Chapter I. The Easiness of Salvation

L'estat de la redemption vaut cent fois mieux que celuy de l'innoccno*.

S. Francit of Sales.

The result of the preceding inquiry has been at the very least to satisfy us as to the fact that God loves us, and as to the nature and character of His love. We have seen that Divine love is at once creative, redeeming, sanctifying, uncreated, and without respect of persons. As creative it was not content to call angels and men out of nothing, but it constituted them at the outset in a state of grace, which was not connatural to them, and was in no way due to their nature. As redeeming, it pursued men when they fell; and at no less an expense than the Incarnation of One of the Divine Persons, and with every circumstance of attraction and prodigality, it bought them back again when they had sold themselves as slaves to evil. As sanctifying, it is incessant in its visitations of grace, and marvellous in the heights of sanctity to which it can raise those whom sin had sunk so low. As uncreated, it is especially astonishing and adorable, and naturally includes, and while it includes surpasses, all created ties and all diversities of human love. As without respect of persons, it enables us to repose our trust, not only on the all-efficacious power of God, but upon that beautiful justice and exquisite fidelity which are the true foundations of our love.

In this love of God we have already passed an eternity. In this love we have lived without beginning. He has never seen His glorious Word, but He has seen us in Him, and the mutual love of Father and of Son from the first has scattered its brightness on our foreseen lives. There is something awful in such enduring love, something which overshadows the spirits of creatures so capricious and inconstant as ourselves. It frightens us that we should have been loved eternally. At the same time what must be the necessary efficacy of an eternal love? Here is a very mine of golden consolation. He who has not ceased to love us from for ever, will not lightly withdraw His love. He will not easily surrender to His enemies a creature whom He has borne in His bosom like a nurse from the beginning. Into the least of His blessings He pours an endless love. There are no infirmities which He disdains, no prayers which He disregards. He cannot love otherwise than with an overflowing love, rewarding the most trivial actions, canonizing the most transitory wishes, and placing around every step of life such a retinue of graces, such an attendance of angels, such an apparatus of sacraments, that the self-will must be strong indeed which can break away from God and lose itself.

He apparently consults our interests rather than His own, by making, in reality, the last identical with the first. His first thought for sinners is to make repentance easy and light; and strange indeed are the things to which His wisdom can persuade His justice, or His goodness bend His sanctity. By His own order, our liberty seems to take precedence of His law, while the whole of creation is apparently disposed for the convenience of our salvation. The increase of this love depends upon ourselves. On this side the grave we can have it when we will, and there is always grace to enable us to ask jt and to will it. The more we ask the more He will give, and reckon the obligation to be on His side rather than on ours. All that is wanted of us is, to take God's side, to love what He loves, to hate what he hates, and, to sum up all in one word, to belong to Jesus Christ.

This is a summary of the results at which we have arrived, and it brings us to the conclusion of the second division of our treatise. In the first, we inquired what it was to be a creature, and what it was to have a Creator, and we saw that creation meant and only could mean love. Full of the knowledge we had thus acquired, we proceeded to ask five questions, concerning the principal mysteries of this Divine Love, which, from its eternal hiding-place in God, came into sight at creation; and we saw that our position as creatures made it important to us to have these questions answered. But it may be objected, All this is so much special pleading for God. It does not state man's case fairly, because it does not state it completely. There are certain phenomena which are practical objections to this view, and they have hardly been considered. This is what may be said. I do not own the justice of it, because as I have said before, if I understand rightly what it is to be a creature, and what it is to have a Creator, I do not see how the creature can have any side at all. It appears that God's side is also the creature's side, and that he can have no other. If we imagine for ourselves an immensely benevolent despot, in possession of the most legitimate claims upon our obedience, but bound, by the rectitude of his own character, as well as by our rights, to the exercise of commutative justice, and call him the Creator, under such a 18 being we should obviously have a side of our own, and a point of view belonging to us. But that is no adequate deseription of God. It is only an uneasy intellectual creation of our own. But, if there be a chance of gaining any more love for God from the hearts of his creatures, most willingly should we engage in the task of meeting these objections; the more willingly, because the soil to be turned up is so rich, concerning, as it does, the Creator's love of His creatures, that it will bloom with fresh and fresh blossoms, almost before the plough has furrowed up the surface.

Our object, however, is strictly a practical one. Hence, we are not going to enter into any of the abstruse questions about the origin of evil, or the existence of hell, or the permission of idolatry, or the eternal destiny of those outside the Church. We are speaking to the children of the Church; and, however dark such questions may be to them, or however worthy of their most vigorous intellectual research, they have no right to be practical difficulties to a Catholic in the pursuit of holiness. Strictly speaking, we have no right to have any difficulties at all; for a speculative difficulty can hardly become a practical one to men who take the teaching of the Church on faith; and men who do not, how shall they dream of attaining holiness at all? Nevertheless, there are some questions which, if not without fault of ours, at least without grievous fault, tease and molest us, and become, not unfrequently, sometimes the sources, and at other times the hotbeds, of temptation. Of these, we may select three, especially, because, in handling them, we shall implicitly and indirectly answer many more. The first is, the difficulty of salvation; the second, the ultimate fate of the great multitude of the faithful; and the third, the perplexing question of worldliness; and these will occupy this and the two following chapters.

It is objected, that all that has been said of the creative love of God would lead to the conclusion, that it is easy to be saved, or that, if it is not easy, the case has not been stated in its entirenoss. To this objection it does not seem a sufficient answer to say, that God is not less good, but that the awful malice and corruption of man's will are too strong even for His will to save us. For, though it is true that God cannot both leave us free and constrain us to be saved, yet His redeeming love might bo expected to make such allowances for the unhappy degradation of man by sin, as to make his salvation not a work of more than ordinary difficulty. Surely, these allowances are implied in the very notion of redemption. If heaven be not easy of access, neither its beauty, nor the generosity with which it is offered, are such motives of love as they would be on the contrary supposition. The most perfectly satisfactory answer to the objection, if it be true, is, that salvation is easy. We are speaking only to and of believers, and are not concerning ourselves with a secret which God has reserved for Himself, and into which we do not attempt to penetrate, even by guesses, because it has no practical bearing upon our own service of God. To a believer, salvation is easy; so easy, in fact, that, to each individual soul in the Church, the chances are greatly in favor of his salvation. This may not be true of him at any given moment, as when he has just relapsed into sin, or when he is enfeebled by a long, wilful captivity to sinful habits, but, looking at his life as a whole, and considering things in the long run, it is true that the chances are greatly in favor of his salvation; and I have my misgivings that I am even thus understating his prospects of success. His life must be a life of efforts; but the efforts are easy — easy in themselves, easy in their auxiliaries, easy in both the prospect of a future and the enjoyment of a present reward. What else is the meaning of our Lord's words: Come to me, all you th.it labor, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, because I am meek, and humble of heart; and you shall find rest to your souls. For My yoke is sweet, and My burden light.¹ Or, again, what can be more distinct than the words of St. John: For this is the charity of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not heavy. For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world; and this is the victory which overcometh the world, our faith?f

