THE ETERNAL YEARS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”
II.
THE PULSATIONS OF TIME.
The deduction we arrive at from the argument which we have laid down is that the history of the world is a consistent one, and not a series of loose incidents strung together. It is as much this morally, it is as truly the evolution and unwinding of a high moral law and of a great spiritual truth, as the life of the plant from the seed to the ripe fruit is the development of a natural growth. This last is governed by laws with which we are only partially acquainted; whereas the moral law and the spiritual truth are revealed to us by the divine scheme of creation and redemption. There is nothing existing, either in the natural or in the spiritual law, and especially in this last, which is not more or less, in one way or in another, by assertion or by negation, a revelation of the divine Being.
He reveals himself directly by his volitions and indirectly by his permissions. And we can only be one with him when we have learnt to accept both and to submit to both; not in the spirit of quietism or fatalism, but as actively entering into his intentions, accepting what he wills, and bearing what he permits. There is no harmony possible between the soul and God until we have arrived at this; and the history of the world is the history of man’s acquiescence in, or resistance to, the supreme will of God. The first disruption of the will of man from the will of God, in the fall of man, wove a dark woof into the web of time; and every act of ours which is not according to the will of God weaves the same into our own lives, because it is a rupture of the law of harmony which God has instituted between himself as creator and us as creatures. Were that harmony unbroken, man would rest in God as in his centre; for, being finite, he has no sufficiency in himself, but for ever seeks some good extrinsic to himself. The same applies to all creation, whose ultimate end and highest good must always be some object beyond, and above itself; and that object is none other than God, “quod ignorantes colitis,”[270]—the finite striving after the Infinite. Thus the whole divine government of the world is a gradual unfolding of the divine Will, according as we are able to receive it. And the degree of receptivity in mankind, at various periods of the world’s history, and in different localities, accounts for the variety in the divine dispensations, and for the imperfection of some as compared with others. The “yet more excellent way”[271] could not be received by all at all times. The promise was given to Abraham. But four hundred and thirty years elapsed before its fulfilment, for the express purpose of being occupied and spent in the institution of the law as a less perfect dispensation, and which was given because of transgressions—“propter transgressiones posita est”[272]—thus showing the adaptive government of God: the gradual building up of the city of the Lord, whose stones are the living souls of men, which are “hewed and made ready,”[273] but so that there shall be “neither hammer, nor axe, nor tool of iron heard” while it is building. For God does not force his creature. He pours not “new wine into old bottles,” but waits in patience the growth of his poor creatures, and the slow and gradual leavening of the great mass. A time had been when God walked with man “at the afternoon air”;[274] and whatever may be the full meaning of this exquisitely-expressed intercourse, at least it must have been intimate and tender. But when the black pall of evil fell on the face of creation, the light of God’s intercourse with man was let in by slow degrees, like single stars coming out in the dark firmament. The revelations, like the stars, varied in magnitude and glory, lay wide apart from each other, rose at different intervals of longer or shorter duration, and conveyed, like them, a flickering and uncertain light, until the “Sun of Justice arose with health in his wings,”[275] and “scattered the rear of darkness thin.” The degree of light vouchsafed was limited by the capacity of the recipient; and that capacity has not always been the same in all ages, any more than in any one age it is the same in all the contemporary men, or in each man the same at all periods of his life. It is thus that we arrive at the explanation of an apparent difference of tone, color, and texture, so to speak, in the various manifestations of God to man. The manifestation is limited to the capacity of the recipient; and not only is it limited, but to a certain extent it becomes, as it were, tinged by the properties of the medium through which it is transmitted to others. It assumes characteristics that are not essentially its own. For so marvellous is the respect with which the Creator treats the freedom of his creature that he suffers us to give a measure of our own color to what he reveals to us, so that it may be more our own, more on our level, more within our grasp; as though he poured the white waters of saving truth into glasses of varied colors, and thus hid from us a pellucidity too perfect for our nature. And thus it happens that to us who dwell in the light of God’s church, with the seven lamps of the seven sacraments burning in the sanctuary, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob hardly seems to us the same God as our God. We see him through the prism of the past, amid surroundings that are strange to us, in the old patriarchal life that seems so impossible a mode of existence to the denizens of great cities in modern Europe.
