THE ETERNAL YEARS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”
IV
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD’S GOVERNMENT—LONGANIMITY
As a lavish and yet unwasteful abundance was the first condition and eminent characteristic of the creation, so is longanimity, or patience, the special quality which marks the dealings of God with his creatures, in the gradual and long-enduring developments of his government. It is the quality to which we are most indebted, and yet which, as regards the history of mankind, we value and understand the least. Possibly the fact of our own brevity of life, as compared with the multitude of thoughts, efforts, and emotions which the immortality of our being crowds across the narrow limit of time, leaving an impression of breathlessness and haste, may put it almost out of our power—save as all things are possible by the grace of God—to raise ourselves to any approximate appreciation of God’s long-enduring patience. And this is increased in the minds of those who are zealous for God’s glory. They chafe at the outrages committed against his law; they sicken before the long, dreary aspect of man’s incredulity and hardness of heart; and the rise of a new heresy, the advent of an antipope, or the horrors of a French Revolution lead them hastily to conclude, and impatiently to wish, that the last day may be at hand. Experience is a slow process. At fifty a man only begins to learn the great value of life and to look back
with marvel at the lavish waste of his earlier years. But if to the individual the convictions resulting from experience are of slow and laborious growth, they are still more so to the multitude. Consequently, though more than eighteen hundred years have come and gone since St. John wrote to his disciples, “Little children, it is the last hour,” nevertheless the pious of all shades of opinion in all ages have not been afraid to utter random guesses that the end of the world cannot be far off because of the wickedness of men. It is indeed true, as the Holy Ghost spoke by St. John, that it is the “last hour.” But what does that “last hour” mean? Not surely a literal last hour or last day, but a last epoch. The epoch in the history of the cosmos before the coming of the Redeemer—that is, before the hypostatic union in a visible, tangible, and real human body of the second Person of the Triune Godhead—was the first hour, or the first epoch. The period since the Incarnation is the last hour, or the last epoch; because nothing mightier or greater can take place than the fact of God taking flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. It is the consummation; it is the one great end of all creation. This last epoch will have its eras, evolving themselves within the bosom of the Catholic Church, just as the first epoch had its eras
in the diverse revelations which God made of himself to man; and which were, if we may use the term without seeming to derogate from their unspeakable importance and their divine origin, of a more desultory nature than those which are, and shall be, accorded to God’s spouse, the infallible church. What is this but to say again what we are endeavoring to express in every page, namely, that “He who sitteth on the white horse went forth conquering, that he might conquer”;[81] and that God’s work ever has been, is now, and ever will be a progressive work. “Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O Thou most mighty. With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously and reign.”[82] When the whole of Scripture is teeming with promises of future more glorious eras of which we now only see the germ, developed here and there in some favored soul, in some special corner of God’s vast vineyard, the church (for the saints have always been men of the future, in advance of their own time), is it not a marvel to hear desponding men talking as though there were nothing better to be hoped for than the end of the world, coming, as they seem to expect it, like a terrific frost which shall nip in the bud all the, as yet, unfulfilled promises, and drown the wicked in a deluge of flame! And this we expect and almost desire, hoping we ourselves may be saved, but without a second thought for God’s beautiful earth, which he has blessed a thousand fold by his own divine footprints on its surface; and where he now makes his tabernacle in ten thousand churches, waiting, nay watching, with that ineffable patience of his, whose cycles of longanimity we are incapable of appreciating!
