THE ETERNAL YEARS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD’S GOVERNMENT—PROGRESSION.
If the preceding considerations have at all succeeded in imparting to our minds a right view of the importance of matter, not solely in its own nature, but in the spiritual world, and in the developments which the spiritual world only arrives at through the medium of matter, we shall find we hold the key to many mysteries, and are walking at liberty in a world of marvels.
So far as we are able to judge, and aided by all that science can discover, we have every reason to believe that the act of creation is complete, and that no more material is needed to work out the ultimate intentions of the divine Being. Certain races of animals have become extinct, and all races are modified more or less by external influences of climate and food. Probably many have all but changed their nature since they first sprang into being; as they will do once more when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. But whether or no this be so, it would be rash to imagine that new creations of hitherto unexisting fauna or flora are ever to be given to the great cosmos. There is nothing to prove that such is the case; and there is a vast amount of facts pointing to the opposite conclusion. Moreover, the completeness of creation is the grander idea of the two, and the most like the ways of God, especially when we consider that
the existence of matter is only as a means to an end; and that end accomplished, why should there be any further increase of what makes up the material world? We will therefore put aside all idea of its being subject to either increase or decrease, while we dwell upon the fact that it is subject to mutations of the most diverse and subtle nature. It is true we are told there shall be new heavens and a new earth. But everything, even the preliminary fact that the “elements will melt with heat” and all things be dissolved, points to renewal, but not to extinction; for we know practically that dissolution, whether by heat or any other force, is not extinction in any case, but only change of form. The new earth is to be one in which “justice dwelleth.”[117] But even on this earth we have evidences of the sanctification of matter by its contact with spiritual things.
We have it first in the relics of the saints, to which not only a sacred memory is attached, but actual supernatural gifts emanate from them, because they have become holy to the Lord; because they had, while still in life, so frequently, or rather so effectively, come in direct contact with the Eucharistic Sacrifice, with the Body and Blood of Him who, in taking flesh and feeding us thereon, brought God to us
and dwelt within us. But the saints are rare; and the example, therefore, derived from their relics is an exceptional one. There are other examples of the way in which the living influence of the faith has changed mankind, through the ages of history, by hereditary transmission.
It has been remarked that while Rome still remained pagan there nevertheless existed other sentiments, and as it were another atmosphere, caught from the presence of Christianity, even while Christianity was ignored or persecuted. The pagan spirit was essentially worldly. How could it be otherwise? Poverty made a man ridiculous; and ridicule is the beginning of contempt. Christian charity and compassion had no pagan counterpart until Christian example gave rise to the notion that it was a wise and good thing to feed the hungry and care for the orphan. Long before the reign of the first Christian emperor the pagan Roman heart, catching some warmth from the celestial fire which burnt unseen in the largely-extended Christian population, began to form institutions which faintly reproduced Christian charity; but this was the influence of mind over mind.
What is a far more remarkable fact is the gradually-developed influence of generations of Christian ancestors over the mere natural instincts of humanity. How much do we not owe to the fact that we descend from a mainly Christian stock! What sweet domestic ties, what calm, heaven-reflecting pools of life, do we not enjoy—not owing to our own personal graces, but because grace, in a greater or less degree, has, though may be with grave exceptions, presided over the rise and growth for centuries of those who have preceded us.
When St. Jerome wrote to the youthful daughter of his beloved penitent Paola, as the former was about to dedicate herself to God in a virgin and secluded life, a very large and most emphatic portion of his instructions is taken up with exposing to her the difficulties she will meet with in preserving an essential virtue, and the extreme measures she, a maiden of seventeen, must resort to as a guarantee against temptation. To what, save to the blessed effects of centuries of a more or less Christian ancestry, do we owe the blessed fact that, whereas to any young girl now entering religion her Christian parents and her priestly adviser would fill hours with counsels about holy poverty, obedience, and the conquest of her own will, hardly one word would be breathed about any imminent peril to a virtue which she only thinks of in its highest religious sense, because she has never even dreamt that it could practically be in danger? The very flesh has been purified and chastened by centuries of grace. The human instincts have been almost unconsciously raised to a higher level; and, evil as the world may yet be, we habitually entertain angels unawares. Thus does the longanimity of God wait with ever-slackening step through the long ages of time, while grace permeates slowly the few but ever-increasing willing hearts, sanctifying soul and body equally and together; for “the Lord dealeth patiently for your sake, not willing that any should perish.” He deals patiently with the world for the sake of the church, patiently with the wicked for the sake of the good, and because the good are not good for themselves alone; they yield a perfume of which they are not conscious, but which attracts others to
them; and if but the ten righteous men can be found, the city will be spared!