This is equally true throughout the history of the world. It is also true of every individual soul; and it is true of the same soul at different periods of its existence. He is the same God always and everywhere. But there is a difference in the kind of reception which each soul gives to that portion of divine knowledge and grace which it is capable of receiving and which it actually does receive. For they are “divers kinds of vessels, every little vessel, from the vessels of cups even to every instrument of music.”[276] They differ in capacity and they differ in material; and the great God, in revealing himself, does so by degrees. He has deposited, as it were, the whole treasure of himself in the bosom of his spouse, the church; but the births of new grace and further developed truth only come to us as we can bear them and when we can bear them. The body of truth is all there; but the dispensing of that truth varies in degree as time goes on. God governs in his own world; but he does so behind and through the human instruments whom he condescends to employ. And as, in the exercise of his own free-will, man chose the evil and refused the good, so has the Almighty accommodated himself to the conditions which man has instituted. Were he to do otherwise, he would force the will of his creature, which he never will do, because the doing it would have for result to deprive that creature of all moral status and reduce him to a machine. From the moment that we lose the power of refusing the good and taking the evil, from the moment that any force really superior to that which has been put into the arsenals of our own being robs us of the faculty of selection, we lose all merit and consequently all demerit. The Creator, when he made man, surrounded him with the respect due to a being who had the power of disposing of his own everlasting destiny. Nor has he ever done, nor will he do, anything which can entrench on this prerogative. The whole system of grace is a system divinely devised to afford man aid in the selection he has to make. There lies an atmosphere of grace all around our souls, as there lies the air we breathe around our senses. The one is as frequently unperceived by us as the other.[277] We are without consciousness as regards its presence, as we are without direct habitual consciousness of the act of breathing and of our own existence, except as from time to time we make a reflective modification in our own mind of the idea of the air and of the fact of our inhaling it. We are unconscious that it is the divine Creator who is for ever sustaining our physical existence. We are oblivious of it for hours together, unless we stop and think. It is the same with the presence of grace.
And though “exciting” grace, as theology calls it, begins with the illustration of the intellect, it does not follow that we are always by any means conscious of this illustration. It is needless to carry out the theological statement in these pages. What we have said is enough to bring us round to our point, which is that the action of grace on the individual soul, and the long line of direct and indirect revelations of God’s will from the creation to the present hour, though always the same grace and always the same revelation, receive different renderings according to the vehicle in which they are held—much as a motive in music remains the same air, though transposed from one key to another. Not only, therefore, does man, as it were, give a color of his own to the revelation of God, but he has the sad faculty of limiting its flow and circumscribing its course, even where he cannot altogether arrest it. We are “slow of heart to believe,” and therefore is the time delayed when the still unfulfilled promises may take effect. Our Lord declares that Moses permitted the Hebrews to put away their wives, because of the hardness of their hearts; “but from the beginning it was not so.”[278] God’s law had never in itself been other than what the church has declared it to be. The state of matrimony, as God had ordained it, was always meant to be what the church has now defined. But man was not in a condition to receive so perfect a law; and thus the condition of man—that is, the hardness of his heart—had the effect of modifying the apparent will of God, as revealed in what we now know to be one of the seven sacraments. The Hebrews were incapable of anything more than a mutilated, or rather a truncated, expression of the divine will, as it was represented to them in the law of Moses on the married state. Nor could we anywhere find a more perfect illustration of our argument. In the first place, it is given us by our Lord himself; and, in the second, it occurs on a subject which, taken in its larger sense, involves almost every other, lies at the root of the whole world of matter, and of being through matter, and may be called the representative idea of the creation. Now, if on such a question as this mankind, at some period of their existence, and that a period which includes ages of time, and covers, at one interval or another, the whole vast globe, could only bear an imperfect and utterly defective rendering, how much more must there exist to be still further developed out of the “things new and old” which lie in the womb of time and in the treasures of the church, but which are waiting for the era when we shall be in a condition to receive them! The whole system of our Lord’s teaching was based on this principle. He seems, if we may so express it, afraid of overburdening his disciples by too great demands upon their capacity. He says with reference to the mission of S. John the Baptist: “If you will receive it, he is Elias that is to come,”[279] and in the Sermon on the Mount he points out to them the imperfection of the old moral code, as regarded the taking of oaths and the law of talion. Now, the moral law, as it existed in the mind of God, could never have varied. It must always have been “perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.” But it passed through an imperfect medium—the one presented by the then condition of mankind—and was modified accordingly.
