Chapter IV. Our Actual Love of God

A voluntary thought and a deliberate desire arc not leas actions in the sight of God than the words of our mouths or the operations of our hands. How wonderful, therefore, is it to reflect on the countless multitudes of strong and vigorous acts which are rising up before the majesty of God from the unsleeping world of angels. Their active intellects with incredible swiftness vary their love and praise, their wonder and admiration, almost incessantly. They sweep all regions of creation with instantaneous flight, and bring back on their wings the odor of God's glory and His goodness, to present as worship before His face: though in their boldest flights they have come nigh no limits of His all-embracing presence. Another while, they plunge deep down and out of sight in some one of His mysterious and profound perfections, and rise again and scatter gladness round them, while their thoughts are as showers of light falling beautifully before His throne. Or again they return through the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem, like laborers wending homeward in the evening, bringing with them troops of human souls, dug out of the fires of purgatory, or disentangled from the briars of earth. In every one of their bright actions there flashes forth, as an additional beauty, their joyous dependence on the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, and their placid obedience to His Human Mother. There is harmony too in the immense diversities of their unnumbered acts, and they all

T make one vast unutterable concord of spiritual music in the car of God. And all is sinless there. No taint, no spot, no venial fault, in all that universe of abundant energy and of lightning-like activity. Its exuberance of sanctity is unflagging and everlasting. God be praised for His goodness in securing at least thus much worship for Himself!

A heart that loves God is often fain, for very weariness and sorrow, to rest upon the thought of that angelic world, and to talk of it in secret colloquies with its own affectionate and faithful guardian angel. Yet the heart cannot rest there long; it cannot rest there finally. For, in truth, no one act of that angelic worship is altogether worthy of the Most High. The whole concourse of marvellous adoration, taken as one grand act, falls short of the exceeding majesty of God, and simply falls short infinitely. God is very good, to rejoice in it with that abounding complacency. But it is only another of His condescensions. It is only another proof that He is, in some mysterious manner, wisely beside Himself with love of His finite and imperfect creatures. If they have been proclaiming His praise in their transcendent hymns for millions and millions of ages, they have not yet paid Him, they never will have paid Him, for the single creation of any one, the humblest, of their countless hosts. And what they give Him, is it not all His own already? Did He not evoke them out of nothing, beautiful and radiant as they are? Is He not pouring bright streams of being into their deep, wide natures, with assiduous munificence, each moment of a never-ending immortality? Yet man, poor man, may well rest awhile his tired and shamefaced heart upon this angelic world of beautiful obedience, and the ravishing tranquillity of its energetic love.

The world of human actions is much more limited; especially if we regard only the inhabitants of earth. Nevertheless, to our apprehension, it possesses immense capabilities for the worship and the love of God. Each one of those seven loves which we considered in the last chapter, is capable of almost as many changes and as many distinct peculiarities, as there are souls on earth. Take away the hours spent in sleep, the years before the use of reason, the dotage of extreme old age, and the amount of insanity in the world, and still, what a vast number of human actions call for God's concurrence, and are performed in His sight in the four-and-twenty hours! Yet none of these actions need be indifferent, in the individual case. All of them can glorify God, and the least of them attain successfully a supernatural end. There are the hundreds of thousands collected in the great manufacturing cities of the European nations, with all the sleepless activity of mind and heart which characterizes them. There are the wandering hordes of the desert or the steppe. The crowded cities of the east, the masses of Africa, the swiftly growing populations of the new world, the well-peopled islands of the broad ocean, and those who dwell near the arctic snows. If we bring before ourselves hill and vale, the riverside and wood, the sea-shore and the pastoral plain, and remember how vast and various are the experiences of human joy and sorrow which are going on in almost every one of the numberless inequalities of the earth's surface, we shall be overwhelmed by the calculation of the human actions which are ever being performed.

Now each one of these actions belongs to God by four different titles, and may be referred to Him by as many different sentiments of gratitude and love. His dominion over us is founded on His having created us, on His continuing to preserve us, on His redeeming us, and on His being our last end, our final cause. These are not so much four separate actions, four distinct mercies, the one separable from the other, as the prolongation and perfection of one divine action, namely our creation out of nothing.