But it is cruel to speak harshly of a few words of discouragement falling from the lips of those who are weary with vigils waiting for new daylight. Only let us learn that the Sun of Righteousness to our perceptions, as it were, sets and rises again. We are like children who think when the glorious golden disc has sunk beneath the horizon that it is utterly gone and is perhaps extinct, while on the contrary the children of another hemisphere are playing in the warmth of its beams; so we see the dark clouds of evil hiding from us the light of grace, first in one spot, then in another, and we grow downcast and impatient. We forget that “not one jot or one tittle shall pass of the law till all be fulfilled”;[83] and that our Lord tells us he “did not come to destroy either the law or the prophets, but to fulfil them.” Bearing this in mind, let our readers take up the Psalms and the Prophets, and study, with a deliberate faith in the inspired words, the promises which concern the future of the world under the tent of the church, the place of which tent shall be enlarged that she may “pass on to the right hand and to the left; and inhabit the [now] desolate cities.”[84]
It is a want of hope—and let us ever remember that hope is a virtue, and not a mere quality or faculty of the mind—which leads us to read the stupendously sublime promises of God to the whole earth in the future of the church, as so much beautiful imagery of which a limited application manifests itself, from time to time, in the partial conversion of some thousands here and there over the vast face of the semi-civilized world, while millions
upon millions remain heathens, Hindoos, Jews, and Mussulmans. We read these glorious utterances of the Scriptures with the restrained admiration of one who, while admiring a poem, makes allowances for the “fine frenzy” of the poet. We take it cum grano salis, and forget that it is the trumpet voice of absolute truth; and that whether or no it point to a millennium upon earth—a question left open by the church, and so little discussed as yet by her modern theologians that we will not dwell upon it—it must mean all it says; and, after the fashion of God’s gifts, more than we can conceive. This, then, is what the patience and longanimity of God is leading us to. These glories, which have exhausted the tenderest as well as the most powerful utterance of language to depict, are the future of the church, when the spouse of Christ shall be the mistress of the world. St. Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews, quoting the eighth Psalm on the high destinies of man, says, “Thou hast subjected all things under his feet,” and adds, “but we see not as yet all things subject to him.” Nevertheless the delay gave no place for doubt that the promise should have an ultimate and complete fulfilment; while he unfolds to us the wherefore of these sublime predictions, the only adequate reason why the human race should be crowned with glory and honor—the one, sole emphatic cause, namely, that all creation is in and for the Incarnation; that the Incarnation is the basement, and the sublime architrave and final coping-stone of the whole edifice; that the creation is for him as entirely as it is by him, and that man is the younger brother of his Redeemer, and shares in his inheritance.
We have already spoken of the indirect and adaptive government of God; of “the government which he condescends to administer in his world through the moral and physical activity with which he has endowed mankind.” We have shown that the representative law of creation is “increase and multiply.” We now come to the fact that since the fall the corollary of that law is labor and toil. The earth from henceforward brought forth thorns and thistles; in other words, on all sides obstacles and difficulties met the advancing steps of the discrowned lord of creation. Speaking according to the eternal decrees of God, and not according to their manifestation through time, we should say that the younger and fallen sons of God had to reconquer the world they were given to reign over, as the elder Son of God, he who is from all eternity, has, in consequence of the same fall, to reconquer the reign of grace in the souls of men, step by step, vanquishing the thorns and thistles with which our unbelief and iniquity tear and rend his bleeding feet! There is God’s work going on in the material world, and there is God’s work going on in the spiritual world. And what we want to do is to persuade our readers not so constantly to put the two in opposition, as though, while the progress of grace is exclusively God’s work, material progress were quite as exclusively man’s work—to say nothing of those who hold it to be the devil’s work.
When the three Persons of the ever blessed Trinity said, “Let us make man,” it was with the expressed intention that he should have dominion over the whole earth—“universæ terræ.” That constitution of man as the lord of creation was not annulled when man fell. It
is true that it became a dominion he had to contest with the beasts of the forest, who were originally to have been his willing slaves; with the thorns and thistles that ever since bar his passage; and with the convulsions of nature, to the secret harmonies of which he had lost the key; while the angelic guardians of the cosmos could not hold intercourse with him in his degraded state, who, although they be “ministering spirits,” are so in secret only, until the time shall come for their promised mission upon earth. Nevertheless man was a monarch still, though a fallen monarch. Or rather we should say that, as redeemed man, he is God’s viceroy; and in that character is reconquering the material world, that as the ages roll on the church, the spouse of Jesus, may “lengthen her cords and strengthen her stakes.”[85]
Materialism is no necessary consequence of material progress. Scientific discovery, whether as regards the solar system, the dynamic forces, chemical affinities, or the properties of the world’s flora, the habits of its fauna and the uses to which all these may be put, is—next to the development of theological truth, of which in a certain sense, as will one day be proved, it is the correlative—the highest gift of God. It is simply man’s fulfilment of his second and inferior mission upon earth. His first mission, or rather his vocation, is to save his soul from sin, and to live in union with his God. His second is to fill the one spot, be it wide or narrow, which God has assigned him in the creation with all the faculties of his mind and intellect. It may be a very small, a scarcely discernible spot that he occupies; but in his degree
he too has to conquer his territorial inch and govern in the creation, though he do so but as a shepherd or a ploughman. We are conscious as we write this of all that may be said in detriment of material progress, of the luxury it leads to, of the rapid propagation of false opinions, evil literature, and irreligious thought; or of the increased facilities for the wholesale slaughter of mankind in modern warfare. No wonder the pure-minded shrink in dismay from much that material progress appears to be producing in the world, and that timid souls are led to believe that such progress not only is not God’s work, but (if we may make this distinction) is also not his intention. We would entreat all such to take courage from a few considerations which will lay before them their error in principle, and also give them a wider view of God’s merciful designs in his own creation.