* * * * *
We often hear allusions made to the destructive work of time, to the ruin of nations, and the obliteration of vast and crowded cities; and writers of the day indulge in sensational reflections upon the future fate of the peoples and homes of modern days. We are all acquainted with the New Zealander who is to sit amid the ruins of London. But those who speak and write in this sense have in their minds the fate of heathen nations and pagan cities in the first hour or epoch of the world’s existence, before the accomplishment of the mystery of the Incarnation—that is, before God dwelt upon earth to reconquer by his precious blood and sweat of agony his kingdom among men. But as Christians we cannot believe that Christian nations, however imperfect in their Christian practice, will ever be cast out, root and branch, and the ploughshare pass over their hearths and His altars as over Ninive and Troy, as over the Etruscan cities and the pleasure-loving Roman towns of southern Italy. The ten righteous are never wanting in any city where the altars of Jesus are erected, and where the Mother of fair love is named with tender and reverent confidence. The surging tide of evil may threaten us, as in guilty Paris and brutalized London; but though heavy chastisements may pour down on these examples of modern vice, yet never, never will the dear Conqueror who has deigned to plant his foot on the teeming city streets as his priests carry the Blessed Sacrament to the dying, and who has his tabernacles of love here and there through our crowded thoroughfares,
relinquish his recovered inheritance. Never, never will the lands where he has dwelt be desolate like the godless lands of old.
Believe it, O ye loving hearts! who are burning in silent anguish over the erring and the ignorant, who are pouring sad tears on the cruel wickedness of high places, and on the degradation and depravity of the neglected and the forgotten.
Heavy and sharp and terrible may be the punishment of our iniquities; but even hell itself is less hell than it would be but for the shedding of the precious Blood; and no nation where his name is invoked, no people among whom he has his part—albeit not, alas! the larger part—can ever perish out of sight, out of mind, as the huge heathen nations have gone down in utter darkness in the lapse of ages, and hardly left a stone to proclaim, “I am Babylon.”
Sweet patience of Jesus! sweet pity of Mary! we wrong you both when we forget that where you have once entered, there you will abide; because the few are the salvation of the many; because, though not every door-post and lintel bears the red cross, yet those that do bear it plead for the rest, and the angel of destruction stays his steps at the first and drops his avenging sword; for his Lord and Master has passed that way!