We hold, therefore, in what we have now stated, a distinct view of the way in which God governs the world; not absolutely, not arbitrarily, but adaptively. And where we see imperfection, and at times apparent retrogression, it is the free will of man forcing the will of God to his own destruction, “until he who hindereth now, and will hinder, be taken out of the way.”[280]
If this be true of God’s direct revelations of himself, and of his moral law as given from time to time to mankind, according as, in their fallen state, they could receive it—if, in short, it be true of his direct volitions—it is also true of his permissions. If it hold good of the revelations of his antecedent will, it holds good of the instances (so far as we may trace them in the history of the world) of his consequent will; that is, of his will which takes into consideration the facts induced by man in the exercise of his own free will, which is so constantly running counter to the antecedent will of God. The divine permissions form the negative side of the revelation of God. They are his permissive government of the world, not his direct government. The direct government is the stream of revelation given to our first parents, to the patriarchs and lawgivers of Israel, and now, in a more direct and immediate way, through our Blessed Lord in his birth, death, and resurrection, by the church in the sacraments, and through her temporal head, the vicar of Christ.
Even now, when he has consummated his union with his church, and that she is the true organ of the Holy Ghost, and thus the one true and infallible medium and interpreter of God’s direct government of the world, he also governs it by the indirect way of his overruling providence. The events which occur in history have ever a double character. They have their mere human aspect, often apparently for evil alone; and they have their ultimate result for good, which is simply the undercurrent of God’s will working upwards, and through the actions of mankind. Events which, on the face of them, bear the character of unmitigated evils, like war, have a thousand ultimate beneficial results. War is the rude, cruel pioneer of the armies of the Lord; for where the soldier has been the priest will follow. Persecutions kindle new faith and awake fresh ardor. Pestilence quickens charity and leads to improvements in the condition of the poor. Nor do we believe that it is only in this large and general, unsympathetic, and sweeping manner that God allows good to be worked out of evil. We have faith in the intercession of the Mother of Mercy; and as ultimate good may arise to whole races of mankind out of terrible calamities, so, we are persuaded, there is a more intimate, minute, and loving interference to individual souls wherever there is huge public calamity. The field of battle, the burning city, the flood, and the pestilence are Mary’s harvest fields, whither she sends her angels, over whom she is queen, with special and extraordinary graces, to gather and collect those who might otherwise have perished, and, in the supreme moment which is doubtless so often God’s hour, to win trophies of mercy to the honor and glory of the Precious Blood.
Unless we believe in God’s essential, actual, and unintermittent government of the world, we cannot solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and her cruel, stony stare will freeze our blood as we traverse the deserts of life. If we believe only in his direct government, we shall find it chiefly, if not solely, in his church; and the area is sadly limited! If we acknowledge his essential providence in his permissions, if we make sure of his presence in what appears its very negation, then alone do we arrive at the solution of life’s problems; and even this, not as an obvious thing, but as a constant and ever-renewed act of faith in the under-flowing gulf-stream of divine love, which melts the ice and softens the rigor of the wintry epochs in the world’s history. If we admit of this theory, which is new to none of us, though dim to some, we let in a flood of light upon many of the incidents described in the Old Testament, and specially spoken of as done by the will of God, but which, to our farther-advanced revelation of God, read to us as unlike himself. The light of the later interpretation has been thrown over the earlier fact; but in the harmony of eternity, when we are freed from the broken chord of time, there will be no dissonant notes.
There can be no more wonderful proof of God’s unutterable love than the way in which he has condescended to make the very sins of mankind work to his own glory and to the farther revelation of himself. From the first “felix culpa” of our first parents, as the church does not hesitate to call it, down to the present hour—down even to the secret depths of our own souls, where we are conscious of the harvests of grace sprung from repentant tears—it is still the great alchemist turning base metal in the crucible of divine love into pure gold.
It is one of the most irrefragable proofs of the working of a perpetual providence that can be adduced.
