Chapter III. Our Means of Loving God

Magna res amor. Nam cum amat Deus, non aliud vult quam amari: quippe qui ob aliud non amat, nisi ut amctur, eciens ipsos amore beatos qui sc amaverint. Osuavitatem! Ogratiaml Oamorisvim!

S. Bcrnai-d.

It has often been the benevolent amusement of sages and philanthropists to draw pictures of imaginary republics. Sometimes they have placed their ideal citizens in positions unusually favorable for the exercise of the highest virtues, at other times they have represented the whole duty and happiness of men to consist in some one virtue, as patriotism or simplicity, or again these legislators have delivered their imaginary people from all the restraints and conventions of civilization, in order that the development of their liberty might take its own direction and have the fullest play. So we also might amuse ourselves by conceiving some possible imaginary world. We might suppose that, when the day of doom is over, God's creative love will move to some other planet of our system, and people it with rational creatures, to serve Him and to glorify His Name. We might picture to ourselves these creatures as neither angels nor men; but of some different species, such as God knows how to fashion. They might preserve their original integrity, and neither fall partially, as the angels did, nor the whole race, as was the unhappy fortune of man. They would of course be the subjects of Jesus, because He is the head and firstborn of all creatures. But their wav of worshipping Him might be quite different from ours. They might also be under different material laws; and different powers of mind and will might involve varieties of moral obligation very different from those which belong to us They might thus be another variety in the magnificence of Christ's church. They might be higher than angels, or lower than men, or between the two. They would be least likely to be lower than men, because then our Blessed Lord would not have carried His condescension to the uttermost. When we had fully pictured to ourselves this possible world, we might curiously descend into every conceivable ramification of that new planetary life, and see what the behavior of these creatures would be like. "We might watch them in the arrangements of their social system, in the complications of their public life, or in the minute habits of their domestic privacy. We might picture to ourselves their trades and professions, their standards of the beautiful, their arts and sciences, their philosophy and literature, their rules of criticism, their measures of praise or blame. We might imagine war to be an impossibility to their nature, their political revolutions to be without sin, their sufferings not to be penalties of a past fault, or solitude to be to them the same sort of normal state which society is to us. When we had completed our picture, this possible world would have some kind of likeness to our own, although it would be so very different, partly because God would be its Creator, and partly because we could not paint the picture without copying in some degree from ourselves.

This imaginary world would probably however differ less from ours, than ours would differ from itself, if the precept of the love of God were fully kept by all the inhabitants of the world. Let us try now to put a picture of this before ourselves. It need not be altogether imaginary, and it may actually help to realize itself. Every man and woman iD the world, and every child as soon as it comes to the use of reason, is bound by the golden chains of that delightful precept. Christian or Jew, Mahometan or idolator, all souls, in all their degrees of darkness and of light, arc under the bright shadow of that universal commandment. Nothing can be more reasonable. Every creature was created by God for God's own sake. Hence he has nothing to do but God's work, nothing to seek but God's glory; and that work and that glory God has been pleased to repose in love, in the easy service of a rational and yet supernatural love. Neither has He left us in uncertainty with respect to the extent of the precept. Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole strength. St. Matthew tells us that a doctor of the law said to Jesus, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said to him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. Where Moses says, with thy whole strength, St. Matthew says, with thy whole mind. Thus God is solemnly declared to be the object of our love, which love is to be distinguished by two characteristics. It is to be universal: heart, soul, mind, and strength are to go to it. It is to be undivided: for it claims the whole heart, the whole soul, the whole mind, the whole strength.

Putting it then at the lowest, and setting aside such heroic manifestations of love as are either the ornaments of a devout piety or the counsels of a high perfection, what is every one bound to by this precept, as soon as he attains the use of reason? He is bound to love God better than anything else: he is bound to put a higher value upon God than anything else: he is bound to obey all the will of God about him as far as he knows it: and he is bound, at least

Q in general intention, to direct all his actions to the gloiy of God. In his heart nothing can be allowed to come i.Jto competition with God. His soul must be engrossed by nothing short of God. His mind must esteem nothing at all in comparison with God; and all his strength must be at God's service in a way in which it is not at the service of anything else. Whatever he falls short of all tk<s from the first day of reason's dawn to the closing hour of life, he must repair with a loving sorrow based on God's eternal goodness. This is of simple obligation to the whole world, through the populous breadth of Asia, in the crowded coasts and vast cities of Europe, across Africa from one ocean to the other, from the northernmost dwelling of America to where its extreme headlands face the antarctic ice, and in every island of the sea and palm-crowned coral reef, both great and small. It is as much of obligation, more so if it could be more, as to do no murder. Not a creature of God ever has entered or ever will enter into His eternal joy, who has not kept this precept, or by sorrow won his forgiveness for the breach, except the baptised infants of the catholic church.

Many considerations may be more startling than this: but we know of none which are more profoundly serious. For we must bear in mind that we are speaking, not of counsel, but of commandment, not of perfection but of obligation, not of possibilities but of necessities. It is the very alphabet of our religion, the starting point of our catechism, the first principle of salvation; and reason claims to join with revelation in imposing this universal precept on the souls of men.

Does the world keep it? Let us see what it would bo like if it did keep it. We are to suppose that all the men, women, and children over seven, throughout the earth, loved God always, God supremely, and God with an undivided heart. The world might then be called a world of undivided hearts. It would be the peculiarity of this planet, of this portion of God's creation, of this fair moonlit garden third in order from the sun: it would be its peculiarity that it was a living world of loving human hearts, over which God reigned supreme with an empire of undivided love. This, we must use human words, is what God intended, what God expected, the paradise and court He had prepared for His Incarnate Son And if it were so would it be less unlike the real world than that imaginary possible world which we were picturing to ourselves just now?

