Chapter IV. Our Own God

THE Creator is the creature's home. Neither spirit of angel nor soul of man can rest short of God. They can anchor nowhere save in the capacious harbor of His infinite perfections. All things teach us this beautiful truth. All things that find us wandering lead us home again, to the Bosom of our Eternal Father. The three distinct orders of nature, grace, and glory, if the two last may indeed be called distinct, all in their own respective ways, at once teach us this comforting and saving truth, and help us also to practice what they teach. The natural joy of beautiful scenery, the strong grace of Christian holiness, and the thrill of glory which passes through our souls from the unveiled Face of God, all, in degrees almost infinitely apart, draw us home to God, or keep us there. God is our Last End as well as our First Cause. O that the day were come when we shall be securely at His Feet for ever!

God is included in the idea of creation as our Last End as well as our First Cause. It is as our Creator that He is both the one and the other. We have seen that creation was simply love, a love which called our natures out of nothing, a love which gave them all that was due to them, a love which gave them grace which was not due to them, a love which in matter of fact destined them to a glory which is far beyond our natural capacities. All the three orders of nature, grace, and glory were represented in the act of creation, nature from the very necessity of the case, grace because as a matter of fact God created both angels and men in a state of grace,¹ glory because it was for His glory that we were necessarily created, and, as a matter of fact, in the exuberant goodness of His decrees, for the special, but not necessary, glory of the Beatific Vision.

The angels were created all at once, and because of their excellent perfections, and especially the perfect knowledge which they had of themselves, they rapidly exercised their free will, completed the course of their probation, and entered into the rest and enjoyment of the Creator's beauty. Men are created slowly and by successive generations, and from the great inferiority of their rational nature to the vast intelligences of the angels, they require the revolution of many centuries before their numbers are completed, their destinies fulfilled, and the whole of the elect enter into the everlasting joy of God. Both these creations of angels and men were created simply for God's own glory; but His glory was the creature's bliss, because His glory was to have rational children who should be like Himself and be made participators of His beatitude. But as we cannot be participators of His joy by any natural beatitude, however exquisite and satisfying, and as His very first intention in creation was that we should participate in His own beatitude, it follows that His very intention in creation already involved both grace and glory; and this is the explanation of the beautiful and touching mystery of our being created in a state of grace originally. So nature involved grace, not necessarily, but in the designs of creative love, and grace looked on to glory, and prophesied of it to free-will, and more than prophesied of it, for it was the capacity of glory and its beginning.

Because God is infinitely good and infinitely perfect, He is by His nature, so to speak, bent upon the communication of Himself; and this communication of Himself is, as theologians tell us, twofold, a natural communication, and a free communication. The natural one, as it is altogether necessary, is eternal. It is that by which the Father communicates to the Son His whole essence, power, wisdom, goodness, and beatitude, and the Father and the Son to the eternally proceeding Spirit. It takes place in the production of the Word through the intellect, and of the Spirit through the will; and each of these processions is so perfect and full, that by it the whole good, which is communicated, is as perfectly possessed by Him who receives as by Him who communicates it. The free communication of God is temporal, and takes place in creation, and creation is in order to it, and it takes place first, and foremost, and eminently, in the Hypostatic Union, and then in the gifts of grace and glory; and God's communication of Himself, which in the act of creation was not supernatural, was with a view to what was supernatural, and, as a matter of fact, was not disjoined from it in act. To this, therefore, says Lessius, did God of Himself incline, that is, of His own goodness, setting aside all merit and all necessity of the creature. This communication begins in this life by the gifts of grace, especially faith, hope, and charity; by which virtues we are not only made like to God, but God also is united to us. It is perfected however in the next life by the gifts of glory, namely, the light of glory, the vision of the Divinity, beatific love, and beatific joy. For by these we attain our highest possible similitude to God, and become perfectly the sons of God, and deiform, shining like the Divinity, and exhibiting in ourselves the most excellent image of the Holy Trinity. For by the light of glory we are made like the Father; by the vision of the divine Essence and divine Persons we become liku the Son; by beatific love we are made like the Holy Ghost; by joy we become like the Godhead in beatitude, and the participation of the divine beatitude is completed in us.²

When we speak of God's glory we may mean one or more of four things. First of all, His glory may be either intrinsic or external; and then each of those may be of two kinds also. God's own excellence, His own beauty, the infinity of His perfections in Himself, is as it were the objective glory of God, which is intrinsic to Himself; whereas His own knowledge of Himself, His own love of Himself, and His own joy in Himself, which are also intrinsic, are what theology terms His formal glory. The beauty of creation, the perfections of creatures, their loveliness, their number, their adaptations, even their color and form, are the external glory of God, represented objectively, whereas the knowledge of Him, the love of Him, and the joy in Him, which His rational creatures have, is His formal external glory. It is necessary to put these hard words together, in order to understand the practical conclusions to which we shall be coming presently.

Now we say that God is necessitated to do everything for His own glory, and that though the creation of the world was perfectly free, yet, granting that it was to be created by God, it must of necessity be created for His glory. This is almost venturing to say that He could not help Himself, at least as to the end for which He created. But oh! what joy the creature will find at last in this very necessity, which God is under, of doing everything for His own glory! That God has created the world is a fact. It is contradictory not to His wisdom only, but to every one of His perfections, that He should have created it without an object at all. It is impossible to Him, as God, to have any other end but Himself. It is contrary to the plenitudo of His sclf-sufficienc3r, that He should have created it in order to gain from it conveniences which He has not now, or joys which He does not already possess; for these are intrinsic to Himself. But it is possible for Him to have a glory extrinsic to Himself, over and above that which is intrinsic. On the other hand, it is impossible for Him to have anything else extrinsic to Himself, which creation could give Him, except glory. Even then the glory is not necessary to Him, and does not make Him more blessed or more self-sufficient than He was; at best it is only congruous to His Divine Majesty to have it. Thus it is that God is necessitated to do all things for His own glory. He is limited to this by the very plenitude of His perfections. As nothing exists in the world without the influx of His omnipresence, supporting it and keeping it above the abyss of nothingness, into which of itself it is falling back evermore, so also nothing exists in the world, which is not involved in and depending upon God's glory. Even the permissions of sin glorify Him, for without them the wills of His creatures would not be free.