First, it may be assumed that, as the Almighty has not abdicated his providential government of the world in favor of the powers of darkness, therefore no great and wide-spread movement takes place amongst the children of men without its having an ultimate end for good. We do not believe that evil is to win the day. We utterly refuse to give credit to those who look upon the Lord of Hosts as vanquished in the end, and upon the personal Lucifer, and the principle of evil which he embodies and represents, as going off the field with a crowd of prisoners who will far outnumber the armies of the Lord. This desponding about the triumphs of grace is the residuum of Protestantism. It is the melancholy of sectarianism. It is not in accordance with the teaching of the church; she who is forever lifting
up her eyes unto the hills from whence cometh her help. The church which is built on the Incarnation, which is fed with the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and which owns as her queen the woman “clothed with the sun,” “terrible as an army with banners,” does not limit her hopes to a few sheep scattered in the wilderness, but knows that the “cattle on a thousand hills” also belong to her Lord and Master.
We have no wish to palliate the evil which dogs the footsteps of modern progress. We see that, like the huge behemoth, it tears down many a sacred barrier, many a hallowed landmark, with its gigantic strides, and we mourn with our mother the church, and with all the body of the faithful, over the souls that perish in the fray. But not even for this is it possible to doubt the ultimate designs of God’s providence in making all work together for good.
Good works through evil, not as its instrument but as its vanquished enemy; and material and scientific progress is so certainly a good in itself that it arises from and forms part of the development of man’s original destination, as being lord over the creation. It is the necessary result of that; consequently it is a fulfilment of God’s will. As to its fatal, or at least deleterious, moral effects on individuals, or even for a time on the multitude, this is but the weaving of the dark woof into the web of man’s existence, which is the result of man’s estrangement from God, but which, neither in this nor in any other form, will be allowed ultimately to defraud the Almighty of his glory, by turning a relative, and much less a positive, good into positive evil. We see the beginning; we do not see the end, save by the eyes of faith, and trust in the goodness of
God. We are looking out on the world through the small aperture of time, our own limited time, our own individual brief life, and thus we see all the present evil, and but little, and occasionally nothing, of the future good. But surely as Christians we are bound to believe that no waves of thought or sentiment, and no sustained and wide-spread effort of any kind, take possession of mankind without a special beneficial intention of God’s providence, and without a distinct and absolute good being their ultimate result. We bow our heads to the storm of the elements; we accept the flood and the hurricane, and even the pestilence, as coming by the permission of our heavenly Father, and as in some way working for good. And shall we behold the moral and intellectual activity of man scanning the high heavens, searching the deep bosom of the earth, snatching from nature her most hidden secrets; seeking the principles of life, and the occult laws of development and progression; shall we watch wonderingly the strange, new, and pathetic tenderness with which men are beginning to appreciate and investigate the whole world of creation inferior to themselves, but holding perchance in its silent and patient existence secrets important to us—shall we behold all this, while our hearts burn within us, and not intimately and intently believe that God is carrying on his work, while man seems only to be following his own free will in the exercise of his intellect? Let us be larger hearted and more trusting with our God; nor for a moment suppose that the reins of government have fallen from his hands, or that passing evil will not terminate in greater good. The darkest hour is ever the one before the dawn. Doubtless when the eagles
of Rome sped victorious over the vast and crowded plains of the Gaul and the Frank there were gentle spirits left at home who, having kept themselves pure by the undiscerned aid of the grace which our heavenly Father never refuses to men of good will, grieved that the corruption of Roman luxury should infiltrate its poison into the simple lives of the semi-barbarous and valorous nations. And yet, but for these victorious eagles what would the world be now?
