Opposite St. Jean de Luz, on the other side of the Nivelle, is Cibourre, with its solemn, mysterious church, and its widowed houses built along the quay and straggling up the hill of Bordagain. Prosperous once like its neighbor, it also participated in its misfortunes, and now wears the same touching air of melancholy. The men are all sailors—the best sailors in Europe—but they are absent a great part of the year. Fearless wreckers live along the shore, who brave the greatest dangers to aid ships in distress. In more prosperous days its rivalry with St. Jean de Luz often led to quarrels, and the islet which connects the two places was frequently covered with the blood shed in these encounters. The convent of Recollects, now a custom-house, which we pass on our way to Cibourre, was founded in expiation of this mutual hatred, and very appropriately dedicated to Notre Dame de la Paix—Our Lady of Peace. The cloister, with its round arches, is still in good preservation, and the cistern is to be seen in the court, constructed by Cardinal Mazarin, that the friars might have a supply of soft water.
The Basques are famed for their truthfulness and honesty, the result perhaps of the severity of their ancient laws, one of which ordered a tooth to be extracted every time a person was convicted of lying! No wonder the love of truth took such deep root among them. But had this stringent law been handed down and extended to other lands, what toothless communities there would now be in the world!
THE ETERNAL YEARS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”
II.
THE PULSATIONS OF TIME.
The deduction we arrive at from the argument which we have laid down is that the history of the world is a consistent one, and not a series of loose incidents strung together. It is as much this morally, it is as truly the evolution and unwinding of a high moral law and of a great spiritual truth, as the life of the plant from the seed to the ripe fruit is the development of a natural growth. This last is governed by laws with which we are only partially acquainted; whereas the moral law and the spiritual truth are revealed to us by the divine scheme of creation and redemption. There is nothing existing, either in the natural or in the spiritual law, and especially in this last, which is not more or less, in one way or in another, by assertion or by negation, a revelation of the divine Being.
He reveals himself directly by his volitions and indirectly by his permissions. And we can only be one with him when we have learnt to accept both and to submit to both; not in the spirit of quietism or fatalism, but as actively entering into his intentions, accepting what he wills, and bearing what he permits. There is no harmony possible between the soul and God until we have arrived at this; and the history of the world is the history of man’s acquiescence in, or resistance to, the supreme will of God. The first disruption of the will of man from the will of God, in the fall of man, wove a dark woof into the web of time; and every act of ours which is not according to the will of God weaves the same into our own lives, because it is a rupture of the law of harmony which God has instituted between himself as creator and us as creatures. Were that harmony unbroken, man would rest in God as in his centre; for, being finite, he has no sufficiency in himself, but for ever seeks some good extrinsic to himself. The same applies to all creation, whose ultimate end and highest good must always be some object beyond, and above itself; and that object is none other than God, “quod ignorantes colitis,”[270]—the finite striving after the Infinite. Thus the whole divine government of the world is a gradual unfolding of the divine Will, according as we are able to receive it. And the degree of receptivity in mankind, at various periods of the world’s history, and in different localities, accounts for the variety in the divine dispensations, and for the imperfection of some as compared with others. The “yet more excellent way”[271] could not be received by all at all times. The promise was given to Abraham. But four hundred and thirty years elapsed before its fulfilment, for the express purpose of being occupied and spent in the institution of the law as a less perfect dispensation, and which was given because of transgressions—“propter transgressiones posita est”[272]—thus showing the adaptive government of God: the gradual building up of the city of the Lord, whose stones are the living souls of men, which are “hewed and made ready,”[273] but so that there shall be “neither hammer, nor axe, nor tool of iron heard” while it is building. For God does not force his creature. He pours not “new wine into old bottles,” but waits in patience the growth of his poor creatures, and the slow and gradual leavening of the great mass. A time had been when God walked with man “at the afternoon air”;[274] and whatever may be the full meaning of this exquisitely-expressed intercourse, at least it must have been intimate and tender. But when the black pall of evil fell on the face of creation, the light of God’s intercourse with man was let in by slow degrees, like single stars coming out in the dark firmament. The revelations, like the stars, varied in magnitude and glory, lay wide apart from each other, rose at different intervals of longer or shorter duration, and conveyed, like them, a flickering and uncertain light, until the “Sun of Justice arose with health in his wings,”[275] and “scattered the rear of darkness thin.” The degree of light vouchsafed was limited by the capacity of the recipient; and that capacity has not always been the same in all ages, any more than in any one age it is the same in all the contemporary men, or in each man the same at all periods of his life. It is thus that we arrive at the explanation of an apparent difference of tone, color, and texture, so to speak, in the various manifestations of God to man. The manifestation is limited to the capacity of the recipient; and not only is it limited, but to a certain extent it becomes, as it were, tinged by the properties of the medium through which it is transmitted to others. It assumes characteristics that are not essentially its own. For so marvellous is the respect with which the Creator treats the freedom of his creature that he suffers us to give a measure of our own color to what he reveals to us, so that it may be more our own, more on our level, more within our grasp; as though he poured the white waters of saving truth into glasses of varied colors, and thus hid from us a pellucidity too perfect for our nature. And thus it happens that to us who dwell in the light of God’s church, with the seven lamps of the seven sacraments burning in the sanctuary, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob hardly seems to us the same God as our God. We see him through the prism of the past, amid surroundings that are strange to us, in the old patriarchal life that seems so impossible a mode of existence to the denizens of great cities in modern Europe.