While God was thus under the necessity of creating all things for His glory, if He created at all, much more is the creature under the necessity of glorifying God in all things. But it was not necessary for God to raise the creature to the special glory of the Beatific Vision. It was not due to his nature, not to the highest angelic nature. It was beyond it; and it was beyond it not in degree only, but in kind also. It belonged to another order than that of nature. It was superadded to nature. Nature had to receive another order, that of grace, before it could be capable of the third order, that of glory. Wonderful things had to be done to it, in order to habilitate it for such a possibility as the sight of God. But the remarkable thing is, that these things wero done in the act of creation. The orders both of nature and of grace started in that one act of divine benignity. It was 2 ii 2 sin only, which separated what God had put together. The rebellious angels sinned, and so lost their primal grace, and having no fresh trial given them, forfeited thereby forever the order of glory. Man sinned, and in him also the two orders became separated, and the whole magnificent apparatus of redeeming love is God's invention to unite them again, so that men may become capable of the order of glory. Not that this is the sole reason or the whole explanation of the Incarnation, but only of redemption. Thus, it is absolutely necessary, when we are thinking of creation, to bear in mind the fact, that God created angels and men in a state of grace, and not in a state of pure nature. We are not concerned with other possible creations, but only with our own creation; and the creations of both those angelic and human families of rational creatures, united in the church under the single headship of Jesus, were accomplished in a state of grace; and they were so, because glory, and the especial supernatural glory of a participation in His own beatitude, entered into God's first intention and original idea, as Creator. We shall never understand creation, if we let this fact out of sight for a moment.³

The inanimate and irrational creations glorify God by the very splendor of the beauty in which He has clothed them. They glorify Him by their adaptation and subservience to man. Their abundance in their kinds, and their many kinds, which are over and above what are necessary to man, is another glory of their Creator, by being in some sort a picture of His copious magnificence. They glorify Him, also, by bearing on themselves the seal and signet of His Divinity, and even of His Trinity in Unity, and their degree of goodness depends on the degree in which they adumbrate the divine perfections. But much more does the rational creation glorify its Creator. By its very existence it represents God, as the inanimate and irrational creations do. But by its intelligence it knows God, and with its knowledge loves Him; and by its will it loves Him, and with its love enjoys Him. Thus, the knowledge, love, and joy of the rational creatures, the three things by which they chiefly shadow forth the Holy Trinity, praise and admire and worship the Divine Nature, all which is the rendering glory to Him. By these three things, they, as it were, enter into God and rest in Him, through the gifts, of grace and glory. But let us hear Lessius. In these three acts resides God's chiefest glory, which He Himself intended in all His works; and so likewise in the same acts reside the highest good and formal beatitude of men and angels. By these acts, the blessed spirits are elevated infinitely above themselves, and, in their union with God, become deiform, by a most lofty and super-eminent similitude with God, so that the mind can conceive no greater one. Thus, like very Gods, they shine to all eternity as the sons of glory and the divine brightness. By those same acts, they expand themselves into immensity, so as to be co-equal and co-extensive, as far as may be, to so great a good, that they may take it in and comprehend it all. They will not linger outside, as it were, upon the surface of it, but they go down into its profound depths, and enter into the joy of their Lord; some more, some less, according to the magnitude of the light of glory which is communicated to each. Immersed in this abyss, they lose themselves and all created things; for all other goods and joys seem to them as nothing, by the side of this ocean of goods and joys. In this abyss there is to them no darkness, no obscurity, such as hangs about the Divinity to us now; but all is light and immense serenity, although they are not able fully to comprehend it. There is their eternal mansion, with a tranquil security that they shall never fail. There is the heaven of heavens, in comparison with which all creation is but dross. There is the fulfilling of all their desires; there the possession and frui⁴ tion of all things that are desirable. There nothing will remain to be longed for, or sought for more; for all will firmly possess and exquisitely enjoy every good thing in God. There the whole occupation of the saints will be to contemplate the infinite beauty of God, to love His infinite goodness, to enjoy His infinite sweetness, to be filled to overflowing with the torrent of His pleasures, and to exult with an unspeakable delight in His infinite glory, and in all the goods which He and they possess. Hence comes perpetual praise, and benediction, and thanksgiving; and thus all the Blessed, arrived at the consummation of their desires, and, knowing not what more to crave, rest in God, as their Last End.*

Thus does creation come home, like a weary bird to its roost, to rest in its Creator. And then all movements cease, all vicissitudes, changes, progresses, aspirations, discoveries; and all is rest within, without, around, the kingdom of eternal peace. Then the Son gives up the kingdom to His Father, as the Apostle speaks;f and the subjection of His Human Nature, which had been, as it were, veiled in the government of the Church and in the pomp of judgment, becomes more apparent; and then, as if this last act of unspeakable suljection on the part of that Created Nature, which is the Head and First-born of all creatures, were the crowning beauty of creation, God the Creator becomes all in all, and the chronicles of this creation close Beyond that, all is lost in the indistinguishable radiance of eternity. Such is the history of creation, as theology ventures to conceive it lying in the divine mind. It is a work of simple love, of gigantic dimensions, with the most beautiful proportion in all its parts, and the most exquisite finish in every detail. Love is the life of it, from first to last; and its result is an abiding, immortal, created counterpart of the eternal, uncreated, and undivided Trinity.

If we have taken the pains to master this somewhat difficult account of creation, we shall see that it is, as it were, the frame within which all the relations of the Creator and the creature, which have occupied the preceding chapters, are enclosed. It will make some things plain, which perhaps were not plain before; and it will itself be the easier to understand from what has gone before. Even the horror of worldliness will now become more apparent, and its danger more alarming. But what is the conclusion to which it all leads? That religion must necessarily be a service of love; that the easiness of salvation comes of its being a personal love of God; and that the only security from worldliness is also in a personal love of God. It is neither the wonderful character of its doctrines, nor the pure simplicity of its precepts, nor the supernatural power of its assistances, which make religion what it is, but the fact of its being the creature's personal love of the Creator. This is an obvious thing to say; and yet such consequences flow from it that it must be still more insisted on.

