All Men Have a Special Vocation

There are some thoughts, which, however old, are always new, either because they are so broad that we never learn them thoroughly, or because they are so intensely practical that their interest is always fresh. Such thoughts are for the most part very common thoughts. They are so large and so tall that they are obvious to all capacities, like the huge mountains which are visible from the plain. They require no peculiar keenness of vision; for no one can fail to perceive them. Now among such thoughts we may reckon that thought, which all children know, that God loves every one of us with a special love. It is one of the commonest thoughts in religion, and yet so amazing, that, when we come to look steadily at it, we come nigh to not believing it. God does not look at us merely in the mass and multitude. As we shall stand single, and alone, before His judgment-seat, so do we stand, so have we always stood, single and alone before the eye of His boundless love. This is what each man has to believe of himself. From all eternity God determined to create me, not simply a fresh man, not simply the son of my parents, a new inhabitant of my native country, an additional soul to do the work of the nineteenth century. But He resolved to create me, such as I am, the me by which I am myself, the me by which other people know me, a different me from any that have ever been created hitherto, and from any that will be created hereafter. Unnumbered possible creatures, which God saw when He chose me, He left to remain in their nothingness. They might have wor shipped Him a thousand times better than I shall ever worship Him. They might have been higher, holier, and more interesting. But there was some nameless thing about me which He preferred. His love fastened on something special in me. It was just me, with my individual peculiarities, the size, shape, fashion, and way of my particular, single, unmated soul, which in the calmness of His eternal predilection drew Him to create me. I should not believe that God was God, if I did not believe this. This is the profession of faith which each of us should make in our hearts. I cannot tell how men endure life, who do not profess this faith in the Creator s special love.

Moreover, we may go on to say, this specialty never leaves me. God s preservation of me is in truth a continual new creation. In some respects it is almost more wonderful, and more special, than my original creation. Other men are constantly dying. I am singled out to be kept alive. Half mankind die before they come to the end of boyhood: I am selected for the maturity of age. Must I not infer then also, that, in the sight of God, I stand in some peculiar relation to the whole of His great world? I clearly belong to a plan, and have a place to fill, and a work to do, all which are special; and only my specialty, my particular me, can fill this place or do this work. This is obvious, and yet it is overwhelming also. I almost sink under the weight of the thought. It seems to bring God so very near. Yet on looking back over my past life, and considering it especially in reference to my present position, I see, that while I have had the most perfect liberty, I have really had very little to do with bringing things about, or settling myself in my present position. It has been done over my head, and outside of me, with exceeding suavity and yet at the same time with exceeding force. I have had very little practical influence over my own destiny. This is one side of the question. But then there is another side to it. If I am to be in a special place in God s plan, and do a special work for Him, and no other place is my place, and no other work is my work, then I have a tremendous power over myself, a power the consequences of which may not only easily be ever lasting, but as a matter of fact must positively be ever lasting. I come in sight of the most overshadowing responsibilities. Eesponsibility is the definition of life. It is the inseparable characteristic of my position as a creature. I am constantly moving, constantly acting. I move impulsively, and I work negligently. "What then becomes of my special place and of my special work? From this point of view life looks very serious. Surely we must trust God with a huge confidence, or we shall be frightened into going and burying our talent in the earth!

Now what is it about us, which was the prime object of God s love, when He chose us for creation? It cannot be put into words. It is just all that which makes us ourselves, and distinguishes us from all other selves, whether created or possible. It was precisely our particularity, which God so tenderly and so in tensely loved. The sweetness of this thought is almost unbearable. I draw in my breath as if to convince myself that I am alive. I lay my hand on my heart to feel its beating. First I smile, and then I weep, I hardly know what to do with myself, I am so delight fully entangled in the meshes of divine love. This 26 specialty of God s love startles me more and more, the longer I familiarize myself with it". I am obliged to make acts of faith in God, acts of faith in all His different perfections, but the greatest act of faith in this specialty of His love of me, of me such as I am, such as I know myself to be, even such as He knows me to be. Deeper and perpetually deeper, taller and perpetually taller, the shadow of my responsibilities is cast upon me. But it is not a dark shadow, not depressing but inspiring, sobering but not paralyzing. I see plainly that my love of God must be as special as God s love of me. I must love Him out of my special place, love Him through my special work: and what is that place, what is that work? Is not this precisely the question of questions?

