fresh tides will roll. 0 is not this an immensity of love? 0 beautiful gateway of death! thou art a very triumphal arch for the souls whom Jesus has redeemed.

If His love be mutable, when did it change? Is a whole past eternity no warrant for its perseverance? Is not fidelity its badge and token, a fidelity which is like no created thing, although we call it by a human name? If it be not eternal, when did it begin, and when will it end? The day of judgment, which will be the end of so many things, will only be the beginning of a fresh abundance of this love. If it were a love less than omnipotent, could it have created worlds, could it have assumed a created nature to an uncreated Person, could it have accomplished that series of marvels required in the consecration of the Blessed Sacrament? Could it have been unhurt by the coldness of men, or unimpaired by their rebellion? Is it not a wiso love? Shall we dare to say even of its excesses that they are inconsistent with faultless wisdom? Had its wisdom been at all less than inexhaustible, could it have accomplished the redemption of mankind as it has done, could it have distributed grace with such profound and unerring decision, could it have made the complicated arrangements of a vast universe testify so uniformly of itself, could it judge the world when the time shall come? Is it in any way an imperfect love? Where does it fail? What purpose does it not fulfil? To whom does it not extend? For what need is it not sufficient? Is it an unholy love? The very thought were blasphemy. On the contrary it is the very highest expression of God's ineffable holiness. Is it not also a benignant love? a merciful love? a just love? Is it not a love which directs the whole providence of God, and makes His absolute dominion over us our most perfect freedom? And finally, is it not its very characteristic thai it should be itself our end, our reward, our consummate joy in God? Thus it is the result of His combined perfections, a sort of beautiful external parable of His incommunicable unity.

But not only is love the preacher of God's unity; it ex pounds the Trinity as well. Let us confine ourselves to the single act of Creation. The Eternal Generation of the Son is produced by God's knowledge of Himself. The Eternal Procession of the Holy Spirit is produced by His love of Himself. The Father's knowledge of Himself produces a divine Person, coequal, coeternal, consubstantial with Himself. The love of the Father and the Son produces also a divine Person, coequal, coeternal, consubstantial with the Other Two, from whom, as from a single principle, He everlastingly proceeds. Now see how with awful distinctness creation shadows forth and adumbrates this adorable and surpassing mystery, how the free acts of God outside Himself are shadows cast by the necessary acts within Himself. Creation is in a sort a son of God, a mighty family of sons, expressing more or less partially His image, representing His various perfections, and all with sufficient clearness to enable the apostle to say that we are without excuse if we do not perceive the Invisible by the things that are seen. Creation is a knowledge of God, a manifestation of Him given forth by Himself, and which, when complete, He viewed with divine complacency. But creation is especially a knowledge and manifestation of God's love; it is His love to us, and our love to Him. He created us because He loved us, and He created us in order that we might love Him. Creation was itself the external jubilee of that immense perfection, of which the inward jubilee was the everlastingly proceeding Spirit. As the image of God's perfections, Creation was the faint shadow of that most gladdening mystery, the Eternal Generation of the

Son: and Scripture lays stress on the fact that God produced the worlds by His Son. As the communication of His love, imd the love of His own glory, Creation also dimly pictured that unspeakable necessity of the divine life, the Eternal Procession of the Spirit. AVe have already seen that Creation was only and altogether love. As the Son is produced by the inward uncreated knowledge which God has of Himself; and as the Holy Spirit is produced by the inward uncreated love of God, so is Creation His outward and created love. Creation is a mirror of His perfections to Himself, as well as to His creatures; this must be always borne in mind; and as He is His own end, and seeks necessarily His own glory, Creation is His love of Himself strongly and sweetly attaining its end through His love of His creatures and their love of Him. Perhaps all the works of God have this mark of His Triune Majesty upon them, this perpetual forthshadowing of the Generation of the Son and the Procession of the Spirit, which have been, and are, the life of God from all eternity. Nature, grace, and glory, the Incarnation, the Blessed Sacrament, and the Beatific Vision, may thus perhaps all be imprinted with this mark of God, the emblem, the device, the monogram, of the Trinity in Unity. And thus, when the Word has enlightened every man that comes into the world, and the Spirit has brought all hearts to loving obedience and accepted sanctity, through the grace of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, it is mysteriously written by the apostle, that our Lord shall deliver up the kindom to God and the Father, and the Son also Himself shall be subject in His human nature unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all. The Father has created us, the Son redeemed us, and the Holy Ghost sanctified us; and when the Son and the Holy Spirit have brought us from our wanderings, the Father shall give Himself to us, and then, as the apostle said to Jesus, It suffices us. Then will His love be perfected, His most dear will accomplished, and His Creation crowned.