That all holiness should consist in a personal love of God flows out of the very tie of creation. Creation was an act of love, forestalling or including all other loves whatever. The creature was at once put by the act of creation into various personal relations to the Creator, all of which were of the very tenderest and most intimate description. It flows also out of the knowledge which the creature has of the Creator, and the motives for his personal love of Him increase with the amount of that knowledge. Each perfection pleads for love. Each puts a price on love, and on nothing else but love. Love is the one want of all God's attributes, if we may call it want, and the supplying of that one want is the sole worship of the creature. The easiness of salvation showed that all religion must be a personal love of God. It was easy just because this was all. Tha end of all its sacraments and graces was to infuse or to elicit that love, and the more of it they infused and the more of it they elicited, the more did they contribute to the facility of the triumph. Sin teaches us that all is nothing-worth but personal love of God, both because its forgiveness is the sweetest preacher of divine love on earth, and because the horror of its punishment is the total loss of love in that dark godless hell which is its end. The personality of the evil spirit drives us also into personal love of God, as our security and refuge. The dangers of the world are to be met in no other way than by the personal love of God. It is only the love of Hi in which can kill unworthy loves. It is only the desire of Him which can turn the soul away sick, and dispirited, with the perishable goods of earth. It is only the light of His beauty which can dim and dishonor the flaunting, garish beauty of the world, or make us secretly and sweetly discontented with its lawful, natural, and blameless loveliness. But most of all does this necessity of a personal love of God flow out of the fact, that God Himself, and not any of His created rewards, is our Last End. God Possessed, our own God, that is creation's home, that is our last end, there only is our rest. 0 that the winds of grace would blow that we might sail more swiftly over this broad sea to our eternal home! Another day is gone, another week is passed, another year is told. Blessed be God then, we are nearer to the end. It comes swiftly; yet it comes slowly too. Come it must, and then it will all be but a dream to look back upon. But there are stern things to pass through; and to the getting well through them, there goes more than we can say. One thing we know, that personal love of God is the only thing which reaches God at last. Other things, — they look wise, they begin well, they sound good — but thoy wander; they are on no path; they go aside, or they fall behind, but home they never come. To love, the way is neither hard to find, nor hard to tread; for so it is that love never comes home tired. It gets to God through the longest life more fresh, more eager, more venturous, more full of youth, more brimming with expectation, than the day is started amid the excesses and inexperiences of its first conversion.

No one denies this doctrine of the necessity of personal love of God. It could not be denied without heresy. But there are two different schools of spirituality which treat it very differently; indeed whose difference consists in their different treatment of it.⁵ All are agreed that as the proof of love is the keeping of the commandments, so the sense of duty, the brave determination to do always and only what is right, and because it is right, must go along with and be a part of personal love of God.f Personal love of God without this would be a falsehood and a mockery. They who dwell most strongly on the sense of duty do not omit personal love of God; and they who lay the greatest stress on love both imply and secure the keen sense of rightfulness and duty. But much depends on which of the two we put foremost. It is possible by dwelling exclusively on love to make religion too much a matter of mere devotions, an affair of sentiments and feelings, highly strung and therefore brittle, overstrained and so shortlived. It is possible, on the other hand, that by laying all the stress on duty, especially with young persons or again with sinners,

*A whole string of consequences seem to follow in ascetical theology from the doctrine of Vasquez, Naturam rationalem esse regulam honestatis. The common teaching, however, is against him. See Vasq. i. 2, disp. 58, 2, and disp. 97, 3.

the true motive of duty may not have fair play, and tho peculiar character of the Gospel be overlooked or inadequately remembered. "We must pursue such and such a line of conduct because it is commanded, because it is right, because it will win us respect, because it will enable us to form habits of virtue, because it will edify, because we cannot otherwise go to communion, because we shall be lost eternally if we do not pursue it. This is quite intelligible, and it is all very true, but not particularly persuasive, especially to those whom youth makes ardent, or those whom sin has made invalids. We must pursue such and euch a line of conduct because it is the one which God loves, and God loves us most tenderly, and has loved us from all eternity, and God yearns that we should love Him, and lie catches at our love as if it were a prize, and repays it with a fondness which is beyond human comprehension, and it grieves His love, and He makes it a personal matter, if we swerve from such conduct, and if we only love, all will be easy. This also is intelligible, and very true, and also very persuasive, and has a wonderful root of perseverance in it. But it comes to pass that, while both views are very true, they nevertheless form quite different characters. So that it is one of the most important practical questions of our whole lives, to settle whether we will love God because it is right, or whether we will do right because God loves us and we love Him.

Strange to say, while both these views arc true, they look, as we examine the working out of them, like two different religions. The fact is, that for some reason or other, it is very hard to persuade a man or for him to persuade himself that God loves him. The moment that fact becomes a part of his own sensible convictions, a perfect revolution has been worked in his soul. Everything appears different to him. He has new lights, and feels new powers. Faculties in him, which were well nigh dormant, wake np find do great things. He is a new man. It is a kind of conversion. However good he was before, however regular, however conscientious, however devotional, he feels that the change which has passed over him is in some sense a veritable conversion. He is on a new line, and will henceforth move differently. Many go to their graves without at all realising practically the immense love which God has for them. It has been a want in them all through their lives, and they would have been higher in heaven had they known on earth what heaven has now taught them. A theologian says, that it is one of the weaknesses even of the saints, that they cannot believe in the greatness of God's love for them. It is related in the chronicles of the Franciscans, that, until her director with some difficulty undeceived her, St. Elizabeth of Hungary thought that she loved God more than He loved her. In truth the very immensity, the excesses, the apparent extravagancies of God's love, stand in its own light, and hinder men from believing it as they should. They hardly dare to do so; for it seems incredible that God should love us as He is said to do. It is the grand date in everybody's life, when the knowledge that his Creator loves him passes into a sensible conviction.