Preservation, as we have already seen, is indivisibly one act with creation. Redemption is the preservation of our supernatural life, without which the preservation of our being would seem, not imperfect only, but hardly a benefit. While the tie, which binds us to God as being our Last End, is at once the cause of creation and its effect, the crown and consummation of the whole work of God. We may be almost said to belong more entirely to God by this last relationship than by any other. But all the four ought to enter more or less into every human action. We have no right to eat, or drink, or recreate ourselves without seeking with more or less determinate intention the fourfold glory of God as our Creator, Preserver, Redeemer, and Last End: and a mere mental reference to Him by a loving heart is sufficient thus to ennoble our most trivial doings, and to fasten it firmly to the throne of God.

Perhaps we have not as much devotion as we ought to have to that relation in which God stands to us as our Last End. We think of Him as our Creator and our Father, and these titles so abound in sweetness that they flood our souls with delight, and we cannot tear ourselves away from such heavenly contemplations. Or when our spirits are all freshly bathed in the cold fountains of holy fear, we look up to God with childlike and well-pleased awe, as our all-holy judge and omnipotent irresponsible king. It is less common with us to meditate upon Him and to worship Him as our Last End, and it seems as if our spiritual life sometimes suffered from the omission. ■ For this relation of Last End brings God before us in a manner peculiarly divine, and to which no earthly or heavenly relationship can furnish either parallel or similitude. It puts the whole of practical religion in a clear and undoubted light. It explains all difficulties and answers all objections. There is no satisfaction short of God, no completeness out of God, no support but in God, no rest but upon God, no breathing-time or halting-place except on the Bosom of our Heavenly Father, He is the end to which we are travelling. Like a stone falling on the earth, so are we evermore falling upon God. Creation is not solid ground. It lets us through, and we do not stop until we come to God. He is not one of our ends, but the end of ends, our only end. There is none other end but He. All things else are means. It is this truth which simplifies our lives, and which simplified the live3 of the saints until they were pictures and reflections of His own simplicity. So also if God be our Last End, He is our only home. Wo are strangers everywhere else but in God. All things are foreign to us except God; and thus all our love of home and country, of kith and kin, melts away into the single love of God. He is the home where our welcome is certain, and surpasses all our expectations. He is our rest where alone we can lie down without fear, and sleep sweetly. He in His inaccessible splendor is the beautiful night wherein no man works, but when the weary laborer reposes from his toil in everlasting bliss. He is the cool and fragrant evening, in whose endless sunset creation clothes itself with its final beauty, and reposes in its golden beams, and all sounds of work and all sighs of care are suspended, and all cravings satisfied, and all created spirits filled with an ecstatic life, so full, so glorious, so far-reaching, that the most untiring energies of earth are but as dreary indolence compared with its magnificent tranquillity.

But we must return to the world of human actions. Who could number, at any one given moment, the multitude of such actions on the earth, the pains endured, the sorrows borne, the anxieties combated, the temptations resisted, the words spoken, the thoughts thought, the actions done, all of which the heart of man can multiply and vary and complicate well nigh a hundred times a minute? All these t2 things are the raw material of our love of God, and all can enter into those seven kinds of loving worship which we considered in the last chapter, and all can have a different character of supernatural holiness impressed upon them, according to the four different titles under which we may refer them to God, as our Creator, Preserver, Redeemer, and Last End. But alas! is not this beautiful human worship like a fair dream of some possible creation, which may be, but has not been yet? How much of these treasures of our hearts does our Heavenly Father actually receive? Truly the tribes of men are like a wilderness, capable of cultivation, where corn and wine and oil might come abundantly from the bosom of the earth, and flowers bloom, and tall forests grow, and cattle feed, but which now is little else than sand, and stony plain, and low bushes, wearying the eye by the very expanse of its cheerless monotony.