The likeness of Creation to the Generation of the Son and the Procession of the Holy Ghost is still more striking, when we come to consider the real nature of that perpetual and intimate conservation by which God sustains and preserves all things. Creation and preservation are not two different actions. They can be separated only in idea. The one is the going on of the other. It is an opinion which has found favor in the schools, and which is peculiarly in harmony with the language of the ancient fathers, that no less an influx of God is required to preserve a thing in being than to call it at first out of its original nothingness. In treating of this question theologians necessarily came to examine the real character of the act of Creation. Durandus expressly says, "As it is always true in divine things to say that the Son is ever being begotten of the Father, so is it true to say of the creature, as long as it exists, that it has been created and is being created by God; for the creation of things is the same act as the preservation of them." Scotus says, "A thing may be always said to be being created, as long as it abides, because it is always receiving its being from God," and he quotes S. Augustine as saying that " with respect to God a creature is never ultimately made, but is always being made." Yasquez declares that " the continuous preservation of things by God is a true creation out of nothing." Molina says, " By the same influx of an indivisible action by which God first conferred being upon an angel, He also now preserves him, and confers the same being upon him throughout the whole course of time." Suarez in his Metaphysics teaches the same doctrine. Lessius says, "A created thing is nothing else than an assiduous creation and actual production of its being:" and Scotus again marvellously says, " Created essence of any kind is nothing else than a dependence upon God." It is needless to point out how this indivisible continuity of Creation adumbrates the perpetual Generation of the Son, and the incessant Procession of the Holy Ghost.¹

Such is the love of God; such its character and its degree. This is the love He is loving us with at this very moment: a love passing all example, a love rising above all created loves, a love which even a glorified spirit cannot understand, a love which seems to govern God, a love that tries our faith from its sheer immensity, a love which is eternal, and a love which is in every way worthy of God Himself, and the result of His combined perfections. Let us pause to think. At this very moment God is loving me with all that love. Lord! I believe; help Thou mine unbelief. 0 what then are all things else to me? Pain or ease, sorrow or joy, failure or success, the wrongs of my fellow-creatures or their praise — what should they all be to me but matters of indifference? God loves me: now is the time to die!

But we have next to seek for the reasons of this love. They must be either on our side, or on God's side, or on both. Let us examine our own side first.

The first thing which strikes us is that man is in himself nothingness. His body has been formed of the dust of tho earth, and his soul has been directly created out of nothing by God Himself. Consequently we can have nothing original in us to attract this love of our Creator. Nay, the very act of our creation showed that His love for us existed before we did ourselves. Our very being was because of His love. This consideration alone would seem to settle the question of man's independent possession of any title to the love of God. We have simply nothing of our own, nothing but the disgrace of our origin. There is not a gift of our nature but, if God loves it, He is only loving what is His own, and which in the first instance came to us from His love. -There can be nothing therefore in our own being to love us for, when that very being is nothing more than the effect of a pre-existing love.

Moreover when God. had once called us into life, our extreme littleness seems a bar against any claim to Ilis love, founded on what we are in ourselves. We are only a speck even amidst rational creatures. What are we individually? What is our importance in our country, or even our neighborhood? What is our moral or our intellectual greatness? We are almost lost in the number of men who are now living on the earth. Our leaving it, which must happen one day, will hardly be perceived. We shall leave no gap behind us. We shall hardly want a successor, for what will there be to succeed to? And if wo are mere atoms in the huge mass of men now living, what are we compared to all the multitudes of men who have ever lived, or the enormous hosts who are yet to live before the judgment-day? And after the judgment-day, if God goes on filling the immensity of space, and the numberless o orbs of the nightly heavens, with new rational creations, new subjects for the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, more angels, or more men, or beings that shall be neither angels nor men, we shall become imperceptible motes in the great beams of creative love. And even now there are the angels, and who shall tell their number? For we know that multitudinousness is one peculiar magnificence of their glorious choirs. It is even said that the lowest choir, which is the least in number, far outnumbers all the men that shall have been born from Adam to the day of doom. "What have we to present to the eye of our Creator but an almost indescribable insignificance?

If there is anything positive about us at all, it is our badness. To our nothingness we have contrived to add rebellion. That really is something of our own. We have thoroughly mastered with our understandings the difference between right and wrong, and have deliberately chosen the last and rejected the "first. We have looked God's commandments in the face, and then broken them. Grace has come to us with quite a sensible heat and force, and we have summoned up our power of will, and resisted it. The Holy Ghost has spoken, and we have listened, and then returned an answer in the negative. Conscience has proclaimed the rights of duty, and without so much as taking the trouble to deny the assertion, we have refused obedience to the mandate. We have looked calmly at eternal punishment, we have clearly perceived that nothing short of an omnipotence of anger has been required for the creation of those unutterable tortures, and then for an hour of sin we have braved it all. Time after time we have put God in one scale, and some creature in the other, and then of our own will have pressed down the scale, and made the creature outweigh the Creator. We have neglected God and outraged Him also. We have at once disobeyed Him and forgotten Him. We have both ignored Him and yet have insulted Ilim as well. All this is our own. There is no one to share it with us. Truly we are wonderful creatures, to have done so much in so short a time, to be able indeed to do such things at all. Yet are we making out a very promising case for a title to eternal love?

