THE ETERNAL YEARS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”
CONSUMMATION.
We have spoken of the way in which the arch-enemy, the seducer of God’s children, is aping the mysteries of the still hidden future, according as his subtlety and his enmity direct him. But while his rage and cunning are devising new deceits for those who are not enlightened by divine truth, or who have hid their light under a bushel, our attention is called in a special manner to her whose office it is, and ever has been, to crush his head. Whenever and wherever the deceits of men and devils are putting out the light and wrapping the soul of man in darkness, there does the Virgin Mother come more openly and more directly to counteract the fatal influence. It has been reserved for the cold, matter-of-fact, utilitarian last half of the nineteenth century to see awakened in the multitude the simple and romantic faith in pilgrimages and in the childlike, pathetic histories of Mary’s appearances upon earth that lent such charm to the ages of faith. If the enemy of mankind seems to have more power allowed to him in the
evil days on which we have fallen, so the Mother of fair love, from whose pure hands the divine odyle streams, is deigning to speak to children and childlike souls, showing herself to be the great channel of special graces, the medium of divine communications, and the sure refuge against Satan’s acted prophecy and pantomime of God’s loving intentions. “We will come to him, and dwell with him”—and Mary is the precursor and the channel now as she was then to his first coming, when he took flesh in her womb. The promise to the individual soul is the promise to the church: and vice versa. The revelation of God in the church is also the life of God in the soul—the two are bound up in one. The life of the church is the guarantee of the life of the soul; it is the only sure foundation of such life; and the golden house, the domus aurea, of that life is devotion to the divine Mother. For as her presence, her sweet virginal life, was the necessary preliminary to the first coming of Christ, so will the Son of God not appear on his glorious second mission till Mary has come in the hearts of her people as an army with banners; all her prerogatives known and worshipped, all her position, flowing from her rights as the mother of the God-man, acknowledged and understood, and her court of angels following in her mystic footsteps upon earth, even as the bees follow their queen wherever she may choose to alight; and so preceding the second coming of our dearest Lord and ushering in the new glories of the kingdom of God upon earth.
The Holy Ghost could only be sent by Jesus glorified. The sacrifice of the cross needed to be accomplished and the precious blood
shed, before the promised Paraclete could come. And thus between the one stupendous event and the other there lies an epoch of forty days, when he had not yet ascended into heaven, and when therefore his risen glory was in a measure incomplete. At the beginning of that dread time, full of the deepest mystery, of which we but imperfectly comprehend the meaning, he was seen first by Mary Magdalene in the garden. And as she fell at his feet with extended hands, he said, “Touch me not.” We have probably all of us at some time meditated sadly on those repelling words.
Time was when she might touch those blessed feet, not with her hands only but with her lips. Does he love her less now that her repentance is complete, and her salvation accomplished? Do not her rapid thoughts go back in one rush to the time when she sat at his feet unrebuked, whiling away the contemplative hours as she listened to his words and heard him say she had chosen “the better part”? Does she not with a pang of wounded love recall the moment when she wiped the precious ointment with her hair from the feet she had bathed with it and with her tears? But now he says, “Touch me not!” Yes, there is a change. But, O loving heart! it is not a change of loss but of gain. It is true there is an interim in which our beloved Lord is shrouded from us in too much glory for our human sense. The cradle-time of his sweet infancy is past, the grace of his youth, the glory of his manhood, and all the bitter-sweet ignominies of his cross. He has passed somewhat beyond our ken. He is risen, but not yet ascended. The first Mass[153] had not
then been offered. The bloody sacrifice was over; the Eucharistic Sacrifice had not been celebrated by mere priestly hands, only by his own divine hands on Holy Thursday. Until Mass had once been said, there was something as it were incomplete in the condition of the church. The next touch, the only touch possible for us (save by a special command to St. Thomas and his faltering disciples), was in the Blessed Sacrament.[154] Now we touch him daily, and fear no rebuke. Jesus is ascended, and the Paraclete has come, and is ever coming more and more; and as the Holy Dove sheds the light of his wings upon the church and speaks through her utterance, so the privileges and the status of Mary are more revealed and more developed. We know more of our queen, and we are learning more of her court, and when both have taken their place in the hearts of men and have prepared for the reign of the Holy Ghost, when the angels have accomplished their mission, the far-off glories of which are hardly dawning on us, then will he make us know all that lies hidden in the deep mystery of his second coming, and God and man and angels will be united in the sweet bonds of Jesus, and through the mediation of her who is clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her virgin head.