If all classes in their places, and all minds in their measure and degree, were loving God according to the precept, wonderful results would follow. To realize them we should have to penetrate into every corner of the world, into every secret sanctuary of life, and watch the revolution which divine love would bring about. No one thing would be the same. The world would not be like a world of saints, because we are not supposing heroic, austere, self-sacrificing love, but only the love of the common precept. Voluntary suffering is part of the idea of the Incarnation, or flows from it: for Christian austerity is a form of love, which has little in common with the proud expiating penance of the Hindoo, except the look. It would not be like an immense monastery: for all men would bo in the world, not leaving the world; and the world would be a means of loving God, not a hinderance which our oourage must vanquish, or a snare from which our prudence is fain to fly. There would be no wickedness to make a hell on earth: yet earth could not be heaven, because there would be no vision of God. It would be more like purgatory than anything else. For the love of God would not hinder suffering, though it would almost abolish sorrow. But it would make all men pine very eagerly and very patiently to love God more, and to see Him whom they already love so mttch. The whole earth would be one scene of religion, not of religious* enthushsm or the romance* of sanctity, but of active, practical, exclusive, business-like religion. Common sense would be engrossed with religious duties. Each man would be unimpassionately possessed writh religion, as if it were his ruling passion, working powerfully under control. Yet all this would be within the bounds of the common precept, not like the sublime preternatural lives of the canonized saints. Remember — we are not speak*.ing of what is possible, so much as of what is conceivable. What a change would come over the political world! The love of God would be the honest and obvious and exclusive end of all states and nations. Diplomacy would fade away into mutual counsel for God's glory, and having lost all its mystery, it would lose all its falsehood too. Commercial treaties, questions of boundaries, the rights of intervention, — what a new character the love of God would infuse into as many of these things as it still allowed to live! The mercantile world, how calm and indifferent it would become! No one would make haste to be rich. Except food and raiment and ordinary comforts, we say comforts because, on the hypothesis, men would not be saints, all else of life would be prayer and praise and works of mercy, with confession perhaps for venial sins. The literature of these men would give forth nothing but what was chaste and true, ennobling and full of faith. A daily newspaper, such as we are acquainted with, would be a blissful impossibility. We fear that antiquarian questions might be pursued with somewhat less of zest than now, and possibly fewer sacrifices of life be made to advance the interests of science. A most vigorous reality would enter into and animate everything. Many professions would change their characters; many more would cease to exist. Systems of education would be greatly modified; and prisons and police would disappear from the land. Sessions of parliament would be very short, and little would be said, and very much be done. The tone of conversation would be changed, and a sort of strange tranquillity would come over the race of men, with which energy would not be necessarily incompatible, but under which our energy would be so different from what it is now, that we cannot at all adequately represent it to ourselves.

But, in return for this apparent dulness, which might affect some of the things on which our activity at present fastens, by morbid predilection, how much the world would gain in other ways! How magnificent would be the controversies of such a world! The peace and light of the love of God would elevate the intellect a thousand-fold. The products of the human mind would be incalculably more profound and beautiful than now, and the amount of intellectual activity would be immeasurably increased, while a larger proportion of it also would be employed on the higher branches of mental philosophy. "What elevation, too, and gigantic progress, would the physical sciences probably receive, as well from the greater cultivation of mental philosophy, as from the reach and grasp of intelligence which more abundant grace would restore to us! The sciences of beauty, too, how much more beautiful and abundant would they come, when they were called to minister to the sanctuary of God, and not to the mere material indulgences of men! Who can believe we should not know much more of nature, and of its mysterious properties, if we knew more of Him who originated them all, and love would teach us more of Him? The amount of private happiness would be likewise augmented beyond all calculation. All other loves would be, as it were, glorified by the love of God; and would be poured out of each human heart with an intensity and an abundance to which sin is now a complete impediment. The moral perfections of our nature would bring forth exquisite and generous Q2

18G OUR MEANS OF LOVING COD.

fruits, of which we have at present but rare instances, at distant intervals. But, above and beyond all this, there would be a world of supernatural actions, flowing in incessant streams from every heart, uniting us to God, purifying our commonest intentions, and transforming us, day by day, into an excellence far beyond ourselves. What must the precept be whose common observance would do so much as this? And yet this precept actually lies upon each one of us at this moment, with the most inevitable universality and the most stringent obligation! Surely we must see to this.

Hitherto, we have been engaged in two very elementary inquiries: Why does God wish us to love Him? and, Why does He love us? If God desires us to love Him, there must be some sort of love with which it is possible and right to love Him. This is obvious. Yet, in the course of our investigations, we have come across so much in ourselves that is little and vile and mean, that we may be tempted to think that we cannot love God with any real or acceptable love. It is just here that God meets our self-abjection, guards it from excess, and hinders its doing us any injury, by laying upon us the absolute and essential precept of loving Him with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength. He enables us to fulfil this commandment, by disclosing to us a beautifnl variety of grounds or motives for our love; and He makes the fulfilment easy, by the many kinds of love of which he has made our souls capable, and which suit the different temperaments of men. So, what we have to do now, is to examine our grounds for loving God, and then the various kinds of love with which it is happily in our power to love our most merciful Creator.

We must observe, first of all, that the love which is required of us by the precept, is a personal love. None else will satisfy. It is not the love of the approbation of conscience, or of the self-rewarding sense of duty, or of the loveliness of virtue, or of the immensity of our recompense, or of the attraction which a well-ordered mind has to rectitude and propriety. It is a personal love, and must be characterized by the warmth, the generosity, the intimacy, the dominion, and all the peculiar life which belongs to a personal love, as distinguished from the love of a thing or of a place. It is the love of a Being, of Three Divine Persons, of God. He reveals Himself to lis in various affectionate relationships, so as to make our love more intensely personal, more like a loyalty and a devotion, and, at the same time, to adapt it better to our human nature.

But when we return the love of another, it very much concerns us to know what kind and amount of love it is which we have to return. At the risk of repetition, we must, therefore, briefly sum up the love of God to man, as theology puts it before us. God's love of His creatures is not the fruit of His mercy, or of any of the Divine Perfections by themselves. His love of us is part of His Natural Goodness; and His natural goodness is simply the excellence of His Divine Nature, considered in itself. God'a goodness, we are taught in the catholic schools, is threefold. He is good by reason of the perfection of His nature, and this is His natural goodness. He is good also by reason of His sanctity, and this is His moral goodness. He is good also by reason of His beneficence, which is called His benignity. But, in reality, this last goodness is simply a part of the first, a necessary consequence of the perfection of His Nature, of His natural goodness; so that love of creatures, or the Divine benignity, is part of the perfection of the Divine Nature. How unspeakable, therefore, is the value of the love of God! how transcending the dignity with which it invests the poor helpless creature! and how completely does the origin of His love of us, deep down in the priin.il fountains of the Godhead, simplify Him, and all His condescensions, and His gifts, and His justice, and His anger, to pure and simple love!

Let us follow the teaching of theology a little further. The Divine Nature is a plenitude of perfection, a fulness and a "superfulness," as St. Denys calls it. Not that God is too full, or can ever cease being tilled, but He is eternally filled to overflowing with the true, the beautiful, the magnificent, and the good. Fulness leads to communicativeness. Communicativeness is the consequence of abundance. It is the necessity of an overflowing abundance. It seems a law even among creatures, a shadow of a higher law, that, in proportion as a thing is perfect, it is full of perfection in its own kind, and longs to communicate itself, and at last breaks its bound and does communicate itself. This is the case with human love, human kindness, human knowledge. Exuberance is an inseparable accompaniment of perfection. So this "superfulness" of God, this exceeding plenitude of the Divine Nature, must needs communicate itself, and be eternally communicating itself. This communication may be of two kinds: the one natural or necessary, which must be and which must always be; the other free, which God may withhold, which is a gift, which is not necessary, but which, when God has once been pleased to make it, cannot easily be separated from llim, even in idea. We can conceive that there could have been such a Being as an Uncreating God. But we cannot conceive what lie would have been like. He would not have resembled our own present God. He would not have been our Heavenly Father, merely short of Benignity, Dominion, Providence, Mercy, Justice, and of that perfection which makes Him the End of all things. His natural goodness would have been different, not less infinitely perfect, but inconceivably otherwise than it is now.¹

OUIt MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 1S9

As the perfection of the Divine Nature is infinite, so the communication of it which is natural and necessary must be infinite as well; and it must have this mysterious and adorable characteristic, that it must communicate itself without multiplying itself; for how can that which is infinite be multiplied? Hence comes the fecundity of the Divine Nature, considering that Nature in Three Persons, the Father as the Fountain of the Godhead, the Son as the Eternal Knowledge of itself, and the Holy Ghost as its eternal Love of self, as one essenco in Three Equal Divine Persons. From the communicativeness, or fecundity of the Divine Nature, it must necessarily be that the Father ever generates, the Son is ever generated, the Father and the Son ever breathe forth their love as one, and the Holy Spirit is ever being breathed forth. And because of the infinite plenitude of the Divine Nature there can, in this necessary and natural communication of itself, be no sort of inequality, no precedence, no priority, no diminution, no inferiority, no subordination.² These are not mere words. They are God's eternal life. They will be oui eternal life as well.