The first point, then, for us to consider, is the easiness of salvation in itself. Let no one be afraid that, if the affirmative of this proposition be proved, it will make any of us sluggish and indifferent in the pursuit of Christian perfection. Divine truth is continually exerting an influence and putting forth an attraction, which baffle and deride the guesses and predictions of our human criticism. If the view be true, it will lead men to love God who do not lovo Him now, and it will lead those who love II im already to love Him more. It is not the fear of hell which draws men to aim at perfection, nor is it the ambition to be saints which buoys them up through mortification, weariness, and prayer. It is the beauty of God, which has touched them and taken them captive; and whatever discloses more of that beauty, will be but a stronger attraction enabling them to scale higher summits. So while our enquiry will give us sweet and hopeful views of sinners, it will also humble, edify, and stimulate ourselves, if we are trying to advance in the ways of God.

Let us then trace from the first the process by which God vouchsafes to save a soul. Not many days elapse after a child of catholic parents is born, before he is carried to the baptismal font. There by the almost momentary action of pouring water in the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, the child is regenerated. Nothing can be more cagy, or more instantaneous. Yet let us consider all that is involved in an infant's baptism. Not only are the eternal consequences of the fall to his particular soul in one instant destroyed, but the child beco.mes entitled to the most stupendous privileges and inheritance, which would not have been due to him naturally, even if Adam had not fallen. He is at once raised to a far higher state than one of pure nature. He is the child of God. The Divine Nature has been communicated to him by sanctifying grace. Extraordinary possibilities of spiritual developements and earnests of everlasting life have been implanted in him by certain mysteriously infused habits of the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, perhaps of the other virtues also.² Seven other supernatural habits, standing in the same relation to the actual impulses of the Holy Ghost as the other infused habits stand to actual grace, and which bear the name of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, are also infused into him, containing in themselves spiritual provisions for the greater occasions of his life, for his more intimate intercourse with God, and, if so be, for the magnificent operations of heroic sanctity. Meanwhile, if he dies before the use of reason, there is secured to him the eternal vision of God, with all the intellectual glories of an immortal spirit, whose intelligence had never been developed upon earth at all. Now all this haste, if we may so speak, with which the divine mercy seizes the infant's soul, refusing to wait for his consent or till he can accept God's great gift by a rational act of his own, implies such a determined and exuberant love on the part of the Creator, that it is not easily to be conceived, that the rest of the process of salvation shall not partake of the same character of divine impatience and facility. »

The baptized child, when he comes to the use of reason, finds himself under a code of laws, the object of which is to secure his salvation by prescribing the conditions on which it is to be obtained. These are the ten commandments of God and the six precepts of the Church. They are few in number and easy of observance, at least easy under ordinary circumstances, and on the occasions when they aro difficult, quite marvellous assistances of supernatural grace are prepared and heaped upon the soul. The man finds himself in a world of many pleasures, and of these comparatively few arc sinful; and if the world is full of dangers too, it is always to be remembered that the fatal enemy of the soul, mortal sin, cannot lie in ambush for it or take it by surprise. Full deliberation and advertence are necessary to the commission of a mortal sin. When we think who God is and ponder His eternal truth and ineffable sanctity, it must be a wonder to us that any sin is venial, that no number of venial sins can make a mortal sin, and that no habits of venial sin, however inveterate, unworthy, deliberate, or against special lights, can themselves destroy the soul. It is wonderful that a man can be graciously visited by the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, can feel assured in his own mind that such and such practices or 6olf-denials are really the desire of God in his case, and yet be also sure that those inspirations are not intended as a law, and the resistance of them therefore not a sin, though all want of generosity with God will ultimately and indirectly work its way to sin. Furthermore the condition of the creature seems to be untruthfulness. Everything is false around us, full of excuse, pretence, and insincerity. Yet falsehood is the very opposite of God, who is eternal truth, and it is equally the characteristic of the evil one whom our Lord Himself has named the father of lies. Nevertheless lying is a venial sin. No number of lies however wilful, so long as they are not sins against justice also, can of themselves destroy the soul. Surely this doctrine is full of difficulty.

The whole subject of sin abounds with truths of this description, which are more trying to the faith than the mys-teries either of the Holy Trinity or the Eucharist. Thus the remission of venial sin, one of the most interesting questions in the whole range of theology, appears to be so easy as to be almovst unconscious, and to be quite as incessant as its commission. Blessings, holy water, other sacramentals, the signs of the cross, the Name of Jesus, passing acts of sorrow, nay, some have said, any lifting up of the mind to God, and behold! the guilt of these sins falls from us like a withered leaf from the autumnal tree. And what hosts of venial sins, forgotten and unrepented of, may not a man possibly take with him into the next world, as matter for the fires of purgatory, and which can only delay, and not prohibit, his entrance into glory? All this does not look as if God was a taskmaster, or as if heaven were only for the few. Indeed the way in which He can show all this leniency and make these singular allowances for our infirmity, and at the same time secure purity of heart and real love of Himself, is the most astonishing phenomenon which falls under the observation of those who have to minister to the consciences of men. How men can be so very good at the same time that they are so very bad, it is not easy to explain, while experience leaves us in no doubt whatever of the fact.

What is said of the doctrine of venial sin may be said also of the doctrine of intention. What duty could seem more simple on the part of a creature than a perpetual application of mind and heart to his Creator? We are not our own, and we are not left to ourselves. We are working under our Father's e)7e, and it is for Him that we are working, and at His appointed work. Hence the road to sanctity is by the way of actual intentions for the glory of God. It should he every one's prime occupation to make his intentions actual. All other virtues will come along with this. Surprising treasures of grace will be unlocked to us if we attempt it. This one practice will turn darkness into light all over our souls, and no sinful habit, however inveterate, can exist in the atmosphere of this most glorious of all spiritual exorcises. Yet does any one believe that an actual intention is absolutely necessary to the goodness of an action? Does God get no glory from man's free will, except when man there and then intends it? It may be a question how long a virtual intention lasts, to what extent it can inform and invigorate our actions, and insinuate a supernatural character into them, or what amount of original intensity is required in the morning's intention to give it momentum enough to push its way through the crowded actions of an entire solar day. All these may be questions. But no one maintains that any such assiduous application to God as is a notable difficulty to our infirm and easily distracted nature is at all necessary to salvation..