This is the divine progression, and this is leading to the divine consummation.
* * * * *
Our task is drawing to a close. It has been our endeavor to encircle
the whole creation with the chain of faith, and to bind each to all in endless links of the divine love. We have dared to glance back before time into the bosom of eternity. We have beheld time, as it appears to our human ken, in a manner detach itself from eternity, and seem to become an entity—which indeed it is in a certain sense. We have marvelled at its slow-flowing course and its distant results, as compared with our own rapidity of thought and grasp of imagination. And we have seen that time is patient because it is the offspring of eternity, and because it is the mode and vehicle of God’s revelation of himself to us. God is patient because he is almighty and omniscient. For a little space we have strained our endeavors to look upon the flowing stream as God sees it, and not as we break it up into moments and hours. Our motive for doing this has been to realize so far as is possible the continuousness of God’s action with the indivisibility of his being as he is in himself, and to prove that this indivisibility and intrinsic unchangeableness lie at the root of all his manifestations of himself through the nunc fluens of time. Wherever we have fancied a contradiction to exist, or even a disparity, the error has lain in our partial vision and not in any shadow of change in the great God. He meant always what he means now, but mankind could not always equally bear that meaning. Therefore, as pitying his creation, he has condescended in past ages to pour the divine waters of revelation in diverse colored vessels; so that at one time the limpid liquid seemed to us of a different hue from what it assumed subsequently, until at last the waters of life were held in the crystal vases of the church,
pure and white as they. We perceive and understand that the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is the same God as our God of Bethlehem and Calvary. And the unity of God’s nature becomes ever more and more obvious to us as we study the characteristics of his government. At no period and in no place has the loving Creator forgotten the work of his own hands. And lest we could not find him, he has adapted the light he poured upon us to the weakness of our sight. In the unity of God and in his unchangeableness we find our own link to the past, and discover how we are the inheritors of former ages and the heirs of the years to come. We have indicated (we could do no more) the great fact that all is because God is; that he has and can have no other end than himself; and that it is exactly in that great truth that lies all our hope and all our salvation. For he is absolute goodness as certainly and as necessarily as he is absolute being. This being so, it is impossible for us to wish anything that he has made not to be. Dreadful as is the thought of hell, we could not wish hell were not—we cannot wish evil to exist. But we find it there, and we are silent because he has permitted it. We hate it, because, though he permits it, he hates it. But we see how it grows out of the free will of men and angels; and that, as all merit lies in deliberate choice, there could be no choice if virtue were a necessity. Evil is not, like good, an original and universal principle. It is the negation of that; and required, to give it an actual existence, the free power of deliberate selection, like that of the devils when they fell. We see as we read the history of the world, in the light thrown by the knowledge
of God, that evil works greater good. And as we can see this in part, we believe that it exists in the whole, though our perception is limited. We know that good must triumph in the end. If we thought otherwise, we should make the devil stronger than God, and the scheme of redemption a comparative failure.
As we enumerate all these things, what is the result we arrive at except one of illimitable joy and confidence—exultation beyond all expression in the might and majesty of our God—a hopefulness that exceeds language—a courage too large for a narrow heart, and a boundless, passionate yearning towards all living souls, that they may learn how great a God is our God, and how good and grand a thing it is to be alive and to serve him?
We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it—that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual powers which we have been able to bring to the small aperture in the camera obscura by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity that lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.
Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest possible and reasonable importance to the brute creation. It is an open question in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless it is obvious that brutes perceive only, or chiefly, by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions.
There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perceptions of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjected to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[155] All we have said tends to prove that time has in itself only a relative existence; it is a form or phase of our own being.[156] It is an aspect of eternity; the aspect which is consistent with our present condition.