God brings good out of evil; and though material progress is seldom a real advantage at its first advent, yet when the moral excitement of its early possession has subsided, when the ever living, ever penetrating spirit of God has gradually, through the poor human instruments he condescends to use, claimed all that man can know, do, or acquire, as belonging to himself in the great scheme of creation and redemption, then, by slow degrees perhaps, but by sure ones, the evil gives way to good. It rests with us to hasten the appropriation of all that men call progress, gathering into Peter’s net the large and the small fishes; for it is all ours. As children of the church, to us alone does the world belong in the ultimate and supreme sense. It is our fault if we are not more rapidly converting the raw material which is swept to our feet into increments of God’s glory. It rests with the church in her children to make what the world calls progress become a real progress.
There is no real progress without a fixed principle as its basis and starting point. And that Christianity alone can give; and chiefly Christianity in its only full and perfect form, the Catholic Church. By Christianity we mean the fear and the love of God, with all the pure
moral results which flow therefrom. The moral law is the first law, and material progress is not a real gain until it is married to the moral law. The immediate consequence of material progress is to increase wealth; and the immediate result of increased wealth is a doubtful benefit. While the wealth remains in the hands of the few, the gulf between rich and poor is widened and animosities increased. When first it percolates into the lower strata of society, for the time it exercises thereon a demoralizing effect; for the tendency of a vast deal of material progress, and of its resulting modern institutions and modern customs, is to sap real happiness, and substitute a fictitious excitement based on wealth and luxury. We are thus forever eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The bitter and the sweet will grow together till God shall part them. But the evolutions of the eternal years gradually reconquer the crude materials to the cause which must ultimately triumph; and as the spirit of God moves over the face of the troubled waters the discordant social elements fall into place, and a further degree of the real, true, moral progress of mankind is found to harmonize with the material progress that man was so proud to have gained, and which when he did so was but the coarse though precious ore which waited to be purified in the crucible of the divine law.
Is there any sane man now living who really regrets the invention of printing? We have heard the project of a railroad in China deprecated by a zealous friend to truth. It will carry our merchandise; but will it not also carry our priests? We remember when men said murders would increase because London was
to be lit with gas! Do these sincere-hearted men really think that man is working out solely his own will, and that an evil will, in all this heavy tramp of material progress through God’s world? Is not man fulfilling his destiny of conquering the world; and when he has done his part, albeit done too often in blind and arrogant ignorance, will not the rightful owner of the vineyard come and claim the whole?
It is impossible for us to be slack in the exercise of any one virtue without the omission affecting the whole of our inner and spiritual life. If we allow our hopes to sink low it is certain to affect our faith; and if our faith, then also our love. Nor should we forget that it is “according to our faith that it shall be done unto us.” We are not seconding God’s precious intentions towards us so long as we are taking a desponding, narrow, and unaspiring view of what are likely to be his intentions as regards the future of his creation; and all despising of that creation, all holding cheap the law, the order, the beauty, and the uses of the material creation, arises from an inadequate sense of the mystery of the incarnation, of the Verbum caro factum est which is the one sole efficient reason of all we see and of all that exists. Once raise the inferior questions of nature, of science, and of art up to that level, and we shall find that it imparts a certain balance to all our thoughts, and diffuses a peaceful looking forward and a calm endurance of present ills which are morally what the even pulse and the vigorous strength are physically to the man in perfect health. He is as free from the excitability of fever as from the lassitude of debility; he is a sane man.