Such are the strange relations in which our baptized child finds himself to his Creator as he grows up, and life oroadens out before him. But there are graver matters ftill than venial sins, apparently countless untruths, neglect of inspirations, or the paucity of actual intentions for fiod's glory. There is the question of mortal sin. It is a 'earful thing for the creature to turn away wholly from the Creator, and we can well understand how it should at once destroy the life of grace in the soul. Grace can live with any quantity of venial sin. So long as the eclipse of God in the soul is not total, so long with amazing condescension and as it were a blind love of souls does He continue to dwell within us. But when the eclipse is total, what can follow but total darkness also? This seems inevitable, and yet it is not so. Notwithstanding the horrible malice of mortal sin, as being fully perceived and deliberately admitted, the grand gift of faith, that almost unfailing power of commg right again, survives the commission of a mortal sin. The life of hope does not become extinct; nay, it requires a fresh, distinct, and most difficult mortal sin to destroy that supernatural habit, which gives the soul the buoyancy and elasticity requisite to its conversion. Now is it quite easy to see how two supernatural habits, two heavenly powers, two divine elements, not natural to man, but gratuitously infused into him at baptism, are not forfeited and expelled by the extinction of the life of grace in the soul by mortal sin? God is eclipsed in the soul; hell has begun in it, hell's worst punishment, the loss of God; and there are two celestial virtues preaching in the darkness still, conspiring against the reign of evil, holding their fortresses with magnanimous patience, it may be for long, long years of siege, and attracting to themselves incessant crowds of volunteers in the shape of actual graces. Is not all this wonderful? Is it compatible with the theory that salvation is difficult? Is not mortal sin itself, against its will, a new revelation of the pertinacious love of God?

But more still. Of the thousands of souls in the world to-day, unhappily immersed in the gulfs of mortal sin, is there one whom a whole multitude of beautiful actual graces is not soliciting to return to God? 0 such pathetic invitations. to come back to Him, such fair lights of God's tender compassion riding over the dark soul like the white y2 sunbeams over a stormy landscape, such sweet remorses, sharp, but very, very sweet, such cold sobering thoughts of future punishment, such wise artful alternations of crosses and consolations, such lifelike speakings of dead books, such barbed words of preachers, such solemn eloquence of the deaths of those we love, such a nameless sensible thraldom of God and grace and heavenly presences, which we never can shake off: — all these, now with a very clamor of assaulting armies, now with low, soft, and songlike pleadings, are the forces of actual grace, which have never been drawn off from before the gates of the heart, however long they may have been obstinately barred against God by a countless garrison of mortal sins.

But the most remarkable feature of the baptized soul's position with regard to mortal sin is the perpetual, unlimited iteration of the sacrament of penance. That there should be such a sacrament at all, after the completeness and magnificence of Baptism, is a miracle of divine love. But that the Precious Blood of the Incarnate Word should be always at hand, like a public fountain at a road-side, open, gratuitous, and everflowing, for the convenience of all passers by, could not be believed, if the Church did not assure us of it. Our sheer inability to comprehend a love so great as God's would make simple Novatians of us, if we had not the Church to inform the littleness of our own conceptions by the magnificence of her dogmas. Is it easy to imagine the mercy which will absolve from different mortal sins the same soul perhaps five hundred times in ten or twenty years, and some thousands of times in the course of life? Yet this is not an extravagant or fabulous case. Then again think of the completeness of the absolution. Each time it destroys the guilt of the sin completely, so that it can never rise again, never bring back, even to the relapsed sinner, its consequences of everlasting pmtUVtment, while at the same time it wakens to vigorous life again merits that have been killed a hundred times by sin. How special, how ingenious, how peculiar, how unlike anything human is this process; and yet on reflection how naturally outflowing from the Divine Perfections!

No kind, no number, no duration of sins impede the facility of absolution. Its efficacy is always instantaneous. The word is spoken, and the work is done. But what is still more marvellous is the little which is required for absolution, the ordinary fidelity of the confession, the positive imperfection of the sorrow, the moderate resoluteness of the purpose of amendment 1 Supernatural as all these must be, the confession, the sorrow, and the purpose, and depending for their validity on certain theological requirements, yet are they not among the commonest graces in the Church? Is attrition a romantic flight of generosity, or the purpose of amendment akin to the heroism of martyrdom? Surely these requisites for absolution seem completely within the compass of our infirmity. And after all it is God Himself who is supplying more than half of them Himself by grace. In truth this enquiry into the easiness of salvation is beginning to fill us with fear, because it is carrying us so far! But might it not have been expected that as Penance is more troublesome than Baptism, so each time that the Sacrament of Penance is repeated, the requisites for absolution might have been increased, that the sinner should have bidden higher for pardon after every fall and that there should have been at least so much punishment for his relapses as consists in an increase of his difficulties in winning God back to him again. Yet we know that this is not at all the case. The habitual sinner and he who has once fallen, the sinner of a day and the sinner of half a century — to all the simple requisites for absolution remain the same. Nay even where the confessor exacts from the penitent more convincing evidence of his repentance, it is only the confessor's inevitable infirmity as a creature, and as such unable to read the heart; God leaves the light conditions of absolution just What they were before. If all this were not among God's daily mercies, how inscrutable would it not seem to us; but we are obliged without fault of ours to tread God's common mercies under foot, because He has so profusely strewn the whole earth with them, that there is not room to move.