From the way in which we have seen that God has made use of different races to work for the establishment and development of his church, we have opened a glorious vista of hope in the future, and we have rejoiced over the work to be done, and the laborers who at the eleventh hour shall be called into the vineyard, until even the fragments that remain shall be gathered up, so that nothing may be lost. We have dared to maintain, against
all those who cavil at the evil days on which we have fallen, that Christianity has infiltrated its influence in regions where it is blasphemed, or, as in the past Roman Empire, where it was denied. We have endeavored to impress on our readers the importance, and in a certain sense the sacredness, of matter, as the vehicle of God’s demonstration of himself. For, as Fénelon says, “God has established the general laws of nature (which involve all the laws of matter) to hide under the veil of the regulated and uniform course of nature his perpetual operation from the eyes of proud and corrupt men, while on the other hand he gives to pure and docile souls something which they may admire in all his works.” In proportion as we honor God’s laws, so should we honor the means of their manifestation, the substance through and in which they work, and without which they would fall back into the abstract and have no existence outside God himself. We say in proportion, because the manifestation is second to the principle manifested, and the modus operandi is inferior to him who employs it. We have as much difficulty in conceiving of God apart from his operations as we have in realizing eternity apart from time. And therefore is all honor due to the vast creation whereby we see the evidence of things not seen, and everything becomes to us “holy to the Lord.” It is for this reason that the true and intelligent love of nature is essentially the offspring of the Christian faith. The ancients cannot be said to have had it in any degree beyond a remote possibility in their intellectual nature. To them nature was a weird enchantress, hiding her terrible secrets with a jealous care. The silence
and solitude of the forests and the mountains were full of a sense of horror. The separate trees held a lamenting and imprisoned spirit; the gay, sparkling streams were a transmuted nymph, which, like the perfumed shrubs and flowers, told some tale of the anger of the gods and their swift revenge. All that was inanimate inspired sadness. And when their pastoral tales rose into cheerfulness, it was that the lowing herds and bleating sheep formed a part. The sounds and motion of at least animal life were essential. The solitudes of nature were simply awful and terrific; for nature was then only a mystery to unredeemed humanity. She held deep secrets in her bosom, but the curse had set its seal upon them all, and she waited in long mournful silence for the hour when the human feet of the Creator should press her varied fields, and by his thrilling touch break the iron bars of her captivity, and teach her to tell of him in the whispered music of her thousand voices. In truth, her secrets were his, nor dared she break silence until he had come to set free the mystery of love for which she was created and instituted. But when Love himself had walked the earth, and mingled his tears—ay, and his precious blood—with the dews of his own creation, then the dark melancholy of nature grew into sweet pathos, and her solitudes were filled with secrets of his presence.
But what was then hidden from the pagan world could hardly be so to the first father of our race, he who out of the vast stores of his infused science named all created beings. When Adam saw the corn growing bright in thick array, and the vine bending down with purple fruit, surely he understood, as in
a prophecy, the great symbol of the bread of life and of the Holy Eucharist. The body and blood of the Incarnate God, albeit unbroken and unshed, must have been present to his ardent expectation as he beheld their antitype in the garden of Paradise. The rose with her mystic bosom deep enfolded must ever have awakened some passing thought of the Rosa mystica. And when to sad Eve, after her exile beyond the gates guarded by the flaming sword of the cherubim, the rose appeared bearing thorns among her five or seven leaved foliage, she guessed at the sacred crown and the divine wounds of the God-man, and at the sevenfold desolation of the mother who bore him. And what to us are the bright autumn hedgerow leaves dabbed with blood, not red now but tawny? Are they not tokens that he has trod that way and left the traces of his past glorious passion—past, because that blood was shed once for all, but still and for ever remaining; while the scarlet poppy takes up the theme, and in every corn-field, on barren tracks, and meeting the way-worn traveller by the road’s dusty side, reminds him that the sacrifice is renewed hour by hour the wide world over, fresh and life-giving as ever? Can the rich woodlands fail to bring before us the thought of him who gathered from the forests of his own creation the wood for his own cross? Can we sit beneath the dappled sunshine of the flickering boughs without remembering how it dared to lay its quick vibrating touch upon his sacred head, as he walked amid the olive groves of Gethsemane, but withdrew itself, and gave place to the cold moon before the scene of his great agony?
Surely these shadows are full of uncreated light; and from time to time the church retrims her lamps of dogmatic theology, and each time the light streams further down into the still, dim, uncertain regions of natural science, another precious secret is revealed, another ancient doubt dispelled; and matter and natural laws prove themselves each more and more to be the depositories of divine truth and the faithful creatures of the omnipresent Creator.