If all the evil that is in the world arises from the want ot! a practical acknowledgment of the true relations between the Creator and the creature, it is equally true, that from the same want comes all that is deficient in our spiritual lives; and furthermore, the true relations between the Creator and the creature are more readily appreciated, more lovingly embraced, and more perseveringly acted out, on the system which puts love first and duty second, which does right because God loves us, rather than loves God because it is right. Religion, no doubt, comes to persons in different ways. Different parts of it attract different mind?. Men begin in various places in religion. There is not es- 2i actly any one normal beginning of being pious. We should never think therefore of condemning, or throwing the slightest slur, on any method which succeeded in securing the continuous keeping of God's commandments upon supernatural motives. This must be borne in mind, together with the full admission both of the safety and soundness of the other principle, while we state the reasons for preferring that school of spirituality, which puts forward most prominently the personal love of God, and dwells upon it to all persons and at every turn. It seems of the two the most likely to advance the Creator's glory, first by saving a greater number of souls, and secondly by swelling the ranks of those who generously aim at perfection.

Love sharpens our eyes, and quickens all the senses of our souls. Now when we dwell very exclusively on the sense of duty, and urge people to learn to do right just because it is right, we seem often to be wanting in the delicacy and fineness of our spiritual discernment. We are not always on God's side, because we do not instantaneously and instinctively apprehend on which side He is. We do not prophetically see the evil, which is as yet invisible and implicit in some line of action. Our spiritual tastes arc blunt, sometimes inclining to be gross. We do not at onco detect worldliness in its first insidious aggressions. Love has -a specialty for all these things; and conscientiousness often runs aground in shallow places, where love sails through, finding deep water with an almost supernatural skill. The duty principle, if it is allowable so to name it shortly for convenience sake, is more apt to grow weary than love. It is always against the grain of our corrupt nature, and consequently we are obliged to be always making efforts, in order to keep ourselves up to the mark; and when times of dryness or seasons of temptations come, these efforts are not easy to sustain. Love on the contrary is a stimulant. It has a patent for making things easy. It invigorates us, and enables us to do hard things with a sensible sweetness and a religious pleasure, when mere conscientiousness would fail through the infirmity of its own nature. Thus perseverance is more congruous to the conduct which proceeds on the principle of love, than to that which looks prominently to duty. Moreover where there is effort, there is seldom abundance, while it is the characteristic of love to be prolific.

It is necessary for us when we act entirely from a sense of duty to go through many more intellectual processes than when we act from love. We have to investigate the character of the action, to ascertain its bearings, to inform ourselves of its circumstances, to guess its consequences. All this takes time and makes a man slow, and as life runs rapidly, he is apt to be taken by surprise, and either be guilty of some omission, or act in a hurry at the last. This is the reason why slow men are often so precipitate. Any one who observes will see instances of this daily, in the habitual impetuosities of timid men. The duty principle, also, only sails well in fine weather. It does not do for storms. It wants elasticity and buoyancy, and so, when it has fallen into sin, it recovers itself with great difficulty, and is awkward in its repentance, as if it were in a position for which it never was intended. It soon despairs. Sin seems a necessity, and a few serious relapses are enough to make it give up the spiritual life altogether. There are cases of men who never could recover one mortal sin; and we should bo inclined to suspect that they were mostly cases of men who acted from conscience in preference to love.⁶

It also has a propensity to concentrate us upon ourselves, and so to hinder charity. Self must come in, when we are always looking at self and self's behavior, and when even the Object of faith presents itself habitually to us in the light of self's rule. In this way it not unfrequently hinders the more beautiful exercises of charity; for charity is not the doing only our duty to our neighbor. That does not take us much beyond justice. The habit of mind of mere conscientiousness seems different from the habit of mind of exuberant charity. It is not moreover genial to high spiritual things, such as voluntary austerities, the love of suffering, the practice of the evangelical counsels, the sorrow because God is so little loved and so much offended, and the willing renunciation of spiritual consolations and sensible sweetnesses. A merely conscientious man may be intellectually convinced that he ought to aim at perfection, but the chances are immensely against his succeeding; and for this reason, that he has not sufficient momentum. His impulse dies out, and he stops short of the aim. Doing what is right because it is right is not a sufficiently perfect or robust motive to carry a man all the way to perfection. Love alone can do that. It sounds almost like an absurdity to talk of observing the counsels from a sense of duty, or of aiming at a more perfect interior observance of the precepts than it is our duty to aim at, because we have determined to make a duty of it.

This principle, too, although it is thoroughly Christian, and leans on Christ, appears to have but a weak tendency to produce that nameless indescribable likeness to Christ, which is the characteristic of the saints. It has not enough of self-oblivion in it, and is very deficient in its sympathies with the mystical operations of grace. Moreover it has not the same blessings as love; not that it is not an ordinance of God, and one which no one can with safety forget or depreciate: but there is an air about it of the Old Testament rather than the New. It likewise keeps men back by leading to scruples. It never lets conscience alone. It wastes in a fruitless post-mortem examination of its actions the time that might have been spent in acts of heroic contrition or of disinterested love. Nay, it will even disinter again and again those actions, which have already passed the ordeal of so many examinations, and it will dissect, and meddle, until it has acquired an inveterate habit of stooping, and contracted a disease of the eyes. This is its immoderation, the excess to which it tends, and to which it must tend with all the more determination the higher it rises in the spiritual life, where common rules are less clear in their application, and the processes of grace more intricate and unusual. Yet while it breeds scruples, this same principle also ministers to self-trust, because of its habit of examining actions for itself, and then of going by what it sees. It is very rare to find a man, who habitually does what is right only because it is right, who is not at the same time quietly self-opinionated, and dangerously free from all distrust of his own decisions.

Then again there seems in such a principle of action no real rehearsing for heaven. The Blessed in heaven do not act from a sense of duty. They contemplate and love. Surely there must have been some habit formed on earth, to correspond to and anticipate that celestial habit of keeping the gaze fixed on the beautiful object of faith. A conscientious seraph is a very difficult idea to realize. In truth there is nothing supernatural about this principle, except the amount of love which it contains. It borrows from love all about it that is worth much, and yet keeps love in the lowest place, as if it was a dependent and inferior. Thus we are not surprised to find those, who habitually act'upou it, somewhat out of harmony with the lives of the saints, with new miracles, with popular devotions, with apparitions, pilgrimages, taking vows, and other supernatural 26 2i2 things. For the principle does not take kindly to the supernatural, grasps it nervously, and so is perpetually letting it slip because it cannot hold it.