Granted that there are no new creations, but that creation is one act, evolving itself by its innate force into all the phenomena which we see, and into countless possible others which future generations of beings will see, nothing of this can prevent the fact that the moral development of the status of mankind, the revelations of divine truth, and consequently of the Deity, through the flow of ages, has ever been a bringing of good out of evil which no blind, irresponsible law could produce. There is no sort of reason why evil should work into its contrary good, except the reason that God is the supreme good, and directs all apparent evil into increments of his glory, thereby converting it into an ultimate good. We must remember, however, that this does not diminish our culpability, because it does not affect our free-will. It does not make evil another form of good. It is no pact with the devil. It is war and victory, opposition and conquest. It is justice and retribution, and it behooves us to see whether we are among those who are keeping ourselves in harmony with the eternal God in his direct government of the world; in harmony (so far as we know it) with his antecedent will; or whether we are allowing ourselves to drift away into channels of our own, working out only the things that he permits, but which he also condemns, and laying up for ourselves that swift devouring flame which will “try every man’s work of what sort it is.”
We have thus arrived at two different views of God’s government of the world—his direct government and his indirect or permissive government. We now come to what we may call his inductive teaching of the world—the way in which truths are partially revealed to us, and come to us percolating through the sands of time, as mankind needs them and can receive them.
Our Lord himself gives us an example of this inductive process when he speaks of “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob” as being “not the God of the dead, but of the living,” thus showing that the Jews held, and were bound to hold, the doctrine of immortality by an inductive process. The teaching of the old law was symbolic and inductive. The histories of the Old Testament are of the same character. They are written with no apparent design. They are the simple account of such incidents as the historian thought himself bound to record; acting, as he did, under the divine impulse, which underlay his statements without fettering his pen. He was not himself half conscious of the unspeakable importance of his work. Consequently, there is no effort, hardly even common precaution and foresight, in his mode of chronicling events. He glances at incidents without explaining them, because while he wrote they were present to his own experience, and would be to that of his readers. A writer in our day would allude to a person having performed a journey of fifty miles in an hour’s time without thinking it necessary to explain that people travel by steam. In another part he would advert to railroads, and the rapidity of locomotion as their result, equally without a direct reference to the individual who effected fifty miles in an hour. To the reader of three thousand years hence the one incidental allusion will explain and corroborate the other, and thus, by internal evidence, prove the authenticity and consistency of the history. Unintentional coincidences crop up as the pages grow beneath his hand, and to the careful student of Scripture throw light unlooked for on the exactitude and veracity of the narrative. And the substratum of the whole of the Old Testament history is the gradual growth of one family out of all the families of mankind, into which, as into a carefully prepared soil, the seed of divine truth was to be sown. Through all the variety of the Old Testament writers the same underlying design exists; and though this was a special stream of revelation unlike any that now exists or that is now required (for reasons which are obvious to every Catholic who knows what the church is), yet they form an indication of the way in which the divine Creator is for ever governing the world and preparing it with a divine foresight for his ultimate purpose. The Holy Ghost speaks now through a direct organ, which organ is the church. Formerly God spoke through historic events and multitudinous incidents in connection with one race of people. But this very fact authorizes us to believe that the same character of government exists throughout the whole universe in a greater or less degree, and that God is preparing the way for the ultimate triumph of the sacred Humanity and of his spouse the Church, on the far-off shores of sultry Africa, in the inner recesses of silent China, among the huge forests which skirt the Blue Mountains, or amid the glittering glories of the kingdoms of ice.
There is nothing more depressingly sad, more deeply to be regretted, and more difficult to explain than the almost hopeless narrowness of most people in their appreciation of divinely-ordained facts. We live like moles. We throw up a mound of dusky earth above and around us, within which we grope and are content. The treasures of sacred lore, the depths of spiritual science, the infinite variety of Scriptural information, with the divinely-pointed moral of every tale, are things which most of us are content to know exist, and to think no more about. The very lavishness with which God has given us all that we want for the salvation of our souls seems to have stifled in our ungenerous natures the longing to know and to do more. When the Evangelist said that the world would not hold the books that might be written on the sacred Humanity alone, he must have had an intuition, not so much of the material world and material volumes, as of the world of narrowed minds and crippled hearts who would be found stranded on the shores of our much-vaunted civilization and progress.