There still remains a debt due to God from remitted sin, a debt of temporal punishment. This men may be content to bear, seeing that salvation has been made so easy to them, and the malice of their sins has been so great. But God will not suffer this. Straight from the confessional the Church leads her son into the fertile and exuberant region of Indulgences. There the Precious Blood is made to flow even over the temporal consequences of forgiven sin. God would not stop at mere salvation. It is His way to overflow and to exceed. There shall not be a disability in the sinner's path, not a relic of his own foolish covenants with sin, which shall be left to molest him. Nay the relics of sin shall have a strange sacrament to themselves in the Extreme Unction of the dying. But even this is not enough. Souls must be saved, and the saved multiplied, and the heavenly banquet crowded, even if the constraints of fire be needed to anneal the hastier works of grace. Therefore is it that the vast realms of purgatory are lighted up with the flames of vindictive love. Thus a huge amount of imperfect charity shall bring forth its thousands and its tens of thousands for heaven. Redemption shall cover the whole earth, and be plentiful indeed, and the very unworthinesses and short comings of the creature shall only still more provoke the prodigality of the Blood of the Creator. 0 the mercy of those cleansing fires! what could have devised them but a love that was almost beside itself for expedients? Yet even these fires the sinner can avoid, if he please, and without the difficulties of heroic charity. But they shall be made to cast their light even upon earth before their time, and the Precious Blood shall be turned upon them by Indulgences, and they shall be quenched before their blistering tongues have touched the sinner's soul. 0 talk of the difficulty of salvation after this! And what was Divine Love doing, when we last caught a glimpse of it at work? Ah! as at first, so at last, there is the divine impatience, the divine facility, of a Creator who seems as if He could not do without His creatures. We saw love, and it was bending over purgatory, over the net which was almost breaking with the portentous draught of unlikely souls which it had taken. Mary was moving on her throne; the saints were filling heaven with their intercessions; angels were ascending and descending every moment: mass bells were ringing all over the earth, and beads being told, and numberless indulgences sealed in thousands of communions, and alms flowing in to the poor, and penances and pilgrimages being performed; for Divine Love called loudly on angels, saints, and souls of mortal men, to do violence to it, while Jesus supplied the means in His daily adorable Sacrifice and the plentiful treasury of His Precious Blood, Our last sight of love showed it to us impatiently shortening the appointed time of those suffering souls, and heaven and earth astir, as if some great catastrophe had happened, because God Himself seemed as if He wished to cut short by swifter mercies that last grand consummate invention of His creative love, the quiet, unreluctant, beautifying pains of that cleansing fire!

When God came to His creatures visibly, He scandalized them. His three and thirty years were almost a series of scandals, taken by cold hearts at what appeared the very extravagances of His condescension. What wonder then that a scheme of salvation so easy, so pliant, so accommodating, so full of arrangement, and so exuberant, should bo a scandal both to heretics and unbelievers? It is the same

28G THE EASINESS OF SALVATION.

Jesus who ate with publicans and sinners, who pleaded with the Samaritan woman, who rewarded the humble petulance of the Syro-Phoenician, who acquitted the woman taken in adultery, who absolved the Magdalen, and who carried off with Him as His first trophy to an instantaneous paradise the thief who hung upon the Cross. And shall we call that process hard, while our Mother the Church is maligned all day long for representing it so easy and so large?

Look at God's side of the question, and what can fall upon us but utter confusion, perhaps, if it were not for His grace, utter unbelief? Let us narrow our view to the mystery of our dearest Saviour's Passion. Count it all up, measure it in its length and breadth, fathom its depth, handle it and see what it weighs: then pray and suffer for a while, and count and measure and fathom and handle it all again, and see how it all has grown; then pray and suffer more, and then repeat the process; and at the end of a saintly life you will have but a superficial estimation of that astonishing life-giving mystery. From the sacrilegious communion and treachery of Judas to the little garden of Gethsemane, through the brook up the rugged steep to Jerusalem, through the halls of Annas, Caiaphas and Pilate, and the court-yard of Herod, at the pillar of the scourging, in the guard-room of the thorny crowning, along the way of the Cross, up Calvary, at the nailing and the elevation, to the last cry about the ninth hour — follow the fiternal through this appalling drama, which was all for you, all one excess of His uncontrollable creative love to save your soul: and then put by the side of it the requirements which are of obligation, our necessary amount of /ove and worship of Him, the prescribed frequentation of ihe sacraments, the extent of manly effort entailed upon us, and who can say that salvation is not easy, easy indeed to us, however hard it was upon the shoulders of the Incarnate

Word. And then at last, the Beatific Vision! Was there ever such a history? And yet, simple in her faith, and confiding in the inborn beauty and celestial charm of truth to protect itself, this is the Gospel which the unwearied Church is now boldly proclaiming to the corrupt populations of the nineteenth century, as if it were a Concordat between the Creator and the Creature.

Can we say more? Or if there is more to be said, do we need to have it said? Yes! New love, new love, new love of God — we always need to know it, because we always need to love Him more and more. We thought of salvation as easy in itself, let us now look at it as easy because of its assistances. It appears already as if the utmost allowance had been made by God for the weakness and corruption of our nature, so as to put salvation within easy reach of us. But to secure it still more, He has formed alliances for us with Himself and the invisible world, and prepared a system of auxiliaries, both outward and inward, so ingenious and wonderful, as to be a stumbling block to those who are not of the fold.

First and foremost among these, and entering more or less into all of them, is Grace, a various, supernatural, potent, and unintermitting gift, about which enough has been said for the present purpose in the last chapter. There is not a characteristic either of it or of God's way of giving it, which does not bear upon the question of the easiness of salvation. Let us then keep this in mind, as well as what has just been said of the easiness of salvation in itself, while we enumerate some of those incredible aids and consolations which God has devised to make still easier what was already so easy in itself. What Catholic is there who does not know how the four great wants, and duties, and worships which the creature owes to the Creator, the petition of his infirmity, the intercession of his brotherly aifection, the thanksgiving of his startled speechless gratitude, the intelligent joyous acknowledgment of God's absolute dominion, are supplied to him, with an infinite worthiness equivalent to the worth of the Creator Himself, in the Adorable Sacrifice of the Mass? The perpetual Real Presence of Jesus with His faithful, His perseverance in the obscure tabernacle, and his frequent benedictions, which preside over the evenings of our toilsome days, just as Mass so beautifully fills the morning with its light and love, so that it is Jesus all day long, courting our society, and mingling with us with an intimacy we get to understand less, and to prize more, the longer it is vouchsafed, — surely this is enough to supernaturaiize the whole world, to make hard things easy, and dark things bright, and throw an invisible armor round us which will charm our lives against the weapons and the wiles of hell. But what shall we say of Communion? All ideas of familiarity with God, of intimacy with the invisible world, of the spiritual union of heavenly love, fail us here. The creature, trembling, bashful, eager, backward, frightened, delighted, is bidden to kneel down, and feed, not figuratively or by faith, but with an awful bodily reality, upon his Incarnate Creator. And this eating of the Creator by the creature is the highest act of worship which he can perform! We need not stay to follow out the many-fountained grace of a good Communion, nor to see how it branches out into every faculty of the soul, every power of the mind, every affection of the will, every delicate sensibility of the conscience, carrying with it secret blessings multiform and manifold, and insinuating even into flesh and blood and bone, the seeds of a glorious resurrection. And this miraculous feast on our very Creator may be, and He loves it to be, our daily bread! And this to us, who, if we rightly appreciated our vilencss, should be astonished every morning that our common food and clothing were continued to us still!