Yet when in our love of God, and fretted with the feebleness of our own worthless endeavors, we turn to the world of angelic actions, and feed ourselves upon its fragrant and refreshing fulness, we not only soon come to feel how far below the majesty of God is even that transcendent worship, but we rest at last on human acts as after all the sole exclusive adequate worship of the Adorable Trinity. Our eye lingers on the fertile heart of the Virgin Mother, but there is no rest for it even there; and what we seek for God, in our sympathy and affection for His slighted goodness, we find only in the human actions of the Incarnate "Word, in the countless known and unknown momentary mysteries of the Three and Thirty Years, and in the multiplied lives, the daily births, and daily crucifixions, of the altar and the tabernacle. There we behold the Incomprehensible Majesty of the Most High compassed with a worship equal to Himself, as deep, and broad, and high, and bountiful as His own blessed Self. There we sec His infinity worshipped infinitely, with an infinite worship almost infinitely multiplied, and infinitely repeated, in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We would almost rather be men than angels, because these are human actions, and that is a human Heart. Jesus is man, and not an angel. But then He is God Himself; and so it is after all to Himself, and not to His creation, that he owes this beautiful sufficient worship. Shall we sorrow then, and cry alas! because no where is God rightly loved and adequately worshipped, and because the service of the Sacred Heart turns out to be in fact His own? 0 no! rather let us bless Him again and again that He is such a God that none can worship Him as He deserves, that all which is good is at last discovered to be either Himself or at least His own, that all beautiful things come out of His goodness, and go into it again, and are inseparably mixed up with it, and that we only lose ourselves more and more inextricably in the labyrinth of His sovereign goodness the deeper we penetrate into that dear and awful sanctuary.

But we must strive to enter more minutely into the labyrinth of our own manifold unworthiness. We have seen, in the last chapter, in what ways and to what extent it is in our power, with the aid of His grace, to love Almighty God. That inquiry was but a preface to this further one. As a matter of fact, how do we actually love Him? What is the positive amount of our love of God? From all this world of human actions, what sort of proportion does He receive, and with what dispositions is the tax paid? Let us try to make ourselves masters of the statistics of the kingdom of God. Even if it be little in amount which we pay to God, yet much depends on the spirit with which it is paid. Little things are enhanced \y the manner in which they are done, and the intention jut of which they spring. Let us see, then, how our generosity ennobles the meanness and enriches the poverty of our love.

If we look at mankind with reference to their service of God, we may divide them into three classes, comprising two extremes and a mean. The one extreme is occupied by the saints, the second by the great mass of men, and the mean by ordinary believers, such as we ourselves may be. By studying each of these three divisions, we shall obtain something like a clear view of the actual love of creatures for their Creator.

The first thing which strikes us about the saints, is the extraordinary fewness of them. Those who are canonized bear no sort of proportion, in any one generation, to the numbers of the baptized; and if we multiply their number a hundred times, so as to include the hidden saints whom it is not God's will that the Church should raise upon her altars, still, the grievous disproportion will scarcely be perceptibly diminished. Let us grant the largest probable allowance for extraordinary sanctity hidden in the silent cells of the Carthusians, or in other lives, cloistered or not, of singular abasement and abjection, nevertheless, we may suppose the number of saints in any age to fall far below the number of baptized infants who die before the use of reason, and perhaps not to equal the number of deathbed conversions. If we love God really and truly, surely this consideration cannot help but be a painful one. And yet it seems so easy to be a saint! Graces arc so overwhelmingly abundant, and God Himself so unspeakably attractive, that it appears harder to be ungenerous with Him than to be generous; and where perfection is made to consist simply in the fervor and purity of our love, there is almost an intellectual difficulty in comprehending why it is that the saints should be so few.

I>ut it is not only the fewness of their number which we must consider. Wo must think also of the immensity of the graces which they receive. We often get a sight, in times of recollection and prayer, of the fearful way in which our own practice falls short of the graces we receive. Nothing makes us feel our own baseness more keenly or more lastingly than this. Perhaps the disproportion between the practice of the saints and the graces which they actually receive, may be almost as large as it is in our own case. At any rate, we cannot read their lives without being struck with the unused and unemployed profusion of grace by which their souls are deluged. Now all this is God's own outlay. It is what He spends in order to obtain saints; and if we measure extraordinary heights of sanctity by the greatness and variety of the graces given, we shall see that even the holiness of an apostle will seem to be but a poor return for so prodigal an expenditure of grace. Our Lord once spoke of virtue going out of Him, when a poor woman touched Him that she might be miraculously healed. So we may almost define a saint to be one who drains God's abundance more than others do, and costs God more. He is but crowning His own gifts, when He vouchsafes to crown His saints. So is it always when we come to look into the interests and affairs of God's glory. It is at His own expense that He is served. He furnishes the banquet to which He is invited. Like earthly fathers, He must give to His children the riches out of which they may make their offerings to Him. His liberality supplies the means, while His condescension stoops graciously to receive back again what was His own in its first fulness, but which has wasted and faded not a little in the transfer through our hands.