We have said, there was no one to share these miserable prerogatives with us. It is true, and yet it is not true either. For think awhile. Has not Jesus at least offered to share them? There have been times when their real nature, their awful wretchedness, came home to us, and a world would have been a cheap payment to get rid of the guilty past. To be a door-keeper in the house of God seemed then an infinitely better lot than a thousand years amid che splendors of ungodliness. And Jesus came to us in one of those times. He offered to take all this horrible accumulation of rebellion and self-will, and to make it His own, and to give His sufferings for it, and to pay His Blood to ransom us from the intolerable debt of fire, which we had wilfully and scornfully incurred. And we were too glad to accept an offer of such almost fabulous love. And then in a little while, leaving all that old debt on Him, we left his service also. We took back our rights; we re-entered upon the exercise of our unhappy prerogatives; and trampling mercy under foot now, in addition to the other divine perfections we had outraged before, we once more earned for ourselves an endless death, and preferred to the holy love of God the blackness of everlasting fire. And perhaps this process has been repeated a score of times, in our short lives, or a score of scores of times. And certainly such conduct is all our own. An angel never had the opportunity given him of such new choice of evil. Here is the first time in which we come in sight of anything which belongs undoubtedly to ourselves as men; and it were strange indeed if such excess of guilt should be the blissful cause of such exceeding love.

But if, instead of being such quite incredible sinners, we were equal both in our faculties and our innocence to the highest angels, should we be much better able to establish our right and title to the inestimable love of God? What can we do for God? What can we add to Him? What can we give Him, which lie does not possess already, and possess to an infinite extent and with an infinite enjoyment? Is there one of His perfections to which we could put a heightening touch, an additional beauty? Could we by any possible contribution of ours swell the overflowing ocean of His glory? Is there a little joy, however little, which we can give Him, and which is not His already? We could not even be of any real help to Him in the government of the world. If He condescended to make use of our ministrations we should only add to the weight on the shoulder of His omnipotence, not take anything from it. For He would have to concur to every act we did, to every movement we made. He would have actively to fill our nothingness with life, to fortify our feebleness with strength, to illuminate our darkness with His light. The most magnificent of the angels is no help to God. On the contrary, if we may use the word, he is rather a drain upon Him. For the creature thirsts for the influx of the Creator, and the more capacious his nature the more vast are his needs, to be supplied from the undiminished plenitude of God. When God lets His creatures work for Him, it is rather that they make more work for Him to do, as children do when they pretend to help their father. It is a condescension, an honoring of the creature, the clearest proof of God's exceeding love for us. Thus though St. Michael's brightness dazzles us, while we look at it, until we gaze upon it through the many-colorei veil of a creature's necessary imperfections, we can see even in him no right 01

WHY GOD LOVES US. 1G1 title to his Creator's love, except the gifts which that love placed there first of all. But we are not St. Michael. We are not magnificent angels. We are but the most miserable of men, relapsed sinners, even now perhaps only half repentant, with a most cowardly repentance.

If then we must judge of ourselves by human rather than angelic principles, let us apply these human measures to our actual service of our Maker. What is our service of God like? What is its worth, what its true character? Let us for a moment put aside from God the consideration that He is God. He is our Father, our Master, our Benefactor, our fondly-loving Friend. In His immense longevity He has been busy doing us good. It seems to have been His one occupation. He lived for us. We were His end. Words cannot tell the amount of self-sacrifice He has made for us. He slew an only Son to keep us out of harm. Figures could not put down the number of graces He has given and is hourly giving to us. His life will be prolonged, not for His own sake, but for ours, some more centuries, in order that He may go on and complete the sum of His prodigious benefactions. It is not easy to tell what He has been to us. We feel that we do not half know it ourselves. Suffice it to say that this ancient earth has never seen a Father like this Father, or a Master half so kind or half so like an equal, or a Benefactor more prodigal or more self-forgetting, or a Friend more ardently romantic in His attachment. And we have all this love to return. And how do we return it? A certain amount of pious feeling, a scant obedience of a few easy commandments, a respect for His expressed wishes when they do not too much clash with our own interests, a fluctuating quantity of prayer and of thanksgiving, but which engrosses us so little that we are generally thinking of something else all the time. This is what we do for Him in a very irregular and perfunctory kind of way. And if we ourselves were goodnatured human 11 o2 fathers, should we be satisfied if our sons did as much for us as we do for God, and no more? If a friend of seven years' standing repaid thus our love and loyalty, should we not think his friendship and his service almost insulting? Should we not think it so cold, so fitful, so self-seeking, so unjust, that, although charity hopes all things and believes all things, we should consider ourselves justified in saying that it would be utterly impossible, however disposed we might be to waive our rights and to stretch a point, to put a favorable construction upon the conduct of our friend?

But all the while it is God, not merely a friend and benefactor, but God whom we are thus treating, with His ten thousand other ties upon us, and His incomparably greater tenderness, and His absolutely eternal love! 0 is it not humiliating to think of these thing*? But we have not yet drunk our vileness to its dregs. While we are thus abusing the long-suffering of God by our ungraceful slackness, by our injurious coldness, and by our insulting scantiness of service, we have the effrontery to persuade ourselves that we are doing some great thing for Him, that we are almost laying Him under an obligation to us, and that any one who urges upon us a higher perfection is a troublesome dreamer, who is far from doing justice to the reasonable and moderate profession of piety on which we pride ourselves. And all this to God, remembering who God is! And all this after all He has done for us, and is doing now! And all this, when we have so much of the criminal past to undo, so much lost time to make up, so much of actual rebellion to repair and expiate! Surely it was not too much to say that even on human principles our very service of God is almost insulting, our very reparations a new affront. If they be not so, to what is it owing but to the unlimited forbearance of Him upon whose paternal love experience teaches us we can with so much security prosume?

