We are far, therefore, from intending to take up all the possible questions not hedged in and limited and defined by dogmatic teaching, or to try and help others to come to a conclusion on each. We might as well attempt to count the sands of the sea-shore. All we are proposing to ourselves for our own consolation, and, if possible, for that of our readers, is to lay hold of certain facts which will give a clew to other less certain facts, and, in short—if we may be allowed to resort to a chemical term—to indicate certain solvents which will hold in solution the little pebbles that lie in our path, and which might grow into great stumbling-blocks had we not a strong dissolving power always at our command.
It is self-evident that there is one knowledge which contains all other knowledge, and that is the knowledge of God. As all things flow from him, therefore all things are in him; and if we could see or know him, we should know all the rest. That knowledge, that seeing, is the “light of glory.” Its perfection is only compatible with the Beatific Vision, which vision is impossible to mere man in his condition of viator, or pilgrim.[245] It is the conclusion of faith just as broad noon is the termination of darkness. But as faith is the leading up to the Beatific Vision, to the light of glory, and to the knowledge of all things, therefore in its degree is it the best substitute for sight—the dawning of a more perfect day, and the beginning of knowledge. Consequently, “faith is the evidence of things that appear not.” And as it is some of the things “that appear not” which are puzzling and bewildering many of us, let us lay hold of our faith and go whither it shall lead us.
We can in this life only know God mediately and obscurely by reason and faith. But as the direct and clear intuition of God in the Beatific Vision will include the knowledge of all else, so even our present imperfect knowledge of him comprises in a certain sense all other and lesser science, and is necessary to the highest knowledge of created things.
To do this thoroughly we will investigate the occasional divergence between our mental impressions, as we sometimes experience them, and our received belief of the Divine Nature and characteristics.
In a burst of holy exultation S. Paul asks, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord?”[246]—not as though regretting his ignorance, but rather with the feelings of one who, having suddenly come upon an evidently priceless treasure, exclaims, Who can tell what wealth now lies before us?
Yes, indeed! we know him well while we know him but imperfectly. There is more to know than we can guess at, but our hearts are too narrow to hold it. And yet sometimes how full to overflowing has that knowledge seemed! Have we not followed him from the cradle to the grave, in that sweet brotherhood which he has established with each one of us? Have we not lost ourselves in far-reaching thoughts of how, and where he was when his brotherhood with us was not an accomplished fact, but only an ever-enduring divine intention co-equal with his own eternal existence—a phase of that very existence, for ever present to the Divine Idea, though not yet subjected to the conditions of time? We have thought of him as in the bosom of the Father in a way in which, wonderful to relate, he never can be again in the bosom of the Father. A something has passed in respect to the existence of God himself, and actually made a difference in the extrinsic relations of the divine Being.
There was an eternity in which the Son of God—he whom we most seem to know of the three Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity—dwelt in the bosom of the Father unconnected with his sacred humanity. There was an eternity when his name was not Jesus, when he was the Son of God only, and not the Son of man.
We are expressing what everybody knows who is a Christian—a platitude almost, and yet so full of wonder that, unless we have thoroughly gone into it and sifted it, we have not ransacked half the riches of what we can and may know of the “mind of the Lord.”
In truth, we are very apt to be repelled by this contemplation. There is something dreary to us in the eternity when the Brother of our race and the Spouse of our souls was only the everlasting Begotten of the Father, dwelling in that inscrutable eternity to which we, as the creatures of time, seem to have no link. Our thoughts and imaginations are shackled by the conditions of our own being. Yesterday we were not. And so all before yesterday seems like a blank to us. To-morrow we know will be—if not for us in this identical state, yet certainly for us in some other state. But that dim yesterday, which never began and of which no history can be written, no details given, only the great, grand, inarticulated statement made that the Qui Est, the “I am,” filled it—this appalls us. Can nothing be done to mitigate this stupendous though beautiful horror? Is there no corner into which our insignificance can creep, that so we may look out upon those unknown depths without feeling that we are plunging into a fathomless ocean, there to sink in blank darkness and inanition? Surely the God of the past (as from our point of view we reckon the past) should not be so appallingly unknown to us who have our beloved Jesus in the present, and who look forward to the Beatific Vision of the whole blessed Trinity with trembling hope in the future. But before we can in any degree overcome the stupor with which we think of the backward-flowing ages of eternity, we must endeavor more fully to realize the nature of time.
We are all apt to speak of time as a period; whereas it is more properly a state.