There is another point from which we can view the material progress of the world with hopefulness, as helping to work out the future in a sense favorable to the church; and this point comes under the head of what we have called God’s adaptive government of his creation. It is the fact that the progress of civilization develops the natural characteristics of the various races of mankind, and that the history of the church reveals how the providence of God makes use of the characteristics of race—as he does of everything else—for the building up and development of the church, and of truth by her. The life and death of our Lord having been accomplished in the chosen land, among the chosen people, the infant church was speedily transplanted from the shadow of Mount Calvary to the City on the Seven Hills. Judea was her cradle, but Rome was to witness her adolescence. The two leading characteristics of the Latin race were necessary to her growth; for the Latins were the conquerors and the lawgivers of the world, and the pioneers of the future. She was borne on the wings of the Roman eagles. She followed in the footsteps of the victorious legions, and as Rome and time went on with devouring steps, she caught the conqueror and the conquered both in her mystic net, and reigned among the Latin-Celtic races. Rome was the world’s lawgiver. The Latin genius is essentially legislative and authoritative. Subtlety, accuracy, and lucidity were the necessary human elements for the outward expression of the divine truth which the church carried in her bosom; for Catholic theology is a certain science, admitting of fuller developments as “things new and old” are brought forth from
her treasured store, but never making one step too far in advance of another throughout her rhythmical progress. These human elements resided essentially in the Latin mind; and in the Latin tongue, which has ever been the language of the church, and which, the church having consecrated it to her own purposes, became what we popularly call a dead language so far as concerns the shifting scenes and fluid states of man’s mortal life; she laid her hand upon it, and it sublimated beneath her touch, and was consecrated to her use, beyond all changing fashion or wavering sense. The dying Roman Empire involuntarily bequeathed it to her; and the language of the great lawgivers of the world became that of the church, and only on her lips is a living language to this hour. The Latin people were the fountain of law; their code to the present day forms the common law, or the base of the common law, of all Christian nations except where the retrogradations of the Napoleonic code have been flung in the face of humanity and the church as an insult to both. The principle of law, the love of law, lay in them as an hereditary gift. Thus were they as a race specially adapted to become the framers of the church’s canon law, of her discipline, and of her glorious ritual, each phrase of which is the crystallization of a theological truth, a fragment from the Rock of Peter, but perfect in itself and concomitant with all the rest.
Thus also she wrote in letters of red and gold her marvellous ritual, the least part of which embodies a symbolic act relating to the things that are eternal. There is not a touch that is not significative, there is not a line that does not seem caught from the traditions of the
nine choirs of angelic ministers. As full of mystery as of practicality, beautiful, graceful, and complete, it runs through all the life of the church like the veins through the living body, and carries order and harmony through every low Mass in the village church, through high pontifical ceremonials and within the silent gates of cloistered orders where men and women daily and hourly enact and represent the drama of the church.
The same genus runs through all the component parts; and that genus belonged to the race to whom was consigned the laying of the church’s foundations, and the raising of the edifice. And thus there exists, besides the divine integrity of the whole, a certain human consistency which, humanly speaking, is the consequence of the work having been put into the hands of the race that was naturally adapted to effect it. Now, as the ways of God are necessarily always consequent—that is, consistent with each other, moving in harmony and working through law—it is not a vain presumption to imagine that as he has constituted different races with different characteristics, so it is his intention to make use of each and all in the fuller developments of his church.
“Other sheep I have that are not of this fold; them also must I bring.” The words were spoken in Jerusalem while the Latin race was lying in the blind pride of paganism, and the Celtic races were only recently being hewn out of the darkness of their far-off life by the swords of the conquering nation. Surely it is one of those words the fulfilment of which is not complete. There are other races waiting to bring into the vineyard the tools that their native genius
has put into their hands. As the church through the Latin race has formed her external, congregational, hierarchical, and authoritative condition, and has crowned the whole in the last Vatican Council by the dogma of the infallibility, laying thereby the keystone that locks the perfect arch, so now the Teutonic Saxon races, the people of individuality, of complete inner life, combined with vast exterior activity and resistless energy, will be brought forth in God’s providence to carry out the law of liberty which is the correlative of the law of individuality.