Neither is it an attractive principle to others. It deprives goodness of much of its missionary character and converting influences. It does not draw people round it, or make sinners wonder enviously at the sweetness of Christian sanctity. It is dry. It repels. It speaks shortly, and makes no allowances. It is unseasonable, and is proud of disregarding circumstances. Time and place are out of time and place to it. It has a propensity to preach, and dictate, and be tiresome. And in all these respects it plays into the hands of the natural foibles of those to whose character this principle is most likely to commend itself. Then, which sounds a privilege but is in truth a disability, it is a rarer gift than love. It is often a growth of natural character, whereas God pours love out on every one. It thus embraces fewer souls: because fewer are capable of walking by it. It is love, and walking by love, that swells the grand multitude of the number who are saved. Conscientiousness could never fill heaven half so fast as love. So that it neither manufactures the high saints, nor yet throngs with happy crowds the outer courts of heaven.

It is also less directly connected with the gift of final perseverance than love. As was said, it is a life of efforts, and it is the nature of efforts to be complete in themselves, and not enchained one with another; and the doctrine of habit is a poor thing to trust to in the supernatural affairs of grace. God Himself acts from love, that is, from conformity to Himself, and not from a sense of duty.⁷ God's life is love; and thus love has the blessing of exuberance, of fruitfulness, of speed. It is venturesome, overflowing, divine.

All that is good about the other principle is liable to constant error from a want of moderation; and in pointing out the reasons for preferring the principle of love to the principle of duty, as an habitual motive-power in the spiritual life, it has been necessary to touch upon some of the exaggerations to which the exclusive principle of duty may lead, but does not necessarily lead. This must not be misunderstood. The principle of duty is holy and strong. The principle of love disjoined from the principle of duty is a thin^ which will save no man. Doing right because it is right is a course which every one ought to pursue, a habit which all should cultivate. All that we have been arguing for is, that the spiritual man who looks at love primarily and prominently, and at duty secondarily and subordinately, will sooner be a thoroughly converted man, or a saint, or a higher kind of saint, than the spiritual man who reverses the process, and looks at duty primarily and prominently, as the solid part of his devotion, and love secondarily and subordinately, as the sweetening of his duty.

Personal love of God! this then is the conclusion of the whole. To love God because He desires our love, to love Him because He first loved us, to love Him because He loves us with such a surpassing love, to love our Creator because He redeemed us and our Redeemer because He created us, to love Him as our Creator in all the orders of nature, grace, and glory, and finally to love Him for His own sake because of His infinite perfections, because He is what He is, — this, and this alone is religion; this is what flows from the ties between the Creator and His redeemed creature; for what is redemption but the restoring, repairing, and ennobling of creation? To love our Creator as our First Cause, as our Last End, and as our Abiding Possession, — this is the whole matter. lie in His mercy has made the love of Him a precept, and therefore those who do right because it is right really love Ilim, and go to Him at last, as well as those who only love Him or chiefly love Him out of love. But this last way is the most easy for ourselves, and the most honorable for Him. This is why I said at the outset that the beginning of the whole process was rather in God's touching and mysterious desire for our love than in His love of us. That desire of His seems the handle by which loving souls take hold of their religion, and in which they find the key to their own position of creatures, and to the rights and attractions of the Creator; and this desire of God for our love leads straight to our desire for Ilim, our desire not so much for His love as for Himself, that gift of Himself, which, though inseparable from His love, is yet much more than love, more precious, and more tender.

What then is life, but the possession of God, and the beauty of God drawing us ever more and more powerfully to the fuller possession of Ilim, until at length in heaven we come to the fulness of our possession? Let us emancipate ourselves for a while from earthly thoughts, and look up to heaven, while the angels, who rejoice over one sinner that does penance, are keeping the feast of All Saints. That day might be called the Feast of the Magnificence of Jesus; for the spirit of the feast is a spirit of magnificence; it is the feast of the heavenly court of the great King of our salvation. Yet what is the sight which we behold there? Ah! if we look into heaven, we shall learn much about creation! Let us put aside, not in forgetfulness, still less for lack of burning love, the empire of the angels, our elder brothers, and look only at the human family which is there. Around the altar of the Lamb, by Mary's maternal throne, there are various rings and choirs and glorious hierarchies of the saints. They lie bathed in splendor, beautiful to look upon, but it is a splendor which is not their own. Each soul is beautified with an infinite variety of graces, the particular combination of which is distinctive of that particular soul, and is a separate ornament of heaven, so that not one saint could be spared without heaven missing a portion of its beauty. Yet those graces are not their own. They were gifts to begin with, and they must remain gifts to the end. Their exceeding joy is such a vision of delight that we could not see it now, and live. In truth there is not one of their gifts, not the least and lowest of their rewards, but they might well joy in it with a surpassing joy. But it is not so. Their joy is not in their own beauty, or their own perfections, or their bright rewards. It is entirely in something which is not their own. It is the beauty of Jesus which is their magnificence and joy. And the eternity of their joy depends, not in any inward impossibility of their own to fall away, but in the ceaseless attraction of that unfading beauty. 0 look at the tranquillity of that vast scene, outspread before our eyes! It is creation in its Father's house, creation in its home of glory. Its wanderings are over, its problems solved, its consummation gloriously accomplished. Yet the completion and elevation of its nature, the expansion and coronation of its graces, and no less also the actual exuberant and joyous life of its eternal glory, is not in itself, but in its possession of the Creator. It has left itself, and taken up with something else, and so it is perfect, complete, at home, at rest; for that something else is God, its all in all, its own God.

