Section III. Life
I. All day long we live, and hardly ever think of living.
Life is the most intimate feeling we have: so intimate we can hardly realise it.
Outside of ourselves we see nothing but life: creation seems to he simply multitudinous life.
But the life we see is nothing to the unseen life: earth is so full of life, that science is growing almost afraid of its own discoveries.
Spiritual life: the realms of angels.
God Himself is best defined as a boundless ocean of being, an inexhaustible abyss of life.
II. What then is the nature of our human life?
It is a mystery
Physically: never yet discovered, and probably never to be discovered.
Intellectually: here are fresh mysteries.
Morally: full of strange problems, of grandeur and of meanness.
It is a joy.
It is the greatest of all joys: the visible joy of animals is like a visible expression of God s love of them.
The joy by which alone all other joys are possible.
A joy even amidst intensest sorrows.
It is a responsibility.
It is not our own, but a charge.
Difficult to understand, and yet more difficult to manage.
Incredible exactness of the account we have to render: what God wants is increase, not burial of the talent.
It is a probation.
This is the indelible character of every hour and of every action of life.
Revelation is the making known of the terms, and the manner, and the singleness of this probation.
It is a trial for an unknown life which will be very unlike this one.
Strange elasticity of life, not to be permanently crushed by the unrelieved pressure of this sense of probation.
It is a martyrdom.
Because it is a suffering, quick or slow, while on earth.
Also a perpetual, inevitable witnessing to the life, and rights, and grandeurs of God.
It will to all eternity, in weal or woe, be a trophy and a manifestation of the Divine Perfections.
It is a vocation: great necessity of bringing this home to ourselves.
It is a special work, which each has to fulfil. Members of one religious order cannot understand those of another.
The call to it is a divine one.
Hence an objectless, lapsing life is the worst impiety the greatest frustration of a divine purpose: work is the divine condition of the gift of life. 7. It is a worship.
Its beauty and its defects, its powers and its helplessness are alike prayer and praise to God.
Life is worship in the mere living of it, it is so intensely divine a thing.
It is our dignity to make life an enthusiasm by putting love into this worship, and by daring to copy God.
III. Conclusion.
To understand life we must look at God.
What He wants is increase: we must trade with life, and multiply it, and broaden it, and deepen it, and purify it.
It is fearful to think of the unsuspected capabilities of magnificence hidden in the humblest.
The buried talent is the sunken rock on which most lives strike and founder.
To the angels what a fearful sight is the foundering of a single life: to God, who understands it in all its terrible reality, how inexpressible is the horror of the vision!
Yet what is earth to look down upon but a storm-blackened ocean, covered all over daily with the foundering of beautiful predestinated lives!
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF LIFE.
I. Preamble.
Variety of lives: each single life is a species never repeated.
Yet they may be classed: some lives are poems, some histories, some contemplations, some sufferings, some enthusiasms, some pastimes.
But all lives are actions, whether we will it or not; and all serious whether we will it or not.
No man can quite understand another man s life, however nearly he may do so; nay, who will dare to say that he understands his own? this is a great source of charity. We all live secret lives our only true publicity is in the mind of God: we are secret even to ourselves.
Under all this dazzle of diversity life, considered simply as life, has universal charac teristics, life as life has its differences, life as life its samenesses.
IT. What are these characteristics? 1. Its shortness.
- Not time to do all which we have to do:
and time to do nothing with a satisfactory completeness.
Time is always promising to go slower, but seems really to grow precipitate with years.
We do not get used to its shortness: it always equally takes us by surprise.
Its length.
It seems long even at the very moment it feels short.
It is long because it comes in chapters because it is crowded with risks because it makes such deep impressions because it is so varied because it is so uniform.
The yoke of perseverance makes it seem long: hence the lives of good people often seem so weary, especially when grace leaves nature a little more than usual to itself.
Its independence of ourselves.
We have so little power over it hardly any rudder at all.
Yet in some ways we have such a terrible power of inflicting irreparable injury upon ourselves: so that our present selves are hardly ever free, being dependent on our past selves; grace is the only thing like an emancipation.
Yet on the whole, in matters of conduct, and especially in great things, life feels as if it were somebody else s life rather than, our own.
Its dependence upon others.
The way in which it is enchained with things, persons, times, places, and circum stances: and generally so that the outward seems to give the law to the inward.
The most accidental events are those which seem most lastingly and critically to affect our freedom.
And this thraldom, meant in an unfallen world for a beautiful thraldom of love, affects even our eternal destiny: the transient makes a deep dint upon our eternity and our predestination seems often to be accomplished by that which seems most wayward and accidental in what befalls us.
Its vicissitudes.
It never rests: even time varies a state seemingly the same.