* * * * *
We have spoken of the creation as being complete. We have concluded that, while we are incapable of measuring its extent, and can only vainly guess at unknown worlds beyond our own system, it will never receive one atom, one molecule, in addition to those of which it now consists. Our reason for this belief lies deep down in the very roots of theology, which we find a better
reason than any with which mere human science can furnish us, because the end of the latter is contained within the end of the former, as the greater contains the less. We have already stated our reason—namely, that the ultimate object of the creation was the Incarnation, and, that object accomplished, there can apparently be no need of further creation. In saying this we are not presuming to limit the power of God or to interpret his unrevealed will. We are, with all diffidence, formulating a supposition which approves itself to our reason. The creation was the expression of the goodness of God, uttered outside himself by the Logos, God the Son. But the creation, merely as such, merely as existence, and man, the lord of creation, merely in his natural state, were incapable of union with God. Therefore, from the first, man was constituted in a state of grace. Thus the second mission, which is that of the Holy Ghost, and which is the second in the eternal decrees, the nunc stans of eternity, is the first in the nunc fluens of time. For the grace of God, which is the Holy Ghost, was given to man in measure and degree from the first moment of his being, four thousand years before the first mission, that of God the Son, took place in time. Both are continuous, and both are progressive. The mission of God the Son did not cease when he ascended into heaven; for it is continued at the Consecration in every Mass, and in every tabernacle where the Blessed Sacrament dwells. At each Mass he comes and comes again! In the Blessed Sacrament he remains. Therefore his actual presence is progressive, in proportion to the increase of his altars where the bloodless sacrifice is offered,
and where the Bread of Life is reserved. We are ourselves entirely persuaded (and this opinion is in harmony with that of many modern theologians) that the Incarnation would equally have taken place had man never fallen. It was the object of the creation. Man’s fall called for his redemption by the death and Passion of our Lord, and, as a loving consequence, also for the sacrifice of the Mass. But it does not follow that, had the Redemption not come after the Incarnation, because man had not fallen, there would have been no Blessed Sacramental Presence. The church having nowhere defined to the contrary, it is permitted to those whose devotion to the Blessed Sacrament makes the whole creation a blind mystery, and even the Incarnation appear incomplete without it, to believe that the Blessed Sacrament would always have been, and a sinless Adam, with his sinless offspring, have held communion with the incarnate God through and by this divine nourishment, even as his redeemed children do now, only in that case without the sacrifice of the Mass; for where there is no sin there is no sacrifice.[118]
This may be but a pious thought, and we have no wish to press it upon our readers. We leave it to their devotion to follow it out or not as they will. All we want to prove is that, though our Blessed
Lord came once only, conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Blessed Virgin; and once only was crucified, dead, and buried, and rose the third day, and ascended into heaven, nevertheless his sacramental presence is a perpetual carrying on and carrying out of this his first mission to us, and that thus his mission bears a progressive character. He is the conqueror “proceeding to conquer.” He is still sending his messengers before his face to prepare his way. His priests are still going forth to all nations to preach the remission of sins, by planting his altar, which is his earthly throne, in divers parts, till the earth be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the covering waters of the sea.[119] We are looking forward to the fulfilment of that prophecy in all its plenitude; for surely no one can allege either that this time has already come, or that because some, it may be several, missionary priests have had a certain success among the heathen, anything faintly resembling such a grand, lavish promise as that, has received even an approximate fulfilment. Still less will any one assert that such promises are vain; and if not so, then let us look forward, and ever more and more forward, to the progression of our dear Lord’s kingdom upon earth; himself present amongst us in the Blessed Sacrament, coming in that meek guise to take possession of his territories, and all but silently planting his standard first here, then there, as new altars are raised to him, and as other souls are brought beneath the sacraments—the oaths of allegiance to their new Master.
We cannot disguise from ourselves that we have fallen upon evil
times, and that faith has grown dim. Nevertheless, we maintain it would be difficult for any thoughtful and unprejudiced mind to deny the ever-increasing evidence that the leaven is leavening the whole mass; still less can it be affirmed that anything has ever done this in highly-civilized countries except Christianity.
The wealth and learning of the Romans, their vast literature, their high art, had no effect in producing either morality or mercy. There were noble examples among them of men and women who, we may believe, responded to the light vouchsafed them, whose names have come down to us; and doubtless there were many, utterly unknown to history, who obeyed the dictates of their conscience, enlightened by the divine Spirit of whom they had never so much as heard. We do not believe that anywhere, in any age, in any city, however given up to iniquity, there was nothing but eternal death reigning over poor, fallen, suffering humanity, and leaving the beneficent Creator, the dear Redeemer, without a soul to love and serve him, albeit in a blind way. We believe such a condition of things to be simply impossible; but however that may be, whether more or less than we have dared to hope, Christianity was not there, and in its absence nothing availed to produce generally even the appreciation of purity or real charity.