But let us look back again to earth, into the ages past, and see the processes by which God made His saints, by which He drew all these multitudinous rings and choirs and hierarchies of the saints, out of the thick of the world into His Bosom, where just now we saw them lying. The game beauty, which, seen, is their eternal life, unseen and believed in, drew them over earth to heaven. The ways were many, the ways Mere strange, the ways were unlike each other, but this was the one invariable process. It was not a mere sense of duty, nor a grand conscientiousness, however bright and strong, which carried them heroically through opposing obstacles, right up to the highest seats in heaven. It was a secret attraction, a drawing at their hearts, a current sucking them in, at first faint and feeble, slow and uncertain, then steadier, and now swifter, and at last turbulent, and then suddenly they were drawn under and engulfed for ever in the beautiful vision of their Creator. It is the characteristic of God's greatest operations on earth to be invisible. So is it for the most part with His process of making saints. When it does come to view, it is so unlike what we should have expected that it scandalizes us by its strangeness. Can we point to the life of any one saint, at whom people did not take scandal while lie was being sanctified? Why do we not remember more continually this fact, and the lesson it teaches us? When men saw Jesus too near and too openly, they judged Ilim worthy of death. So it is with ourselves. When His 6hadow crosses us in a saint, we judge him to be anything rather than a saint, and worthy of condemnation.

The immense variety of ways in which the saints are drawn to God is greatly to be noted. Climate, rank, date in the world's history, sufferings, circumstances, education, vocation, national character, all these have had so much to do with it, and yet so little. They account for much, yet not for all, and for the main thing not in the least; for the same things, which look to be helping saints forward, are visibly keeping other souls back. There is plainly a secret spell at work, a spell on the world, on life, on sorrow, on darkness, on trial, and even on sin. It is working in them. It is strengthening itself in different souls by contradictory circumstances. But it is a spell, nothing else than a spell. It is none other than the beauty of Jesus, which is the life and light of heaven. Heaven is heaven, because God is so beautiful in the light; and earth is the factory of saints, because God is so beautiful in the darkness.

See how the spell acts, even against the huge, almost resistless, power of the world. Who are they whom it affects? Ah! look at them, lying on God's breast, gleaming there, bright trophies of redeeming grace. They are young, delicate, highborn virgins, in the fires, under the pincers, among the teeth of lions, boy and girl martyrs, like Venantius, Agatha, Agnes, Lucy, Catherine, and Cecilia. They are children, saints in childhood, whoso reason was anticipated that they might love Jesus; they were little things who tore their flesh with scourges, who prayed hours at a time, who had ecstasies and worked miracles, who had mysterious sufferings, and lived in a mystical world, and were incomprehensibly like Jesus. They were kings and queens, who put away their crowns, took up the cross, and bared their feet, and went off after God. They were gallant soldiers, like St. Ignatius, or lawyers like St. Alphonso. They were freshly converted sinners, with all their habits of sin still strong upon them. Or they were ordinarily good men in the world who loved permitted liberty and blameless pleasure, but over whom by degrees a sort of dream seemed to pass, and noiselessly, they were led out of the crowd dreaming of the beautiful God, and there was a cold touch of death, and they woke up, and found it more than true.

These were the persons on whom the spell worked. Now see from what it drew them. There were first of all the exquisite sinless pleasures of all the senses. And the saints are so fer from being insensible persons, that none can rival them in the keen susceptibilities of pleasure, or in the refined vivacitv of their sensitiveness. It is this which enables tlicm to suffer so acutely, as if they had first been flayed alive and then bid to walk through the thorny world. There was the external beauty of the earth, in which they could read more plainly than other men the sweet enticing loveliness of God's perfections. There were the ties of the most holy and tender love. Children deserted their parents, who loved those parents with such a love as common children do not know. There were mothers walking into convents over the bodies of their sons. There were mothers watching their sons writhing in the excruciating agonies of a ferocious martyrdom, and encouraging them with tearless eyes to suffer more and more. There were fund husbands and doting wives parting of their own accord for all the term of life, and the cloister-door closing upon well-known faces as if it had been the hard cold slab of the very tomb. There were joys from which the saints voluntarily turned in order that they might indulge in sorrow, and so catch just a little look of Christ. And under their sorrows, when heaven rained crosses on their heads, and earth burned their feet as they walked, 0, then was the magic of the potent spell! with what elasticity they rose up under their load, and how they sang, like angels, as they went! And it was liberty which they all gave up, the liberty out of which God gets all His creature's love, the liberty which, alas! refuses him so much! They gave up their liberty for the sweet captivity of personal love of God; but it was the free surrender of their liberty which made it beautiful to God's eye, and sweetness to Ilis taste, and music in His ear. What a spell to have drawn such myriads of souls from such attractions, what power, what pleading, what persuasiveness, what versatility, and yet withal tranquil as the beautiful God Himself!

All these wonders are done by the beauty of God acting on the soul. In heaven it is more intelligible; for there the blessed Vision is eternal, unchanging, and in the full blaze of glory. But the strange and touching thing is, that on earth it is the merest glimpses of God which work all these wonders. A chance text of acripturc falls upon the ear, in church or out of it, and a touch of power comes with it, and with the power a flash of light, and a saint is made. There are brief sweetnesses in prayer, which come now and then in life, like shooting moonbeams through rents on close-packed cloudy nights. They lit up the cross upon the steeple and were gone, lint the soul fed on them for days. There are the first moments after communion, an unearthly time, when we are like Mary, carrying the Lord of heaven and earth within her, and we feel Him, and have so much to say that we do not speak at all; and the time passes, and we seem to have missed an opportunity. But the work was done, and a supernatural health is dancing in our blood, and straightway we climb a mountain on the road to heaven. Then there are sudden gushes of love, and along with the love, light also; and we know not why they come nor whence. Heaven is all quiet above us, and makes no sign. Circumstances are going on around us in the old tame, languid way. What can it be? Certainly it came from within, as if a depth of the soul had broken up, and flooded the surface; and we remember that, within us, in one of those depths, in which perhaps we have never been ourselves, and till eternity dawns never shall be, God deigns to dwell, and now we understand the secret. Then there are momentary unions with Him in times of sorrow, which were so swift that they looked like possibilities rather than actual visitations. But they were true embraces from our Heavenly Father, and they have healed us of diseases, and they have infused a new strength into us, and they were so close that wre have been tingling ever since, and feel the pressure at this moment still. Then there were flashes from the monstrance, which showed us we know not what and told us we know not what. Only they made the darkness of the world very thick and palpable, like lightning on a moonless night. But they did a work; for we felt ourselves laid hold of in the solid darkness which followed the sudden light, and hurried on over stocks and stones and up high places, and then we were left, lonely, but behold! so much nearer than we had ever seen it before, a pale streak, which was the dawning of the heavenly day. Nay, one sight of God's beauty at death, such a sight as the dying have sometimes, and which we cannot explain, is enough in the way of sanctity to do all life's work in one short hour. 0! then, if God be all this in time, what must eternity be like? 0, happy, happy saints! for a while longer you shall be in His beautiful light, and we be far, far away: for a while — yet but for a while, and then we also shall be with you, with the same glad light of that Divine Face shining full upon our ransomed souls!