Its constant changes weary us, and also interfere with the growth of habits: and that purposely, for life is a deeper thing than an affair of habits.
We seem to live out and finish several lives in one, by reason of this changing: we learn the extent of life, and get that dim suspicion of its infinite capabilities, out of which heroisms come when wanted.
Its uniformity.
There is a uniformity in the very perpetuity of change.
Life seems more uniform than it is, be cause present years prophesy of the future, and assimilate the past, and so all life is always being lived twice, if not thrice over. 3. All life is a being overworked and the feeling of fatigue simulates the effects of uniformity. 7. It has a distinct divine meaning.
This is true of all varieties of lives: the business of our life is to find it out.
Grace is to some a prospective, to others a retrospective, to others a piecemeal revefation of this meaning.
Thus all life is strictly providential to us, and most so in least things: and least so to those who have, or when they have, much developed self-consciousness. Too much self-consciousness oversets the truthfulness of life.
III. Conclusion.
This life, thus characterised, does not pass so much in an outside world, as within the temple, which is God.
How intimate beyond thought or word God is to it all; right fear and right love hinders this feeling from becoming a superstition.
We must be weary of life, and yet love it resting in it, yet yearning for heavenly things accounting it as little, yet reverencing it as great husbanding it with thrift, yet spending it with generosity.
We must live life by unliving it i.e. by living for something beyond, something different from it and we do this in penance, in mortification, in prayer, in works of mercy, in suffering, and above all in contemplation. 5. Our life must be an unretracted supernatural love, as if it were part of God s life rather than our own.
THE STATES OF LIFE.
I. Preamble.
The light and shade, the weather and the seasons make the mountains always new: so is it with the picturesqueness of human life, as the procession of circumstances drifts over it.
The very shallowest life on earth has always some unexpected novelties to disclose.
This is because of the strange mixture and mutual imbedding of the natural and supernatural, which belongs to every life, and is its secret rudder.
The way in which men s lives change under the quiet or the sudden pressure of providence is a continual new and double revelation of God and of humanity.
We shall only consider states which belong, not to the individual, but to human life in general.
II. The states of life.
Its theological states.
Nature.
Nature is ever a likeness to God, in degree and proportion and fitness.
No rational creation has been in a state of nature.
We must not underrate the goodness and beauty of nature.
Grace.
Its wonderful character, which grows incredible as we think of it.
Its strife and harmony with nature.
The state of grace in fallen creatures is not one of peace but of conflict.
Glory.
The most natural of the states of life, because the one for which we were created.
The most supernatural, because the attainment of it is wholly the work of grace.
It is stable, enduring, and contented * and it alone brings out life, and all that is in it, giving life unity by making it entirely and only love.
II. States of age.
Youth.
Its freshness and unworldliness.
Its sensual and imaginative character.
Its empire over our future.
Middle life.
Its worldliness: yet to the unworldly it brings increased sense of vanity of the world.
Time of changes and crises: its sensual character becomes more animal because less imaginative.
The way in which new passions domineer: it is the time when sweet, kind, and gentle things perish.
Old age.
Life withdrawing its forces, and living more slowly.
It is a time when life is very secret, secret even to ourselves.
When nature does not withstand grace, but conspires against it and undermines it.
III. States of circumstances.
Happiness.
It improves the good, but spoils the mediocre character: it makes the holy humble.
It broadens the character, however, rather than deepens it: but breadth is best for some.
To the loving it is a new power of making others happy, a new power of loving.
Sorrow.
To most this is normally the sanctifying state, but it requires great grace.
Its action is so energetic that it hardens the hearts which it does not soften and ennoble.
It is the world in which grace finds and multiplies its capabilities: it is the beautifier of all life. 3. Temptation.
This comes by seasons, or in storms, or in epochs, sometimes almost or wholly lifelong.
It is the action of living invisible evil upon the strength and feebleness of our nature.
In no part of His providence is God so watchful, so minute, or so partial to our interests. IV. Beligious states.
Conversion.
It should commit itself, like James and John, with a discreet indiscretion.
It is a season when our duty to God seems through our unskilfulness to thwart our duties to our neighbours.
Penance.
It should be abiding yet cheerful, brave yet cautious, shamefaced but trusting.
It should have seasons of rigour, as the Holy Spirit seems to guide us.
It should be very secret, and silent, and be the basis of all our successive spiritual states.
Hubits of virtue.1
Life often gets out of the groove now with out our knowing when or how.
Vigilance over our character is apt to he onesided, and so neglect to correspond to inspirations.
There is often a want of delicacy in our appreciation, and we get too natural after having exaggerated against nature.
Conclusion.