This is equally true throughout the history of the world. It is also true of every individual soul; and it is true of the same soul at different periods of its existence. He is the same God always and everywhere. But there is a difference in the kind of reception which each soul gives to that portion of divine knowledge and grace which it is capable of receiving and which it actually does receive. For they are “divers kinds of vessels, every little vessel, from the vessels of cups even to every instrument of music.”[276] They differ in capacity and they differ in material; and the great God, in revealing himself, does so by degrees. He has deposited, as it were, the whole treasure of himself in the bosom of his spouse, the church; but the births of new grace and further developed truth only come to us as we can bear them and when we can bear them. The body of truth is all there; but the dispensing of that truth varies in degree as time goes on. God governs in his own world; but he does so behind and through the human instruments whom he condescends to employ. And as, in the exercise of his own free-will, man chose the evil and refused the good, so has the Almighty accommodated himself to the conditions which man has instituted. Were he to do otherwise, he would force the will of his creature, which he never will do, because the doing it would have for result to deprive that creature of all moral status and reduce him to a machine. From the moment that we lose the power of refusing the good and taking the evil, from the moment that any force really superior to that which has been put into the arsenals of our own being robs us of the faculty of selection, we lose all merit and consequently all demerit. The Creator, when he made man, surrounded him with the respect due to a being who had the power of disposing of his own everlasting destiny. Nor has he ever done, nor will he do, anything which can entrench on this prerogative. The whole system of grace is a system divinely devised to afford man aid in the selection he has to make. There lies an atmosphere of grace all around our souls, as there lies the air we breathe around our senses. The one is as frequently unperceived by us as the other.[277] We are without consciousness as regards its presence, as we are without direct habitual consciousness of the act of breathing and of our own existence, except as from time to time we make a reflective modification in our own mind of the idea of the air and of the fact of our inhaling it. We are unconscious that it is the divine Creator who is for ever sustaining our physical existence. We are oblivious of it for hours together, unless we stop and think. It is the same with the presence of grace.
And though “exciting” grace, as theology calls it, begins with the illustration of the intellect, it does not follow that we are always by any means conscious of this illustration. It is needless to carry out the theological statement in these pages. What we have said is enough to bring us round to our point, which is that the action of grace on the individual soul, and the long line of direct and indirect revelations of God’s will from the creation to the present hour, though always the same grace and always the same revelation, receive different renderings according to the vehicle in which they are held—much as a motive in music remains the same air, though transposed from one key to another. Not only, therefore, does man, as it were, give a color of his own to the revelation of God, but he has the sad faculty of limiting its flow and circumscribing its course, even where he cannot altogether arrest it. We are “slow of heart to believe,” and therefore is the time delayed when the still unfulfilled promises may take effect. Our Lord declares that Moses permitted the Hebrews to put away their wives, because of the hardness of their hearts; “but from the beginning it was not so.”[278] God’s law had never in itself been other than what the church has declared it to be. The state of matrimony, as God had ordained it, was always meant to be what the church has now defined. But man was not in a condition to receive so perfect a law; and thus the condition of man—that is, the hardness of his heart—had the effect of modifying the apparent will of God, as revealed in what we now know to be one of the seven sacraments. The Hebrews were incapable of anything more than a mutilated, or rather a truncated, expression of the divine will, as it was represented to them in the law of Moses on the married state. Nor could we anywhere find a more perfect illustration of our argument. In the first place, it is given us by our Lord himself; and, in the second, it occurs on a subject which, taken in its larger sense, involves almost every other, lies at the root of the whole world of matter, and of being through matter, and may be called the representative idea of the creation. Now, if on such a question as this mankind, at some period of their existence, and that a period which includes ages of time, and covers, at one interval or another, the whole vast globe, could only bear an imperfect and utterly defective rendering, how much more must there exist to be still further developed out of the “things new and old” which lie in the womb of time and in the treasures of the church, but which are waiting for the era when we shall be in a condition to receive them! The whole system of our Lord’s teaching was based on this principle. He seems, if we may so express it, afraid of overburdening his disciples by too great demands upon their capacity. He says with reference to the mission of S. John the Baptist: “If you will receive it, he is Elias that is to come,”[279] and in the Sermon on the Mount he points out to them the imperfection of the old moral code, as regarded the taking of oaths and the law of talion. Now, the moral law, as it existed in the mind of God, could never have varied. It must always have been “perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.” But it passed through an imperfect medium—the one presented by the then condition of mankind—and was modified accordingly.