God speaks to the individual soul through his organ the church, through her sacraments, down to her least ceremony, and through her authority. Nor have we any absolute test and security that it is his voice we hear and no delusion of our own, except as we are in harmony with her authority. All may be a mistake save what is in accordance with the one infallible voice. But nevertheless it is to the individual soul that God speaks, and not to the masses as such. God leads each soul separately, and individually apart, and there is no real religion that is not the secret intercourse, the hidden communion, of the solitary soul, alone with God. Every human soul has its secret with God, a secret of love, or a secret of hatred, or of avoidance. God penetrates our souls through the sacraments of the church; but past the sacraments, and as the result of the sacraments, there must grow up the continued, sustained, and ever more and more habitual presence of God in the soul, before we arrive at that state for which the church and the sacraments are but the means to an end—though a divine means. “We will come
to him and make our abode with him.”[86]
Nothing less than this is the promise of God, and should be the object of man. The church in her sacraments and ordinances is the one authorized and infallible way to bring about this blessed union. But unless that be accomplished, all the outward devotions that saints, or confraternities, that individuals or congregations, ever devised and poured into the church’s lap like handfuls of flowers, will be to those who rest in them as fading as flowers, and as sure to be swept away and burned when the fire shall try of what sort the work is. The dying to self—not as man’s restrictions can produce its outward semblance, but as God’s working in the soul joined to our good will can alone effect it—and the consequent union with him whose divine spirit rushes in wherever we make room for him to come, is the one sole object of all that the church gives us and does for us; of all the barriers she erects, of all the gardens she plants, of all her discipline and her ceremonial. It is the only living reality. It was so with the saints of all ages and nations. They valued all in proportion as by its use they killed self and put the living God instead; and they valued it no more. Low down in the soul the deep pulsation of the thought of God, ruling all our actions from the least to the greatest, this is what our dear Lord demands of us in every communion we make; this is what his church intends in all her teaching. This alone will hasten the reign of the Holy Ghost, when God “will pour his spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”[87] In other words, the gates of the supernatural world shall be thrown open, not to a rare and scanty few, but to all to whom “it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God.”[88]
We seem to have wandered from our subject; but it is not so. We were writing of the future development of the church through the different characteristics of different races, as instruments in God’s hands in the working of his adaptive government; and this has led us to describe the necessity of the inner life of the soul with God, because the Teutonic and Saxon races are the people with whom the tendency to a deep inner life is a natural peculiarity. They are more self-contained, self-reliant, reserved, and recollected than the versatile Latin races; and though none of these characteristics necessarily lead to a spiritual inner life of any form—that being a free grace from God—they are the apt instruments for grace to make use of in producing a certain form. They are, therefore, those to whom we may look for the next important era in the church’s history; when all the vast and complicated edifice of her hierarchy being complete she has now to expand the fuller development and deeper utterance of her inner life in individual souls; and that no longer as an occasional glorious phenomenon of grace, but as spread over a vast area, as influencing whole peoples, and as becoming the sustained life of Christianity. Law and liberty in one; the “freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free.”
We were also speaking of material progress; and these same Teutonic
Saxon races are the races who are specially extending it throughout the world. We have endeavored to show that in material progress man is achieving his secondary mission of exercising dominion over the whole creation. Thus we find that, having in his wonderful providence united the two characteristics of strong individuality and vehement activity in certain races, God has prepared for the future of the church, when inner spiritual life shall be more diffused, an era when the spirit of God will take possession of all that man can know, do, or acquire as belonging to himself, “and through him to his church, in the great scheme of creation and redemption.” And thus material progress will be assimilated to the welfare of the church; and the stones will be turned into bread—not in the sense of the arch deceiver, who claims all material progress as his own region, but united with “the word that proceedeth from the mouth of God”;[89] the material sanctified by the spiritual, when all shall be “holy to the Lord.”
The inaccuracy of the popular, as distinguished equally from the Catholic and the rationalistic view of the importance of matter, and of material progress which is the march of man’s conquest over matter, arises chiefly from the imperfect manner in which we realize the universal presence of God. Many among us can look back with a distinct recollection to the time when a mother first announced to us the great truth that God is everywhere. With the unfailing practical sense of children, we probably began to individualize certain familiar objects with the query was he there—in this table, in that flower, in my living
hand, in the pen I hold? And the bewilderment of immensity crept over us as we tried to grasp the thought of the great universal presence.
As in later years theological questions opened upon us—the mysteries of our faith, the angelic choirs, the army of saints and martyrs, the Incarnation, and the localization of the eucharistic presence in the Blessed Sacrament—many of us have gradually dropped the more intense sense of God’s omnipresence. It probably was more accurately felt by the Old Testament saints than by any, except saints, under the new law. It is not that we have lost sight of the truth that he sees, hears, and knows each one of us, always and everywhere; but we forget that he fills all space, and that he is in all things. It is a remarkable fact that the very lowest, the least theological and dogmatic, of all heathen beliefs, where all are a jargon of error, is nevertheless the faint reflection of this truth. We allude once more to the animism of the lower savage races, which lends a spiritual presence even to inanimate and inorganic matter. To them God is everywhere and in every thing; so that to them no thing exists disconnected from a spiritual presence as abiding in it, and that not in the pantheistic form of many gods, but as all matter holding an occult spirit, which is the same spirit in each substance. But there it ends; a blind creed, which does not even go the length of acknowledging a personal deity or a divine providence. None the less is it founded on a truth which often slips out of our consciousness, while we are occupied with the more familiar articles of our faith. Let us examine how this great truth, as we hold it in its fulness and
completeness, may be brought to bear on the question now before us of the value of the cosmos, of the status of matter, and of the fact that it is the indirect revelation, even as the Incarnation is the direct revelation of God—Jesus Christ the God-Man being the mediator between the creature and his creator.