Besides this necessary communication of the Divine Nature, which is natural to it, and inevitable, there is also a free communication of it, an overflow which is a gift, a magnificence deeply appertaining to God's natural goodness, and yet which He could withhold, and still be God. As we call the necessary communication of the Divine Nature its fecundity, so we call the free communication of it, its benignity, both being in fact consequences of God's natural goodness, only the one necessary, the other free. There is no limit to the number of ways in which the Divine Nature may freely communicate itself; and each of these ways will represent a different and peculiar rational creation. "VVe only know of two such ways, which have resulted, one in the creation of angels, the other in the creation of men. But there might be as many divers rational creations as there are millions of starry worlds, or all the stars multiplied a million times. "We cannot venture to suppose that the creations of angels and men have exhausted the possible modes by which the Divine Nature may freely communicate itself to created intellects and to created wills. Creation, if we may say so, is perhaps only in its infancy; and as God seems to have an inconceivable love of order, and lie, to whom there is no succession, appears to delight in doing things successively in realms of time and space, so, when the doom has closed the probation of the family of man, other creatures may succeed, other natures people material worlds, or immaterial homes of spiritual beauty; and so God may go on in His fertile benignity for evermore. I cannot look at the starry skies, but this thought comes to my mind like a belief. There may be rational creatures lower than man, though it certainly is very difficult to conceive of them. But even our limited capacities can imagine a perpetual efflux of rational creations higher than man in almost numberless degrees. Thus creation is God doing freely, what in the Generation of the Son and the Procession of the Holy Ghost He does necessarily. The natural goodness of God, which is defined to be the excellence of the Divine Nature, is the single explanation of all His operations, whether within Himself or without. So that the same love which evermore " produces" in God, as theologians speak, the Holy Trinity, made of its own free will both men and angels, and cherishes them with an eternal compassion. What a view of creation does not this open out before us! How is it we can ever think of anything but God? 0 how more than royal is the origin of our immortal souls, and in what vast destinies does

Divine love intend that they should expatiate for evermore! Garth grows more and more like a speck as our thoughts iscend: our affections detach themselves from it more and oiore. As life goes on, and life and grace together draw us nearer to God, earth, in spite of all its affectionate memorials, becomes only a pretty planet, and nothing more: but oh! why is it we let slow time do the work which swift grace would so much better do?

But this account of God's love of creatures does by no means include all that is to be said of His love of man. The creation of angels is incomparably more magnificent than the creation of men. Men are all of one species. The diversities of the angels are no doubt specific. Some have thought that as angels do not produce each other, like the fruitful generations of men, each angel must be a species himself. Others consider, for reasons this is not the place to enter into, that each choir consists of three species, which in the nine choirs of the three hierarchies would make twenty-seven species. None would doubt but that the hierarchies and even the choirs must differ from each other specifically. Nay, to us we confess it seems unlikely that earth with its infinite variety of beasts and birds, of insects and fishes, should outdo in this peculiar kind of magnificence, namely, the numberlessness of species, the great angelic world; and if the specific differences of the angels are more simple than those of earth, they would be all the more striking because of their simplicity. Yet in spite of the superiority of the angelic world, and because perhaps we are less acquainted with its peculiar prerogatives, men seem to have many indubitable pre-eminences above the angels. The angels imitate the virginity of the Most Holy Trinity without its fruitfulness. Man shares in the fruitfulness of God; and Mary, a pure daughter of man and whose nature is merely human, shares at once the fruitfulness and the virginity of God, and, as His Mother, rules the angels with queenly supremacy in heaven. This pretty planet was the scene of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion of the Son of God. He took man's nature upou Him, not that of angels. He had a human Mother, a human Soul, a human Body. He spoke human language, and had human thoughts. He had human ways about Him, human habits, gestures, peculiarities, and even infirmities. Furthermore, when the angels fell, He held out no hand to check them as they went down the frightful abyss. Man He forgives not once, or twice, or seventy times seven times, but many times a day, and all day long. He stands in a different relation to man, and man to Him. His love of man comes out of the same natural goodness, which gives forth His love of the angels. But His love of us is a different sort of love. His love of us seems to contain more than His love of them. At least it has certain peculiarities proper to itself, a fondness, a clinging to us, a patience with us, a pursuit of us, an attraction to us, which the pardon of the Fall and the mystery of the Incarnation do nothing but exemplify. Whence this predilection for the human race? Whence this preference on the part of the Divine Nature of human nature over the angelic? Is it because we are so little and so low? Is it because the Divine Nature in yearning to communicate itself, yearned to do so to the uttermost, was not content short of the lowest point of the rational creation, and that the depth of its abasement was the measure of its gladness and its love? If so, new creations will be higher than man, not lower: lower than the angels, God's eldest born, but higher than that lowest step in the scale of intellectual creations, whereon the Incarnate Word has taken His stand that He may embrace all creations beneath His Headship, and cement all of them together, the highest with the lowest, as one dominion pertaining to the Unity of God.

Such is the only picture that we, after trial, have bees able theologically to make to ourselves of the love of God for man. It is this enormous love which it is our duty to return. It is not a matter of choice, or of perfection. It is a question of precept and obligation. It is a commandment, which we shall be lost eternally if we do not endeavor to fulfil. Our next step, therefore, must be to enquire upon what feelings of our human nature God has engrafted the possibility of our loving Him, in what channels He has bidden that love to run, what motives are to actuate it, on what relationships to Him it is to establish itself. For it will be found that God is so essentially good that whatever position He takes up with regard to us is a new right and title to our love. We do not say that those who are lost will love Him, but even in their case His mercy has a right to love, both because punishment was so long delayed, and because it is now inflicted with so much less severity than they have both merited and could be supernaturally strengthened to endure. But in our case, whose account is mercifully not yet closed, it is simply true that every relation in which God stands to us furnishes us with new and constraining motives to love Him with a fresh and daily beginning love.