Whatever God does, teaches us lessons. Each one of His works has many significancies. All possible interpretations are true, so long as they be worthy of

His majesty. At the very outset the specialty of God s love of us teaches us some lessons, which we must at least enumerate before we go further. The first is that there is no service of God except that of love. We must love Him with a hopeless love, despairing of our ever being able to love Him as we ought. We must love Him with a brave love, which indeed calculates grace, but does not calculate difficulties. We must love Him with a swift, pushing love, which, like a tree, is fastening itself deeper in the ground with its roots, while it is also climbing higher into the blue sky.

God s love of us is so bewikleringly great, and so bewilderingly special, that we must love Him with a glorious love, to be worthy of the name of love at all.

But this specialty of His love also teaches us to be afraid. Our love will be no worse for this, but all the better. It is indeed a fearful thing to have to do with God. It is fearful to think how much He expects of us, and yet with what justice He expects so much. It is fearful to think of the sea of grace around us, which so much love, and so special a love, implies. It is fearful to think how easily we may slide out of our place, how easily we may miss of our work; and then whither shall we fall? Truly, to wander away from God eternally seems a cheeringly hard thing to do-when we think of His much love of us, and yet almost inevitably easy when we think of His special love of us-. That specialty, which makes His love so sweet, is just the thing which makes our responsibilities so terrible. Even human love is half fear, and more than half fear when it is more than commonly sweet. What then shall we say of divine love? At least this, that he, who loves most, fears most.

Furthermore, the specialty of God s love impresses upon us the necessity of slowness in our dealings with Him. It must not be the slowness of unwillino- service

JD or of frightened service. It must be a prompt and generous slowness; only it must be slow. There is no hurry in eternal things. We must indeed run to do the commandments of God; but we must run cautiously, and look about us while we run. A man must move very cautiously among complicated machinery, especially machinery which is as swift and powerful as it is complicated. If we are not slow, we shall miss things. We shall miss seeing God, and miss hearing Him also. We shall not do our work well, and we shall leave the places, where we have worked, littered and un tidy. We can hardly be reverent unless we are slow. We cannot speak, even to utter acts of love, when we have run ourselves out of breath by our precipitation. We have to do with a God, who paused tranquilly for four thousand years, when the world was falling into the dismal abyss for want of Jesus. "What is special needs to be exact; and all accuracy takes time. So in this sense, we must in the spiritual life let God do the swiftness, and we will do the slowness. Then, once more, the specialty of God s love teaches us that we must confine and concentrate ourselves very determinately on our own place and work, which that love has assigned to us. In the matter of God s service, generals are good for nothing. They are universally inefficacious. We must come to particulars, and we must fasten ourselves on particulars, and rest in them. Then of course it is of the utmost consequence to us that we should fasten on the right particulars. In other words, it is almost of as much importance in the spiritual life to know w T hat to leave undone as to know what to do. Incletermination has ruined as many good beginnings, as either resistance or negligence. It is well to pause, and think of that.

What is our next step? We have seen the specialty of God s love for us, and the lessons which it teaches us. Now let us look at the spiritual life in the light of this single but all-embracing truth. The view we o s* generally take of it is this. There are multitudes of people, who by the help of the sacraments keep their heads above water, clear themselves of mortal sin, and save their souls, through the amazing compassion of God. In reality the frequentation of the sacraments, along with what that frequentation implies, is a spiritual life. For it is a life of grace, not of nature. could not end in salvation were it otherwise. But we generally use the term spiritual life in a more restricted sense. We mean by it, an aiming at devotion, at the evangelical counsels, or at the perfect interior keeping of the commandments. Of persons so aiming we think that a small number of them have what we call voca tions. These vocations are of three sorts. They are either to the ecclesiastical state, or to the religious life, or to some very special life of inward contemplation or of outward philanthropy in the world; and these last we account to be very rare. The remaining vast multitude of spiritual persons have no vocations. They simply remain in the world, sanctifying themselves in their proper place and by their proper work. Certainly this division expresses a truth, but it expresses it very badly, so badly as to lead us to a false view. The truth is, and it follows from the specialty of God s love of us, every man has a distinct vocation, a vocation of his own, a vocation which may be like other men s vocations, but is never precisely the same. For convenience sake we may class people in the spiritual life, according to their devotions, or outward position, or peculiar work. But these divisions do not include everything. No two of us are alike. God saw a specialty in us eternally. It was this specialty which He loved. It is this specialty which decides our place and our work in His creation.