As we have said, the Romans were a grand law-giving nation. Civil rights were understood, upheld, and protected better than by the modern Napoleonic code, and far more in harmony with Christianity, which ultimately profited by, and copied so largely, the Roman law. But the law did not touch the heart or enlighten the conscience; and
while the public life of Rome had much moral grandeur, the private existence of man and woman alike was infamous; and it was so in proportion to their advance in wealth and luxury.
We have said that only Christianity can moralize civilized nations, and we did so advisedly; for a certain inoffensiveness, and the practice of many natural virtues, exist among nations that have not come within the range of so-called civilization. Where the intellectual and reasoning powers of men are undeveloped, they retain something like the innocence of children. But when man without Christianity is raised to intellectual height, cultivated in mind, refined in manner, surrounded by art, and with advanced knowledge of physical science—when he has thus developed all his powers, without having a corresponding force given him against the inclinations of natural concupiscence, he is then no longer in the infancy of humanity. It is mature, and the ripe fruit tends to rottenness. Civilization and knowledge must go forward pari passu with divine grace to be a real benefit to mankind; for there is no good apart from a high moral standard, whether we consider the individual or the nation, and no moral standard will long support itself without the concomitance of grace. We are told that the great question of the day is the modus vivendi between the church and modern progress. If this be so, the church alone can discover and develop it; because the church is the organ of the Holy Ghost, and when our Lord was about to leave this earth he promised the Paraclete, who would “teach us all things.” Therefore the church is the ultimate dispenser of all science, no matter of what
nature; and as the reign of the Holy Ghost shall be more and more established in the now perfectly-defined status of her infallibility, so will she increasingly take up unto herself, within her own arena, all the gifts of knowledge and science which are her essential prerogatives. Once more she will become the queen of nations, the guide and pioneer of the world.
Hers has been a long history of struggle, and frequently of apparent defeat; but out of it she has ever risen victorious, though her victories are different in character from the triumphs of the world, because they are so silent and so peaceful that they are only known by their results. The first of these results is more liberty, a widening of the cords of her tent; for as the church defines her own nature with increased accuracy, so by this accuracy she leaves more freedom to her children. Definition is also limitation; and both exclude doubt. Doubt is slavery, while certainty is liberty. When our Lord began to teach of the coming kingdom of God, he did so by parables, and to his own immediate disciples alone was an explanation vouchsafed: “To you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but to the rest in parables.” He spoke of himself as “straitened” until his work should be accomplished.
The whole history of the church has been on the same principle. Until certain things have been accomplished her path is hemmed in, and the accomplishment is ever effected by the means of her enemies, even as our salvation was by the hands of those who crucified Jesus. The rise of each heresy has produced the definition of doctrine, and each definition has widened the
horizon of our faith and flooded our life with light. The war with evil has had no other result than to impart spiritual strength to the spouse of Christ. And now everything points to a great crisis, a culminating term, a springtide of the waters of grace; for the long war with Protestantism has led up to the dogma of the Papal Infallibility. The coping-stone is laid, and a new era is beginning, which will be the fuller development of the individual life of the soul in the beauty of holiness and in the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. The external edifice is complete; the interior decoration will hasten towards completion. Already we see the signs of those better times approaching. We see them alike in the preternatural as in the supernatural world. The spirits of evil are guessing at the future, and, as is their wont, are anticipating the coming events by parodying the divine future action. The sleepless intelligence and never-wearying enmity of Satan pursues with relentless accuracy every development of God’s truth in the history of the church. With the fragments, in his fallen state, of his former untold science, combined with his thousands of years of cumulative experience, his one desire is to be beforehand with God. In advance of the great divine act of the Incarnation, he instituted the horrors of possession, and practised them in the pagan world on a scale he is but seldom allowed to repeat where the name of Jesus is uttered. With each phase of God’s divine action on the world, and of concomitant human necessities, he changes his tactics. There are but few among us who remember or realize the fact that every incident of our lives is lived in connection with three worlds—the tangible, visible,
material world, the world of grace, and the world of the prince of the powers of the air. The masses live (consciously) in the first alone; the good and pious remember the second; but few even of these attempt to realize the last in anything like a just proportion with its immensity, its subtlety, and its ubiquity. Nor is it our object to press the subject on their attention. It is not every mind that can bear to meet the thought, beyond the limits of the universal prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