But even at the best, if we make the most of the generous and heroic love of the saints, it is absolutely vile as compared either with its object or with their grace. It is not enough that the little which they give is already rather His than theirs; but it is also in itself unworthy of His 15 transcending greatness and surpassing goodness. Even the saints are unprofitable servants. The chosen apostles of the Incarnate Word were taught so to look upon themselves. Yet these saints are the good extreme among men. From them, if from any, may God look for a plentiful harvest of glory. Their purity of intention, their intensity of love, their generosity of self-sacrifice, are the pastures in which His glory is to feed. Yet even here how poor, how scanty, how irregular is the return of the creature to the All-merciful Creator! He has all the work to do Himself which He pays them for doing; and when they have somewhat marred the beauty of His design, He accepts their work as if on the one hand He did not perceive its imperfection, and on the other did not recognise that all the goodness and the beauty of it were His own. How then must our Heavenly Father condescend to value the worship and the loyalty of a free created will! And how true it is that even the magnificence of the saints is after all but meanness, in respect of the boundless majesty and overwhelming holiness of Him upon whose grace they live, and by whose Blood they are redeemed!

If we turn from the saints to the other extreme, the mass of men, the vision which we are constrained to look upon is truly of the darkest and most disheartening description. By the side of the multitude, the heroism of the saints doe8 indeed appear falsely magnified into the most gigantic dimensions. Can anything be said of men's ignorance of God, but that it ifi boundless, universal, incredible? Could the lives of men be what they are, if they had so much as the commonest elements of the knowledge of God? Do not millions act and speak and think, as if God was of a lower nature than themselves? Do they not attribute to Him an indifference to right and wrong, which they would consider revolting in a fellow-creature? Or again, do they not so completely overlook Him as to forget His existence, and to live as if there were no one to consult but themselves, no will to satisfy except their own? With many it would almost be doing God too great an honor to be at the pains to deny His existence; and others only advert to His perfections to dishonor them by their unmanly superstitions. Indeed in such complete ignorance of God do crowds of men live, that we could not have credited the possibility of it, if our own observation had not presented it to us as a fact which no reasonable man could doubt.

Moreover it by no means appears that, with the appalling corruption of our nature, the knowledge of God is sufficient to secure for Him even our esteem. Horrible to relate, aversion to God is far from being uncommon among His creatures. There are many bold and impenitent sinners who are devils before their time, to whom the Name of God or His perfections are not so much terrible as they are odious. When they come in sight of His commandments, or of some manifestation of His sovereignty, or even some beautiful disclosure of His tenderness, they are like possessed persons. They are so exasperated as to forget themselves, until their passion hurries them on to transgress, not only the proprieties of language, but even the decorum of outward behavior. There seems to be something preternaturally irritating to them in the very mention of God, quite irrespective of the absolute dominion which He claims over them as their Creator. There are others, whose habitual state of mind, when they approach religious subjects, is to be on their guard against God, as if there were some dangerous subtilty in the greatness of His wisdom, or some artful overbearing tyranny in the condescensions of His majesty, or some dishonest concealed purpose in the invitations of His mercy. With these men the probabilities are against God. He is not likely to mean well. It is safest to distrust Him. Discretion must beware of Him. Moderation must not be excited by Him. We must not let

Him throw us out of our wise sobriety. He has come to bargain with us, and we must be vigilant, or we do not know to what we may be induced to commit ourselves. With such men their first thought of God is to dishonor Him; for how shall a son doubt his father without doinj; him dishonor?