Thus then we have each of us a vocation of our own. No man or woman on earth has the same. There has never been precisely the same vocation since the world began. It will never be precisely repeated up to the day of doom. No matter what our position in life may be, no matter how ordinary our duties may seem, no matter how commonplace the aspect of our circum stances, we each of us have this grand secret vocation. "We are, in a certain inaccurate and loving sense, necessary to God. He wants us in order to carry out His plans, and nobody else will quite do instead of us. Here is our dignity; here also is qur duty. This is the deep fountain of our love; this also is the deep fountain of our fear. Our vocation is as real a vocation, as distinctive a vocation, as the vocation to be a Carmelite or an Ursuline, a Franciscan or an Oratorian. It is less visible, less easy to describe. "We may be less certain about it, and it is far harder to know. But there it is, a regular and complete vocation. If this is true, all spiritual life is simply working at random, if it is not based either upon the knowledge of this vocation, or upon the endeavour to find it out. That vocation, whatever it is, is God s will about us. He may never intend us to know it fully. But He intends that we should try to find it out, Holiness consists simply of two things, two endeavours, the endeavour to know God s will, and the endeavour to do it when we know it.

]N"ow have we considered this truth practically and seriously? Is it always before us? I do not say, Do we, each of us, know our own vocation; for that I hold to be a matter of quite secondary importance, though doubtless of importance. The sense of our vocation, the feeling that we have a vocation, peculiar, special, individual, unmated in the whole world, the faith that this vocation is one of pure love, that it flows straight out of our eternal predestination, that it is at the mercy of our own free wills, that all the endless grace, which comes to us, comes because of that vocation, and that it lies around us either as a revealed or unrevealed revelation, an interpreted or an uninterpreted vision, this is truly the important matter. We know neither God nor ourselves nor others, until we have this knowledge. It puts others into their true positions towards God, and ourselves into our true positions towards them. It makes us first to feel that we are God s property, and then to act as His property, and not our own. It also makes God our property. He is not only our God, but our own God. He is really ours in a way in which He is no one else s, through His special love of us separately. He is not distant. He is not common property between all His creatures, though He is most truly so. His arms are not round all men, and round us amongst them, though verily His arms are so round us. But His arms are round our own selves. We have Him all to ourselves, in secret caresses, in private embraces, in a privileged exclusiveness. He is the God of our own souls, simply, sweetly, truly, our own private God. I am always pleased with St. Jane Frances de Chantal for being so sharp with the pedantic lady, who said that for fear of selfishness, and attachment, and a want of holy poverty, she would only call God God, not her God, her own God.¹ The Blessed mother would not hear of it. She had been brought up in a different school. We must be of her school. We know of no such wire drawn distinctions. We are greedy of God, and will have Him all to ourselves, leaving His infinite wisdom. and power to manage how to be exclusively every body else s God, while we have the exclusive enjoyment of Him for ourselves.

Nowhere do we find God so infallibly as in the special vocation which He gives us. But this outward providence does not altogether settle what this vocation is. It settles much, but it does not settle all. We have an inward life to live as well as an outward one, and the inward completes the outward, fulfils the outward. The inward life more often interprets the outward, than the outward the inward. It certainly is an overwhelming truth, and yet a cheering one, that we have all got a special vocation from God. Indeed I should say much more about it, and show how astonishing it is from every point of view, if it were not just now my business rather to explain matters, than either to excite your feelings or to give way to my own. But there is another truth lying close to it, which is almost as astonishing. It is this. We are continually receiving special revelations from God. We live in the midst of revelations. We are almost always inspired, not merely now and then, but almost always, and in a very true and peculiar sense. In other words, we are continually receiving what we ordinarily call inspirations. There is hardly ever a complete silence in our souls. God is whispering to us wellnigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. This is so invariable that we come to believe He is always whispering to us, only that we do not always hear, because of the hurry, noise, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on. Thus He is for ever tellino- us His o

Will, not only by His Church and in His Word, but privately. These inspirations are like private revela tions to us. There are, as you may suppose, many intricate and difficult questions connected with these inspirations. This is not the time to enter upon these. I only want to put them before you at present, as part of the specialty of God s love towards each of us separately. Moreover these inspirations are immediately connected with our special vocation, whatever it may be. They are given either to show us what our special vocation is, or to enable us to do our special work, even if we are not to know that it is our special work. They are to our vocation what the sun and rain are to the seed or the growing plant. They further God s special design upon us, and enable it to develope itself. Holiness of the highest kind is distinguished by the quickness and fineness of its ear in detecting these inspirations, and by its promptitude and docility in following them.