WHY GOD LOVES US. 1G3

But if God is His own end, and by a sort of necessity cannot but seek His own glory in all things, it would seem as if to be like God would be a legitimate title to His love. He will look with complacency upon that which reflects Himself. Still if even on this account God loved men, it would be a reason rather on His side than on our own. Nevertheless let us see what the real truth of the matter is. We are the contradictory of God in almost every respect. To say nothing of the finiteness and feebleness belonging to us as creatures, our moral qualities present a more fearful dissimilarity from His holiness and perfection. "We are deficient in the very virtues which we are able to acquire, and for the acquisition of which He has given us special aids of grace. Nay, when He has summed up all that shall entitle us to the forgiveness of our sins, all that shall win for us the very kindness and favor which we seek from Him, into one simple precept, and told us to forgive if we would be forgiven, and to do to others as we would He, as well as they, should do to us, our corrupt nature finds the simple lesson an infinite hardship in practice. Times have been, alas! who will say those times are not now? when the world's sins have so sickened God that He has repented, immutable though He be, that He ever created man. And now what in all the world does He behold like Himself? Nothing but the grace He has planted there, like an ailing exotic in an uncongenial soil, stunted in growth, with a few pale leaves scarcely hanging on to its boughs, flowering hardly ever, and only under great forcing heat, and bearing fruit in this climate never? Is that the heavenly tree? Oh! who would know it in such woful plight? Of a truth God has much to bear not to be downright ofFended with the grace He sees on earth, to say little of the nature there, and still less of the prolific sin. We know our own hearts far too well: and can we believe that God can look clown from heaven, and see Himself reflected there? Earth has but one consolation. Truly there is something on man's side, something which is man's own, on which God's eye can rest, and love not only what it sees, hut he so ravished thereby, that it will pour itself out in floods, and run over, and deluge the universe with light and loveliness, and that w'ght which is man's own, though it is not in man, is the Blessed Sacrament, where the patience of God securely rest its foot, and the divine anger rests, and sleeps sweetly, and wakes not to remember its errand of vindictive purity. There is one characteristic of man which especially precludes our finding in him the reasons of God's amazing love. It is not exactly sin. It is not precisely any one of the imperfections to which as a finite being he is subject. It is rather the combined result of all his imperfections. lie is characterized by meanness. When we do really great things, we fail in some little point of them. There is a flaw of meanness running across our generosity, and debasing every one of its products. Our love and hatred, our praise and blame, our anger and our good-humor, have all got the same crack in them, this flaw of meanness. With ourselves, what is self-deceit but meanness, what is slavery to bodily comforts, what greediness at meals, what rudeness in manners, what personal vanity, what a hundred idle extravagances of self-praise in which we daily indulge, what the inexhaustible pettiness of wounded feeling, but meanness, downright meanness? In our intercourse with others, what is lying but meanness, what are pretence, selfishness, irritability, and more than half the world's conventions, but meanness, systematized meanness? In our relations with God, what are lukewarmness, and hypocrisy, and self-righteousness, but meanness? what is venial sin but miserable meanness? Many a man, who has found it hard to hate himself, when he looked only at his sins, has found the task much easier when he had the courage to hold close to his eyes for a good long while the faithful picture of his incredible meanness. 0 what a piercing, penetrating vision it is, running all through us with a cold sharpness, when grace lets us see how low and vile, how base and loathsome, how little and how sneaking — forgive the word, we cannot find another — we are in everything. Everybody seems so good, except ourselves; and we, 0 so intolerably hateful, so ugly, so repulsive, such a burden to ourselves! And if this can be made plain to our dull, gross sight, what must it be to the clear penetration of the All-holy Majesty of God?

But surely it is useless going on. We have doubtless by this time lost sight of all claims to love, which we might have fancied we had when we started. It is plain that the reasons for God's love of man are not at all to be found on our side, and therefore they must be on the side of God. If any truth in the world is established, this is. Certainly the extremity of our lowness may be the measure of the height of God's love, but it cannot furnish us with the reason of it. We are often tempted, when reflecting on these matters, to say shortly that God loves us because we are so peculiarly unloveable. This may do well enough for a paradox in the pulpit to strike sleepy auditors; but we must go deeper down than this when we read or meditate.

Now every one of the reasons for God's loving us being on His side, not on ours, is it not remarkable that in our service of God we should feel as if it were a bargain between two more or less equal parties, and that if we did our share the other would be held to do his? We do not at all realize the spiritual life as an intercourse where all the duty is on one side, and all the liberality on the other. Yet surely it must be so. If certain things are due to ua as creatures, when once we have been created, so that God would not be God, if He did not give them, yet that we were created at all was an immense gratuitous love. If IIo condescends to make a covenant with us, yet it is of Ilia own free love that He stoops to bind Himself; and again love, eternal love, must first have created us, before we could exist to be parties to a covenant. So that all is love. The analysis of creation resolves itself simply into love. Moreover what would become of us, if God gave us nothing but our due, or if He kept His munificence within the limits of His strict covenant? Is not His love breathing out everywhere, and breaking down our pride into humility, as the summer rain beats down the fragile flower, while we arc weighing with minutest scales each ounce, and drachm, and scruple, of the miserable alloy with which we are pa}'- ing Him under the sweet-sounding name of love?