While acknowledging the force of law, we have denied that law can have an independent existence apart from a self-existing, self-conscious lawgiver, of whom it is the exponent. We have asserted the same as regards force, which is but another name for law, or, rather, which is law in posse. And we have stated that as science proves the absence of all direct contact in the material world, the world of atoms, so the only real contact is that of spirit on matter, of the divine Creator on his own creation. For he is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. All forces, all active powers, emanate from God. They are the evidences to us of his existence. They could as little exist without him as a shadow can exist without light. They are one in their nature, though they are diverse in their effects, because they are God’s constant touch on his own creation. He exists formally in all space and beyond all space. And everywhere he is the same: the immutable and absolute Ens. In his touch on his creation he gives rise to the active forces which virtually declare his being, and which are extended throughout space, but under a million varied degrees of being and a million varied forms. They
are virtually everywhere equally. But their manifestation in mind and degree is as diverse as all that exists in the vast cosmos, inside and outside of which God is, infinite and entire.
We have not enlarged upon this theme as we might have done. We have only pointed out to our readers how God’s touch on his creation is the only absolute contact that exists, and that science goes to prove the absence of all other, that is, of all material contact. We have abstained from trying to demonstrate how this truth sweeps away a hundred doubts respecting God’s ways towards man, and a thousand difficulties that might prove stumbling-blocks to our faith. We have desired no more than to put the thought, nay, we might say the fact, before them, and leave them to work out all its corollaries in love and devotion. We are not writing for sceptics but for those who believe, and would fain believe yet more surely, giving a reason for the faith that is in them, and dwelling in prayer on thoughts which reveal more of God’s character to the soul. We are to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. That is, in our measure and degree, we are to aim at a faint reflection of the harmony, the proportion, the justice of God. To do this, and to aim at doing it, we need to form in our own minds an accurate though but a limited view of the character of God. And to effect this, we must as it were look at his character all round—for which purpose the past, the present, and the future are all-important to us; and we have to view him as he reveals himself to us in his creation, in his government, and in his promises. We have ventured to maintain that the whole of his
creation is with a view to his Incarnation; that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is enhanced by his glorious passion and most precious death working our redemption; that it is glorified by his resurrection and ascension; and only completed in his sacramental presence; that as this sacramental presence is the one great fact virtually enclosing in itself all the others, as it is the coping-stone of the great mystery of the Incarnation, its lowest depth and greatest height, so is it the link that rivets the creation to the God-man, and the keystone to all the science of matter and dynamic force. For it is the divine epitome of all the laws that govern both, the reason of their being, and the last exponent of their rootedness in God. It completes the circle within whose bounds lies the entire cosmos as a globe environed by the serpent. It is the golden ring with which the divine Spouse has wedded himself to his church and to all the world, if they but know it. Words fail us. We cannot say enough; for these are thoughts too deep for words, and which seem to be rather darkened than expressed by language. And, like all that is greatest, they come to us from that which seems most simple and most hidden of all—a silken-curtained Tabernacle; and behind the little closed door lies all; every secret has its solution within the round white limits of the Host, for that Host is the great ultimatum of the creation, and the absolute consummation of God’s giving himself to man, while the latter is in the condition of viator.
We have entreated our readers not to be deluded by the dimness of the present times, but by prayer and solitary thought to strain their spiritual vision to behold the brightness
of the future which is coming upon us like the rays of the sun behind a mist; the reign of the Holy Ghost—the enlargement of the church’s border, and the spreading of the cords of her tent; the devotion to the Mother of God taking root in an honorable people; and thus, through the mediation of her who is the first among all created beings, bringing the whole outer world nearer to the spiritual world. This, and the future mission, may be a very distant one, of her messengers the angels, are all certain because they are written, and even now the signs of the times indicate their advent. In whatever form they may come, whatever may be the details filling up the wonderful picture of the future, whatever, in short, may be the literal working-out of the wonderful promises of the Gospel, one thing at least is certain: they mean peace to men of good-will. We may be quite unable to define or explain them; we are waiting for the hour when the church shall teach us more. But we cannot exaggerate their importance, nor can we deny that our blessed Lord has left a rebuke on those who make no attempt to discern the signs of the times. There are souls among his special servants who are the men of the future. They are those who are called to stand on the watch-towers of prayer, and to hear the cry, “Watchman, what of the night?”
