We hold, therefore, in what we have now stated, a distinct view of the way in which God governs the world; not absolutely, not arbitrarily, but adaptively. And where we see imperfection, and at times apparent retrogression, it is the free will of man forcing the will of God to his own destruction, “until he who hindereth now, and will hinder, be taken out of the way.”[280]
If this be true of God’s direct revelations of himself, and of his moral law as given from time to time to mankind, according as, in their fallen state, they could receive it—if, in short, it be true of his direct volitions—it is also true of his permissions. If it hold good of the revelations of his antecedent will, it holds good of the instances (so far as we may trace them in the history of the world) of his consequent will; that is, of his will which takes into consideration the facts induced by man in the exercise of his own free will, which is so constantly running counter to the antecedent will of God. The divine permissions form the negative side of the revelation of God. They are his permissive government of the world, not his direct government. The direct government is the stream of revelation given to our first parents, to the patriarchs and lawgivers of Israel, and now, in a more direct and immediate way, through our Blessed Lord in his birth, death, and resurrection, by the church in the sacraments, and through her temporal head, the vicar of Christ.
Even now, when he has consummated his union with his church, and that she is the true organ of the Holy Ghost, and thus the one true and infallible medium and interpreter of God’s direct government of the world, he also governs it by the indirect way of his overruling providence. The events which occur in history have ever a double character. They have their mere human aspect, often apparently for evil alone; and they have their ultimate result for good, which is simply the undercurrent of God’s will working upwards, and through the actions of mankind. Events which, on the face of them, bear the character of unmitigated evils, like war, have a thousand ultimate beneficial results. War is the rude, cruel pioneer of the armies of the Lord; for where the soldier has been the priest will follow. Persecutions kindle new faith and awake fresh ardor. Pestilence quickens charity and leads to improvements in the condition of the poor. Nor do we believe that it is only in this large and general, unsympathetic, and sweeping manner that God allows good to be worked out of evil. We have faith in the intercession of the Mother of Mercy; and as ultimate good may arise to whole races of mankind out of terrible calamities, so, we are persuaded, there is a more intimate, minute, and loving interference to individual souls wherever there is huge public calamity. The field of battle, the burning city, the flood, and the pestilence are Mary’s harvest fields, whither she sends her angels, over whom she is queen, with special and extraordinary graces, to gather and collect those who might otherwise have perished, and, in the supreme moment which is doubtless so often God’s hour, to win trophies of mercy to the honor and glory of the Precious Blood.
Unless we believe in God’s essential, actual, and unintermittent government of the world, we cannot solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and her cruel, stony stare will freeze our blood as we traverse the deserts of life. If we believe only in his direct government, we shall find it chiefly, if not solely, in his church; and the area is sadly limited! If we acknowledge his essential providence in his permissions, if we make sure of his presence in what appears its very negation, then alone do we arrive at the solution of life’s problems; and even this, not as an obvious thing, but as a constant and ever-renewed act of faith in the under-flowing gulf-stream of divine love, which melts the ice and softens the rigor of the wintry epochs in the world’s history. If we admit of this theory, which is new to none of us, though dim to some, we let in a flood of light upon many of the incidents described in the Old Testament, and specially spoken of as done by the will of God, but which, to our farther-advanced revelation of God, read to us as unlike himself. The light of the later interpretation has been thrown over the earlier fact; but in the harmony of eternity, when we are freed from the broken chord of time, there will be no dissonant notes.
There can be no more wonderful proof of God’s unutterable love than the way in which he has condescended to make the very sins of mankind work to his own glory and to the farther revelation of himself. From the first “felix culpa” of our first parents, as the church does not hesitate to call it, down to the present hour—down even to the secret depths of our own souls, where we are conscious of the harvests of grace sprung from repentant tears—it is still the great alchemist turning base metal in the crucible of divine love into pure gold.
It is one of the most irrefragable proofs of the working of a perpetual providence that can be adduced.