Few things are more remarkable in the tone and character of modern Catholic writers than the small amount of use they make of Scripture: so strangely in contrast with the old writers, and with even the great French spiritual authors of a century and a half ago. Their pages are rich with Scriptural lore. Their style is a constant recognition of the government and designs of God as shown to us in our past and present, and as we are bound to anticipate them in the future. In our time this has given place to emotional devotion; a most excellent thing in its way, but only likely to have much influence over our lives when it is grounded on solid theology and directed by real knowledge. No doubt it is so in the minds of the authors themselves; but we fear it is rare in those of their ordinary readers, who thus drink the froth off the wine, but are not benefited by the strengthening properties of the generous liquid itself. Nor will they be until they have made up their minds to believe and understand that conversion is not an isolated fact in their lives, but a progressive act involving all the intellect, all the faculties, be they great or small (for each one must be full up to his capacity), and all the heart, mind, and soul. The whole man must work and be worked upon in harmony; and we must remember that it is work, and not merely feeling, consolation, emotion, prettiness, and ornament, but an intellectual growth, going on pari passu with a spiritual growth, until the whole vessel is fitted and prepared for the glory of God.
We think we may venture to say that few things will conduce more to this than the study of the divine Scriptures under the light and teaching of the Catholic Church. In them we find a profound revelation of the character of God. We are, as we read them interpreted to us by the lamp of the sanctuary, let down into awful depths of the divine Eternal Mind. We watch the whole world and all creation working up for the supreme moment of the birth of Jesus; while in the life of our Blessed Lord himself we find, condensed into those wonderful thirty-three years, the whole system of the church—the spiritual fabric which is to fill eternity, the one God-revealing system which is finally to supersede all others.
Unhappily many persons are under the delusion that narrowness and ignorance are the same as Christian simplicity, and that innocence means ignorance of everything else, as well as of evil. These are the people who are afraid to look facts in the face, and to read them off as part of the God-directed history of the world. These are they to whom science is a bugbear. They hug their ignorance as being their great safeguard, and wear blinkers lest they should be startled by the events which cross their path. Grown men and women do it for themselves and attempt it for their children, and meanwhile those to whom we ought to be superior are rushing on with headlong daring, carrying intellectual eminence, and originality, and investigation of science, all before them; while we, who should be clad in the panoply of the faith, and afraid of nothing, are putting out the candles and shading the lamps, that we may idly enjoy a shadow too dense for real work.
And yet is not the earth ours? Is not all that exists our heritage? To whom does anything belong if not to us, the sons of the church, the sole possessors of infallible truth, the only invulnerable ones, the only ever-enduring and ever-increasing children of the light? The past is ours; the present should be ours; the future is all our own. Our triumph may be slow (and it is slower because we are cowards), but it is certain. Are we not tenfold the children of the covenant, the sons of the Father’s house, the heirs of all? We alone are in possession of what all science and art must ultimately fall back upon and harmonize with. There is no success possible but what is obtained, and shall in the future be obtained, in union with the church of God. Have we forgotten, are we ever for a moment permitted to forget, that the church of God is not an accident, nor a cunningly-devised, tolerably able, partially infirm organization, but that she is the spouse of the God-Man, the one revelation of God, perfect and entire, though but gradually given forth; that all the harmonies of science are fragments of the harmony of God himself, of his pure being, of the Qui Est; and that the harmony of the arts is simply the human expression of the harmony of the Logos, the human utterances of the articulations of the divine Word, as they come to us in our far-off life-like echoes from eternity?
Even the great false religions of the past, and of the present in the remote East, are but man’s discord breaking the harmony of truth while retaining the key-note: the immortality of the soul and the perfection of a future state in the deep thoughts of Egypt, the universality of God’s providential government of the world in Greek mythology, the union of the soul with God in Brahminism, and the One God of Mahometanism. Each has its kernel of truth, its ideal nucleus of supernatural belief, which it had caught from the great harmony of God in broken fragments, and enshrined in mystic signs. Even now, as we look back upon them all, we are bound to confess that they stand on a totally different ground from the multitudinous sects of our day, which break off from the one body of the church and drift off into negation or Protestantism. Far be it from us to insinuate that any, the lowest form of Christianity, the weakest utterance of the dear name of Jesus, is not ten thousand fold better than the most abstruse of the old Indian or Egyptian religions. Wherever the name of Jesus is uttered, no matter how imperfectly, there is more hope of light and of salvation than in the deepest symbols of heathen or pagan creeds. It may be but one ray of light, but still it is light—the real warming, invigorating light of the sun, and not the cold and deleterious light of the beautiful moon, who has poisoned what she has borrowed.[281] Nevertheless, and maintaining this with all the energy of which we are capable, it is still true that each one of the great false religions, which at various times and in divers places have swayed mankind, was rather the overgrowth of error on a substantial truth than the breaking up of truth into fragmentary and illogical negation, which is the characteristic of all forms of secession from the Catholic unity of the church. The modern aberrations from the faith are a mere jangle of sounds, while the old creeds were the petrifaction of truth. The modern forms of faith outside the church are a negation of truth rather than a distortion. Consequently, they are for ever drifting and taking Protean shapes that defy classification.