First of all, we are God's subjects. There are none of us who desire to question His dominion. We should be simply ruined, annihilated, if we were not in His care and keeping. Obedience to Him is safer and happier for us than any liberty of which we could dream. He is our king, and never monarch had so many claims to enthusiastic popularity as He. His rule over us is the gentlest we can conceive. It hardly makes itself felt at all. His omnipresence is like the pressure of the air, needful to health and life, yet imperceptible. His government is one of love. His very penalties we have to wring from Him by repeated treasons, and when they come they are so disguised in mercy, that it is hard to discern between chastisement and 13 R love. His facility in pardoning is something beyond compare. He seems to compromise His own regal dignity by the profuse liberality with which He uses His prerogative of mercy. He pardons not only after the nervousness of trial and the ignominy of conviction, but He pardons us without mentioning it, without boasting of it, without warning us, without getting the credit of pardoning, often as in baptism, and with forgotten sins, without even our acknowledgment of guilt. Often He seems to forgive before the offence is complete. We sin, half knowing we shall be forgiven. As to the consequences of our sins to others, He hardly ever lays on us the responsibility of attending to them. He charges His own administration with that burden, which of a truth requires a love, a wisdom, and a power which He alone possesses. No earthly king was ever like Him in His providence over His subjects. No angelic monarch could come near Him in this beautiful perfection. Every want is foreseen. The vast complications both of nature and of graco fit close to the individual life, shield it from every danger, penetrate it with a balm and sweetness which give vigor and delight, and make each man feel as if the world were made for him alone, and as if he were rather the last end of God than God the last end to him. In the exercise of His royalty, all is equable, timely, harmonious, pliant; nothing harsh, sudden, abrupt, disconcerting, or domineering. Surely then, simply as Ilia subjects, we are bound to a loyalty and love as warm, and generous, and faithful, as it is easy, ennobling and delightful.

But we are His servants also. He is our master as well as our king. All servitude is full of motives of humility. Servants, when they forget that they are servants, cease that moment to be good servants. Yet, if we thought and felt aright, presumption would be more likely than abjection to grow upon the thought that we are in the service of our Ma ker. The annals of history give us many beautiful examples of the attachment which a noble-minded servant can have for his earthly master; and the memorials of private life are full cf them all the year round. But what is it which makes a master so justly dear to a good servant? It is his considerateness. And who is so considerate as God? Oh wonderful mystery! see how God always shows by His manner to us His remembrance of our little services, a forgetfulness of our slovenly shortcomings, an affectionate exaggerated satisfaction with what we do, and at the worst a look only of wondering wounded feeling, when disgrace, reproof, or chastisement would better have fitted our misdeeds! lie never lets us be oppressed with work. He never disregards our fatigue. He cheers us under failure. It is, if we must say it, almost the fault of His easy kindness that we are apt to forget ourselves, to play the master, and to wonder when He does not wait on us and serve, though of a truth He seldom fails to change places with us when we want it. His forbearance is one incessant miracle. We should not keep a servant a month who treated us as we. treat Him. Awkward, ungracious, reluctant, it is thus we always meet the courtesies of His abundant love, which vouchsafes to treat us on equal terms, lest even the look of condescension should wound the silly susceptibilities of our childish pride. As to wages, both those He has bound Himself to give, and those which come in the shape of frequent gifts, and perquisites unspecified, the bounty of an earthly master is to His munificence as the poverty of the creature is to the wealth of the Creator. Who would not rather be the servant of such a Master, than have a whole world left to himself and to the liberty of his disposal? Who would care to have creation for his property, when he may have the Creator for his own?

God is our Friend. It requires an act of faith, and not a little act, to say so. But so it is; the Infinite, the Omnij is our boson friend. We doubt if any friendship ever really lasted the whole of two lives. Few men are habitually insincere even with the few whom they love extremely. Fewer still trust friends with a perfectly confiding trust Xay, friend snip shows itself in a morbid readiness to take offence, in petty diplomacies to find out if injurious suspicions are true, in proud silences which will not ask for explanations, caches made for the childish excitement of The truth is, friendship is a romance, that and spoken a thousand times among men, unless in a dramatic way. Thus we pray proverbially to be Bared from our friends, and we sav that n man who has many acquaintances, and few friends, is at •nee the happiest and the safest of mankind. There hare hardly been n dozen friendships since the time of Jonathan and David, which could bear the weight of an awkward-looking circumstance, or a decently attested report. And friendship at its height, in the fervor of its fever-fit, what is it but a tyranny? Our friends think themselves gods, aot men, and us their instruments, the profitable impleof their pleasure, their ambition, and their will. is not consecrated by a sacrament as marriage Yet wt muni nuwi sfriuni. uTs ^.r'.:'t. bum unbefriended solitude. But there is no real friend but God. - in His own world almost the solitary example of the beauty of fidelity. See what a friend He is I He acts as if He thinks better of us than we think even of ourselves. ■ He can suspect nothing: fur He is God. He forgives ouYiutu as mat as we commit them, and appears to forget ns soon as Lie has forgiven. His love is always as fr^ us us it was at the beginning. And He keeps plighting His friendship with us by presents, whose exuberant variety never tires, while their magnificence and exceeding price outstrip the fondest expectation, and the grace with which they are conferred removes from the of obligation all the feelin* of oppression rather to the equal familiarity of lore.

will we can be friends with God, and He gives Hin np to His friends with such a romantic exelusivenesi*, that we feel as if He belonged to as atoms, and that all of

'}: - - 7.:: -,V •- 1 - >:-::' -:77L:-: 11 - predilection. Truants and prodigals, bo longer worthy to u:■-.::-: h:..;.r>. i-: 7- -::: h:«:; ->. •-.::::'--?

of His most lavish paternal tenderness. Did erer mother yearn over the cradle of her first-born, as He has yearned over us? Did erer father make his children's soiioua more his own than God has done, or yet leave to them so theirs? Did ever parental lore remain true love, and yet r.: =:?h?::~:'rf. ■:?:'. -;.?;:-:; r ~:.-_:: y;:^;:::.::: with so light a hand or with a muion mere reluctant? Can Divine Love quite exculpate itself from the charge of having spoiled us by its indulgence? Did ever father so consistently or with such grave affection win his children to repentance by the sorrow that He showed and by the hard hearts and drawn us, humbled yet doubly loving, to His knees for pardon? Does not each chastisement seem worth tor more than the pain it gives, by the increase of love and the new inventions of His favour with which He follows it? 0 who is such a Father as God is! The Sternal Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the F-:—;:• 11. <;:----.:,; F,:-;::': - vr ~.;.

of Htm we forget the love of our earthly tothers; for they hardly look like tothers by the side of Him.

He is oar Creator also, and- we are His creatures, the least and lowest of those who can glorify Him with a rear sonable worship, and yet whom He has loved above the angels, and chosen to be nigher to Himself. Here we have no earthly term of comparison whereby to judge of His surpassing love. He has chosen us; and choice is the highest act of love. He chose us when as yet we lay in the bosom of the great void, distinguishable only to the piercing eye of II is preference and love. He chose us rather than others. He had a special love for something we by grace might be, and which others could not be or would not be. It was His first choice of us. It was eternal. Our likeness lived in the Divine Mind from everlasting, and was cherished there with infinite complacency. He prepared a fortune for us, marked out a life, measured our sorrows to us with wise love, and tempered our joys so that they might not be an injury. He gave us a work, clothed us with a vocation, and destined for us a particular crown and place in heaven. We cannot name the thing which is bright and good within us, nor the thing which is attractive and delectable without us, but it comes from our creation. We have to do with it, as being the creatures of the infinitely benignant God. All we are or have is His, together with all we are capable of being and having. That we are not imprisoned in perdition at this moment is simply an interference of His goodness. Our creation is our share of the infinite goodness of God. What should we be without it? Can any love of ours be otherwise than a poor return for such a love as His?