There are others who are not by any means to be reckoned among the mass of men, and who serve Him truly with a holy fear, but who seem not to have escaped altogether the contagion of this aversion to God. With them it shows itself in the shape of uneasiness, perplexity, and doubt. They entertain suspicions against the perfections of God's justice or the universality of His compassion. When they hear of certain things, jealousy of God starts up as it were unbidden in their hearts. It is not so much that they have definite intellectual difficulties in matters of faith. But they have not that instantaneous and unclouded certainty, that all is right, and best, and exquisitely tender, where God is concerned, which is the pure sunshine and invigorating air of the atmosphere of faith. Nay, have we not all of us moods, in which an allusion to God makes us impatient; and is not this fact alone the nearest of any fact to a deep-sea sounding of our corruption?

It is hard to see what God has done to deserve all this. It seems most unkind, most cruelly disloyal to the immensity of His goodness, and to the unalterable bounty of His compassionate dominion. Truly, He is our King as well as our Father, our Master as well as our Friend. But are the relations incompatible? It is the very necessity of our case as creatures, that we must be under a law; and could we be under laws less numerous, less onerous, than those under which we are laid by the unchangeable perfections of God? Easy laws, few laws, and laws which it is our own interest to keep — these are the characteristics of the dominion of God. Why then are we restless and uneasy, and not rather happily lost in amazement at the goodness of our great Creator? It seems wonderful that He who is so great should also be so good; and it is the joyous lesson which the sands of life teach us, as they run yearly out, that His very greatness is the only blessed measure of His goodness.

But ignorance of God and aversion to God are not of themselves a sufficient description of the religious condition of the great mass of men. There are multitudes also who are simply indifferent to God. It sounds incredible. The mere knowledge that there is a God should be enough to shape, control, revolutionize, and govern the whole world. And this, quite independent of the minute, infallible, and touching knowledge of Him which revelation gives us. But when that is added, surely it should be enough to strike indifference out of the list of possible things. Surely every human heart should be awake, and alert, to hear the sound of God's voice, or discern His footprints on the earth. Our Creator, our Last End, our Saviour, our Judge, upon whom we depend for everything, whose will is the only one important thing to us, whose Bosom is the one only possible home for us — and He to be regarded as simply the most uninteresting object in His own world! Is this really credible? Alas! we have only to look around and see. Does a day pass which does not prove it to us? Nay, very often, to our shame be it spoken, is it not a considerable exertion even to us to interest ourselves in God? And this indifference, can we be quite sure that it is less dishonorable to God than positive aversion?

These are melancholy results. Yet somehow they spur us on to try to do more for God ourselves, and to love Him with a purer and more disinterested love. Alas! if the saiuts are few in number, those who are either ignorant of God, or indifferent to Him, or have an aversion to Him, u are countless multitudes. Many fair regions of this beautiful world are peopled by idolaters. The sacred places of scriptural Asia are tenanted by the followers of Mahomet. Heresy and schism usurp whole countries, which boast of the name of Christian; and even in catholic lands, it is depressing to think how many thousands there are, who must be classed with those who are not on the side of God. These are very practical considerations; for if there is the least honesty in our professions of loving God, they must greatly influence both the fervor of our devotion and the amount of our mortification. They bring home to us that suffering and expiatory character, which, by a law of the Incarnation, belongs to all Christian holiness.

But we shall find considerations even yet more practical, if we turn from these two extremes to the mean, that is, to ordinarily pious catholics, such as we humbly hope we either are ourselves, or are endeavoring to become. We distinctly aim at making religion the great object of our lives. We are conscious to ourselves of a real and strong desire to love God, and as we grow older the desire grows stronger, and, to say the least of it, it bids fair to swallow up all our other desires, and become the one single object of our lives. The four last things, Death and Judgment, Hell and Heaven, arc often before us, and fill us with a holy terror. We fear sin greatly, and we sometimes think we almost hate it for its own sake, because it is an offence against so good a God. We have times and methods of prayer. We examine our consciences. We hear mass often. We visit the Blessed Sacrament. We are devout to our Lady. We frequent the sacraments. Who can doubt but that all this is the way of salvation? We are happy in the grace which enables us to do all this. We shall be happy indeed in the grace which will enable us to persevere. We are happy also in the thought that there are thousands and thousands in the Church who are thus serving God. But let us look a little moic closely intc this, and examine our lives first as to the amount of love of God which they exhibit, and secondly as to the manner in which we show our love.