The time of figs was not yet. Nevertheless, he in his eternal justice cursed the fig-tree that yielded him no fruit, when he deigned to look up among the broad, scented leaves of its knotted branches. There are souls who are called to bear fruit out of season as well as in season, and woe to them if they fail in their higher and exceptional
spiritual vocation. They are to be beforehand with time; they are to be, though in a silent, hidden way, the spiritual heralds of the future, the harbingers of God’s coming spring, the pioneers of prayer. They are the human messengers that are to prepare his way before him, in those never-ceasing conquests which multiply in proportion as our hearts are ready to receive him. They are to live, as all the great saints have done, in advance of their age. St. Francis was centuries before his time in the refinements of his exquisitely spiritualized nature; St. Vincent of Paul was the same in the creations of his charity; and St. Francis of Sales like St. Philip Neri in the blending of deep piety with the exigencies of modern life. The nearer we approach to the consummation, the more numerous will become the watchers of the night, the souls that are looking out for a new dawn, and who meanwhile are leading an inner life in advance of the present. God alone can know them, and those on whom he has bestowed the gift, though but partially, of the discernment of spirits. To others they will appear as men walking in a dream, visionary and unpractical. It matters not to them. Even here they have in a measure their great reward, for they can say, with their divine Master, “I have meat to eat which you know not.”
We are often tempted to complain that we have fallen upon evil times. The past seems to us to have been more full of heroism, the future we believe will be richer in knowledge. We have slid into a period of prosaic piety mingled with many doubts. Without pausing to argue how much of this is false, we would remark that the
present is an epoch which may yield a larger amount of merit to those who know how to profit by it than perhaps any other—we may make a rich harvest of faith and hope. And we must bear in mind that both these are virtues that will ultimately be swallowed up in the greater and crowning virtue of perfect charity. When we see, there will be an end of faith; when we know, hope will expire in certainty. “There remain now faith, hope, and charity; but the greatest of these is charity.” In proportion to the extension of our knowledge, the area of our blind faith is diminished. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” There is a special grace attending these twilight days, when a larger demand is made upon our faith. The light will gradually increase unto the perfect day—not only the real absolute perfect day of heaven, but in a measure here upon earth. The merit of faith will be less, when the angels are obviously carrying out their mission upon earth, than it is now, when the good lies so hidden, and the evil is so rampant and open. We are foolish not more truly to value the advantages of our own time, and to rejoice that we are called upon to have a greater and a stronger faith than may be possible in those who will, as it were, put their hand into the wounded side where beats the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Whatever has an appearance of discouragement about it is in fact a fresh demand from God upon our larger faith and deeper trust. It is as if he said to us, “You are my friends, and therefore I can count upon you.” We should make haste to lay up a larger harvest of meritorious faith from every
doubt that falls across our path and every cloud that veils the sunshine, and by this very act we shall hasten the dawn and bring on the joyous fruition of our prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—for surely this prayer is intended to be granted in a far greater degree than anything the world has ever seen from the creation to the present hour. Remember who taught us that prayer; and remember the centuries that it has been breathed by all the church of God from infancy to age. It is not a poetic phrase. It is not a hyperbole. It is God’s word, expressive of God’s will and God’s intention; and, therefore, has he made it the universal petition of all his children. It is the epitome of all he demands in every separate soul, until the many units have become a large multitude of the faithful, greater than any man can number.