But we are not only God's creatures; we are His elect as well. He made as it were a second choice of us in Jesus Christ. He foresaw our fall. He beheld not only what Adam's fall entailed upon us, but He saw our own actual sins and guilt. He did not exaggerate our shame, bat He knew it as not all men and angels together could have known it. He penetrated its unbearable corruption. He laid its loathsomeness all bare before His eye. It was incredible. Such graces slighted, such inspirations neglected, such sacraments profaned, and with a perversity, a frequency, an ingenuity of aggravating circumstances, so great that perhaps, if we saw the hideous vision all in one, we should fall back and die. Nevertheless it was not enough to repel His electing love. He chose us to be bathed in the Precious Blood of His Incarnate Son. lie elected us to a magnificent inheritance of grace, and to the royalties of His Holy Church. By virtue of this election He gave us the gift of faith, and threw open to us the golden gates of the overflowing and joyous sacraments. By His first election He chose us out of nothing to have life: by His second, out of darkness to have light. Here again His benignity outstrips all the comparisons of earthly love. When we think who it is that elected us, who we are that He elected, what He gives us through this election, the way in which He gives it, and the end for which He has elected us, we shall acknowledge that His election of us is a tie to be repaid, and even then what payment is it? with all the fervor and fidelity of lifelong love. For wherefore was it that He chose us? He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and unspotted in His sight, in love!

Can more be said? Yes! there is still another tie which binds us fast to God. It is the end of what creation was the beginning; it is the consummation of God's eternal choice. It is the marriage of our souls with Him. We are His spouses, as well as His creatures and His elect. Indeed we are His spouses, because we are His creatures and His elect. But how can we tell wherein the peculiarity of that intimate union consists? When the saints are betrothed to God, it is by operations of grace so magnificent, by supernatural mysteries so transcendent, that the language in which they are related seems unreal and inflated; and if such be the espousals on earth, what will the marriage be in heaven? 0! who shall dare to picture the interior caresses which the soul receives from Him who loved it eternally, and chose it out of nothing in a rapture of creative love? Who shall dare to fasten in ungainly human words the sort of inexpressible equality with God which the soul enjoys, or her unspeakable community of goods with Him? And wherefore does He use the word spouse, but to express this glorious unity? Marriage was made a figure of the unity of God, and a shadow of Christ's union with His Church. Its love was to supersede all other ties. It was to obliterate the father's and the mother's home from the young wife's heart. It was to ride conqueror over the fond mother's idolatry for her first-born. Yet all this is the faintest of shadows, the feeblest of figures, to set forth the union of the soul with God! How shall we love Him as we ought? Rather the question should be, Can we love Him at all with anything worthy of the name of love? May we even try to love Him who has loved us with such an overwhelming love? Must not our only love be speechless fear? No! for it is the law of all creation, the beautiful, benignant law, the unexpected, the incredible commandment, — Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole soul, with thy whole heart, with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength!

Man's imagination can fly far, and picture the wildest pictures to itself. But now let it loose to ride upon the winds of heaven, to search the heights and the depths, to dream the most marvellous dreams, and to conceive the most impossible combinations. Can it picture to itself, can it, however dimly and remotely, divine a greater, a more wonderful, a more various, a more perfect love, consistent with the liberty of the creature, than the love which God has shown and is daily showing to the sons of men? Short of His laying violent hands upon our freedom, and carrying us off to heaven by force, and then doing fresh vioience to our nature, and making it endure and rejoice in the Vision of God, which without holiness would be intolerable to us, — short of this, which would be power rather than love, can we imagine any salvation more complete or more abundant than that with which God has rescued man? Count up all that God has done for yourself. There is your eternal predestination, and the creative love which called you out of nothing; there is your rational and immortal soul, with its beautiful dower of gifts; there is your marvellous body, with its senses, which is one day to be transformed into surpassing loveliness, while every sense with its glorified capacities will pour into the soul such floods of thrilling and exquisite delights, as it will require the strength of immortality to bear; there is the whole material world, made for your intellectual or physical enjoyment or support, so vast and glorious, that a little knowledge of one of its least departments, its minerals, for example, or its plants, makes a man famous among his fellows; there is the guardianship of bright and holy angels; there is your election in Christ, by which you now enjoy the faith and sacraments; there is the giving up by God of His only Son, to take your nature upon Him, to suffer and to die, to redeem you from your sins; there is the gift of His Precious Blood and of His renewed forgiveness, conferred upon you ten thousand times ten thousand times, since you were seven years old, nay, from the very first hour of your regeneration; there is His preservation of you, which is simply the unbroken continuity of your creation, requiring, every moment of day and night, of time and of an eternity to folloAV, as much influx from the Most High, as was needed to call your soul out of nothing at the first; there are all the special helps, the wisely adapted graces, and the fresh arrangements of divine tenderness, which are waiting, ready for the hour when you shall come to die; there is the indwelling of the Third Person of the

Holy Trinity by grace within your soul; and, finally, ther* is your immeasurable reward, which is no gift of God, no immense collection of created pleasures, no multiplication by millions of the highest human and angelic joys, but God, the living God Himself. So that, strictly speaking, as a theologian says, it is not simply God who is the end of man, but God possessed, God by an ineffable communication of Himself become our own, our property, and our enjoyment.

In this catalogue of the demonstrations of love, there are many things so great and so utterly divine, that the unassisted intelligence of the highest angel would never have suspected them. Yet, when once the Incarnation was revealed, many imaginations might have been based thereon. We do not know if we could have ventured to dream of an Incarnation in humility and shame, in poverty and hiddenness, unless we had been told it. But if our dearest Lord had lived on earth His three-and-thirty years, and then gone away, we think we might have conceived some possible extensions of His love. We might have thought it would have been an additional tenderness if He had remained on earth personally until the day of judgment, that we might minister to Him, and share the privileges of Mary and Joseph, the apostles and the devout women in Judea, and have Him near us sensibly, and thus worship Him, as it were, at His own feet. But could we ever have dreamed of the superabundant way in which He has effected this, by the astounding mystery of the Blessed Sacrament?