Meanwhile, even upon earth God is our possession, and 2k we are entering upon our inheritance by degrees. Jesus is the Creator clad in the garments of redeeming love, and wc have Him here on earth already all our own, while wo are sadly but sweetly striving to be all for llim. Already the attributes of the Creator are fountains of joy and salvation to the creature. Why do we not gaze upon them more intently? There is no earthly science which can compete in interest with the science of God. It is a knowledge which quickly leads to love, and love is at once conversion, perseverance, and salvation. The divine perfections support us by their contrast with what we see on earth. They relieve our minds. They increase our trust. They actually out of their own abundance supply our deficiencies. They feed our souls by their grandeur, and exercise an awful mysterious attraction upon us, drawing us towards themselves, yea, into themselves. They affect our souls variously and medicinally. Justice gives us the gift of fear, while mercy emboldens us to the grace of familiarity. Omnipotence is what our weakness wants, and omnipresence what our discouragement requires. Our ignorance consoles itself in omniscience, and our fears lean and rest themselves on providence. And all our wants and all our weaknesses and all our wrongnesses carry their manifold burdens to God's fidelity, full certain that they will be lightened there. All these perfections are deeps, into which we are ever descending now with most surpassing contentment both of mind and will, and in which we shall be ever sinking, delightfully deeper through all eternity. They satisfy us, and they delight by satisfying; and again they do not satisfy, and by not satisfying, they delight still more, because of the delightful hunger which they leave behind, and which is in itself a marvellous, insatiable contentment. They are a rest, and out of them there is no rest, they are a home, and short of them, all is wandering and banishment. They are our own. They belong to us. The Creator has made them all over to us to be our possession and our joy, as if He kept them Himself only to bear the weight of them, so that to us they might be nothing else but joys.⁸ Even His eternity is ours; and though we nre but sons of time, yet, possessing God, we enjoy in Him eternity, and our religious minds even now, much more our glorified spirits hereafter, run forth up the backward ages and again down the countless ages yet untold, and ever lose themselves, and ever find themselves, in that ocean of everlasting life. 0 there is no devotion like devotion to the attributes of God! 0 blessed, 0 beautiful inheritance of the creature! They are eternal, and will never fail us, immutable and will never change, immense and always leave us room. 0 space! thou must widen thy gigantic shadowy limits, else wilt thou be a very prison for our immortal joys!

If earth be such a heaven to believing souls, what sort of heaven must the real heaven be? What is that incomparable beauty which the Blessed are gazing on this very hour? We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think it. What is it that that beauty is doing to their capacious, serene, and glory-strengthened souls? We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think it. What is that divine torrent of love which bursts forth from it, and threatens to submerge and overwhelm their separate created lives? We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think it. Whither reaches that white glistening eternity through which it will endure, and which seems to brighten in the far-off prospect rather than to fade away — whither does it reach? We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think it.

Look how the Splendors of the Divine Nature gleam far and wide, nay infinitely, while the trumpets of heaven blow, and the loud acclaims of the untiring creatures greet with jubilant amazement the Living Vision! See how Eternity and Immensity entwine their arms in inexplicable embrace, the one filling all space, the other outliving all time; the one without quantity or limit, the other without beginning, end, or duration. See how Mercy and Justice mingle with and magnify each other, how they put on with God's being the last end and enjoyment of men. They concerned the concurrence of His omnipotence to our actions, and our free use of that concurrence in sinning, and they implied the conclusion that God's dominion over His free creatures was imperfect because of their freedom. These propositions were condemned as "at the least temerarious and novel." Viva has a short commentary on them. (Opera Omnia, torn. vii. p. 194. Ferrara edition, 1757.) They are also given by I'hilippus de Carboneano, the friend of Benedict XIV., in his treatise on condemned propositions, but he does not name their author; nor does Denzinger in his Enchiridion; and Beruiuo does not give them at all among the propositions of Innoctnt XI., perhaps because they were not condemned as " heretical."

each other's look, and fill each other's offices. Behold tho Understanding and the Will, the one for ever lighting up with such meridian glory the profound abysses of God's uncircumscribed Truth and illimitable Wisdom; the other enfolding for ever in its unconsuming fires the incomprehensible Life of God, His infinite oceanlike expanse of being, and every creature of the countless worlds that from His life draw their own. Look at the divine Immutability and Liberty, how they sit together like sisters, deep enthroned in that marvellous life, and how God is freo because He is immutable, and immutable because He is so free. See how the Son and the Holy Ghost know all the Father's knowledge, and yet He alone by His understanding produces that coeternal Word who is His son. See how the Holy Ghost has all the love both of the Father and the Son; and yet They alone by Their will produced that blessed Limit of Themselves, that uncreated Sigh, that sacred Jubilee of Theirs, that everlasting Bond of union, who is the Holy Ghost. And thus is the loving light of the divine understanding ever on fire with Love; and thus is the living love of the divine will ever gleaming with the magnificence of uncreated Light. And all this life, and all this assemblage of perfections, and all this royal vision, and all this eternal intertwining of uncreated beauties, is itself a simple act, and its simplicity and its actuality are the crowning beauties of it all. God is. He possesses actually fill the plenitude of being, without admixture of privation, without dilution of possibility; for not only are all things possible in Him, but all possibilities are actual to Him. He never yet has been able to be: He never will be able to be: He will never be able not to be. lie simply is. Beginning, end, succession, change — they come not nigh Him. They breathe no breath upon Him. He is a Pure Act. As "St. Gregory Nazianzen says, He is all things, and yet He is nothing, because He does not belong to things at all. lie is, and He is eternally, and lie is necessarily, and He is of Himself. And it is this Simplicity, this Actuality, which passes over the Grand Vision with incessant soft flashes from end to end, and again from end to end, of that endless nature, and which is to the Face of God what expression is to the face of man, at once its charm and its identity, its beauty and its truth. As we know each other by our looks, so we know God by Hit Simplicity.