If we have rightly estimated the importance of our special vocation, we shall sat a due value on these inspirations. But as the vocation is itself a source of holy and salutary fear, so likewise are the inspirations. God ever speaking, the world ever making us deaf, this is something like a description of our state. The very delicacy of the operations of grace makes us fear, because it makes our correspondence to them a matter of such nicety. God and the soul form a world by themselves; and unless we live an inward life in this secret world, these operations of grace will escape unperceived. We cannot doubt but that, even with our utmost diligence, we are continually missing divine opportunities in our souls. We must strain our ears to catch our inspirations, or they will sound only like an inarticulate murmur, even when they are not inaudible altogether. Without an inward life we have no chance of discerning them. Not unfrequently they require other ears than our own to hear them; very frequently other minds than our own to understand them. This is part of the necessity of spiritual direction. We have to take some one else into the councils of our inward life to protect God against ourselves, to guarantee Him, as far as may be, against the wrong which self-love is always ready to do Him.

Many of these private inspirations solicit us, plead with us, hang about us, repeat their invitations, for weeks, months, or even years. Others come and ask, wait a while, and go away again, and return after a long interval. Others come and ask, and hardly wait for an answer, but pass on like a flash of lightning. Some of those which go come back, some do not; of those which come back some return soon, some late, some once more, some repeatedly. Some explain themselves, some simply present themselves to be welcomed, and if not admitted, depart to return no more. You see they are numberless and very various. Yet each of them is a glorious gift, each a divine operation, each an incomprehensible compassion, each a private revelation, each a distinct reinforcement of that special design for which God in His creative love fashioned us in His own mind from all eternity, when He might have made what seems even to our self-love a better choice. It makes us nervous to think of the multitude of these inspirations, their apparent waywardness, their divine susceptibility, and their extreme rapidity. We are almost tempted to despair in the midst of our own inward world of divine things, amidst all this bewildering apparel of sanctifying love. Yet, even in the case of the most momentary of our inspirations, our sanctity, possibly in some indirect way our very salvation, may be mixed up with our docility to them. It is to them at any rate that we are to look both for a disclosure of our special vocation, and for light and fortitude to work it out successfully, and in the way of God s will. It will be part of our amazement, when we are judged, to see what a life of inspirations we have had, and what immense holiness we might have gained with comparative facility.

We must never, then, disjoin our inspirations from our vocation. It is the two together which contain the specialty of God s love of us. But I must speak now of our knowledge of our own secret vocation. I most fully admit that it is a very great advantage to us that we should know it. In fact the knowledge of it is one of our most influential graces. Nevertheless comparatively few men do know it. Of the multitudes who do not know it, some half-know it, some suspect it, some are half-right and half- wrong in their idea of it, and some have not the remotest notion of it; and there are most excellent persons in every one of these classes. Then, ao-ain, of those who do not know it, some remain unknowing through their own fault, and some because

God keeps them in ignorance. In the case of these last we must suppose that they are kept in ignorance for their own good, and that their ignorance is itself an operation of grace, and an act of divine love. There may be reasons peculiar to themselves for ignorance being better for them than knowledge. Their vocation may be of such a nature, that there might be certain spiritual dangers in their knowing it, or their knowledge of it might go far towards frustrating its fulfilment, or it may involve so much suffering that nature would shrink from it if it foresaw it. It must be enough for them to be sure, that their being kept in ignorance is a work of divine love. At any rate we must all guard against two temptations in the matter. The first is a temptation to discouragement, because we cannot find out what our special vocation is, or what special attraction of the Holy Ghost is implied in our inspirations. We must remember that our very ignorance may be part of our vocation, and that our inspirations may purposely avoid illuminating that portion of God s will about us.- Many men of eminent sanctity have to live in their own souls as in the profound magnificence of a cavern, in which they see partly by the strange reflections of those stalac tites which get light we know not whence, and almost seem to create it, and partly by their eyes becoming habituated to the gloom, and learning supernaturally to see in darkness. All discouragement is based on the thought that God loves us less than we thought He did.

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"We may be confident that this ignorance, if it is from. Him, is no proof of the littleness of His love, but rather of its grandeur, and certainly of its specialty, which after all is the sweetest thing in love.