We might also have conceived that it would be a great consolation to have Him still on earth that we might ask Him for dispensations when we needed them, that we might have intricate cases of conscience solved by His unquestionable authority, that we might have formal permission from Him to carry out our favorite schemes for His greater glory, that we might receive absolution from our most heinous sins, that we might ask Ilim what difficult passages in Scripture meant, and that we might hear from His infallible lips the truth or falsehood of uncertain doctrines. All this would have been an immense consolation to us, as it were a fresh dispensation of His love growing out of the exuberant mystery of the Incarnation. But it is just this, which He has provided for us in the Papacy. He has given, out of His dominion, the plentitude of His valid jurisdiction to the Holy Father, that we might have it in our necessities, dispensed with a wisdom which He guides, with a liberality like His own, and a valid jurisdiction no whit inferior to His, because it is in fact His own. These two congenial mysteries of the Blessed Sacrament and the Papacy seem to extend the lovingness of the Incarnation, as far as our imaginations can conceive.

But there is a negative which is almost as inconceivable, a consequence which we should have expected to follow from the Incarnation, which has not followed. Surely, if, when the Incarnation had been first told us, with all its prodigal tenderness, its unnecessary sufferings, its fierce deluge of intolerable ignominies, the various atrocity of its pains, the pleading eloquence of its spendthrift bloodshedding, we had measured its length and breadth, its height and depth, to the best of our ability, we should have expected that henceforth, under the Christian law, perfection would be an obligation, that a precept would have been laid upon us all to love like the saints, and to live lives like theirs. It would not have seemed at all a stretch of jurisdiction, if our Lord had commanded very long fasts, frequent self-flagellations, voluntary austerities, sleeping on the ground, or painful vigils. We could neither have been surprised nor discontented, if, in return for what He had done for us, and in likeness and honor of His suffering life, He had forbidden under pain of mortal sin ail or most of the amusements and recreations of the world. But we think it is most surprising, in fact it would be incredible to us if the faith did not assure us of it, that the Incarnation and Crucifixion have not added one jot or tittle to the original precept of the love of God, that they have actually diminished instead of multiplied our obligations, that the more incalculably beyond our power of repayment divine love has become, it should in fact be easier to repay it, and that less on our parts will save us, now that so much more has been done on His part for our salvation. We are never weary of wondering at this result of the Incarnation, which is to us at once so unexpected, and at the same time so full of overwhelming love.

The conclusion we draw is this. Theology, with all its numberless and marvellous deductions, enables us to imagine possible things with an almost unlimited power of imagination. Now we have combined all the extremes we could, and conceived the most impossible conjectures; and we cannot, do what we will, leave man his liberty, and conceive one additional instance of His love which God could give to the human race. We cannot heighten or embellish what is actual, nor can we dream of anything possible to add. The love of God for man exhausts the possibilities of our imagination. Did God mean more than this, did He mean that it had exhausted the possibilities of His wisdom and His power, when He says so pathetically in Isaias, 0 ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, and ye men of Juda, judge between Me and My vineyard. What is there that I ought to do more to My vineyard, that I have not done to it?

It is this love outstripping all imagination, which we have to return: and how? There are doubtless numberless ways in which God can communicate Himself to created intellects and wills, and each way will produce a different rational creation, and each rational creation be capable of loving God in a great variety of ways. Thus among the angels there may be thousands of different loves of God, foi which we have neither name nor idea; and all of them are doubtless extremely beautiful, and highly spiritual. We are so entangled with matter and material ties that our love is debased in kind, as well as kept down in degree. Whereas the angels, having no connection with matter during their probation, doubtless loved God in their lowest degree with a purity and a fixity of contemplation which the highest saints hardly attain amongst ourselves; though the merits of many saints may have exceeded those of many angels. Leaving then the capacious spirits of angels as an unknown land, we come to the souls of men; and as far as we can divide one sort of love from another, where in reality each more or less involves the other, it seems we can love God with seven different kinds of love, the loves, namely, of benevolence, of complacence, of preference, of condolence, of gratitude, of desire, and of simple adoration. These are as it were so many capabilities of the human soul; and if the fulfilment of the precept of love is what concerns us most, both in this world and in the world to come, the knowledge of these seven varieties of love must be of thegreatest importance to our happiness.

The love of benevolence is one which has been commonly practised by the saints, and often has seemed childish, or at best mere poetry, to those who love God less fervently. There is a strange pleasure in it, from our putting ourselves in an impossible position towards God, in order to confer it on Him. We make ourselves as it were His benefactors, instead of His being ours. We put ourselves on an equality with Him, or even above Him. So it seems. Yet in reality this love of benevolence is the fruit of a holy humility too deep for words, almost too deep for tears. By the love of benevolence we, first of all, wish God to be more perfect, if it were possible, than He really is. Yet what a wild impossibility! But if God's love of His creatures is itself so exaggerated, He must let us love Him with the simplicity of these fervid exaggerations. Moreover this habit of wishing God impossible perfections is not only the result of a more worthy and true appreciation of His perfection and His majesty, but it tends also to produce it, to sustain it, and to increase it. It is at once the cause and the effect of honorable thoughts of God. Another while the love of benevolence takes the form of venturesome congratulations. We wish God all the immense joy of His unimaginable perfections. "We know that He possesses it without our wishing it. We know that our wishes cannot swell by one drop the mighty sea of His interior jubilation. But it is an expression of our love, not in words only but in inward sentiment, which in His sight is an act, and a meritorious act. Wre bid Him rejoice. We wish Him countless happy returns of that eternal festival, which He has in His own blissful self. Or, another while, by the same love of benevolence, we wish Him all increase of His accidental glory; and our wish is efficacious prayer, and obtains for Him a real augmentation of that particular glory. The very wish of itself adds to it, and adds immensely when it comes out of a pure heart and a fervent spirit. It also obtains grace for others, and makes the cause of God to prosper in tho world. Sometimes we earnestly desire that He may have accidental glory which He does not receive. We wish that purgatory were emptied into heaven, or that there were no hell, or that all the heathen were converted, or that all wanderers might return to the fold, or that some one day or night there might be no mortal sin in all our huge metropolis. All this, which the saints have reduced to as many practices as there have been saints to practise it, is the love of benevolence.

The love of complacence is of a different disposition. It is content with God. It not only wants nothing more, but it only wants Him as He is. It is adapted to different moods of mind, suits other characters, or meets the changeful dispositions of the soul, which now needs one class of sentiments, and now another. Complacence fixes its eye upon what it knows of God with intense delight and with intense tranquillity. It rejoices that lie is what He is. It tells Him so. It tells it Him over and over again. Whole hours of prayer pass, and it has done nothing else but tell Him this. 0 sublime childishness of love! 0 most dear repetition, how far unlike the vain repetitions of the heathen, which our Lord reproved! Then it broods over its own joy. It slumbers over its own heart, a sweet and mystical repose, and wakes to renew its oft-told tale. Then a change comes over its spirit. A new strain of music steals out from its inmost soul. It rejoices that none else is like to God. It rejoices with Him in His unity, one of His own deepest and most secret joys. It exults that none can come near it. It asks all the hierarchies of creation with a boastful certainty, vaunting in its triumph, Who is like unto the Lord our God? There is none other God but He. But its eloquence has so touched its own heart, that it becomes silent once again. It leans on God, and at last seems lost in Him, absorbed in quiet gladness and a rapture of holy thought. Thence once more it wakes, and seeing there is none like unto God, simply because He is God, and for no other cause, it bursts forth into passionate rejoicings, that He is not only what He is, but always has been, always will be what He is, that He is of a truth, and shall be, and must be, and alone can be, eternally and victoriously God. These are the delightful occupations of complacent love.