In all these states there is the same in exorable activity almost fiercely imprinted upon life; it is as if we were heing carried down a stream; life is a loom which plies of itself, and is plying day and night.
At the bottom of the soul there is a thirst for God, always insatiable.
How a man makes his own life by his own individual past in all these different states.
No mistake irreparable so far as regards our eternal interests but often so with regard to this world yet there is grandeur in silently sacrificing a life which for God s sake has irretrievably missed of its success in this world.
What may not life be in the world to come, when it can be what we thus see it is on this side the grave, whether multi plied by joy, or magnified by sorrow, or deepened by temptation?
THE MEANINGS OF LIFE.
I. Preamble.
Picture of the angels studying human life, a life so dissimilar to their own, yet so closely associated with it.
Their astonishment at the romantic destinies of men, as visible in history.
They see all human life in God s preference of human to angelic life in the Incarnation.
One of the chief joys of angelic life is to be under human government; Jesus their Head, and Mary their Queen.
They see human life, and all human lives in God: how marvellous must the vision be!
IT. The meanings of life: each of its meanings is threefold 1. To ourselves. 2. To others. 3. To God.
In regard to eternity.
Looked at with reference to time it must seem incomplete, as it was not meant for time.
Indeed it has not only an obscure significance, but no significance at all, except in regard to eternity.
Every aspect of life, when dark, is full of a wistful look of eternity when bright, is simply reflecting eternity.
In regard to the world, and its problems.
To life the world means exile, separation, and conflict: the whole world cannot fill the vacant heart of life,
Absence of curiosity with regard to the problems of the world (or at least patient withholding of judgment), for we are in the crowd, and cannot see the look of the whole, the shape of the Cosmos.
Yet the world, evil as it is, is a revelation of God, which is very needful for us, and enlightens even where it bewilders.
In regard to others, far off or near.
Life is meant to be communicative, a communication of God to all.
No one comes near us or across us, but it is through an intention of God, that we may help, soothe, or cheer him.
We must see God in all men, good or bad, and treat them as His representatives: human life is the Divine Mercy multiplied and made visible in all manner of little inventive tendernesses.
In regard to its own time and place: this regards individual lives.
It has a special work to do, which will not be done if we do not do it.
Kelative duties are a most certain private revelation of God s will about it.
Time and place both pass so life must be prompt to seize and fulfil the vocation of the hour.
In regard to grace.
Grace is meant to be the truth and the complement of life.
Nature is to give place to grace sometimes to be supplanted, sometimes to be ruined by it, sometimes to be voluntarily put to pain because of it. 3. Yet our grace is our own grace, in kind, in degree, and in shape: we must keep to it as to a vocation: our life means our grace: each life means its own grace, and only its own grace.
In regard to glory.
Glory is our proper state our sole satisfaction God s sole satisfaction for us.
Hence our work is not yet begun: it is only preluded, if even so much as that.
Our exile means that we should quicken the impatience of our desires, and make our love burn us more inwardly by restraining it: this life is ooly the first chapter of life, prefatory and of secondary though needful import.
In regard to God.
Our life is His from first to last it is to Him the realisation of a very sweet and eternal thought.
It is an incense to be burnt before Him for ever, the glory of which is in being consumed.
It is to be for ever losing and for ever finding itself in the abyss of His blessed and bliss-giving Sovereignty.
III. Conclusion.
A picture of animal life intense joy of it in insects fishes reptiles birds beasts, wild or domestic: thrills of tlieir peculiar sensations, exquisite senses, and above all their light-like instincts: quantity of out poured joy, varieties of it, intensities of it-hidden divine signet upon each animal pulsation of delight.
Angelic life so hroad, vast, so multitudinous, so impetuous, so peculiar yet one sparkle only as it were of God s jubilant life.
Next to God I most revere a human life: the Life of Jesus upon earth, the Human Life of the Incarnate God.
God s inner Life all love as it were three oceans of light lying one within the other, one unspeakable, illimitable, incomprehensible unity of Life, one only Life but in a three fold jubilee.
God s outer Life all love as Creator, Re deemer, Sanctifier: to each one of us His seeming recklessness, yet His delicate tenderness, and the patience of His sensitive yearn ings for our lives a threefold love, a threefold ministry, but in one single unbeginning and unending love: threefold to Himself, He is one to us and His oneness is eternal love gifting us with eternal life.
Life then is a grandeur; for it is half eternal. Each human life is as it were a divine thing expatriated from heaven, that in its exile it may learn to love God more, and to win a right to His further love. Human life is a divine love, and the meaning of self is God.
PAKT SEVENTH, THE LAST THINGS.
Footnotes
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- Enthusiasm must be its law, else its effort will be insufficient.
Chapter 15 of 18