They have broken up into a hundred forms; they will break up into a thousand more, till the whole fabric has crumbled into dust. They have none of the strong hold on human nature which the old religions had, because they are not the embodiment of a sacred mystery, but rather the explaining away of all mystery. They are a perpetual drifting detritus, without coherence as without consistency; and as they slip down the slant of time, they fall into the abyss of oblivion, and will leave not a trace behind, only in so far that, vanishing from sight, they make way for the fuller establishment of the truth—the eternal, the divine, spherical truth, absolute in its cohesion and perfect in all its parts.
The hold which heathen and pagan creeds have had upon mankind conveys a lesson to ourselves which superficial thinkers are apt to overlook. It is certain they could not have held whole nations beneath their influence had not each in its turn been an embodiment of some essential truth which, though expressed through error, remains in itself essentially a part of truth. They snatched at fragments of the natural law which governs the universe, or they embodied in present expression the inalienable hopes of mankind. They took the world of nature as the utterance neither of a passing nor of an inexorable law, but of an inscrutable Being, and believed that the mystical underlies the natural. Untaught by the sweet revelations of Christianity, their religion could assume no aspect but one of terror, silent dread, and deep horror. Their only escape from this result was in the deterioration that necessarily follows the popularization of all abstract ideas, unless protected by a system at once consistent and elastic, like that which is exhibited in the discipline of the Catholic Church. They wearied of the rarefied atmosphere of unexplained mystery. They wanted the tangible and evident in its place. Like the Israelites, they lusted after the flesh-pots of Egypt; and their lower nature and evil passions rebelled against the moral loftiness of abstract truth. The multitude could not be kept up to the mark, and needed coarser food. The result was inevitable. But as all religion involves mystery, instead of working upward through the natural law to the spiritual and divine law, they inverted the process, and grovelled down below the natural law, with its sacramentalistic character, to the preternatural and diabolic. Mystery was retained, but only in the profanation of themselves and of natural laws, until they had passed outside all nature, and, making a hideous travesty of humanity, had become more vile and hateful than the devils they served.
Thus the Romans vulgarized the Greek mythology; and that which had remained during a long period as a beautiful though purely human expression of a divine mystery, among a people whose religion consisted mainly in the worship of the beautiful, and who themselves transcended all that humanity has ever since beheld in their own personal perfection of beauty, became, when it passed through the coarser hands of the Romans, a degenerate vulgarity, which infected their whole existence, in art and in manners, quite as effectually as in religion. Then Rome flung open her gates to all the creeds of all the world, and the time-honored embodiments of fragmentary but intrinsic truth met together, and were all equally tolerated and equally degenerated. All!—except the one whole and perfect truth: the Gospel of Salvation. That was never tolerated. That alone could not be endured, because the instinct of evil foresaw its own impending ruin in the Gospel of peace.
It was a new thing for mankind to be told that a part of the essence of religion was elevated morality and the destruction of sin in the individual. Whatever comparative purity of life had co-existed with the old religions was hardly due to their influence among the multitude, though it might be so with those whose educated superiority enabled them to reason out the morality of creeds. While the rare philosopher was reading the inmost secret of the abstract idea on which the religion of his country was based, and the common pagan was practising the most degraded sorcery and peering into obscene mysteries, without a single elevation of thought, suddenly the life of the God-Man was put before the world, and the whole face of creation was gradually changed.
But as the shadows of the past in the old religions led up to the light, so shall the light of the present lead up to the “perfect day.”
TO BE CONTINUED.