So far then is clear, that all the reasons for God's love of us are to be found exclusively on His side. No reasons whatever exist on ours. It is still a further inquiry what these reasons are; and one to which wc must now betake ourselves. Alas! with our puny minds it is a hopeless inquisition to search through the vast recesses of the Divine Nature to find the reasons of God's love. God Himself is love, 6'imple love; and we may well suppose that if wo might question each one of His perfections, the answer from them all would still be love. We are so sure of this that we do not anticipate any difficulty. Yet when we come to make the trial, the results are not altogether according to our expectations.

There are few of God's attributes more beautiful or more adorable than His justice. There is no justice like His, for it is founded on His own divine nature, not on any obligations by which He is bound. Some of the saints have had a special devotion to His justice, and have made it in a peculiar manner the subject of their contemplations. An intelligent creature would rather be in the hands of God's justice, than at the mercy of the most loving of his fellow-creatures. The apostle tells us that the acceptance of our contrition and the forgiveness of our sins depends upon God's justice. His distribution of the gifts of nature, grace, and glory, is the masterpiece of His justice, which alone and of itself could fill us with gladness and wonder for a whole eternity. His promises are the children of His justice, and His fidelity to them is His exercise of that most royal attribute. It is because His love is so great a love, that His justice is so perfect and so pure. His punishments even are at once magnificent to look at, yet most dreadful to endure, because of the extremity of their unalterable, and comprehensive and truthful justice. Even the vengeance of our God is a subject which love trembles to contemplate, but from which it will not turn away! His justice moreover, even in the acceptance of our works, is a justice due to His own perfections rather than to the efforts of our misery; for what He receives from us is much more His own than ours. And is there a sight more exalting or more affecting amid all the wonders of theology than to see the beautiful, the faultless rigor of divine justice satisfied to its utmost demand, its enormous and most holy requirements paid in full, and its dread loveliness and majestic sternness worshipped with an equal worship, by the Precious Blood and the mysterious Passion of our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, God and Man? He has hardly begun to know God who has not addicted himself, with humility and fear, his mind hushed and his heart in his hand, to the study of God's tremendous justice. But is it there that we can look for the reason of His love? Was our creation a debt of justice due to our original justice? Has our use of the gifts of nature, or our correspondence to the calls of grace, been such, that we dare to call on God to come and note it with all His justice, and pay it according to the rigor of its merits? Listen to the sweet lamentation that issues evermore from the souls of purgatory through the breathing-places of the Church on earth,— is it not more true? 0 Lord, if Thou shalt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, Lord! who shall abide it? Of a truth we must be well clothed with the grace and justice of Jesus, before we shall dare to say with Job of old, Let Him weigh me in the balance of His justice. Surely if justice alone were to be concerned, we should look for punishment rather than for love.

In the seventeenth century a succession of holy men were raised up in France, who were drawn by the Holy Spirit to honor with a peculiar intensity and devotion the sanctity of God, and by the same unerring instincts of grace they were led to couple with this devotion a special attraction to the spirit of the priesthood of Jesus. Let us approach this attribute of sanctity, and see if we can find there the reason for God's exceeding love of creatures. God is infinite holiness, because He is essential purity. Who can stand before the blaze of such a blinding light? He is holy, because the Divine Essence is the root and fountain of all holiness. He is holy because lie is the rule, the model, the exemplar of all holiness. He is holy, because He is the object of all holiness, which can be nothing else than love of God and union with Him. He is holy, because He is the principle of all holiness, inasmuch as He infuses it into angels and men, and as lie is the last end to which all their holiness is inevitably directed. He is infinitely holy, because He is infinitely loveable; and as all holiness consists in the love of God, so God's holiness consists in the love of Himself. Thus, and what an adorable mystery it is! the infinite purity of God is simply His self-love. We know not if a creature can gain a higher idea of God than is given out by this stupendous truth.

But let us suppose that we are ever so holy, how will this created holiness stand by the side of that of God? He is holy in Himself, and of Himself, holy in essence, which it is impossible for a creature to be. To no creature, says thcology, can it be natural to be the son of God, to be impeccable, to have the Holy Ghost, and to see the Divine Nature. Our holiness consists in gifts gratuitously superadded to the feebleness and impossibilities of our finite nature. The holiness of God is substantial, His own very substance; ours is but a quality and an accessory, an illumination of mind and impulse of will imparted to us by Himself. God is holy infinitely, both in intensity and in extent. Whereas wc have, alas! no words low enough to express the extreme littieness, the deplorable languor, the soon exhausted capacity, of our brightest and most burning holiness. The holiu ^s of God can neither grow nor be diminished. It canncv grow, because it is already infinite. It cannot be diminished, because it is His Essence. Ours is but a speck, whose Tt-»f nature, hope, and effort it is to grow. The holiness of iv\ury might grow for centuries with tenfold the rapidity that her vast merits grew on earth, and at the end she would be as little near the holiness of God as she is now. God's sanctity is eternal, ours but of a year or two; perhaps it began quite late in life. God's sanctity is unintelligible from its excess of purity and its depths of unspotted light; ours, alas! a fellow-creature could see through and appreciate in less than half an hour. Tho holiness of God is ineffably fruitful; for it is the cause which originates, preserves, sets the example, and gives the aim to all created holiness whatsoever. Ours is fruitful, too, for holiness, as such, must be fruitful: but how little have wo done, how many souls have we taught to know God and to love Him? If the scandal and edification we have given were put into the scales, which would weigh down the other?

