This law, in both its aspects, we see actuated in the visible universe. Thus man has need of food, which is administered to him by brutes and the vegetable kingdom; he has need of air, to breathe; of light, to see; of his kind, to multiply and to form society. All other animals have need of beings different from themselves to maintain their own existence; and of their like, to multiply their species. The vegetable kingdom needs minerals, earth, water, and the different saps by which it lives. If vegetables did not expel oxygen and absorb carbonic acid, air would become unfit for the respiration of animals; and these sending back, by respiration, carbonic acid, supply that substance of which plants stand in need. Everything, moreover, in the world serves for the development and perfection of man, both as to his body and as to his intellectual, moral, and social life. Every inferior creature is transformed into man. The same animal and vegetable kingdom which, transformed into his blood, sustains his life, helps him for the development of his ideas and his will. The reason of this law, which may be called the law of life, is, that the unity of the cosmos should not be only apparent and fictitious, but real. Now, a real union is impossible if the terms united exercise no real action upon each other, and do not serve for the maintenance and development of each other.
Finally, the law of communion calls for the law of secondary agency; that is, the effects resulting from the moments of the exterior action of God should be real agents. For no real union and communion could exist among the terms of the external action unless they really acted one upon another; any other union or communion being simply fictitious and imaginary. Hence Malebranche, in his system of occasional causes, where he deprives finite beings of real agency, has not only undermined the liberty of man, but destroyed the real communion among creatures, and marred the beauty and harmony of the cosmos. To represent the cosmos as a numberless series of beings united together by no other tie than juxtaposition, and by no means really acting upon each other, is to break its connection, its real and living unity; is to do away with the whole beauty and harmony of that hymn and canticle which God has composed to his own honor and glory.
We come now to the last question: What is the whole plan of the exterior action of God? We have seen that if there be a way by which to effect a cosmos endowed with a certain absolute perfection, that it would be most agreeable to infinite goodness, the end of the exterior action of God. We have seen, moreover, that whether there be such a way, and what this way is, must be determined by revelation. The Catholic Church, therefore, the living embodiment of revelation, must answer these two problems.
It answers both affirmatively. The most perfect cosmos is possible. God has effected it, because most agreeable to his infinite goodness.
What is this cosmos? We shall give it in the following synoptic table.
God's exterior action divided into:
The hypostatic moment;
The beatific, or palingenesiacal moment;
The sublimative moment;
The creative moment.
The terms corresponding to each moment of the action of God are:
The Theanthropos, or Jesus Christ, God and man, centre of the whole plan;
Beatific cosmos;
Sublimative cosmos;
Substantial cosmos.
Individual terms of each cosmos:
1. Beatified angels and men;
2. Regenerated men on the earth;
3. Angels, or pure spirits;
Men, or incarnate spirits;
Sensitive beings;
Organic beings;
Inorganic beings.
As each moment of the action of God, as the creative, implies two subordinate moments, preservation and concurrence, it follows that each moment of the action of God implies its immanence and concurrence, though in the Theanthropos it takes place according to special laws. Hence,