Nothing less than this is the promise of God, and should be the object of man. The church in her sacraments and ordinances is the one authorized and infallible way to bring about this blessed union. But unless that be accomplished, all the outward devotions that saints, or confraternities, that individuals or congregations, ever devised and poured into the church’s lap like handfuls of flowers, will be to those who rest in them as fading as flowers, and as sure to be swept away and burned when the fire shall try of what sort the work is. The dying to self—not as man’s restrictions can produce its outward semblance, but as God’s working in the soul joined to our good will can alone effect it—and the consequent union with him whose divine spirit rushes in wherever we make room for him to come, is the one sole object of all that the church gives us and does for us; of all the barriers she erects, of all the gardens she plants, of all her discipline and her ceremonial. It is the only living reality. It was so with the saints of all ages and nations. They valued all in proportion as by its use they killed self and put the living God instead; and they valued it no more. Low down in the soul the deep pulsation of the thought of God, ruling all our actions from the least to the greatest, this is what our dear Lord demands of us in every communion we make; this is what his church intends in all her teaching. This alone will hasten the reign of the Holy Ghost, when God “will pour his spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”[87] In other words, the gates of the supernatural world shall be thrown open, not to a rare and scanty few, but to all to whom “it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God.”[88]
We seem to have wandered from our subject; but it is not so. We were writing of the future development of the church through the different characteristics of different races, as instruments in God’s hands in the working of his adaptive government; and this has led us to describe the necessity of the inner life of the soul with God, because the Teutonic and Saxon races are the people with whom the tendency to a deep inner life is a natural peculiarity. They are more self-contained, self-reliant, reserved, and recollected than the versatile Latin races; and though none of these characteristics necessarily lead to a spiritual inner life of any form—that being a free grace from God—they are the apt instruments for grace to make use of in producing a certain form. They are, therefore, those to whom we may look for the next important era in the church’s history; when all the vast and complicated edifice of her hierarchy being complete she has now to expand the fuller development and deeper utterance of her inner life in individual souls; and that no longer as an occasional glorious phenomenon of grace, but as spread over a vast area, as influencing whole peoples, and as becoming the sustained life of Christianity. Law and liberty in one; the “freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free.”
We were also speaking of material progress; and these same Teutonic
Saxon races are the races who are specially extending it throughout the world. We have endeavored to show that in material progress man is achieving his secondary mission of exercising dominion over the whole creation. Thus we find that, having in his wonderful providence united the two characteristics of strong individuality and vehement activity in certain races, God has prepared for the future of the church, when inner spiritual life shall be more diffused, an era when the spirit of God will take possession of all that man can know, do, or acquire as belonging to himself, “and through him to his church, in the great scheme of creation and redemption.” And thus material progress will be assimilated to the welfare of the church; and the stones will be turned into bread—not in the sense of the arch deceiver, who claims all material progress as his own region, but united with “the word that proceedeth from the mouth of God”;[89] the material sanctified by the spiritual, when all shall be “holy to the Lord.”
The inaccuracy of the popular, as distinguished equally from the Catholic and the rationalistic view of the importance of matter, and of material progress which is the march of man’s conquest over matter, arises chiefly from the imperfect manner in which we realize the universal presence of God. Many among us can look back with a distinct recollection to the time when a mother first announced to us the great truth that God is everywhere. With the unfailing practical sense of children, we probably began to individualize certain familiar objects with the query was he there—in this table, in that flower, in my living
hand, in the pen I hold? And the bewilderment of immensity crept over us as we tried to grasp the thought of the great universal presence.
As in later years theological questions opened upon us—the mysteries of our faith, the angelic choirs, the army of saints and martyrs, the Incarnation, and the localization of the eucharistic presence in the Blessed Sacrament—many of us have gradually dropped the more intense sense of God’s omnipresence. It probably was more accurately felt by the Old Testament saints than by any, except saints, under the new law. It is not that we have lost sight of the truth that he sees, hears, and knows each one of us, always and everywhere; but we forget that he fills all space, and that he is in all things. It is a remarkable fact that the very lowest, the least theological and dogmatic, of all heathen beliefs, where all are a jargon of error, is nevertheless the faint reflection of this truth. We allude once more to the animism of the lower savage races, which lends a spiritual presence even to inanimate and inorganic matter. To them God is everywhere and in every thing; so that to them no thing exists disconnected from a spiritual presence as abiding in it, and that not in the pantheistic form of many gods, but as all matter holding an occult spirit, which is the same spirit in each substance. But there it ends; a blind creed, which does not even go the length of acknowledging a personal deity or a divine providence. None the less is it founded on a truth which often slips out of our consciousness, while we are occupied with the more familiar articles of our faith. Let us examine how this great truth, as we hold it in its fulness and
completeness, may be brought to bear on the question now before us of the value of the cosmos, of the status of matter, and of the fact that it is the indirect revelation, even as the Incarnation is the direct revelation of God—Jesus Christ the God-Man being the mediator between the creature and his creator.
First let us bear in mind that no cause can act where it is not virtually present by its power, even if not actually present by its matter. And this law has its correlative in the spiritual world. I influence you only so far as I touch you. I shall have written in vain unless these pages touch your sight. If I were speaking to you with my living voice I could only reach the hearts of those who heard me. To all the rest I am dead; and they are dead to me. This is the moral side of the question, as between man and man. As regards the material side, let us suppose I push forward a ball. It is force emanating from my touch which sets it in motion; but my force has not ceased with my direct touch. It is still my force propelling it as absolutely, though not so powerfully, as at the moment I touched it; and the ball only stops when my force is expended, or when a counter force arrests it. But whence comes my force? Solely from him in “whom we live, and move, and are.” He is our motive power; every act of ours is formed out of his force, equally whether we are acting according to his will or against it.