x\ll this on the supposition that we are as holy as we might be. But we are not so. We are hardly holy at all

And knowing ourselves to be what we are, is it possible for us to conceive that infinite sanctity bade love create us out

P of nothing, because it was so enamored of what it foresaw we should become? The holiness of God has no necessary respect to creatures, as His mercy has; and yet, strange to say! it is this seemingly most inimitable of all His attributes, which is expressly put before us as the object of our imitation. We are to be holy because God is holy, and perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect. Do we then so represent and reflect this sanctity of God, as to become the object of such exuberant affection? If it were only to God's holiness that we might appeal, should we expect to find there the reason of His love? Nay, if we had not truer views of God's equality, could we not more easily fancy omnipotent love required to hinder infinite holiness from turning away from us in displeasure and aversion? What did David mean when he said in the eighty-fifth psalm, first of all, Incline Thine ear, 0 Lord, and hear me, for I am needy and poor, and then, Preserve my soul for I am holy? He was a man after God's heart: but what manner of men are we? Yet, while he was pleading his own ftoliness,² it was not to the holiness of God he was appealing; for he adds, For Thou, 0 Lord, art sweet and mild, and plenteous in mercy to all that call upon Thee.

Is it the divine beauty which is so in love with us miserable creatures? Yet how shall we search the unsearchable loveliness of God? One momentary flash of His beauty would separate body and soul by the vehemence of the ecstasy which it would cause. We shall need to be fortified with the mysterious strength of the light of glory, before in the robust freshness of our immortality we can lie and look upon that beauty tranquil and unscathed. We shall see before us in living radiance, in the light of its own incomprehensibility, in the shapeliness of its own immensity, infinite light and infinite power, infinite wisdom with infinite sweetness, infinite joy and infinite glory, infinite majesty with infinite holiness, infinite riches with an infinite sea of being; we shall behold it not only containing all real and all imaginary and all possible goods, but containing them in the most eminent and unutterable manner, and not only so, but containing them, 0 breathless exhibition of most ravishing supernal beauty! in the unity of a most transcending and majestic simplicity; and this illimitable vision is in its totality the beauty of the Divine Nature; and what we see, though we call it it, is not a thing, but Him, a Being, Him, our Creator, Three Persons, One God. This Beauty is God, the beautiful God! 0 how we ourselves turn to dust and ashes, nay, to loathsome death and corruption, when we think thereon! We were going to say that God has His beauty from Himself, we ours from Him; that His was illimitable, ours almost imperceptible; that His was within, ours borrowed from without; that Hid could neither grow nor fade, while ours is a vague, uncertain, fluctuating shadow: but is it not more true to say that we have no beauty whatsoever? 0 my heart! my heart! how loudly art thou telling me to stop, for, as for infinite beauty, unless it might be infinitely deceived, it could only be revolted by thy guilt and wretchedness'!

Infinite wisdom must have strangely forgotten itself, if it can be in love with us for our own sakes. The most fearful thing about the divine wisdom, and that which makes it so adorable is, that it is God's knowledge of us in Himself. He does not look out upon us, and contemplate us, like an infinitely intelligent spectator, from without. But He looks into Himself, and sees us there, and knows us, as He knows all things, in the highest, deepest, and most ultimate causes, and judges of us with a truth, the light and infallibility of which are overwhelming and irresistible. St. Mary Magdalen of Pazzi examined her conscience out loud in an ecstasy, and we look upon it as a supernatural monument of delicate self-knowledge. But what is the self-knowledge of an examination of conscience, by the side of God's instantaneous, penetrating, and exhausting knowledge of us in Himself? That wisdom also is the capacious abyss in which all the manifold beauties of possible creatures, and the magnificent worship of possible worlds, revolve in order, light, and number amidst the divine ideas. And what are we by the side of visions such as these? As the flood of the noontide sun poured cruelly upon wounded eyes, so is the regard of God's knowledge fixed sternly on the sinner's soul. Oh the excruciating agony it must be, added to the torments of the lost, to feel how nakedly and transparently they lie in the light of God's intolerable wisdom? Must not we too have some faint shadow of that feeling? If the Sacred Humanity of Jesus did not cover our cold and nakedness and shivering poverty as with a sacred mantle, or if we fell out from beneath it into the broad day of God's unsparing wisdom, we should surely faint away with fear and terror in the sense of our abject created vileness. Can we dream then that God loves us so well, because He knows us so thoroughly? 0 no! like little children must we hide our faces in the lap of our dearest Lord, and cry with half-stifled voice, Turn away Thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities! Infinite wisdom has almost taxed itself with ingenious desires to save our souls and to win our love; and what, in spite of all its curious array of graces and inventions, have we become? and how can that wisdom look upon us and be otherwise than disappointed? And what must disappointment be like in God? That which is most like a limit to Omnipotence, is the free will of man; and that which looks most like a failure in unfailing power, is the scantiness of the love which God obtains from man. "We have no words to tell the power of God. AVe have no ideas by the help of which we can so much as approach to an honorable conception of it. What a boundless field of wild speculation possible creatures and possible worlds open out to view! Yet all this does not aid us to imagine God's unimaginable power. Possibility seems to us almost infinite, so widely does it reach, so much does it imply, so stupendous is the variety of operations within its grasp. But a Being who is not bound by impossibility, to whom the impossible is no limit whatever, to whom nothing is impossible, what can He be like? We may heap up words for years, and we get no nearer to realizing what we mean. We have no picture of it in our minds. Now if, to such terrific power, there could be great or small, should not we be so small as to be contemptible in its sight, and so it would pass us over? But if we have restrained this grand Omnipotence, if we have dared to brave its might, if we have ventured to try our strength with its strength, if we have dared to throw our wills as an obstacle beneath the rushing of its impetuous wheels, should we not expect, if God were only and simply power, that it would tread us out of life, trample us back into our darksome nothingness, and then onward, onward, onward still, upon its swift resplendent way through exhaustless miracles, uncounted worlds, and nameless fields of unimaginable glory?