There are twenty-four hours in the day, so many days in the week, and so many weeks in the year. We have various occupations, and manifold ways of spending our time; and the most careless amongst us must have some confused and general notion of the way in which his time is distributed. Now we know that the service of God is the grand thing, or rather that it is the only thing about us which is great at all. What amount of our time then is spent upon it? How many hours of the day are passed in prayer, and spiritual reading, in hearing mass, or visiting the Blessed Sacrament, or in other direct spiritual exercises? Of the time necessarily expended upon our worldly avocations, or the claims of society, how much is spent with any recollection of Him, or with any actual intention to do our common actions for His glory? Can we return a satisfactory answer to these questions? Furthermore, we know that it is essential to our love of God, that we should appreciate Him above all things. Does our practice show that this is anything but a form of words with us? Would strangers, who looked critically at our daily lives, be obliged to say that, whatever faults we had, it was plain that we put no such price on anything as on God? When we look into the interests and affections of our busy, crowded hearts, is it plain that, if the love of God does not reign there in solitary, unmingled splendor, at least it takes easy, obvious, and acknowledged precedence of all our other loves? This is not asking much: but can we answer as we should wish? Again, our actions are perfectly multitudinous. If we reckon both the outward and the inward ones, they are almost as numerous as the beatings of our pulse. How many of them are for God? I do not say how many are directly religious, but how many are at all and in any sense for God? How many in the hundred? Even if we are quite clear that a virtual intention has really got vigor and vitality enough to carry us over the breadth of a whole day, and to push its way through the crowd of things we have to think, to say, to do, and to suffer, — and this is a very large assumption — is this virtual intention in the morning to absolve us from the necessity of any further advertence to God, and must it not also have been made in the morning with a very considerable degree of intensity, in order to propel it for so long as twenty-four hours through such a resisting medium as we know our daily lives to be? To use our national word, are we quite comfortable about this? Are we sure of our view about virtual intention, and without misgivings, and have we found our theory work well in times gone by?

God does not have His own way in the world. What He gets He has to fight for. What is true of the world at large, is true also of our own hearts and lives. Though we love God, and most sincerely, He has to struggle for our love. He has to contend for the mastery over our affections. The preferences of our corrupt nature are not for Him, or for His concerns. Thus it happens almost daily that His claims clash with those of self or of the world. We have to choose between the two, and give the preference to the one over the other. We are for ever having Christ and Barabbas offered to the freedom of our election. Now do we always give the preference to God? Or if not always, because of surprises, impulses, impetuosities, or sudden weaknesses, at least do we never wilfully, deliberately, and with advertence, prefer anything else to God, and give Him the second place? And of the innumerable times in which this conflict occurs, in what proportion of times does God carry off the victory? And when He does, is it an easy victory? Or has He to lay long siege to our hearts, and bring up reinforcement after reinforcement of fresh and untired grace, until at last it looks as if He were almost going to throw Himself on His omnipotence, and overwhelm the freedom of our will? Or again, let us look at the degree of application which we bestow on what we really do for God. Let us confront the carefulness, and forethought, and energy, and perseverance, Avhich we bestow upon our temporal interests or the earthly objects of our love, with those which characterize our spiritual exercises. And will the result of the examination be altogether what we should desire?