But those who can bear it and can follow it out should be doubly on watch and guard in the interests of the multitudes who, it is true, believe in their guardian angel, but forget their left-hand diabolic attendant. It was not so in earlier times when faith was young, among the primitive writers and the great ascetics. One of the holiest of the past generation said that the cleverest work the devil had ever accomplished was the getting men to disbelieve in his existence. Having, as a rule (except among Catholics), established his non-existence in their minds, the sphere of his occult action is necessarily vastly extended. We do not look out for what we firmly believe is not there. He is among us, and we see him not. He has studied the Scriptures, and he knows there will be a time when our maidens shall dream dreams and our young men see visions. He guesses at the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, in a more determinate and wider reign of grace, in the future of the church; and above all he has not forgotten, though many of us have, that there is the promise of yet another mission that will alter the whole face of the world, that will follow on the ever-growing and extending
reign of the Holy Ghost, and that will culminate the glories of their Queen—the mission of the angels. They will come, the bright, swift-winged messengers, and “they shall gather out of his kingdom all scandals, and those that work iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire. Then shall the just shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father,”[120] and “the angels shall go out, and shall separate the wicked from among the just.” We read these sacred words constantly, but how far do we realize their meaning? How far have we amplified the thought in our mind, and given it form and consistency? We read of the day of judgment; but do we suppose that it will be an affair of four-and-twenty hours—the angels in the morning, the judgment about noon, and all the past, present, and future of humanity in heaven or hell by twilight?
It is true we are told that the awful time will come as a thief in the night, and we are apt to explain that into being sudden; whereas it may more properly describe the fact that the time will steal upon us, silently and hiddenly. We shall find our bright brethren, the angels, around us, among us, before we have altogether realized their approach; just as, gradually and by degrees, we shall find the Spirit illuminating the minds and hearts of the innocent and the zealous, the “youths and the maidens,” with divine inspirations, first as the dawning of new light, then as the blaze of noontide. All God’s dealings with his poor creatures have been gradual. They are hidden, but they are never sudden. He always sends his angels before his face to prepare
the way. Noe was more than a hundred years engaged in building the ark, and there it lay, a sign to all men, the black timber ribs against the gray dawn and the flaming evening sky, scanning the heavens like a musical score on which were written the notes of the awful anthem of God’s wrath, while the hammers of the artisans beat time through a century of vain appeal to a God-forgetting world. The suddenness must be laid to their own door, and in no way resulted from God’s dealings with them. The Deluge itself took forty days to exhaust the downpouring floods of rushing waters from the opened gates of heaven. The dawn is ever gradual; the light steals upon us, though at last the sun’s broad disc springs sudden and refulgent above the gray horizon. Many of us, though less guilty in our indifference, are like Gallio, who “cared for none of those things.” The round of our daily life suffices us, and we neither give the time nor the trouble to come to conclusions or to arrive at definite notions even respecting the signs of the times, which our Lord rebuked his disciples for not discerning. Catholics will often talk among themselves and with those outside the church in a casual way about the spiritist manifestations which are so rife in our day, as if it were quite an open question, and that it were unnecessary to have any fixed opinion on the subject. Not only have they never realized that the church has spoken again and again, but also they have never used their common reasoning powers to arrive at the conclusion that either spiritist manifestations, as they are now presented to us, form part of God’s mode of governing his creatures,
and therefore are most precious to each of us, and not to be treated as a trifle; or, as they are in fact, the devil’s guess at some of God’s secrets, and his anticipation of something belonging to the future destiny of man. We have no intention of polluting our pages by allusion to the jejune trifling of spiritist appearances. We would only ask every one solemnly and reverently to think of God’s ways in our world, and then, as before him, to declare whether or no the half-ludicrous, partially ghastly, and altogether jerky, will-o’-the-wisp performances of spiritists have anything in consonance with the dignity, the uniformity, the plain good sense (if this term sound not irreverent) of God’s dealings with his children. They talk of undiscovered natural laws! When did any grand, God-implanted natural law begin to reveal itself by tricks and antics? What are natural laws but revelations of God’s action and divine being? Every one of them shows us God, and leads us to God by simple and lucid gradation. It is the travesty of his laws in which the devil delights; and as within ourselves there are undeveloped laws which have been overlaid by original sin, and lie within us as the butterfly lies in the chrysalis, therefore the enemy of mankind, who, with far-seeing cunning, predicates the glorious future of mankind before the final consummation of all things, is using his knowledge to practise upon these laws to the detriment of those who lend themselves ignorantly as his instruments.