The love of preference, or of esteem, hardly aims so high. It is more mixed up with thoughts of creatures. But it thinks of them only to despise them, and to insult them with its intelligent contempt. It compares God with all other things, as if it had tried them, convicted them of falsehood, and grown weary of their vanity. It tramples them under foot, and makes steps of their ruins whereby it may rise to God. Their nothingness grows upon it. It becomes disabused. Earthly ties no longer hold it down from heaven. Detachment is its characteristic grace. It passes unresistingly over the world, as a swallow skims the green meadow, and seems to have no need of resting. Hence it comes to appreciate God rightly, because it ap preciates Him incomparably above all other things. It began by terms of comparison, and ends by seeing that nothing can compare with Him, and that all comparison is foolish, because He is infinite, eternal, and all-holy. It gives God His right place in the world, which the multitude of men do not give Him. "What is practical religion but giving God His right place in the heart and in our life? The misery of the world is that God's rights are disallowed. This it is which makes it such a desolate and weary land. It is the confusion of the world which tires a loving heart and a quiet spirit. It is all a kind of base anarchy. Words and things not passing current for their right values and their true acceptations; importance attaching to the wrong things; darkness unaccountably held to be light; everything just sufficiently out of its right place to make a tumult all around it, and yet so nearly right that we chafe because we cannot right it: — it is all this which the love of preference remedies, by esteeming God, not as He deserves to be esteemed in Himself, but as He deserves to be esteemed in competition with creatures. This love expresses itself by the energetic abundance of its good works, by its active zeal, by a most intense hatred of sin, by a neglect of comforts, by sacrifice, and by austerity. These are its natural vents, and they at once depict its character. It is a love which, while it worships all the attributes of God, delights above all things to extol His sovereignty.

The love of condolence differs widely again from this. It looks upon God as wronged, and outraged, and in sorrow, as if He needed help, and were asking for an ally. Its tendency is to wed His interests, and to become strangely susceptible about His honor. Its eyes are opened to see what common men cannot see. It beholds God concerned and implicated, where others cannot perceive so much as a vestige of religion being in question. It sees God everywhere, as if His omnipresence had been made visible to it, like the whiteness of the light or the blueness of the sky. It is a jealous love, and considerately inconsiderate, so that men are apt to take umbrage at it. It is very discreet, but not with a discretion which the world approves. Its discretion leads it to keep awake itself, and to awaken others, lest God should pass by unseen, and men should not uncover as He passed. It mingles its own cause with God's, and speaks of the two in the same breath and in the same way, as David does in the Psalms. It seeks God rather than looks at Him, and follows Him, delighted with the humblest servitudes. It has one life-long grief, like Mary's dolors; and that grief is in the abundance and effrontery of sin. Sin is a sharp pain to it. It does not make it angry, but it makes it weep. Its heart sickens with the goings on of men, and it tries to shroud God in the light of its own affectionate compassion. It has no anger with sinners. On the contrary it has quite a devotion to them. Our Lord's passionate, piteous, complaining love of sinners, as it is depicted in the divine Dialogue of S. Catherine of Siena, is the food of its soul. The Sacred Heart is the object of its predilection. It is ever telling God how sorry it is for sin. It has a grand gift of abiding contrition for its own sins, and takes a holy pleasure in self-revenge. It lends God its eyes to weep rivers day and night for sins that are not its own. The seven dolors of Mary are as seven lives of sweet sorrow which by grace it may load, to soothe God for the transgressions of His children. The gift of piety, that peculiar gift of the Holy 14 S2

Ghost, moulds its spiritual life, and its attitude towards God is eminently filial. The atmosphere of its heart is a spirit of reparation; and it lets its life, secretly yet usefully and beautifully, waste away, like sweetest aromatic gums, in sighs and tears before the offended Majesty of God. O happy they who love with such a love! for they have reached that height of virtue which the philosopher saw only as an ideal before him, to feel pleasure and pain, when and where we ought! 0 sweetest of all noviciates for heaven! to have their hearts on fire on earth, burning the sweet perfumes of human love before the throne of the Incarnate Word! To them, true dovelike souls, especially belongs that tender benediction, Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.

It is to be observed of the four kinds of love already described, that their characteristic is disinterestedness. It is not that self is expressly excluded, aj a false spirituality would teach, but that it is undeveloped. It is not rejected, but it is passed over. In the next two kinds of love it occupies, and without reproof, a much more prominent position.

If the quiet eye and the profound heart of the contemplative Mary delights in that love of condolence, which is 6uch a favorite love with cloistered souls, the love of gratitude better suits the external diligence of the active Martha. The love of gratitude is pre-eminently a mindful love. It ponders things and lays them up in its heart, as our Blessed Lady did. It meditates fondly on the past, as Jacob did. It sings of old mercies, and makes much of thorn, like David in the Psalms. It enters largely into the composition, of the Missal and Breviary of the Church. Where another has the memory of his sins continually before him, a soul possessed with the love of gratitude is perpetually haunted by a remembrance of past benefits; and his abiding sotow for sin is a sort of affectionate and self-reproachful reaction from his wonder at the abundant loving-kindness of God. The hideousness of sin is all the more brought out, when the light of God's love is thrown so strongly on it. Hence it comes to pass that a very grateful man is also a deeply penitent man; and as the excess of benefits tends to lower us in our own esteem, so we are humble in proportion to our gratitude. But this love does not rest in the luxurious sentiment of gratitude. It breaks out into actual and ardent thanksgiving; and its thankfulness is not confined to words. Promptitude of obedience, heroic effort, and gay perseverance, these are all tokens of the love of gratitude. It is loyal to God. Loyalty is the distinguishing feature of its service. It is constantly on the look out for opportunities, and makes them when it cannot find them, to testify its allegiance to God; not as if it was doing any great thing, or as if it was laying God under any obligation, but as if it was making payment, part payment and tardy payment, by little instalments, for the immensity of His love. It is an exuberant, active, bright-faced love, very attractive and therefore apostolic, winning souls, preaching God unconsciously, and though certainly busied about many things, yet all of them the things of God. Happy the man whose life is one long Te Deum! He will save his soul, but he will not save it alone, but many others also. Joy is not a solitary thing, and he will come at last to His Master's feet, bringing many others rejoicing with him, the resplendent trophies of his grateful love.