All these are childish and elementary questions to ask ourselves. Yet the results are far more melancholy than when we contemplated the ignorance, aversion, and indifference of the great mass of men. More melancholy, because we profess to be God's champions; it is as it were our place to be on His side. We live encircled by His grace, which flows around us like the plentiful bright air. Our minds are illuminated by the splendors of heavenly truth, and our hearts led sweetly captive by the winning mysteries of the Incarnation. Our lives are charmed by great sacraments, and we are each of us the centre of a very world of invisible grandeurs and spiritual miracles. And in spite of all this, I will not say it is sad, it is really hardly credible that our love of God should amount to so little as it does, whether we regard it as to the time spent upon it, or as to the appreciation of Him above all things, or as to the proportion of our numberless actions which is for Him, or as to our preference of Him when His claims clash with others, or as to the degree of application which we bestow on what we really do for Him. 0 look at all this by the moonlight of Gethsemane, or measure it with the Way of the Cross, or confront it with the abandonment of Calvary! Turn upon it the light of the great love of Creation, whose prodigal munificence, and incomparable tenderness, and seemingly exaggerated compassions we have already contemplated! 0 can it be that this is their 2 creature's return to his Creator, when the creature is holy and faithful and good, and that such is to be God's strong point in the world, the paradise of His delights, the portion of His empire where allegiance still is paid Him? Merciful Heaven! can we be safe, if we go on thus? Are we really in a state of grace? Is not the whole spiritual life a cruel delusion? And are we not after all the enemies, and not the friends, of God? 0 no! faith comes to our rescue. All is right, though truly all is wrong. We are certainly in the way of salvation. Then we say once more, as we find ourselves saying many times a day, what a God is ours, what incredible patience, what unbounded forbearance, what unintelligible contentment! Why is it that very shame does not sting us to do more for God, and to love Him with a love a little less infinitely unlike the love, with which, do what we can, we cannot hinder Him from loving us?

So much for the amount of our love of God. It is little; so little that it would be disheartening, were it not always in our own power, through the abundance of His grace, to make that little more. Let us now, at any rate, console ourselves by looking at the manner and spirit in which we pay to God this little love. Love, like other things, has certain rules and measures of its own. It has certain habits and characteristics. It proceeds upon known principles, which belong to its nature. It acts differently from justice, because it is love and not justice. It does not obey the same laws as fear, simply because it is not fear but love. Every one knows the marks of true love. They are readiness, eagerness, generosity, swiftness, unselfishness, vigilance, exclusiveness, perseverance, exaggeration. In all these respects, except the last, our divine love must at once resemble and surpass our human love. In the last respect it cannot do so, because God is so infinitely beautiful and good, that anything like exaggeration or excess in the love of Him is impossible. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the model of Divine Love. The Immaculate Heart of Mary ascertains for us the amazing heights of love which a simple creature can attain by correspondence to the grace of God. The Saints are all so many samples of divine love, in some one or more of its special characteristics and departments. We know, then, precisely the manner and spirit in which we are to love God. Let us see how far our practice squares with our theory.

Is the following an unkind picture of ourselves? We serve God grudgingly, as if He were exacting. We are slow to do what we know He most desires, because it is an effort to ourselves. We cling to our own liberty, and we feel the service of God more or less of a captivity. Our whole demeanor and posture in religion is not as if we felt God was asking too little, or as if we were most anxious to do more than He required. We serve Him intermittingly, though perseverance is what He so specially desires. We have fits and starts, pious weeks or devout months, and then times of remissness, of effort, of coldness; then n fresh awakening, a new start, and then a slackening again. It is as if loving God went against the grain, as if we had to constrain ourselves to love Him, as if it was an exertion which could not be kept up continuously, as if human holiness could never be anything better than endless be ginnings, and trials which are always falling short of the mark. Thus we also love God rarely, under pressure, on great occasions, at startling times, or when we have sensible need of Him. All this looks as if we did not love Him for His own sake, but for ourselves, or for fear, or because it is prudent and our duty. There is, unmistakeably, a want of heart in the whole matter.

Have we ever done any one action which we are quite confident was done solely and purely for the love of God? If we have, it has not been often repeated. We are conscious to ourselves that there is a great admixture of earthly motives in our service of God. It is astonishing what an amount of vain-glory and self-seeking there is in our love of Him. "We arc also perfectly and habitually aware of this; and yet, which is even more astonishing, we are quiet and unmoved. It breeds in us no holy desperation, nor does it inspire us to any vehement and determined struggles to get rid of the desecrating presence of this unholy enemy. Nay, it almost appears as if we should never have dreamed of loving God, if He Himself had not been pleased to command us to do so; and therefore we do it just in the way in which men always do a thing because they are told, and which they would not have done if they had not been told. Many of us, perhaps, have already given the best of our lives to the world, and now it is the leavings only which go to God. Oh! how often is He asked to drink the dregs of a cup which not the world only, but the devil also, have well-nigh drained before Him! and with what adorable condescension does He put His lips to it, and dwell with complacency upon the draught, as if it were the new wine of some archangel's first unblemished love!