God is truth, all truth, the only truth. Truth is tho beauty of God, and His beauty is the plenitude of truth. Everything is what it is in the sight of God, and it is nothing else. Truth is the character of God's mind, and the perfection of His goodness. All truth in creatures is a derivation from the truth of God. Everything in the divine ideas has a peculiar fitness and congruity which makes it worthy of Him, because it makes it truthful. God is truth, not only in Himself, absolute, unapproachable truth, but He is especially truth as He is the exemplar of creatures. Whatever is true in them, is so because it is in accordance with Him, as their rule and pattern, or, as philosophers call it, their exemplary cause. The whole p2 truth of creation is, therefore, in its conformity to God; and whatever is not conformed to Him is a distortion, a horror, and a lie. Yet there is, perhaps, none of the divine excellencies which more broadly distinguish the Creator from the creature, than this of truth; none with which it is more important for us to communicate; and none whose communication is more thoroughly supernatural, or in which perseverance is more difficult. Moreover, so necessary to creation is this divine perfection in the Creator, that all creatures might say, by instinct as well as by inspiration, Let God be true and every man a liar. But, now, if truth, the only created truth, is likeness to God, conformity to God, a direct aiming at God, how far is there any truth in us? How far do we differ from our original, how do we vary from our pattern, how do we swerve from the straight line, and are awkward in the hands of Him who builds the heavenly Jerusalem after the model of His truth? Must not truth abhor that which is so untrue, as we know ourselves to be? Is it not the case that, many a time in life, the Holy Ghost has wakened us up to a sense of our exceeding untruthfulness, so that we see our whole reality fading away in the darkness of hypocrisy, conceit, pretence, vainglory, intentional falsehood, half-deliberate diplomacy, circuitous insincerity, and unintended unavoidable concealments, which yet make us be all the while acting a part, and seeming to be what we are not? Oh! we feel all miserable and shameful with the uncleanness of untruth, and love to think, in the agony of our self-hatred, that, at least, the eye of God sees through and through our dishonorable disguises, and pierces with his rays of light abysses we ourselves only suspect, and do not know, of the most undignified and monstrous self-deceit. Does God love us, then, because we are so truthful?

Let us ask our question of one more attribute, and then we will conclude our search. But how shall we speak of thee, 0 beautiful mercy of God! It is mercy -which seems, above all things, to make us understand God. AVhile the practise of it in reality makes the creature like the Creator, it seems to us as if, when He practised it, it made the Creator like the creature. For it has about it an appearance of sadness and of sympathy, a pity, a self-sacrifice, a pathos, which belong to the nobility of a created nature. It makes God to be so fatherly, as if truly He sorrowed for His sons, and spoke kind words, and did gentle things, out of the exuberant affection of the pain He feels for our distresses and our needs. How shall we define this golden attribute of mercy? Is it not the one perfection -which we creatures give, or seem to give, to our Creator? How could He have mercy, were it not for us? He has no sorrows that want soothing, no necessities that need supplying; for He is the ocean of interminable being. Mercy is the tranquillity of His omnipotence and the sweetness of His omnipresence; the fruit of His eternity and the companion of His immensity; the chief satisfaction of His justice; the triumph of His wisdom; and the patient perseverance of His love. Wherever we go, there is mercy: the peaceful, active, broad, deep, endless mercy of our heavenly Father. If we work by day, we work in mercy's light; and we sleep at night in the lap of our Father's mercy. The courts of heaven gleam with its outpoured prolific beauty. Earth is covered with it, as the waters cover the bed of the stormy sea. Purgatory is, as it were, its own separate creation; and is lighted by its gentle moonlight, gleaming there soft and silvery through night and day. Even the realm of hopeless exile is less palpably dark than it would be, did not some excesses of mercy's light enter even there.