All helps must seem little after this; yet as they are all so many fresh disclosures of creative love, we must not pass them over. Loneliness is one of the dangers which we have to fear, because of the inability of our mortal nature to cope with the adverse forces of the invisible world; and, to meet this danger, the provident love of God has given us our Guardian Angel. Ever at our side there is a golden life being lived. A princely spirit is there, who sees God and enjoys the bewildering splendors of His Face even there, where he is, nearer than the limits of our outstretched arms. An unseen warfare is raging round our steps: but that beautiful bright spirit lets not so much as the sound of it vex our ears. lie fights for us, and asks no thanks, but hides his silent victories, and continues to gaze on God. His tenderness for us is above all words. His office will last beyond the grave, until at length it merges into a still sweeter tie of something like heavenly equality, when on the morning of the resurrection we pledge each other, in those first moments, to an endless blessed love. Till then we shall never know from how many dangers he has delivered us, nor how much of our salvation is actually due to him. Meanwhile he merits nothing by the solicitudes of his office. He is beyond the power of meriting, for he has attained the sight of God. His work is a work of love, because his sweet presence at our side he knows to be a part of God's eternal and creative love towards our particular soul.

How great a joy and how real a support it is in sorrow, to have the prayers of a saintly man! We can hardly exaggerate the value of the blessing. To seek it is a sign of predestination. But look up to heaven! What are good men on earth to the giant spirits there, and how many thousands and thousands are praying to our good Creator that we may not miss of the happy end of our creation. There are our patron saints whose names we bear, the saints whom we especially love, the saints of our order, our 19 z vocation, or our country, the saints which were patrons of the holy souls whom we have liberated from purgatory, those Holy Souls now saints as well; all these are like so many beadsmen for us before the throne of the Most High. Glassed in Him, as in a pellucid mirror, they see the threads of our lives weaving their variously patterned web. They understand the purposes of God upon us. They are amazed at the diversity and suitableness of His loving artifices and delicately suited vocations. They see the dangers which threaten us, the temptations which penetrate farthest into us, the graces which are weakest in us, the critical moments of life which peril us; and as they see, so do they pray. 0! if we could but remember in our struggles with sin, how we are being backed before the throne of God, wa should surely spurn the tempter from us in the exulting force of our Christian joy and the superhuman energy of the communion of saints.

The Mother of God! In what surpassing heights is she sublimely throned! Yet there is not a day passes in which she docs not interest herself for us. A thousand times and more has she mentioned our names to God in such a sweet persuasive way, that the Heart of Jesus sought not to resist it. She has been in the secret of all the good things which have ever happened to us in life. She has our predestination at heart far more than we have ourselves. She is ever mindful of that second maternity which dates from Calvary, and how we cost her in the travail of her dolors a price which has no fellow except the Sacrifice of her Son, our Brother and our God. 0! what a light does it not shed on life, to think that the same love, the nameless love, the inexhaustible love, wherewith the Heart of Mary loved her blessed Son, is for His sake and by His own command being poured out over us this very hour! We are lying now on earth, dear to heaven, because we are suffused with its pathetic splendors. Angels envy us a love which in their case cannot be, as ours is, identical in kind with that which the sinless Mother had for her adorable Son. But it is not the poetry of this thought on which we need to dwell, bright revelation as it is once more of God's creative love, but on the real help, the substantial support, the immense solid advantages, the positive efficacy, of this lovo of Mary in the matter of our salvation.

Then we have the power of prayer ourselves. We dare not dwell much on this. But of how many theological controversies is the grace of prayer the secret and the key! Can prayer mean that God will give up His own will, and accommodate it to ours? Ask, and you shall have; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. The fervent prayer of a just man is of great avail. Intellectually speaking, it is very hard to believe in prayer; but let us spend but one week in the real earnest service of God and the exercise of a spiritual life, and the fact, and far more than we ever surmised to be the fact, will lie before us bright beyond the brilliance of any human demonstrations. All experience concurs with God's written word to tell us that the immutable is changed by prayer. The saints turn aside the great universal laws of nature by the blow of an ejaculation. Even the unexpressed will of a soul in union with God is a power with the omnipotent Creator, and looks like what it cannot be, a limit to His liberty. And this is always in our reach, instant, light ning-like, peremptory, and efficacious; and on its way to heaven it unites itself with the prayer of Jesus upon earth, with the intercessions of Mary, with the appeals of all the saints, and the earnest outcries and entreaties of the wide militant Church on earth, and thus, like a beautiful storm of supplication, like a loud-voiced litany of all creation, it breaks round the throne of God with majestic power, and the echo is heard in our hearts almost before the inward prayer is broathed, and the words of blustering temptation are hushed within, and the bigs drops of the impetuous rain of grace are falling thick and fast upon us. Ah I it will be one of the joys of heaven to learn the secret of the power of prayer. But now it is a great abyss to the rocky edge of which we climb and look over, and all is sonorous darkness, and we turn giddy, and recover not our senses until we kneel down and adore the one only supreme, infinitely lovely, and unspeakably adorable will of God.

Even dead things have a wizard life put into them, and help us on our road to heaven. And dumb things have a voice, and inanimate things lay strong hands on us, and turn us round to God. The Spirit of God is hiding everywhere, so that the world is an enchanted place, and all the enchantment is for God. Books, sermons, services, scenery, and the examples of those around us, sorrows, joys, hopes, fears, winds and waves, heat and cold, animals and plants — strange powers are touching them at unexpected moments, and they electrify us with thoughts of God, nay often with keen contacts of His presence. All these things teach us one truth, and that one truth is in itself an amazing help, that it is the will of God to each one of us that we should be saved eternally. And are not all the chances blessedly in favour of the accomplishment of that dear Will!

We have already considered the sacraments of baptism, penance, and the eucharist. But there are other sacraments rwhich deserve special notice as auxiliaries to us in the work of our salvation. Just when boyhood is taking us * out into the world, and when the first-fruits of our young independence are at once so dangerous and so dear, the sacrament of confirmation steps in, seals up the grace of our baptism, fills us with the one grace which at that season we need above all others, the gift of fortitude, tries to be beforehand with the world, and enrols us in the actual militia of God, so that, in addition to our former character of His sons, we have now the further character of being His soldiers, and are placed in a peculiar way under the light, the guidance, and the love of the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity. Nothing can be more opportune or more complete than this sacrament of force.