The fallen angels know far more accurately the secrets of our nature than we know them ourselves, and through this knowledge they deceive the unwary. Still more easily they have their way with those
whose reprehensible curiosity induces them to resort to dangerous experiments. It is distressing to hear good, practical Catholics talking loosely on these matters, as though they had little or no data on which to form a solid, reasonable opinion, and were unable to distinguish between natural though occult laws, as they are brought out by divine, supernatural influence on the saints, and the miserable and contemptible practices of the spiritists, the “lo here, lo there” of those who prophesy false Christs.
It is an old proverb that the devil can quote Scripture, and so, also, can he base his evil designs on his knowledge of Catholic truth. We believe in the possibility, by a special permission from God, of the reappearance of the departed amongst us, and of the holy souls coming to ask for prayers, as we read constantly in the lives of the saints; and probably many of us have ourselves known of such incidents on creditable evidence. The devil acts upon this faith as he acts upon his own knowledge of occult laws; and blending a theoretic truth with practical error, he weaves a mesh to catch souls, all the while foreboding the time when the more developed mission of the Holy Ghost, and the elaborating in countless hearts of that hidden holiness by which the church is “all glorious within,” shall bring about that greater familiarity with the supernatural which is foretold as a characteristic of the latter times.
The early teaching of the church laid more stress on the mission of the angels than it became her habit to do in later days. Not that the church, as the organ of the Holy Ghost, ever gives an uncertain sound or calls back any of her divine utterances; but, like a watchful
mother, she holds in her own keeping such of the treasures, new or old, which are not adapted to the present wants of her children. There came a time, as Christianity grew more diffused, when the early Christians, not entirely weaned from the heathen practices of their forefathers, were in danger of attempting to define the occupation and attributes of the angels beyond the limits of the church’s authority. They affected to have learnt the names of many, and to decide on their position and purpose in the angelic hosts. Out of that arose a kind of worship and invocation of the angels which bordered on superstition and savored of the worship offered to the demons among the heathens. This fell under the reprobation of the church, and by a natural reaction left devotion to the angels at a lower ebb than what is warranted by sound doctrine.
Then came the German heretics and the dawn of modern Protestantism; and one of the first of their efforts was to banish all belief in the interposition and ministry of the angelic host. They took advantage of the errors and follies of individuals to write against the whole doctrine of angelic action; and though among Catholics the faith in their guardianship and aid is constant, yet it is not now practically (of course virtually it is the same) what it was in earlier times. But here also we have another instance of how the church brings forth from her divine armory the weapon most needed to defeat the machinations of the arch-enemy; for it has been reserved for our day to see devotion to the angels taking a fuller extension and a more definite form than it ever before held in the history of the church’s inner life. In all her definitions and in all her
practices there resides the spirit of prophecy. They have not only reference to the present time; they are far-seeing and far-stretching. And as the definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in our own time has led to the extension of her reign in the hearts of men, and is preparing the way every hour for her sweet sovereignty to “take root in an honorable people,” so does the increasing devotion to the angels who form her court harmonize therewith, and prepare for that mission of the angels which, however remote, is as certain as the day of judgment. Oh! what enlarged hearts do we need to take in, however inadequately, all that lies before us in the history of God’s creation. Far distant though it be, still is it ours, just as the past is ours, and the present; for all are united in Jesus. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Nothing shall be lost to us. No treasure of the past but has tended to brighten our own brief day, no promise of the future but what we shall reap; for we have all things in Him who contains all in himself, and who gives his whole self to us.
