The animal creation is the unreasoning and innocent embodiment of the natural law, and carries out its mandates unconscious of the why and the wherefore; whereas in fallen man the natural law has overlapped the moral law, and the latter has become warped by the pressure of the former, making all things discordant. As abundance is one of the characteristics of the natural law, so the modes and forms of its execution lie at the very root of all creation. The Spirit of God, the brooding Dove, moved over the face of the waters. The same image of incubation and consequently of imparted heat (motion and heat being allied as reciprocal cause and effect), was in the mind of the old Egyptians when they carved a winged world amongst their mystic signs. So sacred, so holy, so full of deep-hidden meaning was the idea as it lay from all eternity in the divine Mind, that it was through the four thousand historic years which preceded the birth of the God-Man the mode through which God taught the chosen people to expect the Redeemer. It became the hope of every maiden to form one link in the long chain which was to lead up to the Messiah. It sanctified all the ties of domestic
life and made them less a necessity than a high moral duty.
So universal was the sentiment that many, in the tenacity of their desire to carry on the holy tradition, and too earthly to perceive the sin of doing wrong that good might come, thrust aside the law of conscience rather than fail in what weighed upon them as an overwhelming necessity—to continue the natural line—that perhaps they, too, might form one of those from whose loins should spring the Saviour of the world. It was thus that a dignity was imparted to natural ties which surpassed among the Israelites the same sentiment among the Gentiles, but which was but a foreshadowing of their sacred and sacramental state in the church of God.
“Wisdom is justified by her children”; and all that God has ordained must reach its ultimate perfection in his church before it can pass into another phase. “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled.”[61]
As all things in creation are by and for him, as all culminate in him, so when the prophecies were accomplished, and Mary, the immaculate and virgin daughter of the House of David, had, through the operations of the Holy Ghost, become the Mother of God—the law “increase and multiply” having thus ascended to its mystical fulfilment and ultimate development—so from henceforth did it confer a new and more holy character on natural ties by consecrating them as the type and image, of what is spiritual.
The one end in view had survived through all, despite man’s ignorance, infirmity, and sin; and
that end once attained, the sinless Mother clasping to her bosom the Infant God who was from all eternity in the bosom of the Father, from that moment all that was human had a new and divine element in it. All creation, all life, all we have and are, became in a special way “holy to the Lord.” “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God? If any man violate the temple of God, him will God destroy. All things are yours, the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come: all are yours: and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”[62]
Through long centuries man had failed to comprehend even while he felt the underlying mystery of creation. He looked on the fair fields of nature with undiscerning eyes. He hardly guessed at the enigma of the outer world as leading upwards to something nobler; and therefore he dragged the image of God down into the mire of his own existence. He even sought the Deity in what was below himself, worshipping, not men and heroes, but beasts and creeping things; because, being dominated by the idea of the great and all-pervading force of the laws of life and nature, the lower creation presented a more simple and abstract image of their potency. The idea of the principle of life haunted him like a dark and perplexing riddle. Its magnitude weighed upon him. Its universality perplexed him. He had not the light of truth in its plenitude to illumine the dark places of the earth. He could only make guesses at the typical meaning of creation; and as the whirr of life rushed ceaselessly around him without bringing any answer to his questionings, it became a relief to embody the idea which obseded
him in the obscurity of inarticulate being, as affording, if not some solution, at least an absolutely simple and vulgar manifestation of the great fact, until the very scarabei became sacred; and with inverted moral sense, in lieu of seeking for transcendent and pellucid truth in what was above him, he dug down into the very miseries of his own degradation in his attempt to describe the incomprehensible, and that to a degree which we cannot pollute these pages by expressing.
Thus had man covered over with the veil of his iniquities and the thick darkness of his ignorance all the sanctities of life, until the church of God revealed to him that Christ is the head of the church, as the husband is the head of the wife, and placed matrimony among the sacraments; because as a sacrament only is it holy to the Lord, and because, as a sacrament, it is typical of that highest and most divine union of Christ with his church—that union which is her strength, her inviolability, her guarantee, and her ever-enduring and indisputable infallibility.[63]