There are few sources of grace in life more plentiful than marriage, both because of the abundance of its joys, and also because of its innumerable retinue of trials. It makes or mars the happiness of the majority of men, and it is one of the most active powers on earth in fostering or in frustrating the work of God within the soul. Now that we are used to the thought, it seems most natural and fitting that our Lord should have exalted this domestic contract to the exceeding dignity of a Christian sacrament. Yet, beforehand, who would have dreamed of such a thing? And possibly the souls are countless whom this very sacrament has saved, and whom the state of life would have been more likely to ruin than to save, had it not been for its sacramental grace. In no respect does religion so boldly encroach upon the world as in making marriage a sacrament; it is almost the longest reach and the most determined grasp of our sweet Saviour's arm, when He was bent to rescue His dear souls from the fiery ordeal of the world. Death too with its unknown necessities, must have a sacrament which it can call its own, as well to finish the demolition of sin, as to anoint the failing warrior with a heavenly unguent for his last dire combat, and enable him in defiance of earthly calculations to elude the hold which the unseen powers of evil lay upon him in that hour. If we ever need help, will it not be in that dreadful agony, for neither earthly love nor earthly power can help us then? With many, doubtless, the battle has gone hard, though they who stood around neither heard nor saw the mortal wrestle, and with many it was the secret strength of that holy oil, the hidden operation of that sacramental grace, which turned the scale, and consigned to the Good Shepherd's arm that sheep which is now His own for ever. Must not God mean us to be saved, when there is not a conjuncture in our fortune, not a winding in the road of life, but at the turn we find Him waiting with some strange beautiful invention of love, the very mechanism of which none but an all-wise artist could have contrived?

The supernatural power, which God confers upon virtuous actions, is also a remarkable assistance to us in the work of our salvation. It is like adding power a hundredfold to the machines and tools of the mechanic. And here again God does not look to the importance or solemnity of the action, but to the purity of intention with which it is performed. Each pious act, however trivial, has three supernatural forces bestowed upon it. There is, first of all, the force of impetration by which, even while we are unconscious and forgetful of it, our prayers acquire a new vigor and exercise a greater influence over the adorable Will of God. When wo consider how much we want from Him, and how almost our whole life must needs be spent in the attitude of petition, even when we are not formally and directly praying, when we reflect how our very vileness is an incessant supplication to the greatness of our Creator, we shall see how this mysterious power of impetration, hung upon our lives, must aid us in attaining heaven. Of ourselves it would seem as if we were the most unlikely creatures to be heard, relapsed rebels against the majesty of God, and even when we return to our duty, surrendering only on jealous conditions, and with a hundred mean reserves. But this power of impetration makes us really worthy to be heard, and is a sort of invisible beauty glowing in our lives on earth, anticipating that consummate loveliness which gives the interceding saints such power in heaven.

Not less wonderful is the power of meriting which grace communicates to our good works, as though the Heart of Jesus were supposed to animate each one of them, and the infinite worth of His Precious Blood were secretly folded up within them. We have seen how magnificent the rewards of heaven are, and yet one obscure and momentary good work, full of the love of God, and fair to look at because of the purity of its intention, has only to settle but for one instant upon the cross of Christ and thence wing its way to heaven, where its merit has such transcending power as to pass the guards and open the gates of the citadel of the King of kings. See then in what a condition this places us as regards our salvation. Earth is strewn so thickly with the materials of meriting, that all day long we have nothing to do but to gather them up in armsful, as the poor gather firewood in the forest, and even with less toil than theirs. Grace is superabundant and incessant and universal. We can hardly get out of the way of it, if we are perverse enough to try. The process of touching our materials with this heavenly grace is so easy and simple, that by use it becomes almost natural to us, and except for the warm feeling of love in our hearts, we should in the great multitude of our actions, be almost unconscious of the process. So that from our waking in the morning till our falling asleep at night, we are throwing up the merest dust and ashes of earth to heaven, and it is stronger than the laws of its own material vileness, and rises thither, and is put into the divine treasury as the purest gold of Christian merit.

But there is yet another mysterious power infused by grace into our actions, the power of satisfaction. Alas I our sins are both tall and broad, and their malice deep and fearful, while the justice of God is sparkling intolerably and flashing with angry splendor in the light of His jealous and exacting sanctity. We have need to be calling every hour on the atoning Blood of Jesus; for nothing ehort of that can satisfy for the guilt of sins to which eternal death is due. But through the merits of that same dear Saviour our own humblest actions can appease the wrath of God, can give Him real substantial satisfaction, can atone for the temporal punishments in store for our sinful past, and constrain, 0 with such beautiful constraint! even His justice to give us orders on the treasury of His compassion. It would have been indeed a huge mercy, and to our unillumined sense a perfectly inexplicable one, had our Creator been pleased to let our works of penance, our aching fasts, our cold vigils, our burning disciplines, satisfy in some degree the claims of His high justice. But that wc should be allowed to steep the slightest of our ordinary inconveniences, the trouble of getting up in the morning, the coldness of the east wind, the heat of the summer sun, or the insignificant self-denial of a kind action, — that we should be allowed to steep these things in the Blood of the Incarnate "Word, and make them strong, vigorous, and heaven-reaching satisfactions for our sins, is marvellous indeed. What then shall we say to the love which has made all our Christian actions, even those in which there is no inconvenience at all, nay still more, even those which are pleasures and privileges, such as mass, and benediction, and giving alms, and making the sign of the Cross, and reading the lives of saints, into solemn, serious, and efficacious satisfactions for our sins? Surely such a love as this, busy, inventive, ubiquitous, must be bent on saving us, and on saving us as nearly against our wills, as can be with our wills still free!

But He does more. The power of impetration gives us influence over Him for others as well as for ourselves. We can thus obtain gifts for them, which we could not give ourselves. The power of meriting is a personal privilege. Our merits are our own; they cannot belong to another. The glory of heaven is inexhaustible, so that we may go on multiplying our merits, like our Blessed Lady, and yet we shall not drain the rewards of heaven. But strange to say! we may do more than satisfy the justice of God for the temporal punishment of our own sins, whether that punishment consist of the withdrawal of the graces of repentance, or of the sorrows and calamities of life, or of the active fires of purgatory. We may have satisfactions to spare, satisfactions which may go into the treasury of the Church and supply materials for future indulgences, satisfactions which we may at once transfer to others, and God at once accepts the transfer, and bestows the grace, withholds the punishment, or alleviates the suffering, as the case may be. Nay, if He will, He allows us to alienate the satisfactions which we really need ourselves, and bestow them upon others, as an exercise of heroic charity towards our fellows, or of disinterested generosity towards His glory; so that we may not only save ourselves, but help Him also in His grand labor of saving the world which He created without any labor at all. He multiplies saviours, by making us saviours ourselves, at the very moment when He is also multiplying for us the means by which we are the more easily to save ourselves.