It is the strenuousness of our faith which will give a greater distinctness, a more delineated and chiselled clearness, to our convictions, and even to our opinions. At present they hang loose on too many of us, and flap about in the high wind of the world’s contempt and impudent indifference, blinding our sight and hindering our steps. A firmer, steadier faith will gather tight across our bosom all our outstanding notions and ideas, bringing them into subjection to the faith which teaches us to see all things as God sees them—that is, according to our degree, but in the same light that he sees them, which is the light of eternity and of his own being. He has bidden us open our mouth wide that he may fill it. Can, we, then hope too largely or too earnestly? Can we assign any limits to the grace of sanctification in its continuous
progression, or to the advance of love in the ever-enduring reign of the Holy Ghost? The God towards whom we are being so sweetly drawn is infinite, and though each individual must reach his own appointed measure and degree, yet who can dare put a limit even in thought to the plenitude of that future? But for our great and exceeding hope, how barren would our present life appear! Like Rachel, the church cries incessantly to her Lord, “Give me children, or I die.” Let us repeat the prayer, and re-echo in every act of our lives the passionate desire for the spread of truth and the increase of light; for it is hardly less difficult to guess at the beautiful and glorious future which God reserves for his cherished creations—the garment that he has woven for his only-begotten Son—than it is to form an opinion of the possible glorious future of some souls as compared with others. And is this all? Have we by any unguarded expression left on our reader’s mind a notion that we are anticipating the perfectibility of mankind upon earth, the absence of evil, and a sort of pious utopia, as the sum and substance of our expectations—a deifying of the system of nature, a glorification in some distant future of all the natural laws, as ultimate and final, and which, because of the beauty of creation, are to content us and be in some form or other our higher destiny? Not so. The end is not in that, neither is it here. Were Satan bound now, as one day he will be, we still should as now carry about with us the concupiscence which has tainted the nature of every human being, save only the Mother of God. Alas! we need no devil to prompt us to sin, for we carry an enemy
within us. Even mortal sin can be committed without his assistance; and we are but too apt to paint him blacker by thrusting upon him a responsibility which is too often all our own. We believe in no absolutely sinless existence this side the gates of death, except that of the God-man and his immaculate Mother. But this we do believe, that “wisdom is justified by her children,”[157] and we venture to anticipate that all that is holy, beautiful, and fitting in nature will shine with a renewed glory upon earth as the dawn grows to the perfect day, before the temporal gives place to the eternal, and the Son of Man shall have delivered up the kingdom to the Father. “And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then the Son also himself shall be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”[158] We have borne the image of the earthly, we must also bear the image of the heavenly—when God shall be all in all, when we shall have ascended by the ladder of the sacred humanity to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, when we shall look on the Triune God and be satisfied. Before the immensity of that thought there falls a veil of light more impenetrable than the thickest darkness. We cease to think. Our whole being becomes as it were detached from our human consciousness, and for one moment, one awful, never-to-be-forgotten moment, we hang over the abyss which is the eternity and the
infinity of God. Towards that we yearn, for it is our last end. Even the immaculate heart of Mary; even the unutterable endearments of the sacred humanity; even that which in its mystery and its hiddenness is the nearest approach to the undivided thought of God—the Blessed Eucharist—become to us but parts of a whole which must be ours, if we are to be content. The cosmos rolls away from our sight like a scorched parchment before that living heat. The history of Bethlehem and Calvary are manifestations limited in themselves, and indicative of more. The Blessed Paraclete, whose personality we perhaps sometimes find it hard to individualize (though we do not say with the Ephesian disciples that “we have not so much as heard whether there be a Holy Ghost”), becomes in our thoughts a more intense and absolute idea, less vague than in the past, and how inscrutably attractive! We have reached the thought of the Holy Ghost through Jesus. And now we seem to sink into the bosom of the Father through the Holy Ghost; and, in a way too deep for words, to be conscious of ourselves only through our perception of the great God, and to have lost everything save the immensity and the unity, the eternal being and the eternal love, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—the three Persons we have dimly known on earth; and the one God, whom we shall only fully know in heaven, when we shall have entered on the eternal years.
THE END.
[153] By this is meant the first Mass celebrated by a mere man.
[154] With ever-yearning love he calls us in the dear Sacrament of the Altar and before the doors of his tabernacle that we may touch not only his sacred feet as Mary Magdalene pressed them to her lips, but his whole self, his humanity and his divinity in one.
[155] In other words, there is a more imperfect being than ours. Though whether its imperfection is to exclude all idea of their having a future fuller development, whereby and in which they will be indemnified for their sinless share in guilty man’s punishment, is still an open question.
[156] Time is the measure of successive existence in created and finite beings. As a finite spirit cannot escape from this limit of successive existence, any more than a body can escape from the limit of locality and finite movement in space, it is evident that this statement is not correct in a literal and strictly metaphysical sense. Eternal existence is the entire possession of life which is illimitable in such a perfect manner that all succession in duration is excluded. It is possible only in God, who is alone most pure and perfect act, and therefore is at once all he can be, without change or movement. The created spirit must ever live by a perpetual movement or increase in its duration, because it is on every side finite. It is impossible, therefore, that time should cease while creatures continue to exist.—Ed. C. W.
[157] Matt. xi. 19.
[158] 1 Cor. xv.