First let us bear in mind that no cause can act where it is not virtually present by its power, even if not actually present by its matter. And this law has its correlative in the spiritual world. I influence you only so far as I touch you. I shall have written in vain unless these pages touch your sight. If I were speaking to you with my living voice I could only reach the hearts of those who heard me. To all the rest I am dead; and they are dead to me. This is the moral side of the question, as between man and man. As regards the material side, let us suppose I push forward a ball. It is force emanating from my touch which sets it in motion; but my force has not ceased with my direct touch. It is still my force propelling it as absolutely, though not so powerfully, as at the moment I touched it; and the ball only stops when my force is expended, or when a counter force arrests it. But whence comes my force? Solely from him in “whom we live, and move, and are.” He is our motive power; every act of ours is formed out of his force, equally whether we are acting according to his will or against it.
We have said that causes can only act where they are actually or virtually present. But it is a great fact in the material world that there is no such thing as material contact. No matter what substance or what fluid we select, the limpid air or
the hard iron, in all each infinitesimal molecule dwells solitary and apart, and crush them together as we may there is still a space between.
Now, theology teaches us that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. His divine contact with us is closer on our bodies and our souls than the molecules of our bodies are to each other. The only real contact is the presence of God; whether through ourselves or in the vast cosmos around us, the action of forces is God making himself felt. Force is the contact of God, the touch of the divine being on the material world. He is not in us, nor in the worlds around us, as he is in his own essential essence, as he is in himself; but he is there in the effects of his concurrence, and the moment he were to cease to be there (were such a thing possible) in all, or in any one part, the whole or the part would fall away into chaos, quite as certainly as the ball which I have set in motion will cease to roll the instant my force has exhausted itself and ceases to act on the ball. My force diminishes gradually; it is a limited and a borrowed force. The ball goes slower and slower; but so long as it moves, my force is upon it in a stronger or weaker degree. But the force of the divine Being is almighty, is always absolute, is always infinite, is always under his own control; and consequently it never fails, it never waxes less at any one moment, in any one direction.
In every act of our existence we are using God’s force, for him or against him. The whole universe is doing the same. His presence is the sole real contact; the contact
of the Qui Est, of pure absolute being with his own creation.
And all around us we hear a vain clamor about an immutable law that governs nature, while the great primary cause has withdrawn himself from all interference.
We hear of blind forces which spring from nowhere, and hurry us on without any guide save themselves. We repeat it—Law and force are not God; but God is both law and force. There is no motion without a motive power; and there is no motive power at an actual distance from the object set in motion. And thus God, who is law and force, is upon us, within us, around us; and within all, always, and throughout space. There are mutations and diversities in the exhibitions of God’s force, according to his divine will; but there is never anywhere any cessation of it. And there never will be; for if there were, he would contradict himself, and that is impossible.
This, then, is what matter is. It is the exponent of the being of God to the angels and to us. It is not the exponent of himself to himself. That is the eternal generation of the Son in his own bosom; the second person of the Trinity, the divine Logos. And the Incarnation of the eternally-begotten Son in the womb of the ever blessed Virgin Mother is the blending of this double exponent of his being; for it is the Word made flesh; it is God clothing himself in the matter of his own creation, and dwelling amongst men.
Could matter be more beautiful than this? Can we say more in its praise? And could any reflections lead us further from the notions of materialism, or draw us nearer to God?
[81] Apocalypse vi. 2.
[82] Psalm xliv.
[83] Luke v. 18.
[84] See the whole of the 54th chapter of Isaias, as well as numerous other passages.
[85] Isaias liv. 2.
[86] John xiv. 23.
[87] Joel ii. 28.
[88] Mark iv. 11.
[89] Matt. iv. 3, 4.