But there is still a finishing stroke left to perfect this work of divinest art. There is what theologians call satispassion. In other words, for Christ's sake,³ and because nothing about men can escape the universal contagion of His redeeming grace, there is in mere suffering, in the simple pressure of pain, in the sheer tortures of mental anguish, in the very weight of labor and weariness of endurance, a secret underground virtue which is not without its own peculiar acceptableness to the justice of God. It is not that He loves to see His creatures suffer, it is not that His glory can feed itself on mere torments, which arc but irregularities we have brought into His glad creation, and formed no part in the primeval plan of Him who is Himself an uncreated ocean of joy, a glorious abyss of unutterable beatitudes. His love gives an inward dignity even to the most inevitable suffering of the creature. Who can doubt that it is because of Christ, and the luminous shadow of His redeeming Passion which falls with a soft light on every human woe and mortal pain, and so mellows them into that beautiful landscape of earth which God once looked at and blessed for its exceeding loveliness? Thus He, who made Mary merit even while she slept, communicates to us wretched sinners some faint similitude of that astonishing privilege. Even while we are concentrated in our sufferings, while pain absorbs us in itself or else distracts us by its vehemence, some sort of dumb sacrifice to the justice of our Creator is rising up from our clouded minds, as if our bed of pain were an altar to His purity, or our broken heart gave out a faint odor of Christ, or our aching limb were as cinnamon burning in the fire.

Thus it is that divine love follows us everywhere with helps to our salvation. Thus it is that God's blessed will that we should all be saved bears down upon us with almost a tyranny of goodness, in order that we may not escape His eternal company in heaven. Down to teaching us how to make virtues of our necessities, down to the acceptance of the almost unreasonable sacrifice of satispassion, this will of God for our salvation persecutes us with the prodigality of its gifts. Why is it then that so many Christians go wrong and fail, so many more at least than ought to fail, even granting that all who fail are but comparatively few? Is the difficulty of salvation the only answer to this melancholy fact? Have we not seen with our own eyes that it is not difficult? Does not experience teach us with children, and wc arc as children before God, nay does it not teach us with wise grown-up men, that there are easy things in which disobedience will not obey? The facility of a thing is sometimes a temptation to disobedience. So it will occasionally come across us in our meditations that God does Himself an injury by all this prodigality of His love, that He makes Himself too common, that He does not sufficiently stand upon His dignity, that He may miss of His end by the mere eagerness with which He pursues it, that He may hamper and embarrass generous souls who would run more freely if they were less encumbered with help, that His exuberance may be on the one hand a temptation to unbelief, and on the other an allurement to presumption. We know such thoughts are sins, if we deliberately entertain them; and when we do not entertain them, then they are the broken, foolish, incoherent speech of men intoxicated with the wine of God's love, whose very babblings tell what is working in their souls, and how the excesses of His goodness are perplexing them. He knows best; and we know Him sufficiently well to be assured that not one artifice of His compassion could be spared without the sacrifice of a multitude of souls, who are saved just by that one thing, that single special' contrivance of creative love.

If there are Christians who will not meditate upon eternal things, nor use the same rules of patience and discretion in the matter of salvation, which they use in temporal affairs, or if there are any who let evil habits master them, or if by a special wile of Satan they will not let themselves be brought within the influence of a priest, it is not because salvation is not easy, but because they will not comply with its indulgent requisitions. Some men speak as if salvation could not be easy, unless it actually destroyed free will, and carried them off to heaven by force. Yet in reality the love of God goes as near to this as it can do consistent! y with free will; so near that none but He could havo gone so near, and yet avoided the destruction of it. What is it we would have? Our benignant Creator has bewildered us with the rapid, intricate, enormous machinery of His love. He has not only outstripped our imagination, He haa tried our faith. What more could we desire?

But salvation is not only easy in itself and because of its helps; it is easy also because it is our interest. What interests us is by a law of our nature easy, and nothing interests us so much as a thing in which our own welfare is manifestly and deeply involved. This will become evident to us if we compare the pleasures of sin with the pleasures of a state of grace. The pleasures of sin are not lasting. The fires go out for want of fuel. They only burnt brightly and swiftly at first because it was but dry weeds, thorns, and thistles, which supplied them. There is also a want of continuity in sinful pleasures. Sin is not pleasant to look back upon, as a good action is. It lives in excitement and moral intoxication. Its very vehemence makes it subject to relapses. Somehow also the pleasure of sin wastes and devastates the spirit; it blights our human affections; it scorches places in our hearts where green things were wont to grow, and unlike Christian suffering, it does not fertilize hereafter what it is burning now. It leaves behind it remorse which makes our whole life ache, and weariness which turns the very sunshine into a burden. It causes us to be peevish both with ourselves and others; and to a peevish man his own company is more tedious than words can tell. At last bodily health fails, and our spirits give way beneath us; for sin is the twin-brother of sickness. Worldly misfortune not seldom supervenes; and the loss of the respect of others is one of those losses which are almost inevitable to the sinful man. Most sinners also aro ambitious in their own line, and they are cramped even in their means of sinning; they.cannot fulfil their own dreams of profligacy, nor sin upon the grand scale which they intended. Pain and sickness, which are always hard to bear, are desperately intolerable to a man who is not in a state of grace. They involve loss of time, waste of life, diminution of pleasures, when all is so fleeting, and sin so longs to catch each moment as it flies. Moreover they are so unmeaning, or what is worse, so purely penal to the wicked man. Then there is the slavish dread of death, or what is hardly a less sickening misery, the wild forced unbelief of the eternity which is beyond. In a word, a downright habitual sinner is in the long run neither loved nor loving; and if he does not lose the present wTorld altogether, as well as the world which is to come, it is because the justice of His Creator pays him here for such natural kindliness and moral respectability as he may have shown.

Now contrast all this with the delight of being in a state of grace. Is there any earthly joy like the sense of pardon? How deep it goes down into our nature, unlocking such secret fountains of tears as were far beyond the reach of ordinary hopes and fears! There is also a satisf}'ingnes3 about it, which seldom accompanies other joys. A void is filled up in our hearts, which had ached before. Peace comes where before there was a trouble of uncertain fears, and love awakens with a keener, fresher appetite for its obedient work for God. In prosperity, in adversity, in the love of others, in the enmity of others, in hard work, in old age, in sickness, and in death, the state of grace seems just to add what was needed, to supply that the absence of which was regretted, to throw light upon the darkness or to subdue the glare, to level the rocks or fill in the sunken places, to drain what was marshy or irrigate what was dry. It has shed upon the whole of life repose, plenitude, satisfaction, contentment. It has positively given us this world, while it was in the act of transferring to us the other. And is not salvation easy, when it is our own pre- 2a sent interest, our immediate reward, and downright earthly happiness to boot?