The second temptation is to think that God is laying snares for us. There is often a great appearance of this in the spiritual life. An impatient and distrustful heart fancies it detects God circumventing the free-will, which He does not allow Himself absolutely to overrule. The very vastness of our grace makes it present the appearance of an entanglement. Not unfrequently also we separate ourselves insensibly from God, and glide into a current of self-will, which silently and swiftly bears us far away. Then God mercifully disposes outward events, with fitting inward graces, and with gentle mastery brings our lives back to the point at which we left Him. This is in reality a most beautiful ingenuity of compassion, and often an answer to our frightened prayers. But it has a look of interfering with our free will; and in those unloving moods, when we take every thing in a wrong way, we may come to suspect the goodness of God. His love suffers in its credit, because it has been affectionate enough to resort to artifice, not for its own sake, but for ours. Moreover God always remains essentially unknown, lie, who commits him self to God, does not know to how much he commits himself, nor to what. "When we follow our inspirations, we always come to give Him more than we promised. Still our promise was a promise, and not a bargain. The grace of generosity consists in its ignorance of the entire sacrifices it has made inevitable to itself by its loving trust in God. When our heart is hot with love, the sight of these deceivings of divine love fills us with rapture. But in cold times, the same sight makes us suspect God, and resolve to be cautious with Him. Yet we should be greatly surprised if He was to put before us the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of protesta tions we have made to Him in years past, that he was to do what He liked with us, that we freely gave Him all we were, all we had, and all we were capable of suffering, that we desired to have no will but His, and that we only wanted one thing, which was to love Him more, and we did not care what it cost us. You see He has done no more than take us at our word: and we must not care too much about the petulance of our cold seasons. They were certainly great prayers to make, but we were sincere when we made them, and, if it had to come over again, we should commit ourselves once more just in the same way. Nay sometimes it seems as if we were unfairly entrapped by an equivocation in spiritual matters. AVe have promised in one sense, and God has chosen to understand it in another. O these are grand times! They ought to put us into great spirits; for they are divine familiarities, and unusual graces are latent all around. Presently, if only we do not stand on our rights, we shall be raised we know not whither, but somewhere far nearer Him than we are now. Furthermore, we may be sure that a time of divine ignorance has fewer snares than a time of divine light. Where God is concerned, we may walk with more unhesitating confidence in the dark than in the lio-ht. There is no snare in God.

Hence it is, that I have so often repeated^ myself to you about the necessity of having a filial feeling towards God. I often see that you know what is coming, when I begin on that subject. You smile, because it is already so familiar to you: for a sermon, like a song, may have a burden and refrain, and half a dozen burdens may do duty for a hundred songs. But really anything like an interior life is out of the question without this filial feeling towards God. You must believe, you must trust. You must walk rather by your own faith about Him, than by His manifestations of Himself. We creatures are in no condition to judge of Him by appearance. But our faith comprehends Him. He is our Father. That is His grand relation to us. Any acts of His, which seem to contradict that, can only be transcendental proofs of it. The problem of the world burns in some men s hearts like an uneasy fire. But if their whole hearts were on fire with the love of God, where would the problem burn then? There would be no room for it inside. God is my Father, and He could not persuade me to the contrary Himself. This is the position which faith takes up. It is the only position on which a spiritual life can be built. All our graces have to do with our special vocation. Our ignorance of our vocation, if it be from God, is one of the appropriate graces of our vocation. A really interior spirit will see cause for special thankfulness to God for the graces it has not received, as much as for those it has received. Indiscriminate grace would have been its ruin. The soul would have been impeded by it in accomplishing its special end. It would have been either a sickliness, like a forced growth, or a deformity, like a hindered growth. It is a great grace, that our one special grace should not be interfered with. Spiritual mixtures are confusions. Who are the blind men in the spiritual life, but the overladen with good works, the oppressed with pious practices, the overworked with devotions, the overdriven by activities? Still I am willing to grant that the knowledge of their special vocation, which some men have, is an enviable grace. But and please to observe this no man will ever be an interior man until he has reconciled himself to the idea of inequalities in grace.

Besides which, this divine ijmorance is never total.