But the love which has most to do with self is the love of desire, or, as theologians often call it, the love of concupiscence. Saints and sinners, the perfect and the imperfect, the young and old, the penitent and the innocent, the cloistered and uncloistered, all must meet in the sanctuary of this love, and draw waters with gladness from its celestial fountains. What rational creature but must desire God, and desire Him with an infinite and irresistible desire? What created understanding but longs to be flooded with His sweet light? What created will but languishes to be set on fire by the ardor of His ecstatic love? Daniel is called in Scripture the man of desires. Most beautiful of appellations! as if he yearned so eagerly for God, that he should pass into an honorable proverb to the end of time! How beautiful the sight if we could see with the eyes of some sublime intelligence, how this desire of God is the whole beauty and the whole order of His vast creation, drawing onwards to himself across the spiritual realms of angelic holiness, or over the land and sea, the mountains and the vales, of earth, numberless created intellects and wills, and by as many various paths as there are intellects and wills to draw. The tide of all creation sets in with resistless currents to the throne of the Creator. It is this desire which saves and justifies, which crowns and glorifies. It is this love which is heightened and made mere exquisite by the tremulousness of holy fear.³ 0 glorious constraints of this heavenly concupiscence! It is a love which makes us not only desire God, but desire Him supremely above all things. It makes us desire Him only, Him always, and Him intensely; and it allures us with untyrannieal exclusiveness to seek Him in all things here, and to long for

Him as being Himself our sole sufficient and magnificent Hereafter. By this love both high and low are saved; and without it was none ever saved that was saved. A saint, if such an one could be, fit to be canonized for all things else, for the want of this love would be lost eternally; and the death-bed penitent, who has never known a higher love, will be saved by this alone. And do we really desire aught else but God? Or at least can we desire aught but subordinate^ to Him, and far below our longing for His unspeakable recompense, which is Himself? There is nothing to satisfy us but God alone. All things weary us, and fade He alone is ever fresh, and His love is daily like a ne? discovery to our souls. 0 sweet thirst for God! Fair love of supernatural desire! Thou canst wean us better far from earth, and teach us better the nothingness of human things, than the cold, slow experience of wise old age, or the swift sharp science of suffering, loss, and pain!

There is still another love. We hardly know whether to call it a child of heaven or of earth. It is the love of adoration. It is a love too quiet for benevolence, too deep for complacency, too passive for condolence, too contemplative for gratitude; but which has grown up out of the loves of preference and desire, and is, besides, the perfection of all the other loves. It is too much possessed with God to be accurately conscious of the nature of its own operations. It finds no satisfaction except in worship. It comes so near to the vastness of God that it beholds Him only obscurely, and instead of definite perfections in God, sees only a bright darkness, which floods its whole being and transforms it into itself. It is passive; God gives it when He wills. We cannot earn it. Efforts would rather backen it, if it was near, than bring it on or win it into the soul. It waits rather than seeks. God is as if He were all Will to it. His power, His wisdom, His sanctity, they all melt into His will; and all that comes to this love is His will, and except of that Will, it can take no distinct cognisance of anything either in heaven or on earth. Self goes out of it, and enters into that will, and is only contemplated in it, although it is eternally separate and essentially distinct. It is oblivious of itself, as being one with God. Its life is wonder, silence, ecstasy. The operations of grace are simplified into one, and the power of grace which is concentrated in that one is above words; and that single action is the production of an unspeakable self-abasement. It cannot be told. But such was the humility of the Sacred Heart, and such the strange loveliness of the sinless Mother, who so mightily attracted God and drew Him down into her bosom. As the morning sky is all suffused with pearly hues from the unrisen sun, so is the mind, though still on earth, in this love of adoration, all silently suffused, and flushed, and mastered by a most exquisite repose, which can come alone from that Beatific Vision which has not risen yet upon the soul.

These are the seven loves whereby the creature man can love His beneficent Creator. These are the seven liturgies, ancient, authentic, universal liturgies of the human heart. Truly it is little we can do for God, and yet how immeasurably more than we have done for Him as yet. A treatise might be written to reduce these loves to practice,⁴ and to illustrate them copiously with the examples of the saints. But that is not our object now. Has earth any pleasure, of an intellectual, moral, or material sort, to compare with the fruition of a repentant life passed in the occupations of these various loves? The penitent seeks peace, and the end of all love is peace, peace and languishing desire, peace in the assured hope of the soul, and pining for tho ever-coming, still delaying Face of Jesus in the eastern clouds: that east from which He will one day come. Before the dawn of day, a huge toppling mass of unwieldy cloud came up from the west horizon. With incredible swiftness and the loud roaring of sudden wind, it covered like a pall the brilliant moonlit heavens, and deluged the earth with slanting columns of whirling rain. It passed on. A star came out, and then another, and at last the rnoon; and then the storm drove onward to the east, towards the sea, murky and purple, and all at once a lunar rainbow-spanned the black arch of heaven j and it seemed as if Jesus should have come, beneath that bow, and through that purple cloud that was barring the gates of the sunrise; but the wind was lulled, and all was still, by the time the moon had built that bow upon the cloud. And what is all this but a figure of our lives, one of nature's daily parables, of which we might make so much? Ours is a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage by night, beneath the gentle moon, from west to east, from the sunset to the sunrise; it is not like our natural life from east to west, from youth to age, from our rising to our setting; and we shall best beguile the way, and let the storms go unheeded over, if we make God's "justifications our songs in the house of our pilgrimage," and relieve our weariness by the various magnificence of these seven canonical services of our supernatural love.

These are the loves we were made for. They are our means of loving God. If we think too much of their magnificence, we may forget the exceeding loveliness of God. Look at a saint who has loved heroically with these seven loves, for even the love of desire may be heroic, and see how little with all of them he has done for God. He has not paid one of the least of the commonest of God's countless benefits. This is a sad thought, and for us, who are not saints, a grave consideration. For remember how few saints there are, and also how far off from their love if ours! Oh the majesty of God! how it is left desolate, and unrequited! Yet think again of the mysteriously huge price which God puts upon even our little love, and upon the least of our little love! How can it be? What can it mean? "When once we go deep into this subject of Divine Love, mysteries thicken more and more. God alone can give an account of His own love, and of how His unerring wisdom comes to mistake the real price of ours. 0 beautiful Goodness of God! why are we not really beside oui> selves with love of Thee?

Footnotes

1. Lessius do Perfect Piviu. lib. ix. Also St. Thomas i. q. xiii. art. 7. ↩

2. The reader must distinguish between the Divine Essence communicating itself, and the Divine Essence generating itsel' which last is forbidden by the Lateran Council to be said. ↩

3. Beatus vir qui timet Dominum. Qua ratioue beatus? Quia in mandatis ejus cupit nimis. S. Ambrose. A similar statement, made by the Author Bonie years ago in All for Jesus, was animadverted on as inaccurate. It had not however been made without both thought and reading. The expression of St. Paul, desiderium hubens dissolvi et esse cum Christo, is an act of the lore of desire, 1. from the force of terms; 2. on the ancient authority of St. 'Basil, de. rcg. fus. disput, cap. 2; 3. on the modern authority of Bolgeni. Amor di Div., p. i., c. ii. hi.; and that such a love, so expressed, is an heroic love, is asserted on Ihe authority of S. Thomas. 2. 2. qu. xxiv. art. 8. 9. This was the authority on which the statement in All for Jesus was made, and in consequence of the criticism on that passage, the references havo beer verified, the statement reconsidered, and the doctrine of it here re-asserted in Its natural place. ↩

4. The reader must not confound these different kinds of love with th« different states of love expounded in mystical theology. ↩