Let us in thought go back to Paradise, to our great progenitor before his fall. For Adam knew Jesus. Not, indeed, as we know him—the rainless skies of the garden God had planted had formed no background to the beloved sign of our redemption; for as the Redeemer Adam knew him not. We have already given our reasons for believing that besides knowing Him, by the graces of infused science, as the second Person of the Trinity, the Logos, he knew of the intended Incarnation through and by which Jesus was to unite Himself to us. We have also dared to
imagine that he foresaw the Real Presence as the carrying out and completion of the Incarnation. But in those days Adam knew of no shedding of blood, of no sacrifice of suffering. The whole of that pathetic and terrible chapter, written in red characters, was a sealed one to our once sinless forefather. But in addition to the first beautiful and tender history of the future Incarnation there was a glorious page redolent with light and full of joy; for Adam looked out beyond Jesus as the Creator, and Jesus as the elder Brother of man in the Incarnation, to Jesus as the Glorificator. Adam knew that the green glades and fruit-laden forests of Paradise were not to constitute his ultimate home. He aspired after the time when the God-Man would reward his fidelity at the close of a longer or shorter probation, and admit him from the infancy of innocence into the resplendent manhood of accomplished and final grace. Then would he be like Jesus; for he would see him as he is!
Thus did Adam dwell in the contemplation of two futures—the one tender and familiar, the other glorious and triumphant—until his own act had made the rift between the two, and the blood-stained cross crowned the heights of Calvary. O felix culpa! We dare to say it, because our mother the church has said it. And as Adam sees that past now, pardoned, ransomed, and glorified[121] with his glorified Lord, he beholds his children, with each stroke of eternity’s golden moments, thronging through the gates of heaven by the Sacrifice of the cross. What must not his love in heaven be! Next to that of Our Lady
surely his must be the greatest of all the multitude who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.
But the glory of the saints now in heaven cannot be compared with that which will follow after the second mission of our Lord at the consummation of all things; for that mission is a mission of glory, even as his first was a mission of humiliation. He came to us in the womb of Mary, in the manger at Bethlehem, hidden and unknown, poor and despised; but when the time shall be ripe for that second mission, he will come in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.[122] He will come as the glorificator of His own creation, of which Mary is the first in rank, a hierarchy in herself, a sealed fountain, a garden enclosed, a second paradise, but where no sin has entered; and in that second mission his saints, as also his angels, will take part.
Thus we look back upon the first mission accomplished—that of the Incarnation and Redemption; the second mission being accomplished—that of the Holy Ghost gradually developing into the reign of the Holy Ghost; and we look forward to two other missions—that of his angels, and, finally, that of His own second coming. “Behold, he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him.”[123] “For the Lord himself shall come down from heaven with commandment, and with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead, who are in Christ, shall rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be taken up together with them in the clouds, to meet Christ, and so shall we be always with the Lord. Wherefore comfort ye one another with these words.[124]
[117] 2 Peter ii. 10-13.]
[118] The redemption was an ordinance of God consequent upon man’s fall. Had Adam never sinned, Jesus had never been crucified. But it would seem more consonant with the boundless love of God for his creation to believe that the Blessed Sacrament formed part of his antecedent will; and that a sinless race would have received spiritual and divine food, and would have been thereby sanctified, and ultimately glorified through participation in the Body and Blood of the God-Man. It would have been, as it is now, the Bread of Life; bloodless as it is now, but also unbroken as it is not now—that is, divested of its propitiatory character in so far as propitiation involves the idea of offence.]
[119] Isaias xi. 9.
[120] Matt. xiii. 41, 42, 43, 49.
[121] It is generally believed that Adam was amongst the souls released from Limbo when our Lord descended thither, and who entered heaven with him.
[122] Mark viii. 38.
[123] Apocalypse i. 7.
[124] 1 Thess. iv. 15-17.