There is always a glimmering, which the soul acknow ledges as its leader. How little there was to lead the Kings of the Epiphany, and yet what would they have lost, if they had decided not to follow the star! We may take this star as an illustration to us of the doc trine of vocations and inspirations. Many a star has risen to us in the clear blue night of faith, and we have not followed it. Many a leading light has stood over where the Young Child was, as it were beckoning to us with a brightness, in which, modest as it was, w r e felt there was something heavenly; and yet we have turned away, and have now clean forgotten it. If we could but have hearts to feel, and eyes in our souls to see, where we really are! There are good angels round us, and graces are raining down upon us, great and small, all our lives long, and inspirations are falling upon us, thick as snow-flakes, and almost as softly and as silently, and we are fastened with a thousand fasten ings to great unknown eternal purposes, and we feel

41G ALL MEX HAVE A SPECIAL YOCATIOX.

them no more than a strong man feels the cobwebs and the gossamer on the autumnal grass; and all the while we are closed all round, and walled in, not so much with the sun and moon and stars, with the air and the floor of our own planet, as with the living and inevitable presence of the All-holy, who will not spare us one moment from His sight, and who even while we sleep expects us to do our work of glorifying Him, and whose love of us, and therefore His jealousy of us, is as everlasting as Himself.

But there may be some whose ignorance of their vocation is their own fault, or, if not in any fault at all as yet, who may come to the knowledge of it by using the proper means. A man, who does not lead a life of prayer, of course does not lead a life of light; and he, who does not dwell in inward light, can neither see God nor understand His ways with us. If then we would learn what our special vocation is, or at least make that endeavour to learn it, which God expects of us, we must begin by being interior, by attaining that habit of seeing in the dark, to which I have already alluded. God must be watched, in order to be known; and we must watch Him on our knees, and in the lowest place within ourselves to which we can sink. Thus we shall learn much, if we do not learn all. "We shall learn enough to give us the opportunity of being much holier, even if w r e do not learn the precise thing of which we are in quest, namely, our special vocation. Then again,, as spiritual direction is almost a necessary condition of self-knowledge, so is it in ordinary cases almost an inevitable condition of the knowledge of God s dealings with our souls. As heavenly apparitions are visible to some of the bystanders, and not to others, so God s movements in the soul are often manifest to the eyes of others, and hidden from our own. Sometimes there are natural reasons for our not understanding the opera tions of grace within ourselves, and sometimes there are supernatural reasons for their being invisible to us f or inexplicable. While we must be accurate and punctual in the examination of our conscience, we must also lean on some one else, and be content sometimes, and within certain limits, to see with his eyes and to hear with his ears. If we do not lead interior lives, our whole course may be changed without our knowing it. Sometimes this happens through some little in observance of our own, which hardly amounts to a fault, and yet is pregnant with consequences. Sometimes new cir cumstances gather round us, and an invisible hand presses the helm, and our life steers upon a track almost indistinguishably like its old one, yet leading to a very different quarter. Hence to our own inward vigilance and to our docility to intelligent and disinterested direction we must add a quiet observation of what happens to us from without, and which is God s external providence over us. A pondering, a grateful, pensive, admiring pondering, of past mercies is a very different thing from that sickly self-inspection which unnerves so many pious persons, and is unwholesome to all. Our past years are a scroll of prophecy, full of rules and intimations for the future. Like the prophet, we must eat the scroll, and eat it often. A spiritual life, arranged independently of our outward circumstances, and alongside of our external duties instead of upon them, is simply a stronghold of delusions.

But the surest method of arriving at a knowledge of

God s eternal purposes about us is to be found in the right use of the present moment. We must esteem our present grace, and rest in it, and with tranquil assiduity correspond to it. Our present grace is the most infallible will of God. It is a. revelation from God, which almost always brings its own authoritative interpretation along with it. What we want for our sanctification is not merely grace, but the right grace, the right grace at the right time and in the right place. God s will does not come to us in the whole, but in fragments, and generally in small fragments. It is our business to piece it together, and to live it into one orderly vocation. Like a lantern in the night, grace gives light around our feet, a circle of light just wide enough to prevent our stumbling. B-ut then we must look at our feet. If we strain our eyes into the gloom ahead of us, we shall stumble in spite of the lantern: nay sometimes we shall even stumble because of it, its shadows move so suddenly, and with such unwieldy strides. Our present grace is also the one least beset with delusions, and we can act safely upon it, although perhaps not comfortably, even when we do not see how it matches with what has just gone before, or how it can fit into any conceivable future which our circum stances will allow. The hours are like slaves which follow each other, bringing fuel to the firrnace. Each hour conies with some little faggot of God s will fastened upon its bade. If we thus esteem our present grace, we shall begin to understand God s purposes. It seems an easy thing to do, and yet it cannot really be easy because so few do it. One man is always pulling the past to pieces, while another man is marching with his head erect into the uncertain future, disdainful of the present. Strange to say, intentions are more exciting than actions, and therefore more attractive. For safety and for swiftness, for clear light and successful labour, there is nothing like the present. Practically speaking, the moment that is flying holds more eternity than all our past, and the future holds none at all, and only becomes capable of holding any, as it is manufactured piecemeal into the present. The spiritual direction of multitudes of men consists of nothing but keeping them to this; and it is one of those unlikely works which has the misfortune of being seldom successful, even though it is indispensable, and on the whole least successful, where most indispensable.