0 happy souls of the Blessed, and what of you? It is nil written in the Holy Book;⁹ and it needs no commenting. On the third day she laid away the garments she wore, and put on her glorious apparel. And glittering in royal robes, after she had called upon God, the Ruler and Saviour of all, she took two maids with her. And upon one of them she leaned, as if, for delicateness and overmuch tenderness, she were not able to bear up her own body. And the other maid followed her lady, bearing up her train flowing on the ground. But she with a rosy color in her face, and with gracious and bright eyes, hid a mind full of exceeding great fear. In going in she

Sassed through all the doors in order, and stood before the!ing, where lie sat upon His royal throne, clothed with His royal robes, and glittering with gold and precious stones, and He was terrible to behold. And when He had lifted up His countenance, the queen sank down, and her color turned pale, and she rested her weary head upon her handmaid. And the King's spirit was changed into mildness, and all in haste He leaped from His throne, and holding her up in His arms till she came to herself, caressed her with these words: What is the matter, Esther? I am thy Brother, fear not. Thou shalt not die: fur this law is not made for thee, but for all others. Come near then, and touch the sceptre. And as she held her peace, He took the golden sceptre, and laid it upon her neck, and kissed her, and said, Why dost thou not speak to Me? And she answered, I saw Thee, my Lord, as an angel of God, and my heart was troubled for fear of Thy majesty. For Thou, my Lord, art very admirable, as Thy Face is full of graces! And while she was speaking, she fell down again, and was almost in a swoon. But the King was troubled, and all His servants comforted her.

Such is the picture of the Creator and the creature. It is a history of the truest love that ever was: nay of the only love that was ever truly true. And what is the end of all? We are God's own creatures, and God is our own God. All else will fail us, but He never will. All is love with Him, love in light and love in darkness, love always and everywhere. There are many difficulties left unexplained, many problems yet unsolved. Would it not be strange, if it were not so, seeing that He is infinite and we

2k2 finite, He is Creator and we but creatures? But the difficulties are only difficulties of love. There is nothing cold in Uiem, nothing frightening, nothing which goes one step towards disproving that sweet truth that He is our own God, our very own. There is no difficulty in wondering why we are not in heaven already. The wonder and the difficulty are, that such as we know ourselves to be should ever enter there at all. This is the great difficulty, and it is a difficulty for tears. Yet when that difficulty looks up into the face of God's Fidelity, then that sweetest and most soothing of all our Creator's grandeurs wipes the tears from its eyes, and hope comes out from behind her cloud, and shines softly, and the heart is s,till. Our own God? And so beautiful! A theologian said that if one lost soul could reunite in itself all the rage and hatred of all the lost against God, and that it could root, fortify, and confirm all this gigantic rage and hatred in itself for millions and millions of years, until it had become a new, ineradicable, and preternatural nature to him, one little ray of God's beauty falling gently on him for a single moment would change his whole being that instant into such respectful love and utter adoration, that he would not feel the fires that burned him, because of the greater lires of his transported love. And we are free, and we are in earth's fair sunshine, and our heart is full of a little but most true love of God, and a whole world of God's blessed love is resting on our single heart. — and shall we doubt, shall we hesitate, shall we tremble, shall we be chilled in the midst of all these fires of love? 0 my Creator, my Eternal Love! 0 my Father, my Heavenly Father! weary yet full of trust, worthless but truly loving Thee, on earth still and very far from heaven, my home and my rest are still in Thy Fidelity! In Te, Domine! speravi, non confundar in seternum!

TIIE END,

Footnotes

1. Thronghout the whole Treatise the opinion of St. Bonaventure as to the creation of the angels has been assumed to be incorrect. ↩

2. Lessius de Perfect. Divin. lib. xiv. ↩

3. Charitas est ergo causa effirions c*-e«turoe raUonali.", et participate. dMnu.' bonitatil Mt causa fiualis.— lbrpkius. ↩

4. LetriOf, lib. xiv. f 1 Cor. xv. ↩

5. To the doctrine that a good action is essentially and intrinsically good, Medina objects, Si quis relit amare Deuin, et non ex motivo, quod hoc sit conforme legi divinae id pr<*ecipienti, adhuc ponit actum honcstum et bonum. Viva replies, Qui amat Deum, et non ex motivo honestatis, ponit actum honestum, sed non ponit actum honestum honeste. De Actibiis llumanis. qu. ii. ↩

6. Even conscience acts rather by love of the beauty of virtue than by hatred of the malice of vice. Antoine says, Voluntas aversari non potest objectum malum propter solam ejus malitiam tanquam unicum motivum, quia odium malitia? vitii necessario fundatur in amore objective bonitatis virtutis oppositae, illurnque necessario supponit. Undo nemo odit malitiam alicujus vitii propter se, nisi amet, et quia amat, bonitatem et pulchritudinem virtutis oppositae. De Act. Hum. cap. iii. art. i. ↩

7. In Deo operationes moraliter bona?, honcst.T, ac lauilaLiles dicuntur qua sunt conformes fini ipsius Dei, ut est amor suimet. And again, Deus, quia non habet finem ultimum a se distinctum, quando operatur honeste, hoc est conformiter ad proprium finem, et juxta exigcntiam, quam habet a propria natura, non obligatur rigorose a regula honestatis, fed physice, imo et metaphysiee, neceSsit.itur a Feipso. Viva. p. ii. ilisp. vii. q. i. de prima regula moralitatis. ↩

8. Niereinberg in the eighth chapter of the seventh book of his Prodigy of I»i\it:e love, while dwelling on the way in which (iod vouchsafes to put His •(tributes at our disposal, uses language which might seem nearly to fall under the condemnation passed by Innocent XI. in 1679, twenty-one years after Nieremberg's death, on the theses De oinnipotentia donata. But it must be remembered that those propositions had nothing whatever to do ↩

9. Esther xv. ↩