Then, again, we exaggerate our own services, in thought if not in words; and this shows itself in our demeanor. True love never thinks it has done enough. Its restlessness comes from the very uneasiness of this impression. Now, this is not at all our feeling about God. We do not look at things from His point of view. It is only by a painfully-acquired habit of mind that we come to do so. Half the temptations against the faith, from which men suffer, arise from the want of this habit, from not discerning that really the creature has no side, no right to a point of view, but that God's side is the only side, and the Creator's point of view the creature's only point of view,.and that he would not be a creature were it otherwise. Another unsatisfac-

OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. Z6 i tory sign is, that, ordinarily speaking, we have so little missionary feeling about us, and are so unconcerned whether sinners are converted, or whether men love God or nqt. It is quite impossible for true love to co-exist with an unmissionary spirit.

But we all of us have times when we love God more than usual, times of fervor, of closer union with Him, of momentary love of suffering, transitory flashes of things which are like the phenomena of the saints. They neither last long enough nor come often enough to form our normal state. They are simply our best times. Now we need not dwell either upon their rarity or their brevity; but we would fain ask if even then we love God altogether without reserves. Is nothing kept back from Him? Is our renunciation of self ample and faultless? Have we no secret corner of our hearts, where some favorite weakness lurks in the shade, and which the strong light of heavenly love has not blinded to its own interests? I am afraid to go on with the picture, lest I should have to ask myself, at last, What is left of the Christian life? But we have seen enough to confess, of our love of God, that not only is what we give very little, but that even that little is given in the most ungraceful and unlovelike of ways. Surely this is a confession not to be made by words, which are not equal to the task, but only by silent tears, while we lie prostrate before the Throne of Him, whom, strange to say, we really do love most tenderly, even while we slight Him!

On all sides of us there are mysteries. Our relations to God are full of them. Our coldness and His love, His forbearance and our petulance, — we hardly know which is the most strange, the most inexplicable. If we consider attentively how little we love God, and in what way we show it. honesty will compel us to acknowledge that we men should not accept such service at each other's hands. We should reject it with scorn. We should regard it as an injury rather than as a service. A father would disinherit his son; a friend would put away from him the friend of his bosom, if his love were requited as we requite the love of our Heavenly Father. Yet it is the ever-blessed God, who is what He is, to whom we, being what we are, dure to offer this mockery of worship. Will He open heaven, and east His fiery bolts upon us, and annihilate us for ever, that we may be no longer a dishonor to His beautiful creation? Or will He turn from our proffered service with anger, or at least with a contemptuous indifference? "VVe cannot easily understand how it is that He does not. Yet on the contrary He vouchsafes to accept and reward our pitiful affection. And His very rewards and blessings lead us astray; for we begin to put a price upon our merits, according to the greatness of His recompense, not according to the reality of their lowness; and we think we have treated Him with great generosity, and that His reward is to us only the proof of our generosity; while on the contrary we consider Him to be asking very much of us; and our minds do not see His rights, and our hearts do not feel them. And God sees all this, and He makes no sign. It is not so much as if He seemed insensible to our ingratitude; it is rather as if He did not see that it was ingratitude at all. No love can be conceived more sensitive than that of Him who has eternally predestinated, and then called out of nothing, the objects of His choice and predilection. Yet God does not seem to feel our coldness and perversity. Kather He appears to prize what we give Him, and to rejoice in its possession. He wished it otherwise. He made very different terms at the outset. He asked for far more than He has got. But He makes no complaint; and not being able to have His terms allowed, He takes us on our own.

Is it possible that it can be God of whom we are daring thus to speak? 0 why do not all we, His children, league together to make it up to Him? 0 angels of heaven? why is your worship of that Blessed Majesty aught else but tears?

IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 2C9