But we may follow all these rules with adequate fidelity, and yet not find out our special vocation. True, but we have found out that it is God s will we are not to find it out; and surely there is no repose like that of a certain will of God. "When we have ascer tained that, we are contented. The endeavour to learn our vocation is the way to learn it, though it does not secure the knowledge of it. But it secures our sanctification, and therefore its results are practically the same as if we did know our vocation. The endeavour sanc tifies us more than the attainment of our end, and it does so because it deals only with present grace, and so with ascertained wills of God. So long as our ignorance is not our own fault, love is all round us, and we are on the right road. To some, as I said, God gives a clear view of their special vocation. He gives it them as a grace apparently independent of their endea vours, and before they have made any. On some it dawns gradually, like a slow sunrise, and makes many a beautiful revelation of God in the changeful splendours of its rising. On some it fxashes all at once without any reason that we can see, and without our having expected it. Sometimes on the other hand it comes like one of those expected things, which have the charm of always coming unexpectedly. To some the vision of it is granted, when they are yet far off from the fulfilment of it. To others it unveils itself only when they are upon it, so that they almost fall over it, and some do fall over it. Now it is plain that the knowledge of our vocation will affect our whole spiritual life. Men, who enjoy the vision of it, lead special lives based upon that knowledge. It is a great grace, but only to those who have it. It would not be a great grace to those to whom God does not give it.

But the majority never know what their vocation is, because God does not intend them to know it. It is part of their vocation that they should not know it. They even fulfil their vocation and do not know that they have done so. They have no feeling of it at the very moment they are fulfilling it. This ignorance is as great a grace, as the knowledge would have been, though it is a less consoling one. If it be less in itself, it is better for us because it is fitter for us. The size of our graces is not of as much consequence as their suitableness. They must fit us, and they must fit each other, and they must fit the end which God has in view for us. Thus we may be tranquil and courageous in our ignorance. But, even if we belong to the third class of men, those who through their own fault do not know their special vocation, there is nothing to hinder our courage or our tranquillity, if only we are earnestly endeavouring to learn God s will about us. AVe must not fret. Fretting neutralizes grace. It looks a little evil, but it is in truth a great one.

If there be retrospect in eternity, and the Vision in front of us does not absorb us wholly, I conjecture that our life will present this picture to us. In the far back of an unbeginning eternity we shall see a clear and special purpose for which God created us, an individual specialty, which He has never quite repeated in any other of His creatures, a special attraction which called out His love to us, or rather which His love invented, and which made us more dear in His sight than possible better men would have been. This specialty decided our vocation upon earth. It fixed our place. It determined our time. It fashioned our work. All the mercies of our lives had their faces set towards it. Outward circumstances made a current which drew us that way. All our graces were in order to it. All our inspirations, like according notes in music, were a unity, and each sounded out of that eternal purpose, and seemed to call us on to its fulfilment. Each present moment was a partial developement of the one grand special end: and now our glory in heaven answers to the old eternal specialty of God s love about us. The one eternity looks the other eternity in the face. Thus we have all along had the arms of G-od s special, and indeed singular and unshared love, round about us, and in the light of our Blessed Home we see with rapture, that all has been predestination, and that all has been free-will.

Footnotes

1. In like manner we read of the Jesuit, F. Giulio Fazio, the author of the famous treatise on Mortification, that when he was dying, and, taking the Cruciflx in his hand, had said the words, "I wish to live, I long to die, in the arms of my Lord," he kept repeating over and over again the word my, and seemed, says the writer in the Menologio, as if tie were sucking in some delicious liquid. Menologio. Gennajo. 5. ↩