I do not think that, if we kept in view the perfections of God, we should venture to believe, unless the Church taught us, that there was in creation such a place as hell. When it has been revealed to us, we can perceive, not only its reasonableness, but also how admirably it is in keeping with the various attributes of God, and, not least of all, with the exquisiteness of His mercy. There is an awful beauty about that kingdom of eternal chastisement; there is a shadow cast upon its fires, which we admire even while we tremble, the shadow of the gigantic proportions of a justice which is omnipotent; there is an austere grandeur about the equity of God's vindictive wrath, which makes us nestle closer to Him in love, even while we shudder at the vision. But to us who live and strive, who have grace given us, and yet have the power of resisting it; who have room for penance, but are liable to relapse; who are right now, but can at any time go wrong; who can doubt that hell is a pure merc}r, a thriving admonition, a solemn passage in God's pathetic eloquence, pleading with us to save our souls and to go to Him in heaven? There is no class of Christians to whom hell is not an assistance. The conversion of a sinner is never completed without the fear of hell. Otherwise, the work cannot be depended on. It has a flaw in its origin, a seed of decay in its very root. It is unstable and insecure. It is short-liyed and unpersevering, like the seed in our Saviour's parable, which fell upon a rock, sprung up for a season, and then withered away. Hell teaches us God, when we are too gross to learn Him otherwise. It lights up the depths of sin's malignity, that we may look down, and tremble, and grow wise. Its fires turn to water, and quench the fiery darts of the tempter. They rage around us, so that we dare not rise up from prayer. They follow us, like the many-tongued pursuing flames of a burning prairie, and drive us swiftly on, and out of breath, along the path of God's commandments. 0 Hell! thou desolate creation of eternal justice I who ever thought of finding a friend in thee? Yet we cannot doubt but that hell has sent into heaven more than half as many souls as it contains itself.

Even to those aiming at perfection, the thought of hell is an immense assistance. The common things of the faith are, in reality, far above all the high lights of the saints. There is no growing out of or beyond the ordinary motives and old truths of the faith, even for those who are most highly advanced, or are practising the most disinterested love. There is no habitual state in which the spiritual life can rest and stay itself up in those thin atmospheres. Besides which, there can be no bounds safely set to the self-distrust which the greatest saints should have, and are the most likely to have, of themselves. This being so, it is extremely desirable that even those who walk by love, and are aiming at perfection, should bring frequently before their minds the judgments of God, in the terrific severities of hell. There are times when we faint, and are inclined to relax our upward straining, our climbing of the steep mountain of God. Spiritual sweetnesses and periodical absences of temptation often unnerve us for fresh attacks of the Evil One. We come to do things in a slovenly and remiss way, from long habit. While we grow in merits, we are getting hugely into debt to the greatness and the multitude of God's mercies, and this at times unsobers us. Moreover, sanctity cannot grow without there being also a growing appreciation of the possible extremities of God's justice. Neither is it an uncommon delusion to think that we are beyond the fears and impressions of the senses, though our softness in mortification ought to teach us better. Next to a very clear and penetrating contemplation of the attributes of God, nothing enables us to get a true hatred of sin more than the horrible nature of its eternal punishments. In all these conjunctures, the frequent thought of hell is nothing less than an impulse heavenwards. The false delicacy of modern times, in keeping back the scaring images of hell, while, in the case of children, it has often marred a whole education, is a formidable danger to the sanctity as well as to the faith of men.

If the terrors of the Lord contribute largely to the easiness of salvation, the attractiveness of His rewards has also saved its thousands and its tens of thousands. It is hard to disentangle the influence of the thought of heaven from the purity of disinterested love, and it is most undesirable even to attempt it. We want something to put out the beautiful light of earth, and to sully its fair shining. We need a disenchanting power in the midst of a creation so lovely, winning, and specially alluring to our own particular selves, lest it should rob us of our hearts, and leave us nothing to give to God. We covet some unfading ideal so to possess our souls, that we may walk the world in the pure cold chastity of perfect detachment, so that God may be our all. The coruscations of His throne are sometimes too blinding to our eyes. That lofty region of perpetual thunders will sometimes stun us, when littleness and imperfection havo unstrung our spiritual nerves. If we see God now through a glass darkly, sometimes it must be through many earth-tinted glasses that our weak eyes must look at Him. Hence, the need to us of familiarizing ourselves with all that the schools teach us of the joys of heaven. Hence, the power which a simple soul acquires from reposing even on the undeveloped thought of the greatness of his Creator's recompense. And what are all the joys of heaven, but the accidents, the corollaries, the overflows, of the radiant Beatific Vision? So that pure love mingles with our blameless thoughts of self, and heaven is already a power on earth, drawing us with magnetic force into the spheres of its own abounding light; and what is heaven but the locality we give to that dear glory of our Incomprehensible and Omnipresent Father, in whose embrace we long to hide ourselves for love?

I conclude, therefore, that God is bent on saving us, that salvation is easy in itself, easy because of its helps, easy because of the terrors of being lost, and easy because of the attractiveness of its own rewards. This is my answer to those who object to the picture I have drawn of God's creative love. It is founded upon common truths which everybody knows, truths which strike us the more, the more by assiduous contemplation of His attributes we come to know the God to whom we belong. It is drawn from the distinct statements of scripture. It is in harmony with the teaching of the saints. It is the doctrine most full of consolation for creatures. It is the belief most honorable to the Creator.

90 2a2

Footnotes

1. St. Mntt. xi. f 1?t. John, v. ↩

2. Benedict XIV. (do Canonizat. iii. 21) says it is as yet a disputed point, ■whether there is at baptism an infusion of the moral virtues together with the theological. St. Thomas (I. 2. qu. C3. art. 3) discusses the question whether any moral virtues are given to us by infusion, and he answers it affirmatively, because it is necessary that effects should correspond proportionately to their causes and principles. (Cf. Salmanticenses in cursu iii. tr. ii. disp. 3.) Scotus on the other hand denies the infusion of the moral virtue?, (in iii. sent. dist. xxxvi. qu. unic. art. 3). A gloss on the decree of Clement V. in the Council of Vienne, gives these opposite opinions, and the question of the connection between the habits of the theological and moral virtues is left open, because of the authority of those doctors who do not admit th» infusion of the moral virtues iu infant baptism. T ↩

3. It is not meant here that there is not satispassion in the sufferings ol those who are not in a state of grace, or indeed of the heathen. Yet even this may be in some way for Christ's sake, and because of the Incarnation ↩