Granted that there are no new creations, but that creation is one act, evolving itself by its innate force into all the phenomena which we see, and into countless possible others which future generations of beings will see, nothing of this can prevent the fact that the moral development of the status of mankind, the revelations of divine truth, and consequently of the Deity, through the flow of ages, has ever been a bringing of good out of evil which no blind, irresponsible law could produce. There is no sort of reason why evil should work into its contrary good, except the reason that God is the supreme good, and directs all apparent evil into increments of his glory, thereby converting it into an ultimate good. We must remember, however, that this does not diminish our culpability, because it does not affect our free-will. It does not make evil another form of good. It is no pact with the devil. It is war and victory, opposition and conquest. It is justice and retribution, and it behooves us to see whether we are among those who are keeping ourselves in harmony with the eternal God in his direct government of the world; in harmony (so far as we know it) with his antecedent will; or whether we are allowing ourselves to drift away into channels of our own, working out only the things that he permits, but which he also condemns, and laying up for ourselves that swift devouring flame which will “try every man’s work of what sort it is.”
We have thus arrived at two different views of God’s government of the world—his direct government and his indirect or permissive government. We now come to what we may call his inductive teaching of the world—the way in which truths are partially revealed to us, and come to us percolating through the sands of time, as mankind needs them and can receive them.
Our Lord himself gives us an example of this inductive process when he speaks of “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob” as being “not the God of the dead, but of the living,” thus showing that the Jews held, and were bound to hold, the doctrine of immortality by an inductive process. The teaching of the old law was symbolic and inductive. The histories of the Old Testament are of the same character. They are written with no apparent design. They are the simple account of such incidents as the historian thought himself bound to record; acting, as he did, under the divine impulse, which underlay his statements without fettering his pen. He was not himself half conscious of the unspeakable importance of his work. Consequently, there is no effort, hardly even common precaution and foresight, in his mode of chronicling events. He glances at incidents without explaining them, because while he wrote they were present to his own experience, and would be to that of his readers. A writer in our day would allude to a person having performed a journey of fifty miles in an hour’s time without thinking it necessary to explain that people travel by steam. In another part he would advert to railroads, and the rapidity of locomotion as their result, equally without a direct reference to the individual who effected fifty miles in an hour. To the reader of three thousand years hence the one incidental allusion will explain and corroborate the other, and thus, by internal evidence, prove the authenticity and consistency of the history. Unintentional coincidences crop up as the pages grow beneath his hand, and to the careful student of Scripture throw light unlooked for on the exactitude and veracity of the narrative. And the substratum of the whole of the Old Testament history is the gradual growth of one family out of all the families of mankind, into which, as into a carefully prepared soil, the seed of divine truth was to be sown. Through all the variety of the Old Testament writers the same underlying design exists; and though this was a special stream of revelation unlike any that now exists or that is now required (for reasons which are obvious to every Catholic who knows what the church is), yet they form an indication of the way in which the divine Creator is for ever governing the world and preparing it with a divine foresight for his ultimate purpose. The Holy Ghost speaks now through a direct organ, which organ is the church. Formerly God spoke through historic events and multitudinous incidents in connection with one race of people. But this very fact authorizes us to believe that the same character of government exists throughout the whole universe in a greater or less degree, and that God is preparing the way for the ultimate triumph of the sacred Humanity and of his spouse the Church, on the far-off shores of sultry Africa, in the inner recesses of silent China, among the huge forests which skirt the Blue Mountains, or amid the glittering glories of the kingdoms of ice.
There is nothing more depressingly sad, more deeply to be regretted, and more difficult to explain than the almost hopeless narrowness of most people in their appreciation of divinely-ordained facts. We live like moles. We throw up a mound of dusky earth above and around us, within which we grope and are content. The treasures of sacred lore, the depths of spiritual science, the infinite variety of Scriptural information, with the divinely-pointed moral of every tale, are things which most of us are content to know exist, and to think no more about. The very lavishness with which God has given us all that we want for the salvation of our souls seems to have stifled in our ungenerous natures the longing to know and to do more. When the Evangelist said that the world would not hold the books that might be written on the sacred Humanity alone, he must have had an intuition, not so much of the material world and material volumes, as of the world of narrowed minds and crippled hearts who would be found stranded on the shores of our much-vaunted civilization and progress.