What but mercy could have divined the misery of nonexistence, and then have called in Omnipotence and love to build a universe, and fill it full of life? This was its first essay. Yet, as if, in the very instant of peopling no* thingness with angelic and with human life, it outstripped itself, and was not content with its mighty work, it raised its creation to a state of grace simultaneously with its state of nature. Then, when the human race perversely fell from this supernatural order, and drifted away from God, to deluge the world with grace was not enough for mercy. It brought down from heaven the Person of the Eternal Word, and united it to human nature, that so it might redeem the world with the marvels, almost incredible marvels, of a truly divine redemption. Anything, therefore, might be asked of mercy. It might be asked to furnish the reasons of the Creator's love. Yet, if we may say so, mercy seems to be but one method of His love. His love is, somehow, wider than His mercy, although His mercy is simply inCnite. Mercy is one of His perfections, while love is the harmony of all. Mercy does not tire of us, does not despair of us, does not give over its pursuit of us, takes no offence, repays evil with good, and is the ubiquitous minister of the Precious Blood of Jesus. But love seems more than this. Love fixes upon each of us, individualizes us, is something personal. Love is just and equitable no less than kind, is wise as well as powerful. Love is tantamount to the whole of God, and is co-extensive with Him. Mercy is something by itself. Love is the perfection of the Uncreated in Himself. Mercy is the character of the Creator. Mercy pities, spares, makes allowances, condescends. But love rewards, honors, elevates, equalizes with itself. I he idea of predilection does not enter into mercy, whereas, it is i.'ie secret life of love. "We do not know; but it does not seem as if mercy quite answered the question we are asking. And yet, if mercy is not the reason of God's love, where else shall we find it in His infinity?

But it is time to close. We have seen with what a love it is that God loves us, and we have asked why it is He loves ns. It must be for reasons to be found eitber on man's side or on God's side. Not on man's side; for be in bimself is nothingness; be is but a speck even amid rational creations. To bis notbingness be has added rebellion, and in no way can be add anything to God. Even on human principles bis very service of God is almost insulting. He is the contradictory of God in all things, and if he is characterized by any one thing rather than another, it is by pusillanimity and meanness. We have therefore bad to look for the reason on God's side; and looking at His chief perfections, one after another, we have hardly found what we were seeking. Infinite justice would lead Him to punish us. Infinite sanctity would turn away from us in displeasure. Infinite beauty would be revolted, and infinite wisdom be disappointed. Infinite power would regard us as contemptible and pass us over. Infinite truth would contemplate us as an hypocrisy and a lie. Finally, mercy all but infinite would tire of us, and it is just the infinity of mercy which does not tire. But love is something more than not being tired.

Why then docs God love us? We must answer, Because He created us. This then would make mercy the reason of His love. But why did He create us? Because He loved us. We are entangled in this circle, and do not see how to escape from it. But it is a fair prison. We can rest in it, while we are on earth; and if we are never to know anything more, then we will make our home in it for eternity. Who would tire of such captivity?

God loves us because He has created us. What sort of a feeling is it which the peculiarity of having created some one out of nothing would give us? Who can tell? We suppose it to be a feeling which contains in itself all the grounds of all earthly loves, such as paternal, fraternal, conjugal, and filial; and of all angelic loves besides, of which we know nothing. We suppose it to contain them all, not only in an infinite degree, but also in the most in- 12 conceivably eminent manner, and further than that, with an adorable simplicity which belongs only to the Divino Nature. But when we have imagined all this, we see that something remains over and above in a Creator's love, which we cannot explain; but which we must suppose to be a feeling arising out of His having created us out of nothing and which is what it is, because He is what He is, the infinitely blessed God. This then is our answer: He loves us because He has created us. Certainly the mystery does not fill our minds with light; at least not with such light as we can communicate; but, which is far more it sets our hearts on fire.

Footnotes

1. This very interesting question of preservation ii discussed by Lessius in his third hook, De Summo Bono; and then at greater length in his tenth book, De Perfectionibus Divinis. In the opinion given in the text that creatures bear on them the mark, not only of a Creator, but of a Triune Creator, I have ventured to differ from De Lugo. The whole subject is one of great interest; but I cannot do more than advert to it here. It is common with theologians to regard our Blessed Lady as a world by herself, a sort of exemplar and epitome of creation; and the following passage from F. Binet's Chef-d'-(Euvre de Dieu illustrates the view I have put forward in the text. 8pcaking of our Lady's soul, he says, N'est-elle pas veritablement le miroir de la Majeste de Dieu, reprSsentant naivement ce qui se passe dans les splendeurs de l'eternite, ou par une generation Sternelle est engendre le Fils dans lo sein de son Fire, ou, par une emanation ineffable, le Saint-Esprit procede du Pere et du Fils? Partie lere. cap. 5, sect. 11. — See also the conclusion of S. Thomas in the 45th question, vii. article of the P. Prima. In rationalibus creaturis est imago Trinitatis; in caeteris vero creaturis est vestigium Trinitatis; in quantum in eis inveniuntur aliqua, quo reducuntur in Personaa Divinas. Since writing the passage in the text I have found the same view in some hitherto unedited works of Kuysbrok. published by Arnswaldt at Hanover, 1848. The treatise U entitled Spiegel du SUgleit. ↩

2. Many commentators suppose